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

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've had to work emergencies and overtime maybe a total of 6 to 8 hours total, across all the jobs.

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.

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.

What I'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'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's definitely doable. Don't go into games, infrastructure, devops, etc. Find some business that doesn'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.

* As a company, we've largely leaned into asynchronous communication and many/most things just don't need a meeting.

* 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).

* I try to bundle my meetings on the same day. I'd rather have a few meetings back to back that go later rather than have meetings in the afternoon/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 "meeting-free" 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.

* I've marked "Ideal meeting hours" in my calendar on my three "meeting-preferred" 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).

* 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'm just hopping in and out of meetings all the time. On days when I have evening meetings coming up, I'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's the attempt, I'm not always successful with this).

* 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'll attend whatever meetings are needed, I am not one of those people who ever _prefers_ a meeting over other options.

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.

You can compromise and agree on "core hours" where you'll always make yourself available, even if that'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'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.)

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 24/7 - it'd be surprised, but that's clearly not a good place to work then. From my experience, this is the exception, not the rule.

Stockholm syndrome, maybe a bit of ptsd.

I’d not follow such advice @op. Find a place that respects you.