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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

#151

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

> nothing to do with scrum and agile.

Well, I know what you’re trying to say, and technically, you’re correct - if any shred of the agile manifesto were observed, you would be actually correct, too - but “agile as practiced by everybody who practices it” is, for all intents and purposes, “agile and scrum” now, so we may as well stop pretending it’s in any way related to what it was supposed to be. Once the phrase “agile” got some mindshare, it was bastardized and twisted into the unholy abomination that we suffer today: that is, the exact same thing that came before it. If somebody were to come along and put together a perfect, workable, realistic, livable, maintainable, achievable software development methodology - say, the “pwrlma” method - it would be twisted back into what “agile and scrum” are today by the same people who can only reason by analogy. Software will always be managed as if it were a building construction effort and programmers will always be treated as slightly more educated bricklayers.

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

#152

Post by commandlinefan »

mcv wrote: post #34
rightbyte wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> story points in scrum do not directly relate to time worked

Except in the minds of absolutely every single person who applies them to anything.

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

#153

Post by wonderwonder »

scottious wrote: post #148
wonderwonder wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone stopped working, who would grow the food, build the houses or go to medical school? I do absolutely agree with the concept of a UBI but there has to always be people that work otherwise everything collapses.

I think maybe they're suggesting that if you choose to work then you could better your life. If you chose not to work, you'd have some fairly modest no-frills lifestyle. There'd still be a strong incentive to work, but less intense pressure to always be employed. I feel like many people are in a situation where they need to have a job so they end up staying in jobs that they consider BS jobs just for that paycheck. I…

I agree with everything you have said, as well as everything the OP said. I just think we do need to really sit down and figure out the 'basics' of a UBI. I really like the concept of the Yang style $1,000 UBI as a starting point to essentially take the edge off of basic existence.

"I'd never try to take a risk right now because my family is dependent on my passionless job" - hello me.

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

#154

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

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…

yup, health insurance is a very big part of it.

but also, it takes a long time to find another position.

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

#155

Post by olyjohn »

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…

Also looking for a new job in a pain in the ass. First, you have to make or update your resume... which for me is like facing all of my self-hatred. As I make my resume, I spend hours trying not to feel shitty about all the things that I haven't accomplished, and feel shitty about how I don't really have the requirements for the job I want. I compare myself to everybody else in the field as I look for example resumes, realize I don't have the same kinds of accomplishments, and I have just been grinding away for the past 10 years. All this is despite the fact that I know I'm good at my job, and I've never been reprimanded or fired.

Then, I get so sick of going to 6-hour interviews where you go with each member of the team one-on-one. Then wait weeks, get a call back to come in again... Take more time off the current job, lie to your boss again... Spend an hour each time figuring out how to get there and park, and find your way around the completely unmarked campus... Then half the people apologize that they forgot you were coming. Study before hand, writing cover letters, tweaking the resume for each job... I get sick of answering the same questions over and over, when we could have just had a group interview and gotten it over with.

And if you're quitting because you're stressed and burnt out, last thing you want is another thing on your plate to be stressed and burnt out about.

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

#156

Post by Jach »

grawprog wrote: post #77
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 have a decent job, but I have student loans, I live in an expensive city and don't really have the ability to move elsewhere, at least half my cheque goes to rent each month, much of the rest goes towards bills and essentials. The overtime I work is the thing that lets me save money at all, otherwise I'd be living cheque to cheque.

So what's your plan? If you're looking for ideas to save more, I only have one, which is to live with another person (or add more if you already do so) to further cut rent and other bills.

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

#157

Post by scottious »

rayiner wrote: post #138
Ididntdothis wrote: post #5

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…

If your premise were true, you'd expect countries offering more vacation time to have higher productivity per hour worked. ( I.e. more efficiency, even if less total production.) Instead, the U.S. has among the highest levels of productivity per hour worked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)... . Americans are much more productive, even on a per-hour basis, than people in advanced democraci…

If I'm reading the Wikipedia article correctly, then Norway is outpacing the US and they have 25 days of vacation per year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...

So it seems to me that there are a lot of confounding factors here. Do we actually know what causes GDP/hour to go up and down? It doesn't seem directly related to vacation time.

It seems to me more like the Wikipedia article you linked to is saying "countries that give a lot of vacation to all citizens can still have a high GDP per hour worked" and we don't understand what other confounding factors can contribute to GDP/hour

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

#158

Post by about_help »

damq wrote: post #139
beat wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think incentives are removed? Is "work or starve" the only incentive? I'm not talking about a beachfront mansion and a Ferrari in the driveway for everyone. I'm talking about not starving. Want to be more than the bare minimum? Then choose to work. Don't care? Then don't work - not that people who don't care are effective employees anyway.

Have you tried purchasing health care before? It's not inexpensive. There's no way we could guarantee food, health care, and housing for everybody with no work requirement. Only a really stupid person would believe this could work. You're really stupid.

Money is an artificial construct used by humans to facilitate trading their labor amongst each other in order to get what they need to survive.

Arguments about how expensive things are make no sense if we restructure our society where money is only half the equation. The labor required to provide food, health, and housing is incredibly small compared to the overall economy.

People want to be useful, and people want more than just a place to live and food to eat.

The real danger would be in creating a system that stifles the free market side of the economy and leaves people stuck in basic assistance hell with no way of working to improve their lives. Worrying about the costs of providing basic assistance to all is actually the least important bit.

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

#159

Post by commandlinefan »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #61

What's interesting to me is -- for every "burnt out" coworker I see another one with similar pay and title who isn't burnt out. 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.

My personal experience has been the opposite, actually. Early on, I realized that I was constantly being asked by coworkers to “look at this, look at that”, none of which were related to the work that my actual manager had assigned me. So I said no: I focused on what my manager was telling me to do. That seemed to be the “right thing” to do. Everybody hated me because I wouldn’t help them. They showed up in meetings and said they couldn’t meet their commitments because commandlinefan “wasn’t available to help me get CVS set up on my computer”. Management churn being what it was, I never had the same manager for more than six months anyway, so by the time performance reviews came around, whoever my manager-du-jour happened to be based my performance review on the consistently negative things he was hearing from my coworkers. I couldn’t even defend myself by pointing to having accomplished what the previous manager told me to focus on, either: priority churn being what it was, most of it ended up being scrapped before it was used. I finally saw the writing on the wall and did a complete 180. I became the most helpful guy in the world. If anybody, ever, for any reason, asked for my help, I dropped whatever I was doing and focused on helping them until their problem was fixed. Performance reviews went from “needs serious improvement” to “exceeds expectations”. I rarely, if ever, finish anything that I’m actually supposed to be working on, and nobody cares. It’s all reputation, and mine is stellar. I haven’t said no in 20 years and I’ve never been more loved by corporate.

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

#160

Post by Grzegrzolka »

tombert wrote: post #85
esotericn wrote: post #70

As 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?

In Poland it's minimum 26 days and 13-15 days of holidays, but typically companies give you additional 5 days. So 45 days combined
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