Comment by hrbf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hrbf | Hacker News Reader

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If you code at a professional level, you are likely of above average intelligence. You are able to efficiently reason about complex systems to some degree. Those two skills alone qualify you for many jobs, especially when you’re willing to learn. What those are depends entirely on your interests and further skills.

Often, looking into a completely different direction is helpful. Ask yourself what you enjoy doing, apart from programming and computers. It could be cooking, gardening, talking to people, writing, teaching, whatever. Something that is not stressful for you to do. Something your friends maybe told you at one time or the other you’re good at without having to put great effort in it. Something that doesn’t drain you if you’re doing it for extended periods of time. Often that’s where you can find what’s truly important to you and your inherent skills are. Go from there. Let yourself be inspired. Those could be technical or entirely apart from what you’re currently doing.

When you start looking into unconventional jobs, you’ll be astonished what kind of work exists within reach. It often just looks like it isn’t because you’d have to leave your comfort zone to pursue them. That’s the issue with comfort zones: even if you feel like shit, it’s a familiar feeling. As humans, we tend to go with what we know, even if it leads to constantly feeling terrible. This way, we can at least make sense of what surrounds us. Going into the unknown is scary, sometimes it feels like mortal danger.

If you can afford it, take a sabbatical to clear your head. If you have a partner, talk to them about what you’re going through.

I appreciate that you're exhorting people to take some initiative to find alternatives to misery. Your contribution is a positive one. So I support that, good job. I apologize in advance for the lack of positivity in the rest of my reply.

But, for me at least, the problem is that the evidence seems to indicate that, in my life at least, you're super wrong. Sure, okay, I'm of above-average intelligence, and able to efficiently reason about complex systems to some degree. It turns out that, although necessary for a great many jobs, they do not alone qualify me for those jobs. I think I'm willing to learn, but sometimes it seems that I'm not particularly able. I did software for most of a decade, including getting a visa to work in Silicon Valley, and it beat me up pretty bad. I like teaching, by which I mean one-on-one conversations or giving lectures, so I have mostly been pursuing that as a career for most of a decade. And it turns out that the job of teaching involves a lot of things other than the act of teaching, and those other things are way worse than software ever was. So now I'm just as miserable, for half as much money. Though at least I DO get to spend about 6 hours of paid time a week doing teaching-the-act, and that's nice. And because I'm so hilariously poorly-paid, I have job security, because every time they look for new hires, almost everyone who applies is obviously incapable, because you have to be a fool to take this job, so that's nice too.

I do think it's worth it for people who feel miserable to try to figure out how to be not-miserable. But as a related comment says, I enjoy food and shelter. At this point I'm torn between the known misery-and-low-pay-but-job-security of teaching, vs throwing myself back into the meat grinder of software development, knowing I'll make twice the money for less hours worked, but probably I'll get abused and fired again.

Is that a superficial argument?

I get where you’re coming from and empathize. I’ve been in that place for most of my life.

I believe the “food and shelter” argument to be a straw man though. My point is not about throwing yourself into destitution or even a situation in which the financial stress probably just replaces the job stress. That gains you nothing but more misery. There is plenty of middle ground between a good tech salary and starving homelessness.

However, if you permanently value living in a house of your own, driving an upper-class car, owning lots of tech gadgets and whatever else the millions of things are many people feel they need to be happy, over your mental health, this is not going to make much sense. Effectively, you don’t just sell your body for work, you sell your soul. This can even have disastrous results in retirement. I have met very well-off retirees who wouldn’t stop complaining about the “idiots” they had to work for and with.

It’s surely nice to be able to afford shiny things. It's certainly better to cry in the back of a taxi than having to take the bus in that condition. But if you’re willing to cut back and shrink your whole footprint, it is absolutely possible to find a different lifestyle and real contentment. I advocate for the Dieter Rams guideline of “less but better”. In fact, we need less of everything to keep living, with the sole exception of love – for ourselves and others. Everything else flows from that.

If you treat yourself well, others will too. And treating yourself well has very little to do with the amount of money you make or what you can afford. Treating yourself well flows from deep within. More money makes this easier and harder at the same time. The more stuff, the more distractions.

For me, it has become quite impossible to work on useless products and results. Most of what gets built, especially in software, is needless busywork. Just imagine if this energy could be channeled into solving real, hard issues facing us all. For now, that's a rather absurd pipe dream. Living in the real world, we have to adapt to what it is today — and ideally work towards a different tomorrow. So I for one am moving towards new horizons now, earning less than a quarter of what I made before. For me, that’s fine, because I cannot be different. That being said, I totally understand that many feel there's no alternative to the status quo.

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