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A comment on 83% of Developers Suffer from Burnout, Haystack Analytics Study Finds. Parent comment

Re:83% of Developers Suffer from Burnout, Haystack Analytics... by robin_reala on Thursday December 01, 2022 @08:21AM (#33815847)
You need to introduce firebreak sprints. Take a week off every fourth sprint (or whatever) and give devs the freedom to build whatever they think will need doing to make the system better overall. You’ll get a bunch of preventative maintenance that you knew needed doing but never found time to do, but you’ll also get the occasional mad idea that turns out to have big benefits.
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Re:83% of Developers Suffer from Burnout, Haystack Analytics... by nonethewiser on Thursday December 01, 2022 @08:29AM (#33815948)
I dont see why those ideas couldnt be identified and sprinkled into regular sprints.

The idea of a forced break to do these things implies they arent important. Otherwise they should already get picked up.

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Re:83% of Developers Suffer from Burnout, Haystack Analytics... by VyseofArcadia on Thursday December 01, 2022 @08:35AM (#33816005)
I've been in orgs in which developers are considered grunts and no one listens to their feedback. It's not that they aren't important, it's that the PMs/managers/whatever know better.

I see firebreak sprints as a symptom of an org not valuing engineer feedback. "Let the grunts blow off some steam or they'll get disgruntled and leave."

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Re:83% of Developers Suffer from Burnout, Haystack Analytics... by micromacrofoot on Thursday December 01, 2022 @08:46AM (#33816120)
because sprints don’t allow the idle time that’s often needed to come up with such ideas. I could probably work for a year on “oh I’ve been meaning to look into that” tasks that have no clear outcome
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Re:83% of Developers Suffer from Burnout, Haystack Analytics... by danuker on Thursday December 01, 2022 @08:28AM (#33815927)
Firebreak tasks (not sprints) should be taken naturally as prioritization chooses them over other tasks.

Sadly, with higher interest rates, there is a pressure to produce results in the short-term, at the expense of long-term investments.

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Re:83% of Developers Suffer from Burnout, Haystack Analytics... by piva00 on Thursday December 01, 2022 @10:03AM (#33817103)
Higher interests or not the pressure to deliver value and growth every quarter has always been present. In tech especially as we're seen as a hypergrowth model and not growing quickly every quarter is a sign of failure to the expectations of the market™.

I've been working in this industry for 18 years, in different countries with different central banks rates and macroeconomics conditions, it's always been the exact same.

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