Burnout
This seven letter word should be at the top of everyone’s list of things to vehemently avoid.
Working 80 hour weeks?
Pushing commits on Christmas?
Canceling date night because you have “one more” feature to implement?
Take it from someone who’s been there, done that, and still got the scars: it’s not worth it.
I’ve come to learn that burnout is not caused by overworking, it is caused when the output from your effort feels like it is not valued.
I get the appeal. The thought that if I just work harder, my efforts will be seen and valued. Unfortunately, value is in the eye of the beholder; in the case of corporate America, the worshipped shareholders and stakeholders.
My first role out of college was as a data labeler, responsible for populating 500 rows of a single column with predefined classes and creating new classes if none of the existing ones fit the given observation. I did this every week for maybe a month before I started spending every waking minute developing solutions to automate my own job. In hindsight, I was a laughably novice ML engineer who was in the right place at the right time. My second tech lead Chris used to say that “there was so much low hanging fruit, we were tripping over fruit.” I naturally progressed from VBA macros to Python based data integration to Random Forest to neural networks.
I’ll never forget when I gave a presentation to my then manager on a neural network approach to automate an adjacent classification task. He looked at me and made this motion:
I knew in that moment that I had to find a new manager who valued the work I did. Had I stayed, I would’ve been miserable. The delta between what I knew I was worth and what he valued me at was revealed later in the year when he declined my request for promotion. Eight years, four promotions, and two job title changes later, my first team still uses software I wrote on a weekly basis. At least five full time equivalents worth of cost avoidance have been realized over this time. My software made the company tens of millions of dollars in incentive fee over the years. And this dude couldn’t justify a $20,000 raise.
Not everything I have developed has been so fortunate. I presented a solution on stage to a crowd of 300+ people that died within the first week of handing it off to the business who footed the development bill. It was “too much tech debt” to the people taking over the maintenance. The director who requested the solution, the person with the actual problem being solved, still calls me every six months to try and revive it.
There is nothing more soul crushing than spilling your heart and soul into something just to see it shelved.
Especially when internal politics are involved.
Especially when the only feedback you’ve gotten from the person whose problem you are solving is that the solution is fantastic.
Especially when follow on funding was allocated to mature the product and you’re 2-3 years in on it.
As a professional researcher, this is to be expected. The nature of the work is to make many gambles with hopes that one pays off. Rejection and acceptance of failure is part of the job description.
The first time it happens, you get emotional about it.
The third time it happens, you kind of roll your eyes and move on with your life.
The tenth time it happens, you don’t feel anything anymore because your bag of give-a-fucks ran out a long time ago.
At this point, you just feel tired. Burnout begins to creep in.
It’s often not a reflection of who you are.
Sometimes healthy boundaries on expectations aren’t enough.
Sometimes you’re working on the right thing, just for the wrong audience. If you’re not being challenged by the people in the room with you, you’re probably in the wrong room.
The name of the game for employers is to extract more value from employees than they are compensated. As an employee, you have to accept that you will never benefit as much as the company does in this arrangement. It’s the only set of circumstances that financially make sense for them to employ you.
However, you are in control of how much exploitation and undervaluation you are willing to tolerate.
Sometimes we close old chapters so new ones may open.
And that’s ok.
Especially if you’re escaping burnout.