Image by Nataliya VaitkevichHi, I’m Joey, I’ve been at Apsis for nearing 5 years now. During that time, I sold my house, got married, became the dog-father to two Sheep-a-doodles, and now expect a tiny human come the fall. When asked my prospective 5 year plan in the job interview, my truthful answer was: “Still working for Apsis.” Here’s why I was so confident.
Ostensibly, I was doing well. I was managing a small team after being promoted internally, with compensation better than most of my friends in a similar age bracket. I found pinball and rock climbing as hobbies of choice, and I frequently hosted game nights1 with friends at my house that I bought not long before housing prices surged.
Burnout is insidious. It’s a slow burn at first that you may not recognize. Eventually a catalyst causes it to explode like gasoline on coals. That catalyst for me (and many others) was the pandemic.
Suddenly, my social hobbies were torn away, my roommate moved back into his parent’s house, I worked from home, and only saw humans in the grocery store and on a screen. I had only work, video games, and home improvements to occupy my time. At work, I was forced by upper management to submit one of my direct reports as a layoff candidate. The raise that I had been promised was put on hiatus, and I was put to work on an impossible project2 that got directly in the way of putting time into a machine learning project in which I could see the high long term value3.
I had known for a while that I should look for a new job, but was paralyzed by burnout that had spiked from festering to overwhelming. In 2021, when Eric reached out, I was at a low point. My mental and physical health were in the dumps. I had been amazed that such a job existed when Eric joined Apsis years before. Given this incredible opportunity, I felt a lot of internal pressure to impress the team. The promise of a new way of working was the carrot that I needed to overcome my mental block.
At Apsis, the general burnout triggers experienced so commonly in soul-crushing corporate jobs are the guidelines for how not to treat employees. While not infallible, Apsis has been an excellent place for me to recover and thrive.
- Workload—This is a priority for Apsis. See “Work Sustainably” and “Don’t be a hero” to hear from our founders on this.
- Perceived Autonomy—Apsis is, in every way it can be, about giving the individual control back. Whether that control being in your schedule or about what work you take on. It’s fully remote, so you can be a digital nomad. We make every effort to give everyone a chance to choose the projects they work on.
- Community—We are a close-knit team and all end up working with each other on different projects4. We only judge each other when someone overworks (and then only lightly since we’re only human). We’ve supported each other through a variety of life events necessitating extended time off with full pay5. Each Monday during our planning meeting, every team member is given the chance to voice any concerns about how the last week went.
- Reward—Most jobs will dangle money and prestige as the reward for your efforts but, Apsis believes in fair pay for more time with your family or to chase other ambitions.
- Perceived Fairness—In a world where there are endless examples of companies exploiting workers, it can seed a bias to see every decision you don’t like as unfair. Regardless of the reality of your situation, it’s the perception of unfairness that demands such a steep mental tax. Employees at Apsis know that the company cares about treating us collectively as well as possible, as such fairness isn’t an issue.
- Shared Values—We’ve proven ourselves willing to turn down work that we don’t feel matches our shared values. More importantly, each of the other points on this list is part of our shared ethos to take care of each other.
The main risk of burnout in this environment is self-imposed internal pressures6.
I let myself spiral way too far before taking corrective action. Between support from my now-wife, the Apsis team, and the freedom to once again leave the house, I feel so much better. I gained time and motivation to focus on improvement of my internal and external experience. I now maintain a consistent workout schedule; I contribute more to the household instead of pushing off low-priority chores; it’s only on rare occasions that I commiserate with Garfield on Mondays.
If you feel a connection to this story, take a moment… look inward and identify your most prominent burnout factors. A boss on a different wavelength. An industry that you’ve become disillusioned with. No recognition for your finest work. Look for the levers that you can pull to make incremental improvements to these factors. Just like onset, recovery typically comes from a catalyst followed by a slow grind.
Now that the initial major effects of the pandemic are behind us, I’ve been able to get back to my social hobbies: primarily pinball. I participate in the New England Pinball League, and monthly tournaments for the championship belt tournament. My wife frequently jokes that we need a wall mount for the wrestling style belt I take home sometimes. Perhaps pinball could be a fun thing to blog about next…
Footnotes
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Mostly Blood on the Clocktower, a delightfully complicated social deduction game. ↩
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I needed to match datapoints in two disparate sources, one of which was at best incorrect, and at worst missing large swaths of data because someone in another department had not setup the data to be labeled correctly. ↩
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Spoiler alert, turns out AI is a big deal. ↩
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During my time at apsis, I’ve seen multiple people take several full months of take full pay paternity leave, and plan to do the same this fall. We had one member of the team facing a spouse’s sudden, terrifying, life-changing illness take multiple months off to figure out how to move forward. A team member took a month off after going through burnout due to violating our [don-t-be-a-hero] policy under the radar. ↩
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Last fall, 50% of our close-knit geographically-split team came together to help build a fence at my house providing my wife and I peace of mind due to some problem dogs in our neighborhood. ↩
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That’s what therapists are for! ↩