This is sadly a lot more common than people think. I have a similar story from a prior employer, a system administrator who was often asked to fix problems usually caused by bad managerial decisions of which he always flagged initially as being problematic but nobody listened to him, even after it turned out he was right from the start, he was one of those guys who knew their shit. He was a really nice, quiet and reserved guy but I noticed over the space of 3 or so months his attitude towards work and the manager at the time started changing.
Not many people knew of his Twitter account, but I did. He would post crude remarks about the manager not listening to him and how he should be the manager, often using the initials of the manager when he insulted him to be careful and not be accused of slander I guess. I would often hear him in the office talking to himself, swearing under his breath and mashing his keyboard. You could tell it was getting to him. He was on-call 24/7 but apparently wasn't adequately paid the amount he should have been for someone who was expected to fix something at the drop of a hat.
One day he came in and sat at his desk refusing to do any work. He just sat there and then the manager confronted him and asked why he wasn't addressing his list of high priority tickets that he had and then the guy lost it. He didn't get violent, but he started yelling at the guy and the manager was a well-built guy (sorted of sounded and looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger) who I wouldn't even dare cross. After yelling he just walked out and never came back.
Of course my manager reported the incident to some higher-ups and then it was revealed a couple of days later he was in a mental hospital as he had a complete breakdown (he apparently drove himself there). I didn't know him that well, but I went and visited him after finding out where he was. He told me that it all built up; he was being blamed when things went wrong and weren't done on time and not being praised when things went right and were delivered within unrealistic time-frames. His girlfriend had also left him the day prior to the meltdown, he said she was unhappy because he was never home and when he was, he was always fixing something remotely or had to come in to fix something.
I have a feeling this kind of thing is a lot more common than we can imagine.
Sadly it is more common than people even think. Oddly enough it is always the ones that are most productive and I know from personal experience you can clear 200 tickets in a week and somebody doing the same job and paid more gets thru that in a year and you are the one being shafted as you spend your time doing the work instead of office politics.
Perhaps, instead of seeing your job as "what the job description says", you should see it as "whatever actually gets me rewarded."
Which is to say, at some companies, playing office politics is your real job. "Work" is just a signal you can emit to show that you are willing to submit enough to not get fired.
Perhaps doing more office politics than productive work is your job's signal it's time to leave. Do you want to work at a company where more resources are wasted on keeping the lights on so to speak than providing value to users? I sure don't.
If you can't talk to the CEO or CTO, if you're technical, on your first day physically at the company, that's a Bad Signal (tm).
I was assuming a context of "you become aware that your company has this problem, and yet you persist in wanting (or needing) to work there." For example, you might you need the money, live somewhere crap for jobs, and your mortgage is underwater so you can't move somewhere better. If that's the case, then you should, in all pragmatic cynicism, think about your "real job" at the company.
Actually, perhaps I need to preface all my advice with "in all due pragmatic cynicism." I've added it to four posts so far and people seem to react much better to them when I do.
Ah, pragmatic cynicism. Never was a fan of that, always more of a fan of unpragmatically changing things for the better. Especially these days when the global unemployment rate for programmers is ~3%, you will get a different job and you will get it quickly.
I'm told life looks very different if you have done anything resembling settling down. But I haven't been there yet and my glasses have rose coloured lenses.
I was in a highly political and highly toxic situation prior to my current engagement. It took me over two years to get out of it. If you are not already in one of a handful of major tech hubs, it can be extremely difficult to get out such a situation. Granted, the pragmatic cynicism doesn't help, but if you can stomach it you can stay in a somewhat better frame of mind than I let myself devolve into.
Yup. If you become good at corporate politics, you become someone who's good at corporate politics. It's the first time I really understood the whole 'if you stare into the abyss, it also stares into you' thing.
It's a bit like martial arts. Being good at it is nice since you don't have to be afraid of being beaten up. If you have to fight someone every day however, there might be something wrong.
This is spot on, in many engineering jobs getting the right technical decision made requires you to exercise influence over management and peers. And having some influence in the bank involves a careful tending over a long period. If that makes you unhappy, try to think of it as building up karma so you comments go straight to the top of the list.
Accusing politics of being the downfall of some enterprise is a highly purist position. Politics is usually meant as "things that aren't coding that I don't like". Even political virtuosos still accuse blame politics when convenient.
I have seen politics kill someone's work and I have seen a project launch by doing nothing but working away and submitting their end product to flabbergasted responses. But it's rarely so simple.
If you don't understand what's going on and blame politics, you are living in a foreign land and don't understand the language. If you understand and don't try to ensure your voice is heard and respected, you don't understand the customs. If you don't understand the language and customs, you're at the nations mercy.
But fundamentally if you view it as opposed to work you'll rarely succeed in the best outcome even if you do strike a balance.
I don't know a lot of people who want to play office politics, so I don't really see how "politics is your real job" would actually help. It just transforms it from "politics gets in the way of my job" to "my job isn't what it should be, nor what I want".
Perhaps HR should put what actually gets rewarded in the job listing. That way, both employers and employees can save a lot of time by not interviewing for jobs they aren't interested in. If employers were more honest and listed job requirement such as "kissing ass" and "play office politics like you're a congressperson", then we'd all know what jobs to avoid.
That can be for many reasons but an example of events for me will go like this:-
> Get new job, jump in there really eger, do a good job.
> Face stupid political BS, eagerness disappears.
> Start looking for other jobs, then ultimately quit.
If you keep working hard in a toxic environment you're going to do yourself harm. If you care about doing good work, move company. Many will be content with just collecting a wage though.
As an aside, I'ved worked on a helpdesk and got through about 5-8 tickets a day while colleagues got through 40. Ultimately I was promoted because those 8 tickets were the ones everyone else was skipping because they didn't have a clue what to do. Neither did I, but once I figured it out I did. If your tickets regularly require on average 5 to 6 minutes work, then perhaps you should question the value of the work you're doing.
I had a similar situation happen to me, minus the going crazy part. If you constantly have to clean up because of the bad decisions of a manager then you should just leave that company. Don't bust your ass trying to make a difference and change minds that don't want to change. If you are an employee you are expendable.
I am not sure if the "just coast" advice would work. The source of stress is still there, still sapping away all the mental power, still occupying your brain during shower.
It's the injustice in the system. People just can't handle it anymore. It's only going to get worse as they keep on printing money and give it to the rich as well.
Its so unfortunate to hear things like this. I knew of a person who was so stressed out by programming in similar situations that he went through a complete career revamp. He changed to law school and went on to work in government. He seems happier.
I started out as a computer programmer. After a few years of dealing with the braindead corporate system in America, I decided to make a change. I ended up moving to Australia (just applied for citizenship), and I work as a kitchen hand at an all girls boarding school. I get $20 an hour, penalties on weekends and public holidays, 4 weeks paid holidays a year, and superannuation (a retirement fund). Best decision I ever made.
If I didn't end up leaving, I might have ended up just like him.
This makes me wonder if the kind of burnout described by OP has anything particular to do with the profession of programming. We periodically have posts on HN by lawyers who got so burned out by their day jobs that they did a career revamp to become developers...
yeah, I wonder too. I think most people need change and its not uncommon to see people with two careers. But perhaps jobs that are highly specific in the way you get to your output are more so that way. For eg. engineers work on beautiful problems and come up with awesome solutions. But when they are forced to churn out code, its shitty and tough and repetitive process. Same for lawyers who do corp law vs. litigation. I do Product Marketing and because its such a varied job (particularly at a startup) I don't really feel a burn out. Then again, I am only 3 years into working...
Secret I ofund out myself is do not mix what you like to do with what you are paid to do. If you like your job fine, but remember you are paid the same. Many many companies will not reward that extra mile and many performance reviews are completely insulting as everybody gets the same % in so many companies and the variation between poor peope and good is probably an extra .5% pay rise.
So unless you are working for yourself, then work to rule will keep you sane. Use your hindsight to plan holidays, if managment don't listern in a timely manner about a potentual problem then just plan that week off down the line and let them suffer - sadly it is the only way you can stay sane and they can pay for there mistakes. Its hard out there, don't make it harder on yourself.
This is going to sound insulting and I don't mean it that way, but does anyone ever wonder about the fact that managers are frequently considerably less intelligent than the people they manage? I think that's what drives the frustration a lot of the time. The thing is, just because they're less intelligent doesn't mean they're not good managers, but it think it certainly makes it a lot harder for programmers, who are usually very bright, to accept the choices their managers make when they don't particularly agree with them.
Having said that, I think a good compromise would be to make sure that the people who get assigned to managerial positions have formerly had the job of the people they manage. That way they're likely to understand the pinpoints and the frustrations and be motivated to eliminate them. Obviously not all programmers will qualify for this job, but some certainly will.
Completely agree, a manger without a technical (coding, sysadmin, etc.) background has a weak foundation: how can they make decisions without knowing the domain itself?
Not so sure coders trump managers in the intelligence dept. After all, managers tend to earn more, and do less; I'd say they're brilliant in this respect ;-)
I guess that you are still a novice. Usually managers did the work of their underlings. However seldomly a competent person gets promoted - as you need someone to do the work. And since the less competent person will be relatively better manager than producer in comparison to the competent person, the less competent guy gets the promotion.
I strongly advise everyone to read the Putt's Law, where this phenomena is broken down in great depth.
The fact of the matter is that a lot of technical people who are geniuses technically do not have the qualities necessary to be good managers. Good managing requires ability to communicate up, down, and across the corporate hierarchy and the political minefield that comes with it.
Good managers will balance out good technical people in terms of skillset, and help their team to do their job, while also coaching them in the areas where they are weak (and if the manager is weak technically, then obviously technical coaching is not in scope). Good managers will filter what reaches inside their team from the outside and protect their team from crap while captaining the ship forward. They know their weaknesses and also know that good leadership requires hiring people who are smarter than you are, and then helping to facilitate the magic that can happen when good people get together.
Having managers who are strong both technically and in a business sense is rare. There are only so many Elon Musks in the world. But when you work with one, your work becomes very enjoyable.
At the end of the day, team members don't have visibility as to what managers do every day. This blog is great for understanding this stuff: http://randsinrepose.com
I'm just trying to say that just because one may not have experienced them or seen them does not mean they don't exist. I've worked for a few and with a few. They helped me grow.
It's a popular saying around these parts (as in the startup community) that you should hire people smarter than you. It seems like having managers less intelligent than their direct reports would be a sign that the company is applyig that rule well...
I don't think that works because if management is incompetent enough to neglect problems they are creating, do you think they are competent enough to realize they are causing them?
But, for example, if you keep telling your management (as in writing e-mails with CC to higher management or have it written in the meeting minutes) that we need more file servers because we might run out of space and they ignore it, then when it happens and you're not around to fix this next time they may think twice before ignoring your advice. On the other hand if you resolve the issue yourself it can happen that no-one will notice.
Very true. My client was always talking about how much better development could move forward if we worked with a bigger agency, so I stopped stalling it and let him spend a bit of his money to learn firsthand how much "better" everything gets. Afterwards I fixed everything they broke (paid by the hour of course) and haven't heard complaints since.
By planning your holidays.
1) Identify issue and alert manager that it needs addressing - say ew say clock changes for summertime as a poor obvious example.
2) manager ignores it with it will be fine mentality as nothing is on fire at the time
3) you book holiday when you expect shit to hit fan
Shit hits fan, you have issue documented as you alerted your manager and got response not an issue so you booked holiday and not there. With that you can not be blamed. Also ALL IT people worth there salt work above and beyond what there contract states - so if your contract is for DBA work, that is not sys admin work, that is not crawling under desks networking or desktop support - but you help out and do those things. So with that if it is outside your scope of your work contract then again you have the ability to ignore it as well. But the holiday approach is the best.
But there are 3 types of managers - those that can do your job, those that think they can do your job and those that will admit they have no idea. Then ontop of that there are those that can balance dealing with you and sheilding you from HR and the other crap and then there are those that just look after themselfs and smile to your face and say all sorts behind your back. As a rule a manager that can do your job is one you will get on with, ones that can not do your job are less likely to be good managers I have found, though have met some that are and there is no hard and fast rule or way to single the good from the bad sadly until your few months into a job.
> Secret I found out myself is do not mix what you like to do with what you are paid to do
A very good advice I have always followed. This may not be true if you have your own company, however - since you will need a lot of drive to make things move forward.
I think you'll find that it's a common fear. But not so common a thing to happen. Lots of sensible things like exercise and leisure activities will work wonders to distract you from your stresses and worries
Your job is to produce surplus value for your employer in exchange for reduced risk and possibly to specialize into work you find interesting. (Machine Learning doesn't happen without division of labor.)
You do not owe your employer your sanity or anything above and beyond what's reasonable. (As decided by your personal satisfaction and the standards/mores of your culture.)
If you're seeking to put more into the pot so you can extract more later, save money and stash it in a mutual fund or start hustling for yourself. Employers are perfectly happy to ignore you for decades on end, if they even keep you around that long.
Don't pretend value will present itself to you just because you're putting in the hours. Like thinking you'll get a date just because you're a good person.
Edit:
Don't let employers/management guilt you into working more hours than they deserve from you.
I don't think the guy in the story felt guilted into doing more work. He was trying to "climb the corporate ladder" by doing the only thing he knew how to do--working harder. He didn't understand the effort thermocline[1].
Something like this should be passed out to every young person that enters the workforce along with a pamphlet outlining the expected odds of being promoted from a low-level position to a managerial position.
Employers, even the good ones, will put as much work on your plate as you can handle and then keep going. Systematically a workplace just isn't set up to help an employee handle stress, or even pay attention to an employee's stress level. They'll ask you to work overtime even if it is obviously killing you because that's just how the typical work environment is structured. Even moving higher up in the food chain, to be a producer or manager, doesn't change this.
You need only observe how many workplaces will let employees who are obviously sick with a cold/flu come in and work to understand how poorly most workplaces respond to an employee in trouble: They will not send someone home who is actively exposing coworkers to infectious diseases, so do you think they're going to notice if you're risking your health with stress? Sadly not.
So, as an employee, it's up to you: Pay attention to your stress level. If you aren't sleeping well, do something about it. If the stress is making you gain weight, do something about it. If you're having serious, serious problems, do something about it. You can't count on your employer to support you if shit hits the fan - even if it's their fault - because 99% of them won't. You have to be proactive.
You won't get promotions or raises for managing your own stress level and working reasonable hours, but you won't get promotions or raises for literally killing yourself either. So play it safe.
The culture of the company also matters. Joel Spolsky talked a bit about administration as creating "abstraction layers", and what's happening here seems like tiered administration (which I guess is a working definition of bureaucracy). In other words, the administration themselves are isolating themselves, by means of more administration, from the "realities on the ground", which creates this tension between the people who really understand what's involved and the people who commit to involving the company.
So we shouldn't say "it's just up to the employee", because that attitude creates its own culture, one where the employees work just enough to not get fired and the management accepts this attitude as network damage and routes work around it.
Administrations have an opportunity to choose what they're doing. Advising a startup-laden forum like HN to aspire to massively-multiplayer mediocrity might not be wise, because startups exist in a high-failure environment and must strive for passion and excellence. It's the right culture for very large corporations and for franchise restaurants, but it's the wrong culture for the deli down the corner.
Surprisingly, I don't think the solution must require "giving up control" as a developer-manager, though that will certainly help. If you look at these stories, there is a perverse sense of alienation from the company. Maybe this metaphor helps: the manager should be conducting an orchestra. The conductor doesn't have to give up control of the whole orchestra necessarily, but they do need to be aware that it's a bunch of individual people, and you need to communicate your vision of the music you're playing, and they need to feel the same vision and work with you to express it. You also need to forgive errors in performance rather than stop the orchestra for every little thing, and you need to let the audience applaud everyone when success finally happens, and everyone needs to hear the whole symphony, their parts and everybody else's, to know what's going on. In this way, you could in some sense "keep control" even though you give up micromanaging.
No they won't. Plenty of good employers understand work life balance, they understand that output doesn't linearly increase with time, especially in development.
Good employers push their employees in terms of not letting them coast, giving them meaningful work and challenging them to be their best. That is not the same as piling on work and ignoring stress levels. There is an optimum amount of stress at which humans are at their most productive.
If your employer isn't like that then they aren't a good employer.
Do you even have any anecdotes to support this? I have literally never encountered an example of an employer proactively managing an employee's stress level. To suggest that an employer can somehow put employees at 'an optimum amount of stress' suggests a lot more understanding of employees than I think is possible in most scenarios.
I mean, yeah, we can spout platitudes all we want here. I agree that if you aspire to be a good employer, you should treat your employees well. But that's not the problem here: The example employee in the OP was a top performer who helped solve tough problems, and nobody seemed to suspect that anything was wrong until he snapped.
The problem is that workplaces are not designed to be able to identify an employee having problems with stress, let alone to actively manage it. I have never encountered a workplace that can do so effectively - some employers are better than others about things like work/life balance, etc. But the level of stress in your life is variable, and the level of stress being generated by your work is variable, even in the best of circumstances. It is difficult, if not impossible, for an employer to even understand how much stress you might be under outside of work.
For example, a lead artist at a previous employer got let go for getting into too many arguments at work. It was only at that point that we learned that he was having a really tough time because he was a single parent and his son was suffering from a severe, life-threatening condition. It's nice to think that if his supervisors had known they could have done something about it - maybe they would have - but from the outside it merely made him look like a bad employee. Maybe he wanted to keep his personal life private, maybe he thought he had it under control, or maybe they decided they had to set an example regardless of his reasons - but the point stands: Ultimately, it is up to you, not your employer, to manage your stress.
I've a friend who was told that he needed to take a vacation. Not in the "You're out of line" sense at all, but in the "We expect our employees to use their vacation time, and you've been working hard lately." He's also been told to cut back on the his hours, as his bosses didn't want him to sacrifice his personal life.
Usually when you hear stories like this, it's because the employee is screwing up. In this case, it's because the higher ups realize that proactively preventing employees from becoming overstressed is a good way to keep employees.
A "workplace" or "employer" can't do that, but a good line manager can, and will. That's why they're valuable - a well managed team is far more productive in the longterm than a team where you just replace the "spent" people with fresh ones.
Of course a workplace can do that - by encouraging a philosophy of work/life balance, and by encouraging their line managers to actively pursue this. Do you think workplaces just let their line managers roam free, with no guidance?
There is a lot of active effort in my field (consultant engineering) to manage the true productivity and quality output of individuals, because managing this irresponsibly introduces an unacceptable level of risk to projects.
That this (apparently) hasn't made great inroads into software development is another indicator of the field's immaturity and lack of liability. Because there are no serious consequences for shipping faulty software (outside of a very few fields such as industrial automation), companies are not required to care about things like employee happiness or productivity over time, and this is reflected in stories such as this.
The best comments in this thread have advocated a personal, proactive approach to managing your work/life balance. This is true of almost everything about work - career development, training, raises, opportunities, etc etc.
I can't make out what he was paid for "rushing things out." If it's the same as other programmers, then that reflects badly on the managers.
I've seen managers citing low profits for low salaries, but never want to give out the lion's share when the company turns huge profits. Then, programmers become cheap commodities who can be replaced. Cost is always the bare minimum you can get away with, regardless of the profits.
This is more prevalent more in the local corporate companies of my country than start ups.
I can't stress the importance of how some corporate managers hardly know anything about the technicalities, and end up agreeing to outrageous changes in the requirements. This is the problem in IT companies that engage purely in "pricing wars." And the thing is, most of these mangers don't even have the necessary communication skills, for that's all they have to do, right?
Mental illness is very common. This story has nothing to do with programming, except that technically strong people are given a lot of leeway for strange behavior, meaning that folks who need treatment often do not get it soon enough.
The other point, and I think by now all of us should know this, is that we are each responsible for our health and our careers - we cannot look forward to a lifetime with a paternalistic employer.
[Update: this was downvoted. I'm not at all harshing on programmers or on mentally ill people. But we need to face reality; doing otherwise serves no one.]
Thank you for pointing this out. Your downvotes are not deserved. I imagine a number of mentally healthly programmers looking to prove a point in regards to unscrupulous employers would prefer that this not be chalked up to mental illness.
Though the story to me reads like a classic case of mental illness and eventual breakdown. I posted a comment on the blog asking for follow up of the individuals case. Despite citing human factors I bet they don't know, nor care.
I don't like labeling this type of situation mental illness. That suggests that it's only the individual who is ill. It seems to me that situations like this result from a sick system as much or more than from individual sickness.
Are you saying that the system is broken because some jobs ask you to be a hard worker?
The article indicated nothing specific that the company had done wrong. It even admitted that the guy was "well treated and well paid" for his hard work - he just didn't like how he was "respected".
It's astonishing me that getting paid and treated well to work hard triggers a comment that the "system is sick".
It's a matter of human beings being treated like cogs in a machine (which is in fact what they are in today's world). The potential of highly intelligent people is wasted by those who are better at extracting value than creating it. This leads to ever growing frustration which eventually explodes leading to the destruction of peoples lives.
These are seen as individual problems but if these trends continue I believe they will lead to the failure of human civilization and possibly of the human species itself.
hard worker - exactly the type of concept that the machine uses to exploit the naive.
You realize that Hacker News is focused on people starting businesses, right? Why are you here?
hard worker - exactly the type of concept that the machine uses to exploit the naive.
When you get your car worked on, do you expect that the mechanic should fix your car because you're paying him to or because you give him a hug and tell him that he's a useful human being?
When you get a cup of coffee, do you expect the barista to want not only for you to pay for your double whip latte, but to also feel that you're validating her as a human being?
The guy was "well paid and well treated". Without an iota of evidence that the business was doing anything wrong besides expecting that its employees do a good job - you indite the system and ignore the probable fact that this guy had mental stability issues that were going to come out either at work, his personal life, wherever.
I'm not pushing you anywhere. Be here if you like. I was just trying to understand it.
Your comments here are about as appropriate as if I'd go to the golf course and go on melodramatically about how awful a sport golf is. At some point, people would ask me, "Why are you here if you don't like golf?"
> When you get a cup of coffee, do you expect the barista to want not only for you to pay for your double whip latte, but to also feel that you're validating her as a human being?
Yes. I go out of my way to do so. I do try to find things to praise because these people have tons of negative interactions everyday. I do my best to make my interactions with them positive.
This comment really bugs me and I'm not sure why. Somehow I keep hearing in my head "I don't like labeling these gunshot wounds as 'injuries', what's really wrong is the environment full of random gunfire". It's the individual who is suffering, and that's important. Is illness supposed to be a cause, and not a result?
You definitely don't deserve to be downvoted. Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed about and needs to be treated seriously and head-on. Downvoting this is tantamount to stigmatization.
The worker described in the article is shockingly similar to someone I knew several years. That person had a psychotic breakdown at work and accosted our CEO (physically and verbally). He too worked long hours and was considered a productive employee. Though no one cracked the whip on him, I'm sure the stress was a trigger.
Luckily for him, he was in a good enough place to find help and take a step back to recover. Employees at my company kept in contact with him and talked with him frequently. Eventually he found another position and is thriving. I hope the worker in the article gets the same sort of support and isn't stigmatized by his actions.
Mental illness is certainly common, but someone who is normally able to cope ok can be pushed over the edge when under too much stress, and even who initially has no mental health problems at all can end up being driven to insanity, given the right conditions.
We need to be treating mental health just as importantly as physical health. There's all sorts of OH&S guidelines for proper posture, lifting things etc. Similarly, there should be OH&S guidelines for ensuring employees are provided with a safe working environment in which they're not going to end up like this (at least, to the extent that work contributed to their condition).
Yes, ultimately each is responsible to himself/herself. But it doesn't help if someone higher up is taking advantage of such people, knowingly. It is nearly the same as taking advantage of people with low self esteem etc. The managers and higher ups needn't help, but at least they can stay away from making the situation worse.
This is sad, but it's also plain old human psychology.
If you help someone out, you put yourself in an inferior position. If you're always the one sacrificing yourself, people around you will feel more and more superior to you. At some point, they will start expecting that you sacrifice yourself whenever shit hits the fan.
This doesn't mean it's bad to help out, or to sacrifice yourself once in a while. But in order to keep sanity and self dignity, it's extremely important to learn to say no as well.
If you help someone out, you put yourself in an inferior position.
I don't think so. I don't feel so.
At least when things are reasonable. Rather to the contrary: I feel stronger for being able to help.
Of course, in an unhealthy situation where help is required but not appreciated, and the person who help is not respected, then it's different. Fortunately, not my case most of the time.
It's important to keep in mind that the other party may feel superior, even though you don't feel inferior.
However, for many people this whole thing will never become a problem, because they are good at protecting their integrity.
At least when things are reasonable. Rather to the contrary: I feel stronger for being able to help.
That may very well be the case. But people (and situations) are different, and if you have a problem saying no, things may get very unhealthy.
Of course, in an unhealthy situation where help is required but not appreciated, and the person who help is not respected, then it's different. Fortunately, not my case most of the time
I guess that is often the case in stories like this. If you never say no, at some point your help gets more expected than appreciated.
> If you help someone out, you put yourself in an inferior position.
What? This doesn't make sense. When you help someone out, you are putting that person in an inferior position. Does a beggar feel superior to you because you tossed him a quarter?
When you toss a coin, you are already in a superior position. You toss the coin to be nice, and/or to affirm your position as superior (depending on your personality).
That's totally different from agreeing to work over the weekend to save somebody's ass. It's OK as a one-off, but if you do it more often than others, that's when you put yourself in an inferior position.
And this is precisely how the guy from the story thought, that's why he was saying he should be CEO, but the reality was different, because he was treated more like a slave..
Who is getting their work done, with least effort?
They are. They are using your experience to complete one of their objectives, with less effort for themselves.
What about your objectives? Well, if you are measured on helping other people complete their objectives, then it's neutral, you both meet objectives. But if you are not, if you have your own piece of work that needs to advance, then you're pushing back the completion of your objectives.
It does make sense. I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who said you should try to get someone to do you a favor because they'll be more likely to do you more favors in future.
Work-life balance is really important, and having a safety net outside of your workplace and project is key to not going completely batshit.
What's really bad is to find yourself in a position where you see your cofounder/coworker the vast majority of the time, and your work/project gets tangled up in the normal ebb and flow of the relationship.
You really, really don't want to get into a loop where you need to decompress with your best friends, but you can't because you avoid them because your shared work is going poorly, and the work is going poorly because you can't decompress. Yeah, being in that position sucks.
Make sure you've got something positive in your life beyond your current project.
If we're talking about software development, I bet you can piece together a computer from the trash (where do you think my home servers come from :)) that will be good enough to run a company. After that, your only issue is food and rent (which can be either a small or big issue depending on where you live).
The market is like a school yard. Some people are popular and get all the praise. This reinforces their incorrect belief that it was their skill and not chance that got them ahead.
If you want to prove you are really that good, contribute consistent novel and useful ideas to the world year after year. Prove that your ideas are good, with good unbiased evidence.
Or how about you do a good job providing something people will pay money for. Unfortunately for tech people, what the market will pay money for isn't always what tech people want to build.
Funnily, I believe you're both right, that there are several paths to success.
One is the "knowing the right people, buddies/PR" route. I've known several sociopaths and unethical people that do well along that route. Many have the "skill" of making you believe they're your best buddy (and then backstab you), or to sell you a bridge (or sell you a shitty job with unpaid extra hours).
The other is to provide something people will pay for, excel, and get known - which also involves some sales and PR, or marketing, but depending on your profession can be going through the speaker circuits at conferences, writing a blog or some other way to convey expertise, or getting writeups for your product somehow, if it's B2C - see Paul Graham on why he hired a PR:
It takes a variety of skills. Depending upon the endeavor - sometimes it takes technical skills, sometimes it takes sales skills, sometimes it takes marketing skills, sometimes it just takes the people skills to get to know the right people.
What it takes more than anything is drive. The most successful people out there typically have a tremendous amount of drive to pursue success.
I find that people who disregard skill do so because they have no clue as to why they're unsuccessful. The thing that would hurt their egos worst would be to admit to others and to themselves that they have no skill. The best thing that they could do is to look in the mirror, admit that they're lacking something, and work harder to find it.
I don't think that's true. A lot successful founders I know started their own companies because of frustration at their current company. Ironically they pull the shit that annoyed them with their own staff.
Even people with a lot of charisma will have a lot problems if they have no official company authority.
Ironically they pull the shit that annoyed them with their own staff.
Often, this is because they've been drenched from the cold bucket of reality. The nonsense ideas they once had about how easy it was to be the boss and how they would have the time, money, and energy to treat each employee as a special little extremely well paid but not-too-overworked snowflake was completely unachievable.
They realized that being the boss is difficult, because no matter how well their little startup is doing, there are always other bosses (customers, the IRS, life) to whom they are responsible.
I know a guy that started cutting himself once with a small pocket knife. He just went back to his office and lost it. He was obviously asked to leave, as he was upsetting the rest of the employees. I saw him a couple of years later and he didn't mention it so I didn't either. How do you ask someone if they are still crazy?
Stress is a killer. I try not to let it get to me; I have responsibilities.
The 8 hour workday was fought for and won for a reason. To expect more, an employer would be unprofessional. To accept more, except when compensated or in extreme circumstances, makes the engineer unprofessional. One comes to soon realize this. (See The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin.)) Most companies, especially startups, don't. It's sad to think that the culture values high stress, long work hours with the inevitable diminishing return, and literally anything, no matter how unhealthy, to get workers to be slaves. At the same time, a lot of these companies have mediocre health and dental benefits with high cost to the employee.
Yeah, companies don't give a shit about you. And why should they? Corporations exist to make money. That's all. Your health, while in the long-term helps this goal, in the short-term it doesn't. The shorter the lifespan of the company, the less they care. This is easily observed.
The question is, why do you give a shit about your company?
>the extra effort and hours that you put into your job as a software developer does not usually amount to someone higher up thinking you should run the company. It has been my experience that good producers are more likely to be asked to continue to produce.
In principle this is not even a bad thing. A great software engineer might not be that great as a manager or CEO.
It would be better to have a technical career track where you advance in pay, in status items (car, single office) or other perks (conference visits payed by the company). And of course a truely great company would send you on extra holiday for all-nighters and weekend-rush jobs.
It's also not necessary to move someone to management to give them more authority. Most software engineers don't want to deal with hiring/firing people or any of the other stuff that comes with being a manager, but they would be interested in having more say in technical decisions.
Doesn't mean the software engineer would be bad at either. In my experience software engineers with leadership skills(meaning someone I would respect, and would work under), still get passed up.
True. 35% may be a bit low, however, but I agree with everything else. On my first job, I didn't follow these guidelines. That's a mistake I won't commit again.
I'd add:
Fourth - say no to overtime, even if it's paid. Unless you're really in desperate need for money, think for a copule of minutes and you'll realize that your time (which you can use to do a ton of interesting things, and in fact is ultimately the matter life is made of) is usually more valuable than your money.
Maybe it is counter intuitive but I think healthy dose of this keeps me more productive and more focused on the job.
While at work I always try to keep somewhere in the back of my mind Bertrand Russell's quote: "One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important". It helps.
Early in my career a more senior developer told me you can't do a good job unless you're willing to get fired for it. Coming from a nouveau middle class background, that was pretty shocking to me but over the years I have seen so many situations that have confirmed it to me.
Saving up a few months of living expenses in a bank account, so called "fuck you" money (or "take this job and shove it" money in polite company), can give you peace of mind about losing your job.
Totally agreed. And I'd add a fourth point in:
- never ever try to please everyone.
As @jaimebuelta pointed out in another comment[1], your bosses will see your kind disposability just as a capability to do more work for less charge.
It happened to me when I was younger: I started working in a small company, only three employers, and I often was (secretly) asked to fix what other two coworkers made wrong. One thing led to another and one day, after 8 weeks that I was working there, the boss fired my two co-workers since I unknowingly proved him to be capable of doing alone a three-person job.
Although in the very first place I was kind of proud of myself — I was showing evidence to be a reliable software developer and it was nice — after a while I realized that things just couldn't work out that way: tripled efforts and responsiblities for same amount of money and same deadlines, I had to work afterhours and in weekends, and I had no more time for social life and hobbies, feeling more and more depressed, it was just driving me crazy.
At that point I thought to myself: "Why the hell people should see me as a sort of super hero? For whom or what am I doing this? I'm only in it for the money, this job pays my bills, I am not this job".
Next morning I talked to my boss and my amount of work came back to what I applied for, and that was one of my best decisions ever.
Second - never do more then 35% of the work you are capable of doing in a day.
I'm a big fan of three-hour-per-day planning. "Metered work" (what your boss expects of you) should be limited to a 3-hour block, preferably a contiguous one. After that, find a way to sneak time into things that build your career. Don't mix the two. (You'll either cut the self-directed stuff and burn out, or give your job responsibilities the shaft and at zero, you might actually get fired.) When you need to spike, turn that 3-hour dedication to 4 or 5 or 6 for a little while. The nice thing about the 3-hour plan is that it accounts for slack, because things always take longer than they should.
It takes your boss 15 minutes per week (on average) to tell you what to do. If you do 15 hours of metered work, you're giving him 60:1 leverage. That's enough not to get you fired.
The trick to becoming awesome, I think, is to take that 25 hours of "working time" per week that most people spend on Reddit or Farmville or non-work IMing and turn it into Coursera or open source time (don't ever use it to write code you'll need for a side project; legal issues make it not worth it). It's not easy, though, because it's much harder to hide it when you're studying machine learning at 2:30 in the afternoon.
The pressure one might feel is overwhelming: you're expected to work extra-hours because you have a salary greater than the region's average (not only company's average!...); you're expected to work extra-hours, otherwise you're not motivated; you're expected to work extra-hours willingly, not because you're asked or it's needed, and be happy about it; you're expected to work extra-hours because someone gave a deadline to a costumer that's technically and humanly unfeasible, and now there's no going back.
All this stress and a mental illness in a parent of mine are scaring me.
The thing is, if I had a mental breakdown and ended up in a mental institution, I would probably repeat the "pen and paper to write a program" episode. My brain is so wired to program, either for work or for leisure, that I can't stop thinking about it. If I'm not doing "something" (reading, watching a movie, ...) I'm thinking of something lisp-y. Its exhausting.
It is important to learn to use your skills to create what you feel, not what some other person tells you to. Developing a skill is the easy part, learning to use it is harder, because you need to find out who you are.
This is the dark side of the (otherwise desirable) trait of "getting things done" as employee.
I you don't actively manage your working hours and hold yourself back, somebody else will suck you out until you have nothing left.
At the end, you will be very unsatisfied for some obscure reason: You did everything you was asked for, yet somehow noone appreciates you and you still earn entry-level.
In my opinion, you should only use 80% of your working hours doing the "real stuff". Devote 20% of your working hours to non-technical work, active career development and image management.
1) talk with your boss about clients
2) show interest in the business side of your project
3) ask challenging non-technical questions
4) have a nice chat with your manager about non-work stuff
5) make sure everyone knows who had the interesting feature idea last week
6) make sure that the decision which overruled your recommendation is in the meeting report.
...
This is good for you and the company in the long run.
Some of your tickets will have to wait, then. Maybe the deadline won't be met perfectly.
For developers who are good at "getting things done" - they should really look forward to building a career as independent developers. Some people just don't care to manage other people and deal with their peculiarities (I 'm one of them) . The few developers that i knew who were really good at getting things done, they still do the bulk of the work in the same companies. Despite being given "senior" titles, i wouldn't like to be in their position. You are supposed to use your work to learn, then move on.
Most managers already know that you can't work 100%.
They expect 20% of your working week to be spent on things which support work but isn't directly the work task itself (meetings, communication, HR, training, etc). And as this is spread out across the week it's not as obvious and visible to the worker that this is the case.
One can still work unhealthily hard for those 4 days a week of real effort. I share your opinion that you should only work that hard 80% of the time (he says, as he starts another 12 hour day), but if you're not accounting for the stuff around the work that still adds up to working at 100% capacity and without the breaks to keep yourself sane, healthy and developing.
Some of the best advice I've ever had was, "when you start at a company, it's tempting to try and work your arse off to prove how worthy you are. Don't - you're not proving anything, you're just establishing precedent. Instead, quickly determine what the absolute minimum you can get away with is and do slightly above that. Then work harder for the month before review time so you can justify a raise. The extra effort will be noticed now, but if you'd worked your arse off then that would just be normal behaviour."
That may be good advice in the sense of being effective, but encouraging people to actively deceive their employers and intentionally do as little as possible is disingenuous and dishonest.
If you don't think that reflects on your integrity, or if you don't consider your integrity worth maintaining, then this really is advice that you could consider good. But telling this to impressionable people who are inexperienced and new to Real Life in general would do them and everyone they'll ever work for a huge disservice.
I think a better version of the parent comment's advice would be figure out what is a reasonable, healthy, sustainable level of productivity and try to work as close to that as possible - and no more.
Yes, this is good advice. It centers on the person and advocates a work/life balance. It doesn't center on the employer and how they can be manipulated and cheated for the employee's benefit.
You should spend your early time at a company gaining an understanding of its business needs (basically understand why you're there) so you can later take 'ownership' of important projects and tasks. Ultimately you'll be judged by your importance to the company, not much you work (although those two are positively correlated).
You're also teaching your management chain to provide the minimum reward, fire frequently, and generally be unpleasant to force you to work more. And you turn your daily life into a struggle, as you and the management feel out and try to budge the line.
>> In my opinion, you should only use 80% of your working hours doing the "real stuff". Devote 20% of your working hours to non-technical work, active career development and image management.
You're right, only the percents are inverted. 20% (max!) for the Company and 80% for personal development.
And the 6 points listed by you show me you're either a clueless employee or an unscrupulous Company jockey.
This sounds like the final destination of burnout. Probably there should be more education about the effects of overworking on mental/physical health so that people can recognise bad situations when they're getting into them and pull out before it leads to self-destruction. Also the fault is partly on the management side. A good manager should notice if a particular person seems to be working a lot longer than anyone else under relentless deadlines and intervene.
While I've never seen anything as bad as in this article I have seen situations where the mild-mannered and earnest tech guy tries to be accommodating to help the company (and sometimes also in the expectation that their efforts will be recognised or rewarded) but really just ends up getting taken advantage of. On odd occasions (especially in the early part of my career) I have even been that guy.
Since nobody here said it, if you ever happen in this situation were management dodges accountability for their actions or doesn't understand they are accountable. then there are two options.
1. Stay: dissociate yourself from the work and the outcome of your work
2. Quit: start looking for companies that are a better fit for your professional pride and when you've found one, jump ship.
Technical skills are still rare, you're not working in a supermarket here. you've got options.
I worked with a guy who was an incredibly talented developer, and it was his first 'proper' development job. He was smart and good at what he did, and made a good impression, however as time progressed and the reality of ever shifting goal posts and getting half the time you really need to do something took it's toll.
Eventually he went to the doctor, who diagnosed a stress related condition and he was prescribed meds which helped for a while. But, it's that melting pot and eventually he snapped, smashed a keyboard and then threw a monitor onto the floor. I took the time to try and help and he realised whilst he loved dev work, he just couldn't deal with the stress of working inside a business and decided to give up.
It's a hard industry, I'm personally surprised there's not a much higher rate of stress related illness and depression. We've all probably skirted the burnout zone on a regular basis, long term that's not going to be great for anyone. I'd say the increase in startups being lead by technically gifted people who've done development should help, but there still seems to be an acceptance of push and push until you break or the job is done.
Im a programmer, ten times better than any of you. I have been in a mental hospital twice in the past 3 years. Once because I was so high up in the US Govt that I was being run by the mafia. And Second because it took me almost a year to shake it off after I quit. I was bribed, I was threatened, and it drove me off a cliff from which I have still not recovered. Be careful what you wish for.
It is far to easy to fall into this trap. At my last job my boss always tryed to finish all my tickets until a friend in managment told me about a conversation he had with our boss. It boils down to: "Does he gt his work done?" "Yes, sometimes he has to stay in late but he gets the job done" "Then we are not giving him enough work. If there are days where he gets the job done and leave on time, there must be times when he finishes his tickets before office hours are over."
At my new job things are a lot better. When I started I screwed up a couple of times because I tryed to make things work by putting in over time and fighting until the last minute when things went south, where all I had to do was tell the mangment why I need more time / manpower like anyone else in my company.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadNot many people knew of his Twitter account, but I did. He would post crude remarks about the manager not listening to him and how he should be the manager, often using the initials of the manager when he insulted him to be careful and not be accused of slander I guess. I would often hear him in the office talking to himself, swearing under his breath and mashing his keyboard. You could tell it was getting to him. He was on-call 24/7 but apparently wasn't adequately paid the amount he should have been for someone who was expected to fix something at the drop of a hat.
One day he came in and sat at his desk refusing to do any work. He just sat there and then the manager confronted him and asked why he wasn't addressing his list of high priority tickets that he had and then the guy lost it. He didn't get violent, but he started yelling at the guy and the manager was a well-built guy (sorted of sounded and looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger) who I wouldn't even dare cross. After yelling he just walked out and never came back.
Of course my manager reported the incident to some higher-ups and then it was revealed a couple of days later he was in a mental hospital as he had a complete breakdown (he apparently drove himself there). I didn't know him that well, but I went and visited him after finding out where he was. He told me that it all built up; he was being blamed when things went wrong and weren't done on time and not being praised when things went right and were delivered within unrealistic time-frames. His girlfriend had also left him the day prior to the meltdown, he said she was unhappy because he was never home and when he was, he was always fixing something remotely or had to come in to fix something.
I have a feeling this kind of thing is a lot more common than we can imagine.
Which is to say, at some companies, playing office politics is your real job. "Work" is just a signal you can emit to show that you are willing to submit enough to not get fired.
If you can't talk to the CEO or CTO, if you're technical, on your first day physically at the company, that's a Bad Signal (tm).
Actually, perhaps I need to preface all my advice with "in all due pragmatic cynicism." I've added it to four posts so far and people seem to react much better to them when I do.
I'm told life looks very different if you have done anything resembling settling down. But I haven't been there yet and my glasses have rose coloured lenses.
It's a bit like martial arts. Being good at it is nice since you don't have to be afraid of being beaten up. If you have to fight someone every day however, there might be something wrong.
I have seen politics kill someone's work and I have seen a project launch by doing nothing but working away and submitting their end product to flabbergasted responses. But it's rarely so simple.
If you don't understand what's going on and blame politics, you are living in a foreign land and don't understand the language. If you understand and don't try to ensure your voice is heard and respected, you don't understand the customs. If you don't understand the language and customs, you're at the nations mercy.
But fundamentally if you view it as opposed to work you'll rarely succeed in the best outcome even if you do strike a balance.
I've been in situations where politicking allowed the company to pivot from an established, ineffective strategy to an new, better one.
> Get new job, jump in there really eger, do a good job.
> Face stupid political BS, eagerness disappears.
> Start looking for other jobs, then ultimately quit.
If you keep working hard in a toxic environment you're going to do yourself harm. If you care about doing good work, move company. Many will be content with just collecting a wage though.
As an aside, I'ved worked on a helpdesk and got through about 5-8 tickets a day while colleagues got through 40. Ultimately I was promoted because those 8 tickets were the ones everyone else was skipping because they didn't have a clue what to do. Neither did I, but once I figured it out I did. If your tickets regularly require on average 5 to 6 minutes work, then perhaps you should question the value of the work you're doing.
Exactly. Either leave or just coast by doing the necessary minimum and keep your stress buffers and brainpower for interesting personal stuff
If I didn't end up leaving, I might have ended up just like him.
So unless you are working for yourself, then work to rule will keep you sane. Use your hindsight to plan holidays, if managment don't listern in a timely manner about a potentual problem then just plan that week off down the line and let them suffer - sadly it is the only way you can stay sane and they can pay for there mistakes. Its hard out there, don't make it harder on yourself.
I agree to that. If management doesn't feel pain of its mistakes it does not have an incentive to improve.
Having said that, I think a good compromise would be to make sure that the people who get assigned to managerial positions have formerly had the job of the people they manage. That way they're likely to understand the pinpoints and the frustrations and be motivated to eliminate them. Obviously not all programmers will qualify for this job, but some certainly will.
Not so sure coders trump managers in the intelligence dept. After all, managers tend to earn more, and do less; I'd say they're brilliant in this respect ;-)
I strongly advise everyone to read the Putt's Law, where this phenomena is broken down in great depth.
Its not uncommon for someone straight out of college, working as an "ideas" man to manage programmers.
People without technical knowledge in the roles of technical managers are in a league of their own when it comes to suck.
Good managers will balance out good technical people in terms of skillset, and help their team to do their job, while also coaching them in the areas where they are weak (and if the manager is weak technically, then obviously technical coaching is not in scope). Good managers will filter what reaches inside their team from the outside and protect their team from crap while captaining the ship forward. They know their weaknesses and also know that good leadership requires hiring people who are smarter than you are, and then helping to facilitate the magic that can happen when good people get together.
Having managers who are strong both technically and in a business sense is rare. There are only so many Elon Musks in the world. But when you work with one, your work becomes very enjoyable.
At the end of the day, team members don't have visibility as to what managers do every day. This blog is great for understanding this stuff: http://randsinrepose.com
http://www.randsinrepose.com/cat_management.html
But, for example, if you keep telling your management (as in writing e-mails with CC to higher management or have it written in the meeting minutes) that we need more file servers because we might run out of space and they ignore it, then when it happens and you're not around to fix this next time they may think twice before ignoring your advice. On the other hand if you resolve the issue yourself it can happen that no-one will notice.
>I agree to that. If management doesn't feel pain of its mistakes it does not have an incentive to improve.
This makes sense, but how do you do that without hurting yourself?
Shit hits fan, you have issue documented as you alerted your manager and got response not an issue so you booked holiday and not there. With that you can not be blamed. Also ALL IT people worth there salt work above and beyond what there contract states - so if your contract is for DBA work, that is not sys admin work, that is not crawling under desks networking or desktop support - but you help out and do those things. So with that if it is outside your scope of your work contract then again you have the ability to ignore it as well. But the holiday approach is the best.
But there are 3 types of managers - those that can do your job, those that think they can do your job and those that will admit they have no idea. Then ontop of that there are those that can balance dealing with you and sheilding you from HR and the other crap and then there are those that just look after themselfs and smile to your face and say all sorts behind your back. As a rule a manager that can do your job is one you will get on with, ones that can not do your job are less likely to be good managers I have found, though have met some that are and there is no hard and fast rule or way to single the good from the bad sadly until your few months into a job.
A very good advice I have always followed. This may not be true if you have your own company, however - since you will need a lot of drive to make things move forward.
You do not owe your employer your sanity or anything above and beyond what's reasonable. (As decided by your personal satisfaction and the standards/mores of your culture.)
If you're seeking to put more into the pot so you can extract more later, save money and stash it in a mutual fund or start hustling for yourself. Employers are perfectly happy to ignore you for decades on end, if they even keep you around that long.
Don't pretend value will present itself to you just because you're putting in the hours. Like thinking you'll get a date just because you're a good person.
Edit:
Don't let employers/management guilt you into working more hours than they deserve from you.
[1] http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/gervais-macle...
I have to admit, I find the jargon of this particular sub-culture of analyzing corporate politics somewhat annoying despite being a fan of Church.
You need only observe how many workplaces will let employees who are obviously sick with a cold/flu come in and work to understand how poorly most workplaces respond to an employee in trouble: They will not send someone home who is actively exposing coworkers to infectious diseases, so do you think they're going to notice if you're risking your health with stress? Sadly not.
So, as an employee, it's up to you: Pay attention to your stress level. If you aren't sleeping well, do something about it. If the stress is making you gain weight, do something about it. If you're having serious, serious problems, do something about it. You can't count on your employer to support you if shit hits the fan - even if it's their fault - because 99% of them won't. You have to be proactive.
You won't get promotions or raises for managing your own stress level and working reasonable hours, but you won't get promotions or raises for literally killing yourself either. So play it safe.
So we shouldn't say "it's just up to the employee", because that attitude creates its own culture, one where the employees work just enough to not get fired and the management accepts this attitude as network damage and routes work around it.
Administrations have an opportunity to choose what they're doing. Advising a startup-laden forum like HN to aspire to massively-multiplayer mediocrity might not be wise, because startups exist in a high-failure environment and must strive for passion and excellence. It's the right culture for very large corporations and for franchise restaurants, but it's the wrong culture for the deli down the corner.
Surprisingly, I don't think the solution must require "giving up control" as a developer-manager, though that will certainly help. If you look at these stories, there is a perverse sense of alienation from the company. Maybe this metaphor helps: the manager should be conducting an orchestra. The conductor doesn't have to give up control of the whole orchestra necessarily, but they do need to be aware that it's a bunch of individual people, and you need to communicate your vision of the music you're playing, and they need to feel the same vision and work with you to express it. You also need to forgive errors in performance rather than stop the orchestra for every little thing, and you need to let the audience applaud everyone when success finally happens, and everyone needs to hear the whole symphony, their parts and everybody else's, to know what's going on. In this way, you could in some sense "keep control" even though you give up micromanaging.
If your employer isn't like that then they aren't a good employer.
I mean, yeah, we can spout platitudes all we want here. I agree that if you aspire to be a good employer, you should treat your employees well. But that's not the problem here: The example employee in the OP was a top performer who helped solve tough problems, and nobody seemed to suspect that anything was wrong until he snapped.
The problem is that workplaces are not designed to be able to identify an employee having problems with stress, let alone to actively manage it. I have never encountered a workplace that can do so effectively - some employers are better than others about things like work/life balance, etc. But the level of stress in your life is variable, and the level of stress being generated by your work is variable, even in the best of circumstances. It is difficult, if not impossible, for an employer to even understand how much stress you might be under outside of work.
For example, a lead artist at a previous employer got let go for getting into too many arguments at work. It was only at that point that we learned that he was having a really tough time because he was a single parent and his son was suffering from a severe, life-threatening condition. It's nice to think that if his supervisors had known they could have done something about it - maybe they would have - but from the outside it merely made him look like a bad employee. Maybe he wanted to keep his personal life private, maybe he thought he had it under control, or maybe they decided they had to set an example regardless of his reasons - but the point stands: Ultimately, it is up to you, not your employer, to manage your stress.
Usually when you hear stories like this, it's because the employee is screwing up. In this case, it's because the higher ups realize that proactively preventing employees from becoming overstressed is a good way to keep employees.
There is a lot of active effort in my field (consultant engineering) to manage the true productivity and quality output of individuals, because managing this irresponsibly introduces an unacceptable level of risk to projects.
That this (apparently) hasn't made great inroads into software development is another indicator of the field's immaturity and lack of liability. Because there are no serious consequences for shipping faulty software (outside of a very few fields such as industrial automation), companies are not required to care about things like employee happiness or productivity over time, and this is reflected in stories such as this.
The best comments in this thread have advocated a personal, proactive approach to managing your work/life balance. This is true of almost everything about work - career development, training, raises, opportunities, etc etc.
I've seen managers citing low profits for low salaries, but never want to give out the lion's share when the company turns huge profits. Then, programmers become cheap commodities who can be replaced. Cost is always the bare minimum you can get away with, regardless of the profits.
This is more prevalent more in the local corporate companies of my country than start ups.
I can't stress the importance of how some corporate managers hardly know anything about the technicalities, and end up agreeing to outrageous changes in the requirements. This is the problem in IT companies that engage purely in "pricing wars." And the thing is, most of these mangers don't even have the necessary communication skills, for that's all they have to do, right?
The other point, and I think by now all of us should know this, is that we are each responsible for our health and our careers - we cannot look forward to a lifetime with a paternalistic employer.
[Update: this was downvoted. I'm not at all harshing on programmers or on mentally ill people. But we need to face reality; doing otherwise serves no one.]
Though the story to me reads like a classic case of mental illness and eventual breakdown. I posted a comment on the blog asking for follow up of the individuals case. Despite citing human factors I bet they don't know, nor care.
The article indicated nothing specific that the company had done wrong. It even admitted that the guy was "well treated and well paid" for his hard work - he just didn't like how he was "respected".
It's astonishing me that getting paid and treated well to work hard triggers a comment that the "system is sick".
These are seen as individual problems but if these trends continue I believe they will lead to the failure of human civilization and possibly of the human species itself.
hard worker - exactly the type of concept that the machine uses to exploit the naive.
You realize that Hacker News is focused on people starting businesses, right? Why are you here?
hard worker - exactly the type of concept that the machine uses to exploit the naive.
When you get your car worked on, do you expect that the mechanic should fix your car because you're paying him to or because you give him a hug and tell him that he's a useful human being?
When you get a cup of coffee, do you expect the barista to want not only for you to pay for your double whip latte, but to also feel that you're validating her as a human being?
The guy was "well paid and well treated". Without an iota of evidence that the business was doing anything wrong besides expecting that its employees do a good job - you indite the system and ignore the probable fact that this guy had mental stability issues that were going to come out either at work, his personal life, wherever.
This is absolutely typical of the problem with society.
Judge me, exclude me, push me under a bridge.
It doesn't matter what you do to me, the day will come when man will be judged by those he has judged.
Your comments here are about as appropriate as if I'd go to the golf course and go on melodramatically about how awful a sport golf is. At some point, people would ask me, "Why are you here if you don't like golf?"
Yes. I go out of my way to do so. I do try to find things to praise because these people have tons of negative interactions everyday. I do my best to make my interactions with them positive.
The worker described in the article is shockingly similar to someone I knew several years. That person had a psychotic breakdown at work and accosted our CEO (physically and verbally). He too worked long hours and was considered a productive employee. Though no one cracked the whip on him, I'm sure the stress was a trigger.
Luckily for him, he was in a good enough place to find help and take a step back to recover. Employees at my company kept in contact with him and talked with him frequently. Eventually he found another position and is thriving. I hope the worker in the article gets the same sort of support and isn't stigmatized by his actions.
We need to be treating mental health just as importantly as physical health. There's all sorts of OH&S guidelines for proper posture, lifting things etc. Similarly, there should be OH&S guidelines for ensuring employees are provided with a safe working environment in which they're not going to end up like this (at least, to the extent that work contributed to their condition).
If you help someone out, you put yourself in an inferior position. If you're always the one sacrificing yourself, people around you will feel more and more superior to you. At some point, they will start expecting that you sacrifice yourself whenever shit hits the fan.
This doesn't mean it's bad to help out, or to sacrifice yourself once in a while. But in order to keep sanity and self dignity, it's extremely important to learn to say no as well.
I don't think so. I don't feel so.
At least when things are reasonable. Rather to the contrary: I feel stronger for being able to help.
Of course, in an unhealthy situation where help is required but not appreciated, and the person who help is not respected, then it's different. Fortunately, not my case most of the time.
It's important to keep in mind that the other party may feel superior, even though you don't feel inferior.
However, for many people this whole thing will never become a problem, because they are good at protecting their integrity.
At least when things are reasonable. Rather to the contrary: I feel stronger for being able to help.
That may very well be the case. But people (and situations) are different, and if you have a problem saying no, things may get very unhealthy.
Of course, in an unhealthy situation where help is required but not appreciated, and the person who help is not respected, then it's different. Fortunately, not my case most of the time
I guess that is often the case in stories like this. If you never say no, at some point your help gets more expected than appreciated.
I can't quite see why that is important. It doesn't hurt me that the other party feels superior. Sometimes it may amuse me, though.
What? This doesn't make sense. When you help someone out, you are putting that person in an inferior position. Does a beggar feel superior to you because you tossed him a quarter?
When you toss a coin, you are already in a superior position. You toss the coin to be nice, and/or to affirm your position as superior (depending on your personality).
That's totally different from agreeing to work over the weekend to save somebody's ass. It's OK as a one-off, but if you do it more often than others, that's when you put yourself in an inferior position.
They are. They are using your experience to complete one of their objectives, with less effort for themselves.
What about your objectives? Well, if you are measured on helping other people complete their objectives, then it's neutral, you both meet objectives. But if you are not, if you have your own piece of work that needs to advance, then you're pushing back the completion of your objectives.
What's really bad is to find yourself in a position where you see your cofounder/coworker the vast majority of the time, and your work/project gets tangled up in the normal ebb and flow of the relationship.
You really, really don't want to get into a loop where you need to decompress with your best friends, but you can't because you avoid them because your shared work is going poorly, and the work is going poorly because you can't decompress. Yeah, being in that position sucks.
Make sure you've got something positive in your life beyond your current project.
Find a hobby :)
If you want to prove you are really that good, contribute consistent novel and useful ideas to the world year after year. Prove that your ideas are good, with good unbiased evidence.
If it doesn't take skill to have success in the market, then what's stopping you from being filthy rich?
contribute consistent novel and useful ideas
Wait, so if the market doesn't know how to properly judge ideas then who is the judge of what's "novel and useful"?
Knowing the right people, flirting with tech reporters, being good at PR etc
That is what gets you ahead.
From what I have seen, it isn't the best solution that wins, but the most publicised.
One is the "knowing the right people, buddies/PR" route. I've known several sociopaths and unethical people that do well along that route. Many have the "skill" of making you believe they're your best buddy (and then backstab you), or to sell you a bridge (or sell you a shitty job with unpaid extra hours).
The other is to provide something people will pay for, excel, and get known - which also involves some sales and PR, or marketing, but depending on your profession can be going through the speaker circuits at conferences, writing a blog or some other way to convey expertise, or getting writeups for your product somehow, if it's B2C - see Paul Graham on why he hired a PR:
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
What it takes more than anything is drive. The most successful people out there typically have a tremendous amount of drive to pursue success.
I find that people who disregard skill do so because they have no clue as to why they're unsuccessful. The thing that would hurt their egos worst would be to admit to others and to themselves that they have no skill. The best thing that they could do is to look in the mirror, admit that they're lacking something, and work harder to find it.
Even people with a lot of charisma will have a lot problems if they have no official company authority.
Often, this is because they've been drenched from the cold bucket of reality. The nonsense ideas they once had about how easy it was to be the boss and how they would have the time, money, and energy to treat each employee as a special little extremely well paid but not-too-overworked snowflake was completely unachievable.
They realized that being the boss is difficult, because no matter how well their little startup is doing, there are always other bosses (customers, the IRS, life) to whom they are responsible.
Stress is a killer. I try not to let it get to me; I have responsibilities.
Yeah, companies don't give a shit about you. And why should they? Corporations exist to make money. That's all. Your health, while in the long-term helps this goal, in the short-term it doesn't. The shorter the lifespan of the company, the less they care. This is easily observed.
The question is, why do you give a shit about your company?
In principle this is not even a bad thing. A great software engineer might not be that great as a manager or CEO.
It would be better to have a technical career track where you advance in pay, in status items (car, single office) or other perks (conference visits payed by the company). And of course a truely great company would send you on extra holiday for all-nighters and weekend-rush jobs.
First - don't care at all about your job. Remember that all corporations are by definition psychopaths and they will treat you accordingly.
Second - never do more then 35% of the work you are capable of doing in a day.
Third - if you find yourself getting stressed out tell yourself repeatedly "It's only a stupid job. There is no point in stressing about it."
I'd add:
Fourth - say no to overtime, even if it's paid. Unless you're really in desperate need for money, think for a copule of minutes and you'll realize that your time (which you can use to do a ton of interesting things, and in fact is ultimately the matter life is made of) is usually more valuable than your money.
Maybe it is counter intuitive but I think healthy dose of this keeps me more productive and more focused on the job. While at work I always try to keep somewhere in the back of my mind Bertrand Russell's quote: "One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important". It helps.
As @jaimebuelta pointed out in another comment[1], your bosses will see your kind disposability just as a capability to do more work for less charge.
It happened to me when I was younger: I started working in a small company, only three employers, and I often was (secretly) asked to fix what other two coworkers made wrong. One thing led to another and one day, after 8 weeks that I was working there, the boss fired my two co-workers since I unknowingly proved him to be capable of doing alone a three-person job.
Although in the very first place I was kind of proud of myself — I was showing evidence to be a reliable software developer and it was nice — after a while I realized that things just couldn't work out that way: tripled efforts and responsiblities for same amount of money and same deadlines, I had to work afterhours and in weekends, and I had no more time for social life and hobbies, feeling more and more depressed, it was just driving me crazy.
At that point I thought to myself: "Why the hell people should see me as a sort of super hero? For whom or what am I doing this? I'm only in it for the money, this job pays my bills, I am not this job".
Next morning I talked to my boss and my amount of work came back to what I applied for, and that was one of my best decisions ever.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5575761
I'm a big fan of three-hour-per-day planning. "Metered work" (what your boss expects of you) should be limited to a 3-hour block, preferably a contiguous one. After that, find a way to sneak time into things that build your career. Don't mix the two. (You'll either cut the self-directed stuff and burn out, or give your job responsibilities the shaft and at zero, you might actually get fired.) When you need to spike, turn that 3-hour dedication to 4 or 5 or 6 for a little while. The nice thing about the 3-hour plan is that it accounts for slack, because things always take longer than they should.
It takes your boss 15 minutes per week (on average) to tell you what to do. If you do 15 hours of metered work, you're giving him 60:1 leverage. That's enough not to get you fired.
The trick to becoming awesome, I think, is to take that 25 hours of "working time" per week that most people spend on Reddit or Farmville or non-work IMing and turn it into Coursera or open source time (don't ever use it to write code you'll need for a side project; legal issues make it not worth it). It's not easy, though, because it's much harder to hide it when you're studying machine learning at 2:30 in the afternoon.
Life is too short to spend every minute of it making somebody else rich.
—ardit
The pressure one might feel is overwhelming: you're expected to work extra-hours because you have a salary greater than the region's average (not only company's average!...); you're expected to work extra-hours, otherwise you're not motivated; you're expected to work extra-hours willingly, not because you're asked or it's needed, and be happy about it; you're expected to work extra-hours because someone gave a deadline to a costumer that's technically and humanly unfeasible, and now there's no going back.
All this stress and a mental illness in a parent of mine are scaring me.
The thing is, if I had a mental breakdown and ended up in a mental institution, I would probably repeat the "pen and paper to write a program" episode. My brain is so wired to program, either for work or for leisure, that I can't stop thinking about it. If I'm not doing "something" (reading, watching a movie, ...) I'm thinking of something lisp-y. Its exhausting.
This is the dark side of the (otherwise desirable) trait of "getting things done" as employee.
I you don't actively manage your working hours and hold yourself back, somebody else will suck you out until you have nothing left.
At the end, you will be very unsatisfied for some obscure reason: You did everything you was asked for, yet somehow noone appreciates you and you still earn entry-level.
In my opinion, you should only use 80% of your working hours doing the "real stuff". Devote 20% of your working hours to non-technical work, active career development and image management.
1) talk with your boss about clients
2) show interest in the business side of your project
3) ask challenging non-technical questions
4) have a nice chat with your manager about non-work stuff
5) make sure everyone knows who had the interesting feature idea last week
6) make sure that the decision which overruled your recommendation is in the meeting report.
...
This is good for you and the company in the long run.
Some of your tickets will have to wait, then. Maybe the deadline won't be met perfectly.
That's fine.
They expect 20% of your working week to be spent on things which support work but isn't directly the work task itself (meetings, communication, HR, training, etc). And as this is spread out across the week it's not as obvious and visible to the worker that this is the case.
One can still work unhealthily hard for those 4 days a week of real effort. I share your opinion that you should only work that hard 80% of the time (he says, as he starts another 12 hour day), but if you're not accounting for the stuff around the work that still adds up to working at 100% capacity and without the breaks to keep yourself sane, healthy and developing.
Good insight from the article: "Note, not everyone hates their jobs. There are some entre-ployees out there that love their jobs."
A new species was discovered: the brainwashed employee who thinks he's an entrepreneur.
If you don't think that reflects on your integrity, or if you don't consider your integrity worth maintaining, then this really is advice that you could consider good. But telling this to impressionable people who are inexperienced and new to Real Life in general would do them and everyone they'll ever work for a huge disservice.
You're right, only the percents are inverted. 20% (max!) for the Company and 80% for personal development.
And the 6 points listed by you show me you're either a clueless employee or an unscrupulous Company jockey.
I think it is the 'equivalent value' principle.
Everyone should only work as much as their salary equivalent value, and no more. At least that's what I do.
The rest of the time... ssh to my private server and do stuff for me. I will appreciate it.
While I've never seen anything as bad as in this article I have seen situations where the mild-mannered and earnest tech guy tries to be accommodating to help the company (and sometimes also in the expectation that their efforts will be recognised or rewarded) but really just ends up getting taken advantage of. On odd occasions (especially in the early part of my career) I have even been that guy.
1. Stay: dissociate yourself from the work and the outcome of your work 2. Quit: start looking for companies that are a better fit for your professional pride and when you've found one, jump ship.
Technical skills are still rare, you're not working in a supermarket here. you've got options.
Eventually he went to the doctor, who diagnosed a stress related condition and he was prescribed meds which helped for a while. But, it's that melting pot and eventually he snapped, smashed a keyboard and then threw a monitor onto the floor. I took the time to try and help and he realised whilst he loved dev work, he just couldn't deal with the stress of working inside a business and decided to give up.
It's a hard industry, I'm personally surprised there's not a much higher rate of stress related illness and depression. We've all probably skirted the burnout zone on a regular basis, long term that's not going to be great for anyone. I'd say the increase in startups being lead by technically gifted people who've done development should help, but there still seems to be an acceptance of push and push until you break or the job is done.
At my new job things are a lot better. When I started I screwed up a couple of times because I tryed to make things work by putting in over time and fighting until the last minute when things went south, where all I had to do was tell the mangment why I need more time / manpower like anyone else in my company.