DevRel Scribbles
  • What are Scribbles?
  • Index
  • Developer Advocacy
  • Developer Advocates
  • Life as a developer advocate
  • Modernising Red Hat’s enterprise developer program
  • Engaging 9-year-old software developers
  • Making 22-year-olds love 26-year-old software
  • Dogfooding developer products: gathering insights from internal hackathons
  • How far does your ethical responsibility stretch for the tech your devs create?
  • Outside the lecture theatre
  • How do you design programs for diversity?
  • Build the Platform Your Developers Actually Want
  • Measuring dev rel programs far beyond marketing activities
  • Developer Evangelism
    • Developer Evangelists
    • How to rock a technical keynote
    • The Art of Slide Design
    • The Art of Talk Design
    • The Art of Story Design
    • Dev events beyond 2021
  • Developer Experience
    • The Power of Content
    • Building a Developer Community in an Enterprise World
    • How to lose a dev in three ways
    • Developer relations, why is it needed?
    • The hierarchy of developer needs
    • GitHub is your documentation landing page
    • Docs as engineering
    • Commit messages vs. release notes
    • A11y pal(ly)- crafting universally good docs
    • Inspiring and empowering users to become great writers, and why that’s important
    • Solving internal technical documentation at Spotify
  • Community Management
    • Building community flywheels
    • DevRel = Community Management?
    • Creating high-quality communities
    • How to grow a healthy Open-Source community?
    • Managing communities at scale
    • Using community to drive growth
    • Useful community success metrics
    • Communities aren't funnels
    • How to mobilise your community during a pandemic
  • Managing a DevRel Team
    • Developer Relations + Product
    • Distributed developer relations
    • Understanding company goals
    • DevRel Qualified Leads (DQL)
    • Path to success for DevRel
    • How to move up in your organization
    • Four pillars of DevRel
    • Building your DevRel dream team
    • Managing the burnout burn-down
    • I messed up and I’m going to get fired
    • How to report on community relationships without being creepy about it
    • How to scale a developer relations team
  • Misc
    • Is developer relations right for you?
    • Tooling your way to a great DevRel Team
    • Planning your DevRel career
    • Success metrics as narratives
    • Get executive buy-in or else
    • Introduction to the AAARRRP devrel strategy framework
    • Strategy for developer outreach
    • Connecting dev rel and product
    • Performance DevRel
    • Ultimate cheat codes for healthier travel
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  • Summary:
  • Scribbles:
  • Causes of burnout in Tech
  • Definition
  • Symptoms of Burnout
  • Three Dimensions
  • Numbers
  • Effects
  • Common solutions to burnout
  • Burnout Resistant teams

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  1. Managing a DevRel Team

Managing the burnout burn-down

A research-based framework for recognising and managing overwork.

PreviousBuilding your DevRel dream teamNextI messed up and I’m going to get fired

Last updated 3 years ago

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Burnout is a recurring point of discussion amongst dev rel practitioners. What can we do to recognise and avoid burnout before it’s too late? Anjuan Simmons shares practical advice in this talk from DevRelCon London 2019.

Summary:

  • The emotional cost in the form of burnout in the software industry is unaccounted for.

  • Burnout leads to three major consequences

    • Exhaustion

    • Cynicism and detachment

    • Sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment

  • Taking a break from social media helps. If you can't do it permanently, restrict it to whatever's important.

  • Health -- burnout takes a physical toll on the body.

    • Staying hydrated.

    • Getting enough sleep.

    • Physical activity to keep your body moving.

Scribbles:

  • The emotional cost in the software industry is unaccounted for.

  • A lot of people forget about this emotional cost which is caused by burnout.

Causes of burnout in Tech

  • There's always new technologies and new tools and new frameworks that need to be learnt.

  • To always keep shipping -- always shipping code, values to customers and proving worth to the business.

  • Increased workload.

Definition

  • Psychological syndrome leads to three major consequences

    • Exhaustion

    • Cynicism and detachment

    • Sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment

Symptoms of Burnout

  • The ongoing feelings that today's resources aren't enough to meet tomorrow's demands.

Three Dimensions

  • Emotional Exhaustion

  • Depersonalisation

  • Reduced personal accomplishment

Numbers

  • Research by Gallup shows -- out of 7.5K employees, 23% reported feeling burned out at least sometimes.

  • Another 20% reported feeling burnout very often or always.

  • 40% felt burned out sometimes.

  • Around 2/3rd of full-time workers experience burnout on the job, i.e 66%

Highly engaged workforce tend to end deal with burnout and are the first ones around you who might be planning to exit.

Effects

  • Feelings tired and having stress, elevated blood pressure and increased heart rate.

  • Progression of mood from being sad, to being terrified to having outbursts of anger.

  • Bedridden or end up in emergency rooms cause they are "too tired" and "exhauster" from burnout.

Common solutions to burnout

Corporate solutions

  • Hiring coaches to tackle burnout in employees

Individual solution

  • Escapism

    • Nice vacation -- make sure you don't make vacation into work -- trying to click best pictures everywhere.

We try to do so much work to show we are not working.

Burndown chart

  • 50 in the image is 50 units of work, units can be anything based on your work.

  • The ideal line would be a straight line where every day an equal amount of work is done and by day 10 we get it down to zero.

  • If you are working under the line, then you are burning out.

Burnout Resistant teams

How to create teams that are burnout resistant?

  • Relationships

    • Developing connections

    • Engagement between coworkers

    • Get-togethers

  • Having a gift card that requires two people to use them.

  • Getting out and meeting in person and working together.

Video
Burnout Burndown Chat