Show HN: CalmJobs.io – Work with companies who values work-life balance | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CalmJobs.io – Work with companies who values work-life balance

calmjobs.io

124 pointsjohn200ok54 comments

This domain looks like it was registered today, and most of the companies on the site are ones that are also on https://peoplefirstjobs.com/ which was announced yesterday by Natalie Nagele of Wildbit: https://twitter.com/natalienagele/status/1207435518205546497

There was also a big thread about "calm technology" a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21799736.

Interesting how most if not all of these companies seem to be working remotely.

I really like the idea of this, but I have to ask - how do you know what companies value work-life balance? Of course everyone says they do... Many times it seems like one company can have some teams that are balanced, and some that aren't. How does anyone even quantify work-life balance?

Exactly! A lot of times companies say they have an excellent work/life balance, but that's just the HR and Marketing teams that come in at 10 and leave at 4. Meanwhile IT is being worked overtime and development teams are on deadline crunches working weekends and holidays. Sales people (the good ones anyways) are used to that kind of schedule. At least that's been my experience at large corporations and even some startups.

My company sent out a memo this week letting us know that they value our work-life balance, which is why they now allow us to pick one of two 8-hour shifts: 7-4 or 8-6.

Also no work-from-home, because we're a family, and you can't be a family remotely. Happy holidays!

8-6 seems to be ten hours?

Or one product team is doing fine but another is severely overworked, because the current highest-priority requirements are bearing down on them in particular.

In my experience, it is the overworked teams that are the ones hiring. They need more people to do work, and overworked teams have higher attrition. This is even if you don't have a bad persistent problem (bad manager/toxic environment). Functional, stable teams usually don't add people once they are full and people don't leave often.

I'm still improving the list but currently, here are some of the things I use to figure out if a company has good work-life balance (not all are required):

- Has 40 hour or less work weeks

- Rarely requires overtime work

- Has a good amount of paid time off (Bonus points if they encourage employees to take a time off, like they require you to utilize all your paid time off and/or they provide a bonus if you take a time off)

- Remote friendly

- Communication is asynchronous by default

- Well known publicly that the company value work-life balance

- Offers good employee benefits (e.g, https://basecamp.com/handbook/08-benefits-and-perks)

This would have to be determined from Glassdoor type feedback, which Glassdoor already has.

Glassdoor seems ripe for astroturfing. At my last company, HR specifically targeted new hires (they didn't want people that had already been there and been soured by the culture) in a mass email to please leave a positive review on Glassdoor. It's also just painfully obvious from looking at the reviews which ones are fake, and it's a lot of them.

This certainly isn't true for all companies, but Glassdoor isn't exactly immune to shilling.

Companies game Glassdoor feedback all the time. 50 negative reviews will get quickly drowned out when HR offers rewards to employees for filling out a Glassdoor review.

How reliable is that data?

I'm kinda skeptical of its ability to provide any real insight company to company.

It's "Basecamp", not "BaseCamp". I'd also recommend rethinking the phrase "work-life balance" because it creates a dichotomy contrasting work against life, which is silly. Work is merely a part of life, and for some people who hold the same values as you seem to (like me), the phrase "work-life balance" is a dogwhistle for a kind of mere lip service to the idea, rather than a real embrace of it.

"Work is merely a part of life"

I feel like that's something someone would come to me and say in order to be dismissive of work creeping into or enveloping everything else.

The dividing line is important because there should be real boundaries sometimes... mostly because people have experienced life without them.

> ... contrasting work against life, which is silly. Work is merely a part of life

Work and life are contrasted for good reason: my time does not belong to me when I'm working -- it belongs to my employer. And, for good reason, the employer-employee relationship is asymmetrical. It's as simple as that.

Of course, if you run your own company or own a significant stake in the company you're at, then it's true that "work is part of life." But that's not a reasonable default position.

Exactly. If I could maintain my current lifestyle without being paid, "work" is not a part of my life I would participate in, in the sense I do now. There probably are things one would call "work" that I would start or continue to do, but definitely not my current job.

Work is not merely a part of life. It's something that is unfortunately required in order to enable the rest of life.

So categorizing the act of being alive into two buckets ("work" and "life") makes sense.

Also, "work-life balance" is a common term.

Regarding correction of the Basecamp brand's capitalization, pedantry doesn't serve you well here. It just signals a particular social deficiency.

I'm on the market and really like the idea of a jobs marketplace and recruiters that prioritize work-life balance first.

I've been looking at Upwork and things have changed quite a bit since when I was using eLance, oDesk, Guru, etc 5 years ago. My specialty is PHP and iOS/Android development, and back then there might be 3-5 bids on gigs after a client listing was up for a few days. Now it's 10-20 the very first day. My market at least seems to be saturated.

I also look on LinkedIn, Indeed and Glassdoor. From what I can tell, just about everything has moved to enterprise, SEO and cybersecurity. The prerequisites now are AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, and specific job roles or languages experience rather than general programming or problem-solving acumen. The vast majority of jobs are full-time.

I can find a full-time job for $100,000 per year much more easily than a part-time job for $50,000. Has anyone had any luck working part-time or remote sustainably?

I'm concerned that as we head up to the next economic downturn and beyond, that programming will get more and more specialized to the point that it becomes IT. So more about support and maintaining existing infrastructure than breaking new ground or solving new problems. I also feel that most of the new disciplines like SEO and dev ops arguably have little or nothing to do with programming and probably shouldn't be grouped with it. They are representative of the ethical/legal shortcomings of search engines, and conceptual issues with software architecture planning vs agile spinning (chasing profit at all cost rather than paying down technical debt). I guess to me, they represent a shift from the egalitarian future of the 90s and twenty-teens to one where profit trumps quality of life for certain people.

Am I misguided here? Is there any chance of getting programmers back to having somewhat independent lives like they enjoyed in the 80s and 90s? This last year I've been considering walking away from programming because it's not about the money anymore. I just don't know if I can give up my whole psyche in 1 and 2 year blocks of my life toiled away on someone else's problems anymore. I admit that I'm actually kind of in crisis about this. Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

This is a good idea but I think calm has the connotations of being slow and without a sense of urgency. Most people want some sort of fast-paced and motivated environment but not one that expects them to work crazy hours or will insane expectations

Great concept! Bookmarked for future reference.

Nitpicky copy edits: In the headline, it should be "value" not "values". Also, I'd update the job buttons to just say "Apply". "Apply Job" sounds awkward.

Would be interesting to see employers that let you work 2-3 days a week.

Good concept. Props for testing your idea so quickly. This is how its done folks.

I'd recommend GitLab too. 100% remote while maintaining double digit y/y growth. I've been to a few of their events. And always hear "this is the best place I've ever worked" ;)

I know they have their reasons, and it may even work for them, but I really loathe their location dependend compensation (as a person living in one).

I think their explanations don't hold water. For eg. they actually compete with other remote companies for people working in what they consider "low-wage regions", but those companies pay the same rates for everyone. So they won't get top engineers from those regions, since those engineers can work in other remote companies which pay more (and don't discriminate people based on location).

> I really loathe their location dependend compensation

Quick thought experiment: would you still disagree location-dependent compensation if they opened a physical office in your region, and priced their offers according to the local market?

Companies that have physical offices in multiple regions naturally adjust compensation levels depending on the local talent market. Why should it be any different for remote companies where the only difference is no physical office?

They don't compete in the local talent market, they compete in the global talent market while offering local compensation. If they have a physical office, then they actually compete in the local market.

edit: I mean have an office and require to work from there. Companies which have an office and offer remote are naturally at a disadvantage here in the same way, though having an office may help offset the disadvantage (some people don't want to work remotely, having an office to go to from time to time and talk to people, meetings, integration parties, other benefits)

edit2: I've also just checked their rates, and for my region they are at best average even accounting for local market prices. So I don't see how they have an attractive offer in any way.

> opened a physical office in your region, and priced their offers according to the local market?

Can't speak for the parent but I live in a city where plenty of tech companies have physical offices, and all of them pay jack-shit relative to the national market.

I don't know if I agree or disagree with it, but I certainly won't be applying with any of them. The same thing goes for GitLab.

I would absolutely still disagree. I recognize that most companies do it, but it makes absolutely no sense to me. If I'm doing the exact same work for the company, surely my compensation should be based on the value of that work, not the physical location of any combination of the company's offices or my residence.

Thanks for the recommendation! I'm currently reading their company culture page (https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/) and doing further research about Gitlab.

Since you mentioned Gitlab, I remember their database incident last 2 years and if I remember correctly, instead of blaming and firing the engineer who accidentally deleted the production database, they owned the responsibility and admitted that there were lots of red flags from the company side of things like db backups weren't working etc... I think they handled the issue properly. So plus points for them <3

Also that thing with adding telemetry-by-default. After the initial surprise and backlash, they were exceptionally transparent throughout the whole process. Although I have always given them points for a solid open core regardless of enterprise, their handling of the situation actually gave me a net positive impression of their treatment of their customers as well.

Are large tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook considered to have good "work life balance"?

The only companies who "value work-life balance" are the ones that let you work part-time. It's, IMO, nuts to spend 40 hours a week at work in this day and age, particularly for software engineers who can demand a relatively high average hourly rate. You can't make all the money in the world.

Part time in a field like retail (for a multinational) or large US brand does not have any flexibility. They will often go out of their way ensure you do not get overtime while simultaneously disrespecting your time outside of the job.

How is that relevant to software engineers? These job posts are not for retail floor workers.

It’s relevant in the sense that job posts that tout “part time” might not care about your work life balance after all. Being a part time software engineer sounds great maybe it would lead to less burnout.

Software engineering is not retail. I think you’ll find that workers who cannot be quickly and easily replaced, as retail workers can, or, at least, are, get treated better than those who cannot be.

Why work part time your whole life when you can work full time and retire at 40?

Because you don't get to retire at 40 by working full time, and it's not even necessarily a good thing to be retired that early in life: cognitive decline sets in, skills atrophy, you just generally feel worthless. I know because I usually take a year off between major job changes. After about 6 months it's pretty clear it's too early for me to retire. For most of us peak earning power only _begins_ in our 40s.

So what you're actually proposing is that people spend a quarter of their life (arguably the _best_ quarter) working 60 hour weeks for peanuts to make somebody else (and that someone is likely working part time) rich, and "retire" with insufficient funds as a burned out husk of their former self.

if you get paid enough to work part time by choice then you definitely get paid enough to retire early on a full time salary. If you double your income and don’t spend more where does all that money go?

This is a fallacy. I'm 42 and have been working in tech since I graduated with my computer engineering degree in '99. I only just paid off my student loans 2 years ago. I have no retirement, and just burned through my savings over some health issues related to burnout.

Things are going to be even worse for millennials. Seriously, anyone reading this should be thinking about what they want out of life and how we could/should organize an economy and culture so that everyone can work sustainably and thrive. If something doesn't change soon, and especially with looming challenges like whole industries being automated, I fear that we are headed towards a future of perfect wealth inequality and 21st century feudalism.

Something odd happened there. I also graduated in '99 and, with a BS CS degree, pretty much did computer engineering. In just two years I paid off my loans, paid off my wife's loans (she didn't work), and bought a somewhat fancy new car. Since then, I've paid off a house and had 12 kids.

I guess things go badly if you paid full price for an expensive school, used private loans with high interest, never paid more than the minimum demanded for your loans, missed some payments, and gave most of your money to your landlord. None of that is required.

Somewhere, something went very wrong for you. Your situation isn't typical for a person with that degree.

You're telling me. The gist of it is that I have the knack for perfect storms.

Moved back in with my dad after graduating, had a couple of the most memorable years of my life. Went into business with one of my best friends growing up, made a bunch of shareware games but never made more than a few thousand dollars here and there. Worked for hp for a year as a contractor, it was wonderful but was going through a turbulent time in my life after the death of a friend so didn't stick with it. Struggled through the dot bomb and housing bubble. Worked as a Mac repair technician. Flipped a bunch of broken Macs for 6 months when nobody anywhere had any money. Worked a few years as a contractor, scraping by on several failed projects for every one that made it into the app stores. Had $20,000 in the bank when Bitcoin was $10, ended up spending it on making good on fixed price contracts I underestimated. Worked as a backend and mobile developer for 4 years for a major consulting agency in town, had a falling out after we realized I wasn't a good fit for the last project I was on.

I realized too late in life that I do poorly with negative reinforcement. So the things that I work the hardest on, when they fail, I sort of shut down and lose hope. All we have as developers is our mental health. If/when that declines, it's devastating. I look back on my career, at the hundreds (thousands tbh) of unfinished programming projects on my hard drive, and I see that I am the poster child of unrealized potential.

It's reached a point where I can't really write about or discuss my life because people find it too depressing. I have unusually high empathy and creativity (statistical outlier INFP) which tend to sabotage my analytical work in programming. I feel the pain and suffering of these times acutely and find it difficult to focus on the problems before me, which tend to be mundane and symptomatic of a world gone wrong. In other words I (like so many over the hill midlife crisis programmers) have come to see much of my work and most trends in computer science in general as a waste of time.

It might be too late for me. I'm trying to put on a brave face and laugh about the whole thing, but I just don't know if my heart is in programming anymore. Imagine what you're doing right now, what you're most passionate about. Then imagine you wake up one day and it's like you had a stroke - you go to do the thing and feel a knot in your stomach, a realization that you'd rather be doing anything else at all. And the feeling lasts 6 months or more. That's what I'm facing now, even though I have so much inspiration to work on inventions and side projects. It's like the well has run dry, and I spend the entirety of my time now coping with daily life, trying to scrape up some money for living expenses, and letting other people's priorities take priority over my own.

I wish there was an alternative economy, some other way of living more like Star Trek. Maybe I should have stayed in academia. I can't even imagine the life I might have had. It's a strange feeling to be able to solve any problem easily, except how to take care of oneself. But that's all I've known for some time now.

Millennial devs at least have it better than any other generation. At no other point in history has a 20-something year old been able to make a 1%er income writing code. But you can in the enchanted playground that is the modern Bay Area.

There’s no telling how long this was last though; maybe at some point in the future there’ll be a reversion to the mean and programmers will go back to making 80k/year like all the other mid-skilled white collar office drones. Which is another reason to drink from the firehose and squeeze every last venture capital penny out of the system while you still can instead of worrying about work-life balance.

Location really is everything. I have a Bay Area idealism but I live in Boise, Idaho. Which for the last 20 years was more like the scenery of Napoleon Dynamite than say, Austin or Boulder. But it's been gentrifying extremely rapidly for the last 5 years or so. There's talk of it being the next Silicon Valley. But good news feels like bad news for me, and I'm in mourning about the loss of heritage.

I wouldn't get too excited. There are many tech companies here in Salt Lake City, but they all pay shit. The last ad I looked at was offering $40-60 an hour... for an "expert" in both C++ and Rust. LOL

Your single point of annecdata doesn't mean it's not possible. As a counter-point, my brother started working as a full-time software engineer at 27 and is currently on track to be able to retire at 40. I've made the financially dubious choice of taking a government R&D job (and started even later), so I certainly won't be retiring that early, but I'm still well on the way to a comfortable retirement. That's two millennials that are having not trouble at all making it work.

> Why work part time your whole life when you can work full time and retire at 40?

How high is the percentage of people who work full time and are able to retire at 40?

My guess: Not very

I'm not sure what kind of biased view you have but that's absolutely not what's common.

If you get paid enough to work part time by choice, then you get paid enough to work full time for only part of the regular working lifespan.

Not everything in life is by choice. Maybe you have to work part-time because of kids, illness, no other jobs being available, location etc. and just get by through other support on top of your part time income.

That's a very simplistic view of the world that's maybe true in a small bubble but definitely not in the real world.

Re-read the top level comment again. The context of the discussion was that someone suggested that high earning professionals should work part time by choice.

Many of the best things in life cannot be fully enjoyed after 40.

I left tech at 33 and became a ski bum. It's simply physically impossible for me to ever get as much out of skiing as someone who starts in their 20's. Backflip? Forget about it. A 22 year old can land on their head and just brush it off. I'll be in the hospital.

Work-life balance: when work is big and near, and life is small and far away. ;)

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