Comment by pbrb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbrb | Hacker News Reader

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This hits really close to home. It's not that I enjoy the thrill... it's that I know I can do it, so that's what I do.

A few years ago I had an incredible run of insane productivity in grad school and at a startup afterwards, but I think it's solely because I had so much to do that I was genuinely interested in that I was crushing through work without it being a last minute delivery (though, there were still a lot of those). Now, I'm so bored with work that I can't even begin to start on anything. Next thing I know it's 11pm and I said I would deliver something the next day and I bang it out, or at minimum come up with a good cover / projection of making major progress. It's really starting to eat at me, and isn't sustainable. This is in no way COVID related, it's been going on for the past 2 years. I was actually planning on hitting the reset button and taking a few months off of work, but now I can't do that. I think the key at this point might be actually getting meds for my ADHD.

Don't you think it might be that you REALLY don't want to do the work you're doing? It's certainly true in my case - the work just violates a lot of my principles and preferences and also, in its core, is not interesting and mostly pointless. My soul is screaming at me to leave. I could try to silence it with meds, but I'd rather just align my work with my values (I plan to do this in about a year, if I last that long), and get out of software engineering. Luckily, I have tons of savings and low costs of living, so I can literally do below minimum wage work and be fine financially.

I think I’ve got some similar experience. I always had underlying focus issues, but managed to excel at school and first job because I really cared.

First work experiences led me to become pretty cynical about office life, and I find that my motivation ultimately gets sapped because I don’t think what I do is that important.

I’ve been soul searching for months about this, including trying a different workplace, etc. The thing is, I know any job can be meaningful—finding meaning in it is something I need to work on.

But I’ve also been searching for a path that will better suit my values.

Some conclusions: I decided to go back to school, and I’m really good at focusing on school work now, it is much easier to do than making myself work.

I wonder if the school work is more motivating because there is the chance for graded feedback though. At work, you never get an A, just “good enough” or “not good enough” plus you don’t have the feeling of working towards a clear goal of the degree.

I wonder if your experience has some things in common with mine—maybe grad school was easier to focus on goal and progress, and start up you were fresh to work and excited.

I ultimately think I have to find some way to feel that what I do is important to the world. That by working on it, I’m creating something important. The question is how to get to that feeling!

Where I work it's like if you do a bad job and screw something up everyone notices and it's a whole lot of drama involved, but if you do a good job and fix something before it blows up, no one notices and no one cares. So all the bad without the good. I guess you get used to it after a while but I would love a metaphorical pat on the back and a "good job" every now and then.

I have had two bad workplaces and one good one. The best I saw, at the good one, was that if something went wrong, we would figure out WHY and how to prevent ourselves from doing this in the future (constructive approach).

The bad places, everyone was about pointing fingers at other people (the worst being those reviewers who blamed first years!) and yelling / lecturing but not problem-solving why the workflow allowed this problem to arise.

I have heard from some friends who do manage to work someplace where their manager expresses appreciation for them frequently.

My point is--I think there are better workplaces out there! (Right now I work for myself which circumvents most of that stuff). But if I was looking for a new employer, my new minimum criteria is that they at least have to handle problems by problem-solving, not drama.

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