Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Their model is to hire fresh people and burn them out.
Increasingly this is the direction western corporations are moving. Their ideal model is: place performance quotas above long term sustainability, people then burn themselves out, you then fire them for performance reasons, and you have them on an aggressive noncompete and threaten them with it when they try to work elsewhere after. Totally consume them. Basically institutionalised "f--k you", gleefully chewing up other human beings.
In some ways we're moving to something worse than slavery. At least with slaves they were seen as "assets" rather than "temporary rentals". They had to take care of them out of necessity, so their evil had that limit on it.
The huge majority of companies operate on nothing like this model. Either they aim to build up a workforce for the long haul and as such care about having a sustainable workload, with occasional spikes and lulls, or they’re just jobs that are hard, that suck and that as a result have a high turnover and pay relatively well for low standards in hiring. See working in an Amazon warehouse.
The companies that do follow this model suck, like EA, but again that’s not a secret. There’s an inexhaustible supply of suckers for every industry that people really, really want to get into and whether it’s film or video games they’re always awful, though at least film pays better.
Maybe the downvotes are meritted, though i didnt mean the hard work, i did actually mean that myself and many i know feel its a grind, and not in a good way.
You somehow make it sound as if i have something against hard work, but its quiet the opposite. It may very well be that my job is a single case of good ol toxic work environment.
I take it you've never worked in a call center? When I did, anything under a `10` (out of 10) on the random surveys they sent out was considered a failure.
I have worked in a call centre.
wasn't my experience at all, I did get "well paid jobs" in startups, but in the end, combining 3 jobs in one and doing 80 hours a week isn't worth it even if your salary looks pretty high.
I've also seen this "culture" of "we're one big family" in startups, which just feels weird and forced.
Yeah no thanks.
When you're 25 and have no ties and no responsibilities, working 12-15 hours a day isn't the impossibility that it is when you are 35 and have a wife, kids, your own house, and social obligations.
Fresh graduates absolutely do not know what they are getting into when they start their first job.
They understand what it means to soldier on despite being tired. They don't understand how much they've taken for granted all that support and feedback that was able to let them cope with the stress, and that now they're on their own.
I expect in a couple years it will get old, but people are waiting to settle down well into their 30s these days to extend these years of pure adult independence for as long as they can.
My ex-wife felt like she was on top of the world until she was burnt out and it developed into full fledged depression at age 27. I’m not saying everyone will end up like her, everyone won’t develop lung cancer from smoking either.
Are you saying that doctors entering their first residency have no idea it's going to be a long 2-4 years? When a friend of mine gradated law school and landed her choice job, her comment was 'the next 2 years are going to suck, but then I'll be set'. Years later she was right.
We are not talking about starting any random job, but those jobs that everyone knows have an initial hazing type of culture. The large majority of jobs are not like this, but big law and finance are and those graduates going into those industries are fully aware.
I'm not sure, I see a lot of companies moving to this model and they are not well paying. They copy startup environments but only in appearance (like a ping pong table for decoration that you are not allowed to play), because of that they justify that you must be passionate and work long hours for a low pay.
I'm friends with accountants for the big 4 firms - they are in no way, shape, or form, high paying initial positions.
- if they don't accept a job like this, they won't get a job anywhere else - this is the only way to make good money - there is no other way to rise up the ranks - loyalty is rewarded - this is a just sacrifice - they're invincible due to their youth
What they're doing however is working / giving away their life for free. It's cheaper for companies to hire people that give away an extra 10-20 free hours a week instead of hiring somebody to work for those extra hours. Even they say "we'll pay you x1.5", they're still making money because they aren't paying x2 for the second person on the payroll.
Unfortunately employees will vehemently defend these practices and even pride themselves on working 10 hours a day. They wear it like a badge of accomplishment and even look down others who don't do the same.
That was pretty much the business model of the few startup jobs I tried
Some of us prefer burnout at reasonable pay than being raped, beaten, and denied all freedoms.
Towards the later stages of slavery, the first 2 were outright illegal, and the third is somewhere on par with wage slavery today.
It sounds like a hot take on the surface, but modern wage slavery is objectively worse than late-stage actual slavery in some regards. We have not really progressed as society. The only thing that has really advanced is the availability of entertainment to placate the masses and prevent most of them from realising that they are in fact little better off than slaves. More than half of all Americans are less than 1 paycheck away from homelessness and subsequent incarceration. There is only illusion of freedom, the reality is they're chained to their jobs.
Fun fact: medieval serfs had about 4 months of 'free' time each year. Of course it still included housekeeping and various chores, but it was nothing compared to the load of full time employment that everyone experiences today almost all year round.
I can only speak for myself here, but I work a full-time job as an SWE.
There are 52 weeks in a year, I have weekends off - that there is 104 days, or (roughly) 3 months of "free time" each year.
Factor in my PTO allowances, plus the fact that I only work 8 hour days, factor out the commute time (about 1-1.5 hours each day), and sleep time...
I'm pretty sure I have at least 4 months of "free time" available each year.
Ultimately, though, it's not the amount - it's what you do with that free time that matters.
I think the issue is that a lot of people don't believe they have a choice. When you are getting hired, make a point that you are not willing to work more than 40 hours a week (unless as completely necessary such as an actual emergency which requires your intervention), but for the hours you do work, you will put in your best effort. You're signing a mutual contract, not indentured servitude, serfdom, being "sold", etc.
It would be plain foolish not to hire someone like that (if they did in fact put in their best work). For some reason everyone thinks they have to be a slave to their company, but any company that recognizes their employees wishes will be able to reduce turnover (which can be very expensive) and in-turn have a higher morale which can improve performance.
I also think that parents are not teaching their kids good skills. I don't recall my parents saying anything other than "work hard" and "do your homework". They didn't tell me how to navigate the real world after school, I figured it out on my own. I learned how to find a company that not only wants me to work for them, but that I'd like to work for them as well. What questions to ask in the interviews, what signs to look out for that raise red flags on how employees are treated, how to research companies to see what the employees say about it and what benefits they may provide.
As a result I probably don't make as much as I could be, or I'm not as far in my career as I could be. But that's okay, because I get to go home at night and not worry about work, and spend time with my family. I also have the option to move jobs at will at any time, for any reason. I was in a job once that wasn't the perfect fit, and found an even better job as a result of the experience I gained working there for a fairly short time.
I love my job now, and I don't know what I would do without it. I'm very lucky that someone has put in the thousands (or hundred thousands, millions, tens of millions?) of dollars to create a business that is able to take advantage of the skill I have without me owning my own business.
Lastly, people are easy to be bitter and resentful. I'd hate to look back and feel like I was taken advantage of for the majority of my life, or missed out on important life events for a job that didn't matter.
When I was at Amazon, this was the feeling with some employees around me: The stack-ranking meant they were made to a rat-race every year.
I can't seem to recall who, but someone higher-up let it slip when quizzed about higher attrition rate (back in 2010s) that Amazon believed in evolution, and that that meant the slow would eventually give the way for the fast and new. Someone even quipped in an internal email-list that employees were about 8th most important resource to Amazon right after the 7th most important resource: The paper-clips.
Interestingly, and in my observation, the managers got more leeway than individual contributors in terms of evolving slowly. I've also seen rest and vest among managers, but rarely among the engineers. Strange power imbalances, if you ask me, existed and could be felt across every organization I worked for.
Naturally it had the opposite effect of us dumping boxes of them in the trash.
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Cop-out rationalization: conventional wisdom holds that IT/CS folks should jump every 2-3 years or they're leaving money on the table -- and turnover rates reflect that. They're going in 2 years anyway, so get what you want out of them before they go. Most of them can't write fizzbuzz anyway, and it's easy to poach better talent by throwing money at them.
> Interestingly, and in my observation, the managers got more leeway than individual contributors in terms of evolving slowly
Managers run the system, so the system evolves to support them and their needs, like a more reasonable pace. Another way to look at it is if you've made it through the burnout phase then you're going to hang around longer, so it makes sense to hold on to proven performers who have much longer employment horizons.
A person I met who is in the video game industry talked about something that happened at one of the companies he did consulting for. A poor guy at that place completely burned himself out and had to be hospitalized to recover. A month after this guy was burned out, a 23 year old was doing the exact same tasks, with the exact same workload and the same impossible deadlines. Sure, video game development with their crunch time is extreme but it's still very scary that something like this is even legal.
"During the summer the packing houses were in full activity again, and Jurgis made more money. He did not make so much, however, as he had the previous summer, for the packers took on more hands. There were new men every week, it seemed--it was a regular system; and this number they would keep over to the next slack season, so that every one would have less than ever. Sooner or later, by this plan, they would have all the floating labor of Chicago trained to do their work. And how very cunning a trick was that! The men were to teach new hands, who would some day come and break their strike; and meantime they were kept so poor that they could not prepare for the trial!
We have hundreds more books for your enjoyment. Read them all!
But let no one suppose that this superfluity of employees meant easier work for any one! On the contrary, the speeding-up seemed to be growing more savage all the time; they were continually inventing new devices to crowd the work on--it was for all the world like the thumbscrew of the medieval torture chamber. They would get new pacemakers and pay them more; they would drive the men on with new machinery--it was said that in the hog-killing rooms the speed at which the hogs moved was determined by clockwork, and that it was increased a little every day. In piecework they would reduce the time, requiring the same work in a shorter time, and paying the same wages; and then, after the workers had accustomed themselves to this new speed, they would reduce the rate of payment to correspond with the reduction in time! They had done this so often in the canning establishments that the girls were fairly desperate; their wages had gone down by a full third in the past two years, and a storm of discontent was brewing that was likely to break any day. Only a month after Marija had become a beef-trimmer the canning factory that she had left posted a cut that would divide the girls' earnings almost squarely in half; and so great was the indignation at this that they marched out without even a parley, and organized in the street outside. One of the girls had read somewhere that a red flag was the proper symbol for oppressed workers, and so they mounted one, and paraded all about the yards, yelling with rage. A new union was the result of this outburst, but the impromptu strike went to pieces in three days, owing to the rush of new labor. At the end of it the girl who had carried the red flag went downtown and got a position in a great department store, at a salary of two dollars and a half a week.
Jurgis and Ona heard these stories with dismay, for there was no telling when their own time might come. Once or twice there had been rumors that one of the big houses was going to cut its unskilled men to fifteen cents an hour, and Jurgis knew that if this was done, his turn would come soon. He had learned by this time that Packingtown was really not a number of firms at all, but one great firm, the Beef Trust. And every week the managers of it got together and compared notes, and there was one scale for all the workers in the yards and one standard of efficiency. Jurgis was told that they also fixed the price they would pay for beef on the hoof and the price of all dressed meat in the country; but that was something he did not understand or care about."
I think you cut and pasted more than you meant to...
As a comparison, traditional slavery is extremely inefficient because traditional slaves are far less motivated, the master has to spend his time or hiring people to constantly threatening and beating slaves work.
To your other points, one could simply say that as a society we need to move away from short-termism and the dogma of maximizing shareholder value.
Though it's not your intention, this blurring of categories justifies real slavery. If everyone is a slave then no one is a slave. If "bourgeois freedom" is an illusion then every kind of repression can be justified by the claim that it will bring about "real freedom".
Actually, the freedoms that we have are real and they matter.
Note - this is only just an observation.
Really amusing - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's a good book, I'd recommend it, and you can draw your own conclusions from reading it. It's like 80 pages, too.
> But we aren't owned.
This is a weird subjective/objective thing. While people may not be chattel slaves to a slaveowner, there is a case to be made of bonded/indentured labor for many. The view of chattel slavery seems to fit well into dominant narratives, as it relies on there being a subject who is enslaving another. Modern conceptions of indentured labor, however, are under an objective threat of violence, and this doesn't fit well into dominant narratives of how exploitation works.
> If everyone is a slave then no one is a slave.
There's nothing indicating that the parent comment believes that everyone is a slave. In fact, there's nothing indicating in the parent comment that he believes we are enslaved.
Cheaper than paying 6 figures, and the ones that stick around are permanently under 6 figure earners.
“The plot of the novel has two distinct movements: the events at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, and the move to Silicon Valley and the "Oop!" project.”
”The novel begins in Redmond as the characters are working on different projects at Microsoft's main campus. Life at the campus feels like a feudalistic society, with Bill Gates as the lord, and the employees the serfs. The majority of the main characters...are living together in a "geek house", and their lives are dedicated to their projects and the company. Daniel's foundations are shaken when his father, a longtime employee of IBM, is laid off. The lifespan of a Microsoft coder weighs heavily on Daniel's mind.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs
Turns out the author was onto something:
”When Microserfs first came out, most people thought it was a tightly focused anthropological look at a tiny group of historically transient information workers in the American Pacific Northwest. It turns out they were forming a template of the way everyone else in the world works in and around information. As time went on it became a lot broader, instead of a lot narrower, which is what happened with Generation X.”
— Coupland, The Times, June 1998
I've certainly been close to being in this boat, had to take a job before I fully recovered, so took one I felt might be a bit lighter on the load and still give me some chance of recovery.
Pleased to report it has been mostly successful.
Does anyone know if there has been any research into this explanation and, if so any pointers to where I can read more?
I’d guess that the opposite is also true. Feeling unsuccessful too much would erode and destroy whatever it is you’re bringing to the table.
One of my buddies went into a burnout phase where he would use his pipette tips in a geometrical pattern and play flash Gameboy Tetris, or sometimes go to the casino and play poker (all of which he got really good at).
By contrast, programming is a cakewalk.
I personally think the problem is we don't really see much of a reward. Weeks of living in flight or fight mode and then a "good job" from the boss isn't a reward. Knowledge workers don't get real tangible rewards. And even if I had $100,000 dropped in my lap today, that wouldn't even be tangible, it'd just disappear in to the mortgage. I'd never actually enjoy it, no part of my monkey brain would think it did a good job.
It's hard for our profession to provide obvious, immediate rewards.
Only a privileged few can take sabbaticals or work wherever/whenever they want.
You have to play the cards you're dealt, though, and if you really need a break, it's way better than the "or else".
So what then? People suffer and struggle and try to improve the lives of their children and then they die.
I say all this not because I'm the first one to realize it but because it's worth repeating. Hopefully someone reads it and it occurs to them how unfair it is.
Mental labor is crushing.
If you're part of a production chain, how many parts are coming down the line? Am I letting people wait further down the line? For many manufacturing steps in a production line you need to manage an amount of tools and parts and keep control of your 'caches' because when you are not working on a part coming down the line, you're preparing intermediate steps, to be able to keep the pace.
Edit: And this task switching all the time can make it hard to get into any kind of flow state with the work. Because the 'disturbances' don't happen in a constant rhythm.
Repetitive boring jobs were not psychologically exhausting for me, at least the ones I did (I worked a couple of warehouse jobs one sorting and inspecting parts before they were sent to an assembly line, and another sorting merchandise coming off a truck, stuffing envelopes/shrinkwrapping for shipping and receiving, data entry, etc).
They can be physically exhausting, especially if you work long hours, but not psychologically. Since my brain didn't need to be taxed I got to let my mind wander and think about things for 8+ hours a day, or have audiobooks play, or whatever, and I still had mental energy afterwards to work on personal projects.
Mentally taxing jobs steal that energy away from you. They tend to pay more, but they take your creative and mental energy away in exchange. And my mental and creative energy is more valuable to me. At least with the more physical jobs I was able to stay in shape a lot more easily.
I'll second this. It feels like you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop, or for you to be called out on not exercising the will-to-power hustle that the business culture of 2020 expects. A couple of slow months and I start getting paranoid.
My dad in his mid 30s worked 13 hours a day + house work...he was a single parent back in 2011. There were no fixed weekends off. Sometimes, there would be a cool off season (heavy rain) but that's it. It was also pretty hard physical labor outside on a bike in 45C+ for hours in long summers. There was no AC or air cooler.
He earned $220 monthly as a salary after taxes. Of course, this was/is a small town and costs are not much but that was still pretty tight for a family of two - one of which was a small kid.
People at that stage don't complain anymore about work. They don't say anything at all about it. They just continue without speaking or showing any signs of burnout. The burnout may be realised for a short duration but afterwards, it's normal. I have done this comparison before and I think it still holds true. You are like a fighter jet or ambulance. Even if you are damaged, you can't stop and worry about it. There are people to look after or protect and without you, they will suffer. This is pretty counterproductive in practice. First, you will deteriorate your health and ignore any suggestions to improve short term issues. Second comes the switch from short term health problems to long term ones, this is a point of denial. At this point, those people stop caring about what happens to them and will dive even deeper.
I don't see my dad and think, "oh he looks like a slave". (Neither does he because he thinks it will pay off and he doesn't have time to be self aware of how much "slave" he is)
In any case, I feel slave is a pretty bad remark to describe a person.
I hope some people in the comments realise this.
Putting the thing in airplane mode and leaving it in a different room when you get home is going to do you way more good than staring into your phone and swiping away at more apps.
I should note that when they do, my union has negotiated a wonderful overtime compensation where I receive a minimum of three hours pay, at 1.5 times the normal rate, if I have to solve an emergency even if it took me five minutes to fix it. If you're my employer, you better make sure that thing is critical to fix before you call in the cavalry.
After my employer did call me, and other team mates, to fix stuff we warned was not stable multiple times well, wouldn't you know it, suddenly people start listening to us when we want to spend more time fixing something instead of just shipping it quickly.
But I basically don't use my phone at home. At most TV and gaming.
It's a trade off, you're getting entertainment but you're trading away creative brain problem solving time that occurs when you idle on a commute or whatever.
https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2019/08/09/im-sick-and-t...
I’ve experienced burn out before in my previous career, but never experienced very bad symptoms like the lady in this article did.
Anecdotally, I believe burnout is more likely when you work on a job that only cares about profits, or is not fulfilling in some meaningful way. I personally couldn’t work at most of the software companies out there. Why would I want to work for some ad company, or some company that makes meaningless apps / programs that doesn’t benefit humanity?
Sure, on a knowledge scale, some of that might be rewarding for me. But I wouldn’t last more than six months in a company like that.
I've never understood how somebody can get burnout in usual for-profit corporation. No feedback loop of 'ok-enough-work-lets-rest-or-have-fun'. But its true many people are desperately lonely or struggle in their personal lives, and structured corporate one might seem tempting.
Some people don't have much choice or prefer focusing on their personal life.
I have some experience with both sides of the coin, here's my personal take on it:
I'm currently taking a month off work, after leaving an ad tech company, full of wonderful and brilliant people, one of the few places in the industry where ethics are constantly discussed and have impact on the direction of the business.
The reason I joined was burnout due to several years of crunch, stress, the most common startup scenario, I guess. The company I joined is famous for great work-life balance, their involvement in the XP community and friendly culture.
But, one of the reasons I left was to work on more meaningful or rewarding projects. I became frustrated with the industry as such, the constant invasion on privacy, its impact on the society as a whole.
I'm in a very priviledged position, due to the job market in my area and the experience (I started working at a fairly young age). I can afford to take a month and look around.
Here's the thing, I wouldn't be able to identify and pursue some of my goals if I didn't work in ad tech, pharma or finance. I just wouldn't have enough deep domain knowledge to approach these problems in a constructive manner. The conversations I have now and the work I can even attempt to do can be much more impactful, purely because I just know more than I used to.
> Anecdotally, I believe burnout is more likely when you work on a job that only cares about profits, or is not fulfilling in some meaningful way.
Both apply to me (which I realised recently), but as far as I know the term burnout used to refer mostly to stressful occupations doing social good (nurses, teachers). A similar discourse around tech jobs is a fairly recent phenomenon. I think that stress can make the most meaningful occupations depressing, purely because it prevents us from seeing their value.
I apologise for the editorialised quoting, I hope I stayed true to the original text.
More on-topic: People work at places like that because it could be so much worse. If it doesn't benefit humanity, maybe it also doesn't actively harm it. Of course this does not apply to ad companies, but there are plenty of vacuous shops that produce things that exist a thousand times over in other places and offer absolutely zero societal benefit. It's busywork, but it's better than starving or preying on your fellow man.
I worked in academic medical research for a while and many people seemed burn out. There was basically no profit motive since we were working for research grants and there was pretty strict controls on how that could be divvied up on payroll (can't just get a million dollar grant and give the boss a 300k pay raise). You'd think it would be fulfilling since we were studying disease/working towards treatments that could actually help people. Meanwhile I have friends in finance working in purely profit-driven roles that don't really help the world per se, and they don't seem burnt out at all. I really think a feeling of freedom has a bigger role than anything else. If you feel like it's not a big deal for you to take a vacation or a long lunch or just be away in general, then you'll feel less burnt out than someone who is expected to show up every day and give it their all with no end in sight, even if the goal they're working towards is something altruistic.
WHO classified it as an occupational phenomenon last year too: https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/97/9/19-020919/en/
It's certainly getting worse in the modern world of knowledge work, not better.
And shameless plug (I guess?) but in my mind fascinating research, we (Asana) surveyed 10K+ knowledge workers a few months ago around the state of work (to figure out where we spend our time at work and what stresses us out etc.):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kiue54hsni6o87x/DO%20NOT%20SEND%20...
Yes, it appears to be that.
She's been the addict, now she's the dealer.
BBC News isn't what it used to be, stopped paying my license fee last year because of the decline.
In 2019, one of my parents tried to meddle in my relationship with my wife, and then took the additional step of nearly ruining our wedding. The additional dozen or so hours per week needed to deal with this (which, by the way, sent me back to my therapist) was overwhelming once sustained for a few months. Oh, also, someone broke into my wife's house and stole a lot of valuable heirlooms, which also caused extra drama in the middle of these two things, which also cost me in lost time, lost sleep, and random interruptions at work.
My performance review for year 2019 was bad. My boss says it was because my Jira card count and code contributions were below X. I let him know of impending catastrophe as best I could the entire year, and adjusted expectations accordingly, but it's clear the org doesn't actually care — so why should he?
These days, for various reasons people are having children in their mid-to-late 30s, and waiting closer and closer to 40 to start having children (many then find out they can't because they left it too late).
For many, the children are not grown and old enough to leave home until the parents hit mid 50s.
Exactly a decade ago I found myself talking to my mother in foreign languages on the phone, thinking I was talking to my clients. I even got used to lucid dreaming as it happened at least once per week.
Took me three weeks to get back any desire to (even think to) code again.
Turns out I had a tumor on an adrenal gland, that was over producing aldosterone. That cascaded into a bunch of other weird health issues.
Don’t assume it’s work, get checked out. Connect the dots.
Anyway, blood tests showed low K, high Na. Further testing showed aldosterone was out of whack. follow up testing confirmed it. CT scan found a tumor. Then a years worth of testing to be sure the thing wasn't a pheochromocytoma - it wasn't. Finally had it excised and have been getting better since.
I think the circumstances mentioned in the article need corrective action, but they are orders of magnitude different than what this phrase was referring to.
If the burnout is mild and you're just working too hard, the solution is to take a break and reduce your hours.
If you're starting to suffer from CFS, then the best solution is a long-term break from work, and a serious re-evaluation of whether you want to continue working there.