- mixing up burnout with physical or mental fatigue
- not serving any purpose (i.e. not providing good directions)
Burnout is primarily a negative change in perception, and it's a spectrum, obviously. You get burned out when your perception of the same situation gets progressively worse. This can be caused by various factors -- exhaustion, doing stuff that doesn't match your values, etc. It can also be prevented in various ways; i.e. you can do very exhausting work and not get burned out.
A really simplistic, but fun/useful way of detecting burnout (not the risk): if you regularly think that you and your team/company/environment work hard, but your customers/broader company/other teams are stupid/not intelligent/not constructive, then that's the first phase ('us vs them'). This can progress to the next phase, where it's more like 'me vs them', so you despise most of your environment. This is when people tend to leave. The last step is apathy, people rarely end here.
It's not really possible to move backwards on this scale without changing roles/work/colleagues.
Our common idea of burnout largely comes from Christina Maslach—the Maslach Burnout Inventory is more or less the standard tool that psychologists use to score and diagnose burnout now—and interestingly, it diagnoses burnout as three related but independent subscales:
Exhaustion - somewhat self-explanatory
Professional Efficacy - your view of your performance
Cynicism - a distancing of yourself from your job
Though you may come across different names in different writings. It's interesting how the subscales impact each other.
I don't know if I fully buy into the framework 100%, but it makes for interesting research nonetheless.
The first time I heard about burnout was from a colleague that was just trying to go back to a job after about two years being mentally unable to do any job. It started when one day, arriving at the work, they just froze and started crying uncontrollably.
It was a diagnosed condition. I am always unsure of what people are talking about when they talk about burnout. Is this panic attack that makes someone temporarily incapable of working or is a strong stress feeling that might be solved just by changing jobs?
The spectrum idea makes sense, but the situation, consequences, and ways to help are very different on different parts of this spectrum.
- mixing up burnout with physical or mental fatigue
- not serving any purpose (i.e. not providing good directions)"
Also I'd argue and add to the list: - not accounting for (undiagnosed) comorbid/latent mental health disorders that affect mood, personality, happiness, well-being in social environments that can cloud your judgement and how you perceive your job w.r.t. the signals that generally predict burnout (e.g. clinical depression, panic attack/anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, etc)
This resonates with me a lot, but are these just your own observations or conclusions supported by directly research? (if so, any chance you could share the sources?)
The major part of burnout is thus caused by HR. HR directs that the way teams are evaluated is that they are compared to one another, and it is mandatory that one team be rated over another team which creates an us vs them mentality. Then members of the team must be evaluated against one another again with one person rated above another which creates a me vs them mentality. If you are rated down, your going to believe that the person doing the rating either can't see that you or your team is working smarter and harder than the rest. They got rated up because they somehow cheated the system and the person who rated them is as stupid as they are. If you or your team are rated first, then obviously they don't work as hard or as smart as you.
I got a 2.1/6, which is less than 50%. Apparently this is a "high" risk of burnout... Why not replace it with a button that says "Do you work in tech?" Yes -> High Risk of Burnout, since that's the vibe they're going with.
When I joined the tech industry in my early 20s and for years after, I noticed that many in their 30s or older seemed burned out. It didn't make much sense to me, because to become a tech worker takes drive and ambition and how would you just lose that one day? Now, 12 years on I can definitely see how burnout is so prevalent.
It's like living in the desert and hearing about people drowning. You'd ask yourself, "how is that even possible?" But now I feel as if I've moved to the beach, and can easily see the waves and how it's a real problem. I don't think I'm burned out, but I'm conscious enough of the possibility to keep an eye on the tide.
My tech career started at around 22. Everyone past the 28 mark seemed to have a generally apathetic vibe to work (compared to my 22 year old excitement). I had no idea how that could happen. Tech was awesome!!!!!!
I'm almost 30 now. Fuck tech. Fuck clients. Fuck management. And especially fuck 22 year olds. I want to put on my headphones, finish my 8 hours of sludge, and run for the exit.
For me it's a bit similar to how I felt as a kid playing with legos. Who wouldn't want to play with legos many hours a day, most days every week? It never occurred to me that there'd come a point where I wanted to know that my work genuinely improved lives. It turns out that being good at something and getting paid for it isn't always enough. It's hard to avoid the question of meaning forever.
The drive and ambition have a funny tech-related spin to them, too. Emotional or relational problems are cast in technical terms as if the solution is to file a bug report on one's own software, even in cases where it makes most sense just to get together and push back on the project / boss / client.
Plus you can only hear about e.g. responsiveness concerns like latency so much from the same team / project before you realize: The people themselves are attempting to work more like, and to become more like, machines. They are also thinking about "my latency" as a way of becoming as responsive as possible. If that's true of the group, you're lucky if the burnout isn't already so well entrenched as to be celebrated.
Did you talk to these dudes ? I remember a few guys being quite dull my internship. I think that old big corps are too removed from reality in a way. You make products and portfolios.. rewrite some shit in <platform of the day> that is clearly not or not clearly an improvement. After some point maybe you just throw in the towel and just coast along for the check.
Also one guy did actually lose it and was now the official monster behind a cubicle. AFAIK he was still there because of years of service and probably some deep system know-how lockdown that nobody wants to touch so he's in charge.
Heh, it rings so true. I remember being an intern and feeling a bit ashamed that I was being paid for tinkering with stuff all day. It was all novel back then and very low-pressure (of course, that's because intern-level tasks are not exactly the most important ones). And there was this 'senior developer' guy whom I of course looked up to. But soon I noticed that he was incredibly checked out and just did the bare minimum of work and browsed facebook the rest of the time. I was seriously confused.
I burnt out 3 years in - just wanted too much, too soon instead of enjoying the process. May have come down to the employers. Have taken it easy these last 5 years, working not for a FAANG but very close and I've never been less stressed. Lucky my employer was acquired, because it sounds like the culture pre-acquisition was much, much more toxic.
I immediately went to do this quiz, but then I couldn't help but wonder if this might be one of those Cambridge Analytica style "quizzes" where they're harvesting psychological data for unknown purposes. I'm not sure if this makes me sound savvy or insane.
No personal information is asked, so the dataset will be pretty useless for monetization (you could just computationally generate a couple of thousand of responses and pretend it was the real deal).
uBlock Origin blocked one weird tracker-like third-party I didn't recognize: fullstory.com. The rest were the usual Google analytics crap.
Taking your comment into consideration, it seems like the quiz format could potentially shut out some of those it rather intends to help--its core audience even...how sad would that be.
Imagine those who would elevate your reality-grounded concern (incorporating the current privacy culture context as it does) to the paranoia level, many of whom would do so simply because stress has so affected their judgment process.
I know folks who work in tech for whom this would be a very quick and biting "no" due to such paranoia. But many of these same people urgently need to set boundaries and address destructive issues with their self-criticism circuits. They are burnt out.
I don't think burnout is really about overwork so much as spending even 40 hours a week doing something that is contrary to your own personal values. I suspect a lot of people work on things (ads, selling more crap, getting people in more debt, etc.) that they ultimately don't think really matter or are a net benefit to society.
I'm mentally and physically exhausted, yes. However, I'm exceptionally happy. I enjoy what I do. I want to do it all day long.
We're working on something I think is useful, I think people need it, and I want them to have it sooner rather than later. This might mean I burn out and need a weeks rest come like... June, but fuck, I'm running straight towards that and I'm so happy I don't care.
A few weeks rest!? You certainly might need that, but it ain't burnout—and yes I'll gatekeep it, because burnout is a different degree. I genuinely hope it doesn't happen for you, and getting out while you're happy is probably a great way to mitigate, but it's risky. One of the things about burnout that is so deceiving, is that combination of feeling great about it and sacrificing so much personally or investing too much personally, then you get hit hard when your expectations stop aligning. Could be anything, like you thought based on your work that you were way more valued, then someone new comes in and fires you or changes direction and all of a sudden the last two years are tossed in the garbage. That 3 weeks you would have spent relaxing turns into 2 years spent figuring out wth you were thinking and what to do next.
I feel this industry is burned out due to the fact that the magic doesn't feel like it's there anymore. If we want a salary we're forced to sign NDA's & NCA's and forego all our personal ambitions to the company.
We have endless pointless tooling for basic shit like writing CRUD apps. Need to make a web app? Install Node to use NPM to install a million and a half packages to write a Hello World example. It's cool though, this project was made by so and so, even though the creators themselves aren't using it in production. God forbid you're writing an SPA, that will be 2 million dependencies. So many noob's entering the work force every day trying to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, constantly cheer-leading the latest worthless framework which is built upon the same old logic used for the past 40 years.
Managers and tech leads suffering from blogitis reading some dumb ass opinion on why he chose React etc.. and pushing the entire team and company in that direction. As far as I can tell, our webapps are still a broken pile of patches just the same as they we're 10 years ago. Only this time around, they're much more difficult to write and maintain.
On top of that we have endless meetings all day, arbitrary 1 - 5 ranking systems, biased promotions and endless arbitrary deadlines. Not to worry though, Agile and all it's pointless complexities to the rescue.
Finally, we have smug spoiled people all over this industry talking down to us about the tech we use and how much smarter they are because they hit the jackpot due to mommy and daddy's connections etc...
It's not the wild west anymore and tech isn't nearly as fun or as competitive for the individual. It's just a choice between the corporate grind or starving startup hipster.
I burnt out several years ago, I was way past the point of return before I realized. I ended up changing jobs, and took a few vacations... even then recovery was slow. After that I returned pretty strong. Since then there have been a few times I recognized it happening again, but being cognizant of the signs goes a long ways towards preventing it.
Same thing. I've never held a job longer then two years.
Not because of incapable of the work but because I get so burnt I shoot myself in a foot and end up "dismissed" "fired" "redundant".
I've been off work for three months now with little-to no money and it's the past three months I've only just started feeling myself again. I start work /again/ next week and I know the novelty of the new job will tick well, but when that wears off.. I will start to burn out again.
It's not stress, I can handle that fine. Its just so stale and no freedom.
I want to run another operating system other than "CentOS". Screw it, lets run OpenBSD for routing instead of $$$ DellForce9 where you have to pay $$$ to enable additional switch ports. But no, it's all got to be kept enterprise. I'm just bored of it as a whole.
I have a working theory that basically all "devops engineer" jobs of the last 5ish years are more or less automatic/happens-by-default burnout traps. Hard to tell how much is that and how much is just we're all sliding into middle age, but man I have yet to see one that wasn't a steadily ratcheting wrench of pressure to keep all the old things running while doing the next new thing every month.
Not only is this politically impossible in the US, it would never be able to be equally applied across the industry. Startups would still give a raw deal to their employees. Startup culture in California practically worships extreme hours and periods without pay as "dedication" and part of the "grind".
Furthermore the fact that programming can be fun enough for lone wolf hackers to do their open source projects for free means that unionization efforts would probably lead to a greater industry reliance on actual free work, not less.
I think that burnout has more to do with existential questions and less to do with labor questions. If you don't have a good answer to "why am I doing this job?" then it doesn't matter if you work 40 hours and have excellent healthcare.
I've never had an issue with any of those things. Maybe people should move away from the valley into the rest of the country where the jobs are more humane
I get the sentiment, but some perspective is in order. We're in the goddamn catbird seat. We make a shitload of money, we actually do have good health insurance, and we punch keyboards in a heated office at a desk. We're not mining coal or working in the fertilizer plant from The Jungle.
In this economy, if your work environment sucks, the door is open and there are greener pastures.
The biggest problem is really that so much of what we do is boring, and, in the greater scheme of things, pointless.
I feel like one of the worst things you can do when you burnout or are on the way to burning out, is to get a new job. Imo, swapping in stuff where stuff wasn't good before is just a way to divert your attention in a way that doesn't let you redevelop your value system in a way that you really need to. Just stop for a while. Maybe a long while. Then see what you want to do.
This is useless, unfortunately. I answered it honestly; I'm someone with a low-agreeableness personality, and some health problems (which have been improving, but nonetheless) which leave me pretty drained of energy at the end of the day.
This test doesn't even try to account for those things, and offers me a high risk of burnout despite low-to-perfect scores for everything else.
I'm more interested in why the site reloads the top portion of the page after the initial load. You can tell, because the top image changes from the person sitting on the left side of the table a flipped one where they are on the right side of the table.
Mostly just getting tired of not having a quiet place to work and needing to grind leetcode so that I don't have to worry about being un-hirerable in my free time. Besides that I generally like being an SWE. I'm also pretty tired of private companies wanting me to value stock options equally to dollars.
A bit (quite a lot) simplistic (but personally, I appreciate the idea).
In order to get a "low" index in each parameter, one needs to always set the best possible scenario, which is not realistic.
Even in the best possible scenario _in real world_, one could be less than sympathetic with somebody else once a month. That doesn't mean they're at "mid" level of a burnout parameter.
And not reaching the productivity potential at times is normal (and cyclical). Again, not a burnout parameter.
I see "Based on scientific questionnaires created by psychology professionals", but I doubt it's professionally assembled.
This is great. Any interest in expanding the Roles available in the drop-down menu to be more inclusive of other Roles within a tech company.
Speaking for myself, a tech industry Marketer, I'm pretty damn burnt out!
Thanks for creating a tool to help us visualize and keep reference of where we're mentally at.
It might be a cool feature to have the ability to save your report and trigger repeat measurements over time. With that data, you could then 'map' the mindspace of the user and how they are hopefully working towards triggers and burnout.
Honest question, is someone not mentally drained after programming(or just working) all day? That has been my experience for my 10+ year career every single day. Am I doing it wrong?
[+] [-] sz4kerto|6 years ago|reply
The problems of these, among other things:
- mixing up burnout risk with burnout
- mixing up burnout with physical or mental fatigue
- not serving any purpose (i.e. not providing good directions)
Burnout is primarily a negative change in perception, and it's a spectrum, obviously. You get burned out when your perception of the same situation gets progressively worse. This can be caused by various factors -- exhaustion, doing stuff that doesn't match your values, etc. It can also be prevented in various ways; i.e. you can do very exhausting work and not get burned out.
A really simplistic, but fun/useful way of detecting burnout (not the risk): if you regularly think that you and your team/company/environment work hard, but your customers/broader company/other teams are stupid/not intelligent/not constructive, then that's the first phase ('us vs them'). This can progress to the next phase, where it's more like 'me vs them', so you despise most of your environment. This is when people tend to leave. The last step is apathy, people rarely end here.
It's not really possible to move backwards on this scale without changing roles/work/colleagues.
[+] [-] ChefboyOG|6 years ago|reply
Exhaustion - somewhat self-explanatory
Professional Efficacy - your view of your performance
Cynicism - a distancing of yourself from your job
Though you may come across different names in different writings. It's interesting how the subscales impact each other.
I don't know if I fully buy into the framework 100%, but it makes for interesting research nonetheless.
[+] [-] soneca|6 years ago|reply
It was a diagnosed condition. I am always unsure of what people are talking about when they talk about burnout. Is this panic attack that makes someone temporarily incapable of working or is a strong stress feeling that might be solved just by changing jobs?
The spectrum idea makes sense, but the situation, consequences, and ways to help are very different on different parts of this spectrum.
[+] [-] ghostbrainalpha|6 years ago|reply
I thought that is the step where most of us have been hanging out.
I have been waiting for the "real burnout" to kick in when I dropped another level or two.
[+] [-] sizzle|6 years ago|reply
- mixing up burnout risk with burnout
- mixing up burnout with physical or mental fatigue
- not serving any purpose (i.e. not providing good directions)"
Also I'd argue and add to the list: - not accounting for (undiagnosed) comorbid/latent mental health disorders that affect mood, personality, happiness, well-being in social environments that can cloud your judgement and how you perceive your job w.r.t. the signals that generally predict burnout (e.g. clinical depression, panic attack/anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, etc)
[+] [-] rpastuszak|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpjoynt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] killjoywashere|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TopHand|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wcunning|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bagacrap|6 years ago|reply
It's like living in the desert and hearing about people drowning. You'd ask yourself, "how is that even possible?" But now I feel as if I've moved to the beach, and can easily see the waves and how it's a real problem. I don't think I'm burned out, but I'm conscious enough of the possibility to keep an eye on the tide.
[+] [-] el_dev_hell|6 years ago|reply
My tech career started at around 22. Everyone past the 28 mark seemed to have a generally apathetic vibe to work (compared to my 22 year old excitement). I had no idea how that could happen. Tech was awesome!!!!!!
I'm almost 30 now. Fuck tech. Fuck clients. Fuck management. And especially fuck 22 year olds. I want to put on my headphones, finish my 8 hours of sludge, and run for the exit.
[+] [-] monktastic1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redisman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themodelplumber|6 years ago|reply
Plus you can only hear about e.g. responsiveness concerns like latency so much from the same team / project before you realize: The people themselves are attempting to work more like, and to become more like, machines. They are also thinking about "my latency" as a way of becoming as responsive as possible. If that's true of the group, you're lucky if the burnout isn't already so well entrenched as to be celebrated.
[+] [-] agumonkey|6 years ago|reply
Also one guy did actually lose it and was now the official monster behind a cubicle. AFAIK he was still there because of years of service and probably some deep system know-how lockdown that nobody wants to touch so he's in charge.
[+] [-] dunkelheit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mandatum|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wjp3|6 years ago|reply
Also, thanks for the laugh re: your username.
[+] [-] notJim|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Freak_NL|6 years ago|reply
uBlock Origin blocked one weird tracker-like third-party I didn't recognize: fullstory.com. The rest were the usual Google analytics crap.
[+] [-] themodelplumber|6 years ago|reply
Imagine those who would elevate your reality-grounded concern (incorporating the current privacy culture context as it does) to the paranoia level, many of whom would do so simply because stress has so affected their judgment process.
I know folks who work in tech for whom this would be a very quick and biting "no" due to such paranoia. But many of these same people urgently need to set boundaries and address destructive issues with their self-criticism circuits. They are burnt out.
[+] [-] harshvladha|6 years ago|reply
and still it says "Your burnout risk is HIGH"
I feel, it was because of little high Self-inefficacy.
I experimented with different answers, once I got 0.6/6 and it said: "Your burnout risk is MID", but for that Self-inefficacy was LOW.
It seems like Self-inefficacy has been taken as a high factor for Burnout.
[+] [-] tempsy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richardlblair|6 years ago|reply
I'm mentally and physically exhausted, yes. However, I'm exceptionally happy. I enjoy what I do. I want to do it all day long.
We're working on something I think is useful, I think people need it, and I want them to have it sooner rather than later. This might mean I burn out and need a weeks rest come like... June, but fuck, I'm running straight towards that and I'm so happy I don't care.
[+] [-] brailsafe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrshawkes|6 years ago|reply
We have endless pointless tooling for basic shit like writing CRUD apps. Need to make a web app? Install Node to use NPM to install a million and a half packages to write a Hello World example. It's cool though, this project was made by so and so, even though the creators themselves aren't using it in production. God forbid you're writing an SPA, that will be 2 million dependencies. So many noob's entering the work force every day trying to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, constantly cheer-leading the latest worthless framework which is built upon the same old logic used for the past 40 years.
Managers and tech leads suffering from blogitis reading some dumb ass opinion on why he chose React etc.. and pushing the entire team and company in that direction. As far as I can tell, our webapps are still a broken pile of patches just the same as they we're 10 years ago. Only this time around, they're much more difficult to write and maintain.
On top of that we have endless meetings all day, arbitrary 1 - 5 ranking systems, biased promotions and endless arbitrary deadlines. Not to worry though, Agile and all it's pointless complexities to the rescue.
Finally, we have smug spoiled people all over this industry talking down to us about the tech we use and how much smarter they are because they hit the jackpot due to mommy and daddy's connections etc...
It's not the wild west anymore and tech isn't nearly as fun or as competitive for the individual. It's just a choice between the corporate grind or starving startup hipster.
[+] [-] swalsh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doublerabbit|6 years ago|reply
I've been off work for three months now with little-to no money and it's the past three months I've only just started feeling myself again. I start work /again/ next week and I know the novelty of the new job will tick well, but when that wears off.. I will start to burn out again.
It's not stress, I can handle that fine. Its just so stale and no freedom.
I want to run another operating system other than "CentOS". Screw it, lets run OpenBSD for routing instead of $$$ DellForce9 where you have to pay $$$ to enable additional switch ports. But no, it's all got to be kept enterprise. I'm just bored of it as a whole.
[+] [-] cagenut|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbrb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gowld|6 years ago|reply
1. I find it difficult to relax after a day of work
2. After a day of work, I feel run-down and drained of physical or emotional energy
3. I feel less and less connected and engaged with the work I do.
4. I do not have a clear idea of the value and purpose of my job
5. I am harder and less sympathetic with people than perhaps they deserve
6. I am worried this job is making me harsher emotionally
7. I feel that I am achieving less than I should
8. I feel that I do not have time to do many of the things that are important for doing a good quality job
[+] [-] jdkee|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etaioinshrdlu|6 years ago|reply
Furthermore the fact that programming can be fun enough for lone wolf hackers to do their open source projects for free means that unionization efforts would probably lead to a greater industry reliance on actual free work, not less.
[+] [-] leftyted|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derision|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bla3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrower123|6 years ago|reply
In this economy, if your work environment sucks, the door is open and there are greener pastures.
The biggest problem is really that so much of what we do is boring, and, in the greater scheme of things, pointless.
[+] [-] dmos62|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blahyawnblah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brailsafe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redisman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samatman|6 years ago|reply
This test doesn't even try to account for those things, and offers me a high risk of burnout despite low-to-perfect scores for everything else.
[+] [-] jlv2|6 years ago|reply
I'm more interested in why the site reloads the top portion of the page after the initial load. You can tell, because the top image changes from the person sitting on the left side of the table a flipped one where they are on the right side of the table.
left https://images.ctfassets.net/z2g90m75le4q/5yT1ytvHM0WLTih13Y...
right https://images.ctfassets.net/z2g90m75le4q/7kam7578mAMnVlgQTP...
[+] [-] llsf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jophde|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pizza234|6 years ago|reply
In order to get a "low" index in each parameter, one needs to always set the best possible scenario, which is not realistic.
Even in the best possible scenario _in real world_, one could be less than sympathetic with somebody else once a month. That doesn't mean they're at "mid" level of a burnout parameter.
And not reaching the productivity potential at times is normal (and cyclical). Again, not a burnout parameter.
I see "Based on scientific questionnaires created by psychology professionals", but I doubt it's professionally assembled.
[+] [-] schwinn140|6 years ago|reply
Speaking for myself, a tech industry Marketer, I'm pretty damn burnt out!
Thanks for creating a tool to help us visualize and keep reference of where we're mentally at.
It might be a cool feature to have the ability to save your report and trigger repeat measurements over time. With that data, you could then 'map' the mindspace of the user and how they are hopefully working towards triggers and burnout.
[+] [-] redisman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|6 years ago|reply