How do I detach myself from my job? | Hacker News Reader

How do I detach myself from my job?

The fact is working in corporate you lick some asses, lick some boots and what not. Some people try to demean you, make fun of you and what not. It would not matter if colleagues are some people. But when your clients are "some people", it feels so bad. The thing is like you exist because of your clients kinda scenarios. Let's be honest about that. We are from Nepal and we've not made any special software that nobody has made or can make. The software is full of negative reviews and it honestly makes the point stronger that we exist because of our clients lol.

How do I deal with this? How do I never feel anything personal about whatever my clients say or do to me? Thankfully, we don't meet in person. We only contact in whatsapp/slack/email. But fck, even a redditor can eat your day by trolling and saying something negative, imagine a real client.

View on HN

Sorry to hear that, shivajikobardan... I feel you, as I used to work in hospitality when I was younger and the amount of shit I had to go through with both clients and colleagues could be made into a fully-fledged tv series (20 seasons long lol).

A few things that helped me through that time were: 1 - Finding at least one (better if more) colleague/s to act as a mutual support group. Meet up on weekends, or during lunch, etc. "No man is an island" as they say. Usually knowing others go through the same pain and struggle and laughing it off helps to a degree. It's not a myself against the world type of situation in this regard.

2 - Find a hobby or thing you do on the side that you like doing. You are not your job. You are more than what you do from 9 to 5. It's a great way to de-stress and at least feel in control. And if that hobby has the potential to earn money - even better. That hope of an "escape" will help kindle that spirit inside of you to keep going.

3 - Preparing for the great escape. At some point, enough is enough and most tactics are just band-aid solutions or "temporary escapes" anyway. Ideally, if you don't like where you are, with a computer, phone and internet connection you can upgrade your skills and pivot in a better direction. Keep your health and energy levels optimal, as many jobs have a nasty tendency to suck the life from you so you don't have enough energy left at the end of the day to do things that matter.

Anyone who belittles you for interacting professionally with them is really just exposing themselves as an asshole, and their behavior is not reflective of you or your worth as a person. That said, what options do you have to train and do something else? Do the minimum to keep your job and be professional, but spend most of your time and energy outside of your job learning and training to do something else. You can use asshole behavior towards you as motivation to burn the midnight oil and get shit done.

In general, any workplace that allows their employees to be abused by clients is not a place anyone should work. You have options even as someone in Nepal, look for international organizations or non-profits or NGOs. Good luck.

I have never licked some ass's working in corp. What you talking about? lol :)

-It's not personal but business with your clients. (I'd hope so)

-Always steer them back to the product vs attacking you which is making the product for them.

-Stay off reddit, and dont let people on the internet affect your feeling.

good luck!

Firstly, you're already making a very insightful observation about the problem you've encountered.

There's some truths that may sound easy or obvious, but may or may not be hard to internalize. They may be intellectually truth, but part of your mind doesn't yet believe them.

    Your work doesn't reflect your worth as a person.

    You do your job but your job doesn't say who you are.

The faster answer is some form of therapy and/or meditation. You would most likely start by observing when you feel most negative, naming the feeling, and exploring the part of the mind that the feeling originated including any core beliefs that formed the negative feeling.

Yikes, I'm sorry you have to deal with assholes like that at work (or anywhere). Nobody should be treated like that! Even when professional disagreements arise, there's no need for personal disrespect.

We all have jobs because some client or another needs us. And most software out there is, well, average. That doesn't mean the people who work on them should be insulted.

Can you minimize the amount of negative social contact in your day, like only interacting as much as you need to at work, and then spending time with people who treat you better (colleagues, friends, family)?

I don't know what the work and social cultures are like in Nepal, but here in the US, if I had a job I didn't love interacting with people I don't really care about, I'd try my best to compartmentalize them -- telling myself "this is only temporary, I just have to hang in there until something better comes along / I work myself up to a better position" -- while trying to be extra-nice to the people I actually enjoy being around. I've made a lot of non-work friends just meeting people and getting to know, treating them well and paying attention to their lives, etc. That is to say, if I can't do anything about the negatives, I can at least make more positive connections to offset them.

But at the end of the day, you just have to try to get out of that sort of situation ASAP :( I'm sorry you have to be in that situation to begin with. Surely that can't be normal for all jobs in Nepal?

Focus on the work you do and your own behaviors. Be proud of who you are and the effort you put in.

The company, the project, your coworkers are outside of your control, so why worry about it?

You would prefer that your colleagues are assholes who try to demean you instead of customers? o_O

I mean, ideally, hopefully nobody does that, but I think most of us would prefer our colleagues to be cordial and customers/clients to be assholes instead of the other way around.

I was laid off months ago. I have stopped cold the tremendous amount of work I was doing on personal projects and open source contributions. I cut off the programming nonsense cold turkey. I am done, and I don't feel any regrets or sadness about it. (I have secured a new job recently though, but its in test automation using a language I have never written in and it pays more.)

Even though this is roughly 15 years of my life I am walking away from I feel so much better now. Here is why:

* I worked on personal projects because I am a creative person who likes to do creative things that I cannot do at work. Now if I want to be creative I practice piano, study history, or do absolutely anything else.

* Working on personal projects allowed me to be ambitious without social constraints and it made me a vastly superior programmer. This is bad, because it put me completely out of alignment with hiring norms. The typical programmer knows what they are required to know to do their job in the office and almost nothing more, which is a stupendously narrow (ignorant) perspective.

* Developing for employment sucks. Your peers are typically super entitled and half the time have no idea what they are doing without a mountain of tools to do half their job for them. As a military guy I had nothing but disdain for the frequently failure followed by stupid excuses, whining, and insecure defensiveness. I also don't miss the pointless meetings that would last forever and accomplished nothing. Worse than all of that is that many developers cannot communicate only any level except an audio call and then even that can be rough. In many ways software hiring is an institutional and educational failure without a unifying sense of professionalism. I would rather be poor than go back to that.

* Unless you are an entrepreneur capable of raising investment capital or are actively trying to get promoted out of software there is no motivation to be ambitious about writing software for employment. None. For years my only ambition was to automate away the stupidity of the work so that I could justify my employment and simultaneously do absolutely anything else other than assigned work.

* I also got tired of being a punching bag by superiors who had no idea what they were doing. When things fail and risk was never considered in the design of the work there will always be fingers to point and shit rolls down hill.

---

My recommendation is if you need to detach yourself from you developer job then just stop doing it. You will get a tremendous amount of social crap about this from your offline social orbit, but fuck them. If they are envious of the high paying job then they should go do it. I have been dealing with this nonsense for months and you will not be able to make them understand your perspective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com