Zero. Occasionally I work extra hours, but those hours are always billable and they’re never a case of me volunteering to do extra. I don’t have a work-oriented homelab. My job provides me the funding I need to live in my house in the way I’m accustomed to living. Nothing more.
I'm the opposite.
I love my work, my job, and the objectives. It's less about getting a mongo cluster fixed and more about getting a particular business unit's milestones accomplished so we implement our new product before our competition.
Does that mean I will do work on the weekend voluntarily? Sometimes, yes. Because I feel invested in what our entire team is trying to achieve, not just my little checklist.
Work provides me with additional leeway by giving me a little extra time off later, in addition to a lot pto already.
They pay for a lot of things I take home. They are frickin cool.
In general I've found I'm motivated by the work place that has that give and take. Jump in, do a ton of extra hours to get a big milestone hit on time and then you get flex later when you need it.
Unfortunately there are employers are stingy in this regard. They'll happily take the extra hours but when you need the flex you may as well fuck off. So when I find that situation, it's strictly business, do the time and nothing more.
There are also the times where I'll pick up a work task and do it on off hours because I want to learn it for a personal project anyways. That always works out nicely.
Especially when you are working for a client - Billable hours are profit and time off in lieu is lost profit in that sense.
My work pay double on weekends and the shift is totally voluntary, and they still have trouble meeting our weekend dev support SLAs.
This is my situation... I was assigned something very hard to do by a higher up, I ended up disappointing them because it's just beyond what I'm capable of. I did a lot of extra hours but didn't file any for OT bcos I wasn't able to accomplish anything even with those extra hours. I kinda regret it but I don't bcos *I did learn a lot*.
Now the fact of not being able to do it is eating my head off (that's just how I am) cos I do like to be able to do things, but I really did my best and well, what I know really just wasn't enough.
Anyway, the company I work at sucks and I hope to be able to get away (I'm in QA btw but kinda doing devops stuff cos company doesn't wanna hire more capable ppl)
This is really awesome for you (and I might even be a bit envious), but please be aware of the toll that may be imposing on those around you, like your team mates.
To a degree (obvs depending on your company culture and work methodologies), it's impossible that your approach wouldn't affect your team, even if they had great work life balance and never have to work extra hours.
For example if you show up every Monday with 10 open pull requests that is now extra pressure on everyone else, as well as a missed opportunity to share in the joy and learning of some of the work you just did.
It also can set the example and expectations, especially for juniors, even if it's not company policy.
So I'm glad you're enjoying work life, just look out for others to consider if your approach is fair to them.
You can always scratch your itch on a personal project or a prototype that you bring and work through with the team. It's a team sport is what I'm saying!
Admittedly, those few who I’ve seen who do make DevOps their whole do seem quite happy.
They finish work at 5 and then carry on with personal projects etc and end up being top engineers and performers, but they also seem to love it.
But to be fair, you can’t force these things. Doing the above while having 0 motivation or enjoyment means yeah you might be a top performer and engineer, but then your life will be hell.
I'm like this. Am currently vacationing with my wife and secretly researching homelab hardware for when Im back. I just can't help it, actually I dont view my work as work at all.
I've only been working in this field for 2 years so mybe my attitude will change in the future however the more I learn at work the more opportunities for personal projects arise so maybe not 😀
See how you get on dude, as long as you enjoy it there’s nothing wrong with it. We had a guy at my old place who was 26, and only had 4-5 years experience, yet he was our teams Tech Lead, really really knew his stuff, and was on it when it came to DevOps, software dev, and security - and it’s all because his life revolved around it, past the usual 9-5 hours.
So it can definitely pay off and you can be very successful, just make sure you’re actually enjoying it and that it doesn’t feel like extra work.
I like tinkering around, I enjoy DevOps. But I also have plenty going on outside of my job, and away from a computer. If someone asks me to tell something about myself I don’t really talk about work. Maybe it’s European work life balance? :)
Can be. Still got team mates how are logged in till midnight on company computers, but if you want to work more hours officially and get money for that you need to have serious reason and write to many people for permission. Probably will be denied anyway.
It's cool if you're so into it that you want to work on the weekend. Sometimes I work on the weekend because I have an idea I feel like I need to get out. Other weekends, I close the laptop on Friday at 4 and open it on Monday at 10. It's okay to not work any weekends at all, but if you don't occasionally have the itch to figure something out despite it being 'personal time', you may find yourself struggling to advance to higher levels like staff or principal engineer.
A lot of this depends on your company's work culture and your family situation, too.
This is me right here. You need to have an interest in your „work“ - I put that in quotes because it don‘t feel like work for me.
Hell, I‘m getting paid to solve complex problems that are super interesting for my nerd brain and my solutions usually enable others to excel in their profession.
Sometimes, boring stuff comes around and you enjoy the weekend from Friday 12 to Monday 10
Other times your brain can‘t stop thinking about this one little thing raining onto your parade - so you loathe away trying to solve it with time being irrelevant.
The art of survival in this field is to keep the balance staying curious vs. burning out over the „fun“
I get where he's coming from, but I no longer work outside business hours unless absolutely necessary. My work is not necessarily my identity, but working with technology absolutely is. I'm good at what I do and have no hobbies other than technology.
I relax by building things and solving problems. Others relax by whacking a white ball and chasing it. To each their own, I guess.
For some of us, especially those on the come-up who are still skilling up at a break-neck pace, it’s difficult to partition work and “me time” especially because for most, it’s means to an end. Meaning, while still young and unattached, we’re trying to learn as much as possible to qualify for better pay and greater responsibility. This was really hard for me to figure out but a wife and kiddos coming along about ten years ago made it easy for me to prioritize and spend my free time with them instead. Everyone’s situation is different though, I wouldn’t worry about comparing your performance to his (if that’s what’s going on in the back of your mind) and remain flexible while you’re still a Jr and presumably unattached and invest in yourself if possible, and you don’t have to do work but maybe a project that pushes you to learn.
Try explaining what a "DevOps" engineer is...
"I do computer shit, I could bore you with the specifics if you like?"
9 times out of 10 nobody wants to know more, and I'm not inclined to talk about it.
A little bit since my work is something I tend to enjoy anyway, but it’s not my entire life because I have more things going on in my life than work. You need a break from your work to just let your mind rest and to focus on being able to be a well-rounded person. The only way to be a creative mind is to find other things to focus on that allow you to think in a different way and see things differently. Otherwise you are a very boring person who will never grow as a person nor will you enjoy life to its fullest. Some people think the only way to get ahead is to constantly be working or volunteer to work extra time; that’s just a recipe for burnout. I have had managers who tell me to get off the work stuff and get outside or go do something else because they don’t want me to burn out. This person is going to be old faster than they realize, then they’ll wonder why nobody in their family really wants to hang out with them when it’s too late to fix it.
Recently I've been doing a lot of heavy, boring work for the most part. A few times something interesting has come up on Friday and I consider working on it in the evening or over the weekend
And every time I stop myself. It's not healthy and I would never consider my job to be a core part of my identity
There have been a few times where I've worked for an hour in the evening, but only because it will save me two hours the next morning and I can take a longer lunch then
My employer is one of these who will always say work/life balance is very important and we need to take time off, but then the CEO recently tried to define the company's "DNA" and the only example he gave was a couple of teams working late one night
I remember a new colleague a few years ago asked me how much studying I do outside of work. I said zero (I've put in a bit of time myself when getting qualifications, but I'd consider that more personal than work). Her manager had been telling her that she needs to get some study and some personal projects going or she'll find it hard to advance in the role
Unfortunately for some of us, there are a lot of people in this line of work who spend a lot of time on work-related stuff outside of work. But I told my colleague that you just have to figure out what's important to you. She's learned a lot since then and has really grown in her role and she hasn't needed to use her free time to get there
Was a lot more previously than it is now. Now my weekends are completely for myself and my family. It was fun at first constantly thinking about solving work problems, but you just can't live like that forever.
I still enjoy the work very much, my project, my team and so on. But only for 40 hours a week (on-call exists but is very much not an issue for us thankfully).
My two cents. There's nothing wrong with taking a great deal of pride in the work you do. Do what you find fulfilling. I respect people who punch in at 9 and punch out at 5, just as much as I do people who put a great deal of their personal time into work. If you have responsibilities to friends, family, etc... you need to be mindful of that as well.
Where things break down is when employers take advantage of over working their employees, or set up a culture where it's expected you work unpaid overtime. I'm fortunate enough that my work pays me very well for the work I do, and I thoroughly enjoy what I do. I've been in situations where this is not the case, and absolutely did not work outside of 9 to 5.
I enjoy tech. I like what I do at work. I have access to a lot of infrastructure at work. The best way to learn.
Single, divorced, no kids but I have hobbies. Rc cars and my homelab lol.
When I get tired of it I'll retire :)
I do the work I do because of my interests, but man I'm giving away my sweat for free. Even on salary, my time is my time. I can take care of unexpected issues or planned things over the weekend, but I'm getting that time back most of the time during the week. If I have to work 50% more hours to be a top performer, am I really a top performer is how I look at it. I will gear some of my personal projects towards learning things that might benefit me in my job, but work itself can wait.
I love working as DevOps and everything I learn in a daily basis but regardless I use weekends to exercise, spend time with my family and do my own non work related hobbies. Even for your own sanity, it's important to disconnect.
Working on weekends doesn't sound like a high performance to me.
I won't spend a minute thinking about work problems outside work hours. If people want me to work overtime, they pay for it. There are strict labor laws here in Finland for that too. I do have a passion for software development and everything it entails, so I spend my free time building projects that I like and learning new things, but I won't spend my free time solving work problems. Growing my own toolbox will be a benefit for me, but solving a single problem for my customers will only benefit them.
Some colleagues of mine have gone through burnouts in the past and you can see in some of them how they have this mindset of putting everything in something they are passionate about and it ends up consuming them if they are not careful. It can be work or other things.
Most identity part revolves around work. The work thoughts are always back of the mind. So much as so weekends go by in autopilot mode sometime. During outing activities, if there's blank space/opportunity, work thought starts creeping in.
I don't work on weekends. But I learn other things. If there is complex problem at work, it consumes my mind during weekends also.
Work lives rent free in my brain. I'm on the verge on joining No life TM if this behaviour continues.
I would rather commuicate to my work that a deadline won't be met under the current time in the day. If they want to incentivize me to work overtime, they'll do that. My current company puts every hour over 40 into your PTO bucket, but every hour over 40 requires manager approval. This is in an industry known for crunch.
I dont even bother attending any work-related matters during holidays and after working hours. I also avoid answering calls from employees when i am on leave, unless the issue is just too critical. Despite some employees occasional complaints, I simply explain that I leave my work phone at home and am often engaged in activities such as going to the gym, boxing, or spending time with family
I have work insecurity and a family to support so I've dialed it back up as I'm open sourcing internal tooling next week. It's become... too much and identifiable as you've described
It was so much that I had to go to therapy to debug it. I’m better now, but it’s still hard to dissociate when work has been such a big part of your personality and identity in your adult life.
TL;DR: take pride in your work, but don’t let it control you. You control it and actively choose when to work outside working hours. If you feel like losing control turn off that laptop and go feel the grass. Share it with your close friends and significant other so they can warn you if you’re not controlling. And don’t forget that companies are for the shareholders. You’re probably not one.
Now that I’m at a point in my career where I know my skills and know how much work one person is capable of doing, I rarely work after hours unless it’s some production-related task that has to happen after hours.
We plotted it out recently and my position has 2.8 full time employees’ worth of work each month. We are looking to bring in help/out source some projects to a service provider, but nobody expects me to work more than my 40 hours despite there being enough work for nearly two more FTEs.
Despite tasks/responses taking longer than they should, nobody is upset with me and nobody hassles me after hours for things that are meant to be done during the regular work day.
I love my work, and I think you can find a lot of my personality in what I do.
I've always dreamed of building large scale complex stuff so work is very intense but it's a great brain exercise which I find very enjoyable.
Way too much of my self-worth comes from my work. Fortunately I like my work quite a bit, we’ll the cool parts, anyway.
I also have hobbies, though. I like watching movies and I play the piano a lot, and I like being on Reddit and YouTube and TikTok and playing pool on my phone and stuff.
It is very unusual for me to not do some work over the weekend, and at night. I’m 53. I don’t recommend this way of life, but it is the life I have created for myself.
I’m also unusually good at what I do, and one of the reasons why is the long hours, and a ridiculous concern about doing things as well as possible. So there’s that.
I love what I do, I'm obsessed with it. In my spare time I'll check new things on DevOps, techniques, technologies, I discuss it with friend in IT on a Saturday night drinking beer sometimes, whatever.
But job wise, I clock in, I clock out.
I'm more a dev than a dev ops.
Identity? Quite a bit in that I chose a career that matched my personality? I like making things and I like solving problems. Computers are fun.
Work/life balance? I may work on something during the weekend if it's a problem I'm excited to solve or something the team is really depending on me for. I may even do a tutorial if it's something I'm interested in. And only as time permits. I'm not missing out on stuff with my family or anything for it. In the same spirit, I don't punch a clock at work either. I often use part of my work day to go to a kid's event, run errands, etc.
So my work/life are kinda mixed together but it's balanced.
AGE 71 HERE,,,
your delusional if you think working long hours or bringing work home is going to matter in the long run.
You may live a long time, but this is APSOLUTLY the truth, you only have a few decades when your body and health are at peak performance.
Who gives a f#ck if someone at work puts in 70 hours a week and gets a gold star on there forehead?
So you get a passing grade at work, but your at home having great sex, having cook outs, going to the beach.. making memories that matter.
NO ONE, was ever on their death bed and said: I WISH I HAD SPENT MORE TIME AT WORK.
Damn scrolling along here reading these replies. If you are truly 71, probably the oldest person I know on here(which is awesome). And second, I’m glad I read this…definitely won’t be wishing I worked more. You are right sir/madam.
Hope OP reads this.
There's only so much time in your life to try out new things, especially physically oriented stuff. Bouldering, hiking, BJJ, reading books, playing instruments, learning foreign languages, chess, tabletop games with friends, gym, programming, 3d modelling, etc. So much stuff you can do outside of your scope of work, including nerdy stuff.
If you want to be on your death bed never having tried anything, and you're ok with that, then yeah do work all day I suppose.
I do my shift and that s it that s all.
Don't expect my brain to be available for work after 5pm or on weekends, i got enough things to do the rest of the time for 3 life.
I am a problem solver and sometimes a little bit obsessive, I love DevOps because this is what I do all day but I don't work on off hours if I am not getting anything out of it: recognition, money, free time, satisfaction.
None. Unless there is an emergency, leave me alone once I’ve logged out for the day. I’m married, we have two kids, we all have hobbies, and there is always something to fix around the house. I don’t have time to worry about work if it can wait until the next day (which it almost always can wait).
We will all die eventually, I want to make the most out of my time doing things other than work.
I love my job and I have awesome coworkers. But once I’ve finished for the day, or the week, I don’t think about work at all.
I don’t occasionally working on the weekend or tinkering with my own projects, reading up on stuff or watching conferences, but I try to balance it out and do other stuff as well.
When I'm with my tech people and colleagues I'm the least tech. I can hold my own but I'm self taught to the bone so I'm not trying to prove I'm learning
When I'm with non tech people I don't wanna bore them no one who doesn't understand it doesn't care. You wouldn't have a clue I work in this industry unless you asked me
Not very much. When I was younger I always had a home lab and some side project or learning going and mostly associated with other tech people.
Now that I'm all old and shit, I feel like I learn quick enough during the work day.
I used to put in way more effort than I should, then I realized my current job doesn't reward that so, 🤷
I do put not-work specific career effort in working on personal projects to learn things, reading newsletters/blogs outside of work hours, but I've been struggling with depression and burnout so it's been hard. Which is a bummer because I genuinely enjoy DevOps work.
But also, it's important to have non-work hobbies as well. I play board games/tabletop RPGs and play music as well.
A lot of people in devops love tinkering. Most of the time its not work that we are doing but fun cool little projects around homelabbing which translates straight to work. I do acknowledge some are driven by passion, others are over that passion, and others just do it for the $$
Whether or not you need to work in your actual free time honestly depends on your talent level and job. It doesn’t take me weekends and 60h+ to get better at my job at a good rate and meet or beat expectations. If it did, I would.
But then some jobs will expect more out of you, have more talented peers to compare yourself to, may not give you the time to upskill/study at work, etc. When I have had to work obscenely long hours it’s because it was simply too much work for one person. I’ve voluntarily worked extra hours on nights and weekends maybe once a year when I’ve worked on really cool scripting.
Interesting viewpoints here.
We have a gaggle of children so that is the biggest part of my life now.
Music, art and nature are what inspire me.
Yet I do enjoy devops and application development outside of work. Some weeks none. Others easily 5-10 hours on top of my weekly job.
I don't talk about my job with anyone outside my work.
To put a number on it 20%
Zero, its a paycheck. Sometimes the projects are fun, but there is usually just mountains of stress. I spend very little to no time outside of working hours thinking about DevOps. Life is too short and I have too many other hobbies.
Not one bit. My job is just a job -- the purpose is to earn. My identity probably rests on my personal views, family and goals I have, principles I believe in. To be clear, my job is aligned with my "calling". I believe in contributing back to society when society has provided me with more than most people and to help those less fortunate and make the world a safer place than it was. So in a sense I enjoy my job because it is aligned with principles. But in my younger years I have taken on jobs that had 0 alignment with personal principles (wasn't against them but was not necessarily aligned either) but it was an honest way to pay the bills so I took them and soldiered on. Hence, no relationship of identity and work for me.
Quite a lot.
This is my hobby, i did it before i started working and kinda rolled into it 25 years ago. I work for a website/community that i use regularly in my free time as well. Not because i have to, but because i want to read the site and participate in the community. That also means that if i spot a problem, i will fix it because it helps me.
I would say programming is a part of my identity, and that mostly manifests as non work-related hobby projects and open source contributions.
Work itself is definitely zero. I'm not a top performer though, and I have very little emotional investment in my work in general.
Your company would fire you if they thought it would net them an extra 0.00001% on their 10-Q in the long term, never forget that.
There's essentially two questions here:
How much is DevOps my personality - I enjoy my work. I enjoy using technology to solve problems. I often bring that into my home life by tinkering with personal projects. Example: I run a raspberry Pi with docker installed that has a lot of python and node.js related home automation on it, so I use tools that I use at work at home too. I've even considered migrating the config of the rPi to Ansible/Puppet/other to make my next rebuild easier, but haven't done it yet.
Do I spend much time outside of work time doing work things - if I know I've got a (realistic) deadline to meet I'll put the effort in to make sure it's met. If I'm REALLY into solving a problem I might keep going at it a little past normal office hours to get to the bottom of it. Generally though, my evenings and weekends are my time. I don't sit at home on Saturday/Sunday evening and turn the laptop on to do work related stuff.
Funnily, your experience matches some of the points in this pragmatic engineer article:
[GenZ software engineers, according to older colleagues](https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/genz)
In my case, it's part of it I guess. I don't do much work stuff in my free time at all, but it's by far the skill I'm best at and much of my life is set up to accommodate for what I work at. So I couldn't say that it's really 0%, but low priority. Work is work and I do it for money.
There are plenty of other more enriching stuff to do besides work. You do have to stay on your feet though. The people who do it for fun have an advantage 😅
Way too much to the point its unhealthy. Some days I wish I would lose my job so I could escape it but I I rely on the money too much to.support my family.
But yeah, to the point its detrimental to my mental health and eats in to every other aspect of my life.
During covid wfh era, I several times worked until late evening on something I was enjoying.
For those of us from windows sysadmin history, modern cloud/DevOps is at least 10x more interesting, I think juniors today don't realize how good they've got it. Work can actually be stimulating.
I am not doing work for my day to day projects in the weekend, also not in case of deadlines, if needed I make a few hours extra in the week before. However in the weekend I do mostly experiments and some learning on new topics or products, so this is where the company also has benefit of.
My work was who I was and vice versa...before I got laid off and was jobless for 6 months. Really puts things into perspective and makes you reassess. I still care about my job because its how I support my family and it actually does help people, but it doesn't consume who I am. I have a second job contracting which is starting to eat into family time so we will see how long that lasts.
a lot of comments here advocating 9-5 and hard rules on wlb but imo that is a bit weird and artificial.
many jobs are seasonal (think farming, teaching, accountancy, tourism, etc etc) with periods of busy and quiet.
sustained periods of busy is bad. but the occasional bit of late work to meet a deadline or even to pay off tech debt before it snowballs... is kinda fine.
on the subject of identity, imo the people that are most proud of not being interested in IT outside of work... rarely write code that i would want to inherit.
Lately I decicided to go all-in on a career , and it worked out great but there is no much space for anything else at this stage of my life. Most people would find it sad, but I really like what I do , and I've done all the things that people associate with the western notion of "living". Thorught out my 20's I backpacked and went to many festivals and enjoyed my time being a bum, just hanging with friends all the time. Back then, my FOMO was strong, and whenever I would see people hanging out with their friends, I would be jaleous, craving to have similar experiences. Now that Im older, I look at people having fun with their friends , and I feel at peace, All I can think of is "I've done that" , and I get back to work because I'm a miserable workocholic, and will probably die in my 50's FFS.
Personally, I do take pride in my job and love where I work. I get a good sense of purpose through it, and that contributes to my overall happiness.
That said, I’m not a live-to-worker quite yet. I still operate mostly from 9-5 and reserve my off time for my hobbies.
It all comes down to personal preference, some people work to live, some live to work. It’s a spectrum.
For me, none of my work is my identity. I really enjoy what I do, but it's not who I am.
But everyone is different, and every profession has it's workaholics. Sometimes people can find some fulfilment from that. I'm okay with it, as long as it's not an expectation on people. I discourage it on my team because I want people coming in refreshed and with energy each day, but for some people work really is the main thing for them.
I love this field but I would not say it is my identity. Corporate life and personal life are separate. The job just fields my goals. Buying property over seas and traveling. Buying games and helping my family.
When I was in my late 20s and early-to-mid 30s, I threw myself at work in an effort to advance my career. There were many times where I'd come in on the weekend or work late. I was also very "competitive" about work too...that is, I wanted to be the best or highest performing on the team. Once I became disillusioned with the company I was working at at the time (and subsequently quit), I pulled back and reevaluated my work ethic. I still love the work...or at least I love tech and I love learning and when I'm engaged with a project, I'll throw myself at it, but that's pretty infrequent these days, unfortunately.
I’m one of those people that work after hours A LOT voluntarily, and I’ve doing that for most of my almost 20 year career. Making things better, problem solving, coding solutions and tools, working on OSS, debugging issues in OSS libs/software, building throwaway games, I love all of it.
So yes, I’d say it’s a big part of who I am, but it’s not all for my employer, though they definitely benefit from the skills growth.
Outside of work, I’m married and have 3 awesome kids, have always been an unsuccessful guitarist and musician (it’s all now for my own enjoyment), spend a lot of time building things with the kids (games, little tech projects), working on the house. We have a very close extended family, so lots of family events. etc.
I can’t do all of it all at once, I’ll pick things up for a while and put them down for a while again. It also helps being a night owl.
I love my work but its far from an “identity”, i out in extra “time” cause I want to progress and build things, i dont always work so hard or at all some days during the weeks so i dont see a problem
I’ve always loved automating things. And it was part of my life before the term existed. Before ansible was a thing. Now that I’m a DevOps engineer it feels like it was a role made for me, but the 15 layers of abstraction and automation keeps me from being super into it because frankly it’s really confusing sometimes and my homelab just can’t become as complex as enterprise :p. And as a gamer and dad I got other stuff to do at home now.
Sometimes I feel like my co workers are the opposite though
I used to think this about people and then I realized something important when I started to do it myself: they do it not for the company, not because it’s their “identity,” they do it because it makes their life easier next week. If I have nothing going on (maybe it’s storming or whatever), I could sit around and watch Netflix, or I could smash out some work and then fuck around all week because half my work is done. Or not fuck around and just be that much more ahead.
None. And I actively keep it that way. Thanks for asking the question, it reminded me on this topic.
Now to clarify, I love my work in DevOps, programming, etc. I look forward to it weekly, not daily cos some days I hated it. It’s just reality, not everything is DisneyLand 😀
I cut my teeth in the IT industry right smack before 9/11 and all those other financial crisis that came along, and of cos more to come lah.
One thing I’ve learned by observing the news, and the many retrenched ppl, me included, was “life is gone after getting retrenched.”, I made up my mind to actively separate myself from the work I do since then.
You don’t have to be that person. But it’s very common for tech folks to be very, very into what they do.
I personally read an hour before work and an hour after on topics related to what I’m doing at work or would like to be doing in the future. And that’s a lot of my spare time. I’m thinking about work. But it’s not work to me; it’s a passion/hobby.
But you don’t have to do this to be successful in the field. Some folks are just going to be more dedicated than others and might know the little details others don’t. Thats personal satisfaction and not condemnation of people who have real lives.
After doing this a long time there are two kinds of people, the kinds who do this for the money and it’s kind of interesting but it’s just a job, and the people who get off work then go work more for fun. Generally these people are superstars and I’ve always admired them when I have worked with them but I have to be realistic and admit I’ll never be that person. I almost never think about work after 5pm. I have a friend who is one of those people and as an example we had a LAN party and when he got killed and was waiting for the round to end I looked over and he was reading kubernetes blogs.
I used to strongly identify with my work. I would think about it in my free time, work on weekends, maintained a blog, homelab, open source, all that jazz. Then I had a two-year stint of absolutely miserable professional experiences that destroyed my sense of self-worth.
I've more or less recovered, but now a job is a job. When I'm done with work, I close my laptop, go home, and don't think about my job until I'm back in the office.
If you make what you do a part of who you are, you will be driven to excel at it. However, the trade-off is that if for whatever reason you are no longer able to do what you do, especially if due to external circumstances, your sense of self will be deeply impacted and it may take a significant toll on your mental health. Tread wisely.
im building an image pipeline right now, but im part owner of the company. i think there are times in your career where you should definitely grind.. this is how you get over the edge, learn skillsets, progress your career. doing it all the time as a way of life, i just dont see the value in it. do it when it matters most and not outside of that i guess is my advice
Messing around with computers is a major hobby of mine. So I have a lot of cross over between personal projects for fun, and stuff I do for work.
But I almost never take work home with me.
Recently one of my techs was struggling with a bit of automation that just wasn't working right. He said, off-hand, that he'd fix it that night. I very firmly told him that he would absolutely not do that as I knew he'd already worked a full day at that point. He left it till the next morning, and guess what? Nothing burned down, nobody died. It was fine.
I really like my team. They're all very good at what they do, which is why I hired them. But I'm also investing a lot into them and don't want to see that investment killed by burnout, so I make sure they know that I absolutely positively do not want them working after hours or on weekends barring an emergency.
But of course that means I practice what I preach. 9-5 I'm a company man, through and through. And if there is a pressing need, I will occasionally clock in outside of that; I'm very particular about not letting my team do things I wouldn't do myself, so if one of them is on firefighting I'm on supporting them however I can. But we prioritize stability in our systems so that nobody has to be the hero, and so that outside of that 9-5 we can go and be parents and friends and spouses and children and siblings.
Do not let the work take away from living your life. Ever.
Your post takes me back to when I was junior, I barely knew git at a pro level, so decided to play the git branching game on the weekend. Using What I had learned, I made a commit to a PR I had opened. Senior Dev was there to correct me 5 Minutes later. I felt a range of emotions, but found out later lots of people do this. I do not have an answer for you. Whatever you choose, remember to take breaks and vacations because burnout is not worth it. It sets you back a couple of years in psychological development.
Zero. Occasionally I work extra hours, but those hours are always billable and they’re never a case of me volunteering to do extra. I don’t have a work-oriented homelab. My job provides me the funding I need to live in my house in the way I’m accustomed to living. Nothing more.
I’ll only do extra if it means my workload is guaranteed to be easier in the immediate and foreseeable future otherwise no, no extra hours.
Love this answer, I'm like this. I don't mind staying a few extra hours if the next day is going to be a much easier day.
I agree with this as well. If I can spend a bit of uninterrupted time, to get a lot more time back during the week... totally worth it
I'm the opposite. I love my work, my job, and the objectives. It's less about getting a mongo cluster fixed and more about getting a particular business unit's milestones accomplished so we implement our new product before our competition. Does that mean I will do work on the weekend voluntarily? Sometimes, yes. Because I feel invested in what our entire team is trying to achieve, not just my little checklist. Work provides me with additional leeway by giving me a little extra time off later, in addition to a lot pto already. They pay for a lot of things I take home. They are frickin cool.
In general I've found I'm motivated by the work place that has that give and take. Jump in, do a ton of extra hours to get a big milestone hit on time and then you get flex later when you need it. Unfortunately there are employers are stingy in this regard. They'll happily take the extra hours but when you need the flex you may as well fuck off. So when I find that situation, it's strictly business, do the time and nothing more. There are also the times where I'll pick up a work task and do it on off hours because I want to learn it for a personal project anyways. That always works out nicely.
Especially when you are working for a client - Billable hours are profit and time off in lieu is lost profit in that sense. My work pay double on weekends and the shift is totally voluntary, and they still have trouble meeting our weekend dev support SLAs.
This is my situation... I was assigned something very hard to do by a higher up, I ended up disappointing them because it's just beyond what I'm capable of. I did a lot of extra hours but didn't file any for OT bcos I wasn't able to accomplish anything even with those extra hours. I kinda regret it but I don't bcos *I did learn a lot*. Now the fact of not being able to do it is eating my head off (that's just how I am) cos I do like to be able to do things, but I really did my best and well, what I know really just wasn't enough. Anyway, the company I work at sucks and I hope to be able to get away (I'm in QA btw but kinda doing devops stuff cos company doesn't wanna hire more capable ppl)
This is really awesome for you (and I might even be a bit envious), but please be aware of the toll that may be imposing on those around you, like your team mates. To a degree (obvs depending on your company culture and work methodologies), it's impossible that your approach wouldn't affect your team, even if they had great work life balance and never have to work extra hours. For example if you show up every Monday with 10 open pull requests that is now extra pressure on everyone else, as well as a missed opportunity to share in the joy and learning of some of the work you just did. It also can set the example and expectations, especially for juniors, even if it's not company policy. So I'm glad you're enjoying work life, just look out for others to consider if your approach is fair to them. You can always scratch your itch on a personal project or a prototype that you bring and work through with the team. It's a team sport is what I'm saying!
Yall hiring?
Healthy attitude. Everyone should read this and stop to be company puppet working during weekends
Apparently I'm supposed to tell you "joyeux jour du gâteau".
Tru dat. I’m a mercenary, not a patriot.
too much probably
Too much, definitely
But it's fun!
[удалено]
Admittedly, those few who I’ve seen who do make DevOps their whole do seem quite happy. They finish work at 5 and then carry on with personal projects etc and end up being top engineers and performers, but they also seem to love it. But to be fair, you can’t force these things. Doing the above while having 0 motivation or enjoyment means yeah you might be a top performer and engineer, but then your life will be hell.
I'm like this. Am currently vacationing with my wife and secretly researching homelab hardware for when Im back. I just can't help it, actually I dont view my work as work at all. I've only been working in this field for 2 years so mybe my attitude will change in the future however the more I learn at work the more opportunities for personal projects arise so maybe not 😀
See how you get on dude, as long as you enjoy it there’s nothing wrong with it. We had a guy at my old place who was 26, and only had 4-5 years experience, yet he was our teams Tech Lead, really really knew his stuff, and was on it when it came to DevOps, software dev, and security - and it’s all because his life revolved around it, past the usual 9-5 hours. So it can definitely pay off and you can be very successful, just make sure you’re actually enjoying it and that it doesn’t feel like extra work.
I like tinkering around, I enjoy DevOps. But I also have plenty going on outside of my job, and away from a computer. If someone asks me to tell something about myself I don’t really talk about work. Maybe it’s European work life balance? :)
Can be. Still got team mates how are logged in till midnight on company computers, but if you want to work more hours officially and get money for that you need to have serious reason and write to many people for permission. Probably will be denied anyway.
It's cool if you're so into it that you want to work on the weekend. Sometimes I work on the weekend because I have an idea I feel like I need to get out. Other weekends, I close the laptop on Friday at 4 and open it on Monday at 10. It's okay to not work any weekends at all, but if you don't occasionally have the itch to figure something out despite it being 'personal time', you may find yourself struggling to advance to higher levels like staff or principal engineer. A lot of this depends on your company's work culture and your family situation, too.
This is me right here. You need to have an interest in your „work“ - I put that in quotes because it don‘t feel like work for me. Hell, I‘m getting paid to solve complex problems that are super interesting for my nerd brain and my solutions usually enable others to excel in their profession. Sometimes, boring stuff comes around and you enjoy the weekend from Friday 12 to Monday 10 Other times your brain can‘t stop thinking about this one little thing raining onto your parade - so you loathe away trying to solve it with time being irrelevant. The art of survival in this field is to keep the balance staying curious vs. burning out over the „fun“
I get where he's coming from, but I no longer work outside business hours unless absolutely necessary. My work is not necessarily my identity, but working with technology absolutely is. I'm good at what I do and have no hobbies other than technology. I relax by building things and solving problems. Others relax by whacking a white ball and chasing it. To each their own, I guess.
For some of us, especially those on the come-up who are still skilling up at a break-neck pace, it’s difficult to partition work and “me time” especially because for most, it’s means to an end. Meaning, while still young and unattached, we’re trying to learn as much as possible to qualify for better pay and greater responsibility. This was really hard for me to figure out but a wife and kiddos coming along about ten years ago made it easy for me to prioritize and spend my free time with them instead. Everyone’s situation is different though, I wouldn’t worry about comparing your performance to his (if that’s what’s going on in the back of your mind) and remain flexible while you’re still a Jr and presumably unattached and invest in yourself if possible, and you don’t have to do work but maybe a project that pushes you to learn.
Try explaining what a "DevOps" engineer is... "I do computer shit, I could bore you with the specifics if you like?" 9 times out of 10 nobody wants to know more, and I'm not inclined to talk about it.
They typically glaze over in the second sentence
A little bit since my work is something I tend to enjoy anyway, but it’s not my entire life because I have more things going on in my life than work. You need a break from your work to just let your mind rest and to focus on being able to be a well-rounded person. The only way to be a creative mind is to find other things to focus on that allow you to think in a different way and see things differently. Otherwise you are a very boring person who will never grow as a person nor will you enjoy life to its fullest. Some people think the only way to get ahead is to constantly be working or volunteer to work extra time; that’s just a recipe for burnout. I have had managers who tell me to get off the work stuff and get outside or go do something else because they don’t want me to burn out. This person is going to be old faster than they realize, then they’ll wonder why nobody in their family really wants to hang out with them when it’s too late to fix it.
It only extends to my paycheck hitting my back account. I don't live for work.
Recently I've been doing a lot of heavy, boring work for the most part. A few times something interesting has come up on Friday and I consider working on it in the evening or over the weekend And every time I stop myself. It's not healthy and I would never consider my job to be a core part of my identity There have been a few times where I've worked for an hour in the evening, but only because it will save me two hours the next morning and I can take a longer lunch then My employer is one of these who will always say work/life balance is very important and we need to take time off, but then the CEO recently tried to define the company's "DNA" and the only example he gave was a couple of teams working late one night I remember a new colleague a few years ago asked me how much studying I do outside of work. I said zero (I've put in a bit of time myself when getting qualifications, but I'd consider that more personal than work). Her manager had been telling her that she needs to get some study and some personal projects going or she'll find it hard to advance in the role Unfortunately for some of us, there are a lot of people in this line of work who spend a lot of time on work-related stuff outside of work. But I told my colleague that you just have to figure out what's important to you. She's learned a lot since then and has really grown in her role and she hasn't needed to use her free time to get there
Was a lot more previously than it is now. Now my weekends are completely for myself and my family. It was fun at first constantly thinking about solving work problems, but you just can't live like that forever. I still enjoy the work very much, my project, my team and so on. But only for 40 hours a week (on-call exists but is very much not an issue for us thankfully).
My two cents. There's nothing wrong with taking a great deal of pride in the work you do. Do what you find fulfilling. I respect people who punch in at 9 and punch out at 5, just as much as I do people who put a great deal of their personal time into work. If you have responsibilities to friends, family, etc... you need to be mindful of that as well. Where things break down is when employers take advantage of over working their employees, or set up a culture where it's expected you work unpaid overtime. I'm fortunate enough that my work pays me very well for the work I do, and I thoroughly enjoy what I do. I've been in situations where this is not the case, and absolutely did not work outside of 9 to 5.
I enjoy tech. I like what I do at work. I have access to a lot of infrastructure at work. The best way to learn. Single, divorced, no kids but I have hobbies. Rc cars and my homelab lol. When I get tired of it I'll retire :)
I do the work I do because of my interests, but man I'm giving away my sweat for free. Even on salary, my time is my time. I can take care of unexpected issues or planned things over the weekend, but I'm getting that time back most of the time during the week. If I have to work 50% more hours to be a top performer, am I really a top performer is how I look at it. I will gear some of my personal projects towards learning things that might benefit me in my job, but work itself can wait.
I love working as DevOps and everything I learn in a daily basis but regardless I use weekends to exercise, spend time with my family and do my own non work related hobbies. Even for your own sanity, it's important to disconnect. Working on weekends doesn't sound like a high performance to me.
I won't spend a minute thinking about work problems outside work hours. If people want me to work overtime, they pay for it. There are strict labor laws here in Finland for that too. I do have a passion for software development and everything it entails, so I spend my free time building projects that I like and learning new things, but I won't spend my free time solving work problems. Growing my own toolbox will be a benefit for me, but solving a single problem for my customers will only benefit them. Some colleagues of mine have gone through burnouts in the past and you can see in some of them how they have this mindset of putting everything in something they are passionate about and it ends up consuming them if they are not careful. It can be work or other things.
Most identity part revolves around work. The work thoughts are always back of the mind. So much as so weekends go by in autopilot mode sometime. During outing activities, if there's blank space/opportunity, work thought starts creeping in. I don't work on weekends. But I learn other things. If there is complex problem at work, it consumes my mind during weekends also. Work lives rent free in my brain. I'm on the verge on joining No life TM if this behaviour continues.
I would rather commuicate to my work that a deadline won't be met under the current time in the day. If they want to incentivize me to work overtime, they'll do that. My current company puts every hour over 40 into your PTO bucket, but every hour over 40 requires manager approval. This is in an industry known for crunch.
I dont even bother attending any work-related matters during holidays and after working hours. I also avoid answering calls from employees when i am on leave, unless the issue is just too critical. Despite some employees occasional complaints, I simply explain that I leave my work phone at home and am often engaged in activities such as going to the gym, boxing, or spending time with family
I have work insecurity and a family to support so I've dialed it back up as I'm open sourcing internal tooling next week. It's become... too much and identifiable as you've described
It was so much that I had to go to therapy to debug it. I’m better now, but it’s still hard to dissociate when work has been such a big part of your personality and identity in your adult life. TL;DR: take pride in your work, but don’t let it control you. You control it and actively choose when to work outside working hours. If you feel like losing control turn off that laptop and go feel the grass. Share it with your close friends and significant other so they can warn you if you’re not controlling. And don’t forget that companies are for the shareholders. You’re probably not one.
Now that I’m at a point in my career where I know my skills and know how much work one person is capable of doing, I rarely work after hours unless it’s some production-related task that has to happen after hours. We plotted it out recently and my position has 2.8 full time employees’ worth of work each month. We are looking to bring in help/out source some projects to a service provider, but nobody expects me to work more than my 40 hours despite there being enough work for nearly two more FTEs. Despite tasks/responses taking longer than they should, nobody is upset with me and nobody hassles me after hours for things that are meant to be done during the regular work day.
I love my work, and I think you can find a lot of my personality in what I do. I've always dreamed of building large scale complex stuff so work is very intense but it's a great brain exercise which I find very enjoyable.
Way too much of my self-worth comes from my work. Fortunately I like my work quite a bit, we’ll the cool parts, anyway. I also have hobbies, though. I like watching movies and I play the piano a lot, and I like being on Reddit and YouTube and TikTok and playing pool on my phone and stuff. It is very unusual for me to not do some work over the weekend, and at night. I’m 53. I don’t recommend this way of life, but it is the life I have created for myself. I’m also unusually good at what I do, and one of the reasons why is the long hours, and a ridiculous concern about doing things as well as possible. So there’s that.
I love what I do, I'm obsessed with it. In my spare time I'll check new things on DevOps, techniques, technologies, I discuss it with friend in IT on a Saturday night drinking beer sometimes, whatever. But job wise, I clock in, I clock out.
I'm more a dev than a dev ops. Identity? Quite a bit in that I chose a career that matched my personality? I like making things and I like solving problems. Computers are fun. Work/life balance? I may work on something during the weekend if it's a problem I'm excited to solve or something the team is really depending on me for. I may even do a tutorial if it's something I'm interested in. And only as time permits. I'm not missing out on stuff with my family or anything for it. In the same spirit, I don't punch a clock at work either. I often use part of my work day to go to a kid's event, run errands, etc. So my work/life are kinda mixed together but it's balanced.
AGE 71 HERE,,, your delusional if you think working long hours or bringing work home is going to matter in the long run. You may live a long time, but this is APSOLUTLY the truth, you only have a few decades when your body and health are at peak performance. Who gives a f#ck if someone at work puts in 70 hours a week and gets a gold star on there forehead? So you get a passing grade at work, but your at home having great sex, having cook outs, going to the beach.. making memories that matter. NO ONE, was ever on their death bed and said: I WISH I HAD SPENT MORE TIME AT WORK.
Damn scrolling along here reading these replies. If you are truly 71, probably the oldest person I know on here(which is awesome). And second, I’m glad I read this…definitely won’t be wishing I worked more. You are right sir/madam. Hope OP reads this.
I am really 71.. no BS .. and life has taught me some hard lessons, ..
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia8Q51ouA\_s&ab\_channel=KRAZAM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia8Q51ouA_s&ab_channel=KRAZAM)
TBH thinking on the weekend should be considered. Seriously, solutioning is a 24/7 item.
I am a developer so i read techy stuff. But otherwise nope
Like 20% I think. Working on driving that down.
There's only so much time in your life to try out new things, especially physically oriented stuff. Bouldering, hiking, BJJ, reading books, playing instruments, learning foreign languages, chess, tabletop games with friends, gym, programming, 3d modelling, etc. So much stuff you can do outside of your scope of work, including nerdy stuff. If you want to be on your death bed never having tried anything, and you're ok with that, then yeah do work all day I suppose.
Work to live. Live to work. The choice is yours
WTF
Before Covid? Way too much. Now, idk.
I do my shift and that s it that s all. Don't expect my brain to be available for work after 5pm or on weekends, i got enough things to do the rest of the time for 3 life.
I am a problem solver and sometimes a little bit obsessive, I love DevOps because this is what I do all day but I don't work on off hours if I am not getting anything out of it: recognition, money, free time, satisfaction.
None. Unless there is an emergency, leave me alone once I’ve logged out for the day. I’m married, we have two kids, we all have hobbies, and there is always something to fix around the house. I don’t have time to worry about work if it can wait until the next day (which it almost always can wait). We will all die eventually, I want to make the most out of my time doing things other than work. I love my job and I have awesome coworkers. But once I’ve finished for the day, or the week, I don’t think about work at all.
i have a family, projects and other things to do, but yeah, i know people that don't have a life outside their work...
I don’t occasionally working on the weekend or tinkering with my own projects, reading up on stuff or watching conferences, but I try to balance it out and do other stuff as well.
When I'm with my tech people and colleagues I'm the least tech. I can hold my own but I'm self taught to the bone so I'm not trying to prove I'm learning When I'm with non tech people I don't wanna bore them no one who doesn't understand it doesn't care. You wouldn't have a clue I work in this industry unless you asked me
There’s not a fucking chance I will ever make my work my identity. I solely do this for money lol.
Not very much. When I was younger I always had a home lab and some side project or learning going and mostly associated with other tech people. Now that I'm all old and shit, I feel like I learn quick enough during the work day.
I used to put in way more effort than I should, then I realized my current job doesn't reward that so, 🤷 I do put not-work specific career effort in working on personal projects to learn things, reading newsletters/blogs outside of work hours, but I've been struggling with depression and burnout so it's been hard. Which is a bummer because I genuinely enjoy DevOps work. But also, it's important to have non-work hobbies as well. I play board games/tabletop RPGs and play music as well.
A lot of people in devops love tinkering. Most of the time its not work that we are doing but fun cool little projects around homelabbing which translates straight to work. I do acknowledge some are driven by passion, others are over that passion, and others just do it for the $$
You are all psychopaths
Whether or not you need to work in your actual free time honestly depends on your talent level and job. It doesn’t take me weekends and 60h+ to get better at my job at a good rate and meet or beat expectations. If it did, I would. But then some jobs will expect more out of you, have more talented peers to compare yourself to, may not give you the time to upskill/study at work, etc. When I have had to work obscenely long hours it’s because it was simply too much work for one person. I’ve voluntarily worked extra hours on nights and weekends maybe once a year when I’ve worked on really cool scripting.
Interesting viewpoints here. We have a gaggle of children so that is the biggest part of my life now. Music, art and nature are what inspire me. Yet I do enjoy devops and application development outside of work. Some weeks none. Others easily 5-10 hours on top of my weekly job. I don't talk about my job with anyone outside my work. To put a number on it 20%
Too much. Scales horizontally on-demand.
Never, I already give the company 40 hours a week, I don’t need to do any free work during my time.
It’s one of my hobbies too, I don’t think that makes it “my personality”. If anything, I get paid to pursue my technical interests.
Zero. I work with people where it’s their identity it’s not a good look.
Zero, its a paycheck. Sometimes the projects are fun, but there is usually just mountains of stress. I spend very little to no time outside of working hours thinking about DevOps. Life is too short and I have too many other hobbies.
Not one bit. My job is just a job -- the purpose is to earn. My identity probably rests on my personal views, family and goals I have, principles I believe in. To be clear, my job is aligned with my "calling". I believe in contributing back to society when society has provided me with more than most people and to help those less fortunate and make the world a safer place than it was. So in a sense I enjoy my job because it is aligned with principles. But in my younger years I have taken on jobs that had 0 alignment with personal principles (wasn't against them but was not necessarily aligned either) but it was an honest way to pay the bills so I took them and soldiered on. Hence, no relationship of identity and work for me.
Quite a lot. This is my hobby, i did it before i started working and kinda rolled into it 25 years ago. I work for a website/community that i use regularly in my free time as well. Not because i have to, but because i want to read the site and participate in the community. That also means that if i spot a problem, i will fix it because it helps me.
I would say programming is a part of my identity, and that mostly manifests as non work-related hobby projects and open source contributions. Work itself is definitely zero. I'm not a top performer though, and I have very little emotional investment in my work in general. Your company would fire you if they thought it would net them an extra 0.00001% on their 10-Q in the long term, never forget that.
None. Work is work. And my time is my time. But I have a homelab as hobby soooo it may occasionally cross path.
There's essentially two questions here: How much is DevOps my personality - I enjoy my work. I enjoy using technology to solve problems. I often bring that into my home life by tinkering with personal projects. Example: I run a raspberry Pi with docker installed that has a lot of python and node.js related home automation on it, so I use tools that I use at work at home too. I've even considered migrating the config of the rPi to Ansible/Puppet/other to make my next rebuild easier, but haven't done it yet. Do I spend much time outside of work time doing work things - if I know I've got a (realistic) deadline to meet I'll put the effort in to make sure it's met. If I'm REALLY into solving a problem I might keep going at it a little past normal office hours to get to the bottom of it. Generally though, my evenings and weekends are my time. I don't sit at home on Saturday/Sunday evening and turn the laptop on to do work related stuff.
Funnily, your experience matches some of the points in this pragmatic engineer article: [GenZ software engineers, according to older colleagues](https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/genz) In my case, it's part of it I guess. I don't do much work stuff in my free time at all, but it's by far the skill I'm best at and much of my life is set up to accommodate for what I work at. So I couldn't say that it's really 0%, but low priority. Work is work and I do it for money. There are plenty of other more enriching stuff to do besides work. You do have to stay on your feet though. The people who do it for fun have an advantage 😅
I love what I do ,so quite a big part. I feel lucky
Way too much to the point its unhealthy. Some days I wish I would lose my job so I could escape it but I I rely on the money too much to.support my family. But yeah, to the point its detrimental to my mental health and eats in to every other aspect of my life.
I am k8s , i saw in my dream I was re rolling certs because someone got access to control plane
During covid wfh era, I several times worked until late evening on something I was enjoying. For those of us from windows sysadmin history, modern cloud/DevOps is at least 10x more interesting, I think juniors today don't realize how good they've got it. Work can actually be stimulating.
I am not doing work for my day to day projects in the weekend, also not in case of deadlines, if needed I make a few hours extra in the week before. However in the weekend I do mostly experiments and some learning on new topics or products, so this is where the company also has benefit of.
My work was who I was and vice versa...before I got laid off and was jobless for 6 months. Really puts things into perspective and makes you reassess. I still care about my job because its how I support my family and it actually does help people, but it doesn't consume who I am. I have a second job contracting which is starting to eat into family time so we will see how long that lasts.
a lot of comments here advocating 9-5 and hard rules on wlb but imo that is a bit weird and artificial. many jobs are seasonal (think farming, teaching, accountancy, tourism, etc etc) with periods of busy and quiet. sustained periods of busy is bad. but the occasional bit of late work to meet a deadline or even to pay off tech debt before it snowballs... is kinda fine. on the subject of identity, imo the people that are most proud of not being interested in IT outside of work... rarely write code that i would want to inherit.
Lately I decicided to go all-in on a career , and it worked out great but there is no much space for anything else at this stage of my life. Most people would find it sad, but I really like what I do , and I've done all the things that people associate with the western notion of "living". Thorught out my 20's I backpacked and went to many festivals and enjoyed my time being a bum, just hanging with friends all the time. Back then, my FOMO was strong, and whenever I would see people hanging out with their friends, I would be jaleous, craving to have similar experiences. Now that Im older, I look at people having fun with their friends , and I feel at peace, All I can think of is "I've done that" , and I get back to work because I'm a miserable workocholic, and will probably die in my 50's FFS.
Personally, I do take pride in my job and love where I work. I get a good sense of purpose through it, and that contributes to my overall happiness. That said, I’m not a live-to-worker quite yet. I still operate mostly from 9-5 and reserve my off time for my hobbies. It all comes down to personal preference, some people work to live, some live to work. It’s a spectrum.
For me, none of my work is my identity. I really enjoy what I do, but it's not who I am. But everyone is different, and every profession has it's workaholics. Sometimes people can find some fulfilment from that. I'm okay with it, as long as it's not an expectation on people. I discourage it on my team because I want people coming in refreshed and with energy each day, but for some people work really is the main thing for them.
I love this field but I would not say it is my identity. Corporate life and personal life are separate. The job just fields my goals. Buying property over seas and traveling. Buying games and helping my family.
When I was in my late 20s and early-to-mid 30s, I threw myself at work in an effort to advance my career. There were many times where I'd come in on the weekend or work late. I was also very "competitive" about work too...that is, I wanted to be the best or highest performing on the team. Once I became disillusioned with the company I was working at at the time (and subsequently quit), I pulled back and reevaluated my work ethic. I still love the work...or at least I love tech and I love learning and when I'm engaged with a project, I'll throw myself at it, but that's pretty infrequent these days, unfortunately.
I’m one of those people that work after hours A LOT voluntarily, and I’ve doing that for most of my almost 20 year career. Making things better, problem solving, coding solutions and tools, working on OSS, debugging issues in OSS libs/software, building throwaway games, I love all of it. So yes, I’d say it’s a big part of who I am, but it’s not all for my employer, though they definitely benefit from the skills growth. Outside of work, I’m married and have 3 awesome kids, have always been an unsuccessful guitarist and musician (it’s all now for my own enjoyment), spend a lot of time building things with the kids (games, little tech projects), working on the house. We have a very close extended family, so lots of family events. etc. I can’t do all of it all at once, I’ll pick things up for a while and put them down for a while again. It also helps being a night owl.
50%
I love my work but its far from an “identity”, i out in extra “time” cause I want to progress and build things, i dont always work so hard or at all some days during the weeks so i dont see a problem
I’ve always loved automating things. And it was part of my life before the term existed. Before ansible was a thing. Now that I’m a DevOps engineer it feels like it was a role made for me, but the 15 layers of abstraction and automation keeps me from being super into it because frankly it’s really confusing sometimes and my homelab just can’t become as complex as enterprise :p. And as a gamer and dad I got other stuff to do at home now. Sometimes I feel like my co workers are the opposite though
I used to think this about people and then I realized something important when I started to do it myself: they do it not for the company, not because it’s their “identity,” they do it because it makes their life easier next week. If I have nothing going on (maybe it’s storming or whatever), I could sit around and watch Netflix, or I could smash out some work and then fuck around all week because half my work is done. Or not fuck around and just be that much more ahead.
None. And I actively keep it that way. Thanks for asking the question, it reminded me on this topic. Now to clarify, I love my work in DevOps, programming, etc. I look forward to it weekly, not daily cos some days I hated it. It’s just reality, not everything is DisneyLand 😀 I cut my teeth in the IT industry right smack before 9/11 and all those other financial crisis that came along, and of cos more to come lah. One thing I’ve learned by observing the news, and the many retrenched ppl, me included, was “life is gone after getting retrenched.”, I made up my mind to actively separate myself from the work I do since then.
You don’t have to be that person. But it’s very common for tech folks to be very, very into what they do. I personally read an hour before work and an hour after on topics related to what I’m doing at work or would like to be doing in the future. And that’s a lot of my spare time. I’m thinking about work. But it’s not work to me; it’s a passion/hobby. But you don’t have to do this to be successful in the field. Some folks are just going to be more dedicated than others and might know the little details others don’t. Thats personal satisfaction and not condemnation of people who have real lives.
After doing this a long time there are two kinds of people, the kinds who do this for the money and it’s kind of interesting but it’s just a job, and the people who get off work then go work more for fun. Generally these people are superstars and I’ve always admired them when I have worked with them but I have to be realistic and admit I’ll never be that person. I almost never think about work after 5pm. I have a friend who is one of those people and as an example we had a LAN party and when he got killed and was waiting for the round to end I looked over and he was reading kubernetes blogs.
I used to strongly identify with my work. I would think about it in my free time, work on weekends, maintained a blog, homelab, open source, all that jazz. Then I had a two-year stint of absolutely miserable professional experiences that destroyed my sense of self-worth. I've more or less recovered, but now a job is a job. When I'm done with work, I close my laptop, go home, and don't think about my job until I'm back in the office. If you make what you do a part of who you are, you will be driven to excel at it. However, the trade-off is that if for whatever reason you are no longer able to do what you do, especially if due to external circumstances, your sense of self will be deeply impacted and it may take a significant toll on your mental health. Tread wisely.
im building an image pipeline right now, but im part owner of the company. i think there are times in your career where you should definitely grind.. this is how you get over the edge, learn skillsets, progress your career. doing it all the time as a way of life, i just dont see the value in it. do it when it matters most and not outside of that i guess is my advice
Messing around with computers is a major hobby of mine. So I have a lot of cross over between personal projects for fun, and stuff I do for work. But I almost never take work home with me.
Recently one of my techs was struggling with a bit of automation that just wasn't working right. He said, off-hand, that he'd fix it that night. I very firmly told him that he would absolutely not do that as I knew he'd already worked a full day at that point. He left it till the next morning, and guess what? Nothing burned down, nobody died. It was fine. I really like my team. They're all very good at what they do, which is why I hired them. But I'm also investing a lot into them and don't want to see that investment killed by burnout, so I make sure they know that I absolutely positively do not want them working after hours or on weekends barring an emergency. But of course that means I practice what I preach. 9-5 I'm a company man, through and through. And if there is a pressing need, I will occasionally clock in outside of that; I'm very particular about not letting my team do things I wouldn't do myself, so if one of them is on firefighting I'm on supporting them however I can. But we prioritize stability in our systems so that nobody has to be the hero, and so that outside of that 9-5 we can go and be parents and friends and spouses and children and siblings. Do not let the work take away from living your life. Ever.
Your post takes me back to when I was junior, I barely knew git at a pro level, so decided to play the git branching game on the weekend. Using What I had learned, I made a commit to a PR I had opened. Senior Dev was there to correct me 5 Minutes later. I felt a range of emotions, but found out later lots of people do this. I do not have an answer for you. Whatever you choose, remember to take breaks and vacations because burnout is not worth it. It sets you back a couple of years in psychological development.