Shortform reading

Tricia Hersey's learnings from her month-long Sabbath, in which she avoided "all social media, no events, no email, no discussing Nap Ministry work details, no bookings, and no traveling".

Salaks writes about burnout and some changes she made to her work schedule to ensure she was prioritizing what is important to her. She talks about how this was difficult for her, given her mindset about work, and how she's trying to change that.

McKinsey published their annual study of women in the workplace, which analyzes DI&B efforts in corporate America and the experiences of women in the workplace. This year's study found that women are experiencing significantly higher levels of burnout, while also stepping into leadership positions and taking on additional work to support their colleagues and teams. McKinsey found much of DI&B work is done by women, and they are largely going unrecognized for it. The study also found that women of color are continuing to have a worse experience at work, and "although the number of White employees who identify as allies to women of color has increased over the past year, the number taking key allyship actions has not." The study summarizes, "The path forward is clear. Companies need to take bold steps to address burnout. They need to recognize and reward the women leaders who are driving progress. And they need to do the deep cultural work required to create a workplace where all women feel valued."

Forsgren writes about measuring workplace productivity, and the limitations of using common metrics like lines of code or number of commits to do so. She speaks about a "more holistic framework" to measure productivity, which would factor in dimensions like satisfaction, well-being, communication, and collaboration, along with measurements of efficiency or output. She discusses how naive interpretations of GitHub statistics, which show increased time working, more code pushed, and faster merges since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, would suggest a positive outlook on productivity, but that these ignore the enormous amount of burnout and dissatisfaction in the tech industry that point to this being very unsustainable. While I like her idea of a holistic view of productivity, I am generally skeptical of telemetry and automated "measurements" of productivity, which I think do a disservice to workers.

Kaczorowski describes her recent experience with burnout, and how it's different from her experiences with the phenomenon before the pandemic began. She gives advice on how to treat people who are experiencing burnout, and she also talks about how she believes that there will be a massive amount of burnout (or people acting on current burnout) in the near future as people move past the uncertainty of the earlier portions of the pandemic.