Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit • Hacker News Board

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#141

Post by blowski » Tue, May 03, 2022, 7:18 PM UTC

ozzythecat wrote: post #122

I’m going to use this post as an opportunity to tell people about Amazon. The company has some of the most incompetent managers, who under pressure, will throw their own people under the bus. By incompetent, I mean “yes” men who tell 10 different people exactly what they want to hear. These are people doing the bare minimum to keep their own jobs, and when things go off rails, they pass the blame to everyone around t…

There does seem tive a certain type of person that thrives at Amazon, while the rest just about survive until they get out.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#142

Post by mycentstoo » Tue, May 03, 2022, 7:18 PM UTC

throwawaymaths wrote: post #105

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…

Brilliant analysis. Anecdotally, I find this to be true in my own case.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#143

Post by hitekker » Tue, May 03, 2022, 7:19 PM UTC

malfist wrote: post #115

kodah wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American Corporations drink their own kool-aid, which is probably why they can sit there and talk about what's wrong concisely without knowing what to do about it. The days of servant leadership, or leading from the front are gone in terms of management. Instead, they're a self-serving bunch. Engineers are effectively the lowest on the hierarchy and their happiness matters to no one in the chain because everyone is s…

You have a very negative opinion about management. Please remember that managers are people too and they're (likely) trying their best too. Just as they give you feedback, it is often helpful to give upward feedback too. Especially if it's in the form of "I need you to do X to help me"

Speaking as a manager, a lot of managers seems to resort to the "managers are people too" truism whenever they're called out on managerial misbehavior. I think a lot of people in the occupation can't own up to abuses of our power so our gut reaction is to handwave away the very idea of power.

"We're all on the same level, so you can't hold us to a higher standard" is a silly but common way to confuse this sort of ethical problem.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#144

Post by jseban » Tue, May 03, 2022, 7:20 PM UTC

kodah wrote: post #120

malfist wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a very negative opinion about management. Please remember that managers are people too and they're (likely) trying their best too. Just as they give you feedback, it is often helpful to give upward feedback too. Especially if it's in the form of "I need you to do X to help me"

Interesting you thought I haven't tried to have those conversations upward. The problem is there's zero incentive for managers to listen or change. I do have a negative opinion about managers. Managers mandated themselves into making x times the amount of their top paid report, control decision making, and have hiring and firing powers all in one position. Managers being people doesn't make them immune from criticism…

> The problem is there's zero incentive for managers to listen or change.

Yeah, there is now only incentive to get rid of you since you are having a negative impact on the manager's (perceived) success, and you have also banned yourself from ever being promoted to management by being disloyal.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#145

Post by WalterSear » Tue, May 03, 2022, 7:22 PM UTC

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #86

civilized wrote: post #41

> 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.

Startup sounds sexy, so everybody and their mother are part of a startup

It's also an excuse to Move Fast And Break Subordinates.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#146

Post by kodah » Tue, May 03, 2022, 7:25 PM UTC

hitekker wrote: post #143

malfist wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a very negative opinion about management. Please remember that managers are people too and they're (likely) trying their best too. Just as they give you feedback, it is often helpful to give upward feedback too. Especially if it's in the form of "I need you to do X to help me"

Speaking as a manager, a lot of managers seems to resort to the "managers are people too" truism whenever they're called out on managerial misbehavior. I think a lot of people in the occupation can't own up to abuses of our power so our gut reaction is to handwave away the very idea of power. "We're all on the same level, so you can't hold us to a higher standard" is a silly but common way to confuse this sort of eth…

Shout-out to you for saying this. I'm not anti-manager by any means, but I'm very vocal that our existing (and most common) system is not working well, or to the benefit of most people or the corporation.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#147

Post by welder » Tue, May 03, 2022, 7:29 PM UTC

This list is missing some stuff...

* lacking a feeling of control over your own success

* removing bureaucratic road blocks in the way of success

* lack of dopamine reward when you complete a project / disconnect from the consumer of your product

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#148

Post by svnt » Tue, May 03, 2022, 7:36 PM UTC

throwawaymaths wrote: post #105

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…

I think you are right. But the operating regime of your hypothesis is basically from naive entry until a point, and that point is when the expected reward transcends rewards that capitalism can provide.

If you want meaning from your work, and that meaning was initially provided by personal growth, then when the position no longer feels like growth, there is no reward possible. Similarly, if you thought you were doing something meaningful but then discover your company, or individuals who benefit more from your work than you do, are part of the problem, there is no redeeming it. To continue you have to resort to selective attention or basic ostriching.

If this is true then the primary protective traits against burnout would be 1) strongly established healthy boundaries around what to expect from a job and a healthy home life or 2) myopic focus on problem solving and a lack of interest or self-limiting that prevents curiosity about higher levels of organization. Anecdotally this matches with my experience — most people who endure fall largely into one or both of those categories.

A possible corollary is that with improvements to (that is, restrictions on) capitalism, more categories of people could continue to work without such ready disillusionment from bad or gray actors.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#149

Post by piva00 » Tue, May 03, 2022, 7:36 PM UTC

bogomipz wrote: post #129

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…

I have similar views on the OKRs. I am not even sure how they became so ubiquitous as a measuring stick. Did this come out of Scrum and just found a welcome place in general management speak? I'm also curious if anyone feels similarly about daily standup meetings and the hyperventilating over the Jira board? I feel like I've been in environments where the goal seems to perversely turn into having something to discuss…

Scrum never really had OKRs.

I noticed OKRs and OKDs and whatever other flavour of it popping up after the big tech rise. Google and others were seeds of this style of delivery management, somehow this was taught in some MBA and when this generation of MBAs started to take reins of other companies it got spread around as gospel.

I fucking hate it, it's overloaded with rituals that get repeated every quarter: workshops, planning sessions, vision/mission workshops, and so on and so forth. The worse is that never seems that anything has enough time to be done, in my experience roughly a month of each quarter is mentally spent by going through these motions, justifying work that needs to be done, doing discovery for what's upcoming (that needs to be done before planning season ends). Constantly switching contexts about what we're working right now with what work needs to be done in the future, every single fucking quarter.

I'm getting extremely tired of this cycle, it's getting longer and longer to recover from each of these "planning seasons".

P.S.: Not mentioning the variance in processes, each company you join has their own set of rituals and timelines for planning and so it'll take a few cycles of it until you figure out what's important and what I can tune off and give my mind a break.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#150

Post by 0daystock » Tue, May 03, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

gherkinnn wrote: post #75

0daystock wrote: post #8

A 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…

What a shortsighted view. I struggle not to go against the comment guidelines. This hustle culture drives me up the wall. A crunch once in a while is fine. Some deadlines are unavoidable. But brute force as corporate culture will inevitably lead to shit results. Especially in so-called "high-stakes environments" , where mistakes carry severe consequences. On top of that, burning out can nullify years of "personal gro…

Honestly, I understand your sentiment and there's probably a bit of Stockholm syndrome going on with my appreciation of such culture. Under it, engineering quality definitely suffers - as well as morale and such things - but these were inconsequential to the bottom line of the business. And while enjoying the rewards of our labor through stock options and market dynamics, it hardly seemed to matter to anyone, including myself. Let's just consider the value proposition: I accumulated five years of salary in one, and can afford to take time off work to focus on personal growth, or whatever. I'm not under any illusion that every high-pressure job is rewarding, but it certainly seems more likely than a lax one where people take their time and true laziness goes unnoticed.