Good Burnout

Amin A.

Scene 1 of No Exit chapter in The Currency of a Founder

By Amin Ariana — October 2015

As an employer, how do I deal with employee burnout?

“Your design, if implemented across the company, has the potential to generate an additional $3 Billion in revenue for us,” said the VP of Marketing to me in a room full of his staff, “what do you need from us?” Eager faces looked astonished that the demo up on the whiteboard worked better than what they described to me when I sat with them in over fifty design-inquiry interviews. I thought for ten seconds, and said to the man at the head of the table “freedom”.

My boss, a Senior Engineering Manager, let me understand that evening that three directors, across three disciplines of Sales, Product and Engineering, asked him to support the project anyway he could if he wanted to be promoted. “I’m assigning five engineers to help you implement this as a product, into the core codebase” he said. “I’ve learned about entrepreneurship,” I said, “that it needs to be guarded against the mainstream culture”. He misunderstood the polite refusal. “You guys can work more from home” he said.

I started having nightmares. Two years of solo hard work that nobody understood stood in limelight, raising the stakes, invoking politics, jeopardizing more careers than mine, and foreshadowing peer opposition. The main codebase took 100 times longer to compile. The engineers wanted recognition for building what remained experimental. The engine of objectives for the next quarter drove the chain of expectation. The constraints of an engineering-driven culture stood opposed to cheap experiments. And the tires of motivation grinded against reality.

Now, Wyoming - that’s an interesting Summer vacation place when you feel crowded. The same counter-culture trait that made me an immigrant and an entrepreneur-in-waiting also caused me to marry a mid-West woman. And in her hometown, I learned what “Burnout” looks like, sounds like, smells like and feels like:

Take a motorbike made to roam the vast roads of the United States. Drive it all the way into Sturgis Motorbike rally. Then build a stage, with rails, flags and pomp. Put the bike up there. Block it with mounted steel. Chain it to the floor. Then tell five burly men to hold you in position, as you accelerate at maximum speed. The back tire spins in place. The wailing cry of the bike can be heard all across the city. And after a few smokey minutes, POP. The tire fails. Standing ovation. Applause in the fog. Cheers to beers. “GOOD BURN-OUT MAN!”, the counter-culture crowd screams, “BURN-OUT!”



attach cover

When I returned, the engineers showed me the “properly engineered” demo they built in my absence. The project manager who worked alongside them wrote about me in a review that I seemed to spin in place a lot and make huffy noises, but not display anymore progress. In Fall, I gave a two week notice to my manager, “I love you guys, but I’m leaving to start a product on my own. I need freedom.” He still didn’t understand my reasons, but showed me a lot of kindness.

In Winter, we had a goodbye team lunch. “By the way,” said one of the five engineers, “They dissolved the entire department with hundreds of people, because a startup company provided a stripped-down tool that does a good-enough job. Our manager missed his promotion to a colleague. You chose the perfect time to give notice, did you know about all this?!”

“POP!” I heard a nerve in my temple. Smoke must have come out of my ears. And I smiled in deflated agony. “I’m sorry my friend,” I said, “doing your best work under cultural constraints is an unthankful business.”

The revenue of the competing startup for the year in question increased by $3 Billion, the same number projected during the demo. The day I quit, the startup started constructing the tallest tower in San Francisco with the money. Each day that I pass by the construction, I make a fist and whisper "Good burnout!"

Amin A.

Written by

Amin Ariana

A software entrepreneur from San Francisco