I’m enjoying a comfortable retirement after 40 years (mostly) as a coder. I’m not a brainiac, but I know I was a better coder than roughly half the men I worked with. One guy on our team once told another woman and me that we were the smartest women he’d ever met. I think he thought we’d be flattered and get all stammery and giggly. We just rolled our eyes.
What’s this 9-month maternity leave? My wife, a Ph.D. in Computer Science working as a data scientist for an insurance company, got six weeks plus took a week of personal time. She was working all the way until both babies came. She now has a director position at a start-up and is just killing it, career-wise. This guy is a complete asshat. (And she did work beyond 9-5 hours – I mean, she’d come home, but she’d always be working at home at night after the kids were in bed. Once she has a problem she wants to solve, she doesn’t stop until she solves it. She’s getting better about it, but it’s really difficult for her to just “turn off” at 5 or 6 p.m. when she wants to finish something.)
Except for the “no physical exertion” part that is pretty much all wrong pre-pandemic. I once had a recruiter pitching me as a developer for a moderately well-known engineering simulation software company and I seriously considered it for a hot moment despite not really being qualified (they wanted someone with an engineering mechanics background, user of their applications, and would take anyone who had both Fortran and C/C++ experience, and technically I matched all requirements if they didn’t ask too many questions about my single class of F77 and brief use of C++) but then I incidentally found out that a guy who I’d worked with at a previous startup was there, and he waved me off after describing the 7-7 office schedule, cut-throat office politicking, and general shitty treatment of developers with whom the management took the tact that anyone who complained could be replaced with a new grad from nearby Ann Arbor in about as much time as it took to pick up the phone. I’ve known people at videogame companies, emterprise ‘solutions’ providers, and animation studios who reported similar conditions, and of course the software industry is where the term “work burnout” emerged from.
I’m sure there are coding houses now that are great places to work and offer a lot of flexibility but for every Google and Facebook I’m morally certain there are ten shitty code prisons that demand long hours and ‘face time’ in office even when you can do 90% of the work sitting on a beach with a wireless hotspot.
Stranger
My takeaway as a layman is that this guy treats his team like slaves and can’t manage well enough to avoid it. I remember reading that Facebook had Silicon Valley’s highest programmer turnover rate, possibly because of managers like this guy. In which case you could look at it as somewhat… chivalrous, that’s the word, baggage intended… that he is unwilling to work pregnant and new mothers that hard. But still reflects very badly on him as a manager.
I don’t know enough about Japanese culture to attribute his attitude to that. But I know there is an overwork culture of some sort, because they have a dedicated word for suicide due to overwork: Karoshi.
~Max
Reddit has many subreddits that love to quote idiots like this to mock them. So I know he’s nothing new or unique. This attitude is all over social media. (And Reddit, though I don’t read those subreddits.)
Shyu did his flameout a whole week ago. By now the mountain of tweets and posts and grams and truths and twills and flarts and ddddds that are saying the same thing in the same language is Everest high.
Why? It’s like white replacement theory. These idiots see their extinction looming and are lashing out. I would pity them but I’m not big enough a person.
So out of all of these women, none complained to Google, or were ignored if they did and this guy suffered no repercussions for such blatant discrimination? Hard to fathom.
Might it be that Shyu is a moronic attention-seeking troll?
Not hard to fathom at all. Someone had to hire the man and let him interview people in the first place. You’d think this whole ‘women should be at home birthing babies’ attitude would stick out like a sore thumb.
~Max
As it’s actually implemented by the guys in the suits? Yeah, probably. But that’s on them. My point is that the inherent nature of the work is very conducive to things like work-at-home. A job like warehouse stocking simply can’t be done remotely (at least, not with the current level of tech, but when the tech gets to the point where it’s possible, it’ll probably also cease to be a job). Something like teaching can be done remotely, but not very well (again, at least at the current level of tech). But programming can definitely be done remotely, and it could have been done remotely for pretty much the entire history of the profession.
This is largely wrong AFAICT. It is actually the silicon valley “prestige” companies like Google, Facebook, etc that are likely to work their employees very hard. Amazon, while not a SV company, is in that same boat in terms of poor work life balance. Large payments in the form of Restricted Stock Units does generally mean these “prestige” tech companies offer very high total compensation.
These companies have a lot of glitzy, news-article inducing perks, but they also have a culture where you are basically expected to work as much as necessary to get whatever you’re working on done, which usually involves absolute minimization of your home life.
Meanwhile lots of programmers in enterprise environments that aren’t big tech firms generally work pretty standard and chill 9 to 5s.
Generally the more technically prestigious or the more “cool” a company is, the worse their work/life balance is for a programmer. Videogame companies are generally even worse than SV companies, because such a huge portion of young CS majors just love the idea of being videogame developers. The problem is videogame companies tend to pay worse than most in the field and frequently have brutal deadlines based on long advertised “shipping dates.” There’s a pretty famous blog post from years ago by the “spouses of EA employees” basically talking about how they are functionally widows/widowers because they are married to someone who works for EA–and that is generally still the case now if not worse. Rockstar games got tons of negative press for how ridiculously it overworked its staff with the release of its Western game “Red Dead Redemption 2” a couple of years ago.
Aha. The Pittee subject of this thread was a wannabe video game developer throughout his professional career, per first cite of the thread. And his wife apparently did just up and leave, with the kid, for Tokyo.
~Max
A lot of “programming” at the large application or enterprise level is not actually writing code but dealing with requirements, defining and redefining architecture, et cetera, which are tasks that require interaction with larger groups, which is a technology that hasn’t been available or very functional until very recently. Of course, there is no way a mainframe programmer circa 1970 could have worked from home, and even for programmers into the ‘Eighties and early ‘Nineties working from home or remotely meant hooking up to a 9600 baud or less modem and slowly uploading their code to a manually managed repository. Today it is so trivially easy to do virtually any job that isn’t physically customer-facing or warehouse/custodial/trade work remotely but I think people have forgotten how quickly that has changed.
I know people who work at Google (and used to know a couple of people who were at Facebook for their ill-fated “Project Aquila” program) and this is not at all what they report. Certainly these companies demand performance but they’re not clocking hours or demanding that employees show the flag at meetings more than a couple of times a year. I have one friend whose been at Google for over a decade; he gets into the office after walking his kids to school, and leaves before 5. To be sure, he works a few hours in the evening as well but he would be doing that anyway, and he estimated that he rarely puts in more than a 45 hour week. He’s never met his real boss face to face because he is on a remote campus but he basically checks in once a week and otherwise isn’t asked to report hours or performance metrics. He also got extra family leave after the birth of his child above that which is provided by already generous California employment law and was able to spread it out over the year to essentially work half-time. Of course, he also pointed out that he’s seen people fired for poor performance or failure to meet critical deadlines without so much as performance review or a PIP, so it isn’t as if these companies don’t care about performance; they just aren’t concerned about artificial and pointless metrics of it.
I’m sure the culture has changed overall post-pandemic because people have learned that they can work from home and still get their work done, and it is now a sellers’ market for people with technical skills and a few years of experience. I’m sure if you are writing firmware for NCR or Roku they’re just happy enough to have someone who can compile working code without it choking, and if you are doing enterprise development and app maintenance there is literally no way you are going to convince someone to work strenuous hours for that kind of non-resume-enhancing experience. But it was not very long ago that people I knew at and were forced to work in office, 10+ hours a day, with zero fucks given for “work/life balance”. And guess what? Those companies are now struggling to hire qualified programmers because nobody wants to work that grind.
Stranger
Just to clarify, he gave 45 hours as the upper bound for his workweek but also described himself as essentially working half-time?
~Max
No, he got family leave for the birth of his child [clarified in edit] which he was able to use to take off 2-3 days a week (alternating with his wife’s schedule) on top of only working a typical 45 hour or less work week; in other words, when using family leave he worked between 16-24 hours a week, which is management was entirely supportive of and rearranged his workload to accommodate.
Stranger
Okay, that makes sense.
~Max
This was not true in the business world. Until recently at least as I explained above. Believe it or not, more than half of the programmers work in the business world. We support banks, warehouse companies, real estate developers and/or like me manufacturing. We we always expected to give the 9-5 (I wish, it was usually 8.5 to 5 or even 8-5) but also provide off hour support without extra pay and usually without comp time.
IBM by all reports was pretty much the same, UPS was a house of horror to work for and they ground through young programmers.
Well these are very large companies so anecdotes are probably of limited utility–but data is also intentionally scarce. I have a friend who manages the building of new data centers for Facebook, and while he has to travel all around the country, he generally does not work more than 40-45 hours a week either, but he has also said that at Facebook almost the entirety of your work situation is determined by the relatively small 6-12 person team that you are on, the entire company being ultimately subdivided into teams of that size.
Going by the best data we have, work/life balance appears to be a common gripe at the Silicon Valley “majors”, and even more so at Amazon. While all of these companies excessively attempt to manage the dissemination of any information that would suggest anything negative about working there, Glassdoor has compiled a Top 25 list of Work Life balance companies and the Silicon Valley majors have generally not regularly cracked the Top 25. Facebook has even missed the list a few times with employee complaints about long hours being cited as the specific reason.
Most of the tech companies on the list are relatively small / lesser knowns (Box, Slack), the one major exception is SAP which is a well known large software firm–but it is also nothing close to the sort of model of the early 21st century tech giants (i.e. Facebook / Google / Apple), it is a more staid and established company akin to IBM or Microsoft.
Here is a particularly unpleasant story about being a white collar worker at Amazon:
There’s also a long line of literature and even business school case studies about chronic overwork in Silicon Valley:
Silicon Valley Ruined Work Culture Everywhere | WIRED
However, there does seem to be a general trend that as a company transitions from its initial form to a larger and more stable enterprise, it appears to gravitate more towards reasonable work hours. While it isn’t nearly as trendy a company as Google or Amazon, Microsoft which was infamous for working its programmers to the bone in the 80s and 90s scores fairly well on work/life issues these days.
There’s at least some evidence some of the current gen of top prestige tech companies have improved a lot in work life as well, probably at least in part due to a spate of very bad press on the issue in the first half of the 2010s.
The videogame industry doesn’t seem to be undergoing any move towards better work/life balance though, at least as of 2021–this book highlights a lot of the pitfalls of working in that field: Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry: Schreier, Jason: 9781538735497: Books (amazon.com)
I’m certainly not going to defend Amazon (don’t know anybody who works there) or what Silicon Valley Bro culture has done to work in general but from the article you link:
- Amazon’s white-collar workers—the ones who write the code and manage relationships with major companies—must endure a corporate culture that is notoriously ruthless compared with those at other major tech companies. This is what it looked like when one of those workers found himself under a boss who embodied Amazon’s obsession with performance and quantifiable results. He asked to be anonymous because he fears retaliation from his current employer.*
[Bold added for emphasis]
I do know a few people who work for Microsoft, and while they definitely put in extra effort to get ahead a lot of it seems to be a bunch of ‘dog & pony’ nonsense; they make it sound very much like old school IBM sans the red ties. (It being Seattle, ‘business casual’ is your basic trifecta of North Face, Columbia, and Patagonia.) I also knew a couple of people who worked at Apple and they did describe it as being very much a pressure cooker with a bunch of secret squirrel stuff going on that everybody vied to be involved with; one guy I knew who since left went on to do product development at a medical equipment company that he said was a total snoozefest but let him get home by 6 and work from home on Friday, plus the traffic in the Twin Cities was so much easier than Cupertino even though he lived three times the distance he got home earlier.
Anyway, this has become quite the hijack but while programming is not the innately ‘family-friendly’ industry some might believe it to be, and has in the past had a well-earned reputation as a grinder for young coders, if you are working 24x7 hours you are either a glutton for punishment or should be looking elsewhere because today there are plenty of jobs for experienced programmers that have a lot of flexibility even if they do demand a lot of hours. If the ‘life’ part of work/life balance appeals to you then there are those kinds of jobs, too; they just aren’t going to be working on videogames or animation sofware.
Stranger
I knew a guy who worked at Microsoft Research, and my impression was that he liked it. No one is clocking your hours; indeed what they care about is performance, namely publishing research papers in computer science. You don’t even have to run Windows on your workstation if you don’t want to. I did not hear anything about potential sex discrimination (besides the background fact that there is only 1 woman for every 3 male computer science Ph.Ds in America, but that is not directly attributable to Microsoft)
This may be appropriate.
True, he talks only about a commitment of 40 hours, but performance is nowhere in the discussion.
Man, I love Elon. He’s the kind of guy who would watch Scrooged and insist that Bill Murray take back the hand towel ‘Christmas bonus’ he gave to Alfre Woodard.
Stranger