Daily standups and a fear of being &quot;caught&quot; on those days where you maybe spent the whole day getting around to doing something that would take you 30 minutes in the zone add to the stress. Standups become vague&#x2F;dishonest to further hide the issue. The truth is sometimes you just need to blow off the whole day, maybe even a whole few days. A lot of devs actually understand needing to take random days off here and there even without having underlying issues. But it&#x27;s hard to justify to managers taking those off, even if unpaid (let alone a random week off after you&#x27;ve determined Monday morning you&#x27;re just not into it at all). I suspect a culture of open slack would make the stressed out employees a lot less stressed out, but it probably isn&#x27;t great for the business. There was a startup that was hiring in the Seattle area a few months ago that stated upfront they only sort of want you to work 20 hours a week, very loose, I wonder how it&#x27;s going.<p>This is even worse when you&#x27;re recovering from burnout. If you reveal you suffered from burnout and are still recovering, you&#x27;re effectively admitting your productive output is some percentage of what it used to be. Even if you used to be above average, you&#x27;re implying that you&#x27;re probably below-average now, and it&#x27;d make more economic sense to replace you or at least pay you much less. (And I bet a lot of devs actually would probably give up half their salary in exchange for only being expected to be around half the time, which may be a good compromise.)<p>From the business owner side I sympathize with wanting to have a workforce full of Carmacks. But realistically speaking, that&#x27;s very hard to accomplish, and there&#x27;s something to be said for giving even us somewhat defective mortals something constructive to do so long as we&#x27;re not contributing negative value that isn&#x27;t based on pure economic utility.