Hacker News Reader

Comment by flatiron | Hacker News Reader

totally agree. my wife's family is all in construction or painters, or working as bar tenders or at beauty salons etc. no health insurance, no ESPP/RSU/401k/FSA/PTO/blah blahs. every time someone politely says "hows work, what are you working on?" its pretty hard not to sound like a jackass when i complain about stuff like endless meetings, murky requirements, etc. my brother in law is always amazed that i can do my entire job on a computer as he's cutting wood and putting up fences.

i remember one time i was on vacation in costa rica and on a zip line tour. guy asks me where im from what i do. he said "oh man that's the dream, you just sit in a chair in the air conditioning all day? you don't know how lucky you have it!" and this dude runs zip line tours in costa rica.

grass is always greener

View on HN

Yeah, sort of, but I feel like this is because most people don't really understand it's not exactly the same thing as sitting around surfing the web. Obviously this isn't a physically challenging job, but it is a mentally challenging job (and the brain is a physical organ too, remember simple physics conservation principles--none of your thoughts come for free, they all cost energy, and complex thoughts take massive energy!). That drains you in an entirely different way.

I would almost argue that having a physically tough day makes me feel sore and tired, but _accomplished_ at the end of the day. Having a mentally tough day doesn't confer any sort of sense of accomplishment, it's just a draining feeling.

Also consider the "happy" ending to Office Space--the protagonist ended up much more satisfied doing a physical construction job in the end.

I think it's worth mentioning the alternate ending from Office Space, thought it was hilariously ironic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK43Ureuiqc

The point is that no matter what you are doing there will be bosses you hate and annoying parts of the job.

Wow. That was much darker than I expected. That ending probably would have made my generation several notches more cynical. Throughout my career, the original ending has literally sustained my hope in the face of soul crushing office work.

yeah, I did not know that existed and kind of wish I had never seen it.

I agree, tech jobs wear down the brain, but at 45 with a body that is falling apart, I thank my lucky stars that my brain still works. I spent a summer hauling bags of shingles up onto a roof in 105F temperatures and that brief experience talked me into going to university and taking the “office job” track.

I don't know. I don't disagree with you, but I think it's sometimes more difficult than it seems initially.

This stuff has been very salient to me the last couple of years. I had a friend who was in a physically abusive relationship, and she was often comparing my behavior, feelings, and thoughts about my job to what she was going through. It's definitely not the same, I don't want to trivialize anything, but in some circumstances a workplace just becomes sort of [emotionally] abusive, extremely dysfunctional, and starts to have tangible harms for spouses, family, etc. in terms of lost time, income, career opportunities, etc. I wrestled a lot with questions like "is it better to not have a job than an abusive dysfunctional one, when it's hurting my family at some level too?"

This isn't the same as putting up with some awareness that what you're doing is existentially empty at some level (which has its own set of issues), but balancing costs and benefits of jobs sometimes is trickier than it seems initially. I think maybe it's the same as the grass-is-always greener you mention, although I think that can go pretty far.

I hear what you are saying and agree with you to a point. I find though that its like this for pretty much all development jobs, just pointless never ending trudging. Only option appears to be getting out of engineering; and taking a 65% pay cut to do so is really not on the table. So because of financial responsibilities (kids, house, etc.) each day is the same and one bleeds into the next.

There's a big difference between pointless drudgery and emotionally abusive, and one of them is indeed pretty normal, the other is things like my manager lying to and about me and setting me up to look like an idiot and pretending it was my fault and literally giving me nightmares and raising my blood pressure 20 points.

> "oh man that's the dream, you just sit in a chair in the air conditioning all day? you don't know how lucky you have it!"

When I'm having this conversation, I usually reply with something along the lines "yes, but imagine that most of your job in that air-conditioned office is doing math tests". It's not a perfect analogy, but it's a pretty valid one in terms of mental fatigue.

and... trying to teach other people how to do math, then having to argue with them why their wrong answers can't be accepted, or having to go redo stacks of previous math problems done wrong by someone who left a year ago.

...while some sales bro seated next to you "to break down silos" is clanging a gong and seeking high-fives, and every 90 minutes you're obliged to trudge into a conference room to discuss yet other math problems that can't reuse the solutions to the previous ones, and the math reference you have is missing 1/3 of its material.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com