91% of employees who have blind installed. Selection bias.
That means it's young engineers at FAANG saying this.
It also means employees who are not necessarily happy.
Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout
31–40 of 99 posts
Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout
#32Is this an infomercial?
Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout
#33There are so many articles that blame leadership for all that ails a company. To me, it seems a bit like saying "most program crashes are caused by runtime errors". While both are true, there are deeper explanations that can be more helpful in starting a discussion.
In the case of crashing a program, maybe it's because of a misused raw pointer or a type error in an untyped language. As soon as you frame it that way, you immediately see possible paths forward to improve the situation.
In the case of burnout at companies, I've found it has more to do with the mindset of the top leaders (who other managers down the chain tend to emulate). The mindset is that the company is "a machine", which makes the rest of us "cogs" (or pick your favorite machine part).
The leaders may be perfectly nice and considerate people in general (or not), but regardless, the company-as-machine mindset leads them to set aside their humanity in the interests of the company. All of sudden everyone on the team needs to be replaceable, have predictably high output, etc. Those might be fine concerns for a business, but they end up blinding managers to the flesh and blood human beings in front of them and they start to see employees as the means to the greater business ends of output, productivity, growth, etc.
I believe this is an issue of human development that affects most companies eventually. Only companies with really developed leaders who, when faced with serious pressure, are able to see people as the unique and complex beings that they are and not make people feel like they somehow don't matter at a fundamental level.
Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout
#34This reminds me of the phrase: "If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent". Therefore, if everyone is burning out, no one is really burning out or, we somehow extended the definition of burnout to something that can be applied to even the most minute set of complaints.
block twitter, facebook, instagram, hackernews, and reddit. BOOM no longer burnt out!
Oh dear... If you do not have a clue of what you are talking about, you'd better be off saying nothing.
Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout
#35I know of a team (~20 devs, a handful of managers) in the middle of a fantastic experiment in burning out the developers.
First, a new remote senior leader took over. He doesn't visit the team or understand them well. He puts pressure on the managers to deliver projects that make his bosses happy by looking sexy, even if they cause more operational issues for the customers. Operational issues = oncall hell, so more devs burn out and quit.
The experiment is going great.
Phase two began recently. Of the three remaining managers, one quit and one was fired for not brown nosing to the remote senior leader enough. (Push back on bullshit projects? That can't be allowed). The single remaining manager is the ultimate brown noser who happily causes his devs on call hell in order to make senior leadership happy.
The devs are all looking elsewhere for work. The general mood is in a freefall. People are taking long vacations away in cities that also have lots of tech jobs.
It's all a fantastic experiment in how to implode a software organization. I really hope to meet the control group some day- they won't believe how lucky they are.
Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout
#36Poor Leadership is also the number one cause for parting ways with a company. For me personally, there was never another reason to leave a company. I never experienced a toxic environment or had colleagues i couldn't stand. It was always the leadership
You've never experienced inconsiderate coworkers? Like coworkers who talk loudly on the phone in a nearby work area, coworkers with hygiene issues, coworkers who don't carry their weight or respond well to training?
It's entirely possible to have had none of these issues when you only worked for a few years or in a few companies.
Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout
#37Number one by a hair. 23% leadership vs. 19% overwork.
Interesting to see the per-company breakdown. I wonder about the sample size. Blind seems like a promising avenue for getting sentiment analysis inside of companies, but there is a pretty serious sampling bias, as many who sign up for Blind might already be feeling disillusioned.
Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout
#38I know of a team (~20 devs, a handful of managers) in the middle of a fantastic experiment in burning out the developers. First, a new remote senior leader took over. He doesn't visit the team or understand them well. He puts pressure on the managers to deliver projects that make his bosses happy by looking sexy, even if they cause more operational issues for the customers. Operational issues = oncall hell, so more d…
I think I work here :)
Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout
#39Number one by a hair. 23% leadership vs. 19% overwork. Interesting to see the per-company breakdown. I wonder about the sample size. Blind seems like a promising avenue for getting sentiment analysis inside of companies, but there is a pretty serious sampling bias, as many who sign up for Blind might already be feeling disillusioned.
Overwork is also leadership: they're setting the unrealistic schedules and they're communicating expectations that people meet are supposed to meet these schedules.
By contrast there are other places where management goes around at quitting time and throws everyone out.
Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout
#40There are so many articles that blame leadership for all that ails a company. To me, it seems a bit like saying "most program crashes are caused by runtime errors". While both are true, there are deeper explanations that can be more helpful in starting a discussion. In the case of crashing a program, maybe it's because of a misused raw pointer or a type error in an untyped language. As soon as you frame it that way,…
Treating team members and colleagues as human beings who bring their whole self to work is, imho, essential to enabling people to deliver their best work.
Understandably, but somewhat irrationally at the same time, companies as they mature tend to put formalized processes over individuals. The reason for this may be to institutionalize knowledge or scale better as the company grows which I do see the point of.
An unwanted mid-term impact of this very often is what you describe, thinking of humans as cogs in a machine, thinking of success as an increase productivity KPIs and increase in company valuation.
For me, this means to establish a positive culture in new companies/teams/etc. where our own values can align with the team's / company's values.