Sure, but also sometimes you waste your life working thinking you kick ass left and right, till you arrive at certain point, ie retirement and realize you actually wasted your life, and no amount of money can change that. Sure, you have a some freedom ahead of you, but only as much as your health, finances and other circumstances allow you to, and this is usually less than people project earlier.
Plus family happens now for many of us, and not later. Kids need their parents, not their money. Its a grave mistake that hurts badly your closest ones for life to prioritize excellence in 1 direction over everything else, especially them.
I'll always have endless amount of respect of people raising their kids properly themselves into mature, happy adults who know what they want in life and go for it, even if it means they just worked to live. I don't have even a cubic picometer of respect for folks who end up doing the opposite, regardless of what they achieved professionally. This world needs new generation of balanced adults much much more than some search optimized by 0.1% or some marginally improved social graph monetization.
Of course not everybody wants, needs or can create a family, that's fine but another topic, then I agree with you more.
After staying at a job for too long by 2008 and barely surviving the recession at a startup until 2012 and also getting married the same year and (gladly) becoming the father to my then 9 and 14 year old stepsons, I changed jobs six times and pushed myself to get ahead until 2020 and falling into a mid level position at BigTech (cloud consulting department).
I then tried to stay on the treadmill and I spent about a year working toward a promotion by increasing my “scope” and “impact”.
I then realized by 2022 at 48 years old, why? I make more than “enough” especially seeing I work remotely.
I then told my manager I was just interested in “improving in my current role” and my wife and I decided to do something completely different:
I found it much better to work “overtime” at my day job to learn new to me technologies and do POCs if the company is not using the technology or to volunteer for assignments based on something I don’t know well and put in extra time to meet the deadline.
One reason is that I can seek feedback from coworkers and polish the POC. I also can take advantage of infrastructure that may be cost prohibitive to test something at scale based on real world usage.
The other reason is that for my next job, it’s much more impressive to say I spearheaded work for a company than a hobbyist side project.
Yes I know one advantage of your own side project is that you can show your code. But most of the time the hiring manager isn’t going to take time to look at your work anyway.
I have personally been fortunate enough to have unfettered Admin access to an AWS account on someone else’s dime between two jobs for the past five years where I could experiment and learn on the job.
