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Comment by emdowling | Hacker News Reader

I’m 32 and can absolutely relate to this, especially with COVID. I work for a FAANG, and the pressure to perform has increased significantly while working from home. It feels relentless, and the lack of in-person social contact with colleagues makes it worse. I know remote working is all the rage right now, but the lack of all in-person engagement has had a hugely negative impact on me and led to feelings of burn out.

Layered on top of that is an inability to escape with now. My family all live overseas, where it isn’t practical to visit them, and holidays are a complex nightmare right now.

I’m incredibly fortunate to have a job during a pandemic-induced recession, but man am I feeling exhausted.

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Sometimes it feels like the managers have to flex just to show that they’re not losing control. We had an extra project to do during lockdown on Covid modeling, on top of everything else, as if we weren’t tired enough.

Let them do the work then!

Chapter 2 of “The Clean Coder” is about 4 minutes read and is the best answer i know of to this common dilemma.

Too many companies are using Covid as excuse to do what they've always wanted to do and not get scrutinised for it.

I'll bet your company won't stop running some kind of extra project or workload even after all this is over, it'll just become the new normal.

For us, we're on "50%" across two projects (some on "33%" across three projects) which all have full time loads, expectations and deadlines.

> For us, we're on "50%" across two projects (some on "33%" across three projects) which all have full time loads, expectations and deadlines.

This. Not only the number of developers on our project was halved, but also all who remained are now expected to work 50% on another project. Sometimes the other project is a small one, but it still distracts a lot to have two Jiras to follow, two daily standups, two sets of planning meetings, etc. Twice the number of managers, but half of teammates. Agile be praised!

Seems to me that a frequent reason to start new projects is a change in management. Essentially, a new manager gets more credit for starting a new project than for maintaining the old one. So a new project is started, even if it does more or less the same thing as the old one. But the old project also must be maintained, because it is necessary to keep the company running, and it will take a few months, maybe years, until the new project can reliably replace its entire functionality. Plus there is the third project, because you sometimes also need to actually create something new.

Many decisions in corporations start making sense when you ask yourself "how would this be described on my manager's CV". Then you realize that the actually useful work would sound completely boring. But those things that drive you crazy, the change for change's sake, they usually can be described as "brave technological leadership" or whatever are the right buzzwords. And this is once-in-a-lifetime chance to get the "brave technological leadership in the middle of COVID-19 pandemic" achievement, so everyone runs like crazy to grab it.

Most of us already recognize it when developers try to do something in order to boost their CVs. "Let's (re)write this in the Newest Framework, preferably also in the Newest Programming language! There is no business reason to do that, and maybe the newest technologies are still full of bugs and miss many important features, but hey, a year or two later when the technology matures enough and the market is full of well-paying jobs, I will be the one who has a year or two of experience in my CV." The secret is, successful IT managers have been already playing this game for a long time.

Damn! This hit home. Not 32, yet. But I can totally see what the OP is saying.

> It feels relentless, and the lack of in-person social contact with colleagues makes it worse

Yup, every meeting seems like people just going on and on, every conversation seems grim and people are always doing something on their laptop while you're talking.

The things which have helped me: 1. Morning walks, I was slowly falling into the cycle of waking up and opening up my laptop 10 to 15 mins later. Now I make it a point to just go for a walk for 30 mins, sometimes I'll get a coffee, I'll listen to music, talk to friends/relatives in a different time zone, etc.

2. Evening workouts. Especially outside for me. Join a gym, cross fit class, something. If you're not comfortable going to public places, I've had some friends who've had some success with the peleton bike, so it might be worth looking into.

3. Not having alcohol readily accessible. Having cold beers in the fridge, makes me wanna have a beer or 2 every evening. I just cut out keeping beers in the fridge and only put them in if friends are coming.

4. Meeting friends/acquaintances/colleagues. Make plans once a week, meet other people who you trust outside of work setting. Try to avoid discussing work and talk about anything else. In my experience the conversation doesn't need to be deep, but I feel much better after meeting and speaking to someone.

all four of these points are pretty helpful, healthy ideas. get outside and get moving, get some exercise, make it hard or impossible to drink by default, cultivate a social life separate from work.

another suggestion: if you've got a dedicated work laptop, when it's time to clock off, pack the thing away and stow it until it's work time again.

> I know remote working is all the rage right now, but the lack of all in-person engagement has had a hugely negative impact on me and led to feelings of burn out.

It's worth keeping in mind remote work doesnt normally require this sort of isolation. I'm normally able to see friends more often since i'm not stuck commuting.

But people at faang work so hard and have every social interaction including meals and sports on campus. So that is gone now. If you are an expat chances are your social life more or less revolves around your workplace anyway. So if you have to work from home that def. can be hard on you, even or especially with the extra time off, which you can spend in your cramped and expensive 1-bedroom.

I work for a FAANG in the UK and have not had the same experience, they have been very accommodating generally. Perhaps different teams within your company are different and you could look at moving? Hope things work out for you.

FAANG Europe and FAANG US can be quite different in terms of culture and work-life balance, due to the different cultures of people in Europe vs the US.

The expat thing is definitely real, as if your whole social circle revolves around people you met at work, you'll probably work more.

But yeah, there's substantial inter-team variance within FAANG so might be worth looking for a better fit for you.

Are you less able to tell what everyone else's performance looks like since you've all been physically isolated? I'm wondering whether it's recessionary pressure or whether they're exploiting the information asymmetry and implying everyone you're competing with is suddenly way more productive than they actually are.

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