Challenges behind growing from 7 to 50 engineers

hashnode.com

8 points·vvoyer··4 comments

To me this whole thing translates as "zero work-life balance" and spun as if that's a good thing.

Hey hi! I am the author of this article and happy to discuss work-life balance since this is a very important topic for me.

Could you point out the parts that made you think that work-life balance was unbalanced at Algolia?

I am 33 years old, married, with a kid and my schedule is mostly oriented towards enjoying time with my family: - I walk my kid to school (8:30am) - I arrive at work between 9am and 10am - I leave work at 5:40pm max - In holidays I have no twitter, no work emails, no GitHub

Not everyone share this balance but we insist a lot on this.

Thanks for reading.

Hey there. When "grit" is shown as a core value that translates to me as "we expect you to work crazy overtime constantly until you burn out." Happy to be wrong about that if that's not the case.

We see grit as in "You want to write about company engineering culture? Draft it, review it, share it and publish it". Not as in "work crazy hours until you burn out".

It is true that grit can be taken the way you said. And it's also true that Algolia being a great company to work for we get excited about work and sometime want to deliver outside 9 to 5.

Still we do ensure via regular one on one how people behave/work and we adjust/advise them when we see that they frequently work too much/burn out.

Finding the sweet spot of work life balance is hard. We want people to feel passionate about what they do instead of looking at the clock waiting to finish work.

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