131–140 of 840 posts
"As I had kids, I learned the importance of being at home for them and that's how I understood Work Life balance - its a balance, sometimes you need to work weekends and nights, sometimes you can head out early or work from home - we balance the needs of the employee and the company." sometimes you need to work weekends and nights while your wife take care of the kids alone so that your career progress and her's not.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend." lmao what a terrible, horrible manager. I would hate working for them, and I would not miss them leaving. Maybe I'm just playing into their "young people don't want to work" stereotype, but if that's what working means, I don't want to do it with them.
A different way of putting it would be whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards their work. It's not incongruent with a balanced life. To me It just means occasdinally you might stay late at work, once in awhile an interesting problem gets you working on the company laptop all Saturday, and if something breaks you're not able to log off until you fix it. Doesn't mean you cant take Friday's off of or…
I will never do this. I havent done this since I was very very young at my first job and i didn't know better. I couldn't think of anything sader or more depressing that giving away my own personal time for someone else.
I'm not going to work on the weekend. I've got much better things to do, like play video games or literally anything else, rather than go back to work and generate wealth for someone else for free.
"As I had kids, I learned the importance of being at home for them and that's how I understood Work Life balance - its a balance, sometimes you need to work weekends and nights, sometimes you can head out early or work from home - we balance the needs of the employee and the company." sometimes you need to work weekends and nights while your wife take care of the kids alone so that your career progress and her's not.…
Baloney. Who's to say that the wife isn't doing the same to further her own career on other nights and weekends?
Many people simply can't hack startup culture. Corp 'culture' created by worthless (damaging) HR dept isn't even that -- its innovation poison. Perfect for hack and hangers on -- u know... people who call themselves 'thought leaders'. Yoga has zero place at a serious busines. It's not a daycare!
It's "business", and why? Are you paying your (say) coders to write code? Unlikely, otherwise you'd measure their productivity in lines-of-code written, which I hope you realize is a bad idea.
More likely you're paying your coders to solve problems. Is sitting in a chair always the best way to solve problems/think? Not necessarily. If physical activity (like yoga) is conducive to better thinking/problem solving, and the company has the resources (Google does) -- I don't see why not.
Another "leader" who complains about employees wanting work life balance and they are extremely entitled. These are the type of managers you want to avoid. I'm sure many Googlers are happy you left.
I think the author is correct that some big tech companies create a culture where going to 11am yoga is more important that crunching out a few more lines of code. He's correct that if your focus is on building and scaling product, this culture reduces the velocity of change. However, I see a couple of things the author is missing: 1) Work life balance is about employee long term retention and places like Google spen…
I remember visiting the valley for the first time for a big company I worked for at another location. The scale of work life balance was unbalanced so many strange ways...
The tech support team I worked with was in 'building 3'. Nobody ever left that building through out the day. I went to the big cafeteria and the options were amazing. I managed to get some of my peers to go with me, several of my peers from building 3 were equally amazed as ... they never went there, they just worked all day, ate something at their desk, and kept working...
Meanwhile I'd go to the cafeteria each day and sit outside and watch as some folks would play basketball for an hour, then a while later show up and chat it up with coworkers (not talking about work) over lunch for what seemed like forever...
The game room was always full of the same guys, the other amenities, yoga, etc, and it often included people who I simply never could get a hold of. HR couldn't be bothered to get security to take my photo for my badge for weeks ... because the gym schedule changed.
It was a weird, unbalanced, yin and yang.
There is no balance when you love.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
His point is a job is not UBI, you supposed to contribute in return and adjust your schedule along other workers (aka a 'workday'). I dunno why is that so controversial.
That may apply to yoga class at 11am, but asking for a day off? Come on...
No. Fuck you, pay me, as the saying goes [1]. As a manager / VP, it is your responsibility to set the product vision and goals. Engineers can't build / sales can't sell a great product if prospective clients are not interested, like putting an art gallery online [2].
Additionally, having no personal stake in the product allows developers / engineers to be more objective and professional. This is a problem that most junior engineers will face at some point, and most senior engineers will easily recognize. You put so many hours and so much work into a new project that you start to make it part of your identity. You can see this in a few consumer products like the Xbox One launch, where Microsoft employees received special Xboxs that had "I MADE THIS" branded on the device [3].
But for most companies engineers and developers have very little influence over the product's specifications - they're simply asked to build a thing already specc'd to hell by PM's, VP's, legal, ADA, and other groups within your organization. So if the joint effort of all those groups results in the product failing before it even hits a developers' desk, why should their compensation be impacted?
The best way to tie development teams to the product is by offering bonuses when the product succeeds. But for some odd reason many companies don't want to do that.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U
[2]: http://paulgraham.com/worked.html
[3]: https://www.neowin.net/news/heres-the-best-look-yet-at-the-w...
Another "leader" who complains about employees wanting work life balance and they are extremely entitled. These are the type of managers you want to avoid. I'm sure many Googlers are happy you left.
I think the author is correct that some big tech companies create a culture where going to 11am yoga is more important that crunching out a few more lines of code. He's correct that if your focus is on building and scaling product, this culture reduces the velocity of change. However, I see a couple of things the author is missing: 1) Work life balance is about employee long term retention and places like Google spen…
On-call engineers for high risk projects and deployments are another situation and not the norm.
The only leaders and teams I have seen push back on this, are the ones who 1) have no kids or 2) have their entire social life wrapped up with their work life. Why would they ever stop working when they can just play video games together at the office and say they are “working late”?