<story><title>Employee burnout is becoming a huge problem in the American workforce</title><url>https://qz.com/932813/employee-burnout-is-becoming-a-huge-problem-in-the-american-workforce/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ashark</author><text>&amp;gt; Even for tech workers, the novelty has worn off,&lt;p&gt;Watching most of what you build—which often wasn&amp;#x27;t exciting or very important-seeming to begin with—be discarded in short order, having benefitted few (&lt;i&gt;i.e.&lt;/i&gt; not enough to justify the effort) or no people, after all kinds of false or semi-real urgency to get it done, year after year after year, will do that. It&amp;#x27;s a testament to how much money is sloshing around that we get paid so much to spend huge amounts of time building soon-to-be digital garbage, I guess.&lt;p&gt;It feels like there&amp;#x27;s an exceptionally stupid monkey smashing shapes against one of those children&amp;#x27;s shape-in-the-correct-hole puzzles, but larger, extending forever into the distance, trying to get some of them to fit, which they mostly don&amp;#x27;t because the monkey&amp;#x27;s so damn stupid. And we&amp;#x27;re the shapes.</text></item><item><author>theothermkn</author><text>I wouldn&amp;#x27;t doubt overwork as a factor, but the elephant in the room is meaninglessness. Work, like God, is dead. Even for tech workers, the novelty has worn off, and people pretty much realize that the &lt;i&gt;core&lt;/i&gt; feature of their jobs is their own economic exploitation.&lt;p&gt;Burnout, like all pain, may be a feature.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>soulnothing</author><text>This I feel like it&amp;#x27;s killing my career. A majority of the contracts I start are canned within a few weeks of me joining. Then they literally give me janitorial work. Can&amp;#x27;t leave, because you jump around to much. Can&amp;#x27;t say the job was canned, you should have chosen better. I haven&amp;#x27;t had a job where stuff was used for 6 years.&lt;p&gt;The exception being a contracting gig. Where I wrote everything they canned me, outsourced it overseas. Then several months later asked me to come back, because the outsourcing firm only knew an older programming language.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s burn out just going to work every day. I&amp;#x27;m either cleaning up others messes. Or interfacing with vendors. I&amp;#x27;m totally aware that work will be tedium four out of the five days. I just want one freaking day, where I can stretch my mind, and actually do something useful. I have a world burning in my head I want to write. Several projects I want to program, and learn. Yet I&amp;#x27;m so burnt out by work end.&lt;p&gt;My work feels like a syndicate show at this point. I have been doing primarily the same thing for 5 years. I&amp;#x27;ve constantly tried to buck this and get into some other area. But a personal mistake has ensured I constantly need money, and can&amp;#x27;t take the time to move properly.</text></comment>
<story><title>Employee burnout is becoming a huge problem in the American workforce</title><url>https://qz.com/932813/employee-burnout-is-becoming-a-huge-problem-in-the-american-workforce/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ashark</author><text>&amp;gt; Even for tech workers, the novelty has worn off,&lt;p&gt;Watching most of what you build—which often wasn&amp;#x27;t exciting or very important-seeming to begin with—be discarded in short order, having benefitted few (&lt;i&gt;i.e.&lt;/i&gt; not enough to justify the effort) or no people, after all kinds of false or semi-real urgency to get it done, year after year after year, will do that. It&amp;#x27;s a testament to how much money is sloshing around that we get paid so much to spend huge amounts of time building soon-to-be digital garbage, I guess.&lt;p&gt;It feels like there&amp;#x27;s an exceptionally stupid monkey smashing shapes against one of those children&amp;#x27;s shape-in-the-correct-hole puzzles, but larger, extending forever into the distance, trying to get some of them to fit, which they mostly don&amp;#x27;t because the monkey&amp;#x27;s so damn stupid. And we&amp;#x27;re the shapes.</text></item><item><author>theothermkn</author><text>I wouldn&amp;#x27;t doubt overwork as a factor, but the elephant in the room is meaninglessness. Work, like God, is dead. Even for tech workers, the novelty has worn off, and people pretty much realize that the &lt;i&gt;core&lt;/i&gt; feature of their jobs is their own economic exploitation.&lt;p&gt;Burnout, like all pain, may be a feature.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>roymurdock</author><text>The monkey image is a great analogy for what economists are currently studying as the &amp;quot;productivity puzzle&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Low to zero productivity growth is also why our unemployment rate in the US is amazingly low (seemingly a tight labor market), but why real median income is stagnant.</text></comment>