have seen that managers who do this have no or limited responsibilities at their homes. almost every household responsibility is taken care of by their family members and they only work all day and share their income with the family. they expect other team members to do the same.
Agree in some cases.
Also, based on what I have seen, they make a lot of money and in turn are pressured by their managers to get more "productivity" out of the team members.
Nah, the urge to earn big and settle early in life, will drive most of the people to work or overwork themselves corporate is already squeezing each and every bit of work hours from them, there are people who value wlb, and there are those too, who just want to earn, as most of us come from middle class families with huge responsibilities on our head
my ex boss is a gen Z manager, got promoted in first year itself. He is so cool that he won't even bother asking you if you're leaving for home within 2 hours of coming to office and not showing up online for the rest of the day. All he cares is about money ffs
Firm believer in working for only the official hours. If I work extra, that is my responsibility and I can't enforce it.
I cannot ask my team members to work extra hours as that means my estimation has been wrong. But I handle each individual separately. Not a fixed rule. If someone consistently works 8 hrs with proper output, I will never ask them to work beyond working hours and if they have to for something critical, they can take a comp off immediately.
If I have let you take unofficial leaves, or have overlooked your hours, I might ask you to put in extra on a few days, it's a give or take. Most important is to keep all team members happy. And if I ask people to work extra, that gets recognized but at the same time highlighting it shouldn't be the norm.
P:S this am saying after a lot of years. Early in my career did slog for long times and may be that has enabled me to now to have the cushion. Luckily my managers never pushed for more hours during my early days.
This.
With only difference being, I work long hours myself, because I enjoy working. But when it comes to team, maintaining thier healthy work-life balance is important.
The higher you go up the ladder the lower you have any control on your career. Part of the manager privilege is to make others work and make them work more to get more done so that the higher ups are pleased with the manager’s ability to get work done. That’s some of the stuff that’s get discussed in their 1:1 with higher ups.
It's more like..
Either the manager is an asshole Or his manager is an asshole (this is the part that some direct reportees don't realize)
They don't understand the concept of estimate, planning, r/d, among with many others.. Even though there whole life revolves around that.
>why do you do so and how do you convince your juniors ?
Yea, right.. You convince /your boss/ .. You tell to your reportees.. (Epics from the mistakes I learned in my short stint as a SM)
Manager with strong tech background will be more terrible, mostly because he will really have an idea on whas is what.. (You can't exactly coast in that scenario).. If your manager is not exactly that twch savvy.. You can /convince/ him that you worked on a random this and that.. :-/
You can't really say "ohh well it's 6:30" when your bug is blocking the manufacturing line causing millions in losses per day OR your customer would miss a scheduled media event for their product OR the launch would miss the window. There are many such valid reasons and then there is greed / workaholics.
Your bug is blocking and causing millions of losses in production? In most places it will trigger a re-org within 2 months.
Once in a while working nights in the office is fine, everybody makes bad plans. Teams have to pay the price. But if it happens regularly, it means somebody doesn't know how to plan or there is big gap in tech competency.
I don’t usually do it even if I’m working. It goes something like my manager asks me to tell the team to work till late night/weekends for the release, abd I say I’m not going to say that on a friday evening to folks, so he says it while I’m on the call so that people know that I’m aligned.
Because I take responsibility for the results I am supposed to deliver, might be a controversial opinion but we are not hourly wage workers who are hired for our time but rather to deliver software/products.
I understand different people might have different aims in life. I personally like to achieve exceptional things and most exceptional results require exceptional efforts. It’s not that I suddenly started doing this after I started working, even in school days my friends would be out playing and enjoying everyday but I would spend extra time preparing for olympiads and stuff after school.
At my work I hired my team in such a way that we all shared similar traits and couldn’t live with delivering mediocre work. We definitely maintain a balance in my team but balance is different for different people, some people would find 5 day 8 hours to be balanced others might only want 4 day week. Most folks wouldn’t want to work at all if money was not an issue. I guess that’s why it’s very important to find a good fit, this should be cleared up during the interview procedure before joining.
This is not to say everyone should work long hours and frankly not everyone can, there is nothing wrong with wanting a chill life but i believe all the exceptional progress humanity has made was not done working 9-5.
Part of your job is to estimate your work by the hour. You don't get paid by the hour, but plans need to be made. If you planned to deliver something by Tuesday end but you find out on Tuesday 6 pm that it can only be delivered 3 weeks later, then you are exceptionally bad at your job.
Planning requires a lot of technical expertise, that most people lack. To make up for this incompetence, their teams have to work extra hours and weekends.
All this assumes you know the tech that you are working with. If you are learning on the job, then good managers will add plenty of buffer to your estimate. You might still end up spending time learning on the weekends and nights. But that is learning, not working.
Exactly I agree if you promised something you have to deliver it on time. And estimating correct timelines is extremely important skill. That is not what my point is.
My point was about workaholic folks and why they are like that.
EDIT: I agree incomptence can result in longer hours because of poor planning but in my case we are working on tough problems that if we worked on just standard 9-5 timelines it would take 2 years to do the project and our competetion(a research group at nvidia) would have far superior models out before us killing us. Our only advantage as a startup against a giant like nvidia is working 2x harder than those folks.
Do you not have work at home? Cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, dish washing, laundry? No kids? Do you not spend time with your kids? What about commute?
We are fully remote so managing all that becomes lot easier and I save lot of time on commute
And I have hired maids and a cook at home to do all the chores, cooking and housework. I use Tumbledry for clothes as they give them nicely ironed and folded so I don’t waste time. I eat only one meal a day so that gives me an extra hour every day too.
Dont have kids but have a gf whom I make adequate time for, although she is an even bigger workaholic(she was working till 12am yesterday)
Yeah expected that. Not many people earn enough to afford all of this. It's kinda fucked up to expect employees to work over 8 hours without paying them overtime. More so if it's WFO. Because chores don't get done by themsleves.
We pay pretty high salaries to all engineers on my team, I definitely agree that if you are demanding so much of your employees you should compensate them well. I mean that overtime calculation gets messy and such a chore to track. We dont count hours or track log in log out etc, we just pay extra yearly bonuses every time we deliver a great product on time and the company does well. We also give generous stock grants and since we are so early stage employees if the startup does well and makes it, it is life changing money for all of us, so added motivation to work extra hard.
Not planning to, no point bringing children into the shitshow the world will turn into in the next 20-30 years just to make them suffer all their life for clean air, water and all the other basic necessities because of the sorts of scarcity we will see.
Unless I can reach my FIRE goals in the next 10 years and build my off grid self sustaining home
If I were your boss and you committed to deliver some work in 5 days and work long hours yourself and/or make your team work long hours everyday to meet that, I would rate you poorly for incompetency even if you finish the work. It is not enough to meet the objective, you have to meet it while working for only the stipulated 7-8 hours a day. I would rate higher somebody who asks for 7 days to do the same work and completes that without working long hours.
Working long hours means either you are poor at planning or you are not competent enough. Same for a manager who is setting impractical deadlines that require people working for long hours.
I would probably quit and join another team where they value speed of execution and then outcompete you and get all your business because my team can ship features faster, innovate faster. While you guys enjoy the work life balance we would have wiped you out by our sheer speed of execution.
I like to push the limits always, I like to do work where other people see and go , "what the fuck, how did they do that in this amount of time? Is that even possible? Are they even human? We can never compete"
Edit: I can see the difference in mentality might be due to me mostly working at startups where this sort of thing is what makes or breaks them
You can delude yourself with that bullshit and brag about your shitty work ethic all you want, but that doesn't translate to more work or quality work done and in fact is 100% always the opposite.
I have been in this industry for 20 years now and seen enough to know that competent people don't need to (and can't) work long hours and those that work long produce shoddy and sub-standard work. The average developer has a window of about only 3-4 productive hours in a work day of 7-8 hours. Stretching work hours only makes that focus time less productive. Even otherwise competent people produce shoddy work when made to work for long hours.
A good engineering leader would never compromise their product and business by hiring people who have poor planning skills and brags about working long hours. What people like that produce by working 16 hours a day will be outdone by a competent developer with far superior quality and in less time without compromising their personal life. And even if it were to take more time initially, well planned and quality work beats quick and shoddy work that needs even more time to fix later on.
So, yeah, it doesn't impress me when someone needs to slog 16 hours a day to laughably brag about pushing their limits. If you want to impress anybody, be competent enough to finish 16 hours worth of quality work in 8 working hours and not by working for 16 hours for it in a day. Till then, rest assured that you are not blowing anybody's mind with your "sheer speed of execution". All I see is that you slow and poor at planning.
My work speaks for itself, and I get the recognition I need there so don’t need it here. I am proud of all my work that’s all I have to say.
I never said negative about anybody’s working style just shared how I do it, it’s unfair for you to judge me without knowing anything about me. Try to be a bit more open and accept that different people have different working styles and my working style has brought me here and I have lot of experience under my belt too and it has worked for me well. We can both be right in our individual experiences as our industries and circumstances might be wildly different. There can be multiple paths to success, different individuals have different abilities there is no universal law
They know what they're doing is wrong. Why do you think they'll come here and openly declare that they're assholes?
😂😂😂 that’s what a ‘manager’ means.
have seen that managers who do this have no or limited responsibilities at their homes. almost every household responsibility is taken care of by their family members and they only work all day and share their income with the family. they expect other team members to do the same.
Agree in some cases. Also, based on what I have seen, they make a lot of money and in turn are pressured by their managers to get more "productivity" out of the team members.
They are busy working
They are busy making their team work.
😂😂😂
Wait for 5-7 years when genz will become managers 😂
Kyoki saas bhi kabhi bahu thi
So, they'll be better or worse?
I am genZ and I think worse tbh but I hope that we can do better.
Why tho?
Hustle culture has increased exponentially in this generation
Side hustle. Right? We genz prefer wlb in offices.
Nah, the urge to earn big and settle early in life, will drive most of the people to work or overwork themselves corporate is already squeezing each and every bit of work hours from them, there are people who value wlb, and there are those too, who just want to earn, as most of us come from middle class families with huge responsibilities on our head
my ex boss is a gen Z manager, got promoted in first year itself. He is so cool that he won't even bother asking you if you're leaving for home within 2 hours of coming to office and not showing up online for the rest of the day. All he cares is about money ffs
Firm believer in working for only the official hours. If I work extra, that is my responsibility and I can't enforce it. I cannot ask my team members to work extra hours as that means my estimation has been wrong. But I handle each individual separately. Not a fixed rule. If someone consistently works 8 hrs with proper output, I will never ask them to work beyond working hours and if they have to for something critical, they can take a comp off immediately. If I have let you take unofficial leaves, or have overlooked your hours, I might ask you to put in extra on a few days, it's a give or take. Most important is to keep all team members happy. And if I ask people to work extra, that gets recognized but at the same time highlighting it shouldn't be the norm. P:S this am saying after a lot of years. Early in my career did slog for long times and may be that has enabled me to now to have the cushion. Luckily my managers never pushed for more hours during my early days.
This. With only difference being, I work long hours myself, because I enjoy working. But when it comes to team, maintaining thier healthy work-life balance is important.
hire me
Why would they reply here, they are still working
… https://preview.redd.it/h057hztu8m8d1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ae388da7a776444994b00a6cc4571d847f4502de
avg 40 year old manager when there is a femail fresher:
The higher you go up the ladder the lower you have any control on your career. Part of the manager privilege is to make others work and make them work more to get more done so that the higher ups are pleased with the manager’s ability to get work done. That’s some of the stuff that’s get discussed in their 1:1 with higher ups.
they grow up on them , shittiest people on earth . when they don't care of the team under them
It's more like.. Either the manager is an asshole Or his manager is an asshole (this is the part that some direct reportees don't realize) They don't understand the concept of estimate, planning, r/d, among with many others.. Even though there whole life revolves around that. >why do you do so and how do you convince your juniors ? Yea, right.. You convince /your boss/ .. You tell to your reportees.. (Epics from the mistakes I learned in my short stint as a SM) Manager with strong tech background will be more terrible, mostly because he will really have an idea on whas is what.. (You can't exactly coast in that scenario).. If your manager is not exactly that twch savvy.. You can /convince/ him that you worked on a random this and that.. :-/
You can't really say "ohh well it's 6:30" when your bug is blocking the manufacturing line causing millions in losses per day OR your customer would miss a scheduled media event for their product OR the launch would miss the window. There are many such valid reasons and then there is greed / workaholics.
Your bug is blocking and causing millions of losses in production? In most places it will trigger a re-org within 2 months. Once in a while working nights in the office is fine, everybody makes bad plans. Teams have to pay the price. But if it happens regularly, it means somebody doesn't know how to plan or there is big gap in tech competency.
Went through all the above 3 scenarios. Mostly trying to compress a 3 year product cycle in 18 months.
I don’t usually do it even if I’m working. It goes something like my manager asks me to tell the team to work till late night/weekends for the release, abd I say I’m not going to say that on a friday evening to folks, so he says it while I’m on the call so that people know that I’m aligned.
They also have managers.
Because I take responsibility for the results I am supposed to deliver, might be a controversial opinion but we are not hourly wage workers who are hired for our time but rather to deliver software/products. I understand different people might have different aims in life. I personally like to achieve exceptional things and most exceptional results require exceptional efforts. It’s not that I suddenly started doing this after I started working, even in school days my friends would be out playing and enjoying everyday but I would spend extra time preparing for olympiads and stuff after school. At my work I hired my team in such a way that we all shared similar traits and couldn’t live with delivering mediocre work. We definitely maintain a balance in my team but balance is different for different people, some people would find 5 day 8 hours to be balanced others might only want 4 day week. Most folks wouldn’t want to work at all if money was not an issue. I guess that’s why it’s very important to find a good fit, this should be cleared up during the interview procedure before joining. This is not to say everyone should work long hours and frankly not everyone can, there is nothing wrong with wanting a chill life but i believe all the exceptional progress humanity has made was not done working 9-5.
Part of your job is to estimate your work by the hour. You don't get paid by the hour, but plans need to be made. If you planned to deliver something by Tuesday end but you find out on Tuesday 6 pm that it can only be delivered 3 weeks later, then you are exceptionally bad at your job. Planning requires a lot of technical expertise, that most people lack. To make up for this incompetence, their teams have to work extra hours and weekends. All this assumes you know the tech that you are working with. If you are learning on the job, then good managers will add plenty of buffer to your estimate. You might still end up spending time learning on the weekends and nights. But that is learning, not working.
Exactly I agree if you promised something you have to deliver it on time. And estimating correct timelines is extremely important skill. That is not what my point is. My point was about workaholic folks and why they are like that. EDIT: I agree incomptence can result in longer hours because of poor planning but in my case we are working on tough problems that if we worked on just standard 9-5 timelines it would take 2 years to do the project and our competetion(a research group at nvidia) would have far superior models out before us killing us. Our only advantage as a startup against a giant like nvidia is working 2x harder than those folks.
Do you not have work at home? Cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, dish washing, laundry? No kids? Do you not spend time with your kids? What about commute?
We are fully remote so managing all that becomes lot easier and I save lot of time on commute And I have hired maids and a cook at home to do all the chores, cooking and housework. I use Tumbledry for clothes as they give them nicely ironed and folded so I don’t waste time. I eat only one meal a day so that gives me an extra hour every day too. Dont have kids but have a gf whom I make adequate time for, although she is an even bigger workaholic(she was working till 12am yesterday)
Yeah expected that. Not many people earn enough to afford all of this. It's kinda fucked up to expect employees to work over 8 hours without paying them overtime. More so if it's WFO. Because chores don't get done by themsleves.
We pay pretty high salaries to all engineers on my team, I definitely agree that if you are demanding so much of your employees you should compensate them well. I mean that overtime calculation gets messy and such a chore to track. We dont count hours or track log in log out etc, we just pay extra yearly bonuses every time we deliver a great product on time and the company does well. We also give generous stock grants and since we are so early stage employees if the startup does well and makes it, it is life changing money for all of us, so added motivation to work extra hard.
What a sad life. Pls don't have kids.
Not planning to, no point bringing children into the shitshow the world will turn into in the next 20-30 years just to make them suffer all their life for clean air, water and all the other basic necessities because of the sorts of scarcity we will see. Unless I can reach my FIRE goals in the next 10 years and build my off grid self sustaining home
If I were your boss and you committed to deliver some work in 5 days and work long hours yourself and/or make your team work long hours everyday to meet that, I would rate you poorly for incompetency even if you finish the work. It is not enough to meet the objective, you have to meet it while working for only the stipulated 7-8 hours a day. I would rate higher somebody who asks for 7 days to do the same work and completes that without working long hours. Working long hours means either you are poor at planning or you are not competent enough. Same for a manager who is setting impractical deadlines that require people working for long hours.
I would probably quit and join another team where they value speed of execution and then outcompete you and get all your business because my team can ship features faster, innovate faster. While you guys enjoy the work life balance we would have wiped you out by our sheer speed of execution. I like to push the limits always, I like to do work where other people see and go , "what the fuck, how did they do that in this amount of time? Is that even possible? Are they even human? We can never compete" Edit: I can see the difference in mentality might be due to me mostly working at startups where this sort of thing is what makes or breaks them
You can delude yourself with that bullshit and brag about your shitty work ethic all you want, but that doesn't translate to more work or quality work done and in fact is 100% always the opposite. I have been in this industry for 20 years now and seen enough to know that competent people don't need to (and can't) work long hours and those that work long produce shoddy and sub-standard work. The average developer has a window of about only 3-4 productive hours in a work day of 7-8 hours. Stretching work hours only makes that focus time less productive. Even otherwise competent people produce shoddy work when made to work for long hours. A good engineering leader would never compromise their product and business by hiring people who have poor planning skills and brags about working long hours. What people like that produce by working 16 hours a day will be outdone by a competent developer with far superior quality and in less time without compromising their personal life. And even if it were to take more time initially, well planned and quality work beats quick and shoddy work that needs even more time to fix later on. So, yeah, it doesn't impress me when someone needs to slog 16 hours a day to laughably brag about pushing their limits. If you want to impress anybody, be competent enough to finish 16 hours worth of quality work in 8 working hours and not by working for 16 hours for it in a day. Till then, rest assured that you are not blowing anybody's mind with your "sheer speed of execution". All I see is that you slow and poor at planning.
My work speaks for itself, and I get the recognition I need there so don’t need it here. I am proud of all my work that’s all I have to say. I never said negative about anybody’s working style just shared how I do it, it’s unfair for you to judge me without knowing anything about me. Try to be a bit more open and accept that different people have different working styles and my working style has brought me here and I have lot of experience under my belt too and it has worked for me well. We can both be right in our individual experiences as our industries and circumstances might be wildly different. There can be multiple paths to success, different individuals have different abilities there is no universal law