This is wrong. It is only one reason for burnout. I have another.
I burned out because I can no longer care enough about what I'm doing at work to motivate my mind to work on the task at hand. It seems fruitless. People can try to convince me there is some good it is doing, but I see only waste and politics. That resentment is not because my workplace doesn't care about my family. They treat me better than any place I could ever hope to work for. The only sacrifice I've had to make for work is my sanity. I cannot stand development anymore, nor technology, nor I.T., but I'm incapable of doing anything else. I've read the books that say I must love what I do, but I don't, and there is no option to love what I do. I have chosen an occupation and career that no longer suits me, and I have no alternative. I am the only one with a job in my family. I cannot fail. I have to trudge on. This is burnout. I have no where to go.
Therefore, I would state instead that burnout is caused by lack of hope.
No, I'm not suicidal. Thanks for stating that, as I'm sure some might be in that situation.
I'm just experienced in a different kind of burnout than what the OP was talking about. And it's a kind of burnout that a number of developers experience at some level after some number of years, but frequently not the sort that you find on HN. I've tried to fix via sleep, exercise, losing weight, etc. and that surely helps but it doesn't fix it. In addition, placing power and trust in the employee definitely helps in that case, as a lot of what drives it is a mix of poor health due to lack of sleep which there are fixes for, lack of ability to concentrate, and weight/fitness, but an important component is out of the control of the employee: the developer/IT employee notices that we all seem to fuss about things that in the end don't really matter, because all code is thrown away, all implementations are replaced, and there is nothing left standing of what is created, and in the end we would seem better off and the nation more employed if that technology weren't distracting everyone. However, activism is not the answer. Technology is inevitable. So you want to become a landscaper, a bartender, or anything to get over that feeling, but you know you can't provide for your family if you do that, so you have the privilege of suffering in a job you hate, knowing that you are spoiled for complaining about a job that pays well. You can't even feel good about complaining.
I've also experienced the other kind of burnout which is what developers usually mean, which is burning the candle at both ends to meet demands you didn't set at work and could not influence even though you tried diligently to, so you have a period of lack of motivation or effectiveness. The result of that for me was that I never want to work for a startup again, because you can get sucked into the idea and the promise- the hope- later to realize that they are desperate and do not care about your family. That is what the OP's post is about, and they are framing it like it can be solved by the employer. Perhaps.
Actually, I shouldn't have said the latter is what the OP's post is about, because being overworked and mismanaged is only one reason for resentment. Resentment could be caused by a number of other things. However, I stand by my original point that hopelessness is another reason for burnout.
I tried the locomotive solution back in the day and there was a reason it died. It sucked. Installing Rails was not the problem. Learning it was.
And again, the problem with Rails 3 today isn't the install. Instead it's that:
1. There is a shit-ton of old Ruby/Rails documentation out there that confuses the living shit out of people, and this is a duck-typed language, which is fine, but it means that people are even less likely to know what the fuck is going on when the code they are trying to use from someone's blog doesn't work.
2. Most of those using Ruby on Rails are not new as they once were, so since the majority know a little more about what the fuck they are doing, they are less likely to write things for those that don't know what the fuck they are doing.
But, writing an .app won't solve that. Instead, spend that time trying to take bundler, Gemfiles, rvm, the more complex Rails directory structure, asset pipeline, etc. and simplify the whole damn thing to create Rails 4, and chalk 3 up to an oops. A lot of the changes in Rails 3 were warranted, but the additional complexity will drive people away, and that is against the soul and original intent of Rails.
Want something that people would be really interested in? A framework that makes both development and scaling EASY. Development was easy with Rails years ago, but scaling was nearly impossible because that wasn't the intent. Now people scale Rails, but it is still hard, and development has gotten much harder. That's bad, because there are already ways to learn to develop quickly, and other solutions for scaling well. Being halfass at both is a sure way to fail miserably over the long-term, and Ruby and Rails is awesome; it shouldn't fail like this.
I burned out because I can no longer care enough about what I'm doing at work to motivate my mind to work on the task at hand. It seems fruitless. People can try to convince me there is some good it is doing, but I see only waste and politics. That resentment is not because my workplace doesn't care about my family. They treat me better than any place I could ever hope to work for. The only sacrifice I've had to make for work is my sanity. I cannot stand development anymore, nor technology, nor I.T., but I'm incapable of doing anything else. I've read the books that say I must love what I do, but I don't, and there is no option to love what I do. I have chosen an occupation and career that no longer suits me, and I have no alternative. I am the only one with a job in my family. I cannot fail. I have to trudge on. This is burnout. I have no where to go.
Therefore, I would state instead that burnout is caused by lack of hope.