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Comment by alrehn | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how much you can consider Work/Life balance a key value when you expect people to work 50 hour weeks (https://www.keyvalues.io/kite). Not to say that 50 hours is awful, there's certainly a lot worse out there, but I'd say it's enough to disqualify that as a 'key value'.

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I agree that any company that asks for more than 40 hours should not be allowed to have the work/life balance key value. The profile says that the company eats dinner together and people go home at 8pm. That sounds pretty work centric and not much time for life left after that.

Also they accompany it with a picture of a fun work outing. Those can be great, but should go with some other key value. When I think of work/life balance I think of having time to myself, to relax, see friends/family and work on other things/hobbies. Company events are nice and I think a good idea in terms of teambuilding but they are still on the side of work, not life.

Also might say that they value their employees being young, single and childless.

If everyone comes in at noon, that seems fine to me. It's not for everyone, but it's not overworking.

Apparently the teams self-select their values, so it looks like these poor souls actually think that working 50 hours a week and eating dinner at the office is good work/life balance.

I agree, though I will give Kite credit for being upfront about the hours and the environment ("we hardly ever speak person-person outside of lunch", [paraphrasing:] "dinner comes at 6:30pm and we sort of expect you'll eat at the office". "Slack doesn't notify after 8pm because that's when most people leave").

Much better to know that from the start than get surprised during interviews or after you start.

Every time work/life balance comes up I get so damn annoyed with this uniquely tech-centric viewpoint.

You've got people bringing home $150-350k/yr plus every imaginable perk fretting over the idea of putting in more than 40 hours a week. Even high-skilled high-pay workers (medicine, legal, and finance come to mind) put in lots of hours without whimpering about finding a balance, much less the vast percentage of the population who hold blue-collar jobs and clamor for overtime pay.

If someone doesn't feel they should work more than 40 hours, then by all means don't take that job, but please drop the damn sense of entitlement. This bubble will not last forever and one's ability to crank out an Uber-for-X clone in NodeJS won't always pay the bills.

> If someone doesn't feel they should work more than 40 hours, then by all means don't take that job, but please drop the damn sense of entitlement. This bubble will not last forever and one's ability to crank out an Uber-for-X clone in NodeJS won't always pay the bills.

It is possible to make a lot of money while working reasonable hours and solving problems that are a lot more interesting than "Uber for X" type shit. The fact that our industry values the latter while burning out inexperienced engineers who don't know better is definitely a problem though.

>You've got people bringing home $150-350k/yr plus every imaginable perk

So now you've made this assumption.

I get what you're saying, but you also have to understand that there are people willing to give up salary for more free time, and these people are therefore allowed to ask for fewer hours. There's no entitlement here.

My assumption is based on the demographics and salaries of the average HN user from the numerous polls that always pop up. It tends to be 20-35 year old white males residing on the west coast of the US where salaries begin at $100k+ for bootcamp grads with zero experience [1], and staff engineers at Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Netflix/Google can easily bring home $500k+ in total compensation.

Developers overwhelmingly choose [2] "Vacation Time" and "Expected Work hours" as their primary attraction when choosing employers. HN users constantly [3] talk about achieving a "work/life balance" and sharply criticize any job which they requires work beyond ~40 hours/week.

So you have one of the most well-compensated career paths combined with the lowest barrier to entry and the primary things people are concerned with is minimizing their time spent working. You're damn right I'm going to call that entitled.

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JR4KrVH1dygniLiLFAMT...

[2] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#work-what-dev...

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

If one company will pay you 500k for working 60h/week and another will pay 500k for working 40h/week, then choosing the latter isn't entitlement. It's market forces at work.

If you think developers are overpaid, then just say that.

Like I said, I don't think working more than 40 hours is the end of the world, I just don't think a company that expects that can list work/life balance as a core value. It's ok to sacrifice that for high salaries or other perks, but that's what a site like this is for, to help match your priorities with a companies'. If you put down work/life balance as one of the things you value most then you probably don't want to work for a place that expects you to work until 8pm.

Any company that expects more than 40 hours a week should be automatically disqualified from picking 'work life balance' imo.

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