Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout

I don't think that'd still classify as burnout, honestly.

That's more like a stress response from getting into the range of an abuser. I'm sure it was extremely traumatic for you, I just don't think anyone could classify such a response as burnout

When I was a youngster, the eight bosses line made me laugh because it was absurd. Deeper into my career, it makes me laugh because it's true.

On a good day, on an unimportant project, I still have three bosses. I have my team lead, my PM, and my actual manager. Currently I'm on a cross-team project of critical importance, so you can add on my manager's manager, his manager, the other team's manager, and his manager. I've got seven goddamn people breathing down my neck on this.

I used to work at a place where I had one manager, even for critically important projects. He was the only one breathing down my neck (and that wasn't often). No PM constantly hassling me to groom my backlog[0], the managers above my immediate manager all had enough trust to not directly meddle. Most productive I've ever been in my career. Ended up leaving because I just didn't give a shit about the project, but sometimes I dream of going back...

[0] I need to rant about this. How am I supposed to be agile if I have to have my backlog completely planned out for the whole project? And I can't just estimate it or backlog the big chunks, because when we start making progress and I update the backlog to reflect things we've learned, I have to justify every single change to my PM who will grumble that we are going off plan. If I don't update the backlog, I get grilled about how accurate it is at the next too many cooks/status update meeting.

We can either do agile or try to plan out the next six months of work at the start. Stop trying to make me do both.

> Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."

This is literally my company. 8 bosses - all of who spending their entire existence in monitoring and PIPing engineers instead of using their authority to deliver constructive outcomes for the business.

There is zero growth mentality among them (except headcount growth for their empires). Can't even imagine how to steer their org to produce value.

Why the f will a IC care more about the success of the business than the 8 destructive bosses above them?

> Most companies only care about the next quarter, or next investor call. Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches.

Or next round of funding.

> Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches.

Ditto on working in a startup.

I watched Office Space for the first time when I was a teenager many years ago. It's funny how much my perception of the movie changed and how much it resonates with my work now, specially since the last years. One difference is that I have 10 different managers, which makes me dissociate enough from work without the need of any hypnotist.

I think Michael Bolton got it better

Peter Gibbons: Our high school guidance counselor used to ask us what you'd do if you had a million dollars and you didn't have to work. And invariably what you'd say was supposed to be your career. So, if you wanted to fix old cars then you're supposed to be an auto mechanic.

Samir: So what did you say?

Peter Gibbons: I never had an answer. I guess that's why I'm working at Initech.

Michael Bolton: No, you're working at Initech because that question is bullshit to begin with. If everyone listened to her, there'd be no janitors, because no one would clean shit up if they had a million dollars.

But if they don't only care about the next quarter how is Gerald Q. Public, born 1958, going to retire to Florida after buying three McMansions (and selling them all at a loss), a sports car, and paying for three divorce settlements? Who are we to deny him the experience of moving down to Boca so he can get his maintenance-provided house on a golf course wiped off its slab by a hurricane before being rebuilt so that he can play golf and wife swap until the dementia sets in?

Workers, always thinking they make the value.

The lack of "another dime" when you work extra is also something that prevents most people from going above and beyond. If there's nothing else out there, why would you care?

Working with my wife now to get her to start a business so we can keep my salary to pay the bills but focus on the business so our effort can have a meaningful impact on the bottom line.

This is it! People have a little bit of a screwed perception of what is „fulfilling“. Yes, there are people whose only kind of fulfilling may be working for a NGO that is trying to fight climate change, save kids in poor countries of the world or clean up the ocean from plastic waste.

While all of those are certainly noble goals, the vast majority of people doesn’t even shoot that high to find any kind of purpose. Most people are already satisfied and feel a sense of accomplishment when their job creates something of value for *someone*.

I had a job with a great paycheck, but spent 40 hours a week doing barely anything. It was fun at first, but it became physically exhausting. I have now a job with similar pay but I build apps that people actually use in their day to day work and quite enjoy, it’s significantly more stressful and demanding than not doing anything, but I don’t feel nearly as exhausted as I did with the previous job.

I’ve felt it myself and have heard others talk about it, but there is an increasing number of jobs that is either objectively useless or perceived as such (by the people employed in that job). Either way, it’s not surprising to me that burnout continues to be on the rise.

This! I enjoy my work in tech, but it mostly never seems to have a beginning nor an end. There’s always the next iteration of work waiting on the horizon. Even though I could afford to hire out, I relished the opportunity to do a repetitive home task like mowing the yard. The mental satisfaction of seeing an unkept yard transform into clean edges, clipped blade mulch islands and more order than chaos - all as a result of the sweat from my brow - provided an internal joy that is hard to describe. There was a beginning, middle and end which soothed my soul and reminded me of what I miss during my regular work in tech.

This is a large part of my experience of burnout. Perhaps not so much alienation, as i understand it, but what you say in your last paragraph resonates with what really sticks in my mind when I'm starting to feel burnout. I end up having to endlessly push the idea of the pointlessness of my work out of my mind and that becomes a form of additional mental 'overhead', so to speak.

People think that the worst part of being a janitor is cleaning toilets. In reality the worst part of being a janitor is living in poverty. This is true about a lot of jobs in our economy.

There are a lot of other outlets to turn that job into something more fulfilling.

- People do their job to make money to provide for their families. For some, that's all the justification you need.

- If it pays well, donate a portion of your income to a charity that you believe in AND get involved with that charity. There are tons of great options out there like Habitat for Humanity, literacy programs, Shriner's, Boy Scouts or a local church just off the cuff. This turns your job into a way that you are helping your community through a organization with a greater purpose. It can shift your perspective.

Just providing some ideas. To each their own.

At least in software it's not alienation, it's never-ending hamster-wheel of sprint after sprint of delivering features by cutting corners atop of existing cut corners.

Unless you have had a career as a janitor, it is extremely patronizing to tell the janitors of the world how fulfilling they should find their jobs.

It can be even worse. When you do a stellar level job, no one complains. When yu slip a little, you have thousands of users complaining about some minor setting showing wrong values: "This crap is useless, they can't even implement one value properly". And you get this after sitting three weeks chasing some obscure bug deep in some library from your hardware vendor.

> Big part of the problem is arguably alienation.

I’ve heard said (don’t recall the specifics) Maslov’s hierarchy is upside down, that with sufficient meaning/purpose, many deprivations of lower elements can be handled.

Not certain if I’d go that far, esp at extremes, but that the pieces of the “hierarchy” are more like eqalish puzzle pieces than a stacked pyramid.

But isn't part of taking a job in the first place to earn money so that you can eat, live and enjoy it with your family and friends.

Maybe the issue is more that we earn so much and have no life outside of work so the "earning money to live" is not there anymore.

We try to find meaning in the work itself instead of in the after-work part.

"... how the world would be worse off if you simply didn't show up"

I've been reflecting on this recently and I think in the context of a job, it operates at both a macro and micro level, and ultimately to feel fulfilled in the long term you need to feel like you matter on both levels.

Macro contributions are the stuff upper management sees— the new products and features, the deals closed, the systems you designed and maintained, the technical directions to advocate for and staff you mentor, the conference presentations you give. These are highly visible contributions are are "easy" to recognize you for, but on the other hand they're also relatively easy to succinctly describe, for example, on a job req, which will be necessary if you do indeed stop showing up.

In contrast to this, the micro contributions are what your close colleagues see. They're who recognize your taste, your care and attention to detail, the thoughtfulness with which you lay out code, balance requirements, utilize tools, and maintain hard-to-measure things like interface boundaries and testability. It's these contributions that quietly keep technical debt under control, save time by preventing problems from ever occurring, and push systems toward ever greater reliability and observability. If you disappear tomorrow, none of this stuff will fall apart overnight; it will degrade in more subtle ways that take much longer to manifest as an actual "problems".

I think for me at least, I sometimes feel a disconnect where I have lots of acknowledgment at the macro level, but still feel burnt out and unappreciated due to gaps at the micro level. The Q12 question about having a "best friend at work" [1] I think is also really tied into all of this, since that's likely to be a person who will see you and what you have to offer much more than a busy manager hustling between meetings all week and rubber-stamping your code reviews.

[1]: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/397058/increasing-importanc...

I think the low status and the low pay of a janitorial job makes it pretty hard for a lot of people. Higher-paying, higher-status IT work has a different set of problems: meaninglessness, drudgery, and cognitive-dissonance.

Do you say that as someone who's been a janitor or is this only fantasy janitoring?

> You get to meet the people whose lives are improved by what you do, every day

Yes! When I retired I started volunteering at a raptor conservation centre, and got given loads of simple mundane tasks. Some were really tedious (cleaning the birds' water bowls, removing poop, getting rid of nettles that blocked a view, etc etc) but at the end of the day my minder could see that the tasks had been done and that I wasn't a flake. They also demonstrated commitment, which helped me move up to helping with the birds themselves, and now I help fly them in experience days, showing them to paying members of the public, and bringing in funds that resource critical conservation projects (nest boxes, anti-poacher campaigns, etc).

In either case, the purpose of what you are doing is earning a salary to pay your bills.

Workers would do well to always keep it in mind.

> You get to meet the people whose lives are improved by what you do, every day.

dude have you ever been to high school?

The janitor in my school was a relaxed guy in his late 50s. He was always joking and seemed to be quite satisfied with his job. All the children respected him - he was the guy you turned to when something was not working right, and he fixed it. He and his family lived on the school campus in a nice bungalow with a nice garden. His children also went to my school. While his salary certainly wasn't great, he did not have to pay any rent (the bungalow was owned by the city and came with the job), and the job was super secure. He was also the person who worked for the school the longest (since the school opened in the early 70ies), and was a walking history book.

In my previous job, we would regularly see a guy with a small truck delivering vegetables door-to-door during our lunch breaks. We all envied him. He was always smiling and whistling, while we were sitting miserably before our food, counting the minutes remaining before we had to go back into a hell of customer tickets and technical debt.

That's it, a very clear formulation. As a teacher, that describes my experience precisely. I am willing to bet it describes all other high-burnout professions.

I'm in tech after a decade working blue collar, most of my friends are still working blue collar, and they're all burned out

Blue collar doesn't just pay you poorly -- it's also tedious, and there's a pervasive sense that nobody gives a damn about you, your safety, or really anything about you. "nobody" being managers, but also your white collar coworkers who "work upstairs", customers, security, etc.

You have very little autonomy: you'll tend to have to ask permission to go for a bathroom break, or to step outside for a minute to get a breath of fresh air, or if anything is going to cause you to be more than 5 minutes late for your shift. Yes, you'll have to beg and might not even be allowed to attend funerals of close family members. You may or may not have to help the customer who keeps sexually harassing you. You probably will be asked to speak to customers with a certain tone and facial expression regardless of how awful you're feeling. Nobody cares that you just went through a breakup

RE safety: you'll have employers doing everything from getting you to work with wiring that isn't up to code when you're not an electrician, to lifting things alone that nobody should lift alone, to working at an unsafe pace, to working during small disasters where half the business is underwater. You might not even be a full employee -- you'd be surprised how many dishwashers, waiters and cooks in San Francisco restaurants are employed as independent contractors but are effectively employees

You aren't making much money, so commuting will tend to be a long slog. You might even be working more than one of these jobs.

Yes, I've had "cool" low wage jobs with nice managers that tried to treat me like a human being. I know those exist. They are exceptional and often don't last

Also I am not writing this to single out the parent, just want to affirm that your boring white collar job is better in ways you probably can't fathom and confirm that blue collar jobs are very much prone to burnout

Value usually comes out of blue collar labor. Almost no value comes out of lucrative tech jobs. The tech that is making the world a better place usually has so many alternatives it wouldn't matter if you closed up shop or not.

Yes, the problem is not the self-reporting, but rather the lack of details on how they measured it.

There are plenty of indirect reasons to working hard. You are theoretically less likely to be fired. You gain a solid reputation among colleagues. You get better at the job which make is easier to get hired elsewhere. Also your conscience plays into it. You feel guilty if you slack off. And there is ego, people want to be the best, or at least not the worst.

I guess it depends on your definition of "hard worker", but I think that people should do the work they agreed to do, to the best of their ability.

I hired a company to install new HVAC in my house, a number of years ago. They spent some time examining the house and came up with a plan. During the course of doing the work, they would occasionally touch base with me to discuss changes they thought made sense (moving one of the thermostat to a location that it more likely to result in the correct temperature, etc). They did a good job and put real effort into making sure I got what I needed.

I hired an electrician to put some outlets in a floor, so that we didn't have cords reaching across the floor from the middle of the room. I described what I was looking to do (plug in the lazyboy, phones, lamp, etc). As he was nearing the completion of his work, I noticed that the outlets were way too recessed; anything with a larger plug (iphone charger) couldn't even plug into it. He pushed back when I told him it needed to be corrected; telling me I could just use an extension cord. I had to keep pushing to get him to spend the time (time that I was paying for per hour anyways) to fix it.

There is a difference between "getting the job done" and "doing a job to the best of your ability"; not killing yourself, but making sure the job is done right, the way you would want it done for yourself. The later is what I consider hard working. I want that from the people I hire and I do my best to provide the same myself.

> the way you would want it done for yourself

Side note, the HVAC system was, give or take, the same system the owner of the company had in his own house. I got everything I could hope for out of their work, and I still reach out to them for anything related (and recommend them highly).

because the "regardless of reward" thing is supposed to be temporary until a decent human being above you realizes that you should be rewarded. If we all just did the absolute minimum then society and humanity would never get anywhere because you'd never know who a good worker is.

A lot of that I think was rooted in low self-esteem. Which is something I still struggle a lot with. The mind is very powerful. At my last job I stepped up to head of engineering after our CTO resigned, and never got a raise. In my mind I didn't deserve it and was a horrible engineer.

Of course, in ethics, you have to consider the situation where everyone has your mindset to determine whether it is bad.

Everyone thinking ‘sucker’ to those who work well reminds me of what it’s like to interact with many government institutions.

In that framing, the mindset might (probably) be unethical.

This is like a cornerstone of American culture, the belief that hard work will be rewarded is ingrained in us. I think it's a great attitude, but hard to keep up when you realize it's often not true

Weird, when I read a comment like yours all that pops into my head is "lazy" and "parasite". Hard work is its own reward.

Because it's a question of morality, if you think they are "suckers" for adhering to what they deemed as honorable, then I don't think I have much more to add.

You'll end up with more cash at the end of the day, but perhaps they go home filling fulfilled.

Not everything in life can be reduced to a profitable equation.

I was definitely raised that way. My parents are from New England so maybe a Puritan thing?

Well, really it is an altruistic trait : I will contribute my best to improving circumstances regardless of reward. Of course this is honorable.

self sacrifice does not make someone a "sucker" by necessity

US Protestant culture. Work is tied up with morals and faith.

I think that it depends on context.

To a significant degree, things like charity and parenting are hard work regardless of reward. Arguably, society is built on the idea of people working hard for the good of the whole.

The problem is that corporate capitalism has become a parasite that exploits these instincts.

Depends on the company. A place like Microsoft or Google, where the company doesn’t really need to try to reap the benefits of their monopolies, a lot of people get away with working 20 hour weeks. Amazon and Meta are known to be harder places to work, so maybe 50-60 isn’t rare - although many just do 40. At startups you have to work long hours but that can be anywhere from 50-70 hours. No one is actually doing the 100 hour weeks they glorify, because it’s impossible to sustain.

The truth is though it’s a broken system. In my opinion even a startup should be able to make it on 40 hours. If they have to put in insane hours for just a slim chance to survive, it’s an indication that there isn’t really fair competition and that the market is too skewed towards existing players.

No not typically. In my experience most people work 40-45 hours at the boring companies that I’ve been at

No, that's an insane workload. Your employer doesn't even deserve 40 hours, let alone 70. Jesus, people, live your lives instead of toiling for the rich people who will take from you until you keel over.

> But they feel it especially at work, because that's the place that they interact with other people the most, so it's the place where there should be the best chance of real human contact. And it's not there.

The worst part is, modern workplace is actively hostile to creating meaningful interpersonal bonds, while it keeps a face of being ridiculously welcoming and inclusive. When you are in such environment it's hard to spot that the game is rigged, and you blame yourself for your interpersonal failures.

> The difference between then and now was that much of the rest of life still had the humanity in it. You knew people in your neighborhood, at your church, at the bar, at the barbershop, at the grocery store. Now... not so much. There's no humanity anywhere. So people feel alienated, not just at work, but everywhere.

We are expected to be well-behaved little worker-consumer automatons.

Go to work. Behave. Don't get out of line. Don't rock the boat. Produce value to enrich the tree of people above you and shareholders. Don't talk too much to co-workers--they're competing with you for promotion. Leave (or get tossed out) when you're used up.

Go to stores. Behave. Buy things. Don't protest. Don't talk too much to people around you--they're competing with you for what you want. Grow the economy by spending your money. Believe in God so you die happily when you are no longer economically viable.

We're lines in someone's spreadsheet.

The highest rate of psychopathy I've experienced was amongst technologists thrust into leadership positions; they believe that people are tools, and thus reduce them to numbers, that everything can be operationalized and optimized, including the human mind.

It's a spiderman-pointing-meme. Workers blame management who blame workers ad infinitum.

Both workers and managers need to understand how to break that cycle and it's through leadership – which isn't something that is correlated with altitude in the org chart.

He's a team leader in a company's internal finance department. He doesn't have anything specialised on his computer that he's mentioned, I'm guessing just Word, Excel and whatever he uses to connect to their finance back-office to extract the data he needs for his reports which I guess might even be web-based.

He drives by car, which is admittedly less inconvenient than travelling by public transport, but still requires a walk across a fairly large car park, potentially in the rain.

The heavy laptop is his company-issued laptop that he has to do his work on, and he longer has a desktop PC because (like everyone else in the office) he no longer has a permanent desk. From what I inferred from the conversation, it's heavy because it's old, not because it's anything special and when we're in the pub bitching about work, he frequently complains how slow it is. It's also not compatible for whatever reason with the docks they've put on the hot desks. Maybe he has an old laptop and they since standardised on a different type of laptop since implementing this policy. Maybe he was given a newer computer for some reason, although I got the impression he's had this since at least before COVID. Anyway, I didn't ask further, as I trust that's he's smart enough to have decided for himself that the provided docks don't work and that it's worth the hassle of unplugging everything from the dock at home and bringing the dock in, and then unplugging the work monitors from the work dock and plugging them into the dock he brought from home. If the dock on the desk just worked, I'm sure he'd use it.

I don't believe he has any fancy pens. He does, however, frequently need to make handwritten notes during meetings and so he brings in his pens and notebook to work and takes them home at the end of the day. Again, this is because he longer has a permanent desk, so nowhere else he could store stuff. I'm sure they have a stationary department he can get new pens and a notebook from, but he'd still have to take them home each day if he wanted to keep the notes, and I can't imagine he'd get away with asking for a new pen and pad every day. I also imagine that he wouldn't want to leave his pen behind and then when he's a different hot desk the next day, just pick up someone's half-chewed pen and work with that. I'm just speculating though, I only know for sure that he told me about having to take his laptop, dock and pen and paper into work each day. Maybe he just decided that it's easier to shove the pad and pen into his rucksack along with everything else each day and traipse over to wherever the stationary is kept every morning.

TBH I wasn't expecting there to be to follow-up questions, so rather than asking about the full specifications of his computer, the quality of the stationary and whether he preferred 2B or HB pencils, I just said "yeah man, that sucks".

I second that academia can be terrible for burnout. In an experimental subject, experiments that can take months to prepare can fail for reasons that you can't do much about, and all you can do is start over.

I used to describe this feeling to my wife as if sometimes someone would come along from time to time and wipe your hard drive.

Even though my current job can be a grind, at least we rarely have to just throw away work.

Sure, but it’s all the same in large corporations. I might be happier in a smaller company, but they pay correspondingly less. I need to pay for a house and education. It’s depressing, but not depressing enough to throw away my children’s future.

I have spent extended periods of time living and traveling on really small 15-17ft sailboats with no electricity or modern tech together with a young kid, and never miss anything about modern life. I feel so much healthier and happier using my body and being outdoors vs in my usual desk job. To be fair I have a job, home, and health care waiting for me if anything goes wrong. But I am certain this isn’t just simple romanticism- living simply outdoors drastically improves my mental health, it is giving me something I need that modern life lacks- possibly the combo of natural light, constant exercise, and no chronic stress. It is physically demanding and often very uncomfortable- and I don’t mind because I feel so much more alive and engaged. If I did not have a family to support, and a career that I feel is important, I am certain I would be happier just living simply and mostly outdoors.

I think that it's possible that isn't true. Perhaps the areas where people in the developed world are worse off (micromanagement, family, home ownership, etc.) are more important to avoiding burnout than the "comfort" that the developed world generally excels at providing.

Stated another way, it is possible that burnout isn't determined by some overall sense of "how difficult is life" but is instead caused by life being difficult in specific ways.

I’ve been homeless. I’ve also been burned out. Being homeless did not magically prevent me from becoming burned out in another stage of my life.