Over a Third of Americans Battle Job Burnout Every Single Week
studyfinds.org
studyfinds.org
an odd source, but OK.
I work remote from a place outside the US. Last thanksgiving my boss (from the US) was on Slack. So were... all but one of my US colleagues. I see them writing at all hours of the night. On a work trip it was more or less assumed I'd work from 9 AM (8:30 ish really if you count coffee before) until 10 PM. I'm not on pagerduty anymore but my daughter still sings Frere Jacque as "Something's broken Something's broken It's your fault!, It's your fault!" I spent half my life on pagerduty (so over half my life - waking and asleep, working in some sort of fashion).
It depends on the industry but there's too many people who are de facto actually at work every waking moment (and sleeping, if you count on-call).
Combine this with the nagging suspicion that none of this actually matters (See "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber) and burnout, detachment, etc. shouldn't be a surprise.
If "at work every waking moment" means "needs to be able to respond to emergencies", then this is actually the norm for everyone in the world until very recently. Anyone who doesn't have an employer is "at work every waking moment" by this definition. Peasants, housewives, aristocrats...
Given the nearly 100% rate of this for all of history, it seems weird to argue that the current -- much lower -- rate is too high.
My parent comment is not complaining about excessive labor time. He's complaining about being on call. Is it strange that people expect compensation for being on call? That depends on what you're willing to consider "compensation". No one is clocked in at an hourly rate while on call because the labor laws prohibit that, but that's an artifact. On-call positions are viewed as more undesirable than otherwise and pay compensation accordingly.
I’ve worked in a couple of places where this kept happening. First time I was junior enough to care and put up with it. Everyone understand: this is not normal. Unless you specifically signed up for pager duty sort of job, no one should put up with this.
I think that's the game at a lot of companies, to just prey on the young and hungry who probably don't know any better and are more likely to put up with bullshit like that.
But what if your company doesn't give the resources you need to make these more robust? Your team may be too small to do much other than run from one fire to another, or to apply a bandaid fix rather than taking the time to do things right from the start. It's also not uncommon to come in to a company inheriting an unholy mess of spaghetti code which no one at the company fully understands nor has the time to document, redesign, or fix.
In these cases emergencies tend to be a regular occurrence, and arguably of the company's own making, but the hands of the people who have to respond to them are effectively tied.
It's a totally different scenario.
Even in situations where there are lives at risk, medical systems, or power grid control, there are plenty of options for planning in advance, for redundancy, for employing people in different time zones. When a peasant has to respond to their house burning, they're motivated to put the candles out before going to bed. When a peasant has to respond to their email system being down, but they're not allowed to allocate more time or money to fix it, that's worse.
Pager duty can burn you out, but it really depends on how much you get paged and how many people are on rotation.
I had one boss who acted very concerned and would keep telling me not to work so late. But at the same time he wanted the same amount of work done, which meant working overtime. When I finally did stop working as much overtime, he was disappointed that I wasn't getting as much work done, and my reviews suffered.
Also, commuting time should be paid as work time. There are so many people with crazy commutes that don't get paid a dime for it. I seem to recall that some European country had in fact required companies to pay for their employees' commutes. The US should follow suit.
Yes, we need more discrimination against poor people who can’t afford to live near job centers.
Ulitmately, labour benefits the business, and surplus accrues to the business. Changing costs mean a shifting balance of inputs (labour, capital). But if your firm isn't profitable whilst paying a living and sustaining wage to its workers, then what exists isn't a profit-making enterprise, but a charity, on behalf of the owners, subsidised by the workers.
There's no law that says a non-viable business has a right to continue operations.
Also, how would you implement this in practice?
I can earn more, without working more, simply by living somewhere cheaper and sitting down in a comfortable car for longer? And I don't have to be an Uber driver dealing with the general public? And if I drive slower, I "earn" more? Sign me up!
(Preferably with a self-driving RV, where I can safely be in the back while it's moving, of course).
For example, yesterday I had a block of deep work scheduled for the afternoon but wasn't really feeling it. So I went on a long hike instead, came home, and worked from 6-9.
I'd need outrageous amounts of money (even for tech) to consider pager duty though, it sounds hellish.
I work for a startup in a customer facing role and if I'm not on the schedule I simply don't get called. The Jewish person is the primary contact on the days around Christmas and the non-Americans take Thanksgiving and the 4th of July (and the boring old Christmas-celebrating Americans cover the holidays that they want to take vacation around, everyone wins). I work 40hr/wk and up to two weekend nights per month (off hours production stuff). I used to work for BigCos and it was even easier, thanks to being global we had people everywhere and nobody ever needed to be woken up unless they were the owner of something broken in production.
Every previous job has been reasonable like this. No employer I have ever encountered expects more than 40hr unless it's specifically negotiated. I know of one person that works 60+hr weeks but he works in education and voluntarily leads an extracurricular he is very passionate about.
Of course my experience is anecdotal and I know there exist 60hr/week sweatshops but for white collar employees they don't seem to be the norm, at least in tech in my region.
But I can see why people would think I'm working extra hours if all they are looking at is my Slack availability. The connectivity of my devices !== whether or not I'm actually going to respond if you send me a message.
Figuring out how to disconnect from work and use the 8 hours of your day that aren't working or sleeping to pursue personal interests is important. The exact answer of how to do that differs between people. But it is a goal worth pursuing.
Health insurance. Fear of losing, or even changing what they have (sometimes accompanied with some very real and not just anxiety out-of-pocket costs running into the thousands of dollars).
Decoupling health insurance from employment is the #1 thing we could do to improve quality of our work. But in the long run, I dream of a day when wage labor is looked back on as nearly as terrible as chattel slavery.
edit: I am 100% serious about this. It is already economically viable, if society chooses to do it, to simply guarantee food, decent housing, and health care to everyone, whether they work or not. At that point, what we do with our time becomes a choice, more than the choice of "work or go homeless and starve". People could still choose to exchange their time and skills for money, and most would, I think. But the coercion of the current system, and the "safety net" holes in that coercion, would disappear.
I'm not talking about a beachfront mansion and a Ferrari in the driveway for everyone. I'm talking about not starving. Want to be more than the bare minimum? Then choose to work. Don't care? Then don't work - not that people who don't care are effective employees anyway.
You're really stupid.
Arguments about how expensive things are make no sense if we restructure our society where money is only half the equation. The labor required to provide food, health, and housing is incredibly small compared to the overall economy.
People want to be useful, and people want more than just a place to live and food to eat.
The real danger would be in creating a system that stifles the free market side of the economy and leaves people stuck in basic assistance hell with no way of working to improve their lives. Worrying about the costs of providing basic assistance to all is actually the least important bit.
Consider your examples. Who would grow the food? Farmers. Because people would grow food anyway (and do), whether or not they get paid, because it's intrinsically rewarding. Building houses? Jimmy Carter is rich and 90-odd years old and builds houses. Med school? Maybe people want to be doctors?
The jobs that are at risk in this model are the jobs that have no intrinsic value to the individual other than the paycheck.
Same issue with building houses. The number of people wanting to perform unskilled labor would not come close to approaching the required need for unskilled laborers. For example I dont think anyone wants to be a roofer in the summer heat, the do it only for the paycheck.
Doctors? You are probably right, people will do it for the love of the work. I am very much pro UBI but there are still a ton of supporting things that need to be worked out.
You wind up in a world where freedom vs slavery is a distinction without a difference.
I’d wager the marginal returns from moving beyond feeding yourself for free to feeding a nation are slim, to none, and very likely negative.
I think it'd be nice to have the option to not work, because then people could take risks and pursue things they otherwise couldn't... I'd never try to take a risk right now because my family is dependent on my passionless job. However if we could take a lifestyle hit (but still survive) and I could try out some business ideas or other career options that I've been thinking about maybe society as a whole could be better off.
I can't say I've thought this through entirely, but it's certainly an idea that intrigues me.
"I'd never try to take a risk right now because my family is dependent on my passionless job" - hello me.
Work is an important value. Whatever economic viability the U.S. has to experiment with weird social ideas, it's because of generations of people who believed in work as a moral imperative.
All art adds to our social wealth?
Like anything else, some art does, lots probably doesn't. And how do we decide what is bringing us value? Which art should be promoted and which is just a scam, a big pile of poop put in a mason jar?
We circle right back to capitalism. Giving the populace a mechanism to vote for what has value and what doesn't. Money. Attention. Time. Esteem. Fame.
Something that adds value. That isn't a commodity. That would be hard to copy.
Innovation's biproduct is profit.
Really, the vast majority of profit is from non-innovative friction.
For instance, in order to fund CalPers, we need a lot of people to do productive work. That's on a multi-decade timer.
We have a couple of problems - a lot of the things we need most (dedicated time from doctors, teachers, etc.) are affected by Baumol's cost disease and in other categories, like housing, we have legally mandated shortages (it's illegal to create enough homes near transit, amenities, and jobs) so we will, by definition, never have enough.
Who would lobby for changing that balance and who would finance the campaigns of politicians that support such a reform?
IMO getting rid of the tax subsidy for employer sponsored insurance, enforcing anti-trust law on health providers (insurance, hospitals, etc.) by forcing them to disclose prices and getting rid of onerous licensing regulations will achieve the intended decoupling between health insurance and employment.
However, you need to pass laws for all that.
This is a great reminder of the root issues we need to deal with.
https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_...
Money in politics flows to candidates who already agree with those who control the money. It doesn't go to change the minds of those who disagree.
Obamacare has twisted some of the incentives of actually working, though. Many of us in groups like /r/financialindependence have calculated that it is now to our advantage to eventually quit work altogether, structure our investments and distributions to ensure we are right below the line where subsidies (from those who continue to work) will pay our way, while we just exit the game itself.
It will do nothing but screw those who continue to work themselves ragged as they are now subsidizing many people, like my possible future self, who have many dollars hoarded away, but refuse to be forced to work for everyone else any longer without the extra renumeration that is now sucked out by the government. And this is one of the problems with socialism.
If things move to a single payer social system under a Warren or Sanders presidency, I'd probably quit my job tomorrow. Those who continue to play the game will be working more and more for less and less.
Not necessarily to be expected, part of the goal of access to healthcare for all is that people can get treatment sooner, before problems get so bad, and get healthier, sooner. Over time if that was effective, medical costs would trend down. America doesn't seem to do that, paying more for the same treatment than other countries, but high healthcare costs are not caused by workers paying them.
But let's say that is expected, healthy people are now paying more to cover the needy. It's a kind of forced charity, and there are good reasons for personally disliking being forced to cover others expenses, sure.
But then your answer to this is to quit your job, and live off your investments? "Making your money work for you" is a polite way of saying "live off the work of others". The dividends and investment growth in that lifestyle come directly from the work done by the still-employed. Your future dream life will send you in the direction of being a shareholder squeezing and extract maximum money from the still-employed, because your survival depends on their work. In a world where everyone saved for financial independence and the pool of workers was ever shrinking, your income would dry up, so the incentives will be upon you to stop the still-employed from doing do what you did - pulling up the ladder after you.
That is, while it won't be outright legislated in a single bill in plain terms like Obamacare was, you will be all-but mandating that other people work to keep you alive, or supporting systems and legislation which has that effect. The very thing you are complaining about, being forced to help others, in your opening paragraph, will still be a system you take part in and support. You're saying "if I am compelled to pay for others, that's evil Socialism" and "if others are working themselves ragged supporting me that's great, self-interest individualism at its best".
screw those who continue to work themselves ragged as they are now subsidizing many people, like my possible future self, [..] while we just exit the game itself.
You aren't exiting the game. You can never exit. The moral answer is to not be the leech you think is so deplorable, and keep working to keep yourself alive. When you can survive on your savings without growth beyond inflation, without dividends, and with spending the principle, then maybe retire. If everyone pitches in, with more people working, there won't need to be screwed over employees working themselves ragged. That ought to benefit society collectively, which will benefit you in roundabout ways.
(This is also why UBI won't ever get off the ground; voters aren't stupid. All that money has got to come from somewhere.)
Replacing a system designed to extract as much as possible from people needing medical help in order to enrich corporations with a system optimized for cost and efficiency.
Insurance is already based on paying for other people’s expenses except that it’s optimized for the profit of the ones running the scheme.
So how do we pay for Medicare for all?
We take 80% of the money, return it to the payers, and pay with the rest, in the form of taxes.
I wouldn’t mind a slight increase in taxes in exchange of knowing that I and nobody else has to ever be afraid to go to the doctor because they can’t afford it.
Ambulance rides don’t need to cost $3000, or a night at the hospital $1000.
Once we have one huge entity to negotiate pricing for everyone (about the only thing insurance companies have going on for them), we won’t have to be paying 10x to 100x what the services cost to provide.
Or should we continue sacrificing human lives and health to the altar of quarterly profits for a handful of people?
Healthcare is a solved problem in all first world countries. Trying to spin it into something else is insulting.
People are not stupid and propaganda has its limits.
How do you know this though?
but also, it takes a long time to find another position.
Then, I get so sick of going to 6-hour interviews where you go with each member of the team one-on-one. Then wait weeks, get a call back to come in again... Take more time off the current job, lie to your boss again... Spend an hour each time figuring out how to get there and park, and find your way around the completely unmarked campus... Then half the people apologize that they forgot you were coming. Study before hand, writing cover letters, tweaking the resume for each job... I get sick of answering the same questions over and over, when we could have just had a group interview and gotten it over with.
And if you're quitting because you're stressed and burnt out, last thing you want is another thing on your plate to be stressed and burnt out about.
This time off was truly a magical time for me, and even though I had to do a ton of work around the house and with the baby, I felt a sense of purpose. I started to feel like a real person again.
I came back to work and I made some huge gains for the company for a short period of time... my creativity was back, my motivation was back. The things I did after paternity leave paid off a huge amount and had ripple effects of increased productivity for the entire company.
Then, I burned out again. Now I'm just a zombie who occasionally writes code and counts down the hours until I can go home. It's obvious to me that I just need some extended time to myself, but that doesn't fly in America. I think my employer would rather me be a zombie than to just have some time off to recharge.
And you probably don't think you can even ask your employer about this: what would it say about your devotion as an employee?
I wonder how much of that is in our own minds, though - my boss is a pretty cool Chinese guy, and I tell him I need time off to deal with something, he says no problem, let me know when you’re back. But I still feel like I’m being silently judged - not just by him, but by everybody.
Does "everybody" include you, too, by the way? Are you actually just judging yourself for taking time off, and assuming everyone else is?
Do you judge others for taking time off too?
I don't have an agenda here, really, except the point out that this being "in our own minds" is not that different from "assumptions that come from our culture"...
The company HQ was in a college town where there was no comparable employer for developers, but our satellite office was in a bigger city. Startups here starting offering 4 weeks vacation as a sign-on enticement. My coworker came back to management with this counter-offer and was told go to Hell. So he took the other offer and left.
One by one, EVERY developer in our satellite office got the same offer, came to our management to ask if they'd match or at least increase the amount of vacation, and all got told to piss off. One by one we watched ALL of our development staff (at the satellite office) leave and not get replaced (interviewees ended up going to the startups offering more leave).
Management (at corporate HQ) demonstrated they would rather ride that sinking ship to the sea bottom than budge on not giving more vacation.
Why?
Because there was a vesting schedule for earning leave, 10 days/yr first 6 years, 15 days/yr 6-12 years, 20 days/yr after 12 years. If they let recent hires jump right to 20 days/yr that's manager compensation territory AND it would invalidate the years those with 11 had been waiting.
(You might think the silver lining is all the new companies without similar hangups employing the programmers who left; unfortunately AFAIK all of those startups folded in the couple years since then.)
And once you have been in that machine for a while taking a little time off feels scary and unfamiliar.
I’m not sure if you’re in the US, or if you’re including paid holidays, but 15 days is the average number of vacation days for people with 25 years of tenure in full time jobs in the US. Most people with less tenure get much less.
So that wouldn’t be an “only” in the US.
I don’t really know if I find anything disagreeable in it tbh. Vacation can be nice but it’s necessity is a function of your baseline work life balance... and work life balance tends to be harder the worse your job is. An interesting paradox in that the people who probably need it most are the least entitled to it per societal norms.
That table is 23 years out of date, and it was only for employees at "small private establishments", which generally means <100 employees in BLS terminology. They generally provide less vacation time than the overall average of employers.
---------
As of 2017, the average in the US is around 15 days after 5 years, 17 days after 10 years, and 20 days after 20 years.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/private-industry-workers-r...
Approximately 90% of full time workers have paid holiday and vacation in some form.
https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/benefits/2017/ownership/private/...
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Also, to note the obvious: The norms for your average HN reader in terms of benefits are likely to be different (better) from the average person in society. I would consider 15 days to be an "only" in the part of the job market I am in.
So it seems to me that there are a lot of confounding factors here. Do we actually know what causes GDP/hour to go up and down? It doesn't seem directly related to vacation time.
It seems to me more like the Wikipedia article you linked to is saying "countries that give a lot of vacation to all citizens can still have a high GDP per hour worked" and we don't understand what other confounding factors can contribute to GDP/hour
Better than the 10 days I've been getting for the past 3 years.
I wonder if a couple generations ago people felt just as burnt out. It seems like this generation is the most burnt out but who knows. With everyone connected all the time, I doubt people are getting proper rest between work. If you’re answering emails over lunch, you’re still working and not resting your eyes/brain.
There is a movement[0][1] towards shorter workweeks which I’m really interested in and, shameless plug[2], I run a site on this topic as well. There is real movement right now towards a 4 day work week in Western society especially in the UK.
[0] https://www.4dayweekus.org/
Easily one of my better decisions.
Worth the 20% cut in pay. For someone with few responsibilities and no expensive hobbies, that is.
Harder to quantify is the time your brain gets off to dream up creative solutions.
1. Work was much more compartmentalized 30 years ago. People may have worked long hours, but for the most part, when they were "done" for the day, they were done (obviously there were exceptions, like people on call). Now, though, there is always email and texts and Slack, so it's more difficult to fully decompress from work.
2. The nature of big business has drastically changed. First, many more people are in service jobs, and I'd argue that actually building something concrete has a higher immediate payoff for most folks. Also, as jobs have gotten more efficient and segmented, most people are more removed from decision making and a tangible feeling of how their effort goes into producing a valuable product.
3. The increasing inequality in America means there is more fear of falling behind, and jobs themselves are more tenuous, so there is more stress to work harder lest you fall out of a middle/upper-middle class.
There's a reason all my vacations are mysteriously vague camping trips to places with terrible reception.
I'm a pro-family, pro-entrepreneur (UBI! Healthcare for all!) dirty socialist, I guess :-)
I would love to take around a month every year just to focus on a purely technical problem instead of focussing 20% of my time in technical stuff, and 80% of my time going through bureaucratic hoops that seemingly have no reason to exist outside of creating a job for the bureaucrats.
I have an OK job overall, but there's just a metric ton of approvals and paperwork that I end up having to do to actually write code, and as a result I get burnt out fairly often.
I think the issue, in American culture, is bigger than just employers and career choices. My wife and I discuss this subject often. The problem is that we are a two career couple who are raising a child in a culture that hasn't, and may never, adapt to not having one parent at home. Our society isn't setup for it. Vital services, like healthcare or simply furnace maintenance before Winter, require a person home from 9am-5pm. Doing so requires either working remotely or a promise to make up the time when you get back to the office.
I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe working remotely will help. Maybe we need to postpone careers until kids are raised like my parents' generation did. (My wife is far better suited to a career. I would gladly volunteer to be at home if we didn't need both pays.)
there is a lot of research these days about autoimmune diseases and how they are triggered by stress, but retina blisters is something I never heard about before.
There's a good reason why people fought for a 40 hour work week. Life is not just about work; you need to relax too.
I refuse to work more than 32 hours a week, and that's working out very well for me. I have time for my hobbies, my kids, my friends and family, and I have time to just do nothing at all on occasion. And the hours I do work are very productive as a result. Admittedly my current project is so interesting that I often work a bit more than 32 hours, but it's because I want to, not because I have to.
You might as well say "Please win the lottery".
Seriously though, please tell me you're not so out of touch with reality that you actually believe the sentence you wrote is meaningful advice. People can't just snap their fingers and create a better job out of thin air.
For a few, not for the majority.
It's possible, but as a more "average" level developer, it's pretty difficult to actually get hired at one of those companies.
A normal, sane job is not as rare as winning the lottery. Entire countries have people working very normal, sane hours. Americans need to stop tolerating these ridiculously long hours. Do 8 hours of good work for 5 days a week, then relax, sleep well, so you start your next day well-rested and ready to deliver another 8 hours of good work. This is a sane balance. Working more than you rest is not. Sacrificing your health and your life for your employer is idiocy.
What would you suggest they do, work less so they can be homeless, starving and uninsured?
You really need to open your eyes and see the world outside your little bubble.
Hardly anyone is sacrificing their health and lives for an employer. They are doing it for the money and hopefully insurance.
I'm not a dev, I'm closer to a BI Analyst if anything. What I do is the epitome of bullshit jobs. The company would be wildly profitable if I just stopped showing up. Yet my reviews and feedback are always glowing even if I do 1 'thing' a week, and yeah 6 months down the line some finding I put into motion results in some marginal change somewhere. It's hard to feel the motivation to do more when the output feels irrelevant.
I'd leave, but it'd be hard to match the benefits, salary, and work/life balance in my region. I know I need to change though because my skills are atrophying due to the ennui.
You guys have this concept of 'vacation' which well, isn't.
15 days or whatever per year pretty much all just must either get banked for emergencies, admin, or maybe that one Mega Holiday where you fly across the world and spend a week or whatever trying to forget your life.
I don't get it at all. It might make sense if you're a founder or whatever and you love your job. Most people are working to live, but there is no "live", because there's no time that isn't work.
I'd rather be homeless. Can I choose to be homeless in Europe instead tho? ;)
However, none of that can be usurped by your employer for other things than vacation. For example, your employer isn't allowed to deduct pay or withhold vacation hours for doctor's visits during work hours. Major life events, like funerals or child births are paid leave. And for most professions, there's no such things as unpaid overtime: you work more hours, you either get more pay or receive more vacation hours.
"Almost all workers are legally entitled to 5.6 weeks’ paid holiday a year (known as statutory leave entitlement or annual leave)."
So 28 days.
Personally I've usually had about 25 days + bank holidays in contracts as standard (i.e. before negotiation), so 33 days in total.
The main distinction though is that because we don't have this 'health insurance tied to work' thing going on, it's at least theoretically possible for a median wage earner who hasn't loaded themselves up with debt to take a decent amount of time off by just leaving their job. Whether they actually do it doesn't matter - there's at least the mental release valve of knowing you can quit.
In the US it sounds like you could get away with that as a healthy 20 year old otherwise you'd be playing the lottery.
Seriously, screw scrum and 'agile'
"Sprint Retrospective" -> "How much did we screw up from overextending so much"
In practice, there is.
“External factors demand we implement feature X by that date”
“Let’s just hire more people, preferably more PMs”
“We have many more ideas in our pipeline. In order to orchestrate these, we need precise estimations.”
This, in short, is the core of value that Scrum adds to the ideas of Agile.
The only problem is that people insist on misunderstanding these simple ideas and try to do Scrum as wrong as possible. The problem isn't Scrum, the problem is people insisting on doing it wrong.
The problem here is toxic corporate culture. Scrum and Agile are not magic spells that miraculously turn idiots into reasonable people. Sure, they could be used as levers to change that culture, but the culture absolutely needs to change, otherwise it's not going to work.
And that's something you can throw in their face: that they're not taking Scrum and Agile development seriously. If they say they want Scrum and Agile, then make sure you understand what they really mean, and hammer on it every time they trample on the autonomy of the developers. Every time they ask why things aren't done, tell them management is interfering with the process.
I'm just fed up with this Agilescrum thing. My present RnD workplace have been transitioning to it in the last years and it's really bad. The prior V-iteration process was good enough. We are mostly just making up estimates and report time accordingly to make the burndown chart look good.
Except in the minds of absolutely every single person who applies them to anything.
Just start pointing this out to people every time this comes up. It's not an exact time estimate, it's an abstract complexity estimate. Insist that the idiots get some actual training in Agile before they start corrupting it beyond recognition. If they want Agile, then they should invest in training people for it, and in spreading the culture that goes along with it. Because Agile is perhaps more about culture than about process.
Only then do you have the information to make a halfway reliable estimate. Without that, it's just going to be guess work.
Sure, but the problem is that, aside from one job, I've never seen any organization that actually does that. Instead, agile/scrum is used as a micromanagement tool and developers get hammered if they don't close their Jira tickets in a timely fashion. It's an total perversion of what agile was intended to be.
But despite all of this, the release deadline does not change and the developers always end up working insane hours fixing last minute bugs discovered by QA days / hours before release.
Although this could just be an issue with where I work as opposed to scrum / agile. :)
It seems a lot of companies are cargo-culting scrum.
I’m trying to say your team isn’t agile, it’s using a cookie cutter process template most likely. Print out the agile manifesto and tape it to the cofee machine.
If your concerns are being overridden by management, your process is neither Agile nor Scrum.
Scrum are agile are extremely effective at fostering micromanagement and overworking and burning out developers.
It's almost always pushed by management, consultants, PMs rather than the ones that have to carry the weight.
"You are doing it wrong, we are here to help" is an old trick.
Well, I know what you’re trying to say, and technically, you’re correct - if any shred of the agile manifesto were observed, you would be actually correct, too - but “agile as practiced by everybody who practices it” is, for all intents and purposes, “agile and scrum” now, so we may as well stop pretending it’s in any way related to what it was supposed to be. Once the phrase “agile” got some mindshare, it was bastardized and twisted into the unholy abomination that we suffer today: that is, the exact same thing that came before it. If somebody were to come along and put together a perfect, workable, realistic, livable, maintainable, achievable software development methodology - say, the “pwrlma” method - it would be twisted back into what “agile and scrum” are today by the same people who can only reason by analogy. Software will always be managed as if it were a building construction effort and programmers will always be treated as slightly more educated bricklayers.
Real Agile is out there, and is being practices very effectively, but you've got to take it and apply it, and not let poor managers corrupt it. And there are many companies that do not have this toxic culture. Or start your own; software developers are in a better position to start their own business than most other professions.
>inb4 “you’re doing it wrong” If so many people get it wrong, I see it a problem inherent to scrum, not its various implementations.
yeah, agile is not fun.
I think a lot of people think they are unable to say "no" nor "pushback." In my experience, saying no actually gets you more respect than saying yes.
There's a more direct link here, though still nothing on methods or sampling:
http://web.archive.org/web/20191103070123/https://tollfreefo...
And I can’t imagine being an exception.
On the other hand, this doesn't really surprise me.