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Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#51

Post by jkhdigital »

barbazoo wrote: post #24

> collective burnout > fortnightly manicures, hair trims and "blowouts" which the founder said showed "appreciation for our busy bees" > Working hours? Not nine to five apparently. Employees can choose the hours they want, just as long as the work gets done It's all just a bunch of BS. Give your employees reasonable time off policies and encourage them to actually take time off instead of letting them get burned out…

Yeah, my personal experience over the past 18 months has led to some changes in how I view the structure of work.

I don’t get burned out from working too much; I get burned out from having to make constant decisions about what I’m going to work on and how I’m going to do it. For me lack of structure is the primary source of burnout, not workload. The flexibility of working from home is nice, but not enough to make up for the increased stress of having to manage the environment all on my own.

Obviously not everyone is like me, but I think it’s common enough that we should be questioning the wisdom of the work-from-home free-for-all.

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#52

Post by zerkten »

shmel wrote: post #30
silicon2401 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very subjective statement. The pandemic has been bar none the best period of my life. Increased physical and social distance from other people, no need to emote in public thanks to masks, no need to commute, greater accommodation for non-social options like self-checkouts. My physical and mental health have skyrocketed, and as a result I feel like I've been on vacation for a year and half, despite only taki…

I keep hearing this over and over. I get it, some people are fairly introverted, some really enjoy WFH. But what stopped you from distancing from people and using self-checkouts before the pandemic? If you hate people, fine, just go home straight after work, you aren't obligated to hang out with anyone. It is not like the government would fine you for coming home before 11pm, right?

> But what stopped you from distancing from people and using self-checkouts before the pandemic?

This was not uniformly accepted behaviour. Yes, some people could find roles and a situation where this was possible before, but most couldn't. Stores didn't really optimize for a self-check out experience.

The social pressure in many organizations and communities to conform was high and there was no escape. If you you wanted to work at a tech company or startup you would have to accept open offices, happy hours, and other social requires to a great extent. It was not acceptable to skip many events and you had no option to switch your working environment in the office because the only option was open space.

The pandemic has forced a change, most importantly, in a relatively uniform manner. I'm not making the argument that we should all accept this other extreme. Just as we return to normality we should consider the experiences of others, and try to make some reasonable adaptations.

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#54

Post by thrower123 »

shmel wrote: post #30
silicon2401 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very subjective statement. The pandemic has been bar none the best period of my life. Increased physical and social distance from other people, no need to emote in public thanks to masks, no need to commute, greater accommodation for non-social options like self-checkouts. My physical and mental health have skyrocketed, and as a result I feel like I've been on vacation for a year and half, despite only taki…

I keep hearing this over and over. I get it, some people are fairly introverted, some really enjoy WFH. But what stopped you from distancing from people and using self-checkouts before the pandemic? If you hate people, fine, just go home straight after work, you aren't obligated to hang out with anyone. It is not like the government would fine you for coming home before 11pm, right?

It's a third of my life, half of my waking hours, that I'm forced to be in a box, dealing with people I wouldn't choose to breath the same air as, pretending to be interested in their small-talk.

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#55

Post by dogman144 »

My small-ish SaaS company in the US gave us all a European Christmas, Dec 24-Jan 2 totally off last year, short of on-call for P0 events. It Really made a difference. It was sub 100 headcount, but the SaaS supported a few major chains.

The upside is hard to measure which might be a blocker for larger, metrics-driven HR teams. However I feel like we all, as humans, know that policies like that make a difference.

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#57

Post by Kiro »

aantix wrote: post #32
silicon2401 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very subjective statement. The pandemic has been bar none the best period of my life. Increased physical and social distance from other people, no need to emote in public thanks to masks, no need to commute, greater accommodation for non-social options like self-checkouts. My physical and mental health have skyrocketed, and as a result I feel like I've been on vacation for a year and half, despite only taki…

Why is having to partake in your misery a good thing? The large majority connect via smiles, laughs, hugs.

It's an unnecessary and superficial conditioning that we need to evolve beyond. Do we want to be cavemen or cybernetic organisms?

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#58

Post by bin_bash »

joegahona wrote: post #4

I 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…

I hate it when people demand that every decision needs to come with some metric. For one, they fall victim to Goodhart’s Law:

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Metrics should drive intuition, not the other way around. We don’t use the scientific method here.

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#59

Post by dogman144 »

curiousgal wrote: post #3

Maybe 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…

Concur with someone else on the thread*. Bumble’s security team is largely overseas (UK). For a US based, culture-forward company, to me this probably implies a lot of offshoring of eng talent at some point, in order to grow. Which in turn probably means growing pains moving from contract devs to a real, in-house producteng program.

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#60

Post by lotsofpulp »

DrBazza wrote: post #49
crowbahr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been WFH for 4 years now and thoroughly enjoy it. I enjoy isolation, I love the intensity of coding that I can get done. I'm generally more introverted. That doesn't make the pandemic fun and rainbows. It's still been psychologically the most difficult time for me because I live in NYC. Walking the dog twice a day on ghost streets empty of any pedestrians, devoid of the hum of traffic and hearing nothing but the…

> Rubbing down the door knob with bleach. This article [1] implies the chance of catching COVID-19 from contact surfaces is 1 in 10,000 *at best* under lab conditions, and negligible at best. You're more likely to be struck by lightning or hit by a car. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...

The funny thing is bleach is what you need to stop noro and rota viruses, and those are actually very transmissible via surfaces, yet the protocol at my kids’ daycare (national chain) does not involve bleaching door knobs on the regular.

The same daycare that 2 weeks ago had an outbreak of noro or rotavirus which caused entire classes of toddlers to be infected and go home and vomit for a day and was spread to siblings and parents at home.

But they are still sanitizing pens. People’s risk profiles are crazy, and there is an insane amount of cover your ass for PR purposes.

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