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Comment by xinn | Hacker News Reader

I felt the same way. I quit. I'm still unemployed.

I will admit the job I had wasn't nearly as dreary, but I was still plagued by the fact that what I was doing was utterly pointless and had zero value.

In retrospect, I wish I had just grown the fuck up and accepted the simple fact that the chances of any person on this earth making his or her life meaningful outside of his or her own family are astronomically slim. The machine we contribute to is one that takes in money, spits out more money, and creates very little value in the process.

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As a matter of fact, giving one's own family its proper value (the most) is one of the problems of our society. And one of the problems with our 'leader-based' culture is that 'ordinary' people (those who are not leaders, who, by mere statistics must be the vast majority) find little support in it.

So, I guess we all need to develop a 'family-centered' philosophy or life more than a 'work-centered'. I find this rather compelling, albeit difficult to tackle (because it is likely you spend more 'conscious' time at job than with your family).

So, as you say, it is a problem of a fine-tuning of one's own values.

Not that I am suggesting 'crap jobs' are good for anyone. But that one has to value 'family success' much more than 'job success'.

No success can make up for failure in the home – Stephen Covey

I'm not quite as cynical as your last line, but I fully agree with the outlook growing up.

And honestly, does any of this sound unique to programming? Do you think carpenters are all happy just making what people will buy from them? Do you think musicians all just want to make music people will buy? Mathematicians of old just being glad they could reliably hit ships with a cannon? Electricians constantly just plugging in similar wirings into similarly bad houses? ...

> Do you think carpenters are all happy just making what people will buy from them?

An anecdote to highlight your point.

I'm a web developer, but I've built furniture four our new house last year. It was fun, I've learned some new things and, most importantly, it's still there once the electricity goes out. It provides, in my opinion, a lot more value than nth iteration of some corporate website re-design. I thought in a parallel universe I could become a carpenter and live a great life. Then I've imagined the parallel universe in which a frustrated carpenter dealing daily with stupid client demands, building the same table over and over again, physically tired and risking dismemberment on a daily basis, comes home. He wants to make him a website to reach to more clients, so he picks up HTML and CSS and Wordpress, builds it and it's fun, it works, you can interact with this creation from anywhere in the world! He goes to sleep thinking "I should've become a programmer instead...".

The grass is greener...

Or do you think Benvenuto Cellini was happy doing salt and pepper for François 1er? (He wasn't, according to his biopic) http://www.jamesgreer.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/cellini... But that's what the kind was paying him for.

Thank you.

I think about quitting every single day, but this fear lets me grind through the day. Being unemployed is just no option if you're not alone/have family.

Look at it this way, if programming were fun, people would do it for free (and many people do) but if you want to make money at it, you are going to not enjoy everything. That's the trade you make, they give you money to do something which you might not enjoy.

The problem is, there are lots of ways to learn that programming CAN be fun (and this site is a great place to learn about places that seem to offer exactly that).

It's not that I do a job in a field that I hate. I have a crappy job in a field that I love. I'm convinced I could resign much more easily if it were the former case..

Yeah. Sometimes I feel like a bum for grinding out a not-so-amazing-but-nice-paying day job, but then I remember my wife and son. To them, I'm a hero. And that's a really big win right there.

I dunno. Quitting pointless jobs is still a net positive if you see the bigger picture I think. Pointless jobs should not be done and the fewer people willing to put up with it, the better. Bosses dealing out pointless jobs will soon learn to either raise pay or solve their problem differently. Sure, sucks when you're longing for that pay check but overall I commend people doing what you did.

Plenty of people have very meaningful lives outside of their family and it is nothing to do with chance. It does however require a level of effort that a lot of people just aren't willing to give.

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