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What do friends do together? Play video games. Have a drink at the bar. Go hiking. Do you not have any hobbies?
If you want to make more money, then knock yourself out. For others, that's that the J-O-B is for.
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For those of us that are married, spending time with our spouses strengthens the marriage. Also, so the wife is less likely to kill you
Given how many candidates mess this up asking at even a first round interview, it may be prudent to remind job seekers deep six that question if you wish to get hired.
What does work/life balance even mean? If you are on-site fixing a computer system, you can't just leave it to complete it another day. If you work in a dental or medical office, you can't take off early while there are patients there. If you are a plumber and you're called for an emergency, you can't ignore it because you are at some Little League baseball game.
The job is 40+ hours a week on average. When there is a deadline you are going to work late and on weekends, there is no escaping that. They are paying you to work there, not leave work early to go attend your child's ballet recital or arrive late because you decided to mow the lawn before you come into the office, followed by a 2-hour lunch. Or leave after lunch on Friday because it's a nice sunny day and you prefer to take a walk.
Work-life balance can mean a lot of things to different people. Some people don't mind working fifty hours or more if there are a ton of vacation days. To others, flexible schedules (within reason) are important. Other people want the ability to telecommute.
The first interview isn't the appropriate place to ask this question, but if you get into subsequent interviews that look like they are wrapping the process up, I don't see any point in continuing if the candidate and the employer are not even close together, on salary, benefits, or whatever.
I had an interview several years back for an IT position two hours away. It seemed a bit senior in responsibility and technical ability compared to what I was doing at the time, but it seemed like it would be an opportunity to grow, so I took a day off and went down there. The job required quite a bit of SQL and Unix knowledge, and only paid $24,000 a year. That was a good $10,000 less than I was making at the time.
The interviewer wasted his time scheduling me. I sat through the interview for about an hour. Once I tried to get some "hard information" out of him on the position itself, that's when he coughed up the $24,000. He wasted my day. If I had known we weren't even going to be on the same playing field, I never would have went.
Lesson learned. Always ask about salary first, because there is no point in going further on the job. People who tell you otherwise are being foolish and treat salary like it is a gift. It is not a gift, it is an exchange for the service you provide. You wouldn't expect someone to re-pave your driveway without giving you the price to do so.
If they really drug test for pot or do they just claim to drug test to scare idiots away!
Drug tests include it all. A friend of mine recently took a drug test where they took a sample of hair from his head. They can use this to see more long-term if you having been taking drugs. I think that goes back like three months or so.
And for those snarky idiots who think they are going to shave their bodies so they can't get a hair sample, they just won't hire you because they can't do the drug test they want.
It was an absolute joke of a place. Of course, we got tons of PTO, but IT couldn't use it because we were always on call, running everything, and thinly staffed. We could wear jeans to work while we sweated it out in the building with no AC. We did have free Cokes to help keep us cool.
Some companies think if they have a ping pong table in the break room, this addresses their motto of work/life balance. There are also sorts of distractions in any office, but there is still work that needs to be done and you are evaluated on what you accomplish, not how much ping pong you play.
It is a valid question to ask, but you shouldn't ask it in the first interview.
And, I don't think I would use the phrase, "work life balance." Maybe I would, but I might ask about the PTO and Holiday policies as well as telecommuting policies or whatever the term means to you.
Companies have published policies on their vacation days. So there is no need to discuss this, because it just shows how unresourceful you are that you didn't even bother to look at the company website.
Telecommuting is a different issue. If you intend to work from home most or all the time, that certainly needs to be discussed right away.
How on earth are you supposed to find out the work-life balance of a company just by researching on your own online?
There is no work-life balance. You are going to spend the vast majority of your life at work. Just accept it. Don't be fooled by this slogan cooked up by the idiots in HR called work-life balance. You wake up at 6 AM and don't get home until 6-7 PM. Do the math, you aren't going to have a balance.
As for researching companies, use Glassdoor, industry forums, and Linkedin. Be resourceful.
There is no work-life balance. You are going to spend the vast majority of your life at work. Just accept it. Don't be fooled by this slogan cooked up by the idiots in HR called work-life balance. You wake up at 6 AM and don't get home until 6-7 PM. Do the math, you aren't going to have a balance.
As for researching companies, use Glassdoor, industry forums, and Linkedin. Be resourceful.
Please. Almost everyone is at my job for work/life balance. It is 40 hours a week unless you want to work more for paid overtime (which is unheard of in my field) and you can telecommute 3 days a week. There's a reason why you can advertise what's essentially an entry-level position and have people with 10+ years of experience happy to take (and in some cases even come back to) the job. My sister works at a place that everyone claims wants to get them there for 80 hours a week and guess what? She's there 40. Her husband works there too and he's also there 40 hours a week. In many cases, the hour requirements can also be very specific to the department within an organization.
I have applied to other jobs where there is NO information about any benefits on the website or on Glassdoor. It made for some awkward conversations in the interviews when they asked about salary expectations, because it's hard to know what to request when you have no idea what the benefits package is. In one case, they couldn't even agree amongst themselves on the benefits package.
I honestly can't see anyone except a millennial asking about it (not to say all millennials would, just that they're the group of people who seem most likely to not understand that's not okay to ask--not "social justice warriors"). It's just one of those things that seems like common sense, to me.
My current job mentioned "flexible schedule" in the job ad, and I was very curious about that and attracted to it but did not say anything about it throughout the interview. My boss finally brought it up at the end, basically kind of asked me what hours I'd like to work, and I tried to act like I was fine with anything. He told me what time the last person in my position came in and left for the day, and I agreed to those hours and they are pretty ideal. He did ask if I could work Saturdays and overtime sometimes, and I said yes. I would hate to do either, but, like I said--common sense, unless you have a good reason not to, which I don't.
Also, there have been a few times I tried to log into sites we use at work to do tasks I forgot to do or to check something from home, and they basically generated emails to my boss to verify that it really was him trying to log in and would not let me get into the sites, lol. So. I actually can't even mix work and life without it being a security issue, lol. (My boss does have a lot of security garbage on our work computers, so I really don't think he'd like us to log in on a "less secure" computer.)
I agreed with you before I even finished reading. Millennials are more likely to perceive this as an "entitlement".
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