61–70 of 218 posts
I think a lot of people think they are unable to say "no" nor "pushback." In my experience, saying no actually gets you more respect than saying yes.
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> It depends on the industry but there's too many people who are de facto actually at work every waking moment If "at work every waking moment" means "needs to be able to respond to emergencies", then this is actually the norm for everyone in the world until very recently. Anyone who doesn't have an employer is "at work every waking moment" by this definition. Peasants, housewives, aristocrats... Given the nearly 100…
You mean emergencies such as your hot shot boss calling you 2am because he wants to discuss some bullshit idea he just had? I’ve worked in a couple of places where this kept happening. First time I was junior enough to care and put up with it. Everyone understand: this is not normal. Unless you specifically signed up for pager duty sort of job, no one should put up with this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It depends on the industry but there's too many people who are de facto actually at work every waking moment If "at work every waking moment" means "needs to be able to respond to emergencies", then this is actually the norm for everyone in the world until very recently. Anyone who doesn't have an employer is "at work every waking moment" by this definition. Peasants, housewives, aristocrats... Given the nearly 100…
You mean emergencies such as your hot shot boss calling you 2am because he wants to discuss some bullshit idea he just had? I’ve worked in a couple of places where this kept happening. First time I was junior enough to care and put up with it. Everyone understand: this is not normal. Unless you specifically signed up for pager duty sort of job, no one should put up with this.
I think that's the game at a lot of companies, to just prey on the young and hungry who probably don't know any better and are more likely to put up with bullshit like that.
I 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'm a pro-family, pro-entrepreneur (UBI! Healthcare for all!) dirty socialist, I guess :-)
Americans really need more vacation time. For a while I worked with only 15 days a year. This never gives you the opportunity to ever really relax. Life becomes just one endless meaningless time of working year after year that kills any kind of creativity . I can see this in a lot of workaholics. They just go through the motions of working hard but don’t get much done. And once you have been in that machine for a whi…
I’m not sure if you’re in the US, or if you’re including paid holidays, but 15 days is the average number of vacation days for people with 25 years of tenure in full time jobs in the US. Most people with less tenure get much less.
So that wouldn’t be an “only” in the US.
"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 for a startup in a customer facing role and if I'm not on the schedule I simply don't get called. The Jewish person is the primary contact on the days around Christmas and the non-Americans take Thanksgiving and the 4th of July (and the boring old Christmas-celebrating Americans cover the holidays that they want to take vacation around, everyone wins). I work 40hr/wk and up to two weekend nights per month (off hours production stuff). I used to work for BigCos and it was even easier, thanks to being global we had people everywhere and nobody ever needed to be woken up unless they were the owner of something broken in production.
Every previous job has been reasonable like this. No employer I have ever encountered expects more than 40hr unless it's specifically negotiated. I know of one person that works 60+hr weeks but he works in education and voluntarily leads an extracurricular he is very passionate about.
Of course my experience is anecdotal and I know there exist 60hr/week sweatshops but for white collar employees they don't seem to be the norm, at least in tech in my region.
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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…
I like some of the principles of agile but like the problem is the ceremonies chew up so much time. I have an none technical project manager who is absolutely in love with everything agile. I am in a project where basically 3 of us are going to do the work. I sit next to one of the people but we still have to have daily stand ups. I am one of those people who works in longish chunks, I can sit for two solid hours or…
I’m trying to say your team isn’t agile, it’s using a cookie cutter process template most likely. Print out the agile manifesto and tape it to the cofee machine.
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.
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…
> " 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.
But despite all of this, the release deadline does not change and the developers always end up working insane hours fixing last minute bugs discovered by QA days / hours before release.
Although this could just be an issue with where I work as opposed to scrum / agile. :)
You guys have this concept of 'vacation' which well, isn't.
15 days or whatever per year pretty much all just must either get banked for emergencies, admin, or maybe that one Mega Holiday where you fly across the world and spend a week or whatever trying to forget your life.
I don't get it at all. It might make sense if you're a founder or whatever and you love your job. Most people are working to live, but there is no "live", because there's no time that isn't work.
I'd rather be homeless. Can I choose to be homeless in Europe instead tho? ;)