The Tsunami of Burnout Few See
68 comments
·January 9, 2025nostradumbasp
righthand
The trick is to stay out of product meetings and not actually care how cool and interesting and useful the product can or will be. Only give feedback to your inner circle (manager, peers) when asked about it. Most importantly, enjoy the tasks assigned to you however dull or basic they may be after you mastered them. Be proud of your work.
cobertos
This is so hard! It leads to poor products/the loudest voice wins. Rarely is there a coherent long-term vision. Even at the benefit of the single participant/employee
fullshark
> The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.
I'm here, but it just seems like a temporary fix. I can't imagine doing this for the rest of my life, but I need money and health insurance. What's the alternative, what did you end up doing?
nostradumbasp
I don't have all the answers. I don't even know your situation. For me, I am still in tech. Like everyone else, my family needs the money. Once in a while I do something that satisfies me personally as well as the company I work for. rt Alternatives? Well, I think anything you can start up on your own where you have the autonomy and can dictate your hours/balance would be your medium term goal. I'm working towards mine, but I think its different for everyone. Contract working, consultant working, small personal business with a reduced hours main stream 9-5.
My assumption is people like us, we care a lot, we are smart, we are capable, and when we get stuck in corporate swamps our inner candle starts to go out. We just need to find ways to spend less time in the swamp.
Trasmatta
I've tried the "don't care too much or too little" dance, and it's only a temporary fix, at least for me. It's really hard to walk that tightrope.
goodcharles
I just watch this monthly, it helps
osigurdson
>> and rates your performance
I think in practice it is much more complicated than that. While org charts largely a tree, the influence graph is often very different. It isn't like the immediate manager can just fire anyone they feel like without consequences in most orgs.
nostradumbasp
Yea but your immediate manager can easily set a person up for complete failure and broadcast only the failings. I've seen it happen to different people on many occasions. Basically the old "balance these 12 things 1 of them, the 1 you drop will end up being me and my buddy bosses most important item and the other 11 are worthless". Or "no need to attend that meeting" and if you don't show oh boy strike one. Positions of influence are super easy to game.
nostradumbasp
Forgot to add if you are in this situation. Document everything off company systems directly. Yes this will slow you down and yes everything is on fire but its now part of keeping and maintaining your job. If you are about to get shit canned for something, call a junkyard dog employment lawyer before you get shit canned and ask them what if any records you can keep. It won't keep your job, you're canned, but maybe it will get you some severance.
datavirtue
At work it is clear. 25% growth per year or we are all out of work. What more do you need, we are all in the same boat from the CEO on down.
We used to run companies and share stock. Now private equity hands out money and goals and if the goals aren't met your company that is doing great and turning 15% per year evaporates on the next recap.
mcmcmc
If you have to grow 25% every year just to stay afloat, I hate to break it to you but your business model is shit
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
I'm not out of work just because one company goes under, though
bdndndndbve
Individual self-reliance and coping only goes so far. I think OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of capitalism increasingly squeezing every once of joy out of people's lives, and demanding more labour from fewer people under dehumanizing conditions.
From a Marxist perspective I think we're seeing the synthesis of deeply individualistic capitalist culture, and the renewed awareness of class consciousness and workers rights. In the past these kind of conflicts have led to the 5 day work week, The New Deal, etc. But the same conditiona can also lead to far-right authoritarianism.
achierius
Love seeing this kind of analysis on HN of all places. At least today we can hope that our understanding of history will lead to people being less electorally friendly to the fascist right than they were the first time around.
bdndndndbve
The trend among men, sadly, is a flight from higher education. It used to be a status symbol, but since more women are entering STEM fields men are increasingly looking for alternative credentials like bootcamps. This is a common phenomenon in many fields across time, where men flee "feminized" work and it becomes less prestigious.
A side effect of higher education becoming "low status" is that men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history. Which makes them more vulnerable to radicalization.
nostradumbasp
I do agree with you. People need to band up with one another and work this out together. In the mean time though, most people are already in a situation where its far too late unless they can shake their situation and start new somewhere else.
I think anyone who has turned on the news in the last 9 years, what technologies and companies are trending, can predict which way things are going to go. Again though, we all need to come together for that too...
HPsquared
It's like impedance matching.
NotGMan
>> but you are at the mercy of who is in charge
Once you realize that that person is an idiot or is against you it kills you psychologically because you realize you are in a dead end.
nostradumbasp
Hi definitely not a G Man.
Personally, idiots are fine as long as they listen to their team-mates when it matters. Maybe that means they aren't idiots... Anyway, adversarial bosses and extremely poorly managed projects are the issue for me. That is a dead-end with possible health issues and career killing sprinkled on-top. There's no helping it either.
justonceokay
Formatting aside, I enjoyed the article and the description of the “village of happy people”. As someone who has burned out twice myself and left tech (with great personal sacrifice), it really can feel like those who are not burning out are living in a bubble.
I’ve mostly let go of those feelings though. My conclusion after working outside of tech and rebuilding my life is that I just didn’t have the constitution to play the corporate game. More power to those who can though.
Loughla
My experience is that burnout tends not to come from the actual work, but all the politics and bullshit that come from office life.
I do similar work in my day job and consulting. I'm very fresh and optimistic during consulting hours, but dread going into the office. I'm genuinely burnt out and just don't give a flying fuck anymore, I don't sleep, and I've been more sick in the last month than ever in my life.
The only difference is that one comes with politics and one doesn't.
svara
One thing that seems to reliably cause burnout is when a person with high flying ambition finds herself in an environment in which she feels stripped of agency.
It's not primarily about expending too much energy, but rather about expending energy in a way that appears futile relative to an ambitious standard set for oneself.
Just my personal observation, but dovetails well with the learned helplessness theory of depression.
ketamine
Feels spot on
nostradumbasp
Such a good way of describing it. Thanks for this, and the comment above it.
moron4hire
This is absolutely it. I've never been able to control how much effort and personal investment I put into a project. If I'm working on something, I have to give it my all.
I used to get burnt out at work all the time, but that really hasn't been the case for the last 5 years. The biggest difference is that I'm I'm in charge now. When I say something is going to take X amount of time or that we have to do things in a certain way, management doesn't argue with me anymore. They just accept that is the way it is, because I'm the one in charge of this area of work.
I haven't changed. I still take too long to finish ostensibly "simple" things because I've nerd-sniped myself [0] into over-engineering things. What has changed is my relationship to the management class. They see me as one of them, now, and that confers a level of respect that is, frankly, enraging when you consider the lack of it in the obverse situation. But, I can make things my way and I can protect my team and that's enough.
Trasmatta
Exactly this. When I can actually do some work, I feel pretty good. But that feels like 5% of my job sometimes.
dylan604
> My experience is that burnout tends not to come from the actual work, but all the politics and bullshit that come from office life
Totally agree. It’s not the stress of doing something new and just trying to figure it all out that’s stressful. That’s actually fun. It’s the arbitrary adjusting of priorities and putting tasks in hold to start some harebrained idea that ultimately gets tossed or proves to not work out that becomes tiresome. Then shit rolls down hill and people want to know why the paused project isn’t completed and assigns blame to the dev rather than piss poor management.
No. I’m not bitter
sateesh
Isn't politics any part of human activity where number of people involved is greater than a critical mass (of say 5) ? I think even the best run, successful orgs have their share of politics. I used to think politics as a bad thing, but now I have accepted that it is an inevitable part of work life and one needs to also learn how to navigate it atleast to the extent that doesn't affect one's well-being or doesn't make one feel that they are being shortchanged, not that I am always successful with it.
ajmurmann
Even at a higher level what you are observing frequently use caused by politics (which admittedly frequently go hand in hand with incompetence or putting personal gain over company outcomes). Especially technical efforts frequently come under attack by product people who are in turn frequently under pressure my sales staff. Nobody along that line has the full picture and pushes for their issues to be solved which seem most urgent to them. Sometimes this business pressure results in correct decisions which still suck. An example might be interrupting a project or cutting corners to get a feature out to get a contract signed and make payroll. Two years later people wonder why the code is shit but the answer is that the company was struggling to survive and corners were cut left and right. Of course often it's just stupidity. I've seen cases where a PM would ask to get a unvetted pet project staffed ("all I need is two people for a week!!") outside of department planning cycles and later this was used in a write up with new leadership as an example of "engineering refusing to work with product".
ketamine
What are you doing now? I am considering becoming a machinist.
datavirtue
Please reconsider. My son just completed training and he is now working full time on getting disability instead of getting a job. I can't really blame him.
You will get hurt and you will be tossed aside with great prejudice.
ketamine
Sorry to hear that. I feel tossed aside due to my burnout and depression so I can relate on that front.
dehrmann
To be clear, this was a personal choice of your son and not because of an injury?
steve_adams_86
A few points in here reminded me of an essay on burnout that I loved a lot, called The Burnout Society.
> The core narrative control is straightforward: 1) everything's great, and 2) if it's not great, it's going to be great.
> We're trained to tell ourselves we can do it, that sustained super-human effort is within everyone's reach, "just do it."
The author of The Burnout Society frames this as a sort of self-slavery, in which we are our own slave-drivers. His logic is actually quite compelling. Yet reassuring, perhaps surprisingly. He doesn't blame the individual, but the culture they live in. There are paths to salvation, and burnout isn't a final destination.
dfee
patcon
Best link? Maybe :) https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-burnout-...
bbor
A) Totally agree. This is a great, very short book -- I highly recommend for anyone in this industry, regardless of philosophy experience. The author is Byung-Chul Han.
B) This is a great point to call out the author for a bit of a myopic view in the bits about "Burnout isn't well-studied or understood." Beyond the philosophy above, there's pages and pages of empirical articles, conferences, even books on the topic: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=burnout
This just comes across as a fallacy I see quite often in intellectual circles, and have surely been guilty of myself: "The problems in the world are caused because the people in charge are too dumb to see everything as clearly as I do; if I was in charge, it would be easy to decide what to focus our resources on!"
peterldowns
For anyone interested in this book, I recommend also reading "Non-Places: Introduction To An Anthropology Of Supermodernity" by Marc Augé. He lays out an interesting argument that the stress and the anxiety of the modern world is due to a collapse of distance — informatically, geographically, and temporally.
Simply put, the modern world feels bad because we're constantly engaging with information that we can't assimilate into a coherent model. In the past you could rely on simple and incorrect models of the world and generally be OK since your life was relatively local. Now, your life requires you to engage in a much larger sphere, one that is too large and changes too quickly to be understood.
PDF: https://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Auge_Marc_Non-Places_Introd...
riffraff
this post seems to mix some valid points and some completely bonkers unrelated things, like the assumption that somehow the US is in stagflation using a graph truncated at data from 2023. Not really explaining why stagflation would cause burnout anyway.
And while I agree with the idea that the society does not pay enough attention to burnout, the article offers no explanation of why he think it's a tsunami, beyond "three people I don't know quit suddenly" (sic).
The article says "everyday life is much harder now, and getting harder". That may be, but there's no proof this is causing more burnout.
sssilver
Vulgarly unrelated to the subject — is anyone able to get a scrollbar to appear on this page on mobile? I kept reading and was completely unable to tell how long of a time commitment this read will be and whether I should continue or read it later.
How did we manage to lose perfectly good scrollbars in this race for colonization of mars and AI singularity?
bkazez
> Burnout isn't well-studied or understood. It didn't even have a name when I first burned out in the 1980s.
Check Wikipedia: “Staff Burnout: Job Stress in the Human Services” was published in 1980, and the Maslach Burnout Inventory was published in 1982.
> We don't bother collecting data on why people quit, or why people burn out, or what conditions eventually break them.
A quick search of academic literature shows this is not true.
scyzoryk_xyz
And yet, the stakes feel so much higher and the problem more immediate
ketamine
> Burnout isn't well-studied or understood. It didn't even have a name when I first burned out in the 1980s. It's an amorphous topic because it covers such a wide range of human conditions and experiences.
I think this was labeled with the overused "nervous breakdown" in those times.
peterldowns
This reminds me of the immense NPR story "Unfit for Work", from back in 2013ish, about the increasing number of Americans opting out of the workforce and instead relying on disability: https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
Has there ever been a followup to this reporting? I'd be really interested to understand if this trend is still happening, and if so, why.
ocimbote
> The Tsunami of Burnout Few See
Who in 2025 does NOT see the "tsunami of burnout"? It seems to me that everybody is talking about it since at least the stabilization (not "end") of the COVID pandemic.
I've only skimmed through the article, so apologies if I missed some important bit of info.
inSenCite
Very familiar story. I'm 9months into quitting my consulting career after 10 years. Relatively long hours, weekend work, and lots of travel. The first few years were great, lots of learning, lots of smart people to work with, smart leadership, interesting and even innovative work.
But then it just got boring AND exhausting. The leadership became uninspired and replaced by the classic sleazy sales persona, the work became mundane, and the constant 4-6month cycle of new clients began to overlap as I went higher up and managed more projects/focused more on sales.
I haven't figured out what I'm gonna do next, frankly the networking burned me out so much I am very averse to it. And ironically I became quite good at it (at least relative to where I started).
I'm booking my first intro chat with someone next week, and already my stomach is turning thinking about scheduling it. I thought I was ready but maybe not...at the same time, life ain't free.
knallfrosch
First, I think mental problems discussed more than ever: Anxiety, autism, inability to focus and yes, burnout. The "only few see" simply isn't true.
Second, the article mixes in some adjacent topics, such as purchasing power. Why? I don't know, but it blows the amount of stuff the article would have to supplement way out of proportion, before even the core message (burnout) was discussed.
Third, I'm always amazed how many people think they are different. You're not. If you care for a family member (children, elderly, disabled..), commute 2400 miles and work 7 days a week, you will burn out. But it won't be a surprise to anyone but you.
What you need is sleep, friends and sports, same as any social animal inhabiting a very real, very physical body.
Fourth, I'm not sure what you want others to do. Instead of complaining about the suggestions, write down what you would have wanted.
datavirtue
Yeah, if this guy was working in the 1970s I'm not sure why he thinks he is supposed to miss the falling side of the wage parabola.
sc68cal
This resonated with me since his description of the situation exactly matches what I have been experiencing the past few months
I've burnt out. It was horrible. I am doing much better now!
The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.
In many places if you get hurt/burnt out on the job the upper seats are looking for any reason to curb stomp you. There's no reason to give a company your all unless you have an actual stake in it or they are there to hold you up when you're dragging. I've worked at multiple places where influential people died, yes dead, below average life expectancy, - on the job - and corporate did everything they could to not even pay out on their legal obligations (life insurance, D&D). In some cases employees joked or snickered about the person who died later on - in meetings.
In tech. I've found that you're not on your own but you are at the mercy of who is in charge of your schedule and rates your performance. If you lose trust in that person your best option is to leave as quickly as possible. Otherwise they will do what they can to destroy you for as much 'profit' as they can claim. Being clear. It is not about realized gains, it could even be at great detriment to a company. It is about short-term line item claimable gains. "We got 4 good months out of her...", "they were terminal and now they will be working somewhere better for them...", "he really wasn't closing as many tickets as the rest of the team...", "they weren't helping as many team members as the rest of the team...", "we never needed someone with an advanced degree...", etc.
Check in with yourself regularly. Know the signs of burn out. The company you work for does not depend on any person caring about you in the slightest.