8 ms·

Regretting the Golden Handcuffs: Beware the Costs of Burnout

282 points by micahalles 11y ago

x0x0 11y ago
Random thoughts: It's nice to hear about a situation closer to most startup outcomes. When Matthew notes that someone sent him the acquisition terms and the founders made out well while line level / low level managers basically got nice severances, it's something everyone here should keep in mind. It's great if founders make out well as long as everyone else does too; it's when those outcomes diverge that it rankles. If a potential employer tries to put nonsense like a 2-year noncompete -- during which of course they don't pay you -- plus ownership of side projects into your contract, it's a sign you're dealing with assholes. If you can, you should just walk away. Many of us live in CA, so some of this can't happen, but a startup here tried something similar: their 16 page (!!!) employment contract specified that if I used my personal media device or laptop for any business purpose, they had the unlimited right to inspect/search them on demand. By my reading, even something as tenuously related as two factor auth on work gmail being sent to my personal cell, or taking a business call on my cell would have counted. The founder tried to blame it on boilerplate their lawyers inserted; he couldn't even take responsibility for what was, after all, the contract he was asking me to sign. I walked away. Read those contracts.
- tajen 11y ago
  Re non-compete/IP ownership: I wonder whether I should say where I worked or how illegal was their employment contract... Can't do both, it's protected by their confidentiality clause ;)
  - fredgrott 11y ago
    in USA it depends on your State Location..if in CA see a lawyer as you may not be aware of certain rights you have
- adamc 11y ago
  These are the kinds of things you would hope would get reported on a site like glassdoor. (I have no affiliation.) I realize they often don't, but if they did, it would generate more pressure to clean up their act.
  - x0x0 11y ago
    I thought about that, but frankly, I don't want to get sued. And the founder certainly remembers the candidate who told him "lawyers work for the company, not the other way around, so stop your bullshit".
  - speedkills 11y ago
    This really resonated with me. It was almost exactly my experience after 13 years at my last "startup". Everything went to hell there and bad reviews pile up in glass door but they actively push the ratings back up with fake reviews so all reviews are either 1 star or 5 stars (that should be a sign to anyone reading the reviews). Funny how when you are going through it it feels like you are uniquely suffering, then you read someone else write down thoughts that feel pulled from your own mind.
- spydum 11y ago
  Full agree on the non-compete. However, the search of personal devices after you've conducted business seems legitimate to me. If they need to investigate the evidence to understand the exposure/whatever in the event a situation arises where you used your personal device, they obviously need access. They are simply trying to neutralize the excuse that "its your personal device and you have no authority to search it", by getting your consent ahead of time. I do agree, they are often extremely vague, but I'm not sure it's reasonable for them to spell out every possible use case where it should or should not apply. Simply don't use personal equipment when acting on behalf of the business (everyone should be happy there), OR get an exception written up by your own legal and get their sign off on the situations which you object to (they might not be so flexible). I don't think there is malice in the intent there though.
  - exelius 11y ago
    If they want access to my personal equipment, they can get a subpoena. No way does any company get to examine my personal stuff without due process.
    - ska 11y ago
      It really is as simple as that iff you never use your personal device for any business purpose. [update] This was unclear: I'm saying this relationship is simple if and only if you have not used your devices for business purposes. If you have, you need only hope that none of the clauses in your agreements (you did have a lawyer review these?) cover it.
      - exelius 11y ago
        Even if I used it for work purposes occasionally, they can go to court and prove that in the process of getting a subpoena and I'll happily comply. Due process exists for a reason; if you let any company examine your personal devices/data outside of a court order, they can use it for any purpose they want. Subpoenas are limited in scope, and everything is documented.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  I received a buyout offer with the terms of being prohibited to do anything that "directly or indirectly competes with <company>". Indirectly? So if I take a contract from a competitor and work on improving a DB engine, well that's indirect. It transitively closes over essentially everything. Especially difficult as I contribute to some OSS projects that a lot of businesses in that industry use. I just kept refusing that part and eventually they gave in; it's not like they intended to prohibit everything, they just needed tighter language that wouldn't harm me. My favourite part is when people say part of a contract is "just there" but it'd never be used. OK well in that case, let's just remove it and I'll just agree to be nice.
  - scurvy 11y ago
    Indeed. I cross out sections of contracts, initial there, and then hand it to the other party to sign. Most of them agree that what I've crossed out is BS and will initial. If they don't, it's a good sign that they're actively trying to screw you one way or another.
- colechristensen 11y ago
  I think you may be over-attributing actions to malice instead of incompetence.
- shostack 11y ago
  Often times companies/vendors don't find it worth it to pay legal to make these changes on edge cases, particularly if they have enough hungry people willing to work for them. There's also the worry that word will get around and more people will ask for exceptions (same or other). So it is in fact easier and more cost effective to say "take it or leave it." Not saying the clause is justified, because that was ridiculous, but it is interesting to get at the root of why they won't change it, and often pushing back consistently will get them to that point fairly quickly.
Permit 11y ago
>The vendor abandoned their technology, and our generous free services attracted people who proved hard to convert to paying customers. This line rings very true. At my company our first product was offered for free. We had thousands of users, but after months and months of work we realized only a small fraction of our user base was going to be converted into paying customers. (Like OP, I began to feel burnt out at this point) When we launched our second product, we realized we needed to answer the question: "Will people pay for what we build?" as fast as possible. We charged users to pre-order our alpha and when we realized people were willing to pay for it, we poured ourselves into the product. I think many founders are scared to ask for money (We were). But if you're building a product that you would eventually like to charge people for, you really have to force yourself to ask those hard questions as soon as possible.
- SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
  >The vendor abandoned their technology Don't forget the other half of this statement: I've always been concerned with basing a product on a locked-in technology from an unproven vendor. And vendors do shut down. I've seen it happen many times. Sometimes they get eaten up by a "bigger fish" that wants to use their technology internally, and they then shut down the external service you were so fond of.
  - lyonheart 11y ago
    Author here: In our case the vendor was very proven, but the tech and their approach to it was not. What actually happened is a bit more complicated than _abandoned_, but those words got the point across without delving into the irrelevant. Needless to say, I am _very_ leery now of the motives of open-source products that aren't run like open-source projects.
beachstartup 11y ago
> because tech is a small town and I shouldn’t burn any bridges to anyone out there listening - it's not. technology is a huge, huge, huge, huge established industry. think about it - what does "tech" even mean? it's an umbrella term for 4 or 5 classifications that all kind of bleed into each other - including finance. in addition, every non-tech company has a shitload of tech in it. gee whiz. it's almost as if technology is critical to the functioning of the modern business enterprise! this is fear-based thinking at its worst. this is the kind of silly thing scared, gutless engineers say to each other by the watercooler while the business guys laugh out loud and backslap each other in the proverbial smoke-filled room. the most powerful thing you can do in technology (and all business, really) is not give a fuck what the other guy thinks (the "guy" being your negotiating counter-party). stick to your guns or just take the money and run. if you waffle, you're sunk by your own torpedo.
- norea-armozel 11y ago
  I think it's more that the startup scene in SV is much smaller than say working from some random company throughout the United States or the world at large. I can see that reputation and being known by name could be a reality in startups for sure. Outside of that? I would be completely floored if anyone knew me just from the random jobs I've had across multiple industries that write software for internal/external use.
  - joesmo 11y ago
    Even the startup scene in SV/SF is so huge, this is not a problem unless you do something notorious / egregious (like crash and burn your Ferrari into the CEO's office) and even then, people will forget in a few months. Totally agree that is such bullshit advice.
- scurvy 11y ago
  I'll disagree. I've had people come up to me and mention that they remembered my posts on XYZ mailing list. Said mailing list is a huge, public list and I might have posted on it a dozen times. What you say and how you act can definitely have a positive impact on your career. I haven't looked for a job since college. I doubt the negatives are as impacting as the positives, but I'm sure they do exist.
exelius 11y ago
The author speaks of passion a few times. I think that's the key here; he forced himself to feel passionate about the end goal when in reality he didn't care. You can't do that. If you're not passionate, faking it will kill you. There is a middle ground between signing and not signing here: set boundaries up front. Let them know "Hey, I'll sign this and help with the integration, but just know my heart won't be in it. I don't know that I can promise you more than a solid 45 hours a week. But I can't deliver that passion I had building the product because I'm really not passionate about this." And yeah, those employment contracts are bullshit. Before you sign a contract, you are under no obligation to do anything. A good tactic is to just redline anything you want thrown out and send it back to the lawyers without comment. Also realize that many companies throw these bullshit clauses in just so they can negotiate them away later (as opposed to having to offer you more money). If it's important enough to the founders, they will find the money to make it worth your while. An extra hundred grand out of a big payday to ensure a critical employee is present to handle the sale is just a cost of doing business. Unless you would go out for drinks with someone after you stop working with them, it's not going to hurt your relationship (they may even respect you more for it).
klenwell 11y ago
> The sad thing about the metrics-driven performance culture the Times describes at Amazon is studies show overworked people perform worse. I'm glad the author made this point and backed it up with a reference. It reaffirms something I already believed (whether on the basis of personal experience, something I'd read before, or mere wishful thinking, I couldn't tell you so the reference helps). It is a sensible constraint that came to mind in reading all the tech workplace horror stories that the Times's Amazon piece inspired. While reading that Times article I checked out the link to their 14 sacred principles. The funny thing was that I agreed with most of them. They were all ideas that occurred to me over the course of my career working independently, with small companies, and especially now in corp. The one thing that was missing, I felt, was a Rule #15: Never work more than 8 hours a day. Without it, it's no surprise you end up burnt out or living in the sort of dystopian workplace documented in the Times' Amazon article. But then I suppose, as has been pointed before, long work hours are more about cultural signaling and penny-wise-pound-foolish accounting than really improving productivity.
- shostack 11y ago
  But what if "8 hours a day" isn't the magic number for everyone? What if for some people, the magic number to avoid burnout is 4 hours a day? Or the other end of the spectrum...12?
  - hessenwolf 11y ago
    I'll not lie, I'm a 14, 14, 6, 4 kinda guy. Then Friday through Sunday is for playing, thinking, and reading, but mostly meeting up with people to exchange ideas, potentially with beer.
    - brianwawok 11y ago
      And for a job that isn't customer facing, we should allow if possible. I can understand why the cashier at the store needs to work 8s.. how would I schedule people based on how many hours they feel like working? For programming with delivery at the week or month level.. people should be able to slice the work how it works for them. (I think my ideal work is like 12 - 7 - 7- 6- 6- 3 or something)
joslin01 11y ago
I worked extremely hard at my last start-up to the point of being completely burnt out. I'm happy because it made me stronger, but I'll never forget being over and for about 4-5 months after, never looking at a computer. I didn't want anything to do with them for awhile, and pursued a vicious "I'm gonna go pro in golf" campaign (can't take the idealism/ambition out of a true entrepreneur). I'm really happy now, but I understand burn-out at a much deeper level than I had before. There was a time when I would think "just get over it," but now I understand it has very real effects. When you don't want to think, it's not always a simple case of laziness. It takes work to switch into your "system 2" (as called by "Thinking Fast and Slow") -- your focused mindset. Then once you're in this mindset, it's no picnic. What's fascinating is that if you stay in system 2 for too long, you begin to show signs of paranoia and depression. You become withdrawn and isolate yourself further from society. You might hypothesize this is a natural reaction of an _injured_ animal, but it's hard for you to understand that your brain is exhausted and needs to rest. Instead, you say "go faster!" and it begins to try to come up with more & more schemes to prevent you from going into system 2. Fantasies that would have meant nothing to you well-rested are now of utmost importance because you're actually procrastinating because you're actually fatigued. Burn-out is a real thing. I love work and I work very hard, but there's times when you have to say "You know what, this weekend is all mine." Those are the weekends I sleep anywhere from 10-14 hours each night, and not because I'm indulging, but just like muscles, my brain is resting and hopefully "growing".
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  I've been delving into burnout for the past years. If I can get into flow, I'm fantastic and do very well. But getting there is increasingly more difficult. I've given up many contracts and work, only keeping a few clients. But just having anything, even if it's 1 day a week, it seems to keep you "involved" mentally and you're not really free, even if most of the time you're not doing anything. The sick part is that to really pull out, I need to work a lot more, to set things up to take a year off. So it creates this spiral that seems rather hard to break out of.
- woohoo7676 11y ago
  Do you have any tips for combating burnout that worked well for you? I'm starting to feel the signs of burnout (which probably means I'm actually in deeper than I think), and I'd like to try to head this off before it gets worse. I know setting hard boundaries for work/non work and taking chunks of time for yourself is a good start, but would love to hear if you had any more advice? Thanks!
mattzito 11y ago
One of the things I always encourage people to do as part of an acquisition is to handle the transition gracefully (1 year-ish), and then start looking around for what else you might want to do inside the acquirer. Often there won't be anything, and you can just bide your time or flee the scene - but other times there might be a perfectly interesting job elsewhere in the organization that you can use to build your skills, beef up your resume, and live out your golden handcuffs. But too many people that I see just sit there, quietly miserable, while their product dies around them.
veritas3241 11y ago
I'd be curious to hear from employees who have worked for Elon Musk either at Tesla or SpaceX. I'm currently reading Ashlee Vance's book on Elon and the descriptions of the working conditions for Tesla and SpaceX employees sounds both exhilarating and completely exhausting. Does working on something as truly world-changing as space travel or electric vehicles make up for the 80+ hour work weeks? Is it easier to work so hard when there's no doubt that what you're doing matters?
- uxp100 11y ago
  as truly world-changing as [...] electric vehicles EVs have been around for a long long time, commercially, and conversions. I'm glad tesla is doing what they are, but world-changing seems like a stretch to me. Anecdotally, I've heard from employees that Tesla is having attrition issues, so apparently not. They've recently added a few minor perks to try and keep engineers.
  - robryan 11y ago
    The world changing part might be getting them to the mainstream. Which is a combination or funding infrastructure, lowering prices and spurring competition from the other car makers.
deleted 11y ago
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danielweber 11y ago
I have never said to myself "I wish I had stuck around that company longer." I have often said "I should have left much sooner." I'm sure there are some examples of someone leaving when lightning was about to strike and make all the insiders rich. Those instances are even more rare than start-up successes making employees rich.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  I left a company to go back to school (took on massive loans). A few months later, the company closed up and people got extremely generous severances. Would have probably covered half my tuition costs. I definitely wish I had stuck around THAT company longer!
  - thothamon 11y ago
    Which illustrates the original point: that scenario -- generous severances when the company is going out of business -- is incredibly rare. A much more likely scenario is your options become worthless and you're laid off. If you can leave a bad environment, I recommend leaving ASAP instead of letting the golden handcuffs keep you -- unless the golden handcuffs promise a huge return, and there's little or no doubt about getting that return.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  I know a few folks who have left jobs and then said "I wish I had stuck around that company longer". In all cases, it was never financial. Rather, it was "If I'd known what I didn't know, I would've stuck around longer so I could pick <ex-coworker>'s brain about it." Even in my own case, where I joined a company thinking I'd leave after a year but stayed 5 years because I was still learning things (and had optimized my career for learning the whole way), there were still some times after I left where I thought, "Man, if only I still had access to <old design doc or code>." I see financial motivations coming up much more often when people say "Man, I'm glad I stayed." Vesting cliffs are really easy to predict, and even IPOs and acquisitions have some hints coming; if you're about to get a major windfall, you'll probably know it.
xhrpost 11y ago
What are people's thoughts/experiences with burnout happening without overtime? Over the past few years I've grown more and more bored at work. Even switching jobs from different ends of the spectrum didn't fix this. I can get myself into flow but it seems to take more and more will power as time goes on. Different tech challenges help, but it's nothing like my halcyon days of straight out of college. Of coming into work and just doing the job and enjoying it with no use of will power. I go home and then fight to do the "bare minimum", read, exercise, eat healthy, minimal home chores and decent sleep. I've wondered if having a home hobby would help but I have none. I feel like "burnout" describes where I'm at, but I have a hard time stating it as fact because I rarely work over 40hrs a week on the job. So, thoughts? Could I actually be in a burnout phase or is this something completely different?
- shostack 11y ago
  My current working theory on that is we always want what we don't have. For people who value their free time, rarely working over 40hrs a week is a dream. When they achieve that dream, suddenly they realize they want to be working less than that, and 40hrs becomes a drain and no longer the energizing freedom it may have been initially. Just a theory. Personally, I get bored with my current "life" from a given point in time, and need to radically change an aspect of it to add that excitement and focus back to it. Doesn't always go as planned though. But as you get older, I find people in general get tired of the same bullshit that keeps popping up at job after job, and that almost never goes away.
- davidjairala 11y ago
  I personally find myself going through this with most aspects of my life. I have lulls at work where I'm less than 100% excited about the work at hand, and then after a while I'm back in top shape, but I now find it normal when the lulls occur. It happens to me for most other hobbies as well. I enjoy working out a lot, but there are times where I just don't feel super excited about it, for like lets say a month or so, and I have to put in a lot of will-power to get to the gym. So I do basically what you do here as well, try different kind of workouts, etc., with varying results and that helps sometimes. I think at the end of the day it's really hard to maintain that level of passion for something that you do day in day out. You just have to accept the downtime and know that it will pass in a bit. At least that's my take on it. Edit: right after I posted I was reminded of a quote lifters use often: "motivation gets you in the gym, as it's fleeting, but discipline keeps you coming back". I think the same applies here, to some extent.
CuriousSkeptic 11y ago
It seems to be a common sentiment that burnout is largely driven by how many hours a day you work. Why is that? From what I've been taught burnout is the result of continuous stress. Where stress is more or less defined as a continuous sensation of being threatened. I've seen people with perfectly normal workours become burnt out. I've even seen people working ten hours a week getting burnt out. The common factor thus not being the objectively measurable amount of work. My own formula for diagnosing a work environment is more like Risk of Burnout = perception of expectations / perceptions of means to deliver But a more useful model might be the SCARF-model presented in this tech talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M It seems to me that hours worked relates to issue of burnout more like lack of sleep to the risk of catching a cold. Potentially a big factor, but only incidentally.
- ghostbrainalpha 11y ago
  Such a great comment. My happiest times were from a startup where we worked 80 hours a week. Another startup we were in the process of selling, was such a hostile place it literally gave me work related PTSD and I was only working 40 hours per week.
xacaxulu 11y ago
I remember trying to describe burnout to my step-mom who is French. I kept trying to figure out how to say it in French and she joked that they don't have much of a phrase for it; the just say "le burnout" which I find rather telling. It seems like such an american problem that so many articles like these have to be written.
- bengalister 11y ago
  It is true that we (French) say "le burnout" but it does not mean we are not affected too, contrary to popular belief ;-) A few years ago, it seems that workers of ex-publicly held companies (France Telecom for instance) were the most affected with a few suicide cases that made the news. Recent studies said 2 workers out of 10 felt affected. IMHO, the white collars of big companies feel affected because they have to do more than before to stay in the international race in less time since they usually have 6-10 weeks of holidays per/year (no sick days). Having so many holidays is really challenging for an organization, especially in the summer, period of the year when people are off for 2-4 weeks. It means also long work days for workers. Personally i'd prefer to have less holidays and come back home earlier. Having said that, on a yearly basis, white collars work much less than their American counterparts on average.
- Squarel 11y ago
  Would that be because there is less of a culture of presenteeism, and more vacation days, and more time off when sick?
brightball 11y ago
This deserves every ounce of attention that it can get and I definitely know the feeling. I worked about as hard as I could for a little over a year to save a 15 year old company from going under. I was the only developer/infrastructure person because we couldn't hire anybody else since it looked like a sinking ship. I worked 24/7 (with a wife and 2 kids) on this beastly mix of 10 year old Perl and very inexperienced Rails code. Despite the hours, I was excited because I thought this was THE big opportunity. At my one year review, the owners told me I wasn't working hard enough. I went from a high point to a low point overnight. Wrestled with it for about a month. Then while I was riding in the car with my wife I got a snarky hipchat message from the owner of the company and showed it to my wife. She looked right at me and said, "Quit. Don't worry about the money, we will figure it out. I don't want you working for people like that and it's obvious what it's doing to you." So I resigned. Told them I'd stay on for 30 days for transition but that it just wasn't the right place for me. The weight off my shoulders from resigning was ENORMOUS. For about 2 months I struggled with what to do. All the experience I'd gained at that job had virtually made my resume and after the experience, just like you I wanted to find something MEANINGFUL to do. Something I could wake up every morning and know that what I was doing made a difference for the right reasons. And the opportunity came 2 months later. I ended up turning down a job for twice the pay for what I knew was best in the long run. So far it has been and my wife and I have never been happier. This company treats employees better than any I've ever even heard of. Not silly perks but actual, life balance, we value you as a human being, feel free to move about the company if you want a different challenge...perks. The only downside is that I'm pretty sure my wife will kill me if I ever lose this job. :-)
- tzs 11y ago
  So what happened to the company you left?
  - brightball 11y ago
    I stabilized them over the course of that year and helped them transition to new developers. Company is doing fine as far as I know and should be for a while. They've got a massive network effect which is why they were able to survive months of chaos from a bad rebuild. That's the only reason I came on in the first place. The network effect bought a lot of time to fix things and there was no clear "Facebook" to their "MySpace." Really the only thing working against the company is that their target market is aging a lot.
johngalt 11y ago
Passion causes burnout. Have you ever noticed that the people who just punch a clock and go home never experience burn out? Even if they end up working overtime? It's always the people who identify with their work that get burned.
- omouse 11y ago
  You might be on to something here, I guess it's too much to ask for some kind of meaning in your work when you're there for 8hrs a day.
- eastbayjake 11y ago
  YES. And to an extent, just punching the clock is a defense mechanism in work environments where low autonomy + high demands are creating an environment for burnout. But I've seen bright-eyed 23-year-old engineers suffer vicious burnout by trying to tackle the low autonomy part ("Hey boss, what if we did X? Hey boss, I put together this slidedeck for this feature that would be so cool! Hey boss, check out this mockup I did of a site redesign!") and then after hitting a brick wall enough times they become embittered and disconnected. I think it's because equity creates a belief in young workers that the company is "theirs" -- but after you've realized that startups are like any other job where you trade time for money while implementing the Highest Paid Person's Opinion, you lose that passion quickly.
  - jschwartzi 11y ago
    I checked out about halfway through my run at my current job. I think after the third time I suggested a tool or process change and the reply from the lead was "we've never done it that way" at a startup it dawned on me that this company will never accomplish anything technically interesting. Incidentally, there's a bonus coming up for a major milestone and I'm seriously considering handing in my two weeks notice after the direct deposit clears. The CEO tried to sell the whole equity angle, but I honestly don't see any resume improvement potential here and that's all I really care about. I've worked at companies that gave a shit and I just don't think this is one of them.
- studentrob 11y ago
joesmo 11y ago
Some psychologists consider burnout to be depression, not just depression-like. In my own experience, I'd have to agree. Luckily it's generally brought on by stress and most people recover within weeks or months if they are able to rest or be removed from the cause.
rusabd 11y ago
I worked two jobs - one full time during day and part-time during evenings and weekends. Both were dev jobs. I lasted only 10 months. The last months were really ugly - I was abusive, harsh to others, really unpleasant person to be around. I quit both jobs and moved city. It took me 4 months of doing absolutely nothing to recover.
studentrob 11y ago
> Be careful with passion and those who would use it against you. The problem is he let someone else define his passion. Nobody can use your own passion against you. Passion is just a word and anyone can say it. But you alone are the one who decides what you believe in, how much you are willing to work for, etc.

282 points by micahalles 11y ago

x0x0 11y ago

Random thoughts: It's nice to hear about a situation closer to most startup outcomes. When Matthew notes that someone sent him the acquisition terms and the founders made out well while line level / low level managers basically got nice severances, it's something everyone here should keep in mind. It's great if founders make out well as long as everyone else does too; it's when those outcomes diverge that it rankles. If a potential employer tries to put nonsense like a 2-year noncompete -- during which of course they don't pay you -- plus ownership of side projects into your contract, it's a sign you're dealing with assholes. If you can, you should just walk away. Many of us live in CA, so some of this can't happen, but a startup here tried something similar: their 16 page (!!!) employment contract specified that if I used my personal media device or laptop for any business purpose, they had the unlimited right to inspect/search them on demand. By my reading, even something as tenuously related as two factor auth on work gmail being sent to my personal cell, or taking a business call on my cell would have counted. The founder tried to blame it on boilerplate their lawyers inserted; he couldn't even take responsibility for what was, after all, the contract he was asking me to sign. I walked away. Read those contracts.

tajen 11y ago
Re non-compete/IP ownership: I wonder whether I should say where I worked or how illegal was their employment contract... Can't do both, it's protected by their confidentiality clause ;)
- fredgrott 11y ago
  in USA it depends on your State Location..if in CA see a lawyer as you may not be aware of certain rights you have
adamc 11y ago
These are the kinds of things you would hope would get reported on a site like glassdoor. (I have no affiliation.) I realize they often don't, but if they did, it would generate more pressure to clean up their act.
- x0x0 11y ago
  I thought about that, but frankly, I don't want to get sued. And the founder certainly remembers the candidate who told him "lawyers work for the company, not the other way around, so stop your bullshit".
- speedkills 11y ago
  This really resonated with me. It was almost exactly my experience after 13 years at my last "startup". Everything went to hell there and bad reviews pile up in glass door but they actively push the ratings back up with fake reviews so all reviews are either 1 star or 5 stars (that should be a sign to anyone reading the reviews). Funny how when you are going through it it feels like you are uniquely suffering, then you read someone else write down thoughts that feel pulled from your own mind.
spydum 11y ago
Full agree on the non-compete. However, the search of personal devices after you've conducted business seems legitimate to me. If they need to investigate the evidence to understand the exposure/whatever in the event a situation arises where you used your personal device, they obviously need access. They are simply trying to neutralize the excuse that "its your personal device and you have no authority to search it", by getting your consent ahead of time. I do agree, they are often extremely vague, but I'm not sure it's reasonable for them to spell out every possible use case where it should or should not apply. Simply don't use personal equipment when acting on behalf of the business (everyone should be happy there), OR get an exception written up by your own legal and get their sign off on the situations which you object to (they might not be so flexible). I don't think there is malice in the intent there though.
- exelius 11y ago
  If they want access to my personal equipment, they can get a subpoena. No way does any company get to examine my personal stuff without due process.
  - ska 11y ago
    It really is as simple as that iff you never use your personal device for any business purpose. [update] This was unclear: I'm saying this relationship is simple if and only if you have not used your devices for business purposes. If you have, you need only hope that none of the clauses in your agreements (you did have a lawyer review these?) cover it.
    - exelius 11y ago
      Even if I used it for work purposes occasionally, they can go to court and prove that in the process of getting a subpoena and I'll happily comply. Due process exists for a reason; if you let any company examine your personal devices/data outside of a court order, they can use it for any purpose they want. Subpoenas are limited in scope, and everything is documented.
deleted 11y ago
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MichaelGG 11y ago
I received a buyout offer with the terms of being prohibited to do anything that "directly or indirectly competes with <company>". Indirectly? So if I take a contract from a competitor and work on improving a DB engine, well that's indirect. It transitively closes over essentially everything. Especially difficult as I contribute to some OSS projects that a lot of businesses in that industry use. I just kept refusing that part and eventually they gave in; it's not like they intended to prohibit everything, they just needed tighter language that wouldn't harm me. My favourite part is when people say part of a contract is "just there" but it'd never be used. OK well in that case, let's just remove it and I'll just agree to be nice.
- scurvy 11y ago
  Indeed. I cross out sections of contracts, initial there, and then hand it to the other party to sign. Most of them agree that what I've crossed out is BS and will initial. If they don't, it's a good sign that they're actively trying to screw you one way or another.
colechristensen 11y ago
I think you may be over-attributing actions to malice instead of incompetence.
shostack 11y ago
Often times companies/vendors don't find it worth it to pay legal to make these changes on edge cases, particularly if they have enough hungry people willing to work for them. There's also the worry that word will get around and more people will ask for exceptions (same or other). So it is in fact easier and more cost effective to say "take it or leave it." Not saying the clause is justified, because that was ridiculous, but it is interesting to get at the root of why they won't change it, and often pushing back consistently will get them to that point fairly quickly.

Permit 11y ago

>The vendor abandoned their technology, and our generous free services attracted people who proved hard to convert to paying customers. This line rings very true. At my company our first product was offered for free. We had thousands of users, but after months and months of work we realized only a small fraction of our user base was going to be converted into paying customers. (Like OP, I began to feel burnt out at this point) When we launched our second product, we realized we needed to answer the question: "Will people pay for what we build?" as fast as possible. We charged users to pre-order our alpha and when we realized people were willing to pay for it, we poured ourselves into the product. I think many founders are scared to ask for money (We were). But if you're building a product that you would eventually like to charge people for, you really have to force yourself to ask those hard questions as soon as possible.

SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
>The vendor abandoned their technology Don't forget the other half of this statement: I've always been concerned with basing a product on a locked-in technology from an unproven vendor. And vendors do shut down. I've seen it happen many times. Sometimes they get eaten up by a "bigger fish" that wants to use their technology internally, and they then shut down the external service you were so fond of.
- lyonheart 11y ago
  Author here: In our case the vendor was very proven, but the tech and their approach to it was not. What actually happened is a bit more complicated than _abandoned_, but those words got the point across without delving into the irrelevant. Needless to say, I am _very_ leery now of the motives of open-source products that aren't run like open-source projects.

beachstartup 11y ago

> because tech is a small town and I shouldn’t burn any bridges to anyone out there listening - it's not. technology is a huge, huge, huge, huge established industry. think about it - what does "tech" even mean? it's an umbrella term for 4 or 5 classifications that all kind of bleed into each other - including finance. in addition, every non-tech company has a shitload of tech in it. gee whiz. it's almost as if technology is critical to the functioning of the modern business enterprise! this is fear-based thinking at its worst. this is the kind of silly thing scared, gutless engineers say to each other by the watercooler while the business guys laugh out loud and backslap each other in the proverbial smoke-filled room. the most powerful thing you can do in technology (and all business, really) is not give a fuck what the other guy thinks (the "guy" being your negotiating counter-party). stick to your guns or just take the money and run. if you waffle, you're sunk by your own torpedo.

norea-armozel 11y ago
I think it's more that the startup scene in SV is much smaller than say working from some random company throughout the United States or the world at large. I can see that reputation and being known by name could be a reality in startups for sure. Outside of that? I would be completely floored if anyone knew me just from the random jobs I've had across multiple industries that write software for internal/external use.
- joesmo 11y ago
  Even the startup scene in SV/SF is so huge, this is not a problem unless you do something notorious / egregious (like crash and burn your Ferrari into the CEO's office) and even then, people will forget in a few months. Totally agree that is such bullshit advice.
scurvy 11y ago
I'll disagree. I've had people come up to me and mention that they remembered my posts on XYZ mailing list. Said mailing list is a huge, public list and I might have posted on it a dozen times. What you say and how you act can definitely have a positive impact on your career. I haven't looked for a job since college. I doubt the negatives are as impacting as the positives, but I'm sure they do exist.

exelius 11y ago

The author speaks of passion a few times. I think that's the key here; he forced himself to feel passionate about the end goal when in reality he didn't care. You can't do that. If you're not passionate, faking it will kill you. There is a middle ground between signing and not signing here: set boundaries up front. Let them know "Hey, I'll sign this and help with the integration, but just know my heart won't be in it. I don't know that I can promise you more than a solid 45 hours a week. But I can't deliver that passion I had building the product because I'm really not passionate about this." And yeah, those employment contracts are bullshit. Before you sign a contract, you are under no obligation to do anything. A good tactic is to just redline anything you want thrown out and send it back to the lawyers without comment. Also realize that many companies throw these bullshit clauses in just so they can negotiate them away later (as opposed to having to offer you more money). If it's important enough to the founders, they will find the money to make it worth your while. An extra hundred grand out of a big payday to ensure a critical employee is present to handle the sale is just a cost of doing business. Unless you would go out for drinks with someone after you stop working with them, it's not going to hurt your relationship (they may even respect you more for it).

klenwell 11y ago

> The sad thing about the metrics-driven performance culture the Times describes at Amazon is studies show overworked people perform worse. I'm glad the author made this point and backed it up with a reference. It reaffirms something I already believed (whether on the basis of personal experience, something I'd read before, or mere wishful thinking, I couldn't tell you so the reference helps). It is a sensible constraint that came to mind in reading all the tech workplace horror stories that the Times's Amazon piece inspired. While reading that Times article I checked out the link to their 14 sacred principles. The funny thing was that I agreed with most of them. They were all ideas that occurred to me over the course of my career working independently, with small companies, and especially now in corp. The one thing that was missing, I felt, was a Rule #15: Never work more than 8 hours a day. Without it, it's no surprise you end up burnt out or living in the sort of dystopian workplace documented in the Times' Amazon article. But then I suppose, as has been pointed before, long work hours are more about cultural signaling and penny-wise-pound-foolish accounting than really improving productivity.

shostack 11y ago
But what if "8 hours a day" isn't the magic number for everyone? What if for some people, the magic number to avoid burnout is 4 hours a day? Or the other end of the spectrum...12?
- hessenwolf 11y ago
  I'll not lie, I'm a 14, 14, 6, 4 kinda guy. Then Friday through Sunday is for playing, thinking, and reading, but mostly meeting up with people to exchange ideas, potentially with beer.
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    And for a job that isn't customer facing, we should allow if possible. I can understand why the cashier at the store needs to work 8s.. how would I schedule people based on how many hours they feel like working? For programming with delivery at the week or month level.. people should be able to slice the work how it works for them. (I think my ideal work is like 12 - 7 - 7- 6- 6- 3 or something)

joslin01 11y ago

I worked extremely hard at my last start-up to the point of being completely burnt out. I'm happy because it made me stronger, but I'll never forget being over and for about 4-5 months after, never looking at a computer. I didn't want anything to do with them for awhile, and pursued a vicious "I'm gonna go pro in golf" campaign (can't take the idealism/ambition out of a true entrepreneur). I'm really happy now, but I understand burn-out at a much deeper level than I had before. There was a time when I would think "just get over it," but now I understand it has very real effects. When you don't want to think, it's not always a simple case of laziness. It takes work to switch into your "system 2" (as called by "Thinking Fast and Slow") -- your focused mindset. Then once you're in this mindset, it's no picnic. What's fascinating is that if you stay in system 2 for too long, you begin to show signs of paranoia and depression. You become withdrawn and isolate yourself further from society. You might hypothesize this is a natural reaction of an _injured_ animal, but it's hard for you to understand that your brain is exhausted and needs to rest. Instead, you say "go faster!" and it begins to try to come up with more & more schemes to prevent you from going into system 2. Fantasies that would have meant nothing to you well-rested are now of utmost importance because you're actually procrastinating because you're actually fatigued. Burn-out is a real thing. I love work and I work very hard, but there's times when you have to say "You know what, this weekend is all mine." Those are the weekends I sleep anywhere from 10-14 hours each night, and not because I'm indulging, but just like muscles, my brain is resting and hopefully "growing".

MichaelGG 11y ago
I've been delving into burnout for the past years. If I can get into flow, I'm fantastic and do very well. But getting there is increasingly more difficult. I've given up many contracts and work, only keeping a few clients. But just having anything, even if it's 1 day a week, it seems to keep you "involved" mentally and you're not really free, even if most of the time you're not doing anything. The sick part is that to really pull out, I need to work a lot more, to set things up to take a year off. So it creates this spiral that seems rather hard to break out of.
woohoo7676 11y ago
Do you have any tips for combating burnout that worked well for you? I'm starting to feel the signs of burnout (which probably means I'm actually in deeper than I think), and I'd like to try to head this off before it gets worse. I know setting hard boundaries for work/non work and taking chunks of time for yourself is a good start, but would love to hear if you had any more advice? Thanks!

mattzito 11y ago

One of the things I always encourage people to do as part of an acquisition is to handle the transition gracefully (1 year-ish), and then start looking around for what else you might want to do inside the acquirer. Often there won't be anything, and you can just bide your time or flee the scene - but other times there might be a perfectly interesting job elsewhere in the organization that you can use to build your skills, beef up your resume, and live out your golden handcuffs. But too many people that I see just sit there, quietly miserable, while their product dies around them.

veritas3241 11y ago

I'd be curious to hear from employees who have worked for Elon Musk either at Tesla or SpaceX. I'm currently reading Ashlee Vance's book on Elon and the descriptions of the working conditions for Tesla and SpaceX employees sounds both exhilarating and completely exhausting. Does working on something as truly world-changing as space travel or electric vehicles make up for the 80+ hour work weeks? Is it easier to work so hard when there's no doubt that what you're doing matters?

uxp100 11y ago
as truly world-changing as [...] electric vehicles EVs have been around for a long long time, commercially, and conversions. I'm glad tesla is doing what they are, but world-changing seems like a stretch to me. Anecdotally, I've heard from employees that Tesla is having attrition issues, so apparently not. They've recently added a few minor perks to try and keep engineers.
- robryan 11y ago
  The world changing part might be getting them to the mainstream. Which is a combination or funding infrastructure, lowering prices and spurring competition from the other car makers.

deleted 11y ago

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danielweber 11y ago

I have never said to myself "I wish I had stuck around that company longer." I have often said "I should have left much sooner." I'm sure there are some examples of someone leaving when lightning was about to strike and make all the insiders rich. Those instances are even more rare than start-up successes making employees rich.

ryandrake 11y ago
I left a company to go back to school (took on massive loans). A few months later, the company closed up and people got extremely generous severances. Would have probably covered half my tuition costs. I definitely wish I had stuck around THAT company longer!
- thothamon 11y ago
  Which illustrates the original point: that scenario -- generous severances when the company is going out of business -- is incredibly rare. A much more likely scenario is your options become worthless and you're laid off. If you can leave a bad environment, I recommend leaving ASAP instead of letting the golden handcuffs keep you -- unless the golden handcuffs promise a huge return, and there's little or no doubt about getting that return.
nostrademons 11y ago
I know a few folks who have left jobs and then said "I wish I had stuck around that company longer". In all cases, it was never financial. Rather, it was "If I'd known what I didn't know, I would've stuck around longer so I could pick <ex-coworker>'s brain about it." Even in my own case, where I joined a company thinking I'd leave after a year but stayed 5 years because I was still learning things (and had optimized my career for learning the whole way), there were still some times after I left where I thought, "Man, if only I still had access to <old design doc or code>." I see financial motivations coming up much more often when people say "Man, I'm glad I stayed." Vesting cliffs are really easy to predict, and even IPOs and acquisitions have some hints coming; if you're about to get a major windfall, you'll probably know it.

xhrpost 11y ago

What are people's thoughts/experiences with burnout happening without overtime? Over the past few years I've grown more and more bored at work. Even switching jobs from different ends of the spectrum didn't fix this. I can get myself into flow but it seems to take more and more will power as time goes on. Different tech challenges help, but it's nothing like my halcyon days of straight out of college. Of coming into work and just doing the job and enjoying it with no use of will power. I go home and then fight to do the "bare minimum", read, exercise, eat healthy, minimal home chores and decent sleep. I've wondered if having a home hobby would help but I have none. I feel like "burnout" describes where I'm at, but I have a hard time stating it as fact because I rarely work over 40hrs a week on the job. So, thoughts? Could I actually be in a burnout phase or is this something completely different?

shostack 11y ago
My current working theory on that is we always want what we don't have. For people who value their free time, rarely working over 40hrs a week is a dream. When they achieve that dream, suddenly they realize they want to be working less than that, and 40hrs becomes a drain and no longer the energizing freedom it may have been initially. Just a theory. Personally, I get bored with my current "life" from a given point in time, and need to radically change an aspect of it to add that excitement and focus back to it. Doesn't always go as planned though. But as you get older, I find people in general get tired of the same bullshit that keeps popping up at job after job, and that almost never goes away.
davidjairala 11y ago
I personally find myself going through this with most aspects of my life. I have lulls at work where I'm less than 100% excited about the work at hand, and then after a while I'm back in top shape, but I now find it normal when the lulls occur. It happens to me for most other hobbies as well. I enjoy working out a lot, but there are times where I just don't feel super excited about it, for like lets say a month or so, and I have to put in a lot of will-power to get to the gym. So I do basically what you do here as well, try different kind of workouts, etc., with varying results and that helps sometimes. I think at the end of the day it's really hard to maintain that level of passion for something that you do day in day out. You just have to accept the downtime and know that it will pass in a bit. At least that's my take on it. Edit: right after I posted I was reminded of a quote lifters use often: "motivation gets you in the gym, as it's fleeting, but discipline keeps you coming back". I think the same applies here, to some extent.

CuriousSkeptic 11y ago

It seems to be a common sentiment that burnout is largely driven by how many hours a day you work. Why is that? From what I've been taught burnout is the result of continuous stress. Where stress is more or less defined as a continuous sensation of being threatened. I've seen people with perfectly normal workours become burnt out. I've even seen people working ten hours a week getting burnt out. The common factor thus not being the objectively measurable amount of work. My own formula for diagnosing a work environment is more like Risk of Burnout = perception of expectations / perceptions of means to deliver But a more useful model might be the SCARF-model presented in this tech talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M It seems to me that hours worked relates to issue of burnout more like lack of sleep to the risk of catching a cold. Potentially a big factor, but only incidentally.

ghostbrainalpha 11y ago
Such a great comment. My happiest times were from a startup where we worked 80 hours a week. Another startup we were in the process of selling, was such a hostile place it literally gave me work related PTSD and I was only working 40 hours per week.

xacaxulu 11y ago

I remember trying to describe burnout to my step-mom who is French. I kept trying to figure out how to say it in French and she joked that they don't have much of a phrase for it; the just say "le burnout" which I find rather telling. It seems like such an american problem that so many articles like these have to be written.

bengalister 11y ago
It is true that we (French) say "le burnout" but it does not mean we are not affected too, contrary to popular belief ;-) A few years ago, it seems that workers of ex-publicly held companies (France Telecom for instance) were the most affected with a few suicide cases that made the news. Recent studies said 2 workers out of 10 felt affected. IMHO, the white collars of big companies feel affected because they have to do more than before to stay in the international race in less time since they usually have 6-10 weeks of holidays per/year (no sick days). Having so many holidays is really challenging for an organization, especially in the summer, period of the year when people are off for 2-4 weeks. It means also long work days for workers. Personally i'd prefer to have less holidays and come back home earlier. Having said that, on a yearly basis, white collars work much less than their American counterparts on average.
Squarel 11y ago
Would that be because there is less of a culture of presenteeism, and more vacation days, and more time off when sick?

brightball 11y ago

This deserves every ounce of attention that it can get and I definitely know the feeling. I worked about as hard as I could for a little over a year to save a 15 year old company from going under. I was the only developer/infrastructure person because we couldn't hire anybody else since it looked like a sinking ship. I worked 24/7 (with a wife and 2 kids) on this beastly mix of 10 year old Perl and very inexperienced Rails code. Despite the hours, I was excited because I thought this was THE big opportunity. At my one year review, the owners told me I wasn't working hard enough. I went from a high point to a low point overnight. Wrestled with it for about a month. Then while I was riding in the car with my wife I got a snarky hipchat message from the owner of the company and showed it to my wife. She looked right at me and said, "Quit. Don't worry about the money, we will figure it out. I don't want you working for people like that and it's obvious what it's doing to you." So I resigned. Told them I'd stay on for 30 days for transition but that it just wasn't the right place for me. The weight off my shoulders from resigning was ENORMOUS. For about 2 months I struggled with what to do. All the experience I'd gained at that job had virtually made my resume and after the experience, just like you I wanted to find something MEANINGFUL to do. Something I could wake up every morning and know that what I was doing made a difference for the right reasons. And the opportunity came 2 months later. I ended up turning down a job for twice the pay for what I knew was best in the long run. So far it has been and my wife and I have never been happier. This company treats employees better than any I've ever even heard of. Not silly perks but actual, life balance, we value you as a human being, feel free to move about the company if you want a different challenge...perks. The only downside is that I'm pretty sure my wife will kill me if I ever lose this job. :-)

tzs 11y ago
So what happened to the company you left?
- brightball 11y ago
  I stabilized them over the course of that year and helped them transition to new developers. Company is doing fine as far as I know and should be for a while. They've got a massive network effect which is why they were able to survive months of chaos from a bad rebuild. That's the only reason I came on in the first place. The network effect bought a lot of time to fix things and there was no clear "Facebook" to their "MySpace." Really the only thing working against the company is that their target market is aging a lot.

johngalt 11y ago

Passion causes burnout. Have you ever noticed that the people who just punch a clock and go home never experience burn out? Even if they end up working overtime? It's always the people who identify with their work that get burned.

omouse 11y ago
You might be on to something here, I guess it's too much to ask for some kind of meaning in your work when you're there for 8hrs a day.
eastbayjake 11y ago
YES. And to an extent, just punching the clock is a defense mechanism in work environments where low autonomy + high demands are creating an environment for burnout. But I've seen bright-eyed 23-year-old engineers suffer vicious burnout by trying to tackle the low autonomy part ("Hey boss, what if we did X? Hey boss, I put together this slidedeck for this feature that would be so cool! Hey boss, check out this mockup I did of a site redesign!") and then after hitting a brick wall enough times they become embittered and disconnected. I think it's because equity creates a belief in young workers that the company is "theirs" -- but after you've realized that startups are like any other job where you trade time for money while implementing the Highest Paid Person's Opinion, you lose that passion quickly.
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  I checked out about halfway through my run at my current job. I think after the third time I suggested a tool or process change and the reply from the lead was "we've never done it that way" at a startup it dawned on me that this company will never accomplish anything technically interesting. Incidentally, there's a bonus coming up for a major milestone and I'm seriously considering handing in my two weeks notice after the direct deposit clears. The CEO tried to sell the whole equity angle, but I honestly don't see any resume improvement potential here and that's all I really care about. I've worked at companies that gave a shit and I just don't think this is one of them.
studentrob 11y ago

joesmo 11y ago

Some psychologists consider burnout to be depression, not just depression-like. In my own experience, I'd have to agree. Luckily it's generally brought on by stress and most people recover within weeks or months if they are able to rest or be removed from the cause.

rusabd 11y ago

I worked two jobs - one full time during day and part-time during evenings and weekends. Both were dev jobs. I lasted only 10 months. The last months were really ugly - I was abusive, harsh to others, really unpleasant person to be around. I quit both jobs and moved city. It took me 4 months of doing absolutely nothing to recover.

studentrob 11y ago

> Be careful with passion and those who would use it against you. The problem is he let someone else define his passion. Nobody can use your own passion against you. Passion is just a word and anyone can say it. But you alone are the one who decides what you believe in, how much you are willing to work for, etc.