Ask HN: Do you work nights/weekends?
When I worked at my first startup, I got put on support engineer duty. My job was to be the engineer first-responder for any customer support tickets that came in that day. Customer Support would triage the tickets and if they thought it was a bug, it would come to me. I would fix it, and then send it back.<p>I got really, really good at fixing bugs, reading&#x2F;parsing other people&#x27;s code, and then mimicking their style so that it looked like their code all along. Pretty fun.<p>It was a startup, there were about 10 engineers. I would show up around 8:30am and work until 7:30am, getting lunch and sometimes dinner with my coworkers. I worked very hard and tried to get to inbox zero day. Sometimes a ticket would come in at 5:35, and I&#x27;d sigh and tackle it and try and get a fix out before I left. (Note: by &quot;push&quot; I just mean put a PR up, not actually deploy it, because obviously it needed review and testing.)<p>One night, miracle of miracles, I had a date. And I was supposed to meet her at 7pm, which meant I needed to leave the office at six so that I could get home, change, then meet her. I had four (4) tickets left in the queue. Normally I would have tried to push fixes for all of them before I left, but I didn&#x27;t. I just left, and I went on my date. No 2nd date, if you&#x27;re curious.<p>The next day I showed up at work at 8am, a little early, because I knew I didn&#x27;t finish everything the day before.<p>Nobody said anything.<p>Nobody complained.<p>The customers responded with &quot;thank you for fixing this so quickly!&quot; even though I had waited overnight.<p>I had an epiphany -- which is probably obvious to many of you reading this right now. I realized that I had been busting my ass for no good reason. I realized that there is ALWAYS more work. I realized that nobody really expects any non-emergency work to get done after 5pm, even in start up culture. (If they do, they&#x27;re lunatics that don&#x27;t respect you as a fully realized human being and you should find another boss.)<p>I started showing up at 9am and leaving at 5pm. Sometimes I made it through my tickets, sometimes I had a handful leftover. I fixed them all in a timely fashion in 1-2 business days instead of &lt;1 business day, and my boss gave me high marks. I got promotions, I got raises, I&#x27;m now very successful, imo.<p>That was 11 years ago, and ever since I&#x27;ve kept a pretty strict work&#x2F;life balance. I try really hard to leave work at work and enjoy life after. My company doesn&#x27;t own my life -- they pay me for 9-5. If they want more time, they pay more money. In fact, I consider overtime to be even _more_ expensive than my regular salary.<p>All of that said... do I do things on the weekend? Sometimes. Maybe. Mostly personal projects. But I do it because I want to, not because anyone else expects the work to be done. And there is a special carveout for on-call rotations and after-hours emergencies where I may need to respond to something, but I tend to work out comp time instead. For example, if I have to spend 4 hours on a weekend to fix something, I get to check out a few hours early on Friday.<p>So I guess... it depends. But don&#x27;t work extra hours unless you want to. Nobody reasonably expects it, and as a salaried employee, you don&#x27;t get paid extra for it. Nobody&#x27;s going to remember that you worked til 10pm every night, but they will remember that you never came to their birthday parties. Just keep that in mind.