>How can any of us get better if we can’t afford to extract ourselves from the environment that caused the harm?
>When you’re finally in recovery, you’ll start to be able to see what an environment that doesn’t do that to you looks like. Then we can build it together.
Maybe it is because being a good manager is hard. Maybe running an effective organisation is hard. Maybe being in your 20s and having a bunch of VC money doesn't translate to being able to do the above?
Being a good manager takes time and a willingness to be emotionally aware. It also requires mentoring.
On the other hand, if a bunch of burnt out engineers with capital want to pop me an email why don't we start something?
I think this comment is spot on. Another thing I’ll add: building something successful enough to be sustainable is incredibly difficult, especially when market value for SWEs is established by a few winner-take-all disruptions that panned out in the internet and smart phone transitions of the past two decades.
The saccharine platitudes and subtle gaslighting of the corporate world is really just a thin veneer designed to allow employees to get some work done without having to think too deeply about the brutality of globalized capitalism.
Because companies earn money by producing goods or providing services, but those goods and services are required by burned out people.
Let's say your company can build and ship a product in 2 years and none of the workers end up crunching. What if every single client is not in the position to wait 2 years (because they are themselves crunching) so they go with the company that builds it in 6 months?
> How else could burned out developers organize to create a space for recovery?
There are thousands of ways to organize people, from TAZ's[1] to 12-step programs[2] to Kibbutzim[3].
A company as it's done in the modern US is an oligarchy in which leadership threatens the underlings with withholding the means of meeting their basic needs if they don't meet demands. It's fundamentally inherently stressful to be an underling in such an organization, because you don't have freedom or security.
Your can say, "what if we make the oligarchs kinder" but that's not a real option: if kind people are starting an organization from scratch they don't set themselves up as oligarchs. There is that company that came up on HN a few weeks back where everyone was paid the same, but they made no pretense that if that model becomes unsustainable they'll abandon it.
And sure, you can fundamentally change the structure to make it more equitable, but at that point it's different enough from a company in the normal sense of the word, that I don't think I'd call it a company, even if it technically files articles of incorporation.
employees behind a company labor to create value, they don't necessarily define the company - the owners do. owners set the policies, hours, hire and fire to promote a particular culture (or set the rules or expectations to). this power imbalance between employer and employee is exactly where the burnout tends to happen.
'we can build it together' - why is that not happening?
>Structural problems require structural solutions. Healthy organizations, healthy people.
>How can any of us get better if we can’t afford to extract ourselves from the environment that caused the harm?
>When you’re finally in recovery, you’ll start to be able to see what an environment that doesn’t do that to you looks like. Then we can build it together.