The Decline of Work-Life Balance: A 12-Year Tech Industry Perspective
Posted by anomaly2104@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 84 comments
Posted by anomaly2104@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 84 comments
thrilla_gorilla@reddit
I've been in the tech industry for 25 years and I'm confident that work life balance isn't connected to the industry as much as the company and department that you work in. Balance has been steadily been getting better for me because I prioritize it over chasing huge salaries.
You can filter out soul sucking jobs during the interview by asking about the hours and time crunches.
MCFRESH01@reddit
I am reviving an old thread just to say I noped out a phone screening today. Dude said engineers work till 7 or 8 every night and weekends
thrilla_gorilla@reddit
Good on you.
The way I see it, for salaried workers, any hour worked beyond 40 effectively reduces your hourly pay rate. In your case, that’s about a 30% hourly pay cut.
Signal-Woodpecker691@reddit
I’ve been in the industry 20 years, I have never done a single hour of overtime. I’m still with my current company because although they pay slightly below market rate, their flexibility is excellent and I am able to work around all requirements of my home life.
Darth_Ender_Ro@reddit
Government job?
Signal-Woodpecker691@reddit
No
zlance@reddit
Another thing, work life balance is an active process of setting boundaries. I tell my manager that I only can do like a week a month of overtime, and will not do more. And I don't. If I been working evenings for a for a few weeks, I'm not pushing things until next quarter. And I shouldn't, cuz I will lose velocity.
It is highly dependent on which place one works of course, but in every place some people will schedule meetings after working hours, and some people turn off slack after they are done.
ChimpScanner@reddit
My previous company let me bank my hours even though I was salary. So if I worked overtime I'd just take that many hours off the next day or whenever things weren't busy.
It's definitely important no matter where you work (unless you're on call) to turn off all work notifications at 5:00.
Brian@reddit
Yeah - this seems something the article is sorely missing.
The problem with a "12-Year Tech Industry Perspective" is that it's your perspective. What happens to each person is going to vary by sheer chance as much as from any consistent trend, and its the people who've got worse who are going to write articles like this, mistaking their own experience for something universal.
Revolutionary_Log307@reddit
My experience is actually the opposite of this article. I had much worse work life balance 12-15 years ago than I do now.
rarted_tarp@reddit
Same. I used to work 80h/week for a Canadian company for $80k/y, now I work 35h/week for an American company for $300k base.
I've never been this comfortable.
caltheon@reddit
Yeah, when I was making $13 an hour I worked my ass off. Now that I'm making >$300k I am working less, but thinking about work more. I probably spend 4 hours during the work day actually working, and then little micro-working periods in the evening. I prefer that to just banging out an 8 hour day
SuperHumanImpossible@reddit
I've been doing this for 35 years and my work life balance is substantially better now than it was. Especially with wfh stuff.
Hot-Luck-3228@reddit
What balance?
I am working 100+ hours a week (not joking) and it is still not enough.
setuid_w00t@reddit
Why?
Hot-Luck-3228@reddit
Can't find a better option that pays similarly. With a mortgage and hopefully a kid down the line; I can't afford to.
dodjos65465@reddit
How much money are you making by working 100 hours per week?
Hot-Luck-3228@reddit
Give or take about 200k EUR a year. Please do mind I do contract work though so without any kind of benefits including pension or vacation days etc.
dodjos65465@reddit
OK, but how in the world are you in such a squeeze for money then? Are you in US? I see you said EUR, but in EU, that's an absurdly large amount of money. I make 75k EUR gross and I'm living like a king.
Hot-Luck-3228@reddit
Netherlands.
Mortgage payment and a dependant partner with a chronic health condition. Love her to bits so it is worth the sacrifice but it does put a strain so to speak.
dodjos65465@reddit
Shit :(
Well, keep fighting, what can I say. I've worked with some Duchies, and I've heard that the real estate market was absolutely bonkers. Great country, but an expensive place to live in.
dodjos65465@reddit
This seems to be exclusively American problem.
I mean, this is straight-up illegal in literally every developed nation.
fourpenguins@reddit
This particular blogger is based in India
dodjos65465@reddit
Aye, that explains it.
EntroperZero@reddit
In the industry and in life in general, you will be treated the way you allow yourself to be treated. If you don't want to work 80-hour weeks, then don't work them. "No" is a complete answer. You're going to tell me it's not that simple, but I'm telling you with decades of experience that it literally is that simple.
dodjos65465@reddit
Who the fuck wants to work 80 hours per week? Literal slaves didn't work that kind of hours. Why are Americans this insane?
peroqueteniaquever@reddit
When you take work hours plus extra hours plus study hours plus, you realize you work more than literal peasants for the awesome privilege of not being to afford a house and a family on one salary
dodjos65465@reddit
There is a reason I mentioned Americans in that comment. This shit is literally illegal in most of the developed AND developing world. I'm not even allowed to work overtime for more than an additional 8 hours per week, and 12 hours in a day is the maximum for one day. And I'm in fricking Serbia, not even in EU. I don't think I've ever worked an 80 hour week in my life, that sounds like suicide.
EntroperZero@reddit
Puritanical "work ethic" / "hustle culture" / whatever you want to call it. Greed is apparently good, while sloth is the worst of the sins.
ChimpScanner@reddit
When you first start out it's not that simple, because you have the misconception that working extra hours will lead to raises, and you tend to get stressed out by deadlines.
Once you've been in the industry for a few years, it's definitely that simple. I close my laptop at 5:00 on the mark, and always take a full hour for lunch and multiple breaks. I get all my work done. If people can't get their work done during an 8 hour work day (5-6 hours of productive time) then there's a problem with management.
EntroperZero@reddit
Yeah, it really only takes 2-3 years to figure out that the good people will respect you more for pushing back, and the bad people will respect you because you give them no choice.
yes_u_suckk@reddit
In my opinion work-life balance is heavily connected to the country where you live.
I worked in America some years ago, in the heart of the Silicon Valley, and I had a shitty work-life balance there. It was pretty common for me to work 60+ hours/week.
The mentality in America usually is: "The project is late? Oh well, let's stay work during the evening so we can deliver on time".
Later in my life I moved to Sweden and the way worked is perceived here is VERY different from America. In 10 years living and I don't remember a single week when I worked more than 40 hours.
In Sweden (Scandinavia, in general) the mentality is: "The project is late? Lets talk to the PM/client and let them know that we will have the postpone the delivery".
The salaries here are not as high as in America, but I would never work in the US again.
ambientocclusion@reddit
You worked at a reasonable company and now don’t.
sylvester_0@reddit
Yeah. I have a 32 hour work week and "unlimited" PTO. I just got approved for a 3 week vacation this summer.
seiggy@reddit
Yep. I've had the opposite journey my last 20 years in the industry. I went from the least reasonable companies, to more and more reasonable. When I first started, it was common to have 48 hour weekend deployments, and all-nighters. Working 24+ hours in a single day was the norm.
Every move I made, I ensured the company I moved to had a better work-life balance than the last.
Now I only work more than 40 hours in a week when I want. I never get called after-hours. And in the 3 years I've been at the company, I've only had to work 2 hours total on weekends.
If I make a move from this place, I'll be looking for a 32hr work week max.
Halkcyon@reddit
Dev practices in general have also changed. Moving from physical, to virtual, to containerized, our deployments keep getting more reliable and faster to do.
EntroperZero@reddit
This is undeniably true. In the mid 2000s, you had to ask during the interview if the company was using source control at all. Now you ask which CI/CD pipeline they use.
Halkcyon@reddit
Even ~8 years ago, deployments were all-weekend affairs deployed to virtual hosts when everyone from devs to ops were in the office once a month.
Now? We do them remotely, only devops needs to be available, and they're done in the course of a few hours.
Fedcom@reddit
Remote deployments are the worst because people don’t care about getting out of there
duck-tective@reddit
you will still find run teams that refuse to do anything but weekend deployments. you will get them in big companies sadly. don't ask me how i know.
our_day_will_come@reddit
Oh I know too, saddled with ‘microservices’ that aren’t microservices
duck-tective@reddit
we all really be living the same lives.
Halkcyon@reddit
Oh we're still stuck logging in on a Saturday night, but it's not an all day, all hands on deck in the physical office kind of affair.
nerd4code@reddit
LOL
TargetDroid@reddit
lol. I love this comment.
Unusual_Flounder2073@reddit
My current boss says to take 30 days of our unlimited PTO a year. I just started and my personal life has been a train wreck with numerous days off needed. Not a negative word. Pay is a bit less than my last job but I got laid off from that one. We literally had a work life balance session 2 weeks ago. Which I ironically missed because I was skiing with my son for his spring break.
FieryPhoenix7@reddit
If you see a company offering dinner as a “perk”, run the F away.
PandaWonder01@reddit
In tech companies, not offering food is somewhat related to the company being cheap, which often translates to other difficulties at work. In my experience, the companies charging for coffee were much more stressful than the companies offering 3 meals a day.
Kered13@reddit
Meh. I like working late hours. Go in just before lunch, stay for dinner. Sadly they haven't brought dinner back since we returned to office.
Drugba@reddit
Probably a good general rule, but just to put an exception out there, I worked at a company that offered breakfast and dinner, but w/l balance was great. The company needed customer support teams available close to 16 hours a day so they had one shift in early and a second shift that stayed late. Breakfast and dinner started as perk for them and pretty quickly was opened up to everyone who was in office at those times
vir-morosus@reddit
I've been in the tech industry for over 35 years. Work-life balance wasn't even a term back when I started. I remember one job where I worked 36 hours on, 16 hours off. Did that for 2 years.
Today, I generally work 40-45 hours a week. Seems like it's a lot better.
ChimpScanner@reddit
Do you have any statistics to back up your claim, or are you just basing this on an anecdote? Either way, tech should be unionized.
maxinstuff@reddit
Weird, as I have observed the exact opposite, such that it feels to me the pendulum has almost gone too far the other way - lots of people contributing next to nothing and clocking off in the name of “work life balance.”
I think I liked it better when they at least pretended to be busy.
ChimpScanner@reddit
I bet you're the type of person to stay later and make everyone else feel like they have to stay later. I am salary so I work my 8 hours then leave. I don't work a minute over as I'm not getting paid to.
When you're on your death bed you'll have many regrets. Not working more won't be one of them.
zazzersmel@reddit
thank god we have people like you to make sure life sucks as much as possible for no reason
shoter0@reddit
I also observed exact opposite. My work-life balance is only growing for last ~5 years.
Barn07@reddit
When Corona hit, I went from >40 hrs week onsite to each day playing basketball close to my home during those 2 hours lunch break and nobody complained. For me, home office/hybrid was there to stay
SpaceMonkeyAttack@reddit
I work for a company which has excellent W/L balance on paper. I get Friday afternoons off, above-average holiday allowance, and I actually get paid overtime for being on-call.
The problem is that (a) we have employees and customers in multiple timezones and (b) Slack. In theory, if there's an outage outside working hours, the on-call engineer gets woken up, and the rest of us ignore it until the next morning. In practice, because high-ups respond to slack messages after 1800, it creates an expectation that everyone ought to be doing that. And I'm always getting messages due to having co-workers in other timezones.
You can turn off notifications outside working hours, but it feels a bit wrong when you log in the next morning, and see a whole thread of your coworkers that took place while you were having dinner.
sonobanana33@reddit
Don't have slack on your personal phone
Close your work computer when you are not working
TRexRoboParty@reddit
You feel guilty for eating dinner outside of working hours?
That is some impressive/insane corporate conditioning.
The higher ups get paid more for more responsibility. Let them do what they do.
stejzyy23@reddit
Why TF you feel bad to turn off notifications after work hour? I'm sorry but this is crazy to me.
au5lander@reddit
I close my laptop at the end of the day and unless I get a phone call from a team mate or manager telling me we need all hands on deck, I don't open it again until the start of the next work day.
forceCode@reddit
I myself cannot confirm this. I live and work in Germany and am a developer for 15+ years.
WriteCodeBroh@reddit
Rising pressure seems accurate. Even when I work my standard 40, it feels like someone is constantly breathing down my neck. I’ve noticed a lot of knee jerk decisions being made at the management level these past few years as a lot of the free money has dried up in tech. A lot of “we need to get this wild hair idea I came up with in my head last week out the door. How’s your progress? Any updates?”
ratttertintattertins@reddit
Oh I really agree with this comment. I’d actually go even further. I actually work fewer hours now than I did in say 2010.. but I’m under a lot more pressure because of the rise of scrum etc, and I feel a lot more burned out than I did when I was working longer.
Of course, I’m also more senior now so it’s hard to say how much impact that’s had too.
setuid_w00t@reddit
This is just an anecdotal rant
cheezballs@reddit
Nope. Its entirely up to where you work. Some companies are just flat-out amazing to work for.
I've been with my company for 13 years now. The work-life balance is so so so amazing. 4 x 10s, work from home, relaxed culture, frequent optional work events in our local office, frequent optional team building events at fun places.
It also matters what your direct boss manages like, as well.
PMzyox@reddit
My bosses have been asking how much OT I can work and once they got me on that salary hook it wasn’t even an ask. It’s been this way for 20 years. WLB creep is middle managers literally trying to maintain their relevance.
Hanahoeski@reddit
My company was bought and my boss said the new company likes employees to have a salary. Said it was good for us. I told him nah I'm good. As soon as we have salary they'll expect more OT and if I need to take off outside of what little vacation/sick time I have (as in I'll just eat it and have a smaller paycheck) it'll be a problem and I'll have to make up time. Eff that! He didn't like my answer. But he's a workaholic with no personality other than work and doesn't understand why people want free time. I always assume people like that have some demons they don't want to think about so they keep themselves busy. An avoidance strategy. I'm fine with my thoughts. Hell I specifically watch my thoughts as a meditation practice.
DeltaBurnt@reddit
If your company barely gives you sick/vacation time and they expect you to work OT to make up for taking said time then that's a woefully mismanaged company. You shouldn't avoid salary because you think it'll hurt your ability to take vacation. Maybe that was the case at your old company, but it's certainly not the norm.
The overtime I can't really argue with. There are some companies that offer salary and overtime/on call pay though.
Hanahoeski@reddit
I know this is r/programming so maybe it's different in that world. My job is construction. They are all like that. Most construction workers are knuckleheads that couldn't cut it in school and they have no other option (myself included) and there is so many of us that we can be taken advantage of easily. If I could concentrate on school for more than 15 min I could do something else but currently I'm stuck and have been for 25 years. It sucks being relatively smart but not able to do any sort of schooling. And yes I've tried all the prescriptions to motivate me. It's like my brains gas tank only holds 1 pint and it takes 24 hours to fill.
DeltaBurnt@reddit
That's rough man, if anything I think people working construction jobs should get even more sick/vacation time to account for the physical toll.
Hanahoeski@reddit
I will die earlier because of the abuse on my body and brain. Wake up at 4:30 scramble to leave the house by 5:00 then 1 to 1.5 hour drive to DC then beat myself up and strain my brain until I'm wiped out by noon. Take lunch sometimes sleeping through it. And then push myself through the second half of the work day with anger and adrenaline. Then drive home in traffic for at least 1.5 hours if not 2 . Then get home do any chores I need to do. Shower , eat and watch tv for maybe an hour then go to sleep and do it all again. Thank god I don't have children, I don't know how I would handle that. All for 31 an hour , which I used to think was a lot until I got older. After all that I have no mental energy to do anything to change my career. I just can't think. But I've only got maybe 20 years until I die at around 60 so at least I've got that to look forward to. Past 60 doesn't look fun at all and I will never be able to retire so I'd rather not be doing this in my 70's and 80's
Halkcyon@reddit
lol
Hot_Blackberry_6895@reddit
Requiring regular OT is a sign of bad management and poor project resourcing and a clear signal to sell your time elsewhere.
PMzyox@reddit
I concur.
menge101@reddit
You can only say that confidently for you then.
tazebot@reddit
Just look at tech support for unions to see how that plays out.
IngenuityAsleep5356@reddit
It depends on the org and your manager. I'm in the same job the past 5 years. Previous manager wanted me to work after surgery, the same day. Current manager wants me to take the day off if I'm feeling stressed.
Now we have a blog post stating that WLB is declining everywhere over the past several years, and it's also the title of a reddit post. And people see this and I don't know if they stop to question the source.
StrayStep@reddit
I feel exactly the way this blogger explains.
COVID and before. I did not have a proper work life balance. But switched to Cybersecurity Dev just as COVID quarantine happened.
I did not know it at the time. But myself and everyone I worked with were being asked to give our life to the job to keep up. Last min meetings interrupting work, couldn't go an hr without some new task, this was pushed by MGMT and then asked to work weekends to meet deadlines that NONE of us developers said were possible.
3 yrs later. Every dev has left the company, I took a 4 month mental leave(very lucky I could). I'm still with company, but I'm coasting and keeping my head down until the right job comes along.
Passed MGMT were good at collaboration and maintaining loyalty. But they filled every dev with hot air until they burst. Now the company is suffering.
hissInTheDark@reddit
Let me guess, "industry perspective" comes from the "guys, I have kidney surgery today, but don't hesitate to call me anytime" country?
Halkcyon@reddit
My boss today "I'm taking a sick day, but don't hesitate to call me if needed"
If you're going to be out, just be out, y'know?
KagakuNinja@reddit
I don't see that trend at all. Since the pandemic, work from home has become the norm. That is the biggest improvement in work-life balance in my 37 years of working in tech.
The start up boom of the 90s saw tons of companies expecting everyone to work overtime on crazy deadlines. But even before that, I remember interviewing at places that claimed to be elite teams that worked a lot of overtime.
jeerabiscuit@reddit
And of velocity and quality too consequently