Jeremy Zawodny works for Yahoo and has noticed many of his coworkers and colleagues are taking extended leaves from their full-time tech jobs to strive for work/life balance.
I used to work for a huge tiny non-profit. By “huge” I am referring to the sense that our projects affected hundreds of thousands of people each year, and by “tiny” I mean that there were fewer than ten people in the organization and at most three of those ten working on my projects. Overtime was the rule, not the exception, and sixty hour weeks plus weekends was the starting point.
Work/life balance was a myth, reserved for people who did not want to do great things. This was not easy, as many would-be coworkers discovered. Employment was a revolving door at the organization. More than one new hire lasted no more than three weeks. I was a veteran, an old hat, having been with the organization for three years before I left.
Since I left, the CEO of that organization has transformed his attitude quite a bit. Although he still believes that great things can only be accomplished with great sacrifice, he recognizes that even great people sometimes need to balance their personal life with their professional life. For him, it has always been different, since he has been the CEO of this organization since he was 23—twenty-something years ago. This organization is his life, but I think even he is looking for some balance now.
He has a blog. (I tried to incorporate blogs into the organization back in 2000 but it didn’t stick back then.)
But back to Jeremy Zawodny. His colleagues work at companies where it’s possible to take extended leaves in search of work/life balance. At this non-profit, that would be impossible. At my current job, it would be quite difficult, as many aspects of my immediate area of the company function more like a huge tiny non-profit than any other type of entity.
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I remember one of Dilbert cartoons, when hair-pointed boss says to Alice: “You should balance you work/life time. It’s 168 hours a week, so I expect you to be here 84 hours a week”. :-)