Tech Stories: The 80 Hour/Week Job

Back in 2001 when I returned from my vacation in Japan, the Dot Com Era was over. I had just been able to taste the peak before everything collapsed before my eyes. The one company that would have been my true dream company declared bankruptcy while I was overseas, a place that tried to recruit me. Instead of the 20 calls/day situation I experienced after putting my resume out for a part time contract position while working at the race parts company, I experienced dead silence. Worse yet I was in major debt and had to figure out something because I did not want to place any burden on my parents, who already had their share of financial problems as well as dealing with some of my student loans.

The so-called senior engineer title I possessed while at the race parts company was meaningless because people could just examine my resume and see how little experience I had compared to what the title really meant. I felt my confidence shattered as rejection after rejection hit me. You still could be ghosted back then so that’s not a new thing. Also, the amount of requirements in a bear period like that was still ridiculous. You’d see stupid things like 10+ years of Tomcat despite the software being out only for a few at best. Yet it taught me a lot about the recruiting industry with their buzzword searches and know-it-nothing demeanors. They were not much better than used cars sales people who managed to slink into an industry flowing with money.

Desperate, I eventually came across a small time ad company over in Santa Monica. As I was still young, healthy and energetic, the commute at that stage did not bother me as much as it would these days. The interview itself I remember little but the offer was very low and almost on par with what I was making at the race parts company. Nonetheless, I really had zero choice as I had debt on three credit cars, a close car loan and my student loans. Because I still had dreams of visiting Japan again in mind, I decided on taking the job but didn’t know how bad things would get.

The engineering team was only composed of three people. One guy might’ve been slightly older and graduated from UC Berkeley. The other guy was, I believe, a year younger than me and dropped out of UCLA. There were three others running the show from a nice office near Bundy. In essence, this place was doing simple banner ads. I didn’t know too much about ad networks back then but always felt they were shady even in those early days. But the long and short of it is that you have a website where if you’re the advertiser, you upload your assets (images) and create campaigns, targeting pieces of content and pay to have your ads shown in the hope that they are clicked (sometimes this is called a Call to Action or CTA). Then there’s the marketplace where a content provider will hook into an ad network and get selected based on the amount of traffic they have. The higher the traffic, the more pay outs and the more likely a site will be accepted.

From there, based on different factors setup for the content provider in the marketplace, you have the ad server which identifies your website based on some ID and serves up the relevant ads. Now, the ad server needs to scale because of the amount of hits that happen across the web. These days there are other aspects to these ad networks such as behavioral monitoring via a tracking pixel, dealing with cookies (or cookie-less) and browser identification, far higher levels of scaling. In short, those aspects have increased in complexity.

At the time I worked at this place, there weren’t many sophisticated ad networks around. DoubleClick was probably the biggest next to Goto.com, which pushed the idea of bid placement (which Yahoo owns the patent and why they’re still relevant). Also, the level of traffic was much smaller as there weren’t as many crawlers, bots, mobile devices and people on the internet. So even having a cache-less system with a relational database could still work back then.

Regardless, our task was improving the existing system. I think my main task was building up the thing that would serve the ad while the UCB guy built a cronjob to ingest the data. I think the original ad server had been done in PHP but I wanted to convert it into Embed Perl/mod_perl since I was still very gung ho about perl back then. Although these days, I probably could handle the task much better, I might’ve struggled a bit with those concepts since my engineering sense hadn’t been as fleshed out and my experience was much lighter.

As a result, I was working long hours. Our team were easily pulling 80 hours a week. We didn’t have an actual concept of core hours so we’d roll in approximately around 2pm because traffic between the 405 and 10 wasn’t as bad. But we would stay until approximately 2am Monday through Sunday. Unfortunately, the idea of remote work wasn’t a thing back then or I’m sure at the very least we could’ve been given laptops to pull off these long hours.

Beyond that, I gained a lot of weight. The VP of engineering, though a nice guy, had an eating problem to put it nicely. Before the whole notion of free lunches, unlimited snacks became a kind of norm in numerous tech shops (up until the pandemic that is), this guy would buy a ton of junk food and leave it on the table. Chips, donuts, high caloric snacks, soda, etc. This was well before the morbid obesity thing had been identified in America. Even then you could tell this wasn’t a normal situation. He would buy these really great meatball sandwiches from one of those local delivery places along with these snacks before there was an Uber type of food delivery service on your phone. Instead of having one, he might’ve been getting two. I remember how he admitted that he spent all night at a Norm’s and having three breakfast plates. My coworker and I just looked at each other in horror at this guy’s eating habits because it obviously wasn’t good for him.

I think part of the issue now that I can see these things in retrospective is that it was most likely stress eating. He still had bad eating habits but I think the situation he was in compounded the issue. He was under a great deal of pressure from management, which were two partners. However, one guy left for one reason which shrunk the team and money incredibly. And I was uncertain if we could make money just because of how the site was under development with no end in site without proper project management. But the VP of engineering did stick up for us as I recall overhearing him talk to the owner about how small our team was and the unrealistic expectations put upon us.

My other coworker, the one from UCB, I believe was married and living over in Santa Monica at the time. He might’ve been expecting a child soon so he was under tremendous stress as well. I think just the three of us though managed to get along fine and in those late hours there was a real bond. I tried to keep in contact with the UCB guy for a while until time and distance split us apart. But when you’re grinding for 80 hours a week and seeing the night as you walk out of the office, you become close to your war mates.

However, one incident was something I had been planning for a while. I was to meet a friend up in the Bay Area because I bought her friend a round trip plane ticket from Japan (they were wrestlers). So I wanted to see them both and would drive up one weekend. Of course, that meant not showing up during the weekend, even though I wasn’t making a lot and certainly not getting any overtime. But I needed the time to myself since this was one of the few opportunities I knew I would have like this, especially because I paid for it.

When I returned back to LA, I got chewed out on the phone. Unlike the shady clothing shop, I actually bothered to pick up the phone rather than ghosting this spot. The owner gave me a long rant about how he was 100% into this business and didn’t care about my personal life more or less. All I could do was sit there and listen to this asshole just shoot me down. After he was finished, I simply told him I quit after two months of dealing with this nonsense. 80 hours in a shitty economy where my health was on a steady decline for terrible wages wasn’t worth it. I decided to take a risk in finding a new job despite how hard it was to land that one. Things did manage to pay themselves off in the end but it was scary because of the debt I was in as well as the general economic landscape.

If there are a few lessons I could teach here it’s that your health, both mental and physical, are the most important things that you need to treasure. No job is worth the sacrifice unless it’s some exorbitant amount (but even then you’d have to question what the job is; like if you were going to be a ground zero patient for a nuclear blast, well that money ain’t worth it no matter how many digits they tack on). Another lesson is to never get so desperate to undervalue yourself. You should certainly do your own due diligence in researching a spot to ensure that the amount of shadiness is reduced. You can’t completely avoid some level of problems in the corporate world because most places end up selling snake oil (especially tech unsurprisingly). But taking that first offer before looking up the people involved is worth the headaches even if it means risking losing the offer.