The boss, not the workload, causes workplace depression
sciencenordic.com
sciencenordic.com
- Unknown expectations from the job
- Little or no control over decisions that affect your job
- Missing feeling of involvement
We can also say that not-every-boss is the irritant in a bad workplace situation, but that's a nitpick. Yes, I've had the bad-boss-in-a-good-organization and I've had the great-boss-in-a-rotten-job scenarios. In the latter type of situation, at least one human in a management or executive role made decisions that adversely affected my personal growth, workplace conditions, or feedback relationship with the company. It was often many humans up-the-chain making these kinds of decisions, in a loosely (sadistically) coordinated fashion, fully aware that their handling of resources was resulting in human suffering. If you have a great boss, both your job and his/her job can still be very, very stressful and limiting. Since we know that it's possible to run companies that don't have chronic worker stress issues, it's very much immoral to put people through this in the service of any business or organizational goals. (This applies to not-for-profit orgs, too)
There isn't a particularly good reason why a modern middle manager has that much power over their direct reports.
> A study of 4,500 public employees... at Danish schools, hospitals, nurseries, offices, etc.
Public employees in Denmark work 35 hours a week, with 8 weeks holiday for teachers and 5 weeks holiday for others.
I really do not think this study applies to people who work 12 hours a day with no holidays.
Also it was published in 2013
It amazes me how on one hand "Peopleware" (1987) and "The mythical man-month" (1975) are held up as ground-breaking ideals here but a published academic study is dismissed because "it was published in 2013".
As for "Well it's not transferable to 12 hours a day with no holidays", what you're describing isn't reality for most people in most countries. It is not even legal to work 12 hours a day for 5 days a week in any of Europe+.
If you are doing 12 hour days and don't have holidays then you are a slave not a worker.
+ Except UK, but only if you have specifically opted out of the law, otherwise the 48 hour week maximum still applies.
12 hours a day is not uncommon. Even in EU and public sector, for example doctors in some eastern countries have to work this way.
Anyway, my point is: this study should not be miss represented.
I recently switched jobs and dropped from 40 hours to 35 hours a week and only feel much more productive from it.
Working 70 hours week is a guaranteed way to have a mediocre productivity and quality of life. In the end you spend half your time fixing your own mistakes and waste the other half writing said mistakes. You're then much more vulnerable to anything listed in the article.
well it looks like mr Bezos was at least telling the truth when he made this offer.
I quit to go to a new company, but I would have gladly kept my boss. Actually that's happened to me a couple times.
In my first job post university, after about two years, the moment I realized "I don't belong here" was when a coworker in the 80% underground open plan office stood up and asked in a loud voice to be heard by everybody "Does anybody need a few project hours for billing? I've got some hours left in my project that you can have." My boss responded "Yes! I'll take whatever hours you can spare for myself and for [Noseshine (me)]". We had to have a billable customer project for each and every hour of our time at work.
My boss was great, the "system" sucked.
The product had a hideous installation process involving hundreds of manual edits to settings in IIS and configuration files. I was deliberately told not to try to improve that via scripting, because they wanted to keep being able to charge customers dozens of billable hours for each installation.
Each project was... a lot of hand-customization, and usually took 8-12 hours, and we did a few dozen per year (IIRC) and that number was growing. But each one was... a pain.
I spent some time putting a lot of configurable stuff in a a config file, and some runtime checking of the configs, and dynamic behaviour, and... we had something that would make setup of the form and most 'custom' requests down to about 1-2 hours max.
I wasn't filling out my timesheet, and someone said "you have to put what project you were working on"... so I filled in 42 hours (over 2 weeks - part time here and there) for "project X" and... holy crap I got a verbal beating. We're going to lose this client - we're overbilling, we're gouging, etc.
I tried to very little avail to demonstrate that... we can keep charging 12 hours ($2500? IIRC) for the pages in future, but now they'll only take an hour or so. Apparently I was talking to the wrong people because they thought I was advocating fraud, and I probably almost got fired over that. My code was erased, everything was put back the way it was, they 'ate' the overage to the client (read... I just had 42 less billable hours for 2 weeks) and ... I was sort of 'demoted'.
Had only been there a month or so, and I think had I been able to explain to the owner (a tech guy, and decent business guy) what I'd done, he might have understood. My cube was only 30 feet from the guy. In my eyes at the time, though, I thought this wrath was coming from him through someone else. Looking back now, I doubt he was even aware of it.
He probably didn't know about that situation, but he should have been aware of the billable hours culture and the problems that was causing.
Wow...
I'll just stick my toe in the water... At what point are we as an industry going to call that fraud?
If boss (really boss^n, for any n) makes them miserable, if just make more places relatively attractive. But there are always people quitting from good work places.
Sometimes, an undeniably amazing opportunity falls into the lap of someone who is overall quite happy at their present job, and they quit that job. But that's a fairly rare case.
Is that true? I don't know of any studies but I give a new company like a year before I start looking for something better. Now I've been in the same position for 6 years but I've been looking for something "better" the entire time and actually turned in my notice twice but ended up staying. No offense to any employer but they have never shown loyalty to me. I'm not giving it to them.
I've also talked to a therapist's but in general have no other major causes of stress in my life. I make more than double the median income in my area, my family is all healthy and close, etc. Work seems to be a major cause of stress. I've tried to find another job but the interview process in tech is more stressful than the actual work. So many rejections just wear you out over time.
To your point I would say the only way they could really tell if it was job related would be talking to each person and ruling out other causes.
And this isn't a specific example, this is just something that has happened so often that it seems to be an epidemic.
I think Agile is partly to blame for this. Sure, changing direction every 2 weeks is ok, but you have to leave room for designing the new features, you can't just add them to the workload for the next sprint.
Been there, done that, not again.
Testify, brothers!