Work Life balance slows careers
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Work Life balance slows careers
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Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#2Well, at least he spared a moment for a reflection on how it's affecting his family.
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#3Side 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.
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#4Slows 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.
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#5Unless 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.
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#6Repeating what working women have been saying for decades
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#7Yes, 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
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#8Congrats 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.
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#9Well, at least he spared a moment for a reflection on how it's affecting his family.
> When I first started at Microsoft, I had a sleeping bag in my office. I coded until 11pm nightly and slept until 3am, at which point I’d code until ~6am, then sleep until my first meeting ~10am.
It’s everyone’s pejorative on what they want to focus on in life, but this is pretty insane. Obviously it worked out for him (so we think), but this sounds like recipe for a couple divorces and kids that hate you (even if he eventually slowed down somewhat).
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#10> Work Life balance slows careers
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!