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Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

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Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#101

Post by thenerdhead »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #74
thenerdhead wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the overworking leading to constant stress and that stress leading to ME/CFS which leads to a number of issues like trouble sleeping, physical/mental symptoms, and depression/anxiety? This seems to be significantly undiagnosed. How do you know? What treatment has significantly helped? Getting good sleep? Mindfulness? Walks? etc? I ask because I'm writing a book about this and want to learn more.

Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) was the first treatment where there was a night and day improvement and from that point I knew I was not imagining my problems as many doctors kept suggesting. I was doing a linear search through all known fatigue treatments before hitting this one. I found out about it from what sounded like a crazy person posting on a YouTube video. I explicitly looked for crazy people posts because I figu…

What about a general anxiety disorder? This sounds similar to what I had. Lots of anxiety, doctors not able to say much but "you're healthy" and then when I worked on my anxiety, everything started to get better.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#102

Post by spaetzleesser »

“Managers should create space to celebrate small wins and reflect on the mountains you’ve climbed.”

I personally can live without the BS celebrations. Make sure the the daily work is bearable. If you are a manager do your job and manage people and the work. Don’t just pass on orders from above and pass metrics back to above.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#103

Post by spaetzleesser »

vlunkr wrote: post #100
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #7

All 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…

A huge problem I had to overcome was learning to leave work mentally every day. The online and WFH nature of software work makes it easy to feel like you're always on-call and feeling some low-level stress. This is a quick path to burnout for me. My advice to anyone in this situation is to be firm about not working outside your regular hours. If someone messages or emails when you're not working, don't respond until…

Turn off all work devices after work hours.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#104

Post by dsr_ »

vlunkr wrote: post #100
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #7

All 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…

A huge problem I had to overcome was learning to leave work mentally every day. The online and WFH nature of software work makes it easy to feel like you're always on-call and feeling some low-level stress. This is a quick path to burnout for me. My advice to anyone in this situation is to be firm about not working outside your regular hours. If someone messages or emails when you're not working, don't respond until…

Since I started working from home, I have an alarm set for 4:50pm to remind me that 'work' ends in 10 minutes. I might choose to violate that deliberately, but not by accident.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#105

Post by throwawaymaths »

StevenWaterman wrote: post #37

I 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…

These are not two different types of burnout... They are one and the same. Pressure and overwork do not per se cause burnout... What causes burnout is if the effort-reward cycle misses (either repeatedly for small efforts, or if you put in a lot of effort and have a categorical miss)

Reward could be anything. The feeling of a job well done (easy to miss if the project is a failure, or if management pivots), it could be the expectation of career advancement, it could be soft recognition by peers... And is dependent on the individual and project. You could even have an outward success and a pay raise but if you wanted your peers to love you and they didn't.... Burnout. You could even have an easy and unpressured job and burn out if it's not providing the rewards you expect.

In any case the disconnect between effort and reward teaches your brain to associate effort with failure and the fact that the common. "take a break" advice failed for you should not be surprising, because I think that doesn't work in general: it doesn't reassociate effort with expected reward.

I feel like a lot of people here are using the topic of burnout to hoist their opinions about American capitalism or whatever, but I honestly don't believe that this is the root cause. Plenty of people work their asses off and are happy to do so because it can be its own reward, or, they know what they want and know how to get it after each brutal push of effort. But not falling victim to burnout takes self-awareness, or good managers (capitalist systems or otherwise - e.g. academia or military) and both of those are in short supply, blaming capitalism is much easier.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#106

Post by lobstrosity420 »

brtkdotse wrote: post #29
maerF0x0 wrote: post #16

> Celebrate progress. Burnout is often caused by a feeling of stagnation. Seeing the progress you’re making day-to-day is hard. Managers should create space to celebrate small wins and reflect on the mountains you’ve climbed. I really appreciate this one. As a very high conscientiousness and med-high neuroticism person a manager asking for a "status check" on a project actually sounds like "You did something wrong th…

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

This video is an amazing summary of the GitLab article itself.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#107

Post by dijit »

s_dev wrote: post #69
dijit wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PG says a startup is any company who looks at growth as their primary measure. Intel is a startup by this definition.

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.

Oh.

I really have a negative emotional response to abusing language like this.

All companies focus on growth to some extent. A growth-focused company is, in my option, a completely separate thing from a startup.

Though startups are usually extremely growth focused.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#108

Post by cjbgkagh »

thenerdhead wrote: post #101
cjbgkagh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) was the first treatment where there was a night and day improvement and from that point I knew I was not imagining my problems as many doctors kept suggesting. I was doing a linear search through all known fatigue treatments before hitting this one. I found out about it from what sounded like a crazy person posting on a YouTube video. I explicitly looked for crazy people posts because I figu…

What about a general anxiety disorder? This sounds similar to what I had. Lots of anxiety, doctors not able to say much but "you're healthy" and then when I worked on my anxiety, everything started to get better.

Generalized anxiety disorders can certainly cause dysautonomia and treating the anxiety can help treat dysautonomia. For many people this is sufficient to return to normal. For those of us less fortunate we need to keep pursuing additional options. I have a rather severe form of hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome so I need substantial meds to keep functioning.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#109

Post by StevenWaterman »

ornornor wrote: post #99
StevenWaterman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partly, yes. I left that company and started my own. That's brought its own set of troubles, but it has at least given me a chance to regain my love for programming. Looking back, I did really enjoy trying to fix the organisational issues that caused my burnout. So I was going through this constant cycle of - Get frustrated by something when programming - Realise there's an issue in process / workflow - Get excited t…

This resonates very much with my own experience. I’ve quit my last job because it broke this camel’s back and now the last thing I want to do is going back as a developer. I also do enjoy fixing things and processes so that others don’t needlessly suffer through work and actually enjoy themselves. But how do you go about switching tracks to coaching? What does it even entail? How do you learn? And more importantly: w…

I get where you're coming from, and they're questions I'm working on answering as well. Unlike you, I have worked in jobs where that kind of proactive find-and-fix mentality was prevalent, where they bought into continuous improvement. They do exist, it does work, and that's what made it so frustrating when I wasn't allowed to fix things in this job.

I don't have all the answers yet, and it's something I'm in the process of doing. However, what is really helping me (and what made me realise this was the issue in the first place) is working with a coach. It's a bit like therapy/counselling, basically someone to guide me through the process of figuring out what went wrong and why, and how to fix it in future. He's from the tech industry, so has a base level understanding of things, and was able to give me some good pointers for how to find resources.

I think the thing that started me off learning & reskilling was reading blogs from technical coaches like [1]. Clearly the job I want does exist, and there is a demand for it. It's not common, but it exists.

[1] https://philippe.bourgau.net/

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#110

Post by kadomony »

john_cogs wrote: post #18
nixgeek wrote: post #12

“Working at a startup is demanding. GitLab team members are often under a lot of pressure.” Isn’t being a $7.5B publicly-traded company the definition of not a startup?

GitLab has documented how to still be a startup after IPO: https://about.gitlab.com/company/still-a-startup/

So basically, how to continue to exploit your employees for maximum output even though technically people can chill out. Got it.
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