Why it's OK to leave a tech job at 5 p.m.
I'm kind of suspicious whenever I hear the phrase "work/life balance".  It strikes me as something that seeks to reinforce the industrial-revolution-era idea that my (week)days should be broken into thirds: working (not fun but pays bills), playing (fun but costs money), and sleeping.Sure, that's definitely better than working 12 hour days, but is that really the goal?  It seems that most of the fun-loving and happy people I know, regardless of their financial situation, don't operate in such a world.A good friend and startup founder (who you might think would tend towards free-market/libertarianism, since he works very hard and surely wants to be compensated for it) asks me: we can feed and clothe and house everyone, so why don't we?  Why isn't work optional?  People who work hard to make a dent in the universe will anyway, and people who just mess around don't really get much done at work anyway, so why keep up the charade?  How many great ideas (or works of art) are stuck in somebody's brain simply because they don't know how to make that idea pay the rent?I'm a programmer -- or at least, of all the things I've done in my life, that's the one I've been paid the most money for.  But personally, I hate that it's always indoors and sedentary.  It's unfortunate that society places so much value on an activity that is arguably bad for my physical and mental health.  So why are virtually all programming jobs (ostensibly) full-time, i.e., 40 hours?  A programmer's salary is great, but why can't I work 20 hours as a programmer, and 20 hours as a tree-planter, or teaching rock climbing to high school kids, for maybe 55% of a programmer's salary?  Out of all the possible ways of dividing up my time, spending all daylight hours indoors writing code is perhaps the worst I can imagine.I know I don't have all the answers, but I think that after a decade of work, I'm starting to know what questions to ask.  If I find myself asking about "work/life balance", I've already lost, because it means I'm admitting that the "work" is something I know I won't love doing.  Certainly some people have no problem breaking their day up like this, but I can't, and I suspect I'm not alone.