Burnout as Workplace Injury

Burn-out is treated in the tech industry as if it was some kind of inevitability. Just the natural effects of working really hard on hard problems, in a fast paced industry, that’s changing the world, and creating the future, this is just the price of “building””, and blah blah blah.

Consider the possibility that burnout is NOT natural, it does NOT just happen because you’re “working hard”, it does not just occur because you at the “wrong company” in the sense of your personal passions not making a connect with your employer. This thing they tell you is natural, that is normal, to the point of “everyone gets burned out” — this thing that is treated as almost an unavoidable reality —- is actually happening because tech corporations are creating dangerous working conditions and its effects have a very profound, negative impact on lives.

“Burn out” ends up being a VERY catch-all term for any of a number of purported causes and their symptoms: overwork, worn out from long hours, physical pain from using the computer so much, having insomnia/not getting enough sleep for long periods of time, stress from workplace deadlines and milestones, disenchantment and frustration with the work, interpersonal problems with a team or manager, lack of acknowledgement for personal contribution. Burnout may mean: You’re losing your passion, you are weary from long-haul product development or crunch, the ups and downs of startup life are getting to you, the party lifestyle catches up with you, you don’t have enough time to spend with your family, you need to work on your work/life balance, you need to be switched to another team to work on another project … 

Burnout is only, in fact, an umbrella cover-up term for a litany of tensions that tech workers have with management, all wrapped up in the shiny notion that this is just totally fucking normal. When I look at the symptoms described above, I see programmers being abused with insane hours, programmers being coerced to spend all of their time in the office, programmers having drugs and alcohol shoved down their throats literally 24/7. I’m reading hostile work environments, maybe bullying, maybe verbal abuse, maybe stack-ranking, maybe intimidation, maybe toxic competition. With management being even cruel and abusive — criticism, unmeetable goals, dismissiveness, pressure, blame. Hostile engineering environments where people are sometimes literally scared of not being good enough, fucking something up, letting down the team, crashing the infrastructure, getting fired. There are a lot of people regularly on-call in this industry and on-call can significantly interfere with people’s sleep, time with their family, with their schedule, etc., while being often inordinately stressful — you get paged at 3 am because there’s an outage and you are now literally fighting fires right out of bed in the night. (On this point, I find it fascinating that a field which includes large of groups of people being on call for critical infrastructure, is thought of as somehow not have workers, or serious workers).

What I see is environment where abusive or sadistic people climb the highest in the corporate ladder and then are put in positions of power over people they terrorize with micro aggressions, aggressive work environments, arguments/fighting, undercutting, pitching people against each other, etc. What I see is a host of physical problems that come — uncompensated — from working an the industry that staunchly pretends there are no physical consequences of being on the computer your whole life, tap-tap-tapping for 9+ hours every day. And thus they are not prevented or treated, or given the proper accommodation  — while tech has a reputation for being a field that has no physical engagement, tell that to the people who are experiencing debilitating RSI and migraines and tension headaches and arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome and chronic back pain, often requiring use of opiates/narcotics. Physical pain and stress is a common contributor to what we broadly just call “burnout”. 

You see *slight* acknowledgement of the true nature of burnout, or at least, the closest we get, in ideas like: people don’t get burnout from working hard, they get burnout because they *aren’t seeing the results of their work*, they get burnout because they *aren’t stakeholders in the process* *don’t have a defined career path* *don’t have enough contact with the executive suite*, and so on. This acknowledges that burnout points to SOMETHING wrong, but doesn’t define what that is in any kind of material or systemic terms nor follow the train of inquiry further. And there’s always a quick fix solution from management: this is something that will resolve it in just a month, maximum. Just check you’re email while you’re off, and maintain your call schedule. It’s normal. Happens to everyone. Take a week off. 

What if burnout wasn’t just a natural consequence of “startup hustle”, but rather is what we are calling a host of actually very disturbing symptoms that we are seeing consistently in the high tech world that have very serious consequences, long term consequences, for every aspect of people’s lives? It reminds me a lot of the 10x engineer trope, where you have this idea of the 10x engineer and that is this person who is sometimes literally killing themselves for their job; burnout is like the “necessary price” you pay for that, and in and of itself, is associated with success and dedication and heroism, rather than maltreatment by the field and company. 

Here are some of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in people describing in their experiences as burnout: 

TOTAL addiction to the company, and I mean just absolute obsession with work, to a total inability to engage in the rest of their lives; ironically, burnout often doesn’t cause people to detach from their companies, it causes them to cling to them ever tighter (more evidence that this is being caused by an abuse pattern). People often end up working around the clock when they are in the depths of burnout, but the quality of the work is obviously continuously going down, which leads them into an ugly cycle of it taking longer and longer to do things. People can persist in this state, of work being actually a private hell, for very long periods of time. It’s like watching someone sink into quicksand — it’s like they’re trapped by the company. 

Overwork, a really serious issue in the industry. At one job I worked at, the average number of days taken off in a full calendar year, was six. People would be online up to 14 hours a day. We had people who were traveling to different continents with no time to adjust, going on essentially tours of America where you spend 2 days in one city meeting clients and then three in another, and all of those have late dinners and cocktail hours and you’re “on” for days on end. There is no bounds around how much you work, tech workers don’t have a right or a schedule to stop working, they can be pushed indefinitely. People’s entire lives become their work, and then, how are you going to leave your work? Tech companies, conveniently, offer “unlimited vacation days”, which is pointed to as a perk and a structure of work-life balance, when we factually know that it actually causes people to take significantly less vacation time than they would otherwise.

And so we get to the point where people start to lose the things that they do have outside of work. It’s often joked that a lot of relationships and marriages don’t survive “startup life”, and I do mean joked about, despite the fact that it presents the ugly notion that it is COMMON for *specifically work* and the affects of work on people and the people around them, to literally break up partnerships and families. People lose their families: get divorces, become estranged/unfamiliar with their children, lose custody — burnout is something that impacts every area of worker’s lives and involves them withdrawing from life outside work, not being able to be mentally present for that time, having changes in personality and temperament, etc. 

We discussed this in depth higher up, so I’ll be brief, but I will say that in all my years working Silicon Valley, the physical toll of computer work being treated as non-existent or outlier, when it is very predictable and incredibly widespread, stands out as a most concerning labor issue. I know people who had to CHANGE INDUSTRIES because they could no longer type or manage the pain of computer work, I know people who have had to get surgeries and go through painful and rigorous physical therapy, people who have had to deal with serious back injuries and chronic pain. These are WORKPLACE INJURIES — and that is a critical piece of information and context, but it is a just another way that something as serious as workplace conditions and injuries — including PERMANENT injuries — that are in direct connection to these employers, are simply glossed over as “burnout”.

One that stands out as most damning and also incredibly material from a medical standpoint: that people often develop a host of psychological changes and challenges during burnout, including decreases in memory and cognitive effects such as focus. People actually develop diagnosable mental illnesses, get panic attacks and have anxiety and insomnia, people become so severely depressed they are unable to get out of bed, unable to work at all; people develop really serious anxiety about their work and also just in general; changes in mood and motivation; I have actually met people that I would feel comfortable saying have PTSD as a result of their workplace. After one job that I worked at, I spent years having trouble looking at my inbox because I associated it with so much stress and anxiety and even trauma — just looking at unread messages made my heart drop. THAT IS NOT NORMAL.

So at this point we are talking about something that is actually CREATING MENTAL ILLNESS in its workers — that is “burnout”. And if you are seeing these types of mental illness develop in the workforce, this also implicates potential changes to the brain that we see in association with such conditions, including inflammation, shrinkage of the brain, even tissue damage can occur. This is one of the reasons that I think of burnout as a health syndrome in general. For as much as we talk about intelligence in Silicon Valley, we don’t talk as much about the brain, we don’t talk about the actual health of the brain. I think it bears significant study, but certainly huge amounts of stress, chronic stress, can cause various forms of actual brain damage, and while brain damage can heal, it certainly can’t heal with ongoing exposure to chronic stress and the environments that cause it. You’re looking at a phenomenon that is sometimes caused by YEARS of various bad working conditions and can alter very fundamental aspects of a person’s life. 

Addiction also has a really ugly role to play. People who get hooked on drugs or alcohol due to the industry’s party lifestyle, and because they are using stimulants to get their work done and then sedatives or downers so that they can sleep at night. People end up with very serious addictions, they can easily lose their jobs and careers and even family and friends. Ironically, if you develop alcoholism as a result of tech’s 24/7 drinking culture that is 100% purposefully created by companies, it is YOU who will be out on your ass. Burnout is something that people try to self-medicate — because its actually a really bad feeling. It is very serious worker abuser if you are producing the conditions that consistently and reliably result in actual addiction, when that is a known phenomenon of the the field, and the working conditions are not adjusted in any way but rather keep up a tremendous amount of pressure to maintain. Pressuring workers into constant intoxicant use is in fact workplace abuse. 

This is on the softer side, certainly, but I’ve always found it the most poignant and human. Which is that because of “burnout”, people stop even LIKING, at all, or even being able to TOLERATE, what they do at all. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to over the years who have said that even *one specific job* at *one specific company* RUINED their career in a fundamental way. It might sound “oh boo hoo, we don’t work for our passions, asshat” but to go from at least having some enjoyment, sense of mastery or sense of craft, to hating that work… that’s actually a bad thing, and people have often invested years and years, decades, into their craft; only to find themselves at what perhaps should be the “peak” of their careers, being unable to do it without pain and suffering and distress, and hating it forever because that’s what they know how to do and they have people to support. That’s really a terrific thing to rob someone of, especially in a world that is going to force them to continue to work even as it has sapped all will to.

I have come to think of it this way: Burnout is a known configuration or series of symptoms that arises when employees are being chronically abused and exploited by their employers, up to CAUSING and INDUCING a very serious syndrome, which is a work-related injury arising from bad conditions. 

The tech industry APPEARS to address burnout: it talks about how to avoid burnout on your teams, how to recover from burnout (and get back to work ASAP), it talks about what burnout looks like, and how to know if you are burned out. On the surface, these seems to be addressing burnout — but its really not, because its not being honest about what burnout is and why it happens. To me, this functions more as a cover up for what is actually happening, a way for companies and management to also make it seem as if they are doing something about it, and also to normalize the existence of burnout in general; again, this is supposed to be just part of the game, I.e. “Everyone gets burned out sometime”. 

But on top of everything, the timeline of burnout is actually way longer than — management — would like you to believe. People often say that they are never the same, that after first contracting a severe enough burnout they feel that even years and years down the road, they still have symptoms — even saying they just feel… different, pointing to a pretty holistic long-term effect that people feel it substantially changes *who they are as a person* and their lives and careers, in profound ways. 

Burnout is pitched as something that can be solved with a new job, or a new position, or a month away. For top performers it is not unusual, when they go to management and lament how miserable they are, for the employer to simply say, take some time off. Take the wife and the kids to Hawaii. You can come back on your own time; your job will still be waiting for you. To me this is symptomatic of the company’s recognition that their “best people” are being worked into skeletons of their selves, that they end up at the point where they simply cannot continue to work; that this is expected, and they will push people as far as the can go before they break down and then you just give them some time off and maybe suggest they go to the therapist and hope they come back and keep trucking. Otherwise, someone fresh out of school who doesn’t have RSI or PTSD yet, is ready to take the spot.  

These are ALL sites around which workers *should* organize, unionize, protest, rebel, strike — to oppose their corporation and the treatment that produces this result consistently, then packages it as “burnout” in a very insidious version of victim-blaming and gaslighting. But as I’ve said elsewhere, it is more important for tech workers to be BETTER than other workers, to maintain their inordinate wealth gap over other workers, to have the ability to displace other workers from their communities, and to exploit other workers — than it is to recognize themselves as workers, find solidarity in worker’s movements, and organize for better conditions for themselves, and those of them in particular who AREN’T working at the “top tier” FAANG companies, are NOT commanding the high end of the range, but do bear the brunt of the evil labor practices at the top. 

Tech workers: being better than everyone is more important to them than even their own working conditions, even tho they get so much of the SAME shit, INCLUDING workplace injuries, that other workers endure. 

So you know, fuck it. Get hurt.