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Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

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Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#191

Post by DiggyJohnson »

outworlder wrote: post #66
spacemadness wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote time. As I’ve moved into larger companies and am shackled by OKRs, I am enjoying my work a lot less and feel under more pressure than ever but am getting less useful work done. It feels like a lack of trust and assumes the organization is run very efficiently and fairly—which I don’t think any company can truly claim. People just seem to adjust by gaming these systems instead of putting useful effort into th…

> As I’ve moved into larger companies and am shackled by OKRs, I am enjoying my work a lot less and feel under more pressure than ever but am getting less useful work done. Ditto. At this point I feel that spending my entire day writing emails (even though I'm on engineering) would not only look better but would meet OKRs, while getting zero actual useful work done. I hate this fad.

This is precisely the cause of my burnout this month, at a huge aerospace company you’ve heard of.

I felt like I wasn’t able to motivate myself to do the work, because I was incentivized to do what you described. I ended up doing both, poorly, but honestly I was able to make it a shockingly long time (I’m surprised I was the one to realize and decide to leave, no manager conversation yet).

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#192

Post by mellavora »

coffeefirst wrote: post #43
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…

> serious work requires sacrifice and some burnout is inevitable Well, the Navy Seals, who know a thing or two about high stress and deadly serious work, popularized the expression "slow is smooth and smooth is fast." But unless you're an emergency room doctor or defending Ukraine or developing the next COVID19 vaccine, come on, nothing you're doing is that important. What you're describing is not a thing that most o…

> slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

and speed is the economy of motion.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#193

Post by rramadass »

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…

You will find this book very helpful - Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#194

Post by allknowingfrog »

paulcole wrote: post #55
allknowingfrog wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm probably off-topic here, but isn't a gift card just money with restrictions? I guess maybe the "gift" is the freedom from responsibility, in the sense that you won't feel guilty about where you spend the money (because someone else decided for you). Is there a more favorable explanation for the value of a gift card as a gesture?

> Is there a more favorable explanation for the value of a gift card as a gesture? I don't get what you're expecting in terms of an answer here. A gift card is a gift. A gift is a gesture of kindness and thoughtfulness. Something doing something thoughtful and kind and thinking about you makes you feel good.

Turning cash into a gift card is not a thoughtful gesture. Gift cards are popular because they're easy, which is the opposite of thoughtful. I would be offended if my employer ever gave me a gift card instead of a cash bonus.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#195

Post by kodah »

bps4484 wrote: post #181
kodah wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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." I'm curious where you work (not specifically, I'm talking about generally the industry), because it's not been my experience either as a manager nor my understanding of anyone else in silicon valley or large or mid sized software companies. I've manage…

I work in Fintech. On average, managers make more than their reports and heavily influence how much their reports make. Just based on levels.fyi managers earn a base of $40k over their engineering equivalent, with a higher bonus and stock margin as well (at my company). My company also doesn't position technical leaders at the same level as their manager, so technical leaders are already in an odd position when trying to represent the team. Generally I've figured out that many managers don't know what "influencing" is, so it starts to feel like "pressuring" from someone who doesn't understand the product from a technical perspective. I don't think any of this is uncommon to the larger software landscape, but certain companies may hire better managers than others.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#196

Post by SkyMarshal »

kodah wrote: post #53
y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So stop putting them under a lot of pressure. The second tip hints at this, but it only seems to be a reactionary measure. Maybe all this goalsetting, OKRs and such is exactly the problem with the industry, always having to feel pressured to an extreme by metrics and stats which effectively mean nothing, when most people just want to put in an honest day's work and progress. You nailed it. The entire article can be…

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…

That’s exactly why many of the best engineers move to Silicon Valley and start their own startup, or work at an engineer-founded one.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#197

Post by zackmorris »

kozd wrote: post #165
zackmorris wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was going to comment something similar. After 4 years at a job I loved, went through the worst burnout of my life in 2018-2019, roughly the year before the pandemic. Lost the job and about lost my mind when executive dysfunction made it so hard to find work. Spent 2020 doing handyman work and donating plasma to make rent. Turns out that I was sensitive to wheat, milk/unaged cheese and almonds but didn't know it yet.…

https://www.statnews.com/2018/01/23/everlywell-food-sensitiv...

Thanks, I didn't know it started on Shark Tank. Ya one of the main issues is that the tests can show an immune response, but not the specific foods that triggered it. So they might report too strongly on foods in your system and miss foods that you haven't been eating lately.

I want to emphasize though that this is a situation where leads are more important than evidence. For example, my sensitivity to wheat was shown as normal but I have since discovered that it causes instant inflammation in my gut and I gain 5 pounds the next day, then go into a slow decline if I keep eating it. And it showed normal sensitivity to beans because I've been avoiding them, but I still can't eat most types except maybe garbanzos and lentils sparingly.

Also wanted to mention that I forgot introvert/extravert in my comment about TikTok and one's reaction to it. I was thinking more about how skepticism affects it, but our tastes are more complex than 1 scale, or even 4 bits for the 16 personalities of Myers-Briggs. Even 20-30 bits might not be able to predict them, since every personality is unique.

Edit: "stars in the sky" is what I meant in my previous comment (of course we can see the sky). I'm a bit OCD but with diverging thoughts so brevity is a real challenge for me.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#198

Post by kodah »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #196
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…

That’s exactly why many of the best engineers move to Silicon Valley and start their own startup, or work at an engineer-founded one.

Ironically or not, GitLab is actually both.

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#199

Post by maerF0x0 »

lobstrosity420 wrote: post #106
brtkdotse wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It a very, very fine line to tread before it becomes Defiant Jazz ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Turq37lntO0 )

This video is an amazing summary of the GitLab article itself.

I'll be honest that I dont really get it. Is it just that the one guy is the only one trying to get work done and everyone else is hindering that?

Re: Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

#200

Post by [deleted] »

mellavora wrote: post #189
scrollbar wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems silly though. The term "growth company" seems a lot more authentic. Of course these labels are not black/white, but it's a useful distinction. There are simply different dynamics at a growth company vs. a startup.

A "growth company" is a company with high P/E, with the added assumption that the high P/E is justified based on an expectation that E will increase much faster than P. "growth" is taken as the opposite of "value". A "value" company is a company with a low P/E, and with the added assumption that P is low due to reasons which are likely to change in P's favor. Thus the difference between "growth" and "value" is simply…

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