Software engineer John Carmack, co-founder of Id Software, worked 10-hour days, 6 days a week throughout his career. Some engineers think this is reasonable. Others will say it leads to burnout. My take? Longer hours are fine when it’s on your terms, you’re gaining something valuable, and your life circumstances allow it.
The noisiest voices on LinkedIn form two camps:
- Work only the hours in your contract, and no more.
- Hustle, never take breaks, work late, and work weekends.
In my opinion the answer lies somewhere in the middle, and heavily depends on the individual.
Most engineers at Euc prefer a more sensible work-life balance of 7-8 hours, while a handful will often work 9 or 10 hour days. Usually it’s because we’re working towards a “target date” (a term that translates to “woke deadline”), or some production issue needs to be resolved today for some reason (maybe app store submission has a cutoff time).
In these past few weeks, I’ve been in the latter cohort, building multi-factor authentication for our Juniper patients. But at my previous company, the work was slow, stagnant, repetitive, and I rarely stayed late. I was spending a lot of time firefighting. In fact, it was common to clock off early.
I remember talking to a Staff Engineer at a Christmas party, who gave me some candid advice. In his 20s he was the kind of engineer who would work long hours and weekends, but now that he’s matured he wouldn’t recommend it. He was burned out for years before he realised.
Despite this warning, I find that once most of the team goes home, I get an hour of uninterrupted focus time. No meetings, no questions, no distractions. I can smash out some good code, or focus deeply on code review.
Committing to extra time isn’t challenging. I don’t have kids. I don’t have a long commute. If I can dedicate an extra hour towards my career, that’s worth it in the long run. Call it “career investment”.
Maybe working late is the easy option, because I already know what I should be doing, while clocking out actually results in decision fatigue. What’s for dinner? Should I go for a run? Do I need to do laundry? I’ve been programming for longer than I’ve been an adult, so that would make sense.
It might sound dull, but building something, submitting PRs, seeing tests pass, these are deeply satisfying–it scratches an indescribable itch.
If I can translate additional daily effort into project results and domain knowledge, which in turn can be leveraged for performance reviews to advance my career, then hanging back an hour to get quality work done is worth it. Especially because I like writing code!
While overtime has its place, I draw the line at working on weekends–the laptop stays at the office. During the week, though, I put in more practice to sharpen my skills. Work that isn’t drudgery means that I’m getting smarter.
As long as those extra hours are on your own terms, the question shifts from “is it okay to work late?” to “what do I stand to gain from another hour?”.