Senior SWE @ Stealth

Erin Pangilinan

Underrated:

(1) spatial computing, web3/blockchain/crypto and AI - for the last like 10 years only now are people starting to get it.

2) Company swag, conference swag, even the Drake jacket with the Apple logo from WWDC in the 90s is worth hundreds to thousands of dollars now. I love the 90s vintage inspired swag from Apple’s WWDC conference this year. 

Overrated: 

1) people who tell me their startup vertical is more valuable and important than yours because of just $ from the most shallow and vain metric 

People who tell me that working towards advancing healthtech, meter, and biotech impacting millions of people with disease is useless too small of a market and that selling CRM software is more successful and practical and meaningful (ya someone told me who sold his company to Salesforce and told me old people with neurodegenerative brain disease and cancer didn’t matter because the market was too small and generally all of HealthTech was too small…and ya a relative worked as an early Salesforce employee and also founded and sold a cloud company, whose relative also had this disease). It’s interesting that people only find value in sheer numbers and don’t care for humanity…arguably that happened right before COVID-19 so this stayed with me a lot with a great distaste. 

2) Designers that say they won’t take free swag because they’re too eco-friendly and chic to take a new t-shirt to their wardrobe for a tech company they work for or help out with as a volunteer open source contribute (this has happened to me multiple times on email specifically from designers who declined free swag and they cite the same reason), I’m all for sustainability but I wonder if they just don’t like the design because they didn’t the design the logo of that company instead lol. 

As a recovering workaholic who used to work on average 60-80 hours a week and thinking 100 hours wasn’t enough to meet my goals (everyone on the Obama campaign and us alumni of it are hardcore), was not only unsustainable and made me so unhappy, but also had long term effects on my burnout for years. Yes, I was more productive, I did more in 1.5 years than I had in 5, but I also suffered injury that lasted me 10+ years, and folks died on that job, and on my job after that.

**tl:dr: working more hours can make you more productive, but it won’t make you happy, it isn’t maintainable on term, and you can suffer the consequences to your health long-term.**

I don’t think I counted the exact number of hours doing my last startup per week (I was founder and CTO managing 4 ICs and then a bunch of other business stuffs/depts), but what I can say is that the scope of it was about 3-4 companies in one and I was burned out for 6 months. Oddly, I overrode my nervous system and had the audacity to think I could start another startup company or fund right away (right before I bled out and almost died from a bear death experience), and still wanted to do so afterward. I went into a dark place after that.

**What it means is: overwork can kill you, and literally, and it isn’t just the number of hours you put in, but the mental and physical taxation on the body and mind that does the number.**

Moving forward, outside of benefits like fertility and basic pay with stock options and healthcare, I look for somewhere that isn’t so friggin’ demanding that the work I do is not valued and takes up every waking minute of my life, whether or not it was for someone else’s company or my own.

**Rest is important and so is being realistic and manageable with expectations for yourself and the team around you to execute. I** worked in what you called the most toxic cultures in various industries at the highest levels and while it taught me a lot about discipline, the values of efficiency and top world class performance and running everything literally like a military op by the nanosecond, it also taught me the ways I was treated less than human and that to expect everyone to operate like this long-term may not be the best. **While this may sound like dedication and commitment and sacrifice, there is a borderline between insane and reasonable. Use your own judgement here, but even if you sleep 6-8 hours a night, eat healthy, workout, etc. and work 40 hours a week, it can still be a lot and that should be enough.**

**3 Various Cultures of Work in Tech and the 'ideal outlier'**

1. **The Cut # of Hours and hope it solves the problem approach:** Other cultures of tech companies like Team Treehouse tried at 30 hours per week to be productive but I heard changed since then too.
2. **The scope it smaller so it doesn't hyperscale and need VC money so we run lean approach (the ideal method, but not necessarily the right option):** I also heard similar stories of Basecamp with regard to scale of the company and that ultimately while everyone dreams of a work-life balance utopia for a big tech company or a startup, there is always a chance of overwork if it isn’t a lifestyle business. Still, some tech companies operate like a lifestyle business or consultancy and that can also burn you out as the primary owner not at scale.
3. **Work-Life Balance Ideal -- but you might not get promoted or make as much money** - I also know folks close to me who achieve perfect work-life balance, with all the stock options and salary (but less pay for the last 9 years like thinks heir max was 100K), work less than 40 hours a week in tech, go on rock climbing and PTO for at least a quarter of the year, but are “always on” remote on Slack 24/7 almost so that is another thing to consider.

**What this means: know what value you are trading your time and energy for (money etc.). and choose accordingly.**

**Ideal Outlier:** While this can be seen as a false paradigm (the 3 above don't apply to you) and you can get paid $600K+ working less than 20 hrs a week. Comment// \[I'm sure that exists ***SOMEWHERE***, but find that it's reserved from very rare, high level, very senior ICs, and my friends who were all acqui-hires at their startup that sold it because they couldn't scale like FAANGMULA and get paid $1-2M/year at minimum and chill all day on their product they're working on integrating into a larger product from the acquiring company. Many of these people leave to eventually found their own companies again as serial entrepreneurs (and work hella hours again) or become VCs (Venture Capitalists), angel investors etc.\].

**My bottom line: I personally wouldn’t overwork myself that ridiculously again, if anything if I did 60-80 hours a week it would be because the job required it and I was all in, or I had a side hustle and more grad school that totaled another 10-20 hours a week**. I also have ex-Meta and ex-Amazon engineering friends who regularly work 60 hours a week and still volunteered for leadership roles for two non-profits (mine and another friend’s non-profit), but that didn’t last.

AND if you ***still*** don't believe me and have been an indie dev consultant, you can read Jonathan Stark's great list-serve against all hourly billing (for independent contractors) and think about the value you provide, so your work is not valued based by the number of hours you bill, and how you bill varies by project and measured by value. This is different for FTE (Full Time Employees) at various tech companies and then it's just about 'are you getting the job done' balance with health and money exchange. <https://jonathanstark.com/>

Mid-Level Software Engineer at Other

I also group by tag in Upnote (used to use Inkdrop and Quiver for this), and also use Skeema for bookmark archive by project that I can toggle through with search within the browser. It is helpful and nothing is ever lost. 

I’ve been using Sunsama for a while. I started timing almost everything I do when I get out of bed and generated data viz to see where my time went, there’s also an archive. I’ll share a referral code if interested just DM me on Slack.

GANTT charts, Notion and other product / project management systems help, so does body doubling and pomodoro technique to keep me a little more accountable and less lonely (tactic many Neurodivergent and ADHD folks use). 

I echo all the comments made by Lee especially. Part of the reason I ever considered just going back to IC is that while I can facilitate and lead meetings and manage people (a rarer skill I find with engineering and technician folks the more I move up), but I felt like I was getting too far away from code, too removed from the technology and contributing what I found valuable as opposed to “my team did X.” It’s great to be a leader, but knowing I had more of my fingerprint on something more technically made me and still makes me most happy. Most of the happy CTO and founder types never leave coding a bit. Just my two cents. 

Data structures and algorithms (DSA) interviews are the most notorious in tech, leading to millions of engineers over-grinding LeetCode. In reality, behavioral interviews are the most important interview type, and most engineers unfortunately suck at them.

[Course] Master The Behavioral Interview As A Software Engineer

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