Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
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Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#2Good. We're taking all of July off at my company. Why? Because covid was an incredibly hard period for all of us and we as humans need a break. Somehow we all just seem to expect things to keep going like nothing changed. We all just seem to be expected to gloss over the pains of isolation, potential death and stress of work and life with no separation or boundaries. We made a conscious decision at my place of work to actually acknowledge the difficulties we've all been through and we're just going to take July off, because what else are we going to do? Ignore it? No. We won't do that.
I'd advise everyone to try take as much time off as possible this year. If it's available to you, take an extended break. The mental, physical and psychological damage of covid is something we really can't ignore.
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#3Maybe I am too naive but what the heck are they overworking on? It's an app with some basic functionality. Is software dev in such a sad state that you can't deliver a self-standing product that doesn't require teams working overtime to keep it running? I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers which are the only two things that jump to mind as being labor-intensive for a an app with millions of users
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#4I would love to know how they are measuring the success of this measure -- and I'm not being cynical. How would one even begin to weigh the tradeoffs of closing business for everyone for an entire week against the increased productivity upon return and something woolly like "improved morale." What if giving everyone a week of twice a year was actually beneficial to the company? Or even quarterly? Many companies already have an unspoken/informal week off between Christmas and New Year's.
Also, this is incredible Marketing for Bumble, as many people are going to share this in Slack channels in an effort to get their companies to do the same.
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#5Maybe I am too naive but what the heck are they overworking on? It's an app with some basic functionality. Is software dev in such a sad state that you can't deliver a self-standing product that doesn't require teams working overtime to keep it running? I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers which are the only two things that jump to mind as being labor-intensive for a an app with mill…
Complexity expands to fit the available budget.
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#6Minus the poor schmucks stuck in ops I bet.
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#7Sounds like a bit of sleazy PR to me. Considering the roots of this entire platform...
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#8Maybe I am too naive but what the heck are they overworking on? It's an app with some basic functionality. Is software dev in such a sad state that you can't deliver a self-standing product that doesn't require teams working overtime to keep it running? I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers which are the only two things that jump to mind as being labor-intensive for a an app with mill…
They had an IPO and their user count spiked. The former requires a ton of work on the finance/management team (great writeup here on HN recently. The link evades me). The latter probably necessitated some rearchitecturing.
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#9Maybe I am too naive but what the heck are they overworking on? It's an app with some basic functionality. Is software dev in such a sad state that you can't deliver a self-standing product that doesn't require teams working overtime to keep it running? I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers which are the only two things that jump to mind as being labor-intensive for a an app with mill…
Perhaps it's user moderation?
But they have a lot of open positions, so there's apparently a lot more to this app than I realize: https://team.bumble.com/open-roles
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#10Maybe I am too naive but what the heck are they overworking on? It's an app with some basic functionality. Is software dev in such a sad state that you can't deliver a self-standing product that doesn't require teams working overtime to keep it running? I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers which are the only two things that jump to mind as being labor-intensive for a an app with mill…
FTA: “Bumble has had a busier year than most firms, with a stock market debut, and rapid growth in user numbers.”
I don’t think they’re implying that everyone is working overtime. Scaling up to accommodate a lot of new users isn’t always simple, we all know this. And a looming IPO means the pressure to get that scaling right first time is high (and has plenty of non-tech requirements to stress out employees too)
A busy year like that combined with the effects of COVID means that a lot of people feel burnt out. A synchronised break also has benefits: with no-one working there’s much less chance you’ll be tempted to “just check emails quickly” and get sucked back in.
I didn’t have a particularly intense workplace in the last year and I still feel pretty burnt out so I can sympathise.