It is 10:17 PM on a Wednesday in an IT park in Whitefield, Bangalore. The food delivery guy walks through the lobby for what might be the third time tonight -- someone on the fourth floor ordered biryani, someone on the sixth floor ordered wraps, and the security guard does not even look up anymore. The fluorescent lights hum. Through the glass walls of a conference room, you can see a team on a call with a US client. A woman at a corner desk is staring at her screen, not really working, not really leaving either. She has been here since 9 AM. Her gym bag sits untouched under her desk where she left it on Monday.
This is not a crisis. Nobody is yelling. Nothing is on fire. It is just... normal. This is what a normal Wednesday night looks like in thousands of offices across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurgaon, Chennai. And that is sort of the problem, is it not? That this is normal.
I have worked in HR for fourteen years, mostly with IT companies. I am not going to pretend I have figured out work-life balance myself. Some weeks I am good about boundaries. Other weeks I answer emails at 11 PM and tell myself it is a one-time thing. (It is never a one-time thing.) But I have watched this industry long enough to have some thoughts about why it is like this and what -- if anything -- individuals can do about it when the system itself is not really designed for balance.
The Culture of Presence
Let me start with something that is not talked about openly enough. In many Indian IT workplaces, there is an unspoken equation: being present equals being committed. If your manager is online at 9 PM, you feel the pressure to be online at 9 PM. Nobody sends a memo about it. Nobody says "you must work late." But the first person who leaves at 6 PM regularly becomes "the person who leaves at 6 PM" -- and that becomes their identity in the team, fair or not.
I remember a conversation with a software engineer at a mid-size company in Pune. He told me he finishes his actual work by 5:30 most days. But he stays until 7:30 or 8 because leaving on time "looks bad." He sits at his desk, browses the internet, maybe does some online learning, waits for enough people to leave before he feels comfortable leaving. Think about that. Two to three hours a day -- ten to fifteen hours a week -- of just performing presence. Multiply that across thousands of employees and you have an entire industry burning time and calling it dedication.
The uncomfortable truth is that this is not just a management problem. Employees enforce it on each other too. I have heard team members make comments like "Oh, leaving already?" to someone walking out at 6:30. It comes from a place of resentment more than anything -- if I am stuck here, why should you get to leave? The crab mentality is real, and it keeps everyone in the bucket.
The Client Time Zone Trap
A lot of the late nights in Indian IT are not about Indian managers being unreasonable. They are about geography. When your client sits in California, their 10 AM is your 10:30 PM. And if the client wants a daily standup at their 10 AM, well. You are on a call at 10:30 PM.
Some companies handle this well. They build in comp-offs, adjusted schedules, late start times. Others just expect you to work a regular Indian business day AND be available for US hours. You end up working a split shift that nobody calls a split shift. Morning meetings with your Indian team. Then a few hours of "overlap." Then evening calls with the US. Before you know it, your workday is 14 hours and you have been told it is 8.
I do not have a clean solution for this one. The client work has to happen. The time zones are not going to change. What I have seen help, in teams that manage this better than others, is brutal honesty about what the schedule actually is. If the job requires evening calls three days a week, say that during hiring. Build it into the role description. Let people make informed choices instead of discovering it in week two.
Small Things That Actually Help (When You Can Do Them)
I hesitate to turn this into a "tips" section because most work-life balance tips feel like putting a band-aid on a broken bone. "Take a walk during lunch!" Sure, when lunch is a 15-minute thing eaten at your desk because there is a deployment at 2 PM. But some things do make a difference, not because they fix the system but because they create small pockets of space in a day that otherwise has none.
Block your calendar before anyone else does. This is the single most practical thing I can recommend. If you do not block time for focused work, deep thinking, or even just eating, someone else will fill your calendar with meetings. In Outlook, in Google Calendar, wherever your company lives -- block 12:30 to 1:30 every day. Call it "busy" or "focus time" or whatever your team culture allows. Some people will ignore the block. Most will not.
Have a shutdown ritual. Not a "laptop off, phone off" dramatic thing -- that is not realistic for most people. But a small signal to yourself that the work day is over. Close all browser tabs. Write tomorrow's to-do list. Put the laptop in a different room if you work from home. The ritual does not matter as much as the consistency. Your brain needs a cue that work mode is ending, especially when you work from the same room you sleep in.
Stop checking Slack/Teams after a certain hour. I know. I KNOW. You are worried about missing something urgent. But here is what I have noticed after years of watching notification patterns: about 90% of messages sent after 9 PM do not need a response until morning. The 10% that are truly urgent -- your manager will call you. If they are not calling, it can wait. The anxiety of "what if" keeps people glued to notifications far more than actual urgency does.
Use your leave. India's IT industry has a bizarre relationship with leave. Companies offer 18, 20, 24 days of paid leave and employees use maybe 8 of them. The rest get accumulated, encashed, or they just expire. People treat leave like a savings account they are afraid to withdraw from. Take your leave. Take a random Tuesday off and do nothing. The work will survive.
The Things That Need to Change That You Cannot Change Alone
Here is where I have to be honest about the limits of individual advice.
You can block your calendar, have a shutdown ritual, protect your evenings -- and it still will not matter much if your company's actual operating model requires 60-hour weeks. If your team is understaffed by three people and management is not hiring, no amount of personal boundary-setting is going to give you work-life balance. You will just be setting boundaries and then breaking them, over and over, and feeling like a failure for it.
The truth is that many IT companies in India are profitable specifically because they overwork their employees. The billing model -- billing clients for 40 hours a week per resource while expecting 50-60 hours of actual work -- creates value for the company at the expense of the employee's time and health. This is structural. It is not something you can meditate your way out of.
When I see articles telling people to "practice mindfulness" or "set boundaries" without acknowledging this structural reality, it frustrates me. It puts the burden on the individual to fix a system-level problem. You should set boundaries, yes. But you should also know that sometimes the right answer is not "manage your time better." Sometimes it is "this job is taking more than it gives, and I need to find a different one."
The Privilege Problem
I need to say this, and I say it as someone who is aware of my own position in this. Most work-life balance advice assumes a level of financial and social privilege that not everyone has.
"Just leave at 6 PM" is easy advice when you do not have a home loan EMI, a car loan, parents who depend on your income, and the knowledge that losing this job would mean three months of panic while you look for another one. "Set boundaries with your manager" sounds simple until your manager is the kind of person who holds grudges and you know the next appraisal cycle is in two months.
I work with employees across salary brackets. For someone earning 25 lakhs a year with savings and a partner who also earns -- yeah, they have options. They can push back. They can even quit and take a month to reset. For someone earning 5 lakhs, supporting a family, with EMIs that eat 40% of their take-home -- "just set boundaries" is advice that ignores their actual reality.
I do not know how to reconcile this. I think about it a lot. The people who most need work-life balance are often the people who can least afford to demand it. Entry-level employees in service companies, people on bench with the fear of being "released," contractors without job security -- these people work the hardest, tolerate the most, and get the least say in their own schedules. Telling them to "prioritize wellness" feels almost cruel when the alternative to overwork is unemployment.
What Managers Can Actually Do
Since I work with management as much as with employees, let me say this to anyone in a leadership position. The single biggest thing you can do for your team's work-life balance is model it yourself. Not talk about it in town halls. Not send emails about "wellness week." Actually leave on time yourself. Actually take your leave. Actually not send messages at midnight.
Because your team watches you. They do not listen to what you say about balance. They watch what you do. If you send emails at 11 PM (even with a "no need to respond tonight" disclaimer), you have set the tone. People will respond. They will stay up. They will adjust to your rhythm because you are their manager and that is how it works.
The best managers I have seen in terms of team well-being share a few habits. They protect their team from unnecessary meetings. They push back on unreasonable client demands instead of passing the pressure down. They actively tell people to go home. Not in a performative way but in a "I noticed you have been logging in at 8 and still here at 9, what is going on, how can we fix the workload" way. These managers exist. They are not the majority, but they exist, and their teams have noticeably lower attrition.
Relationships, Health, and the Things You Cannot Get Back
A few years ago, I facilitated a workshop for a large IT company. During one exercise, I asked people to write down what they had missed in the past month because of work. The answers were... heavy. A daughter's school play. A father's doctor's appointment. A friend's wedding reception. A spouse's birthday dinner that got rescheduled twice and then just did not happen. Regular exercise that stopped four months ago and never restarted. A hobby -- someone wrote "guitar" and then crossed it out, like even admitting they used to play guitar felt silly.
Nobody was crying. Nobody was having a breakdown. It was all very measured, very controlled. But the room was quiet in a way that told me everyone recognized something in that exercise. The slow accumulation of small sacrifices. No single one of them is devastating. But they add up. And one day you look around and realize you have not done anything for yourself in months, and the worst part is you cannot even identify when it started.
I talked to a senior developer once -- fifteen years in the industry, well-paid, respected in his field. He told me, quietly, that his teenage son does not really talk to him. "I was never home during the years when kids form bonds with their parents," he said. "I was always deploying something. And now he is 16 and he has his own world and I am a stranger in my own house." He was not angry at his company. He was not blaming anyone. He was just sad. And I think that sadness is more common than any of us want to admit.
The Hybrid Work Question
Post-pandemic, hybrid and remote work became part of the conversation. And in some ways it helped -- no commute, more flexibility, the ability to put in a load of laundry between meetings. But in other ways it made things worse. The boundary between work and home dissolved completely. Your office is now also your bedroom, your dining table, your living room. There is no physical act of "leaving work" because work is everywhere.
I have talked to remote workers who say they work more hours from home than they ever did from the office. The laptop is right there. The notification is right there. At 10 PM, you think "let me just check one thing" and suddenly it is 11:30. There is no social cue of an empty office, colleagues leaving, the lights being turned off. Your cue to stop is... what? Your own willpower? That is a lot to ask every single day.
Companies that do remote well have figured out something important: remote work requires more structure, not less. Fixed meeting hours. No-meeting days. Expected response time windows (not instant, not "within minutes"). These sound like restrictions, but they are actually liberating. Without them, the default becomes "always on" and nobody benefits from that. Not even the company, because burned-out employees write worse code, make worse decisions, and eventually quit.
What I Actually Want to Say
I started this article thinking I would write something helpful. Something with actionable advice that people could implement tomorrow. And I have put some of that in here. But the longer I write, the more I feel the weight of what I am not saying, which is this: the Indian IT work culture, in its current form, is not compatible with a healthy life for most people in it. Not incompatible in a dramatic, headline-making way. Just in a slow, quiet, erosive way. A way that takes two hours from your evening and ten days from your leave balance and five years from your relationship with your kids, and you barely notice it happening because everyone around you is losing the same things.
I do not think the answer is meditation apps or team outings or "fun Fridays." Those things are fine. They are not the answer. The answer is probably something structural -- shorter work weeks, enforced leave policies, realistic project timelines, hiring enough people to do the work that needs to be done instead of stretching five people across eight people's worth of jobs. These changes are expensive. Companies resist them. And so we end up with wellness webinars instead.
If you are reading this at 10 PM from your office, or from your dining table that doubles as your desk, I do not have a neat closing thought for you. I wish I did. Close the laptop if you can. Go for a walk if the neighbourhood is safe enough at this hour. Call someone you have been meaning to call. Or just sit for five minutes without looking at a screen. That is not a solution. But it is five minutes, and five minutes is something.
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