The conversation

PragmaticPulpHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

The absolute worst company I worked for had this separation as a core philosophy

… The absolute worst company I worked for had this separation as a core philosophy. They had different managers for everything: Product managers to make all of the product decisions, UX managers to make all of the design decisions, project managers to decide when we’d do things and how to check in on our progress every few hours of every day, program managers who thought they were engineers who just didn’t write code, VPs who would choose all of your programming languages and frameworks for you, and on and on. These people would shuffle from meeting to meeting every day with a 2-hour company-paid lunch in the middle (which they ultimately got in trouble for) but wouldn’t ever do any of the work themselves. Meanwhile, if any engineer dared make a suggestion we’d get a long lecture about staying in our lanes. Then when projects were late/wrong/failed or just missed the mark about what the company needed, they would do long post mortems to assign blame to different engineers for doing it wrong. …

Original discussionSurviving Burnout162 source comments · at import
4

What was this responding to?

Parent context · original excerpt

BR
bruce511HN

>> caring about the results of our actions but having no meaningful control over those outcomes This really dies sum it up in a useful generic way. Ultimately the balance of this sentence will differ from context to context, but the equation ultimately has to balance. Put another way, if you care a lot, but have no agency, then ultimately you will be frustrated. If you care a lot, but have no resources, then again, you get frustrated. Burnout is just the moment whe you stop fruitlessly caring. But you -want- to care (about something) so not-caring leads to depression. Matching your care to resources available is a good start. Make sure you care about something that can be materially affected by your resources. Feeling under-resourced is a sign that those allocating the resources have different goals to you. If your care exceeds your agency in resources product direction, code quality, th…

Full original

Community replies 0

No community replies yet. Add your perspective.

Replies from the source 4

Direct replies available in this import. Original-language excerpts.

SC
scrupleHN

Completely spot on from my personal experience. FWIW, I have seen this in every startup I've joined.

Full original
OR
ornornorHN

This is pretty much everywhere I’ve worked at in my 10 years career so far. I honestly don’t know what to do about it. It seems hopeless and I’ve been avoiding going back to work for the last 18 months. I also wonder if there is something wrong with me because everyone else seems to cope with it somehow and keep on working. I’ve thought about starting my own business but it’s too much hard work which I don’t think I can pull off. The idea of going back to employee work makes me feel like shit because I’ll end up in the same environment (since 99% of companies work this way) and I don’t want to go through yet another burnout. Would love to hear about how others have overcome this.

Full original
CO
cookiepersonHN

You described the symptoms of psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists in a single sentence. Research these personality disorders. It will bring you peace and explain the majority of malfunctions in the world. Specifically look into the sociopath apathy empath triad.

Full original
ST
steveBK123HN

Yeah my last place was like this, and all the non-engineers sucked at their jobs leaving engineers to pick up the slack on everything from project planning to sprint planning, to engaging with users, gathering requirements, prioritizing tasks, etc. This despite having an entire product team who was making all sorts of insane non-product decisions (technologies, programming languages, binary storage formats, vendors to outsource to, etc). The product team was somehow too busy to make it to any meetings with tech leads & devs, despite seemingly not talking to users either since we were left doing so. We'd have 10hrs/sprint of planning meetings, and our product guy would show up for 30 minutes of one meeting. Unbelievable stuff.

Full original
Continue on Hacker News

Respect different perspectives. Share concrete experiences.

Sign in to post, reply, repost, and quote.