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The Burnout Machine

unionize.fyi

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Re: The Burnout Machine

#331

Post by ledzep2 »

The nature of free market is competition. And the nature of competition is to get more profit out of less people. It means longer hours, more focus, less complaint, less life. You think new technology is gonna save the poor workers coz it boosts productivity? Only temporarily until everyone has it. Then It's the same game all over again, pushing out new features, new compaigns, re-org, transformation around the clock.

Once one player in the market starts to work the longer hours, it's guaranteed to spread to every corner. Coz you need to up the game and catch up with the competition.

Endless grind.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#332

Post by mystraline »

echelon wrote: post #298
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, this person isn’t a worker class. They’re managerial class spreading essentially propaganda against something that would threaten them,

I've always been an IC.

Please. You don't make 10 figures on your work.

Its how you exploit other people is where you get $1,000,000,000 or a billion worth.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#333

Post by null_name »

deedubaya wrote: post #26

Burnout? Yes. Overwork? Maybe. Unionize? Eh… The post reeks of privilege. Go work a manual labor job outside in the sun for a few weeks and tell me how bad tech employees have it. Most of non-tech America is not empathetic to our plights. They’ll probably cheer on the offshoring of our jobs.

I think it is possible to acknowledge that privilege, while still highlighting the things that suck for us, and the ways unions can help. I wish the article did this. I firmly believe there is a strong case to be made here. It gets muffled by the narrowness of the author's perspective.

I've worked in a kitchen and a warehouse for a while, I absolutely know how good we've got it. I have friends who tell me about people dying at their workplaces. Pretty much everyone I know who's not a programmer is living paycheck-to-paycheck. I'm still incredibly burnt out, and probably couldn't continue for another 6 months if my life depended on it.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#334

Post by [deleted] »

stared wrote: post #100

Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode" (I moved from academia over a decade ago, and I know the difference). This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels like it lacks perspective compared to virtually any other occupation. > We’re living in a world where billion dollar tech companies expect us to live and breathe code, demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion…

[deleted]

Re: The Burnout Machine

#335

Post by thorum »

Foreignborn wrote: post #160
rco8786 wrote: post #82

> You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient No offense, but was this written a decade ago? All of that stuff is long, long gone. > demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion." Not my experience at all. From startups to big tech/FAANG, silicon valley and otherwise. Never been asked for an 80 hour…

it’s because they used an LLM to edit the prose. It has all the signature marks. There might be good content there, but it’s full of AI slop.

More than just editing, I’d say. Large sections are clearly 100% AI.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#337

Post by Cyph0n »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #102
Cyph0n wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unbelievable that this had to be spelled out. Do people actually think that current working conditions and employee rights were bestowed upon us by benevolent capitalists?

When it comes to tech workers, not by benevolent capitalists, but by greedy capitalists. Up until say 2022 or so, the vast majority of people who worked in tech companies in the US were compensated extremely well (relatively) without unions, the reason being that (a) modern tech, especially software, can be such a "force multiplier" where a small team of programmers can serve millions of customers and (b) there reall…

We were talking about where worker rights came from in general. And the answer to that is unions.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#338

Post by achenet »

d3ckard wrote: post #250
ActorNightly wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout". I can explain it pretty well. You can classify pretty much all jobs into 2 categories - map lookups and reasoning. A map lookup job is something where you learn to associate a specific problem with a solution. Most jobs are like this. You go work in construction, its pretty much map lookup - supervisor tells you to go prep the concrete…

It’s exactly the opposite. Burnout happens when a person with high reasoning skills is not allowed to actually used them and forced into map lookup tasks (most commonly with a useless, here be dragons kind of map).

This is exactly my experience. I like to think I'm a decent thinker. I've spent the past 6 months basically in constant burnout, started smoking again and am up to a pack a day now, because my job is "we're going to tell you that you have ownership over this perimeter, and then give you basically zero leeway in how to do things. You have to do it this way because that's what the senior architect with the hard-on for every new DevOps tool has decided. You thought that db migration could be done with just a simple script and modifying a few API endpoints? Lol No, we're using Temporal. Wait,why do you keep telling us you want to quit and go back to doing maths research?"

Re: The Burnout Machine

#339

Post by thorum »

Why does this AI-generated article have 400 upvotes? The conversation here is valuable, but surely we could find a human article to have it under instead?

Re: The Burnout Machine

#340

Post by archsurface »

stared wrote: post #100

Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode" (I moved from academia over a decade ago, and I know the difference). This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels like it lacks perspective compared to virtually any other occupation. > We’re living in a world where billion dollar tech companies expect us to live and breathe code, demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion…

Not all dev jobs are like that. There is only one country called the USA.
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