I Knew a Programmer Who Went Completely Insane

The 8 hour workday was fought for and won for a reason. To expect more, an employer would be unprofessional. To accept more, except when compensated or in extreme circumstances, makes the engineer unprofessional. One comes to soon realize this. (See The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin.)) Most companies, especially startups, don't. It's sad to think that the culture values high stress, long work hours with the inevitable diminishing return, and literally anything, no matter how unhealthy, to get workers to be slaves. At the same time, a lot of these companies have mediocre health and dental benefits with high cost to the employee.

Yeah, companies don't give a shit about you. And why should they? Corporations exist to make money. That's all. Your health, while in the long-term helps this goal, in the short-term it doesn't. The shorter the lifespan of the company, the less they care. This is easily observed.

The question is, why do you give a shit about your company?

> Secret I found out myself is do not mix what you like to do with what you are paid to do

A very good advice I have always followed. This may not be true if you have your own company, however - since you will need a lot of drive to make things move forward.

The culture of the company also matters. Joel Spolsky talked a bit about administration as creating "abstraction layers", and what's happening here seems like tiered administration (which I guess is a working definition of bureaucracy). In other words, the administration themselves are isolating themselves, by means of more administration, from the "realities on the ground", which creates this tension between the people who really understand what's involved and the people who commit to involving the company.

So we shouldn't say "it's just up to the employee", because that attitude creates its own culture, one where the employees work just enough to not get fired and the management accepts this attitude as network damage and routes work around it.

Administrations have an opportunity to choose what they're doing. Advising a startup-laden forum like HN to aspire to massively-multiplayer mediocrity might not be wise, because startups exist in a high-failure environment and must strive for passion and excellence. It's the right culture for very large corporations and for franchise restaurants, but it's the wrong culture for the deli down the corner.

Surprisingly, I don't think the solution must require "giving up control" as a developer-manager, though that will certainly help. If you look at these stories, there is a perverse sense of alienation from the company. Maybe this metaphor helps: the manager should be conducting an orchestra. The conductor doesn't have to give up control of the whole orchestra necessarily, but they do need to be aware that it's a bunch of individual people, and you need to communicate your vision of the music you're playing, and they need to feel the same vision and work with you to express it. You also need to forgive errors in performance rather than stop the orchestra for every little thing, and you need to let the audience applaud everyone when success finally happens, and everyone needs to hear the whole symphony, their parts and everybody else's, to know what's going on. In this way, you could in some sense "keep control" even though you give up micromanaging.

Learn to say "no" before it becomes your only choice.

The trick to avoiding complete burnout is easy.

First - don't care at all about your job. Remember that all corporations are by definition psychopaths and they will treat you accordingly.

Second - never do more then 35% of the work you are capable of doing in a day.

Third - if you find yourself getting stressed out tell yourself repeatedly "It's only a stupid job. There is no point in stressing about it."