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Burnout can happen for any number of reasons. Being overworked is a common one, but that's just one variation on a bad work environment burning you out. You can even get burnout on a perfectly well managed team full of people you enjoy working with if you just get tired of working on the same thing for years. There's not a list of things that qualify for burnout.
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Feb 23, 2017 16:32
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Arachnamus posted:Sounds like you're bored but comfortable. That's a sticky tar trap combination because comfortable means easy, but easy means you're not learning. I'd say that's pretty accurate. Nothing is really challenging and I rarely get to "make" anything or learn anything new. The most challenging tasks aren't challenging because they are complex or difficult problems to solve, but because they are long and tedious. At times I find my self deliberately over-engineering solutions to mundane problems to try to make the work interesting. More complex and interesting custom development has actually been turned down because we are "too busy" working on these pre-built systems. Trying to get more interesting work, I created a demo of what could be made custom in lieu of buying a pre-built product for an upcoming project. They liked the idea and hired an outside consulting firm to do the development instead of utilizing the developers they already have. Apparently I'll get to "own" the product afterwards, but in my mind that's only slightly better than if they had just bought some pre-built product for it. It might even end up being worse depending on how the project itself goes. Arachnamus posted:Which would you prefer, easy OK money for a few years until the ship sinks, or jump ship now for more challenging climes but more risk? The easy okay money would in the short term, but I feel like I'd really be sacrificing my long-term career if I wanted to be doing development. I really don't want to stagnate my career in the interest of avoiding all risk. I almost want to go to my manager with "Hey, this isn't the kind of development I want to be doing. Is there anything else we could be doing?", but I've already done that before, in less formal ways. I'm worried that a more clear approach would starting a ticking clock on "Oh we need to replace wilderthanmild before he leaves on his own." without accomplishing anything. wilderthanmild fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Feb 23, 2017 |
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Feb 23, 2017 17:17
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wilderthanmild posted:I'd say that's pretty accurate. Nothing is really challenging and I rarely get to "make" anything or learn anything new. The most challenging tasks aren't challenging because they are complex or difficult problems to solve, but because they are long and tedious. At times I find my self deliberately over-engineering solutions to mundane problems to try to make the work interesting. It sounds like your company isn't really interested in doing the kind of development you want to be doing and you aren't really gaining skills that are going to translate into another company doing stuff you want to do, so you should probably start looking for a better job
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Feb 23, 2017 17:26
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wilderthanmild posted:I still find the work boring and find my skills under utilized This alone would be enough to motivate me to find a position somewhere else. If career growth has stagnated, it's time to move on. But that's just me 
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Feb 23, 2017 17:33
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Jose Valasquez posted:It sounds like your company isn't really interested in doing the kind of development you want to be doing and you aren't really gaining skills that are going to translate into another company doing stuff you want to do, so you should probably start looking for a better job ROFLburger posted:This alone would be enough to motivate me to find a position somewhere else. If career growth has stagnated, it's time to move on. But that's just me Yea reading the replies and re-reading my original post, I think there isn't much reason to think I should stay unless a sudden miraculous change happens. I'm going tidy up my resume and start job hunting.
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Feb 23, 2017 17:38
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Do people still maintain paper resumes anymore? I track my work history and accomplishments in LinkedIn and StackOverflow and if I need a PDF or something I just export one of those as a PDF.
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Feb 23, 2017 17:40
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Pollyanna posted:Do people still maintain paper resumes anymore? I track my work history and accomplishments in LinkedIn and StackOverflow and if I need a PDF or something I just export one of those as a PDF. Yes. Linked in is high level summary for me. Resume goes into specifics and is customized for the role being asked.
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Feb 23, 2017 17:43
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I mean, it's not paper, but yeah, I have a versioned LaTeX file that I dust off every few years.
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Feb 23, 2017 17:49
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It is still good practice to maintain a copy of your resume that doesn't look like poo poo on a printed page. I make it a habit to bring a few printed copies of the same resume that I sent to a company when I show up for an interview for a few reasons:
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Feb 23, 2017 17:49
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csammis posted:It's not an urban legend: sometimes the copy you sent to the company is mysteriously different when it makes it to the interviewer's hands. Thanks recruiters! I was pretty upset about this when a recruiter did it to me. It wasn't even just the "oh hide contact info so they have to go through us to make the hire" but rather them editing, rewording, and reformatting things. It didn't help that it was downright worse and harder to read than my actual resume.
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Feb 23, 2017 17:53
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That's one benefit of LaTeX -- the PDFs it outputs are harder for recruiters to gently caress with than the Word docs they want everyone to use.
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Feb 23, 2017 18:14
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csammis posted:It's not an urban legend: sometimes the copy you sent to the company is mysteriously different when it makes it to the interviewer's hands. Thanks recruiters!
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Feb 23, 2017 18:35
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Keep your resume as XML and write an XSLT for each output type you need. I unironically want to do this but haven't made the time yet.
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Feb 23, 2017 18:37
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I have a git repo of my resumes I output and I have Pandoc output a Word doc for the people that will probably copy-paste my stuff elsewhere and PDFs otherwise. But honestly, it's not really as important as my github contributions, blog posts, and other publications for companies that I actually want to work for.
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Feb 23, 2017 18:39
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Well, poo poo. I should up my game.
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Feb 23, 2017 19:01
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:That's one benefit of LaTeX -- the PDFs it outputs are harder for recruiters to gently caress with than the Word docs they want everyone to use. My website is my CV but I maintain a tidy print CSS style for if someone prints it or saves to PDF, but I've had recruiters just ctrl+a ctrl+c ctrl+p into a blank word doc and I've shown up to interviews to see my careful (skills relevant!) layout work dumped into giant untidy paragraphs. wilderthanmild posted:Yea reading the replies and re-reading my original post, I think there isn't much reason to think I should stay unless a sudden miraculous change happens. I'm going tidy up my resume and start job hunting. Yay! Once that's underway there'd also be no reason not to sit down with your boss and lay out what they'd need to do to keep you i.e. get you some worthwhile work within a reasonable space of time. Pollyanna posted:I'll also admit, I've been pulling some less-than-40 hour days recently. Often by 4, I'm totally brain drained and I often call it a day there cause I'm just not productive at that point. It feels like burnout, but I was under the impression that burnout was due to being overworked, and the situation here is more environmental in nature. Can burnout happen because of a bad environment? See this post in this very thread which helped me out quite a lot some years ago: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3607482&pagenumber=6&perpage=40#post433598225 It's not always burnout.
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Feb 23, 2017 19:02
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csammis posted:It is still good practice to maintain a copy of your resume that doesn't look like poo poo on a printed page. I make it a habit to bring a few printed copies of the same resume that I sent to a company when I show up for an interview for a few reasons:
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Feb 23, 2017 19:20
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Pollyanna posted:I'll also admit, I've been pulling some less-than-40 hour days recently. Often by 4, I'm totally brain drained and I often call it a day there cause I'm just not productive at that point. I personally feel that this is pretty normal. (Some/Most) Programming is very mentally taxing, and it's really difficult to keep your brain going at that level for 8+ hours. I'd say on average, I'm good for about 5-6 hours of hard core coding (hopefully with a break in there), and then I operate at a lower level. This time can be used to send/reply to emails, do some mindless cleanup or refactoring, or other admin tasks. I may have days where I finally look at the clock and realize I've been headsdown for 8-10 hours coding, but those are pretty rare. As for resumes, my LinkedIn mirrors my paper copy almost exactly. I also have a HTML and PDF (without contact info) copies available on my simple website, which should be easy to find by my name. I'm not totally cool with having all of that information out there for anyone to find, but I consider it worth it to allow prospective employers to easily find and research me (even if they came from a recruiter.)
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Feb 23, 2017 19:21
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Pollyanna posted:Do people still maintain paper resumes anymore? I track my work history and accomplishments in LinkedIn and StackOverflow and if I need a PDF or something I just export one of those as a PDF. Sometimes a place will specifically ask for one or print the document you send them. It's best to have whatever formats available the place wants and to have one that looks good if printed. It shows foresight as well. That and having relevant links as necessary. Some places won't even glance at your linked in while others won't bother looking at anything else. The right answer is whatever the place asks for.
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Feb 23, 2017 19:29
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Pollyanna posted:I'll admit, I've never gotten into the larger community of professional developers past SA. Part of it is not knowing where to start. How good are weekly meetups and working groups for this kind of thing (networking, career advice, etc.)? If I join a Ruby, Clojure, or Elixir meetup, will that work, or should I look forward something more general? What do people do to bolster their careers? I don't go to many meetings about programming languages, actually none. Usually I go to meetings about Agile and talk with others about how they run their agile teams, how they point, etc. since I have no agile experience outside of my company. It's helped a lot with setting expectations with the product owners as well as dealing with other team members. Sadly, I keep getting ignored when I mention that 12 people is way too many (including 5 loving product people to 3 devs and 1 QA) and it seriously hampers actually getting any grooming and planning done in an efficient way.
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Feb 23, 2017 20:53
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If you are salaried and expected to work overtime, then you should subtract that overtime on the days you aren't working. Make me work 60 hours one week? Next week I work 20.
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Feb 24, 2017 03:19
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ratbert90 posted:If you are salaried and expected to work overtime, then you should subtract that overtime on the days you aren't working. This is one way to look at it. The other is that your salary is higher then it would otherwise be to compensate you for those extra hours. If this is an issue for you, then it's something you should definitely get clarity on when you're hired because being salaried does not mean you work only 40 hours a week. It's not entirely relevant, but of the jobs I can think of that make the equivalent to better paid software engineers pretty much all of them are expected to work overtime with the two most common examples would be big law lawyers and doctors.
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Feb 24, 2017 03:32
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I think the extreme demand for the services these professions provide also have something to do with the pay, along with the difficulty of attaining even basic competency. Agree that the hours are something you should try to get clarity on ahead of time, though. Best to approach this delicately: "What's a typical work day like for you? When was the last time you took a vacation?" See if you can get a picture of the overall work/life balance, rather than just asking straight out if you'll be required to work more than 40 hours. I'm a huge advocate for changing the culture surrounding work but an interview is not the time to plant that flag.
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Feb 24, 2017 08:59
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asur posted:This is one way to look at it. The other is that your salary is higher then it would otherwise be to compensate you for those extra hours. If this is an issue for you, then it's something you should definitely get clarity on when you're hired because being salaried does not mean you work only 40 hours a week. It's not entirely relevant, but of the jobs I can think of that make the equivalent to better paid software engineers pretty much all of them are expected to work overtime with the two most common examples would be big law lawyers and doctors. They wouldn't pay so much if they couldn't extract significantly more value from your work so I'm not putting in overtime on a regular basis out of gratitude.
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Feb 24, 2017 14:32
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Some workplaces have severe imbalances and variance across teams and individuals for work-life balance and the question starts to become less meaningful in an interview situation the bigger the company. What I really look for are signs that my interviewers are super busy and stressed out, what people in the office are doing when they don't notice me, and probing questions about the scope and ambition of work being that I'd be demanded for. A lot of this stuff is something you don't know how to assess until you've worked in different kinds of code gulags.
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Feb 24, 2017 14:59
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asur posted:This is one way to look at it. The other is that your salary is higher then it would otherwise be to compensate you for those extra hours. If this is an issue for you, then it's something you should definitely get clarity on when you're hired because being salaried does not mean you work only 40 hours a week. It's not entirely relevant, but of the jobs I can think of that make the equivalent to better-paid software engineers pretty much all of them are expected to work overtime with the two most common examples would be big law lawyers and doctors. The higher you are paid the more your time is worth. If they want me to work 20 extra hours that week, they sure as hell aren't going to pay me an extra 1200$.
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Feb 24, 2017 15:21
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asur posted:This is one way to look at it. The other is that your salary is higher then it would otherwise be to compensate you for those extra hours. Every time I change jobs, my salary goes up, my paid time off goes up, and my work week gets slightly shorter. The shittiest jobs were the ones I worked hardest at!
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Feb 24, 2017 15:38
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You just described capitalism lol I will do my role and job and if I'm needed more at crunch time I will say "sure I'll do the work but I'm going to work from home a lot and slack a bit after we roll out" and if that's not okay then it becomes an issue. It never has. That said I'm looking to go 80-100% remote in my next job.
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Feb 24, 2017 16:22
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The thing about crunch time is that, at least for me, 40 hours is already pushing how much I can put in at work before I start doing negative work. More time in the office is only going to make things worse. I guess this isn't a problem when you have more mechanical work to do that just needs to be chewed through and has a low potential for bugs, but with even moderately complicated work, I find that if I try to push my work hours beyond what I'm comfortable with, I end up creating bugs that take more time to fix than what was "saved" by my spending the extra time on the job.
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Feb 24, 2017 16:28
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:The thing about crunch time is that, at least for me, 40 hours is already pushing how much I can put in at work before I start doing negative work. More time in the office is only going to make things worse. I guess this isn't a problem when you have more mechanical work to do that just needs to be chewed through and has a low potential for bugs, but with even moderately complicated work, I find that if I try to push my work hours beyond what I'm comfortable with, I end up creating bugs that take more time to fix than what was "saved" by my spending the extra time on the job. That's been true for me too. I can work more than 40 hours but the productivity will not be higher so it's mostly just for the show. Also, there's no such thing as what you call "being exempt" here, except for management. Overtime has to be paid or put into a bank.
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Feb 24, 2017 19:26
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AskYourself posted:That's been true for me too. I can work more than 40 hours but the productivity will not be higher so it's mostly just for the show. https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17e_computer.htm quote:The FLSA requires that most employees in the United States be paid at least the Federal minimum wage for all hours worked and overtime pay at time and one-half the regular rate of pay for all hours worked over 40 hours in a workweek.
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Feb 24, 2017 21:54
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Ghost of Reagan Past posted:No, there's a classification of "exempt" and "nonexempt", which means that you aren't guaranteed overtime pay. America! Well that's messed up. Is there anything in place to prevent abuse ? I gotta say, I really like the land of the Tim Horton 
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Feb 24, 2017 22:51
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IT professionals aren't exempt in Ontario (can't speak for the rest of Canada) either.
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Feb 24, 2017 23:14
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AskYourself posted:Well that's messed up. Is there anything in place to prevent abuse ? Hahahah, is there anything in place to prevent abuse... Here in Eagleland, the abuse is a perk for owners and management. The only thing that can practically prevent it is a tech leader or manager who knows how to work set expectations for the higher ups and prevent crunch time in the first place, or a development team that refuses to do crunch as a whole. Both of those require a certain amount of self confidence and strength of will, which, if possessed by a person almost precludes them from working with computers in the first place.
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Feb 25, 2017 06:28
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Not 100%. There are those tests mentioned as EA learned the hard way a few years ago. Some jr engineers and artists were classified as exempt but were being directed too closely and were found in court to not be eligibilie for exempt status. Queue a huge overtime pay and penalties.
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Feb 25, 2017 06:37
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Over time, places that ask for a lot of overtime or otherwise have abusive practices get a bad reputation and will have trouble attracting quality talent. It's not immediate and doesn't provide recompense directly to the people who suffer by those practices, but there are long-term economic costs to it.
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Feb 25, 2017 07:55
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fantastic in plastic posted:Over time, places that ask for a lot of overtime or otherwise have abusive practices get a bad reputation and will have trouble attracting quality talent. It's not immediate and doesn't provide recompense directly to the people who suffer by those practices, but there are long-term economic costs to it. So the invisible hand then, I believe as much as in the trickle down economics. Because these things don't really work IMHO, except in making people believe someone else or something else will save them if they let the rich get richer.
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Feb 25, 2017 14:08
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AskYourself posted:So the invisible hand then, I believe as much as in the trickle down economics. This stuff works best when workers can easily find a new job, which is pretty much true right now for us.
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Feb 25, 2017 14:14
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:The thing about crunch time is that, at least for me, 40 hours is already pushing how much I can put in at work before I start doing negative work. More time in the office is only going to make things worse. I guess this isn't a problem when you have more mechanical work to do that just needs to be chewed through and has a low potential for bugs, but with even moderately complicated work, I find that if I try to push my work hours beyond what I'm comfortable with, I end up creating bugs that take more time to fix than what was "saved" by my spending the extra time on the job. I've got the same problem. I try to make up for it by never putting work down when I'm on a roll just because it's quittin' time or whatever. Of course, when it's my boss saying "stop working and come drink with us" the plan doesn't work.
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Feb 25, 2017 17:00
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raminasi posted:I've got the same problem. I try to make up for it by never putting work down when I'm on a roll just because it's quittin' time or whatever. Of course, when it's my boss saying "stop working and come drink with us" the plan doesn't work. I try to keep it around 35 hours a week, any more than that and my productivity plummets. In exchange I do crunch time and don't worry about having to deal with demanding extra time off. That's the way salary is supposed to be. Also I take the kids to appointments and take a hour lunch to go to the gym. A salaried employee SHOULD be able to do those things without the company complaining in exchange for efficient and quality work. If you are salaried and your company demands 40 hours a week, no overtime, and expects you to handle crunch time without giving back you have a bad company.
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Feb 25, 2017 17:49
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