notmyemployer

From my experience this isn't true. I make a lot more money now freelancing than I did working much longer hours at startups. Sure, there are promises of my options being worth millions, but the reality is that they're sitting in my desk gathering dust. I'd actually take a pay cut to go back into a startup setting once this contract is over, mainly because I often miss the level of intensity, creativity, and the feeling of ownership that comes with a startup. I prefer being the dumbest person in the room.

Driving young programmers through 12 hour days is just a recipe for burn out and technical debt that you'll have to pay back later. I've definitely been there.

I guess it all comes down to what you consider a good work-life balance. For me being able to work from wherever an Internet connection exists and the ability to make my own hours is it, and yeah sometimes that'll mean a few weeks of 10-12 hour days here and there. For some it means a strict 9-5 with an hour lunch at an office park off a highway, which I don't judge, but for me sounds like a nightmare.

Again, as long as you're keeping up with contemporary development practices and are pushing your knowledge I think you'll be able to choose whatever definition of work-life balance is for you and be fine.

I'm working on a contract tangentially related to this work and it's really not about young people working long hours. There are plenty of older people emailing me at 10 or 11 pm after the kids are in bed that don't know what's going on. This is solely about the quality of the talent.

I encounter people and teams that are just unwilling to adopt contemporary development and deployment practices. The article notes that Hipchat was a struggle to get approval for, yet I often run into people at CMS that never log in to it and prefer tons of emails. Deployments aren't automated and still happen for some teams on calls during maintenance periods once a week. I've had people in technical capacities ask what GitHub is.

The problem is institutional, it really has nothing to do with young people working 10 hour days. I care about my work-life balance -- I'm too old to crash on the couch at my startup's office like I did at past jobs in my 20s -- but I also keep up with contemporary development practices, make a point to study a new language every year, read academic papers, and care about my work. I don't think I can say the same about most devs I've encountered in government. The consulting firms are incentivized to build walls and protect the way they do business in order to keep getting that contract money.

If you're an older dev that is intellectually curious in the practice and art of software development I think you'll be fine.

This was my experience as well, it was mainly the arbitrary road blocks. When I'd be on a call and realize there was finally another dev on the line I'd immediately get in touch via email or chat and back channel while the swarm of project managers talked about who knows what.

Sure, if those testers actually know what they're doing, which wasn't clear if they actually did. A bunch didn't even know how to use git and didn't have commit access to the repos to begin with.

I have no problem with other people testing my code, but that there wasn't a culture of engineers writing their own tests at all was surprising and troubling.

I've done some federal contracting and the issues seem to be cultural. The government hands out what they call "prime" contracts which are then subcontracted out to multiple other firms. The primes tend to be stodgy old companies filled with lawyers and MBAs that can win the contracts, who then view the engineers as replaceable cogs. You then interact with multiple other contractors that own particular parts of the stack, for example an independent testing contractor and another for infrastructure. It wasn't uncommon to have 5 project managers for each engineer on the project.

Coming from tech startups this was completely shocking, I was so used to an engineer driven culture. That developers couldn't write their own tests, or manage their own infra, or deploy multiple times a day was super frustrating.

There sounds like there are some great initiatives to change this old approach, but until then I can't imagine many talented devs would put up with the bureaucratic bullshit.