> What’s even stranger are the many reports of burnout from people early in their career. High-power-track jobs like banking and law are scrambling to keep thei

> What’s even stranger are the many reports of burnout from people early in their career. High-power-track jobs like banking and law are scrambling to keep their young workers from quitting. I think I know what's going on here. I've been learning machining for the past couple years. The first thing you learn are feeds and speeds, and everyone tells you to look them up in the Machinery's Handbook. What they don't tell you is that the feeds and speeds there are targeted at high volume industrial output; how to turn every watt of electricity you put into your 5 million dollar CNC machine into profit. It targets a 15 minute tool life. If you're making $10,000 parts 24/7, then buying a new drill every 15 minutes is nothing. But it isn't what hobbyists want; their machines can't drive the tool that hard, and they don't have the money to buy new tools every 15 minutes. (To be fair, 15 minutes is not as short as it sounds, which is why you can get away with using their feeds and speeds as a hobbyist.) Similarly, I think the software engineering practices project management techniques that we commonly use have similar "15 minute engineer life" targets, it's just that nobody knows that. A big problem that project management tooling tries to address is "student syndrome". That's where someone gives you 3 weeks to do a 2 week project, and humans naturally spend two weeks slacking off and then 1 week doing 50% of the project. The "solution" is to just give you only one week to do the project. It's half done, whatever, but at least you didn't slack off for two weeks. Unfortunately, you do that for a year and then burn out. There is never the mental satisfaction of a job well done, there is only more work and constant negotiating for the time and space in which to do the work. Basically, they think that people will have 40 year careers, but run them at feeds and speeds that only let them last for 15 minutes. Of course everyone is quitting due to burn out, and "lying flat" instead.