Yeah, Before Children (BC) the World is your oyster.
Sure, but that's when kids are fairly young. That'll pass when he heads off to primary school (elementary?). Well until the next one and then you decide NO MORE! :)
> Don't work more than 10 hours because daycare closes at 6PM
My advice would be cut that back to eight hours at most (or else burn out will hit you), unless of course you've got some mad distanced round trip between office/home/daycare in which case that's understandable. Or you get paid a stupidly amazing salary where sticking this out for 5-7 years means you can extricate yourself to a slower pace of life.
I wouldn't say I'm an overachiever but I do work at a fairly high-pressure, competitive BigCorp. Haven't been fired yet, and my performance reviews are fine. The truth is that if somebody else owns 100% of your highest level creative output, he owns your soul too, and I'm just not down for that.
It does mean making sacrifices in other areas, but for me personally the alternatives are worse. Obviously not everybody has the luxury of so much (theoretical) free time.
At the time I was also a field engineer so I could be sent off on a 400 mile round trip to resolve a customer issue on-site. The drive to the office was 50-60 mins as well.
During the working week I often I wasn't getting home until around 7:30pm and by 9:30pm I was dead to the world.
It was shit. I had no social life and wouldn't see friends until the weekend (usually a Saturday because on a Friday I was buggered - I did in fact fall asleep in the pub one night after just one pint).
In the end I thought "fuck this", went back to my old regime of fall out of bed at 7:45am'ish, coffee, jump in car and life significantly improved. I got to see my pals in the evening if I wanted to and could also spend a couple of hours in the evening fiddling with code, reading books and even watching a bit of telly.
So yeah I kinda wholeheartedly agree with your comment.