Overworking is a problem only if you are underpaid. 80 hour weeks for a year if I get paid 1 million dollars? Hell yeah. "Monk Mode" all the way.
Then get another job where you are paid 1M a year and don't have to overwork.
There’s no glory in overworking, it’s just imminent burnout
41–50 of 59 posts
Re: There’s no glory in overworking, it’s just imminent burnout
#42In the menagerie of death marches I've been a party to throughout my ~20yr career. Every single one of them was predicated on a team that was, in aggregate, a low-performing team, so we were all having to work so much to make up for the lack of ability and/or preparedness of others, and those others were having to work so much to compensate for not being particularly good at their jobs, and taking on way more respon…
I mostly agree with you, but I think there are two orthogonal angles worth considering. First of all, some startups foster a cult-like, work-together-play-together environment where the pressure to overwork is subtly amped up as well since everyone spends all their time together. This kind of company is arguably exploiting young people's natural disposition and projected fantasies of success, although if they pay wel…
> ...if they pay well and give above average equity then it could be more of a lifestyle choice than outright exploitation...
It's my experience, and I suspect it's a larger phenomenon, that every company thinks it's giving out above average or at least "competitive" compensation.
Re: There’s no glory in overworking, it’s just imminent burnout
#43In the menagerie of death marches I've been a party to throughout my ~20yr career. Every single one of them was predicated on a team that was, in aggregate, a low-performing team, so we were all having to work so much to make up for the lack of ability and/or preparedness of others, and those others were having to work so much to compensate for not being particularly good at their jobs, and taking on way more respon…
Not always so simple though, a lot of places have a pattern of overwork that goes a bit more like this. Someone somewhere up the chain overpromises on something without consulting the people that will do the work. Then the team is forced to burn the midnight oil to do that, because they are a talented group, who like the work and don't want the company to look bad, they manage to actually hit the date or miss it just…
Yep. I've seen this happen a lot. A company that is serious about fixing it can do it simply: just provide compensation and/or time off to people who have to work overtime to meet company goals.
The usual response is "Well, we couldn't afford to do that!". Which means "our business model depends on our employees shouldering some of our costs" if you think about it.
Re: There’s no glory in overworking, it’s just imminent burnout
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was younger I used to work a lot of extra hours because I enjoyed the work. Now not so much, but still get enthused about things from time to time and find myself still at work at 8:00pm not even aware of what time it is.
Likewise. I still stay up late most nights after my wife and child go to bed so that I can have 2-3 hours of uninterrupted time to work on little projects that are interesting to me or help expand my skill set. But that kind of work is elective, and is essentially a hybrid of hobby and duty, so I'm not convinced it fits the typical mold of a path to inevitable burnout.
Perhaps most importantly, you're not making commitments based on this extracurricular work. If you're sick or even just disinterested, you can just work less. You don't have to get approval, risk your performance evaluation, or quit your job.
Re: There’s no glory in overworking, it’s just imminent burnout
#45I agree, overwork is bad. But this part struck me: "Clarity struck me at a management meeting when a colleague asked my opinion on a project. I shrugged lightly and said it didn’t matter to me, my team would be able to support whatever decision that was made. It was a somber, sobering realization: I didn’t care." Now maybe this was one of those internal realizations, which is totally legit. But not having an opinion…
I've had more problems in the other direction, actually: people who weren't that opinionated executing on really bad plans. They could be really terrible plans, even. Like cutting corners here or there, but they just didn't want to make an issue out of it.
Re: There’s no glory in overworking, it’s just imminent burnout
#46Overworking is a problem only if you are underpaid. 80 hour weeks for a year if I get paid 1 million dollars? Hell yeah. "Monk Mode" all the way.
Then get another job where you are paid 1M a year and don't have to overwork.
Do you know about some of these? I'm available on those terms.
Re: There’s no glory in overworking, it’s just imminent burnout
#47Wow! Takes courage to act and even more to tell the world about it. I believe many of us can relate to the internal self-guessing voice that makes us think we're not qualified or good enough and that keeps pushing us over the edge. Sometimes, even the most experienced of us can fall in that trap and end up burned out.
Re: There’s no glory in overworking, it’s just imminent burnout
#48I see that the author of this post is a woman. I wanted to write something about overworking and burnout as a result of our normative (but toxic) masculine archetypes (disclosure: I am a man; I have a wife and a step-daughter; I have burnt out twice in the past two years, the first time was really bad).
Last year, around this time of the year, I read "Tantra Illuminated", which changed how I view work (and overwork), and play. Tantra is not really that accessible to most people though, and it takes a long time to explain.
This year, personal crisis led me to the book, "The Trickster, Magician, and Grieving Man". Unlike "Tantra Illuminated", the book is very accessible, though it might evoke significant emotional resistance in men who attempt to read it. The book is a critique on the normative archetype of masculinity, and has a powerful way of explaining why overworking and burnout is appealing.
The book starts with the first chapter on the shadow archetype of unacknowledged pain. The rest of the first half of the book explains the consequences of the unacknowledged pain, with the latter half of the book explaining three additional masculine archetypes. Although the book covers a lot of ground, I'll narrow it down to just overworking and burnout.
Pain is the experience of something in the world imposing on your sense of self. The normative masculine archetypes is such that, we try to chose our pain (by being a hero). The reality is that we cannot control and master all that we see. Each of us is connected in a complex intertwining of relationships, both physically and emotionally. In order to achieve the perceived ideal of being untouched, and untransformed, the classical male archetypes tends towards deadening ourselves towards pain and cut ourselves off from the connections that pain is signaling to us. That pain doesn't really go away, and instead, accumulates as a rejected shadow-side of our psyche.
One of the things that happens after that is to the taking on of the burden of the world as a proxy. The strain of upholding something is substituted for becoming present to the pain we carry. It brings with it thrill, the exhilaration. We tell ourselves narratives such as, "I am doing this for you", but it is just another way of avoiding the pain.
Taking this to its extreme leads to violence and war, drawing in others into the maelstrom of rage in a fit to avoid that pain.
Burnout happens when you can no longer avoid the pain. It looks like external stress, but what it really is, is the accumulation of unacknowledged pain of living. It's not something you can move past (which was what led to that accumulation in the first time). Being present to that pain, and just letting it be, letting it speak, letting it unfold in its own time is the only way to recovery.
This whole thing goes deeper than that if you want to avoid the cycles of overworking and burnout.
Re: There’s no glory in overworking, it’s just imminent burnout
#49Yeah fuck any place that wants you to work 90 hours a week. Stay only until you can find a better job.
How do you effectively find another job when you're working 90 hours a week? It's hard enough when you're working 40.