It seems to me that a lot of contemporary burnout stems from the extremely abstract nature of the modern economy.
During and after college, I spent 4-5 years working at a bakery. The pay was poor, the hours worse, customers irritating, and career advancement non-existent. And yet, I got to make hundreds of real, physical objects every day, entirely from scratch, and then see people enjoy them. That sort of instant feedback made all the scrubbing, mopping, and change-counting bearable, at least in an obvious cause-effect sense. This counter is covered in flour because I was baking these loaves of bread all day.
Compare this to the average office job. For the most part, the end product of a week's or month's work is essentially a bunch of text on a screen. Take a writer, for example. In the past, a journalist or writer would have some physical remnants and products of their work - the notes and manuscripts for their articles and then the final published piece in a newspaper or physical book. Today, they have...a collection of blog posts and internet articles. The physicality of the work has evaporated entirely.
I don't really know if this is a solvable problem in the near future, but I hope that the digital economy takes a turn back towards some sense of physicality.
> It seems to me that a lot of contemporary burnout stems from the extremely abstract nature of the modern economy
I think doing things in the real world that you believe to be useful can provide meaning (e.g., baker making bread that that you see people enjoy, or a doctor checking a kid and being thanked by parents). However, to me, it is orthogonal to working with physical objects. I am perfectly happy working with text on screen that produces plots and formulas as long as I convince myself that those could be useful for something I consider important.
The big problem I believe is the fact that many people know that what their work will be used for is useless to a society (or even mildly harmful). I suspect that people working on targeting ads to sell unneeded junk, hooking kids on time-wasting apps or winning in a zero-sum game of HFT know deep inside that their work is a waste at best.
This can be rationalized away for a while, but not being able to answer "what am I doing this for?" can eat one up long term. My 2c.
I suspect many/most engineer-types could be happy with only 1-2 of the following:
* Contributing to a project/mission that feels worthwhile.
* Practicing good craft/professionalism. (Which doesn't necessarily mean always being able to do the best code/architecture/process, but to work well within your constraints.)
* Being part of a good team.
Though ideally you have all three, and perhaps other things, as well.
I agree about abstract, and maybe that ties into feelings about contributing. For a while, I was working with only code related to aviation, and I felt good about my modest role in some good processes, but I don't actually like flying, so I hadn't been up-close with airplanes in a while. One day, it occurred to me that it would be a boost of inspiration to go see some of the real-world aircraft and activity. Aviation is really amazing concert of processes and technology, most of it not visible, but there's something to be said for tangible. Since I wasn't aware of anything like an observation window in my airport that (post-9/11) one could access without a ticket, I spent some time finding and printing photos of some of the aircraft I'd been working with, and decorated my office, which did give a boost.
I found this to be so true at a job I had in international development. Being on a small but respected team in the org and having input on how projects all over the world would be implemented was very fulfilling.
It can be even worse for some people stuck in the Corporate/IT world of endless projects spun up destined to failure because all the requirements are coming from the top of the organization with little insight on how to put it all together. People lose motivation quickly not because of a physical object at the end of the day, but autonomy over their work and some feeling that what they are doing will be USED by someone. Versus a year of work for a project that never gets off the ground, just to be moved to another project.
Agreed. I can put up with a lot of abstract drudgery trying to figure out how to work with stupid non-compliant "interop" implementations when I remind myself that my company's systems are involved in making health records more accessible for over 100 million people.
Very true regarding the advertising industry but I feel like this is easily extended to encompass almost all product driven commercial businessess.
On the one hand we're killing the earth, polluting and creating a nightmare existence for our children. On the other hand, buy more stuff! I don't understand how anyone can justify this to themselves and I believe the resultant self doubt is a key factor in burnout.
P.s. never mention this at work... It's the elephant in every meeting room.
> the end product of a week's or month's work is essentially a bunch of text on a screen
For me as a developer this isn't so much of a problem. I take pride in my code up to a point (happy to admit I'm a bog-standard dev) but very much take pride in my documentation, always striving to make it as clear and useful as possible. I often come back to instructions I've written in years past and feel proud of the effort I made.
But... what really drains all of the fun out of my work is the software I have to use - I truly believe it's some of the worst quality commercial software money can buy, and it never gets better, with the company apparently firmly set on its 'let the users act as your QA department' philosophy and no improvement in sight.
If anyone needs a geo-hacker with C#, Python, PostgreSQL and good presentation/documentation skills I'm open to offers!
> For me as a developer this isn't so much of a problem. I take pride in my code...
My trouble with this is that the end goal of the business is never quality software on its own merits, therefore any effort I put into making it so is seen as wasteful or even counterproductive. I'm not even allowed to take pride in my own craftsmanship. (Documentation? We've got features to ship, and deadlines, given to us by marketing.) In the interview, I'm quizzed on my ability to spot all the crazy corner cases of an algorithm, but once I'm hired, my manager comes by to make sure I only hit the happy path, and don't waste time on things that most users will probably never run into, probably. The whole thing will be thrown out and rewritten soon enough, anyway.
> But... what really drains all of the fun out of my work is the software I have to use - I truly believe it's some of the worst quality commercial software money can buy, and it never gets better, with the company apparently firmly set on its 'let the users act as your QA department' philosophy and no improvement in sight.
I believe this is another symptom of the same problem. They're just like you or me, sitting in a different room at a different company, with a manager breathing down their neck to add more features and not worry about the occasional bug.
One bad driver can cause a traffic jam, but one good driver can't cure one.
> For me as a developer this isn't so much of a problem. I take pride in my code up to a point (happy to admit I'm a bog-standard dev) but very much take pride in my documentation, always striving to make it as clear and useful as possible. I often come back to instructions I've written in years past and feel proud of the effort I made.
Do you have any links on how to improve documentation writing? I am starting to lead a team and my documentation skills are just not up to the level that I like.
I can't find the name of it, but I read a book a while back that discussed just this - the author had been an extremely successful intellectual, but quit to run a motorcycle repair shop. He found that the "big" work was absolutely unrewarding due to no real tangible feedback - he never knew if he was doing well, and had no payoff, but repairing a motorcycle is something that is extremely tangible and rewarding in that you can see the results of your effort.
Maybe he was more of a "sensor" (personality type that needs to see a tangible result). A lot of developers are sensors (ISTJ in the myers briggs woo woo parlance), but also a lot are intuitors which might not need this.
I read this book years ago thinking it was specifically about motorcycles (at the time I was riding a lot as a hobby) and instead got this strange meditation on the nature of work and its meaning. I was annoyed at first but kept reading. Ended up loving it. Highly recommend.
It is inspired by it, but with a modern look on the same ideas.
It is about paying attention to what you do, to put effort into what you are doing. The Zen book was about that as well; if you put attention and effort into fixing motorcycles, it will often be rewarding.
"burnout stems from the extremely abstract nature of the modern economy."
That is incorrect. According to research, burnout steams not from the work, but from the pressure to complete the work, and the consequences of not completing the work.
Almost every job in the private sector is "At-will" employment. Meaning you can be fired for any work related reason. Not finishing an assignment? Poor performance? etc, you are at risk of being fired.
That pressure to constantly perform under pressure is what causes burnout. You baking is not a pressure packed job, you are following a simple procedure that requires little to no thinking at all.
If you were threatened or worked "under the gun"at the bakery, I gurantee you would burnout.
> According to research, burnout steams not from the work, but from the pressure to complete the work, and the consequences of not completing the work.
> You baking is not a pressure packed job, you are following a simple procedure that requires little to no thinking at all.
What? A job that "requires little to no thinking at all" can nonetheless include a strong pressure to perform or get fired, which is what you say causes burnout.
I disagree with that on a personal experience, and I have read plenty of research from suggesting that while pressure is part of the equation it isn’t necessarily corporate pressure. It is more often related to lack of purpose, lack of guidance, personal conflict with a superior.
All these can go un-identified, stress accumulates, productivity decreases, and that’s when corporate pressure can kick in.
In my case there was no corporate pressure, although there was clear decrease in performance.
As soon as I figured out (actually a LICSW, over the phone and one face-to-face visit) that I was doing a burnout, I was able to get back on my feet make a plan and I liked my job and my environment again.
This was a few years ago, and now I’m feeling going down a bit, and I blame the lack of direction, lack on continuity, lack of a mission. I could literally stop doing any meaningful work for a year before anyone would acknowledge any form of poor performance.
I am obviously not going this route, I have a plan, but corporate pressure isn’t what is triggering me, the lack thereof might be
My friend dropped out of (traditional) college due to low grades and became a welder. Not only does he make an upper middle class salary, he said the best part is getting to build stuff and have it be used for important things.
Yeah. Last summer I went to the Empire State Building in New York city and two things struck me. First was the quality of the work and second was the recognition paid to those responsible for that quality.
On the observation floor they have these plaques that display lists of recognized tradesmen who built the damn thing. I was almost moved to tears looking at those lists and realizing what these people had done in a years time.
And if you happen to be in the lineage of those builders... Imagine being able to take your children to that place, point at those lists and say; look there, your great grand father helped make this building.
“On the observation floor they have these plaques that display lists of recognized tradesmen who built the damn thing. ”
I don’t think this would happen anymore. Workers don’t get much respect these days. They are kept anonymous. The first Macs had the names of the developers somewhere. No way this would fly these days.
Not just the Macs themselves, but also the software in old Macs often had the names of its programmer(s) on the About box as opposed to a generic company name. I think this was sort of part of the Macintosh culture at the time since the software that came with the OS itself had the programmers' names instead of Apple too.
Today you only see that only on open source software... and Adobe (for some reason :-P). Although in both cases it is usually tacked under an "Authors" or "Credits" button (mainly because the credits is usually a laundry list with tons of names).
Possibly because Adobe software has a long history with the entertainment industry. Games have credits, albums list their performers and composers, and movies end with 10 minutes of everyone who showed up on the set one day (and their dog). Attribution is very important in the artistic fields.
On the other side of the aisle, Excel began as a tool for financial calculations, and it has never included any names in its about panel, even back in the 1980's: https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-excel/1x
There are all these stories about Hertzfeld, Atkinson and others from the early Mac days. I have never heard similar stuff about iPhone development. Who are the heroes of iOS?
I really don't mean for that to sound in any way snarky or whatever. I'm also not trying to diminish the role Jobs played as a visionary, driving the company to create the right product. Not a Jobs cultist, and I'm also not wishing to denigrate him. It's just that, in light of the point being made, I think it really illustrates that point so well that there are only two names that I feel are championed as the heroes of the iPhone & iOS—Jobs and Ive. Sure, there are other execs who show up in keynotes/events, and they get some praise for their roles/departments ... and I think that really drives the point home. People doing the work aren't highlighted and recognized. It's the execs who get the praise, accolades, awards, etc. Maybe there are individual contributor names on patents or something, but nobody really seems to know who they are.
It comes down to a cognitive trade off. No one can or wants to remember or contemplate the tens, hundreds or thousands of people whose efforts went into completing something. It's just easier, calorically speaking, to give the attention to a few.
There's a recent book called Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda which details how the iPhone touch keyboard was built. So there's bits and pieces here and there.
There isn't a Homeric saga which details all the subsystems and who built them however.
That seems to be an expected thing in entertainment products. Getting in the credits is very important to one's career and place in the field(s) involved.
I think most of the burn out comes from the 80-20 principle, where 20% of your staff deliver 80% of the output. I know where I work, if you work late and look around it is always the same handful of people who are working back. Usually its because they know so much about the organisation that people come to them to solve problems, and then they have to work late to do there own work.
I feel like if you are part of that 20% it can get pretty tiring, particularly if your personal life is also under pressure at the same time. (i.e. its hard to have quality relationships when you have to constantly work late).
I'm not sure if this feeling is universal, but I have a hunch that it kind of is. In terms of productivity, and organisational impact not everyone is equal, and those that are disproportionate in impact are put under increased pressure and stress during these times of efficiency and cost cutting.
I agree with your 80/20 prinicpal. However, I don't believe that staying late at the office is any indicator of productivity. In fact, I would argue that staying late at the office may have the opposite connotation.
Sure, staying late makes sense sometimes(deadlines to meet, production bugs, making a client happy, etc), however, staying late on a regular basis would indicate to me that these people are either very inefficient, need some extra manpower, or have a process problem.
Hours worked does not equate directly to productivity.I think believing that they do is a toxic mindset.
You should try working in a position where you are in the non-productive 80%, you will probably burn out a lot faster than if you are in the productive 20%.
Yeah, I have had similar experiences. Besides just "making physical objects", there's also the camaraderie of working with others directly. Working directly with other people I was laughing, talking, listening all day and those were really fulfilling relationships.
I think this is subjective, to be honest. Personally, I do my best work alone without distraction from others. While I do like being social over coffee or lunch, when I have to write code or prototype/tweak a system, I don't want talking, chatting, or other people's music in the background. This is what works for me. I turn on the Trance channel and grind it out. I can get more work done in half a day like this than in two days working with others. Thankfully, my job is largely dependent on what I can offer and not on pure teamwork.
For me it depends on the current task. For work that needs deep concentration, I appreciate solitude. But for tedious, boring work, I appreciate the background noise.
You have a point there. I am mechanical engineer now doing software and I really miss seeing and touching(!) the final product. When I did commercial software at least you saw something on the screen quickly. Now I am in medical devices and I almost never get to witness or experience the results of my work. When you are done with something it still takes often years to get it to market. Add to that all the reporting requirements and the actual work is totally detached from the product.
I definitely miss direct contact with the results of my work.
I'd suggest automotive. I get to build software and see how it directly effects hardware for testers that we build. That's incredibly satisfying to me. And you don't have to wait 20 years to pass FDA inspection.
I noted the same things when I was going through burnout. I also noted that no one in my life used or even really knew about what I did. It felt like telling people I had a Canadian girlfriend. People are pretty sure I really do have a job but who knows what it is.
So not only is the physical aspect of the job missing, the produced artifacts of your labours don't exist in your community either. It is like leaving your community for 8+ hours a day.
Lastly, it is demonstrably ephemeral. Websites, apps, documents, spreadsheets, reports. It's all obsolete so fast that it can feel pointless having put so much effort in the first time.
I love software and I love working in competent teams and making cool stuff. But I think it needs to be balanced with doing real world things within your community.
This really connects for me. I'm a library maintainer, and it's very satisfying to me to know that my team's work leads to visible, measurable improvements in the apps that our users make, even if it's not tangible objects; it's still a bit of a "text on a screen" outcome, but at least I get to write changelings and release notes that detail what we accomplished and why it made things better (usually).
I also suspect this is why so many people I know in the industry (myself included) have hard-physical-object hobbies like baking, brewing, cycling, robotics... we need to fulfill a drive to create.
I fully get this, my software is used by my team directly (I'm a bioinformatician surrounded by biologists) and I see them be impressed when I whip out relevant data in the blink of an eye. It's my mayor motivator at work.
One reason why Ford had to raise salaries to the famous five dollars a day was that workers were turned from craftsmen to simple cogs on the assembly line and didn’t want to do that boring and repetitive job.
I feel the same is happening in software. Compared to the 90s it feels much more like assembly line work where a worker does something very specialized and repeats it over and over.
And Ford's wage increase has been famously and misleadingly mythologized as a favor he did to his employees so they could afford to buy his cars. Matthew Crawford's takedown of this bullshit in Shop Class as Soulcraft is delicious.
The fact that so many people seem to believe that any businesses would decide to pay their workers above market value, in hopes that some percentage of that would come back in the form of higher sales, speaks to the marketing success of the Ford Motor Company.
Ford had the idea of a new way to manufacture things, and paid what he needed to in order to get workers who could learn this system and deliver value to him and the shareholders. It also helped that his heyday was in the 1920s, when the US economy was strong, which also colors people's memory. He likely also considered that it's sometimes better to overpay a little to assure you have the workers you need, rather than risk delaying a shipment.
It's the same with tech companies like Google, they're paying what they need to pay to attract the talent they want.
What's funny is that if a modern CEO said something like "We're going to pay our employees better so they can afford our product", it would be immediately seen as self-serving marketing nonsense to hide the actual truth. But the mythical Henry Ford says it, and people believe it. Sigh.
I was the exact opposite. 6-7 years of restaurant work for 40 hours a week with a bachelors degree mixed in cause terrible burnout for me. Once I got my office job I had instant relief. I could feel myself getting burnt out again due to over work (and very underpaid). Switched jobs and found a great team and company!
Agreed! I pointed this out to my boss once, when I was working at a healthcare-related startup. I wrote software, and I didn't have much confidence that it caused any positive effect. He explained that somebody would see the result of my software, and take an action, which would influence someone else, and so on down the line, and eventually, someone's health would have an improved result. It was all about The System, and I shouldn't be discouraged because that's just how all modern life is. You contribute to your one piece of The System and you'll probably never see the effects yourself.
I'm glad I got out of that world, and back into the physical world. As you say, the pay/hours/etc are worse but there are some things you just can't put a price on.
This is a bit different in embedded systems. Here is this physical object, and today it can do something that it couldn't do yesterday, because I made it do that. For software, it has a lot of physicality...
I think Marx talks about this. The problem in his view was mostly the assembly line disassociating your work from the end product. He valued individual tradesmen perfecting a craft and moving any repetitive work to machines.
But I don't think it's quite right. Take a look at the joy in mission control when they achieve their goal. No one is responsible for physically making any part of that rover, shuttle, etc. but the joy of accomplishment is still real.
I'd imagine the joy of launching a highly successful digital product is just as real.
I think the disassociating comes from not feeling like you played a part in the product. I think authority over a product's idea/vision is just as satisfying as authority over it's physical shape.
Having occupied each of the 4 quadrants of the (physical/digital, vision/worker) tuple at some point in my life, I disagree. The move from (digital, vision) to (physical, worker) was a joyous one for me.
> Compare this to the average office job. For the most part, the end product of a week's or month's work is essentially a bunch of text on a screen.. The physicality of the work has evaporated entirely.
The end product is not just a bunch of digitized string characters, but human affect after reading.
I actually have done a fair bit of bakery in my life so I know what you mean, but I get the same satisfaction from writing programs. I'm not sure if all "office workers" get this, though.
Besides inherent meaning in the work itself (like zookeeping) I think the information economy is just structurally stressful... when you look decades ahead.
Career progression can feel like an up-or-out pyramid. Many devs feel (rightly or wrongly) like they need to progress to super-dev or manager by 35, because who's going to hire a 40 to engineer, especially when the tech stack/tools get a reset every 5 years.
..and devs have it good, ATM. High demand, at least some respect for experience. Who's hiring a 49 year old social media ambassador? Will the arcane understanding of azure enterprise pricing and configuration that keeps you employed today get you employed in 2025? How about agile expertise?
I think people look at their jobs, and just can't see a safe path to retirement at 66. The job, or the company won't exist by then.
It's stressful.
My grandad was a farmer and builder. His father and brothers were farmer-tradesmen too. By 30 he had acquired some land, stock, a light truck and tools for the contracting business. He raised cattle and built houses until retirement (when he traded building for running a BnB, and still farmed a little).
The point is that people expected their career to have long term legs. A lot of the new information economy feels very fleeting, by comparison.
Meanwhile most of us have fathers, aunts or whatnot that found themselves unemployed in their 50s after a promising-seeming 40s. Travel agents when Expedia happened. Programmers when the dot-com bust happened... real estators when that happened, Greek civil servants when Greece went bust...
yep, and trying to stay relevant in the web development world is exhausting.
I learned SQL once, and it's carried me throughout my career. Every 2-3 years, the ideal JS developer checklist completely changes, and now I need to learn how to bundle and deploy JS apps yet again.
It gets less and less fun re-learning how to do the same thing over and over again. I used to love learning all about the latest greatest tools in the web world; but I just don't have that kind of energy anymore. It drives me crazy to have to go through the process of learning gulp/webpack/rollup/whatever new JS tool comes out in 2019/2020.
> Who's hiring a 49 year old social media ambassador?
I think the demand for this is actually going to be huge in the future. There are getting to be a lot of older people who grew up with computers, and have a massive amount of purchasing power. A twentysomething is probably not going to be the right person to reach them.
I agree that a lot of this is perception, and the "young man's game" assumption is largely false, just driven by meaningless demographic trends (not as many people started coding in 1980 as in 2010, so there are proportionally few old programmers.
I'm talking about a larger feeling. The industry is ethereal. The companies and jobs in the 2039 information economy will be very different. Sure, it's possible to keep up. But, it may not be easy. In a lot of cases, you can probably expect the rug to be pulled out.
I agree that a talented engineer will probably be in demand. But that's just a small portion of people.
Compare this to bookkeeping, welding, lawyering, nursing...
An average 35 year old nurse (or most people working in a hospital long term) can imagine themselves continuing on some relatively uneventful path for another 30 years. An average employee at Uber? A lot less so.
..and most people work at much less prestigious companies than Uber.
There's an advice that I tend to give to my younger colleagues who ask about this stuff: love your profession, not your job.
I love my profession -- I wanted to be an engineer for as long as I can remember. But that doesn't mean I loved every engineering job I've ever held. If a job makes you dislike what you do to the point where you stop cultivating your abilities, I think you should leave it as soon as you can.
Whenever I get too worked up about how decisions are made in my group, I like to think of all the IT departments there are in my city, in the world even.
I don't care about what decisions are being made in those places, so I shouldn't get too worked up about decisions being made where I work either.
If, after giving my recommendations, and making my arguments, people still decide to do risky dumb things with infrastructure, I don't let it bother me anymore.
At one time I was contracting at a place where every process was broken, from IT to management to testing. It wasn't really a place that attracted talented developers. There were a some developers that were talented and a lot which were mediocre or had given up along the way. Development progressed at the pace of syrup. They paid on time, though.
Anyway, being a professional, I put in my hours and did my best to contribute until the contract ran out. But I also stuck a post-it note to the bottom of my screen with my all-time favourite Polish phrase: "Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy". Literally: "Not my circus, not my monkeys.". I.e. the inherent brokenness wasn't my problem to fix.
When I was contractor and had to sit through stupid meetings I always looked at my watch and thought "Here is another $20, here is another" and so on. It's cynical but makes it much more bearable.
I do the same but there is a certain emotional numbness to it. On the one hand it’s good to say “fuck it” but on the other hand it doesn’t feed your soul.
Right way, but the problem is that when the shit hits the fan people often forget good advise and the priority is to do cleanup asap. That repeats so often.
Great advice. I would only add to that, that not only can your "job make you dislike what you do", but also the environment you do your job in.
Yes - some parts of any job suck. Some parts have to be dealt with and one needs to have at least some kind of tolerance for frustration.
But there is a threshold. If the job, the people, the culture around you do not show that they respect and value you, but only the bottom line they can grind you down for: Get out.
> I would only add to that, that not only can your "job make you dislike what you do", but also the environment you do your job in.
Yeah, I meant "your job" in the generic way, including everything there is about it. Where you work, who you work with, what you do, for whom etc.
Every aspect of professional life includes things that we'd rather not deal with. Programming? You're gonna have to write boring boilerplate code sometimes. Poor tooling? You're going to have to convince management to give you the budget you need to fix it, and that's going to involve a lot of politics. Meetings? Some of them are going to be a waste of time but you'll have to attend them. Volunteering projects? Some are genuine, some are there only because someone has some KPIs to meet.
These are things that you're going to have to deal with anywhere you go.
Things that you don't have to deal with anywhere you go, however, include stuff like abusive behaviour, regular and unpaid overtime with an expectation that "everyone loves what they do and works 60-hour weeks here", or poor working conditions that take a toll on your health. That's stuff that no one should "deal" with (except, you know, by leaving).
That's fantastic advice. I think it's a case of caring about the right things, and learning when to let go/not take things personally.
On a slight tangent, I've always found that hobbies - and treating programming as one of them - always helps me disassociate from thinking about my own achievements as only being work-related. I've tried so many things, just because they interested me, and got fairly good at some of them. Sometimes it might be a craft, another time it might be learning a new programming language, or a piece of software I don't know well enough.
The ones I don't enjoy so much fall by the wayside (life drawing, golang, philosophy, whittling, many more), but some chance subjects have directly led to better jobs (ruby, elixir), some have made me a better programmer, and anything else I can at least say has made me a more rounded and knowledgable person, and hopefully more employable because of it.
Good stuff. The one thing that has made me happier as I age is treating a job as just an income source. I design board games as a hobby and can take pride in that work without all of the nonsense of pointless meetings and political games.
Totally agree. I always say that whatever you do as a job, you should capitalize on youself.
Figure out what is your vision on the purpose of your job and how it integrates with the perspective of your own professional goals. Then push it as much as you can, thereby building up experience on the path to these goals. If you find an dead end, seek antoher job.
Many times have I confronted my own vision against that of (or lack therof) my hierarchy, and the undertaking of proving my point earned me a great deal of experience, regardless of the outcome (which, over time, has been largely positive, i.e. my vision proven right).
Yes, I should leave this job and probably this profession. But I don't know what I could do instead that would provide the same immediate benefits, pay, and perks that this job does. So, I'm rolling along and spending all my other time with my family and working on writing.
I wish I could articulate precisely what -- a the age of cough cough -something -- has kept me engaged and happy as a software developer. In part, I've been lucky. I've mostly had decent jobs and companies that treated employees humanely. Partly, I feel that I keep improving at what I do, and that alone is somewhat satisfying. Partly, I just like thinking and solving puzzles, which pretty much describes actual coding.
Contrast that to my wife, who, despite having a degree from a top ivy league school, seems to have hated every job she's ever had and would drop it all to retire in an instant if she could afford it.
I will note that I also have had the luxury of exploring the "do what you love" career theory. Out of high school, I wanted to be an orchestral musician, and spent like 12 years pursuing that path before realizing that it wasn't going to work out. So I sort of had to reset my brain to understand that I didn't have to do this one thing to be happy. So I'm not sitting here in a cubicle thinking "if only...." because I've done the "if only." (Not having other options is actually a surprisingly effective route to happiness. (See: Stumbling on Happiness)).
Another great book related to this topic is "How to Want What You Have."
A big part of this is just how you see the world, and perhaps how well you understand yourself. Not sure which term to use: attitude, personality, outlook, frame of mind, perspective, etc.
I have definitely had times in my career when I dreaded going to work. Like I could feel an actual physical weight on my shoulders as I drove up to the office.
In my current season in life, I can see a lot more what is good and what is bad, what I'm willing to put up with and what I'm not, what I'm good at and what I'm not, what is actually a big deal versus what is just a big deal in my mind, and so on.
That perspective will keep me more happy in any job, even ones that other people may dislike. But it also draws me to work that I know will keep me happy because I understand what contentment is in a way I didn't understand 15-20 years ago.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, would I stay in my current job? Probably not. But that doesn't mean I'm unhappy in the job -- as ways to earn money go, this one is pretty nice. But it was a circuitous path to get here, and I think the biggest lie we can perpetrate on young folks is that there is a single passion they should pursue to find their calling. Almost no one gets it right on their first try.
I love technology, and i love building things. But i have to admit that i'm lucky that something i enjoy doing also pays well. If i enjoyed painting more than anything else, i probably would have been miserable. So it's not just a matter of pursing what you enjoy, it's also being lucky.
I've followed a similar path as you. I was a late-bloomer, academically. Just sorta bounced around until my mid-twenties when I got bored/depressed (or did I simply realize I would be miserable later in life?) with what I was doing in my minimum-wage jobs. I somehow got interested in Physics, put myself back into school, at which point I became incredibly interested in Software Development during an internship my Junior year and the rest is a standard Tech Industry story.
I work really long hours, not because I feel some need to satisfy my corporate overlords or because I have too much to do, but simply because I find it fun. I'm sure most everyone here can relate, but that feeling of banging your head against a wall for (x-amount of time) and then suddenly nailing a solution is exhilarating. I don't think that I can hit burnout with that, but maybe I'm wrong.
I see two things with this:
1) I (and this cannot be stressed enough) got _really_ lucky having an inherent interest in something that also aligned with a market need.
2) In the course of "bouncing around" in my late-teens and early-twenties I had a lot of time to ruminate (consciously or not) on who I was and what I wanted with life. This isn't some profound thing I'll say and I've certainly seen it echoed here before, but pushing young people (let's be real... they're kids) to make an extremely costly decision that will impact the entirety of their life without knowing who they even are is...crazy.
Like you, I'll contrast that with my wife: High School -> SATs -> college application process -> enter a curriculum for (insert here) -> graduate -> get a job (not even in your mid-twenties yet). Maybe some people do know who they are at an early age, but I'd wager most people don't really know themselves until ~25.
And now, here you are, coming to terms with yourself after having invested god-knows-how-much money and four years into something you'll likely evolve out of, but still needing to put in the hours to make ends meet and climb the ladder (we all want to be middle management, right?). The key to loving your job in the age of burnout is to not take your job until you know who you are. And even then your interests may not even align with an economic need. So what do you do? Especially when you need to feed yourself and, potentially, your family. It seems to me that finding a career that you like and that feels like fun, rather than work, is a total crap shoot. Sort of like a romantic relationship. Ideally, you want a partner that grows with you, but as we all know that's hard to predict because people change at varying rates or not at all.
TL;DR: If you're (really really) lucky and happen to fall into a career path that grows with you, you might not experience burnout
You are absolutely right. I wish what you did becomes the norm in the future for most kids. Having to make a decision like college at 18 is absolutely nuts for most kids.
> "But with the rise of Protestantism, work was ennobled. Martin Luther for the first time suggested that an individual’s work—whether it was making shoes or building churches—could be a way of serving God, and that the harder we worked (and, by default, the more money we made), the better God would be pleased.
> "That Protestant work ethic dominates in the US to a greater degree than almost anywhere else because it is a relatively young country without a long, prevalent pre-Protestant history..."
I've heard this theory of the protestant work ethic many times very recently. I grew up in what I think was a very typical American protestant culture, where, yes, work is ennobled ("all work is a high calling, not just clerical work") but I have never encountered this sentiment to the workaholic extreme that is being associated to it. Just the opposite was true: a huge emphasis was placed on the Sabbath commandment. Not in the legalistic, "it's a sin if you work on Sundays" kind of way, but definitely in the work-life balance, burnout-avoiding kind of way. Sabbath rest has always been centrally important to the brand of protestant work ethic that I came up in. Curious if others have different experiences?
IMO the Protestant work ethic, while it has its roots in the ennobling of work in service to God, quickly got twisted through the Puritans and their adherence to "working out your salvation" rather than "for it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, not by works so that no one can boast." Even if that wasn't the official theology, that's certainly the behavioral tradition. And this quickly got twisted into the fundamental American myth: you get what you deserve.
Are you wealthy? Then you must have worked hard. Are you poor? Then you must be lazy. Did participating in an essential oils MLM bankrupt your family? You just didn't want success enough.
So the protestant work ethic in a modern sense, (IMO, of course) is ennobling work BECAUSE your "righteousness" for whatever religious or non-religious definition you want to use is based in your hardworkingness.
Exactly right, it's a human nature twist on misinterpreted Protestant theology. Or rather a human instinct dressed up with the language of religion, in this case Protestantism but it could be anything. The manipulative language of MLMs which make money off the failures of their consultants, pulls from this work = salvation misinterpretation that boils down to "you get what you deserve," which is completely at odds with _real_ Protestant (and Catholic, orthodox, other Christian) theology.
Ironically, this belief is honestly held by many con artists, who placate their conscience by telling themselves that whoever is stupid "deserves" to be scammed.
Agree with you. Disagree with article. Reformed thinking says that God created work, and thus work is good and it is intended to fulfill humanity. However, work, money, status, career progression, are idols. Two laws since the resurrection: love God, love your neighbor. You can love God by working, but it is not the only means and work for work's sake should not be loved or exalted.
Seems intuitively obvious to me to the point of being a fluff piece.
The article is effectively saying that if your job needs to not be pointless in order for you to do it.
If you go to work every day, don't achieve anything in the wider world, don't save for the future, don't have any plans in general, then you're going to have a bad time.
That's a completely natural response to, well, wasting your entire life if left unchecked.
You can be paid very little but if it allows you to support your family that can be fulfilling.
After 6 years of egineering, ive had to stop and start to learn this skill. I lost the ability to rest without thinking about what i could be doing now..
Having a good life/work balance is very hard in modern age. Team hates you because each time you have to go out to LIVE, they feel like they have to do your job too.. Feeling guilty also sux. But what can you do.
Great qualification in the first sentence: many things that have seemed obvious to me have been hailed as innovative by others - just given the limitations of human mind, this is inevitable. (Could have been summed into one sentence, that much I concede.)
There's something overlooked about zookeepers and many other professions: it's done _outside_. Being outside, directly under the sun, makes us happy, regardless of weather or temperature. I don't think one can be happy being inside all of the time (inside the home, the car, the office, the gym, the mall...)
I see trash collectors every day, singing while doing their job. It's one of the least considered occupation, and maybe least enviable. Yet if we ever saw an office worker sing, we'd think they'd gone crazy.
I think we need to find a way to put a little more Nature in office jobs.
This is so true. Every time there's a nice sunny workday, I'm looking out the window thinking "wtf am I doing in here?". In fact, I think it's possible that many of our feelings of anomie and meaninglessness at work could be a misinterpretation our bodies' signal that says: "hey you! get out of this cave and go gather some berries!"
"At the same time, we’re brought up to believe that work—not the church, the state, or even the family—is the fountainhead from which our sense of meaning should spring."
And therein lies the problem. Ask someone who's recently retired.
The key to loving your job is to remember it is a job. While not all jobs are fun, it's likely most HN posters have it a lot better than say, a construction worker. By all means, try to find work you find interesting/exciting, but I think you set yourself up for failure and sadness if you expect the same level of joy from paid work that you will get from your hobbies.
My friends with 3 jobs don't get burnout. They work the hours they're scheduled (or get paid overtime). You perform tasks for a few hours (sometimes very long hours), but then you're done for the day, and the next day you start anew. Some days are worse than others, but in general, work doesn't pile up; you just do what you can each day. The work isn't "carried over" into subsequent days or weeks.
Office work feels more like pushing a boulder uphill, and if you don't make enough progress, the hill's incline seems to get steeper.
I find that the key to me loving my job is: working remotely. Doesn't really matter what the company does, if I have to commute and go to an open office floor plan, I'm not happy.
I do like the interaction with people that I get at my job. It's not entirely the same over slack, but that might be because the people whom I work with tend to be more "in-person people".
Apart from that, I also like that going to the office gives me a chance to go outside, if I'd work remotely.. I'd probably only go outside a few days a week.
OTOH, open floor plans and commuting does suck. And I'm happy (and more productive) the days that I do work from home.
Hill farming sheep has no career progression, every year is the same brutal sequence, and you're at the mercy of whatever meagre prices the market sets for meat and fleeces. The tangible outputs vs office work does not seem sufficient compensation in many cases. http://www.farmbusiness.co.uk/news/more-then-one-farmer-a-we...
"For most of human history, work was a drudgery to be borne by those people who had to do it, and avoided by those who could afford to. From ancient Greece to medieval Europe, toil was seen as a necessary evil, and mainly as a misfortune of the poor. "
Human life, yes. History? Not so much. Possibly the only hunter-gatherer civilization we have more than fragments of history from are the Australian Aborigines. This makes it very hard to ask anthropological questions of the past about how people felt about their work.
Ancient India, ancient China, ancient Egypt, and ancient Mesopotamia are all civilizations with far older histories (with meaningful archaeological remains and in many cases written records) than ancient Greece. Greece is just where many Euro-centric historical perspectives begin.
There's an easy, applicable step... don't have a bullshit job. Unfortunately, bullshit jobs tend to pay better. That's because without the money, no one would do them.
This article suggests that the "key" to making a horrible modern job slightly less intolerable is: slacking off as much as possible (or at the very least lowering the priority of work in your life as much as you can) and being very blatant about it so that everyone else is encouraged to follow your example. ;-)
Why should anyone love their job? You should love your family and friends, not your job.
I guess it'll be ideal if you could enjoy your job, but it's insane to love it. Besides, most people have a job to survive and eventually retire ( not have job ).
I wonder when and where the idea of loving your job came about.
It's the #1 time consuming thing in your life. You spend most of the day doing it, for most of your life.
It's not the 1800s anymore.
"Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to survive." - Raoul Vaneigem
I think you can love a job without taking it too far. It's true that someone who loves a job could be taken advantage of by an employer who feels like that gives them leverage. And it could lead to problems with work / life balance.
But, I don't think that means a middle road is impossible. One can love food without being overweight. You just have to practice moderation. Loving something doesn't mean there are no limits to how much of it you try to cram into your life.
During and after college, I spent 4-5 years working at a bakery. The pay was poor, the hours worse, customers irritating, and career advancement non-existent. And yet, I got to make hundreds of real, physical objects every day, entirely from scratch, and then see people enjoy them. That sort of instant feedback made all the scrubbing, mopping, and change-counting bearable, at least in an obvious cause-effect sense. This counter is covered in flour because I was baking these loaves of bread all day.
Compare this to the average office job. For the most part, the end product of a week's or month's work is essentially a bunch of text on a screen. Take a writer, for example. In the past, a journalist or writer would have some physical remnants and products of their work - the notes and manuscripts for their articles and then the final published piece in a newspaper or physical book. Today, they have...a collection of blog posts and internet articles. The physicality of the work has evaporated entirely.
I don't really know if this is a solvable problem in the near future, but I hope that the digital economy takes a turn back towards some sense of physicality.