Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
- 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.
- The business has to prove it can run with just the necessary amount of staff for operations and customer support. (These staff generally work with their managers to take an equal amount of time off.)
Personally I use that week in summer to disconnect from work and do something theraputic for myself- go for a 7+ day motorcycle ride, preferably through places where internet connections are poor.
I've also worked at places that didn't pay out accrued time when you left.
Their contract basically states:
1. PTO can't be paid out at the end of employment
2. PTO can't be used to quit the job
3. PTO can't be used _the entire last month_ of your employment with them
Which is nuts
By which I mean real time. Like a month or more.
EDIT: Might be less. I forgot to count some other holidays.
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.
I met a few people during such events, which is more or less what you say: you are with people from the company (not necessarily teammates, we did it as a team only once) and you might be helping public parks clean, or take trash from canal on a canoe, or sort food in a food shelter. It's a nice way to take a break, meet people from other areas, feel good about something you do, and managers have been very supportive of that, and they do it too.
I think that is a good balance of what you are talking about
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?
I also generally get to decide the activities on vacation. Many things the company might fund that are fun for some people, like skiing, aren't activities that I'm interested in but would be obligated to participate in.
What you described is a work retreat, not a vacation. I have been on such a trip. It was good for work relationships. It definitely wasn't a vacation.
Would you mind sharing the details of what you did during the trip?
There are some really great hobby slack channels that I personally check on vacation. Can be hard to ignore the random work questions while doing that.
Once another team investigating an outage tried to contact me on vacation... I sent them a photo of my bike in an empty field in the mountains of Oregon and said "Sorry, bad internet out here!"
Also, this is incredible Marketing for Bumble, as many people are going to share this in Slack channels in an effort to get their companies to do the same.
I think you do things like talking to people afterwards and see if they think it was a good idea, looking at attrition rates and try and guess if it moved them, looking at whatever productivity metrics you have, and at the end you probably have a gut feeling on whether or not it was a good idea... That's probably the best that you get.
Maybe I really like working during the summer but have lots of family stuff in the fall. Seems a bit inefficient for this to be so long but I'm all for experimentation.
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Metrics should drive intuition, not the other way around. We don’t use the scientific method here.
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% happier” if you also measured a similar bump in the summer break. (Obviously numbers made up for the sake of example.)
1. Know how they feel
2. Can translate that into numbers accurately.
After many papers and lots of clinical trials, it's widely accepted in the scientific community that the answers to both of your questions are "yes". E.g. see this FDA paper[1].
Of course, it's possible to design your questionnaire badly and there's an art to this, so it's right to be skeptical/cautious about putting this into practice. But you seem to be getting at a more fundamental epistemic question about whether the approach is possible even in principle, which has been thoroughly investigated.
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.
The way my company does this is they ask a lot of questions and then mostly look at aggregates. E.g. they might ask 6 questions about "how do you feel about the size of your workload", "do you feel you have time to do the important things in your life", "are you satisfied with the amount of vacation you take", "do you feel stressed", ... and then roll those into a single "work life balance" metric (questions and specific metric entirely made up).
And actually we outsource to a survey company that does that for us, which apart from outsourcing the non-core competency, means that there is a reasonably neutral party deciding how to aggregate things (I think, I'm not involved in the survey design).
[1] Therefore this is better than perfect?
Agreed and ppl sharing stuff of slack channels are their target customers too.
Nothing like coming back to the office after a week off and you're already back up to your eyeballs in work, the moment you step back into the office.
I'd advise everyone to try take as much time off as possible this year. If it's available to you, take an extended break. The mental, physical and psychological damage of covid is something we really can't ignore.
Those of you who have found the slightly over a year duration of the pandemic difficult have gotten a sample of how miserable pre-pandemic life was for those of us who are more introverted or misanthropic.
But things can change awfully fast even if it seems hopeless, don't give up. The potentially partners you'll meet at this age tend to be more mature on average (generalizing of course!), and I think have a much more healthy perspective on life than the people I often met dating in my 20s. Keep in mind that dating is a numbers game, and like any numbers game, you increase your chances of success the more you play. You need to meet as many people as possible and have fewer expectations--the worse that happens is it doesn't work out and you move on. The hardest part is getting over the fear of rejection, but it can be done, even for the shy.
If it's more the isolation in general that's getting to you rather than no partner, I think if you look around you'll find clubs or groups you can hang around potentially--again you need to get yourself out of your comfort zone and just go join those things. If you're into gaming, feel free to message me (or chat about IT stuff or whatnot--Moonshine#3246 is my Discord).
Covid has been really hard on a lot of people for various reasons, but you're definitely not alone and I'm sure there are plenty of people also looking for more social interaction right now. Just need to find 'em.
I'm about to turn 32 and I'm a bit confused about the whole "last couple of years of being able to meet someone".
I know people who met and got married in their 40s...
Edit: go easy on yourself pal. We've all got enough to deal with in the world without beating ourselves up over imaginary deadlines.
Edit2: also, a lot of marriages are not happy. Imagine having to live in one of them during a pandemic. Usually made me feel better about being single!
Also 35 is the point where medicine considers a pregnancy to be 'geriatric'. And some people are going through menopause by 40! You don't have an infinite amount of time in life no matter how positive your outlook!
While online dating was indeed a bit of a nightmare, dating older women in general was a net positive for me.
I liked people who have lived life a bit, made mistakes, hopefully learned from them, are past the point of obsession about body type, and are more focused on character and how to treat/be treated properly.
People do learn and grow as they age, and most of us become better people.
Which is a dated term that isn't used frequently. Yes the risks for certain things increase after 35 but pregnancy after 35 or 40+ is healthy and common.
> some people are going through menopause by 40!
The average age of Menopause is 51, before 40 is considered "premature menopause".
https://www.webmd.com/menopause/guide/premature-menopause-sy...
It all depends on what you're looking for I guess. Certainly you can get married in your 40s. But at that point having a single child, let alone a few, becomes a monumental task. It's not an imaginary deadline. Fertility falls off a cliff at 35 [0].
Even ignoring the fact that fertility treatments exist...
1 in 4 healthy women in their 20s and 30s will get pregnant in any single menstrual cycle. (The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, 2018)
1 in 10 healthy women in their 40s will get pregnant in any single menstrual cycle. (The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, 2018)
hardly monumental
Once more, the number of chromosomal abnormalities skyrockets after 30 and by 40 around three quarters of eggs (or more, for an individual) will have serious abnormalities.
Even if only a small fraction of women would struggle at 35, but could have gotten pregnant at 25 - for her it's a tragedy. And she is not helped by these messages that 'no worries it's easy to get pregnant at 40'
Regarding your anecdote I do not see its relevance to a discussion of population statistics. People can be infertile because they were paralyzed in a car accident but that doesn’t mean the original claim wasn’t overstated and now walked back.
Regardless, I think narrowing in this specifically on reproductive biology of women in the context of who you date and how you think about relationships is a recipe for failure. Not only does it have somewhat creepy bio-essentialist connotations, but socioeconomic factors and healthcare access also have huge impacts on the health and success of any given pregnancy and childhood/life.
In short, "I have to date right now because I'm 30 and my hypothetical childbearing vessels are becoming less optimal" is an unhealthy and probably incorrect attitude.
2) "1 in 10 healthy women in their 40s will get pregnant in any single menstrual cycle". I.e. there is a 90% chance that a woman over 40 will have at least some difficulty getting pregnant. Likely more than that if their partner is similar in age because male fertility declines with age as well.
3) Getting pregnant is only the first step. Miscarriage rates also increase with age.
That is not what it means. It is unlikely at any age to get pregnant in one menstrual cycle.
"Each month, the average 30-year-old woman has about a 20% chance of getting pregnant. A 40-year-old only has a 5% chance of getting pregnant each month."
https://www.verywellfamily.com/what-are-the-chances-of-getti...
Edit: Wanted to add, though, that _dating_ in your 30s and 40s just gets better and better. Don't worry about that. Maturity is a bonus, not a drawback.
It's an incredible blessing to have been locked-in and had 24/7 support from someone I love and I wish you had it too.
Sorry you had to face this alone.
Being alone sucks and an internet friend won't fix that, but maybe it can help :)
You still have plenty of time - even to meet someone and have kids. Just focus on getting yourself into a good state - gym, hygiene, activities/hobbies where you can meet people. The rest will come.
What?
I'm 33, only a few months into my current relationship, and I have to say that dating is so much better at this age than it ever was.
You can get lucky. There are certainly unicorns out there. Or you can date younger, if you're ok with that. But by and large, women and men work on different timelines. And you don't realize this as a man until it hits. The vast majority of women are out of the dating pool by 30. And by this age, you've both ossified into separate individuals with rigid expectations and assumptions about life, which makes the flexibility needed to build a real lasting connection infinitely harder.
Aim to hit 80 and still shake your head at the person you were when you was 70 ;-)
Here’s one of my favorite quotes that feels relevant:
“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played”
You can find love at any age.
Only a tiny proportion of the adult population in most western countries is single, and asymmetries in the dating pool induced by modern modes of meeting people (ie: apps) have radically upended traditional ideals about coupling and compatibility. Respectfully, if you met your partner 16 years ago (congrats by the way!), that might as well be a completely different world than the one we live in now. I sympathise with the GP's expression of urgency.
That was a good laugh. I think in retrospect spending my 20s in San Francisco had a lot to do with now being single in my 30s.
Where to begin?
The tech industry is massively skewed towards male, so right off the bat your odds of meeting someone in your work life is near nil. Then, with the complete lack of affordable housing, there's no such thing as just being a single 20-something living independently and supporting yourself on a non-tech salary. Bare minimum subsistence income is about $80k. So that filters out the vast majority of women who are in non-tech careers and simply cannot afford to move there.
At that point you're basically left with the lucky few locals who have parents that bought houses in the 80s/90s and live with them rent free, or the unicorn types who make enough to live in SF independently.
From that vanishingly small pool of women, you're now competing with the guys who made startup money or have the $300k+ FAANG gigs and can afford luxury vacations, nice condos, BMWs, etc.
An average dude doesn't stand a chance.
I’m turning 31 in a couple months and am coming out of a 5 year relationship. It’s looking grim AF. My only real hope is that I get back with my ex eventually.
I did the fancy vacations. I have the high income (~400k). I have a reasonably high net worth for my age (~2M). Even have the BMW! Didn’t stop her from walking away because she didn’t wanna date just a miserable workaholic techie anymore!!
Honestly, the best candidates that I think many women are aiming for aren’t the tech guys. It’s the guys with rich families. They’re the ones I see not really having any issues because they don’t really need to have any kind of shit job. They got parental money after all.
SF is like another planet. Unless you're exceptionally ugly or have an incredibly bad personality, you wouldn't have problem dating anywhere else on entire Earth.
I'm 33, living in Eastern Europe, and have nothing special in terms of looks (probably solid 6, but you can just google my username) or money (certainly nothing even close to SF tech salaries). And yet, when I re-activate my profile on Tinder, I get first 100 likes in a first day or two.
E.g. you could buy a farm in the midwest and hire laborers, marry a local, and live life with the salt of the earth.
This is the real issue, not the dating pool.
The obvious evidence against the dating pool is that a fairly large number of divorced people I know getting into serious relationships and married again fairly quickly regardless of their age when the divorce happens.
All of the unhappy single people I know (and there are some happy ones that don't mind) share the same paradoxical thinking: I'm unhappy with how my life is, and I want to be in a close relationship with someone, but am absolutely unwilling to change anything major (sometimes even minor) about who I am, what I believe or how I live.
It seems obvious, but if you are unwilling to change anything about your life, then the only changes you experience are going to be those that are thrust upon you, such as the pandemic.
There was no way to type that out without sounding gross.
The proposition for women in their 30s is worse, even if it is easier to find a date. That biological clock is ticking and most men don’t want to date someone older than them.
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.
I had not yet learned that at the point where there is an argument, both people have already lost.
Sounds like well-earned confidence with a bit self-possessiveness . But on the whole that's not unusual or something that should be frowned upon.
>>I had not yet learned that at the point where there is an argument, both people have already lost.
I used to think like that and all that resulted was having my concerns paid lip service to if not outright dismissed, being blamed when something didn't go someone's way despite not being given clear instruction, being guilted into keeping the peace at the expense of my sense of self, etc. Being useful meant becoming easy to take for granted. Anything less was regarded as "not doing my best", "defiance", "rebellion", and "causing trouble". Polite logical debate and asking the hard questions (when I eventually got to that stage) were met with evasion and scorn in addition to rampant hypocrisy and double standards. At the end of it all, arguing was the only way to truly know where I stand in the world and on what terms or, at the very least, led me to learn how to salvage myself and cut my losses (too late in my opinion, but better late than never). If I had been more willing to be upfront with my disregard for certain ideas, more willing to leverage "No" or "I don't care" without fear of reprisal (real or perceived), then I probably would have been in a better position to know in advance which arguments are worth it and which ones would be pointless time wasters. But I know first-hand that if you don't make yourself or your desired way of life a priority to be defended by whatever means you can muster, no one will. And you will suffer for it.
A five year gap is nothing by the time you're in your thirties.
What some of you people are describing sound more like autism or some kinds of personality disorders. That's very different from introversion--- which roughly half of the population could be categorized as.
I certainly don't miss working from the office, but I miss the variety of downtime. A camel doesn't often need water, but they still need it.
I need a vacation.
I believe for many people, this is more because "everyone else does it" and the general "miserable office atmosphere" in our industry. I'm not accusing the OP of anything by the way.
I would have said that I was in the group of "you've said hello, that's enough social contact for one day", yet after 15 months, at least according to friends and family, I'm more friendly, more sociable, and more outgoing.
I think really for a lot of people that are enjoying WFH for the last 15 months, what they're really enjoying, myself included is not sitting 2 feet from someone who is not family, that talks, fidgets, coughs, sniffs, slurps, and eats food at their desk 3 times a day, and being in an open plan office with 10-100 other people.
But now it’s back on again, frankly, that feeling is coming back. It was nice while it lasted, but that’s clearly not sustainable for anyone.
I'm dreading going to back to the office if I'm honest.
I enjoy isolation, I love the intensity of coding that I can get done. I'm generally more introverted.
That doesn't make the pandemic fun and rainbows. It's still been psychologically the most difficult time for me because I live in NYC. Walking the dog twice a day on ghost streets empty of any pedestrians, devoid of the hum of traffic and hearing nothing but the wails of every ambulance in the area for the better part of a month was deeply disturbing in a way I still haven't come to terms with.
Rubbing down the door knob with bleach. Double masking and surgical gloving when going to the bodega on the block for fruit. A real and valid fear of death and maiming for multiple months isn't something you just bounce back from.
So yes: It's a subjective statement. However it's not like just being an introvert made the pandemic a walk in the park. Don't mistake your experience as speaking for all introverts.
This article [1] implies the chance of catching COVID-19 from contact surfaces is 1 in 10,000 *at best* under lab conditions, and negligible at best. You're more likely to be struck by lightning or hit by a car.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...
The same daycare that 2 weeks ago had an outbreak of noro or rotavirus which caused entire classes of toddlers to be infected and go home and vomit for a day and was spread to siblings and parents at home.
But they are still sanitizing pens. People’s risk profiles are crazy, and there is an insane amount of cover your ass for PR purposes.
This advisory wasn't even available in March or April of 2020: there was nothing. The URL has only existed since April of 2021.
Definitely subjective though. I'd say I'm an introvert, and I've made it through ok, but it still very much feels like I lost a year of my life. It's really not been too different from being in prison in the country where I live.
I will miss that. I liked not being told that I look angry or that I should smile sometimes.
I was even stopped by a random stranger in a supermarket once and they asked if I was OK... I said I was fine, and then she asked if it had been a long day... erm. Guess it's just my face.
I remember in the supermarket I was actually just thinking about if a man could beat a giraffe in a fight.
Humans probably have more stamina, if you can drag out the fight.
I think it's hilarious that HN needs such a disclaimer.
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."
On the other hand, it gives me a chance to step back and develop some real empathy for everyone else. I recognize that I am blessed, and most people aren't wired like me, and the isolation has been really tough for them. When I interact with people over videoconference, I have to remind myself that this person might very well be suffering to the point of a mental breakdown from all this, and I need to communicate with care and thoughtfulness.
This is what I hope everybody else can come out of the pandemic with: empathy, particularly for people like you and me who have thrived during the pandemic. Unfortunately, I fear you are an exception and people will push to make things just how they were before, as evinced by your email. On the bright side, I think it will at least get a little easier to find remote jobs, etc moving forward.
But what stopped you from distancing from people and using self-checkouts before the pandemic? If you hate people, fine, just go home straight after work, you aren't obligated to hang out with anyone. It is not like the government would fine you for coming home before 11pm, right?
This was not uniformly accepted behaviour. Yes, some people could find roles and a situation where this was possible before, but most couldn't. Stores didn't really optimize for a self-check out experience.
The social pressure in many organizations and communities to conform was high and there was no escape. If you you wanted to work at a tech company or startup you would have to accept open offices, happy hours, and other social requires to a great extent. It was not acceptable to skip many events and you had no option to switch your working environment in the office because the only option was open space.
The pandemic has forced a change, most importantly, in a relatively uniform manner. I'm not making the argument that we should all accept this other extreme. Just as we return to normality we should consider the experiences of others, and try to make some reasonable adaptations.
Now almost all the aisles are self-checkout and are friendlier to larger cart-fulls like I buy (having a few kids means there's no such thing as a quick trip with a hand basket anymore...).
No one is forcing you to pretend interest in small talk. If you're not interested in it, say so instead of pretending.
Are you afraid you'll lose your job over being antisocial or rude if you don't pretend to get along with your coworkers?
You might be happier if you look for a job you don't hate.
(Also if you stop seeing other people as beneath you, but that's a taller order)
> just go home straight after work
In your own hypothetical example, I'm still required to be in an office or else be jobless. Finding remote jobs isn't trivial.
I feel like it's a pretty ridiculous over-statement to say that introverts feel like they're in a pandemic normally. I'm an introvert and don't feel like that. I suspect the only people who could reasonably feel like that are people with anxiety disorders or phobias.
I don't know, I'm not saying you can't express your opinion or feel how you feel. But I want to express I'm a bit grossed out reading your post, as you seem just a bit too gleeful and smug at this whole situation.
> Those of you who have found the slightly over a year duration of the pandemic difficult have gotten a sample of how miserable pre-pandemic life was for those of us who are more introverted or misanthropic.
It doesn't impact me what other people feel, but I do hope that people who have not enjoyed lockdown can gain some empathy for the people who have enjoyed lockdown. It seems more like you're defensive at somebody having different preferences than you, which is just how life works.
Additionally, I don't have anxiety. Not before nor during the pandemic. So my point was not anxiety, my point was that the same way life during the pandemic has caused many people inconvenience and frustration, pre-pandemic life is inconvenient and frustrating to me because of the obligation to play social games and always be around people. It's quite tiresome and irritating.
> I'm an introvert and don't feel like that.
I also didn't say all introverts feel like I do, I said pre-pandemic life is miserable for those of us who are _more_ introverted or misanthropic.
I’m pushing back on the sentiment you pose because it’s far too often used and oppressively effective.
Please tell me where I expressed any glee at other people's misfortunes. What I said was the following which is a statement, not an expression of emotion:
> Those of you who have found the slightly over a year duration of the pandemic difficult have gotten a sample of how miserable pre-pandemic life was for those of us who are more introverted or misanthropic.
How other people feel doesn't impact me, but I do hope that people who have not enjoyed lockdown can gain some empathy for the people who have enjoyed lockdown. Pre-pandemic life was as uncaring and dismissive of people who thrive during the pandemic as pandemic life is towards people who thrived before the pandemic.
The large majority connect via smiles, laughs, hugs.
“While most of the early studies were on children residing in orphanages that were deficient in almost every dimension, even children who are reared in relatively good orphanages but who are subject to social and emotional neglect display many of these characteristics while living in the institution”
The effects of early social-emotional and relationship experience on the development of young orphanage children :: Atypical Behaviors
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702123/#:~:tex...
https://open.spotify.com/track/2chEZfdAqJvlw9dM3hAU6p?si=c8f...
While true and a good thing, i cannot simply take a step back, look at the whole picture and feel this feels a bit awakward. The op (guessing) is perhaps a lucky few that got to keep their jobs through the pandemic, spend more time with family and were baking breads and indulging in gardening etc. This while millions lost their jobs and health insurance, relied on govt assistance or pick a job like a cashier where you constantly met people during a pandemic, while day cares and achools were closed. And feels like we expect the rest of the world to move on like nothing else happened while feel like I need a month's break.
> I'm Asim Aslam. The Founder CEO of Micro Services, Inc., creator of the open source cloud platform Micro and a technologist by training.
Finally we reach a point where both the pandemic and everything else has settled down and I'm too burnt out and depressed to enjoy it.
As someone with a family, we've been mostly doing ok through the pandemic. The biggest stresser for us is the lack of babysitting / kid swaps for being able to get project or personal time in (e.g. my half bath remodel has sat untouched for 6 months now).
Not really. Most of my family and friends did fine. Whole bunch of them changed to better jobs due to tech job boom, worked from home, started gardening projects, learnt tennis ect. It was more than awesome for whole bunch of ppl.
Can I an extra week to make up for that?
Ok. Then let's give one to the essential workers who didn't get a break and had to risk their health going in to work every day, delivering food to the WFH crowd, dealing with anti-maskers, delivering packages to the WFH crowd, etc.
I would absolutely love it if this became standard, though ;)
It's not, although it might be in your particular country.
Unlike me taking two week personal leave, there's no anxiety of missing out on important decision, nothing to catch up on when I return. When everyone's back from Christmas holidays it's like the whole company wakes up from two weeks of hibernation. I found the break very refreshing. I wish we would do it more often, say twice a year or maybe even four times a year but one week each, one per quarter.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/01/twitter...
> Twitter has said that it expects a majority of its staff to spend some time working remotely and some time in the office. That's despite its boss Jack Dorsey initially saying that employees could work from home "forever".
> And Google rejigged its timetable for bringing people back to the workplace. As of 1 September, employees wishing to work from home for more than 14 days a year would have to apply to do so.
Though, google has way more employees than twitter I believe (5,000+ vs 130,000+)
My workplace (Moz) has been giving us the third Friday of every month off since April of 2020 due to COVID. The CEO called them "Breather Days" - a day to catch our breath, catch up on chores or home life, help get our kids school straightened out, etc. More importantly than simply getting the days off, the empathy that it demonstrated reassured everyone that we would find the work/life balance we needed even in extraordinary times.
I'm really curious how long we'll keep that in place, especially after re-opening the physical offices.
That was announced a few months ago along with the opening up of most US States and the soon-to-be-widely-available vaccines.
I can't speak for everyone where I work, but this felt like an appropriate time to shift back to normalcy in that regard. In any case, we have a very generous PTO policy that should make it easy for anyone to continue to transition through the rest of the year as they see fit.
What does work for me is having a 40 hour work week. If I'm doing the same job for 50+ hrs/week, I start to dread the work.
That said, this is drastic, seems like something other than burnout is going on.
Source: just came off a 2 1/2 year break
I'll never do that again. What an expensive lesson to learn.
I traveled the world. I went to all seven continents and fucked off big time. I partied when I wanted to. I went where I wanted to go. I was a bit hedonistic at times.
No regrets.
Eventually, I ran out of money, so I'm back again. I honestly didn't want to come back to tech, but that big paycheck, and I'm good at it.
But a vacation is good for other reasons.
This works for me, but it is a very short term solution, about 6-12months in it always seems to creep back.
I honestly don't get it. I have never experienced that feeling. I'm now on my second year of working significantly less, and you'd have to drag me back kicking and screaming.
Shout out to Laura Hogan's late-April "We Need To Talk About Your Q3 Roadmap"[1], which talks about taking care of workers just starting to make it out of a crazy pandemic year.
[1] https://larahogan.me/blog/we-need-to-talk-about-your-q3-road...
I get that from working with and for German, Austrian and Dutch companies in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. It's nigh on impossible to get anything done in August around here.
This doesn't apply to things like resorts and restaurants, for obvious reasons, though if that's what you're thinking of.
I found one Austrian source ( https://www.vol.at/wo-die-produktion-urlaub-macht/3314076 ) mentioning the issue and I can see how it would make sense for some industries to need some maintenance time each year.
The upside is hard to measure which might be a blocker for larger, metrics-driven HR teams. However I feel like we all, as humans, know that policies like that make a difference.
From the article:
> It also boasts a "Mommy Bar" - described as a "private lactation space" by Ms Wolfe Herd - as well as fortnightly manicures, hair trims and "blowouts" which the founder said showed "appreciation for our busy bees".
It seems like an appealing target for private equity or managers installed by a pension fund. Not sure what their ARPU and ARR look like, but when you have a company with solid revenue, perks like this are a huge signal for a bunch of "opportunities for efficiencies," I would wonder how long all that perceived value would be left on the table. It's not just a Bumble thing, I also think story-worthy perks are mostly a cheap way to attract new staff into the pipeline, and get attention from acquirers. Less than $5k in beanbag chairs used to have a 10x ($50k+) return in organic press, recruitment pipeline, and marketing buzz. Culture spend like that can have non-linear returns. That "Mommy Bar," alone probably has a 30x return on what they spent on it.
I'd absolutely close an office for two weeks in August if I ran a company that could afford to, or split it across teams. There's the question of whether you need an office you can afford to close, but from a capital management perspective, if one knew how to make a company appear both attractive yet helpless when it came to optimizing it, to attract someone who liked to solve problems who would intervene and buy in to "fix" this obvious inefficiency for you, well, that would be about par for the course wouldn't it.
In my experience that's been true every year (and I normally try to leave the city for August) but especially this summer post pandemic, post icepocalypse.
I wonder if that's part of it.
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.
> fortnightly manicures, hair trims and "blowouts" which the founder said showed "appreciation for our busy bees"
> Working hours? Not nine to five apparently. Employees can choose the hours they want, just as long as the work gets done
It's all just a bunch of BS. Give your employees reasonable time off policies and encourage them to actually take time off instead of letting them get burned out and then closing the office for a week.
I don’t get burned out from working too much; I get burned out from having to make constant decisions about what I’m going to work on and how I’m going to do it. For me lack of structure is the primary source of burnout, not workload. The flexibility of working from home is nice, but not enough to make up for the increased stress of having to manage the environment all on my own.
Obviously not everyone is like me, but I think it’s common enough that we should be questioning the wisdom of the work-from-home free-for-all.
If you can find a place where the work is more about doing something than figuring out what to do, this sounds fantastic.
I don't know about Bumble, but some of my friends in the UK have found the past year very tough. The UK has had strict restrictions on socialising, travel away from home, even being outdoors.
For months at a time, my siblings have been unable to visit my parents!
I can see the benefit of a company saying "let's all take this week off". It allows holidays of people in the same team to clash, when that might normally not be allowed.
(It's not been great in Denmark either, especially the dark winter with most social life closed. But we were still able to see friends and family and stay in holiday cottages, and no-one was shouted at by police for taking a walk too far from home.)
I remember my brother and sister-in-law getting shouted at for holding hands in Paris last year... Yeah, covid had been hard on everyone
> I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers
Please don't assume this.
Just because you don't use the app and have no interest in the app or company does not mean you need to have a reductionist outlook on other people's work.
Bumble has a great and in depth engineering blog [0] here that doesn't make it 'an app with some basic functionality.'
Please don’t assume this. Parent comment’s question seems genuine.
Why are you assuming genuineness when the parent mentioned this:
'an app with some basic functionality'
'I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers'
'Is software dev in such a sad state that you can't deliver'
'what the heck are they overworking on?'
This is enough to know that the parent is dismissing the effort and work of others to the point that they are expressing a reductionist viewpoint of the entire app and company, which is not ok.
I’m just assuming the question was asked in good faith :) I’ve seen this topic discussed on HN about many companies and sometimes there are interesting and unexpected reasons for the high headcount.
1. I clicked the we're hiring link. Most roles are in EU (particularly UK and Spain). Is that for cost reasons? I know hiring engineers is cheaper in those two locations in particular. Or is it for EU/Badoo reasons?
2. Despite frequently playing up its female-led workplace, all but one of the blog posts are authored by men (based on photos and names). Is this reflective of their staff? The Badoo staff? The pool of people who like to write blog posts?
I don’t think they’re implying that everyone is working overtime. Scaling up to accommodate a lot of new users isn’t always simple, we all know this. And a looming IPO means the pressure to get that scaling right first time is high (and has plenty of non-tech requirements to stress out employees too)
A busy year like that combined with the effects of COVID means that a lot of people feel burnt out. A synchronised break also has benefits: with no-one working there’s much less chance you’ll be tempted to “just check emails quickly” and get sucked back in.
I didn’t have a particularly intense workplace in the last year and I still feel pretty burnt out so I can sympathise.
It's knowledge work that is almost always in the complex domain, and as such it's far from simple. In fact it's the domain of unknown unknowns. So to have a product with millions of users with an online attack vector, that takes security and uptime serious, you need the following lead roles as a minimum:
* Architect
* Security
* Test
* Agile
* Developer
* Operation
* Owner
* UX
An app with millions of users are likely to have multiple teams that have a subset of the full application. For every feature you want to develop or any significant refactorings, you need to involve at least architect, security, test and operations. My experience is that teams around 8-10 people can be really productive and run a service. If you really want to accelerate and be best in class you assign teams to specific parts of the service that makes sense. Could be signup, search, chat, ect.
Then you probably want teams for analytics, ads and marketing, legal and before you know it, you have 50+ people working directly on a "self-standing product".
All that said, if the code base is crap, and the organization of the employees are similar it's highly likely that alone is responsible for creating the additional workload compared to a better codebase and organizational structure.
I should imagine there's a fair few customer support people along with at least a handful of content moderators - considerably more labour intensive than software dev/devops/sysadmin, I think.
Obviously there's also comms teams, marketing, HR, finance, etc. I'd say these are probably also more labour intensive than dev/devops/sysadmin because they tend to involve a lot more human contact, etc.
Come in to an exciting new opportunity. The first week you recoil in horror the technical debt. It appears the previous maintainer/builder didn't know one or more of: basic system admin, testing, documentation, packages, coding design, database design, or security.
The incidents start. The code is so interdependent it's terrifying to make even a small change. Fixing a bug in their custom json generator breaks a service you don't know exists and takes out billing. Yes they wrote their own. You lose the confidence of the team already there. Now you are too afraid to make changes.
All you can do is toil or try to think about selling a rewrite. When one or both of those hit burn out you fire up LinkedIn and beg for mercy.
But they have a lot of open positions, so there's apparently a lot more to this app than I realize: https://team.bumble.com/open-roles
Maybe there's some of that happening in there
If you had any idea on how US orgs work, you wouldn't say that. First, just because the government doesn't impose something, it doesn't mean companies can't do it. In fact, companies so much more for their employees than the government dictates. It's the same for minimum wage: the federal government might be stuck at 7.25, but in practice low pay jobs are more than that: Walmart was 11 last time I checked, Amazon 15 etc.
Most US tech workers have around 20 days of PTO. Paid medical leave is a bit trickier: some companies don't give it to you so it comes out of PTO. Some companies require a doctor's note. Some don't require anything. Some require a note after 10 days....it varies a lot. And this is where the US could step up a bit and acknowledge humans do get sick every now and then, and cover for that.
Do you have any source for that? My limited research[0] shows it's closer to 15 - and sometimes, as you say, this includes sick days. It can't be compared to Europe where you have 4 weeks, guaranteed, for any industry, plus sick days - and many cou. Fortunately WfH greatly reduced the strain reduced with working in the office (commuting, open spaces, not being able to use your time more efficiently), but for non-office workers the problem still remains: you spend your life working and you barely have time to even stop and think why you're doing all this. Family life suffers, Cat's Cradle and all. It's all really wrong.
[0] https://www.advanced-hr.com/vcReport/2016-Sequoia-Benchmarki...
My company gives 3 weeks to new hires plus another week around Christmas. They gave us an extra Covid week and everyone sure appreciates it.
In the UK and Spain, that's also the number you must use, I don't know about Russia. (In other words, if you've not used any days by December, you'll be taking all of December off. Or whenever your year wraps round.)
> You must take at least four weeks’ holiday a year, so only holiday on top of this can be carried over and then only if your employer gives you permission or if this is permitted by your contract of employment.
I once had a colleague who was given a letter along the lines of "you still haven't used enough holiday; unless you advise us of your preferred days, you will be on holiday from date X to Y".
I believe it's in order to nullify the ability for a company to apply alternative pressures to stop people taking their entitled holiday.
How hard could a dating app company possibly have to work to make money?
They're not exactly selling ice cream to Eskimos.