[HN Gopher] The state of burnout in tech, 2022 edition [pdf]
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The state of burnout in tech, 2022 edition [pdf]
Author : mooreds
Score : 151 points
Date : 2022-03-03 15:55 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (f.hubspotusercontent30.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (f.hubspotusercontent30.net)
| germinalphrase wrote:
| More detail on the survey data would be nice. For instance, we're
| these conclusions consistent across job roles or localized with
| certain positions.
| Fermin wrote:
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Things contributing to my own (severe) burnout:
|
| 1 - Lack of variety, leading to boredom. After decades in the
| industry, I'm super bored with the things I know, and not in the
| least bit interested in learning more technical minutia of
| whatever flavor... pretty much all of it feels the same. The
| things I'm still interested in (like Scheme) are pretty obscure,
| so I'm unlikely to ever get to work with them. I hate all the
| mainstream tech stacks, but that's where the overwhelming
| majority of work is.
|
| 2 - I don't care about what the company does. 99.9% of the time,
| the real goal is to make some extremely rich people even richer.
| Couldn't care less. I'm not sure that even if I worked for a non-
| profit doing work I thought was important that it would translate
| to my own job being something I wanted to do.
|
| 3 - Chronic understaffing, crazy time pressure, and lack of
| resources. This is endemic in the tech field. Count yourself
| incredibly lucky if you don't have to face this day in and day
| out for years on end. It's even worse when you know the company
| you're working for is making money hand over fist and they could
| easily afford to hire more people, treat them better, and get
| more resources, but you know they'd rather funnel that money in
| to the pockets of those at the top.
|
| 4 - Lies and corporate BS. From bullshit cheerleading and pep
| talks from upper management that a child would be stupid to
| believe, to time wasting, useless policies, to outright lying and
| two-facedness that's super common in the industry. Who wants to
| deal with this?
|
| 5 - Depression. This doesn't help.
|
| The best job I ever had was working part time in a tiny company
| where it was just me and the owner. He was a super nice guy, we
| got along great and just did what needed to be done. No corporate
| BS, no policies, no lies, and back then I wasn't burnt out yet,
| so working on tech stuff still seemed interesting.
|
| After burning out on tech I really should have switched to
| another career (completely outside of tech)... or even tried
| management, but I never did, and my skills have atrophied so I'm
| super rusty and out of it regarding the newer buzzword
| technologies.. though I'd like to think that I still have good
| troubleshooting skills and can learn anything.. if I cared.. but
| I don't.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Quote from Office Space: http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3u7bxz
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Chronic understaffing, crazy time pressure, and lack of
| resources. This is endemic in the tech field.
|
| Plenty of SW jobs where this is not a problem (some even have
| good pay, not FAANG level, though).
|
| Go interview, and ask questions during the interview about it.
| Questions I've asked:
|
| 1. I don't check my email when I go home (unless there's a
| cross-geo meeting or something). Is that workable with this
| job?
|
| 2. What is the cycle of work like? How often do you work more
| than 40 hours a week? Is it regular, continuous work or are
| there crunch times?
|
| 3. Do you have on-call work? (If yes, probe into details - some
| on call work is terrible, but I've been on interviews where the
| person said he got a call only 3 times in a whole year).
| francisofascii wrote:
| This. The tech, role, salary, and checklists like the Joel
| Test are less important to me now, than questions like this.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| The problem about being oncall is not how many times you get
| called, it's that you cannot plan anything in your free time
| without having to take your laptop with you.
| mparnisari wrote:
| For me is the other way around, i don't mind taking my
| laptop everywhere, but i loathe getting a page at 3am
| wiz21c wrote:
| The company BS is unbelievable. I would love to hear how the
| company justifies that BS. They never do and because of that, I
| have to add the fact that I don't understand why the BS exists.
| So it doubles the pain: it sounds BS and I can't explain what
| purpose it serves...
| wpietri wrote:
| > I'm not sure that even if I worked for a non-profit doing
| work I thought was important that it would translate to my own
| job being something I wanted to do.
|
| Hi! I've worked for a few non-profits over the years. They are
| no panacea! Many businesses at least have a clear success mode:
| do good things for people and they'll pay you so you can do
| more good things for them.
|
| But the business model of many non-profits is something like,
| "Sell good feelings to rich people, and then use the surplus to
| Do Good." This is a much messier feedback loop, and it's very
| hard to build a precise enough agreement of what "Good" means
| to prioritize and focus. And big-dollar donations often come
| with strings attached, meaning it can end up feeling like the
| problems you get in early enterprise software companies, where
| the tail wags the dog.
|
| All kinds of organization have problems with the sorts of
| people who really want to be in charge. It's true that non-
| profits have fewer very greedy people, but they have at least
| as many people who want to be famous. Or who enjoy exercising
| power in a hierarchy.
|
| That said, I know people who have found the right circumstances
| and have had great jobs. And one of the benefits of every non-
| profit I've worked for is that the people are great. Smart,
| dedicated, caring, and mission driven. So although nobody
| should think of it as utopia, I'd encourage people to check it
| them out.
| lupire wrote:
| If you don't need money (permanently or temporarily) as a
| techie, don't work a job for a nonprofit. If you want to help
| people, take time off your high paying corporate job to
| contribute to free software, or run a forum website, or do
| citizen data journalism.
| sbarre wrote:
| I have also found that non-profits can become a home to
| "useless zealots", a perhaps unkind but in my experience
| accurate term.
|
| They work there because they _really_ believe in the non-
| profit 's cause, but they are not good at their job.
|
| They are either loved or tolerated by leadership because of
| their belief in the cause, but typically cause more problems
| than they fix, and can be very difficult to deal with.
| wpietri wrote:
| Ooh, interesting. I haven't seen that, but totally get how
| it happens.
| sdo72 wrote:
| This list has everything I face as well. Even the best working
| job was with a tiny company which was my own and my partner. I
| see almost everyone is forced to lie in the corp world. Corp
| world like people to lie.
|
| The thought of switching career came to me a few times after my
| startup but quickly died because those careers can't never meet
| the decent salary to support my life and my family, and I've
| been living quite frugal already, nowhere near luxurious.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > After burning out on tech I really should have switched to
| another career... or even tried management
|
| Just a tip from someone who made that jump: If those five
| things you listed contributed to your burnout, trust me, moving
| into management won't help.
|
| 1. Management is the same damn slog day after day. You deal
| with people acting like children, senior management who lack
| any coherent vision and don't know what they're doing,
| colleagues who were Peter Principle'd into their roles, and on
| and on. It's unrelenting.
|
| 2. Being a manager is just doing work to make rich people
| richer, but with extra steps.
|
| 3. Imagine being a manager! You keep hearing you're
| understaffed, that there's enormous time pressure, that you
| lack resources, that your staff are frustrated, unmotivated,
| burned out. If you're a good manager you care and desperately
| want to help. But you can't do a god damned thing about it
| because the executives don't give a damn.
|
| 4. You're literally in the middle of this. As a middle manager
| you have the choice to parrot the upper management crap, or
| tell it like it is. Neither is great. And that's ignoring the
| politics, and the pointless policies, the endless process...
|
| 5. That's invariant.
|
| The real issue is that a lot of companies are simply toxic
| places to work. The job doesn't change that. Whether you're an
| individual contributor on the ground or a manager trying to
| improve the lives of your staff, if the company sucks, it sucks
| for everyone.
|
| The truth is: not all companies suck that badly. Or, at least,
| they all suck in different ways. As you yourself have realized,
| the trick is finding that place that fits for you.
| apohn wrote:
| I was a manager at one point, and the combination of #3 and
| #4 basically killed my interest in management.
|
| As an IC, your manager can tell you to do something that
| makes no sense. They can either agree with you or disagree
| about how stupid it is, but if it comes from above it has to
| be done. As an IC, you just do it and try your best to
| disconnect emotionally and get it over with.
|
| As a manager, you first listen to your manager tell you to do
| something that makes no sense. You push back, but they say
| your team has to do it. You take it to your direct report and
| they push back, and now you are forcing somebody to work on
| something they rightfully don't agree it. Unless you are an
| a$$shole, it's hard to disconnect emotionally when you are
| forcing somebody to do something you don't agree with. Do
| that over and over...it really takes a toll.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > As a manager, you first listen to your manager tell you
| to do something that makes no sense. You push back, but
| they say your team has to do it. You take it to your direct
| report and they push back, and now you are forcing somebody
| to work on something they rightfully don't agree it. Unless
| you are an a$$shole, it's hard to disconnect emotionally
| when you are forcing somebody to do something you don't
| agree with. Do that over and over...it really takes a toll.
|
| Yup. What you've just described is the trap of having all
| the accountability but none of the control, and it's
| profoundly demoralizing.
| aqme28 wrote:
| This is another issue though. Nothing burns you out quite
| like realizing that you don't even want your boss's job. It
| makes your career feel hopeless.
| apohn wrote:
| Honestly, for me this realization made dealing with my job
| frustrations easier. As an IC in a tech role, I'm paid
| decently despite not working for FAANG. I don't have to
| aspire to become a manager just so I can afford my
| mortgage, family expenses, etc. When all the "extra" and
| "volunteer" stuff starts getting pushed on me, I don't feel
| the need to do it so I can "demonstrate performing above my
| current level" or whatever BS they want to call it.
|
| At one point I worked in a matrixed org that heavily
| interacted with business analysts, HR people etc. Some of
| those folks who were desperately trying to climb to a
| manager role so they could get paid a decent salary. A lot
| of them hated their jobs, but moving to manager position
| was their only choice.
|
| Imagine feeling forced to climb to a job that you don't
| even really want. It's no surprise that people just resort
| to political maneuvering to get that coveted manager spot.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > This is another issue though. Nothing burns you out quite
| like realizing that you don't even want your boss's job. It
| makes your career feel hopeless.
|
| Yes. Yes it does.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Nothing burns you out quite like realizing that you
| don't even want your boss's job."_
|
| As much as I hated my last job, I thought my boss' job was
| even worse because of all the corporate BS he had to
| constantly put up with. He seemed to love his job despite
| that, though.
|
| Also, some of my colleagues (who'd been working for
| decades, just like me) seem to still love it and thrive on
| the stuff that made me want to quit and demotivated me. I'm
| fascinated with how some people like them are able to
| persevere and thrive in the same situations that make
| people like me quit and burn out.
|
| I still don't know their secret.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > Also, some of my colleagues (who'd been working for
| decades, just like me) seem to still love it and thrive
| on the stuff that made me want to quit and demotivated
| me. I'm fascinated with how some people like them are
| able to persevere and thrive in the same situations that
| make people like me quit and burn out.
|
| It really comes down to the level of influence and
| control you have in the organization.
|
| If you feel empowered to enact positive change, even if
| it's just at your level in collaboration with your
| colleagues, then that can be enough to remain motivated.
| Speaking for myself, for years, this describes how I
| managed to stay motivated through a _lot_ of BS.
|
| But when that falls away--when senior management becomes
| ineffective, when your colleagues leave or become
| demotivated themselves, when leadership starts to get in
| the way of your enacting change, when the organization
| becomes large enough that it's more likely to resist
| change than embrace it-- _that_ is when management
| becomes, at best, an unrelenting chore.
|
| I've been a middle manager for nearly eight years. The
| first 5-6 of that were pretty good. But in the
| intervening years the company has grown and is now big
| enough that my ability to enact change in the
| organization has all but disappeared and I'm considering
| my options.
| berg117 wrote:
| Your boss probably had to seem to love his job. Indeed,
| that's part of the job, as a middle manager.
|
| What's amazing about corporate is that, when you get
| together years later and the truth comes out because
| everyone has moved on, you realize how much everyone
| really hated their jobs. There are some true-believing
| useful idiots out there, but I'd guess that 80% of people
| see corporate for what it is--they're just not allowed to
| make it known that they do. It's reminiscent of that time
| people applauded Stalin for 11 minutes because no one
| wanted to risk being the first one to stop clapping.
|
| As a worker, you're at least allowed to grumble a little
| bit. As a middle manager, you're a full-time actor. You
| have to implement the will of some truly awful people and
| pretend to have no moral objections whatsoever.
|
| Some middle managers truly are pricks and petty tyrants,
| but my observation is that most of them are just forced
| to pretend to be that way, becoming the face of horrible
| decisions so the execs can be loved by the masses. Your
| boss doesn't want to be a micromanaging cunt--he has to
| pretend to be one, because he's a rubber glove for
| executives.
| berg117 wrote:
| This times 100. Being a middle manager sucks even more,
| because you have no real ability to protect people. When the
| people under you are happy and doing well, you spend no real
| time with them... because you're constantly being pulled to
| deal with crises, often of executive cause... whatever
| problem the unluckiest or worst person on your team faces is
| your problem, every day.
|
| It also confirmed my negative views of upper management and
| capitalism. Growing up, I had always felt that the left-wing
| view of corporate executives as worthless, evil parasites
| whom society would be better without was an exaggeration, or
| a negative depiction derived from a mix of envy and the "bad
| apple" effect. Nope. I've sat in enough meetings and heard
| how upper-level executives talk about their workers to
| realize that the "haters" were dead right all along. Half of
| these people in upper management deserve to be guillotined;
| the other half are not so severely awful, but are spineless
| or ineffective at doing anything to oppose the horrible
| culture.
|
| _As a middle manager you have the choice to parrot the upper
| management crap, or tell it like it is. Neither is great._
|
| Yeah, this conflict of interest is the worst. Do what's
| right, and you're risking your livelihood, while not really
| helping the people beneath you. Lie for executives' benefit
| (i.e., be the face of their bad decisions, so the execs can
| be loved) and it corrodes your soul, but at least you stay
| employed.
|
| The funny thing is that corporate capitalism is now
| indistinguishable from the Soviet system at its worst. We are
| in Kazakhstan 1987 right now. The only difference is that we
| pay two orders of magnitude more for these shithead
| bureaucrats than the most corrupt SSRs ever did.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I had a great eng job at a tiny consulting company. Very
| relaxed. No pressure other than the occasional state deadline.
| We just used meh tech and the pay was 25%+ lower than what you
| would expect.
|
| It was perfect but if the salary was better I probably would
| have stayed for 10 years. Much of the staff had.
| ekir wrote:
| Why is burnout considered a syndrome that needs a solution? We
| work in a mentally exhausting and demanding field, why can't we
| normalize the idea of taking a break? Is the status quo really to
| work for several uninterrupted decades and then retire?
|
| If a company has a burnt-out high performer they want to keep,
| then offer them a sabbatical. Let them take the time they need to
| relieve their stress. If they still don't want to come back, well
| that's life.
|
| I say this as someone who put in their notice on this past Monday
| because of burn out. After nearly fifteen years working in this
| industry, I'm tired. I'm going to take time off and rest up,
| maybe work on my own projects. I feel no shame in this.
| PennRobotics wrote:
| I'll self-select high risk. My factors: * Kids
| and the number of illnesses they bring home to share with me
| * A few major projects constantly interrupted by "small" support
| requests (or sick days) * Failing to understand a very
| complicated source tree
| H8crilA wrote:
| I had problems with this in 2022, so I wonder: what's the trend
| here? I do suspect that work from home has some effects that kick
| in with a significant delay, perhaps even more than a year after
| you go remotely.
| marcossponton wrote:
| It's crucial to start talking about this problem with
| representative and not superficial data.
| 131012 wrote:
| 32000+ participants is not that superficial.
| eulers_secret wrote:
| Took the survey, it suggests I have a 'high' risk of burnout...
| then they try to sell me services to fix the problem they just
| diagnosed me with.
|
| Hmmm, I wonder why I'm so cynical? Why do I assume bad faith so
| often? I wonder??? Guess it's a mystery.
| ozzythecat wrote:
| I rose to a fairly high rank at Amazon. I was given explicit
| feedback to not get involved in certain day to day decisions or
| outcomes.
|
| There was immense pressure to disconnect from actual situations
| and focus mainly on the "goals"... that if you didn't do that,
| you weren't being effective and you were wasting energy, holding
| yourself back from getting to the next level.
|
| My first thought was that this feedback is around scaling.
| Obviously, the more you're involved in the day to day, the more
| on your plate, the less you can scale up and focus on the big
| picture.
|
| It took me some time to piece things together. The reality is
| that leadership wants senior leaders to stay disconnected. It
| makes it significantly easier to make decisions you wouldn't make
| if you personally knew the people those decisions impact.
|
| I won't give specifics of another story, out of risk of getting
| outed. But imagine a C-level leader at Amazon telling people to
| step up and deliver among impossible timelines. To paraphrase,
| and btw - every one of these statements WERE made. I'm not making
| up a single statement.
|
| "No, you're not getting the raises you think you're getting. And
| yes, many of your colleagues will leave in the coming months,
| because other companies will pay them significantly higher
| compensation. And yes, that will mean even more work for you. And
| yes, morale is suffering because of high attrition, but you need
| to convince your teams to deliver this."
|
| You see things like this in Hollywood films or TV dramas where
| you have cartoon villain personalities in positions of
| leadership. At the end of their speech, they might offer some
| candy or a box of donuts as token to make up for their asks.
|
| At Amazon, if you work near or on campus, you get free bananas.
| :)
|
| At Amazon the problem is they fail to see their employees as
| human beings. And they consider it a feature, not a bug.
|
| Throw 100 things at the wall and see what sticks. If among those
| 100 things you also have to gut humans and use their guts and
| flesh to make things stick, then you do what needs to be done. If
| you don't, the leadership will actually try and guilt you - that
| the problem is your inability, a weakness in your skill set and
| who you are.
| nus07 wrote:
| "It took me some time to piece things together. The reality is
| that leadership wants senior leaders to stay disconnected. It
| makes it significantly easier to make decisions you wouldn't
| make if you personally knew the people those decisions impact."
|
| -This is something that me as a middle level developer never
| even thought or considered. Now things make a lot of sense
| especially the disconnect that leadership often has. This is
| priceless, thank you !
| berg117 wrote:
| To the people who run tech companies, and the corporate system as
| a whole, burnout is a feature, not a bug. The people in charge
| are not very smart and they can't recognize talent, so their only
| way to pick the next generation of leaders (other than through
| nepotism, which is how 85% of the good slots get allocated) is to
| subject people to increasing pointless unpleasantness and wait
| for attrition to create a ranking. It can't be fixed. It will be
| that way until the whole system is scrapped.
|
| This is not limited to capitalist bureaucracies, of course--the
| most dysfunctional corners of the Soviet system were eerily
| similar--but it is arguably most pronounced in the corporate
| world, because there is no purpose for these hierarchies
| existing, or indeed no purpose for most of these companies at all
| except to make money for a small number of people whom there is
| no good reason to care about.
|
| The WHO is right. Burnout isn't a medical problem or classical
| mental illness. It is a rational response to living under a
| socioeconomic system that has no right to exist.
| zwieback wrote:
| I'd be interested in the correlation to two metrics: age and size
| of employer. When I was young I worked at startups: super
| stressful, high risk of company collapse, constant overload,
| funding stress, etc. I'm in my 50s now and have worked at hp for
| 20 years. I feel nearly zero stress and don't know whether it's
| because I've just been through the cycle enough times to know the
| world won't end because of me and also the company is just super
| nice to me. And I still do almost 100% technical work as an IC.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| It's even worse now. Many juniors can barely get in the
| industry, let alone for a living remotely close to that a few
| decades ago (in many places even just a decade-half a decade
| ago). Tech requirements have grown to ridiculous proportions
| with many companies unwilling to teach, or trying to profit off
| the unwillingness of others to teach, at the cost of the
| potential hire. Meanwhile, corporations haven't really gotten
| less stressful over time. The improvements in tooling haven't
| necessary resulted in easier jobs as much as more requirements
| piled on top.
|
| This doesn't mean IT is worse than most other fields, but it
| sure hasn't gotten any better given the problems most younger
| generations run into today.
| deletethis31415 wrote:
| I think remote work actually _helps_ in extending how long one
| can be burnt out and still working - at least for as long as you
| are still functioning.
|
| You don't need to put on your poker face all the time and can
| hide the depersonalization ghost in the closet for a little bit
| if there's a meeting. You can go hug your dog afterwards or do
| something else to keep on trucking.
|
| Then some companies mandated a return to the office. Ghosts won't
| be in the closet for an entire workday in a bland office setting
| full of people you don't want to be around, so people finally
| quit.
| amznbyebyebye wrote:
| I myself have to remember to ease up on colleagues and that the
| phenomenon, at last where I work, is one of largely silent
| suffering.
|
| When you work with computer code that obeys logic and that we
| have the power of telling the computer what to do, it's easy to
| forget that humans are different, they have a dash of
| irrationality and emotion.
|
| Also that many times, we just don't have all the context behind
| why someone may be doing/not doing the things they are.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| End overtime exemption. If an org can push workers for more work
| without paying them more, why wouldn't they? Solving this problem
| requires systems-level thinking. Understanding the incentives
| that result in burnout-creating interactions is key to creating
| new incentives that don't induce burnout.
|
| The quickest way to not fixing burnout is assuming that it is a
| natural part of software development, that it's up to individuals
| to manage their own boundaries, or that the industry is
| impossible to change. None of these are entirely false nor
| entirely true, but they do nothing to affect change.
|
| Is the end of overtime exemption a silver bullet? No, but it is a
| critical step toward creating incentives that do address worker
| burnout. It shifts a manager's choice from "push the team harder
| to get out a feature and deal with the consequences later" to
| "push the team harder and it costs $X."
|
| There is a key piece of perspective that helps to understand this
| - management rarely has clarity in their business decisions. What
| drives management toward pushing workers to work more and
| ignoring burnout is that building product has a more tangible
| result than burnout. You may ask, "no, management weighs the
| costs and benefits!" Maybe yours does, but when the benefits are
| easier to quantify than the costs, the decision is clear.
|
| This is why putting a dollar amount on the decision is so
| important. It shifts the decision to "possibly build it faster
| for $X" where the dollar cost amount has more clarity than the
| benefits. It doesn't mean management chooses not to build faster
| every time, but the decision framing does change the response.
| Anyone in management knows what clarity in business decisions
| means and how it affects outcomes.
| casralad wrote:
| I support this. Overtime is free labor and the market should be
| regulated by the government to prohibit this.
|
| That said, I've been a software engineer for over twenty years
| and most of those years I've worked under 40 hours a week and
| rarely worked overtime.
| uoaei wrote:
| > I've worked under 40 hours a week and rarely worked
| overtime
|
| That is exactly the slack in the system that makes the
| endeavor sustainable. There's no way to get quality software
| out of consistently drained engineers.
|
| Trying to find some "balance" without hedging for the
| asymmetry inherent in the problem will lead you to burn out
| roughly half of the workforce, which has nonlinear (very
| superlinear) knock-on effects for the success of the
| remaining half.
|
| If you burn out the top half of your workforce, the bottom
| half will suddenly bear twice the load and burn out that much
| faster.
| fsociety wrote:
| It's a great idea. I bet this would ultimately improve security
| and reliability/devops organizations at companies too.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| From what I've seen, across the industry, the folks who are burnt
| out are almost entirely individual contributors. You rarely see
| burnout in management, and it's typically in the form of folks
| who want to go back to being ICs/tried management and hated it.
|
| I think companies really need to work on reducing or eliminating
| the amount of bullshit ICs have to deal with vs management (time
| tracking, status updates, on call, etc) or have management do the
| same amount of bullshit. Your boss may say they understand what
| you're going through, but they most likely do not have the same
| level of bullshit being asked of them on a daily basis. They can
| sit in meetings all day, miss deadlines, and no one knocks them
| on it like an IC where being a day late gets put on a PIP.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| > You rarely see burnout in management
|
| I see it all the time. The difference is management can often
| delegate the tasks they're most burnt out on to others.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| I think this is true. Management will shred through IC
| engineers, getting results but burning alot of them out in the
| process. Theres no accountability, and in some respects, its
| good business for them. They get the work done, the burnout
| really doesnt have that many repercussions.
|
| The overarching issue is:
|
| you need stability/healthy employees at the higher levels, at
| the lower levels it doesnt matter.
|
| You cant have turn over in management, its a risk to the
| company. Turnover in engineers, even highly skilled ones, can
| be recovered from with some extra cost.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| It's actually terrible business because constantly having to
| hire, train, and ramp up new engineers takes up so much more
| time than retaining staff would. But no one wants to hear
| that when X needs to be released by Y and we can make that
| happen if our engs just work a little harder/longer.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > It's actually terrible business because constantly having
| to hire, train, and ramp up new engineers takes up so much
| more time than retaining staff would.
|
| And who has to go through all that?
|
| The managers.
|
| Trust me, _we_ don 't want it any more than the ICs do. But
| senior/executive management doesn't feel the pain and
| therefore doesn't care.
| [deleted]
| dougmccune wrote:
| This is probably just grass is greener stuff, but I've seen the
| opposite. Now, that said, this was post acquisition, but my
| anecdote is that in our case the ICs were shielded from all the
| office politics shenanigans and were able to just focus on
| delivering work. Meanwhile, those in management positions were
| repeatedly pulled into agenda-less meetings, were "voluntold"
| for tasks unrelated to their jobs, and were generally unhappy.
| Obviously it all depends on the culture within an organization.
| But in our case we worked really hard to shield the ICs from
| the BS, but those in management bore the brunt, and the burn
| out and resignations reflected that.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| I absolutely agree with all of this. Management burnout is
| absolutely real and significant, and I'm honestly a little
| surprised someone would claim otherwise. The only way I can
| imagine coming to that conclusion is to have either 1) never
| been a manager, or 2) only worked at companies with
| ineffective/inactive management.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I think you have a different definition of bullshit than me.
| Sitting in a pointless meeting so I can daydream or work on
| something while half paying attention? That sounds like a
| vacation where I don't get bugged by drive bys. Voluntold
| work is the norm for ICs, my condolences that you have to
| deal with it. I think your list is a a best case scenario of
| the bullshit ICs might have to deal with, and it's a good
| example of my point: management doesn't have the same pain.
| kradeelav wrote:
| YMMV, but it's personally entirely the opposite with what I've
| seen in the design industry, which feels somewhat similar to
| software in the sense we're both building things.
|
| IC's that I've seen on my end to have a little more latitude to
| actually design things and have a small amount of independence
| there, wheras managers are stuck with the 'keep the project
| going' paperwork, people paperwork, shielding the team from the
| politics, etc.
|
| (I've personally found a way to sidestep a lot of that, but so
| many of my previous managers have burned out to the above
| reasons.)
| onion2k wrote:
| _You rarely see burnout in management.._
|
| You rarely see burnout in anyone, because everyone does their
| best to hide it. Their performance drops until they quit. Most
| people just assume that's incompetence, _especially_ with
| managers.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I'm in management (former IC). I fight against as much
| pointless paperwork and bullshit as I can, but accounting
| principles and tax treatment of capitalizable work (and
| sometimes R&D credit programs and similar) force some amount of
| good-faith estimation of activities for which some amount of
| tracking is needed.
|
| (If we paid you to do some operations task for an hour, that
| whole amount is a business expense this year. If we paid you to
| build software that will deliver value for the next three
| years, we have to take the expense of that hour across the next
| 36 months, not at all once. It's a GAAP and a US tax code
| requirement. In no way do I care if you worked 33.25 or 40.75
| hours in any given week other than to have enough data for
| finance to do accounting and file taxes correctly.)
| berg117 wrote:
| I've been a manager. Managers burn out all the time. They're
| just not allowed to show it. They get some degree of exemption
| from the petty humiliations (time tracking, on-call duty) and
| they do have human shields to throw in front of a bus or few...
| but as a middle manager, you're even closer to the truly
| horrible people up top, and your daily life is consumed by the
| issues faced by your unluckiest subordinate (sometimes he
| deserves it, sometimes he doesn't). You don't spend time with
| your underlings when the work is going well; you're constantly
| being pulled to deal with the crises and the sad cases.
|
| Every company has an invisible line, like the officer/enlisted
| distinction in militaries, but always undocumented for obvious
| reasons. Above it are the real humans whom the company cares
| about; below it are the "resources". ICs are always below the
| line, except in R&D jobs that aren't available without a top-10
| PhD... but most managers are also below the line.
|
| Above the line, you basically write your own performance review
| because the bosses are your buddies. Below the line, it's
| miserable, and as you said you're one delay or mistake away
| from being sent to the Performance Improvement Camps. Almost
| all first-level managers in a company of significant size (25+
| people) are below the line and spend just as much time on
| humiliating work justification (e.g., status reports) as the
| guys at the bottom.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Send me an email sometime (contact info in profile), I like
| the cut of your jib and would be interested in collaborating
| with you.
| batmaniam wrote:
| This index seems to indicate that people across all of tech have
| a good chance of suffering from burnout. We have a 42.1% chance
| of burning out apparently, which is pretty huge. It would be
| interesting to see the breakdown by age as well, as life stage
| changes as people get older and can affect their rate of burnout.
|
| That means even if we jump jobs to get out of a toxic work
| environment, there's still a good possibility to get burned out
| at the new job. And with the rate of exhaustion being over 55%
| for both men and women, that means we have slightly less than a
| 50-50 chance of finding a good job that won't overwork us. And
| that assumes your work environment doesn't change (ie, your boss
| leaving, re-orgs, etc).
|
| Maybe it's time we get together and just stop putting up with
| toxic environments, because it's pretty much prevalent. The only
| way to do that is to form solidarity with one another, and push
| back against the toxicity through a collective group.
| qqtt wrote:
| Just speaking personally, but a lot of the feelings of "burn out"
| I was experiencing since the start of the pandemic were actually
| not attributable to the work I was doing, but rather the bad
| habits I picked up during the first year or so of the pandemic.
|
| Doom scrolling about news, a little too much time spent every day
| on social media (including hacker news), overloading myself with
| information and not really creating enough. It is especially easy
| to fall into these bad habits in a work from home environment
| where it is easy to get distracted if you don't have the
| discipline.
|
| What worked for me is actually identifying the patterns of my
| behavior everyday, and cutting things out. No more phone time
| from 8am to 12pm. No more reading about news after 12pm. Even
| those two things cut out a lot of nonsense time out of my day and
| after just a week I felt re-energized and re-focused.
|
| I wonder how much of the creeping burnout that seems to be
| affecting the workforce is a confluence of bad habits encroaching
| on actual productivity - social media addiction is a huge one,
| with people spending way too much time reading and interacting
| about people and news and events which have zero impact on them.
| oars wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree this is the main issue. Being inundated
| with information, checking the Coronavirus worldometer multiple
| times daily and constantly reading about the doom & gloom of
| our world made me feel terrible.
|
| Cutting out the news did wonders for my mental health and
| wellbeing.
| armagon wrote:
| Does changing jobs help with burnout, or are the people who plan
| on leaving their current work going to find themselves burned out
| again/still in a few months?
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I feel like the first month is great then its the same cycle.
| Especially because you have to start over and build a
| reputation of doing good work so you work a little later and a
| little harder one week then that becomes the norm and on it
| continues.
| lumost wrote:
| Something that doesn't seem explored here is the effect of
| working on ineffective work.
|
| Everyone will encounter something like the following in their
| career
|
| 1. There is a problem that your customers and you face - but you
| are not allowed to solve it for "Reasons"
|
| 2. The product area will never work, but you must continue
| working on things that no one will ever use for "reasons". Ever
| write exhaustive test coverage for something that won't be used?
|
| 3. The things that you work on will never take you to where you
| want to go in your career. Your managers will not let you take on
| work that moves the needle for you personally.
|
| 4. It's the same problems day after day without any resolution.
| There is no support to solve them (A ticket queue with dozens of
| identical tickets).
|
| I'd say the main times I've felt burnout were one of the above.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| For #4, it doesn't even need to be the same ticket. Having a
| ticket queue without end and that being all you do is enough
| too.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Quote from Office space: http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3u7bxz
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| I'd say this is essentially the cause of burnout in, well, life
| in general.
|
| The same applies to any sustained pursuit, be it a hobby, work,
| relationship (romantic or otherwise), family relations, etc.
|
| If you constantly bash your head against a wall and factors
| outside of your control conspire to mean that you make no or
| little progress and receive no or little reward then you need
| to stop.
|
| Burnout is your body's way of forcing you if you persist.
| mparnisari wrote:
| 1 and 2 are the reasons I left my previous job. I was not
| motivated at all.
| lupire wrote:
| Great specific examples of burnout, which generally is the
| feeling that nothing you _can_ do is worthwhile, so the optimal
| choice is to do nothing.
|
| "I'll do this nonsense because I need the paycheck" is a way to
| avoid burnout, unless you already have enough money for your
| needs that money can buy.
| wpietri wrote:
| 100% agreed. I'm not sure how big a problem this is, but it's
| been huge for me personally.
|
| I write software because I like solving problems for people.
| It's gratifying to build clever things, but for me it has to
| end in making the world better somehow. Even if it's just one
| person, which has happened when I'm building in-house tools.
|
| But there's so much out there that isn't about actually getting
| things done. E.g., the project that is touted as using the hot
| technology (e.g., ML) because people want to be seen as on the
| leading edge; actual results would be a hindrance to bragging.
| Or the executive who wants to respond to public criticism and
| so launches an initiative that will show a lot of motion and be
| something they can point to, but will not actually make a
| difference. Or the big-talking boss who gets promoted based on
| the size of his project and how tough he looks, so he
| drastically overstaffs something, causes a lot of chaos, and
| then makes everybody work stupid hours in crunch mode to hit an
| entirely artificial deadline. And so on, and so on.
|
| These sorts of bullshit projects are way harder on me than
| actual hard work, because I experience constant dissonance
| between my goals (make things! help people!) and the day-to-day
| of the project.
|
| And I think it's even worse for others, because it's easy to
| learn the lesson that the important thing at work is just to
| shut up and play pretend with whatever the bosses want. That's
| a lesson I absolutely refuse to learn. But many apparently do,
| and that can ruin a person for their whole career.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| When you see the politics behind tech leadership it can be
| hard to unsee it. Everything is always the previous
| leadership's fault, and whatever hot new methodology or
| design pattern is the current buzzword will solve all the
| problems that could possibly come up in the future. Everyone
| knows reality will be much more complicated than implied, but
| then whoever is working on that code when it happens to fall
| apart will take the blame. Activity and irrelevant metrics
| will drive how successful people think the project is,
| regardless of whether any customers are actually getting
| helped.
|
| It's hard to solve for these problems because that tone comes
| from the top, but trusting people and removing toxic
| personalities is a good start. Every successful team I've
| been on had a focus on the customer and the end goal and
| didn't let politics get in the way of solutions.
| lumost wrote:
| It's funny, I recently attempted to learn the latter lesson
| in order to get a good paycheck and build something really
| exciting. After 3+ years of working on making something
| happen, I finally realized that it either wasn't going to
| happen - or the company would never let me be the one to do
| it.
|
| After hanging up the towel officially, my mind is boggled by
| how much the constant pushing against a wall was weighing on
| me.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Maybe I'm naive but the 20% of free self directed work (ala
| Google) seems like an effective cure right ? It might be enough
| to feed a worker enough deep satisfaction to make the potential
| bs job acceptable again.
| brimble wrote:
| Sitting here mid-career, I suppose (maybe farther along than
| that--we'll see how the whole age discrimination thing works
| out in a couple years), I'm now convinced that the problem is
| doing the same thing week. After week. After week.
|
| I think I'd be absolutely thrilled to be in this industry,
| still, if I wrote code... I dunno, 25-30 weeks per year, then
| did _literally anything else_ the other weeks, including any
| kind of work that didn 't involve staring at a screen.
|
| It's doing the same thing almost all damn year that makes is
| such a grind.
|
| I like working, actually. I hate doing the exact same work
| 48+ weeks per year. HATE it.
| Underqualified wrote:
| David Graeber talks about this in his book 'bullshit jobs'. He
| also links the rise of bullshit jobs to the rise of burnouts
| and other mental issues.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| What a great book rec. I wish more hacker news comments
| recommended less technical but still highly analytical books
| like this.
| brimble wrote:
| I doubt even 10% of the code I've written over the last 15ish
| years is still in use, anywhere.
|
| I doubt more than a quarter of it ever had an overall positive
| effect--monetary or otherwise--large enough to justify the cost
| of writing it.
|
| I've spent probably a third of my career, spread out here and
| there, working on projects that all the ICs could tell were
| doomed for super-obvious reasons (clear failure to find
| product/market fit then doubling down, entering a market very
| late and with only a few percent of the investment it would
| take to have a realistic chance at it, that kind of thing)
|
| Then there are vanity projects like a company's annual investor
| report _app_. JFC.
|
| Working in tech feels like being a small part of some kind of
| horrible random input process that feeds the capitalist pyramid
| above.
| enobrev wrote:
| This echoes my experience as well, but from a freelance
| perspective rather than as an employee. About 20 years of web
| development experience with hundreds of projects. Some were
| excellent, hopeful projects that legitimately helped people.
| Most were not. Regardless, there are maybe 3-5 of them left,
| and it's hard to say if _any_ of the code I've written on
| them is still there.
|
| The majority of my last ten years have gone toward start-ups,
| and the timelines toward EOL are generally even shorter - at
| least until we hit something out of the park. At the very
| least the days are exciting, the problems are interesting,
| and the distance between myself and the end user is very
| short.
| gdfgjhs wrote:
| Another big issue is Checkmark Driven Development.
|
| I signed up to work on a microservice where we were supposed to
| be a small startup within a big company. We supposedly can make
| decisions which are good for our customers and work on
| interesting challenges.
|
| Except security and compliance is top priority, and it doesn't
| matter how those security and compliance requirements fit our
| service. We need to get a checkmark. Everyone from security and
| compliance team is unable to have a technical discussion but
| they continue make technical decisions for us.
|
| And in order to stay relevant, they change their checkmark
| requirements every few months. So we spend all our time, trying
| to keep our service compliant and don't really get anytime to
| work on real issues.
|
| I get the feeling my job's main function is to keep these
| security and compliance people happy. They have no skin in our
| service, my manager doesn't want to bring up issues with her
| higher up.
|
| All this leave me feeling extremely unsatisfied and burned out
| at the end of the day.
| runnerup wrote:
| It ends with a sales pitch for a manual to reduce burnout by
| paying attention to 16 dimensions. This document provides no
| solutions for workplace burnout.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| It's called the state of burnout in tech, not the solution to
| burnout in tech.
| heroHACK17 wrote:
| Has anyone pivoted out of tech completely? What was your
| experience like?
| odysseus_3 wrote:
| I'm in the middle of a pivot out, having recently quit what was
| my "dream job" at a top company while making the most money
| I've earned in my career.
|
| I knew it was coming eventually after having burned out a
| couple times at prior jobs. In all cases it was caused by a mix
| of the factors the article mentions plus a lack of meaning and
| fulfillment as a software engineer that I've never been able to
| escape. This last role was sort of a last ditch effort to see
| if a renowned company, good salary, and good manager could make
| things better. It didn't, and in fact I think it was the
| cognitive dissonance of that situation that lead me to burnout
| harder and more quickly than I have in past positions.
|
| I've had a few weeks to reflect and recharge and so far I have
| no regrets.
|
| The next step is to try hard to find a better option in another
| industry or some form of self-employment, though it's required
| some mindfulness to be honest with myself about what I truly
| want and could be qualified for. I also know that I could
| easily just go right back into the fray; who could give up the
| money and stability? I don't take those for granted. It's
| certainly a far better option than failing my family or going
| into poverty. But I'm optimistic I can make it work.
| tayo42 wrote:
| any time i think of this i look at the pay and realize it would
| be insane to
| an9n wrote:
| I'd like to know the same. I'm near the point of leaving the
| industry just out of disgust at where it's going.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I get some pretty bad burnout when I don't get along well with my
| team and/or the workload feel too large. The second one is even
| fine for sometime if the team is understanding.
|
| Mostly its interacting with people who are just
| unhelpful/unkind/unfriendly/combative that makes me think, "Why
| am I spending so much of my life doing this?" which tends to
| cause me to spiral a bit.
|
| If anyone is reading this and thinks oh maybe I should be nicer
| to my teammates... You should try. Being a little kinder might
| make your life a lot easier because your team wont dislike
| interacting with you.
| autokad wrote:
| In general, Tech has no respect for people's personal time.
|
| Leetcoding is a problem. we are forced to spend substantial parts
| of our lives preparing for these coding interviews, and that
| doesn't cover design, behavioral, and take homes. my brother is a
| doctor who makes 350k base, you know what an interview is like
| for him? "do you doctor" "yes I do doctoring" "great come
| aboard". its problematic that our gatekeepers for roles is
| guarded by skill sets that have very little to do with our day to
| day jobs, and that we have to spend our precious personal time
| prepping for it. this gets amplified by the fact that promotions
| are so little, the only way to get a real raise is through job
| hopping.
|
| On call. We should value our personal time, any company/manager
| that expects you to work during it without at least offering 2x
| pay for those hours, has no respect for your personal time. you
| are giving your life away here, so its no wonder why on call is
| so life draining.
|
| There are more but dont want to go on further
| fsociety wrote:
| The bar to becoming a doctor is significantly higher than
| becoming a programmer though. And there are several obligations
| you have with professional boards on continuing education and
| remaining sharp in your practice.
|
| I find it hard to agree with the idea that a programmer's time
| is respected less than a doctor's too. How many hours per a
| week does a doctor work vs programmer? Unless you are
| experienced and in a cushy private practice, I'd bet the doctor
| has less freedom with time.
| francisofascii wrote:
| You are correct. The time demands of even highly experienced
| doctors is surprisingly true. I would argue that profession
| should also be reformed to require less hours.
| CalRobert wrote:
| The world is burning, carbon emissions are increasing despite a
| global pandemic, democracy is in backslide, and I'm doing stupid
| shit that really doesn't matter. My children will grow up in a
| hotter, thirstier, more dangerous world. Nothing I'm doing is
| going to improve this.
|
| My job is cush. I work remote. I make good money. But I stare
| blankly at the screen and just can't bring myself to care. I eye
| climatebase and naturetech a lot, though.
| Maximus9000 wrote:
| There are companies that you could work for that would be win-
| win. Companies that are making the world better and still
| require talented software developers.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Which industries are you referring? I feel like most
| industries that have job openings is suspect from a moral
| perspective.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Some of the companies I have spoken with, or would like to:
|
| culdesac.com (car-free urban communities) planet.com
| cervest.earth
|
| also jobs at climatebase.org and naturetech.io
|
| If I were in urban design I'd look at
| https://www.humankind.city/ among other similar
| organisations. The EU made a bunch of urban mobility
| related content free at https://urbanmobilitycourses.eu, my
| favourite is https://urbanmobilitycourses.eu/courses/free-
| visualization-t...
| CalRobert wrote:
| There are! I've been interviewing with them the last couple
| weeks. I also have a personal project that I hope helps
| (meant to help get walking and bike infra built)
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I would love to work at a company that does something great
| for the world. Like work on climate change or longevity. It
| feels so hard to find those roles though.
| heurist wrote:
| I'm at a company with a sustainability and technology-oriented
| mission that still can't get its shit together and let me do my
| damn job. Grass is always greener. The mission does help,
| though.
| uoaei wrote:
| Your comment drives to the crux and puts the issue in context,
| thanks.
|
| It is the _lack of things to look forward to_ or _be excited
| about_ that causes and sustains burnout. Be it in the scope of
| a single project, or career development, or an entire
| generational legacy, we have lost hope.
| marsnegrette wrote:
| What about the demands outside of work that affects burnout?
| porker wrote:
| For me burnout comes from imposter syndrome. It's being
| surrounded by a tech world with people who are so certain about
| everything, and especially that their way is right. Where there's
| no nuance or context taken into account.
|
| I find it exhausting as I'm constantly questioning myself. And,
| despite delivering projects that help people and work for the
| business, I always seem to be swimming against the tide of
| (programmer) opinion.
|
| 20 years down, another 20 to go.
| layer8 wrote:
| While the problem of burnout is very real (I'm affected myself),
| please note that this is partially an ad for Yerbo, and there is
| no indication that the study was conducted independently.
| quantumabyss wrote:
| Without a comparison to other careers / professions the
| statistics presented don't mean much. How burnt out are teachers
| is my question. They're paid a lot less.
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