Back in February of this year I was assigned as the Technical Lead Architect for Manila of a new project, a SharePoint + web services based development for a large utilities company in the U.S.

I got very excited because it was a large project that required hardcore SharePoint development which would push my skills to a number of levels up; but things wasn’t as pretty and excited as I thought to be. The last 7 months was the worst “work life balance” experience I had in a very long time. These past months were packed with intense pressure, countless overnights, long working hours, frustrating environments and all the negative things I wouldn’t want to live on.

Long hours is probably an understatement here, it’s more like insane, inhuman working hours because I am talking about having worked multiple 35 straight working hours, numerous 12 straight hours of conference calls, normal 14-16 chargeable hours in a day, forced to work on weekends, special non-working holidays, etc. To top it all, we don’t get legit overtime pay but some cheap premium and food/transpo allowance that is just enough for your expenses.