What you describe there is laziness. Burnout is this weird concept that developers have invented to describe "I can't be bothered to keep going". 5 years, no days off, one 5 day holiday per year, on call 24/7 for the duration, and I'm just fine. Depressed and exhausted, yes, but the work keeps flowing in and the code keeps flowing out, which is all that matters.
I guess what I'm getting at is that people have forgotten that work is supposed to be hard. You're supposed to work your nuts off until you lose all track of time. "Free time" is a misnomer, because every moment that you're not working, you're costing yourself time, and time is precious, and should therefore be spent working.
If you can't hack back-to-back 80+ hour weeks, you need to keep throwing yourself into them until you can.
Depressed and exhausted, yes, but the work keeps flowing in and the code keeps flowing out
You call that just fine? This is not fine. This is not healthy and this is the attitude you should be fighting against. If you honestly think that you are a better person and you produce your best work when you're exhausted and depressed, you should probably get some other opinions on that, because I have a strong feeling that the people around you will disagree - whether that's co-workers or family members.
It's fine once you adjust your value system to recognise that work is life, and that everything else is basically irrelevant. No family to speak of (apart from the ones who expect a monthly cheque from me (brother, aunt, mother)), co-workers are employees, so not appropriate for me to talk about it with them!
My interpretation is that he's too shy to ask for help. Most manic depressants are just that, depressed, they hide in their hole and someone has to dig them out (possibly themselves).
Posting self-loathing material is subtle for someone to come along and pick up their shoulders. They know what they're doing is unhealthy or irregular but won't outright admit it because it shows weakness. "My life sucks but I march on and continue to produce acceptable deliverables" is a pride thing.
tl;dr - start slowly, admit that you can improve your life and STILL churn out those code snippets and you'll find yourself happier!
I'm going with "lost track of perspective" here. I've heard the same tune too many times to keep thinking that all those people are really very good dead-pan comedians.
I was saying the same thing not a month ago. Until one day, i completely flipped out during a meeting, stormed out, insulted the owner, and never came back.
I had been working way to much for the past 4years, and on the months leading to the melt down, it was just unhealthy, and i kept going at it, using drugs to keep up (i am deeply ashamed looking back...), barely sleeping and eating. And slowly it creep up on me, until i completely lost it. By my foolish attitude, i had not only burn myself (its been a month, i haven't been out of my place, i haven't written a line of code - i tried, but just the sight of it makes me sick -), but also hurt my co-workers and company, who in the process have lost their Chief Engineer and probably the project i was working on as well -months of work, and in the 6digits investment-.
There are people you can talk too, if it's not friends, professional help is there, i know how hard it can be to admit you've screwed up your life and health, but for your own sake, go get some help, before it is too late.
Because when your mind says stop, it'll be past the point where you can fix this "easily", and you'll be stuck with your decision for months, may be years. Take control of your situation, before your mind does it for you...
Yeah, I've reached a special place. Modafinil to work days on end without sleep, grass to force myself to sleep when I know I really need to.
I definitely need help, and I know it, but in the UK, the social stigma attached to seeing a mental healthcare professional exceeds that of going insane.
No dude! It's cool if what you value in your life is work but plenty of people work to live. Jobs shouldn't require you to put in 80 hour work weeks, that should be the choice of the individual.
5 years, no days off, one 5 day holiday per year, on call 24/7 for the duration, and I'm just fine.
You mention hard work, but I would argue you are really not working that hard. Working hard (either physically or mentally) like you say you do is simply not sustainable long term. I have known people who have put themselves in the hospital through burnout. Sleeping at the office 6 days/week, living on vending machine food, and the stress of the whole thing is physically dangerous. This doesn't even address the quality of their work which went down over time.
It's similar to the overtraining concept when weight lifting. If you are only playing with the pink weights then it's easy to workout for hours each day, every day. Start messing around with real weight on the same schedule and your body will eventually start regressing. It simply does not have time to fully recover from each workout. I believe this also happens with tough mental work.
Keep in mind this isn't talking about a crunch time or short stints of crazy work. Burnout comes from long runs of working at a non-sustainable pace.
It's good to know that HN is going down the same drain that reddit went down. Since when did hard work and dedication to one's tasks become a bad thing?
I don't think there's ever been a monolithic work-to-the-bone culture among hackers, whether at HN or elsewhere. It's definitely one part of hacker culture (and engineering culture more generally, which is full of billion-hour-shift "war stories"), but there's always been a strong opposition to that culture as well, of the "work smarter, not harder" variety, and of course lots of gray areas in between.
Some people really thrive on 80-hour workweeks, but if you don't (and I'd say most people don't), there's no particular reason to hold them up as a good thing. If you're starving and have to do it to keep from being homeless, then grit your teeth and do it, sure, but if someone's unhappy with their situation and has options, a rational solution is to look into those options...
What happens when you Win. I mean you're working on a project/business right. So heres the key question.
What was the person embarking on the journey after, what were her ambitions and aspirations. And should you manage to get there, what is next. Will there even be a next step for this new person. Or has the goal consumed the person?
One of the most important lessons I have learned from Nejc Zaplotnik, who was at the time of his death tied with Reinhold Messner in Alpinism.
"The Path is the Goal. There is nothing more important in life than the Path. Goals are mere means, since once you reach a peak its never over, you take a look around and pick a new Goal. Therefore Goals are meaningless. The only thing that matters is the Path."
So if the pain you are enduring is a vital part of your path, then it is actually good. But if this pain is not the path - then get hell out now. Don't loose the sight of your path by looking at the goal.
What you describe is that you basically have no life at all, so whats all the work for if you dont even enjoy it and instead feel depressed and exhausted ?
Sounds like a sad life.
That code you're writing in the 79th hour must be of astonishing quality! Seriously, I don't see how anyone can be productive after, say, 50 hours or so..
My observation has been that people working more than 8 hours a day for more than a week only overproduce for a very short time. 16 hour work days general degenerate into spending most of the early day fixing bugs from the day before, tiring you out so when you get those 'fixed' you spend the rest of the day introducing 'new' bugs, then repeat the next day.
There are certainly some companies with a culture of overwork, but the people that actually produce the most are not always the ones who work 16 hour days. I have worked with a lot of people who believe working hard is 'good enough', but I'd never hire them. You have to be able to actually produce something, or you're wasting your time.
"Free time" is a misnomer, because every moment that you're not working, you're costing yourself time, and time is precious, and should therefore be spent working.
Yeah, right. Because we all know that the one thing most people regret on their deathbed is not having spent more time at work.
I like working just fine. In my "free time" I'd rather make music, write in my journal, see friends or go on dates, cuddle with a beautiful woman and smell her hair or maybe just take a stroll through nature and get a sense for the hardly fathomable Universe I am a part of.
I don't know you. But your posting makes it seem like you are working hard in order to distract yourself from the fact that you're a pathetic philistine.
I used to be passionate about the arts, passionate about enjoying nature, good company, good food, travelling, enjoying life, and all the rest that matters.
I've flogged it all out of myself, as if I don't, it just depresses me that I don't get the time to do the things I love. Instead, I've convinced myself that the only thing to love is work, which my slowly but surely insane-turning mind rails against, continually, as I've ended up finding it impossible to care about anything, either way.
That is a very unethical comment. Not impressed. The last thing somebody who is suffering from burn out and possibly depression needs to hear is that it's their own fault for being lazy. It only leads to making the problem deeper + worse, and can be a very dangerous mindset.
I'd be careful to consider whether it's the right course for you too, given you report feeling exhausted and depressed. Even if so, and you see it as necessary e.g. in the early stages of a startup, don't presume to think your situation is everybody else's. And even still, be careful with it.
Actually, I just wanted to see if, on a thread about Burn-out, anyone would recognise it when they see it. Evidently, not.
I'm in the fun dichotomy of knowing damned well that I'm at the end of my tether, burned-out beyond belief, and not having the time or energy to do a bloody thing about it. I work, from the moment I wake to the moment I fall asleep on my laptop, to the moment I'm woken 20 minutes later by a client phoning or raising a support request, I've pushed friends and family out of my life completely, and I'm slowly but surely becoming an aggressive asshole who views anyone who doesn't spend their entire life as working as worthless.
These aren't my values. They don't even remotely reflect who I am as a person, or who I was, at any rate, but I'm helpless to do anything about it, as someone has to do all this crap, and I'm not prepared to inflict it on any of the guys we employ, as I'd rather fuck my life up than someone else's.
You're not helpless. You just think you are. Just hear me out a minute. What would happen if, the next time a client rang in the middle of the night, you just didn't pickup up the phone? What if you just walked out of the office after 8 hours on the job?
I was once in a situation similar to yours. The harder I worked, the more work got piled on me. After about two weeks, I started coming in at 8 and walking out at 4:30. Yeah, it was awkward to walk out when the rest of the team was still coding away. But a funny thing happened. I actually ended up contributing more functionality to the final project than the rest of the team combined. Why? I disciplined myself and made sure that the stuff I wrote worked the first time through, because I had set limits on my time and that set limits on the amount of rework I could do.
These aren't my values. They don't even remotely reflect who I am as a person, or who I was, at any rate, but I'm helpless to do anything about it, as someone has to do all this crap, and I'm not prepared to inflict it on any of the guys we employ, as I'd rather fuck my life up than someone else's.
First, that's a terrible attitude to have, and it ensures that you'll always be in over your head. Second, I'm willing to bet $20 that not all of that work has to get done. If you're really burning out as much as you say you are, you're not doing high quality work anyway. It'd be better to meet with the client and have some very frank discussions regarding the status of the project than deliver something that's complete on paper but only half-works in practice.
I'm desperate for us to hire someone else to at least share the devops/project management/administrative/account management burden with me, however my business partner runs the design side of things, and therefore doesn't see the problems (I never get to sleep, I don't feel like it's permissible for me to do anything but sit in the office waiting for the next crisis), just the symptoms (me being snarky and irritable), therefore assumes the problem is with me, rather than the fact that I'm doing way too much.
Aware of the problem, aware of a resolution, no path to it, however, so I'll probably just keep on cranking until I finally, completely and utterly, unmistakably, lose it.
Sounds like utterly losing it is what you want to have happen. What do you think that will give you permission to do that you don't give yourself permission to do now?
If the business is to survive (and continue to support you & your employees), you have something like these two options:
1) You continue at the existing intolerable grind until you lose it. The entire mass of work that you're currently doing will suddenly be thrown to everyone else, along with whatever else is required to clean up after your personal implosion (will they even know where you are or if you're coming back? will you start throwing servers out the window or screaming at customers?). Somehow with incredible difficulty they may figure it out and rescue the business, in spite of you.
2) You grind up this bitter pill and start giving it now, in little tiny doses. Hand out chunks of responsibility to others, and answer questions but don't micromanage; let them make their own mistakes (and clean them up themselves) until they've got it under control; shuffle things around as needed until folks are comfortable; repeat. Either you will make your way to a business that is sustainable, or you will find that this cannot be, in fact, a workable business that doesn't ride entirely on your back. Which means you should try something else.
It think it should be obvious which path is easier on your colleagues/employees.
If this were me, I think I'd just say "we're going to start having "X got hit by a bus" drills, and you guys have to handle something completely without me". It won't be as good as if you did it yourself, probably, but there's no way in hell they'll get any better without practice.
But not desperate enough to explain this to your business partner? A working relationship is similar a romantic relationship. You can't just hope the other person will "pick up" on what's bothering you. You have to tell them.
Seriously, he's only seeing the symptoms because you aren't showing them to him. Step away is exactly the right advice. Leave the office. Don't handle a crisis.
That should trigger a proper discussion about unrealistic expectations and the fact that you've probably been doing your job progressively worse. A single crisis not managed is usually better than an increasing number of crises badly-managed because you were running yourself into the ground.
wait, hangon. There are partial technical answers to a lot of these problems. First, is shit broken all the time? if that's true, that's the real problem. I've been in that situation before, and it's hellish because you know that if you had a week of 'full productivity' you'd be able to fix the root cause, and shit wouldn't be broken all the time, but you are always too wasted from firefighting to solve the root cause.
Hire some contractors or something to help you get things together to the point where you have emergencies once a week or less; This is a relatively low bar, but it will set things up such that you can sleep most of the time, which is key. Even if you have to pay full rates $150/hr or whatever, (and you should be able to get someone good enough to get you down to the 'failures once a week' bar fairly quickly at that rate.) do it. Have your hired gun bang on things for a week. Someone good and fresh should be able to get you down to 1 downtime-causing failure a week fairly quickly. (really. one failure every 7 days is an extremely low bar unless you have hundreds or thousands of physical servers. I probably get a bad disk a week, but those are 'fix as soon as you are awake' not 'wake up now' events. I get a downtime causing error maybe once every two months, and if you can only afford one sysadmin, chances are you are way smaller than I am.)
The important thing is to focus on bringing your failures down to reasonable rather than on making things perfect. Bring your failures down to humanly tolerable, recover, then start worrying about the failures that happen twice a year.
Next, you have a pager, right? sleep whenever you can. The caffeine makes this harder, but it's still possible. Sleep whenever you can. Set it up so that your pager wakes you, but also set up your alarms so that it only goes off if there is a /real/ problem.
Next, why are you staying at the office? I've bought one of those little verizon brand USB cellphone dongles for both my employee and myself. It's pretty great; you can be way out in the middle of nowhere, get a page, and you can do most of the things you could do in the office.
You need to set expectations. If you got woken up to fight a fire?
you put out the fire, but then you aren't showing up the next day.
So yeah, first priority? sleep. Depriving yourself of sleep is false productivity. Next? make your system more reliable.
Have you heard of saying that path to hell is paved with good intentions?
I have seen two major categories of "asshole bosses":
1. The ones who don't care. These are in it only for the paycheck and maybe they want to see how far they can take it before they get sacked.
2. The ones who care too much. They want to be successful, they need to be seen as good example and will work themselves to madness trying to prove a point. They are also trying to achieve some ideal of their own, for which they feel it should not imposed on others. They think that they are running the show, but they rarely realize they are riding the wheel. Until they just cant take it anymore and drive everyone away.
There have been many people in your shoes. Arguably everyone who is in charge of other people has to face this situation sometimes in their career/life.
Perhaps you have read this essay from Derek Sivers, if you have not it might help you open your eyes and he even offers a pretty good strategy for dealing with your situation (http://sivers.org/delegate).
You say that you don't want to impose on your colleagues. What if there are some that want to be imposed? Who will leave you just because you didn't give them a chance to go through what you are going through now?
There might be people among them, probably most of them, who are willing to help you and have no need to see you suffering. For mutual benefit. They might help you if you are willing to admit the situation you are in.
I really hope you will be able to work it out. Go take a break. The world can do without you. Really. It will have to deal with you leaving one way or another.
People will do the minimum amount of work necessary for the maximal reward. If the minimum amount of work necessary is to just go "can't you just do it", they'll do just that.
As to lumbering employees with this stuff - really, really can't. The guys we employ we employ as developers, not 24/7 unpaid support dogsbodies, which I am, as well as developer, accountant, project manager, salesman and all the rest. It's part and parcel of being self-employed, and at the end of the day I just see it as a failing in myself that I'm not capable of the workload required and demanded of me.
Yes you can. People want a change too, now and then.
Anyways if you make it a communal affair everybody is going to like participating in it. People are inherently team players to the extent that we die or go mad alone.
I was in a team that was terribly overworked and there was shitloads of stuff needed to be done, which nobody did - since it wasn't anyone's job.
Here's what we did - everybody got a slice of work nobody wanted to do. A chore if you will. The system used to assign chores was simple - the guy complaining about some shit not being done, got to be the chief of this "department". He would set the standard, keep track of what is going on, report to the rest of the team and enforce the rules that we agreed upon collectively. We also collectively created a penalty system.
This the made certain that the shit that needed to be done, got done. The shit that didn't need to get done, didn't get done. Everybody got to participate in organization and got some hands on experience with how sausages get done, this is pretty important in engineering environments since a lot of people haven't really been in charge of anything in their lives.
it's up to you, but i have been in a similar situation, and it damaged me more than i thought possible at the time. if you're like me, you're currently taking a grim pride in carrying this.
for what it's worth, if i could send a message back to my past self, i would tell him to stop. 10 years down the line the bad has outlasted the good.
Burnout is this weird concept that developers have invented to describe "I can't be bothered to keep going"
You are not serious, or you haven't been through a burnout. A burnout is probably not due to a lot of work, but to bad conditions/results/consequences. You can get burnt out without working (or working too little), and burn out is more than "I can't keep going". It's a mind disturbing thing and can be quite serious and lead to a depression.
You must be young. Not that there's a problem with that, as the young usually innovate and put a lot of youthful energy into progress.
As you get older and/or start a family, the thought of 80+ hours a week becomes laughable and even dread-inducing.
If work is hard, I'm probably going to look at a different career. Hard implies suffering and unpleasant obstacles to me. If it's challenging however...
I guess what I'm getting at is that people have forgotten that work is supposed to be hard. You're supposed to work your nuts off until you lose all track of time. "Free time" is a misnomer, because every moment that you're not working, you're costing yourself time, and time is precious, and should therefore be spent working.
If you can't hack back-to-back 80+ hour weeks, you need to keep throwing yourself into them until you can.