The key to loving your job in the age of burnout

> It seems to me that a lot of contemporary burnout stems from the extremely abstract nature of the modern economy

I think doing things in the real world that you believe to be useful can provide meaning (e.g., baker making bread that that you see people enjoy, or a doctor checking a kid and being thanked by parents). However, to me, it is orthogonal to working with physical objects. I am perfectly happy working with text on screen that produces plots and formulas as long as I convince myself that those could be useful for something I consider important.

The big problem I believe is the fact that many people know that what their work will be used for is useless to a society (or even mildly harmful). I suspect that people working on targeting ads to sell unneeded junk, hooking kids on time-wasting apps or winning in a zero-sum game of HFT know deep inside that their work is a waste at best.

This can be rationalized away for a while, but not being able to answer "what am I doing this for?" can eat one up long term. My 2c.

> the end product of a week's or month's work is essentially a bunch of text on a screen

For me as a developer this isn't so much of a problem. I take pride in my code up to a point (happy to admit I'm a bog-standard dev) but very much take pride in my documentation, always striving to make it as clear and useful as possible. I often come back to instructions I've written in years past and feel proud of the effort I made.

But... what really drains all of the fun out of my work is the software I have to use - I truly believe it's some of the worst quality commercial software money can buy, and it never gets better, with the company apparently firmly set on its 'let the users act as your QA department' philosophy and no improvement in sight.

If anyone needs a geo-hacker with C#, Python, PostgreSQL and good presentation/documentation skills I'm open to offers!

I can't find the name of it, but I read a book a while back that discussed just this - the author had been an extremely successful intellectual, but quit to run a motorcycle repair shop. He found that the "big" work was absolutely unrewarding due to no real tangible feedback - he never knew if he was doing well, and had no payoff, but repairing a motorcycle is something that is extremely tangible and rewarding in that you can see the results of your effort.

Edit: Found it.

https://www.amazon.ca/Shop-Class-Soulcraft-Inquiry-Value/dp/...

I see someone already mentioned his name (Matthew Crawford) below.

"burnout stems from the extremely abstract nature of the modern economy."

That is incorrect. According to research, burnout steams not from the work, but from the pressure to complete the work, and the consequences of not completing the work.

Almost every job in the private sector is "At-will" employment. Meaning you can be fired for any work related reason. Not finishing an assignment? Poor performance? etc, you are at risk of being fired.

That pressure to constantly perform under pressure is what causes burnout. You baking is not a pressure packed job, you are following a simple procedure that requires little to no thinking at all.

If you were threatened or worked "under the gun"at the bakery, I gurantee you would burnout.

My friend dropped out of (traditional) college due to low grades and became a welder. Not only does he make an upper middle class salary, he said the best part is getting to build stuff and have it be used for important things.

I think most of the burn out comes from the 80-20 principle, where 20% of your staff deliver 80% of the output. I know where I work, if you work late and look around it is always the same handful of people who are working back. Usually its because they know so much about the organisation that people come to them to solve problems, and then they have to work late to do there own work.

I feel like if you are part of that 20% it can get pretty tiring, particularly if your personal life is also under pressure at the same time. (i.e. its hard to have quality relationships when you have to constantly work late).

I'm not sure if this feeling is universal, but I have a hunch that it kind of is. In terms of productivity, and organisational impact not everyone is equal, and those that are disproportionate in impact are put under increased pressure and stress during these times of efficiency and cost cutting.

Yeah, I have had similar experiences. Besides just "making physical objects", there's also the camaraderie of working with others directly. Working directly with other people I was laughing, talking, listening all day and those were really fulfilling relationships.

You have a point there. I am mechanical engineer now doing software and I really miss seeing and touching(!) the final product. When I did commercial software at least you saw something on the screen quickly. Now I am in medical devices and I almost never get to witness or experience the results of my work. When you are done with something it still takes often years to get it to market. Add to that all the reporting requirements and the actual work is totally detached from the product.

I definitely miss direct contact with the results of my work.

I noted the same things when I was going through burnout. I also noted that no one in my life used or even really knew about what I did. It felt like telling people I had a Canadian girlfriend. People are pretty sure I really do have a job but who knows what it is.

So not only is the physical aspect of the job missing, the produced artifacts of your labours don't exist in your community either. It is like leaving your community for 8+ hours a day.

Lastly, it is demonstrably ephemeral. Websites, apps, documents, spreadsheets, reports. It's all obsolete so fast that it can feel pointless having put so much effort in the first time.

I love software and I love working in competent teams and making cool stuff. But I think it needs to be balanced with doing real world things within your community.

Matthew Crawford has done some nice work addressing these ideas.

https://www.matthewbcrawford.com/new-page-1-1-2

This really connects for me. I'm a library maintainer, and it's very satisfying to me to know that my team's work leads to visible, measurable improvements in the apps that our users make, even if it's not tangible objects; it's still a bit of a "text on a screen" outcome, but at least I get to write changelings and release notes that detail what we accomplished and why it made things better (usually).

I also suspect this is why so many people I know in the industry (myself included) have hard-physical-object hobbies like baking, brewing, cycling, robotics... we need to fulfill a drive to create.

I fully get this, my software is used by my team directly (I'm a bioinformatician surrounded by biologists) and I see them be impressed when I whip out relevant data in the blink of an eye. It's my mayor motivator at work.

This is what Marx calls "alienation from the product of your labor".

I was the exact opposite. 6-7 years of restaurant work for 40 hours a week with a bachelors degree mixed in cause terrible burnout for me. Once I got my office job I had instant relief. I could feel myself getting burnt out again due to over work (and very underpaid). Switched jobs and found a great team and company!

Agreed! I pointed this out to my boss once, when I was working at a healthcare-related startup. I wrote software, and I didn't have much confidence that it caused any positive effect. He explained that somebody would see the result of my software, and take an action, which would influence someone else, and so on down the line, and eventually, someone's health would have an improved result. It was all about The System, and I shouldn't be discouraged because that's just how all modern life is. You contribute to your one piece of The System and you'll probably never see the effects yourself.

I'm glad I got out of that world, and back into the physical world. As you say, the pay/hours/etc are worse but there are some things you just can't put a price on.

This is a bit different in embedded systems. Here is this physical object, and today it can do something that it couldn't do yesterday, because I made it do that. For software, it has a lot of physicality...

I think Marx talks about this. The problem in his view was mostly the assembly line disassociating your work from the end product. He valued individual tradesmen perfecting a craft and moving any repetitive work to machines.

But I don't think it's quite right. Take a look at the joy in mission control when they achieve their goal. No one is responsible for physically making any part of that rover, shuttle, etc. but the joy of accomplishment is still real.

I'd imagine the joy of launching a highly successful digital product is just as real.

I think the disassociating comes from not feeling like you played a part in the product. I think authority over a product's idea/vision is just as satisfying as authority over it's physical shape.

> Compare this to the average office job. For the most part, the end product of a week's or month's work is essentially a bunch of text on a screen.. The physicality of the work has evaporated entirely.

The end product is not just a bunch of digitized string characters, but human affect after reading.

Well, Karl Marx devised this problem in the Industrial Revolution with his Alienation concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

I actually have done a fair bit of bakery in my life so I know what you mean, but I get the same satisfaction from writing programs. I'm not sure if all "office workers" get this, though.

yep, and trying to stay relevant in the web development world is exhausting.

I learned SQL once, and it's carried me throughout my career. Every 2-3 years, the ideal JS developer checklist completely changes, and now I need to learn how to bundle and deploy JS apps yet again.

It gets less and less fun re-learning how to do the same thing over and over again. I used to love learning all about the latest greatest tools in the web world; but I just don't have that kind of energy anymore. It drives me crazy to have to go through the process of learning gulp/webpack/rollup/whatever new JS tool comes out in 2019/2020.

> Who's hiring a 49 year old social media ambassador?

I think the demand for this is actually going to be huge in the future. There are getting to be a lot of older people who grew up with computers, and have a massive amount of purchasing power. A twentysomething is probably not going to be the right person to reach them.

Whenever I get too worked up about how decisions are made in my group, I like to think of all the IT departments there are in my city, in the world even.

I don't care about what decisions are being made in those places, so I shouldn't get too worked up about decisions being made where I work either.

If, after giving my recommendations, and making my arguments, people still decide to do risky dumb things with infrastructure, I don't let it bother me anymore.

Great advice. I would only add to that, that not only can your "job make you dislike what you do", but also the environment you do your job in.

Yes - some parts of any job suck. Some parts have to be dealt with and one needs to have at least some kind of tolerance for frustration.

But there is a threshold. If the job, the people, the culture around you do not show that they respect and value you, but only the bottom line they can grind you down for: Get out.

That's fantastic advice. I think it's a case of caring about the right things, and learning when to let go/not take things personally.

On a slight tangent, I've always found that hobbies - and treating programming as one of them - always helps me disassociate from thinking about my own achievements as only being work-related. I've tried so many things, just because they interested me, and got fairly good at some of them. Sometimes it might be a craft, another time it might be learning a new programming language, or a piece of software I don't know well enough.

The ones I don't enjoy so much fall by the wayside (life drawing, golang, philosophy, whittling, many more), but some chance subjects have directly led to better jobs (ruby, elixir), some have made me a better programmer, and anything else I can at least say has made me a more rounded and knowledgable person, and hopefully more employable because of it.

Good stuff. The one thing that has made me happier as I age is treating a job as just an income source. I design board games as a hobby and can take pride in that work without all of the nonsense of pointless meetings and political games.

Totally agree. I always say that whatever you do as a job, you should capitalize on youself.

Figure out what is your vision on the purpose of your job and how it integrates with the perspective of your own professional goals. Then push it as much as you can, thereby building up experience on the path to these goals. If you find an dead end, seek antoher job.

Many times have I confronted my own vision against that of (or lack therof) my hierarchy, and the undertaking of proving my point earned me a great deal of experience, regardless of the outcome (which, over time, has been largely positive, i.e. my vision proven right).

Yes, I should leave this job and probably this profession. But I don't know what I could do instead that would provide the same immediate benefits, pay, and perks that this job does. So, I'm rolling along and spending all my other time with my family and working on writing.

A big part of this is just how you see the world, and perhaps how well you understand yourself. Not sure which term to use: attitude, personality, outlook, frame of mind, perspective, etc.

I have definitely had times in my career when I dreaded going to work. Like I could feel an actual physical weight on my shoulders as I drove up to the office.

In my current season in life, I can see a lot more what is good and what is bad, what I'm willing to put up with and what I'm not, what I'm good at and what I'm not, what is actually a big deal versus what is just a big deal in my mind, and so on.

That perspective will keep me more happy in any job, even ones that other people may dislike. But it also draws me to work that I know will keep me happy because I understand what contentment is in a way I didn't understand 15-20 years ago.

If I won the lottery tomorrow, would I stay in my current job? Probably not. But that doesn't mean I'm unhappy in the job -- as ways to earn money go, this one is pretty nice. But it was a circuitous path to get here, and I think the biggest lie we can perpetrate on young folks is that there is a single passion they should pursue to find their calling. Almost no one gets it right on their first try.

I love technology, and i love building things. But i have to admit that i'm lucky that something i enjoy doing also pays well. If i enjoyed painting more than anything else, i probably would have been miserable. So it's not just a matter of pursing what you enjoy, it's also being lucky.

I've followed a similar path as you. I was a late-bloomer, academically. Just sorta bounced around until my mid-twenties when I got bored/depressed (or did I simply realize I would be miserable later in life?) with what I was doing in my minimum-wage jobs. I somehow got interested in Physics, put myself back into school, at which point I became incredibly interested in Software Development during an internship my Junior year and the rest is a standard Tech Industry story.

I work really long hours, not because I feel some need to satisfy my corporate overlords or because I have too much to do, but simply because I find it fun. I'm sure most everyone here can relate, but that feeling of banging your head against a wall for (x-amount of time) and then suddenly nailing a solution is exhilarating. I don't think that I can hit burnout with that, but maybe I'm wrong.

I see two things with this:

1) I (and this cannot be stressed enough) got _really_ lucky having an inherent interest in something that also aligned with a market need.

2) In the course of "bouncing around" in my late-teens and early-twenties I had a lot of time to ruminate (consciously or not) on who I was and what I wanted with life. This isn't some profound thing I'll say and I've certainly seen it echoed here before, but pushing young people (let's be real... they're kids) to make an extremely costly decision that will impact the entirety of their life without knowing who they even are is...crazy.

Like you, I'll contrast that with my wife: High School -> SATs -> college application process -> enter a curriculum for (insert here) -> graduate -> get a job (not even in your mid-twenties yet). Maybe some people do know who they are at an early age, but I'd wager most people don't really know themselves until ~25.

And now, here you are, coming to terms with yourself after having invested god-knows-how-much money and four years into something you'll likely evolve out of, but still needing to put in the hours to make ends meet and climb the ladder (we all want to be middle management, right?). The key to loving your job in the age of burnout is to not take your job until you know who you are. And even then your interests may not even align with an economic need. So what do you do? Especially when you need to feed yourself and, potentially, your family. It seems to me that finding a career that you like and that feels like fun, rather than work, is a total crap shoot. Sort of like a romantic relationship. Ideally, you want a partner that grows with you, but as we all know that's hard to predict because people change at varying rates or not at all.

TL;DR: If you're (really really) lucky and happen to fall into a career path that grows with you, you might not experience burnout

IMO the Protestant work ethic, while it has its roots in the ennobling of work in service to God, quickly got twisted through the Puritans and their adherence to "working out your salvation" rather than "for it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, not by works so that no one can boast." Even if that wasn't the official theology, that's certainly the behavioral tradition. And this quickly got twisted into the fundamental American myth: you get what you deserve.

Are you wealthy? Then you must have worked hard. Are you poor? Then you must be lazy. Did participating in an essential oils MLM bankrupt your family? You just didn't want success enough.

So the protestant work ethic in a modern sense, (IMO, of course) is ennobling work BECAUSE your "righteousness" for whatever religious or non-religious definition you want to use is based in your hardworkingness.

Agree with you. Disagree with article. Reformed thinking says that God created work, and thus work is good and it is intended to fulfill humanity. However, work, money, status, career progression, are idols. Two laws since the resurrection: love God, love your neighbor. You can love God by working, but it is not the only means and work for work's sake should not be loved or exalted.

> The article is effectively saying that if your job needs to not be pointless...

What the article is also saying - work less. And this is not so obvious I assume for most readers.

Great qualification in the first sentence: many things that have seemed obvious to me have been hailed as innovative by others - just given the limitations of human mind, this is inevitable. (Could have been summed into one sentence, that much I concede.)

it's not enough for me (yet?) for the job to be useful for society at large. quit a job because altough it was useful I was bored

This is so true. Every time there's a nice sunny workday, I'm looking out the window thinking "wtf am I doing in here?". In fact, I think it's possible that many of our feelings of anomie and meaninglessness at work could be a misinterpretation our bodies' signal that says: "hey you! get out of this cave and go gather some berries!"

Working remotely, part of the time, sure.

I do like the interaction with people that I get at my job. It's not entirely the same over slack, but that might be because the people whom I work with tend to be more "in-person people".

Apart from that, I also like that going to the office gives me a chance to go outside, if I'd work remotely.. I'd probably only go outside a few days a week.

OTOH, open floor plans and commuting does suck. And I'm happy (and more productive) the days that I do work from home.

Human life, yes. History? Not so much. Possibly the only hunter-gatherer civilization we have more than fragments of history from are the Australian Aborigines. This makes it very hard to ask anthropological questions of the past about how people felt about their work.

"work was a drudgery ... toil was seen as a necessary evil, and mainly as a misfortune of the poor. "

And this is also largely false. Yet another example of the usual tecno-optimism of HN.

There's an easy, applicable step... don't have a bullshit job. Unfortunately, bullshit jobs tend to pay better. That's because without the money, no one would do them.

It's life, read things, make up your opinions and implement the details yourself.

I didn't even read half the article and it's already talking about not working full time. That's a very actionable thing.

It's the #1 time consuming thing in your life. You spend most of the day doing it, for most of your life.

It's not the 1800s anymore.

"Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to survive." - Raoul Vaneigem

I think you can love a job without taking it too far. It's true that someone who loves a job could be taken advantage of by an employer who feels like that gives them leverage. And it could lead to problems with work / life balance.

But, I don't think that means a middle road is impossible. One can love food without being overweight. You just have to practice moderation. Loving something doesn't mean there are no limits to how much of it you try to cram into your life.

Why? Do you see it as a way to fool people into working harder against their own best interests?

I think there are people who genuinely love their job and I think that's OK.