Recognising Burnout
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:05
All right, folks, Andrew is ready to go, so we are going to make ourselves ready to go, and please give a warm welcome and round of applause to Mr. Hutchings on recognizing burnout. All right, so about burnout, the Oxford Dictionary definition is physical or mental
00:26
collapse caused by overwork or stress. There's loads of other definitions of it, but I thought this was a quite fitting definition. And I thought I'd start with my story. I'm going to try not to uproot this, because it's hard, but...
00:45
So my background, who's heard of MySQL before? Excellent. So that's good to help. I used to work for MySQL. I've worked on several other database projects, one of them is relevant for this talk. I now work for MariaDB as an engineering manager.
01:03
So I've worked on something called OpenStack, which some of you might have heard of before. I was one of the leads for a couple of teams there, and I also worked on a little thing called NGINX, and a few others here. So the relevant part, I worked on a project called Drizzle.
01:23
It was a company I worked for there, a bunch of us working there, small team, but it was an open source project, fork of MySQL, and we all accepted community contributions as if we were lead developers, you know, every contribution was treated the same.
01:45
It was a fantastic project to work for, I had so much fun working there, really, really bright people. March 2011, Drizzle hits GA, first major release. Yeah, first major release, lots of press are going around it, lots of stress, lots
02:08
of build up to it, we were all working extremely, extremely hard. Soon after, a phone call, my manager, Lee, phones up and says, funding's been cut, all
02:27
the entire team's gone, was not fun, but I still had to continue development, had to find a new job, I had three conference talks coming up at the MySQL conference in California, there was a lot going on, so the conference came around, I was giving
02:45
my talks, they were bad, I mean, worse than this, they were terrible. I went in the shower one day, while I was there, and my hair started falling out, and it was serious bad, the stress and stuff involved in that, October 20th, I'll
03:20
tell you that, I've been to the doctors, I was on anti-depressants, I was doing
03:27
the washing up one day, I just burst into tears randomly, it was bad, that's bad. I ended up looking like this, at alopecia, half my hair had gone, my wife said to
03:45
me, keep your hair on, I had my family supporting me without them, I wouldn't have got through this at all, amazing changes. I went to another database company for a
04:03
short time, but I still wasn't right, the community had completely just burnt me out, there were a few people that were quite mean to me in the community as well, it wasn't a lot of fun, I ended up completely leaving database world for five years, that's where I worked for HP, NGINX, etc, it had to be
04:27
done, I had to make these kind of changes. In December of that year, I also went cold turkey on anti-depressants, I really don't recommend doing that, I was quite ill, never, never, just stop, but at the end of it, I started to get
04:44
better, my hair started to grow back, it came back as white fluff to start with, like baby hair, and then came back, you know, it's pretty normal now, I'm going grey, I'm old now, but you know, so a little bit about burnout, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a mental health person, it's just something I've
05:02
been through, and it's kind of linked to depression, my doctors said I had depression, you know, burnout wasn't really a thing that was talked about or known about so much then as it is now, I find it's extremely common in tech, in particular, but it's rarely talked about, it's getting talked about more and
05:22
more, you know, especially in events like this, which, you know, I'm really, really happy about, and it could cause a person to leave a company or a community, you know, I left the database world for a long time, until I joined MariaDB, I was completely out of it, I just couldn't do it anymore, so a
05:41
few other courses of burnout, you know, drowning and workload, if you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, you're working like 60, 80 hour days, I've been doing really bad at that recently, but, you know, if you're drowning in it, you can get you really, really down, it can really kind of kill the thing, lack of autonomy, if you don't feel
06:01
like you're in control of what's going on, you know, you've got no control over anything, then that can really hit you quite hard, feeling undervalued, you're working, you know, every hour God sends, and the sales guys get a bonus, or a holiday, or something like that, and
06:21
you're kind of, well, you know, I'm killing myself over here, you know, that can really, really hit you hard. Reduce priding work, you know, you can really hate what you're doing, and that's the thing. Isolation, that can happen a lot in the open source world, so, for example, right now, I work in the
06:44
UK, I live in the UK, I manage a team that's completely international, so, I've got a guy in Moscow, a guy in Toronto, several in Dallas, my manager is in New York, the CEO is in California, I am literally living in the middle of nowhere, I don't get to
07:03
see my team very often, and it can be quite isolating, you need this human contact every so often, and it can even happen in an office environment, you can be cut off from people in the same office, you know, it can be bad. Values conflict, so, again, it's an important one for open source, because you could work for a company where you love
07:24
working in open source software, but a company kind of switches to enterprise software, you know, closed source software, and you kind of think, well, that's not what I signed up for, and you can really feel disgruntled over that. So, productivity can drop, if you see it in other people,
07:45
or the quality can drop of the projects you're working on, and a person can shy away and lose motivation, you know, they can really kind of fade into the background,
08:01
they could start feeling kind of hopeless, pessimistic, resentful, they could show signs of feeling, you know, not at all engaged. Chronic exhaustion is quite common, while I was going through my bad spell, I was kind of sleeping during the day, you know, probably ridiculous amount of hours,
08:23
I didn't feel motivated in what I was doing, it was really bad. And you don't have time for simple joys in life, you know, play a video game, go for a walk, things like that, you just don't feel like doing that kind of thing anymore. And everyone is different. My wife says I've become irritable and withdrawn, you know, by the way.
08:42
But it's worth remembering, the problems could be something else, so depression, drugs, certain illnesses such as thyroid problems can also give similar kind of symptoms. So there are no silver bullets, you know, there's no one size fits all when it comes to burnout. And you can't really ask someone directly,
09:02
are you burnt out? I wouldn't have been able to tell you at the time I was burnt out, you know, I wouldn't have been able to tell you at the time I was depressed or anything, because I didn't know what those things were like. For a lot of people, you know, if you experience it for the first time, you don't know what it's like. And your friends and family are likely gonna spot it before you do, especially with workload, stress, et cetera.
09:25
So preventative measures as an organization that can be taken, some of these apply to communities, some more to corporations. So building automated tools to remove kind of my nummy tasks, so simple thing, continuous integration, things like that.
09:41
Things that you don't want to be a developer that's essentially a data entry clerk, you know, that's not really gonna help with matters. Having regular check-ins with your team is really, really vital. I try and do this as much as I can as a manager. I have one-to-one calls with them once a month if I can.
10:01
And you know, it's a positive thing. I talk to them about what they're currently working on, if they're happy doing that work, if not, you know, find something else that they can work on. Stuff that's going on in their lives if they want to talk about that stuff as well. I've got one guy who loves going out playing poker at nights and things. He's pretty good at it.
10:20
He makes probably more money. He does work for me, but you know. That kind of thing, you know, keeping them engaged, keeping them, but that way you can identify problems. Problems might not be burnout, but you know, you can identify these kind of things. Take them further. Make sure holidays and vacations are taken.
10:40
I used to be really bad for this, you know. UK gets about 25 vacation days a year, and I would never take them all ever. You know, I'd be really, really bad. Nowadays I do. Give people a buffer when they return. When you come back from vacation, you don't want to be suddenly hit with a thousand emails marked urgent.
11:01
That's just going to drive you right down. You need a slow ramp up, especially if you've been away for two weeks, a month, something like that. That's going to be really bad. And it's going to be a common theme in the next few slides. Communication is key. Talk about it. Talk about it to someone. It could be friends. It could be family. It can be a mental health worker.
11:21
You know, it could be a boss, HR. We've got a fantastic HR, Marie DB, Wunkel Boel, who is pretty much the mother of the company. I can talk to her about anything. She knows about my past and everything. Preventative measures. So take time to reflect your mental state.
11:40
Take time out. Think about it. People say meditating works. I don't do that. I really should, but I don't. Separate your identity from your job. I literally have the next shit I've written there. So yeah, I'm really, really bad at that. You know, my work is my own entity, I think. But I do try and take time out for family nowadays.
12:02
A lot better than I used to be. Take your holidays and vacations. Don't take stressful ones. Don't max out your credit cards. Don't take out stressful loans and things like that. You're just gonna be worried about that the whole time you're away. You know, it could be a staycation if you want. Just get away. And while you're away, switch off.
12:20
Disconnect. I went to Tenerife a couple of years ago in the family. And for the first time ever, I actually uninstalled Slack. I uninstalled my work email accounts. Everything was removed from my phone. And no one knew my phone number either at work. So they could not contact me even if they wanted to. It was bliss.
12:41
And again, communication is key. So the key takeaways from this talk. Mental health is unfortunately still taboo, especially among men in my country in the UK. My eldest son's gone through a lot of mental health issues. And trying to get him help has been really, really hard.
13:03
And the NHS in the UK for teenagers is terrible for mental health. Things are getting better, but they're nowhere near where they should be. The brain and body are connected. You know, I'm kind of evidence of that.
13:20
Hair falling out. I sometimes get eczema as well. I'm pretty stressed. So there can be other physical manifestations, such as it can hit your immune system as well. You can be more vulnerable to illness. I've done a hell of a lot of traveling recently. I am kind of getting over a cold right now. I'm actually deaf in my left ear.
13:41
And I think that's all due to everything that's been going on recently. And it can spill into everyday life. It can affect your family life. It can affect your personal life. And you really want it to do that. Everyone has different tolerances. Some people can take a lot of stress. You know, it could work 60, 80-hour days
14:01
and not be at all by it. Some people really can't. And working in tech and other similar industries, it's very mentally taxing. It can be very stressful. And again, communication is key. Thank you very much.
14:32
So I just want to say thank you very much to Andrew. I really appreciate the talk and the conversation. The director hopefully encouraging us all to start talking amongst each other and support one another. With that, we have some time for questions,
14:42
but we are kind of running behind time. So I'm going to take three questions. And then if we want to take more conversations outside the corridor, that'd be really helpful. So hands up who's got a question. I've got one here in the front. Hi, Andrew. Hi. Just saying that was an incredibly brave presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you.
15:03
Just coming over here. One moment, please. Hi, Andrew. Thanks again. I am a developer as well. And I have type 1 diabetes. And my blood sugar swings also affects, I mean, comebacks to me as mood swings.
15:23
And I guess I'm using antidepressants as well at the moment. I don't know if I have depression or burnout. But my question is simply, what is your motivation to be here and giving this talk to us? And what make you come back basically after five years of break?
15:43
Well, it's two different things. So to give this talk, I don't want people to go through what I went through, basically. If this can help one person, then it's good. As for going back, I'm a geek. I love working on databases. So I needed to get back in that field.
16:02
And I've got a lot of friends that work in databases in general. Actually, at the MariaDB event just before here, giving a talk on the stuff that I'm working on there. And a lot of my friends are there. So it was hard being away. But at the same time, I needed to be away, if that makes sense.
16:22
Thank you. Just got time for one more question. It's coming up here to the back. Thank you. I just had a very practical question. You talked about having a buffer when people come back from holidays.
16:41
Do you have practical tips to implement that? Good question. Practical tips to implement buffering when you come back from holiday. OK. I would say, for me, what I'll do is the first thing I'll come back.
17:00
I won't work on any project work straight away. I'll just look at emails and slowly go through them. I'll probably have loads of bugs and things to work on. But I'll leave those. I've got to stagger it myself kind of thing. Being a manager, I can't really
17:20
run anyone else to do that for me. I would recommend, if you're managing a team, make sure that you're staff are aware that you can just spend a day or two just sorting out emails, just looking at Slack messages, not having to run full on into development because you're two weeks behind on a project or something like that, if that makes sense.
17:46
OK, coming. It's going to be much faster if I just pass this the whole way down. Thanks again for your presentation.
18:01
I was just wondering if you could go back in time and change one thing, what would be that thing that you would change back in that bad period? I definitely wouldn't have done those conference talks. That would have been a big thing. Maybe that would have helped with the stress because there were three 50-minute talks
18:21
and there was a lot of product work. I was also working on articles for the press and things at the time around the release, everything. I had to go on as if everything was fine when it really, really wasn't. I think without the conference, if I had just abandoned the conference that year,
18:40
I probably would have been in a better state of mind in general. Thank you.