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Work Life balance slows careers

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Re: Work Life balance slows careers

#61

Post by Arubis »

mikert89 wrote: post #16

If you want to dedicate yourself to your career, you are are far better off starting a company.

100% true.

If you work your tail off at a bigco, your upside is golden handcuffs, not actual freedom. You'll perpetually have a net worth on paper that drops precipitously if you leave your job and let your options, RSUs, or whatever expire/die unvested. In the meantime, your base comp may look enormous, but if you break it down to an hourly rate and you're busting your ass for 70+ hours a week, you're just getting paid market rate and working a lot more.

If you want to reach escape velocity by sheer wealth accumulation, you need to own the value of your output.

IMHO the best option is to adjust your expectations and find something more rewarding that loves you back.

At length: https://dylanfitzgerald.net/blog/comfortable-satisfaction-pa...

Re: Work Life balance slows careers

#62

Post by eastbound »

Karawebnetwork wrote: post #18

At what cost? 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 yo…

Some people are just socially inept. As far as I remember, groups have turned against me for no reasonable reason. Saw therapists for years, the best one I kept a dozen years but she grew irritated.

Some people are just born to bring taxes in.

(And before you bring up the smug: Did plenty of sports, windsurf, judo, snowboarding, racketball, plenty of travels, lived abroad, tried both genders, had all sorts of friends. Sometimes you just don’t get how to do social. I just work to forget. It’s so extremely irritating, I used to want to take revenge, humans are just… Nazis would be proud).

So yeah, don’t be smug about people who just work. Sometimes that’s just where they are the least “toxic” according to their environment.

Re: Work Life balance slows careers

#63

Post by VirusNewbie »

yladiz wrote: post #20
tayo42 wrote: post #14

Earlier 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 it might be enough to COASTFire, or get a dream house and not stress about the payments, or set up a nest egg, or just lower stress about quitting any future jobs.

It's not black and white, front loading some stress in early career can really change life trajectories, even if it's not a long term lifestyle thing.

I am working a high stress job (that I quite enjoy) at a FAANG company, and i've made enough money here that I could take a much lower paying job at any point and not need to worry about saving for retirement or paying for kids colleges. It's not retire now rich by any means, but it's definitely alleviating some financial worries I used to have.

Re: Work Life balance slows careers

#64

Post by benterix »

What I learn form the article is that for the author, his career is extremely important. But for most people, work is just an aspect of life, not an end in itself. There is enough space in this world for both types.

Re: Work Life balance slows careers

#65

Post by slwvx »

> What’s true at the personal level is true at the national level. Americans enjoy greater prosperity than Europeans due largely to longer work hours.

So there are tradeoffs at the individual level and for countries. The author of the article is in favor of less family time and more work, but acknowledges the tradeoff. Even so, I'm not so convinced that it's quite such a straightforward tradeoff as described in the article and elsewhere in the comments here. I think that going more towards the European model would result in better social stability, better mental health of families and workers, and lower economic inequality. I.e. the American style of gung-ho work ignores many externalities that are implicitly included in the European model (however poorly-defied the "European model" is).

Re: Work Life balance slows careers

#66

Post by throwawaylaptop »

There is also something to be said for getting a running start. I started in car sales because I mostly wasted my mechanical engineering degree. I worked 2 years straight, only taking two days off a year because they closed the building for Thanksgiving and Christmas day. I became top 0.1% nationwide basically within 9 months. I made enough to pay off my house at 28 years old. I had an amazing reputation and executives of the public corporation I worked for would come talk to me when they were in town. Being that good so quickly (the few people ahead of me in the United States had been selling for a decade plus and operating off repeat customers, so by some metrics I was easily #1 in the United States), gives you many advantages that come from recognition and reputation. Would I do that at 40+ with kids? No. But I also wouldn't need to if I had done it as described from 24-30 years old.

Re: Work Life balance slows careers

#67

Post by mikert89 »

Arubis wrote: post #61
mikert89 wrote: post #16

If you want to dedicate yourself to your career, you are are far better off starting a company.

100% true. If you work your tail off at a bigco, your upside is golden handcuffs, not actual freedom. You'll perpetually have a net worth on paper that drops precipitously if you leave your job and let your options, RSUs, or whatever expire/die unvested. In the meantime, your base comp may look enormous, but if you break it down to an hourly rate and you're busting your ass for 70+ hours a week, you're just getting p…

yeah if you leave, you lose all the value you created at the company. they keep it.

Re: Work Life balance slows careers

#69

Post by jermaustin1 »

ipaddr wrote: post #41
mlsu wrote: post #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…

The kid is spoiled. Many Dads work two jobs barely see their family trying to keep a roof over them and food. None of those Dads are beating themselves up because they had to schedule a chess game. Rich person problem that they solved by not working. Most Dads working two jobs can't.

> The kid is spoiled.

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not, so I will default to: I hope you are.

The kid isn't spoiled for wanting to play a game with his dad... and he isn't spoiled for watching and waiting for his dad to input "play with son" in his phone.

If anything the father is spoiled. He is a high-earner, who choses to spend more time working than necessary for the advancement of a career. And his family has spoiled him to the fact that he can get away with spending less time on them than they want.

If they were to then prioritize their want to spend time with someone willfully spending extra time at work, that also wouldn't be spoiled.

Spoiled is asking for something, getting it, and asking for more, getting it, and asking for more, getting it, ask... you get it.

The child asking for his father to spend time with him (even if he was demanding NOW!), isn't spoiled, because obviously, as the father has admitted, he has to schedule time for his child.

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