

Marissa Mayer: Why Work Burnout Is About Resentment - raymondh
http://www.cnbc.com/id/49060108

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Aloisius
Oh not this BS again.

I worked at Napster. I saw well over a hundred people burn out over the course
of a couple years when we were being sued by half the entertainment industry.
I've known people who have burned out during college too from undergrad to
grad school. I knew someone who was so burned out, he moved to a anti-
technology cult in Canada ten years ago. This had nothing to do with
resentment. It had to do with stress.

Just because a few people like Mayer have no need for an emotional or stress
outlet doesn't mean burn out doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Maybe for her,
stress doesn't exist, but for the vast majority of the world, it is quite
real.

The fact that this woman runs a company full of people who have to have
approached or are burned out is, quite frankly, amazing.

~~~
HarryHirsch
This hints at the real issue, but it's much worse than that. One could even
say it's insidious.

Burnout has been studied for decades by occupational psychologists and is a
well understood subject. Whenever a CEO makes pronouncements on stuff and
doesn't so much as make reference to existing research on the matter at hand
anyone should ask themselves what that person wants.

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ryanmolden
>I don't really believe in burnout. A lot of people work really hard for
decades and decades, like Winston Churchill and Einstein," says Mayer, a
former Google engineer and one of Google's earliest employees.

Logic like this is so baffling. Look, I can think of one or two people that
don't seem to suffer form X, so clearly X doesn't exist! Alternate
explanation: Churchill and Einstein were freakish and don't represent normal
humans, thus using them as exemplars is likely not going to be useful.

The rest is just her extrapolating her personal experience as a template to be
writ large with 0 evidence behind its accuracy other than her claims that it
'worked for her' (maybe, people have an amazing ability to conflate 'I was
succesful' with 'what I did clearly is right/effective').

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zackmorris
I burned out at my last job because it was 9 hour days and I wanted to invent
stuff at home. It wasn't so much about the work itself. I also had a mountain
of debt so 100% of the money I made was gone the moment I got it. So after 3
years, I was toast, and now I work for myself.

It's going to take a special kind of incentive to get me back in a day job.
I'll only work for someone who understands the opportunity cost of me working
for them, and that everyone has unique contributions/needs that should be
considered. I'm actually hopeful that will happen though, amazingly, even here
in little old Idaho.

