[supergeek133]

The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.

Amazon takes every minute they're willing to give, they're successful and consistently promoted/paid more.

This is also why I'll never work at Amazon. Haha.

[burningChrome]

>> The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.

This is a very important distinction.

At some age, you're going to have the money and whatever else you want and suddenly ask yourself why you're working so hard when you already have everything you need to be happy. This hit me a few years after I turned 35 and started asking myself was it worth it to have a really nice mountain bike, live in a state that has some of the best trails and the best I can do is get out six times a year because why? Because I'm putting in 50-60 hours at an office for a company that will cut me loose whenever they feel like it.

I realized if I didn't start focusing on my own happiness and stopped using all my energy to prove what an awesome developer I was, it was going to end up very lonely and very unhappy. I was also leery of burning out again like I did a few years earlier and had covered it up from my bosses and co-workers.

I feel like its a crossroads everybody arrives at in different times in their lives. For me, at 35, I felt like I had wasted so many years burning the candle at both ends and for what? Nothing that was going to make my life better. Even a few years after making several changes, I still look back with regret it took so long to see what I was doing to myself.

[sushisource]

It's crazy to me that more people don't realize this. You're working crazy hours, have no meaningful hobbies or life outside of work... and for what? No one's going to remember that you built some nice feature in some bit of software in 100 years, or even 20. Enjoy your life, enjoy people and community and activities. You can still get paid incredibly well as an engineer, more than enough to live comfortably, and work a normal 40 hour week (or less).

People prioritize weird shit.

[zifpanachr23]

Exactly. I want a wife and kids and a family, and for them not to hate me. Work has always got to be secondary to that.

I think the time spent being a workaholic (I did it a little myself early on) is sometimes helpful to really increase your skills quickly. But eventually you hit a sort of skill ceiling and it's increasingly not worth it, especially considering the things you are giving up.

Nobody at your funeral is going to be giving a heartfelt and tearful speech about how great a developer you were. Ordinary people honestly don't give a shit and neither should we besides just being generally competent and able to perform our roles.

[carabiner]

That's why you barista FIRE. Build up that nest egg of $3m then quit to take a part time job at REI or the Amazon warehouse, working 20 hrs/week, and spend the rest of your time mountain biking, skiing.

[algebra-pretext]

I think it's encouraged due to milestones always being set with unrealistic ECDs, so every project is always behind and there's always urgent security fixes to 'catch up' on (I work on an AWS microservice as an L4 SDE, and joined 2y ago, for context). So you work in the off-hours thinking you're 'catching up' to the work you've 'missed', when in reality that is just the expected velocity to keep pace, and being 'caught up' is an unreachable goalpost.

I personally just learned to hide lack of progress on one task behind the urgency of another new issue, or keep tasks as vague as possible so that I can slow down on some days and speed up on other days. As a result I don't think I work crazy hours, but there's just a constant, fatiguing pressure of the feeling of 'I should be catching up on work right now'.

And I only recently realized that it's degrading my ability to enjoy any time at all, whether its PTO or just after work hanging out with my girlfriend.

This is my first eng. job though and I can't tell whether its better or worse in other places, and I tell myself it's probably better than the hours required at a startup. And I feel bad complaining to my friends when they're almost all unemployed or working gig jobs. /rant

[yieldcrv]

This is actually why I’m skeptical about the complaints about Amazon

I’ve never worked there but I feel like I could? The complaints sound like a baseline level of toxicity seen in many places, I have the discipline for and others dont

Amazon would still be the last of the big tech’s I would choose for those reasons, the worst vesting schedule, and RTO, but it definitely sounds relatable