Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

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We sit at a desk writing code. Air conditioning, comfortable chairs, often free snacks and high pay. I realize burnout is real, but until you’ve worked as a refinery worker, on a road crew or a police officer, it’s hard to say that something is wrong with “this” industry. Every single profession has burnout. Every single profession has stress. Most people should be so lucky to have the opportunity to get burned out in one of the highest paying professions. If our industry has a problem, it’s that its practitioners don’t really know what actual suffering on the job is all about. The luxury of taking 5 months off is something unheard of for most typical middle or working class people.

Not to diminish burnout, but claiming that the industry has a problem is just incorrect. Some employers might have a problem — but employers in all industries have problems. The best industry in the world has shitty employers and the worst industry in the world has great employers.

Any normal working class person would laugh at this. It’s like first class travelers complaining about quality of the champagne at the airport lounge. We are immensely lucky to get to do this job. I get close to burnout from time to time, but then I remember what it was like before I got into this industry when I got evicted and slept in my car while DJing at dirty strip clubs just to be able to afford food. I would have given anything for the chance to burnout sitting in an Aeron working with all this incredible technology.

Perspective.

Telling yourself that you have it better than 99% of the world is only a temporary and ineffective remedy to career dissatisfaction. The answer is introspection, finding out what is missing, and the life-long pursuit of self-actualization and eventually transcendence.

Question: have you experienced burnout?

From what I've seen, people have a limited... chain...? Regardless of how "good" their situation is. Some people shoot for "luxury" jobs because they know they won't survive otherwise. It doesn't really make their situation "good", and I see absolutely nothing gained from "it could be worse".

Do we all want to be like refinery workers?

If a person burnt out at an office job ends up committing suicide, while the refiner worker is just mad at life, it raises questions.

So what do you think about Doctors, whose pay is even higher than software, but whose discontent is even more widespread?

Doctors really are committing suicide, but it’s still better than landscaping, so do you just laugh?

I've worked in other industries, especially borderline minimum wage jobs. I've worked just about everywhere at a fast food restaurant, as a clerk for a retail store, unloading freight for another retail store, inspecting, sorting, and transporting parts for a factory, as a server for a restaurant, and stuffing envelopes/packing boxes for a distribution company, as a guy who had about seven reponsibilities at once for a video game publisher (video editor, qa overseer, build tester, pitch evaluator, producer, designer, asset creator) and watch in desperation as our games failed to find an audience to the point where the company eventually closed down.

I've had to deal with vindictive bosses, black fridays, rush hours, sweltering buildings, running all over the factories and buildings, jerk customers, bad press, and all sorts of other crap I've long since forgotten about.

But I've never had anywhere near as much stress in any of those as I have as I have as a software engineer. When you have 10+ different people hounding you to do different things, have tasks in 6 different programs this iteration while having to juggle tasks by other developers, when an architect thought something would take 8 hours but neglected to take into account five different complicating factors and it ends up taking you a full week with increased pressure placed on you to get the damn thing working, when there's a totally esoteric error that you and everyone else in the company or on the internet has no idea how to identify, let alone fix, but you're expected to figure it out anyway. Or figuring out how to get 12+ different technologies (frameworks/languages/platforms) to play nice together all at once, etc.

I'm sure there are other industries that have similar issues, but, software engineering is a more unique than most, because you can work around the fuzziness of people in just about every other industry. With computers if you don't get the incantation exactly right, the computer will not work with you, period. It just won't work, until you eventually find a way that it does.

I still enjoy the logic puzzle to a certain extent, but the shine of the industry is starting to go away and I'm tired of being stressed out all the time, to the point where I pretty much have to take three months off in between jobs just to feel sane again. I've been working my current job for the past three years and I'm pretty much fried. Every day I have to fight the urge to quit, remind myself I can't afford to do that right now.

You are comparing high paid jobs to minimum salary jobs. Apples and oranges. There are other careers out there that pay similarly without any of the issues our industry face. There's nothing special or "lucky" about STEM. You can be lucky if you are someone who is not affected by those issues, but that's all the luck there is to it.

You’re absolutely right and you’re getting silently down-voted by cowards who find it uncomfortable to take an honest look at their lives and realize how great they have it compared to 99% of the rest of the labor force in the world.

I’ve done manual labor and dead-end fast food service work, and I thank my lucky stars every day that I currently find myself gainfully employed in a comfortable office.

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