Take those excited geniuses and have them work on preventing climate change from ruining all life on earth, instead of inventing new ways to profit off of people’s data.
> What, exactly, is wrong with the expectation that people make senior level eventually?
The problem is when you base too much on promotion systems and performance reviews, that end up as a form of bias and favoritism not closely approximating the truth. Some amount of people are doing useful work for you (like cleaning up after people you think are the high performers) that does not surface there, and when you crap on them, pass them up, bust their morale, make them afraid of their next review, etc., you risk losing their valuable contributions.
Just because we have more "stuff" and more advanced "technology" doesn't make life more worth living. Happiness levels across society don't increase alongside productivity.
Okay. That's your choice. But having made this choice, don't complain when those of us who choose to devote more time to work receive greater rewards. There's nothing wrong with paying for performance.
Modus operandi in these companies is to rewrite/reintroduce whole products instead of fixing bugs from already discarded people. So if you lose a critical amount of worn out higher paid contributors, you just make a V2 or introduce a new product with a completely new fresh team that will get discarded after another 3 years. This requires fresh supply of motivated and hungry people willing to take sacrifices and a much smaller amount of people willing to exploit that.
I can't believe people put up with this. I really hope you got paid for that time.
In fact, I need permission from my manager's manager's manager in order to stay past 7pm.
This company believes in a strong work-life balance, and this is one of the ways it achieves this.
Also, it "changes the world" in good ways, not by "connecting people" through bogus data siphoning addiction traps.
You see, the parent poster said:
> They got pushed to check-in code at 12a.m. for example.
This is ENTIRELY different than having you, overly excited about some project, deciding to work late and pushing code at 12am of your own accord. That's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Now, if you are EXPECTED to do it, outside major emergencies, then you have a problem.
Yes my company benefits from it, but so do I. For instance, given a choice of trying to come up with an idea to learn about a feature of AWS and pay money for the resources I use, and take advantage of my work AWS (Dev) account where I am an admin, I would rather do a work related project where I have the resources and I don’t have to come up with an idea and I don’t have to pay for it.
What I don’t do is “signal”. I don’t stay at work late, I don’t send emails out after hours, and I pushback if they give me unreasonable deadlines.
If Facebook's a grind, then that's something the employee has to figure out.
My understanding of the "get promoted or leave" thing is "engineers hired as juniors are expected to get to mid-level in under 5 years (with a half-way milestone at 2 years)"; once you're mid-level it's up to you if you want to carry on climbing. Personally once I got there I switched to a "work more efficiently in fewer hours and keep the same overall productivity" approach instead of trying to get promoted into the senior levels, and that's worked out nicely so far :)
Personally I strongly prefer no fixed working hours. If you want to work at night, so that you can do things when it’s light out (especially in winter), and you still get the expected results, what’s wrong with that?
I can’t stop my bosses from judging based on time spent working (which is silly, but hey, we’re all human), but I sure can try to stop my coworkers from subscribing to such insane work hours.
Also, lone wolves working at night are harder to manage and communicate with.
It’s not a great practice in my opinion. But in practice only a small percentage of engineers fail to make the grade.
Train me, please.
Probably not fired. But the interior motion sensor alarms go on automatically at 7pm, which would probably alert the security guards that roam the campus.
When I first started, I came in too early once and set off the alarms. People were nice about it, but I was super embarrassed because I was a n00b.
Personally I strongly prefer no fixed working hours. If you want to work at night, so that you can do things when it’s light out (especially in winter), and you still get the expected results, what’s wrong with that?
I worked at a place like that once. When I was hired I was told I could make my own hours. I prefer to work early mornings, so some days I came in long before anyone else. A couple of times around 3am. But I always worked at least eight hours, and often more.
In my exit interview, my supervisor was rabid about how I wasn't a good fit because I "come and go as [you] please." She was so full of crap about other allegations against me that I didn't even have a chance to bring up that making my own hours was part of my employment deal.
On the other hand, say it would take me 50 hours and I knew I would have to work on the weekend because I’m not as experienced, but I thought I could still have it done by Monday.
I might be willing to volunteer, knowing it would take me longer but it would also be done on time. That extra 20 hours, I’m still working, committing code but zeal do trying to figure out the framework. I wouldn’t have a problem doing that because I am learning a new skill.
But, I wouldn’t work weekends to finish a project because I was given an unrealistic deadline.
The first scenario, the extra 20 hours benefits me and the company. The second, it just benefits the company.
Unfortunately the number of lazy people far outweigh the number of hard workers.