
How to spot symptoms of burnout on your engineering team - bb87
https://jell.com/blog/spot-symptoms-employee-burnout-engineering-team/
======
Brightwise
That's one of the worst articles on this topic I've ever read.

~~~
YCode
Could anyone recommend a better one?

No sarcasm intended, this is an important issue.

~~~
Brightwise
If we want to approach a topic "How to detect/avoid B/o" in a scientific
manner, we should begin with a definition of what that condition is and what
it is caused by.

It's been some years since I investigated on that topic, but I remember there
are basically two paradigms:

A) Blame the guy/dev/employee B) Blame the company/environment/manager

Depending on your point of view, you may want to settle somewhere in between
these two extremes. I find "The truth about burnout" by Maslach/Leiter in my
bookshelf, who where the first ones doing a proper scientific analysis. They
pretty much end up with paradigm B. As a dev, I liked that.

~~~
YCode
Thanks I'll have to check that out.

I suppose I'd go with B, though I have no idea what to do about that.

------
yeukhon
To be honest, I am burnout. I am not sure how to avoid burnout anymore. What
do people do when they feel they are burnout? I am taking Friday off this
month to relax, but when I back on Monday - Thursday, I feel burnout, feeling
so much I want to accomplish, but yet, so disappointed in myself not able to
deliver everything I want to do.

~~~
pasta
Serious: find another job.

I think burnout happens when you put your standards higher than you can
achieve. But there are different kind of standards.

* You can burnout when you work harder than you can (physically and emotionally).

* You can burnout when your social standard is different than your company's.

* You can burnout when your standard is pleasing the user while your company's standard is pleasing the shareholders.

* You can burn out when you think you are not replaceable and the company will collapse without you (fact: it won't).

* And so on...

I never had a burnout but I suffered from extreme fatigue because I was
sitting all day. I got all kinds of physical and emotional problems. So I
started to burn out. And what scared me most was that working out at the end
of the day doesn't help much when you are sitting still 10 hours in a row.

So I had the luck that I could change jobs. Maybe you are also lucky and can
find something that will help you change the problem that burns you out.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
You can burn out if your authority doesn't match your responsibility. (That
is, if your company considers you responsible for making X happen, but the
things that they allow you to do don't allow you to actually make X happen.)

~~~
yeukhon
That's pretty much sums up (latter).

------
jkmcf
Burnout is working hard on a vision not mutually shared, at an organization
with its head up its ass, for people you don't respect. The money does not
matter. Abnormal silence or open grumbling is a chief symptom.

------
konschubert
Another thing to do when people get burned out is to make sure that they leave
work on time.

~~~
Jimmed
100% agree on this. Whenever I've started to feel the onset of burnout, it's
been at times when I felt I couldn't "just leave" at 5.30, for some misplaced
sense of responsibility. It's that looming sense of 'you're here until it's
done' that fills me (and presumably other developers) with dread.

------
webninja
One thing a good manager can do to help your engineering team is ask each one:
"Is there anything that is getting in the way of you being able to do work
now?". Good communication fixes a lot of problems.

------
draugadrotten
If your gut feeling says someone is stressed out, don't trust them when they
say they are OK. People who burn out always say that, that's why they burn
out.

------
nunez
This wasn't a good read. None of those five things are signs of burnout. They
are signs for a lot of things, but not specifically burnout.

------
kfkhalili
Basically when your employees stop doing what they're supposed to do. Got it,
thanks. How/why did this article start so high on the rank list?

------
sauronlord
The solution to burnout: \- get paid way more

Many people will happily work 14 hour days for a 1 million/year Salary. I
promise you they will not burnout.

But the crux of it is that employers must optimize burnout with labour
expense.

Therefore they focus on the employee's behaviour to identify burnout and give
them "just enough" to be teetering below the burnout phase (on-site massages,
catered lunches, bullshit games, and extra vacation)

Other solution is to have a management/executive team that is proactive and
not reactive.

~~~
slau
This is probably the worst point of view I've ever seen on the topic of
burnout. Let's get one thing out there: Money doesn't make people motivated or
happy. It's a condition of employment. Either employees gets enough money, or
they don't. It is very, very binary.

Throwing money at an employee acts as a temporary cushion, a bandaid. A bonus
will be forgotten within days or weeks, a raise within a month or two. This is
not to say that employees never deserve raises. Employees who take on more
responsibilities, or have acquired more experience definitely deserve a higher
pay.

Motivation is the only true variable that managers can influence on, and the
only one that truly matters. Motivation is like a sea/ocean upon which the
employee sails, not unlike a boat. The obstacles, and blockers that employees
face are like rocks under the water level (to keep with the metaphor, because
the keel would strike the rocks). As a manager, you have two options. Take a
pickaxe and try to move those boulders/rocks out of the employee's way, or add
more water.

In this metaphor, the boulders are typically personal blockers ("I'm a C++
dev, I don't want to work on that Node piece of shit", "I start at 7, so I
don't see why I would have to join a meeting at 4PM", "I worked until 3AM
yesterday, which is why I wasn't there at the team meeting at 11AM", etc). You
can try to remove the boulders, but that's closer to psychotherapy that takes
15 years, which is usually out of the realm of possibilities for a manager and
a company. What a manager can do, however, is help the employee feel more
motivated.

This is where extra holidays in lieu, making people feel part of a team, and
feel ownership/responsibility for the team, and other "soft" things plays its
part. Yes, you can try to tell an employee that you'll give him an extra $200
if they stay late and fix a bug, but that just shows that motivation is coming
from the wrong place.

Monitoring how much motivation an employee has is the #1 job of a good
manager. People who burn out are usually badly managed, or operate in a toxic
environment. A good manager can't (always) fix a bad environment. He can
improve certain aspects of it, though.

~~~
sauronlord
Those studies of money being binary and motivation are bullshit.

Ask how many people earning 1 million dollars a year (doctors, etc) feel about
working 80 hour weeks.

------
blurnsball

      How do you spot this symptom? It might be 
      that a team member isn’t commenting on pull 
      requests as much as she used to. Or he’s not 
      speaking up in sprint planning and retrospective 
      meetings. 
    

Ha ha! Oh god.

This is basically the worst thing I've ever read. And why? I think you already
know, but let me tell you anyway!

Meetings are bullshit. At all times they are unrealistic. There is what people
say during a meeting, and then there is what actually happens during the
interplay of the group dynamic, as work gets done.

Sit at tables all day, and bullshit about diagrams and ideas, with zero
concrete examples, and some ham fisted emails where people dump screenshots
into MS Word documents, and then forward as email attachments, with captions
like "it's broken. fix it."

Then go and try to write some code, and see what happens when someone else in
the meeting drops a JSON object on you, that has half the properties you need
to do anything, and most of them are in the wrong place, or at magic number
slots in an array or something.

You have to have your head up your ass, to expect people to be chipper little
busy bees at all times, and then write feel-good blogarticles like this.

But you have to be Satan himself, to put an article like this in front of a so
called "scrum master" and tell them that happy thoughts at all times are the
only "normal" that is the correct and proper Normal, and all other "normals"
are actually signs of workplace PTSD.

Now uppity tough guy managers will bring motherfuckers in for review only to
remind them that they forgot their flair, and they seem to have a case of the
Mondays lately, and ask them to put on a happy face, and pitch in for the big
win!

That's not how it works.

You have a team dynamic, and that team dynamic doesn't change if your team
members are supporting a "Sick System." A Sick System is doomed to be
inefficient, and foments disappointment, because the process is inefficient by
design, but doubly punishing when hopeless, lost people are involved.

But even so, different team members have different perceptions of progress,
based on skill level and experience. So one individual may be happy with the
current sick system, because it's an improvement from their last shit show,
while another will be fucking miserable because this is the tenth
motherfucking shit show they've had to tap dance in, and the routine never
fucking changes.

If you're looking for symptoms of cynicism after they happened, then it's too
late. You don't understand how they happen, why they exist, or how to prevent
them before they occur. If you can't prevent a loss of enthusiasm and morale,
and expect all hands to express the same cordial cookie cutter productivity,
then you are already lost at sea.

~~~
tkaboutit
Agreed, except a slight visual-tweak I'm seeing on the tough guy manager is
the 'servant-leader'. Somehow these 'servant-leader' action-item lists never
spur any introspection within the manager-deity themselves. The servant-leader
sounds like a great idea to managers who have enough self-awareness to have an
inkling that they have no idea what they're doing aside from following
"industry trends".

They read from the Book of Jobs every monday morning. "If thee bees have
passion, they never work a day in their life. And we hiredest thee smartest to
tell us what to do, not to tell them what to do." But the freedom and passion
they're talking about is in deciding how many story points to attach to the
minute tasks that have been pre-ordained for you to be passionate about. This
is because we would have never hired you if you would not be passionate about
the roadmap at all times. Leaders don't admit mistakes in the Book of Jobs,
they first travel through the bloggosphere on their quest for validation that
it's someone else's fault. If that does not work, they check if the naysayer
can be replaced, preferably at a cheaper rate. If so, the naysayer will be
sacrificed to the land of better opportunities to boost team morale.

This article is telling the story of an engineer who tried to collaborate and
voice their concerns constructively to start, but found out it was all the
meetings and listening was just an empty act on the part of their managers.
Their managers kept cramming so much work into the release that quality
suffered under the unrealistic expectations. Those same unrealistic
expectations that were previously carefully regarded by the subordinate
engineer as risks and concerns.

So the engineer realizes that to get something done, they have to do it
themselves. They work longer hours to rearchitect and/or introduce some new
tools to improve the pipeline, but the manager was unable to understand how
this related to this sprint's burndown chart or the pre-ordained roadmap. And
the only conclusion the manager is capable of, even after reading all the
blogs they could find on the subject is: When there's a misunderstanding with
"their" engineer, it was either a bad hire or even though "their" engineer
speaks fluent C,C++,Go,Haskell and Scala, they just do not seem to understand
pie-charts and maybe they need a 1v1 to talk about it. Yes, more meetings is
what they need to get their work done. The engineer stopped trying to waste
their time voicing anything in meetings.

Their rate of commits dropped because they were working on design work, aka
thinking. But their manager literally treats the github commit graph as an
indicator of the engineer's health vital signs. The manager believes themself
very technologically advanced by not resorting to that barbaric practice of
correlating LOC with an engineer's vital signs. Throughout the whole story,
the manager never actually learned or changed one damn thing. *In the article,
this same story is told through the perspective of a manager with their head
quite far up their ass.

Anyways, what a bunch of back-patting patronizing bullshit. I feel truly sorry
for anyone who has to work under this guy or anyone influenced by him.

~~~
jrs235
Part of the issue is too many people, managers in particular, fail to realize
that "manager" and "leader" aren't synonomous. Managers want to believe they
are though! More than likely because charismatic narcissists tend to rise to
the "top" ( [https://hbr.org/2017/04/if-humble-people-make-the-best-
leade...](https://hbr.org/2017/04/if-humble-people-make-the-best-leaders-why-
do-we-fall-for-charismatic-narcissists) ).

