I think there's two types of work-induced burnout. "White collar" burnout is generally self-inflicted, and to me less about working oneself to exhaustion and more about working any amount of hours on something that you subconsciously believe is fundamentally misaligned with your core principles/true self. My hypothesis on why this seems to be happening at higher rates is because without a focus on raising a family and/or participation in organized religion, our careers/workplace have become the "things" that we now try to put all this meaning behind, and what was once separated from our "life" (e.g. work/life balance) has become our life, and the psychological burden of being forced to be 100% emotionally invested/devoted to our work has consequences.
"Blue collar" burnout, to me, is the archetypal fast food worker making minimum wage working paycheck to paycheck, who not only has to deal with financial insecurity that comes with the job but the physical (actual manual "work") and psychological (rude customers) burdens that come with those types of jobs.
> more about working any amount of hours on something that you subconsciously believe is fundamentally misaligned with your core principles/true self.
That rings true to me. My speculation as to why: at the most general level, our 'work' in life resembles a hierarchical optimization process--goals and sub-goals (and so on) forming a structure defined by nested utility functions.
Our professional goals (and their day-to-day sub-goals), may be pretty significant, but they're still subservient to more fundamental goals implied by fundamental values.
I think burnout is working extensively on some sub-goal (that may be large enough to appear as a top-level goal in itself), that is fundamentally misaligned with some ancestor goal(s): working on it makes no progress or even regression on more significant goals.
I think a common source of this misalignment for tech people of my generation (I'm 33) is being taught as kids that we can do "anything we put our minds to" and that fundamentally we should be aiming to "change the world". Then we grow up and find ourselves faced with the practical reality of the large scale professional world where not everyone gets to run things and the vast majority of folks end up working on insignificant little corners of someone else's probably anti-altruistic money making scheme--just consider the opposition between the early-formed life goals/values and the day-to-day goals of your typical tech worker.
(And perhaps what makes it extra bad is that contemporary perception of how evil/exploitative etc. tech is, is quite high: our culture is steeped in the likes of Black Mirror and other sources of tech paranoia [or maybe just tech cautionaries--who knows].)
Most people aren't interested in changing the world, just their lifestyle, to be what they've been sold as high status.
Facebook as one example is not filled with people who want to change the world, they can go work somewhere that's not cancer for 1/3 the pay any day of the week. Do they? No.
From personal experience - most burn-out is just a personality type. Some people only want to play at 9/10 intensity or not at all. Every professional athlete retires because they've 'burnt out'. Every professional athlete is willing to destroy their body to win. We love self destructive people. We love sacrifice. We love it when someone else does it, for our benefit.
When they're asking you to up your intensity from 4/10 to 6, we call them genius assholes and write blogs about avoiding them at all costs. They're asking you to sacrifice along with them, that is not acceptable. On Sunday, on TV, so that you can drink beer and cheer for your team, acceptable. When it involves you, 'burn out' :)
What would you tell your kids today? I have 2 boys, 7 and 10, and I don't want to lead them into the same trap. We are already dealing with the fear that the schools put into kids about tests. The pressure on kids to be in "performance" mode all the time is really disappointing to me.
Tell them they can work at Starbucks and lead a happy life. If you genuinely believe it, you won't have to tell your kids anything.
There is no pressure on kids, other than their idiot parents. School should be seen as trivial and boring, because grades don't matter. Grades don't matter because if you're not an idiot, you can flunk school and do well in life with minimal effort. Just try many things to see what you like and then do it for 10 years.
If it's athletics, you can go work a physically demanding job that pays well. If it's an intellectual pursuit, you'll be well suited for university and a high paying job. If it's creative, the admiration you get for your art will matter far more than living in a basement. If it's just being a nice, easy-going, kind human being, quality relationships will matter more than living in a basement.
Whichever way you go, you win, unless you have idiot parents who teach you to be unhappy and insecure, like them.
I don't know that there's any particular message I would substitute those with. I think I'd mostly just avoid setting unreasonable expectations. My guess is that the common phrases/sentiments echoed as a I was growing up were so prevalent because some ideas then vogue about how it would develop a child's drive/ambition, or prevent them from artificially limiting themselves (it's a nice idea). My personal view is that honesty is better and that sort of manipulation is a kind of 'technical debt' that will come back to bite later.
Another aspect of it I was reminded of today by a good twitter post (I went back looking for it but it has disappeared from my feed!) has to do with sources of value. It was basically theorizing that lot of people who end up running into issues with generalized anxiety and depression as (young) adults, do so because they place all their self-value in their work and accomplishments (socially defined). He was cautioning people against viewing themselves exclusively as creators of products (in a general sense), and only valuing themselves as such. It's a common trap for folks sort of over-embracing capitalist ethos.
Maybe just making it known that it's _okay_ if they are 'merely' an ordinary person. I bet a lot of this isn't even verbal, but just comes down to whether parents actually are or are not okay with their kids being less than extraordinary.
If you're aware of the issue you're probably already fine though--the rest will follow from that.
(Of course I'm not a professional of any kind on this matter, so, you know--generous grain of salt!)
First, I should note that I’m speculating without any basis at all here: I don’t have kids nor have I had any relevant formal training. It’s entirely possible this is a wrong approach or simply too nuanced for their ages.
I’d try to frame test as purely information-gathering. There should be neither penalties for low grades nor accolades for high grades (those are for dangerous things and showing initiative). Instead, use the grades to adjust study strategies- are their high grades because of a natural affinity or spending too much time on the subject? Are their low grades from not putting in enough time/effort, not understanding the fundamentals, not finding interest in the subject, etc.
> because without a focus on raising a family and/or participation in organized religion, our careers/workplace have become the "things" that we now try to put all this meaning behind, and what was once separated from our "life" (e.g. work/life balance) has become our life, and the psychological burden of being forced to be 100% emotionally invested/devoted to our work has consequences.
This resonates with me a 100%. We forgot that we aren't machines and our mind and soul needs variations - clutching on to something, letting go/resting and moving on to something else is necessary physically and psychologically.
Absence of that we have sustained stress and resulting bad consequences.
Even within a purely work perspective, we arent machines. My productivity (as perceived by the impact of my work not Lines of Code) gies up and down. I will have a good year and save millions of dollars or make a platform that ends up employing dozen software engineers for many products and then you know have years where I make some python framework used by five people have 10 percent better latency. There is a certain tendency by management to reward me in the up years and punish me in the down years but for me as a human they aren't two things. Stuff just goes in cycles. I don't get the big years without the fallow years. I focus on learning stuff each year and trying to get people to always improve things a bit, and it all works out. At least i have learned a lot of cool stuff. And management still hasn't come up with floating promotions where you are a Senior blah blah blah for 24 months then can ebb back.
We don't only need variation, we need rhythm. We live in an a-rhythmic world where in the evening the morning events feel like yesterday, where weeks whoosh by like days, rattled with the constant flurry of calls, messages, notifications and whatnot. There is no pace if one does not set it by himself.
> We live in an a-rhythmic world where in the evening the morning events feel like yesterday
I seriously think this is causing mental dysfunction - depression for instance. Of course I don't know of any way to prove this other than experience - we react to same situations in the same way and we feel stuck/frustrated when we experience repeat cycles of the same thing - that has got to have some negative impact.
I think we can do some things to make it work better but ultimately lot of things are determined by your workplace culture.
My wife is a clinical psychologist focusing on the mental health impact of high-pressure jobs. She had me build this “Burnout Calculator” based on a self-evaluation protocol they use in their practice. Leaving it here in case it’s helpful for anyone: https://azimuthpsych.com/burnout-calculator
Assuming this is a relatively standardized protocol this is a great idea. However, getting a score at the end and then the tag line “you’re fine but you should contact us anyway to see if therapy could help” feels icky
If you actually feel fine, then of course therapy isn’t likely to do much for you. The idea is if you’re feeling terrible enough to evaluate yourself, but it turns out you likely aren’t suffering from burnout, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look into therapy. Often people think they are suffering from burnout, but it turns out they actually have underlying trauma, anxiety, depression, etc. unrelated to work stress.
Everyone, even healthy people, should attend therapy if able. There's a lot of tricky ground to navigate as a person and you don't have to be experiencing trauma to get help.
Therapy. Therapy is a service, and one that in my experience is of dubious value. It is difficult to look at a statement that is essentially "pay for something you don't need" and not think of it as marketing.
Also questioning how they standardized this. I just got a 20 out of 50 and probably should have gotten a 5 out of 50. If you're not a super-fake optimist then the questionnaire is going to think you are the poster-child for burnout.
This is good post on experiencing burnout (and avoiding it).
Written by an early programmer at Slack, and someone involved with their recent desktop app rewrite project.
For me, "team marathon running" on software projects means only rarely "sprinting".
As the author suggests, sacrificing sleep, body, and hours eventually catches up with you. But, it's very easy to do and we've all been there. This is part of the reason that medical residents are burnt out on medicine even though they love medicine. It doesn't matter that you're doing what you love -- that's only the top little self actualization triangle of Maslow's heirarchy/pyramid of needs. You need all the base components of Maslow's heirarchy satisfied, too -- financial health, bodily health, emotional health.
This advice doesn’t get you very far. In the abstract, it’s just more self-help cliché. For me these are hard-won lessons, and it’s unlikely I would have done anything differently if someone had told me this when I was 26 or 30.
I feel like the cause of burnout generally lies much deeper than not asking for help or not putting health first. It's more about certain values embedded in you from your past. Those values make you feel responsible for things you aren't, and might make you push yourself. Which might also bring you good things in life, but you have to wonder where those values came from and if they are indeed true for you and helping you.
“A soldier does not become a shrewd general merely by endorsing the strategic principles of Clausewitz; he must also be competent to apply them.”
“Knowing how to apply maxims cannot be reduced to, or derived from, the acceptance of those or any other maxims.”
— Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind (1949)
I started reading this a couple of weeks ago after seeing it referenced in Peter Naur’s “Programming as Theory Building”, and this point of his in particular keeps coming up in all sorts of contexts: there’s a fundamental difference between knowing how something is done and knowing how to do it. The former is what you get from any sort of how-to or advice article, but the latter comes from experience. It’s unclear if there’s any internal transfer at all between these two kinds of knowledge.
I've come to believe that reading isn't as useful as I previously thought. I still read prolifically, because it is pleasurable, and occasionally inspiring, but not because there are any causal benefits I can point to.
"The saying experientia magistra rerum, ‘experience is a great teacher’, was familiar in the Middle Ages: you don’t learn to ride a horse or shoot an arrow by reading books."
(from the book, oh the irony, The Invention of Science by Wooton)
It sounds like you might be over-correcting if you truly believe reading doesn't have any "causal benefits". The vast majority of what you read might not be directly applicable to your pursuits, but when you find those nuggets that reveal a flaw you hadn't perceived, or point you in a new direction the results can be dramatic. Practice and knowledge go hand-in-hand, the key is judgement on where to focus day-to-day.
I hit that wall somehow hard. There's a very odd cognitive notion about 'know how'. Even stupid simple obvious things, when you've never done them, good chances you will feel weirdly stuck for tiny and absurd reasons.
Not helped by social trends. Disrupt, invent, etc.. there's good things in simple productive, social, regular and predictable work. They're probably healthier.
I think I'm burning out because my job is too easy. I like working. Satisfaction of completing a good job makes me happy. Is anyone else experiencing burnout as a result of numbingly boring tasks rather than from intense bursts of mentally challenging work? Am I conflating burnout with something else like depression?
Writing up UI designed by a designer who doesn't understand my domain's interface guidelines, reexplaining how my software works to the product person during every product meeting, trudging along under leadership that doesn't understand the costs of all the manual things I'm not being empowered to automate and not having new features to show off every 2 weeks is what is making me feel like I'm burnt out.
I've been at the opposite end of things. I've had to sprint through terminals to catch flight after an incredibly slow deployment at a hotel like out of a nail-biting Hollywood thriller. I've crunched through long days before critical events, and then crunched even longer days to work through all the issues we came across afterwards. But these things usually resulted in satisfaction more than frustration.
My symptoms have been physical too. I've vomited before going into work at least a dozen times. I had to start embracing it to get on with my day. Thankfully this is no longer an issue for myself but I couldn't even tell you what had changed to start preventing that.
> Is anyone else experiencing burnout as a result of numbingly boring tasks rather than from intense bursts of mentally challenging work?
For me it’s boring, meaningless and ill-defined tasks. Especially if you have many of those assigned without clear priorities.
I actually like a good crisis at work. E.g. a major production system suddenly going down. Suddenly, there is focus, interrupts go away, the desired result is completely clear and you feel like doing something that matters.
On the other end of the spectrum, working on some meaningless feature (e.g. adding some performance metrics to the system management decided could possibly be useful as if they actually bothered to look at them) has me completely exhausted at the end of the day.
We get stressed when job requirements mismatch our abilities. Usually there's too much work, and we deal with burnout. Sometimes, however, the mismatch goes the other way round, you are overqualified for the job and it becomes excruciatingly boring. That's boreout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boreout
> Writing up UI designed by a designer who doesn't understand my domain's interface guidelines, reexplaining how my software works to the product person during every product meeting, trudging along under leadership that doesn't understand the costs of all the manual things I'm not being empowered to automate and not having new features to show off every 2 weeks is what is making me feel like I'm burnt out.
The common thread of each of the examples you give above sounds like, "other people are incompetent."
Applying principle of charity and assuming they are all actually that bad, you've got to meet people where they are if you want to work effectively with them. Lots has been written on the responsibility of senior engineers in guiding and improving their teams without necessarily having a specific mandate from management to do so.
Perhaps you might also apply a bit of that charity IRL too though. Examine your perceptions and interactions critically.
There's no requirement in life that you have to make things work with any given team, anyway. The clueless and the checked out exist too. If you're surrounded by them and your not married to the org, consider other work.
The bit about ending up in hospital with an obstructed bowel from diverticulitis? I call misdiagnosis - either on his part or mine.
I had an uncannily similar experience, except in my case it was about a week a month (sometimes much more, sometimes less) that I lost to the vomiting, the nausea, the delirium, the totally immobile bowel. In my case, the stress went on for years, and years, utterly relentlessly, day and night, incessantly, and so did the gut attacks. I’d get angry when people mentioned they’d slept badly, because at least they’d got to sleep. I’d spend a sleepless week shivering and roasting and dripping sweat and reeling with nausea, unable to make words or thoughts, then finally suddenly recover, and the moment I was capable of any movement or coherent thought, I’d be writing apologetic emails and heading back to the office, where I’d get a barrage of abuse from both clients and cofounder for my absence.
After multiple hospitalisations they’d decided I had everything from diverticulitis to gallstones to salmonella to a brainstem injury. They took my gallbladder out, did exploratory surgery, every endoscopy you care to name. It kept happening, nothing worked.
Then, I quit my business. Two months later, I had my last “attack”, as I’d come to call them, and it’s now been three years.
So... I wonder if the author had diverticulitis, or was having the same violent physiological reaction to stress that I had apparently developed.
To me burnout is more the psychological state of "why am I even doing this anymore?", loss of enthusiasm, perhaps even some degree of despondency and hopelessness about the future, etc.
This seems more like just temporary over-exertion, under-nutrition/exercise/etc, which can be fixed with a lazy holiday, safe in the knowledge that all those Slack shares are vesting.
In this story someone just shared an experience of being in deep pain, psychologically and physically. While you may not intend to be mean, your response boils down to "you didn't feel enough pain to qualify for burnout." Even if you didn't intend it, this response has an aspect of shaming the author.
I think that it's really important for people to be able to talk about mental health constructively. Specifically, it's important to de-stigmatize the fact that people are susceptible to burnout / anxiety / depression / etc. These aren't necessarily conditions that "can be fixed with a lazy holiday, safe in the knowledge that all those Slack shares are vesting." Instead, they're often conditions that require tailored effort and outside help.
For someone who's going through a mental health issue, it's often really hard to go through the steps needed to improve the situation for themselves. Having others around them understand that it's a struggle, and not something they can "snap out of" is really important.
Again, I doubt you were intending to be belittling here, but I want to point out how important empathy is in this situation.
>it's often really hard to go through the steps needed to improve the situation for themselves. Having others around them understand that it's a struggle, and not something they can "snap out of" is really important.
Having gone through some dark periods of my life, I'd much rather take "snap out of it" advice over the unintentionally patronizing "support". Both are the words of well-intentioned people unable to relate, but one of them mistakenly believes they've overcoming their inability to relate.
I suffered from depression a lot while a teenager and early twenties, and I think lack of empathy from others has helped me snap out of it. Depression, at least for me, can be a form of feeling sorry for myself, and when others feel sorry for me that compounds the problem.
Vacation is good. But two weeks after my vacation I had a rough couple of days, nothing that I couldn't handle before, and I was right back where I started.
I've come to think of it like a mental equivalent of a torn muscle. Recovery takes time—probably far more time than I expect, and if you overexert it, even a little, you'll do a lot more damage a lot faster than you did the first time around.
I guess the source of the burnout is that we are not allowed t o switch careers even for a while. e.g. you are a rockstar developer, say you take a switch to a marine archaeologist or a wildlife photographer for two years and then come back to s/w development? Oh boy you are so screwed
>safe in the knowledge that all those Slack shares are vesting.
You can burnout and be wealthy or ‘rich’. Having money isn’t going to cure psychological issues that aren’t addressed. People set goals and need to accomplish goals to feel worth. If you’re burning yourself out purely to get ‘rich’ you should probably invest in lotto tickets instead.
I hope someone will (or has?) conducted a historical and geographical analysis of the concept of “burnout”. I’m curious about where precisely it emerges (hypothesis, predominantly America) and when (hypothesis, the 21st century).
It’s a peculiar concept in that it seems to capture the idea that we’ve reached a stage in human development in which we shouldn’t really have to work that much, but do so anyway. It a sort of paradoxical situation in which we’ve eliminated the conditions which necessitated or fostered overwork with material ends (must produce xyz units of consumable goods, food etc) for overwork with largely frivolous ends (the sustainment of online systems which don’t actually create any material value—only abstract or cultural value—not true in every case, of course) enter the “burnout” concept—the big boss no longer needs to forcibly push his workers to the edge, they’ll do it for him through some odd sense of pride or ridiculous notions of performance which are enforced not through punishment but through the allocation of “benefits” like respect, small bonuses, etc etc. —the workplace “culture” (though the social dynamics which emerge at workplaces are not worthy of the name) is an effective system for ensuring people overextend themselves.
I recently read a book (Behemoth [0]) about the history of the 'factory' and I can tell you that burnout is omnipresent throughout the entire narrative. Particularly, the 18th century textile mills were a brutal and oppressive place to work. Burnout, financial ruin and pressure, and worker unhappiness were persistent elements of the book. To this day, we still have manufacturing settings that heavily rely in oppressive and abusive labor practices.
I think that what is "new" is burnout in the context of the office and knowledge work.
I had my first major career failure this year and lost a very good job. I was able to land another good job quickly but I’ve been full of doubt and am seriously lacking in confidence ever since. I can’t sleep and have anxiety. The new job has significantly more responsibility and in many ways the pressure that the author describes in rewriting Slack is very similar to what I’m going through. Every time I have a setback at work I am afraid of losing my job. I finally recognized this as burnout and am trying to come back from it but it’s a slow process. I’m trying to exercise more and get enough sleep but the sleep part is still not working all that well.
This was the hardest one for me and caused me a burnout a couple times, especially when working remote from home.
Separate your work and personal life. This was a major change for me. I’ve always identified very closely with my work. I’m learning to separate my sense of self-worth and purpose from my professional self.
Filled my calendar with things like gym and family time outside of working hours. Set my calendar to reject double booked meetings / events automatically was the first step
After that it depends on the reactions you get from that.
There is some horrible javascript that calculates what the font size should be based on the height of the browser. A large screen gets a huge font and if you zoom out then the resize event triggers which keeps the font the same size.
Might be one of the worst things I've seen on the web so far
Burnout fucking sucks. I thought I went through it once in the past (and maybe I did), but when compared to how I feel now it was nowhere near as bad. I recently tried a few things: 1) nootropic supplements, which have helped a bit to an extent; and 2) take a week long tech-free vacation to the mountains, but when I came back my state didn't really change.
I think my burnout is due to feeling utterly unchallenged at work. The work I've been doing feels way below my pay grade. I'm also attempting to grow my own SaaS business and growth is very slow (3 years in, at $4k MRR), which makes that "light at the end of the tunnel" of going full-time on my business seem unreachable at times. I also have a 5 month old, so I'd also factor that into the lower-bound of my stress level (but I do feel like she helps me slog through hard days more than anything).
I'm starting to be more open about my mental health with family/friends, and I feel like I'm in a rut and not sure how to get out of it. I wish I could take a sabbatical.
> I design and build technology in Vancouver. I spend most of my time working on Slack, a paradigm-shifting tool for team communication. In my work I strive for usefulness, beauty, and positive impact on the lives of others.
From this chap's tag line on his home page it seems like he still identifies strongly with his work and over emphasises the importance of it.
Something I think that has helped me avoid burnout is to stop at 16.00 (or whenever your regular working day ends) and leave work, physically and mentally.
On the weekends, I don't think about work ever (unless something happens to the system and I'm on-call, which very rarely happens. I realise I'm lucky in this regard.)
I just can't work more than 6-7 hours on a given day. Working more won't make me more productive, on the other hand I'll waste more time on reddit since I can't stay focused and I can "catch up" my pre-noon procrastination later.
A part of this, of course, is to insist on not working outside work hours from the beginning of joining a company. In doing so, your colleagues will learn to know not to disturb you outside of work unless it's really necessary.
I feel like that's the mistake the author of this article is committing: not doing anything else than work. Everyone needs time off to recoup no matter what business they're in.
I have never been burned out, but I think I would have been. I did a couple stints at various places (non dev work) where I was pretty excited to continue working and get higher in the org. Fortunately for me they were co-ops which ended and allowed me to see that, retrospectively, they kind of sucked, were not especially fruitful career tracks, and would have ground me down after a year or so. It’s really hard to check yourself while engaged and working on something.
Slack spends a lot of time promoting itself as a “work hard, them go home” culture. Do others fimd tat to be true? If so, why would burnout be a risk for someone at Slack?
Not sure what being a millionaire has to do with avoiding burn out. There are plenty of wealthy people who still burn out. If you’re burning yourself out solely for “getting rich” you should probably buy lotto tickets instead.
If you are rich you’re burning out by choice. Having to go through something like long workdays because you want to is a completely different experience than doing so because you have to.
I never understood why people keep working once they have accumulated enough to not have to work anymore.
That was a great read. I think the most important thing is letting go when stressful problems become a danger to your health. Just think "I'm not that important in the grand scheme of things" and take a few steps away from the problem (obviously that's not always possible, but it's more often possible than people think). What will happen is the following:
- Maybe you're right, and things go on nicely without you
- Maybe things go not so well, so your coworkers have to learn redundancy and that they cannot pile all the problems on one person
- Often, you come back from your break (be it going home early, or taking a few days off, etc.) refreshed and you look at the problem from a new perspective. Potential emotions like anger and impatience have worn off, enabling you to act calmly and rationally.
"Blue collar" burnout, to me, is the archetypal fast food worker making minimum wage working paycheck to paycheck, who not only has to deal with financial insecurity that comes with the job but the physical (actual manual "work") and psychological (rude customers) burdens that come with those types of jobs.