Job burnout is very common and more serious than you probably think. Psychologists say most people suffer from at least a mild form of burnout at some point in their lives. It can have severe consequences...you shouldn't take it lightly.

How do you know you're burnt out? The Mayo Clinic says you should ask yourself these questions:

• Have you become cynical or critical at work?

• Do you drag yourself to work and have trouble getting started once you arrive?

• Have you become irritable or impatient with co-workers, customers or clients?

• Do you lack the energy to be consistently productive?

• Do you lack satisfaction from your achievements?

• Do you feel disillusioned about your job?

• Are you using food, drugs or alcohol to feel better or to simply not feel?

• Have your sleep habits or appetite changed?

• Are you troubled by unexplained headaches, backaches or other physical complaints?

You don't have to answer affirmatively to all of these questions, or even to most. Answering yes to even one symptom could be a sign of on-the-job burnout. (It could also point to depression, or even a thyroid disorder. So you should probably see a doctor.)

The factors that cause burnout are familiar to most programmers:

Excessive workload: You are overwhelmed by the excessive amounts of work you must manage on a daily basis without sufficient downtime.

Lack of personal control: If you don't have the authority to decide what needs to be done and how to do it, you're at risk. Everyone needs some flexibility to do their work the way they want to.

Lack of recognition: If your work isn't adequately valued or acknowledged, you're at risk of burnout. There are far too many managers who give only negative feedback.

Role ambiguity: Managers in our field don't have the best reputation regarding clear expectations. Many just wave their hands and expect you to figure out what needs doing and how to do it. If it's not clear what is expected of you, you may be at risk of burnout.

Limited opportunities for advancement: No one wants to feel that he'll spend his whole life on the same treadmill.

Lack of teamwork: If your team doesn't work together well, that may contribute to burnout. Is the load shared unevenly or unfairly? Do you always get the boring part of the job? Are you undermined by your colleagues, or criticized unfairly?

Uninteresting work: Are you interested in the work you do? Many of us get into the field because we love the challenge of solving algorithmic puzzles. No doubt you have noticed by now that this is a very small part of the job. Are the tools you use and the applications you write a good fit for you? If not, you may be at risk of burnout.

Extreme pace: Does your team always work at a breakneck pace? Or is it a sleepy environment with too few real challenges? Either one can contribute to burnout.

Poor corporate values: Do you believe your company is essentially unethical? If your job is to contribute to the success of a company that isn't aligned with your values, you may be vulnerable to burnout.

If you're burned out, you may suffer from insomnia, stress, deteriorating personal relationships, anxiety, fatigue, depression, and alcohol or substance abuse.

What's to be done? Well, you've got two options. You can endure the burnout and hope it goes away, or you can address the issues. If you decide to take action, you've got to change the environment or change yourself – probably a little of both. The Mayo Clinic offers this advice:

First, evaluate your situation and identify the factors that are contributing to burnout. You can't solve the problem until you define it – every programmer knows this. (And every programmer I've ever known forgets it regularly, but that's a story for another day.)

Next, figure out if your job can be restructured to make it more engaging and rewarding. Your manager may be a resource. You might choose to work at home part-time, to switch to more flexible hours, to shift your responsibilities, to take night classes, or to act as a mentor to a newcomer. Be creative – you may come up with a solution that benefits the company while making your work life more tolerable.

Don't forget to do some work on your attitude. Remind yourself why you got into programming in the first place. Reward yourself with short breaks. Spend time talking with colleagues. Combat cynicism.

Reach out for support. Family members, colleagues, and friends are likely to be supportive if you tell them what's going on. Your doctor may be able to hook you up with a support group for burnout victims. Your company may offer confidential counseling services. Don't hesitate to tap these resources.

Finally, do a serious self-inventory. Are you in the right job? Are you even in the right field? Maybe you want to work part-time while working toward a law degree. Or turn down overtime so you can finally finish that novel.

If you need to make a change, make it. You only get one life, so you've got to make the best of it while you can.

Good luck.

Web recommendation: This video made me laugh out loud! J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He is no stranger to burnout, but just now he's doing fine.

Statistics tell me that I get lots of extra readers when I write about Agile development. And why not? The Agile movement is the most interesting trend in software development right now.

I would argue that coding for multicore processors is at least as important as making a move to Agile. So are testing methods and security, security,security. But these are technical problems, not philosophical paradigm shifts.

The problem with Agile is that it isn't really a development method, or even a philosophy. It's an aesthetic. It's a system of values. Heck, the document that started it all, the Agile Manifesto, is written as a statement of values. The Agile movement is little more than a statement of values. The values are intended to serve as a touchstone for developers as they make decisions about how to build teams and applications.

So the modern approach to software development is based on a the value system outlined in the Agile Manifesto. So if we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start by evaluating those values.

There's just one problem. As many others have pointed out, the values are both vague and obvious. There's nothing revolutionary about any of the four values espoused in the manifesto. They're simple common sense.

Of course our development projects should be agile. The opposite of agile is slow and clumsy. Who would choose slowness and clumsiness over agility?

Translating an aesthetic statement into a guideline for real-world team structures, workflows, and development models is a nontrivial task. The values turn out to be the easy part. Developing software is still hard. Pair programming and unit testing and daily builds are consistent with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto, but they are separate innovations in their own right. They would be good ideas with our without the manifesto.

When you describe your team or your values or your project-management philosophy as agile, all you're really saying is that it's good. Based on straight thinking about priorities. You're not saying anything technical and you sure aren't cutting software development's many challenges down to size. You're just expressing agreement with a handful of uncontroversial tautologies. Sure, we like Agile processes. We also prefer code that works. And projects that are finished on time. And teams that come in under budget.

Commitment to Agile isn't enough anymore. What are you really doing to improve your process?

Web recommendation: Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. The writer's contributions to literature are too easily overlooked these days. Certainly, many of his novels and stories now appear quaint, needlessly complicated, wordy, and baroque. But Dickens made lasting contributions to characterization, plot, and fiction's role as social commentary. Check out his life and accomplishments at Dickens 2012, a Web site created by the Charles Dickens Museum and Film London in association with The Dickens Fellowship.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He is currently rereading Salman Rushdie's masterful Midnight's Children, which offers no small debt to Dickens's innovations.

You gotta hand it to the guys at RIM. After a terrible 2011, culminating in the removal of its chief executives, the company is still kicking. Like the Duracell bunny, the company keeps going and going and going.

Service outages, eroding market share, layoffs, plunging stock prices...the news has been nothing but bad for RIM. But the Canadian company, under the leadership of new president and CEO Thorsten Heins, isn't giving up.

RIM's latest strategy is to encourage the development of new apps for the BlackBerry platform. And just how will RIM woo developers? By bribing them.

Until February 13, every Android developer who ports an app to the BlackBerry's virtual Android environment, the Android App Player, will receive a 16GB BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

The arrangement was announced in a tweet by RIM vice-president of developer relations Alec Saunders. To qualify, developers must submit their Android apps to RIM's App World before Valentine's Day.

Introduced in April 2011, the PlayBook has been one of RIM's disappointments, selling a few hundred thousand units compared to Apple's tens of millions. One barrier to the tablet's adoption has been the relative scarcity of applications – hence RIM's announcement.

The 16GB PlayBook is widely available online for $299 or less.

Web recommendation: Well. This is horrifying, cool, and I suppose promising. What a crazy future we appear to be headed toward. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. It snowed so hard in Serbia yesterday that someone has posted a YouTube video of himself snowboarding the streets of Belgrade, towed by a car. Darwinism in action or just another day in the Balkans? You be the judge.

Hiring managers often search job boards, read emails and scour resumes to find the perfect candidates. Now, your job may be a little easier with a company called GitHire. 

GitHire offers a Web service -- for $1000 they'll find five engineeres interested in interviewing with your company. According to their website, they scour Git repositories for you in order to find the best and brightest. 

Software engineers are offered an interview with a company they may be a match for and if they say no, they say no -- no strings, no questions. 

The NY Times wrote an extensive piece on the service and we thought it might be interesting to share with you. Would you (or have you) used a headhunter service?

The terms “hacker” and “social network” don't really go together. Social networks are gathering places for n00bs and kids. Real hackers don't use services like Facebook – they build them. Heck, real hackers are probably too cool even to build them. They'd rather implement obscure networking protocols or write compilers for multicore processors or build robotic systems.

That's what I've always thought, anyway. But according to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, hacking is a core value at Facebook, not just among the coders, but as a way of seeing the world.

Zuckerberg's statement appears on page 69 of Facebook's Securities and Exchange Commission S-1 form, which the company filed yesterday as a matter of law as the first step in its initial public offering, the process whereby a privately held company issues stock for sale to the public. The S-1 statement is full of boilerplate legalese, but it offers interesting glimpses into Facebook's history, finances, business model, and future plans. The document includes a letter to shareholders from Zuckerberg. Such letters are often included in S-1 filings, but they are not required.

It is in the shareholders' letter that Zuckerberg claims that Facebook operates according to a set of principles he calls “the Hacker Way.” The idealistic statement includes a few elements of the Agile Manifesto mixed with a description of Facebook's internal tech process:

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

Not bad, huh? Zuckerberg's letter hasn't convinced me that Facebook is as cool a social network as – oh, reddit, for example. Nor that it would be a great place for programmers to work (though I have read that it is). Still, I give Zuckerberg credit for his letter. He didn't have to say all of that.

You can read the whole S-1 statement here. Take a look. I found it pretty interesting.

Web recommendation: David Letterman just celebrated his 30th anniversary as a late-night talk-show host. I don't watch him anymore, but I remember when he burst onto the scene, replacing old-style comedians with an engaging, self-deprecating, thoroughly distinct voice. Letterman's ironic comedy and laid-back style have become the template for a new generation of hosts. The Huffington Post has collected a series of memorable moments from Letterman's 30 years on late-night TV. I watched them this morning and marveled anew at the comic's genius. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He made a passable turkey soup for lunch today.

Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, has stepped down from his position as gatekeeper of the project. Clearly, the project has grown to a point where the project's creator can finally step back and take a break from working on bug fixes and daily commits. Here's the email he sent to the Node.js developer mailing list:

Now that the rewrite on top of libuv is largely complete, I am ceding my position as gatekeeper to Isaac Schlueter. Our energy will now be largely focused over the next few months on improving the third party module system experience including a website for browsing modules, a new addon build system, and binary installations from npm. Isaac is in the unique position to bridge the gap between core and external modules to ensure a pleasant experience. After three years of working on Node, this frees me up to work on research projects. I am still an employee at Joyent and will advise from the sidelines but I won't be involved in the day-to-day bug fixes. Isaac has final say over what makes it into the releases. Appeals for new features, changes, and bug fixes should now be directed at him.

Here's the best news you'll hear all day: Bloomberg has opened up its market data APIs to the public. That means you can use their APIs to build access to their market data services into your applications. Previously, as you stock market folk already know, Bloomberg's data services came into organisations through Bloomberg terminals.

Mind you, the actual market data is not free here, but if you've already got Bloomberg data services pouring into your organisation, this will open the doors to a lot more options for your application development teams.

In theory, this should give rise to something resembling a standard in the market data API world. Unfortunately, it sounds like that space is a complete mess, thanks to highly expensive data.

That is, getting live, real time market data is expensive, and it takes up a lot of bandwidth. While reading up on this release, I encountered some very well informed comments on Hacker News. One of them pointed to Nanex as a good, cheapish source of data. Unfortunately, their data can only be accessed via a Windows DLL. No Linux for you.

That same comment pointed out that there's a real need for a high quality, Web 2.0'ish real time data feed for investment firms. Maybe Bloomberg's effort here, to lay out a publicly accessible method for accessing such data, will spur the creation of such a company.

SOPA and PIPA are dead. This doesn't mean that pirating software, music, games, and movies online is legal, but that the ability of copyright holders and government agencies to shut down the piracy supply chain remains limited.

The whole Internet community banded together to defeat SOPA and PIPA. We all felt good about protecting free speech in the face of the proposed measures. And it appears that we have won.

So we are left with the status quo. Piracy is still illegal, but it's still common. Copyright holders will continue their search for legal tools to shut down the pipeline. Pirates will continue to use ingenious methods to get their hands on copyrighted works.

What if we are looking at this the wrong way. What if, instead of expending their time and energy stopping piracy, copyright holders accepted the pirates as an inevitable, even helpful, part of the creative ecosystem?

A number of researchers, writers, and even copyright holders are starting to come around to this point of view. In increasing numbers, people are sharing their opinion that piracy is a good thing.

How could this be?

First, there's evidence that piracy is an exploration and sampling tool for the studios' best customers. Survey after survey shows that pirates are more likely to spend a bundle on movies, software, games, and movies. It appears that pirates download content to see if it's worth having, then purchase copies of the stuff they like. Not every pirate turns into a paying customer, but the overlap between pirates and good customers is undeniable. It's not intuitive, but it seems to be true: Pirates are the industry's best customers. As one analyst puts it: “If piracy is a sampling and discovery tool for high spenders, then suppressing piracy could depress legal sales.” Another study, conducted by the Society for Consumer Research, found that users of pirate sites employed the sites as “try before you buy” services, leading pirate site users to “buy more DVDs, visit the cinema more often, and on average, spend more than their 'honest' counterparts at the box office. A 2009 report from the BI Norwegian School of Management has found that those who download music illegally are also 10 times more likely to pay for songs than those who don't.

Second, there's the argument that sales lost to piracy should be considered a marketing cost. Pirates are social, and they spread the word about worthwhile content. Studio execs are pulling their hair out trying to generate favorable mentions on social-media platforms. Pirates are effective at generating such word-of-mouth advertising. And they do it for free.

In an interview with IGN, the founders of game company Team Meat explained that they view piracy as part of their marketing program. Team Meat's Edmund McMillen explains, “The majority of e-mails that we get that revolve around piracy are people saying, 'I just want to get this off my chest. I stole your game when it came out because I wasn't sure about it and I really, really, really love it and so I bought it because I feel real guilty.' This is a common e-mail.”

In his blog at Futurebook.net, publishing pro Timo Boezeman writes about the opportunities available to publishers who embrace piracy as a new avenue for reaching customers instead of a threat: “Think about why people pirate your books. Why would they do that? Think negative and you might say: they don’t want to pay for it. Could be. But the main reason is: they want your book! And that is a good thing, right? So if you want to use that in your own advantage, you could see piracy as sampling. Hey, an opportunity! Take over control and spread the work for free yourself. Not just the complete work with no further actions attached. But for instance a management summary of your (non-fiction) work. Or a version with ads (additional income!). Or a version with social media buttons included to let the readers spread the word (so they become ambassadors of your work, free marketing!). Of course with links included that can help people to buy the original work if they like it (and I know from experience that people do this) in a format they choose (e-book, hardcover, etc.). If you take this even one step further, you can also see that this could help the author spread his name (and expertise), which could lead to extra lectures, workshops or seminars. And if you offer the author a complete package (including arranging his presentations), this could become an alternative source of income for you as a publisher.”

The producers of a a small, independent movie called “Man from Earth” tell a common story: Their movie languished unwatched until it became popular on pirate download sites. Then sales took off, and revenues too. The whole story is here: Internet Piracy is Good for Films.

A similar dynamic helped the sales of the humorous parenting book Go the **** to Sleep. The book grabbed the #1 spot on Amazon's bestseller list—a month before its release. It seems that a pirated copy in PDF form became popular on download sites before the release date. Instead of depressing sales, the pirated version generated interest and demand, and led to higher sales.

You can listen to similar experiences from bestselling author Neil Gaiman in this video. Gaiman used to be against piracy, but his view changed when he noticed that his sales went up in countries where his books were being pirated. As an experiment, he put his novel American Gods on his Web site for free downloading. Sales went up by 300 percent – not just for American Gods, but for all of his books.

Author Paulo Coelho agrees. Coelho not only approves of piracy, but he has actually posted “pirated” versions of his own books at torrent sites like Pirate Bay. Coelho relates the publication history of one of his novels in Russia. The first year, it sold 3,000 copies. The next year a pirated copy was released, and he sold 10,000 copies. The next year saw 100,000 sales, and sales grew to more than a million the next year. Coelho says people bought the printed books after sampling the pirated versions.

Also rethinking piracy is Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio, the company behind Angry Birds and other games. “Piracy may not be a bad thing,” he said at this week's Midem music conference in Cannes, France. “It can get us more business at the end of the day.”

The studios' claims of revenue lost to piracy are grotesquely inflated, but they surely are losing some sales to illegal downloads. It's just possible, however, that they are getting more than sufficient value in return.

Web recommendation: Here is the page in which Google details some of its charitable giving in 2011. The company says it donated more than $100 million to charity over the course of the year. That sounds like a lot...until you realize that it amounts to about one-fourth of one percent of the company's $37.9 billion in revenues. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He wonders if any of his old friends from the dial-up Bulletin Board of the Absurd (7 cps speed limit enforced 24 hours per day) ever read these posts.

Here's an astonishing fact. According to a series of studies conducted by the Pew Research Group, nearly a third of all American adults own tablet computers or e-book readers.

Pew says holiday gift-giving was responsible for rapid growth in the installed base. In just two or three weeks—from mid-December to early January—the percentage of adults who owned tablet computers nearly doubled, rising from 10 to 19 percent. The percentage of adults owning e-book readers likewise grew from 10 to 19 percent. Pew says the number of Americans owning either a tablet or an e-book reader reached 29% in January.

This is good news for tablet makers, obviously. Apple says it sold 15.43 million iPads during October, November, and December of 2011, resulting in record revenues and profits. Sales have been strong for Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Samsung as well.

It's not clear at this point whether sales will continue at December's pace, or if the installed base experienced a one-time growth spurt due to holiday gift-giving.

In either case, the tablet/reader world is now too big to ignore. Apps, Web sites, and net-enabled content all need to take tablet form factors and user-interface quirks into account.

What the new mobile platforms lack is the kind of “killer app” that rocketed previous platforms to success. That's an opportunity for developers. There's a substantial pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow for the firm that creates a gotta-have-it app for tablet/reader systems, whether for consumer or business use.

It's time to put on your thinking cap!

Web recommendation: Who doesn't love geeky t-shirts? I laughed out loud at some of the designs at Sexy Geeks and I bet you will too. J.D. says check 'em out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He currently suffers from a stiff neck, no doubt because he spent all day hunched over the screen of this laptop.

Trade organizations offer professionals a way to meet new colleagues, find out about job opportunities, get discounts and learn more about the field they've chosen. Developers have access to tons of different developer networks -- you've got the Android Developers' blog, the iOS developer network, Windows has one and RIM does too, but wouldn't it be nice to have access to tips and tricks for all those, in one place?

That's the goal of the Application Developers Alliance, a newly formed non-profit trade organization. Their goal, according to Jake Ward, head of communications, is to be the voice of the development industry, agnostic of process/language and platform, globally. The Alliance is free to join (for the time being), has no age restrictions and hopes to offer more discounts beyond the ones they're currently offering, which include some savings on Rackspace hosting and app dev training courses.

Check out the site -- the Alliance Network functions like LinkedIn and allows you to communicate with other developers, share tips, view message boards and search job postings.

Ward said the organization does not aim to discredit any work others have done in the past -- in fact, he said, he starts off most interactions with Meetups and other organizations by acknowledging the great work they've done so far and then asking how the Alliance can help.

As of right now, the Alliance has about 2300 members, many of are based in the US, but approximately 700 are based internationally.

Will you join the Alliance? Do you think there is a need for this?

To learn more visit the website, follow them on Twitter and like them on Facebook.