41–50 of 83 posts
(If you really love the place and want to fight your "workaholic" team mate, start scheduling a couple of your emails at random times during weird hours.)
The key word here is value. Take a big step back and consider what value your colleague brings to the company. What "jobs" and "roles" does she fulfill within the team? Is she staying up late fixing random bugs or doing things others don't want to do? Is she staying late making sure a release goes well or delivering insights to execs to push the product forward?
You used the phrase "stuck with" which suggests negativity and possibly a sense of "it's unfair to me". Is she actively working against the team or is she outperforming others?
Consider what value you bring to the team. Do your manager/people in charge of your compensation recognize the value you bring?
As with most "soft skill" conversations the details of a situation are key.
In my opinion, you need to understand the difference between hard work and smart work. Software development is like an art. A person may spend 18 hours a day to create something that just works while another may spend just 8 creative hours to create a masterpiece. There are many disadvantages of being a hard worker / workaholic: * The expectation of your manager will get elevated and if one fails to be consistent in…
>Appraisal based on relative performance: This sounds logical. I don't think it does. People should be rewarded based on the absolute value they bring to the company, not on their relative ranking. For example, relative ranking means that you always want to work with the worst possible teams (so you are relatively the best) not the best. It also means that politics becomes more important than ability.
Most of the comments in this thread are ridiculous. Just as you (hopefully) get to choose how many hours you work, your coworkers also get to choose how many hours they work. I'd ask yourself two questions: 1: Are you happy with your current work/life balance? 2: Can you achieve your career goals at your current workplace while maintaining your desired work/life balance? If the answer to either of those questions is…
I work a lot. I'm working right now (took a break to read HN). I just enjoy getting things done and it's paid off well for me. I've learned though that my ability to work many hours and my drive to do so doesn't mean I should enforce that on others, so I don't let my teammates know when I work outside of normal hours. I don't send emails at night or weekends. I don't send code reviews on nights and weekends. I try to…
If you're like me and not starting your own extremely successful company, or possibly seriously working on your career in the true sense - in order to get economically independent, you won't get much slack to relax in "later" regardless of what you do...
I've quit consulting and got a boring job at a large boring company in order to spend more time with my family, but somehow I find something that triggers me anyway, and I work too much, which probably affects my health.
I work a lot. I'm working right now (took a break to read HN). I just enjoy getting things done and it's paid off well for me. I've learned though that my ability to work many hours and my drive to do so doesn't mean I should enforce that on others, so I don't let my teammates know when I work outside of normal hours. I don't send emails at night or weekends. I don't send code reviews on nights and weekends. I try to…
I work a lot too, its not uncommon for me to 2x the hours my coworkers put in. And i don't care because I enjoy it. I'm passionate about the work I do and the company I'm contributing to.
I do need to be more mindful of the hours I send emails and slack messages. My current justification is that while I may send outbound communications 24/7, I only follow up during work hours. I could use a tool to queue messages and make me seem less active I guess.
I don't really know what OP is expecting, but if OPs colleague is open to feedback, maybe a quick aside to let them know how they are being perceived is in order. Short of that, VW shuts off email after-hours, maybe OP could do something similar:
Well your relative performance is worse, so either tolerate that or work harder. Nobody's work-life balance is someone else's decision to make.
That is a very american attitude, I'd say =) I consider it a management duty to stop people from working too much (which is a rather european attitude :D).
To me: 1. If there is a direct correlation between hours worked and productivity for the team, then compensation is not relative. 2. To the degree that emails late at night is cast as toxic office politics, so are attempts to normalize the productive efforts of the coworker. 3. Pathologizing a coworker as 'workaholic' delegitmates the person and their values. It tends to provide an excuse for treating the individual…
Pathologising a preference for sustainable pace provides an excuse for treating everyone poorly "for the company's good" rather than accepting all the individuals as what they are: ordinary folk. Good luck.