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Comment by rguzman | Hacker News Reader

honest question: is work that crazy for most people in the software industry? it really doesn't square with my personal experience.

from what i've seen, most people work 10ish to 6ish under very relaxed conditions like eg a comfortable lunch and a few breaks during the day. i've also noticed that people tend to be available online outside of their work hours, but nobody really expects that nor gets mad when someone isn't.

this was true for all of our employees when i was CTO/co-founder and also for us founders most of the time. this was also true when i worked at a Series A startup and it is true in my team at Google, and it seems it'd be similar in most other teams, too.

note that i'm not taking a stance on whether what i described above is good or bad, it's just what i've observed.

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Same. I’ve never worked anywhere where I had to work more than 8 hours. Startups, mid-size, and FANG alike. I have occassionally done stretches of 60-ish hour weeks for 1-2 weeks at a time, but mostly by choice, and this is the exception. 40 hours is typically ample time to get things done. 60 hours is a lot of time to be spending at work.

It boggles my mind that some of my friends (mostly in other industries) toil away for what they claim is 80+ hours per week. I can’t fathom being able to do that and actually be productive for that amount of time for more than 1-2 weeks.

There are definitely tech companies with the crazy-hours workaholic culture but in my experience it’s easy to spot this from a mile away and I simply refuse to work for them. There’s tons of great companies where you can do cool stuff and still have a sane & balanced life.

> It boggles my mind that some of my friends (mostly in other industries) toil away for what they claim is 80+ hours per week. I can’t fathom being able to do that and actually be productive for that amount of time for more than 1-2 weeks.

They're not actually productive for that much time.

That's basically what I've concluded. I think it pretty much boils down to status signaling (creating the appearance of "putting in longs hours"). There was another article posted here last week that touched on that phenomenon.

It's just sad to see people I care about get caught up in that culture when I know they are talented enough to work somewhere else and still make really good money and not have to live like that. But I think workaholism can definitely be addictive and a lot of times it is purely self-inflicted by choice whether conscious or unconscious.

At the few places I’ve worked where long hours were the norm, these “long hours” people were not working all 12+ hours they were in the office. You’d walk by their desk and this rockstar was picking his nose, or browsing Facebook, or playing a video game (on his workstation!).

Im convinced most of the long hours culture is an elaborate signaling exercise and “facetime show”.

No one is outright pressuring me to work long hours, but if I had 8 hours of real work to do, I’d have to work 16. Business hours are fully saturated with bullshit, mostly open office distractions and anxiety.

My jaw drops with envy when I see the impossibly huge allotments of personal space people get in more traditional office spaces. My dad’s cube farm felt like a palace. Fortunately I have two monitors side by side and management doesn’t seem willing to challenge that. Those with only one monitor inevitably get their seats compressed until that’s their entire workspace.

My colleagues assure me it’s no better anywhere else in tech and that if I feel strongly about it, the only thing to do is start my own company.

Meanwhile the company continues to throw money and perks at us. Anything and everything but quiet workspace. Actually there are quiet rooms on every floor! But those are for medication only, no laptops allowed. They came so close to getting it.

I do find that my older relatives/older friends not in tech are a mixture of appalled and amazed when I say I would kill for a cubicle. They equate that with the worst sort of soul crushing jobs, but none of them have gotten to experience the open office

My tech company has individual desks in the open office. I don't think this environment you describe is the norm but I don't have numbers. That just sounds like bad management.

We do too, nominally, but the headcount kept growing and the real estate didn’t.

Ah yeah we're getting there. We just moved to this bigger office too. Frustrating.

Get a new job?

My tech office in Indianapolis has offices for everybody that wants them.

Well, I haven't worked at any places that expected me to work more than 50 hours a week. And none of even explicitly said an amount of hours.

But I have worked at places where there was extreme and contrived pressure to meet artificial goals set by managers with no engineering input. For example, I have worked at places that have stipulated no vacation without prior approval, and had multiple-month windows where vacation wasn't approved.

Most places I worked weren't like that, but a few were very unpleasant and not any more efficient for it.

This is all anecdata, but I'd describe roughly a third of my past software employees as "crazy" with respect to working hours, etc.

The two that really stand out:

1. Enterprise software firm in the healthcare space with a backend lang/storage system that was so antiquated they struggled to find and retain developers. This constraint was so acute that it forced the few remaining developers into a non stop crisis mode as the situation was often "XYZ hospital is down". I left a long time ago, but apparently it's gotten better as they've finally migrated to a more sustainable platform.

2. A hardware/software Augmented Reality startup that had a very difficult time meeting delivery dates. They'd spin up departments like "customer success" and "support" and "technical documentation" and then would have a 6+ month delay shipping. So you'd have very talented people with more or less nothing to do for that timeframe, so people just sat in endless meetings trying to weigh in on everything and it ground the company to a halt. To throw fuel on the fire, they then had the hardware team start working mandatory 6 day weeks (and then made everyone else come in b/c they were "a family").

The making everyone else come in is the worst.

A senior to me dev started working nights. I didn't even know he was doing it but I got in trouble for not being there when he was working. Because I "wasn't available when he needed me".

I think every company is just different. Some are really hard driving and milking their employees. Others are too chill (I had a friend quit a place because people played so much he felt his skills deteriorating). My guess is that what you and I have experienced (mostly relaxed environment, get work done, nothing crazy) is probably closer to the norm.

There is also a bit of entitlement sometimes (needs an office exactly this size, with this type of lamp bulb, < 5dbs of sound, work hours from 10:06 to 6:06 b/c that is fits the optimal biorhythm with the moon, etc...). Which can make it hard to know if the company is really a problem, or is the employee just difficult?

The last three companies I've worked at stated it something like this: you work an average 8 hours per day, we want you to be in the office between 10 am and 4 pm from Tuesday to Thursday so it is not impossible to schedule meetings. Works pretty well for everyone involved.

This doesn't square for me at all, or for many of the people I know. Granted, I don't live in SV, but I and most of the people I know in tech have a pretty relaxed working environment 90% of the time, far more than comparable positions in consulting or finance. I probably have about three or four weeks per year that are serious crunch time where I will work more than 40 hours, but for the most part it's loosely 9-to-5 and very amenable to work-life balance.

Yeah definitely doesn't square with my experience. My first 3 years as a software engineer was filled with late nights at the office, horrendous office politics and an extreme amount of stress. Got so bad I started to get random heart palpitations.

Not that everyday was like this of course, but these conditions were happening more often than not.

Sure, some of it was due to impostor syndrome and competitiveness between team members but most of it was just the environment

This is just an anecdotal generalization, but crazy work hours seem to be correlated with the percentage of H1B employees. Late hours, Saturdays, etc. Have a few colleagues now that left a company like this and tell the stories. The pressure comes from the managers who's entire life is work. My neighbor is a manager at that same company my colleagues left. He is never home, and when I see him outside, he is on a work call, or reviewing work documents.

No, but we pretend it is.

I just pulled a fourteen hour day of straight coding minus lunch and commute (15min commute). Then after six hours of sleep had to finish off the fire in the morning.

I had to do this to prevent a customer from having another reason not to renew. I wouldn't say it's the norm - just that it happens.

I think probably not for many or most of us, although there are some extreme cultures and every office seems to have someone who works day and night. But BaseCamp is selling to a much wider audience than just software developers, right?

Your insightful comment reminds me of the Seinfeld when George acts all pissed off and it telegraphs to others how busy he is. Maybe similar in these scenarios to justify the phat compensation?

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