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Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout
- Aeolun 2y agoI mean, it's hard to not feel burned out when your day consists of process, navigating politics, and implementing ideas that are clearly doomed to fail. It's a lot better than homelessness though.
- killjoywashere 2y ago> It's a lot better than homelessness though. Yeah, I feel like more people in the developed world should go spend quality time with the least among us, the homeless, and folks in the developing world. A lot of people with burnout will find themselves skipping to work. Because at least you're not living in trees with insects and hollowing out a log to sail to another island to get your special needs kid to a doctor on another island 600 miles away. (one of infinite specific stories I'm familiar with).
- _yb2s 2y agoI have spent extended periods of time living and traveling on really small 15-17ft sailboats with no electricity or modern tech together with a young kid, and never miss anything about modern life. I feel so much healthier and happier using my body and being outdoors vs in my usual desk job. To be fair I have a job, home, and health care waiting for me if anything goes wrong. But I am certain this isn’t just simple romanticism- living simply outdoors drastically improves my mental health, it is giving me something I need that modern life lacks- possibly the combo of natural light, constant exercise, and no chronic stress. It is physically demanding and often very uncomfortable- and I don’t mind because I feel so much more alive and engaged. If I did not have a family to support, and a career that I feel is important, I am certain I would be happier just living simply and mostly outdoors.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sandwitches 2y ago[dead]
- harimau777 2y agoI think that it's possible that isn't true. Perhaps the areas where people in the developed world are worse off (micromanagement, family, home ownership, etc.) are more important to avoiding burnout than the "comfort" that the developed world generally excels at providing. Stated another way, it is possible that burnout isn't determined by some overall sense of "how difficult is life" but is instead caused by life being difficult in specific ways.
- _yb2s 2y agoPeople seem to confuse physical comfort with happiness and good mental health when they aren't the same at all. Extreme physical discomfort, or lack of food/water/shelter are awful, but they don't specifically cause burnout. And people don't start "skipping to work" just because they know someone else is less comfortable, when they are worn down from years of chronic stress.
- theshackleford 2y agoI’ve been homeless. I’ve also been burned out. Being homeless did not magically prevent me from becoming burned out in another stage of my life.
- dexwiz 2y agoThis sentiment seems a lot like the “you have it great, there are starving kids in X who have it much worse” meme I often heard growing up. It encourages minimizing one’s problems, which can lead to all sorts of mental health issues. Thinking like this causes me to ignore real issues for too long, because someone else has it worse. It’s like gratitude’s evil twin of an emotion. But we should respect ourselves and strive for better lives, even if they are already good compared to others.
- sandwitches 2y ago[dead]
- Aeolun 2y agoSure, but it’s all the same in large corporations. I might be happier in a smaller company, but they pay correspondingly less. I need to pay for a house and education. It’s depressing, but not depressing enough to throw away my children’s future.
- mschuster91 2y ago> It's a lot better than homelessness though. Yeah and that is why the lobbying power against housing-first, guaranteed/subsidized housing, basic income, unemployment benefits or healthcare not tied to workplaces and whatnot is so strong. The only thing that keeps people from voting with their feet and leaving their toxic employers is the threat of losing healthcare and housing. Take that power away from the employers, and a lot will change on its own.
- jmcmichael 2y agoHomelessness serves as excellent motivation for us to sacrifice our bodies and minds on the behalf of our employers’ profit. Poverty isn’t an unfortunate side effect of resource mis-allocation at the margins of society, but a necessary feature of the institutional mechanisms that burn out generations, keeping the bread and circuses going.
- bdcravens 2y agoMost people don't have "fulfilling" jobs. They have a paycheck. A very small percentage of Americans, let alone those around the world, have the privilege of analyzing how their job makes them feel. I get paid great money to play with computers. My father was an elementary school janitor.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- marginalia_nu 2y agoBig part of the problem is arguably alienation. A janitorial job can be rewarding because you can see that you are making a difference in the world. You get to meet the people whose lives are improved by what you do, every day. Filling out spreadsheets, it can be hard to tell what the purpose of what you are doing, whom it benefits, and how the world would be worse off if you simply didn't show up.
- GiorgioG 2y agoAt least in software it's not alienation, it's never-ending hamster-wheel of sprint after sprint of delivering features by cutting corners atop of existing cut corners.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoWhy do you think that isn't alienating? What you describe makes it almost impossible not to be alienated from your work output (and your company).
- drewcoo 2y agoDo you say that as someone who's been a janitor or is this only fantasy janitoring?
- twojacobtwo 2y agoThis is a large part of my experience of burnout. Perhaps not so much alienation, as i understand it, but what you say in your last paragraph resonates with what really sticks in my mind when I'm starting to feel burnout. I end up having to endlessly push the idea of the pointlessness of my work out of my mind and that becomes a form of additional mental 'overhead', so to speak.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- marcus0x62 2y agoI have no doubt that BCG will be more than happy to help anyone troubled by the implications of this "research" with an "engagement" to study and reduce burnout in their organization. For a nominal fee of course. I have even less doubt that said engagement would not lead to more fulfilled employees given that the MBB consulting cargo cult has arguably given us the modern corporate culture that leads to such prevalent levels of burnout in the first place.
- twojacobtwo 2y agoWhat does MBB mean in this context?
- esprehn 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(management_consultancies) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(management_consul...
- twojacobtwo 2y agoMuch appreciated.
- theIV 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(management_consultancies) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(management_consulta...
- twojacobtwo 2y agoThank you :)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Handprint4469 2y ago> on average, 48% of workers from eight countries indicate that they are currently grappling with burnout. > Based on a survey of 11,000 desk-based and frontline workers in eight countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, UK, and US) The actual report[0] doesn't even mention _how_ they measured burnout, only that "The survey captured self-reported data". [0] https://www.bcg.com/publications/2024/four-keys-to-boosting-inclusion-and-beating-burnout https://www.bcg.com/publications/2024/four-keys-to-boosting-...
- darkwater 2y agoIsn't almost every burnout condition based on self-reporting? There are case where it creates psychosomatic effects but most cases people just express how they feel about their job, no?
- Handprint4469 2y agoYes, the problem is not the self-reporting, but rather the lack of details on how they measured it.
- twojacobtwo 2y agoThey seem to rely on a corelation to feelings of inclusion. > That’s because our research has revealed that burnout—which has historically been considered a consequence of long hours, a physically demanding job, or a high-stress environment—is also highly correlated with low feelings of inclusion. Essentially, employees who are more burned out feel less included at work. And for determining inclusion they say the following: > For this research, we quantified inclusion as a score of how inclusive an employee finds the workplace to be, using BCG’s BLISS Index, a statistically rigorous tool that identifies the factors that most strongly influence feelings of inclusion in the workplace.
- 23B1 2y ago- Good access to resources - Senior managerial support - Psychological safety with direct manager - Fair and equal opportunity for success These are all leadership solves. Not process solves, not spending solves. Leadership. It's ironic that consultancies like BCG – who are masters of technocratic administration, would post this! Innovation excellence is great. Technical excellence is great. You also need soft-skills excellence; People who can find the right mix of skills, resources, and motivation. This is an actual specialty, and though it be steeped in the 'soft' sciences, a bleak reality of getting humans into groups to achieve a common goal. When it works well, you get the A-Team. When it doesn't you get Game of Thrones.
- btbuildem 2y agoThey cater to their audience. And, they would not dare to suggest anything that costs money.
- phil21 2y agoThe funny/ironic thing is, all those items tend to be the first to go when management experiences personal burn-out themselves. I wonder how much burn-out is transferred downwards due to this phenomena.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago"leadership solves" Perhaps there is increasing number of psychopaths in leadership positions?
- 23B1 2y agoThe highest rate of psychopathy I've experienced was amongst technologists thrust into leadership positions; they believe that people are tools, and thus reduce them to numbers, that everything can be operationalized and optimized, including the human mind. It's a spiderman-pointing-meme. Workers blame management who blame workers ad infinitum. Both workers and managers need to understand how to break that cycle and it's through leadership – which isn't something that is correlated with altitude in the org chart.
- jimmar 2y agoIf I can give any advice in this area in a late mid-stage career, find a way to have productive conversations with your supervisor/manager. After about a decade of working in IT, I felt burnt out and left to pursue a PhD. Pursuing a PhD was my high academic achiever's way of dealing with burnout by doing something more intellectually stimulating. But 10 years into a career in academia, the symptoms of burnout can still creep up. But I'm mature enough now to speak up and make sure that I can continue working at a sustainable pace.
- brutus1213 2y agoAc actual academic career is the WORST in terms of burn-out. I was writing paper reviews at 4am. People I know who are professors board planes with a pile of papers to read or review. Midnight meetings to discuss conference organization. Add in the pressure of publish or perish.
- JR1427 2y agoI second that academia can be terrible for burnout. In an experimental subject, experiments that can take months to prepare can fail for reasons that you can't do much about, and all you can do is start over. I used to describe this feeling to my wife as if sometimes someone would come along from time to time and wipe your hard drive. Even though my current job can be a grind, at least we rarely have to just throw away work.
- smithrj 2y agoI used to think my burnout was from long hours, but I recently got a chance to work on a greenfield project at work and loved every second of the 60-70h weeks just building something really cool with a small team. The burnout nearly vanished during this time and only recently has started to reappear and I have a much better understanding now of what causes burnout for me specifically.
- H8crilA 2y agoIf there is any causation in a particular case it's often the other way around: burnout can cause long working hours.
- BobbyTables2 2y agoIndeed. The excitement of an interesting greenfield project is hard to beat. Works seems better than play on those days. The harder the task, the better! In all modesty, I feel I can be a 10X or 100X on such, but it’s hard to let go and end up thinking about work constantly after hours too. But when the task is to update documentation or fix a random test pipeline failure on a Legacy product, the energy doesn’t come so easily…
- AlexanderDhoore 2y agoIs it normal in the US for software developers to work 60-70 hour weeks? I understand this is the case in hip startup culture, but what about normal, boring companies? I work as an embedded software developer in Belgium, and here 40 hours is normal.
- sandwitches 2y agoNo, that's an insane workload. Your employer doesn't even deserve 40 hours, let alone 70. Jesus, people, live your lives instead of toiling for the rich people who will take from you until you keel over.
- shrimp_emoji 2y agoWork fortifies the spirit!
- mschuster91 2y agoYeah no shit. Corporate work has gotten a hellscape. Work got ever more compressed as ever more oh so minute details are being constantly tracked and evaluated - just look at Amazon warehouse workers, your average callcenter staff, or truckers, once the "kings of the roads". Take a second too long on the loo and your manager gets automatically pinged, third time and you're let go. Or if you're in IT, the rat race to the bottom that is called "agile" with sprint points whatnot. And on top of that comes all the surveillance software where every mouse movement, every key stroke is analyzed for performance, and on top of that come stack ranking and similar bullshit pitting employees against each other. The trades don't have it much better. Private customers don't have much spare money left over so they let their stuff degrade until it breaks down completely which makes repair jobs much more complex and extensive, and the customers try to haggle on price wherever they can, landlords are notorious penny pinchers and large construction projects pit tradespeople from across the continent against each other, the cheapest bid wins. And anything public service has it the worst - education is usually the first ones who get their budgets cut when politicians need to fiat money (often leading to teachers having to pay for their own classroom supplies or assisting the poorest of the poor children from their own paycheck), payment usually sucks compared to the private sector, you're subject to ridiculous public records requirements, and (for the Americans) should Project 2025 pass as planned, what used to be career track positions will now to a large degree be political positions, so anything as simple as a party donation can led to you getting fired.
- ikety 2y agoI used to be an employee that would kill themselves for even minimum wage. I think being a hard worker regardless of reward is an honorable trait, but keeping that up for decades is difficult. Naturally I am very loyal and agreeable. I like to solve raw engineering problems, but also social ones. I find a way to adapt to pretty much anything and anyone. This almost always ends with my employer exploiting me. Recently I've switched it up. I focus for a solid 2-4 hours a day on my tasks, and I use the remaining time for learning. It keeps my mind moving and keeps burnout at bay. Even average engineers like myself can optimize their workflow endlessly. You have a few choices at that point. You can give your surplus labor back to your employer in exchange for raises, bonuses, promotions etc. You can take back those hours to improve your WLB. You can reinvest those hours into learning that benefits your current employer, but more importantly, makes you more attractive in the job market. Right now I find myself consistently choosing the third option. Not because I'm focused on maximizing my earnings, but because it is the most fulfilling and enjoyable option for me.
- snapcaster 2y agoWhy did you think being a hard worker regardless of reward is an honorable trait? I don't mean any disrespect but when i read sentences like that all that pops into my head is "sucker"
- nytesky 2y agoI was definitely raised that way. My parents are from New England so maybe a Puritan thing?
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoUS Protestant culture. Work is tied up with morals and faith.
- mcmcmc 2y agoValuing hard work is not US exclusive, many eastern cultures pride themselves on hard work and contribution to community over self-centered obsession over rewards
- chamsom 2y agoCurious about tech burn out as well on top of the job market. A lot of software that was once lauded are now poorly received by the public, so you either recognize the reality of your corporate work or persist in delusion.
- billy99k 2y agoIsn't this what Ycombinator is all about? If you want fulfillment, start your own company and create the job that you are passionate about.
- mewse 2y agoI have started my own company and made a job that I'm passionate about and I think my friends would laugh at anybody who claimed that I wasn't burnt out basically all the time. ;)
- bratbag 2y agoThe one and only time I was burned out, there was no way in hell I was capable of that kind of initiative. Self-autonomy is one of the things it kills. I only escaped burnout via an 'ah-HAH!' moment when reading up on strategy creation, and realised that I needed to start cutting down my workload to only what really matters and nothing more. A startup environment is a terrible environment for anyone who cant cut through the weeds of the nice-to-have to see only the necessary.
- billy99k 2y agoI stated my own consulting company a few years ago. Right now, it's just me. But I plan on hiring employees at some point. Consulting has prevented me from burnout. I almost never have to deal with bullshit corporate politics and if I hate a project, I find a new client.
- velcrovan 2y agoI am doing that very thing this year. It's already amazing how much brighter the world seems.
- rolisz 2y agoOh, you will have to deal with bullshit corporate politics, but in a different way. You will get projects where there will be conflicts between the stakeholders and you'll be sitting there waiting for the final final final final decision to be made.
- atorralb 2y ago[dead]
- Shish2k 2y agoAfter 10 years of startups and 10 years of FAANG, I’m thinking of maybe going this route too - can one do it while primarily focussing on the work though? I’ve always had the impression that starting one's own company is an even mix of sales, accounting, and doing the actual job...
- kertoip_1 2y agoWhat does consulting exactly mean? Do you still write code?
- epolanski 2y agoI am most definitely among those. So much work, so little time.
- sandwitches 2y ago[dead]
- OfficeChad 2y ago[dead]
- Rhapso 2y agoThe system isn't operating at maximum profit margin until the cost of components breaking outweigh the gains of overstressing them.
- goqu 2y agoSome people can work long hours and never experience burnout because they love what they do, while others simply need a better work-life balance. A 4-day workweek is what brings that work-life balance. For anyone interested, here are 200 companies hiring for 4-day weeks - https://okjob.io/companies/ https://okjob.io/companies/ (P.S. I maintain the page. If you know of any company operating on a 4-day week (4x8hrs), please consider submitting it via the contact form)
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago"11,000 desk-based and frontline workers" Software? Devs? Sales? Accountants? This seems like pretty broad category. But also, if such a broad category is having burnout, across countries and cultures, then maybe that is indicating some larger problems?
- harimau777 2y agoSomething that I've noticed is that as a programmer what I make either works or it doesn't. Either my code compiles and passes the tests or it doesn't. However, I don't have control over the factors that facilitate working code (tech debt, reasonable deadlines, good architecture, etc.). So it's the worst of both worlds. I have a lot of responsibility but very little power. Compare this to someone in a soft skill role who may have to deal with kafkaesque bureaucracy but at least it is difficult to objectively measure their results. Or a blue collar worker who is just expected to put in their hours and effort.
- lifty 2y agoBurnout is on the rise not only because of work itself, but also because of mobile phones and addictive applications like Twitter and Instagram. I notice this my myself, my wife and among my group of friends (millennials, some with kids some without). People use these apps to numb themselves but it saps them of motivation and leaves them with little energy to do their normal jobs, especially if it's office jobs.
- deskr 2y agoThe humanity has been taken out of jobs. It's all about making an optimised monkey making machine. I think MBAs are destroying everything. See how Google is being destroyed from the inside. Boeing has pretty much been destroyed from the inside.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago> The humanity has been taken out of jobs. Absolutely, but... The humanity was taken out of jobs before, too. An assembly-line job wasn't like being a craftsman. There was "alienation" (to use the Marxist term) there too. The factory workers were just biological components of a big machine. The difference between then and now was that much of the rest of life still had the humanity in it. You knew people in your neighborhood, at your church, at the bar, at the barbershop, at the grocery store. Now... not so much. There's no humanity anywhere. So people feel alienated, not just at work, but everywhere. But they feel it especially at work, because that's the place that they interact with other people the most, so it's the place where there should be the best chance of real human contact. And it's not there.
- anal_reactor 2y ago> But they feel it especially at work, because that's the place that they interact with other people the most, so it's the place where there should be the best chance of real human contact. And it's not there. The worst part is, modern workplace is actively hostile to creating meaningful interpersonal bonds, while it keeps a face of being ridiculously welcoming and inclusive. When you are in such environment it's hard to spot that the game is rigged, and you blame yourself for your interpersonal failures.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoI'm not saying you're wrong. But would you (or anyone) mind listing the ways that you think that the modern workplace is "actively hostile to creating meaningful interpersonal bonds"?
- softwaredoug 2y agoIt’s hard to know what to make of this when you also read that job satisfaction is at historic highs[1]. One reading is being highly engaged in your job is related to burnout, because you’re more likely to be unhappy when your job doesn’t go the way you want. Whereas just punching a clock you take it less seriously. 1 - https://www.conference-board.org/press/job-satisfaction-hits-all-time-high https://www.conference-board.org/press/job-satisfaction-hits...
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoI am not sure how seriously you can ever take a workplace employer survey. I worked at a place with a particularly grouchy director. Employee survey- many people expressed dissatisfaction with him and the company. He called a meeting of all his underlings effectively saying as confrontationally as possible, “Why aren’t you idiots happy? I am so good to you!” To enormous surprise, the next survey results were significantly higher. Without apparent change in director behavior.
- dogleash 2y agoI looked at their report. The year-to-year trend doesn't show COVID. 2020 looks like 2017. That's enough for me to write it off entirely, but I kept reading. It's surveying overall satisfaction, and what they identify as components of job satisfaction. It's the kind of stuff you'd use to compare between multiple job offers. The burnt out can recognize they have "good" jobs when their subjective experience is miserable. The measured things that you might think are related to burnout (workload, recognition, vacation, interest in work), those things are scored in context of working for a living, not existential satisfaction. Very different from the items and context of the Maslach Burnout Inventory.
- Aurornis 2y agoI did some volunteer mentoring for a while. Burnout was the most common complaint. However, once you dug into each complaint of burnout you discovered that “burnout” has become a catch-all term for a very wide range of feelings. Before that experience I assumed everyone defined burnout as a severe state of deep distress and lack of energy following extended periods of intense stress, frustration, overwork, and/or lack of control. Instead, a lot of people used “burnout” more casually, as a catch-all term for any frustrations with their job any or intermittent tiredness. A lot of people would say they were suffering from burnout one week, then everything would be fine again the next Monday after they did something fun over the weekend. To them, burnout could be as simple as being a little tired one week or having to work full 8-hour days for a couple days in a row. The number of people for whom “burnout” meant a deep and serious affliction that required possibly months to recover from was a lot smaller. It’s similar to the way people casually talk about their “OCD” because they like to be organized, their “ADHD” when they have nothing resembling clinical ADHD, or their “PTSD” after a mildly unpleasant experience. These terms have become so diluted that they can mean almost anything when you ask people to self-report. Sure enough, this survey was self-reported. BCG wants to sell you services related to burnout, so maximizing the number of people reporting “burnout” is in their best interests. A self-report survey of unknown cohorts is the perfect way to maximize that number for their headline.
- hakanderyal 2y agoIn my experience there are different levels to burnout, with each stage is progressing towards a full-blown one like you described. Agreed that I also wouldn't trust any self-reported burnout unless the person has experienced a full-blown one before.
- agumonkey 2y agoI wonder if this shift is due to the web. Everybody can read medical terms and interpret it as they want.
- snird 2y agoAt one point in my career, I've been a CTO of a startup company. I worked 12-14 hours a day, including weekends. My relationship with the CEO was bad, and he actively added "senior tech leads" to the company to compete with me. One day, I arrived to the office, and stood in the hallway across our office door. I froze. I couldn't physically move. I stood there, unable to move, for 2.5 hours until someone passed by and saw me. I'm sharing this story so that readers may have an idea of what severe burnout may look like. It's not that I didn't want to move - I couldn't, my brain didn't let me. I lost my ability to control my body at that point.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cen4 2y agoSee - Mcdonaldization of Society - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_McDonaldization_of_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_McDonaldization_of_Society
- noisy_boy 2y agoWhile managers are whipping them for greater "productivity" and more "velocity". And don't say that there are plenty of jobs for IT workers - that may be true for US but the picture isn't so rosy elsewhere.
- catwalk_moto 2y ago[dead]
- ralferoo 2y ago> it’s far higher for certain subgroups. ... and deskless workers I'm still happily doing a fully remote job, but I've noticed that a number of my friends have been forced to return back to the office 2 or 3 days a week. The irony is that many of their companies have scaled back office space due to decreased natural demand when people had the choice of full-time WFH, but now there isn't space for everyone to come back to the office full-time, even if those employees wanted to. So now, they've lost their desks but have to come in and hot-desk twice a week. One friend has to carry around a heavy laptop (not a powerful one, just a heavy one), the power supply AND a dock (because the hot desk docks aren't compatible), plus all the pens and stationary he needs to and from work twice a week. He used to love being in the office and now hates it. If desklessness really does lead to increased rates of burnout, companies will be setting themselves up for an even bigger problem a year or two down the line.
- pas 2y ago> carry around a heavy laptop ... By car or by public transportation? Can you elaborate what the fancy pens and the heavy laptop are for? :o Seems like a very special job/position. Hot desking sucks ass, because spatial routine is very helpful for many people, and starting the day with this bullshit destroys routine.
- ralferoo 2y agoHe's a team leader in a company's internal finance department. He doesn't have anything specialised on his computer that he's mentioned, I'm guessing just Word, Excel and whatever he uses to connect to their finance back-office to extract the data he needs for his reports which I guess might even be web-based. He drives by car, which is admittedly less inconvenient than travelling by public transport, but still requires a walk across a fairly large car park, potentially in the rain. The heavy laptop is his company-issued laptop that he has to do his work on, and he longer has a desktop PC because (like everyone else in the office) he no longer has a permanent desk. From what I inferred from the conversation, it's heavy because it's old, not because it's anything special and when we're in the pub bitching about work, he frequently complains how slow it is. It's also not compatible for whatever reason with the docks they've put on the hot desks. Maybe he has an old laptop and they since standardised on a different type of laptop since implementing this policy. Maybe he was given a newer computer for some reason, although I got the impression he's had this since at least before COVID. Anyway, I didn't ask further, as I trust that's he's smart enough to have decided for himself that the provided docks don't work and that it's worth the hassle of unplugging everything from the dock at home and bringing the dock in, and then unplugging the work monitors from the work dock and plugging them into the dock he brought from home. If the dock on the desk just worked, I'm sure he'd use it. I don't believe he has any fancy pens. He does, however, frequently need to make handwritten notes during meetings and so he brings in his pens and notebook to work and takes them home at the end of the day. Again, this is because he longer has a permanent desk, so nowhere else he could store stuff. I'm sure they have a stationary department he can get new pens and a notebook from, but he'd still have to take them home each day if he wanted to keep the notes, and I can't imagine he'd get away with asking for a new pen and pad every day. I also imagine that he wouldn't want to leave his pen behind and then when he's a different hot desk the next day, just pick up someone's half-chewed pen and work with that. I'm just speculating though, I only know for sure that he told me about having to take his laptop, dock and pen and paper into work each day. Maybe he just decided that it's easier to shove the pad and pen into his rucksack along with everything else each day and traipse over to wherever the stationary is kept every morning. TBH I wasn't expecting there to be to follow-up questions, so rather than asking about the full specifications of his computer, the quality of the stationary and whether he preferred 2B or HB pencils, I just said "yeah man, that sucks".
- RealCodingOtaku 2y agoIt is (not) surprising that the BCG (A Global Consulting Firm) made a publication about burnout and tunneled in on inclusivity. There are other aspects that contribute heavily to burnout and employee morale, the elephant in the room is the massive layoffs and the lack of promotions[0]. Consulting firms are affected by this a lot. If you cut down most of your workforce, or give no “rewards” for the ones who worked their ass off your revenue, of course there will be burn out, depression, and all other things that would make one stop working. [0] https://www.ft.com/content/8c3679c4-b34a-41d0-93c9-af96ea6f90e2 https://www.ft.com/content/8c3679c4-b34a-41d0-93c9-af96ea6f9... (I couldn't get this archived).
- swayvil 2y agoI got burnout once where my concentration bone got broken. Like, I would try to concentrate and nothing. Scary dreams too
- MichaelRo 2y agoIn my case I wouldn't describe the feeling as burnout as much as PTSD. Without the P of course, because it's ongoing since ever and will go on for ever and ever and ever :) Worst thing in software development is the constant bombardment of the unexpected. There's not a single God-given day in this job that shit just runs smoothly. Always, usually when least expecting it, there's a "wtf is this shit?!!" moment, followed of course by "I must absolutely solve this completely unexpected and incidental thing which popped up that I've no idea how it works or why it happens but can't do any progress on my regular task before I figure this out". A few years of this are enough to send any normal people to the nuthouse or out of the field. Yet, some of us endure it for decades. Seemingly without being affected. Seemingly ... because underneath there's a raging traumatic stress disorder we try to keep in check :)
- Jacobethannn098 2y ago[dead]
- loisralph44 2y ago[dead]
- aurelien 2y agoThis demonstrate that the WHO is a false Human Care Organisation.