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Comment by phtrivier | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what this is supposed to be a metaphor for.

Bullshit / Pointless jobs ? Most are definitely not physically demanding. Meanwhile, our devices run on metals mined by 12 year old kids.

Toxic bosses ? They probably don't act in the open. And they don't pay well.

Lack of workplace regulation ? Your continent democratically decided that workplace regulations were bad, so it should be a "gleeful" metaphor ?

Bad job market ? Then the guy would be accepting a job where he gets punched AND badly paid. But that's not metaphorical: that's a lot of real life jobs.

So I'm missing something here.

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Perhaps your work experience hasn't been VC funded tech firms with inexperienced managers and cargo cult dev processes.

Especially you need to be able to understand the main bit about not needing to do anything at all after daily standup, err I mean punch in the stomach. (because likely the work will be thrown away soon, or the company will pivot.) and then the pre-climax (there's a name for this in plot development but I don't know it), the perf review. and finally the firing. The unnamed peers used as an excuse for a single instance of not being a team player, ie not participating in a nonsense ritual. It is indeed fatal for such firms, so to that degree the firing was a correct action.

To me this is a story about big-A Agile as a disease. But there are other meanings (side messages?) that can be taken away.

Well I worked at VC funded firms, and we were sorta doing agile, and there were stand-ups that lasted 15m, and before and after the stand-ups, work happened, in the form of writing software that we then sold to paying customers.

And, yeah, not all meetings were the best use of our time, it's better to write things down, it's tricky to find out which software to write and which to throw away, we got things wrong lots of time, we wrote legacy code for ourselves, etc...

But "being punched in the stomach and then spend your day doing nothing" was not part of it.

But I guess "burning books" is not yet a thing in the USA, and yet "Farenheit 451" is still a good metaphor of "something" ?

I've never been confortable with the literary genre of "let's slide through the slippery slopes and imagine unrealistic worst case scenarios to sound smart and not really make a case about anything cause fiction".

Book burning is very much a thing there. You don't need fires to burn books.

For being some type of metaphor for life, that the character's spouse was only mentioned a handful of times in passing was decidedly odd.

That was my biggest criticism. Maybe I could have suspended my disbelief back when I was single, but now I'm thinking "my wife would be holding an intervention for me after the first day, if not sooner".

It was a bit odd. On the other hand, this story felt very close to what I feel about my job now and someone here wrote that I am probably depressed. Does my wife know? I think she subconsciously feels that I am not entirelly OK, but I just occasionally complain. That's it. I do not talk about that's stuff much. I do not talk about my thoughts to anyone really. I just have a feeling that nobody would understand. 'You are working at home for five times the pay I am making at factory and you complain?!'. People here complaining that the story was too long and you are complaining that you are still can't relate. This whole wall of text was not enough for you to understand. How me - who is not that eloquent - could explain what I feel inside to someone that I am hanging out once every few months? 'But your wife would understand if you spend five hours to explain.' Or she would just be annoyed to listen to the same stuff, me complaining about my job again. I am tired of me complaining about my job, others would be too.

I essance, it is kind of bizarre and more felt as breaking of the third wall, a wink to the reader, but it is not something that I can't understand. Many man going through stuff like that alone, when asked if everything is fine, for sure they will tell 'its fine' and than decide to kill themselves.

I actually didn't find this odd. I'm child-free, but one thing I've often read about/seen is how life just...disappears...once you have kids. Your time is either consumed by stomach punching, kids, or chores with very little left over.

It's possible that his spouse didn't even notice that he was slowly losing it. It's possible that his spouse _doesn't even know_ that he gets punched in the stomach for work.

That was puzzling for me also...

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