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I'm livid with companies that aren't talking about this with their employees and giving them space and flexibility on deadlines, meetings, telling them to not worry about taking vacation if they need to, etc.

I've talked to so many friends that are stressed out and barely able to work or function right now and they have massive anxiety and stress from world events that are only being compounded by managers and C's not leading by example and telling them to take time for themselves and stopping the unnecessary meetings or TELLING them that they understand their productivity might be gone.

And these are fairly privileged people with the ability to work from home and a stable income.

My wife is a black engineer and she's hanging on the last 2 days still taking client meetings and putting on her "work is still important" face but she's miserable before and after dealing with them. She's also, like a lot of us who haven't been hearing direct empathy from leadership, afraid to take PTO/Vacation right now BECAUSE of the economy and fear of losing her job.

On the flip side I have seen a lot of companies that are giving people Fridays off, 3-4 day weekends to decompress, etc.

I think after this I'll be moving to only working for companies that I find to be very active in social movements.

>>mjayhn+(OP)
I'm really shocked that this is the case. I work for a big evil company (not entirely by choice, my former company was acquired). I really didn't have anything nice to say about them before the pandemic, but so far through the last couple of months they've been doing everything you're talking about. If my company, with their incredibly damning Wikipedia article can do it, I'm at a loss to why anyone else can't.

>>0xffff+Et
I've mostly worked for old-timey telco companies not from CA/WA and they're pretty behind the times on empathetic leadership in my experience. I didn't really start even experiencing what I consider empathetic leadership until I started working for CA/WA companies over the last 5 years.

Any remotely awkward event that popped up you likely had a boss who just didn't say a peep about anything because they didn't want to rock the boat.

Thankfully I'm seeing a lot more reports of the opposite this week but there's still a lot of those companies out there.

>>mjayhn+(OP)
Allowing world events to affect your internal emotional state is no way to live. If you cannot consume news media without being emotionally compromised, you may want to re-consider the news sources you are using, and perhaps reduce your consumption.

>>koheri+Sj1
"Consume news media"

Some of us are living through this in real life, we're not all privileged to just watch this on TV. That's the entire point of being understanding to your employees and coworkers right now, YOU have no idea what is going on right now in other peoples lives, especially if they're not willing to be open with you because of opinions like you've just shared.

Acting like some "just deal with it and work" type is neither endearing nor macho. It wasn't cool 15 years ago when I got into tech and it's not cool now.

Have some empathy for your peers.

Work is not life. Tech is not life.

>>mjayhn+Yr1
I think there's an emotional segregation that happens with age - where you keep work at work, and personal life at home.

I appreciate that a lot younger employees may not be there yet, but I don't think it's correct to assume that everyone in the world needs to emotionally deal with every social/economic/political problem in the world.

That isn't scalable.