Work/Life Balance Will Make You a Better Software Engineer | Hacker News Reader

Work/Life Balance Will Make You a Better Software Engineer

codewithoutrules.com

231 pointsadamnemecek106 comments

My favorite work-life balance commentary comes from Darren Aronofsky's film Pi:

Sol Robeson

You remember Archimedes of Syracuse, eh? The king asks Archimedes to determine if a present he's received is actually solid gold. Unsolved problem at the time.

It tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks. Insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns in his bed for nights on end.

Finally, his equally exhausted wife... she's forced to share a bed with this genius... convinces him to take a bath to relax.

While he's entering the tub, Archimedes notices the bath water rise. Displacement, a way to determine volume, and that's a way to determine density... weight over volume.

And thus, Archimedes solves the problem. He screams "Eureka!" and he is so overwhelmed he runs dripping naked through the streets to the king's palace to report his discovery.

Now, what is the moral of the story?

Maximillian Cohen

That a breakthrough will come.

Sol Robeson

Wrong! The point of the story is the wife. You listen to your wife, she will give you perspective. Meaning, you need a break, you have to take a bath or you will get nowhere. There will be no order, only chaos.

Go home, Max... and you take a bath.

This is the first time that I hear the claim that Archimedes was married.

Wikipedia: "It is unknown, for instance, whether he ever married or had children."

It's a movie, so I don't take it as an actual claim.

Take it as a creative license to make a point :)

It's a parable, not a claim. Since it's unknown whether he was married, just suppose he does. Then you can tell a story where the moral depends on him being married.

Very fitting username. ;)

It's funny: I'd mostly forgotten that particular scene, but the movie is strongly associated with questions of work/life balance in my mind.

Sometimes when I wonder whether I'm getting too carried away with intellectual work, an image comes to mind of Max Cohen standing in front of the bathroom mirror with a drill in hand.

I think the moral of that story is not work life balance. It's that you should work crazy, just don't forget to take a break when you're stuck.

For example, I worked all day today (true story), trying to figure out some algorithm. I got stuck. So I took a walk. And it just came to me while I was taking the walk. Now I'm back and am back to work and it's super productive.

If I worked like 3 hours and then went out to meet friends, have dinner, go watch some musical, and came back. I literally wouldn't have had time to even get to this point.

Back to Archimedes, "The breakthrough came" only because he put his time in, and it just synthesized in his brain when he finally took a break. If Archimedes was a "40 hour work week" guy, he probably wouldn't have got to that state.

3 * 7 = 21 != 40

3 * 5 = 15 != 40

So why do you use the '3 hours of work then slack off' example to deride people working a typical week?

True. I loved the movie, but couldn't understand the ending of the it. Was he hallucinating? Did he have nervous breakdown?

Yeah, I'd like to see some actual data. Some kind of scientific study, anything.

I don't say this because I'm a proponent of work-at-any-cost culture -- I'm not. I work about 45 hours a week, no weekends or nights outside of rare emergencies. That's certainly good for my mood and my relationship with my family and so forth.

But I see all these articles in which they suggest that after 40 hours a week, your productivity crashes or goes negative or whatever, and it strikes me as wishful thinking. The universe does not often line up to give us win-wins like this. My belief is that, probably, for at least a lot of people, if you spend a few years working super hard, you'll probably gain a lot of skill and be highly productive. Maybe if you keep that up for decades, accumulated stress will make it a net negative. Maybe some people have really low tolerance for stress and will much more rapidly turn to net negative.

But the idea that it is universally or near-universally true that everyone is more productive on a 40 hour week is at best under-argued, and, I'd guess, probably mostly untrue.

Completely agree. And the fact that the breaking point is a nice round 40, which just happens to correspond with our culture's 5-day work week and typical 8 hour day is a little too convenient to believe.

The standard argument is that it is the other way around -- we've settled on a 8x5 scheme _because_ our breaking point is around 40 hours. However, like others in this thread, I'm not sure I agree.

Whose standard argument?

I always thought: we work 40 hours a week because we work 8 hours a day; and we work 8 hours a day because Robert Owen's mantra "Eight hours' labour, Eight hours' recreation, Eight hours' rest" caught on.

The apocryphal story I've heard is that the 5-day / 8-hour workweek came from Henry Ford doing rigorous research on productivity in his factories (and that 40 hours/week was less than the norm at the time).

I'd believe that's true, but I'd also believe there's reason to suggest that what holds for factory workers doesn't hold for information economy workers. (Although anecdotally, I find that I'm WAY more productive when working closer to 6-hour work days than 8-hour days.)

>I find that I'm WAY more productive when working closer to 6-hour work days than 8-hour days.

I'm glad someone else has noticed this. The fact that I still end up feeling burned out if I constantly work 8 hour days has made me feel very lazy. It's weird, I feel like I can work at top speed all the time if I work 6 hour days, but if I try to maintain that same pace with longer days then I hit a wall. In effect, I need to pace myself to work 8 hour days.

The only time I feel like I need a day longer than 6 hours is when I'm in meetings all day. Meetings and working seem to use two different kinds of energy. So I could meet for 3 hours about something and work for 6 hours just fine, but I'd be wasting my time if I was attending 3 hours of meetings each day.

The thought above pretty much reinforces my belief that the hours we work have nothing to do with productivity, and everything to do with an illusion of fairness. My boss spends more than half his day in meetings. It probably wouldn't look good if I was working 3 hours less than him each day just because I don't have as many meetings to attend. The issue is even trickier when I consider the fact that many of my coworkers need less concentration to perform their roles, and would be perfectly fine working 5x10s by their own admission.

I believe it. The breaking point is at 40 because the breakdown is in part a sub-conscious negotiation strategy. Like, some folks will get angered by being pressured into washing the dishes, and things magically break and they no longer get pressured into washing the dishes. Similarly, getting pressured into sacrificing your work-life balance can cause the sorts of emotions that are way better for winning those social conflicts than writing good code.

Were you joking or serious? Cause seriously- this is a good joke, if it's a joke! Otherwise, yeah, it's not a coincidence. ;)

I doubt the breaking point is 40, but 40 seems close. I remember looking through studies on the matter[1] and seeing numbers floating around between 35–45 hours/week. It's hard to generalize because productivity is hard to measure and behaves differently in different cultures and professions, but I am willing to believe that the breaking point for most people is within 10—15% of 40 hours/week. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a bit lower...

[1]: Unfortunately I don't have them handy, and they had some clear limitations. If I'm remembering correctly, some were about relatively unskilled work and none were about programming, where measuring productivity is an open problem.

It's anecdotally untrue. The most successful people I know work a lot of hours. I don't advocate it because I don't think it's healthy on a personal level but it's certainly an effective strategy to gain an advantage in the workplace and generally just get more stuff done.

Then the issue is with your definition of successful. If you only main for professional success, indeed, working more hours will put you at advantage.

But having been with already some people on their last days of life, I don't remember any of them regretting of not having spend more time working, but always of having had more time with family and friends.

Clearly the definition here is success at work. Working long hours is unlikely to improve anyone's home situation unless they're impoverished and earning hourly wages or have a home environment so horrible that being at work is preferable.

You said "most successful people". That doesn't clearly mean at work.

The entire comment thread is about success at work. Aetherson used the word "work" 3 times and was clearly discussing the impact of working long hours on success in the workplace.

Willfully ignoring context to try to make your point isn't clever.

>> The most successful people I know work a lot of hours.

That's also anecdotally untrue.

Sure. I was pretty clear that this is my anecdote.

I have my very own anecdotes (based on my own definition of success) - The most unsuccessful people I know work a lot of hours. Don't get me started about my successful 4-hour week friends !

I can totally believe that, but I think it's less a matter of hours, and more about goals and environment and motivation.

Personally, I find it much easier to put in long hours on side projects and on my own company than it is to put in long hours for someone else'e company. And if the environment is bad at a company, long hours can be excruciating.

The most successful people I know work for themselves, or carve out a niche in their companies that allows them to do the things they want to do. And I suspect that enables the conditions under which long hours are easy to put in, and success is easy to achieve.

Nobody has ever become successful by doing more of the same repetitive work. They became a success by starting or running a business, creating a new product or service, inventing something etc.

Bringing that in to this discussion just muddies the water; we're discussing overtime for regular office workers.

If you're working long hours doing repetitive work and you aren't hourly, you should probably get a new job. Most people working long hours in, say, software aren't doing the same thing over and over. They're building more things, more quickly. They're managing projects more successfully. This can absolutely lead to measurable success without starting or running a business, creating a new product or service, or inventing anything meaningful.

If you can get significantly more done than your peers, competent management will notice and reward you meaningfully. The fact that you sacrifice your private life to accomplish this won't be very relevant to whether or not you deserve a huge bonus.

> But I see all these articles in which they suggest that after 40 hours a week, your productivity crashes or goes negative or whatever, and it strikes me as wishful thinking.

This is extremely activity dependent I think.

The article actually talks about using that time to work on things other than what your day job is about.

Here's some data & has a bunch of references to more data. http://lunar.lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf

The claim is not that 40 is some kind of hard threshold, and if you work any more than that you'll be instantly less productive. The claim is that a steady-state of, say, 60 hours per week is less productive long term. It's actually more productive for a little while, like a month, but then people get tired and less productive than rested 40-hour workers after that.

I have experience doing long periods of 80 hour weeks, when I was working in game development. I think it's hard to say definitively that productivity goes negative, that's not what it felt like when we were crunching. OTOH, I did watch as tired crews would make bad decisions during crunch that ended up costing time in the long run, and I can definitely say that 80 hour weeks are not twice as productive as 40 hour weeks.

But even if 80 weeks ends up with only a 50 hour per worker per week extra benefit, because everyone is paid salary and it doesn't cost the corporation an extra penny to make people work 80 hour weeks, there's not any incentive for them not to push for it, unless people quit, but when you're working 80 hour weeks it can be hard to find the energy to hunt for a new job (and people start feeling like they have to do it, because whatever bullshit reasons have been provided), so people don't punish the employer by quitting anywhere near as much as they should.

Agreed, there's often not enough incentive for companies to not do it, and people don't quit often enough - both were true in the cases where I've worked lots of overtime.

That said, productivity during extended 80 hour week crunches may well dip below 40 and be a net drag on the company, but it probably still wouldn't matter. Game studios in particular aren't asking themselves whether it's worth it to crunch, they don't know whether crunch is more or less productive and they don't care. They look at a looming deadline that appears to take 3x more work than there is time left. Publishers attach bonuses to being on time, and fees to being late. Crunch is often seen as the only option. That shouldn't be true at the huge game companies, but it still is.

Plus, it is really hard to measure true productivity in a non-factory setting like software. Nobody actually knows if 80 hours per week sustained equals 50 or 30 or 70 or 10.

All that said, a true 80 hour work week doesn't leave enough time & energy to eat properly, see your family, or even watch TV, let alone job hunt. I'm the kind of person that always does extra work, or has side projects going, but I realized at some point during game crunches that I was trading money for my entire life, and nobody can pay me enough to work 80 hours a week.

Yeah, no disagreements there. I went through the same myself, and I was also in the game industry.

Not all jobs I had in the game industry had required crunch time, though. One had a development manager and veteran developer that didn't believe in crunch and never required it of us, and we never worked more than 50 hour weeks, and that was pretty rare.

I don't know about 60 hours per week, but I work 32 hours (four eight-hour days), and it's fantastic. I noticed that Friday was the day I couldn't wait to end, but now I end the week right before it becomes boring. Every Thursday afternoon is "oh, it's the weekend already? Nice!" and I've been doing this for a year or so.

I definitely recommend it if you can take the salary hit.

I'm jealous, that's my goal and I feel like four 8 hour days or even five 6 hour days is a sweet spot. I'd take the salary hit in a heartbeat, most employers I have experience with don't want to deal with part time (I've asked).

Being self-employed at the moment, I'm contracting to pay bills and working on my company, it's the same thing as a never ending crunch time! I certainly feel like I'm getting more done than a 40 hour week, but maybe I'm not getting enough rest to know the difference. :P

What you're doing now is very very harmful. I used to do it too, and, because I didn't have specific hours, I would feel like I had to work all the time, and would feel guilty when I wasn't working.

The way I solved it was by setting actual work hours and sticking to them. Anything that came in outside work hours could wait until the next day.

Yep, I do feel like I have to work all the time, and I do feel guilty when I'm not working. Pretty sure you're right that I'm doing some damage.

I feel like one of the worst parts about a compressed work schedule is that I've mostly stopped playing & exploring, and exploring is where the good stuff happens. Many of my most important personal developments and achievements were on "fun" time, even if it was work. Doing overtime and working too much like I'm doing now mutes that.

I have some commitments in the short term that mean I can't fix this very quickly, but long term I aim to be where you're at for sure.

It's comments like this that really make me sad about the state of labor solidarity among tech professionals. Like, please, stop torpedoing our negotiation position, especially on a public forum that many technical employers and managers read.

On the object level, I have a suspicion that being productive past 40 hr/wk or so has reverse causation for me. It's bad for me to work over 40 hours a week, so that magically translates into being bad at it. Social negotiation is one of those things that your non-verbal and emotional parts is really good at, and Thomas Schelling style "don't have the ability to do things you don't want others to pressure you into doing" strategies work.

Do you realize that you're basically saying: "shut up with your facts, we've got a way of [easy hipster] living to protect"?

No, he is saying, you need to pace yourself. Don't burn out in your twenties. Most of you won't make your life better by working 80 hrs/week but you make life worse for a lot of people.

That's indeed something to think of.. but that's not what the poster wrote.

You sound like you're either management or the kind of person who's first to cross picket lines.

Anyhow, take out the vitriol and your statement is basically "do you realize that you're supporting the quality of life of software developers?" Yes. Yes I am. I'm a software developer and this stuff is important. I'm opposed to moving towards a negotiated position that gives employers more at the expense of software developers. These are not unreasonable positions to hold.

editing to add in a quote from parent downthread:

>yes, I was in some mid-management level

Keep that in mind as you read comments.

Responding with an ad hominem attack, nice.

You see your position as supporting software developers, which is reasonable. It's not reasonable to expect other software developers to refuse to raise rational points of inquiry that you've based your argument on because it may result in weakening your argument on the merits. It demonstrates that you care more about winning than about the truth. As a result, you're responding to someone who is behaving more rationally than you with an emotional response and personal attacks.

Thanks, that was a lot more eloquent and expressive than what I would have managed. But, yeah, I meant the same thing.

This is the sort of bare-bones level of thinking about the consequences of your actions that I expect out of professionals and adults. The lady in the grocery store may be fat, but loudly talking about that true fact is the sort of thing that we teach our children not to do. I'm not expecting us to not discuss these things; I'm expecting us to not discuss them in a way that hurts us as a class. Keep it over the water cooler, or on private mailing lists.

As far as the ad hominem goes - that's the appropriate response to the social status implications of the "easy hipster" comment.

Regarding the "easy hipster" part - I exaggerated for effect.

That is the perception people have on SV developers, for right or wrong.

Meanwhile, I'm from Sweden so I'm perhaps just an outside observer to this spectacle.. but at least from my perspective, SV developers are generally speaking overpaid. Well, at least compared to Swedish/European developers. :)

I suspect that your belief that SV developers are overpaid is because of targeted media with the goal of underpaying developers outside of Silicon Valley.

If you're reading it, it's for you.

No, it's more the fact that I have been involved in hiring rounds in SV and seen the insane amounts relatively speaking crappy devs are demanding.

Your deleted comment form elsewhere in the thread:

>Well, at the moment I'm (possibly temporarily) retired, doing hobby projects. I have never felt the urge to cross any picket lines.

Not mentioning that you're former management is extremely dishonest. Derailing pro-worker discussions like this with condescension and dishonesty is extraordinarily unethical.

Let me just point out that you just commented to a comment where I said I had been involved in hiring. And yes, I was in some mid-management level. But I was foremost a developer.

Oh please, that's ridiculous. "Pro-worker discussion"? "Former management?" This bizarre class warfare / labor vs. management thing you have going on is so over the top it's ridiculous. This isn't a garment sweatshop in the 1800s.

Even if the person you're responding to on some internet forum is the president of the Foundation For Keeping Software Developers from Being Overpaid, it's not unethical for them to jump into a discussion on the merits without disclosing that fact.

Why are you so afraid of having a frank discussion about this, with anyone? Slinging around terms like "extraordinarily unethical" when they're not even remotely warranted just makes it seem like you have little faith that your position makes any rational sense.

> Even if the person you're responding to on some internet forum is the president of the Foundation For Keeping Software Developers from Being Overpaid ...

For the record - they wanted me to be president, but I declined. I am merely the secretary of said foundation.

Sorry for not being explicitly clear about what I found objectionable.

Saying that you're retired and working on hobby projects is technically true, but in context heavily implies that you did not have a management background. It's not technically lying, but you can mislead people extremely well by saying particular true things in a particular way. That's why I called it "dishonesty" instead of "lying".

And "jump into a discussion on the merits" isn't how I'd characterize their behavior so far. Most of what they've done is snark and implications that play stupid bullshit status games.

You have a very bizarre view of the world from where I'm sitting.

Saying that you're retired and working on hobby projects is technically true, but in context heavily implies that you did not have a management background.

How on earth is this true? In what universe does someone who is retired except for some hobby projects mean that they were never in management? I literally don't know how to parse that.

And even if it is, how does someone who was "former management" now have no credibility to talk about work/life balance or whether developers are overpaid or underpaid? They don't have a particular dog in the fight anymore, right? Unless, as I suspect, you think that they're "different" somehow, not part of the same class of people as you, and they'll "stick with their own kind."

Every comment you've made seems to me to be bigotry with a thin veneer. I don't know, maybe I'm just privileged in that I've never been in a struggle of labor vs. management. Just don't see the world in those terms. I'm sure you think that means that of course I'm engaged in that struggle, and I'm either lying (because I'm in management), or getting screwed (because I'm labor and management is always screwing labor whether they know it or not). Shrug. I'm happy. Not sure what else to tell you.

The only one here who I see playing status games and pumping up the us vs. them mentality is you.

I'd take issue with your claim that the response by GP was the first emotional or attacking blow - that response was to GGP's "easy hipster life" claim, and the implicit claim therein that GP's call for labor solidarity was spoiled whining rather than, perhaps, a call for skilled workers in an industry to support each other's negotiation positions rather than undercut each other.

> It's not reasonable to expect other software developers to refuse to raise rational points of inquiry that you've based your argument on because it may result in weakening your argument on the merits.

What argument are you claiming is weakened? GP is saying that our overall, industry-wide labor bargaining position is weakened when a subset of us willingly take suboptimal work-hour or payment arrangements - really they're giving the companies and hiring side of the discussions all of the leverage over us while dropping our price floor out from under us.

If that sort of thing continues, it signals to the market that we are not skilled labor, just labor. And then all the software jobs run overseas where they are cheaper, just like manufacturing has done over the last 50 years (and software has already begun to).

Maybe the original comment GP's response to wasn't the right one - but it's the right sentiment in this discussion of whether work-life balance is a good thing. How is that even a question?

My biggest beef is that it's undermining a set of strategies for playing office politics. It's in my best interest to enforce boundaries on work-life balance. It's also in my best interest to talk about enforcing those boundaries in terms of what the company wants, rather than what I want.

That last point is a great one I hadn't considered. Framing work-life balance as a business need is the only tenable bargaining position we will continue to have. Thanks for the clarification.

What argument are you claiming is weakened?

I'm not saying any argument is weakened. This is analogous to what I saw:

1. Article claims X, which is good for software devs as a whole.

2. Software dev #1 says "Hmm...is X even true? Doesn't make sense for reasons A, B, and C."

3. Software dev #2 says "Hey, we're trying to negotiate here and it doesn't matter if X is true or not. You shouldn't even be pointing out that it might not be true and that we should have more evidence. You're a traitor!"

Sorry, but I have a lot more respect for software dev #1's position than software dev #2's position. I want to be associated with a community of people who are looking for the truth, even if it leads them somewhere difficult, not protecting themselves at the expense of others, truth be damned.

And I certainly don't want to be associated with a group that not only doesn't want the truth, but yells at anyone within that group who dares to challenge the consensus. Ugh.

> It's not reasonable to expect other software developers to refuse to raise rational points of inquiry that you've based your argument on because it may result in weakening your argument on the merits.

> I'm not saying any argument is weakened.

Let's be consistent.

> I want to be associated with a community of people who are looking for the truth, even if it leads them somewhere difficult, not protecting themselves at the expense of others

A few things:

1. Nobody here has said "don't talk about it, period". Even Software dev #2 from your example has further commented that the criticism is aimed at the forum rather than the topic, due to its high visibility among people who often create labor policies

2. What exactly is "difficult" about a truth backed by scientific data? Also, what in aetherson's original, entirely-opinion comment resembles truth? They themselves are admitting a dearth of data on the issue, then proceed to classify the 40-hour workweek as "wishful thinking" and "probably mostly untrue" - again, without any data to support. How is that a quest for truth again?

3. Who are these "others" you say we are protecting themselves at the expense of? I'm really having difficulty understanding how a plea for labor solidarity alienates anyone except those who profit from undervaluing labor - i.e. management and moneygrubbers.

>And I certainly don't want to be associated with a group that not only doesn't want the truth, but yells at anyone within that group who dares to challenge the consensus.

A few more things:

1. Please tell me what part of saying "I'm sad" and "please don't" in ThrustVectoring's original response is yelling, again?

2. I'm not sure where you live, but where I live class consciousness and work-life balance is decidedly not the consensus. The consensus is actually very clearly aligned with aetherson's claims - that "working lots of hours is totally fine probably don't worry about it", and that as long as you're getting yours everything is fine. It doesn't even seem to be the consensus in this very thread - so it might be prudent to examine why you feel attacked as a minority when you very clearly aren't holding a minority opinion.

3. You haven't actually engaged with any of the arguments here about labor solidarity, but have instead managed to make the conversation about how mean the big scary class-conscious consensus is to the little folk who dare to question whether working more hours in a week might be a good thing. I have a hard time taking this as a serious discussion if you won't grapple with the issues on a substantive level.

Associate with whatever group you like, but it is not the responsibility of people to make you comfortable with ideas you don't like. It's your job to figure out why they make you uncomfortable and investigate that anxiety - or not, you could just do what you did here and dismiss all discussion because people were being mean and "yelling".

Thanks for the chat.

Haha, that's hilarious. I love how you managed to (non-ironically) try and twist this in your mind about me being the one needing a safe space. Excellent.

I didn't engage on the merits of the discussion for the same reason I didn't say that X is necessarily weakened as an argument (you completely skipped the word "if" in your reading of first quote above), which is that I don't have a particular dog in this fight.

But it's so lazy and intellectually dishonest to fault someone for pointing out that maybe we need more evidence. And to then basically call them a traitor? I felt like commenting on it. So I did. Without any disclaimers of any former mgmt experience so I guess I'm a monster as well.

Enough entertainment for one night, I'm out :)

I do want to know whether or not X is true, and it does matter. And I do enjoy being part of a community of people who are looking for the truth.

The problem is that hacker news is not a place where it's safe to ignore the political effects of your speech and focus purely on epistemic truth. Private mailing list? Sure. In person? Sure. On a public forum where management types will imply that you're an overpaid lazy hipster? Yeah no.

If you want a place where people can focus on finding out what's true, you need to make it safe to do that. You're never going to get a truth-seeking discussion about gender or race on r/SRS for exactly that reason. Hacker News is better than most because it's well moderated, but it can't and won't be that way for things that touch on the economic relationships between software developers and their employers.

Wait, so you're implying that "management types" are so stupid that they would have read this article (plus many more like it) and been like "yeah, guess it's better for us to pay the engineers more", but then they see a short comment from someone on a forum saying "hmm, I'm skeptical of this; is there good evidence?" and so the management types are like "whew! never mind! turns out there's no evidence!"

This is simultaneously: a) a bizarrely uncharitable view of "management types" and their intelligence level, b) a clear indication that you don't think the evidence is very good, and c) a ridiculously impractical view of how impossible it is to keep a simple thought from spreading, let alone just occurring.

The fact that the person you were responding to is, in your words, a "management type", and came up with this objection should show how dumb it is to try and keep it out of the discussion. They can clearly think of this objection on their own.

You're missing the core of what I'm concerned about. What I care about is something like "what looking like you're putting in sincere and whole-hearted effort looks like". I oppose publicly talking about how you as a software engineer can put in 45 good hours of work reliably every week and feel like you have good work-life balance for the same reason people make comments if their coworkers over-dress for work.

If you can, and you say that you can, and you don't complain about it, then that becomes expected. This is as true of wearing a suit and tie to work as it is for putting in long hours. Finance is in a really shitty place because of this and I don't want the tech scene to follow suit.

>>I want to be associated with a community of people who are looking for the truth, even if it leads them somewhere difficult, not protecting themselves at the expense of others, truth be damned.

Management wants to protect the company's profit at the expense of employees, so why shouldn't the employees push back and try to protect their quality of life?

An attack on character isn't necessarily an ad hominem fallacy. The poster engaged directly with the argument, and didn't rely on the character attack to make his argument.

Save your call for solidarity for people who aren't in an industry where exceptional individual achievement matters this much. I'm not interested in being saddled like a horse to carry a bunch of can't-dos who should be encouraged to find something they aren't dragging down. Solidarity is for line workers who want to be lazy.

That's what I'm trying to do - keep the can't-dos from acquiescing to management demands in a way that makes effective people look lazy. It's the marginally-employed that are the least able to resist management demands for working more hours. If they work more hours than you do, then you're either working more hours for no gain, or you wind up looking like someone who isn't putting in as much effort as others.

Management expectations are a resource we all share, and that includes you. Yes, solidarity helps the lazy. It also helps the hard-working.

We work in a field where many decide to take advantage of their employees who are usually young, single and love working on their code. This is a ripe combination of exploiting naivety for commercial gain (if you think you make a lot coding, think about those higher up who are selling it).

On the negotiating side, I know a truly brilliant consultant who is way off at the higher end of salaries who negotiated to work only 7 months of the year. He would work 6 days a week and usually 14 hours a day but then wouldn't even touch a computer for almost 6 months. If some people want to work crazy hours they should be able to but they should demand appropriate remuneration for it and not sell their time and brainpower cheaply. And people who can get more done in less time should not be expected to work longer just because others are less productive.

I think the real problem is that most of us spend the first 40 hours of a week on dull stuff and politics and don't learn anything. I think we should fix that first before doing more work in the evening.

You know what makes me the most productive? Working when I have the motivation to do so, I don't mean "I only want to work when I want"..

But sometimes it'll be midnight, and you'll get that brainpower flowing for some reason (I tend to be a night owl)...

Thankfully my position is flexible enough to then take the associated breaks the following day if I need to, or just go home if I'm not super productive (meetings permitting anyway)

Flexibility like this is amazing for individuals who desire it. I'm in a similar position.

I'm not so sure it would work well if I had teammates that needed constant interaction.

I have one, and it's challenging sometimes. Analysis Paralysis really gets under my skin.

that's how Ive been doing it. During the day sometimes Im just goofing off...and then I make up the time at night. Ends up in a wash, but way more fun :)

How many people out there really keep working on the weekends voluntarily as the author seems to suggest? I'm pretty clear with my coworkers/boss that the only time I'm going to work after-hours or weekends is in case of rare, extreme emergency. There's no expectation that I work weekends, so I'm definitely not going to do it voluntarily. I like programming and like learning new things so I often do work on a side-project of some sort, but that's firmly my time, not my employer's.

I've found this is a culture that's easily visible before hiring—perhaps people who value work/life balance avoid it.

That's great if you are working for a single employer regularly month after month. But lots of people work for many different employers/clients. They go through some months with no work, and others with far too much. Sometimes the only way to stay afloat is to work like a maniac when you can and hope that you have a few bucks to spend when the downtime comes. It isn't healthy, but is how you pay the rent.

I don't know how many other people do, but I do, since I'm in a startup and I'm my boss. I'm worried that I might get fired any day now by myself for not working hard enough. ;)

Seriously though, it's harder to avoid in startups, and this forum is more or less dedicated to startups, so I'd expect quiet a few people here do land in this boat. I'd also guess side projects that involve programming probably count as work, as far as what the author intended, and everyone here has side projects going.

Keep in mind that there are plenty of managers that subconsciously reward extra time, and plenty of workers that will put in a little extra to get ahead. It's not fair or good for work/life balance, but it happens. Drawing your own hard line is a good thing, and nobody should be expected to put in unpaid time, but sadly it doesn't work the same for everyone everywhere, and being too vocal about extra work can have unintended consequences.

I have worked a few weekends in a row for a few hours. I opted to not work one weekend and my PM went to my manager to raise concern about getting deliverables out in time for a client.

As an intern I definitely did work week ends, and as a relatively fresh employee (almost a year) I did it quite often, but I'm doing it less and less. I'd say when the work is good, it tends to overflow in your social life. Some jobs (not all) are mind consuming and can't be left alone so easily when going back home. Although if you're doing it because your boss tells you, then you should find another boss.

I work almost every weekend, but there's also plenty of days where I don't start work until noon. I prize flexibility far above absolute number of hours: I'd rather work 60 hours a week than be forced to work 9-5 every day.

After reading such articles I'm always left with the feeling that as software engineers we think we are in some kind of magical domain that is completely different from where the rest of worlds engineers/scientists do their work. I work with a lot of scientists, and most of them have pretty much zero sense of work life balance. They work long hours, often work on weekends, are obsessed about their work, and exhibit all the "red flags" as blog posts like these like to point out. Yet, they are extremely productive; many are world-class scientists who hold dozens of patents. And its not just me, I'd say a TON of scientific and cutting edge engineering work is done by people toiling long hours with not a semblance of a balance in their lives.

(N.B. I'm not endorsing one way or the other, but the insistence of articles like this that X requires Y often goes unchallenged)

> I'd say a TON of scientific and cutting edge engineering

The problem is that most of us think we're doing cutting edge engineering work, but really we're not. We're just the manual laborers of the information age. Artisans at best.

We the average joe engineers of the world, need rest and work/life balance.

That said, Feynman is famous for crediting the stepping away from work work and going back to joyous play, with making discoveries that lead to a Nobel prize. If he kept pushing himself and toiling on the busywork that Real Research was pushing on him, he'd never get anything done.

>That said, Feynman is famous for crediting the stepping away from work work and going back to joyous play, with making discoveries that lead to a Nobel prize. If he kept pushing himself and toiling on the busywork that Real Research was pushing on him, he'd never get anything done.

Hmm, I don't recall him ever saying that. Do you have a cite for that?

What I do recall is him saying he often worked on problems that served no greater purpose, essentially for the fun of it rather than any assumed utility. He may very well have been toiling for long hours on those problems.

It's from Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman. Here's a 1874 day old HN thread about it that also links to a full quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3033359

I remember seeing it in youtube forme once, too. Might be this 1 hour interview, but I can't find the exact timestamp now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zZbX_9ru9U

Why is the end goal to be a better software engineer? It seems like to me that life itself (and hence work/life balance) should the priority of anyone. If anyone disagrees, I would love to hear your thinking.

Many people like to take something they're good at and push it to it's absolute limit. For some it's Starcraft, DOTA or League. For some its parenting. For some its wall climbing. For some it's an open source project. For some its their day job. In that last category, some are software engineers.

I'm sure many coders do share that goal. If you don't, that is fine... but then you are not the target audience for this article. Ideally, people have careers that they value enough to feel the work is worthwhile for its own sake, and not just a means to collect a paycheck that funds the rest of their lives.

I certainly do not work on my off hours for the company I work for. However I WILL work on my own projects on off hours for my own personal ventures/amusement. Often times, this is how I learn most of my new technologies.

These aren't, in my view, necessarily orthogonal. I recently had a big, ambiguous project on my plate where I had to learn some new technologies. I had a good time making toy prototypes of the system I would eventually end up building.

It was my off hours, it furthered my work, and it was fun and fulfilling for me. The best is when your work gives you ambiguous problems that feel like side projects you'd normally want to do anyways.

> You need a hammock to solve hard problems

Tangentially related to this point (less so the section itself) is the benefit of a comfortable working environment. Personally, i have found that a curved chaise is the absolute peak of laptop coding comfort, especially for late night sessions.

If you have space and are in the market for some new furniture, i would urge people to give them a try.

I don't even want a hammock or chair—just a quiet room would be a good start.

I'm looking at pictures of them trying to imagine how this wouldn't kill your neck with a laptop. Can you post a picture of yours (or something similar)?

Any recommendations? My back has been killing me for the last few months.

Hammocks -> hang at 30°angle, need to be big, and lie in them diagonally. No spreader bars. In that case you lie flat.

I strongly believe and practice work/life balance. While I love my job, I love coding, I have several open source projects, etc, and I do sometimes work on nights and weekends, I can't sustain it for very long before I crash and burn.

That being said, the best engineers I know all work crazy hours. Even when they don't they're absurdly productive, but on top of that, they work insane hours without skipping a beat. They shouldn't, they don't need to, they'll get promoted without it easily...but they do anyway. And they still manage.

I don't know what to say to that. But that's my reality, at least.

How does someone like you (and me) compete with those people who can sustain the crazy hours?

We don't. Not everyone can be a nobel prize winner. It's okay to be second best sometimes :)

I'm ok with second best. I just want to make sure I can still get hired in X years.

This is true if the 40 hours that you spend is on deep work. You are pushing your intellectual limit all the time. Practically this isn't the case right ? Most of our work, whether we like it or not, falls into the realm of JSON parsing. 50-60 hours of such work is still fine in my opinion.

This post pretty much makes the statement a lot of scientific research has already proven. Your brain needs rest in order to form new neural connections (especially when you're learning). Working long hours to the point where you are experiencing mental fatigue is counterproductive to one's efficiency and overall output. Even for those people who are capable of pulling 12 - 16 hour days their productivity wanes after a certain point and are more prone to producing lower quality work and making errors. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mental-downtime/

Work/life balance makes you a better person too

This premise is just wishful thinking. Work life balance may make us happier, it may be the best choice to lead a fulfilled life, but it's wrong to suggest it's going to make us win at software development.

List the people you would rate as the top 10 computer scientists or engineers over the last century. Now, how many of these people worked only 40hrs a week or less?

If you're not interested in greatness, or maxing out your true potential, then balance is a fine (maybe wiser) choice. But please don't discredit obsession and single mindedness after they have been the force behind so many accomplishments.

Except that a software engineer has a pretty set salary ceiling and it is much easier to get a side job at night then get a comparable salary raise. The temptation to perform extra work is just too big.

Norman mailer use to say that if he woke up and didn't feel like writing that he'd write himself into a good mood.

If whatever you're working on isn't doing that, do something else.

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