57% of tech industry employees are suffering from job burnout | Hacker News Reader

57% of tech industry employees are suffering from job burnout

forbes.com

53 pointsrosstex27 comments

I start feeling burnout at a job if there's a lot of work, but the problems I'm solving are just not interesting. For example, if we're building on top of a legacy system with piles of technical debt and business pressure to ship features now, there's really not much time to focus on the parts of technology I enjoy: exploring new technology, experimenting with a new and better architecture, and playing around with higher-level ideas about the product and business model. At most, there's time for small-scale refactoring of a few classes and enhancing test coverage. Boring.

On top of it, if an employer prefers I get to the office by 9AM every day instead of on the schedule I function best on, I sometimes have to come to work tired or miss out on social/cultural opportunities that would get me home late.

I think software engineers can have differing motivations. Some want to organize and perfect a codebase. Others want to explore and build new tools and better abstractions. Some do want to socialize a bit; others want to be left on their own to code all day. I think burnout may be high in part because the a good many jobs are stressful without being inherently all that interesting.

I'm burned out.

I took a new job.

First month in, I took 3 days off, simply because of disorganization, stress and my body acted out on it.

I can't work in an open office space. Especially when the devs can work remote whenever.

I also think cultural fit is a big problem. I don't enjoy working for non-tech companies.

My work is simply not interesting, but if I could do it from remote, that's fine. I hate having to signal I'm busy by headphones. I dislike my cubicle location right by the break room and listening in on sales and seeing high school equivalent flirting and then the gossip. It's distracting/doesn't involve me what chad in Sales is trying to hit up the interns. Don't blame him, but I don't want to see it.

That's my experience.

Also, being extraverted in IT while everyone is an Introvert is a drain on itself. Sure, I enjoy tabletop gaming, and I used to play video games. I remember a job I took right outside college, I didn't pass 30 days probation because I refused to play on steam (didn't even know what steam was) with my co-workers after work.

I responded amicably that I was busy after work on the aim chatroom: "I'm here with you 8 hours a day, I don't want to spend another 4 with you guys after a commute home."

"Not a team player."

Total BS. Did not list that job on my resume and it was a complete waste of time.

How does this compare to workers in general? In every other field I've worked, I'd say at least half of the people are burned out but in tech employees have a lot more mobility with respect to their employer. I'm curious how strongly the large difference in the burnout survey between companies correlates to where they are located. I assume companies with large portions of their workforce located in the SV/NY/SEA metros are less burned out in general because they face less risk trying to find another employer.

The amount of click bait in this title is outstanding. Oh and I have to accept some privacy agreement to even read the article? How does this horse shit even get to the front page.

Well, it looks full of dark UX patterns (and possibly it is a GDPR breach) as you need to explicitly opt out of the tracking for ads and the option takes forever to load.

However Forbes in general has set a pretty low bar for its journalism so not much is missed in case of ditching it.

I am seeing a huge influx of people into tech just for the money, and personally I'm quite disgusted by that (although I get their motivations behind that behaviour).

Could this relatively huge burnout figure be a direct result of people entering tech just for the money despite not being passionate in it, and realizing being ears deep in code is just not for everyone (esp. every personality type)?

On the other hand, the kind of people that like to code tend to despise the modern management style of agile standup scrum master slack jira jockeying, so this clearly is a more complex issue.

I'd argue that the constant need for attention by Slack, co-workers, management, email, meetings, phone etc. is also taking its toll.

yes, the constant Slack driven "stop and go" workflow is taking a toll on me. Furthermore, Agile which is supposed to protect the worker bees from the constant noise is failing to do that. Business needs always take precedence.

No, it is pressure and culture that requires long hours. People are able to do job for money for years without being burned out, no matter what job.

I would even say that being in job for money only makes you less likely to burn out - because you are more likely to take time off and not take it personally when things break.

I think some of what the previous commentator I have seen people struggle - it was obvious that they had only gone into tech for societal / family reasons.

Unfortunately this is the only time I have seen some one genuinely incapable of doing the job.

Plenty of capable people are not obsessed geeks. They just are not, but they are still fully competent. Had tech not earned money, they would happily do something else and would be similarly capable give or take.

I think that incapable people are simply that. You can be attracted to technology, spend whole childhood playing with tech and still be dumb. Or too inattentive or too disorganized to actually finish anything larger without help. You can also be smart and love reading/talking about technology and and love those algorithmic puzzlers and still be lazy as hell to do what is actually needed - seeking position where you can hide and pontificate about theories instead of working.

A lot of those people get filtered at the college level. Dropout rates appear to be around 40-60% in US and UK. I wonder if those you meet do not have a relevant degree.

In which way eg a self taught autodidact or those who have ground their way through a degree mill be rote memorisation?

What exactly are you disgusted by?

I'm not so sure. I've been burned out because I realise that I haven't received compensation that respects my skill-set, because I wasn't seeking fulfilment through the job itself and wanted the extra money to support my efforts in discovering what fulfils me.

I've also felt burned out because I went for a total cash grab and, despite the money being amazing, the product I was working on didn't really sing to me. So it turned out that I actually was seeking some fulfilment through work, and there was a balance between the ideal mission and my ideal income.

Money might be the easy thing to blame but I'm not convinced by it. Except that someone may think they've landed an easy job and $$$$ and had no realisation that many entry-level programming jobs will pretty much feel like being a worker on a production line. If you're not happy with being a code-monkey and expected some kind of autonomy then that burnout may come along pretty quickly.

Pure speculation on my part though.

I burnt out after a few years at Google. It's a real problem. I was heavily involved in open source for a decade, but the stress of Google's bullshit (not to let any other employer in our field off the hook!) was not something that my soul could withstand, and now I hate computers and wish that the entire industry would stop existing, for the sake of everybody's mental health.

What sort of companies have you worked at before if you don't mind me asking.

If all your experience hand been in very small companies doing solo work you might have never had to develop the sort of skills needed in large companies.

hear hear. I try to map out a timeline and it seems to all come out of those years around 2007-2008.

For some reason around that point the industry, FOSS included, seemed to decide that most computer owners are idiots, that need to be put in the proverbial padded cell for the well being of both themselves and the larger computer ecosystem.

Ever since that time, there have been ever more layers of obfuscation and automation put in that is supposedly there to avoid problems, but more often than not fails to account for any usage scenario outside of the valley mainstream. And thus result in all kinds of added complications that needs to be disabled, bypassed, and monitored as some future patch may well bring them roaring back to life.

> Could this relatively huge burnout figure be a direct result of people entering tech just for the money

I think it's the opposite. People go into tech with high expectations of excitement, and find themselves fighting the framework-of-the-day (chosen by someone else for irrational reasons), coding CRUD, fixing bugs in legacy code, etc., topped off with agile, scrum master slack jira jockeying etc. Burnout IMO is a result of combination of hard work and the sense of absurdity.

> sense of absurdity.

nailed it

What, exactly, is disgusting about being motivated by money? With very few exceptions this entire industry is built on being motivated by money. Your objection to it seems misplaced.

There are lots of kinds of people who like to code; not all despise management of any sort.

> Some companies had more burnout than others in the survey. Credit Karma had the highest rate, with over 70% of employees saying they were burnt out. Netflix was the lowest at around 39%.

Interesting. I've heard that Netflix is a very high stress place, I would have imagined more burnout... although maybe those people just end up leaving? I could see having a revolving door of people coming and going with a low tenure having a low burnout number just because many people don't stay long enough to burn out or once they're burned out?

One thing about tech is at least you get paid well, so that if you need to take some time off between jobs that is more possible than with many other careers.

Last I read Netflix doesn't hire juniors, could that be the reason?

Could be, I wonder if that is ever accounted for in these burnout studies... I always felt like the senior people are the ones burning out, because they are generally the ones that have to take on random firefighting activities and operations.

Although on future reflection, it seems like the junior ones are also taken advantage of frequently with long hours and "perks."

This is interesting. I've always found programming to be fairly easy. Not only do I do it at work, but I continue on side projects at home.

Its extremely rare that i'll get stressed from doing it and if that happens, normally an hour break (or less) will fix it.

I used to be exactly the same way. 25 years later and I’ve had my fill. Eventually, you’ve seen it all a few times. The packaging changes but processing information and getting it from here to there can only be done in so many ways with 1’s and 0’s.

The incentives are screwed.

Companies chew up young energetic employees and spit them out when they get used up and burned out.

With their short term and selfish thinking the burned out employee is someone else's problem.

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