Side note: After 10 years living in Europe, I moved back to my home country and started looking for remote jobs in the US. It's wild what the US calls “quality of life”. In Europe, I had 6 weeks of vacation per year (from basically day 1) in the US, it’s 2 weeks! In Europe, unlimited sick leave is standard (with varying coverage by insurance); meanwhile, a US company bragging about being a “best place to work” was proudly offering 3 sick days per year! Absolutely crazy.
Slows careers, but I guess "what's the point" of rushing through your career?
You'll likely earn more money, at increased levels of stress, and while giving up on other things life has to offer.
I kind of resonated with the author when I was in my twenties, when I was really focused on work and gave up a lot of 'leasure' time to do so. Nowadays, I think a healthy balance is actually needed to live a full life.
Today I'm a Staff-level IC in my early thirties, and to be honest I sometimes think it would have been nice to linger a bit longer in the other IC levels, to get some more actual programming done versus time spent in meetings & playing a certain amount of politics :)
And as the years go on, I feel that I'm shifting my WLB more and more to the "life" side of the equation.
The rush is to be able to have enough money to retire on, which brings up that parable about the Mexican fisherman and the American entrepreneur.
You're a Staff-level IC, but is it at a company doing something you're in love with, in a manner of how you want to change the world and leave the tiniest legacy? or are you just collecting a paycheck?
Unless you have the magic ticket, a career is a 30-40 year journey. Better to take it with others than going it alone, as you’ll need other people when your cachet fades in the second half. Looking back, I recommend working to live over living to work. And remember, if you don’t separate yourself from your work you’ll have no “you” when you dial back or become unnecessary or undesirable.
And it’s prudent to do “desired things” throughout your life, as your knees might not last or people you want to do things with might not be there. There’s a risk in deferring things until tomorrow as tomorrow might be as you wish it to be.
Yes, and we all know that money and career accomplishment are really what make life worth living. Families are just messy distractions from what REAL life is all about. /s
Congrats on getting promoted every year at Microsoft for 8 years, but this seems to be a career decidedly tilted towards money and status in exchange for effort and time. I hope that upon reflection the author concludes that they were on the Pareto frontier for that tradeoff... but I doubt it.
> I was Facebook’s first engineer promoted to E9 outside the US. All this, at the cost of my second-grade son making sure he had a reserved spot on my calendar prior to me heading off to work that morning. Was it worth it?
> If you want atypically fast career growth, you need to put in the hours. Only you can answer whether the sacrifices are worth it.
Ask the kid. Or the spouse.
My father had a significant career: medical doctor with a PhD, yadda yadda. I won't go into the details, but he left much to be desired both as a husband and as a father. At the age of 54, while he was working on a second PhD, he had a stroke that nearly killed him and left him severely disabled until his death at 70.
Was it worth it? His surviving family doesn't think so. I think we would have all been happier if he had made different choices. His mistakes were a big part of why I quit working to spend time with my own family. Ask my spouse and children whether I made the right call.
A career is just one facet of a fulfilled life alongside relationships, health, personal development and joy. Putting everything aside aiming for promotions may look like a success on paper but it often leads to burnout, loneliness and unfulfilled goals in other areas.
You can climb the ladder but if you ignore the rest of your life you may reach the top, only to realize once alone at the summit that your entire kingdom is in disarray.
Perhaps slowing your career can even be wise if the other spheres of your life are suffering. A sabbatical year or even a deliberate downshift can offer the space to realign and rediscover purpose.
There is something to be said about survivorship bias too, many who work hard don't achieve similar outcomes. We often hear from those who worked relentlessly and succeeded but rarely from the many who worked just as hard and didn't see the same results. For example, some studies show that nearly half of the women in tech leave the industry by mid-career, often due to systemic barriers
Covid helped me with this. I usually spent lots of time outside of work traveling and since I was stuck inside, I used it to completely changes careers and now make more money than I did with my previous career.
Short sighted to prioritize career over life. Few people in the US have any self-worth or identity outside their career, at least IME working in tech. It saddens me greatly. “Productivity” is a disease. Some of my closest friends have no idea what to do with themselves outside of work. No one lays on their death bed wishing they worked more.
> Our family once bought a Nordic chess set my then-seven-year-old son was excited to use. He asked me whether we could play it together, and I said, “Sure!” He then asked me to put it on my calendar, and watched until I had done so. This was a devastating moment of sudden realization for me.
> Only you can answer whether the sacrifices are worth it.
Nah, not only you.
I think a good appendix to this article would be an interview with the 7 year old. If this was my dad, I'd probably strangle him.
If you live to work, all the power to you. Just don't get kids, the world has enough broken folks who are struggling their whole lives to overcome their childhood and their father figure (or the lack of it). They carry the traumas right into their own relationships, often repeating same mistakes. Listen to people a bit since its easy to notice if you know what to look for, its proper pandemic under the hood in all directions.
The ones I've met in this category, always a stellar career, but what was at home, if anything, was less then stellar and the link to corresponding personality traits was pretty obvious. Now I don't think its exclusively either/or situation for everybody, but for most of us it is and certainly would be for me.
I prefer putting down the foot from throttle after some hard-earned leaps in life, and enjoy family time and me time. Right now planning final touches for a 2 week solo adventure vacation in remote Indonesian islands (Togian). Thats after spending 4 weeks of vacations this year with family, and planning another 4-5 together till end of year. While getting paid top 1% of European software dev salaries. Don't need more work wise, there is literally nothing positive that career progression can bring to my life.
Company has rather flat salary structure once you put in enough years, so even moving 2 positions up wouldn't bring much more cash. Work would be much less creative and stress and politics would rise significantly. Good place for some high functioning sociopaths, not so much for more sane folks. Literally would get paid worse per some imaginary mental energy unit put in. No, thank you I am fine.
The real issues come when you work hard and just get exploited.
That's what's really missing here. Someone who got lucky in life and had their hard work rewarded is telling others that hard work pays. In fact for this author in his field it pays off 100x+ whatever it pays for others.
For a salary of a few million a year i too would be willing to work some 12+hour days... for a while. I'd even post a few articles on how hard work is great and rewarding.
There is only so much you can hustle, a lot is out of your control.
We all know people who have repeatedly been given plum projects that are a bit of a fait acompli - highly-visible, wanted, and easy to implement both technically and organizationally - and surprise surprise they get promo after promo for landing high-impact projects. Yet suddenly they arrive in some new team and their career progress grinds to a halt because there is not the same "low hanging fruit" and they can't just slam dunk everything they touch any more. All of a sudden they are left holding some doomed tarball and it is not so easy to look good any more because it's messy and hard and super-complicated and unpopular. They keep putting in the hours yet don't get anywhere.
TL;Dr You need to opportunity, and working more hours won't make those appear every time.
Yes you can try to weasel your way into "making" the opportunity, but then you start playing The Politics Game and that is a totally different kettle of fish.
> He was promoted every year in his first 8 years at Microsoft.
Microsoft has too many layers and they value performative work over any kind of actual leadership experience OR Microsoft's promotions are a sham and leadership select--i.e., filling roles that make the real money--have absolutely nothing to do with these sops to the masses. That's the conclusion I draw from such a bizarre stat. Either way, this guy was played by a system that will happily chew him up before he can realize he wasted his life (unless, of course, this is genuinely what he wanted, in which chase, man, you do you).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 63.3 ms ] threadI kind of resonated with the author when I was in my twenties, when I was really focused on work and gave up a lot of 'leasure' time to do so. Nowadays, I think a healthy balance is actually needed to live a full life.
Today I'm a Staff-level IC in my early thirties, and to be honest I sometimes think it would have been nice to linger a bit longer in the other IC levels, to get some more actual programming done versus time spent in meetings & playing a certain amount of politics :)
And as the years go on, I feel that I'm shifting my WLB more and more to the "life" side of the equation.
You're a Staff-level IC, but is it at a company doing something you're in love with, in a manner of how you want to change the world and leave the tiniest legacy? or are you just collecting a paycheck?
And it’s prudent to do “desired things” throughout your life, as your knees might not last or people you want to do things with might not be there. There’s a risk in deferring things until tomorrow as tomorrow might be as you wish it to be.
From the author of "Water is wet" and "Don't stick your fingers into meat grinder, if you don't want to lose them!"
More news at 11!
> If you want atypically fast career growth, you need to put in the hours. Only you can answer whether the sacrifices are worth it.
Ask the kid. Or the spouse.
My father had a significant career: medical doctor with a PhD, yadda yadda. I won't go into the details, but he left much to be desired both as a husband and as a father. At the age of 54, while he was working on a second PhD, he had a stroke that nearly killed him and left him severely disabled until his death at 70.
Was it worth it? His surviving family doesn't think so. I think we would have all been happier if he had made different choices. His mistakes were a big part of why I quit working to spend time with my own family. Ask my spouse and children whether I made the right call.
A career is just one facet of a fulfilled life alongside relationships, health, personal development and joy. Putting everything aside aiming for promotions may look like a success on paper but it often leads to burnout, loneliness and unfulfilled goals in other areas.
You can climb the ladder but if you ignore the rest of your life you may reach the top, only to realize once alone at the summit that your entire kingdom is in disarray.
Perhaps slowing your career can even be wise if the other spheres of your life are suffering. A sabbatical year or even a deliberate downshift can offer the space to realign and rediscover purpose.
There is something to be said about survivorship bias too, many who work hard don't achieve similar outcomes. We often hear from those who worked relentlessly and succeeded but rarely from the many who worked just as hard and didn't see the same results. For example, some studies show that nearly half of the women in tech leave the industry by mid-career, often due to systemic barriers
> Only you can answer whether the sacrifices are worth it.
Nah, not only you.
I think a good appendix to this article would be an interview with the 7 year old. If this was my dad, I'd probably strangle him.
The ones I've met in this category, always a stellar career, but what was at home, if anything, was less then stellar and the link to corresponding personality traits was pretty obvious. Now I don't think its exclusively either/or situation for everybody, but for most of us it is and certainly would be for me.
I prefer putting down the foot from throttle after some hard-earned leaps in life, and enjoy family time and me time. Right now planning final touches for a 2 week solo adventure vacation in remote Indonesian islands (Togian). Thats after spending 4 weeks of vacations this year with family, and planning another 4-5 together till end of year. While getting paid top 1% of European software dev salaries. Don't need more work wise, there is literally nothing positive that career progression can bring to my life.
Company has rather flat salary structure once you put in enough years, so even moving 2 positions up wouldn't bring much more cash. Work would be much less creative and stress and politics would rise significantly. Good place for some high functioning sociopaths, not so much for more sane folks. Literally would get paid worse per some imaginary mental energy unit put in. No, thank you I am fine.
That's what's really missing here. Someone who got lucky in life and had their hard work rewarded is telling others that hard work pays. In fact for this author in his field it pays off 100x+ whatever it pays for others.
For a salary of a few million a year i too would be willing to work some 12+hour days... for a while. I'd even post a few articles on how hard work is great and rewarding.
I'm so glad I'm not these people, and no one I associate with is either.
We all know people who have repeatedly been given plum projects that are a bit of a fait acompli - highly-visible, wanted, and easy to implement both technically and organizationally - and surprise surprise they get promo after promo for landing high-impact projects. Yet suddenly they arrive in some new team and their career progress grinds to a halt because there is not the same "low hanging fruit" and they can't just slam dunk everything they touch any more. All of a sudden they are left holding some doomed tarball and it is not so easy to look good any more because it's messy and hard and super-complicated and unpopular. They keep putting in the hours yet don't get anywhere.
TL;Dr You need to opportunity, and working more hours won't make those appear every time.
Yes you can try to weasel your way into "making" the opportunity, but then you start playing The Politics Game and that is a totally different kettle of fish.
Microsoft has too many layers and they value performative work over any kind of actual leadership experience OR Microsoft's promotions are a sham and leadership select--i.e., filling roles that make the real money--have absolutely nothing to do with these sops to the masses. That's the conclusion I draw from such a bizarre stat. Either way, this guy was played by a system that will happily chew him up before he can realize he wasted his life (unless, of course, this is genuinely what he wanted, in which chase, man, you do you).