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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.)
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
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.
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.
There is the problem in a nutshell. People thinking that taking a day off for no reason at all provides no benefit. There is plenty of benefit from taking a mental health day and simply playing with your kids or doing whatever hobby you enjoy.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The ideal work/life ratio is 0.
Unless you're a zombie, in which case it's NaN.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
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.
Those unlimited vacation days are an accounting trick to avoid a ledger balance of vacation that is owed to employees.
Cheap storage VM.