11 ms·

Dark side of a Valley software engineer

100 points by polskibus 10y ago

i0nutzb 10y ago
So basically the place that everybody knows that is _the_ place where you have to work 170h/week gets now negative feedback for working that much? Oh well...
- cmdkeen 10y ago
  It reminds me of the pre-crash stories about corporate lawyers and then investment banking working mad work weeks. The difference at least in the case of SV that more people seem to enjoy their work.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    The real difference is that a lot of those corporate lawyers and investment bankers make 3-10x the salary of SV engineer (multiple $ million per year).
    - freyir 10y ago
      Of the population that attends law school, passes the bar exam, and practices law, very few end up as corporate lawyers. And fewer still make multiple millions per year. You're comparing a very broad class (SV engineers) to an extremely small class (corporate lawyers who make $XM per year). It may be fair to say that the pay ceiling is higher for the best-paid lawyers than it is for the best-paid engineers. However, engineers can reach the same pay or much higher by taking on a management role -- CTO, technical co-founder, small business owner, etc. -- at which point, IMO, they typically cease to be engineer. Investment banking & hedge funds are another matter, and the compensation can be ridiculous. From Glassdoor: - Google corporate counsel ($188k salary, $215k with bonus) - Amazon corporate counsel ($180k salary, $250k with bonus) - Microsoft attorney ($164k salary, $224k with bonus)
Pirate-of-SV 10y ago
One of the quotes in this article was written by me on Quora. At the time of typing my response was intentended to be more of a semi serious rant. Just thought this would be worth mentioning.
- emilburzo 10y ago
  Which one?
  - Pirate-of-SV 10y ago
    The quote between the "thinking beanie guy" and cars stuck in traffic. https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-normal-working-day-for-a-software-engineer-in-Silicon-Valley-like/answer/Mattias-Appelgren?srid=hL5j https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-normal-working-day-for-a-sof...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
viraptor 10y ago
While a lot of the stories are pretty much "this insane thing is considered normal around here", there's some that I feel are due to management and should be changed - long hours or not. > harsh deadlines, huge backlog of tasks, fear to fail This happens everywhere. Deadlines exist because customers exist. All backlogs grow until they're silly. Companies may have a fear to fail. But if you have multiple engineers and they're afraid of failure, that's on the management. > If I get a page on the road I need to pull over and get on the system in 5 mins to start debugging. That's just terrible planning. Why are people on call when they're traveling? Even some basic rule like adjusting working hours +/-1h for different people on call to account for commute would help. And we're talking about google who could just do 8h support in 3+ countries and get rid of on call apart from n-th tier "the world is on fire" specialists.
- neverminder 10y ago
  Could it be it's just how it works in USA? I'm a software engineer in London and in the last 2 years I haven't done a single minute of overtime.
  - malachite3453 10y ago
    I'm in the UK too and also a software engineer. Early in ym career I worked in London and sometimes worked over-time to meet some client deadline. I always made sure I got time off in lieu though. Nowadays I resist anything like that, there is 7.5 hours in the day and thats what my employers contract me to. There will ALWAYS be work to do. It never stops. It can wait till tomorrow.
  - gambiting 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure it's just USA. I make a good salary in the North East of UK and I was told multiple times by people from US that I'm crazy to work for that kind of money(If you moved to US, you would easily make 3-4x as much!). And sure, maybe it's true. But I enjoy working 37.5h/week, having 25 paid holiday days a year, unlimited paid sick leave and having a job that I actually like doing - plus I don't really have to think about it once I get home. Healtcare costs me about $100/month in NI contribution, education for my children will be free or almost free - Moving to US for some hypothetical higher salary just does not seem worth it to me at all.
Artlav 10y ago
Add to that the mental burnout of having to violate the natural project hopping progression. The job does not care that you won't be able to get interested in their stuff for unknown amount of months. It must be done, and now. Reading these stories - do people actually get paid more for doing more over there? Here it's a fixed monthly salary, regardless of how much you do (as long as the deadlines are met).
lambdacomplete 10y ago
If working in the SV for such big companies (Google in primis I guess) why do so many people want to work there? Is it just the "brand" effect or it's really worth it (salary and perks aside)?
daemonk 10y ago
Doesn't this describe most jobs that require some kind of technical expertise and creativity? I guess the silicon valley mystique/propaganda really works if people expect it to be vastly different from other jobs.
lordnacho 10y ago
>>If your manager is not a software engineer himself you will have even more stress. Someone should do something about this. Certain other professions, such as the law, protect workers from incompetent management, in many jurisdictions. It might also attract more people to the profession if you knew your boss had done something similar.
- bluesilver07 10y ago
  On the other hand, not all managers with a tech background have good people skills to manage engineers.
  - 20andup 10y ago
    I don't think its so much people skills to manage engineers, more like people skills to talk to the managers above (i.e./ CEO). I think this, too, would be an interesting topic to delve deeper into.
  - anotherarray 10y ago
    On top of this, if they think "he's slow, I could do this in 5 minutes", burning out becomes a lot easier.
dham 10y ago
Then: Get up at 6am, go to work at grocery store. Get paid $7 an hour. Get out at 1pm, go to school. Go back to grocery store at 7 work till 12. Wake up do it again. Weekends nope. Holidays nope. Now: Wake up at 8 get to work at like 8:45 work till 6 or 7. Sit in air conditioning all day at a computer. Free lunch. Go home, don't worry about anything. No tests to study for, no worrying about paying rent. Holidays off. Weekends off. Yea development sucks sometimes but it's almost like doing nothing compared to what I was used to. Sometimes when I get frustrated I just have a flashback of my old life.
- malachite3453 10y ago
  I really pity American office workers. As I understand it, you get measly holiday - like 2 weeks or whatever? You also frequently work unpaid overtime and it is the norm - is that right? There also seems to be much less of a work/life balance. Or maybe my view is skewed by HN and Reddit where there are more software engineer employees. For the record, I'm in the UK, I'm a software engineer. I work about 38hrs a week and get 29 days holiday a year. I'm in the office 0930 and leave 1800. My commute is ~30mins. I've worked for a start-up before but always hated working past 6pm. I just switch-off and start to resent the work. If I'm ever working overtime (very rare) or in the office past 6pm I just think I could be home with my family, playing videogames, cycling, playing with my cat etc.
- parr0t 10y ago
  As someone who until Oct last year worked weekends and weekdays getting up at 2:30 am to bust my ass in a bakery for dismal pay and virtually no social life due to the hours - I work part time as a junior developer now and looking back at my old life I don't know how the hell I did it. It motivates me to do the best I can each day so I don't end up back there.
  - Ntrails 10y ago
    Similar experience as an ex Chef. 60+ hour weeks, 5 days a week spread over various split shifts (so rarely 2 whole days off, and half days never really feel like a break). Working for what comes out as less than minimum wage as salaried. In part because of this, I find it really difficult to deal with people I work with complaining about pay/bonuses/hours etc, because imo what I do now is way easier and probably less empirically useful (although obviously more valuable - thanks capitalism). There is a small part of me that misses the buzz of a busy service though.
max_ 10y ago
Is case you cannot access the main link http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.businessinsider.com/dark-side-of-a-valley-software-engineer-2016-7 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
k__ 10y ago
This is why I always laugh when someone says "Start-Ups are hard! If you want to get rich easy, better get a job at a big company with 100k a year" First, getting such a job is a ton of work and then doing it isn't easy either. I mean, how much people even have the education to got into IT and then score a job at Google for example?
- dasil003 10y ago
  The difference is that at a startup you as one of a handful of individuals actually make or break the company. You should be getting sufficient equity to make it worthwhile, and yes you should be wise enough not to burn yourself out, but you also need to be ready to go the extra mile to give yourself a chance at success. That doesn't mean let companies take advantage of you, but there has to be some mutual level of trust and commitment between early employees or a startup will surely fail. For larger companies it's more transactional in nature: they have a job and a budget, and you have your own interests. The agreement you come to is more of a coldly calculated negotiation.
  - k__ 10y ago
    Also, you can found your own start-up
pakitan 10y ago
> A Google site-reliability engineer starts work at 9 a.m., leaves at 7 p.m., and works in the evenings until about 10 p.m. He's on constant alert because he must respond to urgent pages within 5 minutes. "Go home at 7pm with my backpack and fully charged laptop. If I get a page on the road I need to pull over and get on the system in 5 mins to start debugging. An email alert can wait until i get home. Can anyone please comment on the veracity of this quote? I'm interested in a SRE position and I was researching details a while ago and the only info I found on work hours was someone saying that, given that Google has employees all around the world, you don't really need to do crazy hours or night shifts. However, the comment above indicates 12 hour workdays, which is insane. Is that every day? How does it compare to a Software Engineer position at Google?
- homero 10y ago
  https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-normal-working-day-for-a-software-engineer-in-Silicon-Valley-like https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-normal-working-day-for-a-sof...
  - commentereleven 10y ago
    The important bit from that page is: "I am on-call about 10 days per quarter, usually 3 shifts of 3-4 days each. I am paid extra for my on-call (after-hours) work, but not at my full hourly salary because I only work when there are problems after hours (e.g. on weekends or late at night.)". Note that depending on the exact team, Software Engineers at Google may also be part of an on-call rotation.
    - pakitan 10y ago
      Yes, indeed, turns out BI just cherry-picked the worst part.
      - superswordfish 10y ago
        Ten days per quarter, or forty days per year, in few-day shots at a time. That amounts to a monthly shift, and is just frequent/heavy enough to have a real impact on your personal life. No doubt the "extra" pay (let's be real, you'll never be in the inner circle if you forgo the duty) is barely enough to be noticeable.
LeonM 10y ago
> 7 a.m. Wake up. 8 a.m. Refuse several job offers from Google, Facebook, Oracle, HP and other tech giants. 9 a.m. Write some code that wipes 100 jobs by making people less useful. Noon Free food. 1-3 p.m. Wipe even more jobs. 5 p.m. Meet with investors that are dying to invest in anything that you touch. 7 p.m. Dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. 10 p.m. - Comment on some company blog. Post goes viral and the company becomes an overnight success. I laughed out loud when reading this one, then I got silent as I realised how accurate this is compared to my current situation, and I don't even live in Silicon Valley...
leafmc 10y ago
It's tough, but at some level these people are choosing this lifestyle. There's no shortage of engineering roles in the world that don't require you to work in high pressured environments and that don't require you to work out of hours. I work 4 days per week rather than the typical 5 and refuse to do out of hours jobs, using the additional day to have fun with open source, exercise and just generally keep on top of life. I make well over double the annual average household income for the UK at 30 hours a week. I'd take that over ladder climbing as aggressively as possible any day. We really do have it pretty good.
- malachite3453 10y ago
  I'm in the UK and curious what you do. Sounds good.
- justatdotin 10y ago
  so few people in this world are able to enjoy enough.
jondubois 10y ago
The slide about watching other people getting $1-$20 million payouts while you get nothing because you joined a few months later is the worst part. This also happens outside of Silicon Valley but perhaps not to such an extreme extent. The current system is far from a meritocracy because a lot of unlucky people fall through the cracks. Given how hard I've worked, I've probably fallen through a lot of small cracks (but thankfully no major horror stories as described above).
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Yea, seriously. I never thought of myself as an envious person until coming out here to Silicon Valley and observing the random-jackpot nature of success. You struggle to afford a home hours away from work, while sitting right next to someone with the same skills, job title, education, work history, etc. who has a few million in the bank and drives a new Tesla, and the only difference is he started at the company 6 months before you did. :-/
40something 10y ago
The real dark side is realizing you've been subsidizing the personal lives of management for the last 5 years. They get married, buy houses, have kids, etc.
fulafel 10y ago
Don't people have flexible hours so that over 8 hour days get compensated with paid leave?
- WalterSear 10y ago
  No 'flextime' place that I've ever worked.
hhsnopek 10y ago
Someone has to do this job, in fact the people working these jobs have the ability to job search after a certain period of time within their company. To be honest this is stupid this has hit the front-page because there are so many shit jobs out in the world. And you can't complain for working at one of the biggest tech companies.
simonswords82 10y ago
Are Business Insider literally copy/pasting quora responses to create news articles now?
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100 points by polskibus 10y ago

So basically the place that everybody knows that is _the_ place where you have to work 170h/week gets now negative feedback for working that much? Oh well...

cmdkeen 10y ago
It reminds me of the pre-crash stories about corporate lawyers and then investment banking working mad work weeks. The difference at least in the case of SV that more people seem to enjoy their work.
- coldtea 10y ago
  The real difference is that a lot of those corporate lawyers and investment bankers make 3-10x the salary of SV engineer (multiple $ million per year).
  - freyir 10y ago
    Of the population that attends law school, passes the bar exam, and practices law, very few end up as corporate lawyers. And fewer still make multiple millions per year. You're comparing a very broad class (SV engineers) to an extremely small class (corporate lawyers who make $XM per year). It may be fair to say that the pay ceiling is higher for the best-paid lawyers than it is for the best-paid engineers. However, engineers can reach the same pay or much higher by taking on a management role -- CTO, technical co-founder, small business owner, etc. -- at which point, IMO, they typically cease to be engineer. Investment banking & hedge funds are another matter, and the compensation can be ridiculous. From Glassdoor: - Google corporate counsel ($188k salary, $215k with bonus) - Amazon corporate counsel ($180k salary, $250k with bonus) - Microsoft attorney ($164k salary, $224k with bonus)

Pirate-of-SV 10y ago

One of the quotes in this article was written by me on Quora. At the time of typing my response was intentended to be more of a semi serious rant. Just thought this would be worth mentioning.

emilburzo 10y ago
Which one?
- Pirate-of-SV 10y ago
  The quote between the "thinking beanie guy" and cars stuck in traffic. https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-normal-working-day-for-a-software-engineer-in-Silicon-Valley-like/answer/Mattias-Appelgren?srid=hL5j https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-normal-working-day-for-a-sof...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

viraptor 10y ago

While a lot of the stories are pretty much "this insane thing is considered normal around here", there's some that I feel are due to management and should be changed - long hours or not. > harsh deadlines, huge backlog of tasks, fear to fail This happens everywhere. Deadlines exist because customers exist. All backlogs grow until they're silly. Companies may have a fear to fail. But if you have multiple engineers and they're afraid of failure, that's on the management. > If I get a page on the road I need to pull over and get on the system in 5 mins to start debugging. That's just terrible planning. Why are people on call when they're traveling? Even some basic rule like adjusting working hours +/-1h for different people on call to account for commute would help. And we're talking about google who could just do 8h support in 3+ countries and get rid of on call apart from n-th tier "the world is on fire" specialists.

neverminder 10y ago
Could it be it's just how it works in USA? I'm a software engineer in London and in the last 2 years I haven't done a single minute of overtime.
- malachite3453 10y ago
  I'm in the UK too and also a software engineer. Early in ym career I worked in London and sometimes worked over-time to meet some client deadline. I always made sure I got time off in lieu though. Nowadays I resist anything like that, there is 7.5 hours in the day and thats what my employers contract me to. There will ALWAYS be work to do. It never stops. It can wait till tomorrow.
- gambiting 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure it's just USA. I make a good salary in the North East of UK and I was told multiple times by people from US that I'm crazy to work for that kind of money(If you moved to US, you would easily make 3-4x as much!). And sure, maybe it's true. But I enjoy working 37.5h/week, having 25 paid holiday days a year, unlimited paid sick leave and having a job that I actually like doing - plus I don't really have to think about it once I get home. Healtcare costs me about $100/month in NI contribution, education for my children will be free or almost free - Moving to US for some hypothetical higher salary just does not seem worth it to me at all.

Artlav 10y ago

Add to that the mental burnout of having to violate the natural project hopping progression. The job does not care that you won't be able to get interested in their stuff for unknown amount of months. It must be done, and now. Reading these stories - do people actually get paid more for doing more over there? Here it's a fixed monthly salary, regardless of how much you do (as long as the deadlines are met).

lambdacomplete 10y ago

If working in the SV for such big companies (Google in primis I guess) why do so many people want to work there? Is it just the "brand" effect or it's really worth it (salary and perks aside)?

daemonk 10y ago

Doesn't this describe most jobs that require some kind of technical expertise and creativity? I guess the silicon valley mystique/propaganda really works if people expect it to be vastly different from other jobs.

lordnacho 10y ago

>>If your manager is not a software engineer himself you will have even more stress. Someone should do something about this. Certain other professions, such as the law, protect workers from incompetent management, in many jurisdictions. It might also attract more people to the profession if you knew your boss had done something similar.

bluesilver07 10y ago
On the other hand, not all managers with a tech background have good people skills to manage engineers.
- 20andup 10y ago
  I don't think its so much people skills to manage engineers, more like people skills to talk to the managers above (i.e./ CEO). I think this, too, would be an interesting topic to delve deeper into.
- anotherarray 10y ago
  On top of this, if they think "he's slow, I could do this in 5 minutes", burning out becomes a lot easier.

dham 10y ago

Then: Get up at 6am, go to work at grocery store. Get paid $7 an hour. Get out at 1pm, go to school. Go back to grocery store at 7 work till 12. Wake up do it again. Weekends nope. Holidays nope. Now: Wake up at 8 get to work at like 8:45 work till 6 or 7. Sit in air conditioning all day at a computer. Free lunch. Go home, don't worry about anything. No tests to study for, no worrying about paying rent. Holidays off. Weekends off. Yea development sucks sometimes but it's almost like doing nothing compared to what I was used to. Sometimes when I get frustrated I just have a flashback of my old life.

malachite3453 10y ago
I really pity American office workers. As I understand it, you get measly holiday - like 2 weeks or whatever? You also frequently work unpaid overtime and it is the norm - is that right? There also seems to be much less of a work/life balance. Or maybe my view is skewed by HN and Reddit where there are more software engineer employees. For the record, I'm in the UK, I'm a software engineer. I work about 38hrs a week and get 29 days holiday a year. I'm in the office 0930 and leave 1800. My commute is ~30mins. I've worked for a start-up before but always hated working past 6pm. I just switch-off and start to resent the work. If I'm ever working overtime (very rare) or in the office past 6pm I just think I could be home with my family, playing videogames, cycling, playing with my cat etc.
parr0t 10y ago
As someone who until Oct last year worked weekends and weekdays getting up at 2:30 am to bust my ass in a bakery for dismal pay and virtually no social life due to the hours - I work part time as a junior developer now and looking back at my old life I don't know how the hell I did it. It motivates me to do the best I can each day so I don't end up back there.
- Ntrails 10y ago
  Similar experience as an ex Chef. 60+ hour weeks, 5 days a week spread over various split shifts (so rarely 2 whole days off, and half days never really feel like a break). Working for what comes out as less than minimum wage as salaried. In part because of this, I find it really difficult to deal with people I work with complaining about pay/bonuses/hours etc, because imo what I do now is way easier and probably less empirically useful (although obviously more valuable - thanks capitalism). There is a small part of me that misses the buzz of a busy service though.

max_ 10y ago

Is case you cannot access the main link http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.businessinsider.com/dark-side-of-a-valley-software-engineer-2016-7 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

k__ 10y ago

This is why I always laugh when someone says "Start-Ups are hard! If you want to get rich easy, better get a job at a big company with 100k a year" First, getting such a job is a ton of work and then doing it isn't easy either. I mean, how much people even have the education to got into IT and then score a job at Google for example?

dasil003 10y ago
The difference is that at a startup you as one of a handful of individuals actually make or break the company. You should be getting sufficient equity to make it worthwhile, and yes you should be wise enough not to burn yourself out, but you also need to be ready to go the extra mile to give yourself a chance at success. That doesn't mean let companies take advantage of you, but there has to be some mutual level of trust and commitment between early employees or a startup will surely fail. For larger companies it's more transactional in nature: they have a job and a budget, and you have your own interests. The agreement you come to is more of a coldly calculated negotiation.
- k__ 10y ago
  Also, you can found your own start-up

pakitan 10y ago

> A Google site-reliability engineer starts work at 9 a.m., leaves at 7 p.m., and works in the evenings until about 10 p.m. He's on constant alert because he must respond to urgent pages within 5 minutes. "Go home at 7pm with my backpack and fully charged laptop. If I get a page on the road I need to pull over and get on the system in 5 mins to start debugging. An email alert can wait until i get home. Can anyone please comment on the veracity of this quote? I'm interested in a SRE position and I was researching details a while ago and the only info I found on work hours was someone saying that, given that Google has employees all around the world, you don't really need to do crazy hours or night shifts. However, the comment above indicates 12 hour workdays, which is insane. Is that every day? How does it compare to a Software Engineer position at Google?

homero 10y ago
https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-normal-working-day-for-a-software-engineer-in-Silicon-Valley-like https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-normal-working-day-for-a-sof...
- commentereleven 10y ago
  The important bit from that page is: "I am on-call about 10 days per quarter, usually 3 shifts of 3-4 days each. I am paid extra for my on-call (after-hours) work, but not at my full hourly salary because I only work when there are problems after hours (e.g. on weekends or late at night.)". Note that depending on the exact team, Software Engineers at Google may also be part of an on-call rotation.
  - pakitan 10y ago
    Yes, indeed, turns out BI just cherry-picked the worst part.
    - superswordfish 10y ago
      Ten days per quarter, or forty days per year, in few-day shots at a time. That amounts to a monthly shift, and is just frequent/heavy enough to have a real impact on your personal life. No doubt the "extra" pay (let's be real, you'll never be in the inner circle if you forgo the duty) is barely enough to be noticeable.

LeonM 10y ago

> 7 a.m. Wake up. 8 a.m. Refuse several job offers from Google, Facebook, Oracle, HP and other tech giants. 9 a.m. Write some code that wipes 100 jobs by making people less useful. Noon Free food. 1-3 p.m. Wipe even more jobs. 5 p.m. Meet with investors that are dying to invest in anything that you touch. 7 p.m. Dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. 10 p.m. - Comment on some company blog. Post goes viral and the company becomes an overnight success. I laughed out loud when reading this one, then I got silent as I realised how accurate this is compared to my current situation, and I don't even live in Silicon Valley...

leafmc 10y ago

It's tough, but at some level these people are choosing this lifestyle. There's no shortage of engineering roles in the world that don't require you to work in high pressured environments and that don't require you to work out of hours. I work 4 days per week rather than the typical 5 and refuse to do out of hours jobs, using the additional day to have fun with open source, exercise and just generally keep on top of life. I make well over double the annual average household income for the UK at 30 hours a week. I'd take that over ladder climbing as aggressively as possible any day. We really do have it pretty good.

malachite3453 10y ago
I'm in the UK and curious what you do. Sounds good.
justatdotin 10y ago
so few people in this world are able to enjoy enough.

jondubois 10y ago

The slide about watching other people getting $1-$20 million payouts while you get nothing because you joined a few months later is the worst part. This also happens outside of Silicon Valley but perhaps not to such an extreme extent. The current system is far from a meritocracy because a lot of unlucky people fall through the cracks. Given how hard I've worked, I've probably fallen through a lot of small cracks (but thankfully no major horror stories as described above).

ryandrake 10y ago
Yea, seriously. I never thought of myself as an envious person until coming out here to Silicon Valley and observing the random-jackpot nature of success. You struggle to afford a home hours away from work, while sitting right next to someone with the same skills, job title, education, work history, etc. who has a few million in the bank and drives a new Tesla, and the only difference is he started at the company 6 months before you did. :-/

40something 10y ago

The real dark side is realizing you've been subsidizing the personal lives of management for the last 5 years. They get married, buy houses, have kids, etc.

fulafel 10y ago

Don't people have flexible hours so that over 8 hour days get compensated with paid leave?

WalterSear 10y ago
No 'flextime' place that I've ever worked.

hhsnopek 10y ago

Someone has to do this job, in fact the people working these jobs have the ability to job search after a certain period of time within their company. To be honest this is stupid this has hit the front-page because there are so many shit jobs out in the world. And you can't complain for working at one of the biggest tech companies.

simonswords82 10y ago

Are Business Insider literally copy/pasting quora responses to create news articles now?

jennyryan12345 10y ago

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jennyryan12345 10y ago