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Employee Burnout Is a Problem with the Company, Not the Person (hbr.org)
Employee burnout is a common phenomenon, but it is one that companies tend to treat as a talent management or personal issue rather than a broader organizational challenge. That's a mistake, reads an article on HBR. From the article: The psychological and physical problems of burned-out employees, which cost an estimated $125 billion to $190 billion a year in healthcare spending in the U.S., are just the most obvious impacts. The true cost to business can be far greater, thanks to low productivity across organizations, high turnover, and the loss of the most capable talent. [...] When employees aren't as productive as they could be, it's usually the organization, not its employees, that is to blame. The same is true for employee burnout. When we looked inside companies with high burnout rates, we saw three common culprits: excessive collaboration, weak time management disciplines, and a tendency to overload the most capable with too much work. These forces not only rob employees of time to concentrate on completing complex tasks or for idea generation, they also crunch the downtime that is necessary for restoration.
Developers are so expensive and so hard to find that companies have to work the ones they have pretty hard and not allow them time off. I haven't had a full week off since 1993, and it sucks. Also, I typically lose two and a half weeks of vacation each year since I hit the accrual max. It gets old, but until there's enough developers, things are going to stay bad.
Agile is a manifesto that is hard to argue with.
Agile as implemented is usually scrum...which is a waste of time by design. Good teams can get results with any formal methodology, usually despite it.
The problem with agile is management ignores things like 'people over process' and 'hire competent, enthusiastic individuals' and only follow 'ship often' and 'talk to the client a lot'. Using agile as justification for constant spec drift and little thought going into the spec in the first place.
When someone claims they are 'agile' you should inquire further. The 'hire competent enthusiastic individuals' line has implications. Those people don't work for cheap. If a place is paying 'industry average', they aren't doing agile.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
And that poor unemployed slob who really wants to come back to work? Well, he "doesn't have the skills" .
For the two years (2009-10) I was out of work, hiring managers told me I was overqualified for minimum wage jobs and recruiters told me I was unemployable for anything else. I didn't listen to them. I got a weekend job for a moving company, working 20 hours per month for six months. The day after my Chapter Seven bankruptcy got finalized, I got a new fulltime job. I spent the next two years working seven days a week to rebuild my finances. As the economy got better, so did the jobs that got offered to me. Sometime you just have to hang in there until things get better.