A question for Philip: in the post, you wrote "the only recourse to progressing faster than your peers is to outwork them — with longer hours or more focus and efficacy. Ideally both". I feel like we often place too much emphasis on the "long hours" and overlook the importance of "focus", while IMO if you just "focus" on the right things, you already outwork your peer ~70%. As a long-hourer myself, I found it demotivating when I kept chasing down the rabbit hole of the task at hand and lost the vision on the bigger picture. Only until it's too late into the project that I realized the missed opportunity to expand the scope of my work and make the most impact out of it. Do you have any advice on how to focus on the right things?
Great point about focus. Much better to jog in a straight line than to run serpentine. 90% of efficiency is choosing the right thing to work on, not hyper-optimizing keyboard shortcuts and commute lifehacks.
The difficulty is knowing what to focus on. This is something I've gotten better at with time (e.g. recognizing when a certain direction is likely to fail, or figuring out what I'm doing will have no impact on the broader team), but not something easily articulated. I still feel there's a lot for me to learn in the domain of picking the right problems or right approaches.
Late to the convo. Regarding your point on "working smart not working hard" - I thought the whole point of "working smart" is identifying the important things to work on? Am I missing something?
I think you're right — when most people say "work smart," they probably mean some combination of "choose the right things to work on" and "work in the most efficient way with the best tools and approaches." In my experience, when you work on really strong teams, everyone is pretty much already working smart (i.e. I've never been on a super strong team where some teammates were wasting time or working unnecessarily sub-optimally).
Great question. IMO it’s not an easy question to answer. Everyone has a different framework. Working at Meta definitely helps sharpen this framework :) I’m happy to share mine in a couple of weeks.
Thanks for writing this. In a post you linked to about why America is richer than Europe, the author actually says that in recent times, that wealth gap is due more to productivity than hours worked. A big part of that productivity is that the tech industry is more developed in the US than in Europe. The author also claims that the reason for that is more idiosyncratic (Silicon Valley happens to be in the US, even though doing business in California isn't nice) than systematic.
I think this is actually not quite the whole picture.
Silicon Valley is indeed productive. I question whether it's sufficient to create the entire gap. Europeans do work significantly fewer hours than Americans due to the greater abundance of holidays. Additionally, Europe has allowed in truly vast numbers of legal immigrants from very low productivity parts of the world, which drags down the average.
There isn't a difference in skill between the average US and European tech worker, in my experience. People in America (as distinct from Americans) are much more likely to start companies, and Europeans are content to work easier jobs in subservient positions to the Americans, whilst putting in fewer hours.
I had this discussion with many engineers in my career, Everybody has same hours 9 to 5. Some people decide to walk, some decide to run and some keeps running even after 5 PM may be t9 AM to 9 PM.
Everyone is different, Some just own the Job and some just finish the job.
Thanks for the post and I love the format! I've seen both posts and while I think both sides make valid points, I'd side with Phil on this one from personal experience. The people who I respect and who have achieved a lot in their careers have all worked many hours. On the flipside, I've never met someone who has achieved a lot but doesn't work much.
A question to Phil: how easy is it to put the brakes to focus on different aspects of your life? In my mind, I imagine there'll be times where you're putting your 120% into growing as fast as possible, and other times you'd want to dial back to focus on relationships and family. From your experience, how easy is it to move between the two? Do you think it's fine to have slower career growth at some points in your life and faster growth at others?
For me, slowing down was easy once I had made the decision. But I bet it's not for many people, because it comes with adjustments in career. For instance, you should expect not to grow as quickly, and to be satisfied with peers who will grow faster than you. This wasn't always easy for me to observe, but I knew the choice I had made and I'm very happy to have had more normal working hours for periods of my career.
I think you're right that explicitly choosing when to be faster and slower in career is a smart thing (as opposed to being unconscious of the choices you've implicitly made, which I was for many years).
I'm 57 and all the Employee of the Year awards and professional accolades I accumulated are long forgotten. But I've still got my kids and I'm glad they saw me make an effort to carve out time for them.
After accomplishing all of this, I have 2 questions:
- Was it worth it?
- What were the motivations?
For example, I could definitely see a reason for "putting in the hours" if you are after prestige or you have a deep desire of achieving a big title. But if your motivation is compensation based, I believe that you have many alternatives nowadays that are not working under an employer to get a bigger salary. You can, for example, work on a personal business. For a compensation based motivation, I just don't know if it's worth it. Could you elaborate?
The answer to whether it's worth it is going to primarily depend on a particular person's values. If you're asking whether it was worth it specifically for me, having spent many hardworking hours early in my career to grow quickly, it definitely was.
Wasn't about the money for me. More a sense of personal growth and accomplishment. But if a person were primarily concerned about money, I'd still say working longer hours at many jobs yields better compensation in the long run than not.
Ever hear of effortless attraction? You mentioned manifestation. Ever do it? I was promoted at Capital One to Principal Engineer in under a year and never slept at the office. Of course I put 60 hours a week here and there, some late nights at home. Actually never even mentioned a promotion to my boss and I didn’t expect I’d be promoted but of course took it being very grateful. In a matter of weeks my manager was pushing me to get to the lead level ( which I didn’t even know if I wanted )
I also don’t have a computer science degree. Have a BS in MIS and a 3.14 gpa. I have an AWS certified solutions architect certification I passed on the first try with hardly any AWS experience.
I realize the game is different in big tech as opposed to big banking tech. Whenever I’ve worked so hard at something that I thought I wanted so bad, I fell short.
You can’t underestimate emotional intelligence, especially in software engineering where it’s severely lacking.
Have you ever truly asked yourself if you’re happy? No regrets in your life, happy with what you have. Or is your happiness defined by your next achievement? Do you get that emptiness and then need to “pursue,” the next thing?
If you had full control over your life and could choose would you have the life you have now? Would you have the same job, family, wife, children, house, salary, etc. or would you change anything? If not good for you. Did you really think about it though asking yourself the right questions? Would you choose to have it all if you believed you could? Or would you choose to not be happy?
I’m not selling anything btw, just wondering. Nice post.
A question for Philip: in the post, you wrote "the only recourse to progressing faster than your peers is to outwork them — with longer hours or more focus and efficacy. Ideally both". I feel like we often place too much emphasis on the "long hours" and overlook the importance of "focus", while IMO if you just "focus" on the right things, you already outwork your peer ~70%. As a long-hourer myself, I found it demotivating when I kept chasing down the rabbit hole of the task at hand and lost the vision on the bigger picture. Only until it's too late into the project that I realized the missed opportunity to expand the scope of my work and make the most impact out of it. Do you have any advice on how to focus on the right things?
Great point about focus. Much better to jog in a straight line than to run serpentine. 90% of efficiency is choosing the right thing to work on, not hyper-optimizing keyboard shortcuts and commute lifehacks.
The difficulty is knowing what to focus on. This is something I've gotten better at with time (e.g. recognizing when a certain direction is likely to fail, or figuring out what I'm doing will have no impact on the broader team), but not something easily articulated. I still feel there's a lot for me to learn in the domain of picking the right problems or right approaches.
Late to the convo. Regarding your point on "working smart not working hard" - I thought the whole point of "working smart" is identifying the important things to work on? Am I missing something?
I think you're right — when most people say "work smart," they probably mean some combination of "choose the right things to work on" and "work in the most efficient way with the best tools and approaches." In my experience, when you work on really strong teams, everyone is pretty much already working smart (i.e. I've never been on a super strong team where some teammates were wasting time or working unnecessarily sub-optimally).
+1 same question.
Please share more thoughts on focus, and the right things? When do you drop exploring a rabbit hole?
Great question. IMO it’s not an easy question to answer. Everyone has a different framework. Working at Meta definitely helps sharpen this framework :) I’m happy to share mine in a couple of weeks.
would love to know your framework! Looking forward to it
Thank you for writing this Philip!
Thanks for writing this. In a post you linked to about why America is richer than Europe, the author actually says that in recent times, that wealth gap is due more to productivity than hours worked. A big part of that productivity is that the tech industry is more developed in the US than in Europe. The author also claims that the reason for that is more idiosyncratic (Silicon Valley happens to be in the US, even though doing business in California isn't nice) than systematic.
Thanks for your story on Tim though, I can totally relate.
I think this is actually not quite the whole picture.
Silicon Valley is indeed productive. I question whether it's sufficient to create the entire gap. Europeans do work significantly fewer hours than Americans due to the greater abundance of holidays. Additionally, Europe has allowed in truly vast numbers of legal immigrants from very low productivity parts of the world, which drags down the average.
There isn't a difference in skill between the average US and European tech worker, in my experience. People in America (as distinct from Americans) are much more likely to start companies, and Europeans are content to work easier jobs in subservient positions to the Americans, whilst putting in fewer hours.
I had this discussion with many engineers in my career, Everybody has same hours 9 to 5. Some people decide to walk, some decide to run and some keeps running even after 5 PM may be t9 AM to 9 PM.
Everyone is different, Some just own the Job and some just finish the job.
Thanks for the post and I love the format! I've seen both posts and while I think both sides make valid points, I'd side with Phil on this one from personal experience. The people who I respect and who have achieved a lot in their careers have all worked many hours. On the flipside, I've never met someone who has achieved a lot but doesn't work much.
A question to Phil: how easy is it to put the brakes to focus on different aspects of your life? In my mind, I imagine there'll be times where you're putting your 120% into growing as fast as possible, and other times you'd want to dial back to focus on relationships and family. From your experience, how easy is it to move between the two? Do you think it's fine to have slower career growth at some points in your life and faster growth at others?
For me, slowing down was easy once I had made the decision. But I bet it's not for many people, because it comes with adjustments in career. For instance, you should expect not to grow as quickly, and to be satisfied with peers who will grow faster than you. This wasn't always easy for me to observe, but I knew the choice I had made and I'm very happy to have had more normal working hours for periods of my career.
I think you're right that explicitly choosing when to be faster and slower in career is a smart thing (as opposed to being unconscious of the choices you've implicitly made, which I was for many years).
I'm 57 and all the Employee of the Year awards and professional accolades I accumulated are long forgotten. But I've still got my kids and I'm glad they saw me make an effort to carve out time for them.
After accomplishing all of this, I have 2 questions:
- Was it worth it?
- What were the motivations?
For example, I could definitely see a reason for "putting in the hours" if you are after prestige or you have a deep desire of achieving a big title. But if your motivation is compensation based, I believe that you have many alternatives nowadays that are not working under an employer to get a bigger salary. You can, for example, work on a personal business. For a compensation based motivation, I just don't know if it's worth it. Could you elaborate?
The answer to whether it's worth it is going to primarily depend on a particular person's values. If you're asking whether it was worth it specifically for me, having spent many hardworking hours early in my career to grow quickly, it definitely was.
Wasn't about the money for me. More a sense of personal growth and accomplishment. But if a person were primarily concerned about money, I'd still say working longer hours at many jobs yields better compensation in the long run than not.
Ever hear of effortless attraction? You mentioned manifestation. Ever do it? I was promoted at Capital One to Principal Engineer in under a year and never slept at the office. Of course I put 60 hours a week here and there, some late nights at home. Actually never even mentioned a promotion to my boss and I didn’t expect I’d be promoted but of course took it being very grateful. In a matter of weeks my manager was pushing me to get to the lead level ( which I didn’t even know if I wanted )
I also don’t have a computer science degree. Have a BS in MIS and a 3.14 gpa. I have an AWS certified solutions architect certification I passed on the first try with hardly any AWS experience.
I realize the game is different in big tech as opposed to big banking tech. Whenever I’ve worked so hard at something that I thought I wanted so bad, I fell short.
You can’t underestimate emotional intelligence, especially in software engineering where it’s severely lacking.
Have you ever truly asked yourself if you’re happy? No regrets in your life, happy with what you have. Or is your happiness defined by your next achievement? Do you get that emptiness and then need to “pursue,” the next thing?
If you had full control over your life and could choose would you have the life you have now? Would you have the same job, family, wife, children, house, salary, etc. or would you change anything? If not good for you. Did you really think about it though asking yourself the right questions? Would you choose to have it all if you believed you could? Or would you choose to not be happy?
I’m not selling anything btw, just wondering. Nice post.
I will add that my previous rating before promotion to PA was Too New.
How was your relationship with your wife during that time? Was she supportive of your long hours?