Ask HN: How many hours/week are you expected to work in SV/NY/other tech hubs?
&gt; However, on many job postings you&#x27;ll see words like &quot;grit&quot; or &quot;passion&quot; listed as requirements. These are codewords for &quot;we&#x27;ll work you hard&quot; and &quot;overtime expected&quot;, as far as I can tell.<p>I was talking with some younger friends here in Seattle, and they expressed similar concerns.  This was a total shock to me, because I&#x27;ve been involved in hiring at multiple firms and we use those terms not just in our postings but in our internal discussions for evaluation, etc, and we DON&#x27;T mean what the fears are.<p>In my experience, talking about &quot;passion&quot; is basically shorthand for &quot;we won&#x27;t have to train you and we&#x27;ll have minimal mentorship - you&#x27;ll learn and improve on your own&quot;.  So..not really a _positive_ meaning, but a very different one from the fear.  We don&#x27;t expect people to put in long hours - the normal 40ish work-week, maybe with a crunch day or two each quarter, roughly speaking.  But we do expect&#x2F;want that people are coming in with the interests to improve and the existing skill to do so.  Most places are severely shy of &quot;senior&quot; people (In part, IMNSHO, because they keep trying to hire &quot;senior&quot; people rather than committing to getting more &quot;junior&quot; devs) and as a result they don&#x27;t have people with the time to spare for proper mentorship.<p>While this expectation has been consistent across the places I&#x27;ve worked, that doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s a universal truth...but I&#x27;ve not seen anything that suggests &quot;passion&quot; and &quot;grit&quot; mean &quot;will work stupid long&#x2F;hard&quot; outside of the game industry and startups.
(Notably, most places rush to get to the point when they can recruit as &quot;post-startup&quot;, meaning they no longer ask for those kinds of hours).<p>I&#x27;m in Seattle, and to address your questions:<p>* Roughly 40 hours&#x2F;week, normally a bit less  (8-4, with a work-provided lunch so I end up not working for only a short time).  In the course of a year I expect to have maybe 5 days that I do crazy hours (12-15+ hours&#x2F;day) and maybe 10 days that I do long (10ish hours).  Probably work about 2 weekend days&#x2F;year on average (excluding answering a text&#x2F;message, or doing a small code review - anywhere from 5-15 of those on weekends&#x2F;year, each measured in minutes, not hours)<p>* Higher paying jobs (I&#x27;ve done 90k - 180+k in Seattle) haven&#x27;t required more hours, though being willing to put in hours when something real comes up is always taken as helpful and does a lot to help with promotions and bonuses.  The trick has been finding places that defines something &quot;real&quot; in terms you agree with.  Prod issues that really impacts a customer and comes up 1-2 times&#x2F;year?  Cool.   Being &quot;on-call&quot; each month means you WILL get a call?  Not cool.<p>* Certain positions DO expect more hours, particularly when a problem arises.  Generally Ops people and those that have to resolve production-critical bugs.  This should all be openly available info before and during interviews, though you may have to ask.<p>That said, I&#x27;ve also noticed a name cachet - My Amazonian friends, depending on their teams, have put in some hours I would consider stupid.  They do this WITHOUT a pay bump relative to others in the area&#x2F;field - getting the name on your resume is considered worth the extra effort.   Then again those on other teams have done nothing outside of my norm.<p>To put this all in context - I moved here ~7 years ago, and have worked for 3 companies out here.  I&#x27;ve more than doubled my salary in that time, but my workload hasn&#x27;t changed too much.  One place shifted from a good work&#x2F;life balance to having &quot;crunch-time&quot; start to extend to being very frequent - I left, and so did most everyone else.  One of the big benefits of a high-demand area is that you can be assured of being able to safely leave a company, so work-you-crazy certainly happens and in places, but cannot be the norm.