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Burnout Is Real

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Re: Burnout Is Real

#191

Post by ravedave5 »

ryneandal wrote: post #39
dudus wrote: post #8

I never doubted it was real. But I never really understood what it meant until I was deeply depressed and couldn't get up from bed to go to work anymore. Ended up leaving my job at a FANG and taking a year long sabbatical before rejoining the workforce in a lower/less stressful position for a company not on tech. Sometimes it's still depressing to think o took such a hit in my career. Bit when I remember what I felt…

Don't feel bad if your mental health is in a much better place now. You come first. No exceptions.

Until you have children, then they come first.

Re: Burnout Is Real

#192

Post by peterangular »

mitchbob wrote: post #83
dudus wrote: post #8

I never doubted it was real. But I never really understood what it meant until I was deeply depressed and couldn't get up from bed to go to work anymore. Ended up leaving my job at a FANG and taking a year long sabbatical before rejoining the workforce in a lower/less stressful position for a company not on tech. Sometimes it's still depressing to think o took such a hit in my career. Bit when I remember what I felt…

I gave everything and had nothing left. That's it. Reminds me of the start of Allen Ginsberg's poem America, one of my all-time favorites: America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956. [1] [1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49305/america-56d22b4...

In the US we have a society where people walk around wearing suffering like a badge of honor. We worship work. I was brought up in a Midwest culture where "work ethic" was everything - if you worked hard enough, you would be successful. In contrast, if you were not successful it was because you didn't work hard enough.

Then, I got into tech. I hear "war stories" from people about sleeping under their desk at their cubicles. I hear people tell jokes about how their career strains their marriage. I hear about people wasting their 20's working every hour they can for a FAANG to get ahead... It was like that whole "work ethic gets you ahead" culture from my childhood got turned up to 11.

I'm meandering here but overall that poem reminded me of a blog post from long ago stating "Never Save Anything for the Swim Back. Ever." [1] which was introduced to me by a manager using it as justification to work a 60+ hour crunch week. I guess where I'm going here is these sort of idealizations of fiction where "work ethic trumps all" really clash with this poem. I feel like idealizations like this serve the interests of those who are capitalizing off of labor more than they do the general worker/person.

[1] https://joshldavis.com/2013/08/31/never-save-anything-for-th...

Re: Burnout Is Real

#193

Post by creaghpatr »

jeffrallen wrote: post #147

If you're done with the tech industry, and your wife finds her dream job and your kids need a dad at home, I can recommend folding laundry. It is like car detailing, but you love your customers even more. Life is a one way trip, make it count. And support your wife's dreams.

I love the flow state of folding laundry.

Re: Burnout Is Real

#194

Post by seppin »

ravedave5 wrote: post #191
ryneandal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't feel bad if your mental health is in a much better place now. You come first. No exceptions.

Until you have children, then they come first.

This is why so many people delay or refuse to have kids. You cannot make such a decision to prioritize your mental health when they need support.

Re: Burnout Is Real

#195

Post by thebigspacefuck »

disambiguation wrote: post #56
analyst74 wrote: post #9

Personally, I find the biggest reason for burnout is lack of autonomy. The author seems to have found the same.

I've lost track of the source, but i saw a TED talk that outlines 5 happiness indicators for work. You need at least 3 of them to be happy with your job: 1. Security 2. Good pay 3. Connected with others 4. Satisfaction in work 5. Autonomy These helped me understand my burnout experience. By the time I left, all of the others had vanished except for the pay.

This is probably the SCARF model:

Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness

Re: Burnout Is Real

#196

Post by dijit »

lancemurdock wrote: post #185
culopatin wrote: post #120

I don’t know how to frame this well and I apologize in advance. But I think this idea of “oh wow burnout is real I’m so woke” is a privileged person problem. I don’t mean that burnout is a first world problem, but that this “Burnout is real” is. I struggle to put my head in a place where I can be amazed that burnout is real and that I have to warn others of this “thing” as if it’s not part of millions of people’s liv…

I seriously wish I could never hear the word the "privilege" again. Its an extremely spiteful mechanism to tear people down.

“Your problems are not as bad as these other people’s problems so they are not really problems”.

Lots to unpack, but that’s the statement every time someone mentioned someone else’s privilege.

Re: Burnout Is Real

#197

Post by kstrauser »

culopatin wrote: post #120

I don’t know how to frame this well and I apologize in advance. But I think this idea of “oh wow burnout is real I’m so woke” is a privileged person problem. I don’t mean that burnout is a first world problem, but that this “Burnout is real” is. I struggle to put my head in a place where I can be amazed that burnout is real and that I have to warn others of this “thing” as if it’s not part of millions of people’s liv…

Outside of tech circles, I hear a lot of stuff like "ooh, a bunch of rich techies whining about how tough their jobs are, oooh...". There needs to be a counter to this: life can be challenging for everyone. Just because people don't yell at you or you don't lift heavy logs for a living doesn't mean that your "cushy desk job" isn't hard. It's OK to be feeling these symptoms while sitting at a desk.

Re: Burnout Is Real

#198

Post by goodpoint »

culopatin wrote: post #120

I don’t know how to frame this well and I apologize in advance. But I think this idea of “oh wow burnout is real I’m so woke” is a privileged person problem. I don’t mean that burnout is a first world problem, but that this “Burnout is real” is. I struggle to put my head in a place where I can be amazed that burnout is real and that I have to warn others of this “thing” as if it’s not part of millions of people’s liv…

> “oh wow burnout is real I’m so woke” is a privileged person problem

This is a profoundly destructive narrative.

First of all, comparing levels of privilege or disparaging people with a "privileged person problem" is unhelpful.

If we won the birthplace lottery and live in a wealthy and safe society the best thing to do is to use such advantage to make the whole world a better place and combat inequality.

Rolling your eyes is not that.

Second, burnout and depression are very common in the software industry and yet severely underreported and understated.

Many companies are responsible for exhausting on-call duty shifts, crunch time, endless deadlines. Some try to have employee perform unpaid overtime over weekends by calling it a hackathon.

You never hear these companies taking serious steps to address burnout.

Re: Burnout Is Real

#199

Post by prestigious »

BuckRogers wrote: post #154
ThrowawayP wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been in a similar situation, my sympathies; I've found it to be a very strange sensation. The burnt-out knows exactly what work tasks they need to do, they know that it's easily within their own capabilities, and they (at a conscious level at least) even desperately want to do the tasks to fulfill their professional obligations (or to simply continue getting paid). But the body just will not do it or forcing i…

That's an interesting way to put it. Throughout 2020 I felt that way. I just could not force myself to work, and I've been in the workforce a while (I'm 39 and had a job non-stop since I was 12). I know how important it is to maintain income. I was thrown into a new position where I didn't know how to do the work, so I was trying to figure everything out with a new platform, and I was mostly isolated without any help…

I hear you on the marriage piece. My wife was brutally unsupportive during my burnout and I’m just waiting for my kids to be grown up before I leave.

Re: Burnout Is Real

#200

Post by ElijahLynn »

snarfy wrote: post #12

Exercise has helped me immensely. It's one of the few times a day that I'm focusing on self-improvement. If I don't do that then I focus on everything else and eventually burn out.

At the time of this post, there are 3 occurrences of the word "exercise" in this HN post/thread and 2 are valid suggestions of exercising, such as yours, Snarfy! And I think you are spot on! I get that burnt out feeling when I don't exercise or move much, which COVID has increased (less social gatherings, going places).

There is a fantastic book, Spark, written by John Ratey, M.D., who is/was psychiatrist who used to prescribe drugs for depression and switched to prescribing treadmills instead! He makes a strong case for "exercise for brain health".

This type of work is definitely a factor in burn out, and more so, many of us in this industry have wired, curious brains that can exacerbate the situation even more. And then, when we burn out, we do that same thing to try to "fix the problem" and feel guilt/shame or whatever.

Exercise can help us keep healthy brains to help cope with this stuff much better. Exercise helps us secrete endorphins that make us feel good and help us feel good sensations to counter the stress from this type of work. It is super valid science nowadays as Dr. Ratey proves in his teaching.

For a good next step for anyone reading this and feeling burnt out, see you you can make it through this Ted Talk video by Dr. Ratey (the exercise instead of prozac pyschiatrist) > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBSVZdTQmDs. If you cannot do that, you may have sleep deprivation and need a nap, now. When you wake up, then watch the video, it is ~10 minutes.

This is also the same doctor who co-wrote the book Delivered to Distraction (recently brought up here on HN by Mark Suster) and ADHD 2.0 (2021).

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