RemoteIsHeaven

most burnout is mostly caused by managers and culture that just doesn't care about people. A good manager will get an employee who is approaching burnout to take a break/vacation or even change up what they are working on

Agreed and a great manager won't cause burnout because they fundamentally understand what the expectations of their employees are!

I explained a bit of this in my root comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39809297

Curious to hear what your thoughts are

I'm undecided if the burnout was caused by the job or my inexperience. It was probably both.

Likely the job as in the management - I explained their role in my root comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39809297

Curious to hear what your thoughts are

I’ve been working on a startup on the side with my friend for almost a year now and the work has rarely ever burnt me out.

Well done! I explained this paradox in my root comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39809297

Curious to hear what your thoughts are

Companies that require 50-80 hour weeks, bosses who yell and scream regularly, psychologically manipulative situations, and environments where people are prevented from having control over their own outcomes are going to take a toll on anyone

If you got paid $250k/yr to work fulltime at Bain and all that work was to shred a single piece of paper, any paper, a day and that is it, no crunch time, no yelling bosses, nothing - would you eventually burn out?

Fortune 500's and FAANGs, as large organizations, generally shift towards exploitive, or at the least, behaviors lacking the reciprocity expected

1. What could be causing that?

2. What are the chances of this same behavior happening at a Fortune 500000?

3. How would an employee detect that behavior, potentially as early as when interviewing for the job?

I was fortunate enough to get promoted into a senior management position, where I am mostly focused on tech strategy and not true "developer work" anymore.

1. Did your find doing the "developer work" itself fulfilling in the first place?

2. If given a choice between your management position and the "developer work", which one would you pick?

3. If you could go back in time and redo everything, would you have started off in management to begin with?

4. What would you have done differently?

I ask these questions because I have a hypothesis that you currently work for bad management and that made the developer work really unfulfilling in part because it gave you no to little agency over your impact. By moving into part of the management layer you got some agency over your impact and managed to disassociate yourself from the unfulfilling developer work, but I would like to learn more from you directly

a high-performing individual contributor who “lacks” an eye for the bigger picture, because I show little interest in the business side of things

If focusing on engineering, technical, programming, and math problems is really what excites you and you truly have no interest in the business side of things, you should start looking for companies that will only want you to focus on engineering, technical, programming, and math problems and there are a lot of them out there.

If your current place of work complains you “lack” an eye for the bigger picture, and that might be true, that means they dont have good management at all, because a good manager would immediately understand what you value and align you with that or ask you to leave explictly if that's not what they wanted.

Bad management takes no initiative and lack critical decision making skills, stay away.

I would never have reached the point of ability that I did reach

I think you're conflating skill and ability with impact and expectations.

Early on in your life, your expectations could have been to gain tremendous skill and grow your abilities. You probably didn't care that much if your work went into the trash because in the process, you learned some extremely important and valuable skills. That journey itself made it all worth it and met your expectations.

Over time, as you become more skillful and able, your expectations could change to seeing your work having real impact on the world instead.

This is perhaps, to you, now there's marginal return on being even more skillful and able. You ask "what's the end goal and did I reach it?"

risk being disappointed once more. Maybe this time, you will be able to recognize it before it's "too late". I don't know

I mentioned in my own comment, the root cause of burnout - be it coding or otherwise, is when expectations don't match reality.

If you're a developer, your impact and outcome is beholden to management, so even through you might not realize it, part of your jobsearch now has to focus on ensuring you detect great management - and you make it a part of your interview to locate them.

The real solution to not being burned out: work with a team that actually knows what they are doing and have strong fundamentals.

My job has less (no) global impact. What I did previously affected far more people. I told people what project I was on and they thought that was cool. But I don’t hate my life or job and I very much did before.

As I mentioned in my own comment, the root cause of burnout - be it coding or otherwise, is when expectations don't match reality.

For most people, especially the young, they attach their expectations to the job and work they do. There are also a certain number of people who have other expectations though - like how they can contribute to charity or the well-being of their own family from the money they make, from a job they don't necessarily like or even care about. One example is the popular Bain/McKinsey partner who is happy to sell absolute vaporware that will never be delivered ever, because they don't care whether their customers are happy - their own expectations are how bigger of a yatch or mansion they can upgrade to next year.

It all boils down to what the expectations are and whether they match reality.

The root cause of burnout - be it coding or otherwise, is when expectations don't match reality.

In most cases, people want to do meaningful work and see their work having real impact on the world.

If you spent all your waking hours, eating ramen all the while, building something that has outsized impact on the world, you won't be burnt out - quite the opposite!

OTOH, you can even get burnt out doing almost nothing all day, getting paid six figures if your work got thrown away into the trash can regularly (had no impact at all on anyone).

Burnout happens when that expectation doesn't match reality.

these companies just sound like another high-performance meat grinder

but are constantly under scrutiny. And smaller companies are all going pseudo-agile to try to squeeze every last ounce from their developers

As bad it sounds, high-performance, being under scrutiny, squeeze every last ounce aren't really the root cause of burnout - these are great symptoms of a broken process that leads to unmet expectations that then causes burnout.

The broken process usually are:

Scenario 1: At big company, BigCo, your work rarely has a direct impact on the customer, or when it does, it could have been years since you actually made the change that makes it way to the customer if it ends up that route at all or you have no way of getting customer feedback.

Result: You question yourself whether working so hard or putting in that overtime was really worth it because you have no idea where that effort ended up

Scenario 2: Someone ambitious, NewGun, at BigCo figured out a shortcut to a promotion - build a new product which is "better, faster" than an existing product CashCow. BigCo is too afraid to make major changes to CashCow (because it is the cash cow) and there's already a layer of management that's known to steward CashCow. NewGun is an outsider so even if NewGun pulled off those major changes to CashCow, they won't get most of the recognition - the CashCow stewards will.

Action: NewGun convinces BigCo to give them a bunch of devs, works them to the bone (because they need results yesterday), skips actual customer research and discovery (because that takes too long and they need results yesterday), makes up usecases and fictitious users

Result: Product flops badly because it doesn't appeal to anyone real. Devs question themselves whether working so hard or putting in that overtime was really worth it

Scenario 3: This is a very close cousin of Scenario 2, except that NewGun is a fresh entrepreneur who convinced some investors to give them money. Result is the same

Micromanagement, scrutiny, squeeze every last ounce are all symptoms of bad management. They by themselves aren't a strong differentiator - great management can do scrutiny, squeezing as well when it's tactically critical, but that's the exception, like pulling the handbrake to avoid an accident, than the norm.

The real solution to not being burned out: work with a team that actually knows what they are doing and have strong fundamentals. How do find those teams is perhaps a separate post as this one's way too long already

Are you thinking of Reddit (or HN) style threads?

Not the OP but this would really help

Happy to create an issue if this is a new request or upvote if there's an existing request

I prefer Caddy proxy and with Caddy it's just a single reverse proxy line (it handles the websockets transport seamlessly)

+1

Integration with Google Meet, Zoom would really help.

I see plugins for both but could never get them to work (teams edition though)

The expectation is that, just like on slack, I should be able to do a slash command and have a Google Meet or Zoom meeting ready to join

This would be interesting if E2EE was officially supported

The reality is people claim to need E2EE but it's not worth paying extra for it.

It's kind of like how people nod when you ask them if they hate companies like FB/GOOG stealing their personal information and then you offer them a dollar to give your their DOB, Address and SSN and they happily take the dollar and share all of that info.

… and those really serious about E2EE are using their custom stack anyways.

Mattermost v7 was released on Thursday and includes video conferencing functionality

have you tried running it using Mattermost team (the OSS) instance?

I also use their cloud instance to stay updated on new features but voice is a paid only plan, so couldn't check it out

We now have multiple Mattermost server support in the mobile apps in Beta! If you're interested to try it out, here's how you can join the Mattermost Mobile app beta program.

This is fantastic news!

It is/was a problem having to choose which server to connect to, when I had multiple Mattermost servers.

This new feature will fix that quandary

Different Question: can I point `mmctl` to your managed cloud instance (are the "free tiers" exempt from this ability but paid tiers allow this?), have it create a backup and restore that backup to a local Mattermost team (the OSS) instance? This is just to be able to migrate old team chats off the Mattermost cloud instance but retain the ability to quickly read them now and then if needed

the more places I work the more I realize that the standard is bad leadership.

True!

Why is that, though?

Like - do the great leaders retire quick?

Or is it that we are just an unlucky bunch who get exposed to bad leadership?

Problem solving, decomposition, and the ability to temporarily hold large amounts of information (documentation indexes / what functions are available? kinda things) are all more important than language ability, I think

Makes sense. I asked this question because I have been getting feedback from some managers (technical and non-technical) that good writers translate to good programmers, but I couldn't find any evidence/whitepaper/quality discussion on that

my own boss resigned last month and we've been interviewing for his replacement. I haven't decided whether or not to apply for his position; I don't want all of his responsibilities but I do want to keep the autonomy that I've gained since he left

the risk being that the new boss takes the autonomy away from you (and much more)

How many things are on my own plate that I haven't done anything about yet? A lot

sure but that's not how leadership works.

Part of leadership is prioritization and ownership.

My career trajectory was Dev -> Senior -> Lead -> Director -> Senior. I left a company and purposefully looked for my next job further down the ladder, after having profound burnout that made me question whether I wanted to keep working in the industry at all

Any chance you had terrible, even substandard leadership where you were Director (assuming that's where you had the profound burnout) and you would absolutely have loved it otherwise?

Right on the money!

I also suggested building good, strong relationships.

which ones have the highest returns

Build good, strong relationships.

As geeks we dont tend to value human relationships.

However, good, strong relationships will pay out dividends and change your life for the better.

They will encourage you to improve yourself, improve your health, improve your knowledge.

On the other hand it's also important to realize bad actors and act accordingly.

Check out my latest ASK HN thread for an idea on handling bad actors.

How do I decline cofounder requests?

Are you signalling that you are looking for cofounders?

Does your project page/contact page say "Thank you for your interest in being a cofounder but I'm currently not interested."?

How do I decline cofounder requests?

Are you signalling that you are looking for cofounders?

Does your project page/contact page say "Thank you for your interest in being a cofounder but I'm currently not interested."?

I used to do a lot of drywall work and N95 respirators are just not designed for regular extended use.

If mounted properly, they will restrict the airflow and raise the temperature of your face. I would perspire heavily.

Also, unless proper handling techniques are used, the chances of contaminating the insides of the mask with the virus and then continuing to breathe it will worsen the situation compared to not wearing it at all.

A N95 respirator is not something to slap on willy nilly without training.

I think a regular person who has never worn a N95 respirator before and does not use proper handling techniques is exposing themselves to increased risk than wearing a simpler surgical mask that's more intuitive to use.

If "FakeCo" was to post on Indeed/LinkedIn or even cold email me, I won't even take a second look at it, but, if they post on HN, I will not only check them out but go as far as give their take home assignments a serious shot because HN has a special place in my heart and I want to help my fellow entrepreneurs.

I am very confident in saying this is just not me - a lot of you treat the posts in the monthly "Who's Hiring" pretty seriously as well!

However:

Reading reports on HN, it seems like, certain companies have realized we take the posts in the monthly "Who's Hiring" pretty seriously and are actively exploiting our goodwill.

Currently, there is absolutely no way for us to communicate to each other when we come across these companies.

THIS is an attempt in fixing that.

Secondary objectives of this thread could be to:

i. Inform us if the project manager has asked the non-technical interviewer to ask technical questions from a list. What's the runtime of QuickSort? Best case, worst case or average case? What's the partioning strategy you want me to use? Aux storage needed? Does it say I have to say "O(n log n)" on the list?

ii. Warn us that a post is really for a H1B PERM and no real application is being sought. It's just a honeypot to produce as evidence in case the DHS ever comes knocking asking questions if an US Citizen was considered for the position

iii. Warn us that the architect you get to speak with at the end of the 18 hour interview pipeline hates anyone who ever coded in Java as it's "pure poison for the mind" and wants to ensure you forgot all the "bad habits" that Java taught you and "C# with LINQ" is the real solution to all the world's problems

iv. ... you get the idea

I DONT expect quality control on Indeed/LinkedIn/WhatHaveYou and treat these sites with the respect they deserve.

I DO really respect HN and believe it's important to be able to verify and maintain the integrity of "Who's Hiring" with what we can

Please suggest away and if all these experiences are just me, no one here had to go through any of this, I am really sorry for wasting your time.