I've worked hard since getting out of university. For ten years. I've consistently gotten very positive reviews in my career, with one "average" exception (I quit very soon after). But where am I? Caught in middle management, a cog in a wheel. Do my decisions matter? Does anyone care? Five years ago when I was purely technical I was sure that what I did mattered. Now that I've seen the other side of the looking-glass I'm not so sure. What we do really doesn't impact the bottom line that much. It's just that simple. Much of the productivity gains from technology have been exploited; email, the web, word processors, project planners, etc have all been done. We've seen so many failed "killer apps" in the past five years that were supposed to "revolutionize business" that we've all become jaded.
Technically, SOA looks like it will have some real gains on the technical side so that still interests me. But what else? After you've done 100 JADs and have implemented Agile and Test-Driven Development, what else? After you've gotten the accolades for accelerating deliverables while driving up quality, what's left? There's also the law of diminishing returns. For me to take the next step with leadership, I have to do a lot of work - MBA, take more risks and responsibilities at work, basically work my ass off for the next five years. To do what? Move up into upper-middle-management? Is that what I want to spend my life doing?
A similar thing with Aikido. I'm now Nidan, a second-degree black belt. I've reached the place where I can no longer rely on my Senseis for instruction, I need to dive deep into the meaning of Aikido to synthesize my own understanding to reach the next level. It'll take another 4-5 years and be a huge struggle and risk to get to Sandan, the third degree. After that is the end of the middle part of practice, past Yondan (4th degree) - you get promoted not through technical testing but by your contribution to the spread and depth of the art. I want to continue, but after 13 years of training my work has just begun. How much more will I get out of it? How much more am I capable of understanding and how much work will it take?
Here's some quotes from the article:
Like the science of all emotion, attempts to quantify, analyze, and define burnout have a slightly stilted, unnatural quality. It's a problem that's both physical and existential, an untidy agglomeration of external symptoms and private frustrations, how could such stuff be plotted on a graph? (I keep thinking of Bill Murray and those golf balls, or Bill Murray and his Suntory whiskeys in Lost in Translation, for that matter. Does a culture even need a definition of burnout when it has Bill Murray?) But researchers have nevertheless made valiant efforts to try. In 1981, Maslach, now vice-provost at the University of California, Berkeley, famously co-developed a detailed survey, known as the Maslach Burnout Inventory, to measure the syndrome. Her theory is that any one of the following six problems can fry us to a crisp: working too much; working in an unjust environment; working with little social support; working with little agency or control; working in the service of values we loathe; working for insufficient reward (whether the currency is money, prestige, or positive feedback). "I once talked to a pediatric dentist," she says, and he said, "A good day is when there are no screamers." And I'm sure half the people he was talking about were the parents.
http://nymag.com/news/features/24757/index1.html
