Shanti’s Dispatches

Just came across this link: Dealing With Professional Burnout Without Quitting Your Job.

This one intrigues me:

Spend a week or two doing only the tasks you enjoy. Seriously. Just let the other stuff build up for a while. If a supervisor questions this, tell them that you’re working on higher-priority stuff, which is true - you’re trying to discover - or rediscover - the aspects of your job that bring about passion and excitement within you.

Probably not written by an IT professional.

Project Manager: Can you fix the XYZ bug that’s been a plague on our soul?
You: Oh.. yeah, let me see what I can do…

(2 weeks pass)

PM: Are you f***ing kidding me???

This would never happen in real life. If you have a PM that is doing their job, chances are your ass is busted within a few hours.

Startup Life vs. Task Balance

I think it would help to have some sort of self-selection of projects one works on. I hear Facebook works this way, as sort of one giant open source project from within. i.e. post a list of bugs/features/projects and let people try and snipe off the obvious fun ones. Assign out the dull / painful ones on an even basis.

There is always a slight chance that one interesting thing for one developer equals an exciting project for another. When this happens to be the case, it would be pretty insane to swap out which developer worked on which, just out of someone’s arbitrary opinion instead of the actual devs working on the items.

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos