> 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!
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.
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.