[pdimitar]

> my conclusion was that my burnout (and I think others too) was caused by being a caring decent person in an uncaring world

Yikes! That hits way too close to home. You didn't have to attack me like that.

In seriousness, this is a very astute and correct observation. Noticed it in myself and several others as well. It really pays off to correct your level of caring with what you see from your superiors and colleagues (and peers, in non-commercial activities).

[Buttons840]

I also see some truth in that insight.

A problem I have is I don't know how to work if I don't care. At my last job I tried to not care and succeeded, but then got fired for poor performance.

Are there sufficiently productive people who don't care? Or does everyone care, but some hold themselves to impossibly high standards?

I don't know how to separate "lower standards" and "stop caring". They are the same to me, because lowering my standards requires not caring about the things that comprise my high standard.

[pdimitar]

Oh, that one is easy IMO.

Create a backlog of tasks that you would want to do in a week. Then do it in a month.

Not caring doesn't mean slacking off. It means to reduce your output.

[Dalewyn]

>Or does everyone care, but some hold themselves to impossibly high standards?

That's your answer right there.

Do you know the age old saying "That is above my paygrade."? It means you shouldn't care more than what you are paid to do, which in turn will hopefully prevent you from burning out.

>I don't know how to separate "lower standards" and "stop caring".

You need to remember that your personal satisfaction ("I did good work!") is independent from your peers' satisfaction ("He did good work!"), and that correlation is not causation.

Life is short, draw a clear line between your personal and professional lives and budget your limited capacity for passion appropriately.

[Buttons840]

That explains how to set time boundaries, that's easy, set a timer, use the clock, etc. It's a mechanical process to adhere to time limits.

I'm thinking about things like finding millions of real user passwords in the test database. I complain and push and eventually we delete all the passwords from the database which breaks everyone's test build and in the end I don't make any friends. Did I care to much? I harmed my career because I cared.

Early in the project we agreed to organize our code into modules a certain way, but that fell apart and the code was not organized. I never knew where my code should go, the existing code was not organized, it bothered me a lot. How do I stop caring about that?

Shortly before I was fired a unit test I had written was passing even though it shouldn't have. The code was something like "assert(x == 1); assert(x == 2);" and the test was passing, it was impossible. It was some custom TypeScript stack and I got on the phone with the guy who created the tech stack and he agreed something was off, but none of us had time to look into what's up. I was fired before we ever got to the bottom of it.

These are the most recent examples, but I've had similar issues at other jobs. Imperfections, big or small often bother me more than other, and, again, I don't know how to lower my standards without also stopping caring, but without caring I have a hard time working.

[Dalewyn]

Again, you need to consider what you are paid to do.

Are you paid to care about "finding millions of real user passwords in the test database"? About caring how or whether your code is organized? About what should be happening in a unit test?

If you are paid to care about it, absolutely do so because that's your job. If you aren't, though, at most you should inform someone who is paid to care about it and then forget about it because it's not your concern.

Life is short and there is only so many waking hours in a day, so we need to budget them accordingly. If you can't bring yourself to be less passionate about your work even though you realize it's actually causing you and your coworkers problems, perhaps it's a sign you need to change professions entirely.

[Buttons840]

They say I'm paid to deliver working software, but I'm not able to do that with confidence until lots of things with the system are fixed.

Their actions, though, say that they want someone who hustles and creates bugs and then puts on a good show fixing the bugs they themselves created.

Saying it like that, I guess the solution is to just get out, but it's hard to accept "just find another job" as the solution when I'm not even employed right now.

[pdimitar]

I agree with your comments a lot, just want to point out that questions like these:

> Are you paid to care about "finding millions of real user passwords in the test database"?

...are never clearly answered, in 99% of all jobs everywhere.