I just don’t want to be busy anymore
elenasalaks.medium.com
elenasalaks.medium.com
It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far.
I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right.
You're probably not going to get rich from working a day job. You're replaceable, and if you left your job tomorrow then you'll soon be forgotten. This is true for the majority of software engineers.
In that context, why do so many of us take on so many unnecessary responsibilities? It's tempting to say "Well, my employer assigned them." But how often do you tell them no, or try to present a different approach that just so happens not to involve you?
I know someone who is a chronic yes person. They will almost never say no, and they're pretty stressed day to day because of it. Whenever I point out that they're taking on too much, they say that they disagree and that it's their career.
That's true, but they won't get rich from that career, so I don't understand why they care so much about it.
Just remember to say 'no' for yourself from time to time. You often don't need to take on as many responsibilities as you have.
It's interesting to audit what you do v. your ACTUAL job definition, especially when it comes to blurred responsibilities.
Tell your friend this realistic boss saying:
> If you work hard, put in extra hours, and push to be the best, then "I" get a new Ferrari next year!
If you're in your 20s or 30s, 2M is probably not "retire tomorrow" money, but it would probably let you retire very early if you managed it and made smart investments with it. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think many ICs are getting even 50k from startup equity, nevermind 2M.
20M is "retire tomorrow" money for sure. And definitely workers do not get that kind of money from startup equity.
Most of what I hear now is companies giving fake "shares" that are ostensibly tied to the value of the company but are not actually shares and do not represent any ownership. If they do give shares it's not enough to pay out big, and they get diluted repeatedly over time.
Yep. It's a thing unfortunately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_stock
GP said "anymore", so I assume he was talking about newer startups.
The easiest way is to join companies that are obviously doing well and will likely IPO in 2-3 years. This is still a lottery, but one with much higher odds and a lower potential payout. You can make $600k-1m every few years in equity alone by hopping around these companies.
If you ever wondered why so many people have ~1-2 years of experience at each company on their resume, this is often why. They join, get a decent chunk of their equity grant (in RSUs), then go to another company to get more equity. Some of these companies will do well, others will do poorly. You end up distributing your risk and ensuring you'll get a decent payout.
I thought that RSUs were limited to public companies (since they are essentially grants of stock, not options).
Part of why I wanted to be a contractor was precisely because I didn’t want to play the startup lottery. But RSUs would give an alternative.
I would say that if you want to hit a lotto ticket, this is your best route. Increased variance is your friend when you are at the downside and it’s all uphill.
But if you want to get rich, and you are the average HN reader, it’s better to bet on the typical case.
(That said, if you have a list of companies that meet your current criteria, I would love to know! I know a lot of faang engineers who are bored and would love a shot at millions.)
New Job will pay me double and as such will help me achieve my goals.
Old Company said if I stayed I could achieve a 25% increase in TC if I continued to work on "impactful projects" for 2 years or so. But those projects are the ones I hated there (otherwise a great company)
I've seen first hand when developers leave how all their prideful work becomes a burden to be distributed and shared, and while on notice myself I've seen how all my best and most impactful ideas and projects has been deprioritised. I expect some of it to be lost forever when I go. Instead of milking me for info on my most useful works (libraries, scripts, etc), they have me reassigning meaningless JIRA tickets.
For existing employees, this is rather high, but as you did, you should discount this. To get that boost with your current employer, you need to (i) be irreplaceable for a critical service; or (ii) show proof of external offers.
HR/Finance will sets wages at low-mid market so that the 10 other high performing/underpaid employees in your situation will stay and only you will leave. HR's fine with that bet, and people with initiative like you are the victors.
People on here are always talking about changing jobs and getting a huge salary increase, but these numbers don't make sense unless you were tremendously underpaid for many years.
I spent most of my twenties in college and grad school. Then worked in the Midwest in my early thirties making $100k-$130k.
I moved to Silicon Valley and took a job for $150k. That was a downgrade considering the much higher cost of living, but it seemed like a good stepping stone at the time. I stayed at that company for way too long working towards a promotion that was dangled in front of me but never came, and finally switched to FANG for a 2X increase in total comp.
And many people at my age in the company make about 2X+ of what I make now. The housing prices here are so crazy that I’m ready to throw in the towel on SV, even if it means a pay cut. My QOL was highest outside of the Bay Area working for less.
All that clever software that increased the company's revenue by 10%? A large part of those additional earnings ended up in some landlord's pocket.
We're all just working around the clock so that landlords can increase their rents and sip cocktails.
It’s like the peasants who work all day and have nothing when people from blue blood are having generations living of their backs in castles.
Having an elite is fine, it’s even better when class movement is feasible but when you have a large class of people doing nothing or rewarded drastically differently for the same input, things are not fine.
A friend is thinking about to open a restaurant in a very attractive location, but I said, if you don't own the property the restaurant is in, the land lord will just increase rent until the any profit is barely OK anyways. There is no money in that.
Then, contract around it with a capped escalation factor? And doesn't this apply to any <insert business> renting space?
Of course the restaurant business is probably hit-and-miss and risky, and owning the premises might give you more stability, at least if you don't have a large amount of debt. It sounds to me like your stance might be quite cynical in the sense that almost nobody would try starting a restaurant if they considered owning their premises a necessity.
On a $300k income, even with one earner, you can comfortably afford a $1m+ home (of which there are plenty of single family homes available in many parts of the bay area), and while yes the COL for things like groceries/eating out is higher than in Austin TX, it's not high enough to seriously claim that it's not liveable
I work on the Peninsula. 90% of 3+ bedroom houses currently on the market here cost over $1.75M. Those below that, in the bottom 10%, are what you’d expect to find in the bottom 10%. There are many great places to live where I wouldn’t be forced to choose between that or spending a couple hours a day in traffic. Less money and higher quality of life.
Every time I've changed jobs to date I've had multiple job offers. 3 years ago I had 3 offers from 3 different companies. This time around I had the same - 3 offers, 3 companies. Just in the last 5 years my salary has increased 6 fold.
My basic philosophy with respect to compensation is to take home enough to maintain the lifestyle you want + 20% extra to save and invest.
It really shouldn't be. At the end of the day, the vast majority of workers are being compensated to do/build something they otherwise wouldn't of their own volition. Your mental health ought never be lower in priority than the ambitions of your senior management, or the ROI of the stakeholders.
Saying yes to everything some random PM wants from you is of course not the way. But neither is "lying flat". Hard work is in many ways its own reward.
After decades in the industry, those that have put in the time and effort far outshine their coasting peers. There are benefits for your career should you choose to put in the effort and ascend.
There’s a difference, and school (and parents) don’t teach us the distinction.
It's certainly easier than doing the work. That's the entire premise of your argument.
Many people — perhaps most — are inclined to be afraid of saying no.
You also can’t say no to homework assignments. So we learn the behavior early in life.
But maybe you work hard, do more. What's the financial return on that, for a typical employee over your hypothetical "coasting employee"? 50%? 20%? Less?
Is it worth it? The stress, the extra hours, the opportunity costs?
I share OP's sentiment, and I can flat out say that I am truly fine that "[you] see [me]". The thing is, I don't want to work with you or for you, or for people who don't want to hire me. Jobs are a two-way street and I'm going to pick a place to work for that's a good fit for me time after time. And you know what? I've always busted my ass and I continue to be hired, given raises, etc. - but I will always push back for my own sanity whenever I feel necessary.
>Hard work is in many ways its own reward.
There's a difference between "hard work" and "too much work", and the latter looks different to each and every one of us.
>After decades in the industry, those that have put in the time and effort far outshine their coasting peers. There are benefits for your career should you choose to put in the effort and ascend.
There sure are! And just as there are people like you who want to continue that career ascent, there are those of us who are also completely content with prioritizing other things in our lives beyond our careers, while still putting in a solid day's work every day. I don't care if people outshine me and ascend faster than I do - for me, my career is just something that allows me to provide for my family and my hobbies, but it will never be "who I am". And you know what? I'm happy with my choices and where I'm at. Go on, buddy, and get that promotion! I'll still be over here doing my thing at my pace, not bothered by the fact that I might be standing in your dust.
You would really do well to understand that everyone wants something different out of life and are content to take the paths they want, even if they're not yours. :)
Would you want to go to a hospital where the “it’s not my job” attitude is prevalent? Would you hire a contractor to build a house with that attitude? I tend to think the better organizations don’t think in terms of what are peoples “jobs” but what problems actually need solved
There is a viable different approach, but the employers do not like it. Let’s stop pretending.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/12/nurses-hospi...
Why British hospitals have a fraction of that cost (1/10th)? Oh yes, it is because they decided that it is not a moneymaking business.
Overworked employees should not blame themselves for not being able to keep up with unreasonable hours. They should blame the real responsible for their misery. Their employer.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/08061...
Hospital profits are part of the costs, but doctors and nurses here are also paid more than elsewhere. Doctors in the US are paid multiple times as much as doctors in the UK, and supply restriction is a big part of why that is possible.
There are also administrative costs, drug costs, and insurance overheads to deal with.
This doesn't factor in all the time spent dealing with inscrutable billing practices for fully insured people having routine medical procedures, or the tens of thousands who are bankrupted every year by the same practices. We recently took our daughter to the ER, which is supposed to be a $400 copay. We now have three separate bills from that visit totaling $1100, and I have no idea how many hours it will take to sort out. The same billing department sent us a $380 invoice six months after her birth because (in their description) they forgot she was there.
Just out of curiosity, what’s your proposed solution?
There's been decades of very smart people working on this problem and its still a problem largely because of its complexity. If there was a simple solution, I have a feeling it would have been implemented already.
The irony of your post that starts with "its not that complicated" ends with an anecdote about just how complicated the system is.
It is not complicated.
https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm
https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-birth.ht...
President Obama acknowledged this much when he proposed the Affordable Care Act. He said that he’d prefer a single payer system like other countries use, but that it’s not feasible in the US because we can’t just completely uproot the current system without a ton of unintended consequences.
“Just do it like other countries” isn’t a real plan.
So given the current state of the healthcare system, how do you propose it gets modified to mirror those other countries? Do you have a good handle on how those proposed steps (like drastic reductions in R&D spending) will affect the overall system?
When people naively think there are simple solutions to extremely complex systems, it reminds me of the quote “For every problem there is a solution that is simple, straightforward, and wrong.”
"The facts are undeniable. Citizens of developed countries with variations of single-payer systems — Britain, Germany, France, etc. — pay roughly half what Americans pay for health coverage and have better results to show for it (longer life spans, lower infant mortality).
They accomplish this not through some exotic, foreign magic but by exploiting the economic benefits of large insurance pools that represent the entire population. This allows comprehensive coverage to be offered at affordable rates because everyone shares in the risks and rewards of the system.
Let’s be real clear: This isn’t socialism. This isn’t communism. It’s simple risk management — the same economic principle that underlies all forms of insurance."[1]
The bottom line is that nearly a third of America (over 100 million people) are already on Medicare or Medicaid. That is enough data to forecast any outcome there is. Billing, coding, everything is already at a federal standard. Hospitals, doctors, and clinics love Medicare/Medicaid because they know what they are going to be paid and they are paid. Anyone who claims that it can't work here is either unaware of these facts, or purposefully pretending they don't exist.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-obama...
I'm not arguing whether single payer is a good idea. I'm not arguing that it's tantamount to communism. I'm not arguing that there are many politicians (Obama, included) who are in favor of it. I'm arguing about the feasibility of it in light of naive statements.
It's easy for a politician to endorse a policy, particularly a populist one like Medicare for All. It's entirely different to craft a policy, within the current system, that pragmatically implements it.
My claim is that Obama endorsed the idea because he both thought it was good policy and populist idea that worked in the favor of his politics. But that's entirely different from crafting a pragmatic policy that actually can get passed into law.
I think he's been on the record stating that he didn't like the ACA, but the goal was to pass something, even if it's broken, to try to force it into policy so that it would eventually be fixed into something better. So with so much support, why can't the U.S. implement it? That's central to my point.
"President Obama was clear that – while he would have preferred single payer if we were starting from a clean slate – it would be too disruptive given our current system."[1]
Point being, in many ways it is against the current system. So while you haven't directly addressed my questions, I get the impression you think "Just expand Medicare" is the answer. My point is that it's a bit naive because it really doesn't address the systemic effects that have kept single payer policy from already being implemented.
Medicare/Medicaid is on track to be the largest proportion of the entitlement budget, before expanding it and it doesn't count the Dept. of Veterans Affairs budget (I don't think healthcare is a bad way to spend the budget btw). I know many people will say the Defense budget can be cut to pay for it. But how do you plan on getting that passed when nearly every senator wants to protect the DoD jobs in their state? I'm not even against that idea, I'm just not seeing you advocate a real strategy to implement it. The U.S. is perpetually running against the debt ceiling and your proposal will exacerbate that. This is just the beginning; how do you address the medical insurance industry, particularly when they are heavily lobbying Congress?
If the answer was "Just expand Medicare", it probably would have been implemented already but the fact that it's not should tell you something: maybe it's not that easy. So my question is not whether or not you think it's a good idea, my question is how do you get from the current state to your goal of a single payer system?
[1]https://washingtonmonthly.com/2015/09/13/obama-the-negotiato...
I have directly addressed your question with the fact that already a third of Americans are in a single payer system, and most of the world has a single payer or hybrid system.[1] It's naive to think we don't know how to do it, and that we can't learn something from other nations when we expand it.
If you don't think we're capable of achieving the same results as a bloc of nations that has twice our population and many more cultural differences between them, why? Low confidence in America as a whole? Math and science fundamentally change in different time zones? Nobody in America knows how to read German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Belgian, or English?
> If the answer was "Just expand Medicare", it probably would have been implemented already but the fact that it's not should tell you something: maybe it's not that easy.
There's an even simpler explanation: S.1129 was not passed.[2]
> So my question is not whether or not you think it's a good idea, my question is how do you get from the current state to your goal of a single payer system?
No, your question is, "How can I keep the conversation going pretending that I'll accept an answer?" So let's nip that, and you can answer the following question: what evidence would convince you it is feasible?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univers...
[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/112...
I mean, it’s “obviously” just so easy. Do you have better answers than President Obama? Or President Clinton before him? Or Bob Dole? Or John McCain? Yet with all their knowledge and connections, they couldn’t get it accomplished. Note that in nearly 20 years, Medicare for All bills only made it out of committee once. Why do you think that is?
Perhaps because it’s an enormously complex problem with lots of stakeholders and lots of competing interests. One that doesn’t get fixed by just copying a different model that operates outside of the U.S. constraints.
You still never addressed why those bills don’t pass. It’s like your answer is the trivial (and useless) one that “it’s because not enough people voted for it.”
Saying “we already cover 100MM” doesn’t explain how it can be more than tripled. I didn’t claim it can’t be done, I’m asking why none of the proposals have worked out so far. I’ve never claimed the US “doesn’t know how”, I’m saying they haven’t shown political will to implement it. I’m asking for a pragmatic answer that shows why it hasn’t worked despite previous efforts.
I’m asking for your opinion why that’s the case that nothings has been passed in the last 30 years despite the desire among many, many people to do so. I’ve already outlined a few examples that you just blow past for the naively simple answer. That’s not helpful nor does it demonstrate anything beyond a simplistic understanding of the problem.
I have no problem accepting an answer that actually shows an understanding of the complexity of the problem, even if I don’t agree. I’ll help you: I think the very first problem needs to campaign finance reform. Because without that, any proposed bill that goes against the monied interest is dead in the water. But that’s just the first of many things that has to happen before the bills you’re talking about have any chance.
Short answer: a bill that passes.
Again, I’m not arguing whether it’s technically feasible. I’m saying the US has not yet shown its politically feasible. I think you’re conflating my position on these.
That latter part is a much tougher and complex problem but every bit a necessary part of the solution. So take just a very small subset of that problem: how do you plan on mitigating the insurance industry’s influence in preventing the passage of a bill that goes against their interests?
Once you figure that out, you’ll have dozens of other political concerns to solve before you ever get to consider implementing the technical solution.
Other countries benefit largely from the US healthcare R&D machine. The US funds over 40% of the world medical R&D. While other countries put price controls on their medicine, this arrangement won’t work with the current system if the US does the same. To a certain extent, US high prices partly subsidized the rest of the world.
Like the sibling comment said, if you are overworking then the process is broken.
The thing that I added, is that maybe the process remains broken because the employer finds it profitable.
But as regards 'overworking', while that is certainly true for many US residents in particular, I think the majority of people would be overworked on a surgeon's schedule. Yet reducing it significantly would probably be much worse for patients and decried by surgeons. My viewpoint is mostly informed by the British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh's opinion on working hours.
When people complain of being over burdened, more often than not it means the process they worked within had a lot of waste. Invariably, the proposed solution was always “we need more people”. You can sometimes hide process waste problems with inventory. The number of times hiring people made for a long term solution is exactly zero in my experience, and this includes process improvement work within healthcare.
“Just hire more people” tends to be a myopic view that underscores a misunderstanding of the systemic effects at work.
I am much more a product of the systems than I wanted to accept. That’s the most mature perspective I have had to date - and has led to more empathy than I thought I was capable of.
It’s a lot like how you dislike the people who remind you of your bad qualities.
At least at my employer, it doesn't seem like shirkers and work-to-rule folks are rewarded. Maybe there are some people who do work like this and are still getting rewarded by giving off the appearance of being team players, but I guess you'd have to be a pretty careful actor to accomplish that. You'd also need to be able to manipulate your colleagues into doing the work you aren't, but still liking you enough to review you well during 360 reviews.
That being said, there is a grain of truth in what the op was saying as well. It's not healthy to care too much about your employer's goals, because they are necessarily in tension with yours to a certain degree. Work should be compartmentalized to the degree appropriate to how much you enjoy it and the material rewards you're getting from it, and this balance is going to be specific to each individual person.
I understand what you’re saying about a problem solving mindset, but that is not the issue in burnout. The issue is unrealistic volumes and deadlines that encroach too far into the rest of your life.
Personal boundaries exist in medicine, in fact they are essential to surviving a career in medicine. There will always be more sick, injured, and dying people. The hospital has the mission to save them all if it can. An individual doctor or nurse has to understand that they personally cannot. Or they will burn out very fast.
Overworked tech companies could benefit from some perspective from the medical field. Is someone going to die if your feature misses its ship date? Probably not. People die in ERs every day, but guess what: ER staff still work a fixed set of hours, take vacations, etc.
Hospitals on the other hand, you're just downright wrong about that. Not only in general do hospital staff work 12 hour shifts including being on-call and having to work abrupt hours, especially over the past year their hours have been absolutely ridiculous. This includes nurses and MDs.
Feel free to review some studies on this issue, it's not hard to find nor is it some kind of secret. Basic Google search pops this up within the first few results:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200130302_The_Worki...
That study shows that in fact, nurses work their regularly scheduled shift less than 50% of the time, and 81% of their shifts involve overtime even though only 7% of it is scheduled in advance.
Here is a study looking at work hours among surgeons and physicians:
https://forums.ucdavis.edu/local_resources/docs/Freischlag-S...
It paints a very different picture from the idea that medical staff work very strict and well regulated hours. Their working hours are very chaotic and extreme.
You completely missed my point, which is that it is ridiculous for tech companies to compare themselves to a profession that faces literally life and death situations. Comparing to “the past year” (i.e. a historic global pandemic) just highlights the absurdity.
Your OKRs are not COVID patients!
Healthcare was easily the most toxic environment I ever worked in as well. The CTO literally was happy to quote that he treated it like a sweatshop because thats how you got the most value out of your human resources.
We literally had contractors fall asleep at the wheel and die driving between sites during marathon crunches where people got written up for leaving to eat / sleep.
Engineers in Silicon Valley don’t clock in for a 12 hour shift. They are put on salary and any discussion of schedule is discouraged in favor of talking about “hustle” and “team players.”[1]
My point is not “health care workers don’t work hard.” My point is that they are set up with schedules and structure, which tech companies avoid… and then try to point at health care workers or “contractors” to justify the chaos.
Also I bet your wife is not working so hard just so the hospital can meet its financial goals. If she is like most nurses she is motivated by patient care and probably hates the administration, who are usually seen as bean counters who (if anything) impede care. Again, compare to tech companies who build myths around founders and corporate missions to obscure the purely financial stakes of their work.
[1] I know that not all companies operate this way, not all managers do this, not all engineers experience this. But there is obviously some sort of shared experience among a lot of people that the blog post at the top of the main thread is tapping into.
You're making numerous points and your later ones are good ones. But the working conditions for front line workers, including but not limited to their scheduling, hours, pay, etc, are all terrible.
I think you have a narrowly defined scope of “tech”. What about the software that controls the Da Vinci robot in the operating room? Do you want someone to say “eh, code quality checks aren’t my job?” Or the person writing flight software for aircraft? Or the safety critical software for a power plant?
The point being, yes, perspective is important but it’s a difference of degree not of kind.
There’s a time delay that separates these things. That completely changes your approach.
A better healthcare example may have been, would you be comfortable with people changing the building automation software that controls operating room air exchange rates or oxygen delivery systems?
But again, this isn’t really about software devs so it should extend beyond just SWE roles. It’s about positional duties, regardless if you write code or deliver meds to patients.
All of these systems run into schedule and cost pressures that often causes people to feel overburdened. I don't actually think they are fundamentally different.
Not in EU countries that do not allow the medical profession to opt out of the Working Time Directive.
See"Are the opt-outs related to long hours?" in https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/documents/...
Roles are not nearly as defined as you suggest. Take construction: there will always be conflicts between sub-domains. If there’s a clash between disciplines there’s nothing more frustrating than two sub-contractors who point to each other as the one who must “own” the problem to fix it. Same thing in healthcare. A surgeon who won’t do a task because they believe it’s beneath them is not benefiting the patient.
I don’t think most missions are capable of having clearly defined roles like you suggest. There will always be jobs that fall in the gray area and that’s why almost every job I’ve had included a “and other duties as assigned.”
I agree that perspective is important, but that’s talking about prioritization not shirking duties. I also understand burn out is a real risk, but I don’t think the right mitigation is taking a "that's not my job" perspective; I'd much rather see someone work with their supervisor to say, "here's where that falls in my current priorities". "It's not my job" tends to results in un-productive finger pointing or venting as opposed to actually aligning one's work with what's important to the shared mission.
I want to work with problem solvers not people who identify with strictly defined roles.
I'd honestly be replace "software engineers" with "all jobs"; your post is highly relevant to most fields.
At the same time, it seems like your yes-person friend is both willingly over-working themselves and complaining that they are overworked. So I'll agree that it doesn't make much sense - unless they truly are aiming for an early retirement.
What other reason is there for a career? If there was no financial incentive for most, I highly doubt anybody would waste the time learning how to be a lawyer, programmer, or doctor. People don't just go into a career hoping to make a menial wage and work 40-60 hours a week.
I almost feel guilty I get paid to play with computers all day.
Don't make huge sacrifices unless you have a realistic expectation of abnormally huge returns.
A way to make a living doing what you love. I loved programming as a child/teenager. I wasn't paid then.
I think from the responses you've had to your comment you've now seen that you're in a minority here.
The world is cynical but not that depressing dude
Where am I saying this ? I'm totally ok with "rich" doctors. I totally want the doctor to have its full mind caring about "me" and not how he'll have to pay for his debts.
I'm just saying that it's easy for doctors not to care about money. Not that it's bad or that they are overpaid.
Greed is what compels people to do the difficult things in life. I highly doubt anybody would put up with what you do for med school if you're prospects of earnings was similar to that of a business analyst. Of which can get that job with an Associates Degree or less.
"highly doubt anybody would put up with what you do for med school if you're prospects of earnings was similar to that of a business analyst." - I'm asserting that people do put up with that in many places around the world, where doctors' earnings actually are quite similar to that of a business analyst. And not because they're somehow different, homo sapiens think/work/behave pretty much the same everywhere. The only practical difference that comes to mind is that they don't go into immense debt during med school like in USA.
And even now, I don’t understand why the response to “company will overwork me” is act with bad faith. Just take care of yourself, stop working before the long term costs to yourself your family and your life get too high. That P1 will still be there later. If you have worked for more than two years and not recognized them saying this is crucial is just how they talk, you aren’t as clever as you think. The job market for “can make computer programs” essentially guarantees you cannot be exploited without your consent. Just find you limits and protect them. It will work out. But you don’t need to not offer helpful advice or sketch out solutions for people. That sounds like you are burning down the fun parts of the job to avoid overwork. But the easier way to avoid overwork is to work less.
I guess I’ve been incredibly lucky and probably am in a nice west coast dream bubble, but my bubble vision means I definitely don’t buy that am a rare unicorn. I don’t think I would feel happy about working with peers who had a cynical outlook and we’re not invested in the shared dream.
I am replying only because this was the top comment - I really hope I reach at least one person who’s on the fence about committing to a goal bigger than personal!
I don't think it's cynical at all. Quite the opposite: I think it's how functional teams work effectively.
Of course you can get rich from a FAANG job. But most of us don't work at FAANG. And there are plenty of slackers even at FAANG: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21961560 "Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?"
My thesis here is that this person wasn't doing anything wrong. They don't need to feel bad about providing value to their employer by only "patching things together from an internal codebase" or "not deeply understanding every aspect of what they do." The vast majority of the world operates this way, and I'm not sure FAANG is much of an exception.
I was addressing the heretical point you mentioned - ignore employer’s goals.
May be I missed an exaggeration there.
The trick is to make it a mental shift. Here's a concrete example: Suppose you were coordinating with some large bank that takes a very long time to do anything. Should you feel bad that most of your day is spent waiting for them? Should you proactively go out of your way to find extra work for yourself?
I don't think so. You waiting for Big Bank is the business goal. But most people will tell their manager "I have nothing to do; please find me more work" (in so many words).
There's no reason to stress yourself out like that. Some would say you'd be doing the bare minimum. I would say that you'd be fulfilling your business obligations, and that you'd be acting professionally.
Most people won't have such direct opportunities to minimize their workload. But they often maximize their own workload for no reason, until their managers practically force them to take time off. (Or they don't, which is worse.)
I know only a lucky few who got there by being there at the right time and coasting out. Most had to work it. I can really feel how it is easier to focus on those lucky ones (or the ones who missed out), but I prefer to still focus on the middle ones with right values for whom it worked out.
Now this all seems reasonably true. Most important thing they missed to tell was joining industry/company at time of explosive growth in sector. If one is out with graduate degree in EEE field in late eighties or early nineties and joined a growing tech firm they undoubtedly ended up doing very well even if not an SVP or higher. To their credit was not to totally screw up things and not some great leadership lessons.
This story is not going to repeat for engineer joining in 2020s. There are no great green field projects coming, or customer negotiations happening for a low/mid-level engineers. Most of them will be put to churn out and integrate thousand little micro services and feel grateful that they still have job and health insurance.
Reflecting on myself who joined in mid 2000s all interesting work is now past and even after gaining lot of experience I ended being a JIRA slave and daily agile standup chump today. I can't imagine what an extra mile would be in this environment. I might, however, get fired if I tell a lot of work they are trying to efficiently should not be done at all in first place.
Without more details, any points I make / advice I give will just sound like platitudes. But I do hope you turn it around. The job market is very hot right now fwiw if you want a fresh start.
Each one of those represent very big dreams for me. Dynamo powers practically half the internet. AR experiences are the future of computing interfaces (IMO).
That’s just my experience. I also know of a million projects with equal scope getting built out even today.
It comes down to this: do you want to be judged by your best day or your worst? I personally don’t focus on the media narrative that target a sliver of badness in these places. I prefer to work within the system either advancing the goodness or trying to rethink the issues affecting folks - sometimes luckily both. I believe these companies are too big to be brushed off in a single stroke.
And "caring about your employer's" goals in this day and age while you're working at FB/Google/Amazon (I'm on the fence about Apple, don't have much of an opinion about Netflix) actually makes you look like a sociopath in my eyes. Again, imo being a cynic beats being a sociopath.
Google and Amazon are very large corporations. Someone who works in GCP or AWS is benefiting rest of us.
Another way of seeing this is acknowledging that anyone who owns S&P 500 technically owns these companies. So if you’re making money in stock market, it’s happening due to the very same people you’re condemning. In this day and age it’s very hard to draw a line for “us vs. them”.
A lot of things will fall through the cracks if people don't pick up.
Professionals are not hourly workers, you're not there to do A->B, you're there to deal with the complexity, which means picking up pieces.
That said - you definitely do not have to worry about stuff. A healthy sense of detachment is actually kind of good for both you and your employer.
Your job is a civic responsibility, it's frankly moral to do a 'good job' - but that doesn't mean 'over striving', it doesn't mean 'being taken advantage of' and it doesn't mean having to worry about the bigger picture. That's definitely not your job.
I think a lot of people could be just as productive if they figured out the emotional strain part.
One little trick is to say to yourself 'I Don't Care' - but then go in the office, and put one foot in front of the other, and just get whatever is in front of you done. It's weirdly liberating and can be productive.
Like 'corporate mindfulness' - be present in the thing that you're trying to do - and not caught up in the giant hill of politics, bits and pieces, it's just noise.
Do your job well, go home, and forget about it.
Employers most of the time only care about the management board goals, employee of the year can quickly turn into a jobless employee, given the way company roadmaps work in practice.
The only reward for a job well done is more work.
The quicker you realize that, the happier you'll be.
Sad. But on the bright side, those that excel at what they do are going to be disproportionately rewarded. I love this aspect of society and certain political ideologies want to destroy this.
I can’t believe I’m reading this on HN, a place that used to be full of optimism and accepting grand challenges, looking upto leaders and doing hard things others shy away from.
I know this is a taboo to compare with Reddit, but lately I have to pinch myself and ask is this really HN!?
If you don't own a significant (5%+) chunk in a company, don't do a single minute of non-paid overwork. Do the bare minimum to justify not being fired (and this is key, if they don't fire you for that, it means they accept that what they pay you is being returned to them in work, so why give them more output for the same money?). Save your energy and time and focus on you, your family, your projects. Companies don't care for you, so why the fuck care for them. Get in. Put the minimum that the company accepts for they pay and get the fuck out. Anything else is just bad choice that are have more positives for the companies and downsides for yourself
You're more correct than you think! https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
The TLDR of the above is:
1. There is usually only a single promotion-role on offer.
2. That promotion will go to the best performing employee (whatever metric is used).
3. If you're not the best performing employee, then do only the bare minimum to avoid being fired.
4. Doing the bare minimum to avoid being fired frees up the employee to concentrate energy and efforts towards jumping the corporate ladder (new project, etc).
Note that #4 is an "up or out" proposition: if the employee fails to gain power/influence in the company, then that energy can still be used to land a higher-level position at a different corp using the "new project" effort as an indicator to other companies that the employee has more power/influence than they actually possess.
Even if there's a single promotion per team per year (and there are certainly companies where promotions are not limited like that), that means that, in a team of 4 people, 50% will be promoted in 2 years. So if you like the job and plan to stay for a few years, I fail to see how this tactics is even remotely close to optimal.
Yes. The link goes into details.
> Even if there's a single promotion per team per year (and there are certainly companies where promotions are not limited like that), that means that, in a team of 4 people, 50% will be promoted in 2 years. So if you like the job and plan to stay for a few years, I fail to see how this tactics is even remotely close to optimal.
It's an analysis based on The Office; maybe read it and critique the 20k word write-up (in the link) instead of the 4-point summary.
This isn't an objection to "not caring about employer's goals", far from it, it's clearly an issue with management teething problems as they try to expand a relatively small company and don't know how to do it. But I've found that caring a little bit about the goals, trying to see what they're aiming for and having that inside view of why we aren't getting there, allows me to bridge that gap, offer better advice to management and help the entire team have a less stress filled day, at the expense of some of my own peace of mind.
It'd be easy for me to say "well that's managements issue" but I can't ignore that management issues trickle down to the rest of us, which is much more obvious in smaller companies.
Frankly, most orgs will not reward pro-activity, in fact you can even be punished for it, since if a problem is not yet known by stakeholders then why are you solving it.
There have been times in my career where I spotted issues from other teams on preview or staging servers and helped to fix it. Then I later got blamed (or dragged into the subject) when a similar issue occured on live which I had no association with.
It's better to just sit back and do the minimum, but do it well and professionally. Most importantly, don't make yourself too available:
> Don't respond immediately to messages and emails.
> Don't propose solutions, that you will have to own (at least partly).
> Don't answer questions outside of your responsibility space - even if you know the answer. Instead, direct people to others who should be answering those questions.
Many cases, the stakeholders don't have an appreciation for what you're suggesting or even the consideration to balance your workload:
"Oh, thanks for bringing the problem to my attention, let me just add that to your massive pile of work and make it a P1 like everything else - and this problem space is also now your responsibility forever because you're (in my mind) the expert on it"
- unfortunately, there are many managers that operate this way. Just clueless.
That's why i always advocate a cautious, cynical, self preserving approach but again depends on the env and your relationships.
It does matter how it's conveyed though - it can be interpreted as "not my problem" in certain cultures where people wear too many hats.
One of my workplaces has its engineers overwhelmed with too many responsibilities, like expecting front-end engineers to be wearing the DevOps hat any time a fire comes up related to their own staging environment.
I have found it's a matter of finding comfort in being assertive (and well aware) of the best and worst skills I have to offer in a realistic sense. If I'm particularly weak at a skill and I have little time to build it or refer to deep heady documentation, I ask a colleague who is capable to join me in looking, and they often find the problem within a few minutes, resulting in far less time wasted for all.
I have found a little bit of pro-activity on things you like to do anyway is a good way to turn your job into the job you actually want to do rather than the one you got hired for. I started my current job doing wetlab biology, but I currently do coding and grant writing. I like wetlab, but its exciting to transition into a different area I have wanted to get into for years.
To be clear though, I am still often re-active. I generally won't push hard on things I am not enthusiastic about. It helps to have a friendly and permissive boss.
I think this is the most impactful factor in achieving pro-activity at a level you are comfortable with. The company might not reward you directly, but being able to change your own job description, find ways you can contribute better, etc. are all more motivating than financial incentives.
It’s easy to get burned out doing too much without a boss that’ll recognize your efforts and encourage you to do less from time to time though. A little bit of love and care, however superficial, goes a long way here.
I agree with doing the bare minimum at an expected quality if you are working in an inflexible system, but getting too comfortable there might leave you doing that until retirement.
I used to like (still do) building tools that help with my job. Little command line tools or browser extensions that just make things easier. As soon as management discovered these tools (because i shared them with other devs) it became a full time responsibility for me to maintain them - I had to port them from my personal Github onto the companies.
I also now get feature requests from global teams to add updates to these tools. Now, I don't have a problem with this - I enjoy working on these tools but the issue is they are added on top of my actual work (which is a lot). In hindsight i regretted sharing these tools and adding more responsibility to myself. Mostly because I didn't get a meaningful pay rise or promotion to reflect my additional contribution or lets say expanded job description.
But again, all depends on where you work and with whom.
Well I would say that Wally is a true pragmatist, whilst Dilbert is an eternal optimist - despite the reality of his actions never meeting his expectations. Wally has learnt his lessons unlike Dilbert.
It's kind of the cliche of work smart not hard. Easier said then done but the sentiment being to elevate your status whilst simultaneously reducing your actual deliverables (or delegating them elsewhere) - isn't that ultimately the goal of career progression. Is there anyone that does less actual "work" than a CEO.
I moved from development to management a few years ago and as a manager I have to say my proactive developers are far more valuable to me. I recognise their value and I give them more interesting work and more financial rewards as a result. I also do everything I can to be sure that they're happy and not overworked because I'd hate to lose any of them.
[1] - favoritism is not acceptable in this case as well.
I find that if I propose anything at all ever I immediately become the responsible party for it and forced to own that no matter what it was. Which has lead to me not wanting to propose anything anymore. If I expose that we have a problem with X, I am then the one tasked with solving it no matter how much is already on my plate. So now I try not to see things that aren't going to immediately put us all out of a job.
Highly reactive employees and companies end up being left in the dark and given short notice on everything... leading to more stress
A balance between pro-active and re-active is ideal.
As much as I recognize this can be good advice, this comment makes me sad.
It's like "start underperforming" is the answer given to bad management problems.
Which I agree actually makes sense in a lot of companies (if pro-active efforts are not already being recognized, then it's hard to change the culture).
I also think that a lot of comments here are directed toward financial success, but many people are actually looking for meaningful ways to contribute. People for which the "re-active" approach might not be a solution.
What would be the solution for those people? How unlikely is it to actually switch to a company which recognizes employees willing to be more involved?
Some of the best devs I've worked with are those who just like to work. They are also up for any problem and rarely complain even if (imo) they have too much on their plate. It really just comes down to your personality and needs at that stage of your life.
For myself, I sort of came to the conclusion that I won't encounter meaningful financial success in my day job. I would have to work another 20-30 years to accomplish (financially) what I used to expect I would have done already in my late 20s. So, it's more about trying to maintain some kind enjoyment in my work and also to protect my mental/physical health.
Sometimes you want to work on something that you see it can be useful for you in the foreseeable future, voluntarily, without anyone asking(and you don't have to tell anyone) Said work occasionally benefit you, or even save your ass along the line sometimes.
but too much of it do you no good, that's for sure. And don't announce it to the world because it'll bring you all miserable things. :p
Balance being proactive with being responsive.
I feel you would of received a better response if you used the word Responsive not Reactive in this context and replaced "Don't" with Balance.
Being responsive to things that happen on a daily basis acknowledges that the company we are employed in is messy and stuff happens that you may need to urgently attend to. Yet it doesn't mean that you still can't achieve things that make your place of employment a better place for others.
Perhaps they have company shares?
For me, it is better to ride it. Since I am not going to change my approach to work, I will continue to be an expensive contractor until I can live from my savings and pursue my side projects.
If you make a middle class salary, underspend your income by at least 10%, max out your 401k and IRA, invest in stocks, and start doing this in your 20s, yes, the odds are pretty good you will.
Next, they are upset when MailChimp sells and they don't get their options (apparently believing that receiving options is their sacred right protected by God, Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human rights).
More importantly, if it helps you deliver what you agree to deliver on time with more consistency, people quickly learn to appreciate that.
Honestly I think it’s a wonderful reflection of humans’ innate empathy and drive to help each other, the Stanford Prison Experiment shown to be junk science over and over and over.
We humans are unfortunately exploited by humanoid entities (corporations) who turn humans’ one truly-limited resource (attention) into something that’s also non-human. Everybody has heard the idiom that “time = money”, but have you ever stopped to think how fucked up it sounds when you apply the transitive property of equality to get “money = time”?
This part is so true. I worked with people who were the "conscience" of the project I worked on - they started it, knew everything about it, worked late nights to fix issues etc. Then they left and...the project kept running...everyone managed.
If you are really feeling as you do, I think it's time to reassess your employment and potentially your life.
For instance, I think many startups are different to this, and not only because they are small. More meaning: the genuine opportunity to enact change, I think is the biggest differentiator, alongside better incentives and stock options that in some cases lead to life-changing financial outcomes. There is always risk with this, and it's a higher risk than a larger company, but that's just the mechanics of life, economics, and society.
I work incredibly long hours, so i'm always 'busy', but for the most part I love what I do, like a passion project. This is because I'm transfixed by cause and effect. It's an amazing thing that I don't think our brains are wired to appreciate by default. It takes discovering this and then confirming it, illustrating that just one person can have disproportionate impact in the world. It seems the vast majority of us limit ourselves or feel a sense of imposter syndrome in our own skin.
The more one realises this and manages to instrument some change, the more positive reinforcement one gets, until one can look back at varying chunks of time in one's life to see the impact that was made. This gives you strong sense of meaning to your life, motivating you to fill your time with high impact activities that have the capacity to genuinely change people's lives, alongside your own. This could includes making time for your family and so on: because in many cases this is an important high impact activity.
After realising this and doing it, the feeling you get with a positive outcome, even if you're still in the middle of doing whatever it is, is better than any drug i've taken.
Steve Jobs did an interview in which he more eloquently expresses this ethos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw
I think a lot of entrepreneurs feel this, but it isn't just limited to starting companies. There are so many ways each of us can make an impact.
This is coming from someone who has always had a growth mindset and had a really hard time sitting still. I used to loathe naps and felt like I was missing out if I took one. Now, I take a one hour nap almost daily and I'm finding that after 1pm I'm basically fried (I start working around 7AM).
I'm not sure what to do about it, if anything. If I could retire now, I would.
I'm trying very hard to get my earnestness about learning new things back and I'm finding that my motivation has just tanked.
I'm afraid this is a permanent state now.
I love being challenged, believe I can change to meet most challenges I face, and enjoy looking for opportunities to improve myself. This is how I’d understood the concept of “growth mindset” from Carole Dweck’s book Mindset.
Maybe the difference for me is that none of these things are core components of my identity? It’s just a way of interacting with the world that I find interesting vs. something I feel compelled to go all-gas-no-brakes on all the time.
I don't identify with it so much as I think of it as my baseline. Does this mean my baseline has changed? Absolutely.
It's still irksome because I too enjoyed looking for opportunities to improve myself or the methods I use to get things done. Now, I just don't give a fuck.
Thank you for reminding me of this!
Six hours of work? Lie the other 2 and call it a day.
Or, renegotiate a contract for 6 hours per day.
Given how much productivity I presume you bring, I’d lie.
I don’t feel bad about it since companies care too little (in general). If they care, then I would care. E.g. a 10x more productive engineer doesn’t get 10x the pay. I met one of these people, they lied. They worked 2 hours, shipped one hour of code in production, saved the other one to commit on a rainy day and still got employee of the year because they were by far the most productive.
You could also become a freelancer, then you don’t have to lie.
My point is: six hours of productive work should be enough.
Yes, I realize this isn't a me issue and I'm looking for other work. The problem is that I'm encountering a lot of ageism in this field too.
Ask to hire for help. The business case is: either you break down, and the company loses a valuable person, or they get extra hands and can resume business operations. And while you’re at it ask for a pay raise because you were likely underpaid.
Ageism sucks. See if you can look younger or see if you can work at a company of a linkedin connection.
I am just brainstorming, you know what might apply to you.
Have you considered finding something else?
If you're working from home, its really not that bad, since the other 6 hours of teh day you can learn anything you want. Just have to be near computer incase something happens etc...
I worked for two State Governments, Oregon and Nebraska for a combined 13 years total.
I ended my career at the State of Oregon as an IT Director for a State Agency.
So several things about state employment bothered me to no end:
1. State employee union contracts catered to the lowest common denominator. What I mean by that for one thing, is that you cannot negotiate your salary or your "work out of class" rules/pay.
2. Implementing technology (context was 15 years ago) one always had to consider the public perception. This meant that when iPhones were first introduced, I couldn't consider them as part of my IT planning because of the public perception that I'd be wasting tax dollars on them. Despite the fact that they were superior in every way to what Blackberry was offering at the time.
3. I couldn't buy things off of price agreement despite finding prices lower than what the State had already negotiated.
I think thats the issue you're too high up in the job ladder to not have any 'work responsibilities'.... If you drop back down to the nameless IT 'tinkerer' programmer , responsibilities will vanish!
You mention "If I could retire now, I would"... so maybe you have certain life logistics preventing you from taking a lower pay-grade... but if not...
This is a great time to find freelance work. Your soon to be former employer maybe your first client.
Honestly, you're doing 4 jobs, and I assume only being paid for one. Fuck that noise.
I work for a big company that has, in my opinion, good work/life balance and a great work culture, and we're always hiring.
Ageism is not a thing where I work (I am almost your age).
Can't promise anything but some guidance on what to apply for and some personal anecdotes about my time here, but if you're interested, happy to share.
I just wanted to highlight this. Pure gold.
That's really too much context switching. Of course you're getting burnt.
Effectively pulling all those things off was possible 10 or 20 years ago. The world has gotten too complex now. Unfortunately, it is sort of expected in some shops.
One thing that I find helps tremendously: Don't try to wear more than one hat per day. If you're doing management-related tasks today, don't try to do software engineering on the same day. Even if it means you waste a few hours in a day.
But the demand to constantly be hyper-productive at all three of those things simultaneously just because I happen to have the skillset(s) means I have a hard time caring about any of them.
While I agree there is a lot of ageism, there is something worse than ageism - obvious fatigue and lack of enthusiasm during interviews. You can read burnout on a person in the first few seconds - you may need to get a break so that you can have the proper mindset for interviews.
My main concern is continuing to find work whenever this current job ends. It’s a good field, and I enjoy it because it’s helpful to society ( nursing related software ) but I know I’m not the greatest programmer out there.
My current gig should last a few more years at least, and I have no plans on leaving this company. Still, ageism and staying current is always on the back of my mind, and a part of me wonders if there’s something I’m missing regarding my career
And by the way, I hate lying. I know I can do it relatively well, but I almost never do it because I hate the ethical implications and the memory implications of it. The thing is though, when it comes to companies, they have warped things so much that I'm willing to not stand by my own principles. It really feels to me that they threw a backhanded punch first. Fine, they can do that, but then I can throw one back and encourage other people to do so as well.
Oh, and if I'd be in the interview chair as an interviewer, I'd rather look at someone's experience and transferable skills and throw the whole ageism thing out of the window.
- 'nobody' stays at one company for decades or an entire career any more (perhaps in part because of the massive decline, at least in the UK, of defined-benefit pensions, so 'you' - employer - are not on the hook for that either), so the the 50yo just has potentially a lot more experience than the 30yo, and in reality no difference in how long they'll work there that's due to their ages
- it's widely known that this is the case, so there's surely a big under-tapped pool of older applicants, with fewer competing offers?
Honestly I think it'd be hard for me not to be ageist (if I were a hiring manager, and it weren't illegal to discriminate on the basis of certain 'protected characteristics' which include age) - I'd snap up that cheap experience!
No idea if that's something you've already explored, but felt it couldn't hurt to share.
That being said, I am trying some other remedies before I take Androgel or Androderm and they seem to be slightly helping.
Where did you get that reference range for a 37 year old? I'm not sure that was even true 30 years ago.
Found it: it’s actually 916 ng/dL https://www.healio.com/news/endocrinology/20170223/researche...
Here's a good resource on both methods, and places to order online if you go with that method:
Why even suggest it then?
On the other hand, maybe it's time to reexamine when you can retire. There are a lot of forums about this, my wife 'rescued' me from feeling like I needed to work to normal retirement age after reading a lot of Mr. Money Mustache, FWIW.
While at FAANG, I was at capacity every week. So a 'normal' week (which was actually quite rare), I expected to spend 35-45 hours in work + meetings.
But 75% of those weeks, some urgent issue would come up. Then you have an extra 15-25 hours of attending to the urgency, falling behind 5-15 hours on planned work, and then you spend all evening thinking about how to solve the Very Urgent Problem.
Even if you are good at compartmentalizing, you'll be confounded by redundant messages from middle managers asking you about the status of the Very Urgent Problem.
Taking a break / vacation means twice as much work for 1-3 weeks before the vacation, and 1-3 weeks after, as you must prepare for coverage for while you are out of office, and then catch up on what happened while you were gone.
Add in the death of a loved one, medical issue or even a string of minor problems and you're completely subjugate to external circumstances. This will lead to burnout, at a minimum.
As a younger person, this kind of environment made me feel important and necessary. Later I began to realize this is the opposite of the truth. Important and necessary people have the power to set their own terms.
I am not sure why things have evolved this way. I recently watched Koyaanisqatsi ('life out of balance') a film from the 80s about modernity and technology and found it as relevant as ever. However the busyness that used to be outwardly visible has now migrated into our minds and seems to be causing mass unhappiness and mental health issues.
Bertrand Russell wrote about this in In Praise of Idleness
https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
"In Praise of Idleness." Harper's Magazine. By Bertrand Russell
This has been a fantastic read. Thanks for sharing!
A personal favourite of mine is "The Ancestry of Fascism", delineating social movements in history through the perspective of a constant pendulum pushing/pulling from opposite directions for any kind of social movement (political, artistic, etc.).
Saying I'm 54 and have had a 26+ year career in tech was MY context for feeling spent.
I would suggest a couple of things:
- see a psychologist (not a psychiatrist, athough a psychiatrist may be step later on) - this should help you develop tools to make yourself better
- dont take work home, stop when you are tired - i saw that you fulfill multiple roles, could some of that be delegated? are you being compensated for those roles or did they just pile on over time? maybe its time to talk to your boss about it…
- take a real vacation, as in stay home and dont do anything
- excersize, avoid alcohol/substances
Spend part of every day outside. Spend part of every week in the company of others.
I too was very concerned about if I could "stop" and worried about my mojo and work ethic which went missing around 10 years ago. You learn to cope, and I read enough financial investment advice to realize I need less than I feared post work, but probably I won't entirely retire: moving to a different intensity of work is the goal probably.
It helps to live in an economy with a public health service. Moving country in these times is hard, moving country also breaks social ties which are really important in older age but mid-50s you can make bridges to a new community. So, if you are in a place where health costs will be a major concern, think about international relocation. The longer you leave it the less likely it is to work.
In understand this is a luxury not everyone can afford but what I do now is work from about 6-9am, go out during the day until about 3, work 4-6. Which if you add it up is still a solid 5 hour day.
For whatever reason it just makes me more productive and sleep better at night.
Before I did this I just felt like a slave to my computer, super tired all the time, depressed and lethargic. I had sleeping problems because I felt like I was missing out on “life” and for some reason I’d stay up late on Instagram, YouTube etc, maybe watching others live vicariously ? I felt dissatisfied.
Knowledge work pays well but IMO it can come at a pretty high cost if you don’t prioritise your life.
Edit: I read your reply on another post, I think you’re doing way too much at your job. It’s not manageable and it sounds like you’re burned out and likely failing at at least one of your duties making you feel down.
Like one family I know eats dinner at 1 am, because that’s when the father gets home from work. The kids nap in the evening, and do homework past midnight.
I originally thought that was madness, but they have 6 kids and 4 have gone to Ivy League schools apparently it works for them.
As harsh as it might sound to put it this way, the answer for how some people will be able to manage better with their SO and kids is, "because I don't have your SO and kids for my SO and kids," or more specifically, "by not allowing my relationship with my SO and kids to be like your relationship with your SO and kids." For kids especially and with people I know who have this problem, it's because they infantilize and underestimate their kids (past the point where they're actual infants) and think "that's just how they [i.e. kids] are." Your question posed as if it could have an answer that would somehow be general/widely applicable (and not highly dependent upon the tendencies and personalities of the people involved as individuals) certainly hints towards this.
A valuable (possibly the most?) life skill is to be able to tell people to fuck off in the most sincere and HR approved way imaginable, it's very empowering, would recommend 10 for 10.
The practicality of telling people to fuck off means saying the equivalent of, "I need you to fuck off right now [so I can take care of something important without any distractions/obstructions]," ideally having cultivated the kind of relationship where the receivers understand that importance, whether it's stated plainly or merely implied.
* Plan ahead
* Establish a clear list of goals and objectives with your manager. Make sure your moving toward completion of the goals and they can see that. This keeps them off your back.
* Make it clear that you want to manage your own time and ask if that’s going to be an issue. If it is, find out what can be done to alleviate it.
Sorry if that sounded obvious but it’s taken me years to figure this out.
Ever since the Apple Watch came out, I tracked my sleep and for the last two years I average 6.5 hours, no matter what.
I just kind of assumed it was a consequence of becoming older.
I exercise everyday it wakes me up if I feel tired.
> Most common time people choose to wake up: 6:00 AM
https://snoozester.com/The-Wake-Up-Time-Report.snooze
> The peak time for waking up is between 6 and 6:30am.
I see no point to be sitting at the computer if it's a beautiful day and I already got stuff done early or am going to do stuff late.
I know smart people manage this by blocking calendars etc though.
As one ages, nutrient absorption wanes. You often need more, to get the same as when younger.
So even with an unchanging diet, you may have changed.
Working out is the same, eg a 30 minute walk may require a 35 minutes, 40 minutes, for the same cardio benefit.
What did you feel like at 30, 40 and 47 for comparison?
If it's different, what position / work did you do during those years vs what you do now? Software Engineer and IT is a pretty wide net.
I just didn't realize I was burnt out by the world in general.
I basically work everyday and tell myself “just one more hour and then I’ll take off the rest of the day”. I do that every hour until I get as close to 5 as possible.
I’ve been like this for over a year. This is my life. I try not to think about it.
Another option is to dial back on committments and intensity, possibly with a reduction in income. It's no a full work cessation, but it is preserving sanity and intellectual capacity.
If your finances are stretched now, start cutting. Deep, hard, and fast.
If you've a partner, involve them in this discussion.
Your job starts at 7am? You could start later, like 10. Have your 2-3h lunch time. Finish at 6pm. Change jobs until you find a job like that. There are plenty, I can assure you.
That is not going to help him much now. Not everyone has or could have started saving early in life. Some did not due to ignorance, some did not due to life circumstances, some did but other life events could have taken that from them (i.e bad investments, divorce, medical issue, or 100's of other things).
Just because you have the luck and privilege to be on the FIRE path does not mean everyone else is as lucky or choose that path. This person may have not planned to retire early and looking back now wished they had made that plan in the 20's. The road not taken an all that...
>>Change jobs until you find a job like that. There are plenty, I can assure you.
Again it would seem you are taking your anecdote and applying it globally. This is very region specific and I can assure you in my region there are exactly Zero jobs in IT that allow you to start at 10am, take a 2-3 hour lunch, and knock off an 6pm...
I will not implicitly state those are not common, but I can not imagine a region where they are?
It's very likely he could retire but he just didn't realized. Maybe looking into it, it's not a bad idea.
I worked on 3 continents, in more than 10 companies. No employer ever told me I'm coming in too late, my lunch time it's too long or I'm leaving too early (6pm).
That aside, like I said if your experience is true, which i have my doubts, it does not match mine. Most companies I know of even if they have flex time want their people to start before 9am, and generally do not allow 2-3hr lunches as normal course. Now if you only worked as a contractor this may be different but a salaried position employed directly for a company... Notta gonna happen every often.
At most of the companies I have worked for you would be put on performance review and then terminated.
Underestimate your annual expenses by $10K on a 5% SWR? Ok you need a pot of $200K more. At 3%? $333K more. 2%? $500K.
With interest rates in a 700 year downward trend, and yields dropping across all asset classes, you should NOT assume, as a software engineer, that you will be able to retire in your 50s.
Still, of that's something that appeals, start saving and investing, otherwise the chance is literally 0.
Quite a lot of you didn't grow up in abject poverty and it shows.
The hole this puts you in, 99% of people have a really, really difficult time climbing out of and describing what this process is like, is lost on a lot of people. My biological mother made extremely poor choices and never took my future into consideration. We were housing insecure and we were food insecure. My personal safety was at times in jeopardy.
I've been in survival mode most of my life. It's only the last 5 years that I was in a position to finally make thriving choices for me AND for my family. It was only this month that I finally made the ultimate thriving choice to live in a place that I've dreamt of living in since I was a kid. I'm not even going into any other details about what effect this has on you as an adult, like homelessness, how expensive being poor is, etc.
So I'm only left feeling like laughing (and sometimes crying) when someone mentions savings. Shit, it's only been in the last 10 years, that I got over mentally calculating the cost of everything I put in my shopping cart, to make sure I could afford it. To this day, I still have anxiety over swiping my card in front of people at the grocery store, thinking that surely it's going to be declined (it hasn't in years).
I'm only just now able to start dedicating some of my salary to a savings account (or other investments). There is no time left to ultimately retire with anything matching my current salary, so I've resigned myself to work until I literally can't anymore and with a remote IT job, sitting at a desk, that sounds like 30 more years or more.
Change jobs? I guess you missed the part where I'm encountering ageism? I've had to lop off a decade of my experience in order to try to not appear older with my experience alone.
People who have never had to wonder if they were going to have a meal or a place to sleep as a child can never know how it can permanently change your life. I'm glad you are making strides, I still struggle to, so that's quite the accomplishment and you should be proud.
I don't think I will ever stop tallying my groceries as I put them in the basket. Or being surprised when my kids ask for something from the impulse ailse, I literally don't even see it I'm so used to not being able to get any of it.
I firmly believe if every person had to at least work a minimum wage job for a year and try to survive off it, our society would be so much better off, you wouldn't have to explain being poor to some privileged kid who has all the answers because it worked for them.
Half of the country will never know what it's like to be the other half, but one side has all the incentives to keep it that way.
I have family who still spout 'If I were born poor I'd still end up rich' (translation- poor people are just stupid, I'm smart).
I'm cheering you on, and you give me hope!
Set your sites on what you want and don't waver for as long as you can. It will happen!
Thanks for the positivity!
As an example - we had a very useful, functional internal developer tool written in Elm (the language, not the mail program). The original devs all quit and no one was interested in learning a new language, so the tool is being shut down and "all" (minus the useful parts) content is moving to a half-assed mix of Wiki, Atlassian tools, and honestly just falling through the cracks.
I wasn't involved in the tool's development or depreciation, but just the fact that we have tons of interns and junior software devs around that couldn't be bothered or forced to learn a new language backs up your "I'm spent" motivation TED talk.
Coworker: We'll use Docker, Minikube dev setup,@#$%@.io and Unicorn-Lang, this will be awesomest! Me: Oh, have you considered boring tech? Coworker: ah, it's old, not how software is built today.
Also coworker: leaves 1.5 years later with with us having to pick up the pieces.
Now each day is just a blur of anxiety. I used to love IT, school was a blast I loved programming, servers, networking, security, web design, troubleshooting, but help desk not so much at 52.
I used to work evenings and nights at my old job now 9pm seems like 3am.
I do get tired every once in a while but since I am an independent company I can almost always take my time and recover. So far I did not loose any of that sense of excitement when starting on design of completely new project. I guess being ISV for the last 22 years helps greatly in this department.
Also read a lot, play me some music on keyboard (insanely bad but who cares) and do fair bit of physical activity (cycling, hiking, swimming in the lakes and ocean.
As a result I am very fit, have lots of energy and my brain is always itching to start something new.
What I do not have is a ton of money but I am not doing too bad and would not trade my freedom for anything
I deliberately only work about 4 to 6 hours per day max, and delegate everything else to my team. I also take Wednesdays off entirely to spend as a 'date day' with my wife who also has doesn't have a work shift on Wednesdays, and I don't work on weekends any more.
My working hours are broken up - I may do 2 or 3 hours in the morning when I wake up, but then I go off an indulge in my other passions such as music production etc. Then I may do a couple more hours in the afternoon when the rest of my remote team are coming online on the other side of the world, then I will take a break to cook dinner etc. and check in quickly before going to bed to ensure all tasks are on track. Like the comment poster above I also take regular naps in the afternoon to recharge my batteries.
I also don't have more than 2 to 3 meetings per week, and I am VERY selective about who I meet with and for how long. I am totally focused on maximising every ounce of energy towards only things that will move my startup forward.
Conversely, some of those meetings are actually spent mentoring other startup founders - I find that it really motivates me to 'give back' to the community a little after decades of receiving help and advice.
An yes, I have been through actual burnout 4 times in my career. Each time gets worse, but I also now know to look for the signs - plus my family and colleagues also keep watch for early signs, which helps me mitigate the onset of bad habits and work patterns that may trigger it.
Sometimes I do the same - starting 6-7AM and by around noon I quit. I consider it quite normal and nothing to be ashamed of. Except some emergencies productive people (and I count myself as one) do not really shovel gravel 8 hours a day. No point in doing so.
I highly recommend that you take a good hard look at what it would take for you to get to retirement, and make a plan. It might require cutting back in some areas, but if you don't figure out how to do it then the universe will and it'll probably be worse. Your plan might involve "one last push" to build up savings, or it might involve a "wind down" at a less stressful kind of job that you can sustain for longer. That's up to you. One thing I will say is that I've known several people who tried the "learning new things" route as an antidote to burnout, and it backfired badly. They ended up being even more stressed, unable to perform at their accustomed level, younger colleagues being resentful, etc. Maybe it'll be different for you, but it seems to me that learning new things is best done on your own time - cutting back on work hours to make room if necessary. A sabbatical or a period of part-time work might seem like it's just dragging things out even more, but sometimes it's the right strategy if it keeps you from losing it altogether.
Good luck.
If not, then it's probably time to switch employer, to one that has a product/mission that is aligned with a topic/field that would bring more meaning into your life.
If that's not possible, you could try spending one less hour per day on that job you have, and invest that hour in something that creates meaning in your own terms.
I’ve lived much of my life for the past 30 years in virtual spaces of one form or another, from MUDs to IRC to MMORPGs to early and then fully evolved social media. As commercial virtual space showed up, I noticed the engagement hooks and potential for addiction massively increased.
As that happened, for my own mental health, I have distanced myself. I’ve left most social media, don’t play multi user games and have ramped up my real world social interaction.
If you work hard and have pressing responsibilities, spending the little free time that you have on commercial addictive online pastimes will, in my opinion, guarantee your implosion.
Find spaces to be in during the little free time that you have that don’t make someone else wealthy. Then take it a step further, and find things to do that are good for you.
A solution, in addition to interacting with real people in person more, is to push back hard and rigidly control when and how your work makes contact with the rest of your life.
Personally, I'm a zero contact after work hours kind of guy. When my end-of day hits, I will not answer a single thing that is work related. My colleagues have learned to accept it and the world has not ended or the company failed. People are hired and paid accordingly to respond to off hours emergencies. I am not one of those people.
Obviously, people will have different roles and relationships with their work, so this type of thing won't work for everyone. But the key is more that you take matters into your own hands and that your interactions with your work become the result of a decision you make.
I literally had to tell my colleagues RTFM and don't bother me on my time off.
World kept spinning
I agree, but I also agree with your observation that a lot of the burnout is coming from the activities that people choose to fill their free time with.
I see a lot of people in the tech communities boasting about quitting social media, but they then go on to spend countless hours every day on non-traditional social media like Reddit or HN. Or they endlessly scroll news articles and outrage bait that isn’t really relevant to their lives. Or they spend hours upon hours in video games or watching TV. Or they immerse themselves in drama around things that don’t directly impact them, like anti-vaxxer debates or Twitch live-streamer drama or online culture war arguments.
I’ve also noticed several common themes among the burnout-resistant people I’ve worked with, even at some very demanding jobs. These people tend to be unaware of the latest news headlines or the latest culture war debates. They aren’t keeping up with weekly COVID case counts or fretting over the latest anti-vax trends because they aren’t interested in the drama. They program in their language and framework of choice and aren’t concerned about using the latest and greatest every time the landscape changes (with allowances for steady learning and adapting to mature trends). They’re happy with their job even if it isn’t paying top of market year after year. Most importantly, they spend their free time doing things that make them happy and active instead of angry or lazy.
Unfortunately, I think HN comments and articles tend more toward the former group because debate is interesting and results in engagement. That’s partially why burnout seems to be an epidemic especially in HN discussions, whereas the situation isn’t as universally dire in my real-world experience. Still a problem, but there’s more to it than blaming jobs and Facebook/Instagram/Twitter.
Like you said, a lot of the idle activities that people choose to fill their free time are actually quite draining.
What exactly is it about online spaces that does this ? It’s little wonder that many are burning out after a year of being perpetually online.
However I would also like to add that the amount of uncertainty in the world and in our jobs has gone up. You never really know if you’re doing “enough”. And the internet exacerbates it.
I think you really hit the nail on the head here. We really do, almost all of us in this modern tech world, have an order of magnitude more leverage in our day-to-day activities than the previous generation did. We have a theoretical (though very uncertain) capability of making a marked difference to a chunk of the world (e.g. affecting thousands of people) by putting in an extra hour of work, often without necessitating the involvement of anyone else. To paraphrase uncle Ben, this great power can then put a heavy personal responsibility on our shoulders, even if there isn't a pointy-haired boss breathing down our neck.
During the 1880s, children under 12 were working 16 hours a week in UK factories. So probably not as new as you'd think :)
What they meant of course was not whether they could be "at the job(site)" for more than 4 hours a day, but that you could only really do actual (productive) work for 4 hours a day. The rest, so my friend claimed, is almost always filler. My friend also claimed that they believed this was true almost regardless of the type of work you did. Even people doing physical labor don't actually "work hard" for much more than 4 hours - you need breaks (lots of little ones, or maybe a few long ones).
I still don't know if they're right about this. Personally, I've always preferred the maxim about "work long, hard or smart: pick 2". Either way, I know that across society, not just in IT related fields, we do not honor these ideas about work in any meaningful way.
in a 40-50hr work week I would say 50-60% is productive actual work (i.e writing a program, or doing the actual task you are paid to do), 10-15% is administrative (making task list, organizing your work, reporting about your work, etc) 10-15% is meetings about your work, 10-15% is socialization with co-workers, unofficial breaks, informal meetings, etc.
So if you do not count the other time as "productive" which I could and would challenge then that 4hr number holds true.
Meetings, administrative tasks, emails, chat messages, more meeting requests, for most people the default setup has all of this coming at them like a firehose, and then bizarre expectations build and build like sedimentary rock into this seabed of constant immediate response times and work without productivity, a feeling of working with nothing at the end to justify it.
So using school as a for instance. If it takes me 12 hours of studying a week to ensure an A, but only 2 hours a week to ensure a B, is the additional 10 hours wasted studying really worth it? Nope. Much rather make my life more enjoyable.
I've worked those kinds of jobs with 12 hour shifts pretty recently, and you definitely Really Actually Literally Work 10+ hours of em'. It's kind of a buzz.
I could still do it, 6 days a week, day-in day-out at 32, which was pleasantly surprising to me as someone who has always struggled to work a good 4 actual hours of white collar shift.
Some jobs just come at you non-stop, and basically your only options are quit dramatically, or keep grinding through.
The camaraderie with your work colleagues is something too. I've never felt that kind of genuine, manic, expendables-in-the-trenches, darkly comic camaraderie in any white collar job.
I couldn't keep my brain continually engaged in SE for even what would be a short 'shift' - but I reckon I could still do the >12h full days I did at the cinema as a teenager (plenty to do even while all screens are showing).
Secondly, we do work for more than 4 hours a day. In fact, I work in my sleep. The brain doesn't just shut off. The reason you can't just "keep going" at the keyboard for more than 4 hours is your hands are faster than your brain. But the brain doesn't stop. It keeps crunching away. Every morning I find myself with new insights and new ideas that I didn't have the day before. I'm not just being paid for the hours I spend bashing away at the keyboard, I'm being paid to engage my brain with the business.
From that point on I made it a priority to be home by 6PM so that we could have dinner with the family at 6:30. No more late nights, no more stressing about being the first guy to leave the office. Instead I was going to have a relationship with my kids and share in the adventures of their childhood.
It did affect my career, nobody who wanted to get to VP level ever went home on time AFAICT. But it gave me focus in that I knew I was going to roll out of the office between 5:30 and 5:45 so my deadlines were set accordingly. I did log in some evenings after the kids had gone to bed but it wasn't the "usual" thing. And the wife and I spread out the vacation so that every month we had a 3 day weekend (either from holidays or by using a vacation day.) It made things much more tolerable.
I work from home, and I have an hour before work in the morning with my kids, can eat lunch with them, and log out at 5 pm sharp.
I just don’t care about anything I work on or anyone I work with after a major release a couple months ago that bookmarked nearly everything I wanted to accomplish in this role.
I seriously doubt this will make me happy — more hours, less prestige, new unknowns, sunk accomplishments - but I am well past my “fuck it” point like so many others I talk to.
Parenthood does change a lot of things. But at the end of the day, tech isn't slinging drinks at a bar, or fixing cars, or even like other intense white collar jobs where the stock market closing bell or potential sales target companies office hours put hard time limits on things and let you better compartmentalize your life. It's got elements of research science, art, and construction - ideas percolate over time, experiments need to be run, and structures fail or become unsuitable and need reworking. I used to think with the right methodologies these could all be controlled and that only "dysfunctional" companies didn't do so, but lately I'm concluding that the "busyness" of a software eng. or adjacent jobs in tech just comes with the territory. Yes, some companies are distinctly good or bad at managing the worst of it, but looking at the bigger picture, getting upper middle class salaries in a hot market for talent, to sit in a temperature controlled clean environment and use your brain to solve problems is not a bad trade off for being expected to do amazing things routinely. I think we have a pretty good tradeoff.
People will say "it's just the managers", "it's because you aren't working on interesting things", etc, but it is none of those things. I have worked on interesting projects, been my own boss, etc, and nothing changes.
In ancient times, you would perform physical activities that you often enjoyed to some degree, at least to the extent that they made you feel good at the end of the day and ready to rest. Most of the time, work and play were indistinguishable. Evolution makes it so that we enjoy the things we are supposed to do. Animals play hunt when they are younger (or even when they are older) because it is fun and that is how their genes make them get good at things they need to do. Their job is hunting for food, and they like doing it.
The further away your job is from your natural tendencies, the worse it gets. Sitting in front of a computer programming and doing other things is about as far away as you can get. Sure, we might like solving problems, etc, but not as a job 9-5 every day.
There are the people who say "stop complaining, you sit in an air-conditioned office! You don't have to toil away in a physical labour job", but that is just completely wrong. Sure, some physical labour jobs will mess up your body, but there is nothing healthy about sitting in air-conditioning staring at a computer. I used to work in a physical labour job when I was younger. I had to quit because they were making sure nobody would get full-time steady work. The difference in my mental and physical state going from outdoors physical (but not extreme, body breaking stuff) to office work was extremely noticeable.
Also what you said applies to any office job and not just programming.
Physical labor maybe something that we enjoy but say running a farm requires insane amounts of it day in day out.
Skilled physical labor is where its at.
Unskilled labor is basically a few steps removed from being a slave. 10 hour days (many times 11-12) at bottom-barrel wages, working as fast as you can (because corporate tracks efficiency. Yes, it's actually quantified! HAHA), and getting injured no matter what. It's mind-numbing. I hated it.
Now I've been doing a skilled trade, and I feel rejuvenated from being burnt out of white collar/office shit. Get to work around 6-7am, leave around 2-6pm (depending on workload. Usually it's around 3. However, this is with paid overtime. Once you start making the big bucks, your overtime becomes obscene). If you work for a small shop/family-like environment it's very laid back. You develop the stamina needed in about 6-8 weeks, and after that you get very fast at everything physical you do.
There's a lot of learning involved (especially keeping up with your state's local building code), but once you know the code and how to use the tools, you basically don't need to relearn the latest way to build something, or spend weeks trying to wrap your head around a tool, or hours late at night wracking your brain trying to decipher shitty mandocs and undocumented APIs, or troubleshooting/debugging while simultaneously wanting to blow your brains out.
Everything is simple to learn, troubleshoot, and wrap your head around; it's all in the physical world.
Fuck office jobs. Fuck unskilled labor work. Being a farmer is almost like being a glorified landscaper.
Nonetheless, I don't see myself doing this forever, so I'm working on a side business so I can break out of the labor class, and join my fellow capital-owning brothers.
I think the path is to "ruthlessly compartmentalize" your life. When you are getting the job done, do it well and efficiently, and have things like a standing desk and do stretches and look away from the computer etc. Then when you did enough work for the day, completely do a 180 and go out for a run, practice a language, etc. Make the most of your time.
Couple big ticket items? No problem. Long list of 5-20 minute items, or even worse, conversations of indefinite length? Exhausting.
I am trying to find the nicest way to say: "This should be an e-mail conversation, please send email.", but I wish I could somehow start an email draft that is saved and shows up in some to-do list somewhere.
The intake queues suck because _some_ teams respond to Service Now and some don't. Like, you'll have a pretty easy task which requires stuff from 3 teams, 1 you put in the ticket and they do it same day, the other sits there and never gets picked up, for the third you can't even figure out which team is supposed to do it let alone how you would contact them. So, the hunt begins, and this requires talking to actual humans. Sometimes there are 2 or more teams who could do your thing in different ways but none of them want to.
This is made worse by some parts of the company on webex, some on slack, some only available on teams, some teams responsive to email and others not really etc.
The only thing that makes the whole engine work is an informal network of people that trust each other who glue the whole thing together behind the scenes.
The OP's problem is that large company communication is universally dysfunctional and the "glue" network between them and the people who need things from them is not strong enough. It helps to have a strong informal networker in the reporting chain. This is usually some kind of team lead and everyone accepts that their productivity will be destroyed because "everyone knows who they are" and contacts them out of the blue with their wacky requests. They should then prioritise and route appropriately.
If leaders are not amenable or functional in this way they get routed around and "person you contact to get things done" increasingly diverges from formal leadership.
IMHO, a keen eye for how the organisation actually functions, careful relationship management and knowing which levers and channels to use to get things done are the skills of a 10x person in enterprise.
Every team I work with (very large company) leverages this approach, their productivity would be Nil if they left a direct channel wide open. Back channels exist only where they should exist.
A nice in-the-middle solution that a number of people might appreciate!
Or the classic "Open a ticket."
1. A friend used to say "a human being can do 5 plus or minus 4 things" while holding his hand up and slowly closing one finger after the other ending up at 1. Your comment reminded me of that.
2. I can do a long list of 5-20 minute items. I can also do couple of big ticket items. Just not in the same day. I wish I knew that my Monday would be the long list and I would not mind. We have an on-call week, and that week I do not even pretend to look at big ticket items, but the challenge is that the small things do not stop appearing even when it is not the on-call week.
It’s sad that so many white people have been conditioned to think this way.
"Elephant infrasound" just doesn't quite have the same ring to it as "dog whistle", though.
But strategically, it's not. You need to do those "boring" things that make up some of the best aspects of life, and help you build deeper relationships.
If you need to work to put food on the table, then work. Your family will feel you around because your contributions are meaningful, and you can still build great relationships. But if you are just working to get a bigger house or a new car, then it's not really the same thing.
The idea of being back at work in some 9-5 or 8-6 where my brain is still trying to solve the problems of the day as I lie in bed are over. Certainly a lot of parents can sympathize with the itch of “if I can get the kids to sleep I can get a few more hours in”. No more of that. I can finally be present. I’m done competing with smart people who have no kids, and an industry that expects workaholics.
I voluntarily participate in an employment contract. I like what I do and am good at it. I could work harder but I work what I consider a “fair” amount. Many weeks that is less than 40 hours of my time but sometimes it’s more - if there is an emergency or a crunch time for a reasonable goal, esp if the goal date is not arbitrary.
I really don’t like the idea expressed in some threads here that “I should stop caring about my employer’s goals”. If you don’t care about their goals, then the ethical decision is to quit. They’re not asking you to compromise your principles; they’re offering to pay you in exchange for supporting their goals.
I think a lot of the ideas on this topic are a little bit muddled. If your employer sets unreasonable goals then you’re not doing you or them a favor by trying to meet (much less actually meeting) those goals. If they try unreasonable shit and it works then they will keep on doing unreasonable shit until it bites them, and make everyone miserable in the process.
But not killing myself to meet the unreasonable goal my manager agreed to is not the same as just slacking off all the time. I’m a professional and consider myself ethical and I don’t see a huge ethical difference between stealing and accepting pay for work I didn’t do.
So people who just don't care much about anything (that they could realistically do in a job) should just not have a job at all?
What if I don't suscribe to your "ethics"? Sure, if you own the company I'm employed at, you can fire me. But you can't force your arbitrary ethical standard on anyone else in any other case.
>they’re offering to pay you in exchange for supporting their goals.
They're offering to buy my work in order to support their goals. Not making me care. I have my own goals and I only care about those. There is no benefits at all for me to care about their goals aside from feeling good about being a good worker bee who cares about the hive if I drank the yuppie corporate kool-aid (I didn't). Both the company and me have to make sure that our work agreement satisfy both their goals and mine, or someone is gonna be unhappy. There is a power imbalance in that relationship due to supply and demand of both work and workers, and I'm thankful I'm a skilled professional in that regard.
>I’m a professional and consider myself ethical and I don’t see a huge ethical difference between stealing and accepting pay for work I didn’t do.
Do you uphold the same ethical standard from the company you work for? In a market economy, the incentive of the company is to pay you as little as possible for your work. If they're able to buy your work for less and they don't do it, they will get run over by the competition who will get the edge. Is that unethical?
Ethics and morals are not based in anything concrete and are made to domesticate you. If someone is explaining to you what is good or evil or just, they're trying to make you behave in a certain way to their benefits. Companies that wants "team players" and people "having a personal investment in their work" want complacent workers that will do more for less.
I have always had very little burnout if any. I don't work on as many side projects lately, but I am keeping sane. I work 10-4, sometimes a little later. and I don't feel sorry about it. I get my stuff done, I get more done than most others, maybe less than some of the all-stars, but I know I am not underperforming, and thats fine.
I love what I do as a programmer, I plan to do it for many years, but I will never sacrifice my work-life balance for any company. Especially with my first child on the way.
I think because of this, I get more done, and seem to do more than the others, when in reality, I am doing a bit less, or at least waste less time.
The only single reason we're all in this rate race is gene competition. Remove gene competition, suddenly there is not more need for constant growth, for economic growth, for countries to overwhelm other countries. For groups to fight other groups.
The real reason why we haven't dialed back on 40 working hours per week is that the first country that does it will lose an edge against the others. In the long run it means that country loses power. Maybe the other countries will then "override" it or control it. The people of said powerless country will face the fear of being at the mercy of the ones that continued on a race to growth. Our whole society is nothing but at the mercy of our genes still competing with each other. That's all there is to what we're doing. All of this is still instinct-driven. And 99% of us are blind to that.
> “No way I’m burned out. Look at all the women that are actually suffering. Who am I but a privileged white chic taking up space.”
That's self abuse, mentally tearing yourself down, that is not positive affirmation. Trying to take an objective stock of your context is reasonable, however comparing yourself to those less fortunate is not a positive affirmation.
I had a third kid 4 months ago and my company is transitioning from a small to medium-sized company. I am the tech lead/architect on our company's flagship software and I am constantly struggling with the skill sets of my friendly but incompetent members of my support teams.
We are also trying to move 14-15 customers from single-tenancy to a brand new multi-tenant platform that uses a totally new stack at the same time we are transitioning all our processes.
It's INSANE.
PS: Writing this comment was really helpful for organizing my thoughts for the meetings I have this week. Hopefully I can communicate more effectively to leadership about what is happening. Thanks hackernews.
I hope it's not a final state.
I got burnt out hardcore a few years ago after giving 18 hour days, 7 days a week for 3 years without a break.
When I left, I took 6 months off to try and recharge, except by the end of the 6 months i developed a fear/anxiety/hate of anything technology related, and fell apart physically and mentally.
It's like the mental and physical consequences of working that schedule didn't catch up with me until I stopped.
So I took another 6 months, seeing a professional who prescribed a few things to help.
So after 1 year of not working, I'm back in technology. But I still hate it every day.
I've lost all passion for anything technology related.
I wish I had skills in another area other than technology so I could change careers, but I'd be starting at the bottom which isn't necessary a problem but I'm the primary breadwinner in the family so money becomes the problem.
I'm not sure what I'm getting at, I think for me right now burnout does indeed feel like a 'final state'. I hope one day I can get back to the point where it only lasts for a few days at a time.
It can be. Failing to heed the warning signs can result in a variety of long term medical issues, both physical and mental.
But I’ve gone into that burnout spiral twice in my life; the most recent time (the worse one) was over a decade ago. That burnout was the result of nine continuous months spent in intense crunch on a project I hated but couldn’t leave, along with some other ongoing stressors.
After shipping that project, it took me more than two months of time completely off work before I even started to feel like I was a human again. And then two more months before I started to feel like I wanted to start doing work again. I was absurdly fortunate that I had enough long service leave saved up to afford to take the time I needed. (or alternately, the fact that I had all of that available time off which I hadn’t taken maybe wasn’t the best thing for my chances at avoiding burning out in the first place. That’s a totally valid alternate take on the situation!)
I do agree with your comment that burnout isn’t a “final state”; it’s something that most folks will recover from, given enough time, and it typically gets worse the longer you don’t deal with whatever’s triggering it.
For me, when I was in the middle of the burnout it didn’t feel like a thing I would ever recover from; I just wanted to be left alone in an empty room all day every day and never have to talk to anyone or think about anything ever again. And eventually my brain came back to me and I came out of the burnout. It took a long time, though.
I think there’s a % of people who are convinced that they must do it for job preservation. And I think a far smaller % of them are actually right.
I worried about this a lot. Then it got to the point of being so burned out that I was ready to quit. So I realised I had an opportunity to experiment: delete all work stuff from phone, HARD exit at 5pm (I will hang up on slack conversations), and never work outside core hours. It worked beautifully and I just feel frustrated I didn’t realize this years ago.
I also reduced my availability, it is not so much career suicide as "career murder". You look at your career as it is laid out before you, you say, "yeah, no... no thanks". You weed it and you grow something different in it's place.
In a large and healthy team, when you slow down, others who are ready and willing step up. They are going to need mentoring. If you can turn your reduced availability into a new crop of future leaders, your boss is going to thank you for the service. (Well, it also helped that I noticed what was happening and told my boss to thank me!)
The are lots of places along the line where my experience could have gone differently, for the worse. But it didn't, and I hope the author is as lucky as I was.
As many company owners will tell you, they have no problem with a crazy busy life, because they are so motivated and fulfilled by their work.
For me, I was an engineering manager for 25 years. It was actually long periods of ennui, interrupted by short tornadoes of insanity and stress.
Frankly, I enjoyed the insanity and stress, more than the sitting around, waiting to be useful. I hated it so much, that I tasked myself with a great deal of extracurricular work; just to avoid going nuts (some would say it was not avoided successfully).
Nowadays, I’m basically “retired.”
Except I’m not. I work harder, every day (like, 7 days a week), than I did while I was getting paid.
I feel more relaxed than ever.
I feel like this is the obvious missing link between people like Elon Musk advocating 80-100 hour weeks and the rest of us. I only work 40 hours because I have stuff I actually care about to squeeze into the evenings. If I don't fit in my passion projects and family, then I might as well be an empty husk, not a person.
Completely different story when your main job is also your passion project which you own and derive great fame and fortune from. What else is he going to do? Take a break to work on something he cares about less in the evenings? I can work like a machine as well when I'm personally invested in the outcome and I'll 100% burnout if asked to give the same effort when I'm not.
Once you step out and remind yourself your time in this world is limited, a list of priorities will start to take shape, based on the following questions:
1. which cause is worth it for you to spend your effort and money?
2. which activities bring you pleasure and joy?
3. which are the reasonable sacrifices to fullfill 1 and 2?
There is no universal answer to those questions but everything starts with slowing down, gaining perspective and diving in
But even with my generally laid back workload at my job, I think the culture of the tech industry does seep in a bit and I feel like I need to be doing more. So I start side projects or go learn programming languages or some new tool, which aren't bad things in of themselves until they start to feel like an obligation and start sucking the vitality out of your life. I've started to keep those in check a bit better, mostly by keeping a further distance from the tech world by no longer following tech people on Twitter and drastically cutting back my time on sites like this one(I'm only here now because I finished watching a movie and it's tad early for bed, but to close to pick back up the book I was reading).
I almost want to say that the solution might be do tech work outside the tech industry, but I also spent a few years at mortgage company and with some defense contractors, and those are just soul sucking in different ways. Basically my cure has been to find hobbies and interests far away from anything related to my job.
In my humble opinion, the author is either delusional or spinning a yarn when they say they have solicited advice from colleagues. No co-worker is going to give you advice that doesn't serve their own interests first.
I strongly disagree. Plenty of people are self serving, but friendship and mentorship is possible in the workplace. This says a lot more about the places and people that you have worked with than something universal. Alternatively, if this is a mindset that you bring to interactions with co-workers, you might just be getting it reflected back to you.
I guess I've had a bad run of it then.
This just isn’t true, unless you’ve managed to find a supremely hostile workplace.
I’m always shocked at how cynical some HN comments can be about coworkers. I’ve had my fair share of bad coworkers over the years, but I’ve also found numerous wonderful friends and built lasting relationships with many people.
This idea that all coworkers are inherently out to get you is bizarre.
I suppose my larger point is that if a person's main source of stress is coming from the workplace then it's better to seek insight from sources external to the workplace.
It took about 4-5 weeks into the leave to finally relax, for my mind was wired to expect frequently recurring deadlines, so I was always paranoid of missing (nonexistent) deadlines. I didn't realize how messed up I was until I took a break.
It was liberating to just sit in a rocking chair every night putting the baby to sleep and thinking of nothing else. Maximum happiness.
The idea of "legacy" and the "craft" certainly poke at me often. I am able to develop software for myself that automate much of my job, allow me time to spend with my young family, and maintain my home. I sometimes wish I had the title, and had something I could point at and tell my son "Dad helped build that," one day, as my father did when we would pass a new sub-division of homes that he helped build. However knowing how much drive it takes to stay on top of the newest stack, etc, almost makes me want to strive to stay where I'm at: 40 hours and no more, relaxed, working from home, being with family, with the same salary I would have as a mid to senior dev... life certainly isn't always about the easy decisions.
> And I for one, no longer want to sprint in this rat race.
Great, but you'll have to downgrade your lifestyle. No more road trips around Europe [0], for example. I notice that is distinctly missing from the article. Leaving the rat race doesn't just mean you stop running, it means you stop running in the same direction as everyone else.
[0] https://elenasalaks.medium.com/20-tips-for-a-successful-road...
This can work in two ways. The first is you can be a victim of this and feel betrayed. The second is, you just have to realize another chance will come along where the thing you did most recently will be recognized.
It’s like poker hands. Don’t think you suck because you got a bunch of bad hands in a row. Don’t bet on those hands, and don’t bluff. Just wait until you are ready, because those face cards and pocket aces are coming.
Take it easy (and take that nap).
I think this is one of the hardest things to figure out in life. I think it is one of the major philosophical questions.
I wish I could say I knew the answer, but I am still trying to find an answer.
By no means do I mean to criticize the author for writing this. I only want to encourage everyone else to take this lesson seriously. I've banged this drum before on HN but it can take quite a bit more banging: Take burnout seriously. Take the initial signs of burnout seriously. If you're vaguely nervous about the possibility that you're burning out, take it seriously.
Don't shy away from it. Take this to heart: If you're sort of starting to burn out, and you acknowledge it, there are steps you can take to prevent it from ever happening! There's every reason to acknowledge it to yourself. It is ignoring it that may cause the bad outcome.
I can speak only for myself in that when I have sensed burnout coming on, I take time off. Sometimes with little notice, because I notice I need it. I get my projects changed. I evaluate my life goals before it's a problem. And I've never really suffered a real burn out yet here at 42, even through some bad times.
While I've not had to do this myself, I also strongly encourage extreme self honesty. It's sad to study for some years and then be in a career for longer only to discover it's not the career for you, but it's less sad that staying there. Do you want to be in the brewery business? Do you want to become a carpenter? Be honest.
(Though I do also offer just a bit of warning that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence; do take that into account, too.)
After having two kids, I’ve slowed down a lot, but I believe i can still have just as much impact. I focus my time now, I have hard conversations, I say no to the majority of the things I would have said yes to.
It’s definitely more challenging, but I’m able to keep up by growing in new ways, so keep your head up, you can have a life and get things done. You have to simplify, that’s the hard part.
EDIT: incognito tab works, hope it helps in case anyone is having issues.
It is also my line to explain why I do not have work Slack or work email on my phone.
Even with all these safeguards in place, I still managed to have a crazy burnout from a project. Migraines and hypertension that eventually landed me in the ER and necessitated a month away from work to recover. This taught me that working a normal 40-45 hour week is not enough. Active self-care is necessary outside of those hours.
Tl;dr: Working less is not enough. What we do when we don’t work also matters.
Does not apply to tech
. It's both sad and funny to see things you helped design become obsolete, selling for mils on the dollar or end up in a recycling heap.
. Careers often are all about designing the same thing over and over. Even products that appear different to the user often have similar logical plumbing.
. Tech really does change over time and you don't care about the new. (for example) I could give a rip about anything involving the internet but that's where all the money flows.