RFC: Engineers and Motiviation

Motivation is one of the driving forces for accomplishments and achievements, but it's not always easy to stay motivated. In this episode, Mounir, Matt Dole, and Sultan are talking about how to motivate yourself and stay focused. They also discuss burnout, how to avoid it, and what to do when feeling unmotivated and burnt out.

Transcript

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Sultan: 0:04

Hello and welcome everyone. My name is Sultan, I'm a software engineer at Artsy. I work in the collector experience. Today, I'm going to be your host, and I have two of my favourite Artsy colleagues I have Matt and Mounir. Matt, would you like to introduce yourself, please?

Matt Dole: 0:22

Sure thing Hi Sultan. Hi, Mounir. I am Matt I'm an engineer on the Find and explore team at Artsy, which mostly works on things like searching and filtering, helping collectors get from wanting an artwork to finding an artwork that they really love. How about you Mounir.

Mounir: 0:38

Hello, my name is Mounir. Also software engineer here at Artsy and I'm working with Sultan at the collector experience team. Our team mission is basically to create a great experience for collectors with comprehensive access to the insights and tools they need to strategically and confidently build and sell their collections. Thank you for hosting me here. It's my first time with you.

Sultan: 1:05

Lovely, great to have you here. So today we have an interesting topic, and which is motivation, but in the engineering world. So I would like to ask you a question. We know what motivation is, we know that it sort of drives you. But what is it in the engineering world for you? Mounir?

Mounir: 1:26

It's a bit of a hard question, and also, not there is like no easy way like to reply to this, like in my opinion. But for me, I feel that motivation is that kind of energy or like Power of Feeling that drives me to get things done and to keep like getting to be like to keep moving on with excitement. And yeah, this is how I think of motivations. For me as a software engineer.

Matt Dole: 1:56

Yeah, I feel like the idea of motivation is not necessarily different for engineers or for other folks. But I think what is different about it is that in a lot of jobs, your motivation is often very obvious, you know, you're a salesperson, you need to sell to 10 galleries this month, or you're a cook, you need to make the food that someone is ordering. As an engineer, you tend to have more leeway, we have freedom to work, oftentimes in ways that we want or on projects we want based on interest, or you can maybe change teams within a company, we have a decent amount of flexibility, at least that Artsy, to do stuff that we're interested in and excited about. And oftentimes that ends up being the motivation, because unlike in a lot of other jobs, it's not easy to look at an engineer and be like they are performing well. They cooked 10 burgers, you know, like, is an engineer performing well is a very hard question to answer. And so I think it ends up meaning that motivation usually has to come from you, you have to be someone who says, Okay, I, I'm going to go and do this project, because, you know, I think it's really worthwhile. And like, I guess what I'm saying is, you can get away with not doing work a lot of the time if you really want to plenty of engineers can just sort of slide by or people have like outsourced their work to other engineers and other countries, right? People find all kinds of ways to avoid doing stuff. So to me the difference between, like motivation in general and motivation as an engineer, is that we're thinking in terms of like, what keeps you motivated to do a job that people might not even know if you're not doing particularly? Well?

Mounir: 3:40

That's a very nice way of thinking of it. Yeah, it's

Sultan: 3:44

quite interesting to to look at it that way. Yeah. Yeah. For me, I think motivation is, as an engineer, specifically, like, motivation, in general is what drives me. But for an engineer, it's sort of what excites me what sort of challenges me, like, if there's something that I'm facing, it's challenging enough to make me sort of go out of my way to solve it. It just keeps, keeps me motivated. And if it's not something repetitive, it's something new, something that's sort of something that I would need to think deeply about. That's sort of what is motivating for me as an engineer. And that's how it affects my work in a way.

Matt Dole: 4:27

So you find yourself motivated by solving interesting problems. That's when you know why you are excited to perform a task or learn something because it's a new

Sultan: 4:37

problem for you. Yeah, and sometimes it's just something that makes me work flips. Like I would go into zone because of the this sort of task that I'm positive that I'm focusing on. And the zone for the people who don't know is we need to just or some people call it the flow induced state where you just The creative in a in a level that beautifully, you don't do it in a normal way, it's just everything just goes smoothly with you everything just works. That's my sort of my definition of the flow, the flow or the flow state or the getting in the zone.

Mounir: 5:17

I get that when you're just losing track of time, and just everything seems to be so smooth and endless. And you're just like, very productive. Yeah.

Sultan: 5:27

So my next question for you is, how do you become motivated or stay motivated? Because sometimes, for me, motivation sort of fluctuates. Like, sometimes I'm really energetic and feeling really good. And I'm really excited about the thing that I'm working on. And just keep on doing and finishing the sort of progressing in this sort of task that I'm working on. But how is like, some days, I'm just, I can't do anything, like I would be literally just open at the laptop and just staring at the code. And the code is staring back at me. And it was like, What are we doing here? Come on, we're basically we're not working at the moment. So like, how do you do it? How do you sort of get motivated or stay motivated? When you're working on something

Matt Dole: 6:17

I can relate to both of those feelings definitely. For me, a lot of the time when I'm not feeling particularly motivated myself, I'll lean on others, I will reach out to my team for a pairing session, you know, and it's apparent can be really helpful as a tool to unblock to learn something new. And sometimes it's just a good tool to kind of regain that focus and momentum, right? For me, motivation is often about momentum, that if I have already kind of started in on a project, and I'm excited about finishing it, or there's something new I'm learning, and I'm like, Whoa, this is really interesting, I've really been captured by this, then I'm going to keep going. A lot of times the part that I struggle with is getting started building that momentum to begin with. So if I'm looking at a new task, it feels impossible, it feels too large, how can I actually start to build momentum to get excited about it. And a lot of the time, that's by working with someone else, so maybe someone who has more experience in that particular area I'm working on, awesome, let's sit down together, you can teach me some things and make it feel less overwhelming, less daunting. Or maybe it's just someone else who's also curious to learn about this, or who has a little time to spare and is down to just chat and look at something together. It doesn't always have to be like, Oh, you're going to solve this problem. For me, sometimes it's enough to just talk with someone because they actually push me forward and get me going into something that's going to be interesting and going to be exciting once I get over the hump of starting it. What about pneumonia?

Mounir: 7:48

That's a good point, like getting motivation from others. Like, I think like, I think like this definitely works like have not been doing much of that I feel guilty about it. But I think it's a good point. One thing, one thing, like related to what you said about like getting that motivation from others, or like striving to get the motivation there like to start making action. This reminds me of like a TED talk, I've seen maybe like a year and a half ago, about sometimes like you need to make the action to get inspired to get like to get inspired and to get like some positive motivation. And like, I don't recall, the top name, name, but started with, sometimes you need to, like you don't need motive, like last time, you're not motivated to be able to brush your teeth, or like you to clean your apartment, get still do it. But once you start, you are there already, like the flow and you'll get like some motivation for it. And I feel the same thing like applies like for me, like as a software engineer, getting like, they're like, those direct ways for me like to motivate myself, by actually starting to do things when I'm not really having when I don't have much motivation. One thing we do, for example, in CX is having those small, very small tickets that makes you gives you the feeling actually that you're doing some progress, like some copy adjustments, or like some UI issues, like small issues, you fix those and you're like, Okay, I made some progress here. I made like, something like today, and you're getting better in the flow, other stuff like that they do as well, sometimes, to get myself motivated to do stuff like that day or like to work that day is a lot of the time, you have a really big thing in your mind like, and if you have sad, that big thing in your mind, and you're like not really very motivated to get over with it or like to do it. It really blocks you and makes you thinking that you have not done anything today. And Austan, like you start by the side stuff besides requests, and then you're like, Okay, I'm going to focus on this like later. One thing I learned he's actually like, also like super like funny quote says, like, eat the frog first. And it's about like, if you have a really like a big thing in the room or like a big problem. Start with it. And once you do that, once you make some progress there, actually it says It motivates you to do more and sets the tone for your entire day. This in addition to probably doing the same stuff every day, so if you would be doing the same like, like faking yourself getting into the zone as well, also works, I guess. So by that, I mean, you have to do like the same rituals to get yourself motivated everyday by for example, waking up the same day, drinking the same coffee, if you want to put like the same amount of sugar, it's like exactly with the same snack, or listening to the same type of music. It helps programme you to innovate yourself and get yourself to that they're productive mode. But yeah, these are mostly like their direct stuff that we're responsible or that they feel that makes me like, or like, I believe, as well, for many engineers, like makes them motivated. But there is as well, probably some many other indirect like, factors that we could affect or like we could work on to get motivated, and they're not really like related to us could be coming from our colleagues, they have anything to add, like probably matter.

Sultan: 11:07

Yeah, actually, the topic that you mentioned about the rituals, especially after the pandemic happened, there have been some people who sort of struggled in the sort of how to, like people used to go to the office every day. And it was, in a way, a ritual that you wake up, you take a shower, you get dressed, you commute to the office, and that's sort of your ritual to get to the office. And once you get to the office, you have this sort of energy, or is it this sort of desire to start working, it's sort of it's a motivation in a way. So people were like, I've read a few comments from people on Twitter, that they were sort of struggling in a way. And one of the things that these do is, of course, I'm not doing it, which is waking up, taking a shower and getting dressed and just walk into the desk. And that sort of changes the sort of the mentality around the place. And the sort of corner it like you if you live in a small place, it's going to be just a corner for work. And it just this sort of idea just sort of gets them out of the mentality of oh, I'm at home. No, I'm now at work. Yeah, this is my work corner there. But going back at one of the things that you said that we have in CX, which is the small tickets, the small things that get you started, sometimes I have this sort of mind that sort of just goes astray all the time, if I'm facing anything that's troubling me, like, if I'm working on a task, that's quite hard, and I didn't break it down beforehand, what I would be doing is I'm just working on it, like, now I'm working on it, but my mind is elsewhere, is just trying to solve a problem for another task. And try, sometimes I'm just working on something like, I'll be thinking about something in open source to just fix that issue of sort of anything small that can make me escape the place that I'm going through the place I'm struggling with. And I would just go there and do it. It's in a way it's procrastination in a way. And I would just go and fix that. And I would come back. And I would keep doing that until that I don't have anything left. But to face this sort of task that I'm working on.

Matt Dole: 13:23

Yeah, sort of the magic of taking a break from a problem and letting your brain process in the background and you come back to it an hour or two later. And you have fresh eyes, you have fresh perspective, the thing that you were totally stuck on before is now kind of obvious, right? Maybe you get stuck on something else, and you repeat that process. But being able to take a little break, whether it's working on something else, or going for lunch or talking with a colleague is often the thing that we really need to unstick ourselves. Right. Yeah,

Sultan: 13:48

exactly. Yeah. Which is something that's a bit strange, like you work on the task without actually working on it. Which is, like, I really appreciate how the mind works. Yeah.

Mounir: 14:02

There is a trick actually related to this, like that. One of our colleagues like spoke to me about like, recently is about like, having those power naps. And they're really efficient, like, So what'd you do you just like probably drink a cappuccino or like just like some espresso and then take a 20 minute break. Like a nap. You would wake up like feeling like so productive and already rested enough and very, like super sharp focus, and getting loads of stuff down. And probably you could see like, even from me, it's like sometimes you see like, I get like those periods in the afternoon when I will be like everywhere, like feeling very, very focused. And it's a very nice trick actually, to get yourself sometimes if you're not if you're losing because normally that's you're not sometimes like very motivated to do work. So, taking break. helps or not always but

Sultan: 15:00

So, now we talked about some tips and tricks to motivate yourself. What if none of these sort of works? And you try to finish something that's really close up? Would you? Like, how would you address that issue? Like you tried, the ritual did not work. You tried the sort of the minutes, but it still did not work. You tried to go take a break, take a power nap, and also did not work. But you have something that you need to finish, it's coming soon, and you need to work on it, because it's a big task. Do you have any sort of ideas? How would you address this sort of conundrum? Well,

Mounir: 15:42

that's when you realise you're human. And you can programme I think, like, mostly, for me, the first thing I always say to myself when this happens, and this happens, like regularly like cause, like, regularly, like always, and will keep happening. And also like, going to make the difference between like someone more experienced in knowing like how that you are not going to be always motivated to work. And sometimes we want to be very motivated. So what do you say like to myself, he's mostly like, lunchtime, I feel like, I am not doing any much. And I'm like, be whoring myself, sometimes they're just like, type what I've done this to say, like, actually, I've been achieving some stuff. But even if I tap and then there was like, nothing to type there. Sometimes the trick is just like, only get better with time. And there is no, like, there is no way to rush it. So sometimes a few taking few days off, could help. But a lot of time, you cannot take some days off, because probably you just took some days off, or you cannot take those off. Because you have a very important like a release actually to do. When it comes to that, like, what's very important is actually like, as we do an RC like lunchtime we say like, yeah, just like bring your own self to work. It's just actually to be clear, saying like, Hey, I'm not really like feeling very like motivated or very engaged to this. And I know that we are that we need to do this. But I would very much appreciate actually, if I get some help from here. And that help actually from your colleagues, is what Matt said before is like that motivation from others. You it might help you get a bit more motivated, maybe 10%, more motivated. 20% more motivated, might get you really motivated. And it might not work. But what I believe is very important, it just like realising that you're never going to be always motivated. You will get again, motivated, like with time, but just like give yourself a break. And make sure like to communicate this like with your colleagues with your team in case we have something to work on. Or just like taking some time off.

Matt Dole: 17:53

Yeah, I definitely agree with with everything you said one year. And the answer to this really depends person to person, I feel because everyone has different. I think everyone has periods of doubt or struggle or where they're not motivated. But that looks a little different for everyone. I very much agree with trying to be open about it, and trying to be honest about it. Because I think for myself, I get into a place of shame and guilt and fear about telling people that I'm like, struggling, I'm not having a productive day, I'm not getting stuff done, and everyone has those days. And that's okay. And one, you're not a terrible person, if you're having a bad day. Or if you have an unproductive day, too. It's almost always feels so much better to kind of break out of that by talking with someone or being public about it than just, you know, kind of keeping your head down for a day and hoping you feel better tomorrow. Because then tomorrow, you're like, aw, Theca didn't get anything done yesterday, like, Am I really gonna get anything done today. And you're just, you know, then you get and get into this really awful spiral, right? So yeah, if I can, if I can, if I can find within myself, and enough, enough juice to post in Slack and say, like, Hey, I'm feeling really unmotivated, could someone bear with me on this, you know, can take 10 minutes, just like talk with me, I'm bored, I'm lonely, whatever it is, that's getting me down, you know, that I also find myself in this pattern where if I procrastinate on something, it gets it gets worse and worse, right. So sometimes I will put off something that I'm scared of, right? It's a task that I don't know how to do. It's a big new thing that I have to learn. And so I'll do all the other stuff first, right? I'll do small tickets. I'll help people on Slack. I'll just find anything that like fills up the day like you know, you have to go for a week or two like that just like kind of doing other stuff. And like you said when you're you have to eat the frog, right? Like the hard thing is the thing that is going to be the most satisfying that is probably the most important for you to get done. And so it only gets worse over time and I try to recognise this feeling in myself. Often I'm like, Oh, I'm putting that off like that, that probably means that that's the thing that I really should be doing. So I should go get help with it, or I should literally just write it down. Like, that's a very important tool for me is writing stuff. So when I am stuck, I will I keep like kind of a just week long journal, and I will create a new section that's like getting unstuck, or, ah, you know, sometimes it's just yelling at my text editor right? Now, I'll try to just type up like, what I'm feeling and why I'm struggling and what I can do to get out of it. And oftentimes, that's how I can sort of process that. The last part that I'll add is, for me, I also find it very important to set some intentions for what I want to be to be doing. So I start each day by writing down my plan to do for the day. And sometimes I get through all of it, I feel great, it went great. Sometimes I get through one thing, and it doesn't feel so great. And I kind of have to reevaluate for tomorrow and decide what was really important and what wasn't. And then as the day goes along, I also tried to document how I spent my time. This isn't exhaustive, I tried a version of it, where literally, I would like document, okay, I spent 10 minutes working on this problem and five minutes catching up on Slack. And I went to the bathroom, like I tried that for a little while, it was terrible. I don't recommend it. But just kind of having these high level pictures of like, okay, I you know, paired with colleagues here, I've recorded the podcast here, I went for lunch, I did this other thing that does sometimes helped me to kind of compare what I wanted to get done my to do with what I actually got done. And just like, for me, having that kind of repetition is a little bit of a rhythm that I can get into where I say, even if I'm not feeling great on a particular day, or I'm struggling to define productivity, maybe looking back at my to do list helps. And I can like pick an easier task off that to get started. Or I can reach out to someone and say, Hey, like, I have this thing on my to do list, I don't know, if I'm gonna get to it, like, Could you pick it up? Like, let's talk about it. So those are those are my things are being open, like you said, trying to be open with myself to and acknowledge, like, actually kind of realised when I'm not feeling good when I'm avoiding something and then maybe write that down, or reach out to someone, or tell my team that I could use a little bit of help. We're really lucky, I think to work with people at Artsy who are supportive, high degree of psychological safety, who will say like, oh, cool, let's take a look at that together. And I am very grateful for that support. And that help.

Mounir: 22:26

I have this like a very small short, like, comment about, like, what you said, about like having those two dues like those to do sometimes they feel very, very dangerous, like for me, because a lot of time like, I really have lots of to do slacks. But then I'm like, I did like six or seven things, which is great. But I have 12 things in my to do list. And then I'm like, I really did not get to do all of them like this was not as successful as I thought. So a lot of time, I feel that those two dues, sometimes they set you for good, like for success. But you also need to make sure that at least for me, like have to be always very careful with what I have on my to do list for the day. Because last time I'm just like setting myself up for failure and for feeling bad at the end of the day.

Sultan: 23:13

Yes. Speaking of to do's, yeah, like I try every morning, when I wake up and sort of sort of plan out how the day is going to be and see what I'm going to be doing doing today. But some days, I just don't feel like doing anything. And let's say I don't have a long to do list. Literally, it's just four or five, sometimes six, seven. But some days I just not even finished one. And it just the whole day just the I just spent it. procrastinating doing something else doing something going for lunch. Or maybe if I'm just having the blues, I'm just going to be going for a walk and sort of trying to get out of this mode. And usually what I do and when I come back, especially at the end of the day, I'd be like, huh, yeah, I didn't do anything. So I usually just out of guilt out of shame, I just stay and at least take one to do just to make sure that Oh, I did something today. And it's not healthy. And it's not a good thing. So I'm working on it working to sort of improve on it and just sort of get out of this habit that I usually do

Matt Dole: 24:31

write to dues are a double edged sword. And I think it's really important to not measure your self worth by your to do list, because sometimes you will get zero things done or one thing done. And sometimes that's because you busted ass all day. And the one thing you thought you were going to finish by like 11am turned out to be an all day kind of thing, right? Not like you were just like slacking off. It's just sometimes we're bad at estimating stuff and it ends up taking a while. So to me there's two sides of this. The first is is being reasonable with your expectations, that's often the hardest part is it's really tempting to say like, yeah, I can handle all six of these things. And you know what, maybe on your absolute best day you can, but today is probably not your absolute best day, just statistically, it's probably somewhere in the middle. If you even if you can tackle, you know, 10 things, maybe it's better to set five or six. And if you have extra time, if you have extra energy, you can pull in another one, right, you can have a little little backlog or something. And the second thing is just being okay with where you land and saying, You know what, okay, I made it through three of my things. Today, there were four more on my list, I'm going to put two of those on for tomorrow. And two of them, I'm just going to I'm going to scrap or I'm going to put them in my backlog, I'm going to say, You know what, I might never get to these. And that's okay. Because I pulled in too much. And I really need to focus down. And just because I didn't get to all of these today, it doesn't mean I'm a bad person. It doesn't mean I'm lazy doesn't mean I failed. It just means that today wasn't the day in which I got seven things done. One other topic that I'm curious to get a couple of perspectives on is burnout. All the stuff we've talked about so far has been pretty focused on a day or a week, right? What happens when you feel unmotivated for a month, or when you go on vacation, you take a break, and you come back and you're still really struggling to build a rhythm build habits feel good about your work? Have you to felt burnout? What do you do with it? I'll put it to use.

Sultan: 26:32

So yeah, for me, I did. Like I did my, I think, three or four times, like I'm good at detecting when I'm feeling burnout. And I would just sort of try to communicate it and try to take as much break as I can to avoid her going there. And because when I go there, it's really hard for me to come out of it, like I would need a lot of time, a lot of the I would take some days off and do absolutely nothing. Like just literally just sit on the couch, maybe read just for an hour or two. And just after that just I would be staring at the wall, trying to sort of process all the things that I've been doing for the past sort of few weeks, and sort of try to heal from it, and try to come back and just sort of take my time off, and just enjoy doing nothing. For me, when I just get to the burnout, I just can't function like it would go for weeks. And I would literally can't even type anything like I would show up, I would be there. But to be honest, I'd be just pretending all might like all these sort of all the time, just be pretending that I'm working. But I'm actually doing nothing and not progressing at all. And it's something that's it's real, and everyone is like everyone goes through it, that we just need to be open about it, we need to be accepting of it. Because as Manu said, we're at the end of the day, we're all humans, we're not machines.

Mounir: 28:05

I have been hostile like very close even recently, Yoshi have been very close to like burnout like many times and have an every time I say okay, this is the time that I learned what's my limits, but then you realise that you are like always like pushing yourself a bit beyond the limit. So set like the time to take a break, as I see before you get there like because once you get there, it's too late. One thing has been like doing like a lot, for example, like recently is like taking for example, some longer holiday like longer weekends. Just like as a refresher, or like a change of change of pace, change base. And you can sometimes like really feel very unmotivated yet still work and do stuff and it's not good. Like it's not, it's not good, good for you. It's not good for your team. Because the same way like good energy spreads. Also, bad energy spreads. And from experience like for example, like just like being positive team or leading teams, I can clearly see like if, like one or two people on the team are very motivated, have a very good energy around them. That energy reexpress to the team and the team entirely gets very motivated, and very productive. And the opposite also, like is more true, probably. But this is why like, I believe it's important. When for me myself, or I believe as well for other engineers, the moment you feel like you are close to burnout or you're really like at the burnout, which is not really like is more extreme than one things to take a break like a really, really long break. But also after the break. Sometimes you like steal some stuff like brings memories, bad memories of something or like for example, something happened and you work like on a product for example for a long time to the point where you're like, I cannot take this product anymore, even if it's the most beautiful product that you work on in building a very very wasting like the herd like A colleague of ours, like an ex colleague of ours, like said, One day, he was working on something. And during the retro, he said, like, I just don't feel motivated around this anymore. And I don't really enjoy working on this anymore during the retro. And that was the probably the only action item that they ever heard in a retro that I will never forget. And it was very actually nice. And what he did after that, he just like, took like two or three weeks off, he still realised he's very engaged with the company and loving the product. And he just like switch, like to another team where he spent like a year there. So sometimes, like, maybe where you are is not the right place. And it just time to switch to another like, like another team, or like probably another company. But let's time it's just about your work most likely that what you're doing, you're just like not to engage with with it. Probably because the team you are working on is not like in is not empowering you like or not like motivating you because as you said before, you get a lot of that motivation from the people around you. And being inspired by people around you doing really nice stuff, or encouraging you as well to do stuff without putting much pressure on you. But enough pressure for you to grow. And yeah, sometimes you just need to take a break. And then after coming to the break, you don't go back to the same to the same condition where you were where this happens sometimes just too late. You just like probably need to small change. And then you can switch like probably to another team. If that also does not work. Maybe it's time to free to switch jobs, but less time. If you get there. It's not small thing to use, you're not just going to be recovering in like a weekend and a bigger change in what you do like in your day to day. Is lunchtime, like a very important or like an accessory?

Matt Dole: 31:51

Yeah, I agree. And I think part of what is implied in what you talked about Munir is that burnout looks different. And burnout has different causes. Sometimes it is just pure overwork, right, you've been putting in really long hours, and you know, you're just working too much and you need a break. And then maybe a break is good, right? Taking some vacation coming back, you can feel sort of refreshed. Sometimes it is the team, you know, maybe your team is just not clicking with you. And that's really unmotivated. And it leads you to feel burned out, even if you're working a reasonable amount, in which case a break may or may not help. And maybe it's more about changing to a different team, finding a different project that is more exciting to you, something like that. So yeah, I also especially throughout the pandemic, I think felt very burnt out. And for me, I think it was less about what I was working on and how much I was working, then it was not being around people and feeling very socially dried up, you know, not having any any kind of energy to draw from the people around me. If you haven't been able to tell by today's conversation, I think I'm a pretty social person, I get a lot of motivation from the people around me. I like just chatting with people and engaging in little, you know, conversation about what they're working on and what they're doing. And that's not something that I thought about really before the pandemic or something that I acknowledged was important in terms of motivation to me, but it is just to, you know, I can have a little chat with someone about something totally unrelated and still come out of that feeling more motivated, because I'm like, wow, the world is interesting. That's a cool person I just talked to, I'm gonna go see if I can get something done. Right. So for me, especially during the pandemic, it's been a matter of needing to find ways to have social contact, and especially casual social contacts that don't happen in a meeting, and are difficult on Zoom, things like that. And also, frankly, getting out of my apartment sometimes even if I'm just like going for a walk, like, you know, it's been easy at times these past few years to go a week and be like, Oh, well I really haven't left the apartment in a while have i And so finding ways to get out in the world and be reminded that it's larger than my apartments and be around people talk to people have little conversations. Those are the things that oftentimes if I don't do them result in me feeling burned out. So yeah, I think that there's there's not a single monolith burnout, right. Sometimes it's overwork sometimes it's working on the wrong things or with the wrong team. Sometimes it's just a matter of like the rest of your life that you can feel burned out because your whole life is falling apart. And and the way that manifests is I don't feel like working. So it's it's a hard problem to solve. But I think everyone at least working as an engineer, you go through it at some point, whether it's for life or work or other reasons entirely.

Mounir: 34:35

One thing related to this might be maybe he's not a lot of us has very good ways actually to deal with those issues. or ways that might work for other like people as well. And I feel that since we are like working routine. It's very important as well to raise those issues or like show or like share those like a solutions are like ideas with your colleagues. So if you see like one of your colleagues close to like burnout, or like not really feeling well or feeling stressed, just say hi, like less time like that support actually helps people grow because the more support or like love you show you to your colleagues, the more they will show you and it would create like a very good environment for where everyone can thrive and feel like they can actually raise their voice when they're close to like burnout or like not feeling well. And other thing like related to that this as well is if you work on a big project, even if you're not feeling tired, take a few days off, or remind your colleagues as well to take a few days off. Yeah, definitely. It's very nice. It's definitely like very, very rewarding. You come back. You're like feeling like, oh, this is actually something new. New Start.

Sultan: 35:52

Yeah, coming back from vacation. Yeah, usually gets more energised, you just get more motivation, I guess, to come back at it, like before you actually hit the burnout points. Okay. I guess that's the end of the episode. Thank you, Matt and Munir for joining me. It was a lovely time talking to you. catch you all later.

Matt Dole: 36:13

Thank you both. Let's do this again sometime.

Mounir: 36:15

Thanks for hosting.

Matt Dole: 36:17

Thanks for listening. You can follow the Artsy engineering team on Twitter at Artsy open source and you can find our blog@artsy.github.io This episode was mixed and edited by Jesse Ganya. And our theme music is by Eve Essex you can find on all major streaming platforms. See you next time.