I find remote work makes it harder to draw boundaries. I don’t really have work hours anymore. Co workers are all over the world. Sub 7am meetings. Post 6pm meetings. I wonder if in the old days pre remote if you could just close that laptop and go home?
Absolutely. When I started working at Amazon in 2014 it had a reputation as a company with a very bad work life balance. On the other hand, all communication was done through email and conference call (no cameras). Most people who worked late also stayed late, so it was obvious if someone was being overloaded. We had physical pagers still, which were a kind of physical totem of on-call work that made it very obvious if you were expected to do work outside of business hours.
Compared to the situation today with Slack, AI, and remote culture, almost every company IMO has a much worse work life balance than Amazon did 15 years ago.
I find it easier. In the office a boss can stop me and ask to stay late, a coworker might ask question at 4:59pm, etc. When wfh, literally no one can stop me from closing the work laptop.
I just use garmin watches to track health stuff. I would literally jump for joy if there were a free alternative software and hardware stack to replace this watch or at the very least a cycling computer.
I’d do whatever is not working at Amazon. At Cambridge you will build yourself as a person and probably make life long friends. By the time you’re done the industry may well be over the AI hype and the job market might make more sense.
In this case you will be well reared to take advantage of it.
The shareholders must be furious about this. Why not lay off 30% of the team and outsource game development and use ai for the art? That seems smarter.
