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Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout

290 points by Raj7k 8y ago

rajnish-he 8y ago
It is surprising to see this trend in companies like Microsoft and Amazon.
stonewhite 8y ago
This reminds me of the phrase: "If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent". Therefore, if everyone is burning out, no one is really burning out or, we somehow extended the definition of burnout to something that can be applied to even the most minute set of complaints.
- hackits 8y ago
  block twitter, facebook, instagram, hackernews, and reddit. BOOM no longer burnt out!
  - bebna 8y ago
    Burnout!=Media Addiction
  - zahrc 8y ago
    Oh dear... If you do not have a clue of what you are talking about, you'd better be off saying nothing.
- pasta 8y ago
  You are misusing the phrase and don't have a clue about being burned out. Energy levels are like a rubber band. You can stretch it. But when you are burned out you are at the end of the stretch and even destroying the band so it won't jump back immediately. "If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent" is about bad management. The inability to prioritize.
- draugadrotten 8y ago
  This is bollocks. If all the houses burn down, they have all burned down. There are real hard facts in life and not everything is measured relative to something else.
  - close04 8y ago
    I think this is a simple matter of a wrong analogy on OP's side. They don't understand that "urgent" in this context means "that needs higher priority than everything else". So the saying makes sense: when everything is urgent and has equal "urgent" priority nothing stands above anymore. Being burnt out doesn't need a frame of reference other than the internal one of the "burnee". So it can be valid under any conditions.
- bebna 8y ago
  Don't think so. People in my country are in average old (Germany), we have long standing history in IT, than any other western nation (see CCC for example), but despite both of these, I can count on one hand how many seniors I have seen at work in different companies. Finding a 50+ year old programmer, is like catching an unicorn. Our industry is full of over time and late hours. Full of pressure because of time constraints. And all that focused on only on small part of our body. No wonder that so many get hurt.
TAForObvReasons 8y ago
Original source: http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-say-poor-leadership-is-number-one-cause-for-burnout/ http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-...
BrandonBradley 8y ago
Where is lack of vacation time categorized into this? There are too many answers.
- 0xJRS 8y ago
  That would be added to management
dunkelheit 8y ago
Misleading title: the original survey question is "What is the main source of employee burnout at your current workplace?". Positive answer to this question doesn't mean that the person answering the question is himself burnt out.
- Raj7k 8y ago
  So, I took this title from NextBigWhat. I haven't manufactured this by myself
  - bartread 8y ago
    [EDIT] Removed previous comment as the parent apparently missed the [via] link at the bottom of the article, the same as I did.
bartread 8y ago
Could we please change this headline? At the moment it's pure clickbait. "91% Employees Experience Burnout" implies that 91% of employees suffer from burnout, whereas - firstly - there is no data in the article to indicate that this is the case. Secondly, the question that comes closest to the 91% answer is "What is the main source of employee burnout at your current workplace?", to which 9.7% of people answered that "Burnout isn't a problem at my company." This leaves 90.3% (and a rounding error!) who think that burnout is a problem at their company and think they know why that is. This does not mean they themselves are suffering or have suffered from burnout. I'm not trying to minimise the problem of burnout, but I would strongly suggest if we're going to have a serious discussion about it we should get our facts and our data straight and not base that discussion off a poorly written and researched employee engagement puff-piece.
- Sacho 8y ago
  The headline is clickbait, it does not match the headline of the primary source: http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-say-poor-leadership-is-number-one-cause-for-burnout/ http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-... It is also contradicted by the primary source's previous survey: http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/05/29/close-to-60-percent-of-surveyed-tech-workers-are-burnt-out-credit-karma-tops-the-list-for-most-employees-suffering-from-burnout/ http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/05/29/close-to-60-p...
  - bartread 8y ago
    Nice spot. That tiny [via] link at the bottom is a really sneaky pattern. Didn't even notice it.
    - Raj7k 8y ago
      Same here for me
      - bartread 8y ago
        Fair play: I've removed my comment on the other sub-thread.
Sacho 8y ago
Here's the primary source for the survey in question: http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-say-poor-leadership-is-number-one-cause-for-burnout/ http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-... How useful is a survey like this? The survey does not define burnout to employees, leaving them to guess at the definition. Can employees reliably self-diagnose burnout and differentiate it from similar conditions - i.e. actual depression? Can they also reliably indicate the cause for the burnout, especially if the symptoms can overlap with the cause? Let's say you have burnout because of work overload, but you normally don't mind doing tons of work, just hate your boss. When the feelings of exhaustion/anger come up, will you point them at the work load or at your boss? Perhaps you could relabel it as a survey on workplace discontent, but even then, I don't think it's really well made. The problem with statistical data like this is that we can see the primary source and temper our enthusiasm for the accuracy of the survey, down the broken telephone line, it will be taken as gospel(see the wage gap/sexual harassment statistics as examples).
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  > The survey does not define burnout to employees, leaving them to guess at the definition. This sort of self-reporting is accepted in psychology. The way you determine a subject's happiness is to ask them how happy they feel. Think about how a more rigorous alternative might work. 1. We come up with some more precise definition of "burnout." Perhaps we define it as "an average of X 'frustration' events in the workplace over Y days, combined with a steadily declining sense of 'enthusiasm'" 2. OK, great, but now we need precise definitions of 'frustration' and 'enthusiasm.' Is 'frustration' the momentary frustration we feel when the compiler complains about something? Is it a barely-restrained feeling of wanting to smash one's keyboard over somebody's face? For how many seconds should that feeling be experienced to qualify? Likewise with 'enthusiasm.' Same problem we had in step 1. 3. Alternatively, we could monitor people's cortisol levels, blood pressure levels, and have them spend their workdays in an fMRI machine or something. Although even that would have limitations; that seems more likely to measure acute symptoms than something chronic like "burnout." > Can employees reliably self-diagnose burnout and differentiate it from similar conditions - i.e. actual depression? With a sufficiently large sample size this wouldn't matter. As you say, surely x% of respondents will confuse depression with burnout. However, the value of x% will surely be nearly the same at all companies.
greenleafjacob 8y ago
91% of employees who have blind installed. Selection bias.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  That means it's young engineers at FAANG saying this.
  - tehlike 8y ago
    It also means employees who are not necessarily happy.
- Sonnol53 8y ago
  a lot of ppl in the tech industry
serversystem 8y ago
Goes with the theme that for actual passionate tech workers the reason for burnout is other people and not the tech itself. Hence adage that don't make your hobby your job is nonsense by itself.
- russdpale 8y ago
  This has been my finding. My wife is one of these super doer employee types, and I see her constantly frustrated by the people above her, and the failing processes that they implement that make her job more and more difficult.
DrinkWater 8y ago
Poor Leadership is also the number one cause for parting ways with a company. For me personally, there was never another reason to leave a company. I never experienced a toxic environment or had colleagues i couldn't stand. It was always the leadership
- blitmap 8y ago
  You've never experienced inconsiderate coworkers? Like coworkers who talk loudly on the phone in a nearby work area, coworkers with hygiene issues, coworkers who don't carry their weight or respond well to training?
  - rejschaap 8y ago
    All of these issues should be addressed by the manager.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      Or potentially addressed directly. I've had a couple occasions where I literally told a sexual harassing manager to "go fuck himself" twice. (He was harassing the women at the office) At another company I was politely confronted about a comment I had made, we talked it out. It was unintentionally insulting and we acted as adults and I realized why he brought it up.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    It's entirely possible to have had none of these issues when you only worked for a few years or in a few companies.
  - DrinkWater 8y ago
    I did, but these kind of problems were (at least for me) manageable (discussing the issues, "avoiding" these people, etc).
  - lainga 8y ago
    Well, there's a big gulf between "toxic" or "impossible to stand" and mere "inconsiderate".
shadowsun7 8y ago
This is a woefully inadequate article, and a woefully inadequate survey. So what if 'poor leadership' is the number one cause for burnout? That insight isn't useful. As an employee, I'd like to figure out how to avoid burnout. And as a employer, I'm not sure how to reduce burnout — get better leadership? How do I do that? But it turns out there are good ideas we can try that may be found in the academic literature. Context: I was writing up my process for preventing burnout recently (https://commoncog.com/blog/nuanced-take-on-preventing-burnout/ https://commoncog.com/blog/nuanced-take-on-preventing-burnou...), and I took some time to look into the academic literature for burnout, to see if it highlighted anything I'd missed. I'll give a quick summary: 1. The standard test for burnout today is something called the Maslach Burnout Inventory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslach_Burnout_Inventory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslach_Burnout_Inventory, and it measures burnout along three metrics: exhaustion, inefficacy, and cynicism. a) Exhaustion: described as wearing out, loss of energy, depletion, debilitation, and fatigue. b) Inefficacy: described as reduced productivity or capability. c) Cynicism: negative or inappropriate attitudes towards clients, irritability, loss of idealism, and withdrawal. 2. The MBI is a descriptive model, which helps you identify burnout, but we need a developmental model as well (e.g. what are the various stages of burnout?). The early models of burnout described the pathway as three stages: 1. job stressors (an imbalance between work demands and individual resources), then 2. individual strain (an emotional response of exhaustion and anxiety), and then 3). defensive coping (changes in attitudes and behavior, such as greater cynicism). Or, to put this simply: first your job demands too much of you, then you feel anxious and emotionally exhausted, then you cope by becoming cynical about work, and then you quit. 3. Maslach found that development of cynicism is the biggest predictor of burnout-related turnover. If you're cynical about your job, you're pretty likely to think about quitting or to actually quit soon. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19426369 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19426369) 4. If you look at the literature today, however, you'll find that most burnout research has converged on two development models: the Job Demands‐Resources (JD‐R) model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_demands-resources_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_demands-resources_model) and the Conservation of Resources (COR) model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_resources_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_resources_theo...). I'll leave you to read the respective Wikipedia articles, but the takeaway from both of them is that burnout results from when the resources provided by the job are outstripped by the demands of the job. As a CEO or manager, your best bet to reducing burnout is to increase the list of job resources described in JD-R, that is: > physical, psychological, social, or organisational aspects of the job that are either or: functional in achieving work goals; reduce job demands and the associated physiological and psychological cost; stimulate personal growth, learning, and development. Examples are, career opportunities, supervisor coaching, role-clarity, and autonomy. As an employee, your best bet to reducing burnout is to increase personal resources (which are different from job-provided resources in the JD-R model). But the problem here is that the research doesn't yet know if there are effective techniques in increasing personal resources. Why? Well ... 5. There are only two decades or so worth of research into burnout, and the research was primarily centered around the care-giving professions. Consequently, early models of burnout were thought to stem from social exhaustion (e.g. nurses and doctors dealing with death, or grief); in a 2016 retrospective review article (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4911781/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4911781/), Maslach herself write that this is an active field of research, and they don't yet know if you can train someone to be more resistant to burnout. There are some interesting research directions, though. I found this paragraph in an undergrad paper from Australia (where apparently half of the nurses there leave the profession prematurely, mostly due to burnout): > Rather, failure to recover consistently from such work stresses (in non-work time) is a crucial determinant of chronic (maladaptive) fatigue and burnout evolution (Winwood et al. 2007). When such recovery is effected consistently, physiological toughness (Dienstbier 1989,1991) and enhanced stress resistance is developed, with improved performance at work, better sleep and reduced maladaptive health outcomes (Dienstbier 1991).While some individuals may achieve this spontaneously, far more may beneﬁt from speciﬁc training to do so effectively and consistently. The Winwood paper may be found here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17693784 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17693784 but it's unclear if they've found a set of techniques that work for most people in most professions. I'm still reading up. PS: I have a technique that I use myself, but it's unclear that it would work for everyone. I wrote it up here: https://commoncog.com/blog/nuanced-take-on-preventing-burnout/ https://commoncog.com/blog/nuanced-take-on-preventing-burnou.... It's certainly protected me from burnout in startupland over the years. But, as I've mentioned, I'm interested in the research because the goal there is to find a set of general techniques that would work for most people. My technique has a sample size of one.
beeskneecaps 8y ago
I have seen evidence that Blind is a major source of toxicity at many companies. I would recommend not installing the app as it only serves to make you feel burned out.
- beeskneecaps 8y ago
  Lol @ the downvoting blind employee
  - dang 8y ago
    Please don't do this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
kapauldo 8y ago
Is this an infomercial?
vladgiverts 8y ago
There are so many articles that blame leadership for all that ails a company. To me, it seems a bit like saying "most program crashes are caused by runtime errors". While both are true, there are deeper explanations that can be more helpful in starting a discussion. In the case of crashing a program, maybe it's because of a misused raw pointer or a type error in an untyped language. As soon as you frame it that way, you immediately see possible paths forward to improve the situation. In the case of burnout at companies, I've found it has more to do with the mindset of the top leaders (who other managers down the chain tend to emulate). The mindset is that the company is "a machine", which makes the rest of us "cogs" (or pick your favorite machine part). The leaders may be perfectly nice and considerate people in general (or not), but regardless, the company-as-machine mindset leads them to set aside their humanity in the interests of the company. All of sudden everyone on the team needs to be replaceable, have predictably high output, etc. Those might be fine concerns for a business, but they end up blinding managers to the flesh and blood human beings in front of them and they start to see employees as the means to the greater business ends of output, productivity, growth, etc. I believe this is an issue of human development that affects most companies eventually. Only companies with really developed leaders who, when faced with serious pressure, are able to see people as the unique and complex beings that they are and not make people feel like they somehow don't matter at a fundamental level.
- wickedwiesel 8y ago
  Treating team members and colleagues as human beings who bring their whole self to work is, imho, essential to enabling people to deliver their best work. Understandably, but somewhat irrationally at the same time, companies as they mature tend to put formalized processes over individuals. The reason for this may be to institutionalize knowledge or scale better as the company grows which I do see the point of. An unwanted mid-term impact of this very often is what you describe, thinking of humans as cogs in a machine, thinking of success as an increase productivity KPIs and increase in company valuation. For me, this means to establish a positive culture in new companies/teams/etc. where our own values can align with the team's / company's values.
  - scns 8y ago
throwawayamzn7 8y ago
I know of a team (~20 devs, a handful of managers) in the middle of a fantastic experiment in burning out the developers. First, a new remote senior leader took over. He doesn't visit the team or understand them well. He puts pressure on the managers to deliver projects that make his bosses happy by looking sexy, even if they cause more operational issues for the customers. Operational issues = oncall hell, so more devs burn out and quit. The experiment is going great. Phase two began recently. Of the three remaining managers, one quit and one was fired for not brown nosing to the remote senior leader enough. (Push back on bullshit projects? That can't be allowed). The single remaining manager is the ultimate brown noser who happily causes his devs on call hell in order to make senior leadership happy. The devs are all looking elsewhere for work. The general mood is in a freefall. People are taking long vacations away in cities that also have lots of tech jobs. It's all a fantastic experiment in how to implode a software organization. I really hope to meet the control group some day- they won't believe how lucky they are.
- izzle49 8y ago
  I think I work here :)
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    Me too!
- lovich 8y ago
  What is with companies denying remote work but then bringing in some level of management that works remotely? I've seen happen it in a few places and it feels like animal farm half the time
  - 0xJRS 8y ago
    Worked a job at a startup once that had a 40hr "butt-in-seat" policy. The PM would be the one to record the exact time you sat down, the exact length of your lunch, and the exact time you left. This also included breaks. There would be a report to management every Friday and then a 1 on 1 with the manager if he didn't "like" what he saw.
titzer 8y ago
Number one by a hair. 23% leadership vs. 19% overwork. Interesting to see the per-company breakdown. I wonder about the sample size. Blind seems like a promising avenue for getting sentiment analysis inside of companies, but there is a pretty serious sampling bias, as many who sign up for Blind might already be feeling disillusioned.
- imglorp 8y ago
  Overwork is also leadership: they're setting the unrealistic schedules and they're communicating expectations that people meet are supposed to meet these schedules. By contrast there are other places where management goes around at quitting time and throws everyone out.
  - bittcto 8y ago
    I’ve seen many software companies where for months on end each week more than a weeks worth of new work is added to the product, without changing the deadline, because “management” keeps deciding therecare new features that are critical and they can be just slipped right in. If you tell them they are going to increase the time it takes or lower quality, you’re “not cooperative” or “not a team player”....or they tell you they will take the quality hit... but when there are any problems in the delivered product it’s the teams fault, of course.
liftbigweights 8y ago
Nah. Tech workers burnout for the same reason nurses, cops, accountants and everyone else burns out. The drudgery of the work not meeting your expectations ( cool hacker vs office code monkey ), the open-ended nature of the work ( you will be doing this for the next few decades ), the awareness of time ( or how much of it you are wasting away at work ) and the pittance you get relative to what the company gets. Goodness. I can't believe it's already labor day weekend. Where does the time go.
- indigochill 8y ago
  Maybe in some cases. Having been through leadership ups and downs within the same company (and even same team!) however, for my case it really is about leadership. When I'm happy: We solicit projects from stakeholders on other teams without development resources. They negotiate among each other to decide task prioritization (our manager facilitates). We'll consult on the scope of requests. Usually stakeholders overestimate the work involved and we can make them happy right from the start by promising delivery in a fraction of the time they expected (while still leaving plenty of time for the inevitable unexpected. Projects are usually things that have been a pain for a long time, so people are happy when they're fixed but they're not usually urgent. Is it mundane? Sure, usually. Although we do have the latitude to spice things up if we can fit something cool in within the allotted time. When I'm unhappy: Executives have knee-jerked into another hairbrained scheme that they'll drop in six months (if we're lucky, without another round of layoffs). Nevertheless, it's all hands on deck so we're yanked off everything else to support the "new vision". I do also think sometimes about the value of programmers vs. what they're paid, but I also know that if I think I can do better I'm always free to try. I personally prefer the security of a steady job and freedom from business operation headaches. Maybe one day that'll change, but we'll see.
- segmondy 8y ago
  Well said, the larger the gulf between reality and expectation, the larger the stress and strain. The longer the stress and strain is prolonged, the more likely burnout will be reached.
yourbandsucks 8y ago
More interesting result: broken out by company, the "poor leadership and lack of direction" answer ranges from 15-35% of the vote, and it's the companies with a very public lack of direction that top the list. Meanwhile, Facebook and Uber get great scores on the measure.
CommanderData 8y ago
The five keys to a successful team based on Google research. https://www.inc.com/michael-schneider/google-thought-they-knew-how-to-create-the-perfect.html https://www.inc.com/michael-schneider/google-thought-they-kn... "Google’s “Project Artistotle” investigates why some teams work better than others. Its analysis shows that the combination of individuals making up the group is unimportant. Instead, a team’s “group norms” – its “traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules” – are essential to how well the group performs. Teams are successful if their group norms lead to equal speaking time for all individuals within the group and an awareness of others’ emotional states. These factors produce a situation in which members of the group feel comfortable, or “safe,” and therefore more willing to contribute. Google’s data show that what Harvard business professor Amy Edmondson called “psychological safety” within the group leads to an increase in the group’s collective IQ and therefore its effectiveness and productivity." "1. Dependability. Team members get things done on time and meet expectations. 2. Structure and clarity. High-performing teams have clear goals, and have well-defined roles within the group. 3. Meaning. The work has personal significance to each member. 4. Impact. The group believes their work is purposeful and positively impacts the greater good. Yes, that's four, not five. The last one stood out from the rest: 5. Psychological Safety. We've all been in meetings and, due to the fear of seeming incompetent, have held back questions or ideas. I get it. It's unnerving to feel like you're in an environment where everything you do or say is under a microscope. But imagine a different setting. A situation in which everyone is safe to take risks, voice their opinions, and ask judgment-free questions. A culture where managers provide air cover and create safe zones so employees can let down their guard. That's psychological safety. I know, not the quantitative data that you were hoping for. However, Google found that teams with psychologically safe environments had employees who were less likely to leave, more likely to harness the power of diversity, and ultimately, who were more successful. Engineering the perfect team is more subjective than we would like, but focusing on these five components increases the likelihood that you will build a dream team. Through its research, Google made the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle proud by proving, "The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts." Teams are successful if their group norms lead to equal speaking time for all individuals within the group and an awareness of others’ emotional states. I think this is tricky if a problem and observably true. The teams I've been involved with mesh easier when each are able to commune easily and this normally means equal chances speaking time. Whenever I've seen an imbalance I can safely say it is because the person had obvious narcissistic personality traits which were always destructive long term.
kabdib 8y ago
I left my last job largely because of this. Exec-levels couldn't decide on a technical direction for the next big version of a major consumer product, then chose a very bad strategy, which took nearly a year to change to something sane. Well, at least less crazy. Meanwhile, the competition is not stupid and is not crazy and is not waiting for us to get our act together. Suddenly we have a year to do the thing that the worker-bee level Cassandras were saying was the right thing to do in the first place. Maybe 14 months to bring up hardware, port or write three major hunks of software, get third parties ramped up on development, write tools and do the million things you need to do to ship. Oh, and the team writing the OS we're mandated to use has been ordered not to talk to us and has gone dark, removing our access to their releases and documentation. So there's a meeting of all the software folks, and management tells us "Okay guys, the next year is going to be hell. You'll be allowed to take vacation, probably, we'll tell you when." I'd seen this coming and was sitting in the back of the room with an offer letter in my pocket, trying not to be angry because a bunch of people I like working with a lot are getting shafted. I should be elated at the offer (which is quite good), but instead I just feel sad. I leave. Six months later one of my friends working on the project sends me a picture of his front lawn. He has been unable to find the time or energy to mow it and it is 18 inches high. Eventually they ship (late, of course), to lackluster reviews. My friend has since moved on; most of the people I know there have. They don't like talking about that year-long deathmarch, followed by a year of patching the living crap out of things in the field and struggling for market share. Meanwhile, the competition's product does very, very well. Last I checked, the latest crop of execs there were gunning for the same crazy. Maybe technology has moved on sufficiently and the specific crazy is possible now, but I have numbers indicating things are pretty much the same. I don't know which side to cheer for. Where do they get these lunatics?
- bittcto 8y ago
  I believe they hire those “lunatics” because it’s believed that engineers can’t understand business. As an engineer that has started businesses this is BS. It’s really easy to learn business skills, sales and marketing are not difficult, finance is laughably easy. But so long as the companies are being formed to sell equity to VCs you will see them led by frat boys who the VC frat boys recognize... and they will abuse engineers. My solution- stop working for anyone who isn’t technically competent or at least recognizes engineering needs enough to get out of the way and support being efficient.
bittcto 8y ago
The cause is that “leadership” is generally people who don’t understand technology, and the solution is to stop hiring such incompetence. No car company would allow a CEO who doesn’t understand how cars work, let alone one who has no respect for those who design cars. But most tech companies are lead by tech illiterate MBA types who disdain engineers, and so engineers are managed by people who don’t understand engineering. I’ll give you a particular example but this is not the exception, this was the norm in %85 of the dozen tech companies I’ve worked at: At Amazon my boss was a guy trained to be a prison guard, who was selling pot on campus on the side, who got his job managing engineers because of a political connection. He had difficulty operating Microsoft Office. He was borderline computer illiterate. After a re-organization my bosses’ boss was replaced with a woman whose previous career was literally managing state DMV offices. Hey it’s management, right? Notably both of these people resented the fact that we were getting paid close to as much as they were (yet they with no skills, not even good management skills were still getting paid more!) At that point between me and Bezos there were no engineers in management and nobody who respected engineering (and that included Bezos, this was early enough I worked a lot of tickets with Bezos involved, saw him literally stop us from fixing a problem in October only to go ballistic the day before thanksgiving when the problem surfaced again.) Meanwhile Amazon has this propaganda campaign about how they “raise the bar” in hiring- and it’s true I’ve seen brilliant engineers not hired because of the objections of the “bar raiser”— only that person was the woman whose qualifications was a history keeping he nose clean working for the state!
- seanf 8y ago
  Amazon is getting close to a $1T market cap which makes this look more like an argument for hiring non-technical managers. You didn't provide any examples of poor management by the prison guard or DMV manager, other than some jealously about salary. Other than the bad feelings, did they get results? When Bezos went ballistic the day before Thanksgiving, did you still fix the bug in time? If not, did it really negatively affect the bottom line? Did whatever you instead had to work on in October help the bottom line more than the Thanksgiving bug?
  - blindwatchmaker 8y ago
alpeb 8y ago
Tech leadership is extremely hard. You either get at one extreme the MBA trained to think producing sugared beverages is equivalent to producing software, and at the other the formerly great coder that couldn't metamorphose himself to be able to manage people. Having all the required qualities is extremely rare.
tabtab 8y ago
There's not enough bottom-up feedback in selecting and rewarding managers. Top-down-only evaluations skew behavior. An org should survey EVERYONE about their boss(es) every 6 months or so, and the bosses should be held accountable for improving their weak areas.
jobserunder 8y ago
Unmentioned reason: too much personal employee debt. What's worse than working for a bad boss/company? Working for a bad boss/company and carrying 50k in debt.

290 points by Raj7k 8y ago

It is surprising to see this trend in companies like Microsoft and Amazon.

This reminds me of the phrase: "If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent". Therefore, if everyone is burning out, no one is really burning out or, we somehow extended the definition of burnout to something that can be applied to even the most minute set of complaints.

hackits 8y ago
block twitter, facebook, instagram, hackernews, and reddit. BOOM no longer burnt out!
- bebna 8y ago
  Burnout!=Media Addiction
- zahrc 8y ago
  Oh dear... If you do not have a clue of what you are talking about, you'd better be off saying nothing.
pasta 8y ago
You are misusing the phrase and don't have a clue about being burned out. Energy levels are like a rubber band. You can stretch it. But when you are burned out you are at the end of the stretch and even destroying the band so it won't jump back immediately. "If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent" is about bad management. The inability to prioritize.
draugadrotten 8y ago
This is bollocks. If all the houses burn down, they have all burned down. There are real hard facts in life and not everything is measured relative to something else.
- close04 8y ago
  I think this is a simple matter of a wrong analogy on OP's side. They don't understand that "urgent" in this context means "that needs higher priority than everything else". So the saying makes sense: when everything is urgent and has equal "urgent" priority nothing stands above anymore. Being burnt out doesn't need a frame of reference other than the internal one of the "burnee". So it can be valid under any conditions.
bebna 8y ago
Don't think so. People in my country are in average old (Germany), we have long standing history in IT, than any other western nation (see CCC for example), but despite both of these, I can count on one hand how many seniors I have seen at work in different companies. Finding a 50+ year old programmer, is like catching an unicorn. Our industry is full of over time and late hours. Full of pressure because of time constraints. And all that focused on only on small part of our body. No wonder that so many get hurt.

TAForObvReasons 8y ago

Original source: http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-say-poor-leadership-is-number-one-cause-for-burnout/ http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-...

BrandonBradley 8y ago

Where is lack of vacation time categorized into this? There are too many answers.

0xJRS 8y ago
That would be added to management

dunkelheit 8y ago

Misleading title: the original survey question is "What is the main source of employee burnout at your current workplace?". Positive answer to this question doesn't mean that the person answering the question is himself burnt out.

Raj7k 8y ago
So, I took this title from NextBigWhat. I haven't manufactured this by myself
- bartread 8y ago
  [EDIT] Removed previous comment as the parent apparently missed the [via] link at the bottom of the article, the same as I did.

bartread 8y ago

Could we please change this headline? At the moment it's pure clickbait. "91% Employees Experience Burnout" implies that 91% of employees suffer from burnout, whereas - firstly - there is no data in the article to indicate that this is the case. Secondly, the question that comes closest to the 91% answer is "What is the main source of employee burnout at your current workplace?", to which 9.7% of people answered that "Burnout isn't a problem at my company." This leaves 90.3% (and a rounding error!) who think that burnout is a problem at their company and think they know why that is. This does not mean they themselves are suffering or have suffered from burnout. I'm not trying to minimise the problem of burnout, but I would strongly suggest if we're going to have a serious discussion about it we should get our facts and our data straight and not base that discussion off a poorly written and researched employee engagement puff-piece.

Sacho 8y ago
The headline is clickbait, it does not match the headline of the primary source: http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-say-poor-leadership-is-number-one-cause-for-burnout/ http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-... It is also contradicted by the primary source's previous survey: http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/05/29/close-to-60-percent-of-surveyed-tech-workers-are-burnt-out-credit-karma-tops-the-list-for-most-employees-suffering-from-burnout/ http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/05/29/close-to-60-p...
- bartread 8y ago
  Nice spot. That tiny [via] link at the bottom is a really sneaky pattern. Didn't even notice it.
  - Raj7k 8y ago
    Same here for me
    - bartread 8y ago
      Fair play: I've removed my comment on the other sub-thread.

Sacho 8y ago

Here's the primary source for the survey in question: http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-say-poor-leadership-is-number-one-cause-for-burnout/ http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-... How useful is a survey like this? The survey does not define burnout to employees, leaving them to guess at the definition. Can employees reliably self-diagnose burnout and differentiate it from similar conditions - i.e. actual depression? Can they also reliably indicate the cause for the burnout, especially if the symptoms can overlap with the cause? Let's say you have burnout because of work overload, but you normally don't mind doing tons of work, just hate your boss. When the feelings of exhaustion/anger come up, will you point them at the work load or at your boss? Perhaps you could relabel it as a survey on workplace discontent, but even then, I don't think it's really well made. The problem with statistical data like this is that we can see the primary source and temper our enthusiasm for the accuracy of the survey, down the broken telephone line, it will be taken as gospel(see the wage gap/sexual harassment statistics as examples).

JohnBooty 8y ago
> The survey does not define burnout to employees, leaving them to guess at the definition. This sort of self-reporting is accepted in psychology. The way you determine a subject's happiness is to ask them how happy they feel. Think about how a more rigorous alternative might work. 1. We come up with some more precise definition of "burnout." Perhaps we define it as "an average of X 'frustration' events in the workplace over Y days, combined with a steadily declining sense of 'enthusiasm'" 2. OK, great, but now we need precise definitions of 'frustration' and 'enthusiasm.' Is 'frustration' the momentary frustration we feel when the compiler complains about something? Is it a barely-restrained feeling of wanting to smash one's keyboard over somebody's face? For how many seconds should that feeling be experienced to qualify? Likewise with 'enthusiasm.' Same problem we had in step 1. 3. Alternatively, we could monitor people's cortisol levels, blood pressure levels, and have them spend their workdays in an fMRI machine or something. Although even that would have limitations; that seems more likely to measure acute symptoms than something chronic like "burnout." > Can employees reliably self-diagnose burnout and differentiate it from similar conditions - i.e. actual depression? With a sufficiently large sample size this wouldn't matter. As you say, surely x% of respondents will confuse depression with burnout. However, the value of x% will surely be nearly the same at all companies.

greenleafjacob 8y ago

91% of employees who have blind installed. Selection bias.

stephengillie 8y ago
That means it's young engineers at FAANG saying this.
- tehlike 8y ago
  It also means employees who are not necessarily happy.
Sonnol53 8y ago
a lot of ppl in the tech industry

serversystem 8y ago

Goes with the theme that for actual passionate tech workers the reason for burnout is other people and not the tech itself. Hence adage that don't make your hobby your job is nonsense by itself.

russdpale 8y ago
This has been my finding. My wife is one of these super doer employee types, and I see her constantly frustrated by the people above her, and the failing processes that they implement that make her job more and more difficult.

DrinkWater 8y ago

Poor Leadership is also the number one cause for parting ways with a company. For me personally, there was never another reason to leave a company. I never experienced a toxic environment or had colleagues i couldn't stand. It was always the leadership

blitmap 8y ago
You've never experienced inconsiderate coworkers? Like coworkers who talk loudly on the phone in a nearby work area, coworkers with hygiene issues, coworkers who don't carry their weight or respond well to training?
- rejschaap 8y ago
  All of these issues should be addressed by the manager.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    Or potentially addressed directly. I've had a couple occasions where I literally told a sexual harassing manager to "go fuck himself" twice. (He was harassing the women at the office) At another company I was politely confronted about a comment I had made, we talked it out. It was unintentionally insulting and we acted as adults and I realized why he brought it up.
- user5994461 8y ago
  It's entirely possible to have had none of these issues when you only worked for a few years or in a few companies.
- DrinkWater 8y ago
  I did, but these kind of problems were (at least for me) manageable (discussing the issues, "avoiding" these people, etc).
- lainga 8y ago
  Well, there's a big gulf between "toxic" or "impossible to stand" and mere "inconsiderate".

shadowsun7 8y ago

This is a woefully inadequate article, and a woefully inadequate survey. So what if 'poor leadership' is the number one cause for burnout? That insight isn't useful. As an employee, I'd like to figure out how to avoid burnout. And as a employer, I'm not sure how to reduce burnout — get better leadership? How do I do that? But it turns out there are good ideas we can try that may be found in the academic literature. Context: I was writing up my process for preventing burnout recently (https://commoncog.com/blog/nuanced-take-on-preventing-burnout/ https://commoncog.com/blog/nuanced-take-on-preventing-burnou...), and I took some time to look into the academic literature for burnout, to see if it highlighted anything I'd missed. I'll give a quick summary: 1. The standard test for burnout today is something called the Maslach Burnout Inventory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslach_Burnout_Inventory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslach_Burnout_Inventory, and it measures burnout along three metrics: exhaustion, inefficacy, and cynicism. a) Exhaustion: described as wearing out, loss of energy, depletion, debilitation, and fatigue. b) Inefficacy: described as reduced productivity or capability. c) Cynicism: negative or inappropriate attitudes towards clients, irritability, loss of idealism, and withdrawal. 2. The MBI is a descriptive model, which helps you identify burnout, but we need a developmental model as well (e.g. what are the various stages of burnout?). The early models of burnout described the pathway as three stages: 1. job stressors (an imbalance between work demands and individual resources), then 2. individual strain (an emotional response of exhaustion and anxiety), and then 3). defensive coping (changes in attitudes and behavior, such as greater cynicism). Or, to put this simply: first your job demands too much of you, then you feel anxious and emotionally exhausted, then you cope by becoming cynical about work, and then you quit. 3. Maslach found that development of cynicism is the biggest predictor of burnout-related turnover. If you're cynical about your job, you're pretty likely to think about quitting or to actually quit soon. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19426369 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19426369) 4. If you look at the literature today, however, you'll find that most burnout research has converged on two development models: the Job Demands‐Resources (JD‐R) model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_demands-resources_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_demands-resources_model) and the Conservation of Resources (COR) model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_resources_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_resources_theo...). I'll leave you to read the respective Wikipedia articles, but the takeaway from both of them is that burnout results from when the resources provided by the job are outstripped by the demands of the job. As a CEO or manager, your best bet to reducing burnout is to increase the list of job resources described in JD-R, that is: > physical, psychological, social, or organisational aspects of the job that are either or: functional in achieving work goals; reduce job demands and the associated physiological and psychological cost; stimulate personal growth, learning, and development. Examples are, career opportunities, supervisor coaching, role-clarity, and autonomy. As an employee, your best bet to reducing burnout is to increase personal resources (which are different from job-provided resources in the JD-R model). But the problem here is that the research doesn't yet know if there are effective techniques in increasing personal resources. Why? Well ... 5. There are only two decades or so worth of research into burnout, and the research was primarily centered around the care-giving professions. Consequently, early models of burnout were thought to stem from social exhaustion (e.g. nurses and doctors dealing with death, or grief); in a 2016 retrospective review article (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4911781/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4911781/), Maslach herself write that this is an active field of research, and they don't yet know if you can train someone to be more resistant to burnout. There are some interesting research directions, though. I found this paragraph in an undergrad paper from Australia (where apparently half of the nurses there leave the profession prematurely, mostly due to burnout): > Rather, failure to recover consistently from such work stresses (in non-work time) is a crucial determinant of chronic (maladaptive) fatigue and burnout evolution (Winwood et al. 2007). When such recovery is effected consistently, physiological toughness (Dienstbier 1989,1991) and enhanced stress resistance is developed, with improved performance at work, better sleep and reduced maladaptive health outcomes (Dienstbier 1991).While some individuals may achieve this spontaneously, far more may beneﬁt from speciﬁc training to do so effectively and consistently. The Winwood paper may be found here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17693784 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17693784 but it's unclear if they've found a set of techniques that work for most people in most professions. I'm still reading up. PS: I have a technique that I use myself, but it's unclear that it would work for everyone. I wrote it up here: https://commoncog.com/blog/nuanced-take-on-preventing-burnout/ https://commoncog.com/blog/nuanced-take-on-preventing-burnou.... It's certainly protected me from burnout in startupland over the years. But, as I've mentioned, I'm interested in the research because the goal there is to find a set of general techniques that would work for most people. My technique has a sample size of one.

beeskneecaps 8y ago

I have seen evidence that Blind is a major source of toxicity at many companies. I would recommend not installing the app as it only serves to make you feel burned out.

beeskneecaps 8y ago
Lol @ the downvoting blind employee
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't do this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

kapauldo 8y ago

Is this an infomercial?

vladgiverts 8y ago

There are so many articles that blame leadership for all that ails a company. To me, it seems a bit like saying "most program crashes are caused by runtime errors". While both are true, there are deeper explanations that can be more helpful in starting a discussion. In the case of crashing a program, maybe it's because of a misused raw pointer or a type error in an untyped language. As soon as you frame it that way, you immediately see possible paths forward to improve the situation. In the case of burnout at companies, I've found it has more to do with the mindset of the top leaders (who other managers down the chain tend to emulate). The mindset is that the company is "a machine", which makes the rest of us "cogs" (or pick your favorite machine part). The leaders may be perfectly nice and considerate people in general (or not), but regardless, the company-as-machine mindset leads them to set aside their humanity in the interests of the company. All of sudden everyone on the team needs to be replaceable, have predictably high output, etc. Those might be fine concerns for a business, but they end up blinding managers to the flesh and blood human beings in front of them and they start to see employees as the means to the greater business ends of output, productivity, growth, etc. I believe this is an issue of human development that affects most companies eventually. Only companies with really developed leaders who, when faced with serious pressure, are able to see people as the unique and complex beings that they are and not make people feel like they somehow don't matter at a fundamental level.

wickedwiesel 8y ago
Treating team members and colleagues as human beings who bring their whole self to work is, imho, essential to enabling people to deliver their best work. Understandably, but somewhat irrationally at the same time, companies as they mature tend to put formalized processes over individuals. The reason for this may be to institutionalize knowledge or scale better as the company grows which I do see the point of. An unwanted mid-term impact of this very often is what you describe, thinking of humans as cogs in a machine, thinking of success as an increase productivity KPIs and increase in company valuation. For me, this means to establish a positive culture in new companies/teams/etc. where our own values can align with the team's / company's values.
- scns 8y ago

throwawayamzn7 8y ago

I know of a team (~20 devs, a handful of managers) in the middle of a fantastic experiment in burning out the developers. First, a new remote senior leader took over. He doesn't visit the team or understand them well. He puts pressure on the managers to deliver projects that make his bosses happy by looking sexy, even if they cause more operational issues for the customers. Operational issues = oncall hell, so more devs burn out and quit. The experiment is going great. Phase two began recently. Of the three remaining managers, one quit and one was fired for not brown nosing to the remote senior leader enough. (Push back on bullshit projects? That can't be allowed). The single remaining manager is the ultimate brown noser who happily causes his devs on call hell in order to make senior leadership happy. The devs are all looking elsewhere for work. The general mood is in a freefall. People are taking long vacations away in cities that also have lots of tech jobs. It's all a fantastic experiment in how to implode a software organization. I really hope to meet the control group some day- they won't believe how lucky they are.

izzle49 8y ago
I think I work here :)
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  Me too!
lovich 8y ago
What is with companies denying remote work but then bringing in some level of management that works remotely? I've seen happen it in a few places and it feels like animal farm half the time
- 0xJRS 8y ago
  Worked a job at a startup once that had a 40hr "butt-in-seat" policy. The PM would be the one to record the exact time you sat down, the exact length of your lunch, and the exact time you left. This also included breaks. There would be a report to management every Friday and then a 1 on 1 with the manager if he didn't "like" what he saw.

titzer 8y ago

Number one by a hair. 23% leadership vs. 19% overwork. Interesting to see the per-company breakdown. I wonder about the sample size. Blind seems like a promising avenue for getting sentiment analysis inside of companies, but there is a pretty serious sampling bias, as many who sign up for Blind might already be feeling disillusioned.

imglorp 8y ago
Overwork is also leadership: they're setting the unrealistic schedules and they're communicating expectations that people meet are supposed to meet these schedules. By contrast there are other places where management goes around at quitting time and throws everyone out.
- bittcto 8y ago
  I’ve seen many software companies where for months on end each week more than a weeks worth of new work is added to the product, without changing the deadline, because “management” keeps deciding therecare new features that are critical and they can be just slipped right in. If you tell them they are going to increase the time it takes or lower quality, you’re “not cooperative” or “not a team player”....or they tell you they will take the quality hit... but when there are any problems in the delivered product it’s the teams fault, of course.

liftbigweights 8y ago

Nah. Tech workers burnout for the same reason nurses, cops, accountants and everyone else burns out. The drudgery of the work not meeting your expectations ( cool hacker vs office code monkey ), the open-ended nature of the work ( you will be doing this for the next few decades ), the awareness of time ( or how much of it you are wasting away at work ) and the pittance you get relative to what the company gets. Goodness. I can't believe it's already labor day weekend. Where does the time go.

indigochill 8y ago
Maybe in some cases. Having been through leadership ups and downs within the same company (and even same team!) however, for my case it really is about leadership. When I'm happy: We solicit projects from stakeholders on other teams without development resources. They negotiate among each other to decide task prioritization (our manager facilitates). We'll consult on the scope of requests. Usually stakeholders overestimate the work involved and we can make them happy right from the start by promising delivery in a fraction of the time they expected (while still leaving plenty of time for the inevitable unexpected. Projects are usually things that have been a pain for a long time, so people are happy when they're fixed but they're not usually urgent. Is it mundane? Sure, usually. Although we do have the latitude to spice things up if we can fit something cool in within the allotted time. When I'm unhappy: Executives have knee-jerked into another hairbrained scheme that they'll drop in six months (if we're lucky, without another round of layoffs). Nevertheless, it's all hands on deck so we're yanked off everything else to support the "new vision". I do also think sometimes about the value of programmers vs. what they're paid, but I also know that if I think I can do better I'm always free to try. I personally prefer the security of a steady job and freedom from business operation headaches. Maybe one day that'll change, but we'll see.
segmondy 8y ago
Well said, the larger the gulf between reality and expectation, the larger the stress and strain. The longer the stress and strain is prolonged, the more likely burnout will be reached.

yourbandsucks 8y ago

More interesting result: broken out by company, the "poor leadership and lack of direction" answer ranges from 15-35% of the vote, and it's the companies with a very public lack of direction that top the list. Meanwhile, Facebook and Uber get great scores on the measure.

CommanderData 8y ago

The five keys to a successful team based on Google research. https://www.inc.com/michael-schneider/google-thought-they-knew-how-to-create-the-perfect.html https://www.inc.com/michael-schneider/google-thought-they-kn... "Google’s “Project Artistotle” investigates why some teams work better than others. Its analysis shows that the combination of individuals making up the group is unimportant. Instead, a team’s “group norms” – its “traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules” – are essential to how well the group performs. Teams are successful if their group norms lead to equal speaking time for all individuals within the group and an awareness of others’ emotional states. These factors produce a situation in which members of the group feel comfortable, or “safe,” and therefore more willing to contribute. Google’s data show that what Harvard business professor Amy Edmondson called “psychological safety” within the group leads to an increase in the group’s collective IQ and therefore its effectiveness and productivity." "1. Dependability. Team members get things done on time and meet expectations. 2. Structure and clarity. High-performing teams have clear goals, and have well-defined roles within the group. 3. Meaning. The work has personal significance to each member. 4. Impact. The group believes their work is purposeful and positively impacts the greater good. Yes, that's four, not five. The last one stood out from the rest: 5. Psychological Safety. We've all been in meetings and, due to the fear of seeming incompetent, have held back questions or ideas. I get it. It's unnerving to feel like you're in an environment where everything you do or say is under a microscope. But imagine a different setting. A situation in which everyone is safe to take risks, voice their opinions, and ask judgment-free questions. A culture where managers provide air cover and create safe zones so employees can let down their guard. That's psychological safety. I know, not the quantitative data that you were hoping for. However, Google found that teams with psychologically safe environments had employees who were less likely to leave, more likely to harness the power of diversity, and ultimately, who were more successful. Engineering the perfect team is more subjective than we would like, but focusing on these five components increases the likelihood that you will build a dream team. Through its research, Google made the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle proud by proving, "The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts." Teams are successful if their group norms lead to equal speaking time for all individuals within the group and an awareness of others’ emotional states. I think this is tricky if a problem and observably true. The teams I've been involved with mesh easier when each are able to commune easily and this normally means equal chances speaking time. Whenever I've seen an imbalance I can safely say it is because the person had obvious narcissistic personality traits which were always destructive long term.

kabdib 8y ago

I left my last job largely because of this. Exec-levels couldn't decide on a technical direction for the next big version of a major consumer product, then chose a very bad strategy, which took nearly a year to change to something sane. Well, at least less crazy. Meanwhile, the competition is not stupid and is not crazy and is not waiting for us to get our act together. Suddenly we have a year to do the thing that the worker-bee level Cassandras were saying was the right thing to do in the first place. Maybe 14 months to bring up hardware, port or write three major hunks of software, get third parties ramped up on development, write tools and do the million things you need to do to ship. Oh, and the team writing the OS we're mandated to use has been ordered not to talk to us and has gone dark, removing our access to their releases and documentation. So there's a meeting of all the software folks, and management tells us "Okay guys, the next year is going to be hell. You'll be allowed to take vacation, probably, we'll tell you when." I'd seen this coming and was sitting in the back of the room with an offer letter in my pocket, trying not to be angry because a bunch of people I like working with a lot are getting shafted. I should be elated at the offer (which is quite good), but instead I just feel sad. I leave. Six months later one of my friends working on the project sends me a picture of his front lawn. He has been unable to find the time or energy to mow it and it is 18 inches high. Eventually they ship (late, of course), to lackluster reviews. My friend has since moved on; most of the people I know there have. They don't like talking about that year-long deathmarch, followed by a year of patching the living crap out of things in the field and struggling for market share. Meanwhile, the competition's product does very, very well. Last I checked, the latest crop of execs there were gunning for the same crazy. Maybe technology has moved on sufficiently and the specific crazy is possible now, but I have numbers indicating things are pretty much the same. I don't know which side to cheer for. Where do they get these lunatics?

bittcto 8y ago
I believe they hire those “lunatics” because it’s believed that engineers can’t understand business. As an engineer that has started businesses this is BS. It’s really easy to learn business skills, sales and marketing are not difficult, finance is laughably easy. But so long as the companies are being formed to sell equity to VCs you will see them led by frat boys who the VC frat boys recognize... and they will abuse engineers. My solution- stop working for anyone who isn’t technically competent or at least recognizes engineering needs enough to get out of the way and support being efficient.

bittcto 8y ago

The cause is that “leadership” is generally people who don’t understand technology, and the solution is to stop hiring such incompetence. No car company would allow a CEO who doesn’t understand how cars work, let alone one who has no respect for those who design cars. But most tech companies are lead by tech illiterate MBA types who disdain engineers, and so engineers are managed by people who don’t understand engineering. I’ll give you a particular example but this is not the exception, this was the norm in %85 of the dozen tech companies I’ve worked at: At Amazon my boss was a guy trained to be a prison guard, who was selling pot on campus on the side, who got his job managing engineers because of a political connection. He had difficulty operating Microsoft Office. He was borderline computer illiterate. After a re-organization my bosses’ boss was replaced with a woman whose previous career was literally managing state DMV offices. Hey it’s management, right? Notably both of these people resented the fact that we were getting paid close to as much as they were (yet they with no skills, not even good management skills were still getting paid more!) At that point between me and Bezos there were no engineers in management and nobody who respected engineering (and that included Bezos, this was early enough I worked a lot of tickets with Bezos involved, saw him literally stop us from fixing a problem in October only to go ballistic the day before thanksgiving when the problem surfaced again.) Meanwhile Amazon has this propaganda campaign about how they “raise the bar” in hiring- and it’s true I’ve seen brilliant engineers not hired because of the objections of the “bar raiser”— only that person was the woman whose qualifications was a history keeping he nose clean working for the state!

seanf 8y ago
Amazon is getting close to a $1T market cap which makes this look more like an argument for hiring non-technical managers. You didn't provide any examples of poor management by the prison guard or DMV manager, other than some jealously about salary. Other than the bad feelings, did they get results? When Bezos went ballistic the day before Thanksgiving, did you still fix the bug in time? If not, did it really negatively affect the bottom line? Did whatever you instead had to work on in October help the bottom line more than the Thanksgiving bug?
- blindwatchmaker 8y ago

alpeb 8y ago

Tech leadership is extremely hard. You either get at one extreme the MBA trained to think producing sugared beverages is equivalent to producing software, and at the other the formerly great coder that couldn't metamorphose himself to be able to manage people. Having all the required qualities is extremely rare.

tabtab 8y ago

There's not enough bottom-up feedback in selecting and rewarding managers. Top-down-only evaluations skew behavior. An org should survey EVERYONE about their boss(es) every 6 months or so, and the bosses should be held accountable for improving their weak areas.

jobserunder 8y ago

Unmentioned reason: too much personal employee debt. What's worse than working for a bad boss/company? Working for a bad boss/company and carrying 50k in debt.