Managers and HR leaders can help employees by dialing down the demands they’re placing on people – ensuring that employee goals are realistic and rebalancing the workloads of employees who, by virtue of being particularly skilled or productive, have been saddled with too much. They can also try to increase the resources available to employees; this includes not only material resources such as time and money, but intangible resources such as empathy and friendship in the workplace, and letting employees disengage from work when they’re not working. By avoiding emailing people after hours, setting a norm that evenings and weekends are work-free, and encouraging a regular lunch break in the middle of the day, leaders can make sure they’re sending a consistent message that balance matters.
Key point. In my experience, the high-productivity, high-engagement becoming the new baseline, and then the organization requesting the 120% of that, and repeat every six weeks, is the true killer.
> 120% of that, and repeat every six weeks, is the true killer.
This is what I try to get through to people - if you consistently deliver at 100%, that becomes the baseline and you'll be expected to stretch ever further with little to no extra incentive or support.
Throughout my career I've always held back some level of skill, efficiency, or drive that I can break out as and when required on very particular projects. In the end, it's better for the company as I'm less likely to flame out.
Obviously a lot of companies still operate on visibility and presenteeism over outcomes where it makes it harder, but take the damn lunch break now or you'll never be taking it.
I've only recently learnt to step on the breaks to avoid the baseline reset. It's heart breaking to know you're not tapping your whole potential. Before that, every task, every project done, was an invitation to take on the next issue, non stop. People get used to piggyback on that. Pareto distribution is real.
I know what you mean, people that over-engage themselves to the point that they can't manage their own workload end up creating a toxic work environment and taking it out on their coworkers. In my experience when those people leave the organization morale and retention goes up for everyone else.
The point at which someone becomes 'over-engaged' is highly individualized but based on my experience it is highly associated with people that are deliberately working their way up the management ladder.
It can be demoralizing to step back and ask yourself if what you do at work provides real value. And when you feel pressure to perform heroics to meet an arbitrary deadline, burnout is a real possibility.
It's important make sure you're not sacrificing your wellbeing for the benefit of the company. Your physical and mental health are far too important.
Years ago I sort of arbitrarily decided I'm willing to give 2 heroic week(end)s per year. Once I started putting up boundaries and enforcing them, I was suddenly seen as much more valuable. Promotions, more money. Human psychology is really weird.
It's pretty straight forward: scarcity implies value. It works on all levels of human relationships. FWIIW the inverse is also true: after doubling my consulting rate a couple of times, I found I was treated much better.
I’ve been there. Now, I’m working on something that is at least interesting, useful, and not fundamentally evil, while at the same time I rarely leave the office after about 6 and the deadlines are reasonable. The difference is night and day.
My company makes things that are, I'd argue, a net good to the world (we help make stuff more secure) - but honestly I find myself struggling more and more to care about anything that isn't addressing the climate or democratic breakdown the world faces.
Not rhetorical - genuine question: Does anyone else sit at their desk and think "but guys the ship is sinking, maybe we should worry about fixing the holes before we repaint the tennis court? guys? GUYS????"
This is my problem really, not the company's, but I'm not sure what to do.
My solution is to do one thing, one even very small thing a week to help the meta problems. Writing letters to reps or calling, picking up trash around my neighborhood, or making some care packs for homeless people are all things that don’t take very long, and the difference in feeling like I’m doing something about it vs not has been liberating.
I've had conversations about this with friends after choosing a similarly drastic change like that for myself.
What stops them is a combination of inertia, money and life change. It's not a trivial thing to quit your job and work somewhere else.
One major factor is that you will be taking a large pay cut and might have to move. For those with mortgages and family staying with their less fulfilling jobs makes more sense. for many people their family comes first.
Another issue is that the grass always appears greener.
I do wonder what an engineer at Facebook would tell themselves, I think it might increase empathy with workers who are in places which are being labeled as morally bankrupt. I have some idea but that if they did share their thoughts they would get downvoted and hated for exposing themselves.
I've mentioned it around here before, but I think this is the oft-unseen problem with artificially created scarcities (especially housing scarcities from NIMBYs).
Say you've got 10 people. 5 of them want to do (noble but lower paying thing) and 5 and want to do (meh to possibly sketchy high-paying thing).
If there are 10 homes, that's fine. Maybe the noble ones have simpler, less fancy houses, but they're still basically OK. They still have the basics of life. "I can do something good for humanity and forego some luxury" is something a lot of people might think.
If there are 5 homes, then only the ones who do sketch work can have them. "I can do something good for humanity and be homeless" is something far fewer people think.
This applies to other things where a person might want to voluntarily take in less income (couple with one person doing childcare, taking a career break to learn a new thing, etc.) and it's why creating these fake shortages sucks so much out of the human experience - you have to justify your endeavors in terms of the lost income, and how they'll affect your competitiveness.
I work for environmental nonprofits that also lobby for government intervention. This sector does not pay as well as private industry, so does not have the best people money can buy. Sure we can use your money, but truly, what we need most is extremely talented and capable people who can take those donations and change the world.
I can see clearly from the resumes on my desk that when it comes right down to it, people would rather make big sacrifices to work for a game developer than a nonprofit.
Sometimes it's not always about pay. I was in consulting, then took a salaried job at a University. It was a 10% pay cut, but to compensate for that they offered 3 additional weeks of vacation (five total).
There's always different things you can negotiate on to bring on great talent.
Bit ironic since I left the game industry about a year ago. If you'd like to elaborate I'm all ears, or happy to talk privately (see my profile).
In my spare time I created a real estate finding tool focused on bike and train routes, which I hope indirectly has helped interested people avoid car-centric commutes and lifestyles while not spending insane amounts of money to be in the hippest areas. Apparently it's been useful in my immediate neighbourhood, at least.
But, as everyone else here notes, I've got bills to pay (fewer than most if I'm honest, though) and for now am just trying to destroy some debt.
Actually our HR advertises on the monthly HN jobs thread. We are also on Idealist.org, the best site for nonprofit recruiting. Plus we are a nationally known nonprofit and our jobs are listed on our website. If someone wants to save the world, they know where to find us.
I've found myself in this situation: I was working for a big bank and the conditions were excellent: good teammates, good manager, good pay.
At one point I couldn't stand the cognitive dissonance of watching all these videos/articles about climate change while working for a bank that had a negative contribution to these issues.
I decided to quit and go part-time. I still don't know how to contribute to the issues I care about and earn money at the same time. I'm searching but tbh it's hard and I'm not the only one in this case.
However, now I have more time to think about making the life changes to reduce my impact on the climate/environment: organize camping holidays in my home country vs flying abroad, optimizing my energy needs at home etc.
I'd prefer finding a job where I can do that at a bigger scale but in the meantime that helps
Honestly, it sounds like you may be watching too much news. If you feel there's an impending crisis (especially a worldwide "democratic breakdown"), then it's quite possible you're reacting emotionally to content that's designed to make you feel exactly that.
I recommend unplugging for 30 days before you make any decisions. Walk around and look at the world around you with your own eyes. Don't let the media influence major life decisions without at least purging it from your life a bit first. It can be surprising the effect it has on you.
Wouldn't unplugging and "looking at the world around you with your own eyes" provide a hopelessly narrow and biased slice of objective reality? Why should anyone expect their immediate, physically accessible surroundings and specific lived experience to generalize to entire societies, let alone the globe?
I'd recommend a deliberate analysis and culling of your information sources, not a complete disengagement.
No, I think it would help you engage in with your local community and ground your thinking in a very practical and meaningful reality. I think too many people are focusing on large scale abstract problems that don't actually have the impact on their life that it seems when you ingest too much media.
I wouldn't call it disengagement, I'd call it re-engagement with the real world.
Sure, and then the already privileged people on HackerNews end up continuing to blindly exploit the under-privileged in developing nation. That sounds like a horrible solution.
I'm a remote worker, who will be moving to the semi-rural south in two weeks. My wife and I plan to use our half-acre to grow our vegetables and hunt/fish for all of our meat within three years; we will start immediately but want the transition to happen in gradual steps. Small local changes will aid the environment.
Are you open to chatting? Curious to compare notes. Moved to some land in Co. Offaly (middle of Ireland) in March. Partially inspired by The Market Gardener
What democratic breakdown? I'm fairly unplugged from politics, but the major things people seem to talk about
(Trump, Brexit) at least in my area seem to be deeply rooted in democracy.
I think about this often from the perspective of my job in tech. I just started taking action by getting plugged in with the Citizen's Climate Lobby (https://citizensclimatelobby.org/) which are actually making a difference where it matters, and need volunteers. Take a look? They have weekly intro sessions to get you set up with taking meaningful action.
In my experience HR organizations are mostly there as a sort of risk management for the company, everything / anything else tends to feel like just sort of HR resume fodder / token programs / company cheerleading.
This meme gets repeated on HN quite frequently but a good HR department can help a lot with engagement across the company. Sure, they can't solve specific team problems but if they work as a channel for employees to be heard and upper management trusts them, they can be a positive force.
This very much depends on the culture of the company. I've experienced toxic HR, indifferent HR, incompetent HR and awesomely helpful HR. It depends on the people in the HR team and the people on the exec team.
HR is a really hard job too, very hard to do well and very stressful. Most people never get to see this as it's part of their job that they can't talk about most things they are having to deal with.
Bad HR is a nightmare, good HR can make a massive difference to a company.
> But I cannot agree more that HR is not on your side.
Just to add a counter in case early career people see this and take it as truth - there are companies out there who have really good HR teams who are aligned to their employees. Don't put up with shitty HR because you think all HR teams are shit.
Org I work for has really good HR teams for both the boring process stuff, and fostering a decent working environment. It's one of the strings still holding me to stay.
I worked for a private (venture backed) company that actually had a stellar HR team who seemed to think about the employee's needs first. Or rather, they considered the company's needs first and the company* (ie, the executive team) believed that having an HR department who prioritized employee's needs was the right choice. The most obvious standout example was an employee with health problems who might not be able to return to work. She was kept on the payroll for a full year without working. She never did end up returning to work. This kind of thing paid off in retention, which was wildly high compared to other companies in the market.
But that company was acquired by a massive public company. And now HR is half adversary + half bureaucratic nonsense. Interestingly, the company still offered great benefits. I assume that is because the benefits package is an easy-to-measure piece of compensation, while HR quality is something that is much harder to shop around for.
* caveat, I have no idea how HR would have acted in a situation where an employee brings up concerns that would put the company in legal jeopardy. If I had to guess, they would do the right thing in a "senior harasser vs harassed subordinate" situation. If the the company was clearly in the wrong, I think they would work hard to satisfy the employee to prevent legal jeopardy. If the employee could not be satisfied without a significant hit to the company, I'm pretty sure they would do anything they could to protect the company. And that reflects that at the end of the day, the company comes first. A good HR department can just push much harder for win-wins (and probably only under market conditions that give labor leverage).
(1) Companies where HR is mostly administrative stuff plus risk management.
(2) Companies that claim their HR is more than that and for the employees, but when the situation seems to actually come close to resembling a dilemma, they're mostly administrative stuff plus risk management.
I have yet to hear of or experience a company that claims the latter and actually is the latter.
I have yet to see an engagement program run by HR that wasn't some asinine extrovert-centric activity or obviously propaganda. They are concerned with protecting the company. For some that means viewing employees as liabilities, for others it means viewing them as resources to be kept as happy as necessary for as little cost as can be got away with. It's a rare HR department indeed that ignores its own title and thinks of employees as something other than resources.
The way I see it, employee engagement is primarily the work and responsibility of middle management, direct supervisors, team leads, etc. They are the ones handling the personal one-to-one relationships between the employee and the company.
As you say, good HR department can help a lot in this regard - but in this function it's the same as in other main HR functions (recruitment, training, discipline issues and firing, compensation, legal compliance); most of what HR departments generally do is support for these line managers in their job of managing the employees, not support for the employees themselves.
I think there is a difference between HR as a function and as a department.
E. g. my current employer has a HR department that conaists of a HR division that does typical classical HR tasks, and People Development, who actually do meaningful stuff to bolster retention etc.
I wonder if the mishmash of internal HR responsibilities sort of water down / naturally degrade focus on various things that maybe don't get as much attention such as thoughtful people development.
i'd argue that more often than not "the highly engaged and at risk of burn out" person is full of illusions while the other 4 have been around the block and dont give a %rap anymore.
I often see folks say that schools should teach finance management from a young age.
Well, they also ought to teach time management, emotion management, energy management, people management.
It's just a basic life skill, keeping things in balance. Extremeness in an area can often be disastrous, it might also come with high reward, but very few people know how to be highly engaged and yet sort of keep other parts of their life balanced.
School is one of the more difficult environments for time management: students have half a dozen (or more) different bosses, all of whom reguarly impose hard deadlines, and have a tendency of imposing major deadlines at a simmilar time to each other.
The social environment is probably one of the most diverse that many people will see in their entire lifetimes (not nessasarily along racial lines), with some of the most difficult to deal with people (children) many will face in their lifetime.
Granted, schools often take a trial by fire approach to these lessons (I should know, I burned out during highschool), but I don't see how you can get through school without learning them.
I don't think school teaches time management. Sure, there are plenty of people who learn time management due to the constraints of school, but I don't think they are the majority. The people in my major usually either put all of their effort into something, or they put nothing into it. Only extremes.
Personally, I burned out in high school then again in college. I went 100% in everything related to academics and did exceptionally well, and yet I never realized until the end of college that the only reason I was so successful is because I sacrificed everything to be good at one thing.
I'm still figuring out how to get that balance down and having some sort of more formal education in that area would have been beneficial for me.
There is a difference between teaching some skill and imposing stress on people who lack that skill. To illustrate this, Think about the difference between giving an 8-year-old swimming lessons and tossing an 8-year-old off the side of a boat.
No, its one way of motivating a student to re-invent (and thereby learn) or to apply (and thereby learn) a solution. But if the student doesn’t ever get the solution, they don’t ever learn it.
It is possible for someone to face a problem for decades, to care* deeply about it, for others to succeed at it, and for them to not know how to find a workable answer. For me, happens for “obvious” problems like “how do I learn to how to estimate how long software takes to write?” or “How do I write a first draft of a letter to a friend?” where the answer people have is “just do it” or “just do it and multiply by 2”.
———
* By “care” about it, I mean feel the emotion of wanting a solution. Some people define “care” such that if someone fails at something it means they didn’t care about it. I’m not using that definition.
A couple of big differences I can think of there. The first is the quality of your peers. I imagine like most people on this site, I excelled at school with literally 0 effort. In my opinion burnout is largely driven by excessive exertion for a task that seems ultimately pointless, often paired with minimal reward for such. In school people of the mindset who end up getting into STEM are generally going to have excelled with near 0 exertion while also reaping the various rewards for such. As the quality of your peers increases so too does the required exertion to rise above. To test this hypothesis I'd expect we'd see much higher rates of young burnout at elite/preparatory schools, which is certainly true.
The second is that there aren't really any short term consequences for failure in school. Maybe you get a bad grade but it doesn't really have any immediate impact. In the absolute extreme case, you have to repeat a grade, which isn't a particularly big deal. Once you enter real life, if you don't come up with $x,xxx per month - you're homeless. This shift in consequences radically reshapes people's approach to the game. Imagine playing a video game; now imagine playing that same video game where if you score below average - your home and entire livelihood is put in jeopardy. And you're only playing against other people who are also, at worst, decent at the game. To test that latter hypothesis we could try to determine rates of burnout compared to the independent wealth of individuals. And on that front, I've no idea.
> Well, they also ought to teach time management, emotion management, energy management, people management.
I would argue that's about the only thing that schools do teach.
After around 5th grade, almost none of the facts you teach a kid stay with them into adulthood.
What middle school and high school does is force you to learn how to get your work done on time, be social, have hobbies, work with "bosses", and interact regularly with people you don't like. That's the real value in high school IMO.
99.9% of the people who took calculus in highschool would fail an exam 10 years later. The brain just doesn't hold onto info it doesn't use. I think it would be the same if there was an explicit class on e.g. time management. Nothing you say to the kids will have any impact. OTOH, giving them homework and deadlines let's them actually figure out and practice these skills in a safer environment.
I mean, you're right. But I'm inclined to believe this because most people cannot in fact articulate the difference between metals and nonmetals, complete the square, name the three branches of government, etc.
What's the formula to calculate the volume of a conical pyramid, off the top of your head? I learned that in grade 5, was drilled on it, haven't had to know since and no longer remember. A small example but one I think is fairly representative of at least 50% of what I learned in school. We waste a tonne of time teaching very specific things of limited use, formulas, dates of historic events and busy work like plotting exponentials on graph paper and long division, there's a lot of room to be teaching higher level concepts instead.
The volume of any pointy thing is the area of the base times the height divided by three. It’s not necessarily the most useful thing I know, but I do use it from time to time. (Disclaimer: I did math competitively in grade school, so I have a lot more formulas burned into my head than I’d expect most other people to know. That doesn’t mean I don’t think people should forget how to do simple math like solve a linear equation in one variable, calculate interest, etc.)
> What's the formula to calculate the volume of a conical pyramid, off the top of your head?
I don't need to know the formula off the top of my head; I need to know what a conical pyramid is, what volume is, what a formula is, and how to use it. I guarantee that between me and someone who's never done geometry at all, I can find the volume of a conical pyramid faster and more reliably.
You're right that memorizing specific formulas isn't useful; but using a large number of formulas over and over to gain mastery over the general idea certainly is.
Deriving the formula for the volume of a pyramid manually is nontrivial, usually requiring either calculus or careful application of Cavalieri's principle. I know how to get it but it's not practical to do on the spot, so I treat it as an idiom.
It doesn’t force you to learn those things. It imposes suffering upon people who don’t learn those things.
Whats the difference? Well what is the difference between giving an 8-year-old lessons in how to swim vs. tossing an 8-year-old off the side of a boat?
> It doesn’t force you to learn those things. It imposes suffering upon people who don’t learn those things.
Imposing some form of suffering on those who don't comply is literally what forcing people to do something is.
Edit: Note that simply giving somebody swimming lessons does not force them to swim and neither does it force them to learn anything -- because they're free to ignore you. Tossing them over board is forcing them to swim, because you're taking away the viable alternatives. We agree that the way schools do things is bad, by the way.
Thats like saying that breathing is mandatory. If you toss a child into a body of water, the child continuing to breathe is definitely optional.
———
If someone starts beating you with a rubber hose until you recite Jabberwocky, that doesn’t actually cause you to recite jabberwocky unless you have some means of finding the words to that poem that you can see. The last part, access to how to do the action, is crucial to doing the action.
———
For another example: suppose a 5-year-old child is crying and his grandfather pinches him and tells him to stop crying. But the 5-year-old has not yet learned the emotional self-regulation skills to stop himself from crying. So while the grandfather is forcing compliance, he won’t actually achieve compliance. He’ll just inflict pain.
Likewise, if you have an engineering student drowning under a firehose of work and trying to learn time management. The poorly-managed pile of work is forcing him to learn good time management and punishing him for not learning it. But unless he has access to a known source of guidence on time-management, he’ll continue to suffer. Not only that, but sleep deprivation, as makes this harder.
Sure. Forcing people to do something rarely leads to good results, that's not in dispute here. In fact, that's the whole point of the criticism against schools here. But the reason why forcing doesn't lead to good result is largely because it involves an imposition of suffering, which you yourself reiterate.
Maybe a better way to put it is to say is that schools tend to be bad at encouraging kids to learn, so they try (unsuccessfully) to make up for it by forcing instead.
We agree on that. My point is that "forcing" is "attempting to instill motivation by some form of threat". If there's no implied threat, then it's not really forcing.
> Imposing some form of suffering on those who don't comply is literally what forcing people to do something is.
Not at all: punishments can (and often are) ineffective. You can punish me for being unable to fly. It will not force my body to produce a pair of wings.
Maybe your point is a nitpick about whether attempts to force somebody to something are effective or not, and I could perhaps have phrased that better, but the point remains that what distinguishes "force" from other means to attempt to bend somebody else to your will is the (implied) threat of punishment / suffering.
Or can you give an example in which person A forces person B to do something without a threat of punishment or suffering?
There used to be a time, and in many places still is, when parents, relatives, and the community you grew up in would teach you these things. When kids used to play outside together unsupervised, lots of lessons were learned, even from simple things like playing a game. You had to take losing. If you threw a tantrum, then quickly you weren't invited to play again. I remember growing up, the "coolest" kids were, in retrospect, the most emotionally mature ones, and they were the ones everyone else emulated.
This business of emotional development and learning self-control is too important to leave to classrooms.
Parents would teach their kids about money by giving them an allowance, sometimes you would work for the allowance. I mowed lawns.
I can't believe that kind of stuff doesn't happen, but I notice a lot of lost, lonely souls out there who are really struggling with basic concepts, like maintaining friendships with people they get into arguments with, or disagree with. We do a lot of self-isolating behavior and then struggle with impulse control; I think because being part of a community forces you to engage in some impulse control.
> This business of emotional development and learning self-control is too important to leave to classrooms.
It’s also not really any of the schools business. You can’t fix delinquent parenting in the classroom. The idea of an emotional development curriculum sounds terrifyingly dystopian to me.
terms like "delinquent parenting" are a bit incendiary, and of course part of the job of a school is socialization.
But I think a lot of changes have happened in how kids are raised that don't promote good childhood development. Specifically, unsupervised play with other kids. It just disappeared. Now parents have to supervise everything, which puts incredible pressure on parents, especially if they are working.
In previous generations of our own society and other more traditional societies today, parents had kids younger and there were grandparents and relatives around to help raise them. At the same time, you can open your door and let the kids run out and play in the street. Then ring a bell when it's time for lunch and they come home. That takes huge pressure off parents and lets kids learn some tough lessons that helps them mature.
In every species, play is how the young prepare for adulthood. Play and spending time with older peers. When you take that away and allow only supervised play time -- well, that's too much pressure on parents; they'd have to be superhuman to give their children the same richness of experience in childhood that kids used to have.
I think the consequences of this are huge. For example, I've noticed how even people in their late 20s and early 30s, when they run into some kind of difficulty, immediately call for an authority figure to complain to. You'd learn not to do that if you were engaging in a lot of unsupervised play. But if everything is supervised, then you always have that authority figure to call. Even universities now are acting 'in loco parentis' -- in a very paternalistic manner, and it seems the students demand it. To me, it's as if a part of growing up and taking care of your own problems is missing. Then they go out into the working world and expect 'in loco parentis' from their employer. Well, the employer is happy to help, but now you are in an unhealthy relationship with your job. Then you have people in their 30s saying "God, I wished someone had told me about emotional maturity" -- well, that's really sad.
> terms like "delinquent parenting" are a bit incendiary
Delinquent means to fail in ones duty. If you think parents are failing in their duty to facilitate their children’s emotional development, then it’s just tautological to say they are delinquent.
I pretty much agree with everything else you said. But I disagree with the conclusion that it’s the governments right to take over parenting responsibilities in the absence of abuse, and I strongly disagree with the conclusion that the school is an appropriate place to instruct the emotional development of children. The idea of a standardized emotional development curriculum should terrify anybody.
I never concluded that it was the government's right to take over parenting responsibilities. I explicitly made the point that when institutions act 'in loco parentis', the results are harmful for development -- that includes government.
But I don't think blaming parents is the answer -- this is the result of general social breakdown, and parents today are doing the best they can in an environment where a lot of supporting infrastructure has been taken away from them.
Blame is an entirely different conversation to delinquency. If I get hit by a car, lose my job, and can’t pay my rent, I’d become delinquent in paying my rent. You could debate who’s to blame for that, but it has no bearing on whether I’m delinquent or not.
> I never concluded that it was the government's right to take over parenting responsibilities.
The comment I was originally replying to did. Your initial response, which I mostly agree with, didn’t address that topic at all.
I think this [1] article (Not only applicable to US as it says) is in a way related to discussion. Schools can teach finance/ time/ emotion management may be theoretically to certain extent...but when it comes to it's application for day to day activities which are often linked to our priorities, many people still not able to manage things in right fashion.
I take their point, but there is always going to be somebody that is hungry to make an impact and reap the rewards. It even sounds crazy to think of my job in the context of “how can I sustain this for years/decades”. The whole point of hustling is to level up and do something hopefully more interesting or at the least more lucrative. Most workaholics that I have known were perfectly aware of what they were doing and burnout was not even a factor worth considering.
Turns out “burn out” (turnover) is by far the largest single cost to employers. It adds huge overhead per employee and dramatically reduces a companies profitability if they can’t keep a low turnover.
I think experience plays a role. From my own experience; what I considered high demand 10 years ago is now low demand. Such as resolving a production incident at 10am.
In my past I would switch jobs every couple years. Not due to the stress, but because I was alarmed at how the intensity of work was decreasing at a company. I equated that with slow professional growth.
Now I'm finding several opportunities for growth, but doing so with a calm mindset. Several of my colleagues don't seem calm at all. Yet the majority of us have more control over burnout and "work chaos" than we are lead to believe.
I think the burnout happens when you care too much and can't take it emotionally (when, inevitably, you meet some people who care less). So obviously, people who are "disengaged" are not at risk of burnout - they are managing it.
The point is, it can happen at any objective level of environmental stress. It can also happen at any level of actual performance. The engagement relative to people you interact with is the thing it depends on, I think.
Hmm in my experience burnout has little to do with how much your peers care about their work relative to you?
For me it seems to happen because we feel that we must be emotionally invested in our work, and the toll of being 100% emotionally invested in something that is more likely than not devoid of meaning creates a “burnout” reaction.
My point was more that I disagree that burnout is caused in part by the fact that you perceive other people caring less about work than you do.
If anything, the reason why burnout seems to be more frequent is because too many people care too much about their work, which creates pressure on others to join in on appearing like they care and emotionally invest in their work, which goes back to my theory that people ultimately burnout because they’ve been pressured to put their whole selves into their work when for many their work is actually devoid of much meaning.
Maybe you're talking about a different phenomenon.
> which creates pressure on others to join in on appearing like they care and emotionally invest in their work
I don't see this pressure coming from people who care. I mean, they want others to care, but they certainly don't want them to be pretending it.
So if anything, this pressure comes from within you, and then it also can be considered an issue of emotional control, but it is a different issue than caring too much about your work.
In other words, it seems like there are problems on both ends of the spectrum. I care more than average person in the group => potentially an emotional problem for me (that's my explanation of burnout). I care less than average person in the group => potentially an emotional problem for me (that's your explanation of burnout).
I had one project at a former employer I became emotionally attached to and worked for some weeks from 6am to 6pm on it.
After figuring out the project would not be finished any time soon though I almost couldn't work on it anymore after a holiday. It was like running sprint after sprint and realising you need to run at least a marathon.
I did not have a real burnout but I think I was very close.
I think burnout rarely is connected to an overly strong emotional attachment or investment in work.
This almost sounds like trying to blame the victim. There’s a much simpler description: burnout happens to you because of circumstances imposed by the employer.
You don’t have to be emotionally invested to be deeply stressed by the prospect of getting fired, demoted or turned into a workplace pariah, and in a lot of toxic environments you are made to feel those threats are connected to whether or not you are putting in 8 hours every Saturday or responding to a permanent triage of PagerDuty alerts with no permission to invest time into fixing root causes.
Even when it doesn’t manifest as implied uncompensated overtime, you can end up being expected to be a miracle worker and simultaneously given no resources, all while balancing a personal life or financial obligations that might imply you cannot easily quit jobs or move to a new place for better jobs.
In a Hanlon’s Razor sense, I’d say burnout is almost always about toxic management or executive behavior. Sometimes it’s about a problematic teammate. But it’s rarely caused by the degree of emotional investment of the person burning out. Rather that is a symptom exacerbated by the real causes.
> burnout happens to you because of circumstances imposed by the employer.
This is often the case, but I think very often there is a lot of self-inflicted hurt there, too, with employees burning midnight oil because they convinced themselves that something bad will happen to them if they do a task a day (three days, week) later.
<rant> As a personal anecdote, I have to wage real wars to prevent people who work on my projects from coming to work when they are sick. I do not know what is it -- do they want to look heroic? believe this day is super critical? but they still show up to cough and sneeze on everyone. We have unlimited sick days, stay home! <rant off>
> Sometimes it’s about a problematic teammate. But it’s rarely caused by the degree of emotional investment of the person burning out.
If you care and your toxic teammate doesn't, and then your toxic manager doesn't give a shit about the toxic teammate but instead cares that dared "rock the boat" by bringing it up is it all three thing as a cause or just the toxic manager?
It's swiss cheese failure. If you didn't care you wouldn't be having trouble. If your toxic teammate wasn't toxic you wouldn't be having trouble. If your toxic manager wasn't toxic you would've reasonably had the problem resolved.
I'm saying this having been in this boat two jobs in a row.
This is all relative and very subjective from one person to the next. One person looking like they don't care, is probably somebody who found out that's the best way to act when you truly do care! In a nutshell, nobody can possibly know whether another co-worker truly cares, even if they told their fellow associate they don't. Do you know this person's health situation, their family, their home life? In my opinion, it's always juniors to low level seniors with around 5 years experience or less who run around with their heads cut off expecting everybody else to do the same. If not, they must not care. I think we need to purge these types from any status updates, planning and the like... they clearly just need more time in the trenches taking grenades like the rest of us... eventually they won't care about a few bullets flying around.
Ooh I actually hit this early on in my career. I cared a lot about stuff to the extent that I'd give up going to shows to do work. Well, that was _entirely wrong_. Nobody wanted that of me.
I learnt then that giving that much of a shit only mattered if I were building something for myself. So, for the things I care about, I'll give that much of a damn, but for someone else, they're not getting that.
The mistake I made was that I invested more into that thing than the owners themselves. That's so foolish. Why? They don't want that from you.
In this case you need a highly motivated situational captain on your floor, always on the ball, first in, last out, always pointing and delegating, and rewarding only the highest of achievers. Situational Captain, every organisation needs one.
Around 10 years ago, I felt like I was burning out. I was travelling a lot (sometimes 20+ hour trips involving 3 planes, always in bloody economy...) and working stupid hours.
A few things have changed since, and I'm no longer anywhere near burnout.
I stopped travelling all the time, and I started working from home 4/5 days - less time communiting meant more sleep, and it means I get to have breakfast and lunch with my family etc.
Then I moved to a 4-day working week a couple of years ago, taking a 20% pay cut in the process.
Work-wise, it's the best thing I ever did! I spend less hours working, but somehow I don't seem to be any less productive, so my employer is actually getting a pretty good deal TBH. And I get a 3-day weekend, which means more time for family, me, and side projects.
I can understand why employers are apprehensive about remote work and 4-day weeks, but I really think they need to modernise here - a lot of them still seem to be stuck in the mindset of prioritising "bums on seats" from 9-5, rather than productivity and happy employees.
I think you can take the average knowledge worker employees 5 day week and make it 4 days and they’ll get as much done. If you get the same amount of slack on a 4 day than on a 5 day it’s quite a bit more noticeable. My current co does half days for summer Fridays. The amount that gets released doesn’t change. The amount of incidents over the weekend goes down also.
It started with what they called "Summer Wednesdays" - during the Summer, the company would sponsor an outing to the beautiful beach nearby every Wednesday at lunch.
Then you could come back to office or work from home.
Soon, people started to go to the beach earlier and work from there unless there was a client meeting onsite. One team member (she was in sales) even did her client meeting at the beach.
Team morale drastically changed. Since they would be at the beach, they wanted to have some fun while at the beach - so they shifted the work they got done to the 4 other days.
No more boring meetings - only those meetings everyone really wanted to be on happened. Everyone else was busy working. Teamwork went up because they wanted to be at the beach on Wednesday and have fun instead of coming back to work later.
The performance metrics were so phenomenal next month that management had an informal meeting with the team that basically allowed people to work 4 days a week.
Those who agreed had to sign an addendum to their employment contract that they had taken up the offer for people to work from where-ever they wanted one day a week without needing to come to the office.
I did not like this opacity so when I queried I was told that investors won't sanction this in any shape or form and this would be the only way to pull it off.
Those are the things that really grind enthusiastic people doing hard, creative work to dust.
Proving to the pointy-haired that going to a 4-day week won't hurt "because metrics" only puts a band-aid on the real problem which stems from the fact that many enterprises view people as "components"-- as means a to a corporate-defined end.
For many people a 4-day work week only prolongs the path to burnout, IMHO.
Vote the freeloader off the island. A cooperative is not a charity, though it does have the freedom to be more charitable if that is what the employee/owners decided to do. And obviously, it operates in an external market place which places some pressure on it to operate efficiently.
The primary difference of interest here is the way an employee owned cooperative is directed by people the employees (who know what is really going on in the company) and for their benefit, rather than for the benefit of disinterested shareholders.
Why this model isn't more popular is really confusing to me. Technically trained people have the skills that make the world go round. We should be extorting people with capital through the nose for them and making sure that we are taken care of instead of treated like disposable cogs.
I tried to start a tech co-op. Ours failed because of a lack of shared definitions on too many topics. What was 'work'. What was 'learning/training'. We could agree on goals, but intermediary steps towards those goals were all over the place.
Without a clear provider of vision and decision, it crumbled. This part is true of any venture, but I think becomes even more critical in a co-op since the authority is necessarily shared.
A cooperative can be democratically run but still have a powerful executive figure who is invested with the ability to determine these sorts of things.
I think in broader terms, cooperatives are bound to be less efficient than an equivalent capitalist controlled venture, but that difference doesn't have to be a death sentence for the cooperative.
We did. Even in a hierarchy, an executive's primary role is to build consensus, but in a co-op you're contending with increased ego from the participants. In a hierarchy, not being the executive makes it easier to back down on an issue. In a co-op, part of your mind must see yourself as an owner. In a co-op, every active employee needs at least some degree of CEO-ness. And then you have too many CEOs in the boardroom.
> that difference doesn't have to be a death sentence
Despite my failed attempt at one, I completely agree. To me, the co-op must be the way forward. It's the only likely contender I've found that might bridge capitalism and socialism.
Except that, of course, you're missing the problem. Firing the employee isn't the problem - I don't think it's relevant whether it's done democratically or if the CEO "dictates" it.
The problem is, how to find freeloaders? In absence of objective metrics (which is what the parent raged against), it's an art! Or, it will come down to internal politics, ass-in-the-seat time, popularity contests, ... not that much better than in a non-cooperative company.
In an employee owned company, the stakeholders are closer to the problem and more invested in the solution. Does that mean it won't fail sometimes? Of course not. No solution is perfect, but the incentives in an employee owned cooperative are significantly better than the incentives management in an ordinary company typically has.
Except, in identifying the freeloader, being far less invested in the outcome (e.g. further from the problem) is a benefit as it provides some objectivity. Create a co-op group and convince them their survival is dependent on each other...I highly doubt a group beyond 5 will agree on who the freeloader might be.
This sort of system simply encourages the formation of feuding power blocs. And woe be to those who refuse to join one of those cliques. Finally, if you can be "voted off the island", are you really an owner? IMO, you are not.
This is an amusing comment to me. Maybe I'm burned out come to think of it? Your comment screams lack of experience in the corporate world, at least based on my 10 years in it. I think most companies have no time to have 2 or more programmers working on the same thing even if it produces some decent, soon to be legacy code. The constant, this is the only way to do it from so called seniors in this industry is so so frustrating.
> The constant, this is the only way to do it from so called seniors in this industry is so so frustrating.
Apologies if I came across saying there is the only way to do it. Let me rephrase - if there are multiple stakeholders in a product, I have found it really valuable to have them, physically or virtually in the same space as the work gets done and feedback gets provided in real time dissipating confusion and questions as soon as they arise.
In my experience, fixing an issue at the source is cheaper than discovering it later and running to fix it then because the wrong assumptions were made just because everyone is too busy banging out code.
Creative blocks as real. Rubber ducking is effective and real too.
> I think most companies have no time to have 2 or more programmers working on the same thing even if it produces some decent, soon to be legacy code
1. Why do you think that is? If this question totally flummoxes you, a narrower question could be "what is the objectives of these companies with the code", but try answering the broader question if you have the time
2. Do people generally solve problems better when working in isolation or as a team?
Now, did the companies you have experience with not have more than the programmer who wrote the code review it?
Or test it?
Who wrote the requirements?
Who checked whether the deliverable(s) met the requirements?
In my experience, more than one person ends up touching the code in one way or another until it actually reaches the customer.
I have found, the overall quality is much better when everyone is working together instead of in a waterfall model, in strict sequence with lots of back and forth and meetings with subset of stakeholders until the product actually behaves the way its expected to. Reliably.
The risk of this happening goes up as removed the programmer is from using the product themselves. So if dogfooding works on your projects, by all means do it.
> The equivalent at work is requiring ass-in-the-seat / face-time policies
> people can still contribute zero (except their presence)
I'm confused - it seems to me that you understand that ass-in-the-seat / face-time policies only address the presence problem but cannot address contribution.
1. Do you agree with this?
2. What's your solution to fixing the contribution problem?
Fundamentally that's the nature of employment, the employee is a means to an end? Even in non-capitalist systems you're primarily there to serve a goal. When it gets bad is where you're only there to serve a goal and your contribution and participation aren't valued.
As you say, bad metrics are a problem. But some form of loop-closing is essential.
Not just as far as remote working is concerned, but running better companies as well. I'd say it's fairly clear that knowledge workers don't all fit in the 9-5 schedule, people have different sleep/productivity rythms, there's other beneficial activities that help foster creativity and focus (meditation, exercise, stretching, post-meal nap, ...) that one would ideally enable and even encourage employees to engage in...
But all of that brings a huge problem, that in some way we also need to measure productivity - both to prevent (fire/reeducate) people from abusing the system (freeloaders), and to fairly reward people (avoid negative selection). An additional complication is that productivity is even ill-defined - is banging out tons of code day after day more or less valuable than brainstorming for a few months and coming up with a revolutionary new product? What about basic research, which takes years and has an uncertain outcome?
Probably computing is one of the best test cases for better systems, as programmers have almost complete freedom to work when-/where-/however, it's not a heavily regulated industry, most code is not critical (so it's easy to iterate quickly, as well as experiment with different objectives - slow&correct vs move-fast-and-break-things), and also programmers are productive enough that a few bad apples is unlikely to break the company...
I'm really interested in this general topic, I'd welcome any ideas/discussion/experience!
There was an interesting article about a closely related subject, but I can't find it anymore.
Basically, there's a dichotomy between 2 different kinds of work: Convergent vs Emergent.
In "Convergent" work you are delivering what a market has asked for. You are measured on meeting these requirements with accuracy, speed, cost. Predictability of outcomes is paramount, schedules are everything, people expect to be able to control all variables.
By contrast, in "Emergent" work, you are effectively creating a market. You introduce something that hasn't existed before and which isn't merely a tweak in an existing product. The outcome of Emergent work is new ways of doing things, new products, and new resources. This introduces a lot of "grey area" and lack of focus.
The most successful enterprises find the right balance between Convergent and Emergent work. In manufacturing (my domain), most initiatives are Convergent and expectations focus on meeting some deadline or numeric goal, literally everything else is subordinate to that. Start-ups, of course, have the opposite inclination. In those, a "runway of money" is burnt to introduce some potentially new product with only vague expectations of profit at some time in the future (despite whatever they tell VC's). You sort of need both in an organization and staff (as a whole) need to assimilate both types of work to really succeed.
Thanks, that's a really useful distinctin. I've been thinking along these lines already before, but it's useful to concretely name and describe different modes of work, to better incorporate them in my mental model.
What I had in mind was things like Customer Support or QA personel (which exist even in start-ups & tech companies), where the tasks are pretty clearly defined, it's easy to track progress, and it's fairly important to "do the hours" (e.g. if you need 24-hour customer support), but you can offer things like location independence (precisely because work is so easy to track).
Unfortunately, however, I think that most programming work (and this probably extends to most technological work) isn't quite as easy to categorise... basically, even if your objective is 100% convergent ("our client wants this, we'll make it"), there's still different (better or worse) ways of getting to that goal, so there's still a lot of creativity/decisionmaking involved... and it's obvious that simple metrics don't really work ("I fixed 100 bugs today!" "Yeah but you wrote all of them yesterday.")...
I wonder if the problem isn't how to measure productivity, but the fact that we bother to focus on individual contribution rather than how the organization operates with respect to organizational goals.
I work for a mid-sized university. We're a bit unique, for higher ed, in that we have centralized IT. Our projects support university 5-year plans. When projects do not complete successfully or are extraordinarily late people notice. If teams are hitting their goals - university goals - does it matter if every person on a team is hitting some averaged-out metric for productivity? If a team isn't hitting its goals, usually it's not due to individual contribution, it's due to poor communication, unrealistic goals, frequently shifting requirements/priorities, etc. Usually a sit down with the team to get feedback will tell more of why the team failed.
A hobby of mine is coaching youth basketball. To increase my ability, I joined a forum. Today the moderator posted a quote from NBA player Marc Gasol. Marc lamented the tracking of individual stats because the stats don't tell the story. He stated, correctly IMO, that many critical factors are not tracked and would be hard to measure the importance of. For instance, a player who doesn't score much but prevents his defensive assignment from being a play maker (play makers are more than just scorers). Or the player who sets up the plays that allow other people to score (for those familiar with basketball, think screens/picks). Or the guy who is on the bench but helps calm down players when their team is down.
I've come to feel the same way about IT teams. A win is a team win; a loss is a team loss. In both situations, many factors came into play in order for the outcome to occur. My experience is that individual productivity stats don't give you a clear idea why the outcome occurred. In the end, it's all about the success of the organization.
I agree that team productivity matters more, and much should be left in the hands of team leads... in addition, that enables diversity and internal "cooperative competition" where different leadership/cooperation styles can be tried and tested and evolved further (potentially different ones in different "niches"). However, to some degree, that's just pushing the KPIs down a level (from Cs to team leads). Which might be a good thing, as team leads/line managers are probably better able to assess individual employee productivity... although AFAIK that's already how it works in most companies, and, well, it doesn't really work that well.
> For instance, a player who doesn't score much but prevents his defensive assignment from being a play maker (play makers are more than just scorers). Or the player who sets up the plays that allow other people to score (for those familiar with basketball, think screens/picks). Or the guy who is on the bench but helps calm down players when their team is down.
Yeah, these are certainly good criteria. The benefit is that in such sport, it's probably easier to assess performance/impact, as it's all face time. To some degree, these criteria are applicable to tech work as well ("he's in the office 2 days/week only, but he always solves the problem when the server goes down overnight or over the weekend" or "she works remotely, I never saw her before, but she found 37 critical security bugs in the past year").
> I wonder if the problem isn't how to measure productivity, but the fact that we bother to focus on individual contribution rather than how the organization operates with respect to organizational goals.
YES!
Are you aware of pair and mob programming?
People want to be successful. No one likes to lose. Even a freeloader is expressing that behavior because they believe that is the best way to win.
Pair and mob programming completely makes freeloading impossible. It also is true teamwork
Your comment exemplifies what I'd considered responding to your parent: rate teams and projects, not individuals. Metrics of significance are not atomically SMART, they're probabalistic, noisy, and systemic.
>People want to be successful. No one likes to lose. Even a freeloader is expressing that behavior because they believe that is the best way to win.
Perhaps a win for themselves personally. A freeloader is a selfish individual in team dynamics. They only want accolades/home runs for themselves, and not a World Series for the team.
Interesting points. sorry couldn't get to it earlier until lunch break. Here are my thoughts:
> Perhaps a win for themselves personally.
EVERYONE who's logical wants a win for themselves personally.
Your non selffish teammate wants the company to do well so they continue to get paid, builds a reputation for success and gets the bonuses.
Your CEO wants the company to do well so they continue to get paid, builds a reputation for success and gets the bonuses. Their role require them to think about the company as a whole or there will be guaranteed failure.
The single mother is working hard over multiple shifts for HER children to be fed and schooled. She's not doing the hard work for my family. I don't see a single cent from her.
The billionaire contributes millions to charity so that the planet he lives in is cleaner and better just like you and I spend hundreds of dollars in cleaning OUR houses or helping our neighbors so that it's cleaner and better. No sane person wants to live in a dump or in a place where everyone hates each other.
> A freeloader is a selfish individual in team dynamics. They only want accolades/home runs for themselves, and not a World Series for the team.
I really wish people were more selfish.
Then it would be easier to reason about the world.
The most complicated individuals are those who are "not selfish" - very difficult to reason about IMHO!
There cannot be action without motivation, so what is their motivation, exactly?
Is their motivation to work hard because they want to make the starving kids in Africa more educated?
Do they understand what it takes to make the starving kids in Africa more educated?
Do they have control over what it takes to make the starving kids in Africa more educated?
Do the starving kids in Africa actually want to be more educated or do they want something else first, like food?
How will they behave if one day they realize it's not going to happen like they envisioned? Can I continue to depend on them to deliver they have been or will there be a meltdown?
Selfish people seem to have better clarity over what they need and can communicate it better.
They have better and closer/direct control over their needs and wants. It's not dependent on another random thing or individual or group.
If you have a freeloader on your team and your team agrees on the matter - WHY is that freeloader still around if they are not providing any value?
When I was in college, there was a group of students who were frustrated about how the pub they frequented had a bunch of young women who seemed to go out with much older, well off men. They were upset that the attention of these young women were being taken away by the older, well off men and the men were distracting the women and exploiting them.
They theorized about the ethics, long term effects, viability and so on about the situation.
Since they were computer science students, they wondered whether making better dating apps would improve the situation for these young women who were perhaps not finding the right men.
The reality is the young women were getting something from the older, well off men; the older, well off men were getting something from the young women. Both parties were selfish and knew exactly what was needed and wanted and provided.
Maybe the selfish freeloader at your company is giving the company something it needs and wants that they can't get from the less selfish team members to further its business objectives?
I had a recruiter send me LinkedIn spam that started with "Seeking a senior resource...". Even if the rest of the listing weren't garbage (it was a low effort copy-paste from the job description), that language immediately turned me off.
My last job was for a large enterprise that viewed employees as drop-in components. Not only was it dehumanizing, but it was a terrible way to get any work done.
I think that remote working is psychologically hard. I trust that most people can pull it off short term; long term is more difficult.
There’s also the fact that most people I’ve known in my work need to learn to work when they graduate (I hire mostly graduates). I’d trust someone with 5 years’ experience to know what is generally expected from them if they work remotely; I’d be much more concerned about a graduate. Telling them what “working” means is much harder than them breathing it daily around them at the office.
Another topic is that it can be fairly difficult to measure actual performance, and remote work takes from you several proxies. It might make you more objective - but it might make you less accurate and force you to accept lower performance due to the “benefit of the doubt”.
> I think that remote working is psychologically hard. I trust that most people can pull it off short term; long term is more difficult.
I've been full-time remote for about a year now, and I'm kind of done with it.
It was fantastic at first. I live in Boston, and my commute was about an hour and a half in every morning, and about two hours home every night. Being able to step over the dog and be at my office was (and is) awesome.
But I never see anyone anymore, and that's starting to wear on me. My wife still commutes, so we have about two hours with each other every night before we have to go to bed and do it all again the next day. If I'm not intentional about it, I'll spend 23 hours a day in my house, and while I'm not the most social person around, I think it's starting to have actual negative consequences for my life. I'm grumpier, I get sick more often, I'm tired ...
> If I'm not intentional about it, I'll spend 23 hours a day in my house
I think that's the biggest difference with remote. A lot of things that were seamless with physical presence need to be done with intentionality in a remote setup. You need an explicit time for a daily call / team catchup. You need to either make extra effort or explicitly schedule social chats between coworkers (I like inviting people to do coffee or show off some thing they're interested in). And you personally need to make a schedule that gets you out of the house (I go to coffee shops 3-ish times a week).
I've been remote for 2 years and don't plan on changing any time soon.
Granted, there's a lot of policy- or culture-level stuff that can get in the way. If the rest of you team is co-located and isn't going to remember to bring you in on conversations, remote isn't going to work. Same if your manager equates physical presence to performance.
> You need to either make extra effort or explicitly schedule social chats between coworkers (I like inviting people to do coffee or show off some thing they're interested in). And you personally need to make a schedule that gets you out of the house (I go to coffee shops 3-ish times a week).
> I've been remote for 2 years and don't plan on changing any time soon.
That is very interesting!
Mind a chat? Your profile is bare so I'm assuming you don't want to be bothered without you being involved in it, so I need your help.
Look at my profile or, please, if you can email me at my handle at gmail, I will really appreciate it.
I look forward to a few minutes of a learning opportunity with you.
I've been remote for almost 2 years now, and I have the same experience. It becomes even more important if you have direct reports in the office because co-workers start asking them questions that are more appropriate for you.
The other important thing for me is to keep a regular schedule when I'm "on" and then step away from the workspace when I'm "off." Avoid going into the workspace for personal projects.
Also as part of my job I make sure to stay in contact with my boss about the things that matter to him like our project plan, release dates, and anything I need from him. Deliberate, open communication is very important. I also find that keeping quality written records is critical too because it's the only way to keep everyone on the same page about what we're working on.
And yes, get up, leave the house, and go do something else during the day, every day. I personally go for runs and go to the gym in the early afternoon as a way to be outside. And I spend a lot of time with my girlfriend on weekends too. Neither of us are homebodies when we have free time so that works out very well. Even superficial interactions with other people are enough to fill the cup a little.
You nailed it. I used to be full time remote and I still manage a remote team. We talk about immediate things every day, but we're also have scheduled calls where we talk about the big picture of how things are going.
I've been working remotely for 2 years. What I would do is find a co-working space, where you can get out and socialize, maybe join some meetups. When I actually need to code, I go to coffee shops. These are some of the things that I did and they've helped immensely.
I looked into coworking spaces. The cheapest option, which is basically "you can sit on the couch if there's still space when you get here," is about $500 a month. Boston is unforgiving.
I actually looked at some kind of hybrid co-working option where people could join you at your home/apartment for co-working, I would not mind the company.
Same here in the Bay area, but they have this place called Hacker Dojo, an old-school co working space.
$200/month.
I generally go to a lot of coffeeshops and in the summer breweries :-)
Ouch. Does anyone offer day passes or something similar? I work from home and have been considering a coworking membership, and one space local to me (Grand Rapids, MI) offers a 3 day per month option for $49/month.
Since I started working from home (almost a year ago) I've found myself missing the in-person professional interaction at times. My wife and four young kids are at home, so there's as much human interaction as I want, but I think it's important to be able to "talk shop" with others in person from time to time.
> But I never see anyone anymore, and that's starting to wear on me.
Work is not a replacement for a social life, and there are more ways to develop one now than ever. And, the social load from people who do their social life at work is actually one of the reasons I prefer working from home: I have only so many spoons to spare, and I'd rather spend them on people I chose to associate with. Those might, occasionally, happen to be coworkers, but even then I'd rather socialize in non-work context.
It is a drag when other people still work in the office, or _really want to_ be working in the office, as evidenced by a heavy emphasis on synchronous communication. I'm starting to despise Zoom, for reasons that aren't really directly related to anything Zoom does.
> Work is not a replacement for a social life, and there are more ways to develop one now than ever. And, the social load from people who do their social life at work is actually one of the reasons I prefer working from home: I have only so many spoons to spare, and I'd rather spend them on people I chose to associate with. Those might, occasionally, happen to be coworkers, but even then I'd rather socialize in non-work context.
I understand your point but I wonder if working with people who you would socialize with even outside of work makes work more enjoyable?
From my rather limited experience of working, I've found that in the end the thing I actually work on matters a lot less to my happiness than the people who I do the work with. Alternatively, maybe I just don't like working as much as other people do?
I'm starting to think when looking for a new team I should really be seeing whether I will like my coworkers instead of whether I'll like what I'm doing.
> I understand your point but I wonder if working with people who you would socialize with even outside of work makes work more enjoyable?
Not really. Who I like to work with and who I like to socialize doesn't necessarily match up. Furthermore, I have limited capacity for social interaction - that is why even _if_ I like the people, I prefer to socialize outside of work. Otherwise both work and socialization suffer.
Finally, if your primary source of socialization is the workplace, you open yourself to abuse - companies can, and do, exploit the fact that for many people they become not just the source of income, but also the social support network.
> From my rather limited experience of working, I've found that in the end the thing I actually work on matters a lot less to my happiness than the people who I do the work with.
I just need the coworkers to not be horrible, and what I work with matters quite a lot - if there's one thing about the IT industry that really grinds my gears, it's how often even apparently socially beneficial products are just covers for privacy breaches and boom-and-bust schemes.
> I'm starting to think when looking for a new team I should really be seeing whether I will like my coworkers instead of whether I'll like what I'm doing.
You need both, though you might not get them. Just don't let the workplace _own your social life_. If you feel like working remotely means you have no social life, then you got used to that happening, and that will hurt you, remote or not.
I think there are people that need physical presence at work and people that don't. I've been working remotely for 2 years and don't see myself stoping anytime soon.
All my coworkers are in California, but there's no assumption on my team that people will actually be present in the office. So effectively, things are done as if it was a remote team.
A huge part of this is selecting the right people. We can only hire people that are able to be effective in that environment. You need people that will reach out if they have a problem (but not before at least trying a little bit to solve it themselves). You need to be able to jump on a call at the first sign that you need a higher bandwidth communication channel than chat. As a senior, I always make abundantly clear that I am available to answer questions or fix things when someone is blocked.
I also haven't seen any issues with performance or reviews. Being present at work has nothing to do with performance. Rather, features added, incidencts responded to, tech debt accrued and paid off, etc are how you measure performance and none of those change in a remote environment. You can get an idea of what everyone is up to in a daily call / video chat. And for a more in-depth accounting, you can review git logs, incident notes, support tickets, etc. Basically, performance reviews are not that different in a remote environment.
Yes but you were not born that way. You learnt it, either before or during your professional career. So a select number of companies will be able to hire The Right People, which can be effective working remotely; most of the companies need to have in their team people that, at least for the moment, cannot be entrusted with that.
Yeah, I think I agree with this. I've always worked at companies with increasing autonomy and responsibility. And before that, I was in a number of youth programs focused on accountability and responsibility.
And totally agree that not everyone can or should do remote. It makes a lot of people unhappy. And it doesn't work for a lot of employers b/c they can't find enough of the right people. Or they have some real job-related requirement that makes it difficult or impossible to do remote. Like, how do you have a remote welder or a hardware engineer or biologist or forensic tech person. They need access to physical stuff and/or a lab with expensive equipment.
So, it's not a panacea. But it works really great for some people if it's setup right. And it can be a competitive advantage.
I worked as a remote welder. The company I worked for was 100% remote with no central shop or office. We had mobile welding trucks that were fully loaded with tools and welding generators. We would work with local metal shops to share their space if we needed something like that. We needed access to physical stuff like the metal thing we were welding on, but the employer/employee part was all remote.
It will only work with certain jobs, you need a company-wide buy-in, will not work with only few people working remote and majority onsite, the experience level of the folks involved, communication tools.
We have 4-5 offices with people coming into the office or working remote, but we get a lot of work done. But it's because being in office is not a requirement, it is explicitly spelled out that you can work remotely if you want. There is no penalty for not being in the office.
I can relate, I would much rather a 4 day office work week than working remotely. I'm too comfortable in my home to focus on work, and I'd hate being stuck inside my home for most of the day. Younger me would have loved that, but these days I just want any excuse to leave the house.
I think one of the key success factors is having a dedicated home office, where you can close the door and be in work mode. Doubly so if there are other family members at home during the day.
I have been working full time remote for 10 years, mostly remote for 5 years before that, all at the same SV company. I love it. It does take some discipline, and my work life is entirely separate from my home/social life. I have succeeded
by a) a personal commitment to subject matter mastery, no matter what I'm working on, and b) taking pains to understand stakeholders and the full business context and c) making sure my deliverables always contain some valid answer, that they move the ball forward a bit, no matter what point of scale I'm involved in. I do not join herds but I value them and treat them with respect—they are the dominant human condition. To compensate I conspicuously show my peers and my boss that I have their back. I never, ever gossip. I give away my work freely because social capital. This enables me to blow off a lot of the unproductive collaborative make-work that goes on in any big company, without negative repercussions. Which is good because introversion and ADHD. :-)
I've done it long term, and don't find it in any way psychologically difficult. I totally get that it's not for everyone though - some are too easily distracted, some don't have space for a dedicated home office etc.
I do agree about graduates and juniors though, also because it can be difficult to effectively mentor someone remotely. OTOH, we've never had better tooling and connectivity. I recently met a colleague in person, and didn't realise until he pointed it out that we'd never met before! I'd spent so much time in video conferencing with him that I felt very familiar with him.
> Another topic is that it can be fairly difficult to measure actual performance
This one I don't get though, unless your only measure is how long someone is sat at their desk.
Partially inertia, fear of change and fear of losing control.
> To me, sitting at an office in front of a computer and delivering a feature has no correlation.
I totally agree, this is part of what I was trying to say - performance should not be measured by the number of hours sat at a desk visible to your manager!
> Managers are not idiots, everyone I have worked with are smart and driven, so why are they doing this?
Well, managers are people, so some of them are certainly idiots :)
A little bit later. It was a demand of various labor movements starting in about the mid-1800s (essentially in response to the industrial revolution) and started to be broadly implemented around the turn of the century.
Assuming the work you're doing is worth while, burnout and stress are due to having (or perceiving to have) responsibility but insufficient power or authority to actually meet it. Working hard does not lead to burnout. Working hard but being unable to achieve expected results does. Taking time off rarely helps, because that impossible to meet responsibility is still hanging over you.
Classic example is school teachers in US public schools. They have enormous responsibility with the children, but rarely have power or authority. Instead, they are essentially drones in a big machine.
Not the OP, but I think that's exactly what he meant.
They have the responsibility to educate the future generations and yet have barely any leeway about how to do it.
Especially in the US, teachers often have to assume a parental role and take care of children beyond the scope of their "job". The alternative is to watch children you see every day spiral down a bad path.
The people are in it for some deep care for the task and will endure shit levels. They think it's more important than anything else and cons' don't alter this.
most of the day firefighters get to sit around home base and lift weights / exercise.... definitely nice to have a paid gym membership while at work to fight burnout
fair point, that said they also get violence from people sometimes and risk their lives on a regular basis; you gotta have some deep desire for helping.. that or a deathwish
Whenever I read one of these HBR things on "optimal employee engagement" I feel like I'm reading some modern version of an ancient roman treatise on the care and feeding of agricultural slaves. Everyone who reads this and is trying to optimize their personal employee engagement should reconsider their life choices.
You have to remember we are talking about Human Resources here. Human are just another component of the business process no more, no less. In that sense it makes sense the point of view shown in the article is making you uneasy.
In my experience, if you can produce results, there is little restraint from modern management to exploit you to the max, there is no concern about burnout, or anything, its a daily battle to reign in demands no matter how much you produce.
From what I can understand it is taught at business school to exploit resources, you must look after yourself and push back, surprisingly hard, again in my experience. I find it abhorrent. It was the .com era when things changed, when the sharks realised the computers own the world, before that it was a bunch of happy engineers making stuff.
Even worse many managers seem to be control freaks who can't measure results, and instead insist on micromanaging everything, looking over your shoulder, continually asking for feedback, and "checking in" to see how things are going.
I've said for many years I produce results in spite of managers "helping". Software development is fairly easy I find, it does take time to produce results though, and because no one can see whats going on managers behave the way they do, there's a huge lack of trust on both sides. End of rant.
P.S. I find it easiest to behave like plumbers, they know you need them to clean up your shit, and they have to pay you, so just do what you have to to survive. I remember one guy I hired years ago to do some plumbing at a place I was renovating, kept saying he was busy, yada, yada, went up to the shops he was wandering around having an Ice cream. Medical specialists are another great example I find, they have people making outrageous demands on them, literally life and death, they make sure that people can't find them outside office hours, they are very good at looking after themselves, as they should be.
The amount of pseudoscience on this topic is staggering, and there's seemingly almost no thought given to adverse effects. Incidentally, a good rule of thumb is that anyone who claims that their preferred intervention (for anything, not just productivity/engagement) is beneficial and has "no side effects" or "only good side effects" is very nearly 100% likely to be full of shit. The only way to have no risk of adverse effects is to have no effects at all.
So many comments are speaking about burnout as a result of lack of managing emotional investment in work. This blows my mind because I’ve never seen or heard of burnout manifesting this way in real life, not a single time.
Burnout happens to you and does not originate inside you. A manager or executive burns employees out not employees “letting themselves” become burned out.
Turning it around and acting like it’s intrinsic to the employee is harmful victim blaming. It’s like blaming someone with symptoms of clinical depression for not “managing their emotions.”
I feel very discouraged by this because I don’t think we’ll make progress helping people heal from and avoid burnout unless we recognize that it is caused by the wider sociological issues of toxic management & executive behavior.
Who is victim blaming? We talk about emotional investment because it’s something that is actually under your control to change, unlike your manager or “wider sociological issues”
Exactly. Trying to turn it around like the issue is due to the agency (hence blaming) the victim, when really it’s not down to that person’s agency at all, rather something they are subjected to through no choice of their own.
Your comment in fact is one of the worst forms of victim blaming, and you may not be aware that you’re even doing it: justifying victim blaming as though it is some sort of justified focus on “what you can do” when the problem should not be made to be about that or justified as such.
I am not blaming anyone, I don’t care whose fault it is. I am focusing on what an individual can do because focusing on anything else is a waste of time.
Focusing on what the individual can do _is_ a tacit form of victim-blaming in many situations. For many types of victims, drawing attention to remedies that rely on that person’s agency, rather than wider remedies predicated on greater social responsibility to fix the underlying problem, is a tacit way of putting the onus on a class of victims to “deal with it” and to view whatever type of abuse was inflicted on them as if it is their own private burden, instead of being _everyone’s_ burden to fix.
In other words, changing the conversation to be about “what you can do” tacitly reinforces the stance that it’s nobody else’s problem to fix, which is precisely blaming the victim for being in the situation (e.g. “if you want things to be different, it’s on yourself to do it”).
You may not be consciously aware that your behavior is tacitly blaming victims, but nonetheless it still absolutely is.
I believe it. Currently the rest of my team and I are close to burnout. Our boss is a workaholic who is controlling and rare to give any praise. The company is financially successful, but the average employee only lasts 1-2 years.
For some reason I thought I could stick it out, but I'm trying to make it to the end of the year and then take a break to refocus.
Money only gets you so far - at some point people need a supportive work environment and a sense of ownership at their job.
I've definitely burned out before. Working crazy hours for low pay in hopes of showing my worth and earning more. It kept it up for a few years but eventually broke pretty hard.
I have to say though I am pretty thankful for all of that. It allowed me to reevaluate what was important to me and really think about what I wanted to do. I ended up switching industries all together and I finally don't hate life any more.
I had a job running a tech department on a small company. It was my first management job and I wanted to make a success out it.
The company was pretty dysfunctional and I took it upon myself to pretty much do everything, so much so that I was working 12 hour days (This is work time, minus breaks, measured with an app) so my day would start at ~ 06:30 and finish ~ 21:00.
I have never been quite so miserable in my life and I was making so many mistakes that it was unreal. I also picked up a very bad habit of doing things quickly and 90% there as that was better than not doing them at all and to do them properly would take too long. It's been close to a year now and I still find myself falling in the turn things around quickly and sacrifice quality trap, even when there is no rush at all for it. I hope I get rid of this bad habit soon
I'm a freelancer and realized yesterday that I haven't had a real vacation in 8 years, but also that every one of my clients would probably say yes definitely if I told them I needed a week off. And they did, and I'm taking off next week and I have never been so excited in my life.
I'm a freelancer and I usually take a couple months off between contracts. It's awesome because there is nothing on your mind when you are between contracts. It's also why I prefer freelancing over being an employee.
I just do a PPO plan on the health insurance marketplace in the US. I pay about $500 as a single person nonsmoker 30 year old male. It's been fine so far.
Haha, I first chuckled at this, and then it dawned upon me that I do plan a week off in July-August, having had 2 weeks off in April. European here, of course.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadKey point. In my experience, the high-productivity, high-engagement becoming the new baseline, and then the organization requesting the 120% of that, and repeat every six weeks, is the true killer.
This is what I try to get through to people - if you consistently deliver at 100%, that becomes the baseline and you'll be expected to stretch ever further with little to no extra incentive or support.
Throughout my career I've always held back some level of skill, efficiency, or drive that I can break out as and when required on very particular projects. In the end, it's better for the company as I'm less likely to flame out.
Obviously a lot of companies still operate on visibility and presenteeism over outcomes where it makes it harder, but take the damn lunch break now or you'll never be taking it.
The point at which someone becomes 'over-engaged' is highly individualized but based on my experience it is highly associated with people that are deliberately working their way up the management ladder.
It's important make sure you're not sacrificing your wellbeing for the benefit of the company. Your physical and mental health are far too important.
My company makes things that are, I'd argue, a net good to the world (we help make stuff more secure) - but honestly I find myself struggling more and more to care about anything that isn't addressing the climate or democratic breakdown the world faces.
Not rhetorical - genuine question: Does anyone else sit at their desk and think "but guys the ship is sinking, maybe we should worry about fixing the holes before we repaint the tennis court? guys? GUYS????"
This is my problem really, not the company's, but I'm not sure what to do.
What stops them is a combination of inertia, money and life change. It's not a trivial thing to quit your job and work somewhere else.
One major factor is that you will be taking a large pay cut and might have to move. For those with mortgages and family staying with their less fulfilling jobs makes more sense. for many people their family comes first.
Another issue is that the grass always appears greener.
I do wonder what an engineer at Facebook would tell themselves, I think it might increase empathy with workers who are in places which are being labeled as morally bankrupt. I have some idea but that if they did share their thoughts they would get downvoted and hated for exposing themselves.
Say you've got 10 people. 5 of them want to do (noble but lower paying thing) and 5 and want to do (meh to possibly sketchy high-paying thing).
If there are 10 homes, that's fine. Maybe the noble ones have simpler, less fancy houses, but they're still basically OK. They still have the basics of life. "I can do something good for humanity and forego some luxury" is something a lot of people might think.
If there are 5 homes, then only the ones who do sketch work can have them. "I can do something good for humanity and be homeless" is something far fewer people think.
This applies to other things where a person might want to voluntarily take in less income (couple with one person doing childcare, taking a career break to learn a new thing, etc.) and it's why creating these fake shortages sucks so much out of the human experience - you have to justify your endeavors in terms of the lost income, and how they'll affect your competitiveness.
I spend no time, and quite a lot of money on that problem.
I can see clearly from the resumes on my desk that when it comes right down to it, people would rather make big sacrifices to work for a game developer than a nonprofit.
There's always different things you can negotiate on to bring on great talent.
Hell country.
I started informing that I'm going on vacation. And for doing interviews elsewhere, took "sick" days.
It was a horrible situation to say the least, but now I'm out of that toxic hellhole.
In my spare time I created a real estate finding tool focused on bike and train routes, which I hope indirectly has helped interested people avoid car-centric commutes and lifestyles while not spending insane amounts of money to be in the hippest areas. Apparently it's been useful in my immediate neighbourhood, at least.
But, as everyone else here notes, I've got bills to pay (fewer than most if I'm honest, though) and for now am just trying to destroy some debt.
(NB: You''re not making it easy to find you here.)
I'm not connecting to my own LinkedIn, but we are listed here, and every organization could use your help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_and_cons...
At one point I couldn't stand the cognitive dissonance of watching all these videos/articles about climate change while working for a bank that had a negative contribution to these issues.
I decided to quit and go part-time. I still don't know how to contribute to the issues I care about and earn money at the same time. I'm searching but tbh it's hard and I'm not the only one in this case.
However, now I have more time to think about making the life changes to reduce my impact on the climate/environment: organize camping holidays in my home country vs flying abroad, optimizing my energy needs at home etc.
I'd prefer finding a job where I can do that at a bigger scale but in the meantime that helps
I recommend unplugging for 30 days before you make any decisions. Walk around and look at the world around you with your own eyes. Don't let the media influence major life decisions without at least purging it from your life a bit first. It can be surprising the effect it has on you.
I'd recommend a deliberate analysis and culling of your information sources, not a complete disengagement.
I wouldn't call it disengagement, I'd call it re-engagement with the real world.
I'm a remote worker, who will be moving to the semi-rural south in two weeks. My wife and I plan to use our half-acre to grow our vegetables and hunt/fish for all of our meat within three years; we will start immediately but want the transition to happen in gradual steps. Small local changes will aid the environment.
Not asking the question is much worse. A lot of burnout comes from the unspoken/unconscious perception that your work is meaningless.
In my experience HR organizations are mostly there as a sort of risk management for the company, everything / anything else tends to feel like just sort of HR resume fodder / token programs / company cheerleading.
HR is a really hard job too, very hard to do well and very stressful. Most people never get to see this as it's part of their job that they can't talk about most things they are having to deal with.
Bad HR is a nightmare, good HR can make a massive difference to a company.
Just to add a counter in case early career people see this and take it as truth - there are companies out there who have really good HR teams who are aligned to their employees. Don't put up with shitty HR because you think all HR teams are shit.
Org I work for has really good HR teams for both the boring process stuff, and fostering a decent working environment. It's one of the strings still holding me to stay.
I just haven't had that experience / have not heard from many people who have.
But that company was acquired by a massive public company. And now HR is half adversary + half bureaucratic nonsense. Interestingly, the company still offered great benefits. I assume that is because the benefits package is an easy-to-measure piece of compensation, while HR quality is something that is much harder to shop around for.
* caveat, I have no idea how HR would have acted in a situation where an employee brings up concerns that would put the company in legal jeopardy. If I had to guess, they would do the right thing in a "senior harasser vs harassed subordinate" situation. If the the company was clearly in the wrong, I think they would work hard to satisfy the employee to prevent legal jeopardy. If the employee could not be satisfied without a significant hit to the company, I'm pretty sure they would do anything they could to protect the company. And that reflects that at the end of the day, the company comes first. A good HR department can just push much harder for win-wins (and probably only under market conditions that give labor leverage).
(1) Companies where HR is mostly administrative stuff plus risk management.
(2) Companies that claim their HR is more than that and for the employees, but when the situation seems to actually come close to resembling a dilemma, they're mostly administrative stuff plus risk management.
I have yet to hear of or experience a company that claims the latter and actually is the latter.
As you say, good HR department can help a lot in this regard - but in this function it's the same as in other main HR functions (recruitment, training, discipline issues and firing, compensation, legal compliance); most of what HR departments generally do is support for these line managers in their job of managing the employees, not support for the employees themselves.
E. g. my current employer has a HR department that conaists of a HR division that does typical classical HR tasks, and People Development, who actually do meaningful stuff to bolster retention etc.
Well, they also ought to teach time management, emotion management, energy management, people management.
It's just a basic life skill, keeping things in balance. Extremeness in an area can often be disastrous, it might also come with high reward, but very few people know how to be highly engaged and yet sort of keep other parts of their life balanced.
School is one of the more difficult environments for time management: students have half a dozen (or more) different bosses, all of whom reguarly impose hard deadlines, and have a tendency of imposing major deadlines at a simmilar time to each other.
The social environment is probably one of the most diverse that many people will see in their entire lifetimes (not nessasarily along racial lines), with some of the most difficult to deal with people (children) many will face in their lifetime.
Granted, schools often take a trial by fire approach to these lessons (I should know, I burned out during highschool), but I don't see how you can get through school without learning them.
Personally, I burned out in high school then again in college. I went 100% in everything related to academics and did exceptionally well, and yet I never realized until the end of college that the only reason I was so successful is because I sacrificed everything to be good at one thing.
I'm still figuring out how to get that balance down and having some sort of more formal education in that area would have been beneficial for me.
It is possible for someone to face a problem for decades, to care* deeply about it, for others to succeed at it, and for them to not know how to find a workable answer. For me, happens for “obvious” problems like “how do I learn to how to estimate how long software takes to write?” or “How do I write a first draft of a letter to a friend?” where the answer people have is “just do it” or “just do it and multiply by 2”.
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* By “care” about it, I mean feel the emotion of wanting a solution. Some people define “care” such that if someone fails at something it means they didn’t care about it. I’m not using that definition.
The second is that there aren't really any short term consequences for failure in school. Maybe you get a bad grade but it doesn't really have any immediate impact. In the absolute extreme case, you have to repeat a grade, which isn't a particularly big deal. Once you enter real life, if you don't come up with $x,xxx per month - you're homeless. This shift in consequences radically reshapes people's approach to the game. Imagine playing a video game; now imagine playing that same video game where if you score below average - your home and entire livelihood is put in jeopardy. And you're only playing against other people who are also, at worst, decent at the game. To test that latter hypothesis we could try to determine rates of burnout compared to the independent wealth of individuals. And on that front, I've no idea.
Obviously not and that is the very skill that needs to be learned.
I would argue that's about the only thing that schools do teach.
After around 5th grade, almost none of the facts you teach a kid stay with them into adulthood.
What middle school and high school does is force you to learn how to get your work done on time, be social, have hobbies, work with "bosses", and interact regularly with people you don't like. That's the real value in high school IMO.
99.9% of the people who took calculus in highschool would fail an exam 10 years later. The brain just doesn't hold onto info it doesn't use. I think it would be the same if there was an explicit class on e.g. time management. Nothing you say to the kids will have any impact. OTOH, giving them homework and deadlines let's them actually figure out and practice these skills in a safer environment.
Uh, I think you’re going to have to cite that.
I don't need to know the formula off the top of my head; I need to know what a conical pyramid is, what volume is, what a formula is, and how to use it. I guarantee that between me and someone who's never done geometry at all, I can find the volume of a conical pyramid faster and more reliably.
You're right that memorizing specific formulas isn't useful; but using a large number of formulas over and over to gain mastery over the general idea certainly is.
Whats the difference? Well what is the difference between giving an 8-year-old lessons in how to swim vs. tossing an 8-year-old off the side of a boat?
Imposing some form of suffering on those who don't comply is literally what forcing people to do something is.
Edit: Note that simply giving somebody swimming lessons does not force them to swim and neither does it force them to learn anything -- because they're free to ignore you. Tossing them over board is forcing them to swim, because you're taking away the viable alternatives. We agree that the way schools do things is bad, by the way.
———
If someone starts beating you with a rubber hose until you recite Jabberwocky, that doesn’t actually cause you to recite jabberwocky unless you have some means of finding the words to that poem that you can see. The last part, access to how to do the action, is crucial to doing the action.
———
For another example: suppose a 5-year-old child is crying and his grandfather pinches him and tells him to stop crying. But the 5-year-old has not yet learned the emotional self-regulation skills to stop himself from crying. So while the grandfather is forcing compliance, he won’t actually achieve compliance. He’ll just inflict pain.
Likewise, if you have an engineering student drowning under a firehose of work and trying to learn time management. The poorly-managed pile of work is forcing him to learn good time management and punishing him for not learning it. But unless he has access to a known source of guidence on time-management, he’ll continue to suffer. Not only that, but sleep deprivation, as makes this harder.
Maybe a better way to put it is to say is that schools tend to be bad at encouraging kids to learn, so they try (unsuccessfully) to make up for it by forcing instead.
- motivation (or discipline)
- means
And forcing only tries to apply motivation without thinking about means.
“How?” Is a question that needs an answer from somewhere.
Not at all: punishments can (and often are) ineffective. You can punish me for being unable to fly. It will not force my body to produce a pair of wings.
Or can you give an example in which person A forces person B to do something without a threat of punishment or suffering?
This business of emotional development and learning self-control is too important to leave to classrooms.
Parents would teach their kids about money by giving them an allowance, sometimes you would work for the allowance. I mowed lawns.
I can't believe that kind of stuff doesn't happen, but I notice a lot of lost, lonely souls out there who are really struggling with basic concepts, like maintaining friendships with people they get into arguments with, or disagree with. We do a lot of self-isolating behavior and then struggle with impulse control; I think because being part of a community forces you to engage in some impulse control.
It’s also not really any of the schools business. You can’t fix delinquent parenting in the classroom. The idea of an emotional development curriculum sounds terrifyingly dystopian to me.
But I think a lot of changes have happened in how kids are raised that don't promote good childhood development. Specifically, unsupervised play with other kids. It just disappeared. Now parents have to supervise everything, which puts incredible pressure on parents, especially if they are working.
In previous generations of our own society and other more traditional societies today, parents had kids younger and there were grandparents and relatives around to help raise them. At the same time, you can open your door and let the kids run out and play in the street. Then ring a bell when it's time for lunch and they come home. That takes huge pressure off parents and lets kids learn some tough lessons that helps them mature.
In every species, play is how the young prepare for adulthood. Play and spending time with older peers. When you take that away and allow only supervised play time -- well, that's too much pressure on parents; they'd have to be superhuman to give their children the same richness of experience in childhood that kids used to have.
I think the consequences of this are huge. For example, I've noticed how even people in their late 20s and early 30s, when they run into some kind of difficulty, immediately call for an authority figure to complain to. You'd learn not to do that if you were engaging in a lot of unsupervised play. But if everything is supervised, then you always have that authority figure to call. Even universities now are acting 'in loco parentis' -- in a very paternalistic manner, and it seems the students demand it. To me, it's as if a part of growing up and taking care of your own problems is missing. Then they go out into the working world and expect 'in loco parentis' from their employer. Well, the employer is happy to help, but now you are in an unhealthy relationship with your job. Then you have people in their 30s saying "God, I wished someone had told me about emotional maturity" -- well, that's really sad.
Delinquent means to fail in ones duty. If you think parents are failing in their duty to facilitate their children’s emotional development, then it’s just tautological to say they are delinquent.
I pretty much agree with everything else you said. But I disagree with the conclusion that it’s the governments right to take over parenting responsibilities in the absence of abuse, and I strongly disagree with the conclusion that the school is an appropriate place to instruct the emotional development of children. The idea of a standardized emotional development curriculum should terrify anybody.
But I don't think blaming parents is the answer -- this is the result of general social breakdown, and parents today are doing the best they can in an environment where a lot of supporting infrastructure has been taken away from them.
Blame is an entirely different conversation to delinquency. If I get hit by a car, lose my job, and can’t pay my rent, I’d become delinquent in paying my rent. You could debate who’s to blame for that, but it has no bearing on whether I’m delinquent or not.
> I never concluded that it was the government's right to take over parenting responsibilities.
The comment I was originally replying to did. Your initial response, which I mostly agree with, didn’t address that topic at all.
Helicopter parenting and "controlling" schooling are terrible but don't paint a rosy vision of the past. We can do much better.
> the "coolest" kids were, in retrospect, the most emotionally mature ones
citation desperately needed.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.in/wealthy-americans-dont-have-e...
Turns out “burn out” (turnover) is by far the largest single cost to employers. It adds huge overhead per employee and dramatically reduces a companies profitability if they can’t keep a low turnover.
In my past I would switch jobs every couple years. Not due to the stress, but because I was alarmed at how the intensity of work was decreasing at a company. I equated that with slow professional growth.
Now I'm finding several opportunities for growth, but doing so with a calm mindset. Several of my colleagues don't seem calm at all. Yet the majority of us have more control over burnout and "work chaos" than we are lead to believe.
The point is, it can happen at any objective level of environmental stress. It can also happen at any level of actual performance. The engagement relative to people you interact with is the thing it depends on, I think.
For me it seems to happen because we feel that we must be emotionally invested in our work, and the toll of being 100% emotionally invested in something that is more likely than not devoid of meaning creates a “burnout” reaction.
If anything, the reason why burnout seems to be more frequent is because too many people care too much about their work, which creates pressure on others to join in on appearing like they care and emotionally invest in their work, which goes back to my theory that people ultimately burnout because they’ve been pressured to put their whole selves into their work when for many their work is actually devoid of much meaning.
> which creates pressure on others to join in on appearing like they care and emotionally invest in their work
I don't see this pressure coming from people who care. I mean, they want others to care, but they certainly don't want them to be pretending it.
So if anything, this pressure comes from within you, and then it also can be considered an issue of emotional control, but it is a different issue than caring too much about your work.
In other words, it seems like there are problems on both ends of the spectrum. I care more than average person in the group => potentially an emotional problem for me (that's my explanation of burnout). I care less than average person in the group => potentially an emotional problem for me (that's your explanation of burnout).
I had one project at a former employer I became emotionally attached to and worked for some weeks from 6am to 6pm on it.
After figuring out the project would not be finished any time soon though I almost couldn't work on it anymore after a holiday. It was like running sprint after sprint and realising you need to run at least a marathon.
I did not have a real burnout but I think I was very close.
This almost sounds like trying to blame the victim. There’s a much simpler description: burnout happens to you because of circumstances imposed by the employer.
You don’t have to be emotionally invested to be deeply stressed by the prospect of getting fired, demoted or turned into a workplace pariah, and in a lot of toxic environments you are made to feel those threats are connected to whether or not you are putting in 8 hours every Saturday or responding to a permanent triage of PagerDuty alerts with no permission to invest time into fixing root causes.
Even when it doesn’t manifest as implied uncompensated overtime, you can end up being expected to be a miracle worker and simultaneously given no resources, all while balancing a personal life or financial obligations that might imply you cannot easily quit jobs or move to a new place for better jobs.
In a Hanlon’s Razor sense, I’d say burnout is almost always about toxic management or executive behavior. Sometimes it’s about a problematic teammate. But it’s rarely caused by the degree of emotional investment of the person burning out. Rather that is a symptom exacerbated by the real causes.
This is often the case, but I think very often there is a lot of self-inflicted hurt there, too, with employees burning midnight oil because they convinced themselves that something bad will happen to them if they do a task a day (three days, week) later.
<rant> As a personal anecdote, I have to wage real wars to prevent people who work on my projects from coming to work when they are sick. I do not know what is it -- do they want to look heroic? believe this day is super critical? but they still show up to cough and sneeze on everyone. We have unlimited sick days, stay home! <rant off>
If you care and your toxic teammate doesn't, and then your toxic manager doesn't give a shit about the toxic teammate but instead cares that dared "rock the boat" by bringing it up is it all three thing as a cause or just the toxic manager?
It's swiss cheese failure. If you didn't care you wouldn't be having trouble. If your toxic teammate wasn't toxic you wouldn't be having trouble. If your toxic manager wasn't toxic you would've reasonably had the problem resolved.
I'm saying this having been in this boat two jobs in a row.
I learnt then that giving that much of a shit only mattered if I were building something for myself. So, for the things I care about, I'll give that much of a damn, but for someone else, they're not getting that.
The mistake I made was that I invested more into that thing than the owners themselves. That's so foolish. Why? They don't want that from you.
A few things have changed since, and I'm no longer anywhere near burnout.
I stopped travelling all the time, and I started working from home 4/5 days - less time communiting meant more sleep, and it means I get to have breakfast and lunch with my family etc.
Then I moved to a 4-day working week a couple of years ago, taking a 20% pay cut in the process.
Work-wise, it's the best thing I ever did! I spend less hours working, but somehow I don't seem to be any less productive, so my employer is actually getting a pretty good deal TBH. And I get a 3-day weekend, which means more time for family, me, and side projects.
I can understand why employers are apprehensive about remote work and 4-day weeks, but I really think they need to modernise here - a lot of them still seem to be stuck in the mindset of prioritising "bums on seats" from 9-5, rather than productivity and happy employees.
It started with what they called "Summer Wednesdays" - during the Summer, the company would sponsor an outing to the beautiful beach nearby every Wednesday at lunch.
Then you could come back to office or work from home.
Soon, people started to go to the beach earlier and work from there unless there was a client meeting onsite. One team member (she was in sales) even did her client meeting at the beach.
Team morale drastically changed. Since they would be at the beach, they wanted to have some fun while at the beach - so they shifted the work they got done to the 4 other days.
No more boring meetings - only those meetings everyone really wanted to be on happened. Everyone else was busy working. Teamwork went up because they wanted to be at the beach on Wednesday and have fun instead of coming back to work later.
The performance metrics were so phenomenal next month that management had an informal meeting with the team that basically allowed people to work 4 days a week.
Those who agreed had to sign an addendum to their employment contract that they had taken up the offer for people to work from where-ever they wanted one day a week without needing to come to the office.
I did not like this opacity so when I queried I was told that investors won't sanction this in any shape or form and this would be the only way to pull it off.
Interesting.
Those are the things that really grind enthusiastic people doing hard, creative work to dust.
Proving to the pointy-haired that going to a 4-day week won't hurt "because metrics" only puts a band-aid on the real problem which stems from the fact that many enterprises view people as "components"-- as means a to a corporate-defined end.
For many people a 4-day work week only prolongs the path to burnout, IMHO.
The primary difference of interest here is the way an employee owned cooperative is directed by people the employees (who know what is really going on in the company) and for their benefit, rather than for the benefit of disinterested shareholders.
Without a clear provider of vision and decision, it crumbled. This part is true of any venture, but I think becomes even more critical in a co-op since the authority is necessarily shared.
I think in broader terms, cooperatives are bound to be less efficient than an equivalent capitalist controlled venture, but that difference doesn't have to be a death sentence for the cooperative.
> that difference doesn't have to be a death sentence
Despite my failed attempt at one, I completely agree. To me, the co-op must be the way forward. It's the only likely contender I've found that might bridge capitalism and socialism.
If you are brilliant at engine design does not mean you are brilliant at selling cars.
Selling cars make money. There is negative value in a bunch of engines lying around.
As software engineers we design automation to make a business more efficient.
To make money you need to run a business.
Wow, great solution!
Except that, of course, you're missing the problem. Firing the employee isn't the problem - I don't think it's relevant whether it's done democratically or if the CEO "dictates" it.
The problem is, how to find freeloaders? In absence of objective metrics (which is what the parent raged against), it's an art! Or, it will come down to internal politics, ass-in-the-seat time, popularity contests, ... not that much better than in a non-cooperative company.
If you have a system where a freeloader can win, then you have a system that encourages freeloaders.
There are other systems that make freeloading impossible.
Are you aware of pair and mob programming?
People want to be successful.
No one likes to lose.
Even a freeloader is expressing that behavior because they believe that is the best way to win.
Pair and mob programming completely makes freeloading impossible. It also is true teamwork where everyone is literally on the same page.
The reason why you have a system where a freeloader can win is management that believes pair or mob programming is a waste of time.
This allows silos to build up, provokes and allows for dividing politics of who can know how something works or not and breaks team morale.
You get the behavior you design for.
We prevent freeloader problem by requiring everyone to pay taxes. The equivalent at work is requiring ass-in-the-seat / face-time policies.
I don’t see how pair programming can solve anything, people can still contribute zero (except their presence).
That's not how pair programming works.
Pair programming is not sitting and doing facebook while the other person churns out code.
Infact, in pair programming, that is exactly what you cant do.
Once you understand this, you intuitively understand why mob programming is so much more efficient.
Apologies if I came across saying there is the only way to do it. Let me rephrase - if there are multiple stakeholders in a product, I have found it really valuable to have them, physically or virtually in the same space as the work gets done and feedback gets provided in real time dissipating confusion and questions as soon as they arise.
In my experience, fixing an issue at the source is cheaper than discovering it later and running to fix it then because the wrong assumptions were made just because everyone is too busy banging out code.
Creative blocks as real. Rubber ducking is effective and real too.
> I think most companies have no time to have 2 or more programmers working on the same thing even if it produces some decent, soon to be legacy code
1. Why do you think that is? If this question totally flummoxes you, a narrower question could be "what is the objectives of these companies with the code", but try answering the broader question if you have the time
2. Do people generally solve problems better when working in isolation or as a team?
Now, did the companies you have experience with not have more than the programmer who wrote the code review it?
Or test it?
Who wrote the requirements?
Who checked whether the deliverable(s) met the requirements?
In my experience, more than one person ends up touching the code in one way or another until it actually reaches the customer.
I have found, the overall quality is much better when everyone is working together instead of in a waterfall model, in strict sequence with lots of back and forth and meetings with subset of stakeholders until the product actually behaves the way its expected to. Reliably.
The risk of this happening goes up as removed the programmer is from using the product themselves. So if dogfooding works on your projects, by all means do it.
Looking forward to your thoughts.
I'm confused - it seems to me that you understand that ass-in-the-seat / face-time policies only address the presence problem but cannot address contribution.
1. Do you agree with this? 2. What's your solution to fixing the contribution problem?
As you say, bad metrics are a problem. But some form of loop-closing is essential.
Not just as far as remote working is concerned, but running better companies as well. I'd say it's fairly clear that knowledge workers don't all fit in the 9-5 schedule, people have different sleep/productivity rythms, there's other beneficial activities that help foster creativity and focus (meditation, exercise, stretching, post-meal nap, ...) that one would ideally enable and even encourage employees to engage in...
But all of that brings a huge problem, that in some way we also need to measure productivity - both to prevent (fire/reeducate) people from abusing the system (freeloaders), and to fairly reward people (avoid negative selection). An additional complication is that productivity is even ill-defined - is banging out tons of code day after day more or less valuable than brainstorming for a few months and coming up with a revolutionary new product? What about basic research, which takes years and has an uncertain outcome?
Probably computing is one of the best test cases for better systems, as programmers have almost complete freedom to work when-/where-/however, it's not a heavily regulated industry, most code is not critical (so it's easy to iterate quickly, as well as experiment with different objectives - slow&correct vs move-fast-and-break-things), and also programmers are productive enough that a few bad apples is unlikely to break the company...
I'm really interested in this general topic, I'd welcome any ideas/discussion/experience!
Basically, there's a dichotomy between 2 different kinds of work: Convergent vs Emergent.
In "Convergent" work you are delivering what a market has asked for. You are measured on meeting these requirements with accuracy, speed, cost. Predictability of outcomes is paramount, schedules are everything, people expect to be able to control all variables.
By contrast, in "Emergent" work, you are effectively creating a market. You introduce something that hasn't existed before and which isn't merely a tweak in an existing product. The outcome of Emergent work is new ways of doing things, new products, and new resources. This introduces a lot of "grey area" and lack of focus.
The most successful enterprises find the right balance between Convergent and Emergent work. In manufacturing (my domain), most initiatives are Convergent and expectations focus on meeting some deadline or numeric goal, literally everything else is subordinate to that. Start-ups, of course, have the opposite inclination. In those, a "runway of money" is burnt to introduce some potentially new product with only vague expectations of profit at some time in the future (despite whatever they tell VC's). You sort of need both in an organization and staff (as a whole) need to assimilate both types of work to really succeed.
What I had in mind was things like Customer Support or QA personel (which exist even in start-ups & tech companies), where the tasks are pretty clearly defined, it's easy to track progress, and it's fairly important to "do the hours" (e.g. if you need 24-hour customer support), but you can offer things like location independence (precisely because work is so easy to track).
Unfortunately, however, I think that most programming work (and this probably extends to most technological work) isn't quite as easy to categorise... basically, even if your objective is 100% convergent ("our client wants this, we'll make it"), there's still different (better or worse) ways of getting to that goal, so there's still a lot of creativity/decisionmaking involved... and it's obvious that simple metrics don't really work ("I fixed 100 bugs today!" "Yeah but you wrote all of them yesterday.")...
I work for a mid-sized university. We're a bit unique, for higher ed, in that we have centralized IT. Our projects support university 5-year plans. When projects do not complete successfully or are extraordinarily late people notice. If teams are hitting their goals - university goals - does it matter if every person on a team is hitting some averaged-out metric for productivity? If a team isn't hitting its goals, usually it's not due to individual contribution, it's due to poor communication, unrealistic goals, frequently shifting requirements/priorities, etc. Usually a sit down with the team to get feedback will tell more of why the team failed.
A hobby of mine is coaching youth basketball. To increase my ability, I joined a forum. Today the moderator posted a quote from NBA player Marc Gasol. Marc lamented the tracking of individual stats because the stats don't tell the story. He stated, correctly IMO, that many critical factors are not tracked and would be hard to measure the importance of. For instance, a player who doesn't score much but prevents his defensive assignment from being a play maker (play makers are more than just scorers). Or the player who sets up the plays that allow other people to score (for those familiar with basketball, think screens/picks). Or the guy who is on the bench but helps calm down players when their team is down.
I've come to feel the same way about IT teams. A win is a team win; a loss is a team loss. In both situations, many factors came into play in order for the outcome to occur. My experience is that individual productivity stats don't give you a clear idea why the outcome occurred. In the end, it's all about the success of the organization.
> For instance, a player who doesn't score much but prevents his defensive assignment from being a play maker (play makers are more than just scorers). Or the player who sets up the plays that allow other people to score (for those familiar with basketball, think screens/picks). Or the guy who is on the bench but helps calm down players when their team is down.
Yeah, these are certainly good criteria. The benefit is that in such sport, it's probably easier to assess performance/impact, as it's all face time. To some degree, these criteria are applicable to tech work as well ("he's in the office 2 days/week only, but he always solves the problem when the server goes down overnight or over the weekend" or "she works remotely, I never saw her before, but she found 37 critical security bugs in the past year").
YES!
Are you aware of pair and mob programming?
People want to be successful. No one likes to lose. Even a freeloader is expressing that behavior because they believe that is the best way to win.
Pair and mob programming completely makes freeloading impossible. It also is true teamwork
Hrm: PNS?
Are you aware of pair and mob programming?
People want to be successful. No one likes to lose. Even a freeloader is expressing that behavior because they believe that is the best way to win.
Pair and mob programming completely makes freeloading impossible. It also is true teamwork where everyone is literally on the same page.
Perhaps a win for themselves personally. A freeloader is a selfish individual in team dynamics. They only want accolades/home runs for themselves, and not a World Series for the team.
> Perhaps a win for themselves personally.
EVERYONE who's logical wants a win for themselves personally.
Your non selffish teammate wants the company to do well so they continue to get paid, builds a reputation for success and gets the bonuses.
Your CEO wants the company to do well so they continue to get paid, builds a reputation for success and gets the bonuses. Their role require them to think about the company as a whole or there will be guaranteed failure.
The single mother is working hard over multiple shifts for HER children to be fed and schooled. She's not doing the hard work for my family. I don't see a single cent from her.
The billionaire contributes millions to charity so that the planet he lives in is cleaner and better just like you and I spend hundreds of dollars in cleaning OUR houses or helping our neighbors so that it's cleaner and better. No sane person wants to live in a dump or in a place where everyone hates each other.
> A freeloader is a selfish individual in team dynamics. They only want accolades/home runs for themselves, and not a World Series for the team.
I really wish people were more selfish.
Then it would be easier to reason about the world.
The most complicated individuals are those who are "not selfish" - very difficult to reason about IMHO!
There cannot be action without motivation, so what is their motivation, exactly?
Is their motivation to work hard because they want to make the starving kids in Africa more educated?
Do they understand what it takes to make the starving kids in Africa more educated?
Do they have control over what it takes to make the starving kids in Africa more educated?
Do the starving kids in Africa actually want to be more educated or do they want something else first, like food?
How will they behave if one day they realize it's not going to happen like they envisioned? Can I continue to depend on them to deliver they have been or will there be a meltdown?
Selfish people seem to have better clarity over what they need and can communicate it better.
They have better and closer/direct control over their needs and wants. It's not dependent on another random thing or individual or group.
If you have a freeloader on your team and your team agrees on the matter - WHY is that freeloader still around if they are not providing any value?
When I was in college, there was a group of students who were frustrated about how the pub they frequented had a bunch of young women who seemed to go out with much older, well off men. They were upset that the attention of these young women were being taken away by the older, well off men and the men were distracting the women and exploiting them.
They theorized about the ethics, long term effects, viability and so on about the situation.
Since they were computer science students, they wondered whether making better dating apps would improve the situation for these young women who were perhaps not finding the right men.
The reality is the young women were getting something from the older, well off men; the older, well off men were getting something from the young women. Both parties were selfish and knew exactly what was needed and wanted and provided.
Maybe the selfish freeloader at your company is giving the company something it needs and wants that they can't get from the less selfish team members to further its business objectives?
My last job was for a large enterprise that viewed employees as drop-in components. Not only was it dehumanizing, but it was a terrible way to get any work done.
There’s also the fact that most people I’ve known in my work need to learn to work when they graduate (I hire mostly graduates). I’d trust someone with 5 years’ experience to know what is generally expected from them if they work remotely; I’d be much more concerned about a graduate. Telling them what “working” means is much harder than them breathing it daily around them at the office.
Another topic is that it can be fairly difficult to measure actual performance, and remote work takes from you several proxies. It might make you more objective - but it might make you less accurate and force you to accept lower performance due to the “benefit of the doubt”.
I've been full-time remote for about a year now, and I'm kind of done with it.
It was fantastic at first. I live in Boston, and my commute was about an hour and a half in every morning, and about two hours home every night. Being able to step over the dog and be at my office was (and is) awesome.
But I never see anyone anymore, and that's starting to wear on me. My wife still commutes, so we have about two hours with each other every night before we have to go to bed and do it all again the next day. If I'm not intentional about it, I'll spend 23 hours a day in my house, and while I'm not the most social person around, I think it's starting to have actual negative consequences for my life. I'm grumpier, I get sick more often, I'm tired ...
I think that's the biggest difference with remote. A lot of things that were seamless with physical presence need to be done with intentionality in a remote setup. You need an explicit time for a daily call / team catchup. You need to either make extra effort or explicitly schedule social chats between coworkers (I like inviting people to do coffee or show off some thing they're interested in). And you personally need to make a schedule that gets you out of the house (I go to coffee shops 3-ish times a week).
I've been remote for 2 years and don't plan on changing any time soon.
Granted, there's a lot of policy- or culture-level stuff that can get in the way. If the rest of you team is co-located and isn't going to remember to bring you in on conversations, remote isn't going to work. Same if your manager equates physical presence to performance.
> I've been remote for 2 years and don't plan on changing any time soon.
That is very interesting!
Mind a chat? Your profile is bare so I'm assuming you don't want to be bothered without you being involved in it, so I need your help.
Look at my profile or, please, if you can email me at my handle at gmail, I will really appreciate it.
I look forward to a few minutes of a learning opportunity with you.
The other important thing for me is to keep a regular schedule when I'm "on" and then step away from the workspace when I'm "off." Avoid going into the workspace for personal projects.
Also as part of my job I make sure to stay in contact with my boss about the things that matter to him like our project plan, release dates, and anything I need from him. Deliberate, open communication is very important. I also find that keeping quality written records is critical too because it's the only way to keep everyone on the same page about what we're working on.
And yes, get up, leave the house, and go do something else during the day, every day. I personally go for runs and go to the gym in the early afternoon as a way to be outside. And I spend a lot of time with my girlfriend on weekends too. Neither of us are homebodies when we have free time so that works out very well. Even superficial interactions with other people are enough to fill the cup a little.
Since I started working from home (almost a year ago) I've found myself missing the in-person professional interaction at times. My wife and four young kids are at home, so there's as much human interaction as I want, but I think it's important to be able to "talk shop" with others in person from time to time.
https://www.wework.com/businessplatinum
Having said that, I might consider it if I didn't have a dedicated home office, I had a coworking space next door, or I craved personal interaction :)
Work is not a replacement for a social life, and there are more ways to develop one now than ever. And, the social load from people who do their social life at work is actually one of the reasons I prefer working from home: I have only so many spoons to spare, and I'd rather spend them on people I chose to associate with. Those might, occasionally, happen to be coworkers, but even then I'd rather socialize in non-work context.
It is a drag when other people still work in the office, or _really want to_ be working in the office, as evidenced by a heavy emphasis on synchronous communication. I'm starting to despise Zoom, for reasons that aren't really directly related to anything Zoom does.
I understand your point but I wonder if working with people who you would socialize with even outside of work makes work more enjoyable?
From my rather limited experience of working, I've found that in the end the thing I actually work on matters a lot less to my happiness than the people who I do the work with. Alternatively, maybe I just don't like working as much as other people do?
I'm starting to think when looking for a new team I should really be seeing whether I will like my coworkers instead of whether I'll like what I'm doing.
Not really. Who I like to work with and who I like to socialize doesn't necessarily match up. Furthermore, I have limited capacity for social interaction - that is why even _if_ I like the people, I prefer to socialize outside of work. Otherwise both work and socialization suffer.
Finally, if your primary source of socialization is the workplace, you open yourself to abuse - companies can, and do, exploit the fact that for many people they become not just the source of income, but also the social support network.
> From my rather limited experience of working, I've found that in the end the thing I actually work on matters a lot less to my happiness than the people who I do the work with.
I just need the coworkers to not be horrible, and what I work with matters quite a lot - if there's one thing about the IT industry that really grinds my gears, it's how often even apparently socially beneficial products are just covers for privacy breaches and boom-and-bust schemes.
> I'm starting to think when looking for a new team I should really be seeing whether I will like my coworkers instead of whether I'll like what I'm doing.
You need both, though you might not get them. Just don't let the workplace _own your social life_. If you feel like working remotely means you have no social life, then you got used to that happening, and that will hurt you, remote or not.
Monday or Friday, with the other four days reserved for face-to-face.
Having a non-meeting day is beneficial for productivity. It does require trust and good work ethics. Also, a quiet home office.
All my coworkers are in California, but there's no assumption on my team that people will actually be present in the office. So effectively, things are done as if it was a remote team.
A huge part of this is selecting the right people. We can only hire people that are able to be effective in that environment. You need people that will reach out if they have a problem (but not before at least trying a little bit to solve it themselves). You need to be able to jump on a call at the first sign that you need a higher bandwidth communication channel than chat. As a senior, I always make abundantly clear that I am available to answer questions or fix things when someone is blocked.
I also haven't seen any issues with performance or reviews. Being present at work has nothing to do with performance. Rather, features added, incidencts responded to, tech debt accrued and paid off, etc are how you measure performance and none of those change in a remote environment. You can get an idea of what everyone is up to in a daily call / video chat. And for a more in-depth accounting, you can review git logs, incident notes, support tickets, etc. Basically, performance reviews are not that different in a remote environment.
And totally agree that not everyone can or should do remote. It makes a lot of people unhappy. And it doesn't work for a lot of employers b/c they can't find enough of the right people. Or they have some real job-related requirement that makes it difficult or impossible to do remote. Like, how do you have a remote welder or a hardware engineer or biologist or forensic tech person. They need access to physical stuff and/or a lab with expensive equipment.
So, it's not a panacea. But it works really great for some people if it's setup right. And it can be a competitive advantage.
I think one of the key success factors is having a dedicated home office, where you can close the door and be in work mode. Doubly so if there are other family members at home during the day.
I do agree about graduates and juniors though, also because it can be difficult to effectively mentor someone remotely. OTOH, we've never had better tooling and connectivity. I recently met a colleague in person, and didn't realise until he pointed it out that we'd never met before! I'd spent so much time in video conferencing with him that I felt very familiar with him.
> Another topic is that it can be fairly difficult to measure actual performance
This one I don't get though, unless your only measure is how long someone is sat at their desk.
I dont. Can you tell me your thoughts?
To me, sitting at an office in front of a computer and delivering a feature has no correlation.
... and if there's already a system in place to calculate team's ability to deliver a feature, what's the apprehension?
> and 4-day weeks
.. again, tell me your thoughts?
> a lot of them still seem to be stuck in the mindset of prioritising "bums on seats" from 9-5, rather than productivity and happy employees.
Managers are not idiots, everyone I have worked with are smart and driven, so why are they doing this?
Partially inertia, fear of change and fear of losing control.
> To me, sitting at an office in front of a computer and delivering a feature has no correlation.
I totally agree, this is part of what I was trying to say - performance should not be measured by the number of hours sat at a desk visible to your manager!
> Managers are not idiots, everyone I have worked with are smart and driven, so why are they doing this?
Well, managers are people, so some of them are certainly idiots :)
I moved to a 5-day, 35 hour work week while not taking a pay cut. I just leave early. F em. I'm not burning myself out again.
Classic example is school teachers in US public schools. They have enormous responsibility with the children, but rarely have power or authority. Instead, they are essentially drones in a big machine.
Could you elaborate on that? I always thought that there are rules and procedures for everything so the teachers are fine and covered.
- medical care
- firefighting
The people are in it for some deep care for the task and will endure shit levels. They think it's more important than anything else and cons' don't alter this.
From what I can understand it is taught at business school to exploit resources, you must look after yourself and push back, surprisingly hard, again in my experience. I find it abhorrent. It was the .com era when things changed, when the sharks realised the computers own the world, before that it was a bunch of happy engineers making stuff.
Even worse many managers seem to be control freaks who can't measure results, and instead insist on micromanaging everything, looking over your shoulder, continually asking for feedback, and "checking in" to see how things are going.
I've said for many years I produce results in spite of managers "helping". Software development is fairly easy I find, it does take time to produce results though, and because no one can see whats going on managers behave the way they do, there's a huge lack of trust on both sides. End of rant.
P.S. I find it easiest to behave like plumbers, they know you need them to clean up your shit, and they have to pay you, so just do what you have to to survive. I remember one guy I hired years ago to do some plumbing at a place I was renovating, kept saying he was busy, yada, yada, went up to the shops he was wandering around having an Ice cream. Medical specialists are another great example I find, they have people making outrageous demands on them, literally life and death, they make sure that people can't find them outside office hours, they are very good at looking after themselves, as they should be.
Burnout happens to you and does not originate inside you. A manager or executive burns employees out not employees “letting themselves” become burned out.
Turning it around and acting like it’s intrinsic to the employee is harmful victim blaming. It’s like blaming someone with symptoms of clinical depression for not “managing their emotions.”
I feel very discouraged by this because I don’t think we’ll make progress helping people heal from and avoid burnout unless we recognize that it is caused by the wider sociological issues of toxic management & executive behavior.
Your comment in fact is one of the worst forms of victim blaming, and you may not be aware that you’re even doing it: justifying victim blaming as though it is some sort of justified focus on “what you can do” when the problem should not be made to be about that or justified as such.
In other words, changing the conversation to be about “what you can do” tacitly reinforces the stance that it’s nobody else’s problem to fix, which is precisely blaming the victim for being in the situation (e.g. “if you want things to be different, it’s on yourself to do it”).
You may not be consciously aware that your behavior is tacitly blaming victims, but nonetheless it still absolutely is.
For some reason I thought I could stick it out, but I'm trying to make it to the end of the year and then take a break to refocus.
Money only gets you so far - at some point people need a supportive work environment and a sense of ownership at their job.
I have to say though I am pretty thankful for all of that. It allowed me to reevaluate what was important to me and really think about what I wanted to do. I ended up switching industries all together and I finally don't hate life any more.
The company was pretty dysfunctional and I took it upon myself to pretty much do everything, so much so that I was working 12 hour days (This is work time, minus breaks, measured with an app) so my day would start at ~ 06:30 and finish ~ 21:00.
I have never been quite so miserable in my life and I was making so many mistakes that it was unreal. I also picked up a very bad habit of doing things quickly and 90% there as that was better than not doing them at all and to do them properly would take too long. It's been close to a year now and I still find myself falling in the turn things around quickly and sacrifice quality trap, even when there is no rush at all for it. I hope I get rid of this bad habit soon
https://www.brightball.com/articles/what-exactly-happened-to...