Burnout and Layoffs — Approaches to Managing Overwork and Limited Resources
Burnout and Layoffs — Approaches to Managing Overwork and Limited Resources
Layoffs have left many teams underresourced. The inevitable result is employees feeling stressed, and working long hours. Here are some approaches to improving your situation.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter! I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
This weekend (for those reading later, May 18th, 2024) I ran my first 50k with my wife near Winthrop, Washington. It was exhausting, painful, but a victory to have completed it. Things being hard makes them rewarding. Sorta funny how that works.
Lucia looked unhealthy. She looked tired, and her shoulders sagged.
We were in an Amazon technical operations meeting, talking about our goals for the year. In particular, our larger organization had a goal to reduce the number of high-severity tickets. Lucia was a software engineer working for a peer team, and her team was responsible for an outsized number of our high-severity events.
“Yes, we’re handling them fine.” Lucia said. “We ensure that each high-severity ticket is prioritized, and our whole team gets involved if we have more than two tickets at the same time.”
The purpose of the goal was to reduce the number of bad events for customers, but we also knew that high-severity tickets were particularly hard on the engineering teams. If someone gets woken up by a work event at 2am, it’s not good for them or their family. And if someone is always working on emergencies, it makes it hard for them to do real software engineering.
“But it looks like you’ve had a high rate of incoming tickets for over 6-months now.” I mentioned. “How is the team handling things?”
Lucia casually rolled her eyes and shrugged. “We’re still handling it. There’s nothing we can do about it right now.”
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“Do you think your team needs additional help?” I asked, a bit confused as to why she was so dismissive.
“Of course we do.” she said. “But there’s no one extra right now.”
Her hopeless attitude confused me, so I let the meeting continue forward on other topics. I pulled Lucia aside after the meeting, and asked her why she wasn’t interested in getting help.
“It’s been this way for a while now, clearly no one cares.” she said.
“I think most of us in the room just found out today.” I said.
She looked at me as if I’d grown two heads.
“We’ve all been working 12-hour days for months.” she said a bit angrily. “I think everyone knows it’s too much work for our team.”
Lucia was a victim of a bad team, and a bad manager. But she also missed out on multiple opportunities to improve her situation.
In this tech job market, I’ve repeatedly heard from people who are stuck in similar situations. Their team had layoffs, their workload has increased, and they’re working longer hours with no end in sight.
“Maybe when the market improves, I’ll find something better.” they say.
In most cases, that’s not the only way to handle the situation. Let’s talk through a few other ways you can cope.
A cycle of abuse.
The economy has a hiccup. Perhaps it’s inflation, or the dotcom crash, or the financial markets panic.
Your company decides to cut costs. That’s what every corporate leader is encouraged to do in scary times.
As a part of cost-cutting, your company decides on layoffs. Sometimes entire projects are cut. More often, many teams are trimmed.
On many teams, the workload isn’t decreased. There are fewer people for more work. That work is spread across the remaining employees.
Your 8-9 hour day suddenly needs to be 10, or maybe 11 to keep your head above water.
You’d quit, except that the market has hit many companies. The job market isn’t the best.
Even worse, it’s possible layoffs will return to the team. You feel the need to continue your performance.
Company leadership now looks at their productivity statistics. Looks like almost everything is still getting done! That was some brilliant leadership.
When the market recovers, your company may not immediately start hiring. I mean, why would they? It seems like you’re able to accomplish more with less.
You may be intimately and uncomfortably aware of this cycle. How do we stop this cycle of abuse? Well, we can’t.
Unless we change capitalism in some really strange ways, companies will be incentivized to increase profits. Leaders will be successful in their jobs if they figure out a way to produce more with less. Managers unwilling to go along with the grand corporate plans don’t keep their jobs for long.
From our perspective as workers in the economy, there isn’t anything we can do to break the cycle. But what we can do is influence our personal situation.
What can you control?
My writing goal is to give you actionable advice. I want you to be able to have control over your life. That means I’m not going to attempt magic, like fixing how capitalism works, or making Elon Musk less racist.
If you can’t stop that cycle of abuse, what can you control?
What can you control?
You can educate your manager, to ensure they know the current situation.
You can become your manager’s partner, making it not them vs you, but both of you vs the corporation.
You can approach the balance of resources and workload together.
You can be flexible when needed, to ensure that you’re still viewed as highly valuable.
You can draw solid defensive lines around your personal health and time, to ensure that you protect yourself as needed.
I don’t expect you to fix your company, but I’d like to help you in your personal sphere of influence. Let’s walk through ways you can look valuable, and protect yourself.
Educate your manager.
“Hey Dave, you might want to know that Camille has been putting in some really long hours.” Estelle said.
Estelle was a manager for one of the teams that reported to me. Camille was a software engineer who worked for me directly. And unfortunately, I had no idea that Camille had been working long hours.
Now to be fair, no one clocks their hours, and unless I purposefully monitor someone, I wouldn’t know what time they started or ended their days. Even worse, when people work from home, I have no way of knowing how much time they’re putting in. As long as work kept getting done on their projects, I assume things will be fine. But a lack of any monitoring also means that I don’t have any measurements of people’s workload.
I thanked Estelle for letting me know, and asked Camille for a one-on-one.
Camille looked cheerful enough when she came into my office.
“Hey Camille! How are things going?” I asked.
“Oh, just fine.” she said. “It’s been a bit crazy, but I’m hanging in there.”
“What things in particular are crazy?” I asked.
“Well we have Project Y still wrapping up,” she said, “but there’s also those 2 customer contacts you asked me to look into, and I’m doing the bar raiser training you recommended. So I’m a bit tight on time. But I’m still handling it.”
“That sounds like a lot.” I said diplomatically. “Are you working more than a normal workday to get all that done?”
“Well, sure?” she said, clearly a bit confused. “But I’m keeping up.”
I got the impression that she assumed I knew she was working long hours, and she was focused on proving that she was capable of handling the overwhelming task I’d given her.
“Camille, we’re not in the middle of an emergency. So there’s no reason for you to put in excessive hours. I’m going to give you tasks because I like how you do your work, but your job is to give me expectations of what you can get done in a reasonable workday. We can always put off lower priority work. I need you to let me know about your workload.”
This isn’t a rare occurrence. It’s shocking how often employees assume that their managers know that they’re working hard. But unless you’re using time cards or otherwise literally tracking your time, it’s possible your manager has no idea how hard you’re working.