I am firmly in favor of workers not being exploited or treated poorly. As a #leader, I’ve made it one of my primary focuses. Am I perfect? Of course not. But it’s not just that I do my best at it. It’s that I consider it one of my primary responsibilities, and that it’s as important as literally anything else I do.

I believe that if you are an employee, you should not settle for a place that treats you badly. Places that call you “family” when they need you, but lay you off when you need them. Places that “work hard play hard” and expect you there 60-80 hours a week by default. Places that ask you to miss important life events, or come in on the weekends because the boss needs butts-in-seats (even though I’d finished every task I had) so that he looks good for the C-level folks who are gonna be walking around on Saturday (yes, that has literally happened to me at EA/Maxis. You know who you are.)

BUT…

I struggle with this a lot, because a lot of the best memories of my career are from those torture chamber moments. The 46th day straight of working 11 hour days, the 3am trying-to-get-this-thing-to-build before a huge demo the next day… those things are memories. And a lot of the people I made those memories with became friends that lasted beyond any single job.

Those moments were also where I smashed peoples’ expectations, and built the reputation that was the foundation for the whole rest of my career.

So the advice I have for young people is twofold. Don’t settle for a place that treats you badly. But also, kill it. Overdeliver. Do insane things, sometimes at the cost of other parts of your life. But do it because *you* choose to do it, not because it’s the baseline expectation of an exploitative company.

But if you’ve *got* to choose between the two, and you have the ability and privilege to do it, choose yourself. Choose sanity. Choose life. You’ll eventually be able to get another job, and no matter how good or rare this one seems, you’ll always always always be able to find something better in time.

You’ve only got one life.