Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout
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> Well, root out the real causes of burnout.
I'll offer the definition that's made most sense to me. I didn't come up with it, in fact some wise person here on HN stated it:
Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off.
You can work like a dog to release a feature, and if the feature does what it was meant to do, and you get recognized for your contribution, how hard you worked doesn't matter as much. You are energized, excited to be part of a great team, ready to move on to the next stunning victory.
On the other hand, if you work like a dog on a feature and it gets cut at the last minute, or its success is undermined by some VP's dumb idea, it sucks. If that happens over and over, without a win, you're burned out.
The solution is to get a win. Work on something that you can succeed on, and succeed at it, and get rewarded for it. Could be a big thing, but even a small thing is good enough. Sounds easy, but not always even possible in a badly-run organization.
Exactly.
Yet most people mistakenly attribute the feeling to other causes. OP quote what people think are the causes of their own burnout, and took those at face value.
When you're burnt out, you're probably not in a good state to determine the cause.
There are many reasons for burnout. Working on things that don't pay off is just one of them.
You may disagree with my statement about the cause of burnout, and you may be correct about that.
But it's unlikely you know enough about me to judge how much I know (or don't know) about burnout.
A) Each living human has 2 legs
B) Sharlin has 2 legs
Taken literally, B is a subset of A, so A is the stronger statement.
But in normal speech, it's clear that when someone makes a claim about members of a large group, they're making a statement that usually applies to members of that group. And not claiming to have specific knowledge of every single member.
Because statement B is more specific, I probably need more specific data before I make it.
Does the amount of blame and recognition vary with the amount of effort you put in? I've seen situations like this, and seen people feel burnt out when:
1. However hard they work, they do not get blamed less or recognized more, or even
2. They are blamed more than people who contribute approximately zero. Because those people doing nothing have no output, hence nothing to be blamed for.
I've seen plenty of 2 and find it fascinating how instincts for feedback, including my own instincts which I need to improve, can be so counterproductive towards the hardest working, most committed and effective people.
Not just critical feedback, but assistance, resources and support also follow a similar pattern.
If someone's working hard on something and making clear progress when others are not, from time time they slow down or even just appear to. It's inevitable even if just due to random events.
Occasionally I've seen someone with a history of conscientious and effective work, going through a rough time, a difficulty, or whatever it may be, and be offered straightforward, non-judgemental, kindly meant assistance. That's really nice when it happens for real. But it's so rare. Not many people seem to have it in them to just offer simple agenda-free help to someone without creating more burdens.
Much more often, I've seen the conscientious high performer given gradually increasing harsh feedback even while they are still ahead of others around them, mixed with offers of "help" which are more of a burden. And other people looking for opportunities to "replace" the high performer in various minor roles, perhaps with themselves naturally, due to mistaking results and effort with status and petty-political influence.
The most insidious and ironic of these I've seen weaponized burnout itself: "You seem like you may be heading for burnout. Why don't you step down for a while", said by someone who had been politically maneuvering to take over the role and whose public dramas were a significant driver, perhaps the only driver, of the burnout they purported to care about.
It is a rough social regulation cycle for the person committed to conscientious and effective work in an environment where people say they want one thing but act to produce another.
What would be your definition of a bad manager that doesn't include putting in inputs and not receiving expected[1] outcomes?
[1]: (or maybe "just" could be another term)
Frankly, it's been a while since I had a win. I think I'm gonna try to set myself up for a small success, and see how that goes. Thanks for this.
Gross. All that overtime is systematically stamping all the things that are good for the soul out of life. I'm not going to cheer it on because a feature works.
There's a lot to say about that.
Sometime contexts creates obligations that render reward impossible, you only get a stream of wrong imperatives and lack of benefits.
Sometimes people simply forget how to go for stuff they want. I lived a lot of my life conforming to others orders.. until nothing made sense emotionally. You forget what 'pay off' means for you. Very subtle, very hard. A lot of things in life are negotiating obligations and knowing how to recognize bad deals is key. Freedom is a rare asset :)
Kids have this well set, all they care about is their internal sense of reward.. they'll move relentlessly from rewards to rewards until they're chokeful of them. Social structures blur this into innane amounts of duties that often are invented by morons higher up.
> [...] their level of caring couldn’t be sustained in the absence of results
> Farber often calls burnout “the gap between expectation and reward,”
Also:
> “My clients are perfectionists,” says Alden Cass, a therapist to both corporate attorneys and men on Wall Street. He’s young, about the age of a hungry broker, and he looks like the men he treats—strong features, dark teased hair, Turnbull & Asser striped shirt, nice watch. “They have very rigid ideals in terms of win-lose,” he continues. “Their expectations of success are through the roof, and when their reality doesn’t match up with their expectations, it leads to burnout—they leave no room for error or failure at all in their formula.”
> Yet ask Cass why his clients are burning out, and his answer isn’t any different for a banker than it would be for a public-school teacher; there’s a gulf between what they expected from their jobs and what they got. “I can’t tell you,” he says, “how many people come into my office and ask, ‘How come I have this money and I can’t find happiness?’ ”
> So what does he tell them? “That happiness equals reality divided by expectations.”
Apt analogy there.
Reminds me of, "I asked for wealth and found it in being content with little" / Happiness is in being content.
طلبت الغنى فوجدته في الرضى باالقليل
I really like this way to put it. Lots of people, who talk about how our happiness is driven by our expectations, are politically on the right and emphasizing the idea of personal responsibility. But putting the reality into the numerator, we can also recognize that there might be systemic problems with the "reality" itself, for example social inequality or lack of inclusivity.
I agree but would add "lack of hope" to that. I have no hope that my job/career will get better.
How do you solve that? We mythologized grit, the strength to overcome this preemptive fatigue. But even that, is fatiguing.
Life’s a sport no matter what they say. Whoever doesn’t get tired of it, wins.
Grit and flexibility are in tension with one another.
Being able to accept an approach is unproductive and find another is valuable, in moderation (in excess you flit from task to task without completing any).
Grit is the opposite; being unwilling to give up in the face of adversity is valuable in moderation, but in excess it prevents you from realising when your approach will never pay off.
That's the most work-centric definition of burnout I have ever seen.
I feel this so much. The anxiety of not working while dreading it on the horizon is often worse than the work itself.
For me, a "win" would be accomplishing something and then getting to bask in the success and take a fucking break and do nothing for a year. Shoot, even being able to take a break for a month after busting my butt on a project for a year would be nice. But nope. You never really "finish" anything in software development. You just have an endless backlog of tickets in JIRA. If you get something done faster, you don't get any reward or payoff for doing so.
I once finished my entire week's worth of planned work in two days and instead of being praised for it, I was chided for underestimating my sprint capacity. Did I get to take the rest of the week off? No! Of course not. I was expected to pull more tickets from the top of the backlog and just keep grinding.
I think the point above is that the win needs to be material beyond your own recognition.
Isn’t the trick to just work at a sustainable pace, day in and day out, and celebrate the wins along the way?
All that said, in the last five years my longest holiday has been a week. The work really is endless.
Sometimes, even the week off doesn't mean less work, because the few weeks before the vacation you have to work harder to compensate for your coming absence.
I don't see how it should imply that employee don't have to do anything rest of the week. Likewise, if estimation is too small at the beginning I don't pull 80 hours long week nor I consider it effective.
Had the complain was about overall lack of rest or overwork, that would be understandable. But it is not about that.
It is about expectation that original estimate is measure of how much you should do and if the task turned out faster, you can watch movies rest of the week.
I was burned out but then my boss dragged me in a room and told me I was doing a great job, that they appreciated me and that they know I prefer to work in evenings but get there at 9am every day because that’s my contract, so they said I didn’t need to do that in the future and can arrive whenever I want because they know I work hard enough and will work the hours.
That conversation was enough to completely reset the burnout. No doubt it will come back, but a little appreciation goes a long way.
I do think that many orgs don't have any sense of pacing when it comes to software dev. So, don't set expectations too high for an org if they don't have PTO in place to compensate for hard work.
You know, this might have something to do with why I gravitate towards doing "user" (really other devs since I tend to work on internal tools more than outside facing products) support type stuff. Devs trying to figure out why something isn't working are usually grateful when someone can help them get things working so they can do their job.
ICU Nurses.
What can we learn about burnout from them in this current situation?
I don't think "Burnout is caused by working hard at something for a long time and not having it pay off." applies for them in at all. They are constantly saving lives and constantly seeing the positive results of their actions.
My first guess is that there's just too much work for them in the regions where ICUs which are overburdened. Many ICUs have had to up their nurse-to-patient ratio above 1:2, often to 1:3 and in some places even 1:5 or 1:6. Moreover, many ICU nurses are forced into picking up extra shifts.
Source?
Burnout can come from many different directions though, but everyone has a limit at which no incentive provides enough benefit to outweigh the cost.
"
That's not really a payoff after a while. I work at a medical device company. When I started I got a kick out of all the great patient stories. Even my girlfriend's life changed from suicidal to pretty good because of our device. But after a while never-ending the deadline pressure got to me and no amount of patient success was motivating anymore. I think it's the same in the ICU. After a while you get numb. Only off time and less pressure can reset your emotional gas tank.
You end up thinking these bigger questions like, "why is this only my responsibility to sacrifice? I don't see anyone else making sacrifices!" And "Why is it my responsibility to clean up this mess? Those other people are creating the mess for their own profit but somehow I'm the one that has to fix it?"
It's basically inevitable to recoil at being the one always stuck with the bill while everyone else stops even noticing you paid for them.
When we're working on something we enjoy and find interesting, when we have a plan and a goal, we find that we have infinite energy.
Burnout on the other hand is when no matter how much you seem to work, it has no impact. You don't seem to be making any progress. Burnout is the loss of momentum.
“Improved productivity also helps drive better employee work/life balance and reduces burnout“ - The State of DevOps 2019.
According to the DORA research program, avoiding heavyweight change processes and creating an environment of continuous delivery go a long way to reducing burnout.
What happens if that something doesn't succeed? You're just describing the day to day that caused the burnout haha
My 28 days of paid vacation are my yearly win.
> Man Returns To Work After Vacation With Fresh, Reenergized Hatred For Job
* https://www.theonion.com/man-returns-to-work-after-vacation-...
Edit: But to add to the comedy (all comedy is tragedy, and all tragedy is comedy according to the Greeks), that’s pretty much the reason why I don’t take vacations. It’s not going to change anything, so I much prefer to take days off so I don’t completely lose it.
The sadness is hilarious.
I only take days off to rest, physically and psychologically.
Vacation is great, but I agree with the author here. Vacation _can_ be a tool to combat burnout - but burnout is often a result of other things besides hours worked. I've worked times of 80+ hours. While feeling worn out, I never got burnt out. I've worked times where I can barely put the effort into 30 hours/week.
Right now, I'm attributing my burn out solely to the fact that we have huge amounts of "keep the lights on work" to complete the spin-out while continuing to deliver product. Neither the workload nor the type of work is bad. There's just so much of it and it's wearing.
----
For me, a vacation doesn't solve much for me. I'll be back to "more of the same". What's really helping is the change in pace of my work and the ability to get back to things that engage and excite me.
It has nothing to do with the hours; indeed some of my most productive and least burnt out times have been when I was happily pouring in 60+ hrs/week because I was having fun and so energized by the project and my team’s excitement and collaboration dynamic.
My current thought is product companies might have more of a vested interest in quality, but I'm not positive.
Does anyone have any suggestions here? The only thing I've seen is most people move into management, which I'm thinking is likely the only way out from the long hours and homework/almost constant self-study.
PTO and a healthy work environment are both good.
Requests then take weeks to be completed even though the actual work involved can be measured in minutes
Another core issue for me is the ratio between challenging tasks and more simple tasks.
There should always be a few tasks to work on that are challenging, otherwise procrastination sets in which can turn into some form of burnout if nothing is done.
If it's inauthentic though, employees can smell it from far away.
I suspect you could implement the same policy in practice with less social anxiety by mandating N weeks of vacation and allowing additional time off upon request.
Mandating vacation is a good idea when they really mean it. Use it or lose might work. Fixed days with payout if you quit or an option to cash out works too - companies carry it in their balance sheet and encourage days off as a result.
This is a business transaction. "Unlimited PTO" literally means free paychecks.
In reality, I've seen it implemented as a "take what you need" policy. Unlimited in that sense means there is no upper bound. Managers are trained to push people who are trending under 5 weeks per year to take more time off. Some people take a lot more than that. Work still get done and people seem happy to do the work. Sample size = 1 employer. Inauthentic?
My company just got rid of unlimited PTO for all the reasons people say they hate it - they didn't think people were taking enough PTO for their health, it was used unfairly, etc... Functionally now though, I have to file paperwork with 3 different groups to have someone approve even a single day off so they can make sure I'm not going over the number of days off that I have in accordance with my level and seniority. Thankfully my manager has essentially told us they don't care and we're still on unlimited because they don't want to do the paperwork either.
It's not to say that "unlimited" can't be toxic, but it's easy to forget how onerous other systems can be, which can lead to you taking less time off in the same way. One of my friends is the junior on their team on a fixed PTO system and is being forced to take nearly random days off now in order to have any at all because they didn't get their holiday plans in as early as their more senior team members, so now they're stuck with the dregs. Toxic cultures are gonna be toxic. The framing just changes the mechanism.
I have fixed number of days but still can essentially do this.
> Functionally now though, I have to file paperwork with 3 different groups to have someone approve even a single day off so they can make sure I'm not going over the number of days off that I have in accordance with my level and seniority.
This sounds odd. Why can't you just have a system that tracks number of days and as long as you have the number of days 1-2 days shouldn't be an issue at all. I don't see how switching from unlimited to limited made this approval business necessary at all.
I hypothetically have almost 5 weeks of days off at my current job and between not having much vacation options because of pandemic and not wanting to just be lazy at home, I haven't used most of it. Should someone from HR just tell me I'm not allowed to work in December now?
You can dislike what is meant by "Unlimited PTO" and the fact that it's not clear on how many days you can take off, but that doesn't mean it's unclear what Unlimited PTO entails.
The "flexible hours" policy was bad enough at my last job. Wildly varying interpretations between different managers and department heads under the same roof.
The right to use benefits has to be enforced by the CEO. If people aren't using their vacations (and effectively losing them), then that sets the culture off on the wrong foot from the start.
E.g. At Microsoft you have a max amount of vacation days that you can accrue before they start expiring, and managers get dinged whenever their directs have expiring vacation days. The result: Managers would encourage taking vacation
It's easier to think that employee vacations are worthless as a manager since it doesn't actually contribute to any direct profit. But if you're an employee, and that was a selling point of joining the company, it certainly sucks when the promise of vacation could never be materialized -- because work was apparently too important.
The funny thing was before the VCs bought the company, I had two weeks but in practice could ask the CTO for as much time as I wanted. But unlimited PTO functionally meant negative days off, because performance would decrease when you left. Setting a minimum PTO might help.
Another thing I like are company holidays. When nobody is working, there is no email / code reviews / Slack to miss. That's a real vacation!
If you want that policy to have teeth, maybe end the "year" on a month that few people want vacations, like February. (I'll pull that out of my arse, but it's less than December, I'm sure.)
That would cause them to actually schedule their vacation when they can use it and enjoy it, instead of sitting at home for a month with nothing to do when it crept up on them.
IMO, at least.
Also we recently started having an occasionally Friday that everyone takes off same time. You don't have too but to make it easier that people who are often quite busy have an opportunity to not feel like things are getting behind. Over 90% participation(100+ people) in our group mental health day.
Or take a sabbatical or maternity/paternity leave and just never come back?
This is how it has to be implemented in EU countries, so in general it appears to be (in Ireland, at least) the statutory 20 days + whatever.
People have told me that they've taken up to 8 weeks. But I've never ended up working at any of those companies so it's hard to know if that's true or not.
It also reminds me of the old negotiating tactic - never be the first one to offer up a number.
I can see both to be honest. Especially if you don't 'know what you're worth' in a given market, letting them make the first move at last has a chance that they won't offer you 50k for something hey are prepared to pay 250k for. Potentially they will start off with 150k and you're gonna be happy with it, because you undervalued yourself at 100k. Luckily you didn't say that but took the 150k offered!
If you know you're worth at least 150k, asking for 200k can anchor the negotiations in your direction as long as you don't overshoot what they were prepared to offer by too much (which might just kill the negotiations altogether). You might just walk away with 180k and you feel good because you got 30k more than you thought you might get and they feel good because they got you 'cheaper'.
I have no way of knowing which strategy actually works out better, as its hard to do a controlled experiment here :) Also you probably have incomplete market information and it might be hard to know how incomplete it is.
I now have a contract with fixed 4 weeks off and everybody takes their time. The people I know who have "unlimited PTO" mostly take off less time. I have never heard of anybody taking way more than 4 weeks.
It's basically the same unbalance as some companies having flexible working hours which means you are expected to work overtime during crunch time but when things are slow you are still expected to put in at least 40.
To adjust I have dropped many responsibilities at work, halved my hours to 19 and practice pacing I.e scheduled rest, consistent level of activity day to day.
This has helped a lot.
While not everyone can go part time I wonder if scheduled breaks of even 5 minutes each hour (with no exercise, screen time or chat) would be beneficial to most people.
The other side I feel is companies keep inventing initiatives, kpis, okrs, goals and pushing that down the chain. Dumping more and more onto people and companies evolve from “cool” to “overly bureaucratic” over time.
The most stress is when you need to do X to get the job done but !X to meet some other master, maybe a beloved process. (Looking at you, scrum!)
It’s more stressful if when you try to negotiate out of this you are met with dogma. I tend to leave such work but I’ve seen it enough that it’s a pattern common between companies.
Apparently many companies think they have mastered creative process and people management and everyone else is wrong ;-).
The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems etc.
First we didn't need bonuses, we just needed a pat on the back from managers and co-workers to achieve happiness.
Now, we don't need vacations if we're burnt out, instead we just need flexible hours so we can schedule our death marches around our other responsibilities and mental health resources. 10 hours is 10 hours regardless of how you schedule it. Pressure doesn't go away just because your boss describes impending doom using nice words.
What's next? Desks aren't the answer for writing surfaces because our walls are already flat?
> Though results matter most and Technically Media prides itself on flexibility, as a guide, this role might expect to work roughly 40-45 hours a week.
> Technically Media offers 10 paid holidays per year; 15 PTO days accrued per year with additional P TO offered progressively; as well as a month of paid parental leave.
>Technically Media additionally closes its offices for the final week of the year to relax and unwind before each new year. This serves as additional paid holiday time.
https://technical.ly/job/editorial-director/
It's not the most generous but it's par for Philly area tech companies and its not a tech company, it's a journal.
I “expect” a lot of things that never happen.
And of course if you have a job that perpetuates cyclical or chronic burnout, going on vacation just means that you come back to work even more buried in things that went undone.
Or you sacrifice having a true vacation and still commit to working part of the time you're away.
"Unions. The people who brought you the weekend".
Though to be fair I am not overworked or undervalued. I imagine there’s a lot of engineers who large companies just grind through.
Is the screen actors guild punishing Will Smith and rewarding struggling, untalented commercial actors?
Is the NBA player's association punishing LeBron and rewarding D league players?
Is there even such a thing a "superstar" plumber? I mean, I'm sure there are awful plumbers and amazing plumbers - but do how much can they scale, realistically?
SAG is a weird example. Hard to get in without doing union work. Hard to get union work without being in the union. Can't do non-union work after you're in. The structure reeks of being rigged to temper the rate of newcomers.
When there is a pool of people waiting to take your job, and a company willing to lower working standards, you have little choice but to comply with company requests — unless you are part of a union that collectively acts in the interests of the workers.
For software developers there are forces against unionisation:
1. Global outsourcing. What's the point in unionisation if your job can be done by a motivated pool of workers overseas? A union has little bargaining power at the level of outsourcing complete business units. Or buyouts: I am in New Zealand and whole companies here are purchased by American companies.
2. Many software developers are not easily replaceable. It is difficult to replace a person who has specialist software skills or internal organizational knowledge.
3. There is no pool of easily identifiable talent.
4. Developers have to be dissatisfied with working conditions.
5. Developers have to have reached a ceiling (experienced). In a fast growing industry with technical churn, less experienced developers outnumber older developers? Hard to argue with new blood why unionisation is in their interests?
Edit: I did a quick search for "software developer" on https://seek.co.nz job board and about 1% of jobs were for USD140k+ and most of that 1% were not dev jobs. I know zero developers earning >= $200k. AFAIK pay in NZ for developers is significantly below the US. Opportunity there if you want trustworthy highly skilled remote workers that speak English. Main bummer is NZ is 16 hours ahead so 3PM EST is 7AM NZ time, and Friday in the US is Saturday in NZ https://www.worldtimeserver.com/time-zones/nzst-to-est/
There are a TON of actors in SAG (160,000). Sure, that's more than an order of magnitude smaller than the 4.4M SWEs in the US. But the idea that everyone in SAG is a "star" is absurd.
Similarly, deep bench players in the NBA - sure they are really good - but they are far from stars. And yet, most of them make substantially more money than overseas "stars". This is because of the players' union.
> A labour union is all about fighting for the rights of the undifferentiated many, not the situation where there are named celebrities in a winner's zero-sum market.
I think you missed my point entirely. SAG and the players' union are good for both stars and non-stars.
GP seemed to think that unions by definition are bad for stars. I was merely pointing out that there are examples of unions that are not bad for stars. It just so happens these unions are also examples of unions that are also not bad for non-stars.
> When there is a pool of people waiting to take your job, and a company willing to lower working standards, you have little choice but to comply with company requests — unless you are part of a union that collectively acts in the interests of the workers.
Google is not unionized, and there are a million people that would take my job for much lower pay - and a lot of them could probably end up doing my job after a substantially long learning period. Despite that, I have my job.
The same is true at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft (and many other companies). Theoretically, since these are global companies with large presences all over the world - this isn't (at least) entirely because I'm a US citizen.
I agree with your point for most other professions, though. And maybe this will be truer in the future for "FAANG". But, it's not really true now.
> Edit: I did a quick search for "software developer" on https://seek.co.nz job board and about 1% of jobs were for USD140k+ and most of that 1% were not dev jobs. I know zero developers earning >= $200k. AFAIK pay in NZ for developers is significantly below the US.
The majority of people working at "FAANG" in NZ should be >$200k - if for no other reason than because of RSU appreciation.
Not trying to be rude - but if you want to make more money - just read Cracking the Coding Interview cover to cover and get referrals at FAANG. You honestly might triple your salary. You can DM me on Reddit if you want more feedback / advice / referrals.
I can't think of examples of punishing good ones though. Union contracts frequently have defined procedures for requesting a merit pay increase with a mandatory review process, along with similar procedures for reclassification to a higher level position, also with more pay, when a person's scope of responsibilities shift over time to encompass more than the original job description indicated.
I'm not in a union any longer, but that happened to me when I was: I was very good a specific portion of my job and gradually took on more complicated aspects of it. I applied for reclassification. My workplace had a maximum of 21 days to review & reply to the request, which they granted, and I got a higher title & a nice 20% increase in pay.
As for punishing good workers... I've heard plenty of stories where someone was really good at their job and they just needed some small thing done that they couldn't get the right department to do, so they did it themselves. The union jumped all over them because it's contractually obligated that the other department perform that function.
It was absolutely in the way of the "good worker" and they needed it to be done to improve their morale and get work flowing well. But their only choices were suffer through it, or be sanctioned for fixing it themselves.
That's the punishment.
That depends on the reason for the separation of duties. Think of a unionized construction work where a few people specialize on heavy machinery. You aren't designated as such, but you happen to know how to drive a forklift and you need something moved. I'd be pretty pissed off at you for taking it upon yourself to do it because knowing how to operate a forklift isn't the same as knowing all of the safety protocols and idiosyncracies of operating heavy machinery at that specific site. You could put yourself or others at risk, or screw up the project. Or maybe the construction company pays certain insurance premiums for each designated operator and you just opened them up to bankruptcy if there was an accident.
Sometimes these barriers exist for a good reason. And sure, when you run into one it can be frustrating if it seems harmless-- even productive-- to break protocol. But it's not for each individual worker to determine which protocols they will follow and which ones they will break. That's a recipe for disaster that I have seen happen in & out of unions. The right path on that is to work to change protocol. I've done it plenty of times myself so that I could be more productive but also be in the loop on any special considerations I should be aware of, like not querying the production system directly during certain hours when it could be under high load.
That doesn't means there aren't any useless barriers, but it my experience a barrier is usually--initially-- put into place for a reasonable purpose, and people get frustrated because they don't know what the purpose was. Going cowboy isn't the solution though. Asking questions and finding out if the reasons still apply, and initiating change if they don't, that's the path forward. Sometimes it doesn't work, for stupid reasons, but stupid reasons aren't the sole domain of union beauracracy. They exist everywhere. I don't know if they're more prevalent in unions, but it doesn't make sense to look at unions as useless or bad when they simply share the same behavioral patterns as any other organization of sufficient size and complexity. I have seen unions that are completely dysfunctional, I have also seen businesses that are the same (and had the misfortune of working for one or two)
From a quick search:
> If your booth is a 10×10 or smaller, you may install and dismantle your own exhibit – provided you meet these requirements:
> 1. The Set-up can be accomplished in 1/2 hour or less.
> 2. No tools are required.
> 3. Individuals performing the work must be full-time employees of the exhibiting company and cary identification to verify this fact.
> Exhibitors are allowed to unpack and repack their own product (if it is cartons, not crates). They are also allowed to do technical work on their machines, such as balancing, programming, cleaning of machines, etc. Exhibitors may “hand carry” or use nothing larger than a two wheel baggage cart (rubber or plastic wheels only) to move their items.
* http://www.absoluteiandd.com/union-rules/new-york-trade-show...
> Convention center guidelines dictate that any gear one person can't carry with their hands alone must be handled by official union labor. In other words, you have to pay for people to lug your TVs and booth props from the loading dock to your booth, and it's not exactly cheap.
* https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-02-21-the-costs-...
Now if you have similar rules internal to your company, if you annoy the wrong people, they can simply act in a strictly 'compliant fashion'.
One would easily imagine a software engineering union to be the complete opposite of that, as such a union would be completely new and hungry.
At the same time, I think software engineering is in a position where a lot of employees have the power to switch companies and have more control over how the work is done than other types of jobs. I can see people leaving jobs in mass or starting a union quickly if industry conditions ever get worse.
> I can see people leaving jobs in mass or starting a union quickly if industry conditions ever get worse.
There's some signs of that happening at some companies. Certainly it's a high time for video games tech companies to push for it, against the bad conditions unique to that industry.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. How do unions dictate the way you perform your duties?
And suddenly the union has made me very uninterested in performing my duties at that company at all. I want to be able to work with flexible hours. I don't care to be compensated at 1.5x just because I start at 8:30 and leave at 4 one day, then do 9:30 to 5:30 another etc. I want to work from home every day of the week and I'll manage the separation of family life and work just fine, thank you very much but instead of being stuck in transit hours each way and effectively spending at least 11 hours for work related stuff (actual work plus travel, coz you know, union rules prohibit me working from the train, coz it's not in the office and it's not 9 yet), while WFH means I get up at 8:58 and in a meeting at 9:00 and that's great!
Real life example btw. from where some friends work, not theoretical. While I am flexible to take the kids to school, summercamp etc. at the required hours and just work as soon as I come home and made coffee, they gotta plan everything around their commute and timing it so that they don't come in too much earlier than 9 (wasting their time) and not get cited for clocking in too late, e.g. coz there was traffic.
I was in a union for a little bit, and there was a set process for this. You simply requested & justified a modified schedule, and so long as your boss signed off that it wouldn't negatively impact operations, it was all fine. Not all unions may do this though.
My dad was at a sort of unionized place. The core business wasn't Software but they spun their own IT needs out into an IT service company that became quite large on its own too. This was in Germany though. The actual union negotiated with the core business and for their employees. There's also another system in Germany that's a little separate from unions (which also exist) called roughly translated the "workers council".
The core business for example (manufacturers union) had a 35 hour week. The IT company had an agreement of "what the union contract says but with these modifications e.g. +5 hours." (and some other stuff) the unionization was great for a junior as it guaranteed a minimum pay scale for example with set minimum raises after x time etc. You had to track your time (clocking in and out was provided but not mandatory) and weren't allowed to do too many hours etc. But things were still flexible. Come and go when you want to within reason. And that was already like that in the 1980s. Obviously no WFH at that time :)
When the union renegotiated to 37.5 hours that suddenly meant all IT company personnel had to work 42.5. But the workers council and the company were on good terms and workers were told not to worry, the official stuff will take a week or two to hammer out and put in writing but keep working your 40 hours. The intent was the 40 hours and the +5 was just how it was written down. A technicality.
So yeah it can also be good.
As an example of the individual/departmental level where there was no union involved: I was embedded within a large, mostly customer-facing area. A scheduling change came down that said everyone had to work late hours twice a week on a rotation, for two six-week periods each year when there was increased demand. I don't work with customers, there was no need for me to modify my schedule. I ran things up the chain and a few days later there was a minor policy change that basically said "everyone except him".
Where unions or worker organization (even without a formal union and dues and such) come in is if this doesn't work because individual pull is not enough.
Your case you were lucky, in many an organization you would just have been told "you gotta take one for the team, we cannot make exceptions, then everyone wants one" (note that I don't agree with that but seen/heard this too many times)
They are not into old school craft union practices.
Note I'm not saying that is good or bad... In fact I liked it a lot - work can wait! But the person who said they'd be miserable may just not be able to hang with that.
if union leadership was volunteer, and dues weren’t required, maybe that sort of union would be less susceptible to corruption.
Welcome to all human institutions everywhere.
Ought we dispense with courts, governments, corporations, nonprofits, clubs, police, hospitals, etc. too because they all sometimes do this?
In my current role, taking PTO is a legitimate punishment. If I take a day off, there is nobody else on my team who has capacity to pick up my work in my absence. When I return from PTO, not only do I now have double the amount of work to catch up on, but I also have 15 emails from angry managers upset that I didn't get to their request sooner.
"you should just take some vacation" is often a convenient escape hatch for managers that want to seem like they're helping, but without actually putting any effort into solving the problems that make people want to escape from work in the first place.
Lmao. Nobody else on my team can take up slack because they have literally no space on their calendar. My team is currently at half of our target headcount. Every person is currently working 60 hour weeks and is still behind. "If I let them"? "hoarding meetings"? Please, keep your assumptions about my workstyle to yourself. I literally beg my teammates and managers to join my meetings and share the load, but nobody has the time.
Go read my comment history and you'll see I'm not shy about the fact that I am looking for other jobs, but I'm waiting out until my RSUs vest before leaving my current place. In the mean time, take your negative comments and "karma whoring" attitude back to reddit, it's not welcome here.
Good luck finding that job!
If there's chronic burnout in your company/org then indeed, no amount of vacation will fix that. But neither would flexible work hours or mental health support.
[1] Vacation means complete and total disconnect from work or work related activities. That goes beyond not checking work emails. I'm talking no leetcode or learning some new JS framework.
We're 20x more productive than 40 years ago, yet still work the same hours or more for pay increases that barely keep up with inflation.
I went from 8 weeks / years to 4 or 5. Currently 3. Ha.
I cannot recharge the same way ( meaning : travel for weeks at a time, or chill hard for 2 weeks in a row )
It’s flexible all right. But I feel like I’m always working somehow. Work is near, lurking.
I’m nursing a nice little depression that I feel a road trip would cure easily. Too bad I need to keep my last week of vacation for Christmas week.
1) it was 7 and some change. Not 8w 2 ) due to a special arrangement with my employer.
Those 6 weeks are the norm.
But it become increasingly common to ask for another week as a perk it you are a skill worker.
I my last French job I had weird hours and overtime in the weekend because of the industry I was in. It’s leads 7 and some changes weeks.
So, not 8.
The US is a good environment to innovate, but it's mostly good for companies and not people.
We need our brains to disconnect and we need at least 4 days to a week to start feeling "on vacation" [citation needed], so anythin less than say two weeks or whatever (milage may vary) and you just came from work or are worrying about going back to work. Last time I went on vacation I forgot for a moment where I worked :-)
It'll never prevent burnout, though, and having "job satisfaction" will, as many of the other commands are saying.
It's not a either-or situation. You should have both.
i.e. 10 days vacation shouldn't be celebrated as a benefit.
Vacation isn't everything though; there have been some studies which show the positive effect of a vacation quickly disappears when work resumes.
What we really need (imo) is a shorter, more focused work week (with less fluff + meetings) i.e. a 4 day work week
I have never heard of an employer that makes its employees only take whole weeks rather than a day here or there even though technically you are only entitled to "weeks" off.
This could be country-specific, but in investment banking it is common to require employees to periodically take an uninterrupted block of vacation (in my country, a two-week block once per year seems typical). The rationale is to make it more difficult to perpetuate certain types of fraud, since the bad actor would need to collude with another employee to cover up in their absence.
A bit of a corner case, but thought I'd mention.
Flexible working arrangements are great when the team is able to asynchronously work, but I have yet to see a team that really does asynchronous work right.
I’ve seen it work. But it require discipline.
In my situation the time difference were too striking to hope having synchronized interaction, and the team built on that habit.
But then one day we had a major refactor in our orgs and that was gone.
I think the Linux kernel developers can be considered the biggest software team that does asynchronous work, and it works just fine.
Honestly just some basic mailinglist software installation goes a long way.
And an organization can still have a process in place on how to get synched when its needed (scheduled calls, impromptu emergency response situations, etc).
A position I'm thinking about joining requires being available 9 hours between 9am-6pm EST (I live in EST) to ensure there's reasonable overlap between the west coast US and most European countries. They were really strict on these hours and at first I was against it because I thought what's the difference if I work 2 hours early one day and clock out early or decide to be unavailable for 3 hours in the afternoon (1h lunch break + the 2 hours).
But the more I think about it, the more I think it's a better system for everyone in the end when everyone has strict hours. I wouldn't want to be expected to review a PR at 7pm EST because someone else decided to start a bit later one day.
They have no problem for exceptions like leaving early for a doctor's appointment or picking someone up. The only rule here is you need to give a few days notice which is also reasonable because it lets your team members know you won't be around when you usually are. They don't need to know the details, only that you won't be around. They're also ok if you need to bail without notice because it's something important. Basically don't abuse the system and it's all good.
I do agree that having "core hours" is very valuable with flexible hours. Core hours need to be less than a regular working day though and they should be negotiated by the team internally. Have a team of night owls? Core hours can be 4pm to 10pm for example.
Why would you review a 7pm EST PR any earlier than the next day (which is when you'd see it) and your next day happened to start at 10am only that day? Unless you had started your day late or were working later for another reason (like wanting to take half of Friday off) and you happen to see it.
Timezones suck and make things slower. Companies need to acknowledge that and not by making people work longer than they should.
4 on, 3 off is usual
But if you break it up to two week cycles you get: 4 on, 2 off, 4 on, 4 off 4 on, 1 off, 4 on, 5 off
And even wilder if you do three week cycles: 6 on, 2 off, 6 on, 7 off
Imagine a full week off every third week! Of course, this likely is not very realistic because it would not line up with collaborators well.
Edit* Should add, a lot has to do with your attitude. Some things won’t change and fighting then just makes you look like a jerk in the office. Either come to peace with it or find another job. Of course after you have reasonably done what you think you can to make a difference.
Many jobs are brainless 9to5 collect a paycheck do bare minimum and this is ok for a lot of people, they find creativity and joy elsewhere.
the person comes back to a ton of work waiting for him.
also, when others take vacation, the work pace often does not stop, and the person, who himself is going through a burnout phase, takes on even more load
Stressful travel, no real downtime, spending money like there's no tomorrow.
I enjoy both, but can understand hating the stress of traveling and spending money.
I do not understand how people can write in their resume that they helped their company generate $100 million revenue per year, while being paid < 1 million per year and not feel like they were taken for a ride.
When I started really struggling at a job I’d already established myself in, I learned of and am incredibly grateful for the mental health benefits offered by my employer and for leaders who are open, understanding and willing to work with me when things aren’t going well.
When I first had to broach the subject, easily finding resources about the company’s EAP benefits instead of feeling like it was all some hush hush thing really helped reduce the anxiety of opening up about a difficulty topic.
Unfortunately at many companies it just means a presentation from HR every couple of months that boils down to "10 strategies to cope with the burnout we're causing". Meanwhile the people with actual power to change things keep pushing the same "aggressive" deadlines and refusing to provide the support/resources necessary to meet them in a healthy and sustainable way.