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Comment by bowsamic | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has experienced extreme burnout myself, it's not evil to want employees that won't have mental health issues...

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The evil part is when a company uses this to know exactly how much productivity to extract from an employee. We're close to becoming productivity batteries that are now easily swapped out.

Wouldn't it be good if managers had a hint to be more empathetic towards an employee that's going through a temporary bad mental state, instead of labeling "under-delivery" and throwing him onto a "PIP" process?

Wouldn't it be good if Israel and Hamas became best friends?

What's good and what's likely are not the same thing.

Have you done the research and found a statistically significant impossibility for any manager to feel empathy?

You can have an opinion that yes, but it's not an established fact. It seems to me a cynical view of the world.

*gestures at the couple hundred year old history of organized labor relations*

"Can an individual manager possibly feel empathy?" is, IMO, a red herring. "Do large corporations typically foster a culture where such empathy is rewarded and encouraged?" can be answered with a pretty strong "no".

Source?

Why is that evil?

Yes, but it will be implemented in evil ways, like threatening employees to improve their burnout score or you'll sack them - without reducing their workload, of course.

See "Bradford factor".

Your boss can detect you are frustrated and burned out, or you have a terrible boss and your company doesn't care about you anyway.

This will only be used for evil.

Not all burnout is the fault of the employer but I'd be willing to bet a paycheck the majority of burnout is caused by your "reward" for hard work being more work and fewer resources as opposed to increased pay and/or advancement.

Hard not to see the pattern emerging here..."burnout the employee", "subject them to invasive monitoring", "fire them/force them out because they have mental health issues revealed by said invasive monitoring","hire a replacement at a lower salary".

> it's not evil to want employees that won't have mental health issues...

Yes, it's a good tool to know when fire those employees that are approaching burnout and get some fresh meat.

The evil part is forcing more Jira, sprints and retros on people who are burned out because of Jira, sprints and retros lol.

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