Just to clarify, you used the word "abuse" several times to describe a job where you would have to work in office between 8:30 to 5 and pull (I'm safely assuming) half a million dollars a year?
8:30 to 5 was required, but also never working at home was required, so what I was trying to (poorly) say is that they basically expected you to live in the office and never see your family. I'll update accordingly.
And the comp package I turned down was about $700k at the time, which was 10 years ago. Nowadays it would be a $1M+ job easy.
But not seeing my family is not worth any amount of money to me, since there are other jobs for a lot less that let me see my family and live plenty comfortably.
That's not abusive. That's a rational security posture. Defense contractor employees can't take their work home either. It's nice when you can't be pressured to work off hours.
This isn't true by the way. A lot of defense contractors employ WFH or full remote procedures because 99% of your work will be on things that are unclassified. Most modern development practices separate out the classified material from the actual day to day work because not only is it better for security but also because forcing everyone into a SCIF wastes a lot of time and money.
Let me get this straight... you turned down a nearly seven-figure income because you would be required to not work at home and you were asked to stick to the same office hours as cubible farm workers making a tenth of that income?
Income has logarithmic value. His options were to make 350k and be happy day to day or make twice that and be in an activity hostile environment. Lifestyle wise there is little meaningful difference between 350k and 700k when you don’t have much free time to spend it.
Sure in theory he would be able to retire sooner etc, but retirement isn’t such a big deal if you don’t hate your job. Also, savings compounds so saving 3x as much doesn’t mean working 1/3 as long especially when you consider social security benefits etc.
I work on a software used (not exclusively) by the USA armed forces.
I work from home for the most part. I can do that while travelling as well but I have some limitations on which countries I can do that from. But I'm not sure of the entire list.
Yeah, for that compensation? No question. I'd maybe try and stay a little while past 5. Not sure how many months (years?) I'd last there though, not knowing how 'intensive' the work culture is.
The comp he mentioned is almost 11x of what I make yearly. Of course I lack the skills for a c++ job, but if I worked there for a year I could go on a vacation for the next couple of years. insane.
> But not seeing my family is not worth any amount of money to me, since there are other jobs for a lot less that let me see my family and live plenty comfortably.
That is fine and, tbh, a very healthy attitude. But it is not abusive in any meaningful sense of the word because it is not a worthwhile tradeoff for you personally.
Most HFT shops aren’t pulling crazy hours like that. That’s a wild exaggeration. I worked far longer hours at a FAANG than I ever did as a dev on a low-latency trading desk. Nobody at the latter ever got in my face and screamed at me, either. And guess at which of the two I got an unnerving call from HR asking if I could comment as a witness about some sort of harassment/bullying complaint two coworkers were entangled in during my second week on the job.
Yeah for real, I there is so many tech people are sheltered now days that if anything difficult comes there way they can't handle it. 700k for an 8 hour a day job and claiming to be abused is ridiculous.
It's fine for someone to say they don't want the job but claiming abused is something else. People work months away from there families to provide for them and make 10% of that wage.
It's not an eight hour job, you're completely misreading it. It's eight hours required plus another eight each day of overtime. Which is abusive for a software engineer.
And those people that work months away from their families -- they're being abused too. You'll notice that the owners of oil rigs aren't out there with them, for example.
16h a day is more like m&a hours. I don't believe a second that a quant, let alone a dev, in a hedge fund does anywhere near that time. Having to work late on rare occasions is a completely different thing though, and is not "never seeing one's family". M&A guys never see their family, they do those hours consistently.
> I wouldn't be allowed to take my laptop home, so if I had a hard problem to solve, I'd have to stay in the office the whole time. So basically they expected us to never see our family nor collaborate with anyone.
I did. Myself and multiple other commenters all seem to be on the same page, that your original comment says the job required being in the office 8.5 hours per day, and does not allow work from home. Your follow up comments imply the expectations were an order of magnitude higher.
The part you highlighted says you cannot work from home. That’s unrelated to the number of hours they expected you to work.
I think it’s fairly obvious to anyone who has worked in or around finance that while the contractual hours are X, the work requires 2X hours, thus being unable to take your laptop home requires 2X hours in the office.
Perhaps it would have been helpful to actually say that given that this is not a forum aimed at or primarily populated by people who work in or around finance. In a general context, "8:30 to 5 and you can't work from home" sounds like a description of the standard 20th century business schedule.
Are you really, truly not familiar with the idea that the finance industry stereotypically requires long hours and values work over all else, at an institutional level?
OP could have spelled it out, but in any communication there is a level of shared knowledge.
When you read a comment that you understand to be complaining about making nearly a million dollars whilst working 9/5 in the office, a more charitable path would be to examine your own context and shared knowledge, rather than exclaim loudly that OP is a bad person.
When OP wrote they were required to work in the office 8.5 per day, I assumed that they were required to work in the office 8.5 hours per day. I agree with the other guy, if OP meant to claim they were required to work 16 hours in the office per day, they should've spelled that out and not relied on people to guess.
I understand that, yes. But that's not what the original comment says. If the complaint is that ~16 hours is expected, the comment shouldn't focus exclusively on the fact that 8.5 hours is required.
> Are you really, truly not familiar with the idea that the finance industry stereotypically requires long hours and values work over all else, at an institutional level?
Not the person you're replying to, but I was not aware. I guess we have a different cultural backgrounds and some things that are obvious for most of this website are not for me.
Also this makes me even more confused. So OP actually expects being pressured into working overtime (irrelevant where - at home or in the office)? And that's not even their main issue?
What's the point of getting a double salary if you have to work twice as much? Can't they (as a great software developer with a strong work ethics and a good work-life balance they clearly have) just... refuse the overtime?
I do know that finance people tend to be insane workaholics, but I was not aware that "software engineer who happens to work for a finance company" is a fundamentally different kind of job from "software engineer in the tech industry", with a different culture and harsher expectations.
A blind spot, I suppose; I have spent my whole working life in the West Coast tech industry - though discussions on this site generally seem to share that cultural context.
Before covid, working from home wasn't really a thing at the company I work for. That meant I arrived at the office some time before 10, was there for around 8 hours, then left. That's what "not being allowed to work from home" means to most people.
Yes but I think you're missing the point. It's not the eight hours, it was the specific eight hours regardless of any other work you did plus all the overtime that couldn't be done at home. ie. The complete lack of seeing one's family.
how do you know for certain you'd be required to do overtime consistently? you've never worked in the field. I haven't either but I'm not assuming crazy stuff like being required to work 16h a day. your stance is completely unreasonable. There are other commenters who have worked in the field and said no one was expected to be in the office after normal working hours
I met a banking C++ engineer years ago who was the only one left locally and spent his time teaching C++ to fresh offshore engineers in the form of code reviews. He was kind of a manager, though also his manager was probably rational.
1. It makes no correction in how an irrational institution is run that first level managers are rational. It just means they are stressed.
2. I met him at a language meetup for another language, he wanted out but would have trouble making half his salary.
(If you wanted me to trust code written by interns and reviewed across distance and language barriers, C++ wouldn't be my first choice, assuming I got a job in banking management, how likely would it be that I could change anything about that?)
I think it's safe to say that software development drains the brain fairly quickly. We've all slept under our desks a couple times and worked crazy hours for a few weeks, but anything beyond that doesn't sound humane or even possible. I straight up have difficulty conversing with people after those stints. Brain just shuts off. Stare at wall. Then again, there's astronauts and brain surgeons. Apparently trading desks need freaks.
I read that as perhaps having to stay in the office unreasonably long at times when there's crunch towards some deadline, as opposed to going home and working remotely?
I feel like software development is one of the activities that are difficult to estimate. There's scope creep and sometimes all sorts of deadlines for compliance or feature rollouts and so on, so the actual workload can vary a lot.
Not saying that's okay and shouldn't be considered a planning issue, of course.
No, I'm talking about right now. Or as soon as possible. There is no need, in 2023 AD, to work as hard as in the 1900 just to survive. Absolutely no need. Food and shelter could be easily provided for everyone. And if we can't "easily" provided it, then we should strive to do so. We have to shift from old patterns of thinking to new ways, we have to realize that the only thing holding us down is an outdated view of the world, more and more obsolete.
You are only saying that because you come from a position of privilege, where your work is loosely correlated with your actual survival. I don't understand how you could think food and shelter could be provided for everyone, easily, withiur ignoring all the people who work super hard to provide you just that. Unless you just mean that it could be provided easily for some people, as long as the lower stratas keep working to produce what's needed.
1 to 10% of population works in agriculture. This can be lowered even further with robotics and AI (sure, not in 2023, but in 2030, if efforts are made). They will then give us food and society in exchange gives them everything: schooling, medical care, holidays in nice places, maybe even housing in nice places (near a beach or a mountain). But I think at that point most people would work in agriculture for fun and for wanting to do something, and I honestly believe ag-jobs will be subjected to lottery, for there would be too many applicants.
Once food is taken care of, a great pressure would ease off and people would find themselves with more money, which then might be exchanged to less work.
Same reasoning can be apply to housing or even to medical care. The people who build houses would get the best spots for new houses, or the rarest food, or social recognition and status. And so the medics, teachers, etc.
This can't and won't happen in a day. There are many gotchas and unforeseen problems. But we can start working on it and planning and taking small steps towards this goal. It doesn't have to be all or nothing: it can be, for example, 1 hour off the working day every 5 years, for example.
On the planet I live on 30% of global population works in agriculture. Automation is inevitable and is happening for decades. More often than not it does't mean smaller farmers are given nice houses on the beach for exchange of doing nothing, it works more like huge benefits go to single megacorporation, smaller farmers are pushed out of the market to poverty.
The parent comment's wording was funny, but I think the point was that 9-5 was just the start of the commitment. They would have been expected to stay late and work weekends in the office, alone, isolated on their work until it was done.
Any engineering job paying double Netflix comp is going to have very high expectations about hours worked and rate of delivery.
I've worked on a trading floor before, a very nice one (by repute) but it is still a dreadful place to work. Imagine you are expected to do intensive knowledge work with high stakes and executive / management board oversight in the middle of a kindergarten which includes broadcast/loudspeaker announcements every 30 minutes. People shout, people run about, people stand on desks... Bedlam.
Brings back bad memories of my time as a developer in finance (big bond shop on the west coast). Walls covered in TV screens showing CNBC on mute until some bigshot was on (Fed decision imminent!) and then some intern walked around turning up the volume on all the TVs until the bigshot had finished giving his opinion. Ticker displays running non-stop causing more visual noise. Traders and quants running around. Analysts chatting with their buddies at other firms on the phone. Impossible to get in the zone, very long hours and, worst of all, having to do it all wearing a dress shirt and tie.
It was certainly a memorable experience, but one I never wish to repeat.
So....basically my previous work environment as a military officer in a high-level operations center, except with MASSIVELY better compensation? How do I get one these jobs if my C++ skills are "meh" at best and I haven't done finance/economics stuff since I was an undergrad? The stress and scope of responsibilities are almost a non-issue.
Hit the C++ books; pay for some training (there's plenty online). Then study hard for the interview. It's not rocket science to get some of these jobs.
Historically Netflix only had one level of engineer (this changed last year) with a starting salary of $400k, so I'm guessing it was substantially more than half a million.
I've not seen double, but I've seen a 50% increase, at assuredly a much lower comp level than Netflix, so, far higher marginal-utility for that income, and still wished I hadn't done it about 2 months in.
Like, if you'd put a button in front of me and pressing it would undo it like it'd never happened, I'd have pressed it without hesitation. And they weren't even working me long hours or being outright mean to me or anything, the place and the work were just dreary as fuck and it was making me feel like shit even in my off hours.
I had another job by month 4, and took a pay hit (though not all the way down to my prior level) to get out fast.
Avoiding more bad is more heavily weighted than seeking more good in the brain generally but this heavily differs between people. For many, adding more bad is only offset by an rougly an order of magnitude more good.
This is me. There are lots of jobs that you literally could not pay me enough to do, because they'll make my life miserable. I'd rather be underpaid and enjoy working than make millions and hate life.
Abuse comes in many forms. Just because they're paying "well" doesn't mean it's not an abusive environment. In fact, they are paying so well precisely because it'd abusive.
