Just kidding, I'm in an 18 year old company so my weekends are pretty sweet. Driving tractors and stuff.
But when we started, and even now, it is rare that more than 6 hours go by and we haven't checked email. We are weird, we do pretty great support so people check emails on weekends to see if there is a big problem. If there isn't, off we go to some fun. If there is, rally the troops and get it fixed.
We're in the enterprise software space so it's sort of expected that we have some coverage on weekends.
All that said, if we do our job right, weekends are pretty boring. Which is why we peer review everything and regression test everything. Even with that some stuff slips through but not very often. We did a .0 release 6 weeks ago, found one bug, about to push a .0.1 release out the door. Boring. Which is how I like it.
There generally should never any need to do any work on weekends unless it's an unusual situation. You're just reducing your overall productivity if you work too much. Having said that, sometimes I do work on problems over the weekend just for the fun of it.
Sometimes I take 1 or 2 hours off during the day to play some PS4 ... dont push myself too hard in the weekends
If so, do you think your "normal weekend" is mostly related to one of the following points, all of them, or something else entirely?
a) wealthy enough, not needing to make it work to put food on the table
b) old enough to have priorities shifted
c) easier circumstances (like reputation, network of colleagues etc.)
Only one of those companies demanded my evenings and weekends; it did so because I was a cofounder and I let it do that. And it's the one that failed catastrophically.
2 startups back for me is Arbor Networks, which I joined in 2001, and which was acquired in 2010 for a very large amount of money (it had hundreds of employees at the time). I was hired to take over as lead dev from Dug Song on their flagship product, which at the time (a) had no major customers and (b) was locked in an intense dogfight with two other well-funded competitors with the same small set of customer prospects.
I worked one weekend. Arbor got a deal to monitor the South Korean Winter Olympics for DDoS attacks and the engineering team took shifts managing the deployment. A big deal was made over the fact that we were being asked to do that.
(I later switched from dev to product management, and my schedule got grueling; in particular, I had the worst travel burden of my career. But I asked for that.)
No. I don't think I have normal weekends because I'm wealthy enough to thumb my nose at the startup lifestyle. I thumb my nose at that lifestyle because it is moronic and doesn't work.
