1 week! Love the benevolent leaders of our industry /s
Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
11–20 of 305 posts
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#12Maybe 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…
I don't know about your organization, but at mine utilization jumped like crazy when we all started working from home. People threw themselves into their work and stopped taking vacations. Not a lot of people have taken time to breathe in the last year. Was that focus and effort required? Probably not, but with nothing else to do and in a time of such economic uncertainty people did what they needed to make themselves feel better. I understand why the company would be burnt out.
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#13Maybe 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…
I would bet customer support is the most labor-intensive part of the whole company, with devops a distant second.
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#14Hopefully they can get to a place where people are empowered to regularly take time off when needed!
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#15I 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 alrea…
Some things can't really be measured numerically, I think this is one.
I think you do things like talking to people afterwards and see if they think it was a good idea, looking at attrition rates and try and guess if it moved them, looking at whatever productivity metrics you have, and at the end you probably have a gut feeling on whether or not it was a good idea... That's probably the best that you get.
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#16Minus the poor schmucks stuck in ops I bet.
> A spokeswoman for Bumble said a few customer support staff will be working in case any of the app's users experience issues. These employees will then be given time off to make sure they take a whole week of leave.
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#17Maybe 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 their IPO a few months ago and I imagine all of their staff, not just engineers, were under a lot of pressure. And no one said they were working overtime, just that they were burnt out. Plus, when your company is in the news and your user base grows 30% in a matter if months, that's the time to strike while the iron is hot, which no doubt required a lot of work from all teams.
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#18Maybe 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…
It references "burnout," not "overwork." I think there's a difference.
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#19Maybe 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…
> It's an app with some basic functionality.
> I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers
Please don't assume this.
Just because you don't use the app and have no interest in the app or company does not mean you need to have a reductionist outlook on other people's work.
Bumble has a great and in depth engineering blog [0] here that doesn't make it 'an app with some basic functionality.'
Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
#20Good. 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 t…
Company-wide month off sounds amazing. Would you be willing to name it (would be great PR for them). If not, would you give a sense of geography, industry and size?