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Comment by _davebennett | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm....but what if you are "stuck" in a job that pays decently (enough to cover needs) extremely flexible hours and unlimited vacation and awesome work life balance (sometimes less than 40 per week). But the actual work is pointless and boring. Is that time for a change?

Some people say yes, but often these are the people who are the "high achieving" tech workaholics who love to go home and code for fun.

Other people say no, and these are often the people who don't really care much about work and just look at it to a means to an end.

How would you know?

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I think it depends. Will staying in the position mean I will be ready to face the job market with a possible job loss years down the road?

Personally, I would judge whether I still have opportunities to learn. If not with the projects I'm directly involved, do I have the autonomy to pursue workplace improvements and ways to keep learning at work?

Caveat is that I'm also very early in my career and while I highly value work life balance, which was part of what led me to change careers from semiconductors into software, I probably skew more towards achieving than not.

Only you know the right balance for you. That might be a dream job, or it might be miserable.

I would say if you are in that situation and enjoy it, you should still be learning and investing in yourself outside of work whether that's learning code or practicing your baking. Learning and struggling with new material is basically a muscle and needs to be an ongoing practice, even if it's not directly related to your day to day.

Some people prefer to learn at work. Some people prefer to learn in their free time.

If you are the type that learns at work, then having nothing to learn at your work means you have nothing to learn. If you are the type that learns at home, not coming home exhausted from your work means you can learn more.

Truth is, in most of the tech companies you can find something wrong with the tech or it can get boring pretty quickly. Probably, only the biggest and/or most innovative ones have something really interesting to offer learning/career wise.

If you are a web dev, most of the time you are gonna deal with MVC and similar patterns that you're gonna reuse daily. It's obvious that it gets dull. And when you hear about a new toy that you haven't used yet? You get excited and you want to change a job to get to work with it. But guess what? You are gonna get bored with the new toy after a few months too.

Programming is pretty repetitive and most of the problems aren't that challenging after a few years of experience.

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