3 ms·

I'm not sure how much this advice will be heeded. In a lot of places in tech, there seems to be a culture where companies are more concerned about maximizing u

I'm not sure how much this advice will be heeded. In a lot of places in tech, there seems to be a culture where companies are more concerned about maximizing units of work at the expense of more intangible factors. You see this in Agile, Kanban etc methods of work where personal development is completely subjugated to the needs of the project. Insofar as a guiding principle behind the work does exist, that too tends to be subsumed under 'The Project': 'We're excited about building the future of work!' In more than one company I've worked with, even drawing attention to an article like this would be seen as raising your head above the parapet. It's completely the wrong attitude. Until we start measuring employee performance in new ways and asking different questions of managers, we'll continue to see burnout being viewed as an 'acceptable cost'.

erkkie 10y ago
I agree with your general sentiment and have my share of seeing ridiculous ceremonies of current-workflow-fad-of-the-year being enforced on people, kanban is a great system for managing deliverables in an ad-hoc environment. It's a false premise (and unfortunately all too common, both self-inflicted by developers themselves and by managers) to think that tracking and managing work pipeline == maximizing output at the expense of the worker.
walkingolof 10y ago
>In a lot of places in tech, there seems to be a culture where companies are more concerned about maximizing units of work at the expense of more intangible factors. I agree, there is allot of focus on all sort of tooling to cram points etc out of the work force and the simple answer to that is that is the easy part, really easy part, everything is already there. The really hard part of building a company is making sure that everyone feel part of it and not just some assembly line drone.

erkkie 10y ago

I agree with your general sentiment and have my share of seeing ridiculous ceremonies of current-workflow-fad-of-the-year being enforced on people, kanban is a great system for managing deliverables in an ad-hoc environment. It's a false premise (and unfortunately all too common, both self-inflicted by developers themselves and by managers) to think that tracking and managing work pipeline == maximizing output at the expense of the worker.

walkingolof 10y ago

>In a lot of places in tech, there seems to be a culture where companies are more concerned about maximizing units of work at the expense of more intangible factors. I agree, there is allot of focus on all sort of tooling to cram points etc out of the work force and the simple answer to that is that is the easy part, really easy part, everything is already there. The really hard part of building a company is making sure that everyone feel part of it and not just some assembly line drone.