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Comment by sajithdilshan | Hacker News Reader

The senior you get the more you realise that the only reward for hard work is more work. Then, you learn to say no more often and set boundaries and negotiate like if you want me to work on project A, then I won’t have capacity to work on project B.

Unfortunately, this is something you have to learn through experience and cannot be taught by someone else.

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> the only reward for hard work is more work.

Yup. I work 35-40 hours a week. I do not put work stuff on my personal devices, I do not open my work laptop at home. This isn't something I negotiated or made explicit, it's just what I do. No one has ever objected to my work or output and I keep getting raises every year.

Not possible with jobs with on-call responsibilities (most senior software engineering jobs in my experience).

What I did with oncall was taking the time back from incidents, like working only the afternoon after a midnight page that screwed up my sleep. It's not like I'd have been productive anyway, and people will understand if you cancel a meeting at 2am.

The real annoying part of it is not being able to detach from work the weeks I was oncall, and having to plan travel to ensure that acting in time remains feasible.

Now,if a job requires permanent on-call that is just a bs workaround from having the organisational structure to properly deal with emergencies.

You're totally right, I do the same and on the other hand, but less relevant here, I also don't connect to personal web sites on my work laptop.

you know, that's not completely true. taking breaks or shifting from one idea to the next doesn't necessarily stop the ingenuity and ideas from flowing down the first path.

your hands might be limited that way, but your mind isn't.

I completely agree with you. As I’ve moved up the chain in engineering I’ve realized I suck at multi tasking. Constant reprioritization of tasks to focus on the urgent while also moving lower-priority ones forward has helped me accomplish short-term needs and slow-burning tasks.

I am becoming senior, as of now I'm still getting pay raises and experience I'm cherishing, but you have to be strategic in this phase as well, arguably more?

> The senior you get the more you realise that the only reward for hard work is more work. Then, you learn to say no more often and set boundaries and negotiate like if you want me to work on project A, then I won’t have capacity to work on project B.

This is something that you already realise very, very early in your career. The only hard thing is how to set boundaries and negotiate without infuriating the other side and burning bridges forever.

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