> It seems to me that a lot of contemporary burnout stems from the extremely abstract nature of the modern economy

I think doing things in the real world that you believe to be useful can provide meaning (e.g., baker making bread that that you see people enjoy, or a doctor checking a kid and being thanked by parents). However, to me, it is orthogonal to working with physical objects. I am perfectly happy working with text on screen that produces plots and formulas as long as I convince myself that those could be useful for something I consider important.

The big problem I believe is the fact that many people know that what their work will be used for is useless to a society (or even mildly harmful). I suspect that people working on targeting ads to sell unneeded junk, hooking kids on time-wasting apps or winning in a zero-sum game of HFT know deep inside that their work is a waste at best.

This can be rationalized away for a while, but not being able to answer "what am I doing this for?" can eat one up long term. My 2c.

I suspect many/most engineer-types could be happy with only 1-2 of the following:

* Contributing to a project/mission that feels worthwhile.

* Practicing good craft/professionalism. (Which doesn't necessarily mean always being able to do the best code/architecture/process, but to work well within your constraints.)

* Being part of a good team.

Though ideally you have all three, and perhaps other things, as well.

I agree about abstract, and maybe that ties into feelings about contributing. For a while, I was working with only code related to aviation, and I felt good about my modest role in some good processes, but I don't actually like flying, so I hadn't been up-close with airplanes in a while. One day, it occurred to me that it would be a boost of inspiration to go see some of the real-world aircraft and activity. Aviation is really amazing concert of processes and technology, most of it not visible, but there's something to be said for tangible. Since I wasn't aware of anything like an observation window in my airport that (post-9/11) one could access without a ticket, I spent some time finding and printing photos of some of the aircraft I'd been working with, and decorated my office, which did give a boost.

Sounds like you're talking about "Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose".

I found this to be so true at a job I had in international development. Being on a small but respected team in the org and having input on how projects all over the world would be implemented was very fulfilling.

It can be even worse for some people stuck in the Corporate/IT world of endless projects spun up destined to failure because all the requirements are coming from the top of the organization with little insight on how to put it all together. People lose motivation quickly not because of a physical object at the end of the day, but autonomy over their work and some feeling that what they are doing will be USED by someone. Versus a year of work for a project that never gets off the ground, just to be moved to another project.

Agreed. I can put up with a lot of abstract drudgery trying to figure out how to work with stupid non-compliant "interop" implementations when I remind myself that my company's systems are involved in making health records more accessible for over 100 million people.

Very true regarding the advertising industry but I feel like this is easily extended to encompass almost all product driven commercial businessess.

On the one hand we're killing the earth, polluting and creating a nightmare existence for our children. On the other hand, buy more stuff! I don't understand how anyone can justify this to themselves and I believe the resultant self doubt is a key factor in burnout.

P.s. never mention this at work... It's the elephant in every meeting room.

> the end product of a week's or month's work is essentially a bunch of text on a screen

For me as a developer this isn't so much of a problem. I take pride in my code up to a point (happy to admit I'm a bog-standard dev) but very much take pride in my documentation, always striving to make it as clear and useful as possible. I often come back to instructions I've written in years past and feel proud of the effort I made.

But... what really drains all of the fun out of my work is the software I have to use - I truly believe it's some of the worst quality commercial software money can buy, and it never gets better, with the company apparently firmly set on its 'let the users act as your QA department' philosophy and no improvement in sight.

If anyone needs a geo-hacker with C#, Python, PostgreSQL and good presentation/documentation skills I'm open to offers!

> For me as a developer this isn't so much of a problem. I take pride in my code...

My trouble with this is that the end goal of the business is never quality software on its own merits, therefore any effort I put into making it so is seen as wasteful or even counterproductive. I'm not even allowed to take pride in my own craftsmanship. (Documentation? We've got features to ship, and deadlines, given to us by marketing.) In the interview, I'm quizzed on my ability to spot all the crazy corner cases of an algorithm, but once I'm hired, my manager comes by to make sure I only hit the happy path, and don't waste time on things that most users will probably never run into, probably. The whole thing will be thrown out and rewritten soon enough, anyway.

> But... what really drains all of the fun out of my work is the software I have to use - I truly believe it's some of the worst quality commercial software money can buy, and it never gets better, with the company apparently firmly set on its 'let the users act as your QA department' philosophy and no improvement in sight.

I believe this is another symptom of the same problem. They're just like you or me, sitting in a different room at a different company, with a manager breathing down their neck to add more features and not worry about the occasional bug.

One bad driver can cause a traffic jam, but one good driver can't cure one.

> For me as a developer this isn't so much of a problem. I take pride in my code up to a point (happy to admit I'm a bog-standard dev) but very much take pride in my documentation, always striving to make it as clear and useful as possible. I often come back to instructions I've written in years past and feel proud of the effort I made.

Do you have any links on how to improve documentation writing? I am starting to lead a team and my documentation skills are just not up to the level that I like.

> geo-hacker

Geographer? Geologist? Geometry-specialized mathematician?

Geospatial data/apps

I can't find the name of it, but I read a book a while back that discussed just this - the author had been an extremely successful intellectual, but quit to run a motorcycle repair shop. He found that the "big" work was absolutely unrewarding due to no real tangible feedback - he never knew if he was doing well, and had no payoff, but repairing a motorcycle is something that is extremely tangible and rewarding in that you can see the results of your effort.

Edit: Found it.

https://www.amazon.ca/Shop-Class-Soulcraft-Inquiry-Value/dp/...

I see someone already mentioned his name (Matthew Crawford) below.

Maybe he was more of a "sensor" (personality type that needs to see a tangible result). A lot of developers are sensors (ISTJ in the myers briggs woo woo parlance), but also a lot are intuitors which might not need this.

I read this book years ago thinking it was specifically about motorcycles (at the time I was riding a lot as a hobby) and instead got this strange meditation on the nature of work and its meaning. I was annoyed at first but kept reading. Ended up loving it. Highly recommend.

Sounds superficially similar to the classic Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

It is inspired by it, but with a modern look on the same ideas.

It is about paying attention to what you do, to put effort into what you are doing. The Zen book was about that as well; if you put attention and effort into fixing motorcycles, it will often be rewarding.

"burnout stems from the extremely abstract nature of the modern economy."

That is incorrect. According to research, burnout steams not from the work, but from the pressure to complete the work, and the consequences of not completing the work.

Almost every job in the private sector is "At-will" employment. Meaning you can be fired for any work related reason. Not finishing an assignment? Poor performance? etc, you are at risk of being fired.

That pressure to constantly perform under pressure is what causes burnout. You baking is not a pressure packed job, you are following a simple procedure that requires little to no thinking at all.

If you were threatened or worked "under the gun"at the bakery, I gurantee you would burnout.

> That is incorrect. According to research

Don't say something is black and white incorrect when your evidence is "research".

> According to research, burnout steams not from the work, but from the pressure to complete the work, and the consequences of not completing the work.

> You baking is not a pressure packed job, you are following a simple procedure that requires little to no thinking at all.

What? A job that "requires little to no thinking at all" can nonetheless include a strong pressure to perform or get fired, which is what you say causes burnout.

He says so in his last paragraph.

I disagree with that on a personal experience, and I have read plenty of research from suggesting that while pressure is part of the equation it isn’t necessarily corporate pressure. It is more often related to lack of purpose, lack of guidance, personal conflict with a superior.

All these can go un-identified, stress accumulates, productivity decreases, and that’s when corporate pressure can kick in.

In my case there was no corporate pressure, although there was clear decrease in performance.

As soon as I figured out (actually a LICSW, over the phone and one face-to-face visit) that I was doing a burnout, I was able to get back on my feet make a plan and I liked my job and my environment again.

This was a few years ago, and now I’m feeling going down a bit, and I blame the lack of direction, lack on continuity, lack of a mission. I could literally stop doing any meaningful work for a year before anyone would acknowledge any form of poor performance.

I am obviously not going this route, I have a plan, but corporate pressure isn’t what is triggering me, the lack thereof might be

People are getting burned out in Sweden too and it is very difficult to fire people here.

But you can apply pressure on your workers in other ways even if you cannot easily fire them...

Not at all, there's plenty of burnout in countries without at-will employment.

My friend dropped out of (traditional) college due to low grades and became a welder. Not only does he make an upper middle class salary, he said the best part is getting to build stuff and have it be used for important things.

Yeah. Last summer I went to the Empire State Building in New York city and two things struck me. First was the quality of the work and second was the recognition paid to those responsible for that quality.

On the observation floor they have these plaques that display lists of recognized tradesmen who built the damn thing. I was almost moved to tears looking at those lists and realizing what these people had done in a years time.

And if you happen to be in the lineage of those builders... Imagine being able to take your children to that place, point at those lists and say; look there, your great grand father helped make this building.

“On the observation floor they have these plaques that display lists of recognized tradesmen who built the damn thing. ”

I don’t think this would happen anymore. Workers don’t get much respect these days. They are kept anonymous. The first Macs had the names of the developers somewhere. No way this would fly these days.

Not just the Macs themselves, but also the software in old Macs often had the names of its programmer(s) on the About box as opposed to a generic company name. I think this was sort of part of the Macintosh culture at the time since the software that came with the OS itself had the programmers' names instead of Apple too.

Today you only see that only on open source software... and Adobe (for some reason :-P). Although in both cases it is usually tacked under an "Authors" or "Credits" button (mainly because the credits is usually a laundry list with tons of names).

> and Adobe (for some reason :-P)

Possibly because Adobe software has a long history with the entertainment industry. Games have credits, albums list their performers and composers, and movies end with 10 minutes of everyone who showed up on the set one day (and their dog). Attribution is very important in the artistic fields.

On the other side of the aisle, Excel began as a tool for financial calculations, and it has never included any names in its about panel, even back in the 1980's: https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-excel/1x

There are all these stories about Hertzfeld, Atkinson and others from the early Mac days. I have never heard similar stuff about iPhone development. Who are the heroes of iOS?

Steve Jobs.

I really don't mean for that to sound in any way snarky or whatever. I'm also not trying to diminish the role Jobs played as a visionary, driving the company to create the right product. Not a Jobs cultist, and I'm also not wishing to denigrate him. It's just that, in light of the point being made, I think it really illustrates that point so well that there are only two names that I feel are championed as the heroes of the iPhone & iOS—Jobs and Ive. Sure, there are other execs who show up in keynotes/events, and they get some praise for their roles/departments ... and I think that really drives the point home. People doing the work aren't highlighted and recognized. It's the execs who get the praise, accolades, awards, etc. Maybe there are individual contributor names on patents or something, but nobody really seems to know who they are.

It comes down to a cognitive trade off. No one can or wants to remember or contemplate the tens, hundreds or thousands of people whose efforts went into completing something. It's just easier, calorically speaking, to give the attention to a few.

There's a recent book called Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda which details how the iPhone touch keyboard was built. So there's bits and pieces here and there.

There isn't a Homeric saga which details all the subsystems and who built them however.

Some (not sure if all) Microsoft Sidewinder joysticks had cast signatures of the engineering team:

https://imgur.com/GBi5cjR

https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/4g678s/found_on_the_c...

The work itself is poor quality, even in the high budget projects. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-yorks-super-mall-hudso...

"Poor quality" would probably apply to most tech projects too :-). Most of the stuff we produce is short term and disposable.

Most computer games have credits.

That seems to be an expected thing in entertainment products. Getting in the credits is very important to one's career and place in the field(s) involved.

I think most of the burn out comes from the 80-20 principle, where 20% of your staff deliver 80% of the output. I know where I work, if you work late and look around it is always the same handful of people who are working back. Usually its because they know so much about the organisation that people come to them to solve problems, and then they have to work late to do there own work.

I feel like if you are part of that 20% it can get pretty tiring, particularly if your personal life is also under pressure at the same time. (i.e. its hard to have quality relationships when you have to constantly work late).

I'm not sure if this feeling is universal, but I have a hunch that it kind of is. In terms of productivity, and organisational impact not everyone is equal, and those that are disproportionate in impact are put under increased pressure and stress during these times of efficiency and cost cutting.

I agree with your 80/20 prinicpal. However, I don't believe that staying late at the office is any indicator of productivity. In fact, I would argue that staying late at the office may have the opposite connotation.

Sure, staying late makes sense sometimes(deadlines to meet, production bugs, making a client happy, etc), however, staying late on a regular basis would indicate to me that these people are either very inefficient, need some extra manpower, or have a process problem.

Hours worked does not equate directly to productivity.I think believing that they do is a toxic mindset.

That or they have terrible management that forces them to work late. Been there myself.

> Hours worked does not equate directly to productivity.I think believing that they do is a toxic mindset.

Unfortunately, a lot of companies believe in this mindset. Heck, we have that 996 debacle on the front page right now.

You should try working in a position where you are in the non-productive 80%, you will probably burn out a lot faster than if you are in the productive 20%.

Yeah, I have had similar experiences. Besides just "making physical objects", there's also the camaraderie of working with others directly. Working directly with other people I was laughing, talking, listening all day and those were really fulfilling relationships.

This is is huge disadvantage of remote or distributed work

I think this is subjective, to be honest. Personally, I do my best work alone without distraction from others. While I do like being social over coffee or lunch, when I have to write code or prototype/tweak a system, I don't want talking, chatting, or other people's music in the background. This is what works for me. I turn on the Trance channel and grind it out. I can get more work done in half a day like this than in two days working with others. Thankfully, my job is largely dependent on what I can offer and not on pure teamwork.

For me it depends on the current task. For work that needs deep concentration, I appreciate solitude. But for tedious, boring work, I appreciate the background noise.

After 6 years of remote work, I thought I would like an office environment.. except I don't really care for my cooworkers.

You have a point there. I am mechanical engineer now doing software and I really miss seeing and touching(!) the final product. When I did commercial software at least you saw something on the screen quickly. Now I am in medical devices and I almost never get to witness or experience the results of my work. When you are done with something it still takes often years to get it to market. Add to that all the reporting requirements and the actual work is totally detached from the product.

I definitely miss direct contact with the results of my work.

I'd suggest automotive. I get to build software and see how it directly effects hardware for testers that we build. That's incredibly satisfying to me. And you don't have to wait 20 years to pass FDA inspection.

I noted the same things when I was going through burnout. I also noted that no one in my life used or even really knew about what I did. It felt like telling people I had a Canadian girlfriend. People are pretty sure I really do have a job but who knows what it is.

So not only is the physical aspect of the job missing, the produced artifacts of your labours don't exist in your community either. It is like leaving your community for 8+ hours a day.

Lastly, it is demonstrably ephemeral. Websites, apps, documents, spreadsheets, reports. It's all obsolete so fast that it can feel pointless having put so much effort in the first time.

I love software and I love working in competent teams and making cool stuff. But I think it needs to be balanced with doing real world things within your community.

Matthew Crawford has done some nice work addressing these ideas.

https://www.matthewbcrawford.com/new-page-1-1-2

This really connects for me. I'm a library maintainer, and it's very satisfying to me to know that my team's work leads to visible, measurable improvements in the apps that our users make, even if it's not tangible objects; it's still a bit of a "text on a screen" outcome, but at least I get to write changelings and release notes that detail what we accomplished and why it made things better (usually).

I also suspect this is why so many people I know in the industry (myself included) have hard-physical-object hobbies like baking, brewing, cycling, robotics... we need to fulfill a drive to create.

I fully get this, my software is used by my team directly (I'm a bioinformatician surrounded by biologists) and I see them be impressed when I whip out relevant data in the blink of an eye. It's my mayor motivator at work.

This is what Marx calls "alienation from the product of your labor".

One reason why Ford had to raise salaries to the famous five dollars a day was that workers were turned from craftsmen to simple cogs on the assembly line and didn’t want to do that boring and repetitive job.

I feel the same is happening in software. Compared to the 90s it feels much more like assembly line work where a worker does something very specialized and repeats it over and over.

And Ford's wage increase has been famously and misleadingly mythologized as a favor he did to his employees so they could afford to buy his cars. Matthew Crawford's takedown of this bullshit in Shop Class as Soulcraft is delicious.

Obviously Ford was a good salesman and spinster

The fact that so many people seem to believe that any businesses would decide to pay their workers above market value, in hopes that some percentage of that would come back in the form of higher sales, speaks to the marketing success of the Ford Motor Company.

Ford had the idea of a new way to manufacture things, and paid what he needed to in order to get workers who could learn this system and deliver value to him and the shareholders. It also helped that his heyday was in the 1920s, when the US economy was strong, which also colors people's memory. He likely also considered that it's sometimes better to overpay a little to assure you have the workers you need, rather than risk delaying a shipment.

It's the same with tech companies like Google, they're paying what they need to pay to attract the talent they want.

What's funny is that if a modern CEO said something like "We're going to pay our employees better so they can afford our product", it would be immediately seen as self-serving marketing nonsense to hide the actual truth. But the mythical Henry Ford says it, and people believe it. Sigh.

Good point.

More on this here:

https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2015/05/13/karl-marxs-concept...

I was the exact opposite. 6-7 years of restaurant work for 40 hours a week with a bachelors degree mixed in cause terrible burnout for me. Once I got my office job I had instant relief. I could feel myself getting burnt out again due to over work (and very underpaid). Switched jobs and found a great team and company!

Agreed! I pointed this out to my boss once, when I was working at a healthcare-related startup. I wrote software, and I didn't have much confidence that it caused any positive effect. He explained that somebody would see the result of my software, and take an action, which would influence someone else, and so on down the line, and eventually, someone's health would have an improved result. It was all about The System, and I shouldn't be discouraged because that's just how all modern life is. You contribute to your one piece of The System and you'll probably never see the effects yourself.

I'm glad I got out of that world, and back into the physical world. As you say, the pay/hours/etc are worse but there are some things you just can't put a price on.

This is a bit different in embedded systems. Here is this physical object, and today it can do something that it couldn't do yesterday, because I made it do that. For software, it has a lot of physicality...

I think Marx talks about this. The problem in his view was mostly the assembly line disassociating your work from the end product. He valued individual tradesmen perfecting a craft and moving any repetitive work to machines.

But I don't think it's quite right. Take a look at the joy in mission control when they achieve their goal. No one is responsible for physically making any part of that rover, shuttle, etc. but the joy of accomplishment is still real.

I'd imagine the joy of launching a highly successful digital product is just as real.

I think the disassociating comes from not feeling like you played a part in the product. I think authority over a product's idea/vision is just as satisfying as authority over it's physical shape.

Having occupied each of the 4 quadrants of the (physical/digital, vision/worker) tuple at some point in my life, I disagree. The move from (digital, vision) to (physical, worker) was a joyous one for me.

> Compare this to the average office job. For the most part, the end product of a week's or month's work is essentially a bunch of text on a screen.. The physicality of the work has evaporated entirely.

The end product is not just a bunch of digitized string characters, but human affect after reading.

Well, Karl Marx devised this problem in the Industrial Revolution with his Alienation concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

I actually have done a fair bit of bakery in my life so I know what you mean, but I get the same satisfaction from writing programs. I'm not sure if all "office workers" get this, though.