The damaging effects of 'boreout' at work | Hacker News Reader

The damaging effects of 'boreout' at work

bbc.com

100 pointsllimos71 comments

> “Boreout is chronic boredom. That sums it up,”

Bored at work is a problem? And in a cubicle? You have the internet in your pocket and bluetooth headphones in your ears, no work to do, you're getting paid, and people are complaining about this?

I seriously hope this article is part of some shadowy PR campaign to make people work harder or justify austerity or something. It's hard to believe this is BBC.

People work for money. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A81DYZh6KaQ

> What happens more often, she says, is that people will just show up at their desks and spend time shopping online, cyberloafing, chatting with colleagues or planning other activities. She says that these people aren’t lazy, but are using these behaviours as “coping mechanisms”.

Shopping online, talking to friends, and planning other activities are all things everyone needs to do. They're not coping mechanisms, this is just people getting all their stuff done at work so they have more time to do things important to them.

> Harju describes boreout as “kind of a signature syndrome” of the pandemic; our ennui fueled by too much time in Zoom meetings, surrounded by the same four walls.

Does Harju understand that the organization has made the decision to pay people to attend them?

How anyone can see a job as anything other than a way to sell time for money is beyond me.

Being bored at work would be wonderful. Being bored remote is even better. If I could just get the paycheck and benefits and have absolutely 0 obligations to the company, that would be optimal.

You've clearly never been in the situation then.

It's fine for the first couple of weeks. Maybe even the first few months. But when one third of your life or more is spent with absolutely no meaning what so ever, when you hands feel tied behind your back due to certain obligations / job prospects / whatever, it wears you down. It did for me. It drove me to the point of wanting to end it all.

I really hope you're never properly bored at work.

I’m so sorry that it got so bad for you. I recently quit my job because I was in that situation. I literally had nothing to do. I had maybe 8 hours of actual work a week. Paid really well to do basically nothing all things considered but it drained my soul. Being at home made it more tolerable but after cooking, baking, reading, side projects, getting my side hustle off the ground, exercising, starting an herb garden, taking up sketching, finishing my entertainment backlog, I don’t even know anymore I just couldn’t do it.

There’s something so terribly draining about having so much “kinda free time” where I might have to do random tasks sporadically but is otherwise completely empty.

It sounds like a joke but: if they company was paying you and giving you good performance reviews, your effort was obviously meeting expectations. Why didn't you get an additional full-time job?

Because the time is not truly free? It would only take one agenda collision to foil everything.

I've worked remotely for a long time. I've always had this dream of pushing through my work early in the week so I can fit in a round of golf or a few hours of skiing on a Friday morning. It's panned out less than 5 times because something always comes up on a Friday morning.

It may be a personality thing. I was in that situation and I didn't find it having "absolutely no meaning whatsoever." It was a time to learn, research new technology, experiment, etc. I was in that situation for at least two years before the company went under.

It was before widespread internet, so I can imagine that if I had the net in my pocket it would only have been so much better.

[edit] I had forgotten about this, but ironically, a few years earlier the company started selling a software package that was written by an engineer in a similar situation. He worked at a water plant and his job was basically to sit there all day occasionally checking some gauges to make sure everything was OK. Since he had essentially all day free with no one caring what he did, he wrote a complete software application.

> when one third of your life or more is spent with absolutely no meaning what so ever

I recognize that you're being sincere, and I don't mean to offend, but why would you tie meaning in your life to your labor?

Work time is labor time for me, and any amount of it is actively detracting from me being able to pursue the things that I do think have meaning.

The more time work takes, the less time I have for things that are meaningful, practically by definition.

Tying any sense of meaning or purpose to employment would seem to put the worker in an emotionally precarious position without any obvious benefit.

When I stop requiring additional funds, I'll stop going to work.

What am I missing?

I was once in a position where I had nothing to do for around 5 months straight after starting a job. It was an open office plan, we were clocked in 9-5, and I had a supervisor from another team who sat across from me and meant to keep an eye on me. I was also young and naive enough that I didn't know how far I could push limits slacking, so I didn't really push them at all. I desperately pleaded with everyone for work, but was always told the equivalent of "next sprint we'll have some for you, go read some documentation for now!".

I had never been more depressed in my life than those 5 months.

The closest thing I could compare it to is imagine printing out a copy of your current project's documentation, locking yourself in a room with it for 8 hours, then doing that 100 more times. It's a special type of hell.

No matter how well you think you can divorce your work time from your personal time, it starts to cross over. Work becomes so boringly painful that you actively dread it even in your time off. You know that tomorrow you're going to have to wake up and pretend to stare at documentation. For hours. And hours. And hours. And then repeat that the next day. And the next. And the next - with no end in sight.

Reminds me of school. One of the coping mechanisms I found was daydreaming while pretending to do the work.

The way I see it, "work time" is usually quite a big chunk of a person's life, especially if you throw in commute time. It also tends to take out the most "useful" time of the day.

Want to go hiking? Swimming in a river? Build some furniture? Build a house? Watch birds? Go shopping? Wrench on your car? Race your motorcycle? All are best done during the "work hours".

So while I can see the appeal of not tying one's meaning to one's job, I also completely understand the sinking feeling of having to postpone these activities for doing... nothing.

Because even though you can "find something to do" while at work, most of the time, you're not fully free. You may not just pick up your stuff and go fishing. You have to stay physically at the office and sometimes even have people dropping by asking random questions. So even getting engrossed in a book / music is out, since you'll be randomly interrupted. At least if you're WFH you can do random chores to free up the time afterwards (do the dishes / laundry / bake a pizza).

Of course, if you have to work to live, you have to go through this. But I don't see how its being necessary can make it less soul-crushing. Quite the contrary. I'm lucky enough to be able to find things to do on my own, or if not, work for one of my hobbies which happen to involve computers and don't require me to be physically somewhere precise. But not everyone's so lucky.

Well said.

I don't know. Why do you like chocolate ice cream? At least for me, despite all my efforts in every direction, the things I like or dislike fail to alter themselves that much at my request.

I have mechanisms to deal with them and to ensure that I do certain things, but the inner will always directs in a certain direction. I can summon the motivation to do other things, but I have so far failed to modify that inner desire.

If you're different, then do share what interventions let you modify.

Given that, your question is more like "Why would you like chocolate ice cream?". And the answer is simple: There is no 'why'; there only is.

All meaningful progress requires labor. You're specifically talking about labor paid for by a corporation, but that isn't mutually exclusive with that labor also being a goal or passion that you're interested in.

Meaning is subjective, and many do find it in their work. For example, many software devs like the work of learning about and creating software. To be paid for it is a bonus, not something detracting.

You are missing that people are different. It seems extremely easy and intuitive to compartmentalize aspects of your life.

More power to you. Not everyone is like that. Personally, I find compartmentalization unnatural.

Even the “work hard play hard” aspect of weekday/weekend. Unnatural to me. I do think everything has seasons. I don’t view those seasons as literally on an hourly granularity though, that’s what is unnatural to me.

I think it's the "faking it" part that's draining.

> Work time is labor time for me, and any amount of it is actively detracting from me being able to pursue the things that I do think have meaning.

Exactly, that's the problem. The article is not about not having enough work to do, it's about the work not having enough meaning to want to do it in the first place.

Also the issue that generally you still need the job (because you need income) and more importantly, you need to ensure you have a usable reference from your time there.

Of course you could see it that way. However, what about ethics? If work is just some no meaning thing to do, will you care about the ethical aspects of your work? And I think we need a lot more of that in tech jobs.

Boreout sounds amazing in a remote work situation.

No, if you straight up do "fun things" (watch movies or play video games) then you won't be motivated to work even when it's time for "boreout" to end. So you must do "work safe" activities that wont get you fired all day which is worse than doing boring work that lets you feel useful.

Until guilt sets in. I started getting anxious that I would be "found out", but every week ended again being told I was the most productive.

I ended up quitting when someone popped up with a much more creative job

It's not guilt that's the problem. Just because you're in a remote work situation doesn't mean you just stop thinking about the boring shit that you do. Meetings also don't stop. You get angrier and angrier about the whole situation. It nags on you and actually spend more time thinking about it than you would normally spend on it outside of work.

I guess there are quite a lot of people that can just tune out things they don't like, but I'd wager most people are not capable of that trait. I think the more competent you are the more it bothers you not to produce anything. And it's not related to guilt, at least it never was for me(and looking around in this thread I'm obviously not the only one).

Just because you are paid doesn't mean you want to pass your life without perspective. This is basically someone sucking your life away without drive or mission and only compensating in money. And if there is any truth to the "Drive!" book, then the money is almost secondary to the other two factors.

This is simply not the case once you’ve been in that situation long enough. It’s pretty terrible. I would rather have lots of busywork than be sitting on my hands with nothing to do yet still have the obligation for the company.

Working on something due to lack of work during a zoom meeting is entirely different than doing something in my own time when I have zero obligation to get called out of it at any moment. This prevents Deep Work from occurring. It’s thoroughly unsatisfying, and work is simply not just “time for money”.

The shopping online etc that they’re referring to is being done out of boredom, not out of necessity. It’s a dopamine loop. Same with browsing social media or chatting online.

Please don’t dismiss people and handwave when they’re trying to discuss issues.

Would love to be in a situation like this. How do you find a job that lets you do nothing? I’d be happy to work on personal projects, learning new things, working a second job, etc

You have to account for what you're doing with your time and how it benefits the company and demonstrate that you're making progress. Unless you're better at managing a complex set of lies than most human beings, you're probably not going to succeed at it.

>I’d be happy to work on personal projects, learning new things, working a second job, etc

You aren't allowed to do these things on your first job.

What you are suggesting is almost equivalent to squatting in an apartment for free and then renting it out to someone else to earn money.

Well, these situations usually involve you having to be physically present and won't allow you to be out of office randomly for hours at a time. So that limits the kind of second job you could take.

Also, many people work on fairly locked down computers with nothing much to do aside for (filtered) internet and random "corporate" apps. I'd be quite surprised to learn that in these kinds of situations, where people are required to be physically present to do nothing, they would be allowed to bring in their own computers and openly do private stuff.

> working a second job

This is the part I don't understand. If your job's expectations are so lax, why not potentially double your income?

Clearly you have never been in this situation. I once held a job where I had exactly one hour of work to do each day and nothing else to do. If I put my mind to it, I could finish a weeks’s worth of work in half a day. The rest was wasted time and waiting around. Plus, someone else controlled my time. I had to sit in my chair at my desk for eight hours, take a one hour lunch break in the middle of the city, never leaving the office otherwise.

You have no control over the most important parts for the largest part of your waking day. You are asked to do meaningless busywork that wouldn’t need to be done at all if automated even in a half-assed way. There is zero reason for you to sit in the office all day, wasting hours upon hours except for your boss mandating it. 100% of the non-automated remaining parts of your job could be done remotely, by telephone and email.

This crushes you eventually, depending on personality type sooner or later, especially when your mind is accustomed to tackling and solving problems. It grinds away at your sense of self, drains you of energy, it quite literally drives you slowly insane. You try not to think about it but you do. You try to read, surf the internet, stay in touch with others and do all the things you can do somewhat stealthy. Because when you eventually ask for more stuff to do, you get assigned to sorting contents of binders. Because, according to my boss at the time, “there’s always something to do”. Busywork. Got it.

It makes you depressed, severely so. You realize that nothing you do matters at all and there’s no point to your job anyway. Every trivial task eventually becomes an immense burden that sometimes takes you days to complete, despite being a 30-minute task. In a way this means you have come full circle. You feel your mind rotting away. You feel that you have reached the end of your rope and this is what your life will be from now on. But if you raise your voice and speak up, all it earns you is the scorn of the boss and other (really bad) colleagues that want things to stay as they are.

Some companies may well have an expectation of owning your time regardless of outcome and some people may well be cynical and empty enough to live with this situation, I for one would rather be dead.

It took me four years and a nervous breakdown to finally throw the towel, with no regard for what happened to me afterwards. Yeah, quite a walk in the park those jobs are. Relaxing. Quite ideal.

As others have said, being bored at work is extremely stressful. I am on the verge of leaving a company where I'm totally bored, for an early stage startup where I will be put to the grind. Oddly when I was in such a job before I had the energy to do other projects. I made the time. Now I have the time but it seems.... Meaningless. I am a developer who codes for fun as well, but in the last year I have not written any code worth talking about. My job is a joke because of how badly organized the company is. I went to therapy, tried to see if I had ADHD because I was slowly sinking back into my old habits of jumping between tasks and not prioritising work. Ultimately I decided I need to leave the company because it wasn't me. I was a bad cultural fit because I'm a person who does things for fun. Work was not fun. It was killing me.

> ..., no work to do,

Generally the case is that there is still way to much to do, so you can't do your own thing: but your assigned tasks are meaningless. Think of being paid to dig a hole and fill it in again, and you will be fired if you don't spend your time doing that, even though the net effect would be the same if you just did nothing.

The result is the double whammy of being burnt out by an avalanche of meaningless tasks.

I sometimes experience “boreout” on days where most of my team members are on holidays or when it’s a bit slow at work. However I still have to be “at the computer” even if I’m not doing anything. On the days I am bored, I don’t have motivation to even shop or cyberloaf. With remote work I literally touch my mouse, make sure my teams status is green, walk away and do something else at home. Sucks because I can never disconnect from work for the day. I wish we would advance quicker into performance based / tasks oriented work rather than just needing to be available.

The zero obligations is the gotcha here: you’re still responsible for making decisions based on the boring meetings that take up your entire day.

And since people think they can fill up your calendar with meetings they do and then you’re only left with time outside of work think about mundane issues — which probably have some major consequences but who cares as you’ve sat through dozens of hours of meetings about it.

Boredom as a technique for pruning staff. https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/21/boredom_rooms_japan_e...

> working in a demoralising physical environment like a cubicle farm

Since the rise of the open office, I yearn for the cubicle farm.

The cubicle farm only looked like hell because everyone was coming from private offices. Going from open office to cubicle would be fantastic.

I'm with you. Used to work in a cubicle with 5 foot tall walls. So nice compared to the current open office environment we currently have. Benefits were lack of visual distractions and much fewer audible distractions. We had plenty of opportunities to collaborate when needed.

Cube farms (with ~7 ft. tall walls, not bullpens) are so much better than the typical open office or shared offices, for my preferences.

Bonus, if the cube opening is across the hallway from a window, and the cube lets me orient my seating position towards the opening, for glare and "feng shui".

Open office can be OK, if it has so much available space that I can distance a bit, and maybe also get a window, ideally that opens for fresh air.

Working remote is wonderful. Your work environment is whatever you want it to be, so it’s on you to make it one that makes you effective. Companies that insist on having employees come to an office should learn that lesson. Give your employees control over their work environment. You do trust them, right?

They don't; that's why they have human resource departments.

whatever you can afford*

I hear you. I used to hate cubicle farms because of the monotony. But open office is just the worst.

I'd take a salary cut for a cube any day.

It hurts me that some people seem to consider this a luxury position. I completely wrecks me, to the point where I wished every day that a semi would drive me off the road and end it all. Switching jobs makes these thoughts go away instantly, but the boreout always returns.

Even in times where I have plenty work to do, it's all so meaningless or unchallenging. It's becomes easy faster then I get promoted. Most work is busywork, work on an advice that you know will be ignored in the end. Build a product nobody needs. If it's actually used my input feels minimal. Sure I made it, but 15 people had to review it in an "alignment meeting" at which point I am alienated from it. Imagine building a table and 15 people pointing out small things that could be done better. In the end it might be a better table, but damn would I hate it at that point.

It's heavy, every day feels like a drag. Appearing busy to avoid other bullshit tasks. Hoping IT doesn't look into your browsing behaviour. Rotate the same social media all day. And what maybe stings most, is that your performance reviews are very positive, further strengthening the point that it does not matter how you do it, as long as you are present.

Honestly, my worst days in my life have been during boreout. I still remember 2019 being the worst year in my life because of this and 2020 wasn't as bad but the lockdown didn't let me recover. It's 2021 and everything is all right.

Same here, but burnout. Most of the feedback I was getting were in the form of personal threats and "start looking for other jobs", from management.

I wonder if boreout and burnout are just products of the current imbalances of the current socioeconomic system, on a personal scale? What are we doing wrong economically, politically or socially that produces these extreme disparities in culture and society? Are there any remedies given the current constraints of legal, social, and familial obligations? Is finance so entrenched with physical and emotional well-being, that there can never be a happy medium?

It seems to me that some of the more advanced societies today have started to address some of the more existential questions of human existence through policy, to help assuage some of these fears. As before, policy helped to address some of the more physically threatening things like lions and tigers and bears, by building infrastructure. Advanced society policy addresses more existential questions, as in the above paragraph.

Which one do you live in, one that struggles with the basics, or the one that engages and addresses the existential questions of human existence? If you really want to get serious, what is the optimal velocity at which this occurs?

I'm there now. Our product has achieved cruising altitude, and there isn't a lot to do now but polish it and routinely remind my manager that we don't need to add new features just for the sake of adding features. There's no other challenging products in the pipeline, so ... it's boring. Very boring. I can do my entire job in a few hours a week if I want, and most of that is pointing junior developers in the right direction and interfacing with management to answer questions.

My next installment of the golden handcuffs happens in September, or I'd be out already.

I'm having as hard time imagining this situation. There's no expansion of the market possible? Potential customers never say no based on features? No reductions in cost possible? Nothing that would get existing customers to pay you more?

I don't think I've ever worked on anything where I didn't have a "nice to have" list of interesting things that could easily keep me busy for a year, basically at all times. This is stuff like making the build or deploy or backups faster; tools to make troubleshooting simpler; making the UI retain my last filtering selection when I log in, or fixing that annoying bug where text sometimes overlaps an image. Or it can be as big as rewriting the entire backend processing system, because everytime we touch it, 10 new bugs appear and it has zero ability to be unit tested. This isn't even getting into the product itself.

Seems like a failure (or more likely total lack) of product management.

It happens more at companies where there are multiple products. The opportunity cost of expanding features on product A is expanding features on product B. And then product C comes along, and it’s really hot, and so if A is stable and earning good marks, it doesn’t change much.

Congratulations, you're the epitome of being spoiled rotten.

Why not have a talk with management after the golden handcuffs? It may be that they've got some projects in mind, but haven't surfaced them yet.

Sounds like you probably should be implementing those new features.

Not necessarily. I think it is probably best, for example, that my microwave is not also a calendar.

This is a bad attitude to have, but at least if implementing those (largely useless or unnecessary) features they would be able to try out new technology, new architecture, or something to give their day a little something.

Do other people feel like this at startups? When there's no clear direction and everyone is just working on whatever they find interesting, I just tend to check out. It's just not interesting to build software for the sake of building software, I feel there has to be some product vision or clear feedback cycle to keep me motivated

Depends on the type of place you work. These are good times for POC type of projects. If you have an any kind of curiosity in a new language or there's something that you think could be done to make things better/easier/etc for users/co-workers/whatevs, then work on it so you can share it. Startups are obviously much more open to this, but sometimes you can still do this at evilCorp type places (if you have good management). It's also a good way to play with a new library/package that you've been reading all the cool kids are using.

If you're the type that just tends to check out without clear guidance, I'd suggest you're might not be a fit for a startup type of company.

But you can have product vision or gather feedback yourself?

Same in my company, not a startup any longer. There is just no vision outside of "more" datacenter, users, engineers.

It's like they think if they hire a bunch of smart people, the product will appear automatically.

Which is true but it also sets the tone for sociopaths in the company to thrive

I worked as a system administrator with about 25 local and 25 remote users. At first there was plenty to do, Windows 98 and hardware were buggy things back then. Every one in a while a machine would blue screen, it took months to track it down. (Turns out Microsoft's compiler optimized a bit too much, and unloaded floating point support, and the HP printer drivers still needed it)

Over time, I got things under control, and the hardware and software got more reliable, I had fewer fires to put out. I tried to get some projects going, revamping the hacked together database left by my predecessor, but the production department (not IT) wouldn't have anything to do with it.

Eventually, it got down to showing up, and waiting for things to break, for years. It crushed my soul.

at one job, when we hired a new sysadmin my then boss told him: if things are working well enough that you have nothing to do all day then you are doing a good job.

i don't know if he ever reached that point.

After two or three years at my previous job (first out of college), I felt like I had learned all I could there. They promoted me to senior, but the pay was pretty low (Another company had offered me more at a mid-level position). I jumped after a few weeks for a startup and now I'm not bored and work completely remotely. If I could do it again, I would have left sooner. If you're bored, you need to leave. Sometimes there isn't more for you to learn at certain places.

My previous position was sold to me as requiring lots of low-level skills and I was actually doing only few trivial tasks each week. I left this job after almost two years and have virtually done nothing ever since. Boreout created very hard to get around mechanisms in my brain.

Ah yes just feels like yesterday (15 years ago) when I was berated for questioning the supposed awesomeness of open offices. FAANGs of the time were moving to it so must have been good! I even remember my manager and some of the senior folks at the time treating me as a culture unfit when I mistakenly let know my preference!!

Every job will have time where the main thing you do doesn't have anything to do. Sometimes, there's other things that could use some attention. Other times, there's really just no point at being there other than padding some time sheets. I had one boss that would look around and see that we were just trying our best to do something, and would just offer us the chance to just go do anything other than fill a chair in the office. Because of that, when things were crunch time and needed extra time, I had much less issue giving up that extra time. This was a salary position.

I've been there recently and in the past. This time at least due to remote work I can work on my projects when there's nothing else to do or I just can't face the really boring crap. It really is demoralising and draining like digging holes to fill them back in again

That pretty much describes the last ten years of my day job.

Thank the Gods for my extracurricular OSS work.

There are some day jobs in OSS btw:

https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/Resources

Bored workers is mismanagement. At the very least, you’re not ‘bored’ if that boring job is a step-up. I work in the hospitality business. It’s demanding and very repetitive. And, there is a huge base of low-skilled workers who make little money. I see this all the time: many of the best managers are promoted from entry level. Maybe if you’re bored it’s time to move on and open the spot for the next guy. MY2c

I've experienced this firsthand.

The company was acquired, which caused a lot of work to be assigned in order to bring us into compliance with government regulations.

This resulted in thousands of man-hours of re-creation of build environments, headaches due to increased security, and general burnout.

> “I started observing people in quiet hours in retail stores, and people are just standing there bored. Or taxi drivers that have to wait sometimes for hours in quiet times in the countryside.”

As someone whose job keeps him constantly busy doing boring things, I envy the people in these examples.

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