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Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

141 points by spking 7y ago

grawprog 7y ago
I work six days a week. I leave my house at 7am return home around 7pm, pretty much have time to make dinner and chill for an hour so then go to bed and do it again. I haven't really been out and done anything for a few years now. My body is in pain constantly, I'm always exhausted but my sleep is always poor. I don't remember what it's like to not feel burnt out. It's been like this pretty much since I was in my early twenties and I'm in my thirties now and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of this stopping any time soon.
- volkk 7y ago
  what do you do?
  - grawprog 7y ago
    Program and operate CNC machines.
- bg4 7y ago
  I did this for years and years and developed a blister on my retina from the never ending stress. Permanent vision problems. It's not worth it!
  - internet_user 7y ago
    Can you let us know the actual medical term and how was this linked to stress? there is a lot of research these days about autoimmune diseases and how they are triggered by stress, but retina blisters is something I never heard about before.
    - bg4 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_serous_retinopathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_serous_retinopathy
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Why are you working six days a week? At some point you have to say “no” or your employer will suck your life out of you.
- mcv 7y ago
  That's not healthy. Please take some time off for a vacation and return to a normal 40 hour work week. There's a good reason why people fought for a 40 hour work week. Life is not just about work; you need to relax too. I refuse to work more than 32 hours a week, and that's working out very well for me. I have time for my hobbies, my kids, my friends and family, and I have time to just do nothing at all on occasion. And the hours I do work are very productive as a result. Admittedly my current project is so interesting that I often work a bit more than 32 hours, but it's because I want to, not because I have to.
  - radcon 7y ago
    > Please take some time off for a vacation and return to a normal 40 hour work week. You might as well say "Please win the lottery". Seriously though, please tell me you're not so out of touch with reality that you actually believe the sentence you wrote is meaningful advice. People can't just snap their fingers and create a better job out of thin air.
    - jniedrauer 7y ago
      For technically inclined people in the United States, it can be. It's just a matter of whether or not you want to maximize your income or maximize your quality of life. It is definitely possible to get a tech job at a large company where work-life balance is taken seriously.
      - radcon 7y ago
        > It is definitely possible to get a tech job at a large company where work-life balance is taken seriously. For a few, not for the majority.
      - Goronmon 7y ago
        It is definitely possible to get a tech job at a large company where work-life balance is taken seriously. It's possible, but as a more "average" level developer, it's pretty difficult to actually get hired at one of those companies.
- Ocerge 7y ago
  If you're a developer, in the USA, and you don't work on your life's work...why? There are limitless companies where you can put your 40 in and not literally burn yourself out to death.
GiorgioG 7y ago
Sprints? I love sprints...I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel day in, day out. Seriously, screw scrum and 'agile'
- JTbane 7y ago
  "Sprint Planning" -> "How much work can we overextend our developers with" "Sprint Retrospective" -> "How much did we screw up from overextending so much"
  - aaron-santos 7y ago
    What does the part of planning that calculates velocity and time budgeting look like in this context?
    - pavel_lishin 7y ago
      "We don't have time for that, we're too far behind!"
- strictnein 7y ago
  The feeling of never finishing anything is probably the thing I hate must about agile. Just little bits completed off an ever growing backlog.
  - durnygbur 7y ago
    Wasn’t it exactly how ancient Greeks imagined hell? (Sysiphos, Tantal).
  - mmsimanga 7y ago
    I work in BI building data marts and reports. First we used to have what I would term technical user stories. Build this report, change that cube, build that mart... Then we added analysis stories and off late we now have design user stories. Our sprints are two weeks. One sprint ended up being the developer checking a tick box. But it took a whole month to complete because we had a two week analysis sprint and another two week "implementation" sprint. But guess what we successfully completed all our user stores.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Americans really need more vacation time. For a while I worked with only 15 days a year. This never gives you the opportunity to ever really relax. Life becomes just one endless meaningless time of working year after year that kills any kind of creativity . I can see this in a lot of workaholics. They just go through the motions of working hard but don’t get much done. And once you have been in that machine for a while taking a little time off feels scary and unfamiliar.
- mercutio2 7y ago
  “Only” 15 vacation days? I’m not sure if you’re in the US, or if you’re including paid holidays, but 15 days is the average number of vacation days for people with 25 years of tenure in full time jobs in the US. Most people with less tenure get much less. So that wouldn’t be an “only” in the US. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    Indeed - this is a fantastic argument in favour of emigrating. It's also the cause of friction in multinationals operating in Europe - I was saddened when, upon starting at my "unlimited PTO" employer, they had an internal doc that this really meant "3-4 weeks" (note that 4 weeks is the legal minimum in the EU)
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    15 is “only” in most western countries. Actually in a lot of countries it would be illegal.
  - benplumley 7y ago
    Something can be both average (relative to a population) and low (in an absolute sense). 15 days of holiday per year seems like a great example of this.
  - throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
    I get 15 at low tenure. But if I got more I don’t think I would be able to find reasonable times to take it. My father became a C suite guy at a fairly large corp and by the end of his career had quite a lot of vacation days each year... but he could never find an opportunity to use half of it because he was accountable for far too much. I don’t really know if I find anything disagreeable in it tbh. Vacation can be nice but it’s necessity is a function of your baseline work life balance... and work life balance tends to be harder the worse your job is. An interesting paradox in that the people who probably need it most are the least entitled to it per societal norms.
CalRobert 7y ago
"Conducted by telecommunications company TollFreeForwarding.com, " an odd source, but OK. I work remote from a place outside the US. Last thanksgiving my boss (from the US) was on Slack. So were... all but one of my US colleagues. I see them writing at all hours of the night. On a work trip it was more or less assumed I'd work from 9 AM (8:30 ish really if you count coffee before) until 10 PM. I'm not on pagerduty anymore but my daughter still sings Frere Jacque as "Something's broken Something's broken It's your fault!, It's your fault!" I spent half my life on pagerduty (so over half my life - waking and asleep, working in some sort of fashion). It depends on the industry but there's too many people who are de facto actually at work every waking moment (and sleeping, if you count on-call). Combine this with the nagging suspicion that none of this actually matters (See "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber) and burnout, detachment, etc. shouldn't be a surprise.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > It depends on the industry but there's too many people who are de facto actually at work every waking moment If "at work every waking moment" means "needs to be able to respond to emergencies", then this is actually the norm for everyone in the world until very recently. Anyone who doesn't have an employer is "at work every waking moment" by this definition. Peasants, housewives, aristocrats... Given the nearly 100% rate of this for all of history, it seems weird to argue that the current -- much lower -- rate is too high.
  - yabadabadoes 7y ago
    Given that chauffeuring is driving and we were driving before Uber existed, it seems strange that people expect compensation when driving for Uber and count it as part of their labor time?
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      Try to make the correspondences in your supposed analogy explicit. I'll wait. My parent comment is not complaining about excessive labor time. He's complaining about being on call. Is it strange that people expect compensation for being on call? That depends on what you're willing to consider "compensation". No one is clocked in at an hourly rate while on call because the labor laws prohibit that, but that's an artifact. On-call positions are viewed as more undesirable than otherwise and pay compensation accordingly.
nbrempel 7y ago
I find that If my work isn’t meaningful, it can really drain the life out of me (even more than truly demanding jobs). I wonder if a couple generations ago people felt just as burnt out. It seems like this generation is the most burnt out but who knows. With everyone connected all the time, I doubt people are getting proper rest between work. If you’re answering emails over lunch, you’re still working and not resting your eyes/brain. There is a movement[0][1] towards shorter workweeks which I’m really interested in and, shameless plug[2], I run a site on this topic as well. There is real movement right now towards a 4 day work week in Western society especially in the UK. [0] https://www.4dayweekus.org/ https://www.4dayweekus.org/ [1] https://www.4dayweek.co.uk/ https://www.4dayweek.co.uk/ [2] https://30hourjobs.com https://30hourjobs.com
- gherkinnn 7y ago
  Interesting. I’ve been working 4d/w for years now. I might do 5 for a while if work is interesting, but will take those days off another time. Easily one of my better decisions. Worth the 20% cut in pay. For someone with few responsibilities and no expensive hobbies, that is.
  - beat 7y ago
    I don't even think a 20% cut in pay is fair. Is our productivity, at least in brain-driven jobs, equally distributed across all our working hours? In other words, if we work 20% fewer hours during the week, will we do 20% less work? Or is it more like 10%?
    - gherkinnn 7y ago
      Feels like 10% less “work”. Mainly because there are fewer lapses in concentration. Harder to quantify is the time your brain gets off to dream up creative solutions.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  I think there are some fundamental things that have changed that are much different than 40-50 years ago: 1. Work was much more compartmentalized 30 years ago. People may have worked long hours, but for the most part, when they were "done" for the day, they were done (obviously there were exceptions, like people on call). Now, though, there is always email and texts and Slack, so it's more difficult to fully decompress from work. 2. The nature of big business has drastically changed. First, many more people are in service jobs, and I'd argue that actually building something concrete has a higher immediate payoff for most folks. Also, as jobs have gotten more efficient and segmented, most people are more removed from decision making and a tangible feeling of how their effort goes into producing a valuable product. 3. The increasing inequality in America means there is more fear of falling behind, and jobs themselves are more tenuous, so there is more stress to work harder lest you fall out of a middle/upper-middle class.
Simulacra 7y ago
Job burnout? Try LIFE burnout. The job I've managed to compartmentalize and keep at bay, but life is burning me out and I'm not out of my thirties yet. Things are getting faster and more expensive just to live.
- ifend 7y ago
  This! Totally agree.
- thedaemon 7y ago
  Kids will do that to you. Don't take on a huge burden if you aren't prepared for it.
pwinnski 7y ago
On one hand, I think this could depend very heavily on exactly how the questions is asked. On the other hand, this doesn't really surprise me.
beat 7y ago
So why do they stay at these awful jobs? Health insurance. Fear of losing, or even changing what they have (sometimes accompanied with some very real and not just anxiety out-of-pocket costs running into the thousands of dollars). Decoupling health insurance from employment is the #1 thing we could do to improve quality of our work. But in the long run, I dream of a day when wage labor is looked back on as nearly as terrible as chattel slavery.
- aantix 7y ago
  How will people be compensated relative to their work value?
  - beat 7y ago
    Why do we need to work? edit: I am 100% serious about this. It is already economically viable, if society chooses to do it, to simply guarantee food, decent housing, and health care to everyone, whether they work or not. At that point, what we do with our time becomes a choice, more than the choice of "work or go homeless and starve". People could still choose to exchange their time and skills for money, and most would, I think. But the coercion of the current system, and the "safety net" holes in that coercion, would disappear.
    - WarDores 7y ago
      I'd like to see a source for "It is already economically viable...". Maybe at current levels of production, but you can't just assume current levels of output in every sector while removing incentives.
      - beat 7y ago
        Why do you think incentives are removed? Is "work or starve" the only incentive? I'm not talking about a beachfront mansion and a Ferrari in the driveway for everyone. I'm talking about not starving. Want to be more than the bare minimum? Then choose to work. Don't care? Then don't work - not that people who don't care are effective employees anyway.
2sk21 7y ago
Just a couple days ago there was a big discussion about an article that said that early retirement will lead to cognitive decline. Work and burn out or retire and vegetate? Surely there are some better alternatives?
- andrei_says_ 7y ago
  Retirement for me would mean working on what I love and only that. Presuming that my creativity and contribution are dependent on having an employer is shortsighted. And I can’t imagine being an exception.
- realbarack 7y ago
  There are alternatives. For example: https://basecamp.com/books/calm https://basecamp.com/books/calm
throwaway129917 7y ago
The American Aristocracy wants a return to slavery. Not in name, just in practice. This project is nearly complete.
- naringas 7y ago
  > This project is nearly complete. wrong, it is already complete. But it's a sort of softer (or blurrier) slavery. one difference between old classic slavery and modern employment slavery is that the slave-employees are not bound to a single master. They are "free" to change employers. But they aren't really free to quit working altogether. Only people who own enough assets are free. And surely it could be argue that I exaggerate, that people are indeed free to enterprise and try to make it on their own, as business owners (only really possible if you have enough assets to begin with). But then "the market economy" will subtly force them into hiring employees. If the only way to be "free" is through the enslavement of others, is that true liberty?
  - tasuki 7y ago
    > They are "free" to change employers. But they aren't really free to quit working altogether. Oh yes they are free to quit working altogether. One can choose to become homeless. The more fortunate ones wouldn't even become homeless and would just have to reduce their consumption. But we love consuming a whole lot. > Only people who own enough assets are free. In some way they're slaves to their assets. Karl Marx wrote about this in Kapital. > But then "the market economy" will subtly force them into hiring employees. They could easily forgo that. Few will though. Reminds me of the "the fisherman and the businessman" story. Perhaps this is all because humans are human?
    - naringas 7y ago
      > Perhaps this is all because humans are human? going even further because the sun shines, and further still all this because time goes on...
RomanPushkin 7y ago
100% in Silicon Valley
scottious 7y ago
A year ago I had a 6-week paternity leave at 33 years old. It was the first time since I started my career that I was able to unplug for a significant amount of time. This time off was truly a magical time for me, and even though I had to do a ton of work around the house and with the baby, I felt a sense of purpose. I started to feel like a real person again. I came back to work and I made some huge gains for the company for a short period of time... my creativity was back, my motivation was back. The things I did after paternity leave paid off a huge amount and had ripple effects of increased productivity for the entire company. Then, I burned out again. Now I'm just a zombie who occasionally writes code and counts down the hours until I can go home. It's obvious to me that I just need some extended time to myself, but that doesn't fly in America. I think my employer would rather me be a zombie than to just have some time off to recharge.
- zamfi 7y ago
  > I think my employer would rather me be a zombie than to just have some time off to recharge. And you probably don't think you can even ask your employer about this: what would it say about your devotion as an employee?
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    > don't think you can even ask your employer about this I wonder how much of that is in our own minds, though - my boss is a pretty cool Chinese guy, and I tell him I need time off to deal with something, he says no problem, let me know when you’re back. But I still feel like I’m being silently judged - not just by him, but by everybody.
    - zamfi 7y ago
      > But I still feel like I’m being silently judged - not just by him, but by everybody. Does "everybody" include you, too, by the way? Are you actually just judging yourself for taking time off, and assuming everyone else is? Do you judge others for taking time off too? I don't have an agenda here, really, except the point out that this being "in our own minds" is not that different from "assumptions that come from our culture"...
alexandercrohde 7y ago
What's interesting to me is -- for every "burnt out" coworker I see another one with similar pay and title who isn't burnt out. I think a lot of people think they are unable to say "no" nor "pushback." In my experience, saying no actually gets you more respect than saying yes.
- spking 7y ago
  A lot of people feel that way because they are deathly afraid of losing their job, not gaining or losing respect.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  My personal experience has been the opposite, actually. Early on, I realized that I was constantly being asked by coworkers to “look at this, look at that”, none of which were related to the work that my actual manager had assigned me. So I said no: I focused on what my manager was telling me to do. That seemed to be the “right thing” to do. Everybody hated me because I wouldn’t help them. They showed up in meetings and said they couldn’t meet their commitments because commandlinefan “wasn’t available to help me get CVS set up on my computer”. Management churn being what it was, I never had the same manager for more than six months anyway, so by the time performance reviews came around, whoever my manager-du-jour happened to be based my performance review on the consistently negative things he was hearing from my coworkers. I couldn’t even defend myself by pointing to having accomplished what the previous manager told me to focus on, either: priority churn being what it was, most of it ended up being scrapped before it was used. I finally saw the writing on the wall and did a complete 180. I became the most helpful guy in the world. If anybody, ever, for any reason, asked for my help, I dropped whatever I was doing and focused on helping them until their problem was fixed. Performance reviews went from “needs serious improvement” to “exceeds expectations”. I rarely, if ever, finish anything that I’m actually supposed to be working on, and nobody cares. It’s all reputation, and mine is stellar. I haven’t said no in 20 years and I’ve never been more loved by corporate.
esotericn 7y ago
As a European (for now, oho) this doesn't surprise me at all. American working patterns are bonkers. You guys have this concept of 'vacation' which well, isn't. 15 days or whatever per year pretty much all just must either get banked for emergencies, admin, or maybe that one Mega Holiday where you fly across the world and spend a week or whatever trying to forget your life. I don't get it at all. It might make sense if you're a founder or whatever and you love your job. Most people are working to live, but there is no "live", because there's no time that isn't work. I'd rather be homeless. Can I choose to be homeless in Europe instead tho? ;)
- tombert 7y ago
  I'm genuinely curious; how many days do Europeans typically get?
  - ludoo 7y ago
    20 days minimum by law in Italy (plus sick leave when needed), in practice though it's more like 28 days for most jobs. Excluding weekends and national holidays of course.
  - notfromhere 7y ago
    4-5 weeks?
  - tremon 7y ago
    The legal minimum in NL is (the equivalent of) four weeks per year (20 days on a 40 hours/week contract), so not that much more than US. Some fields (healthcare, construction, education) get more than that. However, none of that can be usurped by your employer for other things than vacation. For example, your employer isn't allowed to deduct pay or withhold vacation hours for doctor's visits during work hours. Major life events, like funerals or child births are paid leave. And for most professions, there's no such things as unpaid overtime: you work more hours, you either get more pay or receive more vacation hours.
    - jmpavlec 7y ago
tombert 7y ago
In Academia, it's not too uncommon for people to take extended sabbaticals to focus on a project without being distracted with work nonsense, but I haven't really heard of any company doing that in the US. I would love to take around a month every year just to focus on a purely technical problem instead of focussing 20% of my time in technical stuff, and 80% of my time going through bureaucratic hoops that seemingly have no reason to exist outside of creating a job for the bureaucrats. I have an OK job overall, but there's just a metric ton of approvals and paperwork that I end up having to do to actually write code, and as a result I get burnt out fairly often.
- andy_boot 7y ago
  I've taken 2 sabbaticals from work. In the UK at least most companies are totally fine with you doing this.
- dillonmckay 7y ago
  I believe Automattic offers this.
- dominotw 7y ago
  I took a sabbatical for couple of months last year and totally wasted the whole thing lazing around.
  - olyjohn 7y ago
    That's not a waste at all. Sounds like you probably needed it.
heroHACK17 7y ago
I was let go from my first dev job (fresh out of college no less) and the couple of months following were actually some of the happiest days of my life. Despite being unemployed, I got my mojo back, taught myself a bunch of new shit unrelated to programming, and tried a lot of new things I wouldn't otherwise have tried. Oftentimes I wonder how I could have been so happy given the circumstances, but it finally dawned on me: getting let go obliterated any conscious or subconscious burnout I had been suffering. I felt like a person again.
thrownawayinusa 7y ago
I'm burnedout because I'm bored. I'm not a dev, I'm closer to a BI Analyst if anything. What I do is the epitome of bullshit jobs. The company would be wildly profitable if I just stopped showing up. Yet my reviews and feedback are always glowing even if I do 1 'thing' a week, and yeah 6 months down the line some finding I put into motion results in some marginal change somewhere. It's hard to feel the motivation to do more when the output feels irrelevant. I'd leave, but it'd be hard to match the benefits, salary, and work/life balance in my region. I know I need to change though because my skills are atrophying due to the ennui.
bpyne 7y ago
I feel burnt out regularly. Earlier in my career I loved reading about software development, both research and practice. But my job isn't particularly stressful. At some points, I feel stress at work, often due to a lack of control over the work environment and vision of the leadership. But they don't push me to work a lot of hours. We're encouraged to use our PTO. I think the issue, in American culture, is bigger than just employers and career choices. My wife and I discuss this subject often. The problem is that we are a two career couple who are raising a child in a culture that hasn't, and may never, adapt to not having one parent at home. Our society isn't setup for it. Vital services, like healthcare or simply furnace maintenance before Winter, require a person home from 9am-5pm. Doing so requires either working remotely or a promise to make up the time when you get back to the office. I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe working remotely will help. Maybe we need to postpone careers until kids are raised like my parents' generation did. (My wife is far better suited to a career. I would gladly volunteer to be at home if we didn't need both pays.)
tripzilch 7y ago
How do you burnout every week? Is that a new use of the word? As far as I know, burnout takes months if not years to recover from.
dredmorbius 7y ago
This ... article ... is awfully scarce on details concerning the study, authors, methods, or links to any of the above. There's a more direct link here, though still nothing on methods or sampling: http://web.archive.org/web/20191103070123/https://tollfreeforwarding.com/blog/stress-anxiety-and-exhaustion-the-extent-of-workplace-burnout-in-modern-america/ http://web.archive.org/web/20191103070123/https://tollfreefo...

141 points by spking 7y ago

I work six days a week. I leave my house at 7am return home around 7pm, pretty much have time to make dinner and chill for an hour so then go to bed and do it again. I haven't really been out and done anything for a few years now. My body is in pain constantly, I'm always exhausted but my sleep is always poor. I don't remember what it's like to not feel burnt out. It's been like this pretty much since I was in my early twenties and I'm in my thirties now and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of this stopping any time soon.

volkk 7y ago
what do you do?
- grawprog 7y ago
  Program and operate CNC machines.
bg4 7y ago
I did this for years and years and developed a blister on my retina from the never ending stress. Permanent vision problems. It's not worth it!
- internet_user 7y ago
  Can you let us know the actual medical term and how was this linked to stress? there is a lot of research these days about autoimmune diseases and how they are triggered by stress, but retina blisters is something I never heard about before.
  - bg4 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_serous_retinopathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_serous_retinopathy
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Why are you working six days a week? At some point you have to say “no” or your employer will suck your life out of you.
mcv 7y ago
That's not healthy. Please take some time off for a vacation and return to a normal 40 hour work week. There's a good reason why people fought for a 40 hour work week. Life is not just about work; you need to relax too. I refuse to work more than 32 hours a week, and that's working out very well for me. I have time for my hobbies, my kids, my friends and family, and I have time to just do nothing at all on occasion. And the hours I do work are very productive as a result. Admittedly my current project is so interesting that I often work a bit more than 32 hours, but it's because I want to, not because I have to.
- radcon 7y ago
  > Please take some time off for a vacation and return to a normal 40 hour work week. You might as well say "Please win the lottery". Seriously though, please tell me you're not so out of touch with reality that you actually believe the sentence you wrote is meaningful advice. People can't just snap their fingers and create a better job out of thin air.
  - jniedrauer 7y ago
    For technically inclined people in the United States, it can be. It's just a matter of whether or not you want to maximize your income or maximize your quality of life. It is definitely possible to get a tech job at a large company where work-life balance is taken seriously.
    - radcon 7y ago
      > It is definitely possible to get a tech job at a large company where work-life balance is taken seriously. For a few, not for the majority.
    - Goronmon 7y ago
      It is definitely possible to get a tech job at a large company where work-life balance is taken seriously. It's possible, but as a more "average" level developer, it's pretty difficult to actually get hired at one of those companies.
Ocerge 7y ago
If you're a developer, in the USA, and you don't work on your life's work...why? There are limitless companies where you can put your 40 in and not literally burn yourself out to death.

GiorgioG 7y ago

Sprints? I love sprints...I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel day in, day out. Seriously, screw scrum and 'agile'

JTbane 7y ago
"Sprint Planning" -> "How much work can we overextend our developers with" "Sprint Retrospective" -> "How much did we screw up from overextending so much"
- aaron-santos 7y ago
  What does the part of planning that calculates velocity and time budgeting look like in this context?
  - pavel_lishin 7y ago
    "We don't have time for that, we're too far behind!"
strictnein 7y ago
The feeling of never finishing anything is probably the thing I hate must about agile. Just little bits completed off an ever growing backlog.
- durnygbur 7y ago
  Wasn’t it exactly how ancient Greeks imagined hell? (Sysiphos, Tantal).
- mmsimanga 7y ago
  I work in BI building data marts and reports. First we used to have what I would term technical user stories. Build this report, change that cube, build that mart... Then we added analysis stories and off late we now have design user stories. Our sprints are two weeks. One sprint ended up being the developer checking a tick box. But it took a whole month to complete because we had a two week analysis sprint and another two week "implementation" sprint. But guess what we successfully completed all our user stores.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

Americans really need more vacation time. For a while I worked with only 15 days a year. This never gives you the opportunity to ever really relax. Life becomes just one endless meaningless time of working year after year that kills any kind of creativity . I can see this in a lot of workaholics. They just go through the motions of working hard but don’t get much done. And once you have been in that machine for a while taking a little time off feels scary and unfamiliar.

mercutio2 7y ago
“Only” 15 vacation days? I’m not sure if you’re in the US, or if you’re including paid holidays, but 15 days is the average number of vacation days for people with 25 years of tenure in full time jobs in the US. Most people with less tenure get much less. So that wouldn’t be an “only” in the US. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm
- CalRobert 7y ago
  Indeed - this is a fantastic argument in favour of emigrating. It's also the cause of friction in multinationals operating in Europe - I was saddened when, upon starting at my "unlimited PTO" employer, they had an internal doc that this really meant "3-4 weeks" (note that 4 weeks is the legal minimum in the EU)
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  15 is “only” in most western countries. Actually in a lot of countries it would be illegal.
- benplumley 7y ago
  Something can be both average (relative to a population) and low (in an absolute sense). 15 days of holiday per year seems like a great example of this.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  I get 15 at low tenure. But if I got more I don’t think I would be able to find reasonable times to take it. My father became a C suite guy at a fairly large corp and by the end of his career had quite a lot of vacation days each year... but he could never find an opportunity to use half of it because he was accountable for far too much. I don’t really know if I find anything disagreeable in it tbh. Vacation can be nice but it’s necessity is a function of your baseline work life balance... and work life balance tends to be harder the worse your job is. An interesting paradox in that the people who probably need it most are the least entitled to it per societal norms.

CalRobert 7y ago

"Conducted by telecommunications company TollFreeForwarding.com, " an odd source, but OK. I work remote from a place outside the US. Last thanksgiving my boss (from the US) was on Slack. So were... all but one of my US colleagues. I see them writing at all hours of the night. On a work trip it was more or less assumed I'd work from 9 AM (8:30 ish really if you count coffee before) until 10 PM. I'm not on pagerduty anymore but my daughter still sings Frere Jacque as "Something's broken Something's broken It's your fault!, It's your fault!" I spent half my life on pagerduty (so over half my life - waking and asleep, working in some sort of fashion). It depends on the industry but there's too many people who are de facto actually at work every waking moment (and sleeping, if you count on-call). Combine this with the nagging suspicion that none of this actually matters (See "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber) and burnout, detachment, etc. shouldn't be a surprise.

thaumasiotes 7y ago
> It depends on the industry but there's too many people who are de facto actually at work every waking moment If "at work every waking moment" means "needs to be able to respond to emergencies", then this is actually the norm for everyone in the world until very recently. Anyone who doesn't have an employer is "at work every waking moment" by this definition. Peasants, housewives, aristocrats... Given the nearly 100% rate of this for all of history, it seems weird to argue that the current -- much lower -- rate is too high.
- yabadabadoes 7y ago
  Given that chauffeuring is driving and we were driving before Uber existed, it seems strange that people expect compensation when driving for Uber and count it as part of their labor time?
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    Try to make the correspondences in your supposed analogy explicit. I'll wait. My parent comment is not complaining about excessive labor time. He's complaining about being on call. Is it strange that people expect compensation for being on call? That depends on what you're willing to consider "compensation". No one is clocked in at an hourly rate while on call because the labor laws prohibit that, but that's an artifact. On-call positions are viewed as more undesirable than otherwise and pay compensation accordingly.

nbrempel 7y ago

I find that If my work isn’t meaningful, it can really drain the life out of me (even more than truly demanding jobs). I wonder if a couple generations ago people felt just as burnt out. It seems like this generation is the most burnt out but who knows. With everyone connected all the time, I doubt people are getting proper rest between work. If you’re answering emails over lunch, you’re still working and not resting your eyes/brain. There is a movement[0][1] towards shorter workweeks which I’m really interested in and, shameless plug[2], I run a site on this topic as well. There is real movement right now towards a 4 day work week in Western society especially in the UK. [0] https://www.4dayweekus.org/ https://www.4dayweekus.org/ [1] https://www.4dayweek.co.uk/ https://www.4dayweek.co.uk/ [2] https://30hourjobs.com https://30hourjobs.com

gherkinnn 7y ago
Interesting. I’ve been working 4d/w for years now. I might do 5 for a while if work is interesting, but will take those days off another time. Easily one of my better decisions. Worth the 20% cut in pay. For someone with few responsibilities and no expensive hobbies, that is.
- beat 7y ago
  I don't even think a 20% cut in pay is fair. Is our productivity, at least in brain-driven jobs, equally distributed across all our working hours? In other words, if we work 20% fewer hours during the week, will we do 20% less work? Or is it more like 10%?
  - gherkinnn 7y ago
    Feels like 10% less “work”. Mainly because there are fewer lapses in concentration. Harder to quantify is the time your brain gets off to dream up creative solutions.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I think there are some fundamental things that have changed that are much different than 40-50 years ago: 1. Work was much more compartmentalized 30 years ago. People may have worked long hours, but for the most part, when they were "done" for the day, they were done (obviously there were exceptions, like people on call). Now, though, there is always email and texts and Slack, so it's more difficult to fully decompress from work. 2. The nature of big business has drastically changed. First, many more people are in service jobs, and I'd argue that actually building something concrete has a higher immediate payoff for most folks. Also, as jobs have gotten more efficient and segmented, most people are more removed from decision making and a tangible feeling of how their effort goes into producing a valuable product. 3. The increasing inequality in America means there is more fear of falling behind, and jobs themselves are more tenuous, so there is more stress to work harder lest you fall out of a middle/upper-middle class.

Simulacra 7y ago

Job burnout? Try LIFE burnout. The job I've managed to compartmentalize and keep at bay, but life is burning me out and I'm not out of my thirties yet. Things are getting faster and more expensive just to live.

ifend 7y ago
This! Totally agree.
thedaemon 7y ago
Kids will do that to you. Don't take on a huge burden if you aren't prepared for it.

pwinnski 7y ago

On one hand, I think this could depend very heavily on exactly how the questions is asked. On the other hand, this doesn't really surprise me.

beat 7y ago

So why do they stay at these awful jobs? Health insurance. Fear of losing, or even changing what they have (sometimes accompanied with some very real and not just anxiety out-of-pocket costs running into the thousands of dollars). Decoupling health insurance from employment is the #1 thing we could do to improve quality of our work. But in the long run, I dream of a day when wage labor is looked back on as nearly as terrible as chattel slavery.

aantix 7y ago
How will people be compensated relative to their work value?
- beat 7y ago
  Why do we need to work? edit: I am 100% serious about this. It is already economically viable, if society chooses to do it, to simply guarantee food, decent housing, and health care to everyone, whether they work or not. At that point, what we do with our time becomes a choice, more than the choice of "work or go homeless and starve". People could still choose to exchange their time and skills for money, and most would, I think. But the coercion of the current system, and the "safety net" holes in that coercion, would disappear.
  - WarDores 7y ago
    I'd like to see a source for "It is already economically viable...". Maybe at current levels of production, but you can't just assume current levels of output in every sector while removing incentives.
    - beat 7y ago
      Why do you think incentives are removed? Is "work or starve" the only incentive? I'm not talking about a beachfront mansion and a Ferrari in the driveway for everyone. I'm talking about not starving. Want to be more than the bare minimum? Then choose to work. Don't care? Then don't work - not that people who don't care are effective employees anyway.

2sk21 7y ago

Just a couple days ago there was a big discussion about an article that said that early retirement will lead to cognitive decline. Work and burn out or retire and vegetate? Surely there are some better alternatives?

andrei_says_ 7y ago
Retirement for me would mean working on what I love and only that. Presuming that my creativity and contribution are dependent on having an employer is shortsighted. And I can’t imagine being an exception.
realbarack 7y ago
There are alternatives. For example: https://basecamp.com/books/calm https://basecamp.com/books/calm

throwaway129917 7y ago

The American Aristocracy wants a return to slavery. Not in name, just in practice. This project is nearly complete.

naringas 7y ago
> This project is nearly complete. wrong, it is already complete. But it's a sort of softer (or blurrier) slavery. one difference between old classic slavery and modern employment slavery is that the slave-employees are not bound to a single master. They are "free" to change employers. But they aren't really free to quit working altogether. Only people who own enough assets are free. And surely it could be argue that I exaggerate, that people are indeed free to enterprise and try to make it on their own, as business owners (only really possible if you have enough assets to begin with). But then "the market economy" will subtly force them into hiring employees. If the only way to be "free" is through the enslavement of others, is that true liberty?
- tasuki 7y ago
  > They are "free" to change employers. But they aren't really free to quit working altogether. Oh yes they are free to quit working altogether. One can choose to become homeless. The more fortunate ones wouldn't even become homeless and would just have to reduce their consumption. But we love consuming a whole lot. > Only people who own enough assets are free. In some way they're slaves to their assets. Karl Marx wrote about this in Kapital. > But then "the market economy" will subtly force them into hiring employees. They could easily forgo that. Few will though. Reminds me of the "the fisherman and the businessman" story. Perhaps this is all because humans are human?
  - naringas 7y ago
    > Perhaps this is all because humans are human? going even further because the sun shines, and further still all this because time goes on...

RomanPushkin 7y ago

100% in Silicon Valley

scottious 7y ago

A year ago I had a 6-week paternity leave at 33 years old. It was the first time since I started my career that I was able to unplug for a significant amount of time. This time off was truly a magical time for me, and even though I had to do a ton of work around the house and with the baby, I felt a sense of purpose. I started to feel like a real person again. I came back to work and I made some huge gains for the company for a short period of time... my creativity was back, my motivation was back. The things I did after paternity leave paid off a huge amount and had ripple effects of increased productivity for the entire company. Then, I burned out again. Now I'm just a zombie who occasionally writes code and counts down the hours until I can go home. It's obvious to me that I just need some extended time to myself, but that doesn't fly in America. I think my employer would rather me be a zombie than to just have some time off to recharge.

zamfi 7y ago
> I think my employer would rather me be a zombie than to just have some time off to recharge. And you probably don't think you can even ask your employer about this: what would it say about your devotion as an employee?
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  > don't think you can even ask your employer about this I wonder how much of that is in our own minds, though - my boss is a pretty cool Chinese guy, and I tell him I need time off to deal with something, he says no problem, let me know when you’re back. But I still feel like I’m being silently judged - not just by him, but by everybody.
  - zamfi 7y ago
    > But I still feel like I’m being silently judged - not just by him, but by everybody. Does "everybody" include you, too, by the way? Are you actually just judging yourself for taking time off, and assuming everyone else is? Do you judge others for taking time off too? I don't have an agenda here, really, except the point out that this being "in our own minds" is not that different from "assumptions that come from our culture"...

alexandercrohde 7y ago

What's interesting to me is -- for every "burnt out" coworker I see another one with similar pay and title who isn't burnt out. I think a lot of people think they are unable to say "no" nor "pushback." In my experience, saying no actually gets you more respect than saying yes.

spking 7y ago
A lot of people feel that way because they are deathly afraid of losing their job, not gaining or losing respect.
commandlinefan 7y ago
My personal experience has been the opposite, actually. Early on, I realized that I was constantly being asked by coworkers to “look at this, look at that”, none of which were related to the work that my actual manager had assigned me. So I said no: I focused on what my manager was telling me to do. That seemed to be the “right thing” to do. Everybody hated me because I wouldn’t help them. They showed up in meetings and said they couldn’t meet their commitments because commandlinefan “wasn’t available to help me get CVS set up on my computer”. Management churn being what it was, I never had the same manager for more than six months anyway, so by the time performance reviews came around, whoever my manager-du-jour happened to be based my performance review on the consistently negative things he was hearing from my coworkers. I couldn’t even defend myself by pointing to having accomplished what the previous manager told me to focus on, either: priority churn being what it was, most of it ended up being scrapped before it was used. I finally saw the writing on the wall and did a complete 180. I became the most helpful guy in the world. If anybody, ever, for any reason, asked for my help, I dropped whatever I was doing and focused on helping them until their problem was fixed. Performance reviews went from “needs serious improvement” to “exceeds expectations”. I rarely, if ever, finish anything that I’m actually supposed to be working on, and nobody cares. It’s all reputation, and mine is stellar. I haven’t said no in 20 years and I’ve never been more loved by corporate.

esotericn 7y ago

As a European (for now, oho) this doesn't surprise me at all. American working patterns are bonkers. You guys have this concept of 'vacation' which well, isn't. 15 days or whatever per year pretty much all just must either get banked for emergencies, admin, or maybe that one Mega Holiday where you fly across the world and spend a week or whatever trying to forget your life. I don't get it at all. It might make sense if you're a founder or whatever and you love your job. Most people are working to live, but there is no "live", because there's no time that isn't work. I'd rather be homeless. Can I choose to be homeless in Europe instead tho? ;)

tombert 7y ago
I'm genuinely curious; how many days do Europeans typically get?
- ludoo 7y ago
  20 days minimum by law in Italy (plus sick leave when needed), in practice though it's more like 28 days for most jobs. Excluding weekends and national holidays of course.
- notfromhere 7y ago
  4-5 weeks?
- tremon 7y ago
  The legal minimum in NL is (the equivalent of) four weeks per year (20 days on a 40 hours/week contract), so not that much more than US. Some fields (healthcare, construction, education) get more than that. However, none of that can be usurped by your employer for other things than vacation. For example, your employer isn't allowed to deduct pay or withhold vacation hours for doctor's visits during work hours. Major life events, like funerals or child births are paid leave. And for most professions, there's no such things as unpaid overtime: you work more hours, you either get more pay or receive more vacation hours.
  - jmpavlec 7y ago

tombert 7y ago

In Academia, it's not too uncommon for people to take extended sabbaticals to focus on a project without being distracted with work nonsense, but I haven't really heard of any company doing that in the US. I would love to take around a month every year just to focus on a purely technical problem instead of focussing 20% of my time in technical stuff, and 80% of my time going through bureaucratic hoops that seemingly have no reason to exist outside of creating a job for the bureaucrats. I have an OK job overall, but there's just a metric ton of approvals and paperwork that I end up having to do to actually write code, and as a result I get burnt out fairly often.

andy_boot 7y ago
I've taken 2 sabbaticals from work. In the UK at least most companies are totally fine with you doing this.
dillonmckay 7y ago
I believe Automattic offers this.
dominotw 7y ago
I took a sabbatical for couple of months last year and totally wasted the whole thing lazing around.
- olyjohn 7y ago
  That's not a waste at all. Sounds like you probably needed it.

heroHACK17 7y ago

I was let go from my first dev job (fresh out of college no less) and the couple of months following were actually some of the happiest days of my life. Despite being unemployed, I got my mojo back, taught myself a bunch of new shit unrelated to programming, and tried a lot of new things I wouldn't otherwise have tried. Oftentimes I wonder how I could have been so happy given the circumstances, but it finally dawned on me: getting let go obliterated any conscious or subconscious burnout I had been suffering. I felt like a person again.

thrownawayinusa 7y ago

I'm burnedout because I'm bored. I'm not a dev, I'm closer to a BI Analyst if anything. What I do is the epitome of bullshit jobs. The company would be wildly profitable if I just stopped showing up. Yet my reviews and feedback are always glowing even if I do 1 'thing' a week, and yeah 6 months down the line some finding I put into motion results in some marginal change somewhere. It's hard to feel the motivation to do more when the output feels irrelevant. I'd leave, but it'd be hard to match the benefits, salary, and work/life balance in my region. I know I need to change though because my skills are atrophying due to the ennui.

bpyne 7y ago

I feel burnt out regularly. Earlier in my career I loved reading about software development, both research and practice. But my job isn't particularly stressful. At some points, I feel stress at work, often due to a lack of control over the work environment and vision of the leadership. But they don't push me to work a lot of hours. We're encouraged to use our PTO. I think the issue, in American culture, is bigger than just employers and career choices. My wife and I discuss this subject often. The problem is that we are a two career couple who are raising a child in a culture that hasn't, and may never, adapt to not having one parent at home. Our society isn't setup for it. Vital services, like healthcare or simply furnace maintenance before Winter, require a person home from 9am-5pm. Doing so requires either working remotely or a promise to make up the time when you get back to the office. I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe working remotely will help. Maybe we need to postpone careers until kids are raised like my parents' generation did. (My wife is far better suited to a career. I would gladly volunteer to be at home if we didn't need both pays.)

tripzilch 7y ago

How do you burnout every week? Is that a new use of the word? As far as I know, burnout takes months if not years to recover from.

dredmorbius 7y ago

This ... article ... is awfully scarce on details concerning the study, authors, methods, or links to any of the above. There's a more direct link here, though still nothing on methods or sampling: http://web.archive.org/web/20191103070123/https://tollfreeforwarding.com/blog/stress-anxiety-and-exhaustion-the-extent-of-workplace-burnout-in-modern-america/ http://web.archive.org/web/20191103070123/https://tollfreefo...