141–150 of 239 posts
The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems etc.
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Unlimited PTO is crazy to me. It takes the principles of spelled-out employment terms and throws them in the trash. The "flexible hours" policy was bad enough at my last job. Wildly varying interpretations between different managers and department heads under the same roof.
Unlimited PTO means there's nothing to cash out at the end of the year if you took 0 days of PTO. It also reminds me of the old negotiating tactic - never be the first one to offer up a number.
I can see both to be honest. Especially if you don't 'know what you're worth' in a given market, letting them make the first move at last has a chance that they won't offer you 50k for something hey are prepared to pay 250k for. Potentially they will start off with 150k and you're gonna be happy with it, because you undervalued yourself at 100k. Luckily you didn't say that but took the 150k offered!
If you know you're worth at least 150k, asking for 200k can anchor the negotiations in your direction as long as you don't overshoot what they were prepared to offer by too much (which might just kill the negotiations altogether). You might just walk away with 180k and you feel good because you got 30k more than you thought you might get and they feel good because they got you 'cheaper'.
I have no way of knowing which strategy actually works out better, as its hard to do a controlled experiment here :) Also you probably have incomplete market information and it might be hard to know how incomplete it is.
When I've been burned out or hated my job, I didn't take vacations, because the crushing realization that I'd have to return to work was almost worse than losing myself in the uninterrupted, repetitive, dead-eyed grind. While on vacation, I'd start thinking about the countdown to the end of the vacation. > Well, root out the real causes of burnout. I'll offer the definition that's made most sense to me. I didn't come…
For me, a "win" would be accomplishing something and then getting to bask in the success and take a fucking break and do nothing for a year. Shoot, even being able to take a break for a month after busting my butt on a project for a year would be nice. But nope. You never really "finish" anything in software development. You just have an endless backlog of tickets in JIRA. If you get something done faster, you don't get any reward or payoff for doing so.
I once finished my entire week's worth of planned work in two days and instead of being praised for it, I was chided for underestimating my sprint capacity. Did I get to take the rest of the week off? No! Of course not. I was expected to pull more tickets from the top of the backlog and just keep grinding.
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But a union will eventually slowly devolve into that example as more and more rules and restrictions are added. Unions have so many benefits but I feel like any time a union dictates how the work is supposed to be done I hate it. That's why I'm super conflicted. It feel like I'd lose a lot of flexibility afforded to me if I joined a union and had to start playing by their rules. At the same time, I think software eng…
a union dictates how the work is supposed to be done I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. How do unions dictate the way you perform your duties?
And suddenly the union has made me very uninterested in performing my duties at that company at all. I want to be able to work with flexible hours. I don't care to be compensated at 1.5x just because I start at 8:30 and leave at 4 one day, then do 9:30 to 5:30 another etc. I want to work from home every day of the week and I'll manage the separation of family life and work just fine, thank you very much but instead of being stuck in transit hours each way and effectively spending at least 11 hours for work related stuff (actual work plus travel, coz you know, union rules prohibit me working from the train, coz it's not in the office and it's not 9 yet), while WFH means I get up at 8:58 and in a meeting at 9:00 and that's great!
Real life example btw. from where some friends work, not theoretical. While I am flexible to take the kids to school, summercamp etc. at the required hours and just work as soon as I come home and made coffee, they gotta plan everything around their commute and timing it so that they don't come in too much earlier than 9 (wasting their time) and not get cited for clocking in too late, e.g. coz there was traffic.
I would bet that flexible work hours are contributing for higher employee burnout.
I think this is a contributor, especially with working remote where folks are spanning many time zones. A position I'm thinking about joining requires being available 9 hours between 9am-6pm EST (I live in EST) to ensure there's reasonable overlap between the west coast US and most European countries. They were really strict on these hours and at first I was against it because I thought what's the difference if I wor…
I do agree that having "core hours" is very valuable with flexible hours. Core hours need to be less than a regular working day though and they should be negotiated by the team internally. Have a team of night owls? Core hours can be 4pm to 10pm for example.
Why would you review a 7pm EST PR any earlier than the next day (which is when you'd see it) and your next day happened to start at 10am only that day? Unless you had started your day late or were working later for another reason (like wanting to take half of Friday off) and you happen to see it.
Timezones suck and make things slower. Companies need to acknowledge that and not by making people work longer than they should.
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There's a lot of companies in the world where "vacation" is offered, but the managers will many times terminate those who take it. All it takes is for one or two employees to be terminated after just getting back from a vacation to send a message to the rest of the employees. The right to use benefits has to be enforced by the CEO. If people aren't using their vacations (and effectively losing them), then that sets t…
Some companies I've been at swung in the opposite direction and I was really greatful for it. E.g. At Microsoft you have a max amount of vacation days that you can accrue before they start expiring, and managers get dinged whenever their directs have expiring vacation days. The result: Managers would encourage taking vacation
It's easier to think that employee vacations are worthless as a manager since it doesn't actually contribute to any direct profit. But if you're an employee, and that was a selling point of joining the company, it certainly sucks when the promise of vacation could never be materialized -- because work was apparently too important.
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"Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off." Exactly. Yet most people mistakenly attribute the feeling to other causes. OP quote what people think are the causes of their own burnout, and took those at face value. When you're burnt out, you're probably not in a good state to determine the cause.
Speak for yourself. Sorry for being blunt, but you clearly know very little about burnout (good for you). If people say that they are burned out because of a bad manager, believe them instead of saying they don't know what they are talking about. There are many reasons for burnout. Working on things that don't pay off is just one of them.
What would be your definition of a bad manager that doesn't include putting in inputs and not receiving expected[1] outcomes?
[1]: (or maybe "just" could be another term)
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There's a lot of companies in the world where "vacation" is offered, but the managers will many times terminate those who take it. All it takes is for one or two employees to be terminated after just getting back from a vacation to send a message to the rest of the employees. The right to use benefits has to be enforced by the CEO. If people aren't using their vacations (and effectively losing them), then that sets t…
Some people add negative value and it’s sometimes not clear until they step away for a couple of weeks.
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"Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off." I agree but would add "lack of hope" to that. I have no hope that my job/career will get better.
I’ll add a small insidious realization of what stress is. It’s one thing to work hard and feel tired after working hard, the causality is natural. It’s when you feel fatigue before you even start the work. Why am I tired before I even begin? That to me it’s a dead giveaway something is wrong. How do you solve that? We mythologized grit , the strength to overcome this preemptive fatigue. But even that, is fatiguing. L…
When I've been burned out or hated my job, I didn't take vacations, because the crushing realization that I'd have to return to work was almost worse than losing myself in the uninterrupted, repetitive, dead-eyed grind. While on vacation, I'd start thinking about the countdown to the end of the vacation. > Well, root out the real causes of burnout. I'll offer the definition that's made most sense to me. I didn't come…
What about people who build tons of successful things and get win after win after win, but are still feeling burned out? For me, a "win" would be accomplishing something and then getting to bask in the success and take a fucking break and do nothing for a year. Shoot, even being able to take a break for a month after busting my butt on a project for a year would be nice. But nope. You never really "finish" anything i…