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Ben Halpern
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What’s your work/life balance like these days?

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Christopher Kade • Edited

It honestly depends on the week, some days I can finish work at around 6 PM and go straight to working on side projects until midnight, and other days I feel like I need a break right after work.

I'm thankful to work at a place where work-life balance is really valued and overtime is never pushed and always avoided.

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Jaime Rios

This balance you mention feels like an exception, but we can bend the culture so it becomes a common thing.

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Esteban Hernández

I always make it very clear that I work from 8 to 5, no exceptions. If that's not good enough then I'm not your guy.

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Christopher Kade

I believe you on this one Jaime. I made sure to chose the right company for my first job as a Software Engineer but have heard really tough stories of burn out from friends & people on Twitter. 😟

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Juan F Gonzalez

I also agree with the sentiment here. Fortunately, the company I work for also values this balance and they allow me the time to do non-work related stuff because they don't want anybody to suffer from burn out.

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Stephen Chiang • Edited

Norway has one of the best work-life balance in the world I think.

I have the flexibility to take care of my family and myself because it's culturally prioritized and supported by the belief that is overall good for the team.

Before, while working in a non tech job in the US, I was on the road 4-6 hours a day, working overtime, etc.

Now I only work overtime when the job needs me to which is rare, I get paid holiday time that would require someone to work for over ten years to achieve in the US and I get home in time to pick up my children, go to the gym, etc.

When life is better, I work better, and that is real value to the team and customer.

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papaponmx profile image
Jaime Rios

Hey, Stephan. That's great, thanks for your input.

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HS • Edited

As Rihanna would say work work work work work ... Joking aside it's Ramadan for us muslims and it means no eating from dawn till dusk (in Bosnia it's like from 2:50 to 20:15 nowadays but it gets longer every day by few minutes) so I don't take lunch breaks and when I get home if I can't sleep I work more as it benefits me to have some extra hours to be able to exchange them later on for a free day. I can say it's actually good feeling to work more and without breaks when you have no place(lunch,coffe with friends etc) to be later on as you don't feel stres from doing overtime.

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Erhan Kılıç

I work with 3 companies. Two of them remote and other one is normal. Well, most of the time I try to spend my time to do my hobbies and travel but it's not much. I'm trying to earn as much as I can before 35 years old :)

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Nick

Hi Erhan! How do you handle the time and work from the 3 companies?

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Erhan Kılıç • Edited

Hi, sometimes I wonder too :)
One of the remote doesn't require full time work so I can handle their tasks on my freetime. Other remote one doesn't have much job. 20 hours in month, mostly.
Normal one is fulltime job.

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Angelique

Better now that the semester is over -- I'm an adjunct professor and the end-of-semester crunch to help students and get grades in is a lot.

Working from home also helps tremendously; I eat at least 2 meals a day with my partner, and we usually take ~2-mi walks together 4 times a week. In general, I can step away from the computer around 6pm every night and am not working into the wee hours of the morning (which I did a lot of when I was a freelancer).

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Amruta Ranade • Edited

I am learning to prioritize play. The company I work at actively supports work-life balance - it's one of our corporate values. We also have unlimited PTO. However, being a workaholic, I find it difficult to step away from work and take time off. So I have been training myself to prioritize non-work activities, schedule them, pay for them, and have them on my calendar. That's the only way I can make myself not work.

I am also getting into the habit of planning a trip out of New York every other quarter. The hustle of the city is addictive and hard to get away from - so I have to physically move away from the city every few months to realize there's a bigger, beautiful world outside of it.

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Der Sascha • Edited

Going to the Bees and harvestimg the honey from them 😉🐝thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i...

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Henry 👨‍💻

Ayy I love bees 🐝 😁, they help with a lot with mah plants 🌱.
Heads up, to embed images in markdown (what DEV uses for its posts) you use the syntax:

![Alt text of image](put-link-to-image-here)
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Subramanya Shenoy • Edited

Working in India for a service based company. I used to have this as my work life balance. 3+ hrs of travel every day. With 9 hrs of mandate hrs to be maintained. But end up working more than that. I would say possible 11hrs a day, this includes constant mental stress and pressure.

After working for a year I called this madness all quits and took a break of 20days. I Would be joining Adobe as a contact employee starting from Monday.

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Eka • Edited

Not that good, but not horrible.

I work remotely so I save commute/transit time! Sometimes I work from coffee shops and co-working spaces though, it helps me focus. I work at a great place that rarely requires overtime as long as I meet my hours—technically 8 hrs a day but in reality not that strict, 2 + 2 + 2-3 hrs or thereabouts. I can set my own hours as long as I communicate it with my team lead.

I (try to) prioritize physical exercise (go to gym on avg 2-3 times/week; go for walks), not skip meals and sleep. I allocate time to visit my parents and catch up with friends.

Other than those, I pretty much code all the time. When I'm done with my day job, I either do side gigs sometimes and/or code to learn stuff. I'm fully self-taught AND a latecomer to tech, so I feel like I have sooooooo much to catch up (also, I do genuinely enjoy coding!).

It's kind of weird when your (1) livelihood (ie. work), (2) future prospects (work-ish), and (3) entertainment/fun (life) are intertwined in one place, ie. coding! Not complaining, though. 🤷🏽‍♀️

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Sandor Dargo

I pay a lot of attention to keep my W/L balance. Even if I love what I do and I'm full of ideas what else to do, I'm on a very strict schedule and if the time is up, I stop what I'm doing.

As such, I keep my fire burning and I step away frequently enough to have a look at what I do from a certain distance.

This limited time also encourages me to work more efficiently.

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Oleg Aleksandrov

The last 6-7 month, I work every day, but I work around 4-5 hours a day. It's better for me cuz after work, I usually don't need time for rest before I can start to do another thing (improve my English or developers skills, reading, met with friends, etc)

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Derek D

Work-life-balance at my current job is awesome. I usually work 9-5 and that's it, unless I have to do a deployment, which I usually do from home around 8ish. I get a work-from-home day every Friday, which usually gives me time to go to my daughter's swim class in the morning and work the rest of the afternoon in my office in the basement.

I've been tempted lately by multiple recruiters offering jobs where I'd be making $25K+ more, I'm just afraid of losing that balance and having to work significantly more time for that salary. Right now, with two small children, I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it.

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mallen-jenz

Semi struggling, but that's usually a temp thing when I get super busy with work and home stuff at the same time. Working from home full time makes it a little more difficult at times but luckily more wife is a retired IT person so she gets the fact that emergency issues or super busy work times are going to happen, it's the nature of the beast

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Thomas H Jones II

In a word, "fsck'ed".

I try to set aside time to go to concerts and such (and just came back from this year's Las Vegas installment of the Electric Daisy Carnival). But, even without work getting in the way of personal time, setting aside sufficient money to do so is always problematic.

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Chris Raven

Most days I work all day (not in a dev role) and then come home around 7:00PM and study for University until around 12:00AM when I go to bed and then back up at 6:00AM to go back to work.

Whilst work is getting better, it can be extremely stressful and tiring, with the amount of work we are expected to get done.