On one hand, I think this could depend very heavily on exactly how the questions is asked.
On the other hand, this doesn't really surprise me.
Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
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Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#22I find that If my work isn’t meaningful, it can really drain the life out of me (even more than truly demanding jobs). I wonder if a couple generations ago people felt just as burnt out. It seems like this generation is the most burnt out but who knows. With everyone connected all the time, I doubt people are getting proper rest between work. If you’re answering emails over lunch, you’re still working and not resting…
Interesting. I’ve been working 4d/w for years now. I might do 5 for a while if work is interesting, but will take those days off another time.
Easily one of my better decisions.
Worth the 20% cut in pay. For someone with few responsibilities and no expensive hobbies, that is.
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has nothing to do with scrum and agile. Or if it does, then they are part of the solution, because one of the rules is that you don't do overtime. If there's too much work to include all features before the deadline, you drop some of the features. Scrum is meant to help estimate based on real work by developers, rather than on overly optimistic planning by managers. They empower the developer and give them the a…
It's funny that some managers give the deadline first and then direct the developers to do Scrum to figure out how to do it in that timeline.
“But we need to know how much it will cost us”
“External factors demand we implement feature X by that date”
“Let’s just hire more people, preferably more PMs”
“We have many more ideas in our pipeline. In order to orchestrate these, we need precise estimations.”
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#24I find that If my work isn’t meaningful, it can really drain the life out of me (even more than truly demanding jobs). I wonder if a couple generations ago people felt just as burnt out. It seems like this generation is the most burnt out but who knows. With everyone connected all the time, I doubt people are getting proper rest between work. If you’re answering emails over lunch, you’re still working and not resting…
I think there are some fundamental things that have changed that are much different than 40-50 years ago:
1. Work was much more compartmentalized 30 years ago. People may have worked long hours, but for the most part, when they were "done" for the day, they were done (obviously there were exceptions, like people on call). Now, though, there is always email and texts and Slack, so it's more difficult to fully decompress from work.
2. The nature of big business has drastically changed. First, many more people are in service jobs, and I'd argue that actually building something concrete has a higher immediate payoff for most folks. Also, as jobs have gotten more efficient and segmented, most people are more removed from decision making and a tangible feeling of how their effort goes into producing a valuable product.
3. The increasing inequality in America means there is more fear of falling behind, and jobs themselves are more tenuous, so there is more stress to work harder lest you fall out of a middle/upper-middle class.
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has nothing to do with scrum and agile. Or if it does, then they are part of the solution, because one of the rules is that you don't do overtime. If there's too much work to include all features before the deadline, you drop some of the features. Scrum is meant to help estimate based on real work by developers, rather than on overly optimistic planning by managers. They empower the developer and give them the a…
It's funny that some managers give the deadline first and then direct the developers to do Scrum to figure out how to do it in that timeline.
A laugh riot, it is.
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#26Sprints? I love sprints...I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel day in, day out. Seriously, screw scrum and 'agile'
Yeah. The notion of sprints doesn’t seem to be healthy at all. There’s always the next big thing on the horizon. No time to reflect on what you’re doing. Closely tracking velocity, knowing full well that it’s a futile exercise in controlling what’s happening. >inb4 “you’re doing it wrong” If so many people get it wrong, I see it a problem inherent to scrum, not its various implementations.
Not everyone is doing it wrong. My current sprint team is pretty laid back. I put my foot down against tracking velocity as a performance metric early on, though. But my argument against it was mostly that it was stupid and counterproductive.
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Sprint Planning" -> "How much work can we overextend our developers with" "Sprint Retrospective" -> "How much did we screw up from overextending so much"
What does the part of planning that calculates velocity and time budgeting look like in this context?
"We don't have time for that, we're too far behind!"
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#28So why do they stay at these awful jobs?
Health insurance. Fear of losing, or even changing what they have (sometimes accompanied with some very real and not just anxiety out-of-pocket costs running into the thousands of dollars).
Decoupling health insurance from employment is the #1 thing we could do to improve quality of our work. But in the long run, I dream of a day when wage labor is looked back on as nearly as terrible as chattel slavery.
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has nothing to do with scrum and agile. Or if it does, then they are part of the solution, because one of the rules is that you don't do overtime. If there's too much work to include all features before the deadline, you drop some of the features. Scrum is meant to help estimate based on real work by developers, rather than on overly optimistic planning by managers. They empower the developer and give them the a…
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
Isn’t that a theory?
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#30I work six days a week. I leave my house at 7am return home around 7pm, pretty much have time to make dinner and chill for an hour so then go to bed and do it again. I haven't really been out and done anything for a few years now. My body is in pain constantly, I'm always exhausted but my sleep is always poor. I don't remember what it's like to not feel burnt out. It's been like this pretty much since I was in my ear…
That's not healthy. Please take some time off for a vacation and return to a normal 40 hour work week. There's a good reason why people fought for a 40 hour work week. Life is not just about work; you need to relax too. I refuse to work more than 32 hours a week, and that's working out very well for me. I have time for my hobbies, my kids, my friends and family, and I have time to just do nothing at all on occasion.…
> Please take some time off for a vacation and return to a normal 40 hour work week.
You might as well say "Please win the lottery".
Seriously though, please tell me you're not so out of touch with reality that you actually believe the sentence you wrote is meaningful advice. People can't just snap their fingers and create a better job out of thin air.