Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

Was going to comment something similar. After 4 years at a job I loved, went through the worst burnout of my life in 2018-2019, roughly the year before the pandemic. Lost the job and about lost my mind when executive dysfunction made it so hard to find work. Spent 2020 doing handyman work and donating plasma to make rent.

Turns out that I was sensitive to wheat, milk/unaged cheese and almonds but didn't know it yet. That saps serotonin, which made it feel like the world was continuously attacking me. Which feels like the withdrawal symptoms of untreated ADHD, like quitting smoking constantly. But at the time, I thought I had something like CFS or fibromyalgia. I believe that these may be correlated with inflammatory foods, and that I might have eventually developed a chronic condition like hypothyroidism or even cancer, so it's worth taking a food sensitivity test. I took the https://www.everlywell.com (no affiliation) test of 200 foods and credit it with pretty much saving my life. Or at the very least, my psyche.

I think what helped me mentally recover during the pandemic was TikTok and the shared awakening that so many people have been experiencing. Love/hate for that app is probably going to correlate with how feeling/thinking, intuitive/sensing and perceiving/judging someone's brain works though (I'm an INFP) so YMMV. I find that shifting realities from a downward to an upward spiral has made me more grateful and aligned me more towards shared prosperity. When I let my ego's goals finally die after 20 years of negative feedback loops, I found that the world picks up the slack so those goals happen anyway in a magnified way, which is manifestation.

What I'm trying to say is that if anyone is struggling with burnout, there's probably another cause which isn't apparent. For example, if you never have time to have a hobby anymore, it's probably time to set boundaries and communicate your needs. If you have no motivation for art or life goals, you might need to pencil active rest into your schedule, so that you give yourself a chance to become bored so you can hear your calling and discover a path to self-actualization. That peaceful source energy that's so abundant in nature is all but denied to us in the modern world where we can't even see the sky or hear a bird.

If that all sounds impossible, then those self-imposed barriers are probably attached to emotional trauma. Like if you're sacrificing your peace for a loved one, it might be time to do some shadow work to understand why you're overprotecting them from their own human experience and dignity. This can look like making the opposite choice than the one you have been making, and observing how reality reconfigures, who's blocking healing, who's helping, etc. It might be painful in the short term, but as each positive feedback cycle engages, it gets easier, and the other side is almost always better than what came before.

Yeah...that's not a "high stakes engineering environment", that's a poorly structure engineering environment.

8-12 years is enough time to train an 'unqualified' candidate, or get them the requisite licensing/certificates/etc, assuredly.

On call while on vacation? You're understaffed then; even in the face of catastrophe you should have an on call rotation. If even then you still end up having to contact one person, you have too much knowledge siloed.

Etc.

> Maybe all this goalsetting, OKRs and such is exactly the problem with the industry,

Yes, yes it is.

That is also a symptom of a bigger problem: management doesn't really have to be useful for the company, they merely have to _appear_ to be. Exceptional management is nearly invisible, which is great for companies, bad for careers.

The solution? Managers will make noise and a lot of it. Part of this requires crazy deadlines. If the ship is not creaking it's not being pushed hard enough. Attrition? Bad culture fit, we work hard, we play hard. "I delivered months ahead of schedule" sounds way better than "I delivered it on time" - nevermind that the "delivered" project is a buggy mess noone uses and will require a lot more effort to get to an acceptable state.

We should be praising progress. Not everything should be a 'sprint', it should be a 'march'. What's all the sprinting for?

Most deadlines literally don't matter. Motivated teams that are able to perform their best work do matter.

> when most people just want to put in an honest day's work and progress.

This.

I really dislike this when it feels forced and artificial.

Also there's a strong risk of doing some little employee-appreciation gesture that backfires and pisses people off. Most of them do, because it feels like the company has cheaped out, or worse, spent a shit-load of money on something that you hate and then expects you to be grateful about it.

Correct -- and he cites big companies like Google and Amazon as still being startups. I agree with this definition -- it's very useful for distinguishing different types of companies and ultimately why some can earn SO much more in investment compared to others.