19 ms·

Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

184 points by dustinmoris 5y ago

asim 5y ago
Good. We're taking all of July off at my company. Why? Because covid was an incredibly hard period for all of us and we as humans need a break. Somehow we all just seem to expect things to keep going like nothing changed. We all just seem to be expected to gloss over the pains of isolation, potential death and stress of work and life with no separation or boundaries. We made a conscious decision at my place of work to actually acknowledge the difficulties we've all been through and we're just going to take July off, because what else are we going to do? Ignore it? No. We won't do that. 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.
- fatjokes 5y ago
  Company-wide month off sounds amazing. Would you be willing to name it (would be great PR for them). If not, would you give a sense of geography, industry and size?
  - keehun 5y ago
    Based on his profile, seems like he is CEO/Founder of his place of work: > I'm Asim Aslam. The Founder CEO of Micro Services, Inc., creator of the open source cloud platform Micro and a technologist by training.
  - jedimastert 5y ago
    Took a look at their bio, then website, they appear to be "The Founder CEO of Micro Services, Inc."
  - dnate 5y ago
    Size of 9 employees according to linkedin
  - Jommi 5y ago
    this happens at every company in most nordic countries. You take 1-2 months of every summer.
- silicon2401 5y ago
  This is a very subjective statement. The pandemic has been bar none the best period of my life. Increased physical and social distance from other people, no need to emote in public thanks to masks, no need to commute, greater accommodation for non-social options like self-checkouts. My physical and mental health have skyrocketed, and as a result I feel like I've been on vacation for a year and half, despite only taking about 3 days of vacation the entire time and starting a new and more intense job. 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.
  - shmel 5y ago
    I keep hearing this over and over. I get it, some people are fairly introverted, some really enjoy WFH. 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?
    - geerlingguy 5y ago
      Not speaking to the other points, but I did notice many stores completely reconfigured the checkouts in my area; before the pandemic there were few very tiny self checkout stalls, and there was always a long line of people with just a few items. 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...).
    - zerkten 5y ago
      > But what stopped you from distancing from people and using self-checkouts before the pandemic? 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.
- ezxCKAz4W 5y ago
  > Because covid was an incredibly hard period for all of us and we as humans need a break. 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.
- baud147258 5y ago
  Maybe it's because I already got a lot of PTO (7 weeks a years, which is standard on this side of the Atlantic), but mandating time off for all the company seems a bit much over letting employee choose when they want to take some PTO
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    That is not standard in Europe. Speaking for Ireland and the UK, I believe that the standard is 4 weeks (20 days) plus public holidays. I would absolutely love it if this became standard, though ;)
  - balfirevic 5y ago
    > 7 weeks a years, which is standard on this side of the Atlantic It's not, although it might be in your particular country.
- dominotw 5y ago
  > Because covid was an incredibly hard period for all of us 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.
- dandersh 5y ago
  God I wished I worked there. Even without Covid this past year would have been tremendously hard on me. When I've talked to my manager about what I've been going through and explaining how it's impacted my performance I get the "Yea it's been a rough year for everyone" bit. 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.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > Because covid was an incredibly hard period for all of us and we as humans need a break. 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.
- Taylor_OD 5y ago
  Yeah I wish more companies would give an extra week of pto this year. Like I didn't leave my house for a year and a half and worked pretty much that whole time without a break while the world felt like it was falling apart. Can I an extra week to make up for that?
- epage 5y ago
  My company has been springkling extra days off throughout the year ("day for me") and its been great. 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).
- daybadone 5y ago
  What would I do with time off? Thanks to questioning things and generally being a blunt person I no longer have anyone willing to speak to me outside of work colleagues who must do so for work. Family and partner all gone before covid. I've been here in a room by myself wfh doing nothing else, seeing noone, since marchc 2020 and there is now noone to see. Time off MEANS NOTHING now. No-one can give me back my life from 2019, and no-one who supportes the anti covid measures that stripped away everything else is likely to consider it a loss. I have nothing but work left. I also do not like my job and seriously struggle to focus for more than a minute as it's all so FUCKING MEANINGLESS.
curiousgal 5y ago
Maybe I am too naive but what the heck are they overworking on? It's an app with some basic functionality. Is software dev in such a sad state that you can't deliver a self-standing product that doesn't require teams working overtime to keep it running? I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers which are the only two things that jump to mind as being labor-intensive for a an app with millions of users
- blowski 5y ago
  Complexity expands to fit the available budget.
- fatjokes 5y ago
  They had an IPO and their user count spiked. The former requires a ton of work on the finance/management team (great writeup here on HN recently. The link evades me). The latter probably necessitated some rearchitecturing.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  Perhaps it's user moderation? 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 https://team.bumble.com/open-roles
- afavour 5y ago
  FTA: “Bumble has had a busier year than most firms, with a stock market debut, and rapid growth in user numbers.” 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.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
joegahona 5y ago
I would love to know how they are measuring the success of this measure -- and I'm not being cynical. How would one even begin to weigh the tradeoffs of closing business for everyone for an entire week against the increased productivity upon return and something woolly like "improved morale." What if giving everyone a week of twice a year was actually beneficial to the company? Or even quarterly? Many companies already have an unspoken/informal week off between Christmas and New Year's. 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.
- gpm 5y ago
  Some things can't really be measured numerically, I think this is one. 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.
  - handmodel 5y ago
    I think the argument would be that this actually could be measured short term (probably all the staff will say they feel better in two weeks) but if in Q3 the CEO realizes they need to roll out some features before a Q4 quarterly call then what could have been a 12 week project will turn into a cramped 10 week project.
    - ryandrake 5y ago
      Yea, this is what always gets me about taking personal vacation time. You take a week off, but that week isn't yours for free. Your expected work keeps accumulating during that week. You're just taking a week of time-debt which you will need to pay off in the form of much higher workload over the following few weeks. I wouldn't be surprised if these employees all get back to work and find their workload doubles for a time just to catch back up!
christkv 5y ago
Minus the poor schmucks stuck in ops I bet.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  > A spokeswoman for Bumble said a few customer support staff will be working in case any of the app's users experience issues. These employees will then be given time off to make sure they take a whole week of leave.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    That's still not ops, but I assume they just forget to mention them.
    - bidirectional 5y ago
      I'd say in spokeperson-speak, ops falls under customer support.
  - thrower123 5y ago
    Dollars to donuts, those aren't "employees", they're contracted folks in a battery cage in Bangalore.
melomal 5y ago
Sounds like a bit of sleazy PR to me. Considering the roots of this entire platform...
nefasti 5y ago
1 week! Love the benevolent leaders of our industry /s
- alimbada 5y ago
  One week in addition to normal holiday allowance.
  - Liquidor 5y ago
    Which is how much...?
    - Loughla 5y ago
      And in addition to that, what is the company culture/attitude around using time off. Unlimited time off is great, in theory, unless you're made to feel like a monster for using any.
    - Symbiote 5y ago
      The legal minimum is 20 days for the London office, 22 in Spain, at least that in Moscow. (This is in addition to public holidays.) Bumble probably offer a bit more. 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.)
      - bidirectional 5y ago
        I don't think it is a requirement to take all holiday in the UK? I've definitely not used all of mine in the past.
        Symbiote 5y ago
        The Northern Ireland link was easier to find: > 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". https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/taking-your-holidays https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/taking-your-holidays
corytheboyd 5y ago
Hopefully they can get to a place where people are empowered to regularly take time off when needed!
barbazoo 5y ago
> collective burnout > 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.
- michaelgrafl 5y ago
  Yes. It's a bad sign that it had come to this in the first place.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  Yeah, my personal experience over the past 18 months has led to some changes in how I view the structure of work. 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.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Are you someone who likes firm boundaries between work and life?
    - jkhdigital 5y ago
      I wouldn't say I like boundaries; it's just that without them my mental health suffers greatly. And I'm terrible at constructing and enforcing those boundaries on my own.
  - pschuegr 5y ago
    +1 If you can find a place where the work is more about doing something than figuring out what to do, this sounds fantastic.
ape4 5y ago
700 employees seems like alot
- motohagiography 5y ago
  It does until you mix that with all the employee perks and see that it could very well be strategic. 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
notyourday 5y ago
Are they taking the app down? Because no matter what people think even that "serverless", "cloud", "automated", "containers", "super-redundant" thing does not run without engineering and ops.
- kevinventullo 5y ago
  The article said there will be some support staff remaining who will then take their week off at a later time.
underseacables 5y ago
Burnt out ..at a dating app? I would love to know what’s going on behind the scenes that brought this about.
dogman144 5y ago
My small-ish SaaS company in the US gave us all a European Christmas, Dec 24-Jan 2 totally off last year, short of on-call for P0 events. It Really made a difference. It was sub 100 headcount, but the SaaS supported a few major chains. 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.
deregulateMed 5y ago
I never found vacations to be useful for burnout. 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.
- jcadam 5y ago
  switching to a new project (or job) is generally the best thing for burnout as a dev. But a vacation is good for other reasons.
  - timeandmoney 5y ago
    > switching to a new project (or job) is generally the best thing for burnout as a dev. This works for me, but it is a very short term solution, about 6-12months in it always seems to creep back.
    - jcadam 5y ago
      I know what you mean. Just gotta keep switching, I guess. My current job has me working short duration R&D projects, which seems to help.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  whenever i go on vacation the first day or two are fun and relaxing but eventually i spend the rest of the week wishing i was back at work
  - 55555 5y ago
    I feel this, but for me that means I haven't gotten fully into vacation mode. The goal is to not think about work at all, and don't do any. Once that feeling goes away, you're on vacation. It takes me ~2 eventful fun days. I can tell I've gotten into vacation flow when I go back to work and the first 2 days back are just as difficult.
  - 5y ago
FunnyLookinHat 5y ago
This is excellent. 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.
- allannienhuis 5y ago
  Ours did the same thing, although we generally vote on which friday it will be for the upcoming month - people often choose to line it up with another stat holiday to make 4 day weekends. I agree that the empathy part of this really means a lot to people. I'm really curious how long we'll keep that in place, especially after re-opening the physical offices.
  - FunnyLookinHat 5y ago
    Ironically, our last one was this past Friday. 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.
allochthon 5y ago
I've been working remotely for about five years, now, and I love it. I've always been curious about working at Twitter and Google, and I was vaguely hoping that they'd start looking at full-time remote hires across their engineering orgs. I value remote work more than I do the possibility of working at Twitter or Google, so it is a little wistfully that I realize I might never follow up on that curiosity.
- Benjammer 5y ago
  I know for a fact that at least some teams at Google are hiring for full-time remote right now.
- fruzz 5y ago
  I think you're right, but I don't think this organizational discomfort with remote work will be true of the next batch of hip companies to work at. So you may yet get your chance. :)
- bern4444 5y ago
  Twitter allows for full time remote. They were one of the first companies to announce it with COVID [0] [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/01/twitter-work-from-home/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/01/twitter...
  - allochthon 5y ago
    I was trying to make sense of these lines from the article. I probably misunderstood. > 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.
    - bern4444 5y ago
      Gotcha, yeah I know for sure twitter is allowing 100% remote. People will have the option to go to an office if they want at Twitter but there's no requirement or need to apply like what you're saying google is doing. Though, google has way more employees than twitter I believe (5,000+ vs 130,000+)
dharmab 5y ago
Adobe does two of these every year, one in winter around the holidays and one in July. From my perspective as an individual contributor, there are a few advantages: - 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.
- tolbish 5y ago
  I wonder if it would be substantially more effective to prevent burnout by having shorter work days or work weeks.
  - dec0dedab0de 5y ago
    I think it would be but I also would like forced time off as well. As well as forced socializing with team mates. And a sabbatical every 5 years or so. 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.
    - dharmab 5y ago
      Adobe also does a sabbatical every 5 years!
    - StevePerkins 5y ago
      > As well as forced socializing with team mates. 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.
slumdev 5y ago
WTF are they doing to burn out the employees? How hard could a dating app company possibly have to work to make money? They're not exactly selling ice cream to Eskimos.
dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
It's called paid vacation in Europe and all citizens have the right to at least 4 weeks per year. I hope this boon arrives to the whole of USA one day, together with paternal holidays, free education and other modern achievements that are standard here. I don't mean to be inflammatory here, it really boggles my mind how a week off is even a thing we're discussing here.
- allannienhuis 5y ago
  pretty sure that they're talking about giving an EXTRA week of time off on top of whatever normal PTO/vaction time they have.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
    Of course, but for all we know this extra week could be the only paid vacation they have since for some reason in the USA there is no concept of mandatory paid vacation.
    - flavius29663 5y ago
      > for all we know 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.
      - dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
        > Most US tech workers have around 20 days of PTO 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-Benchmarking-Report-AHR.pdf https://www.advanced-hr.com/vcReport/2016-Sequoia-Benchmarki...
fellowniusmonk 5y ago
I know this is a little weird, but everyone I know in downtown Austin (where bumble has their offices) had a marked increase in despair/depressive symptoms with the summer jump in heat. 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.
boringg 5y ago
Does one week really resolve it or does it just restart with added pressure? Feels like they might need to pull 2 - 3 weeks to really take pressure off.
vishnugupta 5y ago
For me, the best part of Christmas & new year holidays was the entire company (HQed in west) shuts down. Without exception almost every single office across the world shuts down. It means absolute radio silence, no emails, no slack messages, no nothing. I realised the usefulness of it only when I recently experienced it first hand. 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.
alangibson 5y ago
The real story here is that this is news. It's common for most European businesses for 2 weeks every year in the summer. It's a non-optional, lights out, GTFO shutdown.
- xrstf 5y ago
  Can you give some examples? I live in Europe and have never experienced that in my country suddenly everything stops for 2 weeks in the middle of the summer.
  - alangibson 5y ago
    I should have specified countries I guess. Austria, Germany and Netherlands for sure. Others I'm told but have not directly experienced it.
    - xrstf 5y ago
      Citation needed. Germans do not quit working for 2 weeks in the summer. Where did you get that from? What German companies shut down for 2 weeks in the summer of 2019?
      - alangibson 5y ago
        There's even a word for it. Google Betriebsurlaub. 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.
        xrstf 5y ago
        Yeah, your first comment made it sound to me like the country shuts down (grocery stores, home improvement stores, furnite stores, banks, offices, government agencies, taxis, ...) ;-) I found one Austrian source ( https://www.vol.at/wo-die-produktion-urlaub-macht/3314076 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.
ok_coo 5y ago
I've been burnt out bad before and a week isn't enough. 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.
tibbydudeza 5y ago
Two weeks a year is not enough vacation time.
ElijahLynn 5y ago
My takeaway from this, in addition to it being awesome, is that this likely means that many others are feeling what you are feeling as well, if you are in fact feeling burnt-out too.
rektide 5y ago
1 point by rektide 32 minutes ago | parent | edit | delete [–] | on: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's b... 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-roadmap/ https://larahogan.me/blog/we-need-to-talk-about-your-q3-road...

184 points by dustinmoris 5y ago

asim 5y ago

Good. We're taking all of July off at my company. Why? Because covid was an incredibly hard period for all of us and we as humans need a break. Somehow we all just seem to expect things to keep going like nothing changed. We all just seem to be expected to gloss over the pains of isolation, potential death and stress of work and life with no separation or boundaries. We made a conscious decision at my place of work to actually acknowledge the difficulties we've all been through and we're just going to take July off, because what else are we going to do? Ignore it? No. We won't do that. 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.

fatjokes 5y ago
Company-wide month off sounds amazing. Would you be willing to name it (would be great PR for them). If not, would you give a sense of geography, industry and size?
- keehun 5y ago
  Based on his profile, seems like he is CEO/Founder of his place of work: > I'm Asim Aslam. The Founder CEO of Micro Services, Inc., creator of the open source cloud platform Micro and a technologist by training.
- jedimastert 5y ago
  Took a look at their bio, then website, they appear to be "The Founder CEO of Micro Services, Inc."
- dnate 5y ago
  Size of 9 employees according to linkedin
- Jommi 5y ago
  this happens at every company in most nordic countries. You take 1-2 months of every summer.
silicon2401 5y ago
This is a very subjective statement. The pandemic has been bar none the best period of my life. Increased physical and social distance from other people, no need to emote in public thanks to masks, no need to commute, greater accommodation for non-social options like self-checkouts. My physical and mental health have skyrocketed, and as a result I feel like I've been on vacation for a year and half, despite only taking about 3 days of vacation the entire time and starting a new and more intense job. 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.
- shmel 5y ago
  I keep hearing this over and over. I get it, some people are fairly introverted, some really enjoy WFH. 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?
  - geerlingguy 5y ago
    Not speaking to the other points, but I did notice many stores completely reconfigured the checkouts in my area; before the pandemic there were few very tiny self checkout stalls, and there was always a long line of people with just a few items. 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...).
  - zerkten 5y ago
    > But what stopped you from distancing from people and using self-checkouts before the pandemic? 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.
ezxCKAz4W 5y ago
> Because covid was an incredibly hard period for all of us and we as humans need a break. 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.
baud147258 5y ago
Maybe it's because I already got a lot of PTO (7 weeks a years, which is standard on this side of the Atlantic), but mandating time off for all the company seems a bit much over letting employee choose when they want to take some PTO
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  That is not standard in Europe. Speaking for Ireland and the UK, I believe that the standard is 4 weeks (20 days) plus public holidays. I would absolutely love it if this became standard, though ;)
- balfirevic 5y ago
  > 7 weeks a years, which is standard on this side of the Atlantic It's not, although it might be in your particular country.
dominotw 5y ago
> Because covid was an incredibly hard period for all of us 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.
dandersh 5y ago
God I wished I worked there. Even without Covid this past year would have been tremendously hard on me. When I've talked to my manager about what I've been going through and explaining how it's impacted my performance I get the "Yea it's been a rough year for everyone" bit. 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.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> Because covid was an incredibly hard period for all of us and we as humans need a break. 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.
Taylor_OD 5y ago
Yeah I wish more companies would give an extra week of pto this year. Like I didn't leave my house for a year and a half and worked pretty much that whole time without a break while the world felt like it was falling apart. Can I an extra week to make up for that?
epage 5y ago
My company has been springkling extra days off throughout the year ("day for me") and its been great. 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).
daybadone 5y ago
What would I do with time off? Thanks to questioning things and generally being a blunt person I no longer have anyone willing to speak to me outside of work colleagues who must do so for work. Family and partner all gone before covid. I've been here in a room by myself wfh doing nothing else, seeing noone, since marchc 2020 and there is now noone to see. Time off MEANS NOTHING now. No-one can give me back my life from 2019, and no-one who supportes the anti covid measures that stripped away everything else is likely to consider it a loss. I have nothing but work left. I also do not like my job and seriously struggle to focus for more than a minute as it's all so FUCKING MEANINGLESS.

curiousgal 5y ago

Maybe I am too naive but what the heck are they overworking on? It's an app with some basic functionality. Is software dev in such a sad state that you can't deliver a self-standing product that doesn't require teams working overtime to keep it running? I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers which are the only two things that jump to mind as being labor-intensive for a an app with millions of users

blowski 5y ago
Complexity expands to fit the available budget.
fatjokes 5y ago
They had an IPO and their user count spiked. The former requires a ton of work on the finance/management team (great writeup here on HN recently. The link evades me). The latter probably necessitated some rearchitecturing.
Symbiote 5y ago
Perhaps it's user moderation? 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 https://team.bumble.com/open-roles
afavour 5y ago
FTA: “Bumble has had a busier year than most firms, with a stock market debut, and rapid growth in user numbers.” 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.
SketchySeaBeast 5y ago

joegahona 5y ago

I would love to know how they are measuring the success of this measure -- and I'm not being cynical. How would one even begin to weigh the tradeoffs of closing business for everyone for an entire week against the increased productivity upon return and something woolly like "improved morale." What if giving everyone a week of twice a year was actually beneficial to the company? Or even quarterly? Many companies already have an unspoken/informal week off between Christmas and New Year's. 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.

gpm 5y ago
Some things can't really be measured numerically, I think this is one. 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.
- handmodel 5y ago
  I think the argument would be that this actually could be measured short term (probably all the staff will say they feel better in two weeks) but if in Q3 the CEO realizes they need to roll out some features before a Q4 quarterly call then what could have been a 12 week project will turn into a cramped 10 week project.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    Yea, this is what always gets me about taking personal vacation time. You take a week off, but that week isn't yours for free. Your expected work keeps accumulating during that week. You're just taking a week of time-debt which you will need to pay off in the form of much higher workload over the following few weeks. I wouldn't be surprised if these employees all get back to work and find their workload doubles for a time just to catch back up!

christkv 5y ago

Minus the poor schmucks stuck in ops I bet.

Symbiote 5y ago
> A spokeswoman for Bumble said a few customer support staff will be working in case any of the app's users experience issues. These employees will then be given time off to make sure they take a whole week of leave.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  That's still not ops, but I assume they just forget to mention them.
  - bidirectional 5y ago
    I'd say in spokeperson-speak, ops falls under customer support.
- thrower123 5y ago
  Dollars to donuts, those aren't "employees", they're contracted folks in a battery cage in Bangalore.

melomal 5y ago

Sounds like a bit of sleazy PR to me. Considering the roots of this entire platform...

nefasti 5y ago

1 week! Love the benevolent leaders of our industry /s

alimbada 5y ago
One week in addition to normal holiday allowance.
- Liquidor 5y ago
  Which is how much...?
  - Loughla 5y ago
    And in addition to that, what is the company culture/attitude around using time off. Unlimited time off is great, in theory, unless you're made to feel like a monster for using any.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    The legal minimum is 20 days for the London office, 22 in Spain, at least that in Moscow. (This is in addition to public holidays.) Bumble probably offer a bit more. 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.)
    - bidirectional 5y ago
      I don't think it is a requirement to take all holiday in the UK? I've definitely not used all of mine in the past.
      - Symbiote 5y ago
        The Northern Ireland link was easier to find: > 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". https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/taking-your-holidays https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/taking-your-holidays

corytheboyd 5y ago

Hopefully they can get to a place where people are empowered to regularly take time off when needed!

barbazoo 5y ago

> collective burnout > 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.

michaelgrafl 5y ago
Yes. It's a bad sign that it had come to this in the first place.
jkhdigital 5y ago
Yeah, my personal experience over the past 18 months has led to some changes in how I view the structure of work. 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.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Are you someone who likes firm boundaries between work and life?
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    I wouldn't say I like boundaries; it's just that without them my mental health suffers greatly. And I'm terrible at constructing and enforcing those boundaries on my own.
- pschuegr 5y ago
  +1 If you can find a place where the work is more about doing something than figuring out what to do, this sounds fantastic.

ape4 5y ago

700 employees seems like alot

motohagiography 5y ago
It does until you mix that with all the employee perks and see that it could very well be strategic. 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

notyourday 5y ago

Are they taking the app down? Because no matter what people think even that "serverless", "cloud", "automated", "containers", "super-redundant" thing does not run without engineering and ops.

kevinventullo 5y ago
The article said there will be some support staff remaining who will then take their week off at a later time.

underseacables 5y ago

Burnt out ..at a dating app? I would love to know what’s going on behind the scenes that brought this about.

dogman144 5y ago

My small-ish SaaS company in the US gave us all a European Christmas, Dec 24-Jan 2 totally off last year, short of on-call for P0 events. It Really made a difference. It was sub 100 headcount, but the SaaS supported a few major chains. 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.

deregulateMed 5y ago

I never found vacations to be useful for burnout. 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.

jcadam 5y ago
switching to a new project (or job) is generally the best thing for burnout as a dev. But a vacation is good for other reasons.
- timeandmoney 5y ago
  > switching to a new project (or job) is generally the best thing for burnout as a dev. This works for me, but it is a very short term solution, about 6-12months in it always seems to creep back.
  - jcadam 5y ago
    I know what you mean. Just gotta keep switching, I guess. My current job has me working short duration R&D projects, which seems to help.
missedthecue 5y ago
whenever i go on vacation the first day or two are fun and relaxing but eventually i spend the rest of the week wishing i was back at work
- 55555 5y ago
  I feel this, but for me that means I haven't gotten fully into vacation mode. The goal is to not think about work at all, and don't do any. Once that feeling goes away, you're on vacation. It takes me ~2 eventful fun days. I can tell I've gotten into vacation flow when I go back to work and the first 2 days back are just as difficult.
- 5y ago

FunnyLookinHat 5y ago

This is excellent. 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.

allannienhuis 5y ago
Ours did the same thing, although we generally vote on which friday it will be for the upcoming month - people often choose to line it up with another stat holiday to make 4 day weekends. I agree that the empathy part of this really means a lot to people. I'm really curious how long we'll keep that in place, especially after re-opening the physical offices.
- FunnyLookinHat 5y ago
  Ironically, our last one was this past Friday. 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.

allochthon 5y ago

I've been working remotely for about five years, now, and I love it. I've always been curious about working at Twitter and Google, and I was vaguely hoping that they'd start looking at full-time remote hires across their engineering orgs. I value remote work more than I do the possibility of working at Twitter or Google, so it is a little wistfully that I realize I might never follow up on that curiosity.

Benjammer 5y ago
I know for a fact that at least some teams at Google are hiring for full-time remote right now.
fruzz 5y ago
I think you're right, but I don't think this organizational discomfort with remote work will be true of the next batch of hip companies to work at. So you may yet get your chance. :)
bern4444 5y ago
Twitter allows for full time remote. They were one of the first companies to announce it with COVID [0] [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/01/twitter-work-from-home/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/01/twitter...
- allochthon 5y ago
  I was trying to make sense of these lines from the article. I probably misunderstood. > 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.
  - bern4444 5y ago
    Gotcha, yeah I know for sure twitter is allowing 100% remote. People will have the option to go to an office if they want at Twitter but there's no requirement or need to apply like what you're saying google is doing. Though, google has way more employees than twitter I believe (5,000+ vs 130,000+)

dharmab 5y ago

Adobe does two of these every year, one in winter around the holidays and one in July. From my perspective as an individual contributor, there are a few advantages: - 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.

tolbish 5y ago
I wonder if it would be substantially more effective to prevent burnout by having shorter work days or work weeks.
- dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  I think it would be but I also would like forced time off as well. As well as forced socializing with team mates. And a sabbatical every 5 years or so. 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.
  - dharmab 5y ago
    Adobe also does a sabbatical every 5 years!
  - StevePerkins 5y ago
    > As well as forced socializing with team mates. 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.

slumdev 5y ago

WTF are they doing to burn out the employees? How hard could a dating app company possibly have to work to make money? They're not exactly selling ice cream to Eskimos.

dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago

It's called paid vacation in Europe and all citizens have the right to at least 4 weeks per year. I hope this boon arrives to the whole of USA one day, together with paternal holidays, free education and other modern achievements that are standard here. I don't mean to be inflammatory here, it really boggles my mind how a week off is even a thing we're discussing here.

allannienhuis 5y ago
pretty sure that they're talking about giving an EXTRA week of time off on top of whatever normal PTO/vaction time they have.
- dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
  Of course, but for all we know this extra week could be the only paid vacation they have since for some reason in the USA there is no concept of mandatory paid vacation.
  - flavius29663 5y ago
    > for all we know 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.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
      > Most US tech workers have around 20 days of PTO 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-Benchmarking-Report-AHR.pdf https://www.advanced-hr.com/vcReport/2016-Sequoia-Benchmarki...

fellowniusmonk 5y ago

I know this is a little weird, but everyone I know in downtown Austin (where bumble has their offices) had a marked increase in despair/depressive symptoms with the summer jump in heat. 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.

boringg 5y ago

Does one week really resolve it or does it just restart with added pressure? Feels like they might need to pull 2 - 3 weeks to really take pressure off.

vishnugupta 5y ago

For me, the best part of Christmas & new year holidays was the entire company (HQed in west) shuts down. Without exception almost every single office across the world shuts down. It means absolute radio silence, no emails, no slack messages, no nothing. I realised the usefulness of it only when I recently experienced it first hand. 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.

alangibson 5y ago

The real story here is that this is news. It's common for most European businesses for 2 weeks every year in the summer. It's a non-optional, lights out, GTFO shutdown.

xrstf 5y ago
Can you give some examples? I live in Europe and have never experienced that in my country suddenly everything stops for 2 weeks in the middle of the summer.
- alangibson 5y ago
  I should have specified countries I guess. Austria, Germany and Netherlands for sure. Others I'm told but have not directly experienced it.
  - xrstf 5y ago
    Citation needed. Germans do not quit working for 2 weeks in the summer. Where did you get that from? What German companies shut down for 2 weeks in the summer of 2019?
    - alangibson 5y ago
      There's even a word for it. Google Betriebsurlaub. 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.
      - xrstf 5y ago
        Yeah, your first comment made it sound to me like the country shuts down (grocery stores, home improvement stores, furnite stores, banks, offices, government agencies, taxis, ...) ;-) I found one Austrian source ( https://www.vol.at/wo-die-produktion-urlaub-macht/3314076 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.

ok_coo 5y ago

I've been burnt out bad before and a week isn't enough. 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.

tibbydudeza 5y ago

Two weeks a year is not enough vacation time.

ElijahLynn 5y ago

My takeaway from this, in addition to it being awesome, is that this likely means that many others are feeling what you are feeling as well, if you are in fact feeling burnt-out too.

rektide 5y ago

1 point by rektide 32 minutes ago | parent | edit | delete [–] | on: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's b... 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-roadmap/ https://larahogan.me/blog/we-need-to-talk-about-your-q3-road...