Surviving Burnout (2015)
lifeofaudrey.com
lifeofaudrey.com
This really dies sum it up in a useful generic way. Ultimately the balance of this sentence will differ from context to context, but the equation ultimately has to balance.
Put another way, if you care a lot, but have no agency, then ultimately you will be frustrated.
If you care a lot, but have no resources, then again, you get frustrated.
Burnout is just the moment whe you stop fruitlessly caring. But you -want- to care (about something) so not-caring leads to depression.
Matching your care to resources available is a good start. Make sure you care about something that can be materially affected by your resources. Feeling under-resourced is a sign that those allocating the resources have different goals to you.
If your care exceeds your agency in resources product direction, code quality, then you can choose to care less, (find something else to care about), align your caring to match those who do have agency, or move on.
Starting your own business gives you agency, so you're free to allocate resources as you choose. However you still need to aquire those resources (which in turn can change what you care about.)
Starting and running your own business is enormously freeing - it gives you complete agency. But its also HARD. People don't pay you for what -you- care about, they pay you for what -they- care about. Its very hard to find customers who appreciate your priorities, and it's also hard to adjust your priorities (aka what you care -about-) to match theirs.
But if you get it right, it's amazing.
Do they care about rendering performance? No? Well then I'm sure as hell not goimg to lose sleep over it, and if it seems actively harmful to customers *that I've met* then it's just a place to leave.
There's always a budget, there's always better quality, but if you're the one paying for it in time and energy, and you don't really have a stake in the outcome, the correct answer is "fuck it". Do not care about transactional work more than you need to within the scope that's set forth.
When you're a coder, the code matters. It can be frustrating to see resources allocated to say marketing.
When you are responsible for acquiring resources, then there's more to care about, more to balance. When to market. When to get new hardware.
Programmers care about code performance, code elegance, getting every pixel perfect, perfect design (for when we have s billion users). Business owners care about shipping, and getting paid. Without that the doors close.
As we grow older, as our position evolves, we have to care about more, but in some ways less deeply. There's more nuance, more compromise, more acceptance that it needs to be "good enough" - better than that even - but that perfection is an expensive goal either small returns.
I'm not arguing for mediocre, we all want the product to be better, and incrementally we move towards that. But that movement is in balance with all the other cares.
Installing people into senior positions does not make them better at recognizing these factors, or more incentivized to care.
The point is that a senior can use your argument to trivialize the efforts of an engineer, seem reasonable to outsiders, and be wrong.
If I'm over here spending my late nights trying to pare down our webpack bundle, but my actual day is already done because it was decided that it should be spent doing something else, then someone is liable to get frustrated with how little influence they have over the outcome or reward system. If a customer then comes back and says "oh I love how snappy it is" you can certainly pat yourself on the back for it, but you have no real control over whether that translates into compensation for your effort, either in terms of accolades or money or product direction, unless you're the one making those decisions already.
Part of the reason, in that specific case, is that not only is it hard to say as an IC what the results would be otherwise had you not done X, but also what future results might be if you were to do X again.
It's not that those choices are irrelevant or that they don't have an impact, but if you don't get to allocate company resources to it, and are hoping for a better outcome but can't control that outcome or perception of your work, then it's not worth it.
If I'm John Carmack, I'm going to care deeply about rendering performance of my game, because if it's great, I might make millions, and I get to decide that that's what my employees are optimizing for. If I'm one of those employees, I'm going to meet his expectations, and if I'm very lucky, he'll think highly of me later on. That's... it. Unless I have decent shares or something.
Likewise if you're repeatedly trying to position yourself as the tryhard, you run the risk of reducing your capacity for doing literally anything else in life, which should be a real concern, because if you're not allocating resources at the company to your time, then you're devaluing your own time and resources for no reason; burnout.
Now out yourself in the same position at a massive company that has hierarchies of managers who's sole job it is to check that the status of tickets have changed or whatever. The chance your extracurricular work will influence a better outcome for you is basically nil, because the value of anyone's job is not defined by anything related to quality.
Management that denies engineers this sense of ownership and achievement is a likely cause of burnout. I think we agree mostly agree, but in my view management shares responsibility in this case.
You own it if you own it, keep your personal investment at arms length, lest you become a Jason Bateman character desperately putting in those extra hours so one day hopefully you'll be blessed with that VP position or w/e.
That said, of course if you've achieved something within a fairly tight constraint, ideally you're compensated or recognized somehow for it. Extra worthwhile hours should also be compensated for obviously. But if nobody is willing to pay you for it, it's probably your own undoing.
What I am saying is that value in a product can be "discovered" along the way. An engineer that demonstrates how to add value through individual efforts will probably experience burnout if management chooses to ignore their efforts. But more mature managers will figure out how to work with it.
I do what I'm paid for. I do it to best of my abilities, but I don't care much.
I care for my wife, my unborn child, my dog, myself. Seriously live is so much more than work and code.
I learned to balance myself. I need job for $ and that's it.
If I won lottery I would still code, just not as much (2 h/day) and only fun stuff. Work is usually borning.
Consequently, it's becoming painfully aware to me that if I were to lose my amazingly well-paid job in which I (feel like I truly) excel, it'd be a pain to look for a new one. Because of my niche, I would, most likely, have to go down with my pay by one or even two seniority levels to be a standard SWE in a different company right now.
To be honest I know that I have less value on the market because of that. It is just I don't want second job of just keeping up.
I read article here and there when I have moment, but that's about it.
On other hand I find ecosystem in JS (my slice of cake) is slowing down. There is no new framework every week like it used to be. No ground braking changes.
The absolute worst company I worked for had this separation as a core philosophy. They had different managers for everything: Product managers to make all of the product decisions, UX managers to make all of the design decisions, project managers to decide when we’d do things and how to check in on our progress every few hours of every day, program managers who thought they were engineers who just didn’t write code, VPs who would choose all of your programming languages and frameworks for you, and on and on. These people would shuffle from meeting to meeting every day with a 2-hour company-paid lunch in the middle (which they ultimately got in trouble for) but wouldn’t ever do any of the work themselves. Meanwhile, if any engineer dared make a suggestion we’d get a long lecture about staying in our lanes. Then when projects were late/wrong/failed or just missed the mark about what the company needed, they would do long post mortems to assign blame to different engineers for doing it wrong. At best, they’d come up with vague statements about how “we failed as a team due to communication issues” or something.
It was the most demoralizing work environment. Every meeting was full of sad, dejected engineers. People would quit without having other jobs lined up because they just couldn’t take it any more.
Been in a few places that turned the cargo cult to eleven. Someone brings an article about squads at Spotify and suddenly the team hierarchy changes. Someone discovers a blogpost about how desks on Amazon were made out of doors in the early days and suddenly all new desks are made of doors. Google releases Material design and we have to redesign the whole thing. And there’s also the playground slide and the plastic ball pool.
I recently quit a job, without another lined up, at a startup where I couldn't even last a year. The CTO and the entire engineering management layer under him were all friends from high school.
I honestly don’t know what to do about it. It seems hopeless and I’ve been avoiding going back to work for the last 18 months. I also wonder if there is something wrong with me because everyone else seems to cope with it somehow and keep on working.
I’ve thought about starting my own business but it’s too much hard work which I don’t think I can pull off.
The idea of going back to employee work makes me feel like shit because I’ll end up in the same environment (since 99% of companies work this way) and I don’t want to go through yet another burnout.
Would love to hear about how others have overcome this.
Don't do it alone. Have a look at @jimnotgym's comment.
There is not, and it's important to understand that. The environment is grinding you down, which can make you doubt yourself. In essence, your mind gets tricked into taking the blame for the situation you're finding yourself in.
In the end, while you might not always be able to modify the environment, you can always move away from it. You're avoiding it - you can see that as a part of you looking out for you. It's an important part, and it shows you that you actually have agency: You can do something, and you _are_ doing something. It also means you could do something else. You can take more control and use your agency in a more directed way. See what actions you can take that make you feel better and more in control.
Resist the urge to blame yourself, but don't blame yourself for blaming yourself: see it like a natural reflex that is there, but that you want get more control over. That itch you don't want to scratch, in order to not damage your skin; when you find yourself scratching, forgive yourself for scratching it, and stop scratching.
Most of all, I'm not a professional. Find a professional to talk this over with. They can help immensely putting the your situation in context and figure out ways to interact with it that make you feel good. It works.
I feel like I run into them a lot, and it's consistently awful handling it in practice, since they seem to delight in refining their skills at social and psychological manipulation, and they position themselves to use the mediocre herd as a weapon. Some methods of choice seem be:
* cheap, simple lies which take expensive, complex truths to sort out. Equivocating about descriptions used to challenge them.
* stand themselves next to someone/something highly regarded by the group and reframe attempts calling them on their nefariousness into an attack on that
* shameless and blatant denial of world descriptions where their behavior is anything but perfectly normal and justified. (As particularly prominently demonstrated by political leaders of certain major countries in recent years)
* introducing (or corrupting/extending existing) complex rule systems for purportedly noble reasons, then torture language or put forth extreme interpretations to find ways to claim their toxic bidding must be done, but 'It's not I who say that. That's the rules. We all have to obey the rules'. Particularly for justifying damage or conducting systemic coercion against their victims. (Harry Potter readers may wish to think of Dolores Umbridge, in this regard.)
I'm sure I'm missing several important ones too. If anyone has pointers on how to develop skills to reliably defeat these dangerous parasites, I'd love to know. Sadly I expect it's going to remain highly important skills for the foreseeable future.
The best advice I have is remain honest, don't play their games, document anything said in unrecordable media, and use the fact that they don't know how to stop being excessively brutal or recruiting others to do so against them if required.
No one has a recipe, each person operating like this has their own way of working. There are common exploitations they will use, but all you can do is laugh internally knowing their flaws. Their biggest weakness is they will destroy people unfairly and eventually cause enough damage to an institution that someone above them will realize those losses eventually. You can't call these things out, again you'll be a primary target. But you can easily get them on paper doing this.
Thanks for raising the point, and know that this exchange inspired me to start reading up in greater detail.
This despite having an entire product team who was making all sorts of insane non-product decisions (technologies, programming languages, binary storage formats, vendors to outsource to, etc).
The product team was somehow too busy to make it to any meetings with tech leads & devs, despite seemingly not talking to users either since we were left doing so. We'd have 10hrs/sprint of planning meetings, and our product guy would show up for 30 minutes of one meeting. Unbelievable stuff.
This is really the practice of zen and detachment in work and life. Care, but not to the point where is starts to hurt you.
To me it was the moment I started breaking down in tears when getting to the subway station down my street, on my way to work. Every day.
The next time was when I could not speak about my job and the project I was working on without stammering and my mind going blank (and still couldn’t for months after quitting).
“Frustrated" and "stop to fruitlessly care" don’t feel like they even begin to describe that.
> But you -want- to care (about something) so not-caring leads to depression.
Having also gone through a decade-long depression before that, I’d personally say these two are very different beasts. Both are quite unpleasant, and neither is viable, but each in it’s own way.
Depression, in my case, makes things meaningless in a "calmer" way - I can think about any activity, but it just feels meaningless, as if somebody was asking me to dig a hole then bury it back up. Like, why? What is the point?
Burnout, on the other hand, had an avoidant element to it - when thinking about work, I start feeling helpless and frustrated, which makes my mind go into some primordial "fear" state, rendering me unable to think clearly at all. If I were working while burned out, my "mental context" would be extremely limited - I'd read the words, but couldn't comprehend anything beyond basic instructions (e.g. change config from "foo" to "bar"). The mind is just avoiding making any connections relevant to the work.
This is just my experience. Others' milage may vary.
This part is insane. But it doesn’t only happen when burned out. It happens to me when I get asked to do something that I do not believe in. I say yes, because you know, my boss is asking me to do it. But when I actually start on it my brain just completely shuts down. Like, is it trying to prevent me from seeming efficient at things I absolutely hate?
Burn out, on the other hand, brought me dread, anxiety, exhaustion, and the feeling of being trapped in a pointless but never-ending cycle.
If I were to dive into more details, depression gave me a rock-solid certainty that I could never be happy, or meaningfully enjoy life in any meaningful way.
There might have been some joyous and light-hearted moments in the past, and perhaps the future held some in store for me. I could smile if prompted or expected to. But these moments always were and always would be the accidents. And so was any past or present progress. Insignificant.
I knew that no matter what I would always revert to my norm: apathy and a deep-seated, always present, lingering painful despair. All while somehow remaining alive, without understanding why or how. Going to bed each day, half hoping that this time there will not be a tomorrow.
It also totally crushed any sense of self-worth I had until then.
The kicker being that this certainty and the blindness to anything positive that comes with it enabled a wonderful feedback loop.
Burning out mostly involved permanent and crippling stress and anxiety, accompanied by a permanent doubt on the usefulness of anything I did.
Anything merely evoking work, such as catching a glimpse of my IDE’s icon, evoked fear.
Nothing felt straightforward anymore. Everything required focus and attention, all the while stressed and anxious. Every task felt like it would be complex and difficult. Before I even started.
Simple things became difficult. Average things became exhausting. Difficult things? Insurmountable.
Anything less than absolutely straightforward made me feel as lost as a junior on his first day, unable to even figure out where to start. Except I knew had done these things before, harder ones even, and this had been my codebase for nearly a year.
Each day felt like pointlessly climbing a mountain, for no reason, good or otherwise. Each day was too short for me to get everything done. And yet too long. All while knowing that the next day would only be worse. With no end in sight.
No break ever was long enough. And each break’s end came with the slowly intensifying dread that came from knowing I was going back to that. And yet each break was always too long. There just was too much to do. All of it urgent, important, critical. Most of it pointless because, although finished, ultimately never released.
Needless to say my sense of professional worth was in shambles, and I often joked about changing careers and moving to the countryside to grow dandelions.
> Feel free to decline if it's too personal or you just don't feel like it.
I have to admit I hesitated. So thank you for your thoughtfulness.
Depression - it's hopeless, there's nothing I can do..
Burnout - it's hopeless, but there's so much I can do, let me burn myself out trying to do all of it at once, even though it won't move the needle more than 1%. Almost like "Sunday scaries" but all the time or months nonstop. Just a constant mid-level anxiety & panic.
I find I just don’t have ambitions for anything anymore. I simply exist without any hope/expectation of joy/excitement.
I used to be more energetic and fairly optimistic. I’m not even stressed and have overcome a few minor health issues that used to bother me.
Yet at this point, I can’t help but feel the best years have passed and now it just a slow decline to the end. (But no thoughts of suicide/self-harm).
I know this probably isn’t entire true but can’t get away from the feeling.
Been there. It gets better, but you will have to change some things.
This is what worked for me: allow yourself to have fun. It is not frivolous. It is not insignificant. It is an important part of a fulfilling life, so make time for it. Literally carve some time for it and put it in your daily/weekly schedule if need be.
Once you commit to spending some time every day/week simply to enjoy yourself and have fun, now you can choose an activity.
At first it may seem difficult because everything may seem pointless or discouraging. Passive activities like watching TV/podcasts/videogames are a bad choice. They may be easy and tempting, but really must be avoided. The best choices are social, such as team sports, board games, ballroom dancing, etc. Outdoor activities are also great: walking in nature, riding a bike, etc. Artsy stuff like painting or embroidery are okay, but being neither social nor outdoorsy means they won't be as beneficial.
If you are particularly industrious you may be tempted to learn a new skill like a new language, or going to the gym. Beware: your actual goal is to lighten up your mood and enjoy yourself, not to "be productive" or "be the best version of yourself". Your obsession with productivity is probably what got you in this mess in the first place.
Simply allow yourself to be a kid again. Do fun stuff that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
I'd like to chime in and say that social video games like CSGO or Dota or whatever with friends on discord can be wonderful social activities.
The act of "scheduling" fun makes it hard for me to actually have fun - it feels like a chore. Fun is only fun (to me) if it's spontaneous.
Obviously, that creates quite a vicious cycle... I'm stuck in one right now, actually. I'm just grinding, hoping something's gonna change. I doubt it will, though.
A few things have been helpful though.
• First, the obvious
Quitting the jobs that burned me out.
Avoiding, like the plague, hyper-political or hypocritical work environments. I’ve got better things to than play Game of Thrones or The Young and the Restless.
• The usual
Finding a good therapist. Most will be utterly useless. Competency aside, one that works for one person will be completely unhelpful to someone else. But one that works for you will help you identify and change patterns, in both your everyday life and your "macro" life. They won’t do the work for you, but they will be of tremendous help.
Started doing what I wanted to do as a kid but never did, or not enough. In my case it was surfing and skating. As a child I used to watch those people surfing and skating in movies and wanting to do it too. Turns out, it’s quite fun. Tedious (surfing), and sometimes painful (skating), but really pleasant. It won’t change your life, but in the moment it might just make going through the rest feel like it was worth it.
I went back to activities I used to like but had stopped. For me, it was snorkelling, hiking, and scuba diving. I had entirely forgotten the sense of wonder and excitement that came with it. Scuba diving with a stubborn one year old otitis wasn’t the best of ideas, but we didn’t go below 6m, so it was fine.
• The less obvious and slightly unrelated:
Letting go of high-maintenance friendships and relationships, and letting them die off. It’s incredible how much cognitive and emotional bandwidth these things can take.
• Others
But what has really stuck with me is experimenting. Freeing up some time to experiment with new things. Trying out new things, making new things. Seeing what gets me excited, what sticks, what tickles my brain, and getting back that sense of play in my day to day life.
Lately for me, it’s been stable diffusion and LLM applications, but it can really be anything. The important part is that it should feel more like play than work. The kind of thing that makes you feel so excited you genuinely want to tell everybody about it.
Which unexpectedly reminds me of two people.
The first, a pilot. I wanted to be one at the time, and had somehow gotten a job at the airport so I could see planes all day, meet some pilots, and ask them everything that came to my mind. One of them told that most people didn’t understand that when they (the pilots) went to work, they weren’t going to work. They were going to play. It stuck with me. I obviously didn’t become a pilot, but it stuck.
And the second is Feynman, or more accurately his autobiography ("Surely you’re joking M. Feynman", which I can only wholeheartedly recommend), when he somehow grew bored with physics.
It’s a rather long excerpt, but having looked it up to make sure I wasn’t making it up, here you go:
> Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference. I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.
> So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
> Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.
> I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate. Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics?”
> I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance… I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is …” and I showed him the accelerations.
> He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?”
> “Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.
> It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
All that being said, I don’t really know wether I am truly out of depression, for good, or if it’s just an exceptionally long relief. While it feels okay now, I can regularly see patterns that I wish were long gone creeping back. And I honestly can’t tell wether it’s just me just overreacting, or if it means it will be a life-long struggle.
But it does seem to get easier with time. It takes some effort, every day. But it gets easier
For example: find a local plant store, pick up some pothos[0], and get some roots going. Get two: one that's a little more established in soil and one that's just a bare cutting. All you need is a jar/glass/mug/bowl of water and a sunny spot.
Do not plan! Stop making plans and checklists and calendar events! Feel free to block off time on your calendar for self-care, which is your plant-tending experiment. No more lists or plans after this. You can plan this all in your head:
1. A plant piece (money optional)
2. A humid container (plastic lunch bag? old yogurt tub? something out of the recycling bin? use trash)
3. A sunny spot or a bright light (sun is free)
Just get some vines get the things to grow some roots[3]. Ask the friendly plant store person for some light nutrient solution, or get a tiny amount of Miracle-Gro and dissolve it in water. You don't need anything fancy, this is just an experiment.
Eventually the vine will start growing. After it forms roots and a few new nodes, you can cut it apart[1] and grow more roots. Keep repeating this process and propagating your vines. Do not stress about messing it up. There is an infinite amount of pothos vine out there. It propagates itself. Try rooting small sections until you can do it confidently.[2]
Take more cuttings, root them, grow them out, gift them to friends, give them away, etc.[3]
Alternatively: ask your plant store for leafless scraps of pothos (or philodendron, or similar) and try propagating from nothing[4]
Yes, your work output will suffer, and it should suffer considering the amount of suffering you've done for it!
What helped me was accepting that there was an infinite amount of work to be done in the world, and that working generated more future work. There is no shortage of pending work, and the overall to-do list is endless much like a river is endless. You don't need to tame the river, but it is useful for navigating the environment. Don't hyperfocus on the river, don't fetishize the river, and stop trying to rapidly get to somewhere else via the river. Splash around, do the basic chores, and hang out by the riverbank and watch things happen.
This probably sounds very stupid right now. Feel free to email me. There are some chemical shortcuts one can take, but that's outside the scope of this post.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epipremnum_aureum
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5FfQ_nWrxo
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D89Ia_phck
I'm working on somehow getting a new job (although the self-doubt, fear, and guilt is making is really difficult), and I'm hoping that getting a whiff of something new will at least provide some hope for something worth living for. I don't know if I even like software anymore. I don't know if I was ever good at it, if I'm even good at anything, but I have to believe, because what's the alternative?
Meanwhile I just keep showing up, attending meetings with people yelling at me. Blaming me for the technical problems they didn't want to allocate resources to fix. Even then I can't convince myself that It's not actually MY fault. Maybe i truly didn't communicate how poor the technical state was. Maybe I did actually deserve to be yelled at. Maybe I'm just fucking useless. What's more likely, a whole layer of middle managers being wrong, or that I'm just fucking useless? Wisdom of the crowds and such.
At least I know that my struggle is actually a struggle, and not just me being a weak baby about it, So thank you for that comfort.
PS: It's also quite a coincidence that you started skating. I too recalled how "cool" i thought the skaters looked when I was young, the happy days of playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and how I longed to be cool like that. After riding an electric long board for a year I decided that maybe skating an acoustic skateboard would be fun, and it is. When skating I feel like I'm doing something. I don't feel like i need to be good. I feel cool. Maybe you don't have to be good at your job, maybe you can just be cool.
I also felt useless, like it was my fault, like I suck, like I don’t ever want to do software for money ever again, and like I’m a wimp because others have been working this way for decades… I’m now on my 18th month of avoiding to work again.
All this to say: don’t ignore the warning signs. This is a toxic job, nothing good will come out of it anymore, and delaying your resignation (or months long sick leave if you can get any) will only make the problem worse while requiring an even longer recovery period.
> Maybe I did actually deserve to be yelled at.
Almost certainly not. Even when someone has done a bad job and it causes frustration, yelling doesn't solve the problem; it typically only makes things worse for all parties.
You have value outside of your job. Believing and remembering that can help make the challenges at work less depressive. That's often lost on a forum like this where technical prowess is highly valued.
> I don't know if I even like software anymore
That's fine. Some people might consider that impeccable timing before an LLM replaces our software jobs anyways. If you've succeeded in software to any degree, you've probably learned how to learn. I bet you can do it again in a different field.
> I'm working on somehow getting a new job
I run a small company - link in profile. We make high performance CAD software in C. Reach out if you're interested or just need someone to talk to.
Depression, in the literature, in my experience, and what I've seen in my spouse leads to just wanting to sleep and not get out of bed.
Burnout, however, lead me to be completely incapable of sleep. I couldn't fall asleep for hours. I'd wake up 10x/night in some anxiety sweat thinking about some way I could make the abomination of a project 1% less horrible. I'd wake up 2 hours before my alarm, in pitch black pre-dawn light in dread and just feel like I needed to get the day started.. so much to do, and it was all going to fail, but I had to be seen to be trying.
It always did boil down to having no agency over the outcomes but being made responsible for them, and my warning of the idiocy/likely failure mode of the plan being ignored.
> The next time was when I could not speak about my job and the project I was working on without stammering and my mind going blank (and still couldn’t for months after quitting).
Thank you for writing this. I've been through these states recently and it helps to know other people had similar symptoms.
Not sure what else to call it, but the stage described above probably comes first.
- Low resources * low demands = low motivation + average stress. You don't really give a shit about the job, but it's also not taking a lot out of you either.
- High resources * low demands = high motivation + low stress. The dream!
- High resources * high demands = high motivation + average stress. You've got a lot on your plate - but you also feel well equipped to take it all on. This is a really nice place to be, especially if you're hungry for professional growth.
- Low resources * high demands = Hell. People expect you do build everything from nothing, and nobody's giving you any help at all, and you're bottlenecked by weird insane corporate BS, and on and on and on.
Being at low resources, high demands for too long will lead to burnout. Full stop. If you're there, try to get out. If you're not there, try to stay out.
https://commoncog.com/g/burnout/#the-job-demands-resources-j...
I disagree with that. High resources * high demands is the dream for many people including myself. Low demands -> low motivation, at least for most people. Having a stress free job with low motivation for a long time can even lead to burnout!
The people I know who wish to focus their life around their hobbies or kids want to stay away from high demand jobs even if they were to have high resources.
High resource, low demands = working in a test kitchen
High resource, high demand = working Michelin star restaurant
Low resource, high demand = working at fast food
It sounds a bit like saying "don't love the other person too much". You can try to be more measured in your displays of affection if you think it may scare the other person away, but you're either in love with someone or you're not; "how much" in love you get to be isn't really a conscious decision. And unreciprocated love can lead to relationship burnout in the same way.
So if deep down you care about something but try to consciously "match your care to available resources", it's probably going to lead to more burnout too, not less.
This is basically the best summation of it, and when I notice my role becoming consumed with this, I know its time to leave or face burnout.
My most recent round of this I was a senior IC but put in charge of PMing 2 vendors that were starting work 3 days later, despite them having been in planning for 6+ months without my involvement or knowledge.
Both overly ambitious project I didn't plan, the lead on their side I already told my boss I knew previously & did NOT trust, with incompetent vendors I didn't pick, on an unrealistically short timeline that didn't make sense. Also the two vendors were supposed to coordinate on some integration piece, but didn't trust each other, and were not contractually obligated to coordinate, so of course they didn't.
Management couldn't decide if I was supposed to be helping make them successful with hands-on technical work & coordination, clearing blockers, or impartially measuring their success for the purposes of whether they deserved to be paid for each milestone. It of course ran 2x over the planned timeline, some of which they demanded we pay for, and a lot of which they did for free.. which meant the work was garbage.
In the end one vendor went bankrupt and the other we almost went to court with.
I ended up on this so long that I became strongly associated with its failure, and my senior IC role didn't really exist to go back to. My boss, and their boss, both got moved aside internally out of leadership roles around the time I quit.
I lingered filling other senior IC++/leader-- type roles for a year until I left. Probably the longest stretch I've gone of not really doing any coding, not really running a team, not doing something I enjoy, and not learning anything.. all at the same time.
I work at an early stage startup which I joined on the day one about two years ago. I don’t want to get into too much details but couple months ago we did a pivot, threw away most of the old product and now pretending the new offering is complete (it is the opposite).
I was onboard with the new vision for the company but couple months ago I started noticing something isn’t right. I felt anxious, tired, frustrated yet I desperately wanted myself to be that cliche enthusiastic startup dude. I’m no longer in my early 20s (experienced burnout before as well as two major depression episodes) so started reflecting and looking into the causes. The pivot and the product debt it caused made me do an incredible amount of production debugging and interrupted ad-hoc work for customers we tried to impress. It got so bad I rarely remember the things I worked on the day before. Meanwhile, the product scope keeps expanding and we haven’t even nailed the basics.
Then SVB happened and my guess is that leadership started receiving more heat from the investors. Shit rolls downhill so now CTO only wants to hear about solutions, not problems.
I’ve had it. I gave all energy and skills I had to this company. Now I’m just hitting my head against the wall. I need a break and possibly a new employer. Burnout comes in all shapes and sizes because we are all different. I escape into physical activities and cooking, but mostly try to distance myself emotionally from work.
I wish the best of luck to all of you who are going through a difficult time. Wish me luck as well.
1) People are part of the problem. You solve problems for customers with technical solutions, but your solutions should take into account people in the company. e.g. "how do I solve problem X with a manager that won't listen?" Other people are not a mysterious outside factor, they are a piece of the puzzle that needs to be put together.
2) Ignore your reputation. Do not base your self-worth on the opinion of others. You want to do good work, of course, but often your idea of good work is not what is wanted by the company. They want features, not pretty code. They are often too short-sighted to see the problems they are creating for themselves with this attitude. You must come to accept this.
3) You don't own your work. You must be mercenary. You are paid for your skills but the output is not yours. You will naturally have a sense of ownership over the the work you do. You will want to protect it because your sense of self-worth is linked to the quality of your work. Sever this link.
4) You don't own the company's problems. You must be mercenary. Companies are dysfunctional. They will be short-sighted. They will make mistakes you have seen a thousand times before and the end will be completely predictable. Give your advice, watch it get ignored, get paid, and move on.
5) Find something more important to care about than some stupid tech product. P.S. It's not going to make the world a better place. Quite the opposite if you look at previous evidence.
But I'd also suggest that it's possible to find companies that align with your values, both around work/life balance and around the way the work gets done. That's certainly a skill that I've had to work to develop. And I've had some major misses along the way. But it's probably also the most important skill I've developed.
Owning your company's problems, at least a subset of them, is that fastest (only?) way to move up in a company. If you want to climb the ladder at all, you'll have to own some problems. The key is to do that for a company that recognizes and rewards that ownership. And as soon as they don't, then you become the merc and find a new thing.
How? I keep reading this in similar discussions, but I haven’t found practical advice on how to actually do that. And I can’t trust myself because I keep joining shitty companies on that front one after another.
I think my proxy for work-life balance is days of PTO. I'm typically going to take ~20 a year. That's what I need to recharge and avoid burnout. In a interview with a manager I would ask:
"So, in the job description it says you have Flexible PTO, what does that actually look like here?"
Usually they'll give me some sort of range or average.
A way to cut down on the chances of working for shitty leadership is to ensure you work with high performers. (not foolproof, but helpful) High performers don't like working for shitty leadership. I borrow my proxy for high performance here from the excellent book, Accelerate (Forsgren, Humble, and Kim), and look for the engineering org to implement CI/CD as well as IAC (Infrastructure As Code). I'll ask about these during question time of the technical interview, as well as other things I care about (testing philosophy, etc). I'm sure there are really great organizations that don't do CI/CD or IAC, but I would have to know _for sure_ that they were great, to work for them.
These are obviously super high level proxies for organizational health from the perspective of an engineer. But reading up on organizational health more broadly can help you identify some red flags these proxies don't cover. Check out The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. It's a fantastic book on organizational health.
Lastly, networking can be very challenging but also very helpful here. It's not something that comes easy to me, but it has helped tremendously in figuring out which companies in my community I do and do not want to work for. This could be less relevant now that almost everyone is cool with remote work. But even my most recent job post-covid, was something I found because of my network. Go to meetups. Go to conferences. Get coffee with people who do similar things. It can really pay off.
Her solution to burnout was to _start her own business_?? I'm glad this worked out for her in the end, but holy shit this would be the literal last possible thing I (or I hope many others) would consider as a solution to burnout. That's a _fast track_ to burnout.
I know for myself I’ve been in business for a couple of years with a full-time job and I love my business infinitely more than I could ever care about someone else’s. Once it grows to the point of sustaining my family, I’ll have “made it” by my own estimate.
But I do agree. It’s certainly not a cure-all, and largely depends on your personality and the unique reason you burned out.
Would be interesting to see if the author's opinion has changed today.
But, maybe the author just needed a change of scene...
I was lucky enough to be able to take all of last year off from work to focus on my mental and physical health.
It is probably dependant on people (and ofcourse their situation), but when I see someone talking about overcoming burnout by taking a month off I can't help wonder if they are diluting themselves into believing that everything is now fine, or if it was truly burnout to begin with.
If possible, make sure you give yourself enough time to deal with burnout. There is no shame in needing to take extended time away. Your health is more important than a career.
The vast majority of people cannot afford to take such extended period of time off simply due to financial barriers.
Wondering if people are _actually_ burnt out simply because they have access to much less money than you is a rather arrogant viewpoint. Poor people get sick too.
However you misunderstood where I was coming from. I point out I was lucky enough to be able to take time off to focus on my health, and hint that that is sadly not something everyone can do.
I was able to do this not because of being employed in a high paying tech job, but because of strong union negotiated benefits.
I live in a European country with a sane perspective on work life balance and a strong social safety net.
I will also add that what was written questioned the public statements of individuals that write about dealing with burnout in a single month, not that the very probable situation where individuals have burnout and only have the ability to take a single month off exist.
Like all these articles say, burn out comes from a number of sources, removing these will end up fixing things over a period of time.
Check this thread, you'll find at least one.
Ive been on leave from work due to severe burnout and even just reading this caused me to feel panic. It's this weird feeling where the back of my throat feels like it's closing, my head begins throbbing and my heart races. I know how seriously burnout can affect your life and I'm really glad the author found a way out. We need better options for dealing with burnout because having medical insurance tied to work is obviously suboptimal.
That is a solved problem in many countries.
When the US grows up from its individual first, frontier moxie, pissing context it could have it too.
No, it's not. Especially for cases, when the worker is a migrant from another country. I spent 3+ years of my life working in the country, paying huge taxes and huge healthcare insurance fee(which depends on your salary). And now i'm on the verge when i either work or leave to my home country(with a lots of problems). Despite contributing hugely to this country.
Concepts of countries and borders in itself is unfair to majority of people, who happened to be born in shitholes. Yet westerners just love to exploit these people to death, holding the carrot on the stick in front of their weary faces.
IMHO, this is not what is wrong with the system in the US. The problem is that the consumer of healthcare is doubly removed from the price.
First by the insurance company using the doctors. Second by one's workplace paying for the insurance. Is it any wonder that prices keep going up under such a scheme?
- ban employer-provided insurance entirely. - provide tax breaks for employers who provide insurance stipends to their employees - provide tax breaks for people to buy insurance on the marketplaces - make open enrollment a once a quarter or once a month thing, or even allow you to switch insurance anytime.
The entire problem is that there’s no free market. The people using it aren’t able to negotiate. And when there’s a problem you have to pay your insurance until open enrollment. This means you have no way to vote with your wallet.
One interesting thing about it is that it makes working for small businesses that can't afford good healthcare viable. It would really help jumpstart that part of the economy if we decoupled healthcare from employment.
It's not the author's conclusion, but this is basically my fantasy ever since watching Billions with Wendy Rhoades's character. In that show, Wendy is a performance coach working for a hedge fund whose job is to emotionally pump up the people who work for the hedge fund. The hedge fund employs her because (leaving aside the soap opera dynamics for a second) it recognizes that emotional support is both (a) necessary for fully realizing the potential of their knowledge workers (b) not something that every employee is naturally gifted at providing, neither at work for their colleagues nor in their personal lives.
More companies should employ such coaches and schedule regular sessions for all their employees. If everything's great, then great. If not, it's definitely cheaper than employee churn.
Actually a few companies i know do that for their executive staff just not rank and file employees like in the show. Also if we’re talking about engineers beyond very early stage imo it would have very limited utility for the company
Could you expand on this?
I think this code-only mentality is what will replace engineers with chatGPT.
We need to understand the business, make high level decisions, coordinate across functions - all are crucial to the outcome of our work. It’s not just managerial types that need to do this, so we could all benefit from some coaching and help.
Specifically having a therapist or a coach around is not a big concern, but if your company considers you and your performance important, you will be encouraged to develop yourself and develop your network in the company one way or the other. Whether this happens is the quickest way to determine if you are considered an NPC or not. For example, if travel between offices is common in your company, but you don’t travel and are just thrown in on projects with random people around the world, then you know it’s you. Main characters meet up, plan, improve, guide, imagine, act, change; NPCs more or less do what they’re told. If you rarely hear a word of encouragement or feedback about what you’re doing, it’s probably because nobody cares — or they think they could replace you in a week — and you should calibrate how much you care accordingly.
That honestly sounds dreadful to me, exactly the kind of management-driven nonsense that would make me more likely to quit.
If you want your employees pumped up about work, focus on treating them well not hiring cheerleaders.
"Our development process sucks, we need X to fix Y!", "Sorry, no can do. But don't worry, I'll plan a session with our company cheerleader"
Ever morning we look at the burn down chart. Every morning he tries to tell people to "just see if we can close a ticket because it would be good for the chart".
I've submitted feedback pointing out how negatively useful this little ritual is (because if the task was actually done we'd close the ticket, it's not not being closed just because).
How is the company supposed to know what "treating you well" means if they don't have people who try to figure out what that phrase means to each individual?
Different strokes for different folks, and all that. I'm not picking on you personally, but throughout this entire thread the sentiments I quoted above have been echoed by others.
Look at it a different way ...
A therapist on the payroll (not a cheerleader) will talk to individuals not groups, and in individual engagements will be able to figure out what "treating you well" actually means to that individual.
After all, you want to be treated well by (for example) having some leeway in adopting new tech, while the engineer next to you considers that an additional stress and for him that is "treating him badly". For him, treating him well might involve fewer hours.
Or more Pay.
Or more direct reports.
Or fewer direct reports.
Or company-funded conventions once a year.
Or fewer meetings.
Or more meetings.
Whatever activity the company did that you considered to be "treating you well", I can all but guarantee that one of your peers would consider it "treating me poorly".
Now, granted, I haven't seen the show mentioned, but I think a role along the lines of "wellness engagement and support" is probably a good idea for any company that actually wants to treat their workers well.
How else are they supposed to figure out what "well" means?
Instructing dozens, hundreds, thousands of managers to treat their employees well wouldn't achieve anything. It's similar to how legal codes can't just prescribe "being a good person is legal, being a bad person is illegal". There's so much room for interpretation that it would be effectively meaningless.
As a line manager, ask your employees what they're looking for and provide an environment where they trust you enough to be honest. Then have an adult discussion about the feasibility of delivering what they want and whether some compromise is in order - 'more ponies' is not possible, 'more money' might engender more responsibility, 'more flexible working hours' can easily be accommodated, for example. If doing this effectively requires a therapist then perhaps the organisation should focus on coaching the managers, not the workers.
Yet another fluff meeting that detracts from getting stuff done, adds pressure to deadlines, and is just supposed to make us feel good like a 'pizza party'? To try to encourage us to ignore our families and stay up late working for the company's gain?
I haven't seen the show, but I'm a little cynical of the premise.
I once worked for a company that hired consultants for something like that, and mostly it just increased the already high turnover and burnout level. Maybe there were good intentions, but in practice it just added pressure, fuel to the fire.
I have a private therapist who deals with my personal, and sometimes work, issues. It has been a major contributor to me avoiding burnout through 4 of the roughest years in my career.
I don’t consider therapy to be fluff, and I’d see an employer investing in it as a good sign, not a “pizza party” type event.
My employer does try to invest in mental health awareness but it’s limited to discounts on meditation apps and internal docs on structuring your work a little better.
But I certainly wouldn't want my therapist to be owned by and reporting to my employer, nor would I want to lose my therapist if I switched jobs. It's likely when you do lose or quit your job that you need your therapist most.
Watching this show I kept thinking that I would never ever ever go to see the psychiatrist/psychologist who’s on my employer’s payroll… and I often wonder how these traders who are so smart can’t see the massive conflict of interest or potential for a “play” (as they call them in the show) on themselves from the information gathered.
When we can't solve a technical problem, we often talk to others to unblock ourselves. This is 100% the exact same thing with emotional/mental problems. You need to talk to someone to help "unblock" you as well and allow you to go back to your full productivity.
Having said that, this coach definitely needs some sort of professional license. Having "Life Coach" on the resume isn't going to cut it.
If this is not the case with you, it is best in interest to take out some money and put towards that. That sabbatical gives you some breathing space for you in life. It is worth saving some money and avoiding some luxury expenses.
I've never heard it put this way, but that really resonates.
Nowadays, I work harder and longer -for free- than I ever did, when paid.
I don't feel even slightly burned out. If I feel myself starting to get vexed with a problem, I take a break, watch some TV, play a video game, or just take a nap.
But I get more done, every day, than I ever have before. Much higher Quality, as well. I've already made two releases, this morning.
I guess what I am trying to say is this: don’t necessarily trust your own assessment of the situation. Keep your eyes out for the warning signals.
When I see someone who seems stressed or overworked... I try to remind them that recovering might be easier before they get fully overwhelmed.
'we can build it together' - why is that not happening?
>Structural problems require structural solutions. Healthy organizations, healthy people.
>How can any of us get better if we can’t afford to extract ourselves from the environment that caused the harm?
>When you’re finally in recovery, you’ll start to be able to see what an environment that doesn’t do that to you looks like. Then we can build it together.
How else could burned out developers organize to create a space for recovery?
*edit: to mention the elephant in the room: caring without control results in self-doubt. What does it mean for humans to be 'self'?
There are thousands of ways to organize people, from TAZ's[1] to 12-step programs[2] to Kibbutzim[3].
A company as it's done in the modern US is an oligarchy in which leadership threatens the underlings with withholding the means of meeting their basic needs if they don't meet demands. It's fundamentally inherently stressful to be an underling in such an organization, because you don't have freedom or security.
Your can say, "what if we make the oligarchs kinder" but that's not a real option: if kind people are starting an organization from scratch they don't set themselves up as oligarchs. There is that company that came up on HN a few weeks back where everyone was paid the same, but they made no pretense that if that model becomes unsustainable they'll abandon it.
And sure, you can fundamentally change the structure to make it more equitable, but at that point it's different enough from a company in the normal sense of the word, that I don't think I'd call it a company, even if it technically files articles of incorporation.
[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-...
[2] https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/literature/smf-187_en...
Let's say your company can build and ship a product in 2 years and none of the workers end up crunching. What if every single client is not in the position to wait 2 years (because they are themselves crunching) so they go with the company that builds it in 6 months?
Maybe it is because being a good manager is hard. Maybe running an effective organisation is hard. Maybe being in your 20s and having a bunch of VC money doesn't translate to being able to do the above?
Being a good manager takes time and a willingness to be emotionally aware. It also requires mentoring.
On the other hand, if a bunch of burnt out engineers with capital want to pop me an email why don't we start something?
The saccharine platitudes and subtle gaslighting of the corporate world is really just a thin veneer designed to allow employees to get some work done without having to think too deeply about the brutality of globalized capitalism.
Thank you for saying this. It takes some guts to do it on this particular forum.
* Team sports. Soccer, volleyball, ultimate frisbee, basketball, etc. There is a pickup game somewhere in your city every day/week.
* Outdoors. Group hike, backpacking, cross-country skiing, sailing. E.g. mountaineers.org in PNW, surely there are similar orgs all over.
* Partner dance. You don't need a dedicated partner, events cater to singles too.
* f3nation.com / fianation.com The ultimate free outdoors workout, rain or shine. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/24/us/f3-workout-men-texas.h...
* Running group.
* Pick a church and go to Mass every Sunday morning. Hang around for coffee and Bible study too.
♡
At one point in my life I was dabbling in like 30 different things and never really getting good at any of them or feeling connected with any of their local communities. I made a decision to narrow that down to rock climbing and guitar, and get really committed to those two things. The improvement in my quality of life just from that change was honestly pretty huge.
Of course you need to try a bunch of stuff to find out what you like, but once you find something you're really passionate about, it's okay, beneficial even, to limit how much you try other things so you can really delve into the activity and community you're passionate about.
* Cult. People in cults are very supportive to other cult members.
* Black metal band. Blast beats, tremolo picking, shrieking vocals, pick your poison.
* Cult black metal band. Best of both worlds.
* Mongolian throat singing group.
* Artistic burping club.
* Discord server with guys wearing knee long socks and speaking with voice modulators.
* Trap house. Nothing solves a burnout faster than a psychonautical trip!
* Bird watching club. See what them birds are up to.
* milk the wellness benefits as much as possible - including any therapy cover
* look at leave of absence / sick leave (larger corps are better able to accommodate)
* transfer to a better team
* adjust your hours downwards either explicitly or tacitly
Megacorps aren't great at the whole empowerment and outcome control thing, but you can at least use the benefits to recover and then maybe move to something more meaningful
High performers underestimate how long you can get away with BS at a megacorp. Quarters to even years is the correct answer.
Guy on my team who we took on from the "layoffs list" of his old team. We were forced to hire from this list before hiring externally. Lasted about 2 years with us & then comes to me one day "Hey I'm gonna get laid off, I don't know when but it's been discussed with HR.. oh anyway I thought it would have happened last year". Suddenly it clicked why his work product had been diminishing by the month with us. It still took them a few months to go through with it. So the guy spent 3-4 years in the firm in the process of trying to / being laid off.
We had another guy who we inherited from a wound-down project, basically didn't count against our budget for the year. His choice was to join our team or be fired. Anyway just weeks into it, he called me one day and said "I have a thing with my family, I can't tell you what it is but I'll be gone for a month". I asked him if he talked to HR and he said yes. I called HR and they asked ME what I wanted to do... I was ~25 years old and this dude in his 40s had a family thing.. sure whatever.
Anyway, as you can imagine he basically disappeared and only touched base on the phone to say he need another month, over&over, etc. I punted it up to HR & my manager. He basically just disappeared for the rest of the year (~6 months) until new years layoffs season..
The only good portion of my job is that the work is extremely light (healthcare and govt contracting) so I get a lot of time to myself.
Most of my good team and mentors have left in the past year and teh new execs are micromanaging fkers who'd rather have Mandatory fun meetings and have our cameras on during morning 0800 scrums because why not? "It builds teamwork!"
...I've resigned myself to looking for another job at this point.
Burnout is just when you run out of burn. It's like getting sleepy. You run out of the thing keeping you from being sleepy. You gotta get more stuff to burn if you wanna burn it.
This has been my experience as well. But I started through an easier path, by working out and improving my health.
hate leads to anger
anger leads to violence
critical step
turn violent impulses into physical activity (like running, lifting, combat sports)
just a thought