> My typical day started at 7 a.m. I worked until noon, had lunch and a couple of meetings, and then dove back into intense coding blocks from 2:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.

> Even after work hours, I couldn't turn work off — I kept thinking about the problems at work and what I needed to do. I think the pressure and the environment of working in tech made it incredibly hard for me to disconnect after work.

> For six months, from March to September 2020, I was at the lowest point in my life. Every day felt like a grind: I didn't know what I was doing or why I was still working. My performance started dropping — I couldn't focus on my code or keep up with the deadlines.

> In my opinion, there's a constructive way to give feedback: "Hey, I like the attempt you made here, and there might be opportunities to improve in this way." But some engineers at Meta lacked tact and nuance: "This is really bad. You shouldn't have written it like this." This kind of feedback makes it sound like this is a black-and-white issue, and it often overlooks the emotional aspect of communication.

> I remember one month, I was the only engineer on the Android team because people were either on vacation or taking mental-health leave. I didn't want my team to be held back because of me, so I felt pressured to perform. If I didn't stay up to speed and get those learnings quickly, then I'd be delaying future work streams, which would impact the whole team's progress.

> It was frustrating that leadership was looking so closely at commit counts to gauge employee success. I believed that code quantity alone didn't prove anything — skills like mentorship, project management, and navigating interpersonal dependencies should also be valued. But my manager held a different perspective, and that conversation was one of the last straws that convinced me to leave Meta.

What is...a job?

We need to stop this! We are promoting unhealthy extra hours. We are making it like it's ok to expect/ask developers to work overnight and weekends. Work-life balance is not just a cliché, we need to incentivise developers to have a real life outside of work

> I was once about to leave my place with a date when the office called because of a production issue. She sat and waited patiently for an hour while I tried frantically to fix the issue before she ultimately took off (I couldn’t blame her), leaving me to my work and my coworkers in IRC sharing my misery.

is this company really so dependent of a single developer? unless it's a startup with 3 employees it sounds like a problem. Or maybe the developer thinks it's the only one able to save the day?

This isn't an article about heroism. Keith Teare claims he co-founded TechCrunch. Arrington says "no" and then details why.

One part of the "why" is about value-adding output. Arrington "could never get [Teare] to write anything, or help pay any bills." Co-founders add value; Keith didn't do that.

The second part of the "why" is about input. Output requires input. But it's fair to highlight both, in part to block claims of unappreciated work. In highlighting Heather's "20 hour days" and "sacrificing [of] her personal life," Arrington draws into contrast the difference between someone he considers a co-founder and someone he doesn't.

> 20-hour days are not actually worked

Founded a company. Worked twenty-hour days. Deceptively easy to do if you're chasing a short-term deliverable across multiple time zones. (Short-term because this tactic is obviously unsustainable.)

And then, as their (very young) manager, I realized that we were all being royally abused by the company. I don't recall what the trigger was, but the light bulb went off.

I started telling people to go home at 8pm. I urged them to "take weekends off".

A few months later I was ask to resign ... or to open a new office for the company in another country. (Never mind that productivity had gone up and people were way happier - the CEO loved that people were working all night and weekends and was royally pissed off that they no longer were).

I wish I'd had this to read back then: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o.... I encourage every engineer to work through it slowly. And Michael O'Church has great practical advice.

Having worked in several startups since, and a couple of big companies too, I have a few takeaways that might help newer engineers:

* predictability trumps productivity - if you tell management it will be done by Friday, have it done by Friday. Don't promise them Tuesday and pull an all nighter to do it, and then miss by a day. Pad by a day or two to allow for the inevitable. If you get done early, use it to catch up on your personal work projects (exploring new tools, cleaning up that code from last week, helping out a co-worker). As a manager of engineers, I came to appreciate the (seemingly) slower but more predictable performers, as well as the rockstar miracle workers -- and they usually got paid the same.

* make managers choose what you work on, don't just do it all (they're paid to choose!) - The most useful scheduling / workload trick I learned was to always have handy a list of all the things expected of me. So, when big boss comes over and says "Hey, I know you're busy, but is there any chance you can squeeze in XYZ for me?", you can say, "Sure, I'd LOVE to Mr Big Boss. Which of the following should I push to next week: project A, B or C?" Nine out of ten times, XYZ is less important than what you're already doing and Big Boss will (honestly) re-think and move on. (The sleazy ones will try and find another patsy, so watch to see what they do next so you can calibrate accordingly).

* find a life & validation outside your workplace. When you enjoy your work and your colleagues, it's easy to make that your life. Resist, for fear of living at work. It can be good for a while, but it becomes a rut and you can easily be abused. It's better to find something outside that will forcibly pull you away and give you perspective. Find a sport, form a band, take up a new hobby. Anything that gives you a compelling reason to be out of the office.

* take vacations a week or more at a time. Don't let them expire unused. Don't take them as pay. Get out of town. Go see family. Go skiing/biking/sailing/hiking. Do a course. It will give you perspective and you'll come back to work renewed and a little more clear-eyed.

I see I've rambled on... My meta point is:

Life is short, don't be someone's patsy.

To give another data point, I've worked at a different Big Tech company since 2012, on two different teams, and haven't experienced anything like this. There's no pressure to work after hours, on weekends, or vacations. Just today I was debugging a release blocker with a coworker, and it got to be 4:30, which was when they had planned to end their day. It wouldn't even have occurred to me to suggest they stay late: we can pick it up on Monday and the release can slip.

I'm sure there are people at my company who have experiences closer to the author's: what I'm trying to say is that Big Tech is a big place, and if you find yourself somewhere with bad culture don't take that to mean there aren't other places you would like.

[Steve] pointed out to [the CEO] that what he was watching was that his entire company had bought into the “culture of working late” – but not because they had work to do, or it was making them more competitive or generating more revenue, but because the CEO said it was what mattered. Every evening the VPs were waiting for the CEO to leave, and then when the VPs left everyone else would go home. Long hours don’t necessarily mean success. There are times when all-nighters are necessary (early days of a startup, on a project deadline) but good management is knowing when it is needed and when it is just theater.

I think this is pretty much what most start-ups in the tech sector expect, it's similar to the over-optimisation problem in that because this technique has worked for some very successful companies then obviously every other tech-start up needs to overwork their employees and requires employees to dedicate their life to "the mission".

It's difficult because it's very infectious and it's extremely stressful to everyone who doesn't fit in with the expectations. I've had work experiences where I'm paired with very over-achieving engineers and managers might fall into the trap of comparisons: "Well he gets things many things done in a day and very quickly, why can't you also do that? We really want people to be motivated, to put in those extra hours if needed". And it's a difficult conversation because, how do you tell your boss you're not really interested in working those extra hours? That you don't really value productivity as much as they do, that well... that you have a life that you want to enjoy.

Building up unrealistic and unsustainable expectations is not okay. It's not okay to cry at work because of how stressful a deadline is. I mean, let's be honest here, this person was working at Stripe she's not a nurse that has someone's literal life in their hands. It's not okay to work 15 hours a day, our bodies and minds can only do so much.

And all of this for what? To "increase the internet's GDP"? Might as well just start a war while we're at it, that will for sure increase some countries GDP as well. Seriously, we are people not machines. It's good to be passionate, but where we put our passion is very important.

This affects many engineers including myself. In many cases over working is not necessary and there are diminishing returns, possibly even less overall net returns if you burn out or become too sleep deprived and stressed to function efficiently the following days. In this case he quit, which is an example of this.

As engineers we have to learn how to manage expectations and disconnect from work. As engineering leaders we need to foster a culture of maintaining good work life balance. As founder and CEO, he's in the best possible position to do this. Especially in this case where there is no external deadline.

> The reaction from a group of Silicon Valley executives: Wow.

> “We’re so lazy in the U.S.!” blurted Wesley Chan, a venture capital investor, on the first day of what would be a weeklong journey into the Chinese technology scene.

Uh, how about not. That is the complete wrong response to that. I understand Wesley might have just been trying to lighten the mood or be nice but let's not encourage working yourself to death.

This is a hard pill to swallow for managers, but maybe this is what being a full time developer really is all about? 4 hours of real work and 4 hours of just loafing around?

Forcing oneself to write more code just leads to bloated software. And not doing it while fretting over not giving the employer their money's worth for the last 4 hours is only going to increase stress and hurt performance for the first 4. Maybe instead going for a walk, taking a nap or chatting with other developers is just as much part of what's "real work" for a developer.

> When I’m building my own projects, this is great. I simply stop and pick it up again the next day. By being disciplined in putting in the work each day, and not overdoing it, I end up architecting solutions that are simple and elegant.

This is exactly what the industry needs. Paying for 40 hours and only getting 20 quality hours in front of the computer is probably more profitable for the company in the long run than demanding the full 40 and getting a lot of convoluted garbage.

It seems like he doesn't care about when he works, but he has long uninterrupted work times, which is great, and it's what most developers ask for.

After about a year there I learned about half my team was taking Adderall to keep up. After a two week stint of working until 11am every day of the week I got called back into the office at 12:00 midnight by the CEO and the next day I had to call in sick because I was shivering and cold because of sleep depravation. I started putting out resumes that day.

Hmmm.. hard to imagine a nearly trillion dollar company chugging along nicely without a majority of people "giving a shit". The author seems to conflate working long hours with productivity and caring about a company. Don't you hate it when CXOs don't realise that they are in the knowledge economy where people have different styles of working and different schedules /shrug

However, I work for a large enterprise now. The problem is most of the team doesn't really have much to do most of the time. To show off, people either

    1) spend minimum 8 hours or more in office or 
    2) Blabber all the time about how challenging and demanding their work is. I am looking at you, the sysadmin, who takes 3 weeks to create a server.

The only criteria for them to show their work is the hours, and they never lose a chance to make sure that they remind me and the manager about that- like how they had to do something on weekends or how they have a meeting after 6 p.m. I tried to ignore all this. but it's hard. Those kind of people are the majority. So here is what I did:

Since I don't get to utilize my time properly, I decided to make sure that I at least piss them off more: I have always been an early morning person. I now come to work before anyone else. At least I enjoy the look on their faces. They have nothing to bitch about now :)

Which is exactly what causes a lot of burnout to begin with. People being overworked or worked in such a way that only optimized for the manager - and no one else.

I find myself having not worked insane hours very often. I’ll be real - I’ve never worked much more than 60 hours in a week. (Excluding college) Even then - those were exceptional. However - I’ve been “logged in” for 80+ hours many times. Constantly consumed by the ideas of work, what’s going on, hating my manager, disliking the systems we work in, etc. in some sense it might be better to just log more hours in the chair and actually do a thing that might move the needle but honestly - I’d rather not. I feel they don’t deserve that and when I have done it - it never was recognized or was substantial enough to move us forward or change the fundamental cultural issues.

The fundamental issue is that managers in tech treat people like programs and not like human beings. I know this happens outside of tech too but we try to act like we don’t do that here. But we really do. It’s all a lie.

It’s insane how much lying we all do just to get by. Sometimes I want to found a company just to see if I could actually get rid of the bad incentive structures and actually have a radically honest and helpful company that was driven by compassion and enthusiasm for helping one another. Far fetched tho - I’m not really into brown nosing anyone, VCs included.

During the same interview, the CTO said something to me like: "You can come in, do your work, and leave at 5pm every day. And that's fine. Or, you know, you can stick around a little longer and help take this company to the next level. That's great, too."

As soon as I got home, I googled the company a little more deeply and found a slew of developers complaining on Glassdoor about being pressured to work long hours and come into the office on weekends.

My read on the situation was that the wife had been waiting in the car out in the parking lot for an hour or two (I remember we wasted a half-hour on a whiteboard puzzle-solving exercise which, while kinda fun, didn't really seem that relevant to the position) and was beyond getting sick of this shit.

I imagined him pitching it to her like, "Hey, once we hire another dev, I can start getting out of the office at 5 every day like I promised," when in reality the two (interviewer and new dev) would just guilt each other (or maybe inspire each other!) into working even longer hours.

I used to work 14 hours a day, with 5 hours of sleep, and another 5 hours for everything else. This lasted for only 3 months, but were enough for the following to happen:

* I exhausted myself. I tried being on schedule and keeping up with the original pace, but in fact my productivity lowered so much that I was LESS productive than in a time when I used to work 3-5 hours a day

* I had developed serious health issues ... because of sleep deprivation I began having supra-ventricular tachycardia episodes

* I became isolated, and lost touch with friends. Lack of social interactions leads to depression and paranoia, and I was there

* I couldn't hold the project in my head and I couldn't see the bigger picture anymore. I was unable to make pragmatic decisions anymore, and whenever I had to make a choice, I got lost in endless arguments (paradox of choice at its peak)

* Good software projects require so much more than technical expertise. When you're exhausting yourself to work, you're bound to lose touch with the real world

* I ended burned-out, and I'm still recovering

Most people are unable to work for 6 hours per day (in the zone). If you're able to constantly maintain 8 hours per day, while maximizing your performance, then you're already ahead.

In my case, I eventually learned that the odd hours weren't the key to his perceived success. Instead, he used the odd hours to force us to give him only work that could be accomplished alone. We were lulled into letting him make key architecture decisions in isolation, because no one else was awake or online at the same time to discuss them.

Eventually he became the architect by virtue of operating in isolation, where we couldn't discuss his decisions. Everyone else was forced to work around his code. If he refactored the codebase in the middle of the night to make his job easier, the other team members were all forced to work around his refactor and waste time updating their PRs to match his work.

Worse yet, having someone like that on the team drives away other great employees. Eventually everyone else will get sick of accommodating the architects isolated schedule. If they have other opportunities, they'll leave.

> I often think about how I could have better allowed his brilliance while not alienating the rest of his team, but in the end I failed.

It's not on you. Brilliance and individual productivity aren't everything in a team setting. If your project must scale past a single person, you need everyone operating on the same page. It's painful in the short term to lose the quirky rockstars, but it makes for a healthier team in the long run.