Welcome to our article series about developers and what they do when they’re not building incredible things with code and data.
In “Away From the Keyboard,” MongoDB developers discuss what they do, how they keep a healthy work-life balance, and their advice for people seeking a more holistic approach to coding.
In this article, Ariel Hou shares her day-to-day responsibilities as a Staff Engineer at MongoDB; how a pots-and-pans symphony helped her set boundaries while working from home; and the two rules she follows to separate work and personal time.
Q: What do you do at MongoDB?
Ariel: I work with the Atlas Growth Engineering teams, where our focus is on designing and implementing data-driven experiments on the Atlas product. We target metrics like customer acquisition, retention, feature discovery, etc. We not only run experiments ourselves; we also facilitate other teams in running them by creating tools and platforms, like our internal experimentation admin app and our Javascript experimentation SDK.
In this role, I get to work on full-stack, cross-functional projects where sometimes the audience is Atlas users, and sometimes it’s internal devs. There’s a lot of variety!
Q: What does work-life balance look like for you?
Ariel: Generally, it means I do work during work hours, and then I don’t do work when it’s not work hours. I try to enforce a physical separation as much as a mental one.
Admittedly, the rise of work-from-home that came with the pandemic blurred the boundary some, and it was a bit of a tough adjustment at the beginning of the pandemic when I first started working at home. Since I was already home, there wouldn’t be a clear signal that it was time to “go home”…until there was. Back then, people in Manhattan had taken to banging on pots and pans at around 6 p.m. to salute healthcare workers commuting home, and I could hear it from my apartment. That inadvertently acted as my alarm for the end of the work day!
Q: How do you ensure you set boundaries between work and personal life?
Ariel: The aforementioned physical boundary (for the days I go into the office).
There are two other important concepts for me. First, I compartmentalize: sometimes, I will realize an important work-related thing in my off-hours, but rather than acting on it, I’ll file it away for work time. The second idea, which goes hand-in-hand with the others: don’t break the seal! (AKA, don’t trivially open your laptop or respond to Slack messages during off-hours.) The minute you do, the boundary is broken for the day and it becomes a slippery slope into working more.
Q: Has work/life balance always been a priority for you, or did you develop it later in your career?
Ariel: It was definitely not a priority in my first few years out of college. But living to work made me burnt out by 25. By the time I got to MongoDB, I understood that model wasn’t sustainable, nor was it worthwhile. Thankfully, we don’t have that culture here on the team.
Q: What benefits has this balance given you in your career?
Ariel: If you’ve been working for many hours straight, there’s a certain point in the day where it’s a struggle to progress the code or doc you’re writing. You can try to push through it, but there’s a high chance that the next day, after a night of sleep, you revisit the task and think, “Who wrote this garbage? Oh, heh, me.” And you throw it all out and write a much nicer solution with much less effort. It’s happened to me on numerous occasions. Work-life balance isn’t just better for mental and physical longevity; it legitimately makes you a more effective engineer.
Q: What advice would you give to someone seeking to find a better balance?
Ariel: Don’t break the seal!
Thank you to Ariel Hou for sharing these insights! And thanks to all of you for reading.
For past articles in this series, check out our interviews with:
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