Bro, I’m 7-8 years in and I feel this. I think about this a lot lately.
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Work your 40 hour weeks and then go home. No more, no less. While you don't need to formally track your time, treat that as a rule.
Get a Hobby. It doesn't matter what. Get violin/trumpet/piano/... Take lessons, and commit you will practice 1 hour per day for a year. Buy a hand plane, chisel, and dovetail saw and build some wood boxes. Get a good cookbook and go through it making every single meal one day at a time. Get a tatting shuttle and make some lace. Get a pen and write a novel. It doesn't matter what you do, just sometime. don't spend too much money until you are sure that hobby is for you, but don't buy junk tools for your hobby either (perhaps budget $1000 every 6 months for hobby things - even if you can afford to spend more)
Don't forget your wife in all this! This is last because you are mostly likely to remember what is last. Take her out dancing, or just dance in your living room. Have nice dinners together. Plan a board game night. If you budget for a hobby make sure she has a similar budget for whatever she her hobby is. There are times to do your own hobby and times to share a hobby. Keep your marriage alive - this takes effort, so make sure your wife is one of your hobbies.
Pivot to ED infosec, get a security clearance, work for the government or government contracts.
It's within your field, it's sexy AF, it pays extremely well, and it puts you into a different and rather interesting peer group.
As someone who works in off road/ag, and has other coworkers who used to work for government contracts. They all say it sounds good to say you worked on whatever top secret project, but the work was boring and tedious. The ag work seems like it would be boring but it is the most fun they ever had.
The above is about the very specific place you work. Some places are more fun than others. Industry only plays a part in that a few (games) can abuse their people and still find more while other industries couldn't do the same abuse without getting a bad reputation. Maybe he will find a better place in infosec, maybe he won't, but it isn't about infosec.
What should I do / think about?
I've been in your shoes, and I did eventually make a move for a challenge.
Then I moved back, after I got that urge out of my system. So my best advice, that I followed and it paid off, is leave on good terms, if you leave.
I had to process the transition that I'm no longer primarily paid for making things but for availability and mentorship.
If I was paid hourly for making things, I could never make a living wage. I simply work too fast initially, and I no longer waste enough hours on fixing my past mistakes.
So now I spend an inordinate amount of my time training on whatever amuses me that might someday be valuable to my employer. And I prioritize taking breaks in my schedule to mentor and explain things to peers - whenenver I can afford to. I'm genuinely very good at what I do, so "whenever I can afford to" is astonishingly often.
Eventually that transition to availability and mentorship led to a promotion into roles that demand it more. So I accepted a promotion into management and then read a crap ton of management books.
I'm still a renegade manager whose boss understands that I'll do some coding whenever I please...I mean, whenever my other duties allow.
My position in the company is pretty good and I could probably ride it out until I die or the company picks up on the fact that my output has dropped due to the lack of caring. But that eats at my soul and it isn't fair to my coworkers.
Let me push back a bit on "isn't fair to my coworkers".
I have worked many times with a cranky senior technician who has seen almost everything before and barely gives a shit to do more than the bare minimum.
I adore working with this person. There's never any drama. They get their work done barely but consistently before deadlines. Their work is done correctly more often than my own work is (and I'm quite good, honest). And once in awhile they're generous enough with their time to pull my ass out of the fire of my own incompetence (everyone fails sometimes) with their advice.
Once you've hit the point where things are easy for you that are hard for everyone else, I find your bare minimum effort is more than fair and generous to peers like myself.
Let me add to this by saying the disillusioned old hand in any workplace also has an important role: if management ever starts being unreasonable or makes poor/toxic decisions, the guy working there for over a decade has far more clout in calling it out than a young hire. You've been there long enough that you'll know if something isn't right, and that is insanely valuable for someone starting their career to have in a coworker.
My experience may not be relevant because I always quit when I had toxic managers who were killing me every day, and it may be different from yours, but anyway here are random stupid thoughts:
- "off highway farm equipment": what it this? what language are you using?
- you want a kid and your "position in the company is pretty good": don't quit now!
- game dev: it seems to be awful unless you have a lot of money and write indie games like the Stardew Valley guy (Ubisoft in France is famous for being a burnout machine)
- embedded systems: I would shun embedded dev who uses C and is focused too much on electronics, I would focus on higher-level stuff like C++17/20 or Rust
- I would focus for some time on reading books and papers, and trying new solutions, improving my work in a way that could be applied to another company, like CI/CD, use new languages, find ways do check the code or improve it, fix or change stuff here and there and take notes that can I could reuse...
Anyway, what is your current job right now? What are you doing daily?
Unfortunately, I can't really talk about it too much other than I do C but have recently been ramping up on a C++ part of the code. To be frank, I am currently not a big fan of C++. Seems overly complicated and the people I work with seem to write overcomplicated templated code for what seems to me to be either for fun or job security. Either way seems to make the code hard to read with no benefit.
Edit: I think would much rather work with a language like Rust or Go. Zig looks interesting for a C like.
Some more explanation that I forgot to add about embedded applications: I wrote a few embedded applications but it's not my main job and I have little experience with that. It seems to be polarized somehow: either you write old spaghetti-like C code tied very closed to the hardware and you won't have a good time, or you can write higher-level code which can be more fun (modern C++, Rust, or Zig).
I've been writing C++ for more than 20 years and I hate it, but I hate other languages more. It's very complicated though and I do not recommend it. Modern C++ can still be easy and simple, but you have to know all the rules and it takes a lot of time and experience.
Your conclusion about Rust or Zig is good IMHO. Both could be very good languages for embedded systems. I would not use Go though for that since it is more of a competitor to Python, it is too high-level, and Python is more professional nowadays thanks to new tools like "uv." Even if Google tries to sell Go as a systems' language, I still see it as a "compiled" scripting language that has less libraries than Python, which is why I don't make the switch yet.
This does sound like a burnout, i would recommend to try and rest a little bit for a feel days, maybe a week to put your mind at easy if possible, also gamedev can be a good hobby for taking your head out of work, look on itch.io for a game jam and try to have fun along the way
Thanks! I do game jams every once and a while. While fun, the deadline stress leaves me in a bad place. I have tried the resting thing. I just got off a holiday vacation for a week and it didn't do much for me. I am not sure I have the PTO to take a week off whenever I need it. Not that the company has a bad PTO policy, it's more that I seem to need it a lot.
I've heard but can't confirm that recovery from burnout only really happens after two weeks off. If you don't have the pto to do that, do you have the financial option for unpaid time off? If not, then I'd say start looking for some place that pays better anyway and make sure there's a few weeks between the end of one and the start of the new one.