I can only imagine how frustrating your job must be these days. You are powering through something much worse than what I’m dealing with, and for that, I salute you.
I feel a lot of guilt at the thought of leaving, but also a lot of guilt at the thought of staying and underperforming. I wish there were a pill I could take to get back my old level of enthusiasm and focus. I worry that, even if I changed jobs, these feelings of burnout would take a while to get over, maybe longer than my new boss’s patience would allow. I also worry there might not be anything better for me out there right now. A few former colleagues who left for greener pastures are now coming back!
What @mikecurtis said is my story almost word for word, except for the part about wanting my subordinates right there with me. I’ve always tried to look out for my workers.
I didn’t just change jobs, I changed careers. Went from managing a restaraunt to turning wrenches as a Private in the Army.
I started getting burned out in my current job. Then, I’m not sure how best to describe it, I just decided one day that my boss didn’t get to live in my head after work anymore. I stopped caring about a bunch of little stuff I couldn’t control anyway and just focused on doing the task before me to the best of my ability on any given day and I quit trying to dodge responsibility for my mistakes or the mistakes of the crew I was in charge of. I just didn’t care if I got fired or not.
The funny thing is, I quickly grew to understand why my boss acts the way he does, I actually got better at my job, both the actual work and the supervisory aspects, and my bosses and I communicate get along way better than before.
Omg…I worked in restaurants very early in my work life. And there’s very few jobs I’ve been around that are more demanding than managing a restaurant. It’s a burnout factory!
That’s why you have to decide what you really want from your job and what you’re really willing to give. There might not be “anything better” from a certain point of view. But, it could also be that just about anything else would be better from a different point of view. Not everyone has the same goals in life, and not every job offers you the best chance to achieve those goals.
I’ve spent over 15 years cumulatively working in call centers for various industries. Many is the day I craved the sweet release of death in those jobs. You think it’s okay because the chairs are comfortable and there are pizza parties but after a while the utter pointlessness of shoveling shit against the tide just starts to get to you. Well, me to be fair, some people seem to manage it a lot better than I. Those jobs burned me out something awful and I’ve always had to move on eventually lest I lose my tiny mind.
Lack of focus and irritability, inability to remember or concentrate was usually due to stress from a bad domestic situation. Too much yelling and craziness at home, or in one case, living in an unsafe building, in an unsafe area, and having to spend all my energy just surviving my daily commute past the tent cities and the trash heaps. Living in fear. Also had terrible neighbors who gave air-raid volume late night parties, unannounced, that would shake my walls. So, interrupted sleep and feelings of creepiness in the night. This part wasn’t related to work. I started sleeping all the time whenever it was quiet, just like hungry people start hoarding food.
I’ve experienced work burnout at places where I was not a good fit for the culture, or where I felt that the company didn’t practice what it preached. Like talking about “quality” all the time but not actually having any. Not feeling valued for what I brought to the table. Sometimes there was a lot of Kool-Aid to be drunk, and I hated that… I already liked the industry, why all the forced jollity? Everyone else seemed to love it there except me. The cognitive dissonance made me queasy, uneasy, gaslighted.
The language OP is using " trying out different kinds of bandaids on this suppurating gunshot wound", makes me think that they should leave that job even if it seems crazy to do so. They like being away from work, at least for right now.
I will say… I left one job due to this sort of stress, and while I adored not having THAT job anymore, I went on sabbatical instead of finding more work, just to see what would happen. Total meltdown! I could hardly do anything, and kept berating myself for it. But that was instructive, to realize that I needed structure, and to see that even though I sucked at being lazy, I survived that experience and am much better at managing my time and energy level now.
Here’s another one. When I was working at Intel, I worked from 8 am to 9 pm, not because I was getting anything done but because they served dinner and took names, just for portion control, of course. No one really needed to - we were just showing a competing project how tough we were. The project was a disaster (it cost Intel billions) my boss was a psycho and I was in the wrong job. And I was not allowed to transfer to another group who wanted me.
If I was a gun owner I wouldn’t be here today.
I left, and my new company was great. Reasonable expectations, a good boss, decent hours, and a good environment. The burnout vanished immediately.
Change jobs. This seems like a great time to do it.
I took a totally different job just to get away from a neurotic workplace (part of the neurosis was me putting in 60-70 hrs/wk… after I hit 80 billable hours three weeks in a row, I realized “If I stay here, I’ll never get to know my kids!”).
I took a pay cut to move from private sector (corporate) job to the non-profit world (education). It was worth every penny!
Well, it took me long enough, but I finally realized it wasn’t going to get better so long as I stayed at this job. It’s always been a demanding job, but since the pandemic and a change in upper management 2 years ago, it’s gotten so much worse. I’ve been doing this for 6 years, and I’m good at it; I’ve been promoted 3 times, all the way to supervisor. But so many people have quit due to the stress (we’re losing at least one person a month on average, and not hiring fast enough to keep up) that I’m now doing the work of 2 or 3 people, and I’m exhausted. And I don’t see any reason to believe it’s going to change.
So last month I applied for a nice government job with a good work-life balance where at least half a dozen of my burned-out colleagues have fled to, and yesterday I accepted an offer from them to start May 2!
Now I have to give my notice and decide what my last day will be. If I give exactly 2 weeks notice today, that will put my last day on the first day of my next weeklong planned vacation, and will give me a full month to recover. I kind of feel bad about doing that though. My boss’s boss is a fuckstick of the highest order who is largely responsible for my suffering and deserves to have me quit with no notice at all. But my boss is actually a caring and decent human being who has done everything in his limited power to help me through this difficult time, and he’s the one who will bear the brunt of an early departure, along with those I supervise (who are all great) and our clients (who are desperately in need and woefully underserved already.) I’m thinking of coming back for one more week of work after my vacation, then enjoying 2 weeks off before I start the new job. I’m going to make my decision and submit my letter of resignation in the next 3-5 hours, so if anyone wants to weigh in before that, I would welcome the feedback. How much time off do you think I need between jobs in order not to carry over my toxic burnout to the new venture?
I would take as much time as you can afford, between jobs. It would only be a max. of one month, right? You won’t settle into too many bad habits in just one month.
Me, I was off for 2 years, and developed some bad habits…videogaming being one.
It’s not an issue of what I can afford, or whether I’ll get lazy during the time off. It’s a question of how much do I still want to give to my current employer. They will not be able to replace me anytime soon. We are already extremely short-staffed and losing more people all the time. Every additional departure puts more work on the shoulders of those who remain, and short-changes our clients. I care deeply about both groups. If I could clone myself a dozen times to patch all the holes in this sinking ship, I would. But without the clones, I can’t bear the weight of it all much longer.
Sounds like the only reason to stay is to make life a little easier for co-workers. A tough choice. But if they fired you without notice, they’d be in the same boat. Maybe the canonical two weeks’ notice would be the most graceful exit.
IMHO it’s business. If the company needed to cut your job they would, no matter what their/your feelings are about co-workers, clients, etc. If I were you I would look at the decision just as coldly - it’s just business. Two weeks notice is standard and considerate enough, and going back after your vacation won’t ease your absence anyway, so why not reward yourself for the tough last 2 years with more time off? If the others who migrated to the new job only gave 2 weeks, why shouldn’t you? You need to look out for #1 in this case. The business will survive and go on without you. We are all replaceable - do not feel bad for leaving a poor working situation - take time off, refresh, and prepare for the new job, which will hopefully be better for you.
Yes. I took on a job that was impossible to succeed in and it nearly ground me into hamburger. After about nine months of stress, I resigned and then retired permanently from the working world. Within a week of that decision my wife told me I looked like I’d shed 20 years and that she’d been worried that I’d have a heart attack. While I really hate the fact that I ended up retiring from a project that all the employees there hated, it was a good move, as I think it may have otherwise killed me.
Yeah, I actually have some concrete evidence that this job could eventually, literally, kill me. I saw my doctor in November and my blood pressure was way up. He wrote me a note for 3 days stress leave (the max Kaiser allows without a referral to psych) and a script for Ativan, and told me not to worry about the scolding I got from the nurse about diet and exercise; he believed my work stress alone was causing it. I had another appointment in February at the start of a weeklong vacation, and my blood pressure was still worryingly high. But then at the end of that week, I gave blood, and had my blood pressure checked again as part of the screening process. It was back to normal, after just one week.
The organization I work for is a nonprofit. They’re not cutting staff to save money, and I’m not toiling away to line the pockets of greedy executives. We’re all working our asses off to provide legal services protecting the fundamental rights of indigent clients. Even my fuckstick boss’s boss means well; he’s just doing such a phenomenally bad job at managing that he’s destroying all the people who keep this fragile thing running. There’s no joy for me in leaving, no satisfying “fuck you all” exit, just a lamentable dash for the lifeboats. That’s what makes this so hard.
You’re leaving the company. What do you care what happens beyond whatever notice is customary to give employers these days? Your former boss might be a great guy, but running the business is his or his bosses problem, not yours.
My god, this just gave me a totally unexpected epiphany. I’ve been skirting the edges of burnout since 2008, when I got posted (I was in the military at the time) to a job which was the most stressful thing I had had in 20 years. The people were outstanding but it was the actual work itself.
Three years into it I got a phone call with a wonderful job opportunity (hooray the life-boat’s arrived) and I went through the interview process and got the job, which was going to require a move. Once I was almost committed to leaving the military my wife got a brutal cancer diagnosis (11 years later she’s alive and cancer-free thank god). I had not yet started my new job and had phoned them to turn off the whole thing and explained the reason. My boss offered to let me work remotely until the dust settled, which I did for two years.
Though it’s been a great job and great workplace, I had never fully recovered from the stressful job and cancer episode and now I’m feeling like I’m running out of gas.
About Limmin’s commuting comment - pre-Covid my commute was either a one hour walk (or shorter with intervals of jogging), a 20 minute bike ride, or half-hour bus ride. Though I’m generally enjoying working from home (since March 2020), Limmin’s comment just made me realize how much I miss the decompression at the end of the day, especially from the walk and bike rides. So I may have to start going back to the office in order to recapture that.
My workplace is hugely flexible, so that pre-Covid I would often leave work early, and go for a two hour bike detour home, and then make up an hour or two in the evening.
Notwithstanding all that, however, I am two years away from officially retiring at 65 but am starting to do pension calculations for earlier.
I’m sorry but I have no advice beyond what people have already said about the benefits of not being overly driven or ambitious at work.
Thanks, I agree. There’s no amount of money that could make this OK. My new job is going to involve a $26k pay cut, but if it’s really as much an improvement in quality of life as everyone says, it’ll be the best money I’ve ever spent.
My advice, make the decision that you feel happiest about. There is now a time where you will no longer be responsible for any of this. You can make this time as soon as possible, as late as possible, or something in between, and it is YOUR choice, so make it about you.
If you stay an extra week, and it’s just choosing an extra week of stress and worry, don’t do it. If that extra week gives you peace of mind that these people you care about are getting the best possible transition, then do it.
But, whatever you do, appreciate that you don’t have an obligation to suffer for someone else’s benefit, in this choice, you get to be selfish.