I am an experiences software developer and I won't break my back and work nights/weekends/12 hour days for any employer. I foolishly did this enough in my youth on many occasions and it's just not worth it because you are doing all of the work, your personal life is suffering, and in the end, the investors and owners get rich while you need to find another job when it goes under or is acquired (in rare cases, do you get to keep your job because usually the company acquiring you already has their own people).
When I own > 50% of the company, it's a different story.
At one of my last jobs (> 3 years ago), the boss would call us on holidays, weekends, and whenever else things were on fire and expected us to work. One guy even had to cancel his entire vacation because of a release which had the entire team working on New year's eve into New year's day.
I just refused and wouldn't pick up my phone on the weekends or change my vacation schedule. I think the main issue with me was that the boss's poor management skills caused the delays and issues. Mainly, someone kept corrupting the git repo because they didn't know how to check-in code properly and it would re-introduce bugs we recently fixed and new bugs almost every week. It took her and the project manager 3 months to figure out who it was...and they weren't fired.
I was let go after a little over a year working there and replaced with a remote developer from Mexico. In fact, everyone on the US team was replaced with remote workers because they could work on our holidays and had no problems working every day.
The best part was that the owner gave me shares in the company, for every hour that I worked. I never actually received my share total on paper (besides a generic agreement when I was first employed) because the owner kept giving me a different excuse. About 6 weeks after I left, the owner dissolved the corporation and created a new one so he wouldn't have to pay anyone shares that were promised.
This sort of behavior is common in the valley (re-incorporating to push undesirable people out) and playing semantic and number games on paper to liquidate employees shares.
It's this sort of behavior that forces me to be unemployable as an experienced engineer.
When I own > 50% of the company, it's a different story.
At one of my last jobs (> 3 years ago), the boss would call us on holidays, weekends, and whenever else things were on fire and expected us to work. One guy even had to cancel his entire vacation because of a release which had the entire team working on New year's eve into New year's day.
I just refused and wouldn't pick up my phone on the weekends or change my vacation schedule. I think the main issue with me was that the boss's poor management skills caused the delays and issues. Mainly, someone kept corrupting the git repo because they didn't know how to check-in code properly and it would re-introduce bugs we recently fixed and new bugs almost every week. It took her and the project manager 3 months to figure out who it was...and they weren't fired.
I was let go after a little over a year working there and replaced with a remote developer from Mexico. In fact, everyone on the US team was replaced with remote workers because they could work on our holidays and had no problems working every day.
The best part was that the owner gave me shares in the company, for every hour that I worked. I never actually received my share total on paper (besides a generic agreement when I was first employed) because the owner kept giving me a different excuse. About 6 weeks after I left, the owner dissolved the corporation and created a new one so he wouldn't have to pay anyone shares that were promised.
This sort of behavior is common in the valley (re-incorporating to push undesirable people out) and playing semantic and number games on paper to liquidate employees shares.
It's this sort of behavior that forces me to be unemployable as an experienced engineer.