Absolute Career Advice is Always a Bad Take

There is no right or wrong way to grow your career.

You should work weekends to make progress in your career at a young age. You shouldn’t work weekends and instead should protect yourself from burnout. You should get into open-source software, so you can grow a portfolio and impress potential employers. You shouldn’t get into open-source software because employers don’t want to see their employees wasting time when they could be doing paid code instead.

Does any of that sound familiar?

We are bombarded with advice from engineers and influencers all the time. Most of the time, they have the best of intentions. The problem isn’t that they’re giving advice, but that their advice is provided from the perspective that everybody is under the same constraints and has the same opportunities as they do.

This isn’t the case.

There has been a lot of unrest in the software development and startup worlds over the last few days because of this tweet:

I even dove into the replies with my take, but it got me thinking about this topic. I don’t know Jordan, but I do know that we are worlds apart based on our environments alone — I’m basing this solely on her Twitter profile stating her location as “SF & Miami.”

Where I am, the hustle isn’t quite as necessary. I work remotely, and my salary on its own is higher than the average salary for a family of 4 in my area. So for all intents and purposes, you could consider me well-off in my neighborhood.

Do I work weekends? Well, actually, yes, sometimes. In fact, I worked this past weekend, right after Jordan posted this tweet.

But that was a choice.

It’s all about choice

Last Friday, I had to make a choice. I have a deadline approaching for a client that I don’t want to disappoint. It’s a tight deadline, and I’m not sure if we will hit it.

I also have a wife and two children. Friday evening, I had to bring my son to Scouts and visit my wife’s father for his birthday.

I could have chosen to stay home and continue to work. My wife would have understood this time — looming deadline and all — and my son wouldn’t have minded since he would still have been at Scouts. My father-in-law may have even been happy to see that his daughter’s husband was so focused on keeping a roof over his daughter’s head that he could have ignored me not being there for his birthday.

But what about the next time?

Another option would have been to quit out early and take PTO time. It is allowable under our rules since it would have been only 2 hours. It likely wouldn’t have impacted the project a great deal, and nobody would have said anything this time.

But what about the next time?

This time I decided to work the weekend. I took the time with the family, I got up early this weekend and fixed the bug that I had confounded me, and then I spent time with the family.

But what about the next time?

The next time I will make another choice. And that is exactly what I am suggesting here. Any advice given to you as an absolute is advice that you should take with a grain of salt. We are not the same. We have not had the same experiences or the same constraints.

I will not tell you that you should work the weekend. I will not tell you that you shouldn’t. What I will say is you should make the choice that is right for you.

If you are working in a position that requires you to work weekends and cannot find new work, your situation might make a choice not to work weekends impossible.

If you have a much more flexible schedule but you like working shorter days, maybe a seven-day workweek works for you.

That’s what matters.

Find what works for you, and ignore absolute advice given by people who do not share your experiences.

But also avoid giving absolute advice to people whose experiences you do not share.