How to Avoid Burnout During Your Top Tech Job Search

Someone in my coaching program burnt out in just one month since joining.

Then exited the program, and paused their job search.

Here's what they neglected:

After 12 months running SixFigureEuroEngineer.com (and years watching friends or doing it myself), I'm convinced this is the #1 skill required to land a top role.

Why?

Because landing a top role takes many months of consistent effort.
Here's what I recommend these days to people in my program:

The ones managing to do that, are the ones getting the best results.

In this article I'll be sharing a few concrete ways to optimally manage your energy for your job search.

❌ Start a blog
❌ Build a side project
❌ Contribute to open-source

Here's why 👇
Getting into Big Tech, HFT, or landing a $100k+ remote role takes months of focused work.

Your time and energy are limited.

Use them for the highest-leverage activities:

Everything else is not a top priority.

Side projects, an online presence and open-source contributions can help, especially in some cases.

But since your energy is limited, allocate it to the highest-leverage activities first 👍

Sure, your employer can be a stepping-stone:

But, as discussed earlier, the scarce resource when hunting top jobs is your energy.

And - guess what - 40+ hours per week is a great deal of energy and time.

So what do you do?

I discuss a few strategies in GREAT DETAILS later on in this article, for all paid subs.

For everyone who's not subscribed, I'll leave you with a mental framework that you can use 👇

Define your goals

Assess your resources → Is hyper-performing at my job, while looking for a TOP tech role, sustainable/possible for me?

Ask yourself what would be the cost of "de-resourcing" your current job → Missing out on quicker promos / fewer learnings / getting fired ?

Does leaving your job make sense? → For strategically going back to school / taking a sabbatical / ... ?

Get creative → Think out of the box: what unconventional strategies can you use?

Evaluate which strategy is optimal in your case, based on your specific circumstances

GO GET IT

Ultimately, the battle to land a top role is a mental one:

Here are a few things that helped me in my past job search grind:

Very simple to pursue: you can just use an app like Headspace and follow their guides. It has many science-backed benefits for your mental health.

I've always been sporty and as a kid I did 10 years of competitive sailing, so maybe I'm biased. But doing at least 20-30 minutes of physical activity every day does a lot for me.

Additionally, going on walks or doing yoga also helps: your body needs movement!

Garbage in → garbage out

Sticking to high-quality organic food is 👌👌

Either through a single partner or on hopping on dates: It's a core biological need. And I don't mean just sex. But also everything else that goes around romantic intimacy.

Somewhat similar to the previous point, but with friends and/or family.

I don't think you need many friends or a huge amount of social interactions. But having at least someone in your life that prevents you from feeling isolated and alienated is important.

It seems that people struggle with this nowadays, and it's been proven to impact your well-being and stress a lot.

If you need someone to talk to, you can also look for therapy options. Maybe a pet can be good too 🥰 Or just putting yourself out there a bit more!

This is especially helpful when grinding to get a top job.

At the end of the day, a job is just a job: you shouldn't "kill yourself" over it.

Landing a top role can have many benefits, and incurring some sacrifices to get there is normal. But in the end life can be very good even without entering Google Zurich or getting a six-figure remote role.

So don't tie your happiness and self-esteem to the outcome of your job search.

In this guide, we discussed:

We’ll now expand on this last point, going into detailed strategies.

I mentioned how you need at least 10-15 hours a week, every week, for several months, to land a top role.

I also mentioned how to stay mentally healthy, your life cannot be “just work” for too long: you also need some sport, some socialisation, some sex or cuddling, some hobbies etc.

I think it’s also hard to be "super optimised”, like some people online propose when talking about productivity or bio-hacking.

[Look, if you manage to do everything and still be happy and healthy and have no issue whatsoever, then this guide is probably not for you ^^ But from what I see out there, most people fitting this last category aren’t really ‘living it up’ - just my opinion]

If we look into it, and we account:

Total is: 85–120 hours.

Total hours in a week is: 168.

Therefore, it means we have about: 48 to 83 hours for your day job.

So, technically, yes: you can both do all the above things AND work 40+ hours on your job.

But I think the above schedule is for someone like the ‘bio-hacked’ ‘productivity gurus’ I mentioned above.

I think anyone can do that lifestyle at least for some time. The problem is that, over time, it becomes unsustainable: for instance, what if you want to do a weekend with your friends or gf/bf? That’s gonna go way beyond the 5–10 hours that we accounted for socialising above…

If we’re considering long-enough period of times (like the ones necessary to land a top tech role), having such a strict schedule will impact your well-being.

It’s not even about “being able to”, but also about “wanting to”.

Maybe you are able to go through that schedule and not get sick, but then it means that there are many areas of your life that are ‘understaffed’, and that might be as important as this job search (could be dating, pursuing a hobby, travelling, whatever it is that you like to do in life - even chilling at home watching a movie).

Now, some numbers:
We just mentioned that we have 48 to 83 hours a week for our day job while pursuing a top tech job.

This amount might get smaller when there are spikes in demands (like if you’re interviewing for 2/3 big tech companies, or if you need to rush your system design prep or need to land a referral for a job that might be filled in a week).

The first thing this tells us is that:

It’s also about mental energy.

But, since we’re considering mostly mentally-demanding activities — working as a Software/ML/Data/DevOps Engineer, doing interview prep, iterating on CV/LI, getting referrals etc — we’ll assume there’s a high correlation between the two.