A presentation at PagerDuty Summit in in San Francisco, CA, USA by Dawn Parzych
Recognizing and recovering from burnout Dawn Parzych Developer Advocate dparzych @dparzych
Who am I? Developer Advocate Experienced burnout twice Advanced psychology degree Mom @dparzych @dparzych
Disclaimer I am not a medical professional and cannot diagnose or recommend treatment for any disease. The experiences I share are mine and represent my personal experiences. This talk will mention anxiety, trauma, and depression. Please be responsible for your health and well-being. I will not be offended if you need to leave at any time. @dparzych @dparzych
Stress -> Anxiety - > Burnout @dparzych @dparzych
Who experiences burnout? @dparzych
“Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” @dparzych @dparzych
People constantly exhausted because of work @dparzych @dparzych
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Common work stressors Schedules & deadlines Changes Added responsibilities Colleagues & customers @dparzych
New technology is raising customer expectations at breakneck pace. @dparzych
Doesn’t matter if you’re B2B or B2C… Customers are pushing companies to do better. Customized Experiences Always Available Instant Value 100% Reliability Fast Performance Bug Free Latest Innovation Cross-Platform Consistency Mobile First @dparzych @dparzych @dparzych
“Burnout can show up when leaders equate long hours with getting ahead, when there’s an implicit expectation that staff should come to work despite mental and physical illness.” @dparzych @dparzych
Hero mentality @dparzych @dparzych
@dparzych @dparzych Art courtesy of Denise Yu - http://www.deniseyu.io/art
“When systems are compromised by intruders, investigation and remediation can take even longer—and these periods of incident resolution are intensive and exhausting” Accelerate: State of DevOps 2018 @dparzych @dparzych
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Imbalance in workload @dparzych @dparzych
Autonomy and control @dparzych @dparzych
Rewards @dparzych @dparzych
Workplace community @dparzych @dparzych
Fairness @dparzych @dparzych
Values and ethics @dparzych @dparzych
Recognizing burnout? @dparzych @dparzych
Reducing and recovering from burnout @dparzych @dparzych
Community care @dparzych @dparzych @dparzych
What can managers/companies do? @dparzych @dparzych
Common techniques to “fix” burnout Check-in Don’t overschedule Flex time @dparzych @dparzych
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The pressure is on… How do you provide more value faster without sacrificing quality and your employees health? TIME TO VALUE @dparzych @dparzych @dparzych
Elite companies ship 2,555x faster & fail 7x less than the slow performers. Shrinking time between deploys from months to minutes. 46x more frequent code deployments 2018 DORA State of DevOps Report 2,555x faster lead time from commit to deploy 7x lower change failure rate (Changes are 1/7 as likely to fail) 2,604x faster time to recover from incidents @dparzych @dparzych
They found a better way to deliver change and stay ahead of competition. @dparzych @dparzych
Build Progressive delivery Test in production Targeted rollouts Canary launch @dparzych
Operate Kill switch Service metrics Dynamic configuration Safe migrations @dparzych
What can you do? @dparzych
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Resources ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● https://github.com/thesarahhagan/SEA-DevOps https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/burnout-and-the-brain https://circleci.com/blog/how-i-came-back-from-burnout-by-learning-to-lean-on-my-team/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/nomanazish/2019/05/30/how-to-de-stress-in-5-minutes-or-le ss-according-to-a-navy-seal/#1d788c773046 https://www.mindgarden.com/117-maslach-burnout-inventory https://www.mindgarden.com/274-areas-of-worklife-survey https://selfcare.tech/ https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTCS_08.htm https://medium.com/@devonprice/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01 https://mashable.com/article/community-care-versus-self-care/ @dparzych
To download slides and/or get a LaunchDarkly t-shirt: http://www.launchdarkly.com/dawn @dparzych
Teams work hard to build resilient systems and ensure high availability, but they don’t always see the impact this has on those supporting these services. We praise teams and individuals for going the extra mile or solving incidents while on vacation. We label these people rockstars when things go wrong. We take time to conduct a post-incident retrospective, yet we don’t ask the problem-solver how they are doing and whether they need time to recover. You can only give 110% for so long before you burnout. Dawn Parzych, Developer Advocate at LaunchDarkly, will explore what we can do to avoid burnout in ourselves and others.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
Repository of self-care resources for developers & others
If you think you are experiencing burnout, please seek assistance from a medical or mental health professional, do not rely solely on on-line tests for diagnosis and help.
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