Who said anything about working harder?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45089377

The company gets a simple deal from me. They put the amount of money in my account they agreed to every month and in return they get 40-45 hours a week from me and all of my experience and skills.

They want me to fly out to a customer’s site or sit on a zoom call to close a deal? They got me. They want me to lead a large cloud implementation? No problem. They want a 50+ page management consulting style assessment with pretty diagrams? Say the word. They have a customer with an empty AWS account and they want someone who can do AWS architecture from the “DevOps” [sic] perspective and development? Say the word.

What they don’t get from me is burnout, time away from my wife and exercise in the evening, weekends or on call work. They get 40-45 hours of work from me.

It doesn’t take that much time to write down a summary of what you accomplished every quarter and keep an updated resume and in my case go on LinkedIn and post a banal “thought leadership” bullshit post once a quarter to keep me on the top of people’s mind if things go sideways at my current employer.

I would much rather be in my position where interviewing means some behavioral questions and talking to people than having to grind leetcode and reverse a btree on the whiteboard.

Respectfully, You are not putting in 40--45 hours a week if you are

>I’m 51 and I stay interview ready. My resume and my career documents are updated quarterly and I keep my network warm.

All of the extra bits of work you have to do outside of the 40-45 to stay "interview ready" count as work, youre just not getting paid.

Speak to other professional fields about the requirements they have for getting a job. Even in ones where there is an expectation of continuing education like for doctors, that is usually covered both in time and money by the employers of said doctors, not just something they are expected to moonlight on.

The other professions are even more agahst when they hear things like having to go through 10 round interviews or being grilled on the same set of college basics that dont get used in the day job, as a part of every single interview

At some point since the dotcom bubble, employers figured out a way to convince software engineers that since a bunch of nerds who were interested in this skillset as a hobby were doing it in their free time, the rest of us should be doing that too