I was forwarded an email from a team member, they wanted me to know about a discussion they had with an external entity. That is pretty routine, but the last sentence in the email caught my eye:

A side question, I have impression that Oren works 24/7, but does everyone in the company work on weekends?

In general, aside from emergency support, we don't have anyone that is working outside normal business hours. I'm very happy to say that in the past decade or so since I founded the company, we had exactly zero cases of working over the weekend by employees that weren't part of an emergency support call by a customer. We also don't have people who work until 12 hours days or other such nonsense.

Given the way developers think, let me clarify, the number of emergency support calls for RavenDB is low. A month where we handle 3 emergency support calls for RavenDB is a very notable one, for example. We had one such incident in March, 3 in Feb, and one in Jan.

You might have noticed that I was careful about talking about employees before. That is because, for better or worse, I’m not including myself in those statistics. For the most part, I’m not usually working over the weekends or at night. I have learned my lesson from burnouts in the past. That said, my hobby is to program while my day job is a CEO of a software company. That means that sometimes I get to write code in the office, but there is so much more that goes into managing a company that I don’t get nearly enough of that as I wish I would.

I looked at my GitHub contributions, and they seem to agree:

Note that for me, weekend means Friday & Saturday. So there is a very clear off time.

When you see me doing coding or writing blog posts over the weekend, that is usually me doing that as a hobby role. Same for sitting down in front of the computer after the kids are put to bed, I’m not working, I’m actually having fun practicing my hobby.