
One In Five Employees Is Highly Engaged and at Risk of Burnout (2018) - dcu
https://hbr.org/2018/02/1-in-5-highly-engaged-employees-is-at-risk-of-burnout
======
GordonS
Around 10 years ago, I felt like I was burning out. I was travelling a lot
(sometimes 20+ hour trips involving 3 planes, always in bloody economy...) and
working stupid hours.

A few things have changed since, and I'm no longer anywhere near burnout.

I stopped travelling all the time, and I started working from home 4/5 days -
less time communiting meant more sleep, and it means I get to have breakfast
and lunch with my family etc.

Then I moved to a 4-day working week a couple of years ago, taking a 20% pay
cut in the process.

Work-wise, it's the best thing I ever did! I spend less hours working, but
somehow I don't seem to be any less productive, so my employer is actually
getting a pretty good deal TBH. And I get a 3-day weekend, which means more
time for family, me, and side projects.

I can understand why employers are apprehensive about remote work and 4-day
weeks, but I really think they need to modernise here - a lot of them still
seem to be stuck in the mindset of prioritising "bums on seats" from 9-5,
rather than _productivity_ and happy employees.

~~~
harperlee
I think that remote working is psychologically hard. I trust that most people
can pull it off short term; long term is more difficult.

There’s also the fact that most people I’ve known in my work need to learn to
work when they graduate (I hire mostly graduates). I’d trust someone with 5
years’ experience to know what is generally expected from them if they work
remotely; I’d be much more concerned about a graduate. Telling them what
“working” means is much harder than them breathing it daily around them at the
office.

Another topic is that it can be fairly difficult to measure actual
performance, and remote work takes from you several proxies. It might make you
more objective - but it might make you less accurate and force you to accept
lower performance due to the “benefit of the doubt”.

~~~
thomascgalvin
> I think that remote working is psychologically hard. I trust that most
> people can pull it off short term; long term is more difficult.

I've been full-time remote for about a year now, and I'm kind of done with it.

It was fantastic at first. I live in Boston, and my commute was about an hour
and a half in every morning, and about two hours home every night. Being able
to step over the dog and be at my office was (and is) awesome.

But I never see anyone anymore, and that's starting to wear on me. My wife
still commutes, so we have about two hours with each other every night before
we have to go to bed and do it all again the next day. If I'm not intentional
about it, I'll spend 23 hours a day in my house, and while I'm not the most
social person around, I think it's starting to have actual negative
consequences for my life. I'm grumpier, I get sick more often, I'm tired ...

~~~
neuland
> If I'm not intentional about it, I'll spend 23 hours a day in my house

I think that's the biggest difference with remote. A lot of things that were
seamless with physical presence need to be done with intentionality in a
remote setup. You need an explicit time for a daily call / team catchup. You
need to either make extra effort or explicitly schedule social chats between
coworkers (I like inviting people to do coffee or show off some thing they're
interested in). And you personally need to make a schedule that gets you out
of the house (I go to coffee shops 3-ish times a week).

I've been remote for 2 years and don't plan on changing any time soon.

Granted, there's a lot of policy- or culture-level stuff that can get in the
way. If the rest of you team is co-located and isn't going to remember to
bring you in on conversations, remote isn't going to work. Same if your
manager equates physical presence to performance.

~~~
jschwartzi
I've been remote for almost 2 years now, and I have the same experience. It
becomes even more important if you have direct reports in the office because
co-workers start asking them questions that are more appropriate for you.

The other important thing for me is to keep a regular schedule when I'm "on"
and then step away from the workspace when I'm "off." Avoid going into the
workspace for personal projects.

Also as part of my job I make sure to stay in contact with my boss about the
things that matter to him like our project plan, release dates, and anything I
need from him. Deliberate, open communication is very important. I also find
that keeping quality written records is critical too because it's the only way
to keep everyone on the same page about what we're working on.

And yes, get up, leave the house, and go do something else during the day,
every day. I personally go for runs and go to the gym in the early afternoon
as a way to be outside. And I spend a lot of time with my girlfriend on
weekends too. Neither of us are homebodies when we have free time so that
works out very well. Even superficial interactions with other people are
enough to fill the cup a little.

------
jaden
It can be demoralizing to step back and ask yourself if what you do at work
provides real value. And when you feel pressure to perform heroics to meet an
arbitrary deadline, burnout is a real possibility.

It's important make sure you're not sacrificing your wellbeing for the benefit
of the company. Your physical and mental health are far too important.

~~~
CalRobert
"if what you do at work provides real value"

My company makes things that are, I'd argue, a net good to the world (we help
make stuff more secure) - but honestly I find myself struggling more and more
to care about anything that isn't addressing the climate or democratic
breakdown the world faces.

Not rhetorical - genuine question: Does anyone else sit at their desk and
think "but guys the ship is sinking, maybe we should worry about fixing the
holes before we repaint the tennis court? guys? GUYS????"

This is my problem really, not the company's, but I'm not sure what to do.

~~~
dougmwne
I work for environmental nonprofits that also lobby for government
intervention. This sector does not pay as well as private industry, so does
not have the best people money can buy. Sure we can use your money, but truly,
what we need most is extremely talented and capable people who can take those
donations and change the world.

I can see clearly from the resumes on my desk that when it comes right down to
it, people would rather make big sacrifices to work for a game developer than
a nonprofit.

~~~
SamuelAdams
Sometimes it's not always about pay. I was in consulting, then took a salaried
job at a University. It was a 10% pay cut, but to compensate for that they
offered 3 additional weeks of vacation (five total).

There's always different things you can negotiate on to bring on great talent.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Been there and done that in the academic word. Had 4 weeks of vacation, and
the manager refused to approve vacation time until the week of.

I started _informing_ that I'm going on vacation. And for doing interviews
elsewhere, took "sick" days.

It was a horrible situation to say the least, but now I'm out of that toxic
hellhole.

------
davidscolgan
I'm a freelancer and realized yesterday that I haven't had a real vacation in
8 years, but also that every one of my clients would probably say yes
definitely if I told them I needed a week off. And they did, and I'm taking
off next week and I have never been so excited in my life.

~~~
rb808
Europeans are like damn I haven't had a week off since March, I should
organize one!

~~~
arthur-st
Haha, I first chuckled at this, and then it dawned upon me that I do plan a
week off in July-August, having had 2 weeks off in April. European here, of
course.

------
js8
I think the burnout happens when you care too much and can't take it
emotionally (when, inevitably, you meet some people who care less). So
obviously, people who are "disengaged" are not at risk of burnout - they are
managing it.

The point is, it can happen at any objective level of environmental stress. It
can also happen at any level of actual performance. The engagement relative to
people you interact with is the thing it depends on, I think.

~~~
lanrh1836
Hmm in my experience burnout has little to do with how much your peers care
about their work relative to you?

For me it seems to happen because we feel that we must be emotionally invested
in our work, and the toll of being 100% emotionally invested in something that
is more likely than not devoid of meaning creates a “burnout” reaction.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I think burnout rarely is connected to an overly strong emotional attachment
or investment in work.

This almost sounds like trying to blame the victim. There’s a much simpler
description: burnout happens _to_ you because of circumstances imposed by the
employer.

You don’t have to be emotionally invested to be deeply stressed by the
prospect of getting fired, demoted or turned into a workplace pariah, and in a
lot of toxic environments you are made to feel those threats are connected to
whether or not you are putting in 8 hours every Saturday or responding to a
permanent triage of PagerDuty alerts with no permission to invest time into
fixing root causes.

Even when it doesn’t manifest as implied uncompensated overtime, you can end
up being expected to be a miracle worker and simultaneously given no
resources, all while balancing a personal life or financial obligations that
might imply you cannot easily quit jobs or move to a new place for better
jobs.

In a Hanlon’s Razor sense, I’d say burnout is almost always about toxic
management or executive behavior. Sometimes it’s about a problematic teammate.
But it’s rarely _caused by_ the degree of emotional investment of the person
burning out. Rather that is a symptom exacerbated by the real causes.

~~~
ptero
> burnout happens to you because of circumstances imposed by the employer.

This is often the case, but I think very often there is a lot of self-
inflicted hurt there, too, with employees burning midnight oil because they
convinced _themselves_ that something bad will happen to them if they do a
task a day (three days, week) later.

<rant> As a personal anecdote, I have to wage real wars to prevent people who
work on my projects from coming to work when they are sick. I do not know what
is it -- do they want to look heroic? believe this day is super critical? but
they still show up to cough and sneeze on everyone. We have unlimited sick
days, stay home! <rant off>

------
brok3nmachine
I think experience plays a role. From my own experience; what I considered
high demand 10 years ago is now low demand. Such as resolving a production
incident at 10am.

In my past I would switch jobs every couple years. Not due to the stress, but
because I was alarmed at how the intensity of work was decreasing at a
company. I equated that with slow professional growth.

Now I'm finding several opportunities for growth, but doing so with a calm
mindset. Several of my colleagues don't seem calm at all. Yet the majority of
us have more control over burnout and "work chaos" than we are lead to
believe.

------
drngdds
>Gallup’s shocking statistic that seven out of 10 U.S. employees report
feeling unengaged

You have to be wildly out-of-touch with society to be shocked by the fact that
most people see their job as just a thing they have to do to make money.

~~~
notTyler
I can't speak for everyone but I haven't worked anywhere I thought top level
management wasn't making wildly misinformed decisions out of desire to save
money or (seemingly) straight-up misunderstanding of their business. A lot
harder to be engaged when that's the case.

------
scottlocklin
Whenever I read one of these HBR things on "optimal employee engagement" I
feel like I'm reading some modern version of an ancient roman treatise on the
care and feeding of agricultural slaves. Everyone who reads this and is trying
to optimize their personal employee engagement should reconsider their life
choices.

~~~
chadcmulligan
In my experience, if you can produce results, there is little restraint from
modern management to exploit you to the max, there is no concern about
burnout, or anything, its a daily battle to reign in demands no matter how
much you produce.

From what I can understand it is taught at business school to exploit
resources, you must look after yourself and push back, surprisingly hard,
again in my experience. I find it abhorrent. It was the .com era when things
changed, when the sharks realised the computers own the world, before that it
was a bunch of happy engineers making stuff.

Even worse many managers seem to be control freaks who can't measure results,
and instead insist on micromanaging everything, looking over your shoulder,
continually asking for feedback, and "checking in" to see how things are
going.

I've said for many years I produce results in spite of managers "helping".
Software development is fairly easy I find, it does take time to produce
results though, and because no one can see whats going on managers behave the
way they do, there's a huge lack of trust on both sides. End of rant.

P.S. I find it easiest to behave like plumbers, they know you need them to
clean up your shit, and they have to pay you, so just do what you have to to
survive. I remember one guy I hired years ago to do some plumbing at a place I
was renovating, kept saying he was busy, yada, yada, went up to the shops he
was wandering around having an Ice cream. Medical specialists are another
great example I find, they have people making outrageous demands on them,
literally life and death, they make sure that people can't find them outside
office hours, they are very good at looking after themselves, as they should
be.

------
tomohawk
Assuming the work you're doing is worth while, burnout and stress are due to
having (or perceiving to have) responsibility but insufficient power or
authority to actually meet it. Working hard does not lead to burnout. Working
hard but being unable to achieve expected results does. Taking time off rarely
helps, because that impossible to meet responsibility is still hanging over
you.

Classic example is school teachers in US public schools. They have enormous
responsibility with the children, but rarely have power or authority. Instead,
they are essentially drones in a big machine.

~~~
dawidw
> They have enormous responsibility with the children

Could you elaborate on that? I always thought that there are rules and
procedures for everything so the teachers are fine and covered.

~~~
Leherenn
Not the OP, but I think that's exactly what he meant. They have the
responsibility to educate the future generations and yet have barely any
leeway about how to do it.

------
bassman9000
_Managers and HR leaders can help employees by dialing down the demands
they’re placing on people – ensuring that employee goals are realistic and
rebalancing the workloads of employees who, by virtue of being particularly
skilled or productive, have been saddled with too much. They can also try to
increase the resources available to employees; this includes not only material
resources such as time and money, but intangible resources such as empathy and
friendship in the workplace, and letting employees disengage from work when
they’re not working. By avoiding emailing people after hours, setting a norm
that evenings and weekends are work-free, and encouraging a regular lunch
break in the middle of the day, leaders can make sure they’re sending a
consistent message that balance matters._

Key point. In my experience, the high-productivity, high-engagement becoming
the new baseline, and then the organization requesting the 120% of that, and
repeat every six weeks, is the true killer.

~~~
wastedhours
> 120% of that, and repeat every six weeks, is the true killer.

This is what I try to get through to people - if you consistently deliver at
100%, that becomes the baseline and you'll be expected to stretch ever further
with little to no extra incentive or support.

Throughout my career I've always held back some level of skill, efficiency, or
drive that I can break out as and when required on very particular projects.
In the end, it's better for the company as I'm less likely to flame out.

Obviously a lot of companies still operate on visibility and presenteeism over
outcomes where it makes it harder, but take the damn lunch break now or you'll
never be taking it.

~~~
bassman9000
I've only recently learnt to step on the breaks to avoid the baseline reset.
It's heart breaking to know you're not tapping your whole potential. Before
that, every task, every project done, was an invitation to take on the next
issue, non stop. People get used to piggyback on that. Pareto distribution is
real.

------
segmondy
I often see folks say that schools should teach finance management from a
young age.

Well, they also ought to teach time management, emotion management, energy
management, people management.

It's just a basic life skill, keeping things in balance. Extremeness in an
area can often be disastrous, it might also come with high reward, but very
few people know how to be highly engaged and yet sort of keep other parts of
their life balanced.

~~~
gizmo686
Don't they?

School is one of the more difficult environments for time management: students
have half a dozen (or more) different bosses, all of whom reguarly impose hard
deadlines, and have a tendency of imposing major deadlines at a simmilar time
to each other.

The social environment is probably one of the most diverse that many people
will see in their entire lifetimes (not nessasarily along racial lines), with
some of the most difficult to deal with people (children) many will face in
their lifetime.

Granted, schools often take a trial by fire approach to these lessons (I
should know, I burned out during highschool), but I don't see how you can get
through school without learning them.

~~~
afarrell
There is a difference between teaching some skill and imposing stress on
people who lack that skill. To illustrate this, Think about the difference
between giving an 8-year-old swimming lessons and tossing an 8-year-old off
the side of a boat.

~~~
OJFord
Imposing a problem is one way of teaching a solution - it may not be the best
way, or a way that you like, but it is a way.

~~~
afarrell
No, its one way of motivating a student to re-invent (and thereby learn) or to
apply (and thereby learn) a solution. But if the student doesn’t ever get the
solution, they don’t ever learn it.

It is possible for someone to face a problem for decades, to care* deeply
about it, for others to succeed at it, and for them to not know how to find a
workable answer. For me, happens for “obvious” problems like “how do I learn
to how to estimate how long software takes to write?” or “How do I write a
first draft of a letter to a friend?” where the answer people have is “just do
it” or “just do it and multiply by 2”.

———

* By “care” about it, I mean feel the emotion of wanting a solution. Some people define “care” such that if someone fails at something it means they didn’t care about it. I’m not using that definition.

------
codingstuffs
I believe it. Currently the rest of my team and I are close to burnout. Our
boss is a workaholic who is controlling and rare to give any praise. The
company is financially successful, but the average employee only lasts 1-2
years.

For some reason I thought I could stick it out, but I'm trying to make it to
the end of the year and then take a break to refocus.

Money only gets you so far - at some point people need a supportive work
environment and a sense of ownership at their job.

------
bryan11
Burnout in IT can be like boiling a frog. One can get involved in larger and
larger projects, then architecture, and then find themselves part of an on-
call group that tries to keep production systems running. Pretty soon one is
working excessive hours monitoring systems, driving projects, and also
responding to production issues 24x7.

If it happens gradually enough, working twelve hours a day and being called
repeatedly during evenings and weekends can feel normal. The high cost on
one's health, social life, and family life can be extreme and quite dangerous.

------
pier25
I've had moments in my life where I was working 10+ hours per day, and was
pretty productive, but those streaks didn't last more than a couple of weeks
and then my energy plummeted. Also I was a freelancer so I was sprint-based
and could stop for a couple of days or weeks quite frequently between
projects.

I quit freelancing about 4 years ago and have been working full time for a
company. I've learned the hard way this is actually a marathon and making
sprints is quite unhealthy. The pile of work on your desk never ends and the
only healthy long term strategy is to chew at it slowly. I now have 5 hours of
productive time at the most.

------
geodel
So it just seem like Pareto principle example. 20% of employees making 80% of
effort. I don't know if it is fixable. All I think is folks in that 20% will
keep changing when Companies/HR/Employees make noise about this. One reason is
because 'highly engaged employees' may not be highly productive employees.

Just yesterday at my workplace one dev spent whole day to set up Eclipse
workspace for a basic Microservice project. It was about 10 min job. Now that
person claims to be junior developer not a total novice and I see no reason to
doubt that. But setting up similar projects has been explained and demoed in
great detail at least couple times in last few weeks. Still anytime something
changes he can spend days to do most trivial things. I would think this person
would simply burnout if task is given with a end date. It doesn't matter how
generous is the deadline.

~~~
jtanderson
> So it just seem like Pareto principle example. 20% of employees making 80%
> of effort. I don't know if it is fixable. All I think is folks in that 20%
> will keep changing when Companies/HR/Employees make noise about this.

This actually sounds like it could make for a great system, in the sense that
you still maintain the original quality and quantity of output, but you still
get to avoid the burnout of that 20% completely, because after some time, it
will be somebody else's "turn" to do more heavy-lifting. Obvious problems here
are that 1) company/team structures in industry don't seem conducive to this,
2) skill levels are unequal, so to maintain the quality of the 20%, one would
need to plan carefully to account for this -- but, it also seems like a good
way to help lower skilled workers rise to meet higher standards -- and 3)
hinted at before, this needs to be institutionalized in a tangible way, and
that seems to require a difficult form of team member assessment/introspection
that managers may not be capable of facilitating.

Wrt point 2 above, I've heard from sources I trust (but would have to bug them
for specific sources on this) the following phenomenon has been observed in
education: when you remove top performing students from sections of a course
-- say, to join an honors section of that course -- the non-honors version of
that course has a void for high-performance students. Interestingly, this void
is often filled by the mid-tier students who would have typically performed at
B/C level, and now some of them will rise to perform at an A level. It would
be fascinating to find observations of this in the industrial setting as well.
If I find a source for this, I'll update my comment.

~~~
supernomad
So regarding your point 2 I have, at the very least anecdotally, seen this
happen in practice. I work in a tech startup and as such we have a lot of
highly talented engineers sitting in the top spots throughout the engineering
org. We have recently had the case where some of these top engineers have
shifted focus and we as a company watched as the engineers beneath them rose
to the occasion.

This is definitely a phenomenon that can happen, but it has a dark side that I
feel is rarely accounted for. While you want to have senior talent and empower
your engineers to grow, you also need to have junior/mid level engineers to
support them. All to often the reason you have 20% of the employees making 80%
of the effort is because they have no supporting infrastructure to help them
with their jobs, or they are powerless to leverage the other employees for
help without interacting with, sometimes multiple, management levels.

When we started to expand the engineering org it became readily apparent what
we needed wasn't more senior talent, but more, for lack of a better word,
grunts to help with the mundane tasks that the senior engineers shouldn't be
working on. This same thing happens in most other organizations outside of
software development as well. Essentially one way to ensure that you don't
have your engineers burn out, is to ensure they have a team they can fall back
on completely outside of management. I personally appreciate getting
recognition from my manager and the higher ups at the company I work at.
However I appreciate the team I can rely on far more. I think generally
HR/Managers should get out of the way more often, and instead of directly
acting make it easier for teams to help/support each other.

------
reallydontask
I had a job running a tech department on a small company. It was my first
management job and I wanted to make a success out it.

The company was pretty dysfunctional and I took it upon myself to pretty much
do everything, so much so that I was working 12 hour days (This is work time,
minus breaks, measured with an app) so my day would start at ~ 06:30 and
finish ~ 21:00.

I have never been quite so miserable in my life and I was making so many
mistakes that it was unreal. I also picked up a very bad habit of doing things
quickly and 90% there as that was better than not doing them at all and to do
them properly would take too long. It's been close to a year now and I still
find myself falling in the turn things around quickly and sacrifice quality
trap, even when there is no rush at all for it. I hope I get rid of this bad
habit soon

------
mlthoughts2018
So many comments are speaking about burnout as a result of lack of managing
emotional investment in work. This blows my mind because I’ve never seen or
heard of burnout manifesting this way in real life, not a single time.

Burnout _happens to you_ and does not originate inside you. A manager or
executive _burns employees out_ not employees “letting themselves” become
burned out.

Turning it around and acting like it’s intrinsic to the employee is harmful
victim blaming. It’s like blaming someone with symptoms of clinical depression
for not “managing their emotions.”

I feel very discouraged by this because I don’t think we’ll make progress
helping people heal from and avoid burnout unless we recognize that it is
caused by the wider sociological issues of toxic management & executive
behavior.

~~~
boronine
Who is victim blaming? We talk about emotional investment because it’s
something that is actually under your control to change, unlike your manager
or “wider sociological issues”

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Exactly. Trying to turn it around like the issue is due to the agency (hence
blaming) the victim, when really it’s not down to that person’s agency at all,
rather something they are subjected to through no choice of their own.

Your comment in fact is one of the worst forms of victim blaming, and you may
not be aware that you’re even doing it: justifying victim blaming as though it
is some sort of justified focus on “what you can do” when the problem should
not be made to be about that or justified as such.

~~~
boronine
I am not blaming anyone, I don’t care whose fault it is. I am focusing on what
an individual can do because focusing on anything else is a waste of time.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Focusing on what the individual can do _is_ a tacit form of victim-blaming in
many situations. For many types of victims, drawing attention to remedies that
rely on that person’s agency, rather than wider remedies predicated on greater
social responsibility to fix the underlying problem, is a tacit way of putting
the onus on a class of victims to “deal with it” and to view whatever type of
abuse was inflicted on them as if it is their own private burden, instead of
being _everyone’s_ burden to fix.

In other words, changing the conversation to be about “what you can do”
tacitly reinforces the stance that it’s nobody else’s problem to fix, which is
precisely blaming the victim for being in the situation (e.g. “if you want
things to be different, it’s on yourself to do it”).

You may not be consciously aware that your behavior is tacitly blaming
victims, but nonetheless it still absolutely is.

~~~
boronine
If “drawing attention to remedies that rely on [one’s] agency” is victim
blaming, then I’m all for it.

------
seaborn63
I've definitely burned out before. Working crazy hours for low pay in hopes of
showing my worth and earning more. It kept it up for a few years but
eventually broke pretty hard.

I have to say though I am pretty thankful for all of that. It allowed me to
reevaluate what was important to me and really think about what I wanted to
do. I ended up switching industries all together and I finally don't hate life
any more.

------
duxup
It is interesting how they talk about HR.

In my experience HR organizations are mostly there as a sort of risk
management for the company, everything / anything else tends to feel like just
sort of HR resume fodder / token programs / company cheerleading.

~~~
gtirloni
This meme gets repeated on HN quite frequently but a good HR department can
help a lot with engagement across the company. Sure, they can't solve specific
team problems but if they work as a channel for employees to be heard and
upper management trusts them, they can be a positive force.

~~~
chillwaves
The interests of HR are opposed to the interest of the worker 9 times out of
10. There is no way to reconcile this fact.

~~~
MegaButts
I wrote a long rant but deleted it because it was so personal. But I cannot
agree more that HR is not on your side.

~~~
bunsenhoneydew
This very much depends on the culture of the company. I've experienced toxic
HR, indifferent HR, incompetent HR and awesomely helpful HR. It depends on the
people in the HR team and the people on the exec team.

HR is a really hard job too, very hard to do well and very stressful. Most
people never get to see this as it's part of their job that they can't talk
about most things they are having to deal with.

Bad HR is a nightmare, good HR can make a massive difference to a company.

------
scarejunba
Ooh I actually hit this early on in my career. I cared a lot about stuff to
the extent that I'd give up going to shows to do work. Well, that was
_entirely wrong_. Nobody wanted that of me.

I learnt then that giving that much of a shit only mattered if I were building
something for myself. So, for the things I care about, I'll give that much of
a damn, but for someone else, they're not getting that.

The mistake I made was that I invested more into that thing than the owners
themselves. That's so foolish. Why? They don't want that from you.

------
flowersjeff
We all here would agree with the 80/20 rule. Try explaining that to management
and/or HR. It would seem to be beyond their abilities of comprehension.

Sure they will provide lip service; however, the moment you try to have an
authentic discussion (backed up with evidence mind you) around ways to assuage
potential burn-out due to constant on-the-job heroics...good luck is all I can
say.

I have unfortunately come to realize that those that have perfected the art of
looking busy and/or professional slackers seem to get a free pass.

Frustrating indeed.

------
chadlavi
TBH in the tech industry I would expect this to be more than 20%

------
newsgremlin
The toil for me is feeling like your stuck in a rut pushing out release after
release, this is more apparent in Agile when your working on a service, and
not a product that will be released to the world with high hopes of
groundbreaking success in your industry and then passed onto devops. While I
know I am making a contribution, from a week to week perspective it's easy to
be disconnected from all the real 'good' I do.

------
hyfgfh
The other 4 are reading news on HN

~~~
rolltiide
2 of which are correctly using the unlimited vacation policy because none of
that matters after the company folds

~~~
hamburglar1
2/5 work for a company they think is going to fold?

~~~
rolltiide
Doesn't matter what they think

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dalore
That site was really hard to read. Small and narrow fonts with a strange font
face.

------
vbuwivbiu
you don't realize it until it's already happening

~~~
agumonkey
depends, what do healed burnout patient think ? can they sense things coming
earlier ? attuned from experience ?

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JetezLeLogin
Holy crap, I need to email this link both to my old boss, and to my likely new
boss with whom I'm negotiating salary right now!

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mothsonasloth
..and for each burned out one there is another X to take their place, for the
good of the company.

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lettergram
Exactly the market my startup is targeting:
[https://metacortex.me/](https://metacortex.me/)

Turns out “burn out” (turnover) is by far the largest single cost to
employers. It adds huge overhead per employee and dramatically reduces a
companies profitability if they can’t keep a low turnover.

------
sbhn
In this case you need a highly motivated situational captain on your floor,
always on the ball, first in, last out, always pointing and delegating, and
rewarding only the highest of achievers. Situational Captain, every
organisation needs one.

------
triplee
Happy Friday. Eat Arby's.

------
lanrh1836
That’s called a sociopath where I’m from...

~~~
itronitron
I know what you mean, people that over-engage themselves to the point that
they can't manage their own workload end up creating a toxic work environment
and taking it out on their coworkers. In my experience when those people leave
the organization morale and retention goes up for everyone else.

The point at which someone becomes 'over-engaged' is highly individualized but
based on my experience it is highly associated with people that are
deliberately working their way up the management ladder.

------
readhn
i'd argue that more often than not "the highly engaged and at risk of burn
out" person is full of illusions while the other 4 have been around the block
and dont give a %rap anymore.

~~~
gtirloni
That's clearly a false dichotomy.

------
mberning
I take their point, but there is always going to be somebody that is hungry to
make an impact and reap the rewards. It even sounds crazy to think of my job
in the context of “how can I sustain this for years/decades”. The whole point
of hustling is to level up and do something hopefully more interesting or at
the least more lucrative. Most workaholics that I have known were perfectly
aware of what they were doing and burnout was not even a factor worth
considering.

