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It's both. Burnout is when you invest too much emotionally in something or someone and don't get anything back from it. That can be because you have a steady

It's both. Burnout is when you invest too much emotionally in something or someone and don't get anything back from it. That can be because you have a steady stream of work items and none seem particularly important but you feel obligated to do each one. Or it can be because you labor on the same project for years and never complete it. Or it can be because you work hard and deliver but events outside your control make that delivery pointless. I'm an eng manager at a FAANG. I view my primary job to be saying "No, that doesn't matter." New bug comes in - if it's not a production outage or security bug, it can go in the bug queue and we can forget about it. Engineer says "But what about [edge case], now I have to worry about that too", I can say "No you don't. Ship it anyway." Request from another team comes in - "Sorry, we don't have engineering capacity for that." UX designer has a great new idea - "That's not feasible in the time and resource constraints we have." Probably doesn't make me very popular with other teams, users, or cross-functional partners, but my team (which had had recurrent problems with burnout and spinning their wheels before I joined) is being productive and delivering stuff and seems reasonably happy at work now.

asdfman123 3y ago
I’m an engineer at FAANG and it seems absurd, though, that we have so many resources but can’t apply some craftsmanship every so often. Instead, we churn out features, and everyone cheers when someone adds a new button to the UI.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  It's not rewarded by the performance review system (except at Apple). You can apply craftsmanship, it's just you won't get credit for it, your manager won't get credit for it, your VP won't get credit for it, and so on. That makes it a hard sell. A good manager's not going to penalize you for going above and beyond and fixing issues that you see, but it's hard to make a case for it when there's lots of other stuff to do and nobody important is going to notice the bugfix you just made. (And chances are, new bugs are just going to be introduced by some other team chasing the hot new feature.)
  - asdfman123 3y ago
    It’s also true that I can become a very good portrait painter, but that’s not going to be rewarded by my job either. Still, I do try to make quality software, so I can actually be proud of what I’m doing.
MrDresden 3y ago
On behalf of your team, thank you for taking good care of them. As someone who has been in a team situation without a good manager (where every little thing got highest priority) and subsequently got burned out (also my fault to get too emotionally invested in the work) along with most of the team, I know firsthand the damage that bad management can have on morale, throughput and quality.

asdfman123 3y ago

I’m an engineer at FAANG and it seems absurd, though, that we have so many resources but can’t apply some craftsmanship every so often. Instead, we churn out features, and everyone cheers when someone adds a new button to the UI.

nostrademons 3y ago
It's not rewarded by the performance review system (except at Apple). You can apply craftsmanship, it's just you won't get credit for it, your manager won't get credit for it, your VP won't get credit for it, and so on. That makes it a hard sell. A good manager's not going to penalize you for going above and beyond and fixing issues that you see, but it's hard to make a case for it when there's lots of other stuff to do and nobody important is going to notice the bugfix you just made. (And chances are, new bugs are just going to be introduced by some other team chasing the hot new feature.)
- asdfman123 3y ago
  It’s also true that I can become a very good portrait painter, but that’s not going to be rewarded by my job either. Still, I do try to make quality software, so I can actually be proud of what I’m doing.

MrDresden 3y ago

On behalf of your team, thank you for taking good care of them. As someone who has been in a team situation without a good manager (where every little thing got highest priority) and subsequently got burned out (also my fault to get too emotionally invested in the work) along with most of the team, I know firsthand the damage that bad management can have on morale, throughput and quality.