[HN Gopher] The Tsunami of Burnout Few See
___________________________________________________________________
The Tsunami of Burnout Few See
Author : dxs
Score : 278 points
Date : 2025-01-09 14:25 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (charleshughsmith.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (charleshughsmith.blogspot.com)
| tayo42 wrote:
| Skimmed it. The constant switching from bold to not bold for some
| reason makes the article not feel genuine or some thing like
| that. Like an ad, my attention is constantly being redirected.
| ldmosquera wrote:
| I hate this contant emphasizing with a burning passion; even
| some newspapers do it. It's like trying to hold a conversation
| with someone that shouts the important bits to your face.
|
| https://pypi.org/project/html2text/ has --ignore-emphasis which
| drops bold and italics and cleanses this pest.
| justonceokay wrote:
| Formatting aside, I enjoyed the article and the description of
| the "village of happy people". As someone who has burned out
| twice myself and left tech (with great personal sacrifice), it
| really can feel like those who are not burning out are living in
| a bubble.
|
| I've mostly let go of those feelings though. My conclusion after
| working outside of tech and rebuilding my life is that I just
| didn't have the constitution to play the corporate game. More
| power to those who can though.
| Loughla wrote:
| My experience is that burnout tends not to come from the actual
| work, but all the politics and bullshit that come from office
| life.
|
| I do similar work in my day job and consulting. I'm very fresh
| and optimistic during consulting hours, but dread going into
| the office. I'm genuinely burnt out and just don't give a
| flying fuck anymore, I don't sleep, and I've been more sick in
| the last month than ever in my life.
|
| The only difference is that one comes with politics and one
| doesn't.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > My experience is that burnout tends not to come from the
| actual work, but all the politics and bullshit that come from
| office life
|
| Totally agree. It's not the stress of doing something new and
| just trying to figure it all out that's stressful. That's
| actually fun. It's the arbitrary adjusting of priorities and
| putting tasks in hold to start some harebrained idea that
| ultimately gets tossed or proves to not work out that becomes
| tiresome. Then shit rolls down hill and people want to know
| why the paused project isn't completed and assigns blame to
| the dev rather than piss poor management.
|
| No. I'm not bitter
| sateesh wrote:
| Isn't politics any part of human activity where number of
| people involved is greater than a critical mass (of say 5)
| ? I think even the best run, successful orgs have their
| share of politics. I used to think politics as a bad thing,
| but now I have accepted that it is an inevitable part of
| work life and one needs to also learn how to navigate it
| atleast to the extent that doesn't affect one's well-being
| or doesn't make one feel that they are being shortchanged,
| not that I am always successful with it.
| timr wrote:
| "Politics" are inevitable, but the stuff that the parent
| is describing is a particular type of politics that comes
| with hierarchical power (and possibly bad/immature
| leadership?)
|
| General pattern is that certain people in the level(s)
| above you are fighting for influence to impress the
| levels above, and critically, are willing to use the
| levels below in order to achieve their personal goals
| (organizational goals are secondary, at best). Unless
| leadership is unusually adept at punishing _the first
| signs_ of this behavior, it quickly becomes pathological.
| Every level gets infected, and before long your org has
| all of the backstabbing drama one might associate with an
| imperial court. In times of growth it 's painful enough,
| but in times of limited resources, it's pure bloodsport.
|
| There are people who can effectively detect and push back
| on the behavior, but they seem to be rare, and even more
| rarely make it into positions of influence. My theory is
| that it's so exhausting to be sensitive to the drama that
| you can only make it to the top if you combine it with a
| big dose of sociopathy. You also see it a lot at
| startups, because the founders are typically young,
| arrogant and have no experience managing anyone. By the
| time they realize they've hired a toxic exec layer, it's
| too late.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Even at a higher level what you are observing frequently
| use caused by politics (which admittedly frequently go hand
| in hand with incompetence or putting personal gain over
| company outcomes). Especially technical efforts frequently
| come under attack by product people who are in turn
| frequently under pressure my sales staff. Nobody along that
| line has the full picture and pushes for their issues to be
| solved which seem most urgent to them. Sometimes this
| business pressure results in correct decisions which still
| suck. An example might be interrupting a project or cutting
| corners to get a feature out to get a contract signed and
| make payroll. Two years later people wonder why the code is
| shit but the answer is that the company was struggling to
| survive and corners were cut left and right. Of course
| often it's just stupidity. I've seen cases where a PM would
| ask to get a unvetted pet project staffed ("all I need is
| two people for a week!!") outside of department planning
| cycles and later this was used in a write up with new
| leadership as an example of "engineering refusing to work
| with product".
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > people want to know why the paused project isn't
| completed
|
| You know, from all the talk about agile one would think
| people would remember the one central value from the
| manifesto that gave the name for the thing...
| svara wrote:
| One thing that seems to reliably cause burnout is when a
| person with high flying ambition finds herself in an
| environment in which she feels stripped of agency.
|
| It's not primarily about expending too much energy, but
| rather about expending energy in a way that appears futile
| relative to an ambitious standard set for oneself.
|
| Just my personal observation, but dovetails well with the
| learned helplessness theory of depression.
| ketamine wrote:
| Feels spot on
| nostradumbasp wrote:
| Such a good way of describing it. Thanks for this, and the
| comment above it.
| moron4hire wrote:
| This is absolutely it. I've never been able to control how
| much effort and personal investment I put into a project.
| If I'm working on something, I have to give it my all.
|
| I used to get burnt out at work all the time, but that
| really hasn't been the case for the last 5 years. The
| biggest difference is that I'm I'm in charge now. When I
| say something is going to take X amount of time or that we
| have to do things in a certain way, management doesn't
| argue with me anymore. They just accept that is the way it
| is, because I'm the one in charge of this area of work.
|
| I haven't changed. I still take too long to finish
| ostensibly "simple" things because I've nerd-sniped myself
| [0] into over-engineering things. What has changed is my
| relationship to the management class. They see me as one of
| them, now, and that confers a level of respect that is,
| frankly, enraging when you consider the lack of it in the
| obverse situation. But, I can make things my way and I can
| protect my team and that's enough.
|
| [0] https://xkcd.com/356/
| datavirtue wrote:
| Same here. The word "bodies" is now bandied about with
| little regard for who is in the room. Everything is set
| in warp 11.
| moron4hire wrote:
| You do need to come into the place as a manager, though.
| The attitudes the other management have of you will be
| pinned to whatever their first impression of you was. So
| if you promoted into management, you'll still be treated
| with the same lack of respect as an individual
| contributor.
| ketamine wrote:
| Tons of truth here.
|
| And a lot of management bravado is from fear and
| ignorance of how the work is actually done and their ego
| gets in the way of curiosity.
|
| So then there is a good chance you are not in favor when
| promoted in to their circle because they can feel
| threatened.
| convolvatron wrote:
| thank you. I feel a little less like a misunderstood
| snowflake today because of this.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Exactly this. When I can actually do some work, I feel pretty
| good. But that feels like 5% of my job sometimes.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| I agree. For me it was not that the work was particularly
| difficult or unrewarding, but that I felt as if I did not
| have control over my schedule. Development/Product Management
| could, at the drop of a hat, say we have an emergency patch
| and now Operations needs to clear their evening schedule to
| get it done while the (likely higher paid) developers go home
| at a regular hour and get to do whatever they want.
| ketamine wrote:
| What are you doing now? I am considering becoming a machinist.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Please reconsider. My son just completed training and he is
| now working full time on getting disability instead of
| getting a job. I can't really blame him.
|
| You will get hurt and you will be tossed aside with great
| prejudice.
| dehrmann wrote:
| To be clear, this was a personal choice of your son and not
| because of an injury?
| datavirtue wrote:
| Personal choice but he was injured by chemical exposure
| that burned both of his hands and subsequently avoided
| other serious accidents involving high voltage in
| addition to witnessing 20yr employees getting booted
| (demoted) after injuries. Real industrial revolution,
| pre-workers rights shit. He was thrown out for asking for
| chemical labels to be reapplied to barrels and requesting
| PPE. Most people can't afford the luxury of making such a
| stink.
| ketamine wrote:
| Sorry to hear that. I feel tossed aside due to my burnout
| and depression so I can relate on that front.
| nox101 wrote:
| What's giving me burnout is work from home. I got much of my
| social needs met by working at work with people I liked. We'd
| talk. We'd go to lunch. We'd meet up after work and on
| weekends. We also collaborated at work. Designed things
| together.
|
| Now, 40% of my time is alone in isolation, working at home.
| Collaboration and design work happen in documents at best and
| not in social conversation like it used it.
|
| All of this is making work a chore, "for me". Instead of work
| being an opportunity to hang out with people I like it's just a
| list of things to do alone.
| timewizard wrote:
| I feel like he's just describing the natural consequences of an
| over monopolized technology sector. None of these things are
| natural and instead of facing the problem directly, ironically,
| this author play acts his way through the solution.
|
| I found it uncomfortable.
| shusson wrote:
| > this author play acts his way through the solution.
|
| I thought it was a nice bit of irony. At work there's so much
| play-acting but all in a serious tone.
| squidproquo wrote:
| Thank you for this. It's nice to feel not alone.
| sc68cal wrote:
| This resonated with me since his description of the situation
| exactly matches what I have been experiencing the past few months
| riffraff wrote:
| this post seems to mix some valid points and some completely
| bonkers unrelated things, like the assumption that somehow the US
| is in stagflation using a graph truncated at data from 2023. Not
| really explaining why stagflation would cause burnout anyway.
|
| And while I agree with the idea that the society does not pay
| enough attention to burnout, the article offers no explanation of
| why he think it's a tsunami, beyond "three people I don't know
| quit suddenly" (sic).
|
| The article says "everyday life is much harder now, and getting
| harder". That may be, but there's no proof this is causing more
| burnout.
| jsdwarf wrote:
| One big trigger for burnout is if you cannot answer the
| question "why do I work?" any more. One of the big whys was
| that working hard allows you to buy a house/appartment which
| allows you to maintain your standard of living in retirement.
| But this isn't true any more due to the declining purchasing
| power of salaries. Why should I be stressed out in my job if
| this only allows me to rent an apartment that i have to give up
| as soon as I stop working?
| weitendorf wrote:
| I agree, and I suspect most people are just engaging with the
| title more than its actual contents. To me this reads as a bit
| perma-bear/conspiracy theory inspired. The article is lacking
| in pretty much any evidence to support its claims besides the
| FRED graph of disability claims.
|
| Also I'm pretty sure that graph is showing almost the opposite
| of what they're saying it shows. The number of non-participants
| (of working age) in the US labor force has actually been very
| static since June 2020, following a sustained jump during early
| COVID: [0]. The number of participants has been increasing
| steadily since then: [1].
|
| The graph [2] shows the number of people _in the labor force
| with a disability_ so combined with graphs 0 and 1 I 'm pretty
| sure it's showing that people with disabilities are
| _participating more in the labor force_ and /or that more
| working people are getting diagnosed with conditions (like
| ADHD) that qualify as disabilities (if I had to guess, likely
| because of telemedicine taking off in 2020). It does _not_ show
| non-participation in the labor force due to disability like
| they imply.
|
| [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS15000000
|
| [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV
|
| [2] https://www.oftwominds.com/photos2024/disability8-23a.png
| inSenCite wrote:
| Very familiar story. I'm 9months into quitting my consulting
| career after 10 years. Relatively long hours, weekend work, and
| lots of travel. The first few years were great, lots of learning,
| lots of smart people to work with, smart leadership, interesting
| and even innovative work.
|
| But then it just got boring AND exhausting. The leadership became
| uninspired and replaced by the classic sleazy sales persona, the
| work became mundane, and the constant 4-6month cycle of new
| clients began to overlap as I went higher up and managed more
| projects/focused more on sales.
|
| I haven't figured out what I'm gonna do next, frankly the
| networking burned me out so much I am very averse to it. And
| ironically I became quite good at it (at least relative to where
| I started).
|
| I'm booking my first intro chat with someone next week, and
| already my stomach is turning thinking about scheduling it. I
| thought I was ready but maybe not...at the same time, life ain't
| free.
| methuselah_in wrote:
| I have been through the same process recently on my job.I was so
| much frustrated that I just wanted to quit. I didn't even knew
| what will happen afterwards, you keep on trying your level best
| and yet seems nothing is going to work out for you. By luck my
| health went down because of fever. I had got a week break. Then I
| got fine. But these words the author mentioned are right in each
| sense.
| ncpop wrote:
| Thank you for posting this. It manages to capture how I'm feeling
| quite well. It has made me realize I need to make some
| adjustments to my work and life.
| mordae wrote:
| Dream on. If you feel like making "same adjustments", save up
| for about 1 year vacation ASAP. You won't be able to do
| anything once it hits you.
| sc68cal wrote:
| The problem is, what do you do once you spend up all your
| savings on a 1 year vacation? You have to go back,
| eventually, and it will happen again. Plus, the job market is
| really tough (isn't it always?) and there are a lot of people
| out of work and looking for jobs, it doesn't always make
| sense to voluntarily join that cohort once all your money has
| been spent.
| ketamine wrote:
| > Burnout isn't well-studied or understood. It didn't even have a
| name when I first burned out in the 1980s. It's an amorphous
| topic because it covers such a wide range of human conditions and
| experiences.
|
| I think this was labeled with the overused "nervous breakdown" in
| those times.
| nostradumbasp wrote:
| I've burnt out. It was horrible. I am doing much better now!
|
| The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but
| not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.
|
| In many places if you get hurt/burnt out on the job the upper
| seats are looking for any reason to curb stomp you. There's no
| reason to give a company your all unless you have an actual stake
| in it or they are there to hold you up when you're dragging. I've
| worked at multiple places where influential people died, yes
| dead, below average life expectancy, - on the job - and corporate
| did everything they could to not even pay out on their legal
| obligations (life insurance, D&D). In some cases employees joked
| or snickered about the person who died later on - in meetings.
|
| In tech. I've found that you're not on your own but you are at
| the mercy of who is in charge of your schedule and rates your
| performance. If you lose trust in that person your best option is
| to leave as quickly as possible. Otherwise they will do what they
| can to destroy you for as much 'profit' as they can claim. Being
| clear. It is not about realized gains, it could even be at great
| detriment to a company. It is about short-term line item
| claimable gains. "We got 4 good months out of her...", "they were
| terminal and now they will be working somewhere better for
| them...", "he really wasn't closing as many tickets as the rest
| of the team...", "they weren't helping as many team members as
| the rest of the team...", "we never needed someone with an
| advanced degree...", etc.
|
| Check in with yourself regularly. Know the signs of burn out. The
| company you work for does not depend on any person caring about
| you in the slightest.
| fullshark wrote:
| > The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt
| but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.
|
| I'm here, but it just seems like a temporary fix. I can't
| imagine doing this for the rest of my life, but I need money
| and health insurance. What's the alternative, what did you end
| up doing?
| nostradumbasp wrote:
| I don't have all the answers. I don't even know your
| situation. For me, I am still in tech. Like everyone else, my
| family needs the money. Once in a while I do something that
| satisfies me personally as well as the company I work for. rt
| Alternatives? Well, I think anything you can start up on your
| own where you have the autonomy and can dictate your
| hours/balance would be your medium term goal. I'm working
| towards mine, but I think its different for everyone.
| Contract working, consultant working, small personal business
| with a reduced hours main stream 9-5.
|
| My assumption is people like us, we care a lot, we are smart,
| we are capable, and when we get stuck in corporate swamps our
| inner candle starts to go out. We just need to find ways to
| spend less time in the swamp.
| javcasas wrote:
| Do that while your mind figures out how to make money work
| for you.
|
| Everything is temporary, even you. You only need enough money
| for you to live from your 401k/rented houses/investments.
|
| Also, be on the lookout for new opportunities.
|
| And if you are a bit masochistic just try to work on
| something boring. Helps with "not caring enough, I'm just the
| computer equivalent of a payroll accountant, pay me and
| you'll get your payrolls on time".
| gloryjulio wrote:
| > Everything is temporary, even you.
|
| Glad to see some good old Buddhism philosophy at work. I am
| much happy now once I start thinking the same
| bradleyjg wrote:
| There's a lot of different ways to be miserable in this world
| but one in particular that seems to hit a lot of people in
| our industry is not knowing what you want.
|
| So many people followed a path laid out by others for so long
| ---study hard, do extracurriculars, go to a good college,
| study hard again, do internships, get a job with a
| prestigious company, work towards promo.
|
| At some point, generally in late 20s but can be before or
| after, many such people realize that they have if not
| everything they ever dreamed of then at least a lot of what
| they worked towards. But they still aren't happy because in
| all those years they never figured out what kind of people
| they actually were--what it is that would make them happy.
|
| We all need money, but do you need that much money? If yes,
| then ok. Try to think about what you need the money for in
| the next stupid meeting about story points. But if no, then
| you have options.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| I think it's not as simple as thinking: there is this one
| kind of person you are and it's a constant and you need to
| figure out who that is and how to be that person to be
| happy.
|
| People change a lot. There's no golden idol person in my
| future that would make me happy if only I could break free
| and become that person. That person changes constantly.
|
| I think we are unhappy because we've been fed a lie that
| that person is just over the horizon and you're not living
| your full life properly unless you become that person. The
| problem is that that person changes constantly. It's always
| out of reach and who's to say you will be happy once you
| get to that point?
|
| A change in mindset is the cure. But a change in mindset
| does not cause economies to scale, shareholders to get
| value and cause the wheels of industry to move. We are
| always arriving for something we think will save us.
| datavirtue wrote:
| At work it is clear. 25% growth per year or we are all out of
| work. What more do you need, we are all in the same boat from
| the CEO on down.
|
| We used to run companies and share stock. Now private equity
| hands out money and goals and if the goals aren't met your
| company that is doing great and turning 15% per year evaporates
| on the next recap.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I'm not out of work just because one company goes under,
| though
| mcmcmc wrote:
| If you have to grow 25% every year just to stay afloat, I
| hate to break it to you but your business model is shit
| santoshalper wrote:
| I think he's saying they have to grow 25% per year to
| please their PE overlords.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Ah. Well then yeah, I think it's safe to say the business
| model of PE wealth extraction is broken. That or
| businesses that need to take on PE funding are probably
| not very sound.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| PE is what happens when a company dies - PE is how the
| carcass of the company _rots_.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Private equity is not happy with 15% because they can get
| that by parking their money in a REIT. They are shooting
| for the moon, period. Once you take their money their is no
| backing out. It's to the moon or close up shop.
| bdndndndbve wrote:
| Individual self-reliance and coping only goes so far. I think
| OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of
| capitalism increasingly squeezing every once of joy out of
| people's lives, and demanding more labour from fewer people
| under dehumanizing conditions.
|
| From a Marxist perspective I think we're seeing the synthesis
| of deeply individualistic capitalist culture, and the renewed
| awareness of class consciousness and workers rights. In the
| past these kind of conflicts have led to the 5 day work week,
| The New Deal, etc. But the same conditiona can also lead to
| far-right authoritarianism.
| achierius wrote:
| Love seeing this kind of analysis on HN of all places. At
| least today we can hope that our understanding of history
| will lead to people being less electorally friendly to the
| fascist right than they were the first time around.
| bdndndndbve wrote:
| The trend among men, sadly, is a flight from higher
| education. It used to be a status symbol, but since more
| women are entering STEM fields men are increasingly looking
| for alternative credentials like bootcamps. This is a
| common phenomenon in many fields across time, where men
| flee "feminized" work and it becomes less prestigious.
|
| A side effect of higher education becoming "low status" is
| that men are going to vocational schools that don't teach
| "useless" topics like philosophy or history. Which makes
| them more vulnerable to radicalization.
| fn-mote wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| > men are going to vocational schools that don't teach
| "useless" topics like philosophy or history
|
| And to be clear this includes prestigious nationally-
| ranked "tech" schools, right? Possibly even those with
| lip service to a liberal arts education where one can
| actually be excused from "distribution requirement"
| courses based on their high school experience. (Oh, you
| support that? Well... maybe I did too, but I sure didn't
| understand the connections. Maybe a class would have
| helped.)
| bdndndndbve wrote:
| I'm not sure if I understand your point, but the point is
| there's a kind of credentialing treadmill where once
| women get into a particular field or class of institution
| it loses prestige and men flee to alternatives which
| become more prestigious. An example is undergrad biology
| becoming predominantly women and being seem as the
| "easiest" STEM major.
|
| I think if you see a majority-female CS class graduating
| from Stanford it is a sign that VCs and other power
| brokers will begin weighting that credential less.
|
| This is complementary to the anti-intellectualism that's
| already baked into fascism. Rich people like Peter Thiel
| have already started paying people to "not go to school"
| as an anti-intellectual backlash against inclusion and
| diversity.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| My observation is completely the opposite. Higher
| education is the source of today's youth radicalization.
| Harvard, Columbia, UPenn are all ground zeros of
| radicalization that we as society going to suffer from
| for decades.
| sgarland wrote:
| Who is so fragile that they care about the gender of
| their coworker? This isn't oil rigs or combat roles,
| where brute strength has legitimate value.
| nostradumbasp wrote:
| I do agree with you. People need to band up with one another
| and work this out together. In the mean time though, most
| people are already in a situation where its far too late
| unless they can shake their situation and start new somewhere
| else.
|
| I think anyone who has turned on the news in the last 9
| years, what technologies and companies are trending, can
| predict which way things are going to go. Again though, we
| all need to come together for that too...
| Animats wrote:
| > Individual self-reliance and coping only goes so far. I
| think OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of
| capitalism increasingly squeezing every once of joy out of
| people's lives, and demanding more labour from fewer people
| under dehumanizing conditions.
|
| Yes. The US lost the general pattern of an 8 hour day, a 40
| hour week, time and a half for overtime, and employment
| duration measured in decades. Most people can handle that.
|
| Most people cannot handle 996 work, "clopeners"[1], and "side
| hustles" for long.
|
| That's really it. The US just needs to get back to what were
| normal labor practices from the 1950s to the 1970s.
|
| The key item here is paid overtime at a higher rate. That
| makes it uneconomic to have people at work too long. It's
| cheaper to hire an additional person.
|
| _" Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight
| hours for what you will."_ - Knights of Labor, 1888.
|
| [1] https://calchamberalert.com/2023/04/14/clopening-
| schedules-g...
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is insane that 8 hours of work per day was considered a
| reasonable target, back when they didn't have modern
| automation. Where did we go wrong? Feels like somewhere we
| switched from just trying to do the work that needed to be
| done, to trying figure out a way to generate enough work so
| that we'll be needed.
| bdndndndbve wrote:
| This is the point of dialectical materialism - before the
| 8 hour workweek there was an even longer work day with
| worse conditions. The people born into those
| circumstances struggled against capitalists (in the sense
| of people who have capital) to make 8 hour workdays the
| norm. The next generation was born with 8 hour workdays
| being standard, and capital pushed back and squeezed in
| other areas where labour wasn't resisting. Capital has
| now squeezed so hard that labour is organizing again and
| realizing they need to fight to retain any of their
| rights.
| Animats wrote:
| _Teen Vogue_ had a good article on this back in 2022.[1]
| Similar to the OP here, but better written.
|
| [1] https://www.teenvogue.com/story/work-culture-america
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Feels like somewhere we switched from just trying to
| do the work that needed to be done, to trying figure out
| a way to generate enough work so that we'll be needed._
|
| Modern economy is set on the premise that there's
| _always_ some way to make money, meaning there 's always
| more work that could be done (regardless of whether that
| work is actually useful).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _" Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight
| hours for what you will." - Knights of Labor, 1888._
|
| There's another failure mode of modernity, that makes this
| quote a sleight of hand: _commute_. Commute takes another
| hour or three out of the "rest" and "what you will" sets.
| rvense wrote:
| Also, for families, that was eight hours of paid work
| from one parent, not both...
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I've tried the "don't care too much or too little" dance, and
| it's only a temporary fix, at least for me. It's really hard to
| walk that tightrope.
| goodcharles wrote:
| I just watch this monthly, it helps
|
| https://youtu.be/UFqz5xkgRbs
| convolvatron wrote:
| I watched through some of this. This all seems very wise
| and well-informed. However the answer given is to spend a
| lot of energy attempting to work the system in fairly
| subtle ways to get the outcome you want - that the
| organization will accept your well-intentioned
| contributions to their functioning and eventual profit. All
| it takes is one or two people in the right place that don't
| share the same goal or are just really not that good to
| turn that into an exercise in futility.
| evjan wrote:
| 541 views, on an 8 years old video. How many of those are
| you responsible for? Anyway I put it on my watch later
| list, thanks!
| peterldowns wrote:
| I just watched this -- pretty good talk, thanks for linking
| it.
| NotGMan wrote:
| >> but you are at the mercy of who is in charge
|
| Once you realize that that person is an idiot or is against you
| it kills you psychologically because you realize you are in a
| dead end.
| nostradumbasp wrote:
| Hi definitely not a G Man.
|
| Personally, idiots are fine as long as they listen to their
| team-mates when it matters. Maybe that means they aren't
| idiots... Anyway, adversarial bosses and extremely poorly
| managed projects are the issue for me. That is a dead-end
| with possible health issues and career [Vio]ing sprinkled on-
| top. There's no helping it either. Digging harder just keeps
| the murderer's [Psy]hes cleaner. That's the trap I see a lot
| of people fall into.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's like impedance matching.
| osigurdson wrote:
| >> and rates your performance
|
| I think in practice it is much more complicated than that.
| While org charts largely a tree, the influence graph is often
| very different. It isn't like the immediate manager can just
| fire anyone they feel like without consequences in most orgs.
| nostradumbasp wrote:
| Yea but your immediate manager can easily set a person up for
| complete failure and broadcast only the failings. I've seen
| it happen to different people on many occasions. Basically
| the old "balance these 12 things 1 of them, the 1 you drop
| will end up being me and my buddy bosses most important item
| and the other 11 are worthless". Or "no need to attend that
| meeting" and if you don't show oh boy strike one. Positions
| of influence are super easy to game.
| osigurdson wrote:
| It depends to the extent that the org chart == influence
| graph.
| righthand wrote:
| The trick is to stay out of product meetings and not actually
| care how cool and interesting and useful the product can or
| will be. Only give feedback to your inner circle (manager,
| peers) when asked about it. Most importantly, enjoy the tasks
| assigned to you however dull or basic they may be after you
| mastered them. Be proud of your work.
|
| EDIT: These are things to do together if you have no agency at
| a company to change it. If you need help getting agency, work
| with your manager to get data to back up your arguments.
| cobertos wrote:
| This is so hard! It leads to poor products/the loudest voice
| wins. Rarely is there a coherent long-term vision. Even at
| the benefit of the single participant/employee
| righthand wrote:
| I would argue you're still caring too much. If you can
| abstract your care into another project either at the
| company or in your personal time the crappy product won't
| matter. If you have to speak against someone, get data to
| back yourself up. Or get the loud mouth hooked on data and
| solve it that way.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I've found some combination of agency, upside, and
| interesting problems to solve are the recipe for not burning
| out.
|
| Not working for a jerk manager / at a company with bad
| culture helps, but is not sufficient. I've burned out in a
| "nice culture" company faster than a "cutthroat culture"
| company because the nice guys didn't allow much agency.
| tuyguntn wrote:
| "enjoy the tasks assigned to you however dull or basic they
| may be after you mastered them. Be proud of your work."
|
| Ohhh, this is freakin hard to me. Bunch of users are
| complaining about feature not working properly in our
| Enterprise product, but it's not impactful enough to fix,
| because those users are not going to complain to their
| CEO/COO about broken feature in our product, because they
| themselves might be labeled as COMPLAINER and eventually
| kicked out.
|
| What's impactful? Of course new shiny AI-powered green
| button, it's so amazing, project created by a super talented
| story teller engineer and who is good at selling it to
| leadership. Does it impact metrics? Yes, of course, those
| metrics are also crafted specifically for that feature. (more
| time user spends on that page, more impactful. Is it? maybe
| users are confused or can't find what they're looking for?
| Can you tell it to leadership? Ohh they approved this metric
| and project, are you against VP+ leadership's decisions?)
|
| And we wonder, why do we have double digit customer churn
| rate.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > And we wonder, why do we have double digit customer churn
| rate.
|
| What is the employee churn rate?
| righthand wrote:
| If this is hard then you're ignoring the rest of my comment
| for one sentence. These need to happen together as each
| piece supports the other one. Stop caring about what your
| companies crappy product could be if you have no agency to
| change it.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _The trick is to..._
|
| It's hard to do any one of those, let alone more or all, when
| you're approaching burnout.
|
| > - _stay out of product meetings_
|
| I started to avoid product meetings. Still burned out.
|
| > - _not actually care how cool and interesting and useful
| the product can or will be_
|
| I started to not care how cool or interesting or useful the
| product can or will be. Still burned out.
|
| > - _Only give feedback to your inner circle (manager, peers)
| when asked about it_
|
| I started to only give feedback to my inner circle. That was
| even more painful, and still burned out.
|
| > - _enjoy the tasks assigned to you however dull or basic
| they may be after you mastered them_
|
| I could never enjoy tasks assigned to me when they're dull
| and basic things I've mastered.
|
| > - _Be proud of your work._
|
| As for being proud of my work... well I'm always proud of my
| work. I still burned out. I don't want to even touch the
| things I'm proud of.
|
| Everyone's story of burnout is uniquely different. There's no
| single magic bullet that works for everyone.
| righthand wrote:
| You neglected two of my suggestions.
|
| > I could never enjoy tasks assigned to me when they're
| dull and basic things I've mastered.
|
| If you do need more interesting work and can't shift teams
| then find a new job. You will eventually find yourself
| needing to do the same again after you've mastered the new
| challenge. Keep it up and you will run out of leaps.
| However if you want to exist in a place for a while you
| need to accept that not every project, task, idea will be
| exciting work. Once you accept this, it also opens up
| doorways with what else you can do with your time. Since
| you have a mastered skill set, these menial tasks should
| not be weighing you down to free yourself from the drudgery
| of work.
|
| > As for being proud of my work... well I'm always proud of
| my work. I still burned out. I don't want to even touch the
| things I'm proud of.
|
| You should always be critical of past mistakes and look to
| correct but you should always put your best effort forward.
| That is what pride in work means. You shouldn't have to
| admire every piece of work you deliver as a masterpiece,
| which is what I assume you mean by wanting to touch it. You
| should always carry a positive mindset about your work and
| not treat each success and failure in your life as some
| sort of definitive legacy. Invite in and operate under best
| intentions.
|
| A lot of my advice is about how it works in harmony, not
| some quick instant burnout solution. Resting is important
| as well (breaks, vacations).
|
| Anecdotally I was recently hired at a company that is in
| dire straights. This weighed on me heavily for the first
| six months, eventually they shrunk my team. However I
| cannot afford to get burned out. So the only options are to
| extract as much of the burden from me by being a cog in a
| bullshit factory or find a new job in a psychotic job
| market.
| snozolli wrote:
| _Be proud of your work._
|
| I was just thinking the other day that all of the code I've
| written for companies is now dead and gone. I wrote some
| really elegant, interesting stuff at a few companies and now
| it's only a memory in my head.
|
| I should've gone into civil engineering.
| righthand wrote:
| That's okay, the only person that cares about your legacy
| of code is you. Be proud that you're capable of the work,
| not that you have a commit history when no one is asking
| for that.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I've gradually come to a similar conclusion. The only
| antidote is to make sure the work you're most proud of are
| all open source. It's most likely going to be code you
| wrote in your spare time.
|
| My GitHub has a few pieces of code that I'm really proud
| of. And some companies actually ask for code I'm proud of
| as part of the interview process, so I have that ready and
| it helps.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Buildings fall down eventually, too.
|
| Worth remembering we write code to create human value.
| Somewhere, in some way, your elegant code actually ran and
| did a thing that led some number of humans to be enabled or
| understand or somehow be affected by it.
| tres wrote:
| Personally, I find this aspect of the work somewhat
| profound.
|
| My graveyard of projects and dreams stretches out behind me
| and I feel saddened to know that these articles
| representing portions of my life never achieved what I had
| hoped for them.
|
| However, I've come to view my work like a mandala or some
| representation of our mortality itself; our works and our
| lives are temporary.
|
| We can make the most of the brief moment that we have -
| whether that be through work or through parenting or
| through base jumping - whatever that may be for each of us,
| or we can choose to do nothing with that moment, knowing
| that it's ephemeral and will be gone soon anyway.
|
| I choose to try making each day's the best code I have ever
| written; I want it to be "beautiful" and maintainable in
| spite of knowing that it will be refactored, deleted or
| decommissioned at some point.
| pgwhalen wrote:
| For what it's worth, I've found success in not getting burned
| out by literally doing the opposite of this (save for the
| being proud of my work part).
| righthand wrote:
| Sure, I'm not saying being involved isn't a great way to
| live your working life. However not being involved is a
| great way to avoid burnout by reducing stress factors.
| tootie wrote:
| That's funny I usually think the opposite. I derive no
| satisfaction from writing software for dubious ends.
| Understanding product value and/or helping to determine
| priorities makes things feel more tangible. Maybe better to
| say that you should find your own happy place.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| The problem is you can control the first but not the
| latter. You can control doing quality technical work. You
| cant really control whether what you do has much value (the
| market decides that, not you)
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > It is about short-term line item claimable gains. "We got 4
| good months out of her...", "they were terminal and now they
| will be working somewhere better for them...", "he really
| wasn't closing as many tickets as the rest of the team...",
| "they weren't helping as many team members as the rest of the
| team...", "we never needed someone with an advanced degree...",
| etc.
|
| This resonates with me. The org chart cares about headcount -
| it doesn't matter to them who fills the count. Only plausible
| heads who could pass some random interview. The upper bosses
| don't see you as human, only as chess pieces to move around to
| fit a narrative.
|
| If the narrative against you shifts to the negative, there are
| many ways to justify your exit. They don't care if you die, or
| your children go hungry, or you lose your house or healthcare.
| What they care about is narratives that justify their own
| existence in the org chart. They don't even care about the
| services or products they build. It is just about their own
| existence. Every other effort be damned.
|
| Reader, now that you are aware that they don't care about
| anything - and certainly not about you - it is really up to you
| to secure yourself financially, physically, emotionally and
| preserve your time. If they come at you with reviews or other
| BS, you should consider your time is up, safeguard yourself,
| and sabotage them if you can.
|
| This is fair. Remember that you are playing with the same rules
| as them. If they can't care about engineering, you sure as hell
| don't need to. If they care about politics, you sure as hell
| play it with them.
|
| Take it as a toxic game but secure your life - as far away from
| corporate toxicity as possible.
| nostradumbasp wrote:
| There are tons of companies that don't even produce things
| anymore, all they do is buy and sell other companies as a
| "portfolio". Really weird to think about!
|
| Let me advise against sabotage. There's a saying about
| seeking revenge and digging two graves. The truth is, this
| whole thing is unsustainable, and will collapse on it's own.
| No one actually has to do anything to sabotage something like
| this.
|
| I recommend instead to "document" and "socialize". The people
| who operate this way are sloppy, greedy, and think they are
| invincible. Don't do anything to convince them they are
| though. They are always, and I mean always, fucking up.
| Spread the good word of your documented and likely illegal
| treatment to a pro-bono employment lawyer before or after a
| likely illegal lay-off and get a severance as a settlement
| avoiding court entirely (if you wish).
|
| Socialize with others you trust in your industry about the
| treatment at the companies that operate this way. Be weary of
| slander, that's what documentations helps with. Word travels
| fast. In the old days this was how people dealt with societal
| outcasts. With the internet, this is easier than ever.
|
| That said, I can't control what someone decides to do but I
| will share. One of the "worst" things you can do at a company
| like this is be really nice to people inside and outside your
| team, and do your job within your means. It drives the
| creatures up a wall. Sometimes after you leave even if not by
| your own volition, others will follow suite by their own
| accord.
| vonnik wrote:
| I burned out bad running a startup and shutting it down during
| Covid. I managed to recover since then.
|
| There are lots of causal factors leading to burnout. It's
| basically a long term energy imbalance along multiple
| dimensions.
|
| One of those dimensions is attentional fatigue caused by our
| messy digital environment:
|
| https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
|
| But there are other factors that feed into it: physical,
| emotional, social.
|
| I highly recommend attention span by Gloria Mark, The Power of
| Engagement by Jim Loehr, and for those who want to change their
| life, Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg.
| Centigonal wrote:
| > The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt
| but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.
|
| It really depends on your personal psychology. After I burnt
| out in a demanding role that I adopted as a big part of my
| identity, I joined a new company vowing to not take work as
| seriously (I remember telling myself, "if excess effort isn't
| rewarded, the optimal strategy is to maximize compensation,
| minimize necessary effort, and eliminate excess effort").
|
| After a few months of recovery and ruminating on why I still
| felt so bad (plus therapy), I learned a few things about
| myself:
|
| 1. I feel like garbage when I'm half-assing something at work
| or not giving my all -- especially when the people around me
| are putting in the work.
|
| 2. When I _am_ giving my all and I feel like I 'm not being
| recognized, I begin to lose motivation and burn out. Simple
| tasks become very laborious. This is a gradual, months-long
| process that is difficult to recognize is happening.
|
| 3. When I start to burn out, I am forced by my mind and body to
| half-ass things, which makes me more demotivated, which
| exacerbates the burnout.
|
| Putting these insights into action, I've so far been able to
| keep burnout at bay by finding roles where I can give work my
| all, receive recognition, and be surrounded by others who are
| putting in similar effort. This doesn't mean blindly trusting
| the company or destroying my work-life balance -- I believe
| that "recognition for hard work" includes proactively
| protecting hard workers from their workaholic tendencies and
| giving them the flexibility to take breaks. I'm lucky to work
| with really great people where I frequently pass along
| responsibilities or take work from others to avoid over-
| stressing any one person and enable things like multi-week
| vacations. I have no idea how I will change my approach if I
| lose this workplace dynamic or pick up more forcing functions
| on my workday (e.g. having kids) in the future, but it's
| working pretty well for me right now.
|
| All of this is to say: for me, the low-trust "do the bare
| minimum to stay employed" approach didn't actually help me get
| out of burnout into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a
| work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken
| advantage of. People are wired differently, so I want to
| caution against a one-size-fits-all approach.
| sgarland wrote:
| What industry did you find this unicorn job in? I feel
| exactly as you described in your list.
| j_bum wrote:
| +1, very curious. I yearn for the working environment the
| parent comment describes.
|
| Can it only exist in medium and small companies?
| sgarland wrote:
| The only thing I can think of (and this is purely
| speculative, though I've interviewed at one and enjoyed
| the experience; didn't move forward due to relocation
| concerns) is a quant trading firm.
| weakfish wrote:
| I found it in a corner of my $MEGACORP, but TBF, my
| corner is a former startup that was acquired and retained
| a lot of the brains.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| It can only exist in _high margin_ companies. The trick
| is to find business environments with some 'slack' in
| the funding, because that slack tends to propagate. I
| have made a career out of finding environments with high
| slack and avoiding environments with low slack.
| EtCepeyd wrote:
| Yours has got to be one of the best comments that I've ever
| read on hacker news.
|
| > for me, the low-trust "do the bare minimum to stay
| employed" approach didn't actually help me get out of burnout
| into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a work situation
| where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of
|
| What you just described (so vividly) is _meaning_ , and
| (likely) "flow" too. _Meaning_ must be there for everyone, in
| their efforts; the need for meaning is universal. (We can
| call it intrinsic motivation too.)
|
| Some say that you can find meaning outside of work, and then
| can mostly ignore work; and it's also said (correctly I
| guess) that "psychological richness" (closely related to
| resilience) is important: drawing meaning & satisfaction from
| multiple sources.
|
| Sure, but I have a practical problem with that: if you need
| to work 8 hrs/day to cover your family's needs, you don't
| have time, energy, or opportunity left to find meaning
| _elsewhere_.
|
| And, as others have repeatedly said it here, if you are a
| full time employee making quite beyond your (family's) needs,
| and think about decreasing your working time (giving up
| excess money, but regaining much needed time & freedom),
| _that_ is what is strictly forbidden by the runners of the
| Village of Happy People. You will find effectively no jobs
| that let you work (say) 5 hours per day, for 62.5% of your
| original salary. That way, you 'd just not be a good slave, a
| good cog in the machine. Society is engineered such that you
| _must not_ have free time.
|
| Therefore the only practical option is to find (or create)
| work that provides meaning for you intrinsically. I see no
| other option. You can be an employee or run your own
| business, the same applies. And, unfortunately, this is
| unattainable for most of society.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > It is not about realized gains, it could even be at great
| detriment to a company. It is about short-term line item
| claimable gains.
|
| It's not even about that.
|
| People need to realize that inflicting suffering on those
| "under" someone is one of the main motivators of human
| behavior.
|
| It's innate and it exists because the abuser get tremendous
| benefits, including health-wise.
| nostradumbasp wrote:
| I see what you mean, but I disagree that this is an innate
| trait in human beings. I believe it is sometimes socialized,
| poor understanding of zero-sum games, etc.
|
| Often-times its just garden variety psychopathy, narcissism,
| and other dark personality traits. For those people its
| definitely innate. Unfortunately psychopaths pathologically
| do everything they can to position themselves into seats like
| management/leadership. It's kind of a tricky situation for
| other-wise mentally well people.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt
| but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.
|
| Unfortunately this situation isn't able to be earnestly
| evaluated in the US without enormous effort to reform labor
| law. (Or if it is earnestly evaluated it obviously biases the
| needs of the employer rather than the entity that matters.)
| harha_ wrote:
| I'm currently recovering from burnout and the trick of not
| caring just does not work for me. This is my 2nd burnout and
| even though I learned that trick among other things from the
| 1st, it just does not work because I think it's a problem that
| stems from my personality. I care too much about various things
| that are related to my work.
| dzink wrote:
| It's a feature. Less white collar workers are needed because of
| AI. Instead of trying to fit in where culture is designed for
| attrition, find out what humans need and build something you own,
| using AI if you have to.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| AI is the same as any other hype cycle, and creating ML
| algorithms is boring monotonous work.
|
| Neuromorphic computing on the other hand is very interesting,
| as it gets into ambiguous state resolution rather than layered
| weighting.
|
| The idea AI could even replace a chickens cognitive performance
| in laughable. =3
| intalentive wrote:
| >it gets into ambiguous state resolution I didn't know that
| about neuromorphic computing. Do you have a link that says
| more?
| GoToRO wrote:
| And in my country you can't even take medical leave for burnout.
| lugu wrote:
| Which country is that? Is that common among countries?
| GoToRO wrote:
| .ro
| knallfrosch wrote:
| First, I think mental problems discussed more than ever: Anxiety,
| autism, inability to focus and yes, burnout. The "only few see"
| simply isn't true.
|
| Second, the article mixes in some adjacent topics, such as
| purchasing power. Why? I don't know, but it blows the amount of
| stuff the article would have to supplement way out of proportion,
| before even the core message (burnout) was discussed.
|
| Third, I'm always amazed how many people think they are
| different. You're not. If you care for a family member (children,
| elderly, disabled..), commute 2400 miles and work 7 days a week,
| you will burn out. But it won't be a surprise to anyone but you.
|
| What you need is sleep, friends and sports, same as any social
| animal inhabiting a very real, very physical body.
|
| Fourth, I'm not sure what you want others to do. Instead of
| complaining about the suggestions, write down what you would have
| wanted.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Yeah, if this guy was working in the 1970s I'm not sure why he
| thinks he is supposed to miss the falling side of the wage
| parabola.
| noirbot wrote:
| As other people have posted elsewhere in this, purchasing power
| and the economy is linked to the incentives that cause people
| to burn out. You keep pushing against the tide because you want
| that promotion or raise because costs go up over time. Or
| because you want to do something costly that you think will
| improve your life, such as having a child or moving somewhere
| or fixing an annoyance in your life.
|
| Some people surely burn out because they're just obsessive, but
| many people, myself included, slide into it because "just 4
| more months of this and I can afford X".
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| A few points in here reminded me of an essay on burnout that I
| loved a lot, called The Burnout Society.
|
| > The core narrative control is straightforward: 1) everything's
| great, and 2) if it's not great, it's going to be great.
|
| > We're trained to tell ourselves we can do it, that sustained
| super-human effort is within everyone's reach, "just do it."
|
| The author of The Burnout Society frames this as a sort of self-
| slavery, in which we are our own slave-drivers. His logic is
| actually quite compelling. Yet reassuring, perhaps surprisingly.
| He doesn't blame the individual, but the culture they live in.
| There are paths to salvation, and burnout isn't a final
| destination.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=the+burnout+society
| dfee wrote:
| Better link https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-
| philosophy/burnout-soci...
| patcon wrote:
| Best link? Maybe :)
| https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-
| burnout-...
| bbor wrote:
| A) Totally agree. This is a great, very short book -- I highly
| recommend for anyone in this industry, regardless of philosophy
| experience. The author is Byung-Chul Han.
|
| B) This is a great point to call out the author for a bit of a
| myopic view in the bits about _" Burnout isn't well-studied or
| understood."_ Beyond the philosophy above, there's pages and
| pages of empirical articles, conferences, even books on the
| topic: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=burnout
|
| This just comes across as a fallacy I see quite often in
| intellectual circles, and have surely been guilty of myself:
| "The problems in the world are caused because the people in
| charge are too dumb to see everything as clearly as I do; if I
| was in charge, it would be easy to decide what to focus our
| resources on!"
| peterldowns wrote:
| For anyone interested in this book, I recommend also reading
| "Non-Places: Introduction To An Anthropology Of
| Supermodernity" by Marc Auge. He lays out an interesting
| argument that the stress and the anxiety of the modern world
| is due to a collapse of _distance_ -- informatically,
| geographically, and temporally.
|
| Simply put, the modern world feels bad because we're
| constantly engaging with information that we can't assimilate
| into a coherent model. In the past you could rely on simple
| and incorrect models of the world and generally be OK since
| your life was relatively local. Now, your life requires you
| to engage in a much larger sphere, one that is too large and
| changes too quickly to be understood.
|
| PDF: https://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Auge_Marc_Non-
| Places_Introd...
| noirbot wrote:
| That's very interesting - it aligns to something I've felt
| for a long time about the way the internet and modern media
| has made it so people just know about so many more things
| in the world and thus feel like they need to care about
| them. It's "eat your veggies because some starving African
| child doesn't even have that" but applied to everything,
| and juiced by live footage of a child dying of starvation.
|
| This also, I think, leads to detachment from local issues.
| Why should I look into who's on my city council when I'm
| hearing about the French government falling apart or the
| mayor of New York doing crimes? There's always something
| bigger, worse, more important to the world going on
| somewhere and there's nothing you can do about it, but also
| every part of you feels like you should do _something_.
| peterldowns wrote:
| Well said; I agree with you (and Auge). Another place
| I've seen this discussed is this fantastic blogpost on
| Scholar's Stage: https://scholars-stage.org/the-problem-
| isnt-the-merit-its-th...
|
| In the post, Tanner Greer excerpts from Andrew Yang's
| book _The War on Normal People_ -- here 's the relevant
| quote in full, but I recommend clicking through and
| reading the whole post: > In coming
| years it's going to be even harder to forge a sense of
| common identity across different walks of life. A lot of
| people who now live in the bubble grew up in other parts
| of the country. They still visit their families for
| holidays and special occasions. They were brought up
| middle-class in normal suburbs like I was and retain a
| deep familiarity with the experiences of different types
| of people. They loved the mall, too. > In
| another generation this will become less and less true.
| There will be an army of slender, highly cultivated
| products of Mountain View and the Upper East Side and
| Bethesda heading to elite schools that has been groomed
| since birth in the most competitive and rarefied
| environments with very limited exposure to the rest of
| the country. > When I was growing up, there
| was something of an inverse relationship between being
| smart and being good-looking. The smart kids were bookish
| and awkward and the social kids were attractive and
| popular. Rarely were the two sets of qualities found
| together in the same people. The nerd camps I went to
| looked the part. > Today, thanks to
| assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect,
| attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging
| in the same families and neighborhoods. I look at my
| friends' children, and many of them resemble unicorns:
| brilliant, beautiful, socially precocious creatures who
| have gotten the best of all possible resources since the
| day they were born. I imagine them in 10 or 15 years
| traveling to other parts of the country, and I know that
| they are going to feel like, and be received as,
| strangers in a strange land. They will have thriving
| online lives and not even remember a car that didn't
| drive itself. They may feel they have nothing in common
| with the people before them. Their ties to the greater
| national fabric will be minimal. Their empathy and desire
| to subsidize and address the distress of the general
| public will likely be lower and lower.
| noirbot wrote:
| I'm not sure I at all agree with that quote though. Most
| of what he's describing was equally true of the old
| landed aristocracy or other wealthy families of the past.
| It feels like someone who didn't grow up rich now being
| rich and going "Wow, rich people live differently" as if
| that's some revelation and not something that's been true
| for centuries.
|
| Who does he think went to Harvard and Yale and Princeton
| and Oxford and Cambridge before now? Those people felt as
| superior if not more superior to a random person in
| "normal america" than the current crop of new wealth. The
| Gettys and the Morgans were probably even more detached
| from the rest of the country than anyone is now and
| likely had more overt power over their lives than their
| modern equivalents.
|
| I don't mean this as a defense of these people, just that
| "the elites don't have the best interests of the
| population at heart" is a complaint as old as
| civilization. I don't think Greer or Yang makes a
| compelling argument that the 2019 American moment is
| worse than even recent memory. Greer tries to make a
| point about how people had smaller goals in the past, and
| fought more for their local interests and prestige,
| something I'm both not sure I agree with and would love a
| citation for, and also looks past the fact that the major
| WASPy families did literally run the federal government
| for decades! Often to the detriment of states and regions
| they cared less about, which seems to be what he's
| claiming will be an issue with this new elite.
| evjan wrote:
| Thanks, just placed a hold on that book at my library!
| CaptainFever wrote:
| I am hesitant to believe anything I see from this website. The
| author shows no related qualifications (e.g. economics), and the
| economics here are heterodox. This post feels like mostly
| conspiracy theories ("the system is against us, the system is
| broken, they are controlling the narratives!"), which is all well
| and fine if it makes you feel better, but should not be taken as
| factual nor credible information.
| altairprime wrote:
| By definition, they're right, Madroeconomics and Unemployment
| calculations in particular specifically exclude quality of life
| concerns, centering around mathematical equations that are
| defined to promote cancerous growth ("in a rational economy,
| everyone tries to maximize their earnings") while excluding
| concerns such as burnout. The author's point is that it is
| forbidden to discuss these two concepts in the same breath,
| macroeconomics and burnout, even though they are intrinsically
| linked. The author's point is well-demonstrated by various
| comments in our discussion: rather than considering the
| author's lens and reinterpreting one's worldview through it
| experimentally, I see several comments saying 'don't listen to
| anything they say', 'how can they make such an incomplete
| argument without a masters thesis of proof backing it', and so
| on. Point to the author for that; " _Please respond to the
| strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a
| weaker one that 's easier to criticize._" is mysteriously and
| glaringly absent here, and they rather called it.
| bkazez wrote:
| > Burnout isn't well-studied or understood. It didn't even have a
| name when I first burned out in the 1980s.
|
| Check Wikipedia: "Staff Burnout: Job Stress in the Human
| Services" was published in 1980, and the Maslach Burnout
| Inventory was published in 1982.
|
| > We don't bother collecting data on why people quit, or why
| people burn out, or what conditions eventually break them.
|
| A quick search of academic literature shows this is not true.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| And yet, the stakes feel so much higher and the problem more
| immediate
| vrosas wrote:
| Maybe in academia, but I've never seen any kind of reflection
| or study in the workplace. Twice in my career I've witnessed an
| entire team rage quit on a manager at once. Twice! And I did
| not see management bother to investigate or reflect on what the
| problem was. In both cases the manager continued to not only be
| employed but rebuild their team as they saw fit.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| The concept of Ikigai is not well known in North America:
|
| https://medium.com/@ikigai.consultancy/finding-ikigai-c1fc4c...
|
| Where idealism and economics often change the balance of
| priorities over time for individuals. The fungible nature of the
| modern workforce has lead to a churn and burn culture for skilled
| labor at the board level.
|
| People may land a position they worked for years structuring the
| opportunity, and only discover they fooled themselves into a
| career that makes them miserable.
|
| People need to accept they will change careers around 5 times in
| the modern workforce. Also, the age of the middle class union
| factory worker having a 30 year career became a rarity in the
| 1980s.
|
| My advice is to ensure one balances their own needs with the
| company needs, and abandon the illusion there is a perfect
| version of oneself in the future.
|
| The "not caring" part is easy, as most projects get annoying
| after awhile. =3
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| > Those who haven't burned out / been broken have no way to
| understand the experience. They want to help, and suggest
| listening to soothing music, or taking a vacation to "recharge."
| They can't understand that to the person in the final stages of
| burnout, music is a distraction, and they have no more energy for
| a vacation than they have for work. Even planning a vacation is
| beyond their grasp, much less grinding through travel. They're
| too drained to enjoy anything that's proposed as "rejuvenating."
|
| This is one of the most salient points to me.
|
| When I was burnt out, I was a husk of a human being. I appeared
| to be a high-functioning, successful, positive-trajectory sort of
| guy. Inside I was quite literally dying.
|
| Things that used to be fun, and I knew I liked, were almost
| painful. The energy it took to play with my kids and be happy
| with them was mentally and physically painful to spend.
| Activities like free diving which used to fill me with passion,
| wonder, energy, and joy became chores I actively avoided. I had
| endless excuses to do nothing but the absolute essentials. Keep
| the job, pay the bills, try to sleep, try to wake up, keep going.
|
| I'm quite a bit better now. I opted for work which pays a lot
| less, but allows me to feel much more aligned with what I do, why
| I'm doing, who I do it with, etc. Had I not found that I think
| I'd still be better, but getting out of the work I was doing was
| a good way to expedite recovery.
|
| Good luck to all of you experiencing this. You might have
| normalized it and begun to feel trapped, but I promise there's a
| real life you can enjoy on the other side of it.
| ocimbote wrote:
| > The Tsunami of Burnout Few See
|
| Who in 2025 does NOT see the "tsunami of burnout"? It seems to me
| that everybody is talking about it since at least the
| stabilization (not "end") of the COVID pandemic.
|
| I've only skimmed through the article, so apologies if I missed
| some important bit of info.
| altairprime wrote:
| Employers generally refuse to openly discuss it with anyone who
| isn't a retention risk, which made interviews unattended very
| weird when I would give perfectly honest answers to the
| candidate about "why is this position open?" (a question that
| most candidates don't ask because they're desperate for
| employment).
| peterldowns wrote:
| This reminds me of the immense NPR story "Unfit for Work", from
| back in 2013ish, about the increasing number of Americans opting
| out of the workforce and instead relying on disability:
| https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
|
| Has there ever been a followup to this reporting? I'd be really
| interested to understand if this trend is still happening, and if
| so, why.
| sssilver wrote:
| Vulgarly unrelated to the subject -- is anyone able to get a
| scrollbar to appear on this page on mobile? I kept reading and
| was completely unable to tell how long of a time commitment this
| read will be and whether I should continue or read it later.
|
| How did we manage to lose perfectly good scrollbars in this race
| for colonization of mars and AI singularity?
| matt3210 wrote:
| This seems like the inevitable result of optimizing for GDP
| instead of happiness index.
| franktankbank wrote:
| GDP is mega gamed anyway.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I got burnt out at my last job working hard for them and my
| reward was being laid off and the whole team replaced. Fuck the
| rat race, we're all killings ourselves and giving our lives so
| the rich can get richer.
| tuyguntn wrote:
| This is what I learned in my career with couple of burnouts:
|
| Look at the leadership
|
| - do they brag about everything? Be a story teller, hard work and
| caring about product doesn't matter in such company. Try to get
| promoted faster by boasting your work publicly. Remember, in such
| companies people usually don't care about "fake" metrics you have
| created.
|
| - do they try to dig deeper into problems and solve them? Enjoy
| working there, because if you can show them problems and offer
| your solutions, they will do their best to figure out which
| problem is most urgent to solve and help you. middle managers
| will inherit this behavior from upper management
| weitendorf wrote:
| > We're experiencing stagflation, and it may well just be getting
| started. If history is any guide, costs can continue to rise for
| quite some time as the purchasing power of wages erodes and asset
| bubbles deflate. As noted in a previous post, depending on
| financial fentanyl to keep everything glued together is risky,
| because we can't tell if the dose is fatal until it's too late.
|
| This is giving me permabear vibes. The US is not experiencing
| stagflation. Real (inflation adjusted) gdp per capita is growing
| at 2%. Inflation over the last year was 2.7% and gdp growth and
| the economy grew substantially faster than that.
|
| > That the purchasing power of my wages in the 1970s as an
| apprentice carpenter exceeded almost all the rest of my decades
| of labor should ring alarm bells.
|
| There it is. For what it's worth this probably is true to an
| extent (eg for certain kinds of goods and services), just like
| the growth of economy, but that's because _relative_ incomes and
| _relative_ costs have changed substantially since then. Some jobs
| ' wages (software engineer) grew faster than inflation, others (a
| lot of entry level blue collar ones) didn't. Some costs (rent,
| healthcare) rose faster than average inflation, others (eg
| televisions) didn't.
|
| FWIW the nominal topic of burnout is intriguing to me but I think
| this kind of perma-recession/perma-bear pop-econ, "what happened
| in 1971" stuff is really overplayed and crackpotty. There is no
| "narrative control machinery". I think it's very human to
| extrapolate individual malaise to society as a whole, and you see
| it all the time on the Internet, but most people don't perceive
| society the same way a deeply depressed or burnt out person does.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| > This is giving me permabear vibes.
|
| I've been reading Charles High Smith for at least 15 years.
| He's definitely a permabear. Of course, that doesn't mean he's
| wrong.
| weitendorf wrote:
| Permabears do sometimes make good points but being
| _permanent_ bears they 're almost always wrong in aggregate,
| because they only ever have the same economic perspective,
| which happens to be the opposite of how things have played
| out (at least in the US) for almost one hundred years now.
|
| To square that circle usually they have to turn to conspiracy
| theories, or dabble in economics just deep enough to skew it
| as unsustainable but not so deep that they understand how it
| actually works (see quantitative easing, FRB, "petrodollar",
| etc.).
|
| Maybe (definitely) I've just spent too much time on the
| Internet because to me the whole "secret recession" stuff is
| just tired and wrong at this point. It's been over 15 years
| since the GFC. This kind of perspective feels stuck in the
| 2012 "ugh I got a college degree and now I work in a
| restaurant" Internet, when there have actually been several
| employment/growth booms since then.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| My own conclusion about burnout is that it fundamentally comes
| down to who controls the agenda, and how much you invest in that
| agenda. I've been burned out. Many years ago, early in my career.
| My cure: I was in the lucky position that it was a good time to
| spend a year and half going back to school to knock off a
| graduate degree that simultaneously moved my career forward, gave
| me a total change of scenery, and gave me some break time between
| leaving the job and starting classes, time that I devoted 100% to
| hobbies and home improvement projects. And of course, an easy-to-
| tell story when reentering the job market.
|
| So on the topic of agenda... if what you are working on is your
| own agenda, you don't burn out. You might change the agenda by
| redefining goals, but in the end, you are sailing your own ship.
| Not only do you not burn out, it is curative. It is when you
| absorb someone else's agenda and make it your own to an unhealthy
| extent that you burn out. Always be computing that dot product
| between your employer's agenda vector and your own agenda vector.
| Don't over-invest beyond that dot-product.
| 404mm wrote:
| The tsunami of burnout may be coming - but will it really matter
| to those creating it? We're actively moving towards cheaper labor
| markets and replacing jobs with automation. It seems that the
| only way to get your piece of the pie in this market is if you
| find something that you can solve or do cheaper. Cheaper often
| means replacing and displacing current workers. Great benefit to
| the company and stockholders, not so much to society. Everything
| is driven by profit for those who already have more than they
| need.
| t3chm4nager wrote:
| >> The tsunami of burnout may be coming - but will it really
| matter to those creating it?
|
| Companies used to be at the mercy of workers, we no longer are.
| The moment employees get out of line, work starts to shift to
| H1B workers who are too afraid to complain. If they start
| complaining, work then shifts to offshore resources. You can
| pay 1/3 of the wage and have 2 offshore workers and have
| contingencies.
|
| The onshore workers see this and fall into line, especially
| H1Bs.
|
| Work is sufficiently granular and microservice-ififed that you
| can swap people in and out. The vice keeps tightening.
| 404mm wrote:
| You speak the truth. I work for a 100k employee multinational
| company and "we" just started entered the third phase-
| replacing US based employees with offshore alternatives.
| India and Brazil. I'm still waiting what's coming next.
| akomtu wrote:
| > quitting is a last-ditch effort at self-preservation.
|
| Can you imagine a red cross nurse suffering from burn out? She
| may work for food and her life may be hard by most standards, but
| what she does is in harmony with her true self, and this gives
| her energy and inner peace. A highly paid corporate worker, on
| the other hand, may do something that's against his principles,
| something that doesn't harmonize with his true self, and he has
| to forcefully take bits of energy from his soul and sell it. This
| is what drains him and leads to burnout.
| sseagull wrote:
| While not usually applied to everyday white collar workers, you
| seem to be hinting at what is called "moral injury"
|
| Typically associated with the military and with healthcare
| professionals who go into their fields with good intentions,
| but then have to sacrifice on those for various (typically
| capitalistic or even arbitrary) reasons.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury
| cess11 wrote:
| It's terribly sad to see people in the thread rationalising
| 'giving work all' and so on.
|
| My advice is to start meeting other people and take up some
| activity that is more fun than work. If your local jurisdiction
| allows exploitation that makes this hard or impossible then you
| ought to flee this tyranny.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| I've personally burned out a couple of times. First was a Fintech
| startup back in 2011 or so. Second was at an aerospace startup
| that you've heard of.
|
| In both cases, the unique factor was an extended period of time
| where I was the sole person who could some considerable piece of
| work that the business relied upon for day to day operations,
| which meant that I couldn't take effective breaks and I lived
| constantly on call and in the critical path.
|
| I had to quit both jobs in order to both grant myself the space
| to not feel captive and also to show management that more than a
| single person was necessary to perform the tasks that I had been
| performing.
| Panoramix wrote:
| I've burned out once, but that was enough. I am working again
| but it's been more than 7 years and I'm not fully recovered.
| I'm very careful now not to paint myself into a corner (or let
| some manager do it for me) as I know I wouldn't survive the
| next time it happens. Also my ability to put crazy hours or
| handle stress has been permanently impaired. While I function
| normally, if stress is a glass that can take water until it
| starts to spill, my glass has permanently shrunk in size.
|
| I keep less vital, less exciting positions and compliment the
| missing excitement or fulfillment with things from my personal
| life. I do miss those times when I had the complete overview
| and agency but it wasn't worth this.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| I believe that burnout exists because of the dissonance between
| doing-what-you-want and doing-what-you-can. If you can't do what
| you want, then do what you can and come to some sensible
| accommodation between the two. If that's not possible, perhaps
| you can want something else, and do whatever that is. It is a
| conscious decision, and it's positive, at least in the sense that
| it's your decision. If you can't square the circle, you must pick
| either a square or a circle. It's just not possible to have both
| when they're so out of harmony. Don't be afraid to hit the eject
| button and reset your want/can compass.
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| Lots of comments here not even bothering to read the OP article
| on the true sources of burnout. Cute advice on how to cope with
| it but no thought on what systemic causes were. It's like helping
| fellow miners cope with lung disease rather than think if there's
| a better power source than hand mined coal.
| davedx wrote:
| Meanwhile I saw this on HN jobs last week:
|
| > The Culture: What It Means to Be a Thoughtful Warrior
|
| > Working Norms: The Warrior's Code of Conduct We don't approach
| our work as just a job; we approach it as a mission. Delivering
| excellence at the highest level requires commitment, resilience,
| and an unshakable work ethic. To achieve this, we embrace working
| norms that ensure clarity, accountability, and growth--for both
| the individual and the team.
|
| > 60 to 80-Hour Work Weeks: Our mission demands intensity. This
| isn't about clocking hours; it's about pursuing excellence with
| discipline and focus. We operate at high intensity to transform
| healthcare. Warriors are prepared to dedicate 60 to 80 hours per
| week to pushing boundaries
|
| https://www.thoughtful.ai/blog/being-a-warrior-at-thoughtful...
| gdubs wrote:
| My theory on burnout is that it arises when the effort you put in
| doesn't have a meaningful impact because of misalignment or a
| lack of autonomy. It's like pushing on a lever but the gears are
| jammed. You're asked to push and push harder, but nobody in a
| position of power is willing to fix the damn gears.
|
| I've worked harder than imaginable in my life on projects without
| burning out, because the work was incredibly fulfilling -- and it
| fit well with my core beliefs, interests, values. And then I've
| burnt out from putting tons of unrecognized effort into projects
| where I lacked adequate leverage to change things.
|
| People won't always look after you and burnout can be hard to
| recover from -- harder than you might think. So take care of
| yourself -- and never stop looking for work that aligns with your
| core values, interests, and the kind of life you want to build.
| ConspiracyFact wrote:
| There's something that's been in the back of my mind for a while,
| and I think I haven't acknowledged it due to shame. I believe
| that many people will relate, though.
|
| As technology continues to automate more and more "mindless"
| work, knowledge workers are forced to _actively think_ for a
| larger and larger portion of our work days, and with increasing
| intensity--and this is highly stressful. Of course, doing some
| thinking at work is enjoyable and fulfilling, but most people
| can't put in 6+ hours of concentrated thinking five days a week
| for extended periods of time without burning out.
|
| In the past, the educations we received were like investments in
| an autopilot mode that we could turn on for large portions of the
| work day. Some thinking has always been required for
| professionals, but there were also many situations which could be
| handled with minimal effortful thought, thanks to education.
| These situations are disappearing, and it's literally tiring us
| out.
| intalentive wrote:
| It's true that it's getting harder to maintain a middle class
| lifestyle. Many young people view homeownership and starting a
| family as totally out of reach, and resort to apathy or
| resentment. The entry-level job market is not promising and
| apparently the sexual economy is also messed up. Reddit in
| particular is filled with anger at our system, while the CEO
| killer was widely praised. This is the stuff that revolutions are
| made of. Meanwhile it seems that our ruling class neither notices
| nor cares; it's just full steam ahead in the race to the bottom.
| Expect political instability if things continue this way.
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