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Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

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Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#151

Post by piva00 »

MV9dDrxo wrote: post #62
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…

Get out of my head! This resonates with me - this is exactly how I'm currently feeling. Do you have any resources that were particularly insightful to you from your research?

Take care. I do validate and recognise exactly what OP mentioned, I suffered of it from the later half of 2020 all the way to the end of 2021, things are slowly getting better since December when I changed orgs (inside the same company).

I'm still far away from how I used to perform, I'm doing therapy and it's been one of the worst issues I've talked about for a while. It creeped into other areas of my life and now affects my day-to-day life and hobbies, the pandemic just made everything much worse.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#152

Post by dudul »

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…

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.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#153

Post by quantified »

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"

All the way up to the CEO who’s setting the tone. The farther up the ladder, the “best” is more likely to serve their own interest, it’s why they’ve pursued that rank in the first place.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#154

Post by ErrantX »

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)

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#155

Post by president »

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'm convinced this model only really works because of the tech visa program. When you have a huge class of people that don't really have a choice between pushing back and keeping their hopes for a green card, you're going to get an environment where collective bargaining no longer works. I have experienced this at the last 3 places I've worked, all large enterprise software companies. There's no going back unfortunately and I feel bad for future generations of tech workers as it's already starting to feel like a bloodbath.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#156

Post by citilife »

jseban wrote: post #134
citilife wrote: post #92

One thing as a manager I was passionate about was monitoring the team stress. Some team members work better under pressure, others don't and it's a balancing act. For instance, I've had co-workers that need the constant pressure to accomplish their goals and they can go on like that for years. The act of accomplishing something is worth the stress. Personally, I don't really get burned out. I have limitations on hour…

So you tighten the thumbscrews until people start to crack, and then you give them some bread and circuses

People handle different loads. Some people perform better under stress, others need far more time off and breaks and they'll perform better.

As a manager you're a representative of the company, and it's your duty to maximize value for the company. That means approaching each person differently and with respect. Most people say "I want to get promoted" or "I want to be in this position in my career in X years" or "I want to work on Y type of project". As a manager I have to deliver Z.

All of those require a level of stress to achieve, so I work with my colleagues to help them achieve their goals in a measured way. At the same time I ensure we deliver Z on time.

Don't really know how you got the "start to crack" out of my previous comment. People are different, they should all be handled with a unique approach to collaboration.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#157

Post by maerF0x0 »

thrower123 wrote: post #77
maerF0x0 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much feel you on this. At some point I have enough company swag. I do think the "appreciation store" model is a really good one. Allowing each to choose their reward.

I very much think that the "give me money" model is a really good one. There's this very odd strain of infantilization that runs through a lot of corporate office management, like they are trying to reward second-graders with a choice from the prize box if they collect enough gold stars, rather than dealing with fully-grown adults that have their own children.

I actually really agree with this too. It helps normalize comp across all life choices too. There are so many, some which people get salty about suggesting it's a form of "comp" .

For examples:

  * I basically don't drink so anything that has alcohol as it's selling point is non-comp to me

  * I'm not going to be a parent so why cant I have a sabbatical in place of parental leave?

  * I basically don't get sick, and when I do I still manage to deliver decently. Why not pay me out sick days? I could just lie and take them, but why should I have to?
-* and before someone goes exclaiming "Privilege!" remember these are real life choices with costs borne in other areas of life -- for example the choice to not have children is going to be very expensive when I'm older and have to pay for everything that children do for free taking care of their elderly parents. It's not a pure privilege, but a temporal shift of cost/benefits. *-

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#158

Post by skipants »

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/

I've been following this feature request for awhile now: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/32712

Look at how many different hands this had to pass through before anything got done. I don't think I've seen any startup survive working like that.

Oh and nothing is done yet, 5 months later. It's still in the "design phase".

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#159

Post by bogomipz »

piva00 wrote: post #149
bogomipz wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: workshop…

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 become largely performative and toxic.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#160

Post by blenderdt »

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 also had a burnout recently.

As far as I know there are no different kinds of burnout. A burnout is always caused by long periods of stress exhausting the body.

The causes of stress can of course be very different. Working below or above your level can cause stress. But also long periods of physical pain can cause stress. Or being overstimulated all the time. And it can be a sum of all kinds of stress. For example when you struggle in a relationship it is much harder to cope with stress at work.

Stress eats your energy.

It's also difficult to prevent a burnout yourself because after a long time you can get used to being stressed. You forget how it is to be relaxed.

Sometimes it is just not clear what caused a burnout. It just adds up.

The best way to prevent a burnout and to recover from it is to accept you are stressed and tired and you need to step back. This is also the most difficult thing to do.

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