I have never had a problem about the volume or difficulty of work in any job I've ever had. In fact, some of my favorite memories of work have been sprints to finish something, whether in software, retail/distribution, or food service. I take great pride in delivering, sometimes with compromised quality, but always on time and budget. I imagine many here feel the same way.

My internal struggle is the constant questioning of whether or not I should even put up with illogical bullshit. I have no doubt that hard work, long hours, complex work, and difficult customers are occasionally part of my world. But every day, in my morning exercise when I would prefer focusing on the work of the day, I always find my mind drifting into anger over unnecessary bullshit like:

  - working for unethical people
  - watching others line their pockets while I work
  - choosing what's best for the company vs. the customer
  - busting my ass while others sit and watch
  - endless meetings about nothing
  - watching great stuff I built being scrapped by idiots
  - watching horrible decisions made by those for their own benefit
  - witnessing the functional taking back seat to the political
  - dealing with managers who don't understand technology (and don't care to learn)
  - dealing with people who don't understand the business/industry and (don't care to learn)
  - horrible working conditions for workers while managers get luxury
  - constant work-prevention structure imposed by people who have never accomplished anything

My struggle continues. I only hope I have the foresight to take intervention before I ever become like OP.

Talking of morning exercises, Marcus Aurelius used to remind himself in the morning that he would be around exactly the kind of people you describe, but that they did not have the power to make him crazy if he is aware of their inevitability: http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.2.two.html (BTW: I only used this source because it seems to be public domain and available online, if you want to read translations of ancient texts, invest in a modern one that is more convenient to read.)

(1) Of course, if you start your own company, you will be dealing with things you can't control as well.

Edit: Replaced asterisks that made the text italics.

You are technically correct.

When you run your own company, the things that are "out of your control" don't feel that way, because at the end of the day, you decide how you want to act on them.

If a customer insists on butting his head in malevolent ways into a user experience I've created for their product because they think they know better, I have a few options. Of its an especially unruly customer, I have two: fire them or work with them. I will, in my mind, piece together the pros and cons of both, and will come to what I believe is the best decision. You are still deciding your fate and can live with the consequences because they're per your terms.

This is why, if I had a small team working on projects, every big decision would require unanimous vote. It's easy for someone to whine about having to work on something they don't believe in, but when you make them part of that decision process, and they consider the factors thoughtfully (like an owner), you give them that peace of mind of knowing they decided their own fate. They tend to come to the same conclusions you do, but aren't bothered by it because they're not doing it "only because you said so."

Employees have this freedom with their employers too, but not many realize it or are cowed by their personal circumstance. To compound this, one of the functions of (bad) management has been to keep them in the dark about their options outside of the company in case they get fed up with being shit on all the time.

Seeing millions of dollars poured in projects that go nowhere since they are executed by incompetent workers lead by machiavellian managers is horribly depressing.

I feel that a startup setting would be incredibly more efficient to do what we do. But of course it'd be difficult to fund it, unless it's operated as a charity or it's backed up by the gov't.

In the meanwhile I'm acting as a stoic and enjoying some tiny victories.

It's difficult to leak details and make an impact. Academia is really screwed up. 90% of what gets published is a blatant lie, but nobody seems to care. Most researchers live in a distorted reality.

Maybe bring up valid issues in email and once they go nowhere, make the emails public. You could potentially redact names, which would make it harder for them to attack you later...

Considering the goal is just to shape them up, perhaps you could fake or anonymously threaten a leak. Or for instance spread a rumor that you're being audited for this stuff. And if you see anyone shred anything, collect the pieces.

Or find a donor and don't "leak" anything specifically but get them calling for an audit.

With more specifics and an idea of how bad things are, we might be able to find something that would work.

I realize leaking is dangerous and burdensome for those who have to do it.

I think this comment distills the essence of the problem the which gives people so much trouble. If your perspective is that of a maker/hacker then good work (which should be rewarded) is to make great things, things please people and improve their lives, and perhaps profit the company. If your goal is maximising profit for the company, sometimes good ideas will need to be canned or replaced by bad ones the customer wants, sometimes work will need to be stopped after much effort was put in, sometimes politics will override technical considerations. If your goal is maximising profit for the individual at minimal cost, you want others to do the work while you get the rewards, and neither the business nor other workers, nor their pet projects, are your concern - more fool them if they take the company propaganda as truth, believe they are living in a meritocracy, and don't realise the realities of workplace politics. From the perpective of a manager who has climbed the greasy pole to luxury while workers suffer horrible working conditions, who is the idiot?

I would argue that classifying people as idiots is not useful and obscures the real differences in outlook which produce this sort of friction. There are many other perspectives to work (not tied to specific roles like manager or programmer I hasten to add), and holding them does not make people idiots, in fact many others might view someone slaving away for a company in the misapprehension that they are improving the world as an idiot; both would be wrong. The best way to deal with this IMHO is to recognise that workplaces have a culture, which contains and controls many different aspirations, and if you find this culture toxic, you should change job if at all possible - it is very hard to change a company culture or the perspectives of other workers on their work. Also, work should not be your only passion if you want to remain sane.

Absolutely, those are caricatures which would not fully apply to any person or any role - real successful companies probably have a balance of different types in them across a broad spectrum of attitudes to work, profit versus excellence, etc....

I've had a few jobs in my lifetime that left me with the feelings you posted here... The beatings will continue until morale improves.

These points: - working for unethical people - busting my ass while others sit and watch - watching horrible decisions made by those for their own benefit

were ultimately the biggest reasons I've left jobs.

In one place I worked, we created software for the financial industry and sold it in regions, like such-and-such county or city. Then our office setup one of our systems and competed under the table with the regional customers around us.

Scummy. Ultimately, I left over this issue and it is still my favorite job I've had or will ever have. All because one guy got greedy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias

Otherwise, if I am ever successful, Microsoft will clone my business. I think it has happened to almost all their partners.

Unless they are bought by Microsoft, like the Sysinternals guys. That's the only good exit.

I think the circumstances and frustration go beyond the description in this Dilbert cartoon, but it has never left my mind since I saw it:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-06-02/

Excerpt: "Wow! They're both better than my current job!"

I'm sure if I put you on a 120 hour week for a few months you'd change your opinion about that, even if you were to ship something at the end of it.

I don't think it's a good idea nor particularly ethical given the situation under discussion to boast about how you've never had a problem with overwork.

Is that a real project you worked on?

If so, and if it happened a couple years ago in Colorado -- I was one of your coworkers.

And I left just a couple weeks after the rest of you guys.

That was some crazy shit but in the end we did ship. And on time, even.

But I can't even pass that freeway exit any more without feeling a sense of dread.

The point is that edw's comment on hours sits ill-at-ease with the rest of his post. As if overwork isn't a MAJOR factor in burnout.

I don't disagree with his other points, rather we mustn't pretend like working ludicrous hours isn't bad for you.

And actually I remember it as 110 hour weeks (though it's possible that I was the slacker of the bunch).

Yeah, we had something like 3 months of working 15 to 18 hours per day, 7 days per week.

Totally possible.

Totally stupid.

I guess.

I live in the US, where what is or is not legal plays second fiddle to what is or is not good for shareholders.

I've heard that working hours for truckers is very strict in Europe but not as strict in north america. I wonder how that relates across other industries. For truckers it's mostly for physical safety, but cognitive stress can be just as dangerous.

Indeed, whatever your occupation you will balance imperfect choices of what you will do, who you will work with, and the outcome of your efforts. Humility and acceptance of your limits go far in preserving sanity, whether you lead a multibillion dollar corporation, write software with a team, or sweep the floors alone after hours. You don't have total control, but that doesn't mean you don't have some control; do what you can (sometimes that means doing your job well, and sometimes that means leaving your job for another).

Always consider you have imperfect information before coming to this verdict.

As developer sometimes we think we know whats going on but really don't.

As a new startup founder I find myself making tons of what I would previously classify as horrible decisions just because I have much more information about what is going on.

The decisions you make change once you have to consider cash, timelines, resource availability and potential sales.

"watching horrible decisions made by [others] for their own benefit"

I think the answer lies in how you direct that feeling - either as hate for your job; or to drive a passion to control your own destiny by getting out and doing something yourself.

It's not that simple. Seriously, people who work for me fight with me about exactly the same things I fought with my boss about back when I was really frustrated by working for other people. Working for yourself does not save you from dealing with these problems. It makes you see these problems from another angle, sure, but that doesn't always help.

there are so many compromises you have to make when you own the company, too. I mean, it's different, in that you own it, and ultimately, you have lines you won't cross even if it destroys the company; but god damn it's harder when you can't just walk. (I mean, some people feel like they can't walk away from their jobs. I /never/ felt that way until I had my own company, with customers and contracts. Right now? I can't walk, not without corporate and personal bankruptcy. There's no serious debt, but leases act exactly like debt when you stop paying them; I'm on the hook for leases that total well north of a third of a million in datacenter space alone... of course, that's payable over the next five years or so.) But yeah. I remember when I could decide I was tired of my job, and just go get another one. That was nice.

I mean, I talk a lot about the waste that salespeople are; the value subtracted by this negotiation process... that was actually a large part of the reason I went into business myself. It was clearly an irrational reason, as where I stand now, I spend a lot of time playing emotional games to see who gets the surplus value out of a deal, as the asking prices are set for companies that have margins at least an order of magnitude better than mine. And I still think it's a waste... but I'm doing it anyhow, because otherwise I can't afford jack. I mean, seriously, it is not unusual for the final price to be 20% of the asking price. what the hell?

The real problem is that negotiation is supposed to find the things that are important to me that are not important to you, and vis-a-vis. You want to work out a deal where both parties benefit maximally, by changing the deal. (this, actually, I think is why small businesses can often compete with businesses that are much larger with giant economies of scale. I can negotiate (in the positive way) with an employee "I can't give you as much as that other company, but I can let you set your own hours and work from home." - or if the employee wants something else, I can change my company around to accommodate that in ways a large company could not.)

Problem is? that is /hard/ - the people negotiating, first, have to understand the product, and generally speaking, salesmen selling technical stuff do not. Then, they have to have the authority to change the deal in non-standard ways (which I understand is hard because it means that five years from now, you've gotta keep supporting that one-off configuration. I'm moving co-lo, and all the one-off deals I made are now coming back to bite me in the ass. And I'm small enough that it can still all mostly be in my head.) It's way easier to make the "what you get" standard, then just figure out what the surplus value is in dollars, and play emotional games to see who gets the lions share of that surplus value.

Worse, now /you/ are the guy that's gotta kill the project that your employee worked so hard on, because /you/ planned poorly. I mean, at least you can honestly take responsibility for it and apologize, but meh. Now you are the one taking advantage of that hard worker who never really gets all that much extra money. (not having a lot of money is a good excuse here, and yeah, a lot of people want recognition as much as they want money... but even that is hard to do correctly.) Now /you/ are the guy that has to put the kibosh on a promising new hire because your supplier decided to increase prices, or your revenue took a dive.

It's easy to say 'I can do better' - actually doing better? harder than it looks. A lot harder, certainly, than just switching jobs.

Problem with me is, I'm unable to do that. I DO enjoy the work I do, I DO recognize the value that I am bringing to the company/others, and I AM frustrated at people who insist on a work-prevention structure, but I just cannot bring myself to push things off my own plate.

I see the people who stand around talking about useless miscellaneous happenings while everyone else is sitting/working. I see the people who (even in non-managerial roles), take the fruits of my effort, and wave it high in the air "oh look, I'm such a genius! Look at what I did!". I see those same people treat me like crap simply because I'm actually doing work and not talking about how I lost $500 playing online poker yesterday, or how his iPhone app made 5 bucks this month. I'm see those same people make racist or sexist remarks as a joke, 5 feet away from the subjects of their jokes. I'm not the "in" crowd, I'm just there to produce results and value so they can show it off, get promoted, and look back down on me and sneer.

I also see that one other programmer on the other corner, working just like me, and being treated no differently.

I'm a very patient and calm person, but seeing how much anger I have pent up, I can only extend a little of my remaining empathy and sense that, that one other programmer feels very much the same.

Is there any solution to this?

I was going to quit the software business entirely, but a chance meeting led to finding someone who actually cared and wanted to make a difference, as well as being positioned to do so. And we ended up starting Akvo.org, and now all is a hell of a lot better.

I think I've learned to work through this brand of bullshit without being consumed by it, but I've earned myself a pair of golden shackles in the process.

My recent focus has been devising an escape route. I believe it starts with recognizing what's really important in life and learning to want less. I'm not sure where it ends, but it's hard to imagine escaping most of the bullshit while working for anyone else.

What do you suppose we do?

For the long-term, here's the financial structure for the solution that I see: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macle... . Essentially, I think VC-istan and MegaCorps are both dead ends when it comes to genuine technical excellence (which weird people like us care about). I think it's time to have a serious conversation about financing a fleet of mid-growth K-strategist startups instead of these red-ocean, r-strategist, get-big-or-die marketing gambits.

Here's an insane thought that I had that just might work. Find a Midwestern city that has $25 million to blow on becoming a top technology hub and set up an Autonomy Fund. (I'll do the "grunt work" of screening for talent; if this idea has legs I'd drop everything to implement it.) 100 top-notch programmers, $125k per year (out of which their resource/AWS costs come, so no one's living high on the hog), and 2 years. First, these companies are designed to become profitable, not to exit, so compensation is profit-sharing, not the joke equity offered by VC-istan. The city that funds this takes a 37.5% profit-share of whatever they build (it's valuating their work at $333k per year, which is lower than a VC valuation, but the terms are better.) If it works, then add time to the schedule (i.e. more years of life and more startups) and possibly more engineers. This is like Y Combinator, but without the feeder-into-VC dynamic; it's to build real businesses that generating lasting value both to a geographical area and to technology itself.

I seriously think that Autonomy Funds are going to be big in the next 10 years-- VC-istan is essentially a shitty implementation of an Autonomy Fund, except with selection based on connections rather than technical ability-- but there are some obvious problems (moral hazard, principal-agent issues) that need to be solved.

That really, really resonated! Now for a counterpoint. When I read that remark, I recalled reading a recent interview of Groupon's COO and I quote this para:

In 2007, he started Global Scholar to “help teachers give differentiated education to kids using technology. It was a fantastic experience. I raised $50 (INR 2,698.63) million in the toughest economy since the Depression. In 30 months, I gave four times returns to my investors and then sold the company in 2010-11.” On why he did so, he quips, “The moment you start a company, it is for sale… at the right price. You can’t have emotions…” (emphasis mine)

Now tell me, just how exactly are you even going to combat deeply entrenched mindsets like those, which also happen foster the usual confirmation and survivor bias dreams in most, if not all aspiring "wantapreneurs"?

Michael, I really commend your insight into the problem, but "you have an uphill struggle ahead of you" might be the understatement of the year.

EDIT: formatting and word rearrangements and deleted some line that might be misconstrued!

EDIT 2: Sigh. I really wish, that when people downvote something they don't agree with, they take a moment to tell why.

I don't think selling a company is a bad thing. I think building a company with the idea in mind that one must sell (because one's backers will flip out if there isn't a sale) is bad.

So they're closing the circle and turning it into a revolving door for an incestuous aristocracy where the amount of value you capture is a function of who you know and who owes you a favor instead of being a function of how much value you actually create.

How do you stop any market from getting taken over by psychopaths who want to turn it into an incest-fest? This is also a problem in every other industry ever, and also in government. Is there a such thing as a corruption-repellent, paychopath-kryptonite system, and if so, what is it?

I suggest replacing these useless leeches with open source software.

I believe that most administrative tasks in large organizations are by now routine. For instance, there is absolutely zero invention in the insurance case processing industry : get claimee's documents, validate them and check contract's term. The only thing managers do is add useless overhead that justifies their presence and aimlessly complexify software that could be written once for the next 50 years at least.

With good open-source case management software, any organization can use it readily; no need for clueless suits to come in and pretend they analyze it because they can't; no need for them to demand costly and dangerous changes without any justification (other than the inept rules they created in the first place).

There is no need for the bums any more : just use free software that will readily organize your service.

Yes. Make the goal of your organisation a social good, and not making money.

I doubt it. I think we have to just keep reinventing. There's no system we can set up and have it run on its own.

I like the way the Scandinavians think: they hybridize between the socialist welfare state and a capitalistic market for innovation in a way we could stand to learn from.

But that's not what the US Constitution is, either. It was a legal framework and social contract that set up an elaborate system of checks and balances to prevent psychopaths from amassing too much political power. The democracy still running on that framework is a living, evolving thing, that has struggled to adapt with changing times, but it's done a pretty good job of keeping the psychos out of supreme ruling power (or at least keeping any one particular psycho from holding onto it very long) since 1787.

Meanwhile in the corporate world, we don't have that. Most private organizations are not even remotely democratic in nature. I think that's the core essence of what needs to change. And I think that's sort of what you're getting at by advocating open allocation and profit sharing.

Either that, or we need to at least strengthen the welfare state enough to decouple employment from basic livelihood, so that business failure doesn't impose the risk of homelessness/starvation, and most people aren't compelled to become MacLeod Losers, selling all their economic upside risk off in exchange for stable shelter, food, and medical care.

Neither do I see it as an inherently bad thing. There are valid and compelling reason to sell a company. E.g., There might be no "family successors". Your heart may no longer be in it. You might want to do other things. You might feel that someone else might take it to the next level better than yourself at the helm.... etc., etc..

>> building a company with the idea in mind that one must sell [........] is bad

And that's exactly what was being implied here.... "The moment you start a company, it is for sale… at the right price". And I have a problem with that one too!

Technocrats are Clueless who go the other way and turn into "Sociopath with a heart of gold" types. We actually believe that there's something worth fighting for. Since we tend to disadvantage our own employability and, therefore, our incomes, I believe this puts us into the "insane" category.

We are here to use technology and rationality to do what our Boomer forebears never did (they came too soon, and had a lack of insight into the real problem) which is end industrial authoritarianism. The '60s radicals are back, 45 years later, but we sling code and like markets (in a left-libertarian, hybridize-the-welfare-state-and-market-economy, sort of way).

I think your chaotic/lawful dichotomy is very real, but the good/evil dichotomy is really a matter of perspective, I don't think it exists in a concrete sense. Selfish/generous might be a closer representation of reality. What most of us perceive as "evil" is really just a person wielding power over others for selfish means.

There's a growing contingent of people using technology for generous rather than selfish means (yeah that's what "open source" is) and their philosophy is extending into social activism, but the industrial authoritarians have a big head start on us. They've been using technology as an expedient to their selfish purposes for a very long time already. (What's worse than being a MacLeodian Loser? Not even being one anymore because your former employer figured out how to make a machine do your job and had no reason to keep paying you. That describes 11 million Americans.)

I've always found it funny that generosity and sharing are "radical" and "activist" while greed and selfishness, even to the extreme, are now considered normal.

Thanks! So there's hope for me. Let me know when you are ready with the offices. I might pack my bags and book that ticket to join you. I hope the pay's sufficient ;-)

Who else do you see investing in an Autonomy Fund? Once the concept is proven, everyone will want in (and then there will be saturation + a bunch of crappy ones that don't vet and underperform) but I think the first ones are going to be very hard sells. My thought was that local governments' desires to build tech hubs might be used to justify the first Autonomy Fund.

I have several friends who have stayed there after graduating from NDSU to work as developers and engineers. If you make $50K/year you can easily live high on the hog. It also continues to keep a "small town" feel even though its grown a ton over the past ten years.

(a) Fargo's local government would be supportive of a technology Autonomy Fund, and...

(b) it would be possible to get a critical mass of engineers to live there?

Also, what's the gender balance? I'm married so I don't care, but I think we'd have the best odds in a town where it's at least 53:47 women.

1) Cheap airfare, international destination

2) A Party Town, probably helps the gender balance in one aspect, people would like to visit you.

3) No Income Tax

4) Still close to the SF Bay Area

5) Never cold, barely rains (good or bad depending on your preferences)

6) Really cheap real estate. Buy a townhouse for under $100k!

7) Many tech conventions are hosted there

8) Driving from one corner to another takes only 30 minutes according to google maps.

If we could set up Autonomy Funds we could reshape this industry.

For myself? Not a chance in hell. Sorry, I lived in Grand Forks for several years, and between the wind, extreme temperature differences, and flooding, you'd not be able to get me to live there. Sure, you could eventually offer enough money, but it wouldn't fit in this plan.

b) impossible

As I think about it, I don't want the governments footing the bill. I'd prefer to have at least 50% private investment (1:! matching?) as long as it's willing to stay passive enough not to interfere with engineer autonomy. Furthermore, over the long term, I'd want the ability of engineers to buy into the fund.

AFAIK, in software world the way to deal with this situation is to build a new level of infrastructure abstraction to deal with oppressive OSes (ie webapps) and let the old system slowly die out because its services aren't really needed.

Wonder what will become the political analog of the Web.

Oh wait, the Web will itself evolve to become oppressive, no new analogs needed.

Hegel would be happy, now that's dialectics in action.

I mean, if we're supposed to compete with the bio mass of India or China, we're gonna have a bad time...

Just because nation-states aren't the forefront of the most interesting stuff going on in the world today doesn't mean they don't perform a necessary function. The psychological problem with a functioning, well-done nation-state is that it fades into the background, and people just suddenly act surprised when they wake up one day after voting for neoliberals and find they've lost their rent subsidies, their child allowance, and half the coverage on their health insurance.

> The state is a political and geopolitical entity; the nation is a cultural and/or ethnic entity. The term "nation state" implies that the two geographically coincide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state

Though their are arguments to be made that China is a Han nation-state that simply forces everyone else to go along with what the ruling clique of Han want.

Silicon Valley's tolerance of failure is paper-thin and a "heads, I win; tails, you lose" mentality. It means, "it's morally okay for me to fail you". It justifies fast firing and VC caprice, but if you actually fail, you're every bit as ostracized like PNG garbage as in any other society.

On edw519's so-called "breakdown": The guy's been handed a shit sandwich by life-- when your IQ passes 150, conflicts with authority are inevitable; it comes to you looking for fights, and if you don't see it that way, then your IQ is not over 150 and probably not even 140 because every genuine 150+ I have ever met has experienced that-- and he keeps working his ass off and doing the right thing. Balls of Steel. You know how fucking hard it is to keep working your ass off when every signal coming your way is negative? How fucking brutal it can be to keep believing in yourself in a world where people avoid the sick, unlucky, or unpopular with no concern as to whether it's their fault?

I have a lot of respect for winter travelers like 'edw519 and Abraham Lincoln. Summer traveling is nice, but you only get a sense of the real landscape if you go when the trees are bare.

At 150, authority comes to you looking for fights (even if you don't do anything to it) because you make it insecure about its inherent illegitimacy and moral emptiness.

Actual 150s are pretty rare: about 43 per 100,000 people. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3.333+sigma

Your assertion is that people with high IQ (which we're taking your word for, as well as the accuracy of the tests that we're assuming they took and shared the results with you) actually had the government after them in numerous enough occasions to be statistically significant. We're further assuming that you're right in that this is generalizable beyond your sample set (which is how big?), and then that there's no sample bias going on that would make your observations irrelevant to most populations.

I don't see any reason to believe that what you've seen can actually be called representative. No, just because there isn't a study behind it doesn't mean it isn't true. But that also means you have no grounds beyond "experience and observation" to make your statement, and when you're giving basically no useful data on how you reached your conclusion, no rational person would call this a useful or valid generalization. A hypothesis worthy of testing, perhaps. But that's all it is.

The government? No, that's not what I'm talking about when I talk about authority. I'm talking about managerial authority.

That's why we were talking past each other.

Then the sky colour would be called "orange" and the blue-seer would be lying or misrepresenting the facts due to miscommunication, sickness (hallucinations), disease (colour blindness), drug use, etc.

I have a high IQ and have never had regular "fights" with competent authority figures (management, government officials / LE, etc). I'm also very libertarian and don't like working for others but when I do I don't have problems.

I also have good social skills so that probably plays a part too.

One skill that is NOT correlated with IQ is the ability to reflect honestly on your own motivations. (If anything, the smarter people are, the better they get at rationalising.) So here's a mirror:

- you have a problem with authority

- you have a high IQ

- you have a deep-seated need to feel that you're better than other people.

Not many people knew of his Twitter account, but I did. He would post crude remarks about the manager not listening to him and how he should be the manager, often using the initials of the manager when he insulted him to be careful and not be accused of slander I guess. I would often hear him in the office talking to himself, swearing under his breath and mashing his keyboard. You could tell it was getting to him. He was on-call 24/7 but apparently wasn't adequately paid the amount he should have been for someone who was expected to fix something at the drop of a hat.

One day he came in and sat at his desk refusing to do any work. He just sat there and then the manager confronted him and asked why he wasn't addressing his list of high priority tickets that he had and then the guy lost it. He didn't get violent, but he started yelling at the guy and the manager was a well-built guy (sorted of sounded and looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger) who I wouldn't even dare cross. After yelling he just walked out and never came back.

Of course my manager reported the incident to some higher-ups and then it was revealed a couple of days later he was in a mental hospital as he had a complete breakdown (he apparently drove himself there). I didn't know him that well, but I went and visited him after finding out where he was. He told me that it all built up; he was being blamed when things went wrong and weren't done on time and not being praised when things went right and were delivered within unrealistic time-frames. His girlfriend had also left him the day prior to the meltdown, he said she was unhappy because he was never home and when he was, he was always fixing something remotely or had to come in to fix something.

I have a feeling this kind of thing is a lot more common than we can imagine.

Which is to say, at some companies, playing office politics is your real job. "Work" is just a signal you can emit to show that you are willing to submit enough to not get fired.

If you can't talk to the CEO or CTO, if you're technical, on your first day physically at the company, that's a Bad Signal (tm).

It's a bit like martial arts. Being good at it is nice since you don't have to be afraid of being beaten up. If you have to fight someone every day however, there might be something wrong.

Actually, perhaps I need to preface all my advice with "in all due pragmatic cynicism." I've added it to four posts so far and people seem to react much better to them when I do.

I'm told life looks very different if you have done anything resembling settling down. But I haven't been there yet and my glasses have rose coloured lenses.

I have seen politics kill someone's work and I have seen a project launch by doing nothing but working away and submitting their end product to flabbergasted responses. But it's rarely so simple.

If you don't understand what's going on and blame politics, you are living in a foreign land and don't understand the language. If you understand and don't try to ensure your voice is heard and respected, you don't understand the customs. If you don't understand the language and customs, you're at the nations mercy.

But fundamentally if you view it as opposed to work you'll rarely succeed in the best outcome even if you do strike a balance.

I've been in situations where politicking allowed the company to pivot from an established, ineffective strategy to an new, better one.

> Get new job, jump in there really eger, do a good job.

> Face stupid political BS, eagerness disappears.

> Start looking for other jobs, then ultimately quit.

If you keep working hard in a toxic environment you're going to do yourself harm. If you care about doing good work, move company. Many will be content with just collecting a wage though.

As an aside, I'ved worked on a helpdesk and got through about 5-8 tickets a day while colleagues got through 40. Ultimately I was promoted because those 8 tickets were the ones everyone else was skipping because they didn't have a clue what to do. Neither did I, but once I figured it out I did. If your tickets regularly require on average 5 to 6 minutes work, then perhaps you should question the value of the work you're doing.

Exactly. Either leave or just coast by doing the necessary minimum and keep your stress buffers and brainpower for interesting personal stuff

You need only observe how many workplaces will let employees who are obviously sick with a cold/flu come in and work to understand how poorly most workplaces respond to an employee in trouble: They will not send someone home who is actively exposing coworkers to infectious diseases, so do you think they're going to notice if you're risking your health with stress? Sadly not.

So, as an employee, it's up to you: Pay attention to your stress level. If you aren't sleeping well, do something about it. If the stress is making you gain weight, do something about it. If you're having serious, serious problems, do something about it. You can't count on your employer to support you if shit hits the fan - even if it's their fault - because 99% of them won't. You have to be proactive.

You won't get promotions or raises for managing your own stress level and working reasonable hours, but you won't get promotions or raises for literally killing yourself either. So play it safe.

So we shouldn't say "it's just up to the employee", because that attitude creates its own culture, one where the employees work just enough to not get fired and the management accepts this attitude as network damage and routes work around it.

Administrations have an opportunity to choose what they're doing. Advising a startup-laden forum like HN to aspire to massively-multiplayer mediocrity might not be wise, because startups exist in a high-failure environment and must strive for passion and excellence. It's the right culture for very large corporations and for franchise restaurants, but it's the wrong culture for the deli down the corner.

Surprisingly, I don't think the solution must require "giving up control" as a developer-manager, though that will certainly help. If you look at these stories, there is a perverse sense of alienation from the company. Maybe this metaphor helps: the manager should be conducting an orchestra. The conductor doesn't have to give up control of the whole orchestra necessarily, but they do need to be aware that it's a bunch of individual people, and you need to communicate your vision of the music you're playing, and they need to feel the same vision and work with you to express it. You also need to forgive errors in performance rather than stop the orchestra for every little thing, and you need to let the audience applaud everyone when success finally happens, and everyone needs to hear the whole symphony, their parts and everybody else's, to know what's going on. In this way, you could in some sense "keep control" even though you give up micromanaging.

If your employer isn't like that then they aren't a good employer.

I mean, yeah, we can spout platitudes all we want here. I agree that if you aspire to be a good employer, you should treat your employees well. But that's not the problem here: The example employee in the OP was a top performer who helped solve tough problems, and nobody seemed to suspect that anything was wrong until he snapped.

The problem is that workplaces are not designed to be able to identify an employee having problems with stress, let alone to actively manage it. I have never encountered a workplace that can do so effectively - some employers are better than others about things like work/life balance, etc. But the level of stress in your life is variable, and the level of stress being generated by your work is variable, even in the best of circumstances. It is difficult, if not impossible, for an employer to even understand how much stress you might be under outside of work.

For example, a lead artist at a previous employer got let go for getting into too many arguments at work. It was only at that point that we learned that he was having a really tough time because he was a single parent and his son was suffering from a severe, life-threatening condition. It's nice to think that if his supervisors had known they could have done something about it - maybe they would have - but from the outside it merely made him look like a bad employee. Maybe he wanted to keep his personal life private, maybe he thought he had it under control, or maybe they decided they had to set an example regardless of his reasons - but the point stands: Ultimately, it is up to you, not your employer, to manage your stress.

Usually when you hear stories like this, it's because the employee is screwing up. In this case, it's because the higher ups realize that proactively preventing employees from becoming overstressed is a good way to keep employees.

There is a lot of active effort in my field (consultant engineering) to manage the true productivity and quality output of individuals, because managing this irresponsibly introduces an unacceptable level of risk to projects.

That this (apparently) hasn't made great inroads into software development is another indicator of the field's immaturity and lack of liability. Because there are no serious consequences for shipping faulty software (outside of a very few fields such as industrial automation), companies are not required to care about things like employee happiness or productivity over time, and this is reflected in stories such as this.

The best comments in this thread have advocated a personal, proactive approach to managing your work/life balance. This is true of almost everything about work - career development, training, raises, opportunities, etc etc.

This is the dark side of the (otherwise desirable) trait of "getting things done" as employee.

I you don't actively manage your working hours and hold yourself back, somebody else will suck you out until you have nothing left.

At the end, you will be very unsatisfied for some obscure reason: You did everything you was asked for, yet somehow noone appreciates you and you still earn entry-level.

In my opinion, you should only use 80% of your working hours doing the "real stuff". Devote 20% of your working hours to non-technical work, active career development and image management.

1) talk with your boss about clients

2) show interest in the business side of your project

3) ask challenging non-technical questions

4) have a nice chat with your manager about non-work stuff

5) make sure everyone knows who had the interesting feature idea last week

6) make sure that the decision which overruled your recommendation is in the meeting report.

...

This is good for you and the company in the long run.

Some of your tickets will have to wait, then. Maybe the deadline won't be met perfectly.

That's fine.

If you don't think that reflects on your integrity, or if you don't consider your integrity worth maintaining, then this really is advice that you could consider good. But telling this to impressionable people who are inexperienced and new to Real Life in general would do them and everyone they'll ever work for a huge disservice.

They expect 20% of your working week to be spent on things which support work but isn't directly the work task itself (meetings, communication, HR, training, etc). And as this is spread out across the week it's not as obvious and visible to the worker that this is the case.

One can still work unhealthily hard for those 4 days a week of real effort. I share your opinion that you should only work that hard 80% of the time (he says, as he starts another 12 hour day), but if you're not accounting for the stuff around the work that still adds up to working at 100% capacity and without the breaks to keep yourself sane, healthy and developing.

I think it is the 'equivalent value' principle.

Everyone should only work as much as their salary equivalent value, and no more. At least that's what I do.

The rest of the time... ssh to my private server and do stuff for me. I will appreciate it.

The other point, and I think by now all of us should know this, is that we are each responsible for our health and our careers - we cannot look forward to a lifetime with a paternalistic employer.

[Update: this was downvoted. I'm not at all harshing on programmers or on mentally ill people. But we need to face reality; doing otherwise serves no one.]

We need to be treating mental health just as importantly as physical health. There's all sorts of OH&S guidelines for proper posture, lifting things etc. Similarly, there should be OH&S guidelines for ensuring employees are provided with a safe working environment in which they're not going to end up like this (at least, to the extent that work contributed to their condition).

The worker described in the article is shockingly similar to someone I knew several years. That person had a psychotic breakdown at work and accosted our CEO (physically and verbally). He too worked long hours and was considered a productive employee. Though no one cracked the whip on him, I'm sure the stress was a trigger.

Luckily for him, he was in a good enough place to find help and take a step back to recover. Employees at my company kept in contact with him and talked with him frequently. Eventually he found another position and is thriving. I hope the worker in the article gets the same sort of support and isn't stigmatized by his actions.

The article indicated nothing specific that the company had done wrong. It even admitted that the guy was "well treated and well paid" for his hard work - he just didn't like how he was "respected".

It's astonishing me that getting paid and treated well to work hard triggers a comment that the "system is sick".

These are seen as individual problems but if these trends continue I believe they will lead to the failure of human civilization and possibly of the human species itself.

hard worker - exactly the type of concept that the machine uses to exploit the naive.

You realize that Hacker News is focused on people starting businesses, right? Why are you here?

hard worker - exactly the type of concept that the machine uses to exploit the naive.

When you get your car worked on, do you expect that the mechanic should fix your car because you're paying him to or because you give him a hug and tell him that he's a useful human being?

When you get a cup of coffee, do you expect the barista to want not only for you to pay for your double whip latte, but to also feel that you're validating her as a human being?

The guy was "well paid and well treated". Without an iota of evidence that the business was doing anything wrong besides expecting that its employees do a good job - you indite the system and ignore the probable fact that this guy had mental stability issues that were going to come out either at work, his personal life, wherever.

Yes. I go out of my way to do so. I do try to find things to praise because these people have tons of negative interactions everyday. I do my best to make my interactions with them positive.

This is absolutely typical of the problem with society.

Judge me, exclude me, push me under a bridge.

It doesn't matter what you do to me, the day will come when man will be judged by those he has judged.

Your comments here are about as appropriate as if I'd go to the golf course and go on melodramatically about how awful a sport golf is. At some point, people would ask me, "Why are you here if you don't like golf?"

Though the story to me reads like a classic case of mental illness and eventual breakdown. I posted a comment on the blog asking for follow up of the individuals case. Despite citing human factors I bet they don't know, nor care.

You do not owe your employer your sanity or anything above and beyond what's reasonable. (As decided by your personal satisfaction and the standards/mores of your culture.)

If you're seeking to put more into the pot so you can extract more later, save money and stash it in a mutual fund or start hustling for yourself. Employers are perfectly happy to ignore you for decades on end, if they even keep you around that long.

Don't pretend value will present itself to you just because you're putting in the hours. Like thinking you'll get a date just because you're a good person.

Edit:

Don't let employers/management guilt you into working more hours than they deserve from you.

[1] http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/gervais-macle...

I have to admit, I find the jargon of this particular sub-culture of analyzing corporate politics somewhat annoying despite being a fan of Church.

First - don't care at all about your job. Remember that all corporations are by definition psychopaths and they will treat you accordingly.

Second - never do more then 35% of the work you are capable of doing in a day.

Third - if you find yourself getting stressed out tell yourself repeatedly "It's only a stupid job. There is no point in stressing about it."

As @jaimebuelta pointed out in another comment[1], your bosses will see your kind disposability just as a capability to do more work for less charge.

It happened to me when I was younger: I started working in a small company, only three employers, and I often was (secretly) asked to fix what other two coworkers made wrong. One thing led to another and one day, after 8 weeks that I was working there, the boss fired my two co-workers since I unknowingly proved him to be capable of doing alone a three-person job.

Although in the very first place I was kind of proud of myself — I was showing evidence to be a reliable software developer and it was nice — after a while I realized that things just couldn't work out that way: tripled efforts and responsiblities for same amount of money and same deadlines, I had to work afterhours and in weekends, and I had no more time for social life and hobbies, feeling more and more depressed, it was just driving me crazy.

At that point I thought to myself: "Why the hell people should see me as a sort of super hero? For whom or what am I doing this? I'm only in it for the money, this job pays my bills, I am not this job".

Next morning I talked to my boss and my amount of work came back to what I applied for, and that was one of my best decisions ever.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5575761

Maybe it is counter intuitive but I think healthy dose of this keeps me more productive and more focused on the job. While at work I always try to keep somewhere in the back of my mind Bertrand Russell's quote: "One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important". It helps.

I'd add:

Fourth - say no to overtime, even if it's paid. Unless you're really in desperate need for money, think for a copule of minutes and you'll realize that your time (which you can use to do a ton of interesting things, and in fact is ultimately the matter life is made of) is usually more valuable than your money.

I'm a big fan of three-hour-per-day planning. "Metered work" (what your boss expects of you) should be limited to a 3-hour block, preferably a contiguous one. After that, find a way to sneak time into things that build your career. Don't mix the two. (You'll either cut the self-directed stuff and burn out, or give your job responsibilities the shaft and at zero, you might actually get fired.) When you need to spike, turn that 3-hour dedication to 4 or 5 or 6 for a little while. The nice thing about the 3-hour plan is that it accounts for slack, because things always take longer than they should.

It takes your boss 15 minutes per week (on average) to tell you what to do. If you do 15 hours of metered work, you're giving him 60:1 leverage. That's enough not to get you fired.

The trick to becoming awesome, I think, is to take that 25 hours of "working time" per week that most people spend on Reddit or Farmville or non-work IMing and turn it into Coursera or open source time (don't ever use it to write code you'll need for a side project; legal issues make it not worth it). It's not easy, though, because it's much harder to hide it when you're studying machine learning at 2:30 in the afternoon.

They didn't get more people to help, but they were told they only had to work 4 days a week instead of 5, so, you know... That's a raise, right? Problem solved! More money for less hours in the office!

Except for the fact they still had the same amount of work that kept them back at night on the weekends.

Sysadmin #1 left the meeting, went to his office and wrote his resignation letter.

Sysadmin #2 went back to his office. He was found a short time later with slashed wrists and not in a very healthy state. He was taken to hospital, patched up, and put in to a psych ward for a while. After a few months he returned to his job in a very medicated state, and just wandered around having hard to follow conversations with people. He couldn't really do his job any more, but the employer either felt guilty about letting him go, or wasn't legally able to. I'm not sure.

Sysadmin #1 successfully resigned, and was hired back as a contractor, setting his own hours and getting paid at a greatly inflated rate.

For the last few months I've been growing more depressed, more anxious, and more stressed. I love my job, but it requires a good deal of interaction with clients, which never fails to stress me out. Combine that with relationship nonsense and a general vicious cycle of pain (due to an injury causing chronic pain) and depression, and it's led to a situation where I'm spiraling out of control.

After many years of being fairly stable, I started self-harming again and ending up in these obsessive thought loops, culminating in thoughts of death and (occasionally) suicide. Now, I know myself well enough to know that I'm not going to commit suicide (I've been far worse than I am right now, and I've managed to pull myself away from that; I enjoy life entirely too much for suicide, even if things suck right now. I still have hope for the future, and that's not something I see changing.), but this is obviously not healthy. I know I need help, but I have a few problems:

Problem #1: I can't find a therapist I can actually trust and connect with. I have serious problems talking to people in real life, so I attempted online therapy; every one I tried was a complete and utter waste of hundreds of dollars. I don't know that I'd go so far as to call them scams, but I wouldn't feel bad about doing so. Regardless, text-based therapy would make a huge difference for me, and I just can't find anything that Doesn't Suck (TM).

Problem #2: I've been looking at treatment facilities to just go there, disconnect from the world, and focus on getting better. But I have a job, bills to pay (that can be dealt with by savings, assuming I have a job when I'm out), and responsibilities. I know about FMLA leaves of absence, but that requires you (!) to disclose your illness to your employee; given the massive stigma around mental illness, I really, really dislike that option. All of this, of course, means I feel even more pressure; even in treatment I would feel that pressure.

So, HN, what do I do? Problem #2 would be awesome to solve, but problem #1 is the big one; without ongoing therapy, any help I get isn't going to be sustained. I know there's a solution here, and I know I can get better. I'm optimistic about the future for many reasons, and I want to stop feeling like the sky is falling every 15 minutes.

Sorry for threadjacking, and thank you all.

There are great books by David Burns: "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" and "When Panic Attacks". Both are available at amazon kindle: http://amzn.com/0380810336 and http://amzn.com/076792083X The "Feeling Good" book is focused primarily on depression issues and "When Panic Attacs" (as its name suggest) on various anxiety disorder. I suggest to read them both. They are really helpful, but not just because of their content(which is good), but because they present of number techniques from Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, which you can apply on yourself. But please note that reading the book and using these methodics is order of magnitude more effective than just reading the book and internalizing its contents.

Also, can you please elaborate on your issue with finding a therapist? Can you just go to a therapy session? Or you can't because you have to overcome strong anxiety first? If you are able to come and see a therapist(being able to manage your anxiety if you have any), then find a good CBT therapist and do come see her of him. Therapists are trained to deal with people who have all sorts of issues, even such serious as yours.

> Also, can you please elaborate on your issue with finding a therapist? Can you just go to a therapy session? Or you can't because you have to overcome strong anxiety first?

I've attempted to find a therapist I can communicate well with online (complete failure there -- every service I tried was less than worthless, simply because it didn't give me what I really wanted, which was a judgement-free, confidential way to talk through things) and in person. In person, it's very difficult for me to talk about personal matters (business/tech stuff isn't a problem) so finding someone I can trust is incredibly difficult.

Not true.

You don't have to disclose the nature of the condition, simply that a serious condition exists.

It doesn't have to specify what the condition is, just something demonstrating that a physician has validated your need to take leave for a condition protected by FMLA.

In any case, providing a medical certification only involves the HR department of an employer and there are clear rules about non-disclosure to people the applicant works for/with.

Source: Personal experience with the process and extensive conversation with people who deal with such things for a living.

IF your having serious trouble call your local mental hospital ( Stanford is world class they deal with this sort of thing all the time and there staff knows how to help you communicate with work.)

FYI :If you get fired while in the hospital or on leave without cause you have great grounds for a lawsuit ( plenty of lawyers will take these kinds of cases )

I've met devs who only consider one side of the employee-employer agreement -- "don't get fired, don't get fired, don't get fired." What about the other side? "If ___ quits, we are screwed."

This is the reason why we invest in our skills, this is why we read things like HN, this is why we make ourselves indispensable. Because a higher level of skill, both technically, socially and in business, not only makes you a greater employee, but it gives you more autonomy over your own circumstances.

I don't agree with the comments here that encourage people to half-ass their 9-5 because "you owe the company nothing." I encourage you to do the opposite -- become so good at what you do that they can't ignore you. Be such a valuable perspective/contributor/asset that they shudder at the thought of losing you. Be great and the power will follow.

And if they still treat you like shit, leave. If this doesn't apply to your industry, leave the industry. Good, smart devs are hard to find and someone else will pay good money for you.

What's really bad is to find yourself in a position where you see your cofounder/coworker the vast majority of the time, and your work/project gets tangled up in the normal ebb and flow of the relationship.

You really, really don't want to get into a loop where you need to decompress with your best friends, but you can't because you avoid them because your shared work is going poorly, and the work is going poorly because you can't decompress. Yeah, being in that position sucks.

Make sure you've got something positive in your life beyond your current project.

Find a hobby :)

If you help someone out, you put yourself in an inferior position. If you're always the one sacrificing yourself, people around you will feel more and more superior to you. At some point, they will start expecting that you sacrifice yourself whenever shit hits the fan.

This doesn't mean it's bad to help out, or to sacrifice yourself once in a while. But in order to keep sanity and self dignity, it's extremely important to learn to say no as well.

I don't think so. I don't feel so.

At least when things are reasonable. Rather to the contrary: I feel stronger for being able to help.

Of course, in an unhealthy situation where help is required but not appreciated, and the person who help is not respected, then it's different. Fortunately, not my case most of the time.

It's important to keep in mind that the other party may feel superior, even though you don't feel inferior.

However, for many people this whole thing will never become a problem, because they are good at protecting their integrity.

At least when things are reasonable. Rather to the contrary: I feel stronger for being able to help.

That may very well be the case. But people (and situations) are different, and if you have a problem saying no, things may get very unhealthy.

Of course, in an unhealthy situation where help is required but not appreciated, and the person who help is not respected, then it's different. Fortunately, not my case most of the time

I guess that is often the case in stories like this. If you never say no, at some point your help gets more expected than appreciated.

I can't quite see why that is important. It doesn't hurt me that the other party feels superior. Sometimes it may amuse me, though.

They are. They are using your experience to complete one of their objectives, with less effort for themselves.

What about your objectives? Well, if you are measured on helping other people complete their objectives, then it's neutral, you both meet objectives. But if you are not, if you have your own piece of work that needs to advance, then you're pushing back the completion of your objectives.

When you toss a coin, you are already in a superior position. You toss the coin to be nice, and/or to affirm your position as superior (depending on your personality).

That's totally different from agreeing to work over the weekend to save somebody's ass. It's OK as a one-off, but if you do it more often than others, that's when you put yourself in an inferior position.

At my new job things are a lot better. When I started I screwed up a couple of times because I tryed to make things work by putting in over time and fighting until the last minute when things went south, where all I had to do was tell the mangment why I need more time / manpower like anyone else in my company.

Bad managers don't care how much you work. A friend of mine works in tele-completions for the health insurance industry. He has the highest rate of completions per day than anyone else in his unit for nearly four years running. He has been overlooked for every promotion and opportunity to move to a better position. The managers don't want him to leave the unit because their numbers will go significantly down if he does.

I've worked an incredible amount of overtime for employers early on in my career. I wanted to show them that I could play the game, get things done, and save the day. I thought that it would pay off. It never did.

So I stopped doing it.

I knew that the calls would just keep coming. I knew that there was no incentive to let me have time off. I knew that I would never be compensated in any way for all that effort if someone higher up could help it. As long as I was convinced that was the way the world worked, they were getting cheap labour and profiting while I was being driven into the ground and made miserable.

You have to make the life that you want. Never let anyone else be in control of you. They have no authority to make you come into work in the middle of the night or stay at work for thirty-six hours straight. I think it's a terrible shame that some people think they have some sort of power to compel others to do this for them. And it often leads to tragedies like the one the OP described.

I did find that most of my co-workers were not aware of such programs, so if you feel like you could benefit from such a program, please contact your HR department. It's quite possible you already have such a program available to you and taking advantage could help out quite a bit if you are stressed.

Stress is a killer. I try not to let it get to me; I have responsibilities.

1. Stay: dissociate yourself from the work and the outcome of your work 2. Quit: start looking for companies that are a better fit for your professional pride and when you've found one, jump ship.

Technical skills are still rare, you're not working in a supermarket here. you've got options.

If I didn't end up leaving, I might have ended up just like him.

The latest company I was employed at there had me working ridiculous hours but this is completely anecdotal, I'm glad I have my life back.

The classification of a job as exempt or non-exempt is not arbitrary but I don't know all the rules governing that. I would wager that the majority of people reading this page who live and work in the US would have an 'exempt' job, though.

I've seen managers citing low profits for low salaries, but never want to give out the lion's share when the company turns huge profits. Then, programmers become cheap commodities who can be replaced. Cost is always the bare minimum you can get away with, regardless of the profits.

This is more prevalent more in the local corporate companies of my country than start ups.

I can't stress the importance of how some corporate managers hardly know anything about the technicalities, and end up agreeing to outrageous changes in the requirements. This is the problem in IT companies that engage purely in "pricing wars." And the thing is, most of these mangers don't even have the necessary communication skills, for that's all they have to do, right?

I had a roommate lose it. He was very disciplined, but had a chemical imbalance in his head. He was a hard worker, but did this really have any impact on his losing it? I am not an expert, but I doubt it.

The end lesson of "Don't kill yourself for a company if they don't respect you" may be true, but that seems a little disconnected from taking care of your mental health.

Perhaps, but I believe there's a close relationship between the two. Getting the balance wrong can definitely lead to mental health problems.

There's a point at which health becomes more important than money. If someone is working so hard that the stress is taking such a toll that their marriage is at risk, they end up in a mental hospital, and/or are considering suicide, money ceases to become a consideration.

The most important thing for employers to consider in this sense is the wellbeing of their employees - this comes above everything else. If someone is healthy and happy, they can do a lot. If someone is stressed and unhappy, they're going to produce little.

And at the end of the day, the best way to improve performance is to ensure a proper work/life balance. It's about working smarter, not harder.

This has been my experience as well. No company ever uses that time to great benefit either, they just use it to change their minds seven times before release instead of two. Killing yourself for someone else is not worth it.

In principle this is not even a bad thing. A great software engineer might not be that great as a manager or CEO.

It would be better to have a technical career track where you advance in pay, in status items (car, single office) or other perks (conference visits payed by the company). And of course a truely great company would send you on extra holiday for all-nighters and weekend-rush jobs.

Eventually he went to the doctor, who diagnosed a stress related condition and he was prescribed meds which helped for a while. But, it's that melting pot and eventually he snapped, smashed a keyboard and then threw a monitor onto the floor. I took the time to try and help and he realised whilst he loved dev work, he just couldn't deal with the stress of working inside a business and decided to give up.

It's a hard industry, I'm personally surprised there's not a much higher rate of stress related illness and depression. We've all probably skirted the burnout zone on a regular basis, long term that's not going to be great for anyone. I'd say the increase in startups being lead by technically gifted people who've done development should help, but there still seems to be an acceptance of push and push until you break or the job is done.

So unless you are working for yourself, then work to rule will keep you sane. Use your hindsight to plan holidays, if managment don't listern in a timely manner about a potentual problem then just plan that week off down the line and let them suffer - sadly it is the only way you can stay sane and they can pay for there mistakes. Its hard out there, don't make it harder on yourself.

A very good advice I have always followed. This may not be true if you have your own company, however - since you will need a lot of drive to make things move forward.

I agree to that. If management doesn't feel pain of its mistakes it does not have an incentive to improve.

Having said that, I think a good compromise would be to make sure that the people who get assigned to managerial positions have formerly had the job of the people they manage. That way they're likely to understand the pinpoints and the frustrations and be motivated to eliminate them. Obviously not all programmers will qualify for this job, but some certainly will.

I strongly advise everyone to read the Putt's Law, where this phenomena is broken down in great depth.

Its not uncommon for someone straight out of college, working as an "ideas" man to manage programmers.

People without technical knowledge in the roles of technical managers are in a league of their own when it comes to suck.

Good managers will balance out good technical people in terms of skillset, and help their team to do their job, while also coaching them in the areas where they are weak (and if the manager is weak technically, then obviously technical coaching is not in scope). Good managers will filter what reaches inside their team from the outside and protect their team from crap while captaining the ship forward. They know their weaknesses and also know that good leadership requires hiring people who are smarter than you are, and then helping to facilitate the magic that can happen when good people get together.

Having managers who are strong both technically and in a business sense is rare. There are only so many Elon Musks in the world. But when you work with one, your work becomes very enjoyable.

At the end of the day, team members don't have visibility as to what managers do every day. This blog is great for understanding this stuff: http://randsinrepose.com

http://www.randsinrepose.com/cat_management.html

Not so sure coders trump managers in the intelligence dept. After all, managers tend to earn more, and do less; I'd say they're brilliant in this respect ;-)

But, for example, if you keep telling your management (as in writing e-mails with CC to higher management or have it written in the meeting minutes) that we need more file servers because we might run out of space and they ignore it, then when it happens and you're not around to fix this next time they may think twice before ignoring your advice. On the other hand if you resolve the issue yourself it can happen that no-one will notice.

>I agree to that. If management doesn't feel pain of its mistakes it does not have an incentive to improve.

This makes sense, but how do you do that without hurting yourself?

Shit hits fan, you have issue documented as you alerted your manager and got response not an issue so you booked holiday and not there. With that you can not be blamed. Also ALL IT people worth there salt work above and beyond what there contract states - so if your contract is for DBA work, that is not sys admin work, that is not crawling under desks networking or desktop support - but you help out and do those things. So with that if it is outside your scope of your work contract then again you have the ability to ignore it as well. But the holiday approach is the best.

But there are 3 types of managers - those that can do your job, those that think they can do your job and those that will admit they have no idea. Then ontop of that there are those that can balance dealing with you and sheilding you from HR and the other crap and then there are those that just look after themselfs and smile to your face and say all sorts behind your back. As a rule a manager that can do your job is one you will get on with, ones that can not do your job are less likely to be good managers I have found, though have met some that are and there is no hard and fast rule or way to single the good from the bad sadly until your few months into a job.