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?"
Television, radio, and even my favorite hobby of listening to music seem to need to be supplanted by something else. I used to enjoy sitting down, putting on a CD or record and just listening. Now, I get bored too quickly - and that makes me somewhat sad (but not depressed).
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
Information overload is part of the problem. The other part is the abusive lifestyles we lead - in part by choice and in part because the industry expects it of us. The more strenuous brain-work you're having to do on a daily basis, the more sleep you need to avoid clinical depression - yet we're expected to, want to, and are driven to sleep relatively little.
The answer is to do you magic during an 8 hour work day, and spend the rest of the day being relaxes, and get a good 8-10 hours of sleep every night - good sound sleep. If you're already suffering clinical depression of some stage, you need even more sleep to recover from it. A good diet and a healthy level of exercise also wouldn't hurt. Be sure to read the linked kuro5hin articles though on the caveats of exercise for the clinically depressed.
11*43+456^2
Anyway, some resources. If you are taking/thinking about taking meds, I highly recommend http://www.crazymeds.org/ The site isn't run by a doctor, but having checked his information from a number of different sources, he definitely seems to get the information right. Plus, the site is irreverant, which I appreciate.
The first course of therapy for depression is cognitive behavioral therapy. There is a standard book that explains these techniques. Feeling Good, by David Burns. Amazon link here: http://tinyurl.com/7dxos
I've read a lot of books on depression over the past 18 months, and the best, the most informative, I found was The Noonday Demon, by Andrew Solomon. Amazon again: http://tinyurl.com/99neh
Finally, the links in the post were good, and a good start, but I definitely disagree with some of his advice. Everybody is different, so take the time to hear different viewpoints on diagnoses, symptoms, and cures.
If you're wondering, treatment has made me better than I was, but I still have room for improvement. This is important. Depression may never (or it may) be "cured" for you, but in nearly all cases, treatment will decrease its severity. But not necessarily right away. Treatment is a process, and it takes some time to get there. Be patient.
"My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate hair."
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.
I've been experiencing this 'effect' lately.
/. , or browsing forums for new knowledge. All (mostly) legit use of my time, but it's starting to feel like it is all I can, or want, to do. The worst part is, nothing seems to stick anymore. I'll read some info on a site and not remember it a day later.
/. but ultimately who cares about that. I sit, frustrated at myself and the amount of mounting work... a pile that grows exponentially it seems... Yet I can't seem to motivate myself to change it. I recognize that it's happening... I see the crash ahead of me. It's not that I'm apathetic or lazy, but I sure seem to be behaving that way. Is this a symptom of depression?
I'm the sole developer on a fairly elaborate project. Everything tech related is my responsibility. Site design and architecture, development, support, training, hardware, software, security, everything.
Early on, it wasn't so bad. Then a year went by. Then two. The third has now completed and I'm entering the fourth. Some days I sit at my desk staring at the screen. In my mind, I'm running through everything I should be doing, but I can't seem to get my fingers to do the typing or my legs to move me to the other side of the room to the desk where I work on hardware.
I almost didn't bother typing this... but it's kind of theraputic in a way.
Anyway, lately I seem to find all kinds of 'filler' activities to consume my time. Reading up on the latest changes to the various software we use, keeping up with
Sure, I can probably remember most of the topics on
I've never really thought of myself as someone who gets depressed. Maybe that's denial talking. How does one check for that?
More importantly, how does one go about kick-starting their motivation again? I've tried little side projects that are related to what I do already, in the hopes that will gain me some momentum and I can then change lanes and keep working, but I can't even seem to build up any steam.
Even as I type I'm getting bored. Could be because I figure nobody will even care what I'm typing in the first place. Then again, if it helps someone else, or someone with insight can explain it then maybe it was worth it.
I wonder if there's anything good on tv right now?
... 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 thought this was a little well written to have been posted that quickly. This is originally from http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.7.8.10 5659.2501.html and written in 2001. I would hope that this posted does not repeat this stunt in the future, regardless of the topic or their opinions.
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!