| No idea as like others have said the survey is only 2 years old. What I can say is Google is the first company I've personally worked at where it was easy to always work. At all my previous jobs (video games) the dev kits could not be taken home and even if there happened to be a PC version there's no way I could have taken home the terabytes of source data needed to work on the game. Nor would any company have let me if I could. The short of that meant once I left work I couldn't keep working. At Google on the other hand my work email went up 10-100 fold over previous companies. I could read that anytime day or night and even if I didn't intend to read it at home I'd open up my laptop and given that I left gmail running I'd see new messages, open a few without thinking and get stucked in and 20-60 mins would go by at ~12:00am. I saw several other employees responding to email between 11pm and 1am all from home. I'm not saying that's bad for work/life balance. I have no idea. I certainly felt good to respond to people as soon as I noticed but maybe it would have been better to disconnect? Similarly I could ssh/vnc in if I wanted to. And, working on Chrome which is open source meant I could work anywhere on any machine I chose. Something I wasn't used to from previous jobs. My understanding is some of those things are far more common for other programming jobs. My financial friends all have ways to log into work from home when they need to. Yet another is being involved in a web browser meant it was easy to get sucked into tons of mailing lists. The WebGL list, the Web Audio list, the W3 lists, the Web Apps List. All the places where browser standards are discussed and that discussion goes on 24/7. It's very tempting to keep checking how people are responding to your comments or where some other part of the standards discussion is going. So that's also hard to turn off. Again I don't know if that's good or bad for work/life balance. It certainly feels good to participate. Is that work? Or is it more like going to a PTA meeting or city council meeting? No where was I encouraged to work after hours by Google. It was completely up to me to decide if I checked email at home or if I worked on stuff at home and if I stayed late or went home early. All I'm saying is it was easy to do these things, something I wasn't used to from previous jobs. PS: You don't have to work at Google to participate in those mailing lists. If you want to influence web standards just get involved. |
> Again I don't know if that's good or bad for work/life balance.
It's bad.