Why I Find Bullshit Work Intolerable | Hacker News Reader

Why I Find Bullshit Work Intolerable

shubhamjain.co

55 pointsshubhamjain63 comments

"Contrary to popular belief, burnout isn’t caused by a lack of work-life balance. It’s driven more by the lack of ability to do meaningful work."

Couldn't agree more. I wish I was more like my peers who don't seem to get as fully invested in their work (emotionally, mentally, etc)...but if I'm dedicating 40 hours a week to something, it's hard to continue if the work isn't aligned with what I define as meaningful.

Like the author, I've beat myself up over the idea that my remote job offers good enough W/L balance...but that doesn't fix the core problem that the vast majority of those 40 hours are spent frittering away at the structure of the corporation (and its motivations).

Getting paid well enough to afford a satisfying lifestyle is pretty meaningful, IMO. Is that not enough?

Absolutely not.

I want to spend the third of my life I spend working doing something meaningful which I enjoy doing.

I don't even spend the money tbh.

If your job was to watch paint dry for 8 uninterrupted hours every day, but you were paid $150k/year, do you think you would feel happy and fulfilled?

being absurd, of course, but there are degrees to everything.

I think we can all agree that everyone has some lower boundary for “needs interesting day-to-day activities” — some folks just have different amounts.

I get it. I would also greatly prefer to enjoy my days _and_ get paid a software engineer’s salary, but life is rarely that kind. And when it is, it tends not to last.

I _want_ to enjoy my job, but I _need_ to make money. Most people don’t get either of those things, so I’ve come to terms with just having the latter.

I think the term golden handcuffs would apply here and I’d say it’s not enough. If the basic necessities were affordable, I might put my skills into a completely different field than the one I’m in. Unfortunately, everyone is hoarding money, which means I have to hoard money (or make as much as humanly possible).

If doing meaningful work is part of the lifestyle, then it’s not enough.

>Contrary to popular belief, burnout isn’t caused by a lack of work-life balance.

I'd say boredom isn't burnout. I've done the 9-5 and was bored out of my skull. I'd often have zero output in a given day.

I'm now doing my own start up and putting in a fairly significant chunk of hours (80h+/week) and while I absolutely love what I do, it's just getting too hard to keep up the pace. I'm tired, my work output degrades, so I get even less done. But I still absolutely love it =P

Then don't dedicate 40 hours. I read plenty of books on my phone in meetings or on my laptop. Do plenty of appointments and calls to the bank and other errands during company time.

Being annoyed at your job is not burnout.

It can definitely contribute, though, right?

Being annoyed at the same things for a long time can really sap your enjoyment and motivation.

Sure, but that's still a distinct thing. When burned out you physically can't put yourself into performing the job (and often other things in your life too) regardless of your motivation or desire. Being demotivated may but does not necessarily lead into that state; it's not necessary for it to occur either.

Meaningful work will become boring. Pick your favorite dish and have it for 45 days straight and you’ll desperately want something else to eat. Ok, so the counter would be that we need variety of work. But, you can ask someone who travels a lot for work and see if they like this variety of places to see; they don’t. They get sick of variety.

All of these discussions IMO make no sense to me. For every claim, I can find a counter argument. It’s just intellectual masturbation. No progress or insight is to be gained.

This isn't true. I worked for three years helping write automation utilities for an engineering department. I talked to the people who were able to work more easily and effectively due to my work every day. I heard how I was helping them and how I could improve things and I constantly worked to make things work better for them. I absolutely found the work satisfying for multiple years.

I disagree, I never got tired of building my own products. I get tired of any job after 6 months, after I've seen anything there is to see and to deal with way too much bullshit

Companies are creative until they have large, multi-million dollar contracts and engineers are more of a cost center to keep the lights on.

Most tech is bullshit no matter which way you spin it. I need to pay my bills, so I keep quiet in the meantime. However, 90% of what I feel like I do seems like a waste. Is it a waste for the company? Not sure.

Yeah, I keep quiet too when I find myself in that position, and for the same reason, need the paycheck. It’s wonderful to do meaningful work and get paid good money for it but it doesn’t align too often that way

I find that most meaningful work or whatever is meaningful to me, is not very well paid

OP does not understand risk management or product delivery and is therefore labelling it as "bullshit".

And yet, OP should feel blessed. Not because of the bullshit work, but because they are one of a lucky few who have managed to land a career doing what they love. Speak to any other person that managed to do that, and they all know what OP is describing.

My only advice for OP is - work on understanding the purpose, history and alternatives of the "bullshit", then move on to work at small (5-7) independent teams where you can control the "bullshit". If you do it well, you will find your gang and it will be liberating. Read about Kelly Johnson and his teams work on the U-2 and SR71, you will love it.

Sorry but no. What you see in corporate environments has nothing to do with risk management or product delivery, it’s often just pure ineptitude and useless people artificially trying to justify their existence.

You are attributing something to malice that can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Few people are out there actively misleading stakeholders about why they're important. If that was the case, businesses would be rushing to fix that problem. What you're seeing is simply overly complex, highly inefficient product delivery pipelines, which have been grandfathered in, and would be too expensive and too risky to fix. So companies continue chugging along as long as the line goes up.

People absolutely do because that is how you get promoted when you don't know what you are doing.

The fact is, most of the people on the corporate world just don't need to be there. They add nothing and slow things down.

> You are attributing something to malice that can be adequately explained by stupidity

Oh I didn’t intend to do so, that’s what I meant with ineptitude.

My bad, I misread your comment

There definitely is waste in big corporations, but not everything you don’t understand is waste.

Many times in my life someone tried to tell me something that I disregarded as wrong or misguided, only to (years! decades!) later realize the that they were right in ways I just couldn't understand yet.

I suspect (and hope) this will continue for as long as I remain introspective and willing to learn and grow.

I feel like this is one of those things that only time and the perspective it adds can teach you.

I agree whole-heartedly. I’ve wasted many hours in security committee meetings. But then a CVE was discovered and we were able to respond in minutes. Earned our compensation 10x over with that preparedness, even if a lot of being prepared looked like downtime.

I‘m not sure if that’s the scenario OP describing.

In my experience, that would be a company that spends hours in security committee meetings and then fails to react appropriately in an actual emergency.

Sure. But in the things I do understand, I know waste when I see it (and I see a lot of it).

I actually couldn’t see it as well when I was younger and understood less.

The corporate world is so inefficient that most of the job is bullshit. I routinely came up with solutions which worked better in a tenth of the times and a tenth of the resources and made product about them after the contract.

Working in a startup is an improvement - and you have to be way more flexible on wearing different hats (some of which may feel like bullshit but are actually important).

Working on your own with trusted parties is nirvana.

The bigger the organisation, the greater the inefficiency. The worst are government or contractors working with the public.

I stopped working with people who ever worked with the government an I have to de-bullshit engineers who spent too much time at FANGs and picked up a bunch of bad habits. Ex startuppers make the best employees, super product and user focused while shipping consistently.

This piece really resonates with me. There’s only one piece of advice I can give which eased this problem for me: to not take it personally. This isn’t about you: you are doing a role for a company. It’s just business.

Quite literally: busy-ness!

For older people, do you ever find what you are looking for, at least at a reasonable price?

I was once the way of OP but then decided that fixing that would involve mostly eliminating other people (and I am highly risk averse, so doing my own thing is not acceptable to me) and I decided that was not feasible.

So I embraced apathy and am now the time killing bureaucrat calling meetings about status codes that both OP and the old me used to hate and apathy and indifference seem comfortable enough.

As I got older I cared less about dramatically changing the world, in the day job at least. It became a way to pay the bills and provide for my family.

I can live with that and it no longer bothers me the same way it did when I burned with the need to prove myself and do something awesome.

I'm still a creative person, I invent algorithms and play guitar and write software I care about. The job pays the bills.

So, you have basically killed your soul?

Who is better off: (1) A MAMAA employee who approaches their job with religious-like zeal, pouring their heart and soul into extended workweeks to feed the gaping maw of Big Tech, or (2) a 9-5 software engineer working at a company nobody's heard of, on projects they don't personally care about, leaving actual time, energy, and creativity for people, projects, and other things that they do care about?

If the 9-5 does leave enough energy and creativity, then probably (2). My problem is, it doesn’t. It eats up my soul.

Refocused its desires on what is possible. But essentially, yes.

Suppress it yourself while at work, or the job will do it for you.

Can you do a good job, be creative, within the boundaries of your role?

Just focus on what your boss sees and slash everything else to get time back.

So I neither do a good job nor practice any kid of creativity at work, but work is 15ish hours a week of actual tasks, so it doesn’t matter.

The government wants a world with mindless drones doing BS jobs.

If you want to combat that, you need to do your own thing, deliver value to your peers, inspire them to join you and create a bottom up economy filled with small businesses and not a socialist dystopia run by the government and their friends who own 99% of the "market"

I have the exact same feeling as the author. I got a corporate tech job after leaving academia and quit five years later. It was a good job to save up enough money to do something else that I actually wanted to do. Money was literally the only benefit. As a person, I didn't grow at all and the only intellectual development I ever did was outside of work hours.

I used to struggle with this a lot, and still do to an extent. One of the most frustrating parts of it for me is having to argue problems that have already been solved, people using outdated tech and approaches.

But then I burned out, badly, I’m still living through the aftershocks.

Now I still get frustrated, and I do argue my case, but only so far as my energy allows, at which point I drop it, keep my head down and do the work. I’ve moved real creativity to my private life where I’m learning the guitar, carpentry, electronics, and reading more than I ever have. Far from feeling like I’ve given up, I feel like I’ve taken control where it most matters. Believe me when I say that the effort you spend winning an argument at work will amount to nothing in the long term, nobody will thank you for it. Conserve that energy for yourself.

(Edited formatting)

I remember thinking the same thing in my twenties. Sadly, cynically, and statistically, I think this position usually works itself out over time. Bullshit work is the basis for the entire economy, efforts to eliminate it will result in predictably bad outcomes.

There is a lot of "bullshit work" disguised as busy-ness. But if you take a step back and capture the essence of this author's perspective, it is that they aren't able to regularly get in the "flow state" because their skills are not being utilized enough nor are the challenges hard enough for them to be utilized.

> Repeat this for several years, you won’t feel inspired to create anymore. Maybe someday I would need to come to terms with that. But right now, I am not ready to.

This is exactly what happens. You start to develop apathy. Look for a place that will use your skillset and/or has challenges that are within your ability.

I would rather sady that the autor has problems with working with other people. My take is that they are complaining that they can’t do the easy parts (“coding”) and are forced to deal with hard parts (communication with other human beings).

Reading the article, to me this sounds like a person who turned their hobby into their job, reasonably common in our industry and for anyone who ends up doing this, it will mostly end in frustration.

> Consider a painter who is used to getting inspired and painting in long sessions. Imagine that they find themselves in a corporate setting where they can’t follow their intuitions and have to follow the laid-out process.

Imagine a "team" of painters who all need to come up with a cohesive end result? You can't have Frank doing a bit of cubism in the bottom-left corner and Mitch doing some abstract realism in the top-right. And the reason you work in a team is because is most scenarios, having a single person doing all the work is a liability, especially when it comes to knowledge work.

The work is based on a "brief", i.e. a set of requirements. These are given to you and with your knowledge and experience it is up to you (together with your team) to come up with the best result (taking into account a lot of trade offs such as cost, delivery schedule, maintainability etc). The work you deliver is not your work, it belongs to your client/employer.

I think OP is mixing up people who are not career driven (not sure how to better describe them) with bullshit jobs. OP is also conflating potentially dysfunctional workplaces with bullshit jobs (possibly highly correlated but not the same).

I can think of two pieces of advice.

First, if this is important for you, obviously you need to find a less dysfunctional place to work. This might be another company or something else. You might also need to tune your expectations around dealing with "bullshit". Unless you are independently wealthy, you'll need someone to pay you for your work, and often this will mean dealing with stuff you might consider bullshit.

Second, you don't need to justify anyone why you care about this. I have friends who don't care about their job at all, but I am very career driven. This lead to many arguments about different points of view. The epiphany came when I realized that it didn't matter and I don't have to justify myself to anyone. My friends would hate my lifestyle and I would hate theirs; that's fine, different people are wired differently and that's ok.

I used to feel like this person, and I'd find myself alternating between burnout and enthusiasm every few months as project work ebbed and flowed. Going between the two peaks was exhausting and every crash back down to burnout felt horrible.

My solution was to go and do something fulfilling in my spare time, force myself to stick at it, and not work a second longer than I was obligated to. Keeping my mind busy and satisfied over a longer period of time forced the "work thoughts" out of my head eventually, and made it much easier to detach at the end of each day.

Working from home meant I could turn my 1 hour commute each morning and evening into 2x1 hour to work on something fun for myself. A few months of doing that and I started to feel substantially better, I'd even look forward to the slow periods that would previously have bummed me out - at the end of the day the bastards still have to pay me, and I have less work to do so it's a win-win for me.

Matches my sentiments pretty well.

My way out is two-fold - it is still work in progress, so take it as an attempt rather than a solution:

1. Stay at the soul-sucking job a bit to gain cash and invest in assets that generate passive income

2. Find a time slot in your day or week that is absolutely sacred and do what you consider creative and fulfilling. That you're able to allocate only a tiny fraction of a day to creatively fulfilling work will hurt. But I'm hoping slowly you identify yourself more with this fraction than what you do to for the 8 hours.

Been trying to do this for a little under a year now and there are some good days and some bad days, but I think it keeps me sane. Will need 5ish years to know whether it's really working.

(Edit: formatting)

After 25 years if finally figured out that if the company's processes and business goals fit into my mind and I can understand and support them, I find meaning in my job.

I failed doing this at companies that had too many layers, rules, people, roles and my work was an insignificant cog.

For me it meant leaving the, what I call 'enterprise' world behind. No longer 7 layers of middle management between me and the CEO.

I am no longer filling out templates and forms or chasing KPIs that someone made up. I improve the lives of our customers every single week/release.

Thanks for writing down exactly how I have felt recently.

Engineering requires creativity when the implementation isn’t assured, and creativity requires energy.

The work environment can be like asking people to brainstorm after reading terms and conditions for an hour.

I think you might benefit from reframing who you produce work for, if you feel it’s for a client or the daily process monster, you’re quickly staring at the blank screen again. If you frame it as getting better at work, or another internally goal, you might find you have more creative energy.

Some people can lead a simple satisfying job. Some can have a bullshit job. I totally feel the same things as the author. Some IT jobs are not creative at all. I had to work it out. Had to find I'm most interested in writing. Some jobs are more orinted towards verification, support, management, not development. If you struggle in your current job maybe it is not meant for you.

Half of what he’s talking about is not bullshit, but rather a natural part of working with people who don’t live inside your own head.

But I feel his pain about all these frictions. It’s why I prefer working as an outsider; a consultant and teacher. I have much more control over my work, and rarely have to interact with Jira.

Pretty accurate, one of my previous bosses wanted me to be “normal” and just do 9-5 with all the meetings and he said he doesn’t mind that my productivity will be 70% less.. I left the job after few weeks.

I'm almost speechless to the accurate adherence of the content of this blog post with my current feelings, stemming from my latest work experience.

The hardest part of my job has become the soul crushing endeavour of having to keep up with dysfunctional business organisms filled with every kind of clueless engineers and their day to day crap.

I have to attend "api architecture" meetings where people have zero clue of what domain modeling is, and only ever ask "what should backend/frontend do?" or "array or object for this field?", and push layers of spaghetti over what is a super intricate mess of a codebase, despite the company being super young and giving engineers actually a lot of freedom.

Damn, during our latest "tech team meetup" event a "senior" backend dev just gave a talk about how he used ChatGpt4 to help him write code to parse xml in Scala, "since regex is suboptimal for this case". Nobody except for a jr dev asked him if he ever heard about external deps and their magical ability of helping people avoid reinventing the wheel.

This is not to bash on unskilled people in the industry, it's just that they're the product of a capitalistic machine that works so well, and so much on a plane that's completely detached from reality, that work doesn't even matter anymore. It just feel like we're all forced to turn into NPCs at some point.

> Regardless of how many enjoyable things I was doing in my regular life, my work started to have a negative effect on my mood and outlook.

O pobrecito!

https://www.spanishdict.com/answers/138108/what-does-pobreci...

preach. it feels like it's only getting worse no matter the size of the company. people fundamentally don't understand creativity.

If you think your job isn't BS you probably haven't read enough adversarial content.

0) The Conspiracy Against The Human Race

1) The Machine Stops

2) The One Dimensional Man

3) A City Is Not A Tree

4) Influence

5) La Technique

6) anything from James C. Scott