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If you’re a new engineer reading this article: Startups are talked about as if work-life balance doesn’t or shouldn’t exist. It only doesn’t exist if you (1) ch
by scrose 6y ago
If you’re a new engineer reading this article:
Startups are talked about as if work-life balance doesn’t or shouldn’t exist. It only doesn’t exist if you (1) choose for that to be the case or (2) Have a manager like this who holds things like firing you if ‘someone better comes along’ over your head.
There are plenty of startups where you can put in your ~8 hours and call it a day 99% of the time and the business will still be thriving. Having seen the work some engineers put into cranking out code nonstop, a bit less time coding and a bit more time thinking would have likely done way more good for the code base and the company anyway.
Managers who don’t value your personal time and are willing to fire you anytime ‘someone better’ comes along are toxic and should be avoided.
- wombat-man 6y agoYeah, a lot of startups are under resourced in terms of people though. Maybe nobody is threatening you, but as you settle into the role you kind of realize that working a bit more could actually be the difference success and failure. I do agree that it's better if you're making that call on your own. If management is trying to squeeze you like this by threatening to fire you, it's usually an empty/foolish threat. Hiring a proper replacement takes time.
- scrose 6y ago> Yeah, a lot of startups are under resourced in terms of people though. Maybe nobody is threatening you, but as you settle into the role you kind of realize that working a bit more could actually be the difference success and failure. This is completely my opinion and shaped from my own experience. But if you're working at an understaffed startup, the bottleneck for 'success' is usually not the engineering team, and also almost definitely not correlated with butt-in-seat time and amount of code contributed. Not saying that's what you were implying, but just want to clarify that's the direction I'm coming from. It's up to the business's leaders to determine what should be prioritized with the resources they have and take risks on building out those ideas accordingly. If you, as an engineer, begin working nights and weekends to have the company 'succeed', you're now communicating to management there's all this untapped engineering capacity. You give the illusion that more can consistently be done than is actually sustainable and no one wins when the engineering team burns out 6-12 months later. Well, maybe the company does somewhat when you leave and forfeit all your stock options back to the pool... In my opinion, the biggest impact you can make as an engineer at any level is by stepping away at the end of the day, doing your own thing, and every now and then just think holistically about what you're doing at work and the direction the product you're working on is going in. Your butt-in-seat time will become far more productive as a result.
- wombat-man 6y agoYeah, I think you're probably right about that, but that's not always easy to see at the time. Especially if it's a little earlier in their career.
- kyawzazaw 6y agoHow do you check for and avoid (2) in new grad interview stages? Especially when you are not assigned to a team when applying
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Rebelgecko 6y agoAsk people how many hours per week they work. It might vary a bit from team to team but you'll roughly get an idea of corporate work/life balance
- xmprt 6y agoThere's really no good way if you're applying to big corporations. At smaller companies you'll usually get a feel for the people there based on how you feel during the interviews. You might even get to have lunch with the entire team if it's small enough.