Comment Be careful... . (Score 1) 274
...and remember, sometimes, "Go home, go home" (consider the Muppet characters) is the answer.
In my mid-forties, I worked for about two years with a former Baby Bell (now eaten). We were a startup division, meant to be their entry in the long-distance sweepstakes. Management *very* frequently was running on the the apparent idea that you write all this stuff the way they do in the movies, and I heard "whatever it takes" *FAR* too fucking often. And it wasn't my manager, or even my director, it was upper management. I swore I'd never do that again, the week I broke 70 hours; my dba said the same thing the week he broke 80.
After about a year of this, my late wife made semi-serious jokes about suing the company for alienation of affection. Consider your family.
But we were just pikers. Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) treats their folks like consumables/disposable. One young guy - a lot of them, this was their first job out of college, and we had a *LOT* of them - on week did, and I kid you not, he told me 119 hours in one week. They had him in a motel down the road.... He was working for a different, and better, consulting company a year later.
That's crazy. You'll be vastly more productive if you go home and get a night's sleep, and DON'T THINK about work - your subconscious will do a better job of it that way.
Oh, and for the young fools who think this is the way things should be... my "normal" day was 9.5 - 10 hours/day (not counting lunch) - I did that crazy bunch of hours after the architecture team gave a Pronouncement that everyone had to get their prototype makefile modified so that they could do the nightly rebuild of everything, and when I asked where they were going to get the resources for that, they said they'd find it. Now, some teams were building manually, and some with shell scripts, and...so this was a good idea. But from their prototype?. A week later, all our managers got a letter wanting their senior tech person for a week to do it. This was the end of October. The second week in January, I stood up in the every morning meeting, and announced that I had validated their build.
I was the *very* *first* person to get it working. Experience *does* count, kiddies and CEOs, and you get what you pay for.
Oh, and the summer before I left, a friend who's a degreed praticing psychologist said it was her professional opinion that I was that close to clinical burnout... so, seriously, watch yourself, and keep open the option of saying goodbye.
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