Burnout is classified as an occupational phenomenon by the WHO | Hacker News Reader

Burnout is classified as an occupational phenomenon by the WHO

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110 pointsSunTzu908730 comments

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Also discussed here last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20026378

I've been working on some tips on burnout for early engs. Would value any feedback:

https://www.nemil.com/on-software-engineering/beware-burnout...

Very nice write up! This quote stood out:

“I wasn’t overworked, but I was exhausted all the time”

This strikes a chord in me. I’m beginning to dread a daily fifteen minute scrum - which ought to be no big deal.

I'm not up on all the current methodologies, but 15 minutes every day sounds hellish no matter how well-rested one is.

You’re kidding, right? A 15 minute daily meeting would’ve been wonderful. My average work week usually involved three or more 4am starts to travel, three or more after 3am finishes to catch up, 80+ hours at my desk and at least ten hours of meetings. Some weeks would see me spending every daylight hour sat with clients or development teams, and every dark hour pounding out code, emails and proposals. It took a lot of drugs to keep going.

Also, you say “every day”, but I suspect you’re not including weekends and the days people generally take as holidays. I spent far too many Christmases on conference calls, or launching sites (it’s the quietest commerce day between October and February), and weekends were a thing other people had.

I only slowed down (and finally quit) when the hospitalisations for starvation and dehydration started getting really frequent.

I’m through burnout now and out the other side - I no longer have any interest in being a productive member of society, no ambition, and I’m finally something like happy.

Either way, I’m sorry, 15 minutes of scrum a day is not a burden.

Really? Damn, my friend.

Assuming you work 40 hours a week (ha, as if anybody works 40 hours) that's about 3% of your working hours.

Now, if that's an extra 1.25 hours of meetings tacked onto your existing meeting workload, okay, that's annoying.

But the idea behind daily meetings is that you should spend at least, uh, 3% of your time communicating anyway, so let's do some of it in a brief and scheduled way so we do a little bit less of it in an unscheduled, scattershot way.

> Assuming you work 40 hours a week (ha, as if anybody works 40 hours) that's about 3% of your working hours.

It kind of makes sense. That's 3% of your work that is often "bullshit time" that you have no control over and adds nothing to your ability to get your job done. Combine with other obligations and tight deadlines and it feels like a pointless chore.

True communication is not a matter of a daily meeting with rigid procedures attached.

I'd much rather have scheduled meetings than unscheduled ones.

If the meetings are scheduled, I can plan my flow around them...

Much better than when I'm trying to get work done and somebody yanks me out of the zone and pulls me into some random meeting that's going to last between one and several zillion minutes. We used to call them "drive-by shootings."

There's definitely room for personal preference. For me, I have large numbers of years accumulated doing it both ways, and it's no absolutely no contest.

I'll gladly spend 15 minutes of my day on a scheduled meeting, since I know from experience that it's going to save me a bunch of "drive-by shootings."

The trick with burnout is to learn how to bs. You're going to miss deadlines and there will always be too much work. The trick is no one knows exactly what you are doing 100% of time. If people ask tell them just say 'yeah, plowing away just got to finish off a couple of bits and I'll get back to you'.

For those interested in gaining insight on working hours throughout history, I would recommend you to take a look at OurWorldInData's empirical study. It looks at weekly work hours since 1870s, hunter-gatherer work hours, productivity vs annual work hours, etc.

https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours

It begs the question, is a portion of society burning out because of the type of work, current lifestyle, our knowledge & expectation about the world, something else or a combination of factors?

That graph is amazing! For the people looking at it, you should know that you can click a button to add the United States even though it is not included by default.

Workers give their companies too much. Companies expect too much from their workers. It's a catch 22 of the highest magnitude. Imho, most coders lack the personal skills or self respect they need. We don't speak out against injustices enough. We dont request and seek out the personal respect we deserve. Our eyes hurt, our backs hurt, our heads hurt... but we are competing with people from countries where a good paying job is more rare than a vacation getaway so we can't stop making concessions.

> Companies expect too much from their workers.

(The below will be assuming software developer since you followed up talking about coders).

In the US at least, there's an additional catch 22 because of salary. The average software engineer salary is super high, historically (at least in my experience) because it was compensating people for being oncall, for working off hours, for doing a mad dash to make deadlines in waterfall projects, for being understaffed, for needing to do continual education in your own time, etc.

Now that these super high salaries are the norm and you can't hire anyone with experience without such salaries, companies end up expecting the world from them. Other professions that have similar salary ranges (certain part of finance, law, health, etc) also do.

If salaries were more in line with other type of work (at least in the low end. Nothing wrong with having a wide range), it would be a bit less crazy for someone to work 9/5 and call it a day.

   Now that these super high salaries are the norm 
   and you can't hire anyone with experience without   
   such salaries, companies end up expecting the world 
   from them. Other professions that have similar salary  
   ranges (certain part of finance, law, health, etc) also do.

I honestly wish we could perform the labor version of a stock split and double the number of software engineering jobs and the number of qualified foks while halving the salaries.

I would gladly do my current job for half of what I'm making now if I could work reduced hours.

But no, it's the software industry. The options are generally "unemployment" or "make a bunch of money and work unhealthy hours until you want to die, and then get promoted and work even more" with nothing inbetween. There are exceptions to those norms, but the norms are the norm.

> but we are competing with people from countries where a good paying job is more rare than a vacation getaway so we can't stop making concessions.

In my experience, this is the source of our trouble: we want a middle class life. We want Netflix and a TV subscription and the fastest internet service, we want two cars for our families, we want to be able to eat at restaurants once or twice a month, we want to just buy a new thing if the old one breaks instead of fixing it, we want our house to look the best on the inside and out, we want to take an exotic vacation almost every year.

These are living outside of our means. We can afford these things, but at significant cost to our mental health, to our family and societal obligations, in a word, to our happiness and joy in this life.

I'm convinced that a significant number of us should start living like we're poor, getting rid of all those aforementioned things that have enslaved us, and we'll be significantly happier in life, finally see a way out of our insurmountable debt, finally have the free time we need to do this or that chore we accidentally put off for a few years straight, finally have time to read to our children every single night without the guilt we feel over not using that time to work.

This is certainly true. My wife works in HR. Non-tech employees are quick to make complaints about their bosses and coworkers. One of funny complaint she told me about was from her teammate who gave two weeks notice. Her manager didn't organize a proper going-away lunch. She felt disrespected, so she filed complaint against her manager as she was leaving her current company.

Some people might say that this is typical entitlement mentality. But it still boggles our mind.

When I tried working at a large corporation that I new wouldn't suit me, I noticed an undercurrent of nobody really talking about issues that were holding us back or could help the team and our processes. Naturally I put effort into trying to change that , and would try to professionally adress conflict between team member with them directly or through a manager. Likewise any issues with our work environment and so on. Because nobody else really did this—possibly because they risked their visas—I stood out.

You need a union. One that isn't in cahoots with management. Try the IWW.

Unions aren't a panacea, nor are they something everyone wants.

I, for one, resolved a long time ago never to work in a union environment.

Just look at the hiring process. Almost no other profession accepts a lengthy hiring process as crazy as it is for software engineering now. And the meanest interviewers are fellow engineers.

Us engineers are often too hard on each other while silently accepting abuse from above.

Are you sure about that? I've gone through aero and mechanical engineering interviews that were extremely rigorous and long.

Maybe it’s about engineering in general. The marketing or project manager types I know personally definitely have a much simpler hiring process. They don’t have to study algorithms ahead or do homework projects.

Yeah my interviews as a software engineer have been utterly laughable compared to pretty much any other job that pays comparably. Usually a quick screener interview and then 1-2 additional rounds.

"Burn-out is included in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as an occupational phenomenon. It is not classified as a medical condition."

https://www.who.int/mental_health/evidence/burn-out/en/

Be careful of what you read and believe.

@dang: can we get an appropriate title change?

Yes, changed now.

It's best to email hn@ycombinator.com if you want us to see something. We don't come close to seeing all the comments here!

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