A Brief History of Career Burnout & Me
Tech Is Demanding, Work Has It’s Own Pressure, but That Cultural Tax Is the Kicker.
Talofa reader,
It's been more than a few weeks since I've had the time - or more accurately, the energy - to carve out the space to sit down and write some thoughts for my newsletter.
I’ve been to three different countries in the last four weeks, two for work and one for PTO, and I just got back from a week running solo in Papua New Guinea, delivering workshops to government departments and finance companies.
The planning, communication, logistics, and coordination required for organizing full-day events with presentations and hands-on technical labs can be pretty stressful in itself. But when you add international travel, visa issues, security transportation, domestic flight cancellations, and recovery from a cold, you've got a situation you don't want to be in too often.
It's tough.
But it’s the work.
The problem with the work, as it stands, is sustainability.
And, the way our account is set up, we need1 senior-level technical people who are Pasifika, to go into the Pacific to do this work because we understand that experience and cultural understanding is key to getting positive outcomes in this space.
The pool of people with the necessary technical skills and experience, who are also from the Pacific diaspora, is not large.
And the work that needs doing is not small.
Burnout is nothing new in the tech sector, and it's certainly not new in my career and experience.
In fact, I wrote a blog post about this same phenomenon back in 2018.
When I wrote about it then, I was contracting. I had pressure on a professional and personal level - usual career stuff, right?
Deadlines, navigating company culture, bad management, legacy infrastructure, unrealistic project requirements, and generally keeping up with tech that’s constantly evolving and being marketed to the decision-makers.
When you’re as much of a geek as I am, obsessed with technology, learning about it, building it, watching videos, and talking about it with other geeks, you don’t tend to pay too much attention to the fact that you’re the only Pasifika person in the team, the department, sometimes the entire organization.
Like, you know it as an objective fact, but what are you going to do?
Tech is a fast-paced industry, and we’re constantly learning to keep up with everything, so this pressure is a given - for everyone in this industry.
Working in a big corporate organization comes with its own peculiarities: organizational politics, a big hotbed of personalities, work behaviors, backgrounds, and navigating that with performance pressure is also a given - for everyone.
I’m not oblivious to the reality of corporate life as an obvious “minority” - you’re the odd one out, no one really gets you, you have to do the work to assimilate into everyone else’s “normal” - I’ve always just accepted it as the price of admission to these spaces - it is what it is.
Like, do you really think I say “g’day mate, how's things? Me? Nah, can’t complain... Bob’s your uncle, something about the weather, etc.,” or anything like that to my brothers and people in my community? 😂
I’ve always known about the concept of a “cultural tax” paid by under-represented groups. I thought it mainly referred to the ad-hoc education you had to provide to people to not say stupid shit culturally insensitive things.
It wasn’t until I started doing community work, running code clubs for Pasifika kids in primary schools, that I really had to face a type of pressure or stress that I always knew was there but managed to avoid confronting in its full form.
Representation, when it's just you trying not to be treated like the “diversity hire”, and you don't want to embarrass yourself professionally or let your family down, is one thing.
Representation when you’re advocating specifically for an organisation not to marginalise, not just you, but everyone like you, and you start feeling the weight of that responsibility for your people, is another type of pressure altogether.
Now that I’m one of the few Pasifika at a big tech company, but also in a role that is specifically focused on the Pacific Islands, I’m not only representing the company as a Pasifika person to the Pacific Islands but also representing Pasifika culture, values, and experience to the company on behalf of myself and as a pseudo representative of the Pacific Islands - does that make sense?
For the record, I was born in New Zealand and only spent my pre-school years in Samoa before growing up here. I speak, read, and understand my language and know most of the values, traditions, and protocols that go with my culture.
But this circles back to my earlier point - we don’t have a lot of options to choose from to do this work.
There's a lot of work to do, and only a few of us to do it.
And while we're trying to do our day jobs, we're also doing this, which Cecil Canton neatly describes in his article The “cultural taxation” of faculty of color in the Academy :
He defined “cultural taxation” as the obligation to show good citizenship towards the institution by serving its needs for ethnic representation on committees, or to demonstrate knowledge and commitment to a cultural group, which, though it may bring accolades to the institution, is not usually rewarded by the institution on whose behalf the service was performed.
I've been added to groups and meetings that have nothing to do with tech, and everything to do with 'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion', and I don’t think I can add much value because it’s not my area of expertise (or interest, to be honest).
I get linked up with Māori organisations, which is fine - I always have mean kōrero’s with the cuzzies - but in my opinion, you're shortchanging these folks because I'm Pasifika and Māori are Māori.
None of this work (above) was directly related to my role or performance metrics.
Sure, we all do things here and there that aren't strictly part of our roles, but whole committees, recurring meetings, and monthly catch-ups are not it.
Taika Waititi recently expressed this hilariously in a speech at a luncheon where he said:
“All of us wanna be working and not having to come and do f***ing panels and speeches in the middle of our day. This is a great thing. It’s good that we’re talking about it. We have to keep talking about it but this is the s*** you’ve got us doing.”
And here’s “the rub”…
In and of itself (and like Taika) I think this is good work to do - so this is not a complaint that this work shouldn’t exist.
I do think it’s well-meaning.
It's helping to bring awareness and education, and working to be more inclusive.
That's a good thing, right?
But what is this edition about again?
Oh yeah - burnout.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I think if anything, my burnout comes from having so few hands to cover so much work, the added layer of organisational cultural tax, and then personally wanting the 'good work' to still be done and done properly, which might mean a compromise somewhere.
I actually started a discussion thread in the Pasifika Tech Network Discord, asking who had experienced burnout, and unsurprisingly, a lot of Pasifika tech folks have felt it. All of them had some great tips on how they managed it, which was awesome to see.
The standard advice of drawing healthy work boundaries for yourself and asking for help when you need to, still apply - for everyone.
But I don’t have any answers for dealing with this extra layer of stress and pressure that is not-being-part-of-the-dominant-culture.
If you’re fortunate enough like me to have good work mates and a manager you can talk to, use your powers of communication to let them know where you’re at, it might not solve all your problems, but it helps to know you have people who care enough to be uncomfortable and “yea, I don’t know the answer to this” with you.
Thanks for reading - see you in the next one.
If you genuinely found this post interesting, please give it a ❤️ to let me know 🙏🏽
Learning
Things I’m actively studying or learning this week…
‘AWS Certified Security - Speciality’ - Sat Exam. Passed.
‘AWS Certified Security - Speciality’- Practice Exams100% Completed.Studying for the‘AWS Certified Security - Speciality’certificate:100% Completed.
Building
Things I’m building or working on this week…
Interesting Reads
Articles or other writing that stood out to me this week…
Community
Other projects in community I’m working on…
Pasifika Tech Education Charity - Providing Tech Learning Opportunities for the Pasifika Community.
Pasifika Tech Network - A Network for Pasifika Tech Professionals & Learners.
we’ve long done the “they just need to be qualified” sending of people in, complete the cultural faux pas, and leave things worse than they found it, so trust the use of the word “need” here.