Episode 177: Work life vertigo and work life interviews

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I started working at a big fintech company doing cutting edge work. I was given a ton of responsibility (owned a major component, built it from scratch, manage external relationships with vendors, had a team of 3 engineers, filed a few patents). I was extremely successful at this role but I was working 60 hours a week. Even though I was successful, I felt like I didn’t have good work life balance.

   I left and joined a well established tech company with 600 engineers. I’ve been here almost 1 year now and looking back I’ve only worked on menial feature work and software maintenance. Now I work 30 hours a week and have great work life balance. I feel like I gave up a great opportunity with my old role. How do I make the most of this role? How should I tell my manager I’m not happy? should I just look for a new job?

2. How and when do you ask about or gauge work life balance in a job interview? I recently got to round 4 of an interview and a developer told me that a person wouldn’t do well at this company unless you put in a lot more than 8 hours per day and the CEO rewarded those who stay late at night. This indicated a bad work life balance to me so I didn’t proceed any further.

   Does it look bad to bluntly ask an interviewer “what’s the work life balance like” or ask about this in round 1? Do you think I am lazy?