The person you're responding to did not claim that jobs can't be fulfilling.
They merely said that people shouldn't expect to work a fulfilling job. And they're totally right.
In fact, I'd argue that the extreme majority of jobs are not fulfilling for the majority of the people working them. Retail, fast food, call centers...nobody enjoys those jobs. And yet people work them because they have to, because they pay so little that trying to get out of them takes an incredible amount of work, which is hard to find the motivation to do when you're so beat down by how incredibly shit your job is combined with constantly being stressed about lack of money.
I'm not there person you replied to, but I think I would probably stay at my current job if I was financially independent.
I work for a small company. The company does foreign language training. Most of the business is one-on-one classes between real teachers and students. My job is basically R&D to figure out ways we might use software to improve the teaching/leaning process. My primary focus is on virtual reality, but I'm also exploring a lot in teleconferencing.
For about a year, I was the only software developer on staff. Our company website and our student portal are all developed by a consulting firm. I got to hire another developer about a month ago. We will never be responsible for the website. We strictly work on these R&D projects.
It's been the best job I've ever had. Most money I've ever made. It helps that the company culture is strongly tilted towards "employee empowerment", and not just as a platitude. Nobody brow beats me over anything. Nobody asks me to justify any hardware purchases (though I still do, because I think it's an important part of developing and documenting the projects). When I say something will take X long, they believe me and that's that.
If you like your work, if you like to build things, try finding a small company that isn't a software company. Definitely avoid consulting companies. I spent 15 years in consulting across a variety of company sizes and it was universally soul sucking (though the smaller orgs were definitely less so, up to the best time I had as a consultant was as a freelancer. It still wasn't as good as my current job, though).
Edit: somehow my phone auto corrected 15 years to 25. I'm not quite that old.
Your comment isn't the first time I have heard this advice, "Find a small non tech company and get involved" however I have previously written this advice off for w/e reason.
I now find myself in search of a new opportunity and am very much like many other commenters in this thread, highly unsatisfied with "rat race" type jobs, and if I'm not happy I don't perform up to my ability well.
I'm actually very interested in exploring your path, possibility finding a small non tech company and seeing where/ if I could add value to their organization with my software development experience.
All my previous jobs have been found via standard software development job boards though, StackOverflow, LinkedIn, homegrown software job boards, etc. Do you have any advice on finding a small non tech company that might be looking to add a software developer to their ranks?
Honestly I'd love to chat with ya personally. If you're comfortable shoot me an email otherwise any incite here would be wonderful. Email in my Bio
Stooooop using job applications. You're limiting yourself to an extremely tiny pool of jobs when you go through the front-door of posted jobs. The vast majority of jobs are filled through networking, not cold applications.
My last 10 years of jobs have all been gotten through networking. I've still applied to jobs through postings, but I've mostly not gotten any replies from them. And definitely stop using recruiters. They don't have any access to jobs you can't find on your own. They're just trying to move candidates as fast as possible into companies that can't find employees on their own.
Get out into your community. Get to know people. Be friendly and helpful to them, and eventually they start asking you if you're looking for a job.
The primary problem is that you just don't know what work is out there. Networking is like getting dozens of people looking for jobs for you, and you don't even have to ask them to (and seriously, don't ask them to, it hurts your ability to build relationships with them).
That was the biggest change for me. I grew up in a podunk town and had to get out of it to find people I could stand to hang out with long enough to build useful relationships. I didn't realize at the time that that was what I was doing. And maybe if I understood the importance of finding "the good people", I could have worked harder back there to find the types of people I wanted to work with, and been fine even there. But it's definitely easier in a major metro center.
If you can't, go to conferences. Go to conferences in industries other than tech. Go to enough of them in one industry and you'll end up meeting the same people. It takes a little more time, but actually not a lot. Something about seeing the same people at conferences tends to open people up to each other.
And there are a lot of online conferences these days (for the obvious reason, but there were a lot before, too). Definitely use this time to get out and start meeting people. Hell, I live in DC and one of the communities I'm more active in is actually centered in Austin, TX, and I've never even been there. The particulars of why it happened aren't important, just that it's very much possible to get involved in different groups without actually having to travel.
You might even volunteer at a local foodbank or some other community service type thing. On the surface it will sound unrelated to what you want to do, but you're also meeting other volunteers. Some of whom might be people you want to work with. My first major freelancing gig came from an engineer at a sensor manufacturer that I met because we were volunteering at the same place to teach kids STEM skills.
Hell, take up marathon running. I have never done it, but my wife used to do it, and she always ran and bumped into the same people (if you'll excuse the pun). Anything that gets you into a position to reliably meet people. That's it.
It's hard when you're in a miserable job. All you can think about is the misery you're going to experience next week. And then a year goes by and you've had 52 miserable weeks without even realizing it. "The future always gets here". Literally do anything that breaks you out of that routine (short of shooting heroin, I guess) and you'll probably be a lot better off in a year.
Yes, it's not easy to find, but it exists out there.
I think a lot of people's dissatisfaction comes from the narrative surrounding "financial freedom". We get bombarded with the idea that financial freedom is the one, true path to working on your passions.
For a variety of reasons, I think that's bullshit.
It creates a false hope that there is some state one can achieve that is free of misery. There is no perfect job. Every person working on their passion project also has a lot of chores they don't like that they have to perform or their project will never see the light of day. C'est la vie.
But more insidiously, it denies the concept that one could be happy working as an employee somewhere. It makes me wonder whether it's a narrative intentionally designed to keep people "in their place". By creating a narrative that "financial freedom" is necessary to work on one's passions, it pushes the worker to not look elsewhere for greener pastures. "Stay where you are, the grass is always greener, blah blah blah". Sure, we can certainly get into situations where we are blind to how good we have things. But there are also lots of very toxic places. And just because you're more likely to go from one toxic place to another doesn't mean that the toxicity is "natural" or "inevitable" or "just the way things are".
So the first step is to accept that happiness and satisfaction and having a contented disposition are choices one can make now, not the result of achieving some financial endpoint. Your boss wants you to work overtime to make an impossible deadline happen? His problem. You weren't the one to set the deadline. He needs to own up to his failures.
And then the second step is to be more open minded about where you might work or what work you might do. I used to do nothing but web and database development. I thought that was the only thing I'd ever get hired to do. And I had only ever done it for consulting companies. I tried to get out of it by getting a job doing software product development at a bunch of companies. I kept getting told that I didn't have any product experience, that my consulting experience "didn't apply", that I had never worked on a single project for 10 years straight.
Uh, I don't know a whole lot of people in any field who have worked on a single project for 10 years. They exist, and that's amazing, but that's just not the bulk of people in any industry.
So I just stopped asking permission to do the things I wanted to do. I just started writing exactly the software I wanted. I dragged it into my consulting work (a little easier when I was freelance, but ultimately not that hard even when I wasn't). I didn't ask approval for anything. Occasionally, I got in trouble for it, but most of the time either went completely unnoticed or the benefits were recognized, and it was fine. But the key point was that, even those few times I was getting in trouble for doing whatever the hell I wanted, it was still better than the long period when I was doing what I was told and getting brow-beat all the time to work overtime and do things "The Company Way" or whatever.
That's one of the reasons I constantly advocate for exclusively working for smaller companies. Most small companies don't care how the work gets done, as long as it gets done. Sure, Microsoft and Google and Facebook are going to flip their shit if you unilaterally decide "this code that I wrote is open source". They want you to ask permission first, to write up a business case for why it's better to be opened first, probably develop it in-house for a while before opening it, if ever opening it, if you ever get approval to work on it at all. And some smaller companies attempt to cargo-cult this behavior, but if you just end-run around them, they don't realy care. They just put up with it.
Or not. Maybe they fire you. But if they do, it's not the end of the world. I've only ever been fired from one job, and that was unrelated to my technology decisions. It was also one of the best things that ever happened to me, as it broke my fear of getting fired. I started on this life of "do whatever I want, but do it to the best of my ability" after that and everything has been so much better ever since.
Just... protect yourself. Be a little mercenary about your work. It's your work. Most places actually have lots of jobs, you just don't know where to look for them. Get out into the community and meet people to find them.
Most of our fears about what could happen with our employers and our work situations are pretty unrealistic. It's pretty rare for people to end up on the street, homeless, just because they refused to work overtime. It usually takes a substance abuse problem, or a mental health crisis. Which you're more likely to fall into if you're unhappy. So choose to be happy. And then do whatever it takes to protect that happiness.
I work at a company that's very much not FAANG (more of a small, niche CAD-flavored Adobe), and I do a lot of what you describe.
Namely, a lot of "whatever the hell I want," almost never asking permission, and I don't recall ever needing to beg forgiveness. The end result seems to be that I now know lots of trivia about dusty corners of our massive, legacy code-base and my manager seems to be consulting me on a bunch of architecture-level decisions. Granted, I ... exercise savvy about playing in a leaf-node sandbox vs. a trunk-node jenga tower, and I'm a fluent English speaker with a PhD-level math background so maybe I get a little more latitude than other people.
Still, I find that I feel a lot more free working here, under considerably less pressure to ship, than I did in the PhD program.
This post reads like someone who has achieved (or perhaps inherited) financial freedom and now does whatever they want and doesn't understand why others don't do the same thing. Your first third of your comment argues against trying to obtain financial freedom, but then tries to nudge the reader to do things that likely require financial freedom to achieve.
> Or not. Maybe they fire you. But if they do, it's not the end of the world.
For the majority of people, if they lose their job and don't get something new within two weeks, they don't pay their rent and lose their home.
No. We're not hurting, but we are not by any means financially independent.
You're kind of proving my point on "fears are typically unfounded". Missing a rent payment one month does not usually lead to immediately losing your home. Also, I would wager that a lot of people have friends and family through which they can get assistance if it goes longer than that. It's going to be extremely stressful, but it's not usually going to mean the person is suddenly homeless.
This is what I'm advocating: being more realistic about the worst case scenario. You're probably not actually going to get fired, and you're probably not going to end up homeless if you do.
If your personal, intersectional position is much more precarious, by all means, proceed with more caution. I'm just some dude on the internet. I don't know you. But I'm not writing specifically to you, I'm writing to the aggregate. It doesn't negate that most people have more fear than they need to about getting fired.
I enjoy doing what I do. I think it's possible to combine financial success with personal satisfaction. In fact I believe the greatest financial successes are the ones that are most intimately tied to their creator's personal satisfaction, enjoyment and alignment with what they do
> I enjoy doing what I do. I think it's possible to combine financial success with personal satisfaction.
That's supremely rare, mon ami. "Do what you love and you'll never work a day" doesn't apply to like 90% of the workforce. And even when you do cool stuff, there is often no shortage of BS to go with it.
You are very lucky to love your gig and be well compensated for it; most people are not well compensated and live lives full of endless drudgery.
You don’t need the money. You’ve been given the financial freedom to do whatever you want. And you seriously will just plug away at your job? You can’t think of a better way to spend your time and talents? That’s a bit sad.
I think you're projecting. I suppose in normal times I'd take more time off but otherwise I'm not sure I would quit and do something different. Admittedly lots of people get addicted to effectively the gamification aspects of compensation but there are still lots of people in tech and elsewhere that could absolutely retire comfortably and/or do whatever they wanted at a relatively young age if they wanted to.
You're not always in control of whether your job is fulfilling. Maybe you've been lucky so far, but it's unlikely to last forever.
A piece of advice: The moment it stops being fulfilling for you, you may get the urge to change jobs to something that you think will make you happier. You may change jobs several times trying to rediscover that initial feeling that made you satisfied with your work. But it may never come back. And if it's anything like my situation, in the end, the first job you left may have been the best of the bunch, and you come to the realization that the original satisfaction you had was a fluke and you may never find it again.
There's two ways you could go about fixing this. One is to keep job hopping until you get something that was as good as the first job. The other is to accept that it's just a job, and to try and not derive too much of your happiness purely from work. (Or, more generally, try to not derive too much of your happiness from anything you can't control.)
I think it's important to figure out why you found some piece of work fulfilling. I think a lot of people don't have a good understanding of why they like doing the things they do.
I know a lot of people who say, "I do this job that I hate, and I have this other hobby that I truly love, but if I were to make my hobby my job, I think I'd learn to hate my hobby." I used to say it about a number of things. I love to cook, or I love to paint, or whatever, but I work as a programmer because it's what I can stand to do for work.
And then one day I had gotten so sick of working for terrible companies that I thought I couldn't be a programmer anymore. Then I spent about a year kicking around a bunch of bullshit ideas, trying to find work that wasn't programming, that was "more fulfilling". And ultimately ended up doing a lot of programming in that time, because I had falsely concluded that my terrible work experiences were just "the nature" of working as a programmer.
I didn't hate programming. I hated working for consulting companies ran by MBAs. What I eventually realized was that I love programming. If I had been a graphic designer in those same situations, it would have made life even worse. Programming itself was the thing that I was enjoying that mollified my discontent with my employment situation. Any other job would not have been as satisfying as programming, which is where the concept that I'd "learn to hate" photography or music or teaching or whatever.
Some people I know do the work because they love solving problems for their users. Some people do it because they love learning new things all the time. But I don't think they really know that about themselves. I think they have a surface understanding that, somewhere around this area of this job that I'm doing, there is something here that I like. But they don't have their thumb on what part, exactly, that they like.
I think it's very important to pin it down because I also think it's very important to be able to recognize if it is no longer the thing you love. It's perfectly valid to change your mind about what you love. You might start out on your career loving the intellectual challenge of programming, and you might learn over time that you love interfacing with users even more. But if you haven't taken the time to deeply introspect on what particular aspect of the work it is that you are enjoying, you'll lump it all together as "I love software development", and then wonder why things have gotten bad when you're still a software developer but are now working on database schemas rather than requirements gathering.
You can't know how to fix a thing if you don't know how it's broken. And you can't know it's broken if you don't know what it should look like when its fixed.
A man cannot step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.
The circumstances that made the first job great were no longer there even before I left it, and the role doesn't even exist any more at this point. I've looked at joining (roughly) the same team again but the responsibilities have changed so much that I can't really recreate the same magic.
Live close to work or remote. This reduces commute times and frees up time during your day. Take vacations and do things that excite you. If not remote, take advantage of days you can work from home and go for a long weekend somewhere. Or work from home for a week and go somewhere.
Work to live not the other way around. Clock out and do things.
I'm not sure that's quite the scenario the parent posited. But there is something of a middle ground where you don't necessarily love/are energized by every hour of every working day but you like it well enough on net and you have the flexibility and financial freedom to do things outside of or adjacent to your day to day job that you want to do.
As a worker, a job will always have elements that are inherently stacked against you and are unfair, and those elements are enforced by the same laws that force you to accept such an arrangement otherwise you won't eat and your kid will never be able to see a doctor.
You give part a part of yourself you cannot get back, your time, a limited resource that you can't regain once spent. You often do this for little to no equity in the business you spend the majority of your waking time advancing, and you often have little to no say in how or where your time is spent. For the vast majority of people, they will never be paid enough to be able to live off of their assets, and their time will be spent building wealth for those whose income is derived from their assets.
Unsurprisingly, there are some people who aren't happy with such arrangements and have a lot to say about them.
Everyone exchanges their time for money, if you work a job that's entirely unfulfilling you're trading happiness too. It's an exchange that no one wins.
The company might still win in that exchange, since they get the labor they paid for anyway. Whether you are happy or not is only important insomuch as it alters your productivity. Don't fall into the trap of thinking a company of FAANG size cares all that much about individual employees.
I'm not saying big companies deeply care about you as a person, but their interests are at least partially aligned with yours on this. Happier employees are more engaged, work harder, work longer hours. In many cases the things that make employees "happier" are a lot cheaper for employers than increasing someone's salary by x%.
> Don't fall into the trap of thinking a company of FAANG size cares all that much about individual employees.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking everyone posting on HN comes from a similar background. I work for a non-profit who go to great lengths to make the workplace comfortable.
Don't get me wrong, I think that's great and I'm happy you have a nice workplace. My comments were in the greater context of the thread, which is about working for FAANG companies.
Not at all. They pay what it would cost to replace you. If someone accepted to do the same job for cheaper (or free), they'd take it, regardless of the value it generates.
Salary is correlated with market demand and alternatives, both for the company and the employee.
For example, I know engineers who are some of the most valuable people in the company, and some engineers who are borderline useless. You can be borderline useless but good at self promotion / good at negotiation and be paid a lot more than very valuable eng. fwiw, I'm on the business side of the house, but used to be an engineer. So I think primarily in terms of business value.
Or think of CSMs. They get paid a lot less, on average, than engineers. Are they less valuable / do they create less value? It's quite hard to make that argument: No CSMs, no customers and no upsells.
I agree salary is correlated with demand, but I also believe there's a reason for that demand.
CSMs have no leverage. Engineers are powerful because their work can have an org-wide impact.
If we're talking about business value I think that sales (B2B), marketing (B2C/DTC) and engineers are the largest generators of business value in companies because of the leverage they have.
I have worked in b2b selling to enterprise or midmarket for my whole career, so individual customers are generally noticeable amounts of revenue. And our lowest end customers have CLVs in the 250k+ range. So that obviously influences my view of whether CSMs have org-wide impact.
I can see how that differs with a different business model, but I don't see how you can simultaneously believe CSMs don't have leverage, but salespeople do. In a business -- particularly in a saas model -- where you have CSMs and AEs, CSMs have more leverage, because you probably barely break even on year one of a customer.
If half of all software engineers suddenly died, the remaining software engineers would be able to negotiate higher salaries. But they wouldn't be adding any more value to any given company than they were previously. Conversely, if a spaceship landed with 10 million highly capable software engineers, we'd all be on minimum wage. It doesn't matter how much value you generate. If there are hundreds of other people who could do your job equally well, then you won't be able to negotiate a good salary.
But it's cute that serfs under the yoke of capitalist exploitation think that they are being paid in proportion to the value they generate!
They pay because you wouldn't bring them value if they didn't pay. Otherwise Facebook would be paying the developers of every open source project that they use.
Not value, money. Every job centers around money because we're working for businesses. "Value" is just a side effect (and not a necessary one at that).
Some people find making money meaningful and fulfilling, many of us don't.
My job brings me opportunities of scale that I'm unlikely to find elsewhere, and I genuinely enjoy the challenges, but I'd work on something else if they didn't pay me to do it.
It's not that it's not fun, but fun doesn't pay the bills. If it didn't _have_ to pay the bills, I'd probably still develop software but with a very different focus.
Marx was big on getting people to the place where they don't feel like their work is pointless. But in order to get there, you have to get rid of the social stratification of the current system, where some people do their labor and give it to somebody else to sell. That seller not only gets to keep the majority of the profit, but it also keeps the work from being very fulfilling since you're disconnected from the end product of your effort.
So Marx didn't say it was impossible. He just said that getting from here to there was going to require changes -- changes that could easily be unpleasant.
Who said jobs can't be fulfilling?