
Ask HN: Does anyone really love their job? - tech_crawl_
I had someone tell me recently, &quot;do what you are passionate about and you will love your job.&quot; As I sat there and reflected... I wasn&#x27;t sure if I am &quot;that&quot; passionate about anything... Anyone else in this boat with work?
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williswee
I do. As founder of Tech in Asia, I admit I struggled a little initially
because I kept thinking about money. But as time passes, I learned that there
are things much more important than money. Don't get me wrong, I still think $
is important, I do want to be rich (who doesn't?). But money isn't as
important as building a company with great culture, values and mission that is
worth pursuing.

Life is too short to chase for money. Enough is good, more is better. Live
within your means. I don't crave for a luxurious life. Money is an item to
allow us (the company) to keep doing what we love doing. Valuation is a
measure of how much the company has grown but I'm not obsessed with it. I
rather spend my time being happy. Building a company with good culture, values
and worthy mission makes me happy. If you're interested, our culture code can
be found here:
[https://www.techinasia.com/culture/](https://www.techinasia.com/culture/) :)

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tixocloud
Thanks for starting Tech In Asia. It's been a great source for me to keep
track of all the innovation that's going on in the region. I'm very impressed
by what's going on there. I was originally born in Malaysia but moved to
Canada many years back. However, I've always had a soft spot and its sites
like yours that help me stay connected. Thank you!

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yazaddaruvala
I would say I love my job. However, I'm not enthusiastic about it. From what I
am able to infer, it seems similar to most long term marriages/relationships
and the way spouses/partners feel about each other.

Meanwhile, I am passionate about being my best self. I get great satisfaction
when I know I've done my best at something. In that regard work, whatever it
is, definitely gives me tasks to accomplish, and be my best at. Outside of
video games (and maybe religion?), its the only place in life that gives you
both a task to do and motivation(money) to actually complete it.

I also know what I hate, I hate doing the same thing over and over. I
definitely avoid that. I am very fortunate though. My job doesn't involve a
lot of repetitive tasks. I think that would get on my nerves. I don't think
I'm psychologically built for that.

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FrankyHollywood
Paul Graham writes about this in his excellent book 'Hackers & Painters'
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_%26_Painters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_%26_Painters)).

There often is a big difference between doing what you love, and doing what
must be done in society, like calculating mortgages for some stupid bank with
corporate policies and everyone wearing the same boring blue-ish shirt. I do
it to, have an excellent paycheck, which gives me freedom to do things I like
in my own time.

Most creative persons need a day job. It is very rare that customers are
willing to pay for precisely the thing you like to create. Even Van Gogh
goodn't make a living from his paintings...

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FrankyHollywood
(and I don't hate my job btw, there is a lot of technical challenge in what I
do. Creating a wel performing system for milions of customers is a big puzzle
to be solved.

I just can't stand corporate environment with way to much untalented people in
to expensive suits acting being busy and important :)

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larrymcp
Oh my goodness, yes definitely... I love my job, love my work, the bosses are
fantastic... I am living testimony that it's possible. Don't know how common
this is though.

I work crazy long hours because the work is so much fun, and because I care
about getting a bunch of things done even when there isn't enough time in the
workday.

Yep, call me in love.

~~~
FrankyHollywood
"the bosses are fantastic"... you guys have openings for a good c# dev? :)

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andywood
I love programming in general, but I've struggled through my last few jobs.
I'm pretty close to hating my current job, despite that fact that I work on a
well-known product with millions of users.

The analogy that comes to mind is a pro race car driver who is forced to only
drive on an obstacle course, never exceeding 20 mph. The driver has skills
that enable him to drive successfully on the obstacle course, but he yearns to
do what he loves, opening up on a proper racetrack. In the same way, I have
the skills to do tedious debugging of a large, absurdly complex system with
tons of technical debt, only making minimal changes to avoid the whole pile of
spaghetti collapsing. But I wish every day that I was designing and
implementing systems instead, and I'm good at that, too.

Ironically, it was early in my career that I had the most autonomy to
implement new features and write a lot of code, even if it was on obscure
products. In the latter part of my career, I guess my mistake was allowing
myself to be lured into working on "famous" things at big companies, even
though it amounted to being mostly a maintenance programmer on sprawling,
spaghettified legacy software.

I guess that next time, I should be more diligent about trying to find out
what the day-to-day work will be like (which I find very hard to get an
accurate idea of in the interview process. obviously the interviewer is going
to paint a rosy picture), and at this point I would rather work on something
totally obscure, if it meant I got to do more design and coding.

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lsc
I know for me, there are times and projects where I really do love my job. The
other day I got to code in C for the first time in a long time; I mean, it was
something that would have been far more efficiently done in a regex against
the output of a shell program, but the boss wanted it done using the API, so C
it was. and... there's something really satisfying about writing something
that works in C. That, and the novelty of writing something in C. Novelty is
big for me.

There are other times where, as they say, "that's why they call it work" where
I have to visualize that paycheck to get me through the day. Hell, today I had
to reboot like ten servers and change bios settings by hand. Oh my god, it's
like the attention deficit disorder tests the shrink gives you. "Press Delete
or F12 when the screen tells you to press delete or F12, but not before it
tells you, or else you have to start over and wait an additional 180 seconds."
\- and ten is so few that it didn't justify busting out expect and writing a
script. (I mean, if I was feeling my oats, that's what I would have done, and
it would have been really fun, but I haven't touched expect in years and it
would have taken rather longer to come back up to speed than to just do it.)

Now, obviously, if I have too much of the latter, I start thinking about
changing things, but I think it's not realistic to think that you'll love your
job all the time.

In general, I think how much I enjoy it has as much to do with me and how I
think about it as it has to do with the work. - Certainly, I'm not saying it's
got nothing to do with the work, the work is part of it; but how you approach
that work, how long you've been doing that work, and what your perceived
alternatives are all have a big part to play in your level of satisfaction, in
my experience.

You can mostly ignore the people who crow too much about "passion" \- Most of
the time, if the job ad talks more about passion than about qualifications,
that actually means they want to pay you intern salary and just don't want to
tell you up front. If that's your thing, go for it... but the big corporate
jobs that actually let you operate at scale and/or actually pay decently are
going to be more concerned with qualifications than with "passion"

I'll show up and do the job. And yes, sometimes I will enjoy it. but I'm not
in sales; I don't have to pretend like I'm always happy- and if that's what
you want out of your employees? I thank you for letting me know ahead of time
so that we don't waste oneanother's time.

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NumberCruncher
The trick is not doing what you love (working on something you are passionate
about) but loving what you do (being passionate about whatever you have to
do). This idea is discussed in the following books

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion

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paulrpotts
I've been developing software for 25 years. There are often projects that
drag, and slogs through tedious parts to implement and difficult parts to
debug, but for the most part I do love my work. Making stuff work is a joy to
me. Solving tricky engineering problems and fixing bugs is fun. Writing code
for a product that actually ships and which people enjoy using, that is a
great feeling. The meetings and HR and spreadsheets and reviews and office
politics, not so much, but I've been fortunate to work for a number of
startups and startup-like groups where that kind of stuff can usually be
minimized.

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atsaloli
I've been working on my business for 5 years part-time (on the side while
holding down a full-time job) and full-time for the past half year. My first
full-time employee started working with me on-site at my client this week
after two months of study (at my expense) - I'm training him almost from
scratch as a sysadmin. (He's had one year of QA experience with exposure to
bash/perl scripting.) It's very gratifying to watch my creation (my company)
come into existence, and I love training and mentoring, so yeah, I love my
job.

It's not roses and rainbows every day but I'm moving in the right direction, I
feel, and I'm happy about that. Makes it easier to bear the drudgy aspects of
the job. =)

Good luck!

EDIT: While I was working full-time at my regular job, having a side project
kept me inspired and energized.

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mattm
I tend to be more enthusiastic about my job when I leave something for
tomorrow. Like a "To be continued" episode that gets you hooked, if I leave at
the end of the day with something to finish the next morning, I look forward
to it much more than if I push through and get it done before leaving.

I also find I'm more interested in my job when I take a little time each day
(15-30 minutes) to read a programming book about a technology I'm working on.
Learning is something that I value highly and it makes me more interested in
the work when I learn something new that I can apply or know that I'm getting
a little bit better.

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logn
I think it's sufficient to love doing a good job, i.e., to take pride in your
work. I doubt my dentist's staff is passionate about removing tartar from
teeth, but I would guess they enjoy doing the work correctly.

And even if you're doing what you love, you won't necessarily love every
moment. Nothing has the potential to rob something of its enjoyability quite
like a bad boss or soulless company.

Further, "passion" isn't really applicable to wide swaths of jobs. And many
people's passions have no chance to be profitable.

I think more practical advice is to do work that makes you happy.

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k__
I love developing software. I even do it for recreation. If I could choose, I
would want to work on stuff that is good for everyone. At the moment I'm
working on something "neutral to good" so it's okay I guess.

I'm working remote so besides meetings there isn't much difference between
coding for fun and coding for work. So it's easy money. I wouldn't say I
_love_ the specific job I'm doing right now (I just like it), but I love being
a developer :)

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gesman
At some point I really loved my job because it allowed me to spend lots of
time doing what I really love (outside of main job). Without being restrictive
in any way.

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smt88
There have been some experiments where researchers paid people to do something
they loved. Once the person was paid, their reward response to that activity
diminished. In some cases, it disappeared entirely, and that once-enjoyable
activity became only "work".

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CrowderSoup
I think that you can be passionate about what you DO without loving your job.
I've had jobs I hate, but I've never stopped loving building things.

As an aside, I do love my current job. When you can get both hang on to it!

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hvo
You may find some answers in pg's essay How To Do What You Love
[http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html)

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thebigspacefuck
I love doing a good job. Sometimes nobody tells me whether I am or not.

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imauld
I do.

I recently made a switch from a non-technical role to a technical role and
couldn't be happier. I keep waiting for someone to come over and tell me to
knock it off and come do some actual work.

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tmaly
things can get boring or drag on depending on the project. I have a side
project outside of work that keeps me going.

