Mental health impacts of a big tech job | Hacker News Reader

Mental health impacts of a big tech job

oilyraincloud.com

237 pointsgixo182 comments

Big Tech is hundreds of thousands of employees across thousands of teams with a wide variety of work environments. The author's experience sounds really rough, but it also doesn't make sense to generalize from there to this whole piece of the industry.

To give another data point, I've worked at a different Big Tech company since 2012, on two different teams, and haven't experienced anything like this. There's no pressure to work after hours, on weekends, or vacations. Just today I was debugging a release blocker with a coworker, and it got to be 4:30, which was when they had planned to end their day. It wouldn't even have occurred to me to suggest they stay late: we can pick it up on Monday and the release can slip.

I'm sure there are people at my company who have experiences closer to the author's: what I'm trying to say is that Big Tech is a big place, and if you find yourself somewhere with bad culture don't take that to mean there aren't other places you would like.

> what I'm trying to say is that Big Tech is a big place, and if you find yourself somewhere with bad culture don't take that to mean there aren't other places you would like.

Tell that to an H1B holder.

You're not wrong to point out that we can't generalize from a single data point, but you're wrong to bring your positive experience as if there is an equivalence between the two. They don't have the same weighing; we are not trying to have a 50:50 split between bad and good experiences. Even a single workplace-driven mental health incident is too many. And unlike other workplace related injuries, mental health injuries are elusive to tracking.

One hard metric would be the percentage of FAANG employees that are lost to suicide each year. It would be morbid but telling if some companies have an overrepresentation (I have my doubts but won't voice it here).

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-death-idUSKCN0XP383

> You're not wrong to point out that we can't generalize from a single data point, but you're wrong to bring your positive experience as if there is an equivalence between the two.

I don't think this is how statistics work. Both are one piece of data. In order to make meaningful conclusions, we need more data. It seems to me that all of a sudden we have a mental health epidemic and I am peppered by mental health stories left and right in the media including HN. I'd love to know more if what changed, some hard data, happiness surveys even if they have flaws, it is better than arguing like this.

I'll throw one more anedote - I've worked in large tech company and my experience was it was just super chill. No issues with a team of 24 engineers. Everyone left at 4pm everyday and at 2pm on Friday. In fact, people were frustratingly lazy.

if you start measuring suicides it could just push companies to weed out depressed people from their hiring pool, possibly increasing suicides overall by trying to avoid being painted as the cause (I tend to think the most ironic outcome is the most likely)

> it could just push companies to weed out depressed people from their hiring pool

I’m not saying this is the best metric but they would find that sort of treatment to be highly ineffective. Lifetime prevalence of depression and the depression at any given time are different things; it would be like trying to weed out all future cases of flu based on symptoms at hire time. Either way it wouldn’t make a dent on flu caused by the work environment itself.

How would they do that? Hiring seems like such a ritualized practice anyway, I'm not sure how you'd even determine something like that.

Yeah or the companies get sued like French telecom company Orange because of proper news coverage and labor laws.

I've heard (and agree with) a similar argument about guns and mental illness. Taking away people's guns (or ability to buy guns) because of mental illness is a perverse disincentive for them to seek help.

It's a simple solution, but a bad one. The alternative is to overwhelm people with complete availability and encouragement of help, and while helping them, convince them that it's not in their best interest to own guns (ideally to agree to give up their right to own guns.) Actually effective change is expensive, so will not be done.

That being said, tracking tech suicides doesn't have to track the companies they work for in order to indicate if there's something wrong with the culture. Theoretically, identification of companies would certainly help to figure out what that wrong thing is, though the metric would immediately be gamed in the way you describe and exacerbate the situation.

As a H1B holder who's also a cancer survivor and suffering from severe health issues, I can tell you it's hell. I cry at least once a week at the fact that I cannot take a break without having to destroy my life and my family's life and 20+ years of life built up here. Everything this person said is absolutely true. The high compensation comes at a very high cost. It's not just mental or physical but also moral. You follow some arbitrary process since some higher up decided that it's the best way to measure productivity or performance. You underlevel people because you have to have a high bar. So someone with 20+ years of experience with subject matter expertise (not me) is a 'developing' Principal engineer. You have to hit arbitrary dates with moving goal posts and convince your team that they are doing God's work.

> You underlevel people because you have to have a high bar.

> So someone with 20+ years of experience with subject matter expertise (not me) is a 'developing' Principal engineer.

If one of your major complaints about work is that some other employees only make $300k while some arbitrary table made by the company says they should be making $400k-$500k, then perhaps you're in a pretty good position overall?

In other words - it's a huge organization, of course it's not far from perfect. But, pretty much nothing in life is.

Underleveling people with 20+ years of experience depending on their origin or location is a real thing, and one that HR gets away with too often. My experience is that it contributes to so much pain and churn that it ought to be a legal and compliance offense, but there are no liability factors associated with it, so they keep doing it.

It sounds like they are stringing them along with golden handcuffs, also. I always feared losing my job on my L1B (visa with no job mobility), and now that I was rendered redundant, living my greatest fear, I am genuinely happier than before.

Golden handcuffs are a living hell.

Just curious - how come you haven't got a green card or citizenship if you've been there for 20+ years?

Possible if you are from India. I am on the same boat

Unknown to Americans, the US is still a country run on immigrant "modern slavery". Especially tech companies (most H1B visas)

Of course we should not generalize, but these experiences should not be brushed off either - I suspect a bias towards Apple due to their fanbase.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/kpgs1x/my_experience...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25605211

I doubt it's a bias toward apple so much as Apple's a large company with a diverse set of teams. There are definitely some teams at Apple that I would never want to work for; there are also some teams at Apple that are pretty awesome.

I suspect it's the same at all of the FAANGs, frankly. (Setting aside companies you may not wish to work for because of general company policy/work reasons)

No, to some degree it is Apple. No doubt any larger corporation has its share of worse offenders. But some of the toxicity that exists within Apple is specific to its DNA. The secrecy, siloing across departments and teams, obsession towards not just customer satisfaction but ironclad schedules, middle managers allowed to act like warlords, maybe even the legacy of Jobs' abusive behavior baked into the corporate DNA- that's all uniquely Apple.

I work at Microsoft and am old enough to have long-term friends and acquaintances at Apple, AWS, Facebook, Google, and IBM. The only ones whom I never hear from regarding corporate infighting between teams work at Oracle, and I suspect they keep changing the subject because it’s too traumatic…

It’s not merely politics or teams in-fighting. It’s straight up unprofessional, abusive, insulting behavior that goes unchallenged. It’s belittling, bullying, traumatic environments that everyone accepts as is or are completely oblivious to because of an organization-wide code of silence. Mentally damaging.

Big Tech? Try a friend of mine who quit a management position at wal-mart (vastly overqualified immigrant in a country not in north america) during the pandemic. Everything shifted to this horrible whatsapp group that kept on pestering everyone on and off shift and then he quit and found a way better job because this was hell.

I think it's important to realize that it is not limited to this industry; It's something that's actually also happening outside of bounds where people even might be used to this kind of remote work standards and practices, and it might be considered one even shittier to deal with when it comes to being new to this.

I currently work in a unicorn which recently IPOed and can confirm that I have the same experience as the author of this article.

I also had a very similiar experience at my previous employer which was also a valley based company which IPOed.

I have multiple colleagues who are in the same boat, both current and former, and while I realize this data is anecdotal, from my perspective, work culture in the valley is just plain broken.

People are not robots, they need time to rest and adjust.

So, recently I achieved happiness because I just don't care about the job anymore. I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead. I got a Meets-Most, and I've never been happier.

I'm writing my final proposal as one final swing at the bat and the title is "XYZ or Bust" where either I get buy-in or I'm leaving. I've never felt better in my entire career.

This is made possible because I'm old enough with enough assets that I can quit and retire, so now it is time to leverage the positives.

From reading this, it is clear the team he is on is toxic. The key to not being on-call all the time is not answering the call unless you in rotation. It's hard to do for sure.

> I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead.

It's not just the brazenness of the act, it's the fact you made your defiance into art that I really respect.

Here is the poem:

  I will not do this PSC.
  There is a future that I foresee.
  No longer shall I bend the knee
  to this process called PSC.

This is the way

  Oh oh oh oh oh
  Now I can bring you in
  Warm or cold
  I'll get paid either way
  (Oh oh oh oh)
  It might not buy me happiness
  But it might just ease my pain
  (Oh oh oh oh)
  'Cause it's hard to live
  This life alone
  But it's all I've ever known

As a fellow (ex)FBer who absolutely abhorred PSC, I applaud you, sir.

As a former manager at said company, I would absolutely hate you for making my PSC hell-period even more hellish, as I would still be on the hook for delivering your packet under incredibly unrealistic timelines. Won't somebody think of the managers! ;)

Every time I think that I don't want to do my optional self-review I decide to do it anyway -- because I want to make my manager's life easier.

This is one of the main reasons companies love hiring 20-29 yo people. They work their ass off because that is all they know, as well has having the time to do it. Once people hit 35-50 people realize there are more things to life.

The problem with the kids is they are still cutting their teeth in many aspects. I worked on a core product of a very large tech company on my last run. This wasn’t my first rodeo either. I happened to build most of the product our team owned. There were many disciplines involved and trying to get other experts to evolve was a never ending battle in a losing war. I won’t go into all the glory and failure or how things made it to where they were today. Despite an income that was quite silly I had to walk away. I can still run circles around people half my age, but I can hold the hill for so long. Many of the other old guard went the same route.

> So, recently I achieved happiness because I just don't care about the job anymore. I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead. I got a Meets-Most, and I've never been happier.

You can't do that! Hey, come back here! You're not allowed to do that! Can you hear me? Get back over here, don't walk away. Don't keep walking away. Stop!

Perhaps... but I think companies like FB also get (total guess) thousands of resumes per day. So, for every engineer that walks away, many more are knocking at the door.

So, I think in management's eyes, very very very few people are irreplaceable.

People who are good, and can successfully signal that in the job hunt process have tons of options. So yes, everyone is replaceable, but it takes time and money to do it. Someone having a weird attitude toward the performance management system may not be a good enough reason to replace them if they get the job done. Hiring a new person may be more of a headache for the manager.

That's not true at all where I am. Yes, I can post on twitter and get tons of CVs, but most applicants aren't that good. I may only want to interview 40% of the candidates I get, and I would really only want to hire about 1 in 5 people I interview. Interviewing takes time. Then after that, onboarding people on the job takes time too, it can take people several months to become effective on the job. Skilled, effective employees that you get along with are not easy to replace.

Everything you said about most applicants not being hireable, and the amount of time needed for onboarding, etc. is true.

And yet, from where I sit, it's not obvious that managers (at multiple companies) show that they care that much. I think the exception was when I was at a startup, but I think that was due to combination of two reasons: The amazing manager, and the fact replacing a specialist on our team was even harder.

Disclaimer: My views are my own.

If you're hiring in tech and 40% of applicants are worthy of an interview then that's amazing. It's closer to 10% in my experience.

Never underestimate the effectiveness of total denial. You can hire in people who are barely competent to hold a pair of scissors. Sure they'll erode and ultimately destroy whatever technical edifice you've built this far. But by the time your ability, as a manager, to put a positive spin on the most abject of failure comes to an end, you'll have moved on to an even higher paying job at another FAANG, or retired.

Look at any failed multi-decade war waged by any unbeatable superpower past or present to see the highest levels of military and civilian command employ these exact same methods to build careers so successful that they'll be immortalized in statues for centuries after their deaths :)

That might just help explain certain recent events...

Absolutely not true. Big Tech is struggling to hire - which is why the offer packages are so fat now.

Big tech is struggling to hire in a situation of its own making, by making the interview process so awful, and not caring about retention.

Maybe. But my point is that the fat pay packages are not because big tech has a lot of money. Rather, they are running out of supply for the kind of engineers they would like to hire. It's a demand supply thing. If big tech found it easy to hire, they would pay half of what they do now. Their primary expense is salary for software engineers.

It's also because big tech has a lot of money. Many other companies can't afford to pay those salaries, and they would if they could.

I wouldn't lay retention entirely at the feet of big tech. Yes, there is changing jobs to get a bigger pay bump than staying but that's been true to greater or lesser degrees in a lot of places for a very long time.

But what's also been true for a very long time is that, outside of some of the older larger companies, Silicon Valley has normed job tenures for a lot of people that would seem ludicrously short most other places and would, in fact, possibly make those people unhireable.

>> This is made possible because I'm old enough with enough assets that I can quit and retire

This is the life changing part.

“Notice you’ve been missing a lot of work recently, Peter?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob.”

“It’s not that I’m lazy, I just don’t care.”

“Sounds like someone’s got a case of the Mondays.”

>I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead. I got a Meets-Most

i don't even care to write anything. They aren't going to fire me - there is so much manure to shovel that somebody got to do it and after 30 years i do it very reliably (and i don't care whether i'm doing it here or at some other place, whereis our department has huge challenges hiring people in US). And i'm not promotable anyway.

>The key to not being on-call all the time is not answering the call unless you in rotation.

additional trick - to not go into rotation too, at least until it is really core nature of the business that you was aware about when coming onboard.

>enough assets that I can quit and retire

unfortunately not there yet. Yet it doesn't really matter much as long as there is a demand for tech labor.

That sounds like apathy to me. I think in this industry we have way more opportunities to find meaning to be content with zoning out 40 hours a week.

At a previous company I asked to be a Conscientious Objector from the performance review process as I was just going to get an On Target rating anyway (I did).

(Not retired yet, I knew I was quitting a week or two later. Amazingly my boss was surprised when I gave my notice …).

> I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead. I got a Meets-Most, and I've never been happier.

Can't recommend this enough. I've nearly always opted-out of performance review dance. Just don't do it. In most companies I get pushback to do it but then they give up and it doesn't matter at all. Still get my promotions.

This is less crazy than it sounds. Any half-decent manager would read your poem, laugh, and write a fair and accurate review.

> but the big difference between then and now was that when I was home, I was home. Work stopped, and I could do something else for a bit and didn’t have to worry about anything until the next work day. I didn’t feel much of the mental fatigue I do now.

This really has nothing to do with Big Tech and is a nearly universal characteristic of any job that requires mental effort instead of physical. Yeah, if you're getting paid to move boxes all day, the boxes don't follow you home. If you get paid to think all day, the thoughts do. Nothing much you can do about that other than learn to deal with it.

My friends who are scientists think about their research in their free time, and worry about upcoming conference deadlines, etc. My friends who are lawyers think about their cases and upcoming filing deadlines. My friends on the business and sales side think about clients and deals and marketing. That's just how it goes. Be glad someone is willing to pay you for it and that your brain doesn't wear out from thinking the way your back wears out from carrying boxes.

This person just sounds like they have trouble setting boundaries and some general anxiety issues. I am a SWE at a FANG company right now, in a reasonably important and high-profile area, and the work-life balance is way better than any other job I've had at smaller companies both in and out of "tech".

A friend of mine is a pilot on long flights. He said that the great thing about his job is that he can totally switch off from work as soon as he leaves the plane. Feels like the best of both world. High paid job without the stress.

For the other curious:

https://epicflightacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/maj...

https://epicflightacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/car...

It's way higher than what I expected.

I’m hardly an expert, but I understand it could take 15-20 years of a flying career before you reach the point of being a “first-year captain” at a major airline (the first column in this chart).

Yes, exactly. Expect to spent at least 10 years as a first officer before getting a shot at Captain. I’d wager that Covid has pushed that out to 15 years. I have family and friends who are pilots, and the landscape is brutal with yearly pay rises falling far short of inflation in a lot of cases, and bonuses being minimal or non existent for the last few years

I could be mistaken, but I recall reading that there are quite a few hoops to jump through before you can fly for the big boys. For example, you would typically start with shorter/less important routes on smaller airlines. Also, the pilot unions keep the good routes (and salaries) for the more senior pilots, so tenure plays a big part in how much you get paid.

Agreed with every word of your comment but

> your brain doesn't wear out from thinking the way your back wears out from carrying boxes.

this is not obvious at all.

I worked as a mover in NYC for years before becoming a software developer. Even though I make more money and have an easier life in many ways now, the mental fatigue of working a "knowledge" job is stressful in ways that outweigh most of my hardest physically and emotionally taxing days moving.

Not really my experience at Google tbh. I've been at Google for a little under 4 years and been promoted twice but only work about 4 hours a day. Sometimes I don't do shit for weeks at a time and things seem to pan out ok. I'm not trying to humble brag that I'm 10x or anything--im not, I'm a B grade engineer at best. Sure it can be stressful sometimes, but I'd say that 80% of the time it's really chill.

I'd bet that you're not on one of the profit center teams... And that you don't have an oncall rotation.

I worked in one of the ads teams at Google. I quit a few weeks ago, with reasons similar to the ones described in the article. I was giving just way too much of my life away for that work...

I am an SRE so I am in a rotation, I'm actually oncall right now.

I was in Corp and now I'm in Cloud. I haven't interacted with anyone in ads so I am not familiar with the experience. Do you think your peers had a similar experience as you?

My peers on my team, and on our sister teams (we share the same manager's manager) have all had similar experiences in that: there is so much on everyone's plate, there is so much tech debt, so much to maintain, yet so much to build, so much that breaks, so much surface area to cover, and never enough time or energy.

Interesting… Out of curiosity, do people in profit centers get paid more to compensate for the stress?

I’m thinking in terms of Wall Street banks, where for example traders might have very stressful jobs but receive huge bonuses that far outstrip what the more relaxed back office roles get.

I can't speak for Google, but, at my most recent employer, people on the ads team told me their on-call is pretty hellish. There's no pay differential for switching teams that I know of, either.

there’s no difference in pay other than the fact that anyone with an oncall rotation gets a minor salary bump

Compensation at FAANGs are more or less fixed by level and location. However, people with more stressful teams tend to get promoted much more quickly.

Lucky you. I've heard that Google was pretty relaxed. I've just started working in a big tech company myself. It's a bit early to tell but so far, I find that my colleagues are good (probably better than me) and efficient. It's not especially stressful yet, in the sense there are no hard deadlines or anything really critical, and the project is super interesting. But I can tell that if I were slacking, that would show and I wouldn't compare favorably with them. And it seems everybody is quite anxious with performance evaluations.

I think it depends on what division you’re in and what role you have. I was TL of a team in Cloud and I ran myself ragged. I was getting anxiety attacks every day and felt a literal weight sinking into me as the bus approached the building. I took a 6mo medical leave and still haven’t really recovered.

yeah cloud is a differnt beast. basically amazon within google

same here in cloud, y'all are making me wonder if maybe I shouldn't have given my 2 weeks the other day and instead tried to do an internal transfer

maybe, depends what you want for your career. imo best thing about working at google is just having it on your resume, which you already have

I don't understand why people leave AWS to join Google Cloud only to replicate the environment they were trying to escape.

> Not really my experience at Google tbh.

That's what I thought! Amazon sure, Apple maybe.. but Google seems like a pretty chill place to work. There's a reason it's like one of the hardest to get into, right? :D

You're not bragging, but perhaps you're a match for the culture? Your communication skills are better than your colleagues? You collaborate better across teams, and get more done? You're better at planning, and delegating?

I'm trying to say that you being promoted twice and not being an excellent engineer doesn't mean it's easy. You may have other traits that allow you to excel in that environment. The level distribution by itself says that being promoted twice in 3-4 years, with a significant bump in pay each time, isn't the norm.

It depends what level he started at. L5 to l6 or l7 is way more impressive than l3 to l5

Being on-call but having no tickets come in is not the same as "not working".

There are a few things which makes this culture worse.

Depending on your luck if your manager is someone without kids, or has grown up kids, they might be totally OK working more hours than you, and as a result, the culture can totally become what the author is describing.

Mix the whole interviewing process of Leetcoding with this, and it becomes a sad worklife, and even if you want to escape that, switching careers can only happen if you put in extra hours.

Life is too short to make this sacrifice.

My strategy has been to create good relationships with people in companies and then if they want to hire me, tell them clearly I don't work overtime and I don't do Leetcode. Has worked well for me so far. Relationship building and networking is still the best way even in this industry.

The present company I am working at, I didn't even have to do a coding test. Just a chat.

To me the industry has become so extremely toxic to mental health since agile became a thing. Must "sprint" 100% of the time, keep that velocity up at the maximum sustainable in short periods but forever.

A marathon runner can't have the pace of a 100m sprinter but software engineers are expected to maintain sprint pace for perpetuity.

And give detailed status reports Every.Single.Day. So there's no possibility of a breather, ever.

This is not at all what it used to be like pre-agile. There was time to think deeply about solutions. It was ok to slack off a day (or three) and make it up later when you got into The Zone.

Apparently you’re in good company

https://github.com/rayfrankenstein/AITOW/blob/master/README....

It all depends on the company. My company is seemingly doing Agile, but not finishing tasks within sprint is absolutely no big deal. Sprints come and go while we work on our tasks. The sprints seems more like a way to help PO manage and organize the work than anything that affects the engineers.

Indeed, daily standups are the worst for so many reasons. First of all, everyone's just focused on what they're about to say to justify their employment, and nobody's paying attention to what the others have to say, which was ostensibly the whole point. The only one paying attention is the manager/lead, whose real, not so secret job is to make sure nobody's slacking off.

The second is that productivity in a creative occupation just doesn't work that way. We're not factory workers assembling widgets on a conveyor belt. Einstein didn't give fucking daily updates on his theory of relativity. No, we're not Einstein, but daily updates ensure that we're not thinking meaningful deep thoughts, instead giving in to short-sighted thinking like a starving beggar looking for their next meal.

One of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, Ron Jeffries, suggests developers abandon the word Agile [1]. Instead, we should recommend and practice "Manifesto Agile".

1. https://ronjeffries.com/articles/018-01ff/abandon-1/

Blog like this makes me wonder if I even want to work for FAANG companies anymore. I have never worked for a big corp and never for FAANG companies in particular.

>What I found was that the decent salary and excellent benefits came at a much greater cost.

I know you can get in with a big paycheck work your ass for 10 years and get out with lot of money in your bank. Maybe it my early 20s. Now I'm 35+ I don;t have the motivation to be a Google or Apple Software Engineer. I work in small firm and on interesting problems, and I'm OK with it.

> If it was after 6PM and I heard a notification on my phone, the hair on the back of my neck would stand up. Often times it was someone from work asking a seemingly innocent question.

This happens to me at my current job. But I don't have similar reaction to it. I'm more like "Oh, someone is working late..." And I respond to their queries. I believe performance and getting your task done faster has to do something? I know Amazon PIP thing is scary place to end with. No idea just read it on HN.

I work at Amazon and the work-life-balance is pretty chill. I do my 35 hours a week (7 hours a day--8 including lunch) and completely disconnect outside of that. Manager has been chill so far, expectations couldn't be clearer and are pretty reasonable.

A lot of my friends work at FAANG and finance in SWE roles too and their wlb is pretty good as well, with most working under 40 hours a week--some well under.

And we're all 1-2 years out of college. I really don't get the whole 22 year olds wanting to work a lot thing. Doesn't seem to hold true in my friend group (~10-20 samples).

You really wanna ask yourself if you wanna go thru the promo circus. What I get after a potential promo at Amazon 1.5 years from now is gonna be less than what I can get if I Leetcode hard and interview with some financial firms and unicorns so that's the route I'm planning on going. Knowing this, I don't even really need to meet expectations or try to go beyond them.

Point being: if you're willing to spend a couple hours a week keeping your interview skills sharp, you can afford to just meet expectations or even perform slightly under and stop worrying about promo and just jump ship when you get a better offer. If you go into every job with this mentality, you won't become attached to your job.

Do you get paid full time salary or hourly only for the 35 hours a week?

This is location-dependent: in some countries (France? UK?), 35 hours a week is full time.

France is 35h but for a SWE, there's no fixed schedule and you're not paid by the hour. You get 10 additional vacation days though (so that would be 35 days total).

Nobody counts how many actual hours you work. It's all about your impact and whether you meet your expectations. Some people are much more productive than others, manage their time better and so on... it's a double edged sword though.

Like a sibling comment said, the number of hours worked isn't tracked.

Downside: If you're oncall, you might have to stay up for 18 hours straight of something big goes wrong, and you won't get paid any overtime.

This blog post is a huge overgeneralization of large tech companies. You can't extrapolate from one bad experience at one team at Apple to say that all teams at Apple are bad. And you definitely can't then also conclude that all of FAANG is bad.

It's more that Apple's lows might be lower than those in other big tech companies, because conditions at Apple are permitted to get as bad as they are.

> This may seem outrageous to someone that hasn’t experienced this type of situation, but in the Big Tech world this expectation is normal.

I work at a FAANG, and it's probably a team-by-team thing, but that is absolutely not normal in my experience. That's a particularly shitty circumstance, and it's a bummer your management didn't stick up for you.

Same and I agree- it’s basically all team based.

I worked 17 years at Google on lots of different things and with one exception* never let work stuff interrupt my life when I wasn't at work. I certainly kept odd hours at times and would do things like stay late some days if I had broken something that I thought I could fix before leaving, but once I was done with work I was done.

* The one exception was when I was on a team where we had a rotating pager duty for our stuff in production, and I would periodically be on duty. As I recall we got paid extra for those time blocks.

these days many managers will plead ignorance of on-call bonus pay. our manager tried to put us on oncall and I had to show everybody on the team the page that said they would be gettng bonuses. Suddenly it wasn't an "oncall" but a "unpaid developer rotation"

Yup, me too. Have always met or exceeded expectations working a straight 40. This article is trying to generalize their experience on a bad team to the 500K+ people that work at Big Tech companies.

I keep hearing people say this ("it's all team based"), and I don't doubt that it's true. Suppose I don't want to end up on one of those pressure cooker teams. How can you avoid that? I just don't see how it's possible, unless you know someone inside the company who can give you some insight as to which teams to avoid.

At FB, most ICs are not hired for a specific team in advance, and instead choose between (for SWE, a long list of) teams during the Bootcamp process. You can chat to future team mates (not just manager or lead) and ask them straight out about that. (Some people also ask for the half-ly survey results for that team as well.)

If you’re being hired for a team specifically (at another company, say), ask for a “follow-up” meeting with future team mates after offer as a condition for accept. You have a lot of power at that point.

> The manager of that team demanded I get the release out, and just ignored anything else I had to say. I pointed out that it took them a really long time to respond to my initial report of the issue and we may have been able to come up with something had they responded. The other team wasn’t buying it. From their perspective, the expectation had already been set, and it was up to us to get our job done no matter the cost.

The source of all your misery may have been your inept manager. Your manager's job is to insulate you from these situations when it escalates. Your job is to build a good enough relationship with your manager that they go to bat for you in ambiguous situations. If you can't build this relationship, leave the team immediately and find something else. Direct managers make or break your experience.

As a former manager at a FAANG I completely agree. If this had been my report, I would’ve aggressively followed up with that manager about why exactly an engineer on my team was stressing out on a Friday evening about something they apparently didn’t need until the following Wednesday. If I didn’t get a satisfactory response, I’d be following up with their manager as well as my own.

Yes. This is the way. Management is there to set this kind of boundaries too.

From personal experience:

The stress of dealing with an organization with the wrong culture, and you having to clean up the messes made, with no agency for meaningful change due to leadership is something most folks with some years in this industry have experienced regardless of the size of the company.

At a tech giant the salary removes even more agency. Near a vest date? Most likely not leaving until after. It's an awful feeling to show up for work, having enough professional pride that you continue to perform, but knowing you want to be anywhere but there.

Ironically enough, Apple had an employee assistance program that allowed me to have 15 therapy sessions per year. I used all 15 of them over a 16 week period. What I learned in therapy was a lot of coping mechanisms.

If you use EAP, you give up your right to privacy (in practice if not in law) and damage any chances you have for finding legal recourse.

“If a potential client called me and said: ‘I’m being harassed at work, I feel really stressed and anxious. Do you think I should use my company’s E.A.P.?’” Ms. Mizrahi said, “I would advise them against it.” [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/us/google-workplace-compl... https://archive.is/VKXEU

Thanks for this. I have always suspected such was the case, but never had any proof. I've even had people tell me I'm paranoid. It's good to know I was right. Fortunately, if my work did this to me, I could just say "no thanks, I already have a therapist."

Things that my peers/managers have told me across 9 years working at Bay area public companies in groups that make 100's of millions in revenue

* Things could be worse * Everywhere it's the same * Someone's good time management is someone else's bad time management * The worst behaved wins - be the rhinoceros you wish to see in the world * It doesn't matter what you do, it matter what your bosses boss thinks you do * It is very likely that hiring and headcount is the only thing your boss cares about * We should stop giving RSU grants for people below <insert level> * Everyone can write code, I could easily write a million lines of code if I wanted to * It doesn't matter if you do not get a promotion, you aren't going to take this money with you when you reach heaven < some story about judas and jesus that i did not understand > * If you embarrass me in a meeting, remember that you aren't going to be present when your promotion packet comes up for review * We follow the best development practices - but we also have 3 dozen AWS accounts and manually generated security credentials we message each other in slack * etc etc etc

The least troublesome part was delivering - the hardest was accepting that US work culture confuses leverage for intelligence

So much that could be said here but I'll just be concise. You don't have to work long/odd hours. You can set boundaries. Learn to manage your manager.

Here's what's interesting. We take this "projects have deadlines" idea as gospel and if you dare question it you are an immoral heathen with a poor work ethic.

So you have a software engineer at Apple ruining his mental and physical health to chase a deadline. Only to have someone at Foxconn in China destroy their eyesight slightly sooner gluing digitizers to iPhone screens. Then we can all buy the resulting product for a commercial holiday starring an imaginary jolly fat man.

But is the new iPhone really all that different than the last? It has a marginally better camera and downloads stuff faster, but if it came out a year later nobody would be particularly upset.

I am certain that I am not the only one disillusioned with tech, and indeed consumerism as a whole. The implications of this will be interesting to see once more people work up the courage to say this out loud.

A lot of this rings true. But I also can’t help but think (I’m not FAANG), given the kind of pay at these companies couldn’t or shouldn’t one treat these gigs like 3-4 year tour of duty, and have enough to go away and refresh for a couple of years (with a ton socked away for nest egg/ retirement?)

The problem is that it's easy for people to get addicted to the money. Human psychology is frequently such that it's harder for someone making well into the 6 figures annually to take a pay cut to low 6 figures than it is easier for them to look at their not insignificant savings and realize they can still live comfortably with less income.

My hunch is that people often live at their means and its less often the case that someone earning 250-400k is living at 100k means, especially in expensive cities. So those people can build lifestyles that basically mandate having a high paying job.

This seems like mostly an Apple problem. I have not heard similar issues with Google and Facebook (I don't know anyone in the other "A" or the "N")

Facebook is absolutely well-known for its terrible work-life balance, borne out of high expectations and a high percentage of overachievers.

No, this is a "specific team within FAANG" problem. It absolutely happens at some teams in all of them; it also absolutely does not happen in others. That's the problem with having very large companies; the experience is not homogenous.

Do you work at Apple? That company has ruined more than one of my close friends/family members.

If you don't, just read Steve Job's biography. Most of the work situations Isaacson described in Apple's earlier days are horrifying, albeit presented in a heroic, nostalgic light.

What happened to the people you know?

Apple may be worse than others.. but also know that people move around, and bring a part of their old culture to the new team. If they're in a senior position, and they have a bias towards people from their old employer while hiring, they could start hiring people from the ex-employer. Mix that in with a fast growing team, and now there is a risk of a subset of the company acting like they're at the old company.

FWIW, I have heard these types of stories before too, and they are definitely NOT unique to Apple.

Well, after Google purchased Nest, there were all of those tales about the difficulties of integrating that startup into the parent company. Tony Fadell founded Nest, and he brought Apple's culture into it, and that style definitely did not gel with Google's more laidback environment.

FWIW, the people at Nest have been the nicest people I have worked with during my career. Many of them were ex-Apple. I did not work under Tony though, so can't comment on that. I also remember the comments from the ex-Dropcam team... And I tried to find out what happened there, but never fully found out.

Work is a bit like a relationship. You need to set boundaries from the beginning, and if your employer doesn't respect them, just leave. You can find a new team or a new job, especially in that field.

I know it's easier said than done and one may feel trapped and overwhelmed in a bad situation, but it's just a job at the end of the day.

It's not big tech. It's working for a jerk of a manager who doesn't respect you as a person. I've been in that situation out of tech as well as in tech, and that got solved by getting a new boss or changing jobs.

I don't know if I've just gotten lucky - I have only ever worked at smaller companies I guess - but I've never really dealt with a blurring of time boundaries by my employer. I think at each of my four jobs there was exactly one time I had to deal with an emergency in off-hours. One of those jobs was even toxic in other ways, but invasion of personal time was not one of them.

Is it really that common? Does it mainly happen at global corps that run essential internet infrastructure?

> Does it mainly happen at global corps that run essential internet infrastructure?

Being on-call happens at scale because machines are not to be trusted, and the limits of our skulls meet their match when machines vastly outnumber people. When I worked at Amazon S3, we had rotations where people had physical pagers. On-call was a duty, and everyone shared a rotation.

Honestly, I thought it was an awesome responsibility that there I was at 2 AM and some stupid shit happened in dublin and I got to fix it. (Or at least try to fix it as my first on-call shift was rough)

I think Amazon is one of the few companies that get this right with their cultures because you can own efforts that people use. It's not going to be something discarded after a year unless a massive rewrite is planed. The massive rewrites can be super fun (but hard) as well because you have to do it in-flight.

The reason Amazon gets this right is that you can get a bit of the stake on the outcome, and this is awesome. For instance, I designed how Amazon S3 does URL rewrites on the website endpoint. It's a small feature, but I lead the effort from start to finish. For all practical purposes, that feature is most likely going to last until the end of time. However, its that relationship between myself as an engineer with the customer that makes it worth it (at least emotionally).

This read like a normal workplace to me. It exists somewhere in the space between poor management, not setting boundaries (because you're too worried someone will be disappointed), and all of that leading to abuse of the zero marginal cost of a salaried employee's time. Anyway, I mostly think the writer was just not standing up for himself.

It read like something in the military, but when there's no legal implications to telling someone his request is unreasonable... then I think it's self-inflicted.

This isn't really a big tech phenomenon as similar situations occur all the time at startups and in other industries.

Sometimes the juice is worth the squeeze and sometimes it is not.

Be aware of your work-life balance or lack thereof, the impact on your health and relationships, how work affects your non-work goals, etc. and make the choice you need to make:

1) Try to set boundaries or manage up.

2) Leave for a role that is a better fit.

3) Sometimes it's worth the grind if you are learning enough or being paid enough to stick it out for a bit.

I’ll add that the content of the work, especially around the but not-limited-to the advertising business, can be soul-grinding on its own. As a young person it’s easy to buy into almost any business model, but when you find yourself an instrument of exploitation it can create cognitive dissonance and anxiety. Whether it’s deceiving users, getting them to spend more than they can afford, or creating a wake of environment damage, it’s hard to justify getting paid to do certain kinds of work, regardless of how much you’re “making the world a better place”. Getting paid extremely well to do it makes it feel somehow worse.

I'll second that. I was once hired as a "developer" in customer service for an old software product of a big company. My whole day consisted just of reading through log files. It didn't help that the company didn't invest anything in getting me familiar with the product. In the last months I sometimes got the feeling like my head was literally going to explode. Must have been panic attacks. I took a year off after that.

Yeah, getting people to click on ads is definitely not what I want to do with my life. At my most recent company, I remember when the ads team had run an A/B test that showed a pretty significant lift in the number of ads clicked. Guess what the change was? They just put more ads on the page. I was floored when I heard that.

> It’s an unwritten rule that as a salaried employee in Big Tech, you are effectively on call all the time.

This, right here, is where OP lost. It takes some discipline from management to admit there are only three options:

- There is a formal oncall rotation of people properly equipped to solve all problems.

- Everyone is oncall all the time.

- Whatever you make can only be expected to work in core office hours AND your users understand this is not production level.

In my seven years in Google I've only been in the first and third category. Nobody ever suggested I should do overtime. But I know there are teams in the middle category and people there eventually end up miserable just like OP.

Very relatable.

My biggest gripe is that despite knowing that we don't really know what we are doing, that there are lots of unknowns, that something like this is being done for the first time in team the management often expects deadlines set in stone. All the "agile"ity goes out of the window.

Or worse, like in Uber's case, the CEO will announce something on a whim and you have to scramble to get it done because of no fault of your own.

That is actually one thing I refuse to compromise, and I think the current state of tech gives most developers this luxury, possibly if you are willing to trade off some compensation. Even if that changes, this would be the last thing to go, for me :)

If I'm on call, I'm 100% on call. If something important is late (not endemically but as a one off), I'm fine with working late or on the weekend. Even if someone "unfairly" drags me into their on-call issue I will stay up late and help them.

But once I check out, I check out. I refuse to install work stuff on my phone, and have most notifications off by default... on a rare occasion that someone from work texts me in off hours and off call, I would "miss" the notification unless they describe the problem, and it's actually somewhat urgent. If something is on fire (again, it's very rare and not endemic in the teams I worked in), sure, I'll be there if I'm near a computer. Otherwise I might as well be out in the mountains ;)

Dealing with very young people who have not failed or lost something or someone consequential. And who don’t understand stand that there actions have consequences and its just a fucking job.

I always feel pity when I read accounts of people destroying their mental health and lives to the “glory” of a company. If you don’t look out for, and protect yourself, then there are plenty of people/corporations out there eager and willing to destroy you and suck every last bit of life out of you, leaving you broken and forgotten.

They don't really do it "for the company" though, they get a large paycheck to do it.

The other types exist, but they're typically in non-profits (like, the real kind, not the one where a small team is lining their pockets) and overwork themselves because they believe in the mission.

But if you make 4-10 times the national average, and you start out in your first year making more than most people will at the peak of their career, that's the biggest incentive. You absolutely can semi-retire after five years of doing that and dramatically scale down the amount of work you do because you'll have more savings than most people will have at the end of their career.

> The build server needed to be rebooted, but this was during the pandemic when no one was in the office. Furthermore, it was a Friday making it even more unlikely someone was around to do something as simple as press a button to reboot a machine.

WTF? Why is a company like Apple using one off machines for release builds? That should all be on a VM and a server with a management interface. I made that mistake once and won't make it again.

It can take some time to adjust to feeling like you are always at work but IMO it also feels like I'm never at work. I work 40+ hours and respond to things off hours but I don't have to deal with the hour or so of wasted time and typical office annoyances.

Apple is a very old and heterogeneous company that flies by the skin of its teeth and there are engineering and organizational practices that would make the most hardcore Mac Addict blanch.

True, but that is changing.

They're not. Some random team within Apple is. Just like any other company, there are definitely teams that have a terrible culture along with teams that don't.

> That should all be on a VM and a server with a management interface.

I guess when you have a bespoke OS that can't really be virtualized and needs to run on your own (non-server grade) hardware, you need to do stuff like this. I imagine the 'build server' is actually just a Mac Mini.

https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/report_2720/... "SERIOUS MENTAL ILLNESS AMONG ADULTS BELOW THE POVERTY LINE" (this is simply the first result I found in a large body of research on the mental and physical cost of poverty)

It is worth focusing on the ways in which you are lucky, and it puts some of the stress in perspective. We are living in challenging times - environmental, economic, and societal change. Everyone is experiencing this stress in different ways.

It sounds like you are saying this is first world problems. Instead, for anyone else reading, I’ll suggest that making your own issues smaller makes it impossible to deal with them. Yes, people under the poverty line have it harder but it does not diminish your own problems in life.

I don't know that my short comment required you to restate my point, and in a way that I don't quite agree with. But I appreciate your different viewpoint. I think people should seek treatment and therapy for mental health problems, but it is worth focusing on positive things, also. They are not mutually exclusive.

We all get to points in our careers where we forget to set boundaries. We forget the considerable power we wield. Most crucially: the power to leave.

But before that the power to disconnect from work, to not have slack on your personal phone, and to simply say “no” and set boundaries. You could get fired, true, but thats their loss. You’re lucky in tech that you’ll almost certainly land on your feet.

I don’t work in big tech but I do work in big industry. In my experience you need to have the ability to go hard and put the team on your back when it is actually necessary. You equally need the ability to turn it off and put work back in its proper place. They don’t pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to throw in the towel or coast when shit hits the fan.

This seems specific to apple. I had an offer from apple that I didn't accept because all the sell calls happened outside 9-6 pm on weekdays and on sundays. They were too busy between 9-6 on weekdays to make space for 30 minutes to call me. They scheduled at the weirdest hours. I thought it was just one such call, nope every call with the eng team was the same.

Don't you hate it when people have some anecdata to really whet your appetite and then they just say... "I work on a very important service/thing at some large megacap tech". If you're SWE navigating the very important choice of selecting one of these elusive "good teams with good managers" so you don't accidentally step into one of these abusive teams then you need to know information. You're only doing a disservice to your peers by hiding the information. It's like salary. When SWE salaries became public, it put tremendous pressure on tech to provide massive bumps , bennies, and YoY growth.

I think if we can name names to shame the bad teams it really helps the industry improve conditions and expectations. And if you really are on a good team you should get the word out so it's easier for you to hire.

I'd help if I could but I'm just a student.

The bit about the crush to get something out at all costs which wasn't then looked at for days hits home hard.

I've seen that trick pulled many times over my career and I've learnt to just shrug and let it roll.

Unless you can explain to me why it is so absolutely critical that it needs to go today in a form I can understand then I'm not going remotely above and beyond to make it work out that way.

Stressing out my entire team to make an arbitrary deadline imposed from outside for invisible reasons is the definition of me not doing my job as a leader.

It takes experience and practice to learn to manage upwards but it's an intensely useful skill.

Start not with explaining what you can't/won't do but instead with what you can/will do - most people are reasonable most of the time and if they are unreasonable anyway then whatever you do will not be right/enough.

It's the requirements that kind of bubble up from very far away in a large org that cause the most stress. Almost no one wants their reports or close colleagues to feel inundated and always scrambling but in a big org it's still really hard to mitigate when the originator of a request is a few teams away from the one that is made to feel like a bottleneck (actually there'll be a ton of people feeling like the bottleneck on any project which is by definition not true). Actually the originator might not even feel it's urgent it just feels a little more escalated all along the path.

If you firmly say "no" or "I can't" people will be a lot more accommodating than you think. Easier said than done in the actual situation but it seems almost always true.

This is exactly how it’s been for me at Microsoft on occasion, except (since I’m in consulting services now) it’s mostly about customer requests and sales team expectations. The pandemic made it exponentially worse in some ways (Eternal September in video calls, dealing with dozens more people who lacked the ability to work effectively without meetings, and a dollop of uncertainty), but being fully remote made it a lot more bearable: I switch off my PC and I’m done for the day. No commute, no taking extra micromanagement calls in the car, people started being _civil_ about my availability and stopped expecting instant replies.

As somebody who recently gave up a faculty job at a top-tier CS program, this a) doesn't mirror my experience at all, and b) is still significantly better than the faculty life!

Perhaps this is unique to Apple? Even during my interview they were very explicit about having to work above and beyond. Ended up choosing somewhere else.

Quotes like this bug me:

> If you find yourself in this type of situation, please do what’s best for you and get help if you are feeling stuck or overwhelmed.

Get help the !@#$% where? There isn't a magic American "help" fairy who bails people out of trouble.

These issues are complex, and therapists/counselors/psychologists suck up time and don't really address root causes.

You don't need professionals to help you address your issues. Friends+family+strangers at the bar can help immensely

Good friends can definitely be amazing, but it takes the right type. Family will often tell you what they think will make you feel better, but not necessarily how to address the problem. Strangers at the bar and generally trying to fix problem in an alcohol based environment is a terrible idea.

It honestly depends on the scale of issues. Many people’s problem is that they can’t maintain positive behaviors due to some problems that stem from their family. If you can’t make (healthy) friends easily because you were traumatized during a critical stage of development, how do you get out of that negative spiral?

I honestly didn’t realize any of this until the last 1-2 years. When you’re raised in a fairly stable and supportive family environment, the level of dysfunction in other people’s home lives is completely outside of your reality.

A therapists job is literally to take time to address the root causes of complex issues. Maybe you’ve had bad experience with some therapists/counselors, but I wouldn’t extrapolate that to the whole field of psychology.

What are the odds of finding a good therapist? I fear that many psychologists chose their line of work not because of their analytical capabilities.

I think this depends on the source. One of the best ways to get a good therapist is to have one that has already been vetted through your circle of trust. This is obviously dependent on factors outside of your control, but sometimes you also just have to try some out. I think also...just because a therapist is 'good' doesn't mean they will be good for you in particular.

If the root causes is:

- Financial constraints

- A harasser

- A medical problem

- Etc.

a therapist/counselor can't help you very much. Whenever I've had issues I needed help with, there were real issues behind it. A therapist/counselor won't be able to do much, if anything.

If you're making a $350k salary in a hell-job while having $100k in financial obligations, the solution is simple enough.

If you're making a $350k salary in a hell-job to pay for your kid's medical problem and meet mortgage, talking to a therapist or "just quitting" won't do much.

Are you actually saying that people who go to therapy don't have 'real issues' behind their problems? Damn...

No, I'm saying if you're:

* in an abusive job

* are going to be deported if you quit

* have kids you want to keep in school

... anxiety is a natural biological response, and there isn't a magical therapy trick that will help you get rid of it. Perhaps that time and money is better spent on managing immigration or job issues than on therapy.

And if you're in a new country with no savings and no contacts, continuing with the same example, there might not be friends or family whom you can turn to for help.

You're just picking out examples that suit your point. Are you saying therapy is just a 'magical trick'?

I'm saying that there are internals problems and there are external problems. Whenever I've had mental health issues, there were clear external causes, and therapy ain't gonna do a thing about that. Therapists will tell you the same thing. Removing the root causes will do something.

Unfortunately, there isn't a magical get-help fairy which helps with external problems. Sometimes, your life just gets f-ed up, and there's nothing you can do about it.

The author clearly states that it was the process of working with a therapist and the “face it or replace it” idea that helped them realize they had to leave their job. The solution for any given individual may not be the system as the root cause of the systemic problem, but that doesn’t mean a good counselor can’t be helpful.

+1 just get another job if the job makes you unhappy

Walk it off. /s

Change job ASAP. Getting help while still being abused doesn’t help.

> When you’re a new employee at Apple you’re pretty much thrown into the deep end. There’s no orientation for projects on how to contribute to them or requirements to work within a certain set of guidelines. For the most part I was expected to learn things along the way. On top of that, generally there wasn’t any strict rules on things like code review or pull request requirements. I was given some tasks to complete, but from there it was up to me to learn how to integrate my changes into a massive project I had never seen before. I had to find the right people to talk to and learn a lot by trial and error. I had to do all of this while other teams were expecting my work to be done at a certain time, and even though a valid excuse of mine was “I have no idea what I’m doing,” you can imagine that wasn’t always acceptable to someone dependent on me completing my tasks.

> Furthermore, when issues really started to occur where someone was unable to do any work until you completed a task, it was often threatened that things would need to be escalated to upper management. It was never put this way directly, but to me when people would say this it could be interpreted as “we are going to tell your director about your poor performance.” Because of that, individual contributors (i.e. non-management) would often do everything possible just to get the job done and avoid that escalation. This meant late nights, weekends, skipping lunch, or whatever it takes. Pulling in upper management was bad and should be avoided at all cost. While that wasn’t a written rule, I certainly observed it a lot during my time there.

Seems about right.

Having been there and done that, I can safely state that it's not just Apple's fault. The entire culture is fucked.

At this point I want to figure out a way to work 6 months out of the year at 75$ an hour or so. Then max out my 401k and take 6 months off( see my other thread , I'd do this in a cheaper country)

My theory is I'd end up paying very little taxes compared to working myself mad trying to hit 200k a year.

Aim higher. With the market as it is now you can make 110+ per hour as a subcontractor, doing work not much different than a regular employee. Can make much more if you can find your own clients.

You can even try to set non “fulltime” hours eg 20-30hrs/week but not all clients will go for that.

Also file your taxes as an s-Corp and start a solo 401k. You can contribute much more than a regular salaried employee could

I see the biggest problem here is that when you leave you’re gone for six months. When you come back it’ll take you a month to ramp back up.

I'd be fairly flexible here.

It doesn't need to be a full 6 months every single year , some years might be a bit longer , etc.

I don’t get the “build server” example. It is expected that the author works crazy hours and do the extra mile to get the job done… but that same expectation does not apply to the teams/individuals that own/maintain the build servers?

Another way to look at this is that this person was far too invested in their work and as a result had a negative experience. It's likely they would have similar anxiety issues in most workplaces. Easy to blame a toxic culture. Much harder to accept that your personality is part of the problem. And if this person could accept that, they'd hopefully realize that in caring so much about their work, they were damaging their own mental health.

> Easy to blame a toxic culture. Much harder to accept that your personality is part of the problem. And if this person could accept that, they'd hopefully realize that in caring so much about their work, they were damaging their own mental health.

A very continental take that's much easier to have when others in the organization share the same views. If the culture of the organization is you work late, you care a lot, you're constantly available otherwise you're not a team player and are at risk of being let go, it is unreasonable to say "just don't do it. stop caring". Both psychologically and financially unreasonable.

my experience in big tech is getting stellar performance reviews while slacking with 8 hour days and never being stressed. weird how different other experiences are

"Big Tech" or "Apple"?

"Specific teams in any organization."

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