This deserves every ounce of attention that it can get and I definitely know the feeling. I worked about as hard as I could for a little over a year to save a 15 year old company from going under. I was the only developer/infrastructure person because we couldn't hire anybody else since it looked like a sinking ship.
I worked 24/7 (with a wife and 2 kids) on this beastly mix of 10 year old Perl and very inexperienced Rails code. Despite the hours, I was excited because I thought this was THE big opportunity.
At my one year review, the owners told me I wasn't working hard enough. I went from a high point to a low point overnight. Wrestled with it for about a month. Then while I was riding in the car with my wife I got a snarky hipchat message from the owner of the company and showed it to my wife.
She looked right at me and said, "Quit. Don't worry about the money, we will figure it out. I don't want you working for people like that and it's obvious what it's doing to you."
So I resigned. Told them I'd stay on for 30 days for transition but that it just wasn't the right place for me. The weight off my shoulders from resigning was ENORMOUS.
For about 2 months I struggled with what to do. All the experience I'd gained at that job had virtually made my resume and after the experience, just like you I wanted to find something MEANINGFUL to do. Something I could wake up every morning and know that what I was doing made a difference for the right reasons.
And the opportunity came 2 months later. I ended up turning down a job for twice the pay for what I knew was best in the long run. So far it has been and my wife and I have never been happier. This company treats employees better than any I've ever even heard of. Not silly perks but actual, life balance, we value you as a human being, feel free to move about the company if you want a different challenge...perks.
The only downside is that I'm pretty sure my wife will kill me if I ever lose this job. :-)
Well done. Its not easy to move when everything depends on you even if people don't appreciate it. Great to see that you found real success and it shows what's possible when people aren't afraid to make a move.
I stabilized them over the course of that year and helped them transition to new developers. Company is doing fine as far as I know and should be for a while.
They've got a massive network effect which is why they were able to survive months of chaos from a bad rebuild. That's the only reason I came on in the first place. The network effect bought a lot of time to fix things and there was no clear "Facebook" to their "MySpace."
Really the only thing working against the company is that their target market is aging a lot.
Nah, it worked out. They had to replace me with 3 people. :-)
Besides, I didn't want the company to go under. I'd spent the last year making sure they didn't and didn't want all of that work to be for nothing. Plus, I didn't want the other people who worked there to be out of the job.
Eventually, everybody who worked there with me left on their own.
What are people's thoughts/experiences with burnout happening without overtime? Over the past few years I've grown more and more bored at work. Even switching jobs from different ends of the spectrum didn't fix this. I can get myself into flow but it seems to take more and more will power as time goes on. Different tech challenges help, but it's nothing like my halcyon days of straight out of college. Of coming into work and just doing the job and enjoying it with no use of will power. I go home and then fight to do the "bare minimum", read, exercise, eat healthy, minimal home chores and decent sleep. I've wondered if having a home hobby would help but I have none. I feel like "burnout" describes where I'm at, but I have a hard time stating it as fact because I rarely work over 40hrs a week on the job. So, thoughts? Could I actually be in a burnout phase or is this something completely different?
You say you sleep decently. Do you really get enough sleep? Recently I've had the chance to work from home for a longer period - more than a month - and during that time slept longer and better and it made me realise that I really was tired, seriously tired. That's me of course, not you.
If work is boring, and different kind of jobs don't help, find something besides work: go running, go dancing, go do a theatre course, singing. I tried all kind of things and am open to try anything that seems interesting. I dance a lot, weekly, and it made my life a lot better. I don't say dancing is for you, but whatever you do, it should be fun, something to look forward to.
Maybe singing, dancing and theatre don't appeal to you. It didn't appeal to me, I thought I couldn't do that, that it was difficult. I'm a typical introvert, not artistic or creative, prefer to stay in the background, but all these things were a lot more fun than I ever had thought and I discovered a whole new life.
Don't try them all at once, start with one, give it a good chance, and don't give up if the first course isn't what you hoped for. Try another teacher or school, a different group. All these things come in many varieties and it can be a challenge to find what works for you. Each experience brings you closer to what you want, teaches you something. If you're afraid about something, that is especially interesting.
This didn't make my work better, but it made my life better. And it opens perspectives to new areas, possibly for work. Not that I want to be a dance teacher, but having a new look on life can change work as well.
I want to second what you say about sleep. These days I get plenty of it, and the first thing I notice if I get a night or two of insufficient sleep is a lack of motivation, closely followed by a noticeable drop in cognitive performance.
Would you describe your problem as a lack of fulfillment?
Personally, I find my day job technically challenging, fun, and often rewarding, but I don't really find it fulfilling in some deep meaningful sense. I feel useful but not meaningful.
It took me a while to realize that this was the problem I was having -- and that just switching from software engineering job to software engineering job wasn't going to change it -- and I am still at a crossroads as to what to do about it. I'm not sure if I should seek fulfillment from outside my career -- family, community, a craft, a cause -- or if I should change my career to one I (think I might) find more fulfilling.
There are a lot of kind of people in the world. With regard to life fulfillment (in the sense of "doing good things"), I think there are two broad categories: people who require their work to be personally fulfilling or who require life outside of work to be so.
From personal experience, if you're the kind of person who tends to be more invested at work (seeks out challenges, takes pride in your work, feels pleasure at a job well done), I'd hazard you might not be happy doing work you don't find at least somewhat fulfilling.
My thought process being that personal_investment_in_work + fulfillment_only_outside_of_work = eventually resenting time spent at work as unfulfilling.
Everyone can't work on cancer-curing, economy-stabilizing, poverty-eliminating, food-scarcity-solving, gender-equalizing, minority-protecting, free-speech-supporting things.
But we can at least move a little closer to working on something about which we can honestly say "Yeah, that does make the world a slightly better place."
In my case, my job isn't a drain -- it's useful, good work, not evil, good coworkers, fat paycheck, good hours, lots of flexibility. From a practical standpoint, I'm willing to wager that most people don't find fulfillment in their day job, and my job puts me in a pretty good place to find fulfillment outside of work.
On the other hand, at the moment I'm still young enough to start a second career -- it wouldn't be completely crazy for me to go back to school, learn a completely new skill set, grind up through the ranks, and try to have an impact in some other field.
On the gripping hand, I'm not so young as to be in an impatient rush about everything. I don't need to completely upset my entire life just yet. So I'm carefully researching alternate careers to decide if I'd actually find them fulfilling and have an aptitude for them (it'd be a shame to spend ten years and realize I'm not fulfilled by my second career either). And I'm trying to expand myself a little bit more outside my day job, so that my happiness doesn't rest on a one-legged stool.
I think you have hit the nail on the head. I have a successful (very successful, bootstrapped) startup which basically enables marketers to optimize their ad spend and I dont think I realized that this would become my life.
I've been at it in this industry for over 20 years now and I don't get the kind of clinical burn-out that the author is talking about. I get tired and take a day off, go on vacation or whatever. I also have never had the luxury of being able to go traveling for 6 months (or perhaps I have never just prioritized my life to make that possible).
Perhaps it could be if you have supported yourself with a draining, minimum wage job, and a 2nd one in the evenings, struggling to pay rent, then your tolerance for computer work may be much higher? Whenever I get tired, I just have to remember back to my days of slinging cheeseburgers and I feel content with my current situation.
I personally find myself going through this with most aspects of my life. I have lulls at work where I'm less than 100% excited about the work at hand, and then after a while I'm back in top shape, but I now find it normal when the lulls occur.
It happens to me for most other hobbies as well. I enjoy working out a lot, but there are times where I just don't feel super excited about it, for like lets say a month or so, and I have to put in a lot of will-power to get to the gym. So I do basically what you do here as well, try different kind of workouts, etc., with varying results and that helps sometimes.
I think at the end of the day it's really hard to maintain that level of passion for something that you do day in day out. You just have to accept the downtime and know that it will pass in a bit. At least that's my take on it.
Edit: right after I posted I was reminded of a quote lifters use often: "motivation gets you in the gym, as it's fleeting, but discipline keeps you coming back". I think the same applies here, to some extent.
My current working theory on that is we always want what we don't have. For people who value their free time, rarely working over 40hrs a week is a dream. When they achieve that dream, suddenly they realize they want to be working less than that, and 40hrs becomes a drain and no longer the energizing freedom it may have been initially.
Just a theory.
Personally, I get bored with my current "life" from a given point in time, and need to radically change an aspect of it to add that excitement and focus back to it. Doesn't always go as planned though.
But as you get older, I find people in general get tired of the same bullshit that keeps popping up at job after job, and that almost never goes away.
When was the last time you had a vacation? And I mean a real vacation -- not just a day off to work on home projects. Also make sure the vacation itself isn't too much work (i.e., trying to cram as much activity in as you can).
Personally, I bought a camper that I leave parked at a local campground that is within an hour from home. I'll sometimes take off early on Friday and head up there for the weekend, other times I'll take a week off work. But my favorite is to take a 2 week vacation to someplace with an ocean and beach, and spend quite a bit of time either in the water or just laying on the beach listening to the waves.
But the best cure for burnout that I had was when I had a job that was regular 40 hours, that I got laid off from (6 years ago during the height of the last recession). Spent 4 months in the summer with only a couple interviews, but then when I started my new job I was totally refreshed again. It's only been in the last year that I've started feeling bored/tired again, so maybe it's time for another layoff.
I wonder if tech by and large has lost its focus on important things - curing disease, going to the moon, and all the other impossible goals. Instead, the industry focuses on social networks, business software, ect. Maybe burnout would not be such a problem if there were a true cause to line up behind.
It's easy to stop caring about something when its not really worth caring about.
"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes." --William Gibson
Another thing to consider is that the problem might not be you, it might be that the situation sucks.
Any good therapist would probably ask "So, what are you going to do about it?" Changing your situation and changing your self are both acceptable answers, but the therapist should at least point out that changing your situation is possible too.
Agreed. I didn't mean for my comment to sound like I was discouraging people from seeking therapy. The best thing my therapist did for me was help me realize that I needed to be willing to cut people out of my life.
Yes, I wish people would stop consulting various buzzwords and tech ideals and, instead, suggest OP see a therapist. This sounds like depression to me.
Things that I found that worked: exercise for pleasure (riding my bike!). Connecting with people (one-on-one -- i'd always been part of a big group before). Learning new things, new challenges. Yoga.
A book that helped me a lot was Frankl's "A man's search for meaning". I realized that I had a bit of fight club nihilism in me because I never chose my purpose in life, and so was just sitting on the metaphorical treadmill of existentialistic wallowing.
Are you me? Though mine lasts for several (many) years and other than exercise (gym 4-5 days/week) I haven't found a something that works or anything resembling a life purpose.
If it was just work, I'd say it was certainly just burnout. However, when its pretty much your whole life [it sounds like], it could be depression.
I'm always motivated to do at least a good chunk of my "after work" activities, every week. But yeah, work, ehhhhhhh I'm just not happy unless I'm working on something I'm proud of and that comes along maybe once every 18 months.
It's not as much about how many hours you work so much as how much of your life revolves around your job. Ask yourself this: if things aren't going well in your job, what happens? If your life revolves around one thing and that thing goes badly, it affects your whole life. Having more things outside of work helps a great deal.
I don't think it is burnout -- like you said you experience it as boredom, which I think is a different thing. To cure boredom at work, I've always felt starting a brand new project using new tech and with a new team works.
But being bored at work can lead to feelings of depression if you feel like you aren't really accomplishing anything.
Are you taking 'me time'? When did you last have a decent holiday where you did no programming, turned all your work-related email and phones off, and did something else that you enjoyed and found fulfilling?
It needn't be a home hobby, it might be reading, it might be an activity-club that you enjoy, it might be volunteering - but I've found that I need things outside of work, even work I enjoy, or life's pretty cruddy.
Similarly the stresses of work can really build up, even if the work's quite interesting. There's no amount of money I could be paid to work in a continual six month lump again. That's the sort of thing where you take a holiday and spend the first few days of it just decompressing; eating icecream, sleeping, and reading or watching TV or the like.
I worked extremely hard at my last start-up to the point of being completely burnt out. I'm happy because it made me stronger, but I'll never forget being over and for about 4-5 months after, never looking at a computer. I didn't want anything to do with them for awhile, and pursued a vicious "I'm gonna go pro in golf" campaign (can't take the idealism/ambition out of a true entrepreneur).
I'm really happy now, but I understand burn-out at a much deeper level than I had before. There was a time when I would think "just get over it," but now I understand it has very real effects. When you don't want to think, it's not always a simple case of laziness. It takes work to switch into your "system 2" (as called by "Thinking Fast and Slow") -- your focused mindset. Then once you're in this mindset, it's no picnic.
What's fascinating is that if you stay in system 2 for too long, you begin to show signs of paranoia and depression. You become withdrawn and isolate yourself further from society. You might hypothesize this is a natural reaction of an _injured_ animal, but it's hard for you to understand that your brain is exhausted and needs to rest. Instead, you say "go faster!" and it begins to try to come up with more & more schemes to prevent you from going into system 2. Fantasies that would have meant nothing to you well-rested are now of utmost importance because you're actually procrastinating because you're actually fatigued.
Burn-out is a real thing. I love work and I work very hard, but there's times when you have to say "You know what, this weekend is all mine." Those are the weekends I sleep anywhere from 10-14 hours each night, and not because I'm indulging, but just like muscles, my brain is resting and hopefully "growing".
I've been delving into burnout for the past years. If I can get into flow, I'm fantastic and do very well. But getting there is increasingly more difficult. I've given up many contracts and work, only keeping a few clients. But just having anything, even if it's 1 day a week, it seems to keep you "involved" mentally and you're not really free, even if most of the time you're not doing anything. The sick part is that to really pull out, I need to work a lot more, to set things up to take a year off. So it creates this spiral that seems rather hard to break out of.
Do you have any tips for combating burnout that worked well for you? I'm starting to feel the signs of burnout (which probably means I'm actually in deeper than I think), and I'd like to try to head this off before it gets worse.
I know setting hard boundaries for work/non work and taking chunks of time for yourself is a good start, but would love to hear if you had any more advice? Thanks!
While this might not be the right thing to say, I feel compelled to say it nevertheless: nothing can hurt you unless you give it power to do so.
When I was in the heat of it and naturally did not want to work, I eventually reached a place of working zen -- I will try to do what I can, and forget about my imagined needs of this or that. I simply stared at the screen if I didn't know the buttons to press. This is the experience that I am proud of and that makes me say "I'm happy I went through that."
Too often, we mistake our own fears for limitations, and limitations we do have, we treat as if they were unmalleable. While I always want people to look out for their mental health, I also want people to know what it means to give it their all because I know that teaches you how to break through your self-imposed limitations and grow into an even stronger wo/man.
My advice is to always keep one day for yourself. For me, it's Sunday. Sunday, if I want to work, I work (and when it's that way, work doesn't always feel like work). If I don't want to work, no one can say anything. This gives you time to not think at all about work, which should give you time to stay in system 1 and heal.
What's a real killer is all that unnecessary anxiety and general negative emotions coming from _thinking_ about your work that is hurting you. When you're away from work, stop thinking about work. It's not prudent or responsible of you to be stressing out about something that isn't even going on right now. When it's time to rest, you rest. When it's time to work, you work. It seems simple, but it's the blurred gray area in between the two that affects people the most. When I worked very hard and hit my "work zen mode", it was here that I began to let go of things like what does my boss think or what does my coworker think or some other-nonsense-BS-anxious-thing that has nothing to do with actual work.
I hope it helps. I'm really no huge expert myself, but I am usually the hardest person in the room.
Thanks, I appreciate the perspective! I definitely agree with the real killer being thinking about working while not working. The concept is simple like you said, but actually sticking to it...quite hard. Also, keeping one day a week for yourself seems like a good place to start as well.
I stop doing work on nights & weekends. I generally very much enjoy my job, but when I start to feel off, I cut off all work and just focus on other things that I enjoy. I read more, I play video games, knowing they are "pointless, and I should be using my time better". I watch a movie with my wife instead of opening the laptop and working.
I've found this works fairly well. Sometimes I'll go for two weeks or two months of just turning off 'work'. It has the advantage of letting me continue to be employed.
One of these stints was also when I thought hell, why not try and learn Haskell? ;)
I second this, although I don't have the discipline to do it everyday. When I feel really crappy, I do it and always feel much better for a whole day afterwards. It's also an exercise that is stress-free, easy, and can be done everywhere. I'm not sure about the teacher part though -- I'm not into the mystical mumbo-jumbo (even though I'm Chinese). Something about the movements is just good for relieving stress and I'm not sure they need to be done in exactly the right way -- sort of like how sham acupuncture helps people.
> The sad thing about the metrics-driven performance culture the Times describes at Amazon is studies show overworked people perform worse.
I'm glad the author made this point and backed it up with a reference. It reaffirms something I already believed (whether on the basis of personal experience, something I'd read before, or mere wishful thinking, I couldn't tell you so the reference helps). It is a sensible constraint that came to mind in reading all the tech workplace horror stories that the Times's Amazon piece inspired.
While reading that Times article I checked out the link to their 14 sacred principles. The funny thing was that I agreed with most of them. They were all ideas that occurred to me over the course of my career working independently, with small companies, and especially now in corp.
The one thing that was missing, I felt, was a Rule #15: Never work more than 8 hours a day.
Without it, it's no surprise you end up burnt out or living in the sort of dystopian workplace documented in the Times' Amazon article.
But then I suppose, as has been pointed before, long work hours are more about cultural signaling and penny-wise-pound-foolish accounting than really improving productivity.
I'll not lie, I'm a 14, 14, 6, 4 kinda guy. Then Friday through Sunday is for playing, thinking, and reading, but mostly meeting up with people to exchange ideas, potentially with beer.
It seems to be a common sentiment that burnout is largely driven by how many hours a day you work. Why is that?
From what I've been taught burnout is the result of continuous stress. Where stress is more or less defined as a continuous sensation of being threatened.
I've seen people with perfectly normal workours become burnt out. I've even seen people working ten hours a week getting burnt out. The common factor thus not being the objectively measurable amount of work.
My own formula for diagnosing a work environment is more like Risk of Burnout = perception of expectations / perceptions of means to deliver
It seems to me that hours worked relates to issue of burnout more like lack of sleep to the risk of catching a cold. Potentially a big factor, but only incidentally.
My happiest times were from a startup where we worked 80 hours a week.
Another startup we were in the process of selling, was such a hostile place it literally gave me work related PTSD and I was only working 40 hours per week.
It's nice to hear about a situation closer to most startup outcomes. When Matthew notes that someone sent him the acquisition terms and the founders made out well while line level / low level managers basically got nice severances, it's something everyone here should keep in mind. It's great if founders make out well as long as everyone else does too; it's when those outcomes diverge that it rankles.
If a potential employer tries to put nonsense like a 2-year noncompete -- during which of course they don't pay you -- plus ownership of side projects into your contract, it's a sign you're dealing with assholes. If you can, you should just walk away. Many of us live in CA, so some of this can't happen, but a startup here tried something similar: their 16 page (!!!) employment contract specified that if I used my personal media device or laptop for any business purpose, they had the unlimited right to inspect/search them on demand. By my reading, even something as tenuously related as two factor auth on work gmail being sent to my personal cell, or taking a business call on my cell would have counted. The founder tried to blame it on boilerplate their lawyers inserted; he couldn't even take responsibility for what was, after all, the contract he was asking me to sign. I walked away. Read those contracts.
I received a buyout offer with the terms of being prohibited to do anything that "directly or indirectly competes with <company>". Indirectly? So if I take a contract from a competitor and work on improving a DB engine, well that's indirect. It transitively closes over essentially everything. Especially difficult as I contribute to some OSS projects that a lot of businesses in that industry use.
I just kept refusing that part and eventually they gave in; it's not like they intended to prohibit everything, they just needed tighter language that wouldn't harm me.
My favourite part is when people say part of a contract is "just there" but it'd never be used. OK well in that case, let's just remove it and I'll just agree to be nice.
Indeed. I cross out sections of contracts, initial there, and then hand it to the other party to sign. Most of them agree that what I've crossed out is BS and will initial. If they don't, it's a good sign that they're actively trying to screw you one way or another.
These are the kinds of things you would hope would get reported on a site like glassdoor. (I have no affiliation.) I realize they often don't, but if they did, it would generate more pressure to clean up their act.
I thought about that, but frankly, I don't want to get sued. And the founder certainly remembers the candidate who told him "lawyers work for the company, not the other way around, so stop your bullshit".
This really resonated with me. It was almost exactly my experience after 13 years at my last "startup". Everything went to hell there and bad reviews pile up in glass door but they actively push the ratings back up with fake reviews so all reviews are either 1 star or 5 stars (that should be a sign to anyone reading the reviews). Funny how when you are going through it it feels like you are uniquely suffering, then you read someone else write down thoughts that feel pulled from your own mind.
Full agree on the non-compete. However, the search of personal devices after you've conducted business seems legitimate to me.
If they need to investigate the evidence to understand the exposure/whatever in the event a situation arises where you used your personal device, they obviously need access. They are simply trying to neutralize the excuse that "its your personal device and you have no authority to search it", by getting your consent ahead of time. I do agree, they are often extremely vague, but I'm not sure it's reasonable for them to spell out every possible use case where it should or should not apply.
Simply don't use personal equipment when acting on behalf of the business (everyone should be happy there), OR get an exception written up by your own legal and get their sign off on the situations which you object to (they might not be so flexible). I don't think there is malice in the intent there though.
It really is as simple as that iff you never use your personal device for any business purpose.
[update] This was unclear: I'm saying this relationship is simple if and only if you have not used your devices for business purposes. If you have, you need only hope that none of the clauses in your agreements (you did have a lawyer review these?) cover it.
Even if I used it for work purposes occasionally, they can go to court and prove that in the process of getting a subpoena and I'll happily comply.
Due process exists for a reason; if you let any company examine your personal devices/data outside of a court order, they can use it for any purpose they want. Subpoenas are limited in scope, and everything is documented.
"However, the search of personal devices after you've conducted business seems legitimate to me"
So, the founder calls your personal cellphone on the weekend and asks a couple of business questions. You come in on Monday and they lawyer points to the clause in your contract. I'm pretty sure reasonable goes out the window.
Intent and the words you signed need to match or you can get seriously hosed.
I see your point here. A principled person might refuse to answer the phone, or call back from the business phone, but that is fairly impractical I would admit.
My only point here was it seems reasonable for the employer to ask for the world. If it's really worth getting spun up, perhaps you could find out if there is a better version of this boiler plate which respects your privacy.
For what it's worth, at my own employer, the phrase is not so open ended, and I suspect it's the same with others:
"Users who use their non-BIGCORP-email (read that as personal) or IM accounts for any BIGCORP business agree to provide BIGCORP with full access to those account, in the event such is necessary to comply with a discovery request or legal mandate"
Using your personal im for work business is a world away from
1 - incidental use of your cellphone for work, even things such as securing work email via 2fa;
2 - using your phone to answer work email via remotely revokable gmail access;
3 - using your personal laptop to answer work email, again via gmail
none of 1-3 mean an employer should get the rights to view my personal email which is also on my phone, or to look inside my phone at all
"My only point here was it seems reasonable for the employer to ask for the world."
No, its not. We accept it, but its not reasonable, it just a CYA attitude than infects a lot of our business and political dealings. An employer should ask for exactly what they want and no more.
We shouldn't even accept it on formal terms. If they need that kind of access during legal proceedings then we might, in good faith, provide that kind of access but it should be provided because we have a good business relationship and not because we signed a contract that gave them the right to our first born.
Often times companies/vendors don't find it worth it to pay legal to make these changes on edge cases, particularly if they have enough hungry people willing to work for them. There's also the worry that word will get around and more people will ask for exceptions (same or other).
So it is in fact easier and more cost effective to say "take it or leave it."
Not saying the clause is justified, because that was ridiculous, but it is interesting to get at the root of why they won't change it, and often pushing back consistently will get them to that point fairly quickly.
Re non-compete/IP ownership: I wonder whether I should say where I worked or how illegal was their employment contract... Can't do both, it's protected by their confidentiality clause ;)
I have never said to myself "I wish I had stuck around that company longer." I have often said "I should have left much sooner."
I'm sure there are some examples of someone leaving when lightning was about to strike and make all the insiders rich. Those instances are even more rare than start-up successes making employees rich.
I left a company to go back to school (took on massive loans). A few months later, the company closed up and people got extremely generous severances. Would have probably covered half my tuition costs. I definitely wish I had stuck around THAT company longer!
Which illustrates the original point: that scenario -- generous severances when the company is going out of business -- is incredibly rare. A much more likely scenario is your options become worthless and you're laid off. If you can leave a bad environment, I recommend leaving ASAP instead of letting the golden handcuffs keep you -- unless the golden handcuffs promise a huge return, and there's little or no doubt about getting that return.
I know a few folks who have left jobs and then said "I wish I had stuck around that company longer". In all cases, it was never financial. Rather, it was "If I'd known what I didn't know, I would've stuck around longer so I could pick <ex-coworker>'s brain about it."
Even in my own case, where I joined a company thinking I'd leave after a year but stayed 5 years because I was still learning things (and had optimized my career for learning the whole way), there were still some times after I left where I thought, "Man, if only I still had access to <old design doc or code>."
I see financial motivations coming up much more often when people say "Man, I'm glad I stayed." Vesting cliffs are really easy to predict, and even IPOs and acquisitions have some hints coming; if you're about to get a major windfall, you'll probably know it.
Passion causes burnout. Have you ever noticed that the people who just punch a clock and go home never experience burn out? Even if they end up working overtime? It's always the people who identify with their work that get burned.
YES. And to an extent, just punching the clock is a defense mechanism in work environments where low autonomy + high demands are creating an environment for burnout. But I've seen bright-eyed 23-year-old engineers suffer vicious burnout by trying to tackle the low autonomy part ("Hey boss, what if we did X? Hey boss, I put together this slidedeck for this feature that would be so cool! Hey boss, check out this mockup I did of a site redesign!") and then after hitting a brick wall enough times they become embittered and disconnected.
I think it's because equity creates a belief in young workers that the company is "theirs" -- but after you've realized that startups are like any other job where you trade time for money while implementing the Highest Paid Person's Opinion, you lose that passion quickly.
I checked out about halfway through my run at my current job. I think after the third time I suggested a tool or process change and the reply from the lead was "we've never done it that way" at a startup it dawned on me that this company will never accomplish anything technically interesting.
Incidentally, there's a bonus coming up for a major milestone and I'm seriously considering handing in my two weeks notice after the direct deposit clears. The CEO tried to sell the whole equity angle, but I honestly don't see any resume improvement potential here and that's all I really care about.
I've worked at companies that gave a shit and I just don't think this is one of them.
I don't see anything wrong with seeking a job with which I can identify.
The problem comes when I stick it out for too long at a place that does not share my core values. In my experience it is a losing battle. Trying to match what I believe in with a whole company is really tough. I feel burnout is to be expected at times during my career while I figure things out. A little break, some consideration, and new goals help me move forward and find work I can enjoy.
This is a point I was starting to make at the last segment of the piece, but my editor (also my wife) encouraged me to edit that down from 1500 words to what's there and break off the piece about the passionate versus the professional into a follow-up. From the feedback I've been getting, it seems to be something worth exploring.
>The vendor abandoned their technology, and our generous free services attracted people who proved hard to convert to paying customers.
This line rings very true. At my company our first product was offered for free. We had thousands of users, but after months and months of work we realized only a small fraction of our user base was going to be converted into paying customers. (Like OP, I began to feel burnt out at this point)
When we launched our second product, we realized we needed to answer the question: "Will people pay for what we build?" as fast as possible. We charged users to pre-order our alpha and when we realized people were willing to pay for it, we poured ourselves into the product.
I think many founders are scared to ask for money (We were). But if you're building a product that you would eventually like to charge people for, you really have to force yourself to ask those hard questions as soon as possible.
Don't forget the other half of this statement: I've always been concerned with basing a product on a locked-in technology from an unproven vendor.
And vendors do shut down. I've seen it happen many times. Sometimes they get eaten up by a "bigger fish" that wants to use their technology internally, and they then shut down the external service you were so fond of.
Author here: In our case the vendor was very proven, but the tech and their approach to it was not. What actually happened is a bit more complicated than _abandoned_, but those words got the point across without delving into the irrelevant.
Needless to say, I am _very_ leery now of the motives of open-source products that aren't run like open-source projects.
I'd be curious to hear from employees who have worked for Elon Musk either at Tesla or SpaceX. I'm currently reading Ashlee Vance's book on Elon and the descriptions of the working conditions for Tesla and SpaceX employees sounds both exhilarating and completely exhausting.
Does working on something as truly world-changing as space travel or electric vehicles make up for the 80+ hour work weeks? Is it easier to work so hard when there's no doubt that what you're doing matters?
as truly world-changing as [...] electric vehicles
EVs have been around for a long long time, commercially, and conversions. I'm glad tesla is doing what they are, but world-changing seems like a stretch to me.
Anecdotally, I've heard from employees that Tesla is having attrition issues, so apparently not. They've recently added a few minor perks to try and keep engineers.
The world changing part might be getting them to the mainstream. Which is a combination or funding infrastructure, lowering prices and spurring competition from the other car makers.
I worked two jobs - one full time during day and part-time during evenings and weekends. Both were dev jobs. I lasted only 10 months. The last months were really ugly - I was abusive, harsh to others, really unpleasant person to be around. I quit both jobs and moved city. It took me 4 months of doing absolutely nothing to recover.
The author speaks of passion a few times. I think that's the key here; he forced himself to feel passionate about the end goal when in reality he didn't care. You can't do that. If you're not passionate, faking it will kill you.
There is a middle ground between signing and not signing here: set boundaries up front. Let them know "Hey, I'll sign this and help with the integration, but just know my heart won't be in it. I don't know that I can promise you more than a solid 45 hours a week. But I can't deliver that passion I had building the product because I'm really not passionate about this."
And yeah, those employment contracts are bullshit. Before you sign a contract, you are under no obligation to do anything. A good tactic is to just redline anything you want thrown out and send it back to the lawyers without comment. Also realize that many companies throw these bullshit clauses in just so they can negotiate them away later (as opposed to having to offer you more money).
If it's important enough to the founders, they will find the money to make it worth your while. An extra hundred grand out of a big payday to ensure a critical employee is present to handle the sale is just a cost of doing business. Unless you would go out for drinks with someone after you stop working with them, it's not going to hurt your relationship (they may even respect you more for it).
One of the things I always encourage people to do as part of an acquisition is to handle the transition gracefully (1 year-ish), and then start looking around for what else you might want to do inside the acquirer. Often there won't be anything, and you can just bide your time or flee the scene - but other times there might be a perfectly interesting job elsewhere in the organization that you can use to build your skills, beef up your resume, and live out your golden handcuffs.
But too many people that I see just sit there, quietly miserable, while their product dies around them.
I remember trying to describe burnout to my step-mom who is French. I kept trying to figure out how to say it in French and she joked that they don't have much of a phrase for it; the just say "le burnout" which I find rather telling. It seems like such an american problem that so many articles like these have to be written.
It is true that we (French) say "le burnout" but it does not mean we are not affected too, contrary to popular belief ;-)
A few years ago, it seems that workers of ex-publicly held companies (France Telecom for instance) were the most affected with a few suicide cases that made the news. Recent studies said 2 workers out of 10 felt affected.
IMHO, the white collars of big companies feel affected because they have to do more than before to stay in the international race in less time since they usually have 6-10 weeks of holidays per/year (no sick days).
Having so many holidays is really challenging for an organization, especially in the summer, period of the year when people are off for 2-4 weeks. It means also long work days for workers.
Personally i'd prefer to have less holidays and come back home earlier.
Having said that, on a yearly basis, white collars work much less than their American counterparts on average.
> Be careful with passion and those who would use it against you.
The problem is he let someone else define his passion. Nobody can use your own passion against you. Passion is just a word and anyone can say it. But you alone are the one who decides what you believe in, how much you are willing to work for, etc.
> because tech is a small town and I shouldn’t burn any bridges
to anyone out there listening - it's not. technology is a huge, huge, huge, huge established industry. think about it - what does "tech" even mean? it's an umbrella term for 4 or 5 classifications that all kind of bleed into each other - including finance. in addition, every non-tech company has a shitload of tech in it. gee whiz. it's almost as if technology is critical to the functioning of the modern business enterprise!
this is fear-based thinking at its worst. this is the kind of silly thing scared, gutless engineers say to each other by the watercooler while the business guys laugh out loud and backslap each other in the proverbial smoke-filled room.
the most powerful thing you can do in technology (and all business, really) is not give a fuck what the other guy thinks (the "guy" being your negotiating counter-party). stick to your guns or just take the money and run. if you waffle, you're sunk by your own torpedo.
I think it's more that the startup scene in SV is much smaller than say working from some random company throughout the United States or the world at large. I can see that reputation and being known by name could be a reality in startups for sure. Outside of that? I would be completely floored if anyone knew me just from the random jobs I've had across multiple industries that write software for internal/external use.
Even the startup scene in SV/SF is so huge, this is not a problem unless you do something notorious / egregious (like crash and burn your Ferrari into the CEO's office) and even then, people will forget in a few months. Totally agree that is such bullshit advice.
I'll disagree. I've had people come up to me and mention that they remembered my posts on XYZ mailing list. Said mailing list is a huge, public list and I might have posted on it a dozen times. What you say and how you act can definitely have a positive impact on your career. I haven't looked for a job since college.
I doubt the negatives are as impacting as the positives, but I'm sure they do exist.
Some psychologists consider burnout to be depression, not just depression-like. In my own experience, I'd have to agree. Luckily it's generally brought on by stress and most people recover within weeks or months if they are able to rest or be removed from the cause.
I worked 24/7 (with a wife and 2 kids) on this beastly mix of 10 year old Perl and very inexperienced Rails code. Despite the hours, I was excited because I thought this was THE big opportunity.
At my one year review, the owners told me I wasn't working hard enough. I went from a high point to a low point overnight. Wrestled with it for about a month. Then while I was riding in the car with my wife I got a snarky hipchat message from the owner of the company and showed it to my wife.
She looked right at me and said, "Quit. Don't worry about the money, we will figure it out. I don't want you working for people like that and it's obvious what it's doing to you."
So I resigned. Told them I'd stay on for 30 days for transition but that it just wasn't the right place for me. The weight off my shoulders from resigning was ENORMOUS.
For about 2 months I struggled with what to do. All the experience I'd gained at that job had virtually made my resume and after the experience, just like you I wanted to find something MEANINGFUL to do. Something I could wake up every morning and know that what I was doing made a difference for the right reasons.
And the opportunity came 2 months later. I ended up turning down a job for twice the pay for what I knew was best in the long run. So far it has been and my wife and I have never been happier. This company treats employees better than any I've ever even heard of. Not silly perks but actual, life balance, we value you as a human being, feel free to move about the company if you want a different challenge...perks.
The only downside is that I'm pretty sure my wife will kill me if I ever lose this job. :-)