4 ms·

I think burnout rarely is connected to an overly strong emotional attachment or investment in work. This almost sounds like trying to blame the victim. There’s

by mlthoughts2018 7y ago

I think burnout rarely is connected to an overly strong emotional attachment or investment in work. This almost sounds like trying to blame the victim. There’s a much simpler description: burnout happens to you because of circumstances imposed by the employer. You don’t have to be emotionally invested to be deeply stressed by the prospect of getting fired, demoted or turned into a workplace pariah, and in a lot of toxic environments you are made to feel those threats are connected to whether or not you are putting in 8 hours every Saturday or responding to a permanent triage of PagerDuty alerts with no permission to invest time into fixing root causes. Even when it doesn’t manifest as implied uncompensated overtime, you can end up being expected to be a miracle worker and simultaneously given no resources, all while balancing a personal life or financial obligations that might imply you cannot easily quit jobs or move to a new place for better jobs. In a Hanlon’s Razor sense, I’d say burnout is almost always about toxic management or executive behavior. Sometimes it’s about a problematic teammate. But it’s rarely caused by the degree of emotional investment of the person burning out. Rather that is a symptom exacerbated by the real causes.

ptero 7y ago
> burnout happens to you because of circumstances imposed by the employer. This is often the case, but I think very often there is a lot of self-inflicted hurt there, too, with employees burning midnight oil because they convinced themselves that something bad will happen to them if they do a task a day (three days, week) later. <rant> As a personal anecdote, I have to wage real wars to prevent people who work on my projects from coming to work when they are sick. I do not know what is it -- do they want to look heroic? believe this day is super critical? but they still show up to cough and sneeze on everyone. We have unlimited sick days, stay home! <rant off>
mieseratte 7y ago
> Sometimes it’s about a problematic teammate. But it’s rarely caused by the degree of emotional investment of the person burning out. If you care and your toxic teammate doesn't, and then your toxic manager doesn't give a shit about the toxic teammate but instead cares that dared "rock the boat" by bringing it up is it all three thing as a cause or just the toxic manager? It's swiss cheese failure. If you didn't care you wouldn't be having trouble. If your toxic teammate wasn't toxic you wouldn't be having trouble. If your toxic manager wasn't toxic you would've reasonably had the problem resolved. I'm saying this having been in this boat two jobs in a row.

ptero 7y ago

> burnout happens to you because of circumstances imposed by the employer. This is often the case, but I think very often there is a lot of self-inflicted hurt there, too, with employees burning midnight oil because they convinced themselves that something bad will happen to them if they do a task a day (three days, week) later. <rant> As a personal anecdote, I have to wage real wars to prevent people who work on my projects from coming to work when they are sick. I do not know what is it -- do they want to look heroic? believe this day is super critical? but they still show up to cough and sneeze on everyone. We have unlimited sick days, stay home! <rant off>

mieseratte 7y ago

> Sometimes it’s about a problematic teammate. But it’s rarely caused by the degree of emotional investment of the person burning out. If you care and your toxic teammate doesn't, and then your toxic manager doesn't give a shit about the toxic teammate but instead cares that dared "rock the boat" by bringing it up is it all three thing as a cause or just the toxic manager? It's swiss cheese failure. If you didn't care you wouldn't be having trouble. If your toxic teammate wasn't toxic you wouldn't be having trouble. If your toxic manager wasn't toxic you would've reasonably had the problem resolved. I'm saying this having been in this boat two jobs in a row.