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Comment by analyst74 | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I find the biggest reason for burnout is lack of autonomy. The author seems to have found the same.

I'd say burnout happens when you have had too many negative experiences related to work compared to how many positive ones you got and your emotions tells you that it isn't something you should continue doing since it is bad for you.

A negative experience could be that you worked long hours and no longer could do things you love, or people screaming at you causing stress etc, humans are really good at being creative here so most things can fit here.

Yes and lack of Autonomy causes you to have many negative experiences.

Particularly in software engineering you need to constantly make many decisions. But if you don't have autonomy you are constantly having to second guess your self. Not based on what you think is best but based on what you think the other person(s) above you will think. It is way of working that drains your energy.

Yes for me this is the single most demotivating factor.

Great point on that. Autonomy actually takes a lot of stress off because you're not trying to artificially conform to what your superiors want.

I think you're both right. Both autonomy and the rate of positive/negative results relate to the exploration/exploitation tradeoff. We can't find the necessary means to act towards success or assign low probability to success. That means lots of negative ideation which has an emotional impact.

I've lost track of the source, but i saw a TED talk that outlines 5 happiness indicators for work. You need at least 3 of them to be happy with your job:

1. Security

2. Good pay

3. Connected with others

4. Satisfaction in work

5. Autonomy

These helped me understand my burnout experience. By the time I left, all of the others had vanished except for the pay.

I always keep this list in my mind: Autonomy, mastery and purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_Ab...

This is probably the SCARF model:

Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness

For me it was the constant feeling that tasks and responsibilities and difficult decisions are piling up faster than I could process them.

Not just "I have too much work to do", but "I have too much work to do and every day it gets worse, and in the morning meeting my team will tell me they all have too much work to do too, and lots of the problems are due to bad tech decisions I took in a hurry a while ago due to inexperience and lack of time, and... and...".

Fortunately I had an understanding manager who spotted me shaking in the lift into the office one afternoon and helped sort things out.

> and helped sort things out

How?

Being overloaded for a long time is also sometimes a sign that the business is failing.

Which is horrible: It is when a founder is the most tired that he has to deal with the most unknown part of the work. For a simple project manager, it is often when you miss a deadline that you have to write reports and deal with stakeholder dissatisfaction, which cascades into missing other deadlines and having to implement more and more damage control to perform.

Sometimes the only way is to walk away and let it all crumble.

In the short term by moving responsibilities around - in my inexperience I didn't realise that it was okay not to be able to cope with that level of work. In the longer term (eventually) cancelling the project and reorganising.

I feel like autonomy is getting really hard to find in tech. There's just only so many ways you can write a GET route. Then it will get shaped into what it "should" be via PR comments. It makes for good software development, but it just isn't very fun or fullfiling. I miss learning something new and having choice with how to do it, but that doesn't always make for a good product. Sure I can do side projects but I just don't have anything left in me at the end of the day.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

"À mesure que le principe de la division du travail reçoit une application plus complète, l’ouvrier devient plus faible, plus borné et plus dépendant. L’art fait des progrès, l’artisan rétrograde."

Or roughly "In a system of division of labor, the work improves but the worker suffers".

I feel like, as an industry, we've settled on a way of working that probably does produce quality software faster and more reliably, but it takes a toll on the engineers.

Companies with high engineering excellence tend to give their engineers lots of autonomy.

You know you're in one such company when your responsibility is no longer limited to writing good code, but at the table deciding what should be built, and what the future plan is for the company or the product area.

I think it's working hard for no reward.

I've worked hard on things I'm passionate about and never get burnt out.

I took a job recently where the product is millions over budget and years behind and all the work goes into a continual hole... and it's the first time I'm starting to experience burnout.

Honestly I feel like, "good jobs" are very undervalued. I've had high paying jobs that I enjoyed but I never heard good job. It was always okay now what's next? I didn't love those jobs.

I've had lower paying objectively worse jobs where I got more regular positive feedback and I stayed at those jobs longer. I might be an outlier and learned this behavior from sports but it cost nothing tell someone they did a good job and it can go a long way.

It’s a facet of the underlying problem in my experience - feeling that you have no control or ability to solve the pain/endless problems you are being subjected to, and it will never get better.

Eventually anyone is going to be beaten into submission/get learned helplessness in that type of environment.

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