Pairing in Factorio for an hour could replace a round (or two) in an interview loop. I'm convinced it would produce much stronger signals for engineering teams on how folks approach solving problems in a collaborative/team setting.
I used to think my burnout was from long hours, but I recently got a chance to work on a greenfield project at work and loved every second of the 60-70h weeks just building something really cool with a small team.
The burnout nearly vanished during this time and only recently has started to reappear and I have a much better understanding now of what causes burnout for me specifically.
Is it normal in the US for software developers to work 60-70 hour weeks? I understand this is the case in hip startup culture, but what about normal, boring companies? I work as an embedded software developer in Belgium, and here 40 hours is normal.
Depends on the company. A place like Microsoft or Google, where the company doesn’t really need to try to reap the benefits of their monopolies, a lot of people get away with working 20 hour weeks. Amazon and Meta are known to be harder places to work, so maybe 50-60 isn’t rare - although many just do 40. At startups you have to work long hours but that can be anywhere from 50-70 hours. No one is actually doing the 100 hour weeks they glorify, because it’s impossible to sustain.
The truth is though it’s a broken system. In my opinion even a startup should be able to make it on 40 hours. If they have to put in insane hours for just a slim chance to survive, it’s an indication that there isn’t really fair competition and that the market is too skewed towards existing players.
In my experience it's usually 35-40 hours "butt in seat" time but 1 mins - 5 hours of work actually happen. The rest of the time is dopamine switching between news, personal communications, and other forms of non-work entertainment.
I count checking emails, work instant communications, and working through bureaucracy (paperwork flows) as work, not just hands on keyboard working on software solutions.
Also in my experience there are people who focus on only work at work, and they usually drag others into performing their job function.
No, that's an insane workload. Your employer doesn't even deserve 40 hours, let alone 70. Jesus, people, live your lives instead of toiling for the rich people who will take from you until you keel over.
Indeed. The excitement of an interesting greenfield project is hard to beat. Works seems better than play on those days. The harder the task, the better!
In all modesty, I feel I can be a 10X or 100X on such, but it’s hard to let go and end up thinking about work constantly after hours too.
But when the task is to update documentation or fix a random test pipeline failure on a Legacy product, the energy doesn’t come so easily…
When I interviewed there in 2018 the recruiter specifically asked me to memorize all the leadership principles because I will be tested on them during the on-site interview. I feel bad for the candidates who now have to memorize two more of them :(
I recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail and have been really enjoying it so far, unfortunate they are having these outages right as I was getting familiar with the service.
This exists actually for software development. I went through the AWS Software Development Engineer Apprenticeship when I made a career change from Military & Government work into Software.
Similar programs exist at Google, Lyft, and a few other tech companies.
Apprenti, the non-profit that administers the AWS apprenticeship, is doing pretty great work getting people into tech form non-traditional roles.
