The Tsunami of Burnout Few See
charleshughsmith.blogspot.com538 points by dxs 4 days ago
538 points by dxs 4 days ago
I've burnt out. It was horrible. I am doing much better now!
The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.
In many places if you get hurt/burnt out on the job the upper seats are looking for any reason to curb stomp you. There's no reason to give a company your all unless you have an actual stake in it or they are there to hold you up when you're dragging. I've worked at multiple places where influential people died, yes dead, below average life expectancy, - on the job - and corporate did everything they could to not even pay out on their legal obligations (life insurance, D&D). In some cases employees joked or snickered about the person who died later on - in meetings.
In tech. I've found that you're not on your own but you are at the mercy of who is in charge of your schedule and rates your performance. If you lose trust in that person your best option is to leave as quickly as possible. Otherwise they will do what they can to destroy you for as much 'profit' as they can claim. Being clear. It is not about realized gains, it could even be at great detriment to a company. It is about short-term line item claimable gains. "We got 4 good months out of her...", "they were terminal and now they will be working somewhere better for them...", "he really wasn't closing as many tickets as the rest of the team...", "they weren't helping as many team members as the rest of the team...", "we never needed someone with an advanced degree...", etc.
Check in with yourself regularly. Know the signs of burn out. The company you work for does not depend on any person caring about you in the slightest.
> The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.
It really depends on your personal psychology. After I burnt out in a demanding role that I adopted as a big part of my identity, I joined a new company vowing to not take work as seriously (I remember telling myself, "if excess effort isn't rewarded, the optimal strategy is to maximize compensation, minimize necessary effort, and eliminate excess effort").
After a few months of recovery and ruminating on why I still felt so bad (plus therapy), I learned a few things about myself:
1. I feel like garbage when I'm half-assing something at work or not giving my all -- especially when the people around me are putting in the work.
2. When I am giving my all and I feel like I'm not being recognized, I begin to lose motivation and burn out. Simple tasks become very laborious. This is a gradual, months-long process that is difficult to recognize is happening.
3. When I start to burn out, I am forced by my mind and body to half-ass things, which makes me more demotivated, which exacerbates the burnout.
Putting these insights into action, I've so far been able to keep burnout at bay by finding roles where I can give work my all, receive recognition, and be surrounded by others who are putting in similar effort. This doesn't mean blindly trusting the company or destroying my work-life balance -- I believe that "recognition for hard work" includes proactively protecting hard workers from their workaholic tendencies and giving them the flexibility to take breaks. I'm lucky to work with really great people where I frequently pass along responsibilities or take work from others to avoid over-stressing any one person and enable things like multi-week vacations. I have no idea how I will change my approach if I lose this workplace dynamic or pick up more forcing functions on my workday (e.g. having kids) in the future, but it's working pretty well for me right now.
All of this is to say: for me, the low-trust "do the bare minimum to stay employed" approach didn't actually help me get out of burnout into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of. People are wired differently, so I want to caution against a one-size-fits-all approach.
Yours has got to be one of the best comments that I've ever read on hacker news.
> for me, the low-trust "do the bare minimum to stay employed" approach didn't actually help me get out of burnout into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of
What you just described (so vividly) is meaning, and (likely) "flow" too. Meaning must be there for everyone, in their efforts; the need for meaning is universal. (We can call it intrinsic motivation too.)
Some say that you can find meaning outside of work, and then can mostly ignore work; and it's also said (correctly I guess) that "psychological richness" (closely related to resilience) is important: drawing meaning & satisfaction from multiple sources.
Sure, but I have a practical problem with that: if you need to work 8 hrs/day to cover your family's needs, you don't have time, energy, or opportunity left to find meaning elsewhere.
And, as others have repeatedly said it here, if you are a full time employee making quite beyond your (family's) needs, and think about decreasing your working time (giving up excess money, but regaining much needed time & freedom), that is what is strictly forbidden by the runners of the Village of Happy People. You will find effectively no jobs that let you work (say) 5 hours per day, for 62.5% of your original salary. That way, you'd just not be a good slave, a good cog in the machine. Society is engineered such that you must not have free time.
Therefore the only practical option is to find (or create) work that provides meaning for you intrinsically. I see no other option. You can be an employee or run your own business, the same applies. And, unfortunately, this is unattainable for most of society.
My favorite quote from one of my favorite books, Anathem by Neal Stephenson (copied from GoodReads):
"Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story."
Some people need to have their "story", otherwise they end up miserable, regretting their wasted lives.
If someone’s ‘story’ improves in notability, attractiveness, attention grabbingness, etc… wouldn’t someone else’s ‘story’ have to decrease in the same?
As human attention is finite. Or is it suggesting that the ‘story’ can somehow qualitatively improve, without limit, while actually occupying less physical time?
I appreciate the kind words!
The second part of your post is something I've thought about a lot. There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:
- Less communication overhead due to fewer people
- Constant availability (less need to pre-plan meetings, etc to match everyone's hours)
- Less complexity WRT HR, payroll, taxes
- Employees still have to pay for full healthcare, so the employer either provides this or pays a 1099 salary premium (the US's terrible approach of tying health insurance coverage to your employer rears its ugly head yet again)
- Fewer SaaS seats to pay for
Some of these are more solvable than others, and allowing more people to work part-time in tech is definitely swimming upstream, but I do wish more businesses would try.
Sahil Lavingia (Gumroad) is one person leaning into this approach with great success: https://sahillavingia.com/work
- Employees still have to pay for full healthcare, so the employer either provides this or pays a 1099 salary premium (the US's terrible approach of tying health insurance coverage to your employer rears its ugly head yet again)
Health insurance coverage is not tied to an employer. Being able to pay for health insurance premiums with pre tax income is tied to an employer.
The benefit to the (large) employer is that it makes it harder for their employees to compare competing employment offers, and adds a little more friction to an employee who might be considering switching jobs.
The administrative costs of implementing benefits so that pre tax money can be used to pay for them also serve as a barrier to entry for smaller employers (helping large employers), since these costs cannot be amortized over a large number of employees.
But beside all that,
> There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:
It’s just cheaper, in all ways, to have fewer employees. Less people to trust, less people an employer is liable for, less hiring/terminating costs. The cost of burnout is clearly not a significant factor considering the lack of success of businesses full of part time employees.
> You will find effectively no jobs that let you work (say) 5 hours per day, for 62.5% of your original salary.
Not in the US anyway. It’s exceedingly common in the Netherlands to work 32 or even 24 hours a week.
Huh, in tech companies?
Absolutely. Totally normal in the Netherlands. I do this (28 hours). My wife too (32 hours). We've got a kid to raise and a house to look after. We earn more than we need, so why work more hours?
That’s awesome. I chose Japan as my place to live, but NL was a close second. I’ll have to think about it again next time I move.
It's not only common you can in many instances force your employer to lower your hours and keep you on.
Think I'm starting to see why so many people immigrate to Europe. European labor laws and lifestyles are so reasonable. No wonder American life expectancy is so bad.
> What you just described (so vividly) is meaning
In line with Victor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, which explores (among other things) why some Holocaust survivors thrived and some didn’t. Frankl himself was a survivor.
You can't expect 62.5% for 5/8 hours, you have other costs to them for benefits etc.
I think it’s assumed that in a society that would allow for such things benefits wouldn’t be handled at the level of the employer.
I'm a contractor because I work remotely for a foreign company, and they denied me paid holidays with this argument. The cost of vacation is proportional to worked hours. There's a lot of questionable math in HR land though.
I could see maybe the argument against this because of paid accounts in remote systems: google suite, office 365, bamboo, github, etc. compared to reduced use, but they set those up anyway for other people in the company who don't use them (non-devs, etc) and I don't believe the cost per user is significant.
Do you mean tax costs? AFAIK typically country requirements for benefits are proportional to time worked, so part timers don't get all the benefits. Which benefits are you talking about specifically?
Quite the opposite. Employees under 28 hours a week don’t have to be provided health benefits at all, and typically aren’t in industries like retail that mostly employ front line workers on a part time basis.
Part time help is cheap.
Productivity per hour increases though, so it compensates.
I could see it going down if you do something like more work or work like hobbies in the other time instead of more leisure.
I tottaly agree with this sentiment. Still looking for the right balance, but half assing things for me doesn't result in feeling better.
Finding the unicorn job isn't the right thing to predicate your happiness on. One thing I like the idea of and am just starting to try is reminding myself why I'm doing the job. What are my bigger goals that it is contributing towards? I know we all know this at some level, but I think it can help to remind ourselves there is a purpose/meaning to why we do our jobs, even if we don't intrinsically get meaning from them.
I can't remember where I read this idea... but somewhere recently.
Let me try to be more clear, I don't half ass. I just take a 10 minute walk when I get stressed. I take 10 minutes to think through something without touching my keyboard even though the keyboard monitor is monitoring. Once I'm past 8 and a half hours I turn off my computer almost regardless of the circumstances. In certain emergencies I won't, but most of the time that meeting actually is not more important than eating dinner with my family and getting bullet points the next morning.
I hope this helps explain more what I meant by what I was saying. I'm not saying "become terrible at your job and produce poor quality". I am saying, "deliver good enough quality within your means". If your boss says "your current code is good enough for the demo", ship the damn thing as is, don't go rushing to add more features and retesting everything until 4AM.
If a deadline really is too short, say it is too short early on. Keep working, but don't put on a cape and deliver because someone said they wanted something they can't have without causing you to lose sleep for two weeks. People die from stuff like that, it is not worth it.
>... keyboard monitor is monitoring
I would say get out as fast as possible.
That would be part of the medium term plan. Have to hang on as long as I can for now though.
Does not help when the answer is "to not starve and not lose your house for missing three mortgage payments, stupid" though.
I am here to periodically remind HN that no, not all programmers here are millionaires who only work not to get bored.
There is a middle ground where you’re not at risk of missing next month’s mortgage payment, but downshifting or changing careers might mean you take a lot longer to reach retirement (or “financial independence” if you don’t like the word retirement).
There absolutely is this middle ground, agreed. But personally, I've been very stupid with money. I let my passion for technology and the illusion that I will always be in high demand get the better of me and I am currently paying heavy interest, so to speak, in ruined health, both physical and mental, and having to look for a job in tough market with age discrimination sprinkled on top.
Oh well.
My takeaway from your comment is that you should not be an employee; you should be a business owner. That way you can give your all and feel great about it because it will also (hopefully) lead to better and directly measurable outcomes.
Not necessarily. I'm similar to OP in that I get depressed if I'm not doing my best, but I also have a family with young kids. There's no good way for me to get from where I am to business owner—either I'd be risking my family's livelihood on something uncertain or I'd be working in my free time to build a stable business instead of spending time with them.
The compromise I've arrived at is that I give it my all during a very strict time box. I work remotely, so at 9am I start work, I take an hour for lunch, and I check out at 5. With no commute that leaves just over half my workweek waking hours for my family.
During working hours I do it all—I perform my job very well and am lucky enough to be in a place where it's recognized in very measurable ways (promotions, autonomy, and recognition). But I don't give my employer extra time.
Thanks for the insightful comment. I have tried no less than 30 separate approaches for... a bunch of stuff really... and nothing worked.
The only thing that actually seems to net me results these days is indeed extremely strict, zero excuses unless the nukes are flying, time-boxing.
Reassuring to see that it works for somebody else as well. Thank you.
Yes, this is correct. This is my eventual end goal, and a lot of my career so far has revolved around obtaining the skills, connections, and runway money I need to make that leap.
What industry did you find this unicorn job in? I feel exactly as you described in your list.
I work at a ~100 person tech consulting firm[1], although I joined when we were closer to 30. They actually found me through HN!
We mostly design and build data/devops/mlops/cyber platforms for big banks and other finserv companies - lots of Databricks, AWS, and GCP services.
[1] https://bit.ly/4j5cC5T (I'll expire the link in a few days for privacy reasons)
Any reason a lot of the Rearc jobs are outsourced to India?
What is wrong with that?
Takes away jobs from Americans and exploits cheap Indian labor.
Another way to phrase that: it allows Americans to focus on jobs where they add most value, leading to a higher standard of living for both Indians and Americans. You should read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage (and so should Trump)
I don’t really care about the standard of living in India. It is of no concern for me. And the only reason I am commenting is because the linked company is what was brought up. You would be able to find other examples.
But, these positions are easily done by a highly skilled American workforce: Cloud Engineers, Lead Cloud Engineers, Cybersecurity Engineers. That’s what is being advertised.