[thesandlord]

I've also spent a decade in Bay Area tech, and have never been asked or seen any of my coworkers feel this pressure, both at big tech (Google/Stripe) and at tiny startups.

Of course there are crunch times, but the majority of the time WLB was great. In fact, there are definitely a group of folks who seem to be permanently coasting.

There are bad companies and bad teams, but saying all of tech in the bay area operates this way is just wrong.

[kodah]

I would say it's a aspect of Bay Area tech that is uniquely common in Bay Area tech, but exists abroad at lesser frequencies.

Downplaying it given the amount of people who come out to talk about this very thing, as you are doing, also is just wrong.

[tsuujin]

People feel the need to defend Bay Area tech for whatever reason.

I’ve been trying to tell people for years that my experiences at multiple companies, and talking to many, many other devs I met in the area and at conferences, indicate a serious problem in tech that we need take address.

There are always people who will come out and say “well I didn’t have that experience so it doesn’t exist”.

[ajkjk]

It's not really defending Bay Area tech. It's kinda the opposite. I have lot of problems with Bay Area tech, but I'll jump to shoot down hyperbolic criticisms that don't reflect most people's experiences because they' make it harder to _actually_ criticize them, in a 'crying wolf' sense.

The top-level post in this thread is just _wrong_ as a general statement (well, at least the bit "you'll need to work on POCs (new products) in your off-time. Most of these companies don't schedule innovation' for instance"), although there may be specific instances where those are true, and pretending like it isn't means that people's criticisms of these companies are criticizing them for fictional grievances instead of real ones, which makes those criticisms far weaker and easier to fend off.