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Comment by sussexby | Hacker News Reader

Currently in the throes of stepping back my career dramatically as I realise two things:

1. I genuinely miss working alongside people (6+ years now of hybrid but mostly remote working) and by that I mean actually working things out together rather than either being expected to know, learn solo, or book people's time to learn from them

2. the pressure of delivering the best of everything in an ultra-competitive tech space

Currently applying for jobs 1/3 my salary from last year, having already taken a step back to a role 2/3 my salary and still not able to take the pressure. Hoping I find peace in being "ok" in an "ok" job so I can focus on living life again.

Edit: Inspired by the original post - I've kicked off my own: https://heathworks.medium.com/im-quitting-tech-kinda-chapter...

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It seems really prevalent in western societies (America in my experience at least) have a strong culture of career growth. If you’re not getting better paying positions then what are you doing?

I think a lot of people will claim they do this to have wealth reserved to be able to spend their time how they choose in the future, but they seem to me to just get lost in the cycles of wealth accretion and forget to live the life they have.

A friend recently told me that he wanted to stagnate more in his career and grow more in his life, and I think that’s a sentiment that should be shared more.

The problem I see in my western society is that career growth and personal growth are separated.

An individual falling into this divide will always feel conflicted. Unfortunately in todays climate with no social safety net for the individual few may have the privilege to hear their inner voice.

Definitely agree. Christopher Alexander's "A City Is Not A Tree" [0] speaks to this separation too in the context of our physical spaces (based on your comment I sense you may be familiar with this idea). It feels that western society promotes separation by default.

[0] http://en.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexan...

I learned of him a year or so ago and bought:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_on_the_Synthesis_of_Form

My memory is that it rang so true I didn't need to read it. I'm knee deep(decades)in trying to define an aesthetic for "Technology" so that it can be judged as a media. To put it another way a process for judging technical implementations based on universal human needs.

I will check out your reference.

That's neat and makes me feel that if you independently came to similar thoughts then there is some universal thing here to uncover/define. Would be interested to hear more about your thoughts/journey if you have them written up somewhere!

I'm a big believer that humans share a social sub-conconcsious. The ideas I'm sure come from a long Train of utopian modernist designers ideals.

Funny enough I think I finally cracked something critical last week here.

https://boards.core77.com/t/how-does-one-measure-the-aesthet...

I have been practicing sharing ideas on HN and Core77 in effort to start an honest effort.

> If you’re not getting better paying positions then what are you doing?

Working to live rather than living to work.

I strongly feel your first point -- there's been a weird ethos at the FAANG company I'm employed at where you are encouraged to solo-learn, despite many others on the team who could share the learning and create camaraderie in far less time. But if you want to do that, you're seen as a "lesser" engineer -- so instead, everyone struggles for months (average onboarding time is 4-5 months) and it's often repeated that you won't know what you're doing for the first 3 years.

The very notion that you can’t lean over someone’s shoulder and say “hey can you help with something” is a massive failure of remote.

The subtlety of human communication and merits of simple vulnerability exchanges really detracts from team development.

And whilst I do get to see my team - whenever we meet it’s to discuss the “big” stuff and not actually do our daily work, thus we don’t get to learn from each other.

I feel this way too. My solution is that I started enrolling in lab classes at the local university (I've done two semesters of physics so far--oscilloscopes were involved--and this semester I'm starting biology).

It's really fun to be the code wizard in a room full of people who only kind-of need a code wizard. There's no pressure, but there's plenty of opportunity to help people, which scratches the itch for me.

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