Finding my joy 🫶
What I discovered about myself and how it helps me avoid burnout
Earlier this week I decided to embrace the -2°C and snow and ice that hit North West England and took my dog out for an evening walk. Whilst listening to the crunch of snow under foot, my mind quickly jumped into pondering various things I had seen or heard during the previous few days.
LinkedIn seems to be littered with tech folk talking about stress and burnout as if it is an accepted part of our industry. Similarly, I had colleagues sharing some slides from an Oxford University presentation on how to recognise and combat stress and burnout in the workplace.
It got me thinking…
Most people seem to simply put it down to a collection of things such as:
working long hours
deadlines
inexperience in a certain tech stack
hitting bugs / blockers
However, I can think of countless occasions where I have faced into these very things and not once experienced stress or burnout as a result. Why might that be?
The answer I found amongst my musings was ‘joy’, bringing myself back to
’s post about The ‘Joyful Work’ of Software Engineering a few weeks back (see below).
The PC Gamer
If I take myself back to the early 2000s when I was an avid PC gamer, I vividly remember playing games such as World of Warcraft or Call of Duty (the original WWII version) for hours and hours. I would play until silly o’clock in the morning, get a less than adequate amount of sleep and then repeat the same thing over again. Okay, I get it, playing computer games isn’t quite the same as being chased by a project manager for progress on a software development ticket, but they were still high pressure, involved long hours and had deadlines (i.e. a limited amount of time to complete a quest or capture the enemy flag…).
The thing is, in those moments I found myself in a state of pure elation. I was in a zone that was unique to me - a concoction of different emotions, which to some might be their idea of hell, but to me they were fun, exciting and created my own little world of joy (there’s that word again).
The Programmer
Fast forward to my later years when I did more programming than gaming, I had a very similar experience. When building my projects at university I would often find myself in that zone once again, spending a good number of hours churning away code, learning new things about C/C++/Java/C#/JavaScript and trying my very best to apply them accordingly. The joy was real.
This sensation has come in waves throughout my career, with some jobs being full of these moments and others less so. Upon deeper reflection I believe that the very notion of joy is created through a unique set of factors that are important to the individual, so in my case:
zero micromanagement
little distraction
opportunity to learn at a good pace
an interest
These things in conjunction result in me experiencing the joy for what I am doing, allowing me to push beyond what might typically mentally (or physically) exhaust me.
A recent great example of this was during the Christmas break of 2023-24 when I was the head of engineering at a SaaS scale-up. Because of the time of year I joined the company, my pro rata holiday allowance meant that I had to bank up what little allowance I did have to extend my paternity leave. As such I found myself as one of the only people in the company working over the Christmas break, but it presented a great opportunity to fall into the zone and align all of my ‘joy criteria’.
With little else taking priority due to customers being shut, zero distraction from other colleagues, and an opportunity to learn something I’m interested in (observability), I set about improving the product’s observability dramatically. I started putting Honeycomb.io into practice by instrumenting the existing codebase more effectively. This resulted in some epic discoveries around product usage, error rates, poorly-optimised queries and even some other very interesting finds. This then allowed me to start creating a backlog of issues with the API, as well as fixing some of the issues myself. It was a snowball of fun, diving deeper and uncovering things which could provide a lot of value to the business and the customers.
In this week period between Christmas and new year, I had not only been massively productive, but enjoyed every single working second of it. This was despite the fact that for the first time in my 13 years in the industry I was working over Christmas, it was bloody good fun!
Obviously this isn’t the only example of when I’ve found joy in work, otherwise it would have been a very boring 14 years to date. It just serves as a very clear example of when I’ve found myself in such a position and loved every second of it.
The Husband & Father
I also, on a daily basis, find myself in those moments of joy in my role as a husband and father.
Finishing work on time and being able to play with my children brings an instant feeling of joy. Stepping away from work and having that healthy barrier between work and home allows me to put all of my attention on my family.
Those long walks around local National Trust parklands with little distraction, no care in the world other than to spend quality time with my family brings me pure joy. It is a slightly different joy to what I experienced playing games, or spending countless hours with my head stuck into fixing software bugs, but it is joyous nonetheless.
I’ve also been very lucky (or choosy?) to work for companies that align with my joy factors, allowing me to create that healthy work/life balance that we all strive to achieve. Reflecting back on what I consider the important factors for my own joy, it looks like this:
No expectation to work crazy hours (zero micromanagement)
No late night messages from my boss (little distraction)
A culture that promotes self-guided learning (opportunity to learn at a good pace)
Values I can get behind, plus interesting problems to solve (an interest)
In my experience, having a good balance between work and personal life is key to avoiding burnout and maintaining a state of joy on both sides of the fence. If work creeps too much into your personal life, it can start to erode at the very foundations of a health family life. My own experience of this has led to some upsetting times at home, when I’ve struggled to engage as much with my children or even found myself distancing myself from my wife - not healthy!
Conversely, if the balance tips too much in other direction and personal life eats too much into work then things can be equally as negative. Although most modern employers are respectful of people being people and needing to have a degree of flexibility, there is still a limit to what this looks like. Tipping the scale too far can result in poor work performance and the dreaded Performance Improvement Plans and a sense of feeling inadequate.
The Academics
In a recent post on LinkedIn I shared a video of the said dog walk where I mentioned about not knowing if there were academic studies to confirm or deny my feelings. It would feel incomplete or misleading to ignore this point and bring the question to life.
After doing some reading I came across the job demands-resources model - an occupational stress model which suggests “strain is a response to imbalance between demands on the individual and the resources he or she has to deal with those demands”.1
The JD-R model categorises the risk factors associated with this job strain into one of two buckets:
Job demands (physical, psychological, social or organisational requiring sustained physical or psychological effort or skill)
Job resources (physical, psychological, social or organisational that are functional in achieving goals, reducing job demands, stimulate growth, learning and development)
The key thing about the resources is that there are workplace and personal resources - the model makes a clear distinction here
In my example of joy factors, which consequently I wrote down before doing any research, they map quite nicely to the categories described in the JD-R model.
Zero micromanagement: Ties to autonomy, a key job resource that reduces burnout and promotes intrinsic motivation and joy.
Little distraction: Links to control over the work environment, allowing focus and a sense of mastery, another job resource.
Opportunity to learn: Directly relates to personal growth, a known mitigator of burnout and a promoter of engagement.
An interest: Fosters intrinsic motivation, which research shows is a protective factor against burnout.
Finding your joy
I’d love to be able to turn around and tell you a perfect equation for finding joy in all that you do, but that is unique to you.
Why not step away from the laptop, take your dog on a walk and have a think about this too. If you don’t have a dog, just pretend and go for that walk anyway (just don’t start shouting “Rufus” in the park otherwise people will stare).
Think of a time when you were in that joy zone, whether that was in work, playing games, spending time with your children:
how did you feel?
what made you feel like that?
what was the environment like?
who were you with?
what were you thinking about?
Let me know your thoughts and experiences in the comments!
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_demands-resources_model
The Job Demands and Resources model is a good find and makes a lot of sense. We're been speaking with quite a few engineering leaders recently and one of them has a similar approach to creating an environment of high-challenge coupled with high-support.