Burned Out and Handling Burn Out
Let’s face it, this is a thankless, ultimately heartbreaking profession, QA. Personally speaking, I’m very passionate about quality and about making everything right. It gnaws at my craw when management ships flawed product or dismisses too facilely concerns I bring up. As such, I suffer from burn out. A lot. I’ve found that about three years is the maximum I’ve worked in a position so far. At that time, I start thinking Is this the job I want to have for the next 20 years? I evaluate where the company is going and where I am going and determine whether I want to try something else or if I want to work anywhere else.
This all comes from reading Art Wittman’s “‘I’d Rather Work Anywhere Else’” essay about burn out.
You know how burn out feels. A sort of listlessness, a bit of restlessness, and a certain impotence, a dash of I don’t care that’s particularly disabling in QA staff. You doubt you’re having an impact and begin staring at things which aren’t the application under test. You stop looking for more ways to improve your effort and your contribution and focus on willing the minute and hour hands counterclockwise.
So I find something new to do within the company, some reason to stick around, or I get out (note to Mr. Wittman: we’re not machinists here; there is no gee, I’m glad I have a job gratefulness when you’re burnt out).
Now, burn out exists and can recognize the signs in ourselves and others. You can take certain steps as a manager to help prevent your charges from burning out:
- Keep communications open from top to bottom. Burning out can come from no longer feeling excitement about your employer as much as work. Your company should talk straight about its business challenges and prospects and not try to hide troubles or try to convince the employees that the big announcements from the pipeline are perpetually next week. What passes for optimism sometimes is mere dishonesty to the burning out. In the cases where it’s not just mere dishonesty.
- Keep the political crap off of your employees. I’ve mentioned this before as part of my management style. That is: make sure that you’re the one intercepting useless timelines or misplaced criticism from your employees. They don’t need project managers riding them about failing to find defects, for example, or customer account people coming to them to ask them to look at their potential clients. They need to know you’re the guy in charge and will handle any static so they can do the fun things, like breaking things and reducing people to tears.
- Keep the job varied. You know how fun the Monday night: meatloaf; Tuesday night: spaghetti; Wednesday night: pot roast; Thursday night: Hamburger Helper; and Friday night: leftovers menus were? Yeah, take a look at what you’re asking your people to do. If it’s Monday: smoke testing; Tuesday: running financial test scripts; Wednesday: running account management test scripts; Thursday: retesting and reopening defects; and Friday: status meeting and writing new test scripts for the defect fix that passed, you’re going to find a lot of people taking long lunches with ties on.
- Keep the employee learning. As part of keeping the job varied, make sure that your people are learning new things. Getting smarter feels good and gives one self-respect. Doing the same thing over and over again, and they might as well be working on the assembly line.
- Reward the employee. You need to do something to make sure the employee feels appreciated. Aside from atta boys. Aside from office store trinkets and certificates. You need to get your people raises, bonuses, extra days off, or something tangible to show the company really, fiscally appreciates them. Regardless of the economy, regardless of how the company is doing this quarter, your people need to feel they’re appreciated. Because they’re here now, and if you expect them to keep being here at the same salary with additional responsibilities, you’d better make sure they’re not spending their afternoons looking over the salary surveys and Dice.com compensations for similar titles.
Personally, my cure for corporate burnout was to become an independent consultant, where I flit from job to job and project to project before the corporate culture can get me down. But that’s not an option for a lot of people.
