Overcoming Leader Burnout

A conversation with Vaidehi Joshi, Engineering Manager, Vimeo

I talked with Vaidehi Joshi about her project Basecs for my first podcast, Indiedotes. When I started this series I knew I wanted to have her on this series to share her experience with burnout as an engineering leader. Our conversation covered how she became a manager, how she’s battled with perfectionism and over-committing, how she burnt out and eventually came back to a leadership role. We don’t talk about how leadership impacts your mental health enough. We’ll be exploring this topic more.

Before we get started, can you introduce yourself?

Well, my name is Vaidehi. I am a software engineer who had a non-traditional path into tech. I attended a coding boot camp maybe eight years ago, and have been writing code since then, and recently in the last couple of years have dipped my toes into engineering management, which has been a new phase of my career.hese days I'm an engineering manager at Vimeo. I also have just done a lot of technical content in my free time just because I really love learning new things and then sharing them with other folks. That's what the BaseCS series was and I had a podcast that kind of spun off of that.

Yeah, that's kind of the gist. I also enjoy conference speaking and just really love being part of different communities, and opening the door for other people like me who probably didn't have as many doors open. I often think back to what it was like for me when I was starting out. It shouldn't be this hard to get started with something that you're interested in. So I'm trying to make that a little easier for folks.

I love your mission. I feel like everybody maybe has a mission. Mine is I love to create workplaces where people can thrive. These days, I do it through leaders, but that's my thing.

When you started in technology was becoming a manager something that you longed for, something you planned to do?

No, I definitely did not long for it. At the time I was just kind of like, "Oh, a manager is just the person who decides how much I get paid, decides what I work on, and tells me how to get better. I hope I have a good one. I just want a good manager." I've had experiences with different types of managers, and different management styles, but it was never something that I was like that's what I wanted to do, I really wanted to write code and program and build things and learn things and have my hands in the code and try to understand what was going on. That's why I got into the field. That's what I wanted to do for the first six years of my career.

I never even thought about management. It was a thing where I was like, "Oh, maybe one day, I guess everybody has to do it, maybe." I've learned that's not the case and I'm glad and I'm like, "Okay, it should be a conscious choice and you should know what it is." I think, especially when I was starting out, I was just like, "Oh, it's just a thing some people work towards, but I probably am years away from it," and I think I got to that fork in the road about whether I want to be a manager or not sooner than I thought I would've.

How did it happen? How did you become a manager?

I worked at a couple of different companies in the first five or six years of my career. I had no interest in being a manager. I had built a lot of features, I had led a couple of projects of my own. I'd done a lot of the same work and flexed a lot of those same muscles and so I was like, "Okay, this isn't new." Sometimes the technologies are new and the types of problems you're solving are a little unique and refreshing, but once I'd done it enough times, I was like, "Okay, I'm familiar with this," and so I found myself drawn towards the socio-technical problems of building software. That's when I was like, "Oh, okay. I understand what an individual contributor does, but what do you do when you have multiple people and you're trying to get them to all work towards the same thing and balance work, scope things, product priorities, business priorities, staffing, just how do you get this big, nebulous blob of a team to go in that direction?"

I just kept finding myself coming back to that, sometimes in the context of projects, sometimes in the context of leveling up engineers and skills, and so I just kept finding myself drawn to it. I would ask those questions and conversations, despite being not a manager, being very much an individual contributor, and that's when I was like, "Oh, maybe I should figure out if this is something I want to try, what does it even mean to solve these problems?" That's when I was like, "Okay, I think I need to maybe think about where I can go in my career that will open that door for me," because where I was for three years of my career, I was really happy there, learning a lot, but it was such a small company that I was like, "I'm never going to lead a team here. It's too tiny," so that's when I had to jump ship and figure out, okay, what organization is going to pave that path for me? Where will I get to do that? Forem was one of those companies.

How was your transition into management and how was it different than what you imagined?

I mean, my transition into management was interesting because I started off at the company as an IC and then I had time to get to know a lot of things before moving into any kind of managerial role, so that was nice. I think if I had just jumped in from zero to 60, not knowing really anything, not having context, that would've been harder. It was really different from what I thought it was going to be. I think that might have been the nature of where I tried management because management is going to be very different depending on what organization you're at, what support structures you have, and what that company's perspective of management is.

My first foray into management at Forem was this hybrid technical leader manager role where you're committing code, you also have ownership over this part of the product, but you’re also leading people. It wasn't individual teams, so the folks that I was managing didn't even work on the same thing, so that was a really unique experience because a lot of the times I was like, "Oh, I feel like I don't have context on things," and I know there are other companies where that isn’t the case, like where I'm at now. At Vimeo, I know what everybody's working on and I understand it. I think that personally makes me better at my job.

But it was definitely different than I thought it would be. I think you can't really predict the problems you're going to face. Especially as a first-time manager who's new to it, depending on what kind of support system you have, you might get a team that's pretty smooth, things are humming along, or you could inherit a team that isn't that, or you could inherit a team that's a mix of both things.

One of my misconceptions about management was that it’s kind of the same everywhere. Everywhere has the same experience and you just kind of fall into it. I realized it could be very different based on where you are. 

It changes so quickly too, right? Because teams change, people leave, people come and go, people get moved around, and that changes the scale and the type of problem you're working with…that's another reason why it's very nebulous and hard to predict.

I mean, I think it's true. There is a misconception that it's the same everywhere. But it’s really quite different. It depends on so many things like the phase that a business that the company is in. Managing a startup is radically different than managing an established business, or even a scaling business.

Yeah, yeah.

There are so many variables.

Yeah. It's interesting, too, because I think there are a lot of resources out there and sometimes it's easy to read the article or listen to the interviews like this one and then just be like, "Oh, okay, so this is what management is." It's important to remember this is one slice of the pie, and unless that person has worked at plenty of companies and can speak to all of those things, which is a rarer thing in a blog post, right, because people are often tackling one topic, or they're explaining how to do a specific thing, your company may not even have to deal with that, so it might color your perception of the job. But it's just so varied.

I guess what's interesting, too, now that I'm saying it out loud, is that it’s kind of the same with programming, too, and the IC path. It's just that we think that code is more predictable and the problems that you see in one code base are often transferred to another and you're like, "Oh, okay. I know what this role is." That's not true, right? It will be very different based on the scale of the company, how quickly you're shipping if it's a startup versus if it's an organized place where you have resources at your disposal. So it's not that different from IC that way. It's just it's harder to pin down because it's the people problems and I think that can be intimidating to a lot of people.

I've said it a million times, but I think people problems are some of the hardest problems. When you got into the role, was there something that you found particularly hard, or harder than you thought it might be?

There were probably two different things that were very hard for me. One was hard because it was just new and I had to teach myself how to deal with it. The other one was hard because I think it's just hard and it's just the nature of the job. The first thing that was hard for me was learning that my job title had changed and that meant my role had changed and my expectations of what I was supposed to do were different. I think I was still holding onto that IC reigns a little bit. I thought I had to stay close to the codebase and commit code and do all these things. But also, I have all these added responsibilities on top.

That's not to say that managers shouldn't still be technical. It's fine to find ways to be close to the code base, but the nature of that changes when you move into the manager role. You really shouldn't be the person building all the features. You shouldn't be the person who is the blocker or the bottleneck. You should be the support system that's pushing things along and helping things move at the right pace. The nature of that work is very different than the person trail-blazing the path through the code to build a new thing, very different, and so that was hard for me because even though I knew it was part of the job, I had to kind of unteach myself how to do that, undo the knots.

It's about identity, too, right? It's like, "I'm a person who ships code," or, "This is the value that I bring”. As a leader, you have to rethink your identity.

Yep. Absolutely, right, and your value, as you said, that's a really good way of describing it, your value and where you add input shifts and you have to learn how to make that shift. For some people, I think it's really hard. For some people, it just takes time. I think if it's very hard and you are just like, "Wow, I'm really unhappy," maybe that's a sign that you don't actually want to manage, and that's okay. For me, it was just like... Yeah, it was just a, "Okay, I got to slowly teach myself how to shift over to this side."

There's value and there's so much significance in both roles. It's a detriment to everybody if you conflate them and you're like, "I'm going to do both," because you just won't do either one well.

The other thing that was hard for me was just dealing with the tough people problems. I became a first-time manager during the pandemic, too, so there were just a lot of hard human issues, and I was just like, "This is hard. I don't know if I can have this conversation. I've never had this conversation. How do I do this and how do I keep it together and be someone who can be empathetic, but also firm in what I'm saying, and represent the company, but then also look out for the person I'm talking to?" Those are just difficult situations. I don't think I have an answer about how to make that less difficult. I think it's just part of the job.

If you don't like hard conversations, good luck with management and leadership because you're going to have a hard time because it's full of them. It makes leadership challenging, on top of doing it in a pandemic.

Yeah. I think I almost had a moment where I was like, "Do I want to do this? This seems rough. Is management just like this?" Then somebody I think was like, "Just remember you're also in a global pandemic, so everything's kind of heightened a little bit," but I was like, "Some of these conversations are rough." I felt like, I don't know, it was maybe the second half of 2020, early, 2021, there were just things happening in the world every week, or every other week that I felt I had to reach out and either say something to someone or let somebody know I was there, and I was just like, "This is happening all the time. Is this normal?" But I was just like, "This is the nature of the job with the world we're in."

I think that shaped what I thought about management. I took a break from management for a while and coming back to it now, I'm feeling a bit more refreshed, but I think that was just a weird way to be dropped into that role and go into that job because it will shape what you think is normal. A lot of managers I've talked to are like, "No, no, this was like the worst version of being a manager. Pre-pandemic, yes, we had that, but not at the cadence that, you know, is happening now.”

Well, yeah. I think all leaders were challenged during the pandemic, even experienced ones, and then to be new into a role. I think there's also the pressure of keeping it together for the team at the same time. You're trying to support the team, and keep everyone moving forward while taking care of yourself.

It's a very lonely experience. When you're in that position where you can't really let your guard down as much as you would when you're offline, it's very isolating because you don't want to completely collapse in front of people, and sometimes for various privacy reasons, you cannot share things with your team, or with certain people. So you have to figure out how to deal with it internally. 

If you're lucky and you have a support group of other managers, you can lean on them. But in my case, a lot of us were new managers, so we were just like, "What's happening? Is this normal? How do you deal with this? I don't know. This is the first time I've dealt with this." It was a very isolating experience.

I realize now how important it is to have people in your corner who don't necessarily need to know all the details, but can speak to it, and have been in a position like that before, or can give you advice without you necessarily needing to breach privacy and things like that. But it's a strange place to exist because you're not quite part of the team in the same way, but you're also sometimes not the person making all the decisions, so you're in this weird limbo state, and you have a lot of empathy for both parties, you know?

You make a good point. If we think about “middle management” — I don't mean it in that sort of gross, Dilbert-y/'80s sort of way — you feel pressure to be good to the team but you're also not making the decisions. It can be incredibly isolating and difficult. I think there are challenges at that layer that people don't always understand.

Yeah. It's interesting. I feel like I've spoken a little bit about this before with some folks, but being a manager and then coming back to IC made me so empathetic to people who are in that kind of position. Once I moved back into an individual contributor role between my two bookends of management, I was like, "Okay, I have got to be my manager's ally. I know what they're going through. I can just be like, 'Hey, red flag, I think maybe something over here needs your attention,'" because I think if I was them, I wouldn't know but I can see something bubbling over here. I can alert them.

It definitely made me more empathetic as an engineer because I just realized once you're in those rooms, parts of those conversations, you realize that there are so many other things at play, and especially as you become a more senior engineer, like staff, principal, you start to see those things, too, but I think a lot of the times for folks who are in the first, I don't know, few years of their career, as ICs, it's very easy to be like, "Well, why isn't this happening?"

Right, "It's so simple. It's so easy." I think what happens, too, is that we can develop this us-versus-them mentality. I'm not saying all managers and all leaders are amazing, but I think a lot of them are trying to do the best that they can. I've never been against my employees. I'm there for my people. That's why I'm here. I want to make it better. It's about how can we work together better, rather than against each other.

Yeah, absolutely.

I want to shift a bit. So you left your role feeling burned out, right? What contributed to it? Was it the pandemic? Something else?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think burnout is going to look different for everyone. There are probably some common threads, but the things that trigger it are different. For me, there was a lot of lack of clear definition and expectation around my role, and what my role was. I was doing like, three different jobs in one, which was very rough. Then I think also, I have a little bit of a tendency to be a bit of a perfectionist and wanting to do a really good job.

I’m a recovering perfectionist and always will be.

So, you understand. This actually can be a bad personality trait. You can be your own worst enemy, right, where you push yourself to just go really hard on things.

When you’re in a leadership role perfectionism will crush you.

Oh, yeah, because you'll just always feel like you're never doing enough, which is definitely how I felt. I also didn't have a clear job definition. Probably multiple people should have been doing the work that I was doing, and by the time I did realize it, I had burned myself out quite a bit on trying to do all those things. It was just a very fast-growing company with a lot of organizational shifts and some workplace dysfunction that came as part of that.

I think the big thing is there were lots of different contributing factors. The biggest probably is that I let it go on despite getting signs from my body and mind. Maybe if I had seen the signs earlier and paid attention, it might not have forced me to leave my job, but as anyone who's gone through burnout can attest, once you hit a critical turning point, even if you try to step back, back step, and fix things, and try to reel things back in and say, "I have to relinquish these responsibilities. I'm not going to try to overwork. I'm just going to try to take time off." all those things don't really help at that point. That was the thing that I think really drove me to quitting, it was just letting it go beyond the point of no return.

Mm-hmm. You couldn't recover. In mountaineering, there’s something called self-arrest. If you’re falling you can dig your ice ax into the ground to stop yourself. When we're in a leadership role, that ability to self-arrest can become difficult — perfectionism, pressure, we're working so hard, we're trying to really do our best for the team. It's easy to tumble down the mountain and get near the bottom before we recognize how serious it is.

Right. Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, using the ice ax metaphor, sometimes by the time you do pull it out and you're like, "Oh, no, I’ve got to self-arrest," you might be tumbling at such a fast speed that you can't, and you're like, "Oh, I should have done this earlier."

After some time away, you took a job at Vimeo as a senior software engineer. How was it going back into a non-management role?

Yeah, yeah. [Being a manager] definitely made me a more empathetic individual contributor. I think I was a better engineer for it because I had been on the other side. The reason I just went back to an IC role was just wanting to get to this steady state of a known quantity of just writing code and contributing in that way and adding value in that capacity.

I didn't even know if I wanted to be a manager again, because I wasn't sure, was my negative experience and my burnout because of management? Maybe I'm actually not cut out to be that, and I'm better suited for being an individual contributor, or was it something else?

I figured the best and most safe option would be to go with the thing you know. What I didn't actually know at the time is I was still in burnout in that phase, too. I took four months off between my previous job and my new one at Vimeo. Even after I started, I still had this cloud of burnout over me, and I didn't know it. I was like, "Well, I'm ready to work again," but my self-confidence, sense of worth, my ability to speak up about things and voice my opinion, they were a little bit shattered. I thought to myself, "What if I get too committed again? What if I overcommit myself and then just don't know and I suddenly have all this weight I'm carrying and then I'm burnt out again?" So, I just was like, "You know what? I'm going to keep my head down. I'm going to write my code. I'm going to do my job. I'm going to set these boundaries. I'm going to follow them."

That was my defense mechanism in a way. Not that those things were bad, but the detachment was such that it was almost like a response to trauma now that I think about it, right, where it's like when you've gone through a traumatizing thing, you look at that event or that space in a different way. So I was like, "Okay, I’ve got to think about work differently.” It took me, I don't know, five months or more maybe of working to gain that confidence back, to build that trust, to feel safe, and to teach my body and mind. I realized, "Oh, this is different. You don't need to have this traumatic bodily response to this thing. People here care about you. You're supported differently. It's not the same." That's when I was like, "Oh, but I still like these problems, these management problems. Maybe last time, it wasn't because of management. Maybe it was all the other things." That's when I was like, "Okay, I'll raise my hand. Maybe try it again."

There’s so much pressure and responsibility in a leadership role. It can be overwhelming, especially if we tend to overcommit, be perfectionists, and care too much. (I'm raising my hand on all of these) Leadership can be tricky for your well-being. For me, that was one of the most surprising things about leadership. How much I had to take care of myself and modulate my own tendencies.

Yeah. In my experience, leadership will force you to look at yourself in the mirror, "Why am I doing this? Am I doing this because of my ego? Am I doing this because it's the right thing? Am I doing this because I feel like I have something to prove?" 

You cannot do it all. The list is too long, and it's ever-growing, so you have to learn to ruthlessly prioritize. You have to be okay with saying no and you have to be okay with saying, "I'm sorry, I didn't get to it. It's important to me, but I had to just deprioritize it right now.” If you're someone who has a hard time disappointing people, if you're someone who always wants to make other people happy and get approval…unless you face those things unless you become okay with them and can look at yourself in the mirror and be like, "I know why I did what I did and I'm okay with it, I still feel like it was the right decision." But if you were always like, "I've got to make everybody happy. I need to be liked," oof, you're going to have to either work through that in your leadership position of whatever capacity and whatever flavor of leadership you take on, or it's just going to be a painful time because if you don't work through it. You'll run yourself ragged, and burn the candle at both ends.

Right, and in the end, eventually as you burn out, or become trying to seek anyone's approval, then everybody else feels it, too, right?

Yeah. Absolutely.

You're bringing out so many things that I think are so important for people to think about. So you took about nine months away from management (four months off, five months at work) and decided “Maybe I do love this. Maybe I can do it differently." How are you approaching it differently now?”

There are a lot of things I'm not doing that I was doing previously. I've realized that the only person who's going to take care of me is me. That was something I didn't do at my last job. I just didn't think about taking care of myself. I just gave my whole soul and heart to the company. I was just like, "Here you go."

I think this time I've cultivated a good, healthy detachment from the work, too, where I'm like, "Look, we're going to do the best we can. We all are working under constraints. What can we do today to make it better? Maybe we won't accomplish all the things, but let's try to trim things down or break things up, or scope it in a way that we can feel like we're making steps towards steps in the direction we want to go." I think I had to work through a lot of that harder stuff that I've mentioned about proving myself, not wanting to say no, and not wanting to show myself as somebody who can't do everything. Now, I'm just like, "Honestly, I didn't forget about this thing, but this other thing had to take priority. I will get to it. I didn't forget. That's on me. I'll circle back." But yeah, it's just changing the way I approach work.

I've also done things to create boundaries. I don't have work email on my phone. I don't have work Slack on my phone. I work my set hours. I close my laptop and I don't go back and look at it. I had to find the moments when I would just be compelled to do it and stop myself. I think doing that is enough, now I don't really feel compelled to do it as much. There are times when I do need to put in a little extra effort, but then I reclaim that time because I realize now, that I'm setting the example. If I don't do that, what am I saying to the people on my team?

Yep. You're always modeling behavior. It’s like you're on a stage constantly when you're in a leadership role. People are always watching. You’re sending messages that you may not even realize you're transmitting to others.

Yeah, absolutely. Now I think, "Okay if there was a version of myself two years ago, what kind of leader would I want to see?" I try to do that. I'm sure in two years, I'll do what my current version needs, but I'm just trying to do the thing that I wish I had seen, or that I wish somebody had shown me. That's, I think, been helpful. I approach work very differently. I know now that no company's going to really take care of you. You have to take care of yourself. I think I've kind of reclaimed my agency in my work, right, where I know that my job is not me and I have control over how much I give. Before I used to have this chip on my shoulder about, "I got to prove that I can be a manager." Somebody's tapped me on the shoulder, but I've got to prove why they tapped me, and that I'm the right person to be tapped.

Now, I'm like, "Now, I earned this." They wouldn't have put me in this role if they didn't think I could do it and I'm doing my job, and so I'm not really worried about having to keep proving that I can do it because I'm doing the work every day, so why drain my battery to try to do that? A lot of self-reflection and introspection made me shift how I think about work, which was a long time coming, frankly.

How is it being a manager this time?

I really like it. I'm having a great time. I've been doing it for about three months. I love my team. I lucked out. I have this all-women team. I don't understand how that happened, but that is what happened. They're full of enthusiasm and excitement. I feel like my job is to just propel them to where I know they're heading. The thing I really have enjoyed the most about management is growing engineers. I'm learning now in this more healthy, supportive environment, what are the different roles that  you play and the hats you wear as a manager. I'm realizing that I have parts of the job that I like more than other parts. My favorite is growing engineers and watching them evolve. When I get that hit of dopamine, watching the engineers on my team grow, I'm like, "All right, yes, I didn't get through my list, but that was awesome," so I feel like I want to come to work the next day.

That’s awesome. Any other advice you might offer someone else?

Something I've learned in the last two years is that we as an industry — and maybe just as a society in general — don't talk about mental health, in the way that we should. Just in case anyone out there is feeling like they might be burnt out, or feeling hopelessness, despair, or disillusionment, I would urge them to just remember that they, too, have agency. And that we all do. I've talked to enough other people in the industry to know that it's not just me, there are a lot of us who feel this way. I hope we can talk about mental health more, normalize it, and also talk about what it means to get through it. To know that you can get to the other side, and get to a happier, healthier, more balanced place, because it is possible.

If this piece resonated with you, please let me know and give the heart button below a tap.