There is a line, you are being paid for 40 hours, the guy in the article liked what he was doing so did more, and I'm sure the posters in this forum are more in line with that than the expectation you will be putting in extra hours. Consistently needing to work long hours is a failure in management and should be recognized as such, not treated as a badge of honor.

Some weeks i do 50 hours some weeks i do 30 hours, no one really tracks it at my company, which is nice, but there are low performers that kind of take advantage of it and cause bad morale.

This isn't as clear cut as you make it to be:

https://www.businessinsider.com/yaho...k-weeks-2016-8

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35442969

With that said, early Google and Microsoft employees knew they were working something that was about to change the world and also potentially make them a fortune. It's unrealistic to expect this level of buy-in from people working on much more mundane stuff without as much personal upside.

Yeah, when I was at EDS I had a manager say they valued people who put in extra hours over 9-5 people and there was no expectation of partaking in any of the upside of the company (not that there was much upside for EDS in the 00's). It's the difference between expectations and rewards. As long as everyone's on the same page it's fine, but I still maintain that constant death marches are an indicator of bad management and if you hear about the insurance company you are thinking of applying at having a lot of them you should think twice.

I did between 55-60 hours this week which is about what I average but sometimes go even higher.

Congrats kerowo

I know weve had our differences of agreements but that's great to hear. 50% growth should open up a lot of chances over time.

I don’t know if I’ve put in more than 40 hours more than once or twice and oftentimes put in less. I’ve been promoted 3 of the last 4 years. In the right culture it will be more about actual productivity than it will be about “butt in seat” time.

I did turn down an offer from Amazon though because they made it clear that the expectation was more than 40 hours and I highly value work life balance. Would have made a lot more money but didn’t think it was worth it.

Thanks! A bit nerve wracking to see if I can repeat the success I had at my last start up, but it will be nice to be working again.

I know I sorta started this with my working extra, but I agree with this as a general rule. In my previous IT job a long time ago I came in none too early, played basketball or frisbee at long lunches and didn't stay that late. But, I knew I was getting my work done and then some.

bc programming is harder than dr and lawyer work and more important to the bottom line of a company. if anything, we are underpaid.

and no, this aint a bubble, until they find a way to automate writing code with AI, the amount of programmers and adjacent jobs (BA or PM) will continue to increase.

at my company it is frowned upon to work more than 40 hours unless there is a very important circumstance.

Sorry, no. I love what you guys do but any field that can have newbs making solid salaries after a 4 month boot camp isn’t more difficult than what doctors or lawyers do. I’d wager if you lined up people from the three professions by quality there would few if any tranches where developers had the hardest job.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying dev work is easy. I’m saying comparing jobs difficulty based on salary isn’t very meaningful or you end up thinking acting, singing or playing sports are the most difficult jobs of all.

well, it depends on the programmer, just like it depends on the dr. ya, I am gonna go with an ER trauma surgeon over a bootcamp grad. but I am also going to go with a highly productive SR dev/design architect over a family doc.

and just lol lawyers.

That's why I said sort by quality first, I would imagine the top 10% of doctors are doing stuff more difficult than the the top 10% of programmers. I'd also imagine the top of the legal profession can also get pretty complex but that is based on movies of complicated contract or anti-smoking cases...

Drs I think are on both ends. Surgeons, research, specialists, etc are all probably doing ‘harder’ jobs then programmers or lawyers (again for some breakdown by percentile). GPs / Family Doctors I don’t think are doing particularly challenging work.

I’d take programmers over lawyers though any day. Most law stuff isn’t that challenging.

Where do you think the professions fall in regards to the amount of stuff you have to know to do your job?

Common (the rapper): Look around. AI will solve world hunger.

Amazon (trillion $$ company): Here are the results from your search for "Dawn Wall":

1. Gone by Dawn
2. American Psycho
3. Escanaba In Da Moonlight
4. Dawn Wall

I don’t know and it’s an interesting question. My general feeling though is that “amount of stuff you have to know” isn’t really the hard part of any of these jobs. The challenge is more about understanding, navigating, and building complex systems to achieve some goal.

This wasn’t always the case, because even 50 years ago access to foundational information was pretty hard. There was a lot of value in just knowing stuff. But now that’s a lot easier (and will continue to get a lot easier) and so I think it changes what’s important and hard in each of these professions (and many more).

"Know" probably wasn't the right word, more how much do you have to remember? Some of it is offloaded to the google these days, but the more complex the system you are working on the more you have to remember. IT gets around this by using layers of abstraction but I have no idea what docs or lawyers or other engineers use to manage that complexity.

I would agree at the top, docs are better. but on average, I would go with programmers. I may be biased bc I went to school with a lot of drs and a lot of engineers and it wasnt even close.

there is only a small amount of fundamental things that you need to know. more important is being able learn and pick up new things quickly.

docs are easily the most overrated subset of human beings.

the biggest prerequisite to becoming a doctor is having rich parents who push you towards it/push you to study/not having to worry about money until you are nearly 30.

Amazon probably has a financial interest in the first 3. (no programming content, but Chris Hayes' "Why Is This Happening?" podcast last week was about Amazon trying to position themselves as the marketplace for everything and was a really interesting listen)

it kind of is and it manifests in some secondary ways as well. like, the pre med students that I knew pretty much locked themselves in their rooms to study for multiple months of the year. Anything short of straight A's hurt their chances and then of course there was the crazy MCAT study session.

but see, a lot of kids could never do this bc they were required to make money to eat and live. so they were working 20 hours a week during the year and 40 hours a week during breaks. that puts them at a decided disadvantage to the ones fully supported by their parents.

but I will say that the premed students that I knew worked extremely hard and endured quite a bit of stress.

LOL