A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour

I had that exact same attitude when I was 26 and single and had no pets. "I'm going to get awesome at embedded C++ programming, work my ass off in my 20s so I write world-changing software in my 30s and I can retire in my 40s." No pain, no gain, live at work, 80 hour days, all night caffeine and coding sessions. F-yea! I'm a varsity software jock training for the Career Olympics!

Almost 2 decades later, a family to take care of, a little fatter, a little less healthy, a lot more tired, I look back and what difference did it make? There are a bunch of gadgets out there with my software in it. Am I retired? No. Did I change the world? No. Did I invent the next Linux? No. At least for the companies I worked for, my tireless efforts made the shareholders a bit more money, but that's about it.

Look at it by the numbers. Suppose 1 out of every 10,000 jobs out there offer you the opportunity to reach whatever your goals are (ultra-wealth, change the world, create something awesome, whatever your goal is). I think 1 out of 10,000 is EXTREMELY generous given all those "opportunities" out there to build yet-another CRUD web app or yet another B2B IT portal or yet another crappy plastic consumer product. The career lifespan of a software engineer is (again generously) 40 years. If you're an extreme job hopper you can probably try something new once a year. So you have 40 at-bats.

So,

P(home run) = 0.0001

N = 40

P = 1 - (1-P(hr))^N = 1 - (1-0.0001)^40 ~0.4%

So the likelihood of you lucking into that one life-changing opportunity throughout your entire career as an engineer is minuscule. Unless you really think you can both identify the next Facebook before it happens and land a job there while they're tiny. A lot of people think they can do that. A lot of people also think they can pick stocks, predict horse races, or read tea leaves.

I'm not writing this to discourage you, but do understand that the extreme hours you are putting in now are a bet against enormous odds. Don't end up a jaded burnt out 40 year old engineer.

I think the "art of working" is deciding what kind of work you want to do, how big a part of your life you want it to be, and then doing that.

When I read this, I realized something was wrong. Psychology isn't a science, and scientific Nobel prizes are awarded for scientific breakthroughs. So I looked it up and discovered that the psychologist Kahneman won the Economics Nobel, which makes more sense (economics isn't very scientific, but it's certainly more scientific than psychology).

A quick search reveals that a psychologist has never won a science Nobel for psychological work. As in the above example, the notable work of some psychologists is recognized by awarding a Nobel in a more scientific field, to avoid polluting the Nobel's reputation and opening the door to awards in any number of other pseudoscientific fields.