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Comment by spicyusername | Hacker News Reader

Nothing wrong on the surface with this, and the author explicitly acknowledges this risk, but it bears repeating:

Corporate environments are almost always toxic places to fulfill your emotional needs.

It is true that finding a job that "resonates" with your personality is key to living a fulfilling life, and that software engineering is the kind of profession that is really going to fit certain personality types extremely well, but despite that corporate culture can and will take advantage of you, divide you and your work "friends", exploit your willingness to serve, and discard you like trash at any moment.

Be mindful of how much of yourself you derive from serving the financial goals of others.

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I have similar reservations that this expresses, and it leaves me wondering as to what kind of person is suited for this kind of environment. Perhaps that's a pointless question, although I think that there is at least one useful answer to it: I'm not the kind of person who's suited to those environment. I'm not well-suited to take such a huge chunk of my life and basically throwing it away by creating a barrier between it and my emotional life; I find it difficult to imagine even asking another human to do such a thing, and wonder how 'natural' it is to members of a species that evolved without such artificial separations between work and emotions and life.

Throughout the vast arc of human existence, you worked or you died. Nature does not hand you food, shelter, clothing, and flush toilets for free. Most of us, if dropped naked into the wilderness, will die within 24 hours.

Bone evidence from colonial America is the colonists worked like dogs and died young. Bone evidence from the Indians showed repeated famines.

You've misunderstood what the person is saying.

Nature also doesn't hand out corporate welfare or export subsidies but some how that's perfectly natural.

I thought we were talking about capitalism, not the things government does.

Generally speaking, the clan you worked to survive with generally didn't cancel you because a seashell currency accountant saw some tangential benefit for a moment. Which might just be their own survival need to look busy or be a perforative hard ass, to avoid the same thing.

The loyalty you are dismissing as unnatural, was painstakingly discovered by our genes, precisely because it maximized survival in our natural environment.

If you didn't find your work in the clan to be emotionally fulfilling, and stopped working, the clan would not be likely to share the food with you.

Yes, that would be an expected and natural outcome.

Please tell me who is going to die if I don't push my employer-mandated vibeslop up to GitHub. I'm genuinely curious.

Yeah it's really not that serious

you might enjoy the tv series Severance.

On a more serious note, i personally enjoy it. Why? I find software engineering intellectually stimulating and i enjoy the _process_, but i don’t (usually) enjoy the _people_. There are really only a couple former colleagues I actually keep in touch with. You know - the “real” friends so to speak.

My outside-of-work friends are not nerdy like myself and that’s why i love them. Keeps me out of my work bubble and also gives me interesting things to do and talk about on the weekends. :)

Everyone is different though. Some people genuinely enjoy going to the pub with their work mates lol. I’d rather do anything else.

> Corporate environments are almost always toxic places to fulfill your emotional needs.

A job (corporate or government) is exchanging labor for money.

Generally, people tend to be good at jobs they enjoy doing. The idea is to get educated in something you enjoy, and make that your career.

Famously, the world doesn't need people to farm or clean toilets. We can all become "coders".

My wife enjoys her job as a cleaner. But she cleans much more than just toilets. But she cleans the toilets too. The world needs such people.

> Corporate environments are almost always toxic places to fulfill your emotional needs

Luckily the only emotional need my work fulfills is getting money.

Seems like a torturous way to spend 8 hours a day if you only enjoy it for the money. Do you at least _like_ you job?

It's okay. But I will never truly enjoy creating wealth for someone else.

> corporate culture can and will take advantage of you

All jobs take advantage of you to some degree. The difference is that a corporate job pays much more, and the work load is a tiny fraction of other jobs. If you on top of this can work with something you enjoy, then you've gotten a very good deal.

And many people can and do take advantage of corporations.

>> Corporate environments are almost always toxic places to fulfill your emotional needs

Thats the reason I avoid big companies at all costs

Also, Gogol's Chichikov is a better metaphor for the dysfunctional corpo software dev than Akakyevitch...

Old Soviet joke:

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, it's the other way around!

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