Getting Ahead: Pathways to Comfortable Career Satisfaction for the Aspirational
Looking at software career options from an earlier place, many folks find themselves both aspiring for career growth and wanting not to be plugging in 60+-hour weeks by mid-career (and rightly so!). There’s a lot of hustle culture out there that promises to get you there right away; while a few folks out there get lucky, most of this is just concealing the outside-the-office time its purporters are plugging in. In hopes of making this wide range of possibilities a little easier to navigate (and with the wish that I could give myself this same resource some twenty years ago), here’s a breakdown of some common and reliable actual paths towards career satisfaction, particularly for those that are young and hungry:
Put in the hours with your employer. Like, a lot of hours. More than 40. You need to both get in the reps and establish a reputation. It’s hard. It’s low-risk. But you’ll more than likely get where you’re aiming. This is “a job”.
Put in the hours outside of work. Put in enough at your job to get your job done, then keep going. It’ll be more than 40 in total right now. You need to get in the reps and establish a reputation. It’s harder, because you have to self-motivate. It’s medium-risk: you need to self-niche and get good enough at marketing and build an audience or a portfolio or reputation somehow, and you don’t have someone paying you from day 1 and telling you directly what they value. But it’s pretty rewarding. You might get where you’re aiming, and you’ll be at least fine in the meantime. This is “a job, plus a side project” or “a job, plus contracts/consulting”.
