
I was a fast-food worker. Let me tell you about burnout - smacktoward
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/6/20681186/fast-food-worker-burnout
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caymanjim
To me, there's an enormous difference between the kind of stress at a low-
skilled job like this vs. a white-collar career job (or even a blue-collar
career job). Fast-food work is hard work, to be sure. Many low-skilled jobs
involve working hard. You barely have time to eat or take a bathroom break,
they're often physically intense, and even punching orders into a cash
register is exhausting.

I don't want to dismiss the struggle of this kind of work, but to me, it
doesn't even qualify as stress; at least not the same kind of stress I'm used
to as a software developer. Fast-food work can be intense, and difficult, and
painful, but at least for me, it's more about busy-ness than stress. At the
end of your shift, it's over. You can certainly burn out from being worked
like that, but again, it's not exactly the same as the kind of stress software
jobs give me.

The thing I find most stressful about software work is that you can't just end
your shift and leave it behind. If you have an insane fast-food shift, or a
clopen, you might be fried at the end of the day, but you can leave it behind
when you leave.

A software job doesn't go away when you go home. There are no shifts. You work
on things that take months or years. You think about problems on your way to
work, you think about them on the way home, you're constantly planning
tomorrow's meeting schedule, worried about Friday's demo, doing homework to
research new technology, checking to make sure some server is up, being pinged
by a constant stream of email, etc, etc. It never goes away. Your shift is
never really over.

This isn't about blue-collar vs. white-collar so much as about job vs. career.
For the vast majority of employees, fast-food is not a career. It's just a
job. You probably really need the job, and that itself is stressful, but that
stress exists at any job. It's not hard to leave one low-skill job and start
another. If punching in orders at McDonald's is sapping your will to live, you
can walk across the street and stock shelves at Walmart, or choose from a
number of other jobs that don't require much or any experience. They all pay
the same, and even a small town has many to choose from (assuming a
reasonably-healthy economy).

Deep chronic stress, to me, is working a career job that you're trapped in.
You can't leave it behind at the end of the day. It's a lot harder to walk
across the street and start fresh at a new company. Even in a robust tech
market, you're doing real damage to your career if you switch jobs every six
months, and if you do that too often, you'll sink quickly. Unless you live in
a real tech hotspot, you'll quite possibly have to move to a new town, or
spend a long time searching.

I've worked many jobs in both these categories, and I've worked short-term
minimum-wage jobs after working six-figure software dev jobs. The minimum-wage
jobs were exhausting, but at least when the shift ended, it ended, and
tomorrow was another day. I never woke up in the morning thinking about next
month's deadlines or went to bed stressed out about tomorrow morning's
meeting.

~~~
lazyasciiart
> For the vast majority of employees, fast-food is not a career. It's just a
> job

I'm not sure that's true. I'm also not sure that your description of how easy
it is to switch fast food jobs is true. On the other hand, I've never lived
anywhere that I would expect to have trouble finding another job in tech
whenever I wanted. At a minimum, your experiences seem too limited to support
the sweeping generalizations that you have given.

