[cactus2093]

> Now my dev job never really ends, I am constantly thinking about work related problems even while playing with my kids.

I don't know your situation in detail, but I have caught myself feeling like this in the past and it was completely self-imposed. I want to believe that my work is adding value (even putting aside big-picture questions of whether it's valuable to the world overall, just providing immediate value to the business & clients can be rewarding), and since you have so much leverage as an engineer to impact the experience of thousands or millions of users with your code it's easy to let that feeling expand into an unhealthy amount of pressure to put on yourself.

I have found that stepping back and being explicit about my expectations for myself and my work has helped a lot. There are some things that are entirely out of my control, so I definitely shouldn't let myself get stressed about those. There are other things that could be within my control but don't fall within a reasonable set of constraints that I choose to set for myself. I don't expect myself to never make a mistake, or to work 80 hour weeks. This latter category is less black and white and I still struggle with it sometimes. I do want to be committed to my job, I do want to be seen as valuable, and work my way toward promotions, but you can still do that in tech in while still maintaining some work/life balance.

Being a founder for a few years also helped my outlook on this a lot. As a founder, or I imagine a CEO, this type of intense self imposed pressure is seemingly very necessary in order to succeed. As an employee, you see a much smaller reward if things go well, and you should allow yourself to feel a much smaller amount of pressure/stress when problems arise.