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Comment by tropicalbeach | Hacker News Reader

Yeah for real, I there is so many tech people are sheltered now days that if anything difficult comes there way they can't handle it. 700k for an 8 hour a day job and claiming to be abused is ridiculous. It's fine for someone to say they don't want the job but claiming abused is something else. People work months away from there families to provide for them and make 10% of that wage.

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It's not an eight hour job, you're completely misreading it. It's eight hours required plus another eight each day of overtime. Which is abusive for a software engineer.

And those people that work months away from their families -- they're being abused too. You'll notice that the owners of oil rigs aren't out there with them, for example.

> But I would have had to work in their office in Manhattan, be in by 8:30am every day and not leave until after 5 at a miniumum.

That’s what you said originally, which reads as mostly normal work hours, plus maybe some overtime.

If it was 16 hours a day, then please say so.

Read the rest of the comment?

> I wouldn't be allowed to take my laptop home, so if I had a hard problem to solve, I'd have to stay in the office the whole time. So basically they expected us to never see our family nor collaborate with anyone.

I did. Myself and multiple other commenters all seem to be on the same page, that your original comment says the job required being in the office 8.5 hours per day, and does not allow work from home. Your follow up comments imply the expectations were an order of magnitude higher.

The part you highlighted says you cannot work from home. That’s unrelated to the number of hours they expected you to work.

I think it’s fairly obvious to anyone who has worked in or around finance that while the contractual hours are X, the work requires 2X hours, thus being unable to take your laptop home requires 2X hours in the office.

Perhaps it would have been helpful to actually say that given that this is not a forum aimed at or primarily populated by people who work in or around finance. In a general context, "8:30 to 5 and you can't work from home" sounds like a description of the standard 20th century business schedule.

Are you really, truly not familiar with the idea that the finance industry stereotypically requires long hours and values work over all else, at an institutional level?

OP could have spelled it out, but in any communication there is a level of shared knowledge.

When you read a comment that you understand to be complaining about making nearly a million dollars whilst working 9/5 in the office, a more charitable path would be to examine your own context and shared knowledge, rather than exclaim loudly that OP is a bad person.

Not that you did that, but others have.

I do know that finance people tend to be insane workaholics, but I was not aware that "software engineer who happens to work for a finance company" is a fundamentally different kind of job from "software engineer in the tech industry", with a different culture and harsher expectations.

A blind spot, I suppose; I have spent my whole working life in the West Coast tech industry - though discussions on this site generally seem to share that cultural context.

When OP wrote they were required to work in the office 8.5 per day, I assumed that they were required to work in the office 8.5 hours per day. I agree with the other guy, if OP meant to claim they were required to work 16 hours in the office per day, they should've spelled that out and not relied on people to guess.

They are required to work 8.5 hours a day. They are unfortunately, like many other jobs, expected to work more.

I understand that, yes. But that's not what the original comment says. If the complaint is that ~16 hours is expected, the comment shouldn't focus exclusively on the fact that 8.5 hours is required.

> Are you really, truly not familiar with the idea that the finance industry stereotypically requires long hours and values work over all else, at an institutional level?

Not the person you're replying to, but I was not aware. I guess we have a different cultural backgrounds and some things that are obvious for most of this website are not for me.

Also this makes me even more confused. So OP actually expects being pressured into working overtime (irrelevant where - at home or in the office)? And that's not even their main issue?

What's the point of getting a double salary if you have to work twice as much? Can't they (as a great software developer with a strong work ethics and a good work-life balance they clearly have) just... refuse the overtime?

So go home when you get to 5.00. Think. Come back to office at 8.30. Work. That's what most people do.

16h a day is more like m&a hours. I don't believe a second that a quant, let alone a dev, in a hedge fund does anywhere near that time. Having to work late on rare occasions is a completely different thing though, and is not "never seeing one's family". M&A guys never see their family, they do those hours consistently.

you're completely misreading it

Re-read your original description again. Nowhere did you say you had to work 16h a day.

It is implied by not allowing to work from home. There wouldn't be a need to work from home if it was a 9-5 job.

For most of us, "work from home" means doing your regular work, during your regular hours, from your home office. No additional hours are implied.

Before covid, working from home wasn't really a thing at the company I work for. That meant I arrived at the office some time before 10, was there for around 8 hours, then left. That's what "not being allowed to work from home" means to most people.

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