I have been an employee, freelancer and just moved to being/creating an agency. Retrospectively thinking, burning out as an employee felt much better(and safer) than burning out as an entrepreneur.
As an employee - I always loved pressure times, but then retrospectively disliked "performing under pressure" - why? When I do more work - my manager(s) did not say "you worked so hard and stayed up so late". There was a casual "Thanks". But when there was no work - it is suddenly my fault - "You don't work hard to find work and aren't staying full 8 hours". And just one such bad incident was enough to have my quarterly rating degraded for multiple other good incidents.
As a freelancer - I thought it would be easy - But it wasn't. Of course its not because of client(s) demand. When I worked hourly, every hour counts and pays. I realized I had worked as an employee - for peanuts and sometimes for free. I can now put in same effort and get paid hourly. If I am getting a predetermined price - I work even longer - because its easier to work in a project trance and reduce task switching inefficiencies. I worked long hours and I was trapped. It was just a golden-handcuff.
As an agency - The pressure is on me to grow it. Marketing, managing, hiring and sometimes coding and troubleshooting issues and much more draining is troubleshooting team issues. My ambitions are now bigger than they ever were. Even if I am on a not-so-frequent vacation, I cannot stop thinking about work - "after all its my biz now, if I don't think who will" - I keep brainwashing myself with that. Most of my leisure weekends are combined with some sort of low-pressure work.
The answer to killing burnouts is not in the law - but in the society. The society today celebrates "entrepreneurship, grilling and hard work" for material wealth. We celebrate the next Facebook entrepreneur, but we don't celebrate social entrepreneurship. Everybody wants more, more and more material stuff (myself included). We are being brainwashed to want more than what we need. If you look around there are many people working so hard just to make a decent living. They do valuable work too. As an employee I may get paid 5 times more because I create business value - while they create lesser business value and arguably add higher social value.
I agree -- work isn't the only thing you can burn out on.
But I do think it totally relates to the weeks and months working on the start-up after the "Eureka!" moment. I'd say "having the idea" is the "Eureka!" moment in their slogan, and they're referring to eschewing eat and sleep in order to make that idea a real thing. Which takes weeks and months. Which sounds like a recipe for burn-out.
And, honestly, I think entrepreneurship should be approached soberly rather than like some extreme sport or gameshow. Because start-ups can lose you hundreds of thousands of dollars in opportunity costs, potentially, and interrupt other parts of life. Not that they aren't potentially rewarding as well, but the stakes are high and should be treated as such.
A year ago, I would have thought that the antidote to burnout was start-up culture. I'm a little less naive about it now.
The reality is that you can burnout in any of these ways whether or not you're a corporate monkey or a start-up monkey. Substitute vending machines and water coolers for fancy free-for-all-cafes and foosball tables, and many start-ups have similar WORK demands of their employees. In other words, no matter how fun the culture, it can't forever mask the fact that you're working toward someone else's vision and mission.
I once thought this would be very different in a company of 50 vs 50,000. But even in start-ups, we suffer from an over-emphasis on specialized activities (for efficiency and scale). This creates jobs that lack ownership of the big picture, and therefore may create short term excitement (if the work or team is interesting), but does not equate to long term passion and fulfillment.
As a founder with an idea, part of the reason that I don't want to join an existing effort is because I want to build an organization that challenges this model. Is there a way to better distribute ownership of the vision to everyone in the company so that instead of having a bunch of employees working toward your vision, you have a bunch of entrepreneurs collaborating to define that vision? That in my mind is a major part of avoiding burnout.
The secondary piece is helping people realize that work/life balance is always necessary. As a founder, I spent one month subscribing to the Valley norm that I should just work constantly. Mentally I was fine, but physically I pinched a nerve (or something) and all kinds of horror happened. Yet this cultural attitude of fast fast fast is so prevalent, I think we should also do more to encourage people to adopt some "slow" principles.
I'm glad to read this. My experience is pretty terrible at the moment. I'm not at the burnout phase, but maybe it's taking longer and will consequently be a more spectacular breakdown. I feel myself getting to closer to the edge every day.
My life situation: I have a full time day job at a small business of 18 employees as their IT director. I fight fires all day and help them dig out of constant deadline pressures. Oh, and I have my own responsibilities and we have 'initiatives' that we're accountable to which are supposed to be outside of work.
It's been too much for awhile - nearly 2 years. A year ago I started diversifying so I had something to fall back on. I took on a large side project where I'm the sole developer. It was with a longtime moonlighting client of mine who has high expectations of quality and time. I would love to subcontract the development but I'm afraid that it will take more of my time to get started and the cost/quality won't be high enough.
I wake up at 5am, do my moonlighting until about 7am. Help get my 8month old ready for the day and off to daycare. I then still can maintain a workout (30 minutes a day 6 days a week for 5 years straight), and then get to my day job. I'm there until about 6, come home spend a few hour with my daughter and wife and then feel compelled to dig out of the 20 emails I get from my coworkers while I'm disconnected. After that I try to make progress on my moonlighting gig until about 10pm.
My weekends are the same way.
Is this a good way to live? No.
I fool myself into thinking that it's just one more project or one more deadline then the pressure is off. Another one immediately follows. Occasionally, I'll slip into needing to have a few beers while working to take the edge off - to just get through it. Also not good. I'm probably developing some form of RSI because my pinkies and wrist hurt as I type this.
So, I'm suffering. On the other side, my wife just quit her job, we're renting in a new city with a house for sale (mortgage already paid off though) in another. We have at least 60 months of savings and another 40 if/when the house sells. Need insurance though so I can't quit and have no idea what it would take to self-insure. Also, don't want to eat away at that rainy day fund now that I have a daughter to take care of.
What's the solution? I tell myself I'll finish up this side project and that'll be it. I'll try to reduce my hours at work. Hopefully I can get back to a normal life - if I even know what normal is any more...
Well said. For me, it was a great source of burnout when the true transactional nature of work was thrust on me. I had been giving work 110%. My work ethic and output were part of my identity, and I was integrated well socially in the team/unit. I was motivated, gaining influence, getting interesting shit done, and working with great people. But I was also green, and when all of those motivating factors were eroded away, I wasn't prepared. I found my complaints were falling on deaf ears - surely it's obvious to management that there are legitimate problems which will result in worse business outcomes? Surely all of the rhetoric about passion, collaboration and The Mission wasn't just BS? It was very difficult to move from that naive thinking to a more detached one where work is simply a means for earning money to live. The unfortunate reality is that there are few employers at few moments in time that tick more of my boxes as a human than simply paying me money. I think this warrants scaling ones inputs in the same way a business does; I put enough in to get what I need out, and no more.
100% agree. Burn out for me has everything to do with what the work is, whether there are enough hands for it, and whether it’s being properly recognized/appreciated.
It has nothing to do with the hours; indeed some of my most productive and least burnt out times have been when I was happily pouring in 60+ hrs/week because I was having fun and so energized by the project and my team’s excitement and collaboration dynamic.
Burnout for me wasn’t about too many hours. It was more that, especially in the SF tech scene, as an employee you’re expected to drink the Koolaid and not only do your job but be 100% emotionally invested in your company too. The expectation of emotional attachment is, at least for me, what makes working in that kind of environment overwhelming, and recently decided for myself that it isn’t sustainable after 4-5 years in it.
This 100%. I got burned out by the classic case of working at a startup from pre-seed round. After two or three years or so of working virtually every single day, including between leisure activities on “days off” and almost always “on call” replying to emails and DMs, I just stopped. I didn’t reply at absurd hours, even if I knew the answer or had something to say. I didn’t spend hours outside of work thinking about work anymore.
Over time, I started putting more time into properly decompressing from work at the end of the day so I didn’t feel stressed about the next day.
I get burned out from time to time still, but it’s much more “in the moment” burn out vs systemic burn out.
> Jobs in corporate software development can feel pretty much like that, at least for me. Startups are better, but, on the other hand, they work you harder.
You might be confusing cause and effect; you feel those things after being burnt out. Once upon a time, I worked at a start up doing very rewarding, high-impact work with cutting edge technology...just too much of it. I could feel burnout creeping up[1] and I asked my boss for time off, he agreed, but feared I would not return after my break and pressured me to finish the project before leaving by working at an even faster pace - you can guess what happened next. I walked in one morning, sat and my desk and I discovered I no longer had any gas left in the tank: I was completely empty inside, no motivation, no interest in any doing anything work-related, all I could do was browse web comics all day, and even this didn't bring me any joy at the time.
I took my break and switched employers soon after (which wasn't my plan initially), fortunately the new organization had a much slower pace, it took me months to get close to my previous level of productivity. Never again.
1. When weekends doesn't feel like enough time away from work, you might be on your way to burnout
I think burnout, to some extent, is the norm for most people working a 9-5(+).
I think most SWEs that don't get burnout either have an extreme passion for the work such that they don't mind thinking about it 24/7 or opt to go into lower pressure jobs. There are a lot of people finding ways to have lower pressure work at the FAANG level firms as well, although that is harder with the current market crunch for tech.
Many people are willing to grind it out for a couple decades, and some people working FAANG type jobs have been able to build generation wealth doing it, so that's a tradeoff they made.
I think you just have to go into it clearheaded about what you want, and avoiding getting sucked into situations where you're not optimizing properly for anything (i.e working 60 hr weeks for a mid-sized company that doesn't pay that well).
Oh man. Yes, this is a solution to lack of growth. And a great idea for those who want it. But a solution to burnout? Speaking from personal experience and the evidence around me, starting a business seems much more likely to lead to burnout than to cure it.
In my experience, and what the article also mentions, despite the title: it is fundamentally different if you push yourself, or if you're pushed by circumstances.
Pushing yourself, to file the taxes, finish your personal project, go for a run, lookup something in wikipedia.. that is almost always good.
Being pushed by clients, the organization, dead lines. Often bad.
My theory, burnout and stress, happen in environments where you receive responsibilities without the power to fulfill them.
Very interesting topic. Personally, I know many suffering burnout except those who have a balanced life before lockdown. People who have a safe social network. But when it comes to entrepreneurship it's a disaster.
Agree, hours have very little to do with burnout, unless your talking about the colloquial burnout which seems to be used as a synonym for fatigued or exhausted.
I've been a workaholic all my life, often working 80 - 100 hours a week for years on end, often in stressful situations. That didn't cause burnout or anything like it.
What ultimately got me was developing a quick but complex POC that became business critical seemingly overnight. Nothing worse than knowing that a hidden bug in something you coded over beers one night could cost 5000 people their jobs in a matter of hours, and having execs want you to move on to the next big idea instead of providing appropriate resources to carefully rewrite and thoroughly test. The depersonalisation such prolonged stress can cause is really hard to convey.
In my experience, burn out has been less about working 12+ hours a day so much as working even a standard 40 hr workweek on something that is counter to your principles/true self. I think this is more frequently the case today because the expectation that we derive meaning and identity from our work has increased.
Couldn't agree more with this. The same issues occur with entrepreneurial relationships - I've worked in large companies with all of the above issues, and also started various ventures and been highly aware of shifting priorities and focuses that have led to burnout. This is more subtle but since you have to keep things moving forward can create greater personal risk
Meaningful work isn't a guarantee that burnout won't happen.
My first small business I owned hit every bullet point in my career wants and desires and I burned out pretty hard on it. The constant state of being turned on, dangling the career carrot in front of myself wasn't healthy. I had a bad relationship with my own business.
Even though I enjoyed the work, the compensation was good, and I used my hands creatively, my own expectations weren't matching the reality and I still found myself becoming oddly dissatisfied with the work and becoming overwhelmed by the grind.
I think it's much deeper than just work being meaningful. My wife sits on a phone all day really doing useless work for a large publicly traded company and makes great money and absolutely loves it.
Folks like you who are passionate and have an innate strong work ethic are worth their weight in gold, and need to be nurtured and protected from burnout by their managers and peers.
I've been on both sides of this equation. As a consultant with my own business I've done stints of 80+ hour work weeks, wrestled RSI and flirted with the edge of burnout. I've also managed teams with superstars sprinkled in who take on visceral ownership of a project, working to the goal not the clock and doing whatever needs to be done to achieve success. Some here will criticize that as an artifact of poor management / corporate culture, but in my experience different people have different priorities in life and some come with a very strong professional drive and crave the opportunity to outperform. There's an incredible multiplier effect that can raise the productivity of the whole team. But if they're underappreciated, taken for granted, or blindly loaded up with ever-increasing responsibilities as you described it's disastrous. I liken it to using a rare, hand-crafted sports car to haul manure then leaving it out in the rain to rust.
I've learned how crucial it is to stay keyed in to the pulse of your team. Communication is key (simple questions like "How's your workload?", and paying attention if someone who's usually cheerful seems agitated or irritable). At times I've had to force reports to take a few days off in between cycles to regenerate and make sure they stay fresh.
Have also spent some years volunteering in emergency services, and watching ordinary humans placed in high-pressure situations you gain an appreciation for mental health and not being cavalier about it.
I hope your activities playing with those new technologies you mentioned rekindles that spark of wonder which first led you into tech, and you land a career with an employer who knows how to take care of their people. Look forward not back, you've still got years of professional opportunity ahead of you if that's where your desires lay.
I'd say, from my armchair theory, there are a lot of factors that lead to burnout and most all of them I think stem from some underlying pressure to work more. It may he some culturally seeded external pressure of your peers or workplace saying you need to continually push the bar, it may be your own internal goals that create such conditions, but I think it almost always stems from setting and then continously trying to attain unrealistic goals in work.
If you can set realistic goals in realistic time increments that create a situation you can attain with a reasonable work life balance, you no longer need to push 10 hour days, you can take the evening off and relax. You don't need to take your evening and spend it learning some new tech or prepping for interviews to make your need career step.
The issue is that while the pressure can be internal, much of it is becoming external and out of people's control. The way interviews have shifted in the past 20 years is a pretty obvious case of this in my opinion, the bar has been pushed higher and higher due to external pressure pushing the bar up through competition. Many workplaces adopt ridiculous slave driving time management techniques that push people beyond comfortable levels, continously. For those who want to grow you do need to push your boundaries but even then, you need to do so realistically and not continously--people need time to stagnate and be comfortable before they grow a bit.
People sometimes get bored at a job because it's not challenging, they feel they aren't growing, the tech is old, whatever but I've rarely heard anyone complain in these situations that they feel burnt out. They may feel bored or stagnant but I find those situations far more bareable than burnout conditions.
My opinion is that burnout stems largely from Taylorism gone off the rails focusing on pushing human efficiency beyond its breaking point without caring about the humans involved. Technology is pretty bad because tech is a very efficiency focused industry with lots of creative engineers ready to figure out a new way to optimize every aspect they can without often without considering side effects. I don't think it's isolated to tech by any means but I think tech is uniquely positioned to create abusive pressuring situations more than many sectors.
Burnout is about how the time is spent, not about how it's rewarded. You can get paid whatever you want, but if you're miserable for 50%+ of your waking time, you're going to burn out.
Rewards can only sweeten the deal. They can't turn a bad working situation non-toxic (at least not until they cross the threshold of allowing one to escape from the bad situation entirely).
People can only put up with that frustration for so long. When they can't put up with it anymore, that's burnout. It's not about who's getting the profit (though the discouragement from feeling that you're not being treated fairly can definitely be a significant contributor to the stress). Indeed, burnout is very high among business owners.
I'm strongly pro-capitalist, but I agree that we need to adjust structures to ensure that companies are obliged to share a fair portion of their profit with employees. However, I believe this only tangentially relates to the problem of burnout, which is fundamentally about the psychic impact of daily exposure to the same significant stressors.
As an employee - I always loved pressure times, but then retrospectively disliked "performing under pressure" - why? When I do more work - my manager(s) did not say "you worked so hard and stayed up so late". There was a casual "Thanks". But when there was no work - it is suddenly my fault - "You don't work hard to find work and aren't staying full 8 hours". And just one such bad incident was enough to have my quarterly rating degraded for multiple other good incidents.
As a freelancer - I thought it would be easy - But it wasn't. Of course its not because of client(s) demand. When I worked hourly, every hour counts and pays. I realized I had worked as an employee - for peanuts and sometimes for free. I can now put in same effort and get paid hourly. If I am getting a predetermined price - I work even longer - because its easier to work in a project trance and reduce task switching inefficiencies. I worked long hours and I was trapped. It was just a golden-handcuff.
As an agency - The pressure is on me to grow it. Marketing, managing, hiring and sometimes coding and troubleshooting issues and much more draining is troubleshooting team issues. My ambitions are now bigger than they ever were. Even if I am on a not-so-frequent vacation, I cannot stop thinking about work - "after all its my biz now, if I don't think who will" - I keep brainwashing myself with that. Most of my leisure weekends are combined with some sort of low-pressure work.
The answer to killing burnouts is not in the law - but in the society. The society today celebrates "entrepreneurship, grilling and hard work" for material wealth. We celebrate the next Facebook entrepreneur, but we don't celebrate social entrepreneurship. Everybody wants more, more and more material stuff (myself included). We are being brainwashed to want more than what we need. If you look around there are many people working so hard just to make a decent living. They do valuable work too. As an employee I may get paid 5 times more because I create business value - while they create lesser business value and arguably add higher social value.
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