This has been my experience as well. Nowadays I work hard only while most of the following are true: - I'm making top dollar (good salary + equity value is high) - Work is interesting (something new to learn, or challenging, or both) - My home life is not going great (there are ups and downs, and working hard during the downs is a pretty decent way of coping)
I absolutely do not work hard if any one of the following is true: - Project Manager is applying pressure. - People who do not deliver value have been promoted over me. - Manager/Technical leadership has repeatedly ignored my advice and leanded the team in hot water (cutting corners to make arbitrary timelines, only to incur high support costs or maintenance costs later) - Performance Management is not occurring at the company (underperformers are not thrown out, or, worse, promoted). - Company is not doing well (equity value is down). - Salary has not kept pace with market (i.e., nothing more than 3-4% raises per year). - There is an over-reliance on junior people and they start calling the shots, thereby making my hard-won experience useless to the team.
I work for a company belonging to Accenture.
I can only agree. Shareholders get +10%. Employees get nil.
It is expected that we do at least 15 - 25% overtime without compensation. Project manager promises everything the client asks for. Even if they know we cannot in any universe deliver this without massive overtime. At the same time they introduce new mandatory processes to follow costing additional time.
Performance management is a joke. Employee development non existent. Promotion and raises have nothing to do with performance. If managing directors do not like you, you are out of luck as they ultimately decided on your salary, promotion and bonuses.
I am still there because I can only switch jobs after Sept 2021 for private reasons.
After that it is jobhunting season.
If anyone is of the opinion that you do not deserve adequate pay, can be bullied by project managers or others - do yourself a favor and look for another company that does value you.
Large consulting firms seems to operate this way, being basically a pyramid with endless layers of non-programming "Enterprise Architect Solution Expert". I've had folks tell me explicitly when joining these firms post-grad that their goal was not to code in two years.
I was briefly at an Indian subsidiary of EY(those days, the Big 5 weren’t allowed to operate by themselves without partnering with a local chartered accounting firm) because only certain firms could do bank audits and I wanted the experience at one if the Big 5. KPMG was known for its entertainment industry accounts. I picked E&Y for manufacturing and I think I ended up with an international cement conglomerate account. The Big 5 clearly decided who gets what industry. They operate like a cartel. They also had consulting divisions. AA after Enron simply focused solely on consulting and IT.
They are all ‘special’ kinds of hell. Just different flavors. AA/Enron scandal was a big deal and was the only talk for days and days and days.
Slightly dated.. 2018: https://riskmagazine.nl/article/2018-03-19-how-the-big-five-...
[..] Andersen was responsible for checking the accounting of energy company Enron. The energy company went down with great noise because of shoddy accounting. Trouble came for Andersen as they had approved this accounting. After learning the Securities and Exchange Commission had begun an investigation of Enron’s accounting, orders were given at Andersen to destroy thousands of documents and e-mail messages. These illegal acts resulted in a conviction, which made it impossible to act as a public accountant for American stock exchange funds. Andersen decided to hand in its licenses before the SEC would withdraw them.[..]
[..] On appeal for the destruction of the files, Andersen was acquitted and there was no formal objection to the continuation of the audit practice. However, almost all employees had left due to the obscure practices. The practice had changed hands and the name would always be linked to this scandal. The few employees that stayed, worked on litigation arising from past audits, as well as pension issues and few other matters. Also there still is another firm which reminds us of the existence Andersen, namely Accenture. Accenture started off as the consultancy part of Andersen, which split off just in time, before the scandal happened.[..]
AC paid AA 15% of its profits every year. But AC was growing far faster than AA, so AA started growing another consulting arm, which was against the contract.
AC partners claimed contractual breach, and as part of the separation settlement had to change their name and distance themselves from the brand.
This was lucky given what happened with AA’s reputation later.
(Source: I worked there in that time period)
The AC project (which ran about 93-97) went kinda rogue, the bank management lost control of the situation. The AC project managers kept bringing in more AC consultants and told the bank management not to worry, everything was good. They were heavily customizing a non-y2k version of the vendor's software, and the vendor warned project management that they were customizing this in ways that would prevent future support and patches, but AC project management covered this up.
Eventually the vendor contacted the bank CEO directly and said "what are you going to do about the y2k issue, we are concerned". CEO: "What y2k issue?"
The bank had to go live with what they had, fire and blacklist AC and burn tens of millions of $$ to re-start the project to deliver exactly the same thing, but using a y2k-compliant version as a starting point, and removing as much customization as possible so they could take future vendor patches.
Not that Accenture doesn't have enough scandals on their own. So they are by far not the clean guys in this tale.
I remember the German "Berateraffäre" just to state one example.
Is this still a thing as a developer in the western world?
If any of my managers proposed this, I would laugh, then say "ah wait, you're serious?", and then laugh some more.
> Exempt employees stand in contrast to non-exempt employees, which are paid minimum wage and overtime above the standard 40-hour workweek.
Wow if I had heard this in a random bar discussion I would called it complete and utter bullshit. The more I read HN the more it feels like being a worker in the US is like riding a horse through the wild west; anything can happen.
In my country the overtime pay is mandatory by law and it is also constrained to be a minimum of 75% more than the normal wage.
Btw it is also mandatory to enjoy your (minimum of) 23 days of holidays per year; no exchanging for other perks or money, like some comment mentions above.
But for any rolling period of x timeunits (don't want to be too specific obviously) I have a specific amount of hours of overtime that the company doesn't need to compensate in free time. In my case this is ~20% of my regular time in ever rolling period.
But up to a maximum amount of overtime hours per year. This max amount is short of 10% of my yearly hours.
So in the end I have to accept about 10% overtime just already compensated with my contract.
Overall, workers are given a lot more protection than what I feel there is in the US, and that percolates into the common culture and the expectations. Then we get surprised when seeing what happens in other places :-) (both ways)
This is false. First, the relevant rule that is kind of like that is the “salary basis” rule, which doesn't apply to all exempt employees; for instance, it does not apply to “Computer professionals who are paid on an hourly basis at a rate not less than $27.63 per hour.”
Second, even for exempt employees subject to the salary basis test, they can be subject to workplace conduct rules requiring a set schedule and be subject to disciplinary dock for failing to comply with that conduct rule. The structure of the dock needs to make sense as a disciplinary dock and not be a de facto shift to non-salary pay, but there is absolutely no rule in US federal labor law that “an exempt employee chooses their own hours”.
This department of labor letter seems to state otherwise
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/2006...
Yes.
> This department of labor letter seems to state otherwise
That letter doesn't deal with even the question of what effects the status of exempt employees, since it deals with rules applicable to, and I quote from the letter itself, “salaried non-exempt employees.”
Even so, while it finds the specific conduct being addressed was prohibited, it articulates a rule similar to the one I discuss for exempt employees subject to the salary basis test, stating that, “an employer may take a disciplinary deduction from an employee’s salary for willful absences or tardiness or for infractions of major work rules.”
The term for this is “at will employment” and in most started it is the default law.
Meaning that your employment can be terminated by the employer for any reason or no reason at all, without notice.
As in, security coming to your desk and escorting you through the door.
Look it up.
Of course that only applies to people working on employment contracts, not those who got seduced by "B2B" :|
That said, the abuse of the exemption system is arguably a pandemic in the US.
Overtime laws generally allow taking the hours worked back as PTO. The only thing is that usually there are limits to avoid running everyone ragged with no end.
The worse part? As a CS grad, I knew how to do better, but: nobody with the power to change things understood how or why what I was suggesting was better(!).
I've long thought about this afterward, and concluded it's that 'my world' (which includes a lot of experience, and facility with Math) required me to study a lot and learn a lot; and these 'coders' simply did not have the background to understand what I was trying to teach them. I would have had to fill in several semesters in order to get my points across. Yes, I left. (And yes I tried simplifying - but that only goes so far.)
I'll precise I'm not being sarcastic, genuinely curious. My math background could be better and I'm planning on improving that, but it would be for personal satisfaction as it's not hurting my work (legal tech). But maybe it is, you don't know what you don't know.
I'm self taught, and for many years didn't know about algorithms, big-O notation, and similar. You can do a lot of stuff without that knowledge, but there are definitely some areas that require it.
I dunno - I worked hard, especially early in my career and people noticing lead to four new jobs, two of which included substantial pay/benefit raises. Then again more than a bit of that hard work was on cross-organizational teams; I wasn't acting solely in my direct organizational unit.
So hard work can pay off if you are doing it somewhere it is visible by others. Getting involved in working groups outside of your company, even if you have to do it after hours, is a great way to network and help others notice your work ethic.
I see far too many people who burrow into their current organization and then just bitch about it without doing something about it. If people can't see you they won't be able to recognize your work.
This isn't directed at you but just a general observation - if you don't like your current organization, get proactive and do something about it. I have little sympathy for people who just complain without doing anything.
This is a common problem. It doesn't work to do great work and expect others to notice. You've got to promote yourself and your work. Nobody is going to do it for you.
I've seen too many people become embittered waiting for someone else.
Without much experience in the industry, I would say that both perspectives are important:
The person most invested in your success is you, so leverage that and promote yourself.
But you absolutely deserve management and teammates who celebrate your accomplishments and help you get rewarded for them.
Discrimination and prejudice also affect this—it’s probably hard to advocate for yourself if your management just doesn’t believe you’re capable for some reason—but I’ve generally found solace in the synthesis of both attitudes.
Fight for yourself, but find people who fight with you. Maybe put it like this: if you yourself were a people manager, wouldn’t you want to advocate for your reports?
His biggest criticism was that 20 months earlier, I skipped him and addressed his bosses boss for some bureaucratic thing. I find that argument reasonable but it showed me that he was not aware of the full context. Either I never explained it to him or he forgot. The context is: At that time I was in a special two week task-force team where his bosses boss was officially involved as Scrum Master. As such he was officially responsible for impediments. The impediment was: We either get this bureaucracy thing out of the way today or I'm unable to participate in the task-force anymore. Given the urgency and him being our Scrum Master, I found skipping levels the right thing to do.
> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard
Be careful about getting jaded and cynical. This is far from a universal truth in the tech industry. I've hired a few ex-FAANG who had burned out and become cynical on work altogether. We had to let them go because their negativity was dragging everyone down.
A similar thing can happen to people who go through difficult divorces. If they let themselves become cynical, they start believing that marriage is a doomed institution and that all members of their ex-spouse's gender are equally terrible people and such. It can become very counterproductive to moving on.
Every one of them: as soon as I started, the foundational person of the team quit, you know the guy or gal who burned themselves out building the process. Fixing all the cruft and actually trying to unfuck everything but leaving scant documentation because the mountain of technical debt rivaled the heights of K2?
As a result I had to “drink from the water hose” constantly. And this is something I am absolutely sick of doing, and no team should tolerate it.
It’s happened so often I’m beginning to wonder a) how I can assess if the team is bleeding talent (I’ve had companies straight up lie about things like attrition and retention) or b) if I just have some kind of gravitational pull for companies that are running people out the door.
Nothing wrong with asking the average tenure of people on the team imo, that is something you can frame in a way less likely to make them lie.
I've only ever heard that phrase as 'drinking from the fire hose', I didn't know that even a water/garden hose was considered too much.
I think I need to find a better ... career (?)
Well run startups can still compete by making smart, focused decisions.
I think it makes sense to have an on-call rota. Some people do it for a week or so. Cycle it through the team.
There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues.
> There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues
"Thank you for calling. Our normal business hours are ..." works for the rest of the business world, there's no reason it can't work for you. You can always sell 24h tech support for more money, or make products that don't break in the middle of the night by not relying on systems and designs that are likely to fail spectacularly in the middle of the night.
Lots of products need uptime guarantees.
But I bet the people working on those don’t say their employer unexpectedly “roped me into a production support on-call”.
If a role isn’t advertised as having responsibility outside regular office hours, bait and switching people into regularly working outside 9-5 type hours should not be allowed. And “not allowed” with serious enough financial teeth that companies right up to FAANG size would care, or at least that employees leaving/fired from bait and switching employment hours would end up feeling satisfied with their payouts.
If you need uptime guarantees, hire people letting them know up front so they can choose to accept or reject that work. You don’t (or at least shouldn’t) get to drop that responsibility on people who never signed up for it in the first place.
I think the only one with a formal release process was the quarterly release outfit, and even that was due to single-client risk.
I've worked at 3 startups (5th employee, 16th employee, 2nd employee).
The first one had 80 hour weeks and burned me out after a year. The company had enough capital to stay in business, but never went anywhere, and my shares were washed out in subsequent funding rounds.
The second had 40 hour weeks and I worked there for six years. A fair-to-middling exit to Broadcom.
The third one had 40 hour weeks and I worked there for 3 years. A great exit to Google.
Sounds to me like you've malloc'd all of memory.
Yes I've worked for a startup. Yes I did long hours. Yes I learned that's not sustainable and not a good way to make things work.
So, no, I won't do it again.
I've worked in several startups, and occasional death marches are unavoidable. They don't work month in and month out. But enduring that kind of life for just salary is nuts.
Maybe in some cases you can hope for the acquired startup to be the pet project of the acquirer’s founder/CEO?
I think the advantage is supposed to be that you won't come in one day and hear your boss say "Guess what? We're broke."
Sure... but you may still come in and find "this project has been nixed". Upside is that you may still have a 'job' in the bigger company, but everything you worked on may be thrown away, you may lose whatever political power your project had, etc. Certainly there's an 'immediate safety net' issue of "you may have a paycheck next week", but doesn't address any of the emotional stuff that goes along with "we'll have a scrappy startup mentality!"
I had been in something similar - not quite a 'startup in a large company' situation, but similar. And... we hit a "hey, this project is being shut down, and there's no other budget in the company for this team". So.. the company itself was still going OK - everyone else kept rolling along - but a handful of us were effectively cut adrift for a bit. Some were able to be assigned to other internal teams, some weren't.
At some point around March we learnt post-factum that the project, mostly staffed by contract workers (aka "B2B"), nearly lost pretty much all of non-managerial staff, because parent company of the group (a german corp) made decision to cancel all B2B contracts.
Our project barely survived because of some fast talking, and by becoming "important enough" the fact that canceling the contracts would leave them with no "doers" on it was the main reason we didn't get "sorry, you're fired" email.
Imho it's frequently used to falsely motivate junior/inexperienced into working crazy hours that they might get some financial or other rewards like a startup.
I knew of one company, a pair programming shop doing the sort of financial software where bugs could get very expensive. To maximize quality, they had firm rules about all code requiring a pair, and that barring emergencies, everybody had to go home on time. It worked; they had very low bug rates.
They told me about a new employee they had, somebody who'd come from a company where performative overwork was valued. He'd stay until the wee hours, coding up a storm, expecting people to be impressed. In the morning, they'd thank him for his enthusiasm, revert the commit, and do the work again with proper pairing, testing, etc. I never heard what happened to the guy, but I imagine he pretty quickly unlearned his bad habits. That or he quit and went somewhere he could feed his heroism addiction.
In contrast, I remember a long-ago 6-month contract a major online auction company starting with e and ending with Bay. I was on some internal mailing list where I'd get promotion announcements. Every fucking one of them included a dramatic story about how the person had egregiously overworked themselves. The code was of course a giant fucking mess. It was simultaneously the result of tired idiots who never cleaned up and also the cause of so many bugs and schedule issues that people had to dramatically overwork themselves to hit arbitrary managerial deadlines.
It was a valuable lesson to me, the coding version of the Allegory of Long Spoons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons
Ever since I've done my best to work at places where sanity is rewarded and drama discouraged. And to bend things in that direction as I'm able.
I think this close, but a little off. Work hard only on what matters. Join the high visibility projects and work hard on the important parts. "Nobody notices" -> that's up to you. Document and demo your achievements every few weeks.
Work only the good jobs. If it's not good, switch teams ASAP. Never, ever wait for "things to improve". So many times after I switched jobs, I said to myself "Man, why didn't I leave sooner?"
I agree with this but you have to understand that it's very difficult and frightening for an inexperienced new grad or someone on a green card to do. These groups are also unfortunately the most exploited.
At least in large companies it can be pretty hard to actually find the good teams among all of the noise. I've tried to keep my eyes open for them but haven't had any luck yet.
As with most things in life, there are places where it matters and places where it doesn't matter. If someone's a junior employee working in a big company, it's likely that they don't have the necessary experience to figure out whether hard work matters in their position. That's an important risk to be aware of. But the opposite advice, avoiding hard work, is also risky. (And not a good habit to cultivate in the long term of course.) If you're not sure which position you're in, and you don't trust your more experienced coworkers to tell you honestly without punishing you for asking, then putting in some amount of hard work with the goal of finding out is a pretty good start.
So in some cases you want to fast track your advancement in a direction that you like and this possible through this method, and you actually can work hard, so in this case take the chance if you want to. But that kind of situation is quite rare, I think.
Also certainly do not appear to be working too lightly. But also do not appear to be working extremely hard if it is not the case.
And remember, the (perceived) results are more important than actually working hard. It can be very unfair sometimes, because e.g. if you have to maintain and add features in a legacy codebase, (poor, but that's common) higher-ups may be uninterested with your difficulties caused by the spaghettis of your predecessors, but well life is just unfair I guess :P
I think it really depends on the person. It's a very common problem for people to procrastinate or drag their feet on the parts of their job that they don't particularly like. (Just like most students drag their feet doing homework they don't like.) But no job (or school program) is ever 100% fun stuff, and being able to delay gratification and get the unpleasant parts done is a super important life skill that not everyone has. For a lot of people, maybe most HN readers, this is basic stuff that they nailed in high school and never had a problem with after that. But I'm not sure that's the majority experience.
Exactly this. Unless your manager has a history of giving raises and/or promotions to YOU for doing your JOB then do not assume, ever, that they will give you anything for overworking to chase a carrot on a stick.
That said if they have a history of recognizing and appreciating your work, and compensating you for extra effort, then by all means feel free to put some sweat into the work. That's a good relationship.
My rule of thumb whenever starting a new job is - Work hard for the first year, but almost never overtime. Do my job, and do it well, but don't kill myself. If manager recognizes the good work, and gives me a raise, I'll talk to them about incentive based objectives, and that I'm willing to work over time if there's a reward structure. Or, that I'm happy to continue at my 9-5 pace if that's working for them. Point is - always wait for them to make the first move. If they don't, either accept the 9-5 work for the pay, or move on to another employer that does value incentive based (bonus) salaries.
This is the most important lesson I learned working at the fruit company. That and never have a long commute.
I now work at a place that's ten minutes door-to-door in the morning and fifteen in the afternoon. I took a pay cut to achieve that (I live in East Bay), but maybe the new wfh culture post-COVID will open up more possibilities.
Anyway, point being that I've decided that my job is second to my happiness.
This depends a lot on the situation/company. It is definitely true that in many cases it doesn't make sense to work hard. However there are situations where hard work is rewarded. Those are just probably quite rare situations after all.
What I learned people that spend all their time working don't have time for the social engineering needed to get ahead. Also a lot of people that focus heavily on social engineering make bank on passing dirt on their coworkers to upper management.
This. And the intrinsic metric does not necessarily align to the company's until much further down the road or sometimes not at all. Hard lesson for me to learn after a score at the same company and the health insurance stays the same regardless.
YMMV.
If you're the type that doesn't want to work very hard and just there for a paycheck, then you are probably more suited for working at MegaCorp.
Getting these out of wack makes for unhappy working conditions.
- Despite the big release and herculean efforts, both of us were paid a fraction of our target bonus. This was the day I decided to move jobs.
- I eventually grew some balls and told Apple to (a) pay me 2.5x during overtime (b) hire SREs for this critical service, or (c) go fuck themselves. They chose (c), which worked alright because our service was pretty stable.
- The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
- Only my first manager at Apple was an asshole. My last manager was a kind and genial person.