https://pypi.org/project/html2text/ has --ignore-emphasis which drops bold and italics and cleanses this pest.
I’ve mostly let go of those feelings though. My conclusion after working outside of tech and rebuilding my life is that I just didn’t have the constitution to play the corporate game. More power to those who can though.
I do similar work in my day job and consulting. I'm very fresh and optimistic during consulting hours, but dread going into the office. I'm genuinely burnt out and just don't give a flying fuck anymore, I don't sleep, and I've been more sick in the last month than ever in my life.
The only difference is that one comes with politics and one doesn't.
Totally agree. It’s not the stress of doing something new and just trying to figure it all out that’s stressful. That’s actually fun. It’s the arbitrary adjusting of priorities and putting tasks in hold to start some harebrained idea that ultimately gets tossed or proves to not work out that becomes tiresome. Then shit rolls down hill and people want to know why the paused project isn’t completed and assigns blame to the dev rather than piss poor management.
No. I’m not bitter
General pattern is that certain people in the level(s) above you are fighting for influence to impress the levels above, and critically, are willing to use the levels below in order to achieve their personal goals (organizational goals are secondary, at best). Unless leadership is unusually adept at punishing the first signs of this behavior, it quickly becomes pathological. Every level gets infected, and before long your org has all of the backstabbing drama one might associate with an imperial court. In times of growth it's painful enough, but in times of limited resources, it's pure bloodsport.
There are people who can effectively detect and push back on the behavior, but they seem to be rare, and even more rarely make it into positions of influence. My theory is that it's so exhausting to be sensitive to the drama that you can only make it to the top if you combine it with a big dose of sociopathy. You also see it a lot at startups, because the founders are typically young, arrogant and have no experience managing anyone. By the time they realize they've hired a toxic exec layer, it's too late.
You know, from all the talk about agile one would think people would remember the one central value from the manifesto that gave the name for the thing...
It's not primarily about expending too much energy, but rather about expending energy in a way that appears futile relative to an ambitious standard set for oneself.
Just my personal observation, but dovetails well with the learned helplessness theory of depression.
I used to get burnt out at work all the time, but that really hasn't been the case for the last 5 years. The biggest difference is that I'm I'm in charge now. When I say something is going to take X amount of time or that we have to do things in a certain way, management doesn't argue with me anymore. They just accept that is the way it is, because I'm the one in charge of this area of work.
I haven't changed. I still take too long to finish ostensibly "simple" things because I've nerd-sniped myself [0] into over-engineering things. What has changed is my relationship to the management class. They see me as one of them, now, and that confers a level of respect that is, frankly, enraging when you consider the lack of it in the obverse situation. But, I can make things my way and I can protect my team and that's enough.
And a lot of management bravado is from fear and ignorance of how the work is actually done and their ego gets in the way of curiosity.
So then there is a good chance you are not in favor when promoted in to their circle because they can feel threatened.
You will get hurt and you will be tossed aside with great prejudice.
Now, 40% of my time is alone in isolation, working at home. Collaboration and design work happen in documents at best and not in social conversation like it used it.
All of this is making work a chore, "for me". Instead of work being an opportunity to hang out with people I like it's just a list of things to do alone.
If you know you were getting all your social needs met at work, and now you don't, the companies that have moved back to the office should be a godsend for you. So why don't you just change jobs?
I found it uncomfortable.
I thought it was a nice bit of irony. At work there's so much play-acting but all in a serious tone.
And while I agree with the idea that the society does not pay enough attention to burnout, the article offers no explanation of why he think it's a tsunami, beyond "three people I don't know quit suddenly" (sic).
The article says "everyday life is much harder now, and getting harder". That may be, but there's no proof this is causing more burnout.
Also I'm pretty sure that graph is showing almost the opposite of what they're saying it shows. The number of non-participants (of working age) in the US labor force has actually been very static since June 2020, following a sustained jump during early COVID: [0]. The number of participants has been increasing steadily since then: [1].
The graph [2] shows the number of people in the labor force with a disability so combined with graphs 0 and 1 I'm pretty sure it's showing that people with disabilities are participating more in the labor force and/or that more working people are getting diagnosed with conditions (like ADHD) that qualify as disabilities (if I had to guess, likely because of telemedicine taking off in 2020). It does not show non-participation in the labor force due to disability like they imply.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS15000000
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV
[2] https://www.oftwominds.com/photos2024/disability8-23a.png
But then it just got boring AND exhausting. The leadership became uninspired and replaced by the classic sleazy sales persona, the work became mundane, and the constant 4-6month cycle of new clients began to overlap as I went higher up and managed more projects/focused more on sales.
I haven't figured out what I'm gonna do next, frankly the networking burned me out so much I am very averse to it. And ironically I became quite good at it (at least relative to where I started).
I'm booking my first intro chat with someone next week, and already my stomach is turning thinking about scheduling it. I thought I was ready but maybe not...at the same time, life ain't free.
I think this was labeled with the overused "nervous breakdown" in those times.
The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.
In many places if you get hurt/burnt out on the job the upper seats are looking for any reason to curb stomp you. There's no reason to give a company your all unless you have an actual stake in it or they are there to hold you up when you're dragging. I've worked at multiple places where influential people died, yes dead, below average life expectancy, - on the job - and corporate did everything they could to not even pay out on their legal obligations (life insurance, D&D). In some cases employees joked or snickered about the person who died later on - in meetings.
In tech. I've found that you're not on your own but you are at the mercy of who is in charge of your schedule and rates your performance. If you lose trust in that person your best option is to leave as quickly as possible. Otherwise they will do what they can to destroy you for as much 'profit' as they can claim. Being clear. It is not about realized gains, it could even be at great detriment to a company. It is about short-term line item claimable gains. "We got 4 good months out of her...", "they were terminal and now they will be working somewhere better for them...", "he really wasn't closing as many tickets as the rest of the team...", "they weren't helping as many team members as the rest of the team...", "we never needed someone with an advanced degree...", etc.
Check in with yourself regularly. Know the signs of burn out. The company you work for does not depend on any person caring about you in the slightest.
I'm here, but it just seems like a temporary fix. I can't imagine doing this for the rest of my life, but I need money and health insurance. What's the alternative, what did you end up doing?
My assumption is people like us, we care a lot, we are smart, we are capable, and when we get stuck in corporate swamps our inner candle starts to go out. We just need to find ways to spend less time in the swamp.
Everything is temporary, even you. You only need enough money for you to live from your 401k/rented houses/investments.
Also, be on the lookout for new opportunities.
And if you are a bit masochistic just try to work on something boring. Helps with "not caring enough, I'm just the computer equivalent of a payroll accountant, pay me and you'll get your payrolls on time".
Glad to see some good old Buddhism philosophy at work. I am much happy now once I start thinking the same
So many people followed a path laid out by others for so long—-study hard, do extracurriculars, go to a good college, study hard again, do internships, get a job with a prestigious company, work towards promo.
At some point, generally in late 20s but can be before or after, many such people realize that they have if not everything they ever dreamed of then at least a lot of what they worked towards. But they still aren’t happy because in all those years they never figured out what kind of people they actually were—what it is that would make them happy.
We all need money, but do you need that much money? If yes, then ok. Try to think about what you need the money for in the next stupid meeting about story points. But if no, then you have options.
People change a lot. There's no golden idol person in my future that would make me happy if only I could break free and become that person. That person changes constantly.
I think we are unhappy because we've been fed a lie that that person is just over the horizon and you're not living your full life properly unless you become that person. The problem is that that person changes constantly. It's always out of reach and who's to say you will be happy once you get to that point?
A change in mindset is the cure. But a change in mindset does not cause economies to scale, shareholders to get value and cause the wheels of industry to move. We are always arriving for something we think will save us.
We used to run companies and share stock. Now private equity hands out money and goals and if the goals aren't met your company that is doing great and turning 15% per year evaporates on the next recap.
From a Marxist perspective I think we're seeing the synthesis of deeply individualistic capitalist culture, and the renewed awareness of class consciousness and workers rights. In the past these kind of conflicts have led to the 5 day work week, The New Deal, etc. But the same conditiona can also lead to far-right authoritarianism.
A side effect of higher education becoming "low status" is that men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history. Which makes them more vulnerable to radicalization.
> men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history
And to be clear this includes prestigious nationally-ranked “tech” schools, right? Possibly even those with lip service to a liberal arts education where one can actually be excused from “distribution requirement” courses based on their high school experience. (Oh, you support that? Well… maybe I did too, but I sure didn’t understand the connections. Maybe a class would have helped.)
I think if you see a majority-female CS class graduating from Stanford it is a sign that VCs and other power brokers will begin weighting that credential less.
This is complementary to the anti-intellectualism that's already baked into fascism. Rich people like Peter Thiel have already started paying people to "not go to school" as an anti-intellectual backlash against inclusion and diversity.
Social media and its propagandists are the source of modern radicalization, together with failure of neoliberalism to produce growth that benefits the little guy. The university far leftist radical and rural Trump voter have lots in common in hating the status quo. They just blame different things, often the wrong ones like migrants or white privilege.
Everyone not in the billionaire club should hate neoliberalism.
Jobs, gender, salary level for a given job, gender roles, and whether child care is considered "work" are all social constructs.
I think anyone who has turned on the news in the last 9 years, what technologies and companies are trending, can predict which way things are going to go. Again though, we all need to come together for that too...
Yes. The US lost the general pattern of an 8 hour day, a 40 hour week, time and a half for overtime, and employment duration measured in decades. Most people can handle that.
Most people cannot handle 996 work, "clopeners"[1], and "side hustles" for long.
That's really it. The US just needs to get back to what were normal labor practices from the 1950s to the 1970s.
The key item here is paid overtime at a higher rate. That makes it uneconomic to have people at work too long. It's cheaper to hire an additional person.
"Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will." - Knights of Labor, 1888.
[1] https://calchamberalert.com/2023/04/14/clopening-schedules-g...
Modern economy is set on the premise that there's always some way to make money, meaning there's always more work that could be done (regardless of whether that work is actually useful).
A lot of big cities have youth programs out of fear kids will otherwise join gangs. As an adult if you have a big mortgage payment or rent is high you must hustle. Some of this rat race is optional. Advertisers tell us making yet another purchase will solve your problem(s) or insecurity. Ironically if everyone lived modestly that would trigger a recession.
There's another failure mode of modernity, that makes this quote a sleight of hand: commute. Commute takes another hour or three out of the "rest" and "what you will" sets.
Once you realize that that person is an idiot or is against you it kills you psychologically because you realize you are in a dead end.
Personally, idiots are fine as long as they listen to their team-mates when it matters. Maybe that means they aren't idiots... Anyway, adversarial bosses and extremely poorly managed projects are the issue for me. That is a dead-end with possible health issues and career [Vio]ing sprinkled on-top. There's no helping it either. Digging harder just keeps the murderer's [Psy]hes cleaner. That's the trap I see a lot of people fall into.
I think in practice it is much more complicated than that. While org charts largely a tree, the influence graph is often very different. It isn't like the immediate manager can just fire anyone they feel like without consequences in most orgs.
EDIT: These are things to do together if you have no agency at a company to change it. If you need help getting agency, work with your manager to get data to back up your arguments.
Not working for a jerk manager / at a company with bad culture helps, but is not sufficient. I've burned out in a "nice culture" company faster than a "cutthroat culture" company because the nice guys didn't allow much agency.
Ohhh, this is freakin hard to me. Bunch of users are complaining about feature not working properly in our Enterprise product, but it's not impactful enough to fix, because those users are not going to complain to their CEO/COO about broken feature in our product, because they themselves might be labeled as COMPLAINER and eventually kicked out.
What's impactful? Of course new shiny AI-powered green button, it's so amazing, project created by a super talented story teller engineer and who is good at selling it to leadership. Does it impact metrics? Yes, of course, those metrics are also crafted specifically for that feature. (more time user spends on that page, more impactful. Is it? maybe users are confused or can't find what they're looking for? Can you tell it to leadership? Ohh they approved this metric and project, are you against VP+ leadership's decisions?)
And we wonder, why do we have double digit customer churn rate.
What is the employee churn rate?
It's hard to do any one of those, let alone more or all, when you're approaching burnout.
> - stay out of product meetings
I started to avoid product meetings. Still burned out.
> - not actually care how cool and interesting and useful the product can or will be
I started to not care how cool or interesting or useful the product can or will be. Still burned out.
> - Only give feedback to your inner circle (manager, peers) when asked about it
I started to only give feedback to my inner circle. That was even more painful, and still burned out.
> - enjoy the tasks assigned to you however dull or basic they may be after you mastered them
I could never enjoy tasks assigned to me when they're dull and basic things I've mastered.
> - Be proud of your work.
As for being proud of my work... well I'm always proud of my work. I still burned out. I don't want to even touch the things I'm proud of.
Everyone's story of burnout is uniquely different. There's no single magic bullet that works for everyone.
> I could never enjoy tasks assigned to me when they're dull and basic things I've mastered.
If you do need more interesting work and can’t shift teams then find a new job. You will eventually find yourself needing to do the same again after you’ve mastered the new challenge. Keep it up and you will run out of leaps. However if you want to exist in a place for a while you need to accept that not every project, task, idea will be exciting work. Once you accept this, it also opens up doorways with what else you can do with your time. Since you have a mastered skill set, these menial tasks should not be weighing you down to free yourself from the drudgery of work.
> As for being proud of my work... well I'm always proud of my work. I still burned out. I don't want to even touch the things I'm proud of.
You should always be critical of past mistakes and look to correct but you should always put your best effort forward. That is what pride in work means. You shouldn’t have to admire every piece of work you deliver as a masterpiece, which is what I assume you mean by wanting to touch it. You should always carry a positive mindset about your work and not treat each success and failure in your life as some sort of definitive legacy. Invite in and operate under best intentions.
A lot of my advice is about how it works in harmony, not some quick instant burnout solution. Resting is important as well (breaks, vacations).
Anecdotally I was recently hired at a company that is in dire straights. This weighed on me heavily for the first six months, eventually they shrunk my team. However I cannot afford to get burned out. So the only options are to extract as much of the burden from me by being a cog in a bullshit factory or find a new job in a psychotic job market.
This is good advice, work is not a one size fits all solution for self actualization. Most workers just want to fill their requirements and do something meaningful to them with the rest of their time.
I especially like your point about enjoying the fruits of mastery of a task.
They replied to the one that told them their magic advice didn’t actually help them (and they still burned out) with some variety of “That had nothing to do with my advice, you just did it wrong.”
That’s… not cool.
I was just thinking the other day that all of the code I've written for companies is now dead and gone. I wrote some really elegant, interesting stuff at a few companies and now it's only a memory in my head.
I should've gone into civil engineering.
My GitHub has a few pieces of code that I'm really proud of. And some companies actually ask for code I'm proud of as part of the interview process, so I have that ready and it helps.
Worth remembering we write code to create human value. Somewhere, in some way, your elegant code actually ran and did a thing that led some number of humans to be enabled or understand or somehow be affected by it.
My graveyard of projects and dreams stretches out behind me and I feel saddened to know that these articles representing portions of my life never achieved what I had hoped for them.
However, I've come to view my work like a mandala or some representation of our mortality itself; our works and our lives are temporary.
We can make the most of the brief moment that we have – whether that be through work or through parenting or through base jumping – whatever that may be for each of us, or we can choose to do nothing with that moment, knowing that it's ephemeral and will be gone soon anyway.
I choose to try making each day's the best code I have ever written; I want it to be "beautiful" and maintainable in spite of knowing that it will be refactored, deleted or decommissioned at some point.
My goal was to get whatever I was working on not just "done", but "done-done". To a state where, if I walked away, it could live on in a working manner and be easily maintained by someone else. That meant having good test coverage, up-to-date documentation, instructions on how to get started with the repo, notes on dependencies, etc. Sometimes that someone else is future me, six months or six years later.
I experienced burnout early in my career, in the dot-com era, and it became especially acute when then the bubble burst. All those long hours (mostly) for naught.
The best times were at companies where everyone was all-in and we each had each-others back. Rare, but amazing when it happens. These were all at startups.
This resonates with me. The org chart cares about headcount - it doesn't matter to them who fills the count. Only plausible heads who could pass some random interview. The upper bosses don't see you as human, only as chess pieces to move around to fit a narrative.
If the narrative against you shifts to the negative, there are many ways to justify your exit. They don't care if you die, or your children go hungry, or you lose your house or healthcare. What they care about is narratives that justify their own existence in the org chart. They don't even care about the services or products they build. It is just about their own existence. Every other effort be damned.
Reader, now that you are aware that they don't care about anything - and certainly not about you - it is really up to you to secure yourself financially, physically, emotionally and preserve your time. If they come at you with reviews or other BS, you should consider your time is up, safeguard yourself, and sabotage them if you can.
This is fair. Remember that you are playing with the same rules as them. If they can't care about engineering, you sure as hell don't need to. If they care about politics, you sure as hell play it with them.
Take it as a toxic game but secure your life - as far away from corporate toxicity as possible.
Let me advise against sabotage. There's a saying about seeking revenge and digging two graves. The truth is, this whole thing is unsustainable, and will collapse on it's own. No one actually has to do anything to sabotage something like this.
I recommend instead to "document" and "socialize". The people who operate this way are sloppy, greedy, and think they are invincible. Don't do anything to convince them they are though. They are always, and I mean always, fucking up. Spread the good word of your documented and likely illegal treatment to a pro-bono employment lawyer before or after a likely illegal lay-off and get a severance as a settlement avoiding court entirely (if you wish).
Socialize with others you trust in your industry about the treatment at the companies that operate this way. Be weary of slander, that's what documentations helps with. Word travels fast. In the old days this was how people dealt with societal outcasts. With the internet, this is easier than ever.
That said, I can't control what someone decides to do but I will share. One of the "worst" things you can do at a company like this is be really nice to people inside and outside your team, and do your job within your means. It drives the creatures up a wall. Sometimes after you leave even if not by your own volition, others will follow suite by their own accord.
There are lots of causal factors leading to burnout. It’s basically a long term energy imbalance along multiple dimensions.
One of those dimensions is attentional fatigue caused by our messy digital environment:
https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
But there are other factors that feed into it: physical, emotional, social.
I highly recommend attention span by Gloria Mark, The Power of Engagement by Jim Loehr, and for those who want to change their life, Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg.
It really depends on your personal psychology. After I burnt out in a demanding role that I adopted as a big part of my identity, I joined a new company vowing to not take work as seriously (I remember telling myself, "if excess effort isn't rewarded, the optimal strategy is to maximize compensation, minimize necessary effort, and eliminate excess effort").
After a few months of recovery and ruminating on why I still felt so bad (plus therapy), I learned a few things about myself:
1. I feel like garbage when I'm half-assing something at work or not giving my all -- especially when the people around me are putting in the work.
2. When I am giving my all and I feel like I'm not being recognized, I begin to lose motivation and burn out. Simple tasks become very laborious. This is a gradual, months-long process that is difficult to recognize is happening.
3. When I start to burn out, I am forced by my mind and body to half-ass things, which makes me more demotivated, which exacerbates the burnout.
Putting these insights into action, I've so far been able to keep burnout at bay by finding roles where I can give work my all, receive recognition, and be surrounded by others who are putting in similar effort. This doesn't mean blindly trusting the company or destroying my work-life balance -- I believe that "recognition for hard work" includes proactively protecting hard workers from their workaholic tendencies and giving them the flexibility to take breaks. I'm lucky to work with really great people where I frequently pass along responsibilities or take work from others to avoid over-stressing any one person and enable things like multi-week vacations. I have no idea how I will change my approach if I lose this workplace dynamic or pick up more forcing functions on my workday (e.g. having kids) in the future, but it's working pretty well for me right now.
All of this is to say: for me, the low-trust "do the bare minimum to stay employed" approach didn't actually help me get out of burnout into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of. People are wired differently, so I want to caution against a one-size-fits-all approach.
Can it only exist in medium and small companies?
Could you elaborate some more, please?
Given that those places are also doing stuff like writing their own network stack to reduce latency, I get the impression that they know their shit.
We mostly design and build data/devops/mlops/cyber platforms for big banks and other finserv companies - lots of Databricks, AWS, and GCP services.
[1] https://bit.ly/4j5cC5T (I'll expire the link in a few days for privacy reasons)
> for me, the low-trust "do the bare minimum to stay employed" approach didn't actually help me get out of burnout into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of
What you just described (so vividly) is meaning, and (likely) "flow" too. Meaning must be there for everyone, in their efforts; the need for meaning is universal. (We can call it intrinsic motivation too.)
Some say that you can find meaning outside of work, and then can mostly ignore work; and it's also said (correctly I guess) that "psychological richness" (closely related to resilience) is important: drawing meaning & satisfaction from multiple sources.
Sure, but I have a practical problem with that: if you need to work 8 hrs/day to cover your family's needs, you don't have time, energy, or opportunity left to find meaning elsewhere.
And, as others have repeatedly said it here, if you are a full time employee making quite beyond your (family's) needs, and think about decreasing your working time (giving up excess money, but regaining much needed time & freedom), that is what is strictly forbidden by the runners of the Village of Happy People. You will find effectively no jobs that let you work (say) 5 hours per day, for 62.5% of your original salary. That way, you'd just not be a good slave, a good cog in the machine. Society is engineered such that you must not have free time.
Therefore the only practical option is to find (or create) work that provides meaning for you intrinsically. I see no other option. You can be an employee or run your own business, the same applies. And, unfortunately, this is unattainable for most of society.
Part time help is cheap.
I could see maybe the argument against this because of paid accounts in remote systems: google suite, office 365, bamboo, github, etc. compared to reduced use, but they set those up anyway for other people in the company who don't use them (non-devs, etc) and I don't believe the cost per user is significant.
Do you mean tax costs? AFAIK typically country requirements for benefits are proportional to time worked, so part timers don't get all the benefits. Which benefits are you talking about specifically?
The second part of your post is something I've thought about a lot. There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:
- Less communication overhead due to fewer people
- Constant availability (less need to pre-plan meetings, etc to match everyone's hours)
- Less complexity WRT HR, payroll, taxes
- Employees still have to pay for full healthcare, so the employer either provides this or pays a 1099 salary premium (the US's terrible approach of tying health insurance coverage to your employer rears its ugly head yet again)
- Fewer SaaS seats to pay for
Some of these are more solvable than others, and allowing more people to work part-time in tech is definitely swimming upstream, but I do wish more businesses would try.
Sahil Lavingia (Gumroad) is one person leaning into this approach with great success: https://sahillavingia.com/work
Not in the US anyway. It’s exceedingly common in the Netherlands to work 32 or even 24 hours a week.
Finding the unicorn job isn't the right thing to predicate your happiness on. One thing I like the idea of and am just starting to try is reminding myself why I'm doing the job. What are my bigger goals that it is contributing towards? I know we all know this at some level, but I think it can help to remind ourselves there is a purpose/meaning to why we do our jobs, even if we don't intrinsically get meaning from them.
I can't remember where I read this idea... but somewhere recently.
I am here to periodically remind HN that no, not all programmers here are millionaires who only work not to get bored.
Oh well.
I hope this helps explain more what I meant by what I was saying. I'm not saying "become terrible at your job and produce poor quality". I am saying, "deliver good enough quality within your means". If your boss says "your current code is good enough for the demo", ship the damn thing as is, don't go rushing to add more features and retesting everything until 4AM.
If a deadline really is too short, say it is too short early on. Keep working, but don't put on a cape and deliver because someone said they wanted something they can't have without causing you to lose sleep for two weeks. People die from stuff like that, it is not worth it.
The compromise I've arrived at is that I give it my all during a very strict time box. I work remotely, so at 9am I start work, I take an hour for lunch, and I check out at 5. With no commute that leaves just over half my workweek waking hours for my family.
During working hours I do it all—I perform my job very well and am lucky enough to be in a place where it's recognized in very measurable ways (promotions, autonomy, and recognition). But I don't give my employer extra time.
The only thing that actually seems to net me results these days is indeed extremely strict, zero excuses unless the nukes are flying, time-boxing.
Reassuring to see that it works for somebody else as well. Thank you.
> What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of.
I have this in bursts during the off-season and that's where I feel like I'm most productive and useful. But the off-season is getting shorter and shorter and I'm compelled to find something else.
It's not even about that.
People need to realize that inflicting suffering on those "under" someone is one of the main motivators of human behavior.
It's innate and it exists because the abuser get tremendous benefits, including health-wise.
Often-times its just garden variety psychopathy, narcissism, and other dark personality traits. For those people its definitely innate. Unfortunately psychopaths pathologically do everything they can to position themselves into seats like management/leadership. It's kind of a tricky situation for other-wise mentally well people.
Unfortunately this situation isn't able to be earnestly evaluated in the US without enormous effort to reform labor law. (Or if it is earnestly evaluated it obviously biases the needs of the employer rather than the entity that matters.)
I just can't see it ever changing.
But, as people love to say, everyone eventually gets to their own level of incompetence. This is definitely mine. I want to be able to segment my not caring and I am trying various things; nothing so far works but some measures have netted very small results -- like being dead-tired and suffering from 3 separate heavy health conditions, for example. If that can be counted as "a measure that works", that is. :D
I’m not sure how replicable it is in a different org though, and I’m not likely to leave to find out xD
Neuromorphic computing on the other hand is very interesting, as it gets into ambiguous state resolution rather than layered weighting.
The idea AI could even replace a chickens cognitive performance in laughable. =3
I would recommend looking around at the various approaches. Some are less ridiculous than others, and don't need a power generation plant to run the devices.
Best of luck, =3
But if you get AAH, you are reimbursed for the time between when you asked for it and the first payment. Yet that means probably living without any resources for one year or so.
Second, the article mixes in some adjacent topics, such as purchasing power. Why? I don't know, but it blows the amount of stuff the article would have to supplement way out of proportion, before even the core message (burnout) was discussed.
Third, I'm always amazed how many people think they are different. You're not. If you care for a family member (children, elderly, disabled..), commute 2400 miles and work 7 days a week, you will burn out. But it won't be a surprise to anyone but you.
What you need is sleep, friends and sports, same as any social animal inhabiting a very real, very physical body.
Fourth, I'm not sure what you want others to do. Instead of complaining about the suggestions, write down what you would have wanted.
Some people surely burn out because they're just obsessive, but many people, myself included, slide into it because "just 4 more months of this and I can afford X".
> The core narrative control is straightforward: 1) everything's great, and 2) if it's not great, it's going to be great.
> We're trained to tell ourselves we can do it, that sustained super-human effort is within everyone's reach, "just do it."
The author of The Burnout Society frames this as a sort of self-slavery, in which we are our own slave-drivers. His logic is actually quite compelling. Yet reassuring, perhaps surprisingly. He doesn't blame the individual, but the culture they live in. There are paths to salvation, and burnout isn't a final destination.
B) This is a great point to call out the author for a bit of a myopic view in the bits about "Burnout isn't well-studied or understood." Beyond the philosophy above, there's pages and pages of empirical articles, conferences, even books on the topic: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=burnout
This just comes across as a fallacy I see quite often in intellectual circles, and have surely been guilty of myself: "The problems in the world are caused because the people in charge are too dumb to see everything as clearly as I do; if I was in charge, it would be easy to decide what to focus our resources on!"
Simply put, the modern world feels bad because we're constantly engaging with information that we can't assimilate into a coherent model. In the past you could rely on simple and incorrect models of the world and generally be OK since your life was relatively local. Now, your life requires you to engage in a much larger sphere, one that is too large and changes too quickly to be understood.
PDF: https://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Auge_Marc_Non-Places_Introd...
This also, I think, leads to detachment from local issues. Why should I look into who's on my city council when I'm hearing about the French government falling apart or the mayor of New York doing crimes? There's always something bigger, worse, more important to the world going on somewhere and there's nothing you can do about it, but also every part of you feels like you should do something.
In the post, Tanner Greer excerpts from Andrew Yang's book The War on Normal People — here's the relevant quote in full, but I recommend clicking through and reading the whole post:
> In coming years it’s going to be even harder to forge a sense of common identity across different walks of life. A lot of people who now live in the bubble grew up in other parts of the country. They still visit their families for holidays and special occasions. They were brought up middle-class in normal suburbs like I was and retain a deep familiarity with the experiences of different types of people. They loved the mall, too.
> In another generation this will become less and less true. There will be an army of slender, highly cultivated products of Mountain View and the Upper East Side and Bethesda heading to elite schools that has been groomed since birth in the most competitive and rarefied environments with very limited exposure to the rest of the country.
> When I was growing up, there was something of an inverse relationship between being smart and being good-looking. The smart kids were bookish and awkward and the social kids were attractive and popular. Rarely were the two sets of qualities found together in the same people. The nerd camps I went to looked the part.
> Today, thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect, attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging in the same families and neighborhoods. I look at my friends’ children, and many of them resemble unicorns: brilliant, beautiful, socially precocious creatures who have gotten the best of all possible resources since the day they were born. I imagine them in 10 or 15 years traveling to other parts of the country, and I know that they are going to feel like, and be received as, strangers in a strange land. They will have thriving online lives and not even remember a car that didn’t drive itself. They may feel they have nothing in common with the people before them. Their ties to the greater national fabric will be minimal. Their empathy and desire to subsidize and address the distress of the general public will likely be lower and lower.Who does he think went to Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Oxford and Cambridge before now? Those people felt as superior if not more superior to a random person in "normal america" than the current crop of new wealth. The Gettys and the Morgans were probably even more detached from the rest of the country than anyone is now and likely had more overt power over their lives than their modern equivalents.
I don't mean this as a defense of these people, just that "the elites don't have the best interests of the population at heart" is a complaint as old as civilization. I don't think Greer or Yang makes a compelling argument that the 2019 American moment is worse than even recent memory. Greer tries to make a point about how people had smaller goals in the past, and fought more for their local interests and prestige, something I'm both not sure I agree with and would love a citation for, and also looks past the fact that the major WASPy families did literally run the federal government for decades! Often to the detriment of states and regions they cared less about, which seems to be what he's claiming will be an issue with this new elite.
Check Wikipedia: “Staff Burnout: Job Stress in the Human Services” was published in 1980, and the Maslach Burnout Inventory was published in 1982.
> We don't bother collecting data on why people quit, or why people burn out, or what conditions eventually break them.
A quick search of academic literature shows this is not true.
https://medium.com/@ikigai.consultancy/finding-ikigai-c1fc4c...
Where idealism and economics often change the balance of priorities over time for individuals. The fungible nature of the modern workforce has lead to a churn and burn culture for skilled labor at the board level.
People may land a position they worked for years structuring the opportunity, and only discover they fooled themselves into a career that makes them miserable.
People need to accept they will change careers around 5 times in the modern workforce. Also, the age of the middle class union factory worker having a 30 year career became a rarity in the 1980s.
My advice is to ensure one balances their own needs with the company needs, and abandon the illusion there is a perfect version of oneself in the future.
The "not caring" part is easy, as most projects get annoying after awhile. =3
This is one of the most salient points to me.
When I was burnt out, I was a husk of a human being. I appeared to be a high-functioning, successful, positive-trajectory sort of guy. Inside I was quite literally dying.
Things that used to be fun, and I knew I liked, were almost painful. The energy it took to play with my kids and be happy with them was mentally and physically painful to spend. Activities like free diving which used to fill me with passion, wonder, energy, and joy became chores I actively avoided. I had endless excuses to do nothing but the absolute essentials. Keep the job, pay the bills, try to sleep, try to wake up, keep going.
I'm quite a bit better now. I opted for work which pays a lot less, but allows me to feel much more aligned with what I do, why I'm doing, who I do it with, etc. Had I not found that I think I'd still be better, but getting out of the work I was doing was a good way to expedite recovery.
Good luck to all of you experiencing this. You might have normalized it and begun to feel trapped, but I promise there's a real life you can enjoy on the other side of it.
Who in 2025 does NOT see the "tsunami of burnout"? It seems to me that everybody is talking about it since at least the stabilization (not "end") of the COVID pandemic.
I've only skimmed through the article, so apologies if I missed some important bit of info.
Has there ever been a followup to this reporting? I'd be really interested to understand if this trend is still happening, and if so, why.
How did we manage to lose perfectly good scrollbars in this race for colonization of mars and AI singularity?
Look at the leadership
- do they brag about everything? Be a story teller, hard work and caring about product doesn't matter in such company. Try to get promoted faster by boasting your work publicly. Remember, in such companies people usually don't care about "fake" metrics you have created.
- do they try to dig deeper into problems and solve them? Enjoy working there, because if you can show them problems and offer your solutions, they will do their best to figure out which problem is most urgent to solve and help you. middle managers will inherit this behavior from upper management
This is giving me permabear vibes. The US is not experiencing stagflation. Real (inflation adjusted) gdp per capita is growing at 2%. Inflation over the last year was 2.7% and gdp growth and the economy grew substantially faster than that.
> That the purchasing power of my wages in the 1970s as an apprentice carpenter exceeded almost all the rest of my decades of labor should ring alarm bells.
There it is. For what it's worth this probably is true to an extent (eg for certain kinds of goods and services), just like the growth of economy, but that's because relative incomes and relative costs have changed substantially since then. Some jobs' wages (software engineer) grew faster than inflation, others (a lot of entry level blue collar ones) didn't. Some costs (rent, healthcare) rose faster than average inflation, others (eg televisions) didn't.
FWIW the nominal topic of burnout is intriguing to me but I think this kind of perma-recession/perma-bear pop-econ, "what happened in 1971" stuff is really overplayed and crackpotty. There is no "narrative control machinery". I think it's very human to extrapolate individual malaise to society as a whole, and you see it all the time on the Internet, but most people don't perceive society the same way a deeply depressed or burnt out person does.
I’ve been reading Charles High Smith for at least 15 years. He’s definitely a permabear. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
To square that circle usually they have to turn to conspiracy theories, or dabble in economics just deep enough to skew it as unsustainable but not so deep that they understand how it actually works (see quantitative easing, FRB, "petrodollar", etc.).
Maybe (definitely) I've just spent too much time on the Internet because to me the whole "secret recession" stuff is just tired and wrong at this point. It's been over 15 years since the GFC. This kind of perspective feels stuck in the 2012 "ugh I got a college degree and now I work in a restaurant" Internet, when there have actually been several employment/growth booms since then.
You've worked at Microsoft and Google, and still say this? /smh
I've worked at a much smaller multi-national, and during their growth from ~6000 to ~23000, the internal spin-doctoring skyrocketed. Lying internally had become so important that they created new leadership positions for it.
> I think it's very human to extrapolate individual malaise to society as a whole [...] most people don't perceive society the same way a deeply depressed or burnt out person does
You're just confirming what the article says: "Those who haven't burned out / been broken have no way to understand the experience".
Meaninglessness at work is rampant. (Have you seen r/antiwork? or read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs?) And society is wholly engineered to keep us busy, and to keep fleecing us, sheep.
The kind of job where you find enough meaning such that you deem society tolerable is the exception, not the norm.
Even the biggest, richest companies that everybody wants to work for are clumsy and just generally awful at spin-doctoring. It's usually only a handful (like 5 or less) of people at the top doing it, it's usually obvious, and in the worst cases people generally reframe things and omit/hide data rather than tell blatant lies or commit actual fraud. You're right that I did see that up close, coming from real human beings.
That's why I find it laughably absurd to think that hundreds of rank-and-file economists and hundreds of thousands of analysts, government workers, investors, business owners, and politicians (on both sides) could deceptively pull off some smoke-and-mirrors charade for decades on the actual state of the economy. And even more absurd is that this scheme is unravelling because burnt out people are musing on the Internet about how much they hate their job and work in general, rather than actual economists/investors/analysts examining the numbers and finding a discrepancy.
I agree that unfulfilling work is rampant but this conspiratorial framing of "my job sucks" is just crazy. There is no secret puppetmaster engineering society to keep you working a bad job. Sometimes your job just sucks. And the people with influential positions in society are just trying to do their job (or the one they want next) and go home too, they're not hyper-competent double agents working night and day to make sure redditors don't get too close to uncovering it all.
So on the topic of agenda... if what you are working on is your own agenda, you don't burn out. You might change the agenda by redefining goals, but in the end, you are sailing your own ship. Not only do you not burn out, it is curative. It is when you absorb someone else's agenda and make it your own to an unhealthy extent that you burn out. Always be computing that dot product between your employer's agenda vector and your own agenda vector. Don't over-invest beyond that dot-product.
haha, great metaphor! I'll steal it! :)
Companies used to be at the mercy of workers, we no longer are. The moment employees get out of line, work starts to shift to H1B workers who are too afraid to complain. If they start complaining, work then shifts to offshore resources. You can pay 1/3 of the wage and have 2 offshore workers and have contingencies.
The onshore workers see this and fall into line, especially H1Bs.
Work is sufficiently granular and microservice-ififed that you can swap people in and out. The vice keeps tightening.
Can you imagine a red cross nurse suffering from burn out? She may work for food and her life may be hard by most standards, but what she does is in harmony with her true self, and this gives her energy and inner peace. A highly paid corporate worker, on the other hand, may do something that's against his principles, something that doesn't harmonize with his true self, and he has to forcefully take bits of energy from his soul and sell it. This is what drains him and leads to burnout.
Typically associated with the military and with healthcare professionals who go into their fields with good intentions, but then have to sacrifice on those for various (typically capitalistic or even arbitrary) reasons.
My advice is to start meeting other people and take up some activity that is more fun than work. If your local jurisdiction allows exploitation that makes this hard or impossible then you ought to flee this tyranny.
In both cases, the unique factor was an extended period of time where I was the sole person who could some considerable piece of work that the business relied upon for day to day operations, which meant that I couldn't take effective breaks and I lived constantly on call and in the critical path.
I had to quit both jobs in order to both grant myself the space to not feel captive and also to show management that more than a single person was necessary to perform the tasks that I had been performing.
I keep less vital, less exciting positions and compliment the missing excitement or fulfillment with things from my personal life. I do miss those times when I had the complete overview and agency but it wasn't worth this.
> The Culture: What It Means to Be a Thoughtful Warrior
> Working Norms: The Warrior’s Code of Conduct We don’t approach our work as just a job; we approach it as a mission. Delivering excellence at the highest level requires commitment, resilience, and an unshakable work ethic. To achieve this, we embrace working norms that ensure clarity, accountability, and growth—for both the individual and the team.
> 60 to 80-Hour Work Weeks: Our mission demands intensity. This isn’t about clocking hours; it’s about pursuing excellence with discipline and focus. We operate at high intensity to transform healthcare. Warriors are prepared to dedicate 60 to 80 hours per week to pushing boundaries
https://www.thoughtful.ai/blog/being-a-warrior-at-thoughtful...
Yikes. Doctors like primary care providers are already considered by the experts who study these things to have too many patients. So… this platform makes it possible to make that problem _even worse_?
This is ridiculous, 34-39 hours (tops) is at the limit of a healthy work-life balance.
I've worked harder than imaginable in my life on projects without burning out, because the work was incredibly fulfilling — and it fit well with my core beliefs, interests, values. And then I've burnt out from putting tons of unrecognized effort into projects where I lacked adequate leverage to change things.
People won't always look after you and burnout can be hard to recover from — harder than you might think. So take care of yourself — and never stop looking for work that aligns with your core values, interests, and the kind of life you want to build.
It was tough for us doing the mentoring because someone telling us they were experiencing burnout could have meant anything from a severe condition resulting from years of extreme effort against personal and professional headwinds, to the person who was simply bored at work and needed a long weekend with friends to recover.
I’m not trying to gatekeep, but rather point out that there is no longer a single definition of burnout. There are parallels to how conditions like Autism Spectrum Disorder are now being diagnosed in alarmingly high numbers, but when you look closer you realize that the common definition has been stretch far from the original narrow definition.
This creates some difficulty for people experiencing the deepest burnout. When their peers think “burnout” is just a word that means you’re kind of tired and bored in a way that can be easily fixed with a good vacation.
I’ve also noticed a growing trend of people with clear signs of depression mistaking it for burnout. These situations are very concerning for me because by now I’ve seen a lot of people quit their jobs due to “burnout” and then their symptoms get progressively worse, not better, because their real problems were not primarily the result of their job. This problem is becoming more common as “burnout” trends on social media and news headlines with empty advice. Your advice about being actively engaged in directing your own career toward something interesting is much better than the drivel that passes for burnout advice on social media and cheap news articles these days.
With a more than fair share of both, I'm not sure that they're genuinely distinct phenomena.
I'd also be interested in how either/both tie in to depression.
Also, at least in the DSM-5 the definition was actually narrowed recently.
https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupat...
As technology continues to automate more and more “mindless” work, knowledge workers are forced to actively think for a larger and larger portion of our work days, and with increasing intensity—and this is highly stressful. Of course, doing some thinking at work is enjoyable and fulfilling, but most people can’t put in 6+ hours of concentrated thinking five days a week for extended periods of time without burning out.
In the past, the educations we received were like investments in an autopilot mode that we could turn on for large portions of the work day. Some thinking has always been required for professionals, but there were also many situations which could be handled with minimal effortful thought, thanks to education. These situations are disappearing, and it’s literally tiring us out.
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/about-8-us-adults-have-e...
There are a range of risk factors which, if realised in the workplace, result in an exponentially increased risk of harm to an employee. From my understanding, any workplace in which employees are routinely subjected to 2 of these hazards are required to develop and execute a plan to reduce the risks where practical.
The details of these risk factors may be found here: https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/safety-topic/managing-h...
> Even planning a vacation is beyond their grasp, much less grinding through travel. They're too drained to enjoy anything that's proposed as "rejuvenating."
You can't poison yourself 50 weeks out of the year then expect things to be fine because you took a two-week break.
Our system does measure useful deeds and rewards them ( which is great) but measurements have become the goal rather than that what we attempt to measure.
I'm thinking of changing industry away from tech sector but I wonder if every industry is like this or will become the same by the time I finish reskilling?
The only solution I see right now is to just not care about jobs or career. Just coast along, do the bare minimum to get paid, play internal politics... I hate the way I'm turning out and wasting all my skills and energy doing BS but it's the most efficient use of my time given the current state of things.
Based on the current situation, if I can preserve my sanity until retirement, that would be an achievement. That's what I'm aiming for at the moment... And the only way to achieve that is to be totally detached and apathetic towards anything career-related.
This is where I got off the bus. Yes, I agree there are problems. Yes, I agree that individuals are not problematic or wrong for finding institutions intolerable. However, it is a hard no from me on the conclusion. Personifying the "system" is misleading.
>We're trained to tell ourselves we can do it, that sustained super-human effort is within everyone's reach, "just do it." This is the core cheerleader narrative of the Village of Happy People: we can all overcome any obstacle if we just try harder. That the end-game of trying harder is collapse is taboo.
It is still a problem for individuals to solve. We all have to find our own solutions. Broken institutions need to be fixed by individuals or individuals need to find ways to work outside of the existing institutions. As changing larger institutions is a problem beyond my direct control, I've focused on doing my own thing.
The hard work of being an entrepreneur is one option. You don't have to frame it within the grandiose expectations of becoming fabulously wealthy. Simply living on your own terms and thriving outside of the institutions you dislike is a victory unto itself.
There's no magic bullet for the process. Hard work, creative approaches and dogged iteration will not fit into some, "one weird trick to get rich quick" paradigm. The expectation is misplaced. Get rich or be a "wage slave" are both false alternatives. You are sure to burnout if you frame your expectations around them.
Sure, we all burn-out, but if you want results, you have to pick yourself back up and go again. I'm not equipped to judge if this is "fair", but what are the alternatives? Quitting is a guaranteed way to fail. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Oh, they know, but what else are they going to do? Therapists know that "you should quit your job" is useless advice for 90% of their patients. And so they'll treat the symptoms first to keep their patients from jumping off a bridge while working slowly towards fixing the root cause.
Not everyone is out to get you.