Yesterday we had a full team call, and someone mentioned working late...
I told they shouldn't do that.
Then someone else said, jokingly: "Hey look, have you seen my last commit time, it's passed midnight"
This is a behavior I noticed happening in the last few months, while nothing calls for it.
And I got angry, my whole body ached so much I got angry at them...
And I reacted vocally, internally it was even worse.
By then end of the day, after examination of my emotional response, I posted the following to our internal chat channel:
Bit of context about "working too long" and why I reacted the way I did.
I know personally of 7 people who have had or still are in diagnosed Burn-out.
If you take my close work related network into account, even more.
Those are people who have stopped working for at least 6 months to 2 years.
And are still now working part time, still in recovery.
Without speaking of their personality, or personal situation, and how it contributed to their disease;
one of the common thing that happened: they overworked out of their own free will.It's insidious, you don't notice how it affects every other aspect of your life until it's too late.
I understand that in our line of work a certain dose of creativity and insight is present.
And that it's difficult, or even impossible, to switch off.
I understand that we want our system , code to work.
And that it's difficult, or even impossible, to switch off.And that we have this need to solve it now , whenever / wherever "now" is .
I personally never looked at the hours I'm working...it's probably longer than I should.
That's because I'm a slow thinker, take a lot of breaks out of necessity.
If I'm at home, and feel the urge to do something for work , I give it a max time.
Otherwise, I would never sleep.For the "creative" / "insight" part it's not switched off , it's running in the background.
And I make a note of it, in my physical little black book, when I need to take it off my mind.
Writing it down effectively gets it out of my head.Now we're all grown up, everybody does as (s)he wants.
All I can tell from experience is to keep some explicit limits that you should never cross.Now in addition to that:
At [redacted, a client] if you listen closely, there are people who are overworked, in constant stress, and as well in burn-out.One of the driver for me to push for the changes in the architecture, nagging about UX; nagging about a lot of the things we deliver is:
Let's deliver a system that free up people time, facilitate menial tasks , automate manual task, avoid the need to double check ;...
so as to not add difficulty and accidental complexity on top of the work those people do.Making sure they enjoy using the system.
Making sure they have a freed mind to do the complex things we will never automate because t's not cost effective
And make their work environment a bit more "enjoyable".That's our part in making sure people are less stressed out.
In order to do that we must not stress ourselves out.
Take care.
To add more context:
We're a small team and we have a lot of work to do.
We sometimes have hard deadlines, and we currently have one.
Nevertheless we are in a lucky position: our job is not threatened,
we participate and are encouraged to do so in disscussion about the business.
When, for some reason we deliver later than expected, or something unexpected happens,
no-one is mad at us: the work environment is one of openess.
They are hard discussions, but always in order to look for solutions that are viable for the business and achievable by us.
And for this I really need to give a big Thank You to some key people in the business.
( If you read this I hope you know who you are)
To conclude, I'd like to share this quote from Marco Heimeshoff:
"Software development is not about software, it's about People"