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Our common idea of burnout largely comes from Christina Maslach—the Maslach Burnout Inventory is more or less the standard tool that psychologists use to score and diagnose burnout now—and interestingly, it diagnoses burnout as three related but independent subscales:

Exhaustion - somewhat self-explanatory

Professional Efficacy - your view of your performance

Cynicism - a distancing of yourself from your job

Though you may come across different names in different writings. It's interesting how the subscales impact each other.

I don't know if I fully buy into the framework 100%, but it makes for interesting research nonetheless.

The first time I heard about burnout was from a colleague that was just trying to go back to a job after about two years being mentally unable to do any job. It started when one day, arriving at the work, they just froze and started crying uncontrollably.

It was a diagnosed condition. I am always unsure of what people are talking about when they talk about burnout. Is this panic attack that makes someone temporarily incapable of working or is a strong stress feeling that might be solved just by changing jobs?

The spectrum idea makes sense, but the situation, consequences, and ways to help are very different on different parts of this spectrum.

I think the term burnout was first applied to social workers. Just imagine the situation they are in: a steady stream of people with serious problems in their lives comes to you and you are supposed to help them. But you have so little time and power to help any particular case that you hardly seem to make any difference. And no matter what you do that stream never ends. No wonder that feelings of sheer helplessness, ineffectiveness, meaninglessness of your work, cynicism, ennui, and extreme aversion to the work can appear. That's burnout. I don't think it is specifically associated with panic, aside from the panic that if you start working you will experience all the negative emotions that you associate with your job.

> ineffectiveness, meaninglessness of your work, cynicism, ennui, and extreme aversion to the work can appear

Jobs in corporate software development can feel pretty much like that, at least for me. Startups are better, but, on the other hand, they work you harder.

Yeah, exactly.

My own totally unscientific theory of burnout is that with scarce positive reinforcement and lack of progress towards some higher goal your lizard brain just stops understanding why on earth you continue to expend energy on this job thing. Of course your job pays the bills but this may be hard for the lizard brain to understand (and in case of volunteers where even this positive reinforcement is absent, burnout hits them especially hard).

Many corporate jobs share this dynamic. Support, obviously. But every position where there is a lot of routine maintenance and lack of any kind of satisfying milestone ahead carries the risk. Also, opensource maintainers (Unpaid? Check. Never ending stream of maintenance work? Check. Lack of some higher goal? Well, their project is already popular, there may be no other definite goal.)

Startups are better in this regard because growth provides positive reinforcement and the possibility of an exit provides a higher goal. But what if growth stops and the satisfying exit never materializes? Burnout will hit you like a hammer.

> Jobs in corporate software development can feel pretty much like that, at least for me. Startups are better, but, on the other hand, they work you harder.

You might be confusing cause and effect; you feel those things after being burnt out. Once upon a time, I worked at a start up doing very rewarding, high-impact work with cutting edge technology...just too much of it. I could feel burnout creeping up[1] and I asked my boss for time off, he agreed, but feared I would not return after my break and pressured me to finish the project before leaving by working at an even faster pace - you can guess what happened next. I walked in one morning, sat and my desk and I discovered I no longer had any gas left in the tank: I was completely empty inside, no motivation, no interest in any doing anything work-related, all I could do was browse web comics all day, and even this didn't bring me any joy at the time.

I took my break and switched employers soon after (which wasn't my plan initially), fortunately the new organization had a much slower pace, it took me months to get close to my previous level of productivity. Never again.

1. When weekends doesn't feel like enough time away from work, you might be on your way to burnout

It is common with doctors also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion_fatigue

Interesting, there is a discussion in this article on whether compassion fatigue is a form of burnout or not. I think it is. It is probably caused not simply by exposure to suffering, but by exposure to suffering coupled with perceived ineffectiveness in alleviating it. It is not like every patient who comes to a doctor has a specific problem that can be precisely diagnosed and that magically goes away after a treatment is prescribed. Many have chronic illnesses, many will get worse or even die despite the treatment. Many require much more time than what the doctor can spend on them for proper diagnosis and treatment.

Freezing and starting to cry without any reason was the exact same moment for me i recognized i hat do change. I made three weeks holiday without any technical equipment just to slow down life very drastically. A few weeks more of just working half days and much sport and i was back to normal. Never again!

Thanks for sharing your experience! Much appreciated.

It's like a rubber band. You can stretch it far, but then it reaches the limit.

That's why people who are burnt out can suddenly freeze and are unable to continue what they were doing.

This could also be attributed to comorbid/latent mental health issues we are not privy to e.g. depression (emotionally numb), anxiety/malaise in social settings that trigger panic attacks/fight or flight adrenaline response, PTSD from work environment (victims of abuse), bipolar disorder, etc.

These seem to mirror/share symptoms with how people feel when they describe burnout in the workplace. Sometimes I feel like it's the reason people jump ship to new companies in the tech industry around ~2 years mark, keeps the novelty and honeymoon factor going. Thoughts?

Wait.... "apathy" is rare?

I thought that is the step where most of us have been hanging out.

I have been waiting for the "real burnout" to kick in when I dropped another level or two.

Apathy is comparatively rare, yes. (Sorry for the HN crowd for not getting into the data here, not enough time right now.) That's because the previous level is usually so painful that people end up changing something. Especially in engineering the market is so much better than in practically any other field that people who don't move out from the previous phase ('I hate everyone around me') mostly do this because they have something else going on in their lives. This, however (other things going on) is something that _prevents_ further burnout, because one of the best burnout prevention method is _purpose_. Example: working in a call center is mostly extremely stressful. Having a purpose like 'I do this to so that I am able to finish my degree' is an useful thing to prevent burnout. Working hard like hell on a startup for 6 months with a clear purpose usually doesn't cause a burnout (can cause other problems tho').

People who end up in the 'apathy' phase usually do so because they somehow lacked the purpose, the means of changing their situation and also the realization that things are going very badly. If you think that you're in the apathetic phase then you're likely not, because you still have some self-reflection.

Can confirm. I don't have the luxury of burnout, as the the primary breadwinner for a larger than anticipated family (yay twins!). So I hover just above breaking point, and only occasionally dip my toes in no longer having any F*s to give.

On the flip side, if I didn't have the family with young children, I'm positive my life would be so much less stressful, that burnout risk would be slim to none...

Apathy at work is only possible if you have a nothing-required job where you can't get fired for not working. It happens, but commonly employers will notice and fire such an employee.

To quote office space:

"That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."

That describes a big chunk of my co-workers when I worked at a Fortune 500. At bigger companies it is unfortunately particularly easy to coast along that way.

It depends on what you mean by apathy. I'd look up the definition for you, but honestly I can't be bothered. Hyuk hyuk.

Anyway: I am incredibly productive in my ops job, where I feel like the platforms I support are largely meaningless and do nothing but drive efficiency to achieve nothing important for no one in particular.

I feel I am driving 'value creation' for people whose wealth is already immeasurable, in a way that it's like it's without beginning or end and perhaps does not even really exist.

Running thousands of watts worth of automated infrastructure capable of serving gigabytes of traffic at sub millisecond latency, over multipath anycast triple redundant n-tier software defined fuckin' whatever, so that your loading spinner shows up bit faster.

Like a literal hamster wheel.

And all that said I am neither unhappy nor close to burn out. I have absolutely no passion for my job, but I do for the things that it allows me to do. Work is always, for everyone involved, a means to an end:

For the company, that end is whatever it is producing, widgets for the widgetless, convincing people that widgetlessnes is terrible, tracking widget purchases to better market more advanced widgets to those that desire them, or whatever.

For me, it is my salary: The thing in life that grants me the affordance to do what it is that I actually want to do. That which I have pathos for, it could be.

Honestly, a lot of people I deal with are the same: If they could leave their nine-to-five in tech and make an equivalent living doing interpretive dance or painting while doing handstands or competing in spoken-word free-verse poetry competitions, y'know, the thing it is that they want to do that is worth absolutely nothing to anyone else, they probably would. I would write bad novels from the back corner of a dimly lit cocktail bar.

I can't do that for a salary anything near like what I make now, so I do it in my free time.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

This isn't on topic, but assuming you were serious about writing novels in your free time - I enjoyed this comment so much I read it several times, and probably will come back and read it again at some point in the semi-distant future. You have a wonderful way with words.

I was serious about the writing and the cocktail bar.

I owe you a heartfelt thank-you: It plainly and honestly brings me an incredible happiness when people compliment my writing.

Well, fwiw, I had the same reaction. You made me laugh and at the end I thought, that was a damn well-written HN comment.

For what it's worth, I screenshotted your comment to send to some friends before I'd even gotten to the part where you mentioned that you write.

> I have absolutely no passion for my job

Are you talking about the job itself, or the thing being produced?

I don't care about the products my company makes, and I think that's a good thing, at least for me. When I've cared deeply about the actual thing being made in the past, that led to emotional attachment, which sucks when your idea doesn't win. It also led me to tend to bias effort towards my own particular hobby-horse, instead of what the data or the plan told me.

Now, the job itself is different - I care what activities I spend my time doing and who I do it with. Make me do things that bore me, and I will eventually do a bad job, because I'm a bit undisciplined. And shitty or incompetent people will chase me off faster than anything else except obvious management disfunction.

I don't care about either of those things.

I'm an internet plumber, or maybe a computer mechanic. I keep the lights on the a/c working, and it's not for me to question wherefore.

I do my job and do it well because if I'm doing it I may as well do it right, but that's a philosophy for life in general.

Nah, sounds like you're doing fine.

I'd point out that (IMO) you feel like you DO provide value, that you are good at what you do, recognized for it, and there aren't active negatives in your work environment. All that's lacking is a meaningful "greater purpose" that results from the value you provide. Which is fine, although may eventually transition to less than fine.

Thanks. I didn't really think I wasn't doing well enough, but affirmation is always welcome.

As for producing value, yeah, I absolutely crush it in terms of value. I'm spitting out value left and right. If you could measure the amount of value I produce, it's an ever growing number, way way way in the black, guys on the stock market floor screaming 'buy buy buy'. Value practically oozes from my pores. If value were electricity, I could power a small city.

Not sure what that means, though.

Sounds like a reasonable quest for Step 2.

(Step 3 is profit)

I just spent a month doing something enjoyable difficult, but that even if I'd succeeded, would not have produced even close to a month's paycheck worth of value. I'd say "trade?" except there's not much upside to offer.

But seriously: Consider "accuracy" versus "precision". Reaching accuracy from precision is calibration; but AFAIK there's no way to reach precision from accuracy.

You're producing value. Now it's just a question of aligning that value with, well, broader value. Which you can take your time to do.

"The problems of these, among other things:

- mixing up burnout risk with burnout

- mixing up burnout with physical or mental fatigue

- not serving any purpose (i.e. not providing good directions)"

Also I'd argue and add to the list: - not accounting for (undiagnosed) comorbid/latent mental health disorders that affect mood, personality, happiness, well-being in social environments that can cloud your judgement and how you perceive your job w.r.t. the signals that generally predict burnout (e.g. clinical depression, panic attack/anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, etc)

This resonates with me a lot, but are these just your own observations or conclusions supported by directly research? (if so, any chance you could share the sources?)

The book "Tribal Leadership" summarizes that scale nicely.

Also, sharing your data with who?

The major part of burnout is thus caused by HR. HR directs that the way teams are evaluated is that they are compared to one another, and it is mandatory that one team be rated over another team which creates an us vs them mentality. Then members of the team must be evaluated against one another again with one person rated above another which creates a me vs them mentality. If you are rated down, your going to believe that the person doing the rating either can't see that you or your team is working smarter and harder than the rest. They got rated up because they somehow cheated the system and the person who rated them is as stupid as they are. If you or your team are rated first, then obviously they don't work as hard or as smart as you.

This is not how HR departments behave in many companies.

Do these companies retain their employees longer than the companies that do do this?