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.

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.

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!

> 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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

I'm so glad I'm not these people, and no one I associate with is either.

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.

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).

> 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."

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?

https://www.jasonshen.com/169/

oh my god

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"

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

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).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44639573

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://www.jasonshen.com/169/

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.

Career schmeer.