Burnout ≠ Working Too Much
Burnout often stems from a lack of purpose and agency, not just workload. Empowering teams with meaningful tasks and autonomy fosters motivation and connection to their work.
I'm recovering from burnout after working at a big tech company for 10 years. I think this article tries to focus on how just giving people the right work will prevent burnout, but I think the causes are very complex and vary for different people. But it's important to catch it before it's bad. For me, I had difficult to please managers, or projects that went nowhere, or passion projects that were not invested in, or lack of strong non-work relationships, or even just looking at the company I worked at slowly lose all culture and turn into something that started to abuse customers and focus on profits.
I think the "difficult to please managers" speaks to me. I'm a top performing engineer and I had no problems leading the pack until I had a new manager forced on me who was very much a "suit" type. He views the team as numbers and everything can be solved by "throwing more bodies at it"
Thankfully I got promoted to a new team but yes there are many causes for burnout
Yeah, I almost burned out a couple years back and the causes were way more complicated than just getting the right work assigned.
I’d cut ties with my abusive mother. I was saddled with debt from living with her. My economy wasn’t quite working out. I was falling behind on work. Caught Covid, which screwed with my heart so my health deteriorated really rapidly. I wasn’t given the opportunity to work from home and the sum of it all just wore me down.
The tasks weren’t the problem, honestly.
Good luck with your recovery, friend. Sorry that you burnt out in the first place too.
If you don't mind sharing, how did you realise you were going through burnout and what are you doing to help yourself recover?
Not OP but for me it was declining motivation to even get up leading into complete disability inability to go to work in the morning. I was dragging myself to the shower with my head down, drove to work emotionless and all I could feel was an enormous weight pressing me down. I felt like an empty shell.
In my case it was an absolutely horrible project manager that tried to motivate by competition. Everyone against everyone. And the role i tried to fill was way over my head, but he refused to acknowledge. Some months later I was out for three months and I still struggle after five years. I think this fueled my depression and led to my divorce. I will fight everyone who tries to impose the same amount of stress on any of my colleagues for the rest of my life.
Edit: it's late, I'm tired and too German for eloquent English. Sorry for the messy rant
I think I ignored a lot of signs and indications under the feeling that well "I'm promo tracked to the next level and I worked hard so I'll ignore it." My partner told me to talk to somebody, friends said I worked hard. But then slowly my motivation to work at my job decreased. I delivered less, I made up excuses, I stop caring about projects when I used to really care. Which was a huge difference because I used to be a top tier developer every year.
But the big part was my personal life. After work I was tired and not motivated, even though I would barely do any work. loosing interest in hobbies was a big indication. Going to the gym, but not really pushing myself, etc. I think there's some parallels with depression, but I never felt like I had that because I kept getting out of bed doing things.
I had a friend deacribe their experience and I just started thinking yeah I feel the same way. I finally had a health issue/mental breakdown that caused me to go to the doctor and pursue FMLA leave which is giving me partial pay to just focus on myself, focus on friends, and talk to a therapist. I don't know what I'll do when it ends. Probably won't go back to the company.
Weirdly, a lot of my friends in the big tech industry have hit a breaking point and are leaving or on leaves.
If burnout was a natural byproduct of working too much (or too hard, or for too many hours), we’d see every founder/C-level suffering from it.
Oh, a comedy piece! Well deserved sarcasm aside, that bit only tends to be true to small and maybe medium companies, where the top isn't an impenetrable ivory tower.
the real energy drain is when they ask themselves: Why am I doing this?
Because they have to eat and pay their bills, that is literally the only thing keeping people doing the soul crushing shit thrown at them.
My team at work delivered a feature that will save us 18 million a year. They rewarded us by firing half the team.
See now it's saving 20 million /s
I’ve haven’t had a burnout (knocks wood), but the most toxic environment I’ve worked in had tight deadlines, unclear requirements and many last minute changes on features that ultimately didn’t mattered. Combine this with long and tedious release processes and narrow release windows. If a bug slipped through our (not so robust) testing process, it was difficult to fix it.
It felt like the priorities were all wrong. Instead of improving the product for existing customers and improve our release process, it was all about adding pointless features some ”potential buyer” asked for (they never bought the product either way).
Now I work in a much better workplace, thankfully.
To me, he talks more about boreout/brownout than burnout. The first one (I almost did it this year) is about having a job that is boring, like really boring for you (mine was tech support only with absolutely no control over anything, plus some disrespect for my company and client (big bank) starting to appear). Brownout is more on the lost of meaning which he talked more about.
Both may seems "better" than burnout, but being bored enough to have suicidal ideation back is not a great deal (in my case) and according to my therapist : the cause are different, but the result is "always the same" : one day, you can't get out of bed and cry...
