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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]

#61

Post by BaseballPhysics »

aqme28 wrote: post #50
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

Yes. Yes it does.

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

#62

Post by pmoriarty »

aqme28 wrote: post #50
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"Nothing burns you out quite like realizing that you don't even want your boss's job."

As much as I hated my last job, I thought my boss' job was even worse because of all the corporate BS he had to constantly put up with. He seemed to love his job despite that, though.

Also, some of my colleagues (who'd been working for decades, just like me) seem to still love it and thrive on the stuff that made me want to quit and demotivated me. I'm fascinated with how some people like them are able to persevere and thrive in the same situations that make people like me quit and burn out.

I still don't know their secret.

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

#63

Post by gdfgjhs »

lumost wrote: post #6

Something that doesn't seem explored here is the effect of working on ineffective work. Everyone will encounter something like the following in their career 1. There is a problem that your customers and you face - but you are not allowed to solve it for "Reasons" 2. The product area will never work, but you must continue working on things that no one will ever use for "reasons". Ever write exhaustive test coverage fo…

Another big issue is Checkmark Driven Development.

I signed up to work on a microservice where we were supposed to be a small startup within a big company. We supposedly can make decisions which are good for our customers and work on interesting challenges.

Except security and compliance is top priority, and it doesn't matter how those security and compliance requirements fit our service. We need to get a checkmark. Everyone from security and compliance team is unable to have a technical discussion but they continue make technical decisions for us.

And in order to stay relevant, they change their checkmark requirements every few months. So we spend all our time, trying to keep our service compliant and don't really get anytime to work on real issues.

I get the feeling my job's main function is to keep these security and compliance people happy. They have no skin in our service, my manager doesn't want to bring up issues with her higher up.

All this leave me feeling extremely unsatisfied and burned out at the end of the day.

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

#64

Post by berg117 »

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 times 100. Being a middle manager sucks even more, because you have no real ability to protect people. When the people under you are happy and doing well, you spend no real time with them... because you're constantly being pulled to deal with crises, often of executive cause... whatever problem the unluckiest or worst person on your team faces is your problem, every day.

It also confirmed my negative views of upper management and capitalism. Growing up, I had always felt that the left-wing view of corporate executives as worthless, evil parasites whom society would be better without was an exaggeration, or a negative depiction derived from a mix of envy and the "bad apple" effect. Nope. I've sat in enough meetings and heard how upper-level executives talk about their workers to realize that the "haters" were dead right all along. Half of these people in upper management deserve to be guillotined; the other half are not so severely awful, but are spineless or ineffective at doing anything to oppose the horrible culture.

As a middle manager you have the choice to parrot the upper management crap, or tell it like it is. Neither is great.

Yeah, this conflict of interest is the worst. Do what's right, and you're risking your livelihood, while not really helping the people beneath you. Lie for executives' benefit (i.e., be the face of their bad decisions, so the execs can be loved) and it corrodes your soul, but at least you stay employed.

The funny thing is that corporate capitalism is now indistinguishable from the Soviet system at its worst. We are in Kazakhstan 1987 right now. The only difference is that we pay two orders of magnitude more for these shithead bureaucrats than the most corrupt SSRs ever did.

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

#66

Post by berg117 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #62
aqme28 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Nothing burns you out quite like realizing that you don't even want your boss's job." As much as I hated my last job, I thought my boss' job was even worse because of all the corporate BS he had to constantly put up with. He seemed to love his job despite that, though. Also, some of my colleagues (who'd been working for decades, just like me) seem to still love it and thrive on the stuff that made me want to quit an…

Your boss probably had to seem to love his job. Indeed, that's part of the job, as a middle manager.

What's amazing about corporate is that, when you get together years later and the truth comes out because everyone has moved on, you realize how much everyone really hated their jobs. There are some true-believing useful idiots out there, but I'd guess that 80% of people see corporate for what it is--they're just not allowed to make it known that they do. It's reminiscent of that time people applauded Stalin for 11 minutes because no one wanted to risk being the first one to stop clapping.

As a worker, you're at least allowed to grumble a little bit. As a middle manager, you're a full-time actor. You have to implement the will of some truly awful people and pretend to have no moral objections whatsoever.

Some middle managers truly are pricks and petty tyrants, but my observation is that most of them are just forced to pretend to be that way, becoming the face of horrible decisions so the execs can be loved by the masses. Your boss doesn't want to be a micromanaging cunt--he has to pretend to be one, because he's a rubber glove for executives.

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

#67

Post by enobrev »

brimble wrote: post #56
lumost wrote: post #6

Something that doesn't seem explored here is the effect of working on ineffective work. Everyone will encounter something like the following in their career 1. There is a problem that your customers and you face - but you are not allowed to solve it for "Reasons" 2. The product area will never work, but you must continue working on things that no one will ever use for "reasons". Ever write exhaustive test coverage fo…

I doubt even 10% of the code I've written over the last 15ish years is still in use, anywhere. I doubt more than a quarter of it ever had an overall positive effect—monetary or otherwise—large enough to justify the cost of writing it. I've spent probably a third of my career, spread out here and there, working on projects that all the ICs could tell were doomed for super-obvious reasons (clear failure to find product…

This echoes my experience as well, but from a freelance perspective rather than as an employee. About 20 years of web development experience with hundreds of projects. Some were excellent, hopeful projects that legitimately helped people. Most were not. Regardless, there are maybe 3-5 of them left, and it's hard to say if _any_ of the code I've written on them is still there.

The majority of my last ten years have gone toward start-ups, and the timelines toward EOL are generally even shorter - at least until we hit something out of the park. At the very least the days are exciting, the problems are interesting, and the distance between myself and the end user is very short.

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

#69

Post by AlwaysRock »

Maximus9000 wrote: post #54
CalRobert wrote: post #37

The world is burning, carbon emissions are increasing despite a global pandemic, democracy is in backslide, and I'm doing stupid shit that really doesn't matter. My children will grow up in a hotter, thirstier, more dangerous world. Nothing I'm doing is going to improve this. My job is cush. I work remote. I make good money. But I stare blankly at the screen and just can't bring myself to care. I eye climatebase and…

There are companies that you could work for that would be win-win. Companies that are making the world better and still require talented software developers.

I would love to work at a company that does something great for the world. Like work on climate change or longevity. It feels so hard to find those roles though.

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

#70

Post by AlwaysRock »

armagon wrote: post #68

Does changing jobs help with burnout, or are the people who plan on leaving their current work going to find themselves burned out again/still in a few months?

I feel like the first month is great then its the same cycle. Especially because you have to start over and build a reputation of doing good work so you work a little later and a little harder one week then that becomes the norm and on it continues.
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