4 ms·

Things contributing to my own (severe) burnout: 1 - Lack of variety, leading to boredom. After decades in the industry, I'm super bored with the things I know

Things contributing to my own (severe) burnout: 1 - Lack of variety, leading to boredom. After decades in the industry, I'm super bored with the things I know, and not in the least bit interested in learning more technical minutia of whatever flavor... pretty much all of it feels the same. The things I'm still interested in (like Scheme) are pretty obscure, so I'm unlikely to ever get to work with them. I hate all the mainstream tech stacks, but that's where the overwhelming majority of work is. 2 - I don't care about what the company does. 99.9% of the time, the real goal is to make some extremely rich people even richer. Couldn't care less. I'm not sure that even if I worked for a non-profit doing work I thought was important that it would translate to my own job being something I wanted to do. 3 - Chronic understaffing, crazy time pressure, and lack of resources. This is endemic in the tech field. Count yourself incredibly lucky if you don't have to face this day in and day out for years on end. It's even worse when you know the company you're working for is making money hand over fist and they could easily afford to hire more people, treat them better, and get more resources, but you know they'd rather funnel that money in to the pockets of those at the top. 4 - Lies and corporate BS. From bullshit cheerleading and pep talks from upper management that a child would be stupid to believe, to time wasting, useless policies, to outright lying and two-facedness that's super common in the industry. Who wants to deal with this? 5 - Depression. This doesn't help. The best job I ever had was working part time in a tiny company where it was just me and the owner. He was a super nice guy, we got along great and just did what needed to be done. No corporate BS, no policies, no lies, and back then I wasn't burnt out yet, so working on tech stuff still seemed interesting. After burning out on tech I really should have switched to another career (completely outside of tech)... or even tried management, but I never did, and my skills have atrophied so I'm super rusty and out of it regarding the newer buzzword technologies.. though I'd like to think that I still have good troubleshooting skills and can learn anything.. if I cared.. but I don't.

wiz21c 5y ago
The company BS is unbelievable. I would love to hear how the company justifies that BS. They never do and because of that, I have to add the fact that I don't understand why the BS exists. So it doubles the pain: it sounds BS and I can't explain what purpose it serves...
wpietri 5y ago
> I'm not sure that even if I worked for a non-profit doing work I thought was important that it would translate to my own job being something I wanted to do. Hi! I've worked for a few non-profits over the years. They are no panacea! Many businesses at least have a clear success mode: do good things for people and they'll pay you so you can do more good things for them. But the business model of many non-profits is something like, "Sell good feelings to rich people, and then use the surplus to Do Good." This is a much messier feedback loop, and it's very hard to build a precise enough agreement of what "Good" means to prioritize and focus. And big-dollar donations often come with strings attached, meaning it can end up feeling like the problems you get in early enterprise software companies, where the tail wags the dog. All kinds of organization have problems with the sorts of people who really want to be in charge. It's true that non-profits have fewer very greedy people, but they have at least as many people who want to be famous. Or who enjoy exercising power in a hierarchy. That said, I know people who have found the right circumstances and have had great jobs. And one of the benefits of every non-profit I've worked for is that the people are great. Smart, dedicated, caring, and mission driven. So although nobody should think of it as utopia, I'd encourage people to check it them out.
- sbarre 5y ago
  I have also found that non-profits can become a home to "useless zealots", a perhaps unkind but in my experience accurate term. They work there because they really believe in the non-profit's cause, but they are not good at their job. They are either loved or tolerated by leadership because of their belief in the cause, but typically cause more problems than they fix, and can be very difficult to deal with.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Ooh, interesting. I haven't seen that, but totally get how it happens.
- lupire 5y ago
  If you don't need money (permanently or temporarily) as a techie, don't work a job for a nonprofit. If you want to help people, take time off your high paying corporate job to contribute to free software, or run a forum website, or do citizen data journalism.
sdo72 5y ago
This list has everything I face as well. Even the best working job was with a tiny company which was my own and my partner. I see almost everyone is forced to lie in the corp world. Corp world like people to lie. The thought of switching career came to me a few times after my startup but quickly died because those careers can't never meet the decent salary to support my life and my family, and I've been living quite frugal already, nowhere near luxurious.
BaseballPhysics 5y ago
> After burning out on tech I really should have switched to another career... or even tried management Just a tip from someone who made that jump: If those five things you listed contributed to your burnout, trust me, moving into management won't help. 1. Management is the same damn slog day after day. You deal with people acting like children, senior management who lack any coherent vision and don't know what they're doing, colleagues who were Peter Principle'd into their roles, and on and on. It's unrelenting. 2. Being a manager is just doing work to make rich people richer, but with extra steps. 3. Imagine being a manager! You keep hearing you're understaffed, that there's enormous time pressure, that you lack resources, that your staff are frustrated, unmotivated, burned out. If you're a good manager you care and desperately want to help. But you can't do a god damned thing about it because the executives don't give a damn. 4. You're literally in the middle of this. As a middle manager you have the choice to parrot the upper management crap, or tell it like it is. Neither is great. And that's ignoring the politics, and the pointless policies, the endless process... 5. That's invariant. The real issue is that a lot of companies are simply toxic places to work. The job doesn't change that. Whether you're an individual contributor on the ground or a manager trying to improve the lives of your staff, if the company sucks, it sucks for everyone. The truth is: not all companies suck that badly. Or, at least, they all suck in different ways. As you yourself have realized, the trick is finding that place that fits for you.
- aqme28 5y ago
  This is another issue though. Nothing burns you out quite like realizing that you don't even want your boss's job. It makes your career feel hopeless.
  - BaseballPhysics 5y ago
    > This is another issue though. Nothing burns you out quite like realizing that you don't even want your boss's job. It makes your career feel hopeless. Yes. Yes it does.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "Nothing burns you out quite like realizing that you don't even want your boss's job." As much as I hated my last job, I thought my boss' job was even worse because of all the corporate BS he had to constantly put up with. He seemed to love his job despite that, though. Also, some of my colleagues (who'd been working for decades, just like me) seem to still love it and thrive on the stuff that made me want to quit and demotivated me. I'm fascinated with how some people like them are able to persevere and thrive in the same situations that make people like me quit and burn out. I still don't know their secret.
nine_zeros 5y ago
Quote from Office Space: http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3u7bxz http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3u7bxz
AlwaysRock 5y ago
I had a great eng job at a tiny consulting company. Very relaxed. No pressure other than the occasional state deadline. We just used meh tech and the pay was 25%+ lower than what you would expect. It was perfect but if the salary was better I probably would have stayed for 10 years. Much of the staff had.
BeetleB 5y ago
> Chronic understaffing, crazy time pressure, and lack of resources. This is endemic in the tech field. Plenty of SW jobs where this is not a problem (some even have good pay, not FAANG level, though). Go interview, and ask questions during the interview about it. Questions I've asked: 1. I don't check my email when I go home (unless there's a cross-geo meeting or something). Is that workable with this job? 2. What is the cycle of work like? How often do you work more than 40 hours a week? Is it regular, continuous work or are there crunch times? 3. Do you have on-call work? (If yes, probe into details - some on call work is terrible, but I've been on interviews where the person said he got a call only 3 times in a whole year).
- francisofascii 5y ago
  This. The tech, role, salary, and checklists like the Joel Test are less important to me now, than questions like this.
- tkiolp4 5y ago
  The problem about being oncall is not how many times you get called, it’s that you cannot plan anything in your free time without having to take your laptop with you.
  - mparnisari 5y ago
    For me is the other way around, i don't mind taking my laptop everywhere, but i loathe getting a page at 3am
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    Then ask how often one is on call. One week out of every 4 weeks? 8 weeks? 12 weeks? I share your concern - it's why I've never taken an on call job. But I've still interviewed for some and am willing to babysit a laptop once every 6-8 weeks if they typically get a small number of calls - provided there are other benefits to the job (learn something new, higher pay, etc).

wiz21c 5y ago

The company BS is unbelievable. I would love to hear how the company justifies that BS. They never do and because of that, I have to add the fact that I don't understand why the BS exists. So it doubles the pain: it sounds BS and I can't explain what purpose it serves...

wpietri 5y ago

> I'm not sure that even if I worked for a non-profit doing work I thought was important that it would translate to my own job being something I wanted to do. Hi! I've worked for a few non-profits over the years. They are no panacea! Many businesses at least have a clear success mode: do good things for people and they'll pay you so you can do more good things for them. But the business model of many non-profits is something like, "Sell good feelings to rich people, and then use the surplus to Do Good." This is a much messier feedback loop, and it's very hard to build a precise enough agreement of what "Good" means to prioritize and focus. And big-dollar donations often come with strings attached, meaning it can end up feeling like the problems you get in early enterprise software companies, where the tail wags the dog. All kinds of organization have problems with the sorts of people who really want to be in charge. It's true that non-profits have fewer very greedy people, but they have at least as many people who want to be famous. Or who enjoy exercising power in a hierarchy. That said, I know people who have found the right circumstances and have had great jobs. And one of the benefits of every non-profit I've worked for is that the people are great. Smart, dedicated, caring, and mission driven. So although nobody should think of it as utopia, I'd encourage people to check it them out.

sbarre 5y ago
I have also found that non-profits can become a home to "useless zealots", a perhaps unkind but in my experience accurate term. They work there because they really believe in the non-profit's cause, but they are not good at their job. They are either loved or tolerated by leadership because of their belief in the cause, but typically cause more problems than they fix, and can be very difficult to deal with.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Ooh, interesting. I haven't seen that, but totally get how it happens.
lupire 5y ago
If you don't need money (permanently or temporarily) as a techie, don't work a job for a nonprofit. If you want to help people, take time off your high paying corporate job to contribute to free software, or run a forum website, or do citizen data journalism.

sdo72 5y ago

This list has everything I face as well. Even the best working job was with a tiny company which was my own and my partner. I see almost everyone is forced to lie in the corp world. Corp world like people to lie. The thought of switching career came to me a few times after my startup but quickly died because those careers can't never meet the decent salary to support my life and my family, and I've been living quite frugal already, nowhere near luxurious.

BaseballPhysics 5y ago

> After burning out on tech I really should have switched to another career... or even tried management Just a tip from someone who made that jump: If those five things you listed contributed to your burnout, trust me, moving into management won't help. 1. Management is the same damn slog day after day. You deal with people acting like children, senior management who lack any coherent vision and don't know what they're doing, colleagues who were Peter Principle'd into their roles, and on and on. It's unrelenting. 2. Being a manager is just doing work to make rich people richer, but with extra steps. 3. Imagine being a manager! You keep hearing you're understaffed, that there's enormous time pressure, that you lack resources, that your staff are frustrated, unmotivated, burned out. If you're a good manager you care and desperately want to help. But you can't do a god damned thing about it because the executives don't give a damn. 4. You're literally in the middle of this. As a middle manager you have the choice to parrot the upper management crap, or tell it like it is. Neither is great. And that's ignoring the politics, and the pointless policies, the endless process... 5. That's invariant. The real issue is that a lot of companies are simply toxic places to work. The job doesn't change that. Whether you're an individual contributor on the ground or a manager trying to improve the lives of your staff, if the company sucks, it sucks for everyone. The truth is: not all companies suck that badly. Or, at least, they all suck in different ways. As you yourself have realized, the trick is finding that place that fits for you.

aqme28 5y ago
This is another issue though. Nothing burns you out quite like realizing that you don't even want your boss's job. It makes your career feel hopeless.
- BaseballPhysics 5y ago
  > This is another issue though. Nothing burns you out quite like realizing that you don't even want your boss's job. It makes your career feel hopeless. Yes. Yes it does.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "Nothing burns you out quite like realizing that you don't even want your boss's job." As much as I hated my last job, I thought my boss' job was even worse because of all the corporate BS he had to constantly put up with. He seemed to love his job despite that, though. Also, some of my colleagues (who'd been working for decades, just like me) seem to still love it and thrive on the stuff that made me want to quit and demotivated me. I'm fascinated with how some people like them are able to persevere and thrive in the same situations that make people like me quit and burn out. I still don't know their secret.

nine_zeros 5y ago

Quote from Office Space: http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3u7bxz http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3u7bxz

AlwaysRock 5y ago

I had a great eng job at a tiny consulting company. Very relaxed. No pressure other than the occasional state deadline. We just used meh tech and the pay was 25%+ lower than what you would expect. It was perfect but if the salary was better I probably would have stayed for 10 years. Much of the staff had.

BeetleB 5y ago

> Chronic understaffing, crazy time pressure, and lack of resources. This is endemic in the tech field. Plenty of SW jobs where this is not a problem (some even have good pay, not FAANG level, though). Go interview, and ask questions during the interview about it. Questions I've asked: 1. I don't check my email when I go home (unless there's a cross-geo meeting or something). Is that workable with this job? 2. What is the cycle of work like? How often do you work more than 40 hours a week? Is it regular, continuous work or are there crunch times? 3. Do you have on-call work? (If yes, probe into details - some on call work is terrible, but I've been on interviews where the person said he got a call only 3 times in a whole year).

francisofascii 5y ago
This. The tech, role, salary, and checklists like the Joel Test are less important to me now, than questions like this.
tkiolp4 5y ago
The problem about being oncall is not how many times you get called, it’s that you cannot plan anything in your free time without having to take your laptop with you.
- mparnisari 5y ago
  For me is the other way around, i don't mind taking my laptop everywhere, but i loathe getting a page at 3am
- BeetleB 5y ago
  Then ask how often one is on call. One week out of every 4 weeks? 8 weeks? 12 weeks? I share your concern - it's why I've never taken an on call job. But I've still interviewed for some and am willing to babysit a laptop once every 6-8 weeks if they typically get a small number of calls - provided there are other benefits to the job (learn something new, higher pay, etc).