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I don’t know about Facebook, but my friends at Google seem to have terrible work life balance. Seems like they only get a breather when they’re between projects

I don’t know about Facebook, but my friends at Google seem to have terrible work life balance. Seems like they only get a breather when they’re between projects.

nostrademons 5y ago
Google in general has pretty good work/life balance. I think the challenge is that you're responsible for launching on a feature team at Google, and the lead up to a launch has a ton of work that needs to be done often under tight deadline pressure, plus the codebase is crazy complex. If you're a self-motivated, detail-oriented, slightly obsessive individual of the type Google loves to hire, you're not going to rest until it's all done. Infrastructure/logging/analysis/reliability teams have it much better at Google, in terms of work-life balance, but the tradeoff is that it's harder to justify your impact when it comes to promotion time.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  This, I've basically never felt external pressure from management or deadlines in my job. I have however, on more than one occasion, found myself up far too late (or in the pre-pandemic times having nearly missed the last bus home) because I just want to figure out what is causing this damn bug. It could wait until tomorrow, no one would care if I waited until tomorrow, there is no pressure for me to fix it today. But I want to solve the problem.
  - pram 5y ago
    Yeah same. Once I’m on a certain train of thought I can’t stop. Those are the days where I have 5am commits because I never went to bed lol No one is demanding I do that though. They’d probably think I’m crazy tbh
    - lostcolony 5y ago
      Crazy? Maybe. Shooting yourself in the foot? Definitely. The number of times I stepped away from a problem after hammering at it for a couple of hours, took a break, got some sleep, and came back to it and solved it in < 30 minutes is...solidly in the double digits by this point. You may find yourself better served forcing yourself to step away; you may find you get an answer with less work, and take better care of yourself.

I don’t know about Facebook, but my friends at Google seem to have terrible work life balance. Seems like they only get a breather when they’re between projects.

nostrademons 5y ago

Google in general has pretty good work/life balance. I think the challenge is that you're responsible for launching on a feature team at Google, and the lead up to a launch has a ton of work that needs to be done often under tight deadline pressure, plus the codebase is crazy complex. If you're a self-motivated, detail-oriented, slightly obsessive individual of the type Google loves to hire, you're not going to rest until it's all done. Infrastructure/logging/analysis/reliability teams have it much better at Google, in terms of work-life balance, but the tradeoff is that it's harder to justify your impact when it comes to promotion time.

joshuamorton 5y ago
This, I've basically never felt external pressure from management or deadlines in my job. I have however, on more than one occasion, found myself up far too late (or in the pre-pandemic times having nearly missed the last bus home) because I just want to figure out what is causing this damn bug. It could wait until tomorrow, no one would care if I waited until tomorrow, there is no pressure for me to fix it today. But I want to solve the problem.
- pram 5y ago
  Yeah same. Once I’m on a certain train of thought I can’t stop. Those are the days where I have 5am commits because I never went to bed lol No one is demanding I do that though. They’d probably think I’m crazy tbh
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    Crazy? Maybe. Shooting yourself in the foot? Definitely. The number of times I stepped away from a problem after hammering at it for a couple of hours, took a break, got some sleep, and came back to it and solved it in < 30 minutes is...solidly in the double digits by this point. You may find yourself better served forcing yourself to step away; you may find you get an answer with less work, and take better care of yourself.