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A year ago, I would have thought that the antidote to burnout was start-up culture. I'm a little less naive about it now.
The reality is that you can burnout in any of these ways whether or not you're a corporate monkey or a start-up monkey. Substitute vending machines and water coolers for fancy free-for-all-cafes and foosball tables, and many start-ups have similar WORK demands of their employees. In other words, no matter how fun the culture, it can't forever mask the fact that you're working toward someone else's vision and mission.
I once thought this would be very different in a company of 50 vs 50,000. But even in start-ups, we suffer from an over-emphasis on specialized activities (for efficiency and scale). This creates jobs that lack ownership of the big picture, and therefore may create short term excitement (if the work or team is interesting), but does not equate to long term passion and fulfillment.
As a founder with an idea, part of the reason that I don't want to join an existing effort is because I want to build an organization that challenges this model. Is there a way to better distribute ownership of the vision to everyone in the company so that instead of having a bunch of employees working toward your vision, you have a bunch of entrepreneurs collaborating to define that vision? That in my mind is a major part of avoiding burnout.
The secondary piece is helping people realize that work/life balance is always necessary. As a founder, I spent one month subscribing to the Valley norm that I should just work constantly. Mentally I was fine, but physically I pinched a nerve (or something) and all kinds of horror happened. Yet this cultural attitude of fast fast fast is so prevalent, I think we should also do more to encourage people to adopt some "slow" principles.
I would say that start-up culture is the perfect breeding ground for burnout.
#1 cause: lack of a mature organization. No clarity, no process, no structure, constant uncertainty and bosses that clearly have no idea what the fuck they are doing.
Collective ownership, treating employees like entrepreneurs even though they are very different people with a different mindset and different coping mechanisms is not just misguided, it's downright destructive.
Employees are not entrepreneurs, they have a different mindset and different coping mechanisms. They can handle the uncertainty of a starting company that may very well fail, they can handle long hours, but they need certainty about the nature of their job, what is expected of them and their coworkers. Not having that structure makes them extremely vulnerable to any kind of stress, stress that a startup job is guaranteed to have.
It frankly pisses me off how badly employees at startups are treated by not recognizing their needs as employees. No amount of toys, free snacks and other gimmicks will compensate for that.
You typically don't see that big picture when you're 20 - it's hard not to see it at 40. Probably another reason the stereotypical "startup" employee skews younger.
I agree, but I also think investors have bought a narrative of a young organization that breaks things and learns. Part of that narrative is great and it keeps tech fresh and young. I just wish there were a way to have a better dialog or working relationship between generations. Historically humans have been able to work well intergenerationally, so I think there's something endemic to our culture that prevents this from happening.
This is a great perspective, and the corollary of mine. If you're a start-up and you're building a culture where everyone literally is an entrepreneur, maybe you can be more successful, but most start-ups don't have this culture and still expect employees to be super entrepreneurial when they're actually functioning as employees. Everyone loses.
Agreed, I'm not in a startup or working in tech; I am self-employed, but burnout has hit me. I thought I would be endlessly motivated as my own boss. I actually felt the exact moment of its onset, it was at the conclusion of a two month period of being very busy. It was euphoric to be very busy and having people knocking down your door to give you money. But then I entered a slow period, and had to start doing the work, and I've lost so much motivation. I want to pack up shop and start something new; I'm rationalizing this by telling myself "that's what serial entrepreneurs do."
Does anyone have strategies on how to deal with this? I took a vacation but came back surprisingly still lacking motivation. I exercise and enjoy it, but after the exercise high I'm back to the same mental state. It's a complete 180-degree shift in mindset from where I was just 40 days ago.
I pretty much share your experience. I have found that this tends to hit me whenever I work alone. Two things fixed this for me ... somewhat:
1. Find and work with someone who genuinely cares about your work to give you honest but compassionate feedback.*
2. Hire someone to do the work for you. This way we give a monetary figure to our torpor. Now there's a hard price for the lack of interest in completing work but the work still gets done. And that's the only thing to get us out of our misery - finished work!
- * (I'm not suggesting that one should avoid folks who offer brutal yet honest feedback - no - just saying avoid the patently negative discouraging or jealous feedback. Even though you rationally conclude that envious and obviously unfounded negative feedback does not need to discourage you, they still do!)
That's interesting, do you have a strong end vision that you're aiming for? What I've found for myself is that short-term excitement from a cool project or technology or team I'm working on eventually fades, and is not a substitute for long-term passion.
For me, I'm trying to change consumerism...it's a hell of a BHAG, but by pursuing this vision that I genuinely care about, I may have short-term periods of exhaustion instead of excitement, but I'm guaranteeing longer-term reserves of motivation.
I have a much more succinct description of burnout:
Burnout is a broken narrative.
Everyone has ups and downs, and everyone expects that. We persevere, however, because we believe, however irrationally, that it will work out in the end.
Burnout is believing that no, it probably won't.
The way that someone stops believing this is very reasonable---they take risks with the assurance that it will work out ("low salary, but look at the equity! Keep working!"), and then it doesn't (company shuts down). Or perhaps "we promise this is the last crunch" --- and it never is.
Don't confuse this with a lack of trust. Healthy people who don't trust their employers leave and start a company/work for someone else. Burnout is when you don't see a happy ending anywhere.
Sounds like a depression.
Which is why burnout is mostly work-induced depression.
depression is chronic and not necessarily tied to real expectations of real things. Burnout is acute, most people with burnout snap back, although it might take a while.
And/or adrenal fatigue.
I feel like being stuck between the second and the third type of burnout. Honestly, even though coding was my passion since being 13 years old, I had serious troubles at every single programming job I took. My productivity always seems to be at 10% of what I expect from myself; every time I have to think about something I start feeling sleepy (and I need to sleep 8h/day just to be able to get anytthing done), and I procrastinate like you wouldn't believe.
For the last two years I thought that maybe, just maybe, it was because I suck at coding and my work troubles are a symptom of me not being really into programming. And then, few months ago, I stared a completely pointless side project. Back came to me the passion and productivity. I can get more done in 1h for my side project that in 8h at my job. Through the last few months I gradually regained the faith in my own programming skills. I realized that I do indeed know how to code; it's that I just can't force myself to work on stuff I don't give a fuck about.
I'd love to know what to do about this. I understand that it's easier to work on your own idea than on someone else's. But having like order of magnitude differences in productivity between my job and hobby project... this just feels wrong.
</mind-dump> </drunk-posting>
Sounds very much like myself (except that I'm a freelancer, so can procrastinate much easier). I'm still trying to solve it, but I found that some things help:
1. A cardio workout. (Came highly recommended by a dear client of mine, and indeed significantly increases the amount of energy I feel during the day. Does not solve procrastination by itself, but helps with that sleepiness.)
2. Pair programming. (This is a true deal breaker. Maybe we're just not created for solo work, and that's it?)
3. Eating less, and less carbs in particular. (I've been diagnosed with insulin insensibility, and it really shows; I usually get very sleepy after eating.)
4. Doing work you can be proud of, way before the deadline. Not always possible, but when it is, it can keep me going for a bit. Relax, take those extra few hours to make the code clean, polished and well-documented.
In my case (and perhaps in yours as well), it's not really about work being boring or not. I had a very exciting side-project of mine, which is now selling on the Mac App Store for great profit, but I started to procrastinate on it after a few months as well.
Feel free to email me to talk some more.
Thank you for your tips and advice :).
AD 1. I recently went through a physical therapy after a knee accident and I noticed a difference in my energy levels and mood in that period of time, during which I had about 1h of exercise every day. So I think it might be a good idea for me to try and include some workout into daily schedule.
AD 2. Could you elaborate a bit more? I tried it once or twice, and I don't really feel it. I usually think out the things before coding them, and I'm having a hard time coordinating that with other person for anything that's even slightly complex.
AD 3. Been on ketogenic diet last year, didn't notice much of a difference in terms of productivity (but I did lose the weight I wanted).
That sounds completely normal, even for things other than programming. I doubt anybody can be even nearly as productive doing something boring vs something they're excited about, especially if it's a mentally-intensive task.
So how come that everyone else around me seems to be able to remain productive and happy even though working on things the are not excited about in any way? It's a question that keeps bugging me.
I have similar problems. A prescription for methylphenidate makes them manageable, although it does not get rid of them. And nothing works as well as it does in the beginning forever...
I certainly feel some symptoms of burnout - quality of my work went down, development is no longer interesting, all projects look the same to me. But this is not something sudden, it's been there for years, slowly changing my life. Sorry for such an useless comment, but I'm realizing it will be difficult to recover from this creeping apathy.
I've started having this problem lately, and I have <5 years experience in the industry. I work at a web development shop right now, and while I don't plan on leaving soon (still some room to grow as an employee), the problems I find myself solving are largely similar.
A few things that I've found helpful are:
1. Expand horizontally. I've been designing for a while, and it's always a breath of fresh air when I can go design something (in the browser of course, but front-end dev requires so little thought that I barely notice) without restraint. I also enjoy writing, when I can find the time.
2. Experiment with radically different paradigms. I've been diving into Elixir lately, which has been a lot of fun. Still looking for a nail to hit with the Erlang/Elixir hammer, but I've enjoyed building the few toy programs I've worked on to get familiar with the language.
3. Accept the Sex & Cash theory. Hugh MacLeod writes about it in this blog post: http://gapingvoid.com/2004/03/25/the-sex-cash-theory/ Basically, the idea is that you have to internalize that there are things you do for fun, outside of work (sex) and things you do support those things (cash). The cash doesn't have to be enjoyable. By all means, seek opportunities to have fun with the cash side of the equation, but don't get hung up on it: spend your brain cycles enjoying the sex.
Most work is the same bullshit over and over. What about personal development at work? Do they have a 1, 2, or 5 year plan for you? If there's nothing for you for the future, get out.
Also think about finding some hobbies. I know that's a tough one, but that's how it gets sometimes. You need to focus energy elsewhere.
I'm near this point right now. I won't get a promotion unless higher ups quit. I'm in a bit of a rut at home. Gotta shake it up.
That sounds like depression, to be honest. As someone who has depression, and is trying to get better, my best advice is to start by at least mentioning it to my GP. Doctors can help!
I think burnout is a kind of depression, but a work-related one. I don't suffer from apathy in my private life, still have some interests and hobbies, but at work i feel i'm going backwards.
BTW thanks, I really hope this is not a depression. And good luck.
Boy, do I get that. :\
Have you considered changing to a new (and perhaps more interesting) job?
I have considered a change, but i'm still looking for a job that wouldn't be too similar to what I'm doing now. Which is quite tricky considering the fact that i'm developing software ;)
I did not read the full paper so I can't comment on details that are not present, however from the article it seems as if they are attributing the burnout to the individual's own psychology when in fact it's usually a mixture of failures within the organization and the individual combined. I.E an individual may burnout in one company and not another and in reverse an organization is unlikely to burn out 100% of its employees.
Yeah. This was striking to me, too. The article delegitimizes burnout as being only the result of dysfunctional coping strategies. There is no exploitation of labor? There are no dysfunctional organizations? Any job is potentially fulfilling?
For better or for worse, capitalism is alienating; It disregards human value and replaces it with the economic value of labor. Pretending that that isn't the case, that labor in service of another for wages is the proper and normal condition of human beings, will help no one either adapt to this unnatural set of conditions or understand how to work at a societal level to ameliorate it.
From my reading of the article, it described three types of burnout because they result from three different coping mechanisms to stress. The article didn't mention where the stress came from. I think you're right about the organization and employee friction being a source, but it was beyond the scope of the paper.
This was a survey of university workers - so I imagine that's less of an issue than at a company.
I burned out around six years ago, due to constant insults, being shouted at, sworn at, criticisms (not constructive or analytical in any shape or form), taking the blame for other people's mistakes, threats of being "blacklisted", threats of violence, being treated like a retard, developing an awful cough due to the amount of dust on the premises and the disgusting hypocrisy and double standards practised by many of my co-workers. After eight months of work, I could count the number of positive remarks about my work that I had received on one hand with fingers to spare. The number of "incidents" would require roughly 80 or more pairs of hands to tally.
I don't think I fall under any category mentioned in the article, I will furnish myself with a new category: "burnout by feeling terrorised".
From my experience reporting these incidents to an outside authority is pointless, the usual response is "well everyone has problems at work". Do not give them a soundbite of what insults/threats you have endured, you might spend the night in a prison cell.
From the article:
> Treatments that include emotion regulation, increased cognitive flexibility, and mindfulness may help ward off burnout in susceptible individuals, suggests the research team led by Jesus Montero Marin of the University of Zaragoza in Spain.
After being released from this job, the only thing I diagnosed about myself was: "I try too hard to be understanding and sympathetic of others". If you find yourself in this situation, my treatment would be: if the tactics of your enemy are more effective than yours, copy and adapt them to make your swords sharper.
> if the tactics of your enemy are more effective than yours, copy and adapt them to make your swords sharper
If you start copying the enemy's tactics, they have a way of making it look like you started it. Ultimately they are hypocrites who manage their public image to look good while they themselves do the exact opposite. If they're putting bugs in the code to generate money-making after-hours calls, then they'll accuse you of doing it. If they're bullying you, they'll very quickly and loudly call you the bully if you reciprocate in any way. Although they're monitoring you closely, they'll soon notice and single you out if you try it on them. They'll then present the publicly visible aspects of their own harassment as a proportional response to yours, hiding the full extent of their own, the fact they started it, and how tolerant you were of them at first. Because of the legal situation they made sure you were in, your only choice was to walk away. You don't just decide to copy and adapt their tactics one day - the enemy have spent their entire lives honing their own skills in hypocrisy, bullying, whitewashing, and fleecing you of money.
> If you start copying the enemy's tactics, they have a way of making it look like you started it.
Not merely copy, copy then adapt. I think they were not aware of the hypocrisy, merely highlighting it is often enough to stop people in their tracks.
> If they're putting bugs in the code to generate money-making after-hours calls, then they'll accuse you of doing it.
It wasn't a software house, it was an optometrist. They were passing off another optometrist's varifocals as their own. If they were caught, it would be impossible to accuse me of doing it. I worked in the front office dealing with paperwork, I am not optically trained (it's equivalent to studying medicine) and I was not involved in purchases, only sales.
> If they're bullying you, they'll very quickly and loudly call you the bully if you reciprocate in any way. Although they're monitoring you closely, they'll soon notice and single you out if you try it on them.
Who said I was going to resort to bullying, I'm referring to implicit blackmail, level out the field. Suggest the possibility via suitable questions and rhetoric, but never mention it directly. Regarding any kind of monitoring, the higher ups weren't monitoring the workplace effectively, which is partly why this kind of behaviour occurred. The surfacing section at the back of the building was highly inefficient and the problem was rarely discussed, let alone addressed. There were several people who didn't do any work at all, that's mental inefficiency. I was once asked to keep quiet regarding some of my co-workers drinking beer on site. The higher ups would smoke cigarettes inside the building, again asked to keep quiet (smoking indoors at work was banned in Britain the previous year, and the place was stocked with gallons of methanol and white spirit, BOOM).
> They'll then present the publicly visible aspects of their own harassment as a proportional response to yours, hiding the full extent of their own, the fact they started it, and how tolerant you were of them at first.
One colleague used to shout "FUCK OFF" at me on average three to four times a day, in front of a dozen witnesses. Not everybody at that place was a cunt, some of them were cool. Sometimes the phone was left off the hook, so his bad behaviour had been heard by the customers on several occasions. There is simply too much evidence lying around.
> You don't just decide to copy and adapt their tactics one day - the enemy have spent their entire lives honing their own skills in hypocrisy, bullying, whitewashing, and fleecing you of money.
In this case, the enemy was incredibly retarded. Another colleague once asked me to spell "claustrophobia" when she was sitting in front of a computer connected to the internet. One of the delivery men thought that the computer wasn't connected to the internet.
Oh, here's the best bit. I once saw a photograph of the marketing manager sporting black face paint, a wig and a garish looking poncho (he was dressed as a rasta, he looked fucking stupid), snorting cocaine. With hindsight, I wish I had just grabbed it and run to one of their customers down the road.
It sure seems like most tech jobs would only need therapy as a means of last resort. Keeping a mindful eye towards burnout and adjusting your response to it based on the type seems like solid advice.
I see it as:
1. The complainer: sit down and negotiate a way that person can make a bigger impact that's measurable
2. The avoider: simply try to get this person to do something they are excited about
3. The worn-out individual: this person probably just needs a bit of regular recognition (and no overtime)
Personally, I find way more people in categories 1 and 2, though category 3 definitely happens in startup land where people work way too much and only see the mountain in front of them is never getting smaller.
Of course I'm being a bit of an armchair manager, but it seems like a fairly decent starting point.
> Organizations that want to keep their employees happy and productive may begin to invest in the fight against burnout by helping employees find accessible, affordable therapies for coping with stress.
Sounds like an advert peddling employee training sessions in stress management to employers who want to cover their arses legally while continuing to require their workers to, say, carry their mobile phones around at all times to field calls at, say, 3 in the morning to fix problems that wouldn't have happened if the bosses had invested more resources in making sure after-hours problems didn't happen in the first place.
As a developer, on top of 8 to 9 hours of work, I spend 1 to 2 hours reading technical books and coding on a usual weekday. Weekends too are spent on working on side projects. I can do this now as a twenty something, but in my 30s and 40s when there are wife and kids, I am not sure if this is viable.
Are there vocations that doesn't require constant deliberate self-improvement? I can understand casually reading up on books and papers to catch up once in a while, but the expectations imposed on developers to always solve problems, learn completely new tools, frameworks and languages seems undoable for me in the long run.
It's not viable now, yet you still do it. What will change is that you realize it's not viable. It an abuse inherent in our society and culture that the naive are taken advantage of and exploited by society as a whole, driven by the exponential advantages a few gain from the exploitation of 99% of the rest of us. The only thing that trickles down is the fraud of a ponzi/pyramid scheme. Many people don't realize that our whole society is far more like a ponzi/pyramid scheme than not. Sure, you and I are at various levels of the top tier of that ponzi/pyramid scheme, but even we don't realize the un-realized gains due to us that are being pilfered by those above us on that pyramid. We are just happy we get what we got, which is more than those below us, so we feel good in spite of being defrauded, robbed, and stolen from.
If it wasn't about exploitation then our society would shift towards "performance" based work and lower work hours per week with more free time for family, life, and happiness; but all regular people get when they are productive and efficient is more and more work because there is "always someone willing to work harder"...as the wealthy who employ those people who cause that dynamic tell us. The exploitation comes in the lack of limits and boundaries, our wealthy dealers keep telling us we should do more and try a different drug. It's a rather archetypal form of abuse, nothing is good enough and the bar keeps moving higher and higher and is always just out of reach, like that carrot leading a mule on a plow.
I suggest you might want to consider doing what most do, just enough not to get fired and spend all that energy you have to develop your freedom and liberty from the rat-race and maybe even do it in such a manner that allows you to offer that opportunity to others you employ.
Unfortunately, that is rather diametrically opposed to the interests of the YCombinator and VC symbiotic...parasitic???....relationship, but when you are beholden to someone else who draws 20 ... 30 ... 40 ... 50% of your efforts, gains, and profits.....you can never achieve freedom and liberty. There are frequently warnings of schemes that require you to pay or buy into something, what else are many ...most???... of these VC and incubator programs? Maybe slightly better versions? But they still promise you connections and entry into an otherwise closed community they helped build a fence around.
The tools and frameworks and languages all start looking the same after a while, especially the ones you can realistically use. It's important to keep an eye out for new developments but this starts to take less and less time.
When it comes to side projects and self improvement, you have to make more targeted decisions on what you want to spend you time on, but I actually found that to be a good thing. It's not as much of a big deal as you might think.
I'm in the position you're curious about, and it seems quite viable to me. Although everyone knows, that everyone knows, that no coder can be hired over 30, none the less at least some get hired anyway. I keep assuming every job will be my last and I'll have to strike out on my own next time, and its always "A heard from B who heard from C that you're available and I've got the perfect job for your skills..." and here I go again...
"learn completely new"
That is the primary mistake. There is no "completely new". If you think "completely new" exists, go ahead, try to disprove me, go retrocomputing some COBOL on MVS, or learn this decades LISP, or this months web framework, or ...
Not going to be spending ALL weekend working on your projects once the wife, kids, house all become a part of life. Or rephrased, maybe one of your projects is going to be soccer practice with the kids. And thats OK. (edited to add, I think you will also learn the meaning of "midnight engineering" although that might only be a EE term)
My lunch hour might be an hour long but I don't need more than 5 minutes. If I'm not exercising (I hike a lot) the remainder of my lunchtime is reading / experimenting / MOOC. Also for a couple decades I've read before sleeping, although I've been told over and over that it will ruin my back, neck, eyes, sleep, sex life, and posture, but so far so good.
Become a manager. :)
Most people with kids and family and whatever else manage to watch television a couple hours a night. Why can't you study or code instead?
If your side projects are truly worthwhile, you can pay people to do them for you.
Burnout for me was a self propelling entity. I'd work 12 hours a day, but not get anything done. So i'd work 16 hours a day. Not get anything done. I was depressed, unmotivated, unwashed, my personal life was falling apart, and my professional life was falling apart. The worst part is I didn't actually diagnose it as burn out until I got out of the company.
Fascinating. I must be worn out and bored. Huh, I think I already knew that. But linking specific behaviors to it is good. Maybe if I take some time off and find something new to do, I won't be worn out and bored.
Burnout is damage from prolonged stress. Stress happens when an organism faces demands beyond its sustainable capabilities to meet. All stress implies a recovery period, because the stress involves digging into reserves.
I don't think the exact varieties of stress really matter all that much. It's all just a matter of too much stress over time.
I think stress levels can be measured pretty well via biomarkers. Waking body temperature tracks cortisol and adrenalin (higher is better). Resting heart rate (higher is better) and heart rate variability are useful to track. I find when my waking temperature is below 97F it is clearly warning that I am burning out. If possible I might spend a day or two without leaving the couch or thinking about anything.
Athletes track this stuff and back off training accordingly to manage stress. I don't think work/career stress is essentially different from athletic training. It's just that so much white collar work stress is psychological and not obviously quantifiable.
You know what burnout feels like? It feels like dropping everything you're doing, everything you were hoping to achieve, packing a small bag, and flying away to a different continent for a few months.
Burnout is when working at a YC startup during YC feels like a vacation. When waking up at 10am and coding until 10pm feels like rest. That's burnout.
You do not fuck with burnout.
No, this is not burnout. This is overworking. Burnout is when you have zero interest in touching your keyboard, let alone spending 12 hours coding.