I've noticed from reading Reddit and HN threads that there seems to be a <i>lot</i> of variation in how many hours of "actual work" SWEs do at "full-time" jobs. What's the best way to determine--before I accept a job offer--roughly how many hours of actual work per week it would require?<p>One thought I've had is to ask questions during my interviews that would reveal that information (like, "Is there an expectation here to work a set schedule? Or is the focus on getting the work done?", or "How many hours of sleep do you get?", or maybe just directly asking, "What does your daily schedule look like? How do you determine your work schedule? How do you determine when your workday is done?"), but I'm not sure how to best read between the lines of whatever answer I get back, as I suspect that at the workplaces where people work a lot, they may feel pressure to not to talk too much about it. But maybe there's a set of questions I could ask for which the set of answers I get back from employees would sufficiently correlate with their weekly-hours-of-actual-work to allow me to come to an accurate estimate, even if the answer to any one particular question wasn't enough to come up with an accurate estimate(?).<p>Another thought I've had is to check websites where people can leave reviews of their company, but my impression is that at bigger companies there can be a lot of variation across different teams, and so how could I tell what the expectations would be for the particular team I'd end up on?<p>If there are other threads where this topic has been discussed, I'd appreciate being pointed to them.<p>[Full disclosure: I've also just posted this question on Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/y9x2xx/how_to_tell_how_many_hours_of_actual_work_a_job/]
Most places will tell you 40 hours a week, but in reality if you want to move up you gotta be the person that puts out fires and is available on call to fix shit when it breaks out of the blue.<p>There’s some companies that have solid process and don’t require more than 40 hours a week with the ability to advance, unfortunately most companies aren’t like that.<p>One mistake I’ve made that I won’t in the future is to stick my nose and fix things that aren’t really my responsibility. There’s a fine line to walk between revealing your other strengths where you can help other teams, but more often than not you end up with more responsibility and doing 2-3 other peoples work.<p>You have to be careful getting involved in other departments even though you can do it better than those employees and can fix urgent problems. You get stuck with more permanent responsibilities that weren’t part of your main job duties.