21 ms·

Employee burnout is becoming a huge problem in the American workforce

316 points by akeck 10y ago

theothermkn 10y ago
I wouldn't doubt overwork as a factor, but the elephant in the room is meaninglessness. Work, like God, is dead. Even for tech workers, the novelty has worn off, and people pretty much realize that the core feature of their jobs is their own economic exploitation. Burnout, like all pain, may be a feature.
- pdelbarba 10y ago
  tl;dr as it turns out, most people don't achieve self actualization by making money for other people
  - mathgeek 10y ago
    I'd cut the "for other people" part out as well.
  - dangle 10y ago
    I loled. What do you do for money?
- norea-armozel 10y ago
  Yeah I think I agree on the meaninglessness of work these days. And I don't mean that the individual task isn't perceptible as some part of a larger goal but I mean that much of the work I've done was utterly worthless or outright scrapped after the business decided it wanted to go the opposite direction. Not only is this frustrating from a personal point of view but it's also wasteful professionally. I'd rather have unpaid time off while the business finally figured out their strategy or goals for me before stepping into the office. At least then I would have time to do something else (paid or otherwise). Plus, it wouldn't be a waste of other resources such as purchasing licenses for third party software we'll never use in part or in whole or wages that could've been part of another budget for a viable product. All in all, it's this kind of wasteful nature that means the meaninglessness more painful to me since I can't point to a product or service with my fingerprints on it. I can't say "I helped make that possible" or "I helped that company add value to their client's experience."
  - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
    >Yeah I think I agree on the meaninglessness of work these days. These days? In all of human history your likelihood of being a slave was pretty high. Talk about real meaningless. If anything we live in a rare break from slavery which is an outlier. Not to mention back-breaking farm work. Or working in a mine. Or being gang pressed on a ship or into warfare. How's that for meaning? I think punching out some code and rebooting the occasional server and leaving at 5 is slightly better than the above. I think people need to learn some real expectations of what work means and perhaps to read Studs Turkel's Working before they get to complain about their cush white collar jobs being these horrible things. I'm not trying to trivialize work stress, but phrases like 'these days' are highly loaded and non-historic. If anything, we have it easier than all of our ancestors and by a wide margin.
    - norea-armozel 10y ago
      >These days? In all of human history your likelihood of being a slave was pretty high. Talk about real meaningless. If anything we live in a rare break from slavery which is an outlier. Slavery and drudgery are not what make work meaningful or meaningless. >I think people need to learn some real expectations of what work means and perhaps to read Studs Turkel's Working before they get to complain about their cush white collar jobs being these horrible things. As someone who's work in factories, grain elevators, grocery, retail, and currently work in software development I can tell you the meaningless of modern work is the same regardless of the drudgery involved. The fact you equate drudgery with meaningless work shows you have no clue as to how the working classes operate (being that I come from the working class I have some insights to impart here so I'll try to be patient with you). What makes work meaningless for the vast majority of humans is the total lack of control or the inability to perceive the end goal (ex. a factory assembler who'll never see the final product or that they have no say what the product should be or even if it's worthwhile to produce it). The lack of goals or any kind of connection to our work is what drives many people to quit or change jobs regardless of whether it's in an office or in a kitchen or on a factory line. Churn happens because people are intentionally left to be nothing more than trained animal in their task. Punch in, make quota, punch out. And repeat, forever. So, I'm not exactly sure what part of the physical comfort matters when the psychological deprivation weighs as hard as a herniated disk does on a laborer (I know both have similar impact thanks to my mother). And I can say that both physical and psychological pains and deprivations are hell from my own experiences. It's not to say that gilded cages aren't pretty but they're still cages.
- ashark 10y ago
  > Even for tech workers, the novelty has worn off, Watching most of what you build—which often wasn't exciting or very important-seeming to begin with—be discarded in short order, having benefitted few (i.e. not enough to justify the effort) or no people, after all kinds of false or semi-real urgency to get it done, year after year after year, will do that. It's a testament to how much money is sloshing around that we get paid so much to spend huge amounts of time building soon-to-be digital garbage, I guess. It feels like there's an exceptionally stupid monkey smashing shapes against one of those children's shape-in-the-correct-hole puzzles, but larger, extending forever into the distance, trying to get some of them to fit, which they mostly don't because the monkey's so damn stupid. And we're the shapes.
  - tzakrajs 10y ago
    This comment is so real. At the same time, those monkeys put the shape through the correct hole at a fast enough rate to keep the lights on and stay fed to starve another day.
    - marcosdumay 10y ago
      Starve? The monkey is always growing. And the smartest monkey in town by a large margin. Yet, it's infuriating how dumb it is.
      - tzakrajs 10y ago
        If the monkey is the industry, then sure but I was thinking of the monkey as the company and the industry was a cacophony of failed block-thru-hole puzzlers. Either way, thanks again -- I shared this with my coworkers and they appreciated your sentiments.
  - roymurdock 10y ago
    The monkey image is a great analogy for what economists are currently studying as the "productivity puzzle". Low to zero productivity growth is also why our unemployment rate in the US is amazingly low (seemingly a tight labor market), but why real median income is stagnant.
- nibstwo 10y ago
  Meaninglessness is a symptom. Resentment is the cause. Self advocate, complain, fuck shit up and walk away worst case.
- bobbington 10y ago
  God is NOT dead - some people just ignore him. As for you being exploited at work, I agree and it is terrible. I always thought of getting a job but never could for that very reason. Instead I freelance and am finishing up my own software to sell. I'm also careful about the contracts I sign. I turn down work if I don't like the contract. Interestingly Jesus will help you break free from the grind. Many people are in the system because they are afraid of what would happen if they left, I assume. Jesus explained "do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink... Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you". When you believe Jesus it helps you be free and do your own thing because you are not worried about what you will do to live. I knew most people here are probably atheists, and if you are I still respect you 100%. But I have found Jesus teachings to be the most effective tool in transforming my life. George mueller is proof that God takes care of those who trust in him. He decided to believe Jesus' command and he started an orphanage, never asking for one single donation. There was a time they had no food for breakfast for the children. He stayed up late praying, and that night a man came by saying that he could not sleep, but felt that he must bring by bread to the orphanage. There are countless stories he has, reading his autobiography is amazing. His orphanage grew to one of the largest the world has ever seen, and he never asked for one donation. The key is that you only find God if you are looking for him, if you take a chance. But he has promised that if you seek out his kingdom, he will provide. So seek his kingdom and start freelancing! Build your own business, and you won't have to be exploited!
- gdulli 10y ago
  Unless you're born with all the resources you'll ever need, you have to put in one kind of effort or another to secure them. Work never had to have meaning beyond being a way to stay alive. One just needed to accept that life wasn't going to be all leisure. I have a pretty comfortable job/career. I have a hard time saying I'm being exploited just because my work makes someone else richer to a greater extent than it makes me richer. It's engaging (enough) and I live well. I'm not putting my own resources at risk or making personal sacrifices. 20 years into my career and I've never burned out, probably because I never told myself I needed to, or was going to, change the world. And I made it my goal from the start to just find a job/life I was happy with.
  - betenoire 10y ago
    I tend to agree with you. Being exploited sounds negative, and I assume most of the people using the term mean it that way. But it's not a necessary condition of "exploitation". And why wouldn't my employer take full advantage of my services that they are paying for?
    - gdulli 10y ago
      Sure, if we're going by the clinical use of "exploit" without the negative connotations. I can more easily feel like I'm the one exploiting my employer. I get over $200K/year in salary and benefits to spend 40-50 hours/week doing what usually doesn't even feel much like work. I can work extra to get ahead when it would benefit me, or I can do the minimum at a given time. They have to give me free food and a top of the line computer and let me manage what time I come in and leave and what I wear. Because if they don't, I can find another company that will. I get a really nice bonus when the company does well but my comp doesn't go down if it's not doing well. I've spent more time at this job than I did in college, learning a lot here as well, and I can freely take that knowledge to another company whenever I want, I have no commitment here. Obviously it's not always like this. Not even within tech. But many of us can choose whether to see our jobs in a positive or negative light.
      - betenoire 10y ago
- hamilyon2 10y ago
  Fulfilling other's people dreams is not meaninless. We all should be slaves of wishes of others. It is called contribution and serving needs of other poeople
  - astrange 10y ago
    I like this reply the best.
- kirse 10y ago
  the core feature of their jobs is their own economic exploitation. Ugh, I know, being "economically exploited" is so rough -- making six figs in a top-tier profession with low single-digit unemployment that provides for a home/apt, family, regular health insurance, a warm bed and heating for the winter, cooling for the summer, multiple cars and a motorcycle (and maybe even a home for those too), an entire closet full of clothes, multiple pairs of shoes, regular healthy meals, spontaneous travel and vacations, hobbies, movies, TV, games, and entertainment nearly to our hearts' desire. Worse, at work I have to deal with shiny new gadgets, laptops, desktops, servers, giant monitors, a desk and chair to my liking, HVAC, plumbing, and free filtered water. And wait a second, did you say you get paid while taking a bathroom break!? Life really does suck being exploited like this. What's dead is not God, nor work, and the elephant might just be painted on the mirror on your wall.
  - Asooka 10y ago
    But you have literally zero time to enjoy any of those things. You live in the office 80% of the time, your entire life is sitting pretending to be busy, then going "home", where you spend less time than you do at the office, getting a few hours of sleep and eating whatever you can get delivered, which is never really good, then trying to get a few hours of sleep and entering another day of meaningless toil. Your entire life is subjugated. You're practically a serf, with no real control of your own life, owned by a huge corporation that will discard you like wet tissue paper the moment you ask for the privilege of having a human life.
    - rfrank 10y ago
      Nobody is holding a gun to your head and making you do the job or live in the bay area, move and do something else if you don't like it. Trust me, the service worker who commutes on public transit for three hours a day and makes 1/5th a tech salary would love to swap spots with the tech "serfs" if they had a chance.
      - kmicklas 10y ago
        Of course, but that doesn't mean both aren't being economically exploited.
- ryandvm 10y ago
  I can't speak for everyone, but as someone who has definitely burned out several times, for me it's never the work - it's always the workplace. After going through the whole process a few times, I've come to the conclusion that my own burnout is mostly attributable to the following factors: * Lack of voice in the direction of the company. * No personal investment in the success of the company. People respond to incentives. If someone has no say in where the company is going and doesn't share in the companies successes (or failures), it's only a matter of time before any rational individual is going to just stop caring. Fortunately, these problems have solutions. Several hundred year old solutions, no less: https://blog.fountstudio.com/yes-we-have-a-pirate-code-1aa1b2e02bf6 https://blog.fountstudio.com/yes-we-have-a-pirate-code-1aa1b... [Disclaimer: That's my own blog post.]
  - pascalxus 10y ago
    I've never really understood this viewpoint. Why would I care what the company was doing or where it was going? We're just wage earners, earning a living. It's simple: they give me money, I give them time. What they choose to do with my output is their concern. Why care? You don't own the company, not even a tiny fraction (stock options aren't ownership until you excercise, which for most people is never). Your only going to be there a few years, and they'll drop you the first chance they can get where they don't need you. It's like selling an orange. If you're a fruit stand, do you care what your customers will do with the fruits of your labor? What matters to me, is my own working conditions: work/life balance, salary and specifics of the project I am working on: ratio of coding vs fixing other people's messes, dev environment, ease of development and being empowered to write lots of code and functionality, as well as positive feedback from managers and co-workers.
    - ryandvm 10y ago
      I think we are in agreement. If you don't own a meaningful amount of the company, you aren't going to be very interested in the company's success and frankly the company is demonstrably uninterested in your success. By all rights you should feel perfectly comfortable moving on when a better offer comes your way.
  - 10y ago
- mjolk 10y ago
  > I wouldn't doubt overwork as a factor, but the elephant in the room is meaninglessness... people pretty much realize that the core feature of their jobs is their own economic exploitation...Burnout, like all pain, may be a feature. Oh god, if you're feeling theatrically unhappy with your job, it's seriously time to make a move. The core feature of my team is making something we think is awesome and missing from the world, where my role as the head of the startup is to do what needs to get done and make sure my team feels like their work and lives are fulfilling. If any member on my team felt like their work is meaningless or a source of emotional pain, I would not be able to sleep at night.
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  >Work, like God, is dead. Maybe being forced a "life is a meaningless accident and determism means you're just a flesh robot" message since birth is the problem? I follow a basic spritual path of my own doing and its very fulfilling. Its buddhism-lite with a fair bit of meditation and more estoric stuff like lucid dream practice and engage in my own form of 'right speech' and 'right action.' I'm so much more alive than I was before when I just bought into the typical young man's nihilism game. >that the core feature of their jobs is their own economic exploitation. The core feature of my job is to make money for me, and the guys above me doing better don't diminish from my salary. The same way my salary isn't diminishing from the guys below me. We tried forced equality recently in human history and it didn't work, so here we are doing the only thing that does. I think if you just see employment as this bitter zero-sum game you're destined to be unhappy. I'm not happy with work, nor unhappy. I understand what it is, its a compromise like much of life. I see lots of extremist messages passed on to young people about how awful things are but almost never a message about compromise, being realistic, moderation, and finding a path that works for you. Its always "the man is out to get me, so I can't win" stuff that's fairly dramatic and completely demoralizing. It ignores the massive middle-road open to those of us in the wealthy west. Perhaps your life lacks moderation, chance taking, and criticism of what you've been taught by authorities who don't deserve your trust because they're just winging it with desperation just like you. Maybe your attitude is the sum total of decades of the blind leading the blind in our culture. Having a 'I might as well kill myself because everything is so meaningless' attitude is absolutely not normal regardless of how hard you try to normalize it.
  - wry_discontent 10y ago
    > Maybe being forced a "life is a meaningless accident and determism means you're just a flesh robot" message since birth is the problem? And more than that, we're never given education on how to combat the feelings of meaninglessness that this message gives us. I've read a fair amount of existentialist philosophy myself to deal with it, but most people don't and it makes them miserable.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >Maybe being forced a "life is a meaningless accident and determism means you're just a flesh robot" message since birth is the problem? I follow a basic spritual path of my own doing and its very fulfilling. Its buddhism-lite with a fair bit of meditation and more estoric stuff like lucid dream practice and engage in my own form of 'right speech' and 'right action.' I'm so much more alive than I was before when I just bought into the typical young man's nihilism game. Firstly, nobody said anything about life. We were talking about Work with a capital W. Secondly, most of us don't need ghosts and spiritual dreams to have meaningful lives. >I see lots of extremist messages passed on to young people about how awful things are but almost never a message about compromise, being realistic, moderation, and finding a path that works for you. Its always "the man is out to get me, so I can't win" stuff that's fairly dramatic and completely demoralizing. It ignores the massive middle-road open to those of us in the wealthy west. Are you European? I think what you're hearing is coming from Americans because, well, the way American society treats people is actually quite extreme itself. "Head leftward towards the middle!" is going to sound extreme to someone who's idea of normal is to the far-right.
- jdietrich 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
- JDiculous 10y ago
  It's a shame that as a society we have so many of our brightest minds devoted to relatively meaningless work when they could be working on things that they not only want to work on, but are better for humanity. I don't have trouble focusing on my work when I'm in a good company. The problem is that if I take a look at the grand scheme of things and think about the that I'm devoting the majority of my waking hours to coding apps that would get done regardless of whether or not I existed (this space is largely zero sum in that there are more than enough developers to go around), it's kind of depressing. I'd rather be devoting my life to solving the meaningful problems in the world that not enough people are working on (eg. like what Elon Musk is doing). On another note, it surprises me that long breaks from work (eg. sabbaticals) aren't more common. Doing the same thing every weekday gets repetitive and draining.
agottem 10y ago
2008 should have ushered in a new labor movement. It was at this time that workers needed protection from their employer more than ever. The lackluster job market meant employers could demand longer hours and lower wages. Additionally, despite non-existent wage growth, the Federal Reserve fought tooth-and-nail to create inflation while insuring interest on savings was pushed to nothing. Of course we're burned out. We're fighting a losing battle. If Obama had any balls, he would have pushed for policies that protected the worker during this period we needed government the most.
imchillyb 10y ago
The saying goes: "I'm being over-worked and under-paid." When greed for profit over product viability or employee considerations is the /only/ goal of a company, this trend will /always/ be the end result. Profit is what drives markets, but it is employees that drive companies. Or, it is employees that ruin said companies. Businesses beware.
- mtreis86 10y ago
  There was a saying in the Soviet Union, "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work." Apparently this is an ongoing issue https://www2.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/demokratizatsiya%20archive/05-02_rosenblum.pdf https://www2.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/demokratizatsiya%...
TobyGiacometti 10y ago
While companies should definitely be doing something about this, at the end of the day it is our responsibility to look after ourselves. Too many people tolerate this type of treatment out of fear. I understand that this is easier said than done, but I do not think the situation will change much unless people start standing up for themselves. Remember the number 1 regret Bronnie Ware observed while caring for people in the last 12 weeks of their lives: I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- itgoon 10y ago
  Some of the best life advice I got from my Grandmother: You are always working for yourself. You may have an employer, but you are still working for yourself, not them. You're trading your time for money, like any other business. If you don't like the deal, then walk away.
  - TobyGiacometti 10y ago
    Your grandmother was a wise woman!
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - AstralStorm 10y ago
      She forgot to mention a caveat: don't get trapped in a situation you cannot get out of. It is easy to get caught by debt, lack of savings, education or skill. Just as easy by not figuring your advantages and capitalizing on them. The corollary is that it is as easy to stay in place by standing as by running on a treadmill.
      - TobyGiacometti 10y ago
        > The corollary is that it is as easy to stay in place by standing as by running on a treadmill. I like this metaphor! However, once we realize that we are the treadmill, we can turn it off and walk away...
saboot 10y ago
> The Economic Policy Institute shows that productivity increased by 21.6%, yet wages grew by only 1.8% during this time period. > Companies need to do something about this burnout crisis now because otherwise, they will pay the high price of turnover. Hm, what on earth could they possibly do? It's a mystery shrouded in an enigma!
- digitalsushi 10y ago
  I want a job where I pick my next promotion between salary raise and more time off. I dont want a 10k raise. I want a halfday friday from now on.
  - rubicon33 10y ago
    I know someone who negotiated a 4 day work week as part of a new job. He took less salary but, in the end, the time was far more valuable. If you're a software engineer, now is the time to start asking for things like that. If you don't think you'll ever get it at your current job, start looking elsewhere. It's possible, albeit, unlikely.
    - jharger 10y ago
      This sounds amazing, but it also kind of scares me. How do you enforce your employment agreement so that they don't just eventually increase your work week to 5 days and keep you at the same lower salary?
      - xyzzyz 10y ago
        You put it into the employment contract, and in any case, you can always leave.
        pc86 10y ago
        Most places don't have employment contracts. The short answer is you can't. Your boss is always within his or her right to tell you that you have to stay. You're 100% within your right to say "no" and walk out of the door.
chollida1 10y ago
I think the below article on burnout is the best thing Marissa Mayer has ever produced!! https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-12/how-to-avoid-burnout-marissa-mayer https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-12/how-to-av... If you subscribe to the theory that burn out is all about resentment then it gives you a whole new set of tools to deal with it.
- rubiquity 10y ago
  I like the idea but what do you do when your resentment comes from something external rather than internal? Getting to soccer practice on time and eating dinner with your friends can be controlled. What do you do when you're burned out because you don't feel appreciated or challenged?
  - dvtv75 10y ago
    Depends on why you're burning out. Constant demands for overtime without the extra pay? Your manager is also responsible for the IT dept., so when your computers fail IT are told not to bother? Forced to resign down to a much lesser role because of 70+ hours/week and an inconsequential spelling mistake? You seethe, and do less, and less. When a fault occurs that you could correct, you don't. You turn up 40 minutes after starting time, and walk out of meetings early. Everything becomes half-assed. Oh, and you start to plan ahead, so you can get the boss back by dobbing him into a governmental authority. Right now, I get paid to flirt with a lot of pretty women for much of the day.
- nottorp 10y ago
  That's new. Initially she was saying she doesn't believe in burnout, and if you're 'strategic' about showers, you can sleep under your desk and work 130 hour weeks. Random reference: http://www.thegrindstone.com/2013/01/22/mentors/becoming-marissa-mayer-or-how-to-lose-yourself-alienate-people/ http://www.thegrindstone.com/2013/01/22/mentors/becoming-mar...
- TYPE_FASTER 10y ago
  "He came back and said, “Tuesday night dinners. My friends from college, we all get together every Tuesday night and do a potluck. If I miss it, the whole rest of the week I’m like, ‘I’m just not going to stay late tonight. I didn’t even get to do my Tuesday night dinner.’ ” So if he grinds all week, he gets Tuesday night off? lol.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Companies need to do something about this burnout crisis now because otherwise, they will pay the high price of turnover. No, because it's a tragedy of the commons. Companies who take on extra short term costs to deal with it will lose out to companies that don't; even if long-term, overall, it's a better outcome of companies do deal with it. The existence of things like this is pretty much the reason for government.
- bdhess 10y ago
  Your answer assumes that the cost of preventing burnout exceeds the cost of turnover.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    Based on videogame companies and how they churn through deveopers, this definitely seems to be the case for at least some sectors. I'd say the cost of turnover is only high for highly specialized roles; a role which software development is rarely considered to be by companies.
    - sidlls 10y ago
      Yes, and this is because consumers treat software products more like a disposable than a durable good. If they cared about quality, companies would react to that.
    - leggomylibro 10y ago
      Video games might not be the best example; they aren't commodities, and the games which are produced as you described often feel like assembly line productions. Compare Ubisoft's flagship Assassin's Creed or Far Cry games to Ubisoft's arthouse Montpellier studio (1). It's astonishing what a difference culture makes with creative works. Their works are smaller and less consistent, but they have a few enormous successes (compared to how much they cost) among those. But with a commodity like paper clips, where you can buy 100 from anybody, that might not be the case. You get a paper clip no matter how the workers are treated. I guess that might have been what you meant by 'specialized roles,' though. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft_Montpellier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft_Montpellier
st3v3r 10y ago
Not surprising. People are tired of working long, useless hours for nothing other than to make someone else rich. Workers haven't seen meaningful pay increases in a long, long time. Most haven't seen a vacation in years. No wonder they're just tired of the whole thing.
- convolvatron 10y ago
  I think the 'useless' part hasn't been brought up enough on this thread. Every place I work the build is broken, the dependencies are broken, and the tests are a joke. Which means that 10 hours of coding can turn into weeks of trying to get something committed. When you say 'let me fix the build', its always so far down on the list they refuse to deal with it. We are already so late as it is. And so everyone keeps burning hours struggling with the build, and no one is happy. Or a planning process that has me working on a deliverable for a month only to find out that we "aren't doing it that way anymore". Or such a complete lack of any thought testing, which means that when I finally get through implementing your feature on your horrific codebase, there isn't any sane way to get it into production. You pay me well - I'm not taking any vacation - are you going to exploit me properly or let me fuss in the corner and eventually leave because you can't come to grips with your own structural issues.
pmoriarty 10y ago
I've suffered severe burnout so many times in my career, resulting in taking years off from work because I dreaded going back. I want to switch careers, but can't think of anything else I'm qualified for that I'd like to do, and it's really hard to switch careers when you're older. I envy people who can do what they love, or at least not hate, for a living.
- JabavuAdams 10y ago
  Doing what you love may be part of the problem.
- duderific 10y ago
  If you can "take years off from work" you must have done something extremely right at some point. The only significant time I've ever had off from work is getting laid off, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that.
  - pmoriarty 10y ago
    Yes, but there's always a price.. psychological and/or emotional, in my case.
jressey 10y ago
I've been working professionally in IT for about 6 years now and the concept of 'working too little' has never come up from any of my managers. I have a strict personal policy of working the exact amount of hours discussed upon hiring, and never responding to calls or email outside of those hours. For example I worked at a Fortune 50 with a 37.5 hour workweek and always stuck to that. I even counted the time I spent at lunch. Issue never raised. I am not saying cases exist where workers are asked to work more than their agreed hours. I killed myself in kitchens for a $25k salary before switching to tech. These cases are a problem. My point is that this behavior is often self-imposed. People seem to feel a sense of importance when they overwork themselves. Simply stick to the number of hours you've agreed upon and tell your manager to discuss with their supervisor if they bring it up as a disciplinary issue. This all qualified by being in a position of demand as an engineer. Point is, you'd be surprised with what you can 'get away with.'
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  I don't think it is a matter of getting away. I can not be productive (truly productive) for more than 4 hours a day. The rest is just overhead my employer pays to keep me on hand. I guess in theory they could just pay me for those 4 hours as much as they'd pay me for the 8 hours but that's way too much sense for most folks.
  - sodapopcan 10y ago
    Ha, I'm the same way. 4-5 hours, I'd say. I was recently very upfront with my employer about this and I managed to finagle myself a deal where they're halving my salary and I'm going down to four hours per day. They said they would have never hired me part time like that but luckily for me they don't want to lose me. May be worth a shot if you don't mind making less money.
  - wry_discontent 10y ago
    The remaining time, in my experience, is to coordinate meetings with management. Managers at my company have meetings almost all day. I, however, only have a few meetings per week. They can do meetings for 8 hours just fine, but I can't code for 8 hours. I could go home after 4 hours and be just as productive per week, but I'd miss potential meeting hours. And naturally, they are the ones whom we have to cater to when this kind of divide comes up. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
workerexploited 10y ago
First, the unemployment rate numbers are fudged by UNDERemployment, especially by millennials. It's a BS statistic and more people need to realize this. Moving on, I'm a millennial that doesn't work as an engineer/developer/programmer/etc. I make less than $100,000 and I live in a major US city because that's where the jobs are. As noted in the article, it really also comes down to wages just as--but perhaps more than--hours put in. But there's just so much more that is contributing to burnout and the inseparable turnover. Rant incoming. EVERY educated and skilled millennial I know like me (non-"STEM") is job hopping like crazy for that ever-so-slight raise and hope that the grass is greener on the other side. Our resumes are getting PACKED with 6-month and 1-year gigs. Nearly every day on my LinkedIn feed I see someone leaving somewhere and getting a new job. There are just so many things wrong with the workplace resulting in burnout and turnover today for millennials (humans): - We're sick of being paid poorly; a dog-friendly office, free snacks, hip lighting in the lobby, standing desks, and free Friday lunch doesn't make up for poor pay - We're often sick of overpaid-and-often-less-skilled supervisors above us and especially the even more bloated and overpaid management above them - We're sick of positions where we have no opportunities for growth or development of skills or discovering something new - We're sick of working with fellow millenials who give even less of a crap than us so they're just lazy and don't pull their weight until they find the next gig--and we often have to pull their weight for them - We're sick of interviewing in-person and never hearing a word back from crap recruiting and human resources teams - We're sick of being hired on as "freelancer" or "contract" employees so that we're denied benefits even though we dedicate 40+ hours per week to a company
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- slededit 10y ago
  > the unemployment rate numbers are fudged by UNDERemployment The employment numbers are not fudged, they are very specific as to what they contain. Further there are 6 of them so its important to specify which is applicable to whatever you're trying to determine. In the case of underemployment U-6 is the measurement you want to look at. If you look at the historical charts for U-6 you'll see we're below the unemployment level of 1995. http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate
jeena 10y ago
If I didn't have to work for shelter and food, I'd be an artist. I'd be a photographer [0] and a podcaster [1]. I do both already, but I feel that I never have the time to do both thoroughly and as often as I would desire. I'd need some money for travel actually, so I could photograph and interview people who are interesting but do not live where I do. [0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeena/albums/72157677196990660 https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeena/albums/72157677196990660 [1] https://jeena.net/pods https://jeena.net/pods
jm__87 10y ago
If you are a skilled employee working in IT and you have experienced burn out, it is likely something you have done to yourself. Do some companies have ridiculously high expectations of their employees: yes. Do you have to live up to those expectations: no. As a skilled IT worker your knowledge and experience are valuable commodities that can presumably be sold elsewhere. The reason that managers can get away with having ridiculous expectations is because their employees let them. Capitalism rewards those who can wring out the most value for the least cost. Many people will take advantage of you if you simply let them.
- throwaway9475 10y ago
  Sure, just quit your job and stop feeding your family or having a house or health insurance. Or upend your entire life to move somewhere else where you'll mostly likely be treated similarly because you have no idea how a job will be until you work there for three months. Capitalism rewards those who can wring out the most value for least cost, which is why unions were created. Workers on their own have basically no leverage. Honestly, the fact that tech workers can pack up and leave relatively easily (more easily than most Americans, anyway) is part of the problem.
  - jm__87 10y ago
    The reason I specifically mentioned skilled work is because there is a significant investment on the part of the company hiring. Labor unions are useful for unskilled labor where an individual worker has no bargaining chips and the company can replace someone at low cost. Depending on what you do in the tech industry, it is unlikely this applies to you. You either hire someone with less experience and it takes months before they become useful or you hire someone who has all the skills you already need and it is likely that people with the exact skill set you require are in low supply. Keeping these two points in mind, people who work in tech often have quite a good bargaining position with their employer.
    - dvtv75 10y ago
      You would be surprised at just how poorly managed some businesses are, I think. A prior employer has such a bad reputation around the city that even the local IT school refuses to acknowledge that one of their graduates runs the IT department there, and this school is desperate to wave the "We have a successful course!" flag so they can compete with the CS course at the neighboring university. This business hires a few graduates from the course each year, requiring 40 hours a week minimum. The standard of work required immediately would be expected of someone with 5 years experience, and there's no budget for software or hardware, but here's the kicker: the job is actually an internship. There's no pay, but the project is a high-end one. The business is simply getting free labor, and does so regularly. The internships don't lead to a job, although they do provide a professional reference from a business with a terrible reputation. There are no guaranteed bargaining chips.
rux 10y ago
It's from a while back, but here Treehouse describe how they operate on a 9am-6pm four-day week. http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/work-less http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/work-less I remember talking to Ryan Carson (the guy who put this into place) at a conference and he said that the results from doing it were overwhelmingly positive.
- paulcole 10y ago
  RIP to Treehouse's 4-day week. http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2016/09/treehouse_returns_to_five-day.html http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2016/09/t...
  - rux 10y ago
    Ahh damn shame, I hadn't seen this.
jakozaur 10y ago
Not enough holidays? I know a lot of ppl in USA which take too little or none of them for quite a while until they burnt out. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/sep/07/america-vacation-workaholic-culture-labor-day https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/sep/07/america-vacati...
rconti 10y ago
"67% said that they think their employees have a balanced life, yet about half of employees disagree." owww, my head!
- wyldfire 10y ago
  "67% [of companies] ... yet about half of employees [disagree with the claim supported by majority companies surveyed]" > Many companies don’t realize how much burnout is impacting an employee’s work-life. For instance, when we asked them about the topic, 67% said that they think their employees have a balanced life, yet about half of employees disagree. "For instance, when we asked [the companies!]..."
krylon 10y ago
I am getting paid to work 40 hours a week, and for the most part that's what I do. I do respond to calls and mails outside of work hours, because we are a 1.5 person IT department, and when e.g. email does not work, it is kind of a big deal. But that does not happen very often. (I used to have that colleague who literally called me every day, even when I was on vacation and sick, but he quit; the guy who replaced him is great though.) Once a month, servers need to be updated and rebooted, and I do that, too, but I don't mind. It is kind of soothing, in its own way. ;-) I have no problem working long hours when it is necessary. It happens, even in the best of places; but in places where it is the rule, in my experience, it's because management is too cheap to spring for a decent IT department. And having been through a case of burnout (which, IMHO, is just a euphemism for depression), you really can't afford the amount of money it would take to make me go through that again. Or maybe you can, but you don't want to. Either way, I am happy to make a modest living working reasonable hours. My boss seems to agree, so we're cool. (Full Disclosure: I am living and working in Germany, in case it matters.)
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > I have no problem working long hours when it is necessary. It happens, even in the best of places Actually, once in a while, having to put out a big fire is kinda stimulating. Sure it sucks that something's burning, but the challenge can be awesome. Well, as long as it doesn't happen too often. :)
terminallyunix 10y ago
I've been in IT for 20 years next year. I've been a sysadmin this entire time. Back in Virginia (Silicon Valley East), I made great money, but here in Texas, I make a pittance. I'm in my mid 40s and have been looking to get into something else, but building on my existing skills. No one is even looking at me. I'm toying with the idea of maybe going it alone. Start a small IT consultancy. Not sure what angle to look at this from. I'm not trying to put out a "woe is me" here, but rather appeal to the others in here that are toying with the idea of maybe going it alone in some capacity. I've put out literally tons of resumes/CVs in the last couple of years and nary an interview. It's not like I don't have skills, but it seems that employers now want sysadmins to also be programmers and network engineers and coffee monkeys all at the same time. I've also entertained the notion of getting out of IT altogether, but it's all I know. A guy I know bought a small cleaning company and he now cleans houses for the wealthy at 150-200 a house x 4 houses a day. He splits this with one other person. Not quite sure. But in my mid 40s, I don't think my body could handle a purely physical job.
- dingbat 10y ago
  > But in my mid 40s, I don't think my body could handle a purely physical job. not assuming your physical condition, have no idea if you work out or not, but still wondering if you think sedentary IT career has contributed to lack of physical fitness?
  - terminallyunix 10y ago
    I'm OK physically, not Homer Simpson or Mr. Six Pack. I walk all the time, play with my kids outside, but a purely physical job doesn't seem like the right thing for me. Unless I lost my job and had to take on a less-than-desirable physical job to make ends meet, I doubt I will ever leave IT. I like IT work, I love being in the command line building servers, instances, writing shell scripts. Quite a few of my friends have moved up into management and to a man, I think they are miserable--what with dealing with multiple personalities every day, plotting peoples' time off, ensuring on-call coverage, living in meetings. I fancy none of that. My fear is that within a couple of years I'll be 50 and still a sysadmin. Now, having said this, I don't find the work belittling or "less than". My wife, thankfully, is in full support of whatever I undertake as long as I do my bit to provide financially to the household. She has encouraged me more than once to strike out on my own and do my own thing. Like most people, I'm terrified to fail, so I sit and do nothing, wondering why the status quo sucks.
burntoffice 10y ago
The two years I spent in Corporate America on any given day was either living an episode of The Office or Office Space. People burnt out by fire drills coming from above, scared to use PTO as it was "bad optics", not receiving credit or appreciation, etc. WORTH REMEMBERING: By nature of an employee showing up daily is to perpetually commit to the job. It is entirely up to person and their risk capacity. Saw a lot of "stuck" people who didn't like their job, but also wouldn't venture out to change that or actually tap into their true potential.
6stringmerc 10y ago
None of this is surprising if three elements are considered: 1. Productivity has soared 2. Wages have stagnated / wealth gap has widened significantly 3. US Corporate Culture is currently rife with an attitude "Let the Boomers Retire, we have a Hiring Freeze" There are too few people doing the work of too many, which chokes the upward mobility of the youth, increases the wealth gap between Working and Investing class citizens, and essentially is masochism in the "modern era" of US Consumerism as an economic engine. Don't believe me? Do some math on stock buybacks 2015-2016 versus publicly announced hirings and layoffs. You'd be surprised how easily this amounts to justification for putting Greenspan and Bernanke in jail. Those guys stole from tens of millions of Americans to benefit a few hundred.
- surfmike 10y ago
  Only #2 is affected by the Fed/QE, points 1 and 3 would still be true. And look at Europe for an example for what would have happened without our Fed's intervention. The ECB did too little too late and this led to massive youth unemployment; on the other hand our unemployment rate is nearing historical lows. Not being able to get a job (which happened to a lot of grads in 2008) is devastating to people's careers. The employment rate matters!
  - pmichaud 10y ago
    I think it's fair to say that regardless of the historical precedent, the way we measure unemployment now is not representative of the situation out there. Huge numbers of people are chronically underemployed, and an unprecedented number of people have simply given up finding work, neither of which is reflected in the top line "historically low unemployment."
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - npongratz 10y ago
      Indeed, the official participation rate may perhaps offer a better indicator of overall employment in the US [edit: than employment rate alone]: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 Zooming out and eyeballing it, it appears the last time such a small proportion of people were working was circa 1978.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> Vacations allow employees to regenerate so they can elevate their productivity upon return. Sounds like 1975.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  Well, from the employer's point of view, that may well be true. I mean, it would be nice if employers insisted on vacations and good medical plans and other benefits because they saw their employees as human beings who had to be treated well. In practice, though, that's rare. You're more likely to get good treatment from a company because the company realizes that doing so is profitable than you are to get it because the company realizes that doing so is right.
  - sokoloff 10y ago
    I do what's right for our employees because that is profitable. That doesn't make me a bad employer (IMO). You can bet that we mentally (and sometimes overtly) trade off improvements to salary vs long-term incentive vs office perks vs health care vs other benefits. I don't see any other rational way to get a stable outcome that benefits both sides. (A company that pays too much [cash or non-cash benefits] and goes out of business as a result hasn't helped anyone long-term.) We are competing every day to motivate and retain our engineers.
smdz 10y ago
I have been an employee, freelancer and just moved to being/creating an agency. Retrospectively thinking, burning out as an employee felt much better(and safer) than burning out as an entrepreneur. As an employee - I always loved pressure times, but then retrospectively disliked "performing under pressure" - why? When I do more work - my manager(s) did not say "you worked so hard and stayed up so late". There was a casual "Thanks". But when there was no work - it is suddenly my fault - "You don't work hard to find work and aren't staying full 8 hours". And just one such bad incident was enough to have my quarterly rating degraded for multiple other good incidents. As a freelancer - I thought it would be easy - But it wasn't. Of course its not because of client(s) demand. When I worked hourly, every hour counts and pays. I realized I had worked as an employee - for peanuts and sometimes for free. I can now put in same effort and get paid hourly. If I am getting a predetermined price - I work even longer - because its easier to work in a project trance and reduce task switching inefficiencies. I worked long hours and I was trapped. It was just a golden-handcuff. As an agency - The pressure is on me to grow it. Marketing, managing, hiring and sometimes coding and troubleshooting issues and much more draining is troubleshooting team issues. My ambitions are now bigger than they ever were. Even if I am on a not-so-frequent vacation, I cannot stop thinking about work - "after all its my biz now, if I don't think who will" - I keep brainwashing myself with that. Most of my leisure weekends are combined with some sort of low-pressure work. The answer to killing burnouts is not in the law - but in the society. The society today celebrates "entrepreneurship, grilling and hard work" for material wealth. We celebrate the next Facebook entrepreneur, but we don't celebrate social entrepreneurship. Everybody wants more, more and more material stuff (myself included). We are being brainwashed to want more than what we need. If you look around there are many people working so hard just to make a decent living. They do valuable work too. As an employee I may get paid 5 times more because I create business value - while they create lesser business value and arguably add higher social value.
mnm1 10y ago
Companies lie about worker burnout so to not seem inhumane when they're well aware of the conditions they create. Short of a statutory or federal law, this isn't going to change. The fact that the salary loophole exists and we refuse to pay even hourly workers overtime if they make too much money (depending on the state and industry) doesn't bode well for our chances of fixing this. Do these same companies wonder why most of their employees are disengaged? Or is that still such a big "mystery" to their blind management?
deletia 10y ago
Employee burnout happens because the majority of businesses today cling to a 20th century, mass production designed, work model (9am-5pm workday, ass in seat productivity measure) while employees are forced squeeze their lives around a corporation for "security". I recently wrote a post which outlines this idea in a slightly broader context (those interested can visit https://allidina.me https://allidina.me, feedback & constructive criticism welcome). Cheers!
openforce 10y ago
Early in my career, my then really good manager taught me to say no, Which was initially difficult for me. But, I am really thankful for that lesson. Learning to stand your ground and say no to excess work is very important if you care about a life outside work. People from India, like me, especially have a hard time saying NO to being assigned something that, either you have no time to work on or something you don't want to work on. It's a cultural thing combined with the golden leash of H1b visas. I see a lot of my colleagues from India accepting more and more work and end up having almost no life outside of it.
encoderer 10y ago
I question the veracity that American's are working harder than ever before. I think we have higher wage productivity than ever before, and that is not the same.
danielschonfeld 10y ago
Allow me to put this here, seems appropriate. http://slots.info/love-hate-map/#/map http://slots.info/love-hate-map/#/map
d--b 10y ago
I am happy to say that in the hedge I am working at, work hours have gone down a lot. When I joined in 2010, I would start at 6.45am and finish after 9pm everyday. There was a lot of stuff to do. But once the platform improved and the workload reduced, so did the working hours. I am now doing 9 to 6 approximately, which is pretty great. I also removed emails on my smartphone. Best move ever. Push for it. Working less is worth it.
Animats 10y ago
Unions. The people who brought you the weekend.
korzun 10y ago
A lot of people in technology sector think that showing up and writing two lines of code is more than enough to deserve six figure salary now. The same people will make a big deal about staying late or having to work on a weekend once in a while. The sense of entitlement is pretty mindblowing to me.
snarf21 10y ago
The biggest problem is American corporate work is mostly busyness and not enough business. Too many layers and too many people who spend all their time trying to justify their position and not adding value.
awinter-py 10y ago
Investing $$ in employee happiness and retention is a tricky signaling problem. If you need the best people, you probably should care about retention. What if, on the other hand, your managers suck so much that good and bad workers perform at the same level? In this case signaling to your people you don't give a crap about them puts you in a powerful negotiating position.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  "What if, on the other hand, your managers suck so much that good and bad workers perform at the same level? In this case signaling to your people you don't give a crap about them puts you in a powerful negotiating position." Only with the people who can't find work elsewhere. For those that are good, the ones you do want to retain, signaling that you don't give a crap about them will get them to up and leave. Possibly with no notice period.
milge 10y ago
I was laid off new years. I've been doing development for 10 years and specializing in salesforce for 7 years. I haven't found the right position yet, but I know I've been burned out for a little bit now. I've been considering low-paying metal-working jobs, but the sad reality is unemployment pays more. Unemployment runs out in June. I'm kinda indifferent whether I find work. I've started the foreclosure process on my house. This may be the perfect time to just take some time and explore the US. So while I haven't found work yet, the work I have done has put me in the mentality that that's ok. Thanks for reading.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Do the metal working job, or a lower paying job you dig. Do a loan modification to keep your house. Enjoy the extra equity you receive. Then, rent it out while you travel the US.
  - milge 10y ago
    The foreclosure was inevitable. I bought too high about 8 years ago and my house is really old. It needs more money in work than I'd ever make back. Such is life I suppose. A string of hard-earned lessons.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      If you change your mind, I'm happy to walk you through the process, even if you do a short sale instead.
2sk21 10y ago
I often joke that I have to take vacations to get real work done. My company like many does not allow vacation to be rolled over so, I usually wind up taking off the last two weeks of December. This is truly when I get my thinking done - I can spend the entire day from morning to night looking at code without any interruptions.
vogelke 10y ago
I wrote about why I like being a sysadmin after 29 years on Reddit about 2 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5omi1n/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5omi1n/ One of the biggest things that kept me from burning out was realizing that companies (or branches of the service) are neither good nor evil, they're just big. As a result, they'll take whatever you offer and not blink an eye.
jondubois 10y ago
A big problem today is that managers and executives are optimised for short-term gains at the expense of everything else (including long term outlook, ethics and even sanity). People move up the ranks by making random, crazy one-off bets that turn out great in the short term. Nobody notices people who consistently make good long term bets. This is compounded by the fact that people who have power these days tend to overlook failure and only consider good outcomes.
mti27 10y ago
Once I accumulated so much rollover vacation time I decided "I'm not working Fridays anymore" which lasted for many months. I found out later someone had complained to my manager about this, since I was unreachable. That same company had experimented with a 7:30 - 11:30 schedule on Fridays (7:30 - 5:30 Mon-Thurs) which was great: you'd miss heavy traffic coming in and get a head start on every weekend. But someone in the field complained about corporate being unreachable and they ended that too.... The problem is the "flexible thinking" people always come up against the "Bill Lumberghs" of the world and everyone is pulled down to the lowest common denominator.
dsfyu404ed 10y ago
Everyone comes in this thread to complain about how bad life sucks because you don't get two months of vacation time for existing and can't use your sick days on a paper-cut but most of these people will turn right around and talk about how great their employer is if the article is a positive one.
- Clubber 10y ago
  Have any data for that assertion?
BrandonY 10y ago
That photo's position, overhead and looking down a long hallway of cubes, with some meaningless but chipper corporate slogans as well as some very serious business-looking stuff, reminds me of the opening office shot of the game Stardew Valley: http://www11.onrpg.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Stardew-Valley-Joja.jpg http://www11.onrpg.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Stardew-Va... That game's protagonist, perhaps not coincidentally, burns out on their office job and decides to go become a farmer.
kafkaesq 10y ago
...and yet those cubes are possibly sumptuous compared to some I've been asked to work in.

316 points by akeck 10y ago

I wouldn't doubt overwork as a factor, but the elephant in the room is meaninglessness. Work, like God, is dead. Even for tech workers, the novelty has worn off, and people pretty much realize that the core feature of their jobs is their own economic exploitation. Burnout, like all pain, may be a feature.

pdelbarba 10y ago
tl;dr as it turns out, most people don't achieve self actualization by making money for other people
- mathgeek 10y ago
  I'd cut the "for other people" part out as well.
- dangle 10y ago
  I loled. What do you do for money?
norea-armozel 10y ago
Yeah I think I agree on the meaninglessness of work these days. And I don't mean that the individual task isn't perceptible as some part of a larger goal but I mean that much of the work I've done was utterly worthless or outright scrapped after the business decided it wanted to go the opposite direction. Not only is this frustrating from a personal point of view but it's also wasteful professionally. I'd rather have unpaid time off while the business finally figured out their strategy or goals for me before stepping into the office. At least then I would have time to do something else (paid or otherwise). Plus, it wouldn't be a waste of other resources such as purchasing licenses for third party software we'll never use in part or in whole or wages that could've been part of another budget for a viable product. All in all, it's this kind of wasteful nature that means the meaninglessness more painful to me since I can't point to a product or service with my fingerprints on it. I can't say "I helped make that possible" or "I helped that company add value to their client's experience."
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  >Yeah I think I agree on the meaninglessness of work these days. These days? In all of human history your likelihood of being a slave was pretty high. Talk about real meaningless. If anything we live in a rare break from slavery which is an outlier. Not to mention back-breaking farm work. Or working in a mine. Or being gang pressed on a ship or into warfare. How's that for meaning? I think punching out some code and rebooting the occasional server and leaving at 5 is slightly better than the above. I think people need to learn some real expectations of what work means and perhaps to read Studs Turkel's Working before they get to complain about their cush white collar jobs being these horrible things. I'm not trying to trivialize work stress, but phrases like 'these days' are highly loaded and non-historic. If anything, we have it easier than all of our ancestors and by a wide margin.
  - norea-armozel 10y ago
    >These days? In all of human history your likelihood of being a slave was pretty high. Talk about real meaningless. If anything we live in a rare break from slavery which is an outlier. Slavery and drudgery are not what make work meaningful or meaningless. >I think people need to learn some real expectations of what work means and perhaps to read Studs Turkel's Working before they get to complain about their cush white collar jobs being these horrible things. As someone who's work in factories, grain elevators, grocery, retail, and currently work in software development I can tell you the meaningless of modern work is the same regardless of the drudgery involved. The fact you equate drudgery with meaningless work shows you have no clue as to how the working classes operate (being that I come from the working class I have some insights to impart here so I'll try to be patient with you). What makes work meaningless for the vast majority of humans is the total lack of control or the inability to perceive the end goal (ex. a factory assembler who'll never see the final product or that they have no say what the product should be or even if it's worthwhile to produce it). The lack of goals or any kind of connection to our work is what drives many people to quit or change jobs regardless of whether it's in an office or in a kitchen or on a factory line. Churn happens because people are intentionally left to be nothing more than trained animal in their task. Punch in, make quota, punch out. And repeat, forever. So, I'm not exactly sure what part of the physical comfort matters when the psychological deprivation weighs as hard as a herniated disk does on a laborer (I know both have similar impact thanks to my mother). And I can say that both physical and psychological pains and deprivations are hell from my own experiences. It's not to say that gilded cages aren't pretty but they're still cages.
ashark 10y ago
> Even for tech workers, the novelty has worn off, Watching most of what you build—which often wasn't exciting or very important-seeming to begin with—be discarded in short order, having benefitted few (i.e. not enough to justify the effort) or no people, after all kinds of false or semi-real urgency to get it done, year after year after year, will do that. It's a testament to how much money is sloshing around that we get paid so much to spend huge amounts of time building soon-to-be digital garbage, I guess. It feels like there's an exceptionally stupid monkey smashing shapes against one of those children's shape-in-the-correct-hole puzzles, but larger, extending forever into the distance, trying to get some of them to fit, which they mostly don't because the monkey's so damn stupid. And we're the shapes.
- tzakrajs 10y ago
  This comment is so real. At the same time, those monkeys put the shape through the correct hole at a fast enough rate to keep the lights on and stay fed to starve another day.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    Starve? The monkey is always growing. And the smartest monkey in town by a large margin. Yet, it's infuriating how dumb it is.
    - tzakrajs 10y ago
      If the monkey is the industry, then sure but I was thinking of the monkey as the company and the industry was a cacophony of failed block-thru-hole puzzlers. Either way, thanks again -- I shared this with my coworkers and they appreciated your sentiments.
- roymurdock 10y ago
  The monkey image is a great analogy for what economists are currently studying as the "productivity puzzle". Low to zero productivity growth is also why our unemployment rate in the US is amazingly low (seemingly a tight labor market), but why real median income is stagnant.
nibstwo 10y ago
Meaninglessness is a symptom. Resentment is the cause. Self advocate, complain, fuck shit up and walk away worst case.
bobbington 10y ago
God is NOT dead - some people just ignore him. As for you being exploited at work, I agree and it is terrible. I always thought of getting a job but never could for that very reason. Instead I freelance and am finishing up my own software to sell. I'm also careful about the contracts I sign. I turn down work if I don't like the contract. Interestingly Jesus will help you break free from the grind. Many people are in the system because they are afraid of what would happen if they left, I assume. Jesus explained "do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink... Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you". When you believe Jesus it helps you be free and do your own thing because you are not worried about what you will do to live. I knew most people here are probably atheists, and if you are I still respect you 100%. But I have found Jesus teachings to be the most effective tool in transforming my life. George mueller is proof that God takes care of those who trust in him. He decided to believe Jesus' command and he started an orphanage, never asking for one single donation. There was a time they had no food for breakfast for the children. He stayed up late praying, and that night a man came by saying that he could not sleep, but felt that he must bring by bread to the orphanage. There are countless stories he has, reading his autobiography is amazing. His orphanage grew to one of the largest the world has ever seen, and he never asked for one donation. The key is that you only find God if you are looking for him, if you take a chance. But he has promised that if you seek out his kingdom, he will provide. So seek his kingdom and start freelancing! Build your own business, and you won't have to be exploited!
gdulli 10y ago
Unless you're born with all the resources you'll ever need, you have to put in one kind of effort or another to secure them. Work never had to have meaning beyond being a way to stay alive. One just needed to accept that life wasn't going to be all leisure. I have a pretty comfortable job/career. I have a hard time saying I'm being exploited just because my work makes someone else richer to a greater extent than it makes me richer. It's engaging (enough) and I live well. I'm not putting my own resources at risk or making personal sacrifices. 20 years into my career and I've never burned out, probably because I never told myself I needed to, or was going to, change the world. And I made it my goal from the start to just find a job/life I was happy with.
- betenoire 10y ago
  I tend to agree with you. Being exploited sounds negative, and I assume most of the people using the term mean it that way. But it's not a necessary condition of "exploitation". And why wouldn't my employer take full advantage of my services that they are paying for?
  - gdulli 10y ago
    Sure, if we're going by the clinical use of "exploit" without the negative connotations. I can more easily feel like I'm the one exploiting my employer. I get over $200K/year in salary and benefits to spend 40-50 hours/week doing what usually doesn't even feel much like work. I can work extra to get ahead when it would benefit me, or I can do the minimum at a given time. They have to give me free food and a top of the line computer and let me manage what time I come in and leave and what I wear. Because if they don't, I can find another company that will. I get a really nice bonus when the company does well but my comp doesn't go down if it's not doing well. I've spent more time at this job than I did in college, learning a lot here as well, and I can freely take that knowledge to another company whenever I want, I have no commitment here. Obviously it's not always like this. Not even within tech. But many of us can choose whether to see our jobs in a positive or negative light.
    - betenoire 10y ago
hamilyon2 10y ago
Fulfilling other's people dreams is not meaninless. We all should be slaves of wishes of others. It is called contribution and serving needs of other poeople
- astrange 10y ago
  I like this reply the best.
kirse 10y ago
the core feature of their jobs is their own economic exploitation. Ugh, I know, being "economically exploited" is so rough -- making six figs in a top-tier profession with low single-digit unemployment that provides for a home/apt, family, regular health insurance, a warm bed and heating for the winter, cooling for the summer, multiple cars and a motorcycle (and maybe even a home for those too), an entire closet full of clothes, multiple pairs of shoes, regular healthy meals, spontaneous travel and vacations, hobbies, movies, TV, games, and entertainment nearly to our hearts' desire. Worse, at work I have to deal with shiny new gadgets, laptops, desktops, servers, giant monitors, a desk and chair to my liking, HVAC, plumbing, and free filtered water. And wait a second, did you say you get paid while taking a bathroom break!? Life really does suck being exploited like this. What's dead is not God, nor work, and the elephant might just be painted on the mirror on your wall.
- Asooka 10y ago
  But you have literally zero time to enjoy any of those things. You live in the office 80% of the time, your entire life is sitting pretending to be busy, then going "home", where you spend less time than you do at the office, getting a few hours of sleep and eating whatever you can get delivered, which is never really good, then trying to get a few hours of sleep and entering another day of meaningless toil. Your entire life is subjugated. You're practically a serf, with no real control of your own life, owned by a huge corporation that will discard you like wet tissue paper the moment you ask for the privilege of having a human life.
  - rfrank 10y ago
    Nobody is holding a gun to your head and making you do the job or live in the bay area, move and do something else if you don't like it. Trust me, the service worker who commutes on public transit for three hours a day and makes 1/5th a tech salary would love to swap spots with the tech "serfs" if they had a chance.
    - kmicklas 10y ago
      Of course, but that doesn't mean both aren't being economically exploited.
ryandvm 10y ago
I can't speak for everyone, but as someone who has definitely burned out several times, for me it's never the work - it's always the workplace. After going through the whole process a few times, I've come to the conclusion that my own burnout is mostly attributable to the following factors: * Lack of voice in the direction of the company. * No personal investment in the success of the company. People respond to incentives. If someone has no say in where the company is going and doesn't share in the companies successes (or failures), it's only a matter of time before any rational individual is going to just stop caring. Fortunately, these problems have solutions. Several hundred year old solutions, no less: https://blog.fountstudio.com/yes-we-have-a-pirate-code-1aa1b2e02bf6 https://blog.fountstudio.com/yes-we-have-a-pirate-code-1aa1b... [Disclaimer: That's my own blog post.]
- pascalxus 10y ago
  I've never really understood this viewpoint. Why would I care what the company was doing or where it was going? We're just wage earners, earning a living. It's simple: they give me money, I give them time. What they choose to do with my output is their concern. Why care? You don't own the company, not even a tiny fraction (stock options aren't ownership until you excercise, which for most people is never). Your only going to be there a few years, and they'll drop you the first chance they can get where they don't need you. It's like selling an orange. If you're a fruit stand, do you care what your customers will do with the fruits of your labor? What matters to me, is my own working conditions: work/life balance, salary and specifics of the project I am working on: ratio of coding vs fixing other people's messes, dev environment, ease of development and being empowered to write lots of code and functionality, as well as positive feedback from managers and co-workers.
  - ryandvm 10y ago
    I think we are in agreement. If you don't own a meaningful amount of the company, you aren't going to be very interested in the company's success and frankly the company is demonstrably uninterested in your success. By all rights you should feel perfectly comfortable moving on when a better offer comes your way.
- 10y ago
mjolk 10y ago
> I wouldn't doubt overwork as a factor, but the elephant in the room is meaninglessness... people pretty much realize that the core feature of their jobs is their own economic exploitation...Burnout, like all pain, may be a feature. Oh god, if you're feeling theatrically unhappy with your job, it's seriously time to make a move. The core feature of my team is making something we think is awesome and missing from the world, where my role as the head of the startup is to do what needs to get done and make sure my team feels like their work and lives are fulfilling. If any member on my team felt like their work is meaningless or a source of emotional pain, I would not be able to sleep at night.
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
>Work, like God, is dead. Maybe being forced a "life is a meaningless accident and determism means you're just a flesh robot" message since birth is the problem? I follow a basic spritual path of my own doing and its very fulfilling. Its buddhism-lite with a fair bit of meditation and more estoric stuff like lucid dream practice and engage in my own form of 'right speech' and 'right action.' I'm so much more alive than I was before when I just bought into the typical young man's nihilism game. >that the core feature of their jobs is their own economic exploitation. The core feature of my job is to make money for me, and the guys above me doing better don't diminish from my salary. The same way my salary isn't diminishing from the guys below me. We tried forced equality recently in human history and it didn't work, so here we are doing the only thing that does. I think if you just see employment as this bitter zero-sum game you're destined to be unhappy. I'm not happy with work, nor unhappy. I understand what it is, its a compromise like much of life. I see lots of extremist messages passed on to young people about how awful things are but almost never a message about compromise, being realistic, moderation, and finding a path that works for you. Its always "the man is out to get me, so I can't win" stuff that's fairly dramatic and completely demoralizing. It ignores the massive middle-road open to those of us in the wealthy west. Perhaps your life lacks moderation, chance taking, and criticism of what you've been taught by authorities who don't deserve your trust because they're just winging it with desperation just like you. Maybe your attitude is the sum total of decades of the blind leading the blind in our culture. Having a 'I might as well kill myself because everything is so meaningless' attitude is absolutely not normal regardless of how hard you try to normalize it.
- wry_discontent 10y ago
  > Maybe being forced a "life is a meaningless accident and determism means you're just a flesh robot" message since birth is the problem? And more than that, we're never given education on how to combat the feelings of meaninglessness that this message gives us. I've read a fair amount of existentialist philosophy myself to deal with it, but most people don't and it makes them miserable.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >Maybe being forced a "life is a meaningless accident and determism means you're just a flesh robot" message since birth is the problem? I follow a basic spritual path of my own doing and its very fulfilling. Its buddhism-lite with a fair bit of meditation and more estoric stuff like lucid dream practice and engage in my own form of 'right speech' and 'right action.' I'm so much more alive than I was before when I just bought into the typical young man's nihilism game. Firstly, nobody said anything about life. We were talking about Work with a capital W. Secondly, most of us don't need ghosts and spiritual dreams to have meaningful lives. >I see lots of extremist messages passed on to young people about how awful things are but almost never a message about compromise, being realistic, moderation, and finding a path that works for you. Its always "the man is out to get me, so I can't win" stuff that's fairly dramatic and completely demoralizing. It ignores the massive middle-road open to those of us in the wealthy west. Are you European? I think what you're hearing is coming from Americans because, well, the way American society treats people is actually quite extreme itself. "Head leftward towards the middle!" is going to sound extreme to someone who's idea of normal is to the far-right.
jdietrich 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
JDiculous 10y ago
It's a shame that as a society we have so many of our brightest minds devoted to relatively meaningless work when they could be working on things that they not only want to work on, but are better for humanity. I don't have trouble focusing on my work when I'm in a good company. The problem is that if I take a look at the grand scheme of things and think about the that I'm devoting the majority of my waking hours to coding apps that would get done regardless of whether or not I existed (this space is largely zero sum in that there are more than enough developers to go around), it's kind of depressing. I'd rather be devoting my life to solving the meaningful problems in the world that not enough people are working on (eg. like what Elon Musk is doing). On another note, it surprises me that long breaks from work (eg. sabbaticals) aren't more common. Doing the same thing every weekday gets repetitive and draining.

agottem 10y ago

2008 should have ushered in a new labor movement. It was at this time that workers needed protection from their employer more than ever. The lackluster job market meant employers could demand longer hours and lower wages. Additionally, despite non-existent wage growth, the Federal Reserve fought tooth-and-nail to create inflation while insuring interest on savings was pushed to nothing. Of course we're burned out. We're fighting a losing battle. If Obama had any balls, he would have pushed for policies that protected the worker during this period we needed government the most.

imchillyb 10y ago

The saying goes: "I'm being over-worked and under-paid." When greed for profit over product viability or employee considerations is the /only/ goal of a company, this trend will /always/ be the end result. Profit is what drives markets, but it is employees that drive companies. Or, it is employees that ruin said companies. Businesses beware.

mtreis86 10y ago
There was a saying in the Soviet Union, "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work." Apparently this is an ongoing issue https://www2.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/demokratizatsiya%20archive/05-02_rosenblum.pdf https://www2.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/demokratizatsiya%...

TobyGiacometti 10y ago

While companies should definitely be doing something about this, at the end of the day it is our responsibility to look after ourselves. Too many people tolerate this type of treatment out of fear. I understand that this is easier said than done, but I do not think the situation will change much unless people start standing up for themselves. Remember the number 1 regret Bronnie Ware observed while caring for people in the last 12 weeks of their lives: I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

itgoon 10y ago
Some of the best life advice I got from my Grandmother: You are always working for yourself. You may have an employer, but you are still working for yourself, not them. You're trading your time for money, like any other business. If you don't like the deal, then walk away.
- TobyGiacometti 10y ago
  Your grandmother was a wise woman!
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    She forgot to mention a caveat: don't get trapped in a situation you cannot get out of. It is easy to get caught by debt, lack of savings, education or skill. Just as easy by not figuring your advantages and capitalizing on them. The corollary is that it is as easy to stay in place by standing as by running on a treadmill.
    - TobyGiacometti 10y ago
      > The corollary is that it is as easy to stay in place by standing as by running on a treadmill. I like this metaphor! However, once we realize that we are the treadmill, we can turn it off and walk away...

saboot 10y ago

> The Economic Policy Institute shows that productivity increased by 21.6%, yet wages grew by only 1.8% during this time period. > Companies need to do something about this burnout crisis now because otherwise, they will pay the high price of turnover. Hm, what on earth could they possibly do? It's a mystery shrouded in an enigma!

digitalsushi 10y ago
I want a job where I pick my next promotion between salary raise and more time off. I dont want a 10k raise. I want a halfday friday from now on.
- rubicon33 10y ago
  I know someone who negotiated a 4 day work week as part of a new job. He took less salary but, in the end, the time was far more valuable. If you're a software engineer, now is the time to start asking for things like that. If you don't think you'll ever get it at your current job, start looking elsewhere. It's possible, albeit, unlikely.
  - jharger 10y ago
    This sounds amazing, but it also kind of scares me. How do you enforce your employment agreement so that they don't just eventually increase your work week to 5 days and keep you at the same lower salary?
    - xyzzyz 10y ago
      You put it into the employment contract, and in any case, you can always leave.
      - pc86 10y ago
        Most places don't have employment contracts. The short answer is you can't. Your boss is always within his or her right to tell you that you have to stay. You're 100% within your right to say "no" and walk out of the door.

chollida1 10y ago

I think the below article on burnout is the best thing Marissa Mayer has ever produced!! https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-12/how-to-avoid-burnout-marissa-mayer https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-12/how-to-av... If you subscribe to the theory that burn out is all about resentment then it gives you a whole new set of tools to deal with it.

rubiquity 10y ago
I like the idea but what do you do when your resentment comes from something external rather than internal? Getting to soccer practice on time and eating dinner with your friends can be controlled. What do you do when you're burned out because you don't feel appreciated or challenged?
- dvtv75 10y ago
  Depends on why you're burning out. Constant demands for overtime without the extra pay? Your manager is also responsible for the IT dept., so when your computers fail IT are told not to bother? Forced to resign down to a much lesser role because of 70+ hours/week and an inconsequential spelling mistake? You seethe, and do less, and less. When a fault occurs that you could correct, you don't. You turn up 40 minutes after starting time, and walk out of meetings early. Everything becomes half-assed. Oh, and you start to plan ahead, so you can get the boss back by dobbing him into a governmental authority. Right now, I get paid to flirt with a lot of pretty women for much of the day.
nottorp 10y ago
That's new. Initially she was saying she doesn't believe in burnout, and if you're 'strategic' about showers, you can sleep under your desk and work 130 hour weeks. Random reference: http://www.thegrindstone.com/2013/01/22/mentors/becoming-marissa-mayer-or-how-to-lose-yourself-alienate-people/ http://www.thegrindstone.com/2013/01/22/mentors/becoming-mar...
TYPE_FASTER 10y ago
"He came back and said, “Tuesday night dinners. My friends from college, we all get together every Tuesday night and do a potluck. If I miss it, the whole rest of the week I’m like, ‘I’m just not going to stay late tonight. I didn’t even get to do my Tuesday night dinner.’ ” So if he grinds all week, he gets Tuesday night off? lol.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Companies need to do something about this burnout crisis now because otherwise, they will pay the high price of turnover. No, because it's a tragedy of the commons. Companies who take on extra short term costs to deal with it will lose out to companies that don't; even if long-term, overall, it's a better outcome of companies do deal with it. The existence of things like this is pretty much the reason for government.

bdhess 10y ago
Your answer assumes that the cost of preventing burnout exceeds the cost of turnover.
- falcolas 10y ago
  Based on videogame companies and how they churn through deveopers, this definitely seems to be the case for at least some sectors. I'd say the cost of turnover is only high for highly specialized roles; a role which software development is rarely considered to be by companies.
  - sidlls 10y ago
    Yes, and this is because consumers treat software products more like a disposable than a durable good. If they cared about quality, companies would react to that.
  - leggomylibro 10y ago
    Video games might not be the best example; they aren't commodities, and the games which are produced as you described often feel like assembly line productions. Compare Ubisoft's flagship Assassin's Creed or Far Cry games to Ubisoft's arthouse Montpellier studio (1). It's astonishing what a difference culture makes with creative works. Their works are smaller and less consistent, but they have a few enormous successes (compared to how much they cost) among those. But with a commodity like paper clips, where you can buy 100 from anybody, that might not be the case. You get a paper clip no matter how the workers are treated. I guess that might have been what you meant by 'specialized roles,' though. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft_Montpellier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft_Montpellier

st3v3r 10y ago

Not surprising. People are tired of working long, useless hours for nothing other than to make someone else rich. Workers haven't seen meaningful pay increases in a long, long time. Most haven't seen a vacation in years. No wonder they're just tired of the whole thing.

convolvatron 10y ago
I think the 'useless' part hasn't been brought up enough on this thread. Every place I work the build is broken, the dependencies are broken, and the tests are a joke. Which means that 10 hours of coding can turn into weeks of trying to get something committed. When you say 'let me fix the build', its always so far down on the list they refuse to deal with it. We are already so late as it is. And so everyone keeps burning hours struggling with the build, and no one is happy. Or a planning process that has me working on a deliverable for a month only to find out that we "aren't doing it that way anymore". Or such a complete lack of any thought testing, which means that when I finally get through implementing your feature on your horrific codebase, there isn't any sane way to get it into production. You pay me well - I'm not taking any vacation - are you going to exploit me properly or let me fuss in the corner and eventually leave because you can't come to grips with your own structural issues.

pmoriarty 10y ago

I've suffered severe burnout so many times in my career, resulting in taking years off from work because I dreaded going back. I want to switch careers, but can't think of anything else I'm qualified for that I'd like to do, and it's really hard to switch careers when you're older. I envy people who can do what they love, or at least not hate, for a living.

JabavuAdams 10y ago
Doing what you love may be part of the problem.
duderific 10y ago
If you can "take years off from work" you must have done something extremely right at some point. The only significant time I've ever had off from work is getting laid off, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  Yes, but there's always a price.. psychological and/or emotional, in my case.

jressey 10y ago

I've been working professionally in IT for about 6 years now and the concept of 'working too little' has never come up from any of my managers. I have a strict personal policy of working the exact amount of hours discussed upon hiring, and never responding to calls or email outside of those hours. For example I worked at a Fortune 50 with a 37.5 hour workweek and always stuck to that. I even counted the time I spent at lunch. Issue never raised. I am not saying cases exist where workers are asked to work more than their agreed hours. I killed myself in kitchens for a $25k salary before switching to tech. These cases are a problem. My point is that this behavior is often self-imposed. People seem to feel a sense of importance when they overwork themselves. Simply stick to the number of hours you've agreed upon and tell your manager to discuss with their supervisor if they bring it up as a disciplinary issue. This all qualified by being in a position of demand as an engineer. Point is, you'd be surprised with what you can 'get away with.'

dkarapetyan 10y ago
I don't think it is a matter of getting away. I can not be productive (truly productive) for more than 4 hours a day. The rest is just overhead my employer pays to keep me on hand. I guess in theory they could just pay me for those 4 hours as much as they'd pay me for the 8 hours but that's way too much sense for most folks.
- sodapopcan 10y ago
  Ha, I'm the same way. 4-5 hours, I'd say. I was recently very upfront with my employer about this and I managed to finagle myself a deal where they're halving my salary and I'm going down to four hours per day. They said they would have never hired me part time like that but luckily for me they don't want to lose me. May be worth a shot if you don't mind making less money.
- wry_discontent 10y ago
  The remaining time, in my experience, is to coordinate meetings with management. Managers at my company have meetings almost all day. I, however, only have a few meetings per week. They can do meetings for 8 hours just fine, but I can't code for 8 hours. I could go home after 4 hours and be just as productive per week, but I'd miss potential meeting hours. And naturally, they are the ones whom we have to cater to when this kind of divide comes up. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

workerexploited 10y ago

First, the unemployment rate numbers are fudged by UNDERemployment, especially by millennials. It's a BS statistic and more people need to realize this. Moving on, I'm a millennial that doesn't work as an engineer/developer/programmer/etc. I make less than $100,000 and I live in a major US city because that's where the jobs are. As noted in the article, it really also comes down to wages just as--but perhaps more than--hours put in. But there's just so much more that is contributing to burnout and the inseparable turnover. Rant incoming. EVERY educated and skilled millennial I know like me (non-"STEM") is job hopping like crazy for that ever-so-slight raise and hope that the grass is greener on the other side. Our resumes are getting PACKED with 6-month and 1-year gigs. Nearly every day on my LinkedIn feed I see someone leaving somewhere and getting a new job. There are just so many things wrong with the workplace resulting in burnout and turnover today for millennials (humans): - We're sick of being paid poorly; a dog-friendly office, free snacks, hip lighting in the lobby, standing desks, and free Friday lunch doesn't make up for poor pay - We're often sick of overpaid-and-often-less-skilled supervisors above us and especially the even more bloated and overpaid management above them - We're sick of positions where we have no opportunities for growth or development of skills or discovering something new - We're sick of working with fellow millenials who give even less of a crap than us so they're just lazy and don't pull their weight until they find the next gig--and we often have to pull their weight for them - We're sick of interviewing in-person and never hearing a word back from crap recruiting and human resources teams - We're sick of being hired on as "freelancer" or "contract" employees so that we're denied benefits even though we dedicate 40+ hours per week to a company

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
slededit 10y ago
> the unemployment rate numbers are fudged by UNDERemployment The employment numbers are not fudged, they are very specific as to what they contain. Further there are 6 of them so its important to specify which is applicable to whatever you're trying to determine. In the case of underemployment U-6 is the measurement you want to look at. If you look at the historical charts for U-6 you'll see we're below the unemployment level of 1995. http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate

jeena 10y ago

If I didn't have to work for shelter and food, I'd be an artist. I'd be a photographer [0] and a podcaster [1]. I do both already, but I feel that I never have the time to do both thoroughly and as often as I would desire. I'd need some money for travel actually, so I could photograph and interview people who are interesting but do not live where I do. [0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeena/albums/72157677196990660 https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeena/albums/72157677196990660 [1] https://jeena.net/pods https://jeena.net/pods

jm__87 10y ago

If you are a skilled employee working in IT and you have experienced burn out, it is likely something you have done to yourself. Do some companies have ridiculously high expectations of their employees: yes. Do you have to live up to those expectations: no. As a skilled IT worker your knowledge and experience are valuable commodities that can presumably be sold elsewhere. The reason that managers can get away with having ridiculous expectations is because their employees let them. Capitalism rewards those who can wring out the most value for the least cost. Many people will take advantage of you if you simply let them.

throwaway9475 10y ago
Sure, just quit your job and stop feeding your family or having a house or health insurance. Or upend your entire life to move somewhere else where you'll mostly likely be treated similarly because you have no idea how a job will be until you work there for three months. Capitalism rewards those who can wring out the most value for least cost, which is why unions were created. Workers on their own have basically no leverage. Honestly, the fact that tech workers can pack up and leave relatively easily (more easily than most Americans, anyway) is part of the problem.
- jm__87 10y ago
  The reason I specifically mentioned skilled work is because there is a significant investment on the part of the company hiring. Labor unions are useful for unskilled labor where an individual worker has no bargaining chips and the company can replace someone at low cost. Depending on what you do in the tech industry, it is unlikely this applies to you. You either hire someone with less experience and it takes months before they become useful or you hire someone who has all the skills you already need and it is likely that people with the exact skill set you require are in low supply. Keeping these two points in mind, people who work in tech often have quite a good bargaining position with their employer.
  - dvtv75 10y ago
    You would be surprised at just how poorly managed some businesses are, I think. A prior employer has such a bad reputation around the city that even the local IT school refuses to acknowledge that one of their graduates runs the IT department there, and this school is desperate to wave the "We have a successful course!" flag so they can compete with the CS course at the neighboring university. This business hires a few graduates from the course each year, requiring 40 hours a week minimum. The standard of work required immediately would be expected of someone with 5 years experience, and there's no budget for software or hardware, but here's the kicker: the job is actually an internship. There's no pay, but the project is a high-end one. The business is simply getting free labor, and does so regularly. The internships don't lead to a job, although they do provide a professional reference from a business with a terrible reputation. There are no guaranteed bargaining chips.

rux 10y ago

It's from a while back, but here Treehouse describe how they operate on a 9am-6pm four-day week. http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/work-less http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/work-less I remember talking to Ryan Carson (the guy who put this into place) at a conference and he said that the results from doing it were overwhelmingly positive.

paulcole 10y ago
RIP to Treehouse's 4-day week. http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2016/09/treehouse_returns_to_five-day.html http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2016/09/t...
- rux 10y ago
  Ahh damn shame, I hadn't seen this.

jakozaur 10y ago

Not enough holidays? I know a lot of ppl in USA which take too little or none of them for quite a while until they burnt out. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/sep/07/america-vacation-workaholic-culture-labor-day https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/sep/07/america-vacati...

rconti 10y ago

"67% said that they think their employees have a balanced life, yet about half of employees disagree." owww, my head!

wyldfire 10y ago
"67% [of companies] ... yet about half of employees [disagree with the claim supported by majority companies surveyed]" > Many companies don’t realize how much burnout is impacting an employee’s work-life. For instance, when we asked them about the topic, 67% said that they think their employees have a balanced life, yet about half of employees disagree. "For instance, when we asked [the companies!]..."

krylon 10y ago

I am getting paid to work 40 hours a week, and for the most part that's what I do. I do respond to calls and mails outside of work hours, because we are a 1.5 person IT department, and when e.g. email does not work, it is kind of a big deal. But that does not happen very often. (I used to have that colleague who literally called me every day, even when I was on vacation and sick, but he quit; the guy who replaced him is great though.) Once a month, servers need to be updated and rebooted, and I do that, too, but I don't mind. It is kind of soothing, in its own way. ;-) I have no problem working long hours when it is necessary. It happens, even in the best of places; but in places where it is the rule, in my experience, it's because management is too cheap to spring for a decent IT department. And having been through a case of burnout (which, IMHO, is just a euphemism for depression), you really can't afford the amount of money it would take to make me go through that again. Or maybe you can, but you don't want to. Either way, I am happy to make a modest living working reasonable hours. My boss seems to agree, so we're cool. (Full Disclosure: I am living and working in Germany, in case it matters.)

Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> I have no problem working long hours when it is necessary. It happens, even in the best of places Actually, once in a while, having to put out a big fire is kinda stimulating. Sure it sucks that something's burning, but the challenge can be awesome. Well, as long as it doesn't happen too often. :)

terminallyunix 10y ago

I've been in IT for 20 years next year. I've been a sysadmin this entire time. Back in Virginia (Silicon Valley East), I made great money, but here in Texas, I make a pittance. I'm in my mid 40s and have been looking to get into something else, but building on my existing skills. No one is even looking at me. I'm toying with the idea of maybe going it alone. Start a small IT consultancy. Not sure what angle to look at this from. I'm not trying to put out a "woe is me" here, but rather appeal to the others in here that are toying with the idea of maybe going it alone in some capacity. I've put out literally tons of resumes/CVs in the last couple of years and nary an interview. It's not like I don't have skills, but it seems that employers now want sysadmins to also be programmers and network engineers and coffee monkeys all at the same time. I've also entertained the notion of getting out of IT altogether, but it's all I know. A guy I know bought a small cleaning company and he now cleans houses for the wealthy at 150-200 a house x 4 houses a day. He splits this with one other person. Not quite sure. But in my mid 40s, I don't think my body could handle a purely physical job.

dingbat 10y ago
> But in my mid 40s, I don't think my body could handle a purely physical job. not assuming your physical condition, have no idea if you work out or not, but still wondering if you think sedentary IT career has contributed to lack of physical fitness?
- terminallyunix 10y ago
  I'm OK physically, not Homer Simpson or Mr. Six Pack. I walk all the time, play with my kids outside, but a purely physical job doesn't seem like the right thing for me. Unless I lost my job and had to take on a less-than-desirable physical job to make ends meet, I doubt I will ever leave IT. I like IT work, I love being in the command line building servers, instances, writing shell scripts. Quite a few of my friends have moved up into management and to a man, I think they are miserable--what with dealing with multiple personalities every day, plotting peoples' time off, ensuring on-call coverage, living in meetings. I fancy none of that. My fear is that within a couple of years I'll be 50 and still a sysadmin. Now, having said this, I don't find the work belittling or "less than". My wife, thankfully, is in full support of whatever I undertake as long as I do my bit to provide financially to the household. She has encouraged me more than once to strike out on my own and do my own thing. Like most people, I'm terrified to fail, so I sit and do nothing, wondering why the status quo sucks.

burntoffice 10y ago

The two years I spent in Corporate America on any given day was either living an episode of The Office or Office Space. People burnt out by fire drills coming from above, scared to use PTO as it was "bad optics", not receiving credit or appreciation, etc. WORTH REMEMBERING: By nature of an employee showing up daily is to perpetually commit to the job. It is entirely up to person and their risk capacity. Saw a lot of "stuck" people who didn't like their job, but also wouldn't venture out to change that or actually tap into their true potential.

6stringmerc 10y ago

None of this is surprising if three elements are considered: 1. Productivity has soared 2. Wages have stagnated / wealth gap has widened significantly 3. US Corporate Culture is currently rife with an attitude "Let the Boomers Retire, we have a Hiring Freeze" There are too few people doing the work of too many, which chokes the upward mobility of the youth, increases the wealth gap between Working and Investing class citizens, and essentially is masochism in the "modern era" of US Consumerism as an economic engine. Don't believe me? Do some math on stock buybacks 2015-2016 versus publicly announced hirings and layoffs. You'd be surprised how easily this amounts to justification for putting Greenspan and Bernanke in jail. Those guys stole from tens of millions of Americans to benefit a few hundred.

surfmike 10y ago
Only #2 is affected by the Fed/QE, points 1 and 3 would still be true. And look at Europe for an example for what would have happened without our Fed's intervention. The ECB did too little too late and this led to massive youth unemployment; on the other hand our unemployment rate is nearing historical lows. Not being able to get a job (which happened to a lot of grads in 2008) is devastating to people's careers. The employment rate matters!
- pmichaud 10y ago
  I think it's fair to say that regardless of the historical precedent, the way we measure unemployment now is not representative of the situation out there. Huge numbers of people are chronically underemployed, and an unprecedented number of people have simply given up finding work, neither of which is reflected in the top line "historically low unemployment."
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - npongratz 10y ago
    Indeed, the official participation rate may perhaps offer a better indicator of overall employment in the US [edit: than employment rate alone]: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 Zooming out and eyeballing it, it appears the last time such a small proportion of people were working was circa 1978.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

> Vacations allow employees to regenerate so they can elevate their productivity upon return. Sounds like 1975.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Well, from the employer's point of view, that may well be true. I mean, it would be nice if employers insisted on vacations and good medical plans and other benefits because they saw their employees as human beings who had to be treated well. In practice, though, that's rare. You're more likely to get good treatment from a company because the company realizes that doing so is profitable than you are to get it because the company realizes that doing so is right.
- sokoloff 10y ago
  I do what's right for our employees because that is profitable. That doesn't make me a bad employer (IMO). You can bet that we mentally (and sometimes overtly) trade off improvements to salary vs long-term incentive vs office perks vs health care vs other benefits. I don't see any other rational way to get a stable outcome that benefits both sides. (A company that pays too much [cash or non-cash benefits] and goes out of business as a result hasn't helped anyone long-term.) We are competing every day to motivate and retain our engineers.

smdz 10y ago

I have been an employee, freelancer and just moved to being/creating an agency. Retrospectively thinking, burning out as an employee felt much better(and safer) than burning out as an entrepreneur. As an employee - I always loved pressure times, but then retrospectively disliked "performing under pressure" - why? When I do more work - my manager(s) did not say "you worked so hard and stayed up so late". There was a casual "Thanks". But when there was no work - it is suddenly my fault - "You don't work hard to find work and aren't staying full 8 hours". And just one such bad incident was enough to have my quarterly rating degraded for multiple other good incidents. As a freelancer - I thought it would be easy - But it wasn't. Of course its not because of client(s) demand. When I worked hourly, every hour counts and pays. I realized I had worked as an employee - for peanuts and sometimes for free. I can now put in same effort and get paid hourly. If I am getting a predetermined price - I work even longer - because its easier to work in a project trance and reduce task switching inefficiencies. I worked long hours and I was trapped. It was just a golden-handcuff. As an agency - The pressure is on me to grow it. Marketing, managing, hiring and sometimes coding and troubleshooting issues and much more draining is troubleshooting team issues. My ambitions are now bigger than they ever were. Even if I am on a not-so-frequent vacation, I cannot stop thinking about work - "after all its my biz now, if I don't think who will" - I keep brainwashing myself with that. Most of my leisure weekends are combined with some sort of low-pressure work. The answer to killing burnouts is not in the law - but in the society. The society today celebrates "entrepreneurship, grilling and hard work" for material wealth. We celebrate the next Facebook entrepreneur, but we don't celebrate social entrepreneurship. Everybody wants more, more and more material stuff (myself included). We are being brainwashed to want more than what we need. If you look around there are many people working so hard just to make a decent living. They do valuable work too. As an employee I may get paid 5 times more because I create business value - while they create lesser business value and arguably add higher social value.

mnm1 10y ago

Companies lie about worker burnout so to not seem inhumane when they're well aware of the conditions they create. Short of a statutory or federal law, this isn't going to change. The fact that the salary loophole exists and we refuse to pay even hourly workers overtime if they make too much money (depending on the state and industry) doesn't bode well for our chances of fixing this. Do these same companies wonder why most of their employees are disengaged? Or is that still such a big "mystery" to their blind management?

deletia 10y ago

Employee burnout happens because the majority of businesses today cling to a 20th century, mass production designed, work model (9am-5pm workday, ass in seat productivity measure) while employees are forced squeeze their lives around a corporation for "security". I recently wrote a post which outlines this idea in a slightly broader context (those interested can visit https://allidina.me https://allidina.me, feedback & constructive criticism welcome). Cheers!

openforce 10y ago

Early in my career, my then really good manager taught me to say no, Which was initially difficult for me. But, I am really thankful for that lesson. Learning to stand your ground and say no to excess work is very important if you care about a life outside work. People from India, like me, especially have a hard time saying NO to being assigned something that, either you have no time to work on or something you don't want to work on. It's a cultural thing combined with the golden leash of H1b visas. I see a lot of my colleagues from India accepting more and more work and end up having almost no life outside of it.

encoderer 10y ago

I question the veracity that American's are working harder than ever before. I think we have higher wage productivity than ever before, and that is not the same.

danielschonfeld 10y ago

Allow me to put this here, seems appropriate. http://slots.info/love-hate-map/#/map http://slots.info/love-hate-map/#/map

d--b 10y ago

I am happy to say that in the hedge I am working at, work hours have gone down a lot. When I joined in 2010, I would start at 6.45am and finish after 9pm everyday. There was a lot of stuff to do. But once the platform improved and the workload reduced, so did the working hours. I am now doing 9 to 6 approximately, which is pretty great. I also removed emails on my smartphone. Best move ever. Push for it. Working less is worth it.

Animats 10y ago

Unions. The people who brought you the weekend.

korzun 10y ago

A lot of people in technology sector think that showing up and writing two lines of code is more than enough to deserve six figure salary now. The same people will make a big deal about staying late or having to work on a weekend once in a while. The sense of entitlement is pretty mindblowing to me.

snarf21 10y ago

The biggest problem is American corporate work is mostly busyness and not enough business. Too many layers and too many people who spend all their time trying to justify their position and not adding value.

awinter-py 10y ago

Investing $$ in employee happiness and retention is a tricky signaling problem. If you need the best people, you probably should care about retention. What if, on the other hand, your managers suck so much that good and bad workers perform at the same level? In this case signaling to your people you don't give a crap about them puts you in a powerful negotiating position.

st3v3r 10y ago
"What if, on the other hand, your managers suck so much that good and bad workers perform at the same level? In this case signaling to your people you don't give a crap about them puts you in a powerful negotiating position." Only with the people who can't find work elsewhere. For those that are good, the ones you do want to retain, signaling that you don't give a crap about them will get them to up and leave. Possibly with no notice period.

milge 10y ago

I was laid off new years. I've been doing development for 10 years and specializing in salesforce for 7 years. I haven't found the right position yet, but I know I've been burned out for a little bit now. I've been considering low-paying metal-working jobs, but the sad reality is unemployment pays more. Unemployment runs out in June. I'm kinda indifferent whether I find work. I've started the foreclosure process on my house. This may be the perfect time to just take some time and explore the US. So while I haven't found work yet, the work I have done has put me in the mentality that that's ok. Thanks for reading.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
Do the metal working job, or a lower paying job you dig. Do a loan modification to keep your house. Enjoy the extra equity you receive. Then, rent it out while you travel the US.
- milge 10y ago
  The foreclosure was inevitable. I bought too high about 8 years ago and my house is really old. It needs more money in work than I'd ever make back. Such is life I suppose. A string of hard-earned lessons.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    If you change your mind, I'm happy to walk you through the process, even if you do a short sale instead.

2sk21 10y ago

I often joke that I have to take vacations to get real work done. My company like many does not allow vacation to be rolled over so, I usually wind up taking off the last two weeks of December. This is truly when I get my thinking done - I can spend the entire day from morning to night looking at code without any interruptions.

vogelke 10y ago

I wrote about why I like being a sysadmin after 29 years on Reddit about 2 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5omi1n/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5omi1n/ One of the biggest things that kept me from burning out was realizing that companies (or branches of the service) are neither good nor evil, they're just big. As a result, they'll take whatever you offer and not blink an eye.

jondubois 10y ago

A big problem today is that managers and executives are optimised for short-term gains at the expense of everything else (including long term outlook, ethics and even sanity). People move up the ranks by making random, crazy one-off bets that turn out great in the short term. Nobody notices people who consistently make good long term bets. This is compounded by the fact that people who have power these days tend to overlook failure and only consider good outcomes.

mti27 10y ago

Once I accumulated so much rollover vacation time I decided "I'm not working Fridays anymore" which lasted for many months. I found out later someone had complained to my manager about this, since I was unreachable. That same company had experimented with a 7:30 - 11:30 schedule on Fridays (7:30 - 5:30 Mon-Thurs) which was great: you'd miss heavy traffic coming in and get a head start on every weekend. But someone in the field complained about corporate being unreachable and they ended that too.... The problem is the "flexible thinking" people always come up against the "Bill Lumberghs" of the world and everyone is pulled down to the lowest common denominator.

dsfyu404ed 10y ago

Everyone comes in this thread to complain about how bad life sucks because you don't get two months of vacation time for existing and can't use your sick days on a paper-cut but most of these people will turn right around and talk about how great their employer is if the article is a positive one.

Clubber 10y ago
Have any data for that assertion?

BrandonY 10y ago

That photo's position, overhead and looking down a long hallway of cubes, with some meaningless but chipper corporate slogans as well as some very serious business-looking stuff, reminds me of the opening office shot of the game Stardew Valley: http://www11.onrpg.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Stardew-Valley-Joja.jpg http://www11.onrpg.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Stardew-Va... That game's protagonist, perhaps not coincidentally, burns out on their office job and decides to go become a farmer.

kafkaesq 10y ago

...and yet those cubes are possibly sumptuous compared to some I've been asked to work in.