How to spot symptoms of burnout on your engineering team
<p><pre><code>  How do you spot this symptom? It might be 
  that a team member isn’t commenting on pull 
  requests as much as she used to. Or he’s not 
  speaking up in sprint planning and retrospective 
  meetings. 
</code></pre>
Ha ha! Oh god.<p>This is basically the worst thing I&#x27;ve ever read. And why? I think you already know, but let me tell you anyway!<p>Meetings are bullshit. At all times they are unrealistic. There is what people say during a meeting, and then there is what actually happens during the interplay of the group dynamic, as work gets done.<p>Sit at tables all day, and bullshit about diagrams and ideas, with zero concrete examples, and some ham fisted emails where people dump screenshots into MS Word documents, and then forward as email attachments, with captions like &quot;it&#x27;s broken. fix it.&quot;<p>Then go and try to write some code, and see what happens when someone else in the meeting drops a JSON object on you, that has half the properties you need to do anything, and most of them are in the wrong place, or at magic number slots in an array or something.<p>You have to have your head up your ass, to expect people to be chipper little busy bees at all times, and then write feel-good blogarticles like this.<p>But you have to be Satan himself, to put an article like this in front of a so called &quot;scrum master&quot; and tell them that happy thoughts at all times are the only &quot;normal&quot; that is the correct and proper Normal, and all other &quot;normals&quot; are actually signs of workplace PTSD.<p>Now uppity tough guy managers will bring motherfuckers in for review only to remind them that they forgot their flair, and they seem to have a case of the Mondays lately, and ask them to put on a happy face, and pitch in for the big win!<p>That&#x27;s not how it works.<p>You have a team dynamic, and that team dynamic doesn&#x27;t change if your team members are supporting a &quot;Sick System.&quot; A Sick System is doomed to be inefficient, and foments disappointment, because the process is inefficient by design, but doubly punishing when hopeless, lost people are involved.<p>But even so, different team members have different perceptions of progress, based on skill level and experience. So one individual may be happy with the current sick system, because it&#x27;s an improvement from their last shit show, while another will be fucking miserable because this is the tenth motherfucking shit show they&#x27;ve had to tap dance in, and the routine never fucking changes.<p>If you&#x27;re looking for symptoms of cynicism after they happened, then it&#x27;s too late. You don&#x27;t understand how they happen, why they exist, or how to prevent them before they occur. If you can&#x27;t prevent a loss of enthusiasm and morale, and expect all hands to express the same cordial cookie cutter productivity, then you are already lost at sea.