[paxys]

There comes a time in everyone's career when they realize that the "emergency situation" they are in never really ends. There is always a fire to put out. There is always a P0 bug that will sink the entire company if not fixed. There is always a release that absolutely cannot be delayed for any reason, and everyone must work nights and weekends to get it out.

The best you can do is learn to tune out management bullshit and identify what is really important. There is no point losing sleep over the rest. It will be there to work on tomorrow, and the day after.

[jghn]

This was an eye opening moment when it happened to me. Almost nothing has the impact it purports to have. Percentage-wise, very few things are the emergency/fire that people make them out to be, at least in the grand scheme of things.

I think part of it is that people get too wrapped up in their local world and don't see the big picture. For instance "If we don't get this widget added to the thingamabob in the next 3 days the company will go under!" when the thingamabob is just a minor piece of the puzzle for the larger company. Part of it though is driven from the top.

The one downside to having had this realization is it goes both ways. It also means that very few things you do have impact in a positive way as well. For some people this can be motivation killing.

[parpfish]

not everybody gets sucked into firefighting to 'save the company'.

if the fire started due to something you helped create and you have even a smidgen of impostor syndrome, fighting fires is about about saving yourself and cleaning up the messes you've made. the only way to prevent this is to build a team with a strong sense of collective ownership/responsibility and a healthy attitude towards mistakes.

[midhhhthrow]

And to realize that mistakes are a normal part of the pro drive work you do. In fact the most productive engineers also make the most mistakes

[swagasaurus-rex]

Professional engineers are incentivized to make mistakes because sprinting is more important than quality, and quality is not measured by the management. They care about check boxes of features.

If quality mattered, the best engineers would be making the fewest mistakes because mistakes are way more expensive than getting it right

[cybersandwich]

One of the biggest "fire fighters" I ever worked with was a serial arsonist.

She created these cluster fcks and then would throw out her shoulder patting herself on the back for putting it out.

She was in a constant state of panic. It was exhausting to watch her work.

[hirvi74]

I have more a 'do not want to be fired' mentality than a 'save the company' mentality when it comes to technical emergencies.

[kneebonian]

I'm in this stage right now. I'm being moved from an engineering to being trained for an "architect" role, and it sucks. I look at my todo list and most of it involves emailing somebody about something, or preparing a presentation for some council. It feels like I can't actually do anything.

Like when I was an engineer, boom move get things done produce actual results, something would be deployed and value would be delivered, now, if I want to get something done, engage with two or three other teams to do something, talk with their team leads, then the actual engineers, then have a meeting to actually discuss requirements, and what should be a simple program that takes 3 api calls, turns into a 3 month long project.

[drewcoo]

I don't know your team, so I don't know the skills/views/dynamics, but is there a way to cut through red tape?

Do all of the meetings/emails have to happen serially and in that order? If so, why?

Maybe look up what Amazon does with its 2-pagers and 6-pagers. See if you can do something similar where you are.

If it's really such a simple solution and that's obvious early, can you propose the obvious solution when you see it and get reactions?

If you're the only architect, you may have to define some of this stuff and make your changes part of the corporate culture.

If you have any PM buddies (whichever type of P), ask them for advice. A lot of this is their bread and butter, and if they already know your org, they'll have special insights.

[phito]

You should think about doing something else then.

[johnea]

All burned out? Just wait....

Until you've been through another 30 years.

You haven't even reached mid-burn yet...

[solarmist]

Don’t compare suffering. Everyone is entitled to suffer.

[jghn]

This isn't burnout, this kept me from burning out. I was wound up pretty tight and now am more sanguine about work things in general.

[maerF0x0]

> when they realize that the "emergency situation" they are in never really ends.

At least in my experience I've noticed some things.

1. Management is incentivized to create the illusion of crisis to squeeze marginal extra labor out of you. They will be promoted away before burnout burns them.

2. Many of the crises are self inflicted by our response to previous crises. The only way to avoid the nausea of the merry go round is to get off it entirely.

3. You will futiley destroy yourself if you try to rail against the times you live in. You have to let the system fail for it to rectify. Martyring yourself will only extend the suffering as the system has no sentience nor conscience about what it's doing to people who care about reality.

[AndrewKemendo]

This in and of itself is the problem

When every system is *critical system for somebody* and the downtime means loss of capacity, then people are actually hurt, and there are real problems when these things do go down. So you become numb, like a triage nurse, to real suffering because you’re in a system that doesn’t actually give people the resources to fix these things.

Most of the harms in the world are when large systems filled with a lot of people, who have no alternative, break in ways that don’t have compensatory measures. It’s coming for the food supply soon too.

I’ve been in senior leadership positions in very large organizations multiple times, and I promise you that there are critical workloads not just in tech, but in medicine, defense, etc. who only have one or two poorly paid people who are there to make sure that whatever the system is, doesn’t break. And when it does? Welp tough break.

The reality is there should be many people as back up and as compensatory measures however, companies are not incentivized to pay for those back ups because in “normal” times everything looks fine. It’s not broken right now so we don’t need extra support. We’ve all heard the story.

The problem I see is that the world is increasingly filled with these unsustainable debt fueled “critical services”, and humans live within dozens of these large complex systems with no direct alternatives. The workers there are holding on by threads because no company can maintain their business in an environment of forever margin chasing (rat race) and all profits go to insulating owners from downside risks rather than making systems more robust to shocks. So the workers are blown out, owners have half a foot out the door in case of emergency and customers and users are just along for the ride.

Sounds great

[rocky1138]

Have you ever read The Machine Stops? You might find it enjoyable.

https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/th...

[supriyo-biswas]

Not the parent, but thank you for the recommendation. It’s a great read.

[AndrewKemendo]

Thanks for this

Great read

[LegitShady]

For a while I worked in a government role that was very close to the political layer of government - one or two people separate you and many elected politicians.

The emergencies and surprises never stopped. Timelines would change quickly - “start working on it but no deadline” would regularly turn into “this is due at the end of the month” and then “Can you have this done in two weeks” and then “what can we accomplish by the end of the week” and then “this needs to be complete in the system by 4pm tomorrow” sometimes all within a few days. Sudden weekend work including absolutely ridiculous requests that I can’t talk about was pretty normal. Many people involved essentially volunteered large portions of their non-work time to the government because their positions did not include overtime compensation and they thought if they put in the work eventually they’d climb to a position where it would be worth it.

Every meeting was a potential crisis, and the bosses between you and the politicians were no better because of downhill shit theory. Some of the non political leadership were helicoptered political allies instead of technical specialists in the thing we were supposedly supposed to be doing.

I realized about 6 months in that even though in meetings they kept saying “we know workloads are higher than normal but we think we’ll get back to a more reasonable period soon” was just lip service, and that we were actually just in a permanent state of crisis of after crisis handed down to us by politicians who would take days off to go golfing. All this at wages that were not comparable to private industry but on the other hand less worries about tracking hours for billing like I would have had to do outside the public service.

I am glad to have left it behind. My health, both mental and physical, suffered even though I couldn’t tell at the time when I was going through it. There is no reason to live your life that way.

[wonderwonder]

Absolutely. I have so many emergencies coming my way that I reach a point of paralysis. I'm not going to work 65 hour weeks anymore. So I have reached the point where if everything is an emergency then nothing is an emergency. If they want to give me resources to help out on their emergency then cool, otherwise take a number.

Having to be an IC and leadership and attend 5+ meetings a day is an impossible ask for someone that is not young and hungry anymore. When someone asks for things now I always lead with "sure, but its only me, no other resources so it is probably going to take a while"

[droobles]

What I've found in my experience is I started putting up boundaries instead of being a "yes" man and those I've worked with have responded pretty positively to it. Most of the time they're just trying to figure out their own emergencies so as long as they have something to tell their boss it's cool – "We won't be able to meet with xyz until Thursday since they have limited resources" "Okay, update us on what happens Thursday then".

[dataflow]

> The best you can do is learn to tune out

Or look around to see if you might be able to hop over to a team or company that doesn't run like this. They do exist!

[maerF0x0]

name some please. An abundance of candidates should be their reward for being well led.

[wjnc]

As a (middle) manager: I sincerely hope many employees learn this. The best processes, systems and tools have people engaged deeply enough that they care about and work on future performance, UI/UX, efficiency, etc of that processes / system / tools. There’s nothing I like more than kindly being put in place for having unrealistic expectations. However, it is of my opinion that most don’t learn this. Those that do turn into MVPs. Not everyone is a MVP. And that’s not bad. I do think we can teach all people to speak out concerns in a positive way. It’s up to management to listen and take that to heart. That’s good culture. In my open office I hear chit chat comments and worse all the time, but constructive feedback a lot less.

[Loughla]

Working with employees on what the difference is between bitching and exploring concerns is a skill that most managers do not have, or do not teach.

A good manager communicates well, a great manager teaches everyone around them how to communicate well.

[coding123]

This is why we have vacations and the ability to quit too. Not all companies are fires all the time.

[maerF0x0]

name some please. An abundance of candidates should be their reward for being well led.

[hirvi74]

Work in state government. If production crashed on Friday night, the issue would probably not be even noticed or looked into until the following Monday.

[wslh]

This is an issue with management that separated the good and wrong actors, being the former an exception rather than a rule.

Inspired by Marx I could say that manager work is removing workers from their alienation and not work in unoimportant things.

[lucas_membrane]

I realized it that the emergency was a gimmick whan they started wanting me to schedule a few extended trips, 11,000 miles flying in coach each way, to train my replacements.

[mrangle]

Reminds me of national politics