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Comment by batty_alex | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree at all that it's the easiest of careers.

I never had to work free overtime as a postal clerk until 1AM because of a production bug in deployment

I never had to figure out how to fix a fry machine on-the-spot at McDonald's because the person who normally fixes it is on vacation in the mountains

I also never had to learn brand new ways of driving cars every few months as a valet driver.

Maybe your software engineering job is easy but, this is the most stressful job I've had. And i'm not your average HN'er that's only ever known being a code slinger

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That does not sound like normal work for a software engineer. That sounds more like you have found an unusually bad workplace. Why are you changing out tools every few months? Why are you working overtime for free? Why is there only one person who knows how to fix things when they break (especially if that happens so regularly that you have one person who "normally" fixes it)?

The other two are dysfunctional but in the US, SWE are pretty much universally classified as exempt and legally aren't entitled to overtime pay.

I see from your bio that you are based in a country with much better worker rights than the US.

Ah, if that's the case I can understand the argument a bit better, but maybe the article should then be titled "the insanity of being in one of the best-paid professions in one of the richest countries in the world, and still having poor working conditions".

> Why are you working overtime for free?

Thats what oncall is, every job ive seen makes you do it

Apparently this is an EU/US thing, because here overtime and on-call is always paid extra (as is essentially anything beyond your usual 40 hrs/week, or whatever you've got in your contract).

That said, I also see very few jobs that involve on-call. Maybe that's because companies know they have to pay extra for it and therefore don't hand it out willy-nilly, but typically there'll be an ops team who do have on-call, and whose job is to triage and fix anything they can, otherwise just minimise the damage, and then maybe the most business-relevant couple of teams will also have an on-call rotation in case the problem can't be solved by ops alone.

Personally, I've never had on-call.

This. I've worked plenty of places that have awful work/life balances, friends that work in the trades are getting 1.5x to 2x on overtime while I'm working 12-16 hour days and weekends for nothing extra except the possibility of getting fired for performance if I didn't.

I've worked construction when I was younger and wouldn't want to be still doing it at my age, it was physically harder but I wouldn't say it was tough work and at the end of the day I'd leave and not think about it again until I showed up the next day.

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