The state of burnout in tech, 2022 edition [pdf]
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Everyone will encounter something like the following in their career
1. There is a problem that your customers and you face - but you are not allowed to solve it for "Reasons"
2. The product area will never work, but you must continue working on things that no one will ever use for "reasons". Ever write exhaustive test coverage for something that won't be used?
3. The things that you work on will never take you to where you want to go in your career. Your managers will not let you take on work that moves the needle for you personally.
4. It's the same problems day after day without any resolution. There is no support to solve them (A ticket queue with dozens of identical tickets).
I'd say the main times I've felt burnout were one of the above.
I write software because I like solving problems for people. It's gratifying to build clever things, but for me it has to end in making the world better somehow. Even if it's just one person, which has happened when I'm building in-house tools.
But there's so much out there that isn't about actually getting things done. E.g., the project that is touted as using the hot technology (e.g., ML) because people want to be seen as on the leading edge; actual results would be a hindrance to bragging. Or the executive who wants to respond to public criticism and so launches an initiative that will show a lot of motion and be something they can point to, but will not actually make a difference. Or the big-talking boss who gets promoted based on the size of his project and how tough he looks, so he drastically overstaffs something, causes a lot of chaos, and then makes everybody work stupid hours in crunch mode to hit an entirely artificial deadline. And so on, and so on.
These sorts of bullshit projects are way harder on me than actual hard work, because I experience constant dissonance between my goals (make things! help people!) and the day-to-day of the project.
And I think it's even worse for others, because it's easy to learn the lesson that the important thing at work is just to shut up and play pretend with whatever the bosses want. That's a lesson I absolutely refuse to learn. But many apparently do, and that can ruin a person for their whole career.
It’s hard to solve for these problems because that tone comes from the top, but trusting people and removing toxic personalities is a good start. Every successful team I’ve been on had a focus on the customer and the end goal and didn’t let politics get in the way of solutions.
The positive side is that I can now recognize the good signs too. And I'm much better at diagnosing and fixing issues. If the people with power want things fixed, which is definitely not a given.
After hanging up the towel officially, my mind is boggled by how much the constant pushing against a wall was weighing on me.
The same applies to any sustained pursuit, be it a hobby, work, relationship (romantic or otherwise), family relations, etc.
If you constantly bash your head against a wall and factors outside of your control conspire to mean that you make no or little progress and receive no or little reward then you need to stop.
Burnout is your body's way of forcing you if you persist.
I signed up to work on a microservice where we were supposed to be a small startup within a big company. We supposedly can make decisions which are good for our customers and work on interesting challenges.
Except security and compliance is top priority, and it doesn't matter how those security and compliance requirements fit our service. We need to get a checkmark. Everyone from security and compliance team is unable to have a technical discussion but they continue make technical decisions for us.
And in order to stay relevant, they change their checkmark requirements every few months. So we spend all our time, trying to keep our service compliant and don't really get anytime to work on real issues.
I get the feeling my job's main function is to keep these security and compliance people happy. They have no skin in our service, my manager doesn't want to bring up issues with her higher up.
All this leave me feeling extremely unsatisfied and burned out at the end of the day.
I doubt more than a quarter of it ever had an overall positive effect—monetary or otherwise—large enough to justify the cost of writing it.
I've spent probably a third of my career, spread out here and there, working on projects that all the ICs could tell were doomed for super-obvious reasons (clear failure to find product/market fit then doubling down, entering a market very late and with only a few percent of the investment it would take to have a realistic chance at it, that kind of thing)
Then there are vanity projects like a company's annual investor report app. JFC.
Working in tech feels like being a small part of some kind of horrible random input process that feeds the capitalist pyramid above.
The majority of my last ten years have gone toward start-ups, and the timelines toward EOL are generally even shorter - at least until we hit something out of the park. At the very least the days are exciting, the problems are interesting, and the distance between myself and the end user is very short.
"I'll do this nonsense because I need the paycheck" is a way to avoid burnout, unless you already have enough money for your needs that money can buy.
I think I'd be absolutely thrilled to be in this industry, still, if I wrote code... I dunno, 25-30 weeks per year, then did literally anything else the other weeks, including any kind of work that didn't involve staring at a screen.
It's doing the same thing almost all damn year that makes is such a grind.
I like working, actually. I hate doing the exact same work 48+ weeks per year. HATE it.
My job is cush. I work remote. I make good money. But I stare blankly at the screen and just can't bring myself to care. I eye climatebase and naturetech a lot, though.
It is the lack of things to look forward to or be excited about that causes and sustains burnout. Be it in the scope of a single project, or career development, or an entire generational legacy, we have lost hope.
Could you talk a bit about why this kind of information is not enough? (I was in a similar situation as you a few months ago, and it took some time to figure out how to find work that was clearly good for the world. But the specific problems for each of us may be different.)
What did you end up doing?
Yes to 1. and 4., also a bit of 3. Also, a lot of regulatory overhead.
culdesac.com (car-free urban communities) planet.com cervest.earth
also jobs at climatebase.org and naturetech.io
If I were in urban design I'd look at https://www.humankind.city/ among other similar organisations. The EU made a bunch of urban mobility related content free at https://urbanmobilitycourses.eu, my favourite is https://urbanmobilitycourses.eu/courses/free-visualization-t...
PS. I have nothing to do with them.
I used it to find my own house a bike ride from a train station an hour from Dublin (I work remote) with gigabit fibre for under 100k in 2019. I would never have found it with the traditional real estate sites that assume I drive everywhere.
It's just a side project though, I barely get time to hack on it.
1 - Lack of variety, leading to boredom. After decades in the industry, I'm super bored with the things I know, and not in the least bit interested in learning more technical minutia of whatever flavor... pretty much all of it feels the same. The things I'm still interested in (like Scheme) are pretty obscure, so I'm unlikely to ever get to work with them. I hate all the mainstream tech stacks, but that's where the overwhelming majority of work is.
2 - I don't care about what the company does. 99.9% of the time, the real goal is to make some extremely rich people even richer. Couldn't care less. I'm not sure that even if I worked for a non-profit doing work I thought was important that it would translate to my own job being something I wanted to do.
3 - Chronic understaffing, crazy time pressure, and lack of resources. This is endemic in the tech field. Count yourself incredibly lucky if you don't have to face this day in and day out for years on end. It's even worse when you know the company you're working for is making money hand over fist and they could easily afford to hire more people, treat them better, and get more resources, but you know they'd rather funnel that money in to the pockets of those at the top.
4 - Lies and corporate BS. From bullshit cheerleading and pep talks from upper management that a child would be stupid to believe, to time wasting, useless policies, to outright lying and two-facedness that's super common in the industry. Who wants to deal with this?
5 - Depression. This doesn't help.
The best job I ever had was working part time in a tiny company where it was just me and the owner. He was a super nice guy, we got along great and just did what needed to be done. No corporate BS, no policies, no lies, and back then I wasn't burnt out yet, so working on tech stuff still seemed interesting.
After burning out on tech I really should have switched to another career (completely outside of tech)... or even tried management, but I never did, and my skills have atrophied so I'm super rusty and out of it regarding the newer buzzword technologies.. though I'd like to think that I still have good troubleshooting skills and can learn anything.. if I cared.. but I don't.
Just a tip from someone who made that jump: If those five things you listed contributed to your burnout, trust me, moving into management won't help.
1. Management is the same damn slog day after day. You deal with people acting like children, senior management who lack any coherent vision and don't know what they're doing, colleagues who were Peter Principle'd into their roles, and on and on. It's unrelenting.
2. Being a manager is just doing work to make rich people richer, but with extra steps.
3. Imagine being a manager! You keep hearing you're understaffed, that there's enormous time pressure, that you lack resources, that your staff are frustrated, unmotivated, burned out. If you're a good manager you care and desperately want to help. But you can't do a god damned thing about it because the executives don't give a damn.
4. You're literally in the middle of this. As a middle manager you have the choice to parrot the upper management crap, or tell it like it is. Neither is great. And that's ignoring the politics, and the pointless policies, the endless process...
5. That's invariant.
The real issue is that a lot of companies are simply toxic places to work. The job doesn't change that. Whether you're an individual contributor on the ground or a manager trying to improve the lives of your staff, if the company sucks, it sucks for everyone.
The truth is: not all companies suck that badly. Or, at least, they all suck in different ways. As you yourself have realized, the trick is finding that place that fits for you.
At one point I worked in a matrixed org that heavily interacted with business analysts, HR people etc. Some of those folks who were desperately trying to climb to a manager role so they could get paid a decent salary. A lot of them hated their jobs, but moving to manager position was their only choice.
Imagine feeling forced to climb to a job that you don't even really want. It's no surprise that people just resort to political maneuvering to get that coveted manager spot.
As much as I hated my last job, I thought my boss' job was even worse because of all the corporate BS he had to constantly put up with. He seemed to love his job despite that, though.
Also, some of my colleagues (who'd been working for decades, just like me) seem to still love it and thrive on the stuff that made me want to quit and demotivated me. I'm fascinated with how some people like them are able to persevere and thrive in the same situations that make people like me quit and burn out.
I still don't know their secret.
It really comes down to the level of influence and control you have in the organization.
If you feel empowered to enact positive change, even if it's just at your level in collaboration with your colleagues, then that can be enough to remain motivated. Speaking for myself, for years, this describes how I managed to stay motivated through a lot of BS.
But when that falls away--when senior management becomes ineffective, when your colleagues leave or become demotivated themselves, when leadership starts to get in the way of your enacting change, when the organization becomes large enough that it's more likely to resist change than embrace it--that is when management becomes, at best, an unrelenting chore.
I've been a middle manager for nearly eight years. The first 5-6 of that were pretty good. But in the intervening years the company has grown and is now big enough that my ability to enact change in the organization has all but disappeared and I'm considering my options.
What's amazing about corporate is that, when you get together years later and the truth comes out because everyone has moved on, you realize how much everyone really hated their jobs. There are some true-believing useful idiots out there, but I'd guess that 80% of people see corporate for what it is--they're just not allowed to make it known that they do. It's reminiscent of that time people applauded Stalin for 11 minutes because no one wanted to risk being the first one to stop clapping.
As a worker, you're at least allowed to grumble a little bit. As a middle manager, you're a full-time actor. You have to implement the will of some truly awful people and pretend to have no moral objections whatsoever.
Some middle managers truly are pricks and petty tyrants, but my observation is that most of them are just forced to pretend to be that way, becoming the face of horrible decisions so the execs can be loved by the masses. Your boss doesn't want to be a micromanaging cunt--he has to pretend to be one, because he's a rubber glove for executives.
Yes. Yes it does.
It also confirmed my negative views of upper management and capitalism. Growing up, I had always felt that the left-wing view of corporate executives as worthless, evil parasites whom society would be better without was an exaggeration, or a negative depiction derived from a mix of envy and the "bad apple" effect. Nope. I've sat in enough meetings and heard how upper-level executives talk about their workers to realize that the "haters" were dead right all along. Half of these people in upper management deserve to be guillotined; the other half are not so severely awful, but are spineless or ineffective at doing anything to oppose the horrible culture.
As a middle manager you have the choice to parrot the upper management crap, or tell it like it is. Neither is great.
Yeah, this conflict of interest is the worst. Do what's right, and you're risking your livelihood, while not really helping the people beneath you. Lie for executives' benefit (i.e., be the face of their bad decisions, so the execs can be loved) and it corrodes your soul, but at least you stay employed.
The funny thing is that corporate capitalism is now indistinguishable from the Soviet system at its worst. We are in Kazakhstan 1987 right now. The only difference is that we pay two orders of magnitude more for these shithead bureaucrats than the most corrupt SSRs ever did.
As an IC, your manager can tell you to do something that makes no sense. They can either agree with you or disagree about how stupid it is, but if it comes from above it has to be done. As an IC, you just do it and try your best to disconnect emotionally and get it over with.
As a manager, you first listen to your manager tell you to do something that makes no sense. You push back, but they say your team has to do it. You take it to your direct report and they push back, and now you are forcing somebody to work on something they rightfully don't agree it. Unless you are an a$$shole, it's hard to disconnect emotionally when you are forcing somebody to do something you don't agree with. Do that over and over...it really takes a toll.
Yup. What you've just described is the trap of having all the accountability but none of the control, and it's profoundly demoralizing.
Hi! I've worked for a few non-profits over the years. They are no panacea! Many businesses at least have a clear success mode: do good things for people and they'll pay you so you can do more good things for them.
But the business model of many non-profits is something like, "Sell good feelings to rich people, and then use the surplus to Do Good." This is a much messier feedback loop, and it's very hard to build a precise enough agreement of what "Good" means to prioritize and focus. And big-dollar donations often come with strings attached, meaning it can end up feeling like the problems you get in early enterprise software companies, where the tail wags the dog.
All kinds of organization have problems with the sorts of people who really want to be in charge. It's true that non-profits have fewer very greedy people, but they have at least as many people who want to be famous. Or who enjoy exercising power in a hierarchy.
That said, I know people who have found the right circumstances and have had great jobs. And one of the benefits of every non-profit I've worked for is that the people are great. Smart, dedicated, caring, and mission driven. So although nobody should think of it as utopia, I'd encourage people to check it them out.
They work there because they really believe in the non-profit's cause, but they are not good at their job.
They are either loved or tolerated by leadership because of their belief in the cause, but typically cause more problems than they fix, and can be very difficult to deal with.
Plenty of SW jobs where this is not a problem (some even have good pay, not FAANG level, though).
Go interview, and ask questions during the interview about it. Questions I've asked:
1. I don't check my email when I go home (unless there's a cross-geo meeting or something). Is that workable with this job?
2. What is the cycle of work like? How often do you work more than 40 hours a week? Is it regular, continuous work or are there crunch times?
3. Do you have on-call work? (If yes, probe into details - some on call work is terrible, but I've been on interviews where the person said he got a call only 3 times in a whole year).
I share your concern - it's why I've never taken an on call job. But I've still interviewed for some and am willing to babysit a laptop once every 6-8 weeks if they typically get a small number of calls - provided there are other benefits to the job (learn something new, higher pay, etc).
It was perfect but if the salary was better I probably would have stayed for 10 years. Much of the staff had.
The thought of switching career came to me a few times after my startup but quickly died because those careers can't never meet the decent salary to support my life and my family, and I've been living quite frugal already, nowhere near luxurious.
There was immense pressure to disconnect from actual situations and focus mainly on the “goals”… that if you didn’t do that, you weren’t being effective and you were wasting energy, holding yourself back from getting to the next level.
My first thought was that this feedback is around scaling. Obviously, the more you’re involved in the day to day, the more on your plate, the less you can scale up and focus on the big picture.
It took me some time to piece things together. The reality is that leadership wants senior leaders to stay disconnected. It makes it significantly easier to make decisions you wouldn’t make if you personally knew the people those decisions impact.
I won’t give specifics of another story, out of risk of getting outed. But imagine a C-level leader at Amazon telling people to step up and deliver among impossible timelines. To paraphrase, and btw - every one of these statements WERE made. I’m not making up a single statement.
“No, you’re not getting the raises you think you’re getting. And yes, many of your colleagues will leave in the coming months, because other companies will pay them significantly higher compensation. And yes, that will mean even more work for you. And yes, morale is suffering because of high attrition, but you need to convince your teams to deliver this.”
You see things like this in Hollywood films or TV dramas where you have cartoon villain personalities in positions of leadership. At the end of their speech, they might offer some candy or a box of donuts as token to make up for their asks.
At Amazon, if you work near or on campus, you get free bananas. :)
At Amazon the problem is they fail to see their employees as human beings. And they consider it a feature, not a bug.
Throw 100 things at the wall and see what sticks. If among those 100 things you also have to gut humans and use their guts and flesh to make things stick, then you do what needs to be done. If you don’t, the leadership will actually try and guilt you - that the problem is your inability, a weakness in your skill set and who you are.
-This is something that me as a middle level developer never even thought or considered. Now things make a lot of sense especially the disconnect that leadership often has. This is priceless, thank you !
The quickest way to not fixing burnout is assuming that it is a natural part of software development, that it's up to individuals to manage their own boundaries, or that the industry is impossible to change. None of these are entirely false nor entirely true, but they do nothing to affect change.
Is the end of overtime exemption a silver bullet? No, but it is a critical step toward creating incentives that do address worker burnout. It shifts a manager's choice from "push the team harder to get out a feature and deal with the consequences later" to "push the team harder and it costs $X."
There is a key piece of perspective that helps to understand this - management rarely has clarity in their business decisions. What drives management toward pushing workers to work more and ignoring burnout is that building product has a more tangible result than burnout. You may ask, "no, management weighs the costs and benefits!" Maybe yours does, but when the benefits are easier to quantify than the costs, the decision is clear.
This is why putting a dollar amount on the decision is so important. It shifts the decision to "possibly build it faster for $X" where the dollar cost amount has more clarity than the benefits. It doesn't mean management chooses not to build faster every time, but the decision framing does change the response. Anyone in management knows what clarity in business decisions means and how it affects outcomes.
That said, I've been a software engineer for over twenty years and most of those years I've worked under 40 hours a week and rarely worked overtime.
That is exactly the slack in the system that makes the endeavor sustainable. There's no way to get quality software out of consistently drained engineers.
Trying to find some "balance" without hedging for the asymmetry inherent in the problem will lead you to burn out roughly half of the workforce, which has nonlinear (very superlinear) knock-on effects for the success of the remaining half.
If you burn out the top half of your workforce, the bottom half will suddenly bear twice the load and burn out that much faster.
I always admired the approach of one department manager.
His philosophy was: Never say "no" to what your department is being asked to do, but tell them how much it is going to cost (including paid overtime, contractors, etc).
Leetcoding is a problem. we are forced to spend substantial parts of our lives preparing for these coding interviews, and that doesn't cover design, behavioral, and take homes. my brother is a doctor who makes 350k base, you know what an interview is like for him? "do you doctor" "yes I do doctoring" "great come aboard". its problematic that our gatekeepers for roles is guarded by skill sets that have very little to do with our day to day jobs, and that we have to spend our precious personal time prepping for it. this gets amplified by the fact that promotions are so little, the only way to get a real raise is through job hopping.
On call. We should value our personal time, any company/manager that expects you to work during it without at least offering 2x pay for those hours, has no respect for your personal time. you are giving your life away here, so its no wonder why on call is so life draining.
There are more but dont want to go on further
I find it hard to agree with the idea that a programmer’s time is respected less than a doctor’s too. How many hours per a week does a doctor work vs programmer? Unless you are experienced and in a cushy private practice, I’d bet the doctor has less freedom with time.
Doom scrolling about news, a little too much time spent every day on social media (including hacker news), overloading myself with information and not really creating enough. It is especially easy to fall into these bad habits in a work from home environment where it is easy to get distracted if you don't have the discipline.
What worked for me is actually identifying the patterns of my behavior everyday, and cutting things out. No more phone time from 8am to 12pm. No more reading about news after 12pm. Even those two things cut out a lot of nonsense time out of my day and after just a week I felt re-energized and re-focused.
I wonder how much of the creeping burnout that seems to be affecting the workforce is a confluence of bad habits encroaching on actual productivity - social media addiction is a huge one, with people spending way too much time reading and interacting about people and news and events which have zero impact on them.
Cutting out the news did wonders for my mental health and wellbeing.
I think companies really need to work on reducing or eliminating the amount of bullshit ICs have to deal with vs management (time tracking, status updates, on call, etc) or have management do the same amount of bullshit. Your boss may say they understand what you're going through, but they most likely do not have the same level of bullshit being asked of them on a daily basis. They can sit in meetings all day, miss deadlines, and no one knocks them on it like an IC where being a day late gets put on a PIP.
Every company has an invisible line, like the officer/enlisted distinction in militaries, but always undocumented for obvious reasons. Above it are the real humans whom the company cares about; below it are the "resources". ICs are always below the line, except in R&D jobs that aren't available without a top-10 PhD... but most managers are also below the line.
Above the line, you basically write your own performance review because the bosses are your buddies. Below the line, it's miserable, and as you said you're one delay or mistake away from being sent to the Performance Improvement Camps. Almost all first-level managers in a company of significant size (25+ people) are below the line and spend just as much time on humiliating work justification (e.g., status reports) as the guys at the bottom.
You rarely see burnout in anyone, because everyone does their best to hide it. Their performance drops until they quit. Most people just assume that's incompetence, especially with managers.
I see it all the time. The difference is management can often delegate the tasks they're most burnt out on to others.
The overarching issue is:
you need stability/healthy employees at the higher levels, at the lower levels it doesnt matter.
You cant have turn over in management, its a risk to the company. Turnover in engineers, even highly skilled ones, can be recovered from with some extra cost.
And who has to go through all that?
The managers.
Trust me, we don't want it any more than the ICs do. But senior/executive management doesn't feel the pain and therefore doesn't care.
(If we paid you to do some operations task for an hour, that whole amount is a business expense this year. If we paid you to build software that will deliver value for the next three years, we have to take the expense of that hour across the next 36 months, not at all once. It’s a GAAP and a US tax code requirement. In no way do I care if you worked 33.25 or 40.75 hours in any given week other than to have enough data for finance to do accounting and file taxes correctly.)
IC's that I've seen on my end to have a little more latitude to actually design things and have a small amount of independence there, wheras managers are stuck with the 'keep the project going' paperwork, people paperwork, shielding the team from the politics, etc.
(I've personally found a way to sidestep a lot of that, but so many of my previous managers have burned out to the above reasons.)
When you work with computer code that obeys logic and that we have the power of telling the computer what to do, it’s easy to forget that humans are different, they have a dash of irrationality and emotion.
Also that many times, we just don’t have all the context behind why someone may be doing/not doing the things they are.
If a company has a burnt-out high performer they want to keep, then offer them a sabbatical. Let them take the time they need to relieve their stress. If they still don't want to come back, well that's life.
I say this as someone who put in their notice on this past Monday because of burn out. After nearly fifteen years working in this industry, I'm tired. I'm going to take time off and rest up, maybe work on my own projects. I feel no shame in this.
You don't need to put on your poker face all the time and can hide the depersonalization ghost in the closet for a little bit if there's a meeting. You can go hug your dog afterwards or do something else to keep on trucking.
Then some companies mandated a return to the office. Ghosts won't be in the closet for an entire workday in a bland office setting full of people you don't want to be around, so people finally quit.
Mostly its interacting with people who are just unhelpful/unkind/unfriendly/combative that makes me think, "Why am I spending so much of my life doing this?" which tends to cause me to spiral a bit.
If anyone is reading this and thinks oh maybe I should be nicer to my teammates... You should try. Being a little kinder might make your life a lot easier because your team wont dislike interacting with you.
Hmmm, I wonder why I'm so cynical? Why do I assume bad faith so often? I wonder??? Guess it's a mystery.
That means even if we jump jobs to get out of a toxic work environment, there's still a good possibility to get burned out at the new job. And with the rate of exhaustion being over 55% for both men and women, that means we have slightly less than a 50-50 chance of finding a good job that won't overwork us. And that assumes your work environment doesn't change (ie, your boss leaving, re-orgs, etc).
Maybe it's time we get together and just stop putting up with toxic environments, because it's pretty much prevalent. The only way to do that is to form solidarity with one another, and push back against the toxicity through a collective group.
I find it exhausting as I'm constantly questioning myself. And, despite delivering projects that help people and work for the business, I always seem to be swimming against the tide of (programmer) opinion.
20 years down, another 20 to go.
This doesn't mean IT is worse than most other fields, but it sure hasn't gotten any better given the problems most younger generations run into today.
This is not limited to capitalist bureaucracies, of course--the most dysfunctional corners of the Soviet system were eerily similar--but it is arguably most pronounced in the corporate world, because there is no purpose for these hierarchies existing, or indeed no purpose for most of these companies at all except to make money for a small number of people whom there is no good reason to care about.
The WHO is right. Burnout isn't a medical problem or classical mental illness. It is a rational response to living under a socioeconomic system that has no right to exist.
* Kids and the number of illnesses they bring home to share with me
* A few major projects constantly interrupted by "small" support requests (or sick days)
* Failing to understand a very complicated source treeI knew it was coming eventually after having burned out a couple times at prior jobs. In all cases it was caused by a mix of the factors the article mentions plus a lack of meaning and fulfillment as a software engineer that I've never been able to escape. This last role was sort of a last ditch effort to see if a renowned company, good salary, and good manager could make things better. It didn't, and in fact I think it was the cognitive dissonance of that situation that lead me to burnout harder and more quickly than I have in past positions.
I've had a few weeks to reflect and recharge and so far I have no regrets.
The next step is to try hard to find a better option in another industry or some form of self-employment, though it's required some mindfulness to be honest with myself about what I truly want and could be qualified for. I also know that I could easily just go right back into the fray; who could give up the money and stability? I don't take those for granted. It's certainly a far better option than failing my family or going into poverty. But I'm optimistic I can make it work.