On working too hard: finding balance, and lessons learned from others

Now I've had 15 years and running of family life and being the home maker and that's great too. I wish I had some of the physical fortitude I spent earlier but I'm sure that'd be the case regardless.

Have I achieved "work-life balance"? I didn't get rich when I was working, but I got to do things that made me happy and I can argue made the world better, in some small way. Since then, pretty much the same.

I'm in the same boat as the author as far as working too hard, but I've never done it on my salaried work, only on my own projects. Most of them went nowhere and a few gave something useful, but in the end I learned a lot. And it's easy to just drop whatever you're working on when it's just for you.

I can't say if it's out of principe or out of spite, but I actually despise the very idea of doing unpaid work for my employer. If they want more work they can pay me for it, or more likely hire someone else to soak the extra efforts. I work as hard as anyone else during my work hours, and I stay up to date so what more do they want of me. I've actually had managers, who were good managers otherwise, subtly told me I was not doing much (unpaid) overtime compared to other people during my annual review. Funny how things work out, I found another job right after that paid me 50% more and didn't care about my after hours work.

I think that's what I meant by aligning personal projects with career ones. I have no problem with this type of work.

I just wanted to bring up the point of making sure you're not being taken advantage of.

> Not everyone can start a side project or business at 22.

It depends on the project. There is no need for it to be a new business or a groundbreaking open source project. You can be a junior web developer that learns more about SQL and the PostgreSQL internals. Or packages your app with Docker, improves CI pipelines and/or runs it in k8s. Those types of projects get you hugely successful at your job while raising your programmer market value.

If you follow PGs logic, it shouldn't matter because 1 cappuccino is the same amount of liquid than 4 espressos, but we all know it does, right?

Same goes for working on weekends. If all you need to do is solving a super-interesting engineering problem then go for it. If you are firefighting customer escalations in four failed IT projects at the same time, then I'd recommend to take a break.

New college grads can really struggle with finding balance after transitioning out of college. The undergrad environment has well defined start and end points for each class and everyone gets the same or similar workloads, so it's possible to calibrate off of peers and consult with advisors or mentors who have gone through the same system.

Not so with the working world, where there are always more objectives than time and you can't always look to peers to calibrate your progress. Ambitious juniors often see this and decide to go all-in, working as hard as possible on as much as possible for as long as possible.

This leads to burnout in some, though not all, of the people who get swept away in it. We read so many articles about burnout and recovery from burnout that the topic of hard work evokes strong reactions online, as evidenced by this article and the comments section. However, as the author points out there are multiple sides to this story. Hard work isn't always bad, especially if you find yourself enjoying it and learning a lot.

If I'm being totally honest, working hard in my early career paid off significantly down the road. Not necessarily in immediate dollars paid out by my employers at the time, but the network, reputation, and skillset I built along the way are extremely valuable to this day. I didn't even hate the hard work or long hours at the time, because I made a point to surround myself with peers I liked and work I enjoyed. I also made an effort to get plenty of exercise and social activity, which can't be neglected.

In my opinion, too many online discussions around burnout are centered on the idea that work is inherently bad and something that should be minimized as much as possible. An understandable reaction from authors who might be burned out, but framing everything this way has an unintended side effect: It normalizes the idea that work is inherently bad, and that hating your work is natural. This mindset tends to trap people in jobs they hate at companies they dislike with peers they can't stand, all because they've been led to believe that this is the normal state of affairs. They focus too much on trying to tolerate it and manage their borderline burnout instead of trying to move their career in a direction where they can find a job they like.

In my opinion, we need to stop framing this as a debate about whether work is good or work is bad, and start talking more about finding a healthy balance and working toward jobs we like. No job is going to be fun all of the time, but if you're hating every hour of work and counting down the hours to the end of the day every day then you're probably in a below average job.