Work-Life Balance In Tech | Hacker News Reader

Work-Life Balance In Tech

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32 pointsabreckle19 comments

There are really 2 very different ways of interpreting these results.

A) People who're happy with the balance, are being given a lot of free time.

B) People who're happy with the balance, have really low expectations, or don't mind working all the time.

When I read about founders/CEOs being more satisfied than most others, the only reasonable explanation I can think of, is that they don't mind working 16 hour days on a company that they have personally built and run.

When viewed through this lens, it's possible that the demographics with the highest satisfaction rates, aren't actually being given a good work-life balance... they are simply the ones who are "easiest to exploit."

I've also just noticed that people who I work with that are just naturally happy and well adjusted are much more likely to be OK and happy with working lots of hours.

It does not need to be framed as exploitive. Work life balance isn't just about time spent working vs not working -- it's about quality of life. If you have a job where the things you do for work are things that genuinely engage you and give you pleasure, things you would do even if not being paid too, then "working" more hours isn't a lack of balance, it's you spending time doing the things you find personally rewarding.

I really wish they had included SREs and Operations as a category.

Or just work on the east coast. I commute 45 minutes total a week in VA. I make dinner, take courses, work out, play video games, do personal projects/art, and spend quality time with my family, it's great.

That's not necessarily true in Boston, New York city or Southern New Hampshire.

Could you elaborate on Southern NH? Does this apply to Nashua / Manchester? Been considering moving to that area.

I imagine it depends heavily on whether you actually work in Southern New Hampshire, or you live there and commute to Boston. There isn't a huge tech scene in Manchester/Nashua/Portsmouth, but there is a healthy number of jobs - more in the 9-5 corporate or lifestylish vein, than in the nose-to-the-grindstone startup type scene.

Lots of people do head down to the greater Boston area, though, and that commute is pretty brutal.

The trick to have a good time in Boston for me has been to live close to the office. It's 40 minutes per day instead of 40 minutes per week but it's still a far cry from what I hear some of my friends are doing in SV. And the housing here is such that it's entirely within the realm of reasonable to find housing that close.

Tech companies in Southern New Hampshire pull partially from the same talent pool as Boston. A lot of people commute to Boston every day and the other way. Those people sacrifice almost two hours a day which isn't great from a work-life balance standpoint.

If you do get a job in New Hampshire itself, the high tech companies that have to hustle to make enough money to keep up with Boston salaries or risk losing people to the commute.

I live in New Hampshire and I love it but I can't say my work life balance is any better than when I lived in Boston. But my quality of life is quite a bit better. I have a house here, I could never have that in Boston.

45 minutes a week commute? Are you primarily working from home?

Thats less than 10 minutes a day, which seems extraordinarily low, even for South Western VA traffic which is signicantly better than traffic in NoVA.

It is intellectually dishonest to suggest that getting a tech job on the east coast guarantees all the things you just mentioned.

What do you have to gain from such dishonesty?

I feel like this survey being binary is a bit detrimental.

I am about 7/10 happy with my work life balance. I obviously want a 10 (and 10 isn't a unicorn, it exists somewhere) but as a whole I would say "yes."

"On a scale of 1:10, with 10 being Completely Happy..." would have made much more interesting data, but a more difficult infographic.

Wow, I completely missed that and I looked for it.

I latched onto "We found that 81% of Senior Designers were satisfied with their work/life balance while only 46% of Sales Managers felt the same." which frames it as a yes/no in my opinion.

I'm glad it was 1-10

I don't think you missed anything. I don't see an indication that they used a scale, and the legends all say "% who responsed Yes".

I'm curious about the reasons women (especially in Denver aparently) are so unhappy with the balance. Is it due to women being more likely to have jobs that are less balanced or something else?

It's probably a combination of several factors but I would imagine the biggest factor is that women have more non-work demands (social pressures and gender roles making motherhood frequently more demanding than fatherhood, women being expected to carry a larger portion of housework, etc.) than men, and so an equivalent amount of time off is less satisfactory since less of the "free time" is actually free time.

I suspect that another part of it too is that in many jobs women may feel judged more harshly and so less able to actually take advantage of the flexibility that's there since there's already a struggle to be noticed and acknowledged.

There's pretty clear evidence that women value work-life balance and flexibility in scheduling at a much higher amount than men. A large amount of that can be attributed to cultural expectations of raising children.

When you have school-aged children, "work-life balance" for both men and wome (but especially women) changes from "gee, it'd be great if I didn't work until 7 PM every night" to "I need to drop off my kids at 8:30, someone needs to pick them up at 4, they have various practices, etc. during the evening and a whole 2 months I need to account for in the summer"

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