Ask HN: Are there software companies with a good life/work balance? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there software companies with a good life/work balance?

103 pointsdotbob94 comments

I worked for a long time in different software engineering positions in b2b tech companies. It looks like a majority of them go through a very similar trajectory - more product, more customers, raise more money, more people, rinse and repeat until you get to IPO or acquisition.

On the one hand, this approach is understandable (it’s what business is built for), and the pay is good in such companies. But, on the other hand, life/work balance usually sucks.

First of all, there is an unsaid expectation of long hours. A company is always on the verge of signing a new huge business deal, preparing for the magic quadrant, and having critical projects. And even if some reasonable hours are negotiated/achieved, people are forced to have an insane amount of multi-tasking (juggling numerous tasks, initiatives, planning, replanning, strategy shifts, and so on). On the paper, life/work balance is advertised in such companies. In reality, work at such a company is draining way too much energy.

Another unpleasant side. As part of this rush forward, engineering usually cuts many corners (both in tech and vetting new hires). This rush creates a mediocre (at best) tech culture with a lot of tech debt and not following well-established best practices. A huge part of solving/fighting these problems falls on the top tech talent (especially on responsible employees).

I am at the stage of my life where physical and mental health is more important than a marginal dollar. As a result, I have started to look around, and I would appreciate the advice.

Do you know which specific companies or preferable areas have better work/life balance and are more committed to tech excellence?

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In my experience, there are 2 major things that contribute to this from the company. If you want a solid work/life balance, avoid very small companies like the plague. Their whole thing is working you hard to see if the company can become a thing, with a high chance of getting little to no return for the extra work.

The other major item that's contributed to that in my career/careers of people I've talked to about this is growth. You want a company that is experiencing moderate, steady growth. Doubling every year? That's going to be a painful job. Declining every year? Better work harder to justify your job. But a cool 3-15% each year in a steady company means you get to go home at 5.

More than any of that though, the most important contributor to work life balance is you. If you really value that balance, be ready to tell your manager you're not working late and accept that eventually you may get fired. If you're willing to do that, and you do your job well, you'll be fine (either at that role, or the next). I've had to explain to managers that I won't work 60 hour weeks to make a deadline they made up. It's not my company, I don't get any upside in spending more than the agreed upon hours working on it, and it's just a job. People scoff at that mentality, but you need to decide how you live your life and be ready to enforce those boundaries.

I have to take exception with nscalf saying that you should avoid very small companies like the plague. I think that expectation is based on a very silicon Valley view.

However, there are many small companies out there who have a culture that don’t want to grind you to nonexistence. Sure, they may be in Kansas City, or Nashville, or Denver, but their founders understand that the goal isn’t to sell out, the goal is to build a business. True, eventually they may get bought by another company, but along the way they aren’t interested in killing their golden geese.

Before discounting smaller companies, I would recommend delving deep into their culture. You may find that it works for you or you may find that you want no part of it. However, I would give it a shot. You may find that it’s something that you can’t get anywhere else.

Agreed! Our approach with 12 or so developers: no deadlines, code review begins when you are ready. I am actively suspicious of work done quickly. I personally ensure the clients don’t expect guaranteed delivery on a fixed date. Work 38 hours a week. Once every year or two we might need to push something harder for a few days - track how many extra hours you did and take them off later whenever you like. But we try to avoid any sort of crunch.

To get a job you pass my personal, practical, coding test. By practical I mean using an IDE with full web access, Google, Stack Overflow, whatever. I try to hire people with at least 10+ years experience, but the more the better. Some of our best are well over 30 years experience.

In exchange we have a happy group of strong developers enjoying their work and having time for their lives outside of it. This has led to an extremely stable system that’s easy to add features to even after 15 years of evolution. Because of that perhaps it’s actually cheaper to work this way.

What is the total compensation range that the company pays?

It’s at the high end of the scale for the city. Transparently based on years of experience, with about 10 years qualifying for the maximum rate. And we proactively raise the scale when we can, individual negotiation not needed. No KPIs. All pretty simple really, and based on how I would have wanted a job to be.

> It’s at the high end of the scale for the city.

What's the number?

I have a feeling you are not going to get the answer

I second this, I once worked for a small software company with around 15 people working for the company total, including sales. They had steady income for years and there wasn't much pressure to work long hours to deliver a promised product to investors.

I had flexible hours, I'd typically come in at 1 and stay until 7-8 to avoid traffic, I worked from home regularly, and they had free snacks. It was really chill

What happened?

Why did I leave? Because I got a job at Google

Seconded.

My first long-term job out of school was as the 7th man in a well-established telecommunications company. It had easily the best retirement benefit and work-life balance. Second to working from home, it was the best commute (seven minutes in rush hour to start, then 25 minutes after a move).

There were downsides: the engineering wasn't that exciting, and there was no HR (both pro and con, I guess), and the budget was an accounting mistake at any Fortune 500...but I look back on it very fondly.

7th man in a well-established company out of schoool?

Can you parse it for me?

I guess in their use of the word established it's possible to be both small and well established?

Indeed, the business was well over ten years old when I joined and had excess of 1M USD in sales. My boss matched my 401k contributions dollar for dollar without limit up to the maximum you can contribute. The health benefits were chancier because of economy of scale—we just couldn't get the same rates the big guys can—and I plateaued eventually. When I got married and realized that health benefits could trump a bunch of other considerations, and that I needed to think a little harder about my future skillsets, I moved on. But it remains one of my favorite jobs.

This is a really good point. I did have Silicon Valley, VC funding startups in mind when I said this. To add on to this, I would probably ask about what their goals and timelines are. If they’re aiming to raise a round and get acquired, you should probably dig deeper into their culture and the pressures they put around deadlines.

Indeed. I work in Europe for a startup that has experienced 100% growth several years in a row and everyone (except for the founders) works 9-5, goes to the pub on Thursday afternoon and leaves early on Friday.

Avoid growth companies. Small companies can be laid back and sleepy. I once worked at a small manufacturer of serial-to-ethernet boxes run by a bunch of older folks who seemingly just wanted the company to survive until they retired.

I also worked at a small defense contractor. Great work-life balance and a very friendly environment. No backstabbing or politics.

AFAICT, 99% of "software companies" are outside of the asshole belt(i.e. SiValley). They won't pay you $400k/year, but you probably won't care.

My opinion on SiValley just keeps getting lower, frankly. It doesn't help that I'd have about the same amount of money in the bank($300k) after almost 3 years of working my ass off as if I had stayed at home at my lower-paying job and just let my home appreciate in value. From what I hear, the larger SiV companies are starting to hire people into non-SiV offices, so hopefully the valley stops getting worse and those companies don't export their caustic work ethics to the rest of the nation.

The best place I’ve ever worked from a work life balance perspective was a small company (3 devs). I’m still working there.

I don’t think there’s a simple answer.

I have noticed that managers who are parents tend to be more understanding of work life balance. Not sure if that observation would pass a statistical analysis, though.

For what it's worth, I work for a very well known, high growth company. Many others seem to have a problem with work/life balance based on feedback I hear through the grapevine. My team experiences very little of that though. We are well staffed, globally distributed so on call rotations always match our waking time zones, there are loose deadlines at most, and we are given the benefit of the doubt if something takes longer than originally expected to complete. I refuse to answer slack or emails after 5pm (even if I'm on call) and take vacation whenever I want with little approval needed beyond making sure an on call shift is covered.

For all the hate silicon valley-type companies get, I honestly love the spot I'm in. I think it has more to do with team structure and management trusting you enough not to micromanage. Hard to verify that as a job seeker though.

Yeah the only reason this has been allowed is because people used to tolerate it. Now I just leave if a company sucks and it is so empowering, I can’t describe how good it feels.

I want to think it's because leadership, but people also do it for themselves "competing" against other people. It's kind of a prisoner's dilemma.

It's kind of shitty anyways.

> Now I just leave if a company sucks and it is so empowering, I can’t describe how good it feels.

And it's easy for you to hop onto the next job?

I recently launched https://4dayweek.io/ - Software Jobs with a better work / life balance. May be of interest!

There's a list of companies with a better work / life balance here: https://4dayweek.io/4-day-week-companies

In years to come we will look down on current working conditions in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution imo.

Very cool! Glad this exists :D

I notice that there aren't that many listings though, and many of the listings are from the same companies. Is this because there simply aren't many listings for 4 day weeks? Or is it just difficult to get companies list on your marketplace?

Thanks! It's a bit of both really. It's only recently launched so I'm still on the hunt for new companies. They are difficult to come by, however, but the mood is slowly changing...

From companies, I'm getting a lot of responses like "We don't offer a 4 day week, but we would be 'open to applications' for it". So basically you just need to ask which is what I'm working on :)

Colleague of mine here in Germany asked to reduce her hours to part time, the company said no, so she presented them a proforma letter she printed off the internet and now she works part time. Turns out in Germany if you ask to reduce your hours they have to let you, but they don't need to increase them again if you want to go back to full time.

there is also https://30hourjobs.com/

How does compare to parttime.careers?

It depends a bit. Just a good work/life balance isn‘t that hard to find, just choose any decent large company out there.

It seems though like you want to have both a good balance AND excellence, fast learning and great colleagues.

My humble opinion is this can work out shortly, but usually not for long.

The reason being mainly that you’re describing a labile situation: as for any company that tackles a worthwhile and lucrative problem (and the others you really don‘t want to work for), but with a chill attitude and a „great engineering culture“ where resolving tech debt, fixing bugs and proper QA gets the front seat over product iteration — there exists or will eventually exist another company who sees the same opportunity, but attacks it with clear vision and the ruthless execution you despise, eventually sucking the more chill company dry of talent and customers.

I‘ve seen it all the time. Basecamp against Slack. Atlassian against Github.

Note I don’t particularly like this conclusion as well, since I was searching for something similar years ago, but I‘ve found it to hold true in practice. I stand to be corrected by counterexamples though, especially companies that have been around since a decade.

OP here. I don't think that I am looking for a completely chill environment, just something saner than "everything is on fire all the time."

I agree that there is a competition. However, I disagree entirely that crazy pressure and long hours win.

- In b2b companies, it's all about the sales team, and engineering is more of necessary evil dragged by sales along.

- Tech debt and mediocre teams, which I described above, slow things substantially (this is the reason why more hours and bodies are thrown at problems)

Also, I know several great engineers and a team of them working regular hours will wipe a floor with a much-much larger team working a huge number of hours (in organizations I mentioned above). (BTW. Usually, such a small team of great engineers go and build a brand new startup. This would solve the tech-excellency problem, but it doesn't solve the work-life balance problem)

I think you’re absolutely right, but I also think you raise some deep, difficult questions on what kind of society we want to live in, what kind of society is sustainable over time, and how we should treat people as they age (who may be unable or unwilling to keep giving 105%). I also think it demands that corporations pay a fair share to support the society that they are a part of.

>I also think it demands that corporations pay a fair share to support the society that they are a part of.

Honestly, talk of corporations to "pay their fair share" is a distraction. The government has proven itself unwilling or incapable of applying effective taxes on corporations. Even if they did, the taxes are ultimately born by consumers, and a ton of waste is created as a result (see the number of people who work full time in corporate tax accounting).

The cycle from "they don't pay their fair share", to new tax policies, to failure of those policies, to "they don't pay their fair share" is a distraction that prevents us from taking straightforward steps that would help workers tremendously, like a law to require overtime pay for salaried workers who don't get equity.

I think you are spot on. Also applies to people (nice chill guy, someone is gonna out compete you) and nations.

People and companies who grind all the time often make stupid mistakes which undo all the "dividend" from excessive work. They then end up spending more and more time firefighting these issues. The only successful companies I have worked with have had well rested teams.

There's also the other factor of attrition. Companies who force their staff to work overtime ultimately can't keep their good staff.

Google has a pretty good work life balance, at least for the teams I've been on. I usually work for like four hours a day and sometimes I don't really do anything at all for a few days. I have consistently gotten good ratings since joining and have been promoted twice so its not like I have been coasting either. From what I gather, many of my coworkers operate this way and they all deliver and do fine.

I am not saying the work isn't challenging or that I completely unplug when I am not working, its more that you aren't expected to take on unreasonable amounts of work, and, as long as you deliver, nobody really cares how you spend your time during the week

How long have you been at Google, if you don't mind? I'm sort of curious about tenure and how long people typically stay. A recruiter reached out to me for an engineering position in their Chicago office. I'm considering interviewing, but since it'll require a good amount of preparation on my part, I've put it off. I've basically worked at start ups for my entire career so far (10 years) and I'm thinking it would be good to switch, both for pay and work life balance.

I have been at Google for a little over three years. At least in Eng, you have people from the whole spectrum, new people, people that have been there for 17 years, and people who are closer to the middle, like me. I have heard that retention across the company is about 1.5 years, but, in my experience, most people I interact with have been at the company about as long as me or longer.

There are a lot of new people, but, when I joined, there were around 75k employees and now it is closer to 150k, so the new people are additive rather than replacements. Only two people I have worked with closely have left the company all together. There have been others in my circles but not really that many and I don't remember any of them. Instead of leaving the company, most people just leave the team for greener pastures elsewhere in the company

Google has grown from 75k to 150k people in the last three years?

More like four, but yeah. The week I joined I was in the largest intake group in Google history, which was like three thousand iirc. That record has been broken several times now, especially with acquisitions.

I put off interviewing at Google for 2 job changes ... went back for the third just to see. Ended up getting hired. My prior experience in terms of terrible people conducting interviews was so bad that I almost just wrote them off.

Compared to super-early and mid-stage startups, the ability to work a sane amount is done amazingly well at Google, and they pay too much. The downside is that the work is really simple, and the complexity (e.g. of service development) is through the roof and not supported very well. So just get ready to move at less than half the speed you're used to.

TOTALLY worth it to bank money for 3-5 years, IMO.

This is what I did. Coasted for 4.5 years, lived off the free food and got a shitty 250 sqft studio biking distance to work. Did laundry and ate all meals there. Got loads of cash now, trading it for more money and starting a real startup that is actually planning for impact (not perf ratings).

Were you able to build strong relationships (e.g. neighbors, friends, significant other) while living such a minimal lifestyle?

I couldn't imagine doing such a grind for more than a few weeks.

I'm definitely biased towards exactly that frugal-and-bank-the-money mentality ... but if others don't want to be friends with someone who doesn't spend money, that's their thing. I've found it much more rewarding to find people that like you for the way you are rather than trying to buy favor with status or money.

It's definitely not for everybody, but you might be surprised as to what you find by cutting expenses by what most consider to be "drastic measures" just to see. You can always just go spend more anyways after seeing what it's like!

Just because you want to hang out with, or want to date someone who has a space larger than a 250 sq ft studio doesn't mean you are materialistic.

The most important thing is can this person understand why you are living in a 250 sq ft studio and does that decision resonate with them? You would be surprised how few people that filters out. You aren't asking them to live in such a space with you, after all.

Great points

It wasn’t really a grind for me because I might enjoy minimalist more than others.

> I have consistently gotten good ratings since joining and have been promoted twice so its not like I have been coasting either.

I read everywhere that for promotions at Google, you need to keep making new products. How true is that? And how do you deal with it?

Needing to make new products to get promoted is a bit of an exaggeration. The people who need to launch new products to get promoted are generally are directors or maybe L7s, which is a small minority of Googlers. For the majority of people, it's more that you need to "launch" something, which could mean many different things depending on what part of the company you are in. For example, if you are SRE, a promo project could be designing and implement a new set of SLOs that better represent service state and work better in a demonstrable manner. If you are a SWE on an infra team, it could be adding a feature that solves some problems that internal customers are facing that nobody outside Google will ever see.

> I usually work for like four hours a day and sometimes I don't really do anything at all for a few days. I have consistently gotten good ratings since joining and have been promoted twice so its not like I have been coasting either. From what I gather, many of my coworkers operate this way and they all deliver and do fine.

This sounds heavenly. I don't understand why people decide to leave. You collect a hefty paycheck and add padding to your resume that can help guarantee a high-paying job later.

Larger companies (>1000 employees) seem to have a better work life balance.. or at least an opportunity to get lost in the bureaucracy. Salaries are worse and career development seems terrible but that may be a tradeoff you are willing to make.

Salaries are usually fairly comparable per hour worked, and career development can be fantastic. The best managers I’ve had were at a Fortune 500.

But a large company is really like a group of many tiny companies, and it’s hard to reliably be placed in a great area unless you know someone on the inside. Large companies sometimes don’t even let you apply to specific teams.

I was basically about to post this as well.

You want to find a decently large company that has its business model figured out so you don't have to stress about where your salary will be coming from. You probably won't be able to pick a low-stress team unless you already have connections or inside info there.

But you can generally network around the company after getting hired: technology interest groups, non-technology interest groups, recruiting trips, internal chatrooms, folks working on the same open source tech, etc. If you start out in a mediocre-to-bad team, you can often figure out how to get transferred to a better situation within a couple years.

Agreed, currently at a Fortune 500 and have the best manager I’ve ever had

I work for such a firm (10k employees) and we try hard to be competitive with startups on salary - we have to in order to keep hiring. It is definitely not the same pace as a startup (I joined via acquisition), but good big projects at scale and an open-ness to work from just about anywhere. It is a trade off for sure, but RSUs in a mature market are a more sure bet than many startups.

I applaud your company for keeping up with salaries. I think stability and pace and maturity is a great thing. But I’ve seen mass departures once corporate accounting types take over and forget that employees matter for success. They seem to worry too much about finding efficiencies and believe the key to success is the right business processes.

Yes there are, at least in some countries.

This is also not always related to the company size, but avoid small just starting startups. Through some start-ups which already have initial success can be good (as long as they don't go into the "we are failing" phase).

I had some good experiences myself, but I don't know how far they are exceptions and how much it might differ in other companies.

Through it also depends on you a bit, I had worked at a company which generally neither expected long hours or other aspects of overworks BUT some people got so invested that they where doing a lot of long hours by themself, to a degree that one of them was multiple times asked by the CEO to please go home and take a (payed, non holiday) day off for their health...

Also on think which you will probably not avoid is that corners are cuts and tech dept is accumulated. Through it can largely differ what and how much corners are cute and tech dept is accumulated.

Wrt. hiring I have increasingly realized that there is no good way to fully vet people when hiring, there are basics you can somewhat check and you can check if the person seem to fit into the team, but it's all very limited. In the end what seems to work well is to go through a initial interview followed up by a tech interview (maybe mini task too) and a team/social interview. And do the rest of vetting during the first month of employment.

In my experience it's a bit of a hit or miss. Even within the same company, your work life balance can greatly differ from working in one team or another

Keep looking for that place and when you've found it, don't leave it!

It also helps if you can make yourself indispensable in one way or another. Look for ways the business can do better the "important stuff" (usually means save money or avoid legal conflict) and do it. The entire responsibility of keeping the new stuff alive will fall on your shoulders. And you will get a pass at leaving the office early, or perhaps filling out your overtime form will no longer be considered a crime

Answering the last paragraph purely;

I have it on trusted authority that SAP is a good company to work for as they care a lot about making a good environment for their developers. The cynic in me believes this is because their problem space is inherently unsexy.

There does seem to be a correlation with unsexy stuff having better work life balance and sexy stuff being terrible (video games being the inverse of tax software).

But “tech excellence” does not come into it. I’m not sure if you can do both. Usually established companies have something legacy that needs to be maintained.

And new companies are.. undefined. It’s hard to have clear work life balance when everything is undefined.

A company with older folks as they'll have families. Local and state and federal governments. Companies paying a dividend.

I've been working for Genesys for 8+ years, and this was definitely one of the reasons. Even though the company is a tech b2b with the exact cycles you mention, long hours are almost never an expectation here, and family always comes first. Furthermore, we have additional "take care of yourself" timeoff: e.g. in August all Fridays are off, and the last week of each year too. Check us out at https://www.genesys.com/company/careers

You're not looking for a "startup" you're looking for a "company".

Go and find an established company with a product and customers and help them maintain or maybe grow their business. Find a post-IPO or post-acquisition company that isn't trying to hustle or pivot or disrupt and get a nine-to-five where you can punch the clock and collect a paycheck and everyone's happy.

Startups are not for everyone. Don't be afraid of working somewhere that already figured things out and is only executing on that plan.

OP here. I am curious. What about tech-excellency?

I am not sure (I have never been to such companies). However, I believe that such problems (tech-debt and mediocre engineering culture) only tend to grow with time.

Those things tend to stagnate at some point, where you either fix them / get them to a reasonable level or they kill the company.

Check out some of the top company-companies around, something like WalMart, vs a tech-company like Amazon. They don't make their billions a year by being mediocre, but since tech isn't their core business (only supportive thereof) they don't burn people out on it, so will probably have manageable levels of tech debt and average to above-average technical staff. Every company has tech debt and mediocrity, but if you're not changing the wheels on the car while going 110 down the highway it won't affect _you_ nearly as much.

Keep away from countries known for overworking and by extension companies originating from there.

Examples include: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, USA, etc.

Counter examples: The Netherlands, Scandinavia + some other European countries.

From what I've seen so far it's mostly a culture thing.

Note: I'm not really a supporter of the "work/life balance" term as it is very difficult to nail down the meaning. How is work not part of your life, does it imply your work is something bad and should be "balanced out" and so on and so on.

how about job:no-job ratio as the term?

I don't see this being fixed on an industry-wide level except by union-/regulator-mandated limits on hours worked per week. So, I don't see this being fixed (and wouldn't want it to be, as the cure would be worse than the disease)

On a personal level, I don't think it's too bad. There are plenty of places where you can make $300k working 30-40 hour weeks

I’m from Spain and work at a Product Design Studio (elasticheads.com). 6 hours/day and really good salary.

Our bosses are really great people and ask us to not do anything related to work, reply to emails or messages after work.

We might not be Apple or a big company but everybody feels safe, enjoys life and has other things to do than work.

Our goal was to become something like Basecamp and it’s values, sadly we are not following that route anymore given what had happened.

However, we all (7 right now) are committed to grow and make more money but without compromising our life’s.

I think there are other companies doing this in Spain so hopefully the number will increase!

Shopify has been pretty great in this regard. There’s a culture of “protecting each other’s downtime” and thus slack is pretty quiet out of normal work hours aside from the spurious 1-1s and emergency situations. My manager told our team recently there wasn’t enough vacation planned across our team, and we needed to plan some. In my 1-1s she’s been pretty keen on making sure I take breaks and don’t burnout. (Also my coworkers are all pretty smart and it actually feels like a lot gets done)

Asana has great work/life balance and one of our core values is rejecting false trade offs :-)

The product and our company mission is amazing and we do not cut corners but at the same time constantly try to (another company value) “do great things fast”.

We are hiring for lots of engineers - have a look at www.asana.com/jobs and if you think you’re a good fit and have work permit for the country you’re applying for then feel free to send me your resume and I’ll upload it and our talent team will get in touch!

If you're looking for a specific team we're hiring remote engineers on my team at Starry. I have ~1 hr worth of meetings each week as an IC and there's extremely reasonable expectations of output. Concretely, I'm not expected to be on-call and I've never worked a weekend here.

Hours are flexible although most of our team is on EST. Looking for Node or JS experience.

https://grnh.se/77cf4ea42us

-- as most decisions you get there by eliminating the causes of not having good work life balance

avoid VC funded companies. avoid pre-revenue companies without a clear path to revenue. avoid companies where the engineers | co-workers don't have life outside the company avoid companies with hard / set deadlines - this means they've no redudancy in the system. anything without redudancy will always be under pressure

OP here. There are a couple of people talking about a totally chill environment and pretty much coasting (e.g., "at least an opportunity to get lost in the bureaucracy")

This would be way too far on the scale.

The thing which I am looking for is precisely that proverbial "balance". Spend regular hours, a normal amount of energy, make a solid contribution in that time, close my notebook and enjoy non-work-related things.

Basecamp. I think they might be hiring too.

"it doesn't have to be crazy at work"

I am working at Canonical and based solely on my experience it is being really great in this aspect. Although I am working full time from home, which could open more possibility for abuses, management is really careful about the end of your day, time off, etc.

My first “real” job with Seek in Australia, was really really good for work life balance. Unlimited sick leave, Flexible hours, paternity/maternity leave. No probation on being hired, no one was laid off during covid or GFC

Twitter was a great org for work life balance. I worked there 4.5 years.

What's your job?

In Sweden it's pretty good I would say. Of course there are companies and industries that have bad life/work balance, but in general that's not the case, imo.

Mine.

I look after my team because they look after me.

well avoid startups to begin with.

Old dinosaur tech companies. IBM, Oracle, Intel, Texas Instruments, etc

Pivotal Labs (now part of VMware)

This is one of the questions you should ask during your interviews. The smaller the startup, the less likely they are to have a good work/life balance, and the larger the company the more likely you are to have a good work/life balance.

The sad part is that overtime is not really necessary. Outside of emergencies ("the DB is down!"), engineers shouldn't ever really have to work more than 40-50 hours per week. The key is having a good medium-term (or long-term) vision and figuring out the milestones you need to hit to get there. Most companies where I have been expected to put in more than a 9-5 are companies that have zero idea what they're going to be doing three months from now. That's a huge problem.

I firmly believe that if you can plan ahead -- even tentatively! -- you can avoid overtime and focus on the most important things. Let's say you're a company that delivers custom guitars. You started off only in the Minneapolis, MN area because that's where you're headquartered. Now you want to expand into New York City. NYC is your make-or-break market. If you can make it in NYC, you can make it anywhere. So what do you do? Do you put in 80 hour weeks to get to NYC? No, what you do is you look at your current capabilities and you compare that against what you need to do to be successful in NYC. Anything that doesn't get you closer to NYC, you cut from the roadmap. That doesn't mean you never do it, but it means you don't do it now.

And now you're able to measure velocity! If you recall from physics class, velocity = speed + direction). It's not about just going fast, it's about going fast in the right direction. In other words, if you're working on something that isn't getting you closer to NYC, then you may be working fast, but you're not going in the right direction!

Having a clear north star and a clear set of priorities is the key to ensuring good work/life balance.

The reason that bigger companies have a better work/life balance is because they have more resources! More resources to spread out to hit ALL of the goals that they want to do. But smaller companies struggle because they have limited resources when it seems like they need to accomplish everything. It's a hard, hard line to walk. But it's possible. There are a lot of companies that move fast and grow fast and have a good work/life balance. So don't give up.

Back to my first sentence: you should ask about this in your interviews, toward the final stages. "How many hours a week do you work? How far out is your roadmap? What is the biggest thing you need to accomplish in the next six months? How often do you work on things that aren't related to that?"

My two cents? There's always more work tomorrow. It doesn't matter how much you get done today, there's always going to be another pile of work tomorrow. So find a place that recognizes that and prioritizes people as people instead of as cattle. Good luck.

universities

I agree large companies tend to be more likely to fit the requirement but there are also some small companies in this space.

The company I work for, for example, has is small (50 people) but as it's been revenue positive from the start it knows to focus on the longterm win - you don't get that by burning out employees. (If you're a RoR dev... www.platphormcorp.com)

Here are a few tips: 1. Make sure to ask during an interview what office hours are like, and let the company know you're looking for a good balance. A good company will be honest about their expectations - in general nobody wants a bad fit when hiring.

2. It's your life, not the company's. If you told the company you want a good work life balance - start your day at 8 and end at 5pm consistently every day (or whatever the normal work hours are). Let people know those are your hours and that you have other commitments (i.e. a life to live). I've worked with a few people (in other companies) who are great at this - and they were amongst the performers. If your manager knows asking you to work late isn't an option they'll figure something out - that's a manager's job. If you work off hours regularly, a manager will ask you to do it again.

As for tech debt that's a trickier one. It never makes sense to get rid of all tech debt (imo). A tool that's working, that is not really important to the company's future, likely doesn't not need refactoring any time soon. Of course, if business critical software should be kept up-to-date.

nope

I work for a dev shop called Sanctuary Computer (https://www.sanctuary.computer). We take work/life balance very seriously and every employee has the agency to shape the company in ways they see fit. Would love to have more serious back-end/systems developers with me! + we’re always hiring.

Haha, I love your website:

"Thank you for visiting Sanctuary Computer. Our website is currently closed.

Website hours are Monday to Friday 7 AM - 7 PM (in your browser's local time)."

I'd love to learn more about it but your website is currently closed it seems. I'll be honest, I feel like back when my parents told me to go to sleep when I didn't want to, which is frustrated and annoyed. Since I don't want to assume too much about the intention behind it, could you explain this choice?

Just for fun really- distancing ourselves from workaholic tech culture. FYI, you can execute window.HackerDojo.disableNightmode() in the console to disable the closed page.

Thanks. I saw a website recently on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27110263) that had the same idea, you can see a demo here https://www.nightnight.xn--q9jyb4c/demo. I personally really liked the "I’ll sleep later, I really need to use this site right now", I feel like it's more respectful of users.

On the other hand it's intersting to see how much I expect a website to just work and be available 24/7 when I click on a link, so there's a lesson for me here too.

FYI When the site is open for business it downloads 134MB of data.

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