Once again, even though I wrote this for my mentoree. But it's sort of generic and not that personal to him, so I'll repost it in my journal...

MentorNet's suggestion this week is to talk about how I balance my work life with my personal life. That's a tough one. Heck, they're all tough unless I'm in the right mood to write about it. Still, I think it will help you to know how life at a big software company can be.

Really, it goes in cycles. There are times when I'm working 12-hour days, rare times to be sure because I live too far away to keep that up for more than a few days. And there are times when I'm only here for a few hours. In general though, it's about an 8-10 hour day. I can come in fairly late, sometimes arriving at 14:00 or 15:00 but usually 12:00-13:00. I leave at anywhere from 20:00 to 22:00.

For me a lot of it has to do with Bay Area traffic. If I need to get to work by 09:00, I know it's a two hour drive. Heck, if I leave anywhere from 06:00 to 08:00 it'll be about a two-hour drive. So if I really need to be here early I either wake up early and try to leave home by 05:30, or sleep at work overnight. Same for going home. I don't try to leave before 20:00, because traffic is bad through San Francisco and the San Mateo Bridge.

So what does that leave me with? I leave at 11:30 and get back by 22:30. Obviously I don't do anything on weeknights. No dating for me and it's a good thing I don't have a family or else I'd never see them. That's one important thing to keep in mind when you decide on a job: can you live with the commute and the work hours. Or maybe you'll be lucky enough to telecommute.

That brings me to telecommuting. My advice would be "don't do it." From what I've seen and what I've experienced, people who telecommute tend to become lone wolves unless they are absolutely religious about calling people on the phone or using email to constantly keep the lines of communication open. If you don't do that you lose out in the collaborative knowledge and experience of the workplace and you become irrelevant. The only place I've seen it work is at consultancy firms, where employees mostly work alone anyway and don't communicate much to each other except for business purposes.

Back to time. Basically my weekdays are (1) wake up and get ready for work, eat breakfast, shower and so forth, (2) go to work, do my thing, drive back home, (3) watch some taped tv shows, eat dinner, go to sleep. That's it. I normally have about two hours of personal time each night, but I'm a bit mentally tired by then so I just watch tv. Now, I could increase that personal time by moving closer to work. For various reasons I have not done that: higher rent, lot of trouble moving and setting up everything, farther away from my friends and my parents. Really, I want my next move to be into a house, which means I have to wait until I have enough money to buy a house, which means I'm still living an hour from Oracle.

So what about the weekend? As I've told you, I spend most of Saturday with my friends. Occasionally we don't game or it's cut short, but usually my Saturdays are already booked. Kind of pathetic if you think about it, but I do value my friends. That leaves Sunday. I spend Sunday watching anything I taped that I didn't have time to watch during the week (I watch a lot of tv, though I have cut down in the last couple of months), cleaning up from last Saturday and getting ready for next Saturday (I run a game for my friends and that takes 4-6 hours between games for clean up/prep). Go buy groceries, do laundry, and other household chores and that kills my Sunday.

So that still leaves things like my writing (for fun) and reading unaccounted for, as well as times when I have to visit my parents or kid brother or things like that. If I lose Sunday I get really behind on my personal life and usually I make it up by not gaming on Saturday.

But what really happens is that there are days at work where I do nothing constructive. I'm just reading or writing and ignoring my responsibilities. How can I, in all good conscience, do that? Well, if I didn't I'd burn out and that's no good for my company. Also I do pick my spots. There are times when I need to get something done, other times when I don't, other times when it would be nice.

Like right now. I'm writing you this email when I could be doing real work. Ok, everybody understands that it is the rare person that can work at 100% all day long. Everybody takes breaks or works at 80% for a while or whatever. One thing about new people is that they think that putting in 110% is what they're supposed to be doing. That's not quite correct. What we want is for you to complete your projects right and on time. If that truly requires 110% effort then we've given you too much work (and you should say something because they're probably testing you). Experience shows you that there are some fights that you just don't waste time on. You concentrate on what you need to get done according to your style and don't try to save the company by yourself. You're part of a team, you don't need to everything yourself.

Ok, I just rambled for a bit and maybe none of what I've just written makes any sense. Let me try to summarize. At first you'll be expected to work hard. You'll eventually get the experience to know how much energy to devote to different tasks. Don't sacrifice your personal life for work. It's not healthy and you'll just regret it later. You'll find your own balance.

Don't worry if the guy next to you seems to be working harder. Here's an important thing: getting the project done right is important, whether it takes you one day or all the time alloted to the project, that doesn't matter. If been given three months on a project, goofed off for a month, worked crazily for a month to finish it, then work leisurely the last month polishing it up. And then when the deadline was extended because other people didn't get their stuff done I just used that time to goof off and read up on Java.

That's enough for now. Hopefully I didn't just give you bunch of bad advice. As usual, remember that I'm just portraying one data point and coule be way off base.