I'm so rapidly becoming someone who just feels no guilt. It's balance against the abject anxiety I feel no matter what day or time of day it is. The balance against waking up on in a panic that's it's 9:30a and I missed 2 hours of EU meetings only to realize that it's Sunday and everything is fine and I'm supposed to be relaxing. It's clearly not healthy.
But yeah, I've got a FAANG(+? what's it called now? I think I'm in whatever the new one is called now?), and the market isn't _so_ bad, I think? But at the end of the day, the checks clear, and it's mostly on me to decide and act on the prerogative that software is just software, and I need to chill. (But it's really hard...9s are addictive...)
> The balance against waking up on in a panic that's it's 9:30a and I missed 2 hours of EU meetings only to realize that it's Sunday
The thing that's been messing me up, is the completely unhealthy schedules that are typical when you work with people all over the world. For instance, I got up at 6am today, my first meeting was at 7am. In the meeting were people in three countries and at least five timezones.
This trend where people are located all over the planet leads to a scenario where it's not unusual for me to be taking 7am meetings while also working on infrastructure at three in the morning because that's when the maintenance window is.
If we were going to an office, nobody would tolerate this ridiculous schedule.
But since most of us WFH now, it's just become increasingly common that we're working 20 hours days, but there's a bunch of gaps scattered between a 7am start and a 5am end.
You couldn’t pay me enough to work at 3AM. I suppose it’s up to each person to know what they will tolerate, but that one is a deal breaker for me and always will be.
"9s" are brought up in reliability discussions. They refer to the number of 9's in an uptime metric like 99%, 99.9%, 99.9999%, ...
See also "march of the 9s"
But yeah, I've got a FAANG(+? what's it called now? I think I'm in whatever the new one is called now?), and the market isn't _so_ bad, I think? But at the end of the day, the checks clear, and it's mostly on me to decide and act on the prerogative that software is just software, and I need to chill. (But it's really hard...9s are addictive...)