“Burnout isn’t a sign of commitment, it’s a sign of organizational failure.”

Exactly, if you need more bandwidth hire more people, otherwise you’re burning the candle at both ends and everything suffers for it

▲ elicash 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think it's a bit more complicated. More people can sometimes slow things down. You may need to simplify processes, instead.

I agree with the original quote, though.

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hvb2 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Or simply dare to say that the deadline you're shooting for is impossible.

There's value in knowing that too

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bob1029 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

More people is a really difficult problem to solve in the current job market. You might think it's a buyer's market, but all you wind up hiring right now are the best liars. A lot of your honest participants have found alternative ways forward. I stopped applying to "normal" jobs a year ago. 1099 via networking and luck is my life now.

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psunavy03 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I moved to a new position recently and was involved with hiring my replacement. We got a good hire, but one of the people my bosses initially wanted to shortlist had an impressive resume, but then you go on LinkedIn and there are two profiles. Same exact headshot. Similar names, as if one of them could be a nickname and one a full name. Career timelines are totally different though.

So just by doing a little pre-interview prep, I found out that this person (if it was a real person and not a persona of some kind) had a resume with one career timeline and two LI profiles with two separate and different career timelines.

Fed this to my bosses who proceeded to have an extremely awkward and brief interview with the person (or the person posing as the person) about "so, in 2022, were you at $FIRST_COMPANY, $SECOND_COMPANY, or $THIRD_COMPANY?" I mean, you have to pass a background check to work at my company even if offered; why do people do this?

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dspillett 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You might think it's a buyer's market, but all you wind up hiring right now are the best liars.

And wasting a lot of time on the not-so-good liars. We've recently taken on someone for an infrastructure management role and apparently things are much much worse than they were last time we needed that sort of resource (about five years ago). Padding CVs was always an issue, but completely making them up, or getting ChatGPT to do it for you, now seems to be the default behaviour.

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pdimitar 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What is 1099?

	▲	pseudalopex 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		1099 is a US tax form. They meant contracting probably.
	▲	2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

▲ slashdave 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In my experience (as limited as it might be), burnout is a very person thing, usually driven internally by the employee with an out of kilter sense of balance between self-commitment and job performance. Common drivers are broken, centralized processes (e.g. stack ranking) rather than individual managers. Staffing doesn't really help, it just raises the bar, because this is a matter of competition.

In the software world, the sheer focus on compensation is not helpful, especially when some of the larger tech firms promote levels of compensation that nearly all "ordinary" developers could never hope to achieve.

▲ BrandoElFollito 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are cultural differences though.

In France burnout is not seen by the company as commitment. It is seen as either a health accident (best case) or as a fuck up on your side (worst case).

This comes from a fundamentally different approch to work (and work ethics) from the US.

▲ kakacik 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah but in general French approach to work and US ones are... not similar, dare I say the opposite of each other. Often 10 weeks of paid vacation vs 2 (4 is already a big perk). How sick leave is treated or general health issues. Number of public holidays. And so on.

So this view difference makes complete sense.

▲ throwaway2037 2 days ago | parent [-]

I agree with your sentiment. Work in France sounds like hell -- not for the work-life balance, but for the compensation model. Sorry to all of the French readers here. (You may feel similar to the United States or other places.) In these countries were the labour laws are extremely in favour of the worker (France, Germany, Italy, etc.), the pay for technologists is generally awful and there is very little upside. If you work really hard, you barely get paid more. That would so demotivating to me.

About this part:

    > Number of public holidays.

I Googled USA vs France. Both have 11 national holidays per year. Did you mean to write something else?

	▲	kakacik a day ago \| parent [-]
		Ha today I learned something, you are correct its 11 in US too. But it seems (according to gemini) that in US folks do not get automatically a fully paid day off on every one, which is the default in Europe. We often have 'labor day' wich are other types (acknowledged but no day off)

▲ eleveriven 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yep! It's wild how often companies treat burnout like a motivation problem instead of a math problem