Optimizing software dev career for free time, not seniority/money

March 1, 2021 12:54 PM

I have a senior developer title now, but I feel out of my depth, and I don't have enough free time or energy to spend with my family, or to pursue personal projects. I would like to work 40 hours (or less?) every week (or almost every week). Pay cut/losing seniority OK. Difficulty: Full-stack web developer, USA.

Several replies in this Reddit thread suggest looking not at tech companies, but in the tech departments of companies in other industries (hotels, insurance, etc). I'd be curious whether anyone agrees or disagrees with that assessment.

But I assume I'll need to switch languages to have more options. Ruby on Rails (the only framework in which I have recent experience) seems to mainly be used in the startup world (which is notoriously bad for WLB). This blog post indicates that Python is going to have the widest pool of jobs to select from. (Seems important if I need to job hop to find the right fit.) Again, counterpoints welcome.

Snowflakes: I have 4 years web dev experience (Ruby), 3 years in a software developer trainer-type job, and 7 years with non-customer-facing enterprise development (not-at-all-modern Java). I am 45 years old. I am self-taught and have no college degree. I've held only fully-remote jobs since 2012.

Since all my recent professional experience is in Ruby, what are the best ways to convince a shop working in another language to take me on? Open-source contributions? Portfolio projects? Certification? Accepting a cut in pay/seniority to learn on the job (and would employers look askance at this)?

posted by commander_fancypants to Work & Money (15 answers total)

Context: I'm a PM and former developer, and I work primarily for consulting companies. Most of my clients are themselves large companies outside of the "tech sector" - so, ironically, some of your ideal employers. I also started my career with 7 years of lot of not-at-all modern Java!

I also agree that for work/life balance, all else being equal, it's easier to find that in companies that are not "tech companies" - you will generally get paid less but also experience less stress, work fewer hours, and have a more stable tech stack without pressure to work with "the latest hotness." There are many other variables at play, of course, but it's a good rule of thumb.

1) Ruby and Python have a lot in common. Most well-run companies that have 'breathing room' for people to grow at all (ie, not frantic startups) that you'd want to work for anyway will consider substantial Ruby experience roughly equivalent to Python experience, unless they have sufficiently 'exotic' Python-specific work, and even then, again, the good ones will look seriously at you anyway. The fact that you have 2 very different languages under your belt already helps identify you as a "senior dev who happens to work in Ruby right now" as opposed to people who have only ever really used on language in depth and struggle to learn more.

2) While Ruby and Rails have a very startuppy reputation, there's still a fair amount in larger orgs. This is still probably limiting but less than you might fear.

3) You have no college degree. This means a lot of companies will simply not look at you. This is, I want to emphasize, unfair and to their detriment, but it's also true. The nice thing, though, is those that will give you a fair look are by definition organizations with a willingness and ability to look more seriously at actual skills and potential, rather than formal certifications. A very large proportion of the orgs that would reject you out of hand for not ticking the right "Python" boxes are also going to reject you out of hand for not having a degree.

4) To more directly answer your question: I'd take a look at job postings you theoretically might want, and in addition to just straight applying for them, use them as a basis to develop a list of Python (or Java, or whatever) areas you want to be able to demonstrate skill in. A little portfolio project work can go a really long way to demonstrating "I am not an expert in this but I do take it seriously and I have at least a basic understanding of it and can discuss it, and discuss further what I'd like to get better at."
posted by Tomorrowful at 1:22 PM on March 1, 2021 [4 favorites]

I'm a BA in the IT department of an insurance company. The balance is absolutely fantastic. One time I was writing an email but forgot to hit send, so I logged back in at 8pm to send it. The next morning I had a response from my boss questioning why I was doing work after 5pm. They are *very* big on us not working more than 37.5 hours/week. For developers, there are occasional late nights or weekends around the ends of sprints, but that seems rare, and you're allowed to comp that time during the rest of the week. This is just one company, but yeah, insurance IT is good for work-life balance.

I don't work with every application my company has, but I believe the vast majority are written in Java. Don't discount out-of-date Java experience, because you'll probably be working with a lot of legacy code that was written while (or even before) the Java you know was current. And while I don't know what actual hiring managers think, water cooler chitchat here doesn't seem to revolve around languages like it did when I was working at actual software companies.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:31 PM on March 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

I have no idea whether my experience generalizes to your situation, but I enjoyed working for the US Army as a contractor, for six years, programming in Ruby on Rails. Specifically I was maintaining and writing plug-ins for Redmine. The nice thing about the Army is that they usually DO NOT WANT you to work more than 40 hours a week (though they do have a mandatory non-billable 30 minute lunch break which from some points of view brings the work week up to 42.5 hours). I happen to have an advanced degree but there were at least a couple of people in my group who had no degree at all. Do not apply to the Army itself but look for contracting opportunities. If you are interested, I could give you the names of some head-hunters who are looking for this kind of person, but if you're not in the Baltimore-DC area they may not be useful to you.
posted by ubiquity at 1:38 PM on March 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

I would word it as: don't work at startups, software companies, or tech companies at which you would be making The Product.

I know lots of people who - as a fairly common example - work either in-house or for consulting companies doing customizations for stuff like SalesForce, NetSuite, and/or Oracle, or they write integrations between those kinds of things and webcommerce, third-party logistics software, manufacturing platforms, etc. It's generally API-to-API work. The company may very well sell a software product developed by an entirely different team, but that's fine if you're living over on the Sales/Operations/Accounting side instead.

As a consulting gig, it generally pays pretty well because you're a billable resource, and a good shop cares a lot about resource management for the purpose of timelines and knows that rushing/stressing/exploiting doesn't pay in the end. There are periodic fires that require a late night or weekend, stuff happens, but there shouldn't be any real crunch culture. As an in-house developer, you do want to try to identify a healthy system that respects the folks who keep the orders flowing in and invoices flowing out, but they're definitely out there.
posted by Lyn Never at 1:39 PM on March 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

I'd job shift to become an architect. No matter what dev job you choose, they are always going to have tight deadlines, be cutting resources, and fixing defects. Architects and BAs have decent work-life balance.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:50 PM on March 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

Huh, I was interested to read this because I've been thinking about whether I'd like to downshift to part-time sometime in the future and then you said you were looking for... my actual job I have right now.

I am a Rails developer at a software company and I rarely work more than 40 hours a week (like, a couple of weeks a year, and even then I could probably get out of it if I had a hard reason - conversely if I wanted to be the team superstar I would probably need to put in a few more hours). The company only had one fully-remote employee pre-pandemic (an IT/Ops person who started out in-office and then moved cross-country) but the whole company has been fully remote for the last year and it's gone well enough that I would be surprised if we don't consider fully remote hiring in the future (we're currently hiring our third round of fully-remote software interns). We have hired people with no degrees, people with various kinds of fancy degrees, CS grads, bootcamp grads, self-taught people with demonstrable experience, whatevs. We're a startup size tech company but almost 20 years old and not very startuppy, culturally or organizationally.

Anyway: such places do exist! (Although we're not currently hiring - people tend to stay a while.)

Also, though, as kevinbelt notes, Java is a totally useful language to have at big legacy companies. And the Rails experience will make you seem relatively cool. I do worry that that kind of place might be more credential-y overall and eliminate you for not having a degree (since they tend to have more formal hiring processes), but the way around that may just be to make connections with actual humans at those kinds of companies. I do also wonder whether those kinds of companies will be good about remote work post-pandemic but it doesn't hurt to ask.

Honestly I think you should just start applying to jobs that you think you could do at places that sound OK. It will give you a much better idea of what the actual requirements are going to be and even just in an interview you'll get a better idea of the specifics of expectations, etc., than you will from thinking about it generally.
posted by mskyle at 2:02 PM on March 1, 2021 [4 favorites]

The problem with having a project based job is deadlines, and time/budget overruns (where everybody is pushed to spend more time to stay on track).

It may help if you shift to a project manager role, where you don't code, but rather manage people who do. You usually don't code at all, but you coordinate among the various stakeholders, and you smooth obstacles out of the way. More of an agile/SCRUM master, than a true PMP.

But part of it may be because I *hate* project managers who cannot estimate time properly and forces the coders to overtime in order to meet the deadline to cover their incompetence. Why aren't THEY rated for their ability to manage overtime and staff satisfaction, instead of just the results? Because they work under a perverted incentive system, where their higher-ups ONLY care about feature set and on-time delivery and budget, but that's a different topic altogether. Maybe with your coding experience you can do better, knowing already the pitfalls and problems you may run into.

Regular IT job, once you got enough certifications, are a lot better with work/life balance. IMHO, of course. I am a former IT guy found myself stuck between IT and full-stack webdev. :)
posted by kschang at 2:03 PM on March 1, 2021

The last two tech companies I've worked for, at least one of which you know the name of, have allowed me to succeed while working only 40 hours a week (sometimes less, virtually never more). I have been an individual contributor and a manager, and I have gotten good performance ratings, raises, bonuses, etc. I make far more money than my friends who work programming jobs in non-tech companies, and my work/life balance is at least as good as theirs. I'm not going to say this is the norm, but it absolutely is possible.

I personally don't think you should rule out tech companies, especially as someone with no degree who wants to be remote. My experience (making very broad generalizations) is that tech companies are more progressive about remote work and also more open to hiring people with "non-traditional" backgrounds or no degree. I think it's smart to ask about what industries are most open to the arrangement you want, but I also think you'll find that it varies even within an industry, so my advice is to cast a wide net and not limit yourself before even applying.

To make this work in the tech industry, I think you have to do two things.

First, feel it out the best you can during the interview process. Ask people what their days look like, etc. You may have to be delicate asking about "work life balance" or hours, but honestly if those are dealbreakers for you, ask away. If they don't want someone who cares about that, you have your answer. Also ask if there are any operational or oncall responsibilities, or travel.

Second, once you get there, enforce it yourself. In my jobs, no manager has ever told me to go home at 5, or to not work the weekend. But I just don't. I log in around 9, log off around 5, never look at my work email or anything on nights and weekends. I just don't let them pull me into it. I have co-workers who do this, and I guess that's fine for them. But it's not the life I want, and I take some responsibility for shaping it.

Anyway, good luck. I think this is a very wise direction to be going. I hope to never work in a hard-charging long-hours company again, and if my next step dictates taking a pay cut to keep my current lifestyle, I will do so without hesitation.
posted by primethyme at 2:57 PM on March 1, 2021 [14 favorites]

You should definitely think about contracting if you want to work less than 40 hours a week. This works well for me (I'm working on school at the same time) because as a contractor I am able to set my own hours and can just refuse to work a certain day if it conflicts with a class assignment. The downside to working as a contractor is you end up spending time hunting down contracts and need to talk to people about things like payment a lot.

Even if you don't want to be your own contractor, you could work for a place that hires you out as a contractor. My dad, who is also a software developer, is approaching retirement and now works for a subcontracting firm that hires him out for 30 hours a week working on various things involving ServiceNow (one of those big enterprise software suites that need contractors for maintenance/customization). I would think any job opening that says something like "flexible working hours" would be worth taking a look at.
posted by JZig at 4:50 PM on March 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

This might sound glib, but I don’t mean it that way: try asking for more time off!

Not every company will be flexible on this. But some will, especially when the job market is this hot. I managed to find a company that needed my particular skill set quite badly, and they were happy to let me work 4 days a week in exchange for some concessions on compensation.
posted by ripley_ at 7:39 PM on March 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

I’ve had a 20+ year software dev career largely at companies that are not tech companies. I have a non-traditional career background and am a gender minority in this field. My current employer is a large international retail company that has a reputation for treating its employees ethically. I have lots of work life balance, flexibility, and autonomy. I do get paid less than I would at Microsoft or Amazon, but at my age I wouldn’t trade it at all.
posted by matildaben at 8:17 PM on March 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

My whole career has been in tech companies and I finally just got to good work life balance myself after 7+ years. I'd say avoid small startups – they're just going to be more demanding. You want a later stage company where people are mid career and having kids (maybe check out paternity leave policies and look for places with generous ones), and ideally a place where engineering is respected. It's much harder to convince leadership who doesn't really get tech why your project is taking longer than expected (they might think progress should be linear, HA!) whereas I find in a more eng focused company as long as you can communicate clearly about the project status and any reasons you may be blocked, people are pretty understanding and have to just believe whatever you said, also because they often have no idea themselves how hard the thing is. At the end of the day you're the one building it, so it does end up having to go at your pace, and that pace can totally stay within your 40 hours.
posted by internet of pillows at 11:14 PM on March 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

My work-life balance problems are... mainly internal. Call it imposter syndrome, I don't know.

I am learning to work fewer hours and drop projects or miss deadlines. I always expect reprimands. Year after year, I get the same pat on the back at the annual review.

Missed deadlines are the fault of the deadline estimator. Granted, that may be you. It is human nature to over-promise under pressure. The team must take this into account. It is not your job to compensate by working overtime. Keep them informed when you expect a deadline to slip.

If you otherwise like your current job, consider working less. You will still be valuable. Your value does not depend on volunteering overtime.

Many of us have this tendency. Work-life-balance may require an organization that actively mandates it.

Bigger organizations may be better at seeing the big picture of employee well-being. Though note some big organizations are actually loose collections of startups. (See: research universities.)

Also: if you can, living under your means helps cultivate a more relaxed attitude. Understood that's not possible for everyone.
posted by floppyroofing at 7:09 AM on March 2, 2021 [3 favorites]

Some observations based on 15+ years in software development at a mix of company sizes/stages/industries (primarily on the US West Coast):

W2 hourly contracting:

• Practically guaranteed to max out at 40 hrs/week since most companies are reluctant to pay overtime. If you do get overtime that means more $$$ directly to you. Usually a streamlined hiring process, but first hired -> first fired.
• No sick or vacation pay. That won't stop you from taking time off, but you'll need to carefully consider your hourly rate to account for the drop in pay. Also the health/retirement plans offered, if any, will be crappy so you'll need to DIY that and your career development will also be completely DIY.
• Quite often, companies that hire contractors for regular software work do not value software development and development teams as a long-term investment. They're also prone to focus on specific skill matches—4 years of RoR experience but no Sinatra? Sorry, no job for you.

1099 contracting:

• You're basically running a 1-person business entity.
• Work whatever hours you want (subject to your statement of work) because you're your own boss.
• Charge as much $$$ as you can, see above.
• DIY all your own marketing, biz dev, accounting, operations, health plan, retirement plan...
• No regular paycheck, some clients may pay invoices late or never.
• Taxes work very differently in this world versus with W2 employment. Talk to a qualified accountant for advice if you're thinking of going this route.

Tech work for a non-tech company:

• Some of these companies have quite sophisticated software development practices and view the area as a business enabler, if not as a direct profit center—telcos and finance companies often fall into this category. Others will see software development as primarily a cost center, and you'll get the cost and time pressure that comes with that.
• Generally lean towards ~40 hrs/week of work, but I've seen some people put in CRAZY hours at these places.
• Project initiatives, estimation, and deadlines are prone to coming from non-technical stakeholders way above you and may be, to put it charitably, naively optimistic.
• Can be credentialist, as well as focused on specific tech experience versus generalist engineering skills.

Tech work for a tech startup (< 250 people, funding series C or earlier):

• Huge variation in startups -> huge variation in startup cultures and working styles. Some are a soul-crushing grind, some are pretty easy-going, some will have a mix of crunch times and slower times.
• This group tends to skew younger and age bias can be an issue. However you'll also find some older serial entrepreneurs and plenty of engineers with families.
• Regularly working < 40 hrs/week will generally not be on offer, however part-time work arrangements aren't unheard of. You also may be able to get considerable flex in how you schedule your work hours.
• Python and Ruby/RoR are popular languages. Adding a modern frontend framework like React will boost your resume as many of these places are looking for people with at least some full-stack ability.
• Relatively open to people from non-traditional backgrounds and without formal educational credentials. Relatively open to people demonstrating skill through experience with related technologies, via OSS and personal projects, and so on. Don't bother with paid certifications, startups DGAF.

Tech work for an established tech company:

• Again, big variation in cultures here and sometimes, big variation between departments/divisions. Some of these companies (*cough* Amazon *cough*) are notorious for overwork, no respect for personal time, etc., others aren't exactly relaxed but will have a moderate pace.
• 40+ hrs/week is the baseline expectation, but by being firm in setting boundaries you can carve out family and personal time and if you've proven your value you can get quite a bit of leeway. Managers at these places are (or should, mostly) be aware of how burnout and overwork affect the long-term health of the teams and staff often come from a wider age/life-stage mix than startups. However these places can also be full of ambitious hyper-achiever types.
• Many established tech companies are at least partly agnostic about what specific languages/technologies you worked with previously. The trade here is that they're looking for mastery of computer science fundamentals, general problem solving, and software engineering principles. They are aware you will need to learn on the job and they'll expect you to ramp up pretty fast.
• YMMV on how open they are to people from non-traditional backgrounds. Some will happily hire people who don't have a college degree as long as they demonstrate the right experience and skill, others will not. In the last several years there has (IMO unfortunately) been more emphasis in the field on elite university credentials.

posted by 4rtemis at 8:56 AM on March 2, 2021 [4 favorites]

I was a Rails developer up until Beats Music bought the company I worked for and turned me into a NodeJS developer. But 6 months later Apple bought Beats, and I’ve been a Java developer ever since.

I also don’t have a college degree.

No one is going to retire at 30 at Apple anymore, but since we’re both on the other side of 40, we missed that boat anyway. And since I switched to a non public facing infrastructure team, I can remember the last time I worked more than 40 hours per week average in a given month. Oh and I’ve been WFH for last 5 years.

I mention all this because you don’t have to leave the “tech” industry to find roles you are looking for. They are out there at the more established companies.
posted by sideshow at 12:04 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]