[HN Gopher] Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit
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Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit
Author : HieronymusBosch
Score : 269 points
Date : 2022-05-03 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (about.gitlab.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (about.gitlab.com)
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > Celebrate progress. Burnout is often caused by a feeling of
| stagnation. Seeing the progress you're making day-to-day is hard.
| Managers should create space to celebrate small wins and reflect
| on the mountains you've climbed.
|
| I really appreciate this one. As a very high conscientiousness
| and med-high neuroticism person a manager asking for a "status
| check" on a project actually sounds like "You did something wrong
| that gave me cause for concern/doubt" which causes an inordinate
| amount of stress and self doubt that I'm truly giving it my all
| -- which leads me to push harder regardless of how hard I already
| am...
|
| Celebrating progress allows me to say "Yeah, things may not be on
| our desired timeline, but also we're making progress and that
| timeline was unrealistic... We'll get there so long as we
| continue to invest".
| brtkdotse wrote:
| It a very, very fine line to tread before it becomes Defiant
| Jazz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Turq37lntO0)
| lobstrosity420 wrote:
| This video is an amazing summary of the GitLab article
| itself.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I really dislike this when it feels forced and artificial.
|
| Also there's a strong risk of doing some little employee-
| appreciation gesture that backfires and pisses people off. Most
| of them do, because it feels like the company has cheaped out,
| or worse, spent a shit-load of money on something that you hate
| and then expects you to be grateful about it.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| I very much feel you on this. At some point I have enough
| company swag.
|
| I do think the "appreciation store" model is a really good
| one. Allowing each to choose their reward.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I very much think that the "give me money" model is a
| really good one.
|
| There's this very odd strain of infantilization that runs
| through a lot of corporate office management, like they are
| trying to reward second-graders with a choice from the
| prize box if they collect enough gold stars, rather than
| dealing with fully-grown adults that have their own
| children.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| I actually really agree with this too. It helps normalize
| comp across all life choices too. There are so many, some
| which people get salty about suggesting it's a form of
| "comp" .
|
| For examples: * I basically don't drink
| so anything that has alcohol as it's selling point is
| non-comp to me * I'm not going to be a parent
| so why cant I have a sabbatical in place of parental
| leave? * I basically don't get sick, and when
| I do I still manage to deliver decently. Why not pay me
| out sick days? I could just lie and take them, but why
| should I have to?
|
| -* and before someone goes exclaiming "Privilege!"
| remember these are real life choices with costs borne in
| other areas of life -- for example the choice to not have
| children is going to be very expensive when I'm older and
| have to pay for everything that children do for free
| taking care of their elderly parents. It's not a pure
| privilege, but a temporal shift of cost/benefits. *-
| jseban wrote:
| Yeah it pisses me off when I've been squeezed for every drop
| for the whole project by some bozo manager, and then I'm also
| now forced to be forget and forgive all of that, and pretend
| to be happy, because of some awkward celebration, just
| becomes another ass kissing for the manager and salt in the
| wounds for me.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I've never gotten burned out because I had a lot of work to do.
| Those are the good times.
|
| Mostly I've gotten burned out because I couldn't bring myself to
| care and because I was bored.
| darioush wrote:
| I'm pretty sure we will see an appetite for transition to the 4
| day work week.
|
| Most people will find some paycut (10-20%) acceptable in exchange
| for increasing their free time by 50% (2 day weekend -> 3 day
| weekend).
|
| Most companies will find the 10-20% reduction in a very large
| expense (payroll) attractive in the current tightening economic
| conditions.
|
| I would be surprised if there was any productivity loss as a
| result of this, people will feel better, more valued, and will
| perform equally as well. It's not like you can really clock out
| of a software job especially in the remote world, so days off are
| more important.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I think we're very close to it if not there already.
| Additionally, the prevalence of long Covid will likely force
| some companies to re-examine previously sacrosanct employment
| structures such as the 5 day work week or nothing.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| All the "strategies" (really just tips) follow the same pattern
| of either tunneling on overwork as a cause, treating symptoms or
| pathos.
|
| >Sid and Michelle emphasized that the earlier a manager can
| identify burnout the better.
|
| Honestly, at the point of identification, you're likely too late.
| Especially for something as insidious as burnout, which can last
| for years and not show any symptoms before it is beyond the point
| of no return.
|
| >GitLab team members are often under a lot of pressure.
|
| So stop putting them under a lot of pressure. The second tip
| hints at this, but it only seems to be a reactionary measure.
| Maybe all this goalsetting, OKRs and such is exactly the problem
| with the industry, always having to feel pressured to an extreme
| by metrics and stats which effectively mean nothing, when most
| people just want to put in an honest day's work and progress.
|
| Maybe it's time to admit corporations went too far pressuring the
| average worker to worry over every little detail.
| twh270 wrote:
| I'd shorten that to "Maybe it's time to admit corporations went
| too far pressuring the average worker".
|
| It took me a long time to realize it, but work/life balance in
| the U.S. is weighted far too heavily in favor of business, at
| the expense of the individual and their family and community.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| It's not just the US. Without going into the nuances of the
| US, things like burnout are severely on the rise among the
| younger crowds all over the world _despite_ some of them
| working as much or less than before in several countries.
|
| Most of these countries are adopting American office
| concepts. More statistics, more pressure, more management /
| talks with management, more "work family", tighter
| interviews, you name it. All stuff that pressures the Average
| Joe who just wants to make a living. For SE, the majority of
| these jobs are best described as "gluing APIs together",
| nowhere near the prestigious "you really gotta want it!" jobs
| they are sold as. Now add to that while SE does earn above
| average in all of these countries, it isn't so luxurious as a
| non-senior that you could pick your nose and live super
| comfortably no matter which city you live in.
|
| So the pressure got worse and both intrinsic and extrinsic
| motivators are down. Add onto that a bunch of other societal
| problems. If anything, it's more surprising people _aren 't_
| expecting half the populace to burn out at some point in
| life.
| outworlder wrote:
| You start by arguing that it's not just the US, and then
| continue by saying that the rest of the world is adopting
| american practices, which is causing the issue.
|
| I'm confused.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| The former was referencing location, in that other
| western countries are already having the same problems.
| Partially due to adopting the latter culturally. However,
| American office culture is not the _sole_ problem: a lot
| of people in EU wouldn 't object to these office politics
| nearly as much if there was a luxurious total comp
| attached to it or an interesting job. They go through
| worse hoops just for those.
|
| That said, maybe it'd be more apt to say "Silicon Valley
| office culture".
| [deleted]
| nrdgrrrl wrote:
| spacemadness wrote:
| Anecdote time. As I've moved into larger companies and am
| shackled by OKRs, I am enjoying my work a lot less and feel
| under more pressure than ever but am getting less useful work
| done. It feels like a lack of trust and assumes the
| organization is run very efficiently and fairly--which I don't
| think any company can truly claim. People just seem to adjust
| by gaming these systems instead of putting useful effort into
| their work.
| outworlder wrote:
| > As I've moved into larger companies and am shackled by
| OKRs, I am enjoying my work a lot less and feel under more
| pressure than ever but am getting less useful work done.
|
| Ditto.
|
| At this point I feel that spending my entire day writing
| emails (even though I'm on engineering) would not only look
| better but would meet OKRs, while getting zero actual useful
| work done.
|
| I hate this fad.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| Moving to a small company is the only antidote, for the most
| part. Actually, pretty much everything is better at a small
| company. For anyone who's only worked at a mega corp or a
| "Unicorn" where working 60+ hours is expected, working with a
| small group of people who all know each other will change
| your life.
| chrsig wrote:
| it can depend on the stage of life of the small company.
|
| I've been at my current company from it's series A, through
| a series B, a layoff, sale of one of it's IPs/customer
| bases, and ultimately sale to a holding company.
|
| I agree with your overall point -- working with a small
| group of people who all know each other is great. I've had
| the opportunity to work with some people for the better
| part of a decade, and having that kind history with
| coworkers can be a real boon for communication and
| planning. It's also much more impactful when a coworker
| decides to leave.
|
| The real shift towards a more sane work style happened
| after the acquisition by the holding company. It came with
| a layoff at the start, which was really disruptive.
| However, since then, there's been a huge focus on
| profitability rather than growth. Willingness to make big
| investments is much more conservative.
| jldugger wrote:
| > As I've moved into larger companies and am shackled by OKRs
|
| Try moving into a large company _without_ OKRs. How much
| redundancy do you need to buy to achieve your service
| reliability goals? Well, you can decide on any goal you want
| but management now has the right to declare the decision
| wrong post-hoc:
|
| Got an outage? Should have spent more Didn't have an outage?
| Why are we wasting all this money?
|
| And of course, by avoiding any public commitment like an OKR,
| they are somehow absolved of accountability in the matter.
| twh270 wrote:
| I agree fully with this. I'm currently at a small company
| (which has a different set of challenges), but my experience
| is that large employers come up with flavor-of-the-year
| useless metrics in an attempt to measure progress towards
| goals and productivity.
| bogomipz wrote:
| I have similar views on the OKRs. I am not even sure how they
| became so ubiquitous as a measuring stick. Did this come out of
| Scrum and just found a welcome place in general management
| speak?
|
| I'm also curious if anyone feels similarly about daily standup
| meetings and the hyperventilating over the Jira board? I feel
| like I've been in environments where the goal seems to
| perversely turn into having something to discuss at the next
| days standup meeting.
| piva00 wrote:
| Scrum never really had OKRs.
|
| I noticed OKRs and OKDs and whatever other flavour of it
| popping up after the big tech rise. Google and others were
| seeds of this style of delivery management, somehow this was
| taught in some MBA and when this generation of MBAs started
| to take reins of other companies it got spread around as
| gospel.
|
| I fucking hate it, it's overloaded with rituals that get
| repeated every quarter: workshops, planning sessions,
| vision/mission workshops, and so on and so forth. The worse
| is that never seems that anything has enough time to be done,
| in my experience roughly a month of each quarter is mentally
| spent by going through these motions, justifying work that
| needs to be done, doing discovery for what's upcoming (that
| _needs_ to be done before planning season ends). Constantly
| switching contexts about what we 're working right now with
| what work needs to be done in the future, every single
| fucking quarter.
|
| I'm getting extremely tired of this cycle, it's getting
| longer and longer to recover from each of these "planning
| seasons".
|
| P.S.: Not mentioning the variance in processes, each company
| you join has their own set of rituals and timelines for
| planning and so it'll take a few cycles of it until you
| figure out what's important and what I can tune off and give
| my mind a break.
| bogomipz wrote:
| Ah, thanks for the detail regarding the origin of this. For
| some reason I just assumed it came out of some scrum cult
| type thing as the rise of that was also for around the time
| OKR became part of the lexicon. I completely agree. Are we
| just stuck with this then for the foreseeable future I
| wonder? It seems to be that there are enough people that
| share this sentiment that this whole overbearing process
| ritual has become largely performative and toxic.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Well, management types are probably not going to
| collectively vote against something that could jeopardize
| their jobs, even if it would be beneficial for the corp.
| So we're waiting for higher management (C-level) and
| startups to take the risk and show it can be done
| differently and more efficiently.
|
| Meanwhile, most developers are not uncomfortable enough
| they are willing to unionize and stir the pot over this.
| There's a disturbing lack of empirical evidence over all
| this, some even pointing towards how destructive these
| trends are. Yet, if the people themselves are unwilling
| to combine their collective weight and push back,
| nothing's going to happen.
|
| I think the best way to put it is "most people don't care
| or flat-out dislike it, but it is too much effort to push
| back given the perceived success rate". Some adjacent
| comments already hint to it: stirring the pot is a great
| way to get yourself on the no-no list and have to start
| looking for a new job.
| LegitShady wrote:
| You're not wrong. The problem is conflicting incentives.
| Managers are incentivized to create metrics, goals, deadlines,
| and performance structures that give them the feeling (really
| just a feeling often) of being able to measure and 'control'
| progress.
|
| The problem is the people accountable for all those things are
| living under the weight of all their KPIs and metrics. The more
| those measurements are reduced or made less important the
| easier it is to focus on just doing the work. But for the
| manager it becomes harder to state how good the process is, and
| what they need to do to stay on track.
| [deleted]
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Exactly. Putting on ever more pressure while also disempowering
| people puts them in a psychological spit that leads to burnout.
| [deleted]
| jseban wrote:
| > So stop putting them under a lot of pressure. The second tip
| hints at this, but it only seems to be a reactionary measure.
| Maybe all this goalsetting, OKRs and such is exactly the
| problem with the industry, always having to feel pressured to
| an extreme by metrics and stats which effectively mean nothing,
| when most people just want to put in an honest day's work and
| progress.
|
| Yeah I wish you'd at least be given a chance to be responsible
| about delivering, and not always crack the whip by default,
| there's just no way you can ever have a healthy working
| environment.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| > So stop putting them under a lot of pressure. The second tip
| hints at this, but it only seems to be a reactionary measure.
| Maybe all this goalsetting, OKRs and such is exactly the
| problem with the industry, always having to feel pressured to
| an extreme by metrics and stats which effectively mean nothing,
| when most people just want to put in an honest day's work and
| progress.
|
| You nailed it. The entire article can be summed up by your
| statement. It's great they're acknowledging it, but putting
| corporate make-up on it is cringey; it almost comes off like we
| are the problem and not the other way around.
|
| I don't give a damn about "drinking the kool-aid" and I don't
| give a damn about your business theatrics nor the political
| drama that goes with it. Give me work to do and leave me alone
| to do it. That'll solve a lot of the burn-out.
| jseban wrote:
| > Give me work to do and leave me alone to do it. That'll
| solve a lot of the burn-out.
|
| Yeah but this really translates to asking management to
| actually do their job, and letting you do yours. Any hint at
| this attitude will get you in a world of trouble.
| d4mi3n wrote:
| This touches on a theme I see in a lot of US organizations
| I work at: Lack of accountability at the management and
| executive level.
|
| If you're well established in your career as an engineer
| today, you have leverage. Many of us have the very
| privileged luxury of being able to refuse to work at a
| place with poor management, or under a bad manager.
|
| We likewise have the ability to say "no" to things. I
| wouldn't recommend making it a habit, and I'd also suggest
| qualifying any "no" you give to your supervisors, but it's
| important to push back when it's reasonable to do so. e.g.
| "I won't be on call because it is not in my employment
| contract and wasn't a responsibility I agreed to."
| wiz21c wrote:
| that's super right. Got first hand unfortunate experience.
| The simple thing is: please managers don't buy the work-hard-
| to-compete ethos. It's not because you can take it that
| others can or should.
| kodah wrote:
| American Corporations drink their own kool-aid, which is
| probably why they can sit there and talk about what's wrong
| concisely without knowing what to do about it. The days of
| servant leadership, or leading from the front are gone in
| terms of management. Instead, they're a self-serving bunch.
| Engineers are effectively the lowest on the hierarchy and
| their happiness matters to no one in the chain because
| everyone is serving the link above them. If software ever
| does unionize I don't think it'll be over pay, it'll be over
| stuff like this.
| malfist wrote:
| You have a very negative opinion about management. Please
| remember that managers are people too and they're (likely)
| trying their best too. Just as they give you feedback, it
| is often helpful to give upward feedback too. Especially if
| it's in the form of "I need you to do X to help me"
| kodah wrote:
| Interesting you thought I haven't tried to have those
| conversations upward. The problem is there's zero
| incentive for managers to listen or change.
|
| I do have a negative opinion about managers. Managers
| mandated themselves into making x times the amount of
| their top paid report, control decision making, and have
| hiring and firing powers all in one position. Managers
| being people doesn't make them immune from criticism, and
| if me describing the status quo upsets you, then maybe we
| should be having a bigger discussion about what being in
| a captured ideology looks like from the ground.
| jseban wrote:
| > The problem is there's zero incentive for managers to
| listen or change.
|
| Yeah, there is now only incentive to get rid of you since
| you are having a negative impact on the manager's
| (perceived) success, and you have also banned yourself
| from ever being promoted to management by being disloyal.
| np- wrote:
| Not OP, but I don't feel this has anything to do with any
| specific people, but more an indictment of the system
| itself that we've created. Historically, there has never
| been an incentive or compensation structure that exists
| in companies that would lead management to begin to care
| about this stuff over their other priorities and
| deliverables.
| kirsebaer wrote:
| There is when the employees join together in a union.
| hitekker wrote:
| Speaking as a manager, a lot of managers seems to resort
| to the "managers are people too" truism whenever they're
| called out on managerial misbehavior. I think a lot of
| people in the occupation can't own up to abuses of our
| power so our gut reaction is to handwave away the very
| idea of power.
|
| "We're all on the same level, so you can't hold us to a
| higher standard" is a silly but common way to confuse
| this sort of ethical problem.
| kodah wrote:
| Shout-out to you for saying this. I'm not anti-manager by
| any means, but I'm very vocal that our existing (and most
| common) system is not working well, or to the benefit of
| most people or the corporation.
| quantified wrote:
| All the way up to the CEO who's setting the tone. The
| farther up the ladder, the "best" is more likely to serve
| their own interest, it's why they've pursued that rank in
| the first place.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Won't people please think of the poor managers making ten
| times our income, come on guys, just because I will
| literally fire you when some VP demands it, were all on
| the same side. Here, have a cookie and forget this whole
| thing.
| [deleted]
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > So stop putting them under a lot of pressure.
|
| I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Pressure can be
| perceived even without expectations. I think especially junior
| developers have a hard time knowing which deadlines are
| actually important, and may tend to experience a much larger
| responsibility for the entire project than anyone expects of
| them.
|
| In part this may be down to a bad communication style from
| managers, a good manager shields the team from worrying about
| clouds on the horizon; but this isn't always the case.
|
| I've had people I've had to sit down and tell that this
| overtime they're putting in isn't expected of them, nobody asks
| this of them, it isn't their responsibility but the team got
| this, it's not worth burning out at age 24 over some sprint
| deliverable that's like just a cell in a spreadsheet that
| nobody really cares about.
| vlunkr wrote:
| A huge problem I had to overcome was learning to leave work
| mentally every day. The online and WFH nature of software work
| makes it easy to feel like you're always on-call and feeling
| some low-level stress. This is a quick path to burnout for me.
| My advice to anyone in this situation is to be firm about not
| working outside your regular hours. If someone messages or
| emails when you're not working, don't respond until you're back
| on the clock, even disable notifications if that's a stress-
| trigger. Obviously actually being on-call is different. That
| needs to be an official policy, ideally spread across multiple
| devs so you're not on 24/7.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Since I started working from home, I have an alarm set for
| 4:50pm to remind me that 'work' ends in 10 minutes. I might
| choose to violate that deliberately, but not by accident.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Turn off all work devices after work hours.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Maybe all this goalsetting, OKRs and such is exactly the
| problem with the industry,
|
| Yes, yes it is.
|
| That is also a symptom of a bigger problem: management doesn't
| really have to be useful for the company, they merely have to
| _appear_ to be. Exceptional management is nearly invisible,
| which is great for companies, bad for careers.
|
| The solution? Managers will make noise and a lot of it. Part of
| this requires crazy deadlines. If the ship is not creaking it's
| not being pushed hard enough. Attrition? Bad culture fit, we
| work hard, we play hard. "I delivered <project> months ahead of
| schedule" sounds way better than "I delivered it on time" -
| nevermind that the "delivered" project is a buggy mess noone
| uses and will require a lot more effort to get to an acceptable
| state.
|
| We should be praising progress. Not everything should be a
| 'sprint', it should be a 'march'. What's all the sprinting for?
|
| Most deadlines literally don't matter. Motivated teams that are
| able to perform their best work do matter.
|
| > when most people just want to put in an honest day's work and
| progress.
|
| This.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << Exceptional management is nearly invisible, which is great
| for companies, bad for careers.
|
| The more I think about it, the more it aligns with my
| experiences so far.
|
| << Most deadlines literally don't matter.
|
| What?! Are you insane? What are we going to tell blue ribbon
| initiative committee?
|
| << Managers will make noise and a lot of it.
|
| Yup.
| [deleted]
| javajosh wrote:
| The most insidious cause of burnout is _excitement_. To be
| excited about a project, to be important to it, wanting to be a
| hero, wanting to be looked up to by your coworkers, is such a
| powerful motivation to ignore your own health. And it is exciting
| /interesting to see what your limits really are.
|
| The best thing you can do is _develop habits that help you
| recover at every timescale_. On the smallest timescale the
| Pomodoro Technique is really, really good at least in part
| because it quickly proves you wrong if you think you shouldn 't
| stop because "momentum". Never, not once in using the technique,
| have I ever lost momentum and in fact quite often I come back to
| the problem with much greater clarity and speed. (Note that
| taking a 5 minute break every 25 minutes is _entirely different_
| than taking a meeting or working on another problem. Those are
| context switches and are the worst of all worlds - you 're not
| working on the problem AND you're not resting.)
|
| On the daily timescale, morning meditation serves the same
| purpose as the 5 minute break, but it's more intense and more
| holistic. I see it as giving you "headroom" for your day so you
| can deal with things as they come, with equanimity. My worst days
| have always been the ones where I stubbornly refused to meditate
| (and I often do _that_ because I have been meditating regularly
| and feel like I don 't need it anymore. Ha. My mind is sometimes
| a real dick.)
| mr_tristan wrote:
| My main sources of burnout these days are: 1. useless information
| overload, and 2. lack of focus time. And it's rare that I've
| actually met a manager who could even see this as a problem.
|
| My main way to deal with this: just ignore 99% of my incoming
| notifications. The only notifications I need are "SLA is broken".
| Everything else should just be low priority async systems, and
| honestly, email worked pretty well for this but everyone just
| loves using Slack or a similar tool now.
|
| And the entire business loves to work against you too...
|
| Most of my managers have just loved throwing juniors into the mix
| with no structure on how they'll be mentored - just let the
| senior engineers figure it out. Ergo, I now have to periodically
| check Slack and review notifications again just to make sure none
| of the juniors reached out.
|
| Oh, and don't forget the other random people who grabbed your
| name from delivering a bug fix six months ago and just want to
| check on a thing "real quick" or ask a "small" question.
|
| Modern office communication is a clusterfuck, and probably
| contributes more to stress and reduces productivity more than any
| other aspect of work. And trying to remedy this as an individual
| contributor is usually unsustainable. It's a management problem,
| and sadly, this "management toolkit" gleefully avoids this.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| I have been on the edge to burnout. Reasons why.
|
| Incompetent people always stress everybody up:
|
| They put enormous pressure on single persons.
|
| They steel a lot of time and energy.
|
| They try to get other persons to do their work.
|
| They always sidetrack everybody into quests that are not
| important.
|
| They never solve anything. Every solution to a problem comes with
| new problems that are more difficult to handle.
|
| They always blame other people for everything, especially people
| they can get rid of.
|
| They think delivery is more relevant than things work in
| production.
| jseban wrote:
| More or less modus operandi for tech company managers in my
| experience.
| tristor wrote:
| What actually burned me out when I was an engineer was
| conflicting signals.
|
| At one company our team worked ourselves into a froth and got a
| major multi-year project done 8 months ahead of scheduled and
| millions of dollars under budget. Everyone on the team was given
| a sizeable spot bonus and a public thank-you in a company all-
| hands... then they proceeded to lay off the entire team.
|
| At another company, I clearly raised concerns about a new product
| ahead of launch, was told that my concerns were invalid, then the
| senior engineer on the product team left the company, then most
| of the other devs left, then management went live with the launch
| on time even though it was not ready, and I was expected (and
| followed through) on keeping online through the launch rush as
| the assigned Ops person. Afterwards there was never any
| acknowledgement of the fact that I was 100% right in all of my
| criticisms and that their failure to address them directly lead
| to the lost of 5 people, forced me to work significant overtime
| (the first 3 days of the launch I didn't even leave the office, I
| slept on a couch), and that had they addressed them properly it
| would have increase revenues. Senior managers lauded the product
| and considered it a success... I considered (and still consider)
| it a failure, and it's still inferior to competitors that entered
| the market later and did things correctly, the way I would have
| done them.
|
| What would have helped me is that when I felt successful, that my
| management felt our team was successful, and then treated us like
| we were successful. When I felt that our team was failing, that
| management would have treated us like we're failing (additional
| support / time). What happened instead was mixed signals that
| always resulted in a net benefit to senior managers and a direct
| net detriment to the engineering teams, and myself personally. A
| cynical take would be that burn out is caused by senior managers
| being selfish assholes.
| lifeplusplus wrote:
| Why do I feel 2nd company wasn't led by technical founders or
| technical management
| 0daystock wrote:
| A lot of this is centered around doing less, expecting less from
| your workers, hiring more and "being more positive". These are
| pretty sentiments, but frankly they're completely dis-joined from
| the reality of working in a competitive, high-stakes engineering
| environment, where your boss WILL call you while you're on
| vacation, where you WILL go 8-12 months without finding a
| qualified candidate, where you WILL feel pressure to deliver
| products by deadlines. Unfortunately, Gitlab doesn't strike me as
| a high-stakes job for engineers nor managers. This isn't a moral
| judgement on them, but a reminder that serious work requires
| sacrifice and some burnout is inevitable, and even unavoidable.
| And that's not necessary a "bad" thing to avoid as it provides
| valuable life insights and growth in its own way.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| What a shortsighted view. I struggle not to go against the
| comment guidelines. This hustle culture drives me up the wall.
|
| A crunch once in a while is fine. Some deadlines are
| unavoidable. But brute force as corporate culture will
| inevitably lead to shit results. Especially in so-called "high-
| stakes environments" , where mistakes carry severe
| consequences.
|
| On top of that, burning out can nullify years of "personal
| growth". A wreck is a wreck, no matter how many seas it has
| sailed.
| 0daystock wrote:
| Honestly, I understand your sentiment and there's probably a
| bit of Stockholm syndrome going on with my appreciation of
| such culture. Under it, engineering quality definitely
| suffers - as well as morale and such things - but these were
| inconsequential to the bottom line of the business. And while
| enjoying the rewards of our labor through stock options and
| market dynamics, it hardly seemed to matter to anyone,
| including myself. Let's just consider the value proposition:
| I accumulated five years of salary in one, and can afford to
| take time off work to focus on personal growth, or whatever.
| I'm not under any illusion that every high-pressure job is
| rewarding, but it certainly seems more likely than a lax one
| where people take their time and true laziness goes
| unnoticed.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| > serious work requires sacrifice and some burnout is
| inevitable
|
| Well, the Navy Seals, who know a thing or two about high stress
| and deadly serious work, popularized the expression "slow is
| smooth and smooth is fast."
|
| But unless you're an emergency room doctor or defending Ukraine
| or developing the next COVID19 vaccine, come on, nothing you're
| doing is _that_ important.
|
| What you're describing is not a thing that most organizations
| have any real need for, it's a culture of fake emergencies.
| balfirevic wrote:
| > where your boss WILL call you while you're on vacation
|
| > where you WILL feel pressure to deliver products by deadlines
|
| vs.
|
| > where you WILL go 8-12 months without finding a qualified
| candidate
|
| Sounds like a pretty good position to set some boundaries as an
| employee.
| irremediable wrote:
| > the reality of working in a competitive, high-stakes
| engineering environment, where your boss WILL call you while
| you're on vacation, where you WILL go 8-12 months without
| finding a qualified candidate, where you WILL feel pressure to
| deliver products by deadlines.
|
| This sounds like an unproductive environment?
|
| Like... a boss shouldn't need to call reports on their
| vacation, that's why engineers build systems and automate
| things. Being unable to fill a position in 8-12 months suggests
| the hiring process is broken.
|
| I'm all for the importance of hard work, but I'd suggest an org
| like this is working hard but not smart.
| 0daystock wrote:
| It was without a doubt dysfunctional, and I have since left
| the position, but that role was incredibly rewarding
| financially and taught me many things about myself, and what
| I desire out of life. So while I was totally burnt out by the
| end, the juice was certainly worth the squeeze - and I would
| probably do it again instead of a quiet job where my
| supervisor could just lower expectations, though I recognize
| that's not true for everybody.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Yeah...that's not a "high stakes engineering environment",
| that's a poorly structure engineering environment.
|
| 8-12 years is enough time to train an 'unqualified'
| candidate, or get them the requisite
| licensing/certificates/etc, assuredly.
|
| On call while on vacation? You're understaffed then; even in
| the face of catastrophe you should have an on call rotation.
| If even then you still end up having to contact one person,
| you have too much knowledge siloed.
|
| Etc.
| pizza wrote:
| One of the key things I've learned is that the weekend is not for
| recharging. Every day of the week is. There's that quote goes
| "now is the time to put away childish things" - and also its
| complement, at the end of the day, guarantee you have a structure
| allowing you to do something you want to do for a few hours.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I'm curious why the article was started with:
|
| > Working at a startup is demanding
|
| Is there a corollary "working at an established dinosaur is
| relaxing"?
|
| I've worked for 10 years at a company that is celebrating its
| 50th anniversary in a few months. I've been through at least two
| burnout cycles. Peers have experienced the same.
|
| And I've experienced it at the other 4 companies I've worked at.
| I don't think startups have some special corner on the burnout
| market.
|
| Sometimes, I've survived the burnout cycles for another go, but
| in the end in fact, each time I've departed a company it's been
| because of burnout of some sort. It's usually a realization that
| I've made the difference I can make (which may be zero) and I've
| exhausted all my ideas to make the
| compnay/product/team/culture/solutions/whatever any better.
|
| Sadly as I skimmed through this list, about the only one that I
| thought would have had any dent in my various burnouts would be
| #7 - Express Gratitude. And I'm not sure that's really it. I
| think at the end of the day, what I have found lacking is a sense
| of respect. These companies pay so much money to employ and task
| software engineers, and then they try to put them in harnesses
| and treat them likes horses.
| piinbinary wrote:
| Here are some tips I would give, as an individual contributor:
|
| * Minimize the number of simultaneous projects. Having more on
| your plate than you can imagine getting done is a huge cause of
| stress and burnout.
|
| * Avoid switching priorities frequently. Shield the team from too
| many external requests.
|
| * Avoid making "small" requests (e.g. a random data pull).
| Handling your request is probably not as small an amount of work
| as you think. This is especially a problem when for people with a
| lot of meetings - they may not have that many hours left in the
| day for their "real" work, and your "small" request might take up
| all those hours for today (which is really stressful when you
| badly needed those hours for something else!).
|
| * Avoid interrupting developers / making them feel like you could
| demand something at any time.
|
| * Clarify priorities, and don't bug people about lower priority
| things.
|
| * Don't schedule too many meetings. Developers work on a Maker's
| schedule, and ideally would have at least half of each day
| completely free of meetings. Meetings are more draining for ICs
| than they are for you.
|
| * Don't argue with time estimates given by developers. (Though
| looking for ways to reduce the scope of a project is valid)
|
| * Give developers time to pay down tech debt.
|
| * Listen to and act on issues people raise.
|
| * Let people know what is going to happen well in advance. Give
| people time to gear up for changes. Don't make people feel like
| things could suddenly change at any time with no warning.
| incomingpain wrote:
| A couple jobs ago I got very burnt out, MSP where I was the only
| senior tech left. 60-80 hour weeks for many months straight. I
| was so burnt out, that I became extremely defensive and worried I
| was imminently about to be fired literally all the time. Here's
| what my boss did relative to this list, it's a funny parallel:
|
| 1. Disallowed taking vacation because they couldn't afford for me
| to be unavailable. Overtime was switched to time off in lieu but
| couldn't be used. I complained and got special dispensation to
| get overtime paid out.
|
| 2. Increased pressure, I was afterall the person who held the
| place together. New clients are needed to keep the business going
| right?
|
| 3. Regularly micromanaged and brought to light any and all
| mistakes like prioritizing my tasks incorrectly. I shouldn't have
| worked on X, I should have worked on Y.
|
| 4. Hired fresh out of college people and expected me to train
| them. I couldn't give anyone any work. I was expected to train
| them during lunch periods.
|
| 5. Certainly provided coaching, see #3 on how to prioritize tasks
| well.
|
| 6. Reminded me regularly that I was disposable. Even came out
| that he was actively looking for my replacement. Debian,
| postgresql dba, cisco and hp enterprise networking, MCITP,
| typical microsoft enterprise stuff, etc. My replacements were way
| too expensive for some reason.
|
| 7. They did have various things in the office like foosball lol.
| Very cliche at the time. They sold it because we were too busy to
| use it.
|
| 8. Absolutely celebrated progress. There was weekly meetings
| about salesforce metrics. Like how many hours each of us were
| billing out. I did very well here. Coworker who did get to take
| vacation came back to one of these meetings and got publicly
| chewed out for really bad numbers... because he was on
| vacation...
|
| 9. No sympathy. He explained that he was too busy doing sales and
| managing. He would regularly say that if he had the time he could
| go do my job easily.
|
| 10. Oh yes, he would affirm that he was the one working the most
| in the company. 100+ hours he said. I'm not sure what he did. He
| refused to cold call. He didn't do accounting, there was people
| for that. He didn't do tech work. Sure he spent probably 10-20
| hours a week micromanaging.
|
| 11. Reduce hours? I remember this one time where I was headed out
| of the office to a client site but this was maybe 20 minutes
| before the usual end of the day. I got chewed out for trying to
| skip work and go home and be paid for no work. I stayed silent
| and took it. Anyone who would leave 1 minute after the hour
| wasn't in the wrong but there would be comments made.
|
| 12. There was a small list of banned words. You would be punished
| if you ever accidentally said "I'm too busy to do that right now"
| Busy was a banned word.
|
| Minimum wage about 10 years ago was maybe $12/hr in my area. I
| only earnt slightly over $20/hr for this job. The stress from
| this job got me so sick, eventually I ended up in the ER. While
| in the ER he had a coworker 'find me and determine if I am still
| alive.' mind you... he knew exactly which floor I was in at the
| hospital.
|
| After I got onto sick leave, he made the ultimatum that if I
| don't get back to work I would be considered as quitting. I
| replied explaining that it sounded illegal to be firing me for
| getting sick. He backpedaled quickly on that. Few months later I
| got fired anyway for no reason.
|
| I got a new job. He lost a significant number of clients. He
| assumed I was stealing his clients; of which only 2 actually
| followed me to my new job. I got sued for 1.1 million $ for
| poaching his clients but after they found out that none of
| clients he listed were even either of the 2. They didnt even
| realize they lost those 2 yet. There was no non-compete or
| anything, the assertion was that I was a fiduciary employee
| obligated to protect them even after my dismissal. They wanted to
| drop the lawsuit, ended up costing me $2000 for a lawyer.
| kazen44 wrote:
| > . No sympathy. He explained that he was too busy doing sales
| and managing. He would regularly say that if he had the time he
| could go do my job easily.
|
| this is a huge red flag.
|
| No one's job (in a knowledge based worker environment) is ever
| easy, especially not if you are the senior technical person in
| the company. It calls about the dunning-krugger effect all
| over.
| incomingpain wrote:
| >No one's job (in a knowledge based worker environment) is
| ever easy, especially not if you are the senior technical
| person in the company. It calls about the dunning-krugger
| effect all over.
|
| This dude hadn't been a tech is like 10+ years and couldn't
| even do the job of the juniors if truth be told.
|
| It's funny too, on the regular there would be some issue I
| hadn't gotten too yet. He had been contacted for an update so
| he would come to me for an update. He then would want to
| micromanage and make decisions around the the ticket but he
| didn't know even the basics of the situation. So instead of
| letting me decide, he would need me to extensively explain
| the situation so that he could make the decision himself. On
| so many instances I didn't explain well enough or whatever
| and he would make really bad decisions.
|
| For example he made the decision more than once that all
| workstations should have a ping network monitor tracking
| their uptime. Fair enough... that was the case. But then he
| would make the decision that they also should alert us if
| they go down. Except then we suddenly start receiving alerts
| constantly about workstations being turned off or going to
| sleep.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Were you working for a sadist? Even if this was exaggerated a
| little bit, this isn't far from what I've experienced too.
|
| To be honest, I just look at the people in the management roles
| nowadays and if they give me "command and control" vibes, I'm
| out.
|
| Sounds like you worked for a small business and didn't know
| your own worth. You had the leverage the whole time.
| incomingpain wrote:
| >Were you working for a sadist? Even if this was exaggerated
| a little bit, this isn't far from what I've experienced too.
|
| There's corroborated stories that he was much worse before I
| knew him.
|
| While I worked him, he was actively banned from all adult
| hockey leagues in the city due to violence. Generally
| speaking leagues dont allow checking or fighting at all
| because at the end of the day older dudes need to go back to
| work on monday.
|
| So he created his own league which explicitly allowed
| checking and violence. It was tremendously popular the first
| season for the first few games and then by the second season
| nobody was going anymore and they couldn't build 2 teams.
|
| >To be honest, I just look at the people in the management
| roles nowadays and if they give me "command and control"
| vibes, I'm out.
|
| I know better now. I didnt back then.
|
| >Sounds like you worked for a small business and didn't know
| your own worth. You had the leverage the whole time.
|
| Its crazy. When I was in that situation the burnout was just
| so punishing. You feel helpless and incapable. Everything is
| backwards and upside down. My phone would ring and I would
| feel that was it... i was about to be fired. If I wasn't
| being fired... I was about to chewed out for something I
| didn't do.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I believe the most important tool to prevent burnout is slack.
| Not the app, the word.
|
| Slack gives you choice. The choice to work. To have fun. To do
| nothing. Slack allows you to deal with less bullshit. Less waste,
| not more production. Less always-on anxiety and avoiding stress
| completely.
|
| These "manager tools" are not to prevent burnout. They are a list
| of things managers probably should be doing but don't. They
| should already be commonplace in any working environment yet many
| are so barren of them.
|
| 1. Encourage time off - It's usually up to the individual to take
| time off and lookout for their well being. It could be a nice
| thing once and awhile for your boss to "gift" you a day off.
| Please don't encourage me to take my own deserved time off though
| as I have plans for it.
|
| 2. Lower the pressure - I don't see how a manager can control
| this. Some goals are external to the team/individual and people
| still rely on you to complete the work. If a manager can convince
| senior leaders to cut certain goals at risk of attrition, then
| that is their job, not mine.
|
| 3. Be more positive - This is a given. Don't know why it needs to
| be mentioned that positivity begets positivity.
|
| 4. Increase headcount - This is a manager's job. But don't expect
| increasing headcount to improve any condition of burnout just by
| adding more people to problems.
|
| 5. Offer team members coaching - Sure this would be nice, but
| most companies only offer external coaching for senior leaders
| and above. ICs and middle managers hardly will see this benefit.
| Their manager is supposed to be their "coach" and hardly many are
| qualified to do that nor does it even provide benefits given the
| role power.
|
| 6. Remind employees of mental health care resources - I'm sorry
| but every resource i've tried that's corporate sponsored is
| garbage. At least in my experience. The services often ghost you
| and the corporate sponsored quotas are like 10 emails total. Not
| enough to even chat about burnout. Everything meaningful is
| something you still have to pay for yourself (at a discount, but
| still). Running and walking is free though!
|
| 7. Express gratitude - This one is missing all over corporate
| America. A simple "thanks" goes much further than you think.
| Especially those that are genuine and out of the blue. For some
| reason managers tend to not use this "magic" word.
|
| 8. Celebrate progress - One great way to celebrate progress is by
| discussing career growth too. Although chatting about "small
| wins" and reflect on mountains you climbed is nice in retrospect,
| you do all this in expectation of a "reward" at the end of the
| day. Yes some people may genuinely care for their work (I do
| too), but I still expect these things to lead to something
| greater. More responsibilities, more compensation, etc.
|
| 9. Sympathize - It's hard to sympathize or even empathize. The
| work is completely different and even if your manager did the job
| you are doing at one point, you might be doing it better or worse
| than them. It's hard to relate in certain job tracks. It's nice
| for a manager to hold the space, but really coworkers and peers
| usually do it much better.
|
| 10. Lead by example - This one is hard for me. I've never had a
| manager who leads by example. The examples they lead by are not
| ones I would follow anyway because I'm not going to be answering
| email at crazy hours of the day because I value my life outside
| of work more. Sometimes I do check email at night, but I "send
| them later" at reasonable times in the morning. No way in hell
| I'll add email onto my personal devices though.
|
| 11. Reduce the number of hours worked by agreeing to reduce
| effort - This is usually through 1:1s or team syncs / sprint
| ceremonies. Sadly managers do not listen to the boy who cried
| wolf and reduce projects or efforts accordingly. Many of us know
| that when this happens, we just enjoy the crash and burn or feign
| ignorance instead of "I told you so".
|
| 12. Share burnout concerns with others - While I used to do this,
| it has also been detrimental to my career. I become a "flight
| risk" because I'm exploring my options and now I'm suddenly
| valued as much as I knew personally. I shouldn't have to resort
| to this option to feel appreciated. As much as I enjoy talking to
| others about burnout, it just all sounds like we do so much work
| that we aren't feeling appreciated enough with (money,
| recognition, etc).
| bavila wrote:
| > A simple "thanks" goes much further than you think.
| Especially those that are genuine and out of the blue. For some
| reason managers tend to not use this "magic" word.
|
| I used to work in litigation as an attorney before moving to
| the tech world. Started off as a public defender, which
| included working with some very challenging people (not just
| the clients, but also witnesses, sheriffs, prosecutors, judges,
| etc.). Learned pretty quickly to harness the power of three
| very powerful magic spells:
|
| * I'm sorry
|
| * Please
|
| * Thank you
|
| When used with sincerity, you can move mountains. I wish more
| people understood this.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| How to prevent burnout:
|
| Do what you can do, not what someone else wants you to do.
|
| Yes, you need to make money, you can do that too.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Cynical idea, for Senior Management: Make sure less-senior
| managers know that you're always alert to the dangers of
| developer burnout. And that your #1 "quick fix from on high" idea
| for addressing developer burnout is to downsize the intermediate
| management, then use the $Savings to hire more experienced
| developers.
| john_cogs wrote:
| GitLab team member here.
|
| While this blog post looks at what managers can do, we've also
| recently started using Yerbo (Slack app) internally to help
| individuals to assess their own risk of burnout. See:
| https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#yerbo-slack...
|
| Mental health and well-being is always a concern at GitLab (ex:
| the Friends and Family days that we implemented and maintained
| throughout the pandemic to ensure team members are taking time
| off). This month, however, we've been adding additional focus to
| the topic as May is Mental Health Awareness month.
| mdb31 wrote:
| @john_cogs: Are there any plans to connect a self-assessment of
| mental state to the assignment of issues/pings about
| mentions/incident-response pages in the GitLab app?
|
| So, on "I'm on top of the world" days, I get assigned All The
| Issues, get a full-screen popup about each mention, and will be
| asked to be incident lead on just about anything.
|
| Then, if my state is "slightly hungover", I mostly get a list
| of the most pressing issues still pending, without being
| overloaded with new stuff.
|
| And finally, the "hugging my teddy bear" state: no additional
| automated workloads, respectful notifications to anyone pinging
| me, and a note to my manager if it lasts more than a few days?
| john_cogs wrote:
| I'm not aware of any plans for a GitLab x Yerbo integration
| right now but that's a really interesting proposal.
| mdb31 wrote:
| Short-and-easy read that contains much truth. Especially item
| #10, "Lead by example" which encourages managerial review of
| recurring meetings (which often boil down to "well, here is my
| Excel sheet, you tell me how you're doing on each line item: I'll
| let you talk a lot, but I'll only jot down the completion
| percentage in the end") is worth emphasizing.
| astura wrote:
| >Encourage time off
|
| The best way to do this is to mandate a minimum time off. I've
| been lucky enough to work a couple places where this was the
| policy. This has to be a top-down initiative.
|
| >Increase headcount
|
| Definitely. I've seen short-sightedness prevent this from
| happening and it doesn't end well. In fact, I once quit a job
| where I was gradually taking on additional work (without
| additional pay, of course). I probably wouldn't have quit if I
| had one additional person to help me. When I expressed my concern
| I got "we can manage our workload right now." An ounce of
| prevention is worth a pound of cure.
|
| >Express gratitude
|
| Yes, but do it with cash. Don't send trinkets to people's houses
| - just give them the cash instead. It can get really insulting
| when you're rewarding people with silly trinkets then saying
| there's no room in the budget for a pay increase. (Been there).
| ozzythecat wrote:
| I'm going to use this post as an opportunity to tell people about
| Amazon.
|
| The company has some of the most incompetent managers, who under
| pressure, will throw their own people under the bus. By
| incompetent, I mean "yes" men who tell 10 different people
| exactly what they want to hear.
|
| These are people doing the bare minimum to keep their own jobs,
| and when things go off rails, they pass the blame to everyone
| around them, without ever accepting any responsibility.
|
| It's the opposite of everything described in this article.
|
| I've been in meetings where VPs acknowledged their expectations
| on a service launch had led to 60+ SDEs leaving the organization
| or leaving Amazon entirely. They had no remorse.
|
| I was personally told to not get involved in day to day matters
| and keep a distance with engineers in my own organization, so I
| can better focus on doing what's right for the company.
|
| The other problem was that the L5/L6 managers, often without US
| permanent residency status, would simply cower out of fear of
| losing their own jobs. If such a manager loses their job, they
| have maybe 30 days to find another employer who provides them
| sponsorship, or otherwise they have to move back to India.
|
| This led to managers not acting on their teams interest or
| protecting their engineers. Instead, they do everything to
| protect their own careers.
|
| I'm convinced most L7+ managers at Amazon have no ability to
| empathize with engineers. They are literally coached (like I was)
| on avoiding it. It's a sign of weakness.
|
| I do NOT recommend working at Amazon. It's a form of suicide for
| your physical and mental health.
| taurath wrote:
| Quite agree, having had to help ex Amazonians emotionally
| process their anti empathy training whenever they are hired at
| companies I've worked at. All my friends who've stayed at
| Amazon have gotten cold, distant, and the light behind their
| eyes is gone. If you see them entering "work mode" you see what
| is functionally a sociopath - brutal but effective. More have
| taken long breaks from work to get therapy. Some have left the
| industry entirely.
|
| I will not say that "it's not like that for everyone" or "it
| depends what team you're on". The company is made to make you
| think a certain way.
| dudul wrote:
| Amazon is on my blacklist when I evaluate resumes. I would
| never hire someone who spent more than 1 year at Amazon. I've
| seen first hand how these people are incapable of empathy,
| team work or fostering a good environment.
| gusgus01 wrote:
| Is this for managers or engineers as well? There are
| several reasons I've stayed at Amazon as an engineer, such
| as, the stock growth created golden handcuffs, covid added
| a lot of fear and uncertainty and reduced mobility, and the
| team I'm on has a lot of people I've grown fond of through
| shared tribulations.
|
| I've also found that the burnout creates a feedback loop
| that makes leaving hard to accomplish.
| ajb wrote:
| Your cutoff point might be too short. The most empathic
| manager I ever met came from there, spending 1 year 9
| months.
| radnor wrote:
| I've heard similar sentiment from other hiring managers.
| [deleted]
| president wrote:
| I'm convinced this model only really works because of the tech
| visa program. When you have a huge class of people that don't
| really have a choice between pushing back and keeping their
| hopes for a green card, you're going to get an environment
| where collective bargaining no longer works. I have experienced
| this at the last 3 places I've worked, all large enterprise
| software companies. There's no going back unfortunately and I
| feel bad for future generations of tech workers as it's already
| starting to feel like a bloodbath.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| > an environment where collective bargaining no longer works
|
| I'm sure that's not intentional at allllllll
| blowski wrote:
| There does seem tive a certain type of person that thrives at
| Amazon, while the rest just about survive until they get out.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Sadly, you can say that about nearly all of corporate America
| especially the big ones.
| ErrantX wrote:
| I've worked with several ex-amazon managers & I agree.
|
| They are carefully trained to over promise, treat the
| business/product arm as an adversary not a colleague and burn
| out engineers to hit deadlines.
|
| 0 empathy.
|
| (Often these are not bad people, they have just been
| conditioned that this is an effective way to operate; my theory
| is it's the warehouse mentality that A employs at dist centers
| translated to the office)
| volkadav wrote:
| Completely agree. I spent five years at OCI, an AWS
| competitor in Seattle, and during that time had seven
| managers (I think, maybe I missed some hi-bye reorg). The
| rock bottom worst two of them had all of their prior
| management experience at Amazon, and their managerial
| pathologies were similar: zero empathy, absurdly two-faced,
| optics-obsessed, complete grin-fucker sadists to their
| underlings. Both of them ended up leaving my erstwhile
| employer and returning to Uncle Jeff's dickhead spawning
| grounds.
|
| "Too big of an asshole to be a culture fit" when the culture
| in question is Oracle should tell any reader everything they
| need to know about a culture where they do fit in. :p
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| This seems like a pretty weak list to be called a "Toolkit". I
| think burnout is like another major issue: boredom, and both
| share the common trait that by the time a manager is aware of it,
| it is too late to address. Tips like "be positive" and "express
| gratitude" are table-stakes to being a decent team member;
| they're not nearly enough for a manager to to proactively address
| burn-out. Increasing headcount or reducing scope are rarely in
| the control of a direct manager. Nothing here attempts to address
| the underlying causes of burnout that include: boring &
| repetitive work with no slack in the schedule and a persistent
| expectation of fighting fires and noisy, immediate delivery.
| lifeplusplus wrote:
| I got burnt out and it took me 3 years to be interested in tech
| again.. even now I'm not at prev level of starting GitHub
| projects, going to hackathons, and reading tech books. I was done
| done. I attempted random entry level jobs in different fields..
| video editing, cold calling, marketing, and more
| StevenWaterman wrote:
| I suffered from severe burnout around a year ago, and only now am
| I starting to feel back to normal. Nothing here would have helped
| me, and it's pretty clear to me why that is the case.
|
| (Paraphrased from literature that I read at the time)
|
| There's two kinds of burnout. One is caused by overwork, stress,
| long hours, not enough breaks, no holidays, not enough headcount,
| and so on. The kind of things this article talks about.
|
| Instead, my burnout was caused by a lack of progress, which
| destroyed a lot of my other needs that I wasn't even thinking
| about. I felt no autonomy, no meaning to my work, and I felt out
| of place in the team because it seemed like I was the only one
| that was so bothered by it.
|
| I wasn't working too much, and I often was only doing a few hours
| of work a day. However, because of organisational issues, I was
| making no progress, barely any improvements to the code, and was
| completely demotivated. I did try taking time off and taking it
| easy, as the traditional methods to combat burnout. Far from
| helping, they just made things worse, because that wasn't the
| problem. Looking back, the issue was a company pretending to care
| about Agile and just making everything worse in the process.
|
| This ended up being a bit of a rambling vent, and I'm sorry about
| that - but my point is that we need to be aware that not all
| burnout is from stress and overwork. A lack of motivating factors
| can look the same as poor hygiene factors. Your reactionary
| measures *must* include actually talking to the person about what
| is causing the stress, and if needed, being willing to fix the
| organisational issues that are the root cause.
| manish_gill wrote:
| I actually recently suffered (am still suffering from?) a
| burning caused by the combination - super high stress combined
| with absolutely no progress, "busywork" and literally a feeling
| like a plumber whose job is to "support" the people doing the
| cool stuff (which I thought I would get to work on when I was
| hired).
|
| I was given most advice that this article mentions - I took
| vacations, we had internal rotations to reduce stress, we tried
| hiring. Ultimately, none of these efforts came to fruition. I
| think there really is no counter to bad decisions from
| management. You can try to be as nice as possible at an
| individual level, but the "lack of progress" burnout will bite
| you if the pressure doesn't.
| hu3 wrote:
| > Looking back, the issue was a company pretending to care
| about Agile and just making everything worse in the process.
|
| First, thanks for your honest input. I suppose the fix was to
| change job to a company that doesn't pretend to do agile?
| StevenWaterman wrote:
| Partly, yes. I left that company and started my own. That's
| brought its own set of troubles, but it has at least given me
| a chance to regain my love for programming.
|
| Looking back, I did really enjoy trying to fix the
| organisational issues that caused my burnout. So I was going
| through this constant cycle of
|
| - Get frustrated by something when programming - Realise
| there's an issue in process / workflow - Get excited to fix
| that issue - Come up with an idea - Get shut down because I'm
| not paid enough to have those kinds of ideas - Go back to
| programming, even more frustrated
|
| I've since realised that I actually never fit the developer
| role in a company that well. I was good at it, but always got
| drawn towards creating tooling, CI pipelines, running the
| retros - the meta-changes and process improvements. In
| previous jobs that was fine because they were a lot more
| agile. There wasn't as much that needed fixing, and they were
| happy to let me fix the issues that did exist.
|
| I felt no meaning to my work because I was motivated by
| improving things, whether they were in my job description or
| not. I could have a minimal impact by writing some code, or a
| huge impact by helping everyone else write code more
| efficiently, but I wasn't allowed to do the latter.
|
| Anyway yeah long story short I'm currently pivoting my career
| towards the managerial/coaching/processes side. Something
| like "Software Development Coach" rather than just "Software
| Developer". I'm excited for the future again, and excited to
| help other people that are dealing with similar issues :)
| ornornor wrote:
| This resonates very much with my own experience. I've quit
| my last job because it broke this camel's back and now the
| last thing I want to do is going back as a developer.
|
| I also do enjoy fixing things and processes so that others
| don't needlessly suffer through work and actually enjoy
| themselves.
|
| But how do you go about switching tracks to coaching? What
| does it even entail? How do you learn?
|
| And more importantly: who's buying? I was trying to better
| things in every job I had and every time I met the wall of
| "not being paid enough to have these ideas/being road
| blocked".
|
| If companies have this attitude (no matter how much they're
| losing through low morale, inefficiencies, mistakes,
| attrition, etc) when offered a chance to fix it "for free"
| by an actual employee, why would they pay top dollar for a
| coach to make it happen?
|
| It feels to me that management is even more cynical than
| the burnt out grunts and their objective is to squeeze as
| much as they can out of their employees while they last
| because they know they'll quit or burnout in a year or two
| anyway.
|
| How do you even begin a conversation when that's the
| prevalent attitude?
| StevenWaterman wrote:
| I get where you're coming from, and they're questions I'm
| working on answering as well. Unlike you, I have worked
| in jobs where that kind of proactive find-and-fix
| mentality was prevalent, where they bought into
| continuous improvement. They do exist, it does work, and
| that's what made it so frustrating when I wasn't allowed
| to fix things in this job.
|
| I don't have all the answers yet, and it's something I'm
| in the process of doing. However, what is really helping
| me (and what made me realise this was the issue in the
| first place) is working with a coach. It's a bit like
| therapy/counselling, basically someone to guide me
| through the process of figuring out what went wrong and
| why, and how to fix it in future. He's from the tech
| industry, so has a base level understanding of things,
| and was able to give me some good pointers for how to
| find resources.
|
| I think the thing that started me off learning &
| reskilling was reading blogs from technical coaches like
| [1]. Clearly the job I want does exist, and there is a
| demand for it. It's not common, but it exists.
|
| [1] https://philippe.bourgau.net/
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| These are not two different types of burnout... They are one
| and the same. Pressure and overwork do not per se cause
| burnout... What causes burnout is if the effort-reward cycle
| misses (either repeatedly for small efforts, or if you put in a
| lot of effort and have a categorical miss)
|
| Reward could be anything. The feeling of a job well done (easy
| to miss if the project is a failure, or if management pivots),
| it could be the expectation of career advancement, it could be
| soft recognition by peers... And is dependent on the individual
| and project. You could even have an outward success and a pay
| raise but if you wanted your peers to love you and they
| didn't.... Burnout. You could even have an easy and unpressured
| job and burn out if it's not providing the rewards you expect.
|
| In any case the disconnect between effort and reward teaches
| your brain to associate effort with failure and the fact that
| the common. "take a break" advice failed for you should not be
| surprising, because I think that doesn't work in general: it
| doesn't reassociate effort with expected reward.
|
| I feel like a lot of people here are using the topic of burnout
| to hoist their opinions about American capitalism or whatever,
| but I honestly don't believe that this is the root cause.
| Plenty of people work their asses off and are happy to do so
| because it can be its own reward, or, they know what they want
| and know how to get it after each brutal push of effort. But
| not falling victim to burnout takes self-awareness, or good
| managers (capitalist systems or otherwise - e.g. academia or
| military) and both of those are in short supply, blaming
| capitalism is much easier.
| StevenWaterman wrote:
| That's a really interesting hypothesis, and it would make
| sense. Is it something that you've come up with, or is there
| some literature I can read about it?
| throwaway44432 wrote:
| Great analysis indeed. I have have the same question about
| literature.
| svnt wrote:
| I think you are right. But the operating regime of your
| hypothesis is basically from naive entry until a point, and
| that point is when the expected reward transcends rewards
| that capitalism can provide.
|
| If you want meaning from your work, and that meaning was
| initially provided by personal growth, then when the position
| no longer feels like growth, there is no reward possible.
| Similarly, if you thought you were doing something meaningful
| but then discover your company, or individuals who benefit
| more from your work than you do, are part of the problem,
| there is no redeeming it. To continue you have to resort to
| selective attention or basic ostriching.
|
| If this is true then the primary protective traits against
| burnout would be 1) strongly established healthy boundaries
| around what to expect from a job and a healthy home life or
| 2) myopic focus on problem solving and a lack of interest or
| self-limiting that prevents curiosity about higher levels of
| organization. Anecdotally this matches with my experience --
| most people who endure fall largely into one or both of those
| categories.
|
| A possible corollary is that with improvements to (that is,
| restrictions on) capitalism, more categories of people could
| continue to work without such ready disillusionment from bad
| or gray actors.
| mycentstoo wrote:
| Brilliant analysis. Anecdotally, I find this to be true in my
| own case.
| LinearEntropy wrote:
| This is exactly what I have been going through for the last
| year or two. I even changed jobs, finding a role that was
| supposed to be better. At a company that would allow my skills
| to improve, while having what I assumed would be a better run
| company.
|
| Unfortunately the new company is so full of corporate BS that
| I'm finding it even harder to get through each day. I genuinely
| feel like there are staff who are hired to 'improve
| productivity' through implementing Agile company wide, are
| actually doing everything in their power to slow things down.
| I've never seen this amount of unneeded meetings in my
| calendar, all in the name of 'planning'.
| blenderdt wrote:
| I also had a burnout recently.
|
| As far as I know there are no different kinds of burnout. A
| burnout is always caused by long periods of stress exhausting
| the body.
|
| The causes of stress can of course be very different. Working
| below or above your level can cause stress. But also long
| periods of physical pain can cause stress. Or being
| overstimulated all the time. And it can be a sum of all kinds
| of stress. For example when you struggle in a relationship it
| is much harder to cope with stress at work.
|
| Stress eats your energy.
|
| It's also difficult to prevent a burnout yourself because after
| a long time you can get used to being stressed. You forget how
| it is to be relaxed.
|
| Sometimes it is just not clear what caused a burnout. It just
| adds up.
|
| The best way to prevent a burnout and to recover from it is to
| accept you are stressed and tired and you need to step back.
| This is also the most difficult thing to do.
| MV9dDrxo wrote:
| Get out of my head! This resonates with me - this is exactly
| how I'm currently feeling. Do you have any resources that were
| particularly insightful to you from your research?
| StevenWaterman wrote:
| I think that [1] was the article that first alerted me to the
| fact that there's different kinds of burnout and it's not
| one-size-fits-all. Other than that, I don't have too many
| resources. You probably shouldn't take my advice, because my
| burnout ended up with me quitting and taking a year out to
| work on a startup. However if you can leave and join a
| different team / company, I'd recommend it. By the time
| you're feeling burnt out, you probably don't have time to fix
| things.
|
| I did try to fix the root-cause organisational issues, and
| actually did have a sizable impact with many of my
| suggestions having been implemented now. However, I ruined
| myself in the process. It was far more difficult than I
| expected, because it was a huge old-school hierarchical
| place. I wasn't paid enough to fix things, and it wasn't in
| my job description. I ignored that and pushed to fix things
| anyway - last I've heard it actually made a difference and
| some of the things I advocated have actually happened now,
| but it was too late for me.
|
| I just got round to reading the Phoenix Project & Unicorn
| Project recently, and I'd recommend that. I saw an awful lot
| of similarities with my old company, and I think it would
| have helped to have that example of how to improve things.
| Even then, they were only successful in the book because they
| had management buy-in.
|
| [1] https://www.inc.com/melody-wilding/3-types-of-burnout-
| accord...
| piva00 wrote:
| Take care. I do validate and recognise exactly what OP
| mentioned, I suffered of it from the later half of 2020 all
| the way to the end of 2021, things are slowly getting better
| since December when I changed orgs (inside the same company).
|
| I'm still far away from how I used to perform, I'm doing
| therapy and it's been one of the worst issues I've talked
| about for a while. It creeped into other areas of my life and
| now affects my day-to-day life and hobbies, the pandemic just
| made everything much worse.
| stuxnet79 wrote:
| I've always enjoyed reading this article by Angersock. It
| dives into the causal factors of burnout while acknowledging
| how personal and diverse it can be: https://web.archive.org/w
| eb/20190423185636/https://angersock...
| bogomipz wrote:
| I think your comment is very insightful. I agree with your
| distinction between the two kinds of burnout. I feel like the
| second one you mention is often the much worse of the two as
| least with the first case there's the potential to discuss,
| joke and possibly commiserate over head count and long hours.
|
| I would be interested in hearing how you went about moving
| forward form your burnout.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I think this is actually the most common type of "unreported"
| burnout in tech. The enormous amount of work to be done weighs
| on you, but the work doesn't have a defined set of requirements
| or the requirements are constantly shifting. For me, I've seen
| it mostly when a rewrite is happening, seems closely related to
| analysis paralysis.
| scruple wrote:
| > the work doesn't have a defined set of requirements or the
| requirements are constantly shifting. For me, I've seen it
| mostly when a rewrite is happening, seems closely related to
| analysis paralysis.
|
| I'm currently dealing with this at work. I'm effectively
| responsible for a rewrite of another teams backend because
| that team is "short-staffed" or whatever (simple solution:
| hire people, train people, fix the staffing problem) and
| because "we like services!" or whatever (a very stupid and
| short-sighted reason to start a project: it's trying to fit a
| solution with a problem we don't actually have -- oh, no!
| That application is a monolith! The horror!). And on top of
| all of this I was pressured into agreeing with some arbitrary
| deadlines set by someone else before I even had a decent
| understanding of what my team and I were being asked to
| build!
|
| It seems to me, however, and many others at the IC-level,
| many who are not even on our team but who are aware of this
| project I've been gifted, that another teams manager just
| doesn't want to own the problem space any more and he's found
| a way to misuse management to shove it off onto someone else.
|
| And it's all decisions made levels above me (and even my
| manager, FWIW) and we're all just supposed to accept that our
| reality is one where we're thrashed around from project to
| project without any consent, without any conversations,
| without understanding why. And I'm a tech lead at this
| company, and I've been very effective in this role in the
| previous 3.5 years, but now I'm hamstrung by these absolutely
| horrendous decision making processes that exist somewhere
| near the stratosphere.
|
| It's frankly fucking insulting to exist as an IC in corporate
| America and the _only_ thing that keeps me clocking in every
| day is the fact that I have a family and live in a high CoL
| area: They 've got me by the balls _and they know it_. I
| suspect I 'm not alone.
|
| /rant off
| [deleted]
| m2fkxy wrote:
| Wouldn't that be a "boreout" instead of "burnout"?
| StevenWaterman wrote:
| That is probably a better fit, yes. Not perfect, since I was
| still intellectually stimulated by trying to improve the
| environment and processes, but every attempt inevitably hit a
| roadblock. I identify most with the 2nd and 3rd categories in
| [1]
|
| However I think it's more valuable for me to keep using the
| term burnout, especially in situations like this. To a
| manager, burnout and boreout look the same. Ideally you could
| inject 'boreout' into the public consciousness, but it's more
| realistic for me to say I was experiencing burnout with
| different root causes.
|
| [1] https://www.inc.com/melody-wilding/3-types-of-burnout-
| accord...
| mateo411 wrote:
| In this case, I think you wanted more opportunities and
| career growth and that wasn't possible in that role. I've
| been there before. I don't think this is burnout, you just
| outgrew your role, and there was no reason to stick around.
| cpitman wrote:
| I very much agree, it's a big assumption that burnout is only
| cause by too much work or too much pressure. When that
| assumption is unchallenged, it can lead to managers dismissing
| concerns about burnout because their teams are not overworked.
|
| A lack of meaning to the work, or even a lack of work overall,
| can also cause feelings of burnout. A lack of obvious career
| progression can cause burnout. Constantly fire fighting can
| cause burnout.
|
| So if someone says they are burned out, I always ask what is
| causing it before talking about solutions.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| It bears repeating, many people who think they have burnout
| actually have chronic fatigue (CFS/ME) but don't know it yet.
| Repeated burnouts may simply be a relapse and recovery cycle. A
| number of the genetic predispositions to CFS also tends to have
| behavioral components (anxiety disorders and ADHD) that include a
| preference for a career in software. Now with Covid many of those
| who may never have had CFS are finding themselves with Long
| Covid. I mention this because the treatment for burnout is
| completely different to the treatment for CFS.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| I'm ADD and suspect that I had a burnout in 2020(not diagnosed,
| but in retrospect I am quite sure).
|
| Had COVID 2 weeks ago and since then I can't really focus even
| with meds and sleep refreshes me even less than before.
|
| All that being said, do you have some resources to share?
| Sounds like I could be one of the people you describe...
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Main thing is instead of searching for burnout treatment
| search for CFS/ME treatments.
|
| There is no simple explanation nor easy treatments. It's also
| very different depending on what's actually wrong with you. I
| have hEDS so the treatments I do focuses on immunomodulators
| like LDN and LDA, hormone replacement therapy like
| Testosterone and T3, dysautonomia meds like propranolol, and
| research peptides like ipamorelin. I take a lot of vitamins
| as well but I'm not sure about their efficacy. These are
| serious meds and not recommend for most - but they have
| recovered a lot of functionality for me. People should do
| their own research. My hope is that they find out that CFS is
| caused by auto-antibodies and could be cured by a
| neutralizing aptamer like BC007. But the CFS research is only
| starting in earnest now with LongCovid so it could be many
| years before a proper treatment is available.
| puttycat wrote:
| Super interesting. Any references you can share?
| thenerdhead wrote:
| While it sounds correlated, I don't know if that's true. They
| surely can complement each other quite well though!
|
| 2021 I had long covid for almost 14 months. I still worked and
| burnt out once about halfway through the year.
|
| 2022 I recovered and am burning out right now again halfway
| through the year.
|
| I have plenty of energy. I work on compelling side projects,
| exercise everyday, and raise two kids. I just don't really feel
| valued at work for a plethora of reasons and it makes it hard
| to want to work right now after busting my ass everyday.
|
| What I've found is the "treatment" to burnout is clarity. As I
| continue to reflect on why I'm burned out, it's many things
| that are bringing clarity to my long term goals in life. This
| goes back to self-determination theory of feeling a sense of
| competence, relatedness, and autonomy. When any of these are
| threatened or perceived that way at work, I see myself burning
| out.
| [deleted]
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Not everybody experiencing burnout has CFS/ME but enough do
| that it's worth pointing out every time there is a burnout
| discussion. I thought I simply kept burning out through
| overwork for about 10 years before discovering that I
| actually had CFS and I'm assuming I'm not the only one. I was
| highly resistant to the idea of having it as I did not
| identify with the disability and thought CFS people were just
| lazy. Had I known I would have treated it better sooner.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Is the overworking leading to constant stress and that
| stress leading to ME/CFS which leads to a number of issues
| like trouble sleeping, physical/mental symptoms, and
| depression/anxiety?
|
| This seems to be significantly undiagnosed. How do you
| know? What treatment has significantly helped? Getting good
| sleep? Mindfulness? Walks? etc?
|
| I ask because I'm writing a book about this and want to
| learn more.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) was the first treatment where
| there was a night and day improvement and from that point
| I knew I was not imagining my problems as many doctors
| kept suggesting. I was doing a linear search through all
| known fatigue treatments before hitting this one. I found
| out about it from what sounded like a crazy person
| posting on a YouTube video. I explicitly looked for crazy
| people posts because I figured if I found something that
| worked that would be what I would sound like. Doctors
| kept telling me I was perfectly healthy and were no help
| whatsoever.
|
| A lot of what you're talking about would come under the
| category of dysautonomia which certainly plays a part but
| is not the only part. For many people treating
| dysautonomia may be sufficient to recover.
|
| It's massively undiagnosed. Doctors in general are rather
| oblivious.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| What about a general anxiety disorder? This sounds
| similar to what I had. Lots of anxiety, doctors not able
| to say much but "you're healthy" and then when I worked
| on my anxiety, everything started to get better.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Generalized anxiety disorders can certainly cause
| dysautonomia and treating the anxiety can help treat
| dysautonomia. For many people this is sufficient to
| return to normal. For those of us less fortunate we need
| to keep pursuing additional options. I have a rather
| severe form of hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome so I
| need substantial meds to keep functioning.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| CFS is a diagnosis by exclusion. It may not be a particular
| disorder but instead acts as a catch all.
|
| CFS does not have a specific treatment. There are standard
| courses that are recommended, but there is no consensus on how
| to treat it. Usually treatment involves treating underlying
| disorders such as depression.
|
| Burnout is a stress response. Unlike CFS, you should improve
| with rest and taking time. Note that this doesn't mean you are
| going to go back to a hundred percent because you take a few
| days, but seeing improvement on vacation is a good indicator of
| burnout.
| paulmd wrote:
| side note but if you're suffering from chronic fatigue please
| also consider getting checked out for sleep apnea _especially_
| if you snore or are overweight (which again is not uncommon for
| programmers given we sit on our asses all day). It very well
| may not be the only problem, but it may be _part_ of the
| problem.
|
| In the long term sleep apnea will fuck up your heart due to
| hypoxia and it can't be good for your brain or anything else.
| Plus sleep disorders seem to possibly be tied to Alzheimers
| (one theory is that REM sleep helps clear amyloid proteins).
| It's just bad news in general and it's widely under-diagnosed
| given how fat the american population is.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Was going to comment something similar. After 4 years at a job
| I loved, went through the worst burnout of my life in
| 2018-2019, roughly the year before the pandemic. Lost the job
| and about lost my mind when executive dysfunction made it so
| hard to find work. Spent 2020 doing handyman work and donating
| plasma to make rent.
|
| Turns out that I was sensitive to wheat, milk/unaged cheese and
| almonds but didn't know it yet. That saps serotonin, which made
| it feel like the world was continuously attacking me. Which
| feels like the withdrawal symptoms of untreated ADHD, like
| quitting smoking constantly. But at the time, I thought I had
| something like CFS or fibromyalgia. I believe that these may be
| correlated with inflammatory foods, and that I might have
| eventually developed a chronic condition like hypothyroidism or
| even cancer, so it's worth taking a food sensitivity test. I
| took the https://www.everlywell.com (no affiliation) test of
| 200 foods and credit it with pretty much saving my life. Or at
| the very least, my psyche.
|
| I think what helped me mentally recover during the pandemic was
| TikTok and the shared awakening that so many people have been
| experiencing. Love/hate for that app is probably going to
| correlate with how feeling/thinking, intuitive/sensing and
| perceiving/judging someone's brain works though (I'm an INFP)
| so YMMV. I find that shifting realities from a downward to an
| upward spiral has made me more grateful and aligned me more
| towards shared prosperity. When I let my ego's goals finally
| die after 20 years of negative feedback loops, I found that the
| world picks up the slack so those goals happen anyway in a
| magnified way, which is manifestation.
|
| What I'm trying to say is that if anyone is struggling with
| burnout, there's probably another cause which isn't apparent.
| For example, if you never have time to have a hobby anymore,
| it's probably time to set boundaries and communicate your
| needs. If you have no motivation for art or life goals, you
| might need to pencil active rest into your schedule, so that
| you give yourself a chance to become bored so you can hear your
| calling and discover a path to self-actualization. That
| peaceful source energy that's so abundant in nature is all but
| denied to us in the modern world where we can't even see the
| sky or hear a bird.
|
| If that all sounds impossible, then those self-imposed barriers
| are probably attached to emotional trauma. Like if you're
| sacrificing your peace for a loved one, it might be time to do
| some shadow work to understand why you're overprotecting them
| from their own human experience and dignity. This can look like
| making the opposite choice than the one you have been making,
| and observing how reality reconfigures, who's blocking healing,
| who's helping, etc. It might be painful in the short term, but
| as each positive feedback cycle engages, it gets easier, and
| the other side is almost always better than what came before.
| kozd wrote:
| https://www.statnews.com/2018/01/23/everlywell-food-
| sensitiv...
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| I think burnout is the brains mechanism to prevent you from doing
| non-productive work (or at least what it perceives as non-
| productive) the problem is most of the work we doing in corporate
| environments feels pretty non-productive.
|
| Most of my periods of burnout in tech have been due to doing a
| lot of work without any real perceived payoff, this might include
| a lot of team meetings where we discuss priorities and estimates
| ad nauseum or working with tools that constantly fight you. Its
| like playing a game over and over and never making any progress
| eventually your brain is smart enough to tell you that you need
| to avoid playing the game (or going on the same hunt). I don't
| know how you solve this problem but I think most managers don't
| even understand burn out well enough to start.
| fswd wrote:
| I've had pretty bad burnout earlier in my career and this is what
| I am doing now
|
| * Better frameworks. If a framework adds complexity, it needs to
| enhance the feature set and developer experience by 2x.
| Otherwise, I just stick with the basics. Example: I was working
| on a react codebase with insane level of hooks, contexts, 7
| layers of abstraction. Solution: Axios/Fetch right next to the
| form, entire backend functions in the controller: no f's given.
|
| * Business requirements first: I hack off 90% of Agile
| methodology and just do what makes sense. Which is a balance of
| acceptance criteria and user stories, or contract driven
| development to pull the features into production and deliver.
|
| * Thursday and Fridays I don't work, and if it do, it's on
| something completely new or exciting. Last week I played with
| DallE as an API. Unfortunately this means less pay.
|
| * In the winter if its sunny out, I leave around 2pm. And come
| back and work 7pm-10pm.
|
| * One meeting a day, or every other day. And Monday's meeting I
| come in fresh and excited, cite what I am grateful for, and talk
| about how incredible everyone's effort is. It can sound cheesey
| but it works for me.
|
| Last burn out was right before the pandemic. I took a position at
| a startup that told me they were light on meetings, but I ended
| up spending all of my time in meetings and getting absolutely
| nothing done. So I left, and took a big break. I forgot a lot of
| things but realized what I forgot were skills didn't matter.
| Attitude matters over skill. I am not interested at all in React
| 18 and instead focusing on Vanilla JS, HTML5, just regular CSS,
| and just SQL. Day in day out skills. Stuff that won't change in
| 10 years. If I forget something like a new feature in React 18,
| then my mind is telling me it is useless in the long term.
| rubyfan wrote:
| What to do post burn out might be a useful resource as well.
| sli wrote:
| I don't think I've ever had a manager that has checked even a
| single one of these boxed, which I guess explains why I'm so
| burnt out that my (non-solo) software career is likely over.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| is this an out of season April's Fool joke?
|
| Burnout's main cause is cognitive dissonance between the will to
| contribute and succeed, and the believe in the outcomes and
| methods.
|
| NONE of the points mentioned (with the exception of seeking
| external help) in this article would make any significant
| difference to someone advanced n the road to a burnout.
| howinteresting wrote:
| Burnout is not just one thing, it can have several overlapping
| causes. What you describe is one of them, and the article
| covers others.
| nixgeek wrote:
| "Working at a startup is demanding. GitLab team members are often
| under a lot of pressure."
|
| Isn't being a $7.5B publicly-traded company the definition of
| _not_ a startup?
| john_cogs wrote:
| GitLab has documented how to still be a startup after IPO:
| https://about.gitlab.com/company/still-a-startup/
| skipants wrote:
| I've been following this feature request for awhile now:
| https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/32712
|
| Look at how many different hands this had to pass through
| before anything got done. I don't think I've seen any startup
| survive working like that.
|
| Oh and nothing is done yet, 5 months later. It's still in the
| "design phase".
| kadomony wrote:
| So basically, how to continue to exploit your employees for
| maximum output even though technically people can chill out.
| Got it.
| dijit wrote:
| I think that's a lovely page and some excellent sentiments in
| many areas.
|
| However I feel that it's important to accept reality and not
| attempt to redefine words.
|
| A startup is literally defined as to "get something moving",
| I would say at this point that gitlab is definitely in the
| realm of "in motion" and has a significant amount of inertia.
| It is not in the first stages of becoming a company, it is a
| relatively well-oiled, thought through and publicly traded
| company.
|
| Obviously terms can be fuzzy, there may be no single event
| that defines gitlab as no longer being a startup and no
| particular point in time being the point of state alteration.
|
| But gitlab as it exists today definitely does not meet my own
| personal and informal definition of startup, and I suspect
| that is true for many people.
| s_dev wrote:
| This is HN while not everyone's subscribes to everything pg
| says there is a lot of agreement on what constitutes a startup
| and differentiates it from other more conventional businesses.
|
| PG says a startup is any company who looks at growth as their
| primary measure. A business is any company who looks at the
| bottom line as their primary measure.
|
| So it depends on the definition you wish to subscribe to. There
| isn't a universal consensus but in this sense many HNers would
| see GitLab as a startup despite being worth many Billions.
| scrollbar wrote:
| Seems silly though. The term "growth company" seems a lot
| more authentic. Of course these labels are not black/white,
| but it's a useful distinction. There are simply different
| dynamics at a growth company vs. a startup.
| dijit wrote:
| > PG says a startup is any company who looks at growth as
| their primary measure.
|
| Intel is a startup by this definition.
| s_dev wrote:
| Correct -- and he cites big companies like Google and
| Amazon as still being startups. I agree with this
| definition -- it's very useful for distinguishing different
| types of companies and ultimately why some can earn SO much
| more in investment compared to others.
| dijit wrote:
| Oh.
|
| I really have a negative emotional response to abusing
| language like this.
|
| All companies focus on growth to some extent. A growth-
| focused company is, in my option, a completely separate
| thing from a startup.
|
| Though startups are usually extremely growth focused.
| chrsig wrote:
| I'm willing to bet there is a non zero number of executives
| at intel that seem to be under the impression that it is.
| civilized wrote:
| > Working at a startup is demanding.
|
| Is there no limit on what businesses can call themselves
| startups? GitLab is a publicly traded company with a $7B+ market
| cap, 1,500 employees, and many enterprise customers.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| Startup sounds sexy, so everybody and their mother are part of
| a startup
| WalterSear wrote:
| It's also an excuse to Move Fast And Break Subordinates.
| caffeine wrote:
| How about:
|
| * Listening to each person's specific concerns carefully and in
| detail, and then applying as much creativity and empathy as
| possible to help them come up with a resolution?
|
| * Giving people increased responsibility and increased autonomy
| as a response to signs of burnout?
|
| * Quickly transitioning coddlers (who stifle growth), complainers
| (who destroy motivation), victims (who destroy alignment),
| braggarts (who steal credit and poison achievement) out of teams?
|
| * Managing the team competently so that forward progress is
| _actually happening_ and the whole team can see it and sense it
| and take pride in it?
|
| * Ensuring that the team's mission, the company mission, and
| business value are all aligned, and making the team stakeholders
| to give them agency?
|
| Personally, I find saying "the employees have burnout, they
| should work less and celebrate more" is pretty naive. It's likely
| to make things worse.
|
| Burnout isn't overwork. It's more like hopelessness. Effort is
| being made but the emotional reward for visible progress towards
| a valuable goal is not forthcoming. It can _feel_ like overwork,
| but it's more the work to reward ratio that's a problem.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| > Express gratitude.
|
| Maybe the key is to _feel_ gratitude.
| H8crilA wrote:
| Recent burnout recoveree here, opinion: your company is unable to
| fix the problem for you.
|
| The only way to fix it is for you to learn to actually Not Give A
| Fuck. If you are forced to, for example due to immigration or
| family reasons, then I don't have any useful advice, sorry :(.
| Otherwise keep your savings account at 6, 12, ideally 18 months
| worth of living expenses and don't worry about performance
| reports, unanswered emails, "failing" your coworkers, etc. Do
| about 50% of what you can actually deliver and ride along. I
| actually think this is also better for the company, because
| workloads expand and contract sort of naturally, so by keeping
| this margin of 50% you'll be able to handle tougher moments.
|
| Once you get to a dark place: counseling
| (psychologist/psychiatrist), medication, taking 3+ months off -
| great stuff, can definitely recommend. Start with a visit to
| general practitioner.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "Managers should create space to celebrate small wins and reflect
| on the mountains you've climbed."
|
| I personally can live without the BS celebrations. Make sure the
| the daily work is bearable. If you are a manager do your job and
| manage people and the work. Don't just pass on orders from above
| and pass metrics back to above.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Gitlab you are not a startup, don't make me laugh.
|
| Here's a good tip for managers of engineers. Don't be GO all the
| time. Let your team work on non-roadmap items every sprint. Every
| last Friday or whatever.
|
| Don't give your team huge high stakes tasks every time. Give them
| candy in between to relax a bit and recharge. This job will break
| your mind if you don't cool off.
| welder wrote:
| This list is missing some stuff...
|
| * lacking a feeling of control over your own success
|
| * removing bureaucratic road blocks in the way of success
|
| * lack of dopamine reward when you complete a project /
| disconnect from the consumer of your product
| sys_64738 wrote:
| A lot of this is fluff. I don't really care about plaudits, your
| gratitude or other fake positive reinforcement. Give me extra
| money if you think I'm doing a good job. For those who need a
| manager to tell you that you're burned out then that's totally
| the wrong way to perceive it. You tell the manager that you are
| and tell the manager you're taking time off. It's not a
| conversation. Those are statements you make and execute.
| paulcole wrote:
| One person's fluff is another person's meaningful gesture. A
| $100 gift is worth more than a $100 bill to many people.
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| I'm probably off-topic here, but isn't a gift card just money
| with restrictions? I guess maybe the "gift" is the freedom
| from responsibility, in the sense that you won't feel guilty
| about where you spend the money (because someone else decided
| for you). Is there a more favorable explanation for the value
| of a gift card as a gesture?
| paulcole wrote:
| > Is there a more favorable explanation for the value of a
| gift card as a gesture?
|
| I don't get what you're expecting in terms of an answer
| here.
|
| A gift card is a gift. A gift is a gesture of kindness and
| thoughtfulness. Something doing something thoughtful and
| kind and thinking about you makes you feel good.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| The intention is what counts.
| citilife wrote:
| One thing as a manager I was passionate about was monitoring the
| team stress. Some team members work better under pressure, others
| don't and it's a balancing act. For instance, I've had co-workers
| that need the constant pressure to accomplish their goals and
| they can go on like that for years. The act of accomplishing
| something is worth the stress.
|
| Personally, I don't really get burned out. I have limitations on
| hours I can work, but happily work 80 hrs a week. I work 6 days a
| week, sleep 6 hrs a night, and effectively have two full-time
| jobs. If for some reason the stress lets up, I just pick up more
| work.
|
| One of the things I've enjoyed recently is https://www.read.ai/
| it lets you track interactions between co-workers. As I'm fully
| remote and often in meetings. When I see someone start getting
| stressed to the point it negatively impacts interactions we can
| talk it out, do a "game day", etc to improve the situation.
|
| Anyway, I think it's important to note that "preventing burnout"
| is extremely relative and most people handle it wildly
| differently.
| jseban wrote:
| So you tighten the thumbscrews until people start to crack, and
| then you give them some bread and circuses
| citilife wrote:
| People handle different loads. Some people perform better
| under stress, others need far more time off and breaks and
| they'll perform better.
|
| As a manager you're a representative of the company, and it's
| your duty to maximize value for the company. That means
| approaching each person differently and with respect. Most
| people say "I want to get promoted" or "I want to be in this
| position in my career in X years" or "I want to work on Y
| type of project". As a manager I have to deliver Z.
|
| All of those require a level of stress to achieve, so I work
| with my colleagues to help them achieve their goals in a
| measured way. At the same time I ensure we deliver Z on time.
|
| Don't really know how you got the "start to crack" out of my
| previous comment. People are different, they should all be
| handled with a unique approach to collaboration.
| jseban wrote:
| > Don't really know how you got the "start to crack" out of
| my previous comment.
|
| "When I see someone start getting stressed to the point it
| negatively impacts interactions."
| yarg wrote:
| I burnt out; I burnt out hard.
|
| I haven't worked in a couple of years (the most positive thing I
| can say about my state of mind is that - after a very large dose
| of black market mushrooms - I'm no longer suicidal.
|
| The one thing that was the primary contributing factor in my
| spiraling downfall is not mentioned here.
|
| Listen to your fucking developers - the one's at the coalface
| (either they know what they're doing or you've got far deeper
| problems).
|
| I was the primary developer on the non-DB functionality of the
| company's deployment tooling.
|
| I took the most cobbled together piece of unmaintainable shit and
| converted it into something stable and maintainable.
|
| There were times that I needed to make significant changes in
| order to move towards something sane.
|
| And every time the boss would bring in his pet architect who
| would veto every effort I made with no feedback what-so-ever.
|
| Just a no.
|
| I want to modularise the project - no, it's not justified by the
| scope of the project.
|
| I want to move to hierarchical configuration files - no, just
| keep using blah.properties, despite the fact that that we were
| using dynamically generated keys to force that which would be
| cleanly implementable with XML or JSON.
|
| I want a robust solution for dependency injection, I'm thinking
| Spring. No, too heavy for the project - just use META-
| INF/services.
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