Researcher says careers should be longer but have more breaks along the way | Hacker News Reader

Researcher says careers should be longer but have more breaks along the way

work.qz.com

57 pointsrchaudhary19 comments

Since Dr. Carstensen's opinion seems to be landing on the wrong side of the HN consensus, let me play the devil's advocate.

> “We need a new model,” Carstensen says of the current norms around career pacing. The current one “doesn’t work, because it fails to recognize all the other demands on our time. People are working full-time at the same time they’re raising children. You never get a break. You never get to step out. You never get to refresh. . . .We go at this unsustainable pace, and then pull the plug.”

I believe this explanation is intended to sell the idea, but I don't believe this should be the motivation for driving towards a different model. Rather, I'd suggest the motivation to be to enable "productive unemployment" as automation continues to spread. Hear me out.

If there's a consistent and unwavering societal expectation to enter the workplace full time between the ages of 19-22, there'll also be a persistent risk of political upheaval when employment numbers stagnate or falter and when people feel as if they're not achieving what's expected of them (or generally when they're unable to eat), a scenario which will continue to play out and perhaps even become endemic as automation and various branches of AI capture more and more unskilled and skilled labor categories, respectively. Shifting labor expectations allows for a more potentially graceful transition over the course of a few generations to a model where people can choose which direction to take their lives, either studying something in depth before diving into a niche that still needs human talent or focusing on exploring their own personal passions as the world around them continues to operate mostly automatically.

It's a very Gene Rodenberry-esque position to take, and it's perhaps ludicrously optimistic, but a model like what Dr. Carstensen is pitching might make sense in facilitating a gradual transition to a more automated world.

This is the very basic kernel of an idea, and I expect what I've just voiced is crude enough to be utterly dismantled on deeper analysis, but I voice it to get minds thinking moreso than to say "Laura's right and you guys are all wrong"-- nah. It's just a passing thought.

I'm currently working 26 weeks a year (one on, one off) and it is awesome. I realize that I'm very lucky to be able to do this - I have low expenses, almost no debt, and programming pays well enough for me to live comfortably on about half my previous salary.

I used to be planning for early retirement, but this trade-off seems safer. After all, I could spontaneously die the day after I retire and then what was all that work for?

This is really cool, haven't thought about it before. Do you work for the same company or do you find a new job every year?

They're taking about having a 9-day weekend, not a 6-month vacation.

I see. I read it as 1 year on, 1 year off.

I've been wondering about how do get a gig like this for some time.

Are you a regular salaried employee? How did you approach your employer about entering this arrangement?

Yes, I am salaried (before and after I cut my hours). We are a small company of 20-ish people but I was the only IT member. So my main selling point was increasing the bus factor: what if our website goes down and I'm not available? The owners didn't want to increase the IT budget, which worked fine for my plan. I just had to find someone who was willing to "share my job" with me. One of my friends was willing; he has his own LLC set up for contracting work so this gig gives him reliable income while he tries out other work on the side.

I can now also say that for about 50% of my previous salary I am probably providing 70-80% of my previous value. When it's time to go back to work, I'm actually eager, and very productive. So I hope I can use this anecdote to convince any future employers to agree to a similar arrangement.

I worked really hard for 10 years after grad school, then retired for 4 years to have a kid. Changed careers and worked hard or another 8 years, and then retired for 3 years when we had to deal with an extended family illness. I'm currently on the 4th year of my 3rd career. Working hard and taking long breaks has really given me the opportunity to learn and grow, and stay young (most of my team won't believe I'm twice their age).

Curious, how do you prep for comebacks after 3years break? Do you switch fields with each career? Do you try to keep your toolset sharp on almost daily basis since day one of your long break? Thanks

I owe it to intellectual curiosity as a lifelong learner, by accumulating skills and building upon them, and having time to think about problems. With the light speed innovation of business, finance and tech these days, the breaks actually gave me time to catch up. It was much harder to do this working heads down. I was an early user of Coursera and edX as well.

How did you afford to take off for so long during your mini-retirements?

I pursued some highly compensated careers, and I didn't join my colleagues splurging and partying like no tomorrow.

I don't buy it.

I used to pursue highly compensated careers, and now I don't rely on a paycheck. I occasionally pursue some high value commission deals just because I have the network for it, and this can top up my accounts whenever.

I travel a lot and go to a lot of coveted events: it isn't that expensive.

If you already had a highly compensated career (low six figures, high 5 figures in a no-income-tax state), your biggest issue was time.

Stock market fluctuations cost more than going out. Being on the wrong side of the market costs more than the last minute flight to the other side of the world in the middle of summer.

What do you think your friends really did that you abstained from? I'm sure you have a couple of observations, but I think the real conclusion is that you missed out. Quitting work and raising a child is a coveted outcome, for some, but I don't think you know if your colleagues have stunted wealth just because they did things more fulfilling to them.

>"There is no real reason why we need to work this way. The hardest thing is, how does [change] start?” Carstensen said. But “once it starts, there’s very little question that it’s going to roll on."

I will continue to work intensely for my first 10 years of career and retire. Additionally, I'm raising my children to do the same.

The rest of the slaves can feel free to "take time off and work until they're 80".

I can't believe how far our of touch this women is from the nature of dominance hierarchies and productivity.

There is a lot riding on the word “shouldn’t”.

She sounds like she is saying we should structure society in such a manner that this is possible.

She’s not saying individually you could try this at the present time.

Let me guess he's tenure, and got it at age 40....

Life should not be about work and productivity. Retirement at 80? This researcher has totally lost touch with the reality of society outside of Silicon Valley.

She's advocating almost the exact opposite of the stereotypical Silicon Valley model.

This is the fourth paragraph of the article:

> "Rather than a four-decade professional sprint that ends abruptly at 65, Carstensen argues, we should be planning for marathon careers that last longer but have more breaks along the way for learning, family needs, and obligations outside the workplace."

Retirement at 80? Both my in-laws are gone, both cancer victims, one died at 67, the other 74. My mother is 81 with severe dementia, she doesn't know who I am. My father, the only really left standing, has two hip replacements and one knee, and has had a quadruple bypass operation as well. He thinks he can still work, but the reality is that he can barely care for himself and my mother at all.

Now, based on talking to my parents off and on for the last couple of decades, I can assure you that what I stated above is not at all unusual, not in the least. My dad has outlived his entire cohort of friends and associates. All of them are already dead.

So, can we please get back to reality on the whole work thing? You aren't going to be working at age 80. Almost nobody is capable of doing so, the ones who do are the far outliers. I often wonder how guys like Trump, a man in his 70s, can be so energetic knowing what I know about absolutely everyone else that I know who is in their 70s? It makes zero sense. Warren Buffett is another weird outlier. Just retire already.

My plan is to retire as absolutely soon as possible and work part-time if I need to. Health insurance is the one stumbling block in the US, it's damn expensive and getting worse each year and will have to hit a breaking point sooner or later. I took 3 months off from work last year--quit a consulting gig and didn't take another job. It was great, but also nerve-wracking to get re-employed after that. I found myself having to explain way too much about why I did that.

Another anecdote: I've been visiting with a career counselor. So far my biggest takeaway from that is that most people who write code for a living go to a career counselor because they don't want to write code for a living anymore. Not one person counseled towards tech! And here I am, trying to squeeze a few more years out of a programming career!

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