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This - the mental overhead of a software job is not something that is easily turned off during non work hours - especially with a pushy employer or coworkers wi

This - the mental overhead of a software job is not something that is easily turned off during non work hours - especially with a pushy employer or coworkers with no work life balance themselves. You can’t cut steel at home after dinner no matter how hard you try if you don’t have the tools. Conversely, I’m sure you have a computer, can you just login to GitHub for two seconds to review this PR I submitted at 9pm...

kryogen1c 6y ago
> the mental overheard of a software job is not something that is easily turned off during non work hours this is very ignorant. the ability to leave work at work is a personality trait. the job, or type of job, has little to do with it. software development is not some exceptionally difficult thing that tortures and haunts developers.
- jolux 6y ago
  > software development is not some exceptionally difficult thing that tortures and haunts developers. There's definitely a difference between white collar/knowledge work and manual labor or highly people-focused work, though. I've worked retail and food service before and the mental overhead is absolutely different. It took me a long time (years) to learn how to turn off my brain at 5pm and stop programming when I got my first tech job. Not something I had a problem with in more manual industries: when you're not at the workplace, you can't work, even if you wanted to.
  - asidiali 6y ago
    Agreed! Is it black and white? No of course not. You can and need to learn how to properly transition between work and home. It takes time. Totally agree with you. It’s nearly impossible to do when your employer is not on that same page with you, or even worse is instead fighting against it.
- asidiali 6y ago
  > the ability to leave work at work is a personality trait. the job, or type of job, has little to do with it. This is very ignorant. There are many outside factors that go into if an employee needs to focus on work after hours, such as accessibility to the working environment, cultural practices at the company, etc. Who said anything about haunting? If my manager hits me up at 11pm asking for something, sure I can ignore him or her. Then I come in the next day, they already did the thing they asked for themselves because [insert business reason], and says “never mind”. Next time it happens, they go to the other dev who is happy to do it at 11pm. Guess who gets the promotion?
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    The sucker who's working at 11pm? More seriously, if this is you, find an employer/manager who's not gratuitously invading your non work time.
    - asidiali 6y ago
      Very much agreed. You have to do what is in your control as an employee. If it’s a cultural problem, that usually means your best bet is to simply find a team with better culture. Culture is a hard problem to solve if it’s not right.
  - aerosmile 6y ago
    With two comments quoting the same example, you seem really hell-bent on driving this point home. Ok, I'll bite. How often do you get those 11pm requests that will otherwise get rerouted to someone else unless you respond before 8am? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? A few times per year? Context matters, because believe it or not, most professionals occasionally go the extra mile no matter what industry they are in. I recently dropped off a motorcycle for a repair, and the young guy working at that shop stayed an hour late to get my business. When something breaks in my house, I have hundreds of people jumping at the bit to come to fix it at any given time, before or after work, weekday or weekend. Nothing is ever perfect in life, but your criticism of your experience as a software engineer would come across as a lot more empathetic if you started off by acknowledging that you made an excellent career choice to start with, and that this allows you unprecedented career mobility, including the option of easily quitting your job should you have the rare misfortune of having landed at any of the few bad apples that do not reward you for your stress with oodles of money that you wouldn't be able to make anywhere else with that amount of effort and work experience. Not to mention that if stress and money are not your thing, go and work as a software engineer at an old school Fortune 500 company. I promise to you that nobody will ever ask you to do anything at 11pm there, and you'll still get paid well.
- mattnewton 6y ago
  I couldn’t disagree more. I am thinking about hard problems in the back of my mind pretty much all the time, or am not making progress on them. Software engineering can be like pipe fitting, where there is a blueprint; but it can also be a much more creative search for solutions like looking for a math proof, writing a screenplay, or trying to phrase a legal argument that churns up your background cycles. Without those periods I would never be able to do the best work I’ve done. There is a lot of pipe fitting in the business - and it’s fine to do only that. But it’s not some personality defect to have work thoughts kicking around in the back of your head, it’s a necessary trait in my experience for the more difficult software jobs.
  - asidiali 6y ago
    Well said, totally agree. Thank you for explaining the more nuanced points here better than I could. IC-level contracting or consulting gigs are often (not always) much more numb - you’re handed a design, a user spec, maybe some existing APIs or infrastructure, and you essentially color in the lines. Other roles require much more organic composition, aka, Zero to One.
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  Ignoring your last sentence (which doesn't merit response) to disagree with "the type of job has little to do with [the ability to leave work at work]". Thought work is fundamentally different from physical labor. Work:life boundaries are so permeable. Any but the most ignorant, junior, "code-monkey" -type developer spends a large portion of their cognitive resources on solving problems (as opposed to strictly sitting at the keyboard writing code like a factory worker). Compartmentalization may well be a personality trait or learned skill, but setting down physical tools in the shop before commuting home is completely different from a software dev's home office and potentially round-the-clock work cycles.
andrew_ 6y ago
This is a most excellent point. I will say that movement of scope, scheduling, and the like does change during all hours of the day, and calls to the home to talk about that are common after hours.
yardie 6y ago
This is where you ignore the email until the morning. The only place where working offhours has a use is in early startups where money is tight, deadlines are short, and products are loosely defined. If you're working at a well managed company managers will nip it in the bud. Either way I'm not in college and I'm getting my 6-8 hours of sleep. If I work late I arrive late and expect no argument over it. I've only ever gotten an email like that because someone's ass was on the line for a 12am deadline. You only send an email like that because you are burning a personal favour.
- asidiali 6y ago
  Copying part of my reply to another comment: If my manager hits me up at 11pm asking for something, sure I can ignore him or her. Then I come in the next day, they already did the thing they asked for themselves because [insert business reason], and says “never mind”. Next time it happens, they go to the other dev who is happy to do it at 11pm. Guess who gets the promotion? Even if it’s unfair and shouldn’t happen that way - company culture is not something controlled by an contributing engineer. But I agree with your other points - a well run company will nip this in the bud! That’s exactly the point. It’s not in control of the engineer. It’s company culture. You’re right that I’d say this probably happens much more at startups vs larger companies due to the loose and fast nature.
  - yardie 6y ago
    > my manager hits me up at 11pm asking for something One thing I learned about management is they are getting more than salary, usually there is a bonus or RSUs attached to everything they do. But they aren't working at 11pm for the good of the company if the good of the company isn't directly benefiting them. Keep that in mind the next time you respond to that midnight email. > they go to the other dev who is happy to do it at 11pm. Believe it or not this dev sounds like management material. That's not a compliment! If you think back to every belittling, sociopathic manager/director story you've observed or heard, these are the places they are formed. Now some managers are great leaders and you recognize why they are in that position. The majority are sycophants who kiss the right ass, by working at 11pm on a saturday.

kryogen1c 6y ago

> the mental overheard of a software job is not something that is easily turned off during non work hours this is very ignorant. the ability to leave work at work is a personality trait. the job, or type of job, has little to do with it. software development is not some exceptionally difficult thing that tortures and haunts developers.

jolux 6y ago
> software development is not some exceptionally difficult thing that tortures and haunts developers. There's definitely a difference between white collar/knowledge work and manual labor or highly people-focused work, though. I've worked retail and food service before and the mental overhead is absolutely different. It took me a long time (years) to learn how to turn off my brain at 5pm and stop programming when I got my first tech job. Not something I had a problem with in more manual industries: when you're not at the workplace, you can't work, even if you wanted to.
- asidiali 6y ago
  Agreed! Is it black and white? No of course not. You can and need to learn how to properly transition between work and home. It takes time. Totally agree with you. It’s nearly impossible to do when your employer is not on that same page with you, or even worse is instead fighting against it.
asidiali 6y ago
> the ability to leave work at work is a personality trait. the job, or type of job, has little to do with it. This is very ignorant. There are many outside factors that go into if an employee needs to focus on work after hours, such as accessibility to the working environment, cultural practices at the company, etc. Who said anything about haunting? If my manager hits me up at 11pm asking for something, sure I can ignore him or her. Then I come in the next day, they already did the thing they asked for themselves because [insert business reason], and says “never mind”. Next time it happens, they go to the other dev who is happy to do it at 11pm. Guess who gets the promotion?
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  The sucker who's working at 11pm? More seriously, if this is you, find an employer/manager who's not gratuitously invading your non work time.
  - asidiali 6y ago
    Very much agreed. You have to do what is in your control as an employee. If it’s a cultural problem, that usually means your best bet is to simply find a team with better culture. Culture is a hard problem to solve if it’s not right.
- aerosmile 6y ago
  With two comments quoting the same example, you seem really hell-bent on driving this point home. Ok, I'll bite. How often do you get those 11pm requests that will otherwise get rerouted to someone else unless you respond before 8am? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? A few times per year? Context matters, because believe it or not, most professionals occasionally go the extra mile no matter what industry they are in. I recently dropped off a motorcycle for a repair, and the young guy working at that shop stayed an hour late to get my business. When something breaks in my house, I have hundreds of people jumping at the bit to come to fix it at any given time, before or after work, weekday or weekend. Nothing is ever perfect in life, but your criticism of your experience as a software engineer would come across as a lot more empathetic if you started off by acknowledging that you made an excellent career choice to start with, and that this allows you unprecedented career mobility, including the option of easily quitting your job should you have the rare misfortune of having landed at any of the few bad apples that do not reward you for your stress with oodles of money that you wouldn't be able to make anywhere else with that amount of effort and work experience. Not to mention that if stress and money are not your thing, go and work as a software engineer at an old school Fortune 500 company. I promise to you that nobody will ever ask you to do anything at 11pm there, and you'll still get paid well.
mattnewton 6y ago
I couldn’t disagree more. I am thinking about hard problems in the back of my mind pretty much all the time, or am not making progress on them. Software engineering can be like pipe fitting, where there is a blueprint; but it can also be a much more creative search for solutions like looking for a math proof, writing a screenplay, or trying to phrase a legal argument that churns up your background cycles. Without those periods I would never be able to do the best work I’ve done. There is a lot of pipe fitting in the business - and it’s fine to do only that. But it’s not some personality defect to have work thoughts kicking around in the back of your head, it’s a necessary trait in my experience for the more difficult software jobs.
- asidiali 6y ago
  Well said, totally agree. Thank you for explaining the more nuanced points here better than I could. IC-level contracting or consulting gigs are often (not always) much more numb - you’re handed a design, a user spec, maybe some existing APIs or infrastructure, and you essentially color in the lines. Other roles require much more organic composition, aka, Zero to One.
chrisweekly 6y ago
Ignoring your last sentence (which doesn't merit response) to disagree with "the type of job has little to do with [the ability to leave work at work]". Thought work is fundamentally different from physical labor. Work:life boundaries are so permeable. Any but the most ignorant, junior, "code-monkey" -type developer spends a large portion of their cognitive resources on solving problems (as opposed to strictly sitting at the keyboard writing code like a factory worker). Compartmentalization may well be a personality trait or learned skill, but setting down physical tools in the shop before commuting home is completely different from a software dev's home office and potentially round-the-clock work cycles.

andrew_ 6y ago

This is a most excellent point. I will say that movement of scope, scheduling, and the like does change during all hours of the day, and calls to the home to talk about that are common after hours.

yardie 6y ago

This is where you ignore the email until the morning. The only place where working offhours has a use is in early startups where money is tight, deadlines are short, and products are loosely defined. If you're working at a well managed company managers will nip it in the bud. Either way I'm not in college and I'm getting my 6-8 hours of sleep. If I work late I arrive late and expect no argument over it. I've only ever gotten an email like that because someone's ass was on the line for a 12am deadline. You only send an email like that because you are burning a personal favour.

asidiali 6y ago
Copying part of my reply to another comment: If my manager hits me up at 11pm asking for something, sure I can ignore him or her. Then I come in the next day, they already did the thing they asked for themselves because [insert business reason], and says “never mind”. Next time it happens, they go to the other dev who is happy to do it at 11pm. Guess who gets the promotion? Even if it’s unfair and shouldn’t happen that way - company culture is not something controlled by an contributing engineer. But I agree with your other points - a well run company will nip this in the bud! That’s exactly the point. It’s not in control of the engineer. It’s company culture. You’re right that I’d say this probably happens much more at startups vs larger companies due to the loose and fast nature.
- yardie 6y ago
  > my manager hits me up at 11pm asking for something One thing I learned about management is they are getting more than salary, usually there is a bonus or RSUs attached to everything they do. But they aren't working at 11pm for the good of the company if the good of the company isn't directly benefiting them. Keep that in mind the next time you respond to that midnight email. > they go to the other dev who is happy to do it at 11pm. Believe it or not this dev sounds like management material. That's not a compliment! If you think back to every belittling, sociopathic manager/director story you've observed or heard, these are the places they are formed. Now some managers are great leaders and you recognize why they are in that position. The majority are sycophants who kiss the right ass, by working at 11pm on a saturday.