The best you can do is learn to tune out management bullshit and identify what is really important. There is no point losing sleep over the rest. It will be there to work on tomorrow, and the day after.
I think part of it is that people get too wrapped up in their local world and don't see the big picture. For instance "If we don't get this widget added to the thingamabob in the next 3 days the company will go under!" when the thingamabob is just a minor piece of the puzzle for the larger company. Part of it though is driven from the top.
The one downside to having had this realization is it goes both ways. It also means that very few things you do have impact in a positive way as well. For some people this can be motivation killing.
if the fire started due to something you helped create and you have even a smidgen of impostor syndrome, fighting fires is about about saving yourself and cleaning up the messes you've made. the only way to prevent this is to build a team with a strong sense of collective ownership/responsibility and a healthy attitude towards mistakes.
Like when I was an engineer, boom move get things done produce actual results, something would be deployed and value would be delivered, now, if I want to get something done, engage with two or three other teams to do something, talk with their team leads, then the actual engineers, then have a meeting to actually discuss requirements, and what should be a simple program that takes 3 api calls, turns into a 3 month long project.
Until you've been through another 30 years.
You haven't even reached mid-burn yet...
At least in my experience I've noticed some things.
1. Management is incentivized to create the illusion of crisis to squeeze marginal extra labor out of you. They will be promoted away before burnout burns them.
2. Many of the crises are self inflicted by our response to previous crises. The only way to avoid the nausea of the merry go round is to get off it entirely.
3. You will futiley destroy yourself if you try to rail against the times you live in. You have to let the system fail for it to rectify. Martyring yourself will only extend the suffering as the system has no sentience nor conscience about what it's doing to people who care about reality.
When every system is *critical system for somebody* and the downtime means loss of capacity, then people are actually hurt, and there are real problems when these things do go down. So you become numb, like a triage nurse, to real suffering because you’re in a system that doesn’t actually give people the resources to fix these things.
Most of the harms in the world are when large systems filled with a lot of people, who have no alternative, break in ways that don’t have compensatory measures. It’s coming for the food supply soon too.
I’ve been in senior leadership positions in very large organizations multiple times, and I promise you that there are critical workloads not just in tech, but in medicine, defense, etc. who only have one or two poorly paid people who are there to make sure that whatever the system is, doesn’t break. And when it does? Welp tough break.
The reality is there should be many people as back up and as compensatory measures however, companies are not incentivized to pay for those back ups because in “normal” times everything looks fine. It’s not broken right now so we don’t need extra support. We’ve all heard the story.
The problem I see is that the world is increasingly filled with these unsustainable debt fueled “critical services”, and humans live within dozens of these large complex systems with no direct alternatives. The workers there are holding on by threads because no company can maintain their business in an environment of forever margin chasing (rat race) and all profits go to insulating owners from downside risks rather than making systems more robust to shocks. So the workers are blown out, owners have half a foot out the door in case of emergency and customers and users are just along for the ride.
Sounds great
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/th...
The emergencies and surprises never stopped. Timelines would change quickly - “start working on it but no deadline” would regularly turn into “this is due at the end of the month” and then “Can you have this done in two weeks” and then “what can we accomplish by the end of the week” and then “this needs to be complete in the system by 4pm tomorrow” sometimes all within a few days. Sudden weekend work including absolutely ridiculous requests that I can’t talk about was pretty normal. Many people involved essentially volunteered large portions of their non-work time to the government because their positions did not include overtime compensation and they thought if they put in the work eventually they’d climb to a position where it would be worth it.
Every meeting was a potential crisis, and the bosses between you and the politicians were no better because of downhill shit theory. Some of the non political leadership were helicoptered political allies instead of technical specialists in the thing we were supposedly supposed to be doing.
I realized about 6 months in that even though in meetings they kept saying “we know workloads are higher than normal but we think we’ll get back to a more reasonable period soon” was just lip service, and that we were actually just in a permanent state of crisis of after crisis handed down to us by politicians who would take days off to go golfing. All this at wages that were not comparable to private industry but on the other hand less worries about tracking hours for billing like I would have had to do outside the public service.
I am glad to have left it behind. My health, both mental and physical, suffered even though I couldn’t tell at the time when I was going through it. There is no reason to live your life that way.
Having to be an IC and leadership and attend 5+ meetings a day is an impossible ask for someone that is not young and hungry anymore. When someone asks for things now I always lead with "sure, but its only me, no other resources so it is probably going to take a while"
Or look around to see if you might be able to hop over to a team or company that doesn't run like this. They do exist!
A good manager communicates well, a great manager teaches everyone around them how to communicate well.
Inspired by Marx I could say that manager work is removing workers from their alienation and not work in unoimportant things.
Every security solution is just the same Black Box with a one-trick-pony in it.
After the 40th one, they all kinda blur together after awhile. They all have accounts and permissions and reporting and maintenance and update processes and a way to store the data they create...and a single line on a single tab on a single webpage that 'does the trick'.
I'm with the OP. I'm tired of installing SIEMs when the leadership undergoes an upheaval and the new CISO comes in with some form of "Everything you have is CRAP! My stuff is awesome! Warm up the forklift!"
It's all the same alchohol lubricated meetings in a bar with the same deep fried taquitos and the same fidget spinners emblazoned with the product name, usually a VERBNOUN.
This is a cultural problem in the information security space and one reason why I've left that space. I call this "checkbox compliance" culture. Most customers want a box they can rack, check the box on a compliance audit, and move on. Very few companies actually give a shit about security as a practice or philosophy, and don't actually do any of the work to build security into their products and systems.
The epitome of this is that many companies operate devices at their border that strip encryption via using a company-provided CA to man-in-the-middle all traffic across their network to do DPI, and then re-encrypt (hopefully) to the ultimate target. From the perspective of the employee, the primary attacker on the network is the company's own infosec team, because the policies and compliance checkboxes are achieved in the worst possible iteration of how you might meet compliance without any regard to /security/.
This is a fixable situation, but it's a hard thing to fix because like most cultural issues, it's ultimately some kind of tragedy of the commons.
'I don't know Security, so I'm going to pay an MSSP to do it for me.'
This is not a bad thing, per se, it just means that their controls are ceded to a company who has marketing, shareholders, management layers, and _they_ want to optimize _their_ costs....so the protection of your organization will be 1/n of the response team's attention...where N is the number of other companies they're responsible for monitoring.
It's POSSIBLE that you'll get better support by letting an expert multiply their skills across a larger population of targets...it's just not LIKELY.
Why are we sprinting… ALL. THE. TIME. Can’t we at least mix in some brisk walks every now and then a la high intensity interval training?
Following the fitness metaphor, the concept of periodization is an overwhelmingly common training strategy. Periodization turns fitness plans into smaller cycles that include active and passive periods of rest.
It’s recognized that these rest periods are where performance improves - the grind that came before was simply tearing the body down to induce the body to rebuild itself fitter and stronger than before. These rest periods are not a vacation, but rather a reduction in intensity and training load and often include cross-training and other activities that give the athlete a mental and physical break.
I’ve always been surprised some enterprising Agile consultant hasn’t jumped on the same concept to push the concept of recovery sprints, like like an Ironman triathlete will have a recovery week baked into their plan. I’ve heard of sprints that might be focused on technical debt or experimentation, but nothing about a reduction in velocity or anything like that. I think it would be an interesting experiment to try to help mitigate the endless grind.
Additionally, two-week sprints weren’t originally the norm. I left software for a while when four weeks was the most common sprint length and when I came back , everything seemed to have settled on two weeks as the magic number. I never got an explanation why.
If I plan, I get to jog.
But I have to work extra hours to have a plan because my day is full of sprinting.
So I can work twice as long and jog or I can work the regular amount and sprint.
And we reward people who are sprinting because they go twice as fast and that's obviously very valuable because we are optics oriented programmers.
2 weeks: minimal planning effort, not a long enough period to agitate stakeholders when you say "next sprint"
4 weeks: it's MY request and I NEED IT NOW!
In retrospect it would've been fine if I had taken a more relaxed attitude towards it all. Sprints don't mean you have to literally sprint. Epic mode is just a narrative. Work at your pace and it'll be fine.
Hard work doesn't cause burnout. Constantly feeling like you have no control or impact causes burnout.
There could be many reasons why someone is in a burnt out state - from lack of control, to being over-worked, being constantly over stimulated, emotional trauma or any number of other reasons.
It's something unique to the individual and is not always obvious.
There are some opportunities that I think are only available in the FANGs. If your passion is in that domain, then you may have to stick it out. This is the only reason that I can see for doing the corporate grind. I don't have an addiction to money. There is no stuff that I could buy with more money that would be worth the corporate grind.
Software development skills are important enough that you will be in demand no matter where you go. Especially if you're feeling like the author of this article (over it), consider what's really important to you. You may have more options than you think.
In higher education, I can tell you, they do not value diversity of opinion, but they get it in spades. Every decision is questioned, argued, analyzed, and beat to death. Leadership hates it, but I love it. It's one of the closest environments to that 'value diversity of opinion' statement that I've ever been a part of.
I asked, "Why was the 2 weeks so important? Are there any customers waiting for it? Is the company going to lose money? Why is the CTO saying one thing and you are saying something different?"
There was no clear answer to it. Turns out, the managers have designed a game where they assign percentage points for things completed by the end of the quarter. My manager was getting lower points because I was exercising caution - as requested by the CTO.
It is these BS management games that made me realize that the industry is broken beyond repair. I no longer hustle to make managers look good.
Quiet quitting on exploitation is a fair trade. I ain't sacrificing my personal life for BS games.
We're always getting mixed signals... "if you need to delay, delay. you're the best judge of that." And "we have commitments we have to hit at the end of the quarter."
The cynic, the street smart corporate bilinguist hears those two messages and understands plainly that only the latter is true.
The person who takes things at face value is perplexed: They have been told not to hurt themselves, but also told that if they hurt themselves the company will be pleased. How bizarre, to be told opposing requirements, and that half of people are not also perplexed.
I didn't tell them directly since I knew I was being targeted. But I left breadcrumbs of truth within the team so that next time, someone else identifies this same pattern and calls them out again.
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-propaganda-posters...
the posters were very effective at getting us to stop taking the new ceo seriously.
> ”Do or do not, there is no try”
https://makersplace.com/product/yoda-quote-theranos-headquar...
re: Focused - to quote Wiktionary:
"The spelling focused is much more common in the US but also more common in the UK and Australia. The Oxford English Dictionary describes the spelling focussed as irregular."
Speaking a native British English speaker, I'd agree. I focused looks OK, but focussed looks weird to me.
Prioritization:
The 's' versus 'z' debate is perhaps a little more complicated than often presented. There are some words which always were historically spelt with a 'z', but since the interpretation that 'z' is American have started to be spelt with an 's' in English.
In particular the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) tends to favour 'z' spellings for a number of words over the 's' spellings - I think 'nationalization' is a particular example.
It beats "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".
MOLOCH.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
What would we have built in the same time, with the same piles of sand?
The real trick is realizing that's bullshit 99% of the time. Special forces train you to take control of your fight or flight reflex. You need to decide when to unleash the adrenaline. If you lose that control, you're in the whirlwind... Being grounded and tuning out the noise so you can navigate properly is a fundamental life skill.
Is it possible to hustle all the time & not burn out? Yes, but it takes a special type of person who values the hustle, in and of itself, which is rare.
It's important to realize that there's no right or wrong with what you choose to value.
And, as an employee, changing your org's values is probably an impossible task.
Instead, get clear on what your values are. Then, find an environment where you're surrounded with people who share your values. You'll be much happier.
This is a nice thought in theory but if your values include something along the lines of "treat people like they have families and lives and don't use them like a resource until they burn out", that eliminates a surprisingly large number of companies.
Having worked at a few big tech companies at different stages in their lifecycle, I think I'm starting to see where the sweet spots for joining are where they are more likely to align with the ways I want to work (if not all of my values). Equally I'm also starting to learn when it's time to jump from the ship.
This cannot be overstated.
After traveling to LaTam, we have it all backwards. Focus on happiness, family and health are where energy needs to be invested, before anywhere else.
"Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely."
Not everything can be timeboxed in a couple weeks. Combine that with the daily reports... that sort of stuff works very well if you are working on your 78th Web CRUD app. It doesn't work so well when you are doing something much more complex. "Oh that's what POCs are for!" - yes but they are, once again, aggressively timeboxed.
If the 'agile' industry wanted to design the Space Shuttle, it would have to fit in a POC, rather than taking a realistic amount of time to allow for proper design.
The sad truth is that no manager gets promoted by quoting that their project will take 2 years. They will say 6 months, with one shoddy demo at 3 months full of smoke and mirrors, and that buys them time to file "bugs" and "improvements" that will stretch the time it will take to 2 years anyway. By which time they are already going to be at another company.
Not giving a shit and getting the job done is better than caring too much and constantly battling to "improve" things.
I can't handle giving a shit. It burns me out. The best i can do is a "good job" on what i feel like is a reasonable workload.
My grandmother used to say "The graveyards are full of indispensable people." It's true. You leave a void quickly filled after you die. You might as well enjoy the ride.
In high-functioning successful team, everyone is spending significant time in
1. discovery – learning things about the constantly evolving product/functional domain and the tech, and
2. ideation – figuring out what's important and how to solve it,
3. and some non-trivial amount of time in large team collaboration related activities.
But the problem is these activities (and their taxonomies) are not made explicit – their purpose is not explicitly stated; instead people participate in packaged rituals that are supposed to produce results. But because they do it without understanding it, they could feel like a cog in the machine.
But there's also another big part of the reality – those who work themselves too hard and get themselves burnt out are also chasing personal career promotion goals and not succeeding at it.
Then, there are some who don't even have that objective but have a broken work habit and get burnt out.
Of course there are other things at the worst end of the spectrum – bad manager, bad CEO, bad business, bad co-workers, bad vendor-partners etc – that can make things toxic and they get burnt out.
Maybe it's a matter of perspective? It sure helps that I am working on interesting projects. Maybe the diff is that this is how I am having fun.
I still find it fun to work on something novel but I am not nearly as passionate as I used to be. Now I find music more fun.
Except when I'm doing it as paid work for someone else. That drains the fun out of it for me. As a result, I have to have my fun by programming when I'm off work, too.
Software engineering is a "high earning job", yet the basic shit it affords you isn't even to the level of "low" and "middle" paying jobs of the past. You can grind yourself to the bone for years and still not be able to afford to buy a home and raise a family.
Heard similarly about pay in Germany - being a programmist doesn't pay you well
If I'm getting a normal salary, you get a bog standard morning run.
Yeah, it turns out you get to define things in your life, including your pace at work. Be productive but don't burn yourself out. Most likely nothing will happen. Worst case you dodge a bullet and find a more reasonable company. Either way you will be working at your pace.
Too much of what I call emergency-led management.
The reason this author is confused/upset by the Bezos quote is because they are talking about the same sport but a different class.
If an olympic champion told you about their training and diet regiment, you'd say "this sounds horrible" but what you'd mean is "it's not for me, because I am not training for the olympics." On the flip-side if your goal was to be an olympic champ too, your reaction would be "this is what it takes, good to know."
Bezos wasn't setting himself up for an easy 9-5 and he wasn't building a me-too company. He was building Amazon into.. well.. what it is, an absolute champion across multiple industries. And perhaps doing that requires what he describes.
If you're not looking to build an Amazon and you're not looking to be a part of the culture that can do it, then of course "this sounds horrible." And that's OK, just realize you're saying that because "it's not for me, because I don't care about that." It could very well be for other people - and those people might have greater wealth and work engagement than you do as a result. And that's OK too.
I would love to hear an example where in business it came down to motivation of the companies workforce.
I suggest this video about the question of success: Luck or hard(-re in this case) work? https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I
Then look at apex predators. They spend most of their time resting. Their efforts in hunting are extremely focused. Lions are not 'griding' yet they dominate the savannah.
I agree that a balance needs to be struck and something needs to be done, but I'd favor a healthy cadence for my team than have them burn out and quit, leaving me holding the bag.
is my command of english off? this sentence is a lyrical way to write "this journey which only 1 percent have" finished ... not this journey is 1 percent finished ... ;D
I.e., the work is never done. Urgency is forever, because no matter how much you've done, most of the work is still ahead of you, so don't slack off.
I think the original quote was transcribed with a missing word: "This journey is one percent finished".
Until you've been through another 30 years.
You haven't even reached mid-burn yet...
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