Which is why so many of us pretend to be the former. Even when we are not. Because we prefer that our families not starve. Thus the job interviews often become humiliating exercises in lying.
Maybe I’m atypical but this doesn’t match my experience in the tech industry. I’ve worked at 3 companies ranging from 30 person startup to Google, and intrusions on my personal life has been limited to:
prod outages out of hours once every couple of months or so. Annoying, but at the end of the day we need to handle this if we want to keep our customers.
leaving drinks for an hour after work once every 3 months or so. Doesn’t make much of a difference either way.
1 or 2 day off-site event every 6 months or so. Usually fun, but for 2 days off sites the burden falls on my wife who has to take the kids to daycare alone.
On 98% of days I start work at 9, stop work at 6, and can take as many breaks as I want for doctors appointments, emergency childcare, or even hanging out with friends for a beer at lunch.
None of the interviews made a fuss about how many hours I’d be willing to work or how dedicated I was to the job.
My experience of the tech industry, and that of many people I’ve talked to, contains the following as a less-than-rare event:
”Hey, you know that deadline we set last year, the one that you and your coworkers thought was wildly unrealistic? Well somehow we’re way behind on it so we need everyone to work weekends until we’re caught up.”
Most tech companies will give you several interviews with several different people. When going through these I try to identify whoever is the least associated with management, the in-the-trenches guy who has the least incentive to lie to me about how appealing the company is, and I ask that guy what the overtime situation is like. Answers vary but I’ve asked it enough times to say that you seem lucky.
That could well be the case in some tech companies. I have never once been asked to work weekends (or even overtime excepting prod-outages) in 8 years, so there’s clearly a large variance.
I don’t mind the drinks so much (also because the company does not mind if I skip half of them).
For me an off-site event means “the company decided to take away my free afternoon”. I am introverted. Most things that are fun for my colleagues, especially the managers (who make the decisions), are not fun for me. It is less of a burden for the family now that the kids are 6+; it was significantly worse when I had to take a one-week business trip and the kids were e.g. 1 and 3. Especially annoying when the company described the business trip as a reward (albeit one you cannot opt out from), and the days were meeting after meetings, and the evenings were mandatory social activities. I need to spend time alone to recharge psychologically.
I accept the occasional need to fix a production outage. It would be nice if I didn’t have to get to the work early the next day, right after I spent the night fixing the production bug. It would be nice if on top of production outages we didn’t also have various security tests that also have to happen at night so that we do not inconvenience our customers. Or if there were more people on the team to rotate these duties among. If I spend two nights awake during the weekend, doing some mandatory security testing, it feels like I am working a 12-day week, and then I get cranky and write articles like this. (Also, I start interviewing.)
Note that this did not happen during my first year or two in the company. In my experience, these things increase gradually.
I am happy that your experience feels better. I had occasional good jobs, too, but sometimes the situation changes dramatically in the same company, e.g. if there is a change in management.
Off site events always happen on what would otherwise be work days, is that different for you? They’re also optional for us, but we have to work otherwise.
I’ve never gone on any business trips—I think they’re far less common now after COVID.
In general all companies I’ve worked at have given some extra free time the next day if a prod outage took up a significant amount of time.
I guess it just seems our experiences are very different, it would be interesting to ask some more people to see which is more typical.
Ah sorry, I misunderstood the off-site event as business trip. (Not a native English speaker.)
Yeah, the business trips stopped since covid. In my current company, managers keep talking about restarting them, but so far it’s been just talk. When I interviewed for another company, I was told that the business trips would be regular and mandatory (maybe that was also just talk). But it seems that the companies are getting ready… Perhaps no one wants to be the first?
Similarly, companies around me are gradually limiting work from home. No one wants to be the first to remove it completely, because obviously half of their developers would quit the next day, but they e.g. limit it to N days each month, and then reduce N by one every year, trying to stay in sync with competition.
In my job, you get extra money for the evening/weekend work, but not extra free time.
Different experiences could reflect different countries. I wish we had reliable data to compare, not just anecdotes.
Maybe I’m atypical but this doesn’t match my experience in the tech industry. I’ve worked at 3 companies ranging from 30 person startup to Google, and intrusions on my personal life has been limited to:
prod outages out of hours once every couple of months or so. Annoying, but at the end of the day we need to handle this if we want to keep our customers.
leaving drinks for an hour after work once every 3 months or so. Doesn’t make much of a difference either way.
1 or 2 day off-site event every 6 months or so. Usually fun, but for 2 days off sites the burden falls on my wife who has to take the kids to daycare alone.
On 98% of days I start work at 9, stop work at 6, and can take as many breaks as I want for doctors appointments, emergency childcare, or even hanging out with friends for a beer at lunch.
None of the interviews made a fuss about how many hours I’d be willing to work or how dedicated I was to the job.
My experience of the tech industry, and that of many people I’ve talked to, contains the following as a less-than-rare event:
”Hey, you know that deadline we set last year, the one that you and your coworkers thought was wildly unrealistic? Well somehow we’re way behind on it so we need everyone to work weekends until we’re caught up.”
Most tech companies will give you several interviews with several different people. When going through these I try to identify whoever is the least associated with management, the in-the-trenches guy who has the least incentive to lie to me about how appealing the company is, and I ask that guy what the overtime situation is like. Answers vary but I’ve asked it enough times to say that you seem lucky.
That could well be the case in some tech companies. I have never once been asked to work weekends (or even overtime excepting prod-outages) in 8 years, so there’s clearly a large variance.
I don’t mind the drinks so much (also because the company does not mind if I skip half of them).
For me an off-site event means “the company decided to take away my free afternoon”. I am introverted. Most things that are fun for my colleagues, especially the managers (who make the decisions), are not fun for me. It is less of a burden for the family now that the kids are 6+; it was significantly worse when I had to take a one-week business trip and the kids were e.g. 1 and 3. Especially annoying when the company described the business trip as a reward (albeit one you cannot opt out from), and the days were meeting after meetings, and the evenings were mandatory social activities. I need to spend time alone to recharge psychologically.
I accept the occasional need to fix a production outage. It would be nice if I didn’t have to get to the work early the next day, right after I spent the night fixing the production bug. It would be nice if on top of production outages we didn’t also have various security tests that also have to happen at night so that we do not inconvenience our customers. Or if there were more people on the team to rotate these duties among. If I spend two nights awake during the weekend, doing some mandatory security testing, it feels like I am working a 12-day week, and then I get cranky and write articles like this. (Also, I start interviewing.)
Note that this did not happen during my first year or two in the company. In my experience, these things increase gradually.
I am happy that your experience feels better. I had occasional good jobs, too, but sometimes the situation changes dramatically in the same company, e.g. if there is a change in management.
Off site events always happen on what would otherwise be work days, is that different for you? They’re also optional for us, but we have to work otherwise.
I’ve never gone on any business trips—I think they’re far less common now after COVID.
In general all companies I’ve worked at have given some extra free time the next day if a prod outage took up a significant amount of time.
I guess it just seems our experiences are very different, it would be interesting to ask some more people to see which is more typical.
Ah sorry, I misunderstood the off-site event as business trip. (Not a native English speaker.)
Yeah, the business trips stopped since covid. In my current company, managers keep talking about restarting them, but so far it’s been just talk. When I interviewed for another company, I was told that the business trips would be regular and mandatory (maybe that was also just talk). But it seems that the companies are getting ready… Perhaps no one wants to be the first?
Similarly, companies around me are gradually limiting work from home. No one wants to be the first to remove it completely, because obviously half of their developers would quit the next day, but they e.g. limit it to N days each month, and then reduce N by one every year, trying to stay in sync with competition.
In my job, you get extra money for the evening/weekend work, but not extra free time.
Different experiences could reflect different countries. I wish we had reliable data to compare, not just anecdotes.