Hacker News Reader

Comment by BlargMcLarg | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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."

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com