Only if they're a 50th percentile person.
Burnout is also not only a function of workload. Other factors can contribute too.
Of course they have zero incentive to get anything done, they get paid regardless of how well the project gets done.
Maybe if they had the guts to leave a paycheck for browsing Reddit and started their own business they would have success too.
When I work on my projects I have way more stamina than when I'm doing client work. I kind of have to resist the urge to kill myself all the time instead of doing that boring job and I keep reminding me I'll be able to build a villa with the money.
I don't think it's laziness or lack of accountability, I think it's the 20 years of indoctrination in the school system - which are just factories churning out employees afraid of stepping out of line.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. I personally wouldn't say humans are lazy, but simply: people avoid doing things they find unenjoyable, but if they must do something unenjoyable they'll find ways to minimize their time spent doing it.
> Of course they have zero incentive to get anything done, they get paid regardless of how well the project gets done.
This makes it sound like freelancers get more work done, not because it's more enjoyable, but because they must to get paid.
> Maybe if they had the guts to leave a paycheck for browsing Reddit and started their own business they would have success too.
For some people, getting paid to browse reddit is one definition of success.
> When I work on my projects I have way more stamina than when I'm doing client work. I kind of have to resist the urge to kill myself all the time instead of doing that boring job and I keep reminding me I'll be able to build a villa with the money.
Huh... After reading this I need to rethink what you are even arguing. I assumed it was that freelancers put in more hours because the nature of their work is more fulfilling. But you're really just saying, yeah humans are lazy to the point of wanting death over client work, but at least with freelance I can frontload the actual number of miserable hours worked, instead of spreading them over 30 years.
If you've been lucky enough not to encounter them in your day to day, then that's really good, because when you have to work with one of them, boy does it suck.
That being said, I've only encountered this a few times in over 10 years working as a software developer. Most people really do want to do a good job. Even if some of them get distracted easily and need more structure.
That's why we get paid after all. I really enjoy my job and I'm effective, but if I didn't need money, it's not so fun that I wouldn't drop it to do other stuff I find more rewarding.
We aren't built for this either, especially not thought work. Society compells it, which is what it is, but we are not evolved for an 8 hour day of thinking at a desk.
Some people are good at it, but we are asking far more than some people to do it, and you have to do -something- to survive, and the outcome is obvious from thay lens in my opinion.
These are all problems that stem from management, not employees.
Yeah, but not necessarily for any malicious reason. It may not matter to you. My impression is that these people are burnt out from high school and college. But they fit a superficially, stereotypically identical profile to like, the one person you know putting in 80 hour weeks, so they keep getting hired. This is not a fringe idea, it's common enough to be made fun of in movies.
My point is that there are a dozen commenters litigating all sorts of irrelevant issues, when the explanation for how people who want to work 1-2h weeks keep getting $200k/yr+ jobs seems obvious to many non-industry laypeople.
> As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this.
This is great for people whose own pace is reasonable and matched to their compensation. If you’re paying someone 50th percentile compensation and demanding a 90th percentile work pace and output from them, you’re just going to have endless turnover as you burn people out.
Conversely, if you’re paying 90th percentile compensation and you have an employee moving at half the speed of their peers, eventually you’ll get fed up and replace them with someone better matched to the position.
But this all breaks down when you get into the weirder ends of the market. Self-pacing works great for you because you can put in the work to deliver $500K/year of value and companies appreciate it. It doesn’t work for many people whose idea of a workday is to put in 1-2 hours of focus and then browse the internet all day, which is a larger portion of the developer population than I would have guessed before becoming a manager. Other people can’t help but wander through tasks, get distracted by rewrites or new frameworks, needlessly refactor working code, or otherwise do a lot of activity without producing a lot of work. Both of these fault modes benefit greatly from the pacing and structure of management.
There’s no one size fits all approach. I think solo dev contracting is a great option for some people, but the type of person who can self-manage, sell themselves, network, and retain self-discipline isn’t all that common.
I think this is a great example of how different people thrive in different environments.