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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

See, I think there's an ideal that lies in between "work the bare minimum to support yourself" and "work your entire life to the exclusion of other activities."

If I was in your position, I would have tried to get a raise instead of lingering in my mainly automated position -- ideally into another position I can automate. I don't want work to vanish from my head as soon as I leave my office, because that means it didn't particularly affect me in any way.

I don't think this is a particularly 'right' way to handle this. Some people want different things out of their work, and I think that's normal. You mentioned you're freelancing now -- are you doing stuff based off of what you were working on earlier, or did you switch paths?

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The work I did does not even remotely tie into what I am doing now nor did it warrant a second thought beyond the office. It was a contractor position. I had to import data sets into excel from other documents. All I did was export the previous doc into a CSV file and write a script to import it into excel. It was piss easy. Then I shipped off that data set to whatever team needed it. That's all I did. It was menial.

Right now I'm doing iOS development. I get to take my laptop to the park, or anywhere outside and it's goddamn amazing. Last night I worked all day on an isolated beach on an island right across from my city. Possibly the most fun I've had in months to be honest.

Freelancer is the new bohemian.

In all honesty though, that job instilled severe depression in me. Did about 6 months there and literally almost killed myself until I seeked help and my contract was up.

I'm honestly fascinated by that kind of work -- not that its interesting, but the fact that it exists is just strange to me.

Sounds like you're living the dream. Good luck with your continued success!

Nah I'm not making any money at all. I'm using the money from the job I just finished to fund 2 years of development time, rent, and food. I don't spend much so I get to live a fairly risk free lifestyle. I just work and read whatever is interesting that day/week/month.

Worst case scenario: I get a stupid amount of experience and land a sweet job at a startup once my time is up. Loving it.

My minimum goal is to become an awesome full stack engineer. My max goal is to live lavishly as a freelancer/consultant.

Thanks, I hope I succeed as well.

From the viewpoint of someone who has seen the inside of BigCo, that sounds pretty naive. I'd guess most "software" jobs are not too far from spreadsheet automation.

After working in IT consulting, I second that. I often found myself wondering how most of what I did was a waste of my skills. I had learned a lot of cool stuff in college, like distributed systems, that was completely useless to what I did. The problem was, when I transitioned to management, all my proactivity and passion for strategy were also almost useless; you were expected to do as everyone else, or else. So I quit :)

Right now, working on my startup, I get ticked off for a lot of menial work that it involves, but despite being tired and broke, I'm way happier. And this simply because I'm using my skills to work on meaningful stuff.

The chinese have an interesting saying: "All you need to be happy is something to do, someone to love and something to hope for". I think this clearly states the need for balance.

In my view, the hacker mentality is always about finding a way to automate your way out of tedium and do something more interesting with that time instead.

We're all mortal. Even computers have a finite number of ticks on this earth. Time should not be jail-time, where you try to make it pass quickly, which feels like being dead already. It should be child-time, where you look forward to each second and are spent and saddened when it's over.

Wow, your situation sounds amazingly similar to mine.

I do database integration for a large corporation -- moving data from other files and databases into one central database. Not the least bit challenging -- like you, I feel I can do the work in a fraction of the time, yet I'm required to be at my desk 40 hours a week.

Instead of getting depressed, though, I decided to make the necessary changes -- I'd start a freelancing business, and once it's successful I plan to quit this job.

I can't understand how people are like that you said -- "do decently in highschool -> pick a degree that you hope will pay out but don't really care about -> office life." I would be immensely depressed if I had to do this for 40 years with no way out. I have family members, friends, and an ex-girlfriend who think I'm being stupid or lazy. I just want more out of life than the drudgery of an office job.

But congratulations on what sounds like great success, and here's to me doing the same.

> Last night I worked all day on an isolated beach

Do you typically get a lot done working like this? I'd like to give it a shot, but I'm worried that it's not productive at all.

How'd you work all day on battery power? Did you have an internet connection? Did the sunlight make your screen unreadable? Did you have a good and comfortable work posture? Did sand get in your devices?

I'd find stories about this interesting too.

I took a couple of weeks to camp by a lake and attempt to learn kitesurfing, while working in the evenings. In the test run with my solar panel at home, everything worked well - charge batteries during the day, work at night with a dim screen.

In the wild I soon found that mobile internet power usage goes up dramatically if you're a long way away from the mobile tower, it's hard to work without a decent seat (I took my motorcycle, so didn't have a car to sit in), and the light was just too bright in the days/evenings.

Next time I'm going to try with a van =D.

Also, to answer a couple of the other questions:

- Sand wasn't generally a problem for me, except I blew up my fancy 240/12V laptop power adaptor when some wet grit got into the connectors. - Sunlight was only really a problem in regards to battery power; screen brightness is a big contribution to power usage, so there's a trade off.

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