[simoncion]

> For me it got so stressful that in June 2001 I developed a mental illness from all of the stress I was under and all of the extra hours I worked.

It's seriously a damn shame you worked yourself into a nervous breakdown. I can't possibly stress that enough.

I've spent about ten years working a couple of tech jobs. Over those years, I've probably put in a few hundred hours of OT (unpaid or otherwise). If we're pessimistic and call it an even 1k hours of OT, this means that I've spent an average of somewhere between 42 and 45 hours per week at work over my entire career so far.

I -and others in tech that I know- have never been required to work anywhere near point of burnout, let alone breakdown. Moreover, from what I understand of tech sector hiring practices during the Dot Com Era, anyone who could spell SQL and/or HTML could get a well-paying job in the industry.

Maybe those practices also included a near-universal culture of overwork, but -based on what I hear from a few folks who were working in The Valley at the time- I'm pretty certain that that's not true. If management was pressuring you to work those insane hours, you would have very probably found better treatment at another company. It seems like the lower hiring bar would have given a seasoned veteran quite some mobility during the boom. The situation after the bust is another story all together.

Since you stopped working in the industry in 2003 and claim over 25 years of industry experience, would you be so kind compare and contrast the work ethic and attitudes of tech company management during the Dot Com boom of the late 1990s to those of tech company management during the PC Boom of the 1980s and very early 1990s?

Thanks!

[orionblastar]

In the 1980s and early 1990s there was no HTML and JavaScript yet. Some companies still used IBM mainframes and I had to know JCL/JECL and COBOL before I converted the programs to a different language like Turbo Pascal to run on a PC using DOS. Back then it was hard to learn how to program, not everyone could do it. I learned from books at the library and going to the right high school and college.

During the 1990s during the Dotcom boom I was helping people learn how to program in Visual BASIC and ASP using VBScript and JavaScript. The company would hire people who didn't know what they were doing, and I had to mentor them. Visual Studio had Visual Interdev which made making ASP pages better with an IDE to highlight syntax and preview the page before publishing it.

I learned stuff like Python and Java but most of what I worked for was Microsoft IT shops. My wife wouldn't let me relocate so I was stuck in the Saint Louis Missouri area.

I worked for a law firm that did VC funding and many people who worked before me left to do their own startups. We helped out a lot of local startups.

On Linkedin most people sponsor me for Databases because I had to fix problems with the SQL Server tables and indexes a lot. They'd hire someone to do DBA work and they'd mess it all up and I had to fix it. I did the same thing for VB and ASP code. I was considered a super debugger at the time.

I can do HTML, SQL, JavaScript, I learned C# and other languages. I could still work in theory but I am not medically cleared to work yet.

Part of my breakdown is they changed the deadlines from months to weeks for my projects and I had over 141 projects to be done because nobody else could get them to work. When someone failed to get a project done, they transferred it to me. The code was undocumented, no comments, and a big spaghetti mess and it forced me to rewrite parts of it just to get it to compile without errors.

I tried looking for a different job, but nobody was hiring in St. Louis because there was a recession going on.

If I went back to work, I'd take an entry level programming position and work for less pay and have less stress. I wouldn't mind being a junior level developer after all my experience.

I still get job offers but they are for high level stuff I am out of practice in. If I do go back to work it would be an easier job with less stress. One that they could help me with my mental illness and support me with it.

[simoncion]

Given that your high-level summary of your tasks during the 80s and 90s didn't include any descriptions of "long hours" or "frantic scrambles for deadlines", would it be fair to say that -in your experience- -during the PC boom- tech company management encouraged their workers to work no more than 40 hours per week and take as much leave as they required?

Now, you need to carefully read the rest of this paragraph and the next, and keep it in mind while you read the rest of my comment. I have direct personal experience with the sort of tunnel vision that one gets when one is stressed and has folks depending on one's paycheck. I know that solutions that seem blindingly obvious upon later reflection are utterly impossible to find when you're eyeball deep in the shit and slogging forward.

I also have direct personal experience with overworking oneself into a state of exhaustion and mental breakdown. What I have to say may seem glib and simplistic, but that is because it is the result of extended rumination on a long series of deeply unpleasant situations that I found myself in earlier in life. You have very likely come to the same or similar conclusions that I have. I only offer them because you might not have.

> Part of my breakdown is they changed the deadlines from months to weeks for my projects and I had over 141 projects to be done...

The moment that they changed the deadlines was the moment when you should have uttered an unconditional "No.". Because they had no-one else on staff who was capable of doing the work, you had all the power in that negotiation. You were -until the work was done- absolutely, completely untouchable. What were they going to actually do? Fire the only guy who could get the work done? That would have changed their situation from "Most of our customers are going to be angry." to "No-one sane will hire us for work ever again.".

I've worked with many sorts of managers. The best managers know when I've put too much on my plate, and know how to get me to realize it. Average managers almost always take my acceptance of another task as a signal that I'm not overworked; they require me to signal overload. Bad managers don't give a fuck.

I don't know the details and I wasn't there, but -if you never unconditionally said "No."- it might be possible that you had an average manager that was unable to see your severe overload. It's a pity that bad location and bad timing prevented you from jumping ship.

> If I do go back to work it would be an easier job with less stress. One that they could help me with my mental illness and support me with it.

I know some people who are very valuable employees, but are -for one reason or another- incapable of working full-time. The better tech companies recognise their value and work with them to find schedules that will allow the company to keep the worker on their staff.

[orionblastar]

In the 1980s I worked part-time and full-time jobs. It was hourly pay so overtime had to be approved by upper management before it could be done.

In the 1990s I was salary, which means they could make me work extra hours for no extra pay. NO need to get upper management approval.

When I was given 141 projects in our Project Manager app, I said no to them. It was too much and the deadlines were too short. I was told to do them or be fired. I had a house with a wife and son and if I quit I would not get unemployment and in St. Louis at the time finding IT work was hard. Once I got sick and mentally ill they fired me anyway. I heard they were struggling to make things work correctly, ex-coworkers contacted me to re-apply for my old job because the person they hired to replace me didn't know what they were doing. But I was not medically cleared to work and the company had a policy of not rehiring someone they fired.

I'm a dinosaur, PC tech has gotten super fast with a lot of RAM, so they don't need me to debug the programs so they run faster with almost no memory leaks. Just look at modern Windows apps in video games or even Adobe Creative Cloud suite, they are all bloated and buggy and crash and have exploits. That is because they got rid of people like me who knew how to fix the programming issues.