Seen a lot of posts criticizing Amazon for bad WLB and appreciating Adobe/Microsoft for good WLB. Guys, if you get more of life and less/bad quality of work, it is not a good work-life BALANCE. You can only say that Amazon is heavy on work-side while Microsoft/Adobe is heavy on Life side. A good balance rarely exists, in general. It all depends on the team as well as you. You need to be technically good and well-disciplined to make your work-life balance good. It depends more on you than on the company.
Err..not sure where you are getting your intel from, but when folks complain about bad WLB at Amazon/AWS, they are not referring to the mindset of “I am working all the time because I love my job”. Loving what you do is one thing, but when you live in constant fear that you could lose your job anytime, you do not have the luxury to be “well-disciplined to make your work-life balance is good”. You are sorely mistaken if you think that these folks who are complaining about bad WLB are referring to a situation where they have an easy way to set boundaries and define the max number of hours they want to work. Understand that when our fellow Blinders complain about the lack of WLB at Amazon, they are referring to the lack of control over their work hours. They are literally given so much responsibilities to deliver their feature work, manage Ops, wrangle end-to-end work that should be handled by their PM, tech lead, and manager but have to do it all themselves because those people are in one of the following states, “have left the team”, “are yet to be hired” or “working on 6 other projects”, that they are constantly at work. Even when they are logged off their computers, their mind is constantly wired to the TODOs at work. When they are spending time with their friends and families, their loved ones know that they are not really present in any of those conversations. “But that’s your own fault. Just take your time and do your best”, you say. Have you ever heard of the PIP culture at Amazon? That’s very real and is on the minds of every employee every.single.day. Their peers and managers are always watching because when the time comes and they have to give the list of names, they need to have that list ready. I’ve spoken to senior leaders working at AWS who tell me how they never dare to complain or share their grievances with their peers. If they even show a moment of weakness or slowing down, their peers will likely offer them up as a candidate for the next PIP cycle. While this may not be true in every single team at Amazon, it’s true in enough teams that it’s become a known culture in the industry. I don’t know if they have the same practices at Adobe. But at least at Microsoft, they don’t tend to manage their employees that way.
So true. Worked over this long weekend to meet a deadline. Still missed it. Fuck it. Thought about work constantly over the weekend. Not being truly present even when playing with my daughter. Had her in my lap while working for a while. Took my laptop when I went out for a walk so that I could check if the deployment succeeded, which meant I might be able to hand off some work to my colleague who was also working. All the while i already feel behind at work since I was supposed to finish this project last week and now my next one will start late. I have to deliver that by the end of this quarter. Thats already decided.
Also worried about getting pipped all the while so that I can have a 60 day count down started to decide if I will have to uproot my life and leave the country. Fucking A.
WLB is optimal when work = 0 stupid
Adobe, change your dealer
I totally agree with the OP
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What are you smoking?
I don’t understand what he is saying after the first sentence