7 ms·

Why I Collapsed on the Job

101 points by williamstein 9y ago

cyberferret 9y ago
Burnout doesn't differentiate between gender, race, sexual orientation, social status or the size of your bank account. Much like when I was in flying training and we were subjected to the altitude simulation pressure chamber so that we could each identify how we individually experienced the onset of hypoxia, I think it is important that everyone notates down the onset of burnout at home or at work. For me, Stage 1 is when I start feeling myself getting irritable and snapping at those close to me for no reason at all. S2 is when I start having trouble sleeping, and get a really stiff neck leading to headaches. I've got to catch it at that point otherwise if it moves to S3 - crippling headaches, inability to focus on simple tasks or S4 - inability to even get out of a chair due to the feeling of extreme fatigue, then the recovery process is SO much longer and harder. Keep a working journal, or better still, ask someone close to you that you can trust to note any out of character behavioural changes and advise you of them so that you can start to detect patterns and take action to mitigate.
- Lxr 9y ago
  I agree you need to catch it early. I often wonder what the most time-efficient form of mitigation is.
  - acct1771 9y ago
    Complete and total removal from the source until ready.
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    The most time-efficient already implies you see burnout as something you just have to push through and get back to work. This is wrong; the most time-efficient way is to avoid getting it altogether. Stick to regular working hours, don't take your work home, stick to 5 working days a week if possible. And if you're in a managerial position, your job is to delegate work, not do things yourself anyway in addition to trying to delegate things.
  - cyberferret 9y ago
    For me, it is to totally distance myself from my work. That means downing tools, and taking myself away from tech completely, and usually into a different environment. Low stage burnout can be solved by simply spending a weekend completely away from phones and computers, and just pottering in the garden. Later stage burnout usually means taking myself away from even my home town for a bit and soaking up experiences in a different place. Which is exactly what I am doing now - tomorrow I hop on a plane for a 20 hour flight to the other side of the world, to spend a week on a ship (never been on a cruise before). Maximum recharge, no work. Addendum: Important to realise that burnout recovery doesn't necessarily mean sit on a beach and do nothing. Often, my recovery time is some of my busiest, but it is doing something completely different from programming which recharges me, like learning a new song on the guitar, or doing other audio work.
  - Angostura 9y ago
    Back in December; my stress levels were pretty high. I'm a can-do kind of employee; I really enjoy the adrenaline of sorting out an interesting unexpected problem on a short timescale. But I was faced with multiple deadlines and some unexpected work came up and I was called up for jury service ( a not very nice case). I took my laptop home and tried to finish the projects after a day in court. One day, at lunch in the court, I was thinking about a project and found myself silently weeping. So I got straight on the phone to my boss and explained that I;d just found myself crying, thought that this was probably a bad sign and thought I should stop on that project. I'm lucky in that I have an employer that values me, trusts me and takes their duty of care seriously. It probably helps that I'm a man in my 50s. They told me to knock off the project completely and commanded me to stop thinking about it until after Christmas. So, IF * You have a good employer. * You have the courage to admit weakness The most effective thing to do is to tell your boss asap and ask for reasonable accommodation until you feel better. I'm back to doing stupid amounts of work, but my boss trusts that if it feels like it is causing me problems I will tell them, and I trust that they will deal with me reasonably.
  - wsy 9y ago
    The most efficient mitigation is saying no to any additional obligation, and most probably also to some current obligations you already had accepted. Thinking about the issue in terms of time-efficiency will likely not help. It takes as long as it takes until you are back in balance, and accepting that is part of the remedy.
    - cyberferret 9y ago
      This is also an important factor. I know when I am experiencing burnout, the feeling of anxiety and being overwhelmed is heightened. Any extra task thrown at me just snowballs those feelings until I become paralysed with indecision. It is important to 'shed the load' when you feel the onset of burnout. Don't take on anything new - just focus on finishing what you have, and then take a break or reward yourself accordingly before doing any more.
mosselman 9y ago
The point the author seems to make by peppering the article with these mentions of gender seems to be that burnouts in education are gender related. These struggles are universal for all teachers, not just women. Saying 'xyz is hard in education, especially for women' creates an environment in which men should just suck it up and 'stop whining' because women have it truly hard. Saying no to people is hard for many people of both genders and regardless of gender it is hard for couples to have children and both have a demanding career, whatever the underlying cause. Taking care of children and the house are not the only things that can cause stress outside of work and all of those reasons are not gender bound. This sexist approach is unfair to the men in education who can't say no, have to take care of a family on their own, etc. Furthermore it signals to me that all of the other information in the article should be taken with a grain of salt just as an article on space exploration by a flat earther should be taken with a grain of salt. This subjective approach should not be rewarded here on HN or anywhere else.
- annabellish 9y ago
  >xyz is hard in education, especially for women' creates an environment in which men should just suck it up and 'stop whining' because women have it truly hard. It isn't a competition. Everyone's experiences are valid and correct. That women, on average, face the problems of (profession) plus the problems of being a woman in (profession). This doesn't mean that men don't have problems, that their problems are somehow invalidated, or that they should "man up" and take it - the idea that men should do so is actually a problem of _men_ in (profession), because men also have their own set of problems. That women generally, on average, face more and more significant issues does not invalidate anybody and should not cause a competition to find who is most disadvantaged. It should be one component of a rallying point by which everyone's lives can be improved, men and women and everyone else.
  - apatters 9y ago
    You come across in this comment like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. In the first paragraph you say that everyone's issues are "valid," but in the second you say women's issues are more "significant." What does it even mean to say that men's issues are valid but not significant? It sounds like you're still writing off men's issues as unimportant. The whole premise that women's issues are more significant or important deserves some skepticism. We can cherry pick certain groups of privileged people, such as computer engineers or CEOs, where I'd agree that women have it harder. (In education, I'm less convinced.) But in the general US population (which is majority female): - The unemployment rate is majority male - The homeless population is majority male - The incarceration rate is massively majority male - Women do better in school - Women live longer
donquichotte 9y ago
TLDR: It's an anectode of "an associate professor of education-policy studies" at Penn State who suffered from burn-out. I have no idea what we are supposed to take away from her story. Don't work too hard and learn to say no, I guess. There is no clear narrative and the article reeks of self pity (she does not get tired of mentioning that she's a "twice an immigrant" and a woman). EDIT: what bothers me about the article is that there is no root cause analysis and no solution is offered. Also, I am unsure the n-th order immigrant argument is valid. The very concept of a second order immigrant seems bizarre to me. And if they exist, it remains to be proven that k-th order immigrants have it strictly more difficult than l-th order immigrants for all k>l.
- easytiger 9y ago
  Sounds like a millennial manifesto to me.
- deerpig 9y ago
  I hope somebody down votes this. If I could I would.
- chvid 9y ago
  Yeah. She writes as if this is unique to her profession, gender (?!) ... but it is not. This sounds like any other burnout stories from so many fields. Sure some fields are worse than others but academia is probably one of the better ones.
  - monkeynotes 9y ago
    Let's not forget health workers. Doctors and nurses often work ridiculous hours with unimaginable stress, literally life and death decisions every day. I often consider myself to be very lucky to write JS for a living. I earn a decent wage, work decent hours, have reasonably good employability and portability of work, and if I make a mistake I can only kill the browser.
    - zolthrowaway 9y ago
myspy 9y ago
Employers, as well as state institutions need to look more at the health of their employees. Even in Germany we have the problem that people at universities work way too much. People need to be told to stop and take a step back. Hard borders are a necessity. No longer than 40 hours (better 35) per week for EVERYONE. Being it doctors, university professors, steal workers, teachers, cleaning personal. There are enough resources and money flowing through society to enable everyone having work that pays to live and time to live itself. No need for multiple jobs and getting torn apart to make a living. We are not in the time of industrialization. This time is long gone and we should be further than running people down and get a pair of new ones if they are broken.
- germinalphrase 9y ago
  As an American teacher who routinely works 50-60, the idea of only working 35/wk feels like a dream.
  - aianus 9y ago
    Why do you need to work 50-60 hours a week? I know my teachers in HS in Ontario were only scheduled for 4 hours of instruction a day. Are American teachers scheduled for more instruction? How much do grading, lesson planning, and extracurriculars contribute to that figure? 8 hours every working day seems kind of excessive; I graded well over a hundred assignments a week in college as a TA in 10 hours flat. It certainly seemed to me to be a very cushy job at the time but I'd love to hear your perspective.
    - iak8god 9y ago
      Is this supposed to be some kind of joke, or do you really imagine that lesson planning and grading alone for 4 daily hours of classroom instruction would take less than an additional 4 hours?
      - aianus 9y ago
        Not the first time you do it, but by the third, fourth, year in a row, I imagine you would be reusing the lesson plans, assignments, and tests. I know for a fact that’s what my HS math teacher did because we got ahold of the old tests and assignments a couple of times and they were almost identical. Side note: I’m making him sound like a lazy slacker but he was the best teacher I’ve ever had in my life. He taught so much so well that I had perfect grades and didn’t learn any new math in university for the first 6 months.
grondilu 9y ago
> But suddenly my body refused to heal from a simple infection, leading to inflammation that left me bedridden and unable to perform most of my duties for five long weeks. I whish she had tell us more about this, more precisely about what exactly convinced her the real cause was her burning out rather than an exceptionally nasty infection. Not that I doubt it was, but honestly it's what I'm most curious about.
- bionsystems 9y ago
  Constant stress impacts negatively the immune system, you can look it up it's quite well researched. Men sana in corpore sano :)
yAnonymous 9y ago
tl;dr: She's an idiot, but instead of realizing that and improving, she blames others for her failure.
Thriptic 9y ago
Wow the comments in here. This is not an article about the struggles of women in academia, it's an article about the struggles of being a tenured professor in general which are indeed hard. The primary problems are indeed what were pointed out. Professors end up being saddled with a lot of unpaid work that isn't research related: journal obligations, teaching, committees, operations, HR etc. This isn't even getting into another enormous time sink which went unmentioned, fundraising, which I've seen eat up substantial amounts of PI time via grant writing, industry relations, attending conferences to try to find money, contract negotiations etc. Most experienced PIs never actually make it back into the lab once they get tenure (assuming they are lab researchers), which is a real shame. It becomes difficult to say no to all this stuff because thousands of people are fighting tooth and nail over a tiny number of positions, and they get used to slaving away with this kind of workload because it's what academia demands of you to get a tenured position. Once you have it you just keep doing what you've been doing.
gaius 9y ago
Meanwhile in the third world https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-22/hungry-venezuelan-workers-are-collapsing-so-is-the-oil-industry https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-22/hungry-ve...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nutherforgot 9y ago
Good podcast on how bad it can get - basically a woman's diary of her experience: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/burnout-diaries/id1247886202?mt=2 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/burnout-diaries/id124788...

101 points by williamstein 9y ago

Burnout doesn't differentiate between gender, race, sexual orientation, social status or the size of your bank account. Much like when I was in flying training and we were subjected to the altitude simulation pressure chamber so that we could each identify how we individually experienced the onset of hypoxia, I think it is important that everyone notates down the onset of burnout at home or at work. For me, Stage 1 is when I start feeling myself getting irritable and snapping at those close to me for no reason at all. S2 is when I start having trouble sleeping, and get a really stiff neck leading to headaches. I've got to catch it at that point otherwise if it moves to S3 - crippling headaches, inability to focus on simple tasks or S4 - inability to even get out of a chair due to the feeling of extreme fatigue, then the recovery process is SO much longer and harder. Keep a working journal, or better still, ask someone close to you that you can trust to note any out of character behavioural changes and advise you of them so that you can start to detect patterns and take action to mitigate.

Lxr 9y ago
I agree you need to catch it early. I often wonder what the most time-efficient form of mitigation is.
- acct1771 9y ago
  Complete and total removal from the source until ready.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  The most time-efficient already implies you see burnout as something you just have to push through and get back to work. This is wrong; the most time-efficient way is to avoid getting it altogether. Stick to regular working hours, don't take your work home, stick to 5 working days a week if possible. And if you're in a managerial position, your job is to delegate work, not do things yourself anyway in addition to trying to delegate things.
- cyberferret 9y ago
  For me, it is to totally distance myself from my work. That means downing tools, and taking myself away from tech completely, and usually into a different environment. Low stage burnout can be solved by simply spending a weekend completely away from phones and computers, and just pottering in the garden. Later stage burnout usually means taking myself away from even my home town for a bit and soaking up experiences in a different place. Which is exactly what I am doing now - tomorrow I hop on a plane for a 20 hour flight to the other side of the world, to spend a week on a ship (never been on a cruise before). Maximum recharge, no work. Addendum: Important to realise that burnout recovery doesn't necessarily mean sit on a beach and do nothing. Often, my recovery time is some of my busiest, but it is doing something completely different from programming which recharges me, like learning a new song on the guitar, or doing other audio work.
- Angostura 9y ago
  Back in December; my stress levels were pretty high. I'm a can-do kind of employee; I really enjoy the adrenaline of sorting out an interesting unexpected problem on a short timescale. But I was faced with multiple deadlines and some unexpected work came up and I was called up for jury service ( a not very nice case). I took my laptop home and tried to finish the projects after a day in court. One day, at lunch in the court, I was thinking about a project and found myself silently weeping. So I got straight on the phone to my boss and explained that I;d just found myself crying, thought that this was probably a bad sign and thought I should stop on that project. I'm lucky in that I have an employer that values me, trusts me and takes their duty of care seriously. It probably helps that I'm a man in my 50s. They told me to knock off the project completely and commanded me to stop thinking about it until after Christmas. So, IF * You have a good employer. * You have the courage to admit weakness The most effective thing to do is to tell your boss asap and ask for reasonable accommodation until you feel better. I'm back to doing stupid amounts of work, but my boss trusts that if it feels like it is causing me problems I will tell them, and I trust that they will deal with me reasonably.
- wsy 9y ago
  The most efficient mitigation is saying no to any additional obligation, and most probably also to some current obligations you already had accepted. Thinking about the issue in terms of time-efficiency will likely not help. It takes as long as it takes until you are back in balance, and accepting that is part of the remedy.
  - cyberferret 9y ago
    This is also an important factor. I know when I am experiencing burnout, the feeling of anxiety and being overwhelmed is heightened. Any extra task thrown at me just snowballs those feelings until I become paralysed with indecision. It is important to 'shed the load' when you feel the onset of burnout. Don't take on anything new - just focus on finishing what you have, and then take a break or reward yourself accordingly before doing any more.

mosselman 9y ago

The point the author seems to make by peppering the article with these mentions of gender seems to be that burnouts in education are gender related. These struggles are universal for all teachers, not just women. Saying 'xyz is hard in education, especially for women' creates an environment in which men should just suck it up and 'stop whining' because women have it truly hard. Saying no to people is hard for many people of both genders and regardless of gender it is hard for couples to have children and both have a demanding career, whatever the underlying cause. Taking care of children and the house are not the only things that can cause stress outside of work and all of those reasons are not gender bound. This sexist approach is unfair to the men in education who can't say no, have to take care of a family on their own, etc. Furthermore it signals to me that all of the other information in the article should be taken with a grain of salt just as an article on space exploration by a flat earther should be taken with a grain of salt. This subjective approach should not be rewarded here on HN or anywhere else.

annabellish 9y ago
>xyz is hard in education, especially for women' creates an environment in which men should just suck it up and 'stop whining' because women have it truly hard. It isn't a competition. Everyone's experiences are valid and correct. That women, on average, face the problems of (profession) plus the problems of being a woman in (profession). This doesn't mean that men don't have problems, that their problems are somehow invalidated, or that they should "man up" and take it - the idea that men should do so is actually a problem of _men_ in (profession), because men also have their own set of problems. That women generally, on average, face more and more significant issues does not invalidate anybody and should not cause a competition to find who is most disadvantaged. It should be one component of a rallying point by which everyone's lives can be improved, men and women and everyone else.
- apatters 9y ago
  You come across in this comment like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. In the first paragraph you say that everyone's issues are "valid," but in the second you say women's issues are more "significant." What does it even mean to say that men's issues are valid but not significant? It sounds like you're still writing off men's issues as unimportant. The whole premise that women's issues are more significant or important deserves some skepticism. We can cherry pick certain groups of privileged people, such as computer engineers or CEOs, where I'd agree that women have it harder. (In education, I'm less convinced.) But in the general US population (which is majority female): - The unemployment rate is majority male - The homeless population is majority male - The incarceration rate is massively majority male - Women do better in school - Women live longer

donquichotte 9y ago

TLDR: It's an anectode of "an associate professor of education-policy studies" at Penn State who suffered from burn-out. I have no idea what we are supposed to take away from her story. Don't work too hard and learn to say no, I guess. There is no clear narrative and the article reeks of self pity (she does not get tired of mentioning that she's a "twice an immigrant" and a woman). EDIT: what bothers me about the article is that there is no root cause analysis and no solution is offered. Also, I am unsure the n-th order immigrant argument is valid. The very concept of a second order immigrant seems bizarre to me. And if they exist, it remains to be proven that k-th order immigrants have it strictly more difficult than l-th order immigrants for all k>l.

easytiger 9y ago
Sounds like a millennial manifesto to me.
deerpig 9y ago
I hope somebody down votes this. If I could I would.
chvid 9y ago
Yeah. She writes as if this is unique to her profession, gender (?!) ... but it is not. This sounds like any other burnout stories from so many fields. Sure some fields are worse than others but academia is probably one of the better ones.
- monkeynotes 9y ago
  Let's not forget health workers. Doctors and nurses often work ridiculous hours with unimaginable stress, literally life and death decisions every day. I often consider myself to be very lucky to write JS for a living. I earn a decent wage, work decent hours, have reasonably good employability and portability of work, and if I make a mistake I can only kill the browser.
  - zolthrowaway 9y ago

myspy 9y ago

Employers, as well as state institutions need to look more at the health of their employees. Even in Germany we have the problem that people at universities work way too much. People need to be told to stop and take a step back. Hard borders are a necessity. No longer than 40 hours (better 35) per week for EVERYONE. Being it doctors, university professors, steal workers, teachers, cleaning personal. There are enough resources and money flowing through society to enable everyone having work that pays to live and time to live itself. No need for multiple jobs and getting torn apart to make a living. We are not in the time of industrialization. This time is long gone and we should be further than running people down and get a pair of new ones if they are broken.

germinalphrase 9y ago
As an American teacher who routinely works 50-60, the idea of only working 35/wk feels like a dream.
- aianus 9y ago
  Why do you need to work 50-60 hours a week? I know my teachers in HS in Ontario were only scheduled for 4 hours of instruction a day. Are American teachers scheduled for more instruction? How much do grading, lesson planning, and extracurriculars contribute to that figure? 8 hours every working day seems kind of excessive; I graded well over a hundred assignments a week in college as a TA in 10 hours flat. It certainly seemed to me to be a very cushy job at the time but I'd love to hear your perspective.
  - iak8god 9y ago
    Is this supposed to be some kind of joke, or do you really imagine that lesson planning and grading alone for 4 daily hours of classroom instruction would take less than an additional 4 hours?
    - aianus 9y ago
      Not the first time you do it, but by the third, fourth, year in a row, I imagine you would be reusing the lesson plans, assignments, and tests. I know for a fact that’s what my HS math teacher did because we got ahold of the old tests and assignments a couple of times and they were almost identical. Side note: I’m making him sound like a lazy slacker but he was the best teacher I’ve ever had in my life. He taught so much so well that I had perfect grades and didn’t learn any new math in university for the first 6 months.

grondilu 9y ago

> But suddenly my body refused to heal from a simple infection, leading to inflammation that left me bedridden and unable to perform most of my duties for five long weeks. I whish she had tell us more about this, more precisely about what exactly convinced her the real cause was her burning out rather than an exceptionally nasty infection. Not that I doubt it was, but honestly it's what I'm most curious about.

bionsystems 9y ago
Constant stress impacts negatively the immune system, you can look it up it's quite well researched. Men sana in corpore sano :)

yAnonymous 9y ago

tl;dr: She's an idiot, but instead of realizing that and improving, she blames others for her failure.

Thriptic 9y ago

Wow the comments in here. This is not an article about the struggles of women in academia, it's an article about the struggles of being a tenured professor in general which are indeed hard. The primary problems are indeed what were pointed out. Professors end up being saddled with a lot of unpaid work that isn't research related: journal obligations, teaching, committees, operations, HR etc. This isn't even getting into another enormous time sink which went unmentioned, fundraising, which I've seen eat up substantial amounts of PI time via grant writing, industry relations, attending conferences to try to find money, contract negotiations etc. Most experienced PIs never actually make it back into the lab once they get tenure (assuming they are lab researchers), which is a real shame. It becomes difficult to say no to all this stuff because thousands of people are fighting tooth and nail over a tiny number of positions, and they get used to slaving away with this kind of workload because it's what academia demands of you to get a tenured position. Once you have it you just keep doing what you've been doing.

gaius 9y ago

Meanwhile in the third world https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-22/hungry-venezuelan-workers-are-collapsing-so-is-the-oil-industry https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-22/hungry-ve...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

nutherforgot 9y ago

Good podcast on how bad it can get - basically a woman's diary of her experience: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/burnout-diaries/id1247886202?mt=2 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/burnout-diaries/id124788...