Mental health impacts of a big tech job
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Mental health impacts of a big tech job
1–10 of 191 posts
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#2So, recently I achieved happiness because I just don't care about the job anymore. I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead. I got a Meets-Most, and I've never been happier.
I'm writing my final proposal as one final swing at the bat and the title is "XYZ or Bust" where either I get buy-in or I'm leaving. I've never felt better in my entire career.
This is made possible because I'm old enough with enough assets that I can quit and retire, so now it is time to leverage the positives.
From reading this, it is clear the team he is on is toxic. The key to not being on-call all the time is not answering the call unless you in rotation. It's hard to do for sure.
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#3So much that could be said here but I'll just be concise. You don't have to work long/odd hours. You can set boundaries. Learn to manage your manager.
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#4So, recently I achieved happiness because I just don't care about the job anymore. I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead. I got a Meets-Most, and I've never been happier. I'm writing my final proposal as one final swing at the bat and the title is "XYZ or Bust" where either I get buy-in or I'm leaving. I've never felt better in my entire career. This is made possible because I'm old…
> I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead.
It's not just the brazenness of the act, it's the fact you made your defiance into art that I really respect.
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#5I don't know if I've just gotten lucky - I have only ever worked at smaller companies I guess - but I've never really dealt with a blurring of time boundaries by my employer. I think at each of my four jobs there was exactly one time I had to deal with an emergency in off-hours. One of those jobs was even toxic in other ways, but invasion of personal time was not one of them.
Is it really that common? Does it mainly happen at global corps that run essential internet infrastructure?
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#6So, recently I achieved happiness because I just don't care about the job anymore. I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead. I got a Meets-Most, and I've never been happier. I'm writing my final proposal as one final swing at the bat and the title is "XYZ or Bust" where either I get buy-in or I'm leaving. I've never felt better in my entire career. This is made possible because I'm old…
> I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead. It's not just the brazenness of the act, it's the fact you made your defiance into art that I really respect.
Here is the poem:
I will not do this PSC.
There is a future that I foresee.
No longer shall I bend the knee
to this process called PSC.Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#7> This may seem outrageous to someone that hasn’t experienced this type of situation, but in the Big Tech world this expectation is normal.
I work at a FAANG, and it's probably a team-by-team thing, but that is absolutely not normal in my experience. That's a particularly shitty circumstance, and it's a bummer your management didn't stick up for you.
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#8> This may seem outrageous to someone that hasn’t experienced this type of situation, but in the Big Tech world this expectation is normal. I work at a FAANG, and it's probably a team-by-team thing, but that is absolutely not normal in my experience. That's a particularly shitty circumstance, and it's a bummer your management didn't stick up for you.
Same and I agree- it’s basically all team based.
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#9> This may seem outrageous to someone that hasn’t experienced this type of situation, but in the Big Tech world this expectation is normal. I work at a FAANG, and it's probably a team-by-team thing, but that is absolutely not normal in my experience. That's a particularly shitty circumstance, and it's a bummer your management didn't stick up for you.
I worked 17 years at Google on lots of different things and with one exception* never let work stuff interrupt my life when I wasn't at work. I certainly kept odd hours at times and would do things like stay late some days if I had broken something that I thought I could fix before leaving, but once I was done with work I was done.
* The one exception was when I was on a team where we had a rotating pager duty for our stuff in production, and I would periodically be on duty. As I recall we got paid extra for those time blocks.
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#10I don't know if I've just gotten lucky - I have only ever worked at smaller companies I guess - but I've never really dealt with a blurring of time boundaries by my employer. I think at each of my four jobs there was exactly one time I had to deal with an emergency in off-hours. One of those jobs was even toxic in other ways, but invasion of personal time was not one of them. Is it really that common? Does it mainly…
> Does it mainly happen at global corps that run essential internet infrastructure?
Being on-call happens at scale because machines are not to be trusted, and the limits of our skulls meet their match when machines vastly outnumber people. When I worked at Amazon S3, we had rotations where people had physical pagers. On-call was a duty, and everyone shared a rotation.
Honestly, I thought it was an awesome responsibility that there I was at 2 AM and some stupid shit happened in dublin and I got to fix it. (Or at least try to fix it as my first on-call shift was rough)
I think Amazon is one of the few companies that get this right with their cultures because you can own efforts that people use. It's not going to be something discarded after a year unless a massive rewrite is planed. The massive rewrites can be super fun (but hard) as well because you have to do it in-flight.
The reason Amazon gets this right is that you can get a bit of the stake on the outcome, and this is awesome. For instance, I designed how Amazon S3 does URL rewrites on the website endpoint. It's a small feature, but I lead the effort from start to finish. For all practical purposes, that feature is most likely going to last until the end of time. However, its that relationship between myself as an engineer with the customer that makes it worth it (at least emotionally).