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Ask HN: Is it possible to have a structured work day in software dev?

149 pointsby vcool07over 2 years ago
Lately, I feel exhausted with all the late night meetings thats required of me at work. Discussed it with my manager few months ago and he offered to take me off on-call rotation and put me in a leadership role. While this was good initially, lately this has come up with its own set of challenges, where in I&#x27;m required to have nightly meetings with other teams who are outside of my timezone. Since I&#x27;m in a leadership role now, my manager says its inevitable as I&#x27;ve to be present in these meetings.<p>I feel so burned out and anxious all the time, not because of overwork, but due to a lack of formal structure in my work day.<p>I&#x27;m thinking of starting out on my own someday, but I wonder, is it even realistic to have a 9-5 kind of structure in IT&#x2F;software dev field ? Whether i work for a big org &#x2F; startup &#x2F; myself, is it inevitable that I have to work round the clock and I&#x27;ve to accept it as a way of life ? Is there a sub-field in software dev where in I can login at a specific time &#x2F; logout at a specific time and not have to worry about work after I log out.<p>PS: Honestly speaking, I used to work at IT service industry not too long ago (perhaps in mid 2000s), where I was working on a boxed software. Except for some crunch time during major releases, there was no pager duty expected, the pay was average at best and work was monotonous bug fixing, but I felt much more at peace since work was always predictable most of the time. With this on-call culture thanks to the 99.99 uptime thats become the de-facto industry standard for most companies, I wonder whether such companies exist anymore !

70 comments

Rygianover 2 years ago
I work a strict 9am–6pm schedule from western Europe, and interact with both Asian and American colleagues. I simply decline all meetings that are outside of my work window, and it would probably be against the law for my management to expect me to do otherwise (&quot;right to disconnect&quot;).<p>I do know, however, that some of my colleagues in Asian countries feel an non-official pressure to accept late-evening meetings so that European and American colleagues may participate.
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bamboozledover 2 years ago
Discount everything I&#x27;m going to say if:<p>* You&#x27;re meetings go later than midnight or 1am, I think that&#x27;s unreasonable.<p>* You&#x27;re working more than 8 hours a day.<p>I also used to complain to myself about this a lot, then I became resentful and I became kind of grumpy &#x2F; surly in the meetings. I complained to my managers about it and then I realized, for them, meeting attendance was more important than anything else. So I just adapted my schedule to that aim and it was a success.<p>For me it wasn&#x27;t late night, it was early morning meetings that were a problem, I&#x27;m a night owl, I understand everyone is different, there you might like working early mornings for example.<p>Anyway I still struggle with the meetings, but I realized that I used to get up early and commute, and I also realized I have a very flexible life and I even have some of my meetings from bed if I&#x27;m extra tired, just turn off the camera.<p>After a while looked around me and saw that there are truck drivers, who drive all night, they are away from family for long periods of time. Pilots have to do all sorts of weird hours. I guess nothing is perfect, but at least once your meetings are done, you&#x27;re off to a comfortable bed.<p>TL;DR: While it seems bad, is your situation really that bad, can you somehow make it work for you? Can you take most of the day off and work evenings? Can you be more flexible yourself?
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solardevover 2 years ago
It&#x27;s definitely possible to have 9 to 5 software jobs with a good work life balance. For the last decade I&#x27;ve worked for small businesses. nonprofits, and most recently a non tech manufacturing company.<p>All had 9 to 5 schedules with no expectation that you be there outside of regular work hours unless it was a true emergency. In the last ten years, I&#x27;ve had to work emergencies and overtime maybe a total of 6 to 8 hours total, across all the jobs.<p>I think that sort of culture is easier to find if you look for smaller companies that largely work together in the same office anyway, vs huge distributed multinational organizations that are always looking for commodity labor from anywhere.<p>The kinds of companies that look for cultural fit, implicitly or explicitly, also tend to plan around this sort of thing, rather than just blindly making their employees keep irregular hours.<p>What I&#x27;m saying is...this is definitely not something you have to accept as normal. Maybe within a specific part of the industry or at a specific level of management, it&#x27;s a thing, but if you want is a software job that pays a livable wage and still lets you have a regular life outside work, that&#x27;s definitely doable. Don&#x27;t go into games, infrastructure, devops, etc. Find some business that doesn&#x27;t need round the clock presence. Many of those are software jobs in other verticals. They may pay less, but the sanity is worth it IMHO.
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bbarnover 2 years ago
Uptime rates should have no connection to your work hours.<p>99.99% uptime does not mean you need to be on a meeting every night.<p>Your manager is bad. Really bad. Becoming a manager doesn&#x27;t mean you put on some ring and now you&#x27;re in the &quot;inevitably bad club&quot;.<p>Like others have said, find a new job that respects you.
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heisenbitover 2 years ago
&gt; Since I&#x27;m in a leadership role now<p>One challenge of leadership positions is that problems get escalated to you and this comes with unplanned disruptions. If you take the attitude of the previous job that you are responsible for implementing outcomes and combine this with chaotic schedule it gets toxic. It can help to focus on taking responsibility for process and letting somewhat go of outcome. Defining and enforcing process is now more of your job and you should have or need to demand a degree of freedom here.<p>&gt; where in I&#x27;m required to have nightly meetings with other teams who are outside of my timezone<p>You may not avoid these meetings but you may be able to cut work at other times. Saying no to meetings and requests can be scary at first but you can either learn to say no or you will be stuck on this level forever. Your job is now not just to protect yourself but also your team and organization and that critically depends on saying now.
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sourcelessover 2 years ago
Sounds like you are being overworked. A 9-5 as an Eng Manager is achievable, but you might need to jump ship to find it.<p>Working late has a huge knock-on effect on your social life and ability to interact with society around you. That&#x27;s probably contributing to your burnout.<p>If there&#x27;s budget or willingness, having someone in that timezone who can perform your role for that meeting may be possible.<p>I&#x27;d be very wary of taking any regular work outside of your contracted hours unless there is a lot of $$$$ involved and your relationships can survive it.<p>You might get some mileage out of a long vacation, or agressively pruning your work hours.
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lozengeover 2 years ago
Your company is badly managed.<p>Mine also has international teams across the globe and we don&#x27;t regularly have meetings at unreasonable hours (except for employees in India)<p>This is done by not expecting managers in Europe to manage day to day work going on in Asia, etc.<p>Your company doesn&#x27;t value your well being and you should leave.
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tethaover 2 years ago
&gt; With this on-call culture thanks to the 99.99 uptime thats become the de-facto industry standard for most companies, I wonder whether such companies exist anymore !<p>A lot of companies have terrible on-call processes, bad infrastructure and not enough cost-pressure to fix the infra.<p>We do offer systems with 24&#x2F;7 99.9 uptime in SLAs - yet, people are happy to take on-call for a week. They do, because a normal week has zero, or one incidents going on out of hours. Two is considered a lot. At three interrupted sleeps, rotation is offered. At four, rotation is forced and at that point, we usually start to go through full post mortems for all pages to squash this problem.<p>On top, a long escalation at night means the person is legally not allowed to work usually until noon the next day or longer (10 - 12 hours of mandatory rest). The latter alone is a very good incentive for the company to fix technical issues or processes causing these incidents, because all of a sudden, a person pretty much isn&#x27;t working for a week. Besides them being effectively drunk after 3 interrupted sleeps, just without the fun.<p>And similarly, evening work is usually planned 1-2 weeks ahead so we can batch 2-3 hours of evening work together. The person then in turn doesn&#x27;t work the regular day.<p>With measures like that, even us as the ops-team can have normal working hours from 8-10 to 16-18 usually. Unplanned work after 20:00 is very rare.
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endymi0nover 2 years ago
Fun technical challenges.<p>Predictable, steady work schedule.<p>Nice compensation package.<p>Pick two (at most). Sometimes you‘re really lucky, but it won‘t stay forever as the organization will drift into one of the corners naturally.<p>Note it‘s okay to re-pick occasionally as sometimes you need one more than the other in life.<p>I sure did, and found some peace in this great article from NYT: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15107818" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15107818</a>
ctrwu2843over 2 years ago
Nobody is gonna give you work life balance.It&#x27;s something you have to make for yourself by setting boundaries.<p>If those boundaries aren&#x27;t compatible with your current employer find a different one.<p>On-call doesn&#x27;t have to be a nightmare either but it does mean prioritising reliability over feature work, often a be a hard sell to &quot;the business&quot; as they likely care more about revenue over your lack of sleep. Again it comes down to boundaries and sternly refusing to accrue the types of technical debt that are likely to cause issues.<p>Ultimately, you draw power from being the person with the ability to create software. It&#x27;s on you to leverage that to build the lifestyle that you desire.
janciover 2 years ago
&gt; ... I wonder, is it even realistic to have a 9-5 kind of structure in IT&#x2F;software dev field ?<p>Sure it is. The company must be small enough to not have interational clients or big enough to have dedicated support team for different timezone. But not that big to have entire dev team in different timezone you need to communicate with. Or even bigger to have also management in every time zone necessary.<p>My friend works as a dev in a big corporate software company and has a stable schedule. Not 9-5 but more like 11-7 by his own choice. He said his colleages with familly life can start at 7 and be home after 3pm.
janeeover 2 years ago
Yes! I&#x27;d say avoid:.<p>- industries that have serious consequences for errors, e.g. finance, health.<p>- high volume client facing systems, e.g. high tps b2c (think large e-commerce).<p>- companies not yet in a mature phase, e.g. 10 years or older.<p>Start there in terms of simple rules of thumb to filter out potential jobs. Then when doing interviews dig further. Lastly don&#x27;t take leadership positions.<p>In the end of the day it&#x27;s definitely possible to find something fulfilling but not all consuming, just take your time to find a place...I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s out there
dmkirwanover 2 years ago
I was going to respond saying that you should be strict about declining meeting outside of working hours and protect your time, but then I remembered that my company is not every company and this may not be supported or possible. It does sound like you are overworked and the company may be poorly managed in this regard.<p>I think your best options are to speak with your manager about it or start looking for other jobs with better work-life-balance. The companies you are looking for certainly do exist!
senzillaover 2 years ago
It is absolutely possible. Where I work, developers have no more than 4-6 hours of meetings per week!<p>We do meandering sync calls[1] for 1 hour, four times a week. Plus a weekly demo call.<p>It&#x27;s a matter of how much your management cares about developer experience and efficiency. Get another job :)<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.honeycomb.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;standup-meetings-are-dead&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.honeycomb.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;standup-meetings-are-dead&#x2F;</a>
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serial_devover 2 years ago
I honestly think the solution for your problem is much easier than you think. Find a new job. It looks like this company will always find a way to overwork you, one way or another. It&#x27;s not everywhere as toxic, so I&#x27;d start looking for something better.
heywireover 2 years ago
It is absolutely possible, you just need to find company&#x2F;team with an established product that is not trying to mimic a startup. I work 8a - 5p M-F, and have done so for over a decade.
jmfldnover 2 years ago
I don&#x27;t have it that bad compared to you but I do suffer from v complicated days.<p>* Several meetings including standup. These vary massively from low level tech discussions, planning sprint work at more of a &#x27;product&#x27; level, and some big picture company strategy type stuff. I go though lots of big context shifts basically.<p>* Ad hoc calls helping people out with problems.<p>* Mentoring<p>* Fire fighting occasional production issues.<p>* Answering questions from the wider business &#x2F; tech community.<p>* Sprint work.<p>The main issue for me is time fragmentation, all of the above can lead to a lot of context switching. My ways of coping are as follows:<p>* First thing. Write a new todo list. Catch up on lower priority slack messages, emails and so on.<p>* Decline meetings where they&#x27;re not useful.<p>* Split burden of attending certain meetings between teammates eg. we don&#x27;t all have to be at everything.<p>* Mute Slack and work for 30 minute periods. Focus on one thing. Do not multi task. After that period, see if there&#x27;s anything important to reply to. Repeat.<p>* Try to do the hardest earlier in the day. Admin and lower complexity tasks are best left to end of the day.<p>This is just what works for me, hope some of it is useful. I frequently don&#x27;t do all of this. It&#x27;s just an ideal that I try to strive towards however imperfectly. I&#x27;m OK with failure and I don&#x27;t expect to ever really nail this. That&#x27;s just another source of stress. A structure with rules really helps lower the cognitive burden for me though.
another-daveover 2 years ago
Hold on, so you raised to your manager that you&#x27;re getting burnt out my late night meetings &amp; his solution was to move you to a role where late night meetings are inevitable?<p>To be honest, he doesn&#x27;t sound very good — I&#x27;d either try to change manager or change company.<p>To your wider point — there are still companies that have a more traditional dev vs ops&#x2F;sysadmin separation. Especially bigger, more traditional businesses (non tech start-ups) that still do their own software dev in-house.<p>Otherwise, you could get a role where the quality of tooling &amp; support while on call is better. There&#x27;s a difference being 1st line support in a place where things are always on fire and being 3rd line support in a place where the only time you&#x27;re getting a call is once in a blue moon and there&#x27;s a postmortem afterwards to work out how it could&#x27;ve been prevented.
quickthrower2over 2 years ago
I have only ever done sane hours. No oncall or late nights as the normal. You need a company that is not too international and has good ops and treats root causes of outages not just symptoms.<p>Coincidentally I have zero experience with microservices. Might be just a coincidence.
gherkinnnover 2 years ago
Quit as soon as you can. Overworking yourself for an employer who clearly doesn’t respect your time is not worth it.<p>At worst you’ll carry around the scars of burning out for the rest if your life.<p>And yes, it is possible to work reasonable hours. Not only that, but it should be the default.
codingdaveover 2 years ago
&gt; is it even realistic to have a 9-5 kind of structure<p>Yes, but it is worth nothing that is not the same question as to whether you can have a structured work day. I work in about 4 short shifts: A couple hours before my family wakes up, a few hours after kid get to school until our daily standup (which is at my lunch time due to time zones), a couple hours after lunch until kids get home, and a brief check-in before bed to see what my westernmost colleagues have done and review their PRs.<p>So I work 8 hours a day, structured, but spread over about 14 hours. And actually spend more time with my family than I would working &quot;9-5&quot; because I structure my times off when they are around.
karaterobotover 2 years ago
It&#x27;s funny to me that you took joining leadership as a path to <i>less</i> meetings!<p>The only time I worked stupid hours in my career was in a director role: I was in the office at 7:30, left no earlier than 6:30 (usually drove people home after that!), and got very friendly with the weekend cleaning staff because I was in there 2 weekends a month, minimum. I was doing at least 4 hours of meetings a day, and then trying to get a full day of work done on top of that. Forget that noise. I quit and went back to IC, where your problems are your problems, and other people&#x27;s problems are (mostly) their problems.
bpicoloover 2 years ago
Medium sized companies (100-300 engineers) usually have really excellent work life balance in my experience. Remote work has made meetings a bit trickier - try to find an employer who aims to have folk in nearby timezones.<p>This is definitely possible, though.<p>Regarding on-call: Work for internal tools teams at companies that aren&#x27;t really worldwide. Internal tools teams, either developer or business facing, usually don&#x27;t have much in terms of off-hours on-call. On-call expectations are determined more by the product you&#x27;re delivering than the company culture.
f6vover 2 years ago
&gt; is it even realistic to have a 9-5 kind of structure in IT&#x2F;software dev field<p>Absolutely, at least in Europe. Not everywhere, be wary of “we’re family” and “hustle” types.
ElevenLatheover 2 years ago
I&#x27;ve had weird hours and days my whole career, but have always pushed back on unpaid overtime (and it all is when they classify you as exempt&#x2F;salaried) including uncompensated on-call.<p>IMO it&#x27;s possible to limit your hours, though you might have to work odd ones.<p>The only way to meaningfully have control over your schedule is to be independently wealthy, or to live in an advanced social democracy, which amounts to the same thing.
chadcmulliganover 2 years ago
Just say no, it&#x27;s not necessary, some companies are just bad, find a new one. I remember an interview I went to, everyone looked really tired, they had to get some feed from half the world a way in South Africa, in real time. Fair enough I thought, so what sort of hours are we talking - they couldn&#x27;t, or wouldn&#x27;t, give me an answer. I declined. Some companies are just bad, find a new one.
inglorover 2 years ago
I&#x27;m in a large corporate (Microsoft) and in my new&#x27;ish team (under Office) we have very few meetings (compared to before, approx 1h a day) and no late-night ones.<p>It really depends on what you do - one of the reasons I&#x27;m an IC and not a manager is to reduce the number of meetings (when I managed, even at startups it was always a lot of meetings which were needed&#x2F;required).
fhd2over 2 years ago
Lots of people here have been saying that you should find a new job, which is probably not bad advise, but I do think you could also try to insist on boundaries more. If you don&#x27;t set any, people won&#x27;t respect them - it&#x27;s often that simple.<p>You can compromise and agree on &quot;core hours&quot; where you&#x27;ll always make yourself available, even if that&#x27;s in the evening, as long as you can arrange for it. The company can compromise and adopt a more async style of communication (I&#x27;ve established that several times both in leadership and consulting roles - it works, you just need to know how to talk to C levels in their language.)<p>You could even give your leadership some weeks to come up with a solution, telling them your requirements (along with things you could compromise on). If they truly expect you to be available 24&#x2F;7 - it&#x27;d be surprised, but that&#x27;s clearly not a good place to work then. From my experience, this is the exception, not the rule.
lerosover 2 years ago
What you are experiencing is not normal development culture. It is common, yes, but normal or healthy.<p>It sounds like you&#x27;re working with a bunch of workaholics who don&#x27;t mind working outside normal hours and built a company culture around that expectation.<p>I work with colleagues around the world and we stay disciplined within good parts of the day and using async communication for everything else. It&#x27;s not hard to do at all, but it does mean the workaholic upper management folks need to exercise self restraint and patience when scheduling meetings.<p>You can try setting more strict boundaries for your work hours. It may or may not work. You might be seen as lazy or not a team player. In that case, the honest truth is that you&#x27;re in a toxic workplace.
marcinzmover 2 years ago
My current company has teams in NA and EU but they tries to avoid having many meetings across large time zone differences. Even then there are set hours designated for it which keep the time reasonable for everyone. My team is pretty much 9-5 in their time zone (+&#x2F;- 2 hours per individual preference) and on-call is fairly rare (both in how often you&#x27;re on call as it&#x27;s department level and how often an actual alert goes off). The company generally values WLB although I do now some teams are less good about it.<p>To answer you question. Interviews are a two way street and it&#x27;s on you to ask questions to figure out the WLB of the team. Don&#x27;t ask &quot;how is the WLB&quot; but ask specific questions such as &quot;how many time the last month were there meetings after 5pm&quot; or &quot;how often did pages go off the last few months and what is the rotation schedule.&quot;
plaguepilledover 2 years ago
Structure and boundaries in a workday is less a function of the industry and more of manager competency. Don&#x27;t let anyone tell you otherwise, I&#x27;ve seen both sides of the coin.<p>Preemptive reply: yes, it also applies to 100% uptime services. The trick is to have redundancy at all stages - which is what managers are paid to ensure.
SXXover 2 years ago
I&#x27;ll be completely honest: I work at small indie game dev studio with friends. This means we have to crunch for release, work every day and stay at night sometimes. Nobody force me to do it, but it happens. I love this job, but working like that is bad for long-term performance and will inevitable cause burnout.<p>As others have said you are being overworked by your employeer. It&#x27;s not only mean they dont care about your health, but also it means their processes are bad exactly because company itself will only lose in the end: quality will drop, productivity will sink and people will leave.<p>As about working on your own be it freelance or starting your own company: this way you will only have to work much more. So far I haven&#x27;t seen any single successful entrepreneur or founder who wasn&#x27;t working 12 hours a day for at least several years before they get anywhere.
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orzigover 2 years ago
An assumption I bring it to most questions like this:<p>The world, including the tech world, is much bigger than you think.<p>Though I have only seen a tiny fraction of it myself, here’s where I’ve had reliably contained workdays: 1) Machine learning systems for internal Ops processes, we technically had on call rotation but I never heard of anyone being paged at a terrible hour 2) Data engineering for strategic dashboards, where “I will fix it when I get in tomorrow“ is totally fine 3) A cross geography team who is clients are in my time zone, which set the norm that the other people had to shift their working hours instead (I’m not saying that this is globally optimal, but they knew what they were signing up for, and I can be confident this pattern will persist)<p>Each has their own trade-offs, but my point is that you can find options anywhere along some dimension if you keep looking
lawnover 2 years ago
I&#x27;ve had a single late night meeting in my 7 year career, so yes it&#x27;s absolutely possible.<p>But, you may need to change job.
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noodleover 2 years ago
&gt; I&#x27;m thinking of starting out on my own someday, but I wonder, is it even realistic to have a 9-5 kind of structure in IT&#x2F;software dev field ?<p>Yes. I&#x27;ve done it before, and am doing it now. Including at startups. It&#x27;s about intentionally setting your own boundaries and being firm on them.<p>Every job in every industry will ask you at some point to give more than is required, and it&#x27;s up to you to set the boundaries on when and how you say yes and no to these types of requests. My sister works in a non-technical industry and the text of your post could be something she&#x27;s said to me in the past if you just replace &quot;IT&#x2F;software&quot; with her industry. And again, her issues are all caused by simply saying yes to everything asked of her without any boundaries.
lm28469over 2 years ago
Find a smaller company, all my friends are either in big tech companies or small tech startups, they all complain about working hours, stress, being on call, &amp;c. I earn 30% less but I have none of that bs, very chill 9-5, no techbro bs, no investors to please
edemover 2 years ago
Become a contractor. The first thing I tell everybody is &quot;my time, my hardware, my office&quot; and if they don&#x27;t like it i move to the next one. right now i work on an MVP in q4 and i have a 5 min long standup every day and 2 1 hour meetings weekly.
spiffytechover 2 years ago
This is definitely possible.<p>I&#x27;ve very rarely had after-hours meetings because work was handled by colocated teammates, or the company only had one office. If chatting with another timezone was needed at all, it was async, or US cross-coast calls in the morning during business hours.<p>On-call is harder to avoid. It&#x27;s hard to escape being chained to the pager, but even so the actual time spend responding to pages should be low. And I&#x27;ve had a number of jobs that didn&#x27;t come with pager rotation at all.<p>My on call pages mostly looked like &quot;get paged to reboot this thing. 15 minutes 1-3x &#x2F; week.&quot;<p>With a single notable exception, my jobs have kept the majority or entirety of their work inside 9-6.
shultaysover 2 years ago
What kind of timezones are we talking about here? Unless your partner is on the other side of the globe, ie 12 hours time difference, you should be able to find a reasonable time for both of you by shifting your work hours a little for the meeting day. Even a 9 hours difference means that one side can have it on 8:00 - 9:00 while other one is 17:00 - 18:00.<p>Even at 12h difference, otherside can have it on 20:00 - 21:00 (or one hour earlier if you are ok with 07:00 - 08:00) which I wouldn&#x27;t call late night<p>A late night meeting implies the other side is not having a similar compromise.
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weitzjover 2 years ago
Sure. Get a job at an insurance or a bank
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f0e4c2f7over 2 years ago
There is enough demand for tech workers that you can more or less tune these kinds of things.<p>I would suggest talking with a recruiter about what you want and they&#x27;ll probably come back with it in short order.<p>Lots of tech jobs with no overtime or OnCall.<p>Management tends to be a little different there. If you want to work fewer hours I would suggest technical roles over management roles.<p>For starting your own company many people find they work quite a lot. I&#x27;ve met people who run fairly casual side businesses too though so I won&#x27;t say it&#x27;s completely inevitable.
sidllsover 2 years ago
High availability doesn’t require constant in-person vigilance. And on-call rotations should be brief: 1-2 weeks every quarter or so for any reasonably sized team. Even that is objectionable: the company should have dedicated SRE staff that do that work.<p>9-5 is possible even at really good paying tech companies. Your manager&#x2F;org just sounds to be in quite a poor state. I’d suggest looking elsewhere or, if you’re bold, looking at how things can be improved and either spearheading that change possible or making recommendations for it
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mschuster91over 2 years ago
&gt; Is there a sub-field in software dev where in I can login at a specific time &#x2F; logout at a specific time and not have to worry about work after I log out.<p>Yes: public service. At least in Western-ish countries, government employees are among the best protected classes regarding worker rights, however you <i>will</i> suffer hard hits in payment compared to FAANG and friends, and bureaucracy may make your work life hell in another way - think like waiting weeks to get access rights to a file server or your building keys.
jll29over 2 years ago
Startup land is most likely to burn you out with its relentless 80+ weeks (but depends on the you live - there are cultural differences).<p>But you could work as a freelancer&#x2F;contractor or be employed for a few years at a slower-paced show e.g. a gov agency. Once you get bored by it, and after you have had time to recover from burn out, and have had the chance to spend more time with the family, you can always change pace again.<p>I would not agree to any contract with a pager-duty clause, personally, apart way back when I worked as a paramedic.
simonhampover 2 years ago
Working crazy should be (the very rare!) exception and not the norm.<p>Not only does it sound poorly managed, it also sounds like people are focusing patching over problems, treating the symptoms instead of the cause.<p>If you can identify root cause of why teams need so many meetings at unusual times and propose alternatives that mean you don&#x27;t suffer, do it.<p>If your suggestions are ignored or worse, it&#x27;s probably time to leave and find yourself a company that gives a damn about people.
satisficeover 2 years ago
“Starting out on your own” is not a way to work less, but you have a lot more control. To avoid burnout, work must be meaningful and it must be within your reasonable control.<p>I have that as an independent, yet I don’t have any fixed schedule and I basically work every day. (I work three to six hours a day in a mode that feels like work.)<p>Some of my work is coding or coding-like activity. I also teach, which does have a fixed schedule when underway.
discordanceover 2 years ago
It’s more likely in large orgs. I work at a large one and my group consists of 800 people spread across the world. A lot of us got stressed out and burned out due to time zone spread in the pandemic.<p>Our LT took the feedback and we have since regionalized the teams so people don’t work too far out of their time zone.<p>If that’s not possible, perhaps find somewhere else that works in one time zone.
dieselgateover 2 years ago
There&#x27;re some good comments on this thread.<p>This seems like an issue with the Org given the information posted, but it also seems like you have a somewhat supportive manager. There is a lot of merit for considering finding a new role or a more &quot;temporally normal&quot; Org.<p>If your goal is to only work a 9-5 schedule starting your own company may not be the best option, but YMMV.<p>Good luck!
Hamukoover 2 years ago
I very rarely have late meetings, so I can usually keep to about a 8-16 schedule as a senior developer. I even usually manage to have lunch at the same time day-to-day. I guess it helps that almost all of our developers are in the same timezone as I am, and the few that aren&#x27;t, are usually just a couple of hours off.
Genghis_9000over 2 years ago
Yes. I thought this was another &quot;I have OCD and can only program if I sit at the computer in a 5 hour session&quot; thread, but it seems you just have a job without a standard 9-5 schedule. Most software engineering jobs are 9-5, perhaps that changed with startup culture but it certainly hasn&#x27;t gone away.
ss108over 2 years ago
I used to have an extremely regular schedule working at very small startups. I feel like most people in this field do have pretty standard schedules.<p>I have to say, it sounds like you do have structure and regularity--you just have regularly structured meetings outside of 9-6 hours. Not too bad as long as predictable.
PeterStuerover 2 years ago
&quot;Is it even realistic to have a 9-5 kind of structure in IT&#x2F;software dev field?&quot;<p>Yes, it is even the norm outside of the more exploitative environments. Most stable are the in-house dev teams in non-IT industries like financial services, retail, logistics etc.
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ravenstineover 2 years ago
Absolutely, but if that&#x27;s what you want then why have you allowed yourself to take a leadership role? That&#x27;s completely antithetical to not wanting late night meetings and even structured 9-5 days.
aprdmover 2 years ago
I’ve been 9-5 pretty much my Whole 15 years career , including with teams across multiple time zones . For the latter there was the odd meeting but it was very rare. Try to push for more async communications
stillworksover 2 years ago
Have a few questions, and some ideas.. may or may not help :) But definitely some food for thought and introspection.<p><pre><code> Lately, I feel exhausted with all the late night meetings thats required of me at work </code></pre> How long has this been going ? If it has been a couple months then I would recommend waiting it out tbh. In my experience, ideally the anxiety levels eventually fall off in <i>roughly</i> logarithmic decay ie the worst bits are in the beginning and after that it may be possible to find a structure&#x2F;pattern to feel comfortable in (or another very highly likely outcome is that the frog will get boiled... ie you will decide to leave)<p>Do these meetings result in some action items at the end ?<p>If every single one of these meetings result in action items, different ones each time ? Then something is fundamentally wrong (either in the process, or in the software solution or both) that needs fixing and it needs to be established how that can be fixed AND why it has NOT been fixed as yet ? That is where your leadership role will come in handy.<p><pre><code> I feel so burned out and anxious all the time, not because of overwork, but due to a lack of formal structure in my work day. </code></pre> If you are in a leadership role then I am guessing you are not required to <i>deliver story points by writing code</i> ? The only other formal structure outside of coding, reviewing, merging, testing cycle is sadly... meetings. (Takes me back to my earlier question, are meetings resulting in action items ?)<p><pre><code> I&#x27;m thinking of starting out on my own someday </code></pre> Even that path is not guaranteed to bring structure, unless <i>when Gavin Belson calls and you decide to take the 10 million straight away and reject Peter Gregory&#x27;s counter</i> (sorry, that is a Silicon Valley S1, E1 reference) and that depends on if you have an idea&#x2F;MVP worth that bidding... otherwise observing other founders I know personally, they are in for a marathon (possibly triathlon) and the returns&#x2F;pay-off is a long way in the future and structure not guaranteed.<p><pre><code> and work was monotonous bug fixing, but I felt much more at peace since work was always predictable most of the time </code></pre> But the pay was average at best ! No one wants that tbh.<p>I would suggest that try and find out where the inefficiencies are which require these meetings (besides the timezone differences) and use your leadership role to work towards fixing those. If however it is a dead-zone then work towards establishing that is indeed a dead-zone and then leave... don&#x27;t take an uninformed terminal decision.
ricardobayesover 2 years ago
Any company that produces something tangible and uses software in it mostly will have a strict 9-5 schedule. Think car software development, or similar.
spaetzleesserover 2 years ago
There are plenty of jobs with a regular workday. Stay away from operations&#x2F;on-call and avoid companies with offshoring in other time zones.
mklepaczewskiover 2 years ago
tl;dr 95% yes, 5% no.<p>I&#x27;m a solo freelancer and I work from 8am till 3:30pm. However, there are times when things need to be done during late night hours. This happens maybe once a month and I don&#x27;t complain - this is a bonus of working with me. When my client starts to abuse my flexibility I charge 2x&#x2F;3x hourly rate for the tasks done outside my regular work schedule. This quickly verifies how important these tasks really are - sometimes clients indeed pay extra without fuss, at other times the &quot;unacceptable 3 min downtime at 8am&quot; becomes acceptable to them ;-). Share the pain with them.
lysecretover 2 years ago
Might be interesting to look at finance &#x2F; trading related things since they have a pretty strict trading day (I think).
treeman79over 2 years ago
Say no. Find a new job if they object.<p>I’ve done the endless late night meetings a few times in career. It always leads to burnout.
nottorpover 2 years ago
Time to jump jobs until you find an org that relies more on async comms than scheduled meetings...
nathiasover 2 years ago
If &#x27;emergency&#x27; is the default way of working leave, there are no justification for that.
hkonover 2 years ago
Yes, it starts with the word no.
mousetreeover 2 years ago
Have you tried setting clear boundaries? Often this is all that&#x27;s required.
DeathArrowover 2 years ago
I do development and software architecture and I work 8 hours &#x2F; day.
coffeeprocessorover 2 years ago
It is definitely possible, but it depends on what you do, on your company culture, on the legal framework, and how easy it is to replace you. You can do one of three things:<p>1) Endure in your current position, not making any changes, and live with it. 2) Leave and find something else. 3) Try to change things in the company you are currently working. If that does not work, see 1 or 2.<p>Here&#x27;s how I do option 3:<p>I have, from day one, always recorded my work time and kept a kind of diary in my own independent system. Keeping an independent record is valuable. Without data, there is no argument in negotiations (setting boundaries, salary, company paying courses or books...). Also track whenever you need to work on some completely new topic.<p>The employer can of course say that your data may be untrustworthy. Such responses try to divert your attention and keep you from recording. You should still do it. Aim for 5 minutes, possibly 10, every other day, where you record what you did. Aim for another 20 minutes each week (I use saturday or sunday) to aggregate your findings (weekly works well for me).<p>In any negotiation, you should bring up your conclusions. They might &quot;performance evaluate&quot; you, you will professionally provide them with feedback of substance. And this is where you can set boundaries, ask for books, courses, more salary and more. Provide a perspective backed by your data.* If they grant you something, ask &quot;can I have that in writing?&quot; if it is appropriate.<p>After you have done this once or twice, you can gauge whether it is a lost cause (they just do not care — then consider, strongly, to find something else) or if you helped your situation.<p>For me, it worked very well. I have no company phone. I am not working on call. Meetings are scheduled regularly, during my work hours, which are an established boundary (with some leeway though). My weekends and my evenings are sacred.<p>*) Here are some tips:<p>1) Be aware that managers wish their rear ends covered. 2) Do not engage in blatant, harsh criticism. Phrase it like suggestions: &quot;we might do better if we could somehow...&quot; or &quot;we could prevent situations like this in the future if we...&quot;. 3) Never join into ad-hominem talk. Even if you share your co-workers or manager&#x27;s opinion when they riff on somebody, criticize situations, not people. 4) Never falsify your own records (never lie to them when presenting your conclusions); if trust in your data is actively destroyed by you, there is no coming back. 5) If someone does something well, do say so. If things go well, say so. &quot;I have noticed that X does not happen any more, it&#x27;s great!&quot; 6) It is a normal side effect that you might actually become interested in your company&#x27;s well-being if you do the above. You are becoming somebody they wish to keep. 7) YOUR BOSS IS NOT YOUR FRIEND. NEITHER ARE YOUR CO-WORKERS. Always be aware of that.<p>These are my experiences. They might not work for you, and if so, I am sorry.<p>Best of luck to you!
ipaddrover 2 years ago
Time to leave Amazon
throwaway22032over 2 years ago
I have never worked outside of office hours.
drakonkaover 2 years ago
I work at a distributed company with teammates all over the world and the founders in the US, while I&#x27;m in Europe. My meetings are often in the late afternoon or evening for this reason, which I&#x27;ve grown to really enjoy. Here&#x27;s what I find helps:<p>* As a company, we&#x27;ve largely leaned into asynchronous communication and many&#x2F;most things just don&#x27;t need a meeting.<p>* The company and team are aware that we have people everywhere, and try to find reasonable hours for meetings. Next week, a meeting ending at 18.30 my time is the latest meeting I have. Nobody expects me to be present for very late meetings in my time zone (though if it was unavoidable I would still join).<p>* I try to bundle my meetings on the same day. I&#x27;d rather have a few meetings back to back that go later rather than have meetings in the afternoon&#x2F;evening on every day of the week. This works for me for early meetings as well, when they do come up: I just prefer to have as many days as possible completely meeting-free. If a new mandatory recurring meeting is scheduled on one of my &quot;meeting-free&quot; days, I see if I can reshuffle my calendar to bring those blocks of meetings together again. Because there are not many recurring meetings, this is often possible.<p>* I&#x27;ve marked &quot;Ideal meeting hours&quot; in my calendar on my three &quot;meeting-preferred&quot; days, and those meeting hours go from later afternoon to evening in my time zone. This allows my teammates to schedule impromptu meetings on days that still suit me best (whenever possible, which is often).<p>* I think of my morning-early afternoon hours as my focused work hours because I rarely have meetings then, and accept that late afternoons are likely to be more hand-wavy and talky. This also allows me to mentally prepare for synchronous interaction in advance and not feel like I&#x27;m just hopping in and out of meetings all the time. On days when I have evening meetings coming up, I&#x27;ve learned to be OK with starting a bit later or taking a longer lunch. My day is simply offset to accommodate for the meeting times, not extended (at least that&#x27;s the attempt, I&#x27;m not always successful with this).<p>* I make it very clear to my manager that I like minimizing meetings and having more time for focused work, and prefer async communication. Some people are just more into meetings and feel that seeing someone face to face works best for them, and I make it clear that while of course I&#x27;ll attend whatever meetings are needed, I am not one of those people who ever _prefers_ a meeting over other options.<p>I realize some or all of the above could be more complicated in a manager position, but in a well set up distributed team I think it should be manageable to avoid burning out both ICs and managers like this.
scarface74over 2 years ago
Work for the government.