How to know when it's time to go

I think it’s always important to have ambitious life goals. Goals can be career-related. But at least a few should be about your personal life. So, for me, it has always been easy to decide when to go. Is work helping me reach my goals or standing in my way?

As an example, in the early 2000’s I had a comfortable, well-paying job in IT. But I wanted to be a part of something bigger. I wanted to be an expert, pushing the boundaries of science. For awhile, my job helped me pay for school—my extra training directly benefitted the projects I worked on. But eventually, I could see that I was not going to achieve my goals. And even though I loved my job, and my coworkers, it was clear that I had to leave. I do not regret my decision, even though I took a big pay cut to go to grad school, for a long time.

If you don’t have goals, though… god help you.

>Ultimately, work that’s too easy is no fun, and it’s not the basis of a rewarding career. All you’re doing is selling time, and as you get a little older you’ll come to realise that time is a non-renewable resource.

There's this strange myth that white collar workers try and find meaning or reward in their work. If the stars align so that the unquenchable thirst from your brain can be satiated with white collar work then great, keep going. But I suspect that work is just that, selling your time for survival and comfort in other parts of your life. It's even weirder that we place the onus of finding such meaning on the worker when we've built an economic system that expects them to behave like Homo Economicus; getting the best possible economic reward for the smallest possible input. Most of us don't have the luxury of pursuing challenge, putting food on the table is hard enough as it is.

There's plenty of meaning up for grabs in parts of life that don't have anything to do with money. I think as a species we've optimized for the wrong thing; there's a better life to be had with quality leisure time than the convenience lifestyle our current economy seems aimed at. Sell as little of your time for as much as you can get for it and invest that time where you're sure to derive meaning from it.

For me it is pretty clear that there was work-before-I-started-raising-a-young-family and work after.

To be clear, it wasn't over-night. After all, it took me quite a bit of time to adjust to my new role in life as "father". But once it started to embrace me (or, you know, vice-versa) the importance of work and its rewards diminished significantly.

In short, I was soon content to put in the work that got the job done, but I had few aspirations of climbing any kind of career ladder. "Dad" was my new and dominant identity. The paycheck was how I could take the girls on vacations, get them bicycles, fix up the house we lived in, etc.

The issue that I have with this type of article and why they never resonate with me is that they seem to assume you’ll be able to find a job with a similar salary if not a higher one, by snapping your fingers.

I’ll tell you my experience: I’ve been working for 21 years, and I’ve only worked for two companies in that time period (there was a short stint at a third one, but I didn’t fully quit one of the other two so I never really “left”).

At my current job, where I’ve been for 14 of those 21 years, I feel simultaneously underappreciated and overpayed. They pay me too well, to the extent of considering myself lucky if I was able to find a job where I could get 50% of the pay. Yet it bothers me that in 21 years, my only promotion was from junior to senior dev. I’ve seen a few people that I don’t consider better than me, neither from a technical point of view nor a soft skills one, being promoted several times and manage a bunch of people, and that bothers me. The reasons behind it are a mix of being the last member of the “old guard” before a new CTO came about and turned the tables from a technology perspective, and also working remotely. However I’ve always worked hard, created few new issues and solved a bunch of old ones, so they kept giving me unsolicited pay rises.

I’m not crazy about getting into management, however with the rise of AI I think there’s a decent chance of my job being replaced by a machine in the next 5 to 10 years, if not sooner. And even before AI, not many companies are crazy about old tech people without managerial experience.

I’m not good enough to land a job at a FAANG, esp. with my background, and being from a southern European country and as a nearly 45yo with a 3yo child it just won’t happen. But mostly because I’m just not good enough.

We have a saying in my country: would you rather be the tail of a lion or the head of a mouse? I feel like the tail of a mouse, but the job pays too well, so I’m stuck and feeling miserable every day.

That is exactly my point. We have designed the economy with the expectation that anyone able should be investing that much time to make ends meet, when we could lower our expectations and output to ease that burden instead. But that is an entirely radical paradigm shift in the direction of solar punk / degrowth that the world just doesn't seem interested in.