Understanding Generosity Burnout - helping you help others safely

We will be running a hybrid event: if you're in Melbourne, please RSVP on the Melbourne event to attend in person, or follow along on Google Meet. (Link will be published on meetup on the day)

Event details

Talk: Employees with many years at a company, who have developed great expertise and know how to get things done, often have others seek their input and time. These employees are therefore incredibly valuable, not only for their own contribution, but the way they enable others. However, job satisfaction is often lower for these passionate experts, who might find their time spread too thinly and their day too fractured to do the kind of work they enjoy and find meaningful. Thankfully, there are ways to mitigate this, and help our most effective engineers remain effective despite being the go-to person.Takeaways:

• Learn why generosity burnout happens and its impacts
• Learn how to be an expert without burning out
• Learn how to utilise your company’s experts without burning them out

References: While I don’t consider myself an “expert” in Generosity Burnout, I was lucky enough to attend a People Management class run by Reb Rebele this year, who is. This talk attempts to summarise his work with Adam Grant and contextualise it for software engineers. If you can’t make the talk, I recommend you go straight to the source: https://hbr.org/2017/01/beat-generosity-burnout.

Bio: I’m Alex Finkel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-finkel-5423299a/). I worked at Google as a corp infrastructure SRE for two years, then at a science education startup called Stile for the last seven! I’m professionally interested in product development, reliability engineering, and people management, and intend to contribute my career as much as possible towards supporting science and education. I’m expecting my first child in August this year, and love to spend as much time reading sci-fi/fantasy, playing D&D, ballroom dancing and eating noodles as possible.