Burnout is caused by resentment

http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by-resentment.html

by sudonim • 14 years ago

227 70 14 years ago

MrFoof2• 14 years ago

I'd agree.

Every time I've quit, it's because I felt I was repeatedly getting the short end of the stick, and management was expecting me to roll over every time I brought such things up.

I quit my first job at 15 1/2. I worked at a Wal-Mart during the summer to buy a computer. I covered 200% more departments than I was hired for. I never took a day off, despite coworkers just not showing up so they could go to the beach. My department manager LOVED me. After my 3 months, I got $0.24 of my $0.25/hour potential raise. I asked the store manager responsible as to why I didn't get the other penny. His answer was utterly asinine. He expected me to go back to work, understanding. Instead, I called my mom and went home, never to return.

The next two jobs I was vastly underpaid. I knew this because vendors, contractors, my own boss and even the office manager told me, quite literally, that I was getting screwed. I was told to man up in response to crappy raises. Instead, I found better jobs that were willing to give me 25-30% more just to walk in their door.

At one place I blew the doors off of all expectations. I qualified for well above the normal bonus. 32%. I was denied because in order to get the bonus I had to have been there since July 1st. My start date? July 3rd. It's not like it wasn't going to be pro-rated, or cut in half. I simply wasn't going to get it. 32% of my salary was a chunk of change large enough to buy a family sedan, cash. Obviously, I made an issue of it. I had vacations denied and had already dealt with that. When a partner said that there was nothing he could do I gave him my curt two-word response and walked out the door... to basically get my lost bonus half as a signing bonus, and the rest over the next year.

Employment is a two-way street, and when you also decide to make it known that my contract is "at will", be advised that I'm aware that I can just not show up anymore, just to make the point. And even though I won't do that, I know I could. At the very least I ask that you demonstrate it, and ensure that I feel appreciated. If you don't, don't be all that surprised when I jump ship at a moment's notice. It's not rocket science -- put your best foot forward, and if you can't, explain clear as day why you can't. Show some humility, and don't expect me to simply sit there and take it, especially in this market. I'm pretty good about making my happiness unknown, and giving organizations months and months to respond before I finally depart. However I've worked with folks that their mentality towards burning bridges is more akin to Aliens: they don't burn bridges -- they nuke them from orbit, just to make sure.

People do business with people they like, and your employees are not exceptions.

stcredzero2• 14 years ago

Other toxins:

    - Bad faith - not being talked to straight up
    - Resentment and blame - creates more of the same like prions
    - Disrespect - the subtle kind is more insidious
    - Being second guessed/distrusted 
    - Political gamesmanship - have to defeat other departments, then competitors?
    - Overwork 
    - Underwork

All of this is human nature, just not the part of human nature that's going to help your team win.

bluekeybox• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure all of the above act through resentment. This also means that resentment is somewhat of a catch-all term.

ajtaylor• 14 years ago

Hahaha, I love the "nuke em from orbit" comment. Aliens is quite possibly my favorite movie of all time!

But I agree 100% with you. Feeling appreciated and valued can make up for a surprising amount of small things (which can quickly become mammoth). All I ask is that you treat me like a human being and give me a fair salary, and in return I will do my absolute best for you.

philh• 14 years ago

What you describe isn't burnout though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnout_(psychology)

anthonyb• 14 years ago

There does seem to be some confusion about what is and isn't burnout. This link might help. While it's aimed at doctors rather than tech workers, it does give you some idea of the mindset involved: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/medical-education/medical-education-stu...

MrFoof2• 14 years ago

Oh, I've been to step 7 before. Usually when I hit step 8 is when my friends step in and bluntly point out that it's time for me to move on. "You're on all the time -- you need to be able to turn off". "Yeah, I figured I'd call because no one has heard from you in months. Just making sure you're, well, not dead." Etc.

I once had a girlfriend intervene and "take care of the problem" for me. I was being sent all over the eastern seaboard and was only home for about 12 days in the previous 5 months. I was so displeased with the current situation that for the previous month I was barely even calling her. She went in, demanded a meeting with the Chief Strategy Officer and told him that she sincerely hoped his kids died in a car fire. She probably said a few other things, but that was the one she seemed to be most "proud of".

I quit my last job last month. I've been very picky with what I'm targeting, and if they don't respond, I particularly don't care. I've told headhunters I'm not interested in their clients, and I'm not on the job boards and recruiters would get shot down if they did manage to find my number. In the meantime, I always wanted to make video games so I'm giving that a shot. I plan on documenting things in a blog once I get closer to having the first title close to release.

tocomment2• 14 years ago

One job gave me a 10K relocation bonus. Then with no notice whatsoever they deducted that bonus from my year end bonus. I was so mad. They claimed it was official policy but couldn't they have told me that up front when I was evaluating job offers? It was certainly never in my offer letter.

Edit ... I guess your stories are a lot worse. I'm so sorry :-(

michaelochurch5• 14 years ago

Classic bait-and-switch is what you got. Usually, it's a lot less brazen and more subtle (project allocation, promised managerial support that's not delivered) so it can be attributed to shifting priorities, but... yeah, it hurts.

What happened to you: don't these fuckers realize that this is bad business? I don't find it surprising that people in control of business decisions are greedy. They're supposed to be greedy (but hopefully not unethical). It's astonishing to me how stupid a lot of them are.

Let's get real about this shit. An employee who is around for less than 6 months is of very low value to the organization. You want people to stick around? Treat them decently.

In our parents' time, a 6-month job tenure was a black mark, so companies could treat employees like garbage for the first 2 years because it'd be career suicide to leave. It meant you probably got fired, because people just didn't leave stable employment. This day in age, fail-fast is the rule and there's just no such thing as stable employment-- unless you're a senior politician in a one-party district, because the voters are disinclined to fire the bad ones.

michaelochurch5• 14 years ago

That doesn't sound like burnout. It sounds like you lost faith in shitty managers and left. Trust me, this is an experience that almost everyone will have.

The movie portrayal of success is that you become someone's protege and he takes you under his wing. Bud Fox meets Gordon Gekko. The douchebag character that Shia LaBeouf played in that execrable sequel gets a $1.5M check for kissing a suicidal old man on the top of the head. The real world trajectory is rockier. No one powerful gives a shit about you, no one powerful looks out for you. You work your ass off anyway, because it's the right thing to do. You do your best to deliver on promises you make to colleagues, because it's the right thing to do. You get really, really good at a few important skills (written communication, computer programming, and social skills are all very important). If your boss takes interest in your education and career development, you reciprocate with extreme diligence and loyalty. If he doesn't, you steal an education and find ways to learn anyway. Self-mentoring. That's how most successful people will actually come up.

I don't like the term burnout. It suggests finality. It's an artifact of the Western obsession with age and entropy and transience, the idea that people who excel can only persist for so long. It's not true. There's such a thing as "motivational crisis", but it's usually transient. Like earthquakes, most are harmless, and the only ones that are remembered in 10,000 years are those that produce features of beauty. As I get older, they come on quicker but they're of much shorter duration. That tends to be a general pattern. Permanent burnout? No such thing. All fear comes from a fear of permanence (including fear of death) but Buddhism teaches there is no such thing and therefore nothing to fear.

paulhauggis2• 14 years ago

I agree with this.

My problem is that I have a big problem sacrificing my free time for my regular paycheck while the boss makes potentially millions.

joezydeco2• 14 years ago

Hey, that boss isn't taking home a paycheck like you are, so suck it up. <adding sarcasm tag here just in case>

paulhauggis2• 14 years ago

yeah, it's why I work for myself now :-)

tensor2• 14 years ago

Offer your boss to work completely for free in exchange for equity then. I wonder if anyone has tried this and what the response was.

sliverstorm2• 14 years ago

Perhaps one of the causes, but in times past I've definitely started to get burned out on projects I did not resent- that were simply truckloads of work, with limited time for sleep/food/unwinding.

On the bright side, that was much easier to recover from than the soul-crushing burnout I associate with resentment.

j_baker3• 14 years ago

...so it sounds like you resented that job due to giving you limited time for sleep/food/unwinding?

sliverstorm2• 14 years ago

You can lose motivation to do something without resenting it.

ScottBurson• 14 years ago

Agreed. Resentment can certainly be a problem, but it's not the sole cause, or necessarily even the primary cause, of burnout.

I've definitely gotten burned out doing work I very much wanted to have succeed.

Jabbles• 14 years ago

What are the average work hours per week and days' holiday a year taken by a (US) Googler?

j_baker3• 14 years ago

I don't know that there's really that much data on the subject (and if there is, I probably wouldn't be able to disclose it). I will say this though: I've never been asked to work long hours. Nor have I ever been assigned enough work that I've had to work long hours. We tend to not have fixed deadlines, so it's rare that I have to work in crunch mode. Some people love their jobs and work at all hours. Google is more than willing to accommodate those people. Me, I strive to get a lot done in little time so I have more time to unwind and can be more productive the next day.

TL;DR - It depends.

debacle• 14 years ago

What's Google's understanding on working from home / telecommuting? I'm more than willing to work long hours, but I find I'm much happier when I'm sshed in from home than sitting at my desk thinking about my kids.

makmanalp2• 14 years ago

The interesting thing about a culture where the long work day is more common than not is that it starts becoming an expectation even though it isn't codified in any rule. So for example you'd be less likely to get a raise or promotion than a person who puts in more hours than the required. So even though you're not abusing the company you get less benefits for doing the amount of work you're getting paid for.

tumblen• 14 years ago

What is Google's alternative to fixed deadlines? (Really, really curious about this.)

mmcconnell16182• 14 years ago

I find that wasting my time is a larger annoyance than monetary compensation. As I get older I have less tolerance for meaningless meetings and the requirement to work specific hours or be in a physical office for a client just because it makes a manager feel better.

mkramlich• 14 years ago

Agreed. Increasingly I want to focus my work experience down to the exchange: "get things done (well) -> get paid (well)".

gnosis4• 14 years ago

If you call being sick of meetings and having to come in at specific times "burnout", you have a very mild case of it.

Burnout started for me when I noticed that my interests weren't aligned with my company's interests.. or with any company's interests.. or even with my profession's interests.

Coding became boring. So I switched to doing sysadmin. Then sysadmin stuff became boring. Then technology in general became boring. I just didn't care to learn another stupid language or configuration syntax for products I didn't care about and companies whose success or failure I couldn't give two shits about. I didn't care about the clients. Or the users. Or my coworkers.

Not caring. That's a big part of it. So's lacking interest. At times I'd stop caring about anything. Other times I'd care about things, but they weren't things having anything to do with work.

Everything to do with work became a severe chore at best, and a complete nightmare at worst. It all seemed so fake and full of bullshit -- from the company's stupid pep talks or fake parties and dinners where everyone pretended to like each other and kissed up to their bosses.

When I finally quit it felt like such a relief. Quitting days were some of the happiest days of my life. I did that a lot.

That's burnout.

mmcconnell16182• 14 years ago

I'm not saying that being annoyed at meeting == burnout. I'm saying that it is a contributing factor just like resentment over unequal compensation, etc.

Radzell• 14 years ago

I'd agree I almost never burn out because I workout everyday. I really believe the studies that says fit people are happier because nothing clears my mind like working out or playing basketball especially after a long coding session.

anontheanon• 14 years ago

Haha. I am currently going through this phase at my current firm. I can almost track how I have reached this phase:

1. I find on the first day that in the nine months before I joined the company, three people who were doing the same stuff I do were fired.

2. I make an expensive move from a different state. Then on the first day get told that the move in contract had changed and was forced to be sign the new one. An interesting contract that tells me even if the company folds for no good reason of mine, that I would have to payback moving expenses.

3. I get to spend a significant amount of my personal free time outside of company hours on company "bonding activities". I don't mind being told to go on company dinner fests but don't make it a habit and make me miss my own personal life. I like you as people I work under but you are not my friends and you are certainly not my life.

4. For a company that makes $2000 plus per engineer, its fun to see how cheap they are. A nice ergonomic chair? Nope. Traveling 50% of time across a few time zones? Make sure you book the cheapest possible flight that you get (irrespective of the number of stops that you have).

Tiny small things that added up gradually and have led to this situation.

joshu• 14 years ago

re the bonding activities: i've decided they should a) be fun and b) be instead of work. otherwise it's just forced.

cletus• 14 years ago

At the risk of making everything about Google... I'm going to talk about Google (with the disclaimer that I've now worked here for only ~1.5 years so I'm not authority, etc etc).

stcredzero mentions a laundry list of soul-sapping bad behaviour and in previous jobs I've suffered through (or quit over) probably all of them at one time or another.

There are some subtle yet fundamentally important differences in how Google (from my experience) approaches software development that end up addressing a lot of these.

1. Most (if not all) engineering managers are... engineers. I've seen internal job postings for engineering directors (to put that in perspective, an eng director might have 30-100 engineers under him or her typically with some engineering managers in between although some particularly senior engineers may report directly to their director) that call for "deep knowledge of C++". Some eng directors still submit CLs. This is something Google takes very seriously;

2. As an engineer, I don't have to work for you (where "you" is any particular manager or director). This is incredibly important because it puts strict limits on how much crap you can be given because (assuming you're in good standing) you can request a transfer to any team that will take you (within limits and your existing manager can delay you but can't block you);

3. Internally, Google is extremely open with what's going on in the company. There are a handful of things off-limit but in almost all cases you can view the data and code and announcements for almost every project in Google;

4. The level of meetings and overall bullshit has been, in my experience, incredibly low compared to previous employers;

5. Performance reviews are peer-driven. This system is not perfect and you'll have critics who point to thinks like you need senior people around you to get promoted. Some of these claims have merit but the system while not perfect is still (IMHO) very good; and

6. Gratitude. As Steve Yegge [1] puts it:

> You can't help but want to do your absolute best for Google; you feel like you owe it to them for taking such incredibly good care of you.

I find many of these alleviate burnout by way of mitigating resentment. I'm not sure I fully agree that burnout is solely caused by resentment however. I've known people who have been well-rewarded and respected for what they've done but they just reach a point where they need a break and have to do something else. I'd characterize this as burnout but perhaps definitions vary.

Lastly, I'll touch on a point someone else mentioned: as time goes on my tolerance for bullshit and time-wasting goes down. No I'm not going to your daily standup ("mini performance review") because it's a waste of my time. No I'm not going to work on your shitty project that's made shitty technology choices for political rather than technical reasons. I don't have the time nor inclination to indulge you in this.

[1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile...

Agathos• 14 years ago

> you feel like you owe it to them for taking such incredibly good care of you.

As a recovering academic, I felt a twinge of horror when I read this. When I didn't love the work I pushed on mainly out of guilt, and it was more than I could carry after a while. Maybe I should have tried resentment.

polyfractal• 14 years ago

As another recovering ex-academic, I would often tell my friends that academic science (biology in my case) keeps 90% of people around because of guilt and a misplaced sense of honor/duty.

neilk2• 14 years ago

I'm not sure guilt is quite the same as gratitude...

anon_googler• 14 years ago

I think good managers are more important than you suggest:

> you can request a transfer to any team that will take you

If you're trying to transfer because your manager is giving you crap, you'll find it harder than you think to get the transfer approved. In the meantime, your manager can sandbag your quarterly performance rating and taint your compensation and chances for promotion for a long time. A bad manager at Google is still a bad manager.

> Performance reviews are peer-driven.

This is partly true. Promotions are decided by committee with input from your peers. But without strong performance ratings from your manager and appropriate projects to work on, you won't get promoted no matter what your peers say. The committees are very reluctant to override the manager.

michaelochurch5• 14 years ago

If you're trying to transfer because your manager is giving you crap, you'll find it harder than you think to get the transfer approved.

At Google, the not-so-nice managers are the ones who use low ratings to decrease their reports' mobility. You can actually see this on a Perf graph. 3.0, 3.0, 3.0, 3.0, 3.0, 3.5, 3.5. The step discontinuity is because the number itself isn't reported to employee. The bucket is. (3.0 to 3.4 is a huge range, from the 3rd to 65th percentile of the company, but any number in this stretch is reported as "Meets Expectations".) The 3.5 jump happens because the employee gets sick of "Meets Expectations" and the half-step semi-promotion is used to perk him up a little bit. But again, "Exceeds Expectations" is a huge range (3.5 to 3.9) and the numbers are still put in the low end of the range. 3.5 will very rarely get a person promoted.

What the numbers are supposed to represent is a probability that the employee would succeed in the next higher level. 3.x is an x out of 10 chance that a level-N employee would be successful at level N + 1. 2.9 and below is cause to start the PIP/termination process, with a recommendation of timeframe (2.9 = 60 days, 2.8 = 45, 2.7 = 30); 4.1 to 5.0 represents various degrees of consideration for various (sometimes very lucrative) special awards. At 5.0, you might see an EMG award that would impress even bankers.

The ones who overuse 3.0 and 3.5 are the not-so-nice managers, not the evil ones. The evil managers are the ones who use PIPs to block transfers. Those are the 4.1-to-PIP cases where the target has to get a VP override in order to make the move.

In the meantime, your manager can sandbag your quarterly performance rating and taint your compensation and chances for promotion for a long time. A bad manager at Google is still a bad manager.

Bingo, and Google has plenty of those.

Google is a pretty great place if you have a good manager, not because the executives know what they're doing, but because you're getting paid to hang out with some brilliant, creative, curious engineers. A lot of them are really good people as well. So if you have a good manager, you can do very well at Google, but like any company, it's bad if you have a bad manager.

Promotions are decided by committee with input from your peers. But without strong performance ratings from your manager and appropriate projects to work on, you won't get promoted no matter what your peers say. The committees are very reluctant to override the manager.

Exactly. It used to be an OR-gate between manager and peer feedback. Now it's an AND-gate.

michaelochurch5• 14 years ago

As an engineer, I don't have to work for you (where "you" is any particular manager or director). This is incredibly important because it puts strict limits on how much crap you can be given because (assuming you're in good standing) you can request a transfer to any team that will take you (within limits and your existing manager can delay you but can't block you)

True for Real Googlers. Real Googler status used to be informally conferred at Senior SWE but now it's somewhere between Senior SWE and Staff SWE. Real Googlers can pull a Yegge (quit their project in public). Peasants get PIP'd by their managers if they are seen talking to TLs from other teams (transfer risk) in the microkitchen.

andrewcooke• 14 years ago

no - resentment leads to "being pissed-off enough to go work somewhere else".

please, lets keep "burnout" for burning out. you know: when you're in a foetal ball sobbing, begging for it to stop; when you need years before your work is enjoyable again; when the client liaison goes on leave after an "accident" with a knife.

there is a difference between that and "resentment".

neilk2• 14 years ago

Yup. If you're resentful, you are antagonistic towards your boss and your co-workers. You'll be ready to quit.

If you're burned out, you're probably hardest on yourself. It's been described as a 'crisis of self-efficacy'. I suspect that burned-out employees often don't have the self-esteem to quit, until it's absolutely necessary for health reasons or they get fired.

That said... going back to resentfulness... if someone believes they're being gypped by their employer, perhaps that punctures some of the illusions we all have about work. A lot of us knowledge workers strive more for praise and recognition than we do for salary, a fact that our bosses exploit. Maybe the kind of 'burnout' that Marissa Mayer describes, I would call 'waking up to reality'.

gnosis4• 14 years ago

You don't have to sob to be burnt out. You just have to be sick of it all.. and not care.

It really doesn't matter how good the company is, or how well they treat you.

When you're burnt out you just don't want to deal with any of it anymore. You're sick of what you're doing, and you don't want any part of it -- no matter what they offer or how much they coddle you.

Been there.. done that.

boofar• 14 years ago

Most here have commented 3-4 hours ago, but 2 hours ago Isaac Yonemoto left an excellent comment on the blog. So if you read this message, because you're checking the thread for new discussion, I encourage you to check out his comment as well. :-)

nandemo• 14 years ago

Indeed the comment is better than the post.

xtremecool• 14 years ago

Yes, he says something like you burnout when you effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.

Aaronontheweb• 14 years ago

I agree. The biggest reason why employees (or hell, founders too) quit is because they don't feel appreciated.

If I'm working 60-70 hours a week and have a never-ending stream of people inside the company griping at me about why I wasn't able to get non-essential-to-my-role task X,Y, or Z done for them (this is what being in a big company feels like) - that really starts to mount even for employees who know that they're appreciated by their immediate peers and leadership.

Being appreciated by your managing team or your peers isn't enough - YOU need to feel like you're doing a good job. Even someone with a stalwart self-sureness will crumble if they feel like they're constantly failing to deliver what the business needs.

gnosis4• 14 years ago

It's about more than just feeling appreciated and feeling like you've done a good job.

I had both, and yet I still burnt out.

What was lacking was fulfillment -- the sense that the work you do is meaningful for you.

Ideally, your job should be interesting, fun, stimulating, and you should feel that what you do is important. If it's stressful, it should be at a level of stress you can deal with, and the stress should be of a positive sort, not a negative sort.

At some of my jobs I was greatly appreciated, and I knew I was doing a great job. But the work was boring, I didn't feel it was important, and it was extremely stressful. So I burnt out.

abalashov• 14 years ago

Unplug for merely a week? How very masochistically American. Let me teach you something about burnout, you poor, pathetically narrow-minded little man. I'd like to unplug for six months out of the year, at an absolute minimum. That's burnout, my friend.

SideSwipe• 14 years ago

Is it just me, or is insulting + judging + stereotyping someone the epitome of being narrow-minded?

ignorethat• 14 years ago

This is wrong. It is only one reason for burnout. I have another.

I burned out because I can no longer care enough about what I'm doing at work to motivate my mind to work on the task at hand. It seems fruitless. People can try to convince me there is some good it is doing, but I see only waste and politics. That resentment is not because my workplace doesn't care about my family. They treat me better than any place I could ever hope to work for. The only sacrifice I've had to make for work is my sanity. I cannot stand development anymore, nor technology, nor I.T., but I'm incapable of doing anything else. I've read the books that say I must love what I do, but I don't, and there is no option to love what I do. I have chosen an occupation and career that no longer suits me, and I have no alternative. I am the only one with a job in my family. I cannot fail. I have to trudge on. This is burnout. I have no where to go.

Therefore, I would state instead that burnout is caused by lack of hope.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

I am sorry but it sounds more like you are suicidal than burned out. You may want to talk to a proffesional.

ignorethat2• 14 years ago

No, I'm not suicidal. Thanks for stating that, as I'm sure some might be in that situation.

I'm just experienced in a different kind of burnout than what the OP was talking about. And it's a kind of burnout that a number of developers experience at some level after some number of years, but frequently not the sort that you find on HN. I've tried to fix via sleep, exercise, losing weight, etc. and that surely helps but it doesn't fix it. In addition, placing power and trust in the employee definitely helps in that case, as a lot of what drives it is a mix of poor health due to lack of sleep which there are fixes for, lack of ability to concentrate, and weight/fitness, but an important component is out of the control of the employee: the developer/IT employee notices that we all seem to fuss about things that in the end don't really matter, because all code is thrown away, all implementations are replaced, and there is nothing left standing of what is created, and in the end we would seem better off and the nation more employed if that technology weren't distracting everyone. However, activism is not the answer. Technology is inevitable. So you want to become a landscaper, a bartender, or anything to get over that feeling, but you know you can't provide for your family if you do that, so you have the privilege of suffering in a job you hate, knowing that you are spoiled for complaining about a job that pays well. You can't even feel good about complaining.

I've also experienced the other kind of burnout which is what developers usually mean, which is burning the candle at both ends to meet demands you didn't set at work and could not influence even though you tried diligently to, so you have a period of lack of motivation or effectiveness. The result of that for me was that I never want to work for a startup again, because you can get sucked into the idea and the promise- the hope- later to realize that they are desperate and do not care about your family. That is what the OP's post is about, and they are framing it like it can be solved by the employer. Perhaps.

jroseattle• 14 years ago

Most people on the thread have this correct: there is a difference between resentment and burnout. I understand this innately, as I've been there with both feelings, and they are quite different.

When I felt burned out, it was literally like a flame on a match stick. I was exhausted and didn't see a way out of the situation (amazing what a little perspective will get you.) I didn't want to do my job, because my head was full and it felt heavy to me.

Contrast that with resentment, and I was pissed off (and motivated.) I had energy to change the situation, which was entirely different from feeling burned out.

One situation gave me energy and focus; the other felt like an immovable burden. Big difference to me.

falava• 14 years ago

Read the first comment in the page by Isaac Yonemoto it's better than the post.

jacquesm• 14 years ago

You can get burnt out all by your lonesome self just fine without resenting anybody or anything at all.

Burnout is caused by resentment

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