>> you turn in the code, close the ticket, and you're expected to immediately work on the next ticket.
Yes. That's me. And then I crash.
I used to call in sick when I go from heroically solving something unsolvable to start work on a new ticket. Then O thought, this is not sustainable. My boss is all over me for all of my sick time.
So then I started to just say to my manager, hey, Mgr, amma gonna flex this whole Monday. Don't call me. Don't frakkin even think about me. Back on Tuesday, we cool?
Turns out, we were cool.
Whenever someone requires from you to be a hero, don't. Or be that guy, then take a Monday off.
Recognizing that and accommodating it is a sign of maturity for both an engineer and a manager.
> [Audience reply: Sprinter]
> Right, only somebody who runs really short races, okay?
> [Audience laughter]
> But of course, we are programmers, and we are smarter than runners, apparently, because we know how to fix that problem, right? We just fire the starting pistol every hundred yards and call it a new sprint.
https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
don't you just have normal time off on top of sick days?
But if you're in a flexible enough situation where you can just call up your boss like that, that's great. That's what "unlimited time off" should theoretically have been before the well was poisoned. Trust that workers can manage their own mental health but not abuse it to be gone 30% of the year.