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How do you remain on track with toddlers onboard?
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Answer here is simple: put your family first.
Tech has managed to convince so many young people that they’re not supposed to have a life outside of work. I fell for this too when I entered tech, working insane overtime, doing “hackathons” where we just worked all weekend, and spending every remaining moment trying to “stay ahead of the curve”.
This is a trap, and it’s not necessary. I worked this way for years until it completely burned me out and I realized that the things that really mattered were being neglected because some tech bros made me feel like work needed to be my life.
Once I rejected this my life simply became better. I put my 40 hours in and I did my best in those hours, but I took back the other 40-50 hours a week I was working and invested it back into my family.
Today my relationship with my wife and kids is better than it had ever been, I am happier and better rested, and my career has skyrocketed as a result. Turns out when you find balance in your life the quality of what you do improves pretty radically, and maybe your attitude and work relationships improve with it.
I’m an EM for a very large corporation today, I make better money and am healthier and happier than I ever was when I was trying to make work consume my every waking moment. I spend a lot of my time with my direct reports today trying to reinforce that they can clock out at the end of the day and it’ll be fine.
Don’t worry about your career, put that time and energy into your family and your friends. Later-in-life you will thank you for it.
Absolutely. Something that has somehow gotten lost in all the SE grind and staying ahead of the curve is the idea that it is our job's responsibility to us to help us grow and develop in ways that are useful to the job. We have significant informal education just from tinkering / doing personal projects when we had the time that (my hypothesis) we keep that expectation of ourselves as we enter the workplace. We wrongly believe that it is our responsibility to on our own time learn new things about technology.
When you're 12, 18, whatever, you're learning technology because you want to. You're curious and you branch out into other areas. Maintaining that curiosity in the workplace is excellent. AND, remember that a job is something that takes your labor and turns it into capital. The responsibility of a good organization is to understand what skills it needs (whether because we notice that something is missing / lacking, or because there's competent leadership), and then to prioritize its use of our time to grow those capabilities. My company gets my 40 hours. They pay me well for it. Unless there's truly an emergency, they don't get another minute of my time. They have determined that they make a profit off my salary at the level of work that I provide because we agreed to it.
If a company doesn't understand that they need to pay me to learn something that they want me to learn, then they are going back on that agreement.
Technology is both my job and my passion. I will spend all weekend messing with things in my home lab if that's what I want to do, and it often is. Other times I want to disappear into the woods and stare at trees all weekend. Prioritizing your family's needs and your needs should always come before your employer's needs.
This is it. From another angle, setting clear boundaries on your time, delegating and trusting your team, and managing expectations are all powerful skills that need to be developed from the senior level and up. Clearly knowing and articulating your limits can lead to working on more valuable and meaningful work within those limits.