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Comment by primigenus | Hacker News Reader

If you're having trouble with the idea that there is a real human behind this article, someone with feelings and motivations for writing what she did and not just some anonymous internet commenter who "takes a long time to get to the point" or "has a boring writing style", I recommend watching this video she published on Youtube in which she responds to questions people had about her article:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qeyt2Mw4sK4

Like the article, it's very honest and personal. It takes guts to broadcast or publish something like that about yourself on the internet and face the music, as is apparent by some of the responses here and on Youtube. Consider thinking about it next time you decide to post a snarky comment or a TL;DR.

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I think the primary reason that people here are so negative about it is that they personally aren't living authentically, that is to say true to themselves. If you're not living authentically yourself, an encounter with authenticity in someone else will bring up bad feelings, and so the default response will be to come up with all sorts of reasons to shame the other person.

This was one of the best things I've read on Medium. I liked the writing, I liked the emotion, I liked the imagery, and I liked the self-reflection. It's true that stories of angst over leaving the corporate world are nothing new, but the execution was good. It was particularly interesting to hear about her experience at Google in that light, given their cachet as the be-all and end-all of big corporate tech employers.

She's lucky she's able to listen and respond to her intuition about what's right for her personally. One of the great tragedies of Western society is that consumerism is encouraged over the pursuit of meaningful work.

> I think the primary reason that people here are so negative about it is that they personally aren't living authentically, that is to say true to themselves. If you're not living authentically yourself, an encounter with authenticity in someone else will bring up bad feelings, and so the default response will be to come up with all sorts of reasons to shame the other person.

Not really. I didn't read as far to get to the part about authenticity. It's just not the kind of content I expect to find at the top of Hacker News. Many others probably feel the same way.

And please don't bring up the guideline about what is appropriate content for this site. That guideline can be used to encompass pretty much anything.

Ok, but there's another guideline:

> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

Just curious, but what were you expecting when you clicked the link? Surely it wasn't going to be a technical piece?

I wasn't expecting anything specific, I clicked it because it was at the top. There have been many "Why I left [Big Corp]" in the past, subconsciously I was expecting something like that, or at least not a motivational speech.

I honestly hoped it was something about leaving Google as a customer. For example, in the past week, there was an article about Google stating that email stored on Google's servers isn't "private". I hoped there would be other, relatively technical, reasons behind a "break-up" with Google.

That's why I clicked the link. I still think it belongs on HN because it's something readers here would probably be interested in (not me though).

Uh, no. I think they're identifying her for what she is. Immature. She's coming from a perspective where the world owes her a fulfilling career. Mature people think about changing themselves, not blaming their situation.

I think it's also possible that she's realizing that she owes herself a fulfilling career, and then she's taking steps to change her situation...?

What more could she be doing right now to change herself?

Actually, mature people think about bringing themselves into harmony with their situation. That usually involves both changing yourself and your situation. And I think that's what she's doing here.

Simply changing yourself is a stop-gap measure: most people find out that it doesn't actually work long-term, because you can't actually change your true self. You can change your surface behavior, but if those conflict with your deeply-held values, those are going to leak through in times of stress, and you won't be able to do your job effectively. It's better to put yourself in a position where your values and your actions are in harmony: that's why they call it living with "integrity".

No, quite the opposite - she feels that the world/everyone around her said that she needs to make the most of her talents by working hard and then getting the most high-paying job. This is a fairly common feeling among "high-achievers", and sooner or later they all have an epiphany that what the world thinks is good for them is not necessarily what makes them happy. That epiphany is itself a fairly standard cultural trope which crops up (in other guises) in many a superhero movie.

I think you're right. Lots of that kind of resistance amongst us humans. (Climate-change denying e.g.) As my sainted grandmother's graduation card put it:

Polonius:

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Sure, the reason is certainly that...

More simply, the only ones that should care about this post are the people who knows her. I don't see here any depth, any earth shattering conclusions or space for parallels with the tragedies of society in the first world.

Again, simply, she matured over time the decision that that place was not right for her, she didn't care about having a career in a big corporation. Just build an alternative and move on, you are not the only one going through this, don't over think/over analyse it. That's what i would have told her.

Very well-written article. I was half-dreading that this would be a humblebrag about how they're achieved so much more since leaving Google.

Anyway the campfire incident resonated with me, and I completely believe it. I recently finished the book "Autopilot" by Andrew Smart, in which he describes a brain center called the "default mode network" (which was new to me). http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/autopilot/

The default mode network works when nothing else is occupying the brain. Hence to "listen" to "yourself" aka DMN, you have to literally be silent and in silence etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network

So that's where the constant chatter in my head comes from, eh?

I bet if she threw in some awkward Homeric references (instead of the boyfriend one), and wrote it a bit overly analytical and detached, then HN would be satisfied.

My educational background is heavy on Classics, but that's not it at all. I really thought about what she was saying before commenting, and for me it has nothing to do with the incidental that the author is a woman.

The problem here is the millenial-style privilege. It's all so shallow, first-world-problem-ish and child-like in its naivete. So she bought into the lie that having a job is a mystical road to self-fulfillment, discovered it's not fulfilling and set out to live, strangely enough, a lot like a housewife, except without the husband.

It's curious to me that it's so often bankers, techies, and other members of the 1% who find the courage to "strike out on their own."

Does your education extend to existentialism?

The thing is, once you're financially secure and rising up Maslow's hierarchy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs), these first-world problems are your main concerns: what am I doing with my life, and why am I doing it? Of course it is a luxury to be able to worry about self-actualization and finding a comfortable identity/purpose, but so what? Should she not worry about these things? Should she not question her trajectory?

I understand that injustice is happening all over the world, but isn't it still important to examine your own life? Isn't that basically the goal of being alive: to figure out what you really want to do with your time on this planet?

I don't consider that Millennial privilege. I consider it a good idea.

The goal of doing something "more important" like solving world hunger or whatever should be to get more people able to concentrate on 1st world problems.

It is good both for people to help others get up to first world, and for people to deal with first world problems too.

Life examination can be done on wildly different levels. Putting things into perspective helps examining things the right way.

I'll ignore the inflammatory parts and focus on the 1% thing.

Why is it that someone who is privileged isn't allowed to want something more? True, they have a lot, but that's the way of life at this point, people move up, people's position gets better, that's the story of human history. However, this person is SO well off, that they're not allowed to question or look for something better?

Just because there is suffering in the world doesn't mean I can't want for more for myself and family.

Edit: Nope I lied, I'm not going to ignore the inflammatory bit, fuck you for saying it.

Well said. All this "first world problem", "1%", "privilege" bullshit is, well, bullshit. A person's problems are their problems, regardless of what me, you, John Doe, Kevin Mitnick, Paul Graham, Barak Obama, Kevin Spacey, Kevin Bacon, Tom Selleck, or the sterno bum at the corner of 3rd and Main, think about them.

Sure, it would be nice if everybody spent their energy worrying about poverty in Africa or South America, or human rights in China or whatever, but no one is under any particular obligation to devote their energy to those problems, or to prioritize them over their own favorite issues, whatever they may be.

"No one is under any particular obligation to devote their energy to those problems." Why?

Because no one has the authority to impose such an obligation.

But everyone should learn to put their problems into perspective while growing up (and between first world problems and Africa there are a few shades in between).

In other comments i've seen often the word "maturity", well, not to be excessively critic, but that's not the first word that came to mind while reading that article.

But everyone should learn to put their problems into perspective while growing up

Perspective is important no doubt. And don't get me wrong, my own take certainly includes a large degree of concern about "big picture" issues. But as somebody who is admittedly a radical individualist whose interest in philosophy tends towards Existentialism, and who realizes that we are all living very short lives in a brutal and uncaring world... I don't have much of a problem with people who choose to focus on their own problems, needs and concerns.

Like I said, it would be nice if everybody willingly chose to focus on poverty, clean water, vaccinations, clean energy, pollution, etc. But if someone chooses not to focus much (or at all) on that, I can understand and respect their stance.

If I was a hard working immigrant laborer perhaps I would say she was lazy and shallow. If I was a psychologist I would diagnose her with anxiety and possibly depression.

The vagueness is strange. This doesn't feel right -- well people can be manipulated in to making the wrong decision by making that decision feel right and the right decision feel wrong (sales people do this all day.)

However, if you have spent all of your life with tunnel focus on education & then your job, there is a good possibility that you have missed out on a lot of the periphery parts to living. These small things matter a lot more once you reach a higher level of personal achievement. They also allow you to comprehend the rest of the world.

High performance environments, whether in a city like Manhattan or in a 100-hour work week company, breed a whole new set of problems. You don't need to run away from them, but, I do believe some times you need to take a good step or two back. When you return, the actions you take which impact your lifestyle will be more well intended and thought out.

> If I was a psychologist I would diagnose her with anxiety and possibly depression. > The vagueness is strange.

I agree. On my first reading, even I wondered, "why is she trying to solve by quitting a problem that need to be solved with anti-depressants?". But then I realized that her only fault was not articulating her problem properly. I'm sure there are some strong feelings going on there, but I can't seem to make out the reasons.

That's exactly how problems like that can be solved - not with antidepressants.

I take your point, but "The 1%" she is not. At least, not unless she happens to have a net worth of ~$9M, which is the floor for 1%erdom in the U.S.

Nor are most "techies", even if they are fortunate enough to be an exception to the downward trend in real wages (for the moment.)

The floor is more like 370k$.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Distribution_of_Annual_Hou...

http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/20/news/economy/top-1-percent/i...

bstrand mentioned net worth, not annual income.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/measuring-the-t...

The linked article, states a floor of $8.4 million, which is ~ $9 million.

To further the point, $370k is like ~5pc of 8-9 million. Which is to say that if you are <working> for wages, even at 370k your not that well off. If you had $9mm in the bank/investment portofolio, you wouldn't be "working", you'd be counting your passive investment income of ~$370k.

Personally I wasn't a fan of the article because it used an attention grabbing title which had nothing to do with the article. I get it, she decided that there was an alternative path to self fulfilment, more power to her. This could have been a great read if set in the correct context, but what on earth does this article have to do with Google?

What are you talking about? The article explains why she left Google, the company she was working for, to do something else. It's pretty accurate as titles go.

Within the context of the article, it's pretty clear that it could have been _any_ company of size, and she would have had the same response. When you title something 'Why I left Google' but your actually point has nothing to do with Google (or any large well known brand) the most reasonable term is 'Link Bait'.

The point about Google in particular is that it regularly tops the lists of big companies to work at when it comes to people in our field: workplace perks, project choices, flexibility, quality of engineers, and probably more reasons that have been gone over ad nauseam. There is a lot of status associated with being a Googler, and she talks a bit about that.

I disagree. Not every company is Google -- both internally, as an employee, and externally, in people's minds. If your thought process goes, "I am a software engineer; I want to be the best software engineer I can be; Google does the best software engineering on the planet; QED," then it intensely matters that her story involved Google.

Spoken from experience.

I'd be genuinely interested in reading the motivations for writing it, imho personal articles pertains to more private venues. And definitely not on HN, especially when light on content (but that's not her fault).

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