Comment by rawbot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rawbot | Hacker News Reader

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> I just focused on getting MY stuff done and that was it. I stopped taking on other's people work... I would do exactly what a Sprint called for...

This is my reason for burnout, opposite of your example. There's a thin balance doing more work because you enjoy, and doing it because managers are pushing you to do it. And now that I JUST do my job and what I'm asked to do, I have lost a lot of the drive that I loved about being a developer and engineer, making life kind of dull. Weird thing is that it is the job description that put me into this place, with no room for growth, and the search for new jobs has been dry, year after year of searching.

I traded my sanity for a big chunk of my life's enjoyment. That ain't great either.

My theory is burnout comes from a lack of autonomy.

If your "do the minimum" is having complete control over a module and implementing features as slow as you can without pissing anyone off too much, you're going to have a great time.

If your "do the minimum" is picking up the bare minimum number of Jira cards in a sunshine and roses "teamwork makes the dream work" team where everyone is responsible for every line of code but nobody knows more than 5% of the codebase, your mental health is going to go straight down the toilet, because nothing is more stressful than working with over-complicated code you didn't write, and the less cards you pick up, the less code you're going to understand.

your example seems to show that autonomy doesn't matter so much if your choices are ill informed or the environment in which you have autonomy is toxic.

Personally, I think autonomy has little to do with it and lacking autonomy is dangerous to pin burnout on because it puts the responsibility on the person, when burnout is often the result of a system (broken or exploitative).

Sure having autonomy can help cope or delay burnout, but I don't think lacking autonomy is causing burnout singlehandedly.

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