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.
Work Life balance slows careers
21–30 of 122 posts
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#22> 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: m…
If, hypothetically, your kids and wife asked you to work many more hours and earn much more money, would you do it?
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#23Short 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.
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#24Side 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 pr…
Where is "in Europe" in your case? There are around 50 countries, each with their own laws. In Finland, you don't get ANY vacation days until the next time April 1st rolls around. And then, the number of days you get is heavily reduced if you haven't worked the entire year from April-April. Why is it like that? Who the hell knows.
Oh yeah, if you take 5 days off, it counts as 6 days. So you essentially have 5/6 of the days that are promised to you on paper.
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#25> 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.
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#26> 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: m…
If, hypothetically, your kids and wife asked you to work many more hours and earn much more money, would you do it?
If you're stagnating in an entry level job and barely making ends meet, your wife might want you to put your head down or escalate into better job opportunities, and that's a sensible decision.
If you're an engineer at Meta and your wife/kid want you to work even more, then they probably prefer to spend time with your wife's boyfriend, and you deserve some reckoning.
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#27Unless 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 “desir…
A lot of people understood this stuff clearly during COVID and now the conversation is shifting again to the old norms of work and prestige over everything. Life is short, family & friends are important, money can't buy everything and your employer will never love you.
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#28Nobody will remember the extra hours you put in except your family and friends.
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your making like a half million a year then? You'll have financial freedom in a couple years...
Let’s assume you can save half of that. In two years, you’ll have 500,000. Is that enough to never work again?
What is the significance of 2 years? Surely, people capable of earning $500k per year are capable of working more than 2 years, at high salaries less than $500k, still allowing them to sock away more than $500k.
$5M to $10M should provide sufficient passive income, even in coastal California.
Re: Work Life balance slows careers
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your making like a half million a year then? You'll have financial freedom in a couple years...
Let’s assume you can save half of that. In two years, you’ll have 500,000. Is that enough to never work again?
No but maybe 4 years? Plus growth in savings and investments from the rest of a software engineers highly paid career? 10 years without staff level income has me at around a million already. Pay off a house and do what ever you want with another million.Plus you can use that money to pay down high interest loans like mortgages and save more
Edit: never work again doesn't have to be the goal, 2-3mil in the bank, everything paid off. I can get a job writing low stress Haskell and rust or something pointless and still make Sr eng money, like a measly 200k lol