Interviewer: So, we’re like on Slack, like 24-hours a day. You may get a message at 3am on a Saturday and need to log on and participate. There really are no limits.
Me: [hesitatingly] OK… [trying to make light of it, with a joke] I guess you guys aren’t big into the whole “work/life balance” thing. [friendly chuckle]
Interviewer: [slightly offended] No, not at all, we’re 100% committed to work/life balance. [without any sense of irony]
Me: …
Me at 3am: Hey babe… ASL? Whatcha wearing?
I’m sure it’s their definition of paradise…
Beds and feeding tubes.
On that subject, I’m always a little suspicious of places that have lunch catered every day. What? So I just come and never leave the building? Going out to lunch is often a nice break in the day. Not any more!
I know an easy solution. Create a Slack bot that automatically responds when your future boss asks you to jump on Slack
If he gets suspicious, the bot sends a text message. If after 12am, it sends a text message every minute of the hour.
According to https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/companies-free-lunch/, Asana says:
“Our culinary team provides breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner daily. Meals are all organic, sustainably farmed and fished, and local when possible,” Asana says. “Our skilled chefs and nutrition team thoughtfully plan every menu around meals that keep the Asana team feeling energized, nourished and working at their highest potential.”
I think that speaks for itself.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. catered meals should be thought of as part of your compensation for doing your job.
I enjoyed reading all the jokes and tongue-in-cheek comments but I think you deserve a serious reply too…
There are many companies (yes many) that require software developers to be “on call”. Usually they try to structure things so that you are not always on call, not always getting late night or early morning calls. But sometimes that is something that happens due to a customer situation and is outside the company’s control. The ‘best’ companies try to filter events through a layer of employees who work in different timezones and can handle things until the ‘real dev’ team or subject matter expert is awake and at work, but again, it doesn’t always work out that the expertise needed by the customer is available in the support team. And of course some companies are just too small to have anything like that. So in their eyes, work life balance is being able to take time off work to make up for these events. You had to work a 22 hour day yesterday? Take today off. You pulled all nighters with a customer all week ? Take the next week off. That kind of thing. I’m not condoning it, I’m just trying to explain to you this other perspective. It is best you ask current employees about what really happens in case work life balance isn’t even close to reasonable (sometimes due to layoffs for eg. the whole team has to put in more hours and things never normalize).
just my 2 cents. Hope you find a better place to work though!
Yeah, I get that, and I’d probably take the job anyway. Just don’t tell me that it’s a “work/life” balance.
To others, the part of the meals isn’t so much that I don’t like free meals or that they wouldn’t necessarily be good, it’s just that it seems so oppressive - you never get to leave! A catered lunch every now and then is great, but I like being able to step out of the office every now and then and clear the mind.