> Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well.

That would require a whole, separate article.

Many (most?) juniors grinding like that in a major company will work hard to get nowhere. Speaking from experience. Yes, I learned some lessons:

1. Get a different job. Deadend jobs definitely exist, and are quite common.

2. Ignore senior folks who say "You're whining. It's crappy everywhere. Just learn to take it."

Number 2 has been wrong every single time someone said it.

> Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family,

This is not the endorsement you think it is. I've done quite well by insisting on 40 hour weeks. I'm going to assume you're doing much better than I am, because otherwise it seems like a life wasted.

Don't get me wrong. If you want to go much farther than I have, you likely will have to grind and work hard and smart and be lucky. But I assure you - most of the people I know who worked hard are not in a better position than I am (or if they are, the difference is incremental).

You realize “pairing it back to 50 hours a week” is not a great outcome don’t you?

If I graduated post 2012 instead of 1996, I would have tied my horse to a safe BigTech company and made a lot of money in cash and liquid RSUs long before I joined a bullshit startup that statistically wouldn’t have gone anywhere.

Hell I made that choice at 46 when my youngest (step)son graduated. I chose to work at BigTech instead of getting a meaningless “CTO” founding engineer position at a startup.

This is a correct view point to have.

As you get to the downswing of your career, you should have already worked and made enough mistakes to have most of your experience. You must cruise on that experience when you are older.

When you are old, that is not the time to work and make mistakes.

That is, most of the heavy work must be done as early as you can. Eat that frog.

You need to set your bounds in every single workplace, because no one workplace can set the right boundaries for everyone.

We work in different timezones so it's a mess. Either people give up their morning or they give up their evening time.

I'm at the bottom of the chain here and have no authority to change this. Given that I'm being let go soon there's not much reason for them to care about my mental state either.

But from the time I've been here, yes, you need to set boundaries or they'll do it for you. It seems like most PMs are used to talking to robots, because that's how they talk to us lately.

“Set your own boundaries, or someone else will do it for you”

Turtles all the way down

What workplace is not?

Oh they have agency. They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations that folks of privilege do not need to be bothered with. It is immediately obvious how privileged we are compared to many others who are not a liberty of designing their lives or careers.

They're just speaking from their own place of privilege.

I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they can try to make it better for their children, if at all.

Why is this condescending? It's not their fault, it's how the system works and their bad luck in not being born into a more privileged position. For people who cannot make ends meet, trying to make ends meet takes most of their available time and energy, there's not much left to ponder about life's choices.

What it is, in my opinion, is terribly unfair. I agree with the GP commenter that us here mostly ignore this reality. And that's OK, clearly TFA is aimed at privileged people like us, not most people.