It's been my general experience that startups, especially startups built by dev-focussed folk, tend to radically underestimate the impact of people issues (moral, amount of sleep, work/life balance, etc.) on their effectiveness of their business.
In fact I saw almost exactly this story, but with dev rather than support. Going from _perception_ of their being an ever growing list of new features, massive overtime, general feeling of being overwhelmed. To showing that folk were actually getting on top of things with numbers. To some scope adjustment so we could make the hours sane. The team getting happier, and faster at every step.
Thanks for sharing this. It's exactly as you said: we were getting bogged down because the work felt impossible. That was affecting the attitude and productivity of the entire team. It's amazing how much more you can do when it feels possible.
The other thing is we had focused our entire 5 person dev team on helping support with bug fixes and help text / documentation for common problems. That took a while to kick in and lower the support load, but it's definitely helped!
Having family with catheters they would have loved this / love this.
The external valves, and associated bags, are all additional causes of infection — and this would cut those out.
It's really hard to change those bags without spillage. This cuts that out.
The external pipework getting caught on things and causing pain. Solved.
You have to adjust the kind of clothing you wear so that you can have space for the catheter bag. This would cut that out.
The location of catheter bags means that people with certain kind of mobility problems can't change them themselves - this would cut that out. This one directly affects a friend of mine right now. Four times a day that have to be around somebody who is willing to change a catheter bag with them. They cannot get up at night without somebody to disconnect/reconnect the night bag.
The whole issue of not knowing how full the bladder is - this would cut that out.
Never being able to go swimming. Never being able to have a bath. Solved.
If this can be made to work well, and it's a big if I'm sure, it is a game changer and a major quality of life improver.
I grew up listening to recordings of "Round the Horne" in the UK, which included two characters Julian & Sandy that chatted a little in Polari during their sketches. A bunch of Polari words and phrases have migrated into general UK slang — so it's not really a case of dying out… more migrating and changing — as languages & dialects often do.
I'm always astonished as to hows fresh Round the Horne sounds even today, when many of the comedy programmes of that era sound distinctly dated. Still funny, worth a listen.
As I'm sure you know but others might not, that's not a "real" Julian and Sandy sketch.
Edit: The classic Julian and Sandy sketches were recorded between 1965 and 1968. The last one was a reunion in 1987, shortly before Kenneth Williams' death.
Terrible management and/or micromanagement is one of the key reasons a dev can lose motivation. It also doesn't do anyone's morale/motivation any favors to see colleagues get fired. If a manager has had to fire people, and do so repeatedly, then the fault is not so much with those getting fired than the organization/management/hiring process.
One of the key reasons why I've seen dev lose motivation after joining a company is lack of investment on the part of the manager in the employees future goals. I've been in situations during my entry-level days when my manager always made me draw the short straw - did wonders for my motivation.
Exactly, I have seen this at a few companies where the management isn't clear about the responsibilities with the candidate at the time of hiring, only to find out later that the candidate and company has different priorities. I will also add that this is the job of the company to find out the whether the candidate is right fit and not the candidate. The hiring company should be completely transparent about the job responsibilities and work.
Also some management people have completely unrealistic expectations from a hire whose job they hardly understand and with whom they never really talked openly.
And what is this person's definition of unmotivated? Is only doing the work and not beyond what stated in your contract unmotivated? Is having a life outside of work considered unmotivated?
