Comment by tkiolp4
2 years ago
In my experience engineers have more “free time” than eng. managers. As a senior engineer I have not many meetings per week, and the tasks I need to accomplish I can arrange time for them the best way that fits me. So, on Monday I could work fully focused, let’s say, 4h, and call it a day. On Tuesday spend 2h in meetings and another 2h to do PR reviewing… I have almost absolute control over my day, and that feeling is great.
On the other hand, even though eng. managers mostly do meetings, their calendars are usually packed with them. Even worse, they may have one meeting at 8am, another at 12, and another at 4pm… that kills your day completely since you have to stay available during the whole day. Definitely something I would hate.
Meetings filled with endless bike shedding about trivialities, bickering about specs, push and shove over changes in scope and delivery dates… and then every waking moment outside of those meetings, you’re either following up the above from previous meetings or scheduling new ones. Not a fun time.
The flip side is if it’s “crunch time” it’s not the manager that needs to work 12 hours or weekends to get something shipped.
Maybe it’s just that I’m no longer in my 20s (or that I have only worked for european companies) but I do not work extra hours. If the project is going to “fail” because we are not willing to do crunch time (spoiler: the project is not going to fail because of that) then let it be. Mismanagement of time is on managers not on engineers. I can help sure in a punctual situation, but I’ve never done it so far.
That should never happen at any 'good' company imo, and I haven't personally experienced it.
If it is a project I strongly believe in and mostly said we should do, and it is more fun than frustrating, I will get into big focus and work or think about it continually until it is finished, then I slump and relax for a while, going around and bragging to my friends and writing docs and maybe tech talks.
But if it a project without intrinsic motivation or large and clearly present business value (like fixing an incident or saving a $10M client contract but not some hopeful!thing that might pay off in two years), then I keep my weekends to maintain myself as a human being (which ironically also happens to benefit the company on that two year time scale).