[Scalanchilis]

I start feeling burnout at a job if there's a lot of work, but the problems I'm solving are just not interesting. For example, if we're building on top of a legacy system with piles of technical debt and business pressure to ship features now, there's really not much time to focus on the parts of technology I enjoy: exploring new technology, experimenting with a new and better architecture, and playing around with higher-level ideas about the product and business model. At most, there's time for small-scale refactoring of a few classes and enhancing test coverage. Boring.

On top of it, if an employer prefers I get to the office by 9AM every day instead of on the schedule I function best on, I sometimes have to come to work tired or miss out on social/cultural opportunities that would get me home late.

I think software engineers can have differing motivations. Some want to organize and perfect a codebase. Others want to explore and build new tools and better abstractions. Some do want to socialize a bit; others want to be left on their own to code all day. I think burnout may be high in part because the a good many jobs are stressful without being inherently all that interesting.