Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> In 2020, the pandemic destroyed bucket #3 for most people. We were no different. Friends from back home in Canada couldn’t visit us. Even meeting up with local friends became hard. In January 2021 I tore my achilles tendon playing pick-up basketball. There goes bucket #2.

> Only then did I realize bucket #1 had been running low for a while.

I'm somewhat puzzled. If the author is struggling to socialize with friends (bucket #3) and struggling to pay attention to physical health (bucket #2) then why does he think that this is going to help improve work-life balance:

> I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now.

I can empathize with the desire to get caught up in a high-energy startup (it's fun!) but this whole blog post reads like someone trying to replace an increasingly disappointing personal life with excessive workaholism. Filling your days with extra work can fill the "bucket #1" (career) but it seems like a nail in the coffin for the author's problems with bucket #2 (physical health) and bucket #3 (social life).

Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years.

View on HN

+1 I'm finding this post a bit confusing as well. TBH, Google seems to be an ideal place to have work-life balance. Things move slowly and everyone expects that projects never get delivered on time (as the author points out). People generally are not expected to work outside of working hours and definitely not on weekends.

I believe a better title for the blog post could be "Why I left Google: unsatisfying work" and seems more inline with what the author experienced.

Google's culture is built to replace your out of work time with time on Google campuses and ensuring your friends are other Googlers. Work-life balance for Google is just living at Google.

Add that everything you say probably means your work life is also unsatisfying... I mean, nothing makes me happier about my work than when I get something done.

And that culture was blown out of the water when everything shut down and you were sitting at home all day.

That said, while I think "offices with every perk you can think of" is definitely a part of Google culture, the "living at the office" stereotype really only applies to younger folks. Once you have a family, living in a van in the Google parking lot and showering at the gym doesn't really work.

>"Once you have a family, living in a van in the Google parking lot and showering at the gym doesn't really work."

Are there actually folks who live in a van in the parking lot or is that a healthy bit of humor?

There was famously one dude who did it for a while:

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-tru...

It's the kind of socially awkward but technically allowed "lifehack" kind of thing you can imagine a stereotypical Googler coming up with.

It was real (I personally knew one person who did it), though I guess the pandemic must have stopped it.

I worked there with an intern who happened to be in his 40's. He was previously a professional athlete, and decided to get into engineering. He owned a gorgeous ranch in Montana, with his own baseball diamond, outdoor bed, and enough land that the neighboring farmer leased it for planting.

He was living in a crappy studio apartment in the bay area. He decided to try and save money by buying an RV and live in one of the known Google shanty towns in an unused office parking lot. We all teased him that he would never find a girlfriend without real plumbing. He lived there for about 6 months, until security politely asked him to leave because the company wanted to start using the parking lot.

>"He decided to try and save money by buying an RV and live in one of the known Google shanty towns in an unused office parking lot. We all teased him that he would never find a girlfriend without real plumbing"

This whole passage had me in stitches. I'm glad I asked. I may never heard the phrase "known Google shanty towns" again but I will probably never forget it. Cheers.

When I interviewed in pre-pandemic Mountain View, there was a section of the parking lot with around 6 RVs parked next to each other. I couldn't believe my eyes.

Maybe they did it long enough to save up money for a house.

Maybe in Mountain View, but even then: it was never that many people who stayed after hours (I worked there for years, then transferred to SF, where even fewer people stayed/stay late).

I remember a friend showing me around the FB Campus and there was a gym, a barber shop, a Mexican restaurant with bar and I think a drop off laundry place and dentist. I know it was meant to impress but I was horrified by the subtext of all that i.e that it was really just required because people spent so much time there.

I would love to have a gym, barber, dentist and laundry all in the one place. Commuting to those places really isn't time well-spent for me, so the faster I can get in and out, the better.

Restaurants and bars is getting a bit iffy, because that's an inherently social activity and I think you need wider horizons than a hundred fellow Metamates.

In europe there are plenty of walkable cities.

But you can use all those facilities during working hours, leaving your own free time more free.

People say this all the time about Google and it simply doesn't reflect the reality I've seen working here.

Yes, there are cafes and they serve dinner. There is a gym and a game room and other perks. And you know what? At dinner time, there's only a handful of people eating and the rest of the office is a ghost town.

I'm sure that some people do end up with their life revolving around Google. That's probably particularly true for people who got hired right out of college and moved for work. But most people I know seem to have very balanced work and personal lives.

I think people love the idea of a narrative that everything that appears nice about working at Google is actually secretly sinister and is making Googlers miserable but, like, maybe it's just a good job, you know? Maybe they offer all the perks because competition for software engineers is high and it helps attract talent.

Obviously, there's many valid criticisms of Google, as there are with most companies their size. But it's not a supervillain fortress full of trapped minions or something. It's just a huge corporation that found ways to make a lot of money per employee thanks to the magic of software and data. In industries where the marginal cost is zero and competition is still high, this is what you should expect to see.

I worked at Google for a few years. I have the best Google food memories from "The Root". I remember the day they served the most delicious duck I've ever had, and the day all the food was Klingon themed. The food was a nice perk, but I really miss the gym. A few coworkers and I had a standing appointment with a trainer. A coworker also ran a weekly yoga session. It was also easy to bike to work. It all worked because of the on-site showers.

I left to give a smaller startup a shot. I've been there 6 years, and the project continues to keep me engaged and fulfilled. They wrote meals into my employment contract, which I thought was pretty funny. They've followed through with it, although it's not as nice as having dozens of themed cafeterias. I've struggled to consistently hit the gym the last few years because of the relative inconvenience. It's my own lack of self-discipline, though, rather than any pressure from work.

I don't know your situation but I find discipline to be not very helpful as an explanatory variable: it's not something you can meaningfully change. What you can change is the overall environment, such that it's easier to do the thing: have an appointment with a trainer (or set some other time, even before/after work on particular days helps), attach a meaningful goal (weight loss, strength standards), etc.

Basically: reduce activation energy, increase desire.

Work-wise, I have pretty much unlimited schedule flexibility. I have a lot of seniority, and people needlessly fear me for my reputation. My immediate manager is someone younger than me that I helped hire, and he's in the gym probably 4x a week. I went in with him a couple weeks ago and he absolutely wrecked my shoulders in a good way. The problem is that his gym is half an hour away. I can't fix that without moving, and I own a house and have a family. My local gym is a joke, and isn't staffed. I bought an exercise bike a couple years ago, and have maybe ridden it once a month on average. I've owned free weights for years, but the last time I touched them was four months ago when I crushed my fingernail bad enough to go to urgent care. I wasn't even working out, I was moving them back into storage...

I think I am justified it blaming myself for lack of self-discipline. I lost about 8lb since November by calorie counting, due to having elevated liver enzymes. I've gained about half of it back since my enzymes went back to normal though, because it lost its relative importance. My best guess it was due to a medication rather than my weight, and I changed medication. I have a serious and rare medical condition, and the medication I'm taking is probably going to give me cancer in a few decades, so if I'm going to motivate myself to do something it's playing with my daughter or a hobby. If I obsessively worked out, maybe I wouldn't even have the medical condition, but that doesn't seem to be something I'm capable of right now.

10 years ago I got really depressed at work and started working out 3x a week with Herbalife "health coaches". I ached and was hungry all the time and it was great. I was 40lb lighter than I am now, and could do 100 pull-ups. I know I'm still physically capable of doing that, yet it also seems impossible. Laying on the couch reading hacker news seems more important most of the time.

You have lots of seniority, implies a good income thus likely a larger dwelling.

You have free weights at home.

> I think I am justified it blaming myself for lack of self-discipline.

The harsh side of me agrees with this. You have all of the material resources to set up a really cool training setup.

The empathetic/caring side of me disagrees. "Self-discipline" is certainly a thing, but you are also dealing with a medical condition and maybe your body shouldn't be working out in the way that your rational mind thinks it should, plus you want to be a good father to your daughter. Plus, your regular workouts seemed to always have a social component.

Your sub/unconscious needs will dominate whatever "self-discipline" you try to consciously apply.

That's the diagnosis. If correct, the prescription I offer is:

Find a way to do "workouts" which involve your daughter. I started taking my son to the gym when he was 8, he was doing freeweights. He'd help me count reps. When it was his turn to lift, I stressed 1) low weight high reps (like sets of 30), 2) technique, 3) stop before exhaustion. Kid is eight, skeleton is not built for weight-bearing, so cannot stress it with heavy things.

"workouts" could also be walks, preferably in the park/in nature with your daugher. If you want to make it really physical for you while still keeping your daughter's pace, buy a goruck backpack and put 20lbs in it, then 30, then 40. You don't have to walk fast to exercise when carrying a heavy ruck. Your daughter stops to smell a flower? So do you, bend over to sniff the flower--- while wearing a 40lb ruck. You'll get your workout, all while exploring the world at a child's pace.

I exercise about 4x/week, and work remotely. If I owned a home + some barbells, I would space out my schedule to take 2-hour lunches, and get a workout over the lunch break. This would give me enough time to do meaningful exercise, clean myself up, and microwave my prepped lunch for when I sat down again.

I also expect 90% of people to find that whole idea strange or unreasonable.

Fitness comes down to finding some physical activity that you enjoy, or can comfortably perform multiple times per week. I like big, 'chunky' barbell work, such as deadlifts and overhead presses, but used to solely do cardio. Some people like rock climbing, or hiking, or biking. So long as it's a physical activity, it's likely able to be counted as some kind of fitness or exercise.

If you only have the energy for fitness/exercise 1x or 2x a week, then that's all you need to start with. It won't do very much, but is a great starting point for building a stronger habit without overloading yourself.

You don't need to answer these to me, but if you end up going forward with fitness, you'll probably have to answer them for yourself:

What kind of physical activities do you enjoy? Do you have any fitness goals? Are there any weird aches or pains you have that might be lessened with regular exercise? How many sessions are you willing to commit to in a week? Are you willing to follow a healthier diet?

Maybe they offer all the perks because competition for software engineers is high and it helps attract talent.

How does offering perks that people don't actually use attract people? Surely people clever enough to work at Google would see that those things aren't really perks.

Works the same as every apartment building with a rooftop deck and a shared lounge that almost no one ever uses. People see it and because it looks like a resort they move in but almost never use them.

I look at the perks a role offers and ignore any that don't apply to me, and I'm nowhere near clever enough to work for Google. I'm just a bit surprised that people who work at Google wouldn't do the same.

They get used, during the day.

Complete nonsense. I can’t even reach most of my coworkers by chat after hours. Everyone in my office is gone before 6. This may be true for international workers or recent grads who don’t have families or friends local, but in my experience this stereotype of Googlers living on campus is mostly apocryphal and from the dot-com and 00s eta. I heard the same thing about Netscape, people working 100 hour weeks, sleeping under their desks.

The Google of 2022 has over 150k employees, the culture is way different than say, 2007. The average age of the employees these days is older.

The author mentioned that the level in the bucket represented satisfaction, not necessarily time.

The current popular understanding of work life balance (or lack thereof) is almost always about work consuming an unhealthy/unbalanced amount of time, often leaving little time for life. Job satisfaction and work life balance are often linked, but distinct.

I think the thing others are pointing out is that regardless of what he clarifies in the post itself, the title does not match the content.

It’s a confusing title for what comes after it.

I actually don't think the title is confusing. It makes perfect sense. I wrote elsewhere on this thread that the author basically chose to tilt the balance towards work because the other side, life, wasn't working out.

The issue is that when you don't feel like you're achieving things at work, it's stressful.

At the end of a day when you worked on some task for a solid 8 hours, it's easy to unwind - work is done, work was accomplished, you know what you're doing the next day.

At the end of a day when you spent the whole day trying to find out what you should be doing, didn't find anything and will resume that the next day...you can't unwind. Were you doing the right thing? Maybe there was someone else you should've contacted? What if you don't find it tomorrow? Is the organization broken? Should you try to fix it? (No) - there's a lot that you can't help but think about it.

Having time provides a natural level of satisfaction. All of this discussion, but it feels like a natural “both” is the best way of describing the why behind this post.

The subtlety is that its not about projects not being delivered on time, its about them never being delivered (either cancelled or scoped down until no one has to actually do anything).

In an environment like this the incentive is to become a bottleneck for a lot of projects (so you get at least some that get delivered) and then a) do nothing on most to outwait the inevitable cancellation b) do the minimum possible work on the remainder, but make it seem as complex as possible.

Even with low hours of work this becomes a very stressful environment as if you are trying to get something done, you have to be constantly convincing people you are depending on that the project is worthy of category b). While doing the exact thing to the people depending on you. Turnover makes this hard also as a small percentage of coworkers are very valuable to you (you can trust them to prioritize your project).

From my experience this stress stretches into your out of work time, making the WLB worse even with a reasonable amount of "in office" hours.

going through this now with my first L5 scope project.. not enjoying it. too many parties involved and i have to somehow convince them all to do work for me. meanwhile i keep getting bombarded with questions that mean nothing to my immediate scope of work, which is slowly pushing me behind schedule. good news is that my project is unlikely to get canned. we're in too deep already. learned early not to pick useless feature projects and cleanup work. if your manager isn't excited about what you're doing, its gonna get the ax.

The first project I worked on at Google was a system for consumers to send money to each other. My team made a mobile app before I joined, but it "wasn't part of the product vision" for that to be in the Google Wallet app. (So I guess we'll flush hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of code down the toilet!) Our PM looked around for teams willing to use our service, and found the Gmail team very receptive. A few engineers integrated it in about a week and we launched that "send money" button on Gmail at Google I/O. Could never get over how Gmail had "send money" but Google Wallet didn't. (They eventually changed their mind, of course.)

I'll never forget the launch. I was sick, and sitting on the floor of a war room live-coding a script to give every attendee $1. Python, had tests, and it persisted its state to SQLite so that we could Control-C it if our service got too slow. It didn't get too slow; we did a lot of load testing and capacity problems and the launch was very smooth. Most fun I've ever had while sick. (10-year-older jrockway wouldn't go to work while sick, though.)

Haha, I'm still afraid to update GPay because I think they ruined it with their social or coupons or whatever the heck they did to it. All I want is to pay for stuff. When I moved to the US I foolishly tried telling people to pay me, or I tried to pay them with GPay or GWallet or whatever it was, and they were like no? Everyone just uses Venmo now. Missed opportunity.

This is weird - I use it here in the UK and don't recognise this description at all. Social? Coupons? I just tap my phone to pay for stuff. It's the equivalent of Apple Pay, except that everyone's heard of Apple Pay and shops just conflate the two.

Its two different products. Google pay especially in India is a mobile wallet with coupons and rewards. Ironically, the card payment app is now called Google Wallet.

Europe (incl. the UK) doesn't need these social payment apps because we have free instant bank transfers between personal accounts. In the US if you want to send your friend money electronically then you need a 3rd party app.

Brazil implemented Pix last year (free instant bank transfer). Today it's more popular than credit card.

>Our PM looked around for teams willing to use our service, and found the Gmail team very receptive. A few engineers integrated it in about a week and we launched that "send money" button on Gmail at Google I/O. Could never get over how Gmail had "send money" but Google Wallet didn't. (They eventually changed their mind, of course.)

Thanks for the insight on why Google makes so many braindead decisions. It's so frustrating I'm ready to abandon them entirely.

Getting managers excited is one of the unwritten skills required at L5+ lol.

Ya.. I get it, but I don't have the energy to try to convince people to be excited for a project that I'm barely excited for. Nothing I ever do here is exciting. Thought maybe working on app with over a billion users would be exciting, but all we ever do is steal features from other apps.

> all we ever do is steal features from other apps.

Strategically, this is called being a Fast Follower. One of GOOG's problems is that it acts in the market as a fast follower, but tells itself internally that its an groundbreaking innovator. Your reaction (which was also my reaction),

> Nothing I ever do here is exciting. Thought maybe working on app with over a billion users would be exciting...

is a form of corporate-wide cognitive dissonance between GOOG's propaganda and reality.

> learned early not to pick useless feature projects and cleanup work.

And that's why things slowly rot away. Cleanup should be a priority, otherwise it eventually slows down new feature work.

In fact, a project should not be declared finished until its inevitable follow-up cleanup tasks have been completed as well. Just like a party weekend is not finished until you have cleaned up the mess after. Somebody is going to have to do it, and if it's not you right after you're done with your deliverables, then somebody else will have to do it. Possibly yourself further down the road when you actually want to do something else more exciting. Just like doing the dishes. Nobody wants to start preparing a big meal by having to do the dishes from the week prior.

Nobody wants to do the dishes... but we do, because we're adults.

In business, we don't have to be adults.

Yep, technical debt and atrophy. If not paying-down that debt, it becomes like compound interest from a loan shark. If not applying maintenance, atrophy sets in and things get worse and worse.

Yeah. It's less like stress and more like a depressive void and a limbo where you have to work and at the same time not.

Somehow this pace of low energy, zero initiative and low motivation also crushes your motivation for personal project.

I mean nothing beats the feeling of delivering real value by building or fixing things. Its a great feeling! Often after having fixed something after working on it for hours, I will want to do even more for a while because of that “high”.

I work for a another big company and this sounds exactly like my job. Currently trying to get out and writing applications since it becomes unbearable for me.

Usually its the extremes that are having the same effects.

Atm I am in a super demanding job, requiring me to overwork, make decisions on the spot, work on problems etc.

On my free time while I want to sit down and watch some TV, go for running, enjoy a nice dinner or whatever... I FEEL EMPTY!

I am fixated with my work... its not healthy and its creating low motivation for me. It feels like work has taken away all pleasures in life for me. It is not HEALTHY at all (I am currently seeing professionals about it)

Generally anything in moderation is key...

P.S. I do overwork myself for someone else to enjoy the fruits of my labour... sad story.

sounds like the beginnings of either burnout, depression or both. I'm in a job that's not quite demanding enough at the moment and it caused me to fall into a depression. It's good to catch it in time to do something about it.

agree, for me mostly for some reason its the fear of not finding another job...

But well if you are depressed at your job... how bad can it get?

And can really the money you make from a job make back for the depression? My personal opinion is NO!

The subtlety is that its not about projects not being delivered on time, its about them never being delivered (either cancelled or scoped down until no one has to actually do anything).

I can appreciate this feeling, because I've been living it for awhile. If I can borrow the original author's metaphor, as my career bucket sprung a leak, my other buckets were filled, and I've been just fine with that. As others have pointed out in this discussion, this is really all about perspective. If the career bucket is really important, then you will tend to that (but, again, here's where the metaphor falls apart, at least for the author -- he noticed his other buckets also leaking, but he focused on the career bucket [which, of course, is fine if it works for him]).

Yes, the constantly changing landscape of my work can be a mental strain at times, but, for me, it's the devil I know. I've invested 15+ years with my employer, and I know the domain well. I don't want my other buckets to lose water in an effort to fill my career bucket, at least right now.

tl;dr;

To each their own.

I can only speak for myself but I personally find jobs like that to be very stressful. Every review period a coin flip. Periodic severe swings in work output expectations because the thing you thought wasn’t important is now on some executives quarterly goals. Etc. Spending 40 hours a week doing effectively nothing but pushing a rock up a hill can be exhausting. This is a phenomenon that exists outside of my single anecdote: http://www.garlikov.com/philosophy/Sisyphus.html.

Having clear and achievable targets (that are achieved!) and consistent expectations is much preferable.

Don't think author is replacing unhappy personal life with workaholism. He's saying that when you have low energy in some parts of your life, it drains into other parts.

Now that he enjoys his work more, he's finding that he also has more energy for gym / social situations etc.

I had the same experience in big tech. Lack of work progress made me depressed and bled into other parts of my life.

Startups have their own issues, but at least there's more momentum on most days. Important to go with well-funded ones in this environment though, preferably by the top VCs: https://topstartups.io/

You can hardly have time for family, friends and doing sports if you work evenings and weekends!

They would have an ideal work-life balance IF they enabled full remote work.

Their hybrid you-have-to-come-to-the-office approach basically means that you still need to live in an area near to the office, which basically means no real benefits from remote setting.

I had a similar experience - when I felt like things were moving too slow and I didn't deliver a lot I was much more stressed out. My manager and team was satisfied with my output but I couldn't shake the anxiety that I wasn't doing enough!

Ironically for me I went the opposite direction, now working at a large tech company I have more than enough work to fill my plate. I am no longer worried about not doing enough:D

Think you missed the point. Burn out can come from working in a sclerotic organisation where you fail to achieve your goals (despite doing fine professionally and financially and going home at 4pm). This became obvious to the author when other aspects of life were diminished. It also seems procrustean to assume everyone should conform to your notion of work life balance. Working hard on a problem of perceived importance may be exactly what someone wants from life.

I mean sure, the author is in a somewhat luxurious position. But then, why does anyone leave Google if not for some version of this.

Ultimately people like to have some ownership in direction of projects and products.

Many times that is taken from you on larger teams.

It is odd that HBS and value extractors (business/finance/project/marketing) have taken so much power from value creators (creatives/developers/product people) in terms of the power balance, most people know that makes bad products and was really the basis of capitalism starting, ownership of direction.

> In his landmark 1776 work The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith showed that a clever division of labor could make a commercial enterprise vastly more productive than if each worker took personal charge of constructing a finished product. [1]

The project managers and finance want to make the product now, from a value extraction viewpoint over a value creation one. It ultimately leads many value creators to go do their own thing.

No matter how hard they try to remove the creative element of product creation, it is actually a key input to successful projects.

Products are like creative works, they should be built with depth, deep dives and aim to be a fun experience and friend of the user.

Bottom up processes can create great products with polish and love, they are value creation processes.

Top down processes and deadlines create shallow features and products, they are value extraction processes.

The best value creation process is just an iterative/incremental cycle, with lots of power in the court of the value creators over the value extractors.

[1] https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-high-price-of-efficiency

What is bottom up vs top down process? It isn't mentioned in your link.

> The best value creation process is just an iterative/incremental cycle, with lots of power in the court of the value creators over the value extractors.

This is consistent with the development process I've used with my game/app (nebulous) for the last 7 years. I learned very early on that players responded directly (as in told me via reviews and emails) and overwhelmingly positively to frequent substantiative updates. Early on it pushed me to find my absolute limit: ~2 weeks of < 4 hours of sleep each night, on a ~28 hour day schedule.

I kept bureaucracy, overhead, and expenses to a minimum and have been fortunate enough to reap the rewards over an extended period of time. My focus has always been on maximizing user experience first, revenue second.

> What is bottom up vs top down process?

More power/product decisions from the bottom or the developers/creatives/value creators than the top down project managers/finance/value extractors.

Yes, making your own projects is almost a requirement or having side projects when work in on a big team on your day job or other projects. Everyone needs a creative outlet and programming, no matter how hard they try to remove it, is a creative process.

While revenue/value extraction is important long term, it is much easier to sell when love/value creation is present. You can't market and extract value from value that isn't there. You can't rush a quality game mechanic that makes all aspect of your game fun.

Creativity doesn't always fit a 8-6 tightly wound agile process focused on just revenue, you need some open mode or play with that closed mode. It is why indies and artists or writers perform better when they can control their own destiny more. With less oversight directing you to short chance important parts or prototypes, there is more play and open mode which always leads to a better refined product especially where "fun" is part of the product.

Thank you for teaching me two new words and their expressions. English not a first language for me so it is nice to encounter new expressions, which actually isn't that often. Thanks

Wouldn't that be "work-satisfaction" problem rather then "work-life balance" problem?

"The work life balance " is extremely confusing or misleading. He absolutely will get more work life balance at Google than at a startup. What he meant is that he got more excited because he could make more impact despite sacrificing work life balance. It is the opposite of what he claims. People should seriously stop redefining words to make themselves sound smart. And chances are he is gonna get pretty much nothing from the startup equity than from Google. (it is a bet with odds against him , statistically speaking)

I think it's because it's because his buckets are not around time management, but energy management.

And it works both ways. If you are drained by your job, you get home exhausted and want to just lay on the couch. If you are energized by your job, you get home excited. You feel like you can take on the world and then might be up to go to dinner with friends instead of drained and depressed and want to stay home and eat ice cream to console yourself (my personal go to).

The same goes in the other directions. If you are healthy, you will have more energy for other things. If you are unhealthy, your body will drag you down, it will be harder to do other things. Think of having a broken leg or a lot of pain. You just don't feel well and will bring that feeling into other parts of life.

Energy management isn't a zero sum game.

However, I think you do point out something else. Throwing yourself into work because you want to avoid dealing with issues in your other buckets is not an energy gain. But there is a key difference between working more to avoid painful things and reigniting a spark of joy in your work.

Because being miserable for 8 hours a day at work will leave you drained and depressed for the other 16. That makes socializing hard.

Being exited and happy for 9 hours a day at work abd coming home with a sense of accomplishment can actually give you energy to do more for the othe 15 hours.

Based on personal experience.

Think the same. In my case, though it is "Being excited and happy for 4-5 hours a day at work". More than that and my brain is just too tired to enjoy the rest of the day. My schedule is 40h/week, though, but I'm still productive doing half of that.

Yes, but you have to be very careful about the slippery slope here and how you measure things. I personally find that I sleep about the same regardless of how miserable I am at work, which means I get no quality change from roughly eight hours a day. My commute doesn't change in quality either and four many people that commute is 1 hour each way. Some people will find some other numbers that are important to subtract here. In the extreme, you'll find that an extra hour a day of work but reducing the misery of your work can result in 1 good hour of free time instead of 2 mediocre hours of free time. For most people things aren't quite that extreme but it's certainly not anything resembling 15 vs 16.

Exactly my thoughts. It is, in fact, darkly funny that this post is titled around "work-life balance", because the author is basically saying "My life stuff wasn't working out so I tilted the scales towards work."

I completely understand finding it unsatisfying to work in a situation where you're not making any progress. It's something that I think is the worst thing about my current role, and the lack of progress contributes to burnout in its own way. But working weekends and nights regularly is another, faster way to burnout, especially for someone who has a family.

Pedantically, a lack of "work-life balance" can be due to "lack of work" (as opposed to the much more common "lack of life").

Agree that the title could be better worded though.

The author states it wasn't actually work-life balance that was making him happy and tired. Rather, he discovered:

> By mid-2021 I was tired all the time. I know I wasn’t alone, because it was an ongoing meme inside Google2. It’s only now that I realize what was wrong: I missed the satisfaction of building things and finishing projects.

This is the classic justification that leads people to self-defeating workaholism: The idea that you can fill the voids in your life by just working harder.

The false dichotomy is the idea that the alternative to Google is to work more hours + evenings + weekends at a startup. He's replacing one problem with another, but this new problem feels fresh and new and like turning over a new leaf. At least for now.

I mean, I'm the same way. I look back at my life and the times I didn't create things of value seem so meaningless. I don't want to go back to creating meaningless things. Even if I'm working harder, I'm enjoying what I'm doing.

The article really hit home for me, personally.

I enjoy my work… But it is not the thing that gives meaning to my life!

I get what he’s saying though. There can be great joy and a positive feeling of “losing yourself” in your work when you actually get to create. I think his role and and the internal bureaucracy prevented him from using that creative energy.

Indeed, finally fixing something that may have been a thorn in your side for years is a very rewarding thing.

I've worked myself a little extra with a few of these, and I'm glad for it.

I've found a tendency in my line of work/colleagues to call patchwork acceptable, and it regularly comes back to haunt us.

We find a way to stop the 3AM calls and stop there.. neglecting that maybe one person has the necessary context and it may grow out of control again

I don’t think it makes you a workaholic to observe that a shit work environment drains your energy and burns you out, whereas a good one can leave you feeling energized.

They weren’t saying that they needed to work harder at Google to be happy, they were saying they needed to move somewhere else where they could get job satisfaction from completing projects.

It must be nice to be so sure about how others should live their lives.

This is a bizarre non sequitur.

> Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years.

This has been the key pitch since Intel at least, perhaps even Fairchild.

They did explain why they had lost job satisfaction, big companies all over the place are struggling to hold on to people as they restructure and fail to deliver due to the pandemic's impact. The morale and human cost of this organizational faltering is driving people out.

Because buckets #2 and #3 are low, people are having a harder time accepting a bad hand in bucket #1. If you have a good life outside of work you can push through bad work environments for a while.

Some people genuinely believe in their work. Jonas Salk worked hard because he believed his work mattered. This guy works hard at Replit because he believes his work matters. My family friend with Down Syndrome works hard at his menial job because he believes his work matters. If people didn’t work hard to accomplish hard things we would still be living in mud huts with 50% infant mortality.

> this whole blog post reads like someone trying to replace an increasingly disappointing personal life with excessive workaholism.

Agree. Some rationalizations in this post reminded me of a recent "Mourning loss as a remote team"[1] entry.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30811187

I think they meant that once they realized their work was unsatisfying they wanted to change it. The “working late and on weekends” was a way of showing their new excitement for the role.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But I do agree the conclusion for leaving being work life balance seems incorrect.

I never though I would agree with PragmaticPulp ;) , I also have seen this pattern before, as someone who works at Google (SDE) and worked at Amazon previously, and also worked at unknown small/medium size companies, most team WLB at Google is pretty pretty good, you set your own rhythm of work and goals.At Amazon in the other hand is quite different, you will get PIPed for sure if your team is sweaty and you go on a normal pace, but at Google you have to be really awful to get fired. Startups use the "mission" and "family" non-sense to hustle people to work hard, while most of the times are the founders(and the VCs) the only ones that benefit.

This is overly cynical post by otherwise great comments from you, PragmaticPulp.

I personally find working harder is the only way I can survive. Being unproductive is depressing because it brings lackluster mediocre life/rewards with it. With life that is less rewarding and dull, my mental health suffers. Spiraling downwards. It has happened twice.

On the other hand, I never get burned out no matter hours or effort. Building stuff is too much fun. Building stuff with super cool people is even more fun.

Early Googler's were the happiest bunch when it was in a startup stage.

So, I can relate with the author more than your cynical take on this.

The idea is that is one has a fulfilling social life and physical health its easy to deal with, or even be unaware of, less fulfilling work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com