Understanding 「就職したぶん（だけ）」 in 「希望した会社に就職したら就職したぶん（だけ）気苦労も増えるでしょう。」

Question

Consider, from an IMABI tutorial on conditional phrases:

希望した会社に就職したら就職したぶん（だけ）気苦労も増えるでしょう。

Just by getting a job at your dream company, anxiety will also surely increase.

Questions:

1. In 「ぶん（だけ）」, why is だけ in parentheses? Is the author saying that either ぶん or だけ is accepted? Or is the author just saying that ぶん is mandatory, but だけ is optional?

2. Why is 「就職したぶん（だけ）」 needed in the first place? It seems like if we completely removed it, the sentence could still be translated as "just by getting a job at your dream company, anxiety will also surely increase", no?

Perhaps the speaker is trying to say something like:

If I were to get my dream job, it would seem to even (も) add merely-haven-gotten-my-dream-job (就職したぶん（だけ）) stress.

Is this a good way to translate the sentence here?

3. Earlier, the author states that this sentence is an example of the following:

With a conditional, だけ can express "the more, the...". Some patterns include したら…しただけ, …しただけ, …したらそれだけ, and ～ば…だけ". At this point, just recognize what role だけ plays.

I'm pretty confused by what the author means by "the more, the...". At least I don't see "the more, the..." in this sentence?

Answer 1

1. ぶん can be replaced by だけ or だけ can be added. That is, the options are 就職したぶん/就職しただけ/就職したぶんだけ. (だけぶん is not possible.)

2. and 3. Consider a simpler example.

• 食べたら食べたぶん太る or ...食べただけ...

This literally means If I eat, I get weight by the amount(ぶん/だけ) I eat., which would render more idiomatically The more I eat, the more weight I get.

On the other hand, 食べたら太る means simply If I eat, I'll get weight, which should be true, but without the nuance of the more ... the more...

For the particular example, 希望した会社に就職したら気苦労も増えるでしょう makes less sense. 希望した会社に就職したら就職したぶん（だけ）気苦労も増えるでしょう adds the meaning that the stress comes precisely from the fact that you get a dream job (e.g. anxiety about job security/sense of competition etc.). I guess this does not really translate to the more... the more.. sentence in English. You need to think in terms of the literal by the amount (of happiness/luck) you get a dream job and translate it accordingly.

It is more similar in the meaning to 希望した会社に就職したらしたで気苦労も増えるでしょう. It is like: Suppose A, which is a nice thing. But even if A happens, that can be a source of stress too.