"Blue collar" burnout, to me, is the archetypal fast food worker making minimum wage working paycheck to paycheck, who not only has to deal with financial insecurity that comes with the job but the physical (actual manual "work") and psychological (rude customers) burdens that come with those types of jobs.
That rings true to me. My speculation as to why: at the most general level, our 'work' in life resembles a hierarchical optimization process--goals and sub-goals (and so on) forming a structure defined by nested utility functions.
Our professional goals (and their day-to-day sub-goals), may be pretty significant, but they're still subservient to more fundamental goals implied by fundamental values.
I think burnout is working extensively on some sub-goal (that may be large enough to appear as a top-level goal in itself), that is fundamentally misaligned with some ancestor goal(s): working on it makes no progress or even regression on more significant goals.
I think a common source of this misalignment for tech people of my generation (I'm 33) is being taught as kids that we can do "anything we put our minds to" and that fundamentally we should be aiming to "change the world". Then we grow up and find ourselves faced with the practical reality of the large scale professional world where not everyone gets to run things and the vast majority of folks end up working on insignificant little corners of someone else's probably anti-altruistic money making scheme--just consider the opposition between the early-formed life goals/values and the day-to-day goals of your typical tech worker.
(And perhaps what makes it extra bad is that contemporary perception of how evil/exploitative etc. tech is, is quite high: our culture is steeped in the likes of Black Mirror and other sources of tech paranoia [or maybe just tech cautionaries--who knows].)
Facebook as one example is not filled with people who want to change the world, they can go work somewhere that's not cancer for 1/3 the pay any day of the week. Do they? No.
From personal experience - most burn-out is just a personality type. Some people only want to play at 9/10 intensity or not at all. Every professional athlete retires because they've 'burnt out'. Every professional athlete is willing to destroy their body to win. We love self destructive people. We love sacrifice. We love it when someone else does it, for our benefit.
When they're asking you to up your intensity from 4/10 to 6, we call them genius assholes and write blogs about avoiding them at all costs. They're asking you to sacrifice along with them, that is not acceptable. On Sunday, on TV, so that you can drink beer and cheer for your team, acceptable. When it involves you, 'burn out' :)
This resonates with me a 100%. We forgot that we aren't machines and our mind and soul needs variations - clutching on to something, letting go/resting and moving on to something else is necessary physically and psychologically.
Absence of that we have sustained stress and resulting bad consequences.
Written by an early programmer at Slack, and someone involved with their recent desktop app rewrite project.
For me, "team marathon running" on software projects means only rarely "sprinting".
As the author suggests, sacrificing sleep, body, and hours eventually catches up with you. But, it's very easy to do and we've all been there. This is part of the reason that medical residents are burnt out on medicine even though they love medicine. It doesn't matter that you're doing what you love -- that's only the top little self actualization triangle of Maslow's heirarchy/pyramid of needs. You need all the base components of Maslow's heirarchy satisfied, too -- financial health, bodily health, emotional health.
This advice doesn’t get you very far. In the abstract, it’s just more self-help cliché. For me these are hard-won lessons, and it’s unlikely I would have done anything differently if someone had told me this when I was 26 or 30.
I feel like the cause of burnout generally lies much deeper than not asking for help or not putting health first. It's more about certain values embedded in you from your past. Those values make you feel responsible for things you aren't, and might make you push yourself. Which might also bring you good things in life, but you have to wonder where those values came from and if they are indeed true for you and helping you.
“Knowing how to apply maxims cannot be reduced to, or derived from, the acceptance of those or any other maxims.”
— Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind (1949)
I started reading this a couple of weeks ago after seeing it referenced in Peter Naur’s “Programming as Theory Building”, and this point of his in particular keeps coming up in all sorts of contexts: there’s a fundamental difference between knowing how something is done and knowing how to do it. The former is what you get from any sort of how-to or advice article, but the latter comes from experience. It’s unclear if there’s any internal transfer at all between these two kinds of knowledge.
"The saying experientia magistra rerum, ‘experience is a great teacher’, was familiar in the Middle Ages: you don’t learn to ride a horse or shoot an arrow by reading books." (from the book, oh the irony, The Invention of Science by Wooton)
Writing up UI designed by a designer who doesn't understand my domain's interface guidelines, reexplaining how my software works to the product person during every product meeting, trudging along under leadership that doesn't understand the costs of all the manual things I'm not being empowered to automate and not having new features to show off every 2 weeks is what is making me feel like I'm burnt out.
I've been at the opposite end of things. I've had to sprint through terminals to catch flight after an incredibly slow deployment at a hotel like out of a nail-biting Hollywood thriller. I've crunched through long days before critical events, and then crunched even longer days to work through all the issues we came across afterwards. But these things usually resulted in satisfaction more than frustration.
My symptoms have been physical too. I've vomited before going into work at least a dozen times. I had to start embracing it to get on with my day. Thankfully this is no longer an issue for myself but I couldn't even tell you what had changed to start preventing that.
For me it’s boring, meaningless and ill-defined tasks. Especially if you have many of those assigned without clear priorities.
I actually like a good crisis at work. E.g. a major production system suddenly going down. Suddenly, there is focus, interrupts go away, the desired result is completely clear and you feel like doing something that matters.
On the other end of the spectrum, working on some meaningless feature (e.g. adding some performance metrics to the system management decided could possibly be useful as if they actually bothered to look at them) has me completely exhausted at the end of the day.
Do you want to do that everyday for next 20 years?
We get stressed when job requirements mismatch our abilities. Usually there's too much work, and we deal with burnout. Sometimes, however, the mismatch goes the other way round, you are overqualified for the job and it becomes excruciatingly boring. That's boreout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boreout
The common thread of each of the examples you give above sounds like, "other people are incompetent."
Applying principle of charity and assuming they are all actually that bad, you've got to meet people where they are if you want to work effectively with them. Lots has been written on the responsibility of senior engineers in guiding and improving their teams without necessarily having a specific mandate from management to do so.
Perhaps you might also apply a bit of that charity IRL too though. Examine your perceptions and interactions critically.
There's no requirement in life that you have to make things work with any given team, anyway. The clueless and the checked out exist too. If you're surrounded by them and your not married to the org, consider other work.
I had an uncannily similar experience, except in my case it was about a week a month (sometimes much more, sometimes less) that I lost to the vomiting, the nausea, the delirium, the totally immobile bowel. In my case, the stress went on for years, and years, utterly relentlessly, day and night, incessantly, and so did the gut attacks. I’d get angry when people mentioned they’d slept badly, because at least they’d got to sleep. I’d spend a sleepless week shivering and roasting and dripping sweat and reeling with nausea, unable to make words or thoughts, then finally suddenly recover, and the moment I was capable of any movement or coherent thought, I’d be writing apologetic emails and heading back to the office, where I’d get a barrage of abuse from both clients and cofounder for my absence.
After multiple hospitalisations they’d decided I had everything from diverticulitis to gallstones to salmonella to a brainstem injury. They took my gallbladder out, did exploratory surgery, every endoscopy you care to name. It kept happening, nothing worked.
Then, I quit my business. Two months later, I had my last “attack”, as I’d come to call them, and it’s now been three years.
So... I wonder if the author had diverticulitis, or was having the same violent physiological reaction to stress that I had apparently developed.
To me burnout is more the psychological state of "why am I even doing this anymore?", loss of enthusiasm, perhaps even some degree of despondency and hopelessness about the future, etc.
This seems more like just temporary over-exertion, under-nutrition/exercise/etc, which can be fixed with a lazy holiday, safe in the knowledge that all those Slack shares are vesting.
In this story someone just shared an experience of being in deep pain, psychologically and physically. While you may not intend to be mean, your response boils down to "you didn't feel enough pain to qualify for burnout." Even if you didn't intend it, this response has an aspect of shaming the author.
I think that it's really important for people to be able to talk about mental health constructively. Specifically, it's important to de-stigmatize the fact that people are susceptible to burnout / anxiety / depression / etc. These aren't necessarily conditions that "can be fixed with a lazy holiday, safe in the knowledge that all those Slack shares are vesting." Instead, they're often conditions that require tailored effort and outside help.
For someone who's going through a mental health issue, it's often really hard to go through the steps needed to improve the situation for themselves. Having others around them understand that it's a struggle, and not something they can "snap out of" is really important.
Again, I doubt you were intending to be belittling here, but I want to point out how important empathy is in this situation.
Having gone through some dark periods of my life, I'd much rather take "snap out of it" advice over the unintentionally patronizing "support". Both are the words of well-intentioned people unable to relate, but one of them mistakenly believes they've overcoming their inability to relate.
1. It has physical symptoms.
2. It doesn't go away when you stop.
Vacation is good. But two weeks after my vacation I had a rough couple of days, nothing that I couldn't handle before, and I was right back where I started.
I've come to think of it like a mental equivalent of a torn muscle. Recovery takes time—probably far more time than I expect, and if you overexert it, even a little, you'll do a lot more damage a lot faster than you did the first time around.
- thermal paste dries out and becomes brittle due to sustained overheat
- resulting in bad contact between heatsink and CPU
- CPU (returns from vacation and) finds that even small efforts makes core temperature rise quickly, thermal throttles constantly
You can burnout and be wealthy or ‘rich’. Having money isn’t going to cure psychological issues that aren’t addressed. People set goals and need to accomplish goals to feel worth. If you’re burning yourself out purely to get ‘rich’ you should probably invest in lotto tickets instead.
It’s a peculiar concept in that it seems to capture the idea that we’ve reached a stage in human development in which we shouldn’t really have to work that much, but do so anyway. It a sort of paradoxical situation in which we’ve eliminated the conditions which necessitated or fostered overwork with material ends (must produce xyz units of consumable goods, food etc) for overwork with largely frivolous ends (the sustainment of online systems which don’t actually create any material value—only abstract or cultural value—not true in every case, of course) enter the “burnout” concept—the big boss no longer needs to forcibly push his workers to the edge, they’ll do it for him through some odd sense of pride or ridiculous notions of performance which are enforced not through punishment but through the allocation of “benefits” like respect, small bonuses, etc etc. —the workplace “culture” (though the social dynamics which emerge at workplaces are not worthy of the name) is an effective system for ensuring people overextend themselves.
I think that what is "new" is burnout in the context of the office and knowledge work.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/14/behemoth-joshu...
Separate your work and personal life. This was a major change for me. I’ve always identified very closely with my work. I’m learning to separate my sense of self-worth and purpose from my professional self.
After that it depends on the reactions you get from that.
I often feel like the web couldn't possibly get any worse, and every day it finds a new way to surprise me and get worse.
Might be one of the worst things I've seen on the web so far
I think my burnout is due to feeling utterly unchallenged at work. The work I've been doing feels way below my pay grade. I'm also attempting to grow my own SaaS business and growth is very slow (3 years in, at $4k MRR), which makes that "light at the end of the tunnel" of going full-time on my business seem unreachable at times. I also have a 5 month old, so I'd also factor that into the lower-bound of my stress level (but I do feel like she helps me slog through hard days more than anything).
I'm starting to be more open about my mental health with family/friends, and I feel like I'm in a rut and not sure how to get out of it. I wish I could take a sabbatical.
From this chap's tag line on his home page it seems like he still identifies strongly with his work and over emphasises the importance of it.
On the weekends, I don't think about work ever (unless something happens to the system and I'm on-call, which very rarely happens. I realise I'm lucky in this regard.)
I just can't work more than 6-7 hours on a given day. Working more won't make me more productive, on the other hand I'll waste more time on reddit since I can't stay focused and I can "catch up" my pre-noon procrastination later.
A part of this, of course, is to insist on not working outside work hours from the beginning of joining a company. In doing so, your colleagues will learn to know not to disturb you outside of work unless it's really necessary.
I feel like that's the mistake the author of this article is committing: not doing anything else than work. Everyone needs time off to recoup no matter what business they're in.
I never understood why people keep working once they have accumulated enough to not have to work anymore.
- Maybe you're right, and things go on nicely without you
- Maybe things go not so well, so your coworkers have to learn redundancy and that they cannot pile all the problems on one person
- Often, you come back from your break (be it going home early, or taking a few days off, etc.) refreshed and you look at the problem from a new perspective. Potential emotions like anger and impatience have worn off, enabling you to act calmly and rationally.
