Is there some cosmic law that says it is never an employee's fault for "not maintaining work life balance"?

If you have a manager, it's literally their job to manage your performance as an employee, and that includes your work-life balance. Some managers are bad at their jobs (or belong to organizations which would prefer to burn out their employees or otherwise don't care about work-life balance), but if someone is working too many hours, or not taking enough vacation time, or is burning out because they're overwhelmed by their responsibilities or lack of support (either perceived or real), it's within their manager's power to identify those issues, and it's generally within the manager's power to fix them.

There's something creepy about deciding that it is someone else's job to manage your work-life balance. Who is better positioned to do that than you?

People have to recognize their limitations and negotiate with their employer to make sure the employer does too. Sure, that requires attentive managers but it also requires employees who don't cede control of their lives to their employer.

It's not creepy for a manager to notice that you are working 12 hours a day and tell you, "Hey, this doesn't seem long-term sustainable. Why don't you scale things back so we have some slack for when a real emergency happens."

Ultimately though, if your workload is too high then a manager is the only person who can relieve that pressure valve, just a little bit. They have the power, which means usually they have to adopt the responsibility (what e.g. Junior IC is going to ask their boss for less work while also going through a rough time?)

Not only do they have the power, relieving/handling that pressure is a good chunk of the very job description. If you are in charge of administering a team of people and you are doing nothing to coordinate their collective and individual workloads, then what exactly are you for?

They're not managing your work life balance; they're managing your replacement cost (and their own career). If an employee burns out, it can definitely be a systemic issue, so a domino effect of people quitting or at least low morale.

A major component of management is operational effectiveness and redundancy. If someone burns out and you don't see it, your team is suddenly undersized and you needed to hire (and have a recruiting budget) yesterday.

I see my manager as a "negotiator on behalf of the company" for work life balance.

If I want to change something, I run it past them. If it messes something up they come back and say no and why. And I decide if it is worth it to keep working here. Or between us we come up with something else to keep both parties happy.

At my workplace currently, management is pretty flexible and happy to go through whatever HR paperwork required.

If in doubt about the cosmic law, there's an actual labour law about managing employee welfare well enough to prevent burnout (phrased as responsibilities for employee health) in a lot of jurisdictions.

There's truth to this though. I am similar to the "friend" OP is referring to (though I do not get miserable at my job). But there's always a point where I experience extreme apathy at work, to the point that it spirals to not working for a day or two. It leads me to either leaving or quitting the company.

I've consulted a psychiatrist because it's clearly a recurring pattern that has fucked up my career progression. I've been told I might have ADHD.

I think the point (for me at least), is that some people aren't just meant to function in a full-time job. A bit of an exaggeration, but I tell myself that by the time that I'm 30, and I still have someone control my pace, schedule, and deadlines, that I'll kill myself (maybe just metaphorically).

Part of the issue is that most people are not able to work an American 40+ hours a week with only 2 weeks vacation, that you may or may not be able to take, and stay in a healthy place psychologically and physically. It just isn't reasonable.

A lot of people create their own problems. They can't deal with the infinite backlog of work that always grows and that is a personal problem. They aren't being asked to work longer or harder they just can't deal with the fact that the amount of TODO work always grows.

The "infinite backlog of work" is the problem. It will be used as an excuse to ding you on your next performance review. Th fact that companies are structured to ensure that there is always too much work for anyone to do is what leads to stress and burnout.

I have an infinite backlog of work, and I leave work at 5pm on Friday and don't even check my work e-mail until 9am on Monday.

I had two stakeholders insist that 3 things all get done by the following Monday; I reported that wasn't going to be possible. They could not agree on priorities, so I sent an e-mail with the order I was going to work on them that went unanswered. The 3rd thing on the list didn't get done. My manager asked me why and I showed the e-mail chain. I got a "good job" and never heard about it again.

I would not have had the confidence to do this even just 10 years ago, and I suspect that the majority of junior engineers feel that way, and would work through the weekend to get everything done.

Whose fault would it be if I hadn't set boundaries and burnt out? I think there's shared blame and it depends on details. In this hypothetical situation, did my manager notice a lot of weekend work happening and check in with me? Perhaps they wouldn't because they expect a senior engineer to handle this balance, but they would have checked on a more junior engineer? Things aren't completely cut and dry.

Infinite backlog is only stressful if you care.

Perhaps but isn't it probable that those doing the hiring will, right or wrong, engage in exactly that type of thinking?

Being a victim doesn't excuse you from accountability. If you leave a laptop in your car in a shady neighborhood and find it was stolen, that was your fault and you bear the blame for not having common sense. Similarly, we all have the responsibility to take care of our own health and do some learning around what that entails. Suggesting otherwise is infantilization and implies that some entity out there is responsible for our safety and mistakes, not us.

I think you misunderstood the tone of my comment. I'm not saying that that is the case, but that I imagine that kind of victim blaming or whatever you want to call it is what a hiring manager would use with an applicant claiming burnout.

I don't want to be hired by a manager who thinks it is ok to work someone more than 40 hours a week. I make it very clear that I left consulting firm X because of the unreasonable work expectations and that I have no problem working my standard week and overtime when required. But if the base contract is 40 hours a week don't expect me to work 60+ every week.

Were the work hours at the consulting firm made known to you before you joined? Or was it sold as "we occasionally have some crunch times to hit deadlines" and that turned out to be "always."

100% B. I was a senior hire, not a grad. No one at the firm told me at any point during the recruitment that this was what I was signing on for.

Now fair enough I could have checked the /r/consulting sub and found plenty of horror stories, but also I would have asked for more money to reflect the hours worked.

Not sure why we should particularly care what a hiring manager thinks?

What do you think?

Presumably because we want to get hired by that place and what the hiring manager thinks affects our chances of being hired.

Do you need an income (y/n)?

I can't be the only one who hates working for money. Id rather have a healthy goal to work towards, rather than the accumulation of dollars. So many go ideas go to the gutter because they aren't profitable. I think there's more to life than that.

Yes and people have lost track of the value of money.

You can buy valuable things like good health care, living wages, balanced lives, and self respect for employees, fair deals and support for improved lives for customers, a healthier market environment for the planet and future generations. You can buy being the person to make the better world you imagine and make it sustainable to perpetuate that.

These are all for sale and good business practices to boot.

good, you do that and i'll continue to feed myself.

I'd work for food, so we're aren't that dissimilar.

I think it makes sense why one would care about what the hiring manager would think in the context of the quote the original comment includes.

Detachment is pragmatic. But I don't blame people for giving a damn. Especially when companies demand the appearance of "passion".

Unless they were at the very top of their workplaces' hierarchies, that sounds like whoever was in charge of managing them had abdicated their duty.

One of them decided to spend his evenings working. His manager told him it wasn't required and he'll burn out. He did it anyways and burned out.