Soft Skills Engineering · Jamison Dance and Dave Smith

Episode 461: How to do side projects with a family and demanding job and my company promised me a raise, but didn't give it

·33 min·3 clips

Dave argues that work-life balance is a harmful goal and life should be about harmonious design.

This episode of Soft Skills Engineering offers advice on balancing side projects with family and a demanding job, and handling a broken promise about a promotion raise. Hosts Dave Smith and Jamison Dance provide weekly career guidance for software engineers. An anonymous senior engineer at a FAANG company works 45-50 hours weekly, has a family, and is obsessed with an AI-based static analysis product idea. They ask how others with similar responsibilities find time for side projects. The second question comes from "M Play," a senior engineer whose company promoted them but withheld the expected salary increase, promising a review in six months that also yielded nothing. Dave shares that he largely abandoned side projects as his personal and work responsibilities grew, viewing time allocation in focused periods rather than perfect balance. Jamison critiques the "work-life balance" concept as a harmful goal, advocating for life components to harmoniously support each other instead. The hosts suggest discussing the side project with one's spouse, noting that successful tech entrepreneurs over 40 are often divorced due to time demands. One proposed hack is to ruthlessly audit and reallocate time spent on streaming or social media using phone tracking apps. Another is to leverage a FAANG income to pay someone else for time-intensive parts of the work. For the compensation issue, the hosts note the current job market makes finding a better-paying role harder than in previous years. They state an employee's ultimate leverage is quitting, but wielding it is costly. They advise expressing disappointment to one's manager about the broken promise while possibly job searching. The hosts debate whether escalating the issue in writing to company leadership is prudent, with one suggesting it could make you a "retention risk" top of mind for future raises. The tone is conversational and humorous, blending practical advice with personal anecdotes and lighthearted banter. Listeners seeking pragmatic strategies for career and time management dilemmas will appreciate this episode. Those looking for highly structured or purely technical content might find the tangents and humor less engaging.

As heard by us

A brisk, practical talk about side project tradeoffs, family time, and making room for what matters.

Soft Skills Engineering episode 461 turns a side project problem into a plain talk about tradeoffs. Dave Smith and Jameson Dance keep the pace moving, but they do not dodge the awkward parts: talking with a spouse, finding time that is truly discretionary, and admitting that…

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Why you'd press play

For when your ambition keeps competing with your calendar.

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