How do I deal with increased work hour expectations?
When I joined my current company, it was a standard 40 hour/week company. Since the end of last year, we’ve been told that we’re all expected to work 55-60 hours/week to get our startup to a successful state (get funding, retain current customers, attract new ones). I’m feeling extremely miserable from the change because the schedule doesn’t allow me to do all the other things that are important to me outside of work, such as spending time with family, cooking and working out regularly, and dedicating time to my hobbies. I have subscribed to newsletters for years to keep up with how the javascript and react worlds are changing, but have stopped reading them. I feel like the work hours have made me less curious about keeping up with tech and growing, which is the thing that I used to like most about this career.
We’re asked to track and report our hours working on tickets, and any time we fall short of expectations it comes up in our weekly one on one with our manager. It’s making me want to leave, but the market is tough, I haven’t interviewed in years and never done DSA or system design questions, and it’s hard to start with the schedule I have, because again I’m already sacrificing time with my family for this job and don’t want to sacrifice more. It’s crazy how much the extra 15-20 hours per week is costing me emotionally.
How do I get out of a situation like this? I don’t have enough savings to fall back on, my wife doesn’t work, and my state doesn’t provide Medicaid even to households with no income.
Discussion
(3 comments)- 13 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
That sucks that your company is suddenly expecting more from you without any change in compensation or responsibility. One thing that can help is imposing a "time limit" on the increased expectations. Either work with your manager on when the sprint mode will end, or declare for yourself how long you're willing to work extra hours. I've found that having a due date for a project or work period is valuable.
If you don't expect your company to go back to normal hours (I honestly would be skeptical), then the sad reality is that you should prep for a new job:
- Take PTO as needed to study
- Allocate a few hours on weekends to do prep work/networking
Given that you don't have many savings, I definitely wouldn't quit. But you need to figure out how to minimize your work for your day job to make it manageable to network/study.
Some really good advice here: How can I have less burnout and better work-life balance?
- 1
3 months agoEngineer @ RobinhoodIf hours are being tracked through tickets, what's stopping you from overstating the time you've spent by an hour or two?
- 0
3 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroReally sorry to hear this - It's particularly brutal (and stupid) when companies start measuring productivity with number of hours worked instead of impact. Regardless, I think the productivity course is relevant because if your manager has any sense whatsoever, they should be impressed if you achieve a much larger amount of impact than everyone else: [Course] Maximize Your Productivity As A Software Engineer
The other option is to look outwards:
- Look passively and be very selective with opportunities - Make sure to vet them for work-life balance
- Do the bare minimum to meet expectations - Honestly, I condone making up hours worked per ticket here. Who cares if the work gets done in 10 hours or 4 hours?
- Tactically take "vacation" - If you have an onsite with a company you like, it's probably worth using some PTO days to study and of course, do the onsite (companies usually won't let you interview on weekends)
Here's a related thread: "How to balance interview prep with a job?"
