Work/Life Balance With Sasha Rosenbaum, Bill Weiss, and Katie Prizy

Matty and guest host Sasha Rosenbaum, who says this is probably a fourth appearance on the show, record at devopsdays Chicago 2017 about work-life balance, with two of the event's speakers. Katie opened the conference with a talk on devaluing hard work, and works at HCSC in Chicago after starting as a DevOps consultant with no technical background. Bill Weiss, a security architect at Puppet who helped run devopsdays Chicago for its first two years and now helps with Portland, spoke on security not fearing DevOps, which Matty admits had nothing to do with work-life balance, but Bill has a life. The cold open is Katie's line about coming back from a long vacation to 1,000 emails, and Matty's reply, "Sure you can" delete them.

Hero Culture and Mixed Incentives

Matty says the theme of Katie's talk was hero culture: rewarding extra hours gives people no reason to work more efficiently. Katie says organizations assume automation is attractive, and people outside the conference room don't care what you call it. Bill says people want to do what looks immediately right, like spending 16 hours beating on a problem, and that a weekend of miserable firefighting is a good thing done that shouldn't have been necessary. Sasha would go further and say it's a bad thing when recurrent, noting companies give double incentives, praising collaboration and efficiency and then a prize for the most hours worked. Sasha adds research that productivity stops after about 55 hours a week.

Matty recalls Katie's line that no one gets claps for working two hours on Friday. "You get claps for working 10 hours on Friday." Matty describes a sysadmin who worked 70 hours every week, and whose review said the person "takes our site's uptime personally," which Matty meant as praise, and now sees as putting responsibility on the human instead of the system. An old office poster asked "how does it feel to save the day every day? Not all superheroes wear capes." Sasha notes a burnout talk that same day, and that email, laptops and remote work make around-the-clock demands easier. Katie adds that a manager is likely to like whoever answers the phone on Saturday, even while everyone says to have a good weekend.

Leading by Example

Matty recalls an interview with a CEO who said the interview process includes a Saturday call to see whether candidates answer, which Twitter destroyed. Matty thinks that direct toxicity is less common than the unintentional kind, like a manager sending email at 10 at night, even if that manager would rather you watch a show. Sasha says messaging can be direct in the healthy direction, too: a Silicon Valley startup CEO who personally called anyone who answered email on vacation, because no single person can be available 100% of the time. Sasha says at Microsoft nobody minds disappearing for a few hours mid-day as long as results are delivered.

Matty says when Chef changed to unlimited PTO, the CEO, CTO and CFO took three-week vacations first. Bill, at a previous company with unlimited vacation, told the team about time at conferences and shrugged "unlimited PTO," and before a four-week honeymoon pasted junk into Outlook's change password form so there was no getting back in. Bill likes the regulated-industry practice of surprise vacations for accountants, and wants to do that to ops teams: "If we can't survive for 2 weeks without you, it should burn." Matty calls it "a chaos monkey for your team." Katie admits to the arrogance of thinking the team can't live without you, and says at an older-style enterprise, employees may have to stand up for themselves. Matty adds that an unenforced boundary gets crossed, and if it isn't respected, getting out may be the answer. Sasha cites Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In: a McKinsey mentor was surprised how many people quit from burnout with unused vacation.

Tactics

Katie began charging meetups to the company's training bucket after a speaker said it's training: "Charge this to your training bucket." Matty says flexible remote work usually means working more, since the commute demarcation is gone, and Sasha agrees. Matty blocks time for what the job owes back ("Chef owes me 2 hours from last night") and keeps 2 hours a day on the calendar for tasks, treating it like a meeting with someone else. Sasha signs up for a class that starts at 6, and Bill tracks time as if billing customers, and checks vacation quarterly: "If it's August and I've taken a week off, I need to take a break." Bill notes HR likes unlimited vacation because nothing is owed at departure and people take less, and Sasha agrees that it's often "a trick which actually works against you." Matty shares stories from Chef, where a colleague's manager insisted on choosing a vacation budget and dates, and from Travis CI, where vacation is tracked.

Coming Back

Sasha says working on vacation can be self-protection, to avoid coming back to 1,000 emails. Matty's answer is email bankruptcy: set an out-of-office that names who will help, then delete the backlog, and even declare Slack bankruptcy, because "If it's important, it will happen again." Matty says you have to train coworkers first and calls it maybe controversial. Katie takes a more conservative route, scheduling a full day of meetings with the IM off on the first day back so nobody asks anything while going through email.

• Devaluing Hard Work - Katie Prizy, DevOpsDays Chicago 2017
• Security, Don't Fear The DevOps - Bill Weiss, DevOpsDays Chicago 2017