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Understanding Burnout
Cognitive Dissident writes "New York Magazine has posted a feature story about the growing phenomenon of 'burnout' and the growing interest of both healthcare professionals and even corporate management in this problem. Probably the most surprising thing learned from reading this article is that work load is not the best predictor of burnout. Instead it has more to do with perceived 'return on investment' of effort. So work places are having to learn to adjust the work environment to reduce or prevent burnout. From the article: '"It's kind of like ergonomics," [Christina Maslach] finally says. "It used to be, 'You sit for work? Here's a chair.' But now we design furniture to fit and support the body. And we're doing the same here. The environments themselves have to say, 'We want people to thrive and grow.' There was a shift, finally, in how people understood the question."' NPR's Talk of the Nation also had a recent feature story based on this article."
It is not the amount of work that causes burnout, but the fitting of the person to the role they are performing. Make bad fits and the people get frustrated and burn out easier. Make good fits and the creative energy flows.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I almost gave up IT this year. I was working at a financial institute and the work was fun. I wrote a BlackBerry app using java with a .Net backend. Fun stuff. But my manager was a complete jerk. Constantly moody. At my review he said "99% of the time we love you, but that 1% is killing us". I was out for a few days earlier in the year when my son's babysitter almost died, and this was brought up. "I don't care about your babysitter, I don't care about your kid. I just want you to be here for eight hours a day." I gave my notice at the end of the week. Turns out he lost all of his developers in that review month. He must have read somewhere that reviews were the place to smack your employees around.
Although it wasn't the work that made me quit, I was very reluctant to go through the same crap with a new manager. Instead of giving up IT entirely, I went out on my own again. I barely had enough work to pay the bills through the summer, but DAMN I was relaxed! By the end of the summer I was able to stomach another corporate job. It's boring work (See: Read Slashdot), but they are flexible. My old manager was anything but. I'll give it a while and if I get too bored, do my own thang again.
Burnout may not be something you can control, but you can fix it.
Actually the conservative christian and the liberal buddhist will get along MUCH better than the conservative christian and the liberal christian. Or even the conservative christian who believes differently about some minor point of dogma.
The buddhist is safely far enough away that you can disconnect and ignore them. The person who believes almost the same is much more maddening to those who believe there is only one true way.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There is a strong physiological underpinning to burnout, as years of constant stress and little sleep take their toll on the brain (in fact, the last stages of burnout are very much like those of a clinical depression). It is possible to recover, but it can take *years* and it's a difficult process.
A while back I wrote an article for Kuro5hin on this same subject, and that got plenty of positive responses. It was later expanded and wikified into a Wikibook which you might find interesting: Demystifying Depression
(Yeah, sorry for the shameless plug, but this is important stuff that all of us in IT should be aware of. Besides, the link is to a public wikibook, not to my personal blog or anything.)
I consider myself "burned out", pursuing my efforts now on a personal level or for friends. In a way, it seems a shame I am "wasting" such precious insights that 35 years in design work ( I mean *real* design work ) gives a designer. Yet, I elect to live at a near poverty level in lieu of having to "sell my soul" to the suited-and-tied corporate types. I want so bad to go back to the time that I actually meant something to the company, and not be considered just another commodity.
My burnout occurred as I had spent years learning and perfecting a set of software I liked to use on PC's where I could write my own device drivers to make the computer do ANYTHING that it was capable of doing. These were .COM, .EXE, and .SYS files, written in C++ and assembler, running under DOS. I had collected every tool imaginable to let me do any sort of DSP, control any interface, or let me do any mathematical equations ( differential calculus ) on my machine.
I was in the midst of a dream project where I was trying to build a wide-range VCO, yet have the extremely low phase noise which would be required for using it as a local oscillator to drop 256QAM to baseband. The managers came in and demanded I do my work on some lousy 386-SX based machine running Windows 2.1 ( which was current at the time ), running doublespace. My machine at the lab was a 286. But I knew what I was doing with that one. I had no idea how to make my stuff run under Windows in a supervised environment.
I had no interest whatsoever in the fancy graphical output of Windows because I had no idea how the get the machine to do what I wanted, and do it without all the bloat which took forever and a day to execute. My mind was still set on how to use amplifier gains to increase the Q of my resonant circuits and configure the short term phase error through one varactor and the long term frequency control through another varactor, so I could simultaneously reap the benefits of fast phase correction without perturbing the frequency setpoints.
I know if you are not into RF modems, the above looks like gibberish. What I am trying to say is I already knew how to do what I needed to do, I just had to do it the way I knew how to do it.
Hiring somebody to come in and tell me that I can't do it my way - without giving him the onus of showing me exactly how to do it his way - did not help matters one bit.
He came in expecting me to take like a duck to water with his paradigms. Giving me closed-source proprietary crap to build on, citing I had no "need-to-know" how it worked - to me - was tantamount to giving a lawyer legal documents, written in Swahili, to approve. Just tell the lawyer which ones do what and have him approve them.
I thought of myself much like a pianist, with years of experience on the keyboard. Some manager comes in, forces me to use another piano whose keyboard starts with all the A notes, followed by all the B's, and so on... all in order. The manager patiently sits behind his desk, considering me not to be a team player because I hate that piano. He patiently keeps asking me what the problem is, can't I understand? Here it is again, all the A's are here, all the B's are there. All in order. Can't I be flexible enough to use it? Just point and click.
I know just as soon as I take the time to play my music through that machine, the manager is just going to redo the keyboard again. I have no return on my investment of effort whatsoever. Its like trying to put a lot of effort in improving a rented house.
I realized this guy has his experience in presentations, which I consider to be corporate propaganda more than anything concrete and useful. I could not consider him actually designing anything. Yet his training prepared him to find corporate executive types who could be persuaded that his efforts were more valuable than mine, and I should work under him.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]