Burning Out From «Always Be Helpin’»

There is a phrase that I heard more people using than I would have liked, in my life: Always be hustlin’, which is often connected with Uber, though I highly doubt they are the source of it in the first place. I don’t like the phrase nor the spirit it embodies because I met those people. The guys who kept pestering me for years to build their dream site, game, app, always with a catch to make money out of it by hooking people in. For the most part these would be badly thought out clones stealing ideas from one or two successful existing examples, but who am I to go and keep score.

I prefer a variant of it which would be «Always Be Helpin’», inspired in part from Susan Calman’s talk of kindness. The way I tend to express this is: if helping someone does not cause me to lose time, energy, or money, helping them is close to a duty. Unfortunately, turns out this is not as easy as I thought when I expressed it.

I have been applying this particular rule both at work, for which I introspected on the role of senior engineers a couple of times, and in personal time, by trying to keep all of my work “visible”, either as blog posts or as Twitch streams. I’ve been trying to formulate ideas in a way that are more easily understood by newcomers (including my wife who’s been learning Python for the past couple of years and can now follow at least some of my projects), and I even ended up buying stands so that I could more easily stream the hardware implementation of my aircon controller.

But, it turns out, this is leading me to burn out, in both environments, and I seriously need to scale this back.

At work things are actually quite good, but I did sign up to host an intern and, though I’m getting a lot of satisfaction to the experience overall, it reminded me why I don’t want to be a manager. It’s too much pressure for me, and it ends up draining my energy with worry to put someone’s career in my hands. And that is probably the hardest problem in my role: to maintain the expectations of my role, I need to maintain a healthy impact on “people and org” — and that’s something that taxes me more than the technical requirements of the role.

This is something I struggle with. It makes total sense that for a senior engineering role to be having an impact on the work of other people, and I have been doing my best over time to “scale myself up” as they say — but it’s not something that comes natural to me and it takes energy. At the same time, I’m not the perfect code monkey that can live forever off that, so I really need to find a way that works for me without completely burning out.

In personal time, I found myself trying to find time that works to go ahead and work on stuff “on stream” and explain it there so that random viewers can figure out what I’m doing. But that does not really work that well. if I don’t schedule it ahead of time, nobody turns up, but to schedule it ahead of time it means I need to add to the pressure of not being able to do a number of other things I may have to do.

And the “sizeable chunk of uninterrupted time” that the streaming has been using would be the same reserve I would have for relaxing: after work, before or after dinner (depending on how early it ends up being), and not when we’re out with friends. Since now going out with friends is again an option, at least for some friends who are double-jabbed, this means there’s a lot fewer “slots” for me to stream in. I’ve been pretty much forcing myself to find that time, but this is now getting in the way not just of my own relaxation, but also of family and social life.

When I started the streams, it was because I wanted to figure out how to convey information over video calls, since that has become the norm for work related content as well. And I think I did get a bit more practical at that than I used to. But at the same time, I realize that it’s not something that can be done without a significant investment in the right tools for the job.

I ended up getting the microphone and enough mounts that allow me to keep my already owned camera (and lense) in a position that is useful — and I got the light, which admittedly I can use for a number of other things (and I already used twice for completely different purposes). But then again I can see that to get something of a decent enough quality to make sense, you do end up needing preset selection buttons (Streamdeck or the like), and if you want to have a bit more audience, you end up having to pay one of the providers to get you restreaming options (or technically I could do it from home, if I could be bothered with setting up a restreaming server here, Hyperoptic does provide 1Gbps service, but it’ll be even more work for me to do.

And that is without considering the fact that, even though I have now the videos posted on YouTube for the future, I do not have captions on them. And I have personal experience reminding me that this is not the good way to have content up — but it’s also not something I can do myself, so I would have to pay someone to do it… and it’s not a lot of money, but it’s more money than I wanted to invest just to randomly try stuff out and maybe explain something to the wide world.

Money investment is one thing, but time investment is also another. At some point, I have been considering how to make it easier to explain some concepts that need a bit more dynamic point of views. For that i was considering learning Synfig, which looks like a pretty powerful tool to explain. But it turns out this is not the type of tool I want in my toolbelt at the moment: it’s not an obvious tool unless you know enough of the concepts around animations, and while it would be probably be extremely impactful if I was trying to focus on teaching… that’s not my job, not my role, not what I can have most impact with.

So what is that I can have the most impact with right now? I have no idea! For sure, I need to recover from this spell of burnout. It means that I’ll probably not be streaming any of my work for the foreseeable future. And while I have not settled on taking a break from blogging, it might be a bit more sporadic, skipping some of the Tuesdays at least until the internship is finished and a few other things fall into place.

For now, I won’t be waiting for streams to work on the air conditioner anymore, and in particular as I finish this blog post I just assembled one of the new boards, which hopefully will turn into a working air conditioning control board this very week. But hopefully this mean you’ll see more finalized code and designs being posted, soon.

And, honestly, I start to think why the various social networks of likes, subscribe, comment, … are important to creators. It definitely would feel less taxing to me if I knew that the stuff I’m doing is actually helping people rather than shouting into the void and hope someone is actually listening. So, if you enjoyed my streams and/or blog posts on various topics, while I’m on a break, please share your favourite posts or videos with others, comment to state whether you agree or disagree, in general, if you care about the content, show it. Because it just feels so draining to put effort on things people don’t seem to notice.