Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career
trackinghappiness.com
trackinghappiness.com
I was damn happy as one can be at 3.5 years in my career. 10 years in, I feel like my happiness and awesomeness has been slowly consumed by corporate politics, unfair promotions and layoffs, bad work ethics and the such.
I still like my work. I really really enjoy it when it's productive, and I still feel amazed to see the green checkmark on my CI after a long and challenging git push - but after so many years and a couple companies it's just work.
There are some real cool places and projects to work though, you just need to dig through the "look we're cool let us enslave you" crap.
Yes my work now as senior whatever or whatever whatever manager is not as easy as Jr. Sysadmin, but it's rewarding if the organization is functional, once I learn the ins and outs and after figuring out what to worry about and what to not worry about.
I think that is the "know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em" skill which is totally necessary to be content while working in an office environment.
What hurts is when you decide to switch to another company, which has good rep, and finally find out: it's the same. Everywhere. After the big bosses do stupid shit, they get promoted elsewhere, leaves you fix the broken plates, rince and repeat until a merger, bankruptcy, or major reorg. Meanwhile middle management gets bigger and everything gets slower. Good employees leave, bad one get promoted to middle management, and you wonder why you're stupid enough to stay there.
And I've reaped the rewards from it, but there's still plenty to be miserable about. What was that Nietzsche quote?
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
I'm not sure I've found much meaning in my work life.
Work from home but I'm having a lunch meeting with the major players today which is always a great time getting updates and planning the next week!
So, my work life is great.
Any thoughts on this? Is there any difference?
Getting a situation from 20% optimal to 50% is usually relatively easy; getting to 75% is a giant pain, and either result will get you hailed as a hero.
You also deal with the politics with the disengagement of an outsider, and you're gone before it can suck you in too deep.
"Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bell; I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell."
It takes all kinds
After working so long, I've come to the conclusion that the best way (and maybe the only way for most people) to enjoy work is just work for self. This is easier said than done.
Those "real cool places" you mention, there are very few of those.
How is this "amazing"? Can you not build a branch locally to see if it works as you go? Have you no facilities to run local tests?
You could go for "NASA sure", which is when you spent 100x the effort of the average tech company making sure only some of your spacecraft explode on launch, or you could go for "Github sure", which is when you spend a large chunk of your $200+ million ARR to ensure your core product only has a couple of major outages every year, or you could go for "startup sure", which is when your test coverage is 5% and you throw random stuff into production to see who complains, but you can't ever achieve "absolutely sure".
I would go out on a limb and say that the dev teams you have worked with have cultural issues about openness and saving face, and/or you have not worked on big enough (in terms of devs, LOC, distributed-ness) codebases. I might be wrong.
In the end, we delivered the project, but the company was acquired and everybody got laid off anyway...
I'm seriously considering trying to get out of tech forever after this last gig. I'm moving to Asia in a few weeks to try to work on bootstrapping a small company.
just curious which Asian country?
And yeah, there is no need to waste time for a job that is only driving one crazy. Enjoy Asia!
just some examples from the past couple years that came up real quick =)
The thing I relized that is helping a lot is doing stuff that a) builds on my interests and experience and b) is a intellectual stretch.
Otherwise I run the risk of being bored and running out of patience with the politics around me. Lucky me for now this working out okish to fine sometimes.
Ah, and having colleagues that a fun to work with!
I had the opposite thought. I never used to look at the career ladder, when recently I realized that I might need to, in order to get a more satisfying/challenging job.
I entertained that thought for a bit, but then realized that I enjoy my personal life and projects more, and that it would probably make me enjoy my work less if I were career-focused. Plus, I like my current team and job enough as it is, so it wouldn't be worth it. Now I just try to be mindful of doing things that will advance my career (basically being a valuable employee), but not at the expense of my personal life.
It's often rebuild projects for rebuild's sake, and not because the old one is bad, but because the old one's developers are gone and nobody wants to invest the time and effort it takes to get to know the codebase.
~5 years ago I was probably at my most productive, churning out something like 5000 commits a year or thereabouts; thinking back, I realize that nobody in their right mind would even try to understand everything that I've built during that time.
Last year we were asked back to that customer again, this time to rebuild the application but in $new_tech_of_the_month. That really gave me a sinking feeling - like, I and my colleagues spent over 2.5 years on that application, and now it's just getting thrown away (we're talking >100 application screens here) because someone higher up decided Angular was no longer cool and everything had to be done in Polymer?
I mean if they had only properly maintained the application since I left. But nope, bumble along for 3 years and just toss the lot.
TL;DR, a lot of software is throwaway and effort is wasted.
You are not an asshole. Bootlickers gets promoted and stupid managers are biased towards them
I'm starting to understand why everyone says the best jobs are never on public display and you should network and making a brand for yourself. Working actively on that now, will see where that brings me. Also working on my own projects. The most important point for me is to try to make it better.
I've recently joined a very early stage startup at a pretty high level. I'm in charge of an entire class of product (mobile native apps) and it's been the best experience of my career so far. It's stressful and tough but I'm 100% in charge so I can care as deeply as I want and it's up to me to make it work. Very rewarding vs the typical Corporate slag.
I hear you loud and clear. One way to get a higher standard of quality may be to switch industries. In aviation, where bugs can cost lives, there tends to be a higher standard. You may still find the bar of your co-workers isn't as high as yours, but it will definitely be higher than at a consumer-products or web-facing company. I know, I've interviewed at a few of those and turned down follow-up interviews and offers because they don't care enough about quality to do QA.
"Devs push to prod; rollback and page someone if it breaks" isn't acceptable when the customer isn't able to take 300 aircraft out of service every week to load your latest release.
In my way of thinking, there are a lot of things you have to do in your day that you may not really want to do. For example, you've got to brush your teeth. I don't have a "brush my teeth"/life balance. I brush my teeth because I want my teeth brushed. Sometimes I enjoy brushing my teeth. Spending some time to look after myself can be very rewarding. Most of the time, I'm thinking about my other priorities.
The same goes for cleaning the house, doing your dishes, doing your laundry, cooking, doing yard work, visiting your family, washing your car, fixing things around the house, etc, etc. At various times, those tasks are the highest priority even though you might not want to do them. You still have to do them. But people who find a way to enjoy at least some of those tasks are going to be a lot happier overall than people who don't.
I think you are right that for most people that the binary point of view is the truth of it, but to be perfectly frank, for most people their only free time is being taken up by watching people being nasty to each other on reality TV shows. Just because it is common, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
You've got 8 hours of your day being taken up by work. You've got lunch at work. You've got your commute. You've got getting ready for work. You've got unwinding from the stress of work. That's a crap load of your life! You can waste it being miserable if you like, but I really don't recommend it.
In any job there is something you can find to enjoy. You may not enjoy it every single day, but the more you succeed in getting into the enjoyment zone, the better your life is going to be. Or at least, that's the way I look at it.
You might be able fool yourself for a while with the power of positive thinking but a happy servant is still a servant.
I understand it's not always simple to make the change (which is why I've kept my standard of living relatively low on purpose). But it can be done, there are places way out in the sticks that need good talent, and even if you're not architecting realtime distributed systems there can be interesting projects on tiny teams.
As a developer, you would do well to seek out the feedback from users/the impact your work has. Allow yourself to feel responsible for that impact. Taking ownership will make you feel more engaged than the dopamine hits of 'closing JIRA tickets'.
"Rick, the only connection between your unquestionable intelligence and the sickness destroying your family is that everyone in your family, you included, use intelligence to justify sickness. You seem to alternate between viewing your own mind as an unstoppable force and as an inescapable curse. And I think it's because the only truly unapproachable concept for you is that it's your mind within your control. You chose to come here, you chose to talk -to belittle my vocation- just as you chose to become a pickle. You are the master of your universe, and yet you are dripping with rat blood and feces. Your enormous mind literally vegetating by your own hand. I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I'm bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is it's not an adventure. There's no way to do it so wrong you might die. It's just work. And the bottom line is, some people are okay going to work, and some people well, some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose."
Wow, absolutely agree.
I had been a hobbyist hacker for 10 years, since 6th grade, including four years in college. I then got my first job that I was greatly over qualified for as a computer operator. But that was my best opportunity to get to a big city because I had been an intern at the company the prior year.
I changed jobs 3 years later, got a nice 20K bump and another 10K bump over the next year, learned a lot and I thought I was doing well. That year and the next year was great.
Over the next 7 years, no growth in skills and only making $7K more over that time with measly raises and bonuses being cut, I hated my job but I felt so unqualified that I didn’t make a move and I was just miserable.
I finally woke up and changed companies and started back gaining new skills and seeing a salary increase.
Over the next 10 years, I can honestly say I never hated my job for more than a month. Once I started hating my job and I learned all I could, I had the skill set and the optionally to jump ship. Even if I didn’t leave immediately, I never felt “stuck”.
I guess that’s just a long winded way of saying that I only hate my job when I don’t feel like I’m growing and/or have any optionality.
I also realized that I work next in small companies with little red tape.
How often did this happen? Did you have problems with being perceived as a job hopper?
It’s about having a story to tell and yes you do have to be able to have a good explanation without sounding negative. It also helps that I have the CTO of the first company as a reference and the hiring manager of the third company as a reference who had the same issues I had.
1. The company went out of business - that was an easy one.
2. Large company hired fast to develop a new .net project but two years in all of the business was on their legacy PHP product, no one wanted to do PHP. There is no money in saying “I developed a PHP app”
3. Cant go into details without doxing myself but it was highly political and we working in a remote office away from the seats of power.
4. It was a contract to perm and when they gave me a permanent offer they told me up front that they didn’t want to be a software development shop but they wanted me to lead two initiatives. I saw the writing on the wall.
There were other reasons for leaving the 2-4 one but that’s the story I tell which are all true.
Now, things are different. I’ve come close to maxing our as an individual contributor in my local market, I have no desire to be a manager, and a dev lead position doesn’t pay enough more (about $10-$15K) to be worth the extra headache (been there done that).
I am continuously learning to keep my options open in case something changes, but I really like my job even though it can get crazy but its not because of the people.
As much as I say in theory that you should always leave a job if you feel like you’re stagnating, I’m not sure that I would have the discipline to leave a job a like just for that reason as long as I’m making enough to live the lifestyle I want and my compensation is not to out of whack with the market.
My job is fine in terms of paycheck and learning, but it feels like I'd have an easier time if I just ignored issues but that's not really the kind of person I want to become.
Come back to me when you’ve been at it for 30 years. At year 5 or 6 of working FT professionally, which came after ten years of working through college, I started getting jaded, same thing, same stupid “mistakes” (choices really), etc. Towards the end of my sixth year, I ended up getting a full, unfiltered view of inequity and the brutal sausage making that is all sizable organizations.
30 years in you realize that sitting all day and killing it to 2am takes a huge toll on your body and even 8 hour stunts may not be all that good, standing desk or no.
By the time you lose your youthful bliss, it’s too late to start saving. You need to take it on faith that future you has seen more of the operational realities of the world and this has not improved their existence.
The whole FIRE thing is a way to package and sell stuff; the dominant bloggers In the community who are “retired” are doing between 40k and 500k a year in web ad revenue. They mostly do not actually live the life they are suggesting: they have not retired, they’ve changed to a higher risk career. (Exception: earlyretirementnow.com ).
That said, like sites dedicated to exercise or eating well, the basic message is a good one and not a new one (see The Richest Man In Babylon, Your Mobey Or Your Life, etc.). So in that sense, anything that sells the mindset is a net good.
With employment, there's usually a lower limit since there's a reasonable change you're able to eat and stay out of the rain.
I don't understand these people who can't find things to keep them occupied outside work. I don't have enough hours in the day to do all the things I want to do. Work is just 8 hours per day that I can't do those things.
Plus, being able to attend events spontaneously and stay out as late as you want is pretty great.
It'd be interesting to leverage something like this to decide when I should take vacation... If my happiness is slowly decreasing and visualized like this, it'd serve as a nice reminder to schedule some vacation. I'd also be interested to see how long after vacations the "high" wears off
Do you know if it can be configured to have more levels? Or if other apps have more specificity?
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.jonathansau...
I've decided I'm not a "cultural fit" for corporate environments. But I've been working in corporate environments so long, everybody assumes I wouldn't be fit for anything else.
Trying to answer the question of "does work make me happy?" is much more complex than comparing happiness levels between work and non-work days - they are not independent. How much of your happiness of a non-work day is precisely because it is a day off? An imperfect analogy would be the feeling of enjoying a holiday but also being glad to be home at the end of it.
It takes me about 3 minutes every day to track happiness, and the advantages go much further than just the collection of data. It's also a moment of self-reflection and meditation in a way. It puts my mind at rest.
The author mentioned FIRE (Financially Independent, Retired Early) which, IMHO, a big factor in your happiness at work based on my own experience being on both ends of having money and nothing.
Some background context - worked for a decade+, quit job to go travel for 6 months with sizable savings in bank account, came back almost broke, now back in the workforce.
So I am one of the lucky ones in the world to absolutely love the industry I am in hence never hated "work". Colleagues, office politics, etc is another matter but "work" itself was always interesting thus I was happy in the sense that I never hated doing my actual "work". What I noticed that contributed to my happiness at "work" was how correlated it was to the savings in my bank account. The more my bank account grew, the less I worried about the "other things" (crazy bosses, stifling politics, strange colleagues, etc) and the more I could relish enjoying the challenges of doing my actual "work".[1]
Fast forward a decade, I then quit my job to travel and it was absolute bliss of happiness! Kind of a taste of retirement life. HOWEVER, while I had a huge chunk of savings, it wasn't exactly FU forever money so as the bank account started dwindling while traveling, I noticed my happiness was correlated again and I started enjoying traveling less.
Once my bank account was down to an unacceptable level (for my own standards), I made the decision to go back to work to replenish it and work again towards my FIRE goal. I managed to get another job in an industry that I enjoyed doing the "work" but I wasn't exactly feeling happy this time round due to the constant worry about being laid off, having to pander to colleagues and/or bosses, dealing with politics, etc. Doing the work was fine but a lot of my unhappiness came from worrying about "everything else" at work due to me depending on the paycheck.
Fast forward to today, my savings are back to healthy levels and once again, I'm happy at "work" even though nothing has changed in terms of "everything else". Makes me realise that anecdotally for me at least, having FU money in my bank account contributes A LOT to my happiness at work - assuming of course with a caveat that you love doing what you are doing at work.
[1] I put apostrophes (") around the word work because I defined work in this context as not the job/position as a whole but the actual thing that I do. I.e. If work is Software Engineer at Google, I defined "work" as doing code related stuff.
I should mention that I do live in an expensive part of the world (think SF but not SF) and the bank account was just the liquid assets bit of the portfolio. Been on the FIRE journey for 10 years now so I have some illiquid assets (properties, stocks, etc) but I tend to not think of touching it ever.
I need to be disciplined over several decades until I can reach it. Being disciplined isn't something that comes natural to me and it's sometimes very exhausting (applies to eating, exercising and sleeping a well).
Thinking about this awesome goal far into the future makes me sad right now. It makes it harder for me to be present and appreciate what I already have (also something I've always struggled with).
Therefore I try to avoid focusing on FIRE too much. I don't maximize my savings rate as much as possible and instead taking a more relaxed approach. I'm playing with the idea of going down to 50% at work and 25% for hobby hacking and 25% parental leave. This will affect my FIRE date but I hope it'll make me happier right now.
A healthier mindset is a 'plentiful mindset', which promotes positive 'risks'. Say, taking off 6 months to develop a personal project of yours for potential income.
Throughout my early 20's I bounced between service jobs, saving, then extended travel (usually working in youth hostels or service while abroad as well). The last big trip was 6 months in Asia and coming back to attempt to enter the working world again in 2009 which...wasn't a great time.
Through social connections, I was able to make a cross-country move, work in a new industry, and actually got decent enough to be promoted from a very low-level to actually managing a team of people on projects within 1.5 years. But those 1.5 years were lived at 70-80 hr workweeks which isn't exactly good for a person. Then the projects ended, the company moved and I was laid off.
Tried to move to a different industry. Another bout of unemployment. Moved into IT and now in my third company in five years (due to being laid off).
My intent, having moved, was to create some measure of stability in my life but it's not worked out like that in our modern work environment, especially at the less in-demand side of the economy where stagnant wages, reliance on employment for healthcare, and rising housing costs might keep you spinning your wheels at a job because at least it's what you have, a current paycheck.
To circle back to what OP said toward the end - being able to walk away (the FU money), if you're able to get in that place - is definitely worth it.
I think it's also helpful to try and assess not what makes you 'happy' at work but maybe what tips the scales for what aspects of what you're doing are enjoyable, stimulating, etc. and what you dread or dislike and, whether in your current role or future ones, try and aim toward a position that includes more of the former.
My current job isn't all green grass and puppy dogs but I'm content right now, which helps me focus more energy on other aspects of my life. And maybe that's the best we can really hope for since there are no guarantees in this life.
I'm a solo founder of a small startup, and I really enjoy the freedom to work on whatever I want. I'm making lots of mistakes and not growing as fast as I could be, but I'm learning a lot and I enjoy almost everything that I'm working on. I'm even enjoying the marketing, sales, and support, because it's fun to talk to people and personally solve their problems.
I'm not sure if I ever want to bring on a co-founder or hire some people, but I think it could be interesting to work with a small group of generalists where everyone just works on whatever they think is important. There's a famous quote from Steve Jobs: "It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do." I don't think it's a very radical idea, but I don't know if many companies actually put it into practice. I think that kind of decision-making is usually reserved for cofounders or C-level executives, and it probably breaks down after 10+ employees. But would be fun to try with a small team.
Can anyone recommend a course or a book to achieve that ? Something that makes you happy naturally (not forced).
I don't believe I can feel happy all the time or even most of the time. But the feeling that I want to have at the end of the day is that I am being productive and that I feel satisfied at the end of every day.
Kudos on this, and I assume there's a link to how you track your happiness in there somewhere. I've got to dive deeper.
I describe my method here (it's really simple): https://www.trackinghappiness.com/about/method
There are other apps out there that do the same, but approach it differently. You have to find what works for you. No method is wrong in my opinion, it's just that you have to find the method that works best for you. ;-)
Today I changed how our promotions work. Do I think its a wise use of resources? Nope. It was probably a waste of 2 hours of my time. Marketing will probably ask me to switch it back in a few months because they have no idea what they are doing. After stepping away from the task for 5 minutes and ending the arguments in my head against the task. I hopped into the code. I began enjoying figuring how to organize the code in a way that creating unit tests would be easy. I refactored some small things here and there and checked off the task. I was pleased with what I created despite being displeased with the task. I then moved on to a more interesting and useful task.
What kills me. Is a bug that interrupts my flow. Each day I create a list of a few work items I will accomplish. There may be a meeting, a few small tasks, and then a piece of a larger project I am working on. When that gets thrown off by some asshole trying to hijack the sprint or a critical bug it pretty much shatters my day. I feel so unproductive. Resolving a must-fix-now bug is both handling debt and incurring debt (through loss of time). It really fucking kills me.
When I feel grumpy because of popup bugs, asap tasks and really stupid marketing/seo requests I usually tell my self that hey, I still get my paycheck so if this is what makes them happy, then let's make them happy.