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Burnout is caused by resentment

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Re: Burnout is caused by resentment

#41

Post by makmanalp »

matwood wrote: post #35
makmanalp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing about a culture where the long work day is more common than not is that it starts becoming an expectation even though it isn't codified in any rule. So for example you'd be less likely to get a raise or promotion than a person who puts in more hours than the required. So even though you're not abusing the company you get less benefits for doing the amount of work you're getting paid for.

So for example you'd be less likely to get a raise or promotion than a person who puts in more hours than the required. If person A does more work than person B who should be promoted and paid more? Some people get more work done than other people because they are smarter. Others get more work done because they simply put in more hours. Is there really much difference between the two?

In principle, I agree wholly. In practice, I think hours often gets used as a substitute metric for amount of work done or value brought. It's this substitution and the (possibly unconscious) merit given to extra hours over extra efficiency.

Re: Burnout is caused by resentment

#42

Post by anon_googler »

cletus wrote: post #20

At the risk of making everything about Google... I'm going to talk about Google (with the disclaimer that I've now worked here for only ~1.5 years so I'm not authority, etc etc). stcredzero mentions a laundry list of soul-sapping bad behaviour and in previous jobs I've suffered through (or quit over) probably all of them at one time or another. There are some subtle yet fundamentally important differences in how Goog…

I think good managers are more important than you suggest:

> you can request a transfer to any team that will take you

If you're trying to transfer because your manager is giving you crap, you'll find it harder than you think to get the transfer approved. In the meantime, your manager can sandbag your quarterly performance rating and taint your compensation and chances for promotion for a long time. A bad manager at Google is still a bad manager.

> Performance reviews are peer-driven.

This is partly true. Promotions are decided by committee with input from your peers. But without strong performance ratings from your manager and appropriate projects to work on, you won't get promoted no matter what your peers say. The committees are very reluctant to override the manager.

Re: Burnout is caused by resentment

#43

Post by SideSwipe »

abalashov wrote: post #37

Unplug for merely a week? How very masochistically American. Let me teach you something about burnout, you poor, pathetically narrow-minded little man. I'd like to unplug for six months out of the year, at an absolute minimum. That's burnout, my friend.

Is it just me, or is insulting + judging + stereotyping someone the epitome of being narrow-minded?

Re: Burnout is caused by resentment

#44

Post by Drbble »

polyfractal wrote: post #34
Agathos wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you feel like you owe it to them for taking such incredibly good care of you. As a recovering academic, I felt a twinge of horror when I read this. When I didn't love the work I pushed on mainly out of guilt, and it was more than I could carry after a while. Maybe I should have tried resentment.

As another recovering ex-academic, I would often tell my friends that academic science (biology in my case) keeps 90% of people around because of guilt and a misplaced sense of honor/duty.

But my impression is that in the lab sciences (or any crunch mode job) you are made to feel that everyone relies on you so you are stuck taking care of them, whereas the gratitude model is that the company is so nice to you that you want to earn the respect they give you.

Re: Burnout is caused by resentment

#45

Post by bluekeybox »

stcredzero wrote: post #4
MrFoof wrote: post #2

I'd agree. Every time I've quit, it's because I felt I was repeatedly getting the short end of the stick, and management was expecting me to roll over every time I brought such things up. I quit my first job at 15 1/2. I worked at a Wal-Mart during the summer to buy a computer. I covered 200% more departments than I was hired for. I never took a day off, despite coworkers just not showing up so they could go to the b…

Other toxins: - Bad faith - not being talked to straight up - Resentment and blame - creates more of the same like prions - Disrespect - the subtle kind is more insidious - Being second guessed/distrusted - Political gamesmanship - have to defeat other departments, then competitors? - Overwork - Underwork All of this is human nature, just not the part of human nature that's going to help your team win.

I'm pretty sure all of the above act through resentment. This also means that resentment is somewhat of a catch-all term.

Re: Burnout is caused by resentment

#46

Post by kamaal »

tensor wrote: post #28
joezydeco wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, that boss isn't taking home a paycheck like you are, so suck it up.

Offer your boss to work completely for free in exchange for equity then. I wonder if anyone has tried this and what the response was.

Nothing would happen.

I don't know from where this started.

But I am expected to make for somebody Else's lapses all the times. This is called in classic management language 'Team work'. And the managers don't pay you for doing 'Team work' , at best you are assumed to just doing your duty. So you are not supposed to get paid extra.

I know a lot of managers who consider people who ask rewards for extra/free/innovation/ work as a evil people.

Re: Burnout is caused by resentment

#47

Post by rwg »

polyfractal wrote: post #34
Agathos wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you feel like you owe it to them for taking such incredibly good care of you. As a recovering academic, I felt a twinge of horror when I read this. When I didn't love the work I pushed on mainly out of guilt, and it was more than I could carry after a while. Maybe I should have tried resentment.

As another recovering ex-academic, I would often tell my friends that academic science (biology in my case) keeps 90% of people around because of guilt and a misplaced sense of honor/duty.

Are there Ivory Tower Anonymous meetings I can attend? I recently turned in my yearly activity report, and I finally (ten years) realized that it has become a list of things I absolutely hate doing. I think it's time to give this "industry" I keep hearing about a go...

Re: Burnout is caused by resentment

#48

Post by tensor »

kamaal wrote: post #46
tensor wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offer your boss to work completely for free in exchange for equity then. I wonder if anyone has tried this and what the response was.

Nothing would happen. I don't know from where this started. But I am expected to make for somebody Else's lapses all the times. This is called in classic management language 'Team work'. And the managers don't pay you for doing 'Team work' , at best you are assumed to just doing your duty. So you are not supposed to get paid extra. I know a lot of managers who consider people who ask rewards for extra/free/innovation…

I took the comment about bosses not taking home a paycheck to be referring to a startup scenario where funding is tight and so the founders don't take home a salary while the first few employees do.

In that situation it's not at all uncommon to trade some wage for equity, but there are not many cases that I've heard of, outside of the founders themselves, that are so extreme that people literally take home only equity.

If the discussion is talking about big well established companies, then the situation is very different. I can't imagine many managers not taking home a salary and definitely agree that inequity is generally a big problem as is the expectation of common place unpaid overtime.

Re: Burnout is caused by resentment

#49

Post by madhadron »

Drbble wrote: post #44
polyfractal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another recovering ex-academic, I would often tell my friends that academic science (biology in my case) keeps 90% of people around because of guilt and a misplaced sense of honor/duty.

But my impression is that in the lab sciences (or any crunch mode job) you are made to feel that everyone relies on you so you are stuck taking care of them, whereas the gratitude model is that the company is so nice to you that you want to earn the respect they give you.

Actually, it's more subtle and more pernicious in biology. First, you make sure that your wage slaves have no marketable skills (a PhD in molecular biology is comparable to a community college graduate). Then you carefully isolate them from all perspective and knowledge of career tracks other than the academic treadmill. Finally, you dangle the PhD in front of grad students ("You can't quit now, you won't get anything! You have to hold on until you have the degree! It's all or nothing!"), until they've sunk so many years in that they aren't willing to abandon the sunk time. Then you set up a culture where ridiculous hours and inadequate support are considered normal and make the payoff for the bosses be to get as much labor out of someone as they can get before shoving them out the door to the next slave master. The behavior of your average professor towards his lab would have him slapped with lawsuits in normal work environments.

Re: Burnout is caused by resentment

#50

Post by ignorethat »

This is wrong. It is only one reason for burnout. I have another.

I burned out because I can no longer care enough about what I'm doing at work to motivate my mind to work on the task at hand. It seems fruitless. People can try to convince me there is some good it is doing, but I see only waste and politics. That resentment is not because my workplace doesn't care about my family. They treat me better than any place I could ever hope to work for. The only sacrifice I've had to make for work is my sanity. I cannot stand development anymore, nor technology, nor I.T., but I'm incapable of doing anything else. I've read the books that say I must love what I do, but I don't, and there is no option to love what I do. I have chosen an occupation and career that no longer suits me, and I have no alternative. I am the only one with a job in my family. I cannot fail. I have to trudge on. This is burnout. I have no where to go.

Therefore, I would state instead that burnout is caused by lack of hope.

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