Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It flipped for me at 35. I went from obsessed with the grind/culture/career garbage and just had an aha moment where I said, "hey i have an easy job, with hours that are so flexible it feels illegal, and my pay is double what most of my friends' dual-incomes are". I started to just focus on hobbies and family and less on work.

I don't live to work anymore, I work to live.

I still get stellar marks at work, i know my shit and i'm good at it. But the illusion has worn off for me. It's just a job. I meet deadlines, but I also push back on deadlines that require crunch time or weekend work. I push back on weekend or late time work completely now. I'm not embarrassed anymore to say "I don't want to work on the weekend, and its unreasonable for you to expect me to, so that project will get done next week".

My job is a means for providing for a comfortable retirement, and a comfortable life. I enjoy tech, but I enjoy my hobbies more. My hobbies keep me healthy and happy, work doesn't do either of those two things. Work is work, that's fine. But let's call it what it is. Let's not forget to live too.

Honestly, this is the sort I'm rooting to be culled out. I'm all for a healthy work-life balance but have no sympathy for the "rest and vest" folks - there are absolutely people getting paid in the top 1% who work ~25 hours a week and do absolutely nothing useful. Meanwhile, there are plenty of critical teams drowning in work that can't get additional headcount because of layoffs and the fact they don't have the right buzzword in their team name. If you're taking up a seat and coasting, someone else is paying the price.

Unfortunately FAANG rating systems aren't great and often reward vanity projects going nowhere over the work keeping the company afloat, so I entirely believe that's possible even while having good ratings.

But for the person above, it's not like them working harder will help the teams that actually do need more people but aren't getting it.

Individually, perhaps not. In aggregate, there definitely could be more resources made available for critical services if you could make the org 20% more efficient just by getting rid of people who think they're entitled to a huge paycheck for chilling.

Those all read like great reasons to cull and replace a great deal of tech management.

Agreed with the culling part. I write code for the job and also after hours as my hobby. I wait for the weekend to work on harder/more experimental stuff. I remember the days when I was surrounded by people like me. These days all I hear is 'it's just a job that provides for my hobbies'. And the decline in the work quality is so obvious. And the level of bullshittery and invented office language is through the roof.

There is no way these two things aren't connected.

Cool, the rest of us have other hobbies. You’re not better than us, you’re just one dimensional. That’s a drag on work quality in an entirely different way.

No. It's not a drag on work quality. Quite the opposite. The fact that people look down upon this kind of passion is exactly what I am talking about when saying that the quality of software is declining. People who view it as "just a job" don't get to high performance levels.

And since they are the majority they get to decide. And they decide to choose mediocrity. Consoling themselves that "good code isn't that important", "I'll do it next week", and other excuses.

It can be a drag on work quality. An engineer that dabbles in design hobbies on the side can provide valuable UX ideas that will make the whole product excellent whereas an engineer that nerds out on the latest code trend will pitch rewriting the whole product in Rust at the 11th hour as if any user gives a shit.

I’ve worked with plenty of people like you and some of them wouldn’t know a good product if it smacked them in the face. Most products don’t need more engineering capabilities, they need people involved with excellence in multiple skills.

Apple is an embodiment of this. None of their engineering is bleeding edge but they make categorically redefining products. People that nerd out over something like Linux wouldn’t get it.

I have yet to meet a software engineer who is highly competent and also suggests rewriting a working application in Rust at the 11th hour. In fact the people you are talking about are mostly juniors who read something in an article on a random webpage.

By the way you are talking, no, you have not worked with people like me. Most products are garbage because of poor planning, poor market research and bad/rushed engineering.

Tell me you don't know anything about Apple without telling me that you don't know anything about Apple. A lot of their engineering is absolutely bleeding edge. Right now I am working on improving/adding features to a real time ray tracing renderer that works at 30+ fps on the latest iPhones 14 Pro. Most people's desktop PCs cannot do real time ray tracing and yet Apple does it on a phone. But I guess that is not bleeding edge...

Any industry that can't sustain itself with a majority of workers who are "just doing it as a job" is doomed to fail.

I say this after doing SW development for a few decades. You can't count on "passion," "rockstars" or "10x developers." You can only count on the slogs who show up, do a good job and go home.

It was doing just fine before people with the "just a job" attitude showed up. Definitely not failing.

The "just a job" people have always been there. You don't notice them because they just get shit done and then go home without making a big deal about it.

> "I don't want to work on the weekend, and its unreasonable for you to expect me to, so that project will get done next week"

Balls the size of spacehoppers. I love it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com