Ask HN: Are there software companies with a good life/work balance?
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?
95 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadBut a large company is really like a group of many tiny companies, and it’s hard to reliably be placed in a great area unless you know someone on the inside. Large companies sometimes don’t even let you apply to specific teams.
You want to find a decently large company that has its business model figured out so you don't have to stress about where your salary will be coming from. You probably won't be able to pick a low-stress team unless you already have connections or inside info there.
But you can generally network around the company after getting hired: technology interest groups, non-technology interest groups, recruiting trips, internal chatrooms, folks working on the same open source tech, etc. If you start out in a mediocre-to-bad team, you can often figure out how to get transferred to a better situation within a couple years.
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.
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
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.
I look after my team because they look after me.
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
There are a lot of new people, but, when I joined, there were around 75k employees and now it is closer to 150k, so the new people are additive rather than replacements. Only two people I have worked with closely have left the company all together. There have been others in my circles but not really that many and I don't remember any of them. Instead of leaving the company, most people just leave the team for greener pastures elsewhere in the company
Compared to super-early and mid-stage startups, the ability to work a sane amount is done amazingly well at Google, and they pay too much. The downside is that the work is really simple, and the complexity (e.g. of service development) is through the roof and not supported very well. So just get ready to move at less than half the speed you're used to.
TOTALLY worth it to bank money for 3-5 years, IMO.
I couldn't imagine doing such a grind for more than a few weeks.
It's definitely not for everybody, but you might be surprised as to what you find by cutting expenses by what most consider to be "drastic measures" just to see. You can always just go spend more anyways after seeing what it's like!
I read everywhere that for promotions at Google, you need to keep making new products. How true is that? And how do you deal with it?
This sounds heavenly. I don't understand why people decide to leave. You collect a hefty paycheck and add padding to your resume that can help guarantee a high-paying job later.
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.
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.
There's also the other factor of attrition. Companies who force their staff to work overtime ultimately can't keep their good staff.
Honestly, talk of corporations to "pay their fair share" is a distraction. The government has proven itself unwilling or incapable of applying effective taxes on corporations. Even if they did, the taxes are ultimately born by consumers, and a ton of waste is created as a result (see the number of people who work full time in corporate tax accounting).
The cycle from "they don't pay their fair share", to new tax policies, to failure of those policies, to "they don't pay their fair share" is a distraction that prevents us from taking straightforward steps that would help workers tremendously, like a law to require overtime pay for salaried workers who don't get equity.
I agree that there is a competition. However, I disagree entirely that crazy pressure and long hours win.
- In b2b companies, it's all about the sales team, and engineering is more of necessary evil dragged by sales along.
- Tech debt and mediocre teams, which I described above, slow things substantially (this is the reason why more hours and bodies are thrown at problems)
Also, I know several great engineers and a team of them working regular hours will wipe a floor with a much-much larger team working a huge number of hours (in organizations I mentioned above). (BTW. Usually, such a small team of great engineers go and build a brand new startup. This would solve the tech-excellency problem, but it doesn't solve the work-life balance problem)
"Thank you for visiting Sanctuary Computer. Our website is currently closed.
Website hours are Monday to Friday 7 AM - 7 PM (in your browser's local time)."
On the other hand it's intersting to see how much I expect a website to just work and be available 24/7 when I click on a link, so there's a lesson for me here too.
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.
However, there are many small companies out there who have a culture that don’t want to grind you to nonexistence. Sure, they may be in Kansas City, or Nashville, or Denver, but their founders understand that the goal isn’t to sell out, the goal is to build a business. True, eventually they may get bought by another company, but along the way they aren’t interested in killing their golden geese.
Before discounting smaller companies, I would recommend delving deep into their culture. You may find that it works for you or you may find that you want no part of it. However, I would give it a shot. You may find that it’s something that you can’t get anywhere else.
I had flexible hours, I'd typically come in at 1 and stay until 7-8 to avoid traffic, I worked from home regularly, and they had free snacks. It was really chill
My first long-term job out of school was as the 7th man in a well-established telecommunications company. It had easily the best retirement benefit and work-life balance. Second to working from home, it was the best commute (seven minutes in rush hour to start, then 25 minutes after a move).
There were downsides: the engineering wasn't that exciting, and there was no HR (both pro and con, I guess), and the budget was an accounting mistake at any Fortune 500...but I look back on it very fondly.
Can you parse it for me?
To get a job you pass my personal, practical, coding test. By practical I mean using an IDE with full web access, Google, Stack Overflow, whatever. I try to hire people with at least 10+ years experience, but the more the better. Some of our best are well over 30 years experience.
In exchange we have a happy group of strong developers enjoying their work and having time for their lives outside of it. This has led to an extremely stable system that’s easy to add features to even after 15 years of evolution. Because of that perhaps it’s actually cheaper to work this way.
I don’t think there’s a simple answer.
I have noticed that managers who are parents tend to be more understanding of work life balance. Not sure if that observation would pass a statistical analysis, though.
It's kind of shitty anyways.
And it's easy for you to hop onto the next job?
I also worked at a small defense contractor. Great work-life balance and a very friendly environment. No backstabbing or politics.
AFAICT, 99% of "software companies" are outside of the asshole belt(i.e. SiValley). They won't pay you $400k/year, but you probably won't care.
My opinion on SiValley just keeps getting lower, frankly. It doesn't help that I'd have about the same amount of money in the bank($300k) after almost 3 years of working my ass off as if I had stayed at home at my lower-paying job and just let my home appreciate in value. From what I hear, the larger SiV companies are starting to hire people into non-SiV offices, so hopefully the valley stops getting worse and those companies don't export their caustic work ethics to the rest of the nation.
For all the hate silicon valley-type companies get, I honestly love the spot I'm in. I think it has more to do with team structure and management trusting you enough not to micromanage. Hard to verify that as a job seeker though.
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.
I notice that there aren't that many listings though, and many of the listings are from the same companies. Is this because there simply aren't many listings for 4 day weeks? Or is it just difficult to get companies list on your marketplace?
From companies, I'm getting a lot of responses like "We don't offer a 4 day week, but we would be 'open to applications' for it". So basically you just need to ask which is what I'm working on :)
Hours are flexible although most of our team is on EST. Looking for Node or JS experience.
https://grnh.se/77cf4ea42us
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!
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.
I am not sure (I have never been to such companies). However, I believe that such problems (tech-debt and mediocre engineering culture) only tend to grow with time.
Check out some of the top company-companies around, something like WalMart, vs a tech-company like Amazon. They don't make their billions a year by being mediocre, but since tech isn't their core business (only supportive thereof) they don't burn people out on it, so will probably have manageable levels of tech debt and average to above-average technical staff. Every company has tech debt and mediocrity, but if you're not changing the wheels on the car while going 110 down the highway it won't affect _you_ nearly as much.