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Comment by pascalxus | Hacker News Reader

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pascalxus·

- Good work/life balance

- Stability (can remain in the same job 5+ years)

- Money and benefits

- Close commute

I find that the Work/life balance part of it is the most important because this is the most important factor that influences almost everything else: cooperative culture, better teamwork, no toxic environment, less politics, no stabbing in the back, etc.

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Work/life balance, absolutely. I've got a wife and kids. I don't live and die with the project meeting some arbitrary deadline. You want it to ship by a certain date? Fine. Control the feature list. You want it to ship by then plus have all the features everyone can dream up? Sorry, I'm not going to kill myself to make it happen.

Now, in this business, I get that crunch time happens sometimes. I accept it as part of the job, as long as it's rare. One month a year is reasonably rare. (On my current job, it was one night in seven years.) One month out of two is not rare, and I won't put up with it.

Crunch time should rarely ever happen unless the people having to crunch are the ones that agreed to and bought into the project, its scope, and deadlines. That is rarely ever the case. The implementors are rarely the ones that have enough say or control over scope, time, or budget. The one(s) that made the promise(s) should be held accountable for their failure(s).

There's also the factor that some people are chronic workaholics who can't separate work from real life.

When you're learning to code early on the push to become a "stronger" developer makes it easy to pursue this.

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