Understanding Burnout 289
Cognitive Dissident writes "New York Magazine has posted a feature story about the growing phenomenon of 'burnout' and the growing interest of both healthcare professionals and even corporate management in this problem. Probably the most surprising thing learned from reading this article is that work load is not the best predictor of burnout. Instead it has more to do with perceived 'return on investment' of effort. So work places are having to learn to adjust the work environment to reduce or prevent burnout. From the article: '"It's kind of like ergonomics," [Christina Maslach] finally says. "It used to be, 'You sit for work? Here's a chair.' But now we design furniture to fit and support the body. And we're doing the same here. The environments themselves have to say, 'We want people to thrive and grow.' There was a shift, finally, in how people understood the question."' NPR's Talk of the Nation also had a recent feature story based on this article."
Frustration burnout (Score:5, Interesting)
Causes of Burnout (Score:5, Interesting)
When you don't do anything that seem important to you, you simply stop being able to do it.
At some point, your brain figures out it only has one life to live and it's being wasted. So it "burns out" to get itself out of the current, unhealthy environment.
If you burn out, it's not really your fault entirely.
But you should recognize it as your brain and body telling you to get out now, you're killing it!
this is just my theory, of course.
I'm a recent victim, I guess (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought I was young, invulnerable, but working from 9am to 7pm just got to me, after about 4 years. Now I just can't agree with the idea that I have to go and do stuff for someone ever again.
And I feel happy without that. I think something just broke, and I don't want to fix it.
Re:Are we sure it comes from work? (Score:5, Interesting)
Managers (Score:5, Interesting)
Although it wasn't the work that made me quit, I was very reluctant to go through the same crap with a new manager. Instead of giving up IT entirely, I went out on my own again. I barely had enough work to pay the bills through the summer, but DAMN I was relaxed! By the end of the summer I was able to stomach another corporate job. It's boring work (See: Read Slashdot), but they are flexible. My old manager was anything but. I'll give it a while and if I get too bored, do my own thang again.
Burnout may not be something you can control, but you can fix it.
Re:Are we sure it comes from work? (Score:5, Interesting)
Often the sign burnout is about to occur is an increase in intensity (which is really denial that they are burning out).
In my online gaming guilds, a person saying they love it so much that they are here for life is the surest sign that they will be gone within a month.
It's different than merely losing interest. It's an increase in interest and them a flameout.
Health? (Score:4, Interesting)
The end result was that I was always tired, hurting, and totally unable to get anything done. It was one massive negative feedback loop, and I found myself just wanting to quit everything. The end result was depression, burnout, and suffering.
I'd say staying healthy is one step in preventing burnout.
Re:Are we sure it comes from work? (Score:5, Interesting)
The buddhist is safely far enough away that you can disconnect and ignore them. The person who believes almost the same is much more maddening to those who believe there is only one true way.
Burnout and depression (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a strong physiological underpinning to burnout, as years of constant stress and little sleep take their toll on the brain (in fact, the last stages of burnout are very much like those of a clinical depression). It is possible to recover, but it can take *years* and it's a difficult process.
A while back I wrote an article for Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] on this same subject, and that got plenty of positive responses. It was later expanded and wikified into a Wikibook which you might find interesting: Demystifying Depression [wikibooks.org]
(Yeah, sorry for the shameless plug, but this is important stuff that all of us in IT should be aware of. Besides, the link is to a public wikibook, not to my personal blog or anything.)
in children it's called Failure to Thrive (Score:4, Interesting)
What they're really pointing to as "burnout" is really a lack of personal growth. Call it the "working dead" if you will. You're working, but never "productive" enough for advancement. you have all the other things but aren't really "alive".
John Mayer even has a Song about it "Something's missing"... you can buy it on iTunes with your credit card to put on your iPod, in your in car stereo adapter, on the way to work!
Re:Are we sure it comes from work? (Score:5, Interesting)
The buddhist is safely far enough away that you can disconnect and ignore them. The person who believes almost the same is much more maddening to those who believe there is only one true way.
See Wikipedia's entry on The Uncanny Valley [wikipedia.org].
Re:Causes of Burnout (Score:5, Interesting)
The body has its own ways of telling it wants to quit, even if the brain keeps on denying the signals. In WWI many soldiers went blind suddenly, without any reason. Many soldiers couldn't walk anymore. But when tested using clever tricks, it was clear they could see or walk. It was simply the body taking over the decision, giving them a reason to get out of that horrible situation.
Just recently I met a teenager who's legs felt like pudding. Sometimes she just fell on the ground, couldn't walk. She was showing all the signs of burnout or chronic stress. Her parents denied her problems - the cause of this - said she was faking, which made it impossible for her to handle the situation. This was her body taking over the decision.
Personal experience with 4 burnouts (Score:4, Interesting)
People forced to work excessive hours usually go somewhere else but don't burn out. They actually don't quit or take long vacations to make up for it, which shows they probably bring the long hours on themselves.
Re:We want people to thrive and grow (Score:2, Interesting)
Are we sure it comes from work? For many, yes... (Score:3, Interesting)
Pressure creates stress.
By reducing your financial obligations, you've done a good job of reducing these pressures. If a client gives you too much shit, you fire 'em. Employees should have the same attitude. If your boss is unbearable, fire his/her ass and get a new one. Live in a place without many jobs? Find contracts where you can telecommute, move, or find a new line of work.
Don't buy top-of-the-line everything. Learn to enjoy Doom 3 at 800x600 with a 32 MB of video card. You don't have to get rid of everyhing, but you have to get rid of some things and scale back on others. The bottom line is that people need to take active steps in setting up their lives so that they have as much leverage as possible over their own lives and so that "stress" like this won't be a problem.
Re:Are we sure it comes from work? (Score:4, Interesting)
About 4 years ago, I started working for myself, and have so far had no problems getting work in my field of expertise. However, I've never spent that much of the money on things per se, but have had a rather "maniac" save for a rainy day attitude. Most of the time I've had around 2-3 major customers, and then quite a few smaller jobs on the side.
That was a big mistake. I know the saying "if you can turn down one customer, try without anyone for three weeks", but really, as a programmer, it is so stressful to always have a bad conscience about something. If you get all your work done by working your ass off, you will feel bad/stressed because you do not socialize with your friends. When you socialize, you feel bad about the work you should have done.
This culminated with a WoW-addiction on top of that. Needless to say, my health has suffered from this. (One doctor wondered if I was on drugs, since I was so skinny
My advice to deal with burnout is to avoid as much sidework and distractions from your main sources of income. If you got like a 6-12 month contract with a major employer, you can do without the smaller side contracts, EVEN if you can do them on the evening for a week or so.
Having multiple deadlines for several customers occuring at the same day is pure hell. Do not do that on a regular basis, take care of the good customers, and learn to say no to work. Rather, network with other guys, and send them the business. The person you sent away will feel that you made an effort to help them out, and if the other guy needs the business, he owe you one. Win/Win!
It is OK to work a lot on the same project, as long as you can focus on that alone, and manage to take time off. Its all the distractions that has go. (My record is a major python app, one huge
Sorry for rambling.
"the existential quest" (Score:2, Interesting)
I spent the first three years after graduate school working on the "Trusted Mach [sparta.com]" project. The code I wrote, three years of my professional life, now sits on a shelf somewhere at the NSA, never deployed.
After that I spent a year working on a firewall product for Norman Data Defense systems. Ever hear of it? Europeans may know Norman ASA for its antivirus software, but I believe the firewall had all of about six customers worldwide.
There are a few other projects where I'm not sure whether the code i wrote was ever deployed or not. I believe my work on EDOS helped sling around the bits received from the Terra [nasa.gov] and Aqua satellites, that brings me some comfort.
But I've spent a good chunk of my professional career writing code that ultimately made no difference to anyone. That's why I'm satisfied now to do part-time less complex software development work for a small business [trocadero.com] (where what I write gets deployed immediately, and if it doesn't change the world at least helps our customers), and work part-time as a shiatsu therapist [earthtouchshiatsu.com] (where what I do makes a definite impact).
Re:Are we sure it comes from work? (Score:1, Interesting)
Some people would say that religion is very relevant and applicable to everyday life...
Re:Are we sure it comes from work? (Score:3, Interesting)
"I don't discuss business or politics or religion with my real friends and family".
This works well for artisans or guardians (SP/SJ) types, but not for rationals or idealists (NT/NF). If you're someone who thrives on abstract thought, by all means, include politics and religion and business or anything else that's abstract. The process for recharching mental batteries differs markedly for the different types of people. Chances are, you know what recharges your batteries. It's just that you haven't set time aside for those things, because you thought other things would let you recharge your batteries as well - like more money, more stuff, more, more, more. If you're stressed, unhappy, burned out, reevaluate your life and see where you're putting your energy into. Chances are, you'll find places that you neglected and that just require an attitude adjustment to reach.
Anatomy of a burnout. (Score:5, Interesting)
I consider myself "burned out", pursuing my efforts now on a personal level or for friends. In a way, it seems a shame I am "wasting" such precious insights that 35 years in design work ( I mean *real* design work ) gives a designer. Yet, I elect to live at a near poverty level in lieu of having to "sell my soul" to the suited-and-tied corporate types. I want so bad to go back to the time that I actually meant something to the company, and not be considered just another commodity.
My burnout occurred as I had spent years learning and perfecting a set of software I liked to use on PC's where I could write my own device drivers to make the computer do ANYTHING that it was capable of doing. These were .COM, .EXE, and .SYS files, written in C++ and assembler, running under DOS. I had collected every tool imaginable to let me do any sort of DSP, control any interface, or let me do any mathematical equations ( differential calculus ) on my machine.
I was in the midst of a dream project where I was trying to build a wide-range VCO, yet have the extremely low phase noise which would be required for using it as a local oscillator to drop 256QAM to baseband. The managers came in and demanded I do my work on some lousy 386-SX based machine running Windows 2.1 ( which was current at the time ), running doublespace. My machine at the lab was a 286. But I knew what I was doing with that one. I had no idea how to make my stuff run under Windows in a supervised environment.
I had no interest whatsoever in the fancy graphical output of Windows because I had no idea how the get the machine to do what I wanted, and do it without all the bloat which took forever and a day to execute. My mind was still set on how to use amplifier gains to increase the Q of my resonant circuits and configure the short term phase error through one varactor and the long term frequency control through another varactor, so I could simultaneously reap the benefits of fast phase correction without perturbing the frequency setpoints.
I know if you are not into RF modems, the above looks like gibberish. What I am trying to say is I already knew how to do what I needed to do, I just had to do it the way I knew how to do it.
Hiring somebody to come in and tell me that I can't do it my way - without giving him the onus of showing me exactly how to do it his way - did not help matters one bit.
He came in expecting me to take like a duck to water with his paradigms. Giving me closed-source proprietary crap to build on, citing I had no "need-to-know" how it worked - to me - was tantamount to giving a lawyer legal documents, written in Swahili, to approve. Just tell the lawyer which ones do what and have him approve them.
I thought of myself much like a pianist, with years of experience on the keyboard. Some manager comes in, forces me to use another piano whose keyboard starts with all the A notes, followed by all the B's, and so on... all in order. The manager patiently sits behind his desk, considering me not to be a team player because I hate that piano. He patiently keeps asking me what the problem is, can't I understand? Here it is again, all the A's are here, all the B's are there. All in order. Can't I be flexible enough to use it? Just point and click.
I know just as soon as I take the time to play my music through that machine, the manager is just going to redo the keyboard again. I have no return on my investment of effort whatsoever. Its like trying to put a lot of effort in improving a rented house.
I realized this guy has his experience in presentations, which I consider to be corporate propaganda more than anything concrete and useful. I could not consider him actually designing anything. Yet his training prepared him to find corporate executive types who could be persuaded that his efforts were more valuable than mine, and I should work under him.
Dr. E.L. Kersten can help (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Are we sure it comes from work? (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless I'm mistaken, that's an oxymoron. A "hard core extremist Buddhist" would be like a "hard core extremist agnostic" -- it just can't happen, because the whole "religion" is based on figuring the stuff out for yourself. Therefore, trying to coerce somebody into believing it makes absolutely no sense.
The other three (or rather four, counting atheists) are certainly possible, though!
Rapidly burning out myself (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a large workload right now. I'm part of 3 major projects right now, all of which have the eyes or personal involvement of the owners of my family-owned company. One of the project I have basically been in the lead position on for months now. It was sold to the owners by my last supervisor but the plan was always for me to implement it. This involves a significant amount of planning, late night windows, etc. My second project hinges on the first but is backed by the division of the company that I actually work for. I'm contracted out to another division which is the owner of the first project. Confused yet? The third project is one that I've had so little time to work on that I feel significantly inferior in knowledge to the lesser technical and non-technical people associated with the project. I'm asked a question and I honestly can't answer it because I've had little involvement in the project. It's a major projects that's worth millions to my company in the not too distant future.
I have so much work on my plate that I don't know where to even begin. On top of all that I have the daily break/fix duties of the division that I've been contracted to. There is a bad personality at the division I'm contracted too that I have to deal with. He makes horrible business and technical decisions that I have to somehow work around.
I also have a wealth of crap dumped on me from my division in the form of internal documentation, procedures, processes, and politics. I have been placed smack in the middle of the political fighting between the divisions of my company. What's more the division I'm contracted to never tells my division about the many positive things I do. They only speak up when they perceive something as being negative. Of course my division thinks that this is a major problem and that it's my fault. I must be doing something wrong if they don't hear anything good from my customer. Well for starters I have a technical relationship with my customer. There is not sales person relationship with this customer. That's where the personal comments are made. Secondly my customers switches multiple times per week about how they want to be treated (as a customer or as a member of the family).
I feel that 99% of my heartburn is caused by my own employer and not by my customer. My wage is 20-25% below market, even for this area. My employer has accused me of falsifying time entries and mileage reports. My employer asked me to do a significant amount of work on a 7 day period but didn't want to pay me for it. They actually said that it wasn't possible to work 96 hours in a week. It's bad enough having to work that much time in a week but it's even worse if your employer accuses you of trying to defraud the company. The same went for my mileage report. This same person refused to reimburse me for my mileage to a client in another town (actually 2 towns away) even though my last 2 supervisors told me to include it. He also wouldn't pay for the travel time. I don't even bother turning in mileage anymore. I end up eating a couple hundred a month but it's simply less heartache in the end. I didn't expense a training trip from a few months back because I heard that my employer paid up to a certain meal per dium if I had receipts. My coworkers and myself took turns buying the meals and I didn't keep receipts. I figured rather than putting up with the hassle of trying to get them to pay for it I would simply eat the 4 days of per dium. The last time I asked them to buy a book for me I went round and round with them over which customer to bill the book to. WTF?! My employer is all about making money, customer be damned. My review had a handful of negative marks on it. All of them came back to me not taking advantage of opportunities for me to bring another billable
Re:Are we sure it comes from work? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm considering a job change. I need to acquire better certs for my field. I'm trying to decide if I should wait until I have those to see if it improves my relationship with my current employer, or if I should take my new certs and run, or if I should just get out now to work on my certs while looking for a new job. Money is a problem for me. My current employer pays me so little that I'm having trouble staying afloat. I'm trying to pay down credit cards but the process is slow. I have an investment account that I could tap but I'm afraid to because that's my only source of fairly liquid cash. I have a couple retirement accounts that I can tap of I absolutely have to but that will cost me about 40% off the top (taxes and a 10% penalty). How hard was it for you to pull up stakes and relocate? I know that a lot of people do it in this industry and do it often. I don't really want to do that but I can see where that's required to get ahead in this business. Any other thoughts or comments you might have would be helpful. I'm thinking about looking for a career counselor or someone along those lines.
Re:Are we sure it comes from work? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm riding a POS old motorcycle round the world. It's great. I ran out of money and picked up a job as a GM at a landmark art house movie theatre that has a long history of bad management, and was physically falling apart (and we're using Win98!). I'm making huge improvements that will last a long time. When I leave for Round 2, the theatre is in much better shape, and I've hired staff that can take over and be good managers.
Way less money, but I feel better about the job. I'm never going to do computer only work ever again.
Re:Anatomy of a burnout. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll be on my way out of my current organisation (it's a joke to call it an 'organisation' really as it implies much more than we have) as soon as I am able.
Authoritarian management, lack of respect for engineers, not deferring to engineers for answers, last minute preparations for demonstrations, no significant forward planning.
Some of these things can be smoothed over by the engineers, we can put in some more effort and make things work. There is no reward for this - just more work and pressure. It is counterproductive to cover the cracks too, the same thing will happen next time with the 'culprits' putting in even less effort because they got away with it last time.
I have tried to influence the people/organisation to work in a more professional way. While they respond with the usual platitudes and say that my concerns will be addressed no action is forthcoming. I can wait only so long - any further and I am denying myself the opportunity to further my career in a sensible way.
Luckily I can see the signs of the burnout and can only hope that I can escape before I do something unfortunate. I will however take a few parting shots on the way out, there is no way on Earth I will work for the organisation or any of the management again - this bridge is one I can happily burn.
So I feel for you 'anubi', I can understand your position and can only hope that you are happy now in whatever role you have undertaken.
If I had mod points you'd get them all +5: The Way It Is.