Burnout from an Organizational Perspective | Hacker News Reader

Burnout from an Organizational Perspective

ssir.org

198 pointsrustoo94 comments

The article actually doesn’t tell the true horror of the situation which is this: Companies burn out employees and then deal with the consequences by firing them or bullying them into quitting. Employees lie about how their last job ended and limp into the next one, using the unemployment gap to recover as best they can.

+1 so true. Even companies with good intentions can tend to lead employees to burnout.

Companies that use the: recruit a lot of people, burn out most, rinse and repeat strategy are fairly easy to identify.

As an employee you should have your eyes open about this but it’s not necessarily the case that they should be avoided at all costs. Properly used, time at one of these companies can change the trajectory of your career. Depending on where you are in life that can be worth it.

Having a time boxed plan makes it more likely you can survive the experience with your health and sanity intact.

But, we as a community should get better at calling these companies out publicly. Especially if they show up in a comment on the monthly hiring post. Don't let your fellow engineers get burnt. More community cooperation in this regard would go a long way.

You don’t need to go public, companies that relying on burning people out simply deserve zero respect from their employees.

Remember as critical as everything seems it’s no longer your problem once you move on. Sure, moving on to your next job might seem to be leaving them in a lurch, but lack of redundancy isn’t your problem.

PS: The best thing you can do for your teammates in that situation is convince them to find a better job.

Cancel culture doesn't have to be used for everything (and IMO should not be used for _anything_). Mob justice won't fix the company, and if the company is big enough (perhaps some SV companies who shall not be named), it won't have any real effect. Burnout is often an acceptable "work hazard" for the CV reputation gained. A good parallel to this is finance where burnout is practically built into the program. Medicine also crosses my mind when thinking of fields where burning yourself out could, counter-intuitively, be considered highly beneficial as a long term play.

Outlets for this already exist in the form of Glassdoor but much like every other review service once it reaches scales the usefulness of the reviews falls precipitously.

You also open yourself up to libel claims. Assuming your canceling actually works I would not be surprised if the company spent significant effort to take you to court and financially ruin you. Even more so if the accusations aren't entirely true (perhaps it's just one division and not the entire company).

Instead, it's probably more useful to _train_ people to notice these things and ascertain the risks. Burnout can often be worth it if the net-gain-after-burnout improves your prospects to advance in your field, confers a pedigree, or any other number of small things. Returning to the finance example this is certainly why people risk it. At the end of the day, in the US at least, a little over half of the states in the union are right-to-work. This is the safety valve for companies who deliberately churn employees - just leave. Ideally after you've already lined up a new gig in your field.

Easy to identify? What are the signs, save for things you could only be told by a friend on the inside?

High turnover, especially if there’s a big peak at 2-3 years of experience.

For mid-career professionals, you should be able to tell this from your second or third degree network on LinkedIn or similar. For students, you should be suspicious of any company that’s hiring a lot of fresh grads unless they are gigantic (in which case, consult the alumni whisper network).

Cerner in KC is like that. Grab all the college grads, burn them to death for 3 to 4 years, cull the herd.

https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/cerner-layoffs-part-of-...

Here is example of the culture: https://www.bizcominthenews.com/files/cerner-1.pdf

that would be from then-CEO Neal Patterson, from Wikipedia :

Patterson is infamous for an email[7] scolding managers for not coming to work before 8 am and leaving before 5 pm, now a prominent example used when discussing email netiquette. On the day that the email was posted to Yahoo!, the company's market cap fell by over 22%[8] from a high of US$1.5 billion.[9]

[7] "BBC News - AMERICAS - Boss's e-mail bites back". BBC. Archived from the original on February 8, 2009.

[8] ..

[9] Flynn, Nancy; Kahn, Randolph (2003). E-mail Rules: A Business Guide to Managing Policies, Security, and Legal Issues for E-mail and Digital Communication. AMACOM Div American Mgmt Assn. p. 45. ISBN 9780814471883. netiquette.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Patterson

This is highly sector dependent. I've worked at startups for almost my entire career and a big peak of leaving engineers at 2-3 years wouldn't even cause me any concern. In the 10 years in industry I've worked I'd argue the average engineer leaves around the 5 year mark. This typically coincides with a failed seed round or reaching a terminal title (senior, staff, etc) and not being able to go further.

The fresh grads case is a good point. The one company I left fairly quickly was almost entirely powered by intern/junior labor. Seniors left quickly due to a combination of bad management, low advancement opportunities, and constantly having to re-train people. This, I think, is worth looking out for.

If they are specifically recruiting people from out of town, they are most likely doing so to get away from the existing whisper network.

That is one thing we are going to be writing extensively about regarding remote jobs in the coming years.

This. And when they burn you out and you have no support network or family and programming jobs in the area are all full of programmers who got fired from X, because you moved there.

Lucasfilm tried to recruit me once-- which would have been my dream job-- but couldn't match what I was being paid in Orange County. The recruiter actually tried to convince me my housing costs would be less in the bay area. I had family in the bay area and they all confirmed that Lucas was a notorious abusive employer.

I had a similar thing with Dreamworks-- they best offer they could make was 25k less than I was making at the time.

Hiring loads and loads of fresh grads and then making your campus feel just like college so your amenities can trick them into working 60-hour weeks.

For small companies, I feel like checking out how many people used to work there(and when they left) on LinkedIn vs. how old the company is works as a really great metric. If you’re looking at a 100 person company that appears to have more former engineers than a 500 person company in the same timeframe… we’ll just leave it at that.

Every one of your interviewers says they have great work life balance while looking like an extra from a zombie movie. Dark circles around the eyes, bags underneath.

To be fair, in my case that’s because I play computer games until 2am, nothing to do with my job that ends at 6pm.

That's what the "every single one" qualifier is for :)

One is how much they expose you to the team you will join / consistency of information about the size / location / roles within the team during the interview process.

I once joined a team that had 40% sustained turnover for the 5 years I stayed on. I only stayed because they basically golden handcuffed me.

Despite interviewing with 6-7 different individuals 1-on-1, only 2 of them were actually future team mates.

By the time I joined, I discovered that on my team of 5: - manager had joined weeks before interviewing me, replacing the long time team lead who had been fired - 2 guys were being fired & I was to take on their responsibilities along with the other guy they just hired (who was a flake, so I took on 2 jobs within 3 months) - I was the first person to sit in-office, the rest were remote, this meant a disproportionate support burden went to me immediately despite being new and not knowing the platform

It was also the first place I ever worked where it was normal for people to get fired in their first year. Not sure how you ask about that in an interview though, lol.

> It was also the first place I ever worked where it was normal for people to get fired in their first year. Not sure how you ask about that in an interview though, lol.

There is a way, actually.

One of the things you want to ask when joining a non-tiny company is about the overall retention figures. Average/median tenure is a good start, especially coupled with a question on what the company does with their exit interview data. You could also ask for a rough bucketing on the tenure: how many people stay beyond 1y/3y/5y.

It's going to be a rare company who can (or will) share even semi-accurate figures, but you should be able to get a decent grip on the fractions. Also, if those in the company who are supposed to know this are evasive about the question, that's a red flag all on its own right.

I hope all people start asking such questions. It will bring more accountability and will make it difficult for toxic companies to hide their issues.

Maybe candidates can start asking for a company's "resume"?

This happened to me at the last job, and I've commented something similar once: the interview experience and the first couple of month experiences were so different I've got no qualms saying it straight up: I felt lied to.

On top of joining a team that felt completely bootstrapped and thrown together for my arrival and included ZERO engineers with domain knowledge or familiarity on the system they had just been pulled off of systems they'd built and maintained for the last several years to this new team I was hired into, two people left within the first two months, another got fired due to ongoing and apparently continued behavioral issues, and a third appeared on my team out of nowhere. Got pulled into a zoom call one day "So and so works for you now" and that was it.

All of this after an interview process where I was assured: "these guys have been working on this since inception".

The place was absolutely bonkers compared to the interview, and I thought I had done a pretty decent job peeling the layers of filibustering answers when I would inquire about things like turnover, team sizes, promotions and firings, open positions/how long they'd been open et al. Or at least the recruiter I worked with leading up to getting an offer letter was more than forthcoming and transparent about this stuff....

...except THAT person ended up quitting two weeks before I did.

I was interviewed at a place we all have heard of, talked first to the hiring manager over the phone. It went well, so we scheduled an in person interview a week later. When I got there, I asked hey where is the hiring manager that I talked to? The answer was: well he got into a disagreement with the CEO (whose name rhymes with Dion) and he no longer works here. What a first red flag!

There’s tournament model and then there’s just straight up dysfunctional.

i would ask what is their opinion regarding overtime. it’s a good measure of toxicity if overtime is expected (excluding emergencies), whether it is paid or not.

I find that Blind discussions are pretty representative, but it's mostly abour larger companies. For every Amazon there are hundreds of smaller companies.

I was working at such a place when the 2008 recession happened. That was brutal. I still have health issues from that experience.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Your plans to get out quick may run into economic epicycles and then your clever plan ain’t so clever.

I had a similar experience at the same time.

Yup.... for me it was Amazon. And I was in H-1B back then, so I just put it up with it for a while, until the economy improved. The company had such a weird culture. It was pretty stressful.

The most insidious thing they did was delay the green card application as much as they could, and just drag things out on purpose. Since I am Albanian/European, I could get it faster as my country is not on the per country cap that Indian and Chinese applicants are. They knew it, as they kept dragging out the first stages of the applications on everything. It was mental abuse.

By 2011, the economy was recovering, and I did switch, but I had to redo all the green card application stuff again.

Not many realize this, but having the green card process drag out long has a detrimental effect on the whole job market, not just for the specific immigrant.

Yes, It creates serfs/indentured servitude. Both the H1B visa and GC application should belong to the worker/applicant, with conditions (as long as they are employed with the given salary, pay taxes, etc...).

The employee should just be able to do the process themselves, and handle it the papers with their own lawyer.

It is clear that the H1B is setup to maximize the benefits to large corps, and not necessary the american economy/people.

It’d be nice if there existed any forum that collected these anecdotes. Glassdoor is heavily censored, teamblind requires tying your identity to the account, etc. Lots of toxic workplaces exist and remain unknown outside of rare Twitter threads.

Easy to indentify because it's all of them. Not everyone burns out at every company and some people really do switch for a better opportunity, but burnout is very common and is everywhere.

This is tricky. I don’t necessarily disagree, but evaluating these things can be more difficult for some people.

For me, it’s very easy for me to get attached because I care about some combination of the problem and the team. I’ve had some major wins improving things in those cases, but I’ve also had some major losses. And it’s very difficult for me to recognize burnout symptoms until they’re severe enough to require extensive recovery time.

Sure, the idea of timeboxing could be useful, but I could also just let that slide given my motivation to improve things. In the end, it’s not worth it to me anymore to put myself in that situation.

> Companies that use the: recruit a lot of people, burn out most, rinse and repeat strategy are fairly easy to identify.

How?

There is a lot of reporting about companies in two areas I am familiar with: video games and entertainment. Both industries are aware that there are a lot of young people really desperate to break into them. Not all companies take advantage of that, but many do.

Some game companies that have only really young workers below senior management and explain this by saying older people don't get what they are doing. They say it quietly, and indirectly because it opens them up to discrimination lawsuits. But what it really means is experienced people aren't putting up with something about the company.. the hours, the management, something. And unfortunately this does not really seem to be an impediment to their success.

I suspect Netflix is one of these companies.

I'd love to work there but I struggle to justify the burnout that will result i'm not 20 anymore.

Maybe I'm strange, but the idea of starting a new job with the intention of quitting doesn't sit right with me. To me, that would be like getting married with the intention of getting a divorce.

I know that realistically, I'm probably going to find a different job at some point, but it's always been a natural progression and not a planned movement.

So every job acceptance has to be accompanied by a lifetime commitment? That sounds even stranger.

Maybe marriage wasn't a good simile...

I've never started a job thinking "I'm going to work here for X years, and then quit (for Y reason)". I've also never started a job expecting to work there for the rest of my career, although I would be happy if it was a good job and I did.

I might end up quitting my current job after a year or two, I might be here 10 years, maybe I'll leave in a casket. I don't have a set date for when I'll quit.

My father has had the same job for over 40 years. He's had different roles (originally a telecommunications rigger, now a network engineer) and worked for different companies (buyouts etc.), but he's never actually had to apply for a new job. He's enjoyed his work and had a good career.

I guess there's not many jobs like that these days though.

I can attest to this from experience. What’s shocking is that I’ve even seen such a company deliberately ignore my mitigation requests, only to fulfill them in my wake when I gave notice.

And it’s not as if my work wasn’t valued, I had just been given a rather significant raise a couple months earlier. As far as I could tell, they were happy to throw money at extracting every bit of value out of me until I was completely empty.

I wonder just how prevalent the pattern of a perpetually burnt-put employee shuffling to job to job like this is. I imagine that some of them simply need a year off away from the world or a lucky break with a good employer to get back into peak form. However, my suspicion is that the majority of them are simply not cut out for the field but insist on staying in because they believe, correctly or not, that it’s the only kind of job that can give worthwhile pay.

(Edit to add) It’s also why I roll my eyes so hard at most of the standard suite of job interview questions. When there is a known and obvious correct answer, all it does is filter out candidates who are too honest to lie, too stupid to know you’re supposed to lie, and candidates who cannot confidently sell a lie.

> simply need a year off away from the world

It's actually really hard (mentally) to do this if you don't already have a shitton of savings in the bank that you're not worried about paying rent, and aren't worried about getting a new job. For a lot of people it's harder than it sounds. But yes, gap years would be amazing.

Another thing I wish was more encouraged is part-time work. Working for a year at maybe 20 hours a week would probably pay all living expenses while you have plenty of space and time to recover and time to spend in the wilderness or beach or whatever strikes your fancy. Everyone seems to want to shovel you in as a full-time employee, and part-time seems to be looked down upon more than it should as a transition and recovery tool.

Part-time employment should also be a key to any discussion on preventing mass unemployment due to automation. Rather than have high-paid salary jobs for the few and UBI for everyone else, normalize part-time work and keep keep more people actively engaged in the economy.

As someone with 20+ experience I can tell you burnout is real. It doesn't make you not cut out for the field. That burnout travels with you.

Burnout doesn't happen everywhere. It tends to happen when bad or inexperience people run projects.

If someone feels like there company is burning them out they probably are. Move on before it eats at you. You cannot change bad management.

> Burnout doesn't happen everywhere. It tends to happen when bad or inexperience people run projects.

Definitely.

I would also add that burnout at least for me is a function of ROI. In my experience, teams are willing to put in crazy hours if doing so regularly results in success and favorable outcomes for them. If you force teams to put in crazy hours and the effort results in failure more than a few times, it decimates morale and very quickly leads to burnout. If you're asking teams to give their all you had better be able to deliver.

IMO burnout comes from failing to ship something worthwhile; the feeling that “despite how hard you worked, it didn’t matter in the end” is at the core of my experience with it.

You find yourself thinking “I was sure that would be good and worked hard, and it turned out not to be. Now I am sure my new project will be good, but how can I know it’s going to go differently”.

I've been here myself, and I've seen it in others.

Having too much responsibility to early in one's career I think is a significant risk factor, especially combined with certain personality types. Moreso if you lack a strong professional network and/or mentorship. This situation is often correlated with clueless and/or ineffective and/or hostile management, which is it self an exacerbating factor.

I don't think it's the only cause, but it's probably a common one.

I think you get to burnout pretty quivk with overwork and no worthwhile ouput, but you can also get there with overwork and good output over a long enough period, too.

It’s not enough for the output to be good; you have to feel like it was worthwhile.

Building and shipping great software that goes on to have few or no users? Burnout.

Building widely used software but you come to believe it does more harm than good? Also burnout.

Avoiding it requires believing in the value of the things you have done; imo overwork can only speed up the process, but will not cause it if you believe in the rightness of what you are doing.

This is almost exactly me right now. I have laughable employment gaps for this reason, and am literally going to limp into my next whenever that is. I let myself be fired when I burnt out at my last one. It's hard to tell what I'm well-suited for though. Only working 6 months every 1.5 years for the same pay as many other things working the whole time isn't too bad though. I'd love to find something I can keep, but I have no idea what an actual lucky break would look like. I look at other potential career choices and they don't really seem that different.

I tend to burnout when there's a conflict between expectations and requirements from management, and lack of agency to actually be as productive as I can be. Also when the work becomes very mundane, or I'm required to respond to customers quickly while trying to meet code related deadlines.

This last time it was most of that, but also I couldn't go to the gym, couldn't engage in my other leisure stuff, couldn't hang out with friends or at a coffee shop, or really do anything but wake up and write fucking react code, and a close friend died. So I just stopped being able to do that and gave up. Best pay I've ever had, don't know what I'm doing next, but I'm bored and almost broke.

You're probably a "No problem!" guy. I actually look for people like you in my own organization because you're trouble, but I'll write this from your perspective.

With your employment history, you'll be very eager to please. You will say "Yes" and "No problem" to anything, which is not a problem, if it's actually not a problem. But this:

> when there's a conflict between expectations and requirements from management, and lack of agency to actually be as productive as I can be.

tells me it is a problem. Your quote is always true in any company. This will always happen. You will always burn out.

Here is what you do. You don't answer "No problem". You answer "Write down exactly what you want and a timeframe when you need it and I'll see if I can deliver". This will do two things:

-50% of your work will disappear. There are many middle managers who just go around delegating, thinking that is their job. In reality this is procrastination and they are useless. They will not even be able to write a spec sheet (look into how a good one looks and demand exactly that). These are the most idiotic projects in the company and now you will not be involved

-the projects that come with a spec sheet have self documenting ~code~ expectations. If you force people to write something down in a specific manner, most will realise their lunacy

Then you communicate. Don't hide anything. Tell everyone involved exactly the ups and downs (this is where lack of agency comes in and where it disappears with competent management. If it's incompetent you'll at least not feel responsible or shame) of the project. This isn't poker.

There. This might be too personal. This might be completely wrong. But please realise that it's you doing this to yourself.

Actually no, this could almost not be further from accurate. I say almost because there was one case where I definitely committed to way too much at once, but I can't think of a way it's generally true. Based on your answer and re-reading my comment, it seems like I could have phrased one bit differently. I meant expectations in terms of software delivery, but requirements more broadly. As in, being expected to complete X, but also being required to do it a noisy office or handle customer support troubleshooting. I think what you're saying is important though, I just happened to read similar advice when I identified that I was doing that to myself years ago. It was no doubt a problem I found myself in, and probably did contribute to burnout the first time, but the bigger issue then was that I was already just staring at my screen hopelessly wondering why I couldn't motivate myself to write html. Happened about 6 months in and that's my going residency so far. Its usually a few months previous to that where a manager makes a huge and arbitrary change even though I've figured out how to be productive by then. Like shuffling all the teams in one case, and putting me (adhd) on customer support.

Apologies, if I had pegged you all wrong.

> manager makes a huge and arbitrary change

This is a violation of agreed upon terms, though. Same as feature creep. Again, most managers are just looking for work theatre, rightfully afraid they'll be found out for the imposters they are.

This behavior is extremely demotivating. "why I couldn't motivate myself to write html." - maybe you are right and you can't write html under these circumstances?

Leave out the adhd, maybe customer support is just something you absolutely do not want to do, so where is the motivation supposed to come from?

Thank you, this post gave me something to chew on.

I'm not sure, I think this is ungenerous and cynical. I think if you were to seriously evaluate people on a large scale for burn out, you would find that it is more common, across more professions, than is commonly accepted.

There is probably a bottom tier of practitioners who are marginal, and their successes will be more randomly distributed due to fortunate or unfortunate circumstances. The unfortunate people in this group will be difficult to distinguish from the incapable-but-hanging-on-anyway.

That said, I suspect that there is also not that much difference between the symptoms of being burned out and of never having been capable in the first place. I also am not convinced that all burn-out is reversible. Even if you recover your full mental and emotional strength, the experience of deep burn-out can really change a person. You can never get back time that you lose.

Having gone through two of these (one shorter and the recent one much larger), I think the best thing anyone can do for themselves is make a "break glass in case of burnout" plan where they save up margin during the good times so that when the famine hits part of the stress isn't the painted-in-corner feeling of "I need a break but have no margin to take one"

Ultimately the answer is always simple and involves protracted rest - deload, de-stress as much as possible, and recover. 6 months preferred, but 12 months for major crisis' is nice to have in your back pocket.

A very good point. Having the freedom to quit at any time without completely jeopardizing one's finances is liberating.

I was talking with a friend about this the other week. Fairly close to retirement, I gather financially comfortable, and they like where they are but they're also in sort of an unusual position and have been through a couple of organizational changes.

I was struck when they told me they felt really liberated because they could honestly tell managers when various shuffling was going on that, if it made more sense for them to go somewhere else, they were perfectly cool with that.

somehow that's judged by paper pushers, bean counters and hr. how do you answer questions on gaps in your CV?

You were working as an independent consultant.

I'm not even sure you need to pretend you were working. Especially mid-career, taking 6 to 12 months off to consider your options, do some learning, etc. isn't something I would think twice about as an employer.

"gaps in your resume" is actively used to cover over-40 hiring discrimination in tech jobs

Fair enough for some situations. I guess it helps that I've never had a job since school where I came in through HR as opposed to someone I knew.

Well, if you can avoid it, I wouldn't recommend full-on unemployment unless the situation is really that bad. Work provides an intrinsic sense of daily purpose and routine that does help with psychological recovery, regardless of how one feels about it in the middle of burnout.

A part-time schedule could always be part of the burnout plan. Or a planned sabbatical. Like I said, do the creative thinking now so it's not when you're in the firefight.

I've done this a few times and never had a problem.

I put my time off front and centre. I learned Spanish, worked on side projects, taught myself self-reliance and the ability to overcome obstacles, etc. etc.

As someone that has been unemployed for 6 months, dealing with burnout, I was tremendously grateful that a younger me saved and lived well below my means.

I was mocked for going to a state school, mocked for driving a 10 year old car, mocked for living in a cheaper home and now told I am lucky and privileged to be able to take time off to deal with burnout. Ok. Sure.

No matter how you live or what you think, half the internet hates you.

Months of meditation helped me realize I can be happyand avoid stress by not caring so much about other people's opinions of how my life is wrong.

Was just told the other day I should get a better car. I 'deserve' it, as my Ford Focus... "that's a car for college kids... you deserve better". (I'm mid 40s, fwiw). My wife and I have lived mostly at or below our means for a while now. Years ago I got in to some bad debt and it took years to work out of. Kept working out of it, and now have... a lot (relatively speaking).

I'm burned out, and I need some time 'off'. My wife injured herself about 18 months ago and can't work anymore (well, nowhere near what she could, so she's effectively 'retired' at this point). I feel like I can't really be 'off', but realistically speaking, we have... probably 2-3 years of 'runway' of regular monthly expenses available, plus moderately adequate savings. This shouldn't be a problem. Forcing myself to do it is the problem.

But yeah, I have got the joking/mocking (good natured, usually), but the savings are real. I actually feel guilty at this point that I could just take off some months and coast (even though I don't) because I know there's people that can't. And I used to be one of them. It's hard to adjust to 'enough' when you spent a long time without enough.

I mean, also, getting a new car is all fun and games for a month, and then you only notices the flaws, and then it’s just your car, and then you’ll need to buy a car of the same expensive class the next time (I saw my in-laws buy a new luxury 7-seater SUV to replace their 7-seater SUV even though their kids have been gone for 10 years and they have zero grand kids, I know the feeling), which ups your spending. It’s much more liberating to know you can get the hell out if you want to because you saved enough money, and it also reduces your stress levels.

My previous team apparently consisted mostly of people who didn't have that option - at least that's what I gathered from conversations and the reactions to my resignation, one of them specifically saying that "quitting like this is a luxury that only people with sizeable savings can afford".

I've found that it's hard to grow professionally if your focus is on getting through the month on your engineer salary.

Applies to any level of income, but is especially hard when you need a good job to sustain yourself.

My parents have never bought a new car, and I've followed in their footsteps. Unless there's financial benefits (tax writeoffs etc.) there's absolutely no reason to buy a new car. The minute you drive out of the dealership, your car loses a quarter of its value.

My current car is old enough to vote. But maintenance is cheap and its comfortable to drive. Why would I buy a newer and more expensive car?

I got rid of a 14 year old car and replaced with a 2 year old car. I think there's some potential benefits to newer cars - better safety standards, better gas mileage, generally newer little luxuries (rear camera, bluetooth, better lights, etc).

By 10+ years old on that car, I was starting to have to do non-zero-cost maintenance (above oil change, etc), so having a newer car will remove those costs (and annoyances) at the cost of a bit more up front now. Small, calculated tradeoffs, I guess.

But in the discussion with the guy I referenced above, he's... a car salesman. Part time. But he's sold enough that he can 'borrow' any car he wants, and constantly rotates through phenomenally nice/upscale cars. He has a hard time imagining have to go back to driving 'dumpy, low-end' cars like my Focus. I have a hard time imagining going back to 'check to check' living and always being behind on bills. He's not necessarily in that situation, but I know him well enough to know he doesn't have 3 years of expenses saved up.

I'd really like to develop better abilities to identify and prevent burn out my self. I thought I was just too dumb to keep up. Too lazy to keep focused. It wasn't that, constant quotes that didn't land, unhappy clients and extreme hours that resulted in unhappy management due to the project being over due. Hard work over a long time with nothing but negative feedback left me so drained I was very unproductive, embarrassingly so. I thought I'd never be a good developer but a change in jobs instantly changed that. Long hours, harder work but loads of positive feedback. All of a sudden I could focus all day, learn quicker and get so much work done. I thought I had more self control but it turns out I require certain things from my environment to perform.

This really resonates with me. When I was just starting out, I was assigned a mentor- a senior dev who refused to pair with me, who would ghost me for days at a time, always promising that "even though he was busy now, he'd get in touch with me this afternoon" and then vanish until I'd ping him after stand up the next day, where he would make the same promise. All the while, I'd try hard to learn the codebase and fix bugs without help (fairly difficult for a brand new, fresh out of college grad) but without help from my assigned mentor, all I got was shame and derision in stand ups for not producing enough and for "being afraid to ask for help" (no one really believed that such an amazing senior dev would refuse to give me the time of day). This convinced me I was stupid, that I couldn't be a good developer, and that I should go back to QA. Burned out and dejected, I gave my manager a heads up, put in for a transfer to another team as a QE, and tried to deal with the heart-crushing reality that I was too stupid to learn something new and that I needed to go back to what I was at least marginally acceptable at.

Turns out, my request to change teams was approved but my request to change positions was denied and they kept me as a junior dev. But this time, my team actually responded to me. I found a senior dev who not only didn't mind answering questions, but he actively got excited when I'd reach out for help because in his eyes, I wasn't a nuisance, I was proactive. And it was infectious. All of a sudden, instead of dreading going to work or getting a ticket assigned to me, I got excited! I learned more in just a week with that new mentor than I had in three months with my old team. I never became a 10x rockstar code god, but I learned to love my job and found out a lot about myself. I didn't realize it before all this, but apparently I'm the kind of person who needs something from my team too.

Wow that sounds very similar to the culture I was in juniors were left to flail and management was bitter at their lack of performance. No mentoring existed. I think largely because management there were extraordinary developers that didn't need a lot mentorship themselves, or maybe after a few decades had forgotten the amount of input they had.

The attitude at the company I'm at now is amazingly different. The owner is trying to step back so he sees his most valuable work to be mentoring and teaching. The result is a company that can't stop growing. Everyone is developing their skill set and taking on new responsibility's.

I think the previous companies management took on so much of the day to day work they had little time for themselves let alone training others. They're genuinely brilliant and harder working than anyone I've met but just didn't build people.

Ah yeah, I worked at a place that had a clearly-communicated "sink or swim" approach. The stress level was pretty high the entire time I worked there. The stressfulness of the environment was exacerbated by them letting people go without either a) clearly communicating where people were falling short, or b) providing any resources whatsoever to help people grow/improve. The employee handbook they provided to staff was a 1-page PDF that said "DO IT". I'm not joking nor exaggerating - this was sent out after staff asked for any sort of employee handbook because they kept getting reprimanded for things they didn't know were expectations/rules.

Not only does it make all the difference when you actually support your employees, it's also the law in many regions. Needless to say, I am always extremely appreciative of employers that support their team and help them grow.

The bus factor has a lot to do with this imo. Every startup I have worked for lets middle managers hold a ton of information and power. Middle managers at companies with a high turnover rate tend not to trust engineers too much if at all, and startups usually have high turnover rates. This results in toxic relationships between engineers and managers. It's hard to get motivated at work when someone is -virtually or literally- looking over your shoulder all the time, second guessing everything you do, and delaying processes by withholding technical knowledge.

In some cases, this ultimately results in what I call the "empty desk syndrome". This is when you visit your new employer's offices, and most desks are empty because a wave of employees just left or was fired. The cycle repeats indefinitely, with you becoming part of the next wave.

The best way to deal with burn out is to start offering a 4 day week imo.

I recently launched https://4dayweek.io to help normalise this - Software jobs with a better work / life balance

I find that about a 30-35 hour work week is ideal for me. I have kids, a house, a social life, juggling all of that is challenging and working straight 8-10 hour days just leaves everything else to fall out in the mix. Even though I didn’t like working from home all day every day, the pandemic added some slack to the 40 hour work week. I wish I could get that slack back while being in the office, because I do believe there is a productivity multiplier to being in person.

I would take 50% paycut to get 3 day week, but it is quite hard with constantly evolving SaaS devops.

Moreover teams and dev work are micromanaged these days so much with n-th incarnation of "Agile" and Slack 24/7 presence that it is nearly impossible to get a week of autonomy and hyperfocused deep cave work. I know communication is important, but frequent interruption and progress reporting is killing my productivity and creativity. I feel like drone gluing mudballs to bring some success to daily sprint standup confessional.

Anyway, I'm looking around for greener pastures.

I feel this. I feel even less autonomy with the advent of slack and always on communication tools, and it has hurt my productivity. And then when I try to say I'm going heads down to get things done I'll get pinged anyway with claims of a manufactured "emergency". We don't write medical software and hell we haven't even released yet, there is no such thing as an emergency! I work in consulting so the usual excuse is always, "But a client demo" which in my head just means management setting poor expectations.

This, and even when not pinged, only keeping Slack open 9-5 makes me stay constantly alert and anxious of some fallout from management meetings.

I had to reply to this because I’ve been feeling this very heavily the last few years. Not sure what to do about it either because it feels like it’s everywhere.

Specifically “Agile”, the lack of autonomy, and the standup confessional.

I can appreciate communicating and keeping everyone on the same page. At some point though, we’re going to have to realize we’re all professionals and we can trust people to do their jobs.

I literally would kill people if it meant I could spend a whole, single, uninterrupted day, just working on tickets.

You can if you just do it in reverse order?

Right? I know a couple people who have made a 3-day work week a requirement for them to take a role. It makes the job hunt a bit harder, but all I've heard back is "it's 100% worth it" in terms of pursuing this and holding your ground on it.

This is a great initiative. I hope the next phase of the website also has job openings for non-technical positions. All the best for this great initiative :)

Better write an article "Burnout From an Geographical Perspective"

In the western Europe, software developers are making so little money, they are literally "working for food". There is no other place on planet with a worse TECH-JOB-SALARY-TO-AVERAGE-SALARY ratio. And, unlike other poorly paid jobs in the western Europe, as a software engineer you will not have a nice weekend that you can spend with your friends and family. You will learn the next upcoming framework... No wonder the tech industry in Europe is dead.

Also check those numbers:

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Apartment price in Munich (Germany) is the same as in San Francisco. However, in SF you will make 3-10 times more money (as developer)...

Where did you get that?

> Rent Prices in San Francisco, CA are 129.25% higher than in Munich Resta

The pickles/vinegar analogy is vivid. Certainly when I have been burnt out it's fair to say I was well-pickled.

What is burnout? More importantly, what is not burnout but just hard work and challenge? Why just software engineering?

Until we have a clear definition, the discussion is almost meaningless.

The article being discussed here makes no mention of software development at all, and clearly defines exactly what burnout is and how it differs from depression, anxiety, and compassion fatigue. Give it a read, it could prove to be insightful

“Extensive research by the military on sustainable performance in stressful conditions teaches that leaders should become champions of health, rather than taskmasters that drive teams and organizations to burnout.”

Burnout is where the organization treats its employees as disposable to be used and thrown away. Tech companies in the USA are notorious for this. They literally push their employees into resigning and replace them with more throwaway employees.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com