when i got burnt out, i left for a low-pay high-meaning tech job at a nonprofit.

it made things so much worse because it turns out that when you go to a low-paying job the quality of the org and coworker talent drops a LOT. this lead to a highly dysfunctional workspace which added so much more stress because a) dysfunction is stressful and b) you could see how that dysfunction directly harmed the meaningful thing you were supposedly working toward.

one of my proposals for partially fixing burnout would be to allow devs to take unpaid sabbaticals.

if i could have taken 6-9mo away from my job to do my "meaningful work" and then come back, i would've much preferred that to just outright leaving. i imagine that that'd be a great employee retention tool for the tech co as well.

In smaller companies you can negotiate it as my friend did.

There is some stigma around "diy sabbaticals" (leaving job without new one), my fiance and family was quite surprised and frustrated for proposing to leave a "high paying job where I don't have a lot of work/stress" without new one in toughy developer market with lot of layoffs.

There are hardly any jobs like that in the world. It would also be hard to create them via some state intervention, because it's very hard to create "meaningful, high impact, high autonomy" via bureucratic process.

I don't mean state intervention as most programmers are quite privileged, but a company that creates something like skunk works for people for burned out people

As Steve Jobs put it, "we're in a business of making phones, not hiring people". It makes way more sense for a company to get rid of an employee when they admit to burn out, rather than try to help them.

Yes, but I think this and (un)paid sabbaticals may attract a elite talent that is in short supply (at least in the US). But then again this is my speculation.

*If* such a thing could be done under typical corporate incentives/behavior, then I suspect the “high impact” part would need to be scrapped. Because when something is important to a corporation, it turns its eyes that thing (so to speak), which disrupts the other properties.

Or, “high impact” could be spread over the long term. So, unknown-payoff R&D. It would need to be an “invest and ignore” strategy and require a lot of institutional trust.

Many kinds of hands-on volunteering would do this. The “high impact” part would be the people helped giving direct appreciation.

I agree, but the charities programs I applied only need the marketing/seo or wordpress guy. Most charities don't have a need for the programmers.

Hands on. Build a house. Serve soup.

There’s a lot of jobs that follow this if your income is guaranteed. Most of the stress & pressure of a job comes from the fear of not loosing it.