My company is really good about work life balance. But there are plenty of people, myself included, who log in on the weekends or at 2AM and write code or review stuff. Coding is fun!
There are people out there who do for pay something very similar to what they would do if they had millions of dollars.
Culture matters.
https://www.good.is/money/france-lets-you-disconnect
> In France, if you’re a company of 50 employees or more, you cannot email an employee after typical work hours. The labor law amendment has come about because studies show that in the digital age, it’s increasingly difficult for people to distance themselves from the workplace during their off hours. This new provision allows people to get the full advantage of their time off.
> “All the studies show there is far more work-related stress today than there used to be, and that the stress is constant,” Benoit Hamon of the French National Assembly told the BBC. “Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”
That's ridiculous. The protection should be to protect the employee who sets their phone/computer not to check email during off hours, not a prohibition on the sender uploading a message to their mail server's queue.
I email my staff at 2am constantly. I don't expect replies until they're "at work" (wherever and whenever that may be).
If someone wishes to volunteer to work 24/7, it isn't my job to stop them. It's insane of them, though, and I might contemplate firing someone who felt pressured to act/respond at 2am (for being dumb and unreasonable).
Just because you think there is no pressure to reply, doesn't mean there isn't a societal/workplace culture that pushes people to do so when their superiors ask for something. Same reason you can tell a co-work something is dumb, but you would say 'lets look it from another angle' to a manager or ceo.
That's usually the case, the above source didn't explain it correctly.
The law actually only obligates the company to agree a set of rules with the staff elected representatives (usually from a union). In almost all cases, those rules are simply that employees cannot be obligated to connect outside their paid work hours, and not suffer any consequence for not connecting.
It is normal to work at 2am if you work the way I and most of my associates work.
I think it's fairly common for hackers and other deep-thinking types to work very intensely for 2-5 minutes at a bunch of different times all throughout the day.
Gaslighting your team could backfire in any number of ways.
I admit that it might just work well for me as I don't actually need work life balance or really use the time off. What I mean is that I have never experienced any pressure to work beyond regular hours. I am not sure that the weekend/2AM logins/commits are supported. I have never heard much comment on them at all really.
Setting the example for the rest of the team when you are explicitly/implicitly recognized as the leader is very important. I had to learn this lesson recently.
For example, I signaled to the team last Friday that I was not going to be working at all this weekend. Checked my email just now and neither did anyone else. If I put something up for code review on Saturday afternoon, someone else on the team is likely to pop in for review and then likely do some work tasks themselves. Its not that this is bad, but you have to be aware that it is happening and moderate it accordingly.
As time goes on it feels more and more like the developer community is here for the money and not the challenge/fun/etc. And that is totally cool. I just worry about the higher order consequences of technology employees principally motivated by money and not the inherent correctness or value of a technology solution. Accusatory phrases like "NIH Syndrome" seem to be used less frequently by those who enjoy programming regardless of the money. Perhaps there is the risk of leaving some innovation on the table if your entire team is full of people like this. But maybe it makes perfect sense for your business model (i.e. just vendor everything out).
Also, working 60 hour weeks on a regular basis is not viewed as "healthy" by some, but I feel fucking incredible doing what I am doing right now. If I had not pushed through some painful adventures, I probably would not have the level of experience & autonomy that I get to enjoy today.
I do recognize that there are a lot of work environments in which certain virtuous cycles are not allowed to iterate properly. I did have to change jobs 6+ times before I found something that fit me. The notions presented throughout HN regarding "toxic" interactions/teammates/et. al. are certainly the most adverse force I have encountered in my career. Nothing is more devastating to innovation and career advancement than some salty crab pulling the rest of the crabs back down into the bucket. If you love technology but cant stand the work for whatever reason, maybe pop in for a few interviews elsewhere.
But why not work on a fun personal project instead of giving your labour away for free? (I am assuming you are not the majority owner of your company)
If your company doesn’t allow taking the following morning off. Don’t do this. They don’t deserve your extra work. Find a technique that takes your mind off you work (personally I like to count up the American Presidents since Lincoln; or the states admitted in order since Vermont; takes me right to sleep before I reach Oregon [although my company allows me to take the following morning off, most of the time I feel like sleeping rather then working]).
Now I sleep with a notebook by my bed. When this happens, I write down enough of the solution to convince my brain I won't forget it. Then getting back to sleep is easy.
Either a digital todo-list or a physical notebook both work for me.
As long as you can convince your mind that the task is stored in a safe place so it's OK to stop thinking about it - you can get back to it any time you need to.
So much this. I have worked places where the work was boring and everybody is just phoning it in 9-5, and places where people work weekends because they're truly engaged in their work.
In theory, the former has great work/life balance but every hour at work felt like a drag, I wasn't engaged, I wasn't growing. And worse still, I didn't even really understand this when it was happening. I just thought work was awful like this and even started looking at other careers to get out.
Then I worked at a couple places in that latter category. It was night and day. I was still able to live my life, but I was more engaged, getting amazing opportunities and growing a LOT more.
I've always tried to be careful about the message I send by working weekends or nights. I don't brag when I do it. Try to keep it low profile by not communicating with coworkers (unless it's an outage or something). If my manager asks me to more than on rare occasions, it's also not acceptable.
I've had to physically take away a "coding is fun" -person's laptop, disabled all their logins and their office keyfob and force them to take their mandatory vacation.
Without this they would've worked during vacation and committed a bunch of stuff on their first day back to not get caught working during holidays...
Even then they replicated the Java stack they were working on with Rust, from memory, at home during the vacation. Just for fun.
When you love your job, maybe a bit too much, it becomes really hard to see when you've burned out. Sometimes dreaming about code is a good thing, your subconscious is working on a problem. Other times it's a sign of burnout.
I've been there and now I know how to not end up there - and I try my best to not have people who work with me burn out either.
In psychology it quite often arises that something we perceive as a good trait but is generally kind of vague (like say self esteem) turns out to be correlated with what we consider bad more tangible traits (like narcissism, and criminal behavior). I wouldn’t be surprised if work enthusiasm is similar and correlates way more with stress, burnout, and high turnover rates, then with the popularly believed successful career.
I did a quick scan on search results for "work enthusiasm" google scholar and the research seems mixed. There are a lot of studies that correlate work enthusiasm (or worker’s zest) with good outcome, but a few in between that correlated it with burnout. This was also the case before the self-esteem camp was brought down with quality research.
If you are enthusiastic there is one more thing that might burn out. I am usually quite enthusiastic when at a new job, but as soon as I start to despise the process or are forced to do a half assed job it the enthusiasm fades.
It got way less stressful for me when I stopped to care that much about the end result and worked less hard (I never worked overtime, I mean per hour) since I figured that I did not have the authority anyway to change most stuff. I guess that is some form of burn out of spirit.
In the beginning of my career I though I was way better then my colleges, but I realized that they had mostly just "burned out" before me and did the bare minimum.
I spent my early career doing stuff way too fast and thoroughly. After the fifth time a spec changed midway and invalidated most of my work I slowed down to the proper level and started getting praise for being so fast =)
Cut down the tall ones because they create problems for the shorter ones.
Maybe fix your company culture to create norms? If some exceeds those norms so what?
The labor struggle is one that is fought bottom-up. Unless we stand united, the bosses hold all the cards. A single worker has no power to fix their companies culture, but a united workforce does. This is not applicable to the tall poppy syndrome at all.
In fact if you want to find a silly analogy, call it the weak link problem. An almost united workforce will get exploited through the few that aren’t.
If more work and more hours make your bosses more money, they should pay you more, if they don’t, this work is wasted on making your bosses more money and cheapens the value of the work for the rest of us. If you realize this and stop working overtime, that is also a good thing. More time with your family, at your local chess club, the pub, or in your personal code repos.
I think the myth of (3) unions stagnate job efficiency is a result of bad union practices (I don’t know of examples but I’m sure there are plenty) then of solidarity. There is nothing inherent about a union that will make job efficiency stagnate.
This is what folks who worked at GM in Detroit told me. Guys would punch in, then head to the bar. I remember seeing local new coverage with undercover video of these guys being at strip clubs while on the clock. Was going on for years.
Here is a more recent example...
https://www.autoblog.com/2012/12/10/chrysler-workers-fired-f...
I'm not recommending flipping burgers for free overtime, but it's ludicrous to claim that working hard doesn't pay dividends in professional high-skill fields for fair employers.
I'm also a well paid software developer, but I spent my 20s recording albums, learning to garden, staying fit, and generally not spending my time making money for someone else for free.
(obviously you need to work for a startup which reciprocates. but most do).
People fought hard for our rights to free time. People died for this right. If your work makes your company more money, they should pay you. They shouldn’t reward your hard work with something vague like job prospects and opportunities, no they should pay you overtime with money. If you work more then 40 hours a week, you should get your extra hours payed in overtime (not less then 90% of your base wage). If they don’t want to give you that, you are being exploited by your bosses.
Do know that you can practice your skills and get your fair share for your work. Don’t let anyone exploit your work. You’re worth more than that. Solidarity.
I don't need your patronization or protection.
You see the more workers that do work for free the less value all our work is. And hundreds of years of labor struggle will all be for nought.
It would be more effective than going around trying to convince software engineers they are chumps for working hard.
Please consider that before you clock in at 2AM to write code so that your bosses can make more money. Your work, your body, and our solidarity is worth more then that.
I’ll start by clarifying: I’ve never said GP can just stop doing work. What I’m iterating on is that their work is worth something, and their overtime work is worth more. They should not be doing overtime work unless they get fair compensation.
Now that that is cleared, I’m gonna assume you are answering some of my other posts where I talk repeatedly about solidarity. My call for solidarity is a plead to not work overtime without compensation because it cheapens the work for the rest of us. I’m asking GP (and others on this thread) to not give their bosses free labor because I don’t want my bosses to demand free labor from me. You see solidarity is needed because if most workers our industry gives free labor, then I can’t be expected not to, I’ll just get fired.
There is no win-win in a class struggle. For us workers to win, our bosses must loose. Past labor activists have fought hard to give us our benefits which include paid overtime. If we don’t use it, we will loose it. 1-0 for our bosses. However if we use it, and get paid overtime: 0-1 for us and the struggle continues.
I’ve worked with people who have dedicated their lives to their work. They like it. They’ll work weekends and evenings. Nobody is making them do it.