One In Five Employees Is Highly Engaged and at Risk of Burnout (2018)
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A few things have changed since, and I'm no longer anywhere near burnout.
I stopped travelling all the time, and I started working from home 4/5 days - less time communiting meant more sleep, and it means I get to have breakfast and lunch with my family etc.
Then I moved to a 4-day working week a couple of years ago, taking a 20% pay cut in the process.
Work-wise, it's the best thing I ever did! I spend less hours working, but somehow I don't seem to be any less productive, so my employer is actually getting a pretty good deal TBH. And I get a 3-day weekend, which means more time for family, me, and side projects.
I can understand why employers are apprehensive about remote work and 4-day weeks, but I really think they need to modernise here - a lot of them still seem to be stuck in the mindset of prioritising "bums on seats" from 9-5, rather than productivity and happy employees.
There’s also the fact that most people I’ve known in my work need to learn to work when they graduate (I hire mostly graduates). I’d trust someone with 5 years’ experience to know what is generally expected from them if they work remotely; I’d be much more concerned about a graduate. Telling them what “working” means is much harder than them breathing it daily around them at the office.
Another topic is that it can be fairly difficult to measure actual performance, and remote work takes from you several proxies. It might make you more objective - but it might make you less accurate and force you to accept lower performance due to the “benefit of the doubt”.
I've been full-time remote for about a year now, and I'm kind of done with it.
It was fantastic at first. I live in Boston, and my commute was about an hour and a half in every morning, and about two hours home every night. Being able to step over the dog and be at my office was (and is) awesome.
But I never see anyone anymore, and that's starting to wear on me. My wife still commutes, so we have about two hours with each other every night before we have to go to bed and do it all again the next day. If I'm not intentional about it, I'll spend 23 hours a day in my house, and while I'm not the most social person around, I think it's starting to have actual negative consequences for my life. I'm grumpier, I get sick more often, I'm tired ...
I think that's the biggest difference with remote. A lot of things that were seamless with physical presence need to be done with intentionality in a remote setup. You need an explicit time for a daily call / team catchup. You need to either make extra effort or explicitly schedule social chats between coworkers (I like inviting people to do coffee or show off some thing they're interested in). And you personally need to make a schedule that gets you out of the house (I go to coffee shops 3-ish times a week).
I've been remote for 2 years and don't plan on changing any time soon.
Granted, there's a lot of policy- or culture-level stuff that can get in the way. If the rest of you team is co-located and isn't going to remember to bring you in on conversations, remote isn't going to work. Same if your manager equates physical presence to performance.
The other important thing for me is to keep a regular schedule when I'm "on" and then step away from the workspace when I'm "off." Avoid going into the workspace for personal projects.
Also as part of my job I make sure to stay in contact with my boss about the things that matter to him like our project plan, release dates, and anything I need from him. Deliberate, open communication is very important. I also find that keeping quality written records is critical too because it's the only way to keep everyone on the same page about what we're working on.
And yes, get up, leave the house, and go do something else during the day, every day. I personally go for runs and go to the gym in the early afternoon as a way to be outside. And I spend a lot of time with my girlfriend on weekends too. Neither of us are homebodies when we have free time so that works out very well. Even superficial interactions with other people are enough to fill the cup a little.
> I've been remote for 2 years and don't plan on changing any time soon.
That is very interesting!
Mind a chat? Your profile is bare so I'm assuming you don't want to be bothered without you being involved in it, so I need your help.
Look at my profile or, please, if you can email me at my handle at gmail, I will really appreciate it.
I look forward to a few minutes of a learning opportunity with you.
Work is not a replacement for a social life, and there are more ways to develop one now than ever. And, the social load from people who do their social life at work is actually one of the reasons I prefer working from home: I have only so many spoons to spare, and I'd rather spend them on people I chose to associate with. Those might, occasionally, happen to be coworkers, but even then I'd rather socialize in non-work context.
It is a drag when other people still work in the office, or _really want to_ be working in the office, as evidenced by a heavy emphasis on synchronous communication. I'm starting to despise Zoom, for reasons that aren't really directly related to anything Zoom does.
I understand your point but I wonder if working with people who you would socialize with even outside of work makes work more enjoyable?
From my rather limited experience of working, I've found that in the end the thing I actually work on matters a lot less to my happiness than the people who I do the work with. Alternatively, maybe I just don't like working as much as other people do?
I'm starting to think when looking for a new team I should really be seeing whether I will like my coworkers instead of whether I'll like what I'm doing.
Not really. Who I like to work with and who I like to socialize doesn't necessarily match up. Furthermore, I have limited capacity for social interaction - that is why even _if_ I like the people, I prefer to socialize outside of work. Otherwise both work and socialization suffer.
Finally, if your primary source of socialization is the workplace, you open yourself to abuse - companies can, and do, exploit the fact that for many people they become not just the source of income, but also the social support network.
> From my rather limited experience of working, I've found that in the end the thing I actually work on matters a lot less to my happiness than the people who I do the work with.
I just need the coworkers to not be horrible, and what I work with matters quite a lot - if there's one thing about the IT industry that really grinds my gears, it's how often even apparently socially beneficial products are just covers for privacy breaches and boom-and-bust schemes.
> I'm starting to think when looking for a new team I should really be seeing whether I will like my coworkers instead of whether I'll like what I'm doing.
You need both, though you might not get them. Just don't let the workplace _own your social life_. If you feel like working remotely means you have no social life, then you got used to that happening, and that will hurt you, remote or not.
Since I started working from home (almost a year ago) I've found myself missing the in-person professional interaction at times. My wife and four young kids are at home, so there's as much human interaction as I want, but I think it's important to be able to "talk shop" with others in person from time to time.
Having said that, I might consider it if I didn't have a dedicated home office, I had a coworking space next door, or I craved personal interaction :)
Monday or Friday, with the other four days reserved for face-to-face.
Having a non-meeting day is beneficial for productivity. It does require trust and good work ethics. Also, a quiet home office.
All my coworkers are in California, but there's no assumption on my team that people will actually be present in the office. So effectively, things are done as if it was a remote team.
A huge part of this is selecting the right people. We can only hire people that are able to be effective in that environment. You need people that will reach out if they have a problem (but not before at least trying a little bit to solve it themselves). You need to be able to jump on a call at the first sign that you need a higher bandwidth communication channel than chat. As a senior, I always make abundantly clear that I am available to answer questions or fix things when someone is blocked.
I also haven't seen any issues with performance or reviews. Being present at work has nothing to do with performance. Rather, features added, incidencts responded to, tech debt accrued and paid off, etc are how you measure performance and none of those change in a remote environment. You can get an idea of what everyone is up to in a daily call / video chat. And for a more in-depth accounting, you can review git logs, incident notes, support tickets, etc. Basically, performance reviews are not that different in a remote environment.
And totally agree that not everyone can or should do remote. It makes a lot of people unhappy. And it doesn't work for a lot of employers b/c they can't find enough of the right people. Or they have some real job-related requirement that makes it difficult or impossible to do remote. Like, how do you have a remote welder or a hardware engineer or biologist or forensic tech person. They need access to physical stuff and/or a lab with expensive equipment.
So, it's not a panacea. But it works really great for some people if it's setup right. And it can be a competitive advantage.
I think one of the key success factors is having a dedicated home office, where you can close the door and be in work mode. Doubly so if there are other family members at home during the day.
I do agree about graduates and juniors though, also because it can be difficult to effectively mentor someone remotely. OTOH, we've never had better tooling and connectivity. I recently met a colleague in person, and didn't realise until he pointed it out that we'd never met before! I'd spent so much time in video conferencing with him that I felt very familiar with him.
> Another topic is that it can be fairly difficult to measure actual performance
This one I don't get though, unless your only measure is how long someone is sat at their desk.
It started with what they called "Summer Wednesdays" - during the Summer, the company would sponsor an outing to the beautiful beach nearby every Wednesday at lunch.
Then you could come back to office or work from home.
Soon, people started to go to the beach earlier and work from there unless there was a client meeting onsite. One team member (she was in sales) even did her client meeting at the beach.
Team morale drastically changed. Since they would be at the beach, they wanted to have some fun while at the beach - so they shifted the work they got done to the 4 other days.
No more boring meetings - only those meetings everyone really wanted to be on happened. Everyone else was busy working. Teamwork went up because they wanted to be at the beach on Wednesday and have fun instead of coming back to work later.
The performance metrics were so phenomenal next month that management had an informal meeting with the team that basically allowed people to work 4 days a week.
Those who agreed had to sign an addendum to their employment contract that they had taken up the offer for people to work from where-ever they wanted one day a week without needing to come to the office.
I did not like this opacity so when I queried I was told that investors won't sanction this in any shape or form and this would be the only way to pull it off.
Interesting.
I moved to a 5-day, 35 hour work week while not taking a pay cut. I just leave early. F em. I'm not burning myself out again.
I dont. Can you tell me your thoughts?
To me, sitting at an office in front of a computer and delivering a feature has no correlation.
... and if there's already a system in place to calculate team's ability to deliver a feature, what's the apprehension?
> and 4-day weeks
.. again, tell me your thoughts?
> a lot of them still seem to be stuck in the mindset of prioritising "bums on seats" from 9-5, rather than productivity and happy employees.
Managers are not idiots, everyone I have worked with are smart and driven, so why are they doing this?
Partially inertia, fear of change and fear of losing control.
> To me, sitting at an office in front of a computer and delivering a feature has no correlation.
I totally agree, this is part of what I was trying to say - performance should not be measured by the number of hours sat at a desk visible to your manager!
> Managers are not idiots, everyone I have worked with are smart and driven, so why are they doing this?
Well, managers are people, so some of them are certainly idiots :)
Those are the things that really grind enthusiastic people doing hard, creative work to dust.
Proving to the pointy-haired that going to a 4-day week won't hurt "because metrics" only puts a band-aid on the real problem which stems from the fact that many enterprises view people as "components"-- as means a to a corporate-defined end.
For many people a 4-day work week only prolongs the path to burnout, IMHO.
Not just as far as remote working is concerned, but running better companies as well. I'd say it's fairly clear that knowledge workers don't all fit in the 9-5 schedule, people have different sleep/productivity rythms, there's other beneficial activities that help foster creativity and focus (meditation, exercise, stretching, post-meal nap, ...) that one would ideally enable and even encourage employees to engage in...
But all of that brings a huge problem, that in some way we also need to measure productivity - both to prevent (fire/reeducate) people from abusing the system (freeloaders), and to fairly reward people (avoid negative selection). An additional complication is that productivity is even ill-defined - is banging out tons of code day after day more or less valuable than brainstorming for a few months and coming up with a revolutionary new product? What about basic research, which takes years and has an uncertain outcome?
Probably computing is one of the best test cases for better systems, as programmers have almost complete freedom to work when-/where-/however, it's not a heavily regulated industry, most code is not critical (so it's easy to iterate quickly, as well as experiment with different objectives - slow&correct vs move-fast-and-break-things), and also programmers are productive enough that a few bad apples is unlikely to break the company...
I'm really interested in this general topic, I'd welcome any ideas/discussion/experience!
I work for a mid-sized university. We're a bit unique, for higher ed, in that we have centralized IT. Our projects support university 5-year plans. When projects do not complete successfully or are extraordinarily late people notice. If teams are hitting their goals - university goals - does it matter if every person on a team is hitting some averaged-out metric for productivity? If a team isn't hitting its goals, usually it's not due to individual contribution, it's due to poor communication, unrealistic goals, frequently shifting requirements/priorities, etc. Usually a sit down with the team to get feedback will tell more of why the team failed.
A hobby of mine is coaching youth basketball. To increase my ability, I joined a forum. Today the moderator posted a quote from NBA player Marc Gasol. Marc lamented the tracking of individual stats because the stats don't tell the story. He stated, correctly IMO, that many critical factors are not tracked and would be hard to measure the importance of. For instance, a player who doesn't score much but prevents his defensive assignment from being a play maker (play makers are more than just scorers). Or the player who sets up the plays that allow other people to score (for those familiar with basketball, think screens/picks). Or the guy who is on the bench but helps calm down players when their team is down.
I've come to feel the same way about IT teams. A win is a team win; a loss is a team loss. In both situations, many factors came into play in order for the outcome to occur. My experience is that individual productivity stats don't give you a clear idea why the outcome occurred. In the end, it's all about the success of the organization.
> For instance, a player who doesn't score much but prevents his defensive assignment from being a play maker (play makers are more than just scorers). Or the player who sets up the plays that allow other people to score (for those familiar with basketball, think screens/picks). Or the guy who is on the bench but helps calm down players when their team is down.
Yeah, these are certainly good criteria. The benefit is that in such sport, it's probably easier to assess performance/impact, as it's all face time. To some degree, these criteria are applicable to tech work as well ("he's in the office 2 days/week only, but he always solves the problem when the server goes down overnight or over the weekend" or "she works remotely, I never saw her before, but she found 37 critical security bugs in the past year").
YES!
Are you aware of pair and mob programming?
People want to be successful. No one likes to lose. Even a freeloader is expressing that behavior because they believe that is the best way to win.
Pair and mob programming completely makes freeloading impossible. It also is true teamwork
Hrm: PNS?
Basically, there's a dichotomy between 2 different kinds of work: Convergent vs Emergent.
In "Convergent" work you are delivering what a market has asked for. You are measured on meeting these requirements with accuracy, speed, cost. Predictability of outcomes is paramount, schedules are everything, people expect to be able to control all variables.
By contrast, in "Emergent" work, you are effectively creating a market. You introduce something that hasn't existed before and which isn't merely a tweak in an existing product. The outcome of Emergent work is new ways of doing things, new products, and new resources. This introduces a lot of "grey area" and lack of focus.
The most successful enterprises find the right balance between Convergent and Emergent work. In manufacturing (my domain), most initiatives are Convergent and expectations focus on meeting some deadline or numeric goal, literally everything else is subordinate to that. Start-ups, of course, have the opposite inclination. In those, a "runway of money" is burnt to introduce some potentially new product with only vague expectations of profit at some time in the future (despite whatever they tell VC's). You sort of need both in an organization and staff (as a whole) need to assimilate both types of work to really succeed.
What I had in mind was things like Customer Support or QA personel (which exist even in start-ups & tech companies), where the tasks are pretty clearly defined, it's easy to track progress, and it's fairly important to "do the hours" (e.g. if you need 24-hour customer support), but you can offer things like location independence (precisely because work is so easy to track).
Unfortunately, however, I think that most programming work (and this probably extends to most technological work) isn't quite as easy to categorise... basically, even if your objective is 100% convergent ("our client wants this, we'll make it"), there's still different (better or worse) ways of getting to that goal, so there's still a lot of creativity/decisionmaking involved... and it's obvious that simple metrics don't really work ("I fixed 100 bugs today!" "Yeah but you wrote all of them yesterday.")...
Are you aware of pair and mob programming?
People want to be successful. No one likes to lose. Even a freeloader is expressing that behavior because they believe that is the best way to win.
Pair and mob programming completely makes freeloading impossible. It also is true teamwork where everyone is literally on the same page.
Perhaps a win for themselves personally. A freeloader is a selfish individual in team dynamics. They only want accolades/home runs for themselves, and not a World Series for the team.
> Perhaps a win for themselves personally.
EVERYONE who's logical wants a win for themselves personally.
Your non selffish teammate wants the company to do well so they continue to get paid, builds a reputation for success and gets the bonuses.
Your CEO wants the company to do well so they continue to get paid, builds a reputation for success and gets the bonuses. Their role require them to think about the company as a whole or there will be guaranteed failure.
The single mother is working hard over multiple shifts for HER children to be fed and schooled. She's not doing the hard work for my family. I don't see a single cent from her.
The billionaire contributes millions to charity so that the planet he lives in is cleaner and better just like you and I spend hundreds of dollars in cleaning OUR houses or helping our neighbors so that it's cleaner and better. No sane person wants to live in a dump or in a place where everyone hates each other.
> A freeloader is a selfish individual in team dynamics. They only want accolades/home runs for themselves, and not a World Series for the team.
I really wish people were more selfish.
Then it would be easier to reason about the world.
The most complicated individuals are those who are "not selfish" - very difficult to reason about IMHO!
There cannot be action without motivation, so what is their motivation, exactly?
Is their motivation to work hard because they want to make the starving kids in Africa more educated?
Do they understand what it takes to make the starving kids in Africa more educated?
Do they have control over what it takes to make the starving kids in Africa more educated?
Do the starving kids in Africa actually want to be more educated or do they want something else first, like food?
How will they behave if one day they realize it's not going to happen like they envisioned? Can I continue to depend on them to deliver they have been or will there be a meltdown?
Selfish people seem to have better clarity over what they need and can communicate it better.
They have better and closer/direct control over their needs and wants. It's not dependent on another random thing or individual or group.
If you have a freeloader on your team and your team agrees on the matter - WHY is that freeloader still around if they are not providing any value?
When I was in college, there was a group of students who were frustrated about how the pub they frequented had a bunch of young women who seemed to go out with much older, well off men. They were upset that the attention of these young women were being taken away by the older, well off men and the men were distracting the women and exploiting them.
They theorized about the ethics, long term effects, viability and so on about the situation.
Since they were computer science students, they wondered whether making better dating apps would improve the situation for these young women who were perhaps not finding the right men.
The reality is the young women were getting something from the older, well off men; the older, well off men were getting something from the young women. Both parties were selfish and knew exactly what was needed and wanted and provided.
Maybe the selfish freeloader at your company is giving the company something it needs and wants that they can't get from the less selfish team members to further its business objectives?
My last job was for a large enterprise that viewed employees as drop-in components. Not only was it dehumanizing, but it was a terrible way to get any work done.
If you have a system where a freeloader can win, then you have a system that encourages freeloaders.
There are other systems that make freeloading impossible.
Are you aware of pair and mob programming?
People want to be successful.
No one likes to lose.
Even a freeloader is expressing that behavior because they believe that is the best way to win.
Pair and mob programming completely makes freeloading impossible. It also is true teamwork where everyone is literally on the same page.
The reason why you have a system where a freeloader can win is management that believes pair or mob programming is a waste of time.
This allows silos to build up, provokes and allows for dividing politics of who can know how something works or not and breaks team morale.
You get the behavior you design for.
We prevent freeloader problem by requiring everyone to pay taxes. The equivalent at work is requiring ass-in-the-seat / face-time policies.
I don’t see how pair programming can solve anything, people can still contribute zero (except their presence).
I'm confused - it seems to me that you understand that ass-in-the-seat / face-time policies only address the presence problem but cannot address contribution.
1. Do you agree with this? 2. What's your solution to fixing the contribution problem?
That's not how pair programming works.
Pair programming is not sitting and doing facebook while the other person churns out code.
Infact, in pair programming, that is exactly what you cant do.
Once you understand this, you intuitively understand why mob programming is so much more efficient.
Apologies if I came across saying there is the only way to do it. Let me rephrase - if there are multiple stakeholders in a product, I have found it really valuable to have them, physically or virtually in the same space as the work gets done and feedback gets provided in real time dissipating confusion and questions as soon as they arise.
In my experience, fixing an issue at the source is cheaper than discovering it later and running to fix it then because the wrong assumptions were made just because everyone is too busy banging out code.
Creative blocks as real. Rubber ducking is effective and real too.
> I think most companies have no time to have 2 or more programmers working on the same thing even if it produces some decent, soon to be legacy code
1. Why do you think that is? If this question totally flummoxes you, a narrower question could be "what is the objectives of these companies with the code", but try answering the broader question if you have the time
2. Do people generally solve problems better when working in isolation or as a team?
Now, did the companies you have experience with not have more than the programmer who wrote the code review it?
Or test it?
Who wrote the requirements?
Who checked whether the deliverable(s) met the requirements?
In my experience, more than one person ends up touching the code in one way or another until it actually reaches the customer.
I have found, the overall quality is much better when everyone is working together instead of in a waterfall model, in strict sequence with lots of back and forth and meetings with subset of stakeholders until the product actually behaves the way its expected to. Reliably.
The risk of this happening goes up as removed the programmer is from using the product themselves. So if dogfooding works on your projects, by all means do it.
Looking forward to your thoughts.
The primary difference of interest here is the way an employee owned cooperative is directed by people the employees (who know what is really going on in the company) and for their benefit, rather than for the benefit of disinterested shareholders.
Wow, great solution!
Except that, of course, you're missing the problem. Firing the employee isn't the problem - I don't think it's relevant whether it's done democratically or if the CEO "dictates" it.
The problem is, how to find freeloaders? In absence of objective metrics (which is what the parent raged against), it's an art! Or, it will come down to internal politics, ass-in-the-seat time, popularity contests, ... not that much better than in a non-cooperative company.
Without a clear provider of vision and decision, it crumbled. This part is true of any venture, but I think becomes even more critical in a co-op since the authority is necessarily shared.
I think in broader terms, cooperatives are bound to be less efficient than an equivalent capitalist controlled venture, but that difference doesn't have to be a death sentence for the cooperative.
> that difference doesn't have to be a death sentence
Despite my failed attempt at one, I completely agree. To me, the co-op must be the way forward. It's the only likely contender I've found that might bridge capitalism and socialism.
If you are brilliant at engine design does not mean you are brilliant at selling cars.
Selling cars make money. There is negative value in a bunch of engines lying around.
As software engineers we design automation to make a business more efficient.
To make money you need to run a business.
As you say, bad metrics are a problem. But some form of loop-closing is essential.
It's important make sure you're not sacrificing your wellbeing for the benefit of the company. Your physical and mental health are far too important.
My company makes things that are, I'd argue, a net good to the world (we help make stuff more secure) - but honestly I find myself struggling more and more to care about anything that isn't addressing the climate or democratic breakdown the world faces.
Not rhetorical - genuine question: Does anyone else sit at their desk and think "but guys the ship is sinking, maybe we should worry about fixing the holes before we repaint the tennis court? guys? GUYS????"
This is my problem really, not the company's, but I'm not sure what to do.
I can see clearly from the resumes on my desk that when it comes right down to it, people would rather make big sacrifices to work for a game developer than a nonprofit.
In my spare time I created a real estate finding tool focused on bike and train routes, which I hope indirectly has helped interested people avoid car-centric commutes and lifestyles while not spending insane amounts of money to be in the hippest areas. Apparently it's been useful in my immediate neighbourhood, at least.
But, as everyone else here notes, I've got bills to pay (fewer than most if I'm honest, though) and for now am just trying to destroy some debt.
There's always different things you can negotiate on to bring on great talent.
I started informing that I'm going on vacation. And for doing interviews elsewhere, took "sick" days.
It was a horrible situation to say the least, but now I'm out of that toxic hellhole.
Hell country.
(NB: You''re not making it easy to find you here.)
I'm not connecting to my own LinkedIn, but we are listed here, and every organization could use your help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_and_cons...
What stops them is a combination of inertia, money and life change. It's not a trivial thing to quit your job and work somewhere else.
One major factor is that you will be taking a large pay cut and might have to move. For those with mortgages and family staying with their less fulfilling jobs makes more sense. for many people their family comes first.
Another issue is that the grass always appears greener.
I do wonder what an engineer at Facebook would tell themselves, I think it might increase empathy with workers who are in places which are being labeled as morally bankrupt. I have some idea but that if they did share their thoughts they would get downvoted and hated for exposing themselves.
Say you've got 10 people. 5 of them want to do (noble but lower paying thing) and 5 and want to do (meh to possibly sketchy high-paying thing).
If there are 10 homes, that's fine. Maybe the noble ones have simpler, less fancy houses, but they're still basically OK. They still have the basics of life. "I can do something good for humanity and forego some luxury" is something a lot of people might think.
If there are 5 homes, then only the ones who do sketch work can have them. "I can do something good for humanity and be homeless" is something far fewer people think.
This applies to other things where a person might want to voluntarily take in less income (couple with one person doing childcare, taking a career break to learn a new thing, etc.) and it's why creating these fake shortages sucks so much out of the human experience - you have to justify your endeavors in terms of the lost income, and how they'll affect your competitiveness.
At one point I couldn't stand the cognitive dissonance of watching all these videos/articles about climate change while working for a bank that had a negative contribution to these issues.
I decided to quit and go part-time. I still don't know how to contribute to the issues I care about and earn money at the same time. I'm searching but tbh it's hard and I'm not the only one in this case.
However, now I have more time to think about making the life changes to reduce my impact on the climate/environment: organize camping holidays in my home country vs flying abroad, optimizing my energy needs at home etc.
I'd prefer finding a job where I can do that at a bigger scale but in the meantime that helps
I recommend unplugging for 30 days before you make any decisions. Walk around and look at the world around you with your own eyes. Don't let the media influence major life decisions without at least purging it from your life a bit first. It can be surprising the effect it has on you.
I'd recommend a deliberate analysis and culling of your information sources, not a complete disengagement.
I wouldn't call it disengagement, I'd call it re-engagement with the real world.
I'm a remote worker, who will be moving to the semi-rural south in two weeks. My wife and I plan to use our half-acre to grow our vegetables and hunt/fish for all of our meat within three years; we will start immediately but want the transition to happen in gradual steps. Small local changes will aid the environment.
I spend no time, and quite a lot of money on that problem.
Not asking the question is much worse. A lot of burnout comes from the unspoken/unconscious perception that your work is meaningless.
https://www.brightball.com/articles/what-exactly-happened-to...
The point is, it can happen at any objective level of environmental stress. It can also happen at any level of actual performance. The engagement relative to people you interact with is the thing it depends on, I think.
For me it seems to happen because we feel that we must be emotionally invested in our work, and the toll of being 100% emotionally invested in something that is more likely than not devoid of meaning creates a “burnout” reaction.
This almost sounds like trying to blame the victim. There’s a much simpler description: burnout happens to you because of circumstances imposed by the employer.
You don’t have to be emotionally invested to be deeply stressed by the prospect of getting fired, demoted or turned into a workplace pariah, and in a lot of toxic environments you are made to feel those threats are connected to whether or not you are putting in 8 hours every Saturday or responding to a permanent triage of PagerDuty alerts with no permission to invest time into fixing root causes.
Even when it doesn’t manifest as implied uncompensated overtime, you can end up being expected to be a miracle worker and simultaneously given no resources, all while balancing a personal life or financial obligations that might imply you cannot easily quit jobs or move to a new place for better jobs.
In a Hanlon’s Razor sense, I’d say burnout is almost always about toxic management or executive behavior. Sometimes it’s about a problematic teammate. But it’s rarely caused by the degree of emotional investment of the person burning out. Rather that is a symptom exacerbated by the real causes.
This is often the case, but I think very often there is a lot of self-inflicted hurt there, too, with employees burning midnight oil because they convinced themselves that something bad will happen to them if they do a task a day (three days, week) later.
<rant> As a personal anecdote, I have to wage real wars to prevent people who work on my projects from coming to work when they are sick. I do not know what is it -- do they want to look heroic? believe this day is super critical? but they still show up to cough and sneeze on everyone. We have unlimited sick days, stay home! <rant off>
If you care and your toxic teammate doesn't, and then your toxic manager doesn't give a shit about the toxic teammate but instead cares that dared "rock the boat" by bringing it up is it all three thing as a cause or just the toxic manager?
It's swiss cheese failure. If you didn't care you wouldn't be having trouble. If your toxic teammate wasn't toxic you wouldn't be having trouble. If your toxic manager wasn't toxic you would've reasonably had the problem resolved.
I'm saying this having been in this boat two jobs in a row.
I had one project at a former employer I became emotionally attached to and worked for some weeks from 6am to 6pm on it.
After figuring out the project would not be finished any time soon though I almost couldn't work on it anymore after a holiday. It was like running sprint after sprint and realising you need to run at least a marathon.
I did not have a real burnout but I think I was very close.
If anything, the reason why burnout seems to be more frequent is because too many people care too much about their work, which creates pressure on others to join in on appearing like they care and emotionally invest in their work, which goes back to my theory that people ultimately burnout because they’ve been pressured to put their whole selves into their work when for many their work is actually devoid of much meaning.
> which creates pressure on others to join in on appearing like they care and emotionally invest in their work
I don't see this pressure coming from people who care. I mean, they want others to care, but they certainly don't want them to be pretending it.
So if anything, this pressure comes from within you, and then it also can be considered an issue of emotional control, but it is a different issue than caring too much about your work.
In other words, it seems like there are problems on both ends of the spectrum. I care more than average person in the group => potentially an emotional problem for me (that's my explanation of burnout). I care less than average person in the group => potentially an emotional problem for me (that's your explanation of burnout).
In my past I would switch jobs every couple years. Not due to the stress, but because I was alarmed at how the intensity of work was decreasing at a company. I equated that with slow professional growth.
Now I'm finding several opportunities for growth, but doing so with a calm mindset. Several of my colleagues don't seem calm at all. Yet the majority of us have more control over burnout and "work chaos" than we are lead to believe.
You have to be wildly out-of-touch with society to be shocked by the fact that most people see their job as just a thing they have to do to make money.
From what I can understand it is taught at business school to exploit resources, you must look after yourself and push back, surprisingly hard, again in my experience. I find it abhorrent. It was the .com era when things changed, when the sharks realised the computers own the world, before that it was a bunch of happy engineers making stuff.
Even worse many managers seem to be control freaks who can't measure results, and instead insist on micromanaging everything, looking over your shoulder, continually asking for feedback, and "checking in" to see how things are going.
I've said for many years I produce results in spite of managers "helping". Software development is fairly easy I find, it does take time to produce results though, and because no one can see whats going on managers behave the way they do, there's a huge lack of trust on both sides. End of rant.
P.S. I find it easiest to behave like plumbers, they know you need them to clean up your shit, and they have to pay you, so just do what you have to to survive. I remember one guy I hired years ago to do some plumbing at a place I was renovating, kept saying he was busy, yada, yada, went up to the shops he was wandering around having an Ice cream. Medical specialists are another great example I find, they have people making outrageous demands on them, literally life and death, they make sure that people can't find them outside office hours, they are very good at looking after themselves, as they should be.
Classic example is school teachers in US public schools. They have enormous responsibility with the children, but rarely have power or authority. Instead, they are essentially drones in a big machine.
Could you elaborate on that? I always thought that there are rules and procedures for everything so the teachers are fine and covered.
- medical care
- firefighting
The people are in it for some deep care for the task and will endure shit levels. They think it's more important than anything else and cons' don't alter this.
Key point. In my experience, the high-productivity, high-engagement becoming the new baseline, and then the organization requesting the 120% of that, and repeat every six weeks, is the true killer.
This is what I try to get through to people - if you consistently deliver at 100%, that becomes the baseline and you'll be expected to stretch ever further with little to no extra incentive or support.
Throughout my career I've always held back some level of skill, efficiency, or drive that I can break out as and when required on very particular projects. In the end, it's better for the company as I'm less likely to flame out.
Obviously a lot of companies still operate on visibility and presenteeism over outcomes where it makes it harder, but take the damn lunch break now or you'll never be taking it.
Well, they also ought to teach time management, emotion management, energy management, people management.
It's just a basic life skill, keeping things in balance. Extremeness in an area can often be disastrous, it might also come with high reward, but very few people know how to be highly engaged and yet sort of keep other parts of their life balanced.
School is one of the more difficult environments for time management: students have half a dozen (or more) different bosses, all of whom reguarly impose hard deadlines, and have a tendency of imposing major deadlines at a simmilar time to each other.
The social environment is probably one of the most diverse that many people will see in their entire lifetimes (not nessasarily along racial lines), with some of the most difficult to deal with people (children) many will face in their lifetime.
Granted, schools often take a trial by fire approach to these lessons (I should know, I burned out during highschool), but I don't see how you can get through school without learning them.
It is possible for someone to face a problem for decades, to care* deeply about it, for others to succeed at it, and for them to not know how to find a workable answer. For me, happens for “obvious” problems like “how do I learn to how to estimate how long software takes to write?” or “How do I write a first draft of a letter to a friend?” where the answer people have is “just do it” or “just do it and multiply by 2”.
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* By “care” about it, I mean feel the emotion of wanting a solution. Some people define “care” such that if someone fails at something it means they didn’t care about it. I’m not using that definition.
Personally, I burned out in high school then again in college. I went 100% in everything related to academics and did exceptionally well, and yet I never realized until the end of college that the only reason I was so successful is because I sacrificed everything to be good at one thing.
I'm still figuring out how to get that balance down and having some sort of more formal education in that area would have been beneficial for me.
Obviously not and that is the very skill that needs to be learned.
The second is that there aren't really any short term consequences for failure in school. Maybe you get a bad grade but it doesn't really have any immediate impact. In the absolute extreme case, you have to repeat a grade, which isn't a particularly big deal. Once you enter real life, if you don't come up with $x,xxx per month - you're homeless. This shift in consequences radically reshapes people's approach to the game. Imagine playing a video game; now imagine playing that same video game where if you score below average - your home and entire livelihood is put in jeopardy. And you're only playing against other people who are also, at worst, decent at the game. To test that latter hypothesis we could try to determine rates of burnout compared to the independent wealth of individuals. And on that front, I've no idea.
This business of emotional development and learning self-control is too important to leave to classrooms.
Parents would teach their kids about money by giving them an allowance, sometimes you would work for the allowance. I mowed lawns.
I can't believe that kind of stuff doesn't happen, but I notice a lot of lost, lonely souls out there who are really struggling with basic concepts, like maintaining friendships with people they get into arguments with, or disagree with. We do a lot of self-isolating behavior and then struggle with impulse control; I think because being part of a community forces you to engage in some impulse control.
It’s also not really any of the schools business. You can’t fix delinquent parenting in the classroom. The idea of an emotional development curriculum sounds terrifyingly dystopian to me.
But I think a lot of changes have happened in how kids are raised that don't promote good childhood development. Specifically, unsupervised play with other kids. It just disappeared. Now parents have to supervise everything, which puts incredible pressure on parents, especially if they are working.
In previous generations of our own society and other more traditional societies today, parents had kids younger and there were grandparents and relatives around to help raise them. At the same time, you can open your door and let the kids run out and play in the street. Then ring a bell when it's time for lunch and they come home. That takes huge pressure off parents and lets kids learn some tough lessons that helps them mature.
In every species, play is how the young prepare for adulthood. Play and spending time with older peers. When you take that away and allow only supervised play time -- well, that's too much pressure on parents; they'd have to be superhuman to give their children the same richness of experience in childhood that kids used to have.
I think the consequences of this are huge. For example, I've noticed how even people in their late 20s and early 30s, when they run into some kind of difficulty, immediately call for an authority figure to complain to. You'd learn not to do that if you were engaging in a lot of unsupervised play. But if everything is supervised, then you always have that authority figure to call. Even universities now are acting 'in loco parentis' -- in a very paternalistic manner, and it seems the students demand it. To me, it's as if a part of growing up and taking care of your own problems is missing. Then they go out into the working world and expect 'in loco parentis' from their employer. Well, the employer is happy to help, but now you are in an unhealthy relationship with your job. Then you have people in their 30s saying "God, I wished someone had told me about emotional maturity" -- well, that's really sad.
Delinquent means to fail in ones duty. If you think parents are failing in their duty to facilitate their children’s emotional development, then it’s just tautological to say they are delinquent.
I pretty much agree with everything else you said. But I disagree with the conclusion that it’s the governments right to take over parenting responsibilities in the absence of abuse, and I strongly disagree with the conclusion that the school is an appropriate place to instruct the emotional development of children. The idea of a standardized emotional development curriculum should terrify anybody.
But I don't think blaming parents is the answer -- this is the result of general social breakdown, and parents today are doing the best they can in an environment where a lot of supporting infrastructure has been taken away from them.
Blame is an entirely different conversation to delinquency. If I get hit by a car, lose my job, and can’t pay my rent, I’d become delinquent in paying my rent. You could debate who’s to blame for that, but it has no bearing on whether I’m delinquent or not.
> I never concluded that it was the government's right to take over parenting responsibilities.
The comment I was originally replying to did. Your initial response, which I mostly agree with, didn’t address that topic at all.
Helicopter parenting and "controlling" schooling are terrible but don't paint a rosy vision of the past. We can do much better.
> the "coolest" kids were, in retrospect, the most emotionally mature ones
citation desperately needed.
I would argue that's about the only thing that schools do teach.
After around 5th grade, almost none of the facts you teach a kid stay with them into adulthood.
What middle school and high school does is force you to learn how to get your work done on time, be social, have hobbies, work with "bosses", and interact regularly with people you don't like. That's the real value in high school IMO.
99.9% of the people who took calculus in highschool would fail an exam 10 years later. The brain just doesn't hold onto info it doesn't use. I think it would be the same if there was an explicit class on e.g. time management. Nothing you say to the kids will have any impact. OTOH, giving them homework and deadlines let's them actually figure out and practice these skills in a safer environment.
Whats the difference? Well what is the difference between giving an 8-year-old lessons in how to swim vs. tossing an 8-year-old off the side of a boat?
Imposing some form of suffering on those who don't comply is literally what forcing people to do something is.
Edit: Note that simply giving somebody swimming lessons does not force them to swim and neither does it force them to learn anything -- because they're free to ignore you. Tossing them over board is forcing them to swim, because you're taking away the viable alternatives. We agree that the way schools do things is bad, by the way.
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If someone starts beating you with a rubber hose until you recite Jabberwocky, that doesn’t actually cause you to recite jabberwocky unless you have some means of finding the words to that poem that you can see. The last part, access to how to do the action, is crucial to doing the action.
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For another example: suppose a 5-year-old child is crying and his grandfather pinches him and tells him to stop crying. But the 5-year-old has not yet learned the emotional self-regulation skills to stop himself from crying. So while the grandfather is forcing compliance, he won’t actually achieve compliance. He’ll just inflict pain.
Likewise, if you have an engineering student drowning under a firehose of work and trying to learn time management. The poorly-managed pile of work is forcing him to learn good time management and punishing him for not learning it. But unless he has access to a known source of guidence on time-management, he’ll continue to suffer. Not only that, but sleep deprivation, as makes this harder.
Maybe a better way to put it is to say is that schools tend to be bad at encouraging kids to learn, so they try (unsuccessfully) to make up for it by forcing instead.
- motivation (or discipline)
- means
And forcing only tries to apply motivation without thinking about means.
“How?” Is a question that needs an answer from somewhere.
Not at all: punishments can (and often are) ineffective. You can punish me for being unable to fly. It will not force my body to produce a pair of wings.
Or can you give an example in which person A forces person B to do something without a threat of punishment or suffering?
Uh, I think you’re going to have to cite that.
I don't need to know the formula off the top of my head; I need to know what a conical pyramid is, what volume is, what a formula is, and how to use it. I guarantee that between me and someone who's never done geometry at all, I can find the volume of a conical pyramid faster and more reliably.
You're right that memorizing specific formulas isn't useful; but using a large number of formulas over and over to gain mastery over the general idea certainly is.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.in/wealthy-americans-dont-have-e...
For some reason I thought I could stick it out, but I'm trying to make it to the end of the year and then take a break to refocus.
Money only gets you so far - at some point people need a supportive work environment and a sense of ownership at their job.
If it happens gradually enough, working twelve hours a day and being called repeatedly during evenings and weekends can feel normal. The high cost on one's health, social life, and family life can be extreme and quite dangerous.
I quit freelancing about 4 years ago and have been working full time for a company. I've learned the hard way this is actually a marathon and making sprints is quite unhealthy. The pile of work on your desk never ends and the only healthy long term strategy is to chew at it slowly. I now have 5 hours of productive time at the most.
Just yesterday at my workplace one dev spent whole day to set up Eclipse workspace for a basic Microservice project. It was about 10 min job. Now that person claims to be junior developer not a total novice and I see no reason to doubt that. But setting up similar projects has been explained and demoed in great detail at least couple times in last few weeks. Still anytime something changes he can spend days to do most trivial things. I would think this person would simply burnout if task is given with a end date. It doesn't matter how generous is the deadline.
This actually sounds like it could make for a great system, in the sense that you still maintain the original quality and quantity of output, but you still get to avoid the burnout of that 20% completely, because after some time, it will be somebody else's "turn" to do more heavy-lifting. Obvious problems here are that 1) company/team structures in industry don't seem conducive to this, 2) skill levels are unequal, so to maintain the quality of the 20%, one would need to plan carefully to account for this -- but, it also seems like a good way to help lower skilled workers rise to meet higher standards -- and 3) hinted at before, this needs to be institutionalized in a tangible way, and that seems to require a difficult form of team member assessment/introspection that managers may not be capable of facilitating.
Wrt point 2 above, I've heard from sources I trust (but would have to bug them for specific sources on this) the following phenomenon has been observed in education: when you remove top performing students from sections of a course -- say, to join an honors section of that course -- the non-honors version of that course has a void for high-performance students. Interestingly, this void is often filled by the mid-tier students who would have typically performed at B/C level, and now some of them will rise to perform at an A level. It would be fascinating to find observations of this in the industrial setting as well. If I find a source for this, I'll update my comment.
This is definitely a phenomenon that can happen, but it has a dark side that I feel is rarely accounted for. While you want to have senior talent and empower your engineers to grow, you also need to have junior/mid level engineers to support them. All to often the reason you have 20% of the employees making 80% of the effort is because they have no supporting infrastructure to help them with their jobs, or they are powerless to leverage the other employees for help without interacting with, sometimes multiple, management levels.
When we started to expand the engineering org it became readily apparent what we needed wasn't more senior talent, but more, for lack of a better word, grunts to help with the mundane tasks that the senior engineers shouldn't be working on. This same thing happens in most other organizations outside of software development as well. Essentially one way to ensure that you don't have your engineers burn out, is to ensure they have a team they can fall back on completely outside of management. I personally appreciate getting recognition from my manager and the higher ups at the company I work at. However I appreciate the team I can rely on far more. I think generally HR/Managers should get out of the way more often, and instead of directly acting make it easier for teams to help/support each other.
Now I myself have long list of complaints about Spring/Microservice crap and its tendency to bury simple errors in 10 thick layers of abstraction. But that will be more relevant to IT related threads. It is because many other developers are dealing with it and still somehow make it work without spending days for an hour job.
The company was pretty dysfunctional and I took it upon myself to pretty much do everything, so much so that I was working 12 hour days (This is work time, minus breaks, measured with an app) so my day would start at ~ 06:30 and finish ~ 21:00.
I have never been quite so miserable in my life and I was making so many mistakes that it was unreal. I also picked up a very bad habit of doing things quickly and 90% there as that was better than not doing them at all and to do them properly would take too long. It's been close to a year now and I still find myself falling in the turn things around quickly and sacrifice quality trap, even when there is no rush at all for it. I hope I get rid of this bad habit soon
Burnout happens to you and does not originate inside you. A manager or executive burns employees out not employees “letting themselves” become burned out.
Turning it around and acting like it’s intrinsic to the employee is harmful victim blaming. It’s like blaming someone with symptoms of clinical depression for not “managing their emotions.”
I feel very discouraged by this because I don’t think we’ll make progress helping people heal from and avoid burnout unless we recognize that it is caused by the wider sociological issues of toxic management & executive behavior.
Your comment in fact is one of the worst forms of victim blaming, and you may not be aware that you’re even doing it: justifying victim blaming as though it is some sort of justified focus on “what you can do” when the problem should not be made to be about that or justified as such.
In other words, changing the conversation to be about “what you can do” tacitly reinforces the stance that it’s nobody else’s problem to fix, which is precisely blaming the victim for being in the situation (e.g. “if you want things to be different, it’s on yourself to do it”).
You may not be consciously aware that your behavior is tacitly blaming victims, but nonetheless it still absolutely is.
I have to say though I am pretty thankful for all of that. It allowed me to reevaluate what was important to me and really think about what I wanted to do. I ended up switching industries all together and I finally don't hate life any more.
In my experience HR organizations are mostly there as a sort of risk management for the company, everything / anything else tends to feel like just sort of HR resume fodder / token programs / company cheerleading.
E. g. my current employer has a HR department that conaists of a HR division that does typical classical HR tasks, and People Development, who actually do meaningful stuff to bolster retention etc.
HR is a really hard job too, very hard to do well and very stressful. Most people never get to see this as it's part of their job that they can't talk about most things they are having to deal with.
Bad HR is a nightmare, good HR can make a massive difference to a company.
Just to add a counter in case early career people see this and take it as truth - there are companies out there who have really good HR teams who are aligned to their employees. Don't put up with shitty HR because you think all HR teams are shit.
Org I work for has really good HR teams for both the boring process stuff, and fostering a decent working environment. It's one of the strings still holding me to stay.
(1) Companies where HR is mostly administrative stuff plus risk management.
(2) Companies that claim their HR is more than that and for the employees, but when the situation seems to actually come close to resembling a dilemma, they're mostly administrative stuff plus risk management.
I have yet to hear of or experience a company that claims the latter and actually is the latter.
As you say, good HR department can help a lot in this regard - but in this function it's the same as in other main HR functions (recruitment, training, discipline issues and firing, compensation, legal compliance); most of what HR departments generally do is support for these line managers in their job of managing the employees, not support for the employees themselves.
I just haven't had that experience / have not heard from many people who have.
But that company was acquired by a massive public company. And now HR is half adversary + half bureaucratic nonsense. Interestingly, the company still offered great benefits. I assume that is because the benefits package is an easy-to-measure piece of compensation, while HR quality is something that is much harder to shop around for.
* caveat, I have no idea how HR would have acted in a situation where an employee brings up concerns that would put the company in legal jeopardy. If I had to guess, they would do the right thing in a "senior harasser vs harassed subordinate" situation. If the the company was clearly in the wrong, I think they would work hard to satisfy the employee to prevent legal jeopardy. If the employee could not be satisfied without a significant hit to the company, I'm pretty sure they would do anything they could to protect the company. And that reflects that at the end of the day, the company comes first. A good HR department can just push much harder for win-wins (and probably only under market conditions that give labor leverage).
I learnt then that giving that much of a shit only mattered if I were building something for myself. So, for the things I care about, I'll give that much of a damn, but for someone else, they're not getting that.
The mistake I made was that I invested more into that thing than the owners themselves. That's so foolish. Why? They don't want that from you.
Sure they will provide lip service; however, the moment you try to have an authentic discussion (backed up with evidence mind you) around ways to assuage potential burn-out due to constant on-the-job heroics...good luck is all I can say.
I have unfortunately come to realize that those that have perfected the art of looking busy and/or professional slackers seem to get a free pass.
Frustrating indeed.
Turns out “burn out” (turnover) is by far the largest single cost to employers. It adds huge overhead per employee and dramatically reduces a companies profitability if they can’t keep a low turnover.
The point at which someone becomes 'over-engaged' is highly individualized but based on my experience it is highly associated with people that are deliberately working their way up the management ladder.