Comment by wkat4242 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wkat4242 | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah I'm at a mega corp and I'm 50.. I have started really hating my job the last couple of years.

I wanted to earn more and moved into an architect role. This was fine for a while, I really enjoyed smoothing our internal IT experience for our users and bringing all my technical expertise to the table. But then we got an idiot director who wanted to separate architects from technical work.

But now I no longer spend my time with the nuts and bolts but I'm supposed to lay out the work for the operations team. While not having any access to anything. This is a major problem because I learn by doing and Microsoft's documentation is often an outright lie. So my knowledge is withering away, I'm not happy because I'm not doing anything technical and I spend half my day with pencil pushers talking about policies and governance which I don't give any f### about.

And our security team has gone full BOFH and making everything purposely difficult without considering the user experience. In fact sometimes I think they forcefully want to make sure things are difficult for everyone because people associate difficulty doing their work with security ("if it's so difficult to do my job it must be impossible for an attacker to get into it!"). But many of the measures they put in place make no sense. For example for some systems I have to authenticate to the same MFA method 3 times in a row.

And we're now forced to log our hours in Jira (our new director thinks that just logging hours in Jira somehow makes us 'agile'). So I'm being much more micro managed by people who don't have any clue what I do. And just bitching to me about time spent on tasks.

But I'm kinda stuck now :( I wish I could just leave but I need the money :'(

I could have written this verbatim comment, but you saved me the effort. We have "2FA" which becomes 3+FA on the most random stuff at work. So whatever you have to do for the day will contain lots of sprinkled arbitrary 2FA games. Sometimes you can check a box "cache this for a while", other times it's grayed out. Meanwhile, the actual applications we keep running are full of unpatched security holes, for .. reasons. So it is all theater, but my boss and bosses' boss (6 layers last I counted) gets to claim in some review that we are "encryption at rest" etc., so "all is well". My development machine is unable to build executable files, because crowdstrike flags them as suddenly appeared malware. I have got a crowdstrike security exception for a single folder, where I can place my executables.. We have trouble interacting with web services, because the company web filter classifies web api URLs as "newly appeared/unknown website". Our stratosphere one-way-communication management layer are clueless about these issues, as someone have explained to them we "just need to do git push CI/CD to the cloud".. News flash, 80% of our software is NOT cloud or web based.. I "manage" some of these issues, by unplugging the ethernet cable and instead work off wireless HotSpot from my company-provided smartphone, but I am well aware that if the clueless management ever figures any of that out, it is no doubt firing offence :-/. But then again, a new job would be a breath of fresh air, I am unfortunately just paid too well for a cozy, if mindless, job.

This sounds far more real to me than the original post. All the technical issues in the world don't bother me unduly, it really is the managers who make you hate work.

Money wise these corps are a system of their own, they pay enough to make you not quit. The more they pay, generally the more they suck.

Just need to wait till my 401k doubles one more time, my kids finish college, and the house is paid off.... just 10 more years

You can change your need for large amounts of money. There are many efforts to keep you too overdrawn so you stay stuck in place. It turns out you need to use your freedoms to have their advantages. Consider what you truly want.

I'm not overdrawn. I don't have any loans. But I would like to buy a flat and those are really expensive. You also have to do a 30% down payment here. I'm saving money but against the rising prices it feels like I'll never get there.

I believe you don't see yourself as overdrawn and it's nice not to have any debt. This might be hard to read but I write it in sincere support. You write that you are 50 and a technical/software architect at a mega-corp. This implies that you should have a salary exceeding the majority of the population around you. As such, it is possible for a large portion of the population to live on far less money, showing that it is possible. I might suggest that you consider yourself overdrawn in that your future self hasn't been receiving enough of your income. You say you save but at 50, not having 30% means you haven't saved long enough or you are looking at higher cost accommodation than you should. I would personally caution you against a long term loan at this stage since that can hold you in place (i.e. in your unloved role). A mortgage is something that held my feet to the fire and still does though far less than it did. There are tools like You Need A Budget (YNAB) and others but you need to start asking what costs you are choosing that keeps you from reducing your expenses enough to make choose trade offs that let you feel happier and more free. As an architect you should be very familiar with the "all decisions involve trade offs and costs" mindset, just apply it to your finances.

Ahh by 'overdrawn' I thought you were referring to the overdraft facility on bank accounts. Which is basically a short-term loan.

I understand you mean overdrawn in the more psychological sense. In that case yeah I probably am.

So I'm making more than people around me yes. But here in Spain that's still not a lot.

And as far as saving, I've been moving around a lot and that tends to make that harder. I'm also very bad at finances. And I'm a bad architect too. I'm more of an engineer really. The problem is that that used to be the same thing at this company for a while.

I meant it to include your sustainable psychological load but I mean it more holistically. We have resources that are financial, intellectual, temporal, emotional, relational, and more. We make balancing decisions based off our relative value structures over those values.

Based off a quick search, it seems you should be looking at 1.5-4 times average. That would leave you with a minimum of 33% available for saving but you could live in a particularly high cost of living area or be subject to other factors. I have struggled to understand why the salaries across Europe seem to be on such a different scale and would have tried to move there if they were more comparable.

Please understand, I don't mean to criticize. I have been in similar situations and still particularly struggle with the constant pressure to detach from the craft to become a people manager (eh, hem... influencer). I've found that the most valuable asset to changing my relationship with money is self compassion and self love. After all, good money (and life) choices are about making tomorrow always better than yesterday and helping others on to the same path. What better way can we care for ourselves?

Anyway, I wish you the best and hope these comments might help you find your path to joy.

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