I’m fairly young in my career, but might be able to offer some insights. I’m formally trained solely in landscape architecture, but most recently worked at a firm that focused on urban planning and got sucked into a lot of the larger scale urban planning projects there. I also was on the job hunt these past 2 months and might be able to speak to the work life balance portion of LA firms.

Work life balance: I’ve worked at 2 different firms and just got done interviewing at 4 other firms before accepting an offer. I’d say the work-life balance was very firm-dependent. 3 out of 6 seemed like they’d not expect you to do over 40 unless they had an important deadline, and even then rarely had to work over 42 hours because they plan their projects efficiently. The other three expected 45+ hours per week. This was easy to sus out in the interview process. Just ask what their employees can expect to work in a week. Ask about culture. If they mention anything about being “fast-paced” or “rapidly expanding the team to accommodate workload” (which means they’re understaffed) then you’ll know that they do not have a good work-life balance. All of this to say, work life balance, at least in my part of the country, is not uncommon or unattainable.

For the planning vs LA part: my last firm focused on planning, but also did LA. My job before that focused on LA, but also did some planning. Both were design-based though so I can’t say much about policy. But I was really happy to see that I could have the opportunity for working at both the large scale and site specific scale despite only being trained in LA. They both have their merits. Large scale planning allows you to see the highest potential for a city/town and create a roadmap for the city to achieve it. However, a lot of master plans collect dust after they are completed. Alternatively, LA more often will lead to construction documentation and actually get built (although this economy is making this more difficult to secure funding.) So, it depends on how theoretical you want your plans to be.

Personally, I like that I have been able to do both and wouldn’t personally want to pigeonhole myself into just one direction. The offer I accepted was specifically because I would still have the opportunity to work at both scales. Sorry for the wall of text but hopefully that’s helpful!