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Comment by kleinsch | Hacker News Reader

Whenever you see a headline like this, one of the first questions you should ask is: "compared to what?" For this number to be relevant at all, it needs context - among the general population, how what percentage suffer from burnout?

In this case, answering that you feel any amount of burnout (including "To a small extent") to the prompt "I feel burnt out from work" means you suffer from burnout. In fact, the distribution from most burnt out to zero was: 21%, 34%, 28%, 17% - a relatively even distribution. An alternate headline (that's less exciting) is: 45% of software developers barely suffer burnout. That's almost a coinflip.

I'd be shocked if this doesn't just mirror the general population.

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83% is so high that you don't really need to compare it to anything. It basically means almost all devs are burned out. In fact its so high I'm not sure this study makes sense. Its higher than people with real stress like physicians, policemen and firefighters. Yes I've seen burn out here and there and even experienced it myself in one toxic workplace, but 83%? I don't know what went wrong with the study but this just contradicts my life experience by a huge margin.

>Its higher than people with real stress like physicians, policemen and firefighters.

The thing is with most non-office professions like that, especially those involving physical instead of cognitive work, it's much easier to disconnect and relax mentally after work than with software engineering where even once you're done for the day you can end up mentally ruminating about critical bugs or issues throughout the evening, especially if you have a lot of responsibility and you know people/business is counting on you.

SW dev work can be very stressful.

> it's much easier to disconnect and relax mentally after work than with software engineering

Each profession brings its own challenges but I'm skeptical tech workers experience more stress than lawyers or accountants. And when we talk about physicians, nurses or policemen there's no way in mind we experience more stress than those guys. You're thinking about a critical bug which I respect. Those guys sometimes ruminate about matters of life and death. Their jobs are extremely difficult and burn out causing. A "critical bug" for them could be that they misdiagnosed someone and severely compromised their health...I don't really envy their jobs.

>> Its higher than people with real stress like physicians, policemen and firefighters.

> The thing is with most non-office professions like that, especially those involving physical instead of cognitive work, it's much easier to disconnect and relax mentally after work

I wouldn't say being a physician, police or firefighter is non-cognitive work. What you say might apply to some other professions, though. But the mentioned professions definitely see stuff that will haunt you and stay with you, and won't let you disconnect.

I'm not so sure you can easily de-stress as a policeman. When you're involved in a high-stress or even high-risk situations on a daily basis (say, people shouting at you or cursing at you in a threatening manner), this is absolutely something that stays within your body for the remainder of the day or more. There's a reason so many cops drink in the evenings to be able to "unwind".

Would police officers ruminate about mistakes they may have made during a shift? My suspicion is 'generally not', and if that's true, maybe they should?

But police - and most physicians, etc - don't have a WFH option. More and more tech folks working from home don't have an automatic 'mode switch' when you leave and come back. I know it's been talked about to death, but some separation between 'non-work life' and 'work life' is easier when there's a physical separation.

> Would police officers ruminate about mistakes they may have made during a shift?

Hmm why wouldn't they, they seem to be made of the same DNA as you and me. They want to make good impression on their boss, colleagues etc (the politics and who gets ahead bullshit seems to be very high in their field) and are also exposed to very high stress situations - solving murder cases or patrolling the streets doesn't sound too chill to me. Most cop shows depict them as a bunch of alcoholics with failed marriages ... I don't know how accurate that is but it wouldn't surprise me.

There may be a bigger pressure to 'switch off'? dunno - I'm not a police officer. But there is a different work environment, and being 'at home'... you can replay issues in your head, but to what end? You can't go back and make any changes, compared to dev/code work, where you can be thinking about something and ... just go make a change (iow, 'keep working').

My neighbor was a firefighter for 20 years, and from his telling, that's what triggered his alcoholism. Drink a few to relax, later drinking to forget what you've had to witness - death/destruction/tragedy on a regular basis. I would not be at all surprised if alcoholism (or similar substance abuse) was not higher in professions like police than the regular population.

>For this number to be relevant at all, it needs context - among the general population, how what percentage suffer from burnout?

It doesn't have to have a perfectly described population context. If you had a metric that established 60% of all developers had issue X and 60% of the general population also had issue X, it doesn't minimize the significance of issue X. It's still an issue, in this case preventable, and it still effects a relatively large number of people, so let's focus on that.

Context is certainly useful though because if the issue is more widespread (or found isolated with high correlation), it helps us better understand the cause of the issue vs looking at some subset of the population and trying to guess the cause to fix it. If it's the population at large, maybe Agile or knowledge work isn't the cause of burnout, maybe it's something else. But we should still identify the issue and try to fix it.

> 45% of software developers barely suffer burnout.

That sounds like 55% of software developers suffer noticeable burnout, which is pretty bad regardless of what genpop is dealing with.

I'd be shocked if this doesn't just mirror the general population.

That makes it worse.

Yeah, exactly my thought. How could you think that if the sentiment in the general population is that anywhere between 50-85% are feeling burnt out that it's ok because comparatively a group is not suffering more than the other. It's just much worse that the whole population is feeling this bad about work. It shouldn't be this way!

Not so sure about that. Because people are generally biased to not recognize burnout symptoms in themselves (at least not until they've already been burned out once), these numbers seem shockingly high.

Eg parents I think 100% will say they're burnt out.

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