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Comment by sour-taste | Hacker News Reader

This isn't at all a rebuttal of the post, more a different perspective. I started a new job while basically deeply depressed. It colored all my opinions of the company and my coworkers. As I'm coming out of that through a combination of medication and intensive CBT I'm realizing that a lot of the negativity I felt towards my job was the result of the depression. As things improve I'm realizing that the job is mostly neutral but my impression of it was colored by my mental health struggles. This isn't at all to say not to take the authors advice, just take care of yourself and be aware of the possibility that you may be distorting reality if there's any chance you're depressed

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I've recently had a job that started out reasonably good, but after a year and a half, I started wondering what I was doing there, was I really in the right place? Some of the tickets I worked on went nowhere, and I didn't enjoy the stuff I was working on. That lasted a couple of months, and I was seriously considering quitting. And then came a complaint from a user that opened up a whole cesspit of necessary improvements, optimisations and bugs for something I'd previously worked on, and that turned into 9 months of the best fun I've ever had at work. Made a factor 20 improvement to a hideously complex algorithm that nobody understood, found and fixed a bunch of bugs in the algorithm that we had always thought was perfect -- you know, fun stuff. And then my contract ended. But on a high note.

This isn't general advice or anything, but I'm glad I didn't quit a year earlier.

The times I've really had to scramble on something at work describe both some of my best working experiences and some of my worst. I think a big differentiator is clarity. If I know that X needs to be done, and it's important and urgent I'm happy to dig in.

The bad emergencies tend to be scenarios where I'm told OMG we need to fix A, it's an emergency, only to be told a short time later that actually never mind problem B is the real emergency, and then jumping to problem C after that, and so on. That kind of scattered direction can be soul crushing, where I invest in a problem and get far along on a good solution, only to be told that oh actually that urgency was BS, but trust us this new emergency is totally important.

Exactly. In this particular case, it was fun because I recognised the problem and had/took the freedom to get to the bottom of this and fix it as thoroughly as I could. I could easily have decided to accept that the big import process took an hour, but I stubbornly thought it could be faster, and reduced it to 3 minutes. Biggest dopamine boost ever. Still coasting on that. And in doing so, discovered a bunch of bugs, undocumented behaviour users depended on, and ended up addressing all of it in the way I wanted.

That freedom was absolutely key. The same job could have been frustrating and stupid if someone else had been ordered to do what I did.

Steve Jobs said it most profoundly: "love what you do".

This is the opposite of "do what you love".

I wish I understood where he learned this.

It's very profound (and true).

Possibly from the 1970 Stephen Stills song "Love the One You're With"

Possibly his well known interest of Buddhism ?

It is not the opposite. If you do what you love, you love what you do. So its more of, "love what you do" is what to aim for, and "do what you love" is one way to achieve this.

It’s a flip on the framing, and a non trivial one.

One is love what you do - which assumes regardless of what you’re doing, love it.

The other, do what you love - means choose things that make you love them.

They’re completely opposite in what choice they’re telling people to make.

No, it doesn't tell you "regardless". It tells you, if you do something, you better love it. So if you start doing something, and it turns out you don't love it, you better stop doing it, and do something else instead. As an extreme example, take Nazis managing a concentration camp. If it turns out you are not a bad enough person to love it, you better stop doing it.

That is not at all what ‘love what you do’ means. You’re talking about ‘do what you love’. That means what you are talking about.

Both of these sayings can of course be applied to evil as well as good, and be either positive or pathological in impact depending on the situation.

I think we both interpret the mere words in specific ways. It is just that my interpretation is more logical, and also more general, than yours.

It’s basic English grammar. But you do you.

There is syntax (grammar), and there is semantics. You seem to have trouble understanding the full range of semantics that the given syntax allows for.

My ex-girlfriend [1] did this with us and household tasks, especially cooking. I've gone from hating household tasks to being slightly positive about it. I've gone from hating cooking to loving it.

I've tried this with programming. After 15 years, I'm only mildly positive about programming. That has more to do with the culture though, not the activity. I wish there was a business analyst/entrepreneurial programmer hybrid role. Spot opportunities from data, then build out a solution. Or if a solution doesn't need to be built out but it's more of a human/political thing, then do that.

I'm currently a data analyst and get some room (informally) to do just that. It's a really fun role, and I'm programming way cooler things than I ever did as a software engineer.

[1] Mentioning this detail because I don't think I could've learned this any other way. Well, parents maybe, but they didn't have this attitude.

Those roles exist but they’re really senior staff+ into director level roles (at a smaller org). The problem is that they’re really two roles bundled into one - discovery and development . You need to be aware of business impact, pain points, upcoming tech, your competitors, and you need to be able to execute to just the right level of finish.

The bad ones identify solutions that work for huge orgs and try to apply them to everyone and don’t implement them. This is your typical architecture astronaut. Or, they get bogged down in perfection and are massively hands on when they should have stopped long ago. Also your typical micromanaging vp of engineering.

But one or two good ones can be utterly enormous force multipliers.

Maybe I'm suffering from the Dunig Kruger effect but I think I'd be pretty good at it. I guess the only way to show that is by setting up my own company. I'm just afraid of the risk. Finding product market fit seems extremely hard.

Companies that gave me the chance a bit, it seems that I always fulfilled those expectations.

If you do what you love, then you love what you do.

If you love what you do, you didn't necessarily get there by doing what you love.

Reminds me of: a duck is a bird but a bird isn't necessarily a duck.

I agree it's not the opposite.

> If you do what you love, then you love what you do.

While it is possible to both do what you love and love what you do, often if you do what you love you are apt to find out that you don't actually love doing it. Hence the common refrain that cautions against turning your love into a job.

That could also be the overjustification effect

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect

I think the subtle difference is "Do what you love" is passive one is not actively doing anything. They have ideal in their head that may not match reality. "Love what you do" in my eyes is being present and actively loving the moment while doing the work.

A very common example is art. Most people love to draw things like characters or landscapes. But the real world application of art is usually ads, logos, and posters.

There's significant skill overlap, but little passion overlap.

Like dont pursue the happiness but be happy pursuing

Smile more, you will be happier. On how long to know if a job is right, it depends how much you know what you are looking for.

One of many platitudes that kept me in working conditions and religion which were detrimental to my career and mental health.

Maybe it's useful to some who are in objectively good circumstances which they haven't learned to appreciate. I'd still advocate for getting other perspectives from trustworthy folks about ones specific situation.

And not taking advice from billionaires who think their fruity diet will cure their cancer.

to play devils advocate, you can try to “love what you do” while continuing to better your circumstances. No?

The quote doesn’t suggest “the job/career you have now is perfect for you, ignore all red flags”.

The advice is reductive and wide open for interpretation. Also rich coming from a lucky sociopath who cheated even his closest coworker for (relative) pennies.

i try not to judge people holistically when listening to them give advice in a very narrow area, like work in this case. We all have faults, some more than others obviously.

Example: a rapist could be an EXCELLENT plumber as his occupation. One has nothing to do with the other. Pretending like they have no useful plumbing advice to give just makes one look silly.

Steve jobs was a shit human being. But i won’t sit here and pretend he wasn’t a visionary product person, or a person that thought deeply about work, our relation with technology, etc.

For what it’s worth I agree it’s reductive. Most 1-2 sentence life advice is…so not too surprising. :)

    > give advice in a very narrow area, like work in this case

For most working folks, work is about one half of their waking hours. Nothing about that is "narrow". Do your consider advice about sleep to be similarly narrow? It uses about the same time as work.

A similar quote from Nietzsche has really struck to me:

Happiness is not doing everything you want, but wanting everything you do.

On the other hand, some studies show that mildly depressed people have a more accurate model of the world. So what if you were right about your job initially, and the CBT is basically just gaslighting you into spinning things in a positive way?

Mildly is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What does mildly depressed mean?

The idea that there are varying degrees of depression is not a difficult concept to grasp.

Functioning, presumably.

It is a well established clinical term. It's not doing any heavy lifting.

Assuming that is true, does a more negative way of viewing things actually benefit you (even if it would be slightly more "accurate")?

If one has a choice (that means if there is no case of clinical depression):

At least anecdotally a bit of optimism improves my life quality a lot and results in a higher productivity, proactive solution finding and a more pleasant work environment. Constantly looking at the negative side of things (with a healthy serving of snark) contributes, in my opinion, to burnout and fatigue.

It's not difficult to imagine a number of scenarios where that perspective could bite you in the ass.

If you have a false impression of a person's character because you've jedi mindtricked yourself into not thinking the worst of people, you might end up trusting an untrustworthy person.

If you are in a toxic work environment, and you convince yourself it's not so bad, you might end up staying in a situation that is actively harming you.

We are speaking in the abstract and I can't comment on anyone else's experience. But I personally find toxic positivity and the endless drive to be more productive much more dangerous than being too negative.

The counterpoint is that seeing things “as they are” (which is the mind of a depressed person — ask me how I know) can lead you to not give people the benefit of the doubt, it can lead you to be miserly, unmerciful, pessimistic, cowardly. There is always a reason to be distrustful. But the only way good things can happen in your life is to be generous with your spirit and you should seek to do so as a matter of course, even if the rational part of your mind has inhibitions.

This isn’t to say, be foolish. But on the other hand, the mindset that leads to this kind of deprivation can be more difficult to cure, since it always appears from a place of rationality.

The problem with these kinds of discussions is, we tend to get more abstract and further and further away from real-world examples. And it all hinges on what you actually value. I could come up with positive adjectives for every single negative attribute you listed. I can only speak for myself when I say that I have never regretted not giving someone the benefit of the doubt. I have regretted the contrary. Good things often just happen to people because of chance, and they attribute it to some mystical property of the universe--generosity of the spirit, for example. Conversely, being generous does not guarantee that good things will happen to you. I'm afraid it's far more random than most are willing to admit.

> If you are in a toxic work environment, and you convince yourself it's not so bad, you might end up staying in a situation that is actively harming you.

I hate a toxic work environment too, but let’s be real, everything is fake at software companies, so there is no “harm” happening if you stay. So what if leadership is terrible, if you can play their little games, take their money, and not tailspin into a depression… congrats?

There's a mental cost to that. Essentially having to put on a mask and performatively "play their little games" is taxing. Some are better at it than others. But in those quiet moments, don't you ask yourself what percentage of your life you have to be a different person?

I ask myself a lot of things, but they all require money to do. This is just the society we made, you do some shit that doesn’t matter for a few decades, get some money, then go do whatever you want. I’m fine with it. Would I rather not do it? Absolutely!

I'm saying there's a cost to that mentality. There's a personal cost, which is you giving up a part of yourself--not just your time, but your personality--to grow your net worth. And there's a societal cost to this level of cynicism being so pervasive. When the intellectual laborers of a society just go through the motions instead of being invested in what they do, the society as a whole suffers.

If you have to repeat thought eliminating clichés to justify this, it seems like there's a level of self deception going on. The chickens will come home to roost eventually.

Oh you’re assuming I just go through the motions. I do care about the craft of my work. Eh okay.

I agree. While depression and negativity leads you to see things practically rather than in an optimistic and hopeful way, the quality of life and satisfaction in a little optimistic world is much better. I am yet to read Daniel Kahneman but he talks about optimism a lot.

I recommend Martin Seligman. I've read some of Kahneman's academic work. Martin Seligman changed my life with Learned Optimism.

Sounds like my next read. Thinking fast and slow was something I just started but it seems like something I want to read when I’m functioning better.

My preferred modality: "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will."

The trick is to be positive about yourself and the people you can trust, but slightly negative about the world at large.

Unfortunately the one of the tricks of severe depression is to make you feel like that circle of people you can trust is ever-shrinking.

Sometimes, unfortunately, it also is true.

The issue with all of these is that if something is a problem, it’s probably because it’s maladaptive to the actual circumstances someone is in.

And for the same reason ‘no one can tell if you’re a dog’ online, no one can tell if what you’re feeling is actually useful/adaptive or not, especially if the common root to many of the actual disorders is various degrees of bias/delusion

Personally, I employ/enjoy a highly skeptical form of optimism.

I think things could be great, but there are many obstacles along the way to be aware of.

That's the kind of optimistic attitude I'd expect from Emperor Vespasian, builder of the Colosseum. You're role-playing your persona really well!

It isn't true, it is obvious bullshit.

It is like making the argument that the most accurate view of life is doing nothing because we are all going to die anyway.

That may be a subset of people, you also don’t need to be depressed to have an accurate view of the world

There exists another subset of people that merely tolerate the overly optimistic general populace and don’t need that as a coping mechanism to understand and mold the world

I would like to add to this. I have been depressed since I was a teenager. Anxiety Panic attacks, poor sleep, s*ci*l tendencies. I was able to finally get a job at 29 and first 3 months into it, I realized this is not a right fit and the company and its management is chaotic at best. It was a red flag right from the start but I ignored it because I was desperate for a WFH job. After 3 years of therapy, my views had changed that it's not so bad (something that I think the optimistic view changed). I was also looking to move to North America so I kept stalling to find a new job but that was a different thing. After I slipped back into depression a while ago, I again started seriously considering quitting because now in 3 years the company has grown somehow and some of the employees are really toxic. In 3-5 months I seriously want to quit this time whether I switch or no as I will complete 4 years at a company I never planned on working beyond 6 months. So there might be some truth to this. When I am depressed I see all the realistic things going on. When I am doing well I tend to ignore lot of the red flags.

The studies don't show they have a more accurate model of the world. The studies overwhelming only test the immediate judgements of their own behaviour and performance.

The more limited studies with different methodologies have found their judgement of other people's behaviour and performance is wrong. And that if you ask them after a delay (e.g. forcing them to use recall) instead of immediately, they are also wrong.

> some studies show that mildly depressed people have a more accurate model of the world

This is called the “depressive realism” hypothesis and there’s more evidence against it than for it.

The studies don’t show “more accurate model of the world” like the depressive realism pushers claim. They show isolated things like depressed patients performing slightly better in some arbitrary gamified task. There are studies that have the results going the other way, too.

It’s well understood that depressive episodes cause cognitive distortions that lead to overestimating the effort required for tasks, underestimating how easily things can be changed for the better, or ruminating on things that don’t matter.

What is even an "accurate model of the world" in this context? Isn't it all just perception and impression and interpretation?

For example, a depressed person might think: "this company is shit and will go under in 6 months because my coworkers and management are so incompetent and malicious"

Let's say their prediction was true. Good job!

What if the depressed person missed that there were a couple of people at the office who actually were not incompetent and malicious, maybe people they would enjoy to get to know. What if there were opportunities to learn interesting things while the company crashed and burned.

To determine what worldview is most realistic you have to weigh what aspects of reality are most significant.

What does it mean for someone’s model of the world to be accurate? My experience with mild depression is that you notice many negative things which are true but then lack perspective about how much they matter. When you feel better you just don’t pay any mind to these negative things.

I’d argue that you can still have an accurate model of the world without the depression part.

I can’t back it up but recovering from depression by simply putting “rose colored glasses” is a recipe for bouncing back later. Happened to me.

In HN’s case: admitting that companies are quite toxic and more often than not working against you, that most people around you is probably an incompetent if put under a microscope and that the things you’re working on aren’t exactly changing the world for the better.

The trick perhaps is not letting those things make you cynical, and not acting on them. And forgetting yourself because you’re also a bit incompetent too, so you can let you and everyone else off the hook.

> admitting that companies are quite toxic and more often than not working against you, that most people around you is probably an incompetent if put under a microscope and that the things you’re working on aren’t exactly changing the world for the better

It would be so much easier to deal with if I wasn't surrounded by people, especially management, that act like we're on a mission from $DEITY. Seriously, I can get over on working on whatever inane unimportant thing. It's the entire circus acting like we're not that drives me nuts.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't imagine plumbers get talks along the lines of "We're top-notch leaders in our industry for fitting pipes! True innovators. Pushing the envelope. We are world-renowned for our culture and are continually pushing the limits of what's possible. Every day we inspire people to live their best lives and be their true selves. " Add on to that, plumbers are actually important! And they know it.

Related: did you do anything specific to help with your depression? I've been getting into TMS / ketamine / whatever else territory for mine.

Yeah, the scalability of software definitely puts us our industry in a weird spot. Everyone must act as if they're Apple or Google and project confidence.

Plumbers are more impactful than tech, but since the impact is collective and local, there's no crazy talking.

About depression: Classic medication was enough to stop the panic attacks and the crippling negative thoughts, but it wasn't permanent. I would have tried ketamine if it were available to me. Behavioral Therapy helped me avoid bouncing back when lowering the medication. It helped me recognize when I was stuck in a mental loop. Later on we both realized that relationships, jobs and founding startups wasn't giving me structure and purpose in life, and lack of purpose was making me bad again over time. To fix this, some people have religion, others self improvement, others make companies, some get kids... I got a cat. It might not be a "sexy" purpose but it works. Now I can have imperfect relationships, bad days at my job, or pursue the other things that tickle my brain without feeling empty inside. The depression is still looming there but now I know how to deal with it before it takes over.

CBT can definitely veer into gaslightning territory. But then, if it helps you cope, so what?

It is the same with religion. Even though gods objectively do not exist, at least not in a literal sense, it can still help people to cope better with their life and be an overall positive force. Or extremely harmful when abused.

The world is pretty depressing. Everyone is telling themselves little lies one way or another just to be able to function. And no, Atheists are not more rational than religious people per se, they tend to have other delusions.

Personally I think striving to have a realistic model of the world is still the best long term strategy and that those little lies are like drugs that will help you in the short term but wreck havoc in the long term but who knows. It is complicated.

>CBT can definitely veer into gaslightning territory. But then, if it helps you cope, so what?

That's myopic. There's only so much "reframing" you can do before the tension begins to rear its head. Serenity now, insanity later.

Yeah, that is why I wrote:

> Personally I think striving to have a realistic model of the world is still the best long term strategy and that those little lies are like drugs that will help you in the short term but wreck havoc in the long term but who knows. It is complicated.

Though to be fair much of CBT can also be getting rid of false believes that hold you back.

Ultimately CBT has a lot of empirical research backing it up that shows that it is very effective for certain conditions. Though people should also be more aware that it works less well or can be harmful for certain people. It is not a silver bullet but nothing to sneer at.

Ultimately we all cope one way or another. If you believe that you have no delusions, you are more delusional than most of us.

How have you controlled for the possibility that you originally saw clearly and that the therapy is what has distorted your reality?

Yeah, reading this I thought the author should suggest to their friend that they talk to a therapist.

This is a good insight, but they already have a therapist. :) (I am the author)

Good on you for figuring that out. Not everyone is able to deduce that, it's good for your own accountability

That is true, our own perspective is to be taken into account. Sometimes it's worth trying to adjust your own view, but sometimes it's important to bail out before you gaslight yourself.

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