Posts tagged #mental-health on Dynamo Geeks: 9 posts from the community, most useful first.
took a real lunch break today. 1 hour. walked to the river, ate kimbap on a bench, no laptop, no slack. came back and nothing was on fire. 진짜 별거 아닌데 눈물 날 뻔했다... (it's really nothing but i almost cried) small steps...
Earlier this year our company cut about 12% of engineering. I found out 36 hours before. The list was decided above me. Four of the people on it were mine. I've thought about those four calls almost every week since. Here's what happened, what I'd change, and what I wish every laid-off person knew to ask for. How it went HR gave us a script and 15-minute slots. Access would be cut at the end of each call. I pushed…
nobody talks about this part so i will. first three weeks after the layoff: 3 to 4 hours a night. i'd wake up at 4 am and check email for recruiter replies. then linkedin. "excited to announce" posts from people i used to work with. then email again. heart racing every time my phone buzzed, even when it was my mother sending a good morning forward. 4 am, most nights in september. not my laptop. same glow. i'm not…
오늘은 그냥 솔직하게 쓰고 싶어요. I want to write honestly today. Sorry for mixed language... Last week was launch week for big redesign at my company. Six weeks of crunch before. Every day office until 10 or 11 pm, Saturday also, sometimes Sunday "only for few hours". 야근, 주말 출근. Everyone does it, so nobody talks about it. On launch day morning, I sat on my bed with my bag and shoes on. And I could not stand up. Not sick. Just...…
tuesday. 9.07 am. subject line: "an important update about your role". 600 of us got the same email. town hall link at 10. slack deactivated at 9.15. i was in the middle of reviewing a PR. i hope someone merged it. it was a good PR. six years of frontend at a quick commerce unicorn. react, typescript, a design system i built mostly by myself. eight minutes. not our office. ours had more beanbags and fewer windows.…
Every time burnout comes up, someone recommends a meditation app. I have nothing against meditation. But in my experience, most burnout on engineering teams is caused by how the work is set up, and that's the manager's job, not the engineer's. There's decades of research on this. Christina Maslach's six areas of worklife (workload, control, reward, community, fairness, values) are a good starting point if you want…
Last fall I took six weeks of medical leave. Officially it was "a health matter". Unofficially, I had been running on fumes for most of a year and my body finally made a decision my calendar wouldn't. I'm writing this because when I came back, three people on other teams quietly asked me how I knew. The honest answer is that I didn't, not until very late. So here are the signs I missed, in the hope that you catch…
I've been managing for six years and I've run something like 2,000 one-on-ones. Most of what I know about being a manager came out of those 30-minute meetings, including the ones I ran badly. Here's how I run them now. The basics 30 minutes, weekly. I reschedule if I have to. I don't cancel. Cancelling tells people they're the first thing to go. It's their meeting, not mine. They set the agenda first. I add my items…
