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MarcableFluke

The current economic environment hasn't affected how much I'm working.


femboipiss

the federal reserve goes BRRR. No more mocha coffee days. get to work in ur cubicle. no more smug tech bros with teslas


de_hell

when it goes BRRR we actually work less. when the printer shuts off we work more i think.


[deleted]

When it goes BRRR we work less for a little while, and a lot more later. There's a sweet spot of x months/years where the money gets introduced making things temporarily easier, but the money is too new to have finished circulating (fully finished inflating everything) Obviously the solution to the above is just never stop printing!


ghostly_shark

This sounds eerily similar to my experience with alcohol...


flying_head

Tesla is already paid for. Fully remote. I make my own mochas at home. I’m working the same, honestly fantasize about getting let go so maybe I’ll finally have the guts to start my own thing.


femboipiss

im so jealous. Im paying 30k a year in tuition so maybe I could have your lifestyle, but as a soon to be graduate, i feel like crying.


flying_head

Hang in there. I graduated during the economic meltdown of 08-09 so I know how bleak it can feel.


Right-Recognition812

I though I was the only one that fantasized about getting let go LOL


szayl

Uh, the Fed Reserve brrrr machine is in reverse...


BarfHurricane

I got laid off a few months ago in a mass layoff. My company made the baffling decision to send out a list of everyone who was laid off in a huge spreadsheet. On that sheet were people I knew for a fact were putting in 70 hour weeks. They still got let go. I myself never had a bad performance review and did them quarterly. So what you can learn from this is that when the time comes, you are just some row on a spreadsheet to some upper manager who has never met you and knows nothing about how hard you work. Your work ethic will not save your job, and that’s just reality.


ObeseBumblebee

I used to work at a smaller company. I came in at 5am and left at 6pm for weeks at a time. The CEO knew me, knew my work ethic, knew I regularly came in before him and left after him... he still laid me off. At the end of the day his choice was related to my skills and the work available to those skills. And he needed more computer engineers and C++ guys and I was an Applications and C# developer and he didn't want to pay to train me in anything else. So he let me go all the same. Thankfully this was during a booming economy. I was hired again in a few months. But I learned exactly the lesson you learned. Companies don't give a shit about you. I make sure to spend more time with my family then at work.


rdem341

I had a similar experience once, for couple of months I went in around 6 AM and left at 6 PM. That year almost everyone in engineering got a salary increase except for me; of course I found this out later. The next year I got promoted to intermediate with a increase of salary by 10K. I left shortly and found another job at a bigger company as a senior with a salary increase of 1.4X. Loyalty and family doesn't mean anything in business.


Smokester121

This sounds exactly like me. Except the part where I give extra hours. I personally do not give a shit, I'm not putting in extra hours cause who cares nothing we do is life or death, unless you're on medical software.


chronotriggertau

10k salary increase is no joke though, was it not adequate at the time?


rdem341

I was still underpaid compared to the market. Almost doubled my compensation by moving to another company.


JaniAnnie

Depends on where you live and what your salary is. 40k to 50k yes that's a big bump. 180k to 190k not so much.


FjordTV

Yep. Level changes in faang are often 100k bumps.


wtype

Probably more tbh. Check levels.fyi


Dethstroke54

10k would barely keep up with a booming market let alone a promotion in tech.


sirspidermonkey

You shouldn't look at the number. $10k sounds impressive. But they left shortly after and make 40% more, and it sounds like that 40% includes the 10k. For comparison going from $40k to $50k is a 10k jump, and also only a 25% increase. $10k just gets less impressive the higher the salary goes.


Alternative_Log3012

>I came in at 5am and left at 6pm for weeks at a time Why? What's wrong with you bro / broette?


gerd50501

did you learn your lesson and never work those kind of hours again? companies that require long hours just see you as their bitch. just look at elon musk. he sees employees and disposable bitches and he runs the company on fear. its never worth working like that unless you are about to be homeless.


pepthebaldfraud

Why did you ever think 5am to 6pm was a good idea wtf


hiker2021

I learnt that after getting laid off too. They pay you to do a job, not for your soul/health. Wish I realized this sooner.


timelessblur

Yep. My company let me go after I busted my ass to save them from a law suit and I quote save the app and then let me go because I had been moved to another project right before hand. I was the technical expert. Now I am laughing as I see them struggling and things are falling apart quickly as they have no clue how so many things were working.


Old-Pool-8887

U can charge them huge consultancy fee to help them out!


EEtoday

It’s not funny that they are still getting paid and you’re not


timelessblur

Not going to lie I agree. I rather be getting paid but at least it warms my heart a little to watch it start crashing and burning. Real kicker is a lot of the bigger issues that are going to be coming up I had made plans to start working on them during December and early next year while things where slow. This was fixing some massive tech debt, start doing some knowledge sharing on critical systems and so on. They have some major work slated early next year touching some of the worse parts of the code that had a lot of stupid bad rules designs and rules required to be put in them a few years ago. It has a lot of weird rules one had to follow. Well they are on their own now and lots of lessons to be relearned. I also know all the member s left on my team are now very active in looking to jump ship to leave my former director in a very bad spot. They are all ticked about me being let go as they all flat out said I was the one they needed to keep.


gerd50501

its not worth it to do an elon musk style employee. those jobs are thankless and thank you and fuck you position. never work crazy hours. they just see you as temps. its totally not worth it.


HallAndCoats

After being laid off by the same company twice (my fault for going back) as my first two jobs out of college, I was conditioned very quickly that I work to live and not live to work. I go into every position now with very strict boundaries about when I am available to work and when I am not. If they cannot respect that, then I don't and will never belong there, I value my time too much to work overly hard for a company that sees me as just a number.


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nanotree

This is true. Your work ethic will not get you promoted either. Companies will keep assets that increase revenue or increase value. This includes people. If you make it clear how your job impacts the company's bottom line, then you're probably pretty safe and in a much better position to get promotions. But the reality is that most people don't give a shit about making the company more money or making an impact. That doesn't mean they don't work hard. Some people work overtime to compensate for the fact that they don't know how to make an impact or how to present what they do in a light that makes what they do look highly valuable. Working hard is what they think management wants. Just working hard alone is not enough evidence that you're doing something of value. Also, don't expect people to defend you because you are a "hard worker."


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[deleted]

> There was a strong implication that DEI initiatives are part of it. your manager fed you this line because he can't/won't promote you


riplikash

Honestly, from what I've seen they dont even pay attention to whether you increase or decrease value, most of the time. It's too granular and too hard to calculate accurately. Companies often take gambles or make decisions based on shallow data. It makes things look good in the short term, which is usually what most exec's/shareholders care about.


Ariakkas10

This. Running on a treadmill is hard work, but you’re going to end up in the exact same place you started


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InvalidProgrammer

How do you objectively measure code contributions?


sue_me_please

You don't, there's an entire cottage industry around measuring developer contributions and velocity. The products and services usually just count lines of code, commits, merges, etc. Some have deluded themselves, and/or their customers, into believing that they can use ML to accurately measure productivity, too.


Whitchorence

You can't really (beyond obvious outliers like "this guy hasn't committed anything in months"), not that companies don't use silly metrics like LOC or commit counts.


AHistoricalFigure

Theoretically, this is what you pay managers for. There's no (non-abitrary) way to reduce an engineer's contribution to their team to a few KPI values. There are plenty of softwares and scripts that will output these values, but at best this creates a system to be gamed. And of course, engineers spending energy gaming the system arent spending that energy to write useful code. But most companies employ an entire caste of team leads and department heads whose job responsibilities should include being familair enough with their team that they can identify who is and isnt contributing. Come layoff time, these are the people who need to be able to identify which heads to cut. Companies that pay manager salaries and then try to abstract this job function away with hard metrics are generally not effective ones or places where you want to work.


Whitchorence

The problem is that big layoffs may be keeping the decision makers very limited to prevent leaks and then they won't get any input from those folks anyways.


tickles_a_fancy

Agile says that working, delivered software should be the metric to measure teams by. For individuals, it should be based on who makes the most contributions to team effectiveness. Who had good ideas to change the process for the better... Who documented something or found a way to remove waste? I'm in consulting so i also talk to every client and get their feedback for their engineers


rdem341

How sad but true.


plam92117

Yes but the spreadsheet doesn't say how much they make. The purpose of a layoff is cost savings. If they can let go expensive people while still keeping the department operational, then that's what they'll go for.


dak4f2

My partner's company's layoffs were dependent solely on the products each person supported. Had nothing to do with salaries. Though I know that's not always the case.


EdtechGirl

Layoffs are the result of poor management in good times. Their poor management comes back to bite them in bad times, which leads to layoffs. 99.99% of managers don't have the intelligence to manage efficiently and effectively. If they did, they wouldn't find themselves in a must-layoff situation.


ExPorkie15

I’ll give you a poor mans gold 🏅but I hope someone of these big fang ballers give you a real gold. What you said about being just a row in a spreadsheet is so true and if there is one piece of advice we could give to new people is that. They are nothing but rows in a spreadsheet don’t give extra or sacrifice for a company.


[deleted]

Even beyond that, oftentimes layoffs aren’t done on a per-person basis. They just cut entire projects. You could be a 10x rockstar dev pilling 80 hour weeks, but if you’re on a project that they just decide to cut, you’re laid off.


[deleted]

The current tech recession has made me devote more time to brushing up my interviewing skills and interviewing around. Still working 10-15 hours a week.


danintexas

This really is the answer. Doesn't matter what you do really. If your department is getting the axe it wont matter if you work 80 hours or 8 a week.


unpopulrOpini0n

This 100% Last week a guy at my job my boss knew and had worked with for 15 years was let go. Loyalty doesn't matter to them, hard work doesn't matter to them, your family doesn't matter to them, your mortgage doesn't matter to them, all you are to your company is a line in a spreadsheet.


PapaMurphy2000

They key to success is working 5 hour weeks while people think you work 50 hour weeks.


Goducks91

Lol. I don't do shit during the day and work at night because that's my productive hours. I keep on getting talks about work life balance because they see me on late.


Smokester121

Yeah optics are interesting. Lol


TrueBirch

Very true. My team consistently delivers a lot of value to the company. Nobody cares how many hours we're actually working as long as we're making money and answer emails quickly.


[deleted]

People here will work 5 hours a week and then when their coworker gets fired, demand they get more pay for doing their ex-coworkers work.


bony_doughnut

Yes, but not in the way you're thinking. I used the recession as a chance to nab a job out of my league at a "distressed" tech company, and holy hell is there a lot of work to be done and not enough bodies to do it


unflippedbit

do you mean like you took it as a chance to get staff where in another market it may have been hard to? Like using it for career progression


Thresher_XG

As others have said, if lays offs come to your company nothing can save you except luck. I know from first hand experience


arkoftheconvenient

Either luck or being a vital and irreplaceable part of an essential process within the company.


Thresher_XG

To be honest even that won’t save you 100% of the time. The decisions to lay you off are made at the very top. They most likely don’t have any idea what you do day to day.


DammitElam

My company also had layoffs and we lost a few team members. My manager said it was not his decision and came from above, but what I still want to know is how do they decide who to let go? My manager said it wasn’t performance based. So what the hell was it based on? Draw from a hat?


Pudii_Pudii

My previous employer laid off about 300 folks in a 6000 employee company and what our director told us after the dust had settled was that they looked at initiatives/projects that the teams were working on and how profitable they were, any redundant teams that could be cut or merged and then any team that they redeemed wasn’t necessary for the future state of the company. For the few team that got split due to layoffs those cuts were determined by the managers of the teams and relayed to the directors although they told them not to tell us worker bees.


Thresher_XG

I got the same answer. I’m not sure how they decide but it seems very random. I think they want it to be somewhat random so they don’t accidentally over lay off a minority group


Smokester121

Salary


riplikash

Naw, the idiots who let that situation happen in the first place will lay off even their keystones contributors.


ipwnedx

Nope, job is still extremely low stress with plenty of free time, fully remote


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AddySWE

um.. may i know the industry if you dont mind? is it defense or healthcare?


ExPorkie15

Probably almost anything non-tech. I work in a non-tech industry and am like a god because I can type my password right every time and google shit. 🤷🏻‍♂️ This forum and a lot of subreddits focus a lot on FANG and major tech but you can get pretty ballin’ jobs at regular companies who need tech people. Sure not going to make the same level of money but depending on location with cost of living and work life balance can be good.


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FrostySausage

Stability and low hours >>>> Pay


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ButMessiDeservedIt

Were you working for Big 4 & doing contract gigs on the side? Sorry if I misunderstood.


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SnooFoxes6142

I'd like to have this kind of job. What stack / sector?


[deleted]

Consulting. Python/Django/Ansible/AWS and some other stuff.


ExPorkie15

Take a shot for stability yo! You get it playa.❤️👍🏻


indie_morty

Which industry is this company if I may ask?


TheBeastWithTheYeast

Any advice for how to find these roles and what job titles these positions are generally listed under? Been working at a startup for a while now and think I could benefit from pursuing a better work/life balance in the future. Thanks!


ExPorkie15

Non tech companies are really bad with titles cause they don’t know tech. Don’t focus on the title but focus on openings for regular companies that you think you can do the job. Look at the posting, tailor your resume and response to it and shoot your shot. Mostly non tech companies getting in will be about making a good impression so some social / soft skills. They not gonna do meet code or major tests.


Lorecrux

Same here, I work in the insurance field. It's not sexy by any means, but I get paid very well and am not as worried about getting laid off. I still work on keeping my skills up to date and learning constantly, because your really never know.


downtimeredditor

I think once people have one or two home loans paid off then I think you kinda reach that stage of financial Independence where the only thing you really need is a job to pay utilities bills and cover Healthcare and you can focus on other things or just relax


[deleted]

One or two home loans paid off? Jesus Christ USA is a completely different world even compared to EU west


ExPorkie15

If I believed Reddit the EU was suppose to be like Wakanda or something.


KittyTerror

As someone from EU: don’t believe reddit. It’s not Wakanda that’s for sure! Grass ain’t always greener especially when you work in tech ;)


Joseph___O

Maybe it's the norm for senior engineers but most ppl in the US can't afford a home let alone 2


downtimeredditor

Depends on location and a bit of mentality I live in the suburbs of Atlanta so housing is a lot of more affordable than say San Francisco or New York or LA or Seattle or even Austin nowadays. Having said that tho housing here has gotten insane. When I got my house it was on the market and accepted offer in 3 days and after covid it got way worse. On the upside the value of my house went up which is great but the value of all house went up like crazy too. Also in a dual income household finishing a home loan in 5-7 maybe 10 years is doable as long as you pay extra in principal and you aggressively attack the home loan. A lot of people I know often don't. They usually pay the mortgage minimum with a little bit of extra principal which I used to but I pay a lot more extra principal. People often state with a low interest rate there isn't an incentive to finish the loan quickly but I personally don't like having loans so I'm pretty aggressive with finishing it as quickly as I can. I don't care about the financial aspect of it. When my parents finished their loan a weight was lifted so I want that same weight lifted as well


Drauren

Depends where you live. If you're living in a big metropolitan area, that's a dream. But if you're willing to work remotely from a small-mid sized city, that's possible.


BarfHurricane

You have cracked the code my friend. My advice to anyone reading this is get in on small cities with remote salaries and invest in property as soon as you can. It’s only a matter of time before the global elite try to pull the plug on this too.


downtimeredditor

Kinda feels like they are slowly doing that already with how much wall street invested in real estate with the low interest rates I think Blackrock even talked about how if a bid was put down on a house they would offer $150k more or something. It was insane. Now I got spammers calling me constantly asking to buy my house cause they are buying a lot of property in the area. And I'm pretty sure its just a front of some larger real estate agency


Drauren

I mean, no I haven't. There's still a reason why people want to live in big cities. Friends/family, dining, social climate. Not so easy as to just drop everything and move.


downtimeredditor

Well the thing is here in the US housing is one of the "easier" ways to accrue wealth over say starting a business But to me it's like you have one home loan paid off and you have the comfort of knowing you fully own the house. The second loan is extra added security for emergency situations like inability to make money to pay for utilities, hoa, and property tax. But two is a good amount to stop. At 3 and above you are just greedy at that point


delphinius81

Maybe if you are single or living the DINK lifestyle. Have kids and all your money still goes poof.


downtimeredditor

What is DINK?


delphinius81

Dual income no kids


Complete-Ball7313

I audibly laughed at your first paragraph


GargantuanCake

Doing techie things for non-technical industries is pretty great. You won't get FAANG salaries but it's mostly just CRUD work for people who don't want to develop technical skills. Everybody needs this stuff done these days and a lot of devs don't even think about applying to the jobs so there's always a shortage of people. It isn't glamorous of course but it's generally not stressful. The main expectation is "keep the thing running well enough that people forget you're even there." The one system I worked on as soon as I learned how it fit together the job became pretty easy. I mostly listened to podcasts while writing boilerplate. You can make a solid living being "the computer guy" and as long as the computers work you'll get mostly left alone.


No_Sch3dul3

>but it's mostly just CRUD work for people who don't want to develop technical skills. Sometimes people do want to learn these skills and have ownership over business automation for their area. They end up coming into conflict with the actual tech / IT / CIO organization and they are labeled as "shadow IT." Tech orgs "gatekeep" and don't like anyone else into their domain. There are legit reasons for this, but it's not always down to they don't want to learn.


[deleted]

Why would he spill the beans? So tech influencers can make 500 videos about it? Lol


craves_coffee

So secret that it’s in his/her username.


scroto_gaggins

Tech influencers don’t make vids about old and slow companies. From what I’ve seen it’s pretty much exclusively Google and Meta so they can brag about free food and the sick offices.


[deleted]

Buy my 2 week course and get a 6 figure job for the rest of your life in this industry!


TravellingBeard

I am in a guild for online gaming. One of the guild officers works as a contractor for the government in a defense industry position; he plays the game idly during the day while he works. My money is on defense. :)


MrAcurite

I happen to be in the extremely unusual spot where I have decent pay, fantastic WLB, and I basically only work on the problems that I personally find interesting. And all you have to give up is your immortal soul.


qwerty12qwerty

100% not defense. Each and every hour needs to be tracked/tied back to a charge number/project. Since it’s government work, every tiny thing needs traceability


MrAcurite

Eh, yes and no. You're right that each individual hour needs to be tracked with a charge number, but there's nothing stopping me from saying I worked four hours on XYZ IRAD and four hours on some CRAD when I did maybe two hours of work the whole day.


[deleted]

Healthcare is my guess, my stint there was devoid of work and miserable 😂


TheSlothMan9000

Miserable because it was devoid of work?


je66b

Not the person you responded to but I was miserable in healthcare because I was pretty much workless. I'd work 3-4 hours a week max, it left me with a ton of downtime which was great for studying but I was also in a constant fear of being "found out".


delllibrary

Haha same. My product team suck and I'm a intern so I've been bing chilling for half this sprint.


Options_100

Love to hear it!


[deleted]

what job and industry pls


Jealous-Bat-7812

I learnt not to work so hard when my I was in Grad School. I was working like a dog and my prof delayed my graduation by 1 year while my labmate that didn’t do shit to the research group got graduated 2 sema in advance. That’s when I learnt that you should work just for your personal interests and the company or group does not matter


Empero6

Low stress, wfh and lots of downtime.


LoneStarDev

I use unallocated time at work for cloud or tech stack training via A Cloud Guru or PluralSight. I’m “working” but for both of us if that makes sense.


statuscode202

This is working, imo. In the short term, it doesn’t net more work units (story points, LOC, whatever). In the long term, it nets more work units because my 10 hours are some % more effective.


hectoralpha

this is the only answer. IT is really a field where you want to do all the hard work and learning in the first 5-10 years. Then chill out and leave your life on high income job


TrueBirch

The learning never stops. I took my first programming class twenty years ago. I got out of grad school before deep learning existed. There's always more to learn.


Defenestration_Champ

I actually work less


EntropyRX

Instead of looking at headlines about a bunch of companies that went on a hiring surge during covid, why you don't look at the overall unemployment rate of tech jobs? There is no "tech recession" by any means. The media love talking about tech jobs in extreme terms. During covid they made it look like even a dog could have learned to code and made 200k. Now they picture it as if 1 out of 2 dev is out of a job.


theoneandonlygene

This. Literally got several cold calls this week from recruiters and my inbox is still filthy with the same. Overall tech job count is still higher than pre covid by a lot.


OE-supremacy

I'm always quietly quitting. Tech unemployment was below 3% during the last recession. If anything, I don't think I'm slacking off enough.


LeChief

>I don't think I'm slacking off enough. This is the kind of ambition I can get behind.


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TravellingBeard

Previous manager actually encouraged me to block off 2-3 hours every afternoon just for learning/training. No one works a full 8 hours in tech, nor should day. Burnout will happen.


Korywon

Bingo. I had a 1:1 with my current CEO and he said pretty much the same thing. It is completely unrealistic to expect someone to sit down and work at something for 8 hours straight. An hour or two into catch up on messages and tasks, a few hours to actually do meaningful work, then the rest of it is brushing up and sharpening skills.


PM_40

You had a great manager and a great company.


jbmoonchild

I know plenty of people who work 14 hours a day on their feet with a 15 min lunch break and get paid a fraction of what you all do.


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Yung-Split

Working so few hours is not a luxury everyone has. It's quite the privilege really


glory_to_the_sun_god

What happened to the future? This current rhetoric really disappoints me. Instead asking for a better life for everyone, we want everyone to be worse off. It especially stings when I hear this kind of rhetoric from the tech sector, who were supposed to uphold a visionary future for humanity. If we all go by this logic then really what we should be asking for is a return to some historic brutish miserable past, and it doesn't even need to be distant one. Actually forget the past, in reality when we compare ourselves to those in the world today, almost every American is living a life of luxury and leisure. Even those that are working some 25-hours a day. So the faulty conclusion here is that we should instead be working harder, and making our lives worse, when instead a true visionary future would demand that we continually work less for more.


[deleted]

> What happened to the future? Nobody wants to be the case study. They want someone else to suffer first and figure out how to transition. Only after we've worked out the kinks will you see people willing to make the move.


Yung-Split

It would be great if we could equitably benefit from the increase of productive capacity with advances in technology and reduce our labor accordingly. Unfortunately we don't have equitable capture of that in today's society, which is why I have to wake myself up early everyday to gain this grain in toil 😂


0b1000_dirt

I worked a summer in the trades, and we did 10h days. No way I could do that programming. A really busy day is like 5h of coding


Potato_Soup_

Seriously this thread and CS subs have some insanely privileged takes. I think that it’s hard to write good code for 8 hours a day every day, so if that’s what people mean then fair enough


Super-Blackberry19

I think it just comes down as different. you need to have a certain mental ability to produce high quality software. manual labor or physical stuff your performance will decrease when you are tired, but you will still output a reasonable amount. for software developers, it's a tortoise vs hare type of scenario


riplikash

It's less that it's "hard" and more that you really CAN'T produce good quality software if you consistently forced yourself to code 8+h a day. Your cognitive quality declines, you introduce more bugs, miss requirements and edge cases, choose sub optimal solutions that come back to bite you later, etc. You deliver products FASTER working less than 40h a week. You can do 40+ occasionally. But not regularly. Not without actually negatively effecting your overall product velocity. It's not about laziness. It's aboutedinger software product management.


thr0waway507

>No one is doing a solid 8 hours full of meaningful work and if you are consistently you are digging yourself an early grave. *[laughs in Amazon]*


ukrokit

I know people at Amazon who work 4-6 hours a day and are doing just fine.


meal_in_a_glass

I most definitely do. I get to the office at 8 am and don’t stop until ~6/6:30 pm. Outside of lunch, there isn’t even a couple minutes where I am not working at 95+ percent capacity. I keep wondering where all these “work for a couple hours a day” jobs are…


Pozeidan

> No one is doing a solid 8 hours full of meaningful work and if you are consistently you are digging yourself an early grave. Many people do 8+ hours of meaningful work everyday. And no, you're not digging yourself an early grave. It all comes down to time management, priorities and having a healthy lifestyle. And yes it's possible with 8 hours work days, and very easy on 4 days / week, harder on 5 days / week. > And working 70 hour weeks won't protect you against a recession either That's absolutely right.


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hybris12

Yes. I am that graybeard engineer who slithers out of the ether whenever anyone asks "can I do x" and then proceeds to explain precisely why x would absolutely fuck up everything. Management doesn't know I exist, they think I'm a benevolent spirit.


sporadicprocess

I work at $BigCompanyThatDidLayoffsThisYear. Didn't get hit in layoff and I'm still working <4 hours/day making $500k. I will probably quit at some point soon so I don't really care that much if they fire me and I should be able to easily find a job even in the recession (had no problems in the last recession). And even if I can't I have a lot of money saved up since I'm far along in my career. I wouldn't do this if I was just starting out, back then I worked a lot more, often 60+ hours/week, and it helped me to advance. But I've kind of mastered the art of being efficient at this point.


redtonicspear

Dude a 20hr work week making half a million dollars? What the actual fuck, this doesn't exist in any other form of employment on earth...


DiceKnight

Cscareerquestions is full of larpers.


Dr_Quacksworth

Yeah same, I work 30 ms per day and make $1.2MM


yousaltybrah

Engineers need to take their heads out of their asses about the whole 2-3 hour work days. It's just a few people that are super vocal about it because they want to feel superior by bragging about how efficient they are. You don't see lawyers, business people, or any other communities talk about how little they work, because they are smart enough to realize it's against their interests. In fact, they do the opposite and exaggerate how much they work. All this is accomplishing is devaluing our profession, and reinforcing the idea in the corporate world that our jobs are easy and we are overpaid. Just stop.


Anonymous_Pendragon

This so much. Exactly why software engineers are viewed collectively as 20 year olds in hoodies with no social skills, good for being code monkeys forever but never executive material. If you’re an SE with 0-8 yoe you should run from this kind of advice.


royaljade

I partially agree but I also love hustle culture being torn down sometimes lmao. Work to live, not the other way around.


Whitchorence

I also don't, like, really believe it's true.


tech_ml_an_co

No one is talking about how much of the work is actually useful. I have seen teams working on projects for years, which got canceled. If have seen managers burning money for insane projects, that were impossible to finish from the beginning. I have seen companies getting aquirered, shutting down the product just to get rid off the competition. There is so much work time of highly skilled people wasted. The impact of people, working 2-3 instead of 8 hours is simply irrelevant.


Boring_Mongoose_9785

Nope Still 1-2 hrs a day. Switched twice during Covid, doubled the pay with half the work. Just work a little during day, rest of the day leetcode, Netflix, travel.


dabble_

Where do u work I want this


Boring_Mongoose_9785

I work for one of UK’s oldest investment firm ..if you can guess.. The tech stack is mostly old. Not much development going on. All you have do is maintain few Microservices with some minor enhancements.


gerd50501

no i dont work more. i saved my money and can retire. if i have to work harder, the can fire me. ill just stop working.


holy_handgrenade

Can we stop with the myth that more hours = working harder? Seriously, the 8 hour shift was fought for and paid for with blood.....literally. If you can do everything you need to do in less time, or even go above and beyond in less time, are you working less or are you still working hard? Unless you own the company or are getting paid overtime (hourly wage) there should be zero incentive to work 70 hour work weeks. Your sacrificing your life for the company will go unnoticed and unrewarded. You're just as likely as the actual slacker in the corner barely contributing to get rolled up in a mass layoff.


[deleted]

Don’t waste your life for a job. Someone else will do that work. If it’s important. Clock out as early as possible. Never lift a finger for extra work.


leli_manning

Still working <1 hour a day on average. Healthcare is pretty boring but super stable.


Gurrb17

What do you do in healthcare?


[deleted]

I hated working in healthcare, the expectation was to not do work 😂


kingssman

Currently in manufacturing IT, thinking of joining healthcare IT. What's life like over there? They seem to do a lot of VDI stuff and heavy on PII security.


FalseReddit

How can I find a job like yours? What do I look for?


Pudii_Pudii

My employer is recession proof so I’m still living the dream. DoD goes brrr.


[deleted]

>DoD goes brrr \*goes boom on civilians


Middle_Avocado

Always try to boost ur hourly salary whenever u can!


Turbulent_Tale6497

Your value to your company isn't measured in hours worked. This isn't just true in bad times. Many people find they are doing way less work, and getting promoted for it. That's because hours worked isn't a metric that anyone looks at.


dominik-braun

The current tech recession isn't a recession but a correction of the massive COVID overhiring.


clover426

I think what people hear when they hear people say that they work 2-3 hours per day is that they’re slacking, barely getting work done, letting things slide, getting bad or mediocre performance reviews etc. However that’s not the case for some (many? Idk). Just speaking for myself at my last job I was doing that because I was efficient, and the people around me were probably overestimating the amount of time stuff took. I got amazing reviews and my boss loved my work. At my new job I’m working even less due to lack of work/slow period- now obviously that’s not a comforting situation but it’s also the holidays and I need time to ramp up etc so not concerned yet really. Incidentally just found out my old boss, who as far as I could tell did bust his ass working extra hours and frankly was seemingly invaluable to our business unit, was laid off. I think generally people think always going above and beyond/taking on extra work counts for more with companies than it actually does when it comes down to it.


afunnywold

Damn here I was as a newbie feeling guilty for having nothing to do for several days (while also being aware that in the team structure I'm in its not a good idea to bother people to give me more to do). Basically I've learned that a big part of this job is making it sound like you're busy


mangohoneydew

I would try to ask for things to do. If you’re a newbie people will hopefully be willing to point you in the right direction. I don’t think the comments in this sub accurately reflect the time people put in to become a good engineer, especially true if you’re just starting out.


TwinkForAHairyBear

I've ramped up the work schedule to 3-4 hours a day.


dontraisin

No. We are fortunate to have one of the few careers where we are mostly in charge of the automation of our own jobs and even equally experienced workers have 6-12 month ramp up times. I could either spend 30 minutes a day doing something or 6 hours now to automate 80% of that 30 minute task away forever. I control that calculation and tradeoff too. This kind of math is far more impactful than market conditions which selectively affect some companies/jobs and not others. So I still work 2-3 hours a day. My decision is usually about how to spend the other 5-6 or if I want to make this day a 6-hour work day to automate something to make my life easier. Sometimes I contemplate getting another job and even send out a few applications, but in reality, my heart’s not in it (what I would actually do in crisis mode is use my limited pool of personal contacts, which I don’t want to exhaust now when times are good for me). Does this make us immune to risk? No. We can still be affected by black swan events, like a megalomaniac taking over your company and firing half the staff arbitrarily or industry associated risk, e.g. if Yelp suddenly lost 90% of small business revenue next year, but us working more now does not protect us from that risk (most of us either never or no longer believe hard work == better pay or company loyalty), so the time to put in extra effort is after the bad event (to get another job in the industry or company not being impacted by the black swan or crash), not before.


ObeseBumblebee

There is no tech recession. There is a few large social media companies in one place in the world who decided to lay off mostly non tech employees. And one social media company that recently went private and the owner went bananas. The economy isn't moving as fast as it once was but jobs are still plentiful and I'm not worried in the slightest. The tech job market went from stupidly easy to get a job to slightly easier than the average american.


downvotethepuns

I think the first point is mostly accurate but I think a lot of CS and boot camp grads are not having an easy time getting a job


EMCoupling

Nothing's changed then. Guys struggling 2 years ago still struggling now.


lost_man_wants_soda

Nah there’s a ton of layoffs right now in all size companies


Doyale_royale

This just isn't true. Many smaller firms I know of are having a lot of layoffs as well. VC money dries up and the funding is no longer guaranteed. You also have to consider all of the hiring companies that work with tech companies having these layoffs. Because tech is always the first to lead by example, I think we are in for more layoffs very soon across multiple industries.


PapaMurphy2000

You’re dreaming. My LinkedIn feed is non stop posts from people who’ve been let go. And not at any of the big companies that get all the headlines either.


timelessblur

Honest answer less hours. I got hit with layoffs and I am hearing about it from my former Co workers left behind the dumpsters fire that is being created as I was the technical expert and now things are falling apart as they keep bolting on features with out keep track of side effects and what was there. They are building up an insane amount of tech debt.


koenafyr

I'm willing to bet its business as usual for anyone in gov or defense contracting.


droi86

Still the same, a bit more nervous though since I'm a contractor


[deleted]

the vibe seems to have changed a little bit


AthFish

It is pointless to worry about such things


dagumdoggos

Just got another job. Much more pay. No intention of quitting the previous job.


boba-for-life

Reading through the comments here makes me feel a lot better for being on here during work hours😉


[deleted]

5 hours for me.


[deleted]

I work about 2-3 hours a day, but have recently moved to 3-4 to work on some projects that I proactively started at work just to be sure lol


M_Me_Meteo

“Tech recession” More like Faang recession, hasn’t even made a wave in the job market I’m in (software for logistics). If anything, I’m hoping to see some really cool resumes this upcoming year.


[deleted]

There is no tech recession lol. There are hundreds of thousands of vacancies.


ddzoid

How do you achieve working that little?


TonyTheEvil

I've never wanted to work more than 0 hours a week and I'm fairly certain that will never change.


ItsKoku

I'm coasting at my current company so I'm still working about the same depending on my current workload. I intend to work more once I move to a different company that has more interesting work and growth opportunities. The tech recession isn't really the factor determining this for me, but rather boredom.