Ask HN: Strategies to Avoid Burnout?

[throwaway48181]

I'm in a situation where I'm the senior engineer on a team that has to manage a lot of work. I'm a bit overwhelmed right now and having to work nights to keep up with it all.

The main responsibilities are: 1) Building out products, building features and working with the PM to ensure everyone is reaching deadlines. That means working with both backend and frontend engineers.

2) My team has a lot of reusable components that other people use and build on, this makes other teams want to change our APIs often and add things to them. I've been having to code review & design review a lot. There's at least 2-3 concurrent projects at any time every quarter.

3) Work on bugs that come up that sometimes are simple and sometimes require significant investigation.

The team has 3 Product Managers right now so we always have tons of feature requests, asks to investigate future work, etc.

I have only one other team member right now who has been taking on one of the larger projects that requires a lot of cross coordination. They're posting PRs late into the night so asking them to take on more work seems unreasonable.

What's some solutions here?

1 & 3 seem that they still have to happen regardless. But I'm wondering if there are better ways to do 2? Do I need to have to help them find solutions? Do I stop participating in these API changes and just let technical debt accumulate and fix it later?

My manager wants to hire more people but we've had more people, the work just increases to accommodate that new engineer.

[ThrowawayR2]

Some points to ponder:

- You're doing this to yourself, buddy. There's always more work to be done; it's not your responsibility to do all of it.

- You're not going to outrun a train by running faster on the same railroad tracks.

- When (not if, but when) you finally crack up, you won't get a word of thanks for your efforts. They'll just ease you out of the company (gently or, more likely, not) and hire someone else to replace you.

My advice is:

- Gradually start padding your estimates until your work fits into a 40 hour week.

- Learn to say "no" or at least "not right now" to requests from other people and other teams.

- If you get dinged by your management chain for reducing your pace, find a new employer ASAP. Good managers want their employees to work at a sustainable pace because replacing good employees is expensive and risky. You clearly don't have good managers.

[arsenykostenko]

I'd add to this good answer, that I'm afraid, padding estimates gradually won't work — you are already working nights and weekends, and the worst — seems like you are expected to.

I worked in a similar environment for some time where I was expected to start my morning at 7am by joining a call with an offshore team and end my day at 11pm jumping on another status call. I could not fix it, this state of operations was enforced by management.

So many things are wrong here that I just don't believe you can change anything there either, you gotta find another job in my opinion.

[apohn]

Exactly this.

For the sake of argument, let's assume you try 10 different strategies over the next 6 months and all of them fail to reduce the overload. Will you still feel responsibility for not being able to keep up?

A lot of people don't recognize that sometimes you can't fix a situation and that isn't your fault. Burnout comes from that - lots of effort with no result. A great sign of this is that the company has hired more people and the workload increases to keep everybody overloaded.

As ThrowawayR2 said, don't enable this behavior and take responsibility for working nights. Push back against requests and work a sane amount of hours. Make it clear to your management that the workload isn't sustainable. Do this so when you look back you don't ask yourself "Should I have been more clear with management? Was I the problem?" If that isn't supported then find another job.

[codingdave]

> The team has 3 Product Managers right now so we always have tons of feature requests, asks to investigate future work, etc.

This is a red flag to me - 3 PMs should be collaborating together to get to the root of the customer needs, and coming up with new functions that solve problems in simpler, better ways. You should have fewer requests that each have larger impacts. Likewise, why is a PM asking an engineer to do product research? If you need technical analysis, get that into your backlog. Outside of that, the PMs should be doing it.

[chad_strategic]

3 Product Managers = Recipe for disaster

Sounds like you are suffering serious leadership/management issues. Unless you are at start up that is making money and is profitable, kind of sounds like a sinking ship?

I was previously at a start up where it sounds similar to what you are experiencing. Except the business model of the product was failing, I had off shore developers and the business side started point fingers at the the development department. Which was just me and I was the only paid employee. (The company never ever made 1 cent of revenue.)

Regardless after 70 days I resigned, without another job. It took me a year or so to really recover from the exhaustion of the start up.

My only advice is keep in mind that burn out can have far reaching effects after you leave the stressful situation.

[chad_strategic]

Also it's just a job. I know it's difficult to see that in the heat of the moment. But life is so much more than a job. Jobs come and go...

[rboyd]

One hard lesson to learn: usually when you're burning the candle at both ends thinking your hard work will be recognized by management and rewarded, it won't.

Sometimes they don't even notice, more often your output is their idea of baseline, and a budget is predetermined.

Depends largely on the organization, but I think this is the typical case.

Go home, have a life, or if you have extra energy roll it into a side project you can own.

[1337shadow]

1) state how many projects you can deal concurrently, refuse new ones unless relieved from another project

2) let them go into production with their forks to relieve pressure on dependency maintenance: created value at the end of the day will be the same, juggle with more debt

3) seems like a well defined perimeter they could have a new hire for: when not working on a particular bug then work on issues to pay tech debt created by the new strategy for 2)

Also, try to get more specific consulting from an on-call hacker firm: assign more tickets to others. Some hackers have passed such burnouts already, and figured how to keep doing what they love and how much they love without risking burnout ever again / have found preventive fixes for their brains.

[shoo]

First things first: why do you "have" to work nights? Are you getting paid a fair hourly rate for this overtime?

Would anything materially bad happen if you just stop and dial back the hours to whatever you contractually agreed to?

This might depend upon what other alternatives you have for work.

I've worked in companies where management explicitly and structurally decide to always have more work in the pipeline than employees have capacity to deliver. That's a reasonable business decision. It doesn't mean that you're automatically required to work unpaid overtime. Whoever owns the company might be delighted if you do start providing them with a bunch of free labour, but not delighted enough to pay you fairly for it.

As another commenter has pointed out, the three PMs sounds like a bit of a red flag. You could instead be receiving a single stream of prioritised tasks, where all three PMs and other relevant stakeholders have hashed out the priorities.

You might find the earlier discussion of late projects, negotiation, estimation helpful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19072941

Also:

http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1693

> Work expands to exceed your capacity for stress.

> If you can, take an unplanned mental health day. I’ve emailed my boss and cow-orkers at 5:30 in the morning, saying “Hey, it’s gonna be a beautiful day, and I’m going to spend it on two wheels in the mountains instead of pushing buttons in my stall.” Come back refreshed and grinning and try not to make them feel too bad.

E.g.

What do you do that's unrelated to your work that you enjoy in your life? For me personal, physically exercise -- jogging, cycling --- is both enjoyable and helps me maintain mental and physical health, especially during periods of stress, with related or otherwise.

If you can, try increasing the amount of time you spend on non work activities that you enjoy, as you dial back your hours given to the company.

Edit: if things are particularly bad you may be able to recognise your situation as something like this:

http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html

[itamarst]

Working nights is massively counterproductive, and will make you less effective: http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons

As others said:

- Learn to say "no" to people. You listen, make sure they're heard, and then you drop whichever task is least important. https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/08/16/how-to-say-no/

- To meet deadlines... again, drop the less important work. https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/10/24/deadlines/

- Choose what is more or less important based on team goals, project goals, and your goals. Those last, you goals, are the most important ones.

If that won't work at your job, time to find another job.

[70122-_6]

usually happens in febr. and 0ctober, but jb did a video on this. plus 10th of 10th month. https://youtu.be/I88yluGb9oE

[segmondy]

Learn to manage your time, your energy & your emotions.