Is Burnout Just a Sign of a Broken Labor System? (thebaffler.com) 93
A new essay from The Baffler suggests burnout is "a personal malady that indexes a broken labor system," rather than a trendy term that "resonates with affluent professionals who fetishize overwork."
And then the essay turns to Jonathan Malesic's new book The End of Burnout: He casts a critical eye on burnout discourse, in which the term is used loosely and self-flatteringly. Journalistic treatments of burnout — such as Anne Helen Petersen's widely read 2019 essay — tend to emphasize the heroic exertions of the burned-out worker, who presses on and gets her work done, no matter what. Such accounts have significantly raised burnout's prestige, Malesic argues, by aligning the disorder with "the American ideal of constant work." But they give, at best, a partial view of what burnout is. The psychologist Christina Maslach, a foundational figure in burnout research — the Maslach Burnout Inventory is the standard burnout assessment — sees burnout as having three components: exhaustion; cynicism or depersonalization (detectable in doctors, for example, who see their patients as "problems" to be solved, rather than people to be treated); and a sense of ineffectiveness or futility.... Accounts of the desperate worker as labor-hero ignore the important fact that burnout impairs your ability to do your job. A "precise diagnostic checklist" for burnout, Malesic writes, would curtail loose claims of fashionable exhaustion, while helping people who suffer from burnout seek medical treatment.
Malesic, however, is interested in more than tracing burnout's clinical history. A scholar of religion, he diagnoses burnout as an ailment of the soul. It arises, he contends, from a gap between our ideals about work and our reality of work. Americans have powerful fantasies about what work can provide: happiness, esteem, identity, community. The reality is much shoddier. Across many sectors of the economy, labor conditions have only worsened since the 1970s. As our economy grows steadily more unequal and unforgiving, many of us have doubled down on our fantasies, hoping that in ceaseless toil, we will find whatever it is we are looking for, become whoever we yearn to become. This, Malesic says, is a false promise.... [The book] is an attack on the cruel idea that work confers dignity and therefore that people who don't work — the old, the disabled — lack value. On the contrary, dignity is intrinsic to all human beings, and in designing a work regime rigged for the profit of the few and the exhaustion of the many, we have failed to honor one another's humanity.... William Morris, in his famous essay "Useful Work Versus Useless Toil," dreamed of a political transformation in which all work would be made pleasurable. Malesic thinks, instead, that work should not be the center of our lives at all....
Burnout is an indicator that something has gone wrong in the way we organize our work. But as a concept it remains lodged in an old paradigm — a work ethic that was already dubious in America's industrial period, and now, in a period of extreme inequality and increasing precarity across once-stable professions, is even harder to credit.... The top 1 percent of the income distribution is composed largely of executives, financiers, consultants, lawyers, and specialist doctors who report extremely long work hours, sometimes more than seventy a week....
But the strange work ethic the rich have devised seems highly relevant for our understanding of burnout as a cultural phenomenon, especially as it spreads beyond its traditional victims — doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, anti-poverty lawyers — and courses through the ranks of knowledge workers more generally."
And then the essay turns to Jonathan Malesic's new book The End of Burnout: He casts a critical eye on burnout discourse, in which the term is used loosely and self-flatteringly. Journalistic treatments of burnout — such as Anne Helen Petersen's widely read 2019 essay — tend to emphasize the heroic exertions of the burned-out worker, who presses on and gets her work done, no matter what. Such accounts have significantly raised burnout's prestige, Malesic argues, by aligning the disorder with "the American ideal of constant work." But they give, at best, a partial view of what burnout is. The psychologist Christina Maslach, a foundational figure in burnout research — the Maslach Burnout Inventory is the standard burnout assessment — sees burnout as having three components: exhaustion; cynicism or depersonalization (detectable in doctors, for example, who see their patients as "problems" to be solved, rather than people to be treated); and a sense of ineffectiveness or futility.... Accounts of the desperate worker as labor-hero ignore the important fact that burnout impairs your ability to do your job. A "precise diagnostic checklist" for burnout, Malesic writes, would curtail loose claims of fashionable exhaustion, while helping people who suffer from burnout seek medical treatment.
Malesic, however, is interested in more than tracing burnout's clinical history. A scholar of religion, he diagnoses burnout as an ailment of the soul. It arises, he contends, from a gap between our ideals about work and our reality of work. Americans have powerful fantasies about what work can provide: happiness, esteem, identity, community. The reality is much shoddier. Across many sectors of the economy, labor conditions have only worsened since the 1970s. As our economy grows steadily more unequal and unforgiving, many of us have doubled down on our fantasies, hoping that in ceaseless toil, we will find whatever it is we are looking for, become whoever we yearn to become. This, Malesic says, is a false promise.... [The book] is an attack on the cruel idea that work confers dignity and therefore that people who don't work — the old, the disabled — lack value. On the contrary, dignity is intrinsic to all human beings, and in designing a work regime rigged for the profit of the few and the exhaustion of the many, we have failed to honor one another's humanity.... William Morris, in his famous essay "Useful Work Versus Useless Toil," dreamed of a political transformation in which all work would be made pleasurable. Malesic thinks, instead, that work should not be the center of our lives at all....
Burnout is an indicator that something has gone wrong in the way we organize our work. But as a concept it remains lodged in an old paradigm — a work ethic that was already dubious in America's industrial period, and now, in a period of extreme inequality and increasing precarity across once-stable professions, is even harder to credit.... The top 1 percent of the income distribution is composed largely of executives, financiers, consultants, lawyers, and specialist doctors who report extremely long work hours, sometimes more than seventy a week....
But the strange work ethic the rich have devised seems highly relevant for our understanding of burnout as a cultural phenomenon, especially as it spreads beyond its traditional victims — doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, anti-poverty lawyers — and courses through the ranks of knowledge workers more generally."
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Re: It's a sign of masculinity (Score:1)
That and K-12, especially where certain judges are on the boards.
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Can you provide an example of a school board that has mandated the teaching of CRT in a K-12 school?
[CRT trolling is NOT] a sign of masculinity (Score:2)
You are arguing with a troll. Wasting your time. But if the trolls were rational or clever, then all they would need to do is meta (or metastasize?) the topic to "CRT-inspired classes" rather than pretend there are any K-12 classes about anything that could be recognized as CRT.
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Your first paragraph makes some sense. The problem happens when the work doesn't yield the payoff.
After that you're getting into "I'm just being silly".
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The problem happens when the work doesn't yield the payoff.
If you work harder and get more done than your co-workers, and that isn't rewarded with a raise or bonus, you should either cut back on your hours or look for a better job.
One evening, I went back to the office after dinner, planning to work late. When I returned to my desk, there was an envelope with a letter giving me a 3% raise. I noticed that the letter wasn't sealed and there were also letters on everyone else's desks. So I walked around the office and looked at them all. Everyone got the same perc
Re: It's a sign of masculinity (Score:2)
Maybe you didn't get a raise because even tho you work harder, you're clearly an unethical shithead
Re: It's a sign of masculinity (Score:2)
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Even if, for the sake of argument, men have some innate drive to work until bu
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Statistics from Germany for example show workplace accidents and absence related to diagnosed "burnout" being on an ever increasing curve.
Of course one must be careful because as with other diagnosed mental issues there is a natural side effect of a perceived increase purely due to better diagnostic methods. Like with things like Autism diagnoses, the increase can leave people with little to no concept of recognizing biases think that there must be some
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Because hobbies are fun, something you do for pleasure, unlike "work".
Not fun, you can get burned out on chores, these are just another form of work, one you don't get paid for.
Not something you have to constantly do, most don't constantly think of this...
Not really a priority for most people.
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So you're saying that you're compensating for your lack of masculinity in *ahem* "other areas" by working yourself to death to enrich the already wealthy people who own the company you work for.
Great plan. I'm sure that'll end well for you.
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You seem a bit hypermasculinized. Try eating more soy.
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The problem is that things have changed a lot. In the 70s and 80s, if you graduated college with -any- degree, you could nail down a decent job, get yourself a pension, and do OK. You could buy a decent house, and do OK. After 2008, things have changed. Experience is the only thing that matters, and the degree, and in IT certs, will get you past the HR firewall.
Now, it doesn't really matter the extra hours one put in their career. I know people who put in 60+ hours a week, and wondering why their buddy
Interesting, but... (Score:2)
This strikes me as our society's equivalent of pondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, while simultaneously fiddling as the planet burns AND having its head up its own ass.
If you want to read about the real burnout our species is facing, I suggest "Stolen Focus" by Johann Hari.
I dunno... (Score:3)
Speaking from my own experiences only, of course-
I suspect most of us here on Slashdot, are educated, sometimes highly so. The tech industry almost demands that we be such. So I doubt you'll get many viewpoints on this thread by people in the "manual labour" spectrum.
I have done manual labour for ~11 years. I was a building inspector, which while yes requires an education, is also highly taxing both physically and mentally. But it was rewarding and I didn't suffer from burnout, only a desire to work indoors (I detest cold weather)
So I switched to IT, but rather than work for a large company where I might get lost in the crowd, I went for a small 10 person firm. Less money and room for advancement, but my work was recognized, so there was that. I enjoyed it a great deal until economic situations forced my hand to find a better paying job.
Enter: gov't work.
Here we get to the crux of the issue. For those that work/have worked in gov't know the "burnout" that the article talks about isn't accurate (across the board) for one main reason:
Our performance isn't linked to our pay, nor the continued existence of the Agency. In my ~10 years in the gov't (both State and Fed) I have realized several rules:
(1) Don't piss off your boss or make him/her look bad.
(1a) As long as you follow (1), you can be a useless leech on the Agency for the rest of your working life, doing as little as humanly possible and still keep your job.
(2) No matter how heroic your work ethic is, unless you are in the top admin positions, nothing you do will change anything, ever. So get used to it.
I have never seen burnout in a gov't job because the concept of working hard and long hours, doesn't exist. In point of fact, working overtime is strictly forbidden unless you've got a damn good reason, because the gov't has to pay you for that overtime, and they don't want to do that. So 5pm rolls around and everyone bugs out.
As per probably most of us, I'm in IT and while the job is dull (well, routine might be the better word to use) and the rules/red tape/bureaucracy is omnipresent and sometimes irritating, I never have to work weekends, or off hours or holidays or early or late or anything like that. It's the perfect job for coasting through life and not encountering burnout.
Coasting is the proper word here BTW, when I transitioned from the private sector, I brought with me the private sector mentality, work hard, accomplish much, do everything needed. I was told on multiple times to slow down.
The reason I discovered (eventually, I'm thick-headed) is I was making my co-workers look bad, by making them look lazy. It's the unwritten rule in gov't work, everyone is "busy busy busy busy, so much to do" but you never really see anything done. Our performance not being linked to our pay, so why work hard?
It took a great deal to adjust to working at a snail's pace (stretching out a job that could be done in a day to the course of weeks can be tricky to pull off) but everyone around me, both in IT and the non-IT folk, do this. Go getters are will not last long in gov't work. But that leisurely pace only further removes the term burnout.
So next time you are in a long queue waiting for some gov't paper pusher to do a simple task, remember this post.
As an aside, we in the IT dept have been classified as "critical infrastructure" meaning (at least in the State where I work) we cannot be fired for any reason, without an order from the General Assembly. And the GA is only in session for like 3 months out of the year and has far more important issues to deal with.
Job security indeed.
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I suspect most of us here on Slashdot, are educated, sometimes highly so. The tech industry almost demands that we be such. So I doubt you'll get many viewpoints on this thread by people in the "manual labour" spectrum.
Before Slashdot became a forum for I.T. professionals, it was a forum for tech enthusiasts. I.T. didn't necessarily have to be your career path if you found things such as tinkering with computers, gaming, coding as a hobby, etc., to be among your interests.
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It's not just a sense of inadequacy or tedious anonymity that causes burn-out. Most times, it's working too long, not too hard. There are plenty of government jobs that have 12-hour shifts: Nurse, cop, even teacher. There isn't enough time to unwind and sleep before going to work again. Those jobs also have a large administrative overhead so the emotional equivalent of hitting a brick wall also contributes.
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There is also strong indication that an increase in productivity per hour (e.g. from making fewer mistakes) may well compensate for the lower number of hours or even offer gains in productivity per week. The virtue-signalling "heroes of the workplace" do not want to hear that though.
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I also work in local government, and here is my assessment of your posting:
Our performance isn't linked to our pay....
We have yearly performance reviews, just like in most private companies. Whether we are eligible for any yearly COLA's or other pay raises depends no the results of our performance reviews. We have had good fortune in hiring good people, so it's generally not an issue.
I have never seen burnout in a gov't job because the concept of working hard and long hours, doesn't exist.
HAHAHAHA! Good one. I write critical software for our local government, and the local office holders ALWAYS want something new. As it happens, the most recent, unfinish
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Local is not state level or federal level, each having more ossification than the last.
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Coasting is the proper word here BTW, when I transitioned from the private sector, I brought with me the private sector mentality, work hard, accomplish much, do everything needed. I was told on multiple times to slow down.
Sounds like a union job. Same thing happened to one of my former coworkers who was on the cleanup crew at the Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant [wikipedia.org]. He told us a lot of entertaining stories about that job, none of which encouraged faith in the nuclear power industry or PGE.
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Like others already commented, there are workplaces (which are not only limited to government work, by the way, either) where you have to steal equipment or something before you'll actually get fired.
That doesn't mean no one would ever have to work extremely hard there, or long hours, at times.
Also, having to kill time from nine to five, possibly while having to give the impression of being occupied with something, can be exhausting, too, especially if it is accompanied with a bad conscience. There's a clin
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Even that is way too benign and optimistic a view. Yeah, all the time they take credit for others' successes. That's hardly the only dirty thing they do. All too common is the dysfunctional workplace, in which management is full of stupid hacks who don't know much and don't care to learn, are only there because of some personal connection that has nothing to do with merit, and who fear and hate engineers, for being smarter than them. Some take great offense at the slightest hint of superiority from an e
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Look at it from this side:
IT is always boring, or lets say "less demanding" if the IT department is working good
I worked in IT once for 2 years or so. Had nothing to do. Literally nothing. The only "real work" were once every 6 month deployment of a new software version over the weekend.
For every thinkable "special area" we were 1.5 persons. In other words, if I was sick there were two persons who each could replace me on one or the other working area but not in all. Same for me, I could cover subsets (offi
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This is the way. Don't push yourself too far for any damn job. It gets you absolutely nowhere. It's not worth it.
I'm a graphic designer with 26 years of experience across web design and animation, various print media and products, photo manipulation and digital painting, 3D Modeling, 3D Animation, 3D Printing, Vinyl cutting, Sublimation, and recently laser engraving and cutting. I can also troubleshoot and solve most problems in prepress, be them analog or digital. I came up in that wonderful time of analog
Burnout is real, especially in corporate (Score:3)
I'm a guy in my 50's who has NEVER been burned out before ... now - that is.
I've worked for many different companies in different countries and while sometimes stressfull, not entirely unmanageable, but you know - kinda fun stress (we're doing good).
But when I started to work for corporate (a really HUGE world wide company, well known one too...) it changed for the worse, I work in IT so I sort of support my own co-workers worldwide with their IT issues, it almost functions like a call-center but we do so much repair-work (remotely via remote desktop and internal software solutions) that we're a bit of jack-of-all-trades sort of people, you have to if you're gonna survive where I work.
Sadly the burnout rate is high here, we're constantly in lack of personnel at our office HQ. Either people are leaving for another better position within the company or their are just leaving for another job somewhere else. But a thing no one speaks loudly about is the burnout. The burnout can happen at ANY age.
For example, your staff starts to leave, you'll have to handle 10-20 percent more tickets, still not too bad. After a while when 10 people left, you're up to your ears in tickets and the manager "pumps" the ticket heros as genuine heros and it becomes an competition. They also lie to us all and tell us it's NOT about how many tickets we resolve, but how we feel and taking our time - yet we have an intense timing-system that is monitoring how long we take to handle a ticket.
And this is often brought up after the team managers meetings, it's always in their papers "we must reduce overall time" etc. And they're always posting the Daily results of numbers of tickets handled during the day, saying it's not a competition - but yet it very much is.
Personally I don't really want to work there anymore, but at 50+ there's few alternatives to start from scratch again, and I might just have to bite the bullet and "wing it" as a burned out imposter as long as I can get away with it. Sounds sad, which it is - but I honestly don't see any alternatives to that.
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I went to work for Tivoli right after IBM bought them out but before they ruined the work environment. As a cost-saving measure they moved the support department out of the office building adjacent to the Arboretum into an office building on the other side of the actual Arboretum at "The Arboretum", which meant it was out of convenient walking distance during the approximately 48 weeks out of the year in which the weather is shit in Texas. They got rid of our fantastic HR worker (we had one dedicated to our
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And this is often brought up after the team managers meetings, it's always in their papers "we must reduce overall time" etc. And they're always posting the Daily results of numbers of tickets handled during the day, saying it's not a competition - but yet it very much is.
This is what happens when you're metric driven and not results driven. I see the exact same thing in my organization (government) in which I happen to be in the same situation as you. Every weekly meeting brings up closing our tickets, d
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It is particularly bad because a lot of companies think that IT staff are a commodity item. As long as the CVs people post on job boards have whatever tech they use on it, there is an infinite supply of new employees. There is no downside to burning them out, and a considerable upside (less expenditure).
In other areas it can be a bit of a cult over overwork thing. Often it's metric driven, with competition between employees encouraged. If you find a company that has something like that, get out. It's toxic.
Re: Burnout is real, especially in corporate (Score:2)
Management is crazy, probably clinically so. There is this sisyphean practice of trying to do more with less. The more staff you lose, the more that has to be done, the more staff leaves due to stress or a failure to perform at the new required level.
Rallying the staff and pushing to maintain metrics is not the role of a manager. These people have the wrong idea about their own job. A better way is for management to focus on prioritizing the work that should be done, and dropping the work that cannot be don
Re: Burnout is real, especially in corporate (Score:2)
Your reward for trying to learn everything and do everything is being told you're not doing enough. Somehow this only seems to get worse, and eventually you leave.
The next place you work seems so much better. And then eventually it's the same. And then it's finally worse than you even remember.
Where are managers getting all the bad advice? (Score:2)
versus High Performace Organizations Reading List (Score:2)
which I put together starting in 2017: https://github.com/pdfernhout/... [github.com]
"Most of these books, web pages, and videos are about how to design better organizations. Some are about how to be a more effective individual within the organizations we currently have. The items are divided into three broad categories -- Organization and Motivation, Health and Wellness, and Software Development Specific."
A lot of times there are exactly about "encouraging a decent working environment" for long-term productivity. But i
The USA is.. (Score:1)
..almost unique in that being a slave is seen as virtous.
welcome to my world (Score:2)
Hey buddy. It's Sunday, you should be checking your email. How do you have time for Slashdot?
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Indeed.
Avoiding burnout is easy (Score:1)
Just be rich enough to make your money work for you. Buy up some old unprofitable oil field and setup Bitcoin mining rigs to run on the filthy fuel, then sit back and watch the profit roll in. Now, if you're really rich, what you can do is buy the rights to some beloved entertainment franchise. Then you can collect royalties until the stars in the heavens burn out.
Work only is for people who don't have money.
Betteridge strikes again! (Score:3)
Burnout CAN be a sign of a broken labor system, but it isn't necessarily. Everyone is an individual, and the upshot of that is that everyone will react differently to different situations. Even if almost everyone across an industry experiences burnout at about the same time, you can't say it's the system. It might just be the job. Some jobs just aren't that pleasant, and others just take a toll, whether it's physical, emotional, or mental.
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In this case, it is one. Significant burnout rates are not sustainable. Any system that has them is broken. Burnout is a bit like a heart-attack: Each time your remaining strength drops. Friend of mine had 3 of them, spent two months in a specialized hospital after the last one and is now officially disabled and cannot work more than 40%. If he does he will have a 4th burnout and will likely be unable to work at all. Now he is lucky to be highly qualified and has no problem finding a job even at 40% and had
Whiny American "knowledge workers" (Score:1)
Spend a month roofing houses in Texas suburbs, in an Amazon warehouse, even driving a city bus, and then we'll have a discussion on the dignity of work and your burnout.
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Or teaching K-12.
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Just because the bottom and middle of America's labor system are badly badly broken (and they are) doesn't mean the upper quadrants aren't also broken.
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Burnout is a luxury of the rich.
Yeap (Score:2)
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We (North Americans) over-value work (Score:2)
I think a big part of the problem is that we over-value work. Yes, work is necessary. And sometimes it can contribute greatly to humanity and give one a great sense of satisfaction. But sometimes it's just work.
I've been working full-time for 30 years. If I could retire now in my mid-50s, I totally would. It isn't financially viable just yet, but as soon as it is... I'm outta here. To be clear, I enjoy my work, have a pretty sweet gig at the moment, and I'm not burned out at all. It's just that ther
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I think it is collective virtue-signalling and just as stupid.
Burnout is an old condition (Score:2)
An early description of burnout is the ancient Greek tale of Sisyphus.
The Gods assigned to Sisyphus the task of rolling an immense boulder up a steep hill. While he did so, he was accompanied by another man, who had never rolled a boulder anywhere and whose role was to tell Sisyphus that he was working too slowly, and that he was doing it wrong.
Whenever the boulder reached the top of the hill, Sisyphus's companion was handsomely rewarded, promoted and replaced. The boulder would then roll back down the hill
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Also he should feel gratitude to Hades for giving him a job, and be deferential to his hill-side manager.
Burnout affects everyone (Score:1)
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The high paid workers have a whole medical and legal industry behind them giving them (paid) sick leave and the ability to return to work with less hours. The circus has a name, burnout.
The working class joe switches jobs. No circus, no need for the name.
Yes, yes it is. The system always was broken. (Score:2)
I worked in the IT outsourcing business about 20 years ago and the employees from the various IT departments were shuttled and shuffled around more like goods than people. There was even one cartoon showing an IT manager shrink wrapped to a board being placed in a crate for shipment to the next company that was taking on the outsourcing contract. Another with an IT worker just discarded with the trash and the garbage collectors commenting on how someone threw out a perfectly goo IT programmer. When someo
Does work suffer? (Score:2)
If people in 'burnout' produce poorer quality work than by definition it is a sign of a poor culture. That means that your business could pay LESS money to get higher quality work. Just hire some newbies to do the scut work and you can cut down on your overtime.
Note if you have burnout without overtime, something very weird is going on. Or stop breaking the law and pay the overtime you are lying about not doing, you crooked thief.
The real question is, what if burnout does not reduce work quality signifi
of course it is (Score:2)
And here I was thinking that's self-evident and everyone knows it.
I started working at the end of the "golden age" for workers rights. I remember demonstrations for shortening the weekly work week to 35 hours in my youth. I have seen first hand how work became ever more condensed, stressful and demanding. How proper planning was replaced with just-the-bare-minimum especially in regards to people - what 5 people used to do was reduced to 4, then 3 and after a bit of restructuring to 2. Everything was over-op
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Pretty much so, yes. That is one reason why I categorically refuse unpaid overtime. Otherwise it devolves to regular work time and then whenever something bad happens there are no reserves. You are also correct that the "leaders" that cause this bad situation time and again are not evaluated fairly and can hence continue their destructive work. Personally, I think causing somebody to burn out and not watching carefully for early warning signs should be treated as aggravated assault by those responsible. Yes
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Yes, I am for jailing managers
A new age of work will start with a restructuring of the corporate shield, the liability protections, etc.
People in charge of things need to have skin in the game (in the words of Taleb). As long as CEOs can run a company into the ground and get a nice severance package with a couple millions in bonus while everyone else loses their jobs, this insanity will continue.
The second class of people that need to be held responsible is business consultants. The damage these creatures have done to the world is insan
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When I was a young college grad, there were a lot of non-technical things I just did not know, such as the norms of a sane and fair workplace. Management takes unfair advantage of that to regularly up the expectations. We got shifted from paid lunchtimes to unpaid lunchtimes, and it seemed only logical that you not be paid when you weren't working. 9 to 5 became 8 to 5, to make room for an unpaid hour for lunch. Then working through lunch became a way to virtue signal.
Salaried work is way too hourly n
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Over here in Europe I'd put that phase into the 1970s, maybe going into the early 1980s. It was long enough after the war that the damage had been repaired, the economy had recovered and the earliest parts of globalisation (with the export business pushing industries forward) had begun.
When my father finished school, company representatives were waiting outside the school to hire people on the spot - there was a shortage of workers, not of jobs. That was a big part of why employee rights could be won.
Strang
Let's Be Real (Score:1)
Oh boy (Score:2)
The closest thing that whiney essay had to offer was to make work enjoyable. But it also in the end - to put it in simple terms that work is simply bad.
Fix? one of the first things needed is to understand that not all work is following your passion. Sorry - it just isn't, and well meaning teachers and parents are setting kids up on
I pulled the emergency stop in November (Score:3)
I imagine I have a bit of insight but it is a personal story and I imagine being an aspie might lead to me reacting differently to stress than others do... and experiencing different things as stress.
In November, my psychiatrist convinced me to let him take me out of the rat race for a few weeks. That in and of itself felt like I had been driving in heavy fog at night, visibility zero at 120 km/h, knowing the road would take a sharp curve eventually... and FINALLY taking my foot off the gas pedal.
What I have learned is that the burnout came from within. From the expectations I had of myself. Not my employers expectation... Yeah, the company was and is dicking around with some asinine decisions that burns people out left and right but it was always my own decision to participate, it turns out.
I decided that I wanted to reach the level of professionalism I deemed appropriate. I took it upon myself to fight internal bullcrap like Don Quixote. Things that were outside my power to fight and thus outside my responsibility.
I needed to learn that the whole world does not rest on my shoulders and me, alone, upholding all the principles.
Since that happened, I have become VASTLY more stable, more content with life despite covid, despite the war in Ukraine and a host of other things that aren't going perfectly by any stretch of any imagination.
I have accepted that I am surrounded by idiots... but I have also made peace with that insofar as I realize that most of those idiots are doing their best to fight chaos every day... I had to realize that chaos just is THAT strong of a natural phenomenon. I may be more or less of an idiot than everybody else but in the great scheme of things? The difference is negligible.
I have started to direct my limited energy to thinks I CAN influence. And I take great pride in the stability I create in my direct family instead of worrying about greater and greater social spheres in which I am a nothing with no influence or power.
To a degree it felt like giving up the good fight... like quitting... but the fact of the matter is, you can only be a rock to someone else if you're not eroded to sand.
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I have started to direct my limited energy to things I CAN influence.
You make the Stoics proud! Thanks for sharing your story and glad you are happier now.
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The Serenity (Score:2)
Really liked your phrase: "you can only be a rock to someone else if you're not eroded to sand."
Reminds me of the airline advice: "put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others".
Your post also makes me think of the Serenity prayer, which in its original form was:
https://faith-seeking-understa... [faith-seek...anding.org]
"God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."
Although it later became:
lower the work week to 32-35 hours & make OT p (Score:2)
lower the work week to 32-35 hours & make OT pay more for even for salary jobs.
say have an X2 kick in at 50-60 hours and maybe an X2.5 at 80.
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32 hours? How about start with lowering work weeks to an actual 40 hours! That step would go a long way, and it's a lot more doable than 32.
Competition to see who can work hardest (Score:2)
I read about this phenomenon, particularly related to ambitious educated workers in the USA. I think there is a fear that if you don't put in extra hours, forgo your leave entitlement, and so on, you will be seen as inferior, and lose the chance of promotion, among other things. Under those circumstances, a nervous breakdown, early heart problems, and other symptoms of over-work could be viewed as badges of merit. This would not indicate a dysfunctional labour system as such, so much as a harmful work cultu
Pretty stupid analysis. (Score:2)
Burnout has much more to do with unfulfilling repetition than anything else. Change either side and you stave it off for a while. Certain things add to fulfillment for a while-- more money, responsibility, titles, praise, challenging tasks, etc., but they never cure the problem. The repetition can take different forms, and can be addressed to a degree with gamification and rotating tasks-- or a hobby that provides the contrasting focus.
Two companies (Score:2)
Then entered a very ambitious prestigious company. My God. Staff complaining, constantly playing the blame game. Manipulating, gossip. People too busy getting noticed instead of doing their job. Getting into overambitious projects and us plebeians getting the message "just get it done by next week".
It meant that you had to spend too
Cultural (Score:2)
The Top ten Burnout cities are almost all in Asia, with Los Angeles at 9th place and Buenos Aires at 10.
In Europe they drop the pen at 17:00 and go in the beer-garden.
Re: Cultural (Score:2)
From the disability perspective (Score:2)
MBI? (Score:2)
Burnout by human ethic in gov't staff (Score:1)
Burnout in gov't works may be easy to get. Most gov't employees care about the consequences for other humans of not doing their jobs. They works even if you do not pay them ! Magic !
The French gov't uses many strategies to not pay overwork (partial list of the last two decades):
- "free will" (top management in all domains): Do no count the work time ! Easy ! Then new stuffs can be freely added without limitations. Very useful to reduce the number of working people and share the overload.
- "free will
It's real (Score:2)
It's definitely a problem, and a decent company will try to limit it as much as is reasonably possible, and it will still be an issue.
A bad company will completely ignore it and have a huge employee churn.
There are things that can be done to reduce it more effectively that aren't horribly expensive, though they aren't popcorn prices.
The problems I can see are nobody has done it that I know of, a lot of people wouldn't be too accepting of it, and i
Personal choices (Score:2)
When I started my career as a software developer, I noticed people around me working crazy overtime hours to get ahead. I decided that was nuts, and chose to pursue a personal experiment. I chose to work regular hours, except for emergency situations or pre-planned after-hours deployments. I chose to devote my evenings and weekends to my family and to my personal pursuits.
Not only did this choice make for a much happier and healthier existence, but I didn't miss out on the promotions and pay raises my peers
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Yes, it is (Score:2)
And it's been broken since St. Ronnie of the Raygun broke the unions in the US.
40 hour weeks were *normal* for decades. Then Raygun broke the onions, and suddenly "oh, you're in management, not just an employee" became common (the only thing I ever managed were computers, but I couldn't join a union).
What we got was upper management convinced we were indentured servants, and saying "whatever it takes", even if that, say, is working Thanksgiving Day (US) weekend, or 70 hour weeks.
If you think doing that make
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