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.
* 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.