Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?

I did a lot of job-hopping the past few years looking for the right place to work, and I finally found it. I look for companies that respect work-life balance, don't want me to work too hard, and have excellent engineering culture that values high quality work and has managed to retain their senior employees. I deliver great work, they make money off of the code I ship, everybody is happy. I can crunch every once in a while but we all understand that it sucks and isn't a long-term strategy.

My father was a funeral director & coroner. He would NEVER claim he "loves what he does", but he used his career to build a life for him and his family. I look at my career the same way.

What do I ACTUALLY want to do? Develop video games, make music, write fiction. But nobody is shelling out for that, and even if they are, I'm not good enough at it to compete. I know if I pursued any of my passions, I would have to work much harder for much less pay, and be treated much more poorly by my employer. I know my limits and I know that I cannot thrive in a situation like that, I've done it before, no thanks.

Part of growing older is mourning the person you could have been. If I had a time machine, I would have stayed in better shape, practiced guitar more, invested my time more wisely. But I can't, and honestly my life has turned out pretty great by trusting my instincts.

Now I install internet access for people, on infrastructure I have built, and I see how happy they are when they go from 2 to 100mbps (this is often in a field in the middle of nowhere). This means they can talk to their families, actually do the work that pays their bills, and just generally entertain themselves.

It is very rewarding. And I know all these people as they are essentially my neighbours.

But what I really love, what drives me, is solving interesting problems. That's my entire career. Solve interesting problems.

    "We're building a web2.0 exercise tracking..." No!
    "We're putting health records on the block..." Nein!
    "We're improving how people buy insuran..." Non!
    "We're creating a mobile app to submit expens..." Nee!
    "We're building a SaaS to improve cable modem analy..." Nie!


    "We're using computer vision to identify fossilized cat shit." Oh hell yes!

At meetups people ask me, "what do you do?"

And I respond, "Whatever the !@#$ I want to, it makes money, and everyone goes home happy."

I haven't worked a day in my life. I play, every day. And any time I've come close to discovering "it's just another job" I go and find something else to do.

My response on LinkedIn or AngelList when approached by business people and recruiters with their dreadful job opening is usually along the lines of "Thanks for making me aware of this opportunity. Sounds boring. Good luck in your continuing candidate search."

The experience has been life changing!

More people should try podcasts: They’re almost as simple as a blog to produce, but allow you to present your story or information in a much more evocative and personal medium: Voice, sound, and music. Additionally, and unlike something like Youtube or Spotify, you retain total control. All you need, essentially, is a website to host MP3s, and an XML file that tells people where those MP3s are. There are plenty of services that will do this for you for a few dollars a month (I use Spreaker), but that’s what it boils down to: No gatekeepers, no monopolies, no algorithms.

I wrote a step by step guide to getting into this, based on my own experience of writing and publishing 6 seasons (so far!) on my blog, here: http://www.0atman.com/articles/21/make-fiction-podcast

I started as a developer, because I was good, I gradually became the lead enterprise architect (I’ve never hated anything more than TOGAF by the way), and eventually “fell” into management. While doing this I rode locally fame ladder in Danish public sector digitalisation which means I’ve had a massive impact on our overall national strategy for IT architecture but like 5 people know who I am. I’m not sure I ever actually liked that work, but it was thrilling to be part of something “important”, so I felt like I liked it. Eventually I had my first child, and 9 months later I had a depression caused by stress so severe I spent a night in a psychward. Long story short I was diagnosed with ADHD at almost 40, and told that I needed to figure out how I wanted to live my life.

Turns out I like problem solving and that I hate project management. So I quit the public sector and found a job in a company where I could be a programmer again, I made sure to find a company where I wouldn’t have to deal with a whole lot of the Atlassian sort bureaucracies surrounding programming and it’s frankly been a bliss.

I’ve gone from not thinking I could ever work more than 30 hours a week until my children left our house to back to full time.

So chances are you probably already know what kind of work you like, but it’s just really hard to figure it out. One thing that I thought I would miss was feeling “important” but the truth is that I was never actually “important”. If it hadn’t been me someone else would’ve done it.

(For reference I’m Danish, having a break down here gets you 6 months sick leave with pay and costs you basically nothing out of your own pocket. This made things easier to say the least.)

It's my strong feeling that people don't actually love jobs, they love kinds of work, but only as long as they have agency. Once the work becomes a job it tends to get subordinated to profit motives, instead of your own creative drives.

My best bet is that if you want to do something you love you have to somehow end up working for yourself.

I know. The title is cheesy and melodramatic. But this book was really helpful in shaping some of my worldview.

This book goes vehemently against the "discovery" of "passion", and instead provides some practical insights on how to do work that you will love. Or how to reach there.

Today, measurement systems combine many of my hobbies, including electronics and programming. I would get bored with becoming a specialist in a narrow tech field. This is also an area where I feel that I can genuinely help people, not just with immediate business problems, but also where I can credibly justify a socially redeeming purpose.

I like the fact that the ultimate judge of my success is mother nature, who doesn't tolerate bullshit.

Advice: Can you work on something that you actually believe in? I read a lot of comments (HN and elsewhere) from people for whom "work" is just an empty cash transaction, and who respect no distinction between good and bad work. (For instance threads on doing little or no actual work without getting caught).

Or, can you completely detach yourself from your day job, satisfy yourself with the empty cash transaction, and get your personal satisfaction in some other way?

I stopped trying to weasel my way to the "right" job/role to get one step closer to my "career goal" or had the right job title, and focused on some self reflection about what I get the biggest kick out of. If you had a good day at the office today, actively try to identify what it was specifically that made your day good (was it a day of code? Bug fixing? Debugging? Meetings? Design work? Etc)

Sounds obvious and simple but I think it took me a decade or so to realise this. Perhaps I could only really come to this conclusion once I had already "proven" myself career-wise and was making enough money to come to the realisation that I could stop trying to climb the career ladder and focus a bit more on what I get a kick out of, and not if the next role was a steppingstone to something else.

I got my start in web development because I had picked it up as a hobby and (at least at the time) it was a good way to get reasonable money without a degree. But my favorite parts were learning new techniques/technologies (I started out without a team to steer me toward best practices so I did a lot of experimentation, self-teaching, and reinventing the wheel - probably made my projects take longer but meant I learned a lot more) and then using that expertise to help my colleagues (once I did have a team, my deeper understanding meant that I was the one to go to when something didn't work right in IE6 or something).

At one point, I was having dinner with a friend at his startup and happened to meet one of their product support engineers. She explained that the role involved becoming an expert in their highly-technical, fast-growing product and then using that expertise to help customers (internal and external ones). I realized that was an entire job made of my favorite parts of my previous job. I applied to join her team and I've happily worked in product support for tech startups ever since. Before this point I never would have considered product support, because I just had a stereotypical vision of it as sitting in a phone center reading from a script. The ideal field for you might be out there without you realizing it exists.

I still try to identify the things I like doing and spend more time doing those things. Sometimes that means spending time working with folks on other teams - not all companies are flexible enough to allow this, but I think healthy ones will because the added perspective usually will make you more valuable to the company as well. Making sure to have these varied experiences and keep learning new things has been a great way to keep up my engagement over time.

I have talked to lots of people who were trying to find their passion and had limited themselves to looking in an area where they felt they could be "well paid." This isn't too surprising because surviving is first, passion is second.

However, what they often don't consider is that compensation is just a part of the picture. If you're making $X and living in New York City you might only be able to rent a room, but making $X in a small town in Minnesota and you can buy the best house in town. Not that I'm advocating you move to Minnesota, rather that one's "Quality of Life" is the complete circle of income/cost of living/friends/opportunities.

Now I have no idea what you're looking at so this might be completely useless but oddly enough, reading people's biographies can give you insights into other choices made and their impact and effect. If you can imagine yourself in those other choices, you can sometimes discover something you would like to try before you've "wasted time" trying something you didn't like. Reading non-fiction for exposure to other life experiences can be helpful in other ways as well, it can help you understand others from a perspective that isn't your own lived experience.

Even though I don’t have very large number of subscribers but I am satisfied with the few people who listen and like . I don’t do any post processing, just raw recording.

Any interested listeners can check out it at -

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vinandi-na-sodi-telugu...

https://pnc.st/s/abhi-podcast

Essentially I wanted to pick my battles.

I started my own company. It was a shorter path than climbing the corporate ladder.

How do you know when you found it? In my case it was my wife saying you haven’t complained about work in a while. You must have found your stride.

Keep swinging for the fence.

Ultimately even if you like a job it’s still a job, and the widely promoted notion of passion rarely holds up.

For example - a good friend and I regularly play battle royale and co-op games together after work in the evenings. The joy of those games, for me, is that we are communicating and working together to achieve something or win. I don’t get the same kind of enjoyment from single player games or games where I’m just grinding alone.

I think looking at “core values” and trying to extrapolate from there might be a good approach (or at least it has been for me). If you don’t have a sense of what those are, maybe take some time to reflect and see if you can find or create them.

I like writing code now, it's like a tool, can build things in that space. Don't think it's a passion though. I didn't come from it, I barely used a computer when I was younger. I say I want to pursue robotics but I'm not pouring myself into it either. Been spending a lot of time consuming as someone else mentioned (tv/social media). Anyway I hope I get it back, true drive vs. drive from sharing/points online. Generally I like creation though, solving things.

Part of the younger days probably just because no responsibility other than doing homework/passing tests.

I discovered that I love writing software when I was a kid (maybe 12 years old?) by writing automation bots for video games: it was so incredibly fun to write a bot that would play the game, level up your characters, and do things that would otherwise take thousands of hours of human grinding to achieve. This passion never left me, and now, more than 20 years later, I still spend a good chunk of time building little scripts/tools/utilities/apps that help me in various ways.

The writing was something that I also got started on early. I discovered my love of writing through IRC where I'd routinely answer people's programming questions and eventually write blog posts explaining answers in more depth than I could fit into a short IRC conversation.

I don't blog as much today (life gets busy), but I do spend a lot of time writing at work, working on the occasional long-form blog post, and ... journaling.

I don't think it's about the field, I think it's about what your role is. I like solving problems, but I can't have that role forever in a programming related environment, so I don't write code for money anymore.

I really like cooking and gardening, but if I were to get a job in a kitchen or picking apples or whatever, I'd hate it. For most people this isn't true, but for me, turning my hobbies into a job turns them into a chore and I start to hate them. I could make a casual business out of them, but I can't do them professionally.

Decide what role you like, and do any job where you can fulfill that role. Maybe you like pleasing people, maybe you like building things, maybe you like the tactile sensation of doing things with your hands. Don't pick a job, pick a role. If it's web dev or a gas station, doesn't matter. Don't let the siren of status and glamour have you broken washed up on the rocks. If the role makes you happy and keeps you clothed and fed that's all that matters.

As to finding something you love, for a lot of people the problem really isn't the finding. There is something they love, and the hard part is finding a path to the doing of it -- to dropping what they're currently doing, and finding an easy viable way to do the other thing while paying their rent and other bills. And honestly, this is usually made easier by money. If you could stockpile a "stake" and then take some time off to explore only things you're deeply interested in, that might help. Another avenue toward that might be living someplace cheaper, so the money piles up quicker, ultimately giving you more flexibility and freedom to pursue things you love.

Along with this, it's important to be honest with yourself. If you can really get in touch with what you like and don't like about the fields you've been in -- those are the truest clues for what you'll want to do. (I mean, your only other option is to talk to other people doing many different things, until you hear about something that also sounds interesting to you.)

I guess the last bit of advice is have hope. Because that's where it starts.

There are basic needs: clean water, clean air, infrastructure, transportation, logistics, etc., etc. And also "non-tangible ones". You can get much more authentic social respect if you work on products/services that people unambiguously like and need.

I recommend, for example: - Biomedical: signals, images, ... (I've done a bit) - Anything GIS, urban/transportation planning, geo-spatial analytics, cities, etc. (my chosen specialty, very fulfilling).

There's lots of number crunching, but also human-entry string processing (fuzzy matching, etc.). Actually, very versatile programmatically. And then there is fast graphics (OpenGL, etc.) - not my favourite part, actually, but you can outsource it partly.

You get to work in very multi-disciplinary groups, so you can really assess where you want to go long-term. I was surrounded by people with very similar training to mine - technologically it was pretty good, but topic-wise it was a bit of an echo-chamber.

If you are high in openness (likely) you will need change and creativity to feel alive. On the other hand, most job will want to keep you in the same place to extract the maximum value from what you know.

You might need to find something where that part of you can grow: start a company, technical sales, consultancy, etc

The past year I’ve fallen in love with life. This has been a combo of a few things - I found work as a consultant where I get to share a unique perspective that when paired with the work of others produces outsized results.

I get paid moderately well by nearly a dozen clients but am the lowest paid team member on each team on a monthly basis - so I don’t feel too much pressure to deliver exceptional results all the time - and the number of clients I have means if I get 1 win a year for all clients I can have a true win each month professionally.

These wins and experiences make me feel like I’m growing and contributing.

Aside from that I’ve developed open and honest relationships with my lover and my friends and see them regularly and I live with housemates so I get my extraversion solved through work and natural interactions even in covid. The honest relationships with my lover and number and depth of friendships has allowed me to not hold any desires back from asking while having less pressure to be the doer of everything. Teams and ideas naturally form over time which has led to fun side projects and profit as well.

I prefer now to give perspective rather than advice but I’d say having a “deal centric” attitude and meeting a lot of people and trying to start things with them - usually based on some process that provides value so you have a process to lean on - seems pretty solid.

For instance building internal portals for small teams or organizations and taking a small ongoing fee to do it could help you. Instead of project based work with a time bound - low to moderate monthly fees with a variety of people can allow you to find creative energy where product management, analytics, etc can help other peoples visions come true over years.

You can see visions come to life without too much stress and avoid a single point of failure.

Happy Christmas and lmk if you’d like to work together on something like this.

That has worked awesome for me. I merged technolgy (software dev/sys adm) with motor sports and with management. Love it so far. Good luck and Merry Christmas!!

That said, do you find yourself spending most your time making or consuming? At some point I just started making stuff for the majority of my time and this was a tipping point for starting to improve my skills in particular areas and narrow my focus.

Plumbers may like to plumb, but they don't like doing it in bad conditions or as many hours as they do. Same for farmers, construction workers, garbagemen, and so on.

Now I produce sell Cannabis & Psychedelics in California where it's sort of legal. I have a huge social life, I've networked with dozens of other artisanal pushers, and now I can pickup like-minded girls and guys by saying "Hey, want to come back to my place and roll Molly or trip on shrooms?"

I make more than twice as much as I did as a backend developer, mostly in BitCoin and cash, and all I do is hang out with people. I haven't had a major depressive episode since my last day of work where I quite by sending him some scat porn and a video of me pissing on my work laptop.

Going through the phases of life and music with regards to ego/success and just standing back and just feeling complete love towards this amazing thing we have been blessed to be part of the human experience.

https://gourav.io/notion-boost

Spend all that energy and time thinking about improving your personal life. Work on your marriage/kids/family/relationships. Love those things.

Don't feel too bad if you can't find something you love to do for a long period of time. Many many people don't know what they love to do their entire life. And that's totally okay.

We've been exploring... We might like doing A for 1 year or 2, then switch to love doing B for a few months, then switch to C for another 3 years... It's normal.

How about thinking in this way - What you don't like to do? Just avoid things you don't like to do as much as possible, then you'll be happier.

The other passion I have (that really is very similar to my primary skill) is woodworking. Anytime I need a particular furniture piece, I design it, buy the materials, cut it up / drill holes, and make my own flat-pack kits for final assembly. This hobby got a lot more fun when I finally realized that I could actually make straight cuts if I properly squared off the saw blade, and started using higher quality wood (instead of standard-grade construction lumber).

I was fine being an individual contributor because I got to listen to Spotify all day with noise cancelling headphones, while learning new coding techniques and playing the compensation bump game, but only as long as compensation bumps seemed practical and got me closer to my goals which became less true over time, especially as stretching compensation desires came with a lot greater scrutiny and impossible expectations.

Being an executive was fine for compensation goals but I didnt like that it was sales. I didnt like balancing all the relationships. I didnt like that my approach to business as a one-off expedition to the new world isn't matched by people that imagine building a corporate forever-home.

Slimming that down further and leaner in other projects, I do like that my precision strike team can execute fast and that I can contribute in all areas, but its hard to focus.

I’m more satisfied with creative arts, which I used to subsidize with my jobs until those become fulfilling as well, so maybe I can just do art again, since the market for that just got super lucrative.

I seek to help all beings collaboratively learn how to better program their bodies and meet all needs while denying none, through science, art, and love.

Since then, I've rebuilt my identity a few times over. I've also helped conceive and am nurturing a new person. Helping them explore the world everyday is so exciting and challenges the status quo of parenting in the area we live so hard, some people literally get angry watching us, will take clandestine photos, and call the police.

I've also come to enjoy the process of exploring and healing from traumas I've experienced.

There's a finite list of human needs for surviving and thriving. Learning about those gave me something to reflect on and pinpoint needs I wanted to focus on helping others meet.

Also, finding ways to integrate what I've learned from different fields into what I'm doing may have helped me keep from feeling boxed in.

The rest of the week I do the software development. I like it most of the time, sometimes I love it, and sometimes (thankfully less of the time and not recently) I hate it and can barely bring myself to call into stand up.

On the balance though, I am deeply grateful that I like my job. I don’t think finding paid employment that you consistently “love” is feasible for most people. Besides, jobs, people and organizations change over time, so loving being a Dev in 2007 doesn’t mean you’ll love it today.

If you are in work you on the balance like and it provides the ability to be fulfilled outside work I’d say count yourself lucky and don’t sweat not having found something you “love.” Perhaps eventually you’ll find that thing, perhaps not, but if you look back at your career and say you mostly enjoyed it then I’ll say you are be looking back at a successful career.

I graduated in journalism, worked early in localization, started my full-time career in customer support and quickly moved into a technical focus, then switched to software engineering. My journalism degree has been useful in how I think about communicating in the office. My customer support and localization background gives me a particular empathy both for end users and "internal customers".

That said, I wouldn't say I -love- software engineering like I love music (which is a hobby I have no professional aspirations in). I'm not someone who consistently does Advent of Code stuff (I need a real problem to motivate me, not a puzzle or toy problem), but I find the projects I work on satisfying and I like (most of) my coworkers.

paradoxically (or maybe not) it is not as rewarding process-wise as writing software, which has the strongest instant gratification loop after, maybe, video games.

You can’t really be a writer, however, unless you want to die in poverty, etc.

But if something is bugging you about this, maybe you could invest some time giving one step back and getting to know yourself better. This will make the exploration on your options more assertive. Study your personality and temperament. Read some biographies of successful people with the same personality of you. Consider options of fields that are more dynamic and let you work on a wide variety of fields (e.g.: entrepreneurship).

Instead of looking for the right activity for yourself, I’d suggest looking for the right mission or purpose for yourself. Doing any task in any fields but that is actually linked to a strong sense of purpose is much more fun.

One of the greatest mistakes I see fellow designers do is try to make their 'passion' into their job - expecting their moonshot webcomic idea to be the bread+butter income, artisanal print hobby to pay the same as a corporate career without a sizeable investment or insane time sunk into marketing, you get the picture.

Early on I made a point to do short contract/internship stints to find our what I "didn't" like to do corporate-wise (packaging, digital design, print design), and narrow down to the parts that left me vaguely looking forward to the next day (experiential design, a team that's enjoyable to work with, autonomy, management). Note that the happy bits are almost as much team dynamics is it is the work itself, if not moreso.

are you trying to find a job that you love or trying to love something outside of work?

after youve answered that question, the next step is exploration. just try out different things and see if something sticks

the person who knows most about you is yourself and people close to you. and maybe ad targeting lmao

To me it's important that I get to decide what I want to work on and what direction I take with the business. A big part is also that I own the code I write.

I’ve moved around a lot in my career as well. For a few years my objective was to work my way from a low paying IT help desk role to an Engineer at FAANG/tech company. My other motivation was to work on things that were interesting to me. I used to worry that the diversity of my career experience and duration of certain jobs could work against me in finding future roles. It turned out that my diversity of experience was an asset to my future career prospects.

I think that is the nice thing about a tech career. You can do a lot of different things, make decent to really good money doing it, and you aren't penalized for trying different things.

I love problem solving and mentoring people.

I would be happy doing this in any context. My career is in software development but if I worked at a bakery, restaurant, or any other job or company I can think of I’d probably find ways to build teams, mentor people, and solve the hard problems.

For the first few years of my career I tried to build things that I was interested in and would obsess about the thing but was in love with the process itself. Later in my career I would look for companies with a mission and a purpose that I loved and a founding team and leaders I aligned with.

I don’t think loving what you do day to day is important or even loving the mission or end goal. A job can just be a job and you can use maximize for free time and/or compensation and use them as the autonomy part for how to spend your free time to master something for a given purpose. That purpose can be something bigger than yourself or just your own personal fulfillment which is also worthwhile.

I plan to retire from tech in a few years and do something else, not because I no longer love it but because I want to try new aspects of problem solving etc. would love to sell physical goods like a cafe or plant store or something.

It sounds like maybe you’re framing the problem wrong. Instead of looking for a magical feeling from the day to day tasks of a specific role or field, try to think about society, how you want to fit into it and what you want your contribution to be (purpose), find a company or non profit or whatever that is trying to move the needle on that topic and have that impact, and then look for roles where you can develop mastery and have autonomy.

Alternatively try different hobbies and interest and try to find one that inspires you. Founder, musician, scientist, philosopher, etc. who inspires you or looks cool. In awe of the guitarist from led zeppelin and then pick up a guitar and work at it every day to develop mastery. Once you reach some level of mastery in some thing you can better reason about other things you might be interested in in a personal or professional context.

How: By quitting every company after doing my maximum. I’m deeply sour, because many people around me succeeded younger at being recognized, generally because of ethnic or gender reason, but I had to walk away and I have succeeded in establishing my company and I’m the PO. I’m also the laundry guy, the accountant and the principal engineer with my 2-5 employees, but I’m still making half a million dollars, so it does seem that I was discriminated in companies compared to my abilities.

I wish I hadn’t a million dollars a year and I had a sense of belonging instead, and wasn’t sour, but such is life. I feel like Donald Duck.

Just realize that being love with something doesn't mean it is always blissful. I love my partner to a deeper degree than I do with any other person (we have no kids), yet we do sometimes fight and don't get along.

It is the same with any job or profession. Realize this and I think you might become more content with what you do.

Outside of an professional setting I must say that after getting my self an espresso machine two years ago I've fallen in love with making and tweaking my shots.

I’ve found I love three things - designing tech solutions but only what I’m passionate about, business (non-tech: finance, risk mgmt, commercial etc) and am passionate about empowering people rather than fleecing them (in a b2c context).

I’m happy with what I’m currently doing as I’m working in the business space now but ultimately think my place would be bootstrapping a user enabling solution and I’m in the early stages of making a side project to hopefully achieve that.

I love (computer) science research and (software systems) development, so that's what I have been enjoying since age 11. Over three decades on, I'm a professor of artificial intelligence, which gives me maximum freedom to play around and invent new techniques. Among other things, I get paid to read HN, write papers and software, and teach the next generation some interesting topics like machine learning.

For me, I love being able to sit down and concentrate for 5 hours and make progress on a coding activity. (Advent of Code is almost catnip for me; I’ll save up a week’s worth of them and blow a half a Saturday on them.) Other people thrive on social aspects of team/project work.

Naturally, I picked a job that gives me virtually none of that focused coding time, so there’s that…

Can anyone else relate? If so, have you solved this problem in your life?

It could be that you will never love technology, but you might love art, music, science, trade work, teaching. Maybe try to make a list of the things in your life that bring you the most joy and motivation and see how they fit in a Venn diagram.

People who are truly passionate about their work are lucky.

But IMHO it's more realistic to find a job that isn't stressful & that one enjoys a bit (if one still needs to pay the bills).

There's a ton of happiness and fulfillment to be found outside of your career.

But you need to have the time and mental capacity to get there.

Works sucks up all of those resources for a lot of people.

I didn’t like my job a year ago, but now that I’ve been given a mandate to improve things both code and process wise I’m really happy.

As a programmer, I am looking for the best development tools.

I love my creative coding project. I built it from scratch and it works.

https://twitter.com/acpustudio

The answer is really simple: try something new. Choose randomly, go on a hunch, put yourself out there.

Why not try to accept you are who you are, and apparently this is part of who you are currently. It seems to work out fine (if it does), so no need to worry.

I followed this approach: Find something that really excites you, fake it 'till you make it, learn from your mistakes and never stop improving.

I consider it a craft, as opposed to a vocation.