Hacker News Reader

Yeah I'm not talking about being "on call". I don't know anything about Amazon other than it's probably full of bad culture. Nowhere I've worked has ever been like that except a handful of emergencies.

I'm talking about working at a relaxed place because everyone actually gets their stuff done 9 to 5. A place that's fun and interesting enough that you feel happy to randomly think about work in the middle of the night for an hour or two or whenever else motivation strikes to keep it that way.

I'm saying that these little nudges from the team where extra hours are silently worked prevents being forced to pick up the slack that shouldn't be there in the first place. Slack comes from miserable people regardless of how many hours they do or don't work.

I initially thought above comment was about on call because of the "things catch on fire part", I guess not

> where extra hours are silently worked prevents being forced to pick up the slack that shouldn't be there in the first place. Slack comes from miserable people regardless of how many hours they do or don't work

This is true except from my experience the miserable people who leave slack for others to pick up aren't normally all that miserable, just not really motivated. At least, they're not miserable until management does something about it

I think it depends. I’ve encountered some people that definitely seen that way. But I also know that during every period of prolonged underperformance in my career (there have been a couple) I have felt awful about it despite having a strong incentive to try to convince myself it’s my fault.

I think a lot of underperformers end up in a hole where they're burnt out to such an extent that they don't have the energy to leave. It takes clarity, introspection, positivity, and extra work to find a new job; those are exactly the things that burnout saps.

Of course, most people are really good at hiding their emotional state, since that's a requirement to fit into a professional workplace. The facade of happiness stays up well after the real thing is gone.

> A place that's fun and interesting enough that you feel happy to randomly think about work in the middle of the night for an hour or two

I feel like in my experience it's actually less about fun and interesting and more about do you feel like the people running the company see you as a compatriot or a cog? I worked at a pretty tiny startup in college where I regularly talked with the CEO and worked directly for one of the VPs. They were great and from start to finish it's been my most positive work experience, since I felt like one of the team. Dare I say it even felt a bit like a family (well, the CEO and VP were a husband-wife team and I was a college kid at the time).

Then I switched to a company that billed itself as having a startup culture but really couldn't because of turf wars between layers of irrelevant middle management, never mind regular tone-deaf decisions from upper management and repeated bad bets from them that lead to multiple layoffs. The work itself is actually more interesting than what I was doing at the real startup, but the mismanagement has pushed me into a mindset of mostly only giving them what I'm contractually obligated to, with rare exceptions for smaller projects that I feel I can have a greater direct impact on. I would hazard a guess that management in that company is actually a net negative because if it wasn't for all the bad politics there, I'd probably be just as happy to give them extra time because like you say the work is fun and interesting. And I know a couple other guys there who -were- regularly giving extra time until they got repeatedly personally burned by management.

> a company that billed itself as having a startup culture but really couldn't because of turf wars between layers of irrelevant middle management, never mind regular tone-deaf decisions from upper management and repeated bad bets

Honestly, that sounds like typical startup to me.

The real startup I worked at was probably around a dozen people when I joined. You could probably grow some beyond that and still be reasonably agile (that is, the CEO still has a good idea of the day-to-day operations and can move the company to the right market fit), but once you're at a size where irrelevant middle management is capable of existing (probably around the point that you need two layers of management), I'd posit it's not really a startup any more. Although this might fly in the face of the common definition.

It is not about the time on the clock, but who controls that clock. If it is the employee they are happy!

Get the 1am lover to do 9-5 they will be as miserable as the 7-3 guy being woken up a 1am

My best hours worked start at 7pm when the world is quieter and my peers arent around to disrupt me.

Plus it feels good that the next time I see someone I have conjured a deliverable.

Meanwhile, if you give me daily 9am meetings I am not functional at any point in the day

Pre-Covid, I was a VP Eng at a startup (total eng team of ~40), I had so many "discussions" with the CEO about who was in the office at what time. The team was people from all stages of life and backgrounds. My QA lead got to the office at 6am and left at 3pm to avoid traffic. Another Eng was a single mom, and was in the office from 9:30am to 3:30pm, and then got back online for a bit after 8pm. Etc. Etc.

Time and again, I'd simply reply with metrics to demonstrate how the team was hitting product & roadmap goals while improving quality. One that really made the point was the Github commit heat map, since there were commits ranging from 6am to 1am every day, with occasional outliers.

On the plus side, I felt particularly well prepared for the WFH / hybrid era, since I was already in the habit of looking at results & outcomes (and setting expectations based on these) vs. hours of butts in chairs.

That sounds great. I wish more people in mid- to high-management would see things that way. From my experience, your single mom’s schedule would be great for me.

These varied schedules won't work in every situation. Sometimes, people need to meet (even if virtually) or they need answers to questions and situations where people's schedules aren't kind of synced becomes problematic.

This sounds more like a Visa problem though. I think the best stress reliever is when you know you are safe losing your job or walking away by yourself, you have enough money saved that you can spend more than a year doing whatever you want even if you were to lose your job and without having to worry about it influencing your life. Then the motivator to do long hours and work at odd times is passion, desire to climb and feeling of ownership rather than fear of losing your job.

I'd like to know what proportion of the working population is in such a strong financial position that they have a year's worth of (nonretirement) living expenses sitting around.

If we're off in fantasy land, the real best stress reliever is to have enough money to cover your expenses for the rest of your life, so you don't even have to consider trading your time for money in the first place.

Probably not that large proportion, but working in tech if you save 50 percentage of your income you should be able to reach that position within a year.

Yes, but I think being able to generate savings for a lifetime is a much further out goal than just 1 year which in tech is very realistic to save 50 percent.

Friendly reminder that "working in tech" doesn't mean you're pulling in $250k+/yr. Most people "working in tech" aren't in Silicon Valley, and can't easily save 50% of our income per year and still have enough to pay for both food and the mortgage/rent.

> "working in tech" doesn't mean you're pulling in $250k+/yr.

You're of course right

> can't easily save 50% of our income

Really? Of course people are at different stages in their life (being the sole income earner in a family with 2 kids for example, would easily mean that you cannot save 50% income in lots of locations), but assuming that we're only talking about new grads (for simplicity's sake)...

I believe that in virtually all locations, tech pays well enough that you can save 50% of your income. I know it is in London, and believe the same applies in east Europe and India for example? (But truthfully, I only know of FAANG salary data for India, not sure how salaries are in the rest of the industry)

"Crazy on-call expectations that require you to be available and potentially working at any hour of the day and night" is something very different than the topic under discussion, and I didn't interpret sublinear's comment at all to be endorsing that viewpoint.

Amazon is known to be a bad place to work for the exact issues you list. The OP was talking about generally, which I agree with.

This conversation feels very similar to comp conversations where outliers drive the discussion.

this isn't about 'on-call' or 'expectations.' Eg, I'm currently looking at a work problem casually (it's about 11 PM) because I have some time and I'm curious, so I can slack off tomorrow at work. Win win.