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Comment by omscs99 | Hacker News Reader

> It’s kind of a miracle engineers are treated as well as we are compared to most traditional office jobs.

Other office jobs are treated better. They don’t get pinged at random times outside of business hours. They don’t have to attend late night meetings because of foreign time zone

I know a bunch of AWS people and have heard worse things from them

Frankly, I love programming but would rather have a regular office job. This industry is predatory

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I think you're glossing over how much people in other office jobs get gaslighted (gaslit?) into showing up at odd times too. To finish a report. To coordinate with an offshore accounting team in a foreign time zone (not unique to Engineering). To be always reading their email. Not for nothing are some states and countries writing rules against being "always on" into their laws, recently. So, sure, a small contingent of Engineering folks might be on-call, but you should be able to make good working agreements about that, put boundaries around it, and keep your sanity. If not, you're maybe being gaslighted like any other old regular office worker.

I replied to your other similar post too, but why not look into working for smaller companies or contract/freelance work? Not all tech jobs are big tech type work. You’ll make less money perhaps but it sounds like you might be happier based on what’s important to you.

Smaller companies are less stressful but they often give you no autonomy or purpose.

It can be a good economic / stress tradeoff but it will suck your soul.

Left job with a unicorn because of stress, I make more than double that by contracting with smaller businesses and working less - but I'm way more depressed about the job.

I think a happy medium might be to run your small product company. I do that on the side as well, but it brings 1/10th of what I can make contracting.

I know tons of office jobs that have to attend late night meetings because of foreign time zones.

Just like I know lots of developers that don't.

What a weird generalisation to make.

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