[nostrademons]

Google in general has pretty good work/life balance.

I think the challenge is that you're responsible for launching on a feature team at Google, and the lead up to a launch has a ton of work that needs to be done often under tight deadline pressure, plus the codebase is crazy complex. If you're a self-motivated, detail-oriented, slightly obsessive individual of the type Google loves to hire, you're not going to rest until it's all done.

Infrastructure/logging/analysis/reliability teams have it much better at Google, in terms of work-life balance, but the tradeoff is that it's harder to justify your impact when it comes to promotion time.

[joshuamorton]

This, I've basically never felt external pressure from management or deadlines in my job.

I have however, on more than one occasion, found myself up far too late (or in the pre-pandemic times having nearly missed the last bus home) because I just want to figure out what is causing this damn bug. It could wait until tomorrow, no one would care if I waited until tomorrow, there is no pressure for me to fix it today. But I want to solve the problem.

[pram]

Yeah same. Once I’m on a certain train of thought I can’t stop. Those are the days where I have 5am commits because I never went to bed lol

No one is demanding I do that though. They’d probably think I’m crazy tbh

[lostcolony]

Crazy? Maybe. Shooting yourself in the foot? Definitely.

The number of times I stepped away from a problem after hammering at it for a couple of hours, took a break, got some sleep, and came back to it and solved it in < 30 minutes is...solidly in the double digits by this point.

You may find yourself better served forcing yourself to step away; you may find you get an answer with less work, and take better care of yourself.