On Working Too Hard

Recenty, I had a run-in with the burnout monster. It went something like this.

For the months of September, October, November, and December, I have been leaving work and going to the Starbucks on Bellevue in DTC. I sit at the tables, order a coffee typically, and work on my laptop. Sometimes I am working on Foundation related items, but usually I am applying to jobs, doing light LeetCoding, or working on my resume.

On December 1st, 2025, I had a man named Harry Weinstein reach out to me on LinkedIn. He was from Palantir and wanted to talk to me regarding a Forward-Deployed SWE position they had in NYC. I was at work at the time of receiving this text, and my body was immediately overwhelmed with stress. My hands were shaking at the thought of this being my ticket to one of the most innovative companies in my sector.

We scheduled a call for that Wednesday. For the days between Monday and Wednesday, I was stricken with fear, stress, and anxiety. I did not have specific anxieties about not knowing what to say, my performance or experience as an engineer, rather, I didn’t want to lose an opportunity to leave a place that was causing me such deep misery.

The call on Wednesday went about as you’d expect. I word vomited for 30 minutes, and by the end of the call he was ready to get off. Do I think he saw that I am a good person who does cool stuff? Probably. Did I convince him that I am the effective communicator he needs in a position like a FDSE? Definitely not.

I have not heard back from him. Bummer.

The next week, I got a message from my friend from Google, Brandon Rodriguez, that there was a position opening on his team and he wanted me to apply for it immediately. Within three days I had applied to the job, within another day, I heard back that they wanted to interview me. After a couple emails back and forth with my recruiter and the scheduler, my first two interviews (behavioral and technical) were scheduled for after Christmas break, December 30th.

I had essentially 21 days to become a god at LeetCode. Instead of doing what I usually do, messing around on my laptop while pretending to solve a problem, I had to grind LeetCode for 21 days, through Christmas, until my fingers fell off.

Week 1: Learning Python Syntax, solving all basic problem types, discovering NeetCode, Practice Interview with Brandon (thank god he picked a dictionary problem!)

Week 2: Continuing to learn harder problems, the speed of my problem solving starts to slow down as the problem difficulty increases. I had a practice interview with Kritika. Week 3: The problem difficult continues to increase, but I am steadily working through them. Christmas break starts and introduces a bunch of inevitable distractions. Week 4: My interview is on Tuesday. I “wfh” Monday, and take work off Tuesday. Behavioral interview goes great, Technical interviewer does not show up to the meeting. Rescheduled for January 8th, 2026.

My burnout started to show around Weeks 3-4. My main symptoms were my overall cynical mood, my inability to pay attention without high amounts of caffeine, and my constant need to reach for dopamine through YouTube, reels, or even vibe-coding. I was hitting a hard wall. But I didn’t want to admit to myself that I was burned out. I had only been studying for three weeks— not nearly hard enough or long enough. But the burnout was only partially linked to the studying, the underlying cause was my stress.

My stress management up until this point in my life was avoidance. I had an extremely high threshold for things that stressed me out. But, if something did stress me out, say Differential Equations, I would avoid it completely and phone it in until absolutely unavoidable (finals).

For the first time, ever in my life, I was faced with a fundamental dilemma:

I had to either face 21 days of pure stress, or fail my Google Interview.

That was what I thought at least. I couldn’t make the stress of the interview go away, no matter how I tried to cognitively reframe it. There was no way to avoid the knowledge that this was my dream, and in front of me was an opportunity to get it. I simply needed to demand more from myself, to not let my avoidant personality get in the way of a groundbreaking opportunity, and to power through. Power through. POWER THROUGH.

It was a mental marathon, that coincidentally started a day after my BMW Dallas half-marathon.

I learned something that boosted my confidence as a SWE 3x. LeetCode became this thing I could do, a beast of the known instead of the unknown. While still a beast, I knew it’s weaknesses as I knew my own. I started to be able to solve hard problems (mediums) off the cuff, almost shocked by my reasoning ability and focus. Here was the catch: It came at the cost of everything sustainable that kept my life in balance. My exercise plan went out the window, my mealplan and meal prep was ground to a halt. My communication with my friends went to zero, I canceled on plan after plan, and I self isolated just to recover from each day. My ability to get my job-related work done was severely impaired. It was frustrating to admit that there wasn’t a secret reserve of mental power that I could simply tap into. I need to fundamentally alter my lifestyle, brain frequency, and consciously block out everything that wasn’t DS&A.

I made tremendous progress, but at the cost of everything that wasn’t important— wait what?

I realized that most of what was cut out was extremely unimportant to me. I freed up tremendous amounts of wasted time by saying to people “I have to leave, I have to study for my interview.” Now, let me be clear that there is a time and place in life to waste time with friends. Not now, and I’m learning that my tolerance for wasted time is always lessening. I need to learn and want to learn as much as I can while I’m young and have a lifetime ahead of me to apply it. I am inspired by young people who do things, follow their dream, fail and succeed quickly. Weeks of focus payoff for years.

As of writing this, I have not had my second interiew. But this process has taught me that I am capable of so much more than I thought I was. My new goal is sustainable drive— maximizing my ability to get what I want while keeping my stress levels low enough to do it sustainably.