The Burnouts of the Century

Following publication of a recent report where 80%(!) of software engineers and managers are reporting burnout, Mike and Erik take on the difficult topic of burnout in our industry. Through a discussion of the definition, causes, and frequency of this phenomenon, your Picture Me Coding hosts decide that maybe software itself is to blame!

Resources

• Burnout self-test
• “Burnout in software engineering: A systematic mapping study
• “A newer and broader definition of burnout: Validation of the "Burnout Clinical Subtype Questionnaire (BCSQ-36)”
• World Health Organization Definition
• Scientific American “Science Quickly” podcast episode “You Can’t Fix Burnout with Self-Care”
• Nagoski sisters Ted Talk: “The Cure for Burnout: Hint it isn’t self-care” 
• “Burnout in Software Development - Survey Results 2021”
• Joy Lab podcast “Is It Burnout or Depression?”

Transcript

(upbeat music) Hello, welcome to Picture Me Coding with Erik Aker and Mike Mull.

Hi, Mike, how you doing? - Hey there, doing pretty well, how are you? - I'm doing all right.

I've been listening to Ohm's "God Is Good" a lot this week, I don't know why.

It's a 15 year old record, I don't know why, it popped in my head.

It's a weird album and I don't know if I, I never know if I should take it seriously.

It's kind of like in "Monty Python on the Holy Grail" when the monks are chanting and intoning and then hitting themselves on the head with the wood. (laughing) This is the same guy, Al Cisneros, who has the line, "The pterodactyl flies again."

Ever listen to Ohm?

- Yeah, I've listened to most of the sleep offshoots but I think Ohm is probably the biggest challenge for me.

- It is a challenge.

This album's weird, it's got these two slower songs at the beginning and then the two little more involved songs at the end and I don't know why I keep listening, I don't know why I'm listening to this.

Do I take this seriously?

But then it just drones on and I kind of like it.

- Is it good work music?

Like, does it get you into the flow?

- Maybe that's why I keep listening to it, it's good.

I'm in the flow state music.

What about you, you got something?

Summertime, what do you got for summer?

- Yeah, I've been listening a lot to a new album called "The Healer" from a band called Sumac.

- Like the plant, Chaparral, Laurel Sumac.

- I have to admit the name is kind of unusual for me because when I think of Sumac, I think of things like Laurel Sumac and various other plants that grow in the desert here in Southern California, including one with the charming name, the sugar bush, which is, I really enjoy it.

- That's not very metal though, is it?

- No, it's not too metal, but the record is definitely metal, but beyond that, it's kind of hard to put much of a label on it.

It's 76 minutes long, but it's only four songs.

- Oh, that sounds right up my alley actually.

- Yeah, there were times when I kind of got a little bit of a Dopesmoker vibe from it, so.

But I think the real, there's a bit of a difference here in terms of, it does have that droney aspect to it at times, but it's also got this kind of math rock feel to it, like lots of rhythm and tempo changes.

And I was talking to another friend about it and I was saying, I'll leave it up to you whether or not to listen to it, but if you can't imagine yourself saying, I really like the riff that kicks in at about 11 minutes in this song, it's probably not a good album for you. - Do you know exactly what to say to get me to go out and try to listen to a thing? - But yeah, for some reason, it's despite being a little challenging, it's very listenable and seems to be good work music, so. - Mike, you sent me this document last week.

It was from this company called Jellyfish, I don't know what they do.

I don't intend this to be an ad for them, I don't know who they are, but apparently they do this survey every year, and they have this survey this year, 2024, the state of engineering management.

And they write, this year, quote, "We surveyed 600 plus engineering leaders, "managers and engineers to see how engineering teams "have evolved and the ways they organize, measure, "and staff their work."

Not normally this type of report, probably not really up my alley, they're talking about engineering management, which is a thing I prefer to ignore.

Here's what's surprising about their report, there's a lot of burnout. - Excessive amounts of burnout, yes. - They said, "In last year's state of engineering management, "engineering teams named burnout "among their top challenges heading into the new year, "they were right to be concerned, "our latest survey found 65% of all respondents "experienced burnout in the past year."

This problem was particularly acute for short staff engineers and leaders overseeing large organizations of respondents at companies with more than 500 people, in their engineering org, 85% of managers and 92% of executives reported experiencing burnout.

A similar number, 85% of engineers who are part of a team of less than 10 engineers said the same.

I don't know about the medium-sized orgs, but it sounds like very large orgs, very small orgs, significant amounts of burnout.

That's a lot of burnout. - Yeah, and if you look across their breakdown here, that it really doesn't get very low in any of the categories.

So 40% is about the lowest it goes and it's above 50 and close to 60 at almost every category.

So yeah, surprising. 

- The majority. 

- Yeah, majority.

Apparently this company does not have anything to do with actual jellyfish, which is kind of a bummer, but.

Yeah, so this reported on a couple of places on social media and I don't know too much about their methodology, but the results seemed a little surprising. 

- Yeah, surprised me too, but I have this anecdotal gut level reaction of, oh, I keep seeing people in our community, software engineering, talking about being burned out, asking how to address burnout, how to treat burnout, what to do about it.

So anecdotally, and obviously that's not scientific, I keep thinking, wow, are people especially burned out right now?

And so I wanted to talk to you about this topic.

We did some reading about it and there are some interesting papers about it, but I have a little bit of a disclaimer here.

Talking about this on the podcast with you, the topic of burnout, it makes me kind of nervous because I can't, it's not like I could speak about this topic with some fluency.

Like if you said to me, hey, tell me about strategies for deploying code in AWS.

Okay, I could talk about that, right, with some fluency.

And it seems like this is one of those topics where it's a lot more irresponsible for us to say things that are wrong than it is to in just purely technical topics. - Yeah, I agree with you.

I get that.

I think mostly what we can offer here is people who have maybe suffered from this syndrome and have been around other people suffering from the syndrome.

So it's a non-professional opinion, but it's not a totally uninformed opinion. - Yeah, we did some reading.

Yeah, I wanted to talk about it.

It seems to be coming up a lot lately.

I see it coming up in context where people are asking for help and they're getting answers like, well, you should work less or get a hobby or change jobs.

And I wanna know, are these responsible suggestions?

And I wanna know, is this happening a lot?

But okay, as with any of our topics, we have to define it a little bit first.

So the first thing I did was I looked at standard definitions.

World Health Organization has one.

They have an international classification of diseases that they reference.

This is the 11th revision.

They say, quote, it is not, burn out now, it is not classified as a medical condition.

It's defined as follows.

It is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.

It is characterized by three dimensions.

Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from one's job or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job and reduced professional efficacy.

So burnout, they write, refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.

Okay, so it's a work thing.

There are three components, feeling tired, exhausted.

It's feeling more immensely distant from your job or negative or cynical about it and feeling like you are not effective in your job, feeling like you are not accomplishing things.

And it turns out these three that they report go back to a researcher whose name is Christina Maslach and she talked about this burnout inventory.

These three components that they reference are straight out of her work from the 1970s.

And in her terminology, and these come up a lot too, these three are called emotional exhaustion.

That's the first.

The second is depersonalization or cynicism and detachment.

And the third is less efficacy or feelings of accomplishment.

So Maslach actually interviewed these first responders, police officers, firefighters and others.

And she was trying to understand how they felt in the face of their very highly stressful jobs.

And she brought the word burnout to them and they totally embraced it like, yes, that's how I feel.

And she wrote this article in the 70s and that article had this virality to it.

Oh, they didn't describe it that at the time.

People from all over the country and the world started writing to her.

And it became a pretty large area of research for her.

Okay, so our definition, how do you feel?

Does the definition make sense?

So far we got three components in the Maslach burnout inventory, emotional exhaustion, feelings of detachment or depersonalization and feelings of loss of efficacy. - So there's two fine points that I'm not a hundred percent sure on.

So one is I'm not entirely sure I get the idea of depersonalization in the list above.

It's called increased mental distance from one's job.

Also a little bit vague to me.

So I might need to dig into that a little bit.

And the other one is that on the third point, it's unclear to me whether or not this means that you are literally less good at your job or if you just feel like you're less good at your job. - Oh, that's a good question.

I don't actually know the answer to that.

This is a feelings thing.

So it's probably the latter is good enough to describe it.

If you feel emotional exhaustion, if you feel like you can't accomplish things, that's probably, those are symptomatic of burnout according to this.

So here's a question I wanted to know.

And this is when I read the survey you sent me, I immediately was like, wow, I've been seeing a lot of people talking about this.

How common is this?

So I found a paper, this was published in March of last year, and the paper is pretty good.

It's titled burnout in software engineering, a systematic mapping study.

So they went out and read and analyzed a whole lot of papers and they did numeric analysis and all kinds of programmatic analysis of these papers in order to look at causes, symptoms of burnout, treatments, things like that.

And they actually write in this paper, burnout is a work related syndrome that's similar to many occupations, quote, influences most software developers.

For decades, studies in software engineering have explored the causes of burnout and its consequences among IT professionals and they wanna like analyze all this stuff.

The software engineering field they write, and the more general IT sector are not immune from the effects of burnout in the workplace.

Recent repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic are detected with surveys of developers.

These reports highlighted that over 80% of the survey developers experienced or are currently experiencing some form of burnout in the workplace.

And they cite this survey that also says 73% of developers said burnout is negatively impacting their productivity or personal life. 80%, that seems like a lot.

Does that, does that seem hard to believe for you? - It seems high.

And another thing that I kind of worry about is that in some cases, workplace burnout gets conflated with just general depression.

I think, if you look at the lists of things that people experience when they have burnout, it probably has a pretty significant intersection with people who are just simply depressed.

And especially post COVID, I think there are a lot of people who during the pandemic and maybe even still just are disillusioned by things in general.

And maybe some of that's carried over into the workplace.

So I guess, the 80% of people experiencing burnout seems high, but I suppose my real question is, is that 80% of the people who are reporting symptoms of burnout, does all of them actually have burnout or is some subset of that people with just depression? - Well, I would imagine the population of people with depression is significantly smaller than, I mean, 80% still a massive number.

Let's say 10% of those people are have depression.

Depression, there's a lot of literature talking about distinction between burnout and depression.

We can talk more about it later, but depression is more of a thing that can, is often described as a thing that just sort of comes on.

It doesn't necessarily relate to your job.

Burnout is not a medical condition, they say.

It is attributed to these external factors.

Work causes this.

But wait, here's my question for you.

What if I said to you a majority of all software, even not even 80%, a majority of all software developers are burned out right now?

When I was a teenager, I went to the East Coast and we traveled through, we went to Maryland and Virginia and Delaware and I discovered crab cakes and I was like, wow, these crab cakes are freaking amazing.

I love crab cakes.

If you told me, 80% of the people who make crab cakes are burnout, I would think, wow, they should fix their shit.

That's a messed up industry right there.

What is wrong with them?

What are they doing wrong?

Yeah, well, I mean, even if you look at professions where you would expect there to be burnout, like if you said 50% of nurses have burnout or 50% of police officers have burnout, you would probably regard that as being a negative thing.

Well, or like prison guards or something like high stress, high conflict jobs you would expect it.

But that's surprising for software.

All right, so let's look at the self-test.

There are different tests out there.

These generally, if you already know about the three components in the Moz Lock burnout inventory, you can kind of see those lurking through these questions.

When I saw some of these questions and I kind of, well, okay, I won't judge them.

Let me give you some of the questions from the test, okay?

And Mike, you have a job, you consider yourself to be a guy with a job.

That's a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

All right, skip that question.

Question I have for you.

Would you agree with the statement, I have negative thoughts about my job?

Yes, do I have like levels of agreement?

Can I?

(laughing) Okay, so in the self-report they have not at all rarely, sometimes, often or very often.

Do you have negative thoughts about your job?

Yeah, I think I'd probably be on the sometimes area.

Sometimes, okay.

Do you ever feel run down and drained of physical or emotional energy?

That's emotional exhaustion right there.

Yes, but keep in mind that I'm very old, so. (laughing) We're gonna go with often.

Are you harder and less sympathetic with people than perhaps they deserve?

What's the one above often?

What's the one above sometimes?

Often, it's often, very often.

So, well, I've worked with people who are afraid of you and they don't talk to you much, and once they talk to you, they're less afraid of you, but they see you go by and they're like, "Oh, that guy's scary."

Yeah.

I don't particularly cultivate that, it just happens.

Are you easily irritated by small problems or by your coworkers and your team?

Yes, so often, but also, again, I have a pretty high baseline of irritation, so.

It's like always there.

Is that like in that one Avengers movie?

I'm always angry, that's my secret, that's the thing.

Yeah, I mean, I probably get irritated three or four times on the drive home, it's a lot of times.

Do you feel misunderstood or unappreciated by your coworkers?

Sometimes.

Okay, do you feel that you have no one to talk to?

I'm gonna be so bombed if you say yes.

What was below sometimes?

Rarely, good answer, good answer.

All right, maybe as a clinician, I should not be influencing your answers.

I think I'm skewing the results of your test, but I gotta tell you so far, not looking good for you, my friend.

The funny thing is that I do have people to talk to, I just don't particularly like to talk to people, so.

Let me see if that's a question on here.

That is not on here, that should be, do you have people to talk to, but you don't want to talk to them?

Should be a question.

Okay, do you feel that you are achieving less than you should?

That is the efficacy component to the Maslach inventory.

I would give that an often, probably.

Okay, do you feel under an unpleasant level of pressure to succeed?

I think for me, that's sometimes, mostly because I'm in such a late stage of my career that it's not all that consequential for me anymore.

Do you feel like you're not getting what you want out of your job as another one?

I don't necessarily want to do all of these, but a lot of these questions are really interesting.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of these, I think I'm at least as sometimes, but I also wonder if maybe everybody who has a job is gonna be at sometimes.

That's exactly my response to this quiz.

It's like, every question is like, do you have a job and do you not love it?

Yeah.

Here's a good one.

I feel that organizational politics or bureaucracy frustrate my ability to do a good job.

And in my own case, I see an organization accompany as politics or bureaucracy.

Yeah, it seems like there's gonna be like, professional athletes, movie stars, rock stars who maybe don't answer sometimes to these questions, but it seems like the majority of people who work would be at least somewhere on this scale.

Yeah, I got one more for you.

This is not all of them.

I didn't want to do all of them, but one more.

This speaks to me of the software field.

I feel that there is more work to do than I practically have the ability to do.

Yeah, often, often or more than often.

Yeah, very often.

All right, I'm gonna calculate your total.

Your total is 52.

The self report says you are at severe risk of burnout.

Do something about this urgently.

Yeah, man, I already have hobbies.

Yeah, I mean, maybe one of the things to do about it, Mike, is to start a podcast, okay?

That's a thought.

I recall seeing a list of things that you can do to sort of ameliorate burnout, and I was a little bit bummed to find out that I already do most of them.

So, yeah.

So it's not working.

Why does this happen?

Why does burnout happen in software, do you think?

So, I have some theories.

Like as we said at the top of this podcast, keep in mind that we don't really know what we're talking about.

So, all of my theories are gonna be crackpot theories.

And it's possibly irresponsible to listen to us on this topic.

Yes, please do not take this as medical advice.

So, one thing is I think that people in our profession tend to identify with the work a little bit more than people in other professions do.

I think this is one of the rare professional fields where people do the same thing that they do at work outside of work for amusement sometimes.

So, hobby coding is like a, I'm identifying with this activity.

It's a thing that I do.

It's not just work.

Yeah, you know, and I don't know that much about other people's jobs, but my guess is that, you know, if you sell insurance, you probably don't spend your weekends trying to pitch insurance to your buddies or whatever.

Maybe you do that.

Or that that activity might be seen as unhealthy behavior.

Right, yeah.

The other thing that I think is sort of unique about our field is that the knowledge that you learn as you go through your career doesn't carry over as well as it does in some other fields.

I don't have any metrics on this either, but you know, I'm guessing if you're in a professional field like law or medicine, you have to spend a lot of time keeping up with new developments.

But most of the stuff that you learned when you were a student or when you were in the early part of your careers still relatively valid, there's probably drugs that people took back then that they don't recommend anymore treatments that they stopped recommending.

But I think in our field, there's this idea that every 10 years, you sort of have to stop and relearn things.

And a lot of what you learn before doesn't really apply anymore, maybe.

Yeah, so you would naturally just by the rate of change in our industry feel like you're accomplishing less over time, your efficacy is reduced.

You sent me an essay that you wrote back in, was it 2004?

Yes.

What gave rise to this essay?

It's about, it's called, "Why Does My Job Suck?"

(laughing) You're talking about burnout.

You remember being self-taught, you have some reasons in here.

What made you write this?

So this was 20 years ago and at the time I had spent several years doing various levels of software team management and right before this I had been managing this consulting group that was, I don't know, 40 people or so.

Decently sized organization sounds like.

It was decent sized and the people involved in it were spread out literally across the world.

So I had, my boss actually worked in Cambridge, England and I had a team that was working in summer in India, I've forgotten where, but anyway, so I would be on calls at seven o'clock in the morning sometimes and seven o'clock in the evening sometimes.

And this was at a time when my sons were young and there was a point of which I just, I remember this one incident where some family had come to visit us in San Diego and we had all gone down to Coronado Island.

And I think my family members were staying at Coronado and they had this nice hotel with a pool.

And so we took the kids to their hotel to swim in the pool and I had this work deadline.

And so my kids were swimming in the pool, but meanwhile I was like sitting in this deck chair by the pool with my laptop trying to finish some work on like a Sunday.

And I just had this sort of epiphany of like, this is probably not good.

So I tried to get back into an engineering role and so what prompted this essay was when I went back in this engineering role, I just, I didn't enjoy the work as much as I had prior to going into management.

And I wrote this essay about what has changed and why don't I feel as fulfilled by this as I used to? - Yeah, it's an interesting essay.

It's 20 years old, but you're talking about things that the example, you gave five examples of causes and your causes are, as I was reading them, I like completely related to four of the five and the fifth like conditionally related to.

So you write, there's nothing new under the sun.

It's like we're doing stuff repeatedly that's been done before.

I think that's a cause of my frustration with my work.

But at the same time, there's too much new stuff we're constantly reinventing and rebuilding and having to adapt to new frameworks and technologies and tools and protocols that are, they might be reinventions, but there's still work I have to do.

I got to run to keep up, to stay in place.

You also write, I didn't get rich enough to stop working, which is a funny cause of burnout.

You also say it's like, there's a death's March equality to it.

It's like, no matter how much you do, there's always more to be done.

And the promise over the past in my career, 10, 15 years and seemingly longer than that, 20, 30 years has been, oh, we're gonna get more efficient.

Computers are gonna be more powerful.

We're gonna have more software that'll do things for us so we can write less code.

And that never happens.

We just keep writing more and more of the stuff, right?

There's more work to do.

It's never less.

And then the other one, which I was not so sure about you, right?

It's not a prestigious career.

And I think that this idea of prestige is really important.

I wanna look at it a little more closely, but I think I would suspect that it goes in waves, but there are moments in our culture where you have this heroes, software developer, heroic figure that can build things, God-like in their abilities to, they can spawn applications from their brains.

And then that kind of goes down a little bit.

Like they're not considered heroes.

You know, like we will valorize people who have these massive open source contributions, but lately I don't see a lot of that.

I think it kind of goes up and down, prestige. - Yeah, I think at that time, it was a little bit before the sort of rock star influencer developer idea. - 10X developer type of person? - Back then, I think there was this sort of notion that software engineering was becoming more formalized.

And so for instance, like the- - UML and- - Yeah, UML was being promoted and the software engineering institute was promoting what they called the capability maturity model.

And, you know, this sort of idea that organizations would get more and more formal in their behaviors.

And so I think there was a point there in the early 2000s where it looked like this was going to be, you know, maybe not a glamorous profession, but at least a respected profession in the same sense that, you know, other engineering professions were at least, you know, if you were a civil engineer, a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, it was considered to be a respectable, fairly prestigious professional career.

And I think as the sort of rock star web app developer became a thing that felt like it was happening less and less and that prestige now meant something more like, you know, you had a big social media presence or- - Or you contribute to largely widely used open source projects. - Right, or, you know, you made, you had a high profile exit from a startup that, you know, internet startup in the late nineties or early 2000s, that kind of thing. - So we're still talking about causes here.

If you listen to this paper, this longer paper, which is pretty good, burnout and software engineering, they're indicating that maybe 80% of software engineers are suffering from burnout, massive number.

Okay, let's take that.

Maybe that's true.

Why does that happen?

That's our question.

You gave five reasons here.

You gave a couple, you gave kind of a theory earlier and reading this material, I think I agree with your theory.

If you go back to Maslach's components, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, being disconnected from the work and feeling like you're accomplishing less, your efficacy is going down.

I kind of think that depersonalization is specific to our culture.

And why, what do we mean by that?

It's what you were talking about.

Like, it's really common for people like us to do the job, but also identify as a person who does this activity.

And so I do the job, but I'm a hobby coder.

I do the job, but I contribute to open source.

It's my identity.

And so when I get overwhelmed, maybe I'm no longer hobby coding 'cause I'm tired or I can't contribute to open source 'cause I just, it's too much, then that feeling of no longer having this as my identity, that in itself is one of the symptoms of burnout.

So it's almost like our culture produces feelings of burnout.

And I think this relates to your comment about prestige. - Yeah, I think that's right.

I can't quite articulate it, but I remember recently I'd sent you this text message saying something like, can you believe that there are people out there who go through their entire lives without ever having to think about computers?

And it was meant to be funny, but there buried in there is this idea that as somebody who's been doing software for 40 years now, it's hard for me to even imagine something else as being a profession, even though most of the people that I'm around all the time don't, most of the people I'm around don't pull out their computers and try to learn Rust on the weekends or whatever. - There's like a danger in identifying so closely with the thing that we do is for our jobs.

And that danger is if the job becomes frustrating, then it's not just the job that's frustrating.

It's like my whole identity could be threatened.

That's a significant danger in the culture that surrounds our field, I think. - I would agree.

I think there's also a bit of this, there's this idea that if you're really good at this profession, you're gonna either get rich or you're gonna get famous.

And I regret that because my personal experience is the best people I've worked with over the decades actually have almost no social media presence.

And it's just, it's because one, they're not interested in two, they're busy. - Yeah.

So depersonalization, it's almost like depersonalization is a software culture thing.

The second component, less efficacy, feeling of less accomplishment.

You brought this up and I also really relate to this comment.

You talked about nothing new under the sun, but at the same time there's too much stuff.

The decline of feelings and of competence and productivity at work is what this is, right?

And it's almost like, yeah, there's so much new innovation, so many new things you have to adapt to.

There's Docker and Kubernetes and cloud and infrastructure is code and there's CI/CD and there's JavaScript front-end frameworks.

I mean, there's millions of examples probably, but like that in itself, how could you not feel like your efficacy is reduced with the rate at which stuff changes in our field? - There's this whole new sea change of AI now too where not only do you feel like you have to keep up with the stuff that's happening in AI, but there's this sort of gut feeling that the AI's may surpass us. - Yeah, and that's both of those, right?

That is depersonalizing and reducing of efficacy.

When people like Sam Altman or Jensen Wang say, "Nobody's gonna write code in the future."

It's like, there's a lot of potential for burnout and significant numbers of people we work with in our industry, peers of ours, hearing that going, "Oh, this thing that matters to me, that's part of my identity.

I'm suddenly gonna be less, it's not gonna be my identity in the future, a computer's gonna do it and I'm gonna barely be able to do anything." - Yeah, I mean, I really think this contributes a lot because it kind of feeds into this idea that the profession is kind of imitative or paint by numbers and I don't think that's really true, but these AI's which are simply repeating what other people have done before can now do your job is a little depressing. - Yeah, yeah, so these three components, they're kind of everywhere.

They're part of our culture, they're part of our industry.

So it's almost maybe a thing that our industry produces, like it's a burnout machine.

There's a word in the burnout in software engineering systematic mapping paper.

I thought you'd really like, the word is quote, "techno stress." - I do like that word.

It sounds a little bit like a music genre, but. - It does.

So this is from the paper.

In a study by Mahapatra et al, the paper, they write, "Investigated the correlation between the dimensions of techno stress creators."

For example, "Techno intention, techno overload, techno insecurity, techno uncertainty, techno complexity."

That's a lot of techno's.

Don't techno for an answer, Mike.

These are independent variables and burnout.

These job demand resources were found to have a significant correlation with burnout.

They actually had this really interesting point just after this in the paper, they say, "For people who are increasingly specialized, they're protected a little bit more."

Like the more specialization you have, maybe the more you feel this efficacy, the more you can reaffirm your identity of like, "Well, I'm a specialist and that's me."

And you don't feel depersonalized.

Techno stress.

I like that word.

So here's another couple of comments from this paper.

"Most of the causes of burnout, they write, include work-related factors such as tension and control, where job overload, role conflict, job specialization, where increasing specialization helps, and job demands.

Several studies also identified other work-related factors such as information overload, severe data cascade, long streaks of uninterrupted contributions."

That's your death march point and long job strains as an impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Disjoint but somewhat related to work-related factors.

Other studies have shown that the communication practices within development team may cause burnout.

And software developers, they actually refer to papers in this paper where they're like, "Does agile cause burnout?"

(laughing) - I'm gonna say yes.

I have no evidence for that, but I like to criticize agile any chance I get. - So here's what I'm hearing.

Our industry, our culture, the rate at which things change and the rate at which we identify with these activities, that these are like an engine that produces burnout on a significant scale.

Are we completely screwed?

(laughing) - I definitely think that's the way it is at the moment.

I'm not convinced that it has always been that way. - Okay, tell me about that.

It used to be better, is what you're saying, in the good old days. - No, not necessarily, but I do think it is a little bit cyclical.

So one of the things that's going on right now that is in the background of this is that the job market for computer programmers and software engineers is not nearly so good as it has been for the prior decade.

So I think five years ago, if you were feeling frustrated with your job, you just get another one.

You could cycle through those every couple of years pretty easily, and I think that probably helped people with a number of the aspects of burnout in terms of you get to see new things and you get to new environments.

So if the people around you are stressing you out, you just find a new environment and I think that's people don't have those options like they did five years ago. - This is a very good point that you raised.

Yeah, that like hero culture when it was, there were lots of jobs and a huge amount of demand and negative unemployment, and we were hotly desired in the industry and interview processes were different.

It was, there's a lot more flexibility, ability to move from one place to another if you're stressed out, you can free yourself from that.

I think what you've raised a very good point here.

So it's not necessarily that things were better in the good old days, it's just that there are mega economic factors and industry factors and job flexibility which can contribute to burnout too.

And maybe that's why anecdotally, it seems like there's so much burnout right now. - I think it's gotta be a contributing factor.

I don't know exactly what the time frame of these studies was, but it seems like it was probably, they're probably recent enough that it was at a point where people could see the industry or the employment opportunities declining. - I finally wondered after reading about these topics, I finally wonder, what were you supposed to do about this when you hit it?

Because I do see people asking socially, hey, how do I deal with this?

And the responses often, I don't think they're glib or flippant, but they just, it makes me wonder, what are you supposed to do?

Especially if you can't leave your job. - I ended up listening to a decent number of podcasts in preparation for this.

And one of the ones I really liked was a relatively short one from Scientific American.

They have a podcast called Science Quickly.

And the recommendations that appear in commentary about this and from psychiatrists and podcasts as well, you should go out and get exercise.

You should try to figure out how to rest from your work.

You should make sure you have people who care about you, give you love and support.

So there's like social component, there's an exercise component, there's a rest component.

But the Science Quickly podcast episode gets to this more recent research saying, this is a social problem.

It's a work problem.

It's not a you problem, it's your environment.

And that's a little bit worrying.

And in fact, here's a quote.

"This rarely happens to one person, it's quite likely it's happening to the people around you too.

This is from the Scientific American podcast.

It's something that happens from external conditions."

So I imagine if you're really suffering from burnout as 80% of our peers are, maybe 60%, I don't know, somewhere there majority of our peers are, the best thing they can do is probably leave, but they probably can't leave. - Yeah, exactly.

I think this is why, you know, I was saying earlier that when I see the things that people suggest to alleviate burnout, I feel like I'm already doing those things.

And so I think this idea from the podcast is right on in that a lot of it's just stuff you can't really control or at least if you do have any control, it's going to be very difficult because it's not just you who needs to change behavior. - I heard interviews with these sisters, Emily Nagosky and Emily Nabot Nagosky.

They published a book recently called "Burnout, the Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle."

They appeared on a few different podcasts.

I heard them on a TED Talk podcast.

I'm not a huge fan of TED Talks, but this is like an interview with them.

So it wasn't your typical techno babble bullshit that you get on TED.

Sorry, if you're a huge TED fan, I kind of can't stand the TED Talks.

Anyway, they have this theory that there's this, they call the stress cycle.

They say, if you think about the natural stress response and humans, there is something that is stressing you.

Maybe it's like your life is in danger and you have some sort of physical expression to respond to that.

Maybe you run away from the thing and then you have this cool down and they call that the stress cycle.

They say, if you get stressed, you have a stressor, but you don't actually go through this physical thing to act on it, physical, like exercise, like run or walk or flex your muscles that you never signal to yourself that I'm past the danger.

It's like this low level of danger that's always there.

So this sounds like similar to what you read.

You said, I read these things that you're supposed to do, but I'm already doing them.

What are those things that you are already doing that you're supposed to be doing?

Was podcasting one of them? - Only in the sense of, it says get a hobby that's not computer stuff, which-- - It's a hobby that's not your job.

Find a hobby that's not your job is one of the things is what you're saying. - Yeah, and I guess this half counts at least.

The other one is exercise, and I think I probably do that maybe to excess.

So those are the two that come to mind.

But again, I don't think, if the source of the frustration is that you don't feel like your work is valued or you feel like you're doing work that people are eager to have finished, it doesn't seem to have any-- - Meaning? - Mission to it, yeah.

It's, I think, it's just not something you can exercise your way out of. - Yeah, yeah, Emily and Amelia Nagosky say, "You can't self-care your way out of this phenomenon."

And if you think about it from that, from the examples you just gave, it's like you can't self-care your way out of making your work more meaningful.

You can't self-care your way out of feeling like it's worth doing, or you can't self-care your way out of our industry, which is like perpetually inventing new ways to do things.

I guess the suggestion then is go be a mushroom farmer. - Yeah, there is a lot of appeal to becoming a shepherd or something like that, but speaking of things I don't know anything about. - I will say that I have had experiences over the last couple of years where I used to do a lot of software on the weekend, software on the side.

I would enjoy it.

These are intellectual challenges I enjoyed.

And I haven't really in the last couple of years.

And I did feel like, whoa, something's wrong with me.

And I listened to the things you're doing in your spare time.

You're reading the Linux kernel scheduler and stuff like that.

And I'm like, geez, Mike is still doing stuff.

What's wrong with me?

There's something wrong with me.

I think it's that depersonalization.

But I kind of wonder if the way in which we take on coding as an identity is not potentially destructive.

Like that's a dangerous aspect of our culture.

Do you agree with that? - Yes and no.

So I guess my, what I would say is, I like if you are spending your weekends trying to learn things because they are going to help you further your career, I think that's probably dangerous if you're thinking of it in terms of, I need to be more competitive in the marketplace or I need to learn this new technology, which is now the hot new thing.

I think that's probably bad for your mental health in the long run.

I don't necessarily think it's bad to do computer stuff if it's stuff that you really enjoy.

I know people who, they're writing enterprise software at work, but on the weekends, they're like messing around with the network in their house or building stuff on their Raspberry Pi or something like that.

I don't think that's necessarily bad.

I made this comment a couple of years ago to some people that the thing I really miss about programming in the modern era is the computers.

And so a lot of the stuff that you're mentioning that I'm doing kind of in my spare time is stuff where I'm just trying to figure out computers again.

But it could be that those things are distinct enough from your work.

Yeah.

Maybe the problem is taking the identity, not even necessarily like I'm trying to advance my career, but like this is who I am.

I do this for my job and I do it outside of my job.

That's a potentially dangerous mode to be in, potentially dangerous.

We're not saying, I'm not trying to say you shouldn't be like that.

I have been like that for much of my career.

Yeah, I mean, I admire people who are very committed to their work.

I admire people who have this sort of mission oriented mindset and they work extra hours to try to accomplish that thing.

And it may be bad for your health, but I don't know that it's necessarily leading to burnout.

I think the thing that leads to burnout is when you start trying to convince yourself that you need to do extra work because that's how you stay competitive in your workplace.

That's the efficacy thing, but this depersonalization thing really, if you have it, if you had a feeling that you're committed to the work that it matters and then that feeling goes away, then there's a break in there that can feel bad.

I guess I think we're staying roughly the same thing.

I guess.

I'm trying to disagree with you better. (laughs) I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you are, well, I mean, just basically, if you're gonna do software work outside of your day job, then it should be something that you enjoy or that gives you some sort of fulfillment.

And if it's not, if it's just something where you're trying to keep up with the latest stuff in the industry, I don't see how that can not to lead to burnout.

Well, I guess after reading all of this stuff, I am concerned that our industry and our culture are potentially dangerous for the mental health of the practitioners. (laughs) - It's a hard profession to leave behind, I think.

One of the things I tried to cultivate over the last years of my career was figuring out ways to sort of turn myself off.

And I think that it became especially difficult when everybody started working from home.

So one of my tactics during the work from home days of the pandemic was that at the end of the day, I would take a walk.

And that might be independent of any exercise I was gonna do, it was just like a head clearing walk.

And it helped me define the difference between the working day and the time I was, the non-working day that I was, where I was gonna, the whole thing was gonna be at home, but one part of it was working and one part of it was non-working.

Didn't always help, but it was at least a method to try to separate the two things. - So maybe separation, you raised COVID as an example.

I did look at Google Trends for searches for burnout.

This is a pretty blunt instrument.

It's not a very scientific analysis, but they have a graph showing search term burnout, pre-COVID.

And then there's a dotted note line.

And at COVID, you could see that it does increase and stay at this higher level.

Well, I guess what we should say to our audiences, be careful out there, friends.

Try not to identify too closely with the stuff.

Try to keep having fun, I guess. - Yeah, it probably helps to be just sort of self-aware of the symptoms and causes of burnout. - Yeah, and to smash agile probably too, right? - Wouldn't mind that, but... (laughing) All right, this has been Picture Recoding with Eric Aker and Mike Moll.

Thanks so much, Mike.

Great talking to you this week. - Thanks, see you next time. - Bye-bye. - Bye. (upbeat music) [MUSIC]