Ask HN: Have you found success and a good work life balance?
It seems that people need to sacrifice life outside of work to make it in the software industry. Has anyone made it and maintained a healthy work life balance?
That said, I something of an edge case. I have an IQ in the mid 80's, so the fact that I got an office job at all is something of an accomplishment. I should've ended up a minimum wage laborer or turning to petty crime. My employer took a pretty significant risk hiring me, so I'm grateful for it.
To answer your question though; About 45 to 60 hours a week can be spent testing various things depending on what needs to be done. It's not a constant flow of testing testing though, I'd probably say at least a few hours of each day is spent semi idle. It can be waiting for feedback or clarification from the devs, or a compilation (which can take up to 55 minutes for a release build of the largest package, but require 3 hours to take it from the final tested version to managers sending out the release email to the public). In other cases it's doing the secondary tasks for testing; setup and teardown, writing reports, hardware changes, etc.
10 to 20 hours a week is spent working on user facing documentation. Some of the time it's just editing what someone else wrote but most of the time it's compiling notes from bug reports, test case results, feature documents, and trying to compress all that information into a more easy to digest format.
About 8 to 16 hours a week is spent reviewing test cases. In most cases it's just making sure that the cases are still relevant and accurate. It is rather tedious and because of that I think no one else wants to do it, but it is a necessary task as letting it slide causes a great deal of confusion for all. There's some 300 to 400 manual test cases at any given time that cannot be readily automated.
Some 2 to 5 hours a week is spent on administrative overhead. Meetings, email, etc.
Beyond that it varies on what odd jobs need to be done around the office, which. Most of the time it's minor things but it can sometimes turn a larger effort, such as a hardware audit.
Keep in mind that 60 to 90 hours a week is a range, but most of the time it hovers closer to 60. Higher times only occur every two or three months or so.
Doctors and medical staff treat human lives and I don't think they are comparable to an office job. They also get paid a lot for that (at least in the US)
I don't know how someone can focus with that time schedule and I cannot see how I could handle that. I have so many other stuff in my life that I could not see myself committing to that, unless maybe in the case of having my own business or actually thinking that doing that (still, only for a limited amount of time) will open up great possibilities (maybe I strongly believe in the start up I work for). Especially not for 40k/year.
Like I said, there's pretty significant downtime, it's not all go all the time. Weekend and evening work is at a fairly relaxed pace as well and is free of distractions.
It helps if you do not have hobbies, friends, dependents, a partner, and a family that is quite fine with not seeing you often, with no realistic possibility of any of that changing in the future. It would be much more difficult if any of those factors were different.
Though pray tell I ask, what on earth makes you think I would deserve 'better?' Should someone more that brings more value then then I not be proportionally rewarded better?
You deserve exactly as much as what you can bargain for. Which could be $40,000 for 40 hours a week. You can be grateful for your current job and also look for better hours.
You should be proud of your current accomplishment. If your current situation is not working for you, you are allowed to work towards finding a better job.
The reason I score low is due to problems in short term memory retention and pattern recognition. Take the next sentence for example. You might be able to skim over it in a few seconds, and skip a few words as you'd be able to key in on some words and work out the meaning of the sentence based on experience. I have a lot more difficulty; most typically I have to read everything word for word in order to grasp the meaning, in some cases up to three times before I am able to work it out. It doesn't mean that I cannot solve the same problem that someone with a 120 IQ can, it means that it takes me quite a bit more time before I'm able to keep it in my head.
And oddly it's for that reason that I'm actually decent at QA. To compensate for the memory problems, I tend to take notes. Very meticulous notes of what I'm doing, when I'm doing it, and why I'm doing it. It makes my test work slow but it makes creating bug reports easy, and the developers seem to like the the level of detail that is written in those reports.
QA work, only 40k, and super low IQ? Is this a jab at QA workers...?
Recently, I started to offer this setup “as a platform” to previous co-workers taking a 20% cut of their billing. If I get to five I can stop working all together.
Right now this doesn’t eat up all too much of my time so all is done in Excel basically. But if we’re, say, 10 devs I’d reconsider building something.
We’re all run-of-the-mill .Net developers, but we all have a niece (mine is finance and pension funds).
I'm not familiar with that phrase. What language is spoken in your northern EU country?
It makes for a positive, productive work environment. And then I'm expected to model the same behavior I want to see from them, so I mean I kind of have to limit myself to 40 hours. You know, for them.
I’m hoping to crack 7 figures in the next couple of years.
I made almost nothing the first 4 years writing apps but eventually learned the craft. I have lost as much as $30,000 on a single dud app and probably had 5 failures before any success.
I highly recommend M.J. DeMarco’s book - Millionaire Fastlane and I’m a big Tim Ferriss/4 Hour Workweek fan.
Do you use paid advertising also or primarily focus on ASO?
Once I made the decision to prioritise lifestyle, I went contracting. Only taking on projects that I liked and working for people I liked. Learning to say "No" was hard at first, but that too can be learnt. I charge for completed units for work, not by the hour.
Beware of thinking that success = having and spending lots of money. If you don't have good health, then you can't really be happy, etc. Important to remember that you can't spend your way to wealth.
I work remote 3 days a week (for 75% salary) and it’s the perfect balance for me. 4 days off is enough to recharge and work on personal projects yet keep some structure.
Not affiliated, but https://30hourjobs.com/ has a list of similar gigs.
I've been in the industry for nearly a decade and pretty much work 40-hour weeks, including at a company that has a reputation for people working long hours, and I've never been on call.
It's really the team, not the company, that matters. People who join teams that work long hours generally know what they are getting themselves into.
I'd estimate I work 40-45 hours most weeks, with occasional bursts of 50-55 hours pre-deadline often compensated for by shorter weeks afterwards. The popular myth of insane working hours aside, this is actually pretty normal [1] in our industry. I get to work with awesome people on projects that I care about, I earn enough to live comfortably but not lavishly (as do many people in this industry), and I have enough time / energy left over to enjoy hobbies, friends, and travel. I also get to learn continuously and enjoy reasonable latitude / autonomy in decision making.
To me, this means I've been pretty damn successful. Could I have more of these things I've described? Possibly, though maybe not more of all of them at once. Am I living the hyper-optimized best possible version of my life? Arguably not, but it's also not clear to me that this exists; all important choices involve tradeoffs, and what's optimal now may not seem so to 5-years-later me. Personally, I've found it healthier to accept that my definition of success has changed and will change further, and that finding success is maybe not as important as searching for it :)
[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=so...
What I ended up doing was basically ramping down my work for many months, and only taking a week or two off completely. This was the most helpful for our family, although my wife's job (professor) offers a significant maternity leave, so my approach might not be optimal for other situations.
I would worry you might not know exactly what you are trying to achieve?
What precisely are you worried about sacrificing in order to achieve your goals? Brunch with friends?
I mean this as a serious question, why should a person be able to achieve anything without sacrificing something else?
I think if you know exactly what priorities you are trying to balance/integrate, the problem becomes concrete, and then much more solvable.
If you use nebulous terms it’s a bit like ‘how long is a ball of string’ and often you end up always feeling like you’ve failed to find either balance, or success, no matter what happens in your life.
I workout regularly, go out with friends, play with my kids and have a successful career.
The trick (for me) is relentless prioritization. Figure out what really matters in all contexts and invest in the important stuff, drop the rest.
If you're working 60-80 hours weeks, you're not prioritizing properly.
Do not confuse urgency with importance. Learn to say no, delegate, trust others and ask for help if you need it.
There's an emotional component to it. You need to be able to be ok failing at some things.
If you want to excel at something, you need to consciously choose what you're going to be bad at.
There will be situations that require extraordinary effort, but these should not be the norm, they should be extraordinary.
I’ve been working in tech professionally for 14 years. I worked very hard during all of those years and before. I’ve never thought of work and life as something that should be balanced. To me balance means the pursuit of those things being even. Instead I think of it as “work life integration”, where both things need to coexist at the same time. Sometimes the push or pull Needs to be greater on one side than the other.
My typical routine is waking up at 7am (unlesd the kids get up earlier). Every morning I make breakfast for my boys, walk the dog, and get myself ready for the day. I drop my oldest son at school and walk 35 min to the office. I’m usually in the office around 9:30/45am. When I’m at work I’m 98% focused and dedicated to work. 2% of the time is a mental break or personal thing. I try to leave the office around 6:30/7pm and make it home just in time to read to the boys and tuck them in to bed. I don’t make it in time every night (I FaceTime for 5 min if I won’t be home). When I do make it back after we put the kids down I spend the next 1-2 hours min with my wife eating dinner and hanging out. Then I’m usually back on the computer for 90-120 min doing some more work.
The weekends are family time, Sat and Sun from 7am-7pm is dedicated family time. I don’t do any real work with the exception of checking email when there’s down time, like during naps or if my wife and the kids run out for a few without me. Fri and Sat evening I try to spend the evening with my wife (we don’t go out a ton right now because of the young kids). From time to time work takes up one or both of those nights. If I’m giving up Fri/Sat with my wife it’s because something important needs to be done and I don’t take that choice lightly. Sunday evening is usually work / prep for the week after the kids go to bed.
I’ve found a good routine where I can work hard and spend time with family. My job is flexible enough where I can go to a morning or mid day appointment for the kids, or go on the occasion field trip, or leave the office at 5 to pick up my son from school from time to time.
A typical work work day usually averages 9-11 hours with the occasional flex up or down. My routine doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything but family and work. I watch between 0–2 hours of tv a week and if I do watch it’s usually during spouse time. I’ve integrated work and life together and try to modulate depending on what’s going on in either world and either time. I have no interest in a perfect consistent balance.
I think there's a lot of hustle porn culture in tech, especially around the entry level where people brag about how many hours per week they spend leetcoding. This creates an unrealistic perception that everyone is always working themselves to the bone. They're not, my last company even did half day Fridays during the summer.
Interestingly, I taught English as a foreign language in Japan for 5 years. I had a colleague who was giving a class on different professions and she asked the students (first year high school/grade 10) what profession they wanted. Many girls in the class said, "I want to be a mother". This infuriated my colleague who chastised the students and told them not to "waste their life".
Of course, being a full time parent is actually a risky proposition in your career. You have to depend on your spouse for making money. If things don't work out, you don't have a lot of security. From that perspective, I completely understand my colleague's reaction. What I find interesting is the feeling that the choice of "full time parent" is considered an unfit career, regardless of risk. Had the students said they wanted to be musicians, a career with considerably more risk, my colleague would not have reacted in such a hostile way.
When put in that light, what is your career to your life? If you spend your time lounging on the beach drinking pina coladas all day, have you "made it"? What if you sit on the street corner drinking cheap whiskey? Are you wasting your life if you achieve nothing in your career? How much of your time on earth should you devote to that work? If you spend your time simply amassing money, have you failed since you did not spend that time curing cancer? Do you need to make up for your complete waste of time making money by donating it at the end of your life?
Of course, I'm being facetious. Your choice of what your want to accomplish and how much of your time your want to spend on it is up to you. Some jobs require considerably more effort than others. Look at the life of the average rock star. Many of them do 300 or more concerts a year. That's a work load that would bury the average software developer, but it's generally necessary at the top end of that profession.
My advice, for what it's worth, is to try to find a job that is satisfying to you and for which the time spent does not seem to be wasted. Don't partition your life between "things I want to do" and "things I have to do". Yes, there will always be things that you have to do that you may not want to. But instead of trying to avoid the things you have to do, try to find things that you want to do and make them things you have to do.
But it's funny, because I mentored a person once who was really upset about the fact that he couldn't compete against the top technical people on the team. He didn't want to put the hours in to get to the next level and somehow felt that it shouldn't be necessary. I kept trying to tell him that he should focus on things that he enjoyed rather than trying to be the best at something he didn't want to do. Nobody needs a team completely full of obsessed programmers. There are lots of other ways to provide value to the team. However it was absolutely useless.
Anyway, it's a thing you've got to work out in your own head and according to your own values. But you can't be upset when you don't get the rewards for the path that you didn't choose.
I've never worked more than 40h/week, I've worked with people who did but it seemed more like they wanted than that it was enforced.
I feel I've never had problems putting boundaries and being reasonable, I currently make what I consider a very good salary for Canada and am working in a place that really values employer happiness.
My company just got break even so I live with the minimum wage possible but it's growing at a good pace.
Work life balance is both great and terrible. I work with my girlfriend. Our life is really flexible but we have customers calls every day. No days without a single call for the last 2 years. But I love what I do.