How to spot symptoms of burnout on your engineering team

https://jell.com/blog/spot-symptoms-employee-burnout-engineering-team/

by bb87 • 9 years ago

43 47 9 years ago

kfkhalili• 9 years ago

Basically when your employees stop doing what they're supposed to do. Got it, thanks. How/why did this article start so high on the rank list?

yeukhon5• 9 years ago

To be honest, I am burnout. I am not sure how to avoid burnout anymore. What do people do when they feel they are burnout? I am taking Friday off this month to relax, but when I back on Monday - Thursday, I feel burnout, feeling so much I want to accomplish, but yet, so disappointed in myself not able to deliver everything I want to do.

faebser• 9 years ago

Hey dude, i went through this too. Getting away from the computer, meditating, yoga and hiking in the mountains helped me but still it took me a year and a half to get better.

If you feel too much pressure weighting you down go get proffesional help, even if it feels like a defeat.

http://quietkit.com, guided meditaton for beginners

yeukhon5• 9 years ago

Thank you!

notalaser• 9 years ago

What do people do when they feel they are burnout?

Take more than a free Friday.

pasta2• 9 years ago

Serious: find another job.

I think burnout happens when you put your standards higher than you can achieve. But there are different kind of standards.

* You can burnout when you work harder than you can (physically and emotionally).

* You can burnout when your social standard is different than your company's.

* You can burnout when your standard is pleasing the user while your company's standard is pleasing the shareholders.

* You can burn out when you think you are not replaceable and the company will collapse without you (fact: it won't).

* And so on...

I never had a burnout but I suffered from extreme fatigue because I was sitting all day. I got all kinds of physical and emotional problems. So I started to burn out. And what scared me most was that working out at the end of the day doesn't help much when you are sitting still 10 hours in a row.

So I had the luck that I could change jobs. Maybe you are also lucky and can find something that will help you change the problem that burns you out.

AnimalMuppet• 9 years ago

You can burn out if your authority doesn't match your responsibility. (That is, if your company considers you responsible for making X happen, but the things that they allow you to do don't allow you to actually make X happen.)

yeukhon5• 9 years ago

Thank you. It's exactly what I am doing.

Thrillington• 9 years ago

Echoing faebser, it took me over 20 months to get over my recent burnout.

It was a financial difficulty, but with the extra time of not working I was able to cut household expenses by about 60% (though those have crept back up since I'm working again). I volunteered for a layoff, so severence covered a lot of the time off.

When I left I hit every item on this list. I thought I never wanted to look at a microcontroller again.

I spent time with some personal projects. Dedicated myself to coaching a local roller derby team and generally followed my curiosity wherever it led.

And I slowly found myself drifting back to embedded projects. I realized a combination of imposter and Stockholm syndrome had kept me at the company for years longer than I should have stayed. But I didn't have an issue with the specialization itself.

I've now found a position I enjoy. In a nice twist of fate we are using a micro built by my previous company and my familiarity is a big asset. My new employer recognized my passion and talent, so this job came with a raise that will cover what I spent during my sabbatical.

The gap did come up in interviews. I was truthful and said I volunteered for a layoff and took a long sabbatical. Then talked about the projects that gave me time to work on.

In closing, I also want to echo the call to go find professional help. I spent many of the dark years talking. It took a long time to work up the courage to take the plunge. I would never have been ready to volunteer for that layoff, or make good use of my time off without those sessions.

yeukhon5• 9 years ago

Thank you. I do go through professional help, but I think switching job is the right path.

chvid• 9 years ago

Take a few days off and then quit your job.

It is a good job market out there and there is no reason should put up with a job that is making you sick.

nunez2• 9 years ago

One day of vacation isn't enough to let you relax. Think about it: if you're American, you spend 250 days of the year working. You have 104 weekend days that you aren't working, but let's assume that you do everything you couldn't do during the week on half of those weekends, which induces something similar to work-related stress. That's a lot of days!

I like talking week-long blocks of time to recover. I work in consulting, and given the amount of decision-making and travel-related stress I undertake during the week, having a week of being at home and doing nothing is very, very welcome.

I think the key is doing nothing. Nothing manifests itself differently to different people. To me, nothing means waking up whenever, driving for hours on end, watching a movie or working on a personal project at my own leisure. For others, it's shitloads of TV (which I don't like). For others still, it's hours of golf or something like that. Detaching completely from work is the key here.

I'm going to emphasise this when I start leading my own teams. I want people to be at their best, and the only way to do that in a world like this is by stepping away from work every so often. You only live once.

Good luck!

draugadrotten• 9 years ago

If your gut feeling says someone is stressed out, don't trust them when they say they are OK. People who burn out always say that, that's why they burn out.

blurnsball• 9 years ago

  How do you spot this symptom? It might be 
  that a team member isn’t commenting on pull 
  requests as much as she used to. Or he’s not 
  speaking up in sprint planning and retrospective 
  meetings.

Ha ha! Oh god.

This is basically the worst thing I've ever read. And why? I think you already know, but let me tell you anyway!

Meetings are bullshit. At all times they are unrealistic. There is what people say during a meeting, and then there is what actually happens during the interplay of the group dynamic, as work gets done.

Sit at tables all day, and bullshit about diagrams and ideas, with zero concrete examples, and some ham fisted emails where people dump screenshots into MS Word documents, and then forward as email attachments, with captions like "it's broken. fix it."

Then go and try to write some code, and see what happens when someone else in the meeting drops a JSON object on you, that has half the properties you need to do anything, and most of them are in the wrong place, or at magic number slots in an array or something.

You have to have your head up your ass, to expect people to be chipper little busy bees at all times, and then write feel-good blogarticles like this.

But you have to be Satan himself, to put an article like this in front of a so called "scrum master" and tell them that happy thoughts at all times are the only "normal" that is the correct and proper Normal, and all other "normals" are actually signs of workplace PTSD.

Now uppity tough guy managers will bring motherfuckers in for review only to remind them that they forgot their flair, and they seem to have a case of the Mondays lately, and ask them to put on a happy face, and pitch in for the big win!

That's not how it works.

You have a team dynamic, and that team dynamic doesn't change if your team members are supporting a "Sick System." A Sick System is doomed to be inefficient, and foments disappointment, because the process is inefficient by design, but doubly punishing when hopeless, lost people are involved.

But even so, different team members have different perceptions of progress, based on skill level and experience. So one individual may be happy with the current sick system, because it's an improvement from their last shit show, while another will be fucking miserable because this is the tenth motherfucking shit show they've had to tap dance in, and the routine never fucking changes.

If you're looking for symptoms of cynicism after they happened, then it's too late. You don't understand how they happen, why they exist, or how to prevent them before they occur. If you can't prevent a loss of enthusiasm and morale, and expect all hands to express the same cordial cookie cutter productivity, then you are already lost at sea.

tkaboutit• 9 years ago

Agreed, except a slight visual-tweak I'm seeing on the tough guy manager is the 'servant-leader'. Somehow these 'servant-leader' action-item lists never spur any introspection within the manager-deity themselves. The servant-leader sounds like a great idea to managers who have enough self-awareness to have an inkling that they have no idea what they're doing aside from following "industry trends".

They read from the Book of Jobs every monday morning. "If thee bees have passion, they never work a day in their life. And we hiredest thee smartest to tell us what to do, not to tell them what to do." But the freedom and passion they're talking about is in deciding how many story points to attach to the minute tasks that have been pre-ordained for you to be passionate about. This is because we would have never hired you if you would not be passionate about the roadmap at all times. Leaders don't admit mistakes in the Book of Jobs, they first travel through the bloggosphere on their quest for validation that it's someone else's fault. If that does not work, they check if the naysayer can be replaced, preferably at a cheaper rate. If so, the naysayer will be sacrificed to the land of better opportunities to boost team morale.

This article is telling the story of an engineer who tried to collaborate and voice their concerns constructively to start, but found out it was all the meetings and listening was just an empty act on the part of their managers. Their managers kept cramming so much work into the release that quality suffered under the unrealistic expectations. Those same unrealistic expectations that were previously carefully regarded by the subordinate engineer as risks and concerns.

So the engineer realizes that to get something done, they have to do it themselves. They work longer hours to rearchitect and/or introduce some new tools to improve the pipeline, but the manager was unable to understand how this related to this sprint's burndown chart or the pre-ordained roadmap. And the only conclusion the manager is capable of, even after reading all the blogs they could find on the subject is: When there's a misunderstanding with "their" engineer, it was either a bad hire or even though "their" engineer speaks fluent C,C++,Go,Haskell and Scala, they just do not seem to understand pie-charts and maybe they need a 1v1 to talk about it. Yes, more meetings is what they need to get their work done. The engineer stopped trying to waste their time voicing anything in meetings.

Their rate of commits dropped because they were working on design work, aka thinking. But their manager literally treats the github commit graph as an indicator of the engineer's health vital signs. The manager believes themself very technologically advanced by not resorting to that barbaric practice of correlating LOC with an engineer's vital signs. Throughout the whole story, the manager never actually learned or changed one damn thing. *In the article, this same story is told through the perspective of a manager with their head quite far up their ass.

Anyways, what a bunch of back-patting patronizing bullshit. I feel truly sorry for anyone who has to work under this guy or anyone influenced by him.

jrs2352• 9 years ago

Part of the issue is too many people, managers in particular, fail to realize that "manager" and "leader" aren't synonomous. Managers want to believe they are though! More than likely because charismatic narcissists tend to rise to the "top" ( https://hbr.org/2017/04/if-humble-people-make-the-best-leade... ).

jrs2352• 9 years ago

Speaking of BS meetings: http://amzn.to/2oeIpEs

Seriously. Good. Stuff.

"Where did This Book Come From?

I wrote this book because someone paid me to. But I also wrote it because I had a deadline. I began jotting down meeting tricks in the summer of 2007 while working for Yahoo!, as I observed them firsthand in meetings with Directors, VPs, Senior VPs, and Senior VP Directors. Seven years later I became a manager at Google and got invited to even more meetings than I ever had before. How did I achieve such an intense trajectory over the course of my luminous career? I went to meetings, and I looked damn smart in them."

I bought this book for my coffee table at home. It's worth the laughs. Sometimes my passive aggressive thoughts make me want to bring it into work and leave on my desk. Or my boss' desk. Or my boss' boss' desk.

konschubert• 9 years ago

Another thing to do when people get burned out is to make sure that they leave work on time.

Jimmed2• 9 years ago

100% agree on this. Whenever I've started to feel the onset of burnout, it's been at times when I felt I couldn't "just leave" at 5.30, for some misplaced sense of responsibility. It's that looming sense of 'you're here until it's done' that fills me (and presumably other developers) with dread.

Brightwise2• 9 years ago

That's one of the worst articles on this topic I've ever read.

sauronlord9• 9 years ago

Glad someone said it.

pasta2• 9 years ago

It's an ad for (bad) managers.

heisenbit• 9 years ago

I was thinking this is a very important and worthwhile topic. But the article reads like bullet points dreamed up in one minute and then filled up with sweet cotton.

YCode2• 9 years ago

Could anyone recommend a better one?

No sarcasm intended, this is an important issue.

Brightwise2• 9 years ago

If we want to approach a topic "How to detect/avoid B/o" in a scientific manner, we should begin with a definition of what that condition is and what it is caused by.

It's been some years since I investigated on that topic, but I remember there are basically two paradigms:

A) Blame the guy/dev/employee B) Blame the company/environment/manager

Depending on your point of view, you may want to settle somewhere in between these two extremes. I find "The truth about burnout" by Maslach/Leiter in my bookshelf, who where the first ones doing a proper scientific analysis. They pretty much end up with paradigm B. As a dev, I liked that.

sauronlord9• 9 years ago

The solution to burnout: - get paid way more

Many people will happily work 14 hour days for a 1 million/year Salary. I promise you they will not burnout.

But the crux of it is that employers must optimize burnout with labour expense.

Therefore they focus on the employee's behaviour to identify burnout and give them "just enough" to be teetering below the burnout phase (on-site massages, catered lunches, bullshit games, and extra vacation)

Other solution is to have a management/executive team that is proactive and not reactive.

anonymoushn• 9 years ago

I feel like I would probably burn out. Can you pay me half as much for half the work?

sauronlord9• 9 years ago

Burnout is a psychological state of being over worked and underpaid/appreciated.

Decrease chance of burnout by exponentially increasing pay.

Another way to avoid burnout is having multiple income streams and therefore being able to tell anyone to shove it on a moments notice.

Take note everyone, this is why you want multiple income streams and is a worthy goal.

I used to burn out for 120k/year pay when required to work 70 hour weeks.

Now I work 80+ hour weeks and get paid almost triple. In control of my destiny and can drop any one client/customer/employer within 2 seconds if they look at me the wrong way.

slau2• 9 years ago

This is probably the worst point of view I've ever seen on the topic of burnout. Let's get one thing out there: Money doesn't make people motivated or happy. It's a condition of employment. Either employees gets enough money, or they don't. It is very, very binary.

Throwing money at an employee acts as a temporary cushion, a bandaid. A bonus will be forgotten within days or weeks, a raise within a month or two. This is not to say that employees never deserve raises. Employees who take on more responsibilities, or have acquired more experience definitely deserve a higher pay.

Motivation is the only true variable that managers can influence on, and the only one that truly matters. Motivation is like a sea/ocean upon which the employee sails, not unlike a boat. The obstacles, and blockers that employees face are like rocks under the water level (to keep with the metaphor, because the keel would strike the rocks). As a manager, you have two options. Take a pickaxe and try to move those boulders/rocks out of the employee's way, or add more water.

In this metaphor, the boulders are typically personal blockers ("I'm a C++ dev, I don't want to work on that Node piece of shit", "I start at 7, so I don't see why I would have to join a meeting at 4PM", "I worked until 3AM yesterday, which is why I wasn't there at the team meeting at 11AM", etc). You can try to remove the boulders, but that's closer to psychotherapy that takes 15 years, which is usually out of the realm of possibilities for a manager and a company. What a manager can do, however, is help the employee feel more motivated.

This is where extra holidays in lieu, making people feel part of a team, and feel ownership/responsibility for the team, and other "soft" things plays its part. Yes, you can try to tell an employee that you'll give him an extra $200 if they stay late and fix a bug, but that just shows that motivation is coming from the wrong place.

Monitoring how much motivation an employee has is the #1 job of a good manager. People who burn out are usually badly managed, or operate in a toxic environment. A good manager can't (always) fix a bad environment. He can improve certain aspects of it, though.

slau2• 9 years ago

To expand on this:

You can underline exceptional performance from an employee (or preferably, a whole team/group of employees) by giving them a bonus, or buying them a nice dinner or whatever. But this has to be a bonus: if the employees ask for it, or if it was a promise (carrot) before the work was done, the point is moot, and the psychological effect of the reward will be, too.

If your team pulls through a very difficult challenge, by sacrificing their own time (working a whole weekend, for example), without anyone in the hierarchy asking so, and it was done to address a business blocker, then that definitely demands compensation. The most obvious compensation would be to give them the time they gave to the company with a bonus 50 or 100%. Add money if you feel it is deserved and think the employees would enjoy it.

Just remember that the company can never use this in negotiations ("You're getting a 3% raise instead of 5% because you got 10k in bonuses last year"). It is proper compensation for work done. Nothing more.

Now, back to the matter of motivation: your team decided to do the work. They are motivated. But having to do this will drain that motivation. It is your job as a company to make sure these situations don't occur again. One way to re-motivate people is to show them the steps you are taking to make sure they never have to sacrifice another weekend. Make sure they understand and agree with the steps. They made efforts, now it's the company's turn to do so as well.

Startups often burn people out because they assume that employees are motivated. But being a paper millionaire only buys so much motivation. Engineers (and others, but I don't manage profiles other than engineers) are under tremendous pressure to deliver. Their motivation disappears because they aren't privy to the founders' vision, or don't understand how their work affects the bottom line.

The biggest indicator of people lacking motivation is asking for more means/resources. When people say "we need to hire more," or "we need more hardware," or "we need a better office;" those should be red flags that there is a problem with motivation. That's not to say your office doesn't really stink, or that their laptops are melting during compiles, though. Asking for resources as a bandaid to productivity, I guess, would be a better indicator of low performance ("I'm slow at writing this feature because I only have 4 cores on my computer").

sauronlord9• 9 years ago

Those studies of money being binary and motivation are bullshit.

Ask how many people earning 1 million dollars a year (doctors, etc) feel about working 80 hour weeks.

sauronlord9• 9 years ago

You cannot make people feel ownership.

It's like me saying I can motivate someone to feel the "ownership" of my house (even though they are not on title).

Ownership is you know, actually OWNING something.(Shares, body/health, vision)

If your team does not feel ownership then is it because they do not actualy even own $1 worth of shares in the company project.

splintercell• 9 years ago

To all the people disagreeing with you, I totally believe that getting paid a lot more works for some people (like me).

The idea behind a burnout is simple, when you feel that your work isn't worth much, you feel burned out. To most people there is an active denial of the fact that they do not want to a certain job for $100k, but are doing it because they have a family to take care of and an old person to take care of after retirement.

They get frustrated because they don't have the appreciation of their job as a software developer, a project manager, an accountant, a baseball player or whatever, as 'valuable work'.

This means that if they were getting paid more for the same job they don't value, then it won't really make them feel better (except if that higher pay allows them to do less work in the same time).

On the other hand, for someone like me, I like what I do as a developer, but sometimes I'm stuck in a job which is awful by the nature of the company I work in, or in other cases just underpaid (both have happened to me, came really close to getting burned out).

jkmcf• 9 years ago

Burnout is working hard on a vision not mutually shared, at an organization with its head up its ass, for people you don't respect. The money does not matter. Abnormal silence or open grumbling is a chief symptom.

webninja• 9 years ago

One thing a good manager can do to help your engineering team is ask each one: "Is there anything that is getting in the way of you being able to do work now?". Good communication fixes a lot of problems.

nunez2• 9 years ago

This wasn't a good read. None of those five things are signs of burnout. They are signs for a lot of things, but not specifically burnout.

How to spot symptoms of burnout on your engineering team

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