Good for you for recognizing what you need and shooting for it. Like you say in the article, you're one of the lucky who have taken that shot and had it work out for you, and I feel like I'm in a similar boat.

Our first kid was born two weeks before California shut down (the first state to do so) for the pandemic. I was stuck in a shitty job with shitty bosses who expected the world (eg, made me lay off 75% of my team in 2019 and proceeded to insist I produce more than before, while telling me to expect "More of the same!", with a perverse enthusiasm, in the coming years when I asked what our long-term plan was, but I digress - shoutout to Apto Solutions!). We had no family living near us, so it was just the two of us raising our first kid in the middle of a lockdown while I worked in-office and my wife tried to somehow simultaneously work FT from home while caring for a newborn. That wasn't tenable, so we uprooted to a more affordable region that had us surrounded by family in early 2021. I did the stay-at-home-dad thing for the better part of 2021 until it was time to get back into the swing of things.

My first interview was at Intel, through a staffing agency, and it sounded goddamned miserable as a new-ish father - rotating shifts (so I'd be required to do graveyards and swing shifts every few weeks), no office (the team I'd be working with said that they had to come in every morning and find whatever conference room might be available that day to post up in), the expectation that on my off days (yes, even vacations) I would need to respond to all emails and messages within one hour (so, how do I fly on a plane or hike in the woods on my day off?), and at the end of every week you had to present your numbers for the week to Intel staff in a way that sounded a hell of a lot like, "Please justify your existence to us and convince us that we should keep you here". It sounded goddamned miserable.

My next interview was the opposite - for a company in the education sector that promoted a healthy work-life balance and a focus on family. So, I leaned into it hard - I told my now-boss during the interview that I was coming out of a very rough, stressful and unreasonable working environment and that I have no desire to put up with anything like that ever again. I said that my primary focus has to be my family, and that I refused to "take home" any stress or work, that I would put 110% into my job while I'm in the office but 0% outside, that my phone would be set up to not notify me of anything afterhours, and that at that point in my life, I had zero desire to climb the corporate ladder and would be more than content sitting in the same position for a good chunk of time.

I thought for sure that their rhetoric around work-life balance and such would be bullshit, but I got the job, and it's exactly like they described. The flexibility and support for all of us to prioritize ourselves, whatever that looks like, is amazing, and I feel incredibly lucky to be here. I can shut off at the end of the day and, in three years, I've yet to take work home with me in any sense of the phrase.

And now that three years have passed and my kids are a bit older, I've been candid about taking more on and maybe moving up the ladder a bit (within reason/my sanity), and they've been very supportive of it.

All that rambling is to say, lean in to whatever it is that you know you need. Reach for it, ask for it, insist on it. It might not always work out, but you may get lucky and end up getting it, and boy is it damn sweet if you do.