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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

#181

Post by gpm »

afarrell wrote: post #169
theptip wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nothing is perfect, this is better than nothing though. [1]

The way my company does this is they ask a lot of questions and then mostly look at aggregates. E.g. they might ask 6 questions about "how do you feel about the size of your workload", "do you feel you have time to do the important things in your life", "are you satisfied with the amount of vacation you take", "do you feel stressed", ... and then roll those into a single "work life balance" metric (questions and specific metric entirely made up).

And actually we outsource to a survey company that does that for us, which apart from outsourcing the non-core competency, means that there is a reasonably neutral party deciding how to aggregate things (I think, I'm not involved in the survey design).

[1] Therefore this is better than perfect?

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

#182

Post by beansontoast »

ramesh31 wrote: post #89
golergka wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> particularly at an age (31) where I'm staring down the last couple years of being able to meet someone What? I'm 33, only a few months into my current relationship, and I have to say that dating is so much better at this age than it ever was.

>I'm 33, only a few months into my current relationship, and I have to say that dating is so much better at this age than it ever was. You can get lucky. There are certainly unicorns out there. Or you can date younger, if you're ok with that. But by and large, women and men work on different timelines. And you don't realize this as a man until it hits. The vast majority of women are out of the dating pool by 30. And…

There are 0 unicorns and 3.9 billion women out there. Many of those are dateable. I can see why somebody would think like you if they've been single for a long time, but my experience has been that arranging dates in my mid-late twenties and early thirties is easier than ever.

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

#183

Post by kbelder »

NationalPark wrote: post #123
ramesh31 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I know people who met and got married in their 40s... It all depends on what you're looking for I guess. Certainly you can get married in your 40s. But at that point having a single child, let alone a few, becomes a monumental task. It's not an imaginary deadline. Fertility falls off a cliff at 35 [0]. [0] https://www.kinderzeit.org/en/fertility-by-age/

> becomes a monumental task Even ignoring the fact that fertility treatments exist... 1 in 4 healthy women in their 20s and 30s will get pregnant in any single menstrual cycle. (The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, 2018) 1 in 10 healthy women in their 40s will get pregnant in any single menstrual cycle. (The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, 2018) hardly monumental

Not just conceiving; _having_ a baby becomes much harder as you age. Birthing is a pretty physically stressful process for lots of women, and the following few years is a lot of very hard work. The most demanding of your life, probably.

Edit: Wanted to add, though, that _dating_ in your 30s and 40s just gets better and better. Don't worry about that. Maturity is a bonus, not a drawback.

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

#185

Post by npteljes »

ryandrake wrote: post #171
handmodel wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument would be that this actually could be measured short term (probably all the staff will say they feel better in two weeks) but if in Q3 the CEO realizes they need to roll out some features before a Q4 quarterly call then what could have been a 12 week project will turn into a cramped 10 week project.

Yea, this is what always gets me about taking personal vacation time. You take a week off, but that week isn't yours for free. Your expected work keeps accumulating during that week. You're just taking a week of time-debt which you will need to pay off in the form of much higher workload over the following few weeks. I wouldn't be surprised if these employees all get back to work and find their workload doubles for a…

I think good management can turn it into a real vacation. Our teams works in scrum and we just commit to fewer or smaller tasks, accounting for the missing person-days.

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

#186

Post by kilroy123 »

deregulateMed wrote: post #56

I never found vacations to be useful for burnout. What does work for me is having a 40 hour work week. If I'm doing the same job for 50+ hrs/week, I start to dread the work. That said, this is drastic, seems like something other than burnout is going on.

Maybe not a short vacation but enough time will do the trick.

Source: just came off a 2 1/2 year break

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

#187

Post by gpm »

WJW wrote: post #125
LandR wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get asked quite often if I'm angry, grumpy, down, "what's wrong?" even when I'm absolutely fine and none of those things. I was even stopped by a random stranger in a supermarket once and they asked if I was OK... I said I was fine, and then she asked if it had been a long day... erm. Guess it's just my face. I remember in the supermarket I was actually just thinking about if a man could beat a giraffe in a fight.

With technological help like guns, obviously the man wins. Without technology but with enough preparation, humans probably still win because they could rig up traps and whatnot. Straight up the giraffe would wreck a humans because they can kick really hard with their long legs.

Terrain probably matters a lot here. On flat ground the giraffe kicks the shit out of humans. On uneven terrain with nooks and crannies to hide in and trip up the long legged thing, and rocks to throw at it to keep it mad, I think a human would have a good chance (not a giraffe fighting expert).

Humans probably have more stamina, if you can drag out the fight.

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

#188

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

allannienhuis wrote: post #168
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #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.

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

Of course, but for all we know this extra week could be the only paid vacation they have since for some reason in the USA there is no concept of mandatory paid vacation.

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

#189

Post by dharmab »

ericbarrett wrote: post #175
dharmab wrote: post #146

Adobe does two of these every year, one in winter around the holidays and one in July. From my perspective as an individual contributor, there are a few advantages: - With no feature/project work that week, there is zero pressure to check email or slack. - Teams are forced to build systems that are automated, resilient and documented enough that most of the staff won't need to be contacted during the shutdown week. -…

Does it draw your vacation time? Mandatory vacations (especially around Christmas) were started in the early 2000s among Bay Area tech companies in order to reduce collective accrued PTO, reducing liability on the balance sheet—had nothing to do with worker health. Although that regime is certainly preferable to so-called "unlimited" PTO.

At Adobe, we have unlimited flexible PTO. In my personal experience I have never heard of PTO being turned down by a manager.

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

#190

Post by Zaheer »

allochthon wrote: post #138

I've been working remotely for about five years, now, and I love it. I've always been curious about working at Twitter and Google, and I was vaguely hoping that they'd start looking at full-time remote hires across their engineering orgs. I value remote work more than I do the possibility of working at Twitter or Google, so it is a little wistfully that I realize I might never follow up on that curiosity.

Many of the large tech co's are now allowing to apply for permanent remote positions: https://www.levels.fyi/remote/
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