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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

Your criteria are off somewhat.

Most people have jobs they hate and no workable path towards finding something they love. In tech, we are very lucky to have skills that we a) enjoy employing, b) can mostly keep doing until our minds fail us, and c) are in high enough demand so as to pay us a living wage.

The vast majority of people aren't so lucky. Your criteria, autonomy, flexibility of hours, nice coworkers, low stress, can't be prioritized unless the former are also satisfied.

To want to work until you die is a privilege afforded to very few. Workable, socially-subsidized retirement plans are needed for everyone else.

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I used to agree with you but now I'm not so sure. My uncle works in health care and had the same experience as me. He hated his old job, switched to a new one - is performing the same work, same hours, but the change in practice environment (better co-workers and more flexible scheduling) improved his attitude similar to mine, and now he's happy to keep working for another decade or so. It wasn't the hours he hated but certain toxic environmental factors (inflexible scheduling, overhead and bureaucracy). I have heard similar things from folks in other industries. Look at taxi drivers. From what I hear, it really sucked to work for medallion owners - you paid a flat weekly rate, and felt like you had to work 7 days a week or were losing money - and if you took a few weeks off (without paying the rate), you lost your grandfathered position in line. You worked for 12 hour shifts. Now with Uber, you can clock in and clock out whenever you want. No boss yelling at you because he is having a bad day and wants to roll the shit down hill. Same amount of work, same amount of money, but much happier drivers from what I can tell due to that autonomy and flexibility. Software is an awesome field with a lot of benefits that others don't enjoy but my sense is that there are a lot of fields within which you could increase quality of work life happiness by increasing autonomy and flexibility. Increased autonomy and flexibility, enabled by technology, if not a free lunch, might at least be a very, very cheap one. Whether large employers have an incentive to explore this or not (before some technology disruption forces them to) is another question.

I don't know if I should interpret this common sentiment as programmers being humble about their jobs and lives, or being braggy about it.

What is the huge difference between programming and most other white-collar jobs, really? Is programming so incredibly liberating and personally fulfilling compared to them? If so, why? It's not that I can't believe that it is true. I'm just curious why it is such a massive difference, apparently.

On the other hand, even for people who looove coding, there is no shortage of those of them who complain that they don't like their coding job. A programming competition is different to coding your own project by yourself, is different from coding whatever greenfield project for a job, is different from being stuck with a monolithic codebase as a maintenance programmer.

The main thing I enjoy about it, as compared with many other careers, is that it's in-demand enough that I'm not at risk of having to put up with anyone's shit for very long if I don't want to. That's not true in many other careers, where all the jobs will be fairly bad because supply/demand for those workers is poor enough that they don't have much power to push back.

Meanwhile, if management does something I don't like and gives me the impression they'll do it again, I start casually applying for other jobs with an expectation of finding something better in a month or two. I can tell managers "no" if they ask too much of me and if they insist on a yes... OK, fine, but you'll be receiving my two-weeks notice before long, hope that was worth it. I can be relaxed in interviews because I know I am the kind of person they're looking for, and if this place doesn't realize that then the next one will. I can bid up my salary because eff it, why not?

I have these liberties and I'm not even in a hot market, and I'm not some superstar developer. Just competent. I'm pretty sure this is very unusual, even in white-collar jobs.

This situation won't last—especially for those down the skill/experience ladder—but it sure is nice right now.

I recently saw an article about a study results which said that in Denmark large portion of population is happy with their jobs, and a lot of them would keep the exact same jobs even if winning the lottery. So, in the right culture, people can be quite happy even with the menial and (superficially) unattractive jobs.

BTW these (and similar) reports intrigue me so much that I'd consider moving to Scandivian country for a couple years just to see it first-hand.

Its cultural, of course. Not every society is full of corporate climbers. Some places its OK to fill a socially useful role, make enough money, and go to the pub after work. Add in family and community club, and you have a life.

I'd argue that this is exactly what blue collar america used to be before manufacturing up and left. That and 30-40 years of productivity gains not distributed to workers.

The social safety net surely helps, too. Improving the worst-case for failing to stay employed gives workers more power to define the terms of employment.

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