Ask HN: Do you work nights/weekends? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you work nights/weekends?

28 pointsAskHNWeekends42 comments

This question is aimed at folks with "traditional" full time jobs.

Those at a high-growth startup or other such scenario, I understand there's intrinsic motivation/expectation to make as much progress as possible. But that's a particular type of role. As well as contractors with multiple gigs, and anyone side-hustling, I imagine odd working hours are common.

Those making a reasonable salary as a full-time developer, do you regularly work nights/weekends for that employer? Do you do it because you enjoy the work? Do you do it because you feel obligated? I'm just trying to get a sense of what people do, in various types of roles. Maybe you work nights/weekends, but take time during weekdays for yourself. Maybe you work as little as possible to get the job done. Just trying to start a conversation around what people's working schedules are like.

View on HN

Full-time software developer with a traditional employer (not a startup).

I don't work nights and weekends. I would have no problem with the occasional extra labor in special circumstances, but if it was a regular thing I would just find another job.

If I worked all weekend, would the CEO be grateful? Would he come over and mow my lawn while I was working? What if I volunteered my labor around his house for the weekend? Would he be grateful enough to properly staff the engineering department of his company?

Working nights and weekends deprives your peers of the opportunity for a job. Every hour you work is one less hour ownership has to pay for. You are suppressing your wage and the wages of your peers.

I am in a startup. When necessary, yes I will put in extra hours.

What does ‘necessary’ mean? I report directly to the big boss and he always insists I don’t have to work outside of regular hours.

But there are times when other team mates are depending on me for something and through external forces (customers, opportunities) they have an expedited timeline, I’ll choose on my own to kick some ass for a few days and help them meet their goals. I am abundantly compensated for my efforts by the company. And the big boss has always recognized my contributions and sweetened the deal for me.

There are also times in normal mode where we have planned things and I underestimated time requirements I will kick in to maintain my reputation. Other times team mates can wait longer and they recognize our dynamic environment and they’re chill about me being “late” on something.

The key is feeling attached to the goal by both appropriate or generous compensation, and camaraderie.

It can get tough without one or the other!

As Ron Swanson says, “Give 100%. 110% is impossible. Only idiots recommend that.”

I used to spend 80 hours a week at past startups because that was required and I wanted to move out of help desk support. There were various moments during my stint at Peloton where that number jumped to 120 hours a week.

I'm now at Federal and spend good 30-35 hours/week at work. I'll work nights but only if I took the day off in the morning without taking my PTO. I am able to enjoy life outside of work and I am a better person for it. There's nothing inherently wrong about working extra hours or nights, but do it for yourself or someone you care about at work, never for the organization.

When I was younger I routinely worked late nights (I’d work normal business hours, then go grab a subway and come back to the office and work until 10-12. I enjoy working alone at night, and I wasn’t using that free time productively, so I figured why not. It did help my career trajectory significantly.

As I’ve gotten older and have better uses for my time I find myself working a ~40hr week and checking out. Occasionally if I have a challenging problem that requires deep focus I’ll log on at night, but only because I like the satisfaction of “the grind” every now and then.

Out of curiosity, what better uses for your time did you find as you grew older?

I may be an outlier, as I'm a bachelor (not much family/relationship time allocated), but I've found myself diving hard into work again as I come into my 40s, after really taking it easy in my 30s.

Not the OP. I used to work hard at night in my early 20s, but now ( approaching 30s), I find it hard to even think about work when the day’s over. I play games sometimes, I have a backlog of movies I want to watch — I have a nice system — and I have various things on my plate to learn. Reading books — fiction — can take a huge chunk of my personal time, and I enjoy spending an hour or two listening to music albums in my collection.

> I have a backlog of movies I want to watch — I have a nice system

You mean a system to handle your backlog of entertainment? Would you provide more details?

For me, “better uses” of my time include spending afternoons with my family.

But in the evening once they’re all settled, I do frequently work. I don’t enjoy TV and social media is cancer. I’ll play the occasional video game with mates.

As a solo business-owner who will likely start hiring down the road, this thread is inspiring in a bad way.

It's crazy to see all these workers who value my time and my business more than they value themselves. Some guy said he worked 120 hours/week at Peloton, lmao. I'm calling bullshit on that one, but the premise remains - there are a non-trivial number of people willing to invest a lot more time and effort than what they're paid for, and for what? A socialwidget? A newtechgrift? The modern economy is bullshit jobs galore. You guys aren't even the cogs in the machine - you're the grease. You want to spend your would-be leisure time lubing up the machine?

I've worked many nights and weekends, but only by my own decision (never on call or firefighting) and usually balanced that by taking time off during traditional working hours. (Back in the 20th century, we believed being salaried meant we were being paid to solve problems, not to be in an office during specific hours)

I like to build and run chemical laboratories which are capable of operation at any time around-the-clock. After-hours surcharges can often be more lucrative than the base lab fees I invoice. Naturally I like to compensate the operators who perform the after-hours work quite well so enthusiasm is enhanced. On top of their regular daytime hours, or instead, it pays to be flexible.

But the 8 - 5 period during the 5-day workweek is so precious for communication with office people of all kinds, from clients to suppliers, within my time zone. Most of the 24/7 week occurs outside these 5 narrow windows, or 10 even narrower ones if you count lunch. Plus lots of times Mondays and Fridays can be easily lost to a good extent.

A lot of businesses need "normal" business hours to be focused on the business itself. Sometimes more so than focusing on engineering during that time even if it's an engineering company. That's the "normal job" 5-day week part that's always habitual for me. The easy part has to be showing up consistently enough that you take off less often than everyone you interact with.

So I prefer to have most physical work, infrastructure building, instrument commissioning & calibration, things like that done "after hours" whenever possible.

With enough of that behind me, I can make the most of it 8 - 5 for a while until the next growth effort, which will have as much of its activity occur after hours also, leaving the 8 - 5 period intact to maintain continuity. As if no new projects are being undertaken until proven viable. It's worth the extra hours.

Long ago I became comfortable with the concept that you can operate a lab like this 5 days a week, but it really needs to be built or grown nights, holidays, and weekends. In our case it's a bonus to be able to also operate when most businesses are closed as well.

This is not some well-funded research outfit, I have to make a profit here.

I work consistent 60 to 70 hour weeks with two young children. My wife is stay at home mom and I like to stay up very late. I have been doing entrepreneurial stuff for several years but even when I was an employee I worked long hours. It helped me learn very quickly and avoid layoffs compared to my peers.

I think a lot of people want to work-to-live rather than live-to-work. I don't take anything for granted, I am always hustling and trying to provide more for my family and a better life than I had growing up. I see free enterprise as satisfying the wants of people voluntarily, which is the most noble way you can help people IMO. So I work long hours with the personal opinion that I am helping society the best way I possibly can.

You and I seem to have a lot in common. Been employed, done entrepreneurship, don't mind long hours.

I find it interesting how people navigate these tradeoffs. I'm 38, married with two kids (one 3, the other 6mos). It's BUSY. Especially because my wife has a good career, which for better or worse, is a big part of her identity and something she'll never not do (building architecture). Given that we'll always have her salary, I manage a couple rental properties part time, plus have taken a few swings at getting bootstrapped products out the door with mixed success.

I honestly don't know whether you or I have it "easier". I have friends with stay-at-home spouses. I envy their ability to just go to work and focus. I spent today (Sunday) fixing our dryer, going to the grocery store, and doing other chores a stay-at-home wife might handle during the week. I work almost every weekend doing either housework, tax prep, or other stuff. On the other hand, I know we'll never not eat, so the financial stress is a lot less than a one-income household trying something entrepreneurial. Unless you're either really rich or have saved a lot (and willing to risk it), it's hard seeing how someone in that position, especially with kids in a high COL area, can make it work without taking a big salary out of the company (and getting financing to do it). It seems borderline impossible.

I think raising two kids is at least one "full time job", probably more because it's not just 9-5 Monday-Friday. If you're in a two-working spouse family with kids, I think it's very difficult to work more than 45-50 hours/week, and that's assuming you have daycare. There's just SO MUCH to do. Laundry, groceries, dishes, and meal prep are easily 15-20h/week for a family of four. Add to that taking kids to/from childcare/school, putting them to bed, bathing them, keeping them entertained on the weekends, doctors' appointments, and the rest, it gets tough to work more than 50h/week with a working spouse. I think 70 is basically not doable unless you're OK going days at a time not seeing your kids, and even then, only one spouse/partner can really do it.

I hang out with the family on weekends, my work day schedule is 9am to 5pm and then 9pm to 2am, Sunday night through Friday at 5pm. The 4 hour window between working sessions is when I hang out with the kids before they go to bed. I usually fit some hours in on Saturday but mostly the weekend is all family time.

All that stuff you mention is mostly my wife during the day. My kids go to school / daycare so she has time to maintain the house and shop.

I work from home and co-founded a fairly large and successful software business that is remote only. This is the only way I can work this much and see family properly.

I’ve had enough exits and frugal savings over the past 20 years to buy multiple rental properties, and I make a good salary.

My wife is very appreciative of what I do and knows all we have is because of my career. She is extremely helpful and accommodating, and we are a team - she manages the kids and house while I make us financially secure.

The best way to summarize my philosophy is long term thinking. I always try to make decisions and investments that help long term, even if there is pain in the short term. You wait long enough and the seeds planted 5, 10, 20 years ago bear fruit. And if you plant those every year, after a while it’s just ripe fruit all the time.

I have no moral issue leaving a giant inheritance to my children - the family unit is the most important thing and I see my work as the beginning of a multi-generational project. I want them to have every advantage in life, but also the philosophical tools to properly manage and grow their wealth, build new businesses, nurture their spiritual and intellectual souls.

There is so much more I could say but I’ve rambled on enough. Like you said we are probably of similar mind in many ways.

One final note is that my family is quite religious which is not typical for big city tech types. However it is a key reason why we are happy IMO.

This is awesome. Thanks. Wish I could meet you.

Incidentally, missed church today as I was too busy with other things. This isn't entirely common for us ;)

Wow awesome to see folk like this out on HN

I'm at two companies, and work 7 days a week. Days, evenings and weekends. I do it because I don't make 6 figures, and I need to save for retirement and for a rainy day.

don't you feel overworked sometimes?

Please be careful. This may not scale into the future.. as you may have to give more attention to family (kids, elders, etc)

Getting a higher paying job by building more skills (instead of a second job) may be a better long term strategy

If it's to fix something I fucked up, yes.

We also take rotations on product releases that must happen outside business hours, but it's planned work and not much of a nuisance.

Working as a dev for a rather large retail chain. My girlfriend is an MD, working shifts (early, late, nights) and on weekends on a regular basis. I keep my working hours aligned with hers, so have "time off" during the week where possible. Working undisturbed on weekends/late hours/night is very productive for me, plus the benefit of "work/life balance"

At my last company I worked way more than 40 hours a week during the ~5 years until we sold. However, even when I was often working 10-12 hours a day, plus many hours on weekends, I would take advantage of the flexibility afforded me by being a partner in the business -- mostly by taking random mornings/afternoons/days off to pursue hobbies, etc.

I am currently doing a research project to fulfill my MSc capstone project requirement. As this involved collaborating with another department (i.e. not my work KPI), I am mostly working on them on non-official timing, e.g. after work or weekends. It's only for another couple of months, but that experience has already created lots of connections.

After six years, I left the Venture Capital path which I detested. Although I still work on weekends and into the late night as a freelancer/advisor, I now take pleasure in my work because I know it holds greater significance.

This leads to the inevitable question: what holds greater significance for me? The outcome or the prestige that comes with the job.

Yes. Arriving ~8:30, leaving ~15:30, working nights/weekends to make ends meet. As far as I'm the one putting my kids into their schools and taking them out at the end of the day, I am happy. I wanted to do this since I was a kid and my dad would leave to work at 06:00 and return home 18:00. Yay, psychology!

I'll often work some time on nights and weekends and take the appropriate comp time off in the following days.

Eg. "work 2 hours tonight, come in 2 hours late tomorrow morning."

People rarely ask me to work off-hours, it's more a "I should do this (update|configuration change|thing) tonight during off-hours."

I prefer to work for between 2 and 4 hours on Saturday and Sunday. And it's always work for myself, not an employer. I'm always fresh for a few hours after I wake up, and enjoy it. Never regretted fewer hours more often. Often regretted more hours in a single sitting (ie. I don't work late).

I work some nights but that's usually because I take time off during the middle of the day to exercise. When I was working a job where I felt under pressure to work nights and weekends I did so. I also left that job after less then a year because I felt the workload and expectations were unrealistic.

I work in peaks and troughs.

With the blessing of fully remote work sometimes my troughs happen during the work day and I don’t get much done… and that’s okay.

I do sometimes make up for it by doing deep solo work on the evenings, or solo individual contributor stuff or strategic planning stuff on Sunday nights to kick off the week.

When I worked for other people (less than half my career) I always used nights to study for my next job.

Very much no. I log in around 8:00am, and log off around 4:00pm. On Wednesday's we have a team meeting at 4:30pm that I will join via my phone with airpods while I'm away from my home office, typically playing a game with my kids, and I bill for that extra half hour.

I’m a senior full stack engineer and also a small business owner. I typically work normal-ish daily hours, and almost always have extra contracting or business work in the evening hours to attend to. I also am a father and a husband.

My life stays pretty busy, but I enjoy it.

It depends.

Usually I would only work weekdays during the day, except if there is a fire to extinguish.

Currently, I work on some exploration ticket that keeps me too curious to just stop during weekends/at night, so I do spend extra time. I plan to go back to a more regular schedule once this is done.

I have never had a regular schedule in my life. The whole concept of a 'week' is foreign to me, and life has passed by in strange ways. Some months can feel like decades, some years can feel like minutes.

I don't love it, but it has its advantages.

I enjoy my work and put in extra hours because I want the business to be successful. Sometimes there’s an interesting problem that’s keeping me up at night. Sometimes there’s a deadline for an important customer I don’t want to let down. Sometimes I’m working on a side project to improve tooling that will make my colleagues and me more productive. Sometimes I just want to impress my boss and earn another pay rise or promotion. I’m now working for my third employer, each boss I’ve had have been workaholics and high achieving. I guess I look up to them as mentors and try to emulate them. Also I’ve never been very good at starting my own business on the side. I can never seem to come up with a good enough idea or stop myself from going above and beyond at work to free up time for entrepreneurial activities.

Ew no. Evenings and weekends are for family, friends and me time. I just refuse to work outside of working hours. I’m ok with being let go if that doesn’t work for the company. Priorities have never been clearer

When I was younger I did. Now, I work someplace that cares about its employees and I no longer feel obligated to.

Yes, sometimes.

In my current role it is almost always because I feel like I should, not because someone is requiring me to do so.

When I worked at my first startup, I got put on support engineer duty. My job was to be the engineer first-responder for any customer support tickets that came in that day. Customer Support would triage the tickets and if they thought it was a bug, it would come to me. I would fix it, and then send it back.

I got really, really good at fixing bugs, reading/parsing other people's code, and then mimicking their style so that it looked like their code all along. Pretty fun.

It was a startup, there were about 10 engineers. I would show up around 8:30am and work until 7:30am, getting lunch and sometimes dinner with my coworkers. I worked very hard and tried to get to inbox zero day. Sometimes a ticket would come in at 5:35, and I'd sigh and tackle it and try and get a fix out before I left. (Note: by "push" I just mean put a PR up, not actually deploy it, because obviously it needed review and testing.)

One night, miracle of miracles, I had a date. And I was supposed to meet her at 7pm, which meant I needed to leave the office at six so that I could get home, change, then meet her. I had four (4) tickets left in the queue. Normally I would have tried to push fixes for all of them before I left, but I didn't. I just left, and I went on my date. No 2nd date, if you're curious.

The next day I showed up at work at 8am, a little early, because I knew I didn't finish everything the day before.

Nobody said anything.

Nobody complained.

The customers responded with "thank you for fixing this so quickly!" even though I had waited overnight.

I had an epiphany -- which is probably obvious to many of you reading this right now. I realized that I had been busting my ass for no good reason. I realized that there is ALWAYS more work. I realized that nobody really expects any non-emergency work to get done after 5pm, even in start up culture. (If they do, they're lunatics that don't respect you as a fully realized human being and you should find another boss.)

I started showing up at 9am and leaving at 5pm. Sometimes I made it through my tickets, sometimes I had a handful leftover. I fixed them all in a timely fashion in 1-2 business days instead of <1 business day, and my boss gave me high marks. I got promotions, I got raises, I'm now very successful, imo.

That was 11 years ago, and ever since I've kept a pretty strict work/life balance. I try really hard to leave work at work and enjoy life after. My company doesn't own my life -- they pay me for 9-5. If they want more time, they pay more money. In fact, I consider overtime to be even _more_ expensive than my regular salary.

All of that said... do I do things on the weekend? Sometimes. Maybe. Mostly personal projects. But I do it because I want to, not because anyone else expects the work to be done. And there is a special carveout for on-call rotations and after-hours emergencies where I may need to respond to something, but I tend to work out comp time instead. For example, if I have to spend 4 hours on a weekend to fix something, I get to check out a few hours early on Friday.

So I guess... it depends. But don't work extra hours unless you want to. Nobody reasonably expects it, and as a salaried employee, you don't get paid extra for it. Nobody's going to remember that you worked til 10pm every night, but they will remember that you never came to their birthday parties. Just keep that in mind.

Great story!

This was a while back, but I remember working on a Yahoo! clone. It was me and two other engineers. One of them got sick and wasn't available. It was my first job, and I really wanted this project to succeed. I kept pushing toward launch, slinging code. One week I worked 96 hours.

We launched.

There was a company all hands meeting scheduled (not just for the launch, a regular one). The sales rep who had sold the deal and shepherded it through launch stood up and said "thanks to Dan for all his hard work on <project>".

He gave me a t-shirt and a 6 pack of beer.

Blech. I helped save a project and this was my thanks? Either I

* misunderstood how important the project was or

* was being treated unfairly

Either possibility sapped my motivation. This profoundly changed my perception of work. I have done a few other long weeks since, but only when I was in leadership and only with my eyes wide open. No more backing into it.

Other than that, companies get what they pay for.

If I'm an FTE, that's 40ish hours a week (flexes to both sides). If I'm a contractor, they get the time we agreed to and I bill for every hour.

That's also a great story! For me it's a lot less about them getting what they paid for and more about me recognizing that my own life matters, too. If we have a conversation as adults and agree that I should work +X more hours per week in return for +Y in compensation/vacation/swag/whatever, then we can do that as adults. But I'm not going to voluntarily put in more time than the expectation, not because I don't care about the business, but because the business doesn't care about me. If they did, they'd recognize it and compensate accordingly.

There's a guy who works for me right now who did some work last night (Sunday), and I've mentioned to him a dozen times that he doesn't need to do work late at night, especially on the weekends. He still does it. That's fine. Good for him. I'll be very flexible on time off in the future, but that's just me being respectful of his time. If he really valued his time more, he'd take the weekends and enjoy it himself, and I'd support that 100%, too.

It's important for us to realize we're all adults and we're all fully realized human beings with our own wants and needs, and as long as we can all agree on that, things will be fine. What ceases to be fine is when someone -- whether it's the business or myself! -- treats me as an unlimited resource with no consideration for personal time.

My advice to anyone is to do the 9-5, do a good job, and don't worry about the rest. If you want to put in a few extra hours because you're passionate about a particular project, by all means, go for it, but recognize that nobody else is asking you do to that. And if they are asking you to do that, then you should challenge it, even if you want to do it. Challenge it and ask for more compensation, more PTO, more swag, more free lunches, more flex time. Whatever it is that you think you deserve. More effort _should_ result in more reward. And if it doesn't, you're in the wrong place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com