
57% of tech industry employees are suffering from job burnout - rosstex
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurencebradford/2018/06/19/why-we-need-to-talk-about-burnout-in-the-tech-industry
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Scalanchilis
I start feeling burnout at a job if there's a lot of work, but the problems
I'm solving are just not _interesting_. For example, if we're building on top
of a legacy system with piles of technical debt and business pressure to ship
features now, there's really not much time to focus on the parts of technology
I enjoy: exploring new technology, experimenting with a new and better
architecture, and playing around with higher-level ideas about the product and
business model. At most, there's time for small-scale refactoring of a few
classes and enhancing test coverage. Boring.

On top of it, if an employer prefers I get to the office by 9AM every day
instead of on the schedule I function best on, I sometimes have to come to
work tired or miss out on social/cultural opportunities that would get me home
late.

I think software engineers can have differing motivations. Some want to
organize and perfect a codebase. Others want to explore and build new tools
and better abstractions. Some do want to socialize a bit; others want to be
left on their own to code all day. I think burnout may be high in part because
the a good many jobs are stressful without being inherently all that
interesting.

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rootsudo
I'm burned out.

I took a new job.

First month in, I took 3 days off, simply because of disorganization, stress
and my body acted out on it.

I can't work in an open office space. Especially when the devs can work remote
whenever.

I also think cultural fit is a big problem. I don't enjoy working for non-tech
companies.

My work is simply not interesting, but if I could do it from remote, that's
fine. I hate having to signal I'm busy by headphones. I dislike my cubicle
location right by the break room and listening in on sales and seeing high
school equivalent flirting and then the gossip. It's distracting/doesn't
involve me what chad in Sales is trying to hit up the interns. Don't blame
him, but I don't want to see it.

That's my experience.

Also, being extraverted in IT while everyone is an Introvert is a drain on
itself. Sure, I enjoy tabletop gaming, and I used to play video games. I
remember a job I took right outside college, I didn't pass 30 days probation
because I refused to play on steam (didn't even know what steam was) with my
co-workers after work.

I responded amicably that I was busy after work on the aim chatroom: "I'm here
with you 8 hours a day, I don't want to spend another 4 with you guys after a
commute home."

"Not a team player."

Total BS. Did not list that job on my resume and it was a complete waste of
time.

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civilitty
How does this compare to workers in general? In every other field I've worked,
I'd say at least half of the people are burned out but in tech employees have
a lot more mobility with respect to their employer. I'm curious how strongly
the large difference in the burnout survey between companies correlates to
where they are located. I assume companies with large portions of their
workforce located in the SV/NY/SEA metros are less burned out in general
because they face less risk trying to find another employer.

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hacker_9
The amount of click bait in this title is outstanding. Oh and I have to accept
some privacy agreement to even read the article? How does this horse shit even
get to the front page.

~~~
jxub
Well, it looks full of dark UX patterns (and possibly it is a GDPR breach) as
you need to explicitly opt out of the tracking for ads and the option takes
forever to load.

However Forbes in general has set a pretty low bar for its journalism so not
much is missed in case of ditching it.

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jxub
I am seeing a huge influx of people into tech just for the money, and
personally I'm quite disgusted by that (although I get their motivations
behind that behaviour).

Could this relatively huge burnout figure be a direct result of people
entering tech just for the money despite not being passionate in it, and
realizing being ears deep in code is just not for everyone (esp. every
personality type)?

On the other hand, the kind of people that like to code tend to despise the
modern management style of agile standup scrum master slack jira jockeying, so
this clearly is a more complex issue.

~~~
myWindoonn
I burnt out after a few years at Google. It's a real problem. I was heavily
involved in open source for a decade, but the stress of Google's bullshit (not
to let any other employer in our field off the hook!) was not something that
my soul could withstand, and now I hate computers and wish that the entire
industry would stop existing, for the sake of everybody's mental health.

~~~
digi_owl
hear hear. I try to map out a timeline and it seems to all come out of those
years around 2007-2008.

For some reason around that point the industry, FOSS included, seemed to
decide that most computer owners are idiots, that need to be put in the
proverbial padded cell for the well being of both themselves and the larger
computer ecosystem.

Ever since that time, there have been ever more layers of obfuscation and
automation put in that is supposedly there to avoid problems, but more often
than not fails to account for any usage scenario outside of the valley
mainstream. And thus result in all kinds of added complications that needs to
be disabled, bypassed, and monitored as some future patch may well bring them
roaring back to life.

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cbanek
> Some companies had more burnout than others in the survey. Credit Karma had
> the highest rate, with over 70% of employees saying they were burnt out.
> Netflix was the lowest at around 39%.

Interesting. I've heard that Netflix is a very high stress place, I would have
imagined more burnout... although maybe those people just end up leaving? I
could see having a revolving door of people coming and going with a low tenure
having a low burnout number just because many people don't stay long enough to
burn out or once they're burned out?

One thing about tech is at least you get paid well, so that if you need to
take some time off between jobs that is more possible than with many other
careers.

~~~
bytematic
Last I read Netflix doesn't hire juniors, could that be the reason?

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cbanek
Could be, I wonder if that is ever accounted for in these burnout studies... I
always felt like the senior people are the ones burning out, because they are
generally the ones that have to take on random firefighting activities and
operations.

Although on future reflection, it seems like the junior ones are also taken
advantage of frequently with long hours and "perks."

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aussieguy1234
This is interesting. I've always found programming to be fairly easy. Not only
do I do it at work, but I continue on side projects at home.

Its extremely rare that i'll get stressed from doing it and if that happens,
normally an hour break (or less) will fix it.

~~~
DougN7
I used to be exactly the same way. 25 years later and I’ve had my fill.
Eventually, you’ve seen it all a few times. The packaging changes but
processing information and getting it from here to there can only be done in
so many ways with 1’s and 0’s.

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borplk
The incentives are screwed.

Companies chew up young energetic employees and spit them out when they get
used up and burned out.

With their short term and selfish thinking the burned out employee is someone
else's problem.

