Hacker News Reader

Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

I think burnout in engineering (at least for me) is just the endless building of widget after widget to make money for someone else while racing against some arbitrary deadline. You just sit in your chair every day, endure mindless meetings where half the people have no idea whats going on and then you try and cram in development while praying that no one will ping you and force you to context switch for an hour. Repeat everyday forever, and this is made worse because now most of us work from home so its all done in isolation. Don't get me wrong I like working from home for the freedom it provides but it is isolating and you are now essentially always at work. Deadlines seem to always get shorter and requirements murkier. Stress is always ramping up and rarely resets. This is fine.

View on HN

> This is fine.

I try to remind myself every day how much rougher it was before I got a dev job. The financial hopelessness. Living in junky apartments with roommates as a married couple. Commuting 4 hours one way 2-3 days a week for part time jobs with no security or benefits. Trying to live off $20-30k a year in California. And still feeling lucky to have any work at all.

I try to remember this while sitting at zoom meetings and feeling exhausted. But the memory is fading...

totally agree. my wife's family is all in construction or painters, or working as bar tenders or at beauty salons etc. no health insurance, no ESPP/RSU/401k/FSA/PTO/blah blahs. every time someone politely says "hows work, what are you working on?" its pretty hard not to sound like a jackass when i complain about stuff like endless meetings, murky requirements, etc. my brother in law is always amazed that i can do my entire job on a computer as he's cutting wood and putting up fences.

i remember one time i was on vacation in costa rica and on a zip line tour. guy asks me where im from what i do. he said "oh man that's the dream, you just sit in a chair in the air conditioning all day? you don't know how lucky you have it!" and this dude runs zip line tours in costa rica.

grass is always greener

I don't know. I don't disagree with you, but I think it's sometimes more difficult than it seems initially.

This stuff has been very salient to me the last couple of years. I had a friend who was in a physically abusive relationship, and she was often comparing my behavior, feelings, and thoughts about my job to what she was going through. It's definitely not the same, I don't want to trivialize anything, but in some circumstances a workplace just becomes sort of [emotionally] abusive, extremely dysfunctional, and starts to have tangible harms for spouses, family, etc. in terms of lost time, income, career opportunities, etc. I wrestled a lot with questions like "is it better to not have a job than an abusive dysfunctional one, when it's hurting my family at some level too?"

This isn't the same as putting up with some awareness that what you're doing is existentially empty at some level (which has its own set of issues), but balancing costs and benefits of jobs sometimes is trickier than it seems initially. I think maybe it's the same as the grass-is-always greener you mention, although I think that can go pretty far.

I hear what you are saying and agree with you to a point. I find though that its like this for pretty much all development jobs, just pointless never ending trudging. Only option appears to be getting out of engineering; and taking a 65% pay cut to do so is really not on the table. So because of financial responsibilities (kids, house, etc.) each day is the same and one bleeds into the next.

There's a big difference between pointless drudgery and emotionally abusive, and one of them is indeed pretty normal, the other is things like my manager lying to and about me and setting me up to look like an idiot and pretending it was my fault and literally giving me nightmares and raising my blood pressure 20 points.

Yeah, sort of, but I feel like this is because most people don't really understand it's not exactly the same thing as sitting around surfing the web. Obviously this isn't a physically challenging job, but it is a mentally challenging job (and the brain is a physical organ too, remember simple physics conservation principles--none of your thoughts come for free, they all cost energy, and complex thoughts take massive energy!). That drains you in an entirely different way.

I would almost argue that having a physically tough day makes me feel sore and tired, but _accomplished_ at the end of the day. Having a mentally tough day doesn't confer any sort of sense of accomplishment, it's just a draining feeling.

Also consider the "happy" ending to Office Space--the protagonist ended up much more satisfied doing a physical construction job in the end.

I think it's worth mentioning the alternate ending from Office Space, thought it was hilariously ironic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK43Ureuiqc

The point is that no matter what you are doing there will be bosses you hate and annoying parts of the job.

Wow. That was much darker than I expected. That ending probably would have made my generation several notches more cynical. Throughout my career, the original ending has literally sustained my hope in the face of soul crushing office work.

yeah, I did not know that existed and kind of wish I had never seen it.

I agree, tech jobs wear down the brain, but at 45 with a body that is falling apart, I thank my lucky stars that my brain still works. I spent a summer hauling bags of shingles up onto a roof in 105F temperatures and that brief experience talked me into going to university and taking the “office job” track.

> "oh man that's the dream, you just sit in a chair in the air conditioning all day? you don't know how lucky you have it!"

When I'm having this conversation, I usually reply with something along the lines "yes, but imagine that most of your job in that air-conditioned office is doing math tests". It's not a perfect analogy, but it's a pretty valid one in terms of mental fatigue.

and... trying to teach other people how to do math, then having to argue with them why their wrong answers can't be accepted, or having to go redo stacks of previous math problems done wrong by someone who left a year ago.

...while some sales bro seated next to you "to break down silos" is clanging a gong and seeking high-fives, and every 90 minutes you're obliged to trudge into a conference room to discuss yet other math problems that can't reuse the solutions to the previous ones, and the math reference you have is missing 1/3 of its material.

I've been more and more of the opinion that hobbies are what drive our sense of meaning and no so much work, but occasionally it's hard to remember that when you're dealing with the shittier aspects of work (for me recently, debugging infrastructure issues with limited visibility and just no progress at all).

We (mostly) make enough money to do pretty well, might as well use it to enable ourselves to enjoy _something_ in life. For a while it was improv for me, now it's more powerlifting, but literally anything you can enjoy that's not work.

I was probably the happiest in my life when I was living in a studio with no furniture/bed working as many random jobs/freelance contracts I could find. :)

This is the joy of working for a large company. I was there a number of years ago. I just started ignoring people and doing what I think is right. No one appeared to notice. I suspect this was because everyone was chasing useless metrics or doesn’t want to challenge the timesheet in case the one apparent source of truth is discovered to be universe crushingly fallible.

I banked the experience and learnings and moved to a company which wasn’t in the fatal decline stage of development.

> I think burnout in engineering (at least for me) is just the endless building of widget after widget to make money for someone else while racing against some arbitrary deadline.

I could not have said this better myself. Yes, we are paid extremely well, but the soul-crushing grind of building stupid web apps for companies that don't even need them really takes a toll eventually.

I tell myself that most other jobs are just as meaningless or come with their own baggage, but I don't know for a fact. I do know that when the stars are aligned, when I'm in a flow and have something interesting to work on, I like the job, and consequently it seems "meaningful" - I think that's just sensory, a feeling. On the other hand sticking with it could be embracing mediocrity.

I think of Candide from time to time. Who can say if this is the paradisaical garden and alternatives could be much, much worse. Either way it's human nature to be restless. Maybe we can't all have the better job. This turns my attention to side projects, but I think as it pertains to tech, I don't have that much interest.

Lots of service jobs don't feel meaningless most of the time (though they may come with other problems).

Plenty of jobs that involve moving around real stuff in real life rarely feel meaningless (though, again, they may have other problems, especially wear & tear on one's body).

I feel like if you are in construction, the daily physical exhaustion and low pay must be crushing but at the end of the job you have built something that is physical and permanent, you have made a mark on the world. In software you have not really made anything, its just a url in a browser. There is nothing tangible you can look back on as you get older and point out to your kids, its just meaningless pixels. There are exceptions of course, people who built the internet changed the world in almost every way. Our crisis is existential.

I used to have this job where all you did all day was put second hand clothes into this huge hydraulic press, you'd press a button and out would come a nicely wrapped bale of clothes. It was absolutely mind meltingly numb job, it required absolutely zero skill and you'd repeat the same motion over and over and over again.

But you know what? I still remember the feeling that you had at the end of the day, seeing stacks upon stacks of these bales, nicely filling the warehouse, how satisfying this was.

I don't remember the last time I felt like that when programming.

My favorite job ever was helping run a camp site at a state park, a couple summers. Carry wood around, take fees at the gate and keep some light records, golf-cart around from time to time to bug people for payment, who were mostly pretty chill about it. Sunlight, outdoors, a fair amount of light physical activity. Busy days with huge lines at the gate flew by in what felt like minutes. Slow days, not much to do but read. Perfect.

Nothing tech related I've done over ~20 years of being paid to do tech shit has been half as good. Buuuut that job paid barely over minimum wage and had no benefits. So. Here I am.

[EDIT] Oh, and not a single screen all damn day! Old-school cash register and paper records.

Indeed. And it may sound silly I get more satisfaction in putting dishes out of dishwasher in right place every morning. But later on mind numbing daily standup sets tone for another crappy day.

I really do hate the daily standups that start every morning. Mindless reporting out that we are behind schedule and that eventually to catch up there is going to have to be a 12 hour day or 2 this week.

>and you are now essentially always at work

I suppose it's easier said than done, but the healthiest thing I did for myself in the transition to WFH during the pandemic was to set up and maintain appropriate boundaries between myself and work.

I'm done at 3:30. If you contact me after 3:30 I'm either ignoring the message until I'm "at work" the next morning, or I'm writing my time up as billable hours.

I've never been questioned on it, and the idea of muting my phone or leaving it in another room provides a mental break that helps with everything

Set boundaries.

Turn off that chat thing when you need to focus. Skip meetings where you neither will learn nor can contribute a unique perspectives. Turn the machine off when the workday is over to deal with the WFH blurriness. Push back on murky requirements.

Yes, it's hard, and it's scary. And I fully ack that in some companies, this would be career-limiting moves. If that's the case, you need to decide how much you want to work for them vs. going somewhere that actually lets you work as a dev.

> Push back on murky requirements.

This is a hugely important thing to learn.

Fact is, it's extremely unlikely a business is going to fire you for pushing back on something you can demonstrate is ridiculous. And engineers should be financially prepared to leave or be fired by employers being unreasonable with their requirements.

Everyone should be financially prepared for this, but this doesn't help the swats of people, including devs in less-favorable places and juniors who are stuck in an unfavorable market.

The biggest problem remains enough people being willing to put up with these insane demands that the requirements continue to get bigger. I haven't seen much fighting back until the "great resignation", and even that I'd consider mild.

This is the exact mindset why I burned out and quit (long before COVID).

The thing about working home alone is difficult. I highly believe that hard deadlines and fixed meeting times destroy the whole concept.

I wake up when I feel to, and do whatever needs to be done and I feel more often motivated to actually do work then I did ever before.

Succinctly nailed it.

I know scrum and sprints get a lot of hate, but I've found them to be extremely effective tools for combating this.

Could you describe more about how scrum/sprints can help combat burnout for you? That hasn't been my own experience.

they set boundaries? i.e. the set explicit limits to activities, provide structure, make responsibilities clear from the get-go, ...

In my experience, whatever boundaries are set within an agile engineering group can be overridden by the priorities, roadmaps, etc. that are imposed from above by the corporate executives. Responsibilities can change overnight as staff are reorganized or laid off by powers beyond their control.

well, my answer is theoretical. My own experience is similar to yours: "your team is no longer following scrum in a mad-rush attempt to deliver the deadline." and then everything gets even worse

Every scrum team I've ever been on fell into that pattern eventually. Companies adopted Scrum because it became the trendy way to signal that you're a modern company. Not because of any actual commitment to its framework.

In reality, Scrum went from "empower engineers" to "allow managers to micromanage their employees even more, but we call it Agile so you can't push back against it because then you're challenging the orthodoxy."

Yes. This is exactly it.

* We track velocity as the key capacity planning metric. We don't use it for performance or anything else (e.g. we don't care if it creeps or if two different teams have two different velocities).

* We then break down all of our work and estimate it. This gives us a scope.

* From there, we have a conversation with our PM. Here's the timelines you want to hit. Given the data, we need X. Do you want to cut scope or extend timelines?

-----

Lastly, we focus a lot on making decisions that maximize velocity over a medium-term (typically 4 to 12 weeks). There is little value in pushing hard in one sprint if it's going to have an opposite reaction in the next sprint.

Agree to disagree. Nobody does scrum "correctly". Generally only the parts that are supposed to squeeze the most short term value from the employees are picked.

It's a scam at every level.

There's no reason why anyone should need to be "certified" for a methodology to be applied. There isn't even a reason why SCUM methodology should be applied as a sort of universally applicable process.

The funniest thing about SCUM is that every diagram someone makes of it looks nearly identical to the straw man that is "Waterfall."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(software_development)#/...

I mean, tell me that you couldn't change some of the jargon on that diagram and fool just about everyone into thinking it describes Waterfall.

The only thing potentially differentiating between SCUM and Waterfall is that the former has (in theory) a smaller iteration window and has liaisons between development and management. But the latter argument is nonsense because generally non-agile teams still self-organize into having liaisons and middle-managers.

And as you pointed out, the answer to why SCUM fails always comes down to not doing it "correctly". If no one can do it correctly, that's because it sucks. I've seen agile principles applied in different ways successfully, but I've never seen SCUM actually work any better than no formal methodology at all.

Thanks for calling it what it actually is. We are having developers hired/not-hired on their descriptions of Agile/Scrum/TDD etc in interviews. Imagine that!

Nobody does it "correctly" because they try to use it for a bunch of things that it shouldn't be used for - like performance comparsions.

Scrum is only a capacity planning tool. Within a certain context, track velocity. When new work comes in, estimate it then compare to velocity. If you don't have the timelines you want, then you need to consider changing scope.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com