Work-Life Balance Slows Careers (E9 Engineer, ex-Meta)

Working harder DOES get you there faster — at a cost.

Welcome back to Path to Staff! We’ve now hit 3000 readers. To celebrate, we have a special guest

Philip Su

(E9 Distinguished Engineer at Meta) this week.

If you know Philip from Facebook, he’s the guy who spent $57,000 buying everyone a cup of coffee for everyone at Facebook across several offices!

In today’s article, Philip talks about how he believes work-life balance is a myth if you want to level up. He was promoted every year in his first 8 years at Microsoft. That’s extremely impressive.

Of course, this intensity isn’t for everyone. I’ll also share the other side of the coin on Philip’s Substack (subscribe if you haven’t!) in a week or two. I’ll share how I find work-life balance while continuing to build my career.

But without further ado, here’s Philip.

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Self-help books and countless motivational speakers evangelize the dream that you can have it all: a great family, a 45-hour work week, a head full of luxurious hair, and faster career growth than your peers.

It isn’t true. Anyone saying differently is selling something or leaving out key context.

Ways to Get Ahead

Three components of fast career growth:

1. Luck

2. Talent

3. Grit

We all know lucky people. You can’t orchestrate attending Sergey Brin’s high school and also having your favorite professor in college turn out to be Sergey’s dad. (Both happened to me, though in my case, neither led to fame and fortune.) Since luck is something you can’t control, there’s no need to discuss it deeply, though it helps to acknowledge it as a significant factor in many people’s careers.[1]

Talent is also not within your control. Some people are just flat-out smarter than you. I will never be an NBA player. Lest you think the latter flippantly irrelevant: in presidential races between two candidates, the taller one wins the popular vote 67% of times because they are perceived as stronger leaders. So height turns out to be quite relevant career-wise. But equally uncontrollable as luck.[2]

This leaves grit as the one thing you control when it comes to career velocity.

True Grit

There are many ways to be gritty, like persisting at self-improvement. But for this post, I’ll focus on the centrality of working hard.

If you are just as smart as everyone else, and you work just as hard as everyone else, you’re just as average.

Now average isn’t bad. In fact, average could be stellar, depending on where you work, so I wouldn’t go around pooh-poohing being average. But you probably didn’t start reading this post to learn how to stay average.

Assuming you aren’t exceptionally luckier or more talented than your peers, the only recourse to progressing faster than your peers is to outwork them — with longer hours or more focus and efficacy. Ideally both.

The opposite surely couldn’t be the case, right? Sally is just as smart as Amy, and every bit as lucky, but works far less than Amy while rocketing past Amy career-wise? Yet this is the gospel preached by many: that you can work the same hours as your peers yet blow past them in career velocity without breaking a sweat.

What’s true at the personal level is true at the national level. Americans enjoy greater prosperity than Europeans due largely to longer work hours. Sure, those longer hours come at the cost of leisure time… but if you wanted to read about how to maximize leisure, you’re reading the wrong post.

Be luckier. Be more talented. Or work harder.

Blasphemy!

I can feel comment-submitting fingers already warming up to send screeds on how this post is all wrong. I’ll address some objections up front.

• Work smarter, not harder. So catchy, this phrase. So smugly superior, as if this golden life hack were unknown to most. If you find yourself in a workplace where you don’t have to work harder simply by “working smarter,” you’ve joined the wrong team or company. On every great team I’ve ever been on, it was table stakes that everyone was already working smartly.

• You’ll have lower output beyond 40 hours. People often refer to Ford’s study of factory workers, where per-hour productivity does indeed decrease after 40 hours. But what many may elide is that total productivity continued to go up until 55-60 hours, at which point mistakes would at last decrease total output. I suspect the same trend holds for office workers: beyond 40 hours, total output continues to go up until the point where mistakes start to overwhelm productivity. But I have little doubt most coders working 45 hours produce more, in total, than when working 40 hours.

• You’ll burn out. You might well. Or is it true that “if you choose a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life?” Everybody has a different threshold of sustainable long-term output. Finding yours is key. But I’ll add this: many times when my direct reports have talked about work-life balance, what they were really saying — implicitly, sometimes unknowingly — was they had lost interest or a sense of purpose in their job.[3]

• You’ll blow relationships. Likely true, depending how unbalanced your life is and how sensitive your friends and partners are. You might also miss opportunities to form new relationships. I’m not saying this is good. I’m saying it’s true.

• You’ll miss out on the better things in life. This is both true and wise. There’s a tradeoff between going faster in your career and deeper in other aspects of your life. It might not be strictly zero-sum (e.g. doing better in career to some degree may improve other aspects of your life), but contrary to all the advertising you’ve seen, you can’t have it all.

Opportunity Costs

Hard work goes a long way.

In college, I was pre-med and scored a 40 on the MCATs (~522 in today’s terms, higher than the median Harvard Medical School student) by reading nine different college textbooks across chemistry, biology, and physics, cover to cover at least two times each. It irked me when friends lauded my intelligence upon hearing my score. I felt they should only attribute the score to my intelligence if they, too, had studied equally hard yet fared worse. As it stood, they misattributed the primary cause of my success to talent, when so much was due to long, laborious hours spent in solitude.

When I first started at Microsoft, I had a sleeping bag in my office. I coded until 11pm nightly and slept until 3am, at which point I’d code until ~6am, then sleep until my first meeting ~10am. This was totally sustainable for me at a time when I had no hobbies and my closest friend also worked similar hours.

I was promoted once a year for my first eight years at Microsoft. This is far from typical, but also not unheard of. Certainly faster than average. Was it due to luck and talent? No doubt. Could I have progressed equally quickly working 45-hour weeks? I can’t imagine how. I literally can’t. I remember learning late-night insights as I debugged things while the janitor vacuumed nearby hallways. I fixed twice as many bugs as a peer who started on my team the same month as I. How could I possibly have progressed as quickly without the advancements I made in those wee hours?

But it all comes at a cost. There are no free lunches. Our family once bought a Nordic chess set my then-seven-year-old son was excited to use. He asked me whether we could play it together, and I said, “Sure!” He then asked me to put it on my calendar, and watched until I had done so. This was a devastating moment of sudden realization for me. Back then at work, I was experiencing what in hindsight may well have been the high point of my entire career: leading the Facebook London engineering office, its first international development outpost. I was Facebook’s first engineer promoted to E9 outside the US. All this, at the cost of my second-grade son making sure he had a reserved spot on my calendar prior to me heading off to work that morning.

Was it worth it? Could I have worked a lot less in my earlier career and have eventually gotten to the same ladder level? Quite possibly. Would I have had more time to spend with family and friends, and perhaps even have developed some hobbies, had I worked less? Most definitely.

I’m no apologist for e/acc’ing your career by working long hours. But I’m not going to blow sunshine and sell you some fantasy where you’re no smarter or luckier than your peers, and you work no harder, yet you break the career velocity sound barrier through positive manifestation and three simple tips.

If you want atypically fast career growth, you need to put in the hours. Only you can answer whether the sacrifices are worth it. And there will be sacrifices, whether intentional or not.

But no shortcuts.

How might you organize your weeks & time for all this work? I’ll post a follow-up article which you’ll receive by subscribing here.

Notes

[1] Yes, you can “make your own luck,” if by that you mean seizing opportunities when they avail themselves and putting yourself in places where you’re more likely to be lucky. I don’t call that behavior “luck” anymore; perhaps a better descriptor is “orchestrating your career to maximize chances you’ll have better opportunities.” When I here use the word “luck,” I mean the kind of chance happening you couldn’t possibly control.
[2] Yes, I could have done human growth hormones earlier in life, or tibial lengthening now. But you miss the broader point if that’s what you’re thinking. There are tons of natural characteristics I have zero control over.
[3] Fireside True Story™ time: Tim was an avid cyclist on my Microsoft team. He loved cycling so much, in fact, he asked in our 1:1 to go to 32 hours a week, explaining that he wanted time to pursue his lifelong passion. I supported this. Tim later joined Google, which in 2004 definitely had worse work-life balance than Microsoft. This surprised me, so I asked Tim how things were going with his cycling when I ran into him six months later. “Biking? I’ve got zero time — I don’t do it at all. I love my job at Google!” This, from a man that swore to me his lifelong passion was being sacrificed at the altar of Microsoft profits.

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Thank you Philip for sharing your insights. If you haven’t subscribed to his Substack, do so here! We’ll be sharing my take on WLB on Molochinations as a follow-up article.