Ask HN: Working 40+ hours/week in a corporate setting? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Working 40+ hours/week in a corporate setting?

10 pointsfjabre6 comments

Seems that there's been a lot of posts about working 40+ hour work weeks for large companies that treat their employees like shit on HN recently.

I wonder how many on this board have found themselves in similar situations and why we continue to let ourselves get pulled into these situations in the first place. I don't like throwing words out there like unionizing but isn't that what people do in face of unfair labor practices?

View on HN

My experience working with large companies is that the work can be boring, non challenging and with lots of politics. That said, if you know how to work within the rules of their game, you don't have to work that hard, make easy steady money and still be considered a great employee. My theory is that good coders tend to be awful at office politics, so we suffer more than necessary when bounded to the inflexible rules at large companies. I learned to handle that from manager who couldn't code his way out of a paper bag, but really understood people.

Someone should come up with an office politics for dummies.. and this would be my first entry: nobody can treat you like shit unless you allow them too.

(feel free to add your own entries ) :)

It's why I went freelance. Win loose or Draw, I am going to work long hours, it's just the nature of the industry. At least freelancing, I make more money per hour, I set my own schedule, I get to work from home a lot, and most importantly as a father of 4, I get paid for every hour that I am away from them. Was I scared stless to jump, sure I was, I left a $150,000 exec job, but in hind sight it was the greatest decision I ever made.

I completely agree. It's a novel concept it seems when you get paid for the hours you actually work instead of feeling pressured into doing so because that's what your peers are doing. I think people let it go far too often in the tech industry.

We do it to ourselves.

We enjoy and take pride in our work. So it's already breached our defenses. If we didn't care, it would be that much easier to say "not my problem" and leave at 5:00.

I also enjoy working hard on challenging problems but I don't enjoy working that hard for free.

Have you ever worked on a challenging project of your own just to satisfy your own interest. How much did you pay yourself?

Paradoxially people work harder on what they do for free. Not because it's free, but because they are choosing the work of their own volition. In fact we even pay other people to create challenging work for us. Ever done a crossword puzzle? Lifted weights at a gym?

The problem we have here is that there is overlap. We aren't factory workers. Most people on this board could land a cushy in-house IT-Admin job rather than run on the development treadmill, but they refuse. Instead they deliberately seek jobs that demand everything from them. Why?

There are similar issues in other fields. Attorneys work long hours, secretaries don't. Bankers work long hours, tellers don't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com