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57% of Tech Workers Are Suffering From Job Burnout, Survey Finds (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A survey conducted among the tech workers, including many employees of Silicon Valley's elite tech companies, has revealed that over 57% of respondents are suffering from job burnout. The survey was carried out by the makers of an app that allows employees to review workplaces and have anonymous conversations at work, behind their employers' backs. Over 11K employees answered one question -- if they suffer from job burnout, and 57.16% said "Yes."

The company with the highest employee burnout rate was Credit Karma, with a whopping 70.73%, followed by Twitch (68.75%), Nvidia (65.38%), Expedia (65.00%), and Oath (63.03% -- Oath being the former Yahoo company Verizon bought in July 2017). On the other end of the spectrum, Netflix ranked with the lowest burnout rate of only 38.89%, followed by PayPal (41.82%), Twitter (43.90%), Facebook (48.97%), and Uber (49.52%).

7 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. Surprise, working people to death leads to burnout by sinij · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Tech work culture is seriously broken when 80 hour weeks and never going on vacation for any reason is encouraged and celebrated. Burnout under such conditions is inevitable.

  2. Gee, I can't imagine why? by rsilvergun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Long on call hours. Declining inflation adjusted wages. Having to spend hours and hours of your own time training because companies don't train anymore. Constant threats of outsourcing or being replaced by an H1-B applicant (despite the fact that that is explicitly illegal).

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  3. Re:Demand vaca time and use it. by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Always take it. Every year -- don't set a precedent that you're overly hard-working...

  4. Strawmen galore! by sjbe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, but the stress that tech people experience is completely fake. It REALLY doesn't matter if your work is done on time.

    It does if you want to remain employed with your current company. If that doesn't matter to you then you probably aren't stressed to begin with. If anyone who worked for me expressed that attitude they would be "succeeding elsewhere" in short order.

    No one is going to die if your software or network doesn't work.

    I'd like to introduce you to some folks who work in medical IT who will disagree with you rather strongly. Same thing with software that controls/drives cars or airplanes or manned rockets or traffic signals or ocean navigation or food safety or electrical grids or nuclear reactor controls or.... The list is very long for things that actually do matter. Yeah, nobody probably cares if your word processor crashes but more than a few of us do things that have serious consequences.

    Amazingly humans survived for thousands of years without IT or computers.

    Ok we're done here. Claiming people shouldn't have stress because computers didn't exist 200 years ago is irrelevant and stupid.

  5. Re:so... by TFlan91 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Then refuse to work, yes you may get fired, but what's worse than getting fired? Working for free.

    My boss is lucky if I even look at my phone off-business-hours, let alone pick it up and respond.

    Sure, if an email is prefixed with "URGENT" or whatever, I take a look, but then I lazily come in the next day an hour or two "late".

    It's all about the contract you signed with your employer. Don't sign shit you haven't read, and don't sign away your youth for pennies.

  6. Re:Manage your choices wisely by sinij · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It is very nice to be independently wealthy and not have to worry about getting a paycheck, but for the rest of us we have to do it for a paycheck or face homelessness and possibly starvation.

    If all available work is under such conditions, is that really a choice?

  7. Re:I just landed my first career IT gig by Anubis+IV · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But the truth is that tech jobs can be stressful too. I imagine people in blue collar jobs believe we are living high on the hog with not a care in the world, but it's not really that way.

    I was pulling long hours one week to try and finish a software update in time. The deadline was fast approaching and the outlook was grim. As usual, the cleaning lady came by to collect the trash that evening and we got to chit-chatting like we usually did (I arrived late and stayed late back then, so my being there when she did her rounds was perfectly normal). Part way through the conversation she paused for a moment, then said something to the effect of, "You know, before I started working here I used to think that you guys all had it easy with your cushy jobs and nice offices. But then I see people here with the look that you have in your eyes right now and I realize I was wrong. It's just as tough. Different, but just as tough, if not tougher."

    I think I mustered a tired "Thanks?" in response.

    I don't make any claim to having it tougher than anyone else (I have a MASSIVE appreciation for manual workers, among many other fields, since I couldn't do that work), but the only people I find suggesting that tech work is easy are those who either aren't in the field and have no awareness of what it entails, or those who are a burden on everyone else around them in the field.