It's certainly getting worse in the modern world of knowledge work, not better.
And shameless plug (I guess?) but in my mind fascinating research, we (Asana) surveyed 10K+ knowledge workers a few months ago around the state of work (to figure out where we spend our time at work and what stresses us out etc.):
I think the scariest thing about burn-out, is that not everyone is financially able to take the recommended time off to recover - what then?
I've certainly been close to being in this boat, had to take a job before I fully recovered, so took one I felt might be a bit lighter on the load and still give me some chance of recovery.
what if the 'recommended time off to recover' is wrong? I believe that burnout comes from a missing a reward that is expected after protracted and intense labor, thereby training your brain that labor = bad. Maybe the right thing to do is to retrain your brain that labor = good, with primary stimuli. Making green dots appear is definitely one very effective way to get over burnout. I haven't had a major burnout incident in years, don't know if it's because I'm getting older and wiser, or if it's because I'm learning how to do little bits of work that are 1) guaranteed to succeed and 2) nearly guaranteed to reward me, at least in ways that matter to me, if not financially or socially (those are the types of reward you can't control and often lead to the hardest burnout).
Yeah. My contrarian opinion on burnout cones from about 10 years of observation as an academic track researcher in the physical sciences (typical 80+, occasional 100h+ workweeks in sometimes physically dangerous environments - carcinogens, implosion and explosion risks, one time a Dewar imploded in my face at 2am). The two leading triggers for burnout were "literally the universe" causing your experiment to repeatedly fail, and possibly more pernicious, "your boss switches tracks on you", due to funding or political concerns. Of course the management class (PIs) has zero empathy because the funnel is so selective that almost all of them had it easy, and anything less is merely a dumb or incompetent employee.
One of my buddies went into a burnout phase where he would use his pipette tips in a geometrical pattern and play flash Gameboy Tetris, or sometimes go to the casino and play poker (all of which he got really good at).
> I believe that burnout comes from a missing a reward that is expected after protracted and intense labor, thereby training your brain that labor = bad.
I personally think the problem is we don't really see much of a reward. Weeks of living in flight or fight mode and then a "good job" from the boss isn't a reward. Knowledge workers don't get real tangible rewards. And even if I had $100,000 dropped in my lap today, that wouldn't even be tangible, it'd just disappear in to the mortgage. I'd never actually enjoy it, no part of my monkey brain would think it did a good job.
It's hard for our profession to provide obvious, immediate rewards.
It depends where you are, but a lot of people are struggling more because the very rich are using automation to eliminate jobs, take the extra money made for themselves and more easily move factories to other countries by chasing the cheapest workers. Also, consider that the decaying of the welfare state in many places has led to increasing homelessness, worsening medical conditions, shorter lives and more misery. Then there's ageism, where older workers worry constantly that they will be fired for being old and they worry that no one will hire them. And then there's the homeless, which in America as not all people know, there is a very loose patchwork of few services to help people who are permanently disabled or unemployed (but could work) to find housing, support and work. In America, if you're broke or working dead-end jobs/below livable wages: "sorry, it's your own fault."
Only a privileged few can take sabbaticals or work wherever/whenever they want.
Depends where you are - in many European countries you'll get paid during medical leave (and you'll get medical leave for burnout) plus companies won't fire you.
Here in the Netherlands the balance of this is quickly tipping the wrong way. For certains low end job types (cleaning, delivery, etc) people no longer get permanent contracts because of the risk for the employer. Instead people work using a sort of pseudo-freelance construction. Having all the risk but having non of the freedom/benefits. New laws to protect these pseudo-freelancers, like manditory insurance or Wet DBA (to determine how much of a real freelancer you are) go against the will of true freelancers and thus are hard to implement as well.
Many US companies provide white collar employees short term disability insurance for medical leave. You'd need an actual medical diagnosis though, "burnout" isn't one. You'd probably also need to be going to some sort of regular treatment during your leave for a doctor to sign off on a disability claim.
Don't forget if you stop working for any reason, you're now a failure, met with suspicion, and expected to explain that for the rest of your life. It's not even about the financial aspect, our society is very punitive to people that want to leave their cages for a while. What you wanted more than this office for one year out of your 30+ year career? There must be something wrong with you.
I've had some really weird experiences with this. Directly after school, I took a year off basically "waiting" for my job to finally accept me (long story, they eventually did) and now, every single recruiter or company I talk to demands I explain why I took a year off. "I see you didn't immediately join the workforce, care to explain?" is what they hit me with every single time. It is unbelievable that I need to explain it to them. They are usually accepting when I tell them I was just waiting for my first job to accept me, but I can't imagine it would be the same if I just needed some "me" time before starting my career.
You must be young. After 20 years, I don't even put those early jobs on my resume. If I even add them at all, it's a one line, name of company + role and some rough dates. Nobody cares. I don't put education or graduation date on the resume anymore, either. Nobody cares. If they care they will ask me.
This kind of stuff only matters like 1-2 years after you graduate. After that, like GPA, nobody gives a shit.
Some of the shitty jobs I had that I quit and didn't go back to work right away, nobody cares about months long gaps. I even completely erased one job I had for 18 months that was just a total shit company and shitty people whom I wanted no further association with. Never been asked about it even once.
This happened to me. At the end of a long and stressful divorce, I realized that I needed to take some time off (or else). Took about six months and then discovered that it's very difficult to get rehired after such a gap. (Being "old" doesn't help either.)
You have to play the cards you're dealt, though, and if you really need a break, it's way better than the "or else".
You just say "My ____ died and I had a tough time with that" (where blank is mother, father, daughter, son, whatever). If they have a problem with that you don't want the job anyways.
99% of the world has a job they can't afford to take leave from. and if you imagine that 99% of the world doesn't have a job that's taxing enough that they'd be burnt out then you don't understand menial labor and how utterly psychologically exhausting it is to do repetitive boring tasks.
So what then? People suffer and struggle and try to improve the lives of their children and then they die.
I say all this not because I'm the first one to realize it but because it's worth repeating. Hopefully someone reads it and it occurs to them how unfair it is.
Mindless repetitive tasks are just fine. You don't have to think about what you're doing, so you are free to let your mind wander to better places. I've done this sort of thing for years, I know what I'm talking about.
A summer of thinning apples 7am-6pm was one of the most skull-numbing, awful jobs I've ever had. I would rather try my luck living by myself in the tundra than do that for my whole life.
The manufacturing work where you have to use humans is usually not as devoid of mental work as may think - things change all the time in your environment, you have to identify different kinds of things to be aware about.
If you're part of a production chain, how many parts are coming down the line? Am I letting people wait further down the line? For many manufacturing steps in a production line you need to manage an amount of tools and parts and keep control of your 'caches' because when you are not working on a part coming down the line, you're preparing intermediate steps, to be able to keep the pace.
Edit: And this task switching all the time can make it hard to get into any kind of flow state with the work. Because the 'disturbances' don't happen in a constant rhythm.
I did a summer working at a printing house where we assembled printed calendars by hand (post-soviet country, people were cheap, machines were horrendously expensive). The job consisted of walking around a long table in a circle and assembling all pages for a calendar, then putting it in a pile for further processing by someone else. 6am - 3pm all day every day.
That job instilled a burning need to never, ever be at a place where something similar is what I need to do for a living, that I feel to this day. It was absolutely crushing.
I've done both repetitive boring jobs and mentally taxing jobs.
Repetitive boring jobs were not psychologically exhausting for me, at least the ones I did (I worked a couple of warehouse jobs one sorting and inspecting parts before they were sent to an assembly line, and another sorting merchandise coming off a truck, stuffing envelopes/shrinkwrapping for shipping and receiving, data entry, etc).
They can be physically exhausting, especially if you work long hours, but not psychologically. Since my brain didn't need to be taxed I got to let my mind wander and think about things for 8+ hours a day, or have audiobooks play, or whatever, and I still had mental energy afterwards to work on personal projects.
Mentally taxing jobs steal that energy away from you. They tend to pay more, but they take your creative and mental energy away in exchange. And my mental and creative energy is more valuable to me. At least with the more physical jobs I was able to stay in shape a lot more easily.
I appreciate giving more visibility to burnout, since I suffered from it in the past, but is this piece an article or PR for this woman and some random app?
> A serious mental-health crisis inspired her new app, designed to help people track their mental health in the same way they might track their diet, weight or workouts, and look for correlations in data between, for example, anxiety levels and sleep, or caffeine consumption and work stress.
The lady who developed the app is a different person from the one who suffered the burnout. If you want to understand or cope with burnout, best just ignore the last part of the article.
I’ve experienced burn out before in my previous career, but never experienced very bad symptoms like the lady in this article did.
Anecdotally, I believe burnout is more likely when you work on a job that only cares about profits, or is not fulfilling in some meaningful way. I personally couldn’t work at most of the software companies out there. Why would I want to work for some ad company, or some company that makes meaningless apps / programs that doesn’t benefit humanity?
Sure, on a knowledge scale, some of that might be rewarding for me. But I wouldn’t last more than six months in a company like that.
I recently quit my job at a web agency. Although some of the projects benefited people in some direct way, most it was all about optimising conversion rates and SEO stuff.
Really felt meaningless, so I quit.
>I’ve experienced burn out before in my previous career, but never experienced very bad symptoms like the lady in this article did.
From the article:
>But she was ignoring some significant signs that all was not well.
>"I used to say I was sick and tired of feeling sick and tired," Amber says.
>And in addition to chronic fatigue and nausea, she was having migraines, extreme abdominal pain, skin rashes and eczema.
>Her GP diagnosed a recurrence of teenage glandular fever.
Maybe the woman in question was suffering with something along the lines of PVF (post viral fatigue) or a mild case of CFS/ME (chronic fatigue syndrome / myalgic encephalomyelitis) which resolved spontaneously. It's impossible to tell just from reading the article, but when there are strong physical symptoms it's reasonable to suspect a physical rather than a psychiatric cause.
Burnout was experienced by many professions, ie caretakers for wounded during world wars. They did care about their work deeply. Same for these days doctors, they choose the work because they are idealists, they still care about their work but grueling hours, little rest etc still make it happen.
I've never understood how somebody can get burnout in usual for-profit corporation. No feedback loop of 'ok-enough-work-lets-rest-or-have-fun'. But its true many people are desperately lonely or struggle in their personal lives, and structured corporate one might seem tempting.
> Why would I want to work for some ad company, or some company that makes meaningless apps / programs that doesn’t benefit humanity?
Some people don't have much choice or prefer focusing on their personal life.
I have some experience with both sides of the coin, here's my personal take on it:
I'm currently taking a month off work, after leaving an ad tech company, full of wonderful and brilliant people, one of the few places in the industry where ethics are constantly discussed and have impact on the direction of the business.
The reason I joined was burnout due to several years of crunch, stress, the most common startup scenario, I guess. The company I joined is famous for great work-life balance, their involvement in the XP community and friendly culture.
But, one of the reasons I left was to work on more meaningful or rewarding projects. I became frustrated with the industry as such, the constant invasion on privacy, its impact on the society as a whole.
I'm in a very priviledged position, due to the job market in my area and the experience (I started working at a fairly young age). I can afford to take a month and look around.
Here's the thing, I wouldn't be able to identify and pursue some of my goals if I didn't work in ad tech, pharma or finance. I just wouldn't have enough deep domain knowledge to approach these problems in a constructive manner. The conversations I have now and the work I can even attempt to do can be much more impactful, purely because I just know more than I used to.
> Anecdotally, I believe burnout is more likely when you work on a job that only cares about profits, or is not fulfilling in some meaningful way.
Both apply to me (which I realised recently), but as far as I know the term burnout used to refer mostly to stressful occupations doing social good (nurses, teachers). A similar discourse around tech jobs is a fairly recent phenomenon. I think that stress can make the most meaningful occupations depressing, purely because it prevents us from seeing their value.
> Why would I want to work for some [...] company [...] that doesn’t benefit humanity
I apologise for the editorialised quoting, I hope I stayed true to the original text.
More on-topic: People work at places like that because it could be so much worse. If it doesn't benefit humanity, maybe it also doesn't actively harm it. Of course this does not apply to ad companies, but there are plenty of vacuous shops that produce things that exist a thousand times over in other places and offer absolutely zero societal benefit. It's busywork, but it's better than starving or preying on your fellow man.
>Anecdotally, I believe burnout is more likely when you work on a job that only cares about profits, or is not fulfilling in some meaningful way.
I worked in academic medical research for a while and many people seemed burn out. There was basically no profit motive since we were working for research grants and there was pretty strict controls on how that could be divvied up on payroll (can't just get a million dollar grant and give the boss a 300k pay raise). You'd think it would be fulfilling since we were studying disease/working towards treatments that could actually help people. Meanwhile I have friends in finance working in purely profit-driven roles that don't really help the world per se, and they don't seem burnt out at all. I really think a feeling of freedom has a bigger role than anything else. If you feel like it's not a big deal for you to take a vacation or a long lunch or just be away in general, then you'll feel less burnt out than someone who is expected to show up every day and give it their all with no end in sight, even if the goal they're working towards is something altruistic.
A lot of companies are actively factoring this into their HR model.
Their model is to hire fresh people and burn them out.
Increasingly this is the direction western corporations are moving. Their ideal model is: place performance quotas above long term sustainability, people then burn themselves out, you then fire them for performance reasons, and you have them on an aggressive noncompete and threaten them with it when they try to work elsewhere after. Totally consume them. Basically institutionalised "f--k you", gleefully chewing up other human beings.
In some ways we're moving to something worse than slavery. At least with slaves they were seen as "assets" rather than "temporary rentals". They had to take care of them out of necessity, so their evil had that limit on it.
Companies that expect people to work this hard are almost exclusively very well paying entry level jobs for fresh graduates with an up or out structure like I-Banking, management consisting or law. People know what they’re getting into when they start these jobs. The hours and workload are not a secret. Most people do their two years and get out. A lot of it amounts to pointless hazing but no one is deceived into thinking Goldman Sachs has a great work life balance.
The huge majority of companies operate on nothing like this model. Either they aim to build up a workforce for the long haul and as such care about having a sustainable workload, with occasional spikes and lulls, or they’re just jobs that are hard, that suck and that as a result have a high turnover and pay relatively well for low standards in hiring. See working in an Amazon warehouse.
The companies that do follow this model suck, like EA, but again that’s not a secret. There’s an inexhaustible supply of suckers for every industry that people really, really want to get into and whether it’s film or video games they’re always awful, though at least film pays better.
Be clearer. I worked a ton of crap jobs in Ireland and always got out at the end of my shift unless someone didn’t show up and I agreed to work longer because I wanted more money. I have a number of relatives in medicine and professional services and long, hard hours describes their jobs well but it’s not chew them up and spit them out; If you want the big bucks you work the long hours.
Its hard to be clear, without betraying too much. i only have me and my experience and how i see others, and what ive been told.
Maybe the downvotes are meritted, though i didnt mean the hard work, i did actually mean that myself and many i know feel its a grind, and not in a good way.
You somehow make it sound as if i have something against hard work, but its quiet the opposite. It may very well be that my job is a single case of good ol toxic work environment.
> Companies that expect people to work this hard are almost exclusively very well paying entry level jobs for fresh graduates with an up or out structure like I-Banking, management consisting or law.
I take it you've never worked in a call center? When I did, anything under a `10` (out of 10) on the random surveys they sent out was considered a failure.
I did the call center thing for a major bank during university.
It was brutal work. But I learned a lot about shameless selling which is pretty useful.
> companies that expect people to work this hard are almost exclusively very well paying entry level jobs
wasn't my experience at all, I did get "well paid jobs" in startups, but in the end, combining 3 jobs in one and doing 80 hours a week isn't worth it even if your salary looks pretty high.
Because of OKRs. Management is setting it so that no-one can reach the objectives. Then there is some speech that OKRs are not really meant to be completed fully but they will still hold it against you if it's not 100%
In startups that's usually how they trick you: they hire you even if you don't have much experience, they give you a decent salary, then they make you feel like you have to work more in order to "prove" their choice was the right one.
I've also seen this "culture" of "we're one big family" in startups, which just feels weird and forced.
One startup I interviewed at, as an experienced developer, told me (paraphrasing here) "you'll be paid a salary lower than what you probably expect, and your first few months you'll need to work overtime to get used to our trendy tech stack, we don't offer health insurance but we do offer...not quite shares, but, sort of ownership interests. You could become a millionaire!"
No, because these kinds of places suck the blood out of people in their early 20s. Usually after they have moved to a new area and left behind all their social connections.
When you're 25 and have no ties and no responsibilities, working 12-15 hours a day isn't the impossibility that it is when you are 35 and have a wife, kids, your own house, and social obligations.
No one actually knows what their first job will be like. But trying to hide that you expect 60-100 hours a week is stupidly counterproductive. Banking, law, consulting are pretty straight up about the hours. People would quit halfway through their first month, their first week of you tried to pull 100 hours on those who didn’t know they’d be working those hours.
A fresh college graduate at age 22 does not understand what 60-100 hours mean. The closest frame of reference they have is pulling an all nighter before an exam or to get a term project done. They can't contemplate their romantic relationship falling apart, the lack of feedback resulting in continuous self doubt keeping them up at night when they're supposed to be resting or how shallow friendships between colleagues are compared to friendships between students (especially when their colleagues have families).
They understand what it means to soldier on despite being tired. They don't understand how much they've taken for granted all that support and feedback that was able to let them cope with the stress, and that now they're on their own.
From my friends who recently graduated and took these jobs in nyc, this wasnt so suprising. They expected to work 10-12 hour days. The familial stuff sucks if you were planning on shacking up at 23, but most people just work their day then drink aggresively in midtown before ubering back to whatever 2k/mo studio tenement they managed to find in brooklyn. Take a boozy trip to the hamptons a couple times in the summer, take your LA trip, go to europe. Suddenly working 12 hour days doesnt seem so bad when you have a rolex on your wrist and a high concentration of adderal in your veins.
I expect in a couple years it will get old, but people are waiting to settle down well into their 30s these days to extend these years of pure adult independence for as long as they can.
That’s the thing about burnout; it feels great because you’re so productive and respected ... until one day your energy is gone. It might take years, it depends on how much support you get from people around at managing your stress, and of course it depends on your own ability to manage it too. I’m skeptical of how effective toys like a Rolex and booze is long term at easing the stress.
My ex-wife felt like she was on top of the world until she was burnt out and it developed into full fledged depression at age 27. I’m not saying everyone will end up like her, everyone won’t develop lung cancer from smoking either.
> Fresh graduates absolutely do not know what they are getting into when they start their first job.
Are you saying that doctors entering their first residency have no idea it's going to be a long 2-4 years? When a friend of mine gradated law school and landed her choice job, her comment was 'the next 2 years are going to suck, but then I'll be set'. Years later she was right.
We are not talking about starting any random job, but those jobs that everyone knows have an initial hazing type of culture. The large majority of jobs are not like this, but big law and finance are and those graduates going into those industries are fully aware.
> Companies that expect people to work this hard are almost exclusively very well paying entry level jobs for fresh graduates with an up or out structure like I-Banking, management consisting or law.
I'm not sure, I see a lot of companies moving to this model and they are not well paying. They copy startup environments but only in appearance (like a ping pong table for decoration that you are not allowed to play), because of that they justify that you must be passionate and work long hours for a low pay.
> Companies that expect people to work this hard are almost exclusively very well paying entry level jobs for fresh graduates with an up or out structure
I'm friends with accountants for the big 4 firms - they are in no way, shape, or form, high paying initial positions.
There also seems to be some kind of institutionalized Stockholm Syndrome for this. People are led to believe that:
- if they don't accept a job like this, they won't get a job anywhere else
- this is the only way to make good money
- there is no other way to rise up the ranks
- loyalty is rewarded
- this is a just sacrifice
- they're invincible due to their youth
What they're doing however is working / giving away their life for free. It's cheaper for companies to hire people that give away an extra 10-20 free hours a week instead of hiring somebody to work for those extra hours.
Even they say "we'll pay you x1.5", they're still making money because they aren't paying x2 for the second person on the payroll.
Unfortunately employees will vehemently defend these practices and even pride themselves on working 10 hours a day. They wear it like a badge of accomplishment and even look down others who don't do the same.
<quote>In some ways we're moving to something worse than slavery. At least with slaves they were seen as "assets" rather than "temporary rentals". They had to take care of them out of necessity, so their evil had that limit on it.</quote>
Some of us prefer burnout at reasonable pay than being raped, beaten, and denied all freedoms.
Towards the later stages of slavery, the first 2 were outright illegal, and the third is somewhere on par with wage slavery today.
It sounds like a hot take on the surface, but modern wage slavery is objectively worse than late-stage actual slavery in some regards. We have not really progressed as society. The only thing that has really advanced is the availability of entertainment to placate the masses and prevent most of them from realising that they are in fact little better off than slaves. More than half of all Americans are less than 1 paycheck away from homelessness and subsequent incarceration. There is only illusion of freedom, the reality is they're chained to their jobs.
Fun fact: medieval serfs had about 4 months of 'free' time each year. Of course it still included housekeeping and various chores, but it was nothing compared to the load of full time employment that everyone experiences today almost all year round.
I'm in favour of making slavery legal again for the sole purpose of making people like this slaves for a year just so they figure out how fucking stupid they are.
'Late-stage' slavery, if it has a meaningful referent at all, refers to chattel slavery in the United States, which is commonly regarded as one of the worst forms of slavery ever devised, much worse than the forms of bondage recorded in (e.g.)classical antiquity and the system of medieval serfdom.
> Fun fact: medieval serfs had about 4 months of 'free' time each year. Of course it still included housekeeping and various chores, but it was nothing compared to the load of full time employment that everyone experiences today almost all year round.
I can only speak for myself here, but I work a full-time job as an SWE.
There are 52 weeks in a year, I have weekends off - that there is 104 days, or (roughly) 3 months of "free time" each year.
Factor in my PTO allowances, plus the fact that I only work 8 hour days, factor out the commute time (about 1-1.5 hours each day), and sleep time...
I'm pretty sure I have at least 4 months of "free time" available each year.
Ultimately, though, it's not the amount - it's what you do with that free time that matters.
The following is entirely my opinion, and not based on empirical evidence, with that said...
I think the issue is that a lot of people don't believe they have a choice. When you are getting hired, make a point that you are not willing to work more than 40 hours a week (unless as completely necessary such as an actual emergency which requires your intervention), but for the hours you do work, you will put in your best effort. You're signing a mutual contract, not indentured servitude, serfdom, being "sold", etc.
It would be plain foolish not to hire someone like that (if they did in fact put in their best work). For some reason everyone thinks they have to be a slave to their company, but any company that recognizes their employees wishes will be able to reduce turnover (which can be very expensive) and in-turn have a higher morale which can improve performance.
I also think that parents are not teaching their kids good skills. I don't recall my parents saying anything other than "work hard" and "do your homework". They didn't tell me how to navigate the real world after school, I figured it out on my own. I learned how to find a company that not only wants me to work for them, but that I'd like to work for them as well. What questions to ask in the interviews, what signs to look out for that raise red flags on how employees are treated, how to research companies to see what the employees say about it and what benefits they may provide.
As a result I probably don't make as much as I could be, or I'm not as far in my career as I could be. But that's okay, because I get to go home at night and not worry about work, and spend time with my family. I also have the option to move jobs at will at any time, for any reason. I was in a job once that wasn't the perfect fit, and found an even better job as a result of the experience I gained working there for a fairly short time.
I love my job now, and I don't know what I would do without it. I'm very lucky that someone has put in the thousands (or hundred thousands, millions, tens of millions?) of dollars to create a business that is able to take advantage of the skill I have without me owning my own business.
Lastly, people are easy to be bitter and resentful. I'd hate to look back and feel like I was taken advantage of for the majority of my life, or missed out on important life events for a job that didn't matter.
> Slavery is not voluntary, and any individual job is.
Why do you assume OP is concerned with only individual jobs? Sure, you can quit working at Target, but you better find something else to fill that gap or you're starving to death in the streets.
I agree that the comparison is horrible, but I have to disagree with you also. My job is not voluntary. Within a relatively short period of time, I could go broke without it (and I have pretty robust savings). I may not be a paycheck away from homelessness, due to my cushy job, but a few months and/or an emergency or two... It could get really bad, quick.
Losing employment is perilous for your career. It looks bad to get fired, take time off, or suddenly quit. Then there's the reality that the next job might not be much better. If every job treats you the same, you don't really have a choice. I can't just change my profession on a dime either. This is basically "if you don't like your country, you can just get out" logic... it doesn't work that way in the real world.
EDIT: Added a word. Also, I want to reiterate that I agree regarding the insanity of the slavery comparison.
Any individual job is voluntary so long as there is more than one employer in the market.
It’s not opinion but fact: you are free to quit your job at any time. You are also likely free to move to any number of different cities that have different job prospects.
That is an important freedom, and you should use it whenever you want.
Slavery is harsher and involuntary, true, but the comparison stands as this is a softer but veiled slavery. You’re free to go but if other places are like that you’re technically really not free to go anywhere..
And starve to death shivering in the street, or go back to the same job again and again. That isn't choice, it just looks like it if you don't see the bigger picture.
> Their model is to hire fresh people and burn them out.
When I was at Amazon, this was the feeling with some employees around me: The stack-ranking meant they were made to a rat-race every year.
I can't seem to recall who, but someone higher-up let it slip when quizzed about higher attrition rate (back in 2010s) that Amazon believed in evolution, and that that meant the slow would eventually give the way for the fast and new. Someone even quipped in an internal email-list that employees were about 8th most important resource to Amazon right after the 7th most important resource: The paper-clips.
Interestingly, and in my observation, the managers got more leeway than individual contributors in terms of evolving slowly. I've also seen rest and vest among managers, but rarely among the engineers. Strange power imbalances, if you ask me, existed and could be felt across every organization I worked for.
I was wondering if/when Amazon would get mentioned in this thread, lol.
---
Cop-out rationalization: conventional wisdom holds that IT/CS folks should jump every 2-3 years or they're leaving money on the table -- and turnover rates reflect that. They're going in 2 years anyway, so get what you want out of them before they go. Most of them can't write fizzbuzz anyway, and it's easy to poach better talent by throwing money at them.
> Interestingly, and in my observation, the managers got more leeway than individual contributors in terms of evolving slowly
Managers run the system, so the system evolves to support them and their needs, like a more reasonable pace. Another way to look at it is if you've made it through the burnout phase then you're going to hang around longer, so it makes sense to hold on to proven performers who have much longer employment horizons.
In Sweden we have many protections against this in theory, but the fact that people are willing to take shit means it's not very effective.
A person I met who is in the video game industry talked about something that happened at one of the companies he did consulting for. A poor guy at that place completely burned himself out and had to be hospitalized to recover. A month after this guy was burned out, a 23 year old was doing the exact same tasks, with the exact same workload and the same impossible deadlines. Sure, video game development with their crunch time is extreme but it's still very scary that something like this is even legal.
Not the first time I quote The Jungle in HN but...
"During the summer the packing houses were in full activity again, and Jurgis made more money. He did not make so much, however, as he had the previous summer, for the packers took on more hands. There were new men every week, it seemed--it was a regular system; and this number they would keep over to the next slack season, so that every one would have less than ever. Sooner or later, by this plan, they would have all the floating labor of Chicago trained to do their work. And how very cunning a trick was that! The men were to teach new hands, who would some day come and break their strike; and meantime they were kept so poor that they could not prepare for the trial!
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But let no one suppose that this superfluity of employees meant easier work for any one! On the contrary, the speeding-up seemed to be growing more savage all the time; they were continually inventing new devices to crowd the work on--it was for all the world like the thumbscrew of the medieval torture chamber. They would get new pacemakers and pay them more; they would drive the men on with new machinery--it was said that in the hog-killing rooms the speed at which the hogs moved was determined by clockwork, and that it was increased a little every day. In piecework they would reduce the time, requiring the same work in a shorter time, and paying the same wages; and then, after the workers had accustomed themselves to this new speed, they would reduce the rate of payment to correspond with the reduction in time! They had done this so often in the canning establishments that the girls were fairly desperate; their wages had gone down by a full third in the past two years, and a storm of discontent was brewing that was likely to break any day. Only a month after Marija had become a beef-trimmer the canning factory that she had left posted a cut that would divide the girls' earnings almost squarely in half; and so great was the indignation at this that they marched out without even a parley, and organized in the street outside. One of the girls had read somewhere that a red flag was the proper symbol for oppressed workers, and so they mounted one, and paraded all about the yards, yelling with rage. A new union was the result of this outburst, but the impromptu strike went to pieces in three days, owing to the rush of new labor. At the end of it the girl who had carried the red flag went downtown and got a position in a great department store, at a salary of two dollars and a half a week.
Jurgis and Ona heard these stories with dismay, for there was no telling when their own time might come. Once or twice there had been rumors that one of the big houses was going to cut its unskilled men to fifteen cents an hour, and Jurgis knew that if this was done, his turn would come soon. He had learned by this time that Packingtown was really not a number of firms at all, but one great firm, the Beef Trust. And every week the managers of it got together and compared notes, and there was one scale for all the workers in the yards and one standard of efficiency. Jurgis was told that they also fixed the price they would pay for beef on the hoof and the price of all dressed meat in the country; but that was something he did not understand or care about."
Pretty funny how NOTHING has changed except the dollar's devaluation. Yesterday's $.15/hr is today's $15/hr. Means nothing. Labor continues to be exploited.
If you're talking about US chattel slavery, your comparison is way off base and you should probably edit your post. Instead of firing an "underperforming" slave they could be legally murdered. Because all descendants were owned by the master indefinitely they could freely breed and rape "top performers" like animals in order to produce more slaves. When we end up with a corporate system that allows for that level of control of life or death in normal circumstances then maybe you can make your comparison. Institutionalized burn out is not it though.
Read Huckelberry Finn, Jim was treated relatively well, however his family was sold away from him, he did not get to see his wife or daughter because it was valuable to the Widow to sell them. Finally he was going to be sold anyway, to somewhere where he would have the high probability of not being treated relatively well. To be treated relatively well as a slave was a living hell, or as it is generally called, slavery.
Damn, I suppose now someone is going to complain about long working hours meaning you never get to see your family anyway.
I couldn’t easily find info on how accurate a portrayal this particular work is, but I think using a work of fiction as historical reference requires a bit of extra care.
It is worse than slavery because companies found they can create an environment for motivated wage slaves constantly competing with each other, aka 'culture'. And fire those who lost motivations in order to strengthen the 'culture'.
As a comparison, traditional slavery is extremely inefficient because traditional slaves are far less motivated, the master has to spend his time or hiring people to constantly threatening and beating slaves work.
There is a difference between being a slave i.e. being owned and being a "wage slave" i.e. operating under significant coercion. We are all coerced to some degree; that's part of being an organism (coerced by nature) and living in a society (coerced by the crushing weight of social interactions). But we aren't owned.
Though it's not your intention, this blurring of categories justifies real slavery. If everyone is a slave then no one is a slave. If "bourgeois freedom" is an illusion then every kind of repression can be justified by the claim that it will bring about "real freedom".
Actually, the freedoms that we have are real and they matter.
(Not OP but) I know it’s an unreasonable and probably inappropriate comparison, but I’m also old enough to have watched the demographics of professional computer programming shift from mostly white guys managing mostly other white guys to mostly white guys managing mostly brown people. I really don’t think it’s my imagination that at least some of the mostly white guys doing the managing have adopted more and more of a plantation-driver mentality.
This IS an unreasonable and inappropriate comparison. Anecdotally I've been overworked by a diverse group of shitty bosses of a variety of races, nationalities, and genders over the years. Nobody has a monopoly on shitty management. Singling out white men as uniquely shitty managers and then slapping on "plantation driver" is super racist!
In Byung-Hul Chan's book, "Burnout Society," he lists this self-delusion of freedom as a foundational component of the emergence of burnout.
It's a good book, I'd recommend it, and you can draw your own conclusions from reading it. It's like 80 pages, too.
> But we aren't owned.
This is a weird subjective/objective thing. While people may not be chattel slaves to a slaveowner, there is a case to be made of bonded/indentured labor for many. The view of chattel slavery seems to fit well into dominant narratives, as it relies on there being a subject who is enslaving another. Modern conceptions of indentured labor, however, are under an objective threat of violence, and this doesn't fit well into dominant narratives of how exploitation works.
> If everyone is a slave then no one is a slave.
There's nothing indicating that the parent comment believes that everyone is a slave. In fact, there's nothing indicating in the parent comment that he believes we are enslaved.
You had a really solid post up until the slavery bit. You really need to educate yourself on the history of slavery if you think we are anywhere close to moving to something worse then slavery.
Not really, I clearly stated "in some ways". As usual, people are hostile to thinking, and are far more concerned with getting their pearl clutching emotional blurts out. This thread is a classic case of that.
Serfdom is a better metaphor. Microserfs was published in 1994:
“The plot of the novel has two distinct movements: the events at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, and the move to Silicon Valley and the "Oop!" project.”
”The novel begins in Redmond as the characters are working on different projects at Microsoft's main campus. Life at the campus feels like a feudalistic society, with Bill Gates as the lord, and the employees the serfs. The majority of the main characters...are living together in a "geek house", and their lives are dedicated to their projects and the company. Daniel's foundations are shaken when his father, a longtime employee of IBM, is laid off. The lifespan of a Microsoft coder weighs heavily on Daniel's mind.”
”When Microserfs first came out, most people thought it was a tightly focused anthropological look at a tiny group of historically transient information workers in the American Pacific Northwest. It turns out they were forming a template of the way everyone else in the world works in and around information. As time went on it became a lot broader, instead of a lot narrower, which is what happened with Generation X.”
I absolutely love how that app that's advertised in the writing is primarily targeted at the 25-40 range... Perhaps after 40 they think you don't work hard anymore... For the record, I started writing code for a living more than 30 years ago. I guess I should be safe, by the mind of these clever guys.
This is highly inaccurate depending on where the upper bound of age is (ie excluding retirees or part timers). For instance, the average person above 40 years of age have much more time to focus on work: Children already grown, not frequently going out to bars or staying up late etc.
These days, for various reasons people are having children in their mid-to-late 30s, and waiting closer and closer to 40 to start having children (many then find out they can't because they left it too late).
For many, the children are not grown and old enough to leave home until the parents hit mid 50s.
This line also stood out to me and perhaps I'm overly charitable, but I decided to interpret it as saying that people who made it to 40 while working in tech must have necessarily matured in their self-care awareness to the point where they don't suffer from burnout anymore, because for a lack of better way to put this, they know better by then.
Just gonna say it, I doubt the solution is yet more apps on the device that is the real source of anxiety.
Putting the thing in airplane mode and leaving it in a different room when you get home is going to do you way more good than staring into your phone and swiping away at more apps.
I've been doing this recently and I do feel like it has helped. Get home, phone goes on the counter in vibrate mode, and I go into another room to relax. I don't check the phone until after dinner usually, which is usually about 3 hours later. Disconnecting for a bit every day has helped with the stress a good amount
I turn off email and Slack when I get home. My stakeholders has to call me if something breaks.
I should note that when they do, my union has negotiated a wonderful overtime compensation where I receive a minimum of three hours pay, at 1.5 times the normal rate, if I have to solve an emergency even if it took me five minutes to fix it. If you're my employer, you better make sure that thing is critical to fix before you call in the cavalry.
After my employer did call me, and other team mates, to fix stuff we warned was not stable multiple times well, wouldn't you know it, suddenly people start listening to us when we want to spend more time fixing something instead of just shipping it quickly.
It's a trade off, you're getting entertainment but you're trading away creative brain problem solving time that occurs when you idle on a commute or whatever.
I think the circumstances mentioned in the article need corrective action, but they are orders of magnitude different than what this phrase was referring to.
One's career isnt always the sole reason for burnout, many times one's workload is totally fine, but combined with their work commute, family and other outside influences, they become burned out. We need to take a holistic look at burnout and not just attribute it to career.
Yes, this was what happened to me. My work wasn't stressful...if anything the issue with it was that I was sitting all day doing nothing, which is perhaps stressful. Added on top of that were a stressful commute, issues with the person I was living with, etc. It started as burnout and then developed into CFS. The only real solution is to deal with all the issues, and then give time for your body to recover (which might take a few months).
> if anything the issue with it was that I was sitting all day doing nothing, which is perhaps stressful
I'll second this. It feels like you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop, or for you to be called out on not exercising the will-to-power hustle that the business culture of 2020 expects. A couple of slow months and I start getting paranoid.
This isn't meant to play down others But seeing comments here, I feel they don't know what slavery is like or have come close to working like it.
My dad in his mid 30s worked 13 hours a day + house work...he was a single parent back in 2011.
There were no fixed weekends off. Sometimes, there would be a cool off season (heavy rain) but that's it. It was also pretty hard physical labor outside on a bike in 45C+ for hours in long summers. There was no AC or air cooler.
He earned $220 monthly as a salary after taxes. Of course, this was/is a small town and costs are not much but that was still pretty tight for a family of two - one of which was a small kid.
People at that stage don't complain anymore about work. They don't say anything at all about it. They just continue without speaking or showing any signs of burnout. The burnout may be realised for a short duration but afterwards, it's normal.
I have done this comparison before and I think it still holds true. You are like a fighter jet or ambulance. Even if you are damaged, you can't stop and worry about it. There are people to look after or protect and without you, they will suffer. This is pretty counterproductive in practice. First, you will deteriorate your health and ignore any suggestions to improve short term issues. Second comes the switch from short term health problems to long term ones, this is a point of denial. At this point, those people stop caring about what happens to them and will dive even deeper.
I don't see my dad and think, "oh he looks like a slave". (Neither does he because he thinks it will pay off and he doesn't have time to be self aware of how much "slave" he is)
In any case, I feel slave is a pretty bad remark to describe a person.
It really depends on a number of factors and how severe the burnout is. If there are other factors involved (stressful commute, interpersonal problems), make sure you deal with those.
If the burnout is mild and you're just working too hard, the solution is to take a break and reduce your hours.
If you're starting to suffer from CFS, then the best solution is a long-term break from work, and a serious re-evaluation of whether you want to continue working there.
For me burnout is less about overworking in a white collar tech job and more this feeling that I'm not necessarily wired want to constantly think about some narrow goal in one of millions of companies out there for 40-50+ hours a week.
I initially went in looking for help coping with stress from exwife+custody - its been a fucked up ride. ANyway, BP was high, so they started treating that. Then diagnosed as diabetic. I was sent to a clinical pharmacist to handle that, and he was looking over my bloodwork and saw the low potassium, and thought it might be an aldosterone issue. Aldosterone being a hormone that controls K/Na balance which controls BP.
Anyway, blood tests showed low K, high Na. Further testing showed aldosterone was out of whack. follow up testing confirmed it. CT scan found a tumor. Then a years worth of testing to be sure the thing wasn't a pheochromocytoma - it wasn't. Finally had it excised and have been getting better since.
Most instances of burnout in my life have come from non-work these days. The company I work for of course doesn't give a shit about this, despite it having a very real effect on my work output.
In 2019, one of my parents tried to meddle in my relationship with my wife, and then took the additional step of nearly ruining our wedding. The additional dozen or so hours per week needed to deal with this (which, by the way, sent me back to my therapist) was overwhelming once sustained for a few months. Oh, also, someone broke into my wife's house and stole a lot of valuable heirlooms, which also caused extra drama in the middle of these two things, which also cost me in lost time, lost sleep, and random interruptions at work.
My performance review for year 2019 was bad. My boss says it was because my Jira card count and code contributions were below X. I let him know of impending catastrophe as best I could the entire year, and adjusted expectations accordingly, but it's clear the org doesn't actually care — so why should he?
Burning out is definitely a taste from hell, if hell exists.
Exactly a decade ago I found myself talking to my mother in foreign languages on the phone, thinking I was talking to my clients. I even got used to lucid dreaming as it happened at least once per week.
Took me three weeks to get back any desire to (even think to) code again.
https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2019/08/09/im-sick-and-t...
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