I think this depends a lot on the nature of one’s work. Examples of busy periods:
- externally driven work (eg some obligation to a client; some change to an api that is relied on)
- intern season / spending time bringing someone new up to speed / when someone leaves a team
Quiet periods:
- the opposite of the above
- times when the business focus is on reliability (eg I think Facebook have a big hiatus on changes to the site during the run up to Christmas as it’s the most profitable time of the year for them).
> - times when the business focus is on reliability (eg I think Facebook have a big hiatus on changes to the site during the run up to Christmas as it’s the most profitable time of the year for them).
I work at Amazon and have been subjected to two versions of those periods (because I switched teams): one was every year around Black Friday and Christmas, and the other one was when a new big show releases on PrimeVideo (like LOTR).
Those periods are the total opposite of quiet.
You still have to work on normal deliverables, except you can't push them on your pipelines (not even beta) and on top of that you have to either support last minute critical demands for ad-hoc work, and then you have to work around the extremely strict deployment windows to actually release that ad-hoc crap to prod.
I have started deployments at 9AM and finished at 11PM routinely during those times because there's a single day where the pipelines are open and you have to complete your deployment before the next day.
I hated this at Amazon. The rest of the year we’d all be so pleased by our frequent deployments. Then for half of Q4 we’d be in code freeze but would be pressured to pile up feature work to go out in Q1. At least weblabs made feature flags easy.
- externally driven work (eg some obligation to a client; some change to an api that is relied on)
- intern season / spending time bringing someone new up to speed / when someone leaves a team
Quiet periods:
- the opposite of the above
- times when the business focus is on reliability (eg I think Facebook have a big hiatus on changes to the site during the run up to Christmas as it’s the most profitable time of the year for them).