Developer Burnout Crisis – Andy Boyle, Clockwise

This is Textron TV. Hey everyone, welcome to another tech strong TV segment. I have a first-time person a First Time guest star an hour.

Well, he's a person too, but he's the First Time guest on our show today. It's Andy Boyle Andy, welcome to Tech strung TV. Thank you so much for having me.

Our pleasure. So Andy, I didn't mention your position your company's name or anything about you. If you don't mind, why not bring our audience up to speed sounds good.

So, my name is Andy Boyle. I'm an engineering manager at clockwise and we are a team time management platform that uses artificial intelligence to help people make time for what matters and a lot of places you have like meetings sometimes throughout the day, but they may not exactly be planned as good as they could be and so you end up having a bunch of like this weird fragmented time. So you can actually focus on getting any work done.

What clockwise does is we actually look at your team's calendar and we will move meetings around so your individual contributors managers. Everybody can actually have focused time to get work done. Got it.

And what about a little bit of your background? And yeah, you mentioned you were a engineering manager, but let's hear a little bit about you. Yeah, I have a very interesting background.

I I can't I came into software development after working in journalism for a long time. I was building a software for journalistic organizations and big news organizations. And then after a while I kind of realized I'm actually more of a software engineer than I am a journalist and I started running some teams.

My first management job was at axios. I was one of the first managers after the CTO. I helped build their devops and back-end team.

I've also managed teams at the Chicago Sun Times and I joined clockwise about three months ago. And right now I'm in charge of the foundations and data teams just kind of building devops but also like developer experience tooling and that sort of stuff. So kind of a wide wide variety of experience very cool.

Matt interesting stuff. All right. Let's jump in though to what we wanted to talk about today.

And it was actually it's actually a topic you know that I've been covering now for a number of years. I mentioned to you off camera and that is burned out and specifically kind of develop a burnout. You know it with over the last couple years with covid.

a lot more people working remotely we seem to have been hearing less about burnout. Because you don't have people maybe in the office from you know, dawn to dusk or whatever. But you know, I would put forth the proposition that one of the big problems we've had with all the remote workers is people don't know how to hit the off button.

And so they wind up working a lot more hours than they actually did when they were going to an office every day. And you know, you could do that for a little bit but like like Grandma always said you can't burn the candle on both ends. And sooner or later it catches up.

Yeah, that's my problem. Take it. Yeah.

No, I I've actually experienced burnout. I had something similar happen in my career where it I was also working remotely. I've worked remotely for the most parts for about eight or nine years.

And so one job it just kind of got to be like you said I was just kind of always on I was always making sure I was always checking slack. I was checking my email. I was just constantly looking at stuff and at some point it just kind of became too much and I ended up having to be like listen.

I'm kind of broken I have to leave because I'm gonna turn into a person I don't want to be and so I had to take a break and kind of reflect and what that kind of taught me was as a manager what I try to do for those who report to me is I really push those boundaries or I set those boundaries so, you know you I expect you to work a 40 a shower week. We shouldn't be contacting you and off hours unless there is really a high level issue. But if there's a high level issue, we already have like pager Duty like we have those sort of things set up to deal with that.

So people are taking turns and we shouldn't be having to contact folks after those 40 hours. Another big part of that is making sure that you're planning your work accordingly. So sometimes you're going to have weeks that suck.

That's pretty normal in software development. You're gonna have some time where we're gonna have to work hard and we may need to work a little extra. But what I tried to do when you have those weeks is make sure that folks understand the next week or a couple weeks after that.

We're going to try to calm things down. So you can sort of rest and develop a regain some of that capacity because if you're redlining if you're at 90% the entire time, you're just like an athlete you're gonna break you're gonna get injured. And in this case, it's gonna be more like a mental injury and then this also leads to programming mistakes or decision making when it comes to what we should be building and also people start to get irritable.

Which means You're not going to work as fast because you're not working as cohesively as a team. So I it's a big issue and I think managers need to be making sure that they are focusing on this and catching if people are responding to stuff at nine o'clock at night. The next day you should message them and say hey, we don't that's not expected of you and you shouldn't be doing that and then having conversations with folks who might be messaging them at nine o'clock at night be like, hey don't message folks this late that was not an emergency.

And we also have specific routes when it is an emergency. So you should use that. Agreed agreed, you know?

I think another thing Andy that might be kind of bringing this to a boil Is is current economic conditions? Right? Hey, the fact of the matter is though there was a ton of suffering in the world over the last couple years.

In the tech World software developers. It was fat times right there were people throwing money at different like crazy money. It developers there weren't many developers out of work.

Right and a lot of teams were probably even maybe a little bloated right? It was a little bit. You know, there was more hands to go around.

Of course, you know tough times Karma and you start cutting heads and payrolls and costs. And and companies are asking employees to do more. right And and I think that's typically or historically another period where we start seeing the burnout.

You know Cycles start picking up. Yeah, if when those times happen and when you push employees further and further and further up toward, you know what I like to refer to as redlining if you're gonna do that. One of the things that you need to do is like build the capacity to be able to deal with it.

And so understand you are probably going to burn out some folks if this is the way that you want to manage people and if you're if that is part of your way of managing folks, I don't necessarily agree with it. But if you do that you need to make sure that you're also having a pipeline for bringing in new folks when folks eventually do get burnt out or you need to have some kind of method of giving them the time off they need when they before they hit that point because if you have an employee who's burnt out, it's often too late. You want to instead be aware of the signs aware of the things that are happening before they reach that and have some kind of intervention and this is where I think companies that perhaps don't have as strong of a product roadmap and they're just like everything is the same level of importance which is it must get done.

Now that also kind of leads to this, you know, 12 hour 14 hour work days nonstop go go because there's a priority issue around the work that you should be doing. Absolutely, man. Absolutely.

So, you know our audience and he's made up of developers obviously, but You know, it's it's probably two thirds one-thirds. single not practitioners, but you know not managers one third. Let's call him a managers and above.

two-thirds, you know single contributors now do our single contributors what a kind of some of the You know red signals flashing signals that they should be aware of. So one big one is it's before your work days even started and if you feel Angry that you have to go to work if you feel physically sick. I've experienced all these myself.

Uh, if you feel depressed like if you are having an emotional reaction to going to work or sometimes a physical reaction that is a key indicator that your brain is kind of telling you this is off we are unhappy and it's gotten to the point where actually having physical reactions and that tells me you need to have a conversation with your boss about taking some time off. And it also is probably a way a start of a conversation around. How are we working as a company?

Because if you're feeling like that, there's probably others who are feeling like that and When you start to feel like that again mistakes crop up irritability and it just starts to drain on you and drain on you and you can only work like that for so long until you break and you know, I've I've broken and it's sometimes this so so I'm I like lift weights on. You know, I'm kind of like an athlete in that regard and you're not supposed to work through the pain. You know, it was like this bad mentality if you had a really bad High School football coach.

They told you like play through the pain. No, that's how you actually get hurt worse. And then the recovery takes even longer and when you are starting to feel these symptoms that is an indicator that something is kind of starting to break.

And you need to have a conversation with your manager around this and hopefully that starts a larger conversation around what are the systemic issues that are causing this because odds are if you're an IC and you're starting to feel this or others and they may not be speaking up about it or if they are no one's listening. And so I think you need to be very open and honest with your boss and just say this is what's happening and I want to be a good contributor. But right now I'm going through a rough time because of some of the systems that have been set up at this job.

And also just probably some of the larger social economic issues that we've kind of been discussing those also kind of impact you even on the job. And so Communications really important holding stuff in will make it worse talking about it with your boss. Even if it feels like it's scary odds are your boss wants you to feel okay, your boss wants you to be like feel psychologically safe because you're going to be the most productive you can be if you if you are.

Sure. Absolutely, man. look You know you said something before?

I I suppose there are organizations that say hey we are going to burn out people and we're just gonna have a pipeline to replace them sounds kind of callous. Yep, right. Yeah, I say a******.

It's right. Oh, yeah to do it. Excuse me, but the fact is there were some organizations that do that right?

And and that's their business model. 5 million meetings eighty thousand Engineers all this stuff and what we found was around 11 hours or so a week Engineers spending meetings, and then they had like six and a half six and a half hours. That's kind of like this fragmented time.

So maybe you get 20 hours of actually good Focus time to do your job. I would ask if when you're when you're applying for some of these places ask to look at a calendar of an individual contributor. if they have Six hours of meetings a day ask them how they're getting any work done.

I've been in that position where it's just been meeting meeting and then they go when are you getting work done? I'm like, I don't know you tell me that's one way that you can kind of look at some of this stuff also asking about all right. Talk me through your pager Duty stuff.

So how does that work? And if you're understanding, how are they dealing with when issues pop up? That says oh we have a system set in place.

These people are on for a week. And then it's this person that way you're probably not going to be pinged every time something goes. Awry.

I would also ask them about like what's your product roadmap look like and if they go, oh, we don't have one. Well, that's a terrifying thing to hear because that means they're not exactly like they're not solving problems now. That they know they're gonna have to deal within six months.

Like you have to set some of the foundation stuff for an initiative in six months. So there's that problem as well. And then one of the last things just ask them.

What's your turnover rate? You know, what's the longest serving employee here or what the average amount of time that people have worked at your company and I think that'll tell you a lot if they are churning people left and right there's a reason and it's usually cultural and you're probably not going to come in and fix that. But again if you want to work at a place like that because maybe they're working on some tech that you're really interested in or It's gonna look really great on a resume and you're gonna be able to you know, live off that for a while.

Like, you know, that's a personal decision. That's not a way I want to run a company and that's I'm I'm a little old to want to work in that kind of environment. So are we all right.

Hey Andy, we're about to add a time. But for people want to get more information about clockwise. Maybe where can they go?

com. We have free trials. We have a bunch of stuff that you can use and honestly, it's software.

I use every single day as a manager and it makes my life so much easier. Very cool man. Andy come back keep us posted.

I'd love to have you here. Continue the conversation. That's the luck at clockwise and thanks for joining us.

Thank you so much for your time. Already. Bye now.

We're gonna take a break here on Tech strong. We'll be right back in a moment.