In my experience, you have to make sacrifices. Everything in life is a trade-off in one eaybor another.
I gave up my nice car and doing track days. Many of my time consuming hobbies that involved going somewhere have been greatly reduced or eliminated. I tried replacing them with smaller hobbies at home while I can watch the kid - like small batch beer brewing or learning bass guitar.
Career-wise I have accepted that I will not be promoted and will remain an average midlevel dev for the foreseeable future, mostly due to the cultural expectation that you have to put in more hours to be higher level (and some past decisions still dragging me down). I also acknowledge that I can't afford to changes jobs, eventhough I hate my current job. I need the money to support my family.
The responsibilities that come with marriage and kids is vastly understated - it can be absolutely crushing. If it weren't for these responsibilities, I would have changed jobs, been a senior dev or tech lead, made and saved more money, and likely would have been able to move to a lower cost area to retire early.
Hmm I can maybe understand why you think you’ll be a mid level dev without putting in hours.. you didn’t mention your location so not sure.
But why in the world can’t you afford to change jobs? Plenty of places need mid level devs and it doesn’t cost anything to change jobs.. in fact they usually pay you more.
The company I'm at requires longer hours for promotions (unofficially of course). I worked as a tech lead and the a senior dev a few years ago. They wouldn't promote me unless I worked at least an extra hour per day.
That system ended up being outsourced and I had to get a new position at the same company. The tech was obscure (FileNet) and thevonky other position I could get was in equally obscure tech (Neoxam). There I became the ASC for the system across 6 teams and two departments - a role typically reserved for senior devs and above. Then they cut the budget in half and did some stuff that I didnt agree with and wouldn't want to be responsible for the security of. So now I'm on a team with modern tech (AWS). It still feels like extra hours are required and they also expect me to be an expert in multiple stacks/systems simultaneously, which is tough. I also feel like, what's the point? The company keeps breaking their own policies and my expertise is just throwaway in their eyes.
Once I become an expert in AWS (which will take a long time the way the work is structured) then I can maybe switch companies. It's still a risk since I have a family to support and I'm responsible for basically all the bills.
I gave up my nice car and doing track days. Many of my time consuming hobbies that involved going somewhere have been greatly reduced or eliminated. I tried replacing them with smaller hobbies at home while I can watch the kid - like small batch beer brewing or learning bass guitar.
Career-wise I have accepted that I will not be promoted and will remain an average midlevel dev for the foreseeable future, mostly due to the cultural expectation that you have to put in more hours to be higher level (and some past decisions still dragging me down). I also acknowledge that I can't afford to changes jobs, eventhough I hate my current job. I need the money to support my family.
The responsibilities that come with marriage and kids is vastly understated - it can be absolutely crushing. If it weren't for these responsibilities, I would have changed jobs, been a senior dev or tech lead, made and saved more money, and likely would have been able to move to a lower cost area to retire early.