Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week • Hacker News Board

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#111

Post by CalRobert » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

mercutio2 wrote: post #65

Ididntdothis wrote: post #5

Americans really need more vacation time. For a while I worked with only 15 days a year. This never gives you the opportunity to ever really relax. Life becomes just one endless meaningless time of working year after year that kills any kind of creativity . I can see this in a lot of workaholics. They just go through the motions of working hard but don’t get much done. And once you have been in that machine for a whi…

“Only” 15 vacation days? I’m not sure if you’re in the US, or if you’re including paid holidays, but 15 days is the average number of vacation days for people with 25 years of tenure in full time jobs in the US. Most people with less tenure get much less. So that wouldn’t be an “only” in the US. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm

Indeed - this is a fantastic argument in favour of emigrating. It's also the cause of friction in multinationals operating in Europe - I was saddened when, upon starting at my "unlimited PTO" employer, they had an internal doc that this really meant "3-4 weeks" (note that 4 weeks is the legal minimum in the EU)

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#112

Post by Hermitian909 » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 4:44 PM UTC

kache_ wrote: post #39

CalRobert wrote: post #8

"Conducted by telecommunications company TollFreeForwarding.com, " an odd source, but OK. I work remote from a place outside the US. Last thanksgiving my boss (from the US) was on Slack. So were... all but one of my US colleagues. I see them writing at all hours of the night. On a work trip it was more or less assumed I'd work from 9 AM (8:30 ish really if you count coffee before) until 10 PM. I'm not on pagerduty an…

I work remotely as well and I observe that a lot of people are available outside their regular working hours. I think remote work is part of the problem: the additional blurring between work and life will askew your work life balance. Pager duty can burn you out, but it really depends on how much you get paged and how many people are on rotation.

Very true, though the flip side of this as that some of us take advantage of remote work to have more flexible lives.

For example, yesterday I had a block of deep work scheduled for the afternoon but wasn't really feeling it. So I went on a long hike instead, came home, and worked from 6-9.

I'd need outrageous amounts of money (even for tech) to consider pager duty though, it sounds hellish.

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#113

Post by tremon » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 4:48 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #85

esotericn wrote: post #70

As a European (for now, oho) this doesn't surprise me at all. American working patterns are bonkers. You guys have this concept of 'vacation' which well, isn't. 15 days or whatever per year pretty much all just must either get banked for emergencies, admin, or maybe that one Mega Holiday where you fly across the world and spend a week or whatever trying to forget your life. I don't get it at all. It might make sense…

I'm genuinely curious; how many days do Europeans typically get?

The legal minimum in NL is (the equivalent of) four weeks per year (20 days on a 40 hours/week contract), so not that much more than US. Some fields (healthcare, construction, education) get more than that.

However, none of that can be usurped by your employer for other things than vacation. For example, your employer isn't allowed to deduct pay or withhold vacation hours for doctor's visits during work hours. Major life events, like funerals or child births are paid leave. And for most professions, there's no such things as unpaid overtime: you work more hours, you either get more pay or receive more vacation hours.

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#114

Post by madengr » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #105

wonderwonder wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone stopped working, who would grow the food, build the houses or go to medical school? I do absolutely agree with the concept of a UBI but there has to always be people that work otherwise everything collapses.

Why would everyone stop working? If you were given the choice, would you just sit around and eat M&Ms and watch tv all day? Or would you work anyway? Consider your examples. Who would grow the food? Farmers. Because people would grow food anyway (and do), whether or not they get paid, because it's intrinsically rewarding. Building houses? Jimmy Carter is rich and 90-odd years old and builds houses. Med school? Maybe…

Hobbies are intrinsically rewarding. Once you do it enough, it becomes monotonous. I don't think roofing a house or plowing a field is intrinsically rewarding past the fist few times.

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#115

Post by pmoriarty » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #17

CalRobert wrote: post #8

"Conducted by telecommunications company TollFreeForwarding.com, " an odd source, but OK. I work remote from a place outside the US. Last thanksgiving my boss (from the US) was on Slack. So were... all but one of my US colleagues. I see them writing at all hours of the night. On a work trip it was more or less assumed I'd work from 9 AM (8:30 ish really if you count coffee before) until 10 PM. I'm not on pagerduty an…

> It depends on the industry but there's too many people who are de facto actually at work every waking moment If "at work every waking moment" means "needs to be able to respond to emergencies", then this is actually the norm for everyone in the world until very recently. Anyone who doesn't have an employer is "at work every waking moment" by this definition. Peasants, housewives, aristocrats... Given the nearly 100…

There's something to what you say. If you're responsible for handling emergencies then you have some incentive for making sure such emergencies don't happen. Thus, developers have incentives to write more robust code and sysadmins have incentives to design more robust systems.

But what if your company doesn't give the resources you need to make these more robust? Your team may be too small to do much other than run from one fire to another, or to apply a bandaid fix rather than taking the time to do things right from the start. It's also not uncommon to come in to a company inheriting an unholy mess of spaghetti code which no one at the company fully understands nor has the time to document, redesign, or fix.

In these cases emergencies tend to be a regular occurrence, and arguably of the company's own making, but the hands of the people who have to respond to them are effectively tied.

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#116

Post by dominotw » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #28

So why do they stay at these awful jobs? Health insurance. Fear of losing, or even changing what they have (sometimes accompanied with some very real and not just anxiety out-of-pocket costs running into the thousands of dollars). Decoupling health insurance from employment is the #1 thing we could do to improve quality of our work. But in the long run, I dream of a day when wage labor is looked back on as nearly as…

> So why do they stay at these awful jobs? > Health insurance.

How do you know this though?

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#117

Post by dominotw » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #79

In Academia, it's not too uncommon for people to take extended sabbaticals to focus on a project without being distracted with work nonsense, but I haven't really heard of any company doing that in the US. I would love to take around a month every year just to focus on a purely technical problem instead of focussing 20% of my time in technical stuff, and 80% of my time going through bureaucratic hoops that seemingly…

I took a sabbatical for couple of months last year and totally wasted the whole thing lazing around.

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#118

Post by wonderwonder » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #105

wonderwonder wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone stopped working, who would grow the food, build the houses or go to medical school? I do absolutely agree with the concept of a UBI but there has to always be people that work otherwise everything collapses.

Why would everyone stop working? If you were given the choice, would you just sit around and eat M&Ms and watch tv all day? Or would you work anyway? Consider your examples. Who would grow the food? Farmers. Because people would grow food anyway (and do), whether or not they get paid, because it's intrinsically rewarding. Building houses? Jimmy Carter is rich and 90-odd years old and builds houses. Med school? Maybe…

Considering most farm workers are unskilled laborers making at or close to minimum wage, why would they work if they could get a UBI that covers all their needs? Farmers would still farm but that's because they own the land and directly benefit from it, they would not be able to perform all of the unskilled labor on their own. This could perhaps be offset if we drastically changed our guest worker program to allow unskilled labor in from other countries but it would have to be setup in a manner that denies these workers a UBI, otherwise they too would not work.

Same issue with building houses. The number of people wanting to perform unskilled labor would not come close to approaching the required need for unskilled laborers. For example I dont think anyone wants to be a roofer in the summer heat, the do it only for the paycheck.

Doctors? You are probably right, people will do it for the love of the work. I am very much pro UBI but there are still a ton of supporting things that need to be worked out.

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#119

Post by throwawayhhakdl » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

mercutio2 wrote: post #65

Ididntdothis wrote: post #5

Americans really need more vacation time. For a while I worked with only 15 days a year. This never gives you the opportunity to ever really relax. Life becomes just one endless meaningless time of working year after year that kills any kind of creativity . I can see this in a lot of workaholics. They just go through the motions of working hard but don’t get much done. And once you have been in that machine for a whi…

“Only” 15 vacation days? I’m not sure if you’re in the US, or if you’re including paid holidays, but 15 days is the average number of vacation days for people with 25 years of tenure in full time jobs in the US. Most people with less tenure get much less. So that wouldn’t be an “only” in the US. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm

I get 15 at low tenure. But if I got more I don’t think I would be able to find reasonable times to take it. My father became a C suite guy at a fairly large corp and by the end of his career had quite a lot of vacation days each year... but he could never find an opportunity to use half of it because he was accountable for far too much.

I don’t really know if I find anything disagreeable in it tbh. Vacation can be nice but it’s necessity is a function of your baseline work life balance... and work life balance tends to be harder the worse your job is. An interesting paradox in that the people who probably need it most are the least entitled to it per societal norms.

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#120

Post by jmpavlec » Fri, Nov 01, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

tremon wrote: post #113

tombert wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious; how many days do Europeans typically get?

The legal minimum in NL is (the equivalent of) four weeks per year (20 days on a 40 hours/week contract), so not that much more than US. Some fields (healthcare, construction, education) get more than that. However, none of that can be usurped by your employer for other things than vacation. For example, your employer isn't allowed to deduct pay or withhold vacation hours for doctor's visits during work hours. Major…

I think 20 is the minimum but from what I've seen 24-25 is the most common (at least in the IT field). I've got 28.