Posted on 2024-05-30 by Matt.
I hear a lot of talk about burnout and its causes, but I feel like the biggest contributors aren't being talked about. Here's my list of causes.
This is the most obvious contributor. You're working too much, too hard, for too long. This can be draining and dehumanizing.
But, the work itself might not be the problem.
I think we've all been there. We have a project to complete, a deadline that might be looming, or just some serious work that needs to be done. You even know exactly what needs to be done and how to do it. There's just one problem: you never seem to actually get the chance to do it.
It might be as insane as days filled with back-to-back meetings, or it just might be death by a thousand paper cuts. Each obligation on its own is reasonable, but all it does is prevent you from actually doing the work you need to do.
And every day, the stress of this unfinished work continues to increase.
There is a certain amount of bullshit at every job. It could be navigating bureaucracy, or it could just be that your efforts are being put into things that you know won't really make a difference.
But there is a certain implicit ratio of real work to bullshit. When this ratio goes too far out of balance, it's hard to bring it back. Now you see it everywhere, and you might find it hard to un-see it.
Entire books have been written about how bad it is for us to be saturated in notifications. And yet, we still run our entire workplace like this.
And this is especially destructive when it blurs the lines between being on and off the clock.
There is a tipping point with tech debt where no matter how simple the work should be, it ends up being complicated. Things that should be easy are hard, and things that should be hard just become implausible. Every change is hard to test, there are constant spooky actions at a distance, and you have zero confidence in what's being shipped. You have entered the downward spiral.
The only way out of it is to slowly and surely make things better every day. It didn't get this way overnight.
But if you are working in a system that got to this point, there's a good chance that every day, someone else is still contributing to making it a little worse. At a certain point, you might look around and feel like Sisyphus. And maybe you just decide to stop pushing the damn boulder.
Maybe what you have is actually a reasonable, well-maintained codebase that you generally like working in. But, the company itself is a dumpster fire.
You see bad decisions made at the top. The company is following strategies that are either contradictory or clueless. Maybe it's just plain underwater. Or maybe you work for a company that's too big to fail, but you're working on a product that will never see the light of day.
You know, deep down, that nothing you work on will actually change the outcome, and that none of this will matter.
No one knows what's going on. No one has the answers to any questions. Things are happening, but no one seems to know when or why. Things that are committed to don't ever seem to get followed up on, and no one questions it.
Or maybe it's more of an individual issue. You've got a lot of things on your plate, and a hundred more on deck. None of these are tracked anywhere, there's no way to get a sense of what your actual obligations are.
This haze of things on the to-do list follows you around and contributes to overall unease and inability to focus.
I recently went into depth on how I feel async communication is overrated, so I won't repeat myself here. Suffice it to say that each of these open loops takes its toll.
What I didn't touch on was the isolation factor that comes with being permanently remote. We're social animals, but we pretend that interacting with our coworkers via text and video call is somehow ticking that box.
I know a lot of WFH fanatics will say things like "Get those needs met outside of work! I shouldn't have to commute just because your social life is lacking." But what's being ignored here is that work is a social activity. It usually requires some form of helping each other, making sacrifices on behalf of each other, and plain old caring about each other.
There's no substitute for feeling like you are on a shared mission.
There are some people that you are just incompatible with. You can try to run out the clock and hope that they move on before you do. But every day that you work with them just feels a little harder.
There are some companies that have a mission that is in stark contrast with your personal values. This is even worse than working somewhere that doesn't matter.
A lot of this comes down to personal agency and control. Having a reasonable amount of control of your time, attention, and focus are going to help protect you from burnout.
At the end of the day, it's usually not the work, it's everything else surrounding it. That's what's known as a job.