| In my experience actual reality is somewhat different – at least at large Internet apps companies. In high-functioning successful team, everyone is spending significant time in 1. discovery – learning things about the constantly evolving product/functional domain and the tech, and 2. ideation – figuring out what's important and how to solve it, 3. and some non-trivial amount of time in large team collaboration related activities. But the problem is these activities (and their taxonomies) are not made explicit – their purpose is not explicitly stated; instead people participate in packaged rituals that are supposed to produce results. But because they do it without understanding it, they could feel like a cog in the machine. But there's also another big part of the reality – those who work themselves too hard and get themselves burnt out are also chasing personal career promotion goals and not succeeding at it. Then, there are some who don't even have that objective but have a broken work habit and get burnt out. Of course there are other things at the worst end of the spectrum – bad manager, bad CEO, bad business, bad co-workers, bad vendor-partners etc – that can make things toxic and they get burnt out. |