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Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe too many people are trying to find all their meaning in life through their work. It's not a recipe for success for most people, I think the media plays it up a bit too much. They're only covering the success stories in terms of people who are single minded and who make their work everything.

The author of the article doesn't mention any relationships or other interests in life, no passion for anything but work. Maybe that wasn't the case but you can't tell from the article.

Lots of people do something in the arts, music, physical fitness, etc.. on the side along with family & relationships or faith/religion to find meaning. If you're happy from that aspect work becomes just something you do to pay the bills. It doesn't mean you're not passionate about work but the other things can make up for times when work isn't so great.

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To me, this guy sounds like he's suffering from classic burnout. I know because I could have written the exact same thing when I burnt out in undergrad:

"I tried prioritizing my work, focusing on the things I felt the most passionately about, but when I tried to work on the projects at the top of this list I couldn't summon any energy. Yet I spent hours and hours thinking obsessively about the ultimate point of my work."

I mean, heck, the guy said he was reading 50 (no doubt challenging) books a year on his work. That's insane.

It's pretty simple: you can't work at an insane pace forever, and eventually your subconscious will rebel and stop working with you.

In my case, it felt like my intentions and actions were connected by a plastic gear, and I had spent so many years jamming that gear as hard as I could that it stripped the teeth off of it. My intentions could spin as hard as they wanted to, but eventually I just found it impossible to do anything.

If you're comfortable sharing, what did you do to get out of that state?

> “It's pretty simple: you can't work at an insane pace forever, and eventually your subconscious will rebel and stop working with you.”

I think there are versions of this where the issue is not pace or volume of work, but rather “meaning” or greater societal impact.

I used to work at a place that gathers a ton of location data on its users, and then packages it into data products & advertising products.

It wasn’t the pace of work that burnt me out there, but instead the lack of meaningful impact. Even a light workload at such a place was already heavy enough to create burnout.

Just as you need rest from volume of work, you also need rest from work that exploits others or work that does not appear to have a constructive purpose.

The plastic gear thing sounds incredibly familiar. (How) did you fix it?

The problem with the workplace is you have a limited amount of control over it. Companies change strategy, get sold, have turnover... and sometimes even though you're sitting at the same desk, you find yourself holding a different job.

As I've gotten older I've found that what type of work I'm doing matters less and less. It can be the most interesting project in the world, but if your teammates are all assholes you'll be miserable. Meanwhile, the cleaning crew has a solid working relationship with each other and are having a great time.

> Maybe too many people are trying to find all their meaning in life through their work.

You probably shouldn't make your "meaning in life" reside completely in your work. But then again, you can't work at a job that is completely meaningless to you.

The problem with burnout generally comes from the feeling of pointlessness. And IT excels at that feeling. We've built an industry that is accustomed -almost to the point of being a fraud to society- to such things as:

- Extremely low productivity in the large. While workers may be fully occupied, and even over-worked sometimes, in the large, a lot of productivity is simply wasted in projects which never take off, are discarded, scratched, changed, etc.

- Low accountability. Current trends like #NoEstimates #NoTesting #NoProductOwners etc, while may or may not have valid points all lead to a larger #NoAccountability "ideal" where developers seem to want no accountability at all for whatever they do. Not having any responsibilities in what you do is actually not the good idea some think it is.

- The pervasive idea that it's all horrible but that's alright. That you don't really need to know how to do stuff, you can just copy-paste it from SO or whatever you find on Google. That programmers just don't know what they are doing but haha I change this line here and it works and I don't know why but it works and that's what matters so I'm going to sarcastically twit about it because everyone will understand and concur. That everything could just crash and burn in microseconds but that won't really happen, right?

- The masterful move of claiming that anyone can program with just good will and disposition. That a degree doesn't matter, that experience doesn't matter, that actual knowledge is secondary to "passion".

All this ends up producing the result that a lot -most? probably so- of jobs in the industry and a large part of every job in the industry is mostly pointless, or at least feels so. And this pointlessness in turn is what produces the burnout.

And I don't really know, but I would tend to think that no matter how much meaning you find outside your job, if that job doesn't at least give you a minimum meaning, you will have a very hard time fighting burnout.

You make a bunch of great points.

A lot of the "No Accountability" stuff to me started to appear about the same time as Agile. Agile removed most of management's accountability and product management's accountability. They could do whatever they want, engineering can just pivot on a dime when they're wrong. If PM asked you to build something ridiculous it's waved away through Agile, it was always too hard to figure out what to build before you build it, so PM can do no wrong.

I think some of the "No accountability" trends on the developer side are just a response.

But all of it makes the workplace a lot harder to stomach.

Just a minor quip about the NoEstimates thing. I have zero illusions that some people adopt it exactly as you state. However, AFAIK the original idea was to use metrics and modeling to eliminate the need for a human to make up an estimate. Instead, you have an estimate based on actual numbers and ideally even with a confidence tied to it.

You probably shouldn’t make your happiness contingent on a meaningful life. If your favorite team isn’t in last place, there’s beer in the fridge, and you’re not dealing with significant physical or emotional trauma, then be grateful you have the opportunity to worry about mastering Lagrangian comment design patterns, diverse leadership efficiency, or performant vested class b proxy options.

Leaving what I'd call "intuitive happiness" immediately leads you into the depths of deciding the goals of human life. If we agree that happiness is desirable, why not just induce it by drugs? Why not try to learn to be happy in all situations at all costs? Mentally disabled people seem to be usually quite happy without all the reasons we need, why not become like them?

For me, happiness requires a meaningful life. If I tried to get rid of that dependency, I'd probably end up a broken man and try one of the above ideas.

>you can't work at a job that is completely meaningless to you

You absolutely can, and millions of people do every day.

But that's also probably why millions of people are psychologically miserable all the time. The subset of people who are working a full-time completely meaningless job (may not apply to part-time) and then finding happiness outside of work entirely. There's plenty of gray in-between though (people define 'meaningless' in their own way).

> Extremely low productivity in the large. While workers may be fully occupied, and even over-worked sometimes, in the large, a lot of productivity is simply wasted in projects which never take off, are discarded, scratched, changed, etc.

When speed became a major factor in this new startup dominated tech world, people think that they just don't have time to plan.

> Low accountability. Current trends like #NoEstimates #NoTesting #NoProductOwners etc, while may or may not have valid points all lead to a larger #NoAccountability "ideal" where developers seem to want no accountability at all for whatever they do. Not having any responsibilities in what you do is actually not the good idea some think it is.

When developers are not given time to plan and test, what does one expect?

That programmers put in their spare time for the company? Ha!

> - The pervasive idea that it's all horrible but that's alright. That you don't really need to know how to do stuff, you can just copy-paste it from SO or whatever you find on Google. That programmers just don't know what they are doing but haha I change this line here and it works and I don't know why but it works and that's what matters so I'm going to sarcastically twit about it because everyone will understand and concur. That everything could just crash and burn in microseconds but that won't really happen, right?

Again, if developers are not given time to reflect like post-mortems and such, what do you expect?

> - The masterful move of claiming that anyone can program with just good will and disposition. That a degree doesn't matter, that experience doesn't matter, that actual knowledge is secondary to "passion".

I used to believe that passion is important. But after a few years in the field, more often than not, it is used as an exploitation vector.

This is a good point. Our culture places a lot of emphasis on work. And I think there's something important there — that if we're going to spend most of our time doing something (work), it should be something we enjoy, find meaningful, and helps others. But if we lose perspective and forget the other things in life we'll surely become unhappy.

Since leaving tech my life has also become more balanced in other areas of life such as relationships and physical health, which I didn't mention in the article. Thanks for pointing that out!

I think the problem many people find in seeking this balance is that, when it comes to skilled/creative labor, it takes a combination of natural talent and deliberate skill-building to break through the plateau of mediocrity. Many are not comfortable making the conscious choice to be mediocre at their trade, despite the fact that being good or great at their trade may not actually bring them happiness.

"...work becomes just something you do to pay the bills."

And the flipside of separating things like that, is that when activities you enjoy are freed completely from having to be a source of money, they sometimes can start to be more fun and meaningful in their own right.

I’ve done some studies in Transactional Analysis, and what strikes me the most is that you have one group of people who need to be recognised for what they do, and another group of people who need to be recognised for who they are.

Plenty of people will get all their meaning from work, and they’ll burn out trying to prove who they are.

Plenty of people hate being defined by their work and want to be recognised for their self.

> Maybe too many people are trying to find all their meaning in life through their work.

Funny, someone at work just shared this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/583441/

Your hobbies are not always in your control. Let's say you have a very busy month at work and at the same time a big music festival is happening which you would like to attend. Work will always mess up your personal lifestyle. All your hobbies are always secondary.

You choose to put importance where you deem best. Some will risk a job to keep up with outside hobbies. Others will drop hobbies.

If you set your priorties you will usually get your most desired outcome.

I see it the same way, that's a real problem. People often don't do anything apart from work, also don't feel like the belong anywhere. Corporate life make it even worse.

I so agree with you. One thing I will add. If you commit to excellence in something you will most likely fall in love with it.

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