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

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#171

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 03, 2022, 8:59 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #140

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…

Quite agree, having had to help ex Amazonians emotionally process their anti empathy training whenever they are hired at companies I’ve worked at. All my friends who’ve stayed at Amazon have gotten cold, distant, and the light behind their eyes is gone. If you see them entering “work mode” you see what is functionally a sociopath - brutal but effective. More have taken long breaks from work to get therapy. Some have…

[deleted]

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#172

Post by manish_gill » Tue, May 03, 2022, 8:59 PM UTC

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…

I actually recently suffered (am still suffering from?) a burning caused by the combination - super high stress combined with absolutely no progress, "busywork" and literally a feeling like a plumber whose job is to "support" the people doing the cool stuff (which I thought I would get to work on when I was hired).

I was given most advice that this article mentions - I took vacations, we had internal rotations to reduce stress, we tried hiring. Ultimately, none of these efforts came to fruition. I think there really is no counter to bad decisions from management. You can try to be as nice as possible at an individual level, but the "lack of progress" burnout will bite you if the pressure doesn't.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#173

Post by volkadav » Tue, May 03, 2022, 9:03 PM UTC

ErrantX wrote: post #154

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…

I've worked with several ex-amazon managers & I agree. They are carefully trained to over promise, treat the business/product arm as an adversary not a colleague and burn out engineers to hit deadlines. 0 empathy. (Often these are not bad people, they have just been conditioned that this is an effective way to operate; my theory is it's the warehouse mentality that A employs at dist centers translated to the office)

Completely agree. I spent five years at OCI, an AWS competitor in Seattle, and during that time had seven managers (I think, maybe I missed some hi-bye reorg). The rock bottom worst two of them had all of their prior management experience at Amazon, and their managerial pathologies were similar: zero empathy, absurdly two-faced, optics-obsessed, complete grin-fucker sadists to their underlings. Both of them ended up leaving my erstwhile employer and returning to Uncle Jeff's dickhead spawning grounds.

"Too big of an asshole to be a culture fit" when the culture in question is Oracle should tell any reader everything they need to know about a culture where they do fit in. :p

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#174

Post by LinearEntropy » Tue, May 03, 2022, 9:03 PM UTC

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…

This is exactly what I have been going through for the last year or two. I even changed jobs, finding a role that was supposed to be better. At a company that would allow my skills to improve, while having what I assumed would be a better run company.

Unfortunately the new company is so full of corporate BS that I'm finding it even harder to get through each day. I genuinely feel like there are staff who are hired to 'improve productivity' through implementing Agile company wide, are actually doing everything in their power to slow things down. I've never seen this amount of unneeded meetings in my calendar, all in the name of 'planning'.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#175

Post by gusgus01 » Tue, May 03, 2022, 9:06 PM UTC

dudul wrote: post #152

taurath wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite agree, having had to help ex Amazonians emotionally process their anti empathy training whenever they are hired at companies I’ve worked at. All my friends who’ve stayed at Amazon have gotten cold, distant, and the light behind their eyes is gone. If you see them entering “work mode” you see what is functionally a sociopath - brutal but effective. More have taken long breaks from work to get therapy. Some have…

Amazon is on my blacklist when I evaluate resumes. I would never hire someone who spent more than 1 year at Amazon. I've seen first hand how these people are incapable of empathy, team work or fostering a good environment.

Is this for managers or engineers as well? There are several reasons I've stayed at Amazon as an engineer, such as, the stock growth created golden handcuffs, covid added a lot of fear and uncertainty and reduced mobility, and the team I'm on has a lot of people I've grown fond of through shared tribulations.

I've also found that the burnout creates a feedback loop that makes leaving hard to accomplish.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#176

Post by yarg » Tue, May 03, 2022, 10:11 PM UTC

I burnt out; I burnt out hard.

I haven't worked in a couple of years (the most positive thing I can say about my state of mind is that - after a very large dose of black market mushrooms - I'm no longer suicidal.

The one thing that was the primary contributing factor in my spiraling downfall is not mentioned here.

Listen to your fucking developers - the one's at the coalface (either they know what they're doing or you've got far deeper problems).

I was the primary developer on the non-DB functionality of the company's deployment tooling.

I took the most cobbled together piece of unmaintainable shit and converted it into something stable and maintainable.

There were times that I needed to make significant changes in order to move towards something sane.

And every time the boss would bring in his pet architect who would veto every effort I made with no feedback what-so-ever.

Just a no.

I want to modularise the project - no, it's not justified by the scope of the project.

I want to move to hierarchical configuration files - no, just keep using blah.properties, despite the fact that that we were using dynamically generated keys to force that which would be cleanly implementable with XML or JSON.

I want a robust solution for dependency injection, I'm thinking Spring. No, too heavy for the project - just use META-INF/services.

Yada, yada, yada. Every damned time. I ended up running the development of a critical utility as a god-damned skunk-works project.

It was soul destroying, but I believed for a long time that the results I produced (the stable releases, tasks that took a fraction of the time they used to) would lead to my input being considered.

It never was.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#177

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 03, 2022, 10:33 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #78

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

You start by arguing that it's not just the US, and then continue by saying that the rest of the world is adopting american practices, which is causing the issue. I'm confused.

[deleted]

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#178

Post by kirsebaer » Tue, May 03, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

np- wrote: post #121

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"

Not OP, but I don't feel this has anything to do with any specific people, but more an indictment of the system itself that we've created. Historically, there has never been an incentive or compensation structure that exists in companies that would lead management to begin to care about this stuff over their other priorities and deliverables.

There is when the employees join together in a union.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#179

Post by nathanaldensr » Tue, May 03, 2022, 11:15 PM UTC

jseban wrote: post #126

thrower123 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah it pisses me off when I've been squeezed for every drop for the whole project by some bozo manager, and then I'm also now forced to be forget and forgive all of that, and pretend to be happy, because of some awkward celebration, just becomes another ass kissing for the manager and salt in the wounds for me.

Corporate "celebrations" are anything but. They are just posturing and virtue signalling. Only on groups of teams in high-trust situations (e.g., a small military unit winning a tough battle) will you experience real celebrations. They won't even have to be planned; they'll just happen!

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#180

Post by bogomipz » Tue, May 03, 2022, 11:15 PM UTC

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #164

bogomipz wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, thanks for the detail regarding the origin of this. For some reason I just assumed it came out of some scrum cult type thing as the rise of that was also for around the time OKR became part of the lexicon. I completely agree. Are we just stuck with this then for the foreseeable future I wonder? It seems to be that there are enough people that share this sentiment that this whole overbearing process ritual has bec…

Well, management types are probably not going to collectively vote against something that could jeopardize their jobs, even if it would be beneficial for the corp. So we're waiting for higher management (C-level) and startups to take the risk and show it can be done differently and more efficiently. Meanwhile, most developers are not uncomfortable enough they are willing to unionize and stir the pot over this. There'…

Agreed. What a sad state of affairs though. All these companies that aspire to disrupt but that spirit somehow doesn't apply to their own management. The irony is quite spectacular. I think your right that any meaningful change will likely come from some successful startups(s.) What a great way differentiator that will be for any startup who actually thinks differently and markets themselves as such as a means to attract talent.