How to spot symptoms of burnout on your engineering team
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No sarcasm intended, this is an important issue.
It's been some years since I investigated on that topic, but I remember there are basically two paradigms:
A) Blame the guy/dev/employee B) Blame the company/environment/manager
Depending on your point of view, you may want to settle somewhere in between these two extremes. I find "The truth about burnout" by Maslach/Leiter in my bookshelf, who where the first ones doing a proper scientific analysis. They pretty much end up with paradigm B. As a dev, I liked that.
I suppose I'd go with B, though I have no idea what to do about that.
It was a financial difficulty, but with the extra time of not working I was able to cut household expenses by about 60% (though those have crept back up since I'm working again). I volunteered for a layoff, so severence covered a lot of the time off.
When I left I hit every item on this list. I thought I never wanted to look at a microcontroller again.
I spent time with some personal projects. Dedicated myself to coaching a local roller derby team and generally followed my curiosity wherever it led.
And I slowly found myself drifting back to embedded projects. I realized a combination of imposter and Stockholm syndrome had kept me at the company for years longer than I should have stayed. But I didn't have an issue with the specialization itself.
I've now found a position I enjoy. In a nice twist of fate we are using a micro built by my previous company and my familiarity is a big asset. My new employer recognized my passion and talent, so this job came with a raise that will cover what I spent during my sabbatical.
The gap did come up in interviews. I was truthful and said I volunteered for a layoff and took a long sabbatical. Then talked about the projects that gave me time to work on.
In closing, I also want to echo the call to go find professional help. I spent many of the dark years talking. It took a long time to work up the courage to take the plunge. I would never have been ready to volunteer for that layoff, or make good use of my time off without those sessions.
I think burnout happens when you put your standards higher than you can achieve. But there are different kind of standards.
* You can burnout when you work harder than you can (physically and emotionally).
* You can burnout when your social standard is different than your company's.
* You can burnout when your standard is pleasing the user while your company's standard is pleasing the shareholders.
* You can burn out when you think you are not replaceable and the company will collapse without you (fact: it won't).
* And so on...
I never had a burnout but I suffered from extreme fatigue because I was sitting all day. I got all kinds of physical and emotional problems. So I started to burn out. And what scared me most was that working out at the end of the day doesn't help much when you are sitting still 10 hours in a row.
So I had the luck that I could change jobs. Maybe you are also lucky and can find something that will help you change the problem that burns you out.
I like talking week-long blocks of time to recover. I work in consulting, and given the amount of decision-making and travel-related stress I undertake during the week, having a week of being at home and doing nothing is very, very welcome.
I think the key is doing nothing. Nothing manifests itself differently to different people. To me, nothing means waking up whenever, driving for hours on end, watching a movie or working on a personal project at my own leisure. For others, it's shitloads of TV (which I don't like). For others still, it's hours of golf or something like that. Detaching completely from work is the key here.
I'm going to emphasise this when I start leading my own teams. I want people to be at their best, and the only way to do that in a world like this is by stepping away from work every so often. You only live once.
Good luck!
If you feel too much pressure weighting you down go get proffesional help, even if it feels like a defeat.
http://quietkit.com, guided meditaton for beginners
It is a good job market out there and there is no reason should put up with a job that is making you sick.
Take more than a free Friday.
Many people will happily work 14 hour days for a 1 million/year Salary. I promise you they will not burnout.
But the crux of it is that employers must optimize burnout with labour expense.
Therefore they focus on the employee's behaviour to identify burnout and give them "just enough" to be teetering below the burnout phase (on-site massages, catered lunches, bullshit games, and extra vacation)
Other solution is to have a management/executive team that is proactive and not reactive.
Throwing money at an employee acts as a temporary cushion, a bandaid. A bonus will be forgotten within days or weeks, a raise within a month or two. This is not to say that employees never deserve raises. Employees who take on more responsibilities, or have acquired more experience definitely deserve a higher pay.
Motivation is the only true variable that managers can influence on, and the only one that truly matters. Motivation is like a sea/ocean upon which the employee sails, not unlike a boat. The obstacles, and blockers that employees face are like rocks under the water level (to keep with the metaphor, because the keel would strike the rocks). As a manager, you have two options. Take a pickaxe and try to move those boulders/rocks out of the employee's way, or add more water.
In this metaphor, the boulders are typically personal blockers ("I'm a C++ dev, I don't want to work on that Node piece of shit", "I start at 7, so I don't see why I would have to join a meeting at 4PM", "I worked until 3AM yesterday, which is why I wasn't there at the team meeting at 11AM", etc). You can try to remove the boulders, but that's closer to psychotherapy that takes 15 years, which is usually out of the realm of possibilities for a manager and a company. What a manager can do, however, is help the employee feel more motivated.
This is where extra holidays in lieu, making people feel part of a team, and feel ownership/responsibility for the team, and other "soft" things plays its part. Yes, you can try to tell an employee that you'll give him an extra $200 if they stay late and fix a bug, but that just shows that motivation is coming from the wrong place.
Monitoring how much motivation an employee has is the #1 job of a good manager. People who burn out are usually badly managed, or operate in a toxic environment. A good manager can't (always) fix a bad environment. He can improve certain aspects of it, though.
Ask how many people earning 1 million dollars a year (doctors, etc) feel about working 80 hour weeks.
It's like me saying I can motivate someone to feel the "ownership" of my house (even though they are not on title).
Ownership is you know, actually OWNING something.(Shares, body/health, vision)
If your team does not feel ownership then is it because they do not actualy even own $1 worth of shares in the company project.
You can underline exceptional performance from an employee (or preferably, a whole team/group of employees) by giving them a bonus, or buying them a nice dinner or whatever. But this has to be a bonus: if the employees ask for it, or if it was a promise (carrot) before the work was done, the point is moot, and the psychological effect of the reward will be, too.
If your team pulls through a very difficult challenge, by sacrificing their own time (working a whole weekend, for example), without anyone in the hierarchy asking so, and it was done to address a business blocker, then that definitely demands compensation. The most obvious compensation would be to give them the time they gave to the company with a bonus 50 or 100%. Add money if you feel it is deserved and think the employees would enjoy it.
Just remember that the company can never use this in negotiations ("You're getting a 3% raise instead of 5% because you got 10k in bonuses last year"). It is proper compensation for work done. Nothing more.
Now, back to the matter of motivation: your team decided to do the work. They are motivated. But having to do this will drain that motivation. It is your job as a company to make sure these situations don't occur again. One way to re-motivate people is to show them the steps you are taking to make sure they never have to sacrifice another weekend. Make sure they understand and agree with the steps. They made efforts, now it's the company's turn to do so as well.
Startups often burn people out because they assume that employees are motivated. But being a paper millionaire only buys so much motivation. Engineers (and others, but I don't manage profiles other than engineers) are under tremendous pressure to deliver. Their motivation disappears because they aren't privy to the founders' vision, or don't understand how their work affects the bottom line.
The biggest indicator of people lacking motivation is asking for more means/resources. When people say "we need to hire more," or "we need more hardware," or "we need a better office;" those should be red flags that there is a problem with motivation. That's not to say your office doesn't really stink, or that their laptops are melting during compiles, though. Asking for resources as a bandaid to productivity, I guess, would be a better indicator of low performance ("I'm slow at writing this feature because I only have 4 cores on my computer").
The idea behind a burnout is simple, when you feel that your work isn't worth much, you feel burned out. To most people there is an active denial of the fact that they do not want to a certain job for $100k, but are doing it because they have a family to take care of and an old person to take care of after retirement.
They get frustrated because they don't have the appreciation of their job as a software developer, a project manager, an accountant, a baseball player or whatever, as 'valuable work'.
This means that if they were getting paid more for the same job they don't value, then it won't really make them feel better (except if that higher pay allows them to do less work in the same time).
On the other hand, for someone like me, I like what I do as a developer, but sometimes I'm stuck in a job which is awful by the nature of the company I work in, or in other cases just underpaid (both have happened to me, came really close to getting burned out).
Decrease chance of burnout by exponentially increasing pay.
Another way to avoid burnout is having multiple income streams and therefore being able to tell anyone to shove it on a moments notice.
Take note everyone, this is why you want multiple income streams and is a worthy goal.
I used to burn out for 120k/year pay when required to work 70 hour weeks.
Now I work 80+ hour weeks and get paid almost triple. In control of my destiny and can drop any one client/customer/employer within 2 seconds if they look at me the wrong way.
I despise 10 hour days. I can't have a life outside of work if I work such days, 5 days a week. Forget 80 hour workweeks: I'd never take the job. When do I have time to do artwork, spend with my family, or explore the place I live? Simple answer, I don't.
Heck, I hated not being able to take 2 weeks off in one chunk, and felt lucky I got that much time.
If you really enjoy the job you are doing, feel appreciated and are decently good at it - it might not be so bad. Unfortunately, I have never found this at a job. At the end of the day, I'm still working for a relative pittance and hate that I have to work. Fuck the folks that want to take my entire life away from me.
Then you can focus on your art and passions.
The odds might be better than the lottery, but they are still pretty astronomical.
The value I provide people? That's a weird thing to look at. I mean, I don't generally cause people issues at a workplace and I make sure I do whatever I am doing for work to the best of my ability. I like to make others' jobs easier as well when possible. That's just standard operating procedure.
But lets face it: Most jobs pay average pay for their field. Most average pay isn't exactly "get rich" pay. The odds of getting really high pay - the sorts that would make me retire early - are even fewer, especially the sort that don't expect years of 60-80 hour workweeks to get to that point. These are the jobs that have astronomical odds to land, especially if you are in your late 30's now. Not quite lotto odds, but still bad enough not to bet your life on.
Most times, it just doesn't seem worth it.
And to tell you the truth, if this were something I wanted, I'd not have moved to Norway. I'm not a skilled worker, and though I've taken a couple of years of language courses, my options are limited. On the other hand, I enjoy the hell out of my life - which is all I really wanted anyway.
Value I provide people? Psh. I can volunteer to spend time with elderly folks that want company. Still fufilling without having to give up my entire life.
Money is a number of things. It is also captured reciprocal altruism, the "value" you provide is often times compensated with money. (Not always)
"Landing a job"
That language makes it seem like you fall into, stumble across, or get "lucky" to work for another man or woman (ie: a JOB)
That language and thinking is precisely what is holding people back from delivering on their life's work and maximizing the value provided to society.
"Giving up my entire life"
Did Steve Jobs, Ghandi, Mandela, Lincoln "give up their lives"?
This is all perspective.
A man with a Mission will not burn out. Better yet, a man with a Mission, autonomy and serious income does not burn out.
Jobs is the closest to what folks would model themselves after. And sure, he was successful and world-changing. But most folks aren't: Again, he's an anomaly. It isn't that that sort of path is impossible, but realistically speaking, most of us won't get there. And I do think he probably worked too much, as do most CEO's. I hope he was happy, but I've never found such a thing to be so.
"That language makes it seem like you fall into, stumble across, or get "lucky" to work for another man or woman (ie: a JOB)"
The truth is, this sort of job is what most people have. It isn't that folks don't put in work or try. It is that a lot of "making it" depends on things outside of your control, such as where you were born, the government where you live, how rich your parents were, the quality of school you went to, whether or not folks like you, health, timing and other such things I'm sure I forgot. It isn't that you can't do things, but realistically not everyone can get to where any of the folks you mentioned were. Most of us are average, working average jobs for some average manager.
This isn't even a bad thing: I've enjoyed most jobs I have had. I liked working at a school kitchen. I liked working at a pharmacy, and find retail to be fun as much as frustrating. I liked being a CNA at a nursing home - especially that (and too bad the pay is usually low and you feel overworked at 40 hours/week). These things don't have paths to riches or to anything on the scale of the people you mentioned. Fufilling or not, I'd still not work any of these for 60-80 hours a week. It is still work.
Of course, it might just be that I chase different sorts of dreams, and have never really found a field that both has actual opportunity for decent money and I like enough to do that much per week. Even then I would refuse: My favorite thing is producing artwork, but doing so for 50-80 hours a week puts me at risk of not being able to use my dominant hand well later in life, as artwork is really hard on the hand, wrist, and elbow joints. I already am reaping that "reward" with mild tennis elbow that occasionally flares up, and I'm only in my late 30's. Oops :)
I strongly disagree with this viewpoint - you can throw as much money as you want at someone, and it might stop them complaining for a bit, but it's not fixing the problem. You can't stop arterial bleeding by wrapping more bandages around the wound.
Burnout is the state of being overworked/underpaid and lacking autonomy agency (because one made bad life choices to support a family, debts, limited mobility).
Most people feel like they are poor little artifacts in a cruel machine or world. That attitude, coupled with low pay and a lacking personal Mission is the reason for burnout.
How do you spot this symptom? It might be
that a team member isn’t commenting on pull
requests as much as she used to. Or he’s not
speaking up in sprint planning and retrospective
meetings.
This is basically the worst thing I've ever read. And why? I think you already know, but let me tell you anyway!
Meetings are bullshit. At all times they are unrealistic. There is what people say during a meeting, and then there is what actually happens during the interplay of the group dynamic, as work gets done.
Sit at tables all day, and bullshit about diagrams and ideas, with zero concrete examples, and some ham fisted emails where people dump screenshots into MS Word documents, and then forward as email attachments, with captions like "it's broken. fix it."
Then go and try to write some code, and see what happens when someone else in the meeting drops a JSON object on you, that has half the properties you need to do anything, and most of them are in the wrong place, or at magic number slots in an array or something.
You have to have your head up your ass, to expect people to be chipper little busy bees at all times, and then write feel-good blogarticles like this.
But you have to be Satan himself, to put an article like this in front of a so called "scrum master" and tell them that happy thoughts at all times are the only "normal" that is the correct and proper Normal, and all other "normals" are actually signs of workplace PTSD.
Now uppity tough guy managers will bring motherfuckers in for review only to remind them that they forgot their flair, and they seem to have a case of the Mondays lately, and ask them to put on a happy face, and pitch in for the big win!
That's not how it works.
You have a team dynamic, and that team dynamic doesn't change if your team members are supporting a "Sick System." A Sick System is doomed to be inefficient, and foments disappointment, because the process is inefficient by design, but doubly punishing when hopeless, lost people are involved.
But even so, different team members have different perceptions of progress, based on skill level and experience. So one individual may be happy with the current sick system, because it's an improvement from their last shit show, while another will be fucking miserable because this is the tenth motherfucking shit show they've had to tap dance in, and the routine never fucking changes.
If you're looking for symptoms of cynicism after they happened, then it's too late. You don't understand how they happen, why they exist, or how to prevent them before they occur. If you can't prevent a loss of enthusiasm and morale, and expect all hands to express the same cordial cookie cutter productivity, then you are already lost at sea.
Seriously. Good. Stuff.
"Where did This Book Come From?
I wrote this book because someone paid me to. But I also wrote it because I had a deadline. I began jotting down meeting tricks in the summer of 2007 while working for Yahoo!, as I observed them firsthand in meetings with Directors, VPs, Senior VPs, and Senior VP Directors. Seven years later I became a manager at Google and got invited to even more meetings than I ever had before. How did I achieve such an intense trajectory over the course of my luminous career? I went to meetings, and I looked damn smart in them."
I bought this book for my coffee table at home. It's worth the laughs. Sometimes my passive aggressive thoughts make me want to bring it into work and leave on my desk. Or my boss' desk. Or my boss' boss' desk.
They read from the Book of Jobs every monday morning. "If thee bees have passion, they never work a day in their life. And we hiredest thee smartest to tell us what to do, not to tell them what to do." But the freedom and passion they're talking about is in deciding how many story points to attach to the minute tasks that have been pre-ordained for you to be passionate about. This is because we would have never hired you if you would not be passionate about the roadmap at all times. Leaders don't admit mistakes in the Book of Jobs, they first travel through the bloggosphere on their quest for validation that it's someone else's fault. If that does not work, they check if the naysayer can be replaced, preferably at a cheaper rate. If so, the naysayer will be sacrificed to the land of better opportunities to boost team morale.
This article is telling the story of an engineer who tried to collaborate and voice their concerns constructively to start, but found out it was all the meetings and listening was just an empty act on the part of their managers. Their managers kept cramming so much work into the release that quality suffered under the unrealistic expectations. Those same unrealistic expectations that were previously carefully regarded by the subordinate engineer as risks and concerns.
So the engineer realizes that to get something done, they have to do it themselves. They work longer hours to rearchitect and/or introduce some new tools to improve the pipeline, but the manager was unable to understand how this related to this sprint's burndown chart or the pre-ordained roadmap. And the only conclusion the manager is capable of, even after reading all the blogs they could find on the subject is: When there's a misunderstanding with "their" engineer, it was either a bad hire or even though "their" engineer speaks fluent C,C++,Go,Haskell and Scala, they just do not seem to understand pie-charts and maybe they need a 1v1 to talk about it. Yes, more meetings is what they need to get their work done. The engineer stopped trying to waste their time voicing anything in meetings.
Their rate of commits dropped because they were working on design work, aka thinking. But their manager literally treats the github commit graph as an indicator of the engineer's health vital signs. The manager believes themself very technologically advanced by not resorting to that barbaric practice of correlating LOC with an engineer's vital signs. Throughout the whole story, the manager never actually learned or changed one damn thing. *In the article, this same story is told through the perspective of a manager with their head quite far up their ass.
Anyways, what a bunch of back-patting patronizing bullshit. I feel truly sorry for anyone who has to work under this guy or anyone influenced by him.