This is one of the questions you should ask during your interviews. The smaller the startup, the less likely they are to have a good work/life balance, and the

This is one of the questions you should ask during your interviews. The smaller the startup, the less likely they are to have a good work/life balance, and the larger the company the more likely you are to have a good work/life balance. The sad part is that overtime is not really necessary. Outside of emergencies ("the DB is down!"), engineers shouldn't ever really have to work more than 40-50 hours per week. The key is having a good medium-term (or long-term) vision and figuring out the milestones you need to hit to get there. Most companies where I have been expected to put in more than a 9-5 are companies that have zero idea what they're going to be doing three months from now. That's a huge problem. I firmly believe that if you can plan ahead -- even tentatively! -- you can avoid overtime and focus on the most important things. Let's say you're a company that delivers custom guitars. You started off only in the Minneapolis, MN area because that's where you're headquartered. Now you want to expand into New York City. NYC is your make-or-break market. If you can make it in NYC, you can make it anywhere. So what do you do? Do you put in 80 hour weeks to get to NYC? No, what you do is you look at your current capabilities and you compare that against what you need to do to be successful in NYC. Anything that doesn't get you closer to NYC, you cut from the roadmap. That doesn't mean you never do it, but it means you don't do it now. And now you're able to measure velocity! If you recall from physics class, velocity = speed + direction). It's not about just going fast, it's about going fast in the right direction. In other words, if you're working on something that isn't getting you closer to NYC, then you may be working fast, but you're not going in the right direction! Having a clear north star and a clear set of priorities is the key to ensuring good work/life balance. The reason that bigger companies have a better work/life balance is because they have more resources! More resources to spread out to hit ALL of the goals that they want to do. But smaller companies struggle because they have limited resources when it seems like they need to accomplish everything. It's a hard, hard line to walk. But it's possible. There are a lot of companies that move fast and grow fast and have a good work/life balance. So don't give up. Back to my first sentence: you should ask about this in your interviews, toward the final stages. "How many hours a week do you work? How far out is your roadmap? What is the biggest thing you need to accomplish in the next six months? How often do you work on things that aren't related to that?" My two cents? There's always more work tomorrow. It doesn't matter how much you get done today, there's always going to be another pile of work tomorrow. So find a place that recognizes that and prioritizes people as people instead of as cattle. Good luck.