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Comment by cbanek | Hacker News Reader

I really like the idea of this, but I have to ask - how do you know what companies value work-life balance? Of course everyone says they do... Many times it seems like one company can have some teams that are balanced, and some that aren't. How does anyone even quantify work-life balance?

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Exactly! A lot of times companies say they have an excellent work/life balance, but that's just the HR and Marketing teams that come in at 10 and leave at 4. Meanwhile IT is being worked overtime and development teams are on deadline crunches working weekends and holidays. Sales people (the good ones anyways) are used to that kind of schedule. At least that's been my experience at large corporations and even some startups.

Or one product team is doing fine but another is severely overworked, because the current highest-priority requirements are bearing down on them in particular.

In my experience, it is the overworked teams that are the ones hiring. They need more people to do work, and overworked teams have higher attrition. This is even if you don't have a bad persistent problem (bad manager/toxic environment). Functional, stable teams usually don't add people once they are full and people don't leave often.

My company sent out a memo this week letting us know that they value our work-life balance, which is why they now allow us to pick one of two 8-hour shifts: 7-4 or 8-6.

Also no work-from-home, because we're a family, and you can't be a family remotely. Happy holidays!

8-6 seems to be ten hours?

I'm still improving the list but currently, here are some of the things I use to figure out if a company has good work-life balance (not all are required):

- Has 40 hour or less work weeks

- Rarely requires overtime work

- Has a good amount of paid time off (Bonus points if they encourage employees to take a time off, like they require you to utilize all your paid time off and/or they provide a bonus if you take a time off)

- Remote friendly

- Communication is asynchronous by default

- Well known publicly that the company value work-life balance

- Offers good employee benefits (e.g, https://basecamp.com/handbook/08-benefits-and-perks)

This would have to be determined from Glassdoor type feedback, which Glassdoor already has.

Glassdoor seems ripe for astroturfing. At my last company, HR specifically targeted new hires (they didn't want people that had already been there and been soured by the culture) in a mass email to please leave a positive review on Glassdoor. It's also just painfully obvious from looking at the reviews which ones are fake, and it's a lot of them.

This certainly isn't true for all companies, but Glassdoor isn't exactly immune to shilling.

How reliable is that data?

I'm kinda skeptical of its ability to provide any real insight company to company.

Companies game Glassdoor feedback all the time. 50 negative reviews will get quickly drowned out when HR offers rewards to employees for filling out a Glassdoor review.

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