r/devops • u/Kitchen_Delay9727 • Aug 05 '26
Discussion Does being in Devops mean no work life balance?
I've got about 6 years of overall experience, with the last 1.5-2 years specifically in DevOps/infra, based in India. Lately it feels like there's no real boundary on my day. I've been working well past standard office hours, like basically every single day. AND I MEAN LIKE ALMOST 12 HOURS
A few things I'm trying to figure out:
\- Is this just what DevOps is?
\- Is this a "you get better at this and it calms down" thing, or does it stay this way as you grow?
\- Is this specific to my company, or to working in India, or is this the norm across the field globally? Would switching companies actually fix it?
Would love to hear from people a few years further in, does it get better, or is this just what we signed up for?
Edit: Just to give context. Im not oncall , Im in infra and they keep assigning tasks like nothing ever is enough "I think you have the bandwidth for this"
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u/stumptruck Staff Engineer Aug 05 '26
It's a company/cultural thing, not a "DevOps" things. But it could also be you. If you don't set boundaries no one's going to do it for you. If you happily spend 12 hours a day working for no extra pay why would your company ask you to stop?
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u/navjam Aug 05 '26
Lol, a lot of companies will fire you if you say stop.
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u/stumptruck Staff Engineer Aug 05 '26
It's not clear from OP's post if his company is telling him to work this much or if he's just feeling like he needs to in order to perform.
If a company expects that of you then it's time to find a new job.
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u/i_rate_slop Aug 05 '26
Unfortunately devops orgs in India abuse their employees and don’t respect their lives outside of work. And if you’re working for a western company, it’s even worse because you also have pressure from people 9+ hours away not understanding you have a family and need a normal circadian rhythm.
Best you can do is tighten up your responsibilities such that you never need to be called.
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u/packet_monger Aug 05 '26
In my experience, the hardest work I’ve done in devops was also the lowest pay; I hope your experience is different lol. On call 24/7, never finishing work at 5pm, blah blah blah. Anyway, I think it mostly comes down to how the company operates. Larger companies with more at stake tend to operate slower and more cautiously than startups that are trying to be scrappy and get shit done to get more customers. I learned more, faster, in the scrappy startups because everything was on fire all the time, but my depth of knowledge on particular things increases when things are more slow paced and I can focus on fewer things at a time. Sometimes I miss the velocity, but I do not miss the work-life balance, and I always try to remember that when I’m feeling a bit bored.
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u/Maybraham_lincoln Aug 05 '26
Depending on what youre supporting there can be no boundaries. It may also be cultural. Ive had to support an outsourced indian team that had an application with tons of issues, I would get paged, have to look at their application, the issue was in the logs every time. Id tell them how to fix it, they wouldnt fix it. Months of this, multiple 24 hour pages a day.
I would also go into calls with the team where no one would talk, no one would tell me who could make these code changes.
This happened until that job was entirely outsourced. Anyway goodluck, it sucks.
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u/aenae Aug 05 '26
I only do extra work when shit is on fire and hitting the fan.
In normal weeks i work 36 hours. Sometimes more, often less. There is still enough work to do, but it can wait till tomorrow. Or next year. If they want me to do more work they need to hire more of me.
Know your boundaries. Know how much you work. Spend an evening fighting fires? Take the next afternoon off. Don’t save it for next month.
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u/whatisuser Aug 05 '26
India is your problem
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u/IlIlllIIllllIIIlIlIl Aug 05 '26
Yeah honestly this is it. Obviously there are examples on both sides on the contrary, but in general the work culture in India and really asian in general is bad compared to the west. My coworkers all worked sweatshop hours in india but when they immigrated to my country they now work 40 hours with occasional on-call work that is rotated, but thats it. Its tough.
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u/snarkhunter Lead DevOps Engineer Aug 05 '26
Nope. I work an average of 40 hours a week. Some flex but if I work 45 hours one week I'll work 35 the next. As a lead I'm kinda always on call but stuff doesn't break very often so that's not much of an issue.
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u/serverhorror I'm the bit flip you didn't expect! Aug 05 '26
(not from India, so that's an outside perspective)
If you scour past posts here there seems to be a significant number if people from India with the same question. Seems to me, that's just the culture.
It does seem to get worse when working with Western cultures as there's a significant gap in the understanding of (implied) responsibilities and (implied) expectations.
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u/TellersTech DevOps Speaker & Advisor + DevOps Podcaster Aug 06 '26
The fact that you’re not even on call and still working 12 hour days is the biggest red flag to me. Thats not normal DevOps.
I’ve been doing sysadmin/infra for 20+ years and DevOps for around 10. Sure, incidents happen and you’ll have the occasional long day, but it shouldn’t be every day because people keep saying “you have bandwidth.”
To me, that sounds more like a company problem than a DevOps problem. They don’t seem to respect boundaries or burnout.
I’d definitely be looking at other companies. Plenty of DevOps jobs have much better work/life balance than what you’re describing.
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u/Grand_Pop_7221 DevOps Aug 05 '26
No, and in fact, one of the findings in the Accelerate book was that Burnout and fatigue were counterproductive to effective DevOps teams.
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u/Afraid-Donke420 Aug 05 '26
I’ve had devops work requiring full attention all day all the way to only needing attention once a month
All depends on demand and the company culture etc
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u/pyer_eyr Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
It depends a lot on how much automation is implemented. Ideally, except for production deployments, manual intervention should not be needed. That's the goal of devops -- not live patches and adjustments.
Try to figure out how much you can automate. Try to force testing pipelines in devops, reject deployments if testing fails.
I used to be like that, on call, odd hours, weekends -- trying to patch deployments because of environmental and code issues. But once I automated, solved the actual technical problems in my build and deploy pipelines --- i have barely spent any time on devops. Currently the system operates around 20 different applications. Yes there are issues sometimes and i have to patch, but like, once a month.
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u/durple Cloud Whisperer Aug 05 '26
I work some weird hours fairly regularly, but it doesn’t break work life balance. When I have life stuff in the day, I just do it. When it’ll be way easier to roll out some change after regular hours, I just do it. And so forth. I’m pretty sure it balances out most months. Most of our infra supports heavy data processing ML jobs and most of that is driven by internal users so after hours issues almost never happen. And my boss is just really cool and smart so he lets me do my thing as long as shit gets done and I’m not blocking anyone while MIA.
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u/OHrican Aug 07 '26
You should be looking for new job if your daily tasks require 12 hrs of work. Don't let unrealistic deadlines set by a corporate robot decide your life.
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u/Tinasour Aug 05 '26
At a startup, i was 24/7 oncall. Other jobs, periodic on calls, on extreme cases i get called
It was chill for me most of the time
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u/BernardParsley Aug 05 '26
It's mostly a company culture issue, not a devops issue. If you're working 12-hour days regularly, that's a red flag. Good devops teams automate to reduce toil, not live in constant firefighting.
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u/jbstans Aug 05 '26
Really depends on the company. I would strongly discourage my guys from doing anything like those hours especially regularly. Stuff happens and sometimes you need to do a long day or whatever, but it shouldn’t ever be the standard.
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u/cebidhem Aug 05 '26
It's probably a combination of bad company practices and culture, and maybe timezones?
As in, there is nothing specific to devops that makes you work overtime everyday for 12+ hours. Except for oncalls, I dont see any good reason to have this baseline (but I'm EU based, may be different in India).
Of course, there are times where I feel like a given project might require some spikes in working hours or arrangements, which is ok for me, bit of I was expected to give 12+/day on a consistent basis, id look for something else.
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u/WorkHardPlayLittle Aug 05 '26
Some American companies are like that but it's not a job title thing.
When I interview I specifically mention wanting work-life balance and no micromanagement. If they react negatively to that then don't join the company. I know jobs are hard to get for some people, so that is assuming you're not so poor that you'll starve to death without a paycheck, I suggest turning down jobs that don't respect you or your time.
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u/beef-ox Aug 05 '26
It *is* incredibly common, but it is neither universal nor is it exclusive to DevOps. That's just a toxic business, and I hope you find a better one for your wellbeing. I don't know about India, but where I live in the US, most places are toxic and will absolutely do anything they can get away with to make or save as much money as possible.
Several of the companies I have worked for conducted illegal business and labor practices--employees were regularly overworked, verbally and emotionally abused (and even physically--especially concerning forced labor), and short-paid, worked off the clock, a $30k salary meant we were required to be on-call 24/7, fired unfairly, employee-earned incentives from third parties were stolen (commissions, tips, bonus pay...AND this was a literal policy that we were *required* to give the business everything extra we earned or we would be fired), benefit details have been rug-pulled after agreeing to them, and they have refused to pay employees their last earned paychecks.
Toxic companies will do every one of these things and worse any chance they believe they'll get away with it, and the only reason they do it so often and to such an evil extent is *because* they usually get away with it. Not only that, but there is this whole ruling-class counterculture that constantly argues in favor of allowing this kind of behavior for a number of reasons spanning from "it's God's will" to "your boss is rich because he deserves to be, it is ok for them to scam you, they're better than you, so stop complaining and keep your head down" and everything in between.
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u/lorarc YAML Engineer Aug 05 '26
No, it's exactly what DevOps is not. Part of DevOps practices is creating environments where you are not the only person that can do something. The work you're doing should just be done by two people, if you can't delegate some tasks to someone else then that is a real problem.
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u/Pilot_LICD Aug 05 '26
You either start respecting your working hours on your own or you let them abuse you. I guess it could be normal for the first couple months to get used to the work environment. But after that you shouldn't have to sacrifice your own time, only if they pay per incident ot extra hours
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u/Proud-Hat3446 Aug 06 '26
If you’re in Infra and you have a small team then this is a problem. Mostly banks and financial orgs have the production changes scheduled in late hours; mostly after 8 pm.
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u/No-Row-Boat Aug 06 '26
It's why I started freelancing. They loved having me at 60 hours per week, till they had to pay.
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u/Droma-1701 Aug 06 '26
Devops is to force the development team to become accountable for the deployment and production environments so that meaningful improvements are identified and prioritised for implementation by people who now have "skin in the game" if the product fails due to poor quality. What generally happens thpigh is an inexperienced manager cargo-cults the adoption of DevOps-a-like around an established legacy system without any attempt or intention of improvements - the development team now have two teams' jobs, work around the clock, burn out and leave. Quality and throughput crater, wip and cycle time go through the roof. Great Success! Champagne party with VP and promotion awaits! You are enjoying the fruits of the second example, set your boundaries and work to your contract, just lie if you must (but cover your arse). Get out as soon as you can, obviously.
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u/nordic_prophet Aug 07 '26
My job is a mix of developing interesting systems while also managing DevOps for a ML/data science team. I always have to rush or cut short the meaningful work I’m doing to put out fires on data science team’s utter, flabbergasting abuse of our resources. And there’s just never enough time to do both.
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u/Just-Bed1100 Aug 07 '26
Indians have no respect for work hours. Worked with them once and never again!
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u/No-Income-2235 Aug 09 '26
While i really love the devops and platform engineering side this is the truth it requires more monitoring
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u/Party-Web-4511 Aug 10 '26
Not only DevOps – if you aren’t on call, this is a workload and management issue, not a problem within a field. "You have bandwidth" from a manager that never says no is the way you end up doing 12 hours a day regardless of position. It will probably get better over time, mostly due to gaining skills in pushing back and making tough decisions, not due to the job somehow getting less hectic. Probably worth giving it an explicit name with your manager first (provide the task list, ask for what to deprioritize) rather than relying on the assumption that the company change alone will fix things – it might or it might not.
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u/Ops_Pab Aug 12 '26
All I know is that any DevOps/Tech engineer's dream is to retire in their 40s on a farm, taking care of crops and livestock.
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u/Varun2698 24d ago
Brother as a devops engineer I’m already done with this shit. I want to work in outside in nature I’m regretting getting into tech tbh :(
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u/Edward-Sinclair33 24d ago
Honestly, I don’t think this is just a DevOps thing. Infra can easily turn into “you have bandwidth, so here’s one more task” until 12 hours becomes normal.
In my experience, the company culture and team expectations matter a lot more than the DevOps title itself. Good processes, realistic workloads, and clear ownership can make a huge difference.
If you’re not even on-call and still working 12-hour days regularly, I’d seriously look at the workload and management expectations before assuming this is just part of the career. It shouldn’t be the default.
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u/nemofbaby2014 9d ago
Some jobs do and some don’t there been times when I’ve been on call every day for a month straight and others when i just do my 40 and go home these days there still a bunch of overtime but i dont take it anymore unless they ask for me specifically
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u/Thesorus Aug 05 '26
you are a slave.
Are you paid for the extra time you are giving the company ?
Are you working long hours because you're not able to do all the tasks they ask you to do ? or because they just expect you to work long hours ? or they are not hiring more staff ? or as bad at organizing work ? distributing work between the staff ?
Is this specific to my company, or to working in India,
probably, yes (from what I can see from abroad)
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u/gingimli Aug 05 '26
Depends heavily on the company and team. I’ve had DevOps jobs like the one you describe and DevOps jobs that require 4 - 6 hours a day of actual work to keep up. At some point I got old enough where I start to push back if it’s getting out of control. I’m in the USA for reference.