Regretting the Golden Handcuffs: Beware the Costs of Burnout
lyonheart.us
lyonheart.us
I worked 24/7 (with a wife and 2 kids) on this beastly mix of 10 year old Perl and very inexperienced Rails code. Despite the hours, I was excited because I thought this was THE big opportunity.
At my one year review, the owners told me I wasn't working hard enough. I went from a high point to a low point overnight. Wrestled with it for about a month. Then while I was riding in the car with my wife I got a snarky hipchat message from the owner of the company and showed it to my wife.
She looked right at me and said, "Quit. Don't worry about the money, we will figure it out. I don't want you working for people like that and it's obvious what it's doing to you."
So I resigned. Told them I'd stay on for 30 days for transition but that it just wasn't the right place for me. The weight off my shoulders from resigning was ENORMOUS.
For about 2 months I struggled with what to do. All the experience I'd gained at that job had virtually made my resume and after the experience, just like you I wanted to find something MEANINGFUL to do. Something I could wake up every morning and know that what I was doing made a difference for the right reasons.
And the opportunity came 2 months later. I ended up turning down a job for twice the pay for what I knew was best in the long run. So far it has been and my wife and I have never been happier. This company treats employees better than any I've ever even heard of. Not silly perks but actual, life balance, we value you as a human being, feel free to move about the company if you want a different challenge...perks.
The only downside is that I'm pretty sure my wife will kill me if I ever lose this job. :-)
They've got a massive network effect which is why they were able to survive months of chaos from a bad rebuild. That's the only reason I came on in the first place. The network effect bought a lot of time to fix things and there was no clear "Facebook" to their "MySpace."
Really the only thing working against the company is that their target market is aging a lot.
Besides, I didn't want the company to go under. I'd spent the last year making sure they didn't and didn't want all of that work to be for nothing. Plus, I didn't want the other people who worked there to be out of the job.
Eventually, everybody who worked there with me left on their own.
Just a theory.
Personally, I get bored with my current "life" from a given point in time, and need to radically change an aspect of it to add that excitement and focus back to it. Doesn't always go as planned though.
But as you get older, I find people in general get tired of the same bullshit that keeps popping up at job after job, and that almost never goes away.
It happens to me for most other hobbies as well. I enjoy working out a lot, but there are times where I just don't feel super excited about it, for like lets say a month or so, and I have to put in a lot of will-power to get to the gym. So I do basically what you do here as well, try different kind of workouts, etc., with varying results and that helps sometimes.
I think at the end of the day it's really hard to maintain that level of passion for something that you do day in day out. You just have to accept the downtime and know that it will pass in a bit. At least that's my take on it.
Edit: right after I posted I was reminded of a quote lifters use often: "motivation gets you in the gym, as it's fleeting, but discipline keeps you coming back". I think the same applies here, to some extent.
However, I recently went through a period of anhedonia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anhedonia), which may be what OP is experiencing.
Things that I found that worked: exercise for pleasure (riding my bike!). Connecting with people (one-on-one -- i'd always been part of a big group before). Learning new things, new challenges. Yoga.
A book that helped me a lot was Frankl's "A man's search for meaning". I realized that I had a bit of fight club nihilism in me because I never chose my purpose in life, and so was just sitting on the metaphorical treadmill of existentialistic wallowing.
Another thing to consider is that the problem might not be you, it might be that the situation sucks.
(Edit: Apparently Gibson attributes it to someone else he retweeted, but the internet is unclear on where exactly it came from)
If it was just work, I'd say it was certainly just burnout. However, when its pretty much your whole life [it sounds like], it could be depression.
I'm always motivated to do at least a good chunk of my "after work" activities, every week. But yeah, work, ehhhhhhh I'm just not happy unless I'm working on something I'm proud of and that comes along maybe once every 18 months.
Perhaps it could be if you have supported yourself with a draining, minimum wage job, and a 2nd one in the evenings, struggling to pay rent, then your tolerance for computer work may be much higher? Whenever I get tired, I just have to remember back to my days of slinging cheeseburgers and I feel content with my current situation.
But being bored at work can lead to feelings of depression if you feel like you aren't really accomplishing anything.
If work is boring, and different kind of jobs don't help, find something besides work: go running, go dancing, go do a theatre course, singing. I tried all kind of things and am open to try anything that seems interesting. I dance a lot, weekly, and it made my life a lot better. I don't say dancing is for you, but whatever you do, it should be fun, something to look forward to.
Maybe singing, dancing and theatre don't appeal to you. It didn't appeal to me, I thought I couldn't do that, that it was difficult. I'm a typical introvert, not artistic or creative, prefer to stay in the background, but all these things were a lot more fun than I ever had thought and I discovered a whole new life.
Don't try them all at once, start with one, give it a good chance, and don't give up if the first course isn't what you hoped for. Try another teacher or school, a different group. All these things come in many varieties and it can be a challenge to find what works for you. Each experience brings you closer to what you want, teaches you something. If you're afraid about something, that is especially interesting.
This didn't make my work better, but it made my life better. And it opens perspectives to new areas, possibly for work. Not that I want to be a dance teacher, but having a new look on life can change work as well.
Personally, I bought a camper that I leave parked at a local campground that is within an hour from home. I'll sometimes take off early on Friday and head up there for the weekend, other times I'll take a week off work. But my favorite is to take a 2 week vacation to someplace with an ocean and beach, and spend quite a bit of time either in the water or just laying on the beach listening to the waves.
But the best cure for burnout that I had was when I had a job that was regular 40 hours, that I got laid off from (6 years ago during the height of the last recession). Spent 4 months in the summer with only a couple interviews, but then when I started my new job I was totally refreshed again. It's only been in the last year that I've started feeling bored/tired again, so maybe it's time for another layoff.
It's easy to stop caring about something when its not really worth caring about.
Personally, I find my day job technically challenging, fun, and often rewarding, but I don't really find it fulfilling in some deep meaningful sense. I feel useful but not meaningful.
It took me a while to realize that this was the problem I was having -- and that just switching from software engineering job to software engineering job wasn't going to change it -- and I am still at a crossroads as to what to do about it. I'm not sure if I should seek fulfillment from outside my career -- family, community, a craft, a cause -- or if I should change my career to one I (think I might) find more fulfilling.
From personal experience, if you're the kind of person who tends to be more invested at work (seeks out challenges, takes pride in your work, feels pleasure at a job well done), I'd hazard you might not be happy doing work you don't find at least somewhat fulfilling.
My thought process being that personal_investment_in_work + fulfillment_only_outside_of_work = eventually resenting time spent at work as unfulfilling.
Everyone can't work on cancer-curing, economy-stabilizing, poverty-eliminating, food-scarcity-solving, gender-equalizing, minority-protecting, free-speech-supporting things.
But we can at least move a little closer to working on something about which we can honestly say "Yeah, that does make the world a slightly better place."
On the other hand, at the moment I'm still young enough to start a second career -- it wouldn't be completely crazy for me to go back to school, learn a completely new skill set, grind up through the ranks, and try to have an impact in some other field.
On the gripping hand, I'm not so young as to be in an impatient rush about everything. I don't need to completely upset my entire life just yet. So I'm carefully researching alternate careers to decide if I'd actually find them fulfilling and have an aptitude for them (it'd be a shame to spend ten years and realize I'm not fulfilled by my second career either). And I'm trying to expand myself a little bit more outside my day job, so that my happiness doesn't rest on a one-legged stool.
It needn't be a home hobby, it might be reading, it might be an activity-club that you enjoy, it might be volunteering - but I've found that I need things outside of work, even work I enjoy, or life's pretty cruddy.
Similarly the stresses of work can really build up, even if the work's quite interesting. There's no amount of money I could be paid to work in a continual six month lump again. That's the sort of thing where you take a holiday and spend the first few days of it just decompressing; eating icecream, sleeping, and reading or watching TV or the like.
I'm really happy now, but I understand burn-out at a much deeper level than I had before. There was a time when I would think "just get over it," but now I understand it has very real effects. When you don't want to think, it's not always a simple case of laziness. It takes work to switch into your "system 2" (as called by "Thinking Fast and Slow") -- your focused mindset. Then once you're in this mindset, it's no picnic.
What's fascinating is that if you stay in system 2 for too long, you begin to show signs of paranoia and depression. You become withdrawn and isolate yourself further from society. You might hypothesize this is a natural reaction of an _injured_ animal, but it's hard for you to understand that your brain is exhausted and needs to rest. Instead, you say "go faster!" and it begins to try to come up with more & more schemes to prevent you from going into system 2. Fantasies that would have meant nothing to you well-rested are now of utmost importance because you're actually procrastinating because you're actually fatigued.
Burn-out is a real thing. I love work and I work very hard, but there's times when you have to say "You know what, this weekend is all mine." Those are the weekends I sleep anywhere from 10-14 hours each night, and not because I'm indulging, but just like muscles, my brain is resting and hopefully "growing".
I know setting hard boundaries for work/non work and taking chunks of time for yourself is a good start, but would love to hear if you had any more advice? Thanks!
When I was in the heat of it and naturally did not want to work, I eventually reached a place of working zen -- I will try to do what I can, and forget about my imagined needs of this or that. I simply stared at the screen if I didn't know the buttons to press. This is the experience that I am proud of and that makes me say "I'm happy I went through that."
Too often, we mistake our own fears for limitations, and limitations we do have, we treat as if they were unmalleable. While I always want people to look out for their mental health, I also want people to know what it means to give it their all because I know that teaches you how to break through your self-imposed limitations and grow into an even stronger wo/man.
My advice is to always keep one day for yourself. For me, it's Sunday. Sunday, if I want to work, I work (and when it's that way, work doesn't always feel like work). If I don't want to work, no one can say anything. This gives you time to not think at all about work, which should give you time to stay in system 1 and heal.
What's a real killer is all that unnecessary anxiety and general negative emotions coming from _thinking_ about your work that is hurting you. When you're away from work, stop thinking about work. It's not prudent or responsible of you to be stressing out about something that isn't even going on right now. When it's time to rest, you rest. When it's time to work, you work. It seems simple, but it's the blurred gray area in between the two that affects people the most. When I worked very hard and hit my "work zen mode", it was here that I began to let go of things like what does my boss think or what does my coworker think or some other-nonsense-BS-anxious-thing that has nothing to do with actual work.
I hope it helps. I'm really no huge expert myself, but I am usually the hardest person in the room.
p.s. there are a lot of charlatans, so you have to find an actually talented teacher
I've found this works fairly well. Sometimes I'll go for two weeks or two months of just turning off 'work'. It has the advantage of letting me continue to be employed.
One of these stints was also when I thought hell, why not try and learn Haskell? ;)
I'm glad the author made this point and backed it up with a reference. It reaffirms something I already believed (whether on the basis of personal experience, something I'd read before, or mere wishful thinking, I couldn't tell you so the reference helps). It is a sensible constraint that came to mind in reading all the tech workplace horror stories that the Times's Amazon piece inspired.
While reading that Times article I checked out the link to their 14 sacred principles. The funny thing was that I agreed with most of them. They were all ideas that occurred to me over the course of my career working independently, with small companies, and especially now in corp.
The one thing that was missing, I felt, was a Rule #15: Never work more than 8 hours a day.
Without it, it's no surprise you end up burnt out or living in the sort of dystopian workplace documented in the Times' Amazon article.
But then I suppose, as has been pointed before, long work hours are more about cultural signaling and penny-wise-pound-foolish accounting than really improving productivity.
What if for some people, the magic number to avoid burnout is 4 hours a day? Or the other end of the spectrum...12?
I can understand why the cashier at the store needs to work 8s.. how would I schedule people based on how many hours they feel like working?
For programming with delivery at the week or month level.. people should be able to slice the work how it works for them.
(I think my ideal work is like 12 - 7 - 7- 6- 6- 3 or something)
From what I've been taught burnout is the result of continuous stress. Where stress is more or less defined as a continuous sensation of being threatened.
I've seen people with perfectly normal workours become burnt out. I've even seen people working ten hours a week getting burnt out. The common factor thus not being the objectively measurable amount of work.
My own formula for diagnosing a work environment is more like Risk of Burnout = perception of expectations / perceptions of means to deliver
But a more useful model might be the SCARF-model presented in this tech talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M
It seems to me that hours worked relates to issue of burnout more like lack of sleep to the risk of catching a cold. Potentially a big factor, but only incidentally.
My happiest times were from a startup where we worked 80 hours a week.
Another startup we were in the process of selling, was such a hostile place it literally gave me work related PTSD and I was only working 40 hours per week.
It's nice to hear about a situation closer to most startup outcomes. When Matthew notes that someone sent him the acquisition terms and the founders made out well while line level / low level managers basically got nice severances, it's something everyone here should keep in mind. It's great if founders make out well as long as everyone else does too; it's when those outcomes diverge that it rankles.
If a potential employer tries to put nonsense like a 2-year noncompete -- during which of course they don't pay you -- plus ownership of side projects into your contract, it's a sign you're dealing with assholes. If you can, you should just walk away. Many of us live in CA, so some of this can't happen, but a startup here tried something similar: their 16 page (!!!) employment contract specified that if I used my personal media device or laptop for any business purpose, they had the unlimited right to inspect/search them on demand. By my reading, even something as tenuously related as two factor auth on work gmail being sent to my personal cell, or taking a business call on my cell would have counted. The founder tried to blame it on boilerplate their lawyers inserted; he couldn't even take responsibility for what was, after all, the contract he was asking me to sign. I walked away. Read those contracts.
If they need to investigate the evidence to understand the exposure/whatever in the event a situation arises where you used your personal device, they obviously need access. They are simply trying to neutralize the excuse that "its your personal device and you have no authority to search it", by getting your consent ahead of time. I do agree, they are often extremely vague, but I'm not sure it's reasonable for them to spell out every possible use case where it should or should not apply.
Simply don't use personal equipment when acting on behalf of the business (everyone should be happy there), OR get an exception written up by your own legal and get their sign off on the situations which you object to (they might not be so flexible). I don't think there is malice in the intent there though.
[update] This was unclear: I'm saying this relationship is simple if and only if you have not used your devices for business purposes. If you have, you need only hope that none of the clauses in your agreements (you did have a lawyer review these?) cover it.
Due process exists for a reason; if you let any company examine your personal devices/data outside of a court order, they can use it for any purpose they want. Subpoenas are limited in scope, and everything is documented.
So, the founder calls your personal cellphone on the weekend and asks a couple of business questions. You come in on Monday and they lawyer points to the clause in your contract. I'm pretty sure reasonable goes out the window.
Intent and the words you signed need to match or you can get seriously hosed.
For what it's worth, at my own employer, the phrase is not so open ended, and I suspect it's the same with others:
"Users who use their non-BIGCORP-email (read that as personal) or IM accounts for any BIGCORP business agree to provide BIGCORP with full access to those account, in the event such is necessary to comply with a discovery request or legal mandate"
No, its not. We accept it, but its not reasonable, it just a CYA attitude than infects a lot of our business and political dealings. An employer should ask for exactly what they want and no more.
1 - incidental use of your cellphone for work, even things such as securing work email via 2fa; 2 - using your phone to answer work email via remotely revokable gmail access; 3 - using your personal laptop to answer work email, again via gmail
none of 1-3 mean an employer should get the rights to view my personal email which is also on my phone, or to look inside my phone at all
I just kept refusing that part and eventually they gave in; it's not like they intended to prohibit everything, they just needed tighter language that wouldn't harm me.
My favourite part is when people say part of a contract is "just there" but it'd never be used. OK well in that case, let's just remove it and I'll just agree to be nice.
So it is in fact easier and more cost effective to say "take it or leave it."
Not saying the clause is justified, because that was ridiculous, but it is interesting to get at the root of why they won't change it, and often pushing back consistently will get them to that point fairly quickly.
I'm sure there are some examples of someone leaving when lightning was about to strike and make all the insiders rich. Those instances are even more rare than start-up successes making employees rich.
Even in my own case, where I joined a company thinking I'd leave after a year but stayed 5 years because I was still learning things (and had optimized my career for learning the whole way), there were still some times after I left where I thought, "Man, if only I still had access to <old design doc or code>."
I see financial motivations coming up much more often when people say "Man, I'm glad I stayed." Vesting cliffs are really easy to predict, and even IPOs and acquisitions have some hints coming; if you're about to get a major windfall, you'll probably know it.
I think it's because equity creates a belief in young workers that the company is "theirs" -- but after you've realized that startups are like any other job where you trade time for money while implementing the Highest Paid Person's Opinion, you lose that passion quickly.
Incidentally, there's a bonus coming up for a major milestone and I'm seriously considering handing in my two weeks notice after the direct deposit clears. The CEO tried to sell the whole equity angle, but I honestly don't see any resume improvement potential here and that's all I really care about.
I've worked at companies that gave a shit and I just don't think this is one of them.
The problem comes when I stick it out for too long at a place that does not share my core values. In my experience it is a losing battle. Trying to match what I believe in with a whole company is really tough. I feel burnout is to be expected at times during my career while I figure things out. A little break, some consideration, and new goals help me move forward and find work I can enjoy.
This line rings very true. At my company our first product was offered for free. We had thousands of users, but after months and months of work we realized only a small fraction of our user base was going to be converted into paying customers. (Like OP, I began to feel burnt out at this point)
When we launched our second product, we realized we needed to answer the question: "Will people pay for what we build?" as fast as possible. We charged users to pre-order our alpha and when we realized people were willing to pay for it, we poured ourselves into the product.
I think many founders are scared to ask for money (We were). But if you're building a product that you would eventually like to charge people for, you really have to force yourself to ask those hard questions as soon as possible.
Don't forget the other half of this statement: I've always been concerned with basing a product on a locked-in technology from an unproven vendor.
And vendors do shut down. I've seen it happen many times. Sometimes they get eaten up by a "bigger fish" that wants to use their technology internally, and they then shut down the external service you were so fond of.
Needless to say, I am _very_ leery now of the motives of open-source products that aren't run like open-source projects.
Does working on something as truly world-changing as space travel or electric vehicles make up for the 80+ hour work weeks? Is it easier to work so hard when there's no doubt that what you're doing matters?
EVs have been around for a long long time, commercially, and conversions. I'm glad tesla is doing what they are, but world-changing seems like a stretch to me.
Anecdotally, I've heard from employees that Tesla is having attrition issues, so apparently not. They've recently added a few minor perks to try and keep engineers.
There is a middle ground between signing and not signing here: set boundaries up front. Let them know "Hey, I'll sign this and help with the integration, but just know my heart won't be in it. I don't know that I can promise you more than a solid 45 hours a week. But I can't deliver that passion I had building the product because I'm really not passionate about this."
And yeah, those employment contracts are bullshit. Before you sign a contract, you are under no obligation to do anything. A good tactic is to just redline anything you want thrown out and send it back to the lawyers without comment. Also realize that many companies throw these bullshit clauses in just so they can negotiate them away later (as opposed to having to offer you more money).
If it's important enough to the founders, they will find the money to make it worth your while. An extra hundred grand out of a big payday to ensure a critical employee is present to handle the sale is just a cost of doing business. Unless you would go out for drinks with someone after you stop working with them, it's not going to hurt your relationship (they may even respect you more for it).
But too many people that I see just sit there, quietly miserable, while their product dies around them.
Having said that, on a yearly basis, white collars work much less than their American counterparts on average.
The problem is he let someone else define his passion. Nobody can use your own passion against you. Passion is just a word and anyone can say it. But you alone are the one who decides what you believe in, how much you are willing to work for, etc.
to anyone out there listening - it's not. technology is a huge, huge, huge, huge established industry. think about it - what does "tech" even mean? it's an umbrella term for 4 or 5 classifications that all kind of bleed into each other - including finance. in addition, every non-tech company has a shitload of tech in it. gee whiz. it's almost as if technology is critical to the functioning of the modern business enterprise!
this is fear-based thinking at its worst. this is the kind of silly thing scared, gutless engineers say to each other by the watercooler while the business guys laugh out loud and backslap each other in the proverbial smoke-filled room.
the most powerful thing you can do in technology (and all business, really) is not give a fuck what the other guy thinks (the "guy" being your negotiating counter-party). stick to your guns or just take the money and run. if you waffle, you're sunk by your own torpedo.
I doubt the negatives are as impacting as the positives, but I'm sure they do exist.