The TRUTH About Working Outside Office Hours as a Developer

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What is up? My mic is on. Good stuff. Um, headed to work. It's Monday morning. Got to go to Reddit for a topic today. Uh, this one is titled, it's from Experienced Dev. It's experienced devs. It's titled, "Do you guys do stuff for your company in your spare time?" What's everyone going to say? Hell no. Um, but I thought it was kind of an interesting one. Um, I didn't even scroll too far on experience devs, but this was near the top for me and I figured why not? Could be kind of interesting. So, friendly reminder, if you want questions answered so I don't have to go to Reddit, just leave them below in the comments. Otherwise, if you want to write something and be kept anonymous, just look for Dev Leader on social media. It's also my main YouTube channel with edited videos instead of vlog vlog entries like this.

And um, yeah, just you can and Nick Cosantino on LinkedIn. send me a message with your question. You could add more context and I'll keep you anonymous that way because comments are not anonymous. They're for everyone else to see as well. Okay, so this is an interesting one because I think probably most people are thinking like, well, why would I do that? You know, I'm getting paid a salary or something. Why would I ever go out of my way to go spend more of my personal time doing something for a company and they're not even going to pay me for it? I think there's a couple reasons, a couple things to consider. Um, and it's not like just pros or just cons. I think we can look at it from a couple different angles. And I have experience with this because this is what I did nonstop for like eight years.

And if you think about it, if there was nothing positive about doing that, I probably wouldn't have done it for eight years straight. Um, but also important to call that out because you will be getting probably a bit more of a biased perspective on why I thought there were good things from that. And as I talk through those, it's important to remember that I'm not saying that's going to be everyone else's lived experience. And in fact, I think I was very fortunate in my experience. And I think that there's probably a lot of other people that don't have the same uh same opportunity that they're put in. And it's probably uh more of a net negative. Oh, pardon me. I just ate a burrito super fast before recording. I was like, I got to eat cuz I haven't eaten yet. And if I don't start driving, I'm going to be late.

But if I eat in the car, then I can't record the vlog. You see where it's going, right? Um, and now I'm going to be uncomfortable from slamming a burrito in like 5 seconds, but here we are. Um, so couple things, right? And I don't exactly know how I want to start this off, so I'll probably bounce around a lot. Um, I think that first of all, we want to make sure that like your work life balance needs to be maintained. That's going to look different for every single person though. Sorry, there's a a light out. So the uh officer conducting traffic just decided to give up. So I was like, I don't know if I'm allowed to just drive through. Like he kind of just put his hands down and everyone got to do what they wanted. Kind of weird. Um yeah, work life balance is going to be important.

That's going to be different for every single person. So, for example, if you're doing stuff for your company on your time and your work life balance is completely shot already, like probably not good. And this is just like the reality even if it wasn't for your company. If you're like over uh you know, stretched too thin doing other things. It could be could just even be like you got kids, you're taking them to soccer practice and school and like you don't have any time for yourself and then you want to layer in one more thing regardless of what it is. Probably a recipe for uh something that's not very sustainable. So, if you're going to do something for work, probably even less sustainable because for most people, it's probably going to be like it's work, not necessarily something that I, you know, love more than anything else for most people.

And, um, if they're not compensating you for it, then probably feels even worse. So, um, I think we want to keep that in mind like first and foremost, right? If you're if it's not going to be sustainable, think twice. I'm not saying that there aren't um periods of work or life where you're doing something that's like not really sustainable to push through, but I think you have to do it with awareness because the danger is that if you don't have awareness and it becomes the new norm and then things start to degrade, you're like, you know, you're basically depressed or you're burnt out and you're like, where did this come from? It's from not having awareness of what's going on. Um, and I'm guilty of this a lot, right? Like I kind of stretch myself too thin a lot of the time. So I'm saying this as someone that does this pretty regularly, but awareness is key.

So I think that's step one is making sure that we understand our own circumstances for maintaining work life balance. Now what's what is this relationship look like? Right? And it's a hard one to answer because depending on the person, the company, the situation, like this could vary dramatically from situation to situation. So to just like go slap a blanket response on something like this is really difficult because we haven't talked about the different variables. So um couple things to consider. Um are you being compensated for it? If you are hey could be interesting if you have capacity for it it's extra money you know like for me making so I make a lot of free content right like videos like this or on my main YouTube channel on my main YouTube channel I literally lose money because I'm paying an editor for the videos to go up so I'm giving my time and money to try and help but I also like I make paid for courses Right.

I make those paid for courses so that I can have an extra revenue stream. So, I am taking time outside of work to go try and make extra money on the side. Um, and if that's something that you're interested in and they're willing to compensate you for, and sorry, for transparency and clarity, the courses I make are not for work. I'm just using it as an example of like extra time outside of work for extra income. If they're going to pay you or compensate you in some way, that might be something that you want to entertain if you have capacity for it, right? Um, however, I suspect that for a lot of people in this situation, there's not going to be um compensation. Um I had an experience I'll share this briefly like when I was working at that previous startup. Um I I feel like I was you know compensated relatively fairly.

Salary was kind of a challenge towards the end. Um not competitive at all. Um so that's you know one thing. But uh I was doing so you probably seen that that TT that's sitting in my driveway. Uh, I didn't show it at the beginning of the video today because I was starting it while I was driving, but that TT has a ton of work done to it. There's like um I don't know, like over $150,000 worth of uh things that have been done to that car. And so, at one point I was like, "Hey, I want to do more things." I was basically dealing with a second engine rebuild in that car. And um I'm like, well, you know, I do I'm working non-stop. And I just had contacted my employer and I said, hey, like is I know we're not like just like handing out stock and stuff.

So like I get it, but I said, is there an opportunity where I could get contracted to do additional work like at an hourly rate? Could we agree on something? and the uh the CTO where I was working like always had additional ideas. It was like a and I'm not saying this in a negative way. He's a awesome guy, but it was always a challenge to be like, "No, we can't just do one more thing. We can't just do one more thing." Um and then what would happen is he would go just do it himself and then be like, "Hey, look, I' I've done it." So like, "Hey, look, here's just the one more thing. It's already done." So, I kind of leaned into this and I said, "Hey, look, like if you have one more thing you want done, I said, is there an

opportunity where I could go build the prototypes for this outside of working hours and basically for an hourly rate?" I said, I I feel like personally we can arrive at something that's like mutually beneficial. I get compensated for my extra time. It's not just like anyone feeling guilty about me working more because I think they were also pretty aware that I worked a lot and they're like trying to be like cognizant of the fact that probably shouldn't just you know keep giving not that they were but like just loading up more work for me cuz I will go do it. Um so I'm getting compensated for it. they're able to kind of advance uh you know more prototypes or other things they want to consider on their product line and it's done in a way that like no again no offense to the CTO like

he would tell you he's not the best programmer it's not his it's not his profession so having it done in a way that can be sustained might might be better for everyone um so I did this right so there was an opportunity where I did extra work on my own time and then transform that into compensation. I did this briefly for one project. But uh just as an example, I think most people probably find themselves in a situation where they're not doing this for compensation though. So then if we think about this scenario, what this relationship means is like is this a temporary thing? Is this an extra project to push through, right? Is it like a seasonal thing that's temporary we got to push through? And then what are you expecting visibility for it? Are you expecting that this is going to demonstrate hey look you've done extra work like you know pat on the back that's going to help with promotion like what is your expectation for doing this?

Because I think personally aside from the work life balance, the expectation that you have for doing this work compared to the reality of it is going to be the biggest opportunity for frustration. Okay. So what I mean by that is if you're like, okay, I'm I've been trying to work towards my senior promotion at work. I'm just making up a scenario, right? trying to work towards that and now I'm finding okay there's some extra stuff that could be done outside of working hours like it's additional and like hm that might be good because if I do that that's going to look like I'm trying harder it's going to look like I'm in more projects like you name whatever thing you want okay and in your mind you're now correlating it to okay this is going to be great because I want to get promoted I I think all these things line up for that.

Like, how could they possibly say no if I go do this? Okay, then you go do the thing. Then you don't get promoted and then you're like, you know what the hell's going on here? This is And and then it feels terrible. So, I think that if you have an expectation, verify it, right? Don't just make assumptions about it. If you're like, "This is going to be something that I think will help me get promoted." Go have a conversation about it. Because if that's your only motivator for doing it truly, and you're talking to your manager and they're like, "That's completely unrelated. That might be good like for you to grow with some skills in general for your career, but that's not going to like tie into promotion, right? I'm just like the thing that you're going to go help with is like I don't know some other technology and like that might be great to learn about but like that's not even what we're doing here.

So like good for you if you want to go learn that stuff but not going to advance uh promotion for you. If you were like okay well the only reason I wanted to do that was for promotion like maybe don't do it then. And at least you confirmed that upfront. you avoided the heartache and the frustration and you just dodged it. Um, so you can do this for anything, right? If you're like, "Oh, I bet you they're going to give me a bonus for that, or I bet you because I'm at a startup, they're going to give me some extra stock for that." Like, don't make assumptions. I think it's too easy for us to invent that kind of stuff in our head because we're trying to rationalize it and we're like that would certainly look good or if I were the other person this

is what I would do but you are not the other person but you don't make those decisions right who does they do so if you if you have an assumption go verify it first and if you're like oh that's going to be too awkward I don't know how to bring that up. Well, like I'll just say this. What's worse? You go have this potentially awkward conversation where you're like, "Hey, I'm willing to go do this, but I have some expectations around this that I'd like to validate with you." Is that more awkward than you not getting the promotion that you were hellbent on and invested all this extra time because you thought it was going to happen and now you're like, you hate your manager? I don't know. Like I I feel like the first one kind of sucks, right? Cuz it's uncomfortable, but like I don't know.

It It seems like if you just do it, then you can get it out of the way. Whereas the other one's kind of like it's not it's not even in your control at that point. It's someone else who's made a decision and you're kind of on the receiving end of it. So I I would encourage you to do the former. Um so yeah, compensation wise, uh promotion wise, I think these types of things are important to consider, but make sure that your expectations are validated. Um next thing I wanted to mention cuz I thought I think this is in the post. the person mentions like so I go do this extra work I guess a couple things right one is like does this just become the new norm so on that note if you had your expectations validated okay so let's talk about it from a compensation perspective someone's like yes we are willing to compensate you for this extra work if that becomes the new norm and you continue to be compensated for it.

Like for example, we use the project scenario that I explained earlier that I went through. If it was like, hey, there's another project. You seemed interested. Do you want to do this other one? Same agreement or we can negotiate it or something. Maybe that's not a bad thing if that's the new norm, right? Like I wanted that, maybe I want it again, but at least it's an option. That could be kind of cool. If it's um if it's about promotions, the reality is this is what I would just have to say about it. If you are doing extra work on the side to try and bridge the gap to get the promotion, this could be a little bit more dangerous because when you get the promotion, your expectations or the expectations of you rather are set higher. If the only way that you could achieve that and sustain it was by doing more extra work on the side, the expectations of you have now increased because you've received your promotion from doing this stuff.

What's going to happen when you stop? Did you change fundamentally how you're doing work to find a better way to sustain this? Or are you now cutting into Oo, that's a bad accident over there. Yikes. The car like it's not facing the right direction. I don't know how that happened. Um, if you haven't found a way to like sustain that without the extra time and effort now that the bar is set higher, like how do you plan to maintain that higher bar? And if you're still set on more advancement in your career, how do you plan to go even further? If you've already kind of tapped into like your personal time to get more done or to get better work done, whatever it happens to be, might be a sustainability problem. I'm not saying like there's no recovery from that or you're screwed. Just something to think about, right?

Like if you had to do that, what is going to change? Now, now in both of those scenarios, I was talking about you being sort of compensated in some way, right? Either financially or through uh promotion. I think the scenario gets even worse if you are not being compensated for the extra work in any way, right? So, you're just doing the extra stuff. It's not acrruing to promotion. It's not incrrewing. Sorry, it's not acrewing to um like performance rewards. Uh because that that's different than promotion technically. Uh some for more junior levels and when I say junior, I just mean there's still a large spectrum of levels. Um generally like higher performance is tied with, you know, sort of promotion that goes along with it at some level. This is kind of a little bit blurry depending on what companies and stuff you're talking about. You can be achieving high performance for your level and still not doing what is expected of you of the next level.

That starts to become more of a separate thing. So you might maybe do this work and it is leading to better performance rewards but not for promotion. Or maybe it's neither. And if it's neither and you're doing this extra stuff, you're sacrificing your own time, I think there is a much greater risk of this becoming the new norm from two directions. One, perhaps your manager or employer now just starts expecting this of you. This is what you do. And when you stop, it's like, well, what's going on? or not even from your manager's perspective. You might think because you never clarified the expectations, you might think, hey, I have to do all this stuff to sustain my growth or this is definitely going to acrue to promotion or performance rewards. So, I just got to keep doing it and you won't take your foot off the gas now.

So, you've now created a new norm for yourself. So, I I think this is a very real problem and I think that you need to again have the conversation about those expectations. This is like the core of like every video I've ever made is get aligned expectations. Um, okay. The other thing that I wanted to to talk about was cuz it's an interesting point that I think the OP made is that so you're going to go do this extra work if it's not the same work that you've already been assigned, right? It's kind of like the example I gave from my experience was like, I'm going to go do some prototyping work. let me go build the thing that you want to see come to life on the side. So that's a very um you know we came up with an agreement for that.

But if you were just doing extra stuff on the side that's not your core work like does that actually create a problem even in my situation if if I handed that back to the CTO and said hey look here's a working prototype. if immediately he just went great. Now who's uh how do we start selling it, right? Like there's other parts to the business, the sales, the marketing, the tech support, the documentation. Um confidence with the team that has to support it. I'm just one dude, right? Uh fortunately that that worked out very well for the transition uh back to a core team that would take that and run with it. It was a prototype that they didn't have to rewrite, which is awesome. So got lucky that way. I want to say maybe a little bit more than luck. Maybe maybe some skill. I don't know.

Um but the reality is when you do extra stuff and it's not just the work that was planned for this can create downstream effects that might be negative. Right? If I kept doing what I was explaining for my situation, all of a sudden now there's more of a burden on the other parts of the business. And then I go whip up another prototype and I say, "Thank you so much for the the pay on that." And then they go, "Okay, great. Now, like we have to go get this next one shipped." And then all of like this the team has to get ramped up in supporting it. The sales, the marketing, like it just creates more downstream work. This guy's got to let me in. Come on, man. stupid people, man. It's like specifically getting into the the spot that I had to merge. You see me with a signal when you speed up to block me.

You better make sure you can drive faster than me. So, in this person's situation, I don't know if that's the case where they're sort of creating more work now. Um, but I think that that could be something that creates some friction. Is this person going to drive or just stop or what? you're pressing your brakes for no reason. Okay. Um, so there's already a lot of factors there to consider, right? I don't think that there is a single right answer to this. Um, I know like let's give can I relate to any recent examples without kind of like disclosing? Um, okay. Let me I'll walk through. Um, so I' I've been talking for months now about this big project. Uh, it ended up getting delayed uh an extra month and that's not because it was late, just a we needed a week extension for putting together a presentation and that caused everything to be shifted a month.

That's coming up very soon to finally wrap up. Um but there have been periods of this project where I am absolutely working like um very late weekends um you name it like absolutely not sustainable. Come on. Um, and one of the sort of things that I learned along the way when when working on this project is like um for me when I took on this project, this was something where I was like, hey, going back to aligning expectations, what I have been sort of uh pushed in the direction of was like, this is going to be a really good project to have uh success on to be able to line up for promotion makes sense. It's a huge project. It's cross team like my entire team plus another team. Um it's like planned to be multimonth. Uh ridiculously big impact like every it checks a ton of boxes.

So it was like this will be a really good one. I need someone to lead it and I'm like yep that's me. Um great stuff. So, you know, really grateful for the opportunity, but I learned partway through um that this is like it is not acrewing to promotion because what is um basically the feedback that I was given is uh completely unrelated to this. In fact, the thing that I'm doing best at is is stuff like this project. So, it's almost like you're already doing this. We already have evidence of this, but there's these other things to go look for. So, what's really difficult in a situation like this from a motivation perspective is if I was doing this project and if it was just during my working hours, okay, no sweat, right? This is what I've been assigned. It's got to get done. Keep going.

But the fact is that this project involves so much extra time outside of my normal hours. Like I have to work with people in China, so I have to be up later at night. I have to work with people in Europe, so I have to be up early in the morning. And then I have to coordinate across all of these teams or like feature crews and project areas. um which is just like an extra thing I have to plan for to to get things done. Then there's document uh writing, there's presentation creation. These are all things that are like kind of extra um and they take up a ton of my personal time. So if we think back to what I was saying, it's like it's not tied to promotion. So, that's not a good motivator there. It's not tied to um like I'm not getting compensated for it.

Maybe what will happen is like, and I won't know this until months from now, maybe this translates into like um not promotion, but uh you know, performance rewards. Like that's cool. Um, but to be honest, like it to me it doesn't if I would have known what I know now before this project, it would have made far more sense to me to go take all of this time and energy and invested into things that would advance my career, not just a performance bonus for the year. One of those things moves me forward in my career in terms of uh uh advancement. Like I want to be in a position where I can manage managers because I've been doing this for 13 years. So like if I'm 5 years at Microsoft without moving at all in that direction, like it's time like I need to start investing into the career growth part, not just like a here's, you know, money is great, but like that's not enough motivation for me.

It would be the wrong wrong investment. So this is me kind of you know kind of learned late in the project. Now the reality is though from from my perspective I'm not going to once hearing that news about this is not going to acrue to promotion I'm not going to just like give up on the project or go oh I guess I'm not going to work late like I have now set the expectation for myself and and tech like I feel like I've set the expectation for the people working on the project I will finish this project out operating at the same level regardless of that feedback that was given to me. I will not change how I operate on this project. Some might say, well, that's stupid, right? You you've already been told you're not going to get anything more for this. You've already looked at the trade and so why would you and that's just how I am.

Like I want to go deliver on this. This is how I've been operating and that's how it is. There are there is I mentioned this second project that came up and I don't tell the details about some of the projects because it's proprietary or private. Um and for that one even you know arguably there's elements to that that could help acrue to promotion. I guess we will see. Um, but this is one of those things where it's like it starts to it starts to feel like a very bad trade. Let's put it that way. Um, when you're already very burnt out and then you have to start adding in like this is outside of work but it's workrelated, it starts to feel like a bad trade in terms of time. I am not a stranger to this because I've lived my entire career trading personal time for work.

Um, but at some point, like when I was getting, you know, more stock and stuff, I'm like, "Hey, this feels like a pretty decent trade." But at some point, if I'm not being compensated for it, I start to go, "Well, who's making the trade?" So, these are things that I think you need to consider in this type of situation, but I think it's going to be scenario by scenario. So, hope that helps. Sorry for the little rant at the end. See you next time. Take care.