Hacker News Reader

Comment by segmondy | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps there really is a severe workplace burnout problem in IT, but perhaps that's not the problem. There're ton of companies with burnout problems and worse turnover rates than IT.

I personally believe that the issue we are seeing today is that most people don't know how to manager stress, emotion & energy. Most people are leading a very reactive life and constantly been pulled and pushed in all directions by "life"

Stress happens when there's a large gulf between what you expect and reality. Most folks in IT are getting paid so well that they can bridge this gap better than most folks. All one has to do is freaking chillax. F material things, don't compare yourself or compete with others, learn to make do with what you have. Last but not least, do your very best at work, but detach your emotion from the outcome.

View on HN

Sounds like moralizing claptrap to be honest.

I have worked at multiple companies with the churn'n'burn mindset, and while some handle the stress better than others, the only thing that handling the stress will get you is more work and stress.

Are there people out there who are taking the world too personally? Yeah, definitely.

When I see people weeping in a bathroom, not once, but so many times I dont even notice it anymore - that's not a personal failing of will, the business is using up people like gristle in the mill.

We have one stall at work that's called "the crying box". It's got a box of extra box tissues, it's a little bigger than most (handicapped), and we keep an old Game Boy with Tetris hidden behind the soap dispenser.

Pretty much everyone disappears in their for about 30 minutes once a week. And this is the men's restroom by the way. Not sure how the ladies deal with things.

That shouldn’t be normal

Just wow!

Detaching emotion from the outcome is key. I've heard it described as professional distance or professional objectivity and it is a key component of maturity. It is more prevalent in other industries, but tech has grown so fast that we have a serious mentoring problem. There isn't enough good mentors, people with decades of experience, to go around. I grew up in part of the industry where people had been working for 3 decades before I got there; their mentality is much different than what I've found in young companies with young (as in age) staffs.

Reminds me of part of that poem by Kipling...

  "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;

  If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

  Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:"

(I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Not that long.) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---

...and which is more, you'll be a man, my son.

This poem was hung on my bedroom wall for my whole childhood. Great poem. It taught me everything about finding the patience to be understanding of other people.

This, of course, is the worst part of the poem, belying its Imperial age genesis, where men were men, and women were ignored. But, if you can ignore the wince-inducing ending, it's a very worthy poem and comes top of British polls of favourite poems almost every time.

> "of course"?

You say this as if a foregone conclusion, a statement of fact.

There's zero wrong with considering what it means to be a man. Just because I don't address what it means to be a woman doesn't make me sexist. It's not toxic to consider who you are and what values you hold dear.

Perhaps the wince that's induced in you is projection on your part? It doesn't make me wince. Nor do I apologize for it. I don't look at this poem as sexist. It addresses who I want to be as a man, no more, no less. It has no bearing on my thoughts of women. I'm not a woman, therefore my thoughts and feelings about what women should be are largely irrelevant... at least as irrelevant as to Rudyard Kipling who didn't address this topic at all in the poem.

This is what I have a problem with; one cannot even share a simple poem without it degenerating into a virtue signalling debate. Now you're forced to defend something that you had nothing to do with. Yuck.

Unfortunately, that's the world we live in at this moment where too many people need to find validation by belonging to some virtue group or another because they care what other people think. In hindsight, I'm not sure why I even cared enough to defend my position. Perhaps I'm not so different as I'd like to hope.

Letting people know your honest thoughts in a straightforward manner is important. I know plenty of folks who hold opinions along the same line as the person you replied to. They are usually various degrees of shocked when I give them civil yet straightforward pushback, and more often then one may think, when done in person, it leads to real discussion, and ideas outside of normal worldview enter both our minds. It is a good thing.

That Kipling poem is flawless. Injecting virtue signalling dilutes its beauty. They don't even go together.

This is personal for me because it is the most profound thing I've ever read. For someone to come and refer to it as sexist is demeaning.

Savor it and quit being so wound up is all I'm saying. There's a place for everything and this was ill-placed.

I think it's very possible to read the last few lines in a non-gendered light. You have to want it to be misogynistic in order to interpret it as such.

I'm not sure I agree, madam.

There is a gulf between "misogynistic" and "being part of a culture that largely ignores women". It strains credulity to claim that the words "son" and "man" don't draw males closer and push females away. Any one poem is a "micro", but it adds up across the culture.

I'll play the historical context card here. At the time the poem was written, that language perfectly evoked the image the author was going for.

Absolutely. It's incredibly innocuous.

I agree wholeheartedly. I've always loved this poem. I think a lot of the values it presents are sadly lost in today's culture - we're in a post-chivalric era alas. But these are the values I grew up with and as a result form the man I am today. This is what happens when your childhood heroes and role models come from the pages of Robin Hood, Les Miserables and The Three Musketeers.

As with all though, you either evolve or you're doomed to irrelevance. This should be a familiar concept to any programmer in the past 20 years :P

> ...sadly lost in today's culture - we're in a post-chivalric era alas. But these are the values I grew up with

Exactly this. It can be tough but you pick up your load and move valiantly forward.

No, you're alright.

‘Of course’, it does lead to the obvious absurdity that a woman who fulfills all the good qualities of the poem is a man! “The Female Man”, perhaps...

Just change the last line to "you'll be an adult, my child" or "you'll be a woman, my girl" and move on.

If you can't make a trivial fix to a simple problem, you aren't paying attention to the poem's message.

I can't understate how bad changing "you'll be a Man, my son" to "you'll be an Adult, my child" would be.

It would be like, in the pursuit of lowering your sodium intake, making bread without salt. Is it healthier? Maybe. What does it taste like now? Cardboard.

> 'Of course’, it does lead to the obvious absurdity that a woman who fulfills all the good qualities of the poem is a man!

But...it doesn't. While the fictious direct addressee is the “son” (whether literal or in the figurative sense of an protege of an elder mentor is neither explicit nor important, since the whole impact of the poem is in its general applicability not in it being specific to an addressee) of the speaker from whose POV the poem is told, the son/man pairing necessarily states that the qualities are tied to adulthood/maturity, but is just as valid if they are not inherently tied to gender as if they are.

I'll be honest, I think you'd be surprised just how many women are more of a man than most men are.

Having grown up as the child of a single mother, I don't think many men ever stop to think where we'd be without them. It's not a place I'd care to exist.

Most men are only as successful as they are because they had a loyal and dependable partner at their side to help propel them there - if by nothing more than taking care of all the shit they have no time for while they're so busy chasing their success. I wonder how many men would be half as successful without their partners supporting them and encouraging them forward.

Thank you for sharing.

What a delight. I'd never read that before. Thank you for posting it!

"Remaining outcome agnostic." i.e. I'll be fine no matter what happens and no matter your emotional state. Also called "Keeping frame." Not letting other people's shit tests affect you.

Amusingly, these are red pill concepts. I don't follow that belief system (many of it's proponents range between pathetic to downright unhinged) but I did read about it. There were some corn kernels of truth worth picking out of the turd of a viewpoint.

TRP has done a great job of appropriating decent life advice and using it to make their misogynistic message more palatable. They're not the first group, nor the last, to employ this technique.

The ideas can be found in various philosophy and culture including Stoicism and eastern philosophy. "Shit tests," though, that's just the misogyny.

Skip the turd, go read philosophy.

I probably missed all that because the one philosophy teacher I had was an obnoxious douche.

Also they need to stop working 80 hour weeks just because the manager asks. They need to say no and be willing to walk away. It's not healthy for anybody to work that much.

> Detaching emotion from the outcome is key.

Performance will drop if you detach emotion from your work, even if it is supposedly 'rational' work.

We aren't robots, and the whole brain is supposed to work together to achieve a goal, and emotions have a part in that.

I don't hold the same opinion. Being detached helps you to remain objective and consistent. Focusing on the process which creates the outcomes, gives you a means to improve in an objective way. That is why people have widespread religious debates about tools and methodology, but less so about outcomes. Certain tools and techniques work well and lead to better outcomes overall, they just can't be applied to all situations. Learning when to apply what technique to a given situation is what maturity and wisdom are. You gain that through failure or though guidance.

This isn't to say outcomes don't matter; but from a practitioners point of view, they matter only so much as they inform those involved on what works and what doesn't. In general, measure what you care about, but be careful because you WILL get more of what you measure and there are often unintended consequences (cobra effect).

edited for additional clarity

> Detaching emotion from the outcome is key.

I think this means more, "however things might go, the outcome is not taken personally", the person's selfhood and worthiness is independent of the work they do.

I also agree that integrating work with deep care, passion, and excitement is worthwhile. Imagine if more people were finding purpose and meaning in their work, how happy and energized they would be!

Yes, passion about how you go about it, not about how it ends up.

I can certainly see how that can normalize behavior where death threats are part of the job (see other comments).

Pro tip: Don't work for any place where "maturity" means becoming less human.

> 3 decades ago

IT used to be a comparatively stable environment if you were supporting servers or infrastructure.

How do you mentor someone in environments where chasing the latest fad every year is the norm?

I guess that is what "leaders" and mentors are supposed to do; lead people around or away from problems. The fact that people feel like they are "chasing the latest fad every year" is in and of itself a problem. They obviously are missing out on the financial advantage stability provides and getting poor returns on their investments. A shop like that might be better off running on all junior staff. So, in my humble opinion, either the wrong people are in charge or employees are misplaced, which again, reinforces that the wrong people are in charge.

A piece of hilariously cynical advise I got from one of those people with decades of experience was, "If you can't change your workplace, then change your workplace." Which is to say, if you don't feel empowered to make changes, then you need to think about why you are there. Is your role simply to be a cog? Hopefully, you are still improving in some way, but if not, you can probably find a better use of your time.

Regarding your question (yikes). Things are very cyclical and problems tend to be recurrent in some form. Thus, things that are new tend to be like things that have existed and some old lessons still apply. Generally, I've tended to mentor on processes, expectations, and alternative techniques.

Sadly, don’t get to school the youts in my end-job, but when I look at my peers, they would just be seen as gatekeepers.

For me, old-dog-learns-new-tricks, I spent the weekend debugging why an ansible script failed. This would be the fourth in the last half year.

Now, I appreciate the work people did, but in the end, I had to figure out why packages x, y and z and dependencies a, b and c would not play on distro N. The deeper I go, the less google is my friend.

I agree that everything is cyclical, but if I was 20-something, I’d just go to a bootcamp for mainframes. 30 years ago, my worst case was RTFM, and damn if the answers weren’t in there.

Today... your mentor is barely keeping it together.

I am so blessed to have entered when I did. But even then, the road was littered with peers who are not the same.

Abstract out a level. I've been getting some decent results recently by going over conceptual stuff, based on my CS degree, with new hires who got into development bootcamp-style.

>Perhaps there really is a severe workplace burnout problem in IT, but perhaps that's not the problem. There're ton of companies with burnout problems and worse turnover rates than IT.

This is true. IT is the second worst industry. Healthcare is worse.

The way Law has dealt with this. The top performers are made partner and are driving Ferraris and the bullshit work is dealt with by the juniors.

>I personally believe that the issue we are seeing today is that most people don't know how to manager stress, emotion & energy. Most people are leading a very reactive life and constantly been pulled and pushed in all directions by "life"

I'm certain there's truth to this.

>Stress happens when there's a large gulf between what you expect and reality. Most folks in IT are getting paid so well that they can bridge this gap better than most folks. All one has to do is freaking chillax. F material things, don't compare yourself or compete with others, learn to make do with what you have. Last but not least, do your very best at work, but detach your emotion from the outcome.

Certainly a factor, but when you're burnt out. You lose emotion. That's actually a telltale of burnout late stages, you lose all emotion.

> The way Law has dealt with this. The top performers are made partner and are driving Ferraris and the bullshit work is dealt with by the juniors.

This is not true. Partners at top firms might be driving Ferraris, but they still work insane hours doing stressful work. Making partner doesn't let you take your foot off the gas. The stress and burnout issue at Biglaw firms is probably worse than in IT.

I think it's more to do with the nature of many jobs. Whether it's open office layout, lack of job security, increased work load, lack of control, lack of meaning, I really do think office jobs have become shittier, and perhaps IT especially as it becomes more of a 'commodity'.

Blaming the resulting problems on the worker is a rather common way of justifying these kinds of abuses (either as internalized by the worker, and as a way for employers to keep feeling like they're good people).

> [..] but detach your emotion from the outcome.

Which is kind of difficult, even as a long-term professional.

As a software developer, I'm responsible for the program that I write. I'm barely responsible for design & marketing, though.

When a customer criticizes the application for being what it is, I find it very hard to detach my emotion from it. I always feel that they are criticizing me, personally. And I blame myself, partly: "How couldn't I have seen this?". But sometimes, the criticism is directed at marketing or design, which leaves me with a "I told them so!" kind of feeling - still, I'm the one who has to defend the decision that has been made in front of the customer.

Btw, they don't know that they are writing with the developer - for them, we look like well-trained support agents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com