when I am supposed to fix tech debt? if every week there is another functionality going out that needs to be done yesterday? Do you think that I have to do it in my free time? Why should I even bother existing
On a mature project in a small team, the only tickets left were hard bugs that nobody wanted. The kind of bugs where you can invest days and have nothing really to show for it except crossing out some suspicions. Or maybe incorrectly crossing one out and then going on a wild goose chase until you circle back to it in a week, flustered.
You're expected to commit all of your mental energy to these tickets day after day, and then once you finally triumph and solve the bug after coffee or amphetamine binges, you turn in the code, close the ticket, and you're expected to immediately work on the next ticket.
You don't get a real break. But you can mentally rest at the start of the next ticket since nobody expects instant results. But now it's been a couple days and people are asking you what you've been doing so far—you must be blocked, right?—but you've barely started and you're pressured to invent small lies and excuses about why you're behind, each one risking yet another slip of the mask.
And when you need some time off the most, it's when you're the most behind of all and people have begun to notice, so taking the time off doesn't even seem like an option.
The attitude I see most often is: "the worker is replaceable and therefore expendable, but the work will always be there until someone takes care of it so burn through as many workers as it takes to get it done"
As long as the business is making money, the prospect of it continuing to make money in the near and medium term future is not in jeopardy, and the actors involved are rational, capable and trustworthy, you should always favor the worker over the work.
IME, zero sum management is an emergent symptom of a poorly performing business (maybe if we make everybody work 150% harder we’ll hit our targets this quarter), insecure executives (who don’t understand the work they manage), or poor hiring/firing practices (the only way to let somebody go is by overloading them and rewarding it with a poor performance review, or you’re hiring people who aren’t capable or don’t care).
If you’re a manager forced to make zero sum decisions and don’t feel empowered to change the root of that problem, you should probably consider leaving — good environments grow people instead of expending people.
This breaks down when you have one player in the arena acting like a snake that tries to devour everyone else(eg. Elon Musk). He has the gift of attracting an endless horde of people to burn through and then tosses them aside once they are no longer useful to him(so many examples in his recent bio). The result is that they move faster than the competition and the others eventually get eaten alive. Normally word would get out that its not safe to work for such a character but SpaceX and Tesla are among the most desired employers that engineering graduates seek to work for. Tesla received 3.6 million job applications in 2022.