Slashdot Mirror
Burnout and Depression Among IT Workers?
Cultural Sublimation asks: "All of us working in IT seem to be
especially prone to problems like
burnout and depression. Could part
of the reason be directly related
to our professions? Recently, there
have been a number of interesting
features on Kuro5hin which have focused precisely on this issue. From people claiming that "
The Internet Is Driving Me Crazy",
to an in-depth two-part series trying to
demystify
depression, the message is that too
much information might be making us sick.
What are the experiences of fellow
Slashdot readers on this topic?"
Its bad enough linking to articles in The Register, do we now link to articles in blogs? What happened to real news? Is this just comments about comments about comments about news?
Wait...I figured it out. Maybe I'm depressed and burned out because, after spending two years on a enterprise wide systems upgrade where I averaged working 75 hours a week as a salaried employee, a project that was completed under budget and 6 months ahead of schedule, I was outsourced at the end of the project to cut costs. Yes, that must be it. (true story)
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Been there...my condolences.
If you expect recognition from your employer, you will always be doomed to disappointment. At the end of the day, you just gotta do it for yourself.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I'd rathter read comments about comments (ad inf.) about real news, than read unsubstantiated anonymous rumors passed off by the mainstream press as real news. It's not that blogs are so journalistic or reliable, it's that mainstream media news is so unreliable and devoid of journalism, that blogs make better news sources these days.
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
I've been watching this pretty closely, preparing for a masters program in a related topic. This isn't directly related to my research, so take it more as an idea than a finding, but:
Information overload will only affect certain personality types. There are those of us who inhale Google daily. Recent example: "I went home last night, discovered Hibernate, learned it, and converted our 70,000-line service center app to use it. Want the diffs?" Yeah, there are people who do this; we had it happen at work about a week ago.
Others simply cannot absorb and process information that quickly. These people are potential info-burnouts. Tends to correlate, in my experience, with a general unwillingness to learn new programming languages or adapt to new systems. They're not being sticks-in-the-proverbial-mud -- they understand that they simply can't cram it into their brain quickly enough, and it often makes them anxious.
There are a lot more types of programmers than that, but you get the idea. In my case, I was trained from an early age to work around my ADD by constantly juggling large amounts of data. (My parents are ADD programmers too.) I have the opposite problem: my productivity declines as my tasks get simpler. It becomes too easy to become distracted.
My point: don't reduce the problem of burnout. There are a lot more variables than just information.
I suspect work conditions have far more to do with burnout and depression. Programmers tend to be expected to work long hours, and at least in my experience, a surprising percentage of programming shops have hostile, competitive, or abusive environments.
Geeks in general don't exercise as much as they should. Lack of exercise leads to depression in a big way. Cut 40 minutes off your other hobby projects and get some good hard exercise, exercise as in you're in the zone for a solid 15 minutes at least. Go get a Polar monitor, it's a nifty gadget (mmm gadgets) that will tell you for sure when you're in the zone. For most people, it's less effort than they think -- you don't have to exhaust yourself to get your heart rate up, though it's pretty punishing to keep it up for the first couple weeks.
If you exercise regularly, your mind will be sharper, and you'll write better code. This I guarantee.
My polar HRM is of course gathering dust. I need to take my own advice.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
And loosing your spouse to someone who is around more than you.
.dot com days, there are no more perks, inhouse childcare, you are being outsourced quicker than you can say "work visa".
This whole "Salary" means 50+ is bullshit. White collar workers make less then union construction workers not even counting in overtime. The union guys at our work pull 6 figures with massive OT, but we get to sit a nice comfy desk why our Boss yells at us why are 10 million customers out of service because of an outage we dont control.
Ya, no stress there, goto work at dark, come at dark, wife is mad at all hours, you want to provide a good home, but thats not good enough.
Really, its come down to 2 parents working to make a living so you can spend time with the family. Good jobs require you to put in more hours, ding ding, problem here...
Humm, ya, unions suck dont they. Thats why companies merge and lay off thousands of workers, oh wait, unless they are union. The IT workers are dropped quick, the union workers sue and get their jobs back.
Americans are idiots, they refuse to realize unions where created for saftey and fair wages. So, who needs a union, the big old corporation will take care of you right? This isnt the
Lets just blame depression, heres your happy pill.
Ask anyone who has left the IT field to reflect and they will tell you how much their job took over their lives....most jobs do not do that.
:)
Plus you have to understand the type of person who usually heads into this field is usually a geek....this is more than just their jobs and usually the geek life is one that is defined early in school life......maybe we should be looking at this from that angle.
I need more sleep...excuse me
As a guy who can't remember phone numbers except by patterns (dyslexia, but I guess I'm stupid), has been treated successfully for carpel tunnel (I guess I wasn't taking breaks correctly), and whose mind wanders quickly from topic to topic and feel like it's being driven by some kind of engine that forces me to go along for the ride (must not be ADD, must be my natural involuntary curiousity), I kinda gotta think this guy is being sarcastic.
Sure wish he'd post his name so we could find out *shrug*
... as someone who has suffered from depression for years, let me hint to you that there are several other things in the IT "lifestyle" ("Life? Don't talk to me about life....") that have something or other to do with depression.
...
(1) Self-care. The style that we encourage in CS courses, with our image of hackers working for days at a time and living on the four programmer food gorups ("caffeine, grease, salt, and processed sugar"), is not something that people can generally physically deal with even into the middle twenties. Sleep and periodic meals make a big big difference to mood.
PHB's who think that you can actually do more in an 80 hour week than in a 50 hour week just add to this, which leads to
(2) Feelings of helplessness. We start out with the frustrations of programming, where we're doing perhaps the most complicated intellectual task invented by humanity, doing it with a body of knowledge that's really only 50 or 60 years old, and dealing periodically with apparently inexplicable problems. Then add the canonical Dilbert moments: PHB's, "flexible" schedules, expected overtime, "offshoring", our own inclination toward being obsessive-compulsive (which we either start with or are trained into by our tools and techniques), and then dealing with a whole lot of people who don't understand the intellectual challenges or share the style of rigorous thought and obsession with detail that go with our field. Depression and burnout are very much related to feelings of helplessness.
(3) programming tends to involve people who are less extroverted and less social. People who are bright, introverted, and unsocial tend to feel isolated and alone. Depressing.
In fact, a lot of us would test pretty highly for Asperger's Syndrome, which is akin to mild autism.
The point is that you don't need some new "information glut" syndrome to explain a prevalence of depression and burnout.
Don't take this the wrong way, but only a few decades ago, homosexuality was a "known medical illness." So was female sexual desire.
Perhaps a "diagnostic and statisical" manual with its origins in the military's quest to figure out who was too crazy (or not crazy enough) to be made a soldier is not the best way to define who's "ill" and who's "healthy". I have little doubt that we are in the midst of what people centuries from now will regard as a dark age in clinical psychology.
Obviously some people have diseases or injuries of the brain or nervous system, but the very concept of "mental illness" is questioned by some very intelligent people. Even many who think the concept of "mental illness" has validity are concerned about overdiagnosis, overmedication, and the civil liberies of those labelled "mentally ill".
My point is absolutely not to say "suck it up!" Some people have very serious problems in their lives, and may be helped by therapy or medication.
But perhaps we should be asking more often if these problems are symptoms of "life out of balance", of a social rather than individual pathology. Sometimes depression may just be a natural symptom of living in a society that's poisoning the environment, screwing the poor and working class, and rolling back social and economic progress. And like all symptoms, it can act as a prompt to action - whereas if supressed by medication and ignored, the underlying problem can only get worse.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I'd say the first one for most people. I switched into Comp. Sci in college and loved it. I even enjoyed my internships during the summers. Then, I had to get a real job after school. Where I lived, basically the only jobs were government contracting, and there were reasons I needed to live there (family, etc.). I got a decent job with a major contractor, enjoyed learning the ropes for the first year or so, but all that gradually wore away the second year and was all gone after the third. The politics of how contracts are doled out and how technologies were chosen eroded all my enthusiasm for working in IT. The fact that incompetent people consistently got the upper hand through burying their heads up the asses of other people and that designs were shoved down our throats from above (people I never even met) just was too much. The worst thing of all was when some government rep would visit and see all the demos and give the whole broken mess a thumbs up!
Through all this I tried looking for other work, but this was post-bubble and sending resumes to other cities was as effective as just throwing them in my own trash can. Head hunters were useless. The only jobs in my own city were obviously available for a reason (shitty company, shitty job, etc.). It was completely demoralizing.
Right now, I'm working on starting my own small business that has absolutely nothing do to with IT. It's my exit strategy from a dead-end career path.
... or at least it seems like that. I am a Medical doctor by training, and as a part of my mandatory membership in the German Medical association I get their weekly journal. Regularly comes up "Burnout in the Medical profession." (noone suffers that bad from burn out like doctors yadda yadda yadda). I am co-owner of a small company, so I get all kinds of more or less useful business related stuff. Regular topic: Burnout in management. (noone suffers that bad from burn out like owners/managers yadda yadda yadda). And now Slashdot.... So it's not only IT, it's the general trend in demanding jobs to overestimate one's capabilities and capacity to endure a lot of pressure over a long period of time.
Sorry that you tried to kill yourself and failed, but STFU. Yeah, let's start blaming something else for our problems, so what is it now, the INTERNET? First we blamed violence in movies, violence in video games, and now the internet?
It's people like you that cannot realize that all of their problems are in their head, and are usually their own fault, and can also be easily fixed by finding a creative outlet. (your mileage may differ, talk to a therapist if you need to)
Stop fucking blaming others. Attempted suicide = cry for help. Don't cry, it doesn't get you anywhere, just ASK for the help.
This will get modded flamebait or whatever, I don't give a shit. You know why? Cuz this whole post is hypocritical, I used to be just like you (a cutter, sometimes too deep), and these 'cries for help' are stupid, and accomplish nothing. Because the sad fact is that no one else really cares. So if you want help, go get it.
And if you don't want help, figure out how to do the suicide right, and don't ruin the world for the rest of us. I like my video games/movies/internet, and don't need more legislation to be passed to regulate what I can and cannot do because some pansy almost kills himself and figures out that the internet is the reason.
(let's see how bad this makes my karma)
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
I never said that the internet grabbed me in a dark alley and forced me to become addicted to it. I know I played a part in the addiction. What I am saying is that there can, in some people, be a danger associated with information overload.
I personally think that recreational drugs should be leagal. People should understand what the drug can do to them and understand the potential consequences of them. I think we are learning that there can, in some people, be a side effect from using the Internet too much. It's ignorant to think that just because something does not effect you, it's not going to effect me.
I actually am starting to see a therapist, and taking steps towards getting better. It's a complicated issue.
Your anger at my post indicates that perhaps you have some issues that could be worked out as well?
Consider what it's like to be a programmer (especially an American programmer) in private industry:
:)
1. Management doesn't like you. They consider you a big sunk cost, a drain on their precious profits. It won't matter whether the product YOUR team developed is the only thing the company has to sell, it won't matter if your skill in setting up their network made them leaner and meaner than the competition, nothing you do or say will change anything. They consider you an anchor around their neck and they resent you for it.
2. You are painfully aware that management (the guys from #1 who don't like you) keeps investigating various outsourcing options. From time to time, you see the CEO having warm conversations with guys in suits, who you know from a conversation in the elevator are with a large outsourcing firm.
3. Although all the guys in Sales are out the door by 5:01PM, and in the bar pickled by 6:00PM, YOU're stuck at work until 9PM every night trying to get a product release out the door. You're working your guts out because your idiot project manager doesn't care (he's drinking with the guys from Sales). And no matter how hard you work, your only thanks is going to be "Damnit, Bill, you're a week late on this! This is going to go in your performance review!"
4. Because you live at work, and therefore are a pasty, nearsighted, vaguely unhealthy dweeb, you haven't been laid in a year. But you have to listen to the sales guys bragging about all the pussy they're getting when they're drunk in the bar you never make it to. Once in a while, one of them catches a venereal disease and you get to enjoy a minute of Shadenfreude. Then you go back to your compiler. What the fuck! It was compiling fine a minute ago... How the fuck did that... Oh. Right. Never mind. (Type, type, type).
5. The ONE NIGHT you go home early (at 6PM) because you're dead exhausted, you run into one of the suits and he quips "Half day, Bob?" The rest of the elevator ride is you fighting the overwhelming urge to stab him in the neck with the pen your father gave you for Christmas. The reason you DON'T is, you're afraid the police won't return it after the forensics guys are done with it. It really IS a nice pen.
6. Every day, on your way in to work, you walk past Smith, who is some vague middle manager or something (you don't know what his actual function is, but he seems to be always present). If you're even a minute late, he makes clucking noises as you pass. If you forgot to shave, he rubs his chin and shakes his head, smiling. The one time you spoke, he got snotty with you, implying that you were a hippie freak.
7. You can't work for more than ten minutes without somebody ruthlessly interrupting you to ask you a question they could have answered with Google in two minutes flat. You briefly consider buying a spray can and filling it with cold water (it worked on your ex-girlfriend's cat). Then you think, nah, better use battery acid. THEN you worry about why you thought of that, and THEN, you worry that you're a big pussy because you worried.
One day, you realize: THIS IS MY LIFE. I picked this on PURPOSE! And just like that, you become a burnout.
DISCLAIMER: When I figured out I was a burnout, I left the private sector and found much happier environs. I feel a whole lot better now.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
All the dyslexics I know are very smart. One was a civil engineer who went back and got a B.A. in English Lit, Honours. He took three times as long to read everything, because the page distorted into strange patterns for him. His essays were brilliant.
Another is my stepbrother, a respected geomorphologist. I helped him overcome the reading barrier, as the letters rearranged themselves into non-english. He improved. His parents were both highly literate professionals, and he had excellent elementary education.
Another one I'm working with right now has the whole page look like it's shifting into hyperspace, or like some funky concrete poetry. She's a psychologist working on a post-doc. All intelligent, ad nauseum.
I also used to tutor stupid kids who couldn't read. They invariably had too much cathode ray tube exposure and no books in the house, and stupid parents who never read to them. None of them were dyslexic.
Likewise with the rest of your cadged assertions... these are real problems that have been overdiagnosed, undoubtedly, to the detriment of the real sufferers. I know an actual ADD sufferer (runs her own successful web publishing and video business), and I know kids who had ritalin forced on them due to misdiagnosis. Your muddying of the waters, however, is a troll.
Damn those pesky terrorists