I had a similar junction in my life and I selected money instead of pursuing family and academic life, now I'm starting to think maybe wasn't a good decision. I'm getting older (38)
Do you mind if I ask did you also quit your job to pursue Phd? Nowadays started working on my old projects, ideas and realised this is the only stuff that I'm enjoyed right now!
If you want to do academic research (and teach a lot), you are definitely young enough to get a PhD. But make sure you are switching because academia is what you love doing, not because you hate your current state (success in academia requires a major committment). My 2c.
Everyone should memorize this adage. Sometimes making a change is the right decision of course. But I've also known a lot of people over the years who just got an itch to make a change because of some relatively minor gripes. And things did not work out as hoped.
Academia in particular is easy to idealize based on successful tenured professors at top tier universities who seem to have a pretty good life.
Most people have a built in bias to stick with what they know rather than trying something new. We probably stay in bad situations much longer than we should. Ymmv
One key is probably to really ask yourself why you want to make a change (or why you're hanging around if you don't really like the situation). If you have good answers, that's fine. If you don't...
Ultimately you have to make decisions based on incomplete information and with the knowledge that no situation is likely to be perfect.
It takes effort on my part to control envy from others. I actively suppress it.
Funny you should ask. I posted about my experience in a recent thread a few weeks back.
Search for my user name here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21299546
Thanks for sharing, I want to congratulate you and your wife because I assume as we get older big changes like quitting job, moving to another country or even moving to another house is getting harder to decide. But I guess hard choices are mostly fruitful in the long run.
Some choices are hard because of uncertainty and fear of the unknonwn. People live through terrible relationships, suffer terrible commutes, work in soul-sucking places etc and are yet unable to quit because the alterntives are less defined.
While I have enough finances to be comfortable (and reduce uncertainty), I don't know of anyone personally who has made the choices I have, even though many are vastly richer than I. They continue to grumble about expenses and commutes and health issues. Middle class people vastly overestimate how much they really need, and peg their lifestyles to that bar, often at the cost of everything dear.
I have a very simple approach. I ask "What's the worst that can happen? Will this affect me next year?". I find that once I quantify it, most fears just melt away. Say my laptop gets stolen and everything in it is irretrievable. No backup, say. What's the worst? It would be a royal pain to get back my life, but by this time next year, I'd be just fine. Moving to a different country to do a PhD? What's the worst? I'll perform badly and get chucked out, and I will return and get another job. Five years from now it would be a fine story to regale my friends with.
Sorry. I'm getting wordier as I grow older!
So the technique I use is I say to myself "It's pretty likely that I'll be 35 years old at some point, regardless of whether I try to get a post-bac or not. It'd be really nice to be a doctor by then". Substitute in whatever long-term goal you have like founding a company or running a marathon.
For context, I have a graduate diploma from the Judge business school, but that was a semiresidential program that allowed me to live in my country.
Wasn't a good decision despite making money or wasn't a good decision because you didn't make enough?
More deep in that topic, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi has a good experiment where they research about what life worths living by asking many participants with different incomes. Result was pretty clear that after some amount of money the life standard has a plateau.
At the end I think this can be considered as an engineering optimisation problem of scarce sources which is limited "time", therefore if I had a second chance I would choose balance more then leaning to one side of family, religion, work triangle.
ref : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66333.A_Life_Worth_Livin...
Have you read the book "Scarcity"? It had a life-altering effect on me. The authors first illustrate the ways in which poor people make terrible economic decisions (spending it all in the first few days of getting a pay check, for example). Then they show how people who are always short of time -- poverty of time -- make similar irrational decisions with their scarce resource, time.
Once you are assured of a certain financial level, one needs to optimise for time.
I guess I just grew out of a phase, into a new one. Which one that is, I do not know yet. But I do know that time is limited, and I'm not going to spend too much on work-for-pay.
The thing I struggle with the most, though, is keeping up with the trends. I tend to do things the same way I did them years ago -- and while these are battle-tested methods of doing things that I know will work, I'm aware that the industry is evolving and maybe I'm not keeping pace.
The older I get the more I see patterns repeat themselves and I'm less interested in learning about the latest trend. I seem to be more passionate about other activities than I am about tech -- especially when I was in my 20's -- and I am concerned I'll eventually become obsolete.
How do you stay motivated to learn tech?
Second, my interest is burrowing down into the underlying mathematics and formalisms. This frees you from having to chase trends at the superficial level (React vs Vue, for example). I went for a PhD in my dotage just to up my game (see my comment history for a recent thread where I described my experience).
Third, I got disillusioned with working for BIG Software and their clients. But smaller companies and organisations and NGOs have got interesting problems to solve, but can't afford talent. Here you get to do build the entire thing on your own, and it is an art to make it simple and aesthetic and a pleasure to use; you get to use lots of relatively new and free technologies, without putting the client's business at risk.
I do feel it's OK to require new tech to prove itself though and I am quite happy to keep it at arms length until it's earned its stripes - while recognising it can take years for the hype cycle to play out.
So far, it’s working but it’s not as easy at it should be. I do work for a company where I legitimately care about the mission, the company and it’s impact but I get most of my sense of purpose from taking care of my team.
Ended up doing 180 on this due to "adult life" responsibilities but I plan to turn this into 360 sooner or later.
Could I have easier time now if I would have been working more a decade ago? Probably. But if I travelled back in time, I wouldn't change anything for less than guaranteed very cushy fuck-you money.
Mind you I was making only 80k less at my last job, a non-FAANG startup. So not saying FAANG is everything, but the workload is sufficiently less than the mad max startup lifestyle.
Yeah, less workload, better pay, what not to like? I guess I just need to get better now.
Will probably return to my startup after I leave my current gig
Who wouldn't want such a life.
Edit: Hey you are that Mark Watson! Truly love your blog!
Second:
> I have never learnt the art of work-life balance, but now I'm able to amortise it over the course of a year!
I took a similar approach and realised that with my attitude towards work I'd need to reduce the contract lengths to a week max, which is obviously impossible, unless I switch careers completely.
What I find really hard is to maintain a work-life balance in my _everyday_ life. I don't mind and occasional crunch—in fact to me it's something equally exciting and addictive. I keep switching between being excited, frustrated or depressed (bored).
It's something I'm trying to work on and recognise some of its triggers, but keep failing, miserably.
I've also gone and worked for a postdoc salary (at Berkeley, on the Bloom language) because the project was so interesting. Once you own a home outright, and health insurance is taken care of, the other expenses are completely manageable. I don't need to earn a lot to lead a rich life.
That is the checklist of a rich person, own home outright, health insurance taken care of, and manageable other expenses.
If you were the same age, but had no home ownership, no health insurance, and dependants how would that change your perspective?
A young person with desired skills could easily be making more than twice this amount in the Bay Area. Owning a house is strictly optional (and a bit mad, to own a house in earthquake country, esp at those prices!)
Point is, many people vastly overestimate how much they need to enjoy a rich life. There's plenty of room at the bottom :)
Now, 50K is huge for the vast majority of the population, so this is all still rich talk. But the HN community is probably in the top 2 percentile of the world's population, so I feel little freer in saying so.
Maybe your definition of rich is incorrect?
Also, I've worked as a barista. My high paying tech job is waaaay easier.
I lean right on political issues, but it wouldn't hurt my feelings at all if a Democrat won in 2020 and actually pushed through significant healthcare reform.
Highly recommended. The most valuable things to me are love first and time second. The benefits of freedom to be good and feel good about what I do are immeasurable.
This is what I'm aiming for in the near term, but how on earth do you find a position with infrequent brutal deadlines?
I don't know if I have a trick for finding a position like this other than to pay close attention to who your manager will be and what _they_ value. My manager believes strongly in the mission of the company (decarbonize the electric grid) but also has young kids that he cares a lot about. He left big tech to work here. So his passion and his work life balance both "trickle down."
What I meant to say earlier is that in a consulting lifestyle, one gets to choose how soon to move to the next gig. For me, it is always a few months between gigs, so the average number of deadlines per year is low :)
I decided that the name of the game is to optimise quality of life. That means, infrequent brutal deadlines, minimal (pref. zero) commute, opportunity to learn, and spend time with family and friends and be of use to society at large.
This meant (1) I'd only do short-term assignments (less than a year) (2) I'll keep my technical chops as current as possible, so no shortage of interesting gigs to work on (3) Not hurry into the next gig when one ended.
I have never learnt the art of work-life balance, but now I'm able to amortise it over the course of a year! Work my ass off when I have a contract, then take off and putter around with different technologies and hobbies. There's lots of time for family and friends. The money is of course considerably less than what I could make, but more money comes at the cost of very high expectations and brutal deadlines. I charge less, and I get more time to do a quality job. Clients remember you for the quality, not for the time taken. Of course, as I get older, I _need_ the extra time too; I just don't have the stamina.
I love it. I am 55 and I code every single day, just for fun.