Ok, so you burned out (maybe not for the first time) and you took an unpaid leave from work. As more time goes on, you convince yourself that your brain is atrophying as you fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
The time comes where you have to go back. How do you do it? How do you shed this feeling of being broken goods in the eyes of yourself and (most likely) others? How do you heal the infected wounds of burnout? I can’t figure it out.
Are you unemployed right now? Because there is really no stress in not working, unless you can't financially sustain yourself. I would recommend moving to a cheap country in Asia to make it last longer and meet new people. Hell go back to school in some cheap country to learn the local language for 6month.
Data science, which I think makes this harder for me because a) things move so fast that you’re out of date within months and b) there is so much surface area of knowledge (math, stats, programming, visualization, ...) that impostor syndrome is an inevitability.
Well in addition to all that Data Science stuff I have become quite knowledgeable about several related fields. At least these topics come to mind:
- Data Engineering: various DB technologies' pros and cons (AWS Athena, Snowflake, MS Sql Server, Elasticsearch, Redis), Airflow, AWS S3
- ML Engineering: AWS autoscaling clusters, EC2, Spark cluster set-up & management, IO/CPU bottle neck identification, optimizing workloads (like how large chunks, how many Spark worker processes, how many threads on Python's libraries, ...)
- Umm Web Engineering?: HTTP API design, load balancing, Docker & Kubernetes, partial results caching for real-time responses
I have understood that on larger organizations each of these could have a dedicated team behind it. Anyway I've been lucky to find this company & role and gotten an opportunitu to learn and apply so many technologies, but I must admit it is getting a bit tricky to keep (shall I say pickle) all that in my brain :D
The time comes where you have to go back. How do you do it? How do you shed this feeling of being broken goods in the eyes of yourself and (most likely) others? How do you heal the infected wounds of burnout? I can’t figure it out.