The are addicted to feeling valuable and important.
When they get home from work, they have nothing else to do.
Working out frequently, getting a family, getting a side project off the ramp, and reducing to part-time have all helped me with my addiction to feeling valuable and important when nothing else is gained than becoming known for fixing stuff in weekends free of charge.
I know first hand about the "fixer" mindset that a lot of engineering-minded men have.
Do yourself a favor and fix things mostly for your family/friends, and your company a distant third. Every single person will be better off in this scenario. It's a hard learned sometimes counter-intuitive lesson, but it must be learned.
I'm there. Everyone else is patting me on the back.
I wish I would have been a video game hedonist blissfully unaware of the world.
Side note: You have less friends as Messiah but more power. I am extremely social, but its really obvious that I'm a 1%er and even 10%ers can't handle that. We have different hobbies. I shape the world/no hobbies, they have more traditional hobbies like fixing and driving fast cars. Basically my friends are other business owners or high status people and we complain about labor quality, margins, and not having time.
There are plenty of people like that in a company but they normally don't cluster together, so it feels like "nobody else cares". That's false. At times that's how exactly how products, or even entire companies, are saved. Because a bunch of individuals who think like that get together and work hard to accomplish something.
Whether that effort is recognized or not depends on the company. If it's not then, I agree, it would be irrational to keep pushing. But you can't know until you try.
(Edit: to be clear, I'm not advocating prioritizing work over anything else, that really depends on you, but there's a fine line between "working hard" and being obsessed. The latter will more often than not result in a net negative in most cases. The same level of effort and/or prioritization should be applied to all areas of life)
The correct approach is to be flexible, recognise that your family is worth more than the company, but still give a shit about your work and getting it done.
Had 1-2 childhood events that shaped you, and now you are afraid to do anything except 'be high value'.
I'm aware of it, I'm even aware of philosophies like Absurdism, good luck changing me. Its either in my DNA or faux-PTSD.
I think this is poor and dangerous advice for anyone who wants to get ahead in life. If you are happy to coast by and not achieve much in life, sure, don’t work hard. But if you want to be one of the few who either rise to the top in your field or to create value in the world, then don’t feel bad about wanting to work hard. People generally learn by doing and those who do a lot learn a lot. Of course, don’t prioritize it over things that are important to you (physical health, family etc) but don’t feel it’s wrong to prioritize it above stuff isn’t important to you (eg Netflix and YouTube shorts).
Go to therapy. Learn about yourself. Work on your communication skills. Figure out what matters to you and invest in it. (For most people, family and friends are high on that list).
By all means work hard, but be strategic about it. Martyring yourself for your company won't make people respect you.
It's worthwhile working for yourself if you do think you're learning, but in today's corporate environment loyalty is just showing your willingness to be exploited.
Work hard for yourself to build your own. But don’t think for one moment that death marches will result in a swift rise to the top.
Shilling for work place abuse and unpaid overtime isn't getting you ahead in life the same way begging for forgivness with an abuser will make your life better.
If your corp can't manage people's time realistically, why would you expect them to manage anything realistically? Get out and go to a real place that knows how to run projects.
Nothing wrong with working hard, but make sure you get something about of it.
If you’re being asked to cancel a holiday because some clown can’t get anything done without setting realistic timelines, don’t do it.
But if you take a job where your boss says “we need to get this done by this date and we need people who are willing to get it done even if that means sacrificing work-life balance” and you get paid like you should for a job like that, then do it.
Does that happen very often though?
Oh yeah, every new-comer to the tech world thinks like this, and 99.99% of them don't get any further "ahead" in life than the rest of us. In fact, many end up further behind.
The trick is to make sure you're always investing in yourself. Even when you're working for others you be either "learning or earning", ideally both.
"rising to the top" is pure ego-inflation
"create value in the world" -- you'd better make sure that you're creating value for the world in something that's important and meaningful to you, not just "create value for shareholders" (who don't give a f about you) which is what "creating value" means 90% of the time if you're in industry
So no, "working hard" won't get you ahead. The people who really get that far ahead in life are the ones networking and learning the political games, not really working. And why do you need to "get ahead" to be successful? I'm ambitious, and I love growing in my career. I'm not someone who is happy with the bog standard things, but I've also learned that when all you value is being ahead of your peers, you miss out on more than you gain. And on top of it, you all end up in similar roles anyway.
Communicate your holiday plans, arrange coverage, put it team calendars, do hand-offs.. and then take it. Projects come & go, dates slip on their own. If you move holidays for project dates you will never take holidays.
The only exceptions would be if you are in a role with seasonality and its generally understood end of year / end of quarter / tax time / something is well known busy season and its in poor taste to disappear during it.
This is exactly how you get guilted into working during vacation; everything is sold as an exception.
Some lines of work simply require you to be working when everyone else is on vacation.
Nowadays working in software I sometimes do stuff on the weekend - but only because I know I can take longer breaks during the week since part of the work is already done.
“Good enough” is my goal and it should be generally. IMO Norway has the best working culture in that regard, although I only know if from the outside/stories.
If your job is some giant e-commerce retailer and you probably shouldn't take Black Friday or the week before Christmas off. If you work in accounting or some operations role then quarter end is likely bad. If you work in tax, then late March thru April probably bad. Etc.
There's plenty of time in the year to take off around whatever your jobs regular busy season is. Don't set yourself up for failure.
These are all management failure, because nine times out of ten you ran out of time because some manager or exec had a great reason why his change was so important that we should break the rules to get it in. Or that what he said isn’t what he meant and now we need to fix it no matter what. This is the sort of exception that makes me upset.
The problem is these children in suits don’t understand that “we have 9 months” means you plan for six months of work. Tops. They can’t stand the “waste” because none of them have read a real management book since college, and they only skimmed it for the test.
Endless crunch is a problem, and I don't crunch to meet made up internal deadlines or for work that is administrative nonsense.
If you want to do people's taxes for a living you have to acknowledge that Feb/March/April are not times where it is appropriate or acceptable for you to schedule a 3-week vacation. This is not the same as "we do database updates in August so no summer holidays."
If it's just we want to launch our latest product in the second week of June, because that's the one-off date we came up with when we started the project, that's different. It's not seasonality it's just failing to account for staff availablity/unrealistic planning.
The tax deadline is predictable. A two-month restriction from holidays is relatively reasonable. The deadline is not realistically controllable. (Your employer cannot eliminate tax filing.)
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[1]: So that's at least two ideas that you obviously have; putting the lie to your "I have no idea".
Yeah, that's idiotic. But only about as much as your version.
Structuring your life completely around anything is a fools errand — work, video games, family, food, etc.
Unless it’s not. Maybe the only thing you care about in the world is your family and you’ll ignore everything else. Maybe video games are your truest passion and you’ll do whatever it takes to play them 80 hours a week.
Maybe I love CRUD apps and Jira as much as my next door neighbor loves his wife. Who’s to say?
If you want to devote your entire life to one thing, go nuts. It’s probably going to have some consequences whether that thing is work or not.
Even if you are a large equity partner it's at best short-sighted. I have written about this before[1] but the gist of it is that even when individual heroics saves a project it has robbed the project manager of valuable feedback regarding how the planning was deficit.
I have had managers say things like: "this could be the last job we ever work" as if none of us are capable of doing math.
That said we are all a bit prideful so exhausting yourself to get that fleeting feeling of having achieved something clever and good is definitely on the table.
Most startups unless you are founding team this is not the case.
Certainly sub-1% ownership is far from large.
A situation where you have sub-$1M equity that is illiquid for a decade until a hoped-for exit is not large equity.
No. It's not.
I interpret that as "This is the job that kills you."
You should put that on a coffee mug and sell it. It would make a great gift to a bunch of people that I know.
The company had a hard deadline to move over to a brand new system. They had 5 years notice and decided not to start it until the year before. If they didn't make the deadline, it would mean millions of dollars in costs because it was outside the contract.
Him and his team made the deadline. His reward was being laid off a few weeks later as his position was eliminated. Now he's over 50 and trying to find work in a terrible time to look for a job.
Awkward silence ensued. ...
I know, that, specially when you get recognised for the hard work it is hard, but you will regret every minute.
If you work for a company that counts on your holidays and vacation to sell their products, you are helping to create the problematic world with have today. If many do that, more will need to do. If none do it, and act like it is an absurd to request it (and it is) nobody is forced to do it and the company is forced to do real estimates even if that hurts your fav CEO pocket