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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like this person has a hobby that they want to get paid to do.

Which is fine, if you can find a way to make it happen.

But for the majority of us, work means work. It's not always aligned with your own interests, it can feel like drudgery, and we accept the uncomfortable reality that our labor is probably making somebody else richer than it's making us.

I'm a fan of cooperatives, where at least you know that you have part ownership over your endeavors. But even then, you often need to work to satisfy clients and customers, rather than to satisfy your own interests.

Ultimately, I've learned to separate my hobby interest in programming and my work. I accept that work will always feel like work, but a few things (like good coworkers) can make a big difference. I try to make the experience tolerable for myself and my coworkers, and then I do what I really love on the side.

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My interpretation was slightly different than yours. I read it as if they have no issue going to work and being paid to be a developer. However, they didn’t want to feel like they needed to constantly be leveling up and working towards the next rung on the ladder. Many companies have written or unwritten rules about leveling up or being pushed out and they screen for people hungry to grow. The author doesn’t seem interested in that trajectory.

I suppose in other industries this isn’t always expected. For example, you can easily be a mid-level accountant for your entire career without the company or industry expecting you to be on track to be their next CFO.

Maybe the author should be looking at medium/big non-tech companies that have been around a long time, have aging codebases, and aren’t innovating in the same way as as big tech or startup. I suspect they might find developers who have been there for many years and are pretty complacent.

I find the author's paragraph about small companies weird: other pages on their site indicate they are at a small 60 person professional services company. Their boss probably doesn't have a yacht. My boss doesn't at a large corporation, and I'm pretty sure his boss and his boss don't either.

Their resume indicates they have 1 year of experience. The unwritten rules about leveling up I think generally amount to reaching a first level "senior" (~5 YoE) where you can be expected to do things like figure out how to do a task and coordinate with others on your own instead of needing a mentor/lead to guide you all the time. Like it's more learning how to work with some technical stuff thrown in. I've been pretty direct with my managers throughout my 30s that I've got other priorities in life now (kids), and I'm not looking to grow and be more ambitious and all that, and I haven't found that to be an issue. Your manager is a person (for now. Good luck to gen alpha). They get it. Caveat: you still need to care, understand what you're doing at work, and do a good job. Don't phone it in, but you don't need to be chasing promotions either once you have some basic competence. I still get good performance reviews. We just have an understanding that I'm not looking at "the next step" or working toward any career goal.

Maybe the author's problem is that their workplace is basically a small body shop and isn't helping them grow? I don't know; never heard of them. They may want to find a more product development oriented company/team (so not just short term projects/contracts), perhaps like you say medium or large so there's more room for mentorship.

I see one of the projects was working on some thing used by a bunch of bike shops. That sounds like serving a direct need some small business had? One way to be both happier and better in your work is to understand why you're doing it. Why did a customer spend a not insignificant amount of money to have this thing developed? Why would someone spend their money to pay you to help them? Try to always have a good understanding of that wherever you are.

> My boss doesn't at a large corporation, and I'm pretty sure his boss and his boss don't either.

Don't have is pretty different from could not possibly afford though

Unless your company is extremely weird, I doubt that many layers of management could not afford a yacht if they wanted one

Then again, the bar for that is actually pretty low.

Source: My dad is a tool salesman, and also was the president of the local yacht club a couple of years ago. Actually thinking about it, that yacht club is surprisingly blue collar

I wouldn't ve surprised if white collar people hold off buying yachts unless they can also afford staff to pilot and manage them

Used plastic boats are a dime a dozen. I would bet almost everyone on this site could afford one if they wanted.

Moxie Marlinspike filmed a fun documentary about it, actually.

There are tons of devs in same bracket, just not the most vocal ones. I could be described as one of them. In most corporations big enough, this is the only way to keep doing development instead of management, unless they have the grow-or-get-fired mentality.

As soon as I would step up one more level, I would be often responsible for team deliveries. Another step and team may not get bigger but various political pressures grow immensely, its much easier to get fired there, dealing with various types of sociopaths is semi-constant. While compensation not that much. And most work time would be spent on meetings and working in MS Office products, not that much development, hardly any creative work.

At the end its just an empty label that is up to you to consider for its worth, to join the rat race or not. Even with my lower position I've managed (rather successfully) teams when needed. I get cca same compensation as 2 levels above with less tenure at the company, way more than any peers and in highest paid region in Europe. I get 10 weeks of paid leave by company due to working on 90% contract. So what is there to strive for - much higher daily stress? Having after-work or weekend calls? Unpaid overtime/weekend work that come with higher positions, although required rarely? Work moving into boring endless calls and discussions, 0 creativity unless you consider churning out excel spreadsheet or powerpoints a creative endeavor? Hardly achievements, rather destructive failures.

No thank you, if I can make the choice. Quality of life, happiness and all that.

What is a 90% contract? First time I see this term and searching it up I can't find a standard definition.

The vast majority of the world population, and the vast majority of all people throughout history have not made their choices of job based on the same criteria some of us who are more privileged do today such as wanting to work on something they value.

A job is and always has been a means to live for the majority of people on this Earth. Feigning a mentality of always wanting to grow is part of the act when it comes to corporate life. But even that in itself (corporate life) is a privilege compared to the grueling work most people throughout history have done.

Don't do anything for the majority of your life that feels like "drudgery". There is a middle ground between slave and idealist.

Working at crappy places because they pay more is a choice, not an inevitability.

Shameless plug, but I just wrote up an article about very similar issues, seems like me and OP are also around the same age. For me this realization was really freeing - bashing my head against "the market" for years, fighting with inconsistent values and expectations. Since I have accepted programming to be a hobby and looking for vocations without all the corporate shingles I am so much happier.

https://abelbodis.hu/lovecode.html (The whole site is very much in progress)

As a person that likes programming but doesn't like some parts of the job it helps me to think about this:

"You are paid for the parts of the work you don't like".

The parts you like are the things you do after work for free as a hobby (think personal projects, playing with a new language, dabbling in microcontrollers...)

It is possible for a business to pay someone for the parts they don't like even when the parts they don't like do not contribute to profit or financial success in some way. This is not only demoralizing, it is usually boring, and usually not a good caraeer strategy because it is not sustainable.

I feel like "My Head Count" is more important than outcomes at many companies.

> But for the majority of us, work means work.

This is true, however, I think that software engineering is an exception there. There are very few professions other than software development (maybe the arts?) where a growth mindset and tinkering on stuff in your free time seems to be mandatory. You don't see accountants or roofers skilling up in their free time. Furthermore, upskilling is less about pursuing one's interests than pursuing the interests of the market and I think this may be the issue for OP.

To gently push back, there are absolutely accountants and roofers who dedicate their free time upskilling or in adjacent hobbies. Many (perhaps most?) other fields have are conferences and journals, certifications, prestige jobs and grindhouse jobs, side hustles, and all the other trappings that feel unique to us. I'm not saying the distribution curve is the same, but it's easy to think this field is more unique than it really is.

And to the counterexample, the country is full of developers who just want to do their 40 hours and go home to their entirely unrelated life and hobbies. Incidentally, I have a friend who just got a job like this. He's the only developer in a regional materials company, and he loves being done with work at 5 (usually closer to 4) so he can go hang out with his kid.

> It sounds like this person has a hobby that they want to get paid to do.

What's the hobby?

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