| 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. |
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.