> Google engineers [are] working 60-70 hours a week - very stressful.
Is this true? I worked a hard 35 hours a week when I was at Google. Granted, I was a junior engineer, but the fact that I could get away with that and have it not affect my career unduly always makes me surprised to hear descriptions of Google as a sweatshop.
Can any Googlers say whether this has changed in the few years since I left? I know they're a massive company so generalizing can be hard, but this is so far from my experience that if be surprised if it was true of enough of the company to make anything approaching a blanket statement. I've always thought that it would be nice to go back to Google to retire in a few years.
Yea, it's not strictly 100% rational of me but to see someone just grossly lying (or being confident in his ignorance) about a fact I know otherwise makes me skeptical of anything else he might have to say..
Perhaps the myth of the 70 hour google work week is a remnant of their startup days.
My experience was like yours - 35 hours per week ( plus summer fridays and tons of personal days and vacation days ). The only exception was the one startup I worked at where we did put in a lot of work in the hopes of a huge payoff. But even there, we put in 70+ hours a week or two before a major milestone/deliverable/etc.
I have not heard of anyone working more than 40hrs regularly and when NEST and DropCam was acquired by Google and tried to make people work long hours, it led to a huge backlash.
> Google engineers [are] working 60-70 hours a week - very stressful.
Is this true? I worked a hard 35 hours a week when I was at Google. Granted, I was a junior engineer, but the fact that I could get away with that and have it not affect my career unduly always makes me surprised to hear descriptions of Google as a sweatshop.
Can any Googlers say whether this has changed in the few years since I left? I know they're a massive company so generalizing can be hard, but this is so far from my experience that if be surprised if it was true of enough of the company to make anything approaching a blanket statement. I've always thought that it would be nice to go back to Google to retire in a few years.