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by parpfish 739 days ago
when i got burnt out, i left for a low-pay high-meaning tech job at a nonprofit.

it made things so much worse because it turns out that when you go to a low-paying job the quality of the org and coworker talent drops a LOT. this lead to a highly dysfunctional workspace which added so much more stress because a) dysfunction is stressful and b) you could see how that dysfunction directly harmed the meaningful thing you were supposedly working toward.
1 comments
parpfish 739 days ago
one of my proposals for partially fixing burnout would be to allow devs to take unpaid sabbaticals.

if i could have taken 6-9mo away from my job to do my "meaningful work" and then come back, i would've much preferred that to just outright leaving. i imagine that that'd be a great employee retention tool for the tech co as well.

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sentimentscan 738 days ago
In smaller companies you can negotiate it as my friend did.

There is some stigma around "diy sabbaticals" (leaving job without new one), my fiance and family was quite surprised and frustrated for proposing to leave a "high paying job where I don't have a lot of work/stress" without new one in toughy developer market with lot of layoffs.

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