> This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels it lacks perspective with virtually any other occupations.
On one hand, misery and happiness are relative. On the other hand, try telling a construction worker how hard our lives are sitting in chairs clicking buttons.
My dad used to have to do things like hot tar roofing to pay the bills. So I still consider it a blessing to get to work in software.
I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout". I think it's wrong to equate it with "working hard". I've known farmers and restaurateurs who work insane hours for decades and never think about burning out. On the other hand, I have felt burned out 3 weeks into a job where I did nothing. I think it has little to do with how hard we work and everything to do with our perception of progress.
I think burnout is Cool Hand Luke being forced to dig a ditch and fill it back up again, for days.
It’s putting in effort without seeing anything concrete to show for it.
If you tar a roof, you can see a roof that will keep out the rain. If you cook a meal, you see someone who was hungry but now full. A lot of jobs don’t have that feedback loop.
Many jobs, including construction, service jobs, even many medical jobs, do not require even the thought of work outside of working hours.
Anecdotally many in these positions that I am friends with will attest that it's great to get off work and pretend work didn't happen and go on with their real life, because they don't have deadlines or projects to stress over, arduous performance reviews, or extensive office politicking and empire-building.
>I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout".
I can explain it pretty well.
You can classify pretty much all jobs into 2 categories - map lookups and reasoning.
A map lookup job is something where you learn to associate a specific problem with a solution. Most jobs are like this. You go work in construction, its pretty much map lookup - supervisor tells you to go prep the concrete, you know the procedure to do it, you go do it. Even high end jobs like VPs are often map lookups, you aren't really thinking about solving any problems, just following the standard procedure of what works and are essentially relying on the actual work of lower ranked people to give you data.
Reasoning jobs are those where you don't have the solution for a particular problem in memory, so you figure it out. For example, business strategy, despite being non technical, is a reasoning problem - there are a lot of variables you have to consider, and success in this regard often involves things like figuring out what you have to do, which is a separate task than actually doing it.
Software engineering is interesting because it can be both. Setting up standard service stacks is often a map lookup job. The interviews themselves test on map lookup really, as most of the problems fall within the scope of pointer manipulation or n-linked lists, with memorizing specific hard ones in case you get asked those. But fundamentally, software development is a reasoning type job.
The burnout happens when someone in software engineering is good at map lookup, but is actually needed to do reasoning, and has no education or training on how to do the latter. For example, I worked at Amazon. Id estimate that if I asked a random sample of 100 engineers to give me http traffic from a service, 1 out of 100 of them would know how to do it, and only about 10 or so would be able to actually go figure it out on their own.
This is why people who are good at reasoning can really do any job well. If you take a software engineer who is extremely competent and can build complex solutions, and make them in charge of optimizing things like delivery, shipping and warehouse storage, or finance management of a company (excluding the emotional response to those jobs), they would be able to do it well.
Whereas people who are good at map lookups tend to be only good at certain jobs in certain quantities.
My experience with burnout doesn't really gel with this. I find map lookup style tasks as you describe them pretty draining and the reasoning tasks relatively more energising.
But generally what actually causes burnout for me is a sense of pointlessness, that the work is nothing but the pay because it's, for example, just some B2B finance adjacent system or something.
Great comments from both of you. I will also add the (unsupportive) environment and uncertainty for the future as major factors IMHO.
One should also consider the "outside" environment. We jumped from covid right into war without a break in between and now we are being told that we will be replaced by AI, while expecting the stock market to crash and increase unemployment. Ah and also the inflation (wage reduction) that has been going on for the last five years and doesn't show a sign of stopping.
I don't think thats burnout, its more like apathy. I am the same way. When I worked for Amazon, I spend half sundays writing scripts that almost automated my map look up tasks (like stuff for oncall)
Burnout is when you are overworked with regular activities that you see no other way to accomplish.
It’s exactly the opposite. Burnout happens when a person with high reasoning skills is not allowed to actually used them and forced into map lookup tasks (most commonly with a useless, here be dragons kind of map).
This is exactly my experience. I like to think I'm a decent thinker. I've spent the past 6 months basically in constant burnout, started smoking again and am up to a pack a day now, because my job is "we're going to tell you that you have ownership over this perimeter, and then give you basically zero leeway in how to do things. You have to do it this way because that's what the senior architect with the hard-on for every new DevOps tool has decided. You thought that db migration could be done with just a simple script and modifying a few API endpoints? Lol No, we're using Temporal. Wait,why do you keep telling us you want to quit and go back to doing maths research?"
I would argue if you are actually good at reasoning, you can easily optimize and make the map lookup tasks efficient and automated. Unless the environment doesn't allow you to do so.
Eh, your definition implies people who are actually skilled (i.e. able to do "reasoning" jobs) don't/can't suffer from burnout. I'd bet there are cases of the opposite of what you describe, where people would be able to solve problems with reasoning, but get burnt out from being locked into a map-lookup structure. Or cases where people are good at, or enjoy, reasoning about one type of problem, but then get thrown into a different field they're not as attuned to or interested in.
In terms of mental process, whenever someone is performing a task, they are looking up information on either directly how to do the task, or are running some thought process (i.e simulation of the world) to figure out some unknown.
Ive been burned out and am VERY good at reasoning. In fact, my burnout was largely because my role went from relatively undisturbed reasoning most of the time with long, but not extreme hours, to extreme hours where I was actively punished for reasoning - all while being micromanaged and pulled in many directions.
And yet, if I had found the new role to be meaningful and, moreover, with and for decent people (rather than a psychopath), I could totally have done all of that.
Burnout comes from when your life has no meaning and, worse, your attempts to find/create meaning are prevented (or worse).
"Those who have a why to live can endure almost any how"
> On the other hand, try telling a construction worker how hard our lives are sitting in chairs clicking buttons.
Construction workers usually chose to do that job instead of call center, cashier or elderly care for instance. The perception of what's stressful or "hard" is I think different (illegal workers who can't do these jobs in the first place being another can of worms)
I also think this is the same perspective for burnout, repetitively doing something that is felt as mind crushing will be a trigger, but what is felt as mind cushing vastly depend on individuals, preferences and predispositions. I don't think there's a single yardstick for that.
I did physical labour when I was younger in a tropical climate and in certain ways it's easier than my SWE job is now.
There are days in SWE where I feel completely and utterly drained and brain dead despite doing nothing but just "clicking buttons". The physical exercise from the job site in comparison was heaven a lot of the time, and even these days when I'm stuck in my 4th useless meeting of the day, I find myself yearning for shovelling in the scorching sun.
On one hand, misery and happiness are relative. On the other hand, try telling a construction worker how hard our lives are sitting in chairs clicking buttons.
My dad used to have to do things like hot tar roofing to pay the bills. So I still consider it a blessing to get to work in software.
I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout". I think it's wrong to equate it with "working hard". I've known farmers and restaurateurs who work insane hours for decades and never think about burning out. On the other hand, I have felt burned out 3 weeks into a job where I did nothing. I think it has little to do with how hard we work and everything to do with our perception of progress.