Was it always nonexistent or was there a time when people could balance their career and family life?
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I hear you. I used to work on a team that had a support queue, and we had 8AM ET - 11PM ET US support hours and the support would shift to India between 11PM ET - 8AM ET.
That meant we had Jabber (pre Webex Teams, now Webex days) installed on our phones. You couldn't get "away". In most cases, it was easy to spend 5 min to fix an issue now while there's only one case in the queue instead of waiting until the next morning when India users would open a dozen cases throughout the night and you have to spend all that extra time resolving multiple cases for the same issue.
I also had the problem where, once I'd helped a user, they'd just reach out to me on Jabber to see if I could resolve their issue without opening a ticket.
I'd like to add another perspective to this issue.
Managers and volume of work are not the only reasons for bad work life balance. There are employees who make these things worst.
Even when there is no real pressure to work after hours, there are those ambitious guys that are always online. I heard my manager praising a guy who would jump in after midnight to fix something mentioned in some message on Webex, that is nowhere near urgent and which would normally be done next day.
If you don't do similar things, you're compared to the guys that do things like that and in that comparison you'll just look lazy, like someone who "only works normal hours" = lazy under-performer.
I know there is a cultural difference between USA and Europe, and I'm in Europe. Here, lawmakers are trying to put "right to disconnect" into legislation, i.e. to disconnect from any messaging and work after working hours. However, that attempt will fail if it is going to be just a right to disconnect. It would need to be mandatory to disconnect in order to protect people's work-life balance.
I was in this rat race for the longest time until I was let go. Best thing in the world. My first managers allowed WLB. Yes, there were the 60-hour weeks, but those followed with 20-hour weeks. It balanced out and vacation was good. Then it shifted away. Our dept went from 13 people to 5. The amount of work didn't change. The manager was too weak to tell her upper managers that getting rid of 60% of the team meant eliminating a large percentage of work. "Prioritize", "execute", "efficiency", and every other BS Bingo terms were thrown out. 60-hours became the new 40-hours, and 80-hours were far more constant. Trying to take a vacation was non-existent. Yes, you can take that week off, but you need to be on these 6 calls, get this work done, etc while away. What was the point in going on vacation if you have to work 20+ hours while gone and you have to go somewhere you can be connected?
I was actually on vacation when I was let go. Blind sided by it, but who cared. I stopped all work immediately and enjoyed my vacation with the family. I applied for a job I saw when I was looking online, had 2 video interviews on that vacation, and 2 in person interviews the week I got back. Accepted the job offer, collected my check, and never looked back. When I took my first vacation, I told the manager I will take the computer and be on the weekly calls. He looked at me with a weird look and told me I was not even permitted to take my computer on vacation and the last thing I would do is be on calls or do any work. He said vacation is vacation and that means absolutely no work. The only difference is there are less vacation days per year, but they are REAL vacation days.
I'll soon be working somewhere where being paid for overtime is the norm, sound a lot more flexible in both directions to me. It seems a lot of managers at Cisco think flexible working times just mean 12 hour days, every day.
If your "contract" is for 37.5 hrs, you are a part-time employee eligible for overtime pay. When I was a red badge "contractor" limited to 40 hrs, some managers were very strict about not letting you work over 40 hrs, one even to the point of not letting me take off Friday to work 8 hrs on Saturday with the rest of the team doing weekend work. Others, OTH, expect me to work my usual 40 and IF there is Fri night/weekend upgrade/maintenance work to do, allow me to take "comp time" the following week, usually on Tue or Wed because they want/need all hands on deck Mon to deal with any breakages caused by the weekend upgrade/maintenance.
What I hate now, about working from home, and before when I was supporting teams on both the West coast and in India, UK and Jerusalem was that there were always early morning meetings, lunch meetings and early evening meetings. You either ended up working 12-14 hr days to make all the meetings, or you sat around twiddling your thumbs waiting for the next meeting because you couldn't run errands, sleep, etc. and make it back for the next meeting. There's no work/life balance if you can't make use of the non-working intervals between work. Working from home has only made it easier for teams to schedule earlier meetings because "you're AT home, you're not stuck in traffic & unavailable and this time is easier for ME" bu-----t.
I've just made the decision to leave my job at Cisco for an MSP, with the main push being work life balance.
As non of my overtime is planned, it has been made very clear to me it is unpaid.
My manager has also made it clear that my 37.5 hour week contract has a clause that basically says I have to work as long as it takes to get the job done.
These factors, along with a department with a lack of resources has made me work 7am to 7pm most days. Always checking email and Webex messages, for no extra pay.
I'll soon be working somewhere where being paid for overtime is the norm, sound a lot more flexible in both directions to me. It seems a lot of managers at Cisco think flexible working times just mean 12 hour days, every day.
Balance is out of whack for east coast people. West coast Cisco has an issue with understanding time zones. Director level people especially.
As an ex tac engineer. Some teams you would see people taking extended lunches, just talking with each other on weekend shifts, living the life. Other teams were not even looking at severity 3 and 4 in their queue as there was an overflow of P1/P2 every single day, my team was the latter. And my view on work life was rather different then some of the other teams. It depends so much on your team/manager who have or don't have your back and workload.
When I worked for Cisco, that was almost 8 years ago, part of my team was in Bangalore, on east coast, some of the vendors were in Denmark and UK and some customers were in ME. I was literally awake 18 hours a day some days.
Cisco, Amazon, Apple are not companies who even know or understand the meaning of work life balance.
Most long-term Cisco employees end up becoming nasty for a reason.
It’s entirely dependent on the BU you work for and how reactive the management chain is.
I used to work for the BU where work life balance was out of wack. Constant war rooms. At the same time, I used to look out of the window from my building and see the same ppl playing basket ball on the court for hours every day.
To be fair, my group had good first and 2nd line managers that weren’t afraid to push back. I didn’t have it as bad as some others under the same BU and director but different teams. There were periods of intense pressure but also lulls.
When I joined Cisco in '08, the employee handbook actually had a section for salaried workers. I can't remember if we're considered exempt or non-exempt from the overtime rules, but it basically boiled down to this: As salaried employees who do not receive overtime pay, you are expected to work the number of hours necessary to complete your assigned tasks. Because PTO is taken in whole day (8 hr increments), it is not necessary to enter time off for doctor's, dentist's, etc. appointments. Just ensure that all your tasks are competed on time and it doesn't matter if you work a 36 hr week or a 50 hr week.
It literally said you could get by working less than 40 hrs per week as long as all your assigned tasks were competed by their deadlines.
So, yeah, work/life balance used to exist. But, now too many things have unreasonable deadlines or some other team screwed up their work which impacts your work and the people with tasks later in projects have to work harder to make up for the lost time earlier in the project.
Still have to attend at least half of your 500 webex per week.
Cisco is a relationship based company. The good ol' boys club has WLB & promotions.
Sounds like you are a disposable grunt worker?
There was a time when this was encouraged and you could actually have a work life balance but that has slowly faded into the background. As higher up "encourage" it, the lower levels of management are pressured for results and the results are more important than happy and healthy employees.
And is this a company-wide issue or am I just unlucky?