Ask HN: Do you *love* your job? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you love your job?

It’s not uncommon to hear people (or rather, guests on various podcasts maybe) say that they love their job, or that they love what they do.

I personally like programming and problem solving, and in theory should love my job, but I really don’t.

Intuitively, I want to blame daily standups, the obsession with JIRA and microtasks, and OKR and the like, for sucking the joy out of it. However, thinking about it more, I’m starting to suspect that it might be somewhat inherent to the fact that these jobs are part of the economy, and as such, the day-to-day is eventually driven by doing whatever makes money for the company. Maybe that’s why many of us have side projects.

So my question is, is there anyone here who can say that they love their job? If so, what is that you do? How did you get there?

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No, I love myself.

I never get invested into a job, ever. This is a cataclysmic mistake of the first order.

However, no matter what I do, I love doing what I'm doing. Doesn't matter if it is working a retail gig, programming, sales, bookkeeping. I just like the process and compete against myself.

If I ever work for a cunt of a person or company, this is no problem at all. I just leave and don't get tweaked out about it.

I only do what I am required to do. I will never work more than 8 hours, unless that is part of the agreement. The agreement is the agreement.

I never make friends at work, I only have business acquaintences. Making friends at work is always a monsterously huge mistake, which I think pretty much everyone can figure out why I say this. Being friendly, yes. Friends, no. Be diplomatic, polite, kind, quick with a compliment, yes. Friends, no. Just google all the reasons why you shouldn't be friends if you can't figure out the reasons. However, one thing that I can tell you is that I never make friends at work, but I am generally among the most liked. Because I don't get involved in all that backstabbing, gossiping crap. And so everyone unfortunately tell me everything because they deem me trustworthy. However, I also tell them not to gossip to me, I don't want to hear it and this is generally respected, and basically because of all this, I'm genarally like by all. However, those with "friends" get all up into the factional warfare and backstabbing and all that noise. So my point is that this is kinda why I always am good anywhere I go.

I also manage up. If someone is being an asshole and is a boss, they are NOT going to get away with that shit from me. Again, I will be nice and stuff and polite, but they will know in no uncertain terms what is not acceptable. Or, if I see that they are such an ass that even managing up they will then get vengeful or vindictive, then I either transfer to somewhere else or just get another job.

I never love jobs. I love myself and how I go about doing things. My little self-competitions, and gamifying tasks.

No sense in loving any job.

This is definitely a way to go about things. What would you say are the trade offs involved compared to other ways?

Yes, it is a way. The issue is which is the percentage better way.

I mean, someone can be mean and spiteful and hate everything about work and make everyone around them miserable. Certianly we've all known people like that. And that means it certainly is a way to go about things. But percentage-wise of a way to go, I don't know, maybe it works better for the person who is mean and spiteful and makes everyone around them miserable.

So I guess you're right. If someone wants to be miserable to themselves and others, if someone wants to make friends and then get involved in the factional warefare, if someone wants to make friends and then you are promoted over your friend who wants the promotion, or they are promoted and you are not, and then have to fire your friend, or get fired, and then hate them forever and feel like you were stabbed in the back....well, hey, it's your life.

I don't know what other "ways" you are specifically talking about, though. But as I said, the trade-off is that with MY way, you don't get involved in petty office backstab bullshit, you don't have arguments with your friends after you know them for a while and find out that you hate them and now you have to work at a place and avoid the other person all the time. But I, since I only work on the pure professional level, ALL of this never happens to me. Never. I go to work, do my job, friendly and polite to all, diplomatic, tactful, never engage in office backstabbings, no factionalisms, everyone likes me because of it, everyone respects me. I don't get sidelined by petty bullshit, I don't have people coming up to me and talking to me for 45 minutes about how much they hate such-and-such person and why they are horrible person. I don't know....call me crazy, but I like being liked, and not drawn into work bullshit, because everyone knows better and doesn't even try to involve me. So how can anyone ever be mad at me, unless I fuck up on my job? Then that's on me and is ok. But I rarely screw up on my job because I don't waste my time on bullshit like factional office warfare and gossiping, and instead, do this think called work - doing what I was hired to do.

Interestingly, I'm very friendly at work, and yet rarely if ever someone comes to my desk to bitch about someone else for 45 minutes. You might be exagerating the cons of estabilishing connections with people. I, for one, prefer to make friends, because this just makes passing the days so much easier and more fun. Without people to talk to, the job (esp. being stuck in an office) would feel a lot like doing a prison sentence. I can't find joy in gamifying the tasks like you do.

Hmm. Everything about this approach to work seems so stoic (?) except the reluctance to make friends at work. There are clearly reasons not to make friends at work. But those reasons are driven by the underlying goal of putting your career above your personal well-being and maintenance of close relationships - which seems contrary to your overall message.

I have made some of my best lifelong friends from old jobs, and wouldn't give up those relationships for anything. Really good people are worth keeping close in your life, and I don't buy the "million fish in the sea" argument.

> I have made some of my best lifelong friends from old jobs, and wouldn't give up those relationships for anything. Really good people are worth keeping close in your life, and I don't buy the "million fish in the sea" argument.

If you've made multiple high value, life long friends at work then how can you not buy that argument? From a relatively small pond you've landed multiple great catches.

Yep.

Million fish in the sea — just, not yours, if you swim around the same old beach.

What makes you think my pond is relatively small?

Because we're comparing it to "the sea"?

I guess part of my rejection of the “the million fish in the sea” is the lack of sea or at least lack of time to explore it in ones life. My pond is bigger than my sea.

I think we’re taking it too far at this point lol.

> Because I don't get involved in all that backstabbing, gossiping crap.

Making friends at work does not necessitate participating in backstabbing, gossiping crap. In fact, being a good friend generally requires not participating in backstabbing, gossiping crap.

You could try being a good friend at work? You might get even more out of life than you currently do.

I joined a new employer months ago and this new employer is taking deliberate efforts to ensure they are a wonderful employer from a developer perspective.

Things they do right:

* Typically one scheduled meeting per day, agile standup, that typically lasts 10 minutes.

* Lots of pair programming and team assistance.

* High selectivity for new employees based primarily on personality, honesty, organizational capabilities, interests, and potential. There was no code test or leet code during the interview.

* They strongly encourage initiative in the code. For example I would like to introduce TypeScript to the code base and increase automation. They are completely fine with that so it’s on me to work that in and ensure I am not breaking things.

* They have a high level of incentive pay for going above and beyond.

* They listen deeply thereby encouraging team members to fully and openly disclose their insecurities, risks, and challenges on their current work. It’s better to fail early as an individual and deliver successfully as a team.

sounds wonderful.

I would love to work in an environment with lots of pair programming. Nothing keeps you moving like someone over your shoulder.

It sounds like you've found a great place to work. Do you think they're successful because it's such a great place to work or do you think their success has enabled them to create a great work environment?

It’s a small company that prides itself on its leadership. They work hard to retain people.

Currently not working and won’t start until January. I left my last employer after 10 years and can speak to my most recent time there.

I found joy in my technical work, solving problems, and often breaking them down and bringing clarity to others. I got the same satisfaction that I get from working out. I did some technical work myself, and a lot of my time went towards meetings and design reviews with other engineers. It was rewarding, and I enjoyed mentoring and seeing people get promoted and progress in their careers.

I didn’t find joy in the layers and layers of bureaucracy and management, who often had no idea what was going on. Many of my management peers were clueless, obsessing with how to build their empires and get their promotions, instead of actually investing in people.

I was in meetings where engineers would literally break down in tears describing their situation. Their management chains were atrocious at managing their people, driving things to completion without stressing everyone out, etc., but they excelled at managing up. When I felt enough was enough and pushed these people to do better, it reflected in poor feedback for me. At one point, I was asked to not be a third party in these matters, to let things be as they are, and avoid forming close relationships with these engineers. I was told directly to focus on productivity and organizational goals.

I thought this was bullshit. Obviously it’s a small world and so I didn’t piss on the table on my way out, but I resigned. Wrapped up things I was driving forward or did a proper hand off. Bye bye!

I really like my job. I have found the things that help me like my job are pretty simple.

I need to feel that I have the required authority and autonomy to effect change. If there are failures that I'm held responsible for, that I also feel powerless to fix, then I burn out. If there are things that I stuffed up but felt like I was empowered to achieve, yet still stuffed up that is a huge learning opportunity. Note it's about how empowered I feel. My feelings don't always line up with reality.

I need to be learning and achieving. If I'm growing as an individual and can see the work I've put in paying off then I feel like I have a purpose and feel great about life.

I need feedback from above. If I'm unsure where I stand I start to get worried and that worry prevents me from working well. Waiting a year for a performance review doesn't work for me, I'm too needy. I should have learnt years ago to ask for more feedback. It's scary but it helps me stay on track.

I also need to feel like I'm part of a team. That we're in this together working towards a common goal. If there are jerks pulling each other down I don't want to be in that team.

Money is important as it feeds my family but my sanity only seems to hold if I get some satisfaction from my job.

My ideal is to work for a boss that manipulates me into performing well.

I have greatly enjoyed certain periods of time in some jobs, say for 3-6 months when I'm working on great stuff.

But even during those times, I'm not like in love with every minute or even every day of it. Its more like a sense of energy to learn/do something, or a feeling of accomplishment/pride when i hit a milestone. Maybe a joy in learning something new and cool sometimes. I think thats the closest you can get to loving a job - its fleeting moments of specific positive feelings.

The day to day is still just work - JIRA and dumb bugs, annoying tasks, boring meetings, broken dev environments, frustrating APIs and code blah blah :p

The problem for me is that there are two parts to the problem

1) do you think your job is meaningful?

2) do the proscriptive process rules around your job "spark joy" (sorry Ms Kondo)

I think 1) used to be true, I had a very strong sense working in the not-for-profit sector in public interest governance/standards was both meaningful and important. I'm less sure about both, and my own relative contribution now, so its hard to believe the labour is justified on the public purse, which makes it hard to have self worth, and harder to feel like problems in 2) are worth tolerating

In 2) the process burdens have risen as roles have moved, and as the organisation both grows and ossifies. So whilst I want to say "it's me: I've grown out of this" it's also partially true "it's them: they've changed the underlying basis of HOW we do this"

Some of 2) is justified. bigger orgs need more structure and process. some of 2) is justified, public interest s/w and services SHOULD be better, SHOULD be "fit for purpose" so we need more test, and UX, and check-before-commit-and-deploy

But a lot of 2) is "yea, this is performance theatre" to make middle managers and hired process consultants feel good about their 1) issues. Their idea of "meaningful" differs from mine.

I'd say "I'm jaded" is a soft version of burn-out. You can do a role too long, against change in expectations and cost and benefit to community, and yourself.

I do love it. I really do. I run a free code school for refugees, with an internal division where we also build products. All our teachers are volunteers, professionals from the local tech scene, so I work with hundreds of developers with all kinds of backgrounds and specialisms. It's both meaningful and technically interesting.

I'm the only technical person on staff, worldwide, so it's obviously an insane workload, but it keeps me fizzing with solutions. If I have an idea for something, I can build it and try it - so it keeps my crackpot inventor soul happy.

And it's wonderful to see my trainees flourishing in their lives and all their achievements. We have supported hundreds of people to become developers and restart their lives. It makes it easy to work hard, to do this.

Noah loves his job:

https://youtu.be/zYJLpX4AD2g

I found this story from Simon Sinek interesting

Video is only three minutes long but should be required watching for all managers. Thank you for sharing.

No more than I would love a hammer or a saw. It’s a tool, a means to an end. I love what can love back, which a job never will.

Unless it's a business that you run on your own.

I doubt anyone truly loves a job unless it's run by them.

I love my job. Sure, there are frustrations, miscommunications, bugs, deadlines, annoying customers, etc. but:

1. I get to play with APL[1] every day which makes work fun[2] in itself.

2. The company I work for very much feels like a family. Most of us are friends as well as colleagues, and end up seeing each other outside of work. We have a strict no overtime-pay policy to avoid employees overworking themselves, and a flat management structure with a large degree of freedom to organise oneself and choose what exactly to work on. Everyone is expected to speak up about any issue they encounter, be it internal, in the product, or in outside communications. After interviews by managers, potential new hires have to present and answer questions about some project of theirs to the entire company. Then we send them out, and anyone can express any concerns (or positivity!) We don't adhere to any strict way of working; just a beginning-of-week standup where we say what we're expecting to work on this week and if we need anything from anyone else, and an end-of-week report on what we got done. And no, we're not a startup, we've been in business for over 45 years, and have customers that are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

[1] https://apl.wiki [2] https://chat.stackexchange.com/search?q=apl+fun&room=240

I love the work I do. I'm not a fan of the people above my skip manager or how they run the company. There's a lot to hate, frankly, but I love the problem solving that I get to do. So I try to keep my head down, do the parts I love, and try to avoid the rubbish.

By staying focused, I earn my respect, but I'm not seen as a "team player" and that's probably not the best thing for my career. But, and here's the key, it appears to be the best thing for my happiness.

I’d say stop listening to podcasts where people are projecting their opinions onto the listener, it’s as bad as social media.

I work in Emergency Services telecommunications. It is by far the most fulfilling role I've ever worked in during the last 20 years of my career, and I have worked in gambling, banking, managed hosting industries amongst many other things.

It's by nature a rather conservative environment, but that's one of its strengths - less continual churn, and getting to make focussed changes that improve performance and reliability, which in turn contributes to helping first responders save lives.

One of the best parts has been able to integrate the best aspects (IMHO) of what you'd call "agile" and "devops", without having to include the whole box and dice of bureaucracy and gesturing/posturing that comes with that. Another has been working in an environment that is not "just" about making money, but also has an impact on people's lives. I've never been happier with my job in my life.

I’ve helped build an EMS that got deployed to 3 countries. This was early in my career.

It’s been downhill from there, in terms of fulfillment and uphill in terms of money.

This makes me profoundly dislike my choices. I keep lying to myself that once I make a decent amount of money I will go back to lower wages and more fulfilling work.

Interesting - the platform I work on pays far more than any other role I've had before, and far more than the majority of other non-executive tech roles in my country. So it's uphill in terms of fulfillment and money from my point of view. I've mentioned to recruiters recently that the job satisfaction is easily worth another $30K or more to me. It would take a lot to move me from my current role. But I recognise that I have gotten extremely lucky.

Maybe a naive approach but if you pull it off it works. You like to solve problems, right? Treat the process as a problem. Treat it as set of restrictions you must work with and conciously try to maximise your skill at mitigating the issues that annoy you.

personally i think devs in the usual scrum process can do most for themselves in actively participating is user story/ticket (re)formation during one of the (too many) meetings you have. Creating well crafted chunks of work make for a very perceptible sense of "joy" you want to find during programming and avoiding, at least in my experience.

Try to fix it if you don't like it cause you're probably going to suffer through it either way.

Sometimes drinking the scrum/agile du jour kool aid gives you a sense of credibility rather than just rebeling silentlyagainst it you get some tools to try to modify into something more enjoyable and sensible

I loved making gears. Getting the machines set up, making the first test cuts, then watching as a blank slowly became a gear that would outlast me was an amazing thing to get to do on a daily basis. Involute gearing is simply astounding in the ways it can be applied to transfer and transform mechanical power.

I hated the pay (too low) and the commute (too long), but making things is awesome for your soul.

Absolutely. Web development with Go and supporting some PHP and Python apps. Tech management understands and values developers. I typically spend less than 30 minutes a day in calls/standup with the rest of my time spent in active development. Most of our developers are remote, including myself. No after-hours availability requirements. How did I get here? Found the job online and applied.

I work for myself, set my own boundaries and processes, and love my job. Sitting in a coffee shop as I write this comment.

self-employment is the best.

How did you get to self-employment?

I would like my job a lot more if I was given a cost of living increase that matches inflation. Unless my productivity has dropped in equal measure..

Otherwise it all seems in vain unless you leave for a raise. No one has loyalty anymore.

I don't think anyone really can love their job because of how much it pays. The best high pay can buy companies is people sticking to their jobs despite hating them (golden handcuffs), and getting the best candidates interested during recruitment.

I enjoy my job, but I don't love it.

I work in medical embedded software. So I love developing software, tinkering with hardware, I don't enjoy the ton of paperwork that medical products require

I think the love come from comparison for me. Among all the jobs that I have tried and known from people, mine is the most tolerable. So I love my job.

I recently began working for AWS and I love my job. I get a lot of satisfaction in soloing customer issues even when they’re not really AWS related.

what sort of role has you taking care of things like that? i’d be curious to hear a bit more.

i took a job at a consulting firm in hopes of getting a lot of variety, but i keep getting stuck digging the dumbest customers out of the deepest muck for years at a time. :(

Nobody loves their job except Klaus Schwabby Schwab

I love my career. Not my job. Sometimes I do like my current job, but that's not always the case. It's fine, though.

I work for myself so yes, i love it and i can no longer do anything else. but it's hard to make money off of it.

Hell yeah! I couldn't imagine anything better than being an entrepreneur with all the ups and downs.