Sometimes jobs aren't just boring, but one is constantly stressed by absurd deadlines or communication efforts with bosses/customers whose expectations are both in line with business practices and out of reality. You surely get back home with a nice check, but no energy or will to spend it on anything fun. Being good at forgetting the workplace and associated problems when one walks out of there is an art not everyone can master, especially among those who actually love their jobs.
At Google I started to forget if I could even build things anymore. Doubted I would be able to pick up the skill of solving problems again if I left the company. I had strange and hard to interpret nightmares after realizing the company’s PR department had sold me a lie. At this point they are a traditional company.
I have a hobby that involves metalworking and building and it was strongest and I was at my most hobby-productive during a time I worked for a soul-destroying FAANG full of unreasonable expectations, stress, awful management, and so on. I think for the sake of your mental health, you really need to get good at "forgetting the workplace" and switching to fun mode. It's a skill like anything that you can practice. I know people who can't separate, and they take their misery from work and spread it into their home life. It's awful, especially for their family.
I fully recognized that would be required when I was in that situation. The TV show Severance kept coming to mind. I think I only saw a couple of episodes and the basic premise of dividing your mind between work and home was too real and I had to stop.
Thankfully I had an alternative and went back to startups. I could absolutely never accept dividing my brain like that, steeping in cognitive dissonance and just letting myself rot inside. Once you’ve felt the good life - where work is play and learning happens all day long - there’s no amount of money that can be accepted to lose that.
Doing the boring job at all is a waste of 50+% of your waking hours? By all means, do it if it makes the remaining 50% more enjoyable, but I think it’s possible to have both.
The non-boring companies I've worked for have had problems of wanting to work you at 150% of your schedule, quite often illegally. It is insanely rare that you'll get a job that keeps you busy (only) 8 hours a day constantly. Either the place is always on fire and has 12 hours of work a day, or you'll have it better managed and work will be bursty with the majority of the time under utilized. Spend that extra time being taught stuff on the company dime.
Possible, but unlikely today. I think the advice being converged on is not to let the possibility of 100% enjoyment ruin one's actual, real-life situation. Attain it if you can, but don't spend your life rueing its absence.
It's more so true today than ever before, where there are more companies than ever willing to consider allowing software developers, and some other kinds of knowledge workers, to work any where in the world.
It gives you more opportunities to find that combination of work you find meaningful, coworkers you mesh with, flexibility, and decent compensation, than any other time in history I'm aware of.
It's still not easy. Just easier than in the past.
I completely agree. As you stay, it's still not easy, especially in the post-ZIRP economy. Do I deserve to work with a team of interesting people, on a product I can be proud of, on a team that gives me flexible work hours? I sure do. But finding it is a big challenge for me, so I'm still going to celebrate the freedoms my current job gives me until I can find the right one.
But you know, at the end there should be someone who is cleaning the toilets and taking out garbage. You eating the cake and having it is a bit selfish.
Just because someone's cleaning the toilet doesn't mean that everyone must struggle. Yes, life's not fair to everyone, some people starve right now, while other throw away kilograms of food. Some people clean toilets while other people were born with gold spoon in their mouth and will enjoy whatever they want for the rest of their lives.
Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the worst offender to the world fairness, I think.
>Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the worst offender
But there is something to be said that some people are born into situations that force them to adopt a very risk adverse posture. If you don’t have any safety net, “daring to work at a place that does not suck” takes on a different risk profile and doesn’t necessarily generalize well as a strategy.
Me living in a 4 BR house with only our 4 family members instead of us taking in a stranger is also a bit selfish.
Everyone does some level of selfish things; trying to shape work so that you find it enjoyable (and therefore likely something that others would also find enjoyable) is an acceptable form of selfishness to most.
I think it was Joel Spolsky, who said one of his responsibilities as CEO of a new startup was cleaning the toilets until they could afford to pay a janitor.
I thought it was a good reminder to have an attitude of just seeing what needs to be done and doing it.
Why can't we just automate the terrible jobs out of existence? There's no good reason why we can't have a machine that cleans the toilet or takes your trash out to the street. Plus a self-driving machine that picks up your trash.
In corporations is not a lot of money, almost never the market rates. In my big non-IT company I am paid at rates lower than any external company we contract for projects, even if their people are always lower qualified.
Also there is the problem of having to deal every day with "professional managers" that don't know anything about IT, but make decisions based on magic 8 ball and their career interests. Similar to illiterate politicians in many countries.
If you were comparing what the other company was charging your company for their developers: Labor and software services have different markets. Because, among other things, tax/insurance regulations and the expectations of contract longevity are not the same. A software shop needs to charge 2-3x salaries to be profitable. I was referring to a theoretical free market for labor.
If you were comparing salaries, either your company was compensating you with extra prestige, job security, etc. or you were underpaid.
I am comparing manager/architect positions in Europe with long-term (5+ years) contractor positions in India. Yes, I know contracting is more expensive than employees, but not to this level. We use contractors because internal developers would be paid so bad, nobody would apply (and they don't).
I'd say they pay bad so they don't have to have the local employees that would be protected by strong local laws. Contracting is effectively cheaper, mostly because the company doesn't care about the health of the local company/economy.
It’s only soul destroying if you let it be. As someone who grew up in poverty and spent most of my 20s working at a call center and pawn shop, I feel like the luckiest person in my family with my soul destroying corporate job.
It sounds cliche but happiness is truly a state of mind. You don’t have to wait for something in the future to be happy now.
These conversations where highly paid software people complain about insanely minor things (the code linter is the worst part of your job??) are actually kind of nice to read, in a funny way.
The privilege of having pixels be the most stressful part of your life... it's actually really nice to read that. Having perspective from hardship is good, and everyone will have at least some perspective at some point in their life when hardship is forced upon them. But hardship in and of itself isn't good. I'm happy it is being completely eradicated from life, at least for some of us.
Yea, that linter thread was wild! Sometimes I think we are totally pampered and out of touch!
I've cleaned McDonalds bathrooms, worked in a plastics factory where the chemical stench left my nose nonfunctional for weeks, hauled heavy sacks of shingles up onto a roof in 100+F degree summer temperatures.
I am utterly grateful and consider it a lucky privilege to now be typing into a computer in a climate controlled office, where my biggest stressor is a deadline.
I don't mean to pile on but i feel the same when software devs here talk about how becoming a farmer is their salvation from their workplace suffering. As a kid I remember watching my cousin lie on his back with a stick welder underneath a horse trailer in 105F Texas summer heat. No thanks, i'll stick with my coffee, desk, and computer.
edit: different strokes for different folks, i don't want to sound too presumptuous. For some people what i described is exactly what would bring them joy.
A lot of the folks working in these bigger tech companies didn't grow up this way. A lot of them grew up in wealthy families, lived in wealthy neighborhoods, were pushed into an elite tech career by their parents, went to elite pre-university schooling, elite universities, etc and have never had to feel monetary scarcity. Just look at HN comments and see how many 3rd generation programmers there are. As an adult with savings working at bigger tech companies and never having experienced hardship or poverty as a child, the prospect of following your dream feels alluring.
I grew up in poverty myself but my partner and many of my friends at bigger tech companies grew up the way I discussed earlier. Most of them were pushed through their parents' social circles into a tech career and never were wanting for money. They feel the grind inherent to being paid for your time as opposed to volunteering your time and think of it as an injustice. My partner and friends complain constantly about tech and their jobs but other than a handful who briefly worked service jobs in their teens, they have nothing to compare it to. I spent my summers as a teen moving heavy boxes/furniture, often in 100F+ hot weather, and being paid in cash (hoping to become a cabinetmaker!) barely making ends meet and I know what it's like to keep a job a job.
I left Big Tech (I had joined it as a startup and ended up staying much longer than I expected) so I understand the complaints about heavily bureaucratic jobs where most of your time is spent coordinating rather than building, and while I'm always unhappy at something or the other with my job, I know how good I have it. I do a job that I don't hate, working with generally smart people, alternating between a cushy office and my home where outside of my work I mostly just complain about minor office perks. It's fantastic.
As a counterpoint to that, I grew up in a blue-collar family under modest circumstances and I still feel like bigcorp software development is soul-crushing. Surely, you appreciate it for a while. But eventually the reality of it sets in, and can't ignore the BS anymore.
I know I'm luckier than most humans on Earth, but still hedonistic adaptation is a thing, even if you grew up in a poor family.
>For some people what i described is exactly what would bring them joy.
Backbreaking manual labor sucks. The heat. The cold. The shit. The frost. I'll format my fucking code any way you tell me to to avoid farm life. Like I give a shit. A week in and I won't even notice. Ah Christ, the smell of cow pus ...nyaagggggh.
As for woodworking: You will get cut, there is no hope of avoiding it, and no telling how bad it's going to be. The next day, we will see how serious your woodworking gig really is. You gotta be out there, bub. Get it stitched up and keep on cranking out the pieces.
I will say: I don't necessarily like to say "lucky," or even "privileged". Luck incites tricky emotion because there's an implication with luck that you didn't deserve it. A gambler who won at the slot machine should have lost his money -- luck carries that "should have" connotation with it. Likewise, privilege carries a zero-sum connotation, because we always mean someone is privileged in relation to another, which introduces almost an adversarial tone to it.
For me, a better term is fortunate. I am fortunate that I have a job in a nice office, solving interesting puzzles all day, getting paid (relatively) a lot of money doing it. Fortune has come upon me. I work hard, although not really harder than any other reasonable person. I was born in the right zip code, to the right family, had access to an amazing education, had the stability in my life to pursue it. Fortune.
I will never look down on anyone who is fortunate. I wish most people could have fortune in their lives. If the price we pay is a few complaints that the soda machine is down today, so be it!
> rarely have I heard someone say “well I said I’d be happy when this happened, it’s happened, and now I’m happy
I've heard this, but only from people who had been in an very shitty situation and then got out. Happiness is a state of mind, but misery is a set of circumstances, and the latter precludes the former unfortunately.
That's not "soul destroying", it's real life. The vast majority of people in this world have to do a job that they aren't in love with so that they can pay the bills. Anyone who is privileged enough to be in a highly paid tech job should be extremely thankful. Not only do we get paid well, we have to work 1/4 as hard as the people busting their asses for a living. We have a real sweetheart deal even if our jobs aren't always everything we would like.
There's something to be said for being able to look back and see a bridge or road or house of piece of furniture or an automobile you built, and see it's still being used and providing value to someone. Even if the monetary compensation was only mediocre.
Because it’s soul destroying knowing that to get medical insurance, it is directly tied to your employment. If not for that, people would gladly pursue their interests and passions without the fear of a bankrupting medical incident.
It sounds like modern day slavery, or perhaps more precisely "corvee" labor. You have to toil away on your master's land before doing your own thing. I find it unbearable, but sadly much of the world has to deal with it.
And you are mocking his authentic feelings. Slaves are an abstract kind of human for him. Feelings are not comparable, right? Now this poor dude can't even vent a lil in an online forum?
To the OP: When it sucks a lot, try singing. It really, really helps. Throw your head back and let it out of you on the way home.
