I have a confession to make: I was on Twitter over the winter holidays when I should have been spending time with my family. What was the trending topic that caught my eye, you might ask? Last minute Christmas gift ideas? Pictures of pets in Santa hats? No, but I wish I could say it was one of those things. Instead, it was about work culture toxicity in tech.
It started with this:
Pretty harmless, right? Of course tech twitter wasn’t going to let this stand without controversy.
I’m not 100% sure if these were the first tweets to start off the debate about work life balance, but they were major players. The fact that this debate sprung up during the winter holidays. The only significant chunk of time off most Americans get, already says a lot about the toxic work culture we have in this country.
What makes it worse is that tech elevates this capitalist propaganda, glorifying workaholic ism. I’ve encountered many people in the tech industry who share this attitude. They are the last ones to leave the office, and they judge you if you don’t work the standard 9-5 hours. I worked at one company where my coworker was asked by his boss to talk to me about arriving to work earlier. He believed that working later hours was a privilege only seasoned developers ought to have.
At another company I worked at we had an AMA with the CEO and someone asked about working from home. The CEO’s response was “sure you can work from home, but you won’t be working for this company anymore.” Its so common for developers to tout all the unorthodox benefits that working in tech can offer. Often the first benefit that is discussed is work from home, but there are many companies where that is not allowed.
Of course, the above examples are far from the worst ones. In game development working 80+ hour weeks is not uncommon, especially during crunch. It’s also not uncommon in early stage startups. Consulting is another area where workaholics runs rampant. I had a stint at a consulting company that didn’t last long because I saw my coworkers burning out. They were actually suffering physical symptoms for months on end.
There are plenty of companies who abuse their engineers like I described above. They can get away with this abuse a lot more easily when they brainwash engineers. Brainwash them to perpetuate the belief that working weekends and nights is the way to a successful career.
Some engineers believe that they have to work extra long hours because they are making more money than people in other industries. However engineers are not like lawyers. They do not charge their clients by the hour, so working those long hours does not actual equal more pay. Certainly it’s not fair that teachers and social workers make way less money than software engineers. But working longer hours out of guilt does not do anything to make the situation less fair. It also won’t make the company you are working at appreciate you more. If anything, they will just start taking your extra hard work for granted. But don’t take my word for it… here are some more tweets that say it a lot better:
I’m going to end my post with this tweet from the creator of Ruby on Rails. Here he responds to someone who agreed with Ryan Selkis about working long hours. Except he took it even farther by saying workaholic ism = changing the world. If anything exemplifies work culture toxicity in tech, it’s this guys hot take.
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Latest comments (25)
I think productivity and output of work/progress is a KPI that is quantified to the point in business where it's no longer considering the fact that we are all human beings with real lives and aspirations.
I can't be alone in thinking that when someone says "You won't change the world on 40 hours a week. I chose to want to change the world" that they are so delusional in perspective that it's frightening that companies advocate this attitude?
If they have free time and want to work instead of spending it with friends and families, it is better to spend it learning some new stuff (tech or maybe some hobby) or doing some open-source community help (as one of the tweets said) or working on your own startup project, not working for some company whose managers and sales promised impossible stuff to clients and now want devs to make impossible - possible (and other "motivational" shit). Most companies give sh*t about you only while you're useful for them. At the first sight of any issue for company budget, they'll lay off anyone, since "everyone is replaceable".
And about that example of "people that changed the world" - all of them either did something they didn't saw as "work" or something that was their personal project, NOT for some company in order for some guy that promised to clients everything they wished in order to pay him to make his dreams become real.
Any company that doesn't allow any time to be worked from home should have a really good reason for not doing so. That CEO was correct, you can work from home at another company, but is that what he actually wants?
I agree.
It may happen every now and then that because of an emergency you need to do the extra effort, but this should be every now and then. If you live in a state of perennial emergency there is something wrong somewhere. Full stop.
Those who say, 'you can't be successful if you don't work 24/7' are really those guys who don't plan thing according to the problem they are trying to solve.
I get that sometimes you don't have the time to plan, but those "sometimes" should not become an excuse for "not planning" every other thing that you can... That's just stupid...
If you're talking about a life/work balance, then there's no place to "life" in your work. It's better to look for another job.
There are people like me who tried to compensate lack of personal life in their 20s and thought I was being workholic. I now regret it during my 30s.
That extra work or the hours you spent gives you nothing back and takes years of your life quality.
I like to think about work as an endurance sport, for example, cycling (whihc is my hobby actually). You won't be a better cyclist simply by riding more. You have to schedule your trainings, with proper rest in between. You'll need a longer rest after a harder training. Good night time sleep is also crucial (8 hours or more). If you don't rest, you'll get overtrained - which doesn't mean that your are going to be too good, but quite the opposite, not getting any gains, or even losing performance. Also, if you got overtrained, you'll need months of rest to recover. It is pretty close to what we would call burnout in tech.
Working in IT is an endurance sport of the brain, which is not a muscle of course, but needs similar care. If you don't treat it well, you won't reach your full potential.
On the other side, there are a few aliens, like Elon Musk, who can do multiple companies with high performance. I have no idea, how he manages it, and I am a bit concerned about his health... but he might be a martian after all.
As a side note to @jmfayard , I'm currently living in Japan, and I exactly know, what you are talking about. It's like a huge group of zombies working all day (and night) long ... and I can't expect zombies to do good work. I am lucky to have found a good company, which cares about my life and carrier, but it is quite rare here.
Where do you work? I'd love to see a list of companies who have a track record of treating their IT staff fairly
This is awesome. Balance needs to be the most important thing for any successful developer or human for that matter.
I think the missing variable here is passion.
People that are passionate about their work or goal want to keep going. People that are working for someone else's goal that work extra are grinding.
Sometimes management is messed up, but to use that as a conclusion ignores the reality that most managers are messed up. If your choice is to not work until you find your unicorn job will probably land you in the poor house.
If the anecdotal evidence provided by some 10X programmers about their positive experiences is the bar for truth, and you aren't a 10Xer, you'll be parked at the 'World isn't fair' lot... long term.
I started this field really late, and I work extra because I don't want to work forever, and I have less time than people that didn't go down a non-related path.
There are people that live the dream without pushing beyond the minimum, but if you're reading this, it's probably not going to be you.
Long hour culture makes me furious. I see it as theft. No one has the right to your time, certainly outside of what they're paying you. (And even then ...)
Moreover, it clearly doesn't work. I'm a firm believer in Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time. Long hour culture just forces people to work poorly in order to avoid burning out.
Well, the opposite is, who are you to judge someone who wants to use this right on time for his/her work?
Absolutely! I try not to judge individuals. As you say, who am I -- who is anyone -- to judge how someone else uses their time?
What I do judge is the organisations that constantly expect their staff (including the most poorly paid) to work crazy hours. That's not a way to care for your employees.
Of course, these organisations can be extremely successful.
Fortunately, there are many other successful organisations who do treat their staff well. More power to them, I say!
Great article. I will soon be starting my career into the job industry and this article I feel is something worth keeping in my mind 😃
Some people value how fast you mop-up over fixing the leak.
Work smarter!
Yep, for sure. I am lucky and privileged to have worked at companies that don't have this culture. Twitter is such a subset of the actual developer population, all you really get is hot takes. I know folks who have worked over 15-20 years in one company and have normal hours and hobbies and are some of the best engineers I've come across.
Speaking from my own experience I think you eventually come to realize what makes you happy and what you don't want to do, then you make sure you keep doing things that light you up and avoid situations where you do things you don't want to do. That takes time for sure, to be in a spot to make that work.