201–210 of 305 posts
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Can you give some examples? I live in Europe and have never experienced that in my country suddenly everything stops for 2 weeks in the middle of the summer.
I should have specified countries I guess. Austria, Germany and Netherlands for sure. Others I'm told but have not directly experienced it.
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I’m curious, are you female? I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that unless I was unbelievably angry. Like maybe once or twice in my entire adult life.
Speaking from personal experience, this happens to male humans as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resting_bitch_face : "Using a type of facial recognition system, they found that the phenomenon is real and the condition is as common in males as in females, despite the gendered word bitch that is used to name the concept."
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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.
> not a giraffe fighting expert I think it's hilarious that HN needs such a disclaimer.
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.
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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've never been so envious of happily married people in my life. Being single throughout this ordeal has broken me mentally, particularly at an age (31) where I'm staring down the last couple years of being able to meet someone my age. And the prospects coming out of it are grim. For people with a happy home life, this may have been a good time. But for the isolated, work from home, single people with no long term so…
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I've never been so envious of happily married people in my life. Being single throughout this ordeal has broken me mentally, particularly at an age (31) where I'm staring down the last couple years of being able to meet someone my age. And the prospects coming out of it are grim. For people with a happy home life, this may have been a good time. But for the isolated, work from home, single people with no long term so…
I met my wife at age 42, been happily married two years now. I've come to learn that relationships and my ability to navigate them have only improved with age. I look back at myself and how I treated people in my 20s and cringe.
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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.
But as long as the results aren't pure noise, i.e., there's some signal there, then with an adequate sample size you can do something with it. Lots of fields deal with noisy, imprecise data. It's just conditional on it not being only noise.
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. -…
I've never been on such a thing but I wonder if it ends up being a real vacation or if everyone is still mainly talking about work except not in front of a computer.
Does anyone want to share a few stories on how their company trips went?
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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.
One of these things is not like the other...
I can tolerate the occasional "mandatory fun" corporate event, but only within reason (e.g. I have kids, so don't give me grief for leaving early).
And I think the entire "work hard play hard" office culture, where you're expected to do happy hour everyday and build your social life around co-workers in order to prove you're a teammate, is ageist and absolutely toxic.
To be blunt, if you have to FORCE people to socialize with you, then maybe you need some self-reflection on why that's necessary.
IMHO, with burnout, a week off feels like taking just one breath. What a week does though is let the workers reconsider their situation. Is the burnout worth it? Companies ultimately don't care if you die tomorrow. We are all replaceable to them in the end.