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Comment by aesyondu | Hacker News Reader

After switching careers to software engineering, I find that I appreciate high intensity / action oriented video games less (DMC, Monster Hunter, etc.).

My browser history is now filled with "chill or relaxing games", "games that don't need thinking" or something to that effect.

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> chill and relax

> don’t need thinking

You seem to be seeking proxies for the effect of not thinking, putting your mind and body at ease, and letting go. Have you given meditation a try? Anecdotally, it can fulfill these needs in a way no other semi-conscious activity seems capable.

I started meditating when I was in university and have done it on and off since then. However, I've stopped a couple of months ago and haven't had the will to do it again. I find other activities more compelling, like reading everylayout or about rails performance.

My experience has been that if work is exhausting, then I turn to games that don't have much of narrative, but which rather on the mechanics. Like racing games, one does not have to think too much, but one has to be alert and focused on it.

Doom Eternal was that kind of game for me. After a long day with another pointless meeting with the usual assholes, slaying demons left and right was almost therapeutic.

Same, I have a bunch of games like Nier: Automata, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Bloodborne, Control and I found that I can only play them on the weekend. After work, I can only play game like Dirt Rally, Trials Fusion and Apex Legends’ Arena. Where you don’t have to strategize that much and only rely on learnt reflexes. Anything that requires decisions or deciphering clues is impossible.

You play Trials to relax? ;)

When you get better at this kind of technically challenging game, there is a kind of flow that happens when you try to get better at previous challenge. The thinking is very minimal as you are only observing where you can improve. And it's a good feeling when you have indeed improved.

Presenting an alternative perspective, I have a high pressure job that requires deep thought (I'm in infosec) and my hobbies are pretty much all about skill/intensity. No judgement if that's what you like, but I find chill/relaxing games to be boring and can't play them for very long without having to go find something more meaningful to do. I enjoy being alone with my thoughts, I just find low-stakes games to be a weird in-between area and while I know they're super popular I just don't get it.

As a sibling comment says, ego depletion research is pretty low quality in terms of reproducibility. Anecdotally, I have never found it to be true for me.

Last time I worked in infosec, it was quite slow, depending on what you're doing. AFAIK you're either monitoring things, in which case it only gets interesting when there is an incident, and/or you're doing projects, but they are slow moving because they involve approvals, physical hardware, etc. If you're writing code all day I guarantee you'll feel drained.

As I said in the post you replied to, my job is high pressure and requires deep thought. My team writes a ton of code, and there's an on-call rotation where you're dealing with incidents and grooming training sets for our models.

> ...I guarantee you'll feel drained.

You'd lose that bet. Maybe you are, I however find writing code just as interesting and invigorating as I did over a decade ago in university. I do it at work, I do it in my free time both for purpose and for fun.

I'm just saying that from experience, I highly doubt there is an infosec job where you have less free time than the average coder. If you have time for deep thinking about problems, you have the kind of time I'm talking about that is super rare _on average_ in the industry.

> ...I highly doubt there is an infosec job where...

I understood your point, you're just incorrect. Different people are different, which was my point.

Now that we have that out of the way, I have to ask; are you ok? You seem really invested in this idea that programming is some kind of exhausting, herculean endeavor and that anyone who is a real coder must be exhausted at the end of a day of coding. That is not normal. If you don't enjoy your job I strongly recommend that you look around. Programming is a super valuable skill and I'm sure you can find a job that's more inline with your life.

I'm more speaking for the average junior dev -- I part-time as a mentor for a coding bootcamp and get to interview thousands of 1st year junior devs on a yearly basis, and the burnout rate is incredible. Contrast that with my time working in infosec, where I had 20-30 hours a week of free time in which to work on random side projects, play call of duty with my boss (literally), etc., while we wait for X thing to be approved or wait for an incident to occur (which might take a whole quarter). When I did the same for the DoD, things were amusingly both less lax and slower.

Now as a CTO at a YC startup, I've created an environment where devs have good work/life balance, time off is encouraged, engineering has significant say and sway on product decisions, etc., but this is by no means the industry norm.

On the infosec side, the industry norm seems to be infosec is largely consolidating as the industry switches to outsourcing everything to public clouds (read: disappearing), and what remains is pretty relaxed unless you are chasing bounties all day, which is typically a self-driven situation. Penetration tests for example seem to have longer timelines these days even though most of the tools are now automated (our startup just went through SOC-2, and I can tell you from the server logs almost all the checks on our staging server happened in the last 72 hours of the evaluation period). My assumption is for the other 26 days of the evaluation they are indeed playing call of duty, and so it goes for the whole infosec industry.

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