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Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

> “When I’m at a red light, I don’t feel like I’m rushed to get home anymore.”

This article and elsewhere I've observed that many employers are running antiquated or misled patterns that cause significant anxiety in their workers (examples are performance reviews[1], stacking unrealistic and unneccessary deadlines in attempt to push additional "performance", and excess hours for the appearances of productivity)

I wonder how many employees would be staying if their employers weren't doing dark patterns?

[1]: https://lattice.com/library/how-your-brain-responds-to-perfo...

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Just from personal experience: more. The past few years I've worked at a company that really values its employees and does none (or at least very few) of those destructive common things. They also do a surprising number of things right in terms of how to actually motivate people (the autonomy, mastery, purpose stuff.)

For the first time in my life, I didn't feel the desire to find a new employer at the two year mark.

Nice! Did you get lucky or did you have a plan to seek out such a company?

100 % luck. I didn't even know such a company existed before this. I was looking for a change in general, hit an unlucky streak of bad interviews, and then this company apparently saw something good in what was yet another interview I bombed, asked what they could offer to pay me such that it would be easier for me to make a decision, and that was that!

Cool. I had the same luck after many bad jobs. The working world in general and including programming tends to lack empathy by default so it’s nice when you find a company that has it and wants to foster a good culture.

It’s hard to tell in advance but any kind of bad vibe … in my experience my gut has been good but it’s a matter of trusting it and having the courage to turn back an offer that is “logically” good.

My employers don't follow any of these types of dark patterns and have been remarkably relaxed around how the time and effort I put in. Despite that, I'm still constantly in stress mode and demand of myself that I'm productive every little second of the day. I feel guilt for taking breaks, despite these being encouraged and feel like I have to show up exactly on the clock despite no one saying anything about the many colleagues I have that don't.

I've come to believe this anxiety actually stems from high school, where teachers would constantly demand punctuality, full focus and productivity. It was an environment where glancing out of the window could get you yelled at. Years later, I still seem to carry that sense of being constantly on edge, that someone is watching, judging.

You can go to your boss for a feedback meeting, establish that everyone is happy with your work. Then, don't frame it as a problem, just take some time to describe your work process, and how it is not 8 hours of typing, but also some lateral thinking, research, and say you wonder how if it may be a bad look. You can calibrate the expectations for your future work in this meeting. Your boss is probably happy you didn't call for that meeting to quit or complain about a workplace incident or whatever and will assure you that you should proceed as you outlined.

Work is a psychologicall rich topic, related to self-worth and livelihood. The work situation could be problematic and you might sense something happening behind the scenes. Trust your feeling.

This is a good advice. Also worth to discuss it with a psychologist.

I had fight similar issues. My excuse to stand up is to eat something. Guess how thin I am… Luckily I changed a lot, it was an 8 year long journey which still ongoing. For me what helped is experimenting, e.g. do some small „crime“ -> experience the lack of arising problem / or that the issue can solved. If you never try just fear, The fear just grows.

For me it was especially hard to accept that I just need sometimes to stare out of the window or draw some graphs by hand, which then ends in the bin. So seemingly unproductive stuff… But in reality this is productive, my brain is working and try to process the topic. Furthermore even just an ordinary discussion with some friend can fire the aha moment.

I can attest to this. I've been at my current (remote) job for 3 years and we don't really do much of performance reviews (there exists some reviews but nothing super formal like any other company I worked at before). There isn't much of the dark patterns you describe here. I totally have that same feeling of "When I'm at a red light, I don't feel like I'm rushed to get home anymore" now, whereas that really wasn't the case back at previous jobs.

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