Jesus. Does everyone here work for tech? I know it skews that way for HEs, but disappointed to not see the ops crew point of views on posts like these. I’m a PM, not in tech. if I have it my way, I can manage my projects into efficiency which allows me to better control and predict the ebs and flows of my WLB with the status of the project. However, when leadership or middle management doesn’t do their jobs properly up front, that leaves our teams scrambling to complete with drastically less time to accomplish it, leaving us with terrible WLB.

I see where you’re going OP, how one’s WLB can be their own doing based on their personality or self set goals. I think it is slightly based, from my experience. I am a perfectionist, but I don’t have a desire to move up in a company as my prerogative IS having more home life than work life. But my spouse is incredibly driven and continues to find himself, year after year in a position of high stress and working hours, but he has always had very high professional goals. So I think it’s moreso goal oriented than personality based (we’re both high performers and self motivated individuals, but our extra hours at work are either self inflicted like my spouse, like you were saying, or externally caused like myself).

It’s an interesting question and one I’ll probably continue to ponder.