Building up, burning out

Last week, Hadi Partovi of Code.org posted this tweet:

Depending on your demographic group, profession, and personal goals, you must be either nodding your head in approval or thinking how insane this person must be to sacrifice a significant chunk of his (and his colleagues') personal life to ship Internet Explorer - probably the world's most hated browser.

I've been thinking about this a lot, and I feel that he's both insane and right. After all, where's the right balance between work and life, when the two so often overlap?

I think this discussion fits into a wider theme, which is that of building up versus burning out.

Building up

A sense of shared community and the feeling of building something meaningful and lasting are amongst the most powerful feelings lucky people will experience in their lifetime. From attending church choir to making art, society and accomplishment are key for our well-being once our basic needs are fulfilled.

For a lot of people, however, it's not really quite straightforward to find either - and that's where jobs often come to the rescue. Modern companies have realized that a sense of shared purpose is key to accomplishing their mission (and therefore meet shareholders' goals) - so they will try to create this feeling amongst their employees.

That's a trick (and not a cheap one), but it's not inherently wrong. When people join mission-oriented companies, they'll usually buy into the community - and by extension, into the mission. And sure, there is a fine line between great company culture and goals, and a cult-like mission - but in general, finding a place to work at that straddles this line (on either side) is a stroke of luck and - for many - a revelation.

"we're building something meaningful, and we're doing it together" is one of the most powerful feelings you can instill into a high-performing team. In fact, I'd argue it's one of the core duties as a senior PM level and above; but the feeling needs to be channeled for the right projects and products. It cannot be a blanket feeling that encompasses anything that the company is doing; it can't be a cult.

Occasionally, projects will come along that warrant this fervor. I can imagine that the project this tweet references (building Internet Explorer over at Microsoft) felt like something worth building, and sacrificing their personal balance, for a lot of people. That's because it hits the three core pillars of a "building up" product:

• 🆕 it is something new: not an iteration of something that exists, but something that truly has the greenfield potential of being the starting point of a lasting legacy
• ⏩ it has a sense of urgency: if it's not built on time by the team, someone else will get there.
• 🆙 people growing on it will experience exponential growth: working on the product will let people develop skills much faster, that will let them grow in their life and career.

By definition then, a "building up" product must be successful - or at least create a lasting legacy with its failure (think General Magic or the Buran shuttle), it must be a sprint, not a marathon - as one cannot sustain a fake sense of urgency forever, and it must end with opportunity and recognition for the team.

I think that's where Hadi's tweet falls short of expectations. Internet Explorer did create a lasting legacy, but a negative one (both because of its anti-competitive practices and because it was, throughout its career, the worst browser to work with); the sense of urgency lasted for years (Hadi himself says "it was a marathon, not a sprint"), and not everyone on the team got the recognition or grew their skills in the direction they wanted.

That's when a "building up" project turns into a "burning out" project.

Burning out

Burnout is a hot topic, especially during this pandemic; and yet I feel it's largely misunderstood in its complexity. In my opinion, burnout is often conflated with exhaustion; and yet, the two are not the same.

Exhaustion is when someone is overworked for weeks, months, sometimes years at a time. They no longer have the time or will to focus on other things; and work becomes their core occupation, around which they mold their life. Eventually, everyone breaks - that's when exhaustion kicks in. Much like a runner collapsing just after the finish line, these people still want to do their job well; they just can't because they are too tired. Unlike burn-outs, the cure is easy: prolonged rest, often a new job, or a change of scenery, and that's pretty much it.

Burnout is a lot more complicated; but if I had to put a label on it, I'd say it's "loving a project more than the project loves you". It's not a function of effort, it's a function of results - and it is much more dangerous and complex than simple exhaustion.

Products that are not "building up" products, but still get hyped up as if they were, are the ones that usually lead multiple people in your team straight into a burnout. If you promise the "new and exciting success", the "speed" and the "reward", you better be sure that all three components are present. People will then make a conscious choice to work deliberately and intensively towards achieving that common goals.

I have been on two products so far that were truly transformative and had a "building up" momentum going on; they were (and still are) the highlights of my career so far; they created amazing friendships at work and - lo and behold - still allowed me to keep my hobbies, my passion, and a reasonable work-life balance. It is possible to work on "building-up" projects without burning out, and they are a transformative experience.

But that's not what Hadi is describing there - and that's why people are reacting negatively to the tweet. Pretty much everyone has direct or indirect experience with a product that gets oversold. We buy the story and pour heart and soul into it; yet the product doesn't seem to fulfill its promises.

Maybe it's a product that's not been built on solid ground and never had real opportunities; or maybe it's been planned beyond the limits of feasibility or resources, so deadlines keep slipping and the amount of work and effort must increase to keep up with increasingly shaky and multi-layered schedules.

Eventually you wake up one day questioning "what am I doing with my life" - and yet you are too tangled with the promises and sunk costs of these crazy cult-like projects. What can you do then if not burning out?

Burning out on these projects, then, is kind of a "circuit breaker" of the unconscious mind, protecting body and souls from the damages of wasting one's life energy on the wrong things. But unlike exhaustion, rest won't be enough: after one has been burned on this type of product, the risk is that cynicism and lack of trust will characterize the rest of his or her career. Recovery takes time - so better not to lead people down this path in the first place.

High performance products

Ultimately, it's not hard to create a strong team. All it takes is matching the expectations with the reality of a team. Not every project can be a "building up" project; not every product a flagship product. Most teams do both innovation and rote maintenance; things that are truly important, and things that are "ok if we fail"; things that are mission critical and things that can wait.

Having a good grip on which is which, both as a leader and as a person will ensure that the rare, beautiful communal effort that is a true "building up" product will be recognized as such. People will believe that something great is being built; they will pour their energy into it and accomplish unheard-of leaps in both the space of possibilities and their own career.

But if you know 🆕 the product isn't transformative, ⏩ it cannot be done as a sprint, or 🆙 it won't bear enough learnings and rewards for the people that pour their energies to it; then it's just better not to lie to yourself and to your colleagues.

Some products are not a higher calling, or a mission - they are just plain work; and recognizing them as such will protect everyone from burning out.