Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

technical.ly

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 239 posts

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#221

Post by rahimnathwani »

Sharlin wrote: post #194
rahimnathwani wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you clearly know very little about burnout" You may disagree with my statement about the cause of burnout, and you may be correct about that. But it's unlikely you know enough about me to judge how much I know (or don't know) about burnout.

But you yourself made the same error, claiming that lots of people are simply mistaken about the causes of their burnouts and that you know their condition better than themselves.

Our statements were qualitatively different. Compare:

A) Each living human has 2 legs

B) Sharlin has 2 legs

Taken literally, B is a subset of A, so A is the stronger statement.

But in normal speech, it's clear that when someone makes a claim about members of a large group, they're making a statement that usually applies to members of that group. And not claiming to have specific knowledge of every single member.

Because statement B is more specific, I probably need more specific data before I make it.

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#222

Post by filoeleven »

jrs235 wrote: post #150
t0mbstone wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about people who build tons of successful things and get win after win after win, but are still feeling burned out? For me, a "win" would be accomplishing something and then getting to bask in the success and take a fucking break and do nothing for a year. Shoot, even being able to take a break for a month after busting my butt on a project for a year would be nice. But nope. You never really "finish" anything i…

A never ending backlog of work to be done. No rest. No jogging. Not even intervals/ladders (sprint a while, then jog a while and repeat). Just sprint. Sprint. Sprint. Until you burn out and collapse.

Rich Hickey on sprints (30-second clip): https://youtu.be/zPT-DuG0UjU

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#223

Post by distances »

throw394024 wrote: post #152
S_A_P wrote: post #54

I had a bad case of burnout 2 years ago. I think for me it wasn’t that I was overwhelmed or otherwise overworked. I was working a lot of hours, but that didn’t bother me either. What got under my skin was that I understood the systemic reasons for all the fires we were having to put out were never going to change. So the burnout was the feeling that I was unable to do anything but tread water.

100% agree. It's about agency. Most companies I've worked at haven't strictly followed agile, and definitely haven't allowed devs much say in prioritizing bugs. My current thought is product companies might have more of a vested interest in quality, but I'm not positive. Does anyone have any suggestions here? The only thing I've seen is most people move into management, which I'm thinking is likely the only way out f…

Who prioritises your bugs then? For my teams we've almost always done bugfixes outside the sprint effort with developers' own initiative. We follow crash reports and prioritise ourselves with never even telling the PO we fixed something. Product owner is left with feature ownership and doesn't have to know about the day-to-day operations except for the metrics that have business impact.

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#224

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

labster wrote: post #83
beerandt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlimited PTO is crazy to me. It takes the principles of spelled-out employment terms and throws them in the trash. The "flexible hours" policy was bad enough at my last job. Wildly varying interpretations between different managers and department heads under the same roof.

My last job implemented an unlimited PTO policy. In 2020, I took about 7 days off, and worked at least 20 days on weekends. With the increased responsibilities, there just wasn’t any time that was good to leave… until I left for good. It was definitely a factor in my current burnout. The funny thing was before the VCs bought the company, I had two weeks but in practice could ask the CTO for as much time as I wanted.…

> Setting a minimum PTO might help

This is how it has to be implemented in EU countries, so in general it appears to be (in Ireland, at least) the statutory 20 days + whatever.

People have told me that they've taken up to 8 weeks. But I've never ended up working at any of those companies so it's hard to know if that's true or not.

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#225

Post by Afton »

pietrovismara wrote: post #207
Afton wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you be miserable? Union dues? occasional union communication? I'm just trying to understand what hypothetical issue you feel would be super arduous.

Funnily enough OP could give you no answer. It seems they just spewed without thought some of the anti-union propaganda that is so common in the US. And nowadays in Europe too, sadly.

TBF, there's not really a notification mechanism for comment replies in HN, so if you're like me, and you just occasionally check in on your comments, it's easy to miss responses until ridiculously too late. I know I have done this in the past.

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#226

Post by djhn »

shoo wrote: post #104
karaterobot wrote: post #53

When I've been burned out or hated my job, I didn't take vacations, because the crushing realization that I'd have to return to work was almost worse than losing myself in the uninterrupted, repetitive, dead-eyed grind. While on vacation, I'd start thinking about the countdown to the end of the vacation. > Well, root out the real causes of burnout. I'll offer the definition that's made most sense to me. I didn't come…

Jennifer Senior's excellent article on burnout, "Can’t Get No Satisfaction" [1], contains this gem of a quote, from psychotherapist & burned-out burnout researcher Prof Barry Farber: > [...] their level of caring couldn’t be sustained in the absence of results > Farber often calls burnout “the gap between expectation and reward,” Also: > “My clients are perfectionists,” says Alden Cass, a therapist to both corporate…

I like this model, but shouldn't reality be replaced by a person's subjective perception of reality? Various states of delusion (intoxicated, in love, religious, depressed, manic) can modulate reality as experienced by the person.

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#227

Post by sneak »

stadium wrote: post #24
sneak wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The passive-aggressive lie that is "unlimited PTO" is part of the growing toxicity of startup work environments.

Depends on the company! If it's inauthentic though, employees can smell it from far away.

It's always inauthentic, as otherwise people would take all work days off, never show up again, and collect a paycheck in perpetuity.

This is a business transaction. "Unlimited PTO" literally means free paychecks.

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#228

Post by namrog84 »

jrockway wrote: post #109
labster wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last job implemented an unlimited PTO policy. In 2020, I took about 7 days off, and worked at least 20 days on weekends. With the increased responsibilities, there just wasn’t any time that was good to leave… until I left for good. It was definitely a factor in my current burnout. The funny thing was before the VCs bought the company, I had two weeks but in practice could ask the CTO for as much time as I wanted.…

Yeah, if I ever start a company, mandatory vacation will be a thing. If you don't use up your 4 weeks of vacation before Thanksgiving, don't come to work for the rest of the year. Don't worry, there will still be work when you get back. Another thing I like are company holidays. When nobody is working, there is no email / code reviews / Slack to miss. That's a real vacation!

It really does need to come from leadership. The last 2 places I've worked had basically no work after Thanksgiving and much of leadership did take off basically entire month of December.

Also we recently started having an occasionally Friday that everyone takes off same time. You don't have too but to make it easier that people who are often quite busy have an opportunity to not feel like things are getting behind. Over 90% participation(100+ people) in our group mental health day.

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#229

Post by wonnage »

8note wrote: post #155
rahimnathwani wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off." Exactly. Yet most people mistakenly attribute the feeling to other causes. OP quote what people think are the causes of their own burnout, and took those at face value. When you're burnt out, you're probably not in a good state to determine the cause.

I certainly get burned out from things that pay off, too

sounds like a personal problem

Re: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

#230

Post by Viliam1234 »

physicles wrote: post #170
t0mbstone wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about people who build tons of successful things and get win after win after win, but are still feeling burned out? For me, a "win" would be accomplishing something and then getting to bask in the success and take a fucking break and do nothing for a year. Shoot, even being able to take a break for a month after busting my butt on a project for a year would be nice. But nope. You never really "finish" anything i…

Are there companies that would let you take the rest of the week off in that situation? If so, shouldn’t they also make you work overtime to finish some work that you underestimated? Isn’t the trick to just work at a sustainable pace, day in and day out, and celebrate the wins along the way? All that said, in the last five years my longest holiday has been a week. The work really is endless.

> All that said, in the last five years my longest holiday has been a week. The work really is endless.

Sometimes, even the week off doesn't mean less work, because the few weeks before the vacation you have to work harder to compensate for your coming absence.

Post reply on HN