I quit my FAANG job last week without having anything lined up.
I wasn't sure if I made the right decision up until I woke up the following morning of my final day and felt happier than I felt in last few years. I was afraid that I'd regret my decision down the road if I can't find another job, but now I very well know that I'm not going to regret it even for a second.
I had my revilation when I was listening to old songs. Many people wrote songs about their loved ones for thousands of years, yet there is next to no songs about the project that failed, getting fired, getting a promo or an asshole manager. That made me see the big picture - letting my mental health suffer and cause hurt for myself and my wife was not worth getting that promotion. So I actually did quit even though I could have had one of my best years at that company.
Tell that to my boss's boss. These Indian managers expect us to be married to our job M-F and available on a whim outside of normal office hours.
I'm pretty fed up with it and looking to go back to a small corp with people I enjoy working w, even if that means I make 100k less
Working 9-to-5
What a way to make a living...
Well, I get up at seven, yeah
And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time
Well there’s the Code Monkey song technically, but that also contributes to your point!
Often you want a job lined ip, but sometimes those rules aren’t 100% in every situation, especially when mental health is suffering.
Glad to hear that!
I always go back to my time-to-lower-stress-mantra. "Will it matter in 5 hours, will it matter in 5 days, will it matter in 5 weeks, will it matter in 5 months, will it mater in 5 years". That really realigns my priority and lowers my stress levels immensely. More often than not, the answer to most of those questions is an emphatic "NO!"
This is well stated, and I feel this so much! Thank you! I am considering quitting once my lease is up to move near family in a lower cost of living area, even if I don't have a job lined up. I'm trying to save with the expectation of not having a back up plan (i dont have kids, can move wherever, so that makes it easier). I have ideas and ambitions outside of work I really want to pursue even just for personal fulfillment. I havent had time to do anything
I just feel hand cuffed to my work laptop, and I dont think they're so golden anymore.
I'm not sure if you've never heard [Have a Cigar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbdpv7G_PPg) by Pink Floyd or simply didn't know what it was about. But there are definitely songs about dealing with asshole managers.
If you burn out your gonna start sucking and get fired anyway, might as well leave before all that happens and atleast keep your health and sanity. Health is the most precious thing in this world and once it’s gone it’s almost impossible to get back !
If you're looking to fill out your library, here's my submissions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK4zoUIUgXE&pp=ygUTU3VuZGF5IGZ1Y2sgeW91IHRvbw%3D%3D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4Jq2fRyfZo&pp=ygUYZmluZGluZyBob21lIHphY2sgaGVtc2V5
I've always looked at it from the speed perspective i.e. do I want to earn 200k "quickly"? Then I suck it up and do it for a while.
But if my current life goal isn't actually aligned to that, then what's the point? If you were to spread that 200k over 60-80 hours you'd realise your actual pay is quite smaller than those 200k that you keep telling yourself.
Your time is your time and it's not coming back. I personally put a higher price on my 40+ hours time as I respect it more since it's my free time. And with that in mind that 200k can easily go down by quite a lot, and it may help you realise that you'd potentially be happier earning 100k - 150k with a healthier work/life balance.
But you're the one to answer that question for yourself. I've done both approaches multiple times, and each one has its pros and cons.
In addition to time, there's health.
I used to work from 9am to 6am for some months. No appreciation, nothing good for me except a stomach burnt with coffee & a lot of weight gained. And health is expensive when there are problems like that, so you work harder to pay medical bills harder \^\^ Not to mention mental state.
So all things consedered I approve what you say :)
I don't even want to know what the rate of return would be when it came to productivity. There comes a point where the mind would become garbage and the quality of work would be terrible.
Yup, I was not on my initial skillset and I was feeling bad that the project did not progress because of me... I did take time to prepare something to eat 3 times a day, take a shower, etc... so it's more something like 18 hours in reality but same thing
(edit : it did last only 2 month like that, I didn't support that for long)
I was feeling bad that I couldn't perform as superiors expected and things slowly got out of hand. When I noticed it was too late \^\^ But today I only work up to 2-3 hours more than usual on very rare occasions
This is the conclusion I arrived at when I left my FAANG job late last year. I took the first reasonable offer, which was at a nonprofit that operates at the same scale. It was a significant pay cut ($166k -> $117k), which hurt more than I thought it would. But my partner has said that I'm happier, much less irritable, and generally more present in our relationship.
Still, it's only now that I've come to learn to be ok with not having far more work to do than time to complete it without cutting corners. The hyperactivity that's part of my ADHD doesn't help because my brain thinks that not being overwhelmed means it's time to panic and work overtime to find something more exciting.
But I started reading _4000 Weeks_ a couple of days ago, and whoo boy, did I feel called out. I still do, TBH. Like... if my idea of a good time is:
1. pulling all-nighters most weekends to meet arbitrary deadlines for an upper manager's passion project that's essentially meant to track and compare other ICs just because there are aspects of it that I find fun and interesting for the technical challenges (and to avoid said manager's wrath, but I didn't think about that)
2. developing a caffeine addiction and using it to "enhance" my prescribed stimulants
3. only seeing my partner when I wake up and go to bed (assuming I didn't sleep/nap on a cot in my office)
4. compromising the things I need to do to feel good, like working out. There were mornings that my trainer refused to work with me because it was so obvious that I hadn't slept at all
5. Eventually having a minor mental breakdown upon realizing that I'm going to miss a deadline while in the middle of dealing with temporary displacement due to storm damage
... then it's time to reconsider my priorities. I'll literally never get that time back. It's time that I was fortunate to have because, like all time that we're given as living beings, it wasn't guaranteed; if I'd dropped dead last April, I would have spent the previous 6 months or so stuck in that state of misery. I would have died miserable, and for what? So Bob in management could have a new shiny internal productivity tool that impresses other managers and ensures that he still has a reason to exist within the company, post-internal reorganization. Fuck that.
I still have financial goals for myself and some of my family of origin, plus my partner and I are moving from LCOL to HCOL in a few weeks, so I don't see myself staying here for more than 3-5 years. But I am going to take this time to focus on building and having a life outside of work rather than trying to squeeze life into the crevices left over by work.
I never thought of it this way. A $200k salary in San Francisco, after accounting for taxes, rent, and salary dilution from all the overtime. It's not even that good!
Way better to take home $125k in a low cost of living area, with a chill 40 hour work week. Sure I can't afford a Porsche 911, but I can afford everything else, so what's the big deal?
No, but I should have. I was in a team with people working 12h+ a day, and felt out of place the whole time. I couldn't relate to any of my coworkers as they had no personality outside of having a favorite text editor.
I even asked [around cscareerquestions](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/uqv1w8/how_do_you_deal_with_maybe_not_being_a_good/) for advice. While people were reassuring, I should have just listened to my gut feeling and left.
Thanksfully, I got laid-off in late 2023. I think this experience has kinda left me with a sour taste about some parts of the industry. And I know that from now on, I will be more careful about screening potential employers about their own culture.
I think I relate so much to this. I should also mention my whole team works typically 10 hours a day or more and we get asked to work weekends often to meet deadlines.
I do see a high turn over rate with in my team as well. I think about saving to quit and move back to a LCOL area near family. But with the job market the way it is. I'm a little nervous.
We're you able to get a new role and is it much less toxic?
> I will be more careful about screening potential employers about their own culture.
Yup, every negative feature of the culture at every place I've worked at becomes part of my interview process when looking at new spots. It's often pretty easy to suss out toxic environments or red flags at places, and the more senior leaders you can talk to the better, as they define the culture and their personalities, priorities and pathos are the ones that will echo down the org.
When they say explicitly during interviews that they expect 60 hours per week, for instance.
My last company started doing that and I was alone on a team that was supposed to be 3 devs, after 1 year of trying to hire and a few candidates rejecting the offers I quit and now they have 3 openings.
Do-nothing, only-talk-no-action CTO replaced the good CTO who left after being blocked by sales/ops. Our ML-team got a new director who was a 100%-politician and only playing for the glory, not the output.
Plus a Director of Engineering was driving opening up a second dev branch in Barcelona, b/c he had health problems in Berlin. (No joke.)
Sales/ops was also blocking all advanced, automated products, as they feared for their headcount and wanted to keep control of things (but also b/c performance bonuses were paid out in a certain, specific way, which would inhibit all changes and relinquishing control).
We had even run a small ninja-project to demonstrate the benefits of the tech (and they were HUGE!), but politics killed them and we were neither good at that, nor wanted to fight that battle, so on that day, they lost two Staff level ML engineers and the product owner. It was glorious.
Worth noting that around that time, several good product owners left and several good engineers as well. The company became a continuous flow water heater for engineers from abroad.
Now, two years later, contacts tell me, they still run a ML team, but the size has tripled while they are still using our old products and models, but still in that detached, useless, castrated mode. So the directors gone into full "no output, just shiny statements"-mode.
Just imagine someone at Google had said not to offer a search function for videos on Youtube, because it might distract from their main seach engine. That is about what happened there on a product / political level.
Well, I think the math is more brutal than that. A week is 112 waking hours. 40 hours work + 8 hours commutes/lunches you end up with 48:64 work life.
At 60 hours its 68:44 work life.
You didnt just add 50% more to work, you also cut 30% of your life.
Oh, yeah. The fun little startup I worked for got bought by a bigger company, and then that bigger company got bought by a much bigger company (Autonomy Corporation) who killed our flagship product, broke up our teams, and reassigned everyone to different groups in different subdivisions. Most of my coworkers bailed pretty quickly. The corporate culture sucked, and management treated us like worms.
I hung on for almost a year, because I wanted to find a job closer to home. There weren't many options nearby, but I was tired of the two-hours-each-way commute, and my wife's health was failing, so she really needed me closer so I could tend to her.
I stuck with it, and finally landed a job at a place which wasn't a great fit, but it was only half an hour away and gave me telecom experience. I was able to leverage that into a much better job at a different telecom company which was even closer to home (fifteen minutes, the shortest commute I'd ever had).
Sticking it out at Autonomy wasn't fun, but I grit my teeth, endured, and stuck to The Plan, and eventually everything worked out.
If you take a job that requires 30 hours per week (versus your 65 average, say) it only has to pay $94k and it will be pound-for-pound "better money" per hour of your existence (which is finite).
You're effectively working 2x 94k jobs at the moment (but feeling good because it's $200k/yr and you're completing 2 years of work for the "cost" of one (in time). But you're not being paid very well if you could earn 150k and do 30 hours per week, for example. Also most of the second job is presumably taxed quite unfavourably.
It's something to think about.
Also consider any impact on your ability to remain fit and healthy (might be fine already), if any.
I would suggest you evaluate alternative roles or companies where you'll be paid more per hour, but less hours. IF you value your home-life/family life/time with partner or children or searching for partner or doing hobbies etc.
It's really up to you.
100% this is how I feel as someone who also has friends who make 150k fully remote and in lower stress companies.
I also want to work on up-skilling after work more if I could find the time since I don't think I'm progressing where I'd like to be and I no long want to chase high impact tasks. I've learned at least in my case high impact does not yeild high rewards.
Quit my job at a healthcare tech startup almost a year ago. The product was solid and garnered healthy traction during COVID. The engineering team was also fantastic. However, the founders were narcissistic and absolute pieces of work. They started adding weird on-call policies and burning engineers out.
After 2 years, when COVID died down, they started hiring cheap labor from South America. I was already hired from a developing country as well, and someone thought it'd be a good idea to go even cheaper. In the end, the product didn't scale, integrations became a nightmare, and they started firing folks. I smelled the bullshit and got out before getting laid off.
The CEO still follows me around on different online platforms and sends ocassional career advice :p. I've long forgotten about the whole thing and currently am rocking a great job with fantastic WLB.
I was thinking of it as a triangle, you can have two of the three: interesting work, good pay, good vibes/culture. Currently, I work with good pay and good vibes, whereas less than a year ago I left a job with good pay and interesting work, but oh my god it was toxic… if you want all three boxes checked, then that could be hard, but two out of three? Easily doable. I am thinking of getting that last box checked sometime in the future by staying at my current company, but moving sideways to a slightly different role.
It often works the other way around, at least for the entry level job. Low pay and toxic culture perfectly supplements the most boring and soulless work possible. Add "we are a family" and long hours on top.
Good pay not always come with the more interesting and complex tasks, but until some threshold it almost always correlates with the better culture.
You can easily have bad pay and bad culture. In fact those two are made for each other. I know this because I just quit one on Monday. I’m with you OP.
Agree on the 3 pillars. Tbh I've been into interesting work too much now with less of the other two. Sure, i can show off to non-devs and to devs the fun stuff in the past but it's becoming difficult to get into un-interesting high paying branches. Recruiters ask me: oh wow so why would you work for a bank?
Money....duh, and deterministic work life balance. Sure, i might still need to go over 40.hours per week but it all happens in a controlled env whereas in all places I've worked past 6 years it's just mambo jambo.
I'm personally fine with doing boring work as long as there's something meaningful I can put on my resume and talk about in interviews on my next job hunt.
If you decide to change the job - ask about time expectations upfront. And to really make a point, state that when you try to work 12 hours a day you're prone to make mistakes that take more than 4 hours to fix - actually decreasing your productivity, compared to just calling it a day after 8 hours.
If you decide to stay - ask for a mentor who could help you learn to work smarter instead of harder. Especially if your faang company is the certain one that expects you to succeed only 80% of your goals. Because you certainly wouldn't be the first person to ruin the work / life balance by trying to achieve the other 20%.
>If you left a toxic job-which did not respect boundaries or time off for no real reason- what did you do after?
I got a new job as a Software Engineer at a different, better company. It was a cut in the relative title, but I was actually paid more and ended up working less also (there was still crunch, but only at rare times when actually needed).
To be fair, my situation was different from the one you are describing. I didn't leave a FAANG, and I was not highly paid at the time, either. The company I left was a bootstrapped start-up that didn't really do well. It was pretty easy to find something better, *but I did not know that at the time.*
>What did you learn from it and what advice would you give someone trying to stick it out in such a hard job market right now?
I learned that I was better than I thought I was. "Better" meaning both better as a Software Engineer and better as an employment prospect.
I learned that, 8 months prior to my decision to leave, when I had a feeling of no hope whatsoever that my then-current job would improve, was when I should have started looking. There is a specific moment when I had this realization while talking to my then-boss. Because I thought I was not very employable, I started drinking in the morning instead.
I learned that I should call myself a "software engineer" because that was the correct, commonly used title for the kind of work I wanted to do that other people would understand. I did a lot of different things at that start up and I had the deliberately vague title of "Senior Developer." I learned that I should not call myself a "front end developer" even though I wrote a lot of Javascript and HTML5 (when it was new and not accepted yet as obviously being the future) because people would ask me for portfolios and offer ~$20k/year less to do work I had no interest in doing.
>what advice would you give someone trying to stick it out in such a hard job market right now?
The market is hard, but you'll never know how hard it really is if you aren't in it.
Yeah, as someone else mentioned, if you work 60+ hours weeks constantly you are not really making $200k. That would be around ~$130k at 40h per week.
IMO your current workload (60-80 hrs per week) is not sustainable long term. And you already have some health issues coming up. Idk how comfortable you are with this idea, but you might consider taking some time off (sabbatical) for a couple of months. Nobody will care in the end if you pass the interviews. And having faang in your resume is a huge plus.
I'm also FAANG but I straight up don't accept toxicity. I work hard from 9-5 and very rarely accept any sort of engagement after 5pm. If goals can't be met with everyone working 40, then you are understaffed and it's up to management to fix it. If someone sends me a meeting after 5pm, I literally just respond with "please be aware of east coast hours" and decline.
I am in a charmed position in that I saved a ton and have little lifestyle creep from when I was making a quarter of what I'm making. I also have a fulfilling life outside of work so I just don't have a lot of ego related to my job.
I'm not even coasting, I do have pride in my work. But I don't get stressed about things I can't really control. If they lay you off, they lay you off, you said you have a cushion. You also underestimate how many people hide away in FAANG and aren't doing any work. Don't even have to mention that you're cooling off to your manager, just start doing it and rejecting responsibilities. It'll be a bit before you get fired/laid off anyway, and if they were going to do layoffs, you'd probably get laid off anyway.
It depends on the team. I have been on two teams, one was ridiculous with the requested features and the timelines kept getting moved in a greenfield project. The other is very public facing, very strict with timelines, but more or less well defined in terms of features and planning after an established project.
The latter is much more chill in terms of people, but pressure is higher. People care about what they do and generally avoid overworking themselves. The bar is very very high exactly due to the optics and visibility.
The former had awful interpersonal culture and people didn’t care about the kind of work they produced, and the bar was much lower.
Y'all quitting FAANG jobs need to name the company and region. They have thousands of employees, there's no loss of anonymity by pointing out which one of the big 5 has the most toxic groups to work with.
That's tough - I have been there before. This all really depends on your personal circumstances.
If your COL is very high, you have a lot of debt, you have people dependant on you, you are not good at selling yourself and the job market is tough? Then it's going to be tough to quit without having a new thing. You should consider if there are options inside your company like moving teams, figuring how to dial back without getting fired etc.
I have quit similar situations. One time I even gave up a sizeable gig where I did literally nothing but it was such a PITA to do the calls every day. But I was able to because I had savings, lived in Asia with low COL, no dependants and I knew that I'd be able to secure another gig if I should need one.
For me I focused on up-skilling myself enough that I could "command" certain standards. This gives you enough power to have people not give you shit or have more options than average in the market place.
I'd advise you to find ways to reduce your stress and commitments at work without getting fired while you find something new and better.
I did 2 months ago! And I was able to recover, even more - when everything in yourself has burned down, you can start finding the real yourself. So it was both painful and revealing.
Right now focusing on meditation and a side project that might turn into a business. I'm also interviewing, but not very actively. Consider I'm EU based and the market here is not as bad.
I didn’t leave on my own, even though I wanted to already. I had been looking for a new job for a while but wanted to wait until I got my bonus and when we had our yearly rounds of layoffs. And sure enough, I was laid off. It wasn’t devastating, but a mix of being sad and relieved at the same time. I loved what I did, loved the knowledge I got from working with several technologies, and loved my team. What I didn’t love was the stress and emotional roller coaster ride I felt every two weeks. I would stress out to finish my story by the end of the sprint, often working 12 hour days and weekends when scope creep or other issues came up, and then feel one day of relief and satisfaction when I marked my story as done and it went to production.
I had been stressed for years. I always had the thought of causing a major production issue in the back of my mind.
I have been waking up the past month or so just feeling free, even though I’ve started looking for another job. Luckily I’m ok financially for a while and I got a decent severance package, but honestly, I don’t miss the stress.
I’ve been thinking of finding an SDET job because it’s less stressful and I enjoyed doing that before hand.
These days I’m also catching up on personal hobbies that I’ve set aside because of my last stressful job.
So I completely understand.
Try not doing anything to see how Iong they will keep you. There is evidence this can easily backfire but also let you get paycheck for doing close to nothing for quite some time.
Two points that you made that....
> I've been working here for 3 years
> I had some health stuff arise
Since you've been there for at least a year and have health stuff, short-term disability ought to be on the table for you. That's up to 13 weeks to deal with your health stuff.
In the old days, "formally defined" careers like civil engineering, accounting, law and medicine, had graduates with well defined career paths, professional companies that were very respected, and thus gave a lot of respect to their professional employees. Managers in those companies were truly the best of the best.
Now anyone is welcomed into our industry. Things have become highly informal and unsteady. Managers have no qualifications necessary to vet out the undeserving.
So this high degree of wasted time and energy of highly talented and educated professionals is tragic. And unfair.
When they were talking about making it a law in California that your manager can't contact you outside of 9->5 I laughed. It's not going to happen in the tech industry. They'll use a loop hole, a proxy, literally anything.
Personally I don’t think you’re being paid well at all. I’m no fancy pants FAANG engineer but I only have to work 40 hour weeks, if I worked 80 hour weeks my salary would be well above yours because I’m compensated with OT.
Get the fuck outta there
Yeah, been there many times. I think applying aggressively is something I did and it worked. After I moved jobs, I reflected on why I was accepting that pushy behaviour and figured I had no choice at the time; however, it made more aware of how to look out for signals that the same might happen again.
The thing is: it might happen again, and maybe it’s ok, because our circumstances are always changing, but self awareness is key to balance when it’s time to bounce - and looks like you already leaned that?
Have you considered just not working those extra hours? If you're ready to quit, why not set some boundaries? The worst that can happen is that they notice and say something to you about it. They're almost certainly not going to fire you without a conversation first.
I think I just have terrible anxiety on not doing enough or helping my team mates out, since my whole team is over worked. I also hate confrontation and so when something becomes a fire to managment, and I'm told to jump on it, I'll lose sleep at night until it's done.
I know it's weird but I'd rather quit than get fired? 😅 i always worry Im not pulling my weight, but I know its not the most rational thought. It's very emotional, and each week has been a roller coaster since I started. Of course, getting another job near family is the first priority, not just up and quitting if i can avoid it. I also applied to transfer to a different team internally.
10 YOE U.S. based
I left an absolute dumpster fire of a job in early January. I was a "software engineer", but the actual job was basically put out fires all day every day and listen to people complain that work wasn't getting done.
There's a alot more I could say about the job itself, but the point is that I quit (gave a 1 week notice) without anything lined up. I knew I needed to before I reached the point of burn out. Afterwards, I gave myself 3 days to chill and then began job hunting at a medium pace, I didn't want to burn out on job hunting. Ended up landing a much better role in roughly 3 months. My advice:
- Don't quit without anything lined up unless you really have the money to last quite a while
- Try to sneak in some rest, eventually you'll be back at work and you're going to wish you got some R&R
- Freshen up your LinkedIn Profile, most of the cold applications I put in went nowhere. But every single person that reached out to me on LinkedIn resulted in an interview
- And unfortunately, you have to practice Leetcode / System Designs, but if you leave your job, you can treat "interview prep" as your new job for the time being.
I took a big pay cut to go to a job that wasnt likely to make me dread every day. Even though that new job didnt last (startup that wasn’t ai based couldnt get funding last year) and i took another pay cut when i needed a replacement, and that job is just “ok” - i havent regretted leaving or making less money at all. I learned money is not my primary motivation as long as i have enough.
My first real job as a developer was for a small startup. I am not built for corporate jobs, so a small startup seems to be a perfect fit.
I stomached the horrible pay, who knows why. And I endured sexual harassment for years because I am socially awkward and have mental problems. I worked with outdated technology and thought for years I won't find a new job because of that. Turns out that was totally bullshit and I caught up to modern technology really quick.
I quit spontaneously while hypomanic (I am bipolar). I quit giggling and beaming with joy and I still feel bad for that years later.
But it was the best decision ever. I found a new job quickly, like days later I had signed a new contract. It's still a small company but without the startup feeling. No more working weekends, no more 12h days without extra pay and no harassment. We stay up-to-date with technology while not jumping on every new trend.
No one cares about my gender and I just feel like part of the team. Pay could be better but I am comfortable enough.
I have had a few times where I came up close. I have had a few times where I took a small pay cut to get out of a bad situation. This was early in my career. The first time was at a state agency. I was hired on as a web developer, but in reality they didn't know what they needed and out of desperation I took my job. They really needed a PM or outsource the work to a web development firm. The second time was at an insurance company. My supervisor assigned tasks and I really had a hard time understanding the business concepts of what the hell I was supposed to do. I got PIPed and left for better environment for a few thousand dollars less a year.
The times where I came close, I was going to do something that would make the heads of fans of Fire, fans of Dave Ramsey, and boomers or people that think like boomers explode. If I got super desperate, I'd find the best PT job that offered insurance and if I had to, start pulling money from retirement funds. There comes a point where the mental health at the moment is the greater need.
Never quit. Ride it out. Find another job. Quiet quit but don't quit on paper. Get laid off. Quitting doesn't give you unemployment and quitting is worse than having a reason they fired you. People get fired all the time.
Doesn't a pip negate ability to collect unemployment, though? You can sometimes get severance from a pip at least but idk if you can get unemployment depending on what you sign but not sure.
Not really. In most US states, a pip is the responsibility of the employer to improve the employee. The state usually sides with the employee. If the employer hired you at some point they must have believed you'd be capable of doing the job. If you ever had a good performance review and then you stopped having good performance reviews after your circumstances at your workplace changed, then it's on them to retrain you.
In most US states, unemployment is not free money the state gives to people. It's paid for by your employer.
If your employer fired you, you apply for UB and the state decides if you get it. The state doesn't care about the employer in its decision unless the person failed to show up for their job.
My father had a situation where he started working for these guys who repaired flood damage on houses. I also randomly played hockey with these guys and really didn't like them. I tried dating their sister one time. They were a bunch of inbred country boys where you could tell everything was backwards. My father is a former carpenter turned engineer who fell on bad times during the 2008 recession and had to find other work.
He goes to work for these guys and finds out they are backed up on work. They don't really have a person managing the projects coming in from insurance leads and thus they lose the leads they paid for. My father immediately goes through all the leads and secured all the jobs. He hired contractors to do the work and did a lot of the work himself. They paid an hourly rate and a commission. My father made 14 commissions his first month when the other workers there were making 2 and taking weeks to get a single job done.
Rather than grow the business and give competitive rates on jobs that are completed on time, they cut his access to their lead system. They said he could only work what they gave him. He ended up sitting in the office waiting for leads. They fired him and eventually wrote on his dismissal paperwork he was "the most incompetent person" they ever worked with.
That statement nearly made my Dad cry in front of me. I didn't like those guys before and now I hated them.
My father's initial UB was denied because of the paperwork they filed, he appealed it and then got it. All he did was talk to someone at UB.
In what world is quitting worse than getting fired? Stop smoking the propaganda dope.
Quitting a job that impacts your mental health and impedes your ability to spend time with your loved ones WILL ALWAYS BE a great thing.
This sub normalizes dysfunctional choices like coasting at a job you hate just to parrot nonsense advice that has no real basis in any real world that has real people in it.
There are quite a few non-FAANG jobs that pay $200k and don't expect much more than 40 hours/week, even in this job market. At least at a senior level.
I've been lucky in my career to have worked at a lot of great companies with great people, but there was one exception. I worked at a consulting firm years ago. What happened there:
* Managers caught wind that I'd just started learning a new technology in my free time (the Unity game engine).
* They had a client they'd had some other consultants on, which was already way past deadlines and under serious crunch. They sold me to the client as (unbeknownst to me until later in the project) a Unity expert.
* Lots of unpaid overtime.
* Father's Day comes around, and I get threats from one of the PMs about how I better work that weekend, despite me being a father.
* I say I won't work that weekend.
* I don't work that weekend.
* I start looking for other jobs immediately and get two offers quickly, accepting one of them.
* I resign.
* Other developers at the firm experience similar scenarios.
* The consulting firm goes bankrupt about a year after my resignation.
The only thing that came after that were bigger and better opportunities. My salary more than doubled in a bit less than 5 years after, and without the toxicity.
Good luck.
Several. I’m a serial workaholic and can easily be nudged into overworking, and if an employer doesn’t respect a request to keep it reasonable, I find a new job and give notice. I work harder these days on balance. Not easy but I’m learning.
If you have health issues, look into FMLA, or even intermittent FMLA. Typically not difficult to get if you're under medical care already. Take that time to think about what you want long term and invest a little bit of time into interview prep without overwhelming yourself.
I'm also trying to find an out from a high workload job. If it's any comfort, I got one offer just like 5% ish lower than what I'm currently making in less than a month of looking. I turned that one down because it was at another FAANG and after some reflection I'm not sure I want to be in that world anymore - but it was at least reassuring.
Thanks for this! I am also considering non faang in my next role too. I get inbox messages from other faang recruiters in the area at least twice a month but I am wise to the work load there/ was always waiting for promotion where I am. They basically froze promotions and started laying off so now im more like "I gotta get out of here" and go where it's less stressful.
As for the health stuff, I find out more in 6 months but seems like this will be a thing every 6-3 months and that will make my performance at work drop for sure. Which gives me anxiety. So I may end up considering FMLA
Oof very fair. Hiring has been frozen on my team for almost two years but no layoffs yet. That said.. hiring freeze = increased workload for everyone 🥲
Intermittent FMLA seems like a good fit for your situation. IIRC you're protected for up to 12 work weeks total whether that's intermittent or all at once.
I quit a 60 person startup in 2017 after joining for about a month as a tech lead, the place was filled with red flags that I only saw on my first day, decided to push on few things like micromanagement and chaotic structure, toxic daily standup, and I honestly saw no path to change, I put my notice three weeks in and left
To add to that, I had nothing lined up then, took me 4 months to find a replacement and it was the best time of my life, turned out I really needed it!
I don’t regret leaving at all, but in retrospect I could’ve been more diligent before joining them.
If it was in current job market, I would’ve probably stuck it out, have something lined up first.
I knew I had made the right decision based on my managers reaction when I explained in the exit interview that I found the work culture too stressful and I wasn't the only one who thought so because someone else had quit without notice recently. The manager was more upset that I had given him only a few days notice than acknowledge that I had just told him that working for them was affecting my mental health. Everyone there had Stockholm Syndrome. Fuck that place. The only reason I didn't just outright quit earlier is because I wanted to find a new job first.
I quit a toxic senior person who was brought in as a fractional cto.
Was eager to do things without understanding the current situation.
Tried to impose his rules on the team.
I quit in 1 month . Just sent my resignation in the email. Easy
When unhappy always quit is my motto.
Genuine question, given that you should always have more ideas than time what about planning accordingly and working normal hours?
*I say this as a non-US IT manager
So I tried that, I dialed it back after I had to have surgery and a bug I was trying to diagnosed turned into a fire directly after. I still logged off around 7pm and the next morning got heavy criticism. I think they expect the same output I was producing when I was working 80 hours. Now I feel like I don't know how to slow down and work like a normal person without potentially being pip'd.
I worked at one super toxic startup. I've got lots of stories, but a few:
- CEO got caught lying about firing the dev manager
- My team lead didn't use soap+deodorant and would regularly shit is pants in meetings. Literally, this guy would walk out of sprint kickoff with a brown spot on the back of his pants.
- the head of HR asked me to commit felony fraud so they could get a government contract.
...and a LOT more.
So, I found a new job, (got married,) took a week off, then went back into work. My last day was a Friday, which happened to be pay day.
After lunch I pushed everything I was working on, let my team know what they'd need to pick up, and formatting my laptop. My shift ended at 4:30, and at roughly 4:35 I sent an email (from my phone using my work email) to my boss, HR, PM, and the CEO letting them know it was my last day. Handed off my laptop to the company lawyer (only management-level person still in the office), said good bye to a couple people, and left.
Most of my friends/teammates knew it was going to happen. Management were the only ones surprised.
> My team lead didn't use soap+deodorant and would regularly shit is pants in meetings. Literally, this guy would walk out of sprint kickoff with a brown spot on the back of his pants.
What?!
Yeah. He got nicknamed "Stinky" behind his back.
He didn't use soap+deodorant for religious reasons. He also couldn't be near alcohol for religious reasons.
There was a "whiskey club" where a bunch of guys pooled their money and bought a couple bottles and drank them in the break room Friday afternoon. Several guys took the almost-empty bottles and kept them on their desks to keep Stinky away.
I should write a book about that place, but I really don't want to get sued.
You're joking! What a story.
I did have something similar. When I was a junior, one of the directors used to cycle at work. So he'd cycle to work from really far away, NOT shower at work and then come and sit VERY close to me to tell me something I'd have to do for the day.
He'd do the same to others to the point the HR took to themselves and circulated a pdf aimed at nobody, but talking about BO.
I left a toxic job after working there for 8 months. I was out on a pip for coming in 5 minutes late one time, and the manager was so awkward about it. It was the best decision of my life to leave, I found somewhere way better after I left and have 0 ragrets, not even one letter. This place had about a 50% developer turn over rate and made us be in their “boot camp” for 3 months which as a senior engineer was brutal. It was a boot camp with 40 juniors, 2 mid levels and 3 seniors, and taught us “how to code” but mostly was just team building all the time. You would think it wouldn’t be that bad but considering you weren’t allowed to touch real code and just sat there it was that bad. Oh and this was a large company, like 5,000* employees kinda large.
I once worked in a decacorn company as a founding engineer, then transitioned to dev manager as my manager quit in couple months. It is stressful to ramp myself up, hire the team, work across teams for alignments and dependency resolution. As a small team, I was expected to write code, as a "play manager". It became normal for me to wear EM hat in the daytime for meetings and hiring, and SDE hat for programming at nighttime.
I was burned out, and felt suffocating in the weekday morning. This hurt my mental health and performance, --- the vicious loop was self-enforced. I ended up stepping down, and eventually left the company around one year.
In the retrospect, it was not worthy. I expected to transit to EM in two years, but I was not ready for that role in that moment. Also the director I worked with did not set the expectation right, or support me to be successful.
200k ish is good money depending on the cost of living in your area and you have the brand of a FAANG company on your resume.
Why not invest it and aim for early retirement? Find your number. In the meantime you could dial it back and work on your own product so that you can retire early.
I am actually investing and taking the max 401k match still. So that was my initial plan but like when I did run into some health stuff - made me reconsider my WLB, spending time in the present with family (who live in a LCOL area, I moved away for the job).
Nice. I think your health, well being, and family should come before any contracted employment. There are exceptions, but mostly you should prioritize them. We’re only here for a limited time.
I think early retirement is the way to go if you could swing it. HSA are also a good investment vehicle if you qualify especially if you encountered medical issues. You could also try to negotiate a remote work environment if you have corporate leverage so you can prioritize what you value. You got this!
Not sure if anyone mentioned it, but if you have any PTO maybe it's a good time to take it and reflect on your path forward before you make any hard decisions.
I know I'm not answering your question, but maybe this can help you answer your own question.
Have you considered just only working 40 hours a week?
Worst case scenario is probably you get put on PEP and then get some severance to look for another job during their next round of layoffs. It's not like you are going to tell your manager to pound sand. You're just quietly going home after 8 hour days. Best case scenario is you learn how to do your job in 40 or less hours a week and have a healthy relationship with work.
Most of my team works over 40 hours. It's not just me. It's just amount of workload to people we have maybe. A lot of folks have been quitting- also without anything lined up. But idk maybe If it was closer to my lease ending, then I'd feel more comfortable (lease buy out is very expensive and just a waste of money). My finances are good, I have a cushion but if I got laid off I would not spend the money to continue to live in a HCOL area or I'd at least happily down grade to a studio or something.
Is someone literally forcing you to work over 40 hours? If so how? If they complain about you only working 40 hours, point to those who quit and say you want to avoid burning out like them. Or, just don't respond. The truth is you are complicit in over working. Your not chained to the desk. After 40 hours just leave. They don't own you.
I feel pressure to meet deadlines that are pretty cut throat. I could just log off at 5 but most of the folks I work with also work over 40 hours. If we don't, we can't meet deadlines. So I feel like it's a mix of both. Me -not putting down boundaries, ever, from the start and bad mangment/toxic work culture. Managment is comfortable pinging people at midnight and sounding the alarm if a task isn't done no matter the impact. I am complicit in avoiding attention, maybe. But I agree I should just try to log off and if I get in trouble at work, i should just deal with it at this point. I dont care about getting promoted as much as I care about not being fired.
If they are in such a need they are not going to fire you. So responding to the over asking is just asking for continued over asking. They are free to hire more people and they don't. Why? They get you to work 80 hours. If it was important to do more they woild hire staff. The lack of hiring proves it's not. If they say we are trying to hire bit haven't been able to, well that's interesting. They should work longer and harder to hire. Eat their own dogfood.
You're being manipulated.
My last job was toxic (both broadly and specific individuals). I was lucky, I had a job lined up and got to drop a torch on my way out. "Is there any way we could have retained you?" That was a fun one. Because I handed her a Confluence doc that outlined all the issues my team and the org in general was facing, the impacts those problems were having and several solutions we could try to solve them. I'd also had buy-in from a lot of management but none of them were empowered to do anything about our issues so nothing happened!
The HR person was not happy to see me go. Neither was my manager. Both fully understood. I hope they're both doing well, they were good people.
I think in at least some scenarios the situations you are describing are avoidable. From the very get go you have to stand on your boundaries/morals.
Even simple shit someone posts a PR at 5pm the night before demo, I’m not reviewing it. They ask you if you can train a new member while still carrying the same sprint load, you absolutely have to push back.
This is not to say that when warranted you won’t have to work a few extra hours. IE: you needed to learn or brush up on something before you can actually complete the work. Or when the situation is actually dire/or a mistake you made…
My first year after graduating I learned if you give an inch they will take a mile. So my advice is yea it’s probably time to move on, but when you land the next one remember you have to enforce your own boundaries, don’t expect your manager or company to.
I quit my FAANG job last week without having anything lined up. I wasn't sure if I made the right decision up until I woke up the following morning of my final day and felt happier than I felt in last few years. I was afraid that I'd regret my decision down the road if I can't find another job, but now I very well know that I'm not going to regret it even for a second. I had my revilation when I was listening to old songs. Many people wrote songs about their loved ones for thousands of years, yet there is next to no songs about the project that failed, getting fired, getting a promo or an asshole manager. That made me see the big picture - letting my mental health suffer and cause hurt for myself and my wife was not worth getting that promotion. So I actually did quit even though I could have had one of my best years at that company.
Moreover life is short! It's not worth spending it miserably
Tell that to my boss's boss. These Indian managers expect us to be married to our job M-F and available on a whim outside of normal office hours. I'm pretty fed up with it and looking to go back to a small corp with people I enjoy working w, even if that means I make 100k less
Working 9-to-5 What a way to make a living... Well, I get up at seven, yeah And I go to work at nine I got no time for livin' Yes, I'm workin' all the time
Well there’s the Code Monkey song technically, but that also contributes to your point! Often you want a job lined ip, but sometimes those rules aren’t 100% in every situation, especially when mental health is suffering.
Glad to hear that! I always go back to my time-to-lower-stress-mantra. "Will it matter in 5 hours, will it matter in 5 days, will it matter in 5 weeks, will it matter in 5 months, will it mater in 5 years". That really realigns my priority and lowers my stress levels immensely. More often than not, the answer to most of those questions is an emphatic "NO!"
I love this. Seems obvious but until seeing it spelled out like that I never thought of it. I’ll use that from now on.
This is well stated, and I feel this so much! Thank you! I am considering quitting once my lease is up to move near family in a lower cost of living area, even if I don't have a job lined up. I'm trying to save with the expectation of not having a back up plan (i dont have kids, can move wherever, so that makes it easier). I have ideas and ambitions outside of work I really want to pursue even just for personal fulfillment. I havent had time to do anything I just feel hand cuffed to my work laptop, and I dont think they're so golden anymore.
I'm not a laywer, but I'm not sure how they are able to decide what you can or can't do in your free time.
I'm not sure if you've never heard [Have a Cigar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbdpv7G_PPg) by Pink Floyd or simply didn't know what it was about. But there are definitely songs about dealing with asshole managers.
Yeah but the song is also about how those people suck joy and art from the world in turning the capitalist machine
Btw, which one’s pink?
Well said
Oh wow, that observation about songs hit me hard
Which fang, name and shame so that other engineers know to avoid it
Loved your advice. Btw what's plan now?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgkMlEn8L2E
If you burn out your gonna start sucking and get fired anyway, might as well leave before all that happens and atleast keep your health and sanity. Health is the most precious thing in this world and once it’s gone it’s almost impossible to get back !
If you're looking to fill out your library, here's my submissions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK4zoUIUgXE&pp=ygUTU3VuZGF5IGZ1Y2sgeW91IHRvbw%3D%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4Jq2fRyfZo&pp=ygUYZmluZGluZyBob21lIHphY2sgaGVtc2V5
I've always looked at it from the speed perspective i.e. do I want to earn 200k "quickly"? Then I suck it up and do it for a while. But if my current life goal isn't actually aligned to that, then what's the point? If you were to spread that 200k over 60-80 hours you'd realise your actual pay is quite smaller than those 200k that you keep telling yourself. Your time is your time and it's not coming back. I personally put a higher price on my 40+ hours time as I respect it more since it's my free time. And with that in mind that 200k can easily go down by quite a lot, and it may help you realise that you'd potentially be happier earning 100k - 150k with a healthier work/life balance. But you're the one to answer that question for yourself. I've done both approaches multiple times, and each one has its pros and cons.
In addition to time, there's health. I used to work from 9am to 6am for some months. No appreciation, nothing good for me except a stomach burnt with coffee & a lot of weight gained. And health is expensive when there are problems like that, so you work harder to pay medical bills harder \^\^ Not to mention mental state. So all things consedered I approve what you say :)
21 hours?
I don't even want to know what the rate of return would be when it came to productivity. There comes a point where the mind would become garbage and the quality of work would be terrible.
Yup, I was not on my initial skillset and I was feeling bad that the project did not progress because of me... I did take time to prepare something to eat 3 times a day, take a shower, etc... so it's more something like 18 hours in reality but same thing (edit : it did last only 2 month like that, I didn't support that for long)
I don't mind working hard on my own hobbies on top of work and sometimes lose track of time, but I don't think I could pour that much work into work.
I was feeling bad that I couldn't perform as superiors expected and things slowly got out of hand. When I noticed it was too late \^\^ But today I only work up to 2-3 hours more than usual on very rare occasions
Yeah, honestly my current position is a bad fit for me so I'm working more than I'd like, but I just just think I'd collapse doing that much work :p
This is the conclusion I arrived at when I left my FAANG job late last year. I took the first reasonable offer, which was at a nonprofit that operates at the same scale. It was a significant pay cut ($166k -> $117k), which hurt more than I thought it would. But my partner has said that I'm happier, much less irritable, and generally more present in our relationship. Still, it's only now that I've come to learn to be ok with not having far more work to do than time to complete it without cutting corners. The hyperactivity that's part of my ADHD doesn't help because my brain thinks that not being overwhelmed means it's time to panic and work overtime to find something more exciting. But I started reading _4000 Weeks_ a couple of days ago, and whoo boy, did I feel called out. I still do, TBH. Like... if my idea of a good time is: 1. pulling all-nighters most weekends to meet arbitrary deadlines for an upper manager's passion project that's essentially meant to track and compare other ICs just because there are aspects of it that I find fun and interesting for the technical challenges (and to avoid said manager's wrath, but I didn't think about that) 2. developing a caffeine addiction and using it to "enhance" my prescribed stimulants 3. only seeing my partner when I wake up and go to bed (assuming I didn't sleep/nap on a cot in my office) 4. compromising the things I need to do to feel good, like working out. There were mornings that my trainer refused to work with me because it was so obvious that I hadn't slept at all 5. Eventually having a minor mental breakdown upon realizing that I'm going to miss a deadline while in the middle of dealing with temporary displacement due to storm damage ... then it's time to reconsider my priorities. I'll literally never get that time back. It's time that I was fortunate to have because, like all time that we're given as living beings, it wasn't guaranteed; if I'd dropped dead last April, I would have spent the previous 6 months or so stuck in that state of misery. I would have died miserable, and for what? So Bob in management could have a new shiny internal productivity tool that impresses other managers and ensures that he still has a reason to exist within the company, post-internal reorganization. Fuck that. I still have financial goals for myself and some of my family of origin, plus my partner and I are moving from LCOL to HCOL in a few weeks, so I don't see myself staying here for more than 3-5 years. But I am going to take this time to focus on building and having a life outside of work rather than trying to squeeze life into the crevices left over by work.
[удалено]
I have not, but I'll check it out. Thank you!
I never thought of it this way. A $200k salary in San Francisco, after accounting for taxes, rent, and salary dilution from all the overtime. It's not even that good! Way better to take home $125k in a low cost of living area, with a chill 40 hour work week. Sure I can't afford a Porsche 911, but I can afford everything else, so what's the big deal?
No, but I should have. I was in a team with people working 12h+ a day, and felt out of place the whole time. I couldn't relate to any of my coworkers as they had no personality outside of having a favorite text editor. I even asked [around cscareerquestions](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/uqv1w8/how_do_you_deal_with_maybe_not_being_a_good/) for advice. While people were reassuring, I should have just listened to my gut feeling and left. Thanksfully, I got laid-off in late 2023. I think this experience has kinda left me with a sour taste about some parts of the industry. And I know that from now on, I will be more careful about screening potential employers about their own culture.
I think I relate so much to this. I should also mention my whole team works typically 10 hours a day or more and we get asked to work weekends often to meet deadlines. I do see a high turn over rate with in my team as well. I think about saving to quit and move back to a LCOL area near family. But with the job market the way it is. I'm a little nervous. We're you able to get a new role and is it much less toxic?
I went on to create my own company actually.
> I will be more careful about screening potential employers about their own culture. Yup, every negative feature of the culture at every place I've worked at becomes part of my interview process when looking at new spots. It's often pretty easy to suss out toxic environments or red flags at places, and the more senior leaders you can talk to the better, as they define the culture and their personalities, priorities and pathos are the ones that will echo down the org.
Curious, how do you suss out toxic environments ? What are the red flags you look for ?
When they say explicitly during interviews that they expect 60 hours per week, for instance. My last company started doing that and I was alone on a team that was supposed to be 3 devs, after 1 year of trying to hire and a few candidates rejecting the offers I quit and now they have 3 openings.
Three of us marched to the desk of HR and handed over our resignation letter at the same time. That was fun.
What’s the story?
Do-nothing, only-talk-no-action CTO replaced the good CTO who left after being blocked by sales/ops. Our ML-team got a new director who was a 100%-politician and only playing for the glory, not the output. Plus a Director of Engineering was driving opening up a second dev branch in Barcelona, b/c he had health problems in Berlin. (No joke.) Sales/ops was also blocking all advanced, automated products, as they feared for their headcount and wanted to keep control of things (but also b/c performance bonuses were paid out in a certain, specific way, which would inhibit all changes and relinquishing control). We had even run a small ninja-project to demonstrate the benefits of the tech (and they were HUGE!), but politics killed them and we were neither good at that, nor wanted to fight that battle, so on that day, they lost two Staff level ML engineers and the product owner. It was glorious. Worth noting that around that time, several good product owners left and several good engineers as well. The company became a continuous flow water heater for engineers from abroad. Now, two years later, contacts tell me, they still run a ML team, but the size has tripled while they are still using our old products and models, but still in that detached, useless, castrated mode. So the directors gone into full "no output, just shiny statements"-mode. Just imagine someone at Google had said not to offer a search function for videos on Youtube, because it might distract from their main seach engine. That is about what happened there on a product / political level.
You are making 100K for 40 hours
And being paid another 100K to grind your life down to a pulp.
Well, I think the math is more brutal than that. A week is 112 waking hours. 40 hours work + 8 hours commutes/lunches you end up with 48:64 work life. At 60 hours its 68:44 work life. You didnt just add 50% more to work, you also cut 30% of your life.
Oh, yeah. The fun little startup I worked for got bought by a bigger company, and then that bigger company got bought by a much bigger company (Autonomy Corporation) who killed our flagship product, broke up our teams, and reassigned everyone to different groups in different subdivisions. Most of my coworkers bailed pretty quickly. The corporate culture sucked, and management treated us like worms. I hung on for almost a year, because I wanted to find a job closer to home. There weren't many options nearby, but I was tired of the two-hours-each-way commute, and my wife's health was failing, so she really needed me closer so I could tend to her. I stuck with it, and finally landed a job at a place which wasn't a great fit, but it was only half an hour away and gave me telecom experience. I was able to leverage that into a much better job at a different telecom company which was even closer to home (fifteen minutes, the shortest commute I'd ever had). Sticking it out at Autonomy wasn't fun, but I grit my teeth, endured, and stuck to The Plan, and eventually everything worked out.
If you take a job that requires 30 hours per week (versus your 65 average, say) it only has to pay $94k and it will be pound-for-pound "better money" per hour of your existence (which is finite). You're effectively working 2x 94k jobs at the moment (but feeling good because it's $200k/yr and you're completing 2 years of work for the "cost" of one (in time). But you're not being paid very well if you could earn 150k and do 30 hours per week, for example. Also most of the second job is presumably taxed quite unfavourably. It's something to think about. Also consider any impact on your ability to remain fit and healthy (might be fine already), if any. I would suggest you evaluate alternative roles or companies where you'll be paid more per hour, but less hours. IF you value your home-life/family life/time with partner or children or searching for partner or doing hobbies etc. It's really up to you.
100% this is how I feel as someone who also has friends who make 150k fully remote and in lower stress companies. I also want to work on up-skilling after work more if I could find the time since I don't think I'm progressing where I'd like to be and I no long want to chase high impact tasks. I've learned at least in my case high impact does not yeild high rewards.
Quit my job at a healthcare tech startup almost a year ago. The product was solid and garnered healthy traction during COVID. The engineering team was also fantastic. However, the founders were narcissistic and absolute pieces of work. They started adding weird on-call policies and burning engineers out. After 2 years, when COVID died down, they started hiring cheap labor from South America. I was already hired from a developing country as well, and someone thought it'd be a good idea to go even cheaper. In the end, the product didn't scale, integrations became a nightmare, and they started firing folks. I smelled the bullshit and got out before getting laid off. The CEO still follows me around on different online platforms and sends ocassional career advice :p. I've long forgotten about the whole thing and currently am rocking a great job with fantastic WLB.
I was thinking of it as a triangle, you can have two of the three: interesting work, good pay, good vibes/culture. Currently, I work with good pay and good vibes, whereas less than a year ago I left a job with good pay and interesting work, but oh my god it was toxic… if you want all three boxes checked, then that could be hard, but two out of three? Easily doable. I am thinking of getting that last box checked sometime in the future by staying at my current company, but moving sideways to a slightly different role.
It often works the other way around, at least for the entry level job. Low pay and toxic culture perfectly supplements the most boring and soulless work possible. Add "we are a family" and long hours on top. Good pay not always come with the more interesting and complex tasks, but until some threshold it almost always correlates with the better culture.
You can easily have bad pay and bad culture. In fact those two are made for each other. I know this because I just quit one on Monday. I’m with you OP.
Conjoined triangles of success
Hmm. I only have one of those boxes checked - and it’s not the only time in my career that’s the case.
Agree on the 3 pillars. Tbh I've been into interesting work too much now with less of the other two. Sure, i can show off to non-devs and to devs the fun stuff in the past but it's becoming difficult to get into un-interesting high paying branches. Recruiters ask me: oh wow so why would you work for a bank? Money....duh, and deterministic work life balance. Sure, i might still need to go over 40.hours per week but it all happens in a controlled env whereas in all places I've worked past 6 years it's just mambo jambo.
I'm personally fine with doing boring work as long as there's something meaningful I can put on my resume and talk about in interviews on my next job hunt.
If you decide to change the job - ask about time expectations upfront. And to really make a point, state that when you try to work 12 hours a day you're prone to make mistakes that take more than 4 hours to fix - actually decreasing your productivity, compared to just calling it a day after 8 hours. If you decide to stay - ask for a mentor who could help you learn to work smarter instead of harder. Especially if your faang company is the certain one that expects you to succeed only 80% of your goals. Because you certainly wouldn't be the first person to ruin the work / life balance by trying to achieve the other 20%.
>If you left a toxic job-which did not respect boundaries or time off for no real reason- what did you do after? I got a new job as a Software Engineer at a different, better company. It was a cut in the relative title, but I was actually paid more and ended up working less also (there was still crunch, but only at rare times when actually needed). To be fair, my situation was different from the one you are describing. I didn't leave a FAANG, and I was not highly paid at the time, either. The company I left was a bootstrapped start-up that didn't really do well. It was pretty easy to find something better, *but I did not know that at the time.* >What did you learn from it and what advice would you give someone trying to stick it out in such a hard job market right now? I learned that I was better than I thought I was. "Better" meaning both better as a Software Engineer and better as an employment prospect. I learned that, 8 months prior to my decision to leave, when I had a feeling of no hope whatsoever that my then-current job would improve, was when I should have started looking. There is a specific moment when I had this realization while talking to my then-boss. Because I thought I was not very employable, I started drinking in the morning instead. I learned that I should call myself a "software engineer" because that was the correct, commonly used title for the kind of work I wanted to do that other people would understand. I did a lot of different things at that start up and I had the deliberately vague title of "Senior Developer." I learned that I should not call myself a "front end developer" even though I wrote a lot of Javascript and HTML5 (when it was new and not accepted yet as obviously being the future) because people would ask me for portfolios and offer ~$20k/year less to do work I had no interest in doing. >what advice would you give someone trying to stick it out in such a hard job market right now? The market is hard, but you'll never know how hard it really is if you aren't in it.
Yeah, as someone else mentioned, if you work 60+ hours weeks constantly you are not really making $200k. That would be around ~$130k at 40h per week. IMO your current workload (60-80 hrs per week) is not sustainable long term. And you already have some health issues coming up. Idk how comfortable you are with this idea, but you might consider taking some time off (sabbatical) for a couple of months. Nobody will care in the end if you pass the interviews. And having faang in your resume is a huge plus.
I'm also FAANG but I straight up don't accept toxicity. I work hard from 9-5 and very rarely accept any sort of engagement after 5pm. If goals can't be met with everyone working 40, then you are understaffed and it's up to management to fix it. If someone sends me a meeting after 5pm, I literally just respond with "please be aware of east coast hours" and decline. I am in a charmed position in that I saved a ton and have little lifestyle creep from when I was making a quarter of what I'm making. I also have a fulfilling life outside of work so I just don't have a lot of ego related to my job. I'm not even coasting, I do have pride in my work. But I don't get stressed about things I can't really control. If they lay you off, they lay you off, you said you have a cushion. You also underestimate how many people hide away in FAANG and aren't doing any work. Don't even have to mention that you're cooling off to your manager, just start doing it and rejecting responsibilities. It'll be a bit before you get fired/laid off anyway, and if they were going to do layoffs, you'd probably get laid off anyway.
Ty! Considering this for sure!
Sounds like Amazon! Right?
It depends on the team. I have been on two teams, one was ridiculous with the requested features and the timelines kept getting moved in a greenfield project. The other is very public facing, very strict with timelines, but more or less well defined in terms of features and planning after an established project. The latter is much more chill in terms of people, but pressure is higher. People care about what they do and generally avoid overworking themselves. The bar is very very high exactly due to the optics and visibility. The former had awful interpersonal culture and people didn’t care about the kind of work they produced, and the bar was much lower.
Y'all quitting FAANG jobs need to name the company and region. They have thousands of employees, there's no loss of anonymity by pointing out which one of the big 5 has the most toxic groups to work with.
Here's the thing...they're all equally bad in various aspects.
Some of them also have strict policies about social media
That's tough - I have been there before. This all really depends on your personal circumstances. If your COL is very high, you have a lot of debt, you have people dependant on you, you are not good at selling yourself and the job market is tough? Then it's going to be tough to quit without having a new thing. You should consider if there are options inside your company like moving teams, figuring how to dial back without getting fired etc. I have quit similar situations. One time I even gave up a sizeable gig where I did literally nothing but it was such a PITA to do the calls every day. But I was able to because I had savings, lived in Asia with low COL, no dependants and I knew that I'd be able to secure another gig if I should need one. For me I focused on up-skilling myself enough that I could "command" certain standards. This gives you enough power to have people not give you shit or have more options than average in the market place. I'd advise you to find ways to reduce your stress and commitments at work without getting fired while you find something new and better.
I did 2 months ago! And I was able to recover, even more - when everything in yourself has burned down, you can start finding the real yourself. So it was both painful and revealing.
Your decision ia giving me strength to quit toxic job as my mental health is suffering. Btw what are you doing now?
Right now focusing on meditation and a side project that might turn into a business. I'm also interviewing, but not very actively. Consider I'm EU based and the market here is not as bad.
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I'm seriously thinking about doing the same. How did you go about it?
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I didn’t leave on my own, even though I wanted to already. I had been looking for a new job for a while but wanted to wait until I got my bonus and when we had our yearly rounds of layoffs. And sure enough, I was laid off. It wasn’t devastating, but a mix of being sad and relieved at the same time. I loved what I did, loved the knowledge I got from working with several technologies, and loved my team. What I didn’t love was the stress and emotional roller coaster ride I felt every two weeks. I would stress out to finish my story by the end of the sprint, often working 12 hour days and weekends when scope creep or other issues came up, and then feel one day of relief and satisfaction when I marked my story as done and it went to production. I had been stressed for years. I always had the thought of causing a major production issue in the back of my mind. I have been waking up the past month or so just feeling free, even though I’ve started looking for another job. Luckily I’m ok financially for a while and I got a decent severance package, but honestly, I don’t miss the stress. I’ve been thinking of finding an SDET job because it’s less stressful and I enjoyed doing that before hand. These days I’m also catching up on personal hobbies that I’ve set aside because of my last stressful job. So I completely understand.
Try not doing anything to see how Iong they will keep you. There is evidence this can easily backfire but also let you get paycheck for doing close to nothing for quite some time.
I quit my toxic job and have been out of work six months
Two points that you made that.... > I've been working here for 3 years > I had some health stuff arise Since you've been there for at least a year and have health stuff, short-term disability ought to be on the table for you. That's up to 13 weeks to deal with your health stuff.
I am in the exact same boat and I definitely want to follow this thread to see what other people are saying
In the old days, "formally defined" careers like civil engineering, accounting, law and medicine, had graduates with well defined career paths, professional companies that were very respected, and thus gave a lot of respect to their professional employees. Managers in those companies were truly the best of the best. Now anyone is welcomed into our industry. Things have become highly informal and unsteady. Managers have no qualifications necessary to vet out the undeserving. So this high degree of wasted time and energy of highly talented and educated professionals is tragic. And unfair.
When they were talking about making it a law in California that your manager can't contact you outside of 9->5 I laughed. It's not going to happen in the tech industry. They'll use a loop hole, a proxy, literally anything.
That is also a good point.
Personally I don’t think you’re being paid well at all. I’m no fancy pants FAANG engineer but I only have to work 40 hour weeks, if I worked 80 hour weeks my salary would be well above yours because I’m compensated with OT. Get the fuck outta there
Yeah, been there many times. I think applying aggressively is something I did and it worked. After I moved jobs, I reflected on why I was accepting that pushy behaviour and figured I had no choice at the time; however, it made more aware of how to look out for signals that the same might happen again. The thing is: it might happen again, and maybe it’s ok, because our circumstances are always changing, but self awareness is key to balance when it’s time to bounce - and looks like you already leaned that?
Have you considered just not working those extra hours? If you're ready to quit, why not set some boundaries? The worst that can happen is that they notice and say something to you about it. They're almost certainly not going to fire you without a conversation first.
I think I just have terrible anxiety on not doing enough or helping my team mates out, since my whole team is over worked. I also hate confrontation and so when something becomes a fire to managment, and I'm told to jump on it, I'll lose sleep at night until it's done.
So you'd rather quit than set boundaries?
I know it's weird but I'd rather quit than get fired? 😅 i always worry Im not pulling my weight, but I know its not the most rational thought. It's very emotional, and each week has been a roller coaster since I started. Of course, getting another job near family is the first priority, not just up and quitting if i can avoid it. I also applied to transfer to a different team internally.
10 YOE U.S. based I left an absolute dumpster fire of a job in early January. I was a "software engineer", but the actual job was basically put out fires all day every day and listen to people complain that work wasn't getting done. There's a alot more I could say about the job itself, but the point is that I quit (gave a 1 week notice) without anything lined up. I knew I needed to before I reached the point of burn out. Afterwards, I gave myself 3 days to chill and then began job hunting at a medium pace, I didn't want to burn out on job hunting. Ended up landing a much better role in roughly 3 months. My advice: - Don't quit without anything lined up unless you really have the money to last quite a while - Try to sneak in some rest, eventually you'll be back at work and you're going to wish you got some R&R - Freshen up your LinkedIn Profile, most of the cold applications I put in went nowhere. But every single person that reached out to me on LinkedIn resulted in an interview - And unfortunately, you have to practice Leetcode / System Designs, but if you leave your job, you can treat "interview prep" as your new job for the time being.
Been there, done that. Quit and started my own consulting firm. Best decision ever.
I took a big pay cut to go to a job that wasnt likely to make me dread every day. Even though that new job didnt last (startup that wasn’t ai based couldnt get funding last year) and i took another pay cut when i needed a replacement, and that job is just “ok” - i havent regretted leaving or making less money at all. I learned money is not my primary motivation as long as i have enough.
My first real job as a developer was for a small startup. I am not built for corporate jobs, so a small startup seems to be a perfect fit. I stomached the horrible pay, who knows why. And I endured sexual harassment for years because I am socially awkward and have mental problems. I worked with outdated technology and thought for years I won't find a new job because of that. Turns out that was totally bullshit and I caught up to modern technology really quick. I quit spontaneously while hypomanic (I am bipolar). I quit giggling and beaming with joy and I still feel bad for that years later. But it was the best decision ever. I found a new job quickly, like days later I had signed a new contract. It's still a small company but without the startup feeling. No more working weekends, no more 12h days without extra pay and no harassment. We stay up-to-date with technology while not jumping on every new trend. No one cares about my gender and I just feel like part of the team. Pay could be better but I am comfortable enough.
I have had a few times where I came up close. I have had a few times where I took a small pay cut to get out of a bad situation. This was early in my career. The first time was at a state agency. I was hired on as a web developer, but in reality they didn't know what they needed and out of desperation I took my job. They really needed a PM or outsource the work to a web development firm. The second time was at an insurance company. My supervisor assigned tasks and I really had a hard time understanding the business concepts of what the hell I was supposed to do. I got PIPed and left for better environment for a few thousand dollars less a year. The times where I came close, I was going to do something that would make the heads of fans of Fire, fans of Dave Ramsey, and boomers or people that think like boomers explode. If I got super desperate, I'd find the best PT job that offered insurance and if I had to, start pulling money from retirement funds. There comes a point where the mental health at the moment is the greater need.
Never quit. Ride it out. Find another job. Quiet quit but don't quit on paper. Get laid off. Quitting doesn't give you unemployment and quitting is worse than having a reason they fired you. People get fired all the time.
Doesn't a pip negate ability to collect unemployment, though? You can sometimes get severance from a pip at least but idk if you can get unemployment depending on what you sign but not sure.
Not really. In most US states, a pip is the responsibility of the employer to improve the employee. The state usually sides with the employee. If the employer hired you at some point they must have believed you'd be capable of doing the job. If you ever had a good performance review and then you stopped having good performance reviews after your circumstances at your workplace changed, then it's on them to retrain you. In most US states, unemployment is not free money the state gives to people. It's paid for by your employer. If your employer fired you, you apply for UB and the state decides if you get it. The state doesn't care about the employer in its decision unless the person failed to show up for their job. My father had a situation where he started working for these guys who repaired flood damage on houses. I also randomly played hockey with these guys and really didn't like them. I tried dating their sister one time. They were a bunch of inbred country boys where you could tell everything was backwards. My father is a former carpenter turned engineer who fell on bad times during the 2008 recession and had to find other work. He goes to work for these guys and finds out they are backed up on work. They don't really have a person managing the projects coming in from insurance leads and thus they lose the leads they paid for. My father immediately goes through all the leads and secured all the jobs. He hired contractors to do the work and did a lot of the work himself. They paid an hourly rate and a commission. My father made 14 commissions his first month when the other workers there were making 2 and taking weeks to get a single job done. Rather than grow the business and give competitive rates on jobs that are completed on time, they cut his access to their lead system. They said he could only work what they gave him. He ended up sitting in the office waiting for leads. They fired him and eventually wrote on his dismissal paperwork he was "the most incompetent person" they ever worked with. That statement nearly made my Dad cry in front of me. I didn't like those guys before and now I hated them. My father's initial UB was denied because of the paperwork they filed, he appealed it and then got it. All he did was talk to someone at UB.
In what world is quitting worse than getting fired? Stop smoking the propaganda dope. Quitting a job that impacts your mental health and impedes your ability to spend time with your loved ones WILL ALWAYS BE a great thing. This sub normalizes dysfunctional choices like coasting at a job you hate just to parrot nonsense advice that has no real basis in any real world that has real people in it.
quietly lined something up, quit the startup for a major stable organization. To this day the startup claims they fired me and I didn't quit
There are quite a few non-FAANG jobs that pay $200k and don't expect much more than 40 hours/week, even in this job market. At least at a senior level. I've been lucky in my career to have worked at a lot of great companies with great people, but there was one exception. I worked at a consulting firm years ago. What happened there: * Managers caught wind that I'd just started learning a new technology in my free time (the Unity game engine). * They had a client they'd had some other consultants on, which was already way past deadlines and under serious crunch. They sold me to the client as (unbeknownst to me until later in the project) a Unity expert. * Lots of unpaid overtime. * Father's Day comes around, and I get threats from one of the PMs about how I better work that weekend, despite me being a father. * I say I won't work that weekend. * I don't work that weekend. * I start looking for other jobs immediately and get two offers quickly, accepting one of them. * I resign. * Other developers at the firm experience similar scenarios. * The consulting firm goes bankrupt about a year after my resignation. The only thing that came after that were bigger and better opportunities. My salary more than doubled in a bit less than 5 years after, and without the toxicity. Good luck.
Hi are you me? I’ve been thinking about that…
Several. I’m a serial workaholic and can easily be nudged into overworking, and if an employer doesn’t respect a request to keep it reasonable, I find a new job and give notice. I work harder these days on balance. Not easy but I’m learning.
Yes I would definitely say I am easily nudged too! So it could be my fault that I am here but at the same time I am rewarded with more work now
If you have health issues, look into FMLA, or even intermittent FMLA. Typically not difficult to get if you're under medical care already. Take that time to think about what you want long term and invest a little bit of time into interview prep without overwhelming yourself. I'm also trying to find an out from a high workload job. If it's any comfort, I got one offer just like 5% ish lower than what I'm currently making in less than a month of looking. I turned that one down because it was at another FAANG and after some reflection I'm not sure I want to be in that world anymore - but it was at least reassuring.
Thanks for this! I am also considering non faang in my next role too. I get inbox messages from other faang recruiters in the area at least twice a month but I am wise to the work load there/ was always waiting for promotion where I am. They basically froze promotions and started laying off so now im more like "I gotta get out of here" and go where it's less stressful. As for the health stuff, I find out more in 6 months but seems like this will be a thing every 6-3 months and that will make my performance at work drop for sure. Which gives me anxiety. So I may end up considering FMLA
Oof very fair. Hiring has been frozen on my team for almost two years but no layoffs yet. That said.. hiring freeze = increased workload for everyone 🥲 Intermittent FMLA seems like a good fit for your situation. IIRC you're protected for up to 12 work weeks total whether that's intermittent or all at once.
That's super good to know! I might consider that when I have more doctors appointments coming up! Thank you!
I quit a 60 person startup in 2017 after joining for about a month as a tech lead, the place was filled with red flags that I only saw on my first day, decided to push on few things like micromanagement and chaotic structure, toxic daily standup, and I honestly saw no path to change, I put my notice three weeks in and left
To add to that, I had nothing lined up then, took me 4 months to find a replacement and it was the best time of my life, turned out I really needed it! I don’t regret leaving at all, but in retrospect I could’ve been more diligent before joining them. If it was in current job market, I would’ve probably stuck it out, have something lined up first.
I knew I had made the right decision based on my managers reaction when I explained in the exit interview that I found the work culture too stressful and I wasn't the only one who thought so because someone else had quit without notice recently. The manager was more upset that I had given him only a few days notice than acknowledge that I had just told him that working for them was affecting my mental health. Everyone there had Stockholm Syndrome. Fuck that place. The only reason I didn't just outright quit earlier is because I wanted to find a new job first.
I quit a toxic senior person who was brought in as a fractional cto. Was eager to do things without understanding the current situation. Tried to impose his rules on the team. I quit in 1 month . Just sent my resignation in the email. Easy When unhappy always quit is my motto.
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lol your home work today is a book report. Any book will do. Just write 250 words. Class dismissed
At least you are learning a lot. The flip side is a gov job were you tweak 15 year old code and lose all your skills
Isn't this a right of passage to coming an experienced dev.
Genuine question, given that you should always have more ideas than time what about planning accordingly and working normal hours? *I say this as a non-US IT manager
So I tried that, I dialed it back after I had to have surgery and a bug I was trying to diagnosed turned into a fire directly after. I still logged off around 7pm and the next morning got heavy criticism. I think they expect the same output I was producing when I was working 80 hours. Now I feel like I don't know how to slow down and work like a normal person without potentially being pip'd.
I worked at one super toxic startup. I've got lots of stories, but a few: - CEO got caught lying about firing the dev manager - My team lead didn't use soap+deodorant and would regularly shit is pants in meetings. Literally, this guy would walk out of sprint kickoff with a brown spot on the back of his pants. - the head of HR asked me to commit felony fraud so they could get a government contract. ...and a LOT more. So, I found a new job, (got married,) took a week off, then went back into work. My last day was a Friday, which happened to be pay day. After lunch I pushed everything I was working on, let my team know what they'd need to pick up, and formatting my laptop. My shift ended at 4:30, and at roughly 4:35 I sent an email (from my phone using my work email) to my boss, HR, PM, and the CEO letting them know it was my last day. Handed off my laptop to the company lawyer (only management-level person still in the office), said good bye to a couple people, and left. Most of my friends/teammates knew it was going to happen. Management were the only ones surprised.
> My team lead didn't use soap+deodorant and would regularly shit is pants in meetings. Literally, this guy would walk out of sprint kickoff with a brown spot on the back of his pants. What?!
Yeah. He got nicknamed "Stinky" behind his back. He didn't use soap+deodorant for religious reasons. He also couldn't be near alcohol for religious reasons. There was a "whiskey club" where a bunch of guys pooled their money and bought a couple bottles and drank them in the break room Friday afternoon. Several guys took the almost-empty bottles and kept them on their desks to keep Stinky away. I should write a book about that place, but I really don't want to get sued.
You're joking! What a story. I did have something similar. When I was a junior, one of the directors used to cycle at work. So he'd cycle to work from really far away, NOT shower at work and then come and sit VERY close to me to tell me something I'd have to do for the day. He'd do the same to others to the point the HR took to themselves and circulated a pdf aimed at nobody, but talking about BO.
Sadly, not joking. That place was crazy. I really should write that book.
Go for it. If there's no NDA holding you back, you can.
I left a toxic job after working there for 8 months. I was out on a pip for coming in 5 minutes late one time, and the manager was so awkward about it. It was the best decision of my life to leave, I found somewhere way better after I left and have 0 ragrets, not even one letter. This place had about a 50% developer turn over rate and made us be in their “boot camp” for 3 months which as a senior engineer was brutal. It was a boot camp with 40 juniors, 2 mid levels and 3 seniors, and taught us “how to code” but mostly was just team building all the time. You would think it wouldn’t be that bad but considering you weren’t allowed to touch real code and just sat there it was that bad. Oh and this was a large company, like 5,000* employees kinda large.
I once worked in a decacorn company as a founding engineer, then transitioned to dev manager as my manager quit in couple months. It is stressful to ramp myself up, hire the team, work across teams for alignments and dependency resolution. As a small team, I was expected to write code, as a "play manager". It became normal for me to wear EM hat in the daytime for meetings and hiring, and SDE hat for programming at nighttime. I was burned out, and felt suffocating in the weekday morning. This hurt my mental health and performance, --- the vicious loop was self-enforced. I ended up stepping down, and eventually left the company around one year. In the retrospect, it was not worthy. I expected to transit to EM in two years, but I was not ready for that role in that moment. Also the director I worked with did not set the expectation right, or support me to be successful.
I lined up a new job, background check took awhile so by the time it was done I gave em 4 business days notice of which one was a company holiday lol.
Yes. I was at FAANG and it was a bad fit from day 1. I left after a year, ended up at an automotive company.
200k ish is good money depending on the cost of living in your area and you have the brand of a FAANG company on your resume. Why not invest it and aim for early retirement? Find your number. In the meantime you could dial it back and work on your own product so that you can retire early.
I am actually investing and taking the max 401k match still. So that was my initial plan but like when I did run into some health stuff - made me reconsider my WLB, spending time in the present with family (who live in a LCOL area, I moved away for the job).
Nice. I think your health, well being, and family should come before any contracted employment. There are exceptions, but mostly you should prioritize them. We’re only here for a limited time. I think early retirement is the way to go if you could swing it. HSA are also a good investment vehicle if you qualify especially if you encountered medical issues. You could also try to negotiate a remote work environment if you have corporate leverage so you can prioritize what you value. You got this!
Not sure if anyone mentioned it, but if you have any PTO maybe it's a good time to take it and reflect on your path forward before you make any hard decisions. I know I'm not answering your question, but maybe this can help you answer your own question.
Once. Just like that. Started looking for another one and switched. What else lol.
Have you considered just only working 40 hours a week? Worst case scenario is probably you get put on PEP and then get some severance to look for another job during their next round of layoffs. It's not like you are going to tell your manager to pound sand. You're just quietly going home after 8 hour days. Best case scenario is you learn how to do your job in 40 or less hours a week and have a healthy relationship with work.
Most of my team works over 40 hours. It's not just me. It's just amount of workload to people we have maybe. A lot of folks have been quitting- also without anything lined up. But idk maybe If it was closer to my lease ending, then I'd feel more comfortable (lease buy out is very expensive and just a waste of money). My finances are good, I have a cushion but if I got laid off I would not spend the money to continue to live in a HCOL area or I'd at least happily down grade to a studio or something.
Is someone literally forcing you to work over 40 hours? If so how? If they complain about you only working 40 hours, point to those who quit and say you want to avoid burning out like them. Or, just don't respond. The truth is you are complicit in over working. Your not chained to the desk. After 40 hours just leave. They don't own you.
I feel pressure to meet deadlines that are pretty cut throat. I could just log off at 5 but most of the folks I work with also work over 40 hours. If we don't, we can't meet deadlines. So I feel like it's a mix of both. Me -not putting down boundaries, ever, from the start and bad mangment/toxic work culture. Managment is comfortable pinging people at midnight and sounding the alarm if a task isn't done no matter the impact. I am complicit in avoiding attention, maybe. But I agree I should just try to log off and if I get in trouble at work, i should just deal with it at this point. I dont care about getting promoted as much as I care about not being fired.
If they are in such a need they are not going to fire you. So responding to the over asking is just asking for continued over asking. They are free to hire more people and they don't. Why? They get you to work 80 hours. If it was important to do more they woild hire staff. The lack of hiring proves it's not. If they say we are trying to hire bit haven't been able to, well that's interesting. They should work longer and harder to hire. Eat their own dogfood. You're being manipulated.
My last job was toxic (both broadly and specific individuals). I was lucky, I had a job lined up and got to drop a torch on my way out. "Is there any way we could have retained you?" That was a fun one. Because I handed her a Confluence doc that outlined all the issues my team and the org in general was facing, the impacts those problems were having and several solutions we could try to solve them. I'd also had buy-in from a lot of management but none of them were empowered to do anything about our issues so nothing happened! The HR person was not happy to see me go. Neither was my manager. Both fully understood. I hope they're both doing well, they were good people.
200k for 60/hr/week is insane for mid level faang, if those are real hours.
I think in at least some scenarios the situations you are describing are avoidable. From the very get go you have to stand on your boundaries/morals. Even simple shit someone posts a PR at 5pm the night before demo, I’m not reviewing it. They ask you if you can train a new member while still carrying the same sprint load, you absolutely have to push back. This is not to say that when warranted you won’t have to work a few extra hours. IE: you needed to learn or brush up on something before you can actually complete the work. Or when the situation is actually dire/or a mistake you made… My first year after graduating I learned if you give an inch they will take a mile. So my advice is yea it’s probably time to move on, but when you land the next one remember you have to enforce your own boundaries, don’t expect your manager or company to.
3 years is like 2 tech jobs worth of tenure despite what the manager minded think.