Dark side of a Valley software engineer | Hacker News Reader

Dark side of a Valley software engineer

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100 pointspolskibus81 comments

Then: Get up at 6am, go to work at grocery store. Get paid $7 an hour. Get out at 1pm, go to school. Go back to grocery store at 7 work till 12. Wake up do it again. Weekends nope. Holidays nope.

Now: Wake up at 8 get to work at like 8:45 work till 6 or 7. Sit in air conditioning all day at a computer. Free lunch. Go home, don't worry about anything. No tests to study for, no worrying about paying rent. Holidays off. Weekends off.

Yea development sucks sometimes but it's almost like doing nothing compared to what I was used to. Sometimes when I get frustrated I just have a flashback of my old life.

As someone who until Oct last year worked weekends and weekdays getting up at 2:30 am to bust my ass in a bakery for dismal pay and virtually no social life due to the hours - I work part time as a junior developer now and looking back at my old life I don't know how the hell I did it. It motivates me to do the best I can each day so I don't end up back there.

Similar experience as an ex Chef. 60+ hour weeks, 5 days a week spread over various split shifts (so rarely 2 whole days off, and half days never really feel like a break). Working for what comes out as less than minimum wage as salaried.

In part because of this, I find it really difficult to deal with people I work with complaining about pay/bonuses/hours etc, because imo what I do now is way easier and probably less empirically useful (although obviously more valuable - thanks capitalism).

There is a small part of me that misses the buzz of a busy service though.

> In part because of this, I find it really difficult to deal with people I work with complaining about pay/bonuses/hours etc,

I get what you're saying and that you likely don't mean any malice, but just in case: It isn't a competition to see who can have the worst working conditions.

That kind of rhetoric is the same that those with capital use to suppress wages/benefits because it's obviously profitable in the long run. It's a manipulation: Many people want to be seen as industrious, and telling someone they're entitled because they want an extra vacation day a year is a powerful manipulation that works much of the time.

Don't be manipulated. The company is almost assuredly making a huge return on your employment. Don't be afraid to assert your right to some of it.

The best approach is to consider yourself a company. Your time is your commodity, your goal is to make profit. Don't give for free your commodity, understand well how is valued in the current market and how to increase that value.

Never go to ask for a bonus/raise because you "deserve" it, but because your skills are valued x in the current job market.

As someone who's been on both sides of the fence, any theories on how they manage to find people to work in cooking, sometimes with really high skill levels, for such long hours for relatively horrible pay?

I mean some I know are very intelligent people, and extremely good at what they do, but make like $50k working 60+ hours per week. It's insane.

Some people truly love it, it's an actual passion. I did work experience at a 2 Michelin Star place, and honestly I've never seen anything like it. I had thought my hours were long - but this was insane. Despite how hard the work was, everyone there was enthusiastic as hell. They saw that one day they'd be able to create the exquisite food, plate it up and send it. That was all they wanted to do.

For those guys (and it was almost all guys) - it was just the only thing they wanted to do in life. This was also kinda the moment I realised it wasn't for me!

While I get your point, I think that to some extent is a false sense of comfort. If you've gone through a challenging time it's more important, not less, to live a balanced life. Because you probably have a lots of "social debt" (loosing contact with friends, not having many relationships, not having done things you normally do at that age etc.) that you need to compensate for. Otherwise you'll sit there at 40+ wondering what happened when (seemingly) everyone else are with their family skiing for the holidays.

Yap. It's very easy to dismiss someone's frustration about X by comparing it with a more miserable Y.

It's really easy when almost anything is more miserable than X.

Working at pizza shops, malls, etc., those things used to be jobs for high schoolers or people between HS and college. It's a shame for many people, the lack of skills makes these the only jobs they can get.

I remember a good number of people on high school who thought they didn't fit in, only went because their parents made them go and who had no intention of going to college or university. Their plan was getting a blue collar job or working for a friend's dad or the like. These days their outlook is dim. There was little forethought in what their situation might look 20 years on, given their choices.

Agreed. As soon as I start complaining about how hard and stressful my job is, I always try to remember how lucky and privileged I am, in the grand scheme of things.

This attitude is how salary ceilings take hold, how "mandatory crunch time" becomes the norm, and how the idea of work-life balance becomes a joke. Even when one's situation is relatively good, one should continue to fight for better.

"I'm training my off-shore replacement, but at least I'm doing it in air-conditioning!"

No, it's not.

In case "mandatory crunch time" becomes the norm, I simply look for another job.

Being able to appreciate that I have that choice is another matter.

I didn't even work during undergrad CS and that was the most stressful point in my life. I easily put in 40-50 hours a week between classes, studying, problem sets and projects.

The months before, during and after interview season were the worst. I had to add 10 hours a week to study 1-2 months beforehand. Then during the interview season, I had to miss classes to go on 7 hour east to west coast flights, with return flights landing at 3 AM local time. After the interviewing season ended, there were mountains of work from missing classes and neglecting school work.

Now it's 10 AM - 7:30 PM (including meal time, I never eat at my desk) with free breakfast, lunch and dinner with no deadlines to worry about. During the undergrad years, I was studying by memorizing the answers to all permutations of a problem because of stress and multiple deadlines a week, but now I have the time to understand the how's and why's of the questions and answers.

Also the money that can effectively be used buy time is nice. I can afford to pay people to fix my toilet/unclog my sink/build IKEA furniture/etc. and have the money to order grocery delivery/drop-off laundry/take-out/etc.

I worked in factory for a while. Wake up at 7am. Be at work by 8am. Work until 12:30. Half hour for lunch. Work until 4:30. Then your day is OVER. You go home and do whatever the hell you want. The stress is lower, the pay is lower and you get much more effective free time. Oh and you don't feel like your brain is about to explode when you go home at 10pm.

tl;dr: yes, there are worse jobs than programming, but not many. The ridiculous amounts of stress is one of the reasons Silicon Valley pays so much more than Industry jobs.

While a lot of the stories are pretty much "this insane thing is considered normal around here", there's some that I feel are due to management and should be changed - long hours or not.

> harsh deadlines, huge backlog of tasks, fear to fail

This happens everywhere. Deadlines exist because customers exist. All backlogs grow until they're silly. Companies may have a fear to fail. But if you have multiple engineers and they're afraid of failure, that's on the management.

> If I get a page on the road I need to pull over and get on the system in 5 mins to start debugging.

That's just terrible planning. Why are people on call when they're traveling? Even some basic rule like adjusting working hours +/-1h for different people on call to account for commute would help. And we're talking about google who could just do 8h support in 3+ countries and get rid of on call apart from n-th tier "the world is on fire" specialists.

Could it be it's just how it works in USA? I'm a software engineer in London and in the last 2 years I haven't done a single minute of overtime.

I'm pretty sure it's just USA. I make a good salary in the North East of UK and I was told multiple times by people from US that I'm crazy to work for that kind of money(If you moved to US, you would easily make 3-4x as much!). And sure, maybe it's true. But I enjoy working 37.5h/week, having 25 paid holiday days a year, unlimited paid sick leave and having a job that I actually like doing - plus I don't really have to think about it once I get home. Healtcare costs me about $100/month in NI contribution, education for my children will be free or almost free - Moving to US for some hypothetical higher salary just does not seem worth it to me at all.

Indeed. Your salary is relative. If you're earning 3-4x more but have to pay 3-4x more on all your expenses, are you really richer? Factor in long hours in general, unpaid overtime, crunch times, a poor work/life ratio in general, etc. It seems like the scales are balanced all wrong.

That's my perception as another tech worker living in the UK. I'd love to hear an argument as to why that isn't the case.

That's also the reason why I love being on part-time. I only get 70% salary, but I get 12 hours more time each week for my own projects, or just for hanging out in the city before sundown.

Have you aways worked part time as a developer? I didn't think it was a common thing but sounds lovely. Can you talk about it some more?

Can't speak to him, but I fluctuate between 24 and 30 hours a week of consulting. I make about as much money as I did as a FT engineer (depending on the project, charging anywhere from $110/hr to $200/hr); dealing with taxes myself is a minor pain in the ass but having a ton of extra time every week is really nice.

I did have to bust my ass a bit to get to the point where I had the skillset and the knowledge necessary to do it, but I'm glad I did. That I am at this point is probably some of why I feel freer to criticize the tech industry--I've been on the bottom and I've since largely stepped out, and it's ugly looking in on it.

I started out full-time, but quickly switched to part-time to do a CS bachelor in parallel (I had a master in physics when I pivoted into IT). Right now, I only have the part-time experience outside of lecture seasons, but I like it very much. I don't have family, so I mainly use the extra time on personal projects or time with friends.

Assuming you had money left over to save, yes, you would be. You would be banking 3-4x as much money, if income and expenses remained proportional

To clarify this post (which I agree with):

Imagine you're making $100 per month right now and spending $95 of it. So you're saving $5 per month.

You move to the US and start making $400 per month, but your expenses skyrocket to $380 per month. But you're now saving $20 per month -- four times as much as you were before.

Now imagine those savings numbers were $1k and $4k, and the difference becomes a pretty big deal.

Personally - right now I know that no matter what happens, my employer has to give me at least 3 months notice to fire me - at will employment is something that sounds almost like a bad joke around here. There does not exist any medical emergency, illness or accident, that would put me in any sort of financial difficulty. Even if 20 helicopters were engaged in transporting me to the hospital or if I had to be put on treatment costing 100k/month, I would never pay anything for it, and my NI contribution would not go up. If I lost my job as a result of an accident I would still be 100% covered. My children will never have to worry about student debt, because they either won't have any, or it will be conditional on them working, capped at a certain level and reasonable.

At the same time, I make enough to pay mortgage on a 4-bedroom house, have a car that I really like, and have the latest gadgets I like. Sure, I can't afford a rolex or a ferrari - but that's fine with me. Saving more money while working in the US and worrying about the above is just absolutely not worth it to me, but again, that's just my personal opinion.

I didn't mean to suggest you should actually move to the US. Life in the US definitely feels pretty backwards compared to some European countries these days, and your examples show that pretty convincingly. I only meant that, despite just being basic arithmetic, it's somewhat paradoxical that savings rates can go up in extremely high cost-of-living areas. It "feels" like you've gained nothing if your income increases by 4x but your cost of living does as well, but in reality you might actually save considerably more money.

Except the only expense likely to be 3-4x more is rent/mortgage. Everything else in the US is going to be the same or cheaper (car, food, gadgets, etc).

Healthcare is the deal-breaker for many, and it's usually WAY more than 3-4x.

It can be. I pay about $400/month for family covergage, this is unusually high for a tech job (many of which have little or no monthly from the employee). So still only $4800 of what might be many tens of thousands of dollars extra. Even $2000/month extra rent is still only $24000 a year, usually a fraction of the higher pay.

righton

Please don't post unsubstantive comments.

Hehe, perhaps not only theory. I did loads of overtime in London, got a 50% pay rise and allowed to build and manage a team, then sent to the USA with UK holidays but US taxes (lower), free housing and further payrise.

I think generalizing in either direction is a waste of time. Surely where you live won't have that much effect on whether you've decided to work overtime or not.

Though I suppose it's more popular to start a business in some locations than in others.

Plural of anecdote!

In some countries there are many more rules about working time.

For example, in the EU it's not permitted to work more than 48 hours per week on average. As far as I know, that includes "on call" time.

http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=706&langId=en&intP...

What does that have to do with anything? Are you implying there is nobody within the EU that works more than 48 hours, or that somehow magically people who call it a day after 40 hours have the same career perspective as those who don't?

> A Google site-reliability engineer starts work at 9 a.m., leaves at 7 p.m., and works in the evenings until about 10 p.m.

That's 11-12 hours per day, which in the EU would limit him to four working days per week.

For someone working normal hours but also on call, if they respond to an incident during the week they're likely to be given e.g. Friday afternoon off in return.

> career perspective

Did you mean prospects, or something else?

I'm sure it makes a difference in some companies, but there are plenty where it doesn't impress anyone.

It includes the time you actually do the on-call work, but not the time when you're just available / waiting.

It depends entirely on your domain. I've been in the software industry for 15 years or so in the U.S., and aside from a couple of stints at start-ups during the first internet bubble/boom, I've rarely worked much overtime. I've worked for the same employer for eight years now, and management's perspective is this: "Sometimes work will require a bit more than 40 hours a week of your time. Sometimes your life will require more. We're okay with that, and understand that there's no magic balancing act. Let's figure that out together."

My sense, too, is that the industry tends to attract workaholics.

Startups attract and value the type of folks who will put in 60 hours every week and get obsessive about it.

Sometimes it grows out of the company as it scales up. Other times it gets institutionalized. The Googles of the world are in a weird spot because they made it part of their culture but the financial and industry upside of working for them mean people apply even if they aren't the kind of folks who can work 60h week for 10 years. Who can say no to that kind of pay cheque?

> people apply even if they aren't the kind of folks who can work 60h week for 10 years.

I think you don't know in advance how long you can stand this before you burn out.

In Portugal, most people (to avoid saying everyone) that work in IT regularly work unpaid overtime, unlike most other professions where overtime is (obviously) paid for, and mostly due to poor management, e.g. project manager doesn't want/know how to negotiate an easily defendable deadline extension, or scope change, or budget restriction, or some basic aspect of the project, so he "asks" the team to work overtime or their performance reviews "may" suffer.

This is, sadly, in line with the mentality of the country's workforce, that believes that you're only doing your job (good or not) if you're leaving after hours...the result is basically people that are too worn out and/or uncooperative by the time they're 40 or less...

> This happens everywhere.

It doesn't happen everywhere.

I work for Pivotal. In my first month I took a train from NYC to Philadelphia to take a weekend course I was interested in. I left the office at 6pm sharp, when we close. At 7pm the train pulled out of the station. I was bored, so I opened my laptop and logged into my work email.

I bounced a few emails back and forth with client devs, who will still in their office. Then at 8pm I closed my laptop and continued merrily on my way.

On the following Monday I was told, in no uncertain terms, to never work after hours again.

The latest I've worked in the office is 6.30pm. Because I thought I'd broken our public cloud. By 6.15pm I had multiple people wandering up and asking why I was still working.

We just now introduced pager duty for teams with operational dependencies. And the policy is: if you have a reason not to answer, then don't.

I am constantly amazed at what people will put up with. Really amazed.

> A Google site-reliability engineer starts work at 9 a.m., leaves at 7 p.m., and works in the evenings until about 10 p.m. He's on constant alert because he must respond to urgent pages within 5 minutes. "Go home at 7pm with my backpack and fully charged laptop. If I get a page on the road I need to pull over and get on the system in 5 mins to start debugging. An email alert can wait until i get home.

Can anyone please comment on the veracity of this quote? I'm interested in a SRE position and I was researching details a while ago and the only info I found on work hours was someone saying that, given that Google has employees all around the world, you don't really need to do crazy hours or night shifts. However, the comment above indicates 12 hour workdays, which is insane. Is that every day? How does it compare to a Software Engineer position at Google?

https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-normal-working-day-for-a-sof...

The important bit from that page is:

"I am on-call about 10 days per quarter, usually 3 shifts of 3-4 days each. I am paid extra for my on-call (after-hours) work, but not at my full hourly salary because I only work when there are problems after hours (e.g. on weekends or late at night.)".

Note that depending on the exact team, Software Engineers at Google may also be part of an on-call rotation.

Yes, indeed, turns out BI just cherry-picked the worst part.

Ten days per quarter, or forty days per year, in few-day shots at a time. That amounts to a monthly shift, and is just frequent/heavy enough to have a real impact on your personal life. No doubt the "extra" pay (let's be real, you'll never be in the inner circle if you forgo the duty) is barely enough to be noticeable.

> No doubt the "extra" pay (let's be real, you'll never be in the inner circle if you forgo the duty) is barely enough to be noticeable.

When allocated 100% to cash (vs. vacation) oncall pay amounts to more than an extra full paycheck every quarter.

If you don't notice an extra $10,000/year post-tax then please, send some of your moneybags to someone who appreciates the value of a dollar. Like me.

>barely enough to be noticeable

For me it's (off the top of my head) about 10%. Definitely noticeable.

Huh it's normal in the UK to be paid for being on call and than paid at a higher rates for any time at BT it was 4 hours minimum for any call 1.5 1.72 (after 8 pm) and double time and a day on Sunday.

One of the quotes in this article was written by me on Quora. At the time of typing my response was intentended to be more of a semi serious rant.

Just thought this would be worth mentioning.

Which one?

The quote between the "thinking beanie guy" and cars stuck in traffic.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-normal-working-day-for-a-sof...

> 7 a.m. Wake up. 8 a.m. Refuse several job offers from Google, Facebook, Oracle, HP and other tech giants. 9 a.m. Write some code that wipes 100 jobs by making people less useful. Noon Free food. 1-3 p.m. Wipe even more jobs. 5 p.m. Meet with investors that are dying to invest in anything that you touch. 7 p.m. Dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. 10 p.m. - Comment on some company blog. Post goes viral and the company becomes an overnight success.

I laughed out loud when reading this one, then I got silent as I realised how accurate this is compared to my current situation, and I don't even live in Silicon Valley...

The slide about watching other people getting $1-$20 million payouts while you get nothing because you joined a few months later is the worst part.

This also happens outside of Silicon Valley but perhaps not to such an extreme extent.

The current system is far from a meritocracy because a lot of unlucky people fall through the cracks.

Given how hard I've worked, I've probably fallen through a lot of small cracks (but thankfully no major horror stories as described above).

Yea, seriously. I never thought of myself as an envious person until coming out here to Silicon Valley and observing the random-jackpot nature of success. You struggle to afford a home hours away from work, while sitting right next to someone with the same skills, job title, education, work history, etc. who has a few million in the bank and drives a new Tesla, and the only difference is he started at the company 6 months before you did. :-/

The real dark side is realizing you've been subsidizing the personal lives of management for the last 5 years. They get married, buy houses, have kids, etc.

It's tough, but at some level these people are choosing this lifestyle. There's no shortage of engineering roles in the world that don't require you to work in high pressured environments and that don't require you to work out of hours.

I work 4 days per week rather than the typical 5 and refuse to do out of hours jobs, using the additional day to have fun with open source, exercise and just generally keep on top of life. I make well over double the annual average household income for the UK at 30 hours a week. I'd take that over ladder climbing as aggressively as possible any day. We really do have it pretty good.

so few people in this world are able to enjoy enough.

>>If your manager is not a software engineer himself you will have even more stress.

Someone should do something about this. Certain other professions, such as the law, protect workers from incompetent management, in many jurisdictions.

It might also attract more people to the profession if you knew your boss had done something similar.

On the other hand, not all managers with a tech background have good people skills to manage engineers.

I don't think its so much people skills to manage engineers, more like people skills to talk to the managers above (i.e./ CEO). I think this, too, would be an interesting topic to delve deeper into.

On top of this, if they think "he's slow, I could do this in 5 minutes", burning out becomes a lot easier.

Are Business Insider literally copy/pasting quora responses to create news articles now?

Add to that the mental burnout of having to violate the natural project hopping progression.

The job does not care that you won't be able to get interested in their stuff for unknown amount of months. It must be done, and now.

Reading these stories - do people actually get paid more for doing more over there?

Here it's a fixed monthly salary, regardless of how much you do (as long as the deadlines are met).

Someone has to do this job, in fact the people working these jobs have the ability to job search after a certain period of time within their company.

To be honest this is stupid this has hit the front-page because there are so many shit jobs out in the world. And you can't complain for working at one of the biggest tech companies.

If working in the SV for such big companies (Google in primis I guess) why do so many people want to work there? Is it just the "brand" effect or it's really worth it (salary and perks aside)?

This is why I always laugh when someone says "Start-Ups are hard! If you want to get rich easy, better get a job at a big company with 100k a year"

First, getting such a job is a ton of work and then doing it isn't easy either.

I mean, how much people even have the education to got into IT and then score a job at Google for example?

The difference is that at a startup you as one of a handful of individuals actually make or break the company. You should be getting sufficient equity to make it worthwhile, and yes you should be wise enough not to burn yourself out, but you also need to be ready to go the extra mile to give yourself a chance at success. That doesn't mean let companies take advantage of you, but there has to be some mutual level of trust and commitment between early employees or a startup will surely fail.

For larger companies it's more transactional in nature: they have a job and a budget, and you have your own interests. The agreement you come to is more of a coldly calculated negotiation.

Also, you can found your own start-up

Is case you cannot access the main link

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Doesn't this describe most jobs that require some kind of technical expertise and creativity? I guess the silicon valley mystique/propaganda really works if people expect it to be vastly different from other jobs.

So basically the place that everybody knows that is _the_ place where you have to work 170h/week gets now negative feedback for working that much?

Oh well...

It reminds me of the pre-crash stories about corporate lawyers and then investment banking working mad work weeks. The difference at least in the case of SV that more people seem to enjoy their work.

The real difference is that a lot of those corporate lawyers and investment bankers make 3-10x the salary of SV engineer (multiple $ million per year).

Of the population that attends law school, passes the bar exam, and practices law, very few end up as corporate lawyers. And fewer still make multiple millions per year. You're comparing a very broad class (SV engineers) to an extremely small class (corporate lawyers who make $XM per year).

It may be fair to say that the pay ceiling is higher for the best-paid lawyers than it is for the best-paid engineers. However, engineers can reach the same pay or much higher by taking on a management role -- CTO, technical co-founder, small business owner, etc. -- at which point, IMO, they typically cease to be engineer.

Investment banking & hedge funds are another matter, and the compensation can be ridiculous.

From Glassdoor:

- Google corporate counsel ($188k salary, $215k with bonus)

- Amazon corporate counsel ($180k salary, $250k with bonus)

- Microsoft attorney ($164k salary, $224k with bonus)

Don't people have flexible hours so that over 8 hour days get compensated with paid leave?

No 'flextime' place that I've ever worked.

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