Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread

I have two anecdotes on that point:

1. Last April, I took two weeks to go to Cuba and work on some non-internet connected work. Cuba has little internet, so this was easy to do.

It was incredibly relaxing, and I made a fair bit of progress in reducing stress. Also generated a lot of helpful insights.

Obviously, you have to go back at some point, and when I did, much of the stress returned. But the time away was helpful, and looking back at it, insights I gained during that time proved helpful over the long run.

2. Figuring out how to manage your devices. Which parts are valuable, which parts aren't, and which part need to be limited?

Actually, in Cuba I had a bit of a revelation: my smartphone was an incredibly device. It took pictures, let me make voice notes, make written notes, do reminders, etc. Not connected to the internet, it was a wonderful assistant, and I was able to use it and quickly put it down.

Back home, I found the things that sucked me in were:

* Twitter. If I'm not careful I can end up reading too many timelines

* Reddit. Certain subreddits for tech news

* Hacker News. 1-2x per day is a great addition to my life. Constantly returning is not.

* Newspaper site. I get great value out of a subscription to the financial times. But it also generates far more than I can or should read.

So, how to deal with this? I first tried a system using the Shortcuts app on iPhone. Basically, I could only access those sites by going through a shortcut routine, and logging visits in a spreadsheet. (this was done automatically)

This worked, but ultimately it proved too cumbersome and easy to circumvent, and I eventually slipped out of it.

Instead, I used a tool that was in my netgear router. They have an integration with Circle by Disney, aimed at letting parents control their children's browsing.

Instead, I used it to control myself. I'm actually paying monthly to use it, and paying extra for their management profile I can install on my iPhone and cellular connected iPad, so stuff gets filtered even off wifi.

And....it actually works. Obviously, I can circumvent the system, but it takes more effort than any of the inbuilt blocking systems. I also removed my vpn from my iOS devices: I realized I basically never was on public wifi anymore. Removal of the VPN made it harder to circumvent the monitoring.

So, now I can't go on those sites on my phone or iPad. I can go on them on my computer. But this hasn't been an issue so far: I've found I'm not likely to spend a ton of time idly browsing at a computer. I generally just use it for work now. If that ever changes, I'll change the filter settings.

But, I do want some of those sites. So, I went through each category, and asked:

* Do they have a podcast? * Do they have an email newsletter?

What I ended up doing was for the ones with podcasts, I just use those. So, I no longer read Apple news on reddit, I just get updates from podcasts, which don't have the same effect for me. For the FT, I just signed up to a bunch of their weekly newsletters and get digests. I did the same with one person on twitter, and made a weekly email reminder to visit the twitter of one other person, who posts infrequently. I got some HN digests too.

So at lunch, I have my designated time to look at distractions on a screen, and I go through the emails. This doesn't take very long at all. Basically 20 min a day covers all the reading I want to do, but I could easily spend 2 hours instead if uncontrolled.

This was my major issue, yours may vary. Other than news, I also culled notifications, and handle all my email from a computer now. I find I process faster, and I don't really have anything urgent.

My phone is now much closer to being a tool, and less a source of distraction.

I think the daily disconnection you're doing is great. If you can get extended time away on your next vacation, and/or if you can do some analysis to figure out specifically what is causing the stress from your tech, that can help. Good luck!

I remember sitting in rapture listening to a retired Chevron executive describing the way white collar work used to be. You basically got hired at a megacorp for life. If things didn't work out after the first couple of years, you were gently taken aside, given nothing new to do, and given a salary and an office for an entire year to find a new position. I was flabbergasted. Only professors with tenure or certain government workers have this kind of job stability, but the entire upper middle class had it at one point. Sure, none of them won .com lotto; they arguably had much better lives on average.

My dad was working class and in the union -he had a different kind of stability.

It's indeed a charade. Maybe it wasn't in the beginning, but it inevitably becomes a charade once a company reaches a certain age and size.

What happens is that, once a company is reliably making money for everyone, the need to "innovate" and make things more "efficient" is dramatically reduced. At the end of the day, most people want to just show up to the office, do what they're told(what they don't actually want to do), and then go back to their lives with their money. If some young engineer shows up with ideas about making things "more efficient", that can only mean people's daily routines get disrupted or they are made obsolete. Nobody really wants to make things better, including those who are running the business since their joy is in being in charge of lots of people(whether they're well-meaning or not). Accountability and integrity gets thrown out the window because, in order to maintain them, someone has to get mad at someone else, and these days people aren't interested in being the person who has to scold people or let them go.

As much as I care about my craft as a software engineer, I realize that every company suffers from this syndrome to some extent, and the most healthy thing to do is to accept that people don't want you fucking with their cash cow. I don't take seriously claims companies make when the talk about "excellence" and "innovation", because once they've got more than 10 employees and their growth pattern has a definite upward trend, those values really go out the window.

And you know something? There's nothing wrong with that. Most people aren't working because they want to. Think you can make things better? Go start your own company.

Salaried work has misaligned incentives as well, hence the article.

It's largely identical in enterprise programming.

I have a lovely and smart boss but I can not get him to look at stuff properly until after I roll out a potentially massive change to our internal ERP.

Real money on the line as well.

I think a lot of it is that non-programming managers don't really grok on the intrinsic level the vast complexity that can be under the skin of a seemingly simple change.

In fact that is largely our job I guess, to hide all that complexity, when a user selects "order following required stock from supplier" they don't need to know what is happening under neath, they just care about price and when it'll be delivered on a container to one of our sites.