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> This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels it lacks perspective with virtually any other occupations. On one hand, misery and happiness are

> This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels it lacks perspective with virtually any other occupations. On one hand, misery and happiness are relative. On the other hand, try telling a construction worker how hard our lives are sitting in chairs clicking buttons. My dad used to have to do things like hot tar roofing to pay the bills. So I still consider it a blessing to get to work in software. I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout". I think it's wrong to equate it with "working hard". I've known farmers and restaurateurs who work insane hours for decades and never think about burning out. On the other hand, I have felt burned out 3 weeks into a job where I did nothing. I think it has little to do with how hard we work and everything to do with our perception of progress.

jimbokun 2y ago
I think burnout is Cool Hand Luke being forced to dig a ditch and fill it back up again, for days. It’s putting in effort without seeing anything concrete to show for it. If you tar a roof, you can see a roof that will keep out the rain. If you cook a meal, you see someone who was hungry but now full. A lot of jobs don’t have that feedback loop.
- dxxth 2y ago
  I think too, is the cost of taking work home. Many jobs, including construction, service jobs, even many medical jobs, do not require even the thought of work outside of working hours. Anecdotally many in these positions that I am friends with will attest that it's great to get off work and pretend work didn't happen and go on with their real life, because they don't have deadlines or projects to stress over, arduous performance reviews, or extensive office politicking and empire-building.
ActorNightly 2y ago
>I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout". I can explain it pretty well. You can classify pretty much all jobs into 2 categories - map lookups and reasoning. A map lookup job is something where you learn to associate a specific problem with a solution. Most jobs are like this. You go work in construction, its pretty much map lookup - supervisor tells you to go prep the concrete, you know the procedure to do it, you go do it. Even high end jobs like VPs are often map lookups, you aren't really thinking about solving any problems, just following the standard procedure of what works and are essentially relying on the actual work of lower ranked people to give you data. Reasoning jobs are those where you don't have the solution for a particular problem in memory, so you figure it out. For example, business strategy, despite being non technical, is a reasoning problem - there are a lot of variables you have to consider, and success in this regard often involves things like figuring out what you have to do, which is a separate task than actually doing it. Software engineering is interesting because it can be both. Setting up standard service stacks is often a map lookup job. The interviews themselves test on map lookup really, as most of the problems fall within the scope of pointer manipulation or n-linked lists, with memorizing specific hard ones in case you get asked those. But fundamentally, software development is a reasoning type job. The burnout happens when someone in software engineering is good at map lookup, but is actually needed to do reasoning, and has no education or training on how to do the latter. For example, I worked at Amazon. Id estimate that if I asked a random sample of 100 engineers to give me http traffic from a service, 1 out of 100 of them would know how to do it, and only about 10 or so would be able to actually go figure it out on their own. This is why people who are good at reasoning can really do any job well. If you take a software engineer who is extremely competent and can build complex solutions, and make them in charge of optimizing things like delivery, shipping and warehouse storage, or finance management of a company (excluding the emotional response to those jobs), they would be able to do it well. Whereas people who are good at map lookups tend to be only good at certain jobs in certain quantities.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jacobgkau 2y ago
  Eh, your definition implies people who are actually skilled (i.e. able to do "reasoning" jobs) don't/can't suffer from burnout. I'd bet there are cases of the opposite of what you describe, where people would be able to solve problems with reasoning, but get burnt out from being locked into a map-lookup structure. Or cases where people are good at, or enjoy, reasoning about one type of problem, but then get thrown into a different field they're not as attuned to or interested in.
- captainbland 2y ago
  My experience with burnout doesn't really gel with this. I find map lookup style tasks as you describe them pretty draining and the reasoning tasks relatively more energising. But generally what actually causes burnout for me is a sense of pointlessness, that the work is nothing but the pay because it's, for example, just some B2B finance adjacent system or something.
  - kavalg 2y ago
    Great comments from both of you. I will also add the (unsupportive) environment and uncertainty for the future as major factors IMHO. One should also consider the "outside" environment. We jumped from covid right into war without a break in between and now we are being told that we will be replaced by AI, while expecting the stock market to crash and increase unemployment. Ah and also the inflation (wage reduction) that has been going on for the last five years and doesn't show a sign of stopping.
  - ActorNightly 2y ago
    I don't think thats burnout, its more like apathy. I am the same way. When I worked for Amazon, I spend half sundays writing scripts that almost automated my map look up tasks (like stuff for oncall) Burnout is when you are overworked with regular activities that you see no other way to accomplish.
- nchmy 2y ago
sensanaty 2y ago
I did physical labour when I was younger in a tropical climate and in certain ways it's easier than my SWE job is now. There are days in SWE where I feel completely and utterly drained and brain dead despite doing nothing but just "clicking buttons". The physical exercise from the job site in comparison was heaven a lot of the time, and even these days when I'm stuck in my 4th useless meeting of the day, I find myself yearning for shovelling in the scorching sun.
makeitdouble 2y ago
> On the other hand, try telling a construction worker how hard our lives are sitting in chairs clicking buttons. Construction workers usually chose to do that job instead of call center, cashier or elderly care for instance. The perception of what's stressful or "hard" is I think different (illegal workers who can't do these jobs in the first place being another can of worms) I also think this is the same perspective for burnout, repetitively doing something that is felt as mind crushing will be a trigger, but what is felt as mind cushing vastly depend on individuals, preferences and predispositions. I don't think there's a single yardstick for that.
joquarky 2y ago
> My dad used to have to do things like hot tar roofing to pay the bills. So I still consider it a blessing to get to work in software. It is a blessing, but it’s also important to recognize who tends to end up in the tech industry. Many of us are well-suited for software work because disabilities or other constraints make many other careers inaccessible. The alternative is poverty.

jimbokun 2y ago

I think burnout is Cool Hand Luke being forced to dig a ditch and fill it back up again, for days. It’s putting in effort without seeing anything concrete to show for it. If you tar a roof, you can see a roof that will keep out the rain. If you cook a meal, you see someone who was hungry but now full. A lot of jobs don’t have that feedback loop.

dxxth 2y ago
I think too, is the cost of taking work home. Many jobs, including construction, service jobs, even many medical jobs, do not require even the thought of work outside of working hours. Anecdotally many in these positions that I am friends with will attest that it's great to get off work and pretend work didn't happen and go on with their real life, because they don't have deadlines or projects to stress over, arduous performance reviews, or extensive office politicking and empire-building.

ActorNightly 2y ago

>I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout". I can explain it pretty well. You can classify pretty much all jobs into 2 categories - map lookups and reasoning. A map lookup job is something where you learn to associate a specific problem with a solution. Most jobs are like this. You go work in construction, its pretty much map lookup - supervisor tells you to go prep the concrete, you know the procedure to do it, you go do it. Even high end jobs like VPs are often map lookups, you aren't really thinking about solving any problems, just following the standard procedure of what works and are essentially relying on the actual work of lower ranked people to give you data. Reasoning jobs are those where you don't have the solution for a particular problem in memory, so you figure it out. For example, business strategy, despite being non technical, is a reasoning problem - there are a lot of variables you have to consider, and success in this regard often involves things like figuring out what you have to do, which is a separate task than actually doing it. Software engineering is interesting because it can be both. Setting up standard service stacks is often a map lookup job. The interviews themselves test on map lookup really, as most of the problems fall within the scope of pointer manipulation or n-linked lists, with memorizing specific hard ones in case you get asked those. But fundamentally, software development is a reasoning type job. The burnout happens when someone in software engineering is good at map lookup, but is actually needed to do reasoning, and has no education or training on how to do the latter. For example, I worked at Amazon. Id estimate that if I asked a random sample of 100 engineers to give me http traffic from a service, 1 out of 100 of them would know how to do it, and only about 10 or so would be able to actually go figure it out on their own. This is why people who are good at reasoning can really do any job well. If you take a software engineer who is extremely competent and can build complex solutions, and make them in charge of optimizing things like delivery, shipping and warehouse storage, or finance management of a company (excluding the emotional response to those jobs), they would be able to do it well. Whereas people who are good at map lookups tend to be only good at certain jobs in certain quantities.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jacobgkau 2y ago
Eh, your definition implies people who are actually skilled (i.e. able to do "reasoning" jobs) don't/can't suffer from burnout. I'd bet there are cases of the opposite of what you describe, where people would be able to solve problems with reasoning, but get burnt out from being locked into a map-lookup structure. Or cases where people are good at, or enjoy, reasoning about one type of problem, but then get thrown into a different field they're not as attuned to or interested in.
captainbland 2y ago
My experience with burnout doesn't really gel with this. I find map lookup style tasks as you describe them pretty draining and the reasoning tasks relatively more energising. But generally what actually causes burnout for me is a sense of pointlessness, that the work is nothing but the pay because it's, for example, just some B2B finance adjacent system or something.
- kavalg 2y ago
  Great comments from both of you. I will also add the (unsupportive) environment and uncertainty for the future as major factors IMHO. One should also consider the "outside" environment. We jumped from covid right into war without a break in between and now we are being told that we will be replaced by AI, while expecting the stock market to crash and increase unemployment. Ah and also the inflation (wage reduction) that has been going on for the last five years and doesn't show a sign of stopping.
- ActorNightly 2y ago
  I don't think thats burnout, its more like apathy. I am the same way. When I worked for Amazon, I spend half sundays writing scripts that almost automated my map look up tasks (like stuff for oncall) Burnout is when you are overworked with regular activities that you see no other way to accomplish.
nchmy 2y ago

sensanaty 2y ago

I did physical labour when I was younger in a tropical climate and in certain ways it's easier than my SWE job is now. There are days in SWE where I feel completely and utterly drained and brain dead despite doing nothing but just "clicking buttons". The physical exercise from the job site in comparison was heaven a lot of the time, and even these days when I'm stuck in my 4th useless meeting of the day, I find myself yearning for shovelling in the scorching sun.

makeitdouble 2y ago

> On the other hand, try telling a construction worker how hard our lives are sitting in chairs clicking buttons. Construction workers usually chose to do that job instead of call center, cashier or elderly care for instance. The perception of what's stressful or "hard" is I think different (illegal workers who can't do these jobs in the first place being another can of worms) I also think this is the same perspective for burnout, repetitively doing something that is felt as mind crushing will be a trigger, but what is felt as mind cushing vastly depend on individuals, preferences and predispositions. I don't think there's a single yardstick for that.

joquarky 2y ago

> My dad used to have to do things like hot tar roofing to pay the bills. So I still consider it a blessing to get to work in software. It is a blessing, but it’s also important to recognize who tends to end up in the tech industry. Many of us are well-suited for software work because disabilities or other constraints make many other careers inaccessible. The alternative is poverty.