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Comment by sauronlord | Hacker News Reader

The solution to burnout: - get paid way more

Many people will happily work 14 hour days for a 1 million/year Salary. I promise you they will not burnout.

But the crux of it is that employers must optimize burnout with labour expense.

Therefore they focus on the employee's behaviour to identify burnout and give them "just enough" to be teetering below the burnout phase (on-site massages, catered lunches, bullshit games, and extra vacation)

Other solution is to have a management/executive team that is proactive and not reactive.

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This is probably the worst point of view I've ever seen on the topic of burnout. Let's get one thing out there: Money doesn't make people motivated or happy. It's a condition of employment. Either employees gets enough money, or they don't. It is very, very binary.

Throwing money at an employee acts as a temporary cushion, a bandaid. A bonus will be forgotten within days or weeks, a raise within a month or two. This is not to say that employees never deserve raises. Employees who take on more responsibilities, or have acquired more experience definitely deserve a higher pay.

Motivation is the only true variable that managers can influence on, and the only one that truly matters. Motivation is like a sea/ocean upon which the employee sails, not unlike a boat. The obstacles, and blockers that employees face are like rocks under the water level (to keep with the metaphor, because the keel would strike the rocks). As a manager, you have two options. Take a pickaxe and try to move those boulders/rocks out of the employee's way, or add more water.

In this metaphor, the boulders are typically personal blockers ("I'm a C++ dev, I don't want to work on that Node piece of shit", "I start at 7, so I don't see why I would have to join a meeting at 4PM", "I worked until 3AM yesterday, which is why I wasn't there at the team meeting at 11AM", etc). You can try to remove the boulders, but that's closer to psychotherapy that takes 15 years, which is usually out of the realm of possibilities for a manager and a company. What a manager can do, however, is help the employee feel more motivated.

This is where extra holidays in lieu, making people feel part of a team, and feel ownership/responsibility for the team, and other "soft" things plays its part. Yes, you can try to tell an employee that you'll give him an extra $200 if they stay late and fix a bug, but that just shows that motivation is coming from the wrong place.

Monitoring how much motivation an employee has is the #1 job of a good manager. People who burn out are usually badly managed, or operate in a toxic environment. A good manager can't (always) fix a bad environment. He can improve certain aspects of it, though.

Those studies of money being binary and motivation are bullshit.

Ask how many people earning 1 million dollars a year (doctors, etc) feel about working 80 hour weeks.

You cannot make people feel ownership.

It's like me saying I can motivate someone to feel the "ownership" of my house (even though they are not on title).

Ownership is you know, actually OWNING something.(Shares, body/health, vision)

If your team does not feel ownership then is it because they do not actualy even own $1 worth of shares in the company project.

To expand on this:

You can underline exceptional performance from an employee (or preferably, a whole team/group of employees) by giving them a bonus, or buying them a nice dinner or whatever. But this has to be a bonus: if the employees ask for it, or if it was a promise (carrot) before the work was done, the point is moot, and the psychological effect of the reward will be, too.

If your team pulls through a very difficult challenge, by sacrificing their own time (working a whole weekend, for example), without anyone in the hierarchy asking so, and it was done to address a business blocker, then that definitely demands compensation. The most obvious compensation would be to give them the time they gave to the company with a bonus 50 or 100%. Add money if you feel it is deserved and think the employees would enjoy it.

Just remember that the company can never use this in negotiations ("You're getting a 3% raise instead of 5% because you got 10k in bonuses last year"). It is proper compensation for work done. Nothing more.

Now, back to the matter of motivation: your team decided to do the work. They are motivated. But having to do this will drain that motivation. It is your job as a company to make sure these situations don't occur again. One way to re-motivate people is to show them the steps you are taking to make sure they never have to sacrifice another weekend. Make sure they understand and agree with the steps. They made efforts, now it's the company's turn to do so as well.

Startups often burn people out because they assume that employees are motivated. But being a paper millionaire only buys so much motivation. Engineers (and others, but I don't manage profiles other than engineers) are under tremendous pressure to deliver. Their motivation disappears because they aren't privy to the founders' vision, or don't understand how their work affects the bottom line.

The biggest indicator of people lacking motivation is asking for more means/resources. When people say "we need to hire more," or "we need more hardware," or "we need a better office;" those should be red flags that there is a problem with motivation. That's not to say your office doesn't really stink, or that their laptops are melting during compiles, though. Asking for resources as a bandaid to productivity, I guess, would be a better indicator of low performance ("I'm slow at writing this feature because I only have 4 cores on my computer").

To all the people disagreeing with you, I totally believe that getting paid a lot more works for some people (like me).

The idea behind a burnout is simple, when you feel that your work isn't worth much, you feel burned out. To most people there is an active denial of the fact that they do not want to a certain job for $100k, but are doing it because they have a family to take care of and an old person to take care of after retirement.

They get frustrated because they don't have the appreciation of their job as a software developer, a project manager, an accountant, a baseball player or whatever, as 'valuable work'.

This means that if they were getting paid more for the same job they don't value, then it won't really make them feel better (except if that higher pay allows them to do less work in the same time).

On the other hand, for someone like me, I like what I do as a developer, but sometimes I'm stuck in a job which is awful by the nature of the company I work in, or in other cases just underpaid (both have happened to me, came really close to getting burned out).

I feel like I would probably burn out. Can you pay me half as much for half the work?

Burnout is a psychological state of being over worked and underpaid/appreciated.

Decrease chance of burnout by exponentially increasing pay.

Another way to avoid burnout is having multiple income streams and therefore being able to tell anyone to shove it on a moments notice.

Take note everyone, this is why you want multiple income streams and is a worthy goal.

I used to burn out for 120k/year pay when required to work 70 hour weeks.

Now I work 80+ hour weeks and get paid almost triple. In control of my destiny and can drop any one client/customer/employer within 2 seconds if they look at me the wrong way.

Now, the alternative view.

I despise 10 hour days. I can't have a life outside of work if I work such days, 5 days a week. Forget 80 hour workweeks: I'd never take the job. When do I have time to do artwork, spend with my family, or explore the place I live? Simple answer, I don't.

Heck, I hated not being able to take 2 weeks off in one chunk, and felt lucky I got that much time.

If you really enjoy the job you are doing, feel appreciated and are decently good at it - it might not be so bad. Unfortunately, I have never found this at a job. At the end of the day, I'm still working for a relative pittance and hate that I have to work. Fuck the folks that want to take my entire life away from me.

You would work 1-2 years and retire for rest of your life.

Then you can focus on your art and passions.

If such a place actually pays that much, sure - but at that point, I'm making well over 6 figures. Most jobs in Indiana were paying less than 100k and still requiring 60-80 hour workweeks.

The odds might be better than the lottery, but they are still pretty astronomical.

The odds of winning the lottery are better than improving yourself and taking control of the value you provide to people?

Improving yourself is a different thing: That's free, and I can use my free time to do that. And I do.

The value I provide people? That's a weird thing to look at. I mean, I don't generally cause people issues at a workplace and I make sure I do whatever I am doing for work to the best of my ability. I like to make others' jobs easier as well when possible. That's just standard operating procedure.

But lets face it: Most jobs pay average pay for their field. Most average pay isn't exactly "get rich" pay. The odds of getting really high pay - the sorts that would make me retire early - are even fewer, especially the sort that don't expect years of 60-80 hour workweeks to get to that point. These are the jobs that have astronomical odds to land, especially if you are in your late 30's now. Not quite lotto odds, but still bad enough not to bet your life on.

Most times, it just doesn't seem worth it.

And to tell you the truth, if this were something I wanted, I'd not have moved to Norway. I'm not a skilled worker, and though I've taken a couple of years of language courses, my options are limited. On the other hand, I enjoy the hell out of my life - which is all I really wanted anyway.

Value I provide people? Psh. I can volunteer to spend time with elderly folks that want company. Still fufilling without having to give up my entire life.

You took the whole "value provided" into a strange direction.

Money is a number of things. It is also captured reciprocal altruism, the "value" you provide is often times compensated with money. (Not always)

"Landing a job"

That language makes it seem like you fall into, stumble across, or get "lucky" to work for another man or woman (ie: a JOB)

That language and thinking is precisely what is holding people back from delivering on their life's work and maximizing the value provided to society.

"Giving up my entire life"

Did Steve Jobs, Ghandi, Mandela, Lincoln "give up their lives"?

This is all perspective.

A man with a Mission will not burn out. Better yet, a man with a Mission, autonomy and serious income does not burn out.

These folks aren't the same. I can't comment on whether or not Lincoln worked too much as I know little about his working habits compared to the standard of the times. Mandela and ghandi are both not quite your normal workers - and honestly outliers. Most folks who helped free slaves are forgotten, after all. As are most people, regardless of what they did with their life. This isn't cynical, just reflective of reality.

Jobs is the closest to what folks would model themselves after. And sure, he was successful and world-changing. But most folks aren't: Again, he's an anomaly. It isn't that that sort of path is impossible, but realistically speaking, most of us won't get there. And I do think he probably worked too much, as do most CEO's. I hope he was happy, but I've never found such a thing to be so.

"That language makes it seem like you fall into, stumble across, or get "lucky" to work for another man or woman (ie: a JOB)"

The truth is, this sort of job is what most people have. It isn't that folks don't put in work or try. It is that a lot of "making it" depends on things outside of your control, such as where you were born, the government where you live, how rich your parents were, the quality of school you went to, whether or not folks like you, health, timing and other such things I'm sure I forgot. It isn't that you can't do things, but realistically not everyone can get to where any of the folks you mentioned were. Most of us are average, working average jobs for some average manager.

This isn't even a bad thing: I've enjoyed most jobs I have had. I liked working at a school kitchen. I liked working at a pharmacy, and find retail to be fun as much as frustrating. I liked being a CNA at a nursing home - especially that (and too bad the pay is usually low and you feel overworked at 40 hours/week). These things don't have paths to riches or to anything on the scale of the people you mentioned. Fufilling or not, I'd still not work any of these for 60-80 hours a week. It is still work.

Of course, it might just be that I chase different sorts of dreams, and have never really found a field that both has actual opportunity for decent money and I like enough to do that much per week. Even then I would refuse: My favorite thing is producing artwork, but doing so for 50-80 hours a week puts me at risk of not being able to use my dominant hand well later in life, as artwork is really hard on the hand, wrist, and elbow joints. I already am reaping that "reward" with mild tennis elbow that occasionally flares up, and I'm only in my late 30's. Oops :)

I think you're operating under a false assumption that everyone in this discussion gains their sense of being appreciated directly from their income.

I strongly disagree with this viewpoint - you can throw as much money as you want at someone, and it might stop them complaining for a bit, but it's not fixing the problem. You can't stop arterial bleeding by wrapping more bandages around the wound.

It will fix the problem.

Burnout is the state of being overworked/underpaid and lacking autonomy agency (because one made bad life choices to support a family, debts, limited mobility).

Most people feel like they are poor little artifacts in a cruel machine or world. That attitude, coupled with low pay and a lacking personal Mission is the reason for burnout.

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