AI Engineers Report Burnout, Rushed Rollouts As 'Rat Race' To Stay Competitive H...

AI Engineers Report Burnout, Rushed Rollouts As 'Rat Race' To Stay Competitive Hits Tech Industry

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  Pointless to ask without knowing what compensation he's getting.

  What the deal with silicon valley jobs used to be was, you'd get a big salary, but you'd work a lot.

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    That, I think, is the lie people are told.
    
    You get paid for 40 hours of work... YOU decide on working more, not the company.
    
    You get paid for your knowledge, expertise, and abilities. not because they can squeeze you for 80 hour work weeks.
    
    That cocaine driven mindset of the 80s and 90s is done, its dead... 40 hours is all a company gets. Emergencies are for the weekends, and if an emergency happens, its 1.5x hrs worked. So if you work 2 hours in an emergency, you get 3 hours during the work week.

    • You get paid for 40 hours of work... YOU decide on working more, not the company.

      During my first year at a tech company in the 1990's, I was told in no uncertain terms that I only get to decide if I want to leave and work someplace else. This was over taking an hour for lunch off-site but leaving at 5pm. I didn't understand that working "9-5" didn't include a lunch break. So then I started working to 6. Then I started coming it at 8. Then I would work a few hours on Saturday. Then I'd write up status reports for my team on Friday nights. And then I'd do bug scrubs on Sundays. Ooops... my wife didn't agree with my career oriented life-style.

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      Some high tech companies still pay high performing employees extremely well, so it may be a rational decision for someone to put in a lot of extra time to get extra compensation.
      
      At some national labs (including where I used to work) employees put in extremely long hours without high compensation because the work was important to them. Getting called in any time of the day or night to fix a problem was common. Some of us actively enjoy our work.
      
      As long as people have other options, I don't see a probl

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        Yeah, I dont put in work before compensation anymore. It is abused too easily.

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        Well, if they want to be paid for quantity rather than quality of work, they'll soon be replaced by AI code-bots. Working more than 35 hours a week doesn't make you any more productive, it just reduces the quality of your work & you take longer to do it. No wonder so much software is buggy & poorly designed & implemented.

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      An emergency is when you have to call law enforcement, fire service, or ambulance, & they're the ones who deal with it.
      
      A manager saying, "Ooh, I've just had a half-baked idea!" is not an emergency. It's an impulse. They shouldn't be able to ruin their coworkers' lives (family & social lives & health) over an impulse. Whatever the coworkers are being paid (assuming it's a liveable wage) is not part of the argument.

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    This info is roughly ten years old, but - I've known Seattle-area Amazon coders and sysadmins. Their contracts made it clear that they were expected to put in as many extra hours as needed, and that those extra hours might be very frequent.

    They were all paid extremely well, and figured (going in) they could put up with it for a few years. However most decided they'd had enough after about one year.

• Don't accept unreasonable demands from employers. It just tells them that you don't value yourself and that you will happily be mistreated further in the future.

  They all waive unvested stock under our nose. For a lot of engineering it's a way for us to retire early. Missing deadlines can tank this kind of tech startup.
  Besides, most people don't want to feel like they are letting down other people on the team. And management counts on our good nature to squeeze the most out of labor.

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    Stock options are nice, but companies are offering "AI engineers" more than $1million salaries right now. "One in the hand is worth more than two in the bush..."

    Amazon is not a startup.

    An unreasonable demand is... unreasonable. Rejecting it is not letting down other people on the team. It is respecting yourself.

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    If you're getting an email or a call late on Friday that something needs to be done by Monday, it's your manager that has already let everyone down. Unless something is on fire, anything that's a weekend surprise is a failure of planning. I can understand crunch for a project that's been in the works for years and has an approaching deadline, but random shit that has sprung up from nowhere means you have incompetent bosses and you bailing their ass out of the fire will only teach them that they can pull the

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    If one dude not working over the weekend will end Microsoft, Amazon, and Google all in one single go...
    Well, Good!

    Maybe you should apply for a job there and then not show up on your first day.
    You could single handedly rid the world of three out of four of the largest corporations on the planet, er, I mean startups

    You'd be a hero