6 ms·

At a start-up? How do you manage live/work balance? Are there any on-call duties? Thanks in advance.

jerguismi 7y ago
There seems to be some kind of understanding that start-up means aways working overtime etc. AFAIK that is not often the case, but people can work quite normally in early-stage companies as well. And mostly it is the founders who are working hard and employees are not required to work the same way.
- rooam-dev 7y ago
  Yes, I agree. We have (trying to have) a similar culture. The overtime is not expected, but the problem is task/context switching, which got better (less).
- atomical 7y ago
  I've worked at mostly startups and I have had a normal work schedule except for maybe 1-2 days a year.
dleslie 7y ago
It's a startup, yes. I work eight hours a day on average, and being that we have staff on most continents we don't really have a need to be on call. That said, I've had a handful of 3am emergencies over the course of the last few years. I work in my garage; so I have no commute, and I no longer lose over two hours a day to commuting. That's meant I contribute far less to open source, which I did while on transit. However, I don't miss commuting at all and am thankful for the time recovered. Balance is blissful. While my wife was on maternity leave for twelve months our girls were at home as well, and so my breaks consisted of spending time with my family. Now I walk them to daycare before work and listen to the rain on my roof while I work.
- rooam-dev 7y ago
  Thank you for your reply. This gives me more food for thought. I am lead engineer at a start-up and my goal is to create a good work environment for our current and future devs. #1 enemy is the on-call, which should be resolved with customer support + some automation.
  - dleslie 7y ago
    FWIW, we're a reasonably successful social application that's _heavy_ on real time networking; so there's always a large number of users active and our services are generally humming along at high throughput. Lots of automated tests. A good community team. Code reviews. A _rigid_ feature-branch-and-test process. A _rigid_ closed beta->open beta->release process. And we still have bugs. But things don't catch fire often, and when they do, it's usually not our fault. ;)
    - rooam-dev 7y ago
      Sounds like what we want to achieve. Good to know it works for others.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- rooam-dev 7y ago
  One more question if you don't mind. What is your vacation policy? Fixed amount + required to take or unlimited + take what you need? I am not a big fan of the latter, but not sure how it works for others. Thanks.
  - dleslie 7y ago
    AFAICT, unlimited. I just ask and they always say yes. Last year I took around 4 weeks of vacation _as well as_ 5 weeks of paternity leave. I think it helps that they've never taken issue with my general performance; if I weren't satisfactory in my output then I probably would have some push back.
deanmoriarty 7y ago
In my very personal experience, many times startups are not full of the brightest engineers, especially if they are based in a major tech hub such as the Bay Area: most talented engineers these days, if location is not an issue, first try a shot at FAANG or similarly big companies where they can experience problems at massive scale and very high compensation. Hence, many folks who end up accepting to work at a startup are less talented engineers (you're left with the "scraps" of the market), so if you're a high performing individual you might find that you really don't need to put that many hours in to be effective, as compared to your peers (and that's deeply depressing as well, and one of the reasons why I left startups for FAANG, other than compensation; talent is SO SO SO much better). I speak for direct experience, I rode a startup train for a long time at a company that grew a lot, and rarely put in more than 40 hours a week into the job, while others were routinely putting 60+. And I kept being praised by the management and technical leadership. The problem (lack of local talent due to big company competition) became severe enough that we had to bootstrap multiple remote teams in easily overlooked areas because the new local hires (San Francisco) were literally trashing the product due to poor development/testing.
- brootstrap 7y ago
  Interesting... i'm in a similar space where I found a decent startup, grinded for a year or two... and have pretty much been riding a gravy train ever since. In the midwest, making 100k in my late 20s and going full time remote soon. we got bought up by some corporate shmos as well so got a pretty penny in stock options
- neilv 7y ago
  I hear conflicting ideas about who's getting the most capable people, and I don't know what's true. Maybe a decade ago, a knowledgeable colleague, speaking of one of the better-regarded FAANGs, told me, "First they hired the A students, then they hired the B students, now they're hiring the C students." More recently, the sentiment I heard among CS-ish PhD students at one big university was that FAANGs (or, at least, particular ones) aren't seen as the cool places to go anymore, and people would rather do their own startups, or get professorships. Personally, I'd consider most of the FAANGs (but not one-sided hire-hazing rituals). But technical cofounder, or working on a startup that's already funded, or a rare research lab position, is seeming more likely to be a good match.
sky_rw 7y ago
Adding to the other responses here; in my experience many engineers at startups get sucked into the mindset of aggressive sprints and crunch time. This manifests as a failure to properly estimate project time. If you are working remote, managing your own hours, and properly estimating your tickets then there is no reason you can't have a very reasonable work/life balance.
swish_bob 7y ago
I've worked at a startup that mandated no developers worked outside core hours (unless responding to an on-call issue, we all took turns on call). It worked fine. The founders were fairly enlightened people, and well aware that we were in this for the long haul - success would take time and nobody could work long hours without the quality of the work suffering. This wasn't the case for all staff, mind. There were definitely people in some roles who worked longer hours. Marketing and PR mostly.
- rooam-dev 7y ago
  Thanks, there is hope then! Something similar I see at my current work place. I always try to send the message it's a marathon and not a constant sprint.
x0x0 7y ago
Eng at my startup (I'm a founder) can work a straight 40-45 hours per week, which translates into probably about 30h/week of heads-down coding, and be highly appreciated. We rotate on-call duties, but seriously, if you're fighting fires all the time, it's because you're bad at computers. Get some discipline about writing code that doesn't blow up constantly, get good at blue-green deploys, do code review, run post-mortems, etc. Basically, exercise some professionalism. We definitely have fires, but it's not a weekly event. Or monthly. Now, not every company is going to be professional, but as a software engineer in this market, where you work is your choice. You can work at a startup building comparatively boring software (like mine!) that sells to enterprises, for founders who don't work 80 hour weeks, and have a good working environment. Or you can not. But now, perhaps more than any other time ever, the choice is yours.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

There seems to be some kind of understanding that start-up means aways working overtime etc. AFAIK that is not often the case, but people can work quite normally in early-stage companies as well. And mostly it is the founders who are working hard and employees are not required to work the same way.

rooam-dev 7y ago
Yes, I agree. We have (trying to have) a similar culture. The overtime is not expected, but the problem is task/context switching, which got better (less).
atomical 7y ago
I've worked at mostly startups and I have had a normal work schedule except for maybe 1-2 days a year.

dleslie 7y ago

It's a startup, yes. I work eight hours a day on average, and being that we have staff on most continents we don't really have a need to be on call. That said, I've had a handful of 3am emergencies over the course of the last few years. I work in my garage; so I have no commute, and I no longer lose over two hours a day to commuting. That's meant I contribute far less to open source, which I did while on transit. However, I don't miss commuting at all and am thankful for the time recovered. Balance is blissful. While my wife was on maternity leave for twelve months our girls were at home as well, and so my breaks consisted of spending time with my family. Now I walk them to daycare before work and listen to the rain on my roof while I work.

rooam-dev 7y ago
Thank you for your reply. This gives me more food for thought. I am lead engineer at a start-up and my goal is to create a good work environment for our current and future devs. #1 enemy is the on-call, which should be resolved with customer support + some automation.
- dleslie 7y ago
  FWIW, we're a reasonably successful social application that's _heavy_ on real time networking; so there's always a large number of users active and our services are generally humming along at high throughput. Lots of automated tests. A good community team. Code reviews. A _rigid_ feature-branch-and-test process. A _rigid_ closed beta->open beta->release process. And we still have bugs. But things don't catch fire often, and when they do, it's usually not our fault. ;)
  - rooam-dev 7y ago
    Sounds like what we want to achieve. Good to know it works for others.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
rooam-dev 7y ago
One more question if you don't mind. What is your vacation policy? Fixed amount + required to take or unlimited + take what you need? I am not a big fan of the latter, but not sure how it works for others. Thanks.
- dleslie 7y ago
  AFAICT, unlimited. I just ask and they always say yes. Last year I took around 4 weeks of vacation _as well as_ 5 weeks of paternity leave. I think it helps that they've never taken issue with my general performance; if I weren't satisfactory in my output then I probably would have some push back.

deanmoriarty 7y ago

In my very personal experience, many times startups are not full of the brightest engineers, especially if they are based in a major tech hub such as the Bay Area: most talented engineers these days, if location is not an issue, first try a shot at FAANG or similarly big companies where they can experience problems at massive scale and very high compensation. Hence, many folks who end up accepting to work at a startup are less talented engineers (you're left with the "scraps" of the market), so if you're a high performing individual you might find that you really don't need to put that many hours in to be effective, as compared to your peers (and that's deeply depressing as well, and one of the reasons why I left startups for FAANG, other than compensation; talent is SO SO SO much better). I speak for direct experience, I rode a startup train for a long time at a company that grew a lot, and rarely put in more than 40 hours a week into the job, while others were routinely putting 60+. And I kept being praised by the management and technical leadership. The problem (lack of local talent due to big company competition) became severe enough that we had to bootstrap multiple remote teams in easily overlooked areas because the new local hires (San Francisco) were literally trashing the product due to poor development/testing.

brootstrap 7y ago
Interesting... i'm in a similar space where I found a decent startup, grinded for a year or two... and have pretty much been riding a gravy train ever since. In the midwest, making 100k in my late 20s and going full time remote soon. we got bought up by some corporate shmos as well so got a pretty penny in stock options
neilv 7y ago
I hear conflicting ideas about who's getting the most capable people, and I don't know what's true. Maybe a decade ago, a knowledgeable colleague, speaking of one of the better-regarded FAANGs, told me, "First they hired the A students, then they hired the B students, now they're hiring the C students." More recently, the sentiment I heard among CS-ish PhD students at one big university was that FAANGs (or, at least, particular ones) aren't seen as the cool places to go anymore, and people would rather do their own startups, or get professorships. Personally, I'd consider most of the FAANGs (but not one-sided hire-hazing rituals). But technical cofounder, or working on a startup that's already funded, or a rare research lab position, is seeming more likely to be a good match.

sky_rw 7y ago

Adding to the other responses here; in my experience many engineers at startups get sucked into the mindset of aggressive sprints and crunch time. This manifests as a failure to properly estimate project time. If you are working remote, managing your own hours, and properly estimating your tickets then there is no reason you can't have a very reasonable work/life balance.

swish_bob 7y ago

I've worked at a startup that mandated no developers worked outside core hours (unless responding to an on-call issue, we all took turns on call). It worked fine. The founders were fairly enlightened people, and well aware that we were in this for the long haul - success would take time and nobody could work long hours without the quality of the work suffering. This wasn't the case for all staff, mind. There were definitely people in some roles who worked longer hours. Marketing and PR mostly.

rooam-dev 7y ago
Thanks, there is hope then! Something similar I see at my current work place. I always try to send the message it's a marathon and not a constant sprint.

x0x0 7y ago

Eng at my startup (I'm a founder) can work a straight 40-45 hours per week, which translates into probably about 30h/week of heads-down coding, and be highly appreciated. We rotate on-call duties, but seriously, if you're fighting fires all the time, it's because you're bad at computers. Get some discipline about writing code that doesn't blow up constantly, get good at blue-green deploys, do code review, run post-mortems, etc. Basically, exercise some professionalism. We definitely have fires, but it's not a weekly event. Or monthly. Now, not every company is going to be professional, but as a software engineer in this market, where you work is your choice. You can work at a startup building comparatively boring software (like mine!) that sells to enterprises, for founders who don't work 80 hour weeks, and have a good working environment. Or you can not. But now, perhaps more than any other time ever, the choice is yours.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]