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Comment by librish | Hacker News Reader

> Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes.

People spend 8 hours + lunch and commuting every weekday on their job. It's almost 50% of the time you spend conscious during a week. Most people want more out of that than just a chore that needs to be done.

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Embrace distributed WFH and you can spend 4 hours in the morning, have a nice picnic, play some basketball, have a couple beers, then retire to your room to do another 4hrs. Or just fuck off some days and counterbalance it by doing hyper focused 12hrs days some other time.

Also: unless you're genuinely curing cancer or flying food to starving African villages or something, 95% of software companies are pretty damn useless and any impact a SWE imagines is basically just a mental fantasy that helps one keep working. No one is genuinely happier because another API is created or some rich person has a better way of managing which products he's selling to other rich people. It's all basically useless and just a way to make money.

That wasn’t an option until a few years ago, and it being an option coincided with the crescendo of a 14 year bull market. Having a few beers before your afternoon shift isn’t likely to viable for long.

Haven't missed a deadline in more than a year, which is more than I can say for most of my coworkers. It turns out that work with a fresh morning brain for 4 hours, a long break, and then later on more work with a refreshed brain is much more efficient than sitting for 8 hrs in an office for no reason.

If I choose to refresh myself via mid-day beer, so what? The code doesn't care how long I sit inside an office. It cares how well my brain works.

(..yes, too much beer and it won't work anymore. Everything in moderation.)

Exactly. They wonder why there are layoffs and they are one of them. Or like in the article, they think they’ll land another gig in 3 months or less.

Heh TBH in most cases I doubt an individual has much if any control over a) if there are layoffs, and b) if they are part of one. I've had the "privilege" of seeing the internals of a few large layoffs, and being caught in one, and from my experience they are usually tied to business decisions outside of the control of your average IC (currently interests rates are putting a major pinch on companies that hold a lot of debt for example) and performance is rarely an actual factor in who goes. In most the large layoffs I've seen the list of who is going is handed down from C or VP level execs with none of management below having any say (which explains why so many take out key resources). Only in one case have I actually seen managers select who to keep.

The whole "layoffs happen because employees are lazy, and affect lazy employees" is a nice narrative of your a business owner to keep the rank and file "motivated", but it's rarely an accurate portrayal of the situation.

Harsh words, but likely unfounded. You don't know their reason for being laid off, it could be that their company didn't product a profit (since in a bull run they don't need to), it could be that a competitor caught up to them, it could be that their division was no longer needed, and so on. Poor performance attributable to WFH necessarily is not very high on the list of why people are laid off, generally speaking.

Counter opinion: You're going to be one of many applicant because everyone else is embracing WFH trend too, so you are competing with everyone, especially with some much experience to show, or a portfolio of trending technologies.

It might be that a dev that has a money cushion and is willing and able to relocate can compete on a level others can't because competition would only be localized.

OP was unemployed a year. Time adds up, that's a lot of money.

> OP was unemployed a year. Time adds up, that's a lot of money.

Luckily my government gives me a full year of unemployment benefits at 2/3rds of my salary besides my savings. Obviously, I don't wish to test my luck regardless, but not everywhere is as cutthroat as the US.

More accurately: your government takes your money and then, maybe, gives it back to you in the form of unemployment benefits and the like, minus significant processing fees.

The alternative is to use the money the government doesn't take and save it for your future "unemployment benefit".

The government would give me more than I would be able to save myself in a year. Over multiple years, I would be able to save more efficiently than the government, true. That's assuming everything goes perfectly however, so I view it as a form of insurance: I make less in order to have less anxiety that I will not be able to provide for myself and my dependents if the overlords decide I am no longer worthy of my job. It's a tradeoff, but one that I will gladly make. As a social good, that money also goes into helping those that were not as lucky as me to be able to make good easy money. And perhaps one day I might be like them too, who knows?

I think the OP is saying that there’s no expectation that the company provide more than what they seek from you. Keeping it professional allows you to compartmentalize the fact that you are there because you add value and nothing more. You can form friendships. You can form guilds/clans/clubs/practices within. You can provide culture and mentorship beyond the duty of the role. At the end of the day though, it’s not a day care and you are there to provide value to the business objectives. My professional colleagues I deeply respect. My friends are sometimes idiots. That’s how I see it.

I think there's a benefit for some people in letting go a bit. Even if you love your job, you need to understand that the system we work in is purpose-built to exploit workers. It's great to be focused on your work when you're working, but once you're done for the day you should unplug as much as you can. Taking PTO? Don't check slack or emails.

I love what I do, but I've found that even still if I let that fact convince me to work more than what is required of me I will eventually feel burnt out and eventually depressed. Maybe this isn't the case for everyone, but it's life outside of work that brings true meaning and purpose to my life. Time with friends and loved ones, going outside into nature and having new experiences, these are all things that make me actually happy. Loving my work just means I'm not sad when I'm at work.

Work is exclusively a method for me to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.

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