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I suspect that burnout happens when you strive to achieve something for many years with singular focus on that thing and it fails to materialize no matter what

I suspect that burnout happens when you strive to achieve something for many years with singular focus on that thing and it fails to materialize no matter what you do. The way I've protected myself from it is that I never had singular focus on just one goal. I always had a dual goal of 1. Financial success and 2. Learning/self-improvement. This has worked out pretty well so far because I've learned a lot from financial failures so I get some satisfaction even when things don't work out. My problem now is that I've failed so much and learned so much that I'm starting to doubt that I can improve any more (it's not what I know, it's who I know which counts at this stage). It's like a machine learning model; it's possible to over-train it; beyond a certain amount, it becomes over-fitted to the training data and its performance starts to degrade. A lot of events which look like important lessons are in fact just random flukes and carry little useful information. After 15 years, I'm getting to the point that I feel like I'm done on the learning side and my focus is shifting more and more towards the financial side of the equation.

piva00 4y ago
> I suspect that burnout happens when you strive to achieve something for many years with singular focus on that thing and it fails to materialize no matter what you do. Not necessarily, at least not in my case. Burnout came from multiple layers of management slightly gaslighting the dev team by acknowledging the issues we brought up, acknowledging these issues were making us slow, that the product which came from the startup phase was full of bugs that got even worse when scaling up, and then just not listening to our suggestions on how to align the business plan with a technical health plan. Worse than that: fake listening and then just ignoring those suggestions on the next quarter planning as if they were never brought up, shoving down our throats their demands for features without regards to our technical notes on why it wouldn't be feasible for the next year with the current state of the codebase. It was extremely demoralising and demotivating, we were not chasing a complete refactoring, we weren't suggesting a 2nd system, we worked pretty hard to come up with a feasible plan for how we could achieve X business goal while needing to do Y technical aspect to properly scale and remove toil. We tracked how much time was spent on toil, how much that cost the company and how much we expected to save in the next 1-5 years depending on what suggestions and pace they bought into. It was a lot of effort to have hard data and facts, tracking code flows that were extremely convoluted and massively increased cognitive overload, etc. It never worked, every quarter the demands were to implement new features on top of the ball of mud while having to do constant firefights when, inevitably, the shit parts would break and our B2B customers would be ringing all alarms with the salespeople. It didn't come from years trying to achieve a goal, it came fast, in 2-3 quarters. They simply never listened to the people they hired as experts, I burned out and had to change jobs and it took more than a year to recover from it.
- underwater 4y ago
  > It was extremely demoralising and demotivating This rings true to me. And I think it extends beyond that to being dehumanised. In a work environment you are made to feel powerless to stop bad things from happening. That breaks us.
  - piva00 4y ago
    > And I think it extends beyond that to being dehumanised. Yes, I have to hard agree on that. It made me feel as a cog in a very dysfunctional and broken machine, being ground while watching the whole machine work, shaking and losing parts. When I opened up about my feelings (after starting therapy) I got so many messages from people wanting to share similar feelings... Being powerless while raising every flag possible about possible improvements was exhausting. I think the only thing that kept my sanity for 4 quarters was that I stopped caring and fixed all low-hanging fruits I could find. Until I got passive-aggressively berated for not delivering something on a timeline I didn't agree to at all, that triggered a kind of despair I haven't felt professionally and finally made me jump from the sinking ship. Cherry on top was getting a veiled threat during my exit interview to not talk about and share my experience with the larger org to "not hurt the ones I loved working with" there. Fuck. That.
    - ornornor 4y ago
      I think we were in very similar positions, minus the exit interview threats. Two weeks ago marked the one year anniversary of my checking out of that insane asylum and I still don’t feel like I’ll be able to be an employee ever again as a result. Could you share the strategy you used to 1. Look for your next job and ensuring a healthier environment and 2. Talking about that previous job in interviews without lying but also without raising red flags for the recruiter?
      - piva00 4y ago
        > Could you share the strategy you used to 1. Look for your next job and ensuring a healthier environment and 2. Talking about that previous job in interviews without lying but also without raising red flags for the recruiter? Unfortunately I don't think I will have much to help here as I simply moved from the child-org to the larger parent-org (that had acquired said child-org, I was actually hired by parent-org to work on improving the codebase of the acquisition) with the help of some amazing people, the larger org is much much healthier (actually one of the best places I've worked at) so I didn't have to hide anything I went through. The people that helped me had experienced the issues with me and lent me a hand to get out after they did, we still commiserate to this day on it... > I still don’t feel like I’ll be able to be an employee ever again as a result. Yeah, it's been taking me a year but I'm slowly getting back to my former self. Still I check out sometimes when things look harder than they should due to some politicking, I got an extreme aversion to any of it, even to the point where I don't try to sell my product or tech ideas because I feel exhausted just by the thought of it. It sucks for my career for now but I'm much healthier than a year ago... There's hope!
haswell 4y ago
> and it fails to materialize no matter what you do In my case, it was the exact opposite. It came after striving for a particular goal for several years, achieving it, and then realizing I had no gas left in the tank to do it all over again (product manager at a big SaaS/PaaS launching products within that platform). The part that's more interesting is why the tank was empty, and it was for many of the reasons mentioned in other comments: - Gaslighting by middle management about solving problems / addressing issues - Responsibility (loads of it) without authority - Lack of focus by execs (leading to massive churn) I do think that constantly striving for something and not achieving it can also be a cause of burnout, but I think it's just one of many possible causes / factors.
dredmorbius 4y ago
That's a possible trigger, but far from the only one.

piva00 4y ago

> I suspect that burnout happens when you strive to achieve something for many years with singular focus on that thing and it fails to materialize no matter what you do. Not necessarily, at least not in my case. Burnout came from multiple layers of management slightly gaslighting the dev team by acknowledging the issues we brought up, acknowledging these issues were making us slow, that the product which came from the startup phase was full of bugs that got even worse when scaling up, and then just not listening to our suggestions on how to align the business plan with a technical health plan. Worse than that: fake listening and then just ignoring those suggestions on the next quarter planning as if they were never brought up, shoving down our throats their demands for features without regards to our technical notes on why it wouldn't be feasible for the next year with the current state of the codebase. It was extremely demoralising and demotivating, we were not chasing a complete refactoring, we weren't suggesting a 2nd system, we worked pretty hard to come up with a feasible plan for how we could achieve X business goal while needing to do Y technical aspect to properly scale and remove toil. We tracked how much time was spent on toil, how much that cost the company and how much we expected to save in the next 1-5 years depending on what suggestions and pace they bought into. It was a lot of effort to have hard data and facts, tracking code flows that were extremely convoluted and massively increased cognitive overload, etc. It never worked, every quarter the demands were to implement new features on top of the ball of mud while having to do constant firefights when, inevitably, the shit parts would break and our B2B customers would be ringing all alarms with the salespeople. It didn't come from years trying to achieve a goal, it came fast, in 2-3 quarters. They simply never listened to the people they hired as experts, I burned out and had to change jobs and it took more than a year to recover from it.

underwater 4y ago
> It was extremely demoralising and demotivating This rings true to me. And I think it extends beyond that to being dehumanised. In a work environment you are made to feel powerless to stop bad things from happening. That breaks us.
- piva00 4y ago
  > And I think it extends beyond that to being dehumanised. Yes, I have to hard agree on that. It made me feel as a cog in a very dysfunctional and broken machine, being ground while watching the whole machine work, shaking and losing parts. When I opened up about my feelings (after starting therapy) I got so many messages from people wanting to share similar feelings... Being powerless while raising every flag possible about possible improvements was exhausting. I think the only thing that kept my sanity for 4 quarters was that I stopped caring and fixed all low-hanging fruits I could find. Until I got passive-aggressively berated for not delivering something on a timeline I didn't agree to at all, that triggered a kind of despair I haven't felt professionally and finally made me jump from the sinking ship. Cherry on top was getting a veiled threat during my exit interview to not talk about and share my experience with the larger org to "not hurt the ones I loved working with" there. Fuck. That.
  - ornornor 4y ago
    I think we were in very similar positions, minus the exit interview threats. Two weeks ago marked the one year anniversary of my checking out of that insane asylum and I still don’t feel like I’ll be able to be an employee ever again as a result. Could you share the strategy you used to 1. Look for your next job and ensuring a healthier environment and 2. Talking about that previous job in interviews without lying but also without raising red flags for the recruiter?
    - piva00 4y ago
      > Could you share the strategy you used to 1. Look for your next job and ensuring a healthier environment and 2. Talking about that previous job in interviews without lying but also without raising red flags for the recruiter? Unfortunately I don't think I will have much to help here as I simply moved from the child-org to the larger parent-org (that had acquired said child-org, I was actually hired by parent-org to work on improving the codebase of the acquisition) with the help of some amazing people, the larger org is much much healthier (actually one of the best places I've worked at) so I didn't have to hide anything I went through. The people that helped me had experienced the issues with me and lent me a hand to get out after they did, we still commiserate to this day on it... > I still don’t feel like I’ll be able to be an employee ever again as a result. Yeah, it's been taking me a year but I'm slowly getting back to my former self. Still I check out sometimes when things look harder than they should due to some politicking, I got an extreme aversion to any of it, even to the point where I don't try to sell my product or tech ideas because I feel exhausted just by the thought of it. It sucks for my career for now but I'm much healthier than a year ago... There's hope!

haswell 4y ago

> and it fails to materialize no matter what you do In my case, it was the exact opposite. It came after striving for a particular goal for several years, achieving it, and then realizing I had no gas left in the tank to do it all over again (product manager at a big SaaS/PaaS launching products within that platform). The part that's more interesting is why the tank was empty, and it was for many of the reasons mentioned in other comments: - Gaslighting by middle management about solving problems / addressing issues - Responsibility (loads of it) without authority - Lack of focus by execs (leading to massive churn) I do think that constantly striving for something and not achieving it can also be a cause of burnout, but I think it's just one of many possible causes / factors.

dredmorbius 4y ago

That's a possible trigger, but far from the only one.