[Cuyacap]

I moved out to Silicon Valley a little over two years ago. My experience with the area has had its positives and negatives, but it has mostly been negative.

I worked in QA for a little over a year at a startup in Mountain View. Firstly, the hours were horrible. I was consistently working twelve hours a day during the week and at least four hours a day one day per weekend. This was finally pared back after I and another member of the QA team started to complain about the hours. Neither the pay nor the equity I received was really fair for the amount of work I put in.

Furthermore, whenever I attempted to advance my skills beyond the QA position, I was blocked again and again. I was only allowed to commit code after I got fed up with an issue, fixed it myself, and basically begged a developer to look at it. It was a two-line fix; however, most of the developers assumed I couldn't write code properly simply because I didn't have a CS background.

Lastly, it was the management layer directly above that finally made me decide to quit. My manager and one of the developers I worked with consistently had this annoying feud going on between them. I was always stuck in the middle of it. All I wanted to do was to complete my job and go home without a headache. Towards the end, that became impossible.

So, if you want to work long hours for horrible compensation, to be pigeonholed into a position and never be allowed to grow your skills, and to be surrounded by people who cannot seem to grow up, then come to Silicon Valley and try your hand at being part of something that may or may not become the next greatest company.

[Bahamut]

Ouch - I try to encourage my QA people to write code if they find something wrong and they feel it's easy to fix, and I am at a startup in downtown Palo Alto.

I successfully fought management to get them to allow time for the other senior engineers to mentor the junior developers, and for all to explore new technologies after a massive burnout session of product development to meet an overly aggressive release deadline - I threatened to quit if big changes weren't made, and I was by far their most productive frontend engineer.

Not all startups are equal - just as it can be difficult to find the career that interests you, it can be just as difficult to find the company you would like to work at.

[hga]

I don't see anything that you've said that's unique to Silicon Valley, except perhaps for the extreme hours which I never experienced. Especially the "QA gets no respect" bit; I jointed Lucent for a QA including programming QA stuff job and it was a miserable, never again, I advise all my friends to avoid it like the plague.

[Cuyacap]

I come from banking in the Midwest. While I worked some long hours occasionally, it was never as bad as what I have experienced here in Silicon Valley. I'm specifically talking about the geographical Silicon Valley, not just the tech scene in the area. On top of that, I'm going to claim unrealistic work / life balance is something common to this part of the country. I've returned to banking out here, and I still find there is an unrealistic expectation of how many hours an employee should work a week.

With that said, I don't really mind the long hours if I am properly compensated. It's not the long hours that bother me. It's the thought that I have nothing better to do than to serve the company at any time of the day. Employment is a mutually beneficial economic relationship. Out here, it seems that a lot of employers think the employees should be thankful they are allowed to work there.

[hga]

I'm from the Midwest myself (sort of, Joplin, MO is at the edge of the West and is culturally Southern). Never worked here, though, but I don't get the impression insane hours are acceptable here. Have worked in the Boston area, roughly in the '80s, and D.C. area, roughly in the '90s. No insane hours either place, aside from some occasional, short term, customer driven projects, which are a very different thing.

As for your latter point ... don't know. When I was "junior" the talent shortage was dire. When I was "senior", I wouldn't put up with such things, but even in cases where I got recruited without having much of an idea of the workplace culture, I don't ever remember a "you should be thankful you are allowed to work here" attitude. Might have been luck of the draw, although in plenty of those places a failure to have hired someone like me at the time would have resulted in the company dying, so....

ADDED: D.C. might be a special case: The culture is overwhelmingly influenced by government contracting, and the government is loathe to pay overtime. And contractors tend to get paid by the billed hour, so unpaid overtime costs them money. And at least compared to Boston a decade earlier, the time you spent in the office was a greater factor in judging your performance.