I did some volunteer mentoring for a while. Burnout was the most common complaint. However, once you dug into each complaint of burnout you discovered that “burnout” has become a catch-all term for a very wide range of feelings.
Before that experience I assumed everyone defined burnout as a severe state of deep distress and lack of energy following extended periods of intense stress, frustration, overwork, and/or lack of control.
Instead, a lot of people used “burnout” more casually, as a catch-all term for any frustrations with their job any or intermittent tiredness. A lot of people would say they were suffering from burnout one week, then everything would be fine again the next Monday after they did something fun over the weekend. To them, burnout could be as simple as being a little tired one week or having to work full 8-hour days for a couple days in a row.
The number of people for whom “burnout” meant a deep and serious affliction that required possibly months to recover from was a lot smaller.
It’s similar to the way people casually talk about their “OCD” because they like to be organized, their “ADHD” when they have nothing resembling clinical ADHD, or their “PTSD” after a mildly unpleasant experience. These terms have become so diluted that they can mean almost anything when you ask people to self-report.
Sure enough, this survey was self-reported. BCG wants to sell you services related to burnout, so maximizing the number of people reporting “burnout” is in their best interests. A self-report survey of unknown cohorts is the perfect way to maximize that number for their headline.
At one point in my career, I've been a CTO of a startup company. I worked 12-14 hours a day, including weekends. My relationship with the CEO was bad, and he actively added "senior tech leads" to the company to compete with me.
One day, I arrived to the office, and stood in the hallway across our office door.
I froze. I couldn't physically move. I stood there, unable to move, for 2.5 hours until someone passed by and saw me.
I'm sharing this story so that readers may have an idea of what severe burnout may look like. It's not that I didn't want to move - I couldn't, my brain didn't let me. I lost my ability to control my body at that point.
I don't think that'd still classify as burnout, honestly.
That's more like a stress response from getting into the range of an abuser. I'm sure it was extremely traumatic for you, I just don't think anyone could classify such a response as burnout
Best take here. I like the BCG selling related services call out. Always question the motives of the author. There is a clear conflict of interest, which ties into the survey results. The validity of the survey and methodology should also be scrutinized.
Self-diagnosing is just part of the current fad of credentialism in discussing the psyche. Nobody can exhibit a pile of adjectives. They need to be attached to a proper noun from a book to be acknowledged. If there isn't a proper noun attached, the individual's external nonconformity or internal dissatisfaction are just a personal failing for not having fixed themselves already.
And ironically it makes society worse at supporting everyone, even those for whom the proper noun is appropriate.
Most people don't have "fulfilling" jobs. They have a paycheck. A very small percentage of Americans, let alone those around the world, have the privilege of analyzing how their job makes them feel.
I get paid great money to play with computers. My father was an elementary school janitor.
I think Office Space summed up the problem nicely:
"Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?
Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.
Bob Slydell: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."
Most companies only care about the next quarter, or next investor call. Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches.
When I was a youngster, the eight bosses line made me laugh because it was absurd. Deeper into my career, it makes me laugh because it's true.
On a good day, on an unimportant project, I still have three bosses. I have my team lead, my PM, and my actual manager. Currently I'm on a cross-team project of critical importance, so you can add on my manager's manager, his manager, the other team's manager, and his manager. I've got seven goddamn people breathing down my neck on this.
I used to work at a place where I had one manager, even for critically important projects. He was the only one breathing down my neck (and that wasn't often). No PM constantly hassling me to groom my backlog[0], the managers above my immediate manager all had enough trust to not directly meddle. Most productive I've ever been in my career. Ended up leaving because I just didn't give a shit about the project, but sometimes I dream of going back...
[0] I need to rant about this. How am I supposed to be agile if I have to have my backlog completely planned out for the whole project? And I can't just estimate it or backlog the big chunks, because when we start making progress and I update the backlog to reflect things we've learned, I have to justify every single change to my PM who will grumble that we are going off plan. If I don't update the backlog, I get grilled about how accurate it is at the next too many cooks/status update meeting.
We can either do agile or try to plan out the next six months of work at the start. Stop trying to make me do both.
> Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."
This is literally my company. 8 bosses - all of who spending their entire existence in monitoring and PIPing engineers instead of using their authority to deliver constructive outcomes for the business.
There is zero growth mentality among them (except headcount growth for their empires). Can't even imagine how to steer their org to produce value.
Why the f will a IC care more about the success of the business than the 8 destructive bosses above them?
> Most companies only care about the next quarter, or next investor call. Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches.
Or next round of funding.
> Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches.
I watched Office Space for the first time when I was a teenager many years ago. It's funny how much my perception of the movie changed and how much it resonates with my work now, specially since the last years. One difference is that I have 10 different managers, which makes me dissociate enough from work without the need of any hypnotist.
Peter Gibbons: Our high school guidance counselor used to ask us what you'd do if you had a million dollars and you didn't have to work. And invariably what you'd say was supposed to be your career. So, if you wanted to fix old cars then you're supposed to be an auto mechanic.
Samir: So what did you say?
Peter Gibbons: I never had an answer. I guess that's why I'm working at Initech.
Michael Bolton: No, you're working at Initech because that question is bullshit to begin with. If everyone listened to her, there'd be no janitors, because no one would clean shit up if they had a million dollars.
But if they don't only care about the next quarter how is Gerald Q. Public, born 1958, going to retire to Florida after buying three McMansions (and selling them all at a loss), a sports car, and paying for three divorce settlements? Who are we to deny him the experience of moving down to Boca so he can get his maintenance-provided house on a golf course wiped off its slab by a hurricane before being rebuilt so that he can play golf and wife swap until the dementia sets in?
The lack of "another dime" when you work extra is also something that prevents most people from going above and beyond. If there's nothing else out there, why would you care?
Working with my wife now to get her to start a business so we can keep my salary to pay the bills but focus on the business so our effort can have a meaningful impact on the bottom line.
I have one that's even worse than that. The company I worked at once insisted on you keeping a timesheet for work done and which clients should be billed for each 15 minute block. They charged the clients according to that. They even went as far as charging other internal teams for your time if you had a chat with a colleague in another team!
If you, however, had any unaccounted for blocks (i.e. not 8h per day), it'd be brought up in your appraisal, and on one occasion when we were told we had to work overtime one evening (about 4 hours) but wouldn't be paid for it, that's when my feelings towards their policy really shifted. From that point on, even if I'd worked late to get the work done for the customer, I made sure that the timesheet only listed the 8 hours so that the company wasn't going to profit from my misfortune. They picked up on that too, and weren't happy, but there was nothing they could do about it.
That culture was truly toxic as an employee. If you were a couple of minutes late for the start of the day, you were hauled into your manager's office for a 10 minute shouting at about the importance of time keeping. There was an unofficial "flexitime" working policy - "you can start any time you like before 9 and end any time you like after 5:30". Obviously, anyone who'd been there more than a year grew tired of this, and at 5:30 every day there was a stampede to leave the office. Nobody left even a minute early because we had timestamped entry/exit logs and we knew the consequences, but equally almost nobody was prepared to stay a minute longer than they had to.
There’s a great Dilbert about that… he turns in his timesheet to Carol the secretary and then she says why are you still standing there and he says I still have 14 minutes scheduled for this.
A janitorial job can be rewarding because you can see that you are making a difference in the world. You get to meet the people whose lives are improved by what you do, every day.
Filling out spreadsheets, it can be hard to tell what the purpose of what you are doing, whom it benefits, and how the world would be worse off if you simply didn't show up.
This is it! People have a little bit of a screwed perception of what is „fulfilling“. Yes, there are people whose only kind of fulfilling may be working for a NGO that is trying to fight climate change, save kids in poor countries of the world or clean up the ocean from plastic waste.
While all of those are certainly noble goals, the vast majority of people doesn’t even shoot that high to find any kind of purpose. Most people are already satisfied and feel a sense of accomplishment when their job creates something of value for *someone*.
I had a job with a great paycheck, but spent 40 hours a week doing barely anything. It was fun at first, but it became physically exhausting. I have now a job with similar pay but I build apps that people actually use in their day to day work and quite enjoy, it’s significantly more stressful and demanding than not doing anything, but I don’t feel nearly as exhausted as I did with the previous job.
I’ve felt it myself and have heard others talk about it, but there is an increasing number of jobs that is either objectively useless or perceived as such (by the people employed in that job). Either way, it’s not surprising to me that burnout continues to be on the rise.
I’ve had the same experience. I actually took a 40% pay cut to work somewhere where I had to actually do something, because of exhausting and depressing doing nothing was
I have never heard that being brought up in a (serious) conversation about UBI tbh. I've had quite a few discussions about this, the most common things people were happy about would be
- Having a financial safety net and removing some degree of existential fear (note, this is in a country with an existing social safety net)
- Switching into a career with less pay but better interest alignment. Interestingly, most of the women I've talked to would strongly prefer a switch into more social careers while basically all men I've talked to (claim) they'd switch into trades.
- Having the option to obtain educational credentials one couldn't get earlier in life for a plethora of reasons, without too much financial concerns (that is in a country with publicly funded free universities)
Certainly there are people who would see not doing anything as a godsend, but I think we generally over estimate our intrinsic desire to do something by working and tend to assume this desire doesn't exist in other people.
This! I enjoy my work in tech, but it mostly never seems to have a beginning nor an end. There’s always the next iteration of work waiting on the horizon. Even though I could afford to hire out, I relished the opportunity to do a repetitive home task like mowing the yard. The mental satisfaction of seeing an unkept yard transform into clean edges, clipped blade mulch islands and more order than chaos - all as a result of the sweat from my brow - provided an internal joy that is hard to describe. There was a beginning, middle and end which soothed my soul and reminded me of what I miss during my regular work in tech.
This is a deliberate mindset that software companies (their leadership) adopt willingly: That their software is never "done". In software, nobody wants to build a new house. They just want to add another floor to the existing building. There are companies who have an end state for their software, at which time they set it down and work on something else, but they are hard to find.
This is a large part of my experience of burnout. Perhaps not so much alienation, as i understand it, but what you say in your last paragraph resonates with what really sticks in my mind when I'm starting to feel burnout. I end up having to endlessly push the idea of the pointlessness of my work out of my mind and that becomes a form of additional mental 'overhead', so to speak.
People think that the worst part of being a janitor is cleaning toilets. In reality the worst part of being a janitor is living in poverty. This is true about a lot of jobs in our economy.
There are a lot of other outlets to turn that job into something more fulfilling.
- People do their job to make money to provide for their families. For some, that's all the justification you need.
- If it pays well, donate a portion of your income to a charity that you believe in AND get involved with that charity. There are tons of great options out there like Habitat for Humanity, literacy programs, Shriner's, Boy Scouts or a local church just off the cuff. This turns your job into a way that you are helping your community through a organization with a greater purpose. It can shift your perspective.
At least in software it's not alienation, it's never-ending hamster-wheel of sprint after sprint of delivering features by cutting corners atop of existing cut corners.
It's less about personal views, and more about the fact that janitor's job is time and location bounded, and the result is immediate and readily assessable.
Our jobs can be the polar opposite of all of that.
It can be even worse. When you do a stellar level job, no one complains. When yu slip a little, you have thousands of users complaining about some minor setting showing wrong values: "This crap is useless, they can't even implement one value properly". And you get this after sitting three weeks chasing some obscure bug deep in some library from your hardware vendor.
I’ve heard said (don’t recall the specifics) Maslov’s hierarchy is upside down, that with sufficient meaning/purpose, many deprivations of lower elements can be handled.
Not certain if I’d go that far, esp at extremes, but that the pieces of the “hierarchy” are more like eqalish puzzle pieces than a stacked pyramid.
I think in general, if you arrange needs into a hierarchy, people will arrange them roughly in reverse of the degree to which they are being satisfied for the person you're asking.
"... how the world would be worse off if you simply didn't show up"
I've been reflecting on this recently and I think in the context of a job, it operates at both a macro and micro level, and ultimately to feel fulfilled in the long term you need to feel like you matter on both levels.
Macro contributions are the stuff upper management sees— the new products and features, the deals closed, the systems you designed and maintained, the technical directions to advocate for and staff you mentor, the conference presentations you give. These are highly visible contributions are are "easy" to recognize you for, but on the other hand they're also relatively easy to succinctly describe, for example, on a job req, which will be necessary if you do indeed stop showing up.
In contrast to this, the micro contributions are what your close colleagues see. They're who recognize your taste, your care and attention to detail, the thoughtfulness with which you lay out code, balance requirements, utilize tools, and maintain hard-to-measure things like interface boundaries and testability. It's these contributions that quietly keep technical debt under control, save time by preventing problems from ever occurring, and push systems toward ever greater reliability and observability. If you disappear tomorrow, none of this stuff will fall apart overnight; it will degrade in more subtle ways that take much longer to manifest as an actual "problems".
I think for me at least, I sometimes feel a disconnect where I have lots of acknowledgment at the macro level, but still feel burnt out and unappreciated due to gaps at the micro level. The Q12 question about having a "best friend at work" [1] I think is also really tied into all of this, since that's likely to be a person who will see you and what you have to offer much more than a busy manager hustling between meetings all week and rubber-stamping your code reviews.
I think the low status and the low pay of a janitorial job makes it pretty hard for a lot of people. Higher-paying, higher-status IT work has a different set of problems: meaninglessness, drudgery, and cognitive-dissonance.
> You get to meet the people whose lives are improved by what you do, every day
Yes! When I retired I started volunteering at a raptor conservation centre, and got given loads of simple mundane tasks. Some were really tedious (cleaning the birds' water bowls, removing poop, getting rid of nettles that blocked a view, etc etc) but at the end of the day my minder could see that the tasks had been done and that I wasn't a flake. They also demonstrated commitment, which helped me move up to helping with the birds themselves, and now I help fly them in experience days, showing them to paying members of the public, and bringing in funds that resource critical conservation projects (nest boxes, anti-poacher campaigns, etc).
The problem is some need to work to burnout or else they can't pay bills. This is especially true in places like the USA where so many social benefits are tied to employment. Employers understand this. They know a lapse in employment could be devastating, so they can put the screws to employees.
With a full time job, you're spending most of your waking hours preparing to work, commuting to work, working, and commuting from work. There's not really much time and energy remaining to do something meaningful. Like it or not, your work is to a good approximation your life, the rest is a rounding error.
I don’t think that’s always true. With remote work, flexible schedules, etc, you can reduce the costs of working. In the worst cases, you might have a long commute making your 8 hour work day into 10+. But you still have weekends and probably at least 6-8 waking hours outside of work. (I’m imagining an 8-6 with commute, so assuming 8 hours of sleep, 6-9pm and 5-8am)
Best case, you remove a commute and gain a whole day back with a 4x8 schedule
Those additional 6-8 hours dwindle down to 1-2 hours real quick when you consider you still have housework to do on top of work, cooking, cleaning, washing, you also need to eat and buy groceries. Also can't do anything exciting immediately before going to sleep.
Of course I'm doing it for the money. I don't like my work that much. (When I was younger, I used to say "Don't they realize that I'd do this for free?" But even then, I'm not sure it was really true...)
But when I was working in medical instruments, and they brought in a doctor who explained how our instrument turned a surgery that had a 50/50 survival rate into one that had better than a 99% survival rate... I was more motivated to work there, and to work well there, and not because I was getting more money. My work had a purpose. It wasn't just a job.
If you paid me the same to be a janitor, I'd take that trade any day of the week. I've been a janitor before and while the job is not fun and has some shitty (pun intended) days - overall I was a better human being not being stuck behind a desk for 10+ hours a day.
Unfortunately our economy is what it is, so you can only really be paid for non-physical work these days. Thus a lot of folks who are doing quite well on paper are struggling internally living a life that simply does not suit them.
It's weird to live your entire life knowing you were not built to do what you do day in and day out to pay the bills.
The janitor in my school was a relaxed guy in his late 50s. He was always joking and seemed to be quite satisfied with his job. All the children respected him - he was the guy you turned to when something was not working right, and he fixed it. He and his family lived on the school campus in a nice bungalow with a nice garden. His children also went to my school. While his salary certainly wasn't great, he did not have to pay any rent (the bungalow was owned by the city and came with the job), and the job was super secure. He was also the person who worked for the school the longest (since the school opened in the early 70ies), and was a walking history book.
In my previous job, we would regularly see a guy with a small truck delivering vegetables door-to-door during our lunch breaks. We all envied him. He was always smiling and whistling, while we were sitting miserably before our food, counting the minutes remaining before we had to go back into a hell of customer tickets and technical debt.
One of my job sites had an isle window overview of a couple acres of grassland. Whenever the grounds guy was mowing and rocking with his headphones guys would stop and watch him do a couple of rows.
I don't think people who never mowed yards as a kid would get it.
When people asked what I do in tech, I'd say "tech janitor".
I've always called myself a "cyber janitor." Same deal. I clean up tech messes that people higher than me make, so that they can take credit for how clean they are.
People don't need fulfilling jobs. They need fulfilling lives. That means it should be relatively easy to earn enough to comfortably live, having enough time to have a family, spend time wiht that family, socialize, have hobbies, go on vacation, help out in their communities, etc.
What's happened in the last 40-50 years is that productivity skyrocketed but real wages remained relatively stagnant to the point where you need 2 people each with a full-time job and each having a "side hustle" or second job just to make ends meet. And you'll still have a lower standard of living than someone working a basic job 50 years ago.
Some turn this conversation, much like homelessness, into a "personal moral failure", meaning it's your fault if you don't have a fulfilling job. Not all jobs can be fulfilling. But if people earn a decent income they don't really care.
We should instead talk about why the demand for greater and greater profits have concentrated the value created by workers into the hands of the very few and why the workers who create that value don't their fair share of those profits.
I'm not sure that I think that burnout is directly related to a job being fulfilling. It seems to me that it is more related to having a lot of responsibility but very little power. Or somewhat equivalently, being in a position where other people can make your work much more difficult without you having much control over it.
In software at least, I think it could also be related to the pace of modern development. Agile sprints mean that you are constantly in a situation where things are down to the wire.
That's it, a very clear formulation. As a teacher, that describes my experience precisely. I am willing to bet it describes all other high-burnout professions.
I don't want to exotisize "blue collar" labor. That being said, I've always wondered if burnout ends up being more likely in roles where you feel like you're suppose to care.
Being bored all the time is annoying and sucks, but being in a thing where you feel like you _shouldn't_ be bored and yet are also sucks. Does it suck more? Not sure!
I'm in tech after a decade working blue collar, most of my friends are still working blue collar, and they're all burned out
Blue collar doesn't just pay you poorly -- it's also tedious, and there's a pervasive sense that nobody gives a damn about you, your safety, or really anything about you. "nobody" being managers, but also your white collar coworkers who "work upstairs", customers, security, etc.
You have very little autonomy: you'll tend to have to ask permission to go for a bathroom break, or to step outside for a minute to get a breath of fresh air, or if anything is going to cause you to be more than 5 minutes late for your shift. Yes, you'll have to beg and might not even be allowed to attend funerals of close family members. You may or may not have to help the customer who keeps sexually harassing you. You probably will be asked to speak to customers with a certain tone and facial expression regardless of how awful you're feeling. Nobody cares that you just went through a breakup
RE safety: you'll have employers doing everything from getting you to work with wiring that isn't up to code when you're not an electrician, to lifting things alone that nobody should lift alone, to working at an unsafe pace, to working during small disasters where half the business is underwater. You might not even be a full employee -- you'd be surprised how many dishwashers, waiters and cooks in San Francisco restaurants are employed as independent contractors but are effectively employees
You aren't making much money, so commuting will tend to be a long slog. You might even be working more than one of these jobs.
Yes, I've had "cool" low wage jobs with nice managers that tried to treat me like a human being. I know those exist. They are exceptional and often don't last
Also I am not writing this to single out the parent, just want to affirm that your boring white collar job is better in ways you probably can't fathom and confirm that blue collar jobs are very much prone to burnout
Thanks for confirming this, I appreciate the blunt perspective here.
The idea of even having to think about your own safety in that way is something I have never had to experience. I have stressed out a lot about money before, but I have never been in a situation at that level, and I will remember to appreciate that.
Yes and on top of all this the physical exertion that you are doing in a bluecollar job is really useless for health and that's the most positive way to describe it. I'd say that it's probably always very detrimental.
Value usually comes out of blue collar labor. Almost no value comes out of lucrative tech jobs. The tech that is making the world a better place usually has so many alternatives it wouldn't matter if you closed up shop or not.
Taking care of a school building could be way more fulfilling than working on ad-tech or some mobile-game funnels tricking people with black patterns (no reflection on you specifically).
I would say even most computer jobs aren’t fulfilling. It’s always funny when companies want to almost bully employees into caring about their “mission”. Maybe if you’re flying to Mars, the mission is genuinely exciting. But it’s hard to care about some database tech or payments or ads or whatever in the same way. And yet people pretend because if they don’t it may negatively affect their job.
> A very small percentage of Americans, let alone those around the world, have the privilege of analyzing how their job makes them feel
From my interactions with Americans, I'd have to say that there are way more people around the world have that luxury than Americans. Exhibit A: The French.
The survey covered multiple countries, shockingly even India, 11k responses.
Everyone, by default, knows how they feel.
Burnout is something that happens to you no matter what you care about.
I have no doubt that BCG will be more than happy to help anyone troubled by the implications of this "research" with an "engagement" to study and reduce burnout in their organization. For a nominal fee of course.
I have even less doubt that said engagement would not lead to more fulfilled employees given that the MBB consulting cargo cult has arguably given us the modern corporate culture that leads to such prevalent levels of burnout in the first place.
They seem to rely on a corelation to feelings of inclusion.
> That’s because our research has revealed that burnout—which has historically been considered a consequence of long hours, a physically demanding job, or a high-stress environment—is also highly correlated with low feelings of inclusion. Essentially, employees who are more burned out feel less included at work.
And for determining inclusion they say the following:
> For this research, we quantified inclusion as a score of how inclusive an employee finds the workplace to be, using BCG’s BLISS Index, a statistically rigorous tool that identifies the factors that most strongly influence feelings of inclusion in the workplace.
Isn't almost every burnout condition based on self-reporting?
There are case where it creates psychosomatic effects but most cases people just express how they feel about their job, no?
I used to be an employee that would kill themselves for even minimum wage.
I think being a hard worker regardless of reward is an honorable trait, but keeping that up for decades is difficult. Naturally I am very loyal and agreeable. I like to solve raw engineering problems, but also social ones. I find a way to adapt to pretty much anything and anyone.
This almost always ends with my employer exploiting me.
Recently I've switched it up. I focus for a solid 2-4 hours a day on my tasks, and I use the remaining time for learning. It keeps my mind moving and keeps burnout at bay. Even average engineers like myself can optimize their workflow endlessly. You have a few choices at that point. You can give your surplus labor back to your employer in exchange for raises, bonuses, promotions etc. You can take back those hours to improve your WLB. You can reinvest those hours into learning that benefits your current employer, but more importantly, makes you more attractive in the job market.
Right now I find myself consistently choosing the third option. Not because I'm focused on maximizing my earnings, but because it is the most fulfilling and enjoyable option for me.
Why did you think being a hard worker regardless of reward is an honorable trait? I don't mean any disrespect but when i read sentences like that all that pops into my head is "sucker"
There are plenty of indirect reasons to working hard. You are theoretically less likely to be fired. You gain a solid reputation among colleagues. You get better at the job which make is easier to get hired elsewhere. Also your conscience plays into it. You feel guilty if you slack off. And there is ego, people want to be the best, or at least not the worst.
I guess it depends on your definition of "hard worker", but I think that people should do the work they agreed to do, to the best of their ability.
I hired a company to install new HVAC in my house, a number of years ago. They spent some time examining the house and came up with a plan. During the course of doing the work, they would occasionally touch base with me to discuss changes they thought made sense (moving one of the thermostat to a location that it more likely to result in the correct temperature, etc). They did a good job and put real effort into making sure I got what I needed.
I hired an electrician to put some outlets in a floor, so that we didn't have cords reaching across the floor from the middle of the room. I described what I was looking to do (plug in the lazyboy, phones, lamp, etc). As he was nearing the completion of his work, I noticed that the outlets were way too recessed; anything with a larger plug (iphone charger) couldn't even plug into it. He pushed back when I told him it needed to be corrected; telling me I could just use an extension cord. I had to keep pushing to get him to spend the time (time that I was paying for per hour anyways) to fix it.
There is a difference between "getting the job done" and "doing a job to the best of your ability"; not killing yourself, but making sure the job is done right, the way you would want it done for yourself. The later is what I consider hard working. I want that from the people I hire and I do my best to provide the same myself.
> the way you would want it done for yourself
Side note, the HVAC system was, give or take, the same system the owner of the company had in his own house. I got everything I could hope for out of their work, and I still reach out to them for anything related (and recommend them highly).
because the "regardless of reward" thing is supposed to be temporary until a decent human being above you realizes that you should be rewarded. If we all just did the absolute minimum then society and humanity would never get anywhere because you'd never know who a good worker is.
> temporary until a decent human being above you realizes that you should be rewarded
In my 25 year career, I have never, ever, ever seen this happen. Nobody is just going to wake up and decide that you should be making more money and reward you. You have to fight for it, schmooze for it, document all that good work you are doing, make a case, fight again for it, beg for it, plead for it, threaten to quit over it, and maybe, maybe the company will finally give in and reward you, after trying every possible way to avoid having to do it.
yes maybe but then you still had to work hard without appropiate reward for a while. So what difference does it make? Either way you'll be working to prove yourself first and then you make a decision whether you want to keep working hard for no additional reward. Also let's remember that this is all based on somebody's own perception of their value. I have seen it where somebody thinks that they did enough work for today and they take it upon themselves to stop working now because they felt that in relation to others, they already did an equal amount. But they were wrong and then they just look like terrible workers with a massive ego.
A lot of that I think was rooted in low self-esteem. Which is something I still struggle a lot with. The mind is very powerful. At my last job I stepped up to head of engineering after our CTO resigned, and never got a raise. In my mind I didn't deserve it and was a horrible engineer.
I relate really strongly to this and your original reply. I worked as hard as I could and kept my head down for decades, I guess secretly hoping I’d be appreciated but never advocating or looking out for myself because I felt worthless and had a lot of self-hate. It wasn’t until I started therapy, especially EMDR and spravato, that I was able to identify and work on past traumas that were driving this behavior. Obviously I don’t know if that’s the case here, but if so I’d really recommend seeking treatment, because you deserve a peaceful and good life.
This is like a cornerstone of American culture, the belief that hard work will be rewarded is ingrained in us. I think it's a great attitude, but hard to keep up when you realize it's often not true
Bingo. Your hard work is ultimately buying your boss's boss's boss's boss a new vacation home or sailboat. You're supposed to feel grateful that you're making a nice middle class salary and can fully fund your 401(k) while they capture the rest of the value you're producing.
Because it's a question of morality, if you think they are "suckers" for adhering to what they deemed as honorable, then I don't think I have much more to add.
You'll end up with more cash at the end of the day, but perhaps they go home filling fulfilled.
Not everything in life can be reduced to a profitable equation.
Valuing hard work is not US exclusive, many eastern cultures pride themselves on hard work and contribution to community over self-centered obsession over rewards
I agree. A lot of times hard work is a good un-to-itself, and more so when helping others, or community.
I think this thread was more about widgets.
Why would people work hard, go above and beyond, so their company can ship 0.007% more widgets this quarter, or improve efficiency 0.02%. When they will not be paid/rewarded any more than the slacker next to them. The people that do have that 'work' ethic, seem to be getting taken advantage of by the employer.
To a significant degree, things like charity and parenting are hard work regardless of reward. Arguably, society is built on the idea of people working hard for the good of the whole.
The problem is that corporate capitalism has become a parasite that exploits these instincts.
I used to think my burnout was from long hours, but I recently got a chance to work on a greenfield project at work and loved every second of the 60-70h weeks just building something really cool with a small team.
The burnout nearly vanished during this time and only recently has started to reappear and I have a much better understanding now of what causes burnout for me specifically.
Is it normal in the US for software developers to work 60-70 hour weeks? I understand this is the case in hip startup culture, but what about normal, boring companies? I work as an embedded software developer in Belgium, and here 40 hours is normal.
Depends on the company. A place like Microsoft or Google, where the company doesn’t really need to try to reap the benefits of their monopolies, a lot of people get away with working 20 hour weeks. Amazon and Meta are known to be harder places to work, so maybe 50-60 isn’t rare - although many just do 40. At startups you have to work long hours but that can be anywhere from 50-70 hours. No one is actually doing the 100 hour weeks they glorify, because it’s impossible to sustain.
The truth is though it’s a broken system. In my opinion even a startup should be able to make it on 40 hours. If they have to put in insane hours for just a slim chance to survive, it’s an indication that there isn’t really fair competition and that the market is too skewed towards existing players.
In my experience it's usually 35-40 hours "butt in seat" time but 1 mins - 5 hours of work actually happen. The rest of the time is dopamine switching between news, personal communications, and other forms of non-work entertainment.
I count checking emails, work instant communications, and working through bureaucracy (paperwork flows) as work, not just hands on keyboard working on software solutions.
Also in my experience there are people who focus on only work at work, and they usually drag others into performing their job function.
No, that's an insane workload. Your employer doesn't even deserve 40 hours, let alone 70. Jesus, people, live your lives instead of toiling for the rich people who will take from you until you keel over.
Indeed. The excitement of an interesting greenfield project is hard to beat. Works seems better than play on those days. The harder the task, the better!
In all modesty, I feel I can be a 10X or 100X on such, but it’s hard to let go and end up thinking about work constantly after hours too.
But when the task is to update documentation or fix a random test pipeline failure on a Legacy product, the energy doesn’t come so easily…
It’s hard to know what to make of this when you also read that job satisfaction is at historic highs[1]. One reading is being highly engaged in your job is related to burnout, because you’re more likely to be unhappy when your job doesn’t go the way you want. Whereas just punching a clock you take it less seriously.
I looked at their report. The year-to-year trend doesn't show COVID. 2020 looks like 2017. That's enough for me to write it off entirely, but I kept reading.
It's surveying overall satisfaction, and what they identify as components of job satisfaction. It's the kind of stuff you'd use to compare between multiple job offers. The burnt out can recognize they have "good" jobs when their subjective experience is miserable.
The measured things that you might think are related to burnout (workload, recognition, vacation, interest in work), those things are scored in context of working for a living, not existential satisfaction. Very different from the items and context of the Maslach Burnout Inventory.
I am not sure how seriously you can ever take a workplace employer survey.
I worked at a place with a particularly grouchy director. Employee survey- many people expressed dissatisfaction with him and the company. He called a meeting of all his underlings effectively saying as confrontationally as possible, “Why aren’t you idiots happy? I am so good to you!” To enormous surprise, the next survey results were significantly higher. Without apparent change in director behavior.
The humanity has been taken out of jobs. It's all about making an optimised monkey making machine. I think MBAs are destroying everything. See how Google is being destroyed from the inside. Boeing has pretty much been destroyed from the inside.
The humanity was taken out of jobs before, too. An assembly-line job wasn't like being a craftsman. There was "alienation" (to use the Marxist term) there too. The factory workers were just biological components of a big machine.
The difference between then and now was that much of the rest of life still had the humanity in it. You knew people in your neighborhood, at your church, at the bar, at the barbershop, at the grocery store. Now... not so much. There's no humanity anywhere. So people feel alienated, not just at work, but everywhere.
But they feel it especially at work, because that's the place that they interact with other people the most, so it's the place where there should be the best chance of real human contact. And it's not there.
> But they feel it especially at work, because that's the place that they interact with other people the most, so it's the place where there should be the best chance of real human contact. And it's not there.
The worst part is, modern workplace is actively hostile to creating meaningful interpersonal bonds, while it keeps a face of being ridiculously welcoming and inclusive. When you are in such environment it's hard to spot that the game is rigged, and you blame yourself for your interpersonal failures.
I'm not saying you're wrong. But would you (or anyone) mind listing the ways that you think that the modern workplace is "actively hostile to creating meaningful interpersonal bonds"?
1. Telling people about their shortcomings will result in them retaliating, instead of improving or explaining why this isn't possible. So you just secretly hate them for being stupid instead of creating dialogue
2. The HR officially encourages people to escalate all and any issues, instead of having people deal with things between themselves. This makes me distrustful because people can be smiling towards me while gathering evidence about my mistakes to make a complaint
3. All conflicts are resolved according to "who is technically right" instead of "who is a better human". Think of all the people who got a promotion by throwing their coworker under a bus because technically speaking they didn't break any rules. This is selective breeding of shitty people
4. Negative behaviors are heavily punished, while positive behaviors are not rewarded. Nobody cares that you helped out many people in need, if you said something mean because you were having a bad day or you simply misread the situation, you're out
5. Companies discourage employees from discussing difficult topics that could potentially bridge gaps between people
6. We collectively accept "at work pretend to be whoever your employer wants you to be" as a normal thing
> Think of all the people who got a promotion by throwing their coworker under a bus because technically speaking they didn't break any rules. This is selective breeding of shitty people
It creates an org chart where everyone "above you" is shitty, and those people, by virtue of being above you, are the role models that you look to for hints on how to behave. So if you're not shitty, you start to conclude that you need to either at least act shitty to get promoted, or leave. Eventually, the company is entirely full of either shitty people or good people cosplaying as shitty people.
You're 100% correct. I have noticed though that in small startups (perhaps around 5 people) you have much less of these problems. Perhaps that's the reason for why they can be so incredibly productive.
> The difference between then and now was that much of the rest of life still had the humanity in it. You knew people in your neighborhood, at your church, at the bar, at the barbershop, at the grocery store. Now... not so much. There's no humanity anywhere. So people feel alienated, not just at work, but everywhere.
We are expected to be well-behaved little worker-consumer automatons.
Go to work. Behave. Don't get out of line. Don't rock the boat. Produce value to enrich the tree of people above you and shareholders. Don't talk too much to co-workers--they're competing with you for promotion. Leave (or get tossed out) when you're used up.
Go to stores. Behave. Buy things. Don't protest. Don't talk too much to people around you--they're competing with you for what you want. Grow the economy by spending your money. Believe in God so you die happily when you are no longer economically viable.
These are all leadership solves. Not process solves, not spending solves. Leadership. It's ironic that consultancies like BCG – who are masters of technocratic administration, would post this!
Innovation excellence is great.
Technical excellence is great.
You also need soft-skills excellence; People who can find the right mix of skills, resources, and motivation. This is an actual specialty, and though it be steeped in the 'soft' sciences, a bleak reality of getting humans into groups to achieve a common goal. When it works well, you get the A-Team. When it doesn't you get Game of Thrones.
The funny/ironic thing is, all those items tend to be the first to go when management experiences personal burn-out themselves. I wonder how much burn-out is transferred downwards due to this phenomena.
The highest rate of psychopathy I've experienced was amongst technologists thrust into leadership positions; they believe that people are tools, and thus reduce them to numbers, that everything can be operationalized and optimized, including the human mind.
It's a spiderman-pointing-meme. Workers blame management who blame workers ad infinitum.
Both workers and managers need to understand how to break that cycle and it's through leadership – which isn't something that is correlated with altitude in the org chart.
> it’s far higher for certain subgroups. ... and deskless workers
I'm still happily doing a fully remote job, but I've noticed that a number of my friends have been forced to return back to the office 2 or 3 days a week. The irony is that many of their companies have scaled back office space due to decreased natural demand when people had the choice of full-time WFH, but now there isn't space for everyone to come back to the office full-time, even if those employees wanted to. So now, they've lost their desks but have to come in and hot-desk twice a week. One friend has to carry around a heavy laptop (not a powerful one, just a heavy one), the power supply AND a dock (because the hot desk docks aren't compatible), plus all the pens and stationary he needs to and from work twice a week. He used to love being in the office and now hates it. If desklessness really does lead to increased rates of burnout, companies will be setting themselves up for an even bigger problem a year or two down the line.
He's a team leader in a company's internal finance department. He doesn't have anything specialised on his computer that he's mentioned, I'm guessing just Word, Excel and whatever he uses to connect to their finance back-office to extract the data he needs for his reports which I guess might even be web-based.
He drives by car, which is admittedly less inconvenient than travelling by public transport, but still requires a walk across a fairly large car park, potentially in the rain.
The heavy laptop is his company-issued laptop that he has to do his work on, and he longer has a desktop PC because (like everyone else in the office) he no longer has a permanent desk. From what I inferred from the conversation, it's heavy because it's old, not because it's anything special and when we're in the pub bitching about work, he frequently complains how slow it is. It's also not compatible for whatever reason with the docks they've put on the hot desks. Maybe he has an old laptop and they since standardised on a different type of laptop since implementing this policy. Maybe he was given a newer computer for some reason, although I got the impression he's had this since at least before COVID. Anyway, I didn't ask further, as I trust that's he's smart enough to have decided for himself that the provided docks don't work and that it's worth the hassle of unplugging everything from the dock at home and bringing the dock in, and then unplugging the work monitors from the work dock and plugging them into the dock he brought from home. If the dock on the desk just worked, I'm sure he'd use it.
I don't believe he has any fancy pens. He does, however, frequently need to make handwritten notes during meetings and so he brings in his pens and notebook to work and takes them home at the end of the day. Again, this is because he longer has a permanent desk, so nowhere else he could store stuff. I'm sure they have a stationary department he can get new pens and a notebook from, but he'd still have to take them home each day if he wanted to keep the notes, and I can't imagine he'd get away with asking for a new pen and pad every day. I also imagine that he wouldn't want to leave his pen behind and then when he's a different hot desk the next day, just pick up someone's half-chewed pen and work with that. I'm just speculating though, I only know for sure that he told me about having to take his laptop, dock and pen and paper into work each day. Maybe he just decided that it's easier to shove the pad and pen into his rucksack along with everything else each day and traipse over to wherever the stationary is kept every morning.
TBH I wasn't expecting there to be to follow-up questions, so rather than asking about the full specifications of his computer, the quality of the stationary and whether he preferred 2B or HB pencils, I just said "yeah man, that sucks".
If I can give any advice in this area in a late mid-stage career, find a way to have productive conversations with your supervisor/manager. After about a decade of working in IT, I felt burnt out and left to pursue a PhD. Pursuing a PhD was my high academic achiever's way of dealing with burnout by doing something more intellectually stimulating. But 10 years into a career in academia, the symptoms of burnout can still creep up. But I'm mature enough now to speak up and make sure that I can continue working at a sustainable pace.
Ac actual academic career is the WORST in terms of burn-out. I was writing paper reviews at 4am. People I know who are professors board planes with a pile of papers to read or review. Midnight meetings to discuss conference organization. Add in the pressure of publish or perish.
I second that academia can be terrible for burnout. In an experimental subject, experiments that can take months to prepare can fail for reasons that you can't do much about, and all you can do is start over.
I used to describe this feeling to my wife as if sometimes someone would come along from time to time and wipe your hard drive.
Even though my current job can be a grind, at least we rarely have to just throw away work.
I sometimes tell my team that writing software is about learning what to write and how to write it, not the actual artifacts. So throwing code out is not bad, it is just part of the process of learning.
I stated my own consulting company a few years ago. Right now, it's just me. But I plan on hiring employees at some point. Consulting has prevented me from burnout. I almost never have to deal with bullshit corporate politics and if I hate a project, I find a new client.
After 10 years of startups and 10 years of FAANG, I’m thinking of maybe going this route too - can one do it while primarily focussing on the work though? I’ve always had the impression that starting one's own company is an even mix of sales, accounting, and doing the actual job...
Oh, you will have to deal with bullshit corporate politics, but in a different way. You will get projects where there will be conflicts between the stakeholders and you'll be sitting there waiting for the final final final final decision to be made.
Something that I've noticed is that as a programmer what I make either works or it doesn't. Either my code compiles and passes the tests or it doesn't. However, I don't have control over the factors that facilitate working code (tech debt, reasonable deadlines, good architecture, etc.).
So it's the worst of both worlds. I have a lot of responsibility but very little power.
Compare this to someone in a soft skill role who may have to deal with kafkaesque bureaucracy but at least it is difficult to objectively measure their results. Or a blue collar worker who is just expected to put in their hours and effort.
It is (not) surprising that the BCG (A Global Consulting Firm) made a publication about burnout and tunneled in on inclusivity.
There are other aspects that contribute heavily to burnout and employee morale, the elephant in the room is the massive layoffs and the lack of promotions[0]. Consulting firms are affected by this a lot.
If you cut down most of your workforce, or give no “rewards” for the ones who worked their ass off your revenue, of course there will be burn out, depression, and all other things that would make one stop working.
Burnout is on the rise not only because of work itself, but also because of mobile phones and addictive applications like Twitter and Instagram. I notice this my myself, my wife and among my group of friends (millennials, some with kids some without). People use these apps to numb themselves but it saps them of motivation and leaves them with little energy to do their normal jobs, especially if it's office jobs.
Corporate work has gotten a hellscape. Work got ever more compressed as ever more oh so minute details are being constantly tracked and evaluated - just look at Amazon warehouse workers, your average callcenter staff, or truckers, once the "kings of the roads". Take a second too long on the loo and your manager gets automatically pinged, third time and you're let go. Or if you're in IT, the rat race to the bottom that is called "agile" with sprint points whatnot. And on top of that comes all the surveillance software where every mouse movement, every key stroke is analyzed for performance, and on top of that come stack ranking and similar bullshit pitting employees against each other.
The trades don't have it much better. Private customers don't have much spare money left over so they let their stuff degrade until it breaks down completely which makes repair jobs much more complex and extensive, and the customers try to haggle on price wherever they can, landlords are notorious penny pinchers and large construction projects pit tradespeople from across the continent against each other, the cheapest bid wins.
And anything public service has it the worst - education is usually the first ones who get their budgets cut when politicians need to fiat money (often leading to teachers having to pay for their own classroom supplies or assisting the poorest of the poor children from their own paycheck), payment usually sucks compared to the private sector, you're subject to ridiculous public records requirements, and (for the Americans) should Project 2025 pass as planned, what used to be career track positions will now to a large degree be political positions, so anything as simple as a party donation can led to you getting fired.
While managers are whipping them for greater "productivity" and more "velocity". And don't say that there are plenty of jobs for IT workers - that may be true for US but the picture isn't so rosy elsewhere.
I mean, it's hard to not feel burned out when your day consists of process, navigating politics, and implementing ideas that are clearly doomed to fail.
This sentiment seems a lot like the “you have it great, there are starving kids in X who have it much worse” meme I often heard growing up.
It encourages minimizing one’s problems, which can lead to all sorts of mental health issues. Thinking like this causes me to ignore real issues for too long, because someone else has it worse. It’s like gratitude’s evil twin of an emotion.
But we should respect ourselves and strive for better lives, even if they are already good compared to others.
Sure, but it’s all the same in large corporations. I might be happier in a smaller company, but they pay correspondingly less. I need to pay for a house and education. It’s depressing, but not depressing enough to throw away my children’s future.
Yeah and that is why the lobbying power against housing-first, guaranteed/subsidized housing, basic income, unemployment benefits or healthcare not tied to workplaces and whatnot is so strong.
The only thing that keeps people from voting with their feet and leaving their toxic employers is the threat of losing healthcare and housing. Take that power away from the employers, and a lot will change on its own.
Homelessness serves as excellent motivation for us to sacrifice our bodies and minds on the behalf of our employers’ profit. Poverty isn’t an unfortunate side effect of resource mis-allocation at the margins of society, but a necessary feature of the institutional mechanisms that burn out generations, keeping the bread and circuses going.
Yeah, I feel like more people in the developed world should go spend quality time with the least among us, the homeless, and folks in the developing world. A lot of people with burnout will find themselves skipping to work. Because at least you're not living in trees with insects and hollowing out a log to sail to another island to get your special needs kid to a doctor on another island 600 miles away. (one of infinite specific stories I'm familiar with).
I have spent extended periods of time living and traveling on really small 15-17ft sailboats with no electricity or modern tech together with a young kid, and never miss anything about modern life. I feel so much healthier and happier using my body and being outdoors vs in my usual desk job. To be fair I have a job, home, and health care waiting for me if anything goes wrong. But I am certain this isn’t just simple romanticism- living simply outdoors drastically improves my mental health, it is giving me something I need that modern life lacks- possibly the combo of natural light, constant exercise, and no chronic stress. It is physically demanding and often very uncomfortable- and I don’t mind because I feel so much more alive and engaged. If I did not have a family to support, and a career that I feel is important, I am certain I would be happier just living simply and mostly outdoors.
I think that it's possible that isn't true. Perhaps the areas where people in the developed world are worse off (micromanagement, family, home ownership, etc.) are more important to avoiding burnout than the "comfort" that the developed world generally excels at providing.
Stated another way, it is possible that burnout isn't determined by some overall sense of "how difficult is life" but is instead caused by life being difficult in specific ways.
People seem to confuse physical comfort with happiness and good mental health when they aren't the same at all. Extreme physical discomfort, or lack of food/water/shelter are awful, but they don't specifically cause burnout. And people don't start "skipping to work" just because they know someone else is less comfortable, when they are worn down from years of chronic stress.
In my case I wouldn't describe the feeling as burnout as much as PTSD. Without the P of course, because it's ongoing since ever and will go on for ever and ever and ever :)
Worst thing in software development is the constant bombardment of the unexpected. There's not a single God-given day in this job that shit just runs smoothly. Always, usually when least expecting it, there's a "wtf is this shit?!!" moment, followed of course by "I must absolutely solve this completely unexpected and incidental thing which popped up that I've no idea how it works or why it happens but can't do any progress on my regular task before I figure this out".
A few years of this are enough to send any normal people to the nuthouse or out of the field. Yet, some of us endure it for decades. Seemingly without being affected. Seemingly ... because underneath there's a raging traumatic stress disorder we try to keep in check :)
The one and only time I was burned out, there was no way in hell I was capable of that kind of initiative. Self-autonomy is one of the things it kills.
I only escaped burnout via an 'ah-HAH!' moment when reading up on strategy creation, and realised that I needed to start cutting down my workload to only what really matters and nothing more.
A startup environment is a terrible environment for anyone who cant cut through the weeds of the nice-to-have to see only the necessary.
I have started my own company and made a job that I'm passionate about and I think my friends would laugh at anybody who claimed that I wasn't burnt out basically all the time. ;)
Curious about tech burn out as well on top of the job market. A lot of software that was once lauded are now poorly received by the public, so you either recognize the reality of your corporate work or persist in delusion.
Some people can work long hours and never experience burnout because they love what they do, while others simply need a better work-life balance. A 4-day workweek is what brings that work-life balance. For anyone interested, here are 200 companies hiring for 4-day weeks - https://okjob.io/companies/
(P.S. I maintain the page. If you know of any company operating on a 4-day week (4x8hrs), please consider submitting it via the contact form)
Before that experience I assumed everyone defined burnout as a severe state of deep distress and lack of energy following extended periods of intense stress, frustration, overwork, and/or lack of control.
Instead, a lot of people used “burnout” more casually, as a catch-all term for any frustrations with their job any or intermittent tiredness. A lot of people would say they were suffering from burnout one week, then everything would be fine again the next Monday after they did something fun over the weekend. To them, burnout could be as simple as being a little tired one week or having to work full 8-hour days for a couple days in a row.
The number of people for whom “burnout” meant a deep and serious affliction that required possibly months to recover from was a lot smaller.
It’s similar to the way people casually talk about their “OCD” because they like to be organized, their “ADHD” when they have nothing resembling clinical ADHD, or their “PTSD” after a mildly unpleasant experience. These terms have become so diluted that they can mean almost anything when you ask people to self-report.
Sure enough, this survey was self-reported. BCG wants to sell you services related to burnout, so maximizing the number of people reporting “burnout” is in their best interests. A self-report survey of unknown cohorts is the perfect way to maximize that number for their headline.