Fuck being productive
dostoynikov.bearblog.dev
dostoynikov.bearblog.dev
The result of not caring shows over time and companies that operate like this tend to fall behind and become obsolete.
I’m not in SV so maybe the situation is different there
It seems employers/supervisors can sniff out when you really care about something, so they use that as leverage to take advantage: heap on more responsibilities without accompanying pay increase, cut benefits, delay raises and promotions, etc. I really wish that weren’t the case, but as a person who’s passionate about my work, I’ve encountered it at every employer so far. Because of that, my career mobility has come entirely from job-hopping (which I’m not a fan of, but I need to pay the bills).
I’m not in SV so maybe the situation is different there
I think most folks want to care about their jobs and the default is having a healthy level of investment. But especially in larger companies, it’s so easy to get burned by workplace politics or leaders just not seeing things the same way you do — just as you said.
Emotional disinvestment in work is a defensive mechanism. Honestly, it feels like the two camps in this thread are almost talking past each other. Yes, it’s good to be invested in your work — it’s better for your emotional/existential health and good for your career. On the other hand, investment being a net good for an employee is hugely dependent on your work environment.
While one could argue that the right thing to do if you feel you can’t be invested is to leave, and I generally agree that leaving is the only real long-term solution, there are also a million reasons why it might not in the short term.
I mean, this obviously depends on the kind of product - is it some biotech to make someone's life better, or is it a gambling website tuned to suck the most out of whales? As engineers we're much better placed than most people to do something meaningful with our work, and sticking with a job where you don't see that value is a pity. But if you just don't care about building something for someone else... maybe you should change that? As you say, there's little choice in whether you have to do it (unless you win the lottery or something), why not make a goal out of it and get some enjoyment out.
With some frugality and smart money management, you can retire in 5-10 years if you're on a dev salary.
No employer is going to pay you 3x what your nearest peer is willing to live on.
I can't retire and never have to work again, but I'm slowing down a bit, and spending more time not earning money (gym, reading, travel, etc).
On second though, if I absolutely needed to, we could probably 'retire' tomorrow, and do a bit more belt-tightening - savings/investments would last probably another 10-12 years without any major changes to lifestyle, then could collect social security. But that's... not something I want to do. I like doing most of what I'm doing, and am just being a bit choosier about what I do now.
EDIT: no kids, semi-rural southern US.
EDIT 2: Moderately high, but irregular, income from consulting/contract dev/tech work. Not W2.
Here in the UK, after tax, $50K/yr doesn't even cover my mortgage, and I live in a house that over 100 years ago, according to the 1911 census, supported a family of 5 on a carriage drivers single income.
I earn a top 1% salary as a dev and retirement will still be 20-25 years away for me under ideal conditions - i.e. a 40% savings rate.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f...
In US terms somewhere around $240K USD, before tax.
Even most US devs don’t make $240k USD.
$120k is also an underestimate given that the top tax bracket in the UK is only 45%. If you apply that, you get $132k (Still an underestimate). $132k is roughly in the same ballpark as $155k.
It's not like the difference between the same income in the US and UK is 50%, and even if you were on $120k USD net that's the same as the median gross income of a SWE in the US.
I don't understand where "not that much" is coming from.
Nice house in London/SF = $$$
Kids = $$$
"good education" (I.e. nice schools) = $$$
No student debt for your kids = $$$
Retire early = $$$
This seems like a classic "3 options, pick 2" kind of scenario. You can never have it all at the max level (Except maybe if you're a billionaire).
At that kind of income CoL also doesn't mean that much unless your lifestyle matches your income (I.e. lifestyle inflation). The energy crisis should not significantly affect people with top 1% income.
That's very easy if you don't have kids - just don't get on a hedonic threadmill (and, if you're already on it, start gradually getting off). I'm not a parent myself, so won't speak about the "with kids" situation.
The average Londoner is paying almost 40% of their take home pay on rent, so saving 2/3rds is already impossible.
Even as one of the lucky ones earning a top 1% salary, I _still_ pay 40% of my take home pay on a mortgage with a 33 year mortgage term!
Your idea of getting off the treadmill must be living in the countryside and taking a 80% pay cut, I suppose?
Before coming to London I was doing an equally demanding role on 20% of my current pay.
Or how about raising a family in a 1 bedroom flat? - i see loads of people doing that these days. My old neighbours both had full time well paid jobs and were still in a 1 bed with a newborn.
There's no real escape. The economy is a dog, and we are all underpaid.
Now 9% of my takehome goes on rent, and I have no idea how I could ever go back to the UK. The energy bills alone are mind boggling, and every time I visit it just feels like it slips further and further behind the times.
The problem in the U.K and especially london is that demand for housing outstrips supply. This denies opportunities to most of the country as the only way for young green people to live in london is to live rent free with parents who paid two years worth of wages for a 3 bed semi 40 years ago, for a house now 10 times wage
The average ${global_alpha_city_dweller} is paying almost 40% of their take home pay on rent
There is nothing particular about London in this context. What about New York City or Sydney or Hongkong or Singapore? Pretty much the same. (Tokyo is an odd duck.)
Also, this:
Even as one of the lucky ones earning a top 1% salary, I _still_ pay 40% of my take home pay on a mortgage
I agree. Living in London is for people who don't mind to work till they're old. I lived there for nearly a year and concluded that, while it's obviously an awesome city, it's not worth spending an extra decade (or more) working just to pay off mortgage to live there. I chose to live in an less awesome city, and thus am already retired at 42 years old.
Don't forget healthcare being tied directly to being employed.
If it was not for that, people could purse their passions versus what they have to do just because.
Meanwhile the average salary in Toronto is $52k USD per year[3], versus San Francisco's average salary of $109k[4].
So that might give you some idea.
[1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-home-sales-1....
[2]: https://www.zillow.com/home-values/20330/san-francisco-ca/
[3]: https://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Location=Toronto-Ontari...
[4]: https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Location=San-Francisco-...
Not only that, but when filing out immigration petitions, most firms will actually file in Canada and the US. Workers who can't meet the higher bar for US immigration will be sent to Canada.
We don't have sufficient birth rates to maintain things and so both economic productivity but also the tax base will be significantly harmed without this immigration.
That's not to disagree with your comment, the large amounts of immigration do cause problems and as you say, much of it flows into certain cities.
With family reunification, it's not uncommon to see aging parents and relatives be sponsored. They add very little to the tax base but are a huge burden long term.
Also, there are some requirements to support those family members:
"You will also sign a Sponsorship Agreement, obligating you to financially support your sponsored relatives if they cant provide for their own needs. The new permanent resident will not qualify for government assistance, even after the sponsored person becomes a permanent resident, separates from you, or leaves the country."
"To sponsor a parent or grandparent, you must obligate yourself for 20 years of financial support."
https://greenlightcanada.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-sponso...
Canada is facing a huge brain drain to the US, for highly paid and in demand professions like in healthcare and tech. It remains to be seen whether or not they can replace the lost productivity of their native expats with mass immigration.
Construction used to happen a lot more than it does now. Demand keeps increasing, but the supply isn't increasing as fast as it used to.
Every homeowner who treats their home as an investment vehicle is game theoretically forced into NIMBYism so that the rich get richer.
We've been okay for a while since we use the influx of cash from new developments to support our existing maintenance obligations, but that adds new maintenance in the future.
It's functionally a Ponzi scheme, and now it's starting to unravel. It'll happen in the U.S. too, just slower since the U.S. is bigger.
Everything is just cheaper in the USA
Canadians have much lower purchasing power than Americans. We earn less than Americans for the same work, we earn CAD which makes it even lower, and on average everything costs more here too. It is shocking to me how cheap things like gas and groceries are in the USA, even after factoring exchange rate.
Nevermind how expensive technology is here.
In my mind, it's rather a combination of:
1) European employees not willing to work much more than 8h a day (whereas US folks tend to work themselves to the bone)
2) European employees living in cheaper countries (so the HR has a ready-made BS answer to "why do I earn less than my US counterparts)
3) What I believe is a bit of disrespect towards non-US employees. If the company's based in the US, the upper management's going to be US, and I often feel like the attitude is somewhat "your education must have been worse than the US one, so you'll probably be worse than US engineers" kind of a deal. This is, of course, very subtle; I've personally never felt that from my immediate co-workers, but the salary policies seem to be geared this way.
Of course, being more expensive to employ doesn't help. I'm sure it's one of the contributing factors too. But, as a European, I feel like it's far from being in the top 5 reasons for the salary discrepancies.
That's with an effective tax rate of like 12% for middle class which is absurdly low. On top of which tech workers can probably afford to shove in the max contribution to an HSA every year completely tax free and then use it for healthcare expenses and/or invest it for retirement otherwise (that's what my wife & I do).
There's a much simpler explanation: The EU simply doesn't have the capital. There are no pools of venture capitalists clustering hundreds of billions of dollars they can piss away on half-ass ideas.
It's as simple as that. They funding money simply doesn't exist.
A Facebook engineer in London is probably earning 70% of what a Facebook engineer in the US is earning, even after taking in to account taxes, benefits and any cost of living discrepancies.
For the specific case of London (and more specifically Facebook), this is driven by the fact that FB/Goog don't count tech people in finance as appropriate comparators. I suspect that this is not true in NY/USA.
As for people pursuing their passions if only X... there are many people who for various reasons do not have to work and who don't work, it's not a hard sell to extrapolate that the behavior of more people joining that class would be much the same as people already in it. For most of them, most of their time is not spent on Star Trek-ish ideals of bettering humanity/themselves or on passion projects.
This mindset is how you kneecap your career. You’ve pigeonholed yourself into the foot soldier category when it becomes immediately obvious to managers that you aren’t thinking about what’s actually good for the company.
You may already know this, but it needs to be explicitly called out that taking that approach to your business relationship with your employer defines the relationship.
However, when the interests of yourself and your company diverge, don't get stuck holding the bag.
Passionate does not necessarily imply loving absolutely every aspect of the job, it just means you've found some aspect you really enjoy and are excited to spend some time on.
People who work solely to advance their careers are generally not awesome to work with, in my experience. The people who work passionately tend to have their careers advanced for them. YMMV...
It is easy though to fall into the trap of making improvements for the sake of improvements, without any real visibility of why that matters to the business. That’s when you can work hard and stagnate at the same time
"But how could this ever be possible, in a field with high salaries and a permanent shortage of skilled workers?", you ask.
By constantly punishing us for caring. By continually providing shitty office space, and bullshit-driven work cultures and interview rituals. And just plain lying, toxic managers and co-workers to deal with.
And then asking us to invest the best years of our livesin all of the above, and then to "care" ... in exchange for not-so-great compensation, a joke vacation allowance - and zero job security.
People who take ownership and initiative for the things they work on get quickly promoted. If they don’t, there is usually some other issue (difficultly to work with) explicitly holding them back.
I have seen many otherwise great engineers take the mindset of “I’m paid to do X so I don’t care about making sure X is the right thing” and they just sit at the senior level their whole career. It’s not bad with current comp levels by any means, but they never move beyond it because they constantly telegraph that they aren’t interested with that attitude.
Keep a clock puncher mindset and you’ll get treated like one.
So companies want you to have faith in them to recognize your value sooner or later, but they don't give you any faith back in return, it's never the case that some HR manager says "oh let's give this guy a quick promotion, let's have faith in him!".
Another point, if one is a professional is supposed to do his job for the agreed rate and nothing more, nothing less so i should be evaluated in what my regular 8 hours of work are, and within the boundaries of my job description, nothing more, nothing less.
When you go to the butcher and order a 1kg steak, you pay precisely it's weight, not more, not less. Let's stop normalizing this "go above and beyond thing", it's not working (most managers suck at their job, scientifically proven), just be fair with the employees and respect everybody's time.
Managers don't fear, we don't want to steal your jobs, just make us get what we want and everybody will live an happy and long life XD. It's that simple.
I will promote the person with regular output and an eye for outcomes, doing the right thing, improving process, etc over the one who just blindly runs at full steam all of the time.
If you think you’re at 200% and not getting recognized, step back and evaluate how much it’s really helping.
If you think it is, write out the argument you would make to get a 100% raise and try to negotiate it. You will likely receive candid feedback about how your grinding is not actually important for the team or the company. At that point you can cut back your push on doing X as fast as possible and start to focus on how and why you do X in the first place.
I would consider that to be impactful and part of performing at 200%, yet it still won't necessarily lead to promotions. Most managers don't care about the team or company, and definitely don't promote based on stuff like "improve process"
This does not match my experience at literally any software company (including multiple failing startups, a successful startup, and huge corporations).
I suspect your issue is that you’re not actually aware of what was providing value to the company you worked for and your managers were caring about seemingly inexplicable things.
But still i can do all of what you are saying and not even being considered for promotion in 20 years, everybody knows this and there is no point in being delusional or forcing narratives, just strive to be the "best possible version of yourself" if you really want it, or just do what you're paid for and that's still ok!
I can tell you from experience as a human being -- and having given many, many friends a shoulder to cry on over the years, in regard to this very issue: that this is of course what management always says in regard to how things work. But the reality on the ground (beneath the confident pronouncements, and fake glassdoor reviews) is often starkly different. And is ultimately what pushes people into the clock puncher mindset.
If they don’t, there is usually some other issue
Right, and it's always, always, always on the employee side -- is what you're basically saying.
No it’s not. Jumping to negative conclusions and engaging in bad faith definitely is a way to get passed over though.
There are lots of reasons, both managerial issues and employee issues, for someone to get passed over despite having the right mindset. My point wasn’t that it’s a guaranteed path to getting promotions. My point is that “not giving a shit” is nearly a guaranteed path to being passed over.
> There are lots of reasons, both managerial issues and employee issues, for someone to get passed over despite having the right mindset.
You're contradicting yourself. Not surprising, lying is one way people get promoted and turn others into clock punchers.
Managerial issues are “explicitly” holding someone back. I didn’t say the issues were with the employee.
> Not surprising, lying is one way people get promoted
Don’t be an asshole. That’s another “explicit” issue that will make it difficult for you to get promoted.
To be clear, my point is that being a clock puncher is an extremely effective way to limit your own career. Giving a shit is not a guarantee to get promotions, but it is requisite baring other very unlikely circumstances.
What you think is the correct solution is often not the correct appropriation of engineering resources for the business.
> which management is often clueless about
It is your job as an engineer to communicate this to management. If you are not capable of doing do so, you are incompetent as an engineer. Being an engineer isn’t being paid to just build whatever you want. That’s how you end up with Juicero.
Making money for someone else is inherently soul-sucking though, at the end of the day.
The emergent nature of corporations is to slowly consume employees' lives and throw away the burnt-out husks once they no longer bring value to executives and shareholders.
Working on something that doesn't interest you just for the sake of technology is not something that will ever make you happy. If you truly have no interest in anything then that's another problem on itself.
No I will not be on call, no your computer turning on isn't a emergency and I will not drop everything to hit the power button.
If they don't like the terms, they're more than welcome to pay double my asking and pay a monthly retainer.
I saw my local library was looking for a sysadmin, it did come with a pay cut, but damn if it isn't a quarter of the responsibilities, fulfilling work, no direct manager, pension, decent healthcare, and I write my own schedule.
No one questions what I do and I have full freedom to come and go without needing to "check-in" with a c-suite.
Will I get rich working this gig, absolutely not but the sense of accomplishment knowing my skill-set is helping the community directly, and those less fortunate fills the pay gap I never thought it could.
It doesn't hurt that it shortened my commute and I do so by bicycle now.
Much much happier now.
> it did come with a pay cut
> a quarter of the responsibilities […] and I write my own schedule […] it shortened my commute
You should factor that into the pay calculation. It’s possible you didn’t get paid less per time-effort.
I stuck with a stressful job I didn't enjoy because the pay was too good to ignore, with my sights set on achieving financial independence. After all was said and done, the money wasn't worth it; all I got was a bitter taste in my mouth from years of grinding myself down.
A better plan would have been to spend time figuring out what sorts of jobs would be better aligned with my life goals.
Many of us in the US would also be, working for less money and responsibility if we had those.
is it though? Your product now is service to a government that may or may not just bomb brown villages for fun.
I hadn't heard the saying you describe literally, though I've heard many variants of "find your passion" such as "find a job you enjoy doing and you will never have to work a day in your life." (Attributed to Mark Twain, Confucius, and others though the true origin seems to be obscure.) Which makes little sense to me since being paid to do something tends to destroy intrinsic motivation.
Perhaps there's a crystallized version of your saying such as "the fastest way to turn your passion into drudgery is to get paid for it."
Fortunately my passions are things I'm unlikely to get paid for - watching netflix, eating snacks, etc..
Nonsense. The lack of passion arises from resentment and by being treated unfairly. While things like communism where everyone is treated equally is demoralising to the key contributors, extreme inequality in compensation is equally demoralising. You need some middle ground.
Without stake(financially), no one is going to spend their whole lives to make other people rich. It doesn't even make logical sense if you think about it carefully.
I am beginning to think we need HN for non-privileged people. A lot of "insights" on this forum come off as extremely deluded and living in a very positive bubble.
Now tell me, how do I get a huge break from programming while never losing a penny from my income? "Live within my means" would be your response perhaps? I still want to buy a house though.
Like come on. Sometimes I also wonder if people didn't start using ChatGPT for commenting on HN for clout.
Having a job you clock into, giving your best effort at that job, stopping work at 5 PM, and then going home and do the things you're passionate about that don't pay the bills is the way that the vast majority of people live. It's only the rich and deluded that think that this isn't the reality for most people, and that's because they're so disconnected from what it's like as an actual member of the working class.
Big petite bourgeoisie masquerading as a worker going on here.
I've worked fast food, I've worked retail (during the launch of the Wii, even, which was an insane time), I've detailed cars, I've worked in a call center.
That's just what I had to do to avoid being buried under student debt.
I think a lot of people working in offices never had this experience. If they worked at all during high school or university it was cushy office jobs wherever their parents worked.
This doesn't generally apply to immigrants, though. That's a whole other thing.
I am completely aware of my viewpoint being extreme and keep myself in check when someone presents something that I would consider a first world problem. But make no mistake, many people in the US and Western world should be counting their blessings much more often.
Dirty Jobs may show some some clocking in and out of only one job and then going home to relax but as a television show that is highly selective of what it decides to show it is not a representative window into how the mass amount of people on this planet live (just like HN is not such a window either).
Simply reading the local news tells me more about the economic hardships of the common worker than a reality tv and internet forums ever could. And those hardships are harsh in many cases.
Unfortunately the wildlife, economics and vehicle companies won’t hire me because I’m not an established domain expert in wildlife, economics or vehicles.
To be a bit more concrete I’ve actually applied to jobs in some of the industries you’ve noted recently, particularly wildlife. I applied for a job that seemed pretty cut and dry: Doing mostly .NET CRUD work for an application supporting [wildlife domain]. It didn’t pay well but it genuinely seemed like a domain I would like and Delma technical view the job was a perfect match for my resume. The application had several binary yes/no questions I had to fill Out mostly along the lines of “Do you have experience in X”. For 90% of the questions my answer was yes. But there was one question basically asking “Do you have experience writing software for our hyper specific domain”. I suppose I could have lied and said yes, though that just meant I’d be rejected after wasting my time and the organization’s time, so I answered truthfully “no”. I was rejected not long later and while it’s impossible to know the exact reason I have my suspicions.
I guess if someone has a fixation on some particular technology or industry then that could be a distinguishing factor. But I’m motivated solely by the capacity for me to make a positive impact and be appreciated. However, any company that isn’t completely dysfunctional will (at least, from the outside, appear to) check that checkbox.
Maybe I have just had good luck with my interviews so far and I am thus taking (at the point in time that I’m choosing between competing offers) some critical thing that usually varies between employers for granted. I dunno.
it ties back to theory of employee motivation, money being only external motivator. For high performance, employee needs also internal motivation (drive).
employees with internal motivation are miles ahead and more productive than without one.
this is why well paid and pampered Gogle engineers are less productive than some open-source enthusiasts
And they are all asking the same question. Will they accept an answer like "because you're only a 7 minute commute from my house", "I think the work will be easy in relation to the salary", or "I think I can get away with barely doing anything for an indefinitely long time period because your org is large and dysfunctional"?
You ask for a performance, you get a performance. Or maybe you're just asking for a rube?
Isn’t that invariant with respect to (prospective) employer?
I naturally feel motivated to do a good job and earn the respect of my coworkers, and the satisfaction and pride that comes with a job well done. In addition to my work output, the title I hold and the salary I’ve earned are evidence to my friends, family and romantic interests of my drive to generate value and the expertise I’ve tirelessly worked towards developing. This further motivates me do good work.
I don’t see why “internal motivation” would vary between employers. Could you give examples of attributes that contribute to your own level of motivation?
But again, in most cases, the answer is "because your company seems tolerable to work for and you advertised an opening and I need work". So you're back to performing.
I agree that asking that question in an interview probably isn't the best method of screening out apathy, but that's why they ask it. I don't actually know what the best method is.
He told us that he only downgraded someone if lots of money were the only reason to apply.
However we're creatures of habit, and I think most people search for rationalizations to do nothing or change nothing. That's comfortable and familiar. People don't know what they want and seem to shop around for placeholders for identity. It's not certain what the payoff will be for any new undertaking.
Free time is what there is for me, and though I don't think of it in "productive" terms, I do think it's important to bias towards action rather than passive consumption.
Pretty sure competing for them necessitates that one might suppose they exist.
I struggled to find meaning in my work for the first few years of my career. I used to lie (unknowingly) to myself "I love my job", "I am passionate about my job", "It's my passion" and I was always disappointed.
That is until one day, after many years and barring many details, I decided to tell myself that "I push buttons on a company laptop in exchange for money and I happen to somewhat like it from time to time". I immediately became better at my job as it improved my mental health. I started seeing my work for what it was.
As for "passion", I started looking elsewhere for it and eventually found it. I can't make living from it, but that's another story.
The book is a fun read, but that’s basically the entire takeaway. And I find it to be a compelling argument.
Passion does need to be found, but it seems logical that your skills will lead you to the passion, rather than the other way around.
If that's the core idea of the entire book then I'm glad I'll save my money and time not to read it. Generalizations are dumb.
That almost sounds like a sort of Stockholm syndrome...
So I got curious, picked up a book from undergrad curriculum and started learning myself. Got more curious, and I enrolled in a Masters program and got a Masters.
I don't have much time these days, but eventually I will get back to it and continue learning more. Perhaps one day, after I have retired or scaled down in my current job, I will pursue a PhD in it.
If you are curious about how I was able to accurately pinpoint "Mathematics" as my passion, then read on...
I was very disappointed by the lack of "scienciness" in software engineering. It wasn't even true engineering in my eyes as in, there were no calculations I needed to do, no statistics to keep in mind. It was just pure coding until something works. That wasn't intelecutally satisfying to me.
So I signed up for Andrew Ng's "Machine Learning" course. I really enjoyed it because he is an excellent teacher. But during the course I noticed something peculiar. I would skim through the reading material about AI/ML but would SLOW DOWN during the Math part of it. I would obsess about the PDEs, think deeply about them, even try to prove/derive them which was totally unnecessary for the purpose of the course and learning AI/ML's applications.
Combine this with my conversations with my colleague about AI/ML. He is really passionate about AI/ML and its applications and how to use it to solve real world problems. As far as I am concerned, I don't care about that at all. I ONLY care about the underlying mathematical objects used in it. He would talk about using an prebuilt library or a model and to just apply it to solve something and it would make him happy. Not me. I want to talk about what degree of the PDEs being used. What theorem is used to prove a certain equation.
This is when I realized that I didn't care about applications all that much. This was further validated when I got curious about the undergrad curriculum and picked up the book "The book of proof", and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I LOVED proving theorem and staring at the mathematical symbols on my notepad/whiteboard/chalkboard (yes, eventually I got a HUGE chalkboard installed in my study).
And, that is how I met Mathematics.
Thank you for reading :)
Simple -- it doesn't.
Strange how you frame it: "the entire problem was that I was thinking wrongly about my job". No, that's not the problem at all for many people.
We're seriously and indisputably talking about losing at least 2/3rd of my income if I get the next best offer in another profession.
And no, I still love programming but the commercial one I now hate. Not sure how can that be remedied. I am taking a hiatus currently but let's be real, that won't solve anything; it's a way to just hate it little less for the first 3-4 months after you're back.
I know it also STRONGLY depends on who you're working for (and the colleagues) but I've sucked at networking all my life and when I finally woke up about it I have nearly zero possibilities to get hired after an informal chat because somebody else already knows me. I got like 3-4 of these bullets and will shoot them soon enough but my faith in the result is low.
So no, I am fairly doubtful that I'll find "something I at least enjoy doing", sadly. Anything I enjoy wouldn't even pay my rent, let alone everything else after it.
You should care a bit, because ultimately whatever we produce ends up directly or indirectly used by other human beings. That is at least my motivation to care about the product - thinking about that person on the other side that will be directly affected in their daily life by the choices I make.
Some days the idea of making a better product because it makes the lives of users better is enough motivation, but not most. I wish I could consistently be more selfless in this regard, but when I'm tired or stressed or depressed, my lizard brain needs a more direct incentive.
I'm "around on Teams/Slack" for ~7 hours a day but I 100% have not worked 8 hours a day in years. Am I the only one? Am I the minority? Am I the majority?
If I go to 60 minutes of meetings a day, it's a lot.
If I write 80 lines of code, it's a lot.
If I research 1-2 production issues, it's a lot.
If I write 20 Teams messages/3 e-mails, it's a lot.
On the other hand, lots of people like those inefficiencies: a chat at the watercooler, talking about how your weekend was, etc. And those are certainly better for your mental health than the pointless meetings some managers would love to pad your schedule with.
For example just even learning enough social/negotiation skills, or influence to educate your clients to be oriented by results rather than hours.
That could be the key, then you can leverage "boring" technology, to solve real problems that matter.
Creating a nice feedback loop were you grow and create your craft so work becomes frustration free and time independent.
The people at your current job aren't your friends. They've let you arrange to give away a full 50% your life (most of what's left must be occupied by sleep, pissing, shitting, eating, and paying bills). Not a single person in your life has said anything or tried to get you out of the office earlier?
You should have at least one friend who cares about your wellbeing and doesn't view you as an object to be exploited without limit.
Good luck, my dude.
> Servitude is thinking that you [need a lot of money to be free].
It's the old "money doesn't buy happiness" argument rehashed again -- plainly insulting to people who are actually in poverty.
“Self-sufficiency is the greatest wealth of all, and the greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom.” – Epicurus
Anyone can pursue their passions, and realize their dreams, but you have to at least consider the affect on your wife or children.
Now this is not saying don't get married, lol.
It's just about choices. Realize that all we think and do, is so subjective.
You could be the smartest guy in the world, or the most caring guy in the world.
Which would you say matters more?
Intellect fades. Youth fades. Life gives way to death.
These are not bad things, but they are natural, as we come to understand.
But in all of this, you have to be you, and not your parents.
Never forget, your parents were children, and probably are in some ways, as the are with you, for your entire life.
Forgive them, and yourself, but never forget, you can always love and help others.
If this life had no point, and was "meaningless", then taking care of others is really more important than anyone.
Every careful thought - it is special, and a beautiful exception.
> Majored Japanese Language at university currently working at a Japanese company as a Japanese translator in Turkey and also, at the same time, self-studying web development slowly as it is my dream to be a developer.
If they're working towards the dream many of us are blessed enough to be living right now, I have a hard time telling them to slow down. I admire that kind of work ethic, honestly.
And you can learn on the job. No need to do that outside work hours. And trying to learn stuff when you are tired after a long day is hard. It makes you more tired, you learn slower, it's frustrating, and you are setting yourself up for being less productive the next day because of it.
Make time for learning stuff, demand time for it even and put it in your calendar or just sneak it in. Get your boss to support you.
Try working smarter, not harder. If it feels like monkey work automate it. It's more fun and you get more productive by doing less. Frees up some time to do more interesting things.
If your work is not interesting to you, you are in the wrong job anyway. But assuming it is, you should make the most of it in terms of making it rewarding (and not just in the money sense).
The work conditions you mentioned (free weekday nights and the weekend) were fought for by organized workers and are very new, why stop there?
I don't think we'll even keep those conditions if that's what we're satisfied with. We already see that in tech with Slack, uncompensated on-call, salaried overtime expectations set during hiring or onboarding, the expectation that prospective hires spend their free time on training projects, etc
The idea that work is “over there” and life is “over here” is not only unique historically, it’s also the reason workers have no power. By failing to demand that companies and organizations adjust to us and telling them “this is how we are going to live and companies need to fit into that” then we tacitly let them collude to keep labor power down.
If you are alienated from your work, and accept and lean into that alienation, then you have no personal drive to make work serve you and your community rather than you serving it.
It’s a race to the bottom of alienation and the paved path of capitalism is basically scraping the bottom at this point.
I've enjoyed the work conditions I mention throughout my career. I'm 48 now. But of course I work in a part of the world where this stuff was sorted out decades ago. 40 hour work weeks, 26 days of vacation per year, etc. Here in Germany, many companies even have policies that state people should not be sending emails or replying to those in their spare time. Such a simple thing. Easy to implement too. Just don't reply outside of work hours.
Of course, I'm a startup CTO so I have none of that because I work for myself. But I still take my weekends and evenings because I'm simply less productive and creative when I'm tired and stressed out which is a different way of saying I'm useless when I'm like that. I need my brain to work properly to be effective. So I use my time wisely. And working on weekends or evenings simply isn't a good use of my time. So, I rarely do that.
Being a wage slave is a choice. If you don't like your life, change it. Lots of people are not capable of reflecting on what they do or why they do it and afraid to change or challenge things. They just do the same thing day after day because that just is what they do; no matter how much it sucks. Change starts with you wanting things to change and then acting to make that happen.
It's incredibly unfortunate that instead of using a shred of empathy to see that your situation isn't the situation of nearly everyone else in the industry, or alive for that matter. "If you don't like your life, change it" screams "I have no idea what I am talking about" because you're failing to see that situations elsewhere are different.
Take a software job in the US. You're working a minimum of 45 hours per week for 40 hours pay. If you have to work overtime you do so for free. If you get sick you have a mandated PTO allowance of 0. You might get two weeks. Your salary will be somewhere in the ballpark of $70k. Is that good? Yes. Is it enough? No. Not even close. If you change employer or region is any of that going to change? No. It won't.
So, what's left? Easy: be born into wealth and retire on it. Just change your life, bro.
They're organized as hell over this, why should workers stay atomized? There's a reason employers don't want workers talking about wages with anyone except their boss.
I’ve worked at 3 companies in my career so far, and worked about 40 hours a week at each of them. i was not born into wealth…neither were (most) of my coworkers.
I won’t even ask about the $70k salary. I made that much at my first gig after college. Sounds like your employer is taking advantage of you.
Yes many of us here are capable of making multiples more than that and so have I, but we're not talking career advice here, we're talking about material conditions industry wide
see for yourself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916453
that’s for a SENIOR btw. Housing in Berlin is not cheap.
The base salary for Entry Level Developer ranges from $67,415 to $84,398 with the average base salary of $75,125.
> Sounds like your employer is taking advantage of you.
That's what employers do. That's all they do. That's all they're designed to do. But that's irrelevant because I am personally speaking to industry trends not a singular employer.
I guess cope harder? You've been working 40 hours. I assume you had a lunch period. That's 45. You work what we all do. Congrats.
Anyway ya’ll bitter as hell lol. Wish you all a pleasant day.
The physical act of creating a child is so easy many people do it by accident. Raising a child is an enormous task.
People from all walks of life have been raising children since, well, forever. Rich, poor, smart, dumb; nearly everyone figures it out.
There is A LOT of child neglect here in the states, and plenty of children literally do not make it out alive.
IMHO Kids aren't really "adults" till about 27-30 given the complexity of society. If you happen to have special needs kids, they will take even longer.
At least for me I will say that disturbingly small number is probably good enough for practical purposes. All favorite thing, people, food are just snapshots in memory and revisiting them in physical world did not feel as great as my mind imagined.
I tried a few of those past favorite things and they were fine but nothing like best moments or some such. Same with people, neither they nor I am same person as before.
And there's the accent, which you'll never lose.
The best time to learn a language is between 0 and 10 y.o.
For people who already know English and aren't super into linguistics like you, the answer to "should I learn to speak x" is no.
The funny thing is that I spent some time working on my English accent, and it wasn't that hard. Grammar and common phrases are two difficult things that I still haven't mastered. The combination of these two factors causes me to sometimes get funny looks when people assume I'm probably a native speaker because I sound so similar, but make weird mistakes when I speak.
Now that I learn a third language (German), I put more effort into grammar and vocabulary but don’t really care about the accent. I’m not a native, deal with it.
That almost sounds like you did not really enjoy raising your kids? I find that's a taboo thing to say, and if that's what you meant, I appreciate you saying so.
Like most things in life, there is a middle ground you know.
But yeah, I know that working time is still too much. But I don't live in a country where I can find a job whenever I want. I have to stick to it because I have not much choice.
If you’re commuting 2+ hours a day buying a bus and helping other commute for $ could be a start :-). All just ideas, though.
How so? On the one hand, there's plenty of unemployed, desperate people, so you can probably get them as employeed for very cheap - but, on the other hand, people are in dire economical condition, so it's hard to sell them anything. I guess, producing stuff for the international market could work well though.
Not everything is about money or paying for things.
>but, on the other hand, people are in dire economical condition, so it's hard to sell them anything.
Buying and selling things is a very American construct and tells like 1/4 of the story when it comes to trading.
I grew up in a rural area of the US. Lots of folks are poor but wealthy beyond measure. Bartering goes a long way and only works if you provide a service that is valuable ;-).
Not everything, but surely running a business is one of those things that IS about money?
I'd disagree. Running a business is about developing systems to create and maintain resources, connections, and influence. Money is a symbolic representation of resources but by itself isn't a resource. Resources in my opinion, and experience, are a very small piece of the puzzle. In my experience connections have way more value than money. In my experience money attracts the worst kinds of folks to work with. My skills have created more value than money ever has.
Best of luck, hang tight..!
All productivity is a means to an end. You are producing something, by definition. What is that and why?
While I do have an "emotional itch" to work on "something" most of the time, I don't leave work to go do more work just for the sake of it. There are specific things that I want to produce because it makes me happy. If I don't work on those things, then it's not that I feel guilty, it's that I feel a void in my life.
In the past I have had so many hobbies and not enough time to dedicate to them all. I would get bored of one and move to another. Some might view that as recreation, but they were always making and producing something. For the last couple of years my wife and I have been performing magic as semi-professionals and as I find myself feeling less and less enthusiastic about modern technology after 25 years in the industry, I'm starting to see a scenario where I retire from tech and we take a major risk and go all in professionally. That can't happen if we don't put the work into it today. Not that you or anyone else should, but there's purpose and motivation behind the decision to produce that.
I don't live for the sake of my employer and I'm not motivated by money (at least not at this stage in my career, I have enough). There are things I want in my life that I will never get if I don't work towards them. Sometimes I am too tired, and that's a good signal that I'm not resting enough. But every single "productive" thing that I do, be it for my employer or myself, has a motivation behind it. No one should feel pressured to produce something just for the sake of producing (unless they are living parasitically off of the efforts of others but that is a whole different conversation).
On another note I really liked "How to Be Idle" by Tom Hodgkinson https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/623922.How_to_Be_Idle In case you get some guilt feelings.
To my limited knowledge, "Don't try" is to say do something that you don't need effort to start doing, something that doesn't feel like a chore to you, something that you are passionate about.
He also mentioned going hungry a lot for his passion.
I don't think that someone who perseveres through all that is a slacker, but again, my understanding is limited.
So he was motivated, but not by work or the concerns of others. The only reason we know about him is because he chose to write and often semi-autobiographically. There are scores of people who make similar arrangements for music, sport, reading, gardening, child rearing… we just don’t hear from them!
Mental health should be more concerned and the "work-life balance" term needs to be brought to the discussion. Also, do not let the "overthinking" in.
By the way, I'm doing my 9-to-5 job for several years as a software engineer and still learning new stuff everyday. It's not the best but I'm enjoying my life. Just relax. =))
Granted if you have a family to provide for, and a life outside work, then you might be "working to live," and entrepreneurship is a needless risk that won't bring additional satisfaction. But if you're at the point that you're stressing over your productivity during the three hours of time you have to yourself each day, then that probably means you don't have much of a life outside work anyway. So it would be better to eliminate the work that is draining your energy, and replace it with pursuit of your own goals. Then you'll have those three hours to yourself, and you'll have spent the whole day being productive. It will be a net gain overall.
The first step is realizing that the risk of quitting your job is much lower than you think. Once you come to terms with that, it will be much easier to quit and begin building something important to you. There are so many opportunities for builders to produce value, raise money, get customers, and generally make themselves more useful, and therefore more fulfilled, than they ever could be while working for someone else. Take advantage of those opportunities while you can. If you fail, try again, or worst case scenario you can revert to your wage slavery.
With a SAHM wife, three kids under ten, a home, an investment property, and several other loans & liabilities, I'd say that the risks are considerable, especially given that neither my wife nor I have any family to fall back on.
If you're some temporarily embarrassed billionaire, then the startup grindset is quite productive towards your goal.
If filling your life with momentary happiness is your goal, then playing videogames is quite productive towards your goal.
If you're a good little worker bee or someone at the Bureau of Labor Statistics is holding your family hostage, then clocking in 18 hours a day/7 days a week at $BIGTECH is quite productive towards your goal.
If you're religious, then going to church, improving your behavior/mindset, etc. are quite productive towards your goal.
It just all comes down to: What do you want out of life? What do you see as the purpose of life? The purpose of your life? Looking at this problem any other way is just deferring your personal philosophy, beliefs, and values to someone else—someone who probably doesn't care one bit about you and what you want.
If every day you do one thing that makes thing easier going forward, gives you another option, makes a job easier in the long term, adds a skill, gets you a reference or a connection, pay a dividend or royalty, etc.. in the long run you will be fine.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
"...you have to move forward every day. Sooner or later you will win."
It's a nice thought, and sounds good, but there's no substance to it.
"On average, I spend about an hour a day on curl. It adds up over time."
Downtime is productive. It recharges you, allows you to background-process your thoughts, fulfills your mind if you're doing something you love, makes you healthier if you're doing something active. Being productive in service to yourself is totally fine.
Eventually I realised that doing what is basically your job in your free time is fucking exhausting.
Nowadays I try to spend that time learning things which won’t enhance my career. Gardening, cooking, woodwork, much less stressful and more fulfilling imo
Meanwhile, with these other things you do get fulfillment because you see directly the fruits of your labor investment. You garden and get food and a beautiful environment. You cook and get a wonderful meal. You woodwork and get something beautiful or functional or both. You work out or do sports and you see your body develop and improve. In all cases, you are getting better at something or producing things and taking full advantage of it. You get this sense of progression like you are skilling in an RPG except the benefits are tangible.
One could argue that this is the problem. Not that you spend your time doing activities others wouldn't consider leisurely, but that you feel compelled to because otherwise you become "really anxious." Some anxiety can be a propulsion, but too much can be a pathology. I'm certainly not fit to evaluate your own, but by your own words I'd suggest it's possibly worth further reflection.
Check out Four Thousand Weeks for some recent musings on why that anxiety may be best ignored rather than heeded: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54785515-four-thousand-w...
There's the "simple carbohydrate" fun of, say, an action game, which is immediate, easy, but low-nutrition and, enjoyed overlong, makes me feel empty inside.
Then there's the "complex carbohydrate" fun of learning something new or working on a project, which is more fulfilling and interesting but also work -- mentally taxing -- and, enjoyed overlong, burns me out.
My brain seems to demand a balanced diet of both.
What happens when you get to such a state where you simply cannot NOT waste time? E.g. your job becomes so soul-sucking that you have no mental energy left? Might you be then the author of the post? Hmm.
I feel I'm more productive after having these small breaks and I feel way happier, anyone should try it
Also who decides the metrics of "Productivity"? If we listen to our bosses and CEOs we would ruin our mind, body and personal relationships while they generate intergenerational wealth.
Not saying you should be doing anymore, just saying it's okay to not be productive after traveling that much on top of a full work day. If it makes you feel better I work from home and recently had to travel for a customer. 2 hours each way, and I only worked 7 hours at the customer and it was the most exhausted I had been in months.
If the commute is no more than 15 minutes, you are losing 30 minutes there and back every day, which is 10 hours every month, almost a waking day every month. Its still lost time. This is without counting the time lost in preparing for getting out of the house, settling in at work, and then doing the exact opposite when commuting back. Make each 10 minutes if you are someone who gets up and going very fast. You are now up to 1 hour lost every day, 20 hours every month. Almost and entire day or two waking days...
That's 10 hours a day! That's too much. You can't be productive for such a long time. Well, the occasional day you can, when inspiration hits and you're really in the flow, but on days that you aren't, sometimes you just need to go home early.
One of the great things about working from home is that you don't have to pretend to be working 8+ hours per day anymore. It's more about the stuff you get done than about looking the part. When I feel burned out, I can actually play a game during the day. When inspiration hits, I can work in the evening. It does blur the lines between private life and work, and that's certainly a risk, but being able to use my time more effectively makes up for that. My productivity has gone up.
Anyway, 10 hours a day is too much. 8 hours per day is too much. 5 days a week is too much. I think 32 hour work weeks or less should become normalised. According to Keynes, we should have been working 15 hour weeks by now. And apparently hunter-gatherers also working only 15 hours a week. The problem is that we don't enjoy the benefits of our increased productivity anymore, and all the profits go to the people at the top.
And expecting to also be productive on private projects after such long work hours? Yeah, that's not going to work. I agree with that part of the article. But I wish people did have more time and energy after work to spend on private projects.
That's not a job my dudeperson, that's a gulag
100 years ago, lots of people, including in the US, fought hard to limit working hours to a 40 hour work week. Keynes even argued that because of increased productivity, we should now be working only 15 hours per week. It's incredibly sad to see how all these accomplishments of the past have been squandered (especially in the US, but not just there). We desperately need a new labour movement.
We honestly should be down to a two- or three-day work week at about 5 hours per day. That's all we really need to work to get our jobs done. But instead we do more work for diminishing returns so we can make the wealthy even wealthier.
Bad analogy. More like a Walmart.
Fight for 4DWW !!!
And are people willing to take a 20% pay cut? I would doubt many people could afford (or wish) to do so.
The entire premise is absurd, which is what I was pointing out.
I'm working 4 days a week, and that's working very well for me. So is my wife. So is my brother, and are several of my friends and coworkers. I strongly recommend it. We should be demanding better, and not discourage each other by saying it's absurd to want a better life.
I really hope to eventually do something that allows me to earn money, and have enough time to both tinker and relax, without running the risk of being exhausted come next morning.
How about some new propaganda?
"Work maximum 5h a day and the other 3h you will donate to your employer if they are kind and give you good atmosphere and money"?
How about that one, eh?
I've actually used counters -- privately, I'll never give anyone access to my machine or my activity times -- for a small period of time and I discovered that my true creative time was something in the order of 2.0 to 3.5 hours a day. And we're talking truly good work here, adding features, refactoring, adding and fixing tests, making automation scripts, you name it, it was all there.
5h doing everything right is enough to burn you out for the next 2-3 days.
Live a simple life, make enough money, then focus on other things. You've met your weekly quota, your bills are paid. Now go play.
When you're on your death bed, you won't be thinking "I wish I spent more time at work, closing tickets".
If you spend 50% of that at work, you have spent 50% of it at work. Probably the most productive 50%.
The entire point of working for someone else is to attain enough money that you don't need to any more and you can treat it as more of an optional thing. If you're not doing that then unless you really enjoy your job burnout is inevitable.
If that were the singular goal/point, then most people should simply give up working entirely because they'll never reach it. They're working their own version of the sunk cost fallacy.
For example I was in a tech company where XMPP was the core of every one of our products. There were almost no REST based APIs in the company and we had our own protocols and APIs which made much of what I did very specific and non transferable. Day in and out I worked with XML, asynchronous messaging and increasingly niche tooling as XMPP became less and less relevant and HTTP based APIs like REST-JSON and WebSockets displaced it.
It wasn’t hard to move jobs but it wasn’t easy either. I had to spend a month or so in my own time learning REST, JSON, WebSockets and Spring MVC in order to pass interviews.
I think constant productivity culture leads to burnout but there’s got to be a middle ground between doing nothing after hours and hustling non-stop.
The perspective of spending 1 or 2 hours playing videogames or watching entertainment (movies, series) became terribly boring to me. I can only think of that as a loss of time: I wouldn't be a better person at the end of it.
Being able to better smash buttons, faster, at the right timing -- watching a story unfold on screen -- these used to be a great source of joy "before". But today, it seems all so dull; my intellect or my body doesn't get any better by doing that. Instead, reading whatever book on ML or even on an obscure programming language or technique, or spending time at the gym, or listening to a lecture on math or physics, sound so much more appealing to me.
I cannot spend time anymore just sitting, it literally upsets me. Anybody feeling the same?
Could be the influence of excessive corporativism as the article suggests, where every second we don't spend creating the proverbial 'value for the shareholders' we have no reason to exist. Slowly it leaks into private life until one cannot relax anymore and can only do productive things constantly or feel guilty about it. Or maybe it's about desperately trying to become that better more capable person we once foolishly promised ourselves we'll be, while we visibly age and wonder which day will be our last wondering "is this really all there is to life?".
Either one I guess.
Instead i surf every day and go hiking and cook meals for my gf. Couldn't be happier. The hustle part will have to wait until i get through this phase.
On one end, I don't want to work too hard now that I'm old. However, I don't have to work too hard as I worked crazy hard for a long decade with massive growth and discipline saving.
When I reflect on interns, I want to hire people that are willing to suffer for the craft. I feel it is morally wrong to encourage a low key lifestyle in the young as it wastes potential.
At core, the question I'm asking is how to find people that desire greatness in life.
It's more about being smart at work and life (find the best tools for you, discover how your own brain works and find lifehacks - including food - to exploit the best from it).
I realize not everyone has the opportunity, but I think a lot of people would be much happier earning less.
It would be lovely to give up the charade of the importance of work.
You will not have that levels of energy forever.
are we the rats?
It took me 20 years and a pandemic to realize that corporations (especially public corporations) are one tracked. They are non-living entities fuelled by the insatiable greed of some. Remember the old adage, I’d rather be poor and happy than rich and miserable? Thanks to the increasing rich/poor divide - now everybody is miserable.
It’s the non-stop work culture, and for what? To sell more new phones and laptops to people, when the old ones work just fine?
But there is hope - with the increasing popularity of self-repair friendly legislations and the promotion of manufacturing jobs (the one thing I appreciate Trump for), we just might be able to save ourselves. As imperfect as Unions are, this was the reason for their existence - to keep the other side in check.
Sorry for going all over the place today. Just some things that have been on my mind lately. YOU mean something. YOUR life and well-being matters. Don’t do it for your loyalty - it means shit in most cases. To your boss it may matter a bit, but to the “company” - a made up non-living entity? Zilch. It is heartless and will show no emotion when making “hard” decisions.
/rant
PS: This is not the entire story. I did not get into the rabbit hole of influencers and online/social click-bait marketing that is thriving on FOMO.
Listen to your body. Always.
"Time enjoyed wasting is not wasted time".
Helped me a lot.