Sustainable work-life balance with Personal SLA (2019)
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Re: Sustainable work-life balance with Personal SLA (2019)
#2A better approach might be: make sure everything you do for work is sustainable. When it's not, make sure you are letting beneficiaries know. (e.g. Yes, we're working weekends for this release, but it's for X and Y reason, and it won't happen regularly)
Re: Sustainable work-life balance with Personal SLA (2019)
#3A better approach might be: make sure everything you do for work is sustainable. When it's not, make sure you are letting beneficiaries know. (e.g. Yes, we're working weekends for this release, but it's for X and Y reason, and it won't happen regularly)
Once you start working weekends for a release it usually will become the norm. You can deal with this by putting a price tag on overwork, e.g. two times salary on weekends or comp time. Don’t give away things for free.
Re: Sustainable work-life balance with Personal SLA (2019)
#4A better approach might be: make sure everything you do for work is sustainable. When it's not, make sure you are letting beneficiaries know. (e.g. Yes, we're working weekends for this release, but it's for X and Y reason, and it won't happen regularly)
I believe working on the weekends is a failure, and we should treat it like any other engineering failure. Why did it happen, how can we improve things so this failure doesn't happen again. Track and assign AIs, and hold people accountable to them.
Re: Sustainable work-life balance with Personal SLA (2019)
#5A better approach might be: make sure everything you do for work is sustainable. When it's not, make sure you are letting beneficiaries know. (e.g. Yes, we're working weekends for this release, but it's for X and Y reason, and it won't happen regularly)
Once you start working weekends for a release it usually will become the norm. You can deal with this by putting a price tag on overwork, e.g. two times salary on weekends or comp time. Don’t give away things for free.
I'm happy to deal with emergencies 1-2 year. Things go wrong sometimes.
It's never become the norm where I've worked. So I don't really have advice for that.
Re: Sustainable work-life balance with Personal SLA (2019)
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once you start working weekends for a release it usually will become the norm. You can deal with this by putting a price tag on overwork, e.g. two times salary on weekends or comp time. Don’t give away things for free.
I'm happy to deal with emergencies 1-2 year. Things go wrong sometimes. It's never become the norm where I've worked. So I don't really have advice for that.
The reason is that tech leadership is doing what I described. Making clear to involved stakeholders that this is not normal and can't be expected every time. As parent commenter has seen, it doesn't happen automatically.
Re: Sustainable work-life balance with Personal SLA (2019)
#7A better approach might be: make sure everything you do for work is sustainable. When it's not, make sure you are letting beneficiaries know. (e.g. Yes, we're working weekends for this release, but it's for X and Y reason, and it won't happen regularly)
I believe working on the weekends is a failure, and we should treat it like any other engineering failure. Why did it happen, how can we improve things so this failure doesn't happen again. Track and assign AIs, and hold people accountable to them.
I think, like most things, this is dependent on circumstances. Planned weekend work (downtime needed, pre-planned release, or timing with external factors) isn't always a failure.
Separate but related, an engineering team that is able to coordinate aggressive cycles on a regular basis, with built-in time to recover, is probably more productive over the long term than one that can't.
Re: Sustainable work-life balance with Personal SLA (2019)
#8Can someone please enlighten me what the heck an SLA is? I skimmed through the article and felt like he teased at providing a definition several times and then never actually did.
Re: Sustainable work-life balance with Personal SLA (2019)
#9Can someone please enlighten me what the heck an SLA is? I skimmed through the article and felt like he teased at providing a definition several times and then never actually did.
Service Level Agreement
Re: Sustainable work-life balance with Personal SLA (2019)
#10Having never read it, the part from Google's SRE book is amusing in the best of ways - a perspective I had never considered in the way it was framed!