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The state of burnout in tech, 2022 edition [pdf]

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Re: The state of burnout in tech, 2022 edition [pdf]

#41

Post by BeetleB »

pmoriarty wrote: post #13

Things contributing to my own (severe) burnout: 1 - Lack of variety, leading to boredom. After decades in the industry, I'm super bored with the things I know, and not in the least bit interested in learning more technical minutia of whatever flavor... pretty much all of it feels the same. The things I'm still interested in (like Scheme) are pretty obscure, so I'm unlikely to ever get to work with them. I hate all th…

> Chronic understaffing, crazy time pressure, and lack of resources. This is endemic in the tech field.

Plenty of SW jobs where this is not a problem (some even have good pay, not FAANG level, though).

Go interview, and ask questions during the interview about it. Questions I've asked:

1. I don't check my email when I go home (unless there's a cross-geo meeting or something). Is that workable with this job?

2. What is the cycle of work like? How often do you work more than 40 hours a week? Is it regular, continuous work or are there crunch times?

3. Do you have on-call work? (If yes, probe into details - some on call work is terrible, but I've been on interviews where the person said he got a call only 3 times in a whole year).

Re: The state of burnout in tech, 2022 edition [pdf]

#42

Post by ozzythecat »

I rose to a fairly high rank at Amazon. I was given explicit feedback to not get involved in certain day to day decisions or outcomes.

There was immense pressure to disconnect from actual situations and focus mainly on the “goals”… that if you didn’t do that, you weren’t being effective and you were wasting energy, holding yourself back from getting to the next level.

My first thought was that this feedback is around scaling. Obviously, the more you’re involved in the day to day, the more on your plate, the less you can scale up and focus on the big picture.

It took me some time to piece things together. The reality is that leadership wants senior leaders to stay disconnected. It makes it significantly easier to make decisions you wouldn’t make if you personally knew the people those decisions impact.

I won’t give specifics of another story, out of risk of getting outed. But imagine a C-level leader at Amazon telling people to step up and deliver among impossible timelines. To paraphrase, and btw - every one of these statements WERE made. I’m not making up a single statement.

“No, you’re not getting the raises you think you’re getting. And yes, many of your colleagues will leave in the coming months, because other companies will pay them significantly higher compensation. And yes, that will mean even more work for you. And yes, morale is suffering because of high attrition, but you need to convince your teams to deliver this.”

You see things like this in Hollywood films or TV dramas where you have cartoon villain personalities in positions of leadership. At the end of their speech, they might offer some candy or a box of donuts as token to make up for their asks.

At Amazon, if you work near or on campus, you get free bananas. :)

At Amazon the problem is they fail to see their employees as human beings. And they consider it a feature, not a bug.

Throw 100 things at the wall and see what sticks. If among those 100 things you also have to gut humans and use their guts and flesh to make things stick, then you do what needs to be done. If you don’t, the leadership will actually try and guilt you - that the problem is your inability, a weakness in your skill set and who you are.

Re: The state of burnout in tech, 2022 edition [pdf]

#43

Post by zwieback »

I'd be interested in the correlation to two metrics: age and size of employer. When I was young I worked at startups: super stressful, high risk of company collapse, constant overload, funding stress, etc. I'm in my 50s now and have worked at hp for 20 years. I feel nearly zero stress and don't know whether it's because I've just been through the cycle enough times to know the world won't end because of me and also the company is just super nice to me. And I still do almost 100% technical work as an IC.

Re: The state of burnout in tech, 2022 edition [pdf]

#44

Post by lupire »

wpietri wrote: post #18
pmoriarty wrote: post #13

Things contributing to my own (severe) burnout: 1 - Lack of variety, leading to boredom. After decades in the industry, I'm super bored with the things I know, and not in the least bit interested in learning more technical minutia of whatever flavor... pretty much all of it feels the same. The things I'm still interested in (like Scheme) are pretty obscure, so I'm unlikely to ever get to work with them. I hate all th…

> I'm not sure that even if I worked for a non-profit doing work I thought was important that it would translate to my own job being something I wanted to do. Hi! I've worked for a few non-profits over the years. They are no panacea! Many businesses at least have a clear success mode: do good things for people and they'll pay you so you can do more good things for them. But the business model of many non-profits is s…

If you don't need money (permanently or temporarily) as a techie, don't work a job for a nonprofit. If you want to help people, take time off your high paying corporate job to contribute to free software, or run a forum website, or do citizen data journalism.

Re: The state of burnout in tech, 2022 edition [pdf]

#46

Post by [deleted] »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #25
candiddevmike wrote: post #9

From what I've seen, across the industry, the folks who are burnt out are almost entirely individual contributors. You rarely see burnout in management, and it's typically in the form of folks who want to go back to being ICs/tried management and hated it. I think companies really need to work on reducing or eliminating the amount of bullshit ICs have to deal with vs management (time tracking, status updates, on call…

I think this is true. Management will shred through IC engineers, getting results but burning alot of them out in the process. Theres no accountability, and in some respects, its good business for them. They get the work done, the burnout really doesnt have that many repercussions. The overarching issue is: you need stability/healthy employees at the higher levels, at the lower levels it doesnt matter. You cant have…

[deleted]

Re: The state of burnout in tech, 2022 edition [pdf]

#47

Post by sokoloff »

candiddevmike wrote: post #9

From what I've seen, across the industry, the folks who are burnt out are almost entirely individual contributors. You rarely see burnout in management, and it's typically in the form of folks who want to go back to being ICs/tried management and hated it. I think companies really need to work on reducing or eliminating the amount of bullshit ICs have to deal with vs management (time tracking, status updates, on call…

I’m in management (former IC). I fight against as much pointless paperwork and bullshit as I can, but accounting principles and tax treatment of capitalizable work (and sometimes R&D credit programs and similar) force some amount of good-faith estimation of activities for which some amount of tracking is needed.

(If we paid you to do some operations task for an hour, that whole amount is a business expense this year. If we paid you to build software that will deliver value for the next three years, we have to take the expense of that hour across the next 36 months, not at all once. It’s a GAAP and a US tax code requirement. In no way do I care if you worked 33.25 or 40.75 hours in any given week other than to have enough data for finance to do accounting and file taxes correctly.)

Re: The state of burnout in tech, 2022 edition [pdf]

#48

Post by casralad »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #26

End overtime exemption. If an org can push workers for more work without paying them more, why wouldn't they? Solving this problem requires systems-level thinking. Understanding the incentives that result in burnout-creating interactions is key to creating new incentives that don't induce burnout. The quickest way to not fixing burnout is assuming that it is a natural part of software development, that it's up to ind…

I support this. Overtime is free labor and the market should be regulated by the government to prohibit this.

That said, I've been a software engineer for over twenty years and most of those years I've worked under 40 hours a week and rarely worked overtime.

Re: The state of burnout in tech, 2022 edition [pdf]

#50

Post by aqme28 »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #20
pmoriarty wrote: post #13

Things contributing to my own (severe) burnout: 1 - Lack of variety, leading to boredom. After decades in the industry, I'm super bored with the things I know, and not in the least bit interested in learning more technical minutia of whatever flavor... pretty much all of it feels the same. The things I'm still interested in (like Scheme) are pretty obscure, so I'm unlikely to ever get to work with them. I hate all th…

> After burning out on tech I really should have switched to another career... or even tried management Just a tip from someone who made that jump: If those five things you listed contributed to your burnout, trust me, moving into management won't help. 1. Management is the same damn slog day after day. You deal with people acting like children, senior management who lack any coherent vision and don't know what they'…

This is another issue though. Nothing burns you out quite like realizing that you don't even want your boss's job. It makes your career feel hopeless.
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