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Comment by jvm___ | Hacker News Reader

Do you want to produce something, or do you want a paycheque for doing work?

If you're a plumber, do you want to be responsible for building a brand new skyscraper with top of the line pipes, or do you just want to show up to your dead-boring factory maintenance job, fix the things you know how to fix and go home to your wife, kids and/or hobbies - which is where you draw satisfaction from life.

Hackernews is slanted towards the "build the latest and greatest and be the best software developer ever". The people who are just average, or good enough for their job, but don't care about staying current with the bleeding edge of tech (like what's posted daily on HN) aren't here to give you a contradictory opinion.

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I also think this is also industry dependent --

sometimes you just wanna work at a small company that prints money, with a boring tech stack, say ROR, Golang -- but doing interesting work.

compared to big company where it's a lot of custom tooling, then other people bringing the latest and greatest tech to enhance their resumes or profile of the company through tech talks etc.

end of day -- it's finding what works for you.

I never bought the idea that work has to be hell to be financially viable. That's just marketing from the C-suite psychopaths.

Have you seen many new skyscraper-level sites pulling all-nighters constantly? And if you saw one, do they do it with the same people that was there at 7am the day prior? There's regulations (and sometimes unions) that make those the best-paying jobs for plumbers and also making sure that the plumbers can go to their families at the end of the day.

My understanding is that there's a ton of overtime in construction work. The projects are on a fixed schedule (a Gant chart made in MS Project), but unpredictable things happen all the time, so overtime is necessary to catch up.

Depends on what you're referring to with overtime. If it means 24/7 rotating shifts to compensate for the unpredictable, yes, that absolutely happens. So it's not so much "overtime", is "off-hour shifts".

Again, this started as an "skyscrapers sites" analogy. If you have a guy working in such construction for 20 hours straight, you're calling for a (very possibly fatal or catastrophic) accident, and there's absolutely no insurance company that'll cover for that, among other problems you'll be calling for.

I'm definitely on that side of building stuff. I really need something to work on and having progress, also unfortunately I'm more into HW. As companies making something HW related are really rare these days. So I'm not shaming the job itself but more like trying to understand if this is just something not for me.

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