But in order to do that we had to work 9 hour days Monday - Thursday.

That extra hour those four days felt torturous, so it meant four days of feeling awful just so I could leave a few hours early on a day in which most people (and myself) already weren't working too hard anyway.

I hated it.

This was at a very low output insurance company, btw, so there often wasn't huge pressure to get things done quickly (new software releases were once a quarter, and IT would complain that two months lead time wasn't enough time to provision a single new server that was a clone of an existing server, as an example of how slow things moved), and the days dragged on way long.

I worked more high pressure startups before where I was often there for 9 or more hours by necessity to meet deadlines that didn't feel so bad.

What's the old saying "A friend in need, is a friend, indeed."?

I like to have personal relationships, as opposed to corporate ones.

Funny story: During the 1990s, my direct boss was a fairly low-key Japanese man. I really liked him. He was a marketing type, so we didn't really have a technical basis for our relationship. He was a decent chap, and I happily followed his orders. In return, he gave me a great deal of agency.

After he returned to Japan, we'd run into each other, from time to time, and it was always a warm, effusive greeting.

Years later, he was the Chairman of the Board of the corporation. I never leveraged the relationship, but my team was always treated well, at our level. We were a small technical team, and it would have been inappropriate to focus on us too much. I had very little ambition to go much higher up the corporate food chain, so all was fine. Once, he made a visit to our office (the US branch). It was a really big deal, and people were snapping to attention all over the building.

He dropped by my tiny little office, to say hi. It was really amusing, to see the puzzled expressions on all the corporate bigwigs in his entourage.

First I have not used the app but IIRC it uses a lot of "Choose the correct word among those four" but it's quite bad for reinforcement. It's much better to reinforce what you learned to have to type a sentence from scratch. I recommend using it on a computer. Also, I don't know if that exercise is still ther, but having to pronounce a sentence is also good. The problem was it was too easy to pass though.

The other thing is that it does not replace learning the language, that is reading a grammar in order to know what are the general rules of the language. But it does replace conversation if you are not able to speak the language and provide a a good source of daily reinforcement, and vocabulary.

It's an effective tool when used correctly in my opinion.