Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.co.uk

161–170 of 305 posts

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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that? What's wrong with SF for dating? (just curious)

>"Why is that? What's wrong with SF for dating? (just curious)" Where to begin? The tech industry is massively skewed towards male, so right off the bat your odds of meeting someone in your work life is near nil. Then, with the complete lack of affordable housing, there's no such thing as just being a single 20-something living independently and supporting yourself on a non-tech salary. Bare minimum subsistence incom…

Don’t feel too bad about the highly paid tech dudes. Tech dudes don’t stand a chance either because women don’t want to date another tech dude.

I’m turning 31 in a couple months and am coming out of a 5 year relationship. It’s looking grim AF. My only real hope is that I get back with my ex eventually.

I did the fancy vacations. I have the high income (~400k). I have a reasonably high net worth for my age (~2M). Even have the BMW! Didn’t stop her from walking away because she didn’t wanna date just a miserable workaholic techie anymore!!

Honestly, the best candidates that I think many women are aiming for aren’t the tech guys. It’s the guys with rich families. They’re the ones I see not really having any issues because they don’t really need to have any kind of shit job. They got parental money after all.

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

#163
It's called paid vacation in Europe and all citizens have the right to at least 4 weeks per year. I hope this boon arrives to the whole of USA one day, together with paternal holidays, free education and other modern achievements that are standard here. I don't mean to be inflammatory here, it really boggles my mind how a week off is even a thing we're discussing here.

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it would be substantially more effective to prevent burnout by having shorter work days or work weeks.

I think it would be but I also would like forced time off as well. As well as forced socializing with team mates. And a sabbatical every 5 years or so. But if I can find a job with full health benefits that lets me work three days a week, I'm going for it. Heck, that is the best argument in favor of universal healthcare. It would help unemployment, because way more people would be working part time.

Adobe also does a sabbatical every 5 years!

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

#165

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.

You may also want to cite the McNamara Fallacy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

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

#166

This is excellent. My workplace (Moz) has been giving us the third Friday of every month off since April of 2020 due to COVID. The CEO called them "Breather Days" - a day to catch our breath, catch up on chores or home life, help get our kids school straightened out, etc. More importantly than simply getting the days off, the empathy that it demonstrated reassured everyone that we would find the work/life balance we…

Ours did the same thing, although we generally vote on which friday it will be for the upcoming month - people often choose to line it up with another stat holiday to make 4 day weekends. I agree that the empathy part of this really means a lot to people.

I'm really curious how long we'll keep that in place, especially after re-opening the physical offices.

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

#167
I know this is a little weird, but everyone I know in downtown Austin (where bumble has their offices) had a marked increase in despair/depressive symptoms with the summer jump in heat.

In my experience that's been true every year (and I normally try to leave the city for August) but especially this summer post pandemic, post icepocalypse.

I wonder if that's part of it.

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

#168

It's called paid vacation in Europe and all citizens have the right to at least 4 weeks per year. I hope this boon arrives to the whole of USA one day, together with paternal holidays, free education and other modern achievements that are standard here. I don't mean to be inflammatory here, it really boggles my mind how a week off is even a thing we're discussing here.

pretty sure that they're talking about giving an EXTRA week of time off on top of whatever normal PTO/vaction time they have.

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

#169

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…

Just to note, you can regularly ask your employees how they feel, and with enough employees get a significant measurement. So maybe they can measure the “woolly” morale impact of this. Tools like Lattice make it easy to do a “pulse” survey for this purpose. Also the great thing about doing this twice a year is you get two experiments so you can start to be confident it’s not just “Christmas makes employees 10% happie…

That assumes that your employees:

1. Know how they feel

2. Can translate that into numbers accurately.

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

#170
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, As my company slowly starts going back to the office, I decided to move to a remote/rural area because I wasn't willing to go back into an office everyday. I expected to have to find a new job, but my current employer offered to let me continue remotely, so I suppose it has worked out.

I am jelaous. My company has a stated goal of going back to its old ways. I requested basically hybrid mode ( one day in office a week ) to show I am a team player, but it is clear remote is reserved for favorites..

Perhaps I'm a favorite... for now - my company is getting acquired, so I may be on the job hunt soon anyway.
Post reply on HN