We are making employees lives miserable to reduce the need of planning for companies. Quite often management lacks the emotional maturity needed in their positions that hides normal mistakes that are part of the job, push for unrealistic schedules and sometimes even get into bulling as a way of getting what they want.
8 hours plus commute time, that has increased as cities have grown, does not allow people to have time to attend their families, their own finances and have time to relax.
When it comes to human management in companies we are closer to the middle ages than to the current knowledge about human nature.
For many the commute more than hits your daily stress quota, even before work contributes. So you can end up starting your day stressed, be that public transport sardines and delays or playing car upon roads so gridlocked that the terminology car park seems more apt.
This to reach an office at some arbitrary time everybody seems to follow of the 8/9am start. Hence you have this sudden rush into cities around that time and again with the bulk leaving home in the early evening.
Travel outside those hours or against the commuter grain are such a joy, that the contrast is huge.
Whilst many companies offer flexible hours, they are still the exception and until more flexibility becomes more widespread along with home working or local hub/satellite office working. Such stress will play more and more a factor.
I'd dare say that having a stressful commute alone can on many levels kill of your entire morning productivity. Then you have the costs, adding more stress. Again costs that would be much cheaper (public transport trains here in the UK) if you travel outside peak hours. But then, roads much more pleasant off peak.
But a 4 day week can sure make a difference over a 5 day one. Working longer hours for 4 days, avoiding some of that peak commute stress and focusing on work, for those days and giving yourself 3 days of freedom. It is a fine balance over having 5 days of self imposed stress if your late home and the impact upon a social life. Which means you end up with a less quality social life and/or work life and by this approach you get quality time with both. Though not always suitable for all, it's more palatable for companies who are less flexible. At least what I've found. Though again, depends upon your job.
> Working longer hours for 4 days, avoiding some of that peak commute stress ...
You're spot on here. The option to travel before/after the rush makes a world of difference.
I'm a freelancer/consultant and I've found that when I'm working as a "vendor", as opposed to a "temporary employee" working on-site during normal business hours, and only need to be on-site for meetings and such, I don't mind commuting at all and actually look forward to heading into the city. Novelty aside, I'm sure this is because I'm usually traveling before (heading to a cafe to prepare for an early meeting) or after (late meeting) the rush and can find a seat, have room to breath, etc. However, when I'm stuck doing the 8/9/10-5/6/7 commute, I find the train/subway ride (and myself) miserable.
It's usually not even in the contract (most contracts were supplied by customer). Contracts usually have something to the effect that the customer will pay for travel. You can justify this by saying that because your place of business (usually your home or office) isn't nearby, and your work does not require you to be on-site, you will charge for the actual time spent on travel to and from customer site. You have to be firm on this, and be prepared to walk away if they refuse. I haven't once encountered any pushback, though, even though my hourly rate was pretty high. Also, where I couldn't park for free, I'd pass through parking as an expense. Clients are cool with that too. Somehow they don't allow any of this shit for regular employees, for reasons that I don't quite understand. :-)
> Somehow they don't allow any of this shit for regular employees, for reasons that I don't quite understand.
It's because contractors are capex and employees are opex. I'm on a staff augmentation contract at a rate 2x the salary cap for the most senior employees. They keep begging me to convert but can't because I would be taking a $100,000 pay cut. It's a ridiculous situation.
This is precisely why I don't have a standard contract -- which, after doing this for a number of years, still seems very odd to me. A while back, I hired a lawyer to revise and amend a contract _supplied by customer_ only to have it rejected because of the time and effort it would have taken their lawyers to review/revise/amend my changes. As I understand it, this same line of reasoning would also prevent (most) of my clients from signing a contract presented by me. This makes businesses sense, and I've since learned that it's standard practice, but I resent that I'm the one who has to make the take-it-or-leave-it decision about whether to work _for_ this client, as opposed to _with_ this client.
> playing car upon roads so gridlocked that the terminology car park seems more apt
I spent 5 years making a 1 hour (each way) commute by car, a distance of 8 miles (also each way). It was soul destroying! Wasting 2 hours of my life every workday just felt so meaningless!
Eventually I moved out of the city to a small town 10 miles out of the city, and only then did I realise just how awful it had been. I'm now lucky enough to work from home 3 days a week and work 1 day in the office - and it's only a 20-25 minute drive.
8 miles is a 30 minute bicycle ride (for me) in the city, and my city is in the top 5 by worst traffic in the world. Except for winter time, I never use a car to go to work, it would take me 1.5-2 hours for 10 miles (in each direction). There are options bicycles and scooters.
I was in a Scottish city of only 200k people, so not nearly the worst by any stretch, but still bad enough to result in soul-destroying journey times during rush hour :(
Unfortunately, cycling isn't an option for everyone.
When I read soul destroying I was certain the punchline is that you'd later started cycling, making commutes both enjoyable and beneficial. Alas, I was wrong.
YMMV. I live in Finland, and I ride a bike almost every day of the year. Last winter the temperatures went below -20˚C and I still took the bike, and enjoyed it. Granted there are maybe three months a year when it takes dedication. And yes you do need a shower unless you have an electric bike.
Why aren't more "knowledge workers" able to work from home 2 or 3 days a week?
I know some people have noisy kids/distractions at home, but seems like it would work for many engineers. Yet every company I've been at, I suggest it, and people give me a sarcastic look like, "yeah, right, we can't do that!"
Possibly a fear that not being seen at work will hamper advancement?
Those things do not matter to the kind of people targeting other people on this irrational basis. What matters is that they have a vague feeling that you are "around" and "a contributor" and "one of us" (feel free to be a bit sick in your mouth at this point).
It's called human resources for a reason - maximize short-term profit while minimizing legal exposure... the same respect we give any other resources.
The 40-hour work week was seen as a step towards ever shorter workdays and weeks thanks to technology. I realize many people now work longer hours, but that should be seen as a problem instead of a fact of life.
> making employees lives miserable to reduce the need of planning
such a great point. we seem to live in a zero-planning world now.
i'm surprised at how often, at least in app programming projects, i go to great lengths to show a manager how the app is progressing and where it's ultimately heading, and get no meaningful course correction or even a "that looks great"
then, the other shoe drops: after the app is complete and ready (or even after it's gone live) -- only then -- do they take the time to actually look at it and demand a change. and they don't care that it's harder to accomplish at that late stage, or that it damages programmer morale. they actually consider that to be a valid process.
I have a lovely and smart boss but I can not get him to look at stuff properly until after I roll out a potentially massive change to our internal ERP.
Real money on the line as well.
I think a lot of it is that non-programming managers don't really grok on the intrinsic level the vast complexity that can be under the skin of a seemingly simple change.
In fact that is largely our job I guess, to hide all that complexity, when a user selects "order following required stock from supplier" they don't need to know what is happening under neath, they just care about price and when it'll be delivered on a container to one of our sites.
That's mostly because managers underrate the concept of 'optimization' and how features are interconnected. Once a developer makes a mistake, all other things already working, gets broken. Small changes are not so small after all. They need to be understood as a whole, instead of individual updates.
Start with UI mock-ups first before writing any back end code. Schedule review meetings and specifically ask management to approve all major elements. Take detailed meeting minutes documenting that approval and send those to all the internal stakeholders. With that paper trail it becomes more difficult to request major changes later.
Crazy idea: what if management was a licensed, regulated career, like traditional engineering, or being a nurse. Like if you have more than 5 "direct reports", you need to get a certification?
I don't think there's any link between certification and competency.
Here in Australia we're going mad for certifications. I had a friend who looked after kids in an after school program. A minimum wage job, but one that she loved. She'd been doing it for nearly 20 years. The government mandated that she needed a $2500 certificate in order to continue to do the job she'd been doing for two decades.
I don't believe there was anything that this certification could have taught her that she didn't already know. Heck, she should have been the one teaching the course. Instead it was being run by an organisation that specialised in running these kinds of certification programs, but certainly didn't specialise in the subject matter.
If we were to mandate certification for managers, my concern would be that - at best - it would end up as just another piece of paper. At worst, it would actively exclude the people who were most qualified and competent, like it did with my friend.
Something like that happened to my mother. She is a teacher in HS. She also happens to teach some courses for teachers in training that are going to teach the same courses she teaches herself. But now, since new decree/law, she can't teach in HS anymore. She still teaches to teachers though. So she's seeing younger teachers she teaches taking her job.
Your friend sounds like an outlier in these circumstances; the certification is more likely to be of benefit to those fresh to the field, and in the field of child-care (and aged care also), I think some bare minimum requirement of capability is warranted.
Professional training organisations may not have direct experience with the subject matter, but given a good curriculum prepared by someone who DOES have experience, I don't see why they couldn't deliver a reasonable result. I agree that any "Q and A" sessions, or questions along the lines of "What is it really like working as a..." would not be that useful, though.
Crazier idea: don’t make management the only route to higher salary, pushing loads of incompetent people into it for purely monetary reasons. Reward highly skilled employees for their skill set and experience.
The thing is, highly skilled employees are only effective if they work in a coordinated manner towards a common goal, and the people in charge of coordinating the teams are... Managers.
To put it differently, in a 6-man team each employee is responsible and held accountable for around 1/6th of the productivity, but the team manager is responsible and accountable for 100% of the effort.
The manager is not responsible for doing any work, only meta work. The metric of work output measures mgmt value input indirectly. You need to look at their actual interaction and analyse the meta work they do directly to get a true account of the value a manager provides.
I think it is mostly an issue caused by how managers are evaluated. Do the teams you supervise outperform (in a short-term metric set) the other teams? If so, you are deemed a good manager.
Upper management usually does not seem to care whether the people you manage leave the company eventually or try to change teams to get away from you.
Good for you! Stand up for yourself if they ask, use words like “inappropriate” and “disrespectful” to describe scheduling a conference call on a Saturday.
Yeah, that’s the problem though, isn’t it, as you’re damned either way - either you miss out on time with your son, or you spend the remainder of your weekend anxious about whether you’re going to be tarred, feathered and fired on Monday.
I chose to forgo children as they would have been a distraction from work. Now it’s too late. Ah well.
It takes a certain amount of self-respect to raise the middle finger to unreasonably-timed work requests, and it says a lot about modern work culture that a lot of people have been cowed into thinking they have no options.
Yeah but the job market in IT is so good there is no need to worry. If you aren’t being treated like a star you can move on to where you are appreciated.
Agreed. The flaw in this article is that it talks about overwork as a given and as a solution offers some measures that can help you individually cope with stress while doing nothing to the overall atmosphere. The idea of reorganizing a workspace so that it is more humane is seemingly too radical.
I am currently recovering from a mild burnout. Self-diagnosed, but I had surely felt a lot of exhaustion, cynicism and ineffectiveness. The curious thing is that I didn't even work that much! (In the end I barely worked at all because I couldn't). What caused it in my opinion was not overwork but the combination of sociopathic senior leadership and an incompetent immediate boss. The senior leadership tried hard to institute a culture of self-blame and fostered the feeling that you were never doing enough while my immediate boss had a preference for the "zerg-rush" style of software development with little design and planning, constantly changing priorities, "motivation" by unrealistic schedules and disregard for quality control (that resulted in several entirely preventable production outages). He also did little to shield us from outside distractions and expected an "always on" attitude (he would message us in the wee hours of the Sunday morning and expect a timely response). All this pushed me hard towards burnout.
In the end I decided to quit my job (high salary be damned) and go on a sabbatical. Already I feel a lot better and am starting to regain some of the interest I had in programming.
What I find sad about this (and other articles like this) is when the time comes within the article to lay out how to avoid burnout and stress, the list nevver includes ways to spend less time working. It's almost like an unspoken rule. I know that to recommend that is to take a chance with your livelihood but I really hope that we can at least stop blaming ourselves for the ridiculous work/life ratio we currently must shoulder to live.
Off the top of my head, there should be a moratorium on requiring email responses for non-essentials outside of office hours. I'd like to get rid of most salaried positions and get people paid by the hour. I've a sneaking suspicion that all the crazy hours that are currently "required by the times" would miraculously evaporate once employers were charged for the time they demand of their people.
As far as I can tell, media never says the bald truth that everyone knows in the back of their heads -
We live in an extremely competitive world where we must fight for our livelihoods. The majority of non-white-collar jobs are worse than whatever crap we have to put up with in the good jobs - they get treated worse, paid less, and have less prospects to escape their situation. So every high-paying becomes increasingly competitive, and you cannot realistically spend too little time working or push back too much because you will be replaced. Employers have always been tyrannical to the greatest degree they can get away with, and they will always do so. They don't care, they will squeeze everything they can out of you. Only reason some programmers have it good for now is extremely short supply, and thats quickly changing as more people rush into the field.
That entire structure makes things very convenient for the rich people at the top. As long as there are enough people stuck in dead-end situations, they can simply pay a little better and have a supply of people willing to do anything - program weapons or junk ads, work 80 hours/week whatever. Its a question of power plain & simple and its frankly ridiculous how many hoops people collectively jump through to avoid facing that fact.
> I'd like to get rid of most salaried positions and get people paid by the hour.
I think having someone counting the number of hours you have your butt in a seat is a particularly degrading form of micromanagement, and I'm glad I don't have to endure it. Your TC is the only number that matters; there's no financial difference between getting paid 300k and no overtime and getting paid 200k + 100k overtime. It's silly to claim that the one is exploitative and the other is not just because the former involves "unpaid overtime".
We pay all our developers by the hour, and I think it's super important.
To correct your first misconception, we don't count peoples hours, people just tell us how many hours they worked each pay cycle.
We also pay 1.5X per hour for more than 40 hours per week if we asked you to work extra.
The primary advantage is that it aligns everyone incentives. In management I know that there is a very real cost to us if we ask people to work more hours.
It's important that we feel the sting, because it means that we are less likely ask people to work overtime, and only when it's really important.
It also lets people work more or less as they choose. Some people might choose to work 30 hour weeks for a while, and it doesn't cause resentment in other team members. People know they are getting paid less for doing it.
I’ve been a software engineer for 18 years and have had 4 jobs, only one (brief) one was hourly and it was arguably the least satisfying by far. I was seen as a resource which is essentially what you’re arguing for “if you’re paid hourly then your time is more valued by management”, but the problem is you’re never given the freedom to roam. Your time is always over managed and accounted for, I could never get into a “flow” state. I imagine that company never created anything novel, it was just factory work.
This is basically how every company theoretically does it in Finland, because of legislation. But then some people work 9 hours and report 8 because they feel pressured to perform better. Or they constantly work long days and receive balance hours (that could be used as vacation), which are cut once a year.
I do like the system, but there are times when you still have to stand up for yourself if your company isn't one of the fairest.
well, I can't speak directly to your situation, but my comment is mostly hinging on my belief that all the mandatory meetings and 'just one more thing' emails we currently deal with would suddenly be less frequent if management had to be mindful of their time and cost.
I have worked for the same employer as both hourly consultant and salaried employee. I saw much more restraint on their part when hours were being counted. On the other hand I am now able to push salary aspect in my favor (ie rely on same salary even if I have to take time off for child’s illness, for example)
I consider myself “paid by the hour” even if I’m not formally paid by the hour. I log my time and have a bank of hours that can’t go outside +/-20 hours. If I did 41 hours last week I’ll do 39 next week. I’ll never take a position where I do more than 40h on average. There is no amount of money that will be compensation enough for regular 45h weeks.
Excluding those that are very low on the income scale, for whom everyone agrees life is difficult, I simply don't understand the claims of inescapable demands on skilled white-collar workers' time. If you're making any sort of non-negligible surplus above the basics, then you're at some level making a conscious choice of that surplus (usually for consumption) over a lower-stress job.
I have a friend who's a quant at Goldman Sachs, whose work life is miserable but who makes a good 150k more than me. His labor isn't (currently) valued at more than mine: I could get a similar TC with little effort and a much _better_ working environment, but I have absolutely no interest: I'm consciously trading off compensation consumption for a better work-life balance. The flipside is that he's consciously trading off quality of life for more compensation, for whatever his personal reasons are. It's bizarre to me to claim that it's a bad thing that that choice is presented to him (or to me for that matter).
I get that this sounds like a general-purpose argument against worker protections, but there's a key difference: in the absence of a robust, UBI-like safety net, we as a society have accepted that coercion can include nominally consensual actions taken to avoid bumping up against a lack of whatever we've defined as the basic necessities that everyone is entitled to (food, shelter, etc).
But the work burnout problem is, statistically, almost entirely a middle- and upper-class problem[1], and these are precisely the people who have the comp surplus to consciously choose to trade off compensation for a better quality of life.
I know as always the dimmer readers of comments like this will pattern-match this to the victim-blaming buzzword, but you can simultaneously bemoan the state of a culture and work to improve your lot within it. In this case, there's a fairly simple, concrete solution: perform worse at your current job by putting in less hours or get a job that isn't so rigid as to require a number of hours above what you find to be your healthy level.
[1] the job-related woes of lower income people tend to involve not being able to get enough employment and thus enough income to live off of
> perform worse at your current job by putting in less hours
Citation needed.
Edit: So self-evident is this equation to some people that they down vote the mere suggestion that working longer hours does not make you better at your job.
What on Earth are you talking about? For the cases where your job requires longer hours even when they don't track productivity, the part of the sentence that you conveniently left out was "..by putting in less hours or get a job that isn't so rigid as to require a number of hours above what you find to be your healthy level."
For the cases where your work doesn't blindly want longer hours but measures your productivity in a saner way, if you can perform better at your job in less hours (which is totally plausible in many situations), then OBVIOUSLY you should be doing it already.
The fragment of a sentence that you quoted is narrowly referring to a situation where 1) you're still getting productivity out of your marginal hour and 2) your work doesn't arbitrarily require absurd hours as detached from productivity.
> So self-evident is this equation to some people that they down vote the mere suggestion that working longer hours does not make you better at your job
I can't even imagine what would drive someone to spend their weekend time feverishly imagining statements that no one is making so they can feel smug about disagreeing with them.
> I can't even imagine what would drive someone to spend their weekend time feverishly imagining statements that no one is making so they can feel smug about disagreeing with them.
I'm sorry my comment upset you. It wasn't my intention.
My point was that in many cases people are inclined to work longer as a result of social pressure when it has no positive impact on productivity. In that case, are longer hours "required"? Or is it strictly a choice? My interpretation of what you said was perhaps more binary than you intended.
In those cases, one can simply work less, shrug off the social pressure, and perform at the same level. You allude to this (sort of) in your second paragraph, but this is not as obvious to many people as you state and, I think, benefits from saying explicitly.
Hopefully you didn't learn this from doing overtime, paid or voluntary? I had to learn the hard way, in part because my dad is naturally a hard worker, so I think I took after him. Eventually I figured out that working more hours virtually never pays off, and it's stupid anyway because even if you're getting paid you're still trading even more of your life away.
> and it's stupid anyway because even if you're getting paid you're still trading even more of your life away.
when you 'trade' you get something of value in return. if you're getting paid and you think it's a fair pay, it's not automatically 'stupid'. saving more now to pay for future expenses, nest egg, rainy day fund, whatever? how can that be 'stupid'? You have an opportunity to provide the means for a more secure future for your family, today, when that ability may be in doubt - take the pay now for more work.
your dad being a 'hard worker' may have been able to provide things to you that you never knew about at the time (or may never know about).
That's a pretty silly line to draw in the sand. No amount of compensation to work 45 hours, really? Even if someone offered you enough money to retire 20 years early, you'd rather spend an extra 20 years doing the 9-5 just to avoid spending 1 extra hour a day at work?
If you made enough money you could easily save 10+ hours a week by moving closer to work, paying people to run errands for you etc. You could easily have more free time working 50 hours a week than someone with less money would working 40.
Anything has a price of course, but realistically there is no position that would let me retire earlier (nor do I want to).
My 40h is also already 100% remote, so very hard to improve on in terms of commutes etc. In fact, if I were to switch to non-remote I’d never accept a 40h ass-in-seat position either.
A 20% pay rise is 10% after taxes here and wouldn’t make a huge difference. Also, I hope and intend to work well into my 70s. For that I need to not burn out in my 40s. I’m happy with what I do. I don’t need more money or more years retired. I need a job I’m happy with, money for bills and time with my family now. I pick up kids from school every day at 4 and make them dinner at 5. All this must sound pretty foreign to Americans...
I would never work more in the hopes to retire earlier. I've worked different time models between essentially do whatever I want and 42 hour weeks. All of them paid for my living standard (which I would say is rather simple).
Everything above 35 hours feels like I have no time for myself anymore.
I think the main reason why I don't get the 'FIRE' mentality is because in my country we have a healthy pension system I can look forward to.
I think employees also need to start taking care of themselves by not following up on every single spontaneous request and also to find something else in time when things turn too toxic.
At least for me I can say that I don't follow up on every single request I get, especially when it's many little ones after "the heavy lifting" is done. Management must also learn that this is not bearable.
Of course one needs to be in a somehow comfortable position and one probably needs a few years of work in the field. Still, for employers it's also a risk to find good (replacement) employees which I have never heard management would admit but seen after leaving positions.
This is doable when you have rock-solid confidence that you will never be let go (or you have fuck you money).
Otherwise, there's always gonna be another chump in their 20's who thinks they're just putting in their dues before being able to dial it back a bit, and you're competing with them.
At least for me it's not about being protected from getting fired or having a giant pile of money. It's more the knowledge that I can find something, worst case within a week because even today everybody is searching devs like crazy. Of course one needs also enough money above credit limit for going at least a month without income.
This is it. When employees realize that only they can control what they respond to and what they do not, outside of direct requests from management, then they can manage their time for the life they want. Until then, people stuck thinking they can offload time management to their managers will keep wondering why they’re feeling overworked.
This times 1000 - it's amazing how often my colleagues talk about how they worked on something over the weekend or just take it for granted that I want to keep chatting about their crap after 6 PM. Or bosses who say "can you deploy that?" when it's 5:30
Man I used to have jobs where I'd come in at 10:30 and leave by two, and I mean in a normal company that 'expected' 9 to 5.
I've never owned or used an alarm clock.
I did however manage to save the project on more than one occasion.¹
When people complain I tell them I'm an ability guy, not an availability guy. If they don't like that then I move on.
¹ One time I hacked a buggy compiler we received from IBM that was preventing us from presenting a demo at a trade show. I did it in 8 hours and we made the trade show in time.
> the list never includes ways to spend less time working. It's almost like an unspoken rule.
Having just spent years outside the developed world and "working", I realize now that it is very much a spoken rule that "Thou shalt contribute to the economy".
> I know that to recommend that is to take a chance with your livelihood
That's a strange statement to make - it's like you are agreeing with the unspoken rule!
Working less absolutely doesn't take a chance with your livelihood. Step down to 4 days a week and drive a use car, don't have a TV and don't buy a new cell phone. At the end of the month you'll still have exactly the same money.
Step down to three days a week and just live in a smaller place and cut out more things - you'll still have exactly the same money.
There are no chances being taken there, just choices.
I think that there is a chance with job security - if you step down you leave the "core group". On the other hand I've seen a lot of people panic about being let go and then realise that actually they have the savings and set up to let them come - abet at a lower "standard" of living than before (no new BMW's, no new 75" TV's, etc). There are limits on this though - especially for folks with kids or dependent relatives. Some people are flogging themselves and living in fear to make other people's end's meet, so to speak.
What exhausts me is the people, the politics, the engineering egos, and the endless tolerance of companies to spend months of time working through previously obviously poor decisions and no tolerance for fixing the attitudes that created them. You’re called perfectionist engineer, regardless of how little effort or time it takes to correct the long term trajectory for your project. There’s little connection to clear organized thinking and the enjoyment of the work, it’s like everyone has gone mad and can’t see the obvious right in front of their face at times.
Do we work for the same company? It's _infuriating_ to watch the same people make the same mistakes time and time again. Where is the accountability? Where has the integrity gone? Was it all a lie? What exactly is the _point_ of this charade?
It's indeed a charade. Maybe it wasn't in the beginning, but it inevitably becomes a charade once a company reaches a certain age and size.
What happens is that, once a company is reliably making money for everyone, the need to "innovate" and make things more "efficient" is dramatically reduced. At the end of the day, most people want to just show up to the office, do what they're told(what they don't actually want to do), and then go back to their lives with their money. If some young engineer shows up with ideas about making things "more efficient", that can only mean people's daily routines get disrupted or they are made obsolete. Nobody really wants to make things better, including those who are running the business since their joy is in being in charge of lots of people(whether they're well-meaning or not). Accountability and integrity gets thrown out the window because, in order to maintain them, someone has to get mad at someone else, and these days people aren't interested in being the person who has to scold people or let them go.
As much as I care about my craft as a software engineer, I realize that every company suffers from this syndrome to some extent, and the most healthy thing to do is to accept that people don't want you fucking with their cash cow. I don't take seriously claims companies make when the talk about "excellence" and "innovation", because once they've got more than 10 employees and their growth pattern has a definite upward trend, those values really go out the window.
And you know something? There's nothing wrong with that. Most people aren't working because they want to. Think you can make things better? Go start your own company.
Often these young engineers don't understand the whole context. They make poor assumptions and don't ask the right questions, and their obviously superior ideas, while well-intentioned, are not actually superior. They come across as arrogant.
The problem is that no one takes them aside to explain any of this, so they become frustrated and eventually cynical. Correctly channeled and nurtured, these engineers can do a lot of good in an organization.
That said, sometimes it is the organization itself. The key to understanding is identifying the right people to ask, and asking the right questions.
IMO, there's only nothing wrong with this behavior because it's so widespread as to be normalized and accepted. If people are content to be frauds, that's their prerogative, but it's making life for the other half a living hell.
edit/ I should probably also make the point that, IME, there's 2 broad cohorts that I'm speaking generally about. Those cohorts are people who are capable but checked out, burnt out, etc... and the other are people who are not capable yet are never held accountable to that fact. I am railing against the second group, because they actively cause harm, again, IME.
I've been feeling this at my current gig. But I just gave notice today. Hopefully my next gig will be better. My other jobs were better, so there is hope.
Chronic stress sets you up for so many diseases, where burnout is just an early warning sign in comparison. Cancer, heart disease, stroke - you name it, chances are way higher that you get it if you are under chronic stress. Being a freelancer with 2 little kids, I‘ve had my fair share of stress (and burnout), but I‘m doing quite well nowadays. So, here‘s my personal anti-stress toolbox, from most effective to least effective:
- Stoic philosophy. Accept that you have control over nothing (only the chance to influence) and eventually that feeling that you carry the world on your shoulders will disappear.
- Stoic philosophy (just to reiterate how important it is)
- Near infrared radiation - improves mitochondrial function and releases NO (a radical caused by cell stress) from the mitochondria. There are plenty of options, i have a device from redlightman.
- CBD - I vape it regularly. It’s legal where I live, but it’s illegal in some countries and US states. It believe it had a tremendous effect on me, even increased sociability.
- Blue light blocking glasses - Staring at my laptop screen for longer periods stresses me out, and using f.lux all day improves this a lot. But using the blue blockers is something different entirely. Sometimes I put on the glasses in the early afternoon and am more focused and relaxed as a result. Sleep also got much better, sometimes I fall asleep while coding in the evening. Take care to use the really yellow/orange ones, as the only-slightly-tinged ones don’t filter heavily enough.
- Sort out family problems, ASAP. Don’t feel stuck - if you do, just do _something_, even if it’s dumb. Feeling stuck kills you. You need to feel accepted by the people you are close to. You need someone you tell your (supposedly) darkest secrets without them condemning you.
- Find a job or position where your „boss“ values you and your work. For me as a freelancer this means I only work with clients for whom the project is important, or even vital (not just a cost-factor).
"Stoic philosophy. Accept that you have control over nothing (only the chance to influence)"
You have control over your reaction to things. And I think this is a key component of Stoicism, especially in the modern working world.
If you are acting (and reacting) true to yourself, then it is other's reactions to your actions that are failing. This goes a long way to reducing the amount of stress felt.
I‘d like to differ here: „You have control over your reaction to things.“.
I‘ve had my fair share of yelling at my kids, and regretting it afterwards. Or writing an inflammatory email response. Obviously, I don’t have full control over my reaction, even though I think I‘m a rather careful person. I do have a strong influence, that’s for sure.
I‘ve stopped beating myself up for knee-jerking something. The unconscious has so much control over what surfaces next. I think it was an article here on HN recently that claimed that decisions are formed up to 12 seconds before they become conscious.
You can train and improve the control you have over your reactions - the knee-jerk doesn't need to materialize into anything more than the initial feeling if you practice mindfulness for long enough. Definitely still not worth beating yourself up for anything that has already happened, but in my own experience, taking note and improving how I mentally and physically act in response to feelings has made my life immeasurably better over time
I think this methodology is a kind of recipe for detaching from yourself completely, leave out the last two clauses which I do like. But, philosophy of suppressing emotions seasoned with substances which inhibit Default Mode Network in your brain? Sure thing if you have failed or feel stuck as a short term remedy, but ain't you gonna lose yourself if do it regularly?
On the contrary, stoicism helps you re-attach, especially if reality as perceived with your old mindset has become unbearable. Think of it as a way of viewing things, and less of suppressing anything. Emotions are generated as a reaction to your perception of reality - you will be fed up by the stranger running a red light, but your anger will swing to concern if you learn that they are heading towards an emergency room. Emotions are really just communicators of the reality you perceive. Stoicism might help you adjust your perception where it is just plain wrong. That’s BTW also how cognitive behavioral therapy works, just with the aid of a professional.
I‘m not sure what you mean with Default Mode Network inhibition. CBD is a cannabinoid, and those are present in all mammal bodies - it’s just an aid for faster repair, especially nerves and brain. You might find your brain working better and clearer, because it regenerates faster.
I understand, if you got your emotions cross-wired by crooked society, then you can put emotions on hold and rethink logically about what's happening. So stoicism is like a negative imprint of mindfulness, something like a maintenance mode. Mindfulness is about to stay present with both emotional and rational, and not trying to rationalize feelings.
DMN is an ancient part of brain which acts like primitive unconscious task scheduler. When it goes nuts, you binge on substances and reset it, then sober up and feel happy. Something like that.
stoic philosophy is no good for the mind. actually feeling your emotions is healthy. it's stuffing them down that makes people crazy or likewise numbed out. this is a difficult truth to understand.
vaping is a poison - clearly. addictions just keep you on the cycle.
real acceptance is powerful but it comes from a place of being connected to yourself which means your emotions. trying to suppress them isn't living since you are suppressing your very nature.
In a healthy mind, there is a causal hierarchy: Reality > your perception of reality > emotions (strongly simplified!). You are suggesting that stoicism means manipulating emotions, at the bottom of the hierarchy. What (to me) it means is manipulating the perception of reality. I agree that shoving aside emotions won’t do you much good, except in the short term (e.g. not punching the boss in the face). Long term emotion suppression will make you depressed. Stoicism doesn’t tell you that you must not be angry. It tells you that your boss is actually not in control of the situation herself, and also does not control your own destiny - her bad decision is suddenly only an annoyance, and not a life-threatening event. And your emotions will adjust accordingly.
Vaping nicotine 20 times a day is obviously a bad idea and might lead to cancer. Vaping 2 draws of CBD (a non-addictive substance) 2-3 times per week might also have a negative long term effect, but I’ll take it. I don’t use propylene glycol, but only vegetable glycerine to minimize risk.
> In a healthy mind, there is a causal hierarchy: Reality > your perception of reality > emotions (strongly simplified!).
That's certainly the conceit of rationality, but realistically the last two have a complex two-way relationship where often, perhaps most often, the reverse order of those two elements dominates.
I agree that, short-term, emotions change perception of reality. Or at least, past trauma and other experiences from the past feed heavily into perception. But my own experience is that the link from perception to emotions is more profound and effective. A few words, formulating crucial information, can turn around your emotions 180 degrees. „I‘m pregnant“, „You have cancer“, „I‘m sorry“, etc. The other direction seems way more subtle to me.
It seems like you don't know much about stoic philosophy, and are guessing that the modern meaning of "stoic" describes it. It does not, and in fact it is more in line with your second to last sentence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism#Ethics_and_virtues
Burnout for me wasn’t about too many hours. It was more that, especially in the SF tech scene, as an employee you’re expected to drink the Koolaid and not only do your job but be 100% emotionally invested in your company too. The expectation of emotional attachment is, at least for me, what makes working in that kind of environment overwhelming, and recently decided for myself that it isn’t sustainable after 4-5 years in it.
I have an entire adult life that has been one burnout after another, continually driven by unrealistic expectations by immature management. As early as '83 being a dumb teen burned out by Apple being an unpaid beta tester for the Mac. Working on the original Fractals team with Mandelbrot and Devanny, I ended up in the hospital from the demands. Then again working at Philips developing video CDs, again at 3D0/EA making their failed console's OS, again at Sony making the PSX OS, again at EA develping during the EA Spouse era, again during the dotcom era developing early IP streaming video, again working in feature film VFX, again at my own startup, and yet still now working facial recognition. Technology kinda sucks, as if you're good they take advantage and bully your good will, mentally manipulating one. I am yet to see any organization without this disease.
It's not just companies driving to more productivity.
For example, those open office layout are about putting more people per square foot. No matter what they say otherwise. Nobody "communicates" in an open office layout and they know it.
This is an example where per-employee productivity is sacrificed for other goals (getting more people into one building). And it is directly affecting stress and burnout.
Huh? People communicate about work all the time in my office and having the ability to initiate conversations fluidly means more efficient collaboration. Fewer meetings, and easier to keep all parties in the know.
There is such thing as too much communication. In my previous company the whole 10 person team sat together on the open space. The result was that my coworkers (sitting 30-40 ft from me) would shout a question to me, because they were too lazy to check project Wiki page to know which environment they should deploy to, for example. Or they would shout totaly useless notifications, like "I've just created pull request, can you review it?". Open plan offices encourage this type of pathological behaviour.
Having that ability is also disastrous to productivity. People realise this and resort to wearing headphones as deterrent to being interrupted. It means that certain people work in constant fear of being dragged out of their flow at any moment. This is why universities have strict office hours. There are types of work that just can't be done with random interruptions.
I've been experiencing a type of burnout for the past 7 years that is mostly mental in nature. I get plenty of exercise and while my sleep schedule is abnormal, I still get normal amounts of sleep.
Where the burnout comes in is when I get back the motivation to learn and program, and everything is going good, but then I start talking to recruiters and applying to jobs, and the farthest I get is the phone interview. I haven't been able to land a technical interview for the past 5 years about. Then it turns into a feedback loop, where my lack of motivation comes back, I let my skills wane, and then I just burnout for a few months.
Each time I try to get back at it, the wall to climb seems higher; like I seriously struggle to just sit down and read an article about this or that topic. It's also difficult to know where to jump back in to brush up on my skills. My ability to think programmatically is still solid, but I forget things like the specifics of setting up webpack or whatever.
shrug oh well. I think I've been getting that motivational tingle back, so maybe this time will be successful? In the mean time I just want to be hired for anything; not even getting calls back from minimum wage job applications.
Try playing a longer game. Pick your favorite tech and join a local group for it, and meet every time they do. Instead of the discomfort of the phone interview, you'll need to tackle the discomfort of connecting with others -- but just realize everyone's human like you, and ultimately wants to connect just as much as you do. Learn about them, look for common ground. Let them get to know you. Don't connect with a certain person? That's expected -- keep trying.
Come up with a notable side-project next time you are inspired -- but make sure it won't take longer than 1-2wks of effort. It can be a gimmick, so long as it is somewhat notable. A trivial CRUD app, but applied to a novel/fun/interesting domain. You could even look for non-profits needing a tech solution. You want to appeal to someone hiring for a jr position, and who wants to see initiative.
Good consultants -- and even FTE career-oriented devs -- tend to have their work lined up via their network. A network is as simple as casually keeping in contact with old coworkers and then pinging them when you're looking for a new opportunity. In your case, it would just be connecting with other tech folk. Open your surface area to opportunity. This is how you end up knowing about job positions not even posted yet, and end up with inside knowledge on tech that can get you into a job much easier.
Look at 1099 contracting. It's low-risk to the employer because you're easier to drop if it doesn't work out. It pays a bit better for you, in return for that risk. If you're out and looking, you can find opportunities to contract that will never be posted to job boards, because a lead engineer just wants to bring someone on quickly. The biggest risk to people pulling 1099 contractors is that contractor ghosting on them, especially when they work remote -- make one of your big selling points be communication.
This strategy -- networking -- is one that is critical to pick up not just for landing a jr/intermediate job, but for keeping career longevity in an ageism-tinted industry.
It'll be a pain in the ass, but surely better than taking minimum-wage. I think networking-motivated individuals who are still early on the dev journey can do very well.
Sounds like you have what I call associative burnout.
It’s basically when your association with an activity becomes so negative that you no longer have the willpower to push yourself to perform the activity.
Your brain has basically puts work in the same category as holding your hand against a hot stove.
I was lucky to have my associations limited to certain employers and role descriptions but it was everything as real as the physical burnout I developed later on in life.
And as far as tips for recovery; the only thing I can think of is to learn to respect the association and stop trying to fight it with willpower. Just stay within the zone You do have motivation for/that does feel good and let it lead you wherever it needs to.
That might end up leading you to a different career but in my case it led me back to basically the same career but with a bunch of ‘red flag’ activities and behaviors (mine and others’) which mean I need to get the hell out of my current job.
Reduce exercise; that alone could deplete your "stress-alleviating well". Obviously, you (unconsciously) see your work as pointless and it probably is; many jobs these days are just useless busywork, even at top companies, even with dubious moral background. Market might also force you to unlearn better ways to program, e.g. if you are forced to switch to JavaScript from a better language, so motivation can get a hit from that as well. You might also notice that most of jobs you can apply to or are contacted by recruiters for are jobs nobody wants to do and for meaningful jobs it's all about networking, reducing motivation to bother to minimum.
The only way I see is to study new things on your own and do your own stuff if you find something you like; to survive try to get some part-time/remote work until you can reap fruits of your labor later. By all means avoid people that are putting you down; they do it so that they could dominate you and feel better about themselves. Start practicing some forgotten virtues, that would make you unique and stand out.
Phone interviews and going through "the front door" of most companies is a soul-crushing experience, in my opinion, most of the time. Don't let the reality of just how difficult going about getting a job that way can be, override your sense of confidence in yourself. I have the same feeling, often. People like you and I need to remind each other, when we feel this way, that it is just hard to go that way.
If I had some real paying work to give you I'd do it in a heartbeat. Your HN name is RandomInteger4 on HN. That says enough for me.
Let me tell you a story...
I was working for a startup over 10 years ago. We started in the back of the owner's house, a glass-enclosed greenhouse (no kidding) that got up to 90+ degrees during the summer, and housed our servers and ourselves. It was a crazy experience - the stories I could tell.
I went through a divorce, while working there, stress, burnout and eventually fell out of the place (it was a bad experience), when they sold the company for a huge amount (tens of millions), and I pretty much got nothing out of it compared to what I put in (other than a lot of experience). I learned a lot but it took a huge amount out of me.
I was depressed. I went through a long period of depression and aimlessness.
A previous boss I had worked for, as an intern, who was kind of a family friend, just told me, "come and do some stuff for me". He gave me a chance, didn't have crazy expectations for me, paid me enough to get by, and I was very lucky - I worked hard and did as much as I could, because I was grateful. It helped me get over the state I was in, and back into the workforce and groove.
It sounds to me like you just need somebody to give you that. I would do it. Can anybody on HN help?
I'm starting to believe that one of my life's goals might be to find a way to help people like you (and once me). You just need to find a space, in which to do some work, without crazy expectations, make some money, make some new connections and get things going again. Sometimes it's just finding the right person or connection to talk to, which implies some degree of social interactions.
I wish you all the best. You will make it through this. Hang in there and if you can, perhaps you will also get lucky and find that opportunity to just get back into it. I really wish for you that you will.
I hope this helps, or somebody else reads this and helps you.
Some schools provide kids with 3 free sessions with a counselor.
I wish tech companies did the same... that it was just a "normal" thing for our mental health. We focus much more on physical health, whereas mental health is taboo.
What I find absolute f'in sucks is living/working in Europe and interacting with Silicon Valley. The time difference between CET and PST is 9 hours. That means the European workday is essentially over when SV starts waking up and piling on the emails, bugs, requests, meetings, etc. So you either end up staying an extra hour or two to do meetings/chats and handle issues, or go home and check email periodically in the evening. Worst when there's a fire alarm and shit hits the fan at 9pm...
Even if you do manage to disconnect, there's wreckage leftover for you to pick up the next morning. Have that happen about once a month and you'll be a frazelled mess, knowing every evening something could go horribly wrong.
Pretty sure I burned myself out three years ago, while launching a big thing for my business. Basically, I ran a live course, and it happened right after some travel that had already been scheduled, so I had no downtime. It was all rush, rush, rush for 2-3 months straight.
This basically set me up for the next several years in business, and I'm glad I did it, but ooof was the penalty high. This makes me think 1. Good heavens, most people burning out don't even get this upside, and 2. If I had just structured things somewhat differently or canceled the travel, I probably could have gotten the benefit while avoiding years of fatigue
Watch out, because it's hard to know what will break you until it does break you. And what breaks quickly takes longer to fix. I generally try to cultivate a high degree of slack in everything that I do: I ignored it once, and paid for it.
Symptoms were:
* Messed up sleep
* a sort of "deadening" where I felt less joy in regular things
* A constant sense of being overwhelmed
* Worsened digestive troubles
* Less ability to tolerate caffeine (I ended up quitting it)
* More muscle tension
* Lack of focus, tendency towards distraction
* More short term thinking
And other stuff I can't remember now. It's basically all fixed, and I feel great. One quibble with the article:
"Burnout is caused by chronic stress, not stressors, the Nagoskis say in their book. It’s important to differentiate the two. Stressors are external: to-do lists, financial problems or anxiety about the future. Stress, on the other hand, “is the neurological and physiological shift that happens in your body when you encounter [stressors],” the Nagoskis write.
To fix burnout, people need to address the stress itself. They must allow their body to complete its stress response cycle. Instead, people tend to focus on stressors. “They assume their stress will go away if they’re on top of things, if they’re accomplishing things and constantly checking things off their to-do list,” Emily Nagoski says."
--> I found that removing stressors by addressing them and getting rid of the source of the stressor was extremely helpful.
But not in a "do the whole todo list" sense. Rather, thinking about what leads to repeat stressors in my life, and eliminating that. Could be as simple as decluttering the house, improving sleep, changing cooking habits, etc. Anything in the daily routine that eliminates a pressure and lets your system cope better with the remaining stressors. Also a big part of it was working less.
No problem. It can be a hard and long problem to solve, but it gets better with time and space.
Everyone's experience is different, but one thing I can say is this: the size of a problem is not necessarily proportional to the effect it will have on you in this state.
For instance, I had a reduced ability to multitask. Multitasking is one of those things where holding even three simple things in your head can be hard.
So, don't beat yourself up if an apparently simple situation is causing you stress. What seems simple may not be, given how humans are wired. And you have a reduced capacity while burnt out.
What you can do is look for things that trigger situations. Then see if you can reconfigure things so that the trigger is eliminated.
It's also helpful to look for physical signs. For example, in my case, I would get a tension in my neck, when inhaling. This happened after a stressor. Paying attention to this let me identify stressors and deal with them.
I also was able to work on it from the other end. Basically, my system was identifying minor threats as larger threats. So, I did something called square breathing. Basically: Stressor --> awareness --> hold breathe, count to 4 --> exhale, then inhale --> hold breathe while inhaled, count to four. Repeat if necessary.
It was like a pattern interrupt. The body wanted to go "minor stressor --> red alert!!!!!!". The breathing interrupted this and demonstrated to the body "see, no threat. Cancel the alarms".
After doing that for a few weeks I basically no longer have to do it, except in rare cases. Though that was some time in to the burnout, so some other stuff may have fixed itself in the meantime. YMMV, including with the specific way in which you do breathing.
Another thing: sleep as if your life depends on it. Good sleep helps every other thing and especially burnout.
I recognize that saying this can make the problem worse. So: if you are awake at night, and can't sleep: don't sweat it. Don't sweat the one offs. Instead, look for causes and solutions.
Working on the general environment helped fixed my sleep. I still have occasional off nights, but the rhythm is better.
Sleep may not be your issue. The point is, to the extent you're able, get outside of a situation, analyze it, look for stressors, and consider the full rational situation. Basically your job is to teach your body to align its (presently damaged) threat response systems to the actual situation, which is presumably not an acute threat.
Some or much of this may not apply to you, so take the bits that do apply. And good luck!
I second the do less work in total but also do more focused work.
I had to take a break for a couple months now where I worked only half days and I've also focused on 1-2 projects instead of being the "person who does everything".
The company I'm working for has gone from a small start-up to a company of 150 people in a few years and while the business grew much of the organizational structure has not followed up and I ended up taking too much responsibility. I've also been "on" for the last five years without the ability to completely relax even on vacations since I was just a phone call away and there was a lot of stuff that only I could do. At one point I was ready to toss the phone in the toilet or smash it against a rock or something. Smart phones are a major source of stress.
I'm back full time now and feel much better but the key is removing the stressors as you call them and focus on fewer things. I've removed a lot of my previous "only me" tasks and focused on two key projects that will make my life even less stressful. I've also sold quite a bit of equity so I won't work myself to death of fear that my absence will send the stock down.
This is so close to my experience it’s amazing. I’ve found that disconnecting from any technology for 2 hours straight on any given day (harder than it should be) will 100% of the time make me feel much better.
I think that it relates to the stress response cycle you’re talking about. If I give my body and mind time away from stressors, I can make quick progress to escaping the “constantly overwhelmed” feeling.
1. Last April, I took two weeks to go to Cuba and work on some non-internet connected work. Cuba has little internet, so this was easy to do.
It was incredibly relaxing, and I made a fair bit of progress in reducing stress. Also generated a lot of helpful insights.
Obviously, you have to go back at some point, and when I did, much of the stress returned. But the time away was helpful, and looking back at it, insights I gained during that time proved helpful over the long run.
2. Figuring out how to manage your devices. Which parts are valuable, which parts aren't, and which part need to be limited?
Actually, in Cuba I had a bit of a revelation: my smartphone was an incredibly device. It took pictures, let me make voice notes, make written notes, do reminders, etc. Not connected to the internet, it was a wonderful assistant, and I was able to use it and quickly put it down.
Back home, I found the things that sucked me in were:
* Twitter. If I'm not careful I can end up reading too many timelines
* Reddit. Certain subreddits for tech news
* Hacker News. 1-2x per day is a great addition to my life. Constantly returning is not.
* Newspaper site. I get great value out of a subscription to the financial times. But it also generates far more than I can or should read.
So, how to deal with this? I first tried a system using the Shortcuts app on iPhone. Basically, I could only access those sites by going through a shortcut routine, and logging visits in a spreadsheet. (this was done automatically)
This worked, but ultimately it proved too cumbersome and easy to circumvent, and I eventually slipped out of it.
Instead, I used a tool that was in my netgear router. They have an integration with Circle by Disney, aimed at letting parents control their children's browsing.
Instead, I used it to control myself. I'm actually paying monthly to use it, and paying extra for their management profile I can install on my iPhone and cellular connected iPad, so stuff gets filtered even off wifi.
And....it actually works. Obviously, I can circumvent the system, but it takes more effort than any of the inbuilt blocking systems. I also removed my vpn from my iOS devices: I realized I basically never was on public wifi anymore. Removal of the VPN made it harder to circumvent the monitoring.
So, now I can't go on those sites on my phone or iPad. I can go on them on my computer. But this hasn't been an issue so far: I've found I'm not likely to spend a ton of time idly browsing at a computer. I generally just use it for work now. If that ever changes, I'll change the filter settings.
But, I do want some of those sites. So, I went through each category, and asked:
* Do they have a podcast?
* Do they have an email newsletter?
What I ended up doing was for the ones with podcasts, I just use those. So, I no longer read Apple news on reddit, I just get updates from podcasts, which don't have the same effect for me. For the FT, I just signed up to a bunch of their weekly newsletters and get digests. I did the same with one person on twitter, and made a weekly email reminder to visit the twitter of one other person, who posts infrequently. I got some HN digests too.
So at lunch, I have my designated time to look at distractions on a screen, and I go through the emails. This doesn't take very long at all. Basically 20 min a day covers all the reading I want to do, but I could easily spend 2 hours instead if uncontrolled.
This was my major issue, yours may vary. Other than news, I also culled notifications, and handle all my email from a computer now. I find I process faster, and I don't really have anything urgent.
My phone is now much closer to being a tool, and less a source of distraction.
I think the daily disconnection you're doing is great. If you can get extended time away on your next vacation, and/or if you can do some analysis to figure out specifically what is causing the stress from your tech, that can help. Good luck!
I mentioned Circle by Disney in the post. I’ve found it pretty simple. Unsure of the security or privacy implications, but it’s had a bog enough impact that I’m fine with it.
The email newsletters and podcasts you have to do manually.
>> I could easily spend 2 hours instead if uncontrolled
You could easily spend 5-6 hours a day if uncontrolled. You probably did spend that much before without noticing. I was horrified when I turned on Screen Time on my iPhone and iPad.
I took a different approach to this - I started my own company a offer contracting services. I tell my clients "I work 40 hours a week, including communting. If you want ass-in-seat, that's ~30h/week. Want more? Let me work from home." (I tell them this in my most sale-sy, honey-dripping voice).
None have objected. I now work on average 6 hours per day, 30 minute lunch, 2x40min train+walk commute where I space out with music or podcasts. I make more money, am happier and in better shape then ever. Can highly recommend.
This topic is important, but this article is weak. They cite a statement about doctor burnout, and a single study about employer statements about the topic. Most of the content is anecdotal, and in that sense they're just going for an 'I hear you' reaction instead of adding anything to the discussion. Disappointing imo.
1) Take on as little debt as you can. This means you'll have more control over what job situations you will be forced to tolerate. Don't fall into the trap of 'rewarding' yourself for your hard work with expensive vacations, cars toys, whatever. Debt is slavery.
2) Leave your work phone in a drawer at work on Friday night, or turn it off. If they bug you about it, tell everyone you went on a camping trip, or went on a multi-pitch rockclimbing expedition or whatever. Keep your work stuff off your personal phone too.
If you have the kind of job where you are truly expected to be available all the time, start looking for another one. It's not worth your life.
And if you're wondering why the boss doesn't seem to burnout even though he's always there and works weekends, it's be cause he has control over his work hours. If you don't, then look for a way to either change that or get out.
These kind of work conditions can seem innocent enough, but if you keep that up for six months or a year and you are likely to burnout.
I'm reminded of this great quote from "Soul of a new machine":
He went away from the basement of Building 14 that day, and left this
note in his cubicle, on top of his computer terminal: "I'm going to a
commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a
season."
I cannot overstate how useful an emergency fund is in the event of serious burnout. Being able to quit your job and escape from that one huge stressor can be incredibly useful for recovery.
If one was a founder who wanted to have their startup succeed without crushing your teams mental/physical health, how would you do it? I understand the founder accepting it as a cost themselves, but when the company's existence depends on speed, how do you balance the push with survival?
- It's understandable that you're super-excited and willing to work 18-hour days to make your business a success. Probably not healthy, but understandable, because it's your baby. Don't expect that from others, because it's not their baby. They have their own babies (and hobby projects, friendships, etc.) that need their attention.
- Consider an employee with 4 kids in different schools, each with different after-school activities, a spouse who also works, and an ailing parent/grandparent who needs care and won't be around much longer. Try to target your expectations for workload and time available to be appropriate for that hypothetical employee, in such a way that they can still live their life and care for their family while also being an effective and valuable employee.
- If you're in software, plan for zero-downtime deployments from day one. Architect and develop for it from the beginning. Don't ask your employees to stay up all night doing deployments and maintenance during a 'quiet time' window in the middle of the night. It's not hard to do daytime deployments without taking the system offline if it's designed for it from the start, but it can be a major challenge to retrofit that ability.
- Continually reassess your deadlines and priorities. If your deadlines are actually hard due to external factors, consider what can reasonably be cut to make the deadline. If they're soft, consider focusing more on priorities of what is most important rather than deadline dates. Seek to relieve pressure rather than creating it, by focusing on what's most important.
And what’s more, our society is unwittingly taking the side of corporations and try to push more of it on another 50% of the population, which is already overworked:
There is a well-known burnout measurement test from Christina Maslach, who gave an interesting overview of job burnout in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRPBkCW0R5E
if some people weren’t burning out, the bean counters would continue squeezing everyone more and the people currently not burning out would start feeling pain also. Some burnout keeps the balance... it’s like if you always succeed, you aren’t achieving your potential.
I remember sitting in rapture listening to a retired Chevron executive describing the way white collar work used to be. You basically got hired at a megacorp for life. If things didn't work out after the first couple of years, you were gently taken aside, given nothing new to do, and given a salary and an office for an entire year to find a new position. I was flabbergasted. Only professors with tenure or certain government workers have this kind of job stability, but the entire upper middle class had it at one point. Sure, none of them won .com lotto; they arguably had much better lives on average.
My dad was working class and in the union -he had a different kind of stability.
I talked to a Chevron Exec while stuck on a ski lift 30 years ago. Back then if they canceled or finished a project they just redeployed the workers to other projects. Vastly different than the current system where they just lay everyone off at the end. If things weren't working out bosses would just transfer employees to a role better suited to them.
You'll get arguments this is more efficient cause free markets blah blah. However I know one semiconductor company in the valley that bucked that trend. Everyone went home at 5-6pm. Didn't work weekends. They just moved people around instead of firing them. And they totally crushed their competition over 20 years.
100% agree with you. The modern organization is so short term focused and so dedicated to purging that they do not develop leadership and cannot handle failure.
The cult of metrics breeds dumb. A big company is more like a Soviet enterprise than a functional business.
"What gets measured gets managed" - corrosively applied by establishing metrics that don't directly reflect business performance and are not under the control of the accountable people (NPS for example) and then directly and blindly using them to determine people's tenure or advancement.
BUT! the development and use of metrics like this is helpful in many ways; the problem is that when really dumb people are asked to do this they use them in really dumb ways and this bit (the lack of capability and brains) is the big issue.
MBA thinking aka "looting everything that isn't bolted down" and "gaming some metric to make yourself look good" is arguably worse than not having a free market. It's funny, one of my historical bugaboos was the looting of Russia (aka US "economists" like Summers and Shleifer and allied oligarchs looting their economy), but if you look at what was going on in the US during the same period ... same thing. The US didn't do things like privatize LBNL and turn it into a disco, but I'm pretty sure there were people who would have argued for it.
Or why don't you just keep your lack of empathy to yourself?
Did you get offended by an article about people who have problems which have zero impact on your life?
Maybe you should take a hard look into yourself first before you comment here why you have such a low level of endurance reading about other people's woes.
We are making employees lives miserable to reduce the need of planning for companies. Quite often management lacks the emotional maturity needed in their positions that hides normal mistakes that are part of the job, push for unrealistic schedules and sometimes even get into bulling as a way of getting what they want.
8 hours plus commute time, that has increased as cities have grown, does not allow people to have time to attend their families, their own finances and have time to relax.
When it comes to human management in companies we are closer to the middle ages than to the current knowledge about human nature.