I Knew a Programmer Who Went Completely Insane | Hacker News Reader

I Knew a Programmer Who Went Completely Insane

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Although this is an extreme example, I sympathize and often have feelings like this. But it's not about the amount of work; it's about the constant internal struggle. Let me explain.

I have never had a problem about the volume or difficulty of work in any job I've ever had. In fact, some of my favorite memories of work have been sprints to finish something, whether in software, retail/distribution, or food service. I take great pride in delivering, sometimes with compromised quality, but always on time and budget. I imagine many here feel the same way.

My internal struggle is the constant questioning of whether or not I should even put up with illogical bullshit. I have no doubt that hard work, long hours, complex work, and difficult customers are occasionally part of my world. But every day, in my morning exercise when I would prefer focusing on the work of the day, I always find my mind drifting into anger over unnecessary bullshit like:

  - working for unethical people
  - watching others line their pockets while I work
  - choosing what's best for the company vs. the customer
  - busting my ass while others sit and watch
  - endless meetings about nothing
  - watching great stuff I built being scrapped by idiots
  - watching horrible decisions made by those for their own benefit
  - witnessing the functional taking back seat to the political
  - dealing with managers who don't understand technology (and don't care to learn)
  - dealing with people who don't understand the business/industry and (don't care to learn)
  - horrible working conditions for workers while managers get luxury
  - constant work-prevention structure imposed by people who have never accomplished anything

Some days I'm on top of the world, rejoicing when something I built provides great value to others. Other days, I feel like I'm digging holes on the beach only to see them filled up by the overnight tide of idiotic others.

My struggle continues. I only hope I have the foresight to take intervention before I ever become like OP.

When you work in a company you don't own, there are a lot of things you will encounter that not under your control (1). Personally, I find the Stoics' attitude very helpful when dealing with that fact. They advocate distinguishing between what is in our control and what isn't, suggesting to focus on acting honorably oneself, but always with reservation, i.e. aware that others can always stop us from reaching our goals but never invalidate our sincere efforts.

Talking of morning exercises, Marcus Aurelius used to remind himself in the morning that he would be around exactly the kind of people you describe, but that they did not have the power to make him crazy if he is aware of their inevitability: http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.2.two.html (BTW: I only used this source because it seems to be public domain and available online, if you want to read translations of ancient texts, invest in a modern one that is more convenient to read.)

(1) Of course, if you start your own company, you will be dealing with things you can't control as well.

Edit: Replaced asterisks that made the text italics.

> (1) Of course, if you start your own company, you will be dealing with things you can't control as well.

You are technically correct.

When you run your own company, the things that are "out of your control" don't feel that way, because at the end of the day, you decide how you want to act on them.

If a customer insists on butting his head in malevolent ways into a user experience I've created for their product because they think they know better, I have a few options. Of its an especially unruly customer, I have two: fire them or work with them. I will, in my mind, piece together the pros and cons of both, and will come to what I believe is the best decision. You are still deciding your fate and can live with the consequences because they're per your terms.

This is why, if I had a small team working on projects, every big decision would require unanimous vote. It's easy for someone to whine about having to work on something they don't believe in, but when you make them part of that decision process, and they consider the factors thoughtfully (like an owner), you give them that peace of mind of knowing they decided their own fate. They tend to come to the same conclusions you do, but aren't bothered by it because they're not doing it "only because you said so."

> Of its an especially unruly customer, I have two: fire them or work with them.

Employees have this freedom with their employers too, but not many realize it or are cowed by their personal circumstance. To compound this, one of the functions of (bad) management has been to keep them in the dark about their options outside of the company in case they get fed up with being shit on all the time.

At a much higher cost. A company with a dozen customers can drop the worst of them without taking a major hit. An employee with one employer has to risk everything. Especially since companies are often communities, so community membership is at risk too.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. I work at one of the top cancer research labs in the world, and you'd be surprised how dysfunctional our organization has become. It's perfectly described by what edw519 has outlined.

Seeing millions of dollars poured in projects that go nowhere since they are executed by incompetent workers lead by machiavellian managers is horribly depressing.

I feel that a startup setting would be incredibly more efficient to do what we do. But of course it'd be difficult to fund it, unless it's operated as a charity or it's backed up by the gov't.

In the meanwhile I'm acting as a stoic and enjoying some tiny victories.

Leak details. If nothing else, more light on the area would make it harder to screw around.

Thanks. Care to elaborate on this?

It's difficult to leak details and make an impact. Academia is really screwed up. 90% of what gets published is a blatant lie, but nobody seems to care. Most researchers live in a distorted reality.

constant work-prevention structure imposed by people who have never accomplished anything

I think this comment distills the essence of the problem the which gives people so much trouble. If your perspective is that of a maker/hacker then good work (which should be rewarded) is to make great things, things please people and improve their lives, and perhaps profit the company. If your goal is maximising profit for the company, sometimes good ideas will need to be canned or replaced by bad ones the customer wants, sometimes work will need to be stopped after much effort was put in, sometimes politics will override technical considerations. If your goal is maximising profit for the individual at minimal cost, you want others to do the work while you get the rewards, and neither the business nor other workers, nor their pet projects, are your concern - more fool them if they take the company propaganda as truth, believe they are living in a meritocracy, and don't realise the realities of workplace politics. From the perpective of a manager who has climbed the greasy pole to luxury while workers suffer horrible working conditions, who is the idiot?

I would argue that classifying people as idiots is not useful and obscures the real differences in outlook which produce this sort of friction. There are many other perspectives to work (not tied to specific roles like manager or programmer I hasten to add), and holding them does not make people idiots, in fact many others might view someone slaving away for a company in the misapprehension that they are improving the world as an idiot; both would be wrong. The best way to deal with this IMHO is to recognise that workplaces have a culture, which contains and controls many different aspirations, and if you find this culture toxic, you should change job if at all possible - it is very hard to change a company culture or the perspectives of other workers on their work. Also, work should not be your only passion if you want to remain sane.

Agree with what you said. But please don't make it sound like an axis with two extremes: "the maker/hacker" and "the profit maximizer". There's a third sweet spot, the "making your client happy" spot, sometimes at the expense of your hacker spirit and sometimes at the expense of a little more short term profit ("ripping them off"). The people who find this 3rd mode of thinking, who believe in "making stuff that helps others make stuff" make the company work and stay afloat and keep it a warm and nourishing environment for both themselves and the "pure hackers" and the "profit psychos".

Agree with what you said. But please don't make it sound like an axis with two extremes

Absolutely, those are caricatures which would not fully apply to any person or any role - real successful companies probably have a balance of different types in them across a broad spectrum of attitudes to work, profit versus excellence, etc....

You are talking to grey-area after all.

Wow... This situation must be more common than I thought.

I've had a few jobs in my lifetime that left me with the feelings you posted here... The beatings will continue until morale improves.

These points: - working for unethical people - busting my ass while others sit and watch - watching horrible decisions made by those for their own benefit

were ultimately the biggest reasons I've left jobs.

In one place I worked, we created software for the financial industry and sold it in regions, like such-and-such county or city. Then our office setup one of our systems and competed under the table with the regional customers around us.

Scummy. Ultimately, I left over this issue and it is still my favorite job I've had or will ever have. All because one guy got greedy.

Yes. The feeling is so common, it even has a name:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias

I don't use or recommend Microsoft tools because of this. They are good, technically speaking, but they will always be scummy.

Otherwise, if I am ever successful, Microsoft will clone my business. I think it has happened to almost all their partners.

Unless they are bought by Microsoft, like the Sysinternals guys. That's the only good exit.

Same could be said for Google.

Ed, 110%. It's almost never about the effort involved -- at least, not on a short-term basis. It's about the context.

I think the circumstances and frustration go beyond the description in this Dilbert cartoon, but it has never left my mind since I saw it:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-06-02/

Excerpt: "Wow! They're both better than my current job!"

"I have never had a problem about the volume or difficulty of work in any job I've ever had. In fact, some of my favorite memories of work have been sprints to finish something, whether in software, retail/distribution, or food service."

I'm sure if I put you on a 120 hour week for a few months you'd change your opinion about that, even if you were to ship something at the end of it.

I don't think it's a good idea nor particularly ethical given the situation under discussion to boast about how you've never had a problem with overwork.

120-hour week for a few months? Shipped at the end of it?

Is that a real project you worked on?

If so, and if it happened a couple years ago in Colorado -- I was one of your coworkers.

And I left just a couple weeks after the rest of you guys.

That was some crazy shit but in the end we did ship. And on time, even.

But I can't even pass that freeway exit any more without feeling a sense of dread.

Haha no thank Science just a theoretical situation, my word I feel for you man - that sounds horrific. I don't think I'd be able to cope. Games industry?

The point is that edw's comment on hours sits ill-at-ease with the rest of his post. As if overwork isn't a MAJOR factor in burnout.

I don't disagree with his other points, rather we mustn't pretend like working ludicrous hours isn't bad for you.

120-hours for multiple weeks? Is that even possible? Why would anyone without substantial ownership stake even do that?

Who said there wasn't substantial skin in the game?

And actually I remember it as 110 hour weeks (though it's possible that I was the slacker of the bunch).

Yeah, we had something like 3 months of working 15 to 18 hours per day, 7 days per week.

Totally possible.

Totally stupid.

I have only 1.5 years of work experience as software engineer. Maybe I am wrong, but aren't most of these quirks just a part of working with others? Regardless you are working for yourself, a company or organization, you have to deal with people. And people can be unethical, apathetic, incompetent, rigid, inexperienced, inappropriate. And when your company become large, it will have processes to limit your reign of power for good of the company. Every person I've worked with (mostly software guys) think they are better than others, and suffered. To me, it's more of an inability to work with others and handling situations and problems.

You learn well, grasshopper.

Indeed, whatever your occupation you will balance imperfect choices of what you will do, who you will work with, and the outcome of your efforts. Humility and acceptance of your limits go far in preserving sanity, whether you lead a multibillion dollar corporation, write software with a team, or sweep the floors alone after hours. You don't have total control, but that doesn't mean you don't have some control; do what you can (sometimes that means doing your job well, and sometimes that means leaving your job for another).

That's why I adore small startups where you can grow with others while being pushed to innovate. And people you work with likely to have the same mentality. The fact that the limited resource presents such challenge it's actually exhilarating! Well, my current job though hits almost all items on that list. It sounds depressing, but it has been a great learning experience! I like challenges and I don't believe in complaints, always make the best of the current situation. (really, I'm just squeezing every bit of learning opportunities out of it... big organizations got huge resources. Ha! =D)

>watching horrible decisions made by those for their own benefit

Always consider you have imperfect information before coming to this verdict.

As developer sometimes we think we know whats going on but really don't.

As a new startup founder I find myself making tons of what I would previously classify as horrible decisions just because I have much more information about what is going on.

The decisions you make change once you have to consider cash, timelines, resource availability and potential sales.

I think this point sums up (most of) the rest of your list quite nicely:

"watching horrible decisions made by [others] for their own benefit"

I think the answer lies in how you direct that feeling - either as hate for your job; or to drive a passion to control your own destiny by getting out and doing something yourself.

>I think the answer lies in how you direct that feeling - either as hate for your job; or to drive a passion to control your own destiny by getting out and doing something yourself.

It's not that simple. Seriously, people who work for me fight with me about exactly the same things I fought with my boss about back when I was really frustrated by working for other people. Working for yourself does not save you from dealing with these problems. It makes you see these problems from another angle, sure, but that doesn't always help.

there are so many compromises you have to make when you own the company, too. I mean, it's different, in that you own it, and ultimately, you have lines you won't cross even if it destroys the company; but god damn it's harder when you can't just walk. (I mean, some people feel like they can't walk away from their jobs. I /never/ felt that way until I had my own company, with customers and contracts. Right now? I can't walk, not without corporate and personal bankruptcy. There's no serious debt, but leases act exactly like debt when you stop paying them; I'm on the hook for leases that total well north of a third of a million in datacenter space alone... of course, that's payable over the next five years or so.) But yeah. I remember when I could decide I was tired of my job, and just go get another one. That was nice.

I mean, I talk a lot about the waste that salespeople are; the value subtracted by this negotiation process... that was actually a large part of the reason I went into business myself. It was clearly an irrational reason, as where I stand now, I spend a lot of time playing emotional games to see who gets the surplus value out of a deal, as the asking prices are set for companies that have margins at least an order of magnitude better than mine. And I still think it's a waste... but I'm doing it anyhow, because otherwise I can't afford jack. I mean, seriously, it is not unusual for the final price to be 20% of the asking price. what the hell?

The real problem is that negotiation is supposed to find the things that are important to me that are not important to you, and vis-a-vis. You want to work out a deal where both parties benefit maximally, by changing the deal. (this, actually, I think is why small businesses can often compete with businesses that are much larger with giant economies of scale. I can negotiate (in the positive way) with an employee "I can't give you as much as that other company, but I can let you set your own hours and work from home." - or if the employee wants something else, I can change my company around to accommodate that in ways a large company could not.)

Problem is? that is /hard/ - the people negotiating, first, have to understand the product, and generally speaking, salesmen selling technical stuff do not. Then, they have to have the authority to change the deal in non-standard ways (which I understand is hard because it means that five years from now, you've gotta keep supporting that one-off configuration. I'm moving co-lo, and all the one-off deals I made are now coming back to bite me in the ass. And I'm small enough that it can still all mostly be in my head.) It's way easier to make the "what you get" standard, then just figure out what the surplus value is in dollars, and play emotional games to see who gets the lions share of that surplus value.

Worse, now /you/ are the guy that's gotta kill the project that your employee worked so hard on, because /you/ planned poorly. I mean, at least you can honestly take responsibility for it and apologize, but meh. Now you are the one taking advantage of that hard worker who never really gets all that much extra money. (not having a lot of money is a good excuse here, and yeah, a lot of people want recognition as much as they want money... but even that is hard to do correctly.) Now /you/ are the guy that has to put the kibosh on a promising new hire because your supplier decided to increase prices, or your revenue took a dive.

It's easy to say 'I can do better' - actually doing better? harder than it looks. A lot harder, certainly, than just switching jobs.

I too, struggle with a lot of this. I've seen people who just "sit back" when they are dissatisfied with the stuff that frustrates them at work.

Problem with me is, I'm unable to do that. I DO enjoy the work I do, I DO recognize the value that I am bringing to the company/others, and I AM frustrated at people who insist on a work-prevention structure, but I just cannot bring myself to push things off my own plate.

I see the people who stand around talking about useless miscellaneous happenings while everyone else is sitting/working. I see the people who (even in non-managerial roles), take the fruits of my effort, and wave it high in the air "oh look, I'm such a genius! Look at what I did!". I see those same people treat me like crap simply because I'm actually doing work and not talking about how I lost $500 playing online poker yesterday, or how his iPhone app made 5 bucks this month. I'm see those same people make racist or sexist remarks as a joke, 5 feet away from the subjects of their jokes. I'm not the "in" crowd, I'm just there to produce results and value so they can show it off, get promoted, and look back down on me and sneer.

I also see that one other programmer on the other corner, working just like me, and being treated no differently.

I'm a very patient and calm person, but seeing how much anger I have pent up, I can only extend a little of my remaining empathy and sense that, that one other programmer feels very much the same.

I definitely sympathize. It feels that the world is accelerating toward the end of some century-long slide from value creation to value capture, where fortunes aren't so much built as they are acquired or harvested from the people who build them.

Is this not common in other industries too? Not just software? The frustration level is probably higher in creative/logical work (software, advertising etc) but I'd guess the situation is probably worse in other industries.

Is there any solution to this?

Have you sought out a mental health professional? In my experience, most incidents like the one linked have little to do with the amount of work or the politics involved, and everything to do with an untreated emotional condition. A lot of your writing above rings true in the same fashion. Please be careful.

Yes, being annoyed by unethical people is a mental condition.

... What, do you consider "being so annoyed by unethical people that you get committed to a mental institution" normal and OK?

There're lots of people who feel like you do.

This was essentially the reason is started my own businesses, or co-founded businesses. I was sick of all of the above. Then, eventually I got sick of the whole money grabbing nature the software business. It was just all about making someone else rich quick.

I was going to quit the software business entirely, but a chance meeting led to finding someone who actually cared and wanted to make a difference, as well as being positioned to do so. And we ended up starting Akvo.org, and now all is a hell of a lot better.

Bullseye.

I think I've learned to work through this brand of bullshit without being consumed by it, but I've earned myself a pair of golden shackles in the process.

My recent focus has been devising an escape route. I believe it starts with recognizing what's really important in life and learning to want less. I'm not sure where it ends, but it's hard to imagine escaping most of the bullshit while working for anyone else.

If I weren't in a different profession, I'd say we must work for the same company.

You have fought the hydra bravely, and I commend you for that. May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back.

What do you suppose we do?

For the long-term, here's the financial structure for the solution that I see: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macle... . Essentially, I think VC-istan and MegaCorps are both dead ends when it comes to genuine technical excellence (which weird people like us care about). I think it's time to have a serious conversation about financing a fleet of mid-growth K-strategist startups instead of these red-ocean, r-strategist, get-big-or-die marketing gambits.

Here's an insane thought that I had that just might work. Find a Midwestern city that has $25 million to blow on becoming a top technology hub and set up an Autonomy Fund. (I'll do the "grunt work" of screening for talent; if this idea has legs I'd drop everything to implement it.) 100 top-notch programmers, $125k per year (out of which their resource/AWS costs come, so no one's living high on the hog), and 2 years. First, these companies are designed to become profitable, not to exit, so compensation is profit-sharing, not the joke equity offered by VC-istan. The city that funds this takes a 37.5% profit-share of whatever they build (it's valuating their work at $333k per year, which is lower than a VC valuation, but the terms are better.) If it works, then add time to the schedule (i.e. more years of life and more startups) and possibly more engineers. This is like Y Combinator, but without the feeder-into-VC dynamic; it's to build real businesses that generating lasting value both to a geographical area and to technology itself.

I seriously think that Autonomy Funds are going to be big in the next 10 years-- VC-istan is essentially a shitty implementation of an Autonomy Fund, except with selection based on connections rather than technical ability-- but there are some obvious problems (moral hazard, principal-agent issues) that need to be solved.

>> First, these companies are designed to become profitable, not to exit, so compensation is profit-sharing, not the joke equity offered by VC-istan

That really, really resonated! Now for a counterpoint. When I read that remark, I recalled reading a recent interview of Groupon's COO and I quote this para:

In 2007, he started Global Scholar to “help teachers give differentiated education to kids using technology. It was a fantastic experience. I raised $50 (INR 2,698.63) million in the toughest economy since the Depression. In 30 months, I gave four times returns to my investors and then sold the company in 2010-11.” On why he did so, he quips, “The moment you start a company, it is for sale… at the right price. You can’t have emotions…” (emphasis mine)

Now tell me, just how exactly are you even going to combat deeply entrenched mindsets like those, which also happen foster the usual confirmation and survivor bias dreams in most, if not all aspiring "wantapreneurs"?

Michael, I really commend your insight into the problem, but "you have an uphill struggle ahead of you" might be the understatement of the year.

EDIT: formatting and word rearrangements and deleted some line that might be misconstrued!

EDIT 2: Sigh. I really wish, that when people downvote something they don't agree with, they take a moment to tell why.

I don't think selling a company is a bad thing. I think building a company with the idea in mind that one must sell (because one's backers will flip out if there isn't a sale) is bad.

It sounds like a lot of what bothers you about VC startups is that they've become a way for megacorps to outsource risky marketing experiments (aka "convex work") and buy the winners while discarding the losers. But through the usual avenues of corruption it's become a rigged game where the sociopaths inside the megacorps are working with their sociopath friends in the VCs and actually picking winners instead of only buying truly viable startups.

So they're closing the circle and turning it into a revolving door for an incestuous aristocracy where the amount of value you capture is a function of who you know and who owes you a favor instead of being a function of how much value you actually create.

How do you stop any market from getting taken over by psychopaths who want to turn it into an incest-fest? This is also a problem in every other industry ever, and also in government. Is there a such thing as a corruption-repellent, paychopath-kryptonite system, and if so, what is it?

>> I don't think selling a company is a bad thing.

Neither do I see it as an inherently bad thing. There are valid and compelling reason to sell a company. E.g., There might be no "family successors". Your heart may no longer be in it. You might want to do other things. You might feel that someone else might take it to the next level better than yourself at the helm.... etc., etc..

>> building a company with the idea in mind that one must sell [........] is bad

And that's exactly what was being implied here.... "The moment you start a company, it is for sale… at the right price". And I have a problem with that one too!

When I saw this story, my first thought was to go to the comments and do a ctrl-F "michaelochurch". Was not disappointed. I think this story is essentially the Clueless -> Loser transition in Gervais principle terminology.

That might be his future, but Clueless -> Loser is "going completely sane".

Technocrats are Clueless who go the other way and turn into "Sociopath with a heart of gold" types. We actually believe that there's something worth fighting for. Since we tend to disadvantage our own employability and, therefore, our incomes, I believe this puts us into the "insane" category.

We are here to use technology and rationality to do what our Boomer forebears never did (they came too soon, and had a lack of insight into the real problem) which is end industrial authoritarianism. The '60s radicals are back, 45 years later, but we sling code and like markets (in a left-libertarian, hybridize-the-welfare-state-and-market-economy, sort of way).

So, you define technocrats as white-hat sociopaths, basically. But don't you think that almost every sociopath sees himself or herself as being white-hat? You've built this narrative about a cosmic struggle between good vs. evil, but do you think anyone self-identifies as being evil?

I think your chaotic/lawful dichotomy is very real, but the good/evil dichotomy is really a matter of perspective, I don't think it exists in a concrete sense. Selfish/generous might be a closer representation of reality. What most of us perceive as "evil" is really just a person wielding power over others for selfish means.

There's a growing contingent of people using technology for generous rather than selfish means (yeah that's what "open source" is) and their philosophy is extending into social activism, but the industrial authoritarians have a big head start on us. They've been using technology as an expedient to their selfish purposes for a very long time already. (What's worse than being a MacLeodian Loser? Not even being one anymore because your former employer figured out how to make a machine do your job and had no reason to keep paying you. That describes 11 million Americans.)

I've always found it funny that generosity and sharing are "radical" and "activist" while greed and selfishness, even to the extreme, are now considered normal.

>> Technocrats are Clueless who go the other way and turn into "Sociopath with a heart of gold" types. We actually believe that there's something worth fighting for.

Thanks! So there's hope for me. Let me know when you are ready with the offices. I might pack my bags and book that ticket to join you. I hope the pay's sufficient ;-)

I completely agree. If you look at the foundation of (in our case) America, it is comprised of a lot of hard work by small businesses and families. They don't dream of "making it big" but they're realistic, offer a product or service that is useful to the community, and try to serve it whole-souled.

I like the idea; however, don't like the relocation. Not that I have anything against a Midwestern town but artificially designating a city to build a "tech hub" has rarely work. Many places have tried but failed. I don't see how it would be different this time. You will get more takers and talents if location is not an issue.

Location is only an issue if we focus on local govts.

Who else do you see investing in an Autonomy Fund? Once the concept is proven, everyone will want in (and then there will be saturation + a bunch of crappy ones that don't vet and underperform) but I think the first ones are going to be very hard sells. My thought was that local governments' desires to build tech hubs might be used to justify the first Autonomy Fund.

The Fed can invest. Federal government has a lot of development grants. The Fed had the stimulus money ready to spend. Lots of them probably had gone to the banks or infrastructure projects to hire bodies off the street but 25M is a rounding error in the scheme of things. It's time for the Fed to invest in hi-tech.

I submit Fargo, ND for your consideration. We have oil money, cheap cost of living, and a decent tech community.

I second this notion.

I have several friends who have stayed there after graduating from NDSU to work as developers and engineers. If you make $50K/year you can easily live high on the hog. It also continues to keep a "small town" feel even though its grown a ton over the past ten years.

I would say SD would be friendlier. They actively advertise in the Minneapolis area boasting of their business friendly government. They'd completely go for something like this, but then, nobody'd want to live anywhere in SD. Ever.

Do you think that:

(a) Fargo's local government would be supportive of a technology Autonomy Fund, and...

(b) it would be possible to get a critical mass of engineers to live there?

Also, what's the gender balance? I'm married so I don't care, but I think we'd have the best odds in a town where it's at least 53:47 women.

How about Las Vegas? I've never been there but:

1) Cheap airfare, international destination

2) A Party Town, probably helps the gender balance in one aspect, people would like to visit you.

3) No Income Tax

4) Still close to the SF Bay Area

5) Never cold, barely rains (good or bad depending on your preferences)

6) Really cheap real estate. Buy a townhouse for under $100k!

7) Many tech conventions are hosted there

8) Driving from one corner to another takes only 30 minutes according to google maps.

RE: (b)

For myself? Not a chance in hell. Sorry, I lived in Grand Forks for several years, and between the wind, extreme temperature differences, and flooding, you'd not be able to get me to live there. Sure, you could eventually offer enough money, but it wouldn't fit in this plan.

a) There might already be something like that. A local guy sold Great Plains to MS years ago for over a billion dollars, and has done a lot to renovate the downtown area and has a local venture fund.

b) impossible

If you're interested in this discussion (autonomy funds) I started it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5578195

Not to derail the thread, but nation-states are about as obsolete as operating systems.

So by obsolete you mean "not trendy to think about but still the single largest contributing factor to every aspect of day to day experience"?

Not quite every aspect, but the lion's share, yes. Precisely so.

Interesting topic. There were early operating systems that served as an infrastructure for user's programs, they trusted the user, etc.., as nation-states basically trust their citizens to trust the government. But then too much malicious os simply unsafe software got written (as developmen became easier; life of citizen demanded much less care for the state) and the OS began morphing into restrictive and oppressive systems like OSX and Win8. As these restrictions inflicted real inconveniences on the well-behaved individuals, and voilà, the government's no longer trusted and has to be fought with.

AFAIK, in software world the way to deal with this situation is to build a new level of infrastructure abstraction to deal with oppressive OSes (ie webapps) and let the old system slowly die out because its services aren't really needed.

Wonder what will become the political analog of the Web.

Oh wait, the Web will itself evolve to become oppressive, no new analogs needed.

Hegel would be happy, now that's dialectics in action.

Wait, web-apps didn't evolve to get past "oppressive" operating systems. They evolved because centralized IT departments and centralized application deployment were easier than providing adequate deployment support and keeping data closed for desktop applications. They're technologically inferior in almost every other way.

This is so true. The country I live in has about the same number of inhabitants as NYC. Today I read an article in a business magazine local to this country saying something like "we [as a country] need to be able to compete with the world".

I mean, if we're supposed to compete with the bio mass of India or China, we're gonna have a bad time...

I live in a country with a similarly small population and much smaller land-area.

Just because nation-states aren't the forefront of the most interesting stuff going on in the world today doesn't mean they don't perform a necessary function. The psychological problem with a functioning, well-done nation-state is that it fades into the background, and people just suddenly act surprised when they wake up one day after voting for neoliberals and find they've lost their rent subsidies, their child allowance, and half the coverage on their health insurance.

not to derail your derailing, but "nation state" has a specific definition that I think is different than what you are referring to. China, India and the US are not nation states. Neither is Belgium. Japan is the largest.

> The state is a political and geopolitical entity; the nation is a cultural and/or ethnic entity. The term "nation state" implies that the two geographically coincide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state

No, I'm referring to nation-states in specific. If you asked me for three major examples of why multinational empire-states are a Bad Idea, I would point to China, India, and the United States.

Though their are arguments to be made that China is a Han nation-state that simply forces everyone else to go along with what the ruling clique of Han want.

Don't worry, once I win the lottery, I shall create a paradise for workers.

Until then, hold your breath.

Unfortunately, after seeing Ed's previous breakdown on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5361056), I have to see comments like this in a new light.

-1547. How in the name of a million fucks is that a breakdown? That sounds like a breakthrough. He's being honest about his atypical and unfortunate trajectory. I wish more people had the fucking cojones to be that way about their setbacks and rejections.

Silicon Valley's tolerance of failure is paper-thin and a "heads, I win; tails, you lose" mentality. It means, "it's morally okay for me to fail you". It justifies fast firing and VC caprice, but if you actually fail, you're every bit as ostracized like PNG garbage as in any other society.

On edw519's so-called "breakdown": The guy's been handed a shit sandwich by life-- when your IQ passes 150, conflicts with authority are inevitable; it comes to you looking for fights, and if you don't see it that way, then your IQ is not over 150 and probably not even 140 because every genuine 150+ I have ever met has experienced that-- and he keeps working his ass off and doing the right thing. Balls of Steel. You know how fucking hard it is to keep working your ass off when every signal coming your way is negative? How fucking brutal it can be to keep believing in yourself in a world where people avoid the sick, unlucky, or unpopular with no concern as to whether it's their fault?

I have a lot of respect for winter travelers like 'edw519 and Abraham Lincoln. Summer traveling is nice, but you only get a sense of the real landscape if you go when the trees are bare.

The beginning was good, but when you claimed that smart people are certain to not get along with authority you went way out on an unsupported limb. I personally think passion and drive correlate to conflict a lot stronger than intelligence does; plenty of smart people know how to choose their battles and bite their tongues, and the suggestion that if they do they must not be super smart is just outrageous.

Around 130, you start to question and dislike authority, but you can still hold back.

At 150, authority comes to you looking for fights (even if you don't do anything to it) because you make it insecure about its inherent illegitimacy and moral emptiness.

Actual 150s are pretty rare: about 43 per 100,000 people. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3.333+sigma

I'm interested to know whether this IQ conflict theory is actually based on something or whether it's coming from your posterior.

Incompetent authority may come looking for fights. Any competent authority figure is going to hire the smartest people possible.

I have a high IQ and have never had regular "fights" with competent authority figures (management, government officials / LE, etc). I'm also very libertarian and don't like working for others but when I do I don't have problems.

I also have good social skills so that probably plays a part too.

Bullshit.

One skill that is NOT correlated with IQ is the ability to reflect honestly on your own motivations. (If anything, the smarter people are, the better they get at rationalising.) So here's a mirror:

- you have a problem with authority

- you have a high IQ

- you have a deep-seated need to feel that you're better than other people.

You are totally right...

This is sadly a lot more common than people think. I have a similar story from a prior employer, a system administrator who was often asked to fix problems usually caused by bad managerial decisions of which he always flagged initially as being problematic but nobody listened to him, even after it turned out he was right from the start, he was one of those guys who knew their shit. He was a really nice, quiet and reserved guy but I noticed over the space of 3 or so months his attitude towards work and the manager at the time started changing.

Not many people knew of his Twitter account, but I did. He would post crude remarks about the manager not listening to him and how he should be the manager, often using the initials of the manager when he insulted him to be careful and not be accused of slander I guess. I would often hear him in the office talking to himself, swearing under his breath and mashing his keyboard. You could tell it was getting to him. He was on-call 24/7 but apparently wasn't adequately paid the amount he should have been for someone who was expected to fix something at the drop of a hat.

One day he came in and sat at his desk refusing to do any work. He just sat there and then the manager confronted him and asked why he wasn't addressing his list of high priority tickets that he had and then the guy lost it. He didn't get violent, but he started yelling at the guy and the manager was a well-built guy (sorted of sounded and looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger) who I wouldn't even dare cross. After yelling he just walked out and never came back.

Of course my manager reported the incident to some higher-ups and then it was revealed a couple of days later he was in a mental hospital as he had a complete breakdown (he apparently drove himself there). I didn't know him that well, but I went and visited him after finding out where he was. He told me that it all built up; he was being blamed when things went wrong and weren't done on time and not being praised when things went right and were delivered within unrealistic time-frames. His girlfriend had also left him the day prior to the meltdown, he said she was unhappy because he was never home and when he was, he was always fixing something remotely or had to come in to fix something.

I have a feeling this kind of thing is a lot more common than we can imagine.

Sadly it is more common than people even think. Oddly enough it is always the ones that are most productive and I know from personal experience you can clear 200 tickets in a week and somebody doing the same job and paid more gets thru that in a year and you are the one being shafted as you spend your time doing the work instead of office politics.

Perhaps, instead of seeing your job as "what the job description says", you should see it as "whatever actually gets me rewarded."

Which is to say, at some companies, playing office politics is your real job. "Work" is just a signal you can emit to show that you are willing to submit enough to not get fired.

Perhaps doing more office politics than productive work is your job's signal it's time to leave. Do you want to work at a company where more resources are wasted on keeping the lights on so to speak than providing value to users? I sure don't.

If you can't talk to the CEO or CTO, if you're technical, on your first day physically at the company, that's a Bad Signal (tm).

Yup. If you become good at corporate politics, you become someone who's good at corporate politics. It's the first time I really understood the whole 'if you stare into the abyss, it also stares into you' thing.

It's a bit like martial arts. Being good at it is nice since you don't have to be afraid of being beaten up. If you have to fight someone every day however, there might be something wrong.

I was assuming a context of "you become aware that your company has this problem, and yet you persist in wanting (or needing) to work there." For example, you might you need the money, live somewhere crap for jobs, and your mortgage is underwater so you can't move somewhere better. If that's the case, then you should, in all pragmatic cynicism, think about your "real job" at the company.

Actually, perhaps I need to preface all my advice with "in all due pragmatic cynicism." I've added it to four posts so far and people seem to react much better to them when I do.

Most individuals wouldn't have chosen that deal at face value, so it's understandable if they eventually come to resent their "real job."

Accusing politics of being the downfall of some enterprise is a highly purist position. Politics is usually meant as "things that aren't coding that I don't like". Even political virtuosos still accuse blame politics when convenient.

I have seen politics kill someone's work and I have seen a project launch by doing nothing but working away and submitting their end product to flabbergasted responses. But it's rarely so simple.

If you don't understand what's going on and blame politics, you are living in a foreign land and don't understand the language. If you understand and don't try to ensure your voice is heard and respected, you don't understand the customs. If you don't understand the language and customs, you're at the nations mercy.

But fundamentally if you view it as opposed to work you'll rarely succeed in the best outcome even if you do strike a balance.

People call poisonous behavior "politics". Positive behavior is "collaboration".

I've been in situations where politicking allowed the company to pivot from an established, ineffective strategy to an new, better one.

I don't know a lot of people who want to play office politics, so I don't really see how "politics is your real job" would actually help. It just transforms it from "politics gets in the way of my job" to "my job isn't what it should be, nor what I want".

This is spot on, in many engineering jobs getting the right technical decision made requires you to exercise influence over management and peers. And having some influence in the bank involves a careful tending over a long period. If that makes you unhappy, try to think of it as building up karma so you comments go straight to the top of the list.

Perhaps HR should put what actually gets rewarded in the job listing. That way, both employers and employees can save a lot of time by not interviewing for jobs they aren't interested in. If employers were more honest and listed job requirement such as "kissing ass" and "play office politics like you're a congressperson", then we'd all know what jobs to avoid.

That can be for many reasons but an example of events for me will go like this:-

> Get new job, jump in there really eger, do a good job.

> Face stupid political BS, eagerness disappears.

> Start looking for other jobs, then ultimately quit.

If you keep working hard in a toxic environment you're going to do yourself harm. If you care about doing good work, move company. Many will be content with just collecting a wage though.

As an aside, I'ved worked on a helpdesk and got through about 5-8 tickets a day while colleagues got through 40. Ultimately I was promoted because those 8 tickets were the ones everyone else was skipping because they didn't have a clue what to do. Neither did I, but once I figured it out I did. If your tickets regularly require on average 5 to 6 minutes work, then perhaps you should question the value of the work you're doing.

I had a similar situation happen to me, minus the going crazy part. If you constantly have to clean up because of the bad decisions of a manager then you should just leave that company. Don't bust your ass trying to make a difference and change minds that don't want to change. If you are an employee you are expendable.

> Don't bust your ass trying to make a difference and change minds that don't want to change.

Exactly. Either leave or just coast by doing the necessary minimum and keep your stress buffers and brainpower for interesting personal stuff

I am not sure if the "just coast" advice would work. The source of stress is still there, still sapping away all the mental power, still occupying your brain during shower.

Ideally it would probably be just coast while looking for a new job in your spare time.

Waaaaaay before all this you should find another place to work...

Your story is really sad. I makes me wonder, do you know if that sysadmin had tried to look for another job before he got totally burnt out?

It's the injustice in the system. People just can't handle it anymore. It's only going to get worse as they keep on printing money and give it to the rich as well.

Employers, even the good ones, will put as much work on your plate as you can handle and then keep going. Systematically a workplace just isn't set up to help an employee handle stress, or even pay attention to an employee's stress level. They'll ask you to work overtime even if it is obviously killing you because that's just how the typical work environment is structured. Even moving higher up in the food chain, to be a producer or manager, doesn't change this.

You need only observe how many workplaces will let employees who are obviously sick with a cold/flu come in and work to understand how poorly most workplaces respond to an employee in trouble: They will not send someone home who is actively exposing coworkers to infectious diseases, so do you think they're going to notice if you're risking your health with stress? Sadly not.

So, as an employee, it's up to you: Pay attention to your stress level. If you aren't sleeping well, do something about it. If the stress is making you gain weight, do something about it. If you're having serious, serious problems, do something about it. You can't count on your employer to support you if shit hits the fan - even if it's their fault - because 99% of them won't. You have to be proactive.

You won't get promotions or raises for managing your own stress level and working reasonable hours, but you won't get promotions or raises for literally killing yourself either. So play it safe.

The culture of the company also matters. Joel Spolsky talked a bit about administration as creating "abstraction layers", and what's happening here seems like tiered administration (which I guess is a working definition of bureaucracy). In other words, the administration themselves are isolating themselves, by means of more administration, from the "realities on the ground", which creates this tension between the people who really understand what's involved and the people who commit to involving the company.

So we shouldn't say "it's just up to the employee", because that attitude creates its own culture, one where the employees work just enough to not get fired and the management accepts this attitude as network damage and routes work around it.

Administrations have an opportunity to choose what they're doing. Advising a startup-laden forum like HN to aspire to massively-multiplayer mediocrity might not be wise, because startups exist in a high-failure environment and must strive for passion and excellence. It's the right culture for very large corporations and for franchise restaurants, but it's the wrong culture for the deli down the corner.

Surprisingly, I don't think the solution must require "giving up control" as a developer-manager, though that will certainly help. If you look at these stories, there is a perverse sense of alienation from the company. Maybe this metaphor helps: the manager should be conducting an orchestra. The conductor doesn't have to give up control of the whole orchestra necessarily, but they do need to be aware that it's a bunch of individual people, and you need to communicate your vision of the music you're playing, and they need to feel the same vision and work with you to express it. You also need to forgive errors in performance rather than stop the orchestra for every little thing, and you need to let the audience applaud everyone when success finally happens, and everyone needs to hear the whole symphony, their parts and everybody else's, to know what's going on. In this way, you could in some sense "keep control" even though you give up micromanaging.

No they won't. Plenty of good employers understand work life balance, they understand that output doesn't linearly increase with time, especially in development. Good employers push their employees in terms of not letting them coast, giving them meaningful work and challenging them to be their best. That is not the same as piling on work and ignoring stress levels. There is an optimum amount of stress at which humans are at their most productive.

If your employer isn't like that then they aren't a good employer.

Do you even have any anecdotes to support this? I have literally never encountered an example of an employer proactively managing an employee's stress level. To suggest that an employer can somehow put employees at 'an optimum amount of stress' suggests a lot more understanding of employees than I think is possible in most scenarios.

I mean, yeah, we can spout platitudes all we want here. I agree that if you aspire to be a good employer, you should treat your employees well. But that's not the problem here: The example employee in the OP was a top performer who helped solve tough problems, and nobody seemed to suspect that anything was wrong until he snapped.

The problem is that workplaces are not designed to be able to identify an employee having problems with stress, let alone to actively manage it. I have never encountered a workplace that can do so effectively - some employers are better than others about things like work/life balance, etc. But the level of stress in your life is variable, and the level of stress being generated by your work is variable, even in the best of circumstances. It is difficult, if not impossible, for an employer to even understand how much stress you might be under outside of work.

For example, a lead artist at a previous employer got let go for getting into too many arguments at work. It was only at that point that we learned that he was having a really tough time because he was a single parent and his son was suffering from a severe, life-threatening condition. It's nice to think that if his supervisors had known they could have done something about it - maybe they would have - but from the outside it merely made him look like a bad employee. Maybe he wanted to keep his personal life private, maybe he thought he had it under control, or maybe they decided they had to set an example regardless of his reasons - but the point stands: Ultimately, it is up to you, not your employer, to manage your stress.

I've a friend who was told that he needed to take a vacation. Not in the "You're out of line" sense at all, but in the "We expect our employees to use their vacation time, and you've been working hard lately." He's also been told to cut back on the his hours, as his bosses didn't want him to sacrifice his personal life.

Usually when you hear stories like this, it's because the employee is screwing up. In this case, it's because the higher ups realize that proactively preventing employees from becoming overstressed is a good way to keep employees.

That's just what they told him, they really rather not pay the overtime.

A "workplace" or "employer" can't do that, but a good line manager can, and will. That's why they're valuable - a well managed team is far more productive in the longterm than a team where you just replace the "spent" people with fresh ones.

Of course a workplace can do that - by encouraging a philosophy of work/life balance, and by encouraging their line managers to actively pursue this. Do you think workplaces just let their line managers roam free, with no guidance?

There is a lot of active effort in my field (consultant engineering) to manage the true productivity and quality output of individuals, because managing this irresponsibly introduces an unacceptable level of risk to projects.

That this (apparently) hasn't made great inroads into software development is another indicator of the field's immaturity and lack of liability. Because there are no serious consequences for shipping faulty software (outside of a very few fields such as industrial automation), companies are not required to care about things like employee happiness or productivity over time, and this is reflected in stories such as this.

The best comments in this thread have advocated a personal, proactive approach to managing your work/life balance. This is true of almost everything about work - career development, training, raises, opportunities, etc etc.

(Generalisation Warning)

This is the dark side of the (otherwise desirable) trait of "getting things done" as employee.

I you don't actively manage your working hours and hold yourself back, somebody else will suck you out until you have nothing left.

At the end, you will be very unsatisfied for some obscure reason: You did everything you was asked for, yet somehow noone appreciates you and you still earn entry-level.

In my opinion, you should only use 80% of your working hours doing the "real stuff". Devote 20% of your working hours to non-technical work, active career development and image management.

1) talk with your boss about clients

2) show interest in the business side of your project

3) ask challenging non-technical questions

4) have a nice chat with your manager about non-work stuff

5) make sure everyone knows who had the interesting feature idea last week

6) make sure that the decision which overruled your recommendation is in the meeting report.

...

This is good for you and the company in the long run.

Some of your tickets will have to wait, then. Maybe the deadline won't be met perfectly.

That's fine.

Some of the best advice I've ever had was, "when you start at a company, it's tempting to try and work your arse off to prove how worthy you are. Don't - you're not proving anything, you're just establishing precedent. Instead, quickly determine what the absolute minimum you can get away with is and do slightly above that. Then work harder for the month before review time so you can justify a raise. The extra effort will be noticed now, but if you'd worked your arse off then that would just be normal behaviour."

You should spend your early time at a company gaining an understanding of its business needs (basically understand why you're there) so you can later take 'ownership' of important projects and tasks. Ultimately you'll be judged by your importance to the company, not much you work (although those two are positively correlated).

This comment horrifies me, and yet it's probably the single best piece of advice here (aside from "quit working in toxic environments").

You're also teaching your management chain to provide the minimum reward, fire frequently, and generally be unpleasant to force you to work more. And you turn your daily life into a struggle, as you and the management feel out and try to budge the line.

That may be good advice in the sense of being effective, but encouraging people to actively deceive their employers and intentionally do as little as possible is disingenuous and dishonest.

If you don't think that reflects on your integrity, or if you don't consider your integrity worth maintaining, then this really is advice that you could consider good. But telling this to impressionable people who are inexperienced and new to Real Life in general would do them and everyone they'll ever work for a huge disservice.

I think a better version of the parent comment's advice would be figure out what is a reasonable, healthy, sustainable level of productivity and try to work as close to that as possible - and no more.

Yes, this is good advice. It centers on the person and advocates a work/life balance. It doesn't center on the employer and how they can be manipulated and cheated for the employee's benefit.

For developers who are good at "getting things done" - they should really look forward to building a career as independent developers. Some people just don't care to manage other people and deal with their peculiarities (I 'm one of them) . The few developers that i knew who were really good at getting things done, they still do the bulk of the work in the same companies. Despite being given "senior" titles, i wouldn't like to be in their position. You are supposed to use your work to learn, then move on.

Absolutely true.

I think it is the 'equivalent value' principle.

Everyone should only work as much as their salary equivalent value, and no more. At least that's what I do.

The rest of the time... ssh to my private server and do stuff for me. I will appreciate it.

Most managers already know that you can't work 100%.

They expect 20% of your working week to be spent on things which support work but isn't directly the work task itself (meetings, communication, HR, training, etc). And as this is spread out across the week it's not as obvious and visible to the worker that this is the case.

One can still work unhealthily hard for those 4 days a week of real effort. I share your opinion that you should only work that hard 80% of the time (he says, as he starts another 12 hour day), but if you're not accounting for the stuff around the work that still adds up to working at 100% capacity and without the breaks to keep yourself sane, healthy and developing.

Mental illness is very common. This story has nothing to do with programming, except that technically strong people are given a lot of leeway for strange behavior, meaning that folks who need treatment often do not get it soon enough.

The other point, and I think by now all of us should know this, is that we are each responsible for our health and our careers - we cannot look forward to a lifetime with a paternalistic employer.

[Update: this was downvoted. I'm not at all harshing on programmers or on mentally ill people. But we need to face reality; doing otherwise serves no one.]

Mental illness is certainly common, but someone who is normally able to cope ok can be pushed over the edge when under too much stress, and even who initially has no mental health problems at all can end up being driven to insanity, given the right conditions.

We need to be treating mental health just as importantly as physical health. There's all sorts of OH&S guidelines for proper posture, lifting things etc. Similarly, there should be OH&S guidelines for ensuring employees are provided with a safe working environment in which they're not going to end up like this (at least, to the extent that work contributed to their condition).

You definitely don't deserve to be downvoted. Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed about and needs to be treated seriously and head-on. Downvoting this is tantamount to stigmatization.

The worker described in the article is shockingly similar to someone I knew several years. That person had a psychotic breakdown at work and accosted our CEO (physically and verbally). He too worked long hours and was considered a productive employee. Though no one cracked the whip on him, I'm sure the stress was a trigger.

Luckily for him, he was in a good enough place to find help and take a step back to recover. Employees at my company kept in contact with him and talked with him frequently. Eventually he found another position and is thriving. I hope the worker in the article gets the same sort of support and isn't stigmatized by his actions.

I don't like labeling this type of situation mental illness. That suggests that it's only the individual who is ill. It seems to me that situations like this result from a sick system as much or more than from individual sickness.

Are you saying that the system is broken because some jobs ask you to be a hard worker?

The article indicated nothing specific that the company had done wrong. It even admitted that the guy was "well treated and well paid" for his hard work - he just didn't like how he was "respected".

It's astonishing me that getting paid and treated well to work hard triggers a comment that the "system is sick".

It's a matter of human beings being treated like cogs in a machine (which is in fact what they are in today's world). The potential of highly intelligent people is wasted by those who are better at extracting value than creating it. This leads to ever growing frustration which eventually explodes leading to the destruction of peoples lives.

These are seen as individual problems but if these trends continue I believe they will lead to the failure of human civilization and possibly of the human species itself.

hard worker - exactly the type of concept that the machine uses to exploit the naive.

human beings being treated like cogs in a machine

You realize that Hacker News is focused on people starting businesses, right? Why are you here?

hard worker - exactly the type of concept that the machine uses to exploit the naive.

When you get your car worked on, do you expect that the mechanic should fix your car because you're paying him to or because you give him a hug and tell him that he's a useful human being?

When you get a cup of coffee, do you expect the barista to want not only for you to pay for your double whip latte, but to also feel that you're validating her as a human being?

The guy was "well paid and well treated". Without an iota of evidence that the business was doing anything wrong besides expecting that its employees do a good job - you indite the system and ignore the probable fact that this guy had mental stability issues that were going to come out either at work, his personal life, wherever.

No one's saying terrible circumstances don't exist. Mental illness is exasperated by terrible circumstances.

Exacerbated?

This comment really bugs me and I'm not sure why. Somehow I keep hearing in my head "I don't like labeling these gunshot wounds as 'injuries', what's really wrong is the environment full of random gunfire". It's the individual who is suffering, and that's important. Is illness supposed to be a cause, and not a result?

Thank you for pointing this out. Your downvotes are not deserved. I imagine a number of mentally healthly programmers looking to prove a point in regards to unscrupulous employers would prefer that this not be chalked up to mental illness.

Though the story to me reads like a classic case of mental illness and eventual breakdown. I posted a comment on the blog asking for follow up of the individuals case. Despite citing human factors I bet they don't know, nor care.

Off topic - but how does one downvote on HN? I only see a small up arrow to the left of the commenters' names. No down arrow.

There is a minimum karma threshold before new users are allowed to downvote.

Yes, ultimately each is responsible to himself/herself. But it doesn't help if someone higher up is taking advantage of such people, knowingly. It is nearly the same as taking advantage of people with low self esteem etc. The managers and higher ups needn't help, but at least they can stay away from making the situation worse.

Your job is to produce surplus value for your employer in exchange for reduced risk and possibly to specialize into work you find interesting. (Machine Learning doesn't happen without division of labor.)

You do not owe your employer your sanity or anything above and beyond what's reasonable. (As decided by your personal satisfaction and the standards/mores of your culture.)

If you're seeking to put more into the pot so you can extract more later, save money and stash it in a mutual fund or start hustling for yourself. Employers are perfectly happy to ignore you for decades on end, if they even keep you around that long.

Don't pretend value will present itself to you just because you're putting in the hours. Like thinking you'll get a date just because you're a good person.

Edit:

Don't let employers/management guilt you into working more hours than they deserve from you.

I don't think the guy in the story felt guilted into doing more work. He was trying to "climb the corporate ladder" by doing the only thing he knew how to do--working harder. He didn't understand the effort thermocline[1].

[1] http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/gervais-macle...

I was giving advice to the general audience.

I have to admit, I find the jargon of this particular sub-culture of analyzing corporate politics somewhat annoying despite being a fan of Church.

Something like this should be passed out to every young person that enters the workforce along with a pamphlet outlining the expected odds of being promoted from a low-level position to a managerial position.

The trick to avoiding complete burnout is easy.

First - don't care at all about your job. Remember that all corporations are by definition psychopaths and they will treat you accordingly.

Second - never do more then 35% of the work you are capable of doing in a day.

Third - if you find yourself getting stressed out tell yourself repeatedly "It's only a stupid job. There is no point in stressing about it."

Totally agreed. And I'd add a fourth point in: - never ever try to please everyone.

As @jaimebuelta pointed out in another comment[1], your bosses will see your kind disposability just as a capability to do more work for less charge.

It happened to me when I was younger: I started working in a small company, only three employers, and I often was (secretly) asked to fix what other two coworkers made wrong. One thing led to another and one day, after 8 weeks that I was working there, the boss fired my two co-workers since I unknowingly proved him to be capable of doing alone a three-person job.

Although in the very first place I was kind of proud of myself — I was showing evidence to be a reliable software developer and it was nice — after a while I realized that things just couldn't work out that way: tripled efforts and responsiblities for same amount of money and same deadlines, I had to work afterhours and in weekends, and I had no more time for social life and hobbies, feeling more and more depressed, it was just driving me crazy.

At that point I thought to myself: "Why the hell people should see me as a sort of super hero? For whom or what am I doing this? I'm only in it for the money, this job pays my bills, I am not this job".

Next morning I talked to my boss and my amount of work came back to what I applied for, and that was one of my best decisions ever.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5575761

> First - don't care at all about your job.

Maybe it is counter intuitive but I think healthy dose of this keeps me more productive and more focused on the job. While at work I always try to keep somewhere in the back of my mind Bertrand Russell's quote: "One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important". It helps.

Early in my career a more senior developer told me you can't do a good job unless you're willing to get fired for it. Coming from a nouveau middle class background, that was pretty shocking to me but over the years I have seen so many situations that have confirmed it to me.

Saving up a few months of living expenses in a bank account, so called "fuck you" money (or "take this job and shove it" money in polite company), can give you peace of mind about losing your job.

True. 35% may be a bit low, however, but I agree with everything else. On my first job, I didn't follow these guidelines. That's a mistake I won't commit again.

I'd add:

Fourth - say no to overtime, even if it's paid. Unless you're really in desperate need for money, think for a copule of minutes and you'll realize that your time (which you can use to do a ton of interesting things, and in fact is ultimately the matter life is made of) is usually more valuable than your money.

I believe I've been doing more than my 35% worth. Time to slow myself down.

Second - never do more then 35% of the work you are capable of doing in a day.

I'm a big fan of three-hour-per-day planning. "Metered work" (what your boss expects of you) should be limited to a 3-hour block, preferably a contiguous one. After that, find a way to sneak time into things that build your career. Don't mix the two. (You'll either cut the self-directed stuff and burn out, or give your job responsibilities the shaft and at zero, you might actually get fired.) When you need to spike, turn that 3-hour dedication to 4 or 5 or 6 for a little while. The nice thing about the 3-hour plan is that it accounts for slack, because things always take longer than they should.

It takes your boss 15 minutes per week (on average) to tell you what to do. If you do 15 hours of metered work, you're giving him 60:1 leverage. That's enough not to get you fired.

The trick to becoming awesome, I think, is to take that 25 hours of "working time" per week that most people spend on Reddit or Farmville or non-work IMing and turn it into Coursera or open source time (don't ever use it to write code you'll need for a side project; legal issues make it not worth it). It's not easy, though, because it's much harder to hide it when you're studying machine learning at 2:30 in the afternoon.

Not sure about the first point. You should work somewhere you feel passionate about. But other than that, this is just what I needed to hear.

I wasn't sure whether to vote your comment up or down, but it's definitely thought-provoking (so I gave you an up vote :)

This has worked for me.

Years ago I knew of a pair of sysadmins who were extremely overworked, often staying back late and working weekends, etc. Eventually they got a meeting with a higher-up and the opportunity to make their case that they should probably get raises and hiring another person or two would be a great help.

They didn't get more people to help, but they were told they only had to work 4 days a week instead of 5, so, you know... That's a raise, right? Problem solved! More money for less hours in the office!

Except for the fact they still had the same amount of work that kept them back at night on the weekends.

Sysadmin #1 left the meeting, went to his office and wrote his resignation letter.

Sysadmin #2 went back to his office. He was found a short time later with slashed wrists and not in a very healthy state. He was taken to hospital, patched up, and put in to a psych ward for a while. After a few months he returned to his job in a very medicated state, and just wandered around having hard to follow conversations with people. He couldn't really do his job any more, but the employer either felt guilty about letting him go, or wasn't legally able to. I'm not sure.

Sysadmin #1 successfully resigned, and was hired back as a contractor, setting his own hours and getting paid at a greatly inflated rate.

This is only tangentially related, but since I'm posting under a throwaway (I've been on HN for many years under my main nick) and can't really ask anyone to upvote this, I feel that this is my best chance for someone to see it.

For the last few months I've been growing more depressed, more anxious, and more stressed. I love my job, but it requires a good deal of interaction with clients, which never fails to stress me out. Combine that with relationship nonsense and a general vicious cycle of pain (due to an injury causing chronic pain) and depression, and it's led to a situation where I'm spiraling out of control.

After many years of being fairly stable, I started self-harming again and ending up in these obsessive thought loops, culminating in thoughts of death and (occasionally) suicide. Now, I know myself well enough to know that I'm not going to commit suicide (I've been far worse than I am right now, and I've managed to pull myself away from that; I enjoy life entirely too much for suicide, even if things suck right now. I still have hope for the future, and that's not something I see changing.), but this is obviously not healthy. I know I need help, but I have a few problems:

Problem #1: I can't find a therapist I can actually trust and connect with. I have serious problems talking to people in real life, so I attempted online therapy; every one I tried was a complete and utter waste of hundreds of dollars. I don't know that I'd go so far as to call them scams, but I wouldn't feel bad about doing so. Regardless, text-based therapy would make a huge difference for me, and I just can't find anything that Doesn't Suck (TM).

Problem #2: I've been looking at treatment facilities to just go there, disconnect from the world, and focus on getting better. But I have a job, bills to pay (that can be dealt with by savings, assuming I have a job when I'm out), and responsibilities. I know about FMLA leaves of absence, but that requires you (!) to disclose your illness to your employee; given the massive stigma around mental illness, I really, really dislike that option. All of this, of course, means I feel even more pressure; even in treatment I would feel that pressure.

So, HN, what do I do? Problem #2 would be awesome to solve, but problem #1 is the big one; without ongoing therapy, any help I get isn't going to be sustained. I know there's a solution here, and I know I can get better. I'm optimistic about the future for many reasons, and I want to stop feeling like the sky is falling every 15 minutes.

Sorry for threadjacking, and thank you all.

I can't comment on the whole situation, since I live outside of the USA, but I can give you some advice about Problem #1.

There are great books by David Burns: "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" and "When Panic Attacks". Both are available at amazon kindle: http://amzn.com/0380810336 and http://amzn.com/076792083X The "Feeling Good" book is focused primarily on depression issues and "When Panic Attacs" (as its name suggest) on various anxiety disorder. I suggest to read them both. They are really helpful, but not just because of their content(which is good), but because they present of number techniques from Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, which you can apply on yourself. But please note that reading the book and using these methodics is order of magnitude more effective than just reading the book and internalizing its contents.

Also, can you please elaborate on your issue with finding a therapist? Can you just go to a therapy session? Or you can't because you have to overcome strong anxiety first? If you are able to come and see a therapist(being able to manage your anxiety if you have any), then find a good CBT therapist and do come see her of him. Therapists are trained to deal with people who have all sorts of issues, even such serious as yours.

Thanks for the references; I'll give them a read ASAP.

> Also, can you please elaborate on your issue with finding a therapist? Can you just go to a therapy session? Or you can't because you have to overcome strong anxiety first?

I've attempted to find a therapist I can communicate well with online (complete failure there -- every service I tried was less than worthless, simply because it didn't give me what I really wanted, which was a judgement-free, confidential way to talk through things) and in person. In person, it's very difficult for me to talk about personal matters (business/tech stuff isn't a problem) so finding someone I can trust is incredibly difficult.

Not all therapy is talk therapy - I thought I needed that, but had similar reservations about how open I could be face to face. When I finally bit the bullet I ended up in most-self-directed CBT, with none of that recounting-childhood-trauma or what have you. It was very pragmatic, more about giving me processes to deal with things, than me telling the psych things and them telling me how to deal with them.

>I know about FMLA leaves of absence, but that requires you (!) to disclose your illness to your employee; given the massive stigma around mental illness, I really, really dislike that option.

Not true.

You don't have to disclose the nature of the condition, simply that a serious condition exists.

Well, I believe you need to get medical proof that such a condition exists, which would reqire disclosing the issue to someone.

The proof can be quite generic.

It doesn't have to specify what the condition is, just something demonstrating that a physician has validated your need to take leave for a condition protected by FMLA.

In any case, providing a medical certification only involves the HR department of an employer and there are clear rules about non-disclosure to people the applicant works for/with.

Source: Personal experience with the process and extensive conversation with people who deal with such things for a living.

Thank you, that's really very good to know. That makes me feel considerably better about that option.

your wrong about #2 in CA this is not the case however your employer is allowed to ask very specific questions about your reason for leave ( but most certainly not your specific illness or diagnoses) however these questions should be answered by a Dr and they are well trained in not giving up any compromising information.

IF your having serious trouble call your local mental hospital ( Stanford is world class they deal with this sort of thing all the time and there staff knows how to help you communicate with work.)

FYI :If you get fired while in the hospital or on leave without cause you have great grounds for a lawsuit ( plenty of lawyers will take these kinds of cases )

At a treatment facility they will help you design a long term treatment plan.

I think part of the problem here is that many devs often don't understand how much power they yield over their own situation. If you're good enough to be depended upon in every panic situation, that means you have more say than you think in the circumstances surrounding your work -- specifically regarding pay, scope creep, working environment, etc. If you don't assert yourself nobody will coddle you, because that's how capitalism works. The goal of the company is to maximize profits, but the cost (both time and $) in finding a talented, hard-working employee is huge and employers know that. So you have to stand up for yourself because you hold more cards than you think. If you have a passive personality where you never push back and don't stand up for yourself you will get completely rolled over.

I've met devs who only consider one side of the employee-employer agreement -- "don't get fired, don't get fired, don't get fired." What about the other side? "If ___ quits, we are screwed."

This is the reason why we invest in our skills, this is why we read things like HN, this is why we make ourselves indispensable. Because a higher level of skill, both technically, socially and in business, not only makes you a greater employee, but it gives you more autonomy over your own circumstances.

I don't agree with the comments here that encourage people to half-ass their 9-5 because "you owe the company nothing." I encourage you to do the opposite -- become so good at what you do that they can't ignore you. Be such a valuable perspective/contributor/asset that they shudder at the thought of losing you. Be great and the power will follow.

And if they still treat you like shit, leave. If this doesn't apply to your industry, leave the industry. Good, smart devs are hard to find and someone else will pay good money for you.

Managers will actively try to stop you gaining power. In most cases authority will play a game of chicken with developers if they know they are considering leaving, rather conceding.

Work-life balance is really important, and having a safety net outside of your workplace and project is key to not going completely batshit.

What's really bad is to find yourself in a position where you see your cofounder/coworker the vast majority of the time, and your work/project gets tangled up in the normal ebb and flow of the relationship.

You really, really don't want to get into a loop where you need to decompress with your best friends, but you can't because you avoid them because your shared work is going poorly, and the work is going poorly because you can't decompress. Yeah, being in that position sucks.

Make sure you've got something positive in your life beyond your current project.

“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.” ― Albert Einstein

Find a hobby :)

All football fans in the world agree with Albert Einstein :)

This is sad, but it's also plain old human psychology.

If you help someone out, you put yourself in an inferior position. If you're always the one sacrificing yourself, people around you will feel more and more superior to you. At some point, they will start expecting that you sacrifice yourself whenever shit hits the fan.

This doesn't mean it's bad to help out, or to sacrifice yourself once in a while. But in order to keep sanity and self dignity, it's extremely important to learn to say no as well.

If you help someone out, you put yourself in an inferior position.

I don't think so. I don't feel so.

At least when things are reasonable. Rather to the contrary: I feel stronger for being able to help.

Of course, in an unhealthy situation where help is required but not appreciated, and the person who help is not respected, then it's different. Fortunately, not my case most of the time.

I don't think so. I don't feel so.

It's important to keep in mind that the other party may feel superior, even though you don't feel inferior.

However, for many people this whole thing will never become a problem, because they are good at protecting their integrity.

At least when things are reasonable. Rather to the contrary: I feel stronger for being able to help.

That may very well be the case. But people (and situations) are different, and if you have a problem saying no, things may get very unhealthy.

Of course, in an unhealthy situation where help is required but not appreciated, and the person who help is not respected, then it's different. Fortunately, not my case most of the time

I guess that is often the case in stories like this. If you never say no, at some point your help gets more expected than appreciated.

It's important to keep in mind that the other party may feel superior, even though you don't feel inferior.

I can't quite see why that is important. It doesn't hurt me that the other party feels superior. Sometimes it may amuse me, though.

> If you help someone out, you put yourself in an inferior position.

What? This doesn't make sense. When you help someone out, you are putting that person in an inferior position. Does a beggar feel superior to you because you tossed him a quarter?

Who is getting their work done, with least effort?

They are. They are using your experience to complete one of their objectives, with less effort for themselves.

What about your objectives? Well, if you are measured on helping other people complete their objectives, then it's neutral, you both meet objectives. But if you are not, if you have your own piece of work that needs to advance, then you're pushing back the completion of your objectives.

I guess I could have been more clear.

When you toss a coin, you are already in a superior position. You toss the coin to be nice, and/or to affirm your position as superior (depending on your personality).

That's totally different from agreeing to work over the weekend to save somebody's ass. It's OK as a one-off, but if you do it more often than others, that's when you put yourself in an inferior position.

And this is precisely how the guy from the story thought, that's why he was saying he should be CEO, but the reality was different, because he was treated more like a slave..

It does make sense. I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who said you should try to get someone to do you a favor because they'll be more likely to do you more favors in future.

It is far to easy to fall into this trap. At my last job my boss always tryed to finish all my tickets until a friend in managment told me about a conversation he had with our boss. It boils down to: "Does he gt his work done?" "Yes, sometimes he has to stay in late but he gets the job done" "Then we are not giving him enough work. If there are days where he gets the job done and leave on time, there must be times when he finishes his tickets before office hours are over."

At my new job things are a lot better. When I started I screwed up a couple of times because I tryed to make things work by putting in over time and fighting until the last minute when things went south, where all I had to do was tell the mangment why I need more time / manpower like anyone else in my company.

Mental health is, unfortunately, not taken very seriously by many companies. I've never seen a benefits package that included therapy or coaching of any kind. We're put under a lot of stress at times (which can be exacerbated by existing mental conditions) and that can seriously affect our health. I suspect mental breakdowns happen more often than they are reported. It's not taken seriously and it's also something people prefer to sweep under the rug.

Bad managers don't care how much you work. A friend of mine works in tele-completions for the health insurance industry. He has the highest rate of completions per day than anyone else in his unit for nearly four years running. He has been overlooked for every promotion and opportunity to move to a better position. The managers don't want him to leave the unit because their numbers will go significantly down if he does.

I've worked an incredible amount of overtime for employers early on in my career. I wanted to show them that I could play the game, get things done, and save the day. I thought that it would pay off. It never did.

So I stopped doing it.

I knew that the calls would just keep coming. I knew that there was no incentive to let me have time off. I knew that I would never be compensated in any way for all that effort if someone higher up could help it. As long as I was convinced that was the way the world worked, they were getting cheap labour and profiting while I was being driven into the ground and made miserable.

You have to make the life that you want. Never let anyone else be in control of you. They have no authority to make you come into work in the middle of the night or stay at work for thirty-six hours straight. I think it's a terrible shame that some people think they have some sort of power to compel others to do this for them. And it often leads to tragedies like the one the OP described.

As you and a friend found out, the problem with putting that much extra effort (especially in 'concave' work) is that a promotion would usually just remove you from the work pool, leading to the ironic effect that the harder you work, the more likely you will limit your chances of moving up.

I've never worked in the Valley, but with one possible exception (I never tried to take advantage while I was there) every job I've had has had some form of Employee Assistance Program that covered things like counseling for workplace-related stress or work-life balance. It wasn't a comprehensive program (that was covered mostly by health insurance) but in most cases it would cover approximately six visits- free of charge- and not on your health insurance .

I did find that most of my co-workers were not aware of such programs, so if you feel like you could benefit from such a program, please contact your HR department. It's quite possible you already have such a program available to you and taking advantage could help out quite a bit if you are stressed.

My benefits include access to lawyers and therapists but the company I work for sells stuff to the insurance market.

It is important to build up your fuck-you fund. Once you have a large cushion to weather over a long period of non-working time, your attitude to work will change. Having the fuck-you option to walk away on your side will help you tremendously in dealing with pressure from work.

I know a guy that started cutting himself once with a small pocket knife. He just went back to his office and lost it. He was obviously asked to leave, as he was upsetting the rest of the employees. I saw him a couple of years later and he didn't mention it so I didn't either. How do you ask someone if they are still crazy?

Stress is a killer. I try not to let it get to me; I have responsibilities.

Since nobody here said it, if you ever happen in this situation were management dodges accountability for their actions or doesn't understand they are accountable. then there are two options.

1. Stay: dissociate yourself from the work and the outcome of your work 2. Quit: start looking for companies that are a better fit for your professional pride and when you've found one, jump ship.

Technical skills are still rare, you're not working in a supermarket here. you've got options.

Its so unfortunate to hear things like this. I knew of a person who was so stressed out by programming in similar situations that he went through a complete career revamp. He changed to law school and went on to work in government. He seems happier.

I started out as a computer programmer. After a few years of dealing with the braindead corporate system in America, I decided to make a change. I ended up moving to Australia (just applied for citizenship), and I work as a kitchen hand at an all girls boarding school. I get $20 an hour, penalties on weekends and public holidays, 4 weeks paid holidays a year, and superannuation (a retirement fund). Best decision I ever made.

If I didn't end up leaving, I might have ended up just like him.

This makes me wonder if the kind of burnout described by OP has anything particular to do with the profession of programming. We periodically have posts on HN by lawyers who got so burned out by their day jobs that they did a career revamp to become developers...

yeah, I wonder too. I think most people need change and its not uncommon to see people with two careers. But perhaps jobs that are highly specific in the way you get to your output are more so that way. For eg. engineers work on beautiful problems and come up with awesome solutions. But when they are forced to churn out code, its shitty and tough and repetitive process. Same for lawyers who do corp law vs. litigation. I do Product Marketing and because its such a varied job (particularly at a startup) I don't really feel a burn out. Then again, I am only 3 years into working...

Is it an american thing that workers do free overtime? I live in Sweden and I know NO ONE that stays late without being compensated either with money or shorter days later in the month.

I think that it is. I've worked for a number of companies in north america but in the US people are basically expected to work long. If your co workers are working overtime to get more done then you should work overtime to get more done.

The latest company I was employed at there had me working ridiculous hours but this is completely anecdotal, I'm glad I have my life back.

It depends on the type of work you're doing. Most jobs in the US fall under the 'Fair Labor Standards Act' and are classified as 'exempt' or 'non-exempt'. 'Exempt' jobs do not require payment for overtime work.

The classification of a job as exempt or non-exempt is not arbitrary but I don't know all the rules governing that. I would wager that the majority of people reading this page who live and work in the US would have an 'exempt' job, though.

All "Computer Professionals" are exempt, so that would cover many of the people on this site. The other exemptions are rather broad and would probably cover most of the rest.

Almost all jobs where you aren't paid hourly (so basically retail, manufacturing and construction) are exempt. I can't think of a single white-collar job that isn't exempt from the overtime requirement.

Not sure if it's Federal or CA law but you have to be making over a certain amount, though, to be exempt. In my last company that way everyone in the engeering dept. making under 70K (so, all of QA and tech support)

For the Federal law, it's $455 per week, so a vast majority of people make enough. I wouldn't be surprised if CA had a higher minimum, since their laws are tend to be more worker friendly than the rest of the US.

It could be a cultural thing. In Spain and Ireland (where I've work), if there is some extra time involved, it's not compensated, unless it is very serious and requested from management (working weekends, etc) My impression is that some people just get a higher workload and work overtime "to catch up" without telling anyone. Of course that's a bad idea, as your manager won't probably notice that you are working overtime, and will increase again the work load "as you are capable of handling it".

I'm in Spain, and this is very much the case. Overtime is basically expected, in many places there's a real culture of not leaving before the boss.

I can't make out what he was paid for "rushing things out." If it's the same as other programmers, then that reflects badly on the managers.

I've seen managers citing low profits for low salaries, but never want to give out the lion's share when the company turns huge profits. Then, programmers become cheap commodities who can be replaced. Cost is always the bare minimum you can get away with, regardless of the profits.

This is more prevalent more in the local corporate companies of my country than start ups.

I can't stress the importance of how some corporate managers hardly know anything about the technicalities, and end up agreeing to outrageous changes in the requirements. This is the problem in IT companies that engage purely in "pricing wars." And the thing is, most of these mangers don't even have the necessary communication skills, for that's all they have to do, right?

Is the issue really work-life balance, or mental health? They are actually two separate things.

I had a roommate lose it. He was very disciplined, but had a chemical imbalance in his head. He was a hard worker, but did this really have any impact on his losing it? I am not an expert, but I doubt it.

The end lesson of "Don't kill yourself for a company if they don't respect you" may be true, but that seems a little disconnected from taking care of your mental health.

Is the issue really work-life balance, or mental health? They are actually two separate things.

Perhaps, but I believe there's a close relationship between the two. Getting the balance wrong can definitely lead to mental health problems.

Maybe overwork exacerbates things, but sometimes it's just chemicals wrong in the head. It can be dangerous to treat major mental illness without addressing the biochemistry. In general I am not pro medication, but breakdowns can be deeper than work. Of course an 80 hour work week won't help an already unstable person.

Agreed. I think anyone in this situation should definitely consult a mental health professional. Depending on the factors though it can be a variety of things, and it may be a case of someone who does have a chemical imbalance but is normally fine if working at normal levels, but the overwork can push them over the edge.

The real issue is pay for performance.

No amount of money is going to help you if you're consistently working 80+ ours a week over a long period of time.

Not even 1 Million a year? 10 million a year? It is only fair.

No, not even $100 million or $1b a year.

There's a point at which health becomes more important than money. If someone is working so hard that the stress is taking such a toll that their marriage is at risk, they end up in a mental hospital, and/or are considering suicide, money ceases to become a consideration.

The most important thing for employers to consider in this sense is the wellbeing of their employees - this comes above everything else. If someone is healthy and happy, they can do a lot. If someone is stressed and unhappy, they're going to produce little.

And at the end of the day, the best way to improve performance is to ensure a proper work/life balance. It's about working smarter, not harder.

"It has been my experience that good producers are more likely to be asked to continue to produce. If they moved you to a higher position and better pay then who would produce the software?"

This has been my experience as well. No company ever uses that time to great benefit either, they just use it to change their minds seven times before release instead of two. Killing yourself for someone else is not worth it.

>the extra effort and hours that you put into your job as a software developer does not usually amount to someone higher up thinking you should run the company. It has been my experience that good producers are more likely to be asked to continue to produce.

In principle this is not even a bad thing. A great software engineer might not be that great as a manager or CEO.

It would be better to have a technical career track where you advance in pay, in status items (car, single office) or other perks (conference visits payed by the company). And of course a truely great company would send you on extra holiday for all-nighters and weekend-rush jobs.

It's also not necessary to move someone to management to give them more authority. Most software engineers don't want to deal with hiring/firing people or any of the other stuff that comes with being a manager, but they would be interested in having more say in technical decisions.

Doesn't mean the software engineer would be bad at either. In my experience software engineers with leadership skills(meaning someone I would respect, and would work under), still get passed up.

I worked with a guy who was an incredibly talented developer, and it was his first 'proper' development job. He was smart and good at what he did, and made a good impression, however as time progressed and the reality of ever shifting goal posts and getting half the time you really need to do something took it's toll.

Eventually he went to the doctor, who diagnosed a stress related condition and he was prescribed meds which helped for a while. But, it's that melting pot and eventually he snapped, smashed a keyboard and then threw a monitor onto the floor. I took the time to try and help and he realised whilst he loved dev work, he just couldn't deal with the stress of working inside a business and decided to give up.

It's a hard industry, I'm personally surprised there's not a much higher rate of stress related illness and depression. We've all probably skirted the burnout zone on a regular basis, long term that's not going to be great for anyone. I'd say the increase in startups being lead by technically gifted people who've done development should help, but there still seems to be an acceptance of push and push until you break or the job is done.

This is my biggest fear for myself.

Secret I ofund out myself is do not mix what you like to do with what you are paid to do. If you like your job fine, but remember you are paid the same. Many many companies will not reward that extra mile and many performance reviews are completely insulting as everybody gets the same % in so many companies and the variation between poor peope and good is probably an extra .5% pay rise.

So unless you are working for yourself, then work to rule will keep you sane. Use your hindsight to plan holidays, if managment don't listern in a timely manner about a potentual problem then just plan that week off down the line and let them suffer - sadly it is the only way you can stay sane and they can pay for there mistakes. Its hard out there, don't make it harder on yourself.

> Secret I found out myself is do not mix what you like to do with what you are paid to do

A very good advice I have always followed. This may not be true if you have your own company, however - since you will need a lot of drive to make things move forward.

> let them suffer

I agree to that. If management doesn't feel pain of its mistakes it does not have an incentive to improve.

This is going to sound insulting and I don't mean it that way, but does anyone ever wonder about the fact that managers are frequently considerably less intelligent than the people they manage? I think that's what drives the frustration a lot of the time. The thing is, just because they're less intelligent doesn't mean they're not good managers, but it think it certainly makes it a lot harder for programmers, who are usually very bright, to accept the choices their managers make when they don't particularly agree with them.

Having said that, I think a good compromise would be to make sure that the people who get assigned to managerial positions have formerly had the job of the people they manage. That way they're likely to understand the pinpoints and the frustrations and be motivated to eliminate them. Obviously not all programmers will qualify for this job, but some certainly will.

I guess that you are still a novice. Usually managers did the work of their underlings. However seldomly a competent person gets promoted - as you need someone to do the work. And since the less competent person will be relatively better manager than producer in comparison to the competent person, the less competent guy gets the promotion.

I strongly advise everyone to read the Putt's Law, where this phenomena is broken down in great depth.

The fact of the matter is that a lot of technical people who are geniuses technically do not have the qualities necessary to be good managers. Good managing requires ability to communicate up, down, and across the corporate hierarchy and the political minefield that comes with it.

Good managers will balance out good technical people in terms of skillset, and help their team to do their job, while also coaching them in the areas where they are weak (and if the manager is weak technically, then obviously technical coaching is not in scope). Good managers will filter what reaches inside their team from the outside and protect their team from crap while captaining the ship forward. They know their weaknesses and also know that good leadership requires hiring people who are smarter than you are, and then helping to facilitate the magic that can happen when good people get together.

Having managers who are strong both technically and in a business sense is rare. There are only so many Elon Musks in the world. But when you work with one, your work becomes very enjoyable.

At the end of the day, team members don't have visibility as to what managers do every day. This blog is great for understanding this stuff: http://randsinrepose.com

http://www.randsinrepose.com/cat_management.html

It's a popular saying around these parts (as in the startup community) that you should hire people smarter than you. It seems like having managers less intelligent than their direct reports would be a sign that the company is applyig that rule well...

Completely agree, a manger without a technical (coding, sysadmin, etc.) background has a weak foundation: how can they make decisions without knowing the domain itself?

Not so sure coders trump managers in the intelligence dept. After all, managers tend to earn more, and do less; I'd say they're brilliant in this respect ;-)

>> let them suffer

>I agree to that. If management doesn't feel pain of its mistakes it does not have an incentive to improve.

This makes sense, but how do you do that without hurting yourself?

By planning your holidays. 1) Identify issue and alert manager that it needs addressing - say ew say clock changes for summertime as a poor obvious example. 2) manager ignores it with it will be fine mentality as nothing is on fire at the time 3) you book holiday when you expect shit to hit fan

Shit hits fan, you have issue documented as you alerted your manager and got response not an issue so you booked holiday and not there. With that you can not be blamed. Also ALL IT people worth there salt work above and beyond what there contract states - so if your contract is for DBA work, that is not sys admin work, that is not crawling under desks networking or desktop support - but you help out and do those things. So with that if it is outside your scope of your work contract then again you have the ability to ignore it as well. But the holiday approach is the best.

But there are 3 types of managers - those that can do your job, those that think they can do your job and those that will admit they have no idea. Then ontop of that there are those that can balance dealing with you and sheilding you from HR and the other crap and then there are those that just look after themselfs and smile to your face and say all sorts behind your back. As a rule a manager that can do your job is one you will get on with, ones that can not do your job are less likely to be good managers I have found, though have met some that are and there is no hard and fast rule or way to single the good from the bad sadly until your few months into a job.

I don't think that works because if management is incompetent enough to neglect problems they are creating, do you think they are competent enough to realize they are causing them?

Sure there are many shades of gray.

But, for example, if you keep telling your management (as in writing e-mails with CC to higher management or have it written in the meeting minutes) that we need more file servers because we might run out of space and they ignore it, then when it happens and you're not around to fix this next time they may think twice before ignoring your advice. On the other hand if you resolve the issue yourself it can happen that no-one will notice.

I think you'll find that it's a common fear. But not so common a thing to happen. Lots of sensible things like exercise and leisure activities will work wonders to distract you from your stresses and worries

I hope he gets better soon. I can relate to him.

The pressure one might feel is overwhelming: you're expected to work extra-hours because you have a salary greater than the region's average (not only company's average!...); you're expected to work extra-hours, otherwise you're not motivated; you're expected to work extra-hours willingly, not because you're asked or it's needed, and be happy about it; you're expected to work extra-hours because someone gave a deadline to a costumer that's technically and humanly unfeasible, and now there's no going back.

All this stress and a mental illness in a parent of mine are scaring me.

The thing is, if I had a mental breakdown and ended up in a mental institution, I would probably repeat the "pen and paper to write a program" episode. My brain is so wired to program, either for work or for leisure, that I can't stop thinking about it. If I'm not doing "something" (reading, watching a movie, ...) I'm thinking of something lisp-y. Its exhausting.

Quite a relevant quote from other blog post today

Life is too short to spend every minute of it making somebody else rich.

—ardit

It's not only programmers. Its managers as well.

Its anyone who subsumes their job to be their identity!

At my old company (big corporation) management shuffles happen every 9 months to a year. One manager went from having 45 people working under him to 0.

The guy had a nervous breakdown as well. I heard he swam in one of our large number of fish tanks. That could be a bad rumor though.

Anyway he was admitted and all that. The company did pay for everything till he made it back about 4-5 months later after which he quit. I remember him looking at me down the escalator and saying "its not worth it man - its not worth it."

So don't let your paycheck or your job be your identity. Also understand that programmers at tech companies (except google/facebook) are at the bottom of the totem pole. So political shit and pressure all end up on the programmer. So try to not be a bottom level programmer for long - either become a tech lead or a manager asap.

> So try to not be a bottom level programmer for long - either become a tech lead or a manager asap.

What if I want to escape the stress, but want my colleagues to escape it too? We can't all be managers.

There are is a (well-backed by arguments) viewpoint that, in order for the capitalism in its current form to work, some portion of the population just needs to get screwed.

Easier said, then done.

swimming in a fish tank is quite easy.

I've seen a lot of this over the past two years. I personally have witnessed five guys completely break down.

Hell, we just had a manager who was under a lot of pressure last summer for a huge release. He had a complete breakdown and after four months off, he came back, took a demotion, but he's not the same guy anymore. He used to have a really outgoing personality and loved to talk about his band and music. Now he just nods when you say "hi" to him and keeps to himself.

While I applaud management for working with him and being patient during his recovery, I'm still wondering why other managers didn't raise flags before he went off the cliff.

For me, the larger problem is how do we stop this from happening? How can we stop these situations before people get to a dead end? For some of these people, it's really serious and something you don't ever come back from, which is really, really scary to me.

Five? Is there some connection - the same industry, or the same company?

Same industry (web development) different companies.

The one thing which connects them all is a developer just like in the article. Driven to perfection, willing to do whatever is asked of him, and burns the candle at three ends until he finally goes over the edge. I'm talking averaging 70 hours a week for two year straight kind of candle burning. The kind of narcissistic pursuit which is simply impossible to achieve.

I have stories of all five if you want to hear them. Let me know and I'll elaborate.

I would like to hear your stories :)

Here you go - didn't want to keep it short:

http://pastebin.com/EmM6sZnR

I, for one, would love to hear the stories.

Learn to say "no" before it becomes your only choice.

As a person who struggles with panic / anxiety, the thought of just flipping out and going mad is a huge anxious fear of mine. I often think about the great chess players who just go mad later in life, and now this, happening to a fellow programmer. The great thing about the work we do is the constant problem solving, and a lot of times I bring those problems home with me, it's nagging 'why wont it work', and I can't stop until it's fixed. It's that kind of 'always on the brain' activity that makes me nervous :). It's too bad this happened to him, but nervous breakdowns happen and hopefully time away will help.

> It has been my experience that good producers are more likely to be asked to continue to produce.

It's my experience that good producers prefer to keep producing, maybe with a little more freedom and a bigger paycheck.

Anybody who wants anything else but is incapable of expressing that through actions and words (other than going apeshit) is unlikely to be capable of actually doing whatever else they want to do. Leaders stand up even if their job description is "producing", they don't simmer in a corner and then explode.

Given how this person handled the situation I would say the company was absolutely right.

The employeer is for a big part at fault here. Off course the employee should make its boundary clear, but the employer just didnt really care for his position. Otherwise they would have noticed much earlier.

Here is my advice, if you think you are really that good, start your own company. Proof it, let the market test you.

The market is like a school yard. Some people are popular and get all the praise. This reinforces their incorrect belief that it was their skill and not chance that got them ahead.

If you want to prove you are really that good, contribute consistent novel and useful ideas to the world year after year. Prove that your ideas are good, with good unbiased evidence.

This reinforces their incorrect belief that it was their skill and not chance that got them ahead

If it doesn't take skill to have success in the market, then what's stopping you from being filthy rich?

contribute consistent novel and useful ideas

Wait, so if the market doesn't know how to properly judge ideas then who is the judge of what's "novel and useful"?

It does take skill, just not technical.

Knowing the right people, flirting with tech reporters, being good at PR etc

That is what gets you ahead.

It takes a variety of skills. Depending upon the endeavor - sometimes it takes technical skills, sometimes it takes sales skills, sometimes it takes marketing skills, sometimes it just takes the people skills to get to know the right people.

What it takes more than anything is drive. The most successful people out there typically have a tremendous amount of drive to pursue success.

I find that people who disregard skill do so because they have no clue as to why they're unsuccessful. The thing that would hurt their egos worst would be to admit to others and to themselves that they have no skill. The best thing that they could do is to look in the mirror, admit that they're lacking something, and work harder to find it.

Or how about you do a good job providing something people will pay money for. Unfortunately for tech people, what the market will pay money for isn't always what tech people want to build.

Great developer not necessarily make great founders or leaders.

Exactly, if the guy can not manage to have a raise for himself, he will probably not be a good sales/leaders/foounders.

I don't think that's true. A lot successful founders I know started their own companies because of frustration at their current company. Ironically they pull the shit that annoyed them with their own staff.

Even people with a lot of charisma will have a lot problems if they have no official company authority.

Ironically they pull the shit that annoyed them with their own staff.

Often, this is because they've been drenched from the cold bucket of reality. The nonsense ideas they once had about how easy it was to be the boss and how they would have the time, money, and energy to treat each employee as a special little extremely well paid but not-too-overworked snowflake was completely unachievable.

They realized that being the boss is difficult, because no matter how well their little startup is doing, there are always other bosses (customers, the IRS, life) to whom they are responsible.

Capital doesn't grow on trees.

If we're talking about software development, I bet you can piece together a computer from the trash (where do you think my home servers come from :)) that will be good enough to run a company. After that, your only issue is food and rent (which can be either a small or big issue depending on where you live).

Ben prints them whenever he wants, in unlimited quantities. Then he gives it to his buddies.

This is a very timely article personally for me and I think this is a really important issue that companies of all shapes and sizes need to be aware of.

I've had a couple of times in the past where I've come very close to being this guy. I'm a very hard worker and take my job really seriously (probably too seriously), and have had management that either doesn't appreciate my contributions, or is driving the company in the wrong direction that you can just see it's going to fail. In this situation, the best thing to do (for both parties) is to simply quit.

And now I'm my own boss, and putting just as much pressure on myself as the management mentioned in the article. I've come to realise very recently (and after some wise advice from a very good friend of mine) how dumb this is, and that there's a certain point you reach where doing more work actually produces less value. In fact you could draw a graph of working hours vs. output, and it would rise steadily up to something like 40-50 hours, and then drop pretty rapidly after that.

I'm learning that not treating everything as urgent, and getting priorities right and accepting that some things just have to wait ultimately ends up being the best thing for everyone involved, including customers.

This sounds like the final destination of burnout. Probably there should be more education about the effects of overworking on mental/physical health so that people can recognise bad situations when they're getting into them and pull out before it leads to self-destruction. Also the fault is partly on the management side. A good manager should notice if a particular person seems to be working a lot longer than anyone else under relentless deadlines and intervene.

While I've never seen anything as bad as in this article I have seen situations where the mild-mannered and earnest tech guy tries to be accommodating to help the company (and sometimes also in the expectation that their efforts will be recognised or rewarded) but really just ends up getting taken advantage of. On odd occasions (especially in the early part of my career) I have even been that guy.

This is remarkably common, although this scenario appears to have played out at a more extreme level. One statement in this post struck me:

"I was the one that the company sent to visit him in the hospital to check on him after his breakdown."

Unless this article was written by the CEO...wow, what a shitty company. It's obvious they didn't value this individual for the person, but for the output. Having run my own operation, I can say without a doubt that I value an employee's output, but the only way I can really protect that long-term is by taking interest in the person. It's entirely obvious the company didn't do that.

In the end, we're all responsible for our own careers and our own mental health. Don't let your expectations get trampled and remain in an environment that forces you to find happiness. We are in a burgeoning industry, just get out there and find what works for you.

I can definitely see this happening. I've never gone insane (thankfully), but when I was younger I have at times gone overboard in trying to please the higher-ups.

It becomes a negative cycle, because you think you're going to blow them away so much with your effectiveness, that they are going to bring you into the boardroom and make you a co-executive of the company.

And when they don't, you just work harder and bring even smarter ideas to the table. And they still don't (they say "thanks", but they don't rearrange their whole world view and make you a key player in the company).

The fallacy is this -- you are waiting for other people to recognize your brillance and "crown" you. You may indeed be brilliant -- I'm not disputing that.

But you can't wait for someone to "crown" you. If you have what it takes to be a key player in a company, then start one (or at least, apply for jobs at that level). Whatever field you want to get in, go do stuff in it. This waiting for external validation is the flaw.

When the higher-ups start benefitting from the work of someone like this, the temptation is way too strong to simply keep the machine cranking as long as possible. And they know how they got into the positions of power they have -- they "went out and seized it", they didn't wait for someone to hand it to the because they deserved it.

So they wouldn't know how to "crown" someone even if they wanted to. The world just doesn't work that way (granted, with some few exceptions). There's no "process" for promoting someone 10 levels because you discovered they are brilliant.

Instead, those at the top took it upon themselves to say, "Hey, I belong at the top, and I'm going to insist on it." Some of them over-estimated themselves, and some didn't. But even the ones who really do belong at the top did not wait to be "crowned", but decided for themselves they belonged there.

At the heart of it is an irrational need for external validation before you pursue the rightful level for yourself.

There are at least 3 posts from hellbanned users there, defending sanity of that programmer.

Stigmatisation at work. :-(

I especially like lucian303's one, which I'll reproduce for those who don't have the appropriate setting:

> The 8 hour workday was fought for and won for a reason. To expect more, an employer would be unprofessional. To accept more, except when compensated or in extreme circumstances, makes the engineer unprofessional. One comes to soon realize this. (See The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin.)) Most companies, especially startups, don't. It's sad to think that the culture values high stress, long work hours with the inevitable diminishing return, and literally anything, no matter how unhealthy, to get workers to be slaves. At the same time, a lot of these companies have mediocre health and dental benefits with high cost to the employee.

> Yeah, companies don't give a shit about you. And why should they? Corporations exist to make money. That's all. Your health, while in the long-term helps this goal, in the short-term it doesn't. The shorter the lifespan of the company, the less they care. This is easily observed.

> The question is, why do you give a shit about your company?

I think this story shows a rather low degree of insight into, or observation of, the programmer's abnormal behavior and health. Come on, tell us a little about adjustment disorder, how it builds up and plays out. Or was it acute depression? Phobia? Paranoia? Was the programmer's family involved? Did he voluntarily seek inpatient treatment? Was he placed in psychiatric detention on judge's orders? Tell us how helpful or unhelpful the employer's health insurance was.

Maybe the purpose of the story is to illustrate a point, probably a good point, about workplaces. Maybe although the purpose appears to be to report a difficult event that occurred to an acquaintance, it just isn't.

In other words, I think it's possible that the story is made up.

This is insanely depressing and a wake up call to all of us who work every weekend trying to get ahead. You know what gets you ahead in this world? Ownership. Anything less is just spinning your wheels. They'll only give you enough to keep coming in.

It is important to learn to use your skills to create what you feel, not what some other person tells you to. Developing a skill is the easy part, learning to use it is harder, because you need to find out who you are.

> It may be hard to swallow but the extra effort and hours that you put into your job as a software developer does not usually amount to someone higher up thinking you should run the company. It has been my experience that good producers are more likely to be asked to continue to produce. If they moved you to a higher position and better pay then who would produce the software?

This is why it's important to have a way to move "up" (greater reward, prestige and technical authority) that doesn't involve becoming management.

If you're feeling similarly, or have in the past, and are looking for an alternative then you might want to consider teaching.

I used to do cubicle work at a couple of tech companies and fucking hated it. I simply cannot stomach office politics, and I can't tolerate others that do the whole ladder climbing, brown nosing thing around me. The straw that broke the camel's back was when my line manager took credit for my work right in front of me without even batting an eyelid. I observed this type of sociopathic behaviour many times from many people. I literally couldn't believe how many fuck heads there are out there.

Here are some benefits that I'm enjoying as a teacher at the moment:

1. Great salary. 90k/year in Australia. I've heard that in other parts of the world it can be a low paying job.

2. Great working hours. 8:30am - 4pm. 30 mins recess, 50 mins lunch. 7 "free" (non teaching) lessons per week (this is equivalent to one day per week) There are lots of teachers that like to play the "poor me" card and tell you how they spend every night till midnight grading work. They're either liars, or are terrible at time management. I consider myself a perfectly OK teacher, and I never go past 4pm and very rarely do school work on a weekend.

3. 14 weeks of paid vacation - I just spent the last 2 weeks doing a garden renovation and got paid to do it.

4. No boss. Technically the principal is my boss, but in 3 years I have barely said more than hello to him and, I sometimes go months without seeing him. No line manager either. What I do in my class is my business. I choose the manner in which I deliver content as well as the interesting tangents that we explore.

5. No office politics bullshit. Schools have a very flat org structure. If you're not looking at advancing to the admin side of things (deputy/principal) then there is effectively no career path (I consider this a good thing).

6. Heaps of time for side projects.

7. Varied work. No two kids are the same, no two semester are ever the same. There are always interesting things happening. Sports days, senior formal, camp etc. I recently spend a week visiting work experience kids and got to visit an army base and defence research facility.

8. Over the years it's inevitable that you will make a difference in some kid's life. Whether it's helping them through a tough emotional period or helping them make informed life and career goals.

There is no way in a million years I could go back to the regular working world. I simply could not give away the complete autonomy and excellent vacation time.

In Australia there is a post-grad degree that you can do which will give you a full teacher qualification in just 18 months. Worth seeing if your district offers similar programs.

Caveat:

1. The school you're at matters. I am at a middle class private school with great kids. I've worked at very tough schools and life sucked, however, some thrive in these conditions.

2. The subject(s) you teach matter. Language rich will entail far more reading and giving written feedback which obviously impacts on hours worked. If you stick to Maths and IT grading is far easier.

I'm a high school student, who is considering teaching as a future career path, and I have a few questions.

1. What subjects do you teach? Would you recommend teaching them?

2. Did you find any value in working at a non teaching job first, then going into the teaching career? Put another way, if you were doing this all over again, would you go straight to being a teacher, or would you have a non-teaching job for a little while, and then teach?

Thanks.

Hi Neil.

1. I teach Computing/IT and a few AU specific subjects (Research Project and Personal Learning Plan). In the past I have taught Maths up to year 8 level also. Both IT and Maths are great subjects. Personally I'm very happy teaching either of them. One thing to note is that as a teacher you do have to be willing to take on a subject you may not be entirely qualified for. For example I'm currently teaching a year 8 media studies course without having any media training. It's really all about having an open mind.

2. Having worked outside of teaching first, even though it was only for 3 years, was invaluable. Career teachers who have only ever taught are a strange bunch. They have a totally distorted picture of reality. They don't realise that in the "real world" people:

a) have line managers,

b) have to keep time sheets which require that literally every hour of time is billed to a client,

c) have a boss working across from you or continuously looking over your shoulder,

d) have only 4 weeks of paid vacation,

e) have a requirement to justify every sick day and produce a doctor's certificate for each absence etc.

f) The list goes on and on.

So in answer to your question: Having a "real" job outside of teaching has been the single best thing I ever did for my "career". It means that even after almost 10 years of teaching I still appreciate all of the great things this job has to offer.

Having said that, teaching is not for everyone. It isn't rocket surgery, but not everyone has what it takes. You have to really love the act of teaching, as well as liking being around kids most of the time.

I'm glad you're considering teaching as a career. I hope, whatever path you choose, things work out in your favour. If you have any further questions then I'm happy to pass on my email address.

All the best.

Hey, thanks for answering my questions. I appreciate the help.

I do have a few other questions. Could I get your email? If you don't want to post it here, my email is in my profile.

This description of what teaching is like in Australia deserves a thread all on its own.

It has been my experience that good producers are more likely to be asked to continue to produce. If they moved you to a higher position and better pay then who would produce the software?

My experience has been the opposite, and more akin to the Peter Principle[1]. The best engineers become team leads, and then managers, and then...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

Has anyone read The Bug (http://www.amazon.com/The-Bug-Ellen-Ullman/dp/B000HWYPSE/ref...)? After reading it and experiencing all kinds of work environments, I can see how a person's sanity is tested.

Yes - I came in just to mention this. A great combination of a glance into the dotcom startup days + a feel of the classic gothic horror novel.

I also saw it as a cautionary tale to people in our line of work.

Yea...i do feel depression sometimes with my work...Also to add to few points mentioned here, I am also end up doing others work when they just stuck the team work...its frustating when u end up doing others work...

But I am always in control..used to play FIFA to control my emotions until my fingers having pain issues...now i watch some movies daily...

Most mental illness is an illness. Just exactly that.

Yes, we want to blame it on working long hours or exposure to unethical bosses, but that myth just makes us feel better. We like to think that we can avoid mental illness by avoiding mean bosses, like we could avoid cancer if we eat plenty of vegetables.

Unfortunately, that just isn't true.

Maybe he didn't know the best way to do something vs the hardest way to do it. Just relax your mind, think the best in you to produce the best thought and we have the best product as we can. It's the boss's job to decide if we do the good job or not. Please, the boss is not our enemy, ourself is our enemy.

Completely and utterly irrelevant, but for some reason I assumed it was this guy: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

All this time I felt I was alone, I'm so tired of my bosses' BS. I've being working so long without feeling I'm working for the right company/boss, I need a break.

Did anyone else laugh when they saw the url 'startingdotnetprogramming.blogspot.com'? I think there's a correlation here with the post title...

It's actually "dotne", not "dotnet". Strange.

Sustainability dictates that you don't keep going above and beyond without corresponding rest and relaxation.

The guy who wrote this should go back to school and learn how to spell.

sad

It's the worst week in 11.5 years to joke about what a part of me wishes he had done, for the good of society, so I won't.

Seriously, though, we need to fucking take this industry back. (I am so fucking serious about this issue that I am willing to fucking split infinitives with "fucking".) These executive assholes are destroying trillions in value ( http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/programmer-au... ) and we have no fucking need for them. Do we need people who understand business, economics, relationships, and sales? Absolutely. And more than anything, we need genuine teachers to step up and provide leadership. What we don't need are the short-sighted extortionist fuckheads who pass for management in most companies.

Sad story, but he needs to set aside time for himself to recuperate and recover from a work week. The old saying that many people have said time and again, that they will go crazy from working, literally happened to him. Why work yourself to the brink of insanity when the people you work for do not honestly care.

Company paid health insurance is one of the stupidest thing ever, the moment you most needed it, they fire you.

Poor guy, this is sad. I did have to laugh at, "He asked for a pencil and a piece of paper so he could write a program down.", however.

Wow, there are some great hidden comments here, goto your settings page, turn showdead to yes.

I knew a .* that went completely insane. Ok, so what?

That's what I thought as well. I expected some dire circumstance that the guy was put in, or some special lesson besides the weekly slacker "don't work to hard for the man" meme.

I know it's prejudiced, but I have a hard time taking someone seriously when they have a typo in the url of their site...

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