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Comment by _prototype_ | Hacker News Reader

I quit my software engineering job last May because of extreme burnout. I took 5 months off and just started working again and feel really good. Something is seriously wrong in this industry

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The fact that you can quit your job and not starve to death is a sign that something is seriously right about the software industry. Poor peasants living hand-to-mouth don’t have the luxury of burnout or sabbaticals. They work every day or their family dies.

Being more generous, I think a work patten more like a tour of duty in war may be desirable to encourage. Work hard in a high stress job for a period of time at the metaphorical frontline and then rest and recuperate.

"Listen kid, just be glad you aren't a peasant."

Having worked as a farmworker in the past every day I am thankful that I have a cushy office job. I live better than the kings of 200 years ago lived let alone my poor ancestors.

Exactly. Spend a summer nailing shingles to roofs in 100F weather all day, and then complain to me about how awful an open office is (with air conditioning and a comfortable chair to sit on). I’m grateful every day that my old man pressured me to get a technology education so I didn’t have to destroy my body daily doing construction like he did.

>Exactly. Spend a summer nailing shingles to roofs in 100F weather all day, and then complain to me about how awful an open office is

Both can be awful.

Just because physical labour is physically tiring, it does not follow that mental labour might not be even more stressful.

I worked farm labour in my 20s and those were some of the best jobs I ever had.

Every meal was a banquet and I slept like a log. Potatoes tasted so good, it was as if I was eating ambrosia.

I also believe that the body and the mind need to be worked together.

The disembodied work typically done in offices is unbalanced, and can be very taxing.

Kings 200 years ago didn't have to spend most of their lives working.

Are you sure about that? From the but of history I know, monarchs had extremely busy schedules and high demands on their "free" time, and I don't expect that all of that was particularly fun.

Especially having to go around "curing" scrofula by the laying on of hands [0].

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_touch

statecraft is a job. It's a popular fiction that historical monarchs spent all their time indulging their hedonistic impulses, but it is fictional.

It is healthy to have a proportional sense of gratefulness for the good things you have. Even if someone else has more.

When you live an easier life than 99% of humans, that's worth being grateful for.

Interestingly given the context of this thread, I think the attitude of always needing to be angry, always focusing on negatives, always demanding more, always blaming others and obsessing over grand injustices can itself tip some people into mental illness.

It's a memeplex thing, though. Constant rage at injustice is a great way for a memeplex to turn people into highly-motivated ideological soldiers. It's a technique used by demagogues from Stalin to Hitler to Castro and Kim, and which you see today as well. But the need to always emphasize that rage and injustice and resentment can definitely push some people over the edge. Gratefulness is a good antidote, in proportion with a balanced and contextualized understanding of the problems of the world.

I'd be more sympathetic to this view if injustice wasn't so glaringly common, and often the things you're grateful for only started to exist because of said injustice being fixed, so it seems backwards to complain about people bringing it to light.

I dunno. I'm grateful for simple things like sunlight and a good sandwich. None of these are related to "injustice". I even stopped intentionally following the news because the whole concept of worrying about injustice seems so draining and almost pointless.

Absolutely, and social media only amplifies these “oppression Olympics”.

> When you live an easier life than 99% of humans, that's worth being grateful for.

There is nothing "easier" in feeling unhappy or angry. Mental illness is widespread across billionaires despite their wealth. It's also well known that mental illness is less common in traditional, less developed societies.

> ... I think the attitude of always needing to be angry ... can itself tip some people into mental illness.

No. People cannot artificially create mental illness in themselves by simply thinking "negatively". There is no simple self-destruct button in our mind: people need to go through (untreated) trauma, pressure, abuse from external sources or diseases or serious genetic conditions.

People can abuse and mistreat themselves as much as they can be abused and mistreated by others. Negative self-talk, for example, can cause real issues. So can suppressing emotions.

There's a big difference between "be glad you aren't a peasant" and "be glad you have the luxury of not working for 5 months". One of those things is a luxury 99%+ (WAG) of folks in the US cannot afford.

Or, you know, build an industry that doesn't burn through people...

Businesses don’t generally burn through people for fun, it is a function of the competitive nature of industry that results in pushing people to their limits (and sometimes beyond).

You are more than welcome to start your own business with a more relaxed environment, but don’t be surprised when a company with a lower work/life balance puts you out of business.

You're outlining the problem but presenting it like an inevitability.

That's why we're in this mess. We see these things as inevitabilities.

You know what that means? We don't control them. So we're going to create a bad situation for ourselves because businesses cannot pull out of a basic game theoretical problem? You think this is OK and not worth looking at? What is even your endgame here?

You are attributing to me approval when all I am doing is describing the problem.

I don't have a good solution given the current economic system.

> You are more than welcome to start your own business with a more relaxed environment, but don’t be surprised when a company with a lower work/life balance puts you out of business.

This quote from your earlier comment comes after you finish "describing the problem".

Taken together, the rhetorical effect is an expression of fatalism. Your formulation accepts the currently destructive state of affairs. It's disingenuous to say "all I am doing is describing the system".

You're describing the system and then subtly suggesting any attempt to improve matters is folly.

EDIT: Fix number agreement in first sentence.

I am not accepting the current state of affairs, I just don’t have a good solution to change it. Neither does the GP, nor anyone else here.

It wasn't always like this, so it doesn't always need to be like this. It's just like this now. Assuming it can never be changed or saying that someone "is free to solve it" isn't super helpful. People can recognise things are problems without having the immediate capacity to alter reality to suit the solution.

Germany somehow manages to be an economic powerhouse while still having strong employee rights and generous work-life balance as the norm.

Yes, overall work-life balance is certainly better than in other places, but mental health is still an issue here. 13 % of all days absent due to illness are attributed to mental health problems[0]. Especially in jobs, where you have lots of responsibility and pressure for very little material reward -- nurses, geriatric workers, teachers.

[0]: https://www.deutsche-depressionshilfe.de/depression-infos-un...

I would say at least people feel free to take time off for mental health reasons. I worked in the US, and I think people don’t think of stress and mental health as legitimate reasons to miss work. They still take time off for those reasons, but much later when they start to manifest themselves in more physical ways.

This is a classic "Appeal to worse problems" logical fallacy. Because other situations could be worse then your problem is irrelevant. It goes all the way back to your parents telling you that your problems are irrelevant because there are starving children in Africa.

Here's a wiki on it. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as

It's one of the purest most common logical fallacies used.

It would be if I was actual using the “appeal to worse” fallacy. I didn’t say that the OP’s problems were irrelevant, only pointed out that the software industry is doing something right (high pay for one) if it allows people to quit because they feel burnt out.

You absolutely did if you look at your comment. But whatever helps you sleep at night sir.

You realise war generally leaves soldiers a wreck of a human right? You probably need to deconstruct that fantasy a bit.

> Poor peasants living hand-to-mouth don’t have the luxury of burnout or sabbaticals. They work every day or their family dies.

There is plenty of historical evidence that shows otherwise.

In most subsistence societies people, including farmers, worked far less than now and with less pressure, lived in a more social environment and had a lot of holidays (especially in the middle ages).

Are you seriously arguing that the average peasant had the luxury to not work because they were feeling burnt out?

Not that it matters too much, but a holiday in the Middle Ages didn't mean the peasants didn't work, it just meant that they didn't eat meat. Otherwise it was work sun-up to sun-down 6 days a week for barely enough food to keep your family alive - that is provided there was not a harvest failure two years in a row.

We sit at a desk writing code. Air conditioning, comfortable chairs, often free snacks and high pay. I realize burnout is real, but until you’ve worked as a refinery worker, on a road crew or a police officer, it’s hard to say that something is wrong with “this” industry. Every single profession has burnout. Every single profession has stress. Most people should be so lucky to have the opportunity to get burned out in one of the highest paying professions. If our industry has a problem, it’s that its practitioners don’t really know what actual suffering on the job is all about. The luxury of taking 5 months off is something unheard of for most typical middle or working class people.

Not to diminish burnout, but claiming that the industry has a problem is just incorrect. Some employers might have a problem — but employers in all industries have problems. The best industry in the world has shitty employers and the worst industry in the world has great employers.

Any normal working class person would laugh at this. It’s like first class travelers complaining about quality of the champagne at the airport lounge. We are immensely lucky to get to do this job. I get close to burnout from time to time, but then I remember what it was like before I got into this industry when I got evicted and slept in my car while DJing at dirty strip clubs just to be able to afford food. I would have given anything for the chance to burnout sitting in an Aeron working with all this incredible technology.

Perspective.

Telling yourself that you have it better than 99% of the world is only a temporary and ineffective remedy to career dissatisfaction. The answer is introspection, finding out what is missing, and the life-long pursuit of self-actualization and eventually transcendence.

You’re absolutely right and you’re getting silently down-voted by cowards who find it uncomfortable to take an honest look at their lives and realize how great they have it compared to 99% of the rest of the labor force in the world.

I’ve done manual labor and dead-end fast food service work, and I thank my lucky stars every day that I currently find myself gainfully employed in a comfortable office.

Question: have you experienced burnout?

From what I've seen, people have a limited... chain...? Regardless of how "good" their situation is. Some people shoot for "luxury" jobs because they know they won't survive otherwise. It doesn't really make their situation "good", and I see absolutely nothing gained from "it could be worse".

Do we all want to be like refinery workers?

If a person burnt out at an office job ends up committing suicide, while the refiner worker is just mad at life, it raises questions.

So what do you think about Doctors, whose pay is even higher than software, but whose discontent is even more widespread?

Doctors really are committing suicide, but it’s still better than landscaping, so do you just laugh?

You are comparing high paid jobs to minimum salary jobs. Apples and oranges. There are other careers out there that pay similarly without any of the issues our industry face. There's nothing special or "lucky" about STEM. You can be lucky if you are someone who is not affected by those issues, but that's all the luck there is to it.

I've worked in other industries, especially borderline minimum wage jobs. I've worked just about everywhere at a fast food restaurant, as a clerk for a retail store, unloading freight for another retail store, inspecting, sorting, and transporting parts for a factory, as a server for a restaurant, and stuffing envelopes/packing boxes for a distribution company, as a guy who had about seven reponsibilities at once for a video game publisher (video editor, qa overseer, build tester, pitch evaluator, producer, designer, asset creator) and watch in desperation as our games failed to find an audience to the point where the company eventually closed down.

I've had to deal with vindictive bosses, black fridays, rush hours, sweltering buildings, running all over the factories and buildings, jerk customers, bad press, and all sorts of other crap I've long since forgotten about.

But I've never had anywhere near as much stress in any of those as I have as I have as a software engineer. When you have 10+ different people hounding you to do different things, have tasks in 6 different programs this iteration while having to juggle tasks by other developers, when an architect thought something would take 8 hours but neglected to take into account five different complicating factors and it ends up taking you a full week with increased pressure placed on you to get the damn thing working, when there's a totally esoteric error that you and everyone else in the company or on the internet has no idea how to identify, let alone fix, but you're expected to figure it out anyway. Or figuring out how to get 12+ different technologies (frameworks/languages/platforms) to play nice together all at once, etc.

I'm sure there are other industries that have similar issues, but, software engineering is a more unique than most, because you can work around the fuzziness of people in just about every other industry. With computers if you don't get the incantation exactly right, the computer will not work with you, period. It just won't work, until you eventually find a way that it does.

I still enjoy the logic puzzle to a certain extent, but the shine of the industry is starting to go away and I'm tired of being stressed out all the time, to the point where I pretty much have to take three months off in between jobs just to feel sane again. I've been working my current job for the past three years and I'm pretty much fried. Every day I have to fight the urge to quit, remind myself I can't afford to do that right now.

While programmers definitely experience burnout, the causes described in the article (fear of losing your job etc) are probably not characteristic for our industry.

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