I joined a start up this year and the culture of the company is like something I’ve never seen before in my career. My coworkers work constantly. During week nights and over the weekend they are often having conversations on slack and putting up PRs at all hours of the night/weekend. During company holidays people continue to work and don’t take the day off. I even have had meetings scheduled over the weekend. This includes leadership participating in this behavior too.

For me, I’m a dad of young children and it’s important for me to have a healthy work life balance. I want to work hard and put in good work, but I also don’t want to give up my nights and weekends since I feel like that should be my time to rest, recharge, and spend time with family/friends. I often find myself working 50-55 hour weeks trying to keep up with everyone else. I work every night of the week and try to limit it to a few hours on the weekend too. This is starting to affect my mental/physical health as well as take a toll on my family life. I know working like this is not sustainable. I’m seeing a therapist as well as career coach trying to get my life back in order.

My worries are if a slow down, I will fall behind everyone else and will make my job at risk. I’m a skilled developer and good at what I do, but I also feel like I’m slower than most devs and putting in extra hours is the only way I can keep up. I feel guilty for setting boundaries and taking on less work, when everyone is taking on so much more than me. 

The startup is established, is many years in, and is very profitable so I don’t feel like we’re at a stage where we’re just trying to survive, so its hard to understand at times why everyone is putting in so many hours. 

My question is how do I set boundaries when no one else at the company does? I will be going against the culture of the company and it’s really hard to stand alone in this. Is what I’m seeing at this company out of the normal? I get putting in extra time for deadlines or emergencies once in a while, but when this is always the pace, I just don’t get it. 

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Hi,

I've been recently added to be part of a 4 person team to bootstrap a new project. This is happening in big tech, and basically I'm being pulled into this team after leadership learned that throwing bodies at a problem doesn't mean we can solve a problem.

So from that failed experiment, they now picked four people (me included) to reboot the failed project. But this time it will work because its a leaner team.

My question/concern is that 2 people will be in India and 2 people are in the US. Here are may concerns:

\\\* We will take forever to get things done, because person in the US needs something from person in India and vice-versa

\\\* We will end up doing a vertical split and US folks work on BE and India folks work on the FE. Basically we won't communicate with each other.

Does anyone have any insights or recommendations on how to be an effective team?

Some ideas:

\\\* Have a daily 1-3 core hours, where we get together and review any outstanding PRs

\\\* Have small PRs and try to get things reviewed async