Hello everyone.  A lot of the recent discussion here on BTL and BTL Radio over the last month or so has revolved around the idea of burnout.  Today I’d like to be a little more personal and share the impact that this has had, and does still have, on me.

Burnout is distinct from stress in a few areas. It’s not the most strictly defined phenomena, but this is good for a quick representation of its effects.

If you’re wondering, this won’t be much about the video games industry specifically.  The lessons should be pretty universal, though.

First, a Near Miss

The first exposure I had to burnout was when I was thankfully much younger.  Just out of college and in the meat grinder of a large studio’s QA department where your worth is primarily measured by how many bugs you can write.  Right after training I had a work day that was over 12 hours long.  Facing college tuition debts, I was all for it.  That’s double time pay!  And so it went for months.  12-14 hour days, sometimes more, rarely much less, 7 days a week for 4-5 months.  It got to the point where we joked the only way to know it was the weekend was because it was so easy to park.  This all capped off with a huge marathon shift that lasted from Friday morning to Sunday afternoon.

For me, at the time, it was a tremendous opportunity, and I gave it everything I had.  I was excited to be getting a higher hourly wage than I ever had before, even though it’s now under minimum wage, and with so much OT, it was actually years before I made that much again.  My youth helped me deal with shorting myself sleep regularly, and I am lucky to have had family help to keep other aspects of my life in order at the time.  Even then, though, it was impacting me.  I would be exhausted, have difficulty holding conversations, and drift off to sleep at the odd family gathering I was able to attend like a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner.  If this had continued much longer, then the energies and resilience of youth would not have been enough to sustain me.

The others around me had their own problems.  The test leads routinely slept at work, under their desks.  Others showered at the nearby gym rather than spending the time at home.  This was all overseen with a mindset of throwing work-hours at the problem, as though nothing else factored into performance.  I’m sure that the leads, and other vets who were there for multiple projects had their own struggles with burnout, but as a contractor, I was able to leave and recharge on my own.

Second, a Different Flavor

Most times you hear about burnout horror stories, it’s about crazy overtime, lack of respect, poor conditions, and so forth, but it can take other shapes.  It can happen without any of those, though.  One place I worked was friendly, respectful, and an overall great place to work.  At this place, for various reasons, it was decided that because a lot of work was expected, we would schedule our shift to have a standard 10 hour day, or a 50 hour week.  We all agreed, this seemed preferable to OT getting out of hand, and we’d be getting paid better.  So, this doesn’t sound too imposing, certainly not to a certain someone who I won’t name again, but it feels a bit different when it continues for over a year.  Here I saw the impact that it had on other people much more clearly.  While we should have been getting 10 hours of work done, most people were tired, and getting much closer to 7 hours worth of good work in.  We were not burning so bright that we’d burn out quickly, but we were burning a little too bright for much too long.

Of course, I don’t want to compare this to the kind of suffering that people went through at places like Team Bondi, or other nightmarish projects.  However, it is a sign that something’s wrong when you’re walking across the parking lot on a sunny day, and you look down at the hot black top and think “that’d be a comfy place to take a nap”.

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