American Workers Are Burned Out, and Bosses Are Struggling to Respond

So much this. The people higher up the ladder are too detached about working conditions and expectations. They are often gatekeeping others growth based on nonsense. Often come up with bullshit policies to squeeze productivity.

We can all see the ineptitude of management (the higher in the ladder they are, the worse they are). If we could fire them, we would.

Toward the top or at the top they look at dollars and cents, keeping investors happy. They are too detached from the people actually doing the work to understand when then harshly and coldly grind out a bit more profit for their bonus that actual people, just like them, bear the burden.

Toss in all the algorithmic cloud management of the people and they get completely disconnected from their workforce.

All of this, and the hours certainly don't help.

Agree 100%. I’m at the tail end of fours years at a FAANG and have worked with several different teams.

I’m always dumfounded by the fact that people even one or two levels above me (Director or Sr. Manager level) don’t even have a basic understanding of the impact that their ‘goals’ have on the people who actually deliver them.

Of course they praise us for delivering during challenging times, but then they go and setup a roadmap for the next year that creates the same situation.

This coupled with the absurd income disparity between internal employees and new hires is finally starting to burn me out.

1000%. I actually love my work and hours and pay, but am leaving strictly because of how petty and dishonest my boss is. I seriously find out all news and happenings via weird he said she said underground channels. I swear it's rage inducing watching a 60 year old "professional" behave like a 12 year old gossiper.

I know most people think that's crazy, just ignore them...but man, it's just not worth my blood pressure spiking and lack of sleep anymore. At this point I don't even know who I hate more, him or my company for being so oblivious to it.

This, my boss got out of the country several time, and worked from home during the mandatory travel quarantine. When we asked to go we had to do the travel quarantine as unpaid days. Even though there is absolutely no issue working from home, and we do when it suits him

I saw a hiring sign at giant eagle the other day that actually said "its better than benifits, it's belonging!" in reference to the workforce being a family. I just can't imagine the people who would unironicaaly push this as a ad for a near min wage job with no benifits, as if your giant eagle family will pitch in to pay your medical bills in lieu of insurance. This kind of ignoring reality for happy fantasies marketing is just getting worse and worse and now it's just becoming a outright joke.

You get a few extra weeks between jobs when you quit or are fired ;D

Some companies will offer either an annual increase in the number of paid vacation days based on seniority/time employed, a generous allowance from the start, or just the fabled "unlimited" vacation days.

There are also all the national holidays that result in 3-day weekends, the week long vacation that is Thanksgiving for many workers, as well as Christmas shutdowns.

It really varies on the industry/job-type, but the bare minimum two weeks of paid vacation can be found in many other places too.

Something that gets missed a lot in these conversations is that hourly workers are often on a vacation accrual type system. Time worked = time vacation earned at a certain ratio. The more senior you become, the higher that ratio. This is anecdata, but I've seen guys be able to take a week-long vacation every three months without ever depleting their two week allowance because they have "refilled" their vacation time by that point.

For job offers that can be negotiated prior to going in, it's been observed that some people might have completely, almost wildly, different vacation plans than what is standard because of what they negotiated at the offer-stage of their employment.

That all being said, I'd rather much have just a simpler, 4-5 week standard across the board vacation law. Would cut the headache out of trying to figure out vacation accrual vs. usage ratios, play guessing games on exactly how unlimited that unlimited plan is, random gossip of that ONE guy at work who's on some different vacation plan because he strongarmed HR during hiring to get it, etc.

American companies tend to give employees as little as possible. Two weeks vacation is 10 days and you may be on call on the last weekend of that. Then you might get a few sick days but it's never enough if you actually get sick with the flu or Covid. So, many of us have to go to work sick or use vacation days. Nobody wants to use vacation while sick, so other people at work get sick because we go to work sick.

And then your vacation has to be approved. I had a manager who would only approve 1 week of vacation at a time. He said 2 weeks off is too long away from work.

So, it varies from one company to another, but generally it's not good because there's too much bullshit involved.

2 weeks paid vacation is a luxury reserved for those who have made it into an upper middle class office job- most blue collar jobs like restocking shelves offer no paid vacation at all, and many offer no maternity leave or health care either. You can always tell a working class person by their teeth, which by their late 30’s will have started falling out.

2-4 weeks of vacation plus 7-10 days of holiday is common.

> Or is it that most companies provide 4 or 5 weeks evenif the law mandates a lot less?

American law doesn’t mandate any vacation leave.

As a Brit who worked in US late 90s-early 00s , some things I noticed: (a) US was 40 hrs/wk, equiv to 3 weeks extra at work per year compared to UK's 37-37.5 standard hrs. (b) Plus sometimes "yeah, I'm also gonna need you to go ahead and come in at the weekend, m'kay", although you can simply refuse. What they gonna do, fire you? Maybe, but maybe not if you got skills and are doing useful work the rest of the time. (c) Compared to UK, in USA people seemed to waste tons of time at work, faffing about, pointless meetings, playing table football, blatantly making personal phone calls e:g to sort out insurance or something, presenteeism, just being there because you're meant to, but too tired to do anything useful, fixing bugs that wouldn't have existed had people gone home at sensible time and not made mistakes under pressure. I got extra holidays by various means including job-hops, 1 was by choice, other the place went bust, took some unpaid leave too. 1 year only had 4 weeks vacation, but quit that job and did long road trip the following year. Many Americans seemed to get their fair share of vacation by job-hopping, contracting, even quitting job to go travelling then call the same employer when they felt like coming back. If you stay in the same job for years your vacation entitlement is rubbish. The problem of course happens if you have a family and need some stability. But I suppose if you're frugal, don't have a huge mortgage, spouse has good skills too, you might both be able to keep job-hopping if that's what it takes to get decent time off. Whole system seems a bit daft to me really.

As a tech worker with 3-5 years experience you can begin to demand 4-6 weeks pretty easily.

>> their companies gave them 3 weeks, and quite quickly 4, and it was actually pretty common

That's pretty common in non-MAMMON tech jobs. I think my first non-intern coding job it was 3 weeks that went to 4 after a couple years, then when I had more senior roles it was 4 or 5 weeks to start. Current job is 5 weeks with an option to buy another week.

When I was working class, it was two weeks, but I would get laid off for a month or two a year, so it was more managing money to have enough to supplement unemployment insurance during the layoff in order to be able to enjoy the time off.

People used to work 12+ hour days, six days a week. Farmers still do, in some cases. It's all about expectations, really.

There have been times in my life that I didn't use vacation because I didn't have enough money to take a vacation that I thought would be fun. In four years of medical residency (aka junior doctor), I think I took three weeks off? I could never take more than one week off at a time, or the month would not count toward my educational requirements. So, why take a week off to sit at the house doing nothing?

I have a lot more time off now, as a fully qualified specialist, but I'm hostage to her schedule for trips, I have to pick my vacation weeks (and yes, I have to take a full week or nothing) a full year in advance, and COVID restrictions have well and truly fucked the kind of travel we did pre-2020. I had two weeks off in September, a reservation made a year before in the hopes that all of this would have been over by then, and I did little things around the house. Frankly, I would just as soon have been at work. The biggest benefit I got was sleeping in, which is nice, but I've been waking up at 5:30 for nearly twenty years, so "sleeping in" is 7 at the latest, and I usually don't make it that far.

As a european you can't understand how America still has slavery, you mean, right?

Cause that's what it is... exhaustion, depression, anxiety, burnout is par for the course with being American, I'll even go out on a limb and say that fixing this and mental health in America would do more for extremely strict gun laws.

People in their right mind don't do this shit. We're not in our right minds (collectively, and it'll be a long time - if ever - before we are.).

That’s why most of these have an archive.md link, there’s a top level comment here with one.