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Comment by Ocerge | Hacker News Reader

> This may seem outrageous to someone that hasn’t experienced this type of situation, but in the Big Tech world this expectation is normal.

I work at a FAANG, and it's probably a team-by-team thing, but that is absolutely not normal in my experience. That's a particularly shitty circumstance, and it's a bummer your management didn't stick up for you.

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I worked 17 years at Google on lots of different things and with one exception* never let work stuff interrupt my life when I wasn't at work. I certainly kept odd hours at times and would do things like stay late some days if I had broken something that I thought I could fix before leaving, but once I was done with work I was done.

* The one exception was when I was on a team where we had a rotating pager duty for our stuff in production, and I would periodically be on duty. As I recall we got paid extra for those time blocks.

these days many managers will plead ignorance of on-call bonus pay. our manager tried to put us on oncall and I had to show everybody on the team the page that said they would be gettng bonuses. Suddenly it wasn't an "oncall" but a "unpaid developer rotation"

Yup, me too. Have always met or exceeded expectations working a straight 40. This article is trying to generalize their experience on a bad team to the 500K+ people that work at Big Tech companies.

Same and I agree- it’s basically all team based.

I keep hearing people say this ("it's all team based"), and I don't doubt that it's true. Suppose I don't want to end up on one of those pressure cooker teams. How can you avoid that? I just don't see how it's possible, unless you know someone inside the company who can give you some insight as to which teams to avoid.

At FB, most ICs are not hired for a specific team in advance, and instead choose between (for SWE, a long list of) teams during the Bootcamp process. You can chat to future team mates (not just manager or lead) and ask them straight out about that. (Some people also ask for the half-ly survey results for that team as well.)

If you’re being hired for a team specifically (at another company, say), ask for a “follow-up” meeting with future team mates after offer as a condition for accept. You have a lot of power at that point.

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