site banner

Wellness Wednesday for November 23, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

my wife doesn't work, but wants to go back when kids are a bit older and that will alleviate the money problem to some degree. Homeschooling might be the default choice if we can't make the budget work otherwise. perhaps, i gave too much circumstantial detail. What i am trying to get at is I'm looking for a way to kickstart my earning potential, but can't crater it in the short term to do so, and i'm not hung up on a lot of other "job satisfaction" criteria beyond balancing family life.

I'm willing to do extra work, but want to find a strategy that will pay off well.

My big fear with #1 above is that even if I find a modest improvement that I may have hit a plateau or ceiling and digging in will only lose more time as I'm already mid 30s. As far as I can tell, it will be a long time with no guarantees to hit director level title/salaries internally, and externally I'm not competitive enough to up-jump levels.

On the other end of the spectrum, my fear with #4 is that I'm too old and established to make a major restart even if its at the bottom of a more lucrative ladder.

Im most curious about folks here in software dev roles' thoughts. especially if you got into it later

#2 and #3 are somewhere in between, strategies that might set me back temporarily, but with the goal of kickstarting momentum in hopes of reaching escape velocity in my current track. The big risk here is that I waste a lot of slack adn resources in the near term only to not succeed or blow up on the launchpad.