I was let go from my first dev job (fresh out of college no less) and the couple of months following were actually some of the happiest days of my life. Despite being unemployed, I got my mojo back, taught myself a bunch of new shit unrelated to programming, and tried a lot of new things I wouldn't otherwise have tried. Oftentimes I wonder how I could have been so happy given the circumstances, but it finally dawned on me: getting let go obliterated any conscious or subconscious burnout I had been suffering. I felt like a person again.
Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
91–100 of 218 posts
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " 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.
I also find this to be the case. Developers have a minimum number of tickets / points we have to close every week. The number of points per ticket is decided by committee and in that committee there are developers of vastly different skills but all have the same minimum. But despite all of this, the release deadline does not change and the developers always end up working insane hours fixing last minute bugs discover…
Yeah, this has nothing to do with scrum/agile. The number of points needs to be decided by the team of developers that's going to pick up those stories. There's to minimum number of tickets or points, you pick up what you can, and the number of points you average over a couple of sprints, helps to estimate how much time future work will take.
It seems a lot of companies are cargo-culting scrum.
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#93As a European (for now, oho) this doesn't surprise me at all. American working patterns are bonkers. 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…
I'm genuinely curious; how many days do Europeans typically get?
20 days minimum by law in Italy (plus sick leave when needed), in practice though it's more like 28 days for most jobs. Excluding weekends and national holidays of course.
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the Democratic primary candidates.
It's probably time to stop expecting politicians to solve these problems for us, regardless of what they claim on the campaign trail.
yeah but only they can write the law and nominate judges to enforce it.
IMO getting rid of the tax subsidy for employer sponsored insurance, enforcing anti-trust law on health providers (insurance, hospitals, etc.) by forcing them to disclose prices and getting rid of onerous licensing regulations will achieve the intended decoupling between health insurance and employment.
However, you need to pass laws for all that.
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did this for years and years and developed a blister on my retina from the never ending stress. Permanent vision problems. It's not worth it!
Can you let us know the actual medical term and how was this linked to stress? there is a lot of research these days about autoimmune diseases and how they are triggered by stress, but retina blisters is something I never heard about before.
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#96I'm burnedout because I'm bored.
I'm not a dev, I'm closer to a BI Analyst if anything. What I do is the epitome of bullshit jobs. The company would be wildly profitable if I just stopped showing up. Yet my reviews and feedback are always glowing even if I do 1 'thing' a week, and yeah 6 months down the line some finding I put into motion results in some marginal change somewhere. It's hard to feel the motivation to do more when the output feels irrelevant.
I'd leave, but it'd be hard to match the benefits, salary, and work/life balance in my region. I know I need to change though because my skills are atrophying due to the ennui.
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#97Earlier 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.
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Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#98In Academia, it's not too uncommon for people to take extended sabbaticals to focus on a project without being distracted with work nonsense, but I haven't really heard of any company doing that in the US. I would love to take around a month every year just to focus on a purely technical problem instead of focussing 20% of my time in technical stuff, and 80% of my time going through bureaucratic hoops that seemingly…
I've taken 2 sabbaticals from work. In the UK at least most companies are totally fine with you doing this.
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#99Sprints? 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…
Nobody falls for this anymore.
Scrum are agile are extremely effective at fostering micromanagement and overworking and burning out developers.
It's almost always pushed by management, consultants, PMs rather than the ones that have to carry the weight.
"You are doing it wrong, we are here to help" is an old trick.
Re: Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
#100I 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.
I don't even think a 20% cut in pay is fair. Is our productivity, at least in brain-driven jobs, equally distributed across all our working hours? In other words, if we work 20% fewer hours during the week, will we do 20% less work? Or is it more like 10%?