I have an entire adult life that has been one burnout after another, continually driven by unrealistic expectations by immature management. As early as '83 being a dumb teen burned out by Apple being an unpaid beta tester for the Mac. Working on the original Fractals team with Mandelbrot and Devanny, I ended up in the hospital from the demands. Then again working at Philips developing video CDs, again at 3D0/EA making their failed console's OS, again at Sony making the PSX OS, again at EA develping during the EA Spouse era, again during the dotcom era developing early IP streaming video, again working in feature film VFX, again at my own startup, and yet still now working facial recognition. Technology kinda sucks, as if you're good they take advantage and bully your good will, mentally manipulating one. I am yet to see any organization without this disease.
Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread
91–100 of 176 posts
Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread
#92There is no way to reduce workload and still generate enough income for the employer and revenue for the employee given current urban land valuations.
And more generally, raise inequality and one group will have increased stress while the other has reduced stress. That is the point of wealth.
Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread
#93It's not just companies driving to more productivity. For example, those open office layout are about putting more people per square foot. No matter what they say otherwise. Nobody "communicates" in an open office layout and they know it. This is an example where per-employee productivity is sacrificed for other goals (getting more people into one building). And it is directly affecting stress and burnout.
Huh? People communicate about work all the time in my office and having the ability to initiate conversations fluidly means more efficient collaboration. Fewer meetings, and easier to keep all parties in the know.
Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd like to get rid of most salaried positions and get people paid by the hour. I think having someone counting the number of hours you have your butt in a seat is a particularly degrading form of micromanagement, and I'm glad I don't have to endure it. Your TC is the only number that matters; there's no financial difference between getting paid 300k and no overtime and getting paid 200k + 100k overtime. It's silly…
We pay all our developers by the hour, and I think it's super important. To correct your first misconception, we don't count peoples hours, people just tell us how many hours they worked each pay cycle. We also pay 1.5X per hour for more than 40 hours per week if we asked you to work extra. The primary advantage is that it aligns everyone incentives. In management I know that there is a very real cost to us if we ask…
I’ve been a software engineer for 18 years and have had 4 jobs, only one (brief) one was hourly and it was arguably the least satisfying by far. I was seen as a resource which is essentially what you’re arguing for “if you’re paid hourly then your time is more valued by management”, but the problem is you’re never given the freedom to roam. Your time is always over managed and accounted for, I could never get into a “flow” state. I imagine that company never created anything novel, it was just factory work.
Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, exactly. Excluding those that are very low on the income scale, for whom everyone agrees life is difficult, I simply don't understand the claims of inescapable demands on skilled white-collar workers' time. If you're making any sort of non-negligible surplus above the basics, then you're at some level making a conscious choice of that surplus (usually for consumption) over a lower-stress job. I have a friend who…
> perform worse at your current job by putting in less hours Citation needed. Edit: So self-evident is this equation to some people that they down vote the mere suggestion that working longer hours does not make you better at your job.
What on Earth are you talking about? For the cases where your job requires longer hours even when they don't track productivity, the part of the sentence that you conveniently left out was "..by putting in less hours or get a job that isn't so rigid as to require a number of hours above what you find to be your healthy level."
For the cases where your work doesn't blindly want longer hours but measures your productivity in a saner way, if you can perform better at your job in less hours (which is totally plausible in many situations), then OBVIOUSLY you should be doing it already.
The fragment of a sentence that you quoted is narrowly referring to a situation where 1) you're still getting productivity out of your marginal hour and 2) your work doesn't arbitrarily require absurd hours as detached from productivity.
> So self-evident is this equation to some people that they down vote the mere suggestion that working longer hours does not make you better at your job
I can't even imagine what would drive someone to spend their weekend time feverishly imagining statements that no one is making so they can feel smug about disagreeing with them.
Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread
#96I wonder if unionization could be a solution here.
Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread
#97> Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread We are making employees lives miserable to reduce the need of planning for companies. Quite often management lacks the emotional maturity needed in their positions that hides normal mistakes that are part of the job, push for unrealistic schedules and sometimes even get into bulling as a way of getting what they want. 8 hours plus commute time, that has increased as ci…
> 8 hours
I just refused to join a conference call on Saturday (opting instead to watch my son’s soccer game), and I know I’ll have to answer for it on Monday.
Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Somehow this even happens with programming managers. I feel like we have a real crisis of leadership in software development.
I'd buy that for a dollar!
Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread
#99> Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread We are making employees lives miserable to reduce the need of planning for companies. Quite often management lacks the emotional maturity needed in their positions that hides normal mistakes that are part of the job, push for unrealistic schedules and sometimes even get into bulling as a way of getting what they want. 8 hours plus commute time, that has increased as ci…
> making employees lives miserable to reduce the need of planning such a great point. we seem to live in a zero-planning world now. i'm surprised at how often, at least in app programming projects, i go to great lengths to show a manager how the app is progressing and where it's ultimately heading, and get no meaningful course correction or even a "that looks great" then, the other shoe drops: after the app is comple…
> ...a zero-planning world now...
JIT is for more than just compilers these days!
Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is so close to my experience it’s amazing. I’ve found that disconnecting from any technology for 2 hours straight on any given day (harder than it should be) will 100% of the time make me feel much better. I think that it relates to the stress response cycle you’re talking about. If I give my body and mind time away from stressors, I can make quick progress to escaping the “constantly overwhelmed” feeling.
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 helpf…
>> I could easily spend 2 hours instead if uncontrolled
You could easily spend 5-6 hours a day if uncontrolled. You probably did spend that much before without noticing. I was horrified when I turned on Screen Time on my iPhone and iPad.