[aprdm]

I have never worked more than 40h a week and always climbed the ladder.

Look for other companies I guess ? A good signal for me is when there are loads of people with families in the company whom have worked there for more than 5-10 years.

A red signal is a minority of people being experienced or having families.

[quietthrow]

So I get this right you are saying what has worked for you is to find companies where most people are middle aged with family obligation and have become comfortable in their jobs. And there you can differentiate much easily and move up faster than you would at a cutthroat place. as even with a little more effort in such a place you will stand out which can be done while maintaining a 40 hour week?

I take it you are single and/or have no other family obligations which gives you an “edge”?

[aprdm]

That was a lot of reading in-between the lines!

The company I work has a lot of very eager and smart people who put 40h a week and have families. They are experts in their field of work (Image processing).

I would say I have been climbing the ladder because I have good soft-skills and strong leadership skills. It happened naturally and was not part of an evil plan or something I tried too hard.

I am OK with not being a programming wizard or using all the latest tech in every project. I am very good in getting people to work together productively and having them delivering projects constantly.

I have gone from Senior to Lead in the past two companies I've been at within 6 months and now am now growing a department.

[jameshush]

Ding ding ding! This person understands. You will NEVER be able to grow a department if you work 80 hours a week hero coding. The longer you work the more irritated you become. The more irritated you are the less people will like you. When enough people hate you you’ll be fired.

Learned the hard way in my early 20s. Now I only put in the extra hours when the site is down, I’m on pager duty, and we’re losing 100k+ dollars every few minutes. I’m friendly and very organized. I manage my own Jira board and let my boss know when we need more people on a project. Definitely not a programming wizard but boy can I get two different departments working together.

[aprdm]

Yeah it is crazy to hear some people work 60h as the norm and 80h, wtf?

I've done a couple of 50-60h stints in my career for rolling out a big project globally or things like that and I was... absolutely... exhausted and drained.

I couldn't think straight, I was being rude to people I love.

To think that people can actually put this amount of hours constantly (am talking 60h!!!) is mind blowing. Maybe my brain is just different and it can't do more than the regular hours.