I agree. I didnt read that as an invitation to take 5 days off every month, therefore advocating 60 additional holidays in a year.
I saw it more as an opportunity to catch up on "other stuff". Maybe a tool you wanted to work on to make your work life easier, or leave a little early to wrap up taxes, or do some PoCs etc. to see whether a refactoring idea you have is actually feasible or not.
Yes, this is more along the lines of what I'm talking about. I'm advocating common sense over religious adherence. Do what works for you.
I am saying there's a lot of burnout in the tech industry and it's at least partly a process problem.
Maybe it's just me and I'm "doing it wrong", but I think it speaks to the issue that the suggestion of "taking it easy a week out of every month" is met with cries of "This is madness! It will never work!"
You may want to look at some of the arguments for "slack" in agile. Other agilists have thought about this from various angles, from scheduling it via WIP limits in kanban to dedicated 1-2 days at the end of a sprint. You're not "painting or surfing or whatever." At the same time, you can't capitalize that, and capitalization drives a large portion of IT.
Edit: I misread this to mean “all devs take a week off” instead of “a light week in collaboration on some backlog stuff” - that makes total sense.
I also misread the "first week" stuff to mean that you leave the room and take a week off.
Having a light week while this is happening makes sense. It ends up being light anyway while the transitions happen. Apologies for the misread.
As for madness - I was not at all implying the suggestion was madness, and different things work for different teams / projects. I personally find standups are super helpful so I wouldn't want to get rid of them. That regular cadence it creates is very helpful in making sure we all stick our heads up and incorporate what's going on around us. If your teams are doing this already without the regular touch-points, that's awesome, but I find that with most teams that is a learned thing that takes a lot of time, and regular scheduled places to update are important to success.
I read it as a proposal to declare 36 weeks a year off-limits for days off, because, you know, there are those well-defined special weeks where vacation days are supposed to be spent.
I saw it more as an opportunity to catch up on "other stuff". Maybe a tool you wanted to work on to make your work life easier, or leave a little early to wrap up taxes, or do some PoCs etc. to see whether a refactoring idea you have is actually feasible or not.