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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%).
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%).
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.
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/
Always take it. Every year -- don't set a precedent that you're overly hard-working...
This is usually the type of thing I tell myself to keep perspective. 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. But I also have two brothers that work jobs requiring much more manual labor. It absolutely takes a toll on your body.
We've recently had a few people come over to hardware management (I am a hardware developer). Both my manager and I told them, hardware projects change EVERY DAY. Every day its, "so and so (big customer) just had issues with this", or "The market is way behind on these parts and we are short", or "The product you just designed is failing ____ test right now, what are we doing to fix it".
I've watched it drive many people out. My own mentor told me when I first started "I'll tell you the first thing my Mentor told me, 'Get out now'". A bit much for a new engineer to take in, but now I know why he said it. Right before he left the company, he started telling me he wasn't sure how much longer he could handle the pressure.
Honestly, I don't care as much about the pay, the fancy benefits, or any of the fluff. What has nearly drove me out is when I feel like every day is just another barrage of unbounded problems. Like you're the guy on the track, your problem is the chains holding you there, and management is driving the train and they aren't slowing it down. You better get those chains undone.
I've been an auto mechanic, welder, machinist, and now EE. My back-up plan / exit strategy is machining. I enjoy it, it is so much more bounded (in my opinion), and still presents good challenges to keep me engaged. I already have a colleague in another company on his way. We've talked at length about it.
I've done a lot of Peopleware like consulting, mostly for software development teams. The IT office space is in general the enemy of these teams. They are noisy and destroy your concentration. You can only break someones concentration for a finite number per day, certainly with introverts, after that the dev is just excausted. As a rule of thumb, the correlation is more people wearing headphones -> more burnout. It's fucked up that people need to wear headphones to attempt to do their work, and a clear sign the environment is poison to their jobs. Of course they put all these people in the same space, to save money. Hardly ever do they do the math, and contemplate how much it costs them in burnout and turnover.
Does this result argue for wider adoption of Netflix's H.R. model, as expressed in the manifesto that went viral a few years back? Namely:
1. Hire "A" players, because the competence of one's coworkers is a large contributor to employee satisfaction.
2. Don't use golden handcuffs as a means of mitigating hiring churn; you want employees to stay at the company because they want to be there. Employees choose how much stock they want vs. cash.
3. Don't use performance based bonuses; high performance is the base level expectation, not something to be singled out and rewarded.
4. "We're a team, not a family." You don't "cut" people from a family; you do "cut" people from a pro sports team.
5. "Hard work - Not Relevant". They care about productivity, not how hard you worked to be productive.
6. Low tolerance for "brilliant jerks".
7. Pay "top of market" wages. "One outstanding employee gets more done and costs less than two 'adequate' employees." "Employees should feel they are being paid well relative to other options in the market."
Working in Belgium and some of the things I have had happened to me.This is in several companies:
On a Friday at the end of February: Hello, you still have not taken your 5 last days and you need to take them at the end of Febrary. "So that means I have the week of next week?" Yes. OK. Have a nice day I see you after that.
These stories are precisely why Belgium, and the rest of Europe are the king of tech development, innovation, and the global leader in envelope-pushing ideas.
I hear this all the time but WTH actually does this? Anyone here at slashdot? Even when I was younger I did an all nighter just once or twice. I've been working 8 hour days the last 15 years.
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
A single data point is statistically meaningless "woe is us" wanking UNLESS other industries are surveyed.
If the "burnout" rate for tech workers is 57%, but for medical workers is 75%, factory line workers is 62%, and teachers is 60%, then the rate for tech workers is really not bad.
If OTOH other industries scale at 20-30%, then the tech sector really is dire.
In short: I suspect that everyone feels like they are underappreciated, underpaid, and is "fed up with all the bullshit at work"...like everyone else.
-Styopa
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?
Try living in a paper bag in the middle of the lake and then talk to me about your resort shack!
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
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.
I worked for a large company that made networking equipment. My job was to run a sanity test framework for their operating system. Developers load the images in a queue, the system pulls them, loads them on real hardware, and executes a body of tests.
The problem was that a bad image would hose the system to where it couldn't reboot, and then it would not be able to correct itself. Every image after that would fail. My job was to come in, clean up the mess, and apologize to each developer. It was actually stressful.
I repeatedly told the manager how I could fix it, and he always said we didn't have time. I waited for him to travel for a week, I shut down the system, and fixed it so that the system got completely initialized between every run. From that point on, every failure was a real failure cause by that developer's changes.
My job became a cake walk. I find most of the stress in this industry is self induced by clueless fucks being in charge.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba