This may not be true anti-work, but it involves less work and going against social norms.
Hello, I have 4 years experience in software engineering at financial institutions with 3 at my current company. I am 100% remote and am an individual contributer.
I want to go to school in Molecular Biology and cell science for a BS and work towards a PhD in statistical genomics.
School is too expensive. While I may get scholarships, the opportunity cost to my income and 401k are massive.
Thus, I want to try talking to my manager about my company's reduced schedule professional program that allows a 3 day work week with full benefits. The key wording of the program is how this will positively impact the company.
My team has a great work life balance and has very rarely worked more than 40 hours a week the past 3 years.
I've been speaking with a confidential mentor, and he's said: 1. What if work becomes demanding and they need that extra 20 hours back? 2. What happens if school makes you miss important meetings? 3. How will people react when you are not around to help / contribute as much? 4. How does the manager make up for the teams velocity that we've established over years and is expected of us?
I feel like I've provided significant value to the company. I've been present for the start of a POC all the way through security evaluations and production deployments across the company. I know how to debug code in a pipeline from code repository configurations to deployment configurations. I know how to trouble shoot our deployment pipeline as well and read tracing data from our applications. I've built apis and provided new solutions to the company for disciplines like Chaos Engineering. I understand the framework our retail department uses for all their apis.
Simply said, I'd like to think I have value as a mentor in the company and can be a significant part time asset to make things run smoother rather than just leaving the company and forcing them to hire and train someone from scratch. I WANT to continue working for them, but I also WANT to go to school soon.
Is there any way I can make a case in my favor? Corporate ethics shouldn't have an issue with research experience in my domain as long as published papers don't name my company which is practically impossible.
I could also delay my education by 2 to 3 years so I can fully afford everything, but then when I leave, my skills in IT will get rusty over time and it'd be hard to get back into the cs industry after the bachelors if something goes wrong because the sector wants relevant experience not 3 to 4 year old experience. I also want to work part time to keep my skills sharp.
The career field I want to get into is completely different from my current corporate work. What I do in the future will likely not directly benefit my company.
If I kept this job for the next 10 years, I could have incredible savings / investments / retirement. If I pursue a PhD I'll likely be starting mostly from scratch when I graduate. But for me, this isn't solely about the money. I want to make a scientific improvement, no matter how small, with the well being in the world in mind in this increasingly distasteful planet.
My family is so focused on the money I could make, they completely reject my scientific interests. That disappoints me.
Any advice? Would it be worth leveraging forgoing a promotion and taking a pay cut in addition to my reduction of hours to justify working part time during school?
Or does it sound more sane to work until I'm financially independent completely before pursuing science even if I regret every moment I do that?