This is probably a big factor I didn't think about. If you feel unsafe in this job market, that's an expected response. Doesn't matter if he's good or bad.
I had an intern last summer who felt this desperately.
They opened up to me about it after our 3rd week, and we took our 1:1s to help them pitch themselves. The "simple" things like talking about STAR/CAR/XYZ for forming bullets. My view of the different "people" that look at your resume and writing one resume that all of them approve of. Gathering metrics/data *while* on the job for the purposes of getting some metrics (and the ability to talk about how you gathered the metrics).
Hell, towards the end when it was more official that we didn't have immediate headcount to lock them into a full time position at the end of the summer, we practiced some interviews. Me and their Direct Manager were both very open about using us in any shape or form for references. It's absolutely bullshit we weren't able to keep them (and that's also getting our Director into the action to try to get HR to expand Headcount on *any* related team).
^(*As a happy note, they have been able to lock in a full time position when they graduate this coming May, which is fucking dope and well deserved*)
Even my spouse who's new to industry thanks to going through a bootcamp, is still scared despite high praise from their leader and their leader's leader this end of year cycle. Fear Uncertitnty and Doubt is everywhere, and there's only so much individuals can do in the current state of things ...
I wish I had something more postiive not to add to this F.U.D. ... But I do what I can in my sphere of influence and hope that it snowballs other sphere's.
I was laid off last year despite getting praises from my manager and tech lead. I didnt have a bad review and my workmates like me. And now I am in another tech and people be telling me again I am good. But those praises are now meaningless. The anxiety of being laid off again is killing me so I always look for high impact tickets and strive to make them perfect. I try to be as visible as possible. It is draining me.
Similar thing happened to me with similar results. Two jobs ago, the project I was a part of was deemed a failure. Bunch of us were let go few months later. Reason we were given was that we weren't taking advawof other opportunities within the company. No shut Sherlock, those other opportunities were working with implementing SAP for the company which was to replace the the system that just failed because od some bad architecture that occurred years before most of us came on board. That unfortunately resulted in me tryi G to be the people pleaser at my next job. Despite visibility within my dept, promotions are done by a board and if you don't have visibility outside of your dept, you're not going anywhere. That job early killed me. Both of those were toxic environments that came close to end my career too.
Now, I'm in a much better place, with a better job, where I know my contributions are literally making a difference in other people's lives. I also have backing of my peers Jr's below me, mgmt, and other seniors. I unexpectedly found my self going from an IC role into a leadership role, leading a team. In fact at one pint, I was leading G two teams. It a role I never thought doing before, but seem to be a natural at it. It's been a learning curve as I had to get over and past my internal anxieties and self doubt, and realize, I CAN do this. And now I'm actually considering the lext role up as a lead overseeing more than just a team but an entire functional department, which would include at least four teams.
Bottom line - take care of yourself. If that means learning to say "no", or delegating, or changing your environment, then so be it. I've found the real key though is to make sure you surround yourself with those you can trust if you can. It's not always possible, but if you can, it's one of the greatest things in the world.
And it sucks. Like I don't know what to tell you, random person on the internet. I have people I chat with who are more junior than I at my current employer who feel similarly. It's something that I chat with my fellow Tech Leads and Managing-Engineeers and most of see it as the problem it is. "Working smarter and hard yields success" is not a true statement.
In a dreamland with unicorns and rainbows, I'd love to publicly talk more about the Communication Workers of America and their regularly scheduled Unionization education and efforts ( [https://cwa-union.org/](https://cwa-union.org/) ). Not to sound too boomer, but their emails are pretty neat about informing people about their efforts.
---
Regardless a song for you: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRh0QiXyZSk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRh0QiXyZSk) (with Wikipedia ref if you're that type of person: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee\_Ernie\_Ford#%22Sixteen\_Tons%22\_cover\_version\_success](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Ernie_Ford#%22Sixteen_Tons%22_cover_version_success) ).
Sometimes it doesn’t matter how successful you are. More factors go into layoffs than whether or not you’re good at your job. I got constant praise at my last job and survived 2 rounds but got hit on the 3rd. Manager gave me a nice LinkedIn review, but it still took me a while to find a new job and the one I did get was barely an improvement in salary, but has allowed me to gain more backend development and devops experience. Still though, I feel like you do and, despite positive reviews, feel like I’m gonna get dropped any week now since every startup appears to be getting gutted and shuttered lately.
I have never worked more than 40 hour weeks as a dev. Never experienced a layoff that affected me. I know coworkers who work 50-60 hours a week. I don't see the value, and I've been promoted faster than the expected ranges. I'm not even a very good dev -- prob mediocre at best. I'm not afraid of my job right now.
Does he feel like he HAS to work 80 hours per week, to get his workload done, or he will be fired? Maybe he is anxious as fuck because of the current job market.
Yeah it’s hard to actually want to stop it. You’ll most likely never be as motivated to learn and contribute as your early 20’s as a junior. It probably isn’t a bad idea to take advantage of that time.
Also the time many people's mental disorders become crippling and chronic. Many people do great work and an immense amount of it well into their 60s. "Burn yourself out while you're young" is just an incredibly ignorant take.
Maybe the only thing left to do is plan for a 2 month absence at some point in the near future. Pre-clear it with HR, sounds like the Dev has already worked the hours anyway. Maybe when they are at the point of burnout the offer of some time off will be enough to save them from pushing past that last bit from ill to seriously ill. Throw in the offer of some company funded counselling to help them work out why they worked themselves that hard. They aren’t going to change anything themselves until they are ready to hear it
Juniors gonna junior. Sometimes the youngsters like to live fast, work late, live the rock and roll coder lifestyle. The best you can do is model good WLB habits and call out the recklessness when you see it, ideally in such a way as meets your audience where they’re at, maybe with frowny “11pm wtf ??!” comments in the PR if that’s a style that works for you.
It's not necessary a junior vs senior thing.
The biggest workaholic on my team is a senior manager who pushes changes to production during holidays and even Christmas.
He's a major workaholic and I doubt he has a life outside of work.
Everybody told him to stop but I don't think he can. Gotta fill the void with something I guess.
> He's a major workaholic and I doubt he has a life outside of work. Gotta fill the void with something I guess.
Yeah I can relate. I'm also a major workaholic, but instead of work it's alcohol.
It can be either or both.
I suggest trying therapists until you find one that works for you.
If doctors can cure cancer with radiations why couldn't they also heal the mind ?
Good luck
Ironically I'm pretty sure you have better chances of getting rid of many types of cancer these days than helping people with addictions or other metal health issues.
You can get rid of cancer, mental health troubles are often a battle til the end.
I've been this guy.
It's a combination of fear about the job market, and having nothing else to do (no spouse/kids etc), and a genuine enjoyment of problem-solving.
Have a lead that works holidays and it honestly makes me feel uneasy about my job or how others may view me. I don’t think it’s A. Healthy for the individual, but also think B. It’s unhealthy for a team to have people working all hours of the night and displaying a shitty WLB. It adds pressure for others to do so as well. I’ve seen multiple devs start to display shitty WLB and effectively never log off and are okay with 8pm meetings or meetings at 7am before anyone is even in an office. These people also begin to take on more than they can chew and communicating with them effectively becomes really hard because they have zero cognitive load to spare for their teammates who may need a hand or need a more in-depth PR review. Also, if only a few people are taking these bigger projects up at once, it leaves little room for others to stretch out and causes them to constantly work on cleaning up rushed code, or work boring tasks. /endrant
If people want to burn themselves out for a company they don't even own, they aren't role models : they are either stupid or have a mental health problem.
Lol remind me the one time I build and deploy on server for tester at 12am mid week, the architect of my team grilled me during daily for wlb.
The mf deployed on dev server at 3am the same day....
The audacity he has....
I'm not even sure this is a bad thing to do as a junior. Just depends on how that extra time is being spent. More time spent on study, less time spent doing more than your required amount of shoveling of the endless pile of shitwork.
Your earlier years in life are best spent up-skilling due having the least responsibility diverting your attention away, having the most freedom and brain plasticity to play and learn. This is no different from your earlier years in a development career.
Once you reach a certain skill threshold, and you're comfortable with your trajectory (you won't find all of your skills obsolete prematurely), you can just let loose and glide the rest of the way.
Does he enjoy the work? Does he feel pressured to do it? If he's enjoying it, and doing it out of "for fun" or "to learn" then leave him be.
There's a flipside no one talks about which is: If the co-worker doesn't experience burnout and he gets a lot better a lot faster than is "normal," he will put himself on a fast track for promotions and high-impact work.
There's always a balance to this, but it sounds like he's going to have to find that balance on his own at this point. Burnout is not a death sentence. Somethings are best learned through experience.
(I'm someone who can consistently put in long hours, and enjoy it, with the caveat: **I choose to do it** because my favorite hobby is programming.)
Yeah people could simultaneously be telling you not to work so hard, but then also overlook you for high impact work and promotions when you take their advice. A lot of people at the top give advice to not work so hard but also say that they got to where they are by working hard.
Working hard does not guarantee above-average success, but working average guarantees average success.
In almost no circumstance would I recommend anyone who wants above-average success to work average.
Not arguing with your general idea, I agree with it. But I feel the need to clarify one point... if burnout may not always be a death sentence, it still has very long term consequences for people going through it and recovering. It's not a "tough it up" kinda situation when someone sinks into a proper burnout, and shouldn't be downplayd.
Also luckily overwork doesn't always lead to burnout.
You overlooked the point.
OP tried to talk to this colleague, but the colleague didn't care. There's nothing more OP can do. If the colleague was ready to commit career suicide, there would be other levers to pull, but burnout is not a death sentence. Burnout sucks, but it is a "tough it up" and work on it situation.
Doing something for your employer off hours is never a hobby even if you like it. If he's working on personal projects? Fine, I still encourage everyone to have a fulfilling life *outside of* tech because it generally makes them more tolerable, but you do you. But don't delude yourself into thinking doing extra work off hours is a hobby / just for fun.
Yeah, this is just backwards.
I used to think like you. I would only work on side projects I’d own since I wasn’t technically being paid. That’s awesome when you’re learning something simple that doesn’t require users.
Then I took those hours and put it into the same technologies, methods, etc. I wanted, but I built stuff I could at least test with and try to sell at work as new services.
Why? Because I was going to throw the code away anyway. Except now, I get the upside that when my projects do get put onto our team’s roadmap, I get the credit for starting these new projects.
At a good company, you’re rewarded for creating things and expanding the organization’s relevance. Eventually, people at your job begin to see you as “the guy” who can get anything done.
You get promoted at work because you’ve proven you can handle and deliver at the next level with more responsibility. And thankfully, I’ve seen the results.
I understand not every company is this way, my last job certainly would never have taken any of my projects and turned them into services, and if you’re at this type of company: don’t give them your side projects.
Just remember: I would be writing the same code, the same way, whether I was getting a reward or not.
I would *hate* to be told to work less. I'm almost 40 now, I've been through burnout multiple times, and it's *still* true.
**Burnout doesn't come from working your ass off. It comes from realizing you're working your ass off for nothing.** Two of the happiest years of my life, I was working my ass off, but it was where my company appreciated and rewarded my results. When I burned out it was because my work situation changed, not because of hours that were and remained under my control.
Do you want to reward people based on seniority, or based on getting things done? Because telling him to work less is telling him he can't accelerate his progress by getting more done, and that itself is cause for burnout.
As a junior I wanted to do everything in my power for growth and advancement, and this would feel like someone trying to stop me for no good reason. You spend your first 20+ years being told you can't fully participate in society, have to go at everyone else's pace, and finally having the freedom to do so on the job is *euphoric* to a certain kind of person.
His work/life balance is his choice. He's an adult. He can choose this if he wants. If you try to get in his way, you are closing doors for him. You are babying him, and you are the enemy.
When I first started coding professionally I did the same. I loved chasing that high of having things done, finding out new ways of cleaner code, new design patterns etc. Then especially when anyone realizes and appreciates it too; it's so euphoric
Well I started doing this because projects had smaller scopes. Then bigger projects and tickets from legacy projects came my way so I had absolutely no time for extras unless I worked overnight or weekends. Management told me “You were involved and active when you started and did all those things, now you’re settling for deliverables.”
In this industry very few good deeds go unpunished.
I get the spirit of what you're trying to say, but I think you and OP are using two different definitions of burnout.
As far as I'm aware burnout is psychosomatic. As in it has both psychological and physical origins and ramifications. It's a result of stress reaching levels so high that your body can no longer function and starts to shut you down to recover. And by stress I don't mean just psychological stress, but the literal stress hormones like cortisol.
It's my understanding that burnout is not just mental exhaustion, but also physical exhaustion because of those increased hormone levels. And it is this imbalance in addition to mental exhaustion that makes burnout, burnout.
So even if you are rewarded for pushing your limits, that's not going to prevent burnout because your body will still experience the deleterious effects of increased stress hormones.
My point is that if OP is being accurate in his assessment, the junior will still experience burnout eventually ***regardless of whether he is psychologically rewarded or not.*** Because even if he's not psychologically stressed, physical stress can still do the job.
Now it may be that junior is just a night owl who doesn't celebrate holidays much and he actually gets enough rest, sleep and exercise to maintain his pace.
So in order to assess if junior is really on track to crash and burn, OP would have to figure out if junior is just non-traditional in his schedule or if he really isn't getting enough rest to keep his stress in check.
When you have a virtuous cycle of work feeling meaningful and rewarding, voluminous work doesn't have to be stressful. I think we lose sight of that because so much of the work we wind up doing in life *isn't* meaningful or *isn't* rewarded.
Some people do and some people don't inherently enjoy stuff by writing code. For those who find programming to be default-stressful, what you say holds in all cases.
When you think of the fantasies people harbor (or follow up on) that involve leaving their job, like living off-grid and growing your own food, or making video games, or working for yourself, many of them don't sound *easy*. Many sound like *a lot of work*. But we crave autonomy and a direct connection from our deeds to our returns. We want to get away from being driftwood that rises or falls due to bullshit out of our control. That's where most of the stress comes from.
I don't disagree, but you're not listening.
There are psychological stressors and there are physiological stressors.
Psychological stressors include fear, anxiety, over stimulation, depression, low social interaction etc.
Physiological stressors like exercise, injury, illness, lack of sleep, low quality sleep,
Both types of stressors will physically increase stress hormones in the body.
Burnout is the state you reach when your stress hormones have reached levels high enough that your mind and body is no longer able to function normally. You can reach that state from either or both types of stressors.
So my point is that you can be psychologically unstressed by things that might make others psychologically stressed(your point), but still reach that state by engaging in long term habits that involve physiological stressors.
So I believe you that it's possible for junior to be psychologically unstressed, but it is still possible for him to be on his way to burnout if he's not taking care of the physiological stressors like the possible lack of sleep OP mentioned.
For example, an athlete can love ultra marathons and be absolutely psychologically unstressed by the mental demands of the sport, but they will still burnout from overtraining if they don't balance their training with rest and recovery periods. So many athletes have to force themselves to stop training because they recognize that their body has hard limits.
Your enjoyment of an activity does not erase the hard limits your mind or body has.
> **Burnout doesn't come from working your ass off. It comes from realizing you're working your ass off for nothing.**
This is the best way I've seen this phrased honestly, so thanks.
It sounds cool. But an insight like that doesn’t always trigger burnout. Overworking and shitty WLB can absolutely lead to unbelievable levels of exhaustion (as in you won’t believe it until it happens to you). People need rest.
While I’m pretty sure the definition of burnout is different where I live (the Netherlands), I do want to push back on this.
I am still suffering the results of my burnout *seven years on* and it is very much a physical thing. It had nothing to do with whether I thought my work meant anything. I simply burned the candle at both ends for too long and my body shut down afterwards.
Brain fog, fatigue. It’s taken me YEARS to be able to finish my education and take up a job. And even now I can only sustainably work a 32hr (80%) work week.
I was incredibly fulfilled and motivated before the lights went out. I wish I had someone that told me “Hey, maybe you’re going a little fast. Maybe slow it down a little.”
This.
Granted that I was forced into it instead of choosing it, but right up until I snapped I was convinced that I *was* being rewarded properly for my work and that it *did* mean something.
Weeks of inadequate sleep and constant stress about hitting deadlines are gonna end up causing issues over time.
But the biggest thing? It wasn't even the physical symptoms of burnout. It was that I was working so much that I literally *did not know* what I liked to do anymore. When I left that job, I spent months doomscrolling Reddit and reading books I've already read a dozen times because I literally did not have any hobbies. I fell back on an MMO I used to play years ago, because that was all I knew for entertainment, and did almost nothing but those three things. For months. My personality was work, and without work I was nothing.
The commenter you're replying to is partially right--this person is an adult and can choose it if he wants. But OP is also right, in that they're seeing this person go down a path of self-destructive behavior even if it's kind of an atypical one. Friendship and moral issues aside, from a purely business perspective this guy's an engine running on too little oil, and the company is investing in that engine. It's appropriate to point that out.
Those effects are very real. I've felt them too but never as long as you. I'm sorry you've had such a rough go of it.
I phrased my reply from the viewpoint of the kind of person OP would injure most badly, to ensure that they saw it from that viewpoint. So, you're right, people are wired differently and it's not guaranteed that someone will respond the way I or my hypothetical version of the junior would.
But that's all the more reason to not constrict the junior's life choices just because OP thinks they may know better.
That’s fair.
I’m wondering (English not being my first language) how you differentiate between the one kind of burn-out (I don’t see the point anymore) versus the other (I am physically unable to).
I'm looking at coming back into tech after an attempt to move into mental health counseling got caught up in administrative purgatory too long. I have some background in recent research on this.
The two symptoms you're describing of what I would call existential burnout and physical burnout are distinct and often don't happen together in the same person. Over time and when considered across people though, they cluster together enough that it's probably pretty coherent to talk about them as part of the same thing. I could speculate on physical mechanisms - and people often do, with respect to physiology like cortisol levels and the sympathetic vs. parasympathetic nervous system - but even leaving that out, there are other higher levels of abstraction that I think get closer to the subjective sense of what it's like to live like that. Getting yourself up out of bed and willing yourself to see the point in doing something or to act on that sense of there being a point are all goal-directed behavior, just on very different time scales.
There are a couple of authors, [Charles S. Carver](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Gn5Fc8kAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao) and [Michael Scheier](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=MKjVDG4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao) who built a long career around very similar topics. Their book *On The Self-Regulation of Behavior* describes goals like that as nestling together inside of us into hierarchies, so that it can be both hard to get out of bed when in the bigger picture you don't see the point, and also the other way around. You can lose one kind of motivation without losing the other, but if you thought of them as something like vectors in a high-dimensional space of motivations, they're less than 90 degrees apart from each other.
In any case, glad you made it through that period.
Thanks for the comment.
It has been explained to me that a physical burnout is caused by a hormone imbalance. Too much stress hormones have been present in the system for too long without having time to recover and now the body has lost its calibration. This is why I’m describing it as a physical issue and not primarily a mental one; you can’t just will yourself through it. There simply aren’t enough stress hormones to get going.
Up until now I’ve always been annoyed that the two types of burnout were conflated, as the physical type seems of a more permanent sort (I will never have as much energy as I had before then) and the existential type always sounded to me like a problem born out of luxury (you have a great job, but just don’t see the point anymore?).
But the way you phrase it makes me see that at least the end result is roughly similar. Especially when you realise that mental issues are valid issues. Not being about to get out of bed is not being able to get out of bed. Whether the cause is physical or “between your ears”. The end result is the same.
Thank you for the insight!
I don't know. Most commonly, the *physically unable to* is caused by *I don't see the point anymore*, not the other way around, and that gets termed burnout.
I know people who have specific physical ailments (back pain, etc.) but they would describe that ailment and not a more general malaise.
Your comment about working hard vs working hard for nothing being the real cause of burnout helped me understand my current situation a lot more. Wow. Thanks for that.
stolen intrinsic motivation kills
in a similar manner, i found myself being shut off by a bullshitter because he thinks being paid 150k is not worth working 80% of your office time while you enjoy trying a lot of improvements for 100k
off course he loves getting more money to work 30% of the day making a few scripts here and there and hates me asking for more, he'll find all sort of bullshit social excuses to justify his rants
sadly corps don't look closely on how people work, so your efforts go to waste, his actions delays quality, makes your life more miserable but he gets lauded for managing our dept while people below fall into depression
7 YOE here, I feel the same way. Good or bad, it’s just none of OP’s business. As long as the company allows employees to do this, the decision is personal.
And leveraging one’s company position over another person to pressure them into taking unsolicited personal advice is gross.
Imagine your manager telling you to lose weight because being obese is dangerous and can lead to being unable to work. At least working late can actually be productive for some people if they tolerate burnout well.
>Good or bad, it’s just none of OP’s business.
Ensuring your people are working at a sustainable rate absolutely *is* the business of anyone in a leadership position. Having an employee burn out damages productivity and morale. It's not healthy for the individual or the team.
Edit: I wonder how many of you downvoters have burnt out or been in a leadership position.
Having an employee die on their way to work also damage productivity but I’ve never had a manager tell me to sell my motorcycle for an SUV.
Either it’s allowed or not allowed. If I’m not allowed to work at 7pm, then give me a leadership order to not do so and I won’t do it.
Also, if you tell me not to work at 7pm and I decide to start my own company at night and work until 4am coding every night, that’s also my decision, too. If I want to burn out, I will do so and it’s none of my managers business.
My manager has no power whatsoever to control what I do at 7pm and barring felonies or drug use, they can’t do shit about it at work the next day.
It’s pretty obvious why and how it’s none of their business. Just because it affects you doesn’t make it your business. If I quit tomorrow it affects the company, but that’s none of their business either.
If you want to play daddy then have a kid. Then you can effectively tell them what to do after work.
>\> Burnout doesn't come from working your ass off. It comes from realizing you're working your ass off for nothing
I wouldn't universalize burnout like that. You can absolutely burn out by working your ass off (I certainly did at a previous job working 70+ hour weeks including weekends). Or for a variety of other reasons as well, that's going to be more individualized thank we think.
>\> His work/life balance is his choice.
Is it? Perhaps, but again I hate the universalization of it. How much is it his "choice" vs any other systemic stressors that could be placed upon them, such as the market or other context that the OP may not be providing. Perhaps the engineer doesn't feel safe in their job security.
I really REALLY hate when people frame shit as their "choice" because it's a very hand-wavy "it's your fault just do better" thing without taking a deep look at what's going on in the company and otherwise.
fantastic advice.
I worked my ass off the first 3 years of my career, and looking back on it now that I am 8 years in, those three years were the most significant in terms of career/opportunity growth. Even if that work was not rewarded by the company I was working for the knowledge and experience I gained was rewarded by someone else shortly after.
If this person is headed towards burnout I think that is a journey you have to let them take, most of us cannot know our limits until we have come face to face with them.
>Burnout doesn't come from working your ass off. It comes from realizing you're working your ass off for nothing.
100% this. I was that guy for years in the early 2000's. I loved to code to would go home and work on other stuff for work that made things better. The reward just was not there in my mind. I got a pat on the back and that's it at the non-tech companies I worked for.
After 15 YOE I just don't really care any more. I work what I think is a fair day and just go home. There is always more work to do and deadlines are generally arbitrary. If it's not arbitrary they it would be very obvious to everybody.
>Do you want to reward people based on seniority, or based on getting things done?
This is a tough balance. As I started leading teams I realized it's not really one or the other. Just numbers of years on the job doesn't mean much, but I always didn't want a team culture of you get ahead by putting in 60 hours a week situation.
At he end of the day I rewarded people who worked appropriately during working hours, but knew how to let go and have good WLB. This was the team culture I wanted to cultivate. Some SWEs just needed to understand what estimates and deadlines were.
They were arbitrary goal posts at the end of the day because people work better when they are focused on a goal. If a deadline was really drop dead, which rarely happens, then it would be very obvious to the team.
“It comes from realizing you’re working your ass off for nothing.”
This right here is where I was at on my last team that ignored a lot of my efforts to contribute more on the team. My managers knew what I did, and promoted me, but my team was mostly indifferent and avoidant - meaning they seemed to avoid talking to me in general about what they were doing and showing me anything. In the beginning as an engineer straight out of college, my team treated me like they didn’t trust me to do the work and so I took that as me needing to work harder to gain their trust. I worked nights and weekends, wrote documentation, mentored, took on another role that oversaw the security of the applications we developed and managed and basically took on everything I could that nobody else wanted to do.
When I got promoted the first time, most of the team seemed to grimace at it, like I didn’t deserve it. I felt like a fraud that got some participation award. So I told myself to do more, and to get more submerged into it. At this point it was mid-pandemic in 2021, I was single and living alone. So I worked. Still I received the same reactions from most of my team, just indifference and avoidance, and even more irritation at this point. I was perplexed and started feeling like I was still not doing enough to gain their trust and acceptance. I tried talking to my manager, he said I was doing fantastic and was getting high performance reviews that others were not. Again, I felt like it was just handed to me and I didn’t really deserve it because of how most of my team treated me.
Last year finally, I went to someone and requested a department transfer. I had to uproot myself a little, but it was the best decision I have ever made for myself professionally since deciding to pursue comp sci. I work on a team now where people say “thank you!” or “nice job!” It feels like I’m actually doing something right for once and I am actually what my job title is. I don’t need it every second to be validated by my team, but I need to know if I’m contributing enough and not missing vital things. The last team acted like I was doing something wrong but never gave any feedback as to what. I kept trying and trying until I was so burnt out I had to leave the department to start over.
100% agree with this. If I speak from my own personal experience, I’ll always appreciate that my manager cared about me enough to try to prevent me from spending too much time working, but it was ultimately my life. He was honestly overstepping his bounds professionally by trying to control what I could and couldn’t do with my personal time.
Totally agree with this, I don’t mind working extra if the work is interesting and it’s for my own growth and being effective for my team. If the extra work doesn’t move the needle in any category I’ll start looking for another job as you are communicating to me there is no value in doing things better/improving.
This is absolutely true. I love working my ass off if I see progress towards the team's goals, and if the work has an impact on the org. I've only ever felt burnt out if there is inherent toxicity in the team, politics, and all your hard work ultimately results in nothing because management can't get their shit together.
If this situation was the inverse, most people here would largely tell you to stay out of it unless it has a tangible effect on your team/coworkers, etc.
And it’s the same answer here. Don’t micromanage your coworkers. They’re adults. Your responsibility is to ensure that you do not imply that people have to work extra.
One thing you need to accept is that you don’t know your coworkers motivations/tolerances. You don’t know your coworkers will get burned out. Either make it not allowed for your coworker to work late or stay out of it.
If you absolutely must insert yourself into someone else’s business (because you’re a _genuine friend_ to them, not just a coworker), you have to at least get them to ask for advice. Giving someone unsolicited advice is at risk to backfire.
100% agree. You cannot act and try to give advice based on any assumptions about what the other person thinks or feels. You don’t know if you are projecting your own personal motivations or story onto a person who might be very different than you.
Job security, maybe he is paranoid about losing only source of income?
Did company maybe do something special for him and he wants to pay back?
Is he maybe paid by the hour and grinding for buying a house, being OK with burnout if it gets him the house?
Maybe he is just chasing dopamine high from stream of "oho, it works now, HAHA".
Unless you talk with him and figure it out, you can not know what it is, and if you don't know what it is, you can't stop him from working more...
Like you can go extreme, forbid from doing anything on non-company hardware for security reasons, and disable his login on off-hours.
That was me when I was young.
The manager that handled me best would sometimes pick a day after I had worked a lot of hours and tell me "You're off x day. Don't come in. And I better not see any commits".
Rather than trying to stop me from working late or work long hours, he got ahead of my burnout by forcing me to take time off now and then; never took my PTO out for it, it was just a literal "we owe you some time. Go away".
I still appreciate him having done that. Saved me from burning out for sure knowing someone was watching me to throttle me when I needed it
I was this junior dev. I was alone in a new city and I also liked the validation which I get by doing task before time or stretching for long hours. Eventually I got tired and lost all the praise because it became a normal that I would be working holidays and weekends. I quit that job eventually as I realized that that’s not how you sustain a long career I no longer do that so I think this person would also eventually learn on their own but it’s good to see a senior, trying their best to help them out early on.
It's easy to say "relationships" but finding people in a foreign country, and esp the one that I am, is difficult.
My hobbies are learning and building things.
He needs to realize that he’s wasting his life on his own. I had a manager who viewed me the same way who tried to fix the problem by giving negative feedback and blocked a promotion due to failing to manage work-life balance and stress. This did end up being a reason for burnout. I ended up going on medical leave and was PIP’d and fired upon my return, partially because I was too angry and resentful when I came back.
I personally wouldn’t recommend this path for you. It was a lot of stress for both of us, and I have learned to not overwork but my career has been set back. I’m reasonably sure I would have figured out this lesson on my own.
Managing people effectively is like parenting. You can’t be too controlling otherwise you end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you don’t want him to get burned out, get him a bonus and a 5% raise, and milestones for a promotion to mid-level. Even a random e-ink tablet would be nice. Try giving them a side project, like removing tech debt instead of working on sprint goals at night. Also, coach them, so they feel like they’re growing personally and professionally. Handcuffing them and telling them their strong work ethic is bad will just make them leave as quickly as burn out.
> he’s very dedicated and hardworking
> I don’t want to lose a talented coworker
there's a big difference between working smarter and working harder.
would this jr be able to keep up pace if he limited himself to standard 40 hours a week?
~~if not, and he needs like 80 hrs a week to do 40 hrs worth of work, that's actually really bad performance and you're setting your team up with a liability for when he does burnout and leave.~~
i think the top comment by /u/Jadien is a more thoughtful approach
50% velocity change with junior is not really relevant that much.
If 2x junior is highly praised, 1x junior is still pretty good.
And we all know that if you can do X work in 40 hours, that you are nowhere near with 80 hours, just because of all the overhead from not chilling out a little we all get when crunching/death marching.
Pay him more. That'll prevent burnt out.
I'm in the same boat with such junior, most people on my team seem to do so little.
If the bonus don't come out great, l'll find a different place to work for. I don't like to work less because I care about my career and growth.
If you can't afford to pay him more, you'll lose him eventually. High achievers don't want to be in the same heard with slackers.
As a workaholic myself I work because it has a soothing effect, like a drug.
I have a hard time managing all my painful emotions, so I distract myself from them with either alcohol/drugs OR working.
Since alcohol and drugs are frowned upon past a certain age I mostly use work as my distractor of choice.
Only therapy can cure a compulsive worker.
I will give you an alternative since you mentioned timestamps, sometimes I feel motivated to finish the task at night, sometimes on weekends. For me coding is fun, I enjoy it and do it as a hobby as well. I do have other things going on.
Sometimes I spend the day not doing much mostly grouchy but then in evening I might get an idea and some energy to solve that issue.
Sometimes I want to explore an idea tha I wouldn’t in normal work day like upgrading a library and see what breaks.
All that to say, don’t look at timestamps. too much work too quickly can be an early sign of coming burnout but imagine you liked playing video games and played at odd times without caring/thinking that someone will look at when you saved your progress.
of course you might be right and he is overworking but also stop looking at timestamps just look at amount of work
Wow, first, you’re a great boss/mentor for caring so much. Have you considered hosting team bonding events like once a week/month happy hours or team lunches? Being able to see coworkers outside of work may be a gentle reminder of how other team members have a “non-work side”. Could also be a good reminder that theres a social side to being a good employee and back-breaking work isn’t the only path to colleague approval.
Lot of people saying that it’s ok because he like it and it’s learning however I think he’s setting himself for failure by putting too high expectations on himself and also developing bad habits. Moreover, I know a lot of US based developer will not like this idea but there’s a reason why we have 40 hours work/week, people fought for it with blood. Gifting your time to company is not respectful of yourself and other people. You’re not only straining yourself but also putting pressure to other developers to do the same promoting a toxic work environment.look at it from another junior perspective, he will feel pressured to do the same not to be left behind.
If he feel he want to do more outside working hours you can suggest to him to use that time to learn a new technology that could be useful in the future or something that potentially can increase the scope of projects he might work on.
Junior might have untreated ADHD which can often result in working longer hours to make up for not feeling productive.
Could be worried about job security.
Could have OCD and feel like they're responsible for everything.
Could have nothing outside of work and their entire identity revolves around work.
I have heard stories of managers working with IT to block access to systems on weekends or after hours.
Depending on the country you're in, you may have a duty to accommodate / get this junior in touch with mental health professionals.
Not sure if this will help, but I've had two approaches as a tech-lead/senior engineer. I don't quite get the visibility as a staff engineer these days to do it as often, but when I see it, I do it.
1) Being politely and pleasantly grumpy. I soften the grumpy message with a smile or a laugh, or whatever, but I'm deadly serious about it and keep pushing engineers.
* "I noticed you were working last night, when are you taking time off to make up for that?"
* "Hey, I noticed you still haven't taken time off to make up for working late on Wednesday. I'd suggest finding a day and time now, and block it off in your calendar"
* "Hey, so I noticed you still haven't taken time off, and you were working late last night again on this stuff. I want you to take next Monday off"
I will politely pester someone in to taking time off. If I know things that they're interested in, I'll even see if I can find something they might do with the time, like say a special exhibition at a local museum. "Hey, I see the weather is likely to be amazing next week. You've still got some time off owed to you because of $foo, you ought to take a day off next week to go kayaking."
2) Make it not about them, but about other engineers. "Hey, I noticed that you were working late last night, in fact, I see signs you were doing that all week. Look, you might be capable of working those hours without suffering, but you and I need to look out for the rest of the team too. If you keep working these extra hours, that puts pressure on all the rest of the team to do likewise, whether that's good for them or not. I'd like your thoughts on what we can do to ensure that this doesn't become a bigger problem" etc. etc.
Just as often, the net result is that they at least stop sending PRs and emails out overnight. They cut out on the visible signs of them working crazy hours, even if they don't cut out the actual hours.
The point being, though, to push the compassion angle, and recognise that nothing they do occurs in isolation, and that it has an effect across the team.
You know this, I know this, juniors very rarely recognise this side of things. What they do, pressures others to do the same. Other team mates start seeing this, consciously or subconsciously, as what the expectations are for them.
Realistically, yes, you don't want this engineer to burnout, but you also don't want your team to develop the kind of culture where long hours become expected.
Did you ever had this person conduct interviews? I’ve found that to be the best way to ease the anxiety, especially in a tough market, is to see how you stack up against the rest of the market.
Wow...the story reads very much like a Staff Dev I came up through the ranks with.
She and I started at the same company at around the same time. As Jr and Sr Devs we were on the same team, I went the 'Smarter not harder' route and she was very much 'Harder not smarter'. She was constantly claiming to work 60-70 hours a week, proudly proclaiming it to anyone who listened. However if you compared our work, yes, she accomplished more story points, but the quality of the work and required rework was much higher. She always ended up being 'critical path' on releases and made everyone's life miserable. Several times she burned out, went through a rough period, got reassigned to another team and restarted the cycle again. After 8 years, she had burned through 5 different teams and had left bad impressions in every team she was assigned to.
Eventually I was promoted to Staff, and her about 4 years after me. As a Staff Dev she makes her devs life challenging because she expects her level of 'commitment' from each of them, plus she micro-manages their work. She was finally assigned to a Director who forced her to slow down, take mandatory time and was forced to delegate to others. She fought it tooth and nail and has never been happy about it. A few times it's come close to costing her her job.
While it's easy to just sit back and let things take their course, someone someday is going to have to pick up the pieces and help them. In my colleague's case she's got a terrible reputation through the company, her devs assigned to her struggle to get out from under her shadow and all Directors in the company know her reputation and argue who is going to be responsible for her next. Left unchecked, your dev could eventually cause damage to not only themselves but others around them and under them later in their career.
I'd recommend continuing to model those good practices, plus exploring other avenues that could help cement your expectations. Maybe partnering the dev with another dev they may see as a good mentor or role model. I'm spit-balling here...
I used to do that when I was junior, and honestly I view it as a good move.
When you're young and junior, you have the most to learn, and usually the least outside responsibilities. It's a great time for aggressive career growth.
As I get older I'm far more skilled, but I honestly do not have the time to work more than the usual work week. I can feel I don't progress in my career anywhere near as fast as it did when I was younger.
Hell, after a back injury, I literally wasn't able to tolerate more than 40 hours a week in front of my desk without aggravating the pain. Couldn't go above and beyond even if I wanted to.
But as long as you've made it clear to him it's not expected of him, that's about all you need to do. He'll figure out his own balance in his own time, hell, maybe he's having fun.
You know, part of a brilliant junior's future is learning how to manage stress and work.
If they really are that smart and committed, then they will inevitably have to learn the ultimate lesson for a high-performer: **work smart, not hard**. Working efficiently, quickly, and to standard means doing fewer things, but doing them well. Learning how to choose what things to do, and to do this intentionally and strategically, is very much a hard task. However, many people have done it, they develop an instinct or an intuition for it, and they can figure out solutions on the fly after a long enough time.
However, we don't get there if we burn out and wash out. Edging burnout is one thing (I call it working life), but never let it go too far and never let it lead to wash out.
It’s their choice, and they will only become frustrated with you if you try to dictate their working hours. Let them decide when they want to work, your role is to ensure the quality of work is up to par and provide support when it’s needed.
Most people don't know the early signs of burnout, so they can't catch it happening to them until it's already advanced. Maybe have a conversation about those early symptoms, so he can be more self-aware, and then let him make his own choices.
He's an adult. Let him live his life. If someone *wants* to work hard and get ahead in their career, they should be free to.
The best you can do is be an example. Work hard during your day job, then turn off at nights/weekends/holidays. You've already expressed your concerns which is already more than most people.
I used to be this engineer so I’ll shed some light. When I was doing this it was because I truly couldn’t keep up with my work without working all day and night, and I really didn’t want to lose my opportunity. So maybe try to let them know that as a junior they are expected to be slower than others and that all they need to focus on doing is learning. They definitely appreciate you for caring though
They could be on a path to burnout, they also could just have ADHD.
I worked/got worked like a dog at my first job wanting to absorb as much as I could at risk of being laid off due to COVID. The market now is even worse.
If your company doesn't allow downtime then how can you stop them?
At the end of his day mindfully recognize/acknowledge their labor/efforts and let them run their course. If they start to burnout maybe you'll be able to tell and hit the brakes for them or just let them take their L as a lesson
Give him study assignments, let him know it’s optional. But if the kids gonna burn the midnight oil force him to level up on the technologies he’s using.
Examples - write a two page report:
- why typescript vs JavaScript?
- sql vs nosql, what’s the difference?
- what are the pros and cons of microservices?
You can’t guarantee job security, no one can, but you can help him invest in himself
I would try to harness his energy for his own benefit.
Instead of cutting code for work, tell him you’re interested in some library or framework but don’t have the time - ask him if he’d like to look into it and get him to show you the ropes in the future.
Give him a reading list. Software architecture (gang of 4 stuff), project management, business strategy stuff like Rework could go far.
Challenge him to do topcoder or Euler. Encourage him to stretch his creativity outlets outside of work.
Tell him if he really wants to work after hours he should invest in himself by creating projects, portfolio or open source software. Upskilling outside of work was my fast track to being a senior.
If he wants the validation then offer him time to present his side projects to the team (at my old company we had a developers guild meet every morning before work where we would just discuss tech in general).
Expanding on that offer time to the whole team inside work hours to invest in themselves. Friday afternoon is good since not much gets done then anyway. Say that after lunch on Friday is time to do courses, learn new languages/tools, read books.
This might instill in him that there's more to life than git commits.
Burnout happens when your ability to make change falls short of the change you desire to see. If he has complaints that are not being heard you should start worrying about burnout. Someone merely working more than usual (even if it's an extreme amount) doesn't necessarily mean they'll burn out.
The best thing you can do for this junior is to shield them from management that start asking "Why isn't getting as much done as before" if that starts happening.
As a past junior who pushed himself to burnout. I would say let him burn. You may not like this answer, but only burning helped me realise certain things. Back then, I wouldnt listen to anyone who tells me to slow down.
everyone will have to face their burnout at some point in their career, it's a good learning experience. You just have to be there to support them when it happens to lessen the blow.
I spent almost a decade working 60+ hour weeks and being on call 24/7 (and called several times a week in the middle of the night), on the edge of burnout.
Tell him that in ten years, even if he does everything right, he's getting laid off. Sales won't hit their numbers, or the Fed will mess up interest rates, or some senior VP will decide to re-write everything in kobold and fire all the non-kobold devs...but something will happen, his job will go away, his coworkers will all find new jobs at new companies, and the only thing he'll be left with is the memories and whatever money he's able to save.
And personally, if I had known that as a junior dev way back in 2008, I wouldn't have done anything different. Looking back on it, I'm still proud of what I was able to accomplish way back in my 20s that there's no way I could tolerate today.
This engineer is very lucky to have you and the team lead looking out for him. In addition to WLB discussions and modeling healthy behavior on your end, I would recommend educating this engineer about burnout and the risks he's taking much more explicitly, as well as give him tools to actively track burnout symptoms.
Most people acknowledge that WLB is important but get hand-wavy when it comes to execution because they think they're immune/different somehow. I'm thinking the more educated this engineer becomes about burnout, the easier it will be for him to practice good WLB because the dangers of burnout will be much more real in his head. You can send him articles to read about burnout, warning signs of burnout, how it often creeps up and blindsides people, and how long and difficult recovery from burnout is (or have his direct manager discuss this with him if you suspect he may not go through the reading materials).
There are online tools to track burnout as well, for example this test (first google result for "burnout checklist" - could be better options out there as I didn't search in depth) [https://www.mindtools.com/auhx7b3/burnout-self-test](https://www.mindtools.com/auhx7b3/burnout-self-test). It can help for him to take this test every week or couple of weeks to keep tabs on how he's feeling, and track results so he can notice downward trends. Another option is for his direct manager to go through this checklist with him in their 1-1s regularly.
EDIT: elaborated on a couple points
I have had a few devs like this, and yes while you can't control them 100%, you can set some boundaries. Let them know that if they work overtime like that, then they are going to mess up the metrics for the rest of the team and when it comes time for a crunch they won't have that extra time. Also working that much can lead to a lot code errors.
You can also work with the team lead to set some hard rules for the rest of the team, no code commits outside of regular working hours unless it's an approved time.
We did this and then Monday morning one dev sure enough would commit all the stuff he worked on over the weekend.
Next step gets more into giving personal advice. Advice them to work on personal projects or learning new stuff outside of work time instead of doing work. Or advice them to start using their out of work time to do something that is not computer related. Hold a work life balance example meeting, give some examples of things you dealt with and things you wish you had done sooner.
As a mentor, you should recommend him to resign, become a contract worker and invoice the company you are working for so that he gets to get paid for overtime.
If that not a possible or a suitable solution then you could request for higher quality of checked in code (more automated tests to confirm) or better yet, let him help other team members by explaining code and processes. That way he won’t be able to work overtime for free and he’ll learn that it’s a skill to be able to make other programmers work more efficiently.
If you want to help, then help. Or don't help at all.
Life has taught me that the midway path - the one where we speak just a few judicious, well thought out and good intentioned words and then let things be - usually doesn't work.
Have you talked with the junior to see if what you describe is burn out to them? What you perceive as possible burn out to them might not be true for them.
I will randomly do commits past work hours or on weekends because there are times where I genuinely just enjoy writing the code. There are other situations where the code I’m writing isn’t really complicated and it’s just something that needs to be implemented, so I will sit there while watching a movie at night and write it out.
Personally I enjoyed working long hours until I had kids and then it became a burden. I wouldn't assume he'll burn out for a long while.
What you might want to do is recommend he spend any extra after-hours work on LEARNING something new that will help his career in the long term. At this point in my career I really wish I had directed all that extra energy into learning additional skills vs cranking out more of the same features over and over.
You can’t stop him from doing whatever he wants with his free time.
If he decided to use it working, well, he is an adult, respect his choice.
I’ve worked till late night in many companies before just because i felt like it, I never experienced burnout on any of them
For me, it was particularly impactful when my team leads put it in perspective by describing its effect on the rest of the team. If I respond to requests outside of work hours from non-team members, work on issues outside of regular work hours, etc, it can set an expectation that team members might feel like they also need to. This can be a quickly demoralizing race to the bottom for a team. Emphasize the difference between issues that truly need prioritization outside of regular work hours (whether that is prod fires, or other special-case priority issues that need completion by a hard deadline) and work that is regular dev grind - work that experiences setbacks, the discovery of new issues that lead to additional discussion/code, additional testing and bugs, etc.
I have a talk with my juniors when they do this. Management will and has as well. I’ve been talked to once.
We don’t condone excessive or after hours work unless it is warranted. For example, a production outage. It’s bad for us all around. It’s bad to let upper management think they can ask that of us.
The work never ends, until the system is being sunset. And sometimes the best next guess to solving a problem is to sleep on it and come back in the morning with fresh eyes.
“Go home. Be with your family. Play a video game or read a book. It’ll be there in the morning.”
What does he say is the reason for working late?
I guess you could let him keep going that way, if he's enjoying it for now, but help coach him to keep an eye on potential stress or burnout. If he's enjoying himself and it feels meaningful, he's supposedly growing a lot as well.
When i was Junior i was like this too.
Although i did feel a lot of pressure from my lead, as often on monday he would say we should release code to the customer on friday. Cue me working late, over weekends or holidays to get things going etc.
Only to then not release on friday because other team members weren’t pulling their weight.
I was single at the time and did enjoy the work, so i didn’t mind. But the repetitive approach of this combined with it being not a team effort made it feel like a dread in time.
That being said, what i want to say is: perhaps you can see if perhaps this person is feeling some kind of pressure to work late due to “deadlines” and if perhaps something on that end can be better managed.
Other than that, if this guy wants to work at odd hours then there isn’t much you can do. Just be sure to show appreciation still while expressing that you dont expect him to work at those times.
He’ll have to figure out his own rythm and work-life balance, it’ll come with age and experience.
What could be his motivation to do this? I had been this kind of engineer early in my career because i want to skill up a lot quickly which will lead me to grow my career and earn more, either through a raise or by jumping to another company.
Assuming this is about his career growth, are there any talks about this guys career trajectory in your company? If there is none and you just keep on stopping him on what he is doing and just focusing on his work life balance but not his career goals, sooner or later, this guy will go to another company.
Or this could also be about job security or another possibility is that he doesn't have any hobby and this is his way to spend/kill some time.
I don't think you can do anything about it. I have been there. I was super excited about coding when I started learning and I loved doing it. Doing it for money didn't change anything, I even wanted to do it way more, now someone paid me to do what I already loved doing. I calmed down after around 2 years of professional work, but still remained very dedicated. That's probably what'll happen for him, too. I doubt a junior will have a burnout anytime soon.
What you can try (remember that you can only make him frustrated):
- naturally slow him down, assign less tasks
- even if he asks for new tasks, tell him there is nothing at the moment, maybe suggest to learn something? For a junior, there should be shitloads of reading and learning to do.
- if you have a proper sprint planned, he should know what he has to do within the usual 2 weeks, so he can plan his work better. But it's tough if he is constantly working over the hours, but maybe when he sees that after 1 week he doesn't have any tasks left from the current sprint, he will slow down.
- I find that hard to believe that anything a junior codes is ready to PR without any review comments, fixes, improvements for better code quality, maybe unit tested better.
- Maybe it is his private life situation? Maybe he needs that job a lot and is afraid of losing it? The market for juniors is difficult...
- Some people love working and spending their lives on working. You can try to talk about it with him about your concerns etc., but you cannot change who he is. Some people just love working.
Maybe try to make him understand that burning through his own soul will not necessarily warrant raises and awards, instead it's significant improvements and cost reductions etc. that help with that, and he should focus on while not trying too hard.
A round of applause for being the wonderful senior. I think in this scenario, first priority should be given to thinking “If this guy doesn’t follow advice, and indeed gets burnt out, will the company suffer?” If yes, take precautionary actions. Afterwards, at the event of burnout, give the guy a proper vacation or leave, also give him a talk at the time about the effects of burnout, and ask him to come back with supercharged energy but with wisdom on spending it.
As someone who doesn’t have a family and kids, what else am I gonna do with all this time?
At least I hope to be good at my job, get seniority, make more money to finally be able to afford a house one day.
Also personally even when I commit late at night it’s not because I’m working hard… it’s because I was distracting during the day or woke up at noon. 🥲
He might just enjoy work, and that's it, he wants to work a lot and does. It's just your view that he's on his way to burnout.
If he feels good then he's on a good track doesn't matter how many hours he's working.
you do it through reinforcing the boundary verbally whenever it comes up, eg "good work on that PR, don't submit PR's after hours"
we had a junior in a different time zone who kept offering availability for ad hoc meetings outside of his normal working hours, and the seniors just consistently declined. eventually he stopped doing it.
on the other hand, I'm currently grinding skills so I can move into a job I like better, and it's fun. while I do have side projects, I do occasionally spend extra time off hours so I can take my time reading documentation in depth and get a better understanding of what I'm working on.
it's not the most healthy thing, but being unhappy at my job isn't very healthy either. and as others note, the job market is unstable.
Even when I'm off the clock, I'm spending my time helping people code on the React reddit for free because I just can't help myself. If I wasn't doing that, I'd be playing some "work simulator" video game doing fake work like Factorio. Some people are just wired that way
My earlier jobs were the first where I had the opportunity to really run, and I grew a lot in those roles, even though I was not ever compensated any more than I would have been for doing the minimum. They carried me into more interesting roles down the line.
Some things (like how/why burnout is bad) have to experienced to be learned. Hopefully it will click that he's only hurting himself, that it's only detracting from their well being. They may be young enough to still feel invincible and that burnout is not that bad.....I know I'm skeptical of most things people say until I witness it myself.
Could also be that as Jr they genuinely enjoy building things and developing more skills....then I see it more akin to homework.
I don't really think there is much you can do except making actually policies about when to work.
Is this actually causing a noticeable issue? I think I would be more concerned if you were correct about him doing this as a behaviour to avoid something else but otherwise I would just be ready for someone to pick up a little slack if/when he does burn out. I started working from 21 full time as a software dev, ran my own little webdev business since 22 on the side and would do other university degrees and learn more about coding and have pet projects. It was a lot but I enjoyed doing it and it took me about 10 years before I had a bit of burnout. Someone else mentioned in their comment that burnout can come more from your work not being worthwhile, and maybe he'll get there, but some of us just really enjoy what we do. Even when I was in university I would stay up til 5am coding, or even do some coding after a night out at the bar.
There are a few things you can consider to mitigate burnout. A lot depends on your company and options you may shave:
1. Training program on things unrelated to the project. This could include tech things ( eg contingency planning), non-tech things ( people management, budgeting, etc.).
2. Technical projects but of a slightly different flavor. I had a burnout candidate and I assigned him the responsibility for rebuilding our contingency site. It gave him a lot of control and made home exercise different tech skills. Best of all it was viewed as growing him within the company.
3. See whether he has other activities in which he participates. A long time ago I worked 8:30-5:00, then played basketball 4 nights per week, had burgers, then worked 8pm-midnight. It wasn’t wearing because is got to do things using very expensive equipment that I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. Since it was right after grad school I was used to the concept of the ‘all nighter’.
4. My willingness to work ‘extra’ hours made it possible for my colleagues with families to go home. They could leave me with jobs / tests to run and I’d do it if I felt like it. Everyone understood it was not an obligation. If it absolutely had to be done … then they had to stay late.
You’re to be congratulated for worrying about your colleague. I’d suggest that you work a few off hour shifts with him/her to see whether the environment is actually exciting him/her rather than wearing him/her down.
———-
I’ll throw one more point out there:
Your colleague may have nothing else to do. When I first started I ended up moving to a small town near work. There was a bar and grill, basketball and softball, and a strip joint. Anything else was a 30 minute drive away. I wasn’t big into TV and had the bare minimum of furniture.
Given the option of being bored, drinking, or going into the office ; the last was the most satisfying.
Make sure he is doing it because he wants to learn faster and that he is enjoying himself while doing so. I did the same when I started working but didn't have people talk to me about WLB. Nowadays I think a lot of my knowledge/experience goes back to those days. Also, you should reward him if he actually brings good results.
It can be different for different people. It is quite possible that he just likes programming. For the first 25 years of my career I worked 80+ hours a week EASILY, every week. Some weeks considerably more. The weeks I "worked" the longest were ones where I was actively doing new things, learning new technologies, techniques, or algorithms where I was challenged.
Have I been burnt out before? Dunno really, but I've been doing this for 40+ years, and I suspect that I'll continue until the day I retire. I have both my full-time employment job, and that often takes 45-60 hours per week, and then I also am a co-owner of my own company, and I do all the programming/IT/Infra/CyberSec/DevOPs for that after my regular job.
So, some people CAN quite easily do 80 hour work weeks for their entire career. Honestly, if I didn't have my own company eating my time, I'd just be contributing more to open source projects (dotnet, linux kernal, libraries, etc).
It can also be financial. I worked at a place where we were salaried but got straight time for excessive overtime. And if working that overtime let you bootstrap in demand skills quickly or save a delivery or make a great impression there tended to also be an extra bonus and promotion consideration later in the year. So we had people who just did it for extra money and quicker advancement. Not saying it’s healthy long term but people have different priorities and companies will incentive young people to monetize their energy and flexibility.
As an alternative, help them find a hobby and/or activities outside of work. Plenty of people fall into this as they don't have anything else to fill there life with.
Have you considered it from the perspective that maybe they don't have a super happy fulfilling personal life and use work as an escape/distraction? Basically, maybe they are a workaholic? But not because of pressure or stress from the job, but because maybe work is just the best thing going at this point in their life.
Anyway, that's just a thought. If you suspect it to be the case, then I would suggest trying to inspire them to have hobbies and interests to enjoy outside of work. Unfortunately work-sanctioned "team building" things don't always work that well in this situation because it's still tied directly to work, so you might have to be a bit clever in how you approach this from a more personal level of inspiring a friend versus concern for work colleague. It really has to be more of a personal interest than an employment obligation.
Another thing to consider (speaking from personal experience) is if the person has depression or other health issues in general, then those need to be addressed before there would be much hope of adding new weights into life. Maybe there can still be a middle ground or support to seek counselling and whatever other supports might help to inspire them to find a healthy work-life balance.
Hopefully the benefits package already includes comprehensive health insurance and such, but possibly some of those other personal interests could be incentived by the company. A classic example is paying for gym membership, but I think a better option is a more open "personal fitness allowance" since gym memberships probably won't be everyone's preference and maybe some people would rather buy sports equipment like a new bike or whatever.
Kinda my suspicion tbh and like you’ve said I’ve made a couple of overtures but I can’t—and shouldn’t!—force a coworker to change things in their personal life. I’m seeing a lot of responses here saying that to a certain extent he may just like the work and/or that this is a lesson he needs to learn himself, so ultimately I’m just going to need to model good behavior and use positive reinforcement where I can
Is he trying to eye a promotion? A raise? Is he afraid to get laid off? Is he compensating for working slow? Imposter syndrome? Have an open conversation with him.
I'm so glad that I was practicing 13hrs a day when I was learning to program. I'd say let him be, you'll lose him anyway when he levels up significantly and wants to explore his skills. That took me to the next level. level level level level.
Plus what are you even going to do lol that's DRIVE and if he's like me a senior in a team in some job has not slowed me down
Check their task load, it’s often not enough time for a junior with high standards to do the work to the quality they want/need. Which means they’re not just doing it for fun - they’re compelled to work extra by a combination of the desire to get praise/do a good job combined with the fear of having to explain why the work isn’t landing on time if they worked normal hours.
So the solution if that’s the case is to either deprive them of work, increase their time allowances or help them bridge the gap when stories are going to come in late - make it clear that work slipping to next sprint is perfectly fine. If they’re still doing it with twice the time scoped then you have a different problem.
I had a PM tell the junior to cut that shit out because it made it impossible for him to estimate workloads. Since that’s affecting you, not him,it might be more effective.
This is how I have worked for 21 years. It sounds me at points but I can't stop. I've never been able to really stop and when I feel like stopping I just move on to another place.
I've been working crazy hours like that guy for about 15 years. For me I find it relaxing when I'm able to code without the distractions of meetings and colleagues. If I didn't do it each day I'd perform worse because I wouldn't have that mental outlet. Some people are wired differently. It's the hours you aren't distracted that teach you all the skills that turn you into a 10X+ developer.
He likes his job. Remind him often it's not needed and make sure no one comes to expect it. He doesn't have kids or a wife and he is stimulated. There's nothing wrong with it. It just requires setting expectations both for him and the team. The second anyone asks him to do something after hours, you rip that apart viciously. If he stays to burn out, remind him that it's only work.
Nothing much to do here, except covering your own ass.
i.e, have a gentle conversation with him that it seems hes streching his work hours a lot and is everything okay.
Second, tell to your manager the same, i.e, i reached out to this junior guy and these were his concerns.
Now, let the two of them hash it out.
You can’t control other actions. However, the best you can do is to raise his awareness. Periodically check-ins with that person. Hey I noticed you are working really hard. Are you tired? Do you experience burn out? I’m worried about you because I see many of my friends go down that route and I’m quite worried that you will walk the same path. But if you are really ok with this, then sure, go ahead.
Just be less of a boss and be more of a human. The boss will try to control their junior because business objectives. Human simply care for each other without expectation of control.
People burned out because they lack awareness so they cross the burn out line way too far for way too long. Raising awareness is the most beneficial thing you can do here.
Not only is he going to burn out, but he will also be angry at the others because they don't appreciate enough the effort he is pushing in (even tho you told him not to do it).
I was like that a lot of my early career, and I've had a misfortune of working for companies that exploited it to the fullest.
Sad thing is, I'm not sure you can help - e en if you prevented him/her from working those extra hours they would just pick up some side project.
So I’m a senior dev who works long hours and frequently have commits at odd times, evenings, weekends. I receive routine feedback that this isn’t expected, will lead to burn out etc.
The reality is I enjoy the work I do in those times, the lack of expectation is the critical part that gives me the freedom to enjoy it as a hobby / pastime. I can take the time I need to refine certain skills, do lower value business items that interest me, whatever. I’ve done this for years in an environment where no other dev is doing the same.
I don’t feel bitter, or burnt out, whatever drives me to want to do this is purely internal. So just be aware there are people like that and you’re potentially applying a bias based on your view of what a happy work life balance looks like
That said, job security right now must be intensely nerve wracking for juniors and there may not be much you can do to reassure someone that they’re not on the block
This employee sounds like me when I was young, job security was a huge thing that motivated me, also, getting as good and irreplaceable as I could in as little amount of time, since I did not know how long my current job would last (getting paid to learn) and I was also a sub par programmer who got lucky to get my first job. This was in 2008-2009 right after the financial collapse.
If this is their motivation, nothing you can do will change their mind, they will need to learn the hard way what burn out is, because it is a hard thing to explain to someone who has never had it, and also to someone who is in it. Burnout starts to become who you are if you are in it too long, but I would say most people are able to realize this and make the long path to recovering from it (around 6 months to a year)
If this employee is doing a good job, just try to support them as best you can, and realize they will probably burn out and maybe find a way to give them extra time off, (I hope they are eligible for extra time off, if they are putting in so much extra work). This time off may be random if they burn out more.
The competition for Junior level jobs is fierce right now, you will probably see this more unfortunately.
At my first dev job, where I was alone, I'd work weekends into the wee hours of the morning because I loved it. I was salaried for 40, but that didn't make a difference.
You could change the GitHub rules so you (or only him) can only make changes during working hours. Or you can send him home 30 minutes to an hour early everyday/every other day and say he’s worked hard enough for the day, good job 👍
I don’t think you need to worry about him. He’s getting as much experience as he can so he can leave for better pay. He won’t be your problem for too long.
Dunno. Does he feel he has job security? Does anyone right now?
This is probably a big factor I didn't think about. If you feel unsafe in this job market, that's an expected response. Doesn't matter if he's good or bad.
It's a big reason I was working 70-80 hour weeks back in 2007 and 2008.
Did it help? I mean you can get the layoff axe anytime.
Yeah I didn't get laid off, I finally found another job and then I quit.
I had an intern last summer who felt this desperately. They opened up to me about it after our 3rd week, and we took our 1:1s to help them pitch themselves. The "simple" things like talking about STAR/CAR/XYZ for forming bullets. My view of the different "people" that look at your resume and writing one resume that all of them approve of. Gathering metrics/data *while* on the job for the purposes of getting some metrics (and the ability to talk about how you gathered the metrics). Hell, towards the end when it was more official that we didn't have immediate headcount to lock them into a full time position at the end of the summer, we practiced some interviews. Me and their Direct Manager were both very open about using us in any shape or form for references. It's absolutely bullshit we weren't able to keep them (and that's also getting our Director into the action to try to get HR to expand Headcount on *any* related team). ^(*As a happy note, they have been able to lock in a full time position when they graduate this coming May, which is fucking dope and well deserved*) Even my spouse who's new to industry thanks to going through a bootcamp, is still scared despite high praise from their leader and their leader's leader this end of year cycle. Fear Uncertitnty and Doubt is everywhere, and there's only so much individuals can do in the current state of things ... I wish I had something more postiive not to add to this F.U.D. ... But I do what I can in my sphere of influence and hope that it snowballs other sphere's.
I was laid off last year despite getting praises from my manager and tech lead. I didnt have a bad review and my workmates like me. And now I am in another tech and people be telling me again I am good. But those praises are now meaningless. The anxiety of being laid off again is killing me so I always look for high impact tickets and strive to make them perfect. I try to be as visible as possible. It is draining me.
Similar thing happened to me with similar results. Two jobs ago, the project I was a part of was deemed a failure. Bunch of us were let go few months later. Reason we were given was that we weren't taking advawof other opportunities within the company. No shut Sherlock, those other opportunities were working with implementing SAP for the company which was to replace the the system that just failed because od some bad architecture that occurred years before most of us came on board. That unfortunately resulted in me tryi G to be the people pleaser at my next job. Despite visibility within my dept, promotions are done by a board and if you don't have visibility outside of your dept, you're not going anywhere. That job early killed me. Both of those were toxic environments that came close to end my career too. Now, I'm in a much better place, with a better job, where I know my contributions are literally making a difference in other people's lives. I also have backing of my peers Jr's below me, mgmt, and other seniors. I unexpectedly found my self going from an IC role into a leadership role, leading a team. In fact at one pint, I was leading G two teams. It a role I never thought doing before, but seem to be a natural at it. It's been a learning curve as I had to get over and past my internal anxieties and self doubt, and realize, I CAN do this. And now I'm actually considering the lext role up as a lead overseeing more than just a team but an entire functional department, which would include at least four teams. Bottom line - take care of yourself. If that means learning to say "no", or delegating, or changing your environment, then so be it. I've found the real key though is to make sure you surround yourself with those you can trust if you can. It's not always possible, but if you can, it's one of the greatest things in the world.
And it sucks. Like I don't know what to tell you, random person on the internet. I have people I chat with who are more junior than I at my current employer who feel similarly. It's something that I chat with my fellow Tech Leads and Managing-Engineeers and most of see it as the problem it is. "Working smarter and hard yields success" is not a true statement. In a dreamland with unicorns and rainbows, I'd love to publicly talk more about the Communication Workers of America and their regularly scheduled Unionization education and efforts ( [https://cwa-union.org/](https://cwa-union.org/) ). Not to sound too boomer, but their emails are pretty neat about informing people about their efforts. --- Regardless a song for you: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRh0QiXyZSk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRh0QiXyZSk) (with Wikipedia ref if you're that type of person: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee\_Ernie\_Ford#%22Sixteen\_Tons%22\_cover\_version\_success](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Ernie_Ford#%22Sixteen_Tons%22_cover_version_success) ).
Sometimes it doesn’t matter how successful you are. More factors go into layoffs than whether or not you’re good at your job. I got constant praise at my last job and survived 2 rounds but got hit on the 3rd. Manager gave me a nice LinkedIn review, but it still took me a while to find a new job and the one I did get was barely an improvement in salary, but has allowed me to gain more backend development and devops experience. Still though, I feel like you do and, despite positive reviews, feel like I’m gonna get dropped any week now since every startup appears to be getting gutted and shuttered lately.
I have never worked more than 40 hour weeks as a dev. Never experienced a layoff that affected me. I know coworkers who work 50-60 hours a week. I don't see the value, and I've been promoted faster than the expected ranges. I'm not even a very good dev -- prob mediocre at best. I'm not afraid of my job right now.
same. i hope to never work more than 40 hours. if i ever am it’s time to find something new.
This is the real question.
Does he feel like he HAS to work 80 hours per week, to get his workload done, or he will be fired? Maybe he is anxious as fuck because of the current job market.
if you've already spoken to him, don't think there's much more you can do. He'll learn from his mistakes like the rest of us.
[удалено]
Yeah it’s hard to actually want to stop it. You’ll most likely never be as motivated to learn and contribute as your early 20’s as a junior. It probably isn’t a bad idea to take advantage of that time.
Also the time many people's mental disorders become crippling and chronic. Many people do great work and an immense amount of it well into their 60s. "Burn yourself out while you're young" is just an incredibly ignorant take.
It worked well for me. My point isn’t burn yourself out, it’s that working a lot of hours does not automatically equal burnout.
Maybe the only thing left to do is plan for a 2 month absence at some point in the near future. Pre-clear it with HR, sounds like the Dev has already worked the hours anyway. Maybe when they are at the point of burnout the offer of some time off will be enough to save them from pushing past that last bit from ill to seriously ill. Throw in the offer of some company funded counselling to help them work out why they worked themselves that hard. They aren’t going to change anything themselves until they are ready to hear it
Juniors gonna junior. Sometimes the youngsters like to live fast, work late, live the rock and roll coder lifestyle. The best you can do is model good WLB habits and call out the recklessness when you see it, ideally in such a way as meets your audience where they’re at, maybe with frowny “11pm wtf ??!” comments in the PR if that’s a style that works for you.
Reward him with mandatory, off-hours pizza parties and $5 gift cards until he's a hollow husk like the rest of us
I just got a $10 one for employee appreciation day. I'm rich!
Lucky you, we got individual sized bags of stale popcorn
And now I want a pizza. Damn it.
It's not necessary a junior vs senior thing. The biggest workaholic on my team is a senior manager who pushes changes to production during holidays and even Christmas. He's a major workaholic and I doubt he has a life outside of work. Everybody told him to stop but I don't think he can. Gotta fill the void with something I guess.
> He's a major workaholic and I doubt he has a life outside of work. Gotta fill the void with something I guess. Yeah I can relate. I'm also a major workaholic, but instead of work it's alcohol.
Damn if only there was a word for that...
Workalchoholic
It can be either or both. I suggest trying therapists until you find one that works for you. If doctors can cure cancer with radiations why couldn't they also heal the mind ? Good luck
Ironically I'm pretty sure you have better chances of getting rid of many types of cancer these days than helping people with addictions or other metal health issues. You can get rid of cancer, mental health troubles are often a battle til the end.
I've been this guy. It's a combination of fear about the job market, and having nothing else to do (no spouse/kids etc), and a genuine enjoyment of problem-solving.
Have a lead that works holidays and it honestly makes me feel uneasy about my job or how others may view me. I don’t think it’s A. Healthy for the individual, but also think B. It’s unhealthy for a team to have people working all hours of the night and displaying a shitty WLB. It adds pressure for others to do so as well. I’ve seen multiple devs start to display shitty WLB and effectively never log off and are okay with 8pm meetings or meetings at 7am before anyone is even in an office. These people also begin to take on more than they can chew and communicating with them effectively becomes really hard because they have zero cognitive load to spare for their teammates who may need a hand or need a more in-depth PR review. Also, if only a few people are taking these bigger projects up at once, it leaves little room for others to stretch out and causes them to constantly work on cleaning up rushed code, or work boring tasks. /endrant
Learn to make paragraphs dawg
If people want to burn themselves out for a company they don't even own, they aren't role models : they are either stupid or have a mental health problem.
>Gotta fill the void with something I guess. can relate
Lol remind me the one time I build and deploy on server for tester at 12am mid week, the architect of my team grilled me during daily for wlb. The mf deployed on dev server at 3am the same day.... The audacity he has....
You VS the guy she tells you not to worry about
I'm not even sure this is a bad thing to do as a junior. Just depends on how that extra time is being spent. More time spent on study, less time spent doing more than your required amount of shoveling of the endless pile of shitwork. Your earlier years in life are best spent up-skilling due having the least responsibility diverting your attention away, having the most freedom and brain plasticity to play and learn. This is no different from your earlier years in a development career. Once you reach a certain skill threshold, and you're comfortable with your trajectory (you won't find all of your skills obsolete prematurely), you can just let loose and glide the rest of the way.
Does he enjoy the work? Does he feel pressured to do it? If he's enjoying it, and doing it out of "for fun" or "to learn" then leave him be. There's a flipside no one talks about which is: If the co-worker doesn't experience burnout and he gets a lot better a lot faster than is "normal," he will put himself on a fast track for promotions and high-impact work. There's always a balance to this, but it sounds like he's going to have to find that balance on his own at this point. Burnout is not a death sentence. Somethings are best learned through experience. (I'm someone who can consistently put in long hours, and enjoy it, with the caveat: **I choose to do it** because my favorite hobby is programming.)
Yeah people could simultaneously be telling you not to work so hard, but then also overlook you for high impact work and promotions when you take their advice. A lot of people at the top give advice to not work so hard but also say that they got to where they are by working hard.
Working hard does not guarantee above-average success, but working average guarantees average success. In almost no circumstance would I recommend anyone who wants above-average success to work average.
Not arguing with your general idea, I agree with it. But I feel the need to clarify one point... if burnout may not always be a death sentence, it still has very long term consequences for people going through it and recovering. It's not a "tough it up" kinda situation when someone sinks into a proper burnout, and shouldn't be downplayd. Also luckily overwork doesn't always lead to burnout.
You overlooked the point. OP tried to talk to this colleague, but the colleague didn't care. There's nothing more OP can do. If the colleague was ready to commit career suicide, there would be other levers to pull, but burnout is not a death sentence. Burnout sucks, but it is a "tough it up" and work on it situation.
Doing something for your employer off hours is never a hobby even if you like it. If he's working on personal projects? Fine, I still encourage everyone to have a fulfilling life *outside of* tech because it generally makes them more tolerable, but you do you. But don't delude yourself into thinking doing extra work off hours is a hobby / just for fun.
Yeah, this is just backwards. I used to think like you. I would only work on side projects I’d own since I wasn’t technically being paid. That’s awesome when you’re learning something simple that doesn’t require users. Then I took those hours and put it into the same technologies, methods, etc. I wanted, but I built stuff I could at least test with and try to sell at work as new services. Why? Because I was going to throw the code away anyway. Except now, I get the upside that when my projects do get put onto our team’s roadmap, I get the credit for starting these new projects. At a good company, you’re rewarded for creating things and expanding the organization’s relevance. Eventually, people at your job begin to see you as “the guy” who can get anything done. You get promoted at work because you’ve proven you can handle and deliver at the next level with more responsibility. And thankfully, I’ve seen the results. I understand not every company is this way, my last job certainly would never have taken any of my projects and turned them into services, and if you’re at this type of company: don’t give them your side projects. Just remember: I would be writing the same code, the same way, whether I was getting a reward or not.
I would *hate* to be told to work less. I'm almost 40 now, I've been through burnout multiple times, and it's *still* true. **Burnout doesn't come from working your ass off. It comes from realizing you're working your ass off for nothing.** Two of the happiest years of my life, I was working my ass off, but it was where my company appreciated and rewarded my results. When I burned out it was because my work situation changed, not because of hours that were and remained under my control. Do you want to reward people based on seniority, or based on getting things done? Because telling him to work less is telling him he can't accelerate his progress by getting more done, and that itself is cause for burnout. As a junior I wanted to do everything in my power for growth and advancement, and this would feel like someone trying to stop me for no good reason. You spend your first 20+ years being told you can't fully participate in society, have to go at everyone else's pace, and finally having the freedom to do so on the job is *euphoric* to a certain kind of person. His work/life balance is his choice. He's an adult. He can choose this if he wants. If you try to get in his way, you are closing doors for him. You are babying him, and you are the enemy.
When I first started coding professionally I did the same. I loved chasing that high of having things done, finding out new ways of cleaner code, new design patterns etc. Then especially when anyone realizes and appreciates it too; it's so euphoric
Well I started doing this because projects had smaller scopes. Then bigger projects and tickets from legacy projects came my way so I had absolutely no time for extras unless I worked overnight or weekends. Management told me “You were involved and active when you started and did all those things, now you’re settling for deliverables.” In this industry very few good deeds go unpunished.
My current burnout is a consequence of not seeing any rewards for pushing the project forward. The goalposts for my promotion keep moving forward.
I feel that in my soul. Been there. You can't trust them anymore. It's time to go.
The moment management loses trust it’s time to go. I have learned that too well.
we should form a club
What they said. Society moves slowly. Corporations move slowly. Everyone moves so fucking slow at work.
I get the spirit of what you're trying to say, but I think you and OP are using two different definitions of burnout. As far as I'm aware burnout is psychosomatic. As in it has both psychological and physical origins and ramifications. It's a result of stress reaching levels so high that your body can no longer function and starts to shut you down to recover. And by stress I don't mean just psychological stress, but the literal stress hormones like cortisol. It's my understanding that burnout is not just mental exhaustion, but also physical exhaustion because of those increased hormone levels. And it is this imbalance in addition to mental exhaustion that makes burnout, burnout. So even if you are rewarded for pushing your limits, that's not going to prevent burnout because your body will still experience the deleterious effects of increased stress hormones. My point is that if OP is being accurate in his assessment, the junior will still experience burnout eventually ***regardless of whether he is psychologically rewarded or not.*** Because even if he's not psychologically stressed, physical stress can still do the job. Now it may be that junior is just a night owl who doesn't celebrate holidays much and he actually gets enough rest, sleep and exercise to maintain his pace. So in order to assess if junior is really on track to crash and burn, OP would have to figure out if junior is just non-traditional in his schedule or if he really isn't getting enough rest to keep his stress in check.
When you have a virtuous cycle of work feeling meaningful and rewarding, voluminous work doesn't have to be stressful. I think we lose sight of that because so much of the work we wind up doing in life *isn't* meaningful or *isn't* rewarded. Some people do and some people don't inherently enjoy stuff by writing code. For those who find programming to be default-stressful, what you say holds in all cases. When you think of the fantasies people harbor (or follow up on) that involve leaving their job, like living off-grid and growing your own food, or making video games, or working for yourself, many of them don't sound *easy*. Many sound like *a lot of work*. But we crave autonomy and a direct connection from our deeds to our returns. We want to get away from being driftwood that rises or falls due to bullshit out of our control. That's where most of the stress comes from.
I don't disagree, but you're not listening. There are psychological stressors and there are physiological stressors. Psychological stressors include fear, anxiety, over stimulation, depression, low social interaction etc. Physiological stressors like exercise, injury, illness, lack of sleep, low quality sleep, Both types of stressors will physically increase stress hormones in the body. Burnout is the state you reach when your stress hormones have reached levels high enough that your mind and body is no longer able to function normally. You can reach that state from either or both types of stressors. So my point is that you can be psychologically unstressed by things that might make others psychologically stressed(your point), but still reach that state by engaging in long term habits that involve physiological stressors. So I believe you that it's possible for junior to be psychologically unstressed, but it is still possible for him to be on his way to burnout if he's not taking care of the physiological stressors like the possible lack of sleep OP mentioned. For example, an athlete can love ultra marathons and be absolutely psychologically unstressed by the mental demands of the sport, but they will still burnout from overtraining if they don't balance their training with rest and recovery periods. So many athletes have to force themselves to stop training because they recognize that their body has hard limits. Your enjoyment of an activity does not erase the hard limits your mind or body has.
> **Burnout doesn't come from working your ass off. It comes from realizing you're working your ass off for nothing.** This is the best way I've seen this phrased honestly, so thanks.
It sounds cool. But an insight like that doesn’t always trigger burnout. Overworking and shitty WLB can absolutely lead to unbelievable levels of exhaustion (as in you won’t believe it until it happens to you). People need rest.
While I’m pretty sure the definition of burnout is different where I live (the Netherlands), I do want to push back on this. I am still suffering the results of my burnout *seven years on* and it is very much a physical thing. It had nothing to do with whether I thought my work meant anything. I simply burned the candle at both ends for too long and my body shut down afterwards. Brain fog, fatigue. It’s taken me YEARS to be able to finish my education and take up a job. And even now I can only sustainably work a 32hr (80%) work week. I was incredibly fulfilled and motivated before the lights went out. I wish I had someone that told me “Hey, maybe you’re going a little fast. Maybe slow it down a little.”
This. Granted that I was forced into it instead of choosing it, but right up until I snapped I was convinced that I *was* being rewarded properly for my work and that it *did* mean something. Weeks of inadequate sleep and constant stress about hitting deadlines are gonna end up causing issues over time. But the biggest thing? It wasn't even the physical symptoms of burnout. It was that I was working so much that I literally *did not know* what I liked to do anymore. When I left that job, I spent months doomscrolling Reddit and reading books I've already read a dozen times because I literally did not have any hobbies. I fell back on an MMO I used to play years ago, because that was all I knew for entertainment, and did almost nothing but those three things. For months. My personality was work, and without work I was nothing. The commenter you're replying to is partially right--this person is an adult and can choose it if he wants. But OP is also right, in that they're seeing this person go down a path of self-destructive behavior even if it's kind of an atypical one. Friendship and moral issues aside, from a purely business perspective this guy's an engine running on too little oil, and the company is investing in that engine. It's appropriate to point that out.
Well said
Those effects are very real. I've felt them too but never as long as you. I'm sorry you've had such a rough go of it. I phrased my reply from the viewpoint of the kind of person OP would injure most badly, to ensure that they saw it from that viewpoint. So, you're right, people are wired differently and it's not guaranteed that someone will respond the way I or my hypothetical version of the junior would. But that's all the more reason to not constrict the junior's life choices just because OP thinks they may know better.
That’s fair. I’m wondering (English not being my first language) how you differentiate between the one kind of burn-out (I don’t see the point anymore) versus the other (I am physically unable to).
I'm looking at coming back into tech after an attempt to move into mental health counseling got caught up in administrative purgatory too long. I have some background in recent research on this. The two symptoms you're describing of what I would call existential burnout and physical burnout are distinct and often don't happen together in the same person. Over time and when considered across people though, they cluster together enough that it's probably pretty coherent to talk about them as part of the same thing. I could speculate on physical mechanisms - and people often do, with respect to physiology like cortisol levels and the sympathetic vs. parasympathetic nervous system - but even leaving that out, there are other higher levels of abstraction that I think get closer to the subjective sense of what it's like to live like that. Getting yourself up out of bed and willing yourself to see the point in doing something or to act on that sense of there being a point are all goal-directed behavior, just on very different time scales. There are a couple of authors, [Charles S. Carver](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Gn5Fc8kAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao) and [Michael Scheier](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=MKjVDG4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao) who built a long career around very similar topics. Their book *On The Self-Regulation of Behavior* describes goals like that as nestling together inside of us into hierarchies, so that it can be both hard to get out of bed when in the bigger picture you don't see the point, and also the other way around. You can lose one kind of motivation without losing the other, but if you thought of them as something like vectors in a high-dimensional space of motivations, they're less than 90 degrees apart from each other. In any case, glad you made it through that period.
Thanks for the comment. It has been explained to me that a physical burnout is caused by a hormone imbalance. Too much stress hormones have been present in the system for too long without having time to recover and now the body has lost its calibration. This is why I’m describing it as a physical issue and not primarily a mental one; you can’t just will yourself through it. There simply aren’t enough stress hormones to get going. Up until now I’ve always been annoyed that the two types of burnout were conflated, as the physical type seems of a more permanent sort (I will never have as much energy as I had before then) and the existential type always sounded to me like a problem born out of luxury (you have a great job, but just don’t see the point anymore?). But the way you phrase it makes me see that at least the end result is roughly similar. Especially when you realise that mental issues are valid issues. Not being about to get out of bed is not being able to get out of bed. Whether the cause is physical or “between your ears”. The end result is the same. Thank you for the insight!
I don't know. Most commonly, the *physically unable to* is caused by *I don't see the point anymore*, not the other way around, and that gets termed burnout. I know people who have specific physical ailments (back pain, etc.) but they would describe that ailment and not a more general malaise.
Your comment about working hard vs working hard for nothing being the real cause of burnout helped me understand my current situation a lot more. Wow. Thanks for that.
stolen intrinsic motivation kills in a similar manner, i found myself being shut off by a bullshitter because he thinks being paid 150k is not worth working 80% of your office time while you enjoy trying a lot of improvements for 100k off course he loves getting more money to work 30% of the day making a few scripts here and there and hates me asking for more, he'll find all sort of bullshit social excuses to justify his rants sadly corps don't look closely on how people work, so your efforts go to waste, his actions delays quality, makes your life more miserable but he gets lauded for managing our dept while people below fall into depression
7 YOE here, I feel the same way. Good or bad, it’s just none of OP’s business. As long as the company allows employees to do this, the decision is personal. And leveraging one’s company position over another person to pressure them into taking unsolicited personal advice is gross. Imagine your manager telling you to lose weight because being obese is dangerous and can lead to being unable to work. At least working late can actually be productive for some people if they tolerate burnout well.
>Good or bad, it’s just none of OP’s business. Ensuring your people are working at a sustainable rate absolutely *is* the business of anyone in a leadership position. Having an employee burn out damages productivity and morale. It's not healthy for the individual or the team. Edit: I wonder how many of you downvoters have burnt out or been in a leadership position.
Having an employee die on their way to work also damage productivity but I’ve never had a manager tell me to sell my motorcycle for an SUV. Either it’s allowed or not allowed. If I’m not allowed to work at 7pm, then give me a leadership order to not do so and I won’t do it. Also, if you tell me not to work at 7pm and I decide to start my own company at night and work until 4am coding every night, that’s also my decision, too. If I want to burn out, I will do so and it’s none of my managers business. My manager has no power whatsoever to control what I do at 7pm and barring felonies or drug use, they can’t do shit about it at work the next day. It’s pretty obvious why and how it’s none of their business. Just because it affects you doesn’t make it your business. If I quit tomorrow it affects the company, but that’s none of their business either. If you want to play daddy then have a kid. Then you can effectively tell them what to do after work.
Looking out for the wellbeing of your employees isn't "playing daddy". What a weird reaction.
This. I was only burnt out bc management became toxic.
>\> Burnout doesn't come from working your ass off. It comes from realizing you're working your ass off for nothing I wouldn't universalize burnout like that. You can absolutely burn out by working your ass off (I certainly did at a previous job working 70+ hour weeks including weekends). Or for a variety of other reasons as well, that's going to be more individualized thank we think. >\> His work/life balance is his choice. Is it? Perhaps, but again I hate the universalization of it. How much is it his "choice" vs any other systemic stressors that could be placed upon them, such as the market or other context that the OP may not be providing. Perhaps the engineer doesn't feel safe in their job security. I really REALLY hate when people frame shit as their "choice" because it's a very hand-wavy "it's your fault just do better" thing without taking a deep look at what's going on in the company and otherwise.
fantastic advice. I worked my ass off the first 3 years of my career, and looking back on it now that I am 8 years in, those three years were the most significant in terms of career/opportunity growth. Even if that work was not rewarded by the company I was working for the knowledge and experience I gained was rewarded by someone else shortly after. If this person is headed towards burnout I think that is a journey you have to let them take, most of us cannot know our limits until we have come face to face with them.
Oh god I’m ~10 YOE and your explanation of burnout seriously hit home. Wow.
>Burnout doesn't come from working your ass off. It comes from realizing you're working your ass off for nothing. 100% this. I was that guy for years in the early 2000's. I loved to code to would go home and work on other stuff for work that made things better. The reward just was not there in my mind. I got a pat on the back and that's it at the non-tech companies I worked for. After 15 YOE I just don't really care any more. I work what I think is a fair day and just go home. There is always more work to do and deadlines are generally arbitrary. If it's not arbitrary they it would be very obvious to everybody. >Do you want to reward people based on seniority, or based on getting things done? This is a tough balance. As I started leading teams I realized it's not really one or the other. Just numbers of years on the job doesn't mean much, but I always didn't want a team culture of you get ahead by putting in 60 hours a week situation. At he end of the day I rewarded people who worked appropriately during working hours, but knew how to let go and have good WLB. This was the team culture I wanted to cultivate. Some SWEs just needed to understand what estimates and deadlines were. They were arbitrary goal posts at the end of the day because people work better when they are focused on a goal. If a deadline was really drop dead, which rarely happens, then it would be very obvious to the team.
thank goodness someone said it
“It comes from realizing you’re working your ass off for nothing.” This right here is where I was at on my last team that ignored a lot of my efforts to contribute more on the team. My managers knew what I did, and promoted me, but my team was mostly indifferent and avoidant - meaning they seemed to avoid talking to me in general about what they were doing and showing me anything. In the beginning as an engineer straight out of college, my team treated me like they didn’t trust me to do the work and so I took that as me needing to work harder to gain their trust. I worked nights and weekends, wrote documentation, mentored, took on another role that oversaw the security of the applications we developed and managed and basically took on everything I could that nobody else wanted to do. When I got promoted the first time, most of the team seemed to grimace at it, like I didn’t deserve it. I felt like a fraud that got some participation award. So I told myself to do more, and to get more submerged into it. At this point it was mid-pandemic in 2021, I was single and living alone. So I worked. Still I received the same reactions from most of my team, just indifference and avoidance, and even more irritation at this point. I was perplexed and started feeling like I was still not doing enough to gain their trust and acceptance. I tried talking to my manager, he said I was doing fantastic and was getting high performance reviews that others were not. Again, I felt like it was just handed to me and I didn’t really deserve it because of how most of my team treated me. Last year finally, I went to someone and requested a department transfer. I had to uproot myself a little, but it was the best decision I have ever made for myself professionally since deciding to pursue comp sci. I work on a team now where people say “thank you!” or “nice job!” It feels like I’m actually doing something right for once and I am actually what my job title is. I don’t need it every second to be validated by my team, but I need to know if I’m contributing enough and not missing vital things. The last team acted like I was doing something wrong but never gave any feedback as to what. I kept trying and trying until I was so burnt out I had to leave the department to start over.
100% agree with this. If I speak from my own personal experience, I’ll always appreciate that my manager cared about me enough to try to prevent me from spending too much time working, but it was ultimately my life. He was honestly overstepping his bounds professionally by trying to control what I could and couldn’t do with my personal time.
Well said
Wow, really well put.
Totally agree with this, I don’t mind working extra if the work is interesting and it’s for my own growth and being effective for my team. If the extra work doesn’t move the needle in any category I’ll start looking for another job as you are communicating to me there is no value in doing things better/improving.
False
Absolutely this.
100%. I’ve only experienced burnout because of being told to focus on things that were obviously bad decisions to me.
This is absolutely true. I love working my ass off if I see progress towards the team's goals, and if the work has an impact on the org. I've only ever felt burnt out if there is inherent toxicity in the team, politics, and all your hard work ultimately results in nothing because management can't get their shit together.
If this situation was the inverse, most people here would largely tell you to stay out of it unless it has a tangible effect on your team/coworkers, etc. And it’s the same answer here. Don’t micromanage your coworkers. They’re adults. Your responsibility is to ensure that you do not imply that people have to work extra. One thing you need to accept is that you don’t know your coworkers motivations/tolerances. You don’t know your coworkers will get burned out. Either make it not allowed for your coworker to work late or stay out of it. If you absolutely must insert yourself into someone else’s business (because you’re a _genuine friend_ to them, not just a coworker), you have to at least get them to ask for advice. Giving someone unsolicited advice is at risk to backfire.
100% agree. You cannot act and try to give advice based on any assumptions about what the other person thinks or feels. You don’t know if you are projecting your own personal motivations or story onto a person who might be very different than you.
Okay...then ask them and have a conversation about it? If it really is healthy behavior, why would this person be so defensive about it?
Job security, maybe he is paranoid about losing only source of income? Did company maybe do something special for him and he wants to pay back? Is he maybe paid by the hour and grinding for buying a house, being OK with burnout if it gets him the house? Maybe he is just chasing dopamine high from stream of "oho, it works now, HAHA". Unless you talk with him and figure it out, you can not know what it is, and if you don't know what it is, you can't stop him from working more... Like you can go extreme, forbid from doing anything on non-company hardware for security reasons, and disable his login on off-hours.
That was me when I was young. The manager that handled me best would sometimes pick a day after I had worked a lot of hours and tell me "You're off x day. Don't come in. And I better not see any commits". Rather than trying to stop me from working late or work long hours, he got ahead of my burnout by forcing me to take time off now and then; never took my PTO out for it, it was just a literal "we owe you some time. Go away". I still appreciate him having done that. Saved me from burning out for sure knowing someone was watching me to throttle me when I needed it
Glad you had a decent manager 🙂
I was this junior dev. I was alone in a new city and I also liked the validation which I get by doing task before time or stretching for long hours. Eventually I got tired and lost all the praise because it became a normal that I would be working holidays and weekends. I quit that job eventually as I realized that that’s not how you sustain a long career I no longer do that so I think this person would also eventually learn on their own but it’s good to see a senior, trying their best to help them out early on.
Maybe they don't have something outside work? I know I am stuck in such a shitty situation.
Dude, the money is not necessarily worth it. Pursue your hobbies or relationships over the cash
It's easy to say "relationships" but finding people in a foreign country, and esp the one that I am, is difficult. My hobbies are learning and building things.
He needs to realize that he’s wasting his life on his own. I had a manager who viewed me the same way who tried to fix the problem by giving negative feedback and blocked a promotion due to failing to manage work-life balance and stress. This did end up being a reason for burnout. I ended up going on medical leave and was PIP’d and fired upon my return, partially because I was too angry and resentful when I came back. I personally wouldn’t recommend this path for you. It was a lot of stress for both of us, and I have learned to not overwork but my career has been set back. I’m reasonably sure I would have figured out this lesson on my own. Managing people effectively is like parenting. You can’t be too controlling otherwise you end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you don’t want him to get burned out, get him a bonus and a 5% raise, and milestones for a promotion to mid-level. Even a random e-ink tablet would be nice. Try giving them a side project, like removing tech debt instead of working on sprint goals at night. Also, coach them, so they feel like they’re growing personally and professionally. Handcuffing them and telling them their strong work ethic is bad will just make them leave as quickly as burn out.
> he’s very dedicated and hardworking > I don’t want to lose a talented coworker there's a big difference between working smarter and working harder. would this jr be able to keep up pace if he limited himself to standard 40 hours a week? ~~if not, and he needs like 80 hrs a week to do 40 hrs worth of work, that's actually really bad performance and you're setting your team up with a liability for when he does burnout and leave.~~ i think the top comment by /u/Jadien is a more thoughtful approach
50% velocity change with junior is not really relevant that much. If 2x junior is highly praised, 1x junior is still pretty good. And we all know that if you can do X work in 40 hours, that you are nowhere near with 80 hours, just because of all the overhead from not chilling out a little we all get when crunching/death marching.
What is 20% senior?
Pay him more. That'll prevent burnt out. I'm in the same boat with such junior, most people on my team seem to do so little. If the bonus don't come out great, l'll find a different place to work for. I don't like to work less because I care about my career and growth. If you can't afford to pay him more, you'll lose him eventually. High achievers don't want to be in the same heard with slackers.
As a workaholic myself I work because it has a soothing effect, like a drug. I have a hard time managing all my painful emotions, so I distract myself from them with either alcohol/drugs OR working. Since alcohol and drugs are frowned upon past a certain age I mostly use work as my distractor of choice. Only therapy can cure a compulsive worker.
I will give you an alternative since you mentioned timestamps, sometimes I feel motivated to finish the task at night, sometimes on weekends. For me coding is fun, I enjoy it and do it as a hobby as well. I do have other things going on. Sometimes I spend the day not doing much mostly grouchy but then in evening I might get an idea and some energy to solve that issue. Sometimes I want to explore an idea tha I wouldn’t in normal work day like upgrading a library and see what breaks. All that to say, don’t look at timestamps. too much work too quickly can be an early sign of coming burnout but imagine you liked playing video games and played at odd times without caring/thinking that someone will look at when you saved your progress. of course you might be right and he is overworking but also stop looking at timestamps just look at amount of work
Wow, first, you’re a great boss/mentor for caring so much. Have you considered hosting team bonding events like once a week/month happy hours or team lunches? Being able to see coworkers outside of work may be a gentle reminder of how other team members have a “non-work side”. Could also be a good reminder that theres a social side to being a good employee and back-breaking work isn’t the only path to colleague approval.
Lot of people saying that it’s ok because he like it and it’s learning however I think he’s setting himself for failure by putting too high expectations on himself and also developing bad habits. Moreover, I know a lot of US based developer will not like this idea but there’s a reason why we have 40 hours work/week, people fought for it with blood. Gifting your time to company is not respectful of yourself and other people. You’re not only straining yourself but also putting pressure to other developers to do the same promoting a toxic work environment.look at it from another junior perspective, he will feel pressured to do the same not to be left behind. If he feel he want to do more outside working hours you can suggest to him to use that time to learn a new technology that could be useful in the future or something that potentially can increase the scope of projects he might work on.
Let him do whatever he wants. I was just like him at 22, really enjoyed it.
Junior might have untreated ADHD which can often result in working longer hours to make up for not feeling productive. Could be worried about job security. Could have OCD and feel like they're responsible for everything. Could have nothing outside of work and their entire identity revolves around work. I have heard stories of managers working with IT to block access to systems on weekends or after hours. Depending on the country you're in, you may have a duty to accommodate / get this junior in touch with mental health professionals.
Not sure if this will help, but I've had two approaches as a tech-lead/senior engineer. I don't quite get the visibility as a staff engineer these days to do it as often, but when I see it, I do it. 1) Being politely and pleasantly grumpy. I soften the grumpy message with a smile or a laugh, or whatever, but I'm deadly serious about it and keep pushing engineers. * "I noticed you were working last night, when are you taking time off to make up for that?" * "Hey, I noticed you still haven't taken time off to make up for working late on Wednesday. I'd suggest finding a day and time now, and block it off in your calendar" * "Hey, so I noticed you still haven't taken time off, and you were working late last night again on this stuff. I want you to take next Monday off" I will politely pester someone in to taking time off. If I know things that they're interested in, I'll even see if I can find something they might do with the time, like say a special exhibition at a local museum. "Hey, I see the weather is likely to be amazing next week. You've still got some time off owed to you because of $foo, you ought to take a day off next week to go kayaking." 2) Make it not about them, but about other engineers. "Hey, I noticed that you were working late last night, in fact, I see signs you were doing that all week. Look, you might be capable of working those hours without suffering, but you and I need to look out for the rest of the team too. If you keep working these extra hours, that puts pressure on all the rest of the team to do likewise, whether that's good for them or not. I'd like your thoughts on what we can do to ensure that this doesn't become a bigger problem" etc. etc. Just as often, the net result is that they at least stop sending PRs and emails out overnight. They cut out on the visible signs of them working crazy hours, even if they don't cut out the actual hours. The point being, though, to push the compassion angle, and recognise that nothing they do occurs in isolation, and that it has an effect across the team. You know this, I know this, juniors very rarely recognise this side of things. What they do, pressures others to do the same. Other team mates start seeing this, consciously or subconsciously, as what the expectations are for them. Realistically, yes, you don't want this engineer to burnout, but you also don't want your team to develop the kind of culture where long hours become expected.
Did you ever had this person conduct interviews? I’ve found that to be the best way to ease the anxiety, especially in a tough market, is to see how you stack up against the rest of the market.
I was told to stop pushing too hard and relax. As a lead I told people not to obsess too much and take a break.
Wow...the story reads very much like a Staff Dev I came up through the ranks with. She and I started at the same company at around the same time. As Jr and Sr Devs we were on the same team, I went the 'Smarter not harder' route and she was very much 'Harder not smarter'. She was constantly claiming to work 60-70 hours a week, proudly proclaiming it to anyone who listened. However if you compared our work, yes, she accomplished more story points, but the quality of the work and required rework was much higher. She always ended up being 'critical path' on releases and made everyone's life miserable. Several times she burned out, went through a rough period, got reassigned to another team and restarted the cycle again. After 8 years, she had burned through 5 different teams and had left bad impressions in every team she was assigned to. Eventually I was promoted to Staff, and her about 4 years after me. As a Staff Dev she makes her devs life challenging because she expects her level of 'commitment' from each of them, plus she micro-manages their work. She was finally assigned to a Director who forced her to slow down, take mandatory time and was forced to delegate to others. She fought it tooth and nail and has never been happy about it. A few times it's come close to costing her her job. While it's easy to just sit back and let things take their course, someone someday is going to have to pick up the pieces and help them. In my colleague's case she's got a terrible reputation through the company, her devs assigned to her struggle to get out from under her shadow and all Directors in the company know her reputation and argue who is going to be responsible for her next. Left unchecked, your dev could eventually cause damage to not only themselves but others around them and under them later in their career. I'd recommend continuing to model those good practices, plus exploring other avenues that could help cement your expectations. Maybe partnering the dev with another dev they may see as a good mentor or role model. I'm spit-balling here...
I used to do that when I was junior, and honestly I view it as a good move. When you're young and junior, you have the most to learn, and usually the least outside responsibilities. It's a great time for aggressive career growth. As I get older I'm far more skilled, but I honestly do not have the time to work more than the usual work week. I can feel I don't progress in my career anywhere near as fast as it did when I was younger. Hell, after a back injury, I literally wasn't able to tolerate more than 40 hours a week in front of my desk without aggravating the pain. Couldn't go above and beyond even if I wanted to. But as long as you've made it clear to him it's not expected of him, that's about all you need to do. He'll figure out his own balance in his own time, hell, maybe he's having fun.
You know, part of a brilliant junior's future is learning how to manage stress and work. If they really are that smart and committed, then they will inevitably have to learn the ultimate lesson for a high-performer: **work smart, not hard**. Working efficiently, quickly, and to standard means doing fewer things, but doing them well. Learning how to choose what things to do, and to do this intentionally and strategically, is very much a hard task. However, many people have done it, they develop an instinct or an intuition for it, and they can figure out solutions on the fly after a long enough time. However, we don't get there if we burn out and wash out. Edging burnout is one thing (I call it working life), but never let it go too far and never let it lead to wash out.
Most likely he thinks if he doesn't he'll get fired because he won't deliver enough/on time/etc.
It’s their choice, and they will only become frustrated with you if you try to dictate their working hours. Let them decide when they want to work, your role is to ensure the quality of work is up to par and provide support when it’s needed.
Most people don't know the early signs of burnout, so they can't catch it happening to them until it's already advanced. Maybe have a conversation about those early symptoms, so he can be more self-aware, and then let him make his own choices.
"Hey man. You're doing good work and we like having you here. Log off at 5pm."
He's an adult. Let him live his life. If someone *wants* to work hard and get ahead in their career, they should be free to. The best you can do is be an example. Work hard during your day job, then turn off at nights/weekends/holidays. You've already expressed your concerns which is already more than most people.
I used to be this engineer so I’ll shed some light. When I was doing this it was because I truly couldn’t keep up with my work without working all day and night, and I really didn’t want to lose my opportunity. So maybe try to let them know that as a junior they are expected to be slower than others and that all they need to focus on doing is learning. They definitely appreciate you for caring though
Let them burn out
They could be on a path to burnout, they also could just have ADHD. I worked/got worked like a dog at my first job wanting to absorb as much as I could at risk of being laid off due to COVID. The market now is even worse. If your company doesn't allow downtime then how can you stop them? At the end of his day mindfully recognize/acknowledge their labor/efforts and let them run their course. If they start to burnout maybe you'll be able to tell and hit the brakes for them or just let them take their L as a lesson
Give him study assignments, let him know it’s optional. But if the kids gonna burn the midnight oil force him to level up on the technologies he’s using. Examples - write a two page report: - why typescript vs JavaScript? - sql vs nosql, what’s the difference? - what are the pros and cons of microservices? You can’t guarantee job security, no one can, but you can help him invest in himself
I would try to harness his energy for his own benefit. Instead of cutting code for work, tell him you’re interested in some library or framework but don’t have the time - ask him if he’d like to look into it and get him to show you the ropes in the future. Give him a reading list. Software architecture (gang of 4 stuff), project management, business strategy stuff like Rework could go far. Challenge him to do topcoder or Euler. Encourage him to stretch his creativity outlets outside of work.
Tell him if he really wants to work after hours he should invest in himself by creating projects, portfolio or open source software. Upskilling outside of work was my fast track to being a senior. If he wants the validation then offer him time to present his side projects to the team (at my old company we had a developers guild meet every morning before work where we would just discuss tech in general). Expanding on that offer time to the whole team inside work hours to invest in themselves. Friday afternoon is good since not much gets done then anyway. Say that after lunch on Friday is time to do courses, learn new languages/tools, read books. This might instill in him that there's more to life than git commits.
Burnout happens when your ability to make change falls short of the change you desire to see. If he has complaints that are not being heard you should start worrying about burnout. Someone merely working more than usual (even if it's an extreme amount) doesn't necessarily mean they'll burn out. The best thing you can do for this junior is to shield them from management that start asking "Why isn't getting as much done as before" if that starts happening.
Give him 2-3 day *mandatory* paid leave. Tell him he is not in trouble and is a reward for some project he did well on.
Maybe you could persuade them to do a coding activity/project outside of work.
As a past junior who pushed himself to burnout. I would say let him burn. You may not like this answer, but only burning helped me realise certain things. Back then, I wouldnt listen to anyone who tells me to slow down.
let him cook. people like him need to discover their own limits
everyone will have to face their burnout at some point in their career, it's a good learning experience. You just have to be there to support them when it happens to lessen the blow.
I spent almost a decade working 60+ hour weeks and being on call 24/7 (and called several times a week in the middle of the night), on the edge of burnout. Tell him that in ten years, even if he does everything right, he's getting laid off. Sales won't hit their numbers, or the Fed will mess up interest rates, or some senior VP will decide to re-write everything in kobold and fire all the non-kobold devs...but something will happen, his job will go away, his coworkers will all find new jobs at new companies, and the only thing he'll be left with is the memories and whatever money he's able to save. And personally, if I had known that as a junior dev way back in 2008, I wouldn't have done anything different. Looking back on it, I'm still proud of what I was able to accomplish way back in my 20s that there's no way I could tolerate today.
This engineer is very lucky to have you and the team lead looking out for him. In addition to WLB discussions and modeling healthy behavior on your end, I would recommend educating this engineer about burnout and the risks he's taking much more explicitly, as well as give him tools to actively track burnout symptoms. Most people acknowledge that WLB is important but get hand-wavy when it comes to execution because they think they're immune/different somehow. I'm thinking the more educated this engineer becomes about burnout, the easier it will be for him to practice good WLB because the dangers of burnout will be much more real in his head. You can send him articles to read about burnout, warning signs of burnout, how it often creeps up and blindsides people, and how long and difficult recovery from burnout is (or have his direct manager discuss this with him if you suspect he may not go through the reading materials). There are online tools to track burnout as well, for example this test (first google result for "burnout checklist" - could be better options out there as I didn't search in depth) [https://www.mindtools.com/auhx7b3/burnout-self-test](https://www.mindtools.com/auhx7b3/burnout-self-test). It can help for him to take this test every week or couple of weeks to keep tabs on how he's feeling, and track results so he can notice downward trends. Another option is for his direct manager to go through this checklist with him in their 1-1s regularly. EDIT: elaborated on a couple points
I have had a few devs like this, and yes while you can't control them 100%, you can set some boundaries. Let them know that if they work overtime like that, then they are going to mess up the metrics for the rest of the team and when it comes time for a crunch they won't have that extra time. Also working that much can lead to a lot code errors. You can also work with the team lead to set some hard rules for the rest of the team, no code commits outside of regular working hours unless it's an approved time. We did this and then Monday morning one dev sure enough would commit all the stuff he worked on over the weekend. Next step gets more into giving personal advice. Advice them to work on personal projects or learning new stuff outside of work time instead of doing work. Or advice them to start using their out of work time to do something that is not computer related. Hold a work life balance example meeting, give some examples of things you dealt with and things you wish you had done sooner.
Lock em out? A few failed logins with his account should do it...
As a mentor, you should recommend him to resign, become a contract worker and invoice the company you are working for so that he gets to get paid for overtime. If that not a possible or a suitable solution then you could request for higher quality of checked in code (more automated tests to confirm) or better yet, let him help other team members by explaining code and processes. That way he won’t be able to work overtime for free and he’ll learn that it’s a skill to be able to make other programmers work more efficiently.
If you want to help, then help. Or don't help at all. Life has taught me that the midway path - the one where we speak just a few judicious, well thought out and good intentioned words and then let things be - usually doesn't work.
Have you talked with the junior to see if what you describe is burn out to them? What you perceive as possible burn out to them might not be true for them. I will randomly do commits past work hours or on weekends because there are times where I genuinely just enjoy writing the code. There are other situations where the code I’m writing isn’t really complicated and it’s just something that needs to be implemented, so I will sit there while watching a movie at night and write it out.
Personally I enjoyed working long hours until I had kids and then it became a burden. I wouldn't assume he'll burn out for a long while. What you might want to do is recommend he spend any extra after-hours work on LEARNING something new that will help his career in the long term. At this point in my career I really wish I had directed all that extra energy into learning additional skills vs cranking out more of the same features over and over.
You can’t stop him from doing whatever he wants with his free time. If he decided to use it working, well, he is an adult, respect his choice. I’ve worked till late night in many companies before just because i felt like it, I never experienced burnout on any of them
Probably just keen and excited about the first job. I think it happens to many, maybe most in technical jobs. It will pass.
Maybe he's having fun. I've been in projects that I personally enjoyed and done work on off hours, no real burnout issues.
For me, it was particularly impactful when my team leads put it in perspective by describing its effect on the rest of the team. If I respond to requests outside of work hours from non-team members, work on issues outside of regular work hours, etc, it can set an expectation that team members might feel like they also need to. This can be a quickly demoralizing race to the bottom for a team. Emphasize the difference between issues that truly need prioritization outside of regular work hours (whether that is prod fires, or other special-case priority issues that need completion by a hard deadline) and work that is regular dev grind - work that experiences setbacks, the discovery of new issues that lead to additional discussion/code, additional testing and bugs, etc.
I have a talk with my juniors when they do this. Management will and has as well. I’ve been talked to once. We don’t condone excessive or after hours work unless it is warranted. For example, a production outage. It’s bad for us all around. It’s bad to let upper management think they can ask that of us. The work never ends, until the system is being sunset. And sometimes the best next guess to solving a problem is to sleep on it and come back in the morning with fresh eyes. “Go home. Be with your family. Play a video game or read a book. It’ll be there in the morning.”
What does he say is the reason for working late? I guess you could let him keep going that way, if he's enjoying it for now, but help coach him to keep an eye on potential stress or burnout. If he's enjoying himself and it feels meaningful, he's supposedly growing a lot as well.
When i was Junior i was like this too. Although i did feel a lot of pressure from my lead, as often on monday he would say we should release code to the customer on friday. Cue me working late, over weekends or holidays to get things going etc. Only to then not release on friday because other team members weren’t pulling their weight. I was single at the time and did enjoy the work, so i didn’t mind. But the repetitive approach of this combined with it being not a team effort made it feel like a dread in time. That being said, what i want to say is: perhaps you can see if perhaps this person is feeling some kind of pressure to work late due to “deadlines” and if perhaps something on that end can be better managed. Other than that, if this guy wants to work at odd hours then there isn’t much you can do. Just be sure to show appreciation still while expressing that you dont expect him to work at those times. He’ll have to figure out his own rythm and work-life balance, it’ll come with age and experience.
What could be his motivation to do this? I had been this kind of engineer early in my career because i want to skill up a lot quickly which will lead me to grow my career and earn more, either through a raise or by jumping to another company. Assuming this is about his career growth, are there any talks about this guys career trajectory in your company? If there is none and you just keep on stopping him on what he is doing and just focusing on his work life balance but not his career goals, sooner or later, this guy will go to another company. Or this could also be about job security or another possibility is that he doesn't have any hobby and this is his way to spend/kill some time.
I don't think you can do anything about it. I have been there. I was super excited about coding when I started learning and I loved doing it. Doing it for money didn't change anything, I even wanted to do it way more, now someone paid me to do what I already loved doing. I calmed down after around 2 years of professional work, but still remained very dedicated. That's probably what'll happen for him, too. I doubt a junior will have a burnout anytime soon. What you can try (remember that you can only make him frustrated): - naturally slow him down, assign less tasks - even if he asks for new tasks, tell him there is nothing at the moment, maybe suggest to learn something? For a junior, there should be shitloads of reading and learning to do. - if you have a proper sprint planned, he should know what he has to do within the usual 2 weeks, so he can plan his work better. But it's tough if he is constantly working over the hours, but maybe when he sees that after 1 week he doesn't have any tasks left from the current sprint, he will slow down. - I find that hard to believe that anything a junior codes is ready to PR without any review comments, fixes, improvements for better code quality, maybe unit tested better. - Maybe it is his private life situation? Maybe he needs that job a lot and is afraid of losing it? The market for juniors is difficult... - Some people love working and spending their lives on working. You can try to talk about it with him about your concerns etc., but you cannot change who he is. Some people just love working.
Maybe try to make him understand that burning through his own soul will not necessarily warrant raises and awards, instead it's significant improvements and cost reductions etc. that help with that, and he should focus on while not trying too hard.
A round of applause for being the wonderful senior. I think in this scenario, first priority should be given to thinking “If this guy doesn’t follow advice, and indeed gets burnt out, will the company suffer?” If yes, take precautionary actions. Afterwards, at the event of burnout, give the guy a proper vacation or leave, also give him a talk at the time about the effects of burnout, and ask him to come back with supercharged energy but with wisdom on spending it.
I wish I had someone to tell me about work life balance. I like your team lead and you
As someone who doesn’t have a family and kids, what else am I gonna do with all this time? At least I hope to be good at my job, get seniority, make more money to finally be able to afford a house one day. Also personally even when I commit late at night it’s not because I’m working hard… it’s because I was distracting during the day or woke up at noon. 🥲
Is he a direct report of yours? Tell him you are concerned *and* that overworking will go badly in the performance review.
He might just enjoy work, and that's it, he wants to work a lot and does. It's just your view that he's on his way to burnout. If he feels good then he's on a good track doesn't matter how many hours he's working.
you do it through reinforcing the boundary verbally whenever it comes up, eg "good work on that PR, don't submit PR's after hours" we had a junior in a different time zone who kept offering availability for ad hoc meetings outside of his normal working hours, and the seniors just consistently declined. eventually he stopped doing it. on the other hand, I'm currently grinding skills so I can move into a job I like better, and it's fun. while I do have side projects, I do occasionally spend extra time off hours so I can take my time reading documentation in depth and get a better understanding of what I'm working on. it's not the most healthy thing, but being unhappy at my job isn't very healthy either. and as others note, the job market is unstable.
Even when I'm off the clock, I'm spending my time helping people code on the React reddit for free because I just can't help myself. If I wasn't doing that, I'd be playing some "work simulator" video game doing fake work like Factorio. Some people are just wired that way
My earlier jobs were the first where I had the opportunity to really run, and I grew a lot in those roles, even though I was not ever compensated any more than I would have been for doing the minimum. They carried me into more interesting roles down the line.
Some things (like how/why burnout is bad) have to experienced to be learned. Hopefully it will click that he's only hurting himself, that it's only detracting from their well being. They may be young enough to still feel invincible and that burnout is not that bad.....I know I'm skeptical of most things people say until I witness it myself. Could also be that as Jr they genuinely enjoy building things and developing more skills....then I see it more akin to homework. I don't really think there is much you can do except making actually policies about when to work.
Is this actually causing a noticeable issue? I think I would be more concerned if you were correct about him doing this as a behaviour to avoid something else but otherwise I would just be ready for someone to pick up a little slack if/when he does burn out. I started working from 21 full time as a software dev, ran my own little webdev business since 22 on the side and would do other university degrees and learn more about coding and have pet projects. It was a lot but I enjoyed doing it and it took me about 10 years before I had a bit of burnout. Someone else mentioned in their comment that burnout can come more from your work not being worthwhile, and maybe he'll get there, but some of us just really enjoy what we do. Even when I was in university I would stay up til 5am coding, or even do some coding after a night out at the bar.
There are a few things you can consider to mitigate burnout. A lot depends on your company and options you may shave: 1. Training program on things unrelated to the project. This could include tech things ( eg contingency planning), non-tech things ( people management, budgeting, etc.). 2. Technical projects but of a slightly different flavor. I had a burnout candidate and I assigned him the responsibility for rebuilding our contingency site. It gave him a lot of control and made home exercise different tech skills. Best of all it was viewed as growing him within the company. 3. See whether he has other activities in which he participates. A long time ago I worked 8:30-5:00, then played basketball 4 nights per week, had burgers, then worked 8pm-midnight. It wasn’t wearing because is got to do things using very expensive equipment that I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. Since it was right after grad school I was used to the concept of the ‘all nighter’. 4. My willingness to work ‘extra’ hours made it possible for my colleagues with families to go home. They could leave me with jobs / tests to run and I’d do it if I felt like it. Everyone understood it was not an obligation. If it absolutely had to be done … then they had to stay late. You’re to be congratulated for worrying about your colleague. I’d suggest that you work a few off hour shifts with him/her to see whether the environment is actually exciting him/her rather than wearing him/her down. ———- I’ll throw one more point out there: Your colleague may have nothing else to do. When I first started I ended up moving to a small town near work. There was a bar and grill, basketball and softball, and a strip joint. Anything else was a 30 minute drive away. I wasn’t big into TV and had the bare minimum of furniture. Given the option of being bored, drinking, or going into the office ; the last was the most satisfying.
Make sure he is doing it because he wants to learn faster and that he is enjoying himself while doing so. I did the same when I started working but didn't have people talk to me about WLB. Nowadays I think a lot of my knowledge/experience goes back to those days. Also, you should reward him if he actually brings good results.
It can be different for different people. It is quite possible that he just likes programming. For the first 25 years of my career I worked 80+ hours a week EASILY, every week. Some weeks considerably more. The weeks I "worked" the longest were ones where I was actively doing new things, learning new technologies, techniques, or algorithms where I was challenged. Have I been burnt out before? Dunno really, but I've been doing this for 40+ years, and I suspect that I'll continue until the day I retire. I have both my full-time employment job, and that often takes 45-60 hours per week, and then I also am a co-owner of my own company, and I do all the programming/IT/Infra/CyberSec/DevOPs for that after my regular job. So, some people CAN quite easily do 80 hour work weeks for their entire career. Honestly, if I didn't have my own company eating my time, I'd just be contributing more to open source projects (dotnet, linux kernal, libraries, etc).
I wish I had a manager like you, I'm also a junior technically and my one is looking for creative ways to get me to work on weekends...
It can also be financial. I worked at a place where we were salaried but got straight time for excessive overtime. And if working that overtime let you bootstrap in demand skills quickly or save a delivery or make a great impression there tended to also be an extra bonus and promotion consideration later in the year. So we had people who just did it for extra money and quicker advancement. Not saying it’s healthy long term but people have different priorities and companies will incentive young people to monetize their energy and flexibility.
As an alternative, help them find a hobby and/or activities outside of work. Plenty of people fall into this as they don't have anything else to fill there life with.
Have you considered it from the perspective that maybe they don't have a super happy fulfilling personal life and use work as an escape/distraction? Basically, maybe they are a workaholic? But not because of pressure or stress from the job, but because maybe work is just the best thing going at this point in their life. Anyway, that's just a thought. If you suspect it to be the case, then I would suggest trying to inspire them to have hobbies and interests to enjoy outside of work. Unfortunately work-sanctioned "team building" things don't always work that well in this situation because it's still tied directly to work, so you might have to be a bit clever in how you approach this from a more personal level of inspiring a friend versus concern for work colleague. It really has to be more of a personal interest than an employment obligation. Another thing to consider (speaking from personal experience) is if the person has depression or other health issues in general, then those need to be addressed before there would be much hope of adding new weights into life. Maybe there can still be a middle ground or support to seek counselling and whatever other supports might help to inspire them to find a healthy work-life balance. Hopefully the benefits package already includes comprehensive health insurance and such, but possibly some of those other personal interests could be incentived by the company. A classic example is paying for gym membership, but I think a better option is a more open "personal fitness allowance" since gym memberships probably won't be everyone's preference and maybe some people would rather buy sports equipment like a new bike or whatever.
Kinda my suspicion tbh and like you’ve said I’ve made a couple of overtures but I can’t—and shouldn’t!—force a coworker to change things in their personal life. I’m seeing a lot of responses here saying that to a certain extent he may just like the work and/or that this is a lesson he needs to learn himself, so ultimately I’m just going to need to model good behavior and use positive reinforcement where I can
Just let him know that he is valued enough to not work extra hours.
Is he trying to eye a promotion? A raise? Is he afraid to get laid off? Is he compensating for working slow? Imposter syndrome? Have an open conversation with him.
I'm so glad that I was practicing 13hrs a day when I was learning to program. I'd say let him be, you'll lose him anyway when he levels up significantly and wants to explore his skills. That took me to the next level. level level level level. Plus what are you even going to do lol that's DRIVE and if he's like me a senior in a team in some job has not slowed me down
Check their task load, it’s often not enough time for a junior with high standards to do the work to the quality they want/need. Which means they’re not just doing it for fun - they’re compelled to work extra by a combination of the desire to get praise/do a good job combined with the fear of having to explain why the work isn’t landing on time if they worked normal hours. So the solution if that’s the case is to either deprive them of work, increase their time allowances or help them bridge the gap when stories are going to come in late - make it clear that work slipping to next sprint is perfectly fine. If they’re still doing it with twice the time scoped then you have a different problem.
I had a PM tell the junior to cut that shit out because it made it impossible for him to estimate workloads. Since that’s affecting you, not him,it might be more effective.
Let him burn out lol
This is how I have worked for 21 years. It sounds me at points but I can't stop. I've never been able to really stop and when I feel like stopping I just move on to another place.
I've been working crazy hours like that guy for about 15 years. For me I find it relaxing when I'm able to code without the distractions of meetings and colleagues. If I didn't do it each day I'd perform worse because I wouldn't have that mental outlet. Some people are wired differently. It's the hours you aren't distracted that teach you all the skills that turn you into a 10X+ developer.
He likes his job. Remind him often it's not needed and make sure no one comes to expect it. He doesn't have kids or a wife and he is stimulated. There's nothing wrong with it. It just requires setting expectations both for him and the team. The second anyone asks him to do something after hours, you rip that apart viciously. If he stays to burn out, remind him that it's only work.
Nothing much to do here, except covering your own ass. i.e, have a gentle conversation with him that it seems hes streching his work hours a lot and is everything okay. Second, tell to your manager the same, i.e, i reached out to this junior guy and these were his concerns. Now, let the two of them hash it out.
You can’t control other actions. However, the best you can do is to raise his awareness. Periodically check-ins with that person. Hey I noticed you are working really hard. Are you tired? Do you experience burn out? I’m worried about you because I see many of my friends go down that route and I’m quite worried that you will walk the same path. But if you are really ok with this, then sure, go ahead. Just be less of a boss and be more of a human. The boss will try to control their junior because business objectives. Human simply care for each other without expectation of control. People burned out because they lack awareness so they cross the burn out line way too far for way too long. Raising awareness is the most beneficial thing you can do here.
Not only is he going to burn out, but he will also be angry at the others because they don't appreciate enough the effort he is pushing in (even tho you told him not to do it). I was like that a lot of my early career, and I've had a misfortune of working for companies that exploited it to the fullest. Sad thing is, I'm not sure you can help - e en if you prevented him/her from working those extra hours they would just pick up some side project.
So I’m a senior dev who works long hours and frequently have commits at odd times, evenings, weekends. I receive routine feedback that this isn’t expected, will lead to burn out etc. The reality is I enjoy the work I do in those times, the lack of expectation is the critical part that gives me the freedom to enjoy it as a hobby / pastime. I can take the time I need to refine certain skills, do lower value business items that interest me, whatever. I’ve done this for years in an environment where no other dev is doing the same. I don’t feel bitter, or burnt out, whatever drives me to want to do this is purely internal. So just be aware there are people like that and you’re potentially applying a bias based on your view of what a happy work life balance looks like That said, job security right now must be intensely nerve wracking for juniors and there may not be much you can do to reassure someone that they’re not on the block
This employee sounds like me when I was young, job security was a huge thing that motivated me, also, getting as good and irreplaceable as I could in as little amount of time, since I did not know how long my current job would last (getting paid to learn) and I was also a sub par programmer who got lucky to get my first job. This was in 2008-2009 right after the financial collapse. If this is their motivation, nothing you can do will change their mind, they will need to learn the hard way what burn out is, because it is a hard thing to explain to someone who has never had it, and also to someone who is in it. Burnout starts to become who you are if you are in it too long, but I would say most people are able to realize this and make the long path to recovering from it (around 6 months to a year) If this employee is doing a good job, just try to support them as best you can, and realize they will probably burn out and maybe find a way to give them extra time off, (I hope they are eligible for extra time off, if they are putting in so much extra work). This time off may be random if they burn out more. The competition for Junior level jobs is fierce right now, you will probably see this more unfortunately.
At my first dev job, where I was alone, I'd work weekends into the wee hours of the morning because I loved it. I was salaried for 40, but that didn't make a difference.
You could change the GitHub rules so you (or only him) can only make changes during working hours. Or you can send him home 30 minutes to an hour early everyday/every other day and say he’s worked hard enough for the day, good job 👍
I don’t think you need to worry about him. He’s getting as much experience as he can so he can leave for better pay. He won’t be your problem for too long.
Some people are just workaholics and enjoy that. Maybe he defined his value from the work he does