I wanted to title this “The only smart thing DHH has ever said”, but that wouldn’t be fair. I just normally tune out when I see/read his rants about the greatness about Ruby/Rails. However, a recent post of his caught my eyes and sucked me in. DHH makes the claim that it’s better to hire family people over people that don’t have a life. I agree 100%. I find the most successful teams I’ve worked on are groups of people that have a life outside of work, and keep things balanced.
I’m with you but after working for both a DOD supplier and a commercial based co I really think it comes down to the economy and your immediate boss.
When things were great some years back, leaving for family stuff was no issue. Then things started to sour and the people with either no life or desire to go home started to move up the ladder.
When I was at the DOD place (which my wife is still at and according to her has changed alot) us single people were almost expected to do all the extra hours because the married/with kids folks valued their lives over the single folk.
The worse case scenario is having a boss who’s in a unhappy marriage. He wants to work the huge hours to stay away from the family and he expects everyone to do the same.
just my $0.02
If you had said DOE instead of DOD I would have thought maybe we worked at the same place! Where I worked we were ‘required’ to work 42-44 hours a week so that the DOE could be billed for the overtime even though we were on salary. And if you didn’t work more than 40 hours, you were docked for it on your yearly review.
That was many years ago but I doubt it has changed too much.