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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

#31

Post by jniedrauer »

mcv wrote: post #9
grawprog wrote: post #2

I 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.…

I assume you sacrifice income to do this? How does that negotiation typically go? Or are you self employed?

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#32

Post by durnygbur »

strictnein wrote: post #11
GiorgioG wrote: post #3

Sprints? I love sprints...I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel day in, day out. Seriously, screw scrum and 'agile'

The feeling of never finishing anything is probably the thing I hate must about agile. Just little bits completed off an ever growing backlog.

Wasn’t it exactly how ancient Greeks imagined hell? (Sysiphos, Tantal).

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#33

Post by jniedrauer »

radcon wrote: post #30
mcv wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For technically inclined people in the United States, it can be. It's just a matter of whether or not you want to maximize your income or maximize your quality of life. It is definitely possible to get a tech job at a large company where work-life balance is taken seriously.

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#34

Post by mcv »

rightbyte wrote: post #19
mcv wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

Not really. Developers are just held accountable or feel accountable for their own forced guesstymates. It was better when managers were guessing becouse they also have the means to change scope.

There's a very good reason why story points in scrum do not directly relate to time worked. You guess story points only in relation to each other. Over time, you can see how many story points you finish per sprint. By seeing how many story points are still on the backlog, you can estimate how long it will take. Add one or two sprints for unforeseen problems, and there's your estimate. Not based on anyone's guess, but on the time it takes to do actual work.

This, in short, is the core of value that Scrum adds to the ideas of Agile.

The only problem is that people insist on misunderstanding these simple ideas and try to do Scrum as wrong as possible. The problem isn't Scrum, the problem is people insisting on doing it wrong.

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#35

Post by GrumpyYoungMan »

mcv wrote: post #12
GiorgioG wrote: post #3

Sprints? I love sprints...I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel day in, day out. Seriously, screw scrum and 'agile'

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…

> "Scrum is meant to help estimate based on real work by developer."

Sure, but the problem is that, aside from one job, I've never seen any organization that actually does that. Instead, agile/scrum is used as a micromanagement tool and developers get hammered if they don't close their Jira tickets in a timely fashion. It's an total perversion of what agile was intended to be.

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#37

Post by mcv »

jniedrauer wrote: post #31
mcv wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I assume you sacrifice income to do this? How does that negotiation typically go? Or are you self employed?

I'm self-employed and work as freelancer. We negotiate my hourly rate, not how many hours I will work. I've never sacrificed any income to do this, because I've been doing this since long before I became a freelancer, and I make way more now than I did then. I have once refused an otherwise very interesting job because they refused to accept a 4-day work week. Their loss.

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#38

Post by aantix »

beat wrote: post #28

So 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…

How will people be compensated relative to their work value?

Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week

#39

Post by kache_ »

CalRobert wrote: post #8

"Conducted by telecommunications company TollFreeForwarding.com, " an odd source, but OK. I work remote from a place outside the US. Last thanksgiving my boss (from the US) was on Slack. So were... all but one of my US colleagues. I see them writing at all hours of the night. On a work trip it was more or less assumed I'd work from 9 AM (8:30 ish really if you count coffee before) until 10 PM. I'm not on pagerduty an…

I work remotely as well and I observe that a lot of people are available outside their regular working hours. I think remote work is part of the problem: the additional blurring between work and life will askew your work life balance.

Pager duty can burn you out, but it really depends on how much you get paged and how many people are on rotation.

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