As a creative I find it hard to justify that, sure I did talk about work during lunch with a coworker or an ex coworker or friend but damn I was just enjoying my pork chops, that's not work!!!
I think Tech community is quite elitist at times
I'm just pissing into the wind. Ultimately it doesn't really matter and I agree it's not worth getting offended about.
Also, the idea of "culturally not accepting" something seems gross. It's the antithesis of diversity.
As I read your schedule, I think, “if this couldn’t be handled between 9-5, with a no-work break for lunch, then something is wrong here and effective decisions aren’t being made.”
I say this as someone with a similar job, the machine learning manager with several teams reporting to me, budgets in the tens of millions per year, staffing decisions, executive meetings, procurement, etc. in a large global ecommerce company, with a similar large scale mission about data driven decision making.
If myself or any of the managers or teams reporting in to me has to work past dinner or _ever_ has to work (even just looking at Slack) on weekends, that’s a massive, critical failure on my part.
Unless we make it a critical company mission level priority, this type of healthy work/life balance culture won’t happen. It has to come down from leaders through example first, especially simply stopping work after about 8 hours that fit in with the diversity of personal life needs reflected by the overall staff (not just preferences of people who don’t mind working late or have fewer obligations preventing it).
I actually think one of the most critical signs of an effective leader is _not_ working, electing to let certain work take longer than it otherwise could — and defending that decision to executives — as part of maturity in establishing a healthy culture.
Working more hours is like taking the lazy way out in some regards. It’s much harder work to build healthy patterns over time. It’s kind of similar to developing the senior engineering skill / discipline to avoid unnecessary refactoring and avoid cluttering up a set of changes with superfluous extra fixes. It takes more discipline to hold back and do it the right way.
FWIW, I'm the only one on my team working these kind of hours because we're still establishing our whole organization and my roles are sundry. I also recognize it as an outlier position, so I don't expect anyone to work anything more than the 40 hour week they are being paid for.
I guess rather than talking though specifics though, it's better to ask - when is it reasonable to expect a work schedule like I describe to exist and for how long?
There's no single answer to this, but it's probably a solution to the inputs of product/business maturity, funding and number of personnel with the right skills. If any of those three are "out of balance" people will need to be putting in more work than their pay and job descriptions provide for.
I'm sure being an engineering manager at a FAANG is probably pretty reasonable from a lifestyle perspective.
1. I make my work/life balance expectations for the team explicit and actively discourage engineers and product/project managers putting in more than 40 hours. More specifically, the goal dates we set for increment deliveries assume they will not be working over those hours. If there are surges needed, I will do my best to add capacity to the teams well ahead of time and have some "floating" engineers who don't need a lot of spin up time to help with that delivery.
2. The majority of the team, aside from my deputy and some leads, don't see a lot of the work I do because it's not relevant to their teams/portfolios. I have a good staff and have built good processes, that makes sure that core teams are shielded from other parts of the organization, or even me from levying requirements that would push them beyond their work schedules.
I manage a team of 10 data analysts. My life has turned into a hell of meetings 8-5, with any gaps dedicated to 1-1s or meeting with my team. Then I do email and some of my own coding on weekends. 60 - 75 hrs per week is normal now.
Complained to my execs about it and they just gave me a retention bonus but no help.
I love my job but am going to have to quit because of this.