Working on something that doesn't interest you just for the sake of technology is not something that will ever make you happy. If you truly have no interest in anything then that's another problem on itself.
I saw my local library was looking for a sysadmin, it did come with a pay cut, but damn if it isn't a quarter of the responsibilities, fulfilling work, no direct manager, pension, decent healthcare, and I write my own schedule.
No one questions what I do and I have full freedom to come and go without needing to "check-in" with a c-suite.
Will I get rich working this gig, absolutely not but the sense of accomplishment knowing my skill-set is helping the community directly, and those less fortunate fills the pay gap I never thought it could.
It doesn't hurt that it shortened my commute and I do so by bicycle now.
Much much happier now.
I am beginning to think we need HN for non-privileged people. A lot of "insights" on this forum come off as extremely deluded and living in a very positive bubble.
Now tell me, how do I get a huge break from programming while never losing a penny from my income? "Live within my means" would be your response perhaps? I still want to buy a house though.
Like come on. Sometimes I also wonder if people didn't start using ChatGPT for commenting on HN for clout.
Unfortunately the wildlife, economics and vehicle companies won’t hire me because I’m not an established domain expert in wildlife, economics or vehicles.
To be a bit more concrete I’ve actually applied to jobs in some of the industries you’ve noted recently, particularly wildlife. I applied for a job that seemed pretty cut and dry: Doing mostly .NET CRUD work for an application supporting [wildlife domain]. It didn’t pay well but it genuinely seemed like a domain I would like and Delma technical view the job was a perfect match for my resume. The application had several binary yes/no questions I had to fill Out mostly along the lines of “Do you have experience in X”. For 90% of the questions my answer was yes. But there was one question basically asking “Do you have experience writing software for our hyper specific domain”. I suppose I could have lied and said yes, though that just meant I’d be rejected after wasting my time and the organization’s time, so I answered truthfully “no”. I was rejected not long later and while it’s impossible to know the exact reason I have my suspicions.
Nonsense. The lack of passion arises from resentment and by being treated unfairly. While things like communism where everyone is treated equally is demoralising to the key contributors, extreme inequality in compensation is equally demoralising. You need some middle ground.
Without stake(financially), no one is going to spend their whole lives to make other people rich. It doesn't even make logical sense if you think about it carefully.
I struggled to find meaning in my work for the first few years of my career. I used to lie (unknowingly) to myself "I love my job", "I am passionate about my job", "It's my passion" and I was always disappointed.
That is until one day, after many years and barring many details, I decided to tell myself that "I push buttons on a company laptop in exchange for money and I happen to somewhat like it from time to time". I immediately became better at my job as it improved my mental health. I started seeing my work for what it was.
As for "passion", I started looking elsewhere for it and eventually found it. I can't make living from it, but that's another story.
Simple -- it doesn't.
Strange how you frame it: "the entire problem was that I was thinking wrongly about my job". No, that's not the problem at all for many people.
I mean, this obviously depends on the kind of product - is it some biotech to make someone's life better, or is it a gambling website tuned to suck the most out of whales? As engineers we're much better placed than most people to do something meaningful with our work, and sticking with a job where you don't see that value is a pity. But if you just don't care about building something for someone else... maybe you should change that? As you say, there's little choice in whether you have to do it (unless you win the lottery or something), why not make a goal out of it and get some enjoyment out.
With some frugality and smart money management, you can retire in 5-10 years if you're on a dev salary.
Don't forget healthcare being tied directly to being employed.
If it was not for that, people could purse their passions versus what they have to do just because.
As for people pursuing their passions if only X... there are many people who for various reasons do not have to work and who don't work, it's not a hard sell to extrapolate that the behavior of more people joining that class would be much the same as people already in it. For most of them, most of their time is not spent on Star Trek-ish ideals of bettering humanity/themselves or on passion projects.
This mindset is how you kneecap your career. You’ve pigeonholed yourself into the foot soldier category when it becomes immediately obvious to managers that you aren’t thinking about what’s actually good for the company.
You may already know this, but it needs to be explicitly called out that taking that approach to your business relationship with your employer defines the relationship.
However, when the interests of yourself and your company diverge, don't get stuck holding the bag.
"But how could this ever be possible, in a field with high salaries and a permanent shortage of skilled workers?", you ask.
By constantly punishing us for caring. By continually providing shitty office space, and bullshit-driven work cultures and interview rituals. And just plain lying, toxic managers and co-workers to deal with.
And then asking us to invest the best years of our livesin all of the above, and then to "care" ... in exchange for not-so-great compensation, a joke vacation allowance - and zero job security.
I agree that asking that question in an interview probably isn't the best method of screening out apathy, but that's why they ask it. I don't actually know what the best method is.
He told us that he only downgraded someone if lots of money were the only reason to apply.
Making money for someone else is inherently soul-sucking though, at the end of the day.
The emergent nature of corporations is to slowly consume employees' lives and throw away the burnt-out husks once they no longer bring value to executives and shareholders.
I'm "around on Teams/Slack" for ~7 hours a day but I 100% have not worked 8 hours a day in years. Am I the only one? Am I the minority? Am I the majority?
If I go to 60 minutes of meetings a day, it's a lot.
If I write 80 lines of code, it's a lot.
If I research 1-2 production issues, it's a lot.
If I write 20 Teams messages/3 e-mails, it's a lot.
On the other hand, lots of people like those inefficiencies: a chat at the watercooler, talking about how your weekend was, etc. And those are certainly better for your mental health than the pointless meetings some managers would love to pad your schedule with.
However we're creatures of habit, and I think most people search for rationalizations to do nothing or change nothing. That's comfortable and familiar. People don't know what they want and seem to shop around for placeholders for identity. It's not certain what the payoff will be for any new undertaking.
You should care a bit, because ultimately whatever we produce ends up directly or indirectly used by other human beings. That is at least my motivation to care about the product - thinking about that person on the other side that will be directly affected in their daily life by the choices I make.
Some days the idea of making a better product because it makes the lives of users better is enough motivation, but not most. I wish I could consistently be more selfless in this regard, but when I'm tired or stressed or depressed, my lizard brain needs a more direct incentive.
For example just even learning enough social/negotiation skills, or influence to educate your clients to be oriented by results rather than hours.
That could be the key, then you can leverage "boring" technology, to solve real problems that matter.
Creating a nice feedback loop were you grow and create your craft so work becomes frustration free and time independent.
Free time is what there is for me, and though I don't think of it in "productive" terms, I do think it's important to bias towards action rather than passive consumption.
The people at your current job aren't your friends. They've let you arrange to give away a full 50% your life (most of what's left must be occupied by sleep, pissing, shitting, eating, and paying bills). Not a single person in your life has said anything or tried to get you out of the office earlier?
You should have at least one friend who cares about your wellbeing and doesn't view you as an object to be exploited without limit.
Good luck, my dude.
“Self-sufficiency is the greatest wealth of all, and the greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom.” – Epicurus
> Majored Japanese Language at university currently working at a Japanese company as a Japanese translator in Turkey and also, at the same time, self-studying web development slowly as it is my dream to be a developer.
If they're working towards the dream many of us are blessed enough to be living right now, I have a hard time telling them to slow down. I admire that kind of work ethic, honestly.
And you can learn on the job. No need to do that outside work hours. And trying to learn stuff when you are tired after a long day is hard. It makes you more tired, you learn slower, it's frustrating, and you are setting yourself up for being less productive the next day because of it.
Make time for learning stuff, demand time for it even and put it in your calendar or just sneak it in. Get your boss to support you.
Try working smarter, not harder. If it feels like monkey work automate it. It's more fun and you get more productive by doing less. Frees up some time to do more interesting things.
If your work is not interesting to you, you are in the wrong job anyway. But assuming it is, you should make the most of it in terms of making it rewarding (and not just in the money sense).
The work conditions you mentioned (free weekday nights and the weekend) were fought for by organized workers and are very new, why stop there?
I don't think we'll even keep those conditions if that's what we're satisfied with. We already see that in tech with Slack, uncompensated on-call, salaried overtime expectations set during hiring or onboarding, the expectation that prospective hires spend their free time on training projects, etc
I've enjoyed the work conditions I mention throughout my career. I'm 48 now. But of course I work in a part of the world where this stuff was sorted out decades ago. 40 hour work weeks, 26 days of vacation per year, etc. Here in Germany, many companies even have policies that state people should not be sending emails or replying to those in their spare time. Such a simple thing. Easy to implement too. Just don't reply outside of work hours.
Of course, I'm a startup CTO so I have none of that because I work for myself. But I still take my weekends and evenings because I'm simply less productive and creative when I'm tired and stressed out which is a different way of saying I'm useless when I'm like that. I need my brain to work properly to be effective. So I use my time wisely. And working on weekends or evenings simply isn't a good use of my time. So, I rarely do that.
Being a wage slave is a choice. If you don't like your life, change it. Lots of people are not capable of reflecting on what they do or why they do it and afraid to change or challenge things. They just do the same thing day after day because that just is what they do; no matter how much it sucks. Change starts with you wanting things to change and then acting to make that happen.
The idea that work is “over there” and life is “over here” is not only unique historically, it’s also the reason workers have no power. By failing to demand that companies and organizations adjust to us and telling them “this is how we are going to live and companies need to fit into that” then we tacitly let them collude to keep labor power down.
If you are alienated from your work, and accept and lean into that alienation, then you have no personal drive to make work serve you and your community rather than you serving it.
It’s a race to the bottom of alienation and the paved path of capitalism is basically scraping the bottom at this point.
At least for me I will say that disturbingly small number is probably good enough for practical purposes. All favorite thing, people, food are just snapshots in memory and revisiting them in physical world did not feel as great as my mind imagined.
I tried a few of those past favorite things and they were fine but nothing like best moments or some such. Same with people, neither they nor I am same person as before.
That almost sounds like you did not really enjoy raising your kids? I find that's a taboo thing to say, and if that's what you meant, I appreciate you saying so.
Like most things in life, there is a middle ground you know.
IMHO Kids aren't really "adults" till about 27-30 given the complexity of society. If you happen to have special needs kids, they will take even longer.
And there's the accent, which you'll never lose.
The best time to learn a language is between 0 and 10 y.o.
The funny thing is that I spent some time working on my English accent, and it wasn't that hard. Grammar and common phrases are two difficult things that I still haven't mastered. The combination of these two factors causes me to sometimes get funny looks when people assume I'm probably a native speaker because I sound so similar, but make weird mistakes when I speak.
Now that I learn a third language (German), I put more effort into grammar and vocabulary but don’t really care about the accent. I’m not a native, deal with it.
But yeah, I know that working time is still too much. But I don't live in a country where I can find a job whenever I want. I have to stick to it because I have not much choice.
Best of luck, hang tight..!
All productivity is a means to an end. You are producing something, by definition. What is that and why?
While I do have an "emotional itch" to work on "something" most of the time, I don't leave work to go do more work just for the sake of it. There are specific things that I want to produce because it makes me happy. If I don't work on those things, then it's not that I feel guilty, it's that I feel a void in my life.
In the past I have had so many hobbies and not enough time to dedicate to them all. I would get bored of one and move to another. Some might view that as recreation, but they were always making and producing something. For the last couple of years my wife and I have been performing magic as semi-professionals and as I find myself feeling less and less enthusiastic about modern technology after 25 years in the industry, I'm starting to see a scenario where I retire from tech and we take a major risk and go all in professionally. That can't happen if we don't put the work into it today. Not that you or anyone else should, but there's purpose and motivation behind the decision to produce that.
I don't live for the sake of my employer and I'm not motivated by money (at least not at this stage in my career, I have enough). There are things I want in my life that I will never get if I don't work towards them. Sometimes I am too tired, and that's a good signal that I'm not resting enough. But every single "productive" thing that I do, be it for my employer or myself, has a motivation behind it. No one should feel pressured to produce something just for the sake of producing (unless they are living parasitically off of the efforts of others but that is a whole different conversation).
On another note I really liked "How to Be Idle" by Tom Hodgkinson https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/623922.How_to_Be_Idle In case you get some guilt feelings.
To my limited knowledge, "Don't try" is to say do something that you don't need effort to start doing, something that doesn't feel like a chore to you, something that you are passionate about.
He also mentioned going hungry a lot for his passion.
I don't think that someone who perseveres through all that is a slacker, but again, my understanding is limited.
So he was motivated, but not by work or the concerns of others. The only reason we know about him is because he chose to write and often semi-autobiographically. There are scores of people who make similar arrangements for music, sport, reading, gardening, child rearing… we just don’t hear from them!
Granted if you have a family to provide for, and a life outside work, then you might be "working to live," and entrepreneurship is a needless risk that won't bring additional satisfaction. But if you're at the point that you're stressing over your productivity during the three hours of time you have to yourself each day, then that probably means you don't have much of a life outside work anyway. So it would be better to eliminate the work that is draining your energy, and replace it with pursuit of your own goals. Then you'll have those three hours to yourself, and you'll have spent the whole day being productive. It will be a net gain overall.
The first step is realizing that the risk of quitting your job is much lower than you think. Once you come to terms with that, it will be much easier to quit and begin building something important to you. There are so many opportunities for builders to produce value, raise money, get customers, and generally make themselves more useful, and therefore more fulfilled, than they ever could be while working for someone else. Take advantage of those opportunities while you can. If you fail, try again, or worst case scenario you can revert to your wage slavery.
With a SAHM wife, three kids under ten, a home, an investment property, and several other loans & liabilities, I'd say that the risks are considerable, especially given that neither my wife nor I have any family to fall back on.
Mental health should be more concerned and the "work-life balance" term needs to be brought to the discussion. Also, do not let the "overthinking" in.
By the way, I'm doing my 9-to-5 job for several years as a software engineer and still learning new stuff everyday. It's not the best but I'm enjoying my life. Just relax. =))
If you're some temporarily embarrassed billionaire, then the startup grindset is quite productive towards your goal.
If filling your life with momentary happiness is your goal, then playing videogames is quite productive towards your goal.
If you're a good little worker bee or someone at the Bureau of Labor Statistics is holding your family hostage, then clocking in 18 hours a day/7 days a week at $BIGTECH is quite productive towards your goal.
If you're religious, then going to church, improving your behavior/mindset, etc. are quite productive towards your goal.
It just all comes down to: What do you want out of life? What do you see as the purpose of life? The purpose of your life? Looking at this problem any other way is just deferring your personal philosophy, beliefs, and values to someone else—someone who probably doesn't care one bit about you and what you want.
If every day you do one thing that makes thing easier going forward, gives you another option, makes a job easier in the long term, adds a skill, gets you a reference or a connection, pay a dividend or royalty, etc.. in the long run you will be fine.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
"...you have to move forward every day. Sooner or later you will win."
It's a nice thought, and sounds good, but there's no substance to it.
"On average, I spend about an hour a day on curl. It adds up over time."
Downtime is productive. It recharges you, allows you to background-process your thoughts, fulfills your mind if you're doing something you love, makes you healthier if you're doing something active. Being productive in service to yourself is totally fine.
Eventually I realised that doing what is basically your job in your free time is fucking exhausting.
Nowadays I try to spend that time learning things which won’t enhance my career. Gardening, cooking, woodwork, much less stressful and more fulfilling imo
Meanwhile, with these other things you do get fulfillment because you see directly the fruits of your labor investment. You garden and get food and a beautiful environment. You cook and get a wonderful meal. You woodwork and get something beautiful or functional or both. You work out or do sports and you see your body develop and improve. In all cases, you are getting better at something or producing things and taking full advantage of it. You get this sense of progression like you are skilling in an RPG except the benefits are tangible.
One could argue that this is the problem. Not that you spend your time doing activities others wouldn't consider leisurely, but that you feel compelled to because otherwise you become "really anxious." Some anxiety can be a propulsion, but too much can be a pathology. I'm certainly not fit to evaluate your own, but by your own words I'd suggest it's possibly worth further reflection.
Check out Four Thousand Weeks for some recent musings on why that anxiety may be best ignored rather than heeded: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54785515-four-thousand-w...
There's the "simple carbohydrate" fun of, say, an action game, which is immediate, easy, but low-nutrition and, enjoyed overlong, makes me feel empty inside.
Then there's the "complex carbohydrate" fun of learning something new or working on a project, which is more fulfilling and interesting but also work -- mentally taxing -- and, enjoyed overlong, burns me out.
My brain seems to demand a balanced diet of both.
What happens when you get to such a state where you simply cannot NOT waste time? E.g. your job becomes so soul-sucking that you have no mental energy left? Might you be then the author of the post? Hmm.
I feel I'm more productive after having these small breaks and I feel way happier, anyone should try it
Also who decides the metrics of "Productivity"? If we listen to our bosses and CEOs we would ruin our mind, body and personal relationships while they generate intergenerational wealth.
Not saying you should be doing anymore, just saying it's okay to not be productive after traveling that much on top of a full work day. If it makes you feel better I work from home and recently had to travel for a customer. 2 hours each way, and I only worked 7 hours at the customer and it was the most exhausted I had been in months.
If the commute is no more than 15 minutes, you are losing 30 minutes there and back every day, which is 10 hours every month, almost a waking day every month. Its still lost time. This is without counting the time lost in preparing for getting out of the house, settling in at work, and then doing the exact opposite when commuting back. Make each 10 minutes if you are someone who gets up and going very fast. You are now up to 1 hour lost every day, 20 hours every month. Almost and entire day or two waking days...
That's 10 hours a day! That's too much. You can't be productive for such a long time. Well, the occasional day you can, when inspiration hits and you're really in the flow, but on days that you aren't, sometimes you just need to go home early.
One of the great things about working from home is that you don't have to pretend to be working 8+ hours per day anymore. It's more about the stuff you get done than about looking the part. When I feel burned out, I can actually play a game during the day. When inspiration hits, I can work in the evening. It does blur the lines between private life and work, and that's certainly a risk, but being able to use my time more effectively makes up for that. My productivity has gone up.
Anyway, 10 hours a day is too much. 8 hours per day is too much. 5 days a week is too much. I think 32 hour work weeks or less should become normalised. According to Keynes, we should have been working 15 hour weeks by now. And apparently hunter-gatherers also working only 15 hours a week. The problem is that we don't enjoy the benefits of our increased productivity anymore, and all the profits go to the people at the top.
And expecting to also be productive on private projects after such long work hours? Yeah, that's not going to work. I agree with that part of the article. But I wish people did have more time and energy after work to spend on private projects.
That's not a job my dudeperson, that's a gulag
100 years ago, lots of people, including in the US, fought hard to limit working hours to a 40 hour work week. Keynes even argued that because of increased productivity, we should now be working only 15 hours per week. It's incredibly sad to see how all these accomplishments of the past have been squandered (especially in the US, but not just there). We desperately need a new labour movement.
Bad analogy. More like a Walmart.
Fight for 4DWW !!!
I really hope to eventually do something that allows me to earn money, and have enough time to both tinker and relax, without running the risk of being exhausted come next morning.
How about some new propaganda?
"Work maximum 5h a day and the other 3h you will donate to your employer if they are kind and give you good atmosphere and money"?
How about that one, eh?
I've actually used counters -- privately, I'll never give anyone access to my machine or my activity times -- for a small period of time and I discovered that my true creative time was something in the order of 2.0 to 3.5 hours a day. And we're talking truly good work here, adding features, refactoring, adding and fixing tests, making automation scripts, you name it, it was all there.
5h doing everything right is enough to burn you out for the next 2-3 days.
Live a simple life, make enough money, then focus on other things. You've met your weekly quota, your bills are paid. Now go play.
When you're on your death bed, you won't be thinking "I wish I spent more time at work, closing tickets".
If you spend 50% of that at work, you have spent 50% of it at work. Probably the most productive 50%.
The entire point of working for someone else is to attain enough money that you don't need to any more and you can treat it as more of an optional thing. If you're not doing that then unless you really enjoy your job burnout is inevitable.
If that were the singular goal/point, then most people should simply give up working entirely because they'll never reach it. They're working their own version of the sunk cost fallacy.
For example I was in a tech company where XMPP was the core of every one of our products. There were almost no REST based APIs in the company and we had our own protocols and APIs which made much of what I did very specific and non transferable. Day in and out I worked with XML, asynchronous messaging and increasingly niche tooling as XMPP became less and less relevant and HTTP based APIs like REST-JSON and WebSockets displaced it.
It wasn’t hard to move jobs but it wasn’t easy either. I had to spend a month or so in my own time learning REST, JSON, WebSockets and Spring MVC in order to pass interviews.
I think constant productivity culture leads to burnout but there’s got to be a middle ground between doing nothing after hours and hustling non-stop.
The perspective of spending 1 or 2 hours playing videogames or watching entertainment (movies, series) became terribly boring to me. I can only think of that as a loss of time: I wouldn't be a better person at the end of it.
Being able to better smash buttons, faster, at the right timing -- watching a story unfold on screen -- these used to be a great source of joy "before". But today, it seems all so dull; my intellect or my body doesn't get any better by doing that. Instead, reading whatever book on ML or even on an obscure programming language or technique, or spending time at the gym, or listening to a lecture on math or physics, sound so much more appealing to me.
I cannot spend time anymore just sitting, it literally upsets me. Anybody feeling the same?
Could be the influence of excessive corporativism as the article suggests, where every second we don't spend creating the proverbial 'value for the shareholders' we have no reason to exist. Slowly it leaks into private life until one cannot relax anymore and can only do productive things constantly or feel guilty about it. Or maybe it's about desperately trying to become that better more capable person we once foolishly promised ourselves we'll be, while we visibly age and wonder which day will be our last wondering "is this really all there is to life?".
Either one I guess.
Instead i surf every day and go hiking and cook meals for my gf. Couldn't be happier. The hustle part will have to wait until i get through this phase.
On one end, I don't want to work too hard now that I'm old. However, I don't have to work too hard as I worked crazy hard for a long decade with massive growth and discipline saving.
When I reflect on interns, I want to hire people that are willing to suffer for the craft. I feel it is morally wrong to encourage a low key lifestyle in the young as it wastes potential.
At core, the question I'm asking is how to find people that desire greatness in life.
It's more about being smart at work and life (find the best tools for you, discover how your own brain works and find lifehacks - including food - to exploit the best from it).
I realize not everyone has the opportunity, but I think a lot of people would be much happier earning less.
It would be lovely to give up the charade of the importance of work.
You will not have that levels of energy forever.
are we the rats?
It took me 20 years and a pandemic to realize that corporations (especially public corporations) are one tracked. They are non-living entities fuelled by the insatiable greed of some. Remember the old adage, I’d rather be poor and happy than rich and miserable? Thanks to the increasing rich/poor divide - now everybody is miserable.
It’s the non-stop work culture, and for what? To sell more new phones and laptops to people, when the old ones work just fine?
But there is hope - with the increasing popularity of self-repair friendly legislations and the promotion of manufacturing jobs (the one thing I appreciate Trump for), we just might be able to save ourselves. As imperfect as Unions are, this was the reason for their existence - to keep the other side in check.
Sorry for going all over the place today. Just some things that have been on my mind lately. YOU mean something. YOUR life and well-being matters. Don’t do it for your loyalty - it means shit in most cases. To your boss it may matter a bit, but to the “company” - a made up non-living entity? Zilch. It is heartless and will show no emotion when making “hard” decisions.
/rant
PS: This is not the entire story. I did not get into the rabbit hole of influencers and online/social click-bait marketing that is thriving on FOMO.
Listen to your body. Always.
"Time enjoyed wasting is not wasted time".
Helped me a lot.
