I feel so burned out and anxious all the time, not because of overwork, but due to a lack of formal structure in my work day.
I'm thinking of starting out on my own someday, but I wonder, is it even realistic to have a 9-5 kind of structure in IT/software dev field ? Whether i work for a big org / startup / myself, is it inevitable that I have to work round the clock and I've to accept it as a way of life ? Is there a sub-field in software dev where in I can login at a specific time / logout at a specific time and not have to worry about work after I log out.
PS: Honestly speaking, I used to work at IT service industry not too long ago (perhaps in mid 2000s), where I was working on a boxed software. Except for some crunch time during major releases, there was no pager duty expected, the pay was average at best and work was monotonous bug fixing, but I felt much more at peace since work was always predictable most of the time. With this on-call culture thanks to the 99.99 uptime thats become the de-facto industry standard for most companies, I wonder whether such companies exist anymore !
I do know, however, that some of my colleagues in Asian countries feel an non-official pressure to accept late-evening meetings so that European and American colleagues may participate.
It’s understood that European folks try to schedule Europe-only meetings in the morning so that there is plenty of time available in the afternoon for NA colleagues, and conversely NA folks keep their mornings open for team meetings.
I personally shift my work day to starting at 7 so that I have an even larger overlap, but not all of us do that and it is not expected of anyone.
It's within the (usually hard-fought for) rights of employees in many countries to refuse such meetings. Unless they explicitly signed up for such a schedule of course. However, I would be very surprised if freelancers and people in leadership positions can refuse to participate in such meetings. In turn, they usually have higher salaries.
Of course, it sucks for people in other countries not being able to refuse to work at weird times. But if they could refuse, their country would immediately be much less attractive as an outsourcing destination.
Edit: tl; dr: regular remote meetings should between people in leadership positions. Day-to-day work should be managed by local managers, else it will either suck for everybody or suck enormously for workers in the country with weaker worker rights.
When I was living in Hawaii I was up at the crack-end a few times a month, pounding coffee, trying to ignore the roosters.
Social acceptability had nothing to do with it. It wasn't a great hour for Brussels either.
Once way to make things more fair is to set up two or three bi- or three-weekly recurring meetings to cover all participants time zones. So everyone gets it to happen in their own TZ at least every other week or so.
I know the practice is often different, depending on where the company's headquarters are, but I encourage folks to spread the rotating TZ idea out of fairness and respect for colleagues elsewhere.
The right to disconnect feels more about letting people disconnect "after hours". But this depends on your hours.
My "team" is composed of around 700 people across Asia and Europe.
My kids are in school during work hours.
My 6pm—midnight slot is strictly private life and there is no reason for it to be otherwise.
So, your last line contradicts the rest of your own comment.
With remote work I appreciate having the option to use the inevitable idle time to be more efficient with house chores and such but remote work never brought me the freedom you tout...
I have worked remotely in the past before COVID and tried your suggested approach, would be free during afternoons and work from 17-00, or split the day in morning and evening work. It didn't ever give me the same relaxation as I get from having free time until the end of the day.
* You're meetings go later than midnight or 1am, I think that's unreasonable.
* You're working more than 8 hours a day.
I also used to complain to myself about this a lot, then I became resentful and I became kind of grumpy / surly in the meetings. I complained to my managers about it and then I realized, for them, meeting attendance was more important than anything else. So I just adapted my schedule to that aim and it was a success.
For me it wasn't late night, it was early morning meetings that were a problem, I'm a night owl, I understand everyone is different, there you might like working early mornings for example.
Anyway I still struggle with the meetings, but I realized that I used to get up early and commute, and I also realized I have a very flexible life and I even have some of my meetings from bed if I'm extra tired, just turn off the camera.
After a while looked around me and saw that there are truck drivers, who drive all night, they are away from family for long periods of time. Pilots have to do all sorts of weird hours. I guess nothing is perfect, but at least once your meetings are done, you're off to a comfortable bed.
TL;DR: While it seems bad, is your situation really that bad, can you somehow make it work for you? Can you take most of the day off and work evenings? Can you be more flexible yourself?
We all have our own idea of what excellence in software engineering looks like, but sometimes we're actually working as chairsitters, other times we're email account managers, sometimes we were only hired so our name/expertise/certifications can be listed on the "About Us" page.
Most of us would say an engineer can still be excellent with a flexible start time, but a chair sitter absolutely can't have that. However it would be fair for a chair sitter to get on the clock time to devote to upstream open source projects or to experiment with new database systems that might be useful for scaling.
I'm talking about meeting attendance being important not just "chair sitting". It's important as a senior engineer to contribute to meetings for planning, setting direction, performance reviews etc. Which is what I'm doing in these meetings.
At one stage I was busy with projects and I'd refuse to attend the late night meetings, because I was busy, I thought just coding was what was important. Then I started to attend the meetings, wake up at 6am and work again. But that's when I realized that, the waking up early and working wasn't what they wanted from me , they wanted me to contribute to the meetings.
So now I reserve myself more for the important meetings task.
Stockholm syndrome, maybe a bit of ptsd.
I’d not follow such advice @op. Find a place that respects you.
Honestly, on my late meeting days, I just work about 3 hours and attend the meetings late at night, because that's what's expected of me and that's enough. The meetings can be intense so I just save myself for them and generally enjoy my day.
My company respects me a lot, but it also respects the fact that it's not all "one timezone is important and others suck" We have to meet with people all over the world and sometimes, it's my time to compromise and meet / work late?
All had 9 to 5 schedules with no expectation that you be there outside of regular work hours unless it was a true emergency. In the last ten years, I've had to work emergencies and overtime maybe a total of 6 to 8 hours total, across all the jobs.
I think that sort of culture is easier to find if you look for smaller companies that largely work together in the same office anyway, vs huge distributed multinational organizations that are always looking for commodity labor from anywhere.
The kinds of companies that look for cultural fit, implicitly or explicitly, also tend to plan around this sort of thing, rather than just blindly making their employees keep irregular hours.
What I'm saying is...this is definitely not something you have to accept as normal. Maybe within a specific part of the industry or at a specific level of management, it's a thing, but if you want is a software job that pays a livable wage and still lets you have a regular life outside work, that's definitely doable. Don't go into games, infrastructure, devops, etc. Find some business that doesn't need round the clock presence. Many of those are software jobs in other verticals. They may pay less, but the sanity is worth it IMHO.
I do feel like OP should definitely start looking at other jobs though, it seems likely they can find something with a more reasonable schedule.
Technically, they didn't even ask for 9-5 strictly, they asked for "structured", and I think the implication is: predictable, regular. Even if it includes some predictable, regular scheduled evening time? This seems to me like it should be do-able, but I'm not sure -- I work in nonprofit sector, where it definitely is.
That's not to say you should live in abject poverty, but that jobs and careers can offer more fulfillment than simple dollars in a paycheck. I've loved all the jobs I've ever had, because I picked them carefully and chose them holistically, not just based on the highest bidder. Work culture matters a LOT... the people you work with become another family, and the good ones care about you and don't want you to work late just the same as I wouldn't want anyone to sacrifice their kids or their mental health or their passions for work -- coworker, boss, founder, anything.
EVERY job I've ever held, except maybe early retail when I was young, held similar attitudes... let's get together, work hard, respect boundaries, respect autonomy and each others' lives. Most importantly, we all thought of each other as people first and employees/managers/owners second, both before but especially after covid when everyone's private lives became a regular part of their online lives.
If your work environment is actively toxic, man, get the hell out of there. It's not worth whatever they're paying you. You could be happy with much, much less.
99.99% uptime does not mean you need to be on a meeting every night.
Your manager is bad. Really bad. Becoming a manager doesn't mean you put on some ring and now you're in the "inevitably bad club".
Like others have said, find a new job that respects you.
This. Find a new job. That's everything you need to know.
/e: also,
"I feel so burned out and anxious all the time, not because of overwork, but due to a lack of formal structure in my work day."
Please do it asap and treat yourself to at least two weeks of personal time before switching jobs. You're shortening your lifespan here because someone else is doing a shitty job (and I not only mean your direct manager).
One challenge of leadership positions is that problems get escalated to you and this comes with unplanned disruptions. If you take the attitude of the previous job that you are responsible for implementing outcomes and combine this with chaotic schedule it gets toxic. It can help to focus on taking responsibility for process and letting somewhat go of outcome. Defining and enforcing process is now more of your job and you should have or need to demand a degree of freedom here.
> where in I'm required to have nightly meetings with other teams who are outside of my timezone
You may not avoid these meetings but you may be able to cut work at other times. Saying no to meetings and requests can be scary at first but you can either learn to say no or you will be stuck on this level forever. Your job is now not just to protect yourself but also your team and organization and that critically depends on saying now.
Particularly due to bad hires and weak processes. A team should be self serving and should know how to deal with issues without hand holding.
But op’s case seems to be a bad company. I’d move on asap. If they are in west or east europe they should find a job in no time.
Working late has a huge knock-on effect on your social life and ability to interact with society around you. That's probably contributing to your burnout.
If there's budget or willingness, having someone in that timezone who can perform your role for that meeting may be possible.
I'd be very wary of taking any regular work outside of your contracted hours unless there is a lot of $$$$ involved and your relationships can survive it.
You might get some mileage out of a long vacation, or agressively pruning your work hours.
Having that kind of meeting be regular sounds like a bad management to me.
Mine also has international teams across the globe and we don't regularly have meetings at unreasonable hours (except for employees in India)
This is done by not expecting managers in Europe to manage day to day work going on in Asia, etc.
Your company doesn't value your well being and you should leave.
A lot of companies have terrible on-call processes, bad infrastructure and not enough cost-pressure to fix the infra.
We do offer systems with 24/7 99.9 uptime in SLAs - yet, people are happy to take on-call for a week. They do, because a normal week has zero, or one incidents going on out of hours. Two is considered a lot. At three interrupted sleeps, rotation is offered. At four, rotation is forced and at that point, we usually start to go through full post mortems for all pages to squash this problem.
On top, a long escalation at night means the person is legally not allowed to work usually until noon the next day or longer (10 - 12 hours of mandatory rest). The latter alone is a very good incentive for the company to fix technical issues or processes causing these incidents, because all of a sudden, a person pretty much isn't working for a week. Besides them being effectively drunk after 3 interrupted sleeps, just without the fun.
And similarly, evening work is usually planned 1-2 weeks ahead so we can batch 2-3 hours of evening work together. The person then in turn doesn't work the regular day.
With measures like that, even us as the ops-team can have normal working hours from 8-10 to 16-18 usually. Unplanned work after 20:00 is very rare.
I felt like I dodged a bullet.
Predictable, steady work schedule.
Nice compensation package.
Pick two (at most). Sometimes you‘re really lucky, but it won‘t stay forever as the organization will drift into one of the corners naturally.
Note it‘s okay to re-pick occasionally as sometimes you need one more than the other in life.
I sure did, and found some peace in this great article from NYT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15107818
If those boundaries aren't compatible with your current employer find a different one.
On-call doesn't have to be a nightmare either but it does mean prioritising reliability over feature work, often a be a hard sell to "the business" as they likely care more about revenue over your lack of sleep. Again it comes down to boundaries and sternly refusing to accrue the types of technical debt that are likely to cause issues.
Ultimately, you draw power from being the person with the ability to create software. It's on you to leverage that to build the lifestyle that you desire.
Sure it is. The company must be small enough to not have interational clients or big enough to have dedicated support team for different timezone. But not that big to have entire dev team in different timezone you need to communicate with. Or even bigger to have also management in every time zone necessary.
My friend works as a dev in a big corporate software company and has a stable schedule. Not 9-5 but more like 11-7 by his own choice. He said his colleages with familly life can start at 7 and be home after 3pm.
- industries that have serious consequences for errors, e.g. finance, health.
- high volume client facing systems, e.g. high tps b2c (think large e-commerce).
- companies not yet in a mature phase, e.g. 10 years or older.
Start there in terms of simple rules of thumb to filter out potential jobs. Then when doing interviews dig further. Lastly don't take leadership positions.
In the end of the day it's definitely possible to find something fulfilling but not all consuming, just take your time to find a place...I'm sure it's out there
I think your best options are to speak with your manager about it or start looking for other jobs with better work-life-balance. The companies you are looking for certainly do exist!
We do meandering sync calls[1] for 1 hour, four times a week. Plus a weekly demo call.
It's a matter of how much your management cares about developer experience and efficiency. Get another job :)
[1]: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/standup-meetings-are-dead/
Whatever works for your team and company, but this sounds excruciatingly inefficient and disruptive. This means that your entire team is interrupted for at least an hour every day, to be part of a meeting that may or may not be productive.
IMO meetings should be anything but meandering. They should have a clear agenda, a strict start and end time, and everyone should be clear on what the outcome was and what was agreed.
Addressing some of the points of the article you linked:
> No one reads async stand-ups.
> If you dig into the “everything async” world you will find the teams that do it best are actually lying.
That might be your experience, but is not objectively true. In my company we use Geekbot, and while I can't speak for everyone, most people do read the async updates.
Let's keep in mind what standups are: quick meetings (15m tops; that's why they're done standing up), where the team can synchronize on work in progress, and address any blocking issues. If there are no blockers for my team members, do I really need to know what they're working on? That should be obvious from regular communication over Slack or GitHub.
So the whole concept of daily meetings, even quick ones, is not strictly necessary. Extending this to an hour daily, and repurposing it for general banter or other regular meetings, seems very unstructured and chaotic.
> Creating a daily social space for the team builds trust and compassion. We get to learn about each other’s hobbies, interests, and lives outside of work.
Ah, so you're using these meetings for social activities. Personally, I don't think knowing my coworkers on a personal level is required to have a professional and cordial relationship. Everyone is different, and I appreciate that others do need that sense of connection, but I wouldn't enjoy forced social activities. At my company we do optional one on one and group sessions specifically for banter and getting to know each other. These can be fun, but the good thing is that they're entirely optional, and are scheduled precisely for this one purpose.
In addition to this, there can be game sessions and, preferably, physical meetups that can serve to create this personal connection, but again, I don't think any of it is strictly necessary to work with someone. There are completely distributed teams that have never met in person, that have established sufficient rapport and trust between them to do great collaborative work. "Teams will always work better when they know one another" is objectively wrong.
The entire concept of forced social activities is reminiscent of large corporate environments where management thinks team building exercises are what makes teams do great work. This always felt cringy, fake and ultimately didn't result in anything. Trust is built naturally by working with someone; not by being forced to learn about their personal lives. The fact our working environments have shifted to being mostly online doesn't change that fact.
> Finally, it actually reduces meetings and interruptions for the team. When we have a team retro, we do it during the sync. Weekly, monthly, quarterly planning—it all happens during the sync.
Frankly, this sounds awful. This means that people are never sure what the purpose of the meeting is and how long it will last. Doing these daily would absolutely interrupt any activity that requires long periods of concentration, such as programming. I would much prefer to have days without any meetings at all, and have scheduled meetings for a specific purpose.
Also, you have quarterly, monthly and weekly planning meetings? That sounds overly excessive.
But again, if all this somehow works for you, then by all means, keep at it. But most of these would be deal breakers for me to work in such an environment, and you shouldn't present this advice as something that will work for all teams and companies.
* Several meetings including standup. These vary massively from low level tech discussions, planning sprint work at more of a 'product' level, and some big picture company strategy type stuff. I go though lots of big context shifts basically.
* Ad hoc calls helping people out with problems.
* Mentoring
* Fire fighting occasional production issues.
* Answering questions from the wider business / tech community.
* Sprint work.
The main issue for me is time fragmentation, all of the above can lead to a lot of context switching. My ways of coping are as follows:
* First thing. Write a new todo list. Catch up on lower priority slack messages, emails and so on.
* Decline meetings where they're not useful.
* Split burden of attending certain meetings between teammates eg. we don't all have to be at everything.
* Mute Slack and work for 30 minute periods. Focus on one thing. Do not multi task. After that period, see if there's anything important to reply to. Repeat.
* Try to do the hardest earlier in the day. Admin and lower complexity tasks are best left to end of the day.
This is just what works for me, hope some of it is useful. I frequently don't do all of this. It's just an ideal that I try to strive towards however imperfectly. I'm OK with failure and I don't expect to ever really nail this. That's just another source of stress. A structure with rules really helps lower the cognitive burden for me though.
To be honest, he doesn't sound very good — I'd either try to change manager or change company.
To your wider point — there are still companies that have a more traditional dev vs ops/sysadmin separation. Especially bigger, more traditional businesses (non tech start-ups) that still do their own software dev in-house.
Otherwise, you could get a role where the quality of tooling & support while on call is better. There's a difference being 1st line support in a place where things are always on fire and being 3rd line support in a place where the only time you're getting a call is once in a blue moon and there's a postmortem afterwards to work out how it could've been prevented.
Coincidentally I have zero experience with microservices. Might be just a coincidence.
At worst you’ll carry around the scars of burning out for the rest if your life.
And yes, it is possible to work reasonable hours. Not only that, but it should be the default.
Yes, but it is worth nothing that is not the same question as to whether you can have a structured work day. I work in about 4 short shifts: A couple hours before my family wakes up, a few hours after kid get to school until our daily standup (which is at my lunch time due to time zones), a couple hours after lunch until kids get home, and a brief check-in before bed to see what my westernmost colleagues have done and review their PRs.
So I work 8 hours a day, structured, but spread over about 14 hours. And actually spend more time with my family than I would working "9-5" because I structure my times off when they are around.
The only time I worked stupid hours in my career was in a director role: I was in the office at 7:30, left no earlier than 6:30 (usually drove people home after that!), and got very friendly with the weekend cleaning staff because I was in there 2 weekends a month, minimum. I was doing at least 4 hours of meetings a day, and then trying to get a full day of work done on top of that. Forget that noise. I quit and went back to IC, where your problems are your problems, and other people's problems are (mostly) their problems.
This is definitely possible, though.
Regarding on-call: Work for internal tools teams at companies that aren't really worldwide. Internal tools teams, either developer or business facing, usually don't have much in terms of off-hours on-call. On-call expectations are determined more by the product you're delivering than the company culture.
Absolutely, at least in Europe. Not everywhere, be wary of “we’re family” and “hustle” types.
IMO it's possible to limit your hours, though you might have to work odd ones.
The only way to meaningfully have control over your schedule is to be independently wealthy, or to live in an advanced social democracy, which amounts to the same thing.
It really depends on what you do - one of the reasons I'm an IC and not a manager is to reduce the number of meetings (when I managed, even at startups it was always a lot of meetings which were needed/required).
You can compromise and agree on "core hours" where you'll always make yourself available, even if that's in the evening, as long as you can arrange for it. The company can compromise and adopt a more async style of communication (I've established that several times both in leadership and consulting roles - it works, you just need to know how to talk to C levels in their language.)
You could even give your leadership some weeks to come up with a solution, telling them your requirements (along with things you could compromise on). If they truly expect you to be available 24/7 - it'd be surprised, but that's clearly not a good place to work then. From my experience, this is the exception, not the rule.
It sounds like you're working with a bunch of workaholics who don't mind working outside normal hours and built a company culture around that expectation.
I work with colleagues around the world and we stay disciplined within good parts of the day and using async communication for everything else. It's not hard to do at all, but it does mean the workaholic upper management folks need to exercise self restraint and patience when scheduling meetings.
You can try setting more strict boundaries for your work hours. It may or may not work. You might be seen as lazy or not a team player. In that case, the honest truth is that you're in a toxic workplace.
To answer you question. Interviews are a two way street and it's on you to ask questions to figure out the WLB of the team. Don't ask "how is the WLB" but ask specific questions such as "how many time the last month were there meetings after 5pm" or "how often did pages go off the last few months and what is the rotation schedule."
Preemptive reply: yes, it also applies to 100% uptime services. The trick is to have redundancy at all stages - which is what managers are paid to ensure.
As others have said you are being overworked by your employeer. It's not only mean they dont care about your health, but also it means their processes are bad exactly because company itself will only lose in the end: quality will drop, productivity will sink and people will leave.
As about working on your own be it freelance or starting your own company: this way you will only have to work much more. So far I haven't seen any single successful entrepreneur or founder who wasn't working 12 hours a day for at least several years before they get anywhere.
Also it obviously gonna depend on what is your speciality. I guess some RoR / Java developer will more likely to find long-term contract.
The world, including the tech world, is much bigger than you think.
Though I have only seen a tiny fraction of it myself, here’s where I’ve had reliably contained workdays: 1) Machine learning systems for internal Ops processes, we technically had on call rotation but I never heard of anyone being paged at a terrible hour 2) Data engineering for strategic dashboards, where “I will fix it when I get in tomorrow“ is totally fine 3) A cross geography team who is clients are in my time zone, which set the norm that the other people had to shift their working hours instead (I’m not saying that this is globally optimal, but they knew what they were signing up for, and I can be confident this pattern will persist)
Each has their own trade-offs, but my point is that you can find options anywhere along some dimension if you keep looking
But, you may need to change job.
I’ve had two employers who had one “let’s all work late and eat together” day a week, but this was consistent and coordinated with everyone’s families.
Unpredictable work hours are entirely avoidable if you’re not in a startup.
Yes. I've done it before, and am doing it now. Including at startups. It's about intentionally setting your own boundaries and being firm on them.
Every job in every industry will ask you at some point to give more than is required, and it's up to you to set the boundaries on when and how you say yes and no to these types of requests. My sister works in a non-technical industry and the text of your post could be something she's said to me in the past if you just replace "IT/software" with her industry. And again, her issues are all caused by simply saying yes to everything asked of her without any boundaries.
I've very rarely had after-hours meetings because work was handled by colocated teammates, or the company only had one office. If chatting with another timezone was needed at all, it was async, or US cross-coast calls in the morning during business hours.
On-call is harder to avoid. It's hard to escape being chained to the pager, but even so the actual time spend responding to pages should be low. And I've had a number of jobs that didn't come with pager rotation at all.
My on call pages mostly looked like "get paged to reboot this thing. 15 minutes 1-3x / week."
With a single notable exception, my jobs have kept the majority or entirety of their work inside 9-6.
Even at 12h difference, otherside can have it on 20:00 - 21:00 (or one hour earlier if you are ok with 07:00 - 08:00) which I wouldn't call late night
A late night meeting implies the other side is not having a similar compromise.
I would suggest talking with a recruiter about what you want and they'll probably come back with it in short order.
Lots of tech jobs with no overtime or OnCall.
Management tends to be a little different there. If you want to work fewer hours I would suggest technical roles over management roles.
For starting your own company many people find they work quite a lot. I've met people who run fairly casual side businesses too though so I won't say it's completely inevitable.
9-5 is possible even at really good paying tech companies. Your manager/org just sounds to be in quite a poor state. I’d suggest looking elsewhere or, if you’re bold, looking at how things can be improved and either spearheading that change possible or making recommendations for it
This depends on the size of company you work at. I haven't worked on teams large enough to only go on call once a quarter, and many employers weren't big enough to have a dedicated on call team.
Yes: public service. At least in Western-ish countries, government employees are among the best protected classes regarding worker rights, however you will suffer hard hits in payment compared to FAANG and friends, and bureaucracy may make your work life hell in another way - think like waiting weeks to get access rights to a file server or your building keys.
But you could work as a freelancer/contractor or be employed for a few years at a slower-paced show e.g. a gov agency. Once you get bored by it, and after you have had time to recover from burn out, and have had the chance to spend more time with the family, you can always change pace again.
I would not agree to any contract with a pager-duty clause, personally, apart way back when I worked as a paramedic.
Not only does it sound poorly managed, it also sounds like people are focusing patching over problems, treating the symptoms instead of the cause.
If you can identify root cause of why teams need so many meetings at unusual times and propose alternatives that mean you don't suffer, do it.
If your suggestions are ignored or worse, it's probably time to leave and find yourself a company that gives a damn about people.
I have that as an independent, yet I don’t have any fixed schedule and I basically work every day. (I work three to six hours a day in a mode that feels like work.)
Some of my work is coding or coding-like activity. I also teach, which does have a fixed schedule when underway.
Our LT took the feedback and we have since regionalized the teams so people don’t work too far out of their time zone.
If that’s not possible, perhaps find somewhere else that works in one time zone.
This seems like an issue with the Org given the information posted, but it also seems like you have a somewhat supportive manager. There is a lot of merit for considering finding a new role or a more "temporally normal" Org.
If your goal is to only work a 9-5 schedule starting your own company may not be the best option, but YMMV.
Good luck!
I have to say, it sounds like you do have structure and regularity--you just have regularly structured meetings outside of 9-6 hours. Not too bad as long as predictable.
Yes, it is even the norm outside of the more exploitative environments. Most stable are the in-house dev teams in non-IT industries like financial services, retail, logistics etc.
We have teams outside the US, mostly business teams (non-IT) that we interact with....China, Israel, Ireland.. Even within the US in Phoenix is a 3 hour timezone difference from me on the East coast.
Another commenter said...find a company that only services the US.
Unless my company clones me (i.e. hire a part timer who does what I do, but only in Asia and west coast) I just become reasonably accommodating knowing we all work together and in the same boat to find hours that work without interfering with my life.
Lately, I feel exhausted with all the late night meetings thats required of me at work
Do these meetings result in some action items at the end ?
If every single one of these meetings result in action items, different ones each time ? Then something is fundamentally wrong (either in the process, or in the software solution or both) that needs fixing and it needs to be established how that can be fixed AND why it has NOT been fixed as yet ? That is where your leadership role will come in handy.
I feel so burned out and anxious all the time, not because of overwork, but due to a lack of formal structure in my work day.
I'm thinking of starting out on my own someday
and work was monotonous bug fixing, but I felt much more at peace since work was always predictable most of the time
I would suggest that try and find out where the inefficiencies are which require these meetings (besides the timezone differences) and use your leadership role to work towards fixing those. If however it is a dead-zone then work towards establishing that is indeed a dead-zone and then leave... don't take an uninformed terminal decision.
I'm a solo freelancer and I work from 8am till 3:30pm. However, there are times when things need to be done during late night hours. This happens maybe once a month and I don't complain - this is a bonus of working with me. When my client starts to abuse my flexibility I charge 2x/3x hourly rate for the tasks done outside my regular work schedule. This quickly verifies how important these tasks really are - sometimes clients indeed pay extra without fuss, at other times the "unacceptable 3 min downtime at 8am" becomes acceptable to them ;-). Share the pain with them.
I’ve done the endless late night meetings a few times in career. It always leads to burnout.
1) Endure in your current position, not making any changes, and live with it. 2) Leave and find something else. 3) Try to change things in the company you are currently working. If that does not work, see 1 or 2.
Here's how I do option 3:
I have, from day one, always recorded my work time and kept a kind of diary in my own independent system. Keeping an independent record is valuable. Without data, there is no argument in negotiations (setting boundaries, salary, company paying courses or books...). Also track whenever you need to work on some completely new topic.
The employer can of course say that your data may be untrustworthy. Such responses try to divert your attention and keep you from recording. You should still do it. Aim for 5 minutes, possibly 10, every other day, where you record what you did. Aim for another 20 minutes each week (I use saturday or sunday) to aggregate your findings (weekly works well for me).
In any negotiation, you should bring up your conclusions. They might "performance evaluate" you, you will professionally provide them with feedback of substance. And this is where you can set boundaries, ask for books, courses, more salary and more. Provide a perspective backed by your data.* If they grant you something, ask "can I have that in writing?" if it is appropriate.
After you have done this once or twice, you can gauge whether it is a lost cause (they just do not care — then consider, strongly, to find something else) or if you helped your situation.
For me, it worked very well. I have no company phone. I am not working on call. Meetings are scheduled regularly, during my work hours, which are an established boundary (with some leeway though). My weekends and my evenings are sacred.
*) Here are some tips:
1) Be aware that managers wish their rear ends covered. 2) Do not engage in blatant, harsh criticism. Phrase it like suggestions: "we might do better if we could somehow..." or "we could prevent situations like this in the future if we...". 3) Never join into ad-hominem talk. Even if you share your co-workers or manager's opinion when they riff on somebody, criticize situations, not people. 4) Never falsify your own records (never lie to them when presenting your conclusions); if trust in your data is actively destroyed by you, there is no coming back. 5) If someone does something well, do say so. If things go well, say so. "I have noticed that X does not happen any more, it's great!" 6) It is a normal side effect that you might actually become interested in your company's well-being if you do the above. You are becoming somebody they wish to keep. 7) YOUR BOSS IS NOT YOUR FRIEND. NEITHER ARE YOUR CO-WORKERS. Always be aware of that.
These are my experiences. They might not work for you, and if so, I am sorry.
Best of luck to you!
* As a company, we've largely leaned into asynchronous communication and many/most things just don't need a meeting.
* The company and team are aware that we have people everywhere, and try to find reasonable hours for meetings. Next week, a meeting ending at 18.30 my time is the latest meeting I have. Nobody expects me to be present for very late meetings in my time zone (though if it was unavoidable I would still join).
* I try to bundle my meetings on the same day. I'd rather have a few meetings back to back that go later rather than have meetings in the afternoon/evening on every day of the week. This works for me for early meetings as well, when they do come up: I just prefer to have as many days as possible completely meeting-free. If a new mandatory recurring meeting is scheduled on one of my "meeting-free" days, I see if I can reshuffle my calendar to bring those blocks of meetings together again. Because there are not many recurring meetings, this is often possible.
* I've marked "Ideal meeting hours" in my calendar on my three "meeting-preferred" days, and those meeting hours go from later afternoon to evening in my time zone. This allows my teammates to schedule impromptu meetings on days that still suit me best (whenever possible, which is often).
* I think of my morning-early afternoon hours as my focused work hours because I rarely have meetings then, and accept that late afternoons are likely to be more hand-wavy and talky. This also allows me to mentally prepare for synchronous interaction in advance and not feel like I'm just hopping in and out of meetings all the time. On days when I have evening meetings coming up, I've learned to be OK with starting a bit later or taking a longer lunch. My day is simply offset to accommodate for the meeting times, not extended (at least that's the attempt, I'm not always successful with this).
* I make it very clear to my manager that I like minimizing meetings and having more time for focused work, and prefer async communication. Some people are just more into meetings and feel that seeing someone face to face works best for them, and I make it clear that while of course I'll attend whatever meetings are needed, I am not one of those people who ever _prefers_ a meeting over other options.
I realize some or all of the above could be more complicated in a manager position, but in a well set up distributed team I think it should be manageable to avoid burning out both ICs and managers like this.