Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit | Hacker News Reader

Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

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All the "strategies" (really just tips) follow the same pattern of either tunneling on overwork as a cause, treating symptoms or pathos.

>Sid and Michelle emphasized that the earlier a manager can identify burnout the better.

Honestly, at the point of identification, you're likely too late. Especially for something as insidious as burnout, which can last for years and not show any symptoms before it is beyond the point of no return.

>GitLab team members are often under a lot of pressure.

So stop putting them under a lot of pressure. The second tip hints at this, but it only seems to be a reactionary measure. Maybe all this goalsetting, OKRs and such is exactly the problem with the industry, always having to feel pressured to an extreme by metrics and stats which effectively mean nothing, when most people just want to put in an honest day's work and progress.

Maybe it's time to admit corporations went too far pressuring the average worker to worry over every little detail.

Anecdote time. As I’ve moved into larger companies and am shackled by OKRs, I am enjoying my work a lot less and feel under more pressure than ever but am getting less useful work done. It feels like a lack of trust and assumes the organization is run very efficiently and fairly—which I don’t think any company can truly claim. People just seem to adjust by gaming these systems instead of putting useful effort into their work.

I agree fully with this. I'm currently at a small company (which has a different set of challenges), but my experience is that large employers come up with flavor-of-the-year useless metrics in an attempt to measure progress towards goals and productivity.

Google Plus.

https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-just-tied-employe...

Moving to a small company is the only antidote, for the most part. Actually, pretty much everything is better at a small company. For anyone who's only worked at a mega corp or a "Unicorn" where working 60+ hours is expected, working with a small group of people who all know each other will change your life.

it can depend on the stage of life of the small company.

I've been at my current company from it's series A, through a series B, a layoff, sale of one of it's IPs/customer bases, and ultimately sale to a holding company.

I agree with your overall point -- working with a small group of people who all know each other is great. I've had the opportunity to work with some people for the better part of a decade, and having that kind history with coworkers can be a real boon for communication and planning. It's also much more impactful when a coworker decides to leave.

The real shift towards a more sane work style happened after the acquisition by the holding company. It came with a layoff at the start, which was really disruptive. However, since then, there's been a huge focus on profitability rather than growth. Willingness to make big investments is much more conservative.

> As I’ve moved into larger companies and am shackled by OKRs, I am enjoying my work a lot less and feel under more pressure than ever but am getting less useful work done.

Ditto.

At this point I feel that spending my entire day writing emails (even though I'm on engineering) would not only look better but would meet OKRs, while getting zero actual useful work done.

I hate this fad.

This is precisely the cause of my burnout this month, at a huge aerospace company you’ve heard of.

I felt like I wasn’t able to motivate myself to do the work, because I was incentivized to do what you described. I ended up doing both, poorly, but honestly I was able to make it a shockingly long time (I’m surprised I was the one to realize and decide to leave, no manager conversation yet).

> As I’ve moved into larger companies and am shackled by OKRs

Try moving into a large company _without_ OKRs. How much redundancy do you need to buy to achieve your service reliability goals? Well, you can decide on any goal you want but management now has the right to declare the decision wrong post-hoc:

Got an outage? Should have spent more Didn't have an outage? Why are we wasting all this money?

And of course, by avoiding any public commitment like an OKR, they are somehow absolved of accountability in the matter.

I'd shorten that to "Maybe it's time to admit corporations went too far pressuring the average worker".

It took me a long time to realize it, but work/life balance in the U.S. is weighted far too heavily in favor of business, at the expense of the individual and their family and community.

It's not just the US. Without going into the nuances of the US, things like burnout are severely on the rise among the younger crowds all over the world despite some of them working as much or less than before in several countries.

Most of these countries are adopting American office concepts. More statistics, more pressure, more management / talks with management, more "work family", tighter interviews, you name it. All stuff that pressures the Average Joe who just wants to make a living. For SE, the majority of these jobs are best described as "gluing APIs together", nowhere near the prestigious "you really gotta want it!" jobs they are sold as. Now add to that while SE does earn above average in all of these countries, it isn't so luxurious as a non-senior that you could pick your nose and live super comfortably no matter which city you live in.

So the pressure got worse and both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators are down. Add onto that a bunch of other societal problems. If anything, it's more surprising people aren't expecting half the populace to burn out at some point in life.

You start by arguing that it's not just the US, and then continue by saying that the rest of the world is adopting american practices, which is causing the issue.

I'm confused.

The former was referencing location, in that other western countries are already having the same problems. Partially due to adopting the latter culturally. However, American office culture is not the sole problem: a lot of people in EU wouldn't object to these office politics nearly as much if there was a luxurious total comp attached to it or an interesting job. They go through worse hoops just for those.

That said, maybe it'd be more apt to say "Silicon Valley office culture".

Is burnout a major problem in Asian countries which are famous for their long working hours? I'm thinking China's 9-9-6 system, Japanese salarymen, and South Korean gwarosa.

> So stop putting them under a lot of pressure. The second tip hints at this, but it only seems to be a reactionary measure. Maybe all this goalsetting, OKRs and such is exactly the problem with the industry, always having to feel pressured to an extreme by metrics and stats which effectively mean nothing, when most people just want to put in an honest day's work and progress.

You nailed it. The entire article can be summed up by your statement. It's great they're acknowledging it, but putting corporate make-up on it is cringey; it almost comes off like we are the problem and not the other way around.

I don't give a damn about "drinking the kool-aid" and I don't give a damn about your business theatrics nor the political drama that goes with it. Give me work to do and leave me alone to do it. That'll solve a lot of the burn-out.

that's super right. Got first hand unfortunate experience. The simple thing is: please managers don't buy the work-hard-to-compete ethos. It's not because you can take it that others can or should.

American Corporations drink their own kool-aid, which is probably why they can sit there and talk about what's wrong concisely without knowing what to do about it. The days of servant leadership, or leading from the front are gone in terms of management. Instead, they're a self-serving bunch. Engineers are effectively the lowest on the hierarchy and their happiness matters to no one in the chain because everyone is serving the link above them. If software ever does unionize I don't think it'll be over pay, it'll be over stuff like this.

You have a very negative opinion about management. Please remember that managers are people too and they're (likely) trying their best too. Just as they give you feedback, it is often helpful to give upward feedback too. Especially if it's in the form of "I need you to do X to help me"

Won't people please think of the poor managers making ten times our income, come on guys, just because I will literally fire you when some VP demands it, were all on the same side. Here, have a cookie and forget this whole thing.

Interesting you thought I haven't tried to have those conversations upward. The problem is there's zero incentive for managers to listen or change.

I do have a negative opinion about managers. Managers mandated themselves into making x times the amount of their top paid report, control decision making, and have hiring and firing powers all in one position. Managers being people doesn't make them immune from criticism, and if me describing the status quo upsets you, then maybe we should be having a bigger discussion about what being in a captured ideology looks like from the ground.

> The problem is there's zero incentive for managers to listen or change.

Yeah, there is now only incentive to get rid of you since you are having a negative impact on the manager's (perceived) success, and you have also banned yourself from ever being promoted to management by being disloyal.

"Managers mandated themselves into making x times the amount of their top paid report, control decision making, and have hiring and firing powers all in one position."

I'm curious where you work (not specifically, I'm talking about generally the industry), because it's not been my experience either as a manager nor my understanding of anyone else in silicon valley or large or mid sized software companies. I've managed engineers who get paid more than me, never have had unilateral hiring or firing powers, and don't control much decision making power other than my ability to hopefully influence engineers or upper management.

I could imagine your case being true in other places (finance, for example) where managers usually aren't engineers and there is much more of a fiefdom organizational structure, but it hasn't been my experience in software.

I work in Fintech. On average, managers make more than their reports and heavily influence how much their reports make. Just based on levels.fyi managers earn a base of $40k over their engineering equivalent, with a higher bonus and stock margin as well (at my company). My company also doesn't position technical leaders at the same level as their manager, so technical leaders are already in an odd position when trying to represent the team. Generally I've figured out that many managers don't know what "influencing" is, so it starts to feel like "pressuring" from someone who doesn't understand the product from a technical perspective. I don't think any of this is uncommon to the larger software landscape, but certain companies may hire better managers than others.

Not OP, but I don't feel this has anything to do with any specific people, but more an indictment of the system itself that we've created. Historically, there has never been an incentive or compensation structure that exists in companies that would lead management to begin to care about this stuff over their other priorities and deliverables.

There is when the employees join together in a union.

Speaking as a manager, a lot of managers seems to resort to the "managers are people too" truism whenever they're called out on managerial misbehavior. I think a lot of people in the occupation can't own up to abuses of our power so our gut reaction is to handwave away the very idea of power.

"We're all on the same level, so you can't hold us to a higher standard" is a silly but common way to confuse this sort of ethical problem.

Shout-out to you for saying this. I'm not anti-manager by any means, but I'm very vocal that our existing (and most common) system is not working well, or to the benefit of most people or the corporation.

All the way up to the CEO who’s setting the tone. The farther up the ladder, the “best” is more likely to serve their own interest, it’s why they’ve pursued that rank in the first place.

Aren't you a kiss ass

That’s exactly why many of the best engineers move to Silicon Valley and start their own startup, or work at an engineer-founded one.

Ironically or not, GitLab is actually both.

> Give me work to do and leave me alone to do it. That'll solve a lot of the burn-out.

Yeah but this really translates to asking management to actually do their job, and letting you do yours. Any hint at this attitude will get you in a world of trouble.

This touches on a theme I see in a lot of US organizations I work at: Lack of accountability at the management and executive level.

If you're well established in your career as an engineer today, you have leverage. Many of us have the very privileged luxury of being able to refuse to work at a place with poor management, or under a bad manager.

We likewise have the ability to say "no" to things. I wouldn't recommend making it a habit, and I'd also suggest qualifying any "no" you give to your supervisors, but it's important to push back when it's reasonable to do so. e.g. "I won't be on call because it is not in my employment contract and wasn't a responsibility I agreed to."

> Maybe all this goalsetting, OKRs and such is exactly the problem with the industry,

Yes, yes it is.

That is also a symptom of a bigger problem: management doesn't really have to be useful for the company, they merely have to _appear_ to be. Exceptional management is nearly invisible, which is great for companies, bad for careers.

The solution? Managers will make noise and a lot of it. Part of this requires crazy deadlines. If the ship is not creaking it's not being pushed hard enough. Attrition? Bad culture fit, we work hard, we play hard. "I delivered <project> months ahead of schedule" sounds way better than "I delivered it on time" - nevermind that the "delivered" project is a buggy mess noone uses and will require a lot more effort to get to an acceptable state.

We should be praising progress. Not everything should be a 'sprint', it should be a 'march'. What's all the sprinting for?

Most deadlines literally don't matter. Motivated teams that are able to perform their best work do matter.

> when most people just want to put in an honest day's work and progress.

This.

<< Exceptional management is nearly invisible, which is great for companies, bad for careers.

The more I think about it, the more it aligns with my experiences so far.

<< Most deadlines literally don't matter.

What?! Are you insane? What are we going to tell blue ribbon initiative committee?

<< Managers will make noise and a lot of it.

Yup.

> We should be praising progress. Not everything should be a 'sprint', it should be a 'march'. What's all the sprinting for?

I'm of two minds on this statement. On the one hand, "sprint" isn't meant to be taken literally in the scrum metaphor, in that teams aren't supposed to be trying to cram in as much stuff as humanly possible. But at the same time, the idea of each two-week period needing to have concrete goals, and failure to meet those goals being a negative indicator, is a major issue.

For me, the value of having deadlines, or something resembling a deadline, is to make it easier to get started. Once I've actually got the ball rolling, it's less important that the schedule actually resembles the plan, insofar as it doesn't affect other people. But my experience with scrum teams is that progress isn't seen as good enough. You have to execute on the plan, at least as far as scheduling is concerned, and cut corners if you have to.

The issue is this rigid equivalency of plan = commitment, and therefore deviation from that plan = failure. No, a plan does not necessarily mean a commitment. A plan lets you get started without spending so much time in decision paralysis. Once you're moving, the real plan evolves.

You're not wrong. The problem is conflicting incentives. Managers are incentivized to create metrics, goals, deadlines, and performance structures that give them the feeling (really just a feeling often) of being able to measure and 'control' progress.

The problem is the people accountable for all those things are living under the weight of all their KPIs and metrics. The more those measurements are reduced or made less important the easier it is to focus on just doing the work. But for the manager it becomes harder to state how good the process is, and what they need to do to stay on track.

Yeah I wish you'd at least be given a chance to be responsible about delivering, and not always crack the whip by default, there's just no way you can ever have a healthy working environment.

Exactly. Putting on ever more pressure while also disempowering people puts them in a psychological spit that leads to burnout.

A huge problem I had to overcome was learning to leave work mentally every day. The online and WFH nature of software work makes it easy to feel like you're always on-call and feeling some low-level stress. This is a quick path to burnout for me. My advice to anyone in this situation is to be firm about not working outside your regular hours. If someone messages or emails when you're not working, don't respond until you're back on the clock, even disable notifications if that's a stress-trigger. Obviously actually being on-call is different. That needs to be an official policy, ideally spread across multiple devs so you're not on 24/7.

Turn off all work devices after work hours.

Since I started working from home, I have an alarm set for 4:50pm to remind me that 'work' ends in 10 minutes. I might choose to violate that deliberately, but not by accident.

I have similar views on the OKRs. I am not even sure how they became so ubiquitous as a measuring stick. Did this come out of Scrum and just found a welcome place in general management speak?

I'm also curious if anyone feels similarly about daily standup meetings and the hyperventilating over the Jira board? I feel like I've been in environments where the goal seems to perversely turn into having something to discuss at the next days standup meeting.

Scrum never really had OKRs.

I noticed OKRs and OKDs and whatever other flavour of it popping up after the big tech rise. Google and others were seeds of this style of delivery management, somehow this was taught in some MBA and when this generation of MBAs started to take reins of other companies it got spread around as gospel.

I fucking hate it, it's overloaded with rituals that get repeated every quarter: workshops, planning sessions, vision/mission workshops, and so on and so forth. The worse is that never seems that anything has enough time to be done, in my experience roughly a month of each quarter is mentally spent by going through these motions, justifying work that needs to be done, doing discovery for what's upcoming (that needs to be done before planning season ends). Constantly switching contexts about what we're working right now with what work needs to be done in the future, every single fucking quarter.

I'm getting extremely tired of this cycle, it's getting longer and longer to recover from each of these "planning seasons".

P.S.: Not mentioning the variance in processes, each company you join has their own set of rituals and timelines for planning and so it'll take a few cycles of it until you figure out what's important and what I can tune off and give my mind a break.

Ah, thanks for the detail regarding the origin of this. For some reason I just assumed it came out of some scrum cult type thing as the rise of that was also for around the time OKR became part of the lexicon. I completely agree. Are we just stuck with this then for the foreseeable future I wonder? It seems to be that there are enough people that share this sentiment that this whole overbearing process ritual has become largely performative and toxic.

Well, management types are probably not going to collectively vote against something that could jeopardize their jobs, even if it would be beneficial for the corp. So we're waiting for higher management (C-level) and startups to take the risk and show it can be done differently and more efficiently.

Meanwhile, most developers are not uncomfortable enough they are willing to unionize and stir the pot over this. There's a disturbing lack of empirical evidence over all this, some even pointing towards how destructive these trends are. Yet, if the people themselves are unwilling to combine their collective weight and push back, nothing's going to happen.

I think the best way to put it is "most people don't care or flat-out dislike it, but it is too much effort to push back given the perceived success rate". Some adjacent comments already hint to it: stirring the pot is a great way to get yourself on the no-no list and have to start looking for a new job.

Agreed. What a sad state of affairs though. All these companies that aspire to disrupt but that spirit somehow doesn't apply to their own management. The irony is quite spectacular. I think your right that any meaningful change will likely come from some successful startups(s.) What a great way differentiator that will be for any startup who actually thinks differently and markets themselves as such as a means to attract talent.

> So stop putting them under a lot of pressure.

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Pressure can be perceived even without expectations. I think especially junior developers have a hard time knowing which deadlines are actually important, and may tend to experience a much larger responsibility for the entire project than anyone expects of them.

In part this may be down to a bad communication style from managers, a good manager shields the team from worrying about clouds on the horizon; but this isn't always the case.

I've had people I've had to sit down and tell that this overtime they're putting in isn't expected of them, nobody asks this of them, it isn't their responsibility but the team got this, it's not worth burning out at age 24 over some sprint deliverable that's like just a cell in a spreadsheet that nobody really cares about.

I suffered from severe burnout around a year ago, and only now am I starting to feel back to normal. Nothing here would have helped me, and it's pretty clear to me why that is the case.

(Paraphrased from literature that I read at the time)

There's two kinds of burnout. One is caused by overwork, stress, long hours, not enough breaks, no holidays, not enough headcount, and so on. The kind of things this article talks about.

Instead, my burnout was caused by a lack of progress, which destroyed a lot of my other needs that I wasn't even thinking about. I felt no autonomy, no meaning to my work, and I felt out of place in the team because it seemed like I was the only one that was so bothered by it.

I wasn't working too much, and I often was only doing a few hours of work a day. However, because of organisational issues, I was making no progress, barely any improvements to the code, and was completely demotivated. I did try taking time off and taking it easy, as the traditional methods to combat burnout. Far from helping, they just made things worse, because that wasn't the problem. Looking back, the issue was a company pretending to care about Agile and just making everything worse in the process.

This ended up being a bit of a rambling vent, and I'm sorry about that - but my point is that we need to be aware that not all burnout is from stress and overwork. A lack of motivating factors can look the same as poor hygiene factors. Your reactionary measures *must* include actually talking to the person about what is causing the stress, and if needed, being willing to fix the organisational issues that are the root cause.

I think this is actually the most common type of "unreported" burnout in tech. The enormous amount of work to be done weighs on you, but the work doesn't have a defined set of requirements or the requirements are constantly shifting. For me, I've seen it mostly when a rewrite is happening, seems closely related to analysis paralysis.

> the work doesn't have a defined set of requirements or the requirements are constantly shifting. For me, I've seen it mostly when a rewrite is happening, seems closely related to analysis paralysis.

I'm currently dealing with this at work. I'm effectively responsible for a rewrite of another teams backend because that team is "short-staffed" or whatever (simple solution: hire people, train people, fix the staffing problem) and because "we like services!" or whatever (a very stupid and short-sighted reason to start a project: it's trying to fit a solution with a problem we don't actually have -- oh, no! That application is a monolith! The horror!). And on top of all of this I was pressured into agreeing with some arbitrary deadlines set by someone else before I even had a decent understanding of what my team and I were being asked to build!

It seems to me, however, and many others at the IC-level, many who are not even on our team but who are aware of this project I've been gifted, that another teams manager just doesn't want to own the problem space any more and he's found a way to misuse management to shove it off onto someone else.

And it's all decisions made levels above me (and even my manager, FWIW) and we're all just supposed to accept that our reality is one where we're thrashed around from project to project without any consent, without any conversations, without understanding why. And I'm a tech lead at this company, and I've been very effective in this role in the previous 3.5 years, but now I'm hamstrung by these absolutely horrendous decision making processes that exist somewhere near the stratosphere.

It's frankly fucking insulting to exist as an IC in corporate America and the only thing that keeps me clocking in every day is the fact that I have a family and live in a high CoL area: They've got me by the balls and they know it. I suspect I'm not alone.

/rant off

Get out of my head! This resonates with me - this is exactly how I'm currently feeling. Do you have any resources that were particularly insightful to you from your research?

I think that [1] was the article that first alerted me to the fact that there's different kinds of burnout and it's not one-size-fits-all. Other than that, I don't have too many resources. You probably shouldn't take my advice, because my burnout ended up with me quitting and taking a year out to work on a startup. However if you can leave and join a different team / company, I'd recommend it. By the time you're feeling burnt out, you probably don't have time to fix things.

I did try to fix the root-cause organisational issues, and actually did have a sizable impact with many of my suggestions having been implemented now. However, I ruined myself in the process. It was far more difficult than I expected, because it was a huge old-school hierarchical place. I wasn't paid enough to fix things, and it wasn't in my job description. I ignored that and pushed to fix things anyway - last I've heard it actually made a difference and some of the things I advocated have actually happened now, but it was too late for me.

I just got round to reading the Phoenix Project & Unicorn Project recently, and I'd recommend that. I saw an awful lot of similarities with my old company, and I think it would have helped to have that example of how to improve things. Even then, they were only successful in the book because they had management buy-in.

[1] https://www.inc.com/melody-wilding/3-types-of-burnout-accord...

Take care. I do validate and recognise exactly what OP mentioned, I suffered of it from the later half of 2020 all the way to the end of 2021, things are slowly getting better since December when I changed orgs (inside the same company).

I'm still far away from how I used to perform, I'm doing therapy and it's been one of the worst issues I've talked about for a while. It creeped into other areas of my life and now affects my day-to-day life and hobbies, the pandemic just made everything much worse.

I've always enjoyed reading this article by Angersock. It dives into the causal factors of burnout while acknowledging how personal and diverse it can be: https://web.archive.org/web/20190423185636/https://angersock...

Wouldn't that be a "boreout" instead of "burnout"?

That is probably a better fit, yes. Not perfect, since I was still intellectually stimulated by trying to improve the environment and processes, but every attempt inevitably hit a roadblock. I identify most with the 2nd and 3rd categories in [1]

However I think it's more valuable for me to keep using the term burnout, especially in situations like this. To a manager, burnout and boreout look the same. Ideally you could inject 'boreout' into the public consciousness, but it's more realistic for me to say I was experiencing burnout with different root causes.

[1] https://www.inc.com/melody-wilding/3-types-of-burnout-accord...

In this case, I think you wanted more opportunities and career growth and that wasn't possible in that role. I've been there before. I don't think this is burnout, you just outgrew your role, and there was no reason to stick around.

> Looking back, the issue was a company pretending to care about Agile and just making everything worse in the process.

First, thanks for your honest input. I suppose the fix was to change job to a company that doesn't pretend to do agile?

Partly, yes. I left that company and started my own. That's brought its own set of troubles, but it has at least given me a chance to regain my love for programming.

Looking back, I did really enjoy trying to fix the organisational issues that caused my burnout. So I was going through this constant cycle of

- Get frustrated by something when programming - Realise there's an issue in process / workflow - Get excited to fix that issue - Come up with an idea - Get shut down because I'm not paid enough to have those kinds of ideas - Go back to programming, even more frustrated

I've since realised that I actually never fit the developer role in a company that well. I was good at it, but always got drawn towards creating tooling, CI pipelines, running the retros - the meta-changes and process improvements. In previous jobs that was fine because they were a lot more agile. There wasn't as much that needed fixing, and they were happy to let me fix the issues that did exist.

I felt no meaning to my work because I was motivated by improving things, whether they were in my job description or not. I could have a minimal impact by writing some code, or a huge impact by helping everyone else write code more efficiently, but I wasn't allowed to do the latter.

Anyway yeah long story short I'm currently pivoting my career towards the managerial/coaching/processes side. Something like "Software Development Coach" rather than just "Software Developer". I'm excited for the future again, and excited to help other people that are dealing with similar issues :)

This resonates very much with my own experience. I’ve quit my last job because it broke this camel’s back and now the last thing I want to do is going back as a developer.

I also do enjoy fixing things and processes so that others don’t needlessly suffer through work and actually enjoy themselves.

But how do you go about switching tracks to coaching? What does it even entail? How do you learn?

And more importantly: who’s buying? I was trying to better things in every job I had and every time I met the wall of “not being paid enough to have these ideas/being road blocked”.

If companies have this attitude (no matter how much they’re losing through low morale, inefficiencies, mistakes, attrition, etc) when offered a chance to fix it “for free” by an actual employee, why would they pay top dollar for a coach to make it happen?

It feels to me that management is even more cynical than the burnt out grunts and their objective is to squeeze as much as they can out of their employees while they last because they know they’ll quit or burnout in a year or two anyway.

How do you even begin a conversation when that’s the prevalent attitude?

I get where you're coming from, and they're questions I'm working on answering as well. Unlike you, I have worked in jobs where that kind of proactive find-and-fix mentality was prevalent, where they bought into continuous improvement. They do exist, it does work, and that's what made it so frustrating when I wasn't allowed to fix things in this job.

I don't have all the answers yet, and it's something I'm in the process of doing. However, what is really helping me (and what made me realise this was the issue in the first place) is working with a coach. It's a bit like therapy/counselling, basically someone to guide me through the process of figuring out what went wrong and why, and how to fix it in future. He's from the tech industry, so has a base level understanding of things, and was able to give me some good pointers for how to find resources.

I think the thing that started me off learning & reskilling was reading blogs from technical coaches like [1]. Clearly the job I want does exist, and there is a demand for it. It's not common, but it exists.

[1] https://philippe.bourgau.net/

These are not two different types of burnout... They are one and the same. Pressure and overwork do not per se cause burnout... What causes burnout is if the effort-reward cycle misses (either repeatedly for small efforts, or if you put in a lot of effort and have a categorical miss)

Reward could be anything. The feeling of a job well done (easy to miss if the project is a failure, or if management pivots), it could be the expectation of career advancement, it could be soft recognition by peers... And is dependent on the individual and project. You could even have an outward success and a pay raise but if you wanted your peers to love you and they didn't.... Burnout. You could even have an easy and unpressured job and burn out if it's not providing the rewards you expect.

In any case the disconnect between effort and reward teaches your brain to associate effort with failure and the fact that the common. "take a break" advice failed for you should not be surprising, because I think that doesn't work in general: it doesn't reassociate effort with expected reward.

I feel like a lot of people here are using the topic of burnout to hoist their opinions about American capitalism or whatever, but I honestly don't believe that this is the root cause. Plenty of people work their asses off and are happy to do so because it can be its own reward, or, they know what they want and know how to get it after each brutal push of effort. But not falling victim to burnout takes self-awareness, or good managers (capitalist systems or otherwise - e.g. academia or military) and both of those are in short supply, blaming capitalism is much easier.

That's a really interesting hypothesis, and it would make sense. Is it something that you've come up with, or is there some literature I can read about it?

Great analysis indeed. I have have the same question about literature.

Brilliant analysis. Anecdotally, I find this to be true in my own case.

I think you are right. But the operating regime of your hypothesis is basically from naive entry until a point, and that point is when the expected reward transcends rewards that capitalism can provide.

If you want meaning from your work, and that meaning was initially provided by personal growth, then when the position no longer feels like growth, there is no reward possible. Similarly, if you thought you were doing something meaningful but then discover your company, or individuals who benefit more from your work than you do, are part of the problem, there is no redeeming it. To continue you have to resort to selective attention or basic ostriching.

If this is true then the primary protective traits against burnout would be 1) strongly established healthy boundaries around what to expect from a job and a healthy home life or 2) myopic focus on problem solving and a lack of interest or self-limiting that prevents curiosity about higher levels of organization. Anecdotally this matches with my experience — most people who endure fall largely into one or both of those categories.

A possible corollary is that with improvements to (that is, restrictions on) capitalism, more categories of people could continue to work without such ready disillusionment from bad or gray actors.

I agree with this definition of burnout.

Another second order consequence of this thing is putting in a lot of effort almost certainly sets you up for this effort-reward cycle miss

I think your comment is very insightful. I agree with your distinction between the two kinds of burnout. I feel like the second one you mention is often the much worse of the two as least with the first case there's the potential to discuss, joke and possibly commiserate over head count and long hours.

I would be interested in hearing how you went about moving forward form your burnout.

I also had a burnout recently.

As far as I know there are no different kinds of burnout. A burnout is always caused by long periods of stress exhausting the body.

The causes of stress can of course be very different. Working below or above your level can cause stress. But also long periods of physical pain can cause stress. Or being overstimulated all the time. And it can be a sum of all kinds of stress. For example when you struggle in a relationship it is much harder to cope with stress at work.

Stress eats your energy.

It's also difficult to prevent a burnout yourself because after a long time you can get used to being stressed. You forget how it is to be relaxed.

Sometimes it is just not clear what caused a burnout. It just adds up.

The best way to prevent a burnout and to recover from it is to accept you are stressed and tired and you need to step back. This is also the most difficult thing to do.

I very much agree, it's a big assumption that burnout is only cause by too much work or too much pressure. When that assumption is unchallenged, it can lead to managers dismissing concerns about burnout because their teams are not overworked.

A lack of meaning to the work, or even a lack of work overall, can also cause feelings of burnout. A lack of obvious career progression can cause burnout. Constantly fire fighting can cause burnout.

So if someone says they are burned out, I always ask what is causing it before talking about solutions.

I actually recently suffered (am still suffering from?) a burning caused by the combination - super high stress combined with absolutely no progress, "busywork" and literally a feeling like a plumber whose job is to "support" the people doing the cool stuff (which I thought I would get to work on when I was hired).

I was given most advice that this article mentions - I took vacations, we had internal rotations to reduce stress, we tried hiring. Ultimately, none of these efforts came to fruition. I think there really is no counter to bad decisions from management. You can try to be as nice as possible at an individual level, but the "lack of progress" burnout will bite you if the pressure doesn't.

This is exactly what I have been going through for the last year or two. I even changed jobs, finding a role that was supposed to be better. At a company that would allow my skills to improve, while having what I assumed would be a better run company.

Unfortunately the new company is so full of corporate BS that I'm finding it even harder to get through each day. I genuinely feel like there are staff who are hired to 'improve productivity' through implementing Agile company wide, are actually doing everything in their power to slow things down. I've never seen this amount of unneeded meetings in my calendar, all in the name of 'planning'.

Are you me?

You will find this book very helpful - Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci.

Here are some tips I would give, as an individual contributor:

* Minimize the number of simultaneous projects. Having more on your plate than you can imagine getting done is a huge cause of stress and burnout.

* Avoid switching priorities frequently. Shield the team from too many external requests.

* Avoid making "small" requests (e.g. a random data pull). Handling your request is probably not as small an amount of work as you think. This is especially a problem when for people with a lot of meetings - they may not have that many hours left in the day for their "real" work, and your "small" request might take up all those hours for today (which is really stressful when you badly needed those hours for something else!).

* Avoid interrupting developers / making them feel like you could demand something at any time.

* Clarify priorities, and don't bug people about lower priority things.

* Don't schedule too many meetings. Developers work on a Maker's schedule, and ideally would have at least half of each day completely free of meetings. Meetings are more draining for ICs than they are for you.

* Don't argue with time estimates given by developers. (Though looking for ways to reduce the scope of a project is valid)

* Give developers time to pay down tech debt.

* Listen to and act on issues people raise.

* Let people know what is going to happen well in advance. Give people time to gear up for changes. Don't make people feel like things could suddenly change at any time with no warning.

> Celebrate progress. Burnout is often caused by a feeling of stagnation. Seeing the progress you’re making day-to-day is hard. Managers should create space to celebrate small wins and reflect on the mountains you’ve climbed.

I really appreciate this one. As a very high conscientiousness and med-high neuroticism person a manager asking for a "status check" on a project actually sounds like "You did something wrong that gave me cause for concern/doubt" which causes an inordinate amount of stress and self doubt that I'm truly giving it my all -- which leads me to push harder regardless of how hard I already am...

Celebrating progress allows me to say "Yeah, things may not be on our desired timeline, but also we're making progress and that timeline was unrealistic... We'll get there so long as we continue to invest".

It a very, very fine line to tread before it becomes Defiant Jazz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Turq37lntO0)

This video is an amazing summary of the GitLab article itself.

I'll be honest that I dont really get it. Is it just that the one guy is the only one trying to get work done and everyone else is hindering that?

That too, but mainly how ridiculous corporate efforts to "reward" their workers look.

I really dislike this when it feels forced and artificial.

Also there's a strong risk of doing some little employee-appreciation gesture that backfires and pisses people off. Most of them do, because it feels like the company has cheaped out, or worse, spent a shit-load of money on something that you hate and then expects you to be grateful about it.

I very much feel you on this. At some point I have enough company swag.

I do think the "appreciation store" model is a really good one. Allowing each to choose their reward.

I very much think that the "give me money" model is a really good one.

There's this very odd strain of infantilization that runs through a lot of corporate office management, like they are trying to reward second-graders with a choice from the prize box if they collect enough gold stars, rather than dealing with fully-grown adults that have their own children.

I actually really agree with this too. It helps normalize comp across all life choices too. There are so many, some which people get salty about suggesting it's a form of "comp" .

For examples:

  * I basically don't drink so anything that has alcohol as it's selling point is non-comp to me

  * I'm not going to be a parent so why cant I have a sabbatical in place of parental leave?

  * I basically don't get sick, and when I do I still manage to deliver decently. Why not pay me out sick days? I could just lie and take them, but why should I have to?

-* and before someone goes exclaiming "Privilege!" remember these are real life choices with costs borne in other areas of life -- for example the choice to not have children is going to be very expensive when I'm older and have to pay for everything that children do for free taking care of their elderly parents. It's not a pure privilege, but a temporal shift of cost/benefits. *-

Yeah it pisses me off when I've been squeezed for every drop for the whole project by some bozo manager, and then I'm also now forced to be forget and forgive all of that, and pretend to be happy, because of some awkward celebration, just becomes another ass kissing for the manager and salt in the wounds for me.

Corporate "celebrations" are anything but. They are just posturing and virtue signalling. Only on groups of teams in high-trust situations (e.g., a small military unit winning a tough battle) will you experience real celebrations. They won't even have to be planned; they'll just happen!

My main sources of burnout these days are: 1. useless information overload, and 2. lack of focus time. And it's rare that I've actually met a manager who could even see this as a problem.

My main way to deal with this: just ignore 99% of my incoming notifications. The only notifications I need are "SLA is broken". Everything else should just be low priority async systems, and honestly, email worked pretty well for this but everyone just loves using Slack or a similar tool now.

And the entire business loves to work against you too...

Most of my managers have just loved throwing juniors into the mix with no structure on how they'll be mentored - just let the senior engineers figure it out. Ergo, I now have to periodically check Slack and review notifications again just to make sure none of the juniors reached out.

Oh, and don't forget the other random people who grabbed your name from delivering a bug fix six months ago and just want to check on a thing "real quick" or ask a "small" question.

Modern office communication is a clusterfuck, and probably contributes more to stress and reduces productivity more than any other aspect of work. And trying to remedy this as an individual contributor is usually unsustainable. It's a management problem, and sadly, this "management toolkit" gleefully avoids this.

“Working at a startup is demanding. GitLab team members are often under a lot of pressure.”

Isn’t being a $7.5B publicly-traded company the definition of not a startup?

GitLab has documented how to still be a startup after IPO: https://about.gitlab.com/company/still-a-startup/

I think that’s a lovely page and some excellent sentiments in many areas.

However I feel that it’s important to accept reality and not attempt to redefine words.

A startup is literally defined as to “get something moving”, I would say at this point that gitlab is definitely in the realm of “in motion” and has a significant amount of inertia. It is not in the first stages of becoming a company, it is a relatively well-oiled, thought through and publicly traded company.

Obviously terms can be fuzzy, there may be no single event that defines gitlab as no longer being a startup and no particular point in time being the point of state alteration.

But gitlab as it exists today definitely does not meet my own personal and informal definition of startup, and I suspect that is true for many people.

So basically, how to continue to exploit your employees for maximum output even though technically people can chill out. Got it.

I've been following this feature request for awhile now: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/32712

Look at how many different hands this had to pass through before anything got done. I don't think I've seen any startup survive working like that.

Oh and nothing is done yet, 5 months later. It's still in the "design phase".

This is HN while not everyone's subscribes to everything pg says there is a lot of agreement on what constitutes a startup and differentiates it from other more conventional businesses.

PG says a startup is any company who looks at growth as their primary measure. A business is any company who looks at the bottom line as their primary measure.

So it depends on the definition you wish to subscribe to. There isn't a universal consensus but in this sense many HNers would see GitLab as a startup despite being worth many Billions.

> PG says a startup is any company who looks at growth as their primary measure.

Intel is a startup by this definition.

I'm willing to bet there is a non zero number of executives at intel that seem to be under the impression that it is.

Correct -- and he cites big companies like Google and Amazon as still being startups. I agree with this definition -- it's very useful for distinguishing different types of companies and ultimately why some can earn SO much more in investment compared to others.

Oh.

I really have a negative emotional response to abusing language like this.

All companies focus on growth to some extent. A growth-focused company is, in my option, a completely separate thing from a startup.

Though startups are usually extremely growth focused.

What about Cisco, then?

They are also very much focused on growth, and there was a time not so long ago when they were as dominant as Google/Amazon.

I really don't see how the definition is helpful in distinguishing companies, nor on how it has anything to do with which companies will be market winners.

For another example, Twist Biosciences. Some truly amazing tech, in a market which will dominate the future. They traded for about $20-30 from 2018 to early 2020. Peaked around 180 (6x 30)in Jan 2021. Currently trading as 31.92.

Are they a startup?

Seems silly though. The term "growth company" seems a lot more authentic. Of course these labels are not black/white, but it's a useful distinction. There are simply different dynamics at a growth company vs. a startup.

A "growth company" is a company with high P/E, with the added assumption that the high P/E is justified based on an expectation that E will increase much faster than P.

"growth" is taken as the opposite of "value". A "value" company is a company with a low P/E, and with the added assumption that P is low due to reasons which are likely to change in P's favor.

Thus the difference between "growth" and "value" is simply if you are looking at the numerator or the denominator. This has no bearing on "startup" vs. "not startup"

Disclosure-- A contact I discuss with regularly gives me some insight into what C-suites are actually thinking.

Novy-Marx (http://rnm.simon.rochester.edu/) showed that top-line revenue growth (rather than bottom-line, the "primary measure" cited above) was the strongest predictor of share price appreciation. He may or may not have been right, but he was undoubtedly influential, in that his insight lead to the "management quality" factor in factor modeling. [The Other Side of Value: The Gross Profitability Premium, Journal of Financial Economics 108(1), 2013, 1-28. http://rnm.simon.rochester.edu/research/OSoV.pdf]

So I would say most CEOs are looking at top-line revenue growth as their key measure.

Which makes PG's distinction more of a polemic than a discriminant.

I think burnout is the brains mechanism to prevent you from doing non-productive work (or at least what it perceives as non-productive) the problem is most of the work we doing in corporate environments feels pretty non-productive.

Most of my periods of burnout in tech have been due to doing a lot of work without any real perceived payoff, this might include a lot of team meetings where we discuss priorities and estimates ad nauseum or working with tools that constantly fight you. Its like playing a game over and over and never making any progress eventually your brain is smart enough to tell you that you need to avoid playing the game (or going on the same hunt). I don't know how you solve this problem but I think most managers don't even understand burn out well enough to start.

How about:

* Listening to each person’s specific concerns carefully and in detail, and then applying as much creativity and empathy as possible to help them come up with a resolution?

* Giving people increased responsibility and increased autonomy as a response to signs of burnout?

* Quickly transitioning coddlers (who stifle growth), complainers (who destroy motivation), victims (who destroy alignment), braggarts (who steal credit and poison achievement) out of teams?

* Managing the team competently so that forward progress is actually happening and the whole team can see it and sense it and take pride in it?

* Ensuring that the team’s mission, the company mission, and business value are all aligned, and making the team stakeholders to give them agency?

Personally, I find saying “the employees have burnout, they should work less and celebrate more” is pretty naive. It’s likely to make things worse.

Burnout isn’t overwork. It’s more like hopelessness. Effort is being made but the emotional reward for visible progress towards a valuable goal is not forthcoming. It can feel like overwork, but it’s more the work to reward ratio that’s a problem.

> Quickly transitioning ... out of teams?

While those behaviours are (to varying extents) anti-social, I think some lee-way has to be given for people being human.

e.g. To an extent, someone burning out and thinking "I don't have enough autonomy to fulfill my responsibility" is complainer/victim, even if it's not what you had in mind.

I think that rather than emphasis being on productivity (a growing, motivated, aligned team), I'd think the more important think in psychological safety. -- The anti-social behaviours have a negative effect; but, without safety, there's a heavier social/political cost to counteract them.

It bears repeating, many people who think they have burnout actually have chronic fatigue (CFS/ME) but don’t know it yet. Repeated burnouts may simply be a relapse and recovery cycle. A number of the genetic predispositions to CFS also tends to have behavioral components (anxiety disorders and ADHD) that include a preference for a career in software. Now with Covid many of those who may never have had CFS are finding themselves with Long Covid. I mention this because the treatment for burnout is completely different to the treatment for CFS.

I'm ADD and suspect that I had a burnout in 2020(not diagnosed, but in retrospect I am quite sure).

Had COVID 2 weeks ago and since then I can't really focus even with meds and sleep refreshes me even less than before.

All that being said, do you have some resources to share? Sounds like I could be one of the people you describe...

Main thing is instead of searching for burnout treatment search for CFS/ME treatments.

There is no simple explanation nor easy treatments. It’s also very different depending on what’s actually wrong with you. I have hEDS so the treatments I do focuses on immunomodulators like LDN and LDA, hormone replacement therapy like Testosterone and T3, dysautonomia meds like propranolol, and research peptides like ipamorelin. I take a lot of vitamins as well but I’m not sure about their efficacy. These are serious meds and not recommend for most - but they have recovered a lot of functionality for me. People should do their own research. My hope is that they find out that CFS is caused by auto-antibodies and could be cured by a neutralizing aptamer like BC007. But the CFS research is only starting in earnest now with LongCovid so it could be many years before a proper treatment is available.

Super interesting. Any references you can share?

While it sounds correlated, I don't know if that's true. They surely can complement each other quite well though!

2021 I had long covid for almost 14 months. I still worked and burnt out once about halfway through the year.

2022 I recovered and am burning out right now again halfway through the year.

I have plenty of energy. I work on compelling side projects, exercise everyday, and raise two kids. I just don't really feel valued at work for a plethora of reasons and it makes it hard to want to work right now after busting my ass everyday.

What I've found is the "treatment" to burnout is clarity. As I continue to reflect on why I'm burned out, it's many things that are bringing clarity to my long term goals in life. This goes back to self-determination theory of feeling a sense of competence, relatedness, and autonomy. When any of these are threatened or perceived that way at work, I see myself burning out.

Not everybody experiencing burnout has CFS/ME but enough do that it’s worth pointing out every time there is a burnout discussion. I thought I simply kept burning out through overwork for about 10 years before discovering that I actually had CFS and I’m assuming I’m not the only one. I was highly resistant to the idea of having it as I did not identify with the disability and thought CFS people were just lazy. Had I known I would have treated it better sooner.

Is the overworking leading to constant stress and that stress leading to ME/CFS which leads to a number of issues like trouble sleeping, physical/mental symptoms, and depression/anxiety?

This seems to be significantly undiagnosed. How do you know? What treatment has significantly helped? Getting good sleep? Mindfulness? Walks? etc?

I ask because I'm writing a book about this and want to learn more.

Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) was the first treatment where there was a night and day improvement and from that point I knew I was not imagining my problems as many doctors kept suggesting. I was doing a linear search through all known fatigue treatments before hitting this one. I found out about it from what sounded like a crazy person posting on a YouTube video. I explicitly looked for crazy people posts because I figured if I found something that worked that would be what I would sound like. Doctors kept telling me I was perfectly healthy and were no help whatsoever.

A lot of what you’re talking about would come under the category of dysautonomia which certainly plays a part but is not the only part. For many people treating dysautonomia may be sufficient to recover.

It’s massively undiagnosed. Doctors in general are rather oblivious.

What about a general anxiety disorder? This sounds similar to what I had. Lots of anxiety, doctors not able to say much but "you're healthy" and then when I worked on my anxiety, everything started to get better.

Generalized anxiety disorders can certainly cause dysautonomia and treating the anxiety can help treat dysautonomia. For many people this is sufficient to return to normal. For those of us less fortunate we need to keep pursuing additional options. I have a rather severe form of hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome so I need substantial meds to keep functioning.

Was going to comment something similar. After 4 years at a job I loved, went through the worst burnout of my life in 2018-2019, roughly the year before the pandemic. Lost the job and about lost my mind when executive dysfunction made it so hard to find work. Spent 2020 doing handyman work and donating plasma to make rent.

Turns out that I was sensitive to wheat, milk/unaged cheese and almonds but didn't know it yet. That saps serotonin, which made it feel like the world was continuously attacking me. Which feels like the withdrawal symptoms of untreated ADHD, like quitting smoking constantly. But at the time, I thought I had something like CFS or fibromyalgia. I believe that these may be correlated with inflammatory foods, and that I might have eventually developed a chronic condition like hypothyroidism or even cancer, so it's worth taking a food sensitivity test. I took the https://www.everlywell.com (no affiliation) test of 200 foods and credit it with pretty much saving my life. Or at the very least, my psyche.

I think what helped me mentally recover during the pandemic was TikTok and the shared awakening that so many people have been experiencing. Love/hate for that app is probably going to correlate with how feeling/thinking, intuitive/sensing and perceiving/judging someone's brain works though (I'm an INFP) so YMMV. I find that shifting realities from a downward to an upward spiral has made me more grateful and aligned me more towards shared prosperity. When I let my ego's goals finally die after 20 years of negative feedback loops, I found that the world picks up the slack so those goals happen anyway in a magnified way, which is manifestation.

What I'm trying to say is that if anyone is struggling with burnout, there's probably another cause which isn't apparent. For example, if you never have time to have a hobby anymore, it's probably time to set boundaries and communicate your needs. If you have no motivation for art or life goals, you might need to pencil active rest into your schedule, so that you give yourself a chance to become bored so you can hear your calling and discover a path to self-actualization. That peaceful source energy that's so abundant in nature is all but denied to us in the modern world where we can't even see the sky or hear a bird.

If that all sounds impossible, then those self-imposed barriers are probably attached to emotional trauma. Like if you're sacrificing your peace for a loved one, it might be time to do some shadow work to understand why you're overprotecting them from their own human experience and dignity. This can look like making the opposite choice than the one you have been making, and observing how reality reconfigures, who's blocking healing, who's helping, etc. It might be painful in the short term, but as each positive feedback cycle engages, it gets easier, and the other side is almost always better than what came before.

https://www.statnews.com/2018/01/23/everlywell-food-sensitiv...

Thanks, I didn't know it started on Shark Tank. Ya one of the main issues is that the tests can show an immune response, but not the specific foods that triggered it. So they might report too strongly on foods in your system and miss foods that you haven't been eating lately.

I want to emphasize though that this is a situation where leads are more important than evidence. For example, my sensitivity to wheat was shown as normal but I have since discovered that it causes instant inflammation in my gut and I gain 5 pounds the next day, then go into a slow decline if I keep eating it. And it showed normal sensitivity to beans because I've been avoiding them, but I still can't eat most types except maybe garbanzos and lentils sparingly.

Also wanted to mention that I forgot introvert/extravert in my comment about TikTok and one's reaction to it. I was thinking more about how skepticism affects it, but our tastes are more complex than 1 scale, or even 4 bits for the 16 personalities of Myers-Briggs. Even 20-30 bits might not be able to predict them, since every personality is unique.

Edit: "stars in the sky" is what I meant in my previous comment (of course we can see the sky). I'm a bit OCD but with diverging thoughts so brevity is a real challenge for me.

side note but if you're suffering from chronic fatigue please also consider getting checked out for sleep apnea especially if you snore or are overweight (which again is not uncommon for programmers given we sit on our asses all day). It very well may not be the only problem, but it may be part of the problem.

In the long term sleep apnea will fuck up your heart due to hypoxia and it can't be good for your brain or anything else. Plus sleep disorders seem to possibly be tied to Alzheimers (one theory is that REM sleep helps clear amyloid proteins). It's just bad news in general and it's widely under-diagnosed given how fat the american population is.

CFS is a diagnosis by exclusion. It may not be a particular disorder but instead acts as a catch all.

CFS does not have a specific treatment. There are standard courses that are recommended, but there is no consensus on how to treat it. Usually treatment involves treating underlying disorders such as depression.

Burnout is a stress response. Unlike CFS, you should improve with rest and taking time. Note that this doesn't mean you are going to go back to a hundred percent because you take a few days, but seeing improvement on vacation is a good indicator of burnout.

The ‘wastebasket’ diagnosis is old. CFS/ME is it’s own thing and has been for some time.

A lot of this is fluff. I don't really care about plaudits, your gratitude or other fake positive reinforcement. Give me extra money if you think I'm doing a good job. For those who need a manager to tell you that you're burned out then that's totally the wrong way to perceive it. You tell the manager that you are and tell the manager you're taking time off. It's not a conversation. Those are statements you make and execute.

One person's fluff is another person's meaningful gesture. A $100 gift is worth more than a $100 bill to many people.

The intention is what counts.

I'm probably off-topic here, but isn't a gift card just money with restrictions? I guess maybe the "gift" is the freedom from responsibility, in the sense that you won't feel guilty about where you spend the money (because someone else decided for you). Is there a more favorable explanation for the value of a gift card as a gesture?

> Is there a more favorable explanation for the value of a gift card as a gesture?

I don't get what you're expecting in terms of an answer here.

A gift card is a gift. A gift is a gesture of kindness and thoughtfulness. Something doing something thoughtful and kind and thinking about you makes you feel good.

Turning cash into a gift card is not a thoughtful gesture. Gift cards are popular because they're easy, which is the opposite of thoughtful. I would be offended if my employer ever gave me a gift card instead of a cash bonus.

A lot of this is centered around doing less, expecting less from your workers, hiring more and "being more positive". These are pretty sentiments, but frankly they're completely dis-joined from the reality of working in a competitive, high-stakes engineering environment, where your boss WILL call you while you're on vacation, where you WILL go 8-12 months without finding a qualified candidate, where you WILL feel pressure to deliver products by deadlines. Unfortunately, Gitlab doesn't strike me as a high-stakes job for engineers nor managers. This isn't a moral judgement on them, but a reminder that serious work requires sacrifice and some burnout is inevitable, and even unavoidable. And that's not necessary a "bad" thing to avoid as it provides valuable life insights and growth in its own way.

> the reality of working in a competitive, high-stakes engineering environment, where your boss WILL call you while you're on vacation, where you WILL go 8-12 months without finding a qualified candidate, where you WILL feel pressure to deliver products by deadlines.

This sounds like an unproductive environment?

Like... a boss shouldn't need to call reports on their vacation, that's why engineers build systems and automate things. Being unable to fill a position in 8-12 months suggests the hiring process is broken.

I'm all for the importance of hard work, but I'd suggest an org like this is working hard but not smart.

It was without a doubt dysfunctional, and I have since left the position, but that role was incredibly rewarding financially and taught me many things about myself, and what I desire out of life. So while I was totally burnt out by the end, the juice was certainly worth the squeeze - and I would probably do it again instead of a quiet job where my supervisor could just lower expectations, though I recognize that's not true for everybody.

Yeah...that's not a "high stakes engineering environment", that's a poorly structure engineering environment.

8-12 years is enough time to train an 'unqualified' candidate, or get them the requisite licensing/certificates/etc, assuredly.

On call while on vacation? You're understaffed then; even in the face of catastrophe you should have an on call rotation. If even then you still end up having to contact one person, you have too much knowledge siloed.

Etc.

> serious work requires sacrifice and some burnout is inevitable

Well, the Navy Seals, who know a thing or two about high stress and deadly serious work, popularized the expression "slow is smooth and smooth is fast."

But unless you're an emergency room doctor or defending Ukraine or developing the next COVID19 vaccine, come on, nothing you're doing is that important.

What you're describing is not a thing that most organizations have any real need for, it's a culture of fake emergencies.

> slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

and speed is the economy of motion.

What a shortsighted view. I struggle not to go against the comment guidelines. This hustle culture drives me up the wall.

A crunch once in a while is fine. Some deadlines are unavoidable. But brute force as corporate culture will inevitably lead to shit results. Especially in so-called "high-stakes environments" , where mistakes carry severe consequences.

On top of that, burning out can nullify years of "personal growth". A wreck is a wreck, no matter how many seas it has sailed.

Honestly, I understand your sentiment and there's probably a bit of Stockholm syndrome going on with my appreciation of such culture. Under it, engineering quality definitely suffers - as well as morale and such things - but these were inconsequential to the bottom line of the business. And while enjoying the rewards of our labor through stock options and market dynamics, it hardly seemed to matter to anyone, including myself. Let's just consider the value proposition: I accumulated five years of salary in one, and can afford to take time off work to focus on personal growth, or whatever. I'm not under any illusion that every high-pressure job is rewarding, but it certainly seems more likely than a lax one where people take their time and true laziness goes unnoticed.

> where your boss WILL call you while you're on vacation

> where you WILL feel pressure to deliver products by deadlines

vs.

> where you WILL go 8-12 months without finding a qualified candidate

Sounds like a pretty good position to set some boundaries as an employee.

One of the key things I've learned is that the weekend is not for recharging. Every day of the week is. There's that quote goes "now is the time to put away childish things" - and also its complement, at the end of the day, guarantee you have a structure allowing you to do something you want to do for a few hours.

I'm curious why the article was started with:

> Working at a startup is demanding

Is there a corollary "working at an established dinosaur is relaxing"?

I've worked for 10 years at a company that is celebrating its 50th anniversary in a few months. I've been through at least two burnout cycles. Peers have experienced the same.

And I've experienced it at the other 4 companies I've worked at. I don't think startups have some special corner on the burnout market.

Sometimes, I've survived the burnout cycles for another go, but in the end in fact, each time I've departed a company it's been because of burnout of some sort. It's usually a realization that I've made the difference I can make (which may be zero) and I've exhausted all my ideas to make the compnay/product/team/culture/solutions/whatever any better.

Sadly as I skimmed through this list, about the only one that I thought would have had any dent in my various burnouts would be #7 - Express Gratitude. And I'm not sure that's really it. I think at the end of the day, what I have found lacking is a sense of respect. These companies pay so much money to employ and task software engineers, and then they try to put them in harnesses and treat them likes horses.

I'm pretty sure we will see an appetite for transition to the 4 day work week.

Most people will find some paycut (10-20%) acceptable in exchange for increasing their free time by 50% (2 day weekend -> 3 day weekend).

Most companies will find the 10-20% reduction in a very large expense (payroll) attractive in the current tightening economic conditions.

I would be surprised if there was any productivity loss as a result of this, people will feel better, more valued, and will perform equally as well. It's not like you can really clock out of a software job especially in the remote world, so days off are more important.

I think we're very close to it if not there already. Additionally, the prevalence of long Covid will likely force some companies to re-examine previously sacrosanct employment structures such as the 5 day work week or nothing.

What actually burned me out when I was an engineer was conflicting signals.

At one company our team worked ourselves into a froth and got a major multi-year project done 8 months ahead of scheduled and millions of dollars under budget. Everyone on the team was given a sizeable spot bonus and a public thank-you in a company all-hands... then they proceeded to lay off the entire team.

At another company, I clearly raised concerns about a new product ahead of launch, was told that my concerns were invalid, then the senior engineer on the product team left the company, then most of the other devs left, then management went live with the launch on time even though it was not ready, and I was expected (and followed through) on keeping online through the launch rush as the assigned Ops person. Afterwards there was never any acknowledgement of the fact that I was 100% right in all of my criticisms and that their failure to address them directly lead to the lost of 5 people, forced me to work significant overtime (the first 3 days of the launch I didn't even leave the office, I slept on a couch), and that had they addressed them properly it would have increase revenues. Senior managers lauded the product and considered it a success... I considered (and still consider) it a failure, and it's still inferior to competitors that entered the market later and did things correctly, the way I would have done them.

What would have helped me is that when I felt successful, that my management felt our team was successful, and then treated us like we were successful. When I felt that our team was failing, that management would have treated us like we're failing (additional support / time). What happened instead was mixed signals that always resulted in a net benefit to senior managers and a direct net detriment to the engineering teams, and myself personally. A cynical take would be that burn out is caused by senior managers being selfish assholes.

Why do I feel 2nd company wasn't led by technical founders or technical management

I’m going to use this post as an opportunity to tell people about Amazon.

The company has some of the most incompetent managers, who under pressure, will throw their own people under the bus. By incompetent, I mean “yes” men who tell 10 different people exactly what they want to hear.

These are people doing the bare minimum to keep their own jobs, and when things go off rails, they pass the blame to everyone around them, without ever accepting any responsibility.

It’s the opposite of everything described in this article.

I’ve been in meetings where VPs acknowledged their expectations on a service launch had led to 60+ SDEs leaving the organization or leaving Amazon entirely. They had no remorse.

I was personally told to not get involved in day to day matters and keep a distance with engineers in my own organization, so I can better focus on doing what’s right for the company.

The other problem was that the L5/L6 managers, often without US permanent residency status, would simply cower out of fear of losing their own jobs. If such a manager loses their job, they have maybe 30 days to find another employer who provides them sponsorship, or otherwise they have to move back to India.

This led to managers not acting on their teams interest or protecting their engineers. Instead, they do everything to protect their own careers.

I’m convinced most L7+ managers at Amazon have no ability to empathize with engineers. They are literally coached (like I was) on avoiding it. It’s a sign of weakness.

I do NOT recommend working at Amazon. It’s a form of suicide for your physical and mental health.

Sadly, you can say that about nearly all of corporate America especially the big ones.

Quite agree, having had to help ex Amazonians emotionally process their anti empathy training whenever they are hired at companies I’ve worked at. All my friends who’ve stayed at Amazon have gotten cold, distant, and the light behind their eyes is gone. If you see them entering “work mode” you see what is functionally a sociopath - brutal but effective. More have taken long breaks from work to get therapy. Some have left the industry entirely.

I will not say that “it’s not like that for everyone” or “it depends what team you’re on”. The company is made to make you think a certain way.

Amazon is on my blacklist when I evaluate resumes. I would never hire someone who spent more than 1 year at Amazon. I've seen first hand how these people are incapable of empathy, team work or fostering a good environment.

Your cutoff point might be too short. The most empathic manager I ever met came from there, spending 1 year 9 months.

I've heard similar sentiment from other hiring managers.

Is this for managers or engineers as well? There are several reasons I've stayed at Amazon as an engineer, such as, the stock growth created golden handcuffs, covid added a lot of fear and uncertainty and reduced mobility, and the team I'm on has a lot of people I've grown fond of through shared tribulations.

I've also found that the burnout creates a feedback loop that makes leaving hard to accomplish.

There does seem tive a certain type of person that thrives at Amazon, while the rest just about survive until they get out.

I've worked with several ex-amazon managers & I agree.

They are carefully trained to over promise, treat the business/product arm as an adversary not a colleague and burn out engineers to hit deadlines.

0 empathy.

(Often these are not bad people, they have just been conditioned that this is an effective way to operate; my theory is it's the warehouse mentality that A employs at dist centers translated to the office)

Completely agree. I spent five years at OCI, an AWS competitor in Seattle, and during that time had seven managers (I think, maybe I missed some hi-bye reorg). The rock bottom worst two of them had all of their prior management experience at Amazon, and their managerial pathologies were similar: zero empathy, absurdly two-faced, optics-obsessed, complete grin-fucker sadists to their underlings. Both of them ended up leaving my erstwhile employer and returning to Uncle Jeff's dickhead spawning grounds.

"Too big of an asshole to be a culture fit" when the culture in question is Oracle should tell any reader everything they need to know about a culture where they do fit in. :p

I'm convinced this model only really works because of the tech visa program. When you have a huge class of people that don't really have a choice between pushing back and keeping their hopes for a green card, you're going to get an environment where collective bargaining no longer works. I have experienced this at the last 3 places I've worked, all large enterprise software companies. There's no going back unfortunately and I feel bad for future generations of tech workers as it's already starting to feel like a bloodbath.

> an environment where collective bargaining no longer works

I'm sure that's not intentional at allllllll

>Encourage time off

The best way to do this is to mandate a minimum time off. I've been lucky enough to work a couple places where this was the policy. This has to be a top-down initiative.

>Increase headcount

Definitely. I've seen short-sightedness prevent this from happening and it doesn't end well. In fact, I once quit a job where I was gradually taking on additional work (without additional pay, of course). I probably wouldn't have quit if I had one additional person to help me. When I expressed my concern I got "we can manage our workload right now." An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

>Express gratitude

Yes, but do it with cash. Don't send trinkets to people's houses - just give them the cash instead. It can get really insulting when you're rewarding people with silly trinkets then saying there's no room in the budget for a pay increase. (Been there).

I have been on the edge to burnout. Reasons why.

Incompetent people always stress everybody up:

They put enormous pressure on single persons.

They steel a lot of time and energy.

They try to get other persons to do their work.

They always sidetrack everybody into quests that are not important.

They never solve anything. Every solution to a problem comes with new problems that are more difficult to handle.

They always blame other people for everything, especially people they can get rid of.

They think delivery is more relevant than things work in production.

More or less modus operandi for tech company managers in my experience.

Cringey type of article - tbh. It reads a lot like - “people are programs - here’s how to optimize them further.”

Which is exactly what causes a lot of burnout to begin with. People being overworked or worked in such a way that only optimized for the manager - and no one else.

I find myself having not worked insane hours very often. I’ll be real - I’ve never worked much more than 60 hours in a week. (Excluding college) Even then - those were exceptional. However - I’ve been “logged in” for 80+ hours many times. Constantly consumed by the ideas of work, what’s going on, hating my manager, disliking the systems we work in, etc. in some sense it might be better to just log more hours in the chair and actually do a thing that might move the needle but honestly - I’d rather not. I feel they don’t deserve that and when I have done it - it never was recognized or was substantial enough to move us forward or change the fundamental cultural issues.

The fundamental issue is that managers in tech treat people like programs and not like human beings. I know this happens outside of tech too but we try to act like we don’t do that here. But we really do. It’s all a lie.

It’s insane how much lying we all do just to get by. Sometimes I want to found a company just to see if I could actually get rid of the bad incentive structures and actually have a radically honest and helpful company that was driven by compassion and enthusiasm for helping one another. Far fetched tho - I’m not really into brown nosing anyone, VCs included.

I burnt out; I burnt out hard.

I haven't worked in a couple of years (the most positive thing I can say about my state of mind is that - after a very large dose of black market mushrooms - I'm no longer suicidal.

The one thing that was the primary contributing factor in my spiraling downfall is not mentioned here.

Listen to your fucking developers - the one's at the coalface (either they know what they're doing or you've got far deeper problems).

I was the primary developer on the non-DB functionality of the company's deployment tooling.

I took the most cobbled together piece of unmaintainable shit and converted it into something stable and maintainable.

There were times that I needed to make significant changes in order to move towards something sane.

And every time the boss would bring in his pet architect who would veto every effort I made with no feedback what-so-ever.

Just a no.

I want to modularise the project - no, it's not justified by the scope of the project.

I want to move to hierarchical configuration files - no, just keep using blah.properties, despite the fact that that we were using dynamically generated keys to force that which would be cleanly implementable with XML or JSON.

I want a robust solution for dependency injection, I'm thinking Spring. No, too heavy for the project - just use META-INF/services.

Yada, yada, yada. Every damned time. I ended up running the development of a critical utility as a god-damned skunk-works project.

It was soul destroying, but I believed for a long time that the results I produced (the stable releases, tasks that took a fraction of the time they used to) would lead to my input being considered.

It never was.

Recent burnout recoveree here, opinion: your company is unable to fix the problem for you.

The only way to fix it is for you to learn to actually Not Give A Fuck. If you are forced to, for example due to immigration or family reasons, then I don't have any useful advice, sorry :(. Otherwise keep your savings account at 6, 12, ideally 18 months worth of living expenses and don't worry about performance reports, unanswered emails, "failing" your coworkers, etc. Do about 50% of what you can actually deliver and ride along. I actually think this is also better for the company, because workloads expand and contract sort of naturally, so by keeping this margin of 50% you'll be able to handle tougher moments.

Once you get to a dark place: counseling (psychologist/psychiatrist), medication, taking 3+ months off - great stuff, can definitely recommend. Start with a visit to general practitioner.

is this an out of season April's Fool joke?

Burnout's main cause is cognitive dissonance between the will to contribute and succeed, and the believe in the outcomes and methods.

NONE of the points mentioned (with the exception of seeking external help) in this article would make any significant difference to someone advanced n the road to a burnout.

Burnout is not just one thing, it can have several overlapping causes. What you describe is one of them, and the article covers others.

“Managers should create space to celebrate small wins and reflect on the mountains you’ve climbed.”

I personally can live without the BS celebrations. Make sure the the daily work is bearable. If you are a manager do your job and manage people and the work. Don’t just pass on orders from above and pass metrics back to above.

This seems like a pretty weak list to be called a "Toolkit". I think burnout is like another major issue: boredom, and both share the common trait that by the time a manager is aware of it, it is too late to address. Tips like "be positive" and "express gratitude" are table-stakes to being a decent team member; they're not nearly enough for a manager to to proactively address burn-out. Increasing headcount or reducing scope are rarely in the control of a direct manager. Nothing here attempts to address the underlying causes of burnout that include: boring & repetitive work with no slack in the schedule and a persistent expectation of fighting fires and noisy, immediate delivery.

GitLab team member here.

While this blog post looks at what managers can do, we've also recently started using Yerbo (Slack app) internally to help individuals to assess their own risk of burnout. See: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#yerbo-slack...

Mental health and well-being is always a concern at GitLab (ex: the Friends and Family days that we implemented and maintained throughout the pandemic to ensure team members are taking time off). This month, however, we've been adding additional focus to the topic as May is Mental Health Awareness month.

@john_cogs: Are there any plans to connect a self-assessment of mental state to the assignment of issues/pings about mentions/incident-response pages in the GitLab app?

So, on "I'm on top of the world" days, I get assigned All The Issues, get a full-screen popup about each mention, and will be asked to be incident lead on just about anything.

Then, if my state is "slightly hungover", I mostly get a list of the most pressing issues still pending, without being overloaded with new stuff.

And finally, the "hugging my teddy bear" state: no additional automated workloads, respectful notifications to anyone pinging me, and a note to my manager if it lasts more than a few days?

I'm not aware of any plans for a GitLab x Yerbo integration right now but that's a really interesting proposal.

Yerbo CEO here.

Yes, we have a Yerbo+Gitlab/Github integration coming. At the beginning it will be to identify and prevent mental wellbeing anti-patterns and then we'll move forward into this direction you mentioned.

Feel free to reach me out to marcos at yerbo dot co if you want to expand your use case!

I've never gotten burned out because I had a lot of work to do. Those are the good times.

Mostly I've gotten burned out because I couldn't bring myself to care and because I was bored.

Short-and-easy read that contains much truth. Especially item #10, "Lead by example" which encourages managerial review of recurring meetings (which often boil down to "well, here is my Excel sheet, you tell me how you're doing on each line item: I'll let you talk a lot, but I'll only jot down the completion percentage in the end") is worth emphasizing.

I've had pretty bad burnout earlier in my career and this is what I am doing now

* Better frameworks. If a framework adds complexity, it needs to enhance the feature set and developer experience by 2x. Otherwise, I just stick with the basics. Example: I was working on a react codebase with insane level of hooks, contexts, 7 layers of abstraction. Solution: Axios/Fetch right next to the form, entire backend functions in the controller: no f's given.

* Business requirements first: I hack off 90% of Agile methodology and just do what makes sense. Which is a balance of acceptance criteria and user stories, or contract driven development to pull the features into production and deliver.

* Thursday and Fridays I don't work, and if it do, it's on something completely new or exciting. Last week I played with DallE as an API. Unfortunately this means less pay.

* In the winter if its sunny out, I leave around 2pm. And come back and work 7pm-10pm.

* One meeting a day, or every other day. And Monday's meeting I come in fresh and excited, cite what I am grateful for, and talk about how incredible everyone's effort is. It can sound cheesey but it works for me.

Last burn out was right before the pandemic. I took a position at a startup that told me they were light on meetings, but I ended up spending all of my time in meetings and getting absolutely nothing done. So I left, and took a big break. I forgot a lot of things but realized what I forgot were skills didn't matter. Attitude matters over skill. I am not interested at all in React 18 and instead focusing on Vanilla JS, HTML5, just regular CSS, and just SQL. Day in day out skills. Stuff that won't change in 10 years. If I forget something like a new feature in React 18, then my mind is telling me it is useless in the long term.

The most insidious cause of burnout is excitement. To be excited about a project, to be important to it, wanting to be a hero, wanting to be looked up to by your coworkers, is such a powerful motivation to ignore your own health. And it is exciting/interesting to see what your limits really are.

The best thing you can do is develop habits that help you recover at every timescale. On the smallest timescale the Pomodoro Technique is really, really good at least in part because it quickly proves you wrong if you think you shouldn't stop because "momentum". Never, not once in using the technique, have I ever lost momentum and in fact quite often I come back to the problem with much greater clarity and speed. (Note that taking a 5 minute break every 25 minutes is entirely different than taking a meeting or working on another problem. Those are context switches and are the worst of all worlds - you're not working on the problem AND you're not resting.)

On the daily timescale, morning meditation serves the same purpose as the 5 minute break, but it's more intense and more holistic. I see it as giving you "headroom" for your day so you can deal with things as they come, with equanimity. My worst days have always been the ones where I stubbornly refused to meditate (and I often do that because I have been meditating regularly and feel like I don't need it anymore. Ha. My mind is sometimes a real dick.)

> Working at a startup is demanding.

Is there no limit on what businesses can call themselves startups? GitLab is a publicly traded company with a $7B+ market cap, 1,500 employees, and many enterprise customers.

Startup sounds sexy, so everybody and their mother are part of a startup

It's also an excuse to Move Fast And Break Subordinates.

Gitlab you are not a startup, don't make me laugh.

Here's a good tip for managers of engineers. Don't be GO all the time. Let your team work on non-roadmap items every sprint. Every last Friday or whatever.

Don't give your team huge high stakes tasks every time. Give them candy in between to relax a bit and recharge. This job will break your mind if you don't cool off.

A couple jobs ago I got very burnt out, MSP where I was the only senior tech left. 60-80 hour weeks for many months straight. I was so burnt out, that I became extremely defensive and worried I was imminently about to be fired literally all the time. Here's what my boss did relative to this list, it's a funny parallel:

1. Disallowed taking vacation because they couldn't afford for me to be unavailable. Overtime was switched to time off in lieu but couldn't be used. I complained and got special dispensation to get overtime paid out.

2. Increased pressure, I was afterall the person who held the place together. New clients are needed to keep the business going right?

3. Regularly micromanaged and brought to light any and all mistakes like prioritizing my tasks incorrectly. I shouldn't have worked on X, I should have worked on Y.

4. Hired fresh out of college people and expected me to train them. I couldn't give anyone any work. I was expected to train them during lunch periods.

5. Certainly provided coaching, see #3 on how to prioritize tasks well.

6. Reminded me regularly that I was disposable. Even came out that he was actively looking for my replacement. Debian, postgresql dba, cisco and hp enterprise networking, MCITP, typical microsoft enterprise stuff, etc. My replacements were way too expensive for some reason.

7. They did have various things in the office like foosball lol. Very cliche at the time. They sold it because we were too busy to use it.

8. Absolutely celebrated progress. There was weekly meetings about salesforce metrics. Like how many hours each of us were billing out. I did very well here. Coworker who did get to take vacation came back to one of these meetings and got publicly chewed out for really bad numbers... because he was on vacation...

9. No sympathy. He explained that he was too busy doing sales and managing. He would regularly say that if he had the time he could go do my job easily.

10. Oh yes, he would affirm that he was the one working the most in the company. 100+ hours he said. I'm not sure what he did. He refused to cold call. He didn't do accounting, there was people for that. He didn't do tech work. Sure he spent probably 10-20 hours a week micromanaging.

11. Reduce hours? I remember this one time where I was headed out of the office to a client site but this was maybe 20 minutes before the usual end of the day. I got chewed out for trying to skip work and go home and be paid for no work. I stayed silent and took it. Anyone who would leave 1 minute after the hour wasn't in the wrong but there would be comments made.

12. There was a small list of banned words. You would be punished if you ever accidentally said "I'm too busy to do that right now" Busy was a banned word.

Minimum wage about 10 years ago was maybe $12/hr in my area. I only earnt slightly over $20/hr for this job. The stress from this job got me so sick, eventually I ended up in the ER. While in the ER he had a coworker 'find me and determine if I am still alive.' mind you... he knew exactly which floor I was in at the hospital.

After I got onto sick leave, he made the ultimatum that if I don't get back to work I would be considered as quitting. I replied explaining that it sounded illegal to be firing me for getting sick. He backpedaled quickly on that. Few months later I got fired anyway for no reason.

I got a new job. He lost a significant number of clients. He assumed I was stealing his clients; of which only 2 actually followed me to my new job. I got sued for 1.1 million $ for poaching his clients but after they found out that none of clients he listed were even either of the 2. They didnt even realize they lost those 2 yet. There was no non-compete or anything, the assertion was that I was a fiduciary employee obligated to protect them even after my dismissal. They wanted to drop the lawsuit, ended up costing me $2000 for a lawyer.

> . No sympathy. He explained that he was too busy doing sales and managing. He would regularly say that if he had the time he could go do my job easily.

this is a huge red flag.

No one's job (in a knowledge based worker environment) is ever easy, especially not if you are the senior technical person in the company. It calls about the dunning-krugger effect all over.

>No one's job (in a knowledge based worker environment) is ever easy, especially not if you are the senior technical person in the company. It calls about the dunning-krugger effect all over.

This dude hadn't been a tech is like 10+ years and couldn't even do the job of the juniors if truth be told.

It's funny too, on the regular there would be some issue I hadn't gotten too yet. He had been contacted for an update so he would come to me for an update. He then would want to micromanage and make decisions around the the ticket but he didn't know even the basics of the situation. So instead of letting me decide, he would need me to extensively explain the situation so that he could make the decision himself. On so many instances I didn't explain well enough or whatever and he would make really bad decisions.

For example he made the decision more than once that all workstations should have a ping network monitor tracking their uptime. Fair enough... that was the case. But then he would make the decision that they also should alert us if they go down. Except then we suddenly start receiving alerts constantly about workstations being turned off or going to sleep.

Were you working for a sadist? Even if this was exaggerated a little bit, this isn't far from what I've experienced too.

To be honest, I just look at the people in the management roles nowadays and if they give me "command and control" vibes, I'm out.

Sounds like you worked for a small business and didn't know your own worth. You had the leverage the whole time.

>Were you working for a sadist? Even if this was exaggerated a little bit, this isn't far from what I've experienced too.

There's corroborated stories that he was much worse before I knew him.

While I worked him, he was actively banned from all adult hockey leagues in the city due to violence. Generally speaking leagues dont allow checking or fighting at all because at the end of the day older dudes need to go back to work on monday.

So he created his own league which explicitly allowed checking and violence. It was tremendously popular the first season for the first few games and then by the second season nobody was going anymore and they couldn't build 2 teams.

>To be honest, I just look at the people in the management roles nowadays and if they give me "command and control" vibes, I'm out.

I know better now. I didnt back then.

>Sounds like you worked for a small business and didn't know your own worth. You had the leverage the whole time.

Its crazy. When I was in that situation the burnout was just so punishing. You feel helpless and incapable. Everything is backwards and upside down. My phone would ring and I would feel that was it... i was about to be fired. If I wasn't being fired... I was about to chewed out for something I didn't do.

Cynical idea, for Senior Management: Make sure less-senior managers know that you're always alert to the dangers of developer burnout. And that your #1 "quick fix from on high" idea for addressing developer burnout is to downsize the intermediate management, then use the $Savings to hire more experienced developers.

One thing as a manager I was passionate about was monitoring the team stress. Some team members work better under pressure, others don't and it's a balancing act. For instance, I've had co-workers that need the constant pressure to accomplish their goals and they can go on like that for years. The act of accomplishing something is worth the stress.

Personally, I don't really get burned out. I have limitations on hours I can work, but happily work 80 hrs a week. I work 6 days a week, sleep 6 hrs a night, and effectively have two full-time jobs. If for some reason the stress lets up, I just pick up more work.

One of the things I've enjoyed recently is https://www.read.ai/ it lets you track interactions between co-workers. As I'm fully remote and often in meetings. When I see someone start getting stressed to the point it negatively impacts interactions we can talk it out, do a "game day", etc to improve the situation.

Anyway, I think it's important to note that "preventing burnout" is extremely relative and most people handle it wildly differently.

So you tighten the thumbscrews until people start to crack, and then you give them some bread and circuses

People handle different loads. Some people perform better under stress, others need far more time off and breaks and they'll perform better.

As a manager you're a representative of the company, and it's your duty to maximize value for the company. That means approaching each person differently and with respect. Most people say "I want to get promoted" or "I want to be in this position in my career in X years" or "I want to work on Y type of project". As a manager I have to deliver Z.

All of those require a level of stress to achieve, so I work with my colleagues to help them achieve their goals in a measured way. At the same time I ensure we deliver Z on time.

Don't really know how you got the "start to crack" out of my previous comment. People are different, they should all be handled with a unique approach to collaboration.

> Don't really know how you got the "start to crack" out of my previous comment.

"When I see someone start getting stressed to the point it negatively impacts interactions."

I got burnt out and it took me 3 years to be interested in tech again.. even now I'm not at prev level of starting GitHub projects, going to hackathons, and reading tech books. I was done done. I attempted random entry level jobs in different fields.. video editing, cold calling, marketing, and more

I believe the most important tool to prevent burnout is slack. Not the app, the word.

Slack gives you choice. The choice to work. To have fun. To do nothing. Slack allows you to deal with less bullshit. Less waste, not more production. Less always-on anxiety and avoiding stress completely.

These "manager tools" are not to prevent burnout. They are a list of things managers probably should be doing but don't. They should already be commonplace in any working environment yet many are so barren of them.

1. Encourage time off - It's usually up to the individual to take time off and lookout for their well being. It could be a nice thing once and awhile for your boss to "gift" you a day off. Please don't encourage me to take my own deserved time off though as I have plans for it.

2. Lower the pressure - I don't see how a manager can control this. Some goals are external to the team/individual and people still rely on you to complete the work. If a manager can convince senior leaders to cut certain goals at risk of attrition, then that is their job, not mine.

3. Be more positive - This is a given. Don't know why it needs to be mentioned that positivity begets positivity.

4. Increase headcount - This is a manager's job. But don't expect increasing headcount to improve any condition of burnout just by adding more people to problems.

5. Offer team members coaching - Sure this would be nice, but most companies only offer external coaching for senior leaders and above. ICs and middle managers hardly will see this benefit. Their manager is supposed to be their "coach" and hardly many are qualified to do that nor does it even provide benefits given the role power.

6. Remind employees of mental health care resources - I'm sorry but every resource i've tried that's corporate sponsored is garbage. At least in my experience. The services often ghost you and the corporate sponsored quotas are like 10 emails total. Not enough to even chat about burnout. Everything meaningful is something you still have to pay for yourself (at a discount, but still). Running and walking is free though!

7. Express gratitude - This one is missing all over corporate America. A simple "thanks" goes much further than you think. Especially those that are genuine and out of the blue. For some reason managers tend to not use this "magic" word.

8. Celebrate progress - One great way to celebrate progress is by discussing career growth too. Although chatting about "small wins" and reflect on mountains you climbed is nice in retrospect, you do all this in expectation of a "reward" at the end of the day. Yes some people may genuinely care for their work (I do too), but I still expect these things to lead to something greater. More responsibilities, more compensation, etc.

9. Sympathize - It's hard to sympathize or even empathize. The work is completely different and even if your manager did the job you are doing at one point, you might be doing it better or worse than them. It's hard to relate in certain job tracks. It's nice for a manager to hold the space, but really coworkers and peers usually do it much better.

10. Lead by example - This one is hard for me. I've never had a manager who leads by example. The examples they lead by are not ones I would follow anyway because I'm not going to be answering email at crazy hours of the day because I value my life outside of work more. Sometimes I do check email at night, but I "send them later" at reasonable times in the morning. No way in hell I'll add email onto my personal devices though.

11. Reduce the number of hours worked by agreeing to reduce effort - This is usually through 1:1s or team syncs / sprint ceremonies. Sadly managers do not listen to the boy who cried wolf and reduce projects or efforts accordingly. Many of us know that when this happens, we just enjoy the crash and burn or feign ignorance instead of "I told you so".

12. Share burnout concerns with others - While I used to do this, it has also been detrimental to my career. I become a "flight risk" because I'm exploring my options and now I'm suddenly valued as much as I knew personally. I shouldn't have to resort to this option to feel appreciated. As much as I enjoy talking to others about burnout, it just all sounds like we do so much work that we aren't feeling appreciated enough with (money, recognition, etc).

> A simple "thanks" goes much further than you think. Especially those that are genuine and out of the blue. For some reason managers tend to not use this "magic" word.

I used to work in litigation as an attorney before moving to the tech world. Started off as a public defender, which included working with some very challenging people (not just the clients, but also witnesses, sheriffs, prosecutors, judges, etc.). Learned pretty quickly to harness the power of three very powerful magic spells:

• I'm sorry

• Please

• Thank you

When used with sincerity, you can move mountains. I wish more people understood this.

How to prevent burnout:

Do what you can do, not what someone else wants you to do.

Yes, you need to make money, you can do that too.

This list is missing some stuff...

* lacking a feeling of control over your own success

* removing bureaucratic road blocks in the way of success

* lack of dopamine reward when you complete a project / disconnect from the consumer of your product

I don't think I've ever had a manager that has checked even a single one of these boxed, which I guess explains why I'm so burnt out that my (non-solo) software career is likely over.

What to do post burn out might be a useful resource as well.

> Express gratitude.

Maybe the key is to feel gratitude.

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