Previously at Uber, Skyscanner, Skype/Microsoft. I love to help people grow and share what I learned. I write longer articles on software engineering at blog.pragmaticengineer.com.
I have a lot of friends who assumed that I must work a lot. However, I never felt that I was too much on the "work" side of work-life balance. I probably put in a bit over 40 hours on most weeks, over the past few years, but not a lot more, and most of this was volunteered. This excludes oncall pages, which I'll get to in the end.
At Skype, work-life balance was great, except when we were weeks before shipping a big project, like the XBox One launch, that was probably the biggest projects I've worked on, shipping Skype on launch day. The month before the launch we did lots of overtime, mostly working with the US-based teams, who all seemed to suddenly be behind.
At Skyscanner, I joined when the company was a pretty stable startup. I initially worked remotely in London, as there was no London office. It was a similar story here: when we got close to a big launch, the pressure was up. Otherwise, things were pretty flexible: I often would start my day late, around 10-11am and stay until around 7pm.
At Uber, when I joined in 2016, it was crazy because of the project I was on. We were rewriting the Uber app from scratch. Not only did we change the design, but we introduced a brand new architecture, which was very much work-in-progress, as we migrated everything on it. We had about 400 mobile engineers working parallel, stepping on each others' toes. And we did the whole rewrite in about 4 months.
That was the only project when I was asked to work on a weekend if don't have anything urgent to do, throughout working at these companies. I was new at the company so I didn't mind that much: it also was by far the most stressful project I'd worked on. Since then, work-life balance has gotten a lot better and I rarely work more than the usual 40 hours. I start around 9-9:30am, leaving around 5:30pm. As I'm a manager now, I sometimes have calls in the evening with the US, I tend to have these on specific days of the week, in one block.
The top two things that impact my work-life balance are these:
1. Cross-timezone meetings. As I work in Europe, collaborating with or depending on US-based teams, this is a big one. You often can only have meetings in the evenings with the US, so this is the thing that creates the logistical challenge. The bigger the office and the more autonomos the team and the things you own, the less you need this.
2. Oncall. At all tech companies I worked, we did DevOps, even before it was a thing. We could build whatever service we wanted, deploy whenever we wanted... but we were responsible to keep it up, 24/7. Our services were always used worldwide. So we had to have oncall. Meaning every 4-6 weeks, for a week, you get paged when anything goes down. Both Microsoft and Uber have additional compensation, which helps make this feel more valued. But people who came from companies that did not have oncall before took time to get used to it. With a good oncall, this is not a big deal, really. But it's always somewhat nerve-wracking to be woken up with an alert that might mean that the system is down.
I definitely found time to work on my side projects outside of working at these companies: I built a bunch of apps, while at Skype/Microsoft, kept blogging throughout this time and right now I'm in the process of writing a book on growing as a software engineer, while working at Uber (you can subscribe here, if you'd like to hear more on the book).
Thank you for the detailed answer, appreciate it :) I am a junior developer and working at a fast-growing startup but I think my work-life balance is not good right now. Not that my company asks me to work at weekends but I just can not get work out of my mind. Do you have some tricks to empty your mind?
Previously at Uber, Skyscanner, Skype/Microsoft. I love to help people grow and share what I learned. I write longer articles on software engineering at blog.pragmaticengineer.com.
Ah, this brings back memories: I also had this at Skyscanner for many months, when starting on a new and exciting product. Meditating/mindfullnmess daily helped me ease it a lot, I listened to this mindfullness compilation, though there are a lot. Also, making sure I did something active (workout, walking etc) even when I was busy, helped me do better.
Minfullness was this weird thing, where everyone told me, it will feel silly for a few weeks and you won't feel anything, but it will slowly start to kick in. It helped, and it also helped put things in perspective for me.
I have a lot of friends who assumed that I must work a lot. However, I never felt that I was too much on the "work" side of work-life balance. I probably put in a bit over 40 hours on most weeks, over the past few years, but not a lot more, and most of this was volunteered. This excludes oncall pages, which I'll get to in the end.
At Skype, work-life balance was great, except when we were weeks before shipping a big project, like the XBox One launch, that was probably the biggest projects I've worked on, shipping Skype on launch day. The month before the launch we did lots of overtime, mostly working with the US-based teams, who all seemed to suddenly be behind.
At Skyscanner, I joined when the company was a pretty stable startup. I initially worked remotely in London, as there was no London office. It was a similar story here: when we got close to a big launch, the pressure was up. Otherwise, things were pretty flexible: I often would start my day late, around 10-11am and stay until around 7pm.
At Uber, when I joined in 2016, it was crazy because of the project I was on. We were rewriting the Uber app from scratch. Not only did we change the design, but we introduced a brand new architecture, which was very much work-in-progress, as we migrated everything on it. We had about 400 mobile engineers working parallel, stepping on each others' toes. And we did the whole rewrite in about 4 months.
That was the only project when I was asked to work on a weekend if don't have anything urgent to do, throughout working at these companies. I was new at the company so I didn't mind that much: it also was by far the most stressful project I'd worked on. Since then, work-life balance has gotten a lot better and I rarely work more than the usual 40 hours. I start around 9-9:30am, leaving around 5:30pm. As I'm a manager now, I sometimes have calls in the evening with the US, I tend to have these on specific days of the week, in one block.
The top two things that impact my work-life balance are these:
1. Cross-timezone meetings. As I work in Europe, collaborating with or depending on US-based teams, this is a big one. You often can only have meetings in the evenings with the US, so this is the thing that creates the logistical challenge. The bigger the office and the more autonomos the team and the things you own, the less you need this.
2. Oncall. At all tech companies I worked, we did DevOps, even before it was a thing. We could build whatever service we wanted, deploy whenever we wanted... but we were responsible to keep it up, 24/7. Our services were always used worldwide. So we had to have oncall. Meaning every 4-6 weeks, for a week, you get paged when anything goes down. Both Microsoft and Uber have additional compensation, which helps make this feel more valued. But people who came from companies that did not have oncall before took time to get used to it. With a good oncall, this is not a big deal, really. But it's always somewhat nerve-wracking to be woken up with an alert that might mean that the system is down.
I definitely found time to work on my side projects outside of working at these companies: I built a bunch of apps, while at Skype/Microsoft, kept blogging throughout this time and right now I'm in the process of writing a book on growing as a software engineer, while working at Uber (you can subscribe here, if you'd like to hear more on the book).
Thank you for the detailed answer, appreciate it :) I am a junior developer and working at a fast-growing startup but I think my work-life balance is not good right now. Not that my company asks me to work at weekends but I just can not get work out of my mind. Do you have some tricks to empty your mind?
Ah, this brings back memories: I also had this at Skyscanner for many months, when starting on a new and exciting product. Meditating/mindfullnmess daily helped me ease it a lot, I listened to this mindfullness compilation, though there are a lot. Also, making sure I did something active (workout, walking etc) even when I was busy, helped me do better.
Minfullness was this weird thing, where everyone told me, it will feel silly for a few weeks and you won't feel anything, but it will slowly start to kick in. It helped, and it also helped put things in perspective for me.
Again, thanks for the answer :) It really helped. I will check mindfulness thingy out.
Cheers!