I don’t think it’s that black-and-white. Sometimes mistakes just happen anywhere, be it with management of developers or whatever. It’s also highly personal the types and amount of stress each individual can cope with. Burnout also happens across many professions, including the managers themselves.

How the manager responds to you having a burnout, however, is what’s important. A good manager will manage to accelerate your recovery, and come up with some plan to prevent it from happening again in the future.

I also believe that in the end, stress management is something that in the end, it’s best you take your own responsibility for. Learn to say no, learn to communicate about your limits, and learn to walk away / push back in case those limits are crossed.

I went through a few burn outs through various phases of my life, and almost always it was a combination of multiple things at once. While a manager can help, in the end I am responsible for my own mental well being.

Well sorry it feels like that my message is blaming management for that. It kinda does (that it's one of their objective and failed to do so). But it's more to show that you're not care less about the work by taking care of yourself, because it's also in the interest of higher ups that you keep up being productive.

If you’ll read the post you’ll see poster is drawn to being a manager.

Managers have managers, though. But perhaps they’re expected to be more self-sufficient in this regard.

I wouldn’t want to be a manager precisely for this type of thing, the ability to absorb stress / pressure from within the organization and relay it in an orderly fashion to your team.

When you are a manager, having a good manager becomes even more important. I enjoyed my time leading a team for exactly this reason.

Working now at a startup, there is little to no management and I find myself wishing for good leadership.

It seems to flow both ways. Management gets burned out dealing with people who just don't care, and they end up not caring about the people they manage.

6 years ago, a COO once told me, "Employees are donkeys. You use a carrot and stick. If they weren't donkeys they'd be running their own business."

It seemed like such stuck up, pretentious 'advice' at the time that I ran far away from that social group. But parent comment made it click - people act like donkeys for a reason. And your comment made that click too, once the whole group acts like donkeys, they're treated like one.

>6 years ago, a COO once told me, "Employees are donkeys. You use a carrot and stick. If they weren't donkeys they'd be running their own business."

A COO is an Employee too. Therefore he is a Donkey as well :)

A COO is an "officer-employee", distinct from a regular unqualified "employee."

So you are saying a COO is an officer-Donkey? :)

But to go back to the parent post, what the COO said "If they weren't donkeys they'd be running their own business."

Maybe some COOs run small businesses they started where they call the all shots. But most big company COOs have a lot of obligations and have a different carrot and stick for the C-Suite. And a lot of them didn't start the business where they became the COO. So, yes, still Donkeys.

The COO never said they weren't a donkey

For context, it was a talk on HR policies. He retired at 40 after investing in real estate, then went back to work running companies, but was no longer solely motivated by compensation or the threat of being fired.

He did call managers "donkeys with sticks", though. Just because they manage, as long as their motivation is solely tied to compensation, they're still no better.

It's donkeys all the way down.

> It seemed like such stuck up, pretentious 'advice' at the time

Because it is pretentious and stuck-up.

Any non-trivial endeavor requires humans working together as a group to achieve it. Reducing the humanity of the group you're working with to "donkeys" is horrifying, and the best executives are the ones who understand - and respect - their people.

If I weren't a donkey, then I wouldn't even be working in the first place let alone running a business.

> 6 years ago, a COO once told me, "Employees are donkeys. You use a carrot and stick. If they weren't donkeys they'd be running their own business."

I don't want to run my own business because I want to be able to drift along and switch off after work. If I did run my own business then it would be better than anybody with this attitude.