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Comment by exApple-anon | Hacker News Reader

Some extra tidbits that didn't make it in because the edit timer ran out:

- Despite the big release and herculean efforts, both of us were paid a fraction of our target bonus. This was the day I decided to move jobs.

- I eventually grew some balls and told Apple to (a) pay me 2.5x during overtime (b) hire SREs for this critical service, or (c) go fuck themselves. They chose (c), which worked alright because our service was pretty stable.

- The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.

- Only my first manager at Apple was an asshole. My last manager was a kind and genial person.

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This has been my experience as well. Nowadays I work hard only while most of the following are true: - I'm making top dollar (good salary + equity value is high) - Work is interesting (something new to learn, or challenging, or both) - My home life is not going great (there are ups and downs, and working hard during the downs is a pretty decent way of coping)

I absolutely do not work hard if any one of the following is true: - Project Manager is applying pressure. - People who do not deliver value have been promoted over me. - Manager/Technical leadership has repeatedly ignored my advice and leanded the team in hot water (cutting corners to make arbitrary timelines, only to incur high support costs or maintenance costs later) - Performance Management is not occurring at the company (underperformers are not thrown out, or, worse, promoted). - Company is not doing well (equity value is down). - Salary has not kept pace with market (i.e., nothing more than 3-4% raises per year). - There is an over-reliance on junior people and they start calling the shots, thereby making my hard-won experience useless to the team.

Throwaway for obvious reasons

I work for a company belonging to Accenture.

I can only agree. Shareholders get +10%. Employees get nil.

It is expected that we do at least 15 - 25% overtime without compensation. Project manager promises everything the client asks for. Even if they know we cannot in any universe deliver this without massive overtime. At the same time they introduce new mandatory processes to follow costing additional time.

Performance management is a joke. Employee development non existent. Promotion and raises have nothing to do with performance. If managing directors do not like you, you are out of luck as they ultimately decided on your salary, promotion and bonuses.

I am still there because I can only switch jobs after Sept 2021 for private reasons.

After that it is jobhunting season.

If anyone is of the opinion that you do not deserve adequate pay, can be bullied by project managers or others - do yourself a favor and look for another company that does value you.

> Accenture

Large consulting firms seems to operate this way, being basically a pyramid with endless layers of non-programming "Enterprise Architect Solution Expert". I've had folks tell me explicitly when joining these firms post-grad that their goal was not to code in two years.

Any company that has to change its name to avoid bad publicity is not worth working for.

Can you give us additional info please?

Arthur Anderson used to be one of the Big 5 accounting firms along with Deloitte and Touche, KPMG, Price Waterhouse and Ernst&Young.

I was briefly at an Indian subsidiary of EY(those days, the Big 5 weren’t allowed to operate by themselves without partnering with a local chartered accounting firm) because only certain firms could do bank audits and I wanted the experience at one if the Big 5. KPMG was known for its entertainment industry accounts. I picked E&Y for manufacturing and I think I ended up with an international cement conglomerate account. The Big 5 clearly decided who gets what industry. They operate like a cartel. They also had consulting divisions. AA after Enron simply focused solely on consulting and IT.

They are all ‘special’ kinds of hell. Just different flavors. AA/Enron scandal was a big deal and was the only talk for days and days and days.

Slightly dated.. 2018: https://riskmagazine.nl/article/2018-03-19-how-the-big-five-...

[..] Andersen was responsible for checking the accounting of energy company Enron. The energy company went down with great noise because of shoddy accounting. Trouble came for Andersen as they had approved this accounting. After learning the Securities and Exchange Commission had begun an investigation of Enron’s accounting, orders were given at Andersen to destroy thousands of documents and e-mail messages. These illegal acts resulted in a conviction, which made it impossible to act as a public accountant for American stock exchange funds. Andersen decided to hand in its licenses before the SEC would withdraw them.[..]

[..] On appeal for the destruction of the files, Andersen was acquitted and there was no formal objection to the continuation of the audit practice. However, almost all employees had left due to the obscure practices. The practice had changed hands and the name would always be linked to this scandal. The few employees that stayed, worked on litigation arising from past audits, as well as pension issues and few other matters. Also there still is another firm which reminds us of the existence Andersen, namely Accenture. Accenture started off as the consultancy part of Andersen, which split off just in time, before the scandal happened.[..]

Accenture used to be Arthur Anderson but changed the name as a result of the Enron scandal.

That’s just not true. Arthur Andersen originally spun off its consulting arm into “Andersen Consulting” under a global holding company. AA did accounting, AC consulting.

AC paid AA 15% of its profits every year. But AC was growing far faster than AA, so AA started growing another consulting arm, which was against the contract.

AC partners claimed contractual breach, and as part of the separation settlement had to change their name and distance themselves from the brand.

This was lucky given what happened with AA’s reputation later.

(Source: I worked there in that time period)

Here is another AC story for you: I worked at a bank in the late 90s, on a crunch y2k project that was instigated because AC knowingly installed a non-y2k compliant set of core systems in about 1997, and didn't pass on the vendor's warnings about y2k to the bank management.

The AC project (which ran about 93-97) went kinda rogue, the bank management lost control of the situation. The AC project managers kept bringing in more AC consultants and told the bank management not to worry, everything was good. They were heavily customizing a non-y2k version of the vendor's software, and the vendor warned project management that they were customizing this in ways that would prevent future support and patches, but AC project management covered this up.

Eventually the vendor contacted the bank CEO directly and said "what are you going to do about the y2k issue, we are concerned". CEO: "What y2k issue?"

The bank had to go live with what they had, fire and blacklist AC and burn tens of millions of $$ to re-start the project to deliver exactly the same thing, but using a y2k-compliant version as a starting point, and removing as much customization as possible so they could take future vendor patches.

Wow. That's ridiculous. Problem with non y2k version was exactly what? Just compatibility with year 2000 to be recognized as valid year? Thanks for replies all!

Correct. The separation did happen before the former parent was involved in the Enron scandal. Or at least before it became public.

Not that Accenture doesn't have enough scandals on their own. So they are by far not the clean guys in this tale.

I remember the German "Berateraffäre" just to state one example.

Ho-lee shiiiit. I wondered what happened to AA... now I know.

Accenture spun off of HP. Don't know what happened to AA.

You're thinking of Agilent. Also Accenture didn't change their name due to Enron. It happened before the scandal (so quite lucky for them!) Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting were involved in a legal tussle which required them to change their name... https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/business/worldbusiness/IH...

> It is expected that we do at least 15 - 25% overtime without compensation

Is this still a thing as a developer in the western world?

If any of my managers proposed this, I would laugh, then say "ah wait, you're serious?", and then laugh some more.

What are you supposed to do if your employment contract says you’re exempt (meaning no overtime pay)?

I even had to look for what it means to "be exempt".

> Exempt employees stand in contrast to non-exempt employees, which are paid minimum wage and overtime above the standard 40-hour workweek.

Wow if I had heard this in a random bar discussion I would called it complete and utter bullshit. The more I read HN the more it feels like being a worker in the US is like riding a horse through the wild west; anything can happen.

In my country the overtime pay is mandatory by law and it is also constrained to be a minimum of 75% more than the normal wage.

Btw it is also mandatory to enjoy your (minimum of) 23 days of holidays per year; no exchanging for other perks or money, like some comment mentions above.

From my contract, there is no overtime pay. Overtime has to be given as free time within a specific amount of time after the overtime occurred.

But for any rolling period of x timeunits (don't want to be too specific obviously) I have a specific amount of hours of overtime that the company doesn't need to compensate in free time. In my case this is ~20% of my regular time in ever rolling period.

But up to a maximum amount of overtime hours per year. This max amount is short of 10% of my yearly hours.

So in the end I have to accept about 10% overtime just already compensated with my contract.

No overtime payment specified in mine, either. The usual thing is to "fall back" to what the law says, and that's what I've seen mostly everywhere. Maybe in other sectors this is negotiated differently, though; apart from the grounds laid by law, a set of sector-specific collective agreements might have been set up in the past for different sectors, further improving or detailing their particular work conditions.

Overall, workers are given a lot more protection than what I feel there is in the US, and that percolates into the common culture and the expectations. Then we get surprised when seeing what happens in other places :-) (both ways)

FYI, it goes both ways. An exempt employee chooses their own hours. If the company tries to dock them for working less they'd immediately become non-exempt.

> If the company tries to dock them for working less they'd immediately become non-exempt.

This is false. First, the relevant rule that is kind of like that is the “salary basis” rule, which doesn't apply to all exempt employees; for instance, it does not apply to “Computer professionals who are paid on an hourly basis at a rate not less than $27.63 per hour.”

Second, even for exempt employees subject to the salary basis test, they can be subject to workplace conduct rules requiring a set schedule and be subject to disciplinary dock for failing to comply with that conduct rule. The structure of the dock needs to make sense as a disciplinary dock and not be a de facto shift to non-salary pay, but there is absolutely no rule in US federal labor law that “an exempt employee chooses their own hours”.

Are you sure?

This department of labor letter seems to state otherwise

https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/2006...

> Are you sure?

Yes.

> This department of labor letter seems to state otherwise

That letter doesn't deal with even the question of what effects the status of exempt employees, since it deals with rules applicable to, and I quote from the letter itself, “salaried non-exempt employees.”

Even so, while it finds the specific conduct being addressed was prohibited, it articulates a rule similar to the one I discuss for exempt employees subject to the salary basis test, stating that, “an employer may take a disciplinary deduction from an employee’s salary for willful absences or tardiness or for infractions of major work rules.”

But the employer chooses what needs to be done and the time frame for completion. You can choose whatever hours will let you complete the assigned work. Just complete it or you're fired.

> The more I read HN the more it feels like being a worker in the US is like riding a horse through the wild west; anything can happen.

The term for this is “at will employment” and in most started it is the default law.

Meaning that your employment can be terminated by the employer for any reason or no reason at all, without notice.

As in, security coming to your desk and escorting you through the door.

Look it up.

I think this is a case of culture clash between USA, where "overtime exempt" is a thing, and most of Europe, where it is required to be paid (of course, there are cases where people end up being pressured... or like me, forgot to log the overtime hours despite secretary going around with the sheet).

Of course that only applies to people working on employment contracts, not those who got seduced by "B2B" :|

It’s supposed to work both ways - I work 60 hours this week with the implicit understanding that I work 20 next week. Sure, I don’t get OT pay, but I can abide by that as long as it all balances out to 2000 hours at the end of the year.

That said, the abuse of the exemption system is arguably a pandemic in the US.

The problem is that unlike with proper overtime protection, it's just an implicit understanding that is in no way guaranteed.

Overtime laws generally allow taking the hours worked back as PTO. The only thing is that usually there are limits to avoid running everyone ragged with no end.

I have a very simple philosophy `no pay no work`. It is about having self respect.

'If you're good at something, never do it for free'

Look for another job. Developers have enough leverage in the job market that there's no need to put up with bad working conditions unless they want to.

Don’t work overtime?

Wow, Great List! The last one (juniors calling the shots) really hit home; when I worked in <automobile industry>, I was ultimately standing on the shoulder of midgets.

The worse part? As a CS grad, I knew how to do better, but: nobody with the power to change things understood how or why what I was suggesting was better(!).

I've long thought about this afterward, and concluded it's that 'my world' (which includes a lot of experience, and facility with Math) required me to study a lot and learn a lot; and these 'coders' simply did not have the background to understand what I was trying to teach them. I would have had to fill in several semesters in order to get my points across. Yes, I left. (And yes I tried simplifying - but that only goes so far.)

I'm curious, what kind of things did you learn in your cs curriculum that applies to that job, and the other coders didn't have?

I'll precise I'm not being sarcastic, genuinely curious. My math background could be better and I'm planning on improving that, but it would be for personal satisfaction as it's not hurting my work (legal tech). But maybe it is, you don't know what you don't know.

Just to add to the list. Keep a paper trail of all communications between you and your line management or any other colleague. Especially abusive communications. It will look really bad when you read these out aloud at a HR meeting for them.

Sounds like you're an algorithms guy, and the other coders didn't have the background needed for understanding their use?

I'm self taught, and for many years didn't know about algorithms, big-O notation, and similar. You can do a lot of stuff without that knowledge, but there are definitely some areas that require it.

It's very prevalent in this industry. Newbies cost less and there is usually a lot of mundane work that needs doing, so they comprise the majority of any average team. Even more so in established or mid-size companies where the sudden expansion or huge existing base necessitates a lot of grunt work. Sadly, there is also a trend of managers bending over backwards to please newbies (otherwise the hiring pipeline is thought to dry up; also, it's easier to hand out raises that appear larger if pay is lower) which exacerbates the situation.

Hiring Newbies to call the shots becoming a cost saving pillar that eroded work culture at Boeing is one of those things that indirectly contributed to the recent debacle.

Is a bean counter still heading Boeing? Technology companies really need to be run by technologists first, businessmen second. It's fine to have a COO handle the nitty-gritty of running the company, but the vision and culture need to be set by a technical person and should be very technology-focused in general.

>The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.

I dunno - I worked hard, especially early in my career and people noticing lead to four new jobs, two of which included substantial pay/benefit raises. Then again more than a bit of that hard work was on cross-organizational teams; I wasn't acting solely in my direct organizational unit.

So hard work can pay off if you are doing it somewhere it is visible by others. Getting involved in working groups outside of your company, even if you have to do it after hours, is a great way to network and help others notice your work ethic.

I see far too many people who burrow into their current organization and then just bitch about it without doing something about it. If people can't see you they won't be able to recognize your work.

This isn't directed at you but just a general observation - if you don't like your current organization, get proactive and do something about it. I have little sympathy for people who just complain without doing anything.

Agree. Not always easy to be rewarded within a company. However, others will notice you do good work (assuming you can make it visible) and they’ll be a great resource when seeking next positions.

> Nobody notices

This is a common problem. It doesn't work to do great work and expect others to notice. You've got to promote yourself and your work. Nobody is going to do it for you.

A good manager should.

You'll be much happier with the career results of taking care of this yourself rather than waiting for someone else to do it.

I've seen too many people become embittered waiting for someone else.

I upvoted both this and the parent.

Without much experience in the industry, I would say that both perspectives are important:

The person most invested in your success is you, so leverage that and promote yourself.

But you absolutely deserve management and teammates who celebrate your accomplishments and help you get rewarded for them.

Discrimination and prejudice also affect this—it’s probably hard to advocate for yourself if your management just doesn’t believe you’re capable for some reason—but I’ve generally found solace in the synthesis of both attitudes.

Fight for yourself, but find people who fight with you. Maybe put it like this: if you yourself were a people manager, wouldn’t you want to advocate for your reports?

This is generally true, however in a toxic workplace being effective might set you as a target for doomed projects or envy - even sabotage. You may see people getting promoted by threatening to leave rather than doing good work. You can't assume good intent in every situation sadly.

When I switched to a different team a year ago, I talked with my ex-manager and asked what he considers be strengths and weaknesses. I found the answer quite funny because it was a random sample of mostly minor things. It showed my that my manager has actually no clue what I'm doing all day. He is a nice guy and wants to be a good manager but that is harder than it looks.

His biggest criticism was that 20 months earlier, I skipped him and addressed his bosses boss for some bureaucratic thing. I find that argument reasonable but it showed me that he was not aware of the full context. Either I never explained it to him or he forgot. The context is: At that time I was in a special two week task-force team where his bosses boss was officially involved as Scrum Master. As such he was officially responsible for impediments. The impediment was: We either get this bureaucracy thing out of the way today or I'm unable to participate in the task-force anymore. Given the urgency and him being our Scrum Master, I found skipping levels the right thing to do.

This why the stereotypical sociopath go-getter/politican/evil-business man claim credit for everything, all the time, and blames everyone else for any failure.

This just convinced me to look for another job ASAP.

It's fun because sometimes all of your points are true at once :)

I can empathize with your story. I once landed what I thought would be my dream job at my dream company. I quickly discovered that the position was open because all of the previous team had quit due to the extreme toxicity.

> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard

Be careful about getting jaded and cynical. This is far from a universal truth in the tech industry. I've hired a few ex-FAANG who had burned out and become cynical on work altogether. We had to let them go because their negativity was dragging everyone down.

A similar thing can happen to people who go through difficult divorces. If they let themselves become cynical, they start believing that marriage is a doomed institution and that all members of their ex-spouse's gender are equally terrible people and such. It can become very counterproductive to moving on.

The last few jobs I’ve had were glowing from the interviews and believe me I asked some very tough questions I hoped would be revealing enough without torpedoing my candidacy.

Every one of them: as soon as I started, the foundational person of the team quit, you know the guy or gal who burned themselves out building the process. Fixing all the cruft and actually trying to unfuck everything but leaving scant documentation because the mountain of technical debt rivaled the heights of K2?

As a result I had to “drink from the water hose” constantly. And this is something I am absolutely sick of doing, and no team should tolerate it.

It’s happened so often I’m beginning to wonder a) how I can assess if the team is bleeding talent (I’ve had companies straight up lie about things like attrition and retention) or b) if I just have some kind of gravitational pull for companies that are running people out the door.

a) how I can assess if the team is bleeding talent

Nothing wrong with asking the average tenure of people on the team imo, that is something you can frame in a way less likely to make them lie.

I'll be honest, my default perspective is to expect filibustering and non-answers from all but the actualized and self-aware teams, who if reading this thread and many, many others like it, and lived experience are anything reliable: are less common than their frustrating counterparts.

You can use that to make your decision then. Both filibustering or a non answer in this case are as good as a negative answer for what you want to figure out with it.

>As a result I had to “drink from the water hose” constantly.

I've only ever heard that phrase as 'drinking from the fire hose', I didn't know that even a water/garden hose was considered too much.

I think I need to find a better ... career (?)

Ah, error on my part. Firehose is correct.

I got an offer from Apple. The hiring manager told me "You worked at a startup before, you'll have no problem working overtime". I didn't end up taking the offer.

I work at a startup right now and can count the number of times I've had to work overtime with a null-pointer - 0.

Well run startups can still compete by making smart, focused decisions.

I've never had a startup that hasn't roped me into a production support on-call for a month or more in addition to regular duties. Under 10 engineers, 50 engineers, 500+ engineers: they've all done this.

I've never worked on a product where it ever made sense to be "on call." I'm an engineer, not a doctor.

If something goes catastrophically wrong at 1am, caused by some unforeseen bug in the code, who fixes it? Who diagnoses that an issue flooding the logs is not an issue with your software but something else down the line?

I think it makes sense to have an on-call rota. Some people do it for a week or so. Cycle it through the team.

There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues.

The disconnect seems to be that it isn't mentioned before the offer. If the employee is expecting normal hours but finds out after the fact that the employer actually demands more on-call than was initially discussed, how could that be interpreted as anything other than a bait-and-switch?

We fix it when we see it's broken, which isn't going to happen at 1am local time. If we have a distributed team the odds are better it gets fixed sooner. The world keeps spinning and there's always another bug to fix, it's not worth losing literal sleep over.

> There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues

"Thank you for calling. Our normal business hours are ..." works for the rest of the business world, there's no reason it can't work for you. You can always sell 24h tech support for more money, or make products that don't break in the middle of the night by not relying on systems and designs that are likely to fail spectacularly in the middle of the night.

That doesn't work if gmail goes down. Or netflix. Or an ISP. Or any product that is primarily used by people outside business hours, e.g. xbox live. "Sorry several million people couldn't play games this weekend, the outage was outside normal business hours."

Lots of products need uptime guarantees.

Sure.

But I bet the people working on those don’t say their employer unexpectedly “roped me into a production support on-call”.

If a role isn’t advertised as having responsibility outside regular office hours, bait and switching people into regularly working outside 9-5 type hours should not be allowed. And “not allowed” with serious enough financial teeth that companies right up to FAANG size would care, or at least that employees leaving/fired from bait and switching employment hours would end up feeling satisfied with their payouts.

If you need uptime guarantees, hire people letting them know up front so they can choose to accept or reject that work. You don’t (or at least shouldn’t) get to drop that responsibility on people who never signed up for it in the first place.

Agreed but it should be paid.

Other fields have separate teams or overtime; salary-exempt isn't something an individual person can realistically negotiate against a company (imo).

Other fields don’t release new version of their product every few days. Oncall for things that are always changing is very hard to be done by people who aren’t ones making those changes. You need formal release process and expecting training for each change. That’s not how 99.99% of internet businesses work.

I'll note that only the largest of those companies had this deployment style. The rest were either ~quarterly (with client pressure to slow that down) or weekly/monthly (agile-ish).

I think the only one with a formal release process was the quarterly release outfit, and even that was due to single-client risk.

This was the first thing that really shocked me at my first job (startup in SF back over a decade ago). The attitude that what we're doing really matters, and if something was found broken on the weekend we'd get a call and have to come into the office. Fucking absurd hubris all throughout SV.

Why are you doing it at all if it doesn't matter?

Very little of what most people do "matters" from a certain point of view. But everyone has to eat and there are plenty of products that make money that might not "matter" but offer jobs. We can't all work for Tesla or SpaceX.

if the only thing that mattered is some system being down not making some suit money, and mgmt has no respect for the work, it doesn’t matter. i work to feed myself not because it matters.

To earn a living.

It’s probably obvious, but I’d suggest never working on a product doctors use.

Agreed: well-run startups can still compete by making smart, focused decisions.

I've worked at 3 startups (5th employee, 16th employee, 2nd employee).

The first one had 80 hour weeks and burned me out after a year. The company had enough capital to stay in business, but never went anywhere, and my shares were washed out in subsequent funding rounds.

The second had 40 hour weeks and I worked there for six years. A fair-to-middling exit to Broadcom.

The third one had 40 hour weeks and I worked there for 3 years. A great exit to Google.

I completely agree, sure if you’re into a feature and on a roll in a startup keep going but if you’ve reached a good point to stop no need to cause yourself stress!

There are definitely days I work late, but that's almost always by choice. When I do work late, it means shorter days for me later in the week.

> can count the number of times I've had to work overtime with a null-pointer - 0.

Sounds to me like you've malloc'd all of memory.

You should have just said no sir I wont have any problem working overtime and my rate is 2.5x for overtime hrs, you wont have a problem paying for that you're a rich company.

I can only answer with LOL to such offers

Yes I've worked for a startup. Yes I did long hours. Yes I learned that's not sustainable and not a good way to make things work.

So, no, I won't do it again.

I never understood the supposed attraction of "just like a startup, but in a big company!". That appears to mean that you will work in a small team, putting in unsustainable hours, but not receive the financial reward that a successful startup could provide.

I've worked in several startups, and occasional death marches are unavoidable. They don't work month in and month out. But enduring that kind of life for just salary is nuts.

The other notable thing about “just like a startup but in a big company” (often for startups which have been acquired) is the frequent claim that the startup will be left alone by the rest of the company. Every single process and incentive is against that remaining true.

Maybe in some cases you can hope for the acquired startup to be the pet project of the acquirer’s founder/CEO?

I knew that to work out exactly once, (not a company I was at).

> the supposed attraction of "just like a startup, but in a big company!"

I think the advantage is supposed to be that you won't come in one day and hear your boss say "Guess what? We're broke."

> I think the advantage is supposed to be that you won't come in one day and hear your boss say "Guess what? We're broke."

Sure... but you may still come in and find "this project has been nixed". Upside is that you may still have a 'job' in the bigger company, but everything you worked on may be thrown away, you may lose whatever political power your project had, etc. Certainly there's an 'immediate safety net' issue of "you may have a paycheck next week", but doesn't address any of the emotional stuff that goes along with "we'll have a scrappy startup mentality!"

I had been in something similar - not quite a 'startup in a large company' situation, but similar. And... we hit a "hey, this project is being shut down, and there's no other budget in the company for this team". So.. the company itself was still going OK - everyone else kept rolling along - but a handful of us were effectively cut adrift for a bit. Some were able to be assigned to other internal teams, some weren't.

A project at big financial company...

At some point around March we learnt post-factum that the project, mostly staffed by contract workers (aka "B2B"), nearly lost pretty much all of non-managerial staff, because parent company of the group (a german corp) made decision to cancel all B2B contracts.

Our project barely survived because of some fast talking, and by becoming "important enough" the fact that canceling the contracts would leave them with no "doers" on it was the main reason we didn't get "sorry, you're fired" email.

> I never understood the supposed attraction of "just like a startup, but in a big company!"

Imho it's frequently used to falsely motivate junior/inexperienced into working crazy hours that they might get some financial or other rewards like a startup.

I got a similar line from a certain european video-game company.

I interviewed for Blizzard many years ago. One of the first questions they asked is how many all-nighters I had done. Yeah, that was the end for me.

My frank response would be something along the lines of "I'm going to ask you a question, and how you respond will likely determine if I work here, 'Are you self selecting for incompetents or doormats?'" Their response to this question would probably tell you most of what you want to know about working at that company.

To be honest, I appreciated the honesty. Lots of companies would not ask such a question because they would be afraid of scaring people off. Blizzard can afford to be very picky about their candidates, and they were surprisingly blunt about the work environment. If I was single, I probably would not have cared - Blizzard was always one of my dream companies to work at.

Yeah, you can do this when you have several equally good offers in your pocket. Meaning you're good enough to be picky. What would be your response if you don't feel you're better than all others who applied for this position?

There’s nothing wrong with choosing a job that you know are going to expect all-nighters, probably un compensated all-nighters - but make sure you choose it knowingly instead of pretending it’s an office hours job. It’d be a rare job in video game production that didn’t involve crunch time, and if you want to work in those roles you can, so long as you accept/embrace that. If you’re the sort of person for whom 2-3 months a year of crunch time is going to destroy your relationships/family/mental health, you should probably choose a different industry. There are lots of 9-5 ish coding jobs that involve zero or minimal outside-office-hours work. Don’t fool yourself I to pretending your “dream job” is one of those if there are obvious (or even subtle) red flags that it’s not.

Actually, I just realized I can't relate to this concern. I've never had a situation when someone asked me to work extra. In every job I've ever had I was expected to get things done, and no one ever cared when I do it as long as I do it by a deadline, or by a sprint review, or by a demo day, etc. More often than not it was me who were setting those deadlines for myself, just because I'm ambitious, and I like to impress others, and I like being promoted. Besides, I could never work 9-5. I usually accomplish little in terms of actual work during those hours. Occasionally I get into the zone late at night, without any distractions. That's when I feel most productive, and that's when I do most of the work. Another thing is, I either work on something I love, or I work for a very decent salary. In both cases, I feel fine working extra hours.

“More than I ever intend to do in my entire career. I’ll just see myself out, sorry you wasted my time here.”

Working overtime at a startup here and there can have an emotional reward, as a small team works together with enthusiasm to bring something to market. Yes, this can be abused by bad management and planning, and often is, but .. it's an entirely different beast from demanding overtime out of employees at a large profitable company where poor planning and under-resourcing are not really excusable.

> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard.

I knew of one company, a pair programming shop doing the sort of financial software where bugs could get very expensive. To maximize quality, they had firm rules about all code requiring a pair, and that barring emergencies, everybody had to go home on time. It worked; they had very low bug rates.

They told me about a new employee they had, somebody who'd come from a company where performative overwork was valued. He'd stay until the wee hours, coding up a storm, expecting people to be impressed. In the morning, they'd thank him for his enthusiasm, revert the commit, and do the work again with proper pairing, testing, etc. I never heard what happened to the guy, but I imagine he pretty quickly unlearned his bad habits. That or he quit and went somewhere he could feed his heroism addiction.

In contrast, I remember a long-ago 6-month contract a major online auction company starting with e and ending with Bay. I was on some internal mailing list where I'd get promotion announcements. Every fucking one of them included a dramatic story about how the person had egregiously overworked themselves. The code was of course a giant fucking mess. It was simultaneously the result of tired idiots who never cleaned up and also the cause of so many bugs and schedule issues that people had to dramatically overwork themselves to hit arbitrary managerial deadlines.

It was a valuable lesson to me, the coding version of the Allegory of Long Spoons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons

Ever since I've done my best to work at places where sanity is rewarded and drama discouraged. And to bend things in that direction as I'm able.

> - The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.

I think this close, but a little off. Work hard only on what matters. Join the high visibility projects and work hard on the important parts. "Nobody notices" -> that's up to you. Document and demo your achievements every few weeks.

Work only the good jobs. If it's not good, switch teams ASAP. Never, ever wait for "things to improve". So many times after I switched jobs, I said to myself "Man, why didn't I leave sooner?"

> Work only the good jobs. If it's not good, switch teams ASAP.

I agree with this but you have to understand that it's very difficult and frightening for an inexperienced new grad or someone on a green card to do. These groups are also unfortunately the most exploited.

Thanks for the correction. I did write this thinking narrowly as a privileged resident and I remember now not everyone has that freedom unfortunately.

I do not understand why someone w/ a green card needs to be afraid of being fired. Isn't the whole point of it to firm up your status as someone who is allowed to stay on indefinitely with very few conditions, one of them being % of year spent in the US, plus not committing certain serious offences (felonies?)

That is true. The parent probably meant to say Visa not Green Card. I can definitely relate to the feeling of being "stuck" in a bad situation while on a Visa and/or while waiting for a green card to be processed. It's such a huge relief when you finally get that freedom to move around in the job market.

People with green cards don't need to be afraid of being fired: they're permanent residents. The people who have to worry are those on work visas.

I am sure he meant people on a work visa, whom the employer had applied for and are waiting to get a green card. The process can take from 2 to 10 years, so you are at the mercy of the employer during that time- where abuse often worsens because of the power leverage.

> If it's not good, switch teams ASAP.

At least in large companies it can be pretty hard to actually find the good teams among all of the noise. I've tried to keep my eyes open for them but haven't had any luck yet.

> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard.

As with most things in life, there are places where it matters and places where it doesn't matter. If someone's a junior employee working in a big company, it's likely that they don't have the necessary experience to figure out whether hard work matters in their position. That's an important risk to be aware of. But the opposite advice, avoiding hard work, is also risky. (And not a good habit to cultivate in the long term of course.) If you're not sure which position you're in, and you don't trust your more experienced coworkers to tell you honestly without punishing you for asking, then putting in some amount of hard work with the goal of finding out is a pretty good start.

I don't know. Work fairly, certainly. Work hard... what's the point?

So in some cases you want to fast track your advancement in a direction that you like and this possible through this method, and you actually can work hard, so in this case take the chance if you want to. But that kind of situation is quite rare, I think.

Also certainly do not appear to be working too lightly. But also do not appear to be working extremely hard if it is not the case.

And remember, the (perceived) results are more important than actually working hard. It can be very unfair sometimes, because e.g. if you have to maintain and add features in a legacy codebase, (poor, but that's common) higher-ups may be uninterested with your difficulties caused by the spaghettis of your predecessors, but well life is just unfair I guess :P

> Work hard... what's the point?

I think it really depends on the person. It's a very common problem for people to procrastinate or drag their feet on the parts of their job that they don't particularly like. (Just like most students drag their feet doing homework they don't like.) But no job (or school program) is ever 100% fun stuff, and being able to delay gratification and get the unpleasant parts done is a super important life skill that not everyone has. For a lot of people, maybe most HN readers, this is basic stuff that they nailed in high school and never had a problem with after that. But I'm not sure that's the majority experience.

> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.

Exactly this. Unless your manager has a history of giving raises and/or promotions to YOU for doing your JOB then do not assume, ever, that they will give you anything for overworking to chase a carrot on a stick.

That said if they have a history of recognizing and appreciating your work, and compensating you for extra effort, then by all means feel free to put some sweat into the work. That's a good relationship.

My rule of thumb whenever starting a new job is - Work hard for the first year, but almost never overtime. Do my job, and do it well, but don't kill myself. If manager recognizes the good work, and gives me a raise, I'll talk to them about incentive based objectives, and that I'm willing to work over time if there's a reward structure. Or, that I'm happy to continue at my 9-5 pace if that's working for them. Point is - always wait for them to make the first move. If they don't, either accept the 9-5 work for the pay, or move on to another employer that does value incentive based (bonus) salaries.

> Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.

This is the most important lesson I learned working at the fruit company. That and never have a long commute.

I now work at a place that's ten minutes door-to-door in the morning and fifteen in the afternoon. I took a pay cut to achieve that (I live in East Bay), but maybe the new wfh culture post-COVID will open up more possibilities.

Anyway, point being that I've decided that my job is second to my happiness.

This depends a lot on the situation/company. It is definitely true that in many cases it doesn't make sense to work hard. However there are situations where hard work is rewarded. Those are just probably quite rare situations after all.

> I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices

What I learned people that spend all their time working don't have time for the social engineering needed to get ahead. Also a lot of people that focus heavily on social engineering make bank on passing dirt on their coworkers to upper management.

>- The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.

This. And the intrinsic metric does not necessarily align to the company's until much further down the road or sometimes not at all. Hard lesson for me to learn after a score at the same company and the health insurance stays the same regardless.

Stuff like this is why I refuse to work at large companies. Shit does happen at smaller companies, for sure, but it seems like larger companies are just that much more dysfunctional that I don't want to take the risk.

I've been on both sides of the BigCo fence, and in my experience, the small companies I've worked at have been much more dysfunctional than the alternatives. A BigCo is usually a loose conglomerate of smaller fiefdoms; -much- the sanity level in your team depends on your immediate boss and coworkers. If you luck out and find the right bunch, you're set. A small company is usually a larger fiefdom than a BigCo team, and self-selects for certain bodily orifices, doormats and complexity junkies.

YMMV.

The lesson should be work as hard as you need to (which usually isn't that hard). Never work harder.

If you're the type of person that can only "work hard" due to being driven by needing the project to be completed and as best as it could possibly be, then maybe working for MegaCorp is not the best idea. Seems to be you'd be much better suited for a start-up (hopefully with prospects of major funding).

If you're the type that doesn't want to work very hard and just there for a paycheck, then you are probably more suited for working at MegaCorp.

Getting these out of wack makes for unhappy working conditions.

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