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Comment by wpasc | Hacker News Reader

This may cut against what some other are saying, but I've found larger tech companies to be very reasonable about the 40 hr work weeks. As you stated, you've had experience all at web startups. Startups tend to encourage the "work-all-day-every-day" mentality whereas (at least in my experience) larger tech companies will let you do your 40 hrs. Doesn't necessarily have to be a strictly tech company. A large corp of any size that has a decent tech department might suit you well, but they may be less open to the long breaks. My experience has been the large companies I've worked at (telco, bank, and largeish internet company) have never encouraged me to work crazy hours. YMMV, good luck!

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This does not reflect my experience at the >10k employee level of company. I've had a more reasonable work week out of the 150 employee consulting firm than I have the 10k employee public software company.

At the >=100k employee, multiple-decades-in-business, old guard type of company, I had the inverse of what you're relaying, as well. On-call was routinely referred to as the 'week of hell'. Fires tended to crop up due to complacency, general feelings of 'job security', and lack of routine upkeep. These sessions in self-flagellation are dutifully shouldered as 'just the thing it does around this time of month'. These aren't fly by night, back of a postcard companies, but instantly recognizable brands, known as market leaders and 'best company to work for' in their community.

The long hours aren't encouraged, but outright mandated with 50 person standups to keep the Confluence pages up to date when email would better suit the task. We mustn't forget the alignment meeting to have the pre-meeting to talk about the plan of the backlog grooming planning meeting.

You should name and shame, no one wants to work at place like this. Surely it's just individual teams and not the entire org though?

You'd be surprised. :)

I've got pretty much the same experience.

I worked for a couple of startups in Berlin and England and I had to work like crazy, then I moved to Norway and started working for a large company(Software Engineer for the oil industry).

Everything is completely different, reasonable working hours, paid over hours no crazy deadlines. On the other hand everything is much slower, e.g. I had to apply for getting a license for Visual Studio and then it has to be approved etc etc.. A lot of bureaucracy.

Overall I've got a better time working here that the startups.

Good luck in your job search.

Same experience, I work for a manufacturing company, 40hr weeks rule!.

Having worked at Microsoft and being now at another big tech company, that hasn't been my experience at all. Those companies seem to be trying to mimic startup culture internally, so they promote the "entrepreneurial employee" idea and try to organize groups internally as small startups.

I wish I could do the 9-5 thing at those companies (given the great pay and benefits, adding a predictable and sane work schedule would be perfect).

You may last a couple years being the odd one out doing strictly 40h a week, but performance review is going to catch up with you at some point.

These days I bite the bullet and stay till 8 or 9pm at the office regularly.

This!

You can follow the 9-5 routine, however at some stage you will bomb the performance reviews. Be overlooked for promotion or terminated altogether. I suppose if you are sharp enough and productive enough, maybe you can pull it off at a B2B type company where pressure is lower.

I would like to extend a thank you from your bosses that you are spending your entire life in the office so the company can make more money from your hard work.

You may get a promotion, of course expecting you to send even more hours in the office and work even harder. But that's what you want anyway.

Jesus. You would be alone in the office after 17.00 if you were in Sweden, and people would think you are a sucker for wasting your life in an office.

You would be seen as someone who has no life. You would not get respect or higher salary here.

You have to admit, the Swedish way is sane while your culture is crazy.

Have to agree there. I rarely stay in the office that long. Usually it's because I started later on that day, so I stay a bit longer. 39h/week and senior dev in a big IT company (4000+ ppl) so yea, I like it here and can't comprehend some of these comments here.

Before immigrating to the US, I actually looked into Sweden. It seems nearly impossible to immigrate there :/

Everything I hear about your country sounds amazing!

Impossible to immigrate to Sweden? They take enormous amounts of immigrants every year. If you just find employer, they will handle the bureaucracy for you. At least you'll get a work permission for certain time and it can be extended if conditions are ok. Consider Finland too.

Just not worth it, my friend

He did say "telco, bank, large internet company". I don't think MS and Amazon are like that.

I worked at a very large company, one of the top 40 on the stock market. The attitude is quite complacent. Everyone except senior management is forced to work 40 hours. As in they are all given generous vacation time, and the electricity is cut during holidays so nobody can work. Any contact outside office hours is highly discouraged by management.

A lot of those companies are not bad. They attract family people who are super smart and hard-working, but prioritize work-life balance. These giant companies know they can't attract the young and ambitious, so they go for the older and experienced.

Seriously, I need names. I have daily daydreams about the “comfy, 9-5, well-paying corporate job”. Maybe it’s the Seattle area but I’ve never heard of one here. Every job ad no matter the company always has the subtle wording that indicates you’ll be working under a lot of pressure and forced to multitask like crazy and spend long hours in the office.

Dunno about US, but in Europe all banks are like that. They know the work is frustrating and boring (they almost never want to rebuild stuff from scratch, so you end up building on decades-old layers of undocumented crap - COBOL etc.) , so they compensate with good pay and low expectations.

It's common outside the US. A bit insulting to name names. But try looking at companies that are at the $1B-$100B mark for over a decade.

You may last a couple years being the odd one out doing strictly 40h a week, but performance review is going to catch up with you at some point.

That doesn't sound like a performance review. It sounds like a "are you staying late in the office" review. If the way to get ahead isn't to be good, but to just stay late, is it really worth it? All those extra hours of your life, sitting at a desk, wishing you could go home, but instead flicking through another batch of click-bait articles and padding out your timesheet.

Although I suppose if that's how it is, one could game it. Turn up a little early even, make a big noise so everyone sees you're there (oh, that guy, he's ALWAYS here early - that's what they'll remember, even if you're actually in early less than everyone else), and then just leave for an hour to have a leisurely breakfast. Pretend you have a meeting before lunch and one after, and just go to the gym and take a long lunch; you could even find a "meeting buddy" - someone with whom you have meetings, on the understanding that neither of you will be there. Faking decisions and the like from meetings is easy; generally, you can make the actual decisions in sixty seconds on your own. Identify days that the boss will be in late or leave early and treat those as short days. Get into the habit of podcasts or self-education during those long evenings at the desk. I suppose if one embraces it and games it for what's being measured - time on the clock - it wouldn't be so bad.

It’s not about perception. I have to stay late because the work itself is insane. Crazy deadlines, dependency on other people/teams, that sort of thing.

I understand the evidence indicates that with long-term excessive long hours, performance is worse. You could be the outlier, able to work efficiently after ten to twelve hours, but I understand the probabilities are against this and that actually it is about perception; that the person in charge of saying how good you are at your job is effectively incompetent and can only measure time in office.

I don’t disagree. But when your deadline is often tomorrow, what can you do?

You can push back or negotiate the deadline. In my short career, I found that most deadlines are BS. They're just there because someone somewhere made the arbitrary decision that it needs to be delivered by then. There is no reason behind it.

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