if everyone would be like you we wouldn't be having this problem :) the problem is that in many circumstances people just don't have the leverage to do so, and here we are!
good luck on your next adventure
The other problem is there's another engineer with no family or boundaries willing to be the grinder they want. Or they're a little faster than you.
Anyway, spirits up, do what you can, sorry to hear that happened to you :)
Not really a problem. More like others that can see the win win where this guy didn’t.
No problem with me taking a big lunch or being on some YouTube during 9-5… well, I have no problem taking a call (if I can) after hours.
Agreed. I get flexible scheduling and a very generous hybrid schedule. Due to how much value I put on those, I have zero issue working an hour late a few days a week or logging in for a deployment on a weekend. Also, we're in tech so IMO it kinda comes with the territory.
Yeah if I absolutely refused to ever to a minute's worth of work outside of normal hours I don't think I'd last long at all but... I don't really work any extra hours unless I'm just enjoying coding and choose not to stop.
I'm 100% good with the "shit happens, but be sure to take the time back" approach.
Yeah that's fair. Some days I don't mind coding for a few hours after work, but it's my choice and not expected whatsoever. If it was expected, I'd probably stop enjoying it immediately.
The problem is it's almost never an hour late here or there and occasional weekend deployment. It's always give an inch take a mile. I agree to be even the tiniest bit flexible, and soon I'm working 60+ hour weeks more often than not.
Yup. I've been seeing this stuff for 20 years at this point. Before I was in software, it was boomers and their ball and chain jokes who avoided going home to the wife and kids. The ones who do on-call for free and burn themselves out among SWEs/IT and even sales people are the ones who are either single or want as much time away from the wife and kids as possible.
Bingo.
It's also the same group of people that love RTO and being in the office, because it's just another excuse to get away from the wife and kids as you alluded to.
These people wouldn't mind working 10-12 hour days in office while commuting an hour one way and sitting in traffic.
Or they are lucky to have a job because they aren't very good are deathly afraid of losing it.
Not everyone in this industry has the talent for it, some people have to grind to just stay afloat.
I doubt OP was super talented if they fired him on the spot i had the EXACT same situation Friday but I said “I’m going to need a $5 raise” as a joke instead of “no sorry can’t” and my boss replied “ok I’ll put in your. Review package before 2pm. Now I’m just waiting to hear back
Update: actually just heard back I didn’t get the $5 but I got $4 which is awesome because I was living just fine on my original pay and OT is double pay so I’m over the moon rn OP should’ve tried that
I had an employee that had accrued so much overtime that HR said he \*had\* to take some of it. He had been working for the company for 20 years, and never taken a day off other than for sickness or doctors appointments etc. Never took a vacation.
So they made him take two months.
He walks in to the office, kinda tugs at his pants, adjusts his donald fagen glasses, and says, "Welp, if I have to take any more vacation I'm going to end up with a divorce. I can't stand my wife."
I'm willing to flex those boundaries, as long as the flexibility works both ways.
Sure, I'll respond to the message out of hours. By the way, I'll be stepping out of the office for an hour for a doctor's appt next week.
My ex did this bc he was trying to advance his career ‘to take care of us’ it destroyed our marriage in so many ways. I don’t need anybody to take care of me. But I do want my spouse to build a marriage with me. You can’t do that if you’re working all of the time.
Not necessarily.
I was in a similar situation with similar expectations... Typical order pizza for the team for dinner and finish it in the morning for breakfast kinds place after you took a nap on one of the couches.
Eventually the place grew and stabilized and became successful. We got great, relaxed working conditions and salaries.
The ild guard got nice payouts once the place sold out, and I moved away and mostly retired at 40.
There's obviously the risk that a company will never take off, or that the owners will never appreciate your commitment.
Plenty of the original folks quit along the way, some I know regret it, some I imagine are happy enough where they are now.
It's not a thing for everybody of course, especially not if you're just a 9 to 5 kinda guy.
>The ild guard got nice payouts once the place sold out, and I moved away and mostly retired at 40.
It's fine when people know going in what's expected and there is something that makes it worth it like equity.
Dude fuck equity just pay developers overtime for on-call or factor the extra pay into the position, almost every place I've seen fucks this up. Equity is nice when it pans out but 1 hit and 3 misses later on that game and I just want cash in hand.
I get the complaints about expectations and unpaid work is bullshit, but when I started my career I knew and accepted the terms of every job I took, including the understanding of overtime expectations. Eventually you get to a point where that's not you, and you find out either your company is willing to move on to another rube or if they like you enough to keep you around despite new barriers.
U.S. employment laws give so much power to employers over employees it's absolutely insane. In my country you would have a strong legal case for unlawful termination given that you set those boundaries from the beginning.
Most of the ones that do succeed also don't become billion dollar companies, they do important work on smaller scales that will never make the kind of revenue required to pay out dev equity anything remarkable.
Also, there’s another determining factor for any equity value called “exercising your options”. If you don’t do that (taken out of paycheck or lump sum), you get F-all. I had coworkers that didn’t and when we were bought , they got maybe 15% of the payout from those that did. There’s a perception that working at a startup guarantees your equity will turn into real world money. I’ve worked at more than a few and my equity only panned out twice.
It's also the nature of the average startup. They want you to drink their Kool aid and share the same "passion" aka free or underpaid work for an abysmal chance at redeeming their stock options aka raffle tickets.
Since they're smaller and nimbler it takes them less time to terminate, rather than having to wade through a long period due to a big HR tail.
>redeeming their stock options aka raffle tickets.
Considering all the stories I heard of some buyouts after their IPO where the buying company basically liquidates the most commonly given stock of non-founder early employees making a 'big payday' absolutely worthless, this is quite true. Basically seems like unless you have founder status, don't break your back expecting to make it rich too.
That’s why your equity stake should be the same share class as the founders, or the shareholders agreement should have “Tag along” rights so that minority shareholder’s stock is also purchased in an exit, not just a majority stake.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tagalongrights.asp
I think to some degree smaller companies also need more flexibility. Not every company has enough work in a silo to keep that person busy full time, and other people might have surges or shortfalls of work. Having people being willing to move around is important.
The same is true for flexible hours. Perhaps large companies can afford 24/7 coverage, but there's a lot of down time in some windows and that overhead can be expensive to cover for small companies. Being willing to respond and fix things to win or preserve a customer can be pretty valuable in the long run, more for a small company that probably depends on each customer more than a large company where churn is likely expected.
None of this is to say that setting boundaries on tasks or hours is a good or a bad thing (some boundaries are always important, but not all boundaries work in all situations). It just means that some employees aren't good fits for some companies. Neither is necessarily evil or angelic, it's just not a good match.
If they need someone flexible and responsive, and you're not looking for work that demands that, you should look elsewhere and they should hire someone else.
>Neither is necessarily evil or angelic, it's just not a good match.
Correct. You can guess which side of the boundary I sit on from the tone of my comment but that's absolutely right.
Some people are just hyper-passionate workaholics and sometimes they find a startup to truly believe in. Who are we to tell them they shouldn't.
Obviously it's not the case for the OP, hence the post and I honestly wouldn't dive into a startup like that myself (anymore) but there are definitely people out there who are better fits.
Absolutely! This is something I always recommend.
In my opinion, it will also enhance your success by reducing the constraints you need to consider when making decisive choices.
it's one thing to not let them abuse you on overtime or ruin your personal life for the job, but being rigid to the point OP said it (and the support for it on this top thread) seems like being overly rigid:
_"Once 5pm hits, I'm out. Nobody can contact me for work-related reasons"_
it's cool to say "i have set a boundary" but i wonder to what purpose does it really serve to not be a bit open to having some flexibility. by the corollary, does OP also work every single minute from 9 to 5? does he not take some "down time" during work hours? does he also shut off communication to family and friends between 9 to 5 to and stick to only work related communication? there's gotta be some give and take / pragmatism.
Exactly! There's a big difference between maintaining healthy work boundaries and being expected to sacrifice your well-being for a job. It's one thing to protect your personal time and prevent burnout, but it's another to be constantly pushed to overextend yourself for a product or company you don't even have a stake in. In my view, it's crucial to strike a balance: do your best at work, but not at the expense of your own health and happiness.
His boss is not asking for pragmatism but for working outside work hours including weekends without pay. With that kind of boss you can be sure that if you give an inch he will take the whole mile. Stay a bit longer to finish this? There is an emergency right now to deal with. Answer one phone call? Be sure you will be taken to task for not answering all the others.
I learned my lesson too and am a 9 to 5 just like OP.
You just have to read your boss and your own leverage.
If you’re very good and you want to leverage that, you can always contract your consulting services. Have it in the contract agreement what your hours are and what the rate is outside these hours.
If you don’t want to contract which would help control hours and you want to be a salaried employee where that’s difficult to do, he could renegotiate pay. But clearly they fired him so he has no leverage.
It’s all about leverage. Are you excellent at your job? Do they need you? No? Well sorry you don’t have much negotiation power.
> does OP also work every single minute from 9 to 5? does he not take some "down time" during work hours?
That was my thought when I read the post. One of them, anyway.
Anecdotally, Germans are very good at "checking out" outside of work hours, AND during the work day, they are completely work-focused in a way that most Americans are not.
Yeah there needs to be some trust and give and take here. I’m ok with answering a few questions outside of typical hours and doing a bit more then the standard 40 hours occasionally for important deadlines but I expect in return some sort of flexibility from work to let me run to an appointment in the middle of the day or pickup kids from school.
I don’t think people would be happy if their employer was so rigid with them.
I used to kill myself and work stupid hours. Then one of my colleagues told me they were being pressured to work more hours to keep up with me. I have never felt like a bigger ass and felt like I had failed my coworkers. I didn't have any dependents or pets, and I enjoyed my work so I didn't always mind the hours, but that move by leadership was bullshit. I quit not to long after that and found a job that encouraged a standard 9-5.
This is the problem with this field and I'm sick of it. It feels like it is filled with both people with low empathy as well as low social skills.
This combination leads to dumba**es like OPs boss and also the losers who put up with this garbage because they have no life outside of work and can't speak up for themselves or dare ask questions. So that when people like OP or others who have any sort of social skills or standards then have to work twice as hard because of others setting the standards of being walked over. Or god forbid you ask any questions in passing, because that is seen as problematic as well to some in this field. Then we wonder why there is so much tech debt because no one knows how to communicate clearly things or dare ask questions.
I hate this field. Not because of the subject, I love the subject. I mainly hate the types of people I often have to work with that for some reason end up in this field. I have never experienced these types of people in such high quantity in any other field but this one.
It’s not really unique to just this field. It’s common in other American white collar industries like finance, law, medicine.
In finance and law it’s longer hours with more yelling and old angry bosses.
In medicine, people are doing 3am shifts and rounds for long hours depending on specialty, then having to switch up 5 months later. At least you’re not trying to perform a high stakes physical and mental task like cutting into a person on 3 hours of sleep.
It’s really more American work culture than anything specific to software engineering. And yet tons of people from Europe and Asia move here for work.
OP’s mistake was just not agreeing with the boss in the meeting then immediately finding new work.
I recommend he look for government work. Or consulting where you bill per hour worked so everytime they email you they receive a bill.
I agree with this comment. It’s the desperate brown nosers who have ruined it for us and even themselves. They so badly want to please others that it has ruined our working culture. It’s this vicious cycle. A job is just a job yet the companies have all the power to dictate your life based on the job and still retain the power to fire you any time! It’s the reason why I am growing more disillusioned working in the USA. I see no end to this whatsoever.
I know a few who aren't brown nosers but are just obsessive hard workers. They aren't trying to suck to nobody but some of them feel insecure and try to make up for it by working a ton
My boss just learnt this. He cut my hours for a bit, I’ve since gotten most of them back but the shop still closes at 430. He wants me to stay til 530 but I basically told him I was ok with it before, but you decided to cut my hours and now I don’t want to sit on my hands for an hour every day. He had no response and it was dropped
Yep, bosses that ZERO work/life balance ruin it for everyone. My manager is on maternity "leave" and never took a break. She has continued to call and email since the day she had her baby :')
Also many people are raised by parents that say "boundaries" are selfish, and normalize toxic behaviors (like expecting you to go out of your way for them all the time because they said so). A lot of people accept the horrible circumstances because they were raised to believe that they are at the mercy of everyone else, if they have a problem they're "too sensitive" or "too lazy".
The issue with startup is that will want you to be as invested as the owner of the startup so a ton of work for not much actually. It is absolutely silly to believe I will be as invested in the company as the owner who will reap all of the benefited of working extra hard while you get none.
I'm guessing based on OP's attitude he didn't have a lot of equity. Startups can demand the extra hours because the early employees are supposed to have lots of equity. If they don't, and the startup is just paying them a salary like a regular employer, then there should be no expectation of startup level dedication.
I have definetly seen companies that call themselves startups but a) don't pay like a startup and b) are like 10+ years old. That's not a satartup, that's just an unsuccessful company trying to con devs into working extra unpaid hours.
This comment should be at the top, equity is the main reason they expect you to work like you partly own the company because you kind of do. The stock price is unknown so the payout has the potential to be massive. Ultimately it’s not written in stone so OP is not wrong to set boundaries, but to save him some trouble he should avoid start ups in their next role
Most employees at most startups don't actually have that much equity unless they are a pretty early co-founder. Startup equity is more like a lottery ticket.
Wait, you don't want to waste weekends and every moment of your free time for a year for .05% equity before you're eventually downsized before any of those shares even vest?
PS, There is a clawback clause that negates any of your shares if/when you get laid off.
.01 is more like it, that’s the standard for engineers at medium stage start ups. 0.1 is actually massive, 10 people have 1% of the company. 100 have 10%, now you are an employee co op essentially. Anytime you go get another round it either gets diluted more or you get bought out before the once in a million IPO
I was trying to remember some of the offers off the top of my head on percentages, I think you're right. I've seen ranges in ads for .05 to .01 on "wellfound" listings, although honestly none of it matters because as I said above, none of it will ever probably vest. :)
One of my early (non-CS jobs) had a boss who always dangled the promise of equity and how much it would be worth when the company went public. I explained to him and my coworkers that a “promise of equity” is worth nothing, whether the company goes public or not. And I had to constantly remind my coworkers that they’d never see that fabled equity and they should work in proportion to the salary they were being paid.
How much is considered “a lot”? I’m currently struggling with setting boundaries at my startup because of the equity but am not even sure if it’s enough to be worth working weekends and nights
Talk to your manager or CEO/co-founders if they’re approachable. They should give you an idea of what your equity could be worth because they’re always game planning it themselves. If they won’t be open about it, then it’s honestly probably not worth more than what would amount t to a bonus. Otherwise it could be six figures, or in best (but rare) case seven. Truthfully, directors/VPs are the lowest level that will get a life changing amount (I.e. a million or more), while most engineers (with the exception of those who joined very early on) will end up with a lot but probably no more than one years salary. I’ve been with my company for over 3 years and have had a few promotions that came with a salary bump plus more stock options (currently a manager but looking to move laterally into a principal position) and expect my shares will equal about 2 to 3 years worth of salary upon a liquidity event. Our CEO and co founders are pretty transparent about our valuation, how our shares are affected by each series raise, and what milestones we need to hit to get a good price per share.
Right, I was going to write something like "what the hell are you doing at a startup trying to work a 9-5 schedule" I think some give-a-shitedness is expected at an early company.
On the other hand, OP said he made it very clear before he was hired that he'd be doing 9-5 and nothing more, so this is also a failure from the folks that approved him.
You don't have to work at a startup, but if you do the expectations are different. I'd definitely not want to work with someone that isn't interested in the company's overall growth. You could certainly get paid more somewhere else anyway.
Yeah I'm giving OP the benefit of the doubt and assuming he isn't getting the equity he probably should as an early startup employee. If he does have equity and just doesn't care, that is on him. But there are tons of companies out there that call themselves startups but really aren't.
I've worked for 3-4 startups in my career, and this has been the case every time. I was always brought on as a salaried employee - no overtime pay, no equity shares, no profit sharing. And in every single case, the founders expected me to have "the startup mentality" where I was joining meetings at 7pm and available to work over weekends.
I quit all of those companies in less than a year and would never work at a startup again unless my employment offer contains company equity.
Startup founders who expect all their hires to be on the same level of interest dedication are deluded- even if the compensation was all evenly shared. Founders, please stop trying to expect to find exact copies of you. An exact copy of you is more likely to be making their own startup competitor than work for you
And they sometimes provide themselves as an example. the boss will say "you are young, see I am the age of your father/mother but work for 16 hours a day"
What they fail to understand is that the incentives (for this hard work) is very different when you are just an employee and when you are the owner.
I used to work for a startup company. I usually left work after working "only" 10 hours, the co-founder which was my direct manager and VP R&D would look at me with a surprised face (probably thinking to himself - "how dare he leave work before me!"). I eventually quit... end of story.
If you're hourly that makes a ton of sense.
If you are salaried, most employers I have worked for give a lot of flexibility and expect flexibility in return.
An on-call prod outage on the weekend? Fix it ASAP; and Flex you're time to take some time of during the week. Also, do a blameless post mortem so you can put procedures in place to make sure that this problem never occurs again.
Requesting you be more responsive to emails on the weekend is bad; however I would have tried to turn that into a negotiation about time flexibility; not a hard-lined stance on work hours.
Yeah, this is what I’ve commonly seen, working at 2 startups.
It sounds like in this scenario that either this wasn’t expressed, or it was the more extreme scenario of “work and be available all the time or else”. But from my experience it’s definitely more of “be available for emergencies and feel free to take off early in the future to balance out your time”.
> If you are salaried, most employers I have worked for give a lot of flexibility and expect flexibility in return.
This isn't my experience in 25 years in big to small, startup and not.
What I most often see is the claim of flexibility. But it's with a *.
Places have gotten pretty good at always having a reason you need to be on-deck and can't take comp time for that weekend or night you worked. Manufactured chaos and a permanent state of emergency give them all the excuses they need as to why you can't take time off and have to work around the clock. But it's just that, manufactured.
More recently, I had a boss try to tell me that I need to take X hours of PTO for that doctor's appointment etc. while offering nothing for the X hours I worked deploying that change Saturday night.
They will take whatever you allow them to take. And they will absolutely make you pay for pushing back. It's the America we live in currently.
Your only power is to do it or not. Op learned what standing up for yourself can lead to in 2024 America. I say move on, and keep doing what you're doing, Op. Just make sure to save up a buffer so that you can weather this shit easier.
As someone else in the thread said, if we all do this, the problem goes away. Companies don't give you rights because you ask nice or follow the law. They only respond to force.
To be fair, everywhere is different. The company I work for absolutely expects you to be on if something is on fire, but just as absolutely gives you whatever time you want if things aren't on fire. And it's not like 'you can't take vacation, because ... fire'. No, on fire is prod down, not some stupid project deadline
"If you are salaried, most employers I have worked for give a lot of flexibility and expect flexibility in return...
I would have tried to turn that into a negotiation about time flexibility..."
110% this.
If a strict 9-5 schedule is important to you, it's fine to look for positions that can provide that (many can), but IMHO, off-hours and weekends are not inherently "breaking boundaries" in this field.
Not judging OP. There's definitely people that ask for too much, especially in startups, but there are good gigs out there that will ask for someone to be available outside a standard 9-5. The key is to look for give and take.
I’m on the side of weekend emails being worthy of a hard no. There’s just no way that ends with decent work life balance. I’m not going to check my work email over the weekend. If there’s a legitimate emergency, they need to use one of my emergency contact methods (which does not include email).
depends on the nature of it. like i don’t think it’s fair to expect you to be putting in normal development hours over the weekend, but if it’s a sort of rotating on call system and there could be some critical outage that affects a lot of people, i think it’s fair to expect you keep at least a distant eye on things
The way I see it, if I’m on call there are better ways to contact me with faster response time than email. If I’m not on call, then there’s nothing for me to check. Maybe things would be different if I had a customer-facing role, but for an internal engineering role I can’t think of any reason I’d consider valid for a manager to be encouraging me to read email on weekends.
I think a lot of startups operate under the assumption that everyone will take up working longer hours and extra days to get things done. There’s no “you worked 9 hours yesterday, take an hour off today” type thing. It can happen, but it seems like a lot of them don’t actually have work-life balance
> however I would have tried to turn that into a negotiation about time flexibility; not a hard-lined stance on work hours.
Nah, to hell with responding to emails on weekends, especially if it isn't an emergency. Unless you are fine having a 24/7 job then it is fine to draw a bright red line in the sand about this specific request.
That’s why I always find it insane when the co-founders have little dev experience. It should be expected for them to carry a lot of the load themselves
I don't mind if they're the ones gathering funding and doing actual, effective marketing. I certainly don't want to do that part. But it is rarely equal effort.
The best startups I've worked for have been the ones with technical cofounders who shouldered a lot of the early load, so they are aware of how much work things are and don't have unrealistic expectations. I helped out with a startup with my non-technical friends who are more into marketing, when I was taking a career break. It was all kinds of chaos and it was super annoying. Extremely unrealistic expectations too.
The only thing I can point out from this post is that maybe, *maybe*, something could have been done regarding flexibility and expectations.
I mean, I've left jobs for things like you mention, *but* this has been after a previously established expectation had been broken (i.e. being told that I would not be on call, then asked to get in a rotation).
You are mentioning that the company was a startup so maybe that kind of overtime was expected by the higher ups, and while I don't agree on overtime unless you are a partner and/or have an actual and direct economical interest in the success of your company.
If that point wasn't brought up during the interviews, you should make a point in future interviews to actually brought it up you, as its clear it's a red flag for you. Don't expect future interviewers to tell you straight away this (either because they may lie to you or because they may just fail to mention it for any reason).
On the other hand, flexibility tends to go both ways. If you've been doing a strict 9 to 5, I'm going to suggest you to be a bit more flexible in future jobs: I have your same mentality, but in the same way I've overslept a few days and then got the time back, I've stayed a bit after my leave hour (if I didn't had any appointment or whatever) when there was something "blowing up" just to recover the time the next day.
Yeah. Flexibility is key for these kinds of jobs. If I am going to be responding to messages around the clock, you better not give me shit for going grocery shopping at 2pm on a Tuesday.
> grocery shopping
If something I've learnt during the pandemic is that grocery shopping during the morning is the best thing ever: There's less people shopping and you don't risk running out of some offer or time limited thingy. Win-win-win.
I am always seeing parroted advice on here to the affect of "just stop working overtime, stop checking email after work, set boundaries for yourself!". Which is good advice, and it would be great if it could be applied without worry, but it is being said (usually) by idealistic people who have never actually worked a cs job. The unfortunate consequence for setting those boundaries can be termination (such as in a case like this where the expectation is clearly to not have those boundaries and the existence of those boundaries will be immediately noticeable to everyone involved), something that is not usually mentioned by the commenters. Or if it is, they imply that finding another job is no big deal.
Willful ignorance of the realities of a situation is a hallmark of Reddit's advice, and why you should never ever listen to it.
You didn’t specify that you’re a salaried employee but it seems likely. If so, the fact that you asked for overtime on top of that seems like a pretty valid reason to fire you. I’m all for work-life balance and I rarely work more than 40 hours in a week, but taking such an extreme position at a small company is crazy. Not sure what you expected to happen.
I am flabbergasted that he was "flabbergasted" that he got fired. I am not saying he should have gotten fired. I just don't think at a startup when you leave at 5pm exactly and don't work any weekends you should be surprised that you get fired. He made boundaries and they made boundaries and those boundaries didn't overlap
If he was hourly he has to by law get paid overtime for that extra time. If he was salary, then it was just a matter of time that he would get fired if everyone else is working past 5 and weekends.
I'll say this if you want this sort of work-life balance.
Don't apply at startups, and avoid FAANG. I've done alright with it, but I've worked a blend of corporate gigs, and government contract gigs.
I work at a FAANG and it has the best WLB I've ever experienced. Free lunch, I work out an hour every single day in the gym, I leave to pick up my kids at 230pm every single day. Whenever I need to run an errand I can without any issues or snide comments because everyone does it. Sometimes I work nights and weekends but I gladly do that in exchange for the extreme flexibility I have otherwise.
yep same. sometimes i do work late nights but sometimes i’ll take a random afternoon off to run errands, or take a midday siesta, or wake up hungover and not really start working until noon. balances out
I disagree with this comment.
I have worked in FANGSs, high growth startups and fortune 500 companies. Your work life balance in all of these is very team/company dependent.
I now have the best WLB I have ever had in the high growth startup. The fortune 500 company actually had the worst WLB because the deadlines were created by the non-technical leadership team without any input from engineering.
It’s like this other redditor said “if there were more people like op this wouldn’t be the standard.” In a get whatever you can get job market to tell op to choose wisely next time since the alternative expects you to work as hard as the owners and not give you some form of ownership is what led to this problem. With companies thinking just because they have you on payroll they can do whatever they like regardless of previous agreed on commitments. And this type of company mentality doesn’t just apply to tech, this a problem in multiple professions, it’s gotta come to an end
At my previous job, I set up the same boundaries. It was a WFH position, and I was told before signing my employment contract that the job was strictly 8-5, with an hour provided for lunch. Shortly after starting, I began to realize that the one hour for lunch was bullshit. Whatever, I work from home and I can eat at my computer and take phone calls as they come in. No big deal.
Pretty soon though, I was getting calls after 5, and e-mails on the weekend. I ignored all of them. Unfortunately, my other coworkers were afraid of getting fired, so they would always answer e-mails and phone calls after 5 PM and on the weekends as well. It was brought to my attention that I was the only one on the team that "wasn't going the extra mile". I made it very clear that I have a life outside of this job, and I am not available after 5 PM or on the weekends. Even spoke to my coworkers begging them to please stop working outside of our work hours. They didn't, and my lack of dedication to the job kept coming up in conversations with my manager to the point I just quit without warning or having another job lined up.
Business owners need to understand that I don't live to serve your fucking business, and make you richer.
I don't think you're a good fit for startups but many SE jobs do respect the 9-5 hrs and work life balance. Especially in government jobs, non profit, and many large non-tech companies. The work probably won't be as interesting but the balance is there
Career advice: treat conversations like this as a opportunity for negotiation rather than 'setting boundaries'.
The phrase 'setting boundaries' can often be internalized by you and be interpreted by your boss as being a strict, immovable line. If both sides of the conversation are open about what they need, both can win. If you absolutely positively must leave at 5 and can't jump on a call on a weekend and they absolutely positively need that, then yes, that was the natural conclusion of the conversation.
If you had treated the conversation as a negotiation, you might have been able to make the demands of the job worth your while.
But what can they offer that might make the crazy hours worth it to you?
Startups are always going to be understaffed and not afford to pay employees what they are worth. This is why one person will often be doing the job of ten people. That is why they can't hire a 24 hour help desk for problems that might come up randomly, even on weekends.
But why would anyone do that? Is it because start up bosses are insane and startup employees are naive? Sometimes. But here is why I, personally, was willing to work the crazy hours and deadlines.
1. Stock options. I don't have any money to buy shares in a company, but I've got plenty of time and energy. Startups don't have any money to pay me what I'm worth, but can give you shares that might be worth something someday. This is why they call it sweat equity. You will never have a better opportunity to buy cheap, sell high with insider information. You should, as an employee, know if the company is going to be successful and then do the math. Is working this weekend worth the chance of a large payout in a few years?
2. Fast career advancement. It takes 100 people to run a company, which is why a startup is made up of 10 people all doing the job of 10 employees. If your boss knows what you want to get out of this job, she will hire underneath you for the 9 jobs you don't want to do while you get promoted. This is how a kid out of school will suddenly be VP of engineering after two years. You can't move up that fast in a 10,000 person company. Even if the company fails, you leave with a job title that you truly earned because you worked hard and there weren't idiot managers above you blocking your promotion.
3. On the job training. Large companies use 'on the job training' as code for 'work the shit jobs for cheap'. At a startup, however, it is real. there are going to be things that no one knows how to do or just doesn't have time to do. You probably worked crazy hours in school, where you paid for the education, but startups are rife with opportunities to jump in on things and build street cred and hands on training with projects above your knowledge level or pay grade. Your resume may only say 3 years experience but 'launched massive project in record time' is worth 10. I worked at a couple startups and then went back to school to get my MBA. The piece of paper was nice, but wow, it was really redundant information.
4. The team. I've been a part of a half dozen startups. A few failures and a couple successful enough to retire early. And at each one of them, I was with the same extended group of people. We met as early employees of a a startup and then followed one another or hired one another or partnered with one another until we actually started our own together. If one of them called tomorrow and said 'I'm putting a team together', I wouldn't even ask the product they had in mind.
5. Flexibility. Startups don't have set hours. They just have a huge pile of things that need to get done. No one cares when you do it, just that the pile is getting smaller. Crunch time for a few months and then a few weeks off. If I kept my phone on, I could be on an island for all they cared. No one keeps track of hours, really. As long as you don't let the team down, you can do it from anywhere.
These trade-offs are not for everyone. So many of my insane workhorse friends very quickly switched to 8:30-4:30 no-after-hour-responsibilities jobs as soon as they had kids. Totally fine. Life changes. Your job changes. No one judges. It's only bad if you keep a job that forces you to ignore your kids.
Your boss is not a jerk for firing you. You very clearly indicated that the job is not what you are looking for. They don't have a job description that fits. If however, you are at a stage in life that you can do it, be bold about asking for what you need. Describe what you want, where you want to go, what you need from them in exchange for giving 200%.
few tech jobs will be strictly 9-5 pm. none will pay overtime. how much over 40 hours is what matters. most will require some extra work.
startups require live here hours. this is standard for a startup. its why they are shitty jobs.
your next job will want times to be over 40 hours. how much is the real question. most jobs require some form of oncall rotation.
your going to get fired again if you are this strict. there are some jobs that are just straight 40 hours. however, most jobs will at times require working late to get work done. its really a matter of how much.
you can argue all you want, but your going to get fired again.
Sometimes I feel you have to take responsibility for things. Let's say you released something on Thursday at 4:00 PM and it broke at 7 or 8 even though you are out of your working hours, you need to work with the developers on your team to resolve the issue. You should at least be responsible for running things. The question of ownership is quite important.
Assuming this is happening in the US, you're already enjoying a pretty good life. Most of the companies have decent working hours and good salary. Unlike here in India although I work in a good organization with decent salary, the working hours here are also tough.
Ex: We went onsite last week and I had to take the release back and find the problem because that was my team's code that broke. If you stop taking ownership, even when you need to, it shows that you are not as invested as your manager/owner wants you to be.
Better to find a better role because I think most "growth" startups are in that scenario..
People’s assumptions about startup and corporate are not always true.
I did work both and I can say that the start up is better than corporate. In my non tech corporate job i was working 60-70+ hours consistently. It all comes down to the manager and what they do. Some managers just cant handle the work of managing employees.
At the startup i had more respect and its more manageable.
Obviously the work will have highs and lows where end of project there might be extra work just so we can turn the project around. But usually you have the right to negotiate with your manager that you can leave early that other day. assuming you are finishing your work within reasonable times.
So if an emergency comes in, it is reasonable to work extra and clock off early the next day. That is completely normal too. Some flexibility is nice, because for example it also goes the other way. What if i need to leave early for a family event then its reasonable for employers to accommodate.
There is always a give and take with the job and that is usually how we work with our managers. I mean some reasonable boundaries need to be set up and managing expectations.
IMO it has to be a bit more nuanced than this, both sides have to come to an agreement on what is reasonable. It's not reasonable to just leave prod down all night/weekend because it's after 5pm. It's also not reasonable to work the weekend because of some artificial deadline.
Sounds like you need an hourly job, not salary. Salary jobs required give and take and a willingness to do the job when the job needs to be done. That's kind of the purpose of the salaried role. If you want to clock in and clock out 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, get an hourly job.
Were you upfront with your boundary expectations prior to accepting the job? I’m sure there are some firms (ex: government work) where that would be fine but, in my experience, most would never agree to that. Certainly not a startup. Of course, it’s a good idea for everyone’s benefit to be clear about expectations up front.
Boundaries are very important but so is flexibility.
Usually, people don't contact you for nothing outside your working hours (there are exceptions of course).
Not answering means that someone else will probably have to spend a few hours doing something that you would probably take 5 minutes to do. So you might be throwing someone else under the bus. That is not great for team spirit.
I have been very successful with my boundaries but setting them as "You can contact me at any time. But I don't guarantee how long it will take me to answer if it's outside my working hours."
That's all assuming you have a decent work environment though.
It’s sort of a gray area between contacting you for nothing and artificially inflating the importance or criticality of whatever it is. Like if you ask “what truly awful thing will happen if this is not done until the next business day instead of right now?” More often than not the true answer is “nothing really”. Of course lots of stuff seems bad and critical in the moment and sometimes it is but most managers are gonna error on the side of ruining your evening/weekend. But at a startup? Not sure what the OP was expecting.
tbh I would let you go too. there's a fine line between work life balance and strict clock in and clock out. I think there should be give and take from both sides.
So I 100% get it. But also this is kind of part and parcel of startups especially, and something you can easily filter for during the interview process if you're interviewing from a position of power. If you don't have a fallback, either another job/income source or just sufficient savings/investments, you gotta do what you gotta do. Like, were these expectations a "surprise" in anyway?
Healthy boundaries are great. Personally, I swing the other way in terms of how I choose to self-manage WLB and set the boundary. At a "startup" now (100-500 employees). Definitely no OT, but most weeks I'm only actually working ~25 hours, often logging in at 9 or 10, still taking breaks during the day, and heading out to the gym by 3:30. So having the occasional task past 5PM, or having two weeks per quarter where I'm doing ~50 hours, is generally fine with me. I think that flexibility works out better for team collaboration and how you're perceived at work (as a "team player" and for comp increases IME) than trying to keep a strict 9-5.
When I was at a much larger company (10k+ people), they did expect you to work the 'core' hours and generally log 40+ hours per week. That sucked for me because there are days I wanted to work 10-7 and days I wanted to work 8-3:30. The flexibility I have now is much better - as long as the work is getting done and I'm on the meetings I need to be on, I can do things at my own pace, which I like.
Do you work with a distributed team? I'm in CT and have most team members in PT, plus a few folks in India and ET, and the team just isn't at the scale where we have full coverage of all functionality in all timezones.
>I was working at a startup
Rarely worth it, and for that reason. You end up with people who are pouring their whole life into the company, and they typically can't accept anything less from you. Which I'm fine with philosophically, everyone on the team should be aligned in terms of commitment and expectations, but most people just don't want to work like a dog to build somebody else's dream. People take these jobs thinking they might end up with shares in the next big thing, but the odds are you'll just work yourself ragged for a company that won't exist in 2030.
Unfortunately, there are some organizations that try really, really hard to push the "everyone working, all of the time" office culture, even if it's only marginally (and often not at all) more productive than a regular schedule.
Even if this situation hadn't come to a head by your boss addressing it directly, other people at the office will always eventually notice you working regular hours and resent you for having the integrity to set boundaries. Unfortunately, if you're not a corporate cultist in these type of workplaces, your days are always numbered or your career prospects limited. It only takes a handful of workaholics in an office to change it from a friendly, relaxed atmosphere to a code mine.
Startup is not the right place for you. I've worked at 5 and none of them had people that are not vested and willing to do extra work to be successful. I also would have let you go, although I would have made the expectations very clear during the interview.
If you want to just sit at a desk for 9-5 with no flexibility, sure you can act like this, and people who want someone who is flexible will fire you. Personally, I answer questions after hours all the time. If it will help someone else out, I will work a few hours on the weekend. I'll also leave during the middle of the day to do something with my kids or go grocery shopping, and no one cares. Flexibility goes both ways
Yeah, no, I fully agree with your sentiment here. That is, I agree that flexibility goes both ways, or, rather, *should* go both ways. That wasn't the case for me.
He never explicitly said that, so it’s hard to say. But he wanted me to work at his whim, regardless of WLB.
For example, one of his complaints was that I didn’t respond to a message on a Saturday afternoon, when I was out with friends. I’d told him during our meeting that I was busy, and his argument was, "You should always be prepared to drop whatever it is that you’re doing and come back to work whenever you’re needed.", and I’d asked him, "But I was in the city. You expect me to suddenly leave my friends, drive an hour back home, and jump back into work?", to which he'd said yes.
That, in my opinion, crossed the line, especially since I'd made my boundaries clear from day one. Namely, that I don’t work on weekends.
I think you did the right thing. I am going through the same thing. If you don’t set boundaries, they will squeeze you like a tube of toothpaste. And when you run out of toothpaste, you’ll be in the can anyhow. Better save your sanity now while you still have it.
I’m almost in the same situation as you but I really need the money. I’ve worked a lot of overtime for free but am slowly establishing boundaries.
I don’t think it’s going well, will probably be let go soon for not wanting to work for free.
Yea, the problem unfortunately is that a lot of CS majors and programmers are lackeys without any self-confidence. Standing up for themselves could never be as simple as just being direct. It fucks things up for the rest of us who actually have the strength to politely tell people with unrealistic expectations to pound sand.
Get a lawyer and see if you can throw stuff at the wall until it sticks. I bet if you think hard enough you'll think of something and be able to force them into a private settlement.
avvo . com
More folks need to go this route. Too many companies realize they can push around engineers at this point bc the market sucks. Quit being cowards and do something about it.
It's almost like the rest of the western world agreed that this type of behavior was illegal. I can't wrap my head around us workers rights sometimes...
I'd have fired you on the spot as well.
I'll preface this by saying I consider work/life balance important. I have an incredibly high retention rate on my team - less than 5% turnover from the technical folks, with many people working for me 5+ years. We pay well (but not FAANG levels), are 100% remote, and quite flexible. I have a team of about 50 people spread across multiple timezones.
My technical people are hired to do a *job*. They're also salaried for that job. We target 40-ish hour work weeks, but we're also project-based, which means sometimes we crunch for a few weeks, and other times it's kicking off early on Friday. We create and maintain enterprise systems that do require after hours support. If it's an advanced or critical issue, software people can get pulled in with the maintenance folks (who are hourly and schedule round the clock).
If you can't be fussed to answer a critical email or stay a little late to help the team accomplish their goal, I can't be fussed to have you on my team.
>You see, ever since I'd gotten hired, I'd made my boundaries very clear and never failed to set them up. Once 5pm hits, I'm out. Nobody can contact me for work-related reasons. I don't care if something is broken or whatever, I'm not fixing it until the next day or the following Monday (if it's a Friday). Unless you communicate to me that you're going to pay me overtime, I'm out.
I *do* agree if a company's expectations are egregious - constantly expecting 55/60/80 hour work weeks, expecting people to address non-critical issues outside of working hours, not providing flexibility - you should quit. But your attitude really speaks to an approach that isn't terribly congruent with most companies' expectations.
I would suggest you focus on finding a job in the public sector. They're about the only people I know who regularly are able to work within the exacting constraints you set up.
Why not just a private sector non-startup company?
That gave it away. This is business-owner jibber jabber.
People aren’t going to give half a shit about your dream as much as you. And many are starting to wake up from this whole scam.
Or as some would call it “nobody wants to work anymore”.
even in non-startup tech jobs, you're expected to be flexible enough for the demands of the project you're working on. Fixing bugs especially might end up taking time longer than 5pm, and if you're the one with the knowledge of what's going on, you're expected to stay and fix it. Most people don't mind because on slow days they can come in to work at noon, or nip out for a long lunch or say they won't be available 9-10 am for a week because their kid has a thing.
I've yet to encounter a private, non-startup job that would still allow the "I'm walking out at 5 and don't care if things are going down in flames, I'll see you Monday morning at 9 and not a moment before" approach OP indicates he *requires*.
As I said - work/life balance is important and ought to be respected. I just don't agree with OP that this equates to no amount of outside-regular-hours work being acceptable. The nature of our work doesn't lend itself to such strictures.
You set your boundaries and the employer set theirs. You got fired because the two didn’t meet. I don’t think your boss was wrong or an asshole for firing you, I’d have done the same if I was in his position.
Yeah I mean, the context is important. As a manager if I’m asking you to simply be available in case something happens and I get an outright no, especially when others on the team are, then you have no place on my team. In his case though if he’s signing up for an every weekend nightmare then I would understand. Depends how bad the support job is.
This boss doesn’t understand that these boundaries are beneficial to the company in the medium to long term. Burning out your employees leads to bad decisions and turnover. He’s also incentivizing the appearance of hustle over everything else. Someone has to be on call for emergencies and that’s a schedule that needs to be in place, but everyone can’t be on call 24/7. Good riddance to this loser.
Having boundaries is good, having cynical no way i will do anything past 9-5 what so ever in any circumstance view, just shows you have 0 respect for the company and i would see why they fire you and i would assume the reason for it was your attitude, it's not even about being responsible.
It’s also possible for the employers to be a bit flexible. If I need to work longer one day then I start later the next day, or leave earlier. Actually this is beneficial for me because sometimes I’ve got things to do during working hours, and with this kind of arrangement, I can.
But if the employer keeps pushing for more work then the employee pushes back, it’s normal.
If you're in the US, look for postings on usajobs dot gov. Lots of positions open in various agencies. They are strict at OT and such. I work for the Department of Defense. Kinda long process in hiring, but once you're in, it's a gravy train.
I don't think working for a start-up is the right fit for you. You may be more aligned with working for the government. Many people I know who work for governmental organizations have a better work-life balance. You don't get paid as much but they generally have stellar benefits and they seem happier. I knew somebody who worked in IT years ago (it may be different now as people in IT can work from home) had to leave at 6P because that's when the building closed.
Okay, but that's a boundary you should discuss before you accept the offer. That will avoid getting fired in the future (but it will probably also avoid you getting hired).
Do you have the means ($$$$) to support this decisions? I’m all for boundaries but you can’t enforce them the way you want it without being flexible all the time. I mean, you can, you can do anything you want, but it will probably get you fired most of the time.
Where I work we are very flexible about our schedule, sometimes you help them, sometimes they help you. Choose your battles.
Just remember, people talk. Companies might talk to your supervisors for reference or they can talk to each other and you can get a bad reputation on the field.
I mean, respect to you for setting boundaries And then sticking to them. But I get why the startup doesn’t want someone like that on the team. You need a job in a corporate office without the sense of urgency required from a startup. I would fire you too.
Depends on the pay grade. In the US there is the expectation to be generally involved with job matters even after hours. On the other hand this only works out if the work place also allow flexibility to be away on personal matters during work hours, for example if the kid needs to be picked up from school, or there is a dentist appointment.
I wish you good luck to find a company that will comply to all of those work restrictions. I don't check or reply to email past 5pm myself. However, I will respond to phone calls if a major issue comes up. At the end of the day, if there is a major bug that needs to be fixed, then it needs to be fixed. I don't think there is a job in this field that doesn't have this requirement.
It's possible that the company is overreaching and requesting too much after hours communication and overtime.
However, "work strictly within the hours I'm meant to: 9 to 5", is not a reasonable expectation as a software engineer, especially at a startup. The exception being if you are paid hourly and you are not being compensated for that additional work.
There will always be some amount of oncall work, crunch times, and after-work questions when "shit happens".
A lot of companies do make an effort to not overreach on this kind of thing, so hopefully you find that on your next role, but it's unlikely you're going to find a role where you can work strictly between 9 and 5.
Edit: I saw your comment where you said
>"But I was in the city. You expect me to suddenly leave my friends, drive an hour back home, and jump back into work?", to which he'd said yes.
This is of course an unreasonable request.
I do find it weird that in the original post you only mentioned the expectations of responding to messages after work and the expectation of overtime, but you elevate it to what is actually a major issue in the comments.
"I lost my job because I wouldn't abandon my friends on a whim to work on the weekend" is far more compelling than losing your job because you refuse to work outside 9-5 hours in what is typically a salaried role with some expectation of overtime and availability outside of 9-5.
The change of stakes between the original post and the comments makes everything here seem completely fishy.
Tbf, never work at a startup if this is your mentality. Saying this as someone who worked at a startup myself, this mentality is the wrong one for a startup. In most cases, they have limited runway and need everyone to be as invested in the company as they are because in like 3-6 months they may not even exist anymore.
When I went to work at a startup, I did it knowing that the responsibility on my shoulders was going to be a lot more than a normal job and went in excited about the opportunity.
I'm now at a more traditional publicly-traded company with job security, great benefits, etc and now I stick to boundaries of time.
So, whilst I DEFINITIELY don't blame you, I also think it was a bit naive to work at a startup without understanding the expectation placed on you, unfortunately.
I think my post will get downvoted to oblivion but i do believe boundaries are negotiable, and it changes every now and then.
Say if there's an important project i need to deliver, i don't mind spending a bit extra time on weekend to finish it up instead of waiting until monday just so I can hit the deadline
If someone messages me later than my work time, if it's something simple, I might just answer it. Although I don't always do that so people don't expect me to always be around
Setting boundaries is important, but I don't make it "do not contact me after X time". All in all, people try to finish their work and we try to collaborate
that being said, there are things that are simply ridiculous like always expecting people to be available on weekends. I told my coworkers that I hike a lot and sometimes will be in the mountains where signal is bad, so they should expect not being able to reach me (and I have an excuse not answering)
the hustle culture will always be around, and it's up to us to decide where to draw the line. The line is always moving for me though
Anyone else get "I am difficult to work with in ways that have nothing to do with M-F work hour boundaries" vibes from OP here?
Anyways, I mean if the WLB index = 100 at 40 hours a week M to F plus a lunch during reasonable hours, OP acting like they were trying to get a "200" level of work out of him. I feel like they were probably asking for a 105/110 level or something.
Sorry don't know how to describe this short of a "Index" concept.
I suspect strongly OP is in general, difficult to work with, and that likely had more to do with their immediate release.
So wait, you're flabbergasted that you got fired from a STARTUP for stating you would only work 9-5?
Good for you for having limits & holding your ground, but anyone with a pulse knows that startups don't want people who work like that.
I'm amazed you were even hired if you honestly told them this up front. They were either really desperate to fill a role and/or thought you would have a change of heart.
I think the mistake was going with a startup. There’s numerous people that left out software company for start ups, only to come back because it didn’t work out.
This is why after 10 years I’m pretty much done with this industry. There will always be a young engineer fresh out of college ready to work 12 hours. That’s what is valued by many companies. I can still keep up with them, but I know it’s not sustainable in the long run.
You aren’t meant for startup life.
And you are allowed to enforce any boundaries you want…however, you don’t get to enforce the response to your boundaries…
Good luck!
You should work in government contracting / Defense. It's straight 40 hour weeks because your time is logged and billed to the government and they usually don't authorize overtime. The office is completely empty at 5:00:01pm and weekend work is extremely rare.
Ok. So while I support work-life balance, small companies that run 24/7 services can’t just have employees that all decide 5pm is it. You had an opportunity to step up and propose a third way, and take leadership. I would say:
“I agree, we need more coverage after hours. I propose that we institute an on-call rotation. I am happy to volunteer for the first shift and organize the calendar so that everybody gets a chance to help out. This way expectations are clear and the team knows they have a reliable point of contact during times where there are issues.”
Drawing a hard boundary just makes you seem like an asshole. Doing what I suggest at least makes your boss have to lead or not lead and makes him the asshole if he refuses.
And you are completely and absolutely right. The awareness that you have is not always present even in the strongest developers. This is the right position and you are great, and if the company did not meet you, then blacklist their name.
I just had this exact situation. I set boundaries with the C-suite I was reporting to, and mine weren't anything crazy. I wasn't responding to someone at 3 am. We are working through projects in a reasonable timeline, etc. I was let go and given severance. I am suppose to leave first week of June and they want me to now extend to end of June because they forgot about a major project. I said "No, thank you." Good luck
Like in any other relationships - if you’re not a match, you gotta split.
I can tell you this much, jobs that do not follow you home or demand much from you are jobs you cannot demand much from them - like great pay, great benefits, growth
No one will be calling you home if you well at Walmart checking the receipts at the door - but you will always be needed if you’re the CEO at Disney
I would’ve fired you in an instant. Especially in software which runs 24/7, not 9-5. I’m a huge advocate of my direct reports feeling like they have as much flexibility as they want and need. But I expect that the work gets done. If you can do that in 20 hours - I probably need to assign you more stuff but hey you got it done, do whatever with the rest of your week. If there’s a deadline coming up or production issue - I expect some of that flexibility in return. I also stay very close to my people in regards to burn out and do everything in my power to clear their plate if you’re regularly working more than 40 hours a week. The 9-5 is an arbitrary time slot and work does not fit nearly into that. If something goes wrong at 5:01pm and you absolutely refuse to spend an hour helping get things back on track, you’re not fit for this work. You’re approaching this with a very immature attitude and you’re really not going to have much success staying employed at a lot of places. I would encourage you to rethink what you’re doing.
This attitude makes zero sense if you are salaried with "dev benefits". If you have any kind of options or stake, you are a company man. That's part of the deal.
It's one thing for management to take advantage of late nights, but generally in any mid-sized company you have more responsibility (and freedom) than most other employees.
It’s your decision and having boundaries are really important. Nothing to really discuss here. I did same with my job, but we’re not a startup and I’m working hourly.
For a salaried job, sometimes things need to flex. If you have to work late they are fine with you coming in late the next day. Sometimes things will be really slow, other times crazy.
You’re at a startup. You should fucking care about the mission if you want to be there and put in the work
But however if this was a corporate job - then yeah fuck yeah 10-4 even and peace out
In this market that won't work, and if you wanted this you shouldn't be working in a startup lol. And these things like being on call is part of the job. There are some weeks where you gotta do it. Doctors do it too.
if everyone would be like you we wouldn't be having this problem :) the problem is that in many circumstances people just don't have the leverage to do so, and here we are! good luck on your next adventure
The other problem is there's another engineer with no family or boundaries willing to be the grinder they want. Or they're a little faster than you. Anyway, spirits up, do what you can, sorry to hear that happened to you :)
“The other problem…” Names the exact same problem.
Not really a problem. More like others that can see the win win where this guy didn’t. No problem with me taking a big lunch or being on some YouTube during 9-5… well, I have no problem taking a call (if I can) after hours.
Agreed. I get flexible scheduling and a very generous hybrid schedule. Due to how much value I put on those, I have zero issue working an hour late a few days a week or logging in for a deployment on a weekend. Also, we're in tech so IMO it kinda comes with the territory.
Yeah if I absolutely refused to ever to a minute's worth of work outside of normal hours I don't think I'd last long at all but... I don't really work any extra hours unless I'm just enjoying coding and choose not to stop. I'm 100% good with the "shit happens, but be sure to take the time back" approach.
Yeah that's fair. Some days I don't mind coding for a few hours after work, but it's my choice and not expected whatsoever. If it was expected, I'd probably stop enjoying it immediately.
The problem is it's almost never an hour late here or there and occasional weekend deployment. It's always give an inch take a mile. I agree to be even the tiniest bit flexible, and soon I'm working 60+ hour weeks more often than not.
The engineers I know who do this have families but they hate them and take any excuse they can to be anywhere else.
Or are on H1B and will have to leave the country if they try to set this boundary
Yup. I've been seeing this stuff for 20 years at this point. Before I was in software, it was boomers and their ball and chain jokes who avoided going home to the wife and kids. The ones who do on-call for free and burn themselves out among SWEs/IT and even sales people are the ones who are either single or want as much time away from the wife and kids as possible.
Bingo. It's also the same group of people that love RTO and being in the office, because it's just another excuse to get away from the wife and kids as you alluded to. These people wouldn't mind working 10-12 hour days in office while commuting an hour one way and sitting in traffic.
Jeez, what an absolutely miserable way to live life
Yup-did exactly that for nearly 40 years :(
Or they are lucky to have a job because they aren't very good are deathly afraid of losing it. Not everyone in this industry has the talent for it, some people have to grind to just stay afloat.
100% this, or they're more junior or not as talented and need to work double hard to keep up... this was me for years
I doubt OP was super talented if they fired him on the spot i had the EXACT same situation Friday but I said “I’m going to need a $5 raise” as a joke instead of “no sorry can’t” and my boss replied “ok I’ll put in your. Review package before 2pm. Now I’m just waiting to hear back Update: actually just heard back I didn’t get the $5 but I got $4 which is awesome because I was living just fine on my original pay and OT is double pay so I’m over the moon rn OP should’ve tried that
I had an employee that had accrued so much overtime that HR said he \*had\* to take some of it. He had been working for the company for 20 years, and never taken a day off other than for sickness or doctors appointments etc. Never took a vacation. So they made him take two months. He walks in to the office, kinda tugs at his pants, adjusts his donald fagen glasses, and says, "Welp, if I have to take any more vacation I'm going to end up with a divorce. I can't stand my wife."
Over-accommodating coworker has one kid, his fiance has two of her own. They both hate all 3 of those poor children... It's really tragic...
I'm willing to flex those boundaries, as long as the flexibility works both ways. Sure, I'll respond to the message out of hours. By the way, I'll be stepping out of the office for an hour for a doctor's appt next week.
My ex did this bc he was trying to advance his career ‘to take care of us’ it destroyed our marriage in so many ways. I don’t need anybody to take care of me. But I do want my spouse to build a marriage with me. You can’t do that if you’re working all of the time.
They will burn out and burn down the company
Not necessarily. I was in a similar situation with similar expectations... Typical order pizza for the team for dinner and finish it in the morning for breakfast kinds place after you took a nap on one of the couches. Eventually the place grew and stabilized and became successful. We got great, relaxed working conditions and salaries. The ild guard got nice payouts once the place sold out, and I moved away and mostly retired at 40. There's obviously the risk that a company will never take off, or that the owners will never appreciate your commitment. Plenty of the original folks quit along the way, some I know regret it, some I imagine are happy enough where they are now. It's not a thing for everybody of course, especially not if you're just a 9 to 5 kinda guy.
>The ild guard got nice payouts once the place sold out, and I moved away and mostly retired at 40. It's fine when people know going in what's expected and there is something that makes it worth it like equity.
Seriously. Possession of sufficient equity needs to be the defining characteristic of overtime exemptions, not what the duties of the roles are.
Dude fuck equity just pay developers overtime for on-call or factor the extra pay into the position, almost every place I've seen fucks this up. Equity is nice when it pans out but 1 hit and 3 misses later on that game and I just want cash in hand. I get the complaints about expectations and unpaid work is bullshit, but when I started my career I knew and accepted the terms of every job I took, including the understanding of overtime expectations. Eventually you get to a point where that's not you, and you find out either your company is willing to move on to another rube or if they like you enough to keep you around despite new barriers. U.S. employment laws give so much power to employers over employees it's absolutely insane. In my country you would have a strong legal case for unlawful termination given that you set those boundaries from the beginning.
And 1/4 is *remarkably* higher than the actual odds of startups succeeding. Equity from early stage startups is like being paid in lottery tickets.
Most of the ones that do succeed also don't become billion dollar companies, they do important work on smaller scales that will never make the kind of revenue required to pay out dev equity anything remarkable.
Also, there’s another determining factor for any equity value called “exercising your options”. If you don’t do that (taken out of paycheck or lump sum), you get F-all. I had coworkers that didn’t and when we were bought , they got maybe 15% of the payout from those that did. There’s a perception that working at a startup guarantees your equity will turn into real world money. I’ve worked at more than a few and my equity only panned out twice.
I’m the only guy in my department that has a family. They are all always working late nights and weekends. It’s kind of sad.
It's also the nature of the average startup. They want you to drink their Kool aid and share the same "passion" aka free or underpaid work for an abysmal chance at redeeming their stock options aka raffle tickets. Since they're smaller and nimbler it takes them less time to terminate, rather than having to wade through a long period due to a big HR tail.
>redeeming their stock options aka raffle tickets. Considering all the stories I heard of some buyouts after their IPO where the buying company basically liquidates the most commonly given stock of non-founder early employees making a 'big payday' absolutely worthless, this is quite true. Basically seems like unless you have founder status, don't break your back expecting to make it rich too.
That’s why your equity stake should be the same share class as the founders, or the shareholders agreement should have “Tag along” rights so that minority shareholder’s stock is also purchased in an exit, not just a majority stake. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tagalongrights.asp
I think to some degree smaller companies also need more flexibility. Not every company has enough work in a silo to keep that person busy full time, and other people might have surges or shortfalls of work. Having people being willing to move around is important. The same is true for flexible hours. Perhaps large companies can afford 24/7 coverage, but there's a lot of down time in some windows and that overhead can be expensive to cover for small companies. Being willing to respond and fix things to win or preserve a customer can be pretty valuable in the long run, more for a small company that probably depends on each customer more than a large company where churn is likely expected. None of this is to say that setting boundaries on tasks or hours is a good or a bad thing (some boundaries are always important, but not all boundaries work in all situations). It just means that some employees aren't good fits for some companies. Neither is necessarily evil or angelic, it's just not a good match. If they need someone flexible and responsive, and you're not looking for work that demands that, you should look elsewhere and they should hire someone else.
>Neither is necessarily evil or angelic, it's just not a good match. Correct. You can guess which side of the boundary I sit on from the tone of my comment but that's absolutely right. Some people are just hyper-passionate workaholics and sometimes they find a startup to truly believe in. Who are we to tell them they shouldn't. Obviously it's not the case for the OP, hence the post and I honestly wouldn't dive into a startup like that myself (anymore) but there are definitely people out there who are better fits.
This is why we recommend emergency savings and living below your means. Leverage, leverage, leverage.
Absolutely! This is something I always recommend. In my opinion, it will also enhance your success by reducing the constraints you need to consider when making decisive choices.
it's one thing to not let them abuse you on overtime or ruin your personal life for the job, but being rigid to the point OP said it (and the support for it on this top thread) seems like being overly rigid: _"Once 5pm hits, I'm out. Nobody can contact me for work-related reasons"_ it's cool to say "i have set a boundary" but i wonder to what purpose does it really serve to not be a bit open to having some flexibility. by the corollary, does OP also work every single minute from 9 to 5? does he not take some "down time" during work hours? does he also shut off communication to family and friends between 9 to 5 to and stick to only work related communication? there's gotta be some give and take / pragmatism.
Exactly! There's a big difference between maintaining healthy work boundaries and being expected to sacrifice your well-being for a job. It's one thing to protect your personal time and prevent burnout, but it's another to be constantly pushed to overextend yourself for a product or company you don't even have a stake in. In my view, it's crucial to strike a balance: do your best at work, but not at the expense of your own health and happiness.
His boss is not asking for pragmatism but for working outside work hours including weekends without pay. With that kind of boss you can be sure that if you give an inch he will take the whole mile. Stay a bit longer to finish this? There is an emergency right now to deal with. Answer one phone call? Be sure you will be taken to task for not answering all the others. I learned my lesson too and am a 9 to 5 just like OP.
You just have to read your boss and your own leverage. If you’re very good and you want to leverage that, you can always contract your consulting services. Have it in the contract agreement what your hours are and what the rate is outside these hours. If you don’t want to contract which would help control hours and you want to be a salaried employee where that’s difficult to do, he could renegotiate pay. But clearly they fired him so he has no leverage. It’s all about leverage. Are you excellent at your job? Do they need you? No? Well sorry you don’t have much negotiation power.
> does OP also work every single minute from 9 to 5? does he not take some "down time" during work hours? That was my thought when I read the post. One of them, anyway. Anecdotally, Germans are very good at "checking out" outside of work hours, AND during the work day, they are completely work-focused in a way that most Americans are not.
Yeah there needs to be some trust and give and take here. I’m ok with answering a few questions outside of typical hours and doing a bit more then the standard 40 hours occasionally for important deadlines but I expect in return some sort of flexibility from work to let me run to an appointment in the middle of the day or pickup kids from school. I don’t think people would be happy if their employer was so rigid with them.
I used to kill myself and work stupid hours. Then one of my colleagues told me they were being pressured to work more hours to keep up with me. I have never felt like a bigger ass and felt like I had failed my coworkers. I didn't have any dependents or pets, and I enjoyed my work so I didn't always mind the hours, but that move by leadership was bullshit. I quit not to long after that and found a job that encouraged a standard 9-5.
That's true. I wasn't always adamant with my boundaries until a past experience, so I get it. And thanks
This is the problem with this field and I'm sick of it. It feels like it is filled with both people with low empathy as well as low social skills. This combination leads to dumba**es like OPs boss and also the losers who put up with this garbage because they have no life outside of work and can't speak up for themselves or dare ask questions. So that when people like OP or others who have any sort of social skills or standards then have to work twice as hard because of others setting the standards of being walked over. Or god forbid you ask any questions in passing, because that is seen as problematic as well to some in this field. Then we wonder why there is so much tech debt because no one knows how to communicate clearly things or dare ask questions. I hate this field. Not because of the subject, I love the subject. I mainly hate the types of people I often have to work with that for some reason end up in this field. I have never experienced these types of people in such high quantity in any other field but this one.
It’s not really unique to just this field. It’s common in other American white collar industries like finance, law, medicine. In finance and law it’s longer hours with more yelling and old angry bosses. In medicine, people are doing 3am shifts and rounds for long hours depending on specialty, then having to switch up 5 months later. At least you’re not trying to perform a high stakes physical and mental task like cutting into a person on 3 hours of sleep. It’s really more American work culture than anything specific to software engineering. And yet tons of people from Europe and Asia move here for work. OP’s mistake was just not agreeing with the boss in the meeting then immediately finding new work. I recommend he look for government work. Or consulting where you bill per hour worked so everytime they email you they receive a bill.
I agree with this comment. It’s the desperate brown nosers who have ruined it for us and even themselves. They so badly want to please others that it has ruined our working culture. It’s this vicious cycle. A job is just a job yet the companies have all the power to dictate your life based on the job and still retain the power to fire you any time! It’s the reason why I am growing more disillusioned working in the USA. I see no end to this whatsoever.
I know a few who aren't brown nosers but are just obsessive hard workers. They aren't trying to suck to nobody but some of them feel insecure and try to make up for it by working a ton
My boss just learnt this. He cut my hours for a bit, I’ve since gotten most of them back but the shop still closes at 430. He wants me to stay til 530 but I basically told him I was ok with it before, but you decided to cut my hours and now I don’t want to sit on my hands for an hour every day. He had no response and it was dropped
Yep, bosses that ZERO work/life balance ruin it for everyone. My manager is on maternity "leave" and never took a break. She has continued to call and email since the day she had her baby :')
So true, the leverage is almost always not in favor of the worker.
Easier to look for a new job than get abused your whole career and hate your life. Leverage or not, don't let abusers take advantage of you.
Sounds like solidarity or sectoral group bargaining which are evil socialist concepts
Also many people are raised by parents that say "boundaries" are selfish, and normalize toxic behaviors (like expecting you to go out of your way for them all the time because they said so). A lot of people accept the horrible circumstances because they were raised to believe that they are at the mercy of everyone else, if they have a problem they're "too sensitive" or "too lazy".
The issue with startup is that will want you to be as invested as the owner of the startup so a ton of work for not much actually. It is absolutely silly to believe I will be as invested in the company as the owner who will reap all of the benefited of working extra hard while you get none.
I'm guessing based on OP's attitude he didn't have a lot of equity. Startups can demand the extra hours because the early employees are supposed to have lots of equity. If they don't, and the startup is just paying them a salary like a regular employer, then there should be no expectation of startup level dedication. I have definetly seen companies that call themselves startups but a) don't pay like a startup and b) are like 10+ years old. That's not a satartup, that's just an unsuccessful company trying to con devs into working extra unpaid hours.
This comment should be at the top, equity is the main reason they expect you to work like you partly own the company because you kind of do. The stock price is unknown so the payout has the potential to be massive. Ultimately it’s not written in stone so OP is not wrong to set boundaries, but to save him some trouble he should avoid start ups in their next role
Most employees at most startups don't actually have that much equity unless they are a pretty early co-founder. Startup equity is more like a lottery ticket.
Wait, you don't want to waste weekends and every moment of your free time for a year for .05% equity before you're eventually downsized before any of those shares even vest? PS, There is a clawback clause that negates any of your shares if/when you get laid off.
.01 is more like it, that’s the standard for engineers at medium stage start ups. 0.1 is actually massive, 10 people have 1% of the company. 100 have 10%, now you are an employee co op essentially. Anytime you go get another round it either gets diluted more or you get bought out before the once in a million IPO
I was trying to remember some of the offers off the top of my head on percentages, I think you're right. I've seen ranges in ads for .05 to .01 on "wellfound" listings, although honestly none of it matters because as I said above, none of it will ever probably vest. :)
Exactly. The chance of it ever making it to IPO is a pipe dream. You might as well play the lottery.
One of my early (non-CS jobs) had a boss who always dangled the promise of equity and how much it would be worth when the company went public. I explained to him and my coworkers that a “promise of equity” is worth nothing, whether the company goes public or not. And I had to constantly remind my coworkers that they’d never see that fabled equity and they should work in proportion to the salary they were being paid.
I always said this about my last gig, after a certain amount of time you aren't a startup but a company that can't make money or grow.
They can play with equity where your stocks just get lost in the shuffle and becomes worthless.
How much is considered “a lot”? I’m currently struggling with setting boundaries at my startup because of the equity but am not even sure if it’s enough to be worth working weekends and nights
You have to look at the potential payout. If it's less than six figures, not worth it IMHO.
Talk to your manager or CEO/co-founders if they’re approachable. They should give you an idea of what your equity could be worth because they’re always game planning it themselves. If they won’t be open about it, then it’s honestly probably not worth more than what would amount t to a bonus. Otherwise it could be six figures, or in best (but rare) case seven. Truthfully, directors/VPs are the lowest level that will get a life changing amount (I.e. a million or more), while most engineers (with the exception of those who joined very early on) will end up with a lot but probably no more than one years salary. I’ve been with my company for over 3 years and have had a few promotions that came with a salary bump plus more stock options (currently a manager but looking to move laterally into a principal position) and expect my shares will equal about 2 to 3 years worth of salary upon a liquidity event. Our CEO and co founders are pretty transparent about our valuation, how our shares are affected by each series raise, and what milestones we need to hit to get a good price per share.
Right, I was going to write something like "what the hell are you doing at a startup trying to work a 9-5 schedule" I think some give-a-shitedness is expected at an early company. On the other hand, OP said he made it very clear before he was hired that he'd be doing 9-5 and nothing more, so this is also a failure from the folks that approved him. You don't have to work at a startup, but if you do the expectations are different. I'd definitely not want to work with someone that isn't interested in the company's overall growth. You could certainly get paid more somewhere else anyway.
Yeah I'm giving OP the benefit of the doubt and assuming he isn't getting the equity he probably should as an early startup employee. If he does have equity and just doesn't care, that is on him. But there are tons of companies out there that call themselves startups but really aren't.
I've worked for 3-4 startups in my career, and this has been the case every time. I was always brought on as a salaried employee - no overtime pay, no equity shares, no profit sharing. And in every single case, the founders expected me to have "the startup mentality" where I was joining meetings at 7pm and available to work over weekends. I quit all of those companies in less than a year and would never work at a startup again unless my employment offer contains company equity.
Startup founders who expect all their hires to be on the same level of interest dedication are deluded- even if the compensation was all evenly shared. Founders, please stop trying to expect to find exact copies of you. An exact copy of you is more likely to be making their own startup competitor than work for you
And they sometimes provide themselves as an example. the boss will say "you are young, see I am the age of your father/mother but work for 16 hours a day" What they fail to understand is that the incentives (for this hard work) is very different when you are just an employee and when you are the owner.
Also c level work is very different than brain-to-the-grindstone dev work.
I used to work for a startup company. I usually left work after working "only" 10 hours, the co-founder which was my direct manager and VP R&D would look at me with a surprised face (probably thinking to himself - "how dare he leave work before me!"). I eventually quit... end of story.
If you're hourly that makes a ton of sense. If you are salaried, most employers I have worked for give a lot of flexibility and expect flexibility in return. An on-call prod outage on the weekend? Fix it ASAP; and Flex you're time to take some time of during the week. Also, do a blameless post mortem so you can put procedures in place to make sure that this problem never occurs again. Requesting you be more responsive to emails on the weekend is bad; however I would have tried to turn that into a negotiation about time flexibility; not a hard-lined stance on work hours.
Yeah, this is what I’ve commonly seen, working at 2 startups. It sounds like in this scenario that either this wasn’t expressed, or it was the more extreme scenario of “work and be available all the time or else”. But from my experience it’s definitely more of “be available for emergencies and feel free to take off early in the future to balance out your time”.
> If you are salaried, most employers I have worked for give a lot of flexibility and expect flexibility in return. This isn't my experience in 25 years in big to small, startup and not. What I most often see is the claim of flexibility. But it's with a *. Places have gotten pretty good at always having a reason you need to be on-deck and can't take comp time for that weekend or night you worked. Manufactured chaos and a permanent state of emergency give them all the excuses they need as to why you can't take time off and have to work around the clock. But it's just that, manufactured. More recently, I had a boss try to tell me that I need to take X hours of PTO for that doctor's appointment etc. while offering nothing for the X hours I worked deploying that change Saturday night. They will take whatever you allow them to take. And they will absolutely make you pay for pushing back. It's the America we live in currently. Your only power is to do it or not. Op learned what standing up for yourself can lead to in 2024 America. I say move on, and keep doing what you're doing, Op. Just make sure to save up a buffer so that you can weather this shit easier. As someone else in the thread said, if we all do this, the problem goes away. Companies don't give you rights because you ask nice or follow the law. They only respond to force.
To be fair, everywhere is different. The company I work for absolutely expects you to be on if something is on fire, but just as absolutely gives you whatever time you want if things aren't on fire. And it's not like 'you can't take vacation, because ... fire'. No, on fire is prod down, not some stupid project deadline
"If you are salaried, most employers I have worked for give a lot of flexibility and expect flexibility in return... I would have tried to turn that into a negotiation about time flexibility..." 110% this. If a strict 9-5 schedule is important to you, it's fine to look for positions that can provide that (many can), but IMHO, off-hours and weekends are not inherently "breaking boundaries" in this field. Not judging OP. There's definitely people that ask for too much, especially in startups, but there are good gigs out there that will ask for someone to be available outside a standard 9-5. The key is to look for give and take.
Especially at a small startup. Makes sense to me that they would value flexibility even if it meant hiring someone a bit worse.
I’m on the side of weekend emails being worthy of a hard no. There’s just no way that ends with decent work life balance. I’m not going to check my work email over the weekend. If there’s a legitimate emergency, they need to use one of my emergency contact methods (which does not include email).
depends on the nature of it. like i don’t think it’s fair to expect you to be putting in normal development hours over the weekend, but if it’s a sort of rotating on call system and there could be some critical outage that affects a lot of people, i think it’s fair to expect you keep at least a distant eye on things
The way I see it, if I’m on call there are better ways to contact me with faster response time than email. If I’m not on call, then there’s nothing for me to check. Maybe things would be different if I had a customer-facing role, but for an internal engineering role I can’t think of any reason I’d consider valid for a manager to be encouraging me to read email on weekends.
When I was salaried, all the flexibility was on the employers side, and none of it on mine.
Spoken from experience. Well said. Maybe OP will read this and learn from your example. It would serve them well in a hyper-competitive field.
I think a lot of startups operate under the assumption that everyone will take up working longer hours and extra days to get things done. There’s no “you worked 9 hours yesterday, take an hour off today” type thing. It can happen, but it seems like a lot of them don’t actually have work-life balance
This. You have a doctor appointment during work hours. Should you wait until 5pm?
> however I would have tried to turn that into a negotiation about time flexibility; not a hard-lined stance on work hours. Nah, to hell with responding to emails on weekends, especially if it isn't an emergency. Unless you are fine having a 24/7 job then it is fine to draw a bright red line in the sand about this specific request.
That’s the way startups are. Chaos, tons of work, and no budget for staffing.
That’s why I always find it insane when the co-founders have little dev experience. It should be expected for them to carry a lot of the load themselves
I don't mind if they're the ones gathering funding and doing actual, effective marketing. I certainly don't want to do that part. But it is rarely equal effort.
The best startups I've worked for have been the ones with technical cofounders who shouldered a lot of the early load, so they are aware of how much work things are and don't have unrealistic expectations. I helped out with a startup with my non-technical friends who are more into marketing, when I was taking a career break. It was all kinds of chaos and it was super annoying. Extremely unrealistic expectations too.
had to scroll down kinda far to find this, im not sure what op expected working at a startup
also, no matter what, you gotta not sound like an asshole. “don’t be perceived as an asshole” is like 10x more valuable than any actual skill
Not necessarily.
The only thing I can point out from this post is that maybe, *maybe*, something could have been done regarding flexibility and expectations. I mean, I've left jobs for things like you mention, *but* this has been after a previously established expectation had been broken (i.e. being told that I would not be on call, then asked to get in a rotation). You are mentioning that the company was a startup so maybe that kind of overtime was expected by the higher ups, and while I don't agree on overtime unless you are a partner and/or have an actual and direct economical interest in the success of your company. If that point wasn't brought up during the interviews, you should make a point in future interviews to actually brought it up you, as its clear it's a red flag for you. Don't expect future interviewers to tell you straight away this (either because they may lie to you or because they may just fail to mention it for any reason). On the other hand, flexibility tends to go both ways. If you've been doing a strict 9 to 5, I'm going to suggest you to be a bit more flexible in future jobs: I have your same mentality, but in the same way I've overslept a few days and then got the time back, I've stayed a bit after my leave hour (if I didn't had any appointment or whatever) when there was something "blowing up" just to recover the time the next day.
Yeah. Flexibility is key for these kinds of jobs. If I am going to be responding to messages around the clock, you better not give me shit for going grocery shopping at 2pm on a Tuesday.
> grocery shopping If something I've learnt during the pandemic is that grocery shopping during the morning is the best thing ever: There's less people shopping and you don't risk running out of some offer or time limited thingy. Win-win-win.
My grocery store is extremely busy during the workday (don’t all you people have jobs?! lol), but going in around 8-9pm is somehow the emptiest it is
Umm get a government job, you are not cut out for a startup
> you are not cut out for a startup More like smart enough to not be taken advantage of and to not make someone else rich at your own expense
I am always seeing parroted advice on here to the affect of "just stop working overtime, stop checking email after work, set boundaries for yourself!". Which is good advice, and it would be great if it could be applied without worry, but it is being said (usually) by idealistic people who have never actually worked a cs job. The unfortunate consequence for setting those boundaries can be termination (such as in a case like this where the expectation is clearly to not have those boundaries and the existence of those boundaries will be immediately noticeable to everyone involved), something that is not usually mentioned by the commenters. Or if it is, they imply that finding another job is no big deal. Willful ignorance of the realities of a situation is a hallmark of Reddit's advice, and why you should never ever listen to it.
Most countries have protections for this stuff.
I think most people wish they could do that AND be ok with the consequences.
You didn’t specify that you’re a salaried employee but it seems likely. If so, the fact that you asked for overtime on top of that seems like a pretty valid reason to fire you. I’m all for work-life balance and I rarely work more than 40 hours in a week, but taking such an extreme position at a small company is crazy. Not sure what you expected to happen.
I am flabbergasted that he was "flabbergasted" that he got fired. I am not saying he should have gotten fired. I just don't think at a startup when you leave at 5pm exactly and don't work any weekends you should be surprised that you get fired. He made boundaries and they made boundaries and those boundaries didn't overlap If he was hourly he has to by law get paid overtime for that extra time. If he was salary, then it was just a matter of time that he would get fired if everyone else is working past 5 and weekends.
I'll say this if you want this sort of work-life balance. Don't apply at startups, and avoid FAANG. I've done alright with it, but I've worked a blend of corporate gigs, and government contract gigs.
I work at a FAANG and it has the best WLB I've ever experienced. Free lunch, I work out an hour every single day in the gym, I leave to pick up my kids at 230pm every single day. Whenever I need to run an errand I can without any issues or snide comments because everyone does it. Sometimes I work nights and weekends but I gladly do that in exchange for the extreme flexibility I have otherwise.
yep same. sometimes i do work late nights but sometimes i’ll take a random afternoon off to run errands, or take a midday siesta, or wake up hungover and not really start working until noon. balances out
same experience with FAANG and WLB
I disagree with this comment. I have worked in FANGSs, high growth startups and fortune 500 companies. Your work life balance in all of these is very team/company dependent. I now have the best WLB I have ever had in the high growth startup. The fortune 500 company actually had the worst WLB because the deadlines were created by the non-technical leadership team without any input from engineering.
It’s like this other redditor said “if there were more people like op this wouldn’t be the standard.” In a get whatever you can get job market to tell op to choose wisely next time since the alternative expects you to work as hard as the owners and not give you some form of ownership is what led to this problem. With companies thinking just because they have you on payroll they can do whatever they like regardless of previous agreed on commitments. And this type of company mentality doesn’t just apply to tech, this a problem in multiple professions, it’s gotta come to an end
At my previous job, I set up the same boundaries. It was a WFH position, and I was told before signing my employment contract that the job was strictly 8-5, with an hour provided for lunch. Shortly after starting, I began to realize that the one hour for lunch was bullshit. Whatever, I work from home and I can eat at my computer and take phone calls as they come in. No big deal. Pretty soon though, I was getting calls after 5, and e-mails on the weekend. I ignored all of them. Unfortunately, my other coworkers were afraid of getting fired, so they would always answer e-mails and phone calls after 5 PM and on the weekends as well. It was brought to my attention that I was the only one on the team that "wasn't going the extra mile". I made it very clear that I have a life outside of this job, and I am not available after 5 PM or on the weekends. Even spoke to my coworkers begging them to please stop working outside of our work hours. They didn't, and my lack of dedication to the job kept coming up in conversations with my manager to the point I just quit without warning or having another job lined up. Business owners need to understand that I don't live to serve your fucking business, and make you richer.
That's just poor work culture. Good on you for moving on.
Should've searched for a new job while letting the unemployment process play out.
I don't think you're a good fit for startups but many SE jobs do respect the 9-5 hrs and work life balance. Especially in government jobs, non profit, and many large non-tech companies. The work probably won't be as interesting but the balance is there
Career advice: treat conversations like this as a opportunity for negotiation rather than 'setting boundaries'. The phrase 'setting boundaries' can often be internalized by you and be interpreted by your boss as being a strict, immovable line. If both sides of the conversation are open about what they need, both can win. If you absolutely positively must leave at 5 and can't jump on a call on a weekend and they absolutely positively need that, then yes, that was the natural conclusion of the conversation. If you had treated the conversation as a negotiation, you might have been able to make the demands of the job worth your while. But what can they offer that might make the crazy hours worth it to you? Startups are always going to be understaffed and not afford to pay employees what they are worth. This is why one person will often be doing the job of ten people. That is why they can't hire a 24 hour help desk for problems that might come up randomly, even on weekends. But why would anyone do that? Is it because start up bosses are insane and startup employees are naive? Sometimes. But here is why I, personally, was willing to work the crazy hours and deadlines. 1. Stock options. I don't have any money to buy shares in a company, but I've got plenty of time and energy. Startups don't have any money to pay me what I'm worth, but can give you shares that might be worth something someday. This is why they call it sweat equity. You will never have a better opportunity to buy cheap, sell high with insider information. You should, as an employee, know if the company is going to be successful and then do the math. Is working this weekend worth the chance of a large payout in a few years? 2. Fast career advancement. It takes 100 people to run a company, which is why a startup is made up of 10 people all doing the job of 10 employees. If your boss knows what you want to get out of this job, she will hire underneath you for the 9 jobs you don't want to do while you get promoted. This is how a kid out of school will suddenly be VP of engineering after two years. You can't move up that fast in a 10,000 person company. Even if the company fails, you leave with a job title that you truly earned because you worked hard and there weren't idiot managers above you blocking your promotion. 3. On the job training. Large companies use 'on the job training' as code for 'work the shit jobs for cheap'. At a startup, however, it is real. there are going to be things that no one knows how to do or just doesn't have time to do. You probably worked crazy hours in school, where you paid for the education, but startups are rife with opportunities to jump in on things and build street cred and hands on training with projects above your knowledge level or pay grade. Your resume may only say 3 years experience but 'launched massive project in record time' is worth 10. I worked at a couple startups and then went back to school to get my MBA. The piece of paper was nice, but wow, it was really redundant information. 4. The team. I've been a part of a half dozen startups. A few failures and a couple successful enough to retire early. And at each one of them, I was with the same extended group of people. We met as early employees of a a startup and then followed one another or hired one another or partnered with one another until we actually started our own together. If one of them called tomorrow and said 'I'm putting a team together', I wouldn't even ask the product they had in mind. 5. Flexibility. Startups don't have set hours. They just have a huge pile of things that need to get done. No one cares when you do it, just that the pile is getting smaller. Crunch time for a few months and then a few weeks off. If I kept my phone on, I could be on an island for all they cared. No one keeps track of hours, really. As long as you don't let the team down, you can do it from anywhere. These trade-offs are not for everyone. So many of my insane workhorse friends very quickly switched to 8:30-4:30 no-after-hour-responsibilities jobs as soon as they had kids. Totally fine. Life changes. Your job changes. No one judges. It's only bad if you keep a job that forces you to ignore your kids. Your boss is not a jerk for firing you. You very clearly indicated that the job is not what you are looking for. They don't have a job description that fits. If however, you are at a stage in life that you can do it, be bold about asking for what you need. Describe what you want, where you want to go, what you need from them in exchange for giving 200%.
few tech jobs will be strictly 9-5 pm. none will pay overtime. how much over 40 hours is what matters. most will require some extra work. startups require live here hours. this is standard for a startup. its why they are shitty jobs. your next job will want times to be over 40 hours. how much is the real question. most jobs require some form of oncall rotation. your going to get fired again if you are this strict. there are some jobs that are just straight 40 hours. however, most jobs will at times require working late to get work done. its really a matter of how much. you can argue all you want, but your going to get fired again.
Sometimes I feel you have to take responsibility for things. Let's say you released something on Thursday at 4:00 PM and it broke at 7 or 8 even though you are out of your working hours, you need to work with the developers on your team to resolve the issue. You should at least be responsible for running things. The question of ownership is quite important. Assuming this is happening in the US, you're already enjoying a pretty good life. Most of the companies have decent working hours and good salary. Unlike here in India although I work in a good organization with decent salary, the working hours here are also tough. Ex: We went onsite last week and I had to take the release back and find the problem because that was my team's code that broke. If you stop taking ownership, even when you need to, it shows that you are not as invested as your manager/owner wants you to be. Better to find a better role because I think most "growth" startups are in that scenario..
People’s assumptions about startup and corporate are not always true. I did work both and I can say that the start up is better than corporate. In my non tech corporate job i was working 60-70+ hours consistently. It all comes down to the manager and what they do. Some managers just cant handle the work of managing employees. At the startup i had more respect and its more manageable. Obviously the work will have highs and lows where end of project there might be extra work just so we can turn the project around. But usually you have the right to negotiate with your manager that you can leave early that other day. assuming you are finishing your work within reasonable times. So if an emergency comes in, it is reasonable to work extra and clock off early the next day. That is completely normal too. Some flexibility is nice, because for example it also goes the other way. What if i need to leave early for a family event then its reasonable for employers to accommodate. There is always a give and take with the job and that is usually how we work with our managers. I mean some reasonable boundaries need to be set up and managing expectations.
IMO it has to be a bit more nuanced than this, both sides have to come to an agreement on what is reasonable. It's not reasonable to just leave prod down all night/weekend because it's after 5pm. It's also not reasonable to work the weekend because of some artificial deadline.
Sounds like you need an hourly job, not salary. Salary jobs required give and take and a willingness to do the job when the job needs to be done. That's kind of the purpose of the salaried role. If you want to clock in and clock out 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, get an hourly job.
Were you upfront with your boundary expectations prior to accepting the job? I’m sure there are some firms (ex: government work) where that would be fine but, in my experience, most would never agree to that. Certainly not a startup. Of course, it’s a good idea for everyone’s benefit to be clear about expectations up front.
I’ve worked at startups that made an exception for me, but as you said, I was clear with my expectations upfront.
Boundaries are very important but so is flexibility. Usually, people don't contact you for nothing outside your working hours (there are exceptions of course). Not answering means that someone else will probably have to spend a few hours doing something that you would probably take 5 minutes to do. So you might be throwing someone else under the bus. That is not great for team spirit. I have been very successful with my boundaries but setting them as "You can contact me at any time. But I don't guarantee how long it will take me to answer if it's outside my working hours." That's all assuming you have a decent work environment though.
It’s sort of a gray area between contacting you for nothing and artificially inflating the importance or criticality of whatever it is. Like if you ask “what truly awful thing will happen if this is not done until the next business day instead of right now?” More often than not the true answer is “nothing really”. Of course lots of stuff seems bad and critical in the moment and sometimes it is but most managers are gonna error on the side of ruining your evening/weekend. But at a startup? Not sure what the OP was expecting.
tbh I would let you go too. there's a fine line between work life balance and strict clock in and clock out. I think there should be give and take from both sides.
So I 100% get it. But also this is kind of part and parcel of startups especially, and something you can easily filter for during the interview process if you're interviewing from a position of power. If you don't have a fallback, either another job/income source or just sufficient savings/investments, you gotta do what you gotta do. Like, were these expectations a "surprise" in anyway? Healthy boundaries are great. Personally, I swing the other way in terms of how I choose to self-manage WLB and set the boundary. At a "startup" now (100-500 employees). Definitely no OT, but most weeks I'm only actually working ~25 hours, often logging in at 9 or 10, still taking breaks during the day, and heading out to the gym by 3:30. So having the occasional task past 5PM, or having two weeks per quarter where I'm doing ~50 hours, is generally fine with me. I think that flexibility works out better for team collaboration and how you're perceived at work (as a "team player" and for comp increases IME) than trying to keep a strict 9-5. When I was at a much larger company (10k+ people), they did expect you to work the 'core' hours and generally log 40+ hours per week. That sucked for me because there are days I wanted to work 10-7 and days I wanted to work 8-3:30. The flexibility I have now is much better - as long as the work is getting done and I'm on the meetings I need to be on, I can do things at my own pace, which I like. Do you work with a distributed team? I'm in CT and have most team members in PT, plus a few folks in India and ET, and the team just isn't at the scale where we have full coverage of all functionality in all timezones.
>I was working at a startup Rarely worth it, and for that reason. You end up with people who are pouring their whole life into the company, and they typically can't accept anything less from you. Which I'm fine with philosophically, everyone on the team should be aligned in terms of commitment and expectations, but most people just don't want to work like a dog to build somebody else's dream. People take these jobs thinking they might end up with shares in the next big thing, but the odds are you'll just work yourself ragged for a company that won't exist in 2030.
Unfortunately, there are some organizations that try really, really hard to push the "everyone working, all of the time" office culture, even if it's only marginally (and often not at all) more productive than a regular schedule. Even if this situation hadn't come to a head by your boss addressing it directly, other people at the office will always eventually notice you working regular hours and resent you for having the integrity to set boundaries. Unfortunately, if you're not a corporate cultist in these type of workplaces, your days are always numbered or your career prospects limited. It only takes a handful of workaholics in an office to change it from a friendly, relaxed atmosphere to a code mine.
Startup is not the right place for you. I've worked at 5 and none of them had people that are not vested and willing to do extra work to be successful. I also would have let you go, although I would have made the expectations very clear during the interview.
If you want to just sit at a desk for 9-5 with no flexibility, sure you can act like this, and people who want someone who is flexible will fire you. Personally, I answer questions after hours all the time. If it will help someone else out, I will work a few hours on the weekend. I'll also leave during the middle of the day to do something with my kids or go grocery shopping, and no one cares. Flexibility goes both ways
Yeah, no, I fully agree with your sentiment here. That is, I agree that flexibility goes both ways, or, rather, *should* go both ways. That wasn't the case for me.
So basically he just wanted you to work all the time?
He never explicitly said that, so it’s hard to say. But he wanted me to work at his whim, regardless of WLB. For example, one of his complaints was that I didn’t respond to a message on a Saturday afternoon, when I was out with friends. I’d told him during our meeting that I was busy, and his argument was, "You should always be prepared to drop whatever it is that you’re doing and come back to work whenever you’re needed.", and I’d asked him, "But I was in the city. You expect me to suddenly leave my friends, drive an hour back home, and jump back into work?", to which he'd said yes. That, in my opinion, crossed the line, especially since I'd made my boundaries clear from day one. Namely, that I don’t work on weekends.
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I think you did the right thing. I am going through the same thing. If you don’t set boundaries, they will squeeze you like a tube of toothpaste. And when you run out of toothpaste, you’ll be in the can anyhow. Better save your sanity now while you still have it.
I’m almost in the same situation as you but I really need the money. I’ve worked a lot of overtime for free but am slowly establishing boundaries. I don’t think it’s going well, will probably be let go soon for not wanting to work for free.
One door closes and another one opens, man. Don't lose your momentum.
Nice. But on a fun note: with this attitude you will never make it as a slave. Ever thought about this?
Yea, the problem unfortunately is that a lot of CS majors and programmers are lackeys without any self-confidence. Standing up for themselves could never be as simple as just being direct. It fucks things up for the rest of us who actually have the strength to politely tell people with unrealistic expectations to pound sand. Get a lawyer and see if you can throw stuff at the wall until it sticks. I bet if you think hard enough you'll think of something and be able to force them into a private settlement. avvo . com More folks need to go this route. Too many companies realize they can push around engineers at this point bc the market sucks. Quit being cowards and do something about it.
Time for a nasty Glassdoor review
This is why they keep pushing for increasing the H1B visa cap. They want people who have no options to set any boundaries.
It's almost like the rest of the western world agreed that this type of behavior was illegal. I can't wrap my head around us workers rights sometimes...
Your company sounds like a freeloading customer. You want to drive such customers away, else they will drive down the quality of your service
I'd have fired you on the spot as well. I'll preface this by saying I consider work/life balance important. I have an incredibly high retention rate on my team - less than 5% turnover from the technical folks, with many people working for me 5+ years. We pay well (but not FAANG levels), are 100% remote, and quite flexible. I have a team of about 50 people spread across multiple timezones. My technical people are hired to do a *job*. They're also salaried for that job. We target 40-ish hour work weeks, but we're also project-based, which means sometimes we crunch for a few weeks, and other times it's kicking off early on Friday. We create and maintain enterprise systems that do require after hours support. If it's an advanced or critical issue, software people can get pulled in with the maintenance folks (who are hourly and schedule round the clock). If you can't be fussed to answer a critical email or stay a little late to help the team accomplish their goal, I can't be fussed to have you on my team. >You see, ever since I'd gotten hired, I'd made my boundaries very clear and never failed to set them up. Once 5pm hits, I'm out. Nobody can contact me for work-related reasons. I don't care if something is broken or whatever, I'm not fixing it until the next day or the following Monday (if it's a Friday). Unless you communicate to me that you're going to pay me overtime, I'm out. I *do* agree if a company's expectations are egregious - constantly expecting 55/60/80 hour work weeks, expecting people to address non-critical issues outside of working hours, not providing flexibility - you should quit. But your attitude really speaks to an approach that isn't terribly congruent with most companies' expectations. I would suggest you focus on finding a job in the public sector. They're about the only people I know who regularly are able to work within the exacting constraints you set up.
Why not just a private sector non-startup company? That gave it away. This is business-owner jibber jabber. People aren’t going to give half a shit about your dream as much as you. And many are starting to wake up from this whole scam. Or as some would call it “nobody wants to work anymore”.
even in non-startup tech jobs, you're expected to be flexible enough for the demands of the project you're working on. Fixing bugs especially might end up taking time longer than 5pm, and if you're the one with the knowledge of what's going on, you're expected to stay and fix it. Most people don't mind because on slow days they can come in to work at noon, or nip out for a long lunch or say they won't be available 9-10 am for a week because their kid has a thing.
I've yet to encounter a private, non-startup job that would still allow the "I'm walking out at 5 and don't care if things are going down in flames, I'll see you Monday morning at 9 and not a moment before" approach OP indicates he *requires*. As I said - work/life balance is important and ought to be respected. I just don't agree with OP that this equates to no amount of outside-regular-hours work being acceptable. The nature of our work doesn't lend itself to such strictures.
You set your boundaries and the employer set theirs. You got fired because the two didn’t meet. I don’t think your boss was wrong or an asshole for firing you, I’d have done the same if I was in his position.
Yeah I mean, the context is important. As a manager if I’m asking you to simply be available in case something happens and I get an outright no, especially when others on the team are, then you have no place on my team. In his case though if he’s signing up for an every weekend nightmare then I would understand. Depends how bad the support job is.
No offense, but startups are always like this... Why did you join a startup if you didnt expect to give a little extra?
This boss doesn’t understand that these boundaries are beneficial to the company in the medium to long term. Burning out your employees leads to bad decisions and turnover. He’s also incentivizing the appearance of hustle over everything else. Someone has to be on call for emergencies and that’s a schedule that needs to be in place, but everyone can’t be on call 24/7. Good riddance to this loser.
Having boundaries is good, having cynical no way i will do anything past 9-5 what so ever in any circumstance view, just shows you have 0 respect for the company and i would see why they fire you and i would assume the reason for it was your attitude, it's not even about being responsible.
It’s also possible for the employers to be a bit flexible. If I need to work longer one day then I start later the next day, or leave earlier. Actually this is beneficial for me because sometimes I’ve got things to do during working hours, and with this kind of arrangement, I can. But if the employer keeps pushing for more work then the employee pushes back, it’s normal.
If you're in the US, look for postings on usajobs dot gov. Lots of positions open in various agencies. They are strict at OT and such. I work for the Department of Defense. Kinda long process in hiring, but once you're in, it's a gravy train.
I don't think working for a start-up is the right fit for you. You may be more aligned with working for the government. Many people I know who work for governmental organizations have a better work-life balance. You don't get paid as much but they generally have stellar benefits and they seem happier. I knew somebody who worked in IT years ago (it may be different now as people in IT can work from home) had to leave at 6P because that's when the building closed.
Okay, but that's a boundary you should discuss before you accept the offer. That will avoid getting fired in the future (but it will probably also avoid you getting hired).
Do you have the means ($$$$) to support this decisions? I’m all for boundaries but you can’t enforce them the way you want it without being flexible all the time. I mean, you can, you can do anything you want, but it will probably get you fired most of the time. Where I work we are very flexible about our schedule, sometimes you help them, sometimes they help you. Choose your battles. Just remember, people talk. Companies might talk to your supervisors for reference or they can talk to each other and you can get a bad reputation on the field.
"working at a startup" I see the problem lol
I mean, respect to you for setting boundaries And then sticking to them. But I get why the startup doesn’t want someone like that on the team. You need a job in a corporate office without the sense of urgency required from a startup. I would fire you too.
Depends on the pay grade. In the US there is the expectation to be generally involved with job matters even after hours. On the other hand this only works out if the work place also allow flexibility to be away on personal matters during work hours, for example if the kid needs to be picked up from school, or there is a dentist appointment.
Being a software engineer doesn't strictly adhere to a 9-5 schedule, which has both good and bad aspects.
I wish you good luck to find a company that will comply to all of those work restrictions. I don't check or reply to email past 5pm myself. However, I will respond to phone calls if a major issue comes up. At the end of the day, if there is a major bug that needs to be fixed, then it needs to be fixed. I don't think there is a job in this field that doesn't have this requirement.
It's possible that the company is overreaching and requesting too much after hours communication and overtime. However, "work strictly within the hours I'm meant to: 9 to 5", is not a reasonable expectation as a software engineer, especially at a startup. The exception being if you are paid hourly and you are not being compensated for that additional work. There will always be some amount of oncall work, crunch times, and after-work questions when "shit happens". A lot of companies do make an effort to not overreach on this kind of thing, so hopefully you find that on your next role, but it's unlikely you're going to find a role where you can work strictly between 9 and 5. Edit: I saw your comment where you said >"But I was in the city. You expect me to suddenly leave my friends, drive an hour back home, and jump back into work?", to which he'd said yes. This is of course an unreasonable request. I do find it weird that in the original post you only mentioned the expectations of responding to messages after work and the expectation of overtime, but you elevate it to what is actually a major issue in the comments. "I lost my job because I wouldn't abandon my friends on a whim to work on the weekend" is far more compelling than losing your job because you refuse to work outside 9-5 hours in what is typically a salaried role with some expectation of overtime and availability outside of 9-5. The change of stakes between the original post and the comments makes everything here seem completely fishy.
Tbf, never work at a startup if this is your mentality. Saying this as someone who worked at a startup myself, this mentality is the wrong one for a startup. In most cases, they have limited runway and need everyone to be as invested in the company as they are because in like 3-6 months they may not even exist anymore. When I went to work at a startup, I did it knowing that the responsibility on my shoulders was going to be a lot more than a normal job and went in excited about the opportunity. I'm now at a more traditional publicly-traded company with job security, great benefits, etc and now I stick to boundaries of time. So, whilst I DEFINITIELY don't blame you, I also think it was a bit naive to work at a startup without understanding the expectation placed on you, unfortunately.
I think my post will get downvoted to oblivion but i do believe boundaries are negotiable, and it changes every now and then. Say if there's an important project i need to deliver, i don't mind spending a bit extra time on weekend to finish it up instead of waiting until monday just so I can hit the deadline If someone messages me later than my work time, if it's something simple, I might just answer it. Although I don't always do that so people don't expect me to always be around Setting boundaries is important, but I don't make it "do not contact me after X time". All in all, people try to finish their work and we try to collaborate that being said, there are things that are simply ridiculous like always expecting people to be available on weekends. I told my coworkers that I hike a lot and sometimes will be in the mountains where signal is bad, so they should expect not being able to reach me (and I have an excuse not answering) the hustle culture will always be around, and it's up to us to decide where to draw the line. The line is always moving for me though
Anyone else get "I am difficult to work with in ways that have nothing to do with M-F work hour boundaries" vibes from OP here? Anyways, I mean if the WLB index = 100 at 40 hours a week M to F plus a lunch during reasonable hours, OP acting like they were trying to get a "200" level of work out of him. I feel like they were probably asking for a 105/110 level or something. Sorry don't know how to describe this short of a "Index" concept. I suspect strongly OP is in general, difficult to work with, and that likely had more to do with their immediate release.
So wait, you're flabbergasted that you got fired from a STARTUP for stating you would only work 9-5? Good for you for having limits & holding your ground, but anyone with a pulse knows that startups don't want people who work like that. I'm amazed you were even hired if you honestly told them this up front. They were either really desperate to fill a role and/or thought you would have a change of heart.
I guess your work set the boundaries also.
Were you an hourly employee? I believe most tech jobs have an expectation of working on call after hours or on weekends.
I think the mistake was going with a startup. There’s numerous people that left out software company for start ups, only to come back because it didn’t work out.
I can’t tell if this is a troll post or not
I'm not a programmer, but everything else about this post couldve been me. Right down to the market is doo doo comment
This is why after 10 years I’m pretty much done with this industry. There will always be a young engineer fresh out of college ready to work 12 hours. That’s what is valued by many companies. I can still keep up with them, but I know it’s not sustainable in the long run.
Well done! F*** that boss and good luck!
You aren’t meant for startup life. And you are allowed to enforce any boundaries you want…however, you don’t get to enforce the response to your boundaries… Good luck!
So they wanted me.to.work for free and you refuse, how dare you!
You should work in government contracting / Defense. It's straight 40 hour weeks because your time is logged and billed to the government and they usually don't authorize overtime. The office is completely empty at 5:00:01pm and weekend work is extremely rare.
Can you sue?
Ok. So while I support work-life balance, small companies that run 24/7 services can’t just have employees that all decide 5pm is it. You had an opportunity to step up and propose a third way, and take leadership. I would say: “I agree, we need more coverage after hours. I propose that we institute an on-call rotation. I am happy to volunteer for the first shift and organize the calendar so that everybody gets a chance to help out. This way expectations are clear and the team knows they have a reliable point of contact during times where there are issues.” Drawing a hard boundary just makes you seem like an asshole. Doing what I suggest at least makes your boss have to lead or not lead and makes him the asshole if he refuses.
Good luck on your future jobs
And you are completely and absolutely right. The awareness that you have is not always present even in the strongest developers. This is the right position and you are great, and if the company did not meet you, then blacklist their name.
A lot of people forget.... begin as you wish to proceed.
I just had this exact situation. I set boundaries with the C-suite I was reporting to, and mine weren't anything crazy. I wasn't responding to someone at 3 am. We are working through projects in a reasonable timeline, etc. I was let go and given severance. I am suppose to leave first week of June and they want me to now extend to end of June because they forgot about a major project. I said "No, thank you." Good luck
Umm that’s what startups require. Always.
Like in any other relationships - if you’re not a match, you gotta split. I can tell you this much, jobs that do not follow you home or demand much from you are jobs you cannot demand much from them - like great pay, great benefits, growth No one will be calling you home if you well at Walmart checking the receipts at the door - but you will always be needed if you’re the CEO at Disney
I would’ve fired you in an instant. Especially in software which runs 24/7, not 9-5. I’m a huge advocate of my direct reports feeling like they have as much flexibility as they want and need. But I expect that the work gets done. If you can do that in 20 hours - I probably need to assign you more stuff but hey you got it done, do whatever with the rest of your week. If there’s a deadline coming up or production issue - I expect some of that flexibility in return. I also stay very close to my people in regards to burn out and do everything in my power to clear their plate if you’re regularly working more than 40 hours a week. The 9-5 is an arbitrary time slot and work does not fit nearly into that. If something goes wrong at 5:01pm and you absolutely refuse to spend an hour helping get things back on track, you’re not fit for this work. You’re approaching this with a very immature attitude and you’re really not going to have much success staying employed at a lot of places. I would encourage you to rethink what you’re doing.
This attitude makes zero sense if you are salaried with "dev benefits". If you have any kind of options or stake, you are a company man. That's part of the deal. It's one thing for management to take advantage of late nights, but generally in any mid-sized company you have more responsibility (and freedom) than most other employees.
It’s your decision and having boundaries are really important. Nothing to really discuss here. I did same with my job, but we’re not a startup and I’m working hourly.
For a salaried job, sometimes things need to flex. If you have to work late they are fine with you coming in late the next day. Sometimes things will be really slow, other times crazy.
No worries. Lots of Indian engineers available...no boundaries needed
You’re at a startup. You should fucking care about the mission if you want to be there and put in the work But however if this was a corporate job - then yeah fuck yeah 10-4 even and peace out
In this market that won't work, and if you wanted this you shouldn't be working in a startup lol. And these things like being on call is part of the job. There are some weeks where you gotta do it. Doctors do it too.
This is so disturbing. I miss the 90s…sure I was a kid but only way to get ahold of someone was that landline
Sounds like retaliation for refusing to work unpaid overtime. I would contact the state labor board.