I suffered from severe burnout around a year ago, and only now am I starting to feel back to normal. Nothing here would have helped me, and it's pretty clear to me why that is the case.
(Paraphrased from literature that I read at the time)
There's two kinds of burnout. One is caused by overwork, stress, long hours, not enough breaks, no holidays, not enough headcount, and so on. The kind of things this article talks about.
Instead, my burnout was caused by a lack of progress, which destroyed a lot of my other needs that I wasn't even thinking about. I felt no autonomy, no meaning to my work, and I felt out of place in the team because it seemed like I was the only one that was so bothered by it.
I wasn't working too much, and I often was only doing a few hours of work a day. However, because of organisational issues, I was making no progress, barely any improvements to the code, and was completely demotivated. I did try taking time off and taking it easy, as the traditional methods to combat burnout. Far from helping, they just made things worse, because that wasn't the problem. Looking back, the issue was a company pretending to care about Agile and just making everything worse in the process.
This ended up being a bit of a rambling vent, and I'm sorry about that - but my point is that we need to be aware that not all burnout is from stress and overwork. A lack of motivating factors can look the same as poor hygiene factors. Your reactionary measures *must* include actually talking to the person about what is causing the stress, and if needed, being willing to fix the organisational issues that are the root cause.
I think this is actually the most common type of "unreported" burnout in tech. The enormous amount of work to be done weighs on you, but the work doesn't have a defined set of requirements or the requirements are constantly shifting. For me, I've seen it mostly when a rewrite is happening, seems closely related to analysis paralysis.
> the work doesn't have a defined set of requirements or the requirements are constantly shifting. For me, I've seen it mostly when a rewrite is happening, seems closely related to analysis paralysis.
I'm currently dealing with this at work. I'm effectively responsible for a rewrite of another teams backend because that team is "short-staffed" or whatever (simple solution: hire people, train people, fix the staffing problem) and because "we like services!" or whatever (a very stupid and short-sighted reason to start a project: it's trying to fit a solution with a problem we don't actually have -- oh, no! That application is a monolith! The horror!). And on top of all of this I was pressured into agreeing with some arbitrary deadlines set by someone else before I even had a decent understanding of what my team and I were being asked to build!
It seems to me, however, and many others at the IC-level, many who are not even on our team but who are aware of this project I've been gifted, that another teams manager just doesn't want to own the problem space any more and he's found a way to misuse management to shove it off onto someone else.
And it's all decisions made levels above me (and even my manager, FWIW) and we're all just supposed to accept that our reality is one where we're thrashed around from project to project without any consent, without any conversations, without understanding why. And I'm a tech lead at this company, and I've been very effective in this role in the previous 3.5 years, but now I'm hamstrung by these absolutely horrendous decision making processes that exist somewhere near the stratosphere.
It's frankly fucking insulting to exist as an IC in corporate America and the only thing that keeps me clocking in every day is the fact that I have a family and live in a high CoL area: They've got me by the balls and they know it. I suspect I'm not alone.
As far as I know there are no different kinds of burnout. A burnout is always caused by long periods of stress exhausting the body.
The causes of stress can of course be very different. Working below or above your level can cause stress. But also long periods of physical pain can cause stress. Or being overstimulated all the time. And it can be a sum of all kinds of stress. For example when you struggle in a relationship it is much harder to cope with stress at work.
Stress eats your energy.
It's also difficult to prevent a burnout yourself because after a long time you can get used to being stressed. You forget how it is to be relaxed.
Sometimes it is just not clear what caused a burnout. It just adds up.
The best way to prevent a burnout and to recover from it is to accept you are stressed and tired and you need to step back.
This is also the most difficult thing to do.
I very much agree, it's a big assumption that burnout is only cause by too much work or too much pressure. When that assumption is unchallenged, it can lead to managers dismissing concerns about burnout because their teams are not overworked.
A lack of meaning to the work, or even a lack of work overall, can also cause feelings of burnout. A lack of obvious career progression can cause burnout. Constantly fire fighting can cause burnout.
So if someone says they are burned out, I always ask what is causing it before talking about solutions.
These are not two different types of burnout... They are one and the same. Pressure and overwork do not per se cause burnout... What causes burnout is if the effort-reward cycle misses (either repeatedly for small efforts, or if you put in a lot of effort and have a categorical miss)
Reward could be anything. The feeling of a job well done (easy to miss if the project is a failure, or if management pivots), it could be the expectation of career advancement, it could be soft recognition by peers... And is dependent on the individual and project. You could even have an outward success and a pay raise but if you wanted your peers to love you and they didn't.... Burnout. You could even have an easy and unpressured job and burn out if it's not providing the rewards you expect.
In any case the disconnect between effort and reward teaches your brain to associate effort with failure and the fact that the common. "take a break" advice failed for you should not be surprising, because I think that doesn't work in general: it doesn't reassociate effort with expected reward.
I feel like a lot of people here are using the topic of burnout to hoist their opinions about American capitalism or whatever, but I honestly don't believe that this is the root cause. Plenty of people work their asses off and are happy to do so because it can be its own reward, or, they know what they want and know how to get it after each brutal push of effort. But not falling victim to burnout takes self-awareness, or good managers (capitalist systems or otherwise - e.g. academia or military) and both of those are in short supply, blaming capitalism is much easier.
I think you are right. But the operating regime of your hypothesis is basically from naive entry until a point, and that point is when the expected reward transcends rewards that capitalism can provide.
If you want meaning from your work, and that meaning was initially provided by personal growth, then when the position no longer feels like growth, there is no reward possible. Similarly, if you thought you were doing something meaningful but then discover your company, or individuals who benefit more from your work than you do, are part of the problem, there is no redeeming it. To continue you have to resort to selective attention or basic ostriching.
If this is true then the primary protective traits against burnout would be 1) strongly established healthy boundaries around what to expect from a job and a healthy home life or 2) myopic focus on problem solving and a lack of interest or self-limiting that prevents curiosity about higher levels of organization. Anecdotally this matches with my experience — most people who endure fall largely into one or both of those categories.
A possible corollary is that with improvements to (that is, restrictions on) capitalism, more categories of people could continue to work without such ready disillusionment from bad or gray actors.
That's a really interesting hypothesis, and it would make sense. Is it something that you've come up with, or is there some literature I can read about it?
Get out of my head! This resonates with me - this is exactly how I'm currently feeling. Do you have any resources that were particularly insightful to you from your research?
I think that [1] was the article that first alerted me to the fact that there's different kinds of burnout and it's not one-size-fits-all. Other than that, I don't have too many resources. You probably shouldn't take my advice, because my burnout ended up with me quitting and taking a year out to work on a startup. However if you can leave and join a different team / company, I'd recommend it. By the time you're feeling burnt out, you probably don't have time to fix things.
I did try to fix the root-cause organisational issues, and actually did have a sizable impact with many of my suggestions having been implemented now. However, I ruined myself in the process. It was far more difficult than I expected, because it was a huge old-school hierarchical place. I wasn't paid enough to fix things, and it wasn't in my job description. I ignored that and pushed to fix things anyway - last I've heard it actually made a difference and some of the things I advocated have actually happened now, but it was too late for me.
I just got round to reading the Phoenix Project & Unicorn Project recently, and I'd recommend that. I saw an awful lot of similarities with my old company, and I think it would have helped to have that example of how to improve things. Even then, they were only successful in the book because they had management buy-in.
Take care. I do validate and recognise exactly what OP mentioned, I suffered of it from the later half of 2020 all the way to the end of 2021, things are slowly getting better since December when I changed orgs (inside the same company).
I'm still far away from how I used to perform, I'm doing therapy and it's been one of the worst issues I've talked about for a while. It creeped into other areas of my life and now affects my day-to-day life and hobbies, the pandemic just made everything much worse.
I actually recently suffered (am still suffering from?) a burning caused by the combination - super high stress combined with absolutely no progress, "busywork" and literally a feeling like a plumber whose job is to "support" the people doing the cool stuff (which I thought I would get to work on when I was hired).
I was given most advice that this article mentions - I took vacations, we had internal rotations to reduce stress, we tried hiring. Ultimately, none of these efforts came to fruition. I think there really is no counter to bad decisions from management. You can try to be as nice as possible at an individual level, but the "lack of progress" burnout will bite you if the pressure doesn't.
This is exactly what I have been going through for the last year or two. I even changed jobs, finding a role that was supposed to be better. At a company that would allow my skills to improve, while having what I assumed would be a better run company.
Unfortunately the new company is so full of corporate BS that I'm finding it even harder to get through each day. I genuinely feel like there are staff who are hired to 'improve productivity' through implementing Agile company wide, are actually doing everything in their power to slow things down. I've never seen this amount of unneeded meetings in my calendar, all in the name of 'planning'.
That is probably a better fit, yes. Not perfect, since I was still intellectually stimulated by trying to improve the environment and processes, but every attempt inevitably hit a roadblock. I identify most with the 2nd and 3rd categories in [1]
However I think it's more valuable for me to keep using the term burnout, especially in situations like this. To a manager, burnout and boreout look the same. Ideally you could inject 'boreout' into the public consciousness, but it's more realistic for me to say I was experiencing burnout with different root causes.
In this case, I think you wanted more opportunities and career growth and that wasn't possible in that role. I've been there before. I don't think this is burnout, you just outgrew your role, and there was no reason to stick around.
I think your comment is very insightful. I agree with your distinction between the two kinds of burnout. I feel like the second one you mention is often the much worse of the two as least with the first case there's the potential to discuss, joke and possibly commiserate over head count and long hours.
I would be interested in hearing how you went about moving forward form your burnout.
Partly, yes. I left that company and started my own. That's brought its own set of troubles, but it has at least given me a chance to regain my love for programming.
Looking back, I did really enjoy trying to fix the organisational issues that caused my burnout. So I was going through this constant cycle of
- Get frustrated by something when programming
- Realise there's an issue in process / workflow
- Get excited to fix that issue
- Come up with an idea
- Get shut down because I'm not paid enough to have those kinds of ideas
- Go back to programming, even more frustrated
I've since realised that I actually never fit the developer role in a company that well. I was good at it, but always got drawn towards creating tooling, CI pipelines, running the retros - the meta-changes and process improvements. In previous jobs that was fine because they were a lot more agile. There wasn't as much that needed fixing, and they were happy to let me fix the issues that did exist.
I felt no meaning to my work because I was motivated by improving things, whether they were in my job description or not. I could have a minimal impact by writing some code, or a huge impact by helping everyone else write code more efficiently, but I wasn't allowed to do the latter.
Anyway yeah long story short I'm currently pivoting my career towards the managerial/coaching/processes side. Something like "Software Development Coach" rather than just "Software Developer". I'm excited for the future again, and excited to help other people that are dealing with similar issues :)
This resonates very much with my own experience. I’ve quit my last job because it broke this camel’s back and now the last thing I want to do is going back as a developer.
I also do enjoy fixing things and processes so that others don’t needlessly suffer through work and actually enjoy themselves.
But how do you go about switching tracks to coaching? What does it even entail? How do you learn?
And more importantly: who’s buying? I was trying to better things in every job I had and every time I met the wall of “not being paid enough to have these ideas/being road blocked”.
If companies have this attitude (no matter how much they’re losing through low morale, inefficiencies, mistakes, attrition, etc) when offered a chance to fix it “for free” by an actual employee, why would they pay top dollar for a coach to make it happen?
It feels to me that management is even more cynical than the burnt out grunts and their objective is to squeeze as much as they can out of their employees while they last because they know they’ll quit or burnout in a year or two anyway.
How do you even begin a conversation when that’s the prevalent attitude?
I get where you're coming from, and they're questions I'm working on answering as well. Unlike you, I have worked in jobs where that kind of proactive find-and-fix mentality was prevalent, where they bought into continuous improvement. They do exist, it does work, and that's what made it so frustrating when I wasn't allowed to fix things in this job.
I don't have all the answers yet, and it's something I'm in the process of doing. However, what is really helping me (and what made me realise this was the issue in the first place) is working with a coach. It's a bit like therapy/counselling, basically someone to guide me through the process of figuring out what went wrong and why, and how to fix it in future. He's from the tech industry, so has a base level understanding of things, and was able to give me some good pointers for how to find resources.
I think the thing that started me off learning & reskilling was reading blogs from technical coaches like [1]. Clearly the job I want does exist, and there is a demand for it. It's not common, but it exists.
(Paraphrased from literature that I read at the time)
There's two kinds of burnout. One is caused by overwork, stress, long hours, not enough breaks, no holidays, not enough headcount, and so on. The kind of things this article talks about.
Instead, my burnout was caused by a lack of progress, which destroyed a lot of my other needs that I wasn't even thinking about. I felt no autonomy, no meaning to my work, and I felt out of place in the team because it seemed like I was the only one that was so bothered by it.
I wasn't working too much, and I often was only doing a few hours of work a day. However, because of organisational issues, I was making no progress, barely any improvements to the code, and was completely demotivated. I did try taking time off and taking it easy, as the traditional methods to combat burnout. Far from helping, they just made things worse, because that wasn't the problem. Looking back, the issue was a company pretending to care about Agile and just making everything worse in the process.
This ended up being a bit of a rambling vent, and I'm sorry about that - but my point is that we need to be aware that not all burnout is from stress and overwork. A lack of motivating factors can look the same as poor hygiene factors. Your reactionary measures *must* include actually talking to the person about what is causing the stress, and if needed, being willing to fix the organisational issues that are the root cause.