On the one hand, this approach is understandable (it’s what business is built for), and the pay is good in such companies. But, on the other hand, life/work balance usually sucks.
First of all, there is an unsaid expectation of long hours. A company is always on the verge of signing a new huge business deal, preparing for the magic quadrant, and having critical projects. And even if some reasonable hours are negotiated/achieved, people are forced to have an insane amount of multi-tasking (juggling numerous tasks, initiatives, planning, replanning, strategy shifts, and so on). On the paper, life/work balance is advertised in such companies. In reality, work at such a company is draining way too much energy.
Another unpleasant side. As part of this rush forward, engineering usually cuts many corners (both in tech and vetting new hires). This rush creates a mediocre (at best) tech culture with a lot of tech debt and not following well-established best practices. A huge part of solving/fighting these problems falls on the top tech talent (especially on responsible employees).
I am at the stage of my life where physical and mental health is more important than a marginal dollar. As a result, I have started to look around, and I would appreciate the advice.
Do you know which specific companies or preferable areas have better work/life balance and are more committed to tech excellence?
The other major item that's contributed to that in my career/careers of people I've talked to about this is growth. You want a company that is experiencing moderate, steady growth. Doubling every year? That's going to be a painful job. Declining every year? Better work harder to justify your job. But a cool 3-15% each year in a steady company means you get to go home at 5.
More than any of that though, the most important contributor to work life balance is you. If you really value that balance, be ready to tell your manager you're not working late and accept that eventually you may get fired. If you're willing to do that, and you do your job well, you'll be fine (either at that role, or the next). I've had to explain to managers that I won't work 60 hour weeks to make a deadline they made up. It's not my company, I don't get any upside in spending more than the agreed upon hours working on it, and it's just a job. People scoff at that mentality, but you need to decide how you live your life and be ready to enforce those boundaries.
There's a list of companies with a better work / life balance here: https://4dayweek.io/4-day-week-companies
In years to come we will look down on current working conditions in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution imo.
It seems though like you want to have both a good balance AND excellence, fast learning and great colleagues.
My humble opinion is this can work out shortly, but usually not for long.
The reason being mainly that you’re describing a labile situation: as for any company that tackles a worthwhile and lucrative problem (and the others you really don‘t want to work for), but with a chill attitude and a „great engineering culture“ where resolving tech debt, fixing bugs and proper QA gets the front seat over product iteration — there exists or will eventually exist another company who sees the same opportunity, but attacks it with clear vision and the ruthless execution you despise, eventually sucking the more chill company dry of talent and customers.
I‘ve seen it all the time. Basecamp against Slack. Atlassian against Github.
Note I don’t particularly like this conclusion as well, since I was searching for something similar years ago, but I‘ve found it to hold true in practice. I stand to be corrected by counterexamples though, especially companies that have been around since a decade.
I am not saying the work isn't challenging or that I completely unplug when I am not working, its more that you aren't expected to take on unreasonable amounts of work, and, as long as you deliver, nobody really cares how you spend your time during the week
This is also not always related to the company size, but avoid small just starting startups. Through some start-ups which already have initial success can be good (as long as they don't go into the "we are failing" phase).
I had some good experiences myself, but I don't know how far they are exceptions and how much it might differ in other companies.
Through it also depends on you a bit, I had worked at a company which generally neither expected long hours or other aspects of overworks BUT some people got so invested that they where doing a lot of long hours by themself, to a degree that one of them was multiple times asked by the CEO to please go home and take a (payed, non holiday) day off for their health...
Also on think which you will probably not avoid is that corners are cuts and tech dept is accumulated. Through it can largely differ what and how much corners are cute and tech dept is accumulated.
Wrt. hiring I have increasingly realized that there is no good way to fully vet people when hiring, there are basics you can somewhat check and you can check if the person seem to fit into the team, but it's all very limited. In the end what seems to work well is to go through a initial interview followed up by a tech interview (maybe mini task too) and a team/social interview. And do the rest of vetting during the first month of employment.
Keep looking for that place and when you've found it, don't leave it!
It also helps if you can make yourself indispensable in one way or another. Look for ways the business can do better the "important stuff" (usually means save money or avoid legal conflict) and do it. The entire responsibility of keeping the new stuff alive will fall on your shoulders. And you will get a pass at leaving the office early, or perhaps filling out your overtime form will no longer be considered a crime
I have it on trusted authority that SAP is a good company to work for as they care a lot about making a good environment for their developers. The cynic in me believes this is because their problem space is inherently unsexy.
There does seem to be a correlation with unsexy stuff having better work life balance and sexy stuff being terrible (video games being the inverse of tax software).
But “tech excellence” does not come into it. I’m not sure if you can do both. Usually established companies have something legacy that needs to be maintained.
And new companies are.. undefined. It’s hard to have clear work life balance when everything is undefined.
Go and find an established company with a product and customers and help them maintain or maybe grow their business. Find a post-IPO or post-acquisition company that isn't trying to hustle or pivot or disrupt and get a nine-to-five where you can punch the clock and collect a paycheck and everyone's happy.
Startups are not for everyone. Don't be afraid of working somewhere that already figured things out and is only executing on that plan.
Examples include: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, USA, etc.
Counter examples: The Netherlands, Scandinavia + some other European countries.
From what I've seen so far it's mostly a culture thing.
Note: I'm not really a supporter of the "work/life balance" term as it is very difficult to nail down the meaning. How is work not part of your life, does it imply your work is something bad and should be "balanced out" and so on and so on.
On a personal level, I don't think it's too bad. There are plenty of places where you can make $300k working 30-40 hour weeks
Our bosses are really great people and ask us to not do anything related to work, reply to emails or messages after work.
We might not be Apple or a big company but everybody feels safe, enjoys life and has other things to do than work.
Our goal was to become something like Basecamp and it’s values, sadly we are not following that route anymore given what had happened.
However, we all (7 right now) are committed to grow and make more money but without compromising our life’s.
I think there are other companies doing this in Spain so hopefully the number will increase!
The product and our company mission is amazing and we do not cut corners but at the same time constantly try to (another company value) “do great things fast”.
We are hiring for lots of engineers - have a look at www.asana.com/jobs and if you think you’re a good fit and have work permit for the country you’re applying for then feel free to send me your resume and I’ll upload it and our talent team will get in touch!
Hours are flexible although most of our team is on EST. Looking for Node or JS experience.
avoid VC funded companies. avoid pre-revenue companies without a clear path to revenue. avoid companies where the engineers | co-workers don't have life outside the company avoid companies with hard / set deadlines - this means they've no redudancy in the system. anything without redudancy will always be under pressure
This would be way too far on the scale.
The thing which I am looking for is precisely that proverbial "balance". Spend regular hours, a normal amount of energy, make a solid contribution in that time, close my notebook and enjoy non-work-related things.
I look after my team because they look after me.
The sad part is that overtime is not really necessary. Outside of emergencies ("the DB is down!"), engineers shouldn't ever really have to work more than 40-50 hours per week. The key is having a good medium-term (or long-term) vision and figuring out the milestones you need to hit to get there. Most companies where I have been expected to put in more than a 9-5 are companies that have zero idea what they're going to be doing three months from now. That's a huge problem.
I firmly believe that if you can plan ahead -- even tentatively! -- you can avoid overtime and focus on the most important things. Let's say you're a company that delivers custom guitars. You started off only in the Minneapolis, MN area because that's where you're headquartered. Now you want to expand into New York City. NYC is your make-or-break market. If you can make it in NYC, you can make it anywhere. So what do you do? Do you put in 80 hour weeks to get to NYC? No, what you do is you look at your current capabilities and you compare that against what you need to do to be successful in NYC. Anything that doesn't get you closer to NYC, you cut from the roadmap. That doesn't mean you never do it, but it means you don't do it now.
And now you're able to measure velocity! If you recall from physics class, velocity = speed + direction). It's not about just going fast, it's about going fast in the right direction. In other words, if you're working on something that isn't getting you closer to NYC, then you may be working fast, but you're not going in the right direction!
Having a clear north star and a clear set of priorities is the key to ensuring good work/life balance.
The reason that bigger companies have a better work/life balance is because they have more resources! More resources to spread out to hit ALL of the goals that they want to do. But smaller companies struggle because they have limited resources when it seems like they need to accomplish everything. It's a hard, hard line to walk. But it's possible. There are a lot of companies that move fast and grow fast and have a good work/life balance. So don't give up.
Back to my first sentence: you should ask about this in your interviews, toward the final stages. "How many hours a week do you work? How far out is your roadmap? What is the biggest thing you need to accomplish in the next six months? How often do you work on things that aren't related to that?"
My two cents? There's always more work tomorrow. It doesn't matter how much you get done today, there's always going to be another pile of work tomorrow. So find a place that recognizes that and prioritizes people as people instead of as cattle. Good luck.
The company I work for, for example, has is small (50 people) but as it's been revenue positive from the start it knows to focus on the longterm win - you don't get that by burning out employees. (If you're a RoR dev... www.platphormcorp.com)
Here are a few tips: 1. Make sure to ask during an interview what office hours are like, and let the company know you're looking for a good balance. A good company will be honest about their expectations - in general nobody wants a bad fit when hiring.
2. It's your life, not the company's. If you told the company you want a good work life balance - start your day at 8 and end at 5pm consistently every day (or whatever the normal work hours are). Let people know those are your hours and that you have other commitments (i.e. a life to live). I've worked with a few people (in other companies) who are great at this - and they were amongst the performers. If your manager knows asking you to work late isn't an option they'll figure something out - that's a manager's job. If you work off hours regularly, a manager will ask you to do it again.
As for tech debt that's a trickier one. It never makes sense to get rid of all tech debt (imo). A tool that's working, that is not really important to the company's future, likely doesn't not need refactoring any time soon. Of course, if business critical software should be kept up-to-date.