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When I've been burned out or hated my job, I didn't take vacations, because the crushing realization that I'd have to return to work was almost worse than losin

When I've been burned out or hated my job, I didn't take vacations, because the crushing realization that I'd have to return to work was almost worse than losing myself in the uninterrupted, repetitive, dead-eyed grind. While on vacation, I'd start thinking about the countdown to the end of the vacation. > Well, root out the real causes of burnout. I'll offer the definition that's made most sense to me. I didn't come up with it, in fact some wise person here on HN stated it: Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off. You can work like a dog to release a feature, and if the feature does what it was meant to do, and you get recognized for your contribution, how hard you worked doesn't matter as much. You are energized, excited to be part of a great team, ready to move on to the next stunning victory. On the other hand, if you work like a dog on a feature and it gets cut at the last minute, or its success is undermined by some VP's dumb idea, it sucks. If that happens over and over, without a win, you're burned out. The solution is to get a win. Work on something that you can succeed on, and succeed at it, and get rewarded for it. Could be a big thing, but even a small thing is good enough. Sounds easy, but not always even possible in a badly-run organization.

rahimnathwani 5y ago
"Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off." Exactly. Yet most people mistakenly attribute the feeling to other causes. OP quote what people think are the causes of their own burnout, and took those at face value. When you're burnt out, you're probably not in a good state to determine the cause.
- tinyhouse 5y ago
  Speak for yourself. Sorry for being blunt, but you clearly know very little about burnout (good for you). If people say that they are burned out because of a bad manager, believe them instead of saying they don't know what they are talking about. There are many reasons for burnout. Working on things that don't pay off is just one of them.
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    "you clearly know very little about burnout" You may disagree with my statement about the cause of burnout, and you may be correct about that. But it's unlikely you know enough about me to judge how much I know (or don't know) about burnout.
    - tinyhouse 5y ago
      You are right and I apologize. It also applies to your statement about other people.
    - Sharlin 5y ago
      But you yourself made the same error, claiming that lots of people are simply mistaken about the causes of their burnouts and that you know their condition better than themselves.
      - rahimnathwani 5y ago
        Our statements were qualitatively different. Compare: A) Each living human has 2 legs B) Sharlin has 2 legs Taken literally, B is a subset of A, so A is the stronger statement. But in normal speech, it's clear that when someone makes a claim about members of a large group, they're making a statement that usually applies to members of that group. And not claiming to have specific knowledge of every single member. Because statement B is more specific, I probably need more specific data before I make it.
  - le-mark 5y ago
    Can confirm, recently went from a great manager who always had our backs and celebrated our successes to one who offers zero support, plenty of blame and zero recognition. I’ve been surprised how devastating it’s been.
    - rahimnathwani 5y ago
      "plenty of blame and zero recognition" Does the amount of blame and recognition vary with the amount of effort you put in? I've seen situations like this, and seen people feel burnt out when: 1. However hard they work, they do not get blamed less or recognized more, or even 2. They are blamed more than people who contribute approximately zero. Because those people doing nothing have no output, hence nothing to be blamed for.
- 8note 5y ago
  I certainly get burned out from things that pay off, too
  - wonnage 5y ago
    sounds like a personal problem
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ketzo 5y ago
This really, really resonates with me. I've been trying to address my own feelings of burnout, and I think this is a big part of it. Frankly, it's been a while since I had a win. I think I'm gonna try to set myself up for a small success, and see how that goes. Thanks for this.
josh2600 5y ago
Great post. An addendum: people still burnout even when the org is succeeding (shipping products, hitting liquidity, etc.).
- jq-r 5y ago
  Oh definitely. Worked in a large company with so much money they didn't know what to do with it. But the number of experienced people leaving weekly was staggering. People would just burn out. And the management didn't give two shits about that. I wonder when this mismanagement will catch up with them as they are still growing.
f69281c 5y ago
>You can work like a dog to release a feature, and if the feature does what it was meant to do, and you get recognized for your contribution, how hard you worked doesn't matter as much. You are energized, excited to be part of a great team, ready to move on to the next stunning victory. Gross. All that overtime is systematically stamping all the things that are good for the soul out of life. I'm not going to cheer it on because a feature works.
- sul_tasto 5y ago
  Striving and succeeding at a personal goal is good for the soul. Feeling a sense of purpose at work and in life is good for the soul.
  - samsquire 5y ago
    I disagree. If your purpose only comes from work I find that kind of depressing. Work is something most people are coerced/forced into to survive and avoid a life of desperation, life has a lot more things in it than work. If someone's purpose is work it kind of makes me think they're not really creative, lack imagination and have had purpose given to them from external sources rather self decided and internal. They didn't really choose a purpose, they just adopted one they fell into. Kind of sad.
agumonkey 5y ago
> Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off. There's a lot to say about that. Sometime contexts creates obligations that render reward impossible, you only get a stream of wrong imperatives and lack of benefits. Sometimes people simply forget how to go for stuff they want. I lived a lot of my life conforming to others orders.. until nothing made sense emotionally. You forget what 'pay off' means for you. Very subtle, very hard. A lot of things in life are negotiating obligations and knowing how to recognize bad deals is key. Freedom is a rare asset :) Kids have this well set, all they care about is their internal sense of reward.. they'll move relentlessly from rewards to rewards until they're chokeful of them. Social structures blur this into innane amounts of duties that often are invented by morons higher up.
math-dev 5y ago
Great, great post. Agree completely and wasn’t aware of this until you wrote it down.
shoo 5y ago
Jennifer Senior's excellent article on burnout, "Can’t Get No Satisfaction" [1], contains this gem of a quote, from psychotherapist & burned-out burnout researcher Prof Barry Farber: > [...] their level of caring couldn’t be sustained in the absence of results > Farber often calls burnout “the gap between expectation and reward,” Also: > “My clients are perfectionists,” says Alden Cass, a therapist to both corporate attorneys and men on Wall Street. He’s young, about the age of a hungry broker, and he looks like the men he treats—strong features, dark teased hair, Turnbull & Asser striped shirt, nice watch. “They have very rigid ideals in terms of win-lose,” he continues. “Their expectations of success are through the roof, and when their reality doesn’t match up with their expectations, it leads to burnout—they leave no room for error or failure at all in their formula.” > Yet ask Cass why his clients are burning out, and his answer isn’t any different for a banker than it would be for a public-school teacher; there’s a gulf between what they expected from their jobs and what they got. “I can’t tell you,” he says, “how many people come into my office and ask, ‘How come I have this money and I can’t find happiness?’ ” > So what does he tell them? “That happiness equals reality divided by expectations.” [1] https://nymag.com/news/features/24757/ https://nymag.com/news/features/24757/
- m0zg 5y ago
  It's not even this for me, as much as it is feeling "trapped" in a situation. I like to keep my options open. When I feel trapped, I move on. "Rewards" can't keep me sane, and without sanity everything else loses meaning. Part of the reason why I got out of big tech: their MO is to keep you trapped, a compliant, good little cog wearing pretty, gold plated handcuffs. As an ex-Microsoft VP once told me: "it's a warm Gulag".
  - yoz-y 5y ago
    Wow. Comparing a cushy desk job with massive pay to a prison labour camp. By a millionaire no less…
    - m0zg 5y ago
      Doesn't matter how "cushy" it is or how big your paycheck is if you're depressed and going insane. That's the point.
giantg2 5y ago
"Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off." I agree but would add "lack of hope" to that. I have no hope that my job/career will get better.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  I’ll add a small insidious realization of what stress is. It’s one thing to work hard and feel tired after working hard, the causality is natural. It’s when you feel fatigue before you even start the work. Why am I tired before I even begin? That to me it’s a dead giveaway something is wrong. How do you solve that? We mythologized grit, the strength to overcome this preemptive fatigue. But even that, is fatiguing. Life’s a sport no matter what they say. Whoever doesn’t get tired of it, wins.
  - seg_lol 5y ago
    Grit is a scam to extract more value out of people you have convinced to play your game. Scratch to win!
    - runawaybottle 5y ago
      Sounds like 1776, I hear a rebellion.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    If it's something you love doing, then it energizes you. When you see your job as hopeless, that's where the pre-existing tiredness comes from. Just like the dread of even logging on.
  - danielheath 5y ago
    > How do you solve that? We mythologized grit, the strength to overcome this preemptive fatigue. Grit and flexibility are in tension with one another. Being able to accept an approach is unproductive and find another is valuable, in moderation (in excess you flit from task to task without completing any). Grit is the opposite; being unwilling to give up in the face of adversity is valuable in moderation, but in excess it prevents you from realising when your approach will never pay off.
muterad_murilax 5y ago
"Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off." That's the most work-centric definition of burnout I have ever seen.
- dnautics 5y ago
  You can work hard at a hobby, not have it pay off, and get burned out on that, too.
Trasmatta 5y ago
> because the crushing realization that I'd have to return to work was almost worse than losing myself in the uninterrupted, repetitive, dead-eyed grind I feel this so much. The anxiety of not working while dreading it on the horizon is often worse than the work itself.
bcrosby95 5y ago
When you say working hard, what does that mean? Not checking HN every other hour? Or working more hours per week?
t0mbstone 5y ago
What about people who build tons of successful things and get win after win after win, but are still feeling burned out? For me, a "win" would be accomplishing something and then getting to bask in the success and take a fucking break and do nothing for a year. Shoot, even being able to take a break for a month after busting my butt on a project for a year would be nice. But nope. You never really "finish" anything in software development. You just have an endless backlog of tickets in JIRA. If you get something done faster, you don't get any reward or payoff for doing so. I once finished my entire week's worth of planned work in two days and instead of being praised for it, I was chided for underestimating my sprint capacity. Did I get to take the rest of the week off? No! Of course not. I was expected to pull more tickets from the top of the backlog and just keep grinding.
- jrs235 5y ago
  A never ending backlog of work to be done. No rest. No jogging. Not even intervals/ladders (sprint a while, then jog a while and repeat). Just sprint. Sprint. Sprint. Until you burn out and collapse.
  - Fronzie 5y ago
    Well said. The agile/scrum methodologies in practice pushes people to do this: sprint, sprint, sprint.
  - filoeleven 5y ago
    Rich Hickey on sprints (30-second clip): https://youtu.be/zPT-DuG0UjU https://youtu.be/zPT-DuG0UjU
- thrav 5y ago
  I think your last paragraph is the key here. You “got the win” without actually getting the win. Instead of praise, reward, recognition — you got more work. I think the point above is that the win needs to be material beyond your own recognition.
- physicles 5y ago
  Are there companies that would let you take the rest of the week off in that situation? If so, shouldn’t they also make you work overtime to finish some work that you underestimated? Isn’t the trick to just work at a sustainable pace, day in and day out, and celebrate the wins along the way? All that said, in the last five years my longest holiday has been a week. The work really is endless.
davesque 5y ago
I think this could be exactly the correct definition of burnout. I'm sure a lot of us care about a lot of things in our lives... until we realize that no one else does.
aceazzameen 5y ago
This is me. I just quit my job this week to take time off because of burnout. It's exactly because I worked like a dog and haven't had a payoff in years. I want to make the best product/feature that I can. I want to give it my all. But I don't have control over the areas where things go wrong. Not having a win - and missing wins from my past - has led me to just take a break from it all.
emeraldd 5y ago
> Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off. You know, this might have something to do with why I gravitate towards doing "user" (really other devs since I tend to work on internal tools more than outside facing products) support type stuff. Devs trying to figure out why something isn't working are usually grateful when someone can help them get things working so they can do their job.
- physicles 5y ago
  Yeah, I’ve routinely found work on internal tools to be the most satisfying. It’s rare to find product work where you’re directly in touch with users who care, and whose expectations you can routinely meet.
beebmam 5y ago
There's one job in the US that is currently experiencing extremely high rates of burnout. ICU Nurses. What can we learn about burnout from them in this current situation? I don't think "Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off." applies for them in at all. They are constantly saving lives and constantly seeing the positive results of their actions. My first guess is that there's just too much work for them in the regions where ICUs which are overburdened. Many ICUs have had to up their nurse-to-patient ratio above 1:2, often to 1:3 and in some places even 1:5 or 1:6. Moreover, many ICU nurses are forced into picking up extra shifts.
- void_mint 5y ago
  I would argue that working really hard to keep people alive through covid while society continues to totally ignore and neglect precaution, thus causing further illness and death, is exactly fitting for "working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off".
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    I don't think it's fair to say that society completely ignores precaution, in fact large swaths of society are sacrificing a lot in order to prevent covid. Especially when you compare to other causes of death, like mobility or obesity. People are willing to sacrifice 100x more to prevent a covid death than they are to prevent a traffic death.
- Olreich 5y ago
  The payoff for ICU nurses is a new critical patient right now. They don’t get to see the lives they save reunited with family or recovering at all. They just get a transfer to a lower level of care and a new patient in. They are also seeing a lot more deaths than usual. 10% mortality is in the ballpark normally. With COVID they are seeing 50% mortality. That’s a lot to deal with, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a major factor in burnout.
  - mym1990 5y ago
jpswade 5y ago
Burnout is something that is discussed quite a lot, but people talk about it as working so hard that you fatigue. When we're working on something we enjoy and find interesting, when we have a plan and a goal, we find that we have infinite energy. Burnout on the other hand is when no matter how much you seem to work, it has no impact. You don't seem to be making any progress. Burnout is the loss of momentum. “Improved productivity also helps drive better employee work/life balance and reduces burnout“ - The State of DevOps 2019. According to the DORA research program, avoiding heavyweight change processes and creating an environment of continuous delivery go a long way to reducing burnout.
corobo 5y ago
The solution to burning out (not being able to work) is work? What happens if that something doesn't succeed? You're just describing the day to day that caused the burnout haha
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> The solution is to get a win My 28 days of paid vacation are my yearly win.

rahimnathwani 5y ago

"Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off." Exactly. Yet most people mistakenly attribute the feeling to other causes. OP quote what people think are the causes of their own burnout, and took those at face value. When you're burnt out, you're probably not in a good state to determine the cause.

tinyhouse 5y ago
Speak for yourself. Sorry for being blunt, but you clearly know very little about burnout (good for you). If people say that they are burned out because of a bad manager, believe them instead of saying they don't know what they are talking about. There are many reasons for burnout. Working on things that don't pay off is just one of them.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  "you clearly know very little about burnout" You may disagree with my statement about the cause of burnout, and you may be correct about that. But it's unlikely you know enough about me to judge how much I know (or don't know) about burnout.
  - tinyhouse 5y ago
    You are right and I apologize. It also applies to your statement about other people.
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    But you yourself made the same error, claiming that lots of people are simply mistaken about the causes of their burnouts and that you know their condition better than themselves.
    - rahimnathwani 5y ago
      Our statements were qualitatively different. Compare: A) Each living human has 2 legs B) Sharlin has 2 legs Taken literally, B is a subset of A, so A is the stronger statement. But in normal speech, it's clear that when someone makes a claim about members of a large group, they're making a statement that usually applies to members of that group. And not claiming to have specific knowledge of every single member. Because statement B is more specific, I probably need more specific data before I make it.
- le-mark 5y ago
  Can confirm, recently went from a great manager who always had our backs and celebrated our successes to one who offers zero support, plenty of blame and zero recognition. I’ve been surprised how devastating it’s been.
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    "plenty of blame and zero recognition" Does the amount of blame and recognition vary with the amount of effort you put in? I've seen situations like this, and seen people feel burnt out when: 1. However hard they work, they do not get blamed less or recognized more, or even 2. They are blamed more than people who contribute approximately zero. Because those people doing nothing have no output, hence nothing to be blamed for.
8note 5y ago
I certainly get burned out from things that pay off, too
- wonnage 5y ago
  sounds like a personal problem

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ketzo 5y ago

This really, really resonates with me. I've been trying to address my own feelings of burnout, and I think this is a big part of it. Frankly, it's been a while since I had a win. I think I'm gonna try to set myself up for a small success, and see how that goes. Thanks for this.

josh2600 5y ago

Great post. An addendum: people still burnout even when the org is succeeding (shipping products, hitting liquidity, etc.).

jq-r 5y ago
Oh definitely. Worked in a large company with so much money they didn't know what to do with it. But the number of experienced people leaving weekly was staggering. People would just burn out. And the management didn't give two shits about that. I wonder when this mismanagement will catch up with them as they are still growing.

f69281c 5y ago

>You can work like a dog to release a feature, and if the feature does what it was meant to do, and you get recognized for your contribution, how hard you worked doesn't matter as much. You are energized, excited to be part of a great team, ready to move on to the next stunning victory. Gross. All that overtime is systematically stamping all the things that are good for the soul out of life. I'm not going to cheer it on because a feature works.

sul_tasto 5y ago
Striving and succeeding at a personal goal is good for the soul. Feeling a sense of purpose at work and in life is good for the soul.
- samsquire 5y ago
  I disagree. If your purpose only comes from work I find that kind of depressing. Work is something most people are coerced/forced into to survive and avoid a life of desperation, life has a lot more things in it than work. If someone's purpose is work it kind of makes me think they're not really creative, lack imagination and have had purpose given to them from external sources rather self decided and internal. They didn't really choose a purpose, they just adopted one they fell into. Kind of sad.

agumonkey 5y ago

> Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off. There's a lot to say about that. Sometime contexts creates obligations that render reward impossible, you only get a stream of wrong imperatives and lack of benefits. Sometimes people simply forget how to go for stuff they want. I lived a lot of my life conforming to others orders.. until nothing made sense emotionally. You forget what 'pay off' means for you. Very subtle, very hard. A lot of things in life are negotiating obligations and knowing how to recognize bad deals is key. Freedom is a rare asset :) Kids have this well set, all they care about is their internal sense of reward.. they'll move relentlessly from rewards to rewards until they're chokeful of them. Social structures blur this into innane amounts of duties that often are invented by morons higher up.

math-dev 5y ago

Great, great post. Agree completely and wasn’t aware of this until you wrote it down.

shoo 5y ago

Jennifer Senior's excellent article on burnout, "Can’t Get No Satisfaction" [1], contains this gem of a quote, from psychotherapist & burned-out burnout researcher Prof Barry Farber: > [...] their level of caring couldn’t be sustained in the absence of results > Farber often calls burnout “the gap between expectation and reward,” Also: > “My clients are perfectionists,” says Alden Cass, a therapist to both corporate attorneys and men on Wall Street. He’s young, about the age of a hungry broker, and he looks like the men he treats—strong features, dark teased hair, Turnbull & Asser striped shirt, nice watch. “They have very rigid ideals in terms of win-lose,” he continues. “Their expectations of success are through the roof, and when their reality doesn’t match up with their expectations, it leads to burnout—they leave no room for error or failure at all in their formula.” > Yet ask Cass why his clients are burning out, and his answer isn’t any different for a banker than it would be for a public-school teacher; there’s a gulf between what they expected from their jobs and what they got. “I can’t tell you,” he says, “how many people come into my office and ask, ‘How come I have this money and I can’t find happiness?’ ” > So what does he tell them? “That happiness equals reality divided by expectations.” [1] https://nymag.com/news/features/24757/ https://nymag.com/news/features/24757/

m0zg 5y ago
It's not even this for me, as much as it is feeling "trapped" in a situation. I like to keep my options open. When I feel trapped, I move on. "Rewards" can't keep me sane, and without sanity everything else loses meaning. Part of the reason why I got out of big tech: their MO is to keep you trapped, a compliant, good little cog wearing pretty, gold plated handcuffs. As an ex-Microsoft VP once told me: "it's a warm Gulag".
- yoz-y 5y ago
  Wow. Comparing a cushy desk job with massive pay to a prison labour camp. By a millionaire no less…
  - m0zg 5y ago
    Doesn't matter how "cushy" it is or how big your paycheck is if you're depressed and going insane. That's the point.

giantg2 5y ago

"Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off." I agree but would add "lack of hope" to that. I have no hope that my job/career will get better.

runawaybottle 5y ago
I’ll add a small insidious realization of what stress is. It’s one thing to work hard and feel tired after working hard, the causality is natural. It’s when you feel fatigue before you even start the work. Why am I tired before I even begin? That to me it’s a dead giveaway something is wrong. How do you solve that? We mythologized grit, the strength to overcome this preemptive fatigue. But even that, is fatiguing. Life’s a sport no matter what they say. Whoever doesn’t get tired of it, wins.
- seg_lol 5y ago
  Grit is a scam to extract more value out of people you have convinced to play your game. Scratch to win!
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    Sounds like 1776, I hear a rebellion.
- giantg2 5y ago
  If it's something you love doing, then it energizes you. When you see your job as hopeless, that's where the pre-existing tiredness comes from. Just like the dread of even logging on.
- danielheath 5y ago
  > How do you solve that? We mythologized grit, the strength to overcome this preemptive fatigue. Grit and flexibility are in tension with one another. Being able to accept an approach is unproductive and find another is valuable, in moderation (in excess you flit from task to task without completing any). Grit is the opposite; being unwilling to give up in the face of adversity is valuable in moderation, but in excess it prevents you from realising when your approach will never pay off.

muterad_murilax 5y ago

"Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off." That's the most work-centric definition of burnout I have ever seen.

dnautics 5y ago
You can work hard at a hobby, not have it pay off, and get burned out on that, too.

Trasmatta 5y ago

> because the crushing realization that I'd have to return to work was almost worse than losing myself in the uninterrupted, repetitive, dead-eyed grind I feel this so much. The anxiety of not working while dreading it on the horizon is often worse than the work itself.

bcrosby95 5y ago

When you say working hard, what does that mean? Not checking HN every other hour? Or working more hours per week?

t0mbstone 5y ago

What about people who build tons of successful things and get win after win after win, but are still feeling burned out? For me, a "win" would be accomplishing something and then getting to bask in the success and take a fucking break and do nothing for a year. Shoot, even being able to take a break for a month after busting my butt on a project for a year would be nice. But nope. You never really "finish" anything in software development. You just have an endless backlog of tickets in JIRA. If you get something done faster, you don't get any reward or payoff for doing so. I once finished my entire week's worth of planned work in two days and instead of being praised for it, I was chided for underestimating my sprint capacity. Did I get to take the rest of the week off? No! Of course not. I was expected to pull more tickets from the top of the backlog and just keep grinding.

jrs235 5y ago
A never ending backlog of work to be done. No rest. No jogging. Not even intervals/ladders (sprint a while, then jog a while and repeat). Just sprint. Sprint. Sprint. Until you burn out and collapse.
- Fronzie 5y ago
  Well said. The agile/scrum methodologies in practice pushes people to do this: sprint, sprint, sprint.
- filoeleven 5y ago
  Rich Hickey on sprints (30-second clip): https://youtu.be/zPT-DuG0UjU https://youtu.be/zPT-DuG0UjU
thrav 5y ago
I think your last paragraph is the key here. You “got the win” without actually getting the win. Instead of praise, reward, recognition — you got more work. I think the point above is that the win needs to be material beyond your own recognition.
physicles 5y ago
Are there companies that would let you take the rest of the week off in that situation? If so, shouldn’t they also make you work overtime to finish some work that you underestimated? Isn’t the trick to just work at a sustainable pace, day in and day out, and celebrate the wins along the way? All that said, in the last five years my longest holiday has been a week. The work really is endless.

davesque 5y ago

I think this could be exactly the correct definition of burnout. I'm sure a lot of us care about a lot of things in our lives... until we realize that no one else does.

aceazzameen 5y ago

This is me. I just quit my job this week to take time off because of burnout. It's exactly because I worked like a dog and haven't had a payoff in years. I want to make the best product/feature that I can. I want to give it my all. But I don't have control over the areas where things go wrong. Not having a win - and missing wins from my past - has led me to just take a break from it all.

emeraldd 5y ago

> Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off. You know, this might have something to do with why I gravitate towards doing "user" (really other devs since I tend to work on internal tools more than outside facing products) support type stuff. Devs trying to figure out why something isn't working are usually grateful when someone can help them get things working so they can do their job.

physicles 5y ago
Yeah, I’ve routinely found work on internal tools to be the most satisfying. It’s rare to find product work where you’re directly in touch with users who care, and whose expectations you can routinely meet.

beebmam 5y ago

There's one job in the US that is currently experiencing extremely high rates of burnout. ICU Nurses. What can we learn about burnout from them in this current situation? I don't think "Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off." applies for them in at all. They are constantly saving lives and constantly seeing the positive results of their actions. My first guess is that there's just too much work for them in the regions where ICUs which are overburdened. Many ICUs have had to up their nurse-to-patient ratio above 1:2, often to 1:3 and in some places even 1:5 or 1:6. Moreover, many ICU nurses are forced into picking up extra shifts.

void_mint 5y ago
I would argue that working really hard to keep people alive through covid while society continues to totally ignore and neglect precaution, thus causing further illness and death, is exactly fitting for "working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off".
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  I don't think it's fair to say that society completely ignores precaution, in fact large swaths of society are sacrificing a lot in order to prevent covid. Especially when you compare to other causes of death, like mobility or obesity. People are willing to sacrifice 100x more to prevent a covid death than they are to prevent a traffic death.
Olreich 5y ago
The payoff for ICU nurses is a new critical patient right now. They don’t get to see the lives they save reunited with family or recovering at all. They just get a transfer to a lower level of care and a new patient in. They are also seeing a lot more deaths than usual. 10% mortality is in the ballpark normally. With COVID they are seeing 50% mortality. That’s a lot to deal with, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a major factor in burnout.
- mym1990 5y ago

jpswade 5y ago

Burnout is something that is discussed quite a lot, but people talk about it as working so hard that you fatigue. When we're working on something we enjoy and find interesting, when we have a plan and a goal, we find that we have infinite energy. Burnout on the other hand is when no matter how much you seem to work, it has no impact. You don't seem to be making any progress. Burnout is the loss of momentum. “Improved productivity also helps drive better employee work/life balance and reduces burnout“ - The State of DevOps 2019. According to the DORA research program, avoiding heavyweight change processes and creating an environment of continuous delivery go a long way to reducing burnout.

corobo 5y ago

The solution to burning out (not being able to work) is work? What happens if that something doesn't succeed? You're just describing the day to day that caused the burnout haha

peoplefromibiza 5y ago

> The solution is to get a win My 28 days of paid vacation are my yearly win.