
Ask HN: Have you found success and a good work life balance? - xupybd
It seems that people need to sacrifice life outside of work to make it in the software industry.  Has anyone made it and maintained a healthy work life balance?
======
ghi5goio3qno4i3
Most my coworkers have. I'm somewhat unlucky in that regard, average work week
is about 60 to 90 hours a week for a $40,000/yr salary as QA.

That said, I something of an edge case. I have an IQ in the mid 80's, so the
fact that I got an office job at all is something of an accomplishment. I
should've ended up a minimum wage laborer or turning to petty crime. My
employer took a pretty significant risk hiring me, so I'm grateful for it.

~~~
csomar
Not sure if you are trolling. But I assume someone writing correct English,
reading Hacker News and landing a Desk job should be at least in the 100+

~~~
ghi5goio3qno4i3
You would not be the first to be flabbergasted when I mentioned this. Thing
is, if you're imagining the someone with low IQ as someone that's on the short
bus that needs padding or a social worker to guide them through the day,
that's actually to somewhere in between 20 and 70. You've probably had
conversations with people in IQ's in my range without realizing it.

The reason I score low is due to problems in short term memory retention and
pattern recognition. Take the next sentence for example. You might be able to
skim over it in a few seconds, and skip a few words as you'd be able to key in
on some words and work out the meaning of the sentence based on experience. I
have a lot more difficulty; most typically I have to read everything word for
word in order to grasp the meaning, in some cases up to three times before I
am able to work it out. It doesn't mean that I cannot solve the same problem
that someone with a 120 IQ can, it means that it takes me quite a bit more
time before I'm able to keep it in my head.

And oddly it's for that reason that I'm actually decent at QA. To compensate
for the memory problems, I tend to take notes. Very meticulous notes of what
I'm doing, when I'm doing it, and why I'm doing it. It makes my test work slow
but it makes creating bug reports easy, and the developers seem to like the
the level of detail that is written in those reports.

~~~
askafriend
Thank you for being open about and sharing your experience, it was helpful for
my understanding.

------
fastbeef
I don’t know if I’ve “made it”, but two years ago I started a small
consultancy which increased my per-hour billing to almost triple compared to
when I was an employee doing the same thing. I use this extra cash flow to
work 25-30 hour weeks.

Recently, I started to offer this setup “as a platform” to previous co-workers
taking a 20% cut of their billing. If I get to five I can stop working all
together.

~~~
whalesalad
The platform you’re referring to: is it software for managing time tracking
and invoicing? Or is it something that helps capture new clients?

~~~
fastbeef
It’s not a software system, but rather me figuring out and abstracting away
stuff like payroll, taxes, bookkeeping, client acquisition, insurances ,
pensions and everything else that makes developers’ palms sweaty when they
think about going freelance.

Right now this doesn’t eat up all too much of my time so all is done in Excel
basically. But if we’re, say, 10 devs I’d reconsider building something.

------
csixty4
The biggest step for me was becoming a manager. As the person calling the
shots, I push my team to work ~40 hour weeks, take comp time if we're paged
after hours, to have interests outside work, and to spend time with those
close to them.

It makes for a positive, productive work environment. And then I'm expected to
model the same behavior I want to see from them, so I mean I kind of have to
limit myself to 40 hours. You know, for them.

~~~
aprdm
You sound a lot like my current manager:) I am sure your team really
appreciates it and that it creates a much better work environment.

------
orasis
Yes. I am an indie iPhone app publisher in the health & fitness space and I
earn a healthy 6 figures working ~25 hours a week.

I’m hoping to crack 7 figures in the next couple of years.

I made almost nothing the first 4 years writing apps but eventually learned
the craft. I have lost as much as $30,000 on a single dud app and probably had
5 failures before any success.

I highly recommend M.J. DeMarco’s book - Millionaire Fastlane and I’m a big
Tim Ferriss/4 Hour Workweek fan.

~~~
bdibs
Any tips for customer acquisition on the App Store?

~~~
orasis
Use apptweak.com to find high traffic keywords then keep optimizing until you
have the top click through rate for those keywords. Over the last year or so
I’ve been able to climb the keyword rankings faster using search ads.

~~~
bdibs
Thanks!

Do you use paid advertising also or primarily focus on ASO?

~~~
orasis
I use Apple Search Ads, but mostly just to boost my keyword rankings.

------
CyberFonic
For me success is being happy and living within my means. Did go through the
corporate drone phase but big income meant high cost of living so I actually
didn't end up saving anything.

Once I made the decision to prioritise lifestyle, I went contracting. Only
taking on projects that I liked and working for people I liked. Learning to
say "No" was hard at first, but that too can be learnt. I charge for completed
units for work, not by the hour.

Beware of thinking that success = having and spending lots of money. If you
don't have good health, then you can't really be happy, etc. Important to
remember that you can't spend your way to wealth.

------
minblaster
I tried the corporate rat race, was not for me. Neither was the startup
lottery ticket grind.

I work remote 3 days a week (for 75% salary) and it’s the perfect balance for
me. 4 days off is enough to recharge and work on personal projects yet keep
some structure.

~~~
38932ur98u
How did you find such a gig?

~~~
minblaster
I had a side project online which the CEO of a small company used (he
mentioned it on twitter). We started a conversation, he was hiring and remote-
friendly, so I joined. After a few years I asked to go part-time.

Not affiliated, but [https://30hourjobs.com/](https://30hourjobs.com/) has a
list of similar gigs.

~~~
gschier
Thanks, that looks like a great resource!

------
twblalock
In my experience work-life balance in the software industry, at least in the
United States, is better than people seem to think. In particular, large
companies have better work-life balance than startups and they pay more, too.

I've been in the industry for nearly a decade and pretty much work 40-hour
weeks, including at a company that has a reputation for people working long
hours, and I've never been on call.

It's really the team, not the company, that matters. People who join teams
that work long hours generally know what they are getting themselves into.

------
wayoutthere
Yeah, but I (and the people I know in my position) enjoy an immense amount of
privilege / dumb luck. Generally it's about being unwilling to sacrifice life
outside of work, and finding opportunities within those confines. Hard to do
if you don't start out with a good network.

------
candu
Similar to many of the other comments here: you should figure out what
"success" means to you. It's easy to make the default assumption that success
means lots of money and long working hours, at which point you've defined
success in opposition to work-life balance. (Not that it's necessarily wrong
to do so, but I'd contend that it _is_ problematic to do so without explicitly
deciding that this is what you want.)

I'd estimate I work 40-45 hours most weeks, with occasional bursts of 50-55
hours pre-deadline often compensated for by shorter weeks afterwards. The
popular myth of insane working hours aside, this is actually pretty normal [1]
in our industry. I get to work with awesome people on projects that I care
about, I earn enough to live comfortably but not lavishly (as do many people
in this industry), and I have enough time / energy left over to enjoy hobbies,
friends, and travel. I also get to learn continuously and enjoy reasonable
latitude / autonomy in decision making.

To me, this means I've been pretty damn successful. Could I have more of these
things I've described? Possibly, though maybe not more of all of them at once.
Am I living the hyper-optimized best possible version of my life? Arguably
not, but it's also not clear to me that this exists; all important choices
involve tradeoffs, and what's optimal now may not seem so to 5-years-later me.
Personally, I've found it healthier to accept that my definition of success
has changed and will change further, and that finding success is maybe not as
important as searching for it :)

[1]
[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=so...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=so-
owned&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=dev-survey-2019&utm_content=launch-
blog#work-_-hours-worked-per-week)

------
gnicholas
I run a SaaS company and quit my day job 5 years ago. When my wife was going
to have our second child last year, I posted here and on other startup forums
to ask how male founders handled paternity leave. Many people commented that
they were also interested in hearing stories of what others had done, but
there were zero responses from male founders who had actually taken a
paternity leave.

What I ended up doing was basically ramping down my work for many months, and
only taking a week or two off completely. This was the most helpful for our
family, although my wife's job (professor) offers a significant maternity
leave, so my approach might not be optimal for other situations.

------
whiddershins
Work life balance can sometimes be a dangerously ill-conceived phrase, as can
success.

I would worry you might not know exactly what you are trying to achieve?

What precisely are you worried about sacrificing in order to achieve your
goals? Brunch with friends?

I mean this as a serious question, why should a person be able to achieve
anything without sacrificing something else?

I think if you know exactly what priorities you are trying to
balance/integrate, the problem becomes concrete, and then much more solvable.

If you use nebulous terms it’s a bit like ‘how long is a ball of string’ and
often you end up always feeling like you’ve failed to find either balance, or
success, no matter what happens in your life.

------
cyberferret
Well, I am working (mainly coding) for about 6 hours a day these days on my
SaaS startup. Never work weekends. Travel a fair bit with my family. I guess
in one respect, that is “success” to me, and a work/life balance...

------
natalyarostova
For me the trick has been to develop my skills where I’m good enough to
strictly stick to 40 hours a week, and where people consider me valuable
enough that even if they wish I worked more, they’re more than happy to
accommodate me. Although the catch is to remain this good I still put in 10-15
hours a week on personal development.

------
juancn
Yes.

I workout regularly, go out with friends, play with my kids and have a
successful career.

The trick (for me) is relentless prioritization. Figure out what really
matters in all contexts and invest in the important stuff, drop the rest.

If you're working 60-80 hours weeks, you're not prioritizing properly.

Do not confuse urgency with importance. Learn to say no, delegate, trust
others and ask for help if you need it.

There's an emotional component to it. You need to be able to be ok failing at
some things.

If you want to excel at something, you need to consciously choose what you're
going to be bad at.

There will be situations that require extraordinary effort, but these should
not be the norm, they should be extraordinary.

------
agotterer
It depends how you define success. I consider myself successful professionally
and personally... I’m the CTO at a startup where I work on problems I find
interesting, with a team I love, at a company I really believe in. At home I
have a wonderful wife and two beautiful kids (3 year and 1 year old).

I’ve been working in tech professionally for 14 years. I worked very hard
during all of those years and before. I’ve never thought of work and life as
something that should be balanced. To me balance means the pursuit of those
things being even. Instead I think of it as “work life integration”, where
both things need to coexist at the same time. Sometimes the push or pull Needs
to be greater on one side than the other.

My typical routine is waking up at 7am (unlesd the kids get up earlier). Every
morning I make breakfast for my boys, walk the dog, and get myself ready for
the day. I drop my oldest son at school and walk 35 min to the office. I’m
usually in the office around 9:30/45am. When I’m at work I’m 98% focused and
dedicated to work. 2% of the time is a mental break or personal thing. I try
to leave the office around 6:30/7pm and make it home just in time to read to
the boys and tuck them in to bed. I don’t make it in time every night (I
FaceTime for 5 min if I won’t be home). When I do make it back after we put
the kids down I spend the next 1-2 hours min with my wife eating dinner and
hanging out. Then I’m usually back on the computer for 90-120 min doing some
more work.

The weekends are family time, Sat and Sun from 7am-7pm is dedicated family
time. I don’t do any real work with the exception of checking email when
there’s down time, like during naps or if my wife and the kids run out for a
few without me. Fri and Sat evening I try to spend the evening with my wife
(we don’t go out a ton right now because of the young kids). From time to time
work takes up one or both of those nights. If I’m giving up Fri/Sat with my
wife it’s because something important needs to be done and I don’t take that
choice lightly. Sunday evening is usually work / prep for the week after the
kids go to bed.

I’ve found a good routine where I can work hard and spend time with family. My
job is flexible enough where I can go to a morning or mid day appointment for
the kids, or go on the occasion field trip, or leave the office at 5 to pick
up my son from school from time to time.

A typical work work day usually averages 9-11 hours with the occasional flex
up or down. My routine doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything but family and
work. I watch between 0–2 hours of tv a week and if I do watch it’s usually
during spouse time. I’ve integrated work and life together and try to modulate
depending on what’s going on in either world and either time. I have no
interest in a perfect consistent balance.

------
kevan
I guess it depends on what your definition of success is. I still average
around 40 hours/week in the office as an SDE 3 at Amazon. I could probably
advance a bit faster by putting in more hours but I'm happy with the pace so
far.

I think there's a lot of hustle porn culture in tech, especially around the
entry level where people brag about how many hours per week they spend
leetcoding. This creates an unrealistic perception that everyone is always
working themselves to the bone. They're not, my last company even did half day
Fridays during the summer.

------
mikekchar
There is no universal "good work life balance". What works for one person,
does not work for another. Even the phrase "work life balance" implies a
particular solution, which I think is often damaging to people. It implies
that there is work, which when I'm doing it suspends my life. It implies that
work is inherently bad for your life goals.

Interestingly, I taught English as a foreign language in Japan for 5 years. I
had a colleague who was giving a class on different professions and she asked
the students (first year high school/grade 10) what profession they wanted.
Many girls in the class said, "I want to be a mother". This infuriated my
colleague who chastised the students and told them not to "waste their life".

Of course, being a full time parent is actually a risky proposition in your
career. You have to depend on your spouse for making money. If things don't
work out, you don't have a lot of security. From that perspective, I
completely understand my colleague's reaction. What I find interesting is the
feeling that the choice of "full time parent" is considered an unfit career,
regardless of risk. Had the students said they wanted to be musicians, a
career with considerably more risk, my colleague would not have reacted in
such a hostile way.

When put in that light, what _is_ your career to your life? If you spend your
time lounging on the beach drinking pina coladas all day, have you "made it"?
What if you sit on the street corner drinking cheap whiskey? Are you wasting
your life if you achieve nothing in your career? How much of your time on
earth should you devote to that work? If you spend your time simply amassing
money, have you failed since you did not spend that time curing cancer? Do you
need to make up for your complete waste of time making money by donating it at
the end of your life?

Of course, I'm being facetious. Your choice of what your want to accomplish
and how much of your time your want to spend on it is up to you. Some jobs
require considerably more effort than others. Look at the life of the average
rock star. Many of them do 300 or more concerts a year. That's a work load
that would bury the average software developer, but it's generally necessary
at the top end of that profession.

My advice, for what it's worth, is to try to find a job that is satisfying to
you and for which the time spent does not seem to be wasted. Don't partition
your life between "things I want to do" and "things I have to do". Yes, there
will always be things that you have to do that you may not want to. But
instead of trying to avoid the things you have to do, try to find things that
you want to do and make them things you have to do.

~~~
quickthrower2
Are you suggesting there are no rockstar developers?

~~~
mikekchar
I suppose the simple answer to your question is that, you don't find musicians
posting on fora asking about unhealthy work-life balance -- despite the fact
that the average working musician's schedule is insane. We get these questions
as programmers because there is a schism between the "rockstar programmer" who
is obsessed with programming and the 9-5 joe who is looking to make a 6 figure
salary in an office. They irony is that the 9-5 is much more likely to be
promoted than the rockstar simply because they are more likely to value people
skills over technical skills.

But it's funny, because I mentored a person once who was really upset about
the fact that he couldn't compete against the top technical people on the
team. He didn't want to put the hours in to get to the next level and somehow
felt that it shouldn't be necessary. I kept trying to tell him that he should
focus on things that he enjoyed rather than trying to be the best at something
he didn't want to do. Nobody needs a team completely full of obsessed
programmers. There are lots of other ways to provide value to the team.
However it was absolutely useless.

Anyway, it's a thing you've got to work out in your own head and according to
your own values. But you can't be upset when you don't get the rewards for the
path that you didn't choose.

~~~
quickthrower2
Nice answer. The musicians might complain in person than on the web. But also
if you are a musician with a hecktic schedule I guess you are probably doing
well and there is hope to be famous and successful if not already. A lot of
programming jobs just pay the bills and hit a glass ceiling. Once that happens
who wants to do 60h if you can do 40h instead? I also think that programming
is specifically mind taxing or can be and I can do 60h of work a week but not
60h of programming.

------
aprdm
I've worked in the UK, Canada and Brazil in over 10 different companies big
and small.

I've never worked more than 40h/week, I've worked with people who did but it
seemed more like they wanted than that it was enforced.

I feel I've never had problems putting boundaries and being reasonable, I
currently make what I consider a very good salary for Canada and am working in
a place that really values employer happiness.

------
trez
None. I am technical startup founder.

My company just got break even so I live with the minimum wage possible but
it's growing at a good pace.

Work life balance is both great and terrible. I work with my girlfriend. Our
life is really flexible but we have customers calls every day. No days without
a single call for the last 2 years. But I love what I do.

------
Gormisdomai
I'm skeptical of what you could learn from a thread like this because of the
huge selection effects involved

------
gshdg
What counts to you as "making it" or "success"?

------
anotheryou
I hopefully tackle one after the other. I went: bad money part time, ok money
40h than 30h/w, interesting job with good money 40h. Next goal: reducing h
again.

------
cryptica
I have found neither.

