> the only reward for hard work is more work.

Yup. I work 35-40 hours a week. I do not put work stuff on my personal devices, I do not open my work laptop at home. This isn't something I negotiated or made explicit, it's just what I do. No one has ever objected to my work or output and I keep getting raises every year.

you know, that's not completely true. taking breaks or shifting from one idea to the next doesn't necessarily stop the ingenuity and ideas from flowing down the first path.

your hands might be limited that way, but your mind isn't.

I am becoming senior, as of now I'm still getting pay raises and experience I'm cherishing, but you have to be strategic in this phase as well, arguably more?

> The senior you get the more you realise that the only reward for hard work is more work. Then, you learn to say no more often and set boundaries and negotiate like if you want me to work on project A, then I won’t have capacity to work on project B.

This is something that you already realise very, very early in your career. The only hard thing is how to set boundaries and negotiate without infuriating the other side and burning bridges forever.

I've interviewed for several senior jobs lately. And found that the more pragmatic and honest I was, the quicker I was dropped from the pipeline.

It goes both ways, and I would argue the spiral happens because the other side expects something above an beyond the possible.

If every senior you hired left in 6 months, there is something wrong with your company. Likely on three levela ends - when evaluating people, when telling them who you are so that they can select themselves out and when they are in.

Btw the same goes for when every junior leaves in 6 months. Or whatever demographic group.

I leave because it stops being "fun". The way my father put it is "when you start a job, they hand you 2 buckets. One they fill with money. The other they fill with crap. When the bucket of crap weighs more than the bucket with money, you leave."

It is hard to take almost any mentorship program seriously that is not a formal university education, and even then, at most universities they do not teach skills that are directly applicable at companies given they are not intended to directly be job training programs. Not that I am on any hiring committee currently, but if I was, I would rather see a candidate with a degree and open source project contributions than App Academy dreck, for example.

I guess "senior" just means older, but in the usual sense, the more senior you are, the more your job involves coordinating with other people. So I don't see how you could disappear when promoted. But I think in this case it's just "you do more work".

I don't agree with that advice.

Interviewing sucks. I know, if you currently have a job then you don't lose anything. Other than precious time and I already feel like I don't have enough free time, I don't want to invest the remaining interviewing.

I have been in a few companies and yes, sometimes getting a promotion is literally impossible. I remember one company that didn't give me a promotion until I threatened to leave.

But if you find the right company, then you shouldn't even need to ask for a promotion.

And lastly, I would hope you are working for a company that you care about. That makes it more complicated to find a replacement

The 'job hopping advice' is always so one-dimensonal as if salary maxing is the only metric that counts. You should always take everything into account

- work climate and coworkers - work life balance - legal rewards for staying (This might not apply to the US but in most of Europe you get progressively harder to fire the longer you stay at one company)

This used to be true during the zero interest rate days when you could leapfrog up the chain but I think the times have changed.

By all means keep your eyes open outside of your org, but it's increasingly hard to even get a resume seen by a human on the other side of the hiring process.

If you have a good reputation on your current team, that places you above external candidates as you look to move up in your organization. Don't ignore that.

“Your job isn’t your job. Your job is to find your next career step.” Paraphrasing from memory from Scott Adams’ “How to fail at almost everything and still win big.”

I haven’t followed that advice, because I quite like my jobs, and getting deep into a problem space is one of life’s pleasures. But, I do think it’s sound advice all the same.

It was written by the bro (LLM) app.

I went through this and ended up becoming (through a long and twisted path) a maintenance super for an apartment building near my house. Maybe an overreaction but every day is a blessing compared to the mental anguish I experienced making corporate software

Close your laptop no more than 8 hours after you opened it. Never work on weekends. If they need more hours worked than that, then they can hire another person to work them. If they fire you (they won't) then I guess you have your answer.

literally three principle engineers i know have done or are doing this. im planning to leave software entirely which is insane, but it has been making more and more sense for me personally.

i cant help but think there will be a mini exodus from big software companies, and im curious what thatll do to the industry.

This was never really true at most places, and even where it was sort of true, it's been false since 2023.

The ladder has collapsed. No more juniors to mentor and grow (in some cases no more US hiring period), and all of the carrots have been replaced with sticks. If you're lucky, the reward for doing good work and being nice is 'not being laid off', but the promo budget is gone and it's not like your boss gets a say in who's laid off so may the odds be ever in your favor.

> Do good work and be nice the rest follows

Nice little soundbite but for this to work your personal interpretation of "good work" and "be nice" needs to align with the people around you and the broader organisation.

In my experience, this only works at some companies. At others you have to play the promotion game (or have your manager play it for you).

I've seen people who don't follow this become emotional wrecks, which as a manager makes me feel like Dr. Phil.

You got really lucky. That was my exact thought as well when I started my career and looking back that was so naive.