I have friends all over MSFT (at their main Redmond HQ campus, not remote offices), and no one outside of Azure works over 40/week. The occasional overtimes/crunches happen so infrequently, they could count the number of those days per year on one hand. And even an average workweek frequently falls under 40/week (all engineering btw, cannot comment on other positions like PM or design).
I honestly am baffled by your info, because Microsoft definitely has a reputation here for being one of the more "relaxed" tech companies. In fact, that's one of the biggest reasons I am staying, because I could definitely make noticeably more by switching to another tech giant, but I don't want to lose my work-life balance, as it isn't easy to find at all.
But, at the end of the year you were calibrated against all of your peers and WLB was not a criteria that mattered. If you just put in your 40 hours you probably wouldn't get fired, but you definitely were not going to be promoted when compared to the people cranking out more work per week. There was a big divide with the younger, fresher folks working all the time (and making their work very visible).
Once you were a senior dev you kind of had a choice to make--if you wanted to keep a high 'promotional velocity' you had to keep working >40 hour weeks or be left in the dust. If you didn't want to climb that ladder then it was totally fine but you would never be promoted beyond another level or two. I knew folks who were senior devs for 10, 15, or even more years. In contrast the partners/high performers were all regularly getting promotions every 2 years or less and absolutely none of them I knew worked less than 60-80 hours a week. To get promoted up to principal and beyond levels required having a consistent history of promotions every couple years--there was no way to really pause or slow down without stopping your entire career development.
From my friends still left there I don't think much has changed over the years. It's a somewhat subtle system where managers and HR can proudly point to never requiring people to work crunch time. They can trot out plenty of 10 year senior engineers to give quotes and talk about how it's so great to just work 40 hour weeks. But at the end of the day if you want to be successful and rise up the ranks at MS, you are going to be working all the time, period (at least until you reach partner level).
But everything is relative to which org and even which team your on. Windows vs Office are going to be completely different as will Azure.
Work life balance doesn’t mean 50-50. The balance is a personal decision and can even change based on life and career stage. Organizations with good WLB enable employees to make that tradeoff and accommodate a wide range of choices.
e: Thought this was outside of Azure, but I was wrong
For example, Amazon is known to be a brutal meatgrinder for engineers, and most of the experiences I've heard of from people I know irl support that assertion. That reputation isn't a secret to absolutely anyone. However, there are definitely those rare few teams at Amazon that are actually quite nice about work-life balance and are extremely functional, without any usual bs you would expect from an average Amazon team. But those teams are absolutely an exception.
Is your SO on Xbox by any chance? Not asking it to invalidate what you have said, I am just genuinely curious. Plus, it would be another good datapoint for me to be aware of in the future. I was guessing Xbox because anything gaming-related is the first thing that comes to mind when I hear about insane work hours.
Seeing them WFH has been really eye-opening on how bad & micromanaging managers can get.
When I was at Amazon, on the other hand, I was usually in the office about 6:30am and would go home about 4 or 5pm. (I was new to big tech and wanted to prove myself.) The younger guys on my team were more 11am - 8pm, so I was always seen as being the guy that left early. And it showed in my relationships with my manager and skip-level, which is a big part of why I left.
So with my n=1 experience, Microsoft is significantly better with work-life balance than Amazon. I can't speak for other big tech. I know this hasn't always been the case - I've heard horror stories from earlier in the Ballmer years, but we're not in the Ballmer years anymore, thank goodness.
I'll also say that there are plenty of times where I *love* what I'm doing and actively put in lots of time because it's fun, not due to pressure to do so. But I've done that at other companies, and I know lots of people that have that passion for what they're doing.
- Getting a healthy amount of sleep or not
- Having time to eat a proper breakfast or not
- Having time to prepare dinner (vs. order out)
- Getting that evening bike ride in before dark or not
- And on and on
I can't help but feel your response to this is part of the problem. 50 hours is a lot of hours, and we shouldn't normalize it.
This was less clear to me earlier in my career. I held a similar viewpoint for awhile. As time went on, and I saw the long term impact on those around me, and eventually myself, I shifted my viewpoint greatly.
While I absolutely agree with you, my career first as a union laborer and now a construction field engineer have really jaded me to the count of hours. It can be very different across different industries.
On my current project Engineers are expected to be present to support field operations, which means starting before the craft workers to ensure everything is ready for the day (possibly as early as 0500) while still being here until 1700 like any other 'office job'; its pretty outrageous. At least when I was a laborer I was hourly.
What can be done to fight the normalization of this? For myself, I fought my way to a senior engineer position and lobbied for a larger staff. Now I not only have enough people to do the job, but we stagger our shifts out to each get around 8hr/day while ensuring full coverage for our field guys throughout their shift. I've worked to instill a culture of "hey you've been here long enough, go the fuck home" with my team. But it took too long to get to this point, and much more tooth and nail fighting than it should have to convince higher ups of the need for what they saw as 'excess staffing', even for my department which is very much production critical.
I dunno, an extra 25% over what is normally expected? What exactly is your threshold for a ticket on the Crazy Train?
I'm actually more productive because I don't spend > 1hr socializing during the day, like I did at the office and have far fewer interruptions.
Regarding deadlines, we plan our sprints and provide estimates for all tasks. Sometimes they slip but if I spend more time one day working on something, you bet your ass that I'm leaving that same amount of hours early next Friday. It's been years since I worked 40 hours in any given week.
My current commute is about 20 minutes by car, which is the longest commute I've had in almost 20 years and I really don't like that. Prior to COVID I switched to biking to work and that was much more pleasant (40 minutes of exercise beats 20 minutes of driving hands-down for me, and we have showers at work).
working for free to meet deadlines is more a problem with the deadline than it is with your working additional hours
The collective agreement for IT service sector workers (incl. software developers) in Finland is 37.5 hours per week, so it sounds pretty crazy actually.