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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."
Free lunch, on site gyms... are all about keeping you at work longer, not going out to lunch, meeting a woman...
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
...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.
Even in places that aren't crazy (Silicon Valley) and full of kids in startups, you have the expectation of working the occasional "crunch time" or odd hours. That's even something we were told to expect in college (in the midwest).
Companies of the same class, industry, and region also vary widely.
If anything, it seems that 45% of the respondents were complaining about "work-life balance" issues. That would seem to make it more of a myth even if a small minority thinks it's one.
Outsourcing and "the bad economy" have certainly been held over people's heads. To believe that corporations won't abuse you to the extent we let them get away with it is just plain silly.
Most people simply aren't in the position to declare that they've had enough and they're not taking any more. Consumer culture strongly discourages that level of solvency.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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.
Yeah, but if we dont have 3 kids and a 5BR house, what you going to do to get a fresh crop around there? import violent druggies and terrorists and criminals from mexico, middle east and china?
If you want me to make the next generation of suitable normal non-violent people who can have a passion and actualize on that , i need a place to live and crank out the new units.
or if you want society to end, keep referring to us doing the hard work of making a living and raising kids as suckers / breeders.
Exactly ... Snoop doggy-dog needs to get a new jobby-job. I've been in the industry since '96, in a variety of roles. You know what I see all the time? Wusses.
It is often healthy for both disgruntled employees as well as fubar companies for people to cut and run. The problem is they don't, they bitch all the time and never leave. They never stand up to their counterparts, and call them out. They just take it and whine. They don't fight requirements bloat or scope creep. It is just as bad for the employers who don't realize they are the problem, but after three people in a row run like hell ... oddly the start to get it.
You might need to re-skil a bit, but trust me there are jobs out there.
Society isn't going to end if tech people stop having kids. The key is that the tech people need to all forgo having children, so that they can devote their lives to their companies. Other (non-tech) people, in other parts of society, will have kids to provide the next generation. This is what we have welfare and many other social programs for: the poor people are having and raising all the kids in society; we're basically paying them for it by giving them handouts. There's no reason for productive people to have children now, since we can simply segregate our society into a higher, productive class and a lower class for breeding. I can't possibly imagine why this won't turn out just fine. Uneducated people are perfectly capable of raising all the physicists and engineers we need for the future.
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.
Growing up, I saw my father work 10 hour days, come home with a stack of work, dial into the office, and work another 4 hours. Then, on the weekends, he'd bring more work home and work hours upon hours. He wasn't getting paid more but was doing a lot of off-hours work on a daily basis. I asked him why he did all this work and his reply was that he had to because his boss expected this level of output from him.
When I entered the workforce, I made it clear that this wouldn't be me. When I left work, work got left behind. I didn't mind the occasional "log in from home because a system went down" or "work a couple extra hours to push a project over the line" but this was to be the exception rather than the rule. When I was home, that was family time, not do-more-work-without-extra-payment time.
My father has since retired and has said that all of that extra time he worked was time wasted because he could have been spending time with his family instead of getting a few more pages entered into the computer.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.
> "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.