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Burnoutindex.org

burnoutindex.org

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Re: Burnoutindex.org

#131

Post by hug »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #71
sz4kerto wrote: post #45

Be really careful with these surveys. The problems of these, among other things: - mixing up burnout risk with burnout - mixing up burnout with physical or mental fatigue - not serving any purpose (i.e. not providing good directions) Burnout is primarily a negative change in perception, and it's a spectrum, obviously. You get burned out when your perception of the same situation gets progressively worse. This can be…

Wait.... "apathy" is rare? I thought that is the step where most of us have been hanging out. I have been waiting for the "real burnout" to kick in when I dropped another level or two.

It depends on what you mean by apathy. I'd look up the definition for you, but honestly I can't be bothered. Hyuk hyuk.

Anyway: I am incredibly productive in my ops job, where I feel like the platforms I support are largely meaningless and do nothing but drive efficiency to achieve nothing important for no one in particular.

I feel I am driving 'value creation' for people whose wealth is already immeasurable, in a way that it's like it's without beginning or end and perhaps does not even really exist.

Running thousands of watts worth of automated infrastructure capable of serving gigabytes of traffic at sub millisecond latency, over multipath anycast triple redundant n-tier software defined fuckin' whatever, so that your loading spinner shows up bit faster.

Like a literal hamster wheel.

And all that said I am neither unhappy nor close to burn out. I have absolutely no passion for my job, but I do for the things that it allows me to do. Work is always, for everyone involved, a means to an end:

For the company, that end is whatever it is producing, widgets for the widgetless, convincing people that widgetlessnes is terrible, tracking widget purchases to better market more advanced widgets to those that desire them, or whatever.

For me, it is my salary: The thing in life that grants me the affordance to do what it is that I actually want to do. That which I have pathos for, it could be.

Honestly, a lot of people I deal with are the same: If they could leave their nine-to-five in tech and make an equivalent living doing interpretive dance or painting while doing handstands or competing in spoken-word free-verse poetry competitions, y'know, the thing it is that they want to do that is worth absolutely nothing to anyone else, they probably would. I would write bad novels from the back corner of a dimly lit cocktail bar.

I can't do that for a salary anything near like what I make now, so I do it in my free time.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

Re: Burnoutindex.org

#132

Post by ChefboyOG »

sz4kerto wrote: post #45

Be really careful with these surveys. The problems of these, among other things: - mixing up burnout risk with burnout - mixing up burnout with physical or mental fatigue - not serving any purpose (i.e. not providing good directions) Burnout is primarily a negative change in perception, and it's a spectrum, obviously. You get burned out when your perception of the same situation gets progressively worse. This can be…

Our common idea of burnout largely comes from Christina Maslach—the Maslach Burnout Inventory is more or less the standard tool that psychologists use to score and diagnose burnout now—and interestingly, it diagnoses burnout as three related but independent subscales:

Exhaustion - somewhat self-explanatory

Professional Efficacy - your view of your performance

Cynicism - a distancing of yourself from your job

Though you may come across different names in different writings. It's interesting how the subscales impact each other.

I don't know if I fully buy into the framework 100%, but it makes for interesting research nonetheless.

Re: Burnoutindex.org

#133

Post by hug »

wcunning wrote: post #48

I got a 2.1/6, which is less than 50%. Apparently this is a "high" risk of burnout... Why not replace it with a button that says "Do you work in tech?" Yes -> High Risk of Burnout, since that's the vibe they're going with.

And they have the balls to tell me that my cynicism level is high.

I mean, they're not wrong, but gosh.

Re: Burnoutindex.org

#134

Post by dunkelheit »

burntoutfire wrote: post #122
dunkelheit wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the term burnout was first applied to social workers. Just imagine the situation they are in: a steady stream of people with serious problems in their lives comes to you and you are supposed to help them. But you have so little time and power to help any particular case that you hardly seem to make any difference. And no matter what you do that stream never ends. No wonder that feelings of sheer helplessness,…

> ineffectiveness, meaninglessness of your work, cynicism, ennui, and extreme aversion to the work can appear Jobs in corporate software development can feel pretty much like that, at least for me. Startups are better, but, on the other hand, they work you harder.

Yeah, exactly.

My own totally unscientific theory of burnout is that with scarce positive reinforcement and lack of progress towards some higher goal your lizard brain just stops understanding why on earth you continue to expend energy on this job thing. Of course your job pays the bills but this may be hard for the lizard brain to understand (and in case of volunteers where even this positive reinforcement is absent, burnout hits them especially hard).

Many corporate jobs share this dynamic. Support, obviously. But every position where there is a lot of routine maintenance and lack of any kind of satisfying milestone ahead carries the risk. Also, opensource maintainers (Unpaid? Check. Never ending stream of maintenance work? Check. Lack of some higher goal? Well, their project is already popular, there may be no other definite goal.)

Startups are better in this regard because growth provides positive reinforcement and the possibility of an exit provides a higher goal. But what if growth stops and the satisfying exit never materializes? Burnout will hit you like a hammer.

Re: Burnoutindex.org

#135

Post by brailsafe »

adrianmonk wrote: post #92
dnate wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, that theory does not work with the fact, that a lot of burnout victims are social workers.

Exactly. Burnout can happen because you have a cynical malaise about your mission. But it can also happen because you are so passionate about your mission that where a normal person would understand reasonable boundaries between work and life, you can't resist the temptation to push right past them. (Which violates the principle of taking care of yourself first, so that you can take care of others.) Sorry to bring up…

I feel like the cynical malaise is maybe more healthy to go in with, and also what your impression of everything turns into after getting burned out because you went in with a ton of personal investment (passion or whatever)

Re: Burnoutindex.org

#136

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

adrianmonk wrote: post #72
sp332 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could use your IP address or some tracking cookies to link this data to a bunch of other data. Potentially.

One nightmare / conspiracy theory scenario is they sell it to potential employers, recruiters, job search web sites, etc. and send them the signal "don't hire this person; they're burnt out".

But a job switch could help the burnout.

Re: Burnoutindex.org

#137

Post by milesvp »

sz4kerto wrote: post #91
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait.... "apathy" is rare? I thought that is the step where most of us have been hanging out. I have been waiting for the "real burnout" to kick in when I dropped another level or two.

Apathy is comparatively rare, yes. (Sorry for the HN crowd for not getting into the data here, not enough time right now.) That's because the previous level is usually so painful that people end up changing something. Especially in engineering the market is so much better than in practically any other field that people who don't move out from the previous phase ('I hate everyone around me') mostly do this because the…

Can confirm. I don't have the luxury of burnout, as the the primary breadwinner for a larger than anticipated family (yay twins!). So I hover just above breaking point, and only occasionally dip my toes in no longer having any F*s to give.

On the flip side, if I didn't have the family with young children, I'm positive my life would be so much less stressful, that burnout risk would be slim to none...

Re: Burnoutindex.org

#138

Post by baumy »

hug wrote: post #131
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait.... "apathy" is rare? I thought that is the step where most of us have been hanging out. I have been waiting for the "real burnout" to kick in when I dropped another level or two.

It depends on what you mean by apathy. I'd look up the definition for you, but honestly I can't be bothered. Hyuk hyuk. Anyway: I am incredibly productive in my ops job, where I feel like the platforms I support are largely meaningless and do nothing but drive efficiency to achieve nothing important for no one in particular. I feel I am driving 'value creation' for people whose wealth is already immeasurable, in a wa…

This isn't on topic, but assuming you were serious about writing novels in your free time - I enjoyed this comment so much I read it several times, and probably will come back and read it again at some point in the semi-distant future. You have a wonderful way with words.

Re: Burnoutindex.org

#139

Post by themodelplumber »

bagacrap wrote: post #88

When I joined the tech industry in my early 20s and for years after, I noticed that many in their 30s or older seemed burned out. It didn't make much sense to me, because to become a tech worker takes drive and ambition and how would you just lose that one day? Now, 12 years on I can definitely see how burnout is so prevalent. It's like living in the desert and hearing about people drowning. You'd ask yourself, "how…

The drive and ambition have a funny tech-related spin to them, too. Emotional or relational problems are cast in technical terms as if the solution is to file a bug report on one's own software, even in cases where it makes most sense just to get together and push back on the project / boss / client.

Plus you can only hear about e.g. responsiveness concerns like latency so much from the same team / project before you realize: The people themselves are attempting to work more like, and to become more like, machines. They are also thinking about "my latency" as a way of becoming as responsive as possible. If that's true of the group, you're lucky if the burnout isn't already so well entrenched as to be celebrated.

Re: Burnoutindex.org

#140

Post by annoyingnoob »

I think burnout happens when you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel, when every week is darker than the last.

My last job offered unlimited vacation. But if I ever took any vacation I'd get a message from my boss the night before I got back with a laundry list of the things that need attention ASAP - I couldn't really finish relaxing before I was vacuumed back into the soul sucking darkness.

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