Hacker News Reader

Comment by blakewatters | Hacker News Reader

Your problem is very simple: you are working on bullshit.

Across your entire description of your situation you never once mentioned what it is you are actually working on but called out the income you hit and frameworks you are playing with. I humbly submit that your problem is that you have lost the plot.

Hate to break it to you chief but the libraries and frameworks and techniques you use to work are not the point. Creating stuff that people want to use is all that matters. Doing it with finesse and craftsmanship is how you go from good to great but if nobody gives a shit you will always feel empty.

Switching projects and doing something "harder" isn't going to fill that void.

Build something people want. I promise your drive and all the rest will follow behind once you are making them happy and get hooked on solving their problems and improving their lives.

That is what this game is all about.

View on HN

> Creating stuff that people want to use is all that matters.

Don't forget that you are one of those people.

When it's something you want, it's somehow easy to find yourself at 3am banging out x86 asm for fun. Doing the exact same work in a corporate day job that you hate makes you want to stab your eyes out.

That's great and all, probably true for a ton of developers. Certainly is and has been for me. Now show us how that's actually useful, the majority of jobs aren't building useful important things. It's building some dumbass startup idea that is very likely to fail or writing insurance backend code or some generic web form that NO ONE gives two shits about. I'm not angry at you, don't want this to come off that way. This industry is fantastic in many ways, great salary, skill based, no hard labor, etc..... But just like most jobs it's a very lucky few that get to work on something they think is important.

Maybe 20+ years have beaten me down but it's so rare that a job that matters is out there and available. It's so depressing how many web apps for really bad ideas are considered "engineering" careers. Maybe that's what I should build a way to find engineering jobs for causes/things that matter to people. I know I'd love to have a job board/DB to search for Climate Change based positions.

It doesn't necessarily have to be world-changing. Just something that you value and causes a glimpse in customers' eyes because now they have the tools they didn't have before can be enough.

Seems like projection, and everyone upvoting this is sharing in it because it's the case for the vast majority of us.

Sure, but does that make it necessarily false?

These kinds of threads are a dart board for everyone to throw out their fresh takes, and the OP to pick and choose from the advice as it applies.

This is me in a nutshell. I am fried from building things that make no difference. If these things were never built the world wouldn't notice. A life of purpose is the cure for burn out. I have not found it yet but let me know if you do.

>That is what this game is all about.

It may to you, but for lots of people it's just another job and that is also valid and sometimes healthy too.

True, but if it were just another job to him, he wouldnt be posting...

> Build something people want

I can recommend building something for fun, just for yourself without anything of the business-y metrics.

When I had a demotivated phase I started to build my website for fun, and didn't give a damn about anything people would say of it. [1]

That ignited the motivation to build my own tools again and led to the motivation of finding something other people might need, too.

A lot of "older" people in the industry that I know also take part in game jams like ludum dare and come together on the weekends to build something fun that they like. Game jams are all about having fun with zero expectations, so you can basically build whatever you want that comes to mind on a specific topic.

[1] https://cookie.engineer

This is something that I wondered too.

Are you excited about the problem that your software and company are focused on improving?

Do you connect with the users whose lives are going to improve when they use your solutions?

Are you empowered to talk to your users and figure out how to solve their problems?

I have always been motivated mostly by the stack I use and especially the complexity of the thing I build. I don't really care if anyone wants it. My most exciting job was a failed startup but to this day I can brag about the kind of system we built. It's probably easier for frontend developers to care about actual users.

Who cares what you build for someone else. Playing with frameworks and salary bumps can be fun.

You know what's not fun? Meetings.. caring about what you build will get you into many meetings.

Or, a variation, instead of building something someone wants, build something you think is valuable and excites you.

Yup. Nailed it.

IMO the people calling this "burnout" have no idea what they are talking about.

Calling it burnout assumes you're working too hard and if you just rest a bit then come back to do the same bullshit work it will be ok.

Working for 15 years, you know how much time off he has taken?

The content of the post clearly indicates complete apathy and lack of interest. Something that happens when you work on bullshit for years.

> Build something people want

Ok, what if instead of yet another one "UberEats for dog treats" I want to build a novel rejuvenation therapy. Or a platform for building such therapies.

What do I click, where do I sign?

t. big tech worker

Something that doesn't exist? You build it.

Something that you know of you check similiar companies.

If you are just browsing for ideas visit angelist.

If you want a great job you have to search. If you don't want to search you'll apply to places you know like big tech.

Another piece of advice is to get involved outside of work and you will be first to hear about the interesting positions.

If you want work alongside people experimenting with rejuvenation therapy, Calico labs works on that. They hire in-house software people and also of course use software provided by external companies.

I haven't worked for them or with them directly, so I don't know anything else about it, but it might be one place to look. I'm sure there are others; they must have competition.

That doesn't explain why OP was able to learn and do bullshit before.

Bullshit is much easier to learn and do when you are young. I am not sure why this is, but a shift does seem to be common once you start to hit your 30's.

This is why it is much easier to recruit people in their 20's to work super hard on problems that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Once people get older, they don't really want to spend all week optimizing a tiny button on an Android app that no one will ever see or use, no matter how much you get paid...

When I was young I didn't realize what I'm working is bullshit. I thought it's the coolest shit in the world. I used to be excited about new technologies. Now when I hear about "new technology" I just roll my eyes, because in %99.99 of the cases, this "new technology" is anything but. It's just a permutation of an existing tech with trivial differences that I'm interested in learning.

Maybe when you're starting out, this kind of work doesn't feel as much like bullshit because you don't have enough experience to differentiate. It feels like you're on your path to becoming a better engineer and the struggles ultimately seem worth it. But I bet once you hit a certain point, having to wrangle with the same flavor of bullshit you did 3, 5, 10+ years ago feels a lot more soul sucking. It doesn't feel like becoming a better engineer like it once did because, in OPs case, learning the syntax/structure of a new JS framework doesn't feel like the sort of vertical learning it once did. You probably want to learn new, more advanced concepts, not "I know how to do this in React - how do I do this in <new JS lib>?"

Similar to JimtheCoder, I think it is experience. As a fresh faced college grad, I got hired at a bank. They have good recruitment, and a decade ago, the entire company was almost cult-ish (in the least bad way possible). The mission was constantly talked about, our members are the most important, we are helping members - our neighbors and public servants - with their problems, and every employee works toward that mission.

It felt really important. And to some extent you can still feel that in some places, even that bank.

However, as you get more experience, and you see the same political mid-management games play out, and you realize a lot of the cynical realities of things, you can lose energy. Or, perhaps you watch people not doing the right thing, but having no power to convince them to do otherwise.

Like an old man telling a child that digging a hole with a shovel is better than digging it with a rock and watching them continue to use the rock: you just get worn out. ---

I agree with the main reply, that burnout is a thing, but that yes, it does help to be working on something you care about if you're going to put the level of mental effort required in software/IT. Sometimes I dream about being a bartender. You do your job, deal with the shit, and go home.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com