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Comment by ro_bit | Hacker News Reader

> For those who can afford to quit, claiming burnout may be an effective way to signal one’s essential employability, a way to reassure your future bosses that you will work yourself to the bone for them, too — right after this break.

I'm not a hiring manager, but I'd imagine from the perspective of one that claiming burnout as a reason for leaving actually signifies the opposite - you're unable to manage a proper work-life balance and there's a risk you'll burn out in a new job too.

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That's some grade A victim blaming right there. As if it's the workers fault for not 'maintaining work life balance properly'.

Perhaps but isn't it probable that those doing the hiring will, right or wrong, engage in exactly that type of thinking?

I think you misunderstood the tone of my comment. I'm not saying that that is the case, but that I imagine that kind of victim blaming or whatever you want to call it is what a hiring manager would use with an applicant claiming burnout.

Not sure why we should particularly care what a hiring manager thinks?

What do you think?

Presumably because we want to get hired by that place and what the hiring manager thinks affects our chances of being hired.

Do you want to proceed getting hired at a place which is going to burn you out (y/n)?

Do you need an income (y/n)?

I can't be the only one who hates working for money. Id rather have a healthy goal to work towards, rather than the accumulation of dollars. So many go ideas go to the gutter because they aren't profitable. I think there's more to life than that.

good, you do that and i'll continue to feed myself.

I'd work for food, so we're aren't that dissimilar.

Yes and people have lost track of the value of money.

You can buy valuable things like good health care, living wages, balanced lives, and self respect for employees, fair deals and support for improved lives for customers, a healthier market environment for the planet and future generations. You can buy being the person to make the better world you imagine and make it sustainable to perpetuate that.

These are all for sale and good business practices to boot.

I think it makes sense why one would care about what the hiring manager would think in the context of the quote the original comment includes.

I don't want to be hired by a manager who thinks it is ok to work someone more than 40 hours a week. I make it very clear that I left consulting firm X because of the unreasonable work expectations and that I have no problem working my standard week and overtime when required. But if the base contract is 40 hours a week don't expect me to work 60+ every week.

Were the work hours at the consulting firm made known to you before you joined? Or was it sold as "we occasionally have some crunch times to hit deadlines" and that turned out to be "always."

100% B. I was a senior hire, not a grad. No one at the firm told me at any point during the recruitment that this was what I was signing on for.

Now fair enough I could have checked the /r/consulting sub and found plenty of horror stories, but also I would have asked for more money to reflect the hours worked.

Victims aren't always blameless, you can be your own victim. Most of the times in my career when I was burnt out and working too much it was because I was too emotionally invested in the work, management didn't care about the quality or improving things. Not caring about things beyond my ability to control has been the biggest change I've ever made to my mental health and was almost entirely under my control.

Others will be in very different situations.

Detachment is pragmatic. But I don't blame people for giving a damn. Especially when companies demand the appearance of "passion".

A lot of people create their own problems. They can't deal with the infinite backlog of work that always grows and that is a personal problem. They aren't being asked to work longer or harder they just can't deal with the fact that the amount of TODO work always grows.

The "infinite backlog of work" is the problem. It will be used as an excuse to ding you on your next performance review. Th fact that companies are structured to ensure that there is always too much work for anyone to do is what leads to stress and burnout.

I have an infinite backlog of work, and I leave work at 5pm on Friday and don't even check my work e-mail until 9am on Monday.

I had two stakeholders insist that 3 things all get done by the following Monday; I reported that wasn't going to be possible. They could not agree on priorities, so I sent an e-mail with the order I was going to work on them that went unanswered. The 3rd thing on the list didn't get done. My manager asked me why and I showed the e-mail chain. I got a "good job" and never heard about it again.

I would not have had the confidence to do this even just 10 years ago, and I suspect that the majority of junior engineers feel that way, and would work through the weekend to get everything done.

Whose fault would it be if I hadn't set boundaries and burnt out? I think there's shared blame and it depends on details. In this hypothetical situation, did my manager notice a lot of weekend work happening and check in with me? Perhaps they wouldn't because they expect a senior engineer to handle this balance, but they would have checked on a more junior engineer? Things aren't completely cut and dry.

Infinite backlog is only stressful if you care.

Is there some cosmic law that says it is never an employee's fault for "not maintaining work life balance"?

If you have a manager, it's literally their job to manage your performance as an employee, and that includes your work-life balance. Some managers are bad at their jobs (or belong to organizations which would prefer to burn out their employees or otherwise don't care about work-life balance), but if someone is working too many hours, or not taking enough vacation time, or is burning out because they're overwhelmed by their responsibilities or lack of support (either perceived or real), it's within their manager's power to identify those issues, and it's generally within the manager's power to fix them.

There's something creepy about deciding that it is someone else's job to manage your work-life balance. Who is better positioned to do that than you?

People have to recognize their limitations and negotiate with their employer to make sure the employer does too. Sure, that requires attentive managers but it also requires employees who don't cede control of their lives to their employer.

It's not creepy for a manager to notice that you are working 12 hours a day and tell you, "Hey, this doesn't seem long-term sustainable. Why don't you scale things back so we have some slack for when a real emergency happens."

Ultimately though, if your workload is too high then a manager is the only person who can relieve that pressure valve, just a little bit. They have the power, which means usually they have to adopt the responsibility (what e.g. Junior IC is going to ask their boss for less work while also going through a rough time?)

Not only do they have the power, relieving/handling that pressure is a good chunk of the very job description. If you are in charge of administering a team of people and you are doing nothing to coordinate their collective and individual workloads, then what exactly are you for?

I see my manager as a "negotiator on behalf of the company" for work life balance.

If I want to change something, I run it past them. If it messes something up they come back and say no and why. And I decide if it is worth it to keep working here. Or between us we come up with something else to keep both parties happy.

At my workplace currently, management is pretty flexible and happy to go through whatever HR paperwork required.

They're not managing your work life balance; they're managing your replacement cost (and their own career). If an employee burns out, it can definitely be a systemic issue, so a domino effect of people quitting or at least low morale.

A major component of management is operational effectiveness and redundancy. If someone burns out and you don't see it, your team is suddenly undersized and you needed to hire (and have a recruiting budget) yesterday.

If in doubt about the cosmic law, there's an actual labour law about managing employee welfare well enough to prevent burnout (phrased as responsibilities for employee health) in a lot of jurisdictions.

Huh? I’ve known 3 people who burned out and every one of them had control over how much work to do and chose to take on an unsustainable amount.

Not saying that’s true in every case, but plenty of workaholics burn themselves out.

Unless they were at the very top of their workplaces' hierarchies, that sounds like whoever was in charge of managing them had abdicated their duty.

One of them decided to spend his evenings working. His manager told him it wasn't required and he'll burn out. He did it anyways and burned out.

There's truth to this though. I am similar to the "friend" OP is referring to (though I do not get miserable at my job). But there's always a point where I experience extreme apathy at work, to the point that it spirals to not working for a day or two. It leads me to either leaving or quitting the company.

I've consulted a psychiatrist because it's clearly a recurring pattern that has fucked up my career progression. I've been told I might have ADHD.

I think the point (for me at least), is that some people aren't just meant to function in a full-time job. A bit of an exaggeration, but I tell myself that by the time that I'm 30, and I still have someone control my pace, schedule, and deadlines, that I'll kill myself (maybe just metaphorically).

Part of the issue is that most people are not able to work an American 40+ hours a week with only 2 weeks vacation, that you may or may not be able to take, and stay in a healthy place psychologically and physically. It just isn't reasonable.

Being a victim doesn't excuse you from accountability. If you leave a laptop in your car in a shady neighborhood and find it was stolen, that was your fault and you bear the blame for not having common sense. Similarly, we all have the responsibility to take care of our own health and do some learning around what that entails. Suggesting otherwise is infantilization and implies that some entity out there is responsible for our safety and mistakes, not us.

This holds a lot of truth. Look at your friends who are miserable in their jobs. Even when they move to a new job they remain miserable. At some point it becomes clear that some people are just always miserable. Burnout is a natural result of their personality. For many, proper mental health treatment can reverse the tide and allow them to live happy lives while working.

There’s a lot of wisdom here.

As a habitual burnout, there is some truth to this. For me, the solution to wanting to quit whatever job I had after 2 or 3 years turned out to be starting my own consultancy. Controlled burns are sort of built-in to consulting since you end up with a new client every 8 months or so anyway.

And yet, many companies offer what amounts to an absolutely abusive environments, and it'd be nice if we could stop blaming people for the fact that their places of employment are disaster areas.

If you need mental health treatment (that you otherwise wouldn't need) to do your job and not despair? There's a good chance there's something wrong with your job.

Yes, I know many companies are abusive and chaotic. Hopefully those workers are able to seek employment elsewhere even in other countries where workers have more respect if necessary.

And sadly there are some people who can't effectively be treated because inside they don't actually want to get better. There is a very good chance that a person miserable at their job could forget about moving to a new job and just quit, have all their needs taken care of to a high standard of living, and still be completely miserable.

How much are we talking about? The chance I mean

You know that's a decent question. If I had the time to do some research I'd look at them and point you to a bunch of studies comparing reported levels of mental health among retirees and maybe ideally some insights on how people in the FIRE movement feel after accomplishing their goal and not working anymore. Then you could have the concrete statistics you seem to want.

What I'd totally expect to find is that, even moreso than old people retiring and feeling a sense of meaninglessness, people who stop working while they're still in their prime working years will grow listless because we're meant to do more, we're meant to take on challenge, maybe even a sacrifice. That the same inner and outer factors that make us depressed at our jobs are actually just also making us depressed generally and reflect an inner pathology where we view ourselves as hopeless, inferior, lost or stuck.

But the info really isn't coming to me at a glance, I don't have time to really do that research, and I don't think I'd be any happier if I did. Unless someone else with the free time and scientific literacy to peruse to a week-old post comes by and contributes the data with a decisive percent chance to this discussion, you either trust my intuition that there's a substantial but hard-to-nail down effect where we're miserable on account of more than our jobs and an unspecified "many" could have all our needs met but still be miserable because you feel what I'm talking about too, or you have your own intuition about the nature of our sense of well-being and work and want to question it. Given a quick glance at your post history you seem like a well-intentioned firebrand of a libertarian who gets downvoted a lot, and I can respect you for that.

I 100% sincerely hope you and everyone else on here reading this has an absolutely fantastic day.

My friends have been miserable in their jobs when their jobs have been miserable.

A lot of jobs are miserable; if someone moves to a new job and is also miserable there, I wouldn't assume that the fault lies with the person from a sample size of two.

I agree though that for many people their situation could be improved by the assistance of a mental health professional. But that doesn't mean that their problems are all caused internally and aren't to some degree a product of their work environment.

I agree. There are two sides here. Managers with mental health issues (ego / lack of empathy) will make their subordinates miserable.

This point also makes me wonder if habitual burnouts are poor at evaluating potential managers during the interview process and as a result end up burning out repeatedly.

Being not very good at evaluating potential managers could be part of it, but also people with less work experience or fewer in-demand skills can't always afford to be choosy about their employer.

> Look at your friends who are miserable in their jobs. Even when they move to a new job they remain miserable.

Quite the opposite for me. I was miserable in my first job. Not a single day where I wanted to go to work. After 4 years I quit and everyone told me that I need to change my attitude, and that all jobs are like this.

They. Were. Completely. Wrong.

I was very happy with my next job.

My 3rd job sucked (for different reasons). I wasn't anywhere near burnout, but my first two jobs taught me one thing: Life is too short to stay at a job that sucked. I moved on to the 4th job which ended up being awesome.

If you're miserable at your job, it may not be you - even if everyone around you thinks it is.

This XKCD is very relevant:

https://xkcd.com/1768/

I think that's a little too much victim blaming. It's true that some people are more susceptible to burn out. But having been in the workplace for almost 30 years now (ouch!) I think the modern work environment is much more set up to take advantage of people than it used. When I started out, working times were pretty fixed and once you were home you were home and no work was done. These days you have to make an effort to disconnect from work in the evening and in many companies there is a lot of subtle pressure to constantly respond to E-mails or other messages, even during nights and vacation.

So yes, people should resist more but the system is more and more stacked up to take advantage of people's weaknesses. And blaming it on the employees is the same strategy fast food or tobacco companies are using. Yes, you can resist but you are up against a lot of well paid people who constantly try to hack your psychology to make you do the things they want you to do, even if it's harmful to you.

The simple solution is to not tell the hiring manager that you burned out. They don't need to know exactly why you left your job. Hell you don't really have to tell them you are unemployed.

If you leave a long gap in your resume they will be curious of course. Say you quit to pursue a self-employment opportunity and it didn't work out.

"Say you quit to pursue a self-employment opportunity and it didn't work out."

That assumes you get a chance to explain.

A lot of time your resume will just go in the trash as soon as they see a big gap in your work history.

And if you do get a chance to say you were pursuing some self-employment opportunity in the gap, that'll rarely be good enough, because what most hiring managers want to see that you kept your skills up to date in the interim and continued to do something related to your field (which people who are burnt out are unlikely to do). Otherwise you're going to fall behind... at least in the tech field.

Other things that matter are:

- how long were the gaps?

- how frequent were the gaps?

- how long did you work at each of your jobs?

If the gaps are long and/or the jobs are short, they're red flags. It doesn't mean you won't get hired, or won't get an interview, but every red flag lowers your chances.

With each gap you're digging yourself deeper and deeper in to a hole that will be progressively harder to climb out of.

My advice is to switch careers as soon as possible.. the longer you wait the harder it'll be. Your choice of alternate career doesn't have to be perfect, and it doesn't have to be "your calling" (often people don't even know their calling until they try it). It's important to try, and maybe try a whole bunch of different stuff until you find a good fit, and not to just languish and rot.

Easier said than done for someone suffering from burnout.. but that's the way out instead of sinking further in.

Of course breaks, therapy, and medication work for some, and I hope they work for you.

Answer: fill the gap in your resume with "consultancy work". You can even take the occasional easy freelance gig to make it true.

Well I think point was to avoid gap in resume`. How are we to know that hiring manager take it negatively? Honestly I would have thought hiring manager will appreciate the fact that I spoke real reason for leaving last job.

Maybe they could just check on specific skills they are looking to hire for. They can check if one is reasonably updated on recent industry/technology trends.

But if hiring folks are really hell bent on finding real reason on why I left the job and not working for last few years, I guess there is no practical way to escape out of it.

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