> Working at a startup is demanding.
Is there no limit on what businesses can call themselves startups? GitLab is a publicly traded company with a $7B+ market cap, 1,500 employees, and many enterprise customers.
Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit
41–50 of 205 posts
Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit
#42I suffered from severe burnout around a year ago, and only now am I starting to feel back to normal. Nothing here would have helped me, and it's pretty clear to me why that is the case. (Paraphrased from literature that I read at the time) There's two kinds of burnout. One is caused by overwork, stress, long hours, not enough breaks, no holidays, not enough headcount, and so on. The kind of things this article talks…
I think this is actually the most common type of "unreported" burnout in tech. The enormous amount of work to be done weighs on you, but the work doesn't have a defined set of requirements or the requirements are constantly shifting. For me, I've seen it mostly when a rewrite is happening, seems closely related to analysis paralysis.
Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit
#43A lot of this is centered around doing less, expecting less from your workers, hiring more and "being more positive". These are pretty sentiments, but frankly they're completely dis-joined from the reality of working in a competitive, high-stakes engineering environment, where your boss WILL call you while you're on vacation, where you WILL go 8-12 months without finding a qualified candidate, where you WILL feel pre…
> serious work requires sacrifice and some burnout is inevitable
Well, the Navy Seals, who know a thing or two about high stress and deadly serious work, popularized the expression "slow is smooth and smooth is fast."
But unless you're an emergency room doctor or defending Ukraine or developing the next COVID19 vaccine, come on, nothing you're doing is that important.
What you're describing is not a thing that most organizations have any real need for, it's a culture of fake emergencies.
Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit
#44All the "strategies" (really just tips) follow the same pattern of either tunneling on overwork as a cause, treating symptoms or pathos. >Sid and Michelle emphasized that the earlier a manager can identify burnout the better. Honestly, at the point of identification, you're likely too late. Especially for something as insidious as burnout, which can last for years and not show any symptoms before it is beyond the poi…
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Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit
#45All the "strategies" (really just tips) follow the same pattern of either tunneling on overwork as a cause, treating symptoms or pathos. >Sid and Michelle emphasized that the earlier a manager can identify burnout the better. Honestly, at the point of identification, you're likely too late. Especially for something as insidious as burnout, which can last for years and not show any symptoms before it is beyond the poi…
Anecdote time. As I’ve moved into larger companies and am shackled by OKRs, I am enjoying my work a lot less and feel under more pressure than ever but am getting less useful work done. It feels like a lack of trust and assumes the organization is run very efficiently and fairly—which I don’t think any company can truly claim. People just seem to adjust by gaming these systems instead of putting useful effort into th…
I agree fully with this. I'm currently at a small company (which has a different set of challenges), but my experience is that large employers come up with flavor-of-the-year useless metrics in an attempt to measure progress towards goals and productivity.
Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit
#46It bears repeating, many people who think they have burnout actually have chronic fatigue (CFS/ME) but don’t know it yet. Repeated burnouts may simply be a relapse and recovery cycle. A number of the genetic predispositions to CFS also tends to have behavioral components (anxiety disorders and ADHD) that include a preference for a career in software. Now with Covid many of those who may never have had CFS are finding…
While it sounds correlated, I don't know if that's true. They surely can complement each other quite well though! 2021 I had long covid for almost 14 months. I still worked and burnt out once about halfway through the year. 2022 I recovered and am burning out right now again halfway through the year. I have plenty of energy. I work on compelling side projects, exercise everyday, and raise two kids. I just don't reall…
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Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit
#47I'm pretty sure we will see an appetite for transition to the 4 day work week.
Most people will find some paycut (10-20%) acceptable in exchange for increasing their free time by 50% (2 day weekend -> 3 day weekend).
Most companies will find the 10-20% reduction in a very large expense (payroll) attractive in the current tightening economic conditions.
I would be surprised if there was any productivity loss as a result of this, people will feel better, more valued, and will perform equally as well. It's not like you can really clock out of a software job especially in the remote world, so days off are more important.
Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit
#48All the "strategies" (really just tips) follow the same pattern of either tunneling on overwork as a cause, treating symptoms or pathos. >Sid and Michelle emphasized that the earlier a manager can identify burnout the better. Honestly, at the point of identification, you're likely too late. Especially for something as insidious as burnout, which can last for years and not show any symptoms before it is beyond the poi…
> 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…
that's super right. Got first hand unfortunate experience. The simple thing is: please managers don't buy the work-hard-to-compete ethos. It's not because you can take it that others can or should.
Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit
#49Here are some tips I would give, as an individual contributor:
* Minimize the number of simultaneous projects. Having more on your plate than you can imagine getting done is a huge cause of stress and burnout.
* Avoid switching priorities frequently. Shield the team from too many external requests.
* Avoid making "small" requests (e.g. a random data pull). Handling your request is probably not as small an amount of work as you think. This is especially a problem when for people with a lot of meetings - they may not have that many hours left in the day for their "real" work, and your "small" request might take up all those hours for today (which is really stressful when you badly needed those hours for something else!).
* Avoid interrupting developers / making them feel like you could demand something at any time.
* Clarify priorities, and don't bug people about lower priority things.
* Don't schedule too many meetings. Developers work on a Maker's schedule, and ideally would have at least half of each day completely free of meetings. Meetings are more draining for ICs than they are for you.
* Don't argue with time estimates given by developers. (Though looking for ways to reduce the scope of a project is valid)
* Give developers time to pay down tech debt.
* Listen to and act on issues people raise.
* Let people know what is going to happen well in advance. Give people time to gear up for changes. Don't make people feel like things could suddenly change at any time with no warning.
Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit
#50It bears repeating, many people who think they have burnout actually have chronic fatigue (CFS/ME) but don’t know it yet. Repeated burnouts may simply be a relapse and recovery cycle. A number of the genetic predispositions to CFS also tends to have behavioral components (anxiety disorders and ADHD) that include a preference for a career in software. Now with Covid many of those who may never have had CFS are finding…
While it sounds correlated, I don't know if that's true. They surely can complement each other quite well though! 2021 I had long covid for almost 14 months. I still worked and burnt out once about halfway through the year. 2022 I recovered and am burning out right now again halfway through the year. I have plenty of energy. I work on compelling side projects, exercise everyday, and raise two kids. I just don't reall…
Not everybody experiencing burnout has CFS/ME but enough do that it’s worth pointing out every time there is a burnout discussion. I thought I simply kept burning out through overwork for about 10 years before discovering that I actually had CFS and I’m assuming I’m not the only one. I was highly resistant to the idea of having it as I did not identify with the disability and thought CFS people were just lazy. Had I known I would have treated it better sooner.