You're actually making the issue worse by conflating burnout with simple... I guess laziness? In fact the whole reason why burnout is such a fascinating phenomenon is because it takes otherwise highly productivity people who do not hate their job and turns them into minimal-productivity people who do hate their jobs. That's nothing at all like you're describing.
Burnout is a huge problem in the creative industries, amongst people who have fought, worked for years or decades, and clawed their way into a job they love and have wanted to do their entire adult lives.
For example, as Ron Moore (I think) says in the documentary "Showrunners", there's a reason almost no TV showrunner is much older than their early 50s. The job (which is insanely intense) burns you out, no matter how much you love it.
I have met a large number of people who love their jobs and have burned out. I'm not really sure that anecdotal evidence is going to satisfy people in this thread of the conversation, so I suspect my volunteering of this is of little utility.
Maybe another way to look at it is the "burn out rate". Different companies have a tendency to turn excited new tech employees into minimally-productive ones in different time frames.
For example Amazon has a burn out rate of about a year, whereas Google and Facebook are about two years and Microsoft four years.
Why should this be the case? I think people above in the thread would argue that it has to do with culture and working conditions, with moral and with levels of individual autonomy.
I've experienced this first hand. It's a surreal feeling, because you know that objectively everything is awesome, but emotionally you want to throw it all away.
I have also experienced burn out with a job that I disliked. In both cases there is a feeling of not being able to focus on the work at hand, that more effort will make you physically sick.
The author's example of eating ice cream at every meal resonates with me really well. You do get tired of it, even if it's conceptually amazing.
Have you ever spent too much time in a row with a best friend? You don't suddenly hate them, you just need a break. The same thing can easily happen with a job that you enjoy.
One's feeling towards their job is not some binary love/hate thing. I would say I do not hate my job, but do I love my job? Everyday? Do I never tire of my job?
I think we could all be a little happier, if we just tried. I'm not saying curing depression or burnout is as trivial as just trying to... But, you can certainly choose to be a notch happier than you are at this moment. Just one notch today, and try for another notch tomorrow. We can start by appreciating what we have.
Are you grateful for anything that doesn't make you happier? It sounds like you're saying that thinking about things that make you happy makes you happy, and that this is something you just learned somehow.
Yes, all things I am grateful for make me happier. But not all things that make you happier, are you grateful for.
Being grateful for something transcends being happy about that something. It's about holding in your mind, certain things that don't just make you happy, but resonate with you.
I don't, for example, think that just conjuring up the thought of a delicious ice cream cone, is going to have any lasting effect on your mood. Yet, ice cream makes me happy.
I do think that taking a moment to reflect on how lucky you are to have a family that is supportive, functional, and healthy... can definitely be a small bump, on the happiness scale.
Unless work is the difference between home and homelessness. I've been close to burnout (read:complete and total apathy at work) a few times before I wizened up, but I kept skating to a minimum because I needed the money.
I think burnout is a much more specific phenomena than just generally hating your job. It can happen in spite of you being very committed to your job (perhaps this even makes it more likely). I do agree though that burnout is not just confined to software developers. Hell, I'm about 1 year in and still recovering from some pretty serious burnout, and my job has almost nothing to do with computers.
I think it can happen in any job where: it's possible to care about the quality of your output, quality tends to be proportional to effort, and it's easy for your output to be discarded or ignored...
I realize you're not saying it's limited to software, but I think it's interesting to note that the term was coined by a psychologist (Herbert Freudenberger) trying to describe a condition he himself experienced.
You can say this about any field. A ditch digger loses "intrinsic motivation" and chooses to not dig a ditch. The ditch digger can't do their job because of burnout.
But somehow it is different in software development?
I'd argue that yes, it is different in software development.
The nature of ditch digging is such that given enough effort, it's probably still possible to dig a ditch. It doesn't mean you'll be motivated to dig the ditch, it doesn't mean it won't be ridiculously hard to dig the ditch, but barring seriously physical issues preventing you from making progress, digging a ditch is mechanical and doesn't really involve a serious need for critical thinking.
When you burn out as a software dev (and probably other fields that involve serious mental investment), it doesn't matter how much you try, there's a good chance you'll just fail.
I do agree that software development is not the only field that can be seriously impacted by burnout, but the degree of impact seems to be highest in fields involving knowledge work.
Hilariously I'm that person who was forced to dig ditches a few times and experienced a mild case of burnout as developer.
In both cases the performance was similar. With earthworks I simply didn't give a damn about the job, so just pecked the ground unenthusiastically. With burnout it was as if petard went off, but instead of earbuzz you get numb to planning, focusing and executing. I actually felt bad about it, but doubt you'd see much behaviour difference from the outside.
So I'd wager the lack of motivation is a serious handicap in both cases. Sure, "anyone can dig a ditch" but I dare you try doing it for a day if you are not into it. Similarly I was already an experienced developer at the point of burnout, and the job at hand wasn't challenging at all.
I don't think you understand the previous comment. Often, with burnout, motivation is not necessarily the issue. You try, or believe that you're trying, your absolute best but everything is falling down around you.
It's not just about motivation, it is just that your perceived ability to execute (going through the motions) and actual ability are completely at odds and you eventually lose all confidence in yourself to continue.
It's not motivation for the job, it's belief in your own abilities / capabilities that erodes your motivation.
Perhaps every case is different, but I hardly can imagine how one can remain motivated in a burnt out condition. It's not like the lack of motivation is the cause here. It's more like the lasting effect that holds your capabilities down.
E.g. I still could read the assignment, understand the problem, even estimate how long it could take the former me to complete. Then continue wasting time in front of the screen, sometimes dabbing here or there, at 1/20th or so of normal work pace. The confidence sure suffers badly, but really it was down to complete lack of will to do anything.
There was a grandsibling comment that you can actually force healthy person to dig ditches and do other menial labor no matter what. This is a problem well studied by prisons and armies of the world over millennia. Thing is, whipping isn't usually tried with burnt out devs, who knows it could have worked. It's not like your IQ drops 50 points or something. USSR and China had a fair experience of forced intellectual prison labor, and things were getting done.
You can whip a tired ditch-digger until they dig more.
You can't whip a tired programmer until they write working code. You'll only get broken code.
A good analogy might be to the division between rank-and-file soldiers in the military, and military officers. You don't need to think to shoot a gun. You do need to think to decide where to send people to shoot their guns.
I think it's all about creativity. When you burn out, your creativity dries up. Most of programming (and generally thinking) is done by your subconscious, and when it says 'I've had enough of this, I'm not helping any more', you are SOL, no amount of willpower will help with that. That's why digging ditches is different.
an emotionally exhausted ditch digger can still use their arms and legs without impediment. an emotionally exhausted programmer cannot focus mentally and cannot write code at all.
These comments here mostly speak for the fact that the commenters did, in fact, never experience burnout, depression or other heavily psychologically draining issues.
Because you literally cannot do things. Which things is completely and utterly irrelevant.
I don't understand why people still
a) think that "knowledge professions" are some kind of unicorn job where special snowflake sauce is required, and it's obviously totally different from those gritty "manual labour jobs" and you have to constantly set yourself apart (how arrogant is that?!)
b) purport this strange notion that psyche has little to do with the body. Digger won't dig? Just whip'em, it'll work for sure.
More like "It happens to everyone."
I know this is a developer-focused site, but this isn't a problem unique to people in software.
An old joke, "Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called everybody, and they meet at the bar."