Employee Burnout Is a Problem with the Company, Not the Person (hbr.org) 262
Employee burnout is a common phenomenon, but it is one that companies tend to treat as a talent management or personal issue rather than a broader organizational challenge. That's a mistake, reads an article on HBR. From the article: The psychological and physical problems of burned-out employees, which cost an estimated $125 billion to $190 billion a year in healthcare spending in the U.S., are just the most obvious impacts. The true cost to business can be far greater, thanks to low productivity across organizations, high turnover, and the loss of the most capable talent. [...] When employees aren't as productive as they could be, it's usually the organization, not its employees, that is to blame. The same is true for employee burnout. When we looked inside companies with high burnout rates, we saw three common culprits: excessive collaboration, weak time management disciplines, and a tendency to overload the most capable with too much work. These forces not only rob employees of time to concentrate on completing complex tasks or for idea generation, they also crunch the downtime that is necessary for restoration.
Excessive collaboration is a good one! (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing like sitting through a .25hr scrum daily meeting and it turning into 1.25hr/daily. By the time it's over I could go take a nap!
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That's not a scrum meeting.
It's probably a daily meeting, but you are not doing scrum.
If you were doing scrum, you would quickly identify that as an obstacle, and get it out of the way. That's what retros are for.
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Yeah, most management people just do not have the discipline to shut up and let people give their scrum status and then ask questions later
A 30 second statement of the defects I worked on that day usually turn into a 5 minute discussion of what the defect actually is and why it's important to fix it and why it might have an impact on the release schedule... blah, blah, blah.
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Then your Scrum Master is not doing it right. He should cut off the discussion and say that's for off-line.
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seriously, if the bug fix wasn't important why did you label it a P1 and put it on top of the fucking backlog, I'm fixing the bug because of how it was prioritized, if you dont like that, do a better job prioritizing.
by the time it is accepted into the sprint that shit should already be figured out
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We hear that all the time, "you're not doing it right...".
I get annoyed when people say that about little details, but if your daily scrum meetings are lasting 75 minutes then you are doing it so wrong that it is inaccurate to even call it "scrum".
My scrum meetings last 5 minutes. The purpose is to raise issues, not to discuss them. The discussion happens elsewhere.
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The question is, why are so many places "doing scrum wrong"? Are these places that would do a bad job of any process, and scrum is the one they've picked? Is scrum just hard to understand and implement? It doesn't really seem that complicated to me. Is there something about scrum that doesn't fit the culture of a lot of companies but for some reason nobody knows that before trying it? Because it's very unlikely the corporate culture is going to change to fit the new development methodology, more like t
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MOst places have no one who has ever had any Scrum training at all. They've heard there should be daily meetings, and bi-weekly meeting, so they have those. But all those meetings are manager briefings, organized along team boundaries, not project boundaries. Not even wrong.
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The question is, why are so many places "doing scrum wrong"?
The GPP is not "doing scrum wrong", he is not doing it at all. He is using the word "scrum" to describe the normal time-wasting "status" meetings that are common at dysfunctional companies. That is not what scrum is.
Is scrum just hard to understand and implement?
No. There are many parts of Agile that are hard, but scrum isn't one of them. Scrum is easy. Just give each person 30 seconds to talk, and they will be forced to focus on the most important issues. If managers interrupt, ignore the scrum master, and hijack the meeting, then YOU ARE NOT DOIN
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you're not doing it right...
Funny how much "agile" apologists have in common with communism apologists.
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a .25hr scrum daily meeting
Wait until you're "matrixed" into multiple projects. Then you can attend three or four daily (one or two hour) "standup" meetings!
Gee, ya think? (Score:2)
It's 99.999% the fault of management. Most of them know *nothing* about what and how things are being done - in IT, I think some of them believe that you just have to point and click and it's done.
I worked for Ameritech, the former Baby Bell, in the mid-nineties, in what was a startup division. For more than a year and a half, I was working 9, 10, 12 and some 16 hour days. I was getting paged frequently. About a year and three quarters in - I was in just over 2 years, and left as they announced the beginnin
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The truth is, your bosses know more than you think, that's why they are the boss and you are not.
My team lead yes. My current manager while he does know more he does not actually know more about my job than I do, in fact he knows very little about my job. What he actually realizes, unlike past shitty ones, is that it is possible for people to not be experts in everything and will trust my and my team lead's judgment. Then again most of the management here didn't become managers by getting an MBA and having no background knowledge on their industry. My manager spent years working in the industry both as
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You're a fool. No, he's not the boss because he knows more than me. Second, when I started, they told us not to worry, no pagers. Two months later, pagers. Then it was ONE BIG PUSH... and the pushes kept coming, and coming, for the same reason that we went from 4 teams to 27, because upper management *are* ignorant, but are sure they know Everything.
And they don't. And suckers like you are one reason they keep doing it.
And I suppose you have no life.
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Still a Help Desk Jocky, eh?
Sociopaths (Score:2)
Burnout is accelerated by incompetency... (Score:4, Insightful)
...You may wonder who exactly *is* incompetent in my post. I am referring to company leadership that has got no clue about how things run.
Sometimes, they do have a clue, but pretend not to know; or provide "non answers" or "non solutions" to real issues.
In many cases, these managers have risen up the ranks of the company solely because of *nepotism* and not capability.
Sometimes, they have risen because of "who you know" for lack of better terminology...
Sometimes they have risen because they [have] provided a "service" or "favor" to the founders or influential parties. I will leave the nature of this service or favor to your imagination...
And BTW, this is very common in today's USA as well. I am speaking as one who lives right here in this blessed "land of the free."
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2 weeks vacation (Score:2)
Two weeks is an insult not a vacation, and you don't even have the decency to mandate that insult.
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I'll take my vacation sure! But while I'm gone it's one more opportunity for them to "forget" how much work I do. And that's working a regular 51 hours a week (yeah I'm a lightweight in the industry) and being extremely productive while doing so. I'm over 40 in "the biz" so EVEN if I had full certs, and EVEN if they were current, and EVEN with a TON of experience, If I'm let go, I'm unlikely to get employed at anything but the lowest technical position. This has already happened to me once. If I want to keep paying my bills and supporting my family I can't let that happen again. Fear runs this business in a lot of places.
You're doing it wrong. It should be the other way around. The company should be afraid that you will leave with valuable experience and knowledge.
You should only have FOMO, fear of missing out. Someone else grabs a nice opportunity when you're on vacation.
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I'll take my vacation sure! But while I'm gone it's one more opportunity for them to "forget" how much work I do. And that's working a regular 51 hours a week (yeah I'm a lightweight in the industry) and being extremely productive while doing so. I'm over 40 in "the biz" so EVEN if I had full certs, and EVEN if they were current, and EVEN with a TON of experience, If I'm let go, I'm unlikely to get employed at anything but the lowest technical position. This has already happened to me once. If I want to keep paying my bills and supporting my family I can't let that happen again. Fear runs this business in a lot of places.
You're doing it wrong. It should be the other way around. The company should be afraid that you will leave with valuable experience and knowledge.
You should only have FOMO, fear of missing out. Someone else grabs a nice opportunity when you're on vacation.
When agism is rampant in multiple industries, and when there are people who will work for much less than I am, then the companies have the upper hand.
I'm not disagreeing that things should be different - just pointing out that they currently aren't.
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Companies have this odd idea these days that everyone is replaceable (well, big companies.. Smaller ones still sometimes have a clue)..
They often lose the good people, and assume they can replace with anyone, and it can be years later before everything falls over in a catastrophic failure that the good skills would have avoided entirely... Think it was RBS that had a critical failure because they'd got rid of all their good techs, and the 'cookie cutter cost cutting replacements' used to save money made a
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I'm the same age and it took me very little time to get a new job when my last place laid a bunch of folks off. Needless to say I take what vacation I can every year.
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But while I'm gone it's one more opportunity for them to "forget" how much work I do.
The wonders of a government that doesn't care about it's people, corporations that profit from screwing over its human resources, and that wonderful "at will" working agreements.
In many countries in the west if someone "forgets" what work you do it's grounds to sue them or get a huge payout on the way out.
It's only a cost if you're paying it (Score:2)
80 hour work week needs to go as well companies (Score:2)
80 hour work week needs to go as well companies that people who work for us the have passion to work from home in there (not so) free time.
Hire more people if you have deadlines that push endless 60-80 hour weeks.
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Hire more people if you have deadlines that push endless 60-80 hour weeks.
That isn't necessarily a fix for that problem either....sometimes it can have the opposite effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
They blame "excessive collaboration"... (Score:3)
... and yet they recommend Agile.
Makes no sense.
Re:They blame "excessive collaboration"... (Score:5, Interesting)
Agile is a manifesto that is hard to argue with.
Agile as implemented is usually scrum...which is a waste of time by design. Good teams can get results with any formal methodology, usually despite it.
The problem with agile is management ignores things like 'people over process' and 'hire competent, enthusiastic individuals' and only follow 'ship often' and 'talk to the client a lot'. Using agile as justification for constant spec drift and little thought going into the spec in the first place.
When someone claims they are 'agile' you should inquire further. The 'hire competent enthusiastic individuals' line has implications. Those people don't work for cheap. If a place is paying 'industry average', they aren't doing agile.
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I did the 'daily stand up', before it was called Scrum. It turned into a _huge_ waste of time. 5 minutes per dev. Team of 5. That's a half hour easy. Without considering the 'game the meeting to avoid work' potential. Push the managers buttons, watch the usual BS. Avoid work, lower everybody's productivity to your normal (zero).
But honestly, that whole place sucked. Recently heard, one of the poor bastards is _still_ with them, decades on.
I forget where I read it. But their was a rant about meetings. C
Burnout has many contributory factors (Score:5, Insightful)
it's usually the organization, not its employees, that is to blame
It is incorrect to suggest that only factors related to work are the cause of burnout and that therefore it is a "company" problem. There can be many issues with an individual's personal life (or their finances, children, partners, parents, neighbourhood or many other sources) that means they are more or less susceptible to "burnout".
Even two people doing the same work: subject to the same level of professional stress can have vastly different reactions to it, depending on how pre-stressed they already are, or what coping mechanisms they have developed, or not - or even due to their personalities.
So while the pressures of a job may well add to an already stressed individual's burnout, it is unlikely to be the sole reason for it. Consequently a proper study would have to look at all aspects of a person's life to determine the extent to which their job or their boss or something else caused them to have problems. And therefore it seems reasonable that the solution to a person's recovery could, in many cases, be found outside of their work life, rather than within the company they work for.
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Well i didn't read the article, but i assume they controlled for this and used statistics. Statistics that take into account people being people and having human traits and such which bias things.
After accounting for all that (which i would hope they did) you can then blame different companies for different levels of burnou
And don't forget... (Score:5, Insightful)
They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's not kid ourselves. Burnout happens because people no longer care about their jobs. Why? Because there is no benefit to working any harder.
Sounds like you're the problem (Score:2)
Re: Sounds like you're the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you must not be very important if the company can survive an entire month without you.
If I didn't take my vacation they would get to try surviving without me around at all.
Re: Sounds like you're the problem (Score:5, Informative)
Finance companies are required by law to make their employees take 5 days in a row off, specifically for this reason, to ensure continuity of business processes in case you get hit by a bus. If you're the only one who knows how things work for day to day processes, there's serious flaws in your organization.
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I think its less for 'hit by a bus' and more to remove you from the environment long enough that any fraud/embezzlement schemes you might have fall apart.
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If your fraud scheme falls apart in 5 days you set it up wrong.
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It might sound useless but I worked at a bank where an AVP got called into the office on the 4th day of his mandatory 5 day vacation. Turns out he had been kiting checks for a client and because he wasn't there someone else caught on. He was escorted out again.
For IT this gets a little trickie
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It lets them see what gets done invisibly the rest of the year.
Most people afraid to take vacation are afraid the boss will learn just how _little_ they actually do. Even worse, that the boss will see the office work much better without them, as they are 'net negative' anti-workers.
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It lets them see what gets done invisibly the rest of the year.
Most people afraid to take vacation are afraid the boss will learn just how _little_ they actually do. Even worse, that the boss will see the office work much better without them, as they are 'net negative' anti-workers.
Well maybe. Problem is, it isn't always fear of taking vacation. I had as much vacation canceled as I took. And those I could take, I spent a lot of time sitting someplace nice on the phone troubleshooting, while the family played in the surf. Almost had to fly back to fix a problem once until a suit caught wind of it and told them they would not do that to me.
Eventually, I "forgot" the company phone and my own to preserve family peace. The upside was when I retired, I had max vacation and sick accumulat
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On consideration, I'll take back 'Most', put in 'Many'. There are a buttload of net negative workers that _never_ take vacation. Been my observation over the years. They guard their little bit of hell.
As far as cancelled vacations. Going to be a long talk about scheduling issues and costs before I cancel anything involved.
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Talk to the big boss about his business' 'truck number'. If they won't pay for any redundancy, _extort_ them for more pay. They will pay, one way or another.
Besides: If you don't have someone learning your tasks, how will your boss promote you to his job when he moves up?
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My last employer required all IT staff to take a full 5 continuous working days off in a row at least once a year. They could not be contacted at all during that time. This was to ensure that we had proper documentation and cross training and could function if said individual was hit by a truck.
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This is just plain good business sense. Getting hit by a truck is somewhat of a rare experience, but there could be any number of reasons why an employee might need to take extended time off or leave the company at a moments notice. Anything from actually being hit by a truck, having to take time off to look after a family member, serious illnesses like cancer, winning 50 million on the lottery, a new lucrative job offer.
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Then you must not be very important if the company can survive an entire month without you.
Or else - if they're very, very clever indeed - they might have worked out some kind of a rota whereby employees with similar qualifications and expertise cover for one another's absence. Hmmmm... now how would that work... maybe if you need a minimum of four employees, if you possibly had five or six, then one of them at a time could go and have a week or two off. We might call it a "vacation", or a "holiday". Things might even go better when the employees occasionally got some rest & recreation.
Unless
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Usually a week in the spring, two weeks in summer and a week in the fall. But hey, at least on your deathbed you'll be able to say that you didn't let that feature slip!
My only regret is that I didn't spend more time at the office.
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I see one anonymous post like this in every single discussion of employee benefits. I have to assume there's one guy in a cage, but with internet access, posting it the same thing repeatedly. (Often there's a jab that Asian co-workers are granted time but the anglo Americans can't get it, that I don't see here, so maybe there are two such people.)
But seriously? You've been at the same company for 24 years, and never had a full week? In the past two and a half decades you have thrown away 2.5 * 24 = 60 weeks
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...there's a person out there who forewent benefits for approximately as long as it's been since the Cubs last won the world series.
Since November 2016?
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Yeah, yeah. As soon as I hit submit, I realize that "previously" would have been better than "last" but what are you going to do?
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you sure as shit aren't going to edit a comment on slashdot
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I'm with you on that. I live in the UK, so its a bit different, but there are TV companies crying out to do an expose on the evil company that has worked an employee for 24 years without a week off.
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Take your vacation. You will be more productive after. Crispy devs not only get less done, but they make more mistakes, resulting in more rework and even worse, more crap in the live codebase to workaround.
I'll believe their is an actual dev shortage when they stop wasting so much of my time. Every goddamn day they burn hours on useless meetings. Email me the minutes and leave me to do actual work.
Daily 'standups'...just no. Daily email status reports to the project manager...takes 5 minutes.
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Remember your most important kindergarten lesson. If you didn't get caught, you didn't do it.
Let them have their fig leaf. But recognize it and skip. Then you have a choice: bar or office? Guess it depends on how much work you have to do and who you are skipping with.
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and not allow them time off
So, a practice illegal in the rest of the western world.
Re:Lack of vacation is the big problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Developers are so expensive and so hard to find that companies have to work the ones they have pretty hard and not allow them time off. I haven't had a full week off since 1993, and it sucks. Also, I typically lose two and a half weeks of vacation each year since I hit the accrual max. It gets old, but until there's enough developers, things are going to stay bad.
If you're good enough, when you say, "I'm taking two weeks off!" your boss says OK.
If he says, "You're too important to take that time off." then you need to reply with, "Then I need a raise. Right now."
If you're so important they can't afford to let you take time off, you're underpaid.
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What if your afraid the boss will learn how little work you actually do?
It would suck to be gone for 4 weeks, and nobody noticed you were gone. Except you weren't there to complain all the time.
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If that is the case. Find a new job and quit. Developers are not expensive but they are paid middle class pay. While most places are used to pay people at poverty rates.
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Fortunately when the mandate to fill the toxic troll quota was handed down, it included mandatory time off for toxic trolls, otherwise everyone else would resign.
Why aren't you're taking your mandatory time off then?
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Two weeks before your vacation, remind your boss about the vacation they had already ap
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No full week since 1993 sounds ridiculous and in fact it is.
Reminds me of the stories of employees abused by the capitalists during the industrial revolution. Child labor 14 hours a day in deplorable circumstances and such...
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Cut me a check for the *overtime* value of the lost vacation.
Pretty simple.
Re: Lack of vacation is the big problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Cut me a check for the *overtime* value of the lost vacation.
Pretty simple.
No. There is no federal law requiring compensation for forfeited vacation time. Some states require that employees be compensated. None require it to be at "overtime" rate.
My company has a "use it or lose it" policy ... which is how it should be. Vacation exists for a reason and "extra pay" is not a substitute.
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Boss: 'You can be replaced.'
Me: 'So can this job! Want to race?'
Boss says nothing...
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Me: 'So can this job!
Yeah, but be careful... replace too many jobs, and you'll be flagged as a "job hopper" and suddenly find it way harder to replace a job. The system will squeeze you every way it can.
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I squeeze back, it's the only solution.
Job hopping has had different meanings over the decades, is always in the eye of the beholder. 20 year, one company chumps would likely call us all 'job hoppers'.
There are bosses who only employ bad negotiators and/or head cases. They are best avoided. Burn that bridge _before_ you cross it.
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Not how it worked out.
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Not how it worked out.
Irreplaceable people like you are hard to come by though.
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I implied a race, which more or less means that I know I will be replaced...it's a question of relative costs and risks. Some employers like to act like they have _all_ the power. Clients are better than employers in that respect.
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When ever I have had a manager suggest that they could cancel my vacation I also remind them that I can easily go and find a different job likely with one of their competitors or even in a different industry doing the same thing as there aren't many people with my knowledge, skill set, and experience. If I wanted I could start tomorrow at a new job.
I've had a lot of vacations cancelled. Never cancelled anyone else's, but seriously, if you issued an ultimatum or threat to me you would have to take it. I'm certain you are the only irreplaceable person on the planet, but I can get people with attitudes anywhere.
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You are correct. My statement was more along the lines of how I feel about being asked to forfeit my vacation.
If you're only going to offer me straight pay if I am giving up vacation time, then I'll just take the vacation. Obviously the same goes for if I lose it outright.
If, however, you're going to compensate me at time and a half then I'm much more amenable to not taking every day of vacation I've earned.
-nB
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I disagree with that. If the workload itself prevents you from taking time off because if you do, you will have triple the work load, then there should be compensation for the fact that you have lost "downtime with your self or your family" . Now, while I would love it to be at overtime rates (from a personal perspective)... I don't believe it should be since it would be compensation at your normal rate typically so I don't any reason why a company would provide extra compensation for that. (I say that as b
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A year+ long death march is a really good way to end up with a shite product. Of the companies I have worked for none of the ones that had extended death marches is still around.
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Longest death march I've had was 36 days.
zero days off, 12 to 16 hours per day.
I took two (comped) weeks off after that.
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seems pretty reasonable to me... I mean ideally there should never be a death march, but no process is perfect and no estimate is exact so it is almost inevitable, even in the best run places, but a hard limit on how long it lasts and good time based compensation after to let your employees recover before tossing them at the next hard project... it goes a long way.
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That sounds like total incompetence from the people responsible for managing the project. Either your deadlines were ridiculous to begin with, you didn't re-negotiate smarter deadlines and more money from the client like you should have, or your company wants to work you to death then quickly replace you with another zombie.
Any death march that lasts more than a few weeks is a red flag you are working at a terrible company and need to switch jobs.
The rest few years I worked, not one single product I was res
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Re: Lack of vacation is the big problem (Score:2)
"So you want to take our rights to negotiate pay?"
No, you can negotiate. The employer just shouldn't make an offer on the assumption ypu won't take leave that is guaranteed to you in labour legislation.
"We pay about 15% more than average with the expectation that you will be dependable rather than lazy and/or unavailable."
I am dependable, productive and available during office hours or any time on an on-call rotation, except when I take my planned leave.
At 15%, your employer is really over-paying, a
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citation?
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Who told you it was illegal to negotiate for your pay in countries outside of the US ?
It's simply not true. Or was it a 1st April and you didn't bothered to check both the source and the calendar ?
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The key lie that bosses at hellholes convince their employees is: It's like this everywhere.
It's just not true.
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You assume other places are better.
They are. I have worked for 7 companies in the Bay Area over the last 30 years, and I have always taken all my vacation and never been pressured otherwise. I got some emails, and a few phone calls about "critical" issues, but those took just a few minutes to resolve.
I currently get 4 weeks (20 work days) per year. I mostly take just a few days at a time spread over the year, and sometimes a week when my kids are out of school. The most I have taken in one block was two weeks for a trip to Europe.
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You assume other places are better.
Oh, there are better places than most. My last gig was a shithole boiler-room (a non-profit), full of hipster kids who didn't like the 'old man' (me) telling them that maybe they should think about maintainability and long-term stability in their code, and not just push for latest/greatest w/o even doing a POC first. I was informed by my (now-ex) boss that maybe I didn't fit in with the culture, and that maybe I should be like the cool kids lest I find myself unemployed.
I found a better position within a we
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Legally, at least in the US, if they deny you the opportunity to take your vacation they must pay it out in a use it or lose it system. Just some food for thought.
That is part of the reason for the current HR corporate trend of unlimited vacation [forbes.com]... Of course, just like unlimited data, unlimited vacation doesn't mean what you think it means, it means your manager has to agree. As part of this HR fad, my company made this transition to unlimited a many years ago. They dutifully bought off all of our unused vacation and initiated this "unlimited vacation" policy.
Since the company "wins" by not booking future liabilities, it's only fair that the employee gets an equi
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Legally, at least in the US, if they deny you the opportunity to take your vacation they must pay it out in a use it or lose it system.
This is incorrect. There is no such requirement.
Some individual states require compensation for forfeited vacation, but there is no federal requirement.
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I will soon get 2 days per month, plus 1 day of sick/family leave.
The sick leave never maxes out. The vacation maxes out at 2 years of accrual (48 days). Plus I get all the holidays.
I've never had any pushback when trying to use it, and the last couple of times I used it I made it a point to be mostly out of contact and not check emails.
I'm flexible about scheduling time off in advance, but if someone ever told me I couldn't use my vacation time to the point where I stopped accruing I'd send my employer a
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Re:Working people harder. (Score:4, Interesting)
And that poor unemployed slob who really wants to come back to work? Well, he "doesn't have the skills" .
For the two years (2009-10) I was out of work, hiring managers told me I was overqualified for minimum wage jobs and recruiters told me I was unemployable for anything else. I didn't listen to them. I got a weekend job for a moving company, working 20 hours per month for six months. The day after my Chapter Seven bankruptcy got finalized, I got a new fulltime job. I spent the next two years working seven days a week to rebuild my finances. As the economy got better, so did the jobs that got offered to me. Sometime you just have to hang in there until things get better.
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I hear this crap all the time about unemployed meaning unemployable but I have come back form being unemployed plenty of times, including a very long stint back after 9/11 fucked the economy for a while.
Maybe these people just don't have skills that are in sufficient demand, maybe they didn't keep their skills fresh... but acting like this is normal ignores the huge number of people who do manage to get hired off of the unemployment rolls