Those who are self-employed may feel differently.
If you value a certain kind of balance in life, I agree with everything you said.
There are many of us who have an internal drive to do “impossible” things; it’s a valuable and inseparable part of our identity.
It’s OK that not everyone has this, the world would probably be worse if everyone did. And it should never feel like an externally-imposed expectation, that would definitely be unhealthy.
But in order to negotiate good work life balances, family time, free weekends etc. programmers would have to negotiate as a group. Yet for some reason they seem to think that doing that -- forming unions -- is somehow horrible. Thus you alone don't have enough leverage.
Eventually the industry is going to cool, but for now Tech really is the closest thing to that Steinbeck quote about temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
> In reality, that engineer doing all that cool stuff in the Bay Area in their shared studio apartment probably doesn’t have a better retirement plan than the community college sysadmin with a paid-off single family home in upstate New York.
I don't think this is accurate, the net worth of the former is probably a multiple of the latter accounting for age.
Current billionaires are almost all from non-elite backgrounds. Only 1 of the top 10 came from a family with billion dollar wealth. https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/#57168b13251c
If you come from an upper middle class background (top 25th percentile), you can become a billionaire in America (with luck and hard work).
No one in the top ten is a rags-to-riches story. Plenty of elite universities and family connections.
I don’t really care if I’m working to 100% of my potential. My employer won’t pay me more for that optimization anyway.
I think there’s something of a toxic attitude in Silicon Valley that we should all be honing ourselves into this amazing constantly-tinkering engineer who runs a really cool blog. There’s also a general toxic mentality in America that we can all work our way to becoming billionaires - in reality, none of us can optimize our way into having family connections to the elites in our society. In reality, that engineer doing all that cool stuff in the Bay Area in their shared studio apartment probably doesn’t have a better retirement plan than the community college sysadmin with a paid-off single family home in upstate New York.
For me, I just work to put food on the table. I want to be average enough to he employable. Anything beyond that isn’t worth the diminishing return on investment, or a reduction in family time.
I can’t optimize my way to being genetically gifted enough to match the output of the 10x engineers who do get promoted, and I certainly can’t match their 24/7 dedication to work. Employers generally promote people for making the right person happy at the right time, not for producing the most technically competent work.