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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

Nobody is "lucky" to be working long hours. No matter how much they love what they're doing.

An engineer making $150k working 60 hour weeks is making $5/hr less than an engineer earning $100k working 36 hour weeks. The latter is literally earning more _for their time_ working half as much for 2/3 the salary.

The hourly rate of an engineer earning $250k for 60 hour weeks is the same as an engineer earning $150k for 36 hour weeks.

The difference of 14 hours a week is 30 1/3 days/year. Some folks are willing to trade an extra month of their time per year from the prime years of their life for money, but not me. It should be a choice, not an expectation.

Maybe your perspective is different because you're a founder, but I get the feeling I wouldn't want to work for your company.

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Yeah your math totally makes sense. I just disagree with the premise:

> The life of an engineer is a life if sacrifice and 7 days a week work for five days pay.

This just isn't true. Maybe at certain startups, but it's your choice to work there. As a (qualified) software engineer, you're blessed with thousands of options, many extremely comfortable. Flexible hours, free food, great pay, no dress code.

When so many people are struggling just to make ends meet, I have very, very little sympathy for someone in shams' situation. Just get a new job.

No dress code is now a perk? Yikes.

Considering hundreds of millions of people don't get that luxury, yes?

I'm not a founder but agree with a13n. Working long hours is not the norm for software development. I live in a city 99% of the people here have never heard of, working 40.0 hours a week (not 36, which seems like an odd number to pick), and I'd need to make $330k in San Francisco to have the same standard of living.

There are plenty of very well compensated 40-hour-a-week software development jobs available.

Usually the time you need to book is lower than the full 40 hour week, I have to book 37 even if I'm pulling 60 or 30.

I think you do have to acknowledge the point that engineers are sometimes thought of as commodities and the business often don't realize the effects of their requests on the engineering team. Management is always very quantitatively focused and its hard to justify a lot of the yak shaving that needs to be done . This leads to poorer quality code or engineers working extra hours so they don't end up swimming in shit every day.

Of course if you are in those situations, just leave, we're in high enough demand right now. Only in a recession should you worry about those qualms.

I wasn't disagreeing with him saying it's not the norm, I'm disagreeing with his suggestion to the parent to basically 'suck it up, princess'.

36 accounts for time spent eating lunch and taking breaks. It's a good target. It also handles common schedules some folks have of 4x9 and 3x12.

i'd like to hear about this city

Any small city with computers, honestly. There are tens of thousands of senior developers, architects, programmer analysts etc that are making $100k or $125k or more in cities you've never heard of with a cost of living that is a small fraction of Silicon Valley. Yes, you're going to find a lot of .Net and Java work, but there's more cutting edge stuff as well (and plenty of the .Net and Java developers I know love talking about Vue or React or anything else tech).

But you need to be okay living in a city nobody's ever heard of, working for a company nobody's ever heard of, and not changing the world. But honestly 99.9% of the people working 80 hour weeks in VC funded start-ups writing the next big CRUD app aren't going to change the world either, and they're paying $3500/mo to rent a 1-bedroom while people in these small cities are paying $1k/mo for a 2-bedroom mortgage a 10 minute commute from their office.

Pick one. There are thousands across the country!

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