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Yours has got to be one of the best comments that I've ever read on hacker news.

> for me, the low-trust "do the bare minimum to stay employed" approach didn't actually help me get out of burnout into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of

What you just described (so vividly) is meaning, and (likely) "flow" too. Meaning must be there for everyone, in their efforts; the need for meaning is universal. (We can call it intrinsic motivation too.)

Some say that you can find meaning outside of work, and then can mostly ignore work; and it's also said (correctly I guess) that "psychological richness" (closely related to resilience) is important: drawing meaning & satisfaction from multiple sources.

Sure, but I have a practical problem with that: if you need to work 8 hrs/day to cover your family's needs, you don't have time, energy, or opportunity left to find meaning elsewhere.

And, as others have repeatedly said it here, if you are a full time employee making quite beyond your (family's) needs, and think about decreasing your working time (giving up excess money, but regaining much needed time & freedom), that is what is strictly forbidden by the runners of the Village of Happy People. You will find effectively no jobs that let you work (say) 5 hours per day, for 62.5% of your original salary. That way, you'd just not be a good slave, a good cog in the machine. Society is engineered such that you must not have free time.

Therefore the only practical option is to find (or create) work that provides meaning for you intrinsically. I see no other option. You can be an employee or run your own business, the same applies. And, unfortunately, this is unattainable for most of society.

You can't expect 62.5% for 5/8 hours, you have other costs to them for benefits etc.

I think it’s assumed that in a society that would allow for such things benefits wouldn’t be handled at the level of the employer.

Quite the opposite. Employees under 28 hours a week don’t have to be provided health benefits at all, and typically aren’t in industries like retail that mostly employ front line workers on a part time basis.

Part time help is cheap.

Those might not be proportial, disregarding fixed costs, on some places those costs/deductions are usually based on a percentage of the given salary or hours worked (Not so in the US, as I'm given to understan)

I was so surprised when I realized stat holidays were paid as a % of the previous 30 days salary in canada.

Productivity per hour increases though, so it compensates.

I could see it going down if you do something like more work or work like hobbies in the other time instead of more leisure.

That is entirely independent of working shorter hours though.

I'm a contractor because I work remotely for a foreign company, and they denied me paid holidays with this argument. The cost of vacation is proportional to worked hours. There's a lot of questionable math in HR land though.

I could see maybe the argument against this because of paid accounts in remote systems: google suite, office 365, bamboo, github, etc. compared to reduced use, but they set those up anyway for other people in the company who don't use them (non-devs, etc) and I don't believe the cost per user is significant.

Do you mean tax costs? AFAIK typically country requirements for benefits are proportional to time worked, so part timers don't get all the benefits. Which benefits are you talking about specifically?

I appreciate the kind words!

The second part of your post is something I've thought about a lot. There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:

- Less communication overhead due to fewer people

- Constant availability (less need to pre-plan meetings, etc to match everyone's hours)

- Less complexity WRT HR, payroll, taxes

- Employees still have to pay for full healthcare, so the employer either provides this or pays a 1099 salary premium (the US's terrible approach of tying health insurance coverage to your employer rears its ugly head yet again)

- Fewer SaaS seats to pay for

Some of these are more solvable than others, and allowing more people to work part-time in tech is definitely swimming upstream, but I do wish more businesses would try.

Sahil Lavingia (Gumroad) is one person leaning into this approach with great success: https://sahillavingia.com/work

- Employees still have to pay for full healthcare, so the employer either provides this or pays a 1099 salary premium (the US's terrible approach of tying health insurance coverage to your employer rears its ugly head yet again)

Health insurance coverage is not tied to an employer. Being able to pay for health insurance premiums with pre tax income is tied to an employer.

The benefit to the (large) employer is that it makes it harder for their employees to compare competing employment offers, and adds a little more friction to an employee who might be considering switching jobs.

The administrative costs of implementing benefits so that pre tax money can be used to pay for them also serve as a barrier to entry for smaller employers (helping large employers), since these costs cannot be amortized over a large number of employees.

But beside all that,

> There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:

It’s just cheaper, in all ways, to have fewer employees. Less people to trust, less people an employer is liable for, less hiring/terminating costs. The cost of burnout is clearly not a significant factor considering the lack of success of businesses full of part time employees.

> You will find effectively no jobs that let you work (say) 5 hours per day, for 62.5% of your original salary.

Not in the US anyway. It’s exceedingly common in the Netherlands to work 32 or even 24 hours a week.

Huh, in tech companies?

Yah, France as well. My boss was at 30h / week.

Switzerland too. It's pretty common for parents to work 80% or 60%.

Is that typically shorter days or fewer days?

Fewer days.

It's not only common you can in many instances force your employer to lower your hours and keep you on.

Absolutely. Totally normal in the Netherlands. I do this (28 hours). My wife too (32 hours). We've got a kid to raise and a house to look after. We earn more than we need, so why work more hours?

That’s awesome. I chose Japan as my place to live, but NL was a close second. I’ll have to think about it again next time I move.

Wow, amazing. Super progressive.

As I believe Deadpool said in the most recent Deadpool and Wolverine movie - ‘The Dutch are never going to the moon, but damn do they know how to live.’

Belgium and Germany too.

Think I'm starting to see why so many people immigrate to Europe. European labor laws and lifestyles are so reasonable. No wonder American life expectancy is so bad.

> What you just described (so vividly) is meaning

In line with Victor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, which explores (among other things) why some Holocaust survivors thrived and some didn’t. Frankl himself was a survivor.

My favorite quote from one of my favorite books, Anathem by Neal Stephenson (copied from GoodReads):

"Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story."

Some people need to have their "story", otherwise they end up miserable, regretting their wasted lives.

If someone’s ‘story’ improves in notability, attractiveness, attention grabbingness, etc… wouldn’t someone else’s ‘story’ have to decrease in the same?

As human attention is finite. Or is it suggesting that the ‘story’ can somehow qualitatively improve, without limit, while actually occupying less physical time?

"Stories" are not a finite resource. In the book, Yul tortured his friends (and whoever was the audience) with his adventures and was a rather poor listener himself, but for Jesry and other avout (monks-scientists) it was always mutual – discussing their research, sharing findings, seeking out help, etc.

Your story is something intrinsic; you can decide how you want to share it with others.

Sharing requires actual time…? Certainly more than zero.

Totally agree with this.

The thing is, there are at least four major factors that lead to the energy depletion of burnout:

- physical (i'm unhealthy, don't sleep, eat or exercise well)

- mental (i'm distracted and interrupted constantly or don't let my brain rest)

- emotional (i work in a culture of terror with people who trigger me)

- meaning - (i simply don't care about what i'm doing and neither do my colleagues)

all of these are necessary, and none are sufficient. most orgs and people are breaking along more than one of these dimensions, and the co-morbidity makes it hard to diagnose the cause of burnout.

I tottaly agree with this sentiment. Still looking for the right balance, but half assing things for me doesn't result in feeling better.

Finding the unicorn job isn't the right thing to predicate your happiness on. One thing I like the idea of and am just starting to try is reminding myself why I'm doing the job. What are my bigger goals that it is contributing towards? I know we all know this at some level, but I think it can help to remind ourselves there is a purpose/meaning to why we do our jobs, even if we don't intrinsically get meaning from them.

I can't remember where I read this idea... but somewhere recently.

Does not help when the answer is "to not starve and not lose your house for missing three mortgage payments, stupid" though.

I am here to periodically remind HN that no, not all programmers here are millionaires who only work not to get bored.

There is a middle ground where you’re not at risk of missing next month’s mortgage payment, but downshifting or changing careers might mean you take a lot longer to reach retirement (or “financial independence” if you don’t like the word retirement).

There absolutely is this middle ground, agreed. But personally, I've been very stupid with money. I let my passion for technology and the illusion that I will always be in high demand get the better of me and I am currently paying heavy interest, so to speak, in ruined health, both physical and mental, and having to look for a job in tough market with age discrimination sprinkled on top.

Oh well.

That's rough. Hope you find the job you need soon.

I wish money management was taught in schools. My family didn't have money so how were they supposed to teach me about compound interests. And those growing up in money may not realize its value...

Thanks. I wish would-be parents had psychological evaluation at least. My mother and father were 95% inept to be parents. They did the very bare minimum and then one of them died and the other was, shall we put it softly, just a drag for 22 years until she died less than two months ago as well.

Pain inside does make one do stupid crap. Definitely applies to me. Now I am trying to heal and be more rational with money at least. The rest will follow more or less automatically; removing stress is itself healing.

Let me try to be more clear, I don't half ass. I just take a 10 minute walk when I get stressed. I take 10 minutes to think through something without touching my keyboard even though the keyboard monitor is monitoring. Once I'm past 8 and a half hours I turn off my computer almost regardless of the circumstances. In certain emergencies I won't, but most of the time that meeting actually is not more important than eating dinner with my family and getting bullet points the next morning.

I hope this helps explain more what I meant by what I was saying. I'm not saying "become terrible at your job and produce poor quality". I am saying, "deliver good enough quality within your means". If your boss says "your current code is good enough for the demo", ship the damn thing as is, don't go rushing to add more features and retesting everything until 4AM.

If a deadline really is too short, say it is too short early on. Keep working, but don't put on a cape and deliver because someone said they wanted something they can't have without causing you to lose sleep for two weeks. People die from stuff like that, it is not worth it.

>... keyboard monitor is monitoring

I would say get out as fast as possible.

That would be part of the medium term plan. Have to hang on as long as I can for now though.

I've learnt this lesson the hard way recently.

I dislike my projects failing and missing deadlines. So in addition to pushing back against unrealistic expectations, I caught other people's dropped balls and filled the gaps of un-backfilled roles. On top of that when there was down times, instead of resting, I took on fun side projects that had higher impact for my employer than the work actually assigned to me.

They got me with praise and guilt tripping, until last year, all the little "do this one more thing", "can you ship it 1 day earlier" had turned into me delivering by myself as much work as the rest of my team on ~20h weeks (because the other 20h I was unable to function due to burnout). We're siloed into different projects so I never realized I was doing 5x the work rather than 20% extra until a new reporting tool visible to each other was used...

So this year, I'm not doing side projects, fixing other people's messes or doing other people's work. I've told my manager and he's bringing an extra person to the team. I'll do my work and I'll do it well but I'm a contractor paid half what my FTE counterparts are, and it's not like there is a path to promotion so I'm not going to compromise my health anymore to do the work of 4 extra people for free. Not in any future job.

Point is, check your workload and if you're doing more than what you're paid for: that's where you can take back the time to find meaning in different things. It's not slacking if you're delivering a day's worth of work in a day, no matter how much HR BS tries to guilt trip you into thinking that.

My takeaway from your comment is that you should not be an employee; you should be a business owner. That way you can give your all and feel great about it because it will also (hopefully) lead to better and directly measurable outcomes.

Yes, this is correct. This is my eventual end goal, and a lot of my career so far has revolved around obtaining the skills, connections, and runway money I need to make that leap.

Not necessarily. I'm similar to OP in that I get depressed if I'm not doing my best, but I also have a family with young kids. There's no good way for me to get from where I am to business owner—either I'd be risking my family's livelihood on something uncertain or I'd be working in my free time to build a stable business instead of spending time with them.

The compromise I've arrived at is that I give it my all during a very strict time box. I work remotely, so at 9am I start work, I take an hour for lunch, and I check out at 5. With no commute that leaves just over half my workweek waking hours for my family.

During working hours I do it all—I perform my job very well and am lucky enough to be in a place where it's recognized in very measurable ways (promotions, autonomy, and recognition). But I don't give my employer extra time.

Thanks for the insightful comment. I have tried no less than 30 separate approaches for... a bunch of stuff really... and nothing worked.

The only thing that actually seems to net me results these days is indeed extremely strict, zero excuses unless the nukes are flying, time-boxing.

Reassuring to see that it works for somebody else as well. Thank you.

What industry did you find this unicorn job in? I feel exactly as you described in your list.

+1, very curious. I yearn for the working environment the parent comment describes.

Can it only exist in medium and small companies?

The only thing I can think of (and this is purely speculative, though I’ve interviewed at one and enjoyed the experience; didn’t move forward due to relocation concerns) is a quant trading firm.

Pardon the apparently naive question: are those places not filled with the most horrible vultures on the planet? That is what I would think but it seems like I am horribly wrong.

Could you elaborate some more, please?

I’ve never worked at one, but I interviewed at HRT. The interviewers were all quite kind, and more importantly to me, they asked difficult questions relevant to the role. Specifically, the role was for DBs, and the questions (beyond “can you do some basic coding”) were all low-level RDBMS or Linux. I hate Leetcode, doubly so when I will never, ever be using those skills on the job.

Given that those places are also doing stuff like writing their own network stack to reduce latency, I get the impression that they know their shit.

    > are those places not filled with the most horrible vultures on the planet?

Why do you think this?

On the contrary, I believe this is a misinformation widely spread by non-technical people about their grit. They actually do some really interesting(definition may differ from yours) work and paces are very sane.

However, given their pay and other contractual limitations, it can be very attractive and fiercely competitive to land a job unless you are really good. Hence the the fake “vultures” rumor to gate keep.

P.S. Worked at one briefly and figured that I will become unemployable in regular market soon if I ever plan to leave… and not work in this industry anymore.

Why would you be unemployable?

I found it in a corner of my $MEGACORP, but TBF, my corner is a former startup that was acquired and retained a lot of the brains.

It can only exist in high margin companies. The trick is to find business environments with some 'slack' in the funding, because that slack tends to propagate. I have made a career out of finding environments with high slack and avoiding environments with low slack.

Just curious… How do you find out there is slack before actually getting the job?

One hint might be found in yearly financial reports. It depends a bit on the country if you can access those reports from non-publicly traded companies. Are they debt-heavy, or do they have enough free cash flow? What if all customers disappear the next day, can the business continue for an extended period of time?

Is that indicator of slack though?

Do you have any actual script, as in, exact questions to ask during interview, so that executives and/or techies would answer clearly whether their company has financial slack?

Revenue or profits per employee is a good start.

By slack do you mean high margin or high revenue per employee or something similar? Or a large war chest/lots of runway?

Definitely, large war chest and lots of runway always helps. Also high margin may be good or bad but high revenue per employee(i.e. consulting firms in government, defense, finance, energy etc. sectors) are the most human friendly places to work at.

relevant:

Slack, by Tom DeMarco https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici...

I work at a ~100 person tech consulting firm[1], although I joined when we were closer to 30. They actually found me through HN!

We mostly design and build data/devops/mlops/cyber platforms for big banks and other finserv companies - lots of Databricks, AWS, and GCP services.

[1] https://bit.ly/4j5cC5T (I'll expire the link in a few days for privacy reasons)

Any reason a lot of the Rearc jobs are outsourced to India?

What is wrong with that?

Takes away jobs from Americans and exploits cheap Indian labor.

Another way to phrase that: it allows Americans to focus on jobs where they add most value, leading to a higher standard of living for both Indians and Americans. You should read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage (and so should Trump)

I don’t really care about the standard of living in India. It is of no concern for me. And the only reason I am commenting is because the linked company is what was brought up. You would be able to find other examples.

But, these positions are easily done by a highly skilled American workforce: Cloud Engineers, Lead Cloud Engineers, Cybersecurity Engineers. That’s what is being advertised.

Read the link: outsourcing results in an improved standard of living in America. Even if Americans are capable of doing those jobs themselves. It’s counterintuitive, I know.

TLDR but i searched the linked page for america and the only mention is a theory, no proof:

"In 1930 Austrian-American economist Gottfried Haberler detached the doctrine of comparative advantage from Ricardo's labor theory of value and provided a modern opportunity cost formulation. Haberler's reformulation of comparative advantage revolutionized the theory of international trade and laid the conceptual groundwork of modern trade theories."

I did read the link and my beef is not with outsourcing in general. Many articles I found say that new roles in areas such as AI, cloud computing, and advanced manufacturing often emerge, providing Americans with more lucrative opportunities in cutting-edge fields. This is the counterintuitive part because Rearc is outsourcing highly skilled jobs that should be done by Americans if we follow the outsourcing is better logic. See my point?

If the jobs are being outsourced then the American company doing the outsourcing apparently saves money. Whether that money eventually ends up in the pocket of the people you want (e.g. workers versus shareholders) is a different debate, but in theory it should also mean there are other higher paying jobs in the labour market in the US otherwise salaries would drop to match the outsourced ones.

That’s some serious mental gymnastics

Sure, if you think about it, layoffs are actually good for employees career growth and the chocolate ration went up to 20 grammes per week.

Wow. How I long to be in the position you are! I got burnt out, and then learnt to emotionally detach myself from my work so that I don’t get hurt by things that are beyond my control.

But I sorely miss not being 100% dedicated. What I do for work has always been a big part of my identity. And half-assing something feels like not being true to myself.

> And half-assing something feels like not being true to myself.

Been there many times, but I found that it’s best to aim for good enough, given the resources and constraints, than 100% all the time. I’m a recovering perfectionist, so it’s not always easy to reach that balance, but I try it anyways. When I do not, my anxiety kicks in, and I’m forced to slow down.. I use to be able to ignore it (the anxiety) and keep pushing, but not anymore..

I think there's a paradox, that if you give too much to your employer, you burn out and then can give them nothing. Therefore, one should give the correct level of engagement , its not disengagement, but, being engaged enough to do the job well while still having a life outside work eg with family and friends. Its possible to work somewhere where your colleagues appear more dedicated than you, for example if they work the weekend and you don't. That doesn't mean you're less committed to your job, in fact it could mean you are more committed, because you know that working weekends is pointless as it leads to extra bugs thus being overall less efficient. In summary, work hard and diligently, while taking necessary breaks, getting required exercise and sleep, recovering properly if ill at ay time, and not working silly hours. so... a bit like a typical European ;)

Europe has great employee protection but it is not always this panacea either everywhere.

When I worked in Paris, I started at 10 am (to avoid rush hour on the subway), but rarely left before 7 or 8 (instead of 6) and it wasn't uncommon for me to stay until 11pm. I was "cadre" which means you need to deliver on tasks but get no overtime pay with the idea that workload is realistic but flexible: finish early and you're done, run late it's on you to deal with it. Needless to say the balance often tilted one way and not in my favor.

One reason was the culture at that company was to take many coffee breaks, long lunches, go for drinks after work and return to the office after etc. That means the days were pleasant and relaxed most of the time, but you made up for it by spending more time at work. I actually enjoyed it at the time, but I don't think I'd do now.

This was quite typical in my experience. Other companies would pay for overtime but only if you worked after 9pm (because 6 to 9 is for dinner). They'd cater pizzas during that time and folks would end their day at 9, and do just the 3h unpaid overtime while eating pizza in front of their pc.

Just saying, Europe has some great labor laws, but it's not all roses and rainbows either. Employers may still try to exploit you as much as they can within those laws (and sometimes by breaking it, I think lawsuits against employers (aux prudhommes) are a lot more common and employees win them quite often.)

I share your psychology.. sadly I never found a place with high drive people (colleagues or hierarchy), for a while I did hard tasks for their own sake but after a while this difference in mindset across the company has diffused in me and I'm ground to a near halt (you know when the simple thought of opening a source file makes you sick to your stomach).

Did you find that job through a friend or by interviewing ? if so did you find ways to filter low drive teams ? I sometime mention I seek high speed but I don't think I can trust HR on this.

Thanks for writing about your experiences. I went through the same series of realizations as you over the past few years.

> What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of.

I have this in bursts during the off-season and that's where I feel like I'm most productive and useful. But the off-season is getting shorter and shorter and I'm compelled to find something else.