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> After burning out on tech I really should have switched to another career... or even tried management

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.

This is another issue though. Nothing burns you out quite like realizing that you don't even want your boss's job. It makes your career feel hopeless.

> This is another issue though. Nothing burns you out quite like realizing that you don't even want your boss's job. It makes your career feel hopeless.

Yes. Yes it does.

"Nothing burns you out quite like realizing that you don't even want your boss's job."

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.

Your boss probably had to seem to love his job. Indeed, that's part of the job, as a middle manager.

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.

> 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.

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.

Honestly, for me this realization made dealing with my job frustrations easier. As an IC in a tech role, I'm paid decently despite not working for FAANG. I don't have to aspire to become a manager just so I can afford my mortgage, family expenses, etc. When all the "extra" and "volunteer" stuff starts getting pushed on me, I don't feel the need to do it so I can "demonstrate performing above my current level" or whatever BS they want to call it.

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.

This times 100. Being a middle manager sucks even more, because you have no real ability to protect people. When the people under you are happy and doing well, you spend no real time with them... because you're constantly being pulled to deal with crises, often of executive cause... whatever problem the unluckiest or worst person on your team faces is your problem, every day.

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.

I was a manager at one point, and the combination of #3 and #4 basically killed my interest in management.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

I have also found that non-profits can become a home to "useless zealots", a perhaps unkind but in my experience accurate term.

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.

Ooh, interesting. I haven't seen that, but totally get how it happens.

If you don't need money (permanently or temporarily) as a techie, don't work a job for a nonprofit. If you want to help people, take time off your high paying corporate job to contribute to free software, or run a forum website, or do citizen data journalism.

Those are good things, but why do you see it as either/or?

> Chronic understaffing, crazy time pressure, and lack of resources. This is endemic in the tech field.

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).

This. The tech, role, salary, and checklists like the Joel Test are less important to me now, than questions like this.

The problem about being oncall is not how many times you get called, it’s that you cannot plan anything in your free time without having to take your laptop with you.

For me is the other way around, i don't mind taking my laptop everywhere, but i loathe getting a page at 3am

Then ask how often one is on call. One week out of every 4 weeks? 8 weeks? 12 weeks?

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).

I had a great eng job at a tiny consulting company. Very relaxed. No pressure other than the occasional state deadline. We just used meh tech and the pay was 25%+ lower than what you would expect.

It was perfect but if the salary was better I probably would have stayed for 10 years. Much of the staff had.

This list has everything I face as well. Even the best working job was with a tiny company which was my own and my partner. I see almost everyone is forced to lie in the corp world. Corp world like people to lie.

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.

The company BS is unbelievable. I would love to hear how the company justifies that BS. They never do and because of that, I have to add the fact that I don't understand why the BS exists. So it doubles the pain: it sounds BS and I can't explain what purpose it serves...

Quote from Office Space: http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3u7bxz