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Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired'

bbc.co.uk

51–60 of 144 posts

Re: Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired'

#51
Just gonna say it, I doubt the solution is yet more apps on the device that is the real source of anxiety.

Putting the thing in airplane mode and leaving it in a different room when you get home is going to do you way more good than staring into your phone and swiping away at more apps.

Re: Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired'

#52
post #21
post #4

I think the scariest thing about burn-out, is that not everyone is financially able to take the recommended time off to recover - what then? I've certainly been close to being in this boat, had to take a job before I fully recovered, so took one I felt might be a bit lighter on the load and still give me some chance of recovery. Pleased to report it has been mostly successful.

If the claim of the scale is true, its a good marker for societal collapse.

You already see this in the US, murder, suicide, drug dependency. Hundreds of people are losing their mind everyday.

Re: Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired'

#53
post #6

I appreciate giving more visibility to burnout, since I suffered from it in the past, but is this piece an article or PR for this woman and some random app?

>or PR for this woman and some random app?

BBC News isn't what it used to be, stopped paying my license fee last year because of the decline.

Re: Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired'

#54
post #4

I think the scariest thing about burn-out, is that not everyone is financially able to take the recommended time off to recover - what then? I've certainly been close to being in this boat, had to take a job before I fully recovered, so took one I felt might be a bit lighter on the load and still give me some chance of recovery. Pleased to report it has been mostly successful.

Depends where you are - in many European countries you'll get paid during medical leave (and you'll get medical leave for burnout) plus companies won't fire you.

Here in the Netherlands the balance of this is quickly tipping the wrong way. For certains low end job types (cleaning, delivery, etc) people no longer get permanent contracts because of the risk for the employer. Instead people work using a sort of pseudo-freelance construction. Having all the risk but having non of the freedom/benefits. New laws to protect these pseudo-freelancers, like manditory insurance or Wet DBA (to determine how much of a real freelancer you are) go against the will of true freelancers and thus are hard to implement as well.

Re: Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired'

#55

I absolutely love how that app that's advertised in the writing is primarily targeted at the 25-40 range... Perhaps after 40 they think you don't work hard anymore... For the record, I started writing code for a living more than 30 years ago. I guess I should be safe, by the mind of these clever guys.

This line also stood out to me and perhaps I'm overly charitable, but I decided to interpret it as saying that people who made it to 40 while working in tech must have necessarily matured in their self-care awareness to the point where they don't suffer from burnout anymore, because for a lack of better way to put this, they know better by then.

Re: Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired'

#56

A lot of companies are actively factoring this into their HR model. Their model is to hire fresh people and burn them out. Increasingly this is the direction western corporations are moving. Their ideal model is: place performance quotas above long term sustainability, people then burn themselves out, you then fire them for performance reasons, and you have them on an aggressive noncompete and threaten them with it w…

If you're talking about US chattel slavery, your comparison is way off base and you should probably edit your post. Instead of firing an "underperforming" slave they could be legally murdered. Because all descendants were owned by the master indefinitely they could freely breed and rape "top performers" like animals in order to produce more slaves. When we end up with a corporate system that allows for that level of control of life or death in normal circumstances then maybe you can make your comparison. Institutionalized burn out is not it though.

Re: Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired'

#57
Origin of the phrase used in the title: https://www.thenation.com/article/fannie-lou-hamer-tired-bei...

I think the circumstances mentioned in the article need corrective action, but they are orders of magnitude different than what this phrase was referring to.

Re: Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired'

#58

A lot of companies are actively factoring this into their HR model. Their model is to hire fresh people and burn them out. Increasingly this is the direction western corporations are moving. Their ideal model is: place performance quotas above long term sustainability, people then burn themselves out, you then fire them for performance reasons, and you have them on an aggressive noncompete and threaten them with it w…

> Their model is to hire fresh people and burn them out. When I was at Amazon, this was the feeling with some employees around me: The stack-ranking meant they were made to a rat-race every year. I can't seem to recall who, but someone higher-up let it slip when quizzed about higher attrition rate (back in 2010s) that Amazon believed in evolution , and that that meant the slow would eventually give the way for the fa…

In my first job back in the 80's a VP sent out a memo to everyone about the importance of reusing paperclips.

Naturally it had the opposite effect of us dumping boxes of them in the trash.

Re: Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired'

#59
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> companies that expect people to work this hard are almost exclusively very well paying entry level jobs wasn't my experience at all, I did get "well paid jobs" in startups, but in the end, combining 3 jobs in one and doing 80 hours a week isn't worth it even if your salary looks pretty high.

How and why someone will work 80 hours a week? Don't they have families, friends, sport, or a hobby? Why is it necessary?

In startups that's usually how they trick you: they hire you even if you don't have much experience, they give you a decent salary, then they make you feel like you have to work more in order to "prove" their choice was the right one.

I've also seen this "culture" of "we're one big family" in startups, which just feels weird and forced.

Re: Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired'

#60

A lot of companies are actively factoring this into their HR model. Their model is to hire fresh people and burn them out. Increasingly this is the direction western corporations are moving. Their ideal model is: place performance quotas above long term sustainability, people then burn themselves out, you then fire them for performance reasons, and you have them on an aggressive noncompete and threaten them with it w…

If you're talking about US chattel slavery, your comparison is way off base and you should probably edit your post. Instead of firing an "underperforming" slave they could be legally murdered. Because all descendants were owned by the master indefinitely they could freely breed and rape "top performers" like animals in order to produce more slaves. When we end up with a corporate system that allows for that level of…

Yes but slaves were expensive. You'd go broke if you just murdered all of them.
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