Employee burnout is becoming a huge problem in the American workforce
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I am not saying cases exist where workers are asked to work more than their agreed hours. I killed myself in kitchens for a $25k salary before switching to tech. These cases are a problem.
My point is that this behavior is often self-imposed. People seem to feel a sense of importance when they overwork themselves. Simply stick to the number of hours you've agreed upon and tell your manager to discuss with their supervisor if they bring it up as a disciplinary issue. This all qualified by being in a position of demand as an engineer.
Point is, you'd be surprised with what you can 'get away with.'
I guess in theory they could just pay me for those 4 hours as much as they'd pay me for the 8 hours but that's way too much sense for most folks.
Managers at my company have meetings almost all day. I, however, only have a few meetings per week. They can do meetings for 8 hours just fine, but I can't code for 8 hours. I could go home after 4 hours and be just as productive per week, but I'd miss potential meeting hours.
And naturally, they are the ones whom we have to cater to when this kind of divide comes up.
In the three years I've been here, I can count on one hand how many times I've actually needed to work off the clock, and our boss does appreciate the effort in direct financial ways.
Otherwise, it's amazing how little managers actually pay attention to their workers. You're right: you can totally get away with setting strict boundaries in most places, just set the tone early and be consistent and professional.
I had an interview once where I asked a manager of an established (10+ years old) company about hours. He expected all employees to put in more than 8 hours most days. I then asked about project scheduling. It seemed to me that there was no slack planned into the releases. Everyone was allocated 110% with no room for slippage.
I'd leave the room at that point, indicating that the next interview should be for replacing that persons' position.
> I have had startups expect more then the typical 40 hours a week, and yep, I burned out pretty fast.
I'm the head of an early stage startup and have a favor to ask: can you give me advice on how to detect someone with your 40-hours-or-I'll-be-unhappy mindset? I've never heard a candidate employee express anything close to "I'm in at 9AM and expect to be out by 5:30", even if shortly down the road, it becomes clear that they feel their work/life balance is being infringed upon.
I don't mean this in any negative way and I envy people that aren't boolean in or out, but people that would feel burned out on 5x10h days (+ sometimes a quick Sunday Slack session) aren't good fits _right now_ for my team. Reliable "I do my 40, put in good work, and I'll be here for years" people are _great_ for much later stage (post-IPO, for instance), but it would deeply bother me if I found out one of my workers was feeling burned out/demotivated.
Think about it. You are asking human beings to make personal sacrifices for no personal gain, but for the sole purpose of making your dream a reality.
Honestly, I think you need to find people who find emotional shelter at work, so you could ask if there is any personal trauma they are trying to avoid.
You could also consider hiring hourly.
> Think about it. You are asking human beings to make personal sacrifices for no personal gain, but for the sole purpose of making your dream a reality.
My team has (real) equity and I like to believe they see the worth of the product. What attracted me to startups when I entered the game was the sense of ownership and agency in projects. That and work can/should come with a sense of reward.
> so you could ask if there is any personal trauma they are trying to avoid.
I think this would be somewhat inappropriate to ask "hey, so do you put in extra hours because you don't feel whole?". Everyone I work with knows they can come to me, even if he/she needs to take his/her house keys and to go to a second location to chat.
> You could also consider hiring hourly.
There's room for hourly consultants, but that hardly makes a team.
> My team has (real) equity and I like to believe they see the worth of the product.
Hey, if you're 'paying' them for their time and they believe their equity is valuable, whether it is or not, sounds like everybody wins.
> What attracted me to startups when I entered the game was the sense of ownership and agency in projects. That and work can/should come with a sense of reward.
That to me sounds like someone who's been had by a capitalistic culture. Unless you're a winner, then good for you.
nor does 5*10 + Sunday.
You're paying your team in Bison Dollars: their compensation has value if and only if the world-domination scheme goes off without a hitch. But that's a big if. The value of the product won't be clear until it goes to market, but the value of the time they put in is lost forever irrespective of the market value of your finished product. Meanwhile, your team's landlords won't accept that equity as rent payment.
Sorry man, it just doesn't work. People will do it, mostly young people. You can take advantage of that, but guess what, that makes you an asshole.
If my employees can't get their work done in 40 hours, then they aren't planning their work effectively. If, as a manager and a leader, I have a duty and a responsibility for the success of my team, then I must make them have a reasonable work/life balance.
I've known a ton of people happy to work until they were quickly burned out, but their output was usually a bunch of sound and fury representing nothing.
So does every other startup. Most of the time it either amounts to nothing, or is dilluted away.
"What attracted me to startups when I entered the game was the sense of ownership and agency in projects. That and work can/should come with a sense of reward."
How do I pay my rent with a sense of reward?
Reminds me of trying to pay rent with Exposure!
This is actually great insight I've never heard before. When I threw myself into 18 hour days 7 days a week it absolutely was an attempt to avoid personal trauma.
Better than a drug addiction I suppose in that it got me places, but probably damaging in many of the same ways.
-Anyone over the age of 25
-Anyone with a spouse or family or has normal non-work hobbies or interests
-Anyone with pre-existing health or stress issues
-Anyone who thinks that getting burned-out is a bad idea
Hope this helps. /s
People over 25 can work more than 40 hours and not get burned out. I feel that you just want to make me out to be a bad guy, so I'm not sure it's worth writing a longer response.
> It it would deeply bother me if I found out one of my workers was feeling burned out/demotivated.
Then make sure people don't overwork. If something happens with a deploy that means people had to work late on thursday, then make sure they are compensated with time off.
> how to detect someone with your 40-hours-or-I'll-be-unhappy mindset
Yes. Here is how: if they aren't unhappy about working a lot then they are inexperienced. Another tell is if they have a family. In your situation, don't hire anyone with kids. Their kids will thank you. and those people don't want to work for you anyway.
The problem is you can't afford to make your company an evening pizza 27 year old bromance company because you likely can't cut out that much of the talent pool without it costing you.
Also: I don't mind people working a lot if compensated well. I could certainly have worked a ton of hours for a period of my life (before kids etc) but I would have been pretty annoyed had I accepted an offer at a company and later found out that the offer was for an expected 50h and not 40h. Don't have people come and waste time at your interview without knowing what the situation is.
That's actually a lot easier said then done at an early stage startup for reasons of talent and compensation.
> The problem is you can't afford to make your company an evening pizza 27 year old bromance company because you likely can't cut out that much of the talent pool without it costing you.
Wow, wait? We're not a "bromance company" and I'm not even sure how to respond to this and I think it's vaguely insulting.
> Also: I don't mind people working a lot if compensated well.
We're very clear with compensation and living wage and actual equity is something we make sure is on the table.
> I could certainly have worked a ton of hours for a period of my life (before kids etc) but I would have been pretty annoyed had I accepted an offer at a company and later found out that the offer was for an expected 50h and not 40h. Don't have people come and waste time at your interview without knowing what the situation is.
This is really important to me and I make sure the candidate actually knows what he/she is getting into.
This is exactly why I wrote:
"I've never heard a candidate employee express anything close to "I'm in at 9AM and expect to be out by 5:30", even if shortly down the road, it becomes clear that they feel their work/life balance is being infringed upon."
The problem isn't that I'm trying to hustle people, it's that people tend to agree to situations they don't actually want when interviewing.
Sorry, no offense intended - I was reading between the lines. Basically if you expect people to be able to always stay after hours, then you are excluding pretty much everyone with a family for example.
It risks creating the typical monoculture of guys (yes unfortunately) between 25 and 35.
People have different ambitions and different needs. The time when I could stay at an office to 6PM is over. I might be willing to do it again in 15 years but now I'm expected to put dinner on the table at 6. A ton of people are in this situation, much too many to ignore even for a startup. They might not seem like a good fit for your phase of startup but I think that mode of thought is counterproductive. A varied set of people will be best. That also means you'll have people with different needs. Cater to those needs and be open with expectations.
Needing people to occasionally work more is normal. Even having an emergency meeting on a Sunday is normal. Just be clear with what the situation is, what is expected, and make sure that the plan is to never have 50h weeks or weekend meetings. The problem is having the "constant crunch time" culture.
> I've never heard a candidate employee express anything close to "I'm in at 9AM and expect to be out by 5:30"
Not sure I understood the problem here, was it that you would have preferred that to surface in the interview, but it didn't, which caused friction down the line when someone turned out to not want to work more than 40h weeks?
Oh yeah, totally. My motivation for asking was to make sure we don't end up in a monoculture of people that stick around after being surprised by the startup grind. That won't work for our business as we _need_ a mix of people, backgrounds, interests to really make it work (opposed to say, a hft/fintech platform, where diversity of thought/life experience isn't crucial).
> A ton of people are in this situation, much too many to ignore even for a startup. They might not seem like a good fit for your phase of startup but I think that mode of thought is counterproductive.
Yeah, it's definitely hard. Funding is limited and early stage is about maximizing the value of capital and speed of validating assumptions, and unfortunately, that often means preclusive criteria for people that need to leave "on time" regularly. Not saying it's right, but that's the reality of most startups.
I want to actively combat the bias of just short circuiting to people that are 22-30 and probably without kids, which means being able to have the conversation of "hey, please don't say this expectation is fine if it's not" and knowing how to tell if someone says it's fine for the sake of getting an offer, but it's actually not.
> Needing people to occasionally work more is normal. Even having an emergency meeting on a Sunday is normal. Just be clear with what the situation is, what is expected, and make sure that the plan is to never have 50h weeks or weekend meetings. The problem is having the "constant crunch time" culture.
The first 5 you hire are basically hopping into constant crunch with you, which is why their equity should be the carrot to make the stick worthwhile.
I think I rubbed people the wrong way or reminded them of a negative employer, but a weekend meeting for us is a few lines on Slack that essentially serves the purpose of "hey, so I decompressed and reflected, and here's where I'm thinking for this week. is this reasonable?"
I don't call meetings without a purpose and I _definitely_ don't want this to be the norm after we grow.
> Not sure I understood the problem here, was it that you would have preferred that to surface in the interview, but it didn't, which caused friction down the line when someone turned out to not want to work more than 40h weeks?
This is exactly it. If a candidate expressed this, I would say "okay, thank you for your time, I hope you're available when we know we can respect this."
I think it's appropriate to be very explicit. Call out the issue. Tell them you aren't signalling. Tell them you really mean what you say, and that if they're going to get burned out from that, then your shop isn't the place for them.
I think based on your responses you have the right attitude.
I think the song-and-dance is very much the problem. Just be explicit. If you want a company that has 50h weeks as norm, then say that (It's insane though). But saying "we expect you to work as long as it takes to meet deadline" is terrible. I'd certainly agree to work more at crunch time - but when is crunch time? how often? The problem is the culture of permanent crunch time.
Be open as a candidate too. I might say
"I'm fine with working a 50h week when required, unless it is the norm. Is it usually OK to do a 30h week the week after such a week?"
The response to that might indicate whether the employer was hoping to see me there for permanent crunch time or not.
You nailed it. The problem is that even when being explicit in expectations, candidates will still try to get that offer, even if it's not the right fit at that time. It's really hard to tell if someone means it when they say "oh, that's fine." I think startups have a certain glamour that masks the reality and people see interviews as tests, not conversations.
Further, I'd love to keep that person in the pipeline -- employee happiness and feeling valued is huge for me, so if that person needs to come in at 10 because they need to drop a kid off at school, I can respect that, and hope he/she is available when we can accommodate it.
> I think based on your responses you have the right attitude.
I really appreciate you saying this.
Now, I'll say point blank that if you're telling your salaried employees to work more than an average of 40 hours a week, you're just an asshole. Even more so than if you're just saying those who would otherwise be skilled wage laborers are salaried exempt as a dodge around relevant labor laws.
The only people who should be living at the office are those with an actual, significant equity stake in the success of the company.
Here's how you detect 40h-or-unhappy. First, check to see if the person has a normal, cocaine-free, methamphetamine-free pulse rate. Then, pat them down and check their pockets for fully vested stock in your company. If you find the first, and not the second, that person will be unhappy working extra-long hours for your benefit.
Parent is absolutely correct. Paying fewer people to work longer hours will absolutely cost you more in the long run. Just hire another person.
That said, I always try to get a sense of expectations in interviews. I don't care if it makes me look like a clock watcher (I'm not). I ask about how the hiring manager works and if they expect their employees to adopt a similar schedule. Or I ask about what the work life balance is like. That kind of thing.
I work to live, not the other way around. I don't want to be just another person who works their ass off until 65 or 70 and then finally gets to retire, only to be dead within a year or two.
Dead honest. I mean a quick async-okay-if-from-phone "hey, here's what I have lined up for this week, can you tell me if this is unreasonable from your perspective" exchange.
I don't know your exact situation, but extrapolating from experiences at early stage startups I worked at:
1) Hire more people. Instead of asking people to give 110%, hire 1.10⨉ the number of people.
2) Give employees the same stock (in the same class as the founders) not some second class options.
3) Get organized. A lot of crunch time occurs because tasks are not well defined, dependencies not identified etc... And write things down, that way you can read a document instead of bothering someone on vacation to ask a question.
Have you considered that even those people that think they are game to work a lot will end up unhappy because of biology? We aren't made to put in 10 hour days with a Sunday slack session before getting back into it on Monday.
It really is that simple.
But you have to understand that some people don't honestly know if they want to work those kinds of hours until they do it. So you will have turnover because of burnout.
FYI, I did have prior experience in a startup. I thought it would be fun to do another one. I guess age just got me turned off to the bullshit. I was not excited to have to respond to silly questions like "what are some alternative ways of using gradle for automating builds" over the weekend. If we're working 60+ hour workweeks taking time off from dating to answer questions related to development process, not the core product direction, is not the sort of shit that's going to keep many people involved.
So, a lot of experienced people will probably be turned off by being asked to work a lot, because, hey, the older you get, the more of a life you probably have. You can probably tell by the amount of down votes you've received, the "we're going to need to work overtime" message is not an easy one to stomach. So, if you need experienced people, be prepared to spend big, and make sure they've got real autonomy. Someone who's been around the block is not going to care as much about your equity, and will lose confidence in you much faster as things don't take off.
I'm glad you left and hope you found something better!
Overworking yourself is a sure way not to a promotion but to having even more work dumped on you.
But if you ask for more vacation when you're hired, you're told you're not high enough on some invisible seniority list despite all your previous years of experience working other places.
I had to use 1 week of my 2 weeks PTO to go support my wife having a child in the hospital. It was complete BS. I was so angry at my boss, furiously angry that he would treat me and my family with such utter disrespect as to take away my hard-earned vacation time simply because my wife needed my support.
Paternity leave? What's that?
I know it's not PTO, but there are certain qualifying events that allow you to take extended leave from work without repercussion. It includes childbirth and medical conditions where a family member needs care. It's the Family Medical Leave Act[0]. The shitty part is that it's unpaid, so if you can't afford to take 1/2/3 month(s) of absence without pay, it's useless to you.
Well, I work for a small MSP, so... unfortunately the government screwed me. Surprise, surprise. Either way, unpaid paternity leave is still ridiculous, no other country in the world does that that I'm aware of.
http://edd.ca.gov/Disability/About_PFL.htm
I wish it were longer, and I wish it paid more, and I wish it were federal, but it's better than nothing.
So much of our society punishes you for illness, and it's sad.
On the other hand most employers are pretty chill WRT the G-Grand-Ops post if you answer your phone for emergency calls once in awhile, then going to the dentist once in awhile during the day is simply handwaved away. Home with a sick kid is handwaved away as "VPN working from home day".
Another interesting strategy if working outside "tech" is to work for an employer with a union, I'm not in the bargaining unit and I'm on salary and if my results and goal metrics are good there is literally no comment to make WRT car repair appointments or something. I'm not on the union timeclock, I have written defined long term goals and metrics, and where I'm sitting at precisely 3:35pm on Tuesday is definitely not one of them.
Obviously life is different in ops or hell desk which often has an abusive call center like atmosphere.
Rather than paternity leave, why not more general leave for everyone?
Unless your parents were heavy smokers, and you are the youngest of many siblings, you're probably going to take parental leave for all your kids before taking bereavement leave for either parent. If you base the leave on some kind of verifiable qualifying event, the accounting would probably be satisfied by the company paying premiums to an insurer. So you could give people time off whenever they are likely to be very distracted from work.
It doesn't just have to be because a crying baby is making an ordinary sleep schedule impossible. Jury duty with sequestration could be distracting. A tornado or house fire might be a bit stressful. Having your car totaled might be worth a few days off to sort out the crisis during regular business hours.
I'm not really very personally invested in parental leave any more, now that I think maybe I won't have to change any more diapers until the first grandchild. But I can think of all kinds of hypothetical circumstances beyond my direct control that might cause me to take some PTO here and there, which can easily chisel away the amount of actual vacation I can take, until I'm down to maybe extending a 3-day [holiday] weekend into 5 consecutive days away from work, and then not getting sick for the next 3 months.
That's not the kind of leave that reverses burnout.
Alternately, maybe just flush the PTO experiment into the toilet of history, reinstitute sick leave and true vacation, and give people enough of each that they can absorb those life events that eventually happen to everyone.
This is what I propose, although you say it more eloquently. Rather than trying to carve out cases, why not offer x months of time off for every y unit of time? Those who want to spend that time with their kids can do that. Why should I remain chained to my desk because that's not what I want to do?
My employer has a strict 9 to 5 attendance policy (which I disagree with for a number of reasons), but one thing that really bugs me about it is that it applies to days when the roads are hard to navigate due to winter weather. Even if there's a state of emergency and the roads are "closed", we're expected to be here because our customers are all around the country, and they didn't have a snow storm, so we need to be here to support them.
Employees with children tend to get leniency in terms of coming in late on days like that, typically because they had to arrange alternative care for their kids with schools closed. But I have no kids, so if I get stuck behind a snow plow and end up getting to the office at 9:05 I'm probably going to get a lecture on how being late is me being disrespectful to the boss and the company.
At least until the robots replace most of us.
You can choose not to eat food, but the individual will not last long.
You can choose not to have kids but the society won't last long.
It's in our interest to support the human part of humanity. We do that with breaks, meal breaks, sick time, vacation time, and other things. But it's also in our interest to benefit society, not just the individual. So we incentivize choices which are mandatory to the health and success of our society, such as creating the next generation to replace those aging out of the workforce.
Other cultures tackle it differently to. In Japan, organized stretching before work is commonplace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqPW6H3soKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biGPteoP2jg
However, it's very silly to compare procreation with fitness.
The fat procreator still benefits the society far more than the slim non...procreator, because on a 100 year or 200 year scale, both are dead, and the society only contains the progeny of one of them.
Put it this way: would you rather have a phone that can be upgraded a ton but will eventually wear out and stop working, or have a phone which can be endlessly replaced such that it is always modern and working, even if it isn't top of the line?
My current employer also has a policy allowing a certain amount of unpaid time out of the office for charity projects that you'd like to participate in.
So even 5 weeks does not allow us to actually go on a vacation.
When I hired on, I was told that using more than 3 days for sick leave would get you fired.
Second, from the perspective of the employer, why should he be punished and forced to pay for these things? He's paying you for your labor, that's the exchange that's been set up. He's not your patron and he hasn't pledged to care for you for the rest of your life. He gets no value when you are not working. What is he paying for, and on what basis should the government compel him to do that?
PTO is a perk, not a right. You are not entitled to your employer's money. That's not to say you shouldn't find an employer who will give that perk, but there's no reason the law should compel him to do so (other than the convenience of the employee).
Then in High School it was Mid June to August.
Then in university mid May to August.
Then I graduated and started to work: 2 weeks, yay![1]
[1] This is true for full time employment. One way to escape it is to work freelance contracts. I did this for years, and regularly gave myself a few months off between contracts.
Joke aside, it baffles me every time this comes up wrt. american workers. I have 5 weeks PTO and I'm the worst off from all of my friends: most have between 7-8 weeks, some even up to 9-11 weeks per annum. [and they're not even teachers] Of course you're also expected to take every last day.
Though when I think of that, a friend of mine who works at the CEA mentioned something like 50 days off.
For US folks :this does not include sick days, these are completely independent (and not capped)
This happens a few days a year in north america, say at christmas or thanksgiving.
You can almost feel the whole country breathing a sigh of relief.
Health care expenses would go down a lot and I believe in many jobs productivity wouldn't suffer much either. I see so many people just going through the motions pretending to be busy.
Maybe this is the plan to fight churn. The devil you know at least gives you a few more days off.
If you're expected to be reachable then you aren't really on vacation. I simply tell them I'm going hiking in $NationalPark where phone service is not possible. If you let them know you are available then they will take advantage of it. If you let them know you are unavailable they'll plan for that.
That's how I got married = "I was told that if you take one of the trails from the lodge over to a high overlook your phone will report signal for at least one carrier from down in the valley, but they're not sure if anyone's ever actually managed to make a call."
Sequoia might not be that isolated these days, but it was still a great choice.
And, heaven forbid you want to do something like take 2 of those 3 weeks within the span of a month.
Seriously, our obsession with work in the US is completely absurd and I cannot understand it.
No wonder people burn out.
Unemployment is our only real vacation, and those who go through extended periods of that know it feels like anything but.
Software developers might have it better, although not always. Here in the midwest I have yet to interview anywhere that offered more than 2 weeks of vacation for a new hire.
I think our sabbatical program isn't common, but the rest of the policy seems fairly standard for the area.
Edit: We also accrue sick time at some pace (maybe 5 per year that don't roll over; I honestly have no idea as I've never tracked nor taken a sick day (in the HR systems); of course, I've stayed home while sick when warranted) and have paid parental leave (6 weeks paid for primary and 2 weeks paid for secondary caregiver).
If taking all possible days, in the first year you have 42 days off, up to 55 by year 10
I tell them we'll see if their opinion changes upon life reflection while in their final hospital bed.
I could go home, watch TV, sweat, and listen for the mice getting into my ramen and oatmeal, or I could stay at work and maybe help do something cool that the CEO could sell to investors.
I pretty much stopped the instant I made a new friend in my new city. That person got me to buy a window AC unit, and keep restaurant reservations, and go to movie theaters, and move to an apartment with fewer freeloading rodents in it.
So you could probably also alleviate their suffering by giving them a reason to leave work at quitting time, and keeping them out long enough to discourage going back.
Nowadays, I only need about 75% of a half-baked, tissue-thin reason to not be at work, to want to leave the office early.
The place I work at seems to respect the work/life balance well. If I get in at 9:00, I'm one of the first people in. If I leave at 6:30, I'm just about the last person out. There are a few people who work odd hours, and people in management who work a lot extra, but I think it's mostly a matter of choice.
My boss works a lot of overtime, partly because he's stretched too thin, being a dev manager and responsible for coding being one of the few key people left who originally wrote (and still understands) much of the system, but I also think he likes it that way. He is always very clear that we are not expected to work extra hours under normal circumstances, and I don't believe he's ever actually asked me to work extra in the 2 years or so, I've worked for him (I have a few times, but very seldom.)
Two problems with that.
1. You get away with x until you can't. Lots of people don't have easy lateral moves to other companies like techies do, so being told to stay late isn't anything they can fight.
2. Advancement is still a thing. If you're the guy clocking out at 4:30 but everyone else stays until 6, your boss will notice and that might hurt your chances of advancement regardless of how "good" you think your work is. Those guys staying to 6 are playing the long game to be noticed and get promoted and a raise. Sure maybe at age 25, making low-end money is great, then you want a kid and a decent home and now you're wondering why you can't get promoted.
>People seem to feel a sense of importance when they overwork themselves.
This goes against everything I've seen. People act a certain way because they feel presured to. Everyone is busy with their self-interest. We don't want to stay late or remote in at night. We do that because we more or less have to.
As someone who has worked in both hardcore and lax environments, I can guarantee you none of this is optional in a former. Getting into a latter took me 10 years. Good jobs where you're seen as a professional with a life outside work are sadly lacking.
I'm childfree, and I have zero interest in climbing the corporate ladder. I work so I can pay my rent and afford food, and that's about it. I'm just not a career-minded person.
From my limited experience, the employment contracts for us salaried people state quite clearly that availability outside of the "office hours" is to be expected in the vague but neverending "emergencies", "company deadlines", "business needs", "results-oriented tasks", etc.
What you're describing - for salaried employees - exists only in government as far as I've seen.
It's amazing how many "emergencies" aren't emergencies. If I have plans I have plans. If there are loads of "emergencies" then that is the result of poor planning and management. Lots of managers I have worked with back off when I decline.
Having said that, not everyone is in a position to be strict about it. It needs to be put into law or hashed out during the hiring process.
It wouldn't come back to you that directly. Sure, people don't get fired for doing the bare minimum. It takes the form of other people seeming more engaged with their jobs than you do, and the consequences you'd expect. There's a middle ground where you don't sacrifice quality of life but don't do the bare minimum.
Burnout, like all pain, may be a feature.
Watching most of what you build—which often wasn't exciting or very important-seeming to begin with—be discarded in short order, having benefitted few (i.e. not enough to justify the effort) or no people, after all kinds of false or semi-real urgency to get it done, year after year after year, will do that. It's a testament to how much money is sloshing around that we get paid so much to spend huge amounts of time building soon-to-be digital garbage, I guess.
It feels like there's an exceptionally stupid monkey smashing shapes against one of those children's shape-in-the-correct-hole puzzles, but larger, extending forever into the distance, trying to get some of them to fit, which they mostly don't because the monkey's so damn stupid. And we're the shapes.
Yet, it's infuriating how dumb it is.
Low to zero productivity growth is also why our unemployment rate in the US is amazingly low (seemingly a tight labor market), but why real median income is stagnant.
One reason wages don't go up is that the value of employer benefits goes up every year because of the incredible cost of providing health insurance.
The exception being a contracting gig. Where I wrote everything they canned me, outsourced it overseas. Then several months later asked me to come back, because the outsourcing firm only knew an older programming language.
It's burn out just going to work every day. I'm either cleaning up others messes. Or interfacing with vendors. I'm totally aware that work will be tedium four out of the five days. I just want one freaking day, where I can stretch my mind, and actually do something useful. I have a world burning in my head I want to write. Several projects I want to program, and learn. Yet I'm so burnt out by work end.
My work feels like a syndicate show at this point. I have been doing primarily the same thing for 5 years. I've constantly tried to buck this and get into some other area. But a personal mistake has ensured I constantly need money, and can't take the time to move properly.
But I also extend this to. There's this project in production. Do unit tests, documentation, project planning clean up. Wiki docs, etc.
Again this stuff needs to be done. This stuff is also part of any job. But if you're hired to design and lead a team to build out service X. The issue is when that project is cancelled, and your full time role now is the above. At least pivot me to be a software dev half of the week on another team. Oh wait another contracting firm owns that team, nevermind.
That's not so bad. I'll sweep the floor in my lab, wipe down benches, equipment, etc after a project. I make it a habit of doing that so I have a fresh start for the next project.
Manual labor is somewhat satisfying sometimes as you can think about other things while doing it.
Just coming in to design a software solution, then pivoting over to that as your sole duty :P.
That's something I find quite painful. The lifespan of tech is so short these days, and many more projects are unsuccessful or discarded than those that last, that sometimes I wish I worked in a medium (unlike software) with more permanence.
I have a pretty comfortable job/career. I have a hard time saying I'm being exploited just because my work makes someone else richer to a greater extent than it makes me richer. It's engaging (enough) and I live well. I'm not putting my own resources at risk or making personal sacrifices. 20 years into my career and I've never burned out, probably because I never told myself I needed to, or was going to, change the world. And I made it my goal from the start to just find a job/life I was happy with.
And why wouldn't my employer take full advantage of my services that they are paying for?
I can more easily feel like I'm the one exploiting my employer. I get over $200K/year in salary and benefits to spend 40-50 hours/week doing what usually doesn't even feel much like work. I can work extra to get ahead when it would benefit me, or I can do the minimum at a given time. They have to give me free food and a top of the line computer and let me manage what time I come in and leave and what I wear. Because if they don't, I can find another company that will. I get a really nice bonus when the company does well but my comp doesn't go down if it's not doing well. I've spent more time at this job than I did in college, learning a lot here as well, and I can freely take that knowledge to another company whenever I want, I have no commitment here.
Obviously it's not always like this. Not even within tech. But many of us can choose whether to see our jobs in a positive or negative light.
Right, that's the point.
Most of us are very lucky compared to most other professions.
That doesn't sound very passionate. You're fired!
(joke, joke)
Ugh, I know, being "economically exploited" is so rough -- making six figs in a top-tier profession with low single-digit unemployment that provides for a home/apt, family, regular health insurance, a warm bed and heating for the winter, cooling for the summer, multiple cars and a motorcycle (and maybe even a home for those too), an entire closet full of clothes, multiple pairs of shoes, regular healthy meals, spontaneous travel and vacations, hobbies, movies, TV, games, and entertainment nearly to our hearts' desire.
Worse, at work I have to deal with shiny new gadgets, laptops, desktops, servers, giant monitors, a desk and chair to my liking, HVAC, plumbing, and free filtered water. And wait a second, did you say you get paid while taking a bathroom break!? Life really does suck being exploited like this.
What's dead is not God, nor work, and the elephant might just be painted on the mirror on your wall.
You might be 1% likely to die working software, but 20% more likely to lose 1 year of life due to inactivity. Different people might choose differently.
So yes, we are all serfs living in various degrees of comfort, but without that which we really crave: freedom. Sure, we could start a business, but most of the capital for doing so (past and present) is held by a very small number of people. Wealth perpetuates wealth, you've got to have money to make money. And you have to have a lot of money to earn your freedom.
To be fair, if you're willing to move somewhere cheap you could easily retire after 15 years as a software engineer in the Bay Area. So it's just ~20% of your life.
I don't know if this is true. I think my savings would have ended up much larger had i NOT moved to the Bay Area due to the cost of living difference. I make about 1.5X here what I used to in Nowheresville, USA, but my cost of living is 5X. My savings rate here is close to zero whereas I used to actually fund my retirement accounts. It's a complicated problem.
Do you need some restaurant recommendations? Everything I get delivered is great.
"Your pay cut in half? That's nothing, so and so has it much worse."
I live in Boston and what is this? We can only afford rent with multiple professionals in the house working.
* Lack of voice in the direction of the company.
* No personal investment in the success of the company.
People respond to incentives. If someone has no say in where the company is going and doesn't share in the companies successes (or failures), it's only a matter of time before any rational individual is going to just stop caring.
Fortunately, these problems have solutions. Several hundred year old solutions, no less: https://blog.fountstudio.com/yes-we-have-a-pirate-code-1aa1b...
[Disclaimer: That's my own blog post.]
What matters to me, is my own working conditions: work/life balance, salary and specifics of the project I am working on: ratio of coding vs fixing other people's messes, dev environment, ease of development and being empowered to write lots of code and functionality, as well as positive feedback from managers and co-workers.
If you don't own a meaningful amount of the company, you aren't going to be very interested in the company's success and frankly the company is demonstrably uninterested in your success. By all rights you should feel perfectly comfortable moving on when a better offer comes your way.
> In light of the fact that piracy is the very definition of theft, it is fascinating to learn that pirate ship crews had a remarkably egalitarian profit sharing model.
This is totally unsurprising to me. This is the same model as taxation in a democracy. Taxation is theft. The taxes (stolen goods) are distributed to those who are a part of the organization that does the taxing (stealing) according to input from members of that organization.
These days? In all of human history your likelihood of being a slave was pretty high. Talk about real meaningless. If anything we live in a rare break from slavery which is an outlier.
Not to mention back-breaking farm work. Or working in a mine. Or being gang pressed on a ship or into warfare. How's that for meaning? I think punching out some code and rebooting the occasional server and leaving at 5 is slightly better than the above.
I think people need to learn some real expectations of what work means and perhaps to read Studs Turkel's Working before they get to complain about their cush white collar jobs being these horrible things. I'm not trying to trivialize work stress, but phrases like 'these days' are highly loaded and non-historic. If anything, we have it easier than all of our ancestors and by a wide margin.
Slavery and drudgery are not what make work meaningful or meaningless.
>I think people need to learn some real expectations of what work means and perhaps to read Studs Turkel's Working before they get to complain about their cush white collar jobs being these horrible things.
As someone who's work in factories, grain elevators, grocery, retail, and currently work in software development I can tell you the meaningless of modern work is the same regardless of the drudgery involved. The fact you equate drudgery with meaningless work shows you have no clue as to how the working classes operate (being that I come from the working class I have some insights to impart here so I'll try to be patient with you). What makes work meaningless for the vast majority of humans is the total lack of control or the inability to perceive the end goal (ex. a factory assembler who'll never see the final product or that they have no say what the product should be or even if it's worthwhile to produce it).
The lack of goals or any kind of connection to our work is what drives many people to quit or change jobs regardless of whether it's in an office or in a kitchen or on a factory line. Churn happens because people are intentionally left to be nothing more than trained animal in their task. Punch in, make quota, punch out. And repeat, forever. So, I'm not exactly sure what part of the physical comfort matters when the psychological deprivation weighs as hard as a herniated disk does on a laborer (I know both have similar impact thanks to my mother). And I can say that both physical and psychological pains and deprivations are hell from my own experiences. It's not to say that gilded cages aren't pretty but they're still cages.
Seriously, what is your intention with that take? Huh? "Hmm, other people had it worse at one point, so I should stop trying to better my position." Seriously, who does that benefit? Absolutely no one.
Sorry, but I wouldn't. I work for one reason and one reason only: to afford food and shelter. I couldn't care less what my employer does with my work as long as I'm getting paid for it.
About 20 years ago, there was a Dilbert strip [0] where Phil says to Dilbert "You can choose eternal high pay, but all of your work will be burned in front of you at the end of each day... or you can choose eternal poverty, but your work will be useful and appreciated". I'd choose the former in a heartbeat -- just as long as I get paid for my work, I don't care if it gets burned in front of me. Hell, I don't even need to get paid a lot -- as long as it can sustain my current lifestyle, I'll be happy.
Oh god, if you're feeling theatrically unhappy with your job, it's seriously time to make a move.
The core feature of my team is making something we think is awesome and missing from the world, where my role as the head of the startup is to do what needs to get done and make sure my team feels like their work and lives are fulfilling. If any member on my team felt like their work is meaningless or a source of emotional pain, I would not be able to sleep at night.
Maybe being forced a "life is a meaningless accident and determism means you're just a flesh robot" message since birth is the problem? I follow a basic spritual path of my own doing and its very fulfilling. Its buddhism-lite with a fair bit of meditation and more estoric stuff like lucid dream practice and engage in my own form of 'right speech' and 'right action.' I'm so much more alive than I was before when I just bought into the typical young man's nihilism game.
>that the core feature of their jobs is their own economic exploitation.
The core feature of my job is to make money for me, and the guys above me doing better don't diminish from my salary. The same way my salary isn't diminishing from the guys below me. We tried forced equality recently in human history and it didn't work, so here we are doing the only thing that does. I think if you just see employment as this bitter zero-sum game you're destined to be unhappy. I'm not happy with work, nor unhappy. I understand what it is, its a compromise like much of life. I see lots of extremist messages passed on to young people about how awful things are but almost never a message about compromise, being realistic, moderation, and finding a path that works for you. Its always "the man is out to get me, so I can't win" stuff that's fairly dramatic and completely demoralizing. It ignores the massive middle-road open to those of us in the wealthy west.
Perhaps your life lacks moderation, chance taking, and criticism of what you've been taught by authorities who don't deserve your trust because they're just winging it with desperation just like you. Maybe your attitude is the sum total of decades of the blind leading the blind in our culture. Having a 'I might as well kill myself because everything is so meaningless' attitude is absolutely not normal regardless of how hard you try to normalize it.
And more than that, we're never given education on how to combat the feelings of meaninglessness that this message gives us. I've read a fair amount of existentialist philosophy myself to deal with it, but most people don't and it makes them miserable.
Firstly, nobody said anything about life. We were talking about Work with a capital W. Secondly, most of us don't need ghosts and spiritual dreams to have meaningful lives.
>I see lots of extremist messages passed on to young people about how awful things are but almost never a message about compromise, being realistic, moderation, and finding a path that works for you. Its always "the man is out to get me, so I can't win" stuff that's fairly dramatic and completely demoralizing. It ignores the massive middle-road open to those of us in the wealthy west.
Are you European? I think what you're hearing is coming from Americans because, well, the way American society treats people is actually quite extreme itself. "Head leftward towards the middle!" is going to sound extreme to someone who's idea of normal is to the far-right.
I don't have trouble focusing on my work when I'm in a good company. The problem is that if I take a look at the grand scheme of things and think about the that I'm devoting the majority of my waking hours to coding apps that would get done regardless of whether or not I existed (this space is largely zero sum in that there are more than enough developers to go around), it's kind of depressing. I'd rather be devoting my life to solving the meaningful problems in the world that not enough people are working on (eg. like what Elon Musk is doing).
On another note, it surprises me that long breaks from work (eg. sabbaticals) aren't more common. Doing the same thing every weekday gets repetitive and draining.
Remember the number 1 regret Bronnie Ware observed while caring for people in the last 12 weeks of their lives: I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
You are always working for yourself. You may have an employer, but you are still working for yourself, not them. You're trading your time for money, like any other business. If you don't like the deal, then walk away.
It is easy to get caught by debt, lack of savings, education or skill. Just as easy by not figuring your advantages and capitalizing on them.
The corollary is that it is as easy to stay in place by standing as by running on a treadmill.
I like this metaphor! However, once we realize that we are the treadmill, we can turn it off and walk away...
FWIW, there is a learning curve to it all. I won't deny having some painful lessons in my past.
> You know my old saying, "Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors."
> what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want but fear the alternative worse.
> They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn't they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?
The full letter: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/10/people-simply-empty-out...
It's bullshit. Stop living on credit, stop using credit cards and ask for what you deserve.
1. Productivity has soared
2. Wages have stagnated / wealth gap has widened significantly
3. US Corporate Culture is currently rife with an attitude "Let the Boomers Retire, we have a Hiring Freeze"
There are too few people doing the work of too many, which chokes the upward mobility of the youth, increases the wealth gap between Working and Investing class citizens, and essentially is masochism in the "modern era" of US Consumerism as an economic engine.
Don't believe me? Do some math on stock buybacks 2015-2016 versus publicly announced hirings and layoffs. You'd be surprised how easily this amounts to justification for putting Greenspan and Bernanke in jail. Those guys stole from tens of millions of Americans to benefit a few hundred.
The ECB did too little too late and this led to massive youth unemployment; on the other hand our unemployment rate is nearing historical lows.
Not being able to get a job (which happened to a lot of grads in 2008) is devastating to people's careers. The employment rate matters!
Huge numbers of people are chronically underemployed, and an unprecedented number of people have simply given up finding work, neither of which is reflected in the top line "historically low unemployment."
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
Zooming out and eyeballing it, it appears the last time such a small proportion of people were working was circa 1978.
LOOK https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRIN25MAUSM156S
v.interesting that the UK's looks completely different and UK productivity has been in a tailspin vs US!
I would add:
4. US Corporate Culture is currently rife with an attitude "If you're not sacrificing your life for the company, you don't deserve your job."
In short, I am in complete agreement with you and the above #4 concept.
> Companies need to do something about this burnout crisis now because otherwise, they will pay the high price of turnover.
Hm, what on earth could they possibly do? It's a mystery shrouded in an enigma!
I dont want a 10k raise. I want a halfday friday from now on.
If you're a software engineer, now is the time to start asking for things like that. If you don't think you'll ever get it at your current job, start looking elsewhere.
It's possible, albeit, unlikely.
The short answer is you can't. Your boss is always within his or her right to tell you that you have to stay.
You're 100% within your right to say "no" and walk out of the door.
Wait, what?! I'm on the younger side, even for a forum like this, and I've had an employment contract for every job I've ever had... even as an intern, short term contractor, or just summer jobs in high school.
I'd immediately walk away from any offer that didn't include an employment contract. Not putting your terms of employment in writing can only result in you, the employee, getting exploited. There are no positives.
I've worked a job with a real contract once in my career. I'm not sure I would do it again. Not being able to quit is a strange feeling, even though there is quite a lot of consideration in return. In the end I opted to not renew and go back to a simple at-will agreement, since I kind of resented the lack of freedom it gave me.
A real contract actually means they must pay the full length regardless of if they fire you, save of course for specific "for cause" reasons outlined in the agreement.
Through unions and collective bargaining.
The most common answer was click. They just hung up on me. I burned several recruiting firms. Telling me I was not passionate about this career choice. I was also told about several companies. How dare I think I was special, and that I didn't commit to the team culture. My explanation was that to fully exercise my mind I have a variety of hobbies that eat up time. I'm working on a novel, acting, etc. They're not competing, but they provide benefit to the company. Nope. I approach this one with real caution now.
They're misunderstanding the meaning of the phrase.
Real //coverage// requires shifts of multiple people for the same job. "Being reachable", used to involve special extra pay just for the option of being called in (actual pay).
I keep trying to push the boundaries outwards in negotiations though, trying to find their breaking points. Often, it surprises me how much I'm able to get away with.
The samizdat of our times might just be about _actually_ working while wading through seas full of these creatures.
I'm not sure how the job market is in Philly, but one of the reasons this worked in SF (I imagine), has to due with the leverage the employee has over their prospective employer.
In SF/bay salaries are quite high, and talent is hard to find.
It doesn't hurt that the engineer who I know that did this, was an incredible engineer.
That said, I still recognize it's probably not something that's going to work all the time. For every 10 companies you ask, 1 will agree.
That's because they are high in absolute terms, but not high in relative terms.
In other words, if the pay was actually high, talent wouldn't be hard to find.
Eventually, you'd attract talent from other regions and related industries (I can make 3 times more in computer science instead of meteorology, you say?).
You'd also see more incentive to improve the productivity of the highly specialized, highly skilled talent. This would look like less patience for things that waste developers' time, like substandard tooling, unacceptable levels of technical debt, etc.
There are jobs where you have to be present X hours. But a knowledge worker, someone who's creating. The end goal should be what's delivered. Not how long I'm present. It's not just the 8 hours 5 days butt in seat. It's that my cell phone is plastered all over. I get lambasted for not responding to an email late at night. Work doesn't end at a cut off. I miss contracting because they would think twice about contacting me after hours.
Shouldn't the company want to get the best possible work out of me. Ensure that their employee has an ideal work/life balance. So that they come to work with energy and able to work properly. Or are we just supposed to be a cog, churning out code.
Again there are checks and balances. The alternative schedule is not concrete. Stuff breaks, you have a meeting week. You'll be working regular hours and then some. That's fine. Just give a balance to not have to cram everything I want to do into two days.
Now I pitched it that writing helps with documentation, the other pieces helped with sales work, etc. So each piece I provided reasoning why it would be better. But that didn't matter.
So why not go back to contracting? I've been thinking a little about doing this, but it seems like it would drag you around to a lot of different locations. And the pay doesn't seem that great either, given the lack of stability and the short-term nature (3, 6, 12-month contracts are the norm from what I see).
I stayed in one general location for about three years. Working 3 to 6 month contracts. Get to know a few firms you're generally good. They'll come calling. Regarding pay, health insurance was the biggest cost. Saving smartly I was able to take one to two months off a year and focus on my own thing. Contracting generally paid well. Then there were the 100+ hour work weeks with time and a half. Essentially do it smartly it's not bad.
With salary it's similar except the hours do not come into play.
It went somewhat well, but reality and inexperience of course hit and we ended up selling 5-6 years later in what amounts to an acquihire.
My new life goal is to get back into that, as it was definitely the happiest time of my life. Just finding solid people who can get work done on projects, without having to kill yourself for no reason. If people were killing themselves for a couple weeks, it was for a damn good reason we all shared the benefits from - e.g. an informed decision by everyone to pitch in for a better outcome at the end. Conversely if we had a slow month we'd work half days on backlog pet projects to help improve tooling. Everyone understood work life had an ebb and flow just like personal life.
That is truly what is working in the American workforce imo. Just the camaraderie of being in something together and believing your co-workers/managers/whatever have your back, just like you have theirs when they go through stuff.
It's taken a few years to make me realize why "owning" my own labor is so important, but it's basically this. I want to have a long-term lifestyle business with people who work hard and passionately, but realize it's simply one aspect of life.
I type this mostly for the simple reason that my initial response was "man I want to hire this guy" but realized how I no longer have the freedom to make such unilateral "crazy" decisions. How many others are in my position? Somewhat depressing to think about :)
I'm curious what do you mean by reality/inexperience?
I've had a few roles very similar to that. It was here's work, get it done by date Y. That was it. A year back during one of my breaks between roles. I spent two months trying to bootstrap a consulting firm. Ran into the no prior clients to get clients problem. But near best damn time of my life. Spending the morning networking talking to people. Then the afternoon, attending tech meetups, and working on projects.
I agree a good team is a corner stone to a good work environment. My favorite places to work also had a strong team to go with it. Also there own little culture traits.
I want to own my own consulting firm/labor. For the variety of projects, work schedule, etc. It's just getting back to that point. Alot of the best tech workers I know. Want to own/work in a consulting firm .For several reasons. They want their own hours/locale to work in. To not be artificially held back on a project, and alternate between tech stacks, to keep their skills sharp.
What we lacked was all the rest - sales, marketing, business development, someone ensuring that the market verticals we were in were strong and who knew when to start looking into new lines of business. While I had some of the latter, the marketing and sales side was always difficult for me.
Lessons definitely learned, and I'm very excited for try #2!
And yep, the team matters the most. People forget what that word means, but when you're in a functional team you'll simply know it. I describe it as that feeling of being stuck on some tedious work you're hacking away at feeling burned out on, leaving for the day, then coming in the next morning to find your co-worker who works late pushed that project forward for you while you were sleeping.
Sounds silly right? But that is severely lacking in most corporations today - that idea of team spirit and team members having each other backs like that. You certainly see it in startups, but that seems to almost be it save very small pockets with competent managers in large corporations almost by accident rather than design.
Reading your other posts in this thread you would have fit right in to our ops team back then. Basically our job was to make sure that phone never rang at 2am, and if it did we had fucked up somewhere so we didn't mind it as much as the only person you typically had to blame was staring back at you in the mirror. Everyone was empowered to keep those calls from coming in though. If your company requires heroics to operate, you're doing it wrong.
Wow. I can't even believe it would require that much of a cut (and clearly even that still wasn't enough for those people). Damn.
However if your boss offers you a 5% raise and you counter with a 5% pay cut and you're out the door at noon every on the last work day of every week, you'd be surprised how willing they would be do to that.
My current job is a compressed work shedule: 9hr days but every other friday off. The friday I do work is 8hrs. And no on-call. I can actually do errands and appointments and spend time with family without taking a vacation day. I love it.
The best way for a company to keep an employee trapped is to grossly overpay them. People quickly scale their obligations up to meet their income, and that usually means that employees will not have the option to go somewhere else if they are paid well above market.
As the employee seeks a new position on the open market and becomes aware of their predicament, the stress they experience goes up, not down.
"More money, more problems", as they say. This is not to justify wage slavery or underpaid workforces, but only to indicate the solution to every problem is not "throw money at it".
We should recognize that the industrialized working habits are unnatural and not necessarily something that maintains its own homeostasis with humanity. There's no guarantee that we'll be able sustain this lifestyle, on either a personal or social scale.
I grant this is not your intent, but it is nonetheless exactly the effect of the line of thought.
For me, the core of the burnout problem is non-cooperative ownership of the means of production, aka capitalism.
The working persons who create all the value in an enterprise are not the persons who make the governance decisions nor the persons who realize full profit from that work. These conflicts of interest are what lie at the root of burnout at least to my eyes.
They are the means of production.
Witness the comedy of the failing business where 10 middle managers have endless meetings about what the last remaining builder should build.
A giant clot of tiny worker friendly regs is one answer. I think a UBI and something reasonable for health care is better. Losing all your best workers because you create a place no one wants to work at is the best possible outcome for corporate doucheyness.
I agree that socialism would be the better way to do this, but I'm not sure if our political system would ever allow it to happen.
Empowering the individual is the answer. Not trading one master for another. Even if the new master double-pinky-swears he's gonna be better than the old one.
Individuals must be empowered by keeping the markets not only open, but gaping. The government's actions should always open up competition.
A great way to get started effecting this would be a liberalization of intellectual property law (trim the lifetime of copyrights to 5 years and patents to 7 years, for example, while also seriously weakening the extent of the monopolies they grant).
Another way would be a modernization of the courts, to ensure that little people can have their concerns addressed speedily and at minimal cost.
Cartels and monopolies should be aggressively disrupted (ideally through indirect action, though direct is not out of the realm of possibility), and market distorters like health insurers should be excised quickly.
[1] https://medium.com/@discomfiting/debunking-if-you-raise-the-...
The UBI is like gravity pulling inequality towards the middle. A force that counteracts the "rich get richer" force that dominates today's economy.
But that's not governance of an enterprise, that's quitting -- a commitment that also very likely mars one's own work record, especially in this business-run society.
>They are the means of production.
Unless the employees govern the company, the first person to disagree with your statement is going to be the boss.
>Witness the comedy of the failing business where 10 middle managers have endless meetings about what the last remaining builder should build.
I'd say the above is not limited whatsoever to failing businesses. The bigger the business/institution, the more likely this over-administrated, top- and middle-heavy shitshow is to be standard operating procedure.
Only if they can organize, and don't have debts, mortgages, kids, limited job options and other such issues...
Which means for most of people it's a "gun in the head" kind of situation more than a decision. At best they can get off of one deal and into another, but they can't stall very much or be too picky and still feed themselves.
Rewards can only sweeten the deal. They can't turn a bad working situation non-toxic (at least not until they cross the threshold of allowing one to escape from the bad situation entirely).
People can only put up with that frustration for so long. When they can't put up with it anymore, that's burnout. It's not about who's getting the profit (though the discouragement from feeling that you're not being treated fairly can definitely be a significant contributor to the stress). Indeed, burnout is very high among business owners.
I'm strongly pro-capitalist, but I agree that we need to adjust structures to ensure that companies are obliged to share a fair portion of their profit with employees. However, I believe this only tangentially relates to the problem of burnout, which is fundamentally about the psychic impact of daily exposure to the same significant stressors.
I can see what you're saying - the money may be secondary. But I think it's a big mistake to even momentarily indulge the idea (even as a hypothetical) that one can get paid "whatever one wants" when that decision is structurally not theirs to make.
>burnout, which is fundamentally about the psychic impact of daily exposure to the same significant stressors.
Do you have any sympathy for the notion that these stressors are reduced or eliminated when workers and managers cooperatively decide what to make and how?
I think the key difference here is that you're approaching this as something that needs to be structured, that there should be a structure in place that allows people to select from a list what they're going to make.
The capitalist perspective is that people can make whatever they want, as long as they are able to persuade someone to give it to them (within the confines of the law). So it's not an absurd hypothetical. There are, of course, no guarantees.
But I don't want this thread to veer too far off-topic, if that ship hasn't already sailed.
>Do you have any sympathy for the notion that these stressors are reduced or eliminated when workers and managers cooperatively decide what to make and how?
Sure I do. The concerns you're listing are among everyone's core psychological needs. People need to feel that they are being treated fairly, that their input is taken seriously, and that they have a reasonable degree of autonomy over their time.
When we don't feel these things are happening for us, the appropriate and natural reaction is angst, or psychic pain, and it's intended to drive us to find a way to correct/balance these stress profiles.
After we've been exposed to these and other psychological stresses without resolution for too long, our body gives up and we enter a state of burnout.
You're suggesting that the cure for burnout is an upheaval in the structure of property ownership. I believe that if it helped at all, this would be an indirect effect at best. In any case, such drastic suggestions are out of scope for the immediate question of addressing burnout in the real world.
There are ways to improve current companies (without fundamentally restructuring their core ownership or authority systems) so that they meet these needs better. There are ways to get these needs filled at home, which, while it won't entirely reduce antipathy toward work, may help mitigate the damage.
Let me be clearer - I am not referencing a proposed structure, I am saying that under the current existing structure, employees cannot choose what to make, because that is in the end the owner's decision, not theirs. That's what I mean by "structurally not theirs to make".
Alternatively, arriving at mutually agreeable decisions about both compensation and work product is (and has been) achievable under cooperative ownership e.g., as long as the employees are categorically indistinguishable from owners and governors.
>People need to feel that they are being treated fairly, that their input is taken seriously, and that they have a reasonable degree of autonomy over their time.
I agree very much, which is why I point out that at a structural level, capitalism specifically denies all three of these to the worker. The owner alone decides how much value the owner takes from what the worker produces, not the worker. The fact that the owner decides on this foundational matter necessarily means that the input of the worker is second-rate input. And when the owner is the sole decider of what and when to make stuff, the worker's autonomy is necessarily subordinate to the owner's.
>In any case, such drastic suggestions are out of scope for the immediate question of addressing burnout in the real world.
In the real world, there are huge, cooperatively owned enterprises profitably employing tens of thousands of people each. Such companies haven't banished burnout -- no utopias anywhere, I'm afraid -- but they are not suffering the burnout crisis that capitalist organizations are. One to check out:
You're assuming that the owner is operating in a vacuum. That is not the case. The worker has the ability to find another employer whose terms are more agreeable, start their own business and attempt to get people to pay them directly for a service, or even to exit the labor force entirely.
If you believe that the owners do not feel the need to compete and that the marketplace is therefore not functioning, that's a separate issue that doesn't depend on ownership structures as such.
>In the real world, there are huge, cooperatively owned enterprises profitably employing tens of thousands of people each.
Sure, but while these are typically very socially-conscious organizations, they aren't non-capitalist and they don't give everyone the level of control and autonomy that you're intimating.
But that doesn't change the relationship except to not begin it, because that is quitting. There remains a structurally subordinate relationship between owner and worker that quitting does not change.
>they don't give everyone the level of control and autonomy that you're intimating.
That is false. Tens of thousands of Mondragon (for example) co-op worker-owners collectively and democratically decide how, when, where and why to work and have done so successfully for many decades. Workers there face significantly less burnout and I suggest it is specifically because of the fundamental change they made to the working relationship by making everyone more or less the same -- there is no greater than a nine times multiple difference in compensation between highest and lowest paid employee for example, and everybody must arrive with some modest capital in order to work there. This is of course unthinkable under capitalism, which is oriented toward concentrating power and capital in a stockholder and governor/owner class, not vesting these things in the people who create all the value.
Speaking of unthinkable, let me observe that as you and I have proceeded, you have edged away from the "real world" you claim to occupy and headed toward an ideological shelter world where what is possible is determined not by existing things but by your certainty that those things don't exist.
I mentioned a feeling of guilt and/or additional responsibility only as one possible reaction to increased pay resulting in additional stress, not as one that is universally felt. There are many other valid reactions, but in most cases, they also end up increasing stress.
IMO, in most cases, "give them more money" is not going to appreciably improve the problem of burnout.
With modern software I can produce the output of hundreds of people from the 1960s orders of magnitude faster. Does that make me more productive? I mean, it does in terms of output, but not input. I'm not really working harder. I'm not really even working smarter. I'm just working on the shoulders of giants.
If I hired a guy to paint a room and gave him a 1-inch wide paintbrush it would take him significantly longer than a guy with a 2-foot wide paint roller. Is the second guy more productive? He does the same thing in less time. If you pay him hourly, you pay him less. You pay less for the same output. He's not working harder. He's just using better tools.
Again, I'm totally ignorant on what exactly "productivity" means in this context. Perhaps this is a well-understood facet of the problem and it is accounted for.
From [1], "... labor productivity measures the amount of real gross domestic product (GDP) produced by an hour of labor"
[1] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/labor-productivity.asp
For example, walmart doesn't pay for employees food anymore because food stamps/EBT aka taxpayers pay for their employees food. Their labor no longer has a dollar value of food or their labor no longer pays for food, sorta. Their employees have left the legacy dollar based food marketplace. Similar things go on with medical care and no bennie jobs. If you believe in the new urbanism religion then people no longer own cars anymore, cars are certainly very expensive and basically unaffordable to the working poor, and someone else is funding the unprofitable mass transit systems... for now. Certainly people who can't afford cars are no longer part of the car economy.
The ultimate extreme of income inequality would be something like the last two unmerged corporations in the USA merge, creating trillions in merger fees as part of the GDP, which divided across many McJob hours would appear to make us all fabulously wealthy, but all the money is located somewhere else, and we all get our food from EBT and health care from medicare and housing has govt assistance leading to most people not really being involved in the legacy economy anymore.
Its not as far fetched as you'd think. There's only 100M full time jobs for 320M people. Two thirds of people live off one third of the people still working. That ratio will increase with automation.
Realistically, across an entire company or economy you're going to hire a lot more 1-inch paint brush people to paint your rooms. So instead of having a dude with a roller doing it alone, you have 2 or 3 people with brushes, maybe working in shifts to get it done.
It's obviously more efficient to use the one guy with the roller, but what if he gets sick? It used to be that Alice, Bob and Candice were all working together. Alice could cover for Bob if Bob got sick or needed to bring his kid to the dentist. Now it's all Steve, and Steve feels the pressure to GET SHIT DONE, because there's no one else to do it. He'll work while sick, his kid won't make it to the dentist.
So sure he's more productive. But back in the day, with the shift work, even if the naive calculation indicates that input effort per employee was the same, you have these soft factors that made quality of life way higher.
And that's without even getting into cost of living/inflation stuff, nevermind student debt. People are hurting out there.
Moving on, I'm a millennial that doesn't work as an engineer/developer/programmer/etc. I make less than $100,000 and I live in a major US city because that's where the jobs are.
As noted in the article, it really also comes down to wages just as--but perhaps more than--hours put in. But there's just so much more that is contributing to burnout and the inseparable turnover.
Rant incoming.
EVERY educated and skilled millennial I know like me (non-"STEM") is job hopping like crazy for that ever-so-slight raise and hope that the grass is greener on the other side. Our resumes are getting PACKED with 6-month and 1-year gigs.
Nearly every day on my LinkedIn feed I see someone leaving somewhere and getting a new job.
There are just so many things wrong with the workplace resulting in burnout and turnover today for millennials (humans):
- We're sick of being paid poorly; a dog-friendly office, free snacks, hip lighting in the lobby, standing desks, and free Friday lunch doesn't make up for poor pay
- We're often sick of overpaid-and-often-less-skilled supervisors above us and especially the even more bloated and overpaid management above them
- We're sick of positions where we have no opportunities for growth or development of skills or discovering something new
- We're sick of working with fellow millenials who give even less of a crap than us so they're just lazy and don't pull their weight until they find the next gig--and we often have to pull their weight for them
- We're sick of interviewing in-person and never hearing a word back from crap recruiting and human resources teams
- We're sick of being hired on as "freelancer" or "contract" employees so that we're denied benefits even though we dedicate 40+ hours per week to a company
The employment numbers are not fudged, they are very specific as to what they contain. Further there are 6 of them so its important to specify which is applicable to whatever you're trying to determine. In the case of underemployment U-6 is the measurement you want to look at.
If you look at the historical charts for U-6 you'll see we're below the unemployment level of 1995.
I do respond to calls and mails outside of work hours, because we are a 1.5 person IT department, and when e.g. email does not work, it is kind of a big deal. But that does not happen very often. (I used to have that colleague who literally called me every day, even when I was on vacation and sick, but he quit; the guy who replaced him is great though.)
Once a month, servers need to be updated and rebooted, and I do that, too, but I don't mind. It is kind of soothing, in its own way. ;-)
I have no problem working long hours when it is necessary. It happens, even in the best of places; but in places where it is the rule, in my experience, it's because management is too cheap to spring for a decent IT department.
And having been through a case of burnout (which, IMHO, is just a euphemism for depression), you really can't afford the amount of money it would take to make me go through that again. Or maybe you can, but you don't want to. Either way, I am happy to make a modest living working reasonable hours. My boss seems to agree, so we're cool.
(Full Disclosure: I am living and working in Germany, in case it matters.)
Actually, once in a while, having to put out a big fire is kinda stimulating. Sure it sucks that something's burning, but the challenge can be awesome.
Well, as long as it doesn't happen too often. :)
When greed for profit over product viability or employee considerations is the /only/ goal of a company, this trend will /always/ be the end result.
Profit is what drives markets, but it is employees that drive companies. Or, it is employees that ruin said companies.
Businesses beware.
Apparently this is an ongoing issue https://www2.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/demokratizatsiya%...
Capitalism rewards those who can wring out the most value for least cost, which is why unions were created. Workers on their own have basically no leverage. Honestly, the fact that tech workers can pack up and leave relatively easily (more easily than most Americans, anyway) is part of the problem.
A prior employer has such a bad reputation around the city that even the local IT school refuses to acknowledge that one of their graduates runs the IT department there, and this school is desperate to wave the "We have a successful course!" flag so they can compete with the CS course at the neighboring university.
This business hires a few graduates from the course each year, requiring 40 hours a week minimum. The standard of work required immediately would be expected of someone with 5 years experience, and there's no budget for software or hardware, but here's the kicker:
the job is actually an internship. There's no pay, but the project is a high-end one. The business is simply getting free labor, and does so regularly. The internships don't lead to a job, although they do provide a professional reference from a business with a terrible reputation.
There are no guaranteed bargaining chips.
No, because it's a tragedy of the commons. Companies who take on extra short term costs to deal with it will lose out to companies that don't; even if long-term, overall, it's a better outcome of companies do deal with it.
The existence of things like this is pretty much the reason for government.
I'd say the cost of turnover is only high for highly specialized roles; a role which software development is rarely considered to be by companies.
But with a commodity like paper clips, where you can buy 100 from anybody, that might not be the case. You get a paper clip no matter how the workers are treated. I guess that might have been what you meant by 'specialized roles,' though.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-12/how-to-av...
If you subscribe to the theory that burn out is all about resentment then it gives you a whole new set of tools to deal with it.
You seethe, and do less, and less. When a fault occurs that you could correct, you don't. You turn up 40 minutes after starting time, and walk out of meetings early. Everything becomes half-assed.
Oh, and you start to plan ahead, so you can get the boss back by dobbing him into a governmental authority.
Right now, I get paid to flirt with a lot of pretty women for much of the day.
Random reference: http://www.thegrindstone.com/2013/01/22/mentors/becoming-mar...
So if he grinds all week, he gets Tuesday night off?
lol.
[0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeena/albums/72157677196990660 [1] https://jeena.net/pods
People from India, like me, especially have a hard time saying NO to being assigned something that, either you have no time to work on or something you don't want to work on. It's a cultural thing combined with the golden leash of H1b visas. I see a lot of my colleagues from India accepting more and more work and end up having almost no life outside of it.
One of the biggest things that kept me from burning out was realizing that companies (or branches of the service) are neither good nor evil, they're just big. As a result, they'll take whatever you offer and not blink an eye.
The same people will make a big deal about staying late or having to work on a weekend once in a while. The sense of entitlement is pretty mindblowing to me.
People move up the ranks by making random, crazy one-off bets that turn out great in the short term. Nobody notices people who consistently make good long term bets.
This is compounded by the fact that people who have power these days tend to overlook failure and only consider good outcomes.
As an employee - I always loved pressure times, but then retrospectively disliked "performing under pressure" - why? When I do more work - my manager(s) did not say "you worked so hard and stayed up so late". There was a casual "Thanks". But when there was no work - it is suddenly my fault - "You don't work hard to find work and aren't staying full 8 hours". And just one such bad incident was enough to have my quarterly rating degraded for multiple other good incidents.
As a freelancer - I thought it would be easy - But it wasn't. Of course its not because of client(s) demand. When I worked hourly, every hour counts and pays. I realized I had worked as an employee - for peanuts and sometimes for free. I can now put in same effort and get paid hourly. If I am getting a predetermined price - I work even longer - because its easier to work in a project trance and reduce task switching inefficiencies. I worked long hours and I was trapped. It was just a golden-handcuff.
As an agency - The pressure is on me to grow it. Marketing, managing, hiring and sometimes coding and troubleshooting issues and much more draining is troubleshooting team issues. My ambitions are now bigger than they ever were. Even if I am on a not-so-frequent vacation, I cannot stop thinking about work - "after all its my biz now, if I don't think who will" - I keep brainwashing myself with that. Most of my leisure weekends are combined with some sort of low-pressure work.
The answer to killing burnouts is not in the law - but in the society. The society today celebrates "entrepreneurship, grilling and hard work" for material wealth. We celebrate the next Facebook entrepreneur, but we don't celebrate social entrepreneurship. Everybody wants more, more and more material stuff (myself included). We are being brainwashed to want more than what we need. If you look around there are many people working so hard just to make a decent living. They do valuable work too. As an employee I may get paid 5 times more because I create business value - while they create lesser business value and arguably add higher social value.
I'm in my mid 40s and have been looking to get into something else, but building on my existing skills. No one is even looking at me.
I'm toying with the idea of maybe going it alone. Start a small IT consultancy. Not sure what angle to look at this from. I'm not trying to put out a "woe is me" here, but rather appeal to the others in here that are toying with the idea of maybe going it alone in some capacity.
I've put out literally tons of resumes/CVs in the last couple of years and nary an interview. It's not like I don't have skills, but it seems that employers now want sysadmins to also be programmers and network engineers and coffee monkeys all at the same time.
I've also entertained the notion of getting out of IT altogether, but it's all I know. A guy I know bought a small cleaning company and he now cleans houses for the wealthy at 150-200 a house x 4 houses a day. He splits this with one other person. Not quite sure. But in my mid 40s, I don't think my body could handle a purely physical job.
not assuming your physical condition, have no idea if you work out or not, but still wondering if you think sedentary IT career has contributed to lack of physical fitness?
I like IT work, I love being in the command line building servers, instances, writing shell scripts. Quite a few of my friends have moved up into management and to a man, I think they are miserable--what with dealing with multiple personalities every day, plotting peoples' time off, ensuring on-call coverage, living in meetings. I fancy none of that.
My fear is that within a couple of years I'll be 50 and still a sysadmin. Now, having said this, I don't find the work belittling or "less than". My wife, thankfully, is in full support of whatever I undertake as long as I do my bit to provide financially to the household. She has encouraged me more than once to strike out on my own and do my own thing. Like most people, I'm terrified to fail, so I sit and do nothing, wondering why the status quo sucks.
one thing you might consider is option of becoming a consultant and having your existing company be your first client. then you'd have more flexibility to explore other options with either other clients or side projects. don't know if that's possible in your organization, but you might be surprised, it could be a win-win for both you and them.
That game's protagonist, perhaps not coincidentally, burns out on their office job and decides to go become a farmer.
People burnt out by fire drills coming from above, scared to use PTO as it was "bad optics", not receiving credit or appreciation, etc.
WORTH REMEMBERING: By nature of an employee showing up daily is to perpetually commit to the job. It is entirely up to person and their risk capacity. Saw a lot of "stuck" people who didn't like their job, but also wouldn't venture out to change that or actually tap into their true potential.
I recently wrote a post which outlines this idea in a slightly broader context (those interested can visit https://allidina.me, feedback & constructive criticism welcome).
Cheers!
When I joined in 2010, I would start at 6.45am and finish after 9pm everyday. There was a lot of stuff to do.
But once the platform improved and the workload reduced, so did the working hours. I am now doing 9 to 6 approximately, which is pretty great.
I also removed emails on my smartphone. Best move ever.
Push for it. Working less is worth it.
http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/work-less
I remember talking to Ryan Carson (the guy who put this into place) at a conference and he said that the results from doing it were overwhelmingly positive.
http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2016/09/t...
If you need the best people, you probably should care about retention.
What if, on the other hand, your managers suck so much that good and bad workers perform at the same level? In this case signaling to your people you don't give a crap about them puts you in a powerful negotiating position.
Only with the people who can't find work elsewhere. For those that are good, the ones you do want to retain, signaling that you don't give a crap about them will get them to up and leave. Possibly with no notice period.
I know a lot of ppl in USA which take too little or none of them for quite a while until they burnt out.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/sep/07/america-vacati...
owww, my head!
> Many companies don’t realize how much burnout is impacting an employee’s work-life. For instance, when we asked them about the topic, 67% said that they think their employees have a balanced life, yet about half of employees disagree.
"For instance, when we asked [the companies!]..."
Sounds like 1975.
That doesn't make me a bad employer (IMO). You can bet that we mentally (and sometimes overtly) trade off improvements to salary vs long-term incentive vs office perks vs health care vs other benefits.
I don't see any other rational way to get a stable outcome that benefits both sides. (A company that pays too much [cash or non-cash benefits] and goes out of business as a result hasn't helped anyone long-term.) We are competing every day to motivate and retain our engineers.
When you say 'let me fix the build', its always so far down on the list they refuse to deal with it. We are already so late as it is. And so everyone keeps burning hours struggling with the build, and no one is happy.
Or a planning process that has me working on a deliverable for a month only to find out that we "aren't doing it that way anymore".
Or such a complete lack of any thought testing, which means that when I finally get through implementing your feature on your horrific codebase, there isn't any sane way to get it into production.
You pay me well - I'm not taking any vacation - are you going to exploit me properly or let me fuss in the corner and eventually leave because you can't come to grips with your own structural issues.