The Tsunami of Burnout Few See

My favorite quote from one of my favorite books, Anathem by Neal Stephenson (copied from GoodReads):

"Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story."

Some people need to have their "story", otherwise they end up miserable, regretting their wasted lives.

I appreciate the kind words!

The second part of your post is something I've thought about a lot. There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:

- Less communication overhead due to fewer people

- Constant availability (less need to pre-plan meetings, etc to match everyone's hours)

- Less complexity WRT HR, payroll, taxes

- Employees still have to pay for full healthcare, so the employer either provides this or pays a 1099 salary premium (the US's terrible approach of tying health insurance coverage to your employer rears its ugly head yet again)

- Fewer SaaS seats to pay for

Some of these are more solvable than others, and allowing more people to work part-time in tech is definitely swimming upstream, but I do wish more businesses would try.

Sahil Lavingia (Gumroad) is one person leaning into this approach with great success: https://sahillavingia.com/work

> You will find effectively no jobs that let you work (say) 5 hours per day, for 62.5% of your original salary.

Not in the US anyway. It’s exceedingly common in the Netherlands to work 32 or even 24 hours a week.

Totally agree with this.

The thing is, there are at least four major factors that lead to the energy depletion of burnout:

- physical (i'm unhealthy, don't sleep, eat or exercise well)

- mental (i'm distracted and interrupted constantly or don't let my brain rest)

- emotional (i work in a culture of terror with people who trigger me)

- meaning - (i simply don't care about what i'm doing and neither do my colleagues)

all of these are necessary, and none are sufficient. most orgs and people are breaking along more than one of these dimensions, and the co-morbidity makes it hard to diagnose the cause of burnout.

You can't expect 62.5% for 5/8 hours, you have other costs to them for benefits etc.

> What you just described (so vividly) is meaning

In line with Victor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, which explores (among other things) why some Holocaust survivors thrived and some didn’t. Frankl himself was a survivor.

Let me try to be more clear, I don't half ass. I just take a 10 minute walk when I get stressed. I take 10 minutes to think through something without touching my keyboard even though the keyboard monitor is monitoring. Once I'm past 8 and a half hours I turn off my computer almost regardless of the circumstances. In certain emergencies I won't, but most of the time that meeting actually is not more important than eating dinner with my family and getting bullet points the next morning.

I hope this helps explain more what I meant by what I was saying. I'm not saying "become terrible at your job and produce poor quality". I am saying, "deliver good enough quality within your means". If your boss says "your current code is good enough for the demo", ship the damn thing as is, don't go rushing to add more features and retesting everything until 4AM.

If a deadline really is too short, say it is too short early on. Keep working, but don't put on a cape and deliver because someone said they wanted something they can't have without causing you to lose sleep for two weeks. People die from stuff like that, it is not worth it.

Does not help when the answer is "to not starve and not lose your house for missing three mortgage payments, stupid" though.

I am here to periodically remind HN that no, not all programmers here are millionaires who only work not to get bored.

Not necessarily. I'm similar to OP in that I get depressed if I'm not doing my best, but I also have a family with young kids. There's no good way for me to get from where I am to business owner—either I'd be risking my family's livelihood on something uncertain or I'd be working in my free time to build a stable business instead of spending time with them.

The compromise I've arrived at is that I give it my all during a very strict time box. I work remotely, so at 9am I start work, I take an hour for lunch, and I check out at 5. With no commute that leaves just over half my workweek waking hours for my family.

During working hours I do it all—I perform my job very well and am lucky enough to be in a place where it's recognized in very measurable ways (promotions, autonomy, and recognition). But I don't give my employer extra time.

Yes, this is correct. This is my eventual end goal, and a lot of my career so far has revolved around obtaining the skills, connections, and runway money I need to make that leap.

I work at a ~100 person tech consulting firm[1], although I joined when we were closer to 30. They actually found me through HN!

We mostly design and build data/devops/mlops/cyber platforms for big banks and other finserv companies - lots of Databricks, AWS, and GCP services.

[1] https://bit.ly/4j5cC5T (I'll expire the link in a few days for privacy reasons)

+1, very curious. I yearn for the working environment the parent comment describes.

Can it only exist in medium and small companies?

I think there's a paradox, that if you give too much to your employer, you burn out and then can give them nothing. Therefore, one should give the correct level of engagement , its not disengagement, but, being engaged enough to do the job well while still having a life outside work eg with family and friends. Its possible to work somewhere where your colleagues appear more dedicated than you, for example if they work the weekend and you don't. That doesn't mean you're less committed to your job, in fact it could mean you are more committed, because you know that working weekends is pointless as it leads to extra bugs thus being overall less efficient. In summary, work hard and diligently, while taking necessary breaks, getting required exercise and sleep, recovering properly if ill at ay time, and not working silly hours. so... a bit like a typical European ;)

> And half-assing something feels like not being true to myself.

Been there many times, but I found that it’s best to aim for good enough, given the resources and constraints, than 100% all the time. I’m a recovering perfectionist, so it’s not always easy to reach that balance, but I try it anyways. When I do not, my anxiety kicks in, and I’m forced to slow down.. I use to be able to ignore it (the anxiety) and keep pushing, but not anymore..

You neglected two of my suggestions.

> I could never enjoy tasks assigned to me when they're dull and basic things I've mastered.

If you do need more interesting work and can’t shift teams then find a new job. You will eventually find yourself needing to do the same again after you’ve mastered the new challenge. Keep it up and you will run out of leaps. However if you want to exist in a place for a while you need to accept that not every project, task, idea will be exciting work. Once you accept this, it also opens up doorways with what else you can do with your time. Since you have a mastered skill set, these menial tasks should not be weighing you down to free yourself from the drudgery of work.

> As for being proud of my work... well I'm always proud of my work. I still burned out. I don't want to even touch the things I'm proud of.

You should always be critical of past mistakes and look to correct but you should always put your best effort forward. That is what pride in work means. You shouldn’t have to admire every piece of work you deliver as a masterpiece, which is what I assume you mean by wanting to touch it. You should always carry a positive mindset about your work and not treat each success and failure in your life as some sort of definitive legacy. Invite in and operate under best intentions.

A lot of my advice is about how it works in harmony, not some quick instant burnout solution. Resting is important as well (breaks, vacations).

Anecdotally I was recently hired at a company that is in dire straights. This weighed on me heavily for the first six months, eventually they shrunk my team. However I cannot afford to get burned out. So the only options are to extract as much of the burden from me by being a cog in a bullshit factory or find a new job in a psychotic job market.

Amen to this. Of the biggest frustrations I've had in my career, at the top of the list is working with engineers who do not take pride in their craft. I'm amazed at the number of people that just dial it in or make minimal effort. Perhaps some of these people are burned-out, but surely not all.

My goal was to get whatever I was working on not just "done", but "done-done". To a state where, if I walked away, it could live on in a working manner and be easily maintained by someone else. That meant having good test coverage, up-to-date documentation, instructions on how to get started with the repo, notes on dependencies, etc. Sometimes that someone else is future me, six months or six years later.

I experienced burnout early in my career, in the dot-com era, and it became especially acute when then the bubble burst. All those long hours (mostly) for naught.

The best times were at companies where everyone was all-in and we each had each-others back. Rare, but amazing when it happens. These were all at startups.

I've gradually come to a similar conclusion. The only antidote is to make sure the work you're most proud of are all open source. It's most likely going to be code you wrote in your spare time.

My GitHub has a few pieces of code that I'm really proud of. And some companies actually ask for code I'm proud of as part of the interview process, so I have that ready and it helps.

That’s okay, the only person that cares about your legacy of code is you. Be proud that you’re capable of the work, not that you have a commit history when no one is asking for that.

Buildings fall down eventually, too.

Worth remembering we write code to create human value. Somewhere, in some way, your elegant code actually ran and did a thing that led some number of humans to be enabled or understand or somehow be affected by it.

Personally, I find this aspect of the work somewhat profound.

My graveyard of projects and dreams stretches out behind me and I feel saddened to know that these articles representing portions of my life never achieved what I had hoped for them.

However, I've come to view my work like a mandala or some representation of our mortality itself; our works and our lives are temporary.

We can make the most of the brief moment that we have – whether that be through work or through parenting or through base jumping – whatever that may be for each of us, or we can choose to do nothing with that moment, knowing that it's ephemeral and will be gone soon anyway.

I choose to try making each day's the best code I have ever written; I want it to be "beautiful" and maintainable in spite of knowing that it will be refactored, deleted or decommissioned at some point.

My oldest code still in production is 20 years old.

Work for non tech companies if you want it to last. Some industrial code is even older - my company has just removed some devices that requires a floppy disk to update

It’s ironic that the absolute shittiest code I’ve ever written right when I came out of university, has been and still is powering a bunch of company websites for 15 years.

If this is hard then you’re ignoring the rest of my comment for one sentence. These need to happen together as each piece supports the other one. Stop caring about what your companies crappy product could be if you have no agency to change it.

> And we wonder, why do we have double digit customer churn rate.

What is the employee churn rate?

Sure, I’m not saying being involved isn’t a great way to live your working life. However not being involved is a great way to avoid burnout by reducing stress factors.

The problem is you can control the first but not the latter. You can control doing quality technical work. You cant really control whether what you do has much value (the market decides that, not you)

I would argue you’re still caring too much. If you can abstract your care into another project either at the company or in your personal time the crappy product won’t matter. If you have to speak against someone, get data to back yourself up. Or get the loud mouth hooked on data and solve it that way.

Not caring combined with low effort is one of the systems. Not caring with good effort is not. Be proud of your work and you won’t become disassociated.

Not caring doesn’t mean checking-out it means being satisfied with your paycheck and not needing more than the limitations if your job.

I think it's not as simple as thinking: there is this one kind of person you are and it's a constant and you need to figure out who that is and how to be that person to be happy.

People change a lot. There's no golden idol person in my future that would make me happy if only I could break free and become that person. That person changes constantly.

I think we are unhappy because we've been fed a lie that that person is just over the horizon and you're not living your full life properly unless you become that person. The problem is that that person changes constantly. It's always out of reach and who's to say you will be happy once you get to that point?

A change in mindset is the cure. But a change in mindset does not cause economies to scale, shareholders to get value and cause the wheels of industry to move. We are always arriving for something we think will save us.

> Everything is temporary, even you.

Glad to see some good old Buddhism philosophy at work. I am much happy now once I start thinking the same

Private equity is not happy with 15% because they can get that by parking their money in a REIT. They are shooting for the moon, period. Once you take their money their is no backing out. It's to the moon or close up shop.

I think he's saying they have to grow 25% per year to please their PE overlords.

I watched through some of this. This all seems very wise and well-informed. However the answer given is to spend a lot of energy attempting to work the system in fairly subtle ways to get the outcome you want - that the organization will accept your well-intentioned contributions to their functioning and eventual profit. All it takes is one or two people in the right place that don't share the same goal or are just really not that good to turn that into an exercise in futility.

541 views, on an 8 years old video. How many of those are you responsible for? Anyway I put it on my watch later list, thanks!

I just watched this — pretty good talk, thanks for linking it.

It depends to the extent that the org chart == influence graph.

There is none, because "alarmingly high" is a subjective metric, that can range from epsilon above 0% to epsilon below 100%, depending on who you ask.

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.

[0] https://xkcd.com/356/

Feels spot on

thank you. I feel a little less like a misunderstood snowflake today because of this.

Such a good way of describing it. Thanks for this, and the comment above it.

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".

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.

> people want to know why the paused project isn’t completed

You know, from all the talk about agile one would think people would remember the one central value from the manifesto that gave the name for the thing...

Sorry to hear that. I feel tossed aside due to my burnout and depression so I can relate on that front.

To be clear, this was a personal choice of your son and not because of an injury?

That's very interesting - it aligns to something I've felt for a long time about the way the internet and modern media has made it so people just know about so many more things in the world and thus feel like they need to care about them. It's "eat your veggies because some starving African child doesn't even have that" but applied to everything, and juiced by live footage of a child dying of starvation.

This also, I think, leads to detachment from local issues. Why should I look into who's on my city council when I'm hearing about the French government falling apart or the mayor of New York doing crimes? There's always something bigger, worse, more important to the world going on somewhere and there's nothing you can do about it, but also every part of you feels like you should do something.

Avoiding overtime helps but if the work conditions are conducive to burnout it can happen even to part time workers.

How much work it takes to protect the balance to avoid burnout can itself also contribute to burnout, say if you constantly have to fight getting overstaffed or repeatedly having to push back on being on call...

I think the difference is that knowledge + actively thinking is more akin to sprinting all day, jogging being more akin to just relying on knowledge.

As another parent, that sounds like a frightening financial burden :( So, $125k-$250k for each child? Is that the going rate in USA now? for comparison , here in UK its gone up lots but 3 years at university would cost approx £30k in tuition, plus maybe £40k in living costs that could be largely avoided by staying at home and going to college locally. Which can be mostly borrowed, and paid back as an extra 9% in tax on earning above a certain amount after graduation. Even with these figures, my wife and I will still encourage our kids to look hard for decent apprenticeships, consider Open University, possibly work part-time and study part-time, to avoid having such a big debt, especially given cost of housing etc. Kinda wonder whether your figures make it worth going to college at all? 20 years ago I met an American who had 6 figure debt from law school and was doing a job at a law firm that she disliked in order to pay off the huge loan so that after that she could then do what she wanted which would pay much less....

Not to be rude, but one divorce could wipe out all that you had saved. Then burnout might be a better option for your kids when it comes time to filling out FAFSA.

I'm knocking on wood. I don't want what happened to me to happen to you.