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Comment by codingstuffs | Hacker News Reader

Appreciate the question. Not particularly - the work culture at my current employer is slowly killing me.

I have managed (through meds/therapy) depression/anxiety. The startup I'm currently working for has no work/life balance, which is severely starting to affect my health.

Engineers are on call all the time. Having to check email on nights and weekends is just a normal week now. There is very little task management, so everything is an emergency and needs to be done right away, regardless of prior tasks or schedule. My previously managed anxiety has gotten much worse from all this.

I'm burnt out, trying to make it another couple months to have enough saved up to take a sabbatical. There are days when I just want to quit and go buy a cabin somewhere and live there for a few years. I'm struggling.

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Hey, I've been there! Still recovering from the burnout almost a whole year later in a new role.

I encourage you to try hard to set boundaries. Only be available after hours by direct phone calls, if possible. Set boundaries on phone calls, especially when you aren't on-call (i.e., "No, I cannot help with this right now, it will have to wait until work hours."). Stop checking into e-mails and work content outside of work. Stay away from politics, news, and other potential stressors for now. Don't think that you always have to exceed expectations. Doing "okay" is an option. Failing is an option. In a start-up, I'm not sure if this logic follows, but in larger corporations it absolutely does... I'd say I wouldn't want to work at a start-up if they didn't support that though!

In the meantime (and I know this is really tough to juggle), I highly recommend seeking out a different role if you can. If they're doing it to you now, they will always do it to you. You need to get out if it's not serving you well. There are better positions out there. No promotion is worth the amount of mental recovery you'll need to do afterwards.

That's my take coming out of a similar position... YMMV, take it all with a grain of salt. Also I'm glad to hear you're seeking out therapy. It saved my life during those dark days.

Best of luck, stay strong, you've got this --

I really needed to hear this today, thank you.

It helps to hear from others who have gone through the same thing, and who have come out the other side. Glad that you made it out, and hopefully I will too soon.

You offer a service to your employer and agreed a price for that service. Don't wrongly assume that just because he pays you, he can ask anything. Of course he can ask anything, but that doesn't mean you have to agree with it. It works both ways, and he needs you as much as you need him.

Make up your own mind of how far you want to go for which price, and stick with it. You have to set clear boundries in such situations.

Setting boundaries is something I've never really been good at, and definitely need to work on.

Thanks for the advice and encouragement.

There are ways you can do it with deniability built in. Switch off your phone. Then be "visiting family for dinner, out of cell range". Forget your phone under the cushion on the couch. Your nephew was playing loud music and you didn't hear it ring.

If the boss says that they need you available for emergencies or whatever, say that your therapist suggested you disconnect in the evenings or you will burn out irreparably, etc.

I think honesty is always the best solution.

Have a talk with your boss and discuss the current situation and how it is not managable. Work out a solution in the short term. What happens next is that your boss will totally not stick up to his end of the agreement, because he will assume you will fix it anyways. But then you stick to yours and let things burn. Then he gets the hard lesson, and you can put the fault in his shoes since it was him who didn't do his part. After that, things should be clear who does what.

In my experience this works, and my empoyers were always very happy to work with me. You don't need to be a pushover to get respect, you just need to do a good professional job. Expecting your employees to be available 24/7 is not profesional, teach him that.

Thanks, I've made a note on my phone which reads 'Let things burn', to review frequently. My employer refuses to set up an on-call rotation, probably to save money, but they will and frequently do call you 24/7 expect you to work immediately, for no additional compensation. This after a week of constant task switching plus a 3 hour total daily commute is just too much to sustain.

I still need to figure out how to deal with the frequent 'can you work next Saturday and Sunday?' with a thank you as payment.

Working in the weekend without pay seems like a problem of your employer and not you. By asking "can you work in the weekend because blabla" he puts that problem onto you. The trick is to point the problem back to him. For example you can say "seems like you need to hire another person, is that planned already?". Or "You need to put a better planning in order" etc.

Try to get concrete plans and dates out of him, and then use that as excuse to not do things "we agreed you would hire someone else at x, you didn't do that, and now I have plans for the weekend. Better make work of that soon!"

He will always try to find excuses, but try to steer the problem to him. Because in the end, it is a failing on his side that you need to work in the weekend, make it very clear it's his fuckup, and if he doesn't fix it soon, it will be him in shit and not you anymore.

That sucks. Personally, I would try to just do less, without asking. On call? Don't answer. They probably won't fire you if they're running like that because there will be no way to replace you. And if they do fire you, oh well, you were planning on quitting that job anyway. I would spend most of my time at that place applying to greener pastures. Interview during lunch, come back like an hour late, just tell them car trouble or something. There's no reason not to lie to people that abuse you.

Well said. This lines up with my personal variant of the golden rule.

"Do unto others has they would do unto you"

Would the people running the business have you increase their profit margin at great personal cost to yourself? Then it is completely fair for you to likewise attempt to enrich yourself at their expense. I no longer do the work that would be best for the business, I try to find myself in the work that would look best on my resume.

One thing I took away from being on-call at a company with lots of outages/incidents: management allows those outages. I know that sounds weird, but if there are constant lights-on problems, but every day management is prioritizing features/other work, the management is demonstrating that those outages are tolerable to them. Once I got my head around this, I stopped jumping-to at 3am like the world was ending for every single incident.

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