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Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread

#131

Post by madaxe_again »

commandlinefan wrote: post #97
kartan wrote: post #7

> 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.

Yeah, that’s the problem though, isn’t it, as you’re damned either way - either you miss out on time with your son, or you spend the remainder of your weekend anxious about whether you’re going to be tarred, feathered and fired on Monday.

I chose to forgo children as they would have been a distraction from work. Now it’s too late. Ah well.

Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread

#132

Post by leowoo91 »

noir_lord wrote: post #69
HillaryBriss wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

That's mostly because managers underrate the concept of 'optimization' and how features are interconnected. Once a developer makes a mistake, all other things already working, gets broken. Small changes are not so small after all. They need to be understood as a whole, instead of individual updates.

Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread

#133

Post by regularfry »

madaxe_again wrote: post #131
commandlinefan wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah, that’s the problem though, isn’t it, as you’re damned either way - either you miss out on time with your son, or you spend the remainder of your weekend anxious about whether you’re going to be tarred, feathered and fired on Monday. I chose to forgo children as they would have been a distraction from work. Now it’s too late. Ah well.

It takes a certain amount of self-respect to raise the middle finger to unreasonably-timed work requests, and it says a lot about modern work culture that a lot of people have been cowed into thinking they have no options.

Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread

#134

Post by dunkelheit »

kartan wrote: post #7

> 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…

Agreed. The flaw in this article is that it talks about overwork as a given and as a solution offers some measures that can help you individually cope with stress while doing nothing to the overall atmosphere. The idea of reorganizing a workspace so that it is more humane is seemingly too radical.

I am currently recovering from a mild burnout. Self-diagnosed, but I had surely felt a lot of exhaustion, cynicism and ineffectiveness. The curious thing is that I didn't even work that much! (In the end I barely worked at all because I couldn't). What caused it in my opinion was not overwork but the combination of sociopathic senior leadership and an incompetent immediate boss. The senior leadership tried hard to institute a culture of self-blame and fostered the feeling that you were never doing enough while my immediate boss had a preference for the "zerg-rush" style of software development with little design and planning, constantly changing priorities, "motivation" by unrealistic schedules and disregard for quality control (that resulted in several entirely preventable production outages). He also did little to shield us from outside distractions and expected an "always on" attitude (he would message us in the wee hours of the Sunday morning and expect a timely response). All this pushed me hard towards burnout.

In the end I decided to quit my job (high salary be damned) and go on a sabbatical. Already I feel a lot better and am starting to regain some of the interest I had in programming.

Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread

#137

Post by quickthrower2 »

GordonS wrote: post #77
Zenst wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many the commute more than hits your daily stress quota, even before work contributes. So you can end up starting your day stressed, be that public transport sardines and delays or playing car upon roads so gridlocked that the terminology car park seems more apt. This to reach an office at some arbitrary time everybody seems to follow of the 8/9am start. Hence you have this sudden rush into cities around that tim…

> playing car upon roads so gridlocked that the terminology car park seems more apt I spent 5 years making a 1 hour (each way) commute by car, a distance of 8 miles (also each way). It was soul destroying ! Wasting 2 hours of my life every workday just felt so meaningless! Eventually I moved out of the city to a small town 10 miles out of the city, and only then did I realise just how awful it had been. I'm now lucky…

8 miles in 1 hour? I’d take up running because it’s be quicker at a not too unreasonable pace.

Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread

#138

Post by quickthrower2 »

regularfry wrote: post #133
madaxe_again wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that’s the problem though, isn’t it, as you’re damned either way - either you miss out on time with your son, or you spend the remainder of your weekend anxious about whether you’re going to be tarred, feathered and fired on Monday. I chose to forgo children as they would have been a distraction from work. Now it’s too late. Ah well.

It takes a certain amount of self-respect to raise the middle finger to unreasonably-timed work requests, and it says a lot about modern work culture that a lot of people have been cowed into thinking they have no options.

Yeah but the job market in IT is so good there is no need to worry. If you aren’t being treated like a star you can move on to where you are appreciated.

Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread

#139

Post by fogetti »

zxcvvcxz wrote: post #102

Quoted post unavailable.

Or why don't you just keep your lack of empathy to yourself?

Did you get offended by an article about people who have problems which have zero impact on your life?

Maybe you should take a hard look into yourself first before you comment here why you have such a low level of endurance reading about other people's woes.

Re: Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread

#140

Post by [deleted] »

pm90 wrote: post #109
Spooky23 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree with you. The modern organization is so short term focused and so dedicated to purging that they do not develop leadership and cannot handle failure. The cult of metrics breeds dumb. A big company is more like a Soviet enterprise than a functional business.

I am very interested to know what you mean by the cult of metrics?

[deleted]
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