Work Life balance slows careers
pathtostaff.com
pathtostaff.com
And it’s prudent to do “desired things” throughout your life, as your knees might not last or people you want to do things with might not be there. There’s a risk in deferring things until tomorrow as tomorrow might be as you wish it to be.
I see this with a lot of people I know who retire and find they don't know what to do with their time. Work is all they ever really did.
I know another guy, well into his seventies, who is still working because there's nothing else he wants to do. He'll either die at his desk or in bed.
As long as you pay your bills, nobody's going to tell you to do things differently. Financial literacy gets a lot of attention, but time and pleasure literacy get none, and our culture emphasizes consumption and income. It's rare to hear someone talk about the dollar value of having a big block of time to spend doing whatever makes you happiest in the moment.
That's what's really missing here. Someone who got lucky in life and had their hard work rewarded is telling others that hard work pays. In fact for this author in his field it pays off 100x+ whatever it pays for others.
For a salary of a few million a year i too would be willing to work some 12+hour days... for a while. I'd even post a few articles on how hard work is great and rewarding.
... but what are the chances of every Facebook IC getting promoted to E9? If you're the only rat on the treadmill when everyone else is ambling about, maybe you stand out to get promoted. If you join a company where all the rats are on treadmills, nobody wins that rat race.
More seriously, I've never heard the E9 designation outside of the military. What does it mean?
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 your entire kingdom is in disarray.
Perhaps slowing your career can even be wise if the other spheres of your life are suffering. A sabbatical year or even a deliberate downshift can offer the space to realign and rediscover purpose.
There is something to be said about survivorship bias too, many who work hard don't achieve similar outcomes. We often hear from those who worked relentlessly and succeeded but rarely from the many who worked just as hard and didn't see the same results. For example, some studies show that nearly half of the women in tech leave the industry by mid-career, often due to systemic barriers
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.
Just a guess that it lies packed somewhere in your use of the word "reasonable"
If my hunch is correct, I think it's only fair to point out that the grandparent was arguing against the career advancement at all costs mindset that the blog is talking about, not situations like yours.
Speaking of which, I am truly sorry you feel the way you do about social stuff. I've grappled with social anxiety and lack of social awareness before, and although I don't think I was ever angry at humanity to the degree you are, I can appreciate how isolating and miserable that headspace can get.
I don't want to put you in a box, but consider this example:
"There is no significant difference in the effectiveness of how autistic and non-autistic people communicate, according to a new study, challenging the stereotype that autistic people struggle to connect with others." https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/autistic-people-communicat...
This highlights how much of our perception is shaped by context and societal bias.
Our society is unwell and the idea of a "third space" (a place outside of home and work where people can connect and thrive) has largely disappeared.
Working a lot can be wonderful when it brings you joy. Think of the Japanese concept of Ikigai (生き甲斐), which refers to having a sense of purpose: something that brings fulfillment and makes life feel worthwhile. If your work gives you that, then that's amazing, and you're fortunate.
It could be that you were born to bring nothing but profits and taxes to the community. And that's perfectly fine if it genuinely makes you happy.
The issue, in my view, is that in our unbalanced society work often becomes that default third space. But it's not designed to support human flourishing in that way. By design, it is meant to extract the maximum amount of profit from human resources, with little to no concern for their well-being. This often leads to burnout or disillusionment, especially when decades of effort go unnoticed or fail to make a meaningful impact on society.
Imagine if we had more spaces where we could do meaningful work, not necessarily for profit, in safe and supportive environments that foster connection with like-minded people. Many of us who quietly struggle on our own while still performing at a high level would finally feel like we belong to a supportive group.
I kind of resonated with the author when I was in my twenties, when I was really focused on work and gave up a lot of 'leasure' time to do so. Nowadays, I think a healthy balance is actually needed to live a full life.
Today I'm a Staff-level IC in my early thirties, and to be honest I sometimes think it would have been nice to linger a bit longer in the other IC levels, to get some more actual programming done versus time spent in meetings & playing a certain amount of politics :)
And as the years go on, I feel that I'm shifting my WLB more and more to the "life" side of the equation.
$5M to $10M should provide sufficient passive income, even in coastal California.
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
Do you live in an urban USA area?
So really if you save half your money, you are only saving $125k per year.
You take home more like $325k+. Assuming we're talking MFJ with a family
And 10% is a high sales tax rate, most jurisdictions are ~7%.
So you can't add tax rates like that.
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.
You're a Staff-level IC, but is it at a company doing something you're in love with, in a manner of how you want to change the world and leave the tiniest legacy? or are you just collecting a paycheck?
> 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: medical doctor with a PhD, yadda yadda. I won't go into the details, but he left much to be desired both as a husband and as a father. At the age of 54, while he was working on a second PhD, he had a stroke that nearly killed him and left him severely disabled until his death at 70.
Was it worth it? His surviving family doesn't think so. I think we would have all been happier if he had made different choices. His mistakes were a big part of why I quit working to spend time with my own family. Ask my spouse and children whether I made the right call.
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.
I will admit that at times I was seduced by the illusion of status, so I get why some people get trapped in that work-first mindset, but it was a very shallow mirage. Just look at your spouse and children and ask whether they would rather have more money, or a more present husband & father.
If my wife asked me to work harder to make more money, I would question my choice to marry her. But she didn't, she was supportive both while I was working and when I decided to quit. She could see the price I was paying for that salary.
But you yourself are saying that if you disagree with your spouse's assessment of the situation (in the hypothetical) you'd consider divorcing her.
You really just want someone to validate the decision you've made rather than challenge it.
As for the rest, I will take your kind insights to heart. If you want to work longer hours because your spouse asks you to make more money, that's your own choice to make. I thankfully didn't have to face that situation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_income,_no_asset#No_income,...
But you're just saying "Ask the kid. Or the spouse... As long as they say what I want to hear."
You may feel that the thing you want to hear is objectively "right" but it isn't.
> If you want to work longer hours because your spouse asks you to make more money, that's your own choice to make.
I don't know why you think that would be my choice? My point is that I don't ask people for input if my mind is already made up.
There aren't a lot of people I meet, that are meaningfully more successful in their career than me, that don't usually make sacrifices I'm unwilling to make for their work/life harmony.
The flip side of the coin is those people might end up alcoholics to try and suppress that drive.
The standard cliches are true as far as I can tell (as I approach 50). "You can't take it with you", "no one wishes on their death bed that they had worked harder", etc. In 10 years, no one at your office is going to care how much time you put in at the office, but your partner and kids will. Do you want them to resent you for it?
Some people work hard but aren't as lucky with the "being rewarded for their hard work" part. A grain of salt required for lucky people's advice. Especially the one with short memory and rose tinted glasses (as other commenter noted, this guy seemed to have burned out[1]). It's Probably more a rationalization to himself and people around him (his kids and wife I guess) sugarcoated as an advice.
Second is people saying "I can retire early if I work hard now" I mean sure. Toil away the best years of your life when you have the most youth, beauty, energy and freedom so you can enjoy leisure when your body is aching and getting a good sleep is hard. I'm not that old but did my stint of "16 hour days 7 days a week" at startup and my reward was useless options and chronic illness flaring up (requiring two minor surgeries down the line). Glad I tried it out tho (minus the physical and mental health toil)
Work life balance slows career. Prioritizing work might speed it up. But I'm not sure the point of a career is the goal, but the journey itself.
I'll do some overtime and all nighters when it's required, rewarded, and I feel like the work matter to me.
This argument always comes up, where we just assume one's "best" years are in their 20s and 30s, and people can't enjoy leisure at 60. My response is always "Make hay when the sun shines." I can accept you're probably at your cognitive and physical peak in your 20s and 30s, and I'd argue that's the time to max out your earnings, because you may not be able to when you're 60+. I look back at my 20s and 30s, and even though I spent most of them working and not really goofing around having fun, I wish I spent even more of them on my career and saving, due to compounding interest and investment gains. If I did, I might be retired already and spending 100% of my time on fun, instead of playing financial catch-up. Probably the worst thing you can do, financially, when you're 22 and just graduated from college is to take a gap year backpacking in Bali or horsing around in Ibiza or something.
In summary: You can have fun and/or work when you're young. You can also have fun, but might not necessarily be able to work when you're older.
You can do both: work hard for a while, enjoy life for a while. Compounding interest is real, it's only limited if you're in a rush to "retire early".
I'd rather find a job I like, that doesn't break me, and enjoy my life and passion(sometimes coincide with work), up until actual retirement age. Most people (in tech) that aim to retire early usually end up working after retirement anyway, just on their own condition.
Enjoying "life" is also a skill. I've been surrounded by workaholics and many of them had to essentially learn that later. (myself included)
You “might” lose half your investments after working 16 Hour Days for 20 years to a divorce. You might get hit by a bus.
Nothing is promised except for this moment, right now.
It’s everyone’s pejorative on what they want to focus on in life, but this is pretty insane. Obviously it worked out for him (so we think), but this sounds like recipe for a couple divorces and kids that hate you (even if he eventually slowed down somewhat).
I think you mean prerogative [1].
I'm so glad I'm not these people, and no one I associate with is either.
> The eighty-hour workweeks and increasing need to be in Asia at inconsistent times, with little warning and often for unknown durations, caused massive stress on the engineers' mental health and their marriages. They were primarily men, and some of their wives took to calling themselves "Apple widows" because their husbands were around so infrequently. So many marriages were broken up during the first year of Jobs's comeback that informal preventative measures were established to contain further damage. Engineers called it the DAP, or Divorce Avoidance Program. In the late 1990s, the acronym referred to to when an engineer couldn't come in to work that day because his marriage was on the line.
> One engineer says the reason he left Apple after more than a decade is that during a routine medical appointment, his doctor noted his high blood pressure and said, "Okay, I need you to do two things for me: lose weight and quit Apple." The doctor explained that that the stress would basically kill him.
> Jon Rubinstein, who worked for Steve Jobs on and off for sixteen years, called the long workweeks "shattering," and it's what led to his own departure later on. "A lot of people got sick at Apple," he once said. "The list goes on and on of people who got terminally ill or really ill... and I was worried that if I stayed, I'd end up damaging myself, and my health was, frankly, more important."
I think financial freedom _needs_ to be a priority for your long-term health, especially if you want to have a family. And achieving financial freedom requires sacrifices elsewhere in your life.
And in general, I think it's totally fine to work hard if you want to, but you absolutely need to make sure that you're getting an exponential amount of payout for every hour of overtime you put in.
that said, if i die, the mortgage gets nullified and my wife/kids get the house. and if i'm alive, i should be able to make enough money (which is - not much).
+ i keep healthy enough to avoid most chronic stuff that would stop me from working until the house is paid, so i see no reason to stress.
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).
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...
oh my god
Ie if you like seeing birds I recommend taking a camera. Not because it'll improve your luck but because you'll be ready to strike more often when the moment comes.
The aftermath? It's not just disappointment—it's emotional devastation that leads straight to burnout. And here's the kicker: once you're truly burnt out, you're looking at years of mental recovery. Years. Your relationship with work fundamentally changes, your confidence tanks, and that passionate developer who once stayed up until 3am solving problems? They might never fully return.
This industry has a serious problem with recognizing genuine effort versus just celebrating the success stories. We need to talk more about the psychological cost of unrecognized devotion and how it's quietly destroying talented people who just wanted their work to matter.
My two cents are that I have hobbies and obsessions that fulfill me and can make me money. I’m keeping the work-life balance and slowly getting better at my hobbies.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to retire early from tech and finish out my time doing something else part time. I started out working on bicycles, I’d like to close things out similarly in a few decades.
Career schmeer.
We all know people who have repeatedly been given plum projects that are a bit of a fait acompli - highly-visible, wanted, and easy to implement both technically and organizationally - and surprise surprise they get promo after promo for landing high-impact projects. Yet suddenly they arrive in some new team and their career progress grinds to a halt because there is not the same "low hanging fruit" and they can't just slam dunk everything they touch any more. All of a sudden they are left holding some doomed tarball and it is not so easy to look good any more because it's messy and hard and super-complicated and unpopular. They keep putting in the hours yet don't get anywhere.
TL;Dr You need to opportunity, and working more hours won't make those appear every time.
Yes you can try to weasel your way into "making" the opportunity, but then you start playing The Politics Game and that is a totally different kettle of fish.
The ones I've met in this category, always a stellar career, but what was at home, if anything, was less then stellar and the link to corresponding personality traits was pretty obvious. Now I don't think its exclusively either/or situation for everybody, but for most of us it is and certainly would be for me.
I prefer putting down the foot from throttle after some hard-earned leaps in life, and enjoy family time and me time. Right now planning final touches for a 2 week solo adventure vacation in remote Indonesian islands (Togian). Thats after spending 4 weeks of vacations this year with family, and planning another 4-5 together till end of year. While getting paid top 1% of European software dev salaries. Don't need more work wise, there is literally nothing positive that career progression can bring to my life.
Company has rather flat salary structure once you put in enough years, so even moving 2 positions up wouldn't bring much more cash. Work would be much less creative and stress and politics would rise significantly. Good place for some high functioning sociopaths, not so much for more sane folks. Literally would get paid worse per some imaginary mental energy unit put in. No, thank you I am fine.
> 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.
Rich person problem that they solved by not working. Most Dads working two jobs can't.
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.
The asking the kid to schedule creates this negative pressure. The kid would take the situation differently if framed differently.
Most kids if asked would never want their parents to work. Don't set your kids up that way. Teach them why work is important to them being able to eat.
The parents of earlier generations sent their kids away if rich or rarely saw them when working the fields 16 hour days.
Given the quote, though, it does sound like the parent is not putting the kid's best interests first and foremost
From the author of "Water is wet" and "Don't stick your fingers into meat grinder, if you don't want to lose them!"
More news at 11!
I made it a requirement for my career that I wouldn’t treat my kids the same way. I set boundaries with work and am very upset when work intrudes
Could I have made more money and had more status?
Certainly, but my kids like spending time with me and they’re the whole reason I’m chasing a salary in the first place
If this is the path you want and your career is the most important thing then go for it.
If you think you're doing this for some deferred reward you're delusional.
Your life is "ending one minute at a time"
Microsoft has too many layers and they value performative work over any kind of actual leadership experience OR Microsoft's promotions are a sham and leadership select--i.e., filling roles that make the real money--have absolutely nothing to do with these sops to the masses. That's the conclusion I draw from such a bizarre stat. Either way, this guy was played by a system that will happily chew him up before he can realize he wasted his life (unless, of course, this is genuinely what he wanted, in which chase, man, you do you).