One of my favorite burnout jobs was as estimator for a high-end hardwood flooring company. Completely fell into it by accident, the place was next door to where I'd walk to get an espresso around 10AM.

So I'd walk in there occasionally to look at some of the demo work they had on the walls, and one day I opened my mouth and said "I need some exercise" and the owner said "we'll make you 'shop boy'!"; bear in mind I was in my 40s at the time. So one or two days a week I'd come in and sweep and clean for a few hours, and then that led to dump runs and eventually they found out I could fix electrical things (like their tools).

The owner was a fundie who homeschooled his kids, I wouldn't tag him as someone I'd seek out for a friend, but we had great conversations about religion and philosophy. The guy who did estimates was tired of it, so he gave me a week's training and off I went; he was my "boss" and he was 19 years old, awesome to work for. It was usually 4-6 hours, 5 days a week. Only paid minimum wage, but after a month they gave me health insurance and I didn't even ask for it.

It was a hoot, I had a "floor hunter" schtick. I got to look at some wild things: a safe that had fallen through a floor, somebody what wanted to put a wine cellar in the underground tunnel (needed a cypress floor natch) which the PO had used as a gun lane, a studs out remodel of an amazing mansion (I saved the subfloor in the ballroom!). Got to see the other side of some IT peeps I knew by reputation, a couple of whom I'd briefly met; a several of them looked like they were experiencing deja vu, but none of them found me out. I bid jobs from $1000 to $100,000 USD.

Did it for about a year.

I've worked in small (less than 20 employees) companies and although there were no grooming / standup / retro meetings (i.e. all the bullshit agile stuff I can't stand), it was replaced with other bullshit like having to answer the phone and deal with passive aggressive customers, zero benefits other than salary (no 401k etc), an owner who said things like "microsoft can build excel, why can't we build <insert feature here>", no project/product managers to manage the todo list, so everything was urgent and must be done imediately!

>an owner who said things like "microsoft can build excel, why can't we build <insert feature here>",no project/product managers to manage the todo list, so everything was urgent and must be done imediately!

<10 employees here. This is exactly my experience. The grass is always greener.

Yeah it helps if the owner codes- so they know what they are talking about at least in principle when it comes to building stuff.

Sometimes that makes it worse. You'll get founders who say "Well, when I originally wrote [our product], it was 1,500 lines of code, and I did it myself in a weekend. Why are you telling me a team of five needs a month to add a single feature???" Except, things are different now that the code base has increased 100X and the number of users has increased 10,000X.

Who downvoted this? Reveal yourself! A small business owner no doubt who the truth hurt.

As someone else said upthread, the character of the owner matters a great deal.

There are nice companies like that even at 100-something employee size. The company being owner-run is paramount, as is the character of the owners (caring more about the product and the craft than about maximizing profit).

> (caring more about the product and the craft than about maximizing profit).

Actually caring about profit is good too. Problems start when the people in charge care about advancement, prestige, status, resume building, or CYA.

The owners should certainly care about being profitable, but increasing profit shouldn’t be the primary criterion for career advancement and product design. In a small company, the hierarchy is also flat enough that there isn’t much space for the people in charge for advancement/prestige/status within the company, in particular not for the owners themselves. In the end, this is also about hiring people with the right attitudes, which again falls to the owners.

Yeah that could be a possibility if all else fails. I think I also want to feel like I own my time. I guess i like the idea of taking this into my own hands, instead of being goldilocks with a job.