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Survey: Tech Pros Ignoring Work-Life Balance Is a Myth (dice.com)
Nerval's Lobster writes: Are tech professionals really willing to live on energy drinks, and sleep on office couches, in order to get the job done? For many, the answer is "no." In response to a new Dice survey (Dice link, obviously), only 5 percent of employees at technology companies said that work-life balance wasn't a top priority for them. Contrast that with nearly 45 percent of respondents who said they wanted more of a work-life balance, even if their current position made that difficult. More than 27 percent of those surveyed also characterized work-life balance in the tech industry as a "myth." It seems that, despite all those companies talking publicly about wanting to give employees a better work-life balance (complete with on-site gyms and unlimited vacation time and... stuff...), it's not really working out for a lot of people. (And that's something that people have been calling out for some time.)
The ideal work/life ratio is 0.
(You can still work, but work on things you care about, not what someone will pay you for).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Startups are where the crazies live.
Free lunch, on site gyms... are all about keeping you at work longer, not going out to lunch, meeting a woman...
I dont know that I'm smart enough to understand exactly what it is you're getting at here.
I've always cared about work life balance - the thing is, that was as true when I used to work 80-100 hour weeks, than it is now when I work 40-50 hours a week. It's just that early on I was happy to have the work side be much heavier.
People see technical workers working hellish hours and think they have no work-life balance because non-techs cannot understand how that might bring its own kind of pleasure.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Doesn't the summary, let alone the article, seem to imply that regardless of the fact that they want better work/life balance, most don't feel like they're getting it?
...that there is a balance. Work almost always wins.
Companies want 24x7 support but don't want to pay for it. So in the mean time, they abuse there IT workers. So IT infrastructure and support departments are usually understaffed.
What's the IT working doing to do when people start scream at him to fix things he/she is responsible during the day. While it may not come to bite them in the ass the immediately, it will look bad on him/her. When raises / firings come around, that person will get the bad end the stick. With more and more IT jobs pushed over seas, getting a new job is not necessarily very easy.
Very often there isn't anybody else who understands what's going on in their environment. You'll be lucky to have two people on the same project that cover the same scope.
The companies hold all of the power.
No good deed goes unpunished.
I worked at a company that did not have any set policy as to how many days you may take off for personal reasons (sickness, having major appliances replaced at home, just felt too tired, whatever).
This policy is not only better for the individual (since they will then stop keeping track of how many days they take off, but rather have them when necessary) it is also better for the company. On average, this policy reduced the number of personal/sick days off an employee took. The old policy, which, IIRC, was a fixed 14 days, had employees keeping track of them and just using them for no reason at all, thus increasing absence for no benefit.
Yes, some employees were sick every Friday. Eventually HR would work with them to figure out what the problem was, and they might even work out something that is better for the employee (perhaps work at home every Friday, this actually happened for more than a few employees). In the end, it was great for everyone.
I now work at a company with a fixed number of days off (7 sick + 1 personal). Keeping track seems like it will be a pain, and it just encourages me to take that 1 personal day off (which is too few, but hey, at least my vacation made up for it) in December whether I want to or not, because otherwise, it's gone.
As an I.T. Support Contractor for the last ten years, my contracts specifically prohibits me from working more than 40 hours and/or outside normal business hours.
which means you can't take anything said here at face value. They purposefully write shitty sensationalist content in order to drive traffic.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Unlimited vacation eh ? When an American says this, they actually mean 20 days of vacation. People are stupid enough to believe that unlimited means unlimited.
http://dilbert.com/strip/2014-..."
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
.
There is no such thing as work-life balance, or maybe there is and some managers call it "slacking:" like mine did.
Where I work keeps promoting this Work/Life balance thing. But it's complete horseshit. Our staff has been cut to the bone and then some, so there isn't enough coverage for our 24x7 operations.
I for example, am a 1-man department, I can't take a sick day or a vacation day, and if I were to take a day off, what I come back to the next day is double the work.
Basically there is no life beyond work, and if you complain, the company is more than happy to lay you off and replace you with a H1-B visa dude.
My guess is that work/life balance isn't for us in the trenches, it's for the guys in the corner offices who make more than a $Million per year, own 6 fancy cars, and talk about their "Vacation Home" in Hawaii.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Is the problem part the nature of the field? Many of my colleges are like me, we work in bursts that can be anywhere from a few days to a few years. Then we take a break and have down time to recover.
I literally can not work effectively any other way because of the shear amount of information I need to keep in my mind, it will get lost if I get distracted. By "information" I don't just mean design plans and such, at can be handled with better planning and organization. I'm talking about the creative side where I in the groove and can pull all the pieces together. There is no way I have found to organize that side of it because by its nature it's disorganized.
The people that don't work this way are frankly not as good as us that do. They may be better balanced in life and therefore happier in the end but they won't create the quality of output that we do.
Anyone who did ignore it is now firmly in burnout and no longer considered a tech pro.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
erh... no. I like food. But I wouldn't die for it. Likewise, as much as I like my job, I wouldn't accept death as a viable alternative to not have it.
I work to live. Not the other way around. And while I'm usually not someone to pretend that my way is the only correct one, I do actually consider it pathological if you think otherwise.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
a few years ago I didn't care much about work/life balance. Working long hours at
something I loved (embedded development) was what I wanted.
But, the longer I worked the less important work became and the
more important other things did.
The companies I worked for still wanted extra hours (salaried of
course so they didn't have to pay extra) and overriding dedication.
My observation is that the more the work force aged and became
more balanced between young go-getters and older experienced
programmers the less desire there has been to be that dedicated.
Some do, but overall it's not as important.
Now that I'm retired I'm still loving the programming side, but I get to do what I want, and all the other things that make life worthwhile.
It's true for most Fortune 500 companies, depending on dysfunctional the I.T. department is. Google was an exception, as I had to haul ass to keep up with the constant change.
It was true for me when i stopped working in 2010. I used to complain about not having any real work to do, that i just sat in my office as long as I wanted (hourly w/unlimited o/t) surfing the web and fielding maybe 4-5 technical debugging problems a week. The only times I worked hard was during delivery times when I was an intern when I'd do 70 weeks for a few consecutive months.
That's a lofty sentiment, but not very practical. Not many people have dreams worth dying over, and I don't see that they should. Should every mediocre artist that loves their craft be willing to die for it? I could see "taking care of my loved ones" as a Work many people could get behind, but even that isn't necessarily worth dying for (nor is dying likely to be a productive option in doing so)
The vast majority of jobs that need doing certainly don't qualify. And the phrase has been long established as actually meaning job/life balance - sadly we don't get to unilaterally change the meaning of a popular phrase, even if it is a misnomer.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The Myth is that you have a choice in the matter.
It's what the industry practically demands of everyone across the board now.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
>Never have so many been paid so much to do so little
It's more accurate to say:
Never have so many been paid so much to do what I cannot understand and have no capacity to appreciate.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
There's a certain novelty of "doing what you love" that's at best a modern invention (much the way "childhood" is).
It used to be that to be a useful part of society, you did the job you were suited for, were apprenticed into by way of parentage, or whatever other circumstance led you there. You accepted that you did a thing, and didn't worry about it being your "dream job", because that's not what drove people back then.
Now, I'm not saying "work/life balance" isn't something that shouldn't enter into consideration when you take a job. It most certainly is, and, in fact, should be protected by your employer, not actively fought for by you. It's just that there's a certain amount of dark amusement I get out of the people that made the concept a meme. It's just that most people don't have such a breadth of historical context when it comes to things like work, marriage and religion that they almost talk about things as if they'd always been the way these people claim they are.
In fact, "work/life balance" is an invention of an age of, if not arrested development, then the idea that people should be entitled to have the life that they want (including getting the big promotion while shouting "work/life balance!" at the very same colleagues that put in extra hours day after day), whether or not those prospects are realistic.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Am I the only one who cheats at this?
Project comes a long with a whole bunch of "after hours" tasks which, as it turns out, you really can get done in normal hours without any noticeable disruption.
Or when it's really necessary, structuring the project so that the "after hours" work gets done on MY schedule, rather than arbitrarily.
Or making sure that "after hours" work is something that can be done from my house, rather than on site.
Or...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
IT has several factors that encourage poor work/life balance:
- The IT landscape is littered with awful companies to work for, who treat their IT people like the janitorial service. The ratio of good to bad employers is very low.
- Companies that are considered "fun to work for" encourage people to constantly be at work by providing free food, free personal services, etc. I just got back from a meeting at Microsoft, and even after Nadella took over and the reduction in their monopoly power, the place is still like a college campus and employees are encouraged to basically live there.
- There's pressure on older workers, who have been around the block and know the game, because there are always younger workers who will willingly work 100 hour weeks because they have nothing else going on in their lives.
- There's also H-1B and offshoring pressure. It's not uncommon to hear CIOs remark that their offshore teams never complain about hours worked. And, outsourcing the entire IT department means the company pays a monthly bill and gets even more compliant H-1B workers.
Outside of crazy industries like video games, or investment banking where you can make massive bonuses that make working the extra hours worth it, I think most employees would prefer to be given a 40 hour week, decent pay, and a good work/life balance. The good companies who provide these things tend to have longer staff tenure, but you don't hear about them as much. This is for 2 reasons -- (1) they're not sexy SV startups writing phone apps, and (2) there aren't very many open positions because employees tend to stay where they're happier.
Employers who treat their employees well will be rewarded in the long term.
I moved away because I wanted a grass fed died. MOO.
> "companies talking publicly about wanting to give employees a better work-life balance (complete with on-site gyms and unlimited vacation time and... stuff...)"
If I saw a company providing an on-site gym, I'd be worried that their goal was the *elimination* of work-life balance. Same with unlimited vacation time. On-site gym means "we want you to be at work as much as possible". Unlimited vacation time means "we will guilt you into not taking very much vacation, because there are no strict rules". I much prefer working for a place where the amount of vacation is explicitly stated (though I wish that number were higher, of course), because that means you know exactly how much it is expected that you will be able to take, and as long as you stay under that number, nobody in the company has any reason or excuse to complain if you take it.
What life? Oh you mean those few hours you spend watching T.V. until it's time to work? Pffft, overrated.
If 27% "characterized work-life balance in the tech industry as a myth"...doesn't it follow that 73% don't think it's a myth?
Maybe it's in Silicon Valley that nobody has a life? I've worked as a software developer in Texas for 25 years, in 6 companies, and I've always had reasonable expectations on my time.
I've been in IT since the middle 70s. "Back in the day" we had a saying about our industry, "Never have so many been paid so much to do so little". Is this no longer true?
Lucky you. I never heard of that saying. I started in '79, so I guess I missed the decade where one didn't have to work hard.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Anyone I know working those types of hours is doing it for a lot more than just a paycheck. I knew a lot of people, when I was younger, who did it too. But for them, it was like, "Hey... I finished school and now I don't really have any other commitments. At work, I mingle with a group of co-workers just like it was when I was in school, and I'm finally earning money in the real world, working my way up this whole corporate ladder thing."
Priorities tend to change as soon as you get serious with a significant other, followed by marriage and possibly kids.
ISIS members killing other Muslims is true only when one ignores the sectarian lines along which they define themselves. They have defined Sunni Arabs as the focus of their caliphate, and others - particularly the nearby Muslims who are either not Sunni (as in Shias or Alawites) or not Arab (Kurds or Druze) - are targets of their wrath. However, that doesn't mean that other Muslims haven't heard their appeal and endorsed them as their leader. Non Arab organizations that have sworn allegance to them include Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in the stans, SIMI in India, Boko Haram in Nigeria and other parties in Libya.
The reason a Muslim database makes sense is that it is common to all Jihadis: while all or even most Muslims may not be Jihadis, all Jihadis are Muslim. Also, due to the Islamic concept of taqiyya (for those who claim that that's Shi'ite, the Sunnite equivalent of that is 'muda'rat') - a principle that exalts lying if the goal is the furtherance of Islam/Shariah, it is impossible to separate out innocent Muslims from Jihadis within their ranks. But searching the entire population just makes that entire exercise a farce. Which is why the search should start w/ Muslims - including people who convert to Islam - and then get filtered down from there.
About perpetrators being known but no action being taken, that's part of the politically correct fear of offending Muslims and accusations of 'Islamophobia' which are usually levelled by Jihadi organizations in the West. The West should just concede the point and move on. Phobias are irrational fears: being afraid of a butterfly is a phobia, while being afraid of a scorpion is not. Similarly, being afraid of Jews or Christians or Buddhists or Hindus is a phobia, while being afraid of Muslims is not.
Jews were stigmatized by others w/o doing anything to provoke that. They never tried to convert others to Judaism, nor did they try to terrorize or otherwise undermine their compatriots. As for the Zionist movement, it started after WWI as a minority movement, but only got traction w/ a majority of the Jews due to the holocaust.
If the only problem w/ Muslims was them keeping to themselves, living in ghettos and having bizarre practices, no one would be complaining. People only started focussing on Muslims after 9/11: what was the equivalent thing that Jews ever did to deserve that? Also keep in mind that there was no country that Jews could call their own, and very few where they were safe. That's totally different from Muslims, who have about 50 countries where they are the majority and call the shots.