Two poems about burnout, growth, and the dreams we cultivate when the terminal goes dark.
I've been in tech for five years now. Not long enough to call myself a senior, but long enough to have worked alongside brilliant engineers who've been doing this for a decade or more. And you know what I've noticed? That faraway look in their eyes during sprint planning. That wistful tone when someone mentions "work-life balance" like it's a mythical creature.
These poems aren't born from my own ten years of experience - I'm not there yet. They're born from watching the people who mentored me, the ones who taught me everything from Git workflows to handling production incidents at 2 AM. They're born from the stories they've shared, the exhaustion I've witnessed, and the surprising number of senior engineers I've met who have half-serious retirement plans involving goats, gardens, or getting really into woodworking.
🔁 The Great Reboot
For everyone who's ever Googled "how to start a small farm" during standup
Ten years of code, of sprints and deploys,
Of Slack notifications and digital noise,
You've debugged the bugs, you've scaled the stack,
And oh, how you've ached for that field out back.
How you've longed to trade your keyboard for a hoe and spade,
To swap your standup for some morning shade,
Where the only crash is rain on tin,
And "organic growth" means what's growin' in.
No more on-call at 3 AM,
Just roosters crowing now and then,
Your new commits? They'll be rows of corn,
Your pull requests? The break of dawn.
So here's to the soil you'll feel beneath your nails,
To simpler bugs (the ones with tails),
To the life you've been dreaming of, my friend —
Where your tomatoes will never seg-fault in the end. 🌾
⭕️ The Circle Of Life:
On mentorship, burnout, and the things we learn to value
The junior bounds in, eyes ablaze,
"I'll refactor this in seven ways!
I learned React, Vue, and Svelte last night,
Plus Three.js — watch this cube rotate just right!"
He speaks of microservices, Docker, K8s,
Of blockchain solutions and AI that creates,
"We need GraphQL, Redis, and Kafka streams!"
His energy boundless, bursting at the seams.
The senior nods and sips his coffee slow,
Remembers when he had that glow,
When every problem had a perfect fix,
When sleep was optional and life was CLI tricks.
He sees himself ten years ago,
Before the burnout's undertow,
Before he learned that "move fast, break things"
Means broken sleep and what exhaustion brings.
He watches, silent, kind, bemused,
Sees passion that will be diffused,
And thinks of seeds he wants to sow,
Of quiet fields and things that grow.
"Good idea," he says. "Ship it Friday, then."
Knowing someday, the kid will understand when
The greatest feature you can deploy
Is finding peace outside the ploy.
But not today. Today, let him run free—
Tomorrow's farmer needs his history. 🌱💻
📝 A Personal Note
Aside from tech, I also love poetry.
I wrote these poems after too many conversations with battle-worn engineers who've seen it all. The ones who patiently explain why my brilliant architectural idea was tried in 2017 and caused a three-day outage. The ones who've taught me that sometimes the best code is the code you don't write. The ones who half-joke about buying land upstate.
There's something bittersweet about watching people who are incredibly good at what they do slowly realize that being good at something doesn't mean it won't drain you. That you can love your craft and still dream of walking away from it.
Five years in, I'm starting to understand what they mean. I'm not ready to trade my IDE for gardening gloves just yet, but I get it now — the appeal of work where the problems are simpler, where success looks like something you can actually hold in your hands, where being "on-call" just means keeping an eye on the weather.
To all the seniors who've mentored me: thank you for your patience with my overly complex solutions. Thank you for sharing your war stories. And hey, if you do eventually buy that farm, I'd love to visit.
To my fellow mid-level devs: take care of yourselves. Learn from the seniors, but also learn from what they wish they'd done differently.
And to the juniors just starting out: your energy is beautiful. Hold onto it, but pace yourself. The marathon is long, and there's no shame in dreaming about a different finish line.
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