Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

>Encourage time off

The best way to do this is to mandate a minimum time off. I've been lucky enough to work a couple places where this was the policy. This has to be a top-down initiative.

>Increase headcount

Definitely. I've seen short-sightedness prevent this from happening and it doesn't end well. In fact, I once quit a job where I was gradually taking on additional work (without additional pay, of course). I probably wouldn't have quit if I had one additional person to help me. When I expressed my concern I got "we can manage our workload right now." An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

>Express gratitude

Yes, but do it with cash. Don't send trinkets to people's houses - just give them the cash instead. It can get really insulting when you're rewarding people with silly trinkets then saying there's no room in the budget for a pay increase. (Been there).

> So stop putting them under a lot of pressure. The second tip hints at this, but it only seems to be a reactionary measure. Maybe all this goalsetting, OKRs and such is exactly the problem with the industry, always having to feel pressured to an extreme by metrics and stats which effectively mean nothing, when most people just want to put in an honest day's work and progress.

You nailed it. The entire article can be summed up by your statement. It's great they're acknowledging it, but putting corporate make-up on it is cringey; it almost comes off like we are the problem and not the other way around.

I don't give a damn about "drinking the kool-aid" and I don't give a damn about your business theatrics nor the political drama that goes with it. Give me work to do and leave me alone to do it. That'll solve a lot of the burn-out.

It's not just the US. Without going into the nuances of the US, things like burnout are severely on the rise among the younger crowds all over the world despite some of them working as much or less than before in several countries.

Most of these countries are adopting American office concepts. More statistics, more pressure, more management / talks with management, more "work family", tighter interviews, you name it. All stuff that pressures the Average Joe who just wants to make a living. For SE, the majority of these jobs are best described as "gluing APIs together", nowhere near the prestigious "you really gotta want it!" jobs they are sold as. Now add to that while SE does earn above average in all of these countries, it isn't so luxurious as a non-senior that you could pick your nose and live super comfortably no matter which city you live in.

So the pressure got worse and both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators are down. Add onto that a bunch of other societal problems. If anything, it's more surprising people aren't expecting half the populace to burn out at some point in life.

I think that’s a lovely page and some excellent sentiments in many areas.

However I feel that it’s important to accept reality and not attempt to redefine words.

A startup is literally defined as to “get something moving”, I would say at this point that gitlab is definitely in the realm of “in motion” and has a significant amount of inertia. It is not in the first stages of becoming a company, it is a relatively well-oiled, thought through and publicly traded company.

Obviously terms can be fuzzy, there may be no single event that defines gitlab as no longer being a startup and no particular point in time being the point of state alteration.

But gitlab as it exists today definitely does not meet my own personal and informal definition of startup, and I suspect that is true for many people.

It a very, very fine line to tread before it becomes Defiant Jazz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Turq37lntO0)