How to design a career that serves your life
Stop sacrificing your life for the corporate ladder. Learn how to rewrite your career goals and use a custom objective function to gain autonomy and beat burnout.
Many developers assume the only definition of success is a straight climb up the corporate ladder.
I used to think the same way when I just started working after university. Later, I realized that climbing is just one option.
You can step off the ladder completely and choose a path that fits a different life.
I remember watching a work colleague hustle for Principal Engineer titles. This engineer worked late nights and some weekends, often sending PRs at 3 am. I’m sure they skipped family and friends’ events to prioritize work. This worked, and this colleague got the promotion. But the question here is, does this effort-reward relationship work for you?
I noticed there are many paths to achieve a destination, and at the same time, many destinations.
Intentionally choosing your work expectations is the real way to achieve personal happiness. If you want to be the fastest promoted engineer, then by all means, go for it. But if you want to transition to self-employment to get a remote job, to prioritize your life outside of work... then you need to be strategic about how you spend your time.
In this post, we’ll cover a technique to make work fit your life.
In this post, you’ll learn
How to identify the traps of standard career progression.
Ways to rewrite your professional goals.
The problem: the “super senior staff engineer” goal
An objective function is the specific metric a system is designed to optimize.