
Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout - Raj7k
http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-say-poor-leadership-is-number-one-cause-for-burnout/
======
throwawayamzn7
I know of a team (~20 devs, a handful of managers) in the middle of a
fantastic experiment in burning out the developers.

First, a new remote senior leader took over. He doesn't visit the team or
understand them well. He puts pressure on the managers to deliver projects
that make his bosses happy by looking sexy, even if they cause more
operational issues for the customers. Operational issues = oncall hell, so
more devs burn out and quit.

The experiment is going great.

Phase two began recently. Of the three remaining managers, one quit and one
was fired for not brown nosing to the remote senior leader enough. (Push back
on bullshit projects? That can't be allowed). The single remaining manager is
the ultimate brown noser who happily causes his devs on call hell in order to
make senior leadership happy.

The devs are all looking elsewhere for work. The general mood is in a
freefall. People are taking long vacations away in cities that also have lots
of tech jobs.

It's all a fantastic experiment in how to implode a software organization. I
really hope to meet the control group some day- they won't believe how lucky
they are.

~~~
lovich
What is with companies denying remote work but then bringing in some level of
management that works remotely? I've seen happen it in a few places and it
feels like animal farm half the time

~~~
0xJRS
Worked a job at a startup once that had a 40hr "butt-in-seat" policy. The PM
would be the one to record the exact time you sat down, the exact length of
your lunch, and the exact time you left. This also included breaks. There
would be a report to management every Friday and then a 1 on 1 with the
manager if he didn't "like" what he saw.

~~~
0xJRS
Oh, our manager _and_ our CTO lived 2 states away and were flown in every
tuesday through thursday.

------
vladgiverts
There are so many articles that blame leadership for all that ails a company.
To me, it seems a bit like saying "most program crashes are caused by runtime
errors". While both are true, there are deeper explanations that can be more
helpful in starting a discussion.

In the case of crashing a program, maybe it's because of a misused raw pointer
or a type error in an untyped language. As soon as you frame it that way, you
immediately see possible paths forward to improve the situation.

In the case of burnout at companies, I've found it has more to do with the
mindset of the top leaders (who other managers down the chain tend to
emulate). The mindset is that the company is "a machine", which makes the rest
of us "cogs" (or pick your favorite machine part).

The leaders may be perfectly nice and considerate people in general (or not),
but regardless, the company-as-machine mindset leads them to set aside their
humanity in the interests of the company. All of sudden everyone on the team
needs to be replaceable, have predictably high output, etc. Those might be
fine concerns for a business, but they end up blinding managers to the flesh
and blood human beings in front of them and they start to see employees as the
means to the greater business ends of output, productivity, growth, etc.

I believe this is an issue of human development that affects most companies
eventually. Only companies with really developed leaders who, when faced with
serious pressure, are able to see people as the unique and complex beings that
they are and not make people feel like they somehow don't matter at a
fundamental level.

~~~
shadowsun7
This opinion is nice but not actionable. That means that it is less useful if
you are in the role of an employer, wanting to reduce burnout in your org.

See my comment below for _actual mental models you can use_ to prevent burnout
in your organisation.[1]

I personally find JD-R more useful, because it prescribes a model of 'jobs
demands outstripping job resources', which then implies that you as manager
can seek ways to increase job resources to help your employees cope. This at
least suggests a direction for trial and error.

Adopting the attitude of 'all people are unique and complex beings that
matter' may be nice, but it doesn't prescribe action. Therefore, it isn't as
useful as 'think of burnout as JD-R or COR and perform experiments according
to those models, pausing each quarter to see if burnout-related turnover has
decreased'.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17850532](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17850532)

~~~
vinceguidry
In absence of leadership, the tool firms use to solve coordination problems is
management. A leader from this perspective is simply a better manager. Better
at all the tasks of coordinating human activity, reading when people are
feeling down, better at inspiring them, better at breaking apart complex tasks
into routine ones that the ICs can more easily understand.

But leaders are practically impossible to reliably hire at rates the business
owner can realistically afford, and if the whole zeitgeist of business starts
paying more for effective leadership, then that just makes the problem a
hundred times worse.

Leadership isn't teachable, but management is. Learning management will teach
you the rudimentary skills of coordinating people to accomplish a goal, but it
won't by itself make you a leader.

Firms can hire more managers, that solves the problem, I call a team with more
than one competent manager, 'well-managed'. But good managers, like good
leaders, wind up getting overworked across projects and so they just miss
things. A leader doesn't miss anything, they're laser focused on the overall
business goals of the project.

~~~
vladgiverts
I agree that leadership isn’t “teachable” in the same sense that a skill or
piece of knowledge is. But it can be supported and cultivated. It’s what I do
for a living as a leadership coach. I don’t actually instruct anyone how to
lead, but rather give them them the opportunity to discover it for themselves.
I’ve seen pretty meaningful shifts for people on the timescale of 3-6 months.

~~~
dsajames
Leadership is very teachable. The military and other large organizations that
need leadership that can't be gotten off the street invest in it.

Few orgs want to teach it because it costs money and the ROI is poor if the
subject jumps ship. The military doesn't have this problem to the same degree
for obvious reasons, but for companies that require common skill sets, it's a
tough decision.

~~~
vladgiverts
It depends what you mean teachable. When a leader is when faced with a serious
challenge, the crux of great leadership is being able to set one’s own ego
aside and act from a place of groundedness and a clear and objective view of
reality.

When human beings are in a difficult situation they all too often try to
comfort themselves by seeking praise/affirmation, stability/safety,
connection/relationship, etc. And in those moments we see everyone around us
as a means to the end of getting one of those things that we feel is missing
for us. Our ego _is_ our personality. We’re fused with it and most of the time
aren’t even aware that we have these impulses.

Great leaders are the ones who develop an awareness of their inner world and
are able to set it aside when they need to act.

Can you teach this? Sort of. There are people who do. You can call what people
like me do as a kind of teaching. But it requires someone more than just
instruction and practice. The person doing the “learning” has to be willing to
let go of parts of themselves that had been with them for most of their life.

I’ve found mere desire to be a better leader is not enough. People’s
psychology is riddled with land mines and powerful defense that won’t let them
abandon a deeply held belief just because someone taught them that it was
somehow counterproductive.

The people that make the leap are usually feeling “stuck” or having some kind
of recurring breakdown that they just can’t bear anymore and don’t know what
else to do.

------
Sacho
Here's the primary source for the survey in question:
[http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-
workers-...](http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-say-
poor-leadership-is-number-one-cause-for-burnout/)

How useful is a survey like this? The survey does not define burnout to
employees, leaving them to guess at the definition. Can employees reliably
self-diagnose burnout and differentiate it from similar conditions - i.e.
actual depression? Can they also reliably indicate __the cause __for the
burnout, especially if the symptoms can overlap with the cause? Let 's say you
have burnout because of work overload, but you normally don't mind doing tons
of work, just hate your boss. When the feelings of exhaustion/anger come up,
will you point them at the work load or at your boss?

Perhaps you could relabel it as a survey on workplace discontent, but even
then, I don't think it's really well made. The problem with statistical data
like this is that we can see the primary source and temper our enthusiasm for
the accuracy of the survey, down the broken telephone line, it will be taken
as gospel(see the wage gap/sexual harassment statistics as examples).

~~~
JohnBooty

        > The survey does not define burnout to employees, leaving them to guess at the definition.
    

This sort of self-reporting is accepted in psychology. The way you determine a
subject's happiness is to ask them how happy they feel.

Think about how a more rigorous alternative might work.

1\. We come up with some more precise definition of "burnout." Perhaps we
define it as "an average of X 'frustration' events in the workplace over Y
days, combined with a steadily declining sense of 'enthusiasm'"

2\. OK, great, but now we need precise definitions of 'frustration' and
'enthusiasm.' Is 'frustration' the momentary frustration we feel when the
compiler complains about something? Is it a barely-restrained feeling of
wanting to smash one's keyboard over somebody's face? For how many seconds
should that feeling be experienced to qualify? Likewise with 'enthusiasm.'
Same problem we had in step 1.

3\. Alternatively, we could monitor people's cortisol levels, blood pressure
levels, and have them spend their workdays in an fMRI machine or something.
Although even that would have limitations; that seems more likely to measure
acute symptoms than something chronic like "burnout."

    
    
        > Can employees reliably self-diagnose burnout and differentiate it from similar conditions - i.e. actual depression?
    

With a sufficiently large sample size this wouldn't matter.

As you say, surely x% of respondents will confuse depression with burnout.

However, the value of x% will surely be nearly the same at all companies.

------
DrinkWater
Poor Leadership is also the number one cause for parting ways with a company.

For me personally, there was never another reason to leave a company. I never
experienced a toxic environment or had colleagues i couldn't stand. It was
always the leadership

~~~
blitmap
You've never experienced inconsiderate coworkers? Like coworkers who talk
loudly on the phone in a nearby work area, coworkers with hygiene issues,
coworkers who don't carry their weight or respond well to training?

~~~
rejschaap
All of these issues should be addressed by the manager.

~~~
paulie_a
Or potentially addressed directly. I've had a couple occasions where I
literally told a sexual harassing manager to "go fuck himself" twice. (He was
harassing the women at the office) At another company I was politely
confronted about a comment I had made, we talked it out. It was
unintentionally insulting and we acted as adults and I realized why he brought
it up.

------
kabdib
I left my last job largely because of this. Exec-levels couldn't decide on a
technical direction for the next big version of a major consumer product, then
chose a _very bad_ strategy, which took nearly a year to change to something
sane. Well, at least less crazy.

Meanwhile, the competition is not stupid and is not crazy and is not waiting
for us to get our act together. Suddenly we have a year to do the thing that
the worker-bee level Cassandras were saying was the right thing to do in the
first place. Maybe 14 months to bring up hardware, port or write three major
hunks of software, get third parties ramped up on development, write tools and
do the million things you need to do to ship. Oh, and the team writing the OS
we're mandated to use has been ordered not to talk to us and has gone dark,
removing our access to their releases and documentation.

So there's a meeting of all the software folks, and management tells us "Okay
guys, the next year is going to be hell. You'll be allowed to take vacation,
probably, we'll tell you when." I'd seen this coming and was sitting in the
back of the room with an offer letter in my pocket, trying not to be angry
because a bunch of people I like working with a lot are getting shafted. I
should be elated at the offer (which is quite good), but instead I just feel
sad.

I leave.

Six months later one of my friends working on the project sends me a picture
of his front lawn. He has been unable to find the time or energy to mow it and
it is 18 inches high. Eventually they ship (late, of course), to lackluster
reviews. My friend has since moved on; most of the people I know there have.
They don't like talking about that year-long deathmarch, followed by a year of
patching the living crap out of things in the field and struggling for market
share. Meanwhile, the competition's product does very, very well.

Last I checked, the latest crop of execs there were gunning for the same
crazy. Maybe technology has moved on sufficiently and the specific crazy is
possible now, but I have numbers indicating things are pretty much the same. I
don't know which side to cheer for. Where do they get these lunatics?

~~~
bittcto
I believe they hire those “lunatics” because it’s believed that engineers
can’t understand business.

As an engineer that has started businesses this is BS.

It’s really easy to learn business skills, sales and marketing are not
difficult, finance is laughably easy.

But so long as the companies are being formed to sell equity to VCs you will
see them led by frat boys who the VC frat boys recognize... and they will
abuse engineers.

My solution- stop working for anyone who isn’t technically competent or at
least recognizes engineering needs enough to get out of the way and support
being efficient.

~~~
ganoushoreilly
I half agree, the reality is sales is a tradecraft honed over time. If it were
as easy as implied, many more of the _Tech_ founders here on HN would have had
their businesses succeed. The truth of the matter is, the us vs them mentality
is just as damaging as one side being arrogant. The only way for a good team
to work is for each to recognize strengths and weaknesses and for leadership
to keep things level headed.

~~~
kabdib
I remember being at a startup full of engineers, and us trying to hire a
salesperson.

Years at big companies taught me contempt for marketing and sales. But there's
nothing like finding _good_ marketing and _good_ sales when you're six months
to financial destruction . . .

~~~
bittcto
Yes, and early in my career I was a technical sales person for a product I
built... paired with a pure sales person.

I don’t mean to say there was no value to his skills— but I am saying that it
was not hard for me to understand enough about sales to hire a good sales
person.

They would of course be a better sales person than me.

The problem is people think your CEO should be a sales person and that’s s
mistake.

Sales is a process that’s easy to replicate.

Creating a novel software application isn’t.

Ate hnicwl CEO can hire a great chief sales guy. A non-technical CEO can’t
hire a CTO and often ends up undermining the product.

I would have no problem being hands off with the sales department.

I have yet to meet a Non technical CEO who doesn’t think he knows how to
design products.

~~~
shanghaiaway
Have yet to meet a technical CEO who does not think they know sales,
marketing, design, etc.

------
dunkelheit
Misleading title: the original survey question is "What is the main source of
employee burnout at your current workplace?". Positive answer to this question
doesn't mean that the person answering the question is himself burnt out.

~~~
Raj7k
So, I took this title from NextBigWhat. I haven't manufactured this by myself

~~~
bartread
[EDIT] Removed previous comment as the parent apparently missed the [via] link
at the bottom of the article, the same as I did.

------
shadowsun7
This is a woefully inadequate article, and a woefully inadequate survey. So
what if 'poor leadership' is the number one cause for burnout? That insight
isn't useful. As an employee, I'd like to figure out how to avoid burnout. And
as a employer, I'm not sure how to reduce burnout — get better leadership? How
do I do that?

But it turns out there are good ideas we can try that may be found in the
academic literature.

Context: I was writing up my process for preventing burnout recently
([https://commoncog.com/blog/nuanced-take-on-preventing-
burnou...](https://commoncog.com/blog/nuanced-take-on-preventing-burnout/)),
and I took some time to look into the academic literature for burnout, to see
if it highlighted anything I'd missed.

I'll give a quick summary:

1\. The standard test for burnout today is something called the Maslach
Burnout Inventory
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslach_Burnout_Inventory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslach_Burnout_Inventory),
and it measures burnout along three metrics: exhaustion, inefficacy, and
cynicism.

a) Exhaustion: described as wearing out, loss of energy, depletion,
debilitation, and fatigue.

b) Inefficacy: described as reduced productivity or capability.

c) Cynicism: negative or inappropriate attitudes towards clients,
irritability, loss of idealism, and withdrawal.

2\. The MBI is a descriptive model, which helps you identify burnout, but we
need a developmental model as well (e.g. what are the various stages of
burnout?). The early models of burnout described the pathway as three stages:
1. job stressors (an imbalance between work demands and individual resources),
then 2. individual strain (an emotional response of exhaustion and anxiety),
and then 3). defensive coping (changes in attitudes and behavior, such as
greater cynicism).

Or, to put this simply: first your job demands too much of you, then you feel
anxious and emotionally exhausted, then you cope by becoming cynical about
work, and then you quit.

3\. Maslach found that development of cynicism is the biggest predictor of
burnout-related turnover. If you're cynical about your job, you're pretty
likely to think about quitting or to actually quit soon.
([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19426369](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19426369))

4\. If you look at the literature today, however, you'll find that most
burnout research has converged on two development models: the Job
Demands‐Resources (JD‐R) model ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_demands-
resources_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_demands-resources_model))
and the Conservation of Resources (COR) model
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_resources_theo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_resources_theory)).
I'll leave you to read the respective Wikipedia articles, but the takeaway
from both of them is that burnout results from when the resources provided by
the job are outstripped by the demands of the job.

As a CEO or manager, your best bet to reducing burnout is to increase the list
of job resources described in JD-R, that is:

> physical, psychological, social, or organisational aspects of the job that
> are either or: functional in achieving work goals; reduce job demands and
> the associated physiological and psychological cost; stimulate personal
> growth, learning, and development. Examples are, career opportunities,
> supervisor coaching, role-clarity, and autonomy.

As an employee, your best bet to reducing burnout is to increase personal
resources (which are different from job-provided resources in the JD-R model).
But the problem here is that the research doesn't yet know if there are
effective techniques in increasing personal resources. Why? Well ...

5\. There are only two decades or so worth of research into burnout, and the
research was primarily centered around the care-giving professions.
Consequently, early models of burnout were thought to stem from social
exhaustion (e.g. nurses and doctors dealing with death, or grief); in a 2016
retrospective review article
([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4911781/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4911781/)),
Maslach herself write that this is an active field of research, and they don't
yet know if you can train someone to be more resistant to burnout.

There are some interesting research directions, though. I found this paragraph
in an undergrad paper from Australia (where apparently half of the nurses
there leave the profession prematurely, mostly due to burnout):

> Rather, failure to recover consistently from such work stresses (in non-work
> time) is a crucial determinant of chronic (maladaptive) fatigue and burnout
> evolution (Winwood et al. 2007). When such recovery is effected
> consistently, physiological toughness (Dienstbier 1989,1991) and enhanced
> stress resistance is developed, with improved performance at work, better
> sleep and reduced maladaptive health outcomes (Dienstbier 1991).While some
> individuals may achieve this spontaneously, far more may beneﬁt from speciﬁc
> training to do so effectively and consistently.

The Winwood paper may be found here:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17693784](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17693784)
but it's unclear if they've found a set of techniques that work for most
people in most professions. I'm still reading up.

PS: I have a technique that I use myself, but it's unclear that it would work
for everyone. I wrote it up here: [https://commoncog.com/blog/nuanced-take-on-
preventing-burnou...](https://commoncog.com/blog/nuanced-take-on-preventing-
burnout/). It's certainly protected me from burnout in startupland over the
years. But, as I've mentioned, I'm interested in the research because the goal
there is to find a set of general techniques that would work for most people.
My technique has a sample size of one.

~~~
padolsey
Thank you for writing this all up. I found this all really interesting but one
question remains: what should we do when we have burnout? It's easy enough to
say "just employ one of your coping mechanisms" but presumably there are real
resentments underlying the situation?

I guess this is the crux really. Is burnout merely an arbitrary expression of
exhaustion and overwork, which carries thoughts and resentments that may seem
'real' but are really just manifestations of stress? Or are the resentments in
any way real? If they're real, I personally feel they need to be tackled in a
way beyond mere coping.

~~~
zoomablemind
The resentment may come from mismatch between personal and job goals. It could
be anything, projects, salary, bosses, colleagues. It may be clear from the
beginning, or pop mid-course.

With no resolution to the mismatch, it leads to self-repression of the
resentment, then to cynicism, and indeed it saps away emotional energy to
manage this.

So, it's important to be aware of how the job vs personal goals match. Making
the job expectation known to the superiors may as well help keeping the
balance. Btw, brown-nosing is a form of negotiation, sure it's not the only
way.

Otherwise the burn-out will be more self-inflicted. Also, there're cases that
may have no practical ways to balance (culture fit). In this case setting to
oneself a limited time-frame to attempt finding the balance (improving the job
goals). Then declare 'mission accomplished' and move on (taking the side of
personal goals).

Low and time-wasteful work-load (9-5) may as much lead to burn-out as the
sweatshop slavery kind. But both environments have those that would flourish
there.

------
titzer
Number one by a hair. 23% leadership vs. 19% overwork.

Interesting to see the per-company breakdown. I wonder about the sample size.
Blind seems like a promising avenue for getting sentiment analysis inside of
companies, but there is a pretty serious sampling bias, as many who sign up
for Blind might already be feeling disillusioned.

~~~
imglorp
Overwork is also leadership: they're setting the unrealistic schedules and
they're communicating expectations that people meet are supposed to meet these
schedules.

By contrast there are other places where management goes around at quitting
time and throws everyone out.

~~~
bittcto
I’ve seen many software companies where for months on end each week more than
a weeks worth of new work is added to the product, without changing the
deadline, because “management” keeps deciding therecare new features that are
critical and they can be just slipped right in.

If you tell them they are going to increase the time it takes or lower
quality, you’re “not cooperative” or “not a team player”....or they tell you
they will take the quality hit... but when there are any problems in the
delivered product it’s the teams fault, of course.

------
BrandonBradley
Where is lack of vacation time categorized into this? There are too many
answers.

~~~
0xJRS
That would be added to management

------
greenleafjacob
91% of employees who have blind installed. Selection bias.

~~~
stephengillie
That means it's young engineers at FAANG saying this.

~~~
tehlike
It also means employees who are not necessarily happy.

------
yourbandsucks
More interesting result: broken out by company, the "poor leadership and lack
of direction" answer ranges from 15-35% of the vote, and it's the companies
with a very public lack of direction that top the list.

Meanwhile, Facebook and Uber get great scores on the measure.

------
alpeb
Tech leadership is extremely hard. You either get at one extreme the MBA
trained to think producing sugared beverages is equivalent to producing
software, and at the other the formerly great coder that couldn't metamorphose
himself to be able to manage people. Having all the required qualities is
extremely rare.

------
TAForObvReasons
Original source: [http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-
workers-...](http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-say-
poor-leadership-is-number-one-cause-for-burnout/)

------
tabtab
There's not enough bottom-up feedback in selecting and rewarding managers.
Top-down-only evaluations skew behavior. An org should survey EVERYONE about
their boss(es) every 6 months or so, and the bosses should be held accountable
for improving their weak areas.

------
beeskneecaps
I have seen evidence that Blind is a major source of toxicity at many
companies. I would recommend not installing the app as it only serves to make
you feel burned out.

------
CommanderData
The five keys to a successful team based on Google research.

[https://www.inc.com/michael-schneider/google-thought-they-
kn...](https://www.inc.com/michael-schneider/google-thought-they-knew-how-to-
create-the-perfect.html)

"Google’s “Project Artistotle” investigates why some teams work better than
others. Its analysis shows that the combination of individuals making up the
group is unimportant. Instead, a team’s “group norms” – its “traditions,
behavioral standards and unwritten rules” – are essential to how well the
group performs. _Teams are successful if their group norms lead to equal
speaking time for all individuals within the group and an awareness of others’
emotional states._ These factors produce a situation in which members of the
group feel comfortable, or “safe,” and therefore more willing to contribute.
Google’s data show that what Harvard business professor Amy Edmondson called
“psychological safety” within the group leads to an increase in the group’s
collective IQ and therefore its effectiveness and productivity."

"1\. Dependability. Team members get things done on time and meet
expectations.

2\. Structure and clarity. High-performing teams have clear goals, and have
well-defined roles within the group.

3\. Meaning. The work has personal significance to each member.

4\. Impact. The group believes their work is purposeful and positively impacts
the greater good.

Yes, that's four, not five. The last one stood out from the rest:

5\. Psychological Safety.

We've all been in meetings and, due to the fear of seeming incompetent, have
held back questions or ideas. I get it. It's unnerving to feel like you're in
an environment where everything you do or say is under a microscope.

But imagine a different setting. A situation in which everyone is safe to take
risks, voice their opinions, and ask judgment-free questions. A culture where
managers provide air cover and create safe zones so employees can let down
their guard. That's psychological safety.

I know, not the quantitative data that you were hoping for. However, Google
found that teams with psychologically safe environments had employees who were
less likely to leave, more likely to harness the power of diversity, and
ultimately, who were more successful.

Engineering the perfect team is more subjective than we would like, but
focusing on these five components increases the likelihood that you will build
a dream team. Through its research, Google made the ancient Greek philosopher
Aristotle proud by proving, "The whole can be greater than the sum of its
parts."

 _Teams are successful if their group norms lead to equal speaking time for
all individuals within the group and an awareness of others’ emotional
states._

I think this is tricky if a problem and observably true. The teams I've been
involved with mesh easier when each are able to commune easily and this
normally means equal chances speaking time. Whenever I've seen an imbalance I
can safely say it is because the person had obvious narcissistic personality
traits which were always destructive long term.

~~~
crispyambulance

        > But imagine a different setting. A situation in which everyone is safe to take risks, voice their opinions, and ask judgment-free questions. A culture where managers provide air cover and create safe zones so employees can let down their guard. That's psychological safety.
    
    

That's all really nice, but it does conflict with #1 and #2. Being able to
"take risks" means that sometimes there's failure and consequences that lead
to projects NOT getting done on time, NOT meeting expectations.

Also, there's a fine line between having members with "well-defined roles" and
silo-ed divisions where people literally don't talk other teams unless there's
a "hand-off" (yep, people still use that word). On the other hand, to have a
really good team, you need folks that will actually listen to outsiders who
might not be formally or organizationally qualified. You need people that will
jump in and do stuff even when it's "not their job".

I am all in favor of the intent of these rules, but applying them takes a
level of nuance that the vast majority of organizations simply can't pull off.
That's OK.

------
liftbigweights
Nah. Tech workers burnout for the same reason nurses, cops, accountants and
everyone else burns out.

The drudgery of the work not meeting your expectations ( cool hacker vs office
code monkey ), the open-ended nature of the work ( you will be doing this for
the next few decades ), the awareness of time ( or how much of it you are
wasting away at work ) and the pittance you get relative to what the company
gets.

Goodness. I can't believe it's already labor day weekend. Where does the time
go.

~~~
indigochill
Maybe in some cases. Having been through leadership ups and downs within the
same company (and even same team!) however, for my case it really is about
leadership.

When I'm happy: We solicit projects from stakeholders on other teams without
development resources. They negotiate among each other to decide task
prioritization (our manager facilitates). We'll consult on the scope of
requests. Usually stakeholders overestimate the work involved and we can make
them happy right from the start by promising delivery in a fraction of the
time they expected (while still leaving plenty of time for the inevitable
unexpected.

Projects are usually things that have been a pain for a long time, so people
are happy when they're fixed but they're not usually urgent. Is it mundane?
Sure, usually. Although we do have the latitude to spice things up if we can
fit something cool in within the allotted time.

When I'm unhappy: Executives have knee-jerked into another hairbrained scheme
that they'll drop in six months (if we're lucky, without another round of
layoffs). Nevertheless, it's all hands on deck so we're yanked off everything
else to support the "new vision".

I do also think sometimes about the value of programmers vs. what they're
paid, but I also know that if I think I can do better I'm always free to try.
I personally prefer the security of a steady job and freedom from business
operation headaches. Maybe one day that'll change, but we'll see.

------
bartread
Could we _please_ change this headline? At the moment it's pure clickbait.

"91% Employees Experience Burnout" implies that 91% of employees suffer from
burnout, whereas - firstly - there is no data in the article to indicate that
this is the case.

Secondly, the question that comes closest to the 91% answer is "What is the
main source of employee burnout at your current workplace?", to which 9.7% of
people answered that "Burnout isn't a problem at my company." This leaves
90.3% (and a rounding error!) who think that burnout is a problem at their
company and think they know why that is. This _does not mean_ they themselves
are suffering or have suffered from burnout.

I'm not trying to minimise the problem of burnout, but I would strongly
suggest if we're going to have a serious discussion about it we should get our
facts and our data straight and not base that discussion off a poorly written
and researched employee engagement puff-piece.

~~~
Sacho
The headline is clickbait, it does not match the headline of the primary
source: [http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-
workers-...](http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-say-
poor-leadership-is-number-one-cause-for-burnout/)

It is also contradicted by the primary source's previous survey:
[http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/05/29/close-
to-60-p...](http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/05/29/close-
to-60-percent-of-surveyed-tech-workers-are-burnt-out-credit-karma-tops-the-
list-for-most-employees-suffering-from-burnout/)

~~~
bartread
Nice spot. That tiny [via] link at the bottom is a really sneaky pattern.
Didn't even notice it.

~~~
Raj7k
Same here for me

~~~
bartread
Fair play: I've removed my comment on the other sub-thread.

------
bittcto
The cause is that “leadership” is generally people who don’t understand
technology, and the solution is to stop hiring such incompetence.

No car company would allow a CEO who doesn’t understand how cars work, let
alone one who has no respect for those who design cars.

But most tech companies are lead by tech illiterate MBA types who disdain
engineers, and so engineers are managed by people who don’t understand
engineering.

I’ll give you a particular example but this is not the exception, this was the
norm in %85 of the dozen tech companies I’ve worked at:

At Amazon my boss was a guy trained to be a prison guard, who was selling pot
on campus on the side, who got his job managing engineers because of a
political connection. He had difficulty operating Microsoft Office. He was
borderline computer illiterate.

After a re-organization my bosses’ boss was replaced with a woman whose
previous career was literally managing state DMV offices. Hey it’s management,
right?

Notably both of these people resented the fact that we were getting paid close
to as much as they were (yet they with no skills, not even good management
skills were still getting paid more!)

At that point between me and Bezos there were no engineers in management and
nobody who respected engineering (and that included Bezos, this was early
enough I worked a lot of tickets with Bezos involved, saw him literally stop
us from fixing a problem in October only to go ballistic the day before
thanksgiving when the problem surfaced again.)

Meanwhile Amazon has this propaganda campaign about how they “raise the bar”
in hiring- and it’s true I’ve seen brilliant engineers not hired because of
the objections of the “bar raiser”— only that person was the woman whose
qualifications was a history keeping he nose clean working for the state!

~~~
seanf
Amazon is getting close to a $1T market cap which makes this look more like an
argument for hiring non-technical managers. You didn't provide any examples of
poor management by the prison guard or DMV manager, other than some jealously
about salary. Other than the bad feelings, did they get results?

When Bezos went ballistic the day before Thanksgiving, did you still fix the
bug in time? If not, did it really negatively affect the bottom line? Did
whatever you instead had to work on in October help the bottom line more than
the Thanksgiving bug?

~~~
blindwatchmaker
> When Bezos went ballistic the day before Thanksgiving, did you still fix the
> bug in time?

This is the kind of line of thinking often pursued by poor managers.

~~~
smhinsey
Yeah, I think there is a certain mindset for whom "going ballistic" seems like
a smart power move that you can use to get results, but in day to day reality,
I see it as the ultimate failure to maintain control over the situation. Guys
like Bezos can get away with it, but that doesn't make it smart.

~~~
blindwatchmaker
It's not even the going ballistic part that gets me, but the sequence of
events. Management refused to allocate the time to fix tech debt/bugs, this
decision comes back to bite them in the ass, GP takes the typical tack that
tries to deflect blame away from shitty management decisions.

"Could you, the devs, have fixed this bug under severe time pressure just
before a critical sales period instead of when you first identified it?" -> if
yes, no problem. Spiritus sancti, management is absolved of their sins.

~~~
bittcto
The fix was a hacknand as for “on time”, no we were already three Sadat’s into
the heavyvsakes week, literally hours before thanksgiving when Bezos decided
to cancel everyone’s thanksgiving because of his own incompetence.

I call it incompetence because prioritizing a new feature over a bug fix is
almost always wrong. And Bezos surrounds himself with yes men so if he under
estimated the bugs impact because a yesman was saving face that’s still on
Bezos.

------
jobserunder
Unmentioned reason: too much personal employee debt.

What's worse than working for a bad boss/company?

Working for a bad boss/company and carrying 50k in debt.

------
serversystem
Goes with the theme that for actual passionate tech workers the reason for
burnout is other people and not the tech itself. Hence adage that don't make
your hobby your job is nonsense by itself.

~~~
russdpale
This has been my finding. My wife is one of these super doer employee types,
and I see her constantly frustrated by the people above her, and the failing
processes that they implement that make her job more and more difficult.

------
stonewhite
This reminds me of the phrase: "If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent".

Therefore, if everyone is burning out, no one is really burning out or, we
somehow extended the definition of burnout to something that can be applied to
even the most minute set of complaints.

~~~
hackits
block twitter, facebook, instagram, hackernews, and reddit. BOOM no longer
burnt out!

~~~
zahrc
Oh dear... If you do not have a clue of what you are talking about, you'd
better be off saying nothing.

