Work versus Life. Greatness versus Family
blog.pieratt.com
blog.pieratt.com
This is silicon valley. You are an engineer earning a top 5% salary in one of the richest countries in your 20s. You can do whatever you want, the ball is in your hands--not your employers. I get 10 emails a week from recruiters and founders trying to get me to come work for them. Don't put up with the 60-80 hour a week bullshit. This is 2013, it costs approximately 20-30k to live a good life with all the success of the last 2000 years of productivity. There is no reason at all to work all the time. Work a normal 40-50 hours a week, save at least half your paycheck and enjoy the rest of your life. If you simply do that, you'll have complete autonomy over your life at age 35 and will only have to work if you choose to. Otherwise you could choose to work 0 hours a week, spend all the time you want with your family, and hack at open source projects, travel, read, exercise, or generally do whatever you want.
We have the power, not the employers.
Maybe you live in Silicon Valley, but not everyone does, and not everyone is an engineer.
In a lot of professions grinding out 60+ hours is the only way to set yourself apart from coworkers and move up the ladder. Moving upwards may not be that important for an engineer who starts at $100k, but for most people who start out in the $50-$70k range it's the only way to enjoy a higher standard of living, better vacations, and pay off student loans faster. I would like to work 40 hours every week but I don't want to be stuck making <$100k for the rest of my life.
However, I don't think anyone should be consistently working over 60 hours a week for any reason. When I say working, I should clarify that I mean going to an office where you have an authority figure telling you that you have to do x, y, and z for them to get a paycheck. I love programming on my own projects and could see myself "working" on those 60 hours a week, but I'd never work that hard to make anyone else rich.
However, even for your own projects, you still need to set aside plenty of time to eat meals with your family, play with your kids (if you have any), eat healthily, exercise, and meditate. Balance of life is the most statistically proven path to increasing your happiness and well-being.
For those making less than 6 figures, I don't think working ridiculous hours is the answer. For one if you can't think of anything else, become an engineer! I mean you are already on hacker news, what are you waiting for?
> I mean you are already on hacker news, what are you waiting for?
Haha, I have definitely considered it. I love programming as a hobby to create neat scripts, automate things, and gather/analyze data, but I enjoy finance as a career. Even the hours aren't too bad as I am working with enjoyable/smart people in my current role.
I'd hate to feel pressured into working crazy hours like that.
Maybe I'm alone, but I doubt it.
What you can do tho is put up with the 40-50 hours a week for a decade and then have the rest of your life to decide what you want to do with each hour of your day and not worry about how much society thinks you should dedicate to working.
To be honest, I'm not sure if a decade is enough to secure financial independence, unless you get paid a ton.
It's not for everyone, but it works well for us. We're all fresh and relaxed at work, and the free time is great for learning, side projects, exercising, travel.
Anyway, we're actually hiring right now: if you're in the Bay Area and looking shoot me an email.
You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
Amen. I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks it's crazy that we as a society think it's normal to spend almost all our time chasing money.
Those perks tend to be concentrated in the Bay Area, where they are worth more than elsewhere since people there tend to spend a vast portion of their income on housing.
But for people who don't want to spend the 2hrs/day total in decent food prep & cooking, it's there for them. Maid service and such is something you usually pay out of pocket, most of the times it's just meals & a gym.
I can work more if I have to but I'd be pretty miserable in the long term.
So much so that it can actually be counter-productive to squeeze in a few extra hours because I'm likely to just make mistakes I have to undo the next day.
These two things are incompatible for all but high earners. Spend $30k & sock away $30k, pre-taxes that's somewhere in the neighborhood of $85k. Not an obscene salary by any measure, but hardly everyone in their mid twenties is in that position.
Horseshit. The cheapest rent I've seen around here is 1500 a month, and that's almost 20 grand a year right there. Add standard utilities, food, insurance, and commuting costs and you're already pushing 30k. That's assuming you don't have student loans to worry about.
I totally agree that the power is in our hands, but it is far less simple to make that work then you are letting on. There is a reason salaries in the valley are so high... it's damn expensive to live here. If you're in a position where you may get fired for not putting in 60 hour weeks, more often than not your options are work 60 hour weeks or hope you get another gig before you're forced to move out of the valley.
Sure that may not be as fun as renting the $3000/month apartment in SF. You have to make choices. Would you rather achieve financial independence at 35 and live with roommates or in a less desirable neighborhood or be forced to work into your 40s? Not saying either choice is correct for everyone, but I definitely made my mind consciously on that question.
1. To be in the top 5% of earners nationally, you need a household income of more than $180,000/year[1]. In the San Francisco Bay Area (which includes the Peninsula and South Bay), you'd need household income of $350,000 to be in the top 5% of local earners. Most single twenty-something engineers in Silicon Valley are not earning more than either number.
2. Emails from outside recruiters != decent job offers. Recruiters are drawn to warm bodies, so they'll talk to anyone who they think they might be able to put in front of a company. While some companies choose to work with them, keep in mind that because a relatively small percentage of new hires typically come through recruiters, candidates brought to a company via one are often at a disadvantage right off the bat.
3. A lot of companies here, particularly startups, expect work and work-related activities ("culture fit" often involves extracurricular "fun") to be a big part of your life. What that translates to in terms of hours will vary, but if you believe that those founders attempting to lure you away from your current job are offering you a straight 40 hour work week that guarantees you your weekends, you're probably going to be disappointed.
I'm not saying "put up with the 60-80 hour a week bullshit" (it almost never makes sense) but the notion that "you can do whatever you want" and take advantage of the hot job market in Silicon Valley is a bit unrealistic.
Based on how your current employer responded to your threat to quit, it sounds like you have made yourself invaluable to your employer. But if you think that a big-name tech company or hot startup would respond as favorably to the same threat because "we have the power, not the employers", I suspect you'd be in for a rude awakening.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-p...
Also, there are a number of careers in the Bay Area that are going to pay a lot besides software development. I was really just using developers as a metaphor for any job paying in the low six figures.
What the author is doing is called "pulling numbers out of your ass". Whether it's 5% or 6% really doesn't matter! He's making a point. You get the point, don't you? His main argument is "You can do whatever you want, the ball is in your hands--not your employers." And this is absolutely true! Any engineer with a bit of people skills and some self-respect (which is like only half of us) can get his/her way. The other half need some personal development before they'll get anywhere in life. It's the sad truth of engineering.
The thing is, what each person wants is different. If you want work-life balance, go work for a 100-person revenue-generating startup. They go home at 5pm. If you want to build your personal brand or get rich, go put in the crazy hours at the latest hot big startup that's trying to prove itself.
The author suggested that the average twenty-something engineer in Silicon Valley was in a far higher echelon of earners than is actually the case. Without any confirmation, he took emails he was receiving from recruiters to mean that he had virtually unlimited job options. And he assumed that the founders who were interested in recruiting him would be offering him a high salary in exchange for less than what his current employer demands. All these things give him a false impression of reality on which his argument was based.
No, not every six-figure engineering job in Silicon Valley requires ten hour-plus days day in and day out, but companies are not paying these salaries and offering perks like catered lunches and dinners, house cleaning, the best equipment, a free laptop, group events, etc. with the expectation that their most valuable employees are going to be out the door and off the clock at 5 pm.
If you truly believe that there is an abundance of six-figure 9-to-5 engineering jobs at major tech companies and funded startups here in the Valley, you're simply wrong. And as I noted, if the person I responded to believes that the type of threat he made to his current employer would be well-received at recognizable companies here, he'd be in for a rude awakening.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. When your employer is paying you, say, $140,000/year and needs you on a weekend to put out a fire or finish a major release, unless you have FU money and are working for the fun of it, you had better have another job already lined up if you're going to threaten to quit. And you might as well line up the next two jobs while you're at it because most jobs (in any industry) that pay above a certain amount come with the expectation that you'll go the extra mile when asked.
The average recruiter, however, is filling a hole that is left behind by somebody who burned out. He's hoping that you can hit the ground running without any training, which is rarely realistic, particularly considering that 80% of programming work is doing what management expects to deliver 20% of the value. Because they haven't trained any of the other people working on the project you'll find that it's difficult to get any questions answered of the order of "how do I get this build consistently?", "how do I get this to build in less than an hour?", "which module is the right place to add that functionality?", "which applicationContext.xml file actually gets deployed to the assembly and how?" and stuff like that..
In a case like that you're set up to fail and you need to "think different" and start with the 80% of the work that gets you 20% of the way there, and then when the special job comes around where you're the best in the world you can sprout solutions like mushrooms.
"To live a healthy and happy life you need to balance three aspects: work, family and personal. People will tell you you need to balance work and family. But you have to recognize that sometimes you will need to spend time as you please: do not feel ashamed for it."
Life is not just work and family, and nobody should be a slave of either.
I might have this tattooed on me somewhere. Thank you.
Time and perspective change our priorities.
It is possible to become great person without ever having a successful IPO. Without ever having a product in the first place. And certainly without giving up most of your life in the likely-to-fail attempt to become 'great' (ie, known and a financial success), at the opportunity cost of living your life.
Because lets face it - our success rate is pretty dismally low. Most of us - no matter how smart, no matter how driven - won't achieve "greatness" in the sense alluded to here. We will be neither the next Jobs nor the next Gates nor the next Zuckerburg.
We will write code. We will make products that may or may not make a difference in people's lives. We will earn salaries that are unreasonably out of proportion to what we actually do (take it while it lasts!).
Most of the people who will remember us are in this closed community of startups. And once we stop producing, most of them will forget us. Some of us will go on to something more - but not most.
Except for a select few of us, nobody will look back at you in 50 years and say "wow, this dude... this dude was an awesome coder/businessman/marketer/designer".
But your kid might look back at you in 50 years and say "he was an awesome dad". Your community might remember you for the assistance you gave. And many, many more might remember you for the difference you made in their lives through your interactions with them.
There's nothing wrong with trying for the 'greatness' discussed in the original post. But never lose sight of the fact that this kind of success is only one path. And, frankly, you have your whole life to get there -- the long path taken by most of the people who are successful in that way.
TL;DR:
There is greatness in things other than the work you do and the money you make.
Your perspective completely and unavoidably changes once kids come along.
Your desire to leave your mark and influence on the world has a new target - the one who is looking at you in the morning, asking you for breakfast.
Still, people are people, people want to build great things. You can do both. It is harder. You have only so much time. Social life gets squeezed. Anyway you're no longer in your twenties with your tribe of friends. You have your own tribe now.
Managing people and managing children has a lot of similarities. Andy Grove in his book High Output Management highly recommends one-on-one meetings with both family members and colleagues.
"There's no such thing as work-life balance, there are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences."
You don't need to rationalize spending more time with your family and less at work or vice-versa, just be honest about the consequences of it.
I worked a ton before I had a family, 7 days a week, always online. Now that I have scaled back I do accomplish less work, and I am 100% ok with that. My choice is more time with my wife and kids, and slightly less money (and alot less chance of a big $$ windfall), but I couldn't be happier.
My thesis advisor chose work over family. He left his lover and hardly ever saw his son until his son was forced to move in with him at the age of 14. (At which point you've really missed the chance to bond with him)
Back in grad school he was often the only professor working on Sunday -- I worked Sundays most of the time but I usually took Saturdays completely off. I still go by the physics sometime on the weekend and his door is the only one open with the lights on.
He got a tenured professorship and a defined benefit pension but his work as a physicist has been solidly average (like the average physicist)
A lot of hard work cost him his family and won him some kind of security which is hard to find today, but he definitely didn't achieve greatness.
I'd even guess that people who work harder are more likely to attain greatness.
I don't remember it verbatim but it was basically: You (my children) all taken care of you have what you need to live, I am working to make sure that the same is true for all the other South African children.
That really hit home for me because instead of looking at spending more time with my family, I looked at using my time wisely toward massive structural goals which would have positive outcomes on the world population.
Not really. I am only saying this because I've seen you shaming someone in other thread and wanted to show you a first-hand example that shaming is bad for constructive discussions.
Karen Croft, a writer who worked for Nader in the late 1970s at the Center for Study of Responsive Law, once asked him if he had ever considered getting married. She reports: "He said that at a certain point he had to decide whether to have a family or to have a career, that he couldn't have both. That's the kind of person he is. He couldn't have a wife—he's up all night reading the Congressional Record." [1]
There's a part of me that admires the sense of devotion to a personal vision or mission. I believe it's this unrelenting, screw-the-consequences, type of drive that create greatness.
At the same time, as a young single man in his 20s, I am still wrestling with my own personal choices and opinions on this matter.
Slightly trolly, I know, but just being devil's advocate.
No. You are a FULL BLOWN "Concern Troll."
Not every child is a spoiled brat who needs an umbilical cord pumping money and is only happy when partying.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -Robert A. Heinlein
But, as the aphorism points out, there's a gap between reality and your preference. We all have the same number of hours in a day and mastery is relative.
If folks specialize they often lose the ability to coordinate their actions with eachother.
The way I look at it is that human beings are as bound by the CAP Theorem as computers are, except that humans are fundamentally unable to achieve full consistency. All specialization and generalization needs to be done with that in mind, namely that all knowledge is incredibly local.
I realize all of that is speculative, but, damn, there has to be a point at which almost all of us would step back and say it isn't worth it. Why bust your ass, endanger your health, and stress yourself out so you can make someone else a load of cash?
(Also notice that many people who insist on the need for ridiculous hours often get something out of it: management, VCs, etc.)
One aspect that is often overlooked is that Jobs was an adoptee. My partner is also adopted, and I can tell you that she will struggle with deep rooted fears and self-confidence issues for life. She is also a workaholic. This is not a conscious decision she makes but rather a learned method for dealing with, and perhaps ignoring, her pain.
It's easy to look at things objectively as a third-party observer. My personal opinion is that Jobs did not have a choice in the matter. Work was his coping mechanism to deal with his pain.
Larry Ellison is also adopted, and I find it interesting that he was close friends with Steve Jobs. The two are quite similar in many ways.
That said, I have a little girl about to hit 2 years old and a wife of almost 5 years. And I'm going to hit 40 in about 2 weeks. I don't learn as quickly and easily I learned when I was much younger.
I know it takes some serious chops and time investment to learn to code. I guess that I just have to trust that I'll get "there" eventually... a little bit at a time.
While I want to continually improve and make a good life for my family... it would be a total travesty to do it at their expense.
btw, the struggle I refer to is the fact that for turning 40 soon... I don't feel old. I just feel like I should have accomplished more with my life, by this time. Know what I mean?
Edited: punctuation
Understand that age is neither good nor bad. There is a lot of ageism in the industry, so one thing you should be prepared to do is strike out on your own if you need to (either part-time as moonlighting or otherwise).
A very important point and very well stated. If I knew of any internet slang signifying a virtual standing ovation I would put it here.
It frequently also comes with pushing an atmosphere of artificial urgency and high interest technical debt (save an hour today and cost the company weeks in a few months) because all are based on panicked short term thinking.
I tend to lose interest if I'm not actively competing against my peers.
Now I just enjoy my job way too much to consider scaling back the hours.
He said this to his then-wife :-)
"I'm very very careful with my time. I try to do nothing that someone else could do. So, I write, I perform and I spend time with my family."
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1opzae/penn_jillette_h...
This doesn't answer the dichotomy of work vs. family, but puts it in a different context. What is the most effective way to spend your time?
The president's daughter scrapes her knee, but there's also a school shooting? I think Obama's gonna be giving a speech, and Michelle's on neosporin duty.
(West Wing spoiler alert 2003) The president's daughter is kidnapped? Well, I hope John Goodman is available, it's about to get Season 4 cliffhanger in here. Someone else can be president. Right now it's not the most effective use of Martin Sheen's time.
The West Wing President Bartlett stepped down because it would be a national security threat to have the President subject to ransom demands.
Which is one of the few things I respect him for, and I never understood why he got so much hate for it.
Imagine this: "Kids, as President of the United States, I'm responsible for a lot of things. I just got a call that I have to take care of. I'm sorry. But I promise I'll come back and finish reading this book to you some other time."
I agree in the West Wing situation, there is a national security concern. But why? Shouldn't this "great" man be able to use his power justly for the greater good, and not let things get personal? No, he understands he wouldn't be able to resist that temptation. Relinquishing his power is showing that his family is more important to him.
“Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – Work, Family, Health, Friends and Spirit and you’re keeping all of these in the air.
You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls – Family, Health, Friends and Spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these; they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for it.
Work efficiently during office hours and leave on time. Give the required time to your family, friends and have proper rest. Value has a value only if its value is valued.”
- Bryan Dyson – Former CEO of Coca Cola
Don't forget that those people had the wife or some others raising their children, something that was generally not considered men's work.
When LedgerSMB forked I remember working late hours in a hotel room with my wife and son (I had a contract for my business that took me out of town, and we all decided it would only work if we all went), and having sessions with Chris Murtagh who would be typing with one hand, and cradling his infant son in the other. Almost every work break would be spent with my family, except for lunch that year (and only that year). Almost every hour not spent with my family would be spent working. Work and family formed the warp and weft of my life.
Fast forward five years, and what's happened is that these have become even more integrated. I schedule my work around family time, and my family time around work. In emergencies I may have to rebalance. But these are all deeply integrated.
In the distant past, this was actually the norm, so it is not that I can do something today that none of the great men in the past could do, but rather that I can return to the solutions which have worked. To some extent the internet enables this, but it isn't really enabling something new. It is rather re-enabling something very old.
Interestingly I don't think double entry accounting was invented by monks sitting in monasteries, but by the collaboration of merchants (whose families were effectively helping run the businesses). Many of the great things we take for granted today were actually built in such a way.
Sometimes it seems like we can only pick two: - family - startup - health
I know the balance can be achieved, but is it balance we are looking for? I have a fear of being mediocre at both. But, we can do better than this. I can do better.
How is hipchat better than IRC or Jabber? Don't these protocols do the same thing for free (as in freedom and pizza).
I believe his son did his own studying of 'politics and war' just as his father did.. just as we do and, unfortunately or otherwise, just as our sons will.