One thing that helped me is not to care so much about my employer's goals.
It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far.
I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right.
You're probably not going to get rich from working a day job. You're replaceable, and if you left your job tomorrow then you'll soon be forgotten. This is true for the majority of software engineers.
In that context, why do so many of us take on so many unnecessary responsibilities? It's tempting to say "Well, my employer assigned them." But how often do you tell them no, or try to present a different approach that just so happens not to involve you?
I know someone who is a chronic yes person. They will almost never say no, and they're pretty stressed day to day because of it. Whenever I point out that they're taking on too much, they say that they disagree and that it's their career.
That's true, but they won't get rich from that career, so I don't understand why they care so much about it.
Just remember to say 'no' for yourself from time to time. You often don't need to take on as many responsibilities as you have.
I totally agree. Don't be "pro-active" be "re-active" - is my way of putting it.
Frankly, most orgs will not reward pro-activity, in fact you can even be punished for it, since if a problem is not yet known by stakeholders then why are you solving it.
There have been times in my career where I spotted issues from other teams on preview or staging servers and helped to fix it. Then I later got blamed (or dragged into the subject) when a similar issue occured on live which I had no association with.
It's better to just sit back and do the minimum, but do it well and professionally. Most importantly, don't make yourself too available:
> Don't respond immediately to messages and emails.
> Don't propose solutions, that you will have to own (at least partly).
> Don't answer questions outside of your responsibility space - even if you know the answer. Instead, direct people to others who should be answering those questions.
I like the sentiment of this comment, but I think it is a little too black and white. I am in science, so your mileage may vary.
I have found a little bit of pro-activity on things you like to do anyway is a good way to turn your job into the job you actually want to do rather than the one you got hired for. I started my current job doing wetlab biology, but I currently do coding and grant writing. I like wetlab, but its exciting to transition into a different area I have wanted to get into for years.
To be clear though, I am still often re-active. I generally won't push hard on things I am not enthusiastic about. It helps to have a friendly and permissive boss.
> “It helps to have a friendly and permissive boss.”
I think this is the most impactful factor in achieving pro-activity at a level you are comfortable with. The company might not reward you directly, but being able to change your own job description, find ways you can contribute better, etc. are all more motivating than financial incentives.
It’s easy to get burned out doing too much without a boss that’ll recognize your efforts and encourage you to do less from time to time though. A little bit of love and care, however superficial, goes a long way here.
I agree with doing the bare minimum at an expected quality if you are working in an inflexible system, but getting too comfortable there might leave you doing that until retirement.
> a little bit of pro-activity on things you like to do anyway is a good way to turn your job into the job you actually want to do rather than the one you got hired for
I used to like (still do) building tools that help with my job. Little command line tools or browser extensions that just make things easier. As soon as management discovered these tools (because i shared them with other devs) it became a full time responsibility for me to maintain them - I had to port them from my personal Github onto the companies.
I also now get feature requests from global teams to add updates to these tools. Now, I don't have a problem with this - I enjoy working on these tools but the issue is they are added on top of my actual work (which is a lot). In hindsight i regretted sharing these tools and adding more responsibility to myself. Mostly because I didn't get a meaningful pay rise or promotion to reflect my additional contribution or lets say expanded job description.
But again, all depends on where you work and with whom.
I moved from development to management a few years ago and as a manager I have to say my proactive developers are far more valuable to me. I recognise their value and I give them more interesting work and more financial rewards as a result. I also do everything I can to be sure that they're happy and not overworked because I'd hate to lose any of them.
I think because you were a developer, so you have that appreciation. I've always preferred working with PM's who were actual Developers. It just makes your life easier.
Unless you work with interns or very junior devs [1], manager deciding whom to give what, also favoring some subset group, giving them interesting tasks and financial rewards, while keeping "boring" stuff for the rest of the team lights up quite a few red flags to be honest. You might want to reconsider what management means.
[1] - favoritism is not acceptable in this case as well.
> Don't be "pro-active" be "re-active" - is my way of putting it.
As much as I recognize this can be good advice, this comment makes me sad.
It's like "start underperforming" is the answer given to bad management problems.
Which I agree actually makes sense in a lot of companies (if pro-active efforts are not already being recognized, then it's hard to change the culture).
I also think that a lot of comments here are directed toward financial success, but many people are actually looking for meaningful ways to contribute. People for which the "re-active" approach might not be a solution.
What would be the solution for those people? How unlikely is it to actually switch to a company which recognizes employees willing to be more involved?
i think it depends on your goals. If you're ambitious and driven and willing to take on extra responsibilities - perhaps with little immediate reward then go for it. For some, it's more about finding a balance to avoid getting too jaded or burnt out.
Some of the best devs I've worked with are those who just like to work. They are also up for any problem and rarely complain even if (imo) they have too much on their plate. It really just comes down to your personality and needs at that stage of your life.
For myself, I sort of came to the conclusion that I won't encounter meaningful financial success in my day job. I would have to work another 20-30 years to accomplish (financially) what I used to expect I would have done already in my late 20s. So, it's more about trying to maintain some kind enjoyment in my work and also to protect my mental/physical health.
One thing I did learn though, is that if you spot a problem and then report it to the relevant stakeholder, along with a plan for how you think it could be resolved, that's a really easy way to work yourself up in a large organisation. You have to work the politics, not just the code.
Many cases, the stakeholders don't have an appreciation for what you're suggesting or even the consideration to balance your workload:
"Oh, thanks for bringing the problem to my attention, let me just add that to your massive pile of work and make it a P1 like everything else - and this problem space is also now your responsibility forever because you're (in my mind) the expert on it"
- unfortunately, there are many managers that operate this way. Just clueless.
That's why i always advocate a cautious, cynical, self preserving approach but again depends on the env and your relationships.
Why so? Delegation is a valuable skill, especially for those seeking a position in leadership.
It does matter how it's conveyed though - it can be interpreted as "not my problem" in certain cultures where people wear too many hats.
One of my workplaces has its engineers overwhelmed with too many responsibilities, like expecting front-end engineers to be wearing the DevOps hat any time a fire comes up related to their own staging environment.
I have found it's a matter of finding comfort in being assertive (and well aware) of the best and worst skills I have to offer in a realistic sense. If I'm particularly weak at a skill and I have little time to build it or refer to deep heady documentation, I ask a colleague who is capable to join me in looking, and they often find the problem within a few minutes, resulting in far less time wasted for all.
> Don't propose solutions, that you will have to own (at least partly).
I find that if I propose anything at all ever I immediately become the responsible party for it and forced to own that no matter what it was. Which has lead to me not wanting to propose anything anymore. If I expose that we have a problem with X, I am then the one tasked with solving it no matter how much is already on my plate. So now I try not to see things that aren't going to immediately put us all out of a job.
I feel you would of received a better response if you used the word Responsive not Reactive in this context and replaced "Don't" with Balance.
Being responsive to things that happen on a daily basis acknowledges that the company we are employed in is messy and stuff happens that you may need to urgently attend to. Yet it doesn't mean that you still can't achieve things that make your place of employment a better place for others.
Agreed with most of your post. Though I'd say a little proactive is still better than bare minimum, but I prefer to keep it private and work on that proactive 'things' at my own pace, no outside pressure.
Sometimes you want to work on something that you see it can be useful for you in the foreseeable future, voluntarily, without anyone asking(and you don't have to tell anyone) Said work occasionally benefit you, or even save your ass along the line sometimes.
but too much of it do you no good, that's for sure. And don't announce it to the world because it'll bring you all miserable things. :p
I found the perfect balance to be very pro-active and resourceful at the beginning of a project, both to structure it in a way that suits me and make a good impression. Later, not so much. And I am not lazy, but being too active means other team members (or even the customers) get too little say.
Although this does make you sound a bit like Wally from Dilbert, but done in the right amount I think it does make sense as taking on too much is the quickest way to never getting anything 'done'.
Well I would say that Wally is a true pragmatist, whilst Dilbert is an eternal optimist - despite the reality of his actions never meeting his expectations. Wally has learnt his lessons unlike Dilbert.
It's kind of the cliche of work smart not hard. Easier said then done but the sentiment being to elevate your status whilst simultaneously reducing your actual deliverables (or delegating them elsewhere) - isn't that ultimately the goal of career progression. Is there anyone that does less actual "work" than a CEO.
I have recently jumped ship from an employer of 3 years after adopting a similar attitude.
New Job will pay me double and as such will help me achieve my goals.
Old Company said if I stayed I could achieve a 25% increase in TC if I continued to work on "impactful projects" for 2 years or so. But those projects are the ones I hated there (otherwise a great company)
I've seen first hand when developers leave how all their prideful work becomes a burden to be distributed and shared, and while on notice myself I've seen how all my best and most impactful ideas and projects has been deprioritised. I expect some of it to be lost forever when I go. Instead of milking me for info on my most useful works (libraries, scripts, etc), they have me reassigning meaningless JIRA tickets.
>Old Company said if I stayed I could achieve a 25% increase [within 2 years]
For existing employees, this is rather high, but as you did, you should discount this. To get that boost with your current employer, you need to (i) be irreplaceable for a critical service; or (ii) show proof of external offers.
HR/Finance will sets wages at low-mid market so that the 10 other high performing/underpaid employees in your situation will stay and only you will leave. HR's fine with that bet, and people with initiative like you are the victors.
My TC increased 7-10%/yr each year I was there, so the promise is inline with expectations. Me and my partner just can't wait 2 years for 25% when I can have 2x now. Even with 2x, raising kids will be financially challenging.
Were you making a very small amount then? You said you were in college 20 years ago. Did you start your career very late or do you want an very large salary before you have kids? I made $60K right out of college (far less than 20 years ago) as a software developer at a small consultancy in one of the cheapest cities in the country.
People on here are always talking about changing jobs and getting a huge salary increase, but these numbers don't make sense unless you were tremendously underpaid for many years.
I spent most of my twenties in college and grad school. Then worked in the Midwest in my early thirties making $100k-$130k.
I moved to Silicon Valley and took a job for $150k. That was a downgrade considering the much higher cost of living, but it seemed like a good stepping stone at the time. I stayed at that company for way too long working towards a promotion that was dangled in front of me but never came, and finally switched to FANG for a 2X increase in total comp.
And many people at my age in the company make about 2X+ of what I make now. The housing prices here are so crazy that I’m ready to throw in the towel on SV, even if it means a pay cut. My QOL was highest outside of the Bay Area working for less.
In the end, those who own the apartments and the buildings will always be able to capture a significant part of the economical output of a city or country.
All that clever software that increased the company's revenue by 10%? A large part of those additional earnings ended up in some landlord's pocket.
We're all just working around the clock so that landlords can increase their rents and sip cocktails.
That’s my main issue with the way our society is structured. There’s a class difference between those who own a property and those who don’t even if they do the exactly same job. I don’t even talk about the people who have not done single contribution to the society and live of on the rent of inherited properties.
It’s like the peasants who work all day and have nothing when people from blue blood are having generations living of their backs in castles.
Having an elite is fine, it’s even better when class movement is feasible but when you have a large class of people doing nothing or rewarded drastically differently for the same input, things are not fine.
Ye. You need to own "the means of production", which in eg. New York or SV is the house you live in, since the house is the reason you can work close to the easy money.
A friend is thinking about to open a restaurant in a very attractive location, but I said, if you don't own the property the restaurant is in, the land lord will just increase rent until the any profit is barely OK anyways. There is no money in that.
No, I don't think it applies to all businesses. Like, restaurants are tied to a location and reputation. An office not so much. Bigger corporations like McDonalds or Starbucks probably have more bargain power and a better picture of how much a location will pay out, etc.
Are you sure most restaurants aren't renting their premises in any case? Owning a property sounds like a massive investment before you're even able to do any business.
Of course the restaurant business is probably hit-and-miss and risky, and owning the premises might give you more stability, at least if you don't have a large amount of debt. It sounds to me like your stance might be quite cynical in the sense that almost nobody would try starting a restaurant if they considered owning their premises a necessity.
If you think you can't live on 300k with a family in the bay area, then you need a serious reality check.
On a $300k income, even with one earner, you can comfortably afford a $1m+ home (of which there are plenty of single family homes available in many parts of the bay area), and while yes the COL for things like groceries/eating out is higher than in Austin TX, it's not high enough to seriously claim that it's not liveable
Show me a 3-4 bedroom house for $1M, and I’ll tell you how many hours the commute would take.
I work on the Peninsula. 90% of 3+ bedroom houses currently on the market here cost over $1.75M. Those below that, in the bottom 10%, are what you’d expect to find in the bottom 10%. There are many great places to live where I wouldn’t be forced to choose between that or spending a couple hours a day in traffic. Less money and higher quality of life.
A little bit of everything you said. I didn't start working in software right away. I didn't complete my (non-CS) degree, and so thought a career in software was out of reach. Right at the beginning I was shot down without interview by a bunch of companies because I had no industry experience. Once I had my lucky break (massively underpaid but fun work with good people) everything changed.
Every time I've changed jobs to date I've had multiple job offers. 3 years ago I had 3 offers from 3 different companies. This time around I had the same - 3 offers, 3 companies. Just in the last 5 years my salary has increased 6 fold.
My basic philosophy with respect to compensation is to take home enough to maintain the lifestyle you want + 20% extra to save and invest.
I know of so many folks in fang and my current job who’d disagree that you can’t get rich from a day job. Most of them got there by not being cynical about their employer’s goals and working with the team to make those happen.
I guess I’ve been incredibly lucky and probably am in a nice west coast dream bubble, but my bubble vision means I definitely don’t buy that am a rare unicorn. I don’t think I would feel happy about working with peers who had a cynical outlook and we’re not invested in the shared dream.
I am replying only because this was the top comment - I really hope I reach at least one person who’s on the fence about committing to a goal bigger than personal!
Why is it required not to say "no" or suggest alternative directions in order to work with your employer to make their goals happen?
I don't think it's cynical at all. Quite the opposite: I think it's how functional teams work effectively.
Of course you can get rich from a FAANG job. But most of us don't work at FAANG. And there are plenty of slackers even at FAANG: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21961560 "Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?"
My thesis here is that this person wasn't doing anything wrong. They don't need to feel bad about providing value to their employer by only "patching things together from an internal codebase" or "not deeply understanding every aspect of what they do." The vast majority of the world operates this way, and I'm not sure FAANG is much of an exception.
I totally agree with push back when necessary: my own career has seen lean times and heavy times as well and thankfully I had built enough work-equity with my employers that they gracefully helped me tide over them. So that’s not what am contesting.
I was addressing the heretical point you mentioned - ignore employer’s goals.
It's a balance. I think most people care too much about their employer's goals. The heresy is that you can't just say "Well, I don't care about my employer's goals," or else you'll be facing some negative reviews.
The trick is to make it a mental shift. Here's a concrete example: Suppose you were coordinating with some large bank that takes a very long time to do anything. Should you feel bad that most of your day is spent waiting for them? Should you proactively go out of your way to find extra work for yourself?
I don't think so. You waiting for Big Bank is the business goal. But most people will tell their manager "I have nothing to do; please find me more work" (in so many words).
There's no reason to stress yourself out like that. Some would say you'd be doing the bare minimum. I would say that you'd be fulfilling your business obligations, and that you'd be acting professionally.
Most people won't have such direct opportunities to minimize their workload. But they often maximize their own workload for no reason, until their managers practically force them to take time off. (Or they don't, which is worse.)
Well, again from personal experience and what I have seen, going the extra mile exactly like you said (not to) is what enabled many to grow both professionally and financially. For many, that’s exactly what put them on the faster track to all that’s good.
I know only a lucky few who got there by being there at the right time and coasting out. Most had to work it. I can really feel how it is easier to focus on those lucky ones (or the ones who missed out), but I prefer to still focus on the middle ones with right values for whom it worked out.
Few months back an SVP type came for internal talk about journey and growth that led to their present position. So their matra was: looking for opportunities, mentoring, having great mentors, learning, proactive problem solving blah..blah.
Now this all seems reasonably true. Most important thing they missed to tell was joining industry/company at time of explosive growth in sector. If one is out with graduate degree in EEE field in late eighties or early nineties and joined a growing tech firm they undoubtedly ended up doing very well even if not an SVP or higher. To their credit was not to totally screw up things and not some great leadership lessons.
This story is not going to repeat for engineer joining in 2020s. There are no great green field projects coming, or customer negotiations happening for a low/mid-level engineers. Most of them will be put to churn out and integrate thousand little micro services and feel grateful that they still have job and health insurance.
Reflecting on myself who joined in mid 2000s all interesting work is now past and even after gaining lot of experience I ended being a JIRA slave and daily agile standup chump today. I can't imagine what an extra mile would be in this environment. I might, however, get fired if I tell a lot of work they are trying to efficiently should not be done at all in first place.
I don’t know your exact situation - but I precisely started working full time in 2003. I have many peers who have grown to vp levels from that time.
Without more details, any points I make / advice I give will just sound like platitudes. But I do hope you turn it around. The job market is very hot right now fwiw if you want a fresh start.
What's the Big Dream at FAANG these days? What "greater goal" is there at Facebook in 2021? Or Amazon? I mean sure, if you want to switch off your moral compass and make lots of money, go you, I guess, but it sounds almost cultish at this point to still believe that there's a higher purpose to working for these companies.
Well I was a part of SqlCE efforts which was the first storage engine tuned for flash devices during a time when flash meant you had to account for wear in software etc. I launched dynamodb - tech lead for storage engines. I’ve been a part of few infrastructure projects in snap where savings are huge (there are talks from my peers in reinvent). Those savings enable snap to make investments like our AR glasses (again I was a part of launching this). I am currently looking at other infra projects which mean big picture efforts that are mind boggling in scope (sorry for being vague about snap - most of these efforts aren’t public).
Each one of those represent very big dreams for me. Dynamo powers practically half the internet. AR experiences are the future of computing interfaces (IMO).
That’s just my experience. I also know of a million projects with equal scope getting built out even today.
It comes down to this: do you want to be judged by your best day or your worst? I personally don’t focus on the media narrative that target a sliver of badness in these places. I prefer to work within the system either advancing the goodness or trying to rethink the issues affecting folks - sometimes luckily both. I believe these companies are too big to be brushed off in a single stroke.
Probably “Discretionary Equity”, a small-to-The-Company but large-to-the-Individual extra grant of restricted stock units given (in secret) to people whose contributions literally make-or-break the business. Think “invent HHVM”.
I do hope that people who got rich by being Faang employees are cynical, because that would be a better option (in my eyes, at least) to being sociopaths.
And "caring about your employer's" goals in this day and age while you're working at FB/Google/Amazon (I'm on the fence about Apple, don't have much of an opinion about Netflix) actually makes you look like a sociopath in my eyes. Again, imo being a cynic beats being a sociopath.
Please see my answer above. I really hope it makes you reconsider that opinion. Most of us are just regular Joe’s looking to make a good life and have an impact.
> And "caring about your employer's" goals in this day and age while you're working at FB/Google/Amazon actually makes you look like a sociopath in my eyes
Google and Amazon are very large corporations. Someone who works in GCP or AWS is benefiting rest of us.
Another way of seeing this is acknowledging that anyone who owns S&P 500 technically owns these companies. So if you’re making money in stock market, it’s happening due to the very same people you’re condemning. In this day and age it’s very hard to draw a line for “us vs. them”.
This is tough if you actually try to have a team-oriented mindset. I’ve worked in groups (hard to really call them a team) where everyone, everyone , stiff armed duties. The end result is that the hard stuff, or low status stuff, never got done. I get there’s a balance, but if you entered a career where you actually care about the mission, it’s hard to just see that mission suffer because people want to take the easy way out. It’s particularly problematic when they are positions of public trust.
Would you want to go to a hospital where the “it’s not my job” attitude is prevalent? Would you hire a contractor to build a house with that attitude? I tend to think the better organizations don’t think in terms of what are peoples “jobs” but what problems actually need solved
Hospitals and contractors are great examples of professional fields where job roles are well-defined and the hours worked are carefully tracked. When contractors get too busy, they tell clients their project is delayed. When ER or ICU resources are maxed out, they stop accepting patients and send them to other nearby hospitals. When clinics are fully booked, they stop making appointments.
I understand what you’re saying about a problem solving mindset, but that is not the issue in burnout. The issue is unrealistic volumes and deadlines that encroach too far into the rest of your life.
Personal boundaries exist in medicine, in fact they are essential to surviving a career in medicine. There will always be more sick, injured, and dying people. The hospital has the mission to save them all if it can. An individual doctor or nurse has to understand that they personally cannot. Or they will burn out very fast.
Overworked tech companies could benefit from some perspective from the medical field. Is someone going to die if your feature misses its ship date? Probably not. People die in ERs every day, but guess what: ER staff still work a fixed set of hours, take vacations, etc.
Contractors is overly broad but plenty of contractors work overtime and very long, stressful hours including weekends and holidays.
Hospitals on the other hand, you're just downright wrong about that. Not only in general do hospital staff work 12 hour shifts including being on-call and having to work abrupt hours, especially over the past year their hours have been absolutely ridiculous. This includes nurses and MDs.
Feel free to review some studies on this issue, it's not hard to find nor is it some kind of secret. Basic Google search pops this up within the first few results:
That study shows that in fact, nurses work their regularly scheduled shift less than 50% of the time, and 81% of their shifts involve overtime even though only 7% of it is scheduled in advance.
Here is a study looking at work hours among surgeons and physicians:
It paints a very different picture from the idea that medical staff work very strict and well regulated hours. Their working hours are very chaotic and extreme.
I don’t need studies, I have a number of friends and family who are doctors and nurses.
You completely missed my point, which is that it is ridiculous for tech companies to compare themselves to a profession that faces literally life and death situations. Comparing to “the past year” (i.e. a historic global pandemic) just highlights the absurdity.
My ancedote, and general data, agrees with the other person that your ancedote is wrong and healthcare is one of the most abusive environments in terms of nursing staff levels, hours, and quality of care. It's like you live in a different world.
Healthcare was easily the most toxic environment I ever worked in as well. The CTO literally was happy to quote that he treated it like a sweatshop because thats how you got the most value out of your human resources.
We literally had contractors fall asleep at the wheel and die driving between sites during marathon crunches where people got written up for leaving to eat / sleep.
My wife is a nurse at a huge national hospital. You're very wrong. 12 hours shifts turn into 13-14 hour shifts. They're so short staffed right now they're offering double pay + cash lump sums that equate it to triple/quadruple pay. But they pay lower than clinics and other hospitals in the area. They don't turn away patients.
You’re not reading what I’m writing. The fact that you know how long your wife’s shift is supposed to be is my point. The fact that nurses are being paid extra money for extra time is my point.
Engineers in Silicon Valley don’t clock in for a 12 hour shift. They are put on salary and any discussion of schedule is discouraged in favor of talking about “hustle” and “team players.”[1]
My point is not “health care workers don’t work hard.” My point is that they are set up with schedules and structure, which tech companies avoid… and then try to point at health care workers or “contractors” to justify the chaos.
Also I bet your wife is not working so hard just so the hospital can meet its financial goals. If she is like most nurses she is motivated by patient care and probably hates the administration, who are usually seen as bean counters who (if anything) impede care. Again, compare to tech companies who build myths around founders and corporate missions to obscure the purely financial stakes of their work.
[1] I know that not all companies operate this way, not all managers do this, not all engineers experience this. But there is obviously some sort of shared experience among a lot of people that the blog post at the top of the main thread is tapping into.
My wife's schedule is 12 hours: 7 to 7. Except nine out of ten times she's there until 8 or 9. It's "scheduled" but much closer to BAT times then sun revolution times. Any talk of schedule is discouraged and nurses are fired very quickly if they don't become "team players". Engineers in the valley have a lot more leeway because hiring is a lot harder. I can actively push back against my managers. My wife would be fired on the spot.
You're making numerous points and your later ones are good ones. But the working conditions for front line workers, including but not limited to their scheduling, hours, pay, etc, are all terrible.
>tech companies to compare themselves to a profession that faces literally life and death situations
I think you have a narrowly defined scope of “tech”. What about the software that controls the Da Vinci robot in the operating room? Do you want someone to say “eh, code quality checks aren’t my job?” Or the person writing flight software for aircraft? Or the safety critical software for a power plant?
The point being, yes, perspective is important but it’s a difference of degree not of kind.
Fair enough on the Da Vinci robot because it's a turn-key product. But I can tell you that people change production code on the fly in safety-critical applications (particularly in the industrial controls space) much more often than many people would be comfortable with.
A better healthcare example may have been, would you be comfortable with people changing the building automation software that controls operating room air exchange rates or oxygen delivery systems?
But again, this isn’t really about software devs so it should extend beyond just SWE roles. It’s about positional duties, regardless if you write code or deliver meds to patients.
All of these systems run into schedule and cost pressures that often causes people to feel overburdened. I don't actually think they are fundamentally different.
Having personally worked in both healthcare and construction (sometimes even healthcare construction), I disagree.
Roles are not nearly as defined as you suggest. Take construction: there will always be conflicts between sub-domains. If there’s a clash between disciplines there’s nothing more frustrating than two sub-contractors who point to each other as the one who must “own” the problem to fix it. Same thing in healthcare. A surgeon who won’t do a task because they believe it’s beneath them is not benefiting the patient.
I don’t think most missions are capable of having clearly defined roles like you suggest. There will always be jobs that fall in the gray area and that’s why almost every job I’ve had included a “and other duties as assigned.”
I agree that perspective is important, but that’s talking about prioritization not shirking duties. I also understand burn out is a real risk, but I don’t think the right mitigation is taking a "that's not my job" perspective; I'd much rather see someone work with their supervisor to say, "here's where that falls in my current priorities". "It's not my job" tends to results in un-productive finger pointing or venting as opposed to actually aligning one's work with what's important to the shared mission.
I want to work with problem solvers not people who identify with strictly defined roles.
Ultimately, it's payers -- taxpayers and insurance payers -- that aren't down the the "hire more people" solution. Another stakeholder group that's not down with it? Doctors. The AMA, who doctors control corporately, don't certify enough medical schools to train sufficient doctors to make the reality you want possible.
I didn't say doctors were responsible for all understaffed roles in the country. But they are partly responsible for understaffed physician roles. :) The payer aspect I mentioned is relevant for the nurses.
In America we pay on average ~$3000 per day of stay in the hospital. How much extra do we have to pay to have enough nurses so that we don't work them to death?
Why British hospitals have a fraction of that cost (1/10th)? Oh yes, it is because they decided that it is not a moneymaking business.
Overworked employees should not blame themselves for not being able to keep up with unreasonable hours. They should blame the real responsible for their misery. Their employer.
Hospital profits are part of the costs, but doctors and nurses here are also paid more than elsewhere. Doctors in the US are paid multiple times as much as doctors in the UK, and supply restriction is a big part of why that is possible.
There are also administrative costs, drug costs, and insurance overheads to deal with.
It's not that complicated. When we setup competition for infrastructure, we needlessly duplicate management, marketing, accounting, and everything else that does not directly result in the service being provided. The US is doubly idiotic by creating huge financial barriers for anyone who wants to enter healthcare. We make the problem even worse with a system that encourages people to delay treatment for problems that get more expensive to treat over time. The less money you have the more you delay, so the entire system eventually ends up overpaying for a worse outcome.
This doesn't factor in all the time spent dealing with inscrutable billing practices for fully insured people having routine medical procedures, or the tens of thousands who are bankrupted every year by the same practices. We recently took our daughter to the ER, which is supposed to be a $400 copay. We now have three separate bills from that visit totaling $1100, and I have no idea how many hours it will take to sort out. The same billing department sent us a $380 invoice six months after her birth because (in their description) they forgot she was there.
Just out of curiosity, what’s your proposed solution?
There's been decades of very smart people working on this problem and its still a problem largely because of its complexity. If there was a simple solution, I have a feeling it would have been implemented already.
The irony of your post that starts with "its not that complicated" ends with an anecdote about just how complicated the system is.
It was an anecdote about how complicated the US system is. Other countries figured out decades ago that adding competition to healthcare does not bring down the price or lead to better life expectancy.
But you’re missing a crucial point: The US is not starting from a blank slate.
President Obama acknowledged this much when he proposed the Affordable Care Act. He said that he’d prefer a single payer system like other countries use, but that it’s not feasible in the US because we can’t just completely uproot the current system without a ton of unintended consequences.
“Just do it like other countries” isn’t a real plan.
So given the current state of the healthcare system, how do you propose it gets modified to mirror those other countries? Do you have a good handle on how those proposed steps (like drastic reductions in R&D spending) will affect the overall system?
When people naively think there are simple solutions to extremely complex systems, it reminds me of the quote “For every problem there is a solution that is simple, straightforward, and wrong.”
Obama has also been endorsing Medicare For All since 2018. From an article about that subject:
"The facts are undeniable. Citizens of developed countries with variations of single-payer systems — Britain, Germany, France, etc. — pay roughly half what Americans pay for health coverage and have better results to show for it (longer life spans, lower infant mortality).
They accomplish this not through some exotic, foreign magic but by exploiting the economic benefits of large insurance pools that represent the entire population. This allows comprehensive coverage to be offered at affordable rates because everyone shares in the risks and rewards of the system.
Let’s be real clear: This isn’t socialism. This isn’t communism. It’s simple risk management — the same economic principle that underlies all forms of insurance."[1]
The bottom line is that nearly a third of America (over 100 million people) are already on Medicare or Medicaid. That is enough data to forecast any outcome there is. Billing, coding, everything is already at a federal standard. Hospitals, doctors, and clinics love Medicare/Medicaid because they know what they are going to be paid and they are paid. Anyone who claims that it can't work here is either unaware of these facts, or purposefully pretending they don't exist.
I'm not arguing whether single payer is a good idea. I'm not arguing that it's tantamount to communism. I'm not arguing that there are many politicians (Obama, included) who are in favor of it. I'm arguing about the feasibility of it in light of naive statements.
It's easy for a politician to endorse a policy, particularly a populist one like Medicare for All. It's entirely different to craft a policy, within the current system, that pragmatically implements it.
My claim is that Obama endorsed the idea because he both thought it was good policy and populist idea that worked in the favor of his politics. But that's entirely different from crafting a pragmatic policy that actually can get passed into law.
I think he's been on the record stating that he didn't like the ACA, but the goal was to pass something, even if it's broken, to try to force it into policy so that it would eventually be fixed into something better. So with so much support, why can't the U.S. implement it? That's central to my point.
"President Obama was clear that – while he would have preferred single payer if we were starting from a clean slate – it would be too disruptive given our current system."[1]
Point being, in many ways it is against the current system. So while you haven't directly addressed my questions, I get the impression you think "Just expand Medicare" is the answer. My point is that it's a bit naive because it really doesn't address the systemic effects that have kept single payer policy from already being implemented.
Medicare/Medicaid is on track to be the largest proportion of the entitlement budget, before expanding it and it doesn't count the Dept. of Veterans Affairs budget (I don't think healthcare is a bad way to spend the budget btw). I know many people will say the Defense budget can be cut to pay for it. But how do you plan on getting that passed when nearly every senator wants to protect the DoD jobs in their state? I'm not even against that idea, I'm just not seeing you advocate a real strategy to implement it. The U.S. is perpetually running against the debt ceiling and your proposal will exacerbate that. This is just the beginning; how do you address the medical insurance industry, particularly when they are heavily lobbying Congress?
If the answer was "Just expand Medicare", it probably would have been implemented already but the fact that it's not should tell you something: maybe it's not that easy. So my question is not whether or not you think it's a good idea, my question is how do you get from the current state to your goal of a single payer system?
> I'm arguing about the feasibility of it in light of naive statements.
I have directly addressed your question with the fact that already a third of Americans are in a single payer system, and most of the world has a single payer or hybrid system.[1] It's naive to think we don't know how to do it, and that we can't learn something from other nations when we expand it.
If you don't think we're capable of achieving the same results as a bloc of nations that has twice our population and many more cultural differences between them, why? Low confidence in America as a whole? Math and science fundamentally change in different time zones? Nobody in America knows how to read German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Belgian, or English?
> If the answer was "Just expand Medicare", it probably would have been implemented already but the fact that it's not should tell you something: maybe it's not that easy.
There's an even simpler explanation: S.1129 was not passed.[2]
> So my question is not whether or not you think it's a good idea, my question is how do you get from the current state to your goal of a single payer system?
No, your question is, "How can I keep the conversation going pretending that I'll accept an answer?" So let's nip that, and you can answer the following question: what evidence would convince you it is feasible?
Yes, the bill was not passed. Neither were any of the proposals for the last 3 decades. Why do you think that is??
I mean, it’s “obviously” just so easy. Do you have better answers than President Obama? Or President Clinton before him? Or Bob Dole? Or John McCain? Yet with all their knowledge and connections, they couldn’t get it accomplished. Note that in nearly 20 years, Medicare for All bills only made it out of committee once. Why do you think that is?
Perhaps because it’s an enormously complex problem with lots of stakeholders and lots of competing interests. One that doesn’t get fixed by just copying a different model that operates outside of the U.S. constraints.
You still never addressed why those bills don’t pass. It’s like your answer is the trivial (and useless) one that “it’s because not enough people voted for it.”
Saying “we already cover 100MM” doesn’t explain how it can be more than tripled. I didn’t claim it can’t be done, I’m asking why none of the proposals have worked out so far. I’ve never claimed the US “doesn’t know how”, I’m saying they haven’t shown political will to implement it. I’m asking for a pragmatic answer that shows why it hasn’t worked despite previous efforts.
I’m asking for your opinion why that’s the case that nothings has been passed in the last 30 years despite the desire among many, many people to do so. I’ve already outlined a few examples that you just blow past for the naively simple answer. That’s not helpful nor does it demonstrate anything beyond a simplistic understanding of the problem.
I have no problem accepting an answer that actually shows an understanding of the complexity of the problem, even if I don’t agree. I’ll help you: I think the very first problem needs to campaign finance reform. Because without that, any proposed bill that goes against the monied interest is dead in the water. But that’s just the first of many things that has to happen before the bills you’re talking about have any chance.
Again, I’m not arguing whether it’s technically feasible. I’m saying the US has not yet shown its politically feasible. I think you’re conflating my position on these.
That latter part is a much tougher and complex problem but every bit a necessary part of the solution. So take just a very small subset of that problem: how do you plan on mitigating the insurance industry’s influence in preventing the passage of a bill that goes against their interests?
Once you figure that out, you’ll have dozens of other political concerns to solve before you ever get to consider implementing the technical solution.
There’s a saying that your can choose between access, quality, and low cost but you can only choose two. The US system has chosen quality and access at the expense of cost.
Other countries benefit largely from the US healthcare R&D machine. The US funds over 40% of the world medical R&D. While other countries put price controls on their medicine, this arrangement won’t work with the current system if the US does the same. To a certain extent, US high prices partly subsidized the rest of the world.
Hiring may be a part of it, but not the whole answer. It actually needs a more process-oriented solution. Adding people to a broken process makes things worse.
When people complain of being over burdened, more often than not it means the process they worked within had a lot of waste. Invariably, the proposed solution was always “we need more people”. You can sometimes hide process waste problems with inventory. The number of times hiring people made for a long term solution is exactly zero in my experience, and this includes process improvement work within healthcare.
“Just hire more people” tends to be a myopic view that underscores a misunderstanding of the systemic effects at work.
Are 8 hour shifts healthy for patients? More handovers is strongly correlated with poorer patient outcomes. We need to strike a balance between the falloff in ability that comes with consecutive hours awake past a certain point, and minimizing handover.
NHS doctors will typically have a significant part of their rota made up of 'long days'. The 'solution' is never 24/7, or less hyperbolic but still overly long hours, because there is a median decrease in cognitive function that
renders additional benefit from fewer handovers moot.
But as regards 'overworking', while that is certainly true for many US residents in particular, I think the majority of people would be overworked on a surgeon's schedule. Yet reducing it significantly would probably be much worse for patients and decried by surgeons. My viewpoint is mostly informed by the British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh's opinion on working hours.
You’re not wrong, but when doctors work longer shifts, they work fewer days of the week. The total weekly hours are the same, they are just distributed differently.
There's room to have pride in your job and still erect those boundaries. Maybe not doing the literal "bare minimum," but recognizing where your duties end. If you're constantly going beyond your duties, there are likely structural issues that are not being addressed.
I wouldn't appeal to a person's better nature to counteract this attitude. If their nature were to be a team player, they would be a team player. Instead, employers need to recognize that there will be mercenary employees, and they need to set up their systems to reward the behavior they actually want to encourage. If mercenary behavior is rewarded, that's what you'll get at the margin.
At least at my employer, it doesn't seem like shirkers and work-to-rule folks are rewarded. Maybe there are some people who do work like this and are still getting rewarded by giving off the appearance of being team players, but I guess you'd have to be a pretty careful actor to accomplish that. You'd also need to be able to manipulate your colleagues into doing the work you aren't, but still liking you enough to review you well during 360 reviews.
That being said, there is a grain of truth in what the op was saying as well. It's not healthy to care too much about your employer's goals, because they are necessarily in tension with yours to a certain degree. Work should be compartmentalized to the degree appropriate to how much you enjoy it and the material rewards you're getting from it, and this balance is going to be specific to each individual person.
Have you ever thought how and why the “it’s not my job” attitude fostered? Most people at least myself on their first day working would never thought they would end up at some point as people they despised so much.
I have had a similar career experience. In time, I’ve decided to accept that I’m much more like those people than I wanted to accept when I felt I was a young and hungry “disruptor”
I am much more a product of the systems than I wanted to accept. That’s the most mature perspective I have had to date - and has led to more empathy than I thought I was capable of.
The reason you didn’t like those people is that somewhere deep inside you knew it could be you in ten years. I had the same thoughts, and came to the same insight.
It’s a lot like how you dislike the people who remind you of your bad qualities.
Like most problems I think there’s the actual issue at hand and also the feelings that fosters. Feeling under appreciated is the #1 complaint amongst employees, I believe, and even out-ranks salary. There’s probably a balance. Sometimes the employer isn’t appreciative and sometimes the employee overly inflates their contribution.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the premise here is that the only purpose for a career is to "get rich". I think a lot of people genuinely enjoy the work they do, and the relationships they have with their co-workers. Or, on the darker side of things, over-work themselves because they can't find anything engaging _outside of work_. For both of those groups of people, they might not actually enjoy getting rich and retiring early.
At the same time, it seems like your yes-person friend is both willingly over-working themselves and complaining that they are overworked. So I'll agree that it doesn't make much sense - unless they truly are aiming for an early retirement.
It is a lost easier to get burnt out if you are chasing success than if you are doing things you intrinsically want to do. I will over do it from time to time but the cure is rest. I don’t need to re-evaluate my goals or priorities for life.
What other reason is there for a career? If there was no financial incentive for most, I highly doubt anybody would waste the time learning how to be a lawyer, programmer, or doctor. People don't just go into a career hoping to make a menial wage and work 40-60 hours a week.
OMG, until like what Netscape IPO almost no programmers wanted or expected to get rich. It was about a job where they paid you to solve problems so interesting you would have contrived to work on them for free.
And even now, I don’t understand why the response to “company will overwork me” is act with bad faith. Just take care of yourself, stop working before the long term costs to yourself your family and your life get too high. That P1 will still be there later. If you have worked for more than two years and not recognized them saying this is crucial is just how they talk, you aren’t as clever as you think. The job market for “can make computer programs” essentially guarantees you cannot be exploited without your consent. Just find you limits and protect them. It will work out. But you don’t need to not offer helpful advice or sketch out solutions for people. That sounds like you are burning down the fun parts of the job to avoid overwork. But the easier way to avoid overwork is to work less.
I'm not inferring here that if we don't pay doctors a lot nobody would be doctors. But what else would drive people to work 36 hour shifts, low to no pay, and put up with that for 10+ years? It's definitely not their character of wanting to help people. Otherwise the medical profession for doctors would be full of women because that is the #1 reason why any of them go into child care or being a teacher. Which if we look at the data, correlates to low wages.
Greed is what compels people to do the difficult things in life. I highly doubt anybody would put up with what you do for med school if you're prospects of earnings was similar to that of a business analyst. Of which can get that job with an Associates Degree or less.
The same pattern of hospital work process and crazy shifts occurs also in countries with very different healthcare funding where the vast majority doctors definitely never become rich and are significantly behind the other "highly skilled" careers. So the long-term perspective of richness is definitely not the only/main thing driving potential doctors to do what they do.
"highly doubt anybody would put up with what you do for med school if you're prospects of earnings was similar to that of a business analyst." - I'm asserting that people do put up with that in many places around the world, where doctors' earnings actually are quite similar to that of a business analyst. And not because they're somehow different, homo sapiens think/work/behave pretty much the same everywhere. The only practical difference that comes to mind is that they don't go into immense debt during med school like in USA.
I dont follow. Do you mean doctors are rich so they dont have to care? Last I checked a doctor needs 10 years since high school to make any real money. A fresh grad in SV needs 4, sometimes 3. By the time the medical student can legally be called doctor, you and I are already making "obscene money" by their standard
> Do you mean doctors are rich so they dont have to care?
Where am I saying this ? I'm totally ok with "rich" doctors. I totally want the doctor to have its full mind caring about "me" and not how he'll have to pay for his debts.
I'm just saying that it's easy for doctors not to care about money. Not that it's bad or that they are overpaid.
Career is something imposed by companies where HR cannot phantom why people like to keep doing what they love, instead of being endless promoted until they aren't fit for the position.
Yeah, this dynamic is what causes me to avoid big companies. As soon as you hire on you get attacked with career goals, assumptions that you want to move up (I'm senior so I already make enough money and have no interest in "moving up"), and being asked to do the litany of things required to move up. Maddening. Especially when you tell several of your bosses directly that you are good and that you already have the position and money you want. It just doesn't register and they keep trying to get you to tick off the boxes that will get you promoted. Figured they would be happy that someone was happy for once and didn't need to maintain them as they strive for promotion. I realized that they string everyone along with promises of career profession. And more than just being strung along, it's mainly a distraction for you to focus on while they overwork you on projects that get cancelled or otherwise don't matter.
Some of us don't like to maintain. It keeps life interesting. I've been told by many people "Oh you'll get tired of it when you get older" but I'm tired of it now. However, the reason I don't stop is it's literally the only thing driving me to do anything in life but be another mouth breather waiting to die in their retirement center while their children grovel over who gets what in the inheritance.
Most (if not all) programmers I personally know are in it because they love computers and programming, and they'd all agree that we're lucky to be doing what we love 9-5 (and then some) whilst getting paid better than average.
I almost feel guilty I get paid to play with computers all day.
You also had someone providing for you and covering all of your costs. Once you leave the carefree comforts of childhood and join the rat race the rules change.
Ones motivation need not change. “Do what you love and the money will follow” is not universally true, but it is pretty damn true for learning and making software.
I love art and music. I'm pretty skilled in a variety of those fields. The reason I don't do them is because programming pays extraordinarily better and can let me have a more relaxed and enjoyable lifestyle as opposed to living in garbage tier slums.
Because you are interested in what you are doing? I had no idea how much a developer or sysadmin made when I was 13 and started playing with FreeBSD and Debian...
It's very easy to say that when you're making more than the cost of living by a significant margin. Not so much when you've lived with meager wages. I love what I do, but I also wouldn't have switched careers if it didn't pay more than I made now. The years I've taken off my life from doing it would not have been worth it for an additional $500/month. If anything that coupled with the major inflation that's happened in the past two years, it wouldn't have even been worth it.
I started doing this around 7 years ago. A company I worked at imposed a nights and weekends working schedule. I left mostly to move to be closer with my current wife who lived further (> 1 hour) away. At the time it was still early in our relationship. Seven years later she is my wife and the company that asked for nights and weekends, no one cares about.
Well said. It is frustrating with the "everything is an emergency" mindset at some companies. I far along in my career that I just let it slide off but others aren't. We had a potential customer that was definitely going to sign a contract on Monday so another engineer spent all weekend getting a new rack mount computer all set up. That was four weeks ago and no one has heard anything from them. The bosses think they they are helping to keep everyone motivated and moving forward but they don't get how bad it is for morale. Everything can't be most important.
Bingo. 90% of the things I broke my back over because “it was an emergency” got scraped or abandoned a week later. And my ex-employer was wondering why our team turnover was through the roof.
I had an old boss that I developed a rule of 3 for. He like to change priorities constantly because that was "agile". So I just knew that until he asked for something the 3rd time, I would say "yes" and let it die on the vine. If he did ask 3 times, then it was probably going to actually stay a priority.
This attitude works at random jobs where you’re replaceable, absolutely. However if you’re a meaningful part of an early team with equity, this is quite literally how you can indeed get rich.
This was how you could get rich. Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I feel that these days VC and founders know all the right tricks to play to remove value from the contributors and reallocate it to the investors.
Nope. You can still get rich from equity, especially by being an early employee. It's all a giant lottery though.
The easiest way is to join companies that are obviously doing well and will likely IPO in 2-3 years. This is still a lottery, but one with much higher odds and a lower potential payout. You can make $600k-1m every few years in equity alone by hopping around these companies.
If you ever wondered why so many people have ~1-2 years of experience at each company on their resume, this is often why. They join, get a decent chunk of their equity grant (in RSUs), then go to another company to get more equity. Some of these companies will do well, others will do poorly. You end up distributing your risk and ensuring you'll get a decent payout.
This is a great narrative! It just doesn’t work out for most people.
I would say that if you want to hit a lotto ticket, this is your best route. Increased variance is your friend when you are at the downside and it’s all uphill.
But if you want to get rich, and you are the average HN reader, it’s better to bet on the typical case.
(That said, if you have a list of companies that meet your current criteria, I would love to know! I know a lot of faang engineers who are bored and would love a shot at millions.)
Companies typically switch to RSUs from option as they get closer to the IPO. Conversely if a company is offering RSUs then it’s a strong signal that they will go public within 18-24 months and also that the options have appreciated as much as they could as evaluated by private investors and so subsequent stock appreciation could only happen by public investors. Exceptions exist but it’s a good heuristic.
You can get RSUs and RSAs from a private company, it's just often undesirable because you pay income tax on the valuation of the shares vested but you can't sell your shares until a liquidity event or IPO.
A lot of the recent IPOs are pretty big, and while I don’t have insider info I assume at least the early employees did well. Robinhood, snowflake, UiPath, Toast, Roblox, Coinbase etc. we are not short of large tech IPOs.
I think this is around $2M in the US, using what the FIrE community says. Does that seem reasonable,
Or are you thinking about $20M+ payouts? (That’s what I would need to retire now.)
"retire early" does not necessarily have to mean "retire tomorrow", I guess it depends how old you are.
If you're in your 20s or 30s, 2M is probably not "retire tomorrow" money, but it would probably let you retire very early if you managed it and made smart investments with it. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think many ICs are getting even 50k from startup equity, nevermind 2M.
20M is "retire tomorrow" money for sure. And definitely workers do not get that kind of money from startup equity.
Most of what I hear now is companies giving fake "shares" that are ostensibly tied to the value of the company but are not actually shares and do not represent any ownership. If they do give shares it's not enough to pay out big, and they get diluted repeatedly over time.
1. you personal savings are more volatile tolerant than big pension funds. SP500 annual avg growth is 10% so you can almost achieve that 7% if you deploy 50/50 split to sp500 index + 30 year t-bonds.
2. It is magnitude more easier to deploy 2 million dollars to market than 2 billion dollars.
The problem is that most people are NOT a meaningful part of an early team. The Silicon Valley Dream is to find a unicorn startup and be one of the first 5 engineers. In pursuit of that dream some people work way too much at jobs where they are NOT going to get rich from it. Stock options almost always end up being worth nothing. I think the OP has a point, which is, unless you're really sure you stand to get rich from that job, don't put your mental health on the line for it. Sound advice.
"Early team" here meaning a founder or first C-level hire. As an engineer, even as one of the first hires, it's unlikely your equity is going to be life changing unless the company ends up going to unicorn valuations - which most startups will not. Better to ask for market level salaries instead.
It really shouldn't be. At the end of the day, the vast majority of workers are being compensated to do/build something they otherwise wouldn't of their own volition. Your mental health ought never be lower in priority than the ambitions of your senior management, or the ROI of the stakeholders.
The irony is that I've consistently gotten more respect by saying no than saying yes. If you say yes all the time, you become the person people go to when they want to dump things on someone. When you say no when you're busy, people quickly learn to respect your time more, and they'll be far more grateful for your time when they get it.
More importantly, if it helps you deliver what you agree to deliver on time with more consistency, people quickly learn to appreciate that.
This sounds like you’ve shifted from the “clueless” to the “loser” archetype in Ribbonfarm’s Gervais Principle (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...) — ignore the insulting names for all three archetypes, I think you’re exactly right about how to reclaim the balance of power between labor and capital.
> You're probably not going to get rich from working a day job. You're replaceable, and if you left your job tomorrow then you'll soon be forgotten. This is true for the majority of software engineers.
This part is so true. I worked with people who were the "conscience" of the project I worked on - they started it, knew everything about it, worked late nights to fix issues etc. Then they left and...the project kept running...everyone managed.
It is easy to say. But people characters are well-formed in theirs twenties. If someone is hardworking and motivated, they will work hard and be proactive regardless of project, compensation or whenever they care for the company. It is not something you can switch on and off.
For me, it is better to ride it. Since I am not going to change my approach to work, I will continue to be an expensive contractor until I can live from my savings and pursue my side projects.
There's a balance needed with smaller companies. I, for a long time, chose not to care about the company's goals and just hit the daily tasks, and for a while it worked and I did very well. But eventually the management had a build up of stress, realising that THEIR choices of assigned tasks were not taking us properly to the goals, and let out the stress on the development team to a point where a few of us quit.
This isn't an objection to "not caring about employer's goals", far from it, it's clearly an issue with management teething problems as they try to expand a relatively small company and don't know how to do it. But I've found that caring a little bit about the goals, trying to see what they're aiming for and having that inside view of why we aren't getting there, allows me to bridge that gap, offer better advice to management and help the entire team have a less stress filled day, at the expense of some of my own peace of mind.
It'd be easy for me to say "well that's managements issue" but I can't ignore that management issues trickle down to the rest of us, which is much more obvious in smaller companies.
Oh, and a mention on 'saying no' - it's very hard to convince an employer to start saying no to customer demands even when they agree with all the reasons set out in front of them, especially when they've had a decade of doing nothing but bespoke work for them. It's taken a year but we're finally at the point we can firmly stand our ground as a dev team and say "no we're not working on that", or "push to Q4", and ignore the "we need this done TODAY" type of demands that have plagued us for years.
A lot of things will fall through the cracks if people don't pick up.
Professionals are not hourly workers, you're not there to do A->B, you're there to deal with the complexity, which means picking up pieces.
That said - you definitely do not have to worry about stuff. A healthy sense of detachment is actually kind of good for both you and your employer.
Your job is a civic responsibility, it's frankly moral to do a 'good job' - but that doesn't mean 'over striving', it doesn't mean 'being taken advantage of' and it doesn't mean having to worry about the bigger picture. That's definitely not your job.
I think a lot of people could be just as productive if they figured out the emotional strain part.
One little trick is to say to yourself 'I Don't Care' - but then go in the office, and put one foot in front of the other, and just get whatever is in front of you done. It's weirdly liberating and can be productive.
Like 'corporate mindfulness' - be present in the thing that you're trying to do - and not caught up in the giant hill of politics, bits and pieces, it's just noise.
1000 times this. The investors who own your company care about your well being as much as it affects the attrition stats in a way that matters to the bottom line. I say this as someone who's job is literally to talk to these people about their priorities before they buy a software company.
> You're probably not going to get rich from working a day job.
If you make a middle class salary, underspend your income by at least 10%, max out your 401k and IRA, invest in stocks, and start doing this in your 20s, yes, the odds are pretty good you will.
+1 and I would add try to own income rental properties by first buying an inexpensive house, not a huge expensive home; as soon as you can buy another inexpensive home and rent the first. Much better to own two modest homes and rent one than to own just one high maintenance cost huge home.
For the people who strongly dislike that opinion of mine, consider the hundreds of thousands of people trying to win that lottery by walking thousands of miles just for a chance to slip through the border.
> I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right.
1. There is usually only a single promotion-role on offer.
2. That promotion will go to the best performing employee (whatever metric is used).
3. If you're not the best performing employee, then do only the bare minimum to avoid being fired.
4. Doing the bare minimum to avoid being fired frees up the employee to concentrate energy and efforts towards jumping the corporate ladder (new project, etc).
Note that #4 is an "up or out" proposition: if the employee fails to gain power/influence in the company, then that energy can still be used to land a higher-level position at a different corp using the "new project" effort as an indicator to other companies that the employee has more power/influence than they actually possess.
Even if there's a single promotion per team per year (and there are certainly companies where promotions are not limited like that), that means that, in a team of 4 people, 50% will be promoted in 2 years. So if you like the job and plan to stay for a few years, I fail to see how this tactics is even remotely close to optimal.
> Even if there's a single promotion per team per year (and there are certainly companies where promotions are not limited like that), that means that, in a team of 4 people, 50% will be promoted in 2 years. So if you like the job and plan to stay for a few years, I fail to see how this tactics is even remotely close to optimal.
It's an analysis based on The Office; maybe read it and critique the 20k word write-up (in the link) instead of the 4-point summary.
> In that context, why do so many of us take on so many unnecessary responsibilities?
Honestly I think it’s a wonderful reflection of humans’ innate empathy and drive to help each other, the Stanford Prison Experiment shown to be junk science over and over and over.
We humans are unfortunately exploited by humanoid entities (corporations) who turn humans’ one truly-limited resource (attention) into something that’s also non-human. Everybody has heard the idiom that “time = money”, but have you ever stopped to think how fucked up it sounds when you apply the transitive property of equality to get “money = time”?
Employers most of the time only care about the management board goals, employee of the year can quickly turn into a jobless employee, given the way company roadmaps work in practice.
As a serial entrepreneur, and therefore employer of many people, I'm pretty horrified to read this. My immediate thought is that it's a toxic attitude, but totally understandable in what is probably the rule rather than the exception, i.e. a 'regular' company. And that's sad.
If you are really feeling as you do, I think it's time to reassess your employment and potentially your life.
For instance, I think many startups are different to this, and not only because they are small. More meaning: the genuine opportunity to enact change, I think is the biggest differentiator, alongside better incentives and stock options that in some cases lead to life-changing financial outcomes. There is always risk with this, and it's a higher risk than a larger company, but that's just the mechanics of life, economics, and society.
I work incredibly long hours, so i'm always 'busy', but for the most part I love what I do, like a passion project. This is because I'm transfixed by cause and effect. It's an amazing thing that I don't think our brains are wired to appreciate by default. It takes discovering this and then confirming it, illustrating that just one person can have disproportionate impact in the world. It seems the vast majority of us limit ourselves or feel a sense of imposter syndrome in our own skin.
The more one realises this and manages to instrument some change, the more positive reinforcement one gets, until one can look back at varying chunks of time in one's life to see the impact that was made. This gives you strong sense of meaning to your life, motivating you to fill your time with high impact activities that have the capacity to genuinely change people's lives, alongside your own. This could includes making time for your family and so on: because in many cases this is an important high impact activity.
After realising this and doing it, the feeling you get with a positive outcome, even if you're still in the middle of doing whatever it is, is better than any drug i've taken.
>You're probably not going to get rich from working a day job. You're replaceable, and if you left your job tomorrow then you'll soon be forgotten. This is true for the majority of software engineers.
I'd honestly be replace "software engineers" with "all jobs"; your post is highly relevant to most fields.
Agreed. It’s also important to remember that as a member of the non-propertied working class you’re always creating more value than what you’re paid for; you’re creating invaluable intellectual property that will bring in truckloads of cash and capital even after you leave the company.
Great point. I try to apply it to myself. Instead of working twice as hard for 5 percent chance of any promotion or other benefit, I'd prefer working hard enough at minimum acceptable level and try to control things from expense side.
The only on-call I accept these days are ones that I get to bill my full rate for the entire time whether they call me or not. Most companies don't accept this deal, but I don't need or want to work for most companies.
I feel genuinely sad for people who believe this. As someone who is extremely critical of my own work, the feeling of walking home knowing I really did something well is so awesome.
A job well done can be its own reward, that is true. Just be careful that the satisfaction does not turn into the main reward, because your management also knows that you derive significant value from the satisfaction and will attempt to save on raises/promotions/etc since you are apparently already happy enough even without those.
Also, spending your career in cynicism guarantees depression of some sorts. It makes you dull, you’ll have poor friends, you’ll attract the worst of people, you’ll create a toxic workplace that would resemble some of the worst run government departments. Impossible to fire, useless bloat of people that have zero interest in improving themselves or others, and life a fulfilling life.
Sad. But on the bright side, those that excel at what they do are going to be disproportionately rewarded. I love this aspect of society and certain political ideologies want to destroy this.
No, those are earned through office politics. A job well done is a good bargaining chip when playing office politics, but it doesn't guarantee you raises, bonuses, promotions or RSUs.
This is a terrible way to live a life. This cynicism would be evident to others, create a toxic pathologically depressing environment and then pull others down with it.
I can’t believe I’m reading this on HN, a place that used to be full of optimism and accepting grand challenges, looking upto leaders and doing hard things others shy away from.
I know this is a taboo to compare with Reddit, but lately I have to pinch myself and ask is this really HN!?
Well, maybe most people have finally seen through what a BS most of the VC/Start Ups are if you are an employee with shitty behaviour from founders/investors that you realize the best way to go through life is to do the same they do, just from the other side.
If you don't own a significant (5%+) chunk in a company, don't do a single minute of non-paid overwork. Do the bare minimum to justify not being fired (and this is key, if they don't fire you for that, it means they accept that what they pay you is being returned to them in work, so why give them more output for the same money?). Save your energy and time and focus on you, your family, your projects. Companies don't care for you, so why the fuck care for them. Get in. Put the minimum that the company accepts for they pay and get the fuck out. Anything else is just bad choice that are have more positives for the companies and downsides for yourself
First, employees stop caring for their employer's goals.
Next, they are upset when MailChimp sells and they don't get their options (apparently believing that receiving options is their sacred right protected by God, Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human rights).
Just know that we see you. We understand that this is your mentality. That's why we don't promote you, that's why we don't hire you, etc.
Saying yes to everything some random PM wants from you is of course not the way. But neither is "lying flat". Hard work is in many ways its own reward.
After decades in the industry, those that have put in the time and effort far outshine their coasting peers. There are benefits for your career should you choose to put in the effort and ascend.
I share OP's sentiment, and I can flat out say that I am truly fine that "[you] see [me]". The thing is, I don't want to work with you or for you, or for people who don't want to hire me. Jobs are a two-way street and I'm going to pick a place to work for that's a good fit for me time after time. And you know what? I've always busted my ass and I continue to be hired, given raises, etc. - but I will always push back for my own sanity whenever I feel necessary.
>Hard work is in many ways its own reward.
There's a difference between "hard work" and "too much work", and the latter looks different to each and every one of us.
>After decades in the industry, those that have put in the time and effort far outshine their coasting peers. There are benefits for your career should you choose to put in the effort and ascend.
There sure are! And just as there are people like you who want to continue that career ascent, there are those of us who are also completely content with prioritizing other things in our lives beyond our careers, while still putting in a solid day's work every day. I don't care if people outshine me and ascend faster than I do - for me, my career is just something that allows me to provide for my family and my hobbies, but it will never be "who I am". And you know what? I'm happy with my choices and where I'm at. Go on, buddy, and get that promotion! I'll still be over here doing my thing at my pace, not bothered by the fact that I might be standing in your dust.
You would really do well to understand that everyone wants something different out of life and are content to take the paths they want, even if they're not yours. :)
Maybe people who put in a ton of work get ahead. That's a big maybe. Sometimes people get ahead because they had the good fortune to be tapped for the big project. Sometimes they were in the right meeting and got tapped by the boss because they were in the room. Sometimes people get ahead because they're better at talking than doing.
But maybe you work hard, do more. What's the financial return on that, for a typical employee over your hypothetical "coasting employee"? 50%? 20%? Less?
Is it worth it? The stress, the extra hours, the opportunity costs?
As a 54 year old Software Engineer, who has had a nice IT career for over 26 years, I'm spent.
This is coming from someone who has always had a growth mindset and had a really hard time sitting still. I used to loathe naps and felt like I was missing out if I took one. Now, I take a one hour nap almost daily and I'm finding that after 1pm I'm basically fried (I start working around 7AM).
I'm not sure what to do about it, if anything. If I could retire now, I would.
I'm trying very hard to get my earnestness about learning new things back and I'm finding that my motivation has just tanked.
I’m younger than you, had the same issue and solved it by working less and doing more outside. Lifting weights in the sun, mountain biking, golf, surfing.
In understand this is a luxury not everyone can afford but what I do now is work from about 6-9am, go out during the day until about 3, work 4-6. Which if you add it up is still a solid 5 hour day.
For whatever reason it just makes me more productive and sleep better at night.
Before I did this I just felt like a slave to my computer, super tired all the time, depressed and lethargic. I had sleeping problems because I felt like I was missing out on “life” and for some reason I’d stay up late on Instagram, YouTube etc, maybe watching others live vicariously ? I felt dissatisfied.
Knowledge work pays well but IMO it can come at a pretty high cost if you don’t prioritise your life.
Edit: I read your reply on another post, I think you’re doing way too much at your job. It’s not manageable and it sounds like you’re burned out and likely failing at at least one of your duties making you feel down.
100% same on all of what you said, and I'm 29. If you're lucky enough to work in a job where you need to produce each week, but can crank whenever you want - go outside to get at least one long-ish walk/bike ride and also one weight/yoga sesh.
I see no point to be sitting at the computer if it's a beautiful day and I already got stuff done early or am going to do stuff late.
The terms "choose to" and "peak time" would imply that those are the most favored times, but the very concept of jobs requires that people wake up at those times whether they want to or not. In fact, the big peak in average waking times in June (when many people have vacations) seems to indicate that most people will in fact wake up later when they do have the choice.
That's not wildly outside normal ranges. The average recommended sleep for an adult is 7-9 hours, with up to an hour variance outside that still being within healthy ranges for some people.
No naps during the day. I just let go of my notions about how much sleep was enough, and started going to bed when I was tired and getting out of bed when I wake up. I do not use an alarm to wake up, and I do not get tired during the day, so I think I've settled on an adequate sleep schedule for my body.
* Establish a clear list of goals and objectives with your manager. Make sure your moving toward completion of the goals and they can see that. This keeps them off your back.
* Make it clear that you want to manage your own time and ask if that’s going to be an issue. If it is, find out what can be done to alleviate it.
Sorry if that sounded obvious but it’s taken me years to figure this out.
Work remotely and not be micromanaged is how I manage something similar. Mine might be even more extreme. Sometimes the second half of my biphasic work schedule may not occur until as late as 9 PM.
In my experience, kids tend to just follow along with their parents habits.
Like one family I know eats dinner at 1 am, because that’s when the father gets home from work. The kids nap in the evening, and do homework past midnight.
I originally thought that was madness, but they have 6 kids and 4 have gone to Ivy League schools apparently it works for them.
Don't underestimate the practicality of telling people to fuck off, even if it will have to be put in different words. If for some reason that's not practical, then that's a problem in itself, so try working on that.
As harsh as it might sound to put it this way, the answer for how some people will be able to manage better with their SO and kids is, "because I don't have your SO and kids for my SO and kids," or more specifically, "by not allowing my relationship with my SO and kids to be like your relationship with your SO and kids." For kids especially and with people I know who have this problem, it's because they infantilize and underestimate their kids (past the point where they're actual infants) and think "that's just how they [i.e. kids] are." Your question posed as if it could have an answer that would somehow be general/widely applicable (and not highly dependent upon the tendencies and personalities of the people involved as individuals) certainly hints towards this.
>> Don't underestimate the practicality of telling people to fuck off, even if it will have to be put in different words.
A valuable (possibly the most?) life skill is to be able to tell people to fuck off in the most sincere and HR approved way imaginable, it's very empowering, would recommend 10 for 10.
Not what I was talking about. What you're describing is a great way to make your co-workers hate you (or make your subordinates hate working for you if you have any and you tolerate this style of communication) while telling yourself how clever you are for figuring out how to flip the script on the system. It's not clever at all. Anyone with a brain can see what's going on when you do it, and it shouldn't be permitted just because someone managed to make their barbs in subtext, rather than explicitly peppering in words like "fuck you." Not-clever toxic passive aggression is one of the worst contributions that office culture has "given" to modern society. And it's certainly not something that makes sense for someone to recommend weaponizing against one's family...
The practicality of telling people to fuck off means saying the equivalent of, "I need you to fuck off right now [so I can take care of something important without any distractions/obstructions]," ideally having cultivated the kind of relationship where the receivers understand that importance, whether it's stated plainly or merely implied.
Having an SO and/or kids can involve more than just tendency and personality issues. Even with the healthiest of boundaries some constraints are non-negotiable and possibly outside ones control.
Six hours of work? Lie the other 2 and call it a day.
Or, renegotiate a contract for 6 hours per day.
Given how much productivity I presume you bring, I’d lie.
I don’t feel bad about it since companies care too little (in general). If they care, then I would care. E.g. a 10x more productive engineer doesn’t get 10x the pay. I met one of these people, they lied. They worked 2 hours, shipped one hour of code in production, saved the other one to commit on a rainy day and still got employee of the year because they were by far the most productive.
You could also become a freelancer, then you don’t have to lie.
My point is: six hours of productive work should be enough.
Part of the problem is that I'm a Software Engineer as well as a Business Analyst and Project Manager. I'm also managing a dev team, so it's really difficult to only work 6 hours a day. Hell, I can't even do all my work in a 40 hour work week.
Yes, I realize this isn't a me issue and I'm looking for other work. The problem is that I'm encountering a lot of ageism in this field too.
If you happen to live in Canada, email me, my HN userid at gmail.
Honestly, you're doing 4 jobs, and I assume only being paid for one. Fuck that noise.
I work for a big company that has, in my opinion, good work/life balance and a great work culture, and we're always hiring.
Ageism is not a thing where I work (I am almost your age).
Can't promise anything but some guidance on what to apply for and some personal anecdotes about my time here, but if you're interested, happy to share.
I simply don’t finish work if I am spent. If I do, then I am worse the next week. I have the luxury of only needing to take care of myself.
Ask to hire for help. The business case is: either you break down, and the company loses a valuable person, or they get extra hands and can resume business operations. And while you’re at it ask for a pay raise because you were likely underpaid.
Ageism sucks. See if you can look younger or see if you can work at a company of a linkedin connection.
I am just brainstorming, you know what might apply to you.
This. I have the same problem (ie 4 roles bundled as one role) and I am so tired. After speaking to many people that are far more successful than me in their careers, I was told:
1. You cannot be successful at 4 things at the same time. I do not work like this because it is impossible. You must pick what you are focusing on.
2. Agree with your management where they expect you to be spending your time. Agree on the plan for everything else which is not in the prior category.
While I agree there is a lot of ageism, there is something worse than ageism - obvious fatigue and lack of enthusiasm during interviews. You can read burnout on a person in the first few seconds - you may need to get a break so that you can have the proper mindset for interviews.
I’m afraid of ageism too, and I’m 39. I’m lucky to work for a company that looked beyond this and saw my skills as a self-taught programmer, and took me on with a freelance contract.
My main concern is continuing to find work whenever this current job ends. It’s a good field, and I enjoy it because it’s helpful to society ( nursing related software ) but I know I’m not the greatest programmer out there.
My current gig should last a few more years at least, and I have no plans on leaving this company. Still, ageism and staying current is always on the back of my mind, and a part of me wonders if there’s something I’m missing regarding my career
Early 40’s and I feel very lucky to have a job. I feel certain that once I hit 50 I’ll be unable to get hired. I think the trick is to make sure the job you have by 45 is somewhere that will be willing to keep you as you age.
Honestly, I'm thinking about how to convincingly lie about my age when I'm that age. It's part of the reason why I don't smoke and don't do much alcohol.
And by the way, I hate lying. I know I can do it relatively well, but I almost never do it because I hate the ethical implications and the memory implications of it. The thing is though, when it comes to companies, they have warped things so much that I'm willing to not stand by my own principles. It really feels to me that they threw a backhanded punch first. Fine, they can do that, but then I can throw one back and encourage other people to do so as well.
Oh, and if I'd be in the interview chair as an interviewer, I'd rather look at someone's experience and transferable skills and throw the whole ageism thing out of the window.
There's two things, or their combination, that I find really confusing about ageism and it's apparent prevalence (I believe it, but no first-hand experience being in my 20s):
- 'nobody' stays at one company for decades or an entire career any more (perhaps in part because of the massive decline, at least in the UK, of defined-benefit pensions, so 'you' - employer - are not on the hook for that either), so the the 50yo just has potentially a lot more experience than the 30yo, and in reality no difference in how long they'll work there that's due to their ages
- it's widely known that this is the case, so there's surely a big under-tapped pool of older applicants, with fewer competing offers?
Honestly I think it'd be hard for me not to be ageist (if I were a hiring manager, and it weren't illegal to discriminate on the basis of certain 'protected characteristics' which include age) - I'd snap up that cheap experience!
> I'm a Software Engineer as well as a Business Analyst and Project Manager. I'm also managing a dev team,
That's really too much context switching. Of course you're getting burnt.
Effectively pulling all those things off was possible 10 or 20 years ago. The world has gotten too complex now. Unfortunately, it is sort of expected in some shops.
One thing that I find helps tremendously: Don't try to wear more than one hat per day. If you're doing management-related tasks today, don't try to do software engineering on the same day. Even if it means you waste a few hours in a day.
I'm a little younger than you (43), but can very much relate. My current position is similar and trying to do all 3 of those things (and do them well) over the past couple of years has lead me to the verge of burnout. The paradox is that I still love what do, and I really enjoy it when I have a chance to focus on one aspect for longer than 15 minutes at a time.
But the demand to constantly be hyper-productive at all three of those things simultaneously just because I happen to have the skillset(s) means I have a hard time caring about any of them.
Sounds like there is no good answer but a start maybe simplify your lifestyle and talk to your current employer about working 32 hours per week. Most likely they will say no and you will need to jump ship.
This is a great time to find freelance work. Your soon to be former employer maybe your first client.
I worked for two State Governments, Oregon and Nebraska for a combined 13 years total.
I ended my career at the State of Oregon as an IT Director for a State Agency.
So several things about state employment bothered me to no end:
1. State employee union contracts catered to the lowest common denominator. What I mean by that for one thing, is that you cannot negotiate your salary or your "work out of class" rules/pay.
2. Implementing technology (context was 15 years ago) one always had to consider the public perception. This meant that when iPhones were first introduced, I couldn't consider them as part of my IT planning because of the public perception that I'd be wasting tax dollars on them. Despite the fact that they were superior in every way to what Blackberry was offering at the time.
3. I couldn't buy things off of price agreement despite finding prices lower than what the State had already negotiated.
_I ended my career at the State of Oregon as an IT Director for a State Agency._
I think thats the issue you're too high up in the job ladder to not have any 'work responsibilities'.... If you drop back down to the nameless IT 'tinkerer' programmer , responsibilities will vanish!
You mention "If I could retire now, I would"... so maybe you have certain life logistics preventing you from taking a lower pay-grade... but if not...
I have wondered about that. Some jobs I think make you die from within even if they are only 9to5. One buddy of mine had a govt job and complained about it everyday… it made him toxic. He eventually left but took waaaay to long.
trick is to bounce around departments until you get into a good group of non-toxic folks, and your skill level is above everyone. 2 hours of work is the equivalent of 2-5 days of another programmers work, and everyone loves your output.
If you're working from home, its really not that bad, since the other 6 hours of teh day you can learn anything you want. Just have to be near computer incase something happens etc...
I can honesty LY tell you moving from private industry to state government was the best decision I have made. Definitely move around until you find people and a department that you like.
I’m not the most wizened of veterans, but rarely have I seen someone put in a true solid 8 hours of work in a day (excluding 11th hour crunches), and even rarer with any regularity. The norm in my experience, in-office or remote, is 3 hours per day. It’s kind of like the televised broadcast of American football. Add up all the commercials (distractions), commentary (socializing), and stoppage (eating/relieving) and you’re left with a fraction of productivity. Not complaining; everything seems to have worked out just fine.
My psychologist urged me to listen to my body. If you find you haven't got an 8 hour day in you, do what you can in less and stop pretending.
Spend part of every day outside. Spend part of every week in the company of others.
I too was very concerned about if I could "stop" and worried about my mojo and work ethic which went missing around 10 years ago. You learn to cope, and I read enough financial investment advice to realize I need less than I feared post work, but probably I won't entirely retire: moving to a different intensity of work is the goal probably.
It helps to live in an economy with a public health service. Moving country in these times is hard, moving country also breaks social ties which are really important in older age but mid-50s you can make bridges to a new community. So, if you are in a place where health costs will be a major concern, think about international relocation. The longer you leave it the less likely it is to work.
I'm a 54 year old too, who has been cutting code since I was 18. Currently running my own startup which is doing well, but I find that the long years of long hours have sapped my energy levels quite drastically.
I deliberately only work about 4 to 6 hours per day max, and delegate everything else to my team. I also take Wednesdays off entirely to spend as a 'date day' with my wife who also has doesn't have a work shift on Wednesdays, and I don't work on weekends any more.
My working hours are broken up - I may do 2 or 3 hours in the morning when I wake up, but then I go off an indulge in my other passions such as music production etc. Then I may do a couple more hours in the afternoon when the rest of my remote team are coming online on the other side of the world, then I will take a break to cook dinner etc. and check in quickly before going to bed to ensure all tasks are on track. Like the comment poster above I also take regular naps in the afternoon to recharge my batteries.
I also don't have more than 2 to 3 meetings per week, and I am VERY selective about who I meet with and for how long. I am totally focused on maximising every ounce of energy towards only things that will move my startup forward.
Conversely, some of those meetings are actually spent mentoring other startup founders - I find that it really motivates me to 'give back' to the community a little after decades of receiving help and advice.
An yes, I have been through actual burnout 4 times in my career. Each time gets worse, but I also now know to look for the signs - plus my family and colleagues also keep watch for early signs, which helps me mitigate the onset of bad habits and work patterns that may trigger it.
Consider that COVID is part of it. I was enjoying myself at work until it hit and then my motivation and desire to learn new things plummeted. I decided to take a sabbatical to recharge and it took a few months before I could enjoy writing code again.
I just didn't realize I was burnt out by the world in general.
I feel this so much. But I can’t take a sabbatical - I have to pay bills.
I basically work everyday and tell myself “just one more hour and then I’ll take off the rest of the day”. I do that every hour until I get as close to 5 as possible.
I’ve been like this for over a year. This is my life. I try not to think about it.
A sabbatical now may stave off not being able to work for months or years later. Possibly sooner than you think.
Another option is to dial back on committments and intensity, possibly with a reduction in income. It's no a full work cessation, but it is preserving sanity and intellectual capacity.
If your finances are stretched now, start cutting. Deep, hard, and fast.
If you've a partner, involve them in this discussion.
I can, but my wife works so hard and she would be so angry if i burned through our savings. I wouldn’t blame her. Also my kids work so hard at school. If I stopped working, it would be a terrible example.
There's a weird fixation on productivity that gets drilled into our heads at a young age. It's beyond okay to not be running 100% all the time, regardless of what the paradigm espouses as value.
The problem I see is that the delivery system has evolved in many companies / tech in general to be JIT, but for human resources.
While at FAANG, I was at capacity every week. So a 'normal' week (which was actually quite rare), I expected to spend 35-45 hours in work + meetings.
But 75% of those weeks, some urgent issue would come up. Then you have an extra 15-25 hours of attending to the urgency, falling behind 5-15 hours on planned work, and then you spend all evening thinking about how to solve the Very Urgent Problem.
Even if you are good at compartmentalizing, you'll be confounded by redundant messages from middle managers asking you about the status of the Very Urgent Problem.
Taking a break / vacation means twice as much work for 1-3 weeks before the vacation, and 1-3 weeks after, as you must prepare for coverage for while you are out of office, and then catch up on what happened while you were gone.
Add in the death of a loved one, medical issue or even a string of minor problems and you're completely subjugate to external circumstances. This will lead to burnout, at a minimum.
As a younger person, this kind of environment made me feel important and necessary. Later I began to realize this is the opposite of the truth. Important and necessary people have the power to set their own terms.
I am not sure why things have evolved this way. I recently watched Koyaanisqatsi ('life out of balance') a film from the 80s about modernity and technology and found it as relevant as ever. However the busyness that used to be outwardly visible has now migrated into our minds and seems to be causing mass unhappiness and mental health issues.
I think it has to do with reifying things that hadn't ought to be rigid. A 0001 deadline is arbitrary, being one minute over is not really consequential from a logical perspective until you've negotiated and inked a contract that makes fees contingent on having X done prior to 0001, and once that contract is signed and made into company custom...
> This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
This has been a fantastic read. Thanks for sharing!
I will add that I recommend the whole "In Praise of Idleness" book from Russell, it's a collection of essays and lots of them are interesting 70-80 years later.
A personal favourite of mine is "The Ancestry of Fascism", delineating social movements in history through the perspective of a constant pendulum pushing/pulling from opposite directions for any kind of social movement (political, artistic, etc.).
I work with people in their 20s through 50s (I'm not quite as experienced as you, but I'm a solid Gen X, so getting there). I feel like this a common sentiment across all ages, which is honestly something new in the past two years.
As an example - we had a very useful, functional internal developer tool written in Elm (the language, not the mail program). The original devs all quit and no one was interested in learning a new language, so the tool is being shut down and "all" (minus the useful parts) content is moving to a half-assed mix of Wiki, Atlassian tools, and honestly just falling through the cracks.
I wasn't involved in the tool's development or depreciation, but just the fact that we have tons of interns and junior software devs around that couldn't be bothered or forced to learn a new language backs up your "I'm spent" motivation TED talk.
I, too, am not excited to take over maintenance of someone else's pet project, whose quality I am not capable assessing (and the "fun of starting" gone).
Coworker: We'll use Docker, Minikube dev setup,@#$%@.io and Unicorn-Lang, this will be awesomest!
Me: Oh, have you considered boring tech?
Coworker: ah, it's old, not how software is built today.
Also coworker: leaves 1.5 years later with with us having to pick up the pieces.
I feel that way now but I'm only 37. I knew it was a bit soon so I went to a doctor, and turns out my testosterone is at 250 (whereas at my age it should be over 1,000).
No idea if that's something you've already explored, but felt it couldn't hurt to share.
Your doctor is misinformed. No one except outliers going through puberty have natural testosterone over 1000. The average for someone in their 30s is around 300-400. 250 is on the lower side but not so low that most people with that level would have the symptoms of low testosterone.
Yes, natural testosterone production decreases throughout your life once you finish puberty. Doctors vary wildly in what levels they will treat. You can find "mens clinics" that will give you testosterone therapy at virtually any blood level, they don't care. They're very expensive though (~$2000+ a year).
I’ve done bloodwork prior to taking Ashwaganda and will do again in two to three months. Testosterone was low, not excessively so but was feeling exhausted and unmotivated. Ashwaganda appears to have given me the energy and motivation back but I’ve only been taking it for a week so am not exactly sure how I’ll fare in the longer term. It gave me enough energy to work out now so Im hoping to raise my energy to prior levels or close by.
Do you go to a doctor to prescribe blood work for you? I am interested in doing bloodwork as part of a wellness check to check for deficiencies etc but am unsure about how to approach this.
If you live in the USA you should be able to order online and then go in person to like a labcorp or whatever. If you ever got a drug test for a job, thats the sort of place that usually does it. I think some states you may need a referral but most you do not. For a hormone related test covering testosterone and other factors it is going to cost >100 dollars.
Also worth checking Vitamin D levels - inside all day at the computer, especially with lockdown, can lead to a deficiency which has direct physiological impacts.
I'm 56, and a couple of years ago I was very much where you are. I was used to hard work (about a dozen startups over the years), I was used to learning and excelling and being recognized for it. Until I wasn't. To keep a long story short, I was able to retire and took advantage of it.
I highly recommend that you take a good hard look at what it would take for you to get to retirement, and make a plan. It might require cutting back in some areas, but if you don't figure out how to do it then the universe will and it'll probably be worse. Your plan might involve "one last push" to build up savings, or it might involve a "wind down" at a less stressful kind of job that you can sustain for longer. That's up to you. One thing I will say is that I've known several people who tried the "learning new things" route as an antidote to burnout, and it backfired badly. They ended up being even more stressed, unable to perform at their accustomed level, younger colleagues being resentful, etc. Maybe it'll be different for you, but it seems to me that learning new things is best done on your own time - cutting back on work hours to make room if necessary. A sabbatical or a period of part-time work might seem like it's just dragging things out even more, but sometimes it's the right strategy if it keeps you from losing it altogether.
I never really made the connection before listening to a recent podcast with an expert on serotonin and dopamine, but do you think this is a natural effect of declining dopamine? Online searching seems to indicate dopamine declines with age and is also responsible for taking risks and motivation for both short and long term goal attainment
I don’t really know much on the topic honestly. There are the usual natural ways to increase dopamine like exercise, getting sunlight, and reducing obesity. There are supplements that supposedly help like vitamin D and magnesium. Then there are drugs that act as dopamine agonists. Where these all fall in terms of efficacy I have no idea.
Im in a different field but I too have felt similarly.
I would suggest a couple of things:
- see a psychologist (not a psychiatrist, athough a psychiatrist may be step later on) - this should help you develop tools to make yourself better
- dont take work home, stop when you are tired - i saw that you fulfill multiple roles, could some of that be delegated? are you being compensated for those roles or did they just pile on over time? maybe its time to talk to your boss about it…
- take a real vacation, as in stay home and dont do anything
I guess I am very lucky then. I am 60 and still very active in development. I develop my own products and I develop new products for clients in various industries. The range is very wide (firmware, low level soft, enterprise applications back and front end, equipment / process control, desktop productivity and entertainment software etc. etc).
I do get tired every once in a while but since I am an independent company I can almost always take my time and recover. So far I did not loose any of that sense of excitement when starting on design of completely new project. I guess being ISV for the last 22 years helps greatly in this department.
Also read a lot, play me some music on keyboard (insanely bad but who cares) and do fair bit of physical activity (cycling, hiking, swimming in the lakes and ocean.
As a result I am very fit, have lots of energy and my brain is always itching to start something new.
What I do not have is a ton of money but I am not doing too bad and would not trade my freedom for anything
The work that you're saying you do daily from 7am-1pm, do you feel satisfied about it at the end of the day? Does it create meaning for you on the grander scheme of things? (based on what your personal values are, and you personally find meaningful)
If not, then it's probably time to switch employer, to one that has a product/mission that is aligned with a topic/field that would bring more meaning into your life.
If that's not possible, you could try spending one less hour per day on that job you have, and invest that hour in something that creates meaning in your own terms.
I'm 52 got laid off a pseudo-IT job went to a technical college, graduated, got entry level IT and after a year I feel burned out. I'm at the bottom rung of IT where even young people get burned out.
Now each day is just a blur of anxiety. I used to love IT, school was a blast I loved programming, servers, networking, security, web design, troubleshooting, but help desk not so much at 52.
I used to work evenings and nights at my old job now 9pm seems like 3am.
>"I'm finding that after 1pm I'm basically fried (I start working around 7AM)."
Sometimes I do the same - starting 6-7AM and by around noon I quit. I consider it quite normal and nothing to be ashamed of. Except some emergencies productive people (and I count myself as one) do not really shovel gravel 8 hours a day. No point in doing so.
It's so hard to reply without coming off as presumptuous and ignorant of your situation, so I apologize in advance. These kinds of feelings can of course be a sign of burnout that can get better with the suggestions in the article plus some significant time off that doesn't come with the penalty of having to make up for all the time off.
On the other hand, maybe it's time to reexamine when you can retire. There are a lot of forums about this, my wife 'rescued' me from feeling like I needed to work to normal retirement age after reading a lot of Mr. Money Mustache, FWIW.
Just curious, but what’s your definition of “growth mindset”?
I love being challenged, believe I can change to meet most challenges I face, and enjoy looking for opportunities to improve myself. This is how I’d understood the concept of “growth mindset” from Carole Dweck’s book Mindset.
Maybe the difference for me is that none of these things are core components of my identity? It’s just a way of interacting with the world that I find interesting vs. something I feel compelled to go all-gas-no-brakes on all the time.
My definition of growth mindset is the same as yours.
I don't identify with it so much as I think of it as my baseline. Does this mean my baseline has changed? Absolutely.
It's still irksome because I too enjoyed looking for opportunities to improve myself or the methods I use to get things done. Now, I just don't give a fuck.
I thought by the time you're 54 you could retire. I'm much younger and I could retire in a couple of years. What is your saving rate? - you can read more here https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/
Your job starts at 7am? You could start later, like 10. Have your 2-3h lunch time. Finish at 6pm. Change jobs until you find a job like that. There are plenty, I can assure you.
Invariably, comment threads like this, pop up when I provide some current thoughts about my career. A career that quite a few HN readers share apparently, but that's where the similarities end.
Quite a lot of you didn't grow up in abject poverty and it shows.
The hole this puts you in, 99% of people have a really, really difficult time climbing out of and describing what this process is like, is lost on a lot of people. My biological mother made extremely poor choices and never took my future into consideration. We were housing insecure and we were food insecure. My personal safety was at times in jeopardy.
I've been in survival mode most of my life. It's only the last 5 years that I was in a position to finally make thriving choices for me AND for my family. It was only this month that I finally made the ultimate thriving choice to live in a place that I've dreamt of living in since I was a kid. I'm not even going into any other details about what effect this has on you as an adult, like homelessness, how expensive being poor is, etc.
So I'm only left feeling like laughing (and sometimes crying) when someone mentions savings. Shit, it's only been in the last 10 years, that I got over mentally calculating the cost of everything I put in my shopping cart, to make sure I could afford it. To this day, I still have anxiety over swiping my card in front of people at the grocery store, thinking that surely it's going to be declined (it hasn't in years).
I'm only just now able to start dedicating some of my salary to a savings account (or other investments). There is no time left to ultimately retire with anything matching my current salary, so I've resigned myself to work until I literally can't anymore and with a remote IT job, sitting at a desk, that sounds like 30 more years or more.
Change jobs? I guess you missed the part where I'm encountering ageism? I've had to lop off a decade of my experience in order to try to not appear older with my experience alone.
You aren't alone brother. I grew up with rich and poor family, but chose the poor.
People who have never had to wonder if they were going to have a meal or a place to sleep as a child can never know how it can permanently change your life. I'm glad you are making strides, I still struggle to, so that's quite the accomplishment and you should be proud.
I don't think I will ever stop tallying my groceries as I put them in the basket. Or being surprised when my kids ask for something from the impulse ailse, I literally don't even see it I'm so used to not being able to get any of it.
I firmly believe if every person had to at least work a minimum wage job for a year and try to survive off it, our society would be so much better off, you wouldn't have to explain being poor to some privileged kid who has all the answers because it worked for them.
Half of the country will never know what it's like to be the other half, but one side has all the incentives to keep it that way.
I have family who still spout 'If I were born poor I'd still end up rich' (translation- poor people are just stupid, I'm smart).
>>I thought by the time you're 54 you could retire. I'm much younger and I could retire in a couple of years. What is your saving rate?
That is not going to help him much now. Not everyone has or could have started saving early in life. Some did not due to ignorance, some did not due to life circumstances, some did but other life events could have taken that from them (i.e bad investments, divorce, medical issue, or 100's of other things).
Just because you have the luck and privilege to be on the FIRE path does not mean everyone else is as lucky or choose that path. This person may have not planned to retire early and looking back now wished they had made that plan in the 20's. The road not taken an all that...
>>Change jobs until you find a job like that. There are plenty, I can assure you.
Again it would seem you are taking your anecdote and applying it globally. This is very region specific and I can assure you in my region there are exactly Zero jobs in IT that allow you to start at 10am, take a 2-3 hour lunch, and knock off an 6pm...
I will not implicitly state those are not common, but I can not imagine a region where they are?
I didn't say he should have retired, it's just my expectation for a software engineer to have the ability to retire by then.
It's very likely he could retire but he just didn't realized. Maybe looking into it, it's not a bad idea.
I worked on 3 continents, in more than 10 companies. No employer ever told me I'm coming in too late, my lunch time it's too long or I'm leaving too early (6pm).
Retiring early is risky. Due to market volatility the safe withdrawal / drawdown rate is lower the longer you need your pot to last, and the impact of miscalculating your expenses worse the lower that rate becomes.
Underestimate your annual expenses by $10K on a 5% SWR? Ok you need a pot of $200K more. At 3%? $333K more. 2%? $500K.
With interest rates in a 700 year downward trend, and yields dropping across all asset classes, you should NOT assume, as a software engineer, that you will be able to retire in your 50s.
Still, of that's something that appeals, start saving and investing, otherwise the chance is literally 0.
10 companies, and "much younger" than the OP. hmmmmm I wonder.....
That aside, like I said if your experience is true, which i have my doubts, it does not match mine. Most companies I know of even if they have flex time want their people to start before 9am, and generally do not allow 2-3hr lunches as normal course. Now if you only worked as a contractor this may be different but a salaried position employed directly for a company... Notta gonna happen every often.
At most of the companies I have worked for you would be put on performance review and then terminated.
Very interesting, I worked both as permanent and on contract basis and they did their best to keep me. Nobody even come close to fire me. I guess just different kind of experience. I'm not trying to convince you, I'm just saying, there is better out there.
With all due respect, saying you're 54 isn't enough context. The past 18 months have been a lot. For everybody, in and out of tech. Knowing you've been in tech longer than most helps sell... what? that you're more deserving of being tired that the rest of us? (Not rowdy invalid, there is an official retirement age after all...) But shit, the new iPhone came out and all I could hear was how much I don't want to wait in line nor be made fun of for my phone having a button and being an olds. I'm really afraid this is a permanent state but I don't have as many years to fall back on. I have enough savings not to starve but the pandemic changed things and those savings aren't going to last forever! (Rapidly dwindling, some might say.) Hope yours lasts longer than mine!
I think it’s pretty clear we have an epidemic of burnout on our hands. I think it’s a new phenomenon. And I think immersive online experiences are the underlying cause.
I’ve lived much of my life for the past 30 years in virtual spaces of one form or another, from MUDs to IRC to MMORPGs to early and then fully evolved social media. As commercial virtual space showed up, I noticed the engagement hooks and potential for addiction massively increased.
As that happened, for my own mental health, I have distanced myself. I’ve left most social media, don’t play multi user games and have ramped up my real world social interaction.
If you work hard and have pressing responsibilities, spending the little free time that you have on commercial addictive online pastimes will, in my opinion, guarantee your implosion.
Find spaces to be in during the little free time that you have that don’t make someone else wealthy. Then take it a step further, and find things to do that are good for you.
I think there is another angle to this, which is that the distinctions between "being at work" and "clocking out" have, for many people who work online all day (and especially for many new to WFH people these past 2 years), faded and faded until now people feel like they are permanently on-call, permanently at the whim of their employer's/manager's/colleague's demands.
A solution, in addition to interacting with real people in person more, is to push back hard and rigidly control when and how your work makes contact with the rest of your life.
Personally, I'm a zero contact after work hours kind of guy. When my end-of day hits, I will not answer a single thing that is work related. My colleagues have learned to accept it and the world has not ended or the company failed. People are hired and paid accordingly to respond to off hours emergencies. I am not one of those people.
Obviously, people will have different roles and relationships with their work, so this type of thing won't work for everyone. But the key is more that you take matters into your own hands and that your interactions with your work become the result of a decision you make.
I am also this kind of person (0 contact outside work), and I also want to add that I had to (strongly) push back when I was contacted on my private phone while on vacation.
I literally had to tell my colleagues RTFM and don't bother me on my time off.
I think this comment touches on something very deep. Spending time in online spaces seems to be profoundly damaging to our mental health.
What exactly is it about online spaces that does this ? It’s little wonder that many are burning out after a year of being perpetually online.
However I would also like to add that the amount of uncertainty in the world and in our jobs has gone up.
You never really know if you’re doing “enough”. And the internet exacerbates it.
I think you really hit the nail on the head here. We really do, almost all of us in this modern tech world, have an order of magnitude more leverage in our day-to-day activities than the previous generation did. We have a theoretical (though very uncertain) capability of making a marked difference to a chunk of the world (e.g. affecting thousands of people) by putting in an extra hour of work, often without necessitating the involvement of anyone else. To paraphrase uncle Ben, this great power can then put a heavy personal responsibility on our shoulders, even if there isn't a pointy-haired boss breathing down our neck.
> I think it’s pretty clear we have an epidemic of burnout on our hands
I agree, but I also agree with your observation that a lot of the burnout is coming from the activities that people choose to fill their free time with.
I see a lot of people in the tech communities boasting about quitting social media, but they then go on to spend countless hours every day on non-traditional social media like Reddit or HN. Or they endlessly scroll news articles and outrage bait that isn’t really relevant to their lives. Or they spend hours upon hours in video games or watching TV. Or they immerse themselves in drama around things that don’t directly impact them, like anti-vaxxer debates or Twitch live-streamer drama or online culture war arguments.
I’ve also noticed several common themes among the burnout-resistant people I’ve worked with, even at some very demanding jobs. These people tend to be unaware of the latest news headlines or the latest culture war debates. They aren’t keeping up with weekly COVID case counts or fretting over the latest anti-vax trends because they aren’t interested in the drama. They program in their language and framework of choice and aren’t concerned about using the latest and greatest every time the landscape changes (with allowances for steady learning and adapting to mature trends). They’re happy with their job even if it isn’t paying top of market year after year. Most importantly, they spend their free time doing things that make them happy and active instead of angry or lazy.
Unfortunately, I think HN comments and articles tend more toward the former group because debate is interesting and results in engagement. That’s partially why burnout seems to be an epidemic especially in HN discussions, whereas the situation isn’t as universally dire in my real-world experience. Still a problem, but there’s more to it than blaming jobs and Facebook/Instagram/Twitter.
Like you said, a lot of the idle activities that people choose to fill their free time are actually quite draining.
Burnout is from people doing tasks that bring little fulfillment for most of their one life on Earth. If you have 1 free minute in 1 year, it's irrelevant what you do on that 1 free minute. This is an exaggeration, but it's to show my point. People want to be spending time doing things they like. 40 hours a week is way too much time spent doing the opposite, regardless of what you do outside of those 40 hours.
You think of burnout being endemic but not because of overwork and the struggles of life but because of video games and social media, when you're spending the better part of a third or in some countries even half of the day at work?
I have a friend who once told me that they can only work for about 4 hours a day. When I challenged them that this seemed like a very priviledged position to be able to take, they insisted that it was actually true for pretty much anyone, it's just that as a society, as an economy, as a series of employer/employee relationships, we pretend that it's not.
What they meant of course was not whether they could be "at the job(site)" for more than 4 hours a day, but that you could only really do actual (productive) work for 4 hours a day. The rest, so my friend claimed, is almost always filler. My friend also claimed that they believed this was true almost regardless of the type of work you did. Even people doing physical labor don't actually "work hard" for much more than 4 hours - you need breaks (lots of little ones, or maybe a few long ones).
I still don't know if they're right about this. Personally, I've always preferred the maxim about "work long, hard or smart: pick 2". Either way, I know that across society, not just in IT related fields, we do not honor these ideas about work in any meaningful way.
This just straight up isn't true for blue collar and service work.
I've worked those kinds of jobs with 12 hour shifts pretty recently, and you definitely Really Actually Literally Work 10+ hours of em'. It's kind of a buzz.
I could still do it, 6 days a week, day-in day-out at 32, which was pleasantly surprising to me as someone who has always struggled to work a good 4 actual hours of white collar shift.
Some jobs just come at you non-stop, and basically your only options are quit dramatically, or keep grinding through.
The camaraderie with your work colleagues is something too. I've never felt that kind of genuine, manic, expendables-in-the-trenches, darkly comic camaraderie in any white collar job.
There's something in it though, I wonder if it's just as simple as how 'physical' it is - if you're sort of 'exercising', obviously anything manual labour is, but also walking around, reaching up to shelves, etc. then it's more continuously doable. Tired and hungry sure, but doable.
I couldn't keep my brain continually engaged in SE for even what would be a short 'shift' - but I reckon I could still do the >12h full days I did at the cinema as a teenager (plenty to do even while all screens are showing).
I would say many white-collar workers are really only able to be productive a lot of the time for 4 hours a day, if they're lucky. I think it's more often far less for people. I don't think the majority of people are lazy, or burnt-out; I think there's just so much extra crap outside of their core tasks that it's very difficult for people to work on something that feels like they are honestly making something, or working towards something substantial.
Meetings, administrative tasks, emails, chat messages, more meeting requests, for most people the default setup has all of this coming at them like a firehose, and then bizarre expectations build and build like sedimentary rock into this seabed of constant immediate response times and work without productivity, a feeling of working with nothing at the end to justify it.
in a 40-50hr work week I would say 50-60% is productive actual work (i.e writing a program, or doing the actual task you are paid to do), 10-15% is administrative (making task list, organizing your work, reporting about your work, etc) 10-15% is meetings about your work, 10-15% is socialization with co-workers, unofficial breaks, informal meetings, etc.
So if you do not count the other time as "productive" which I could and would challenge then that 4hr number holds true.
I don't know really. Several years ago, I got to visit Groupon HQ in Chicago (yes, really! :). I'm an 2nd generation computer person - I started using them in very late 70s and working professionally with them in the middle of the 80s, and even though I was a part of the .com boom, I've been away from that sort of world for decades. Wandering around that place for several hours my main though was "wow, how does anyone ever actually get any work done in this environment, which seems to be designed to encourage people to spend their whole day engaging with other people".
I once visited the opening of a new library, and found myself getting outraged when I looked around at the desks and sitting areas and places where one was supposed to be able to sit down and read a book ---- they were all totally exposed to visibility by everyone else in the entire room in such a way that I knew I could never be comfortable reading a book in this library. And that made me very angry. Yet the fault is somehow mine, as this FISHBOWL architecture is cool and all the rage. Guess I have to take the book home if I want to read it without being WATCHED.
You could also be a statistical anomaly with regards to how long you can work. If I were to bet, users of Hackernews have a higher focus time than most people right now, through training or otherwise.
I don't think this is true. First, as others have pointed out, you can absolutely do a full day of manual labour. I've done this myself before. The hardest day of my life was unloading 12 kitchens from the back of lorries and moving them across a muddy building site. I woke up at 6:00, got home at 18:00 and slept the instant I hit the sheets.
Secondly, we do work for more than 4 hours a day. In fact, I work in my sleep. The brain doesn't just shut off. The reason you can't just "keep going" at the keyboard for more than 4 hours is your hands are faster than your brain. But the brain doesn't stop. It keeps crunching away. Every morning I find myself with new insights and new ideas that I didn't have the day before. I'm not just being paid for the hours I spend bashing away at the keyboard, I'm being paid to engage my brain with the business.
I've always lived by "put the least amount of effort to achieve the most optimal results."
So using school as a for instance. If it takes me 12 hours of studying a week to ensure an A, but only 2 hours a week to ensure a B, is the additional 10 hours wasted studying really worth it? Nope. Much rather make my life more enjoyable.
All good advice. I distinctly remember they day I changed. I was talking to my wife and telling her how I thought Sun should give more vacation, she pointed out that I had come back from the office at lunch time and that is was Christmas Eve which was a company holiday. So many things went "Click!" all at the same time.
From that point on I made it a priority to be home by 6PM so that we could have dinner with the family at 6:30. No more late nights, no more stressing about being the first guy to leave the office. Instead I was going to have a relationship with my kids and share in the adventures of their childhood.
It did affect my career, nobody who wanted to get to VP level ever went home on time AFAICT. But it gave me focus in that I knew I was going to roll out of the office between 5:30 and 5:45 so my deadlines were set accordingly. I did log in some evenings after the kids had gone to bed but it wasn't the "usual" thing. And the wife and I spread out the vacation so that every month we had a 3 day weekend (either from holidays or by using a vacation day.) It made things much more tolerable.
When I was 16, I realized for the first time that there are working dads who cannot eat with their kids. My dad was able to come home every day. For me, it was just normal.
I work from home, and I have an hour before work in the morning with my kids, can eat lunch with them, and log out at 5 pm sharp.
I am absolutely terrified of clicking the “apply” button for a pre-offered internal transfer at my current company. I’m miserable, more miserable than I ever thought I could be, but if I step back I quickly realize that I have the job I always wanted and one that other people would kill for and have it on lock down to the point that I could put in 10 hours a week and still be heralded as a great leader.
I just don’t care about anything I work on or anyone I work with after a major release a couple months ago that bookmarked nearly everything I wanted to accomplish in this role.
I seriously doubt this will make me happy — more hours, less prestige, new unknowns, sunk accomplishments - but I am well past my “fuck it” point like so many others I talk to.
It's very hard to disentangle how much of this is pressure from your workplace vs. your internalized sense of obligation about work intensity.
Parenthood does change a lot of things. But at the end of the day, tech isn't slinging drinks at a bar, or fixing cars, or even like other intense white collar jobs where the stock market closing bell or potential sales target companies office hours put hard time limits on things and let you better compartmentalize your life. It's got elements of research science, art, and construction - ideas percolate over time, experiments need to be run, and structures fail or become unsuitable and need reworking. I used to think with the right methodologies these could all be controlled and that only "dysfunctional" companies didn't do so, but lately I'm concluding that the "busyness" of a software eng. or adjacent jobs in tech just comes with the territory. Yes, some companies are distinctly good or bad at managing the worst of it, but looking at the bigger picture, getting upper middle class salaries in a hot market for talent, to sit in a temperature controlled clean environment and use your brain to solve problems is not a bad trade off for being expected to do amazing things routinely. I think we have a pretty good tradeoff.
I say this all the time - programming as a job is not a sustainable life. The fact is that sitting in front of a computer doing mental gymnastics is not in any way something humans are able to cope with over any period of time.
People will say "it's just the managers", "it's because you aren't working on interesting things", etc, but it is none of those things. I have worked on interesting projects, been my own boss, etc, and nothing changes.
In ancient times, you would perform physical activities that you often enjoyed to some degree, at least to the extent that they made you feel good at the end of the day and ready to rest. Most of the time, work and play were indistinguishable. Evolution makes it so that we enjoy the things we are supposed to do. Animals play hunt when they are younger (or even when they are older) because it is fun and that is how their genes make them get good at things they need to do. Their job is hunting for food, and they like doing it.
The further away your job is from your natural tendencies, the worse it gets. Sitting in front of a computer programming and doing other things is about as far away as you can get. Sure, we might like solving problems, etc, but not as a job 9-5 every day.
There are the people who say "stop complaining, you sit in an air-conditioned office! You don't have to toil away in a physical labour job", but that is just completely wrong. Sure, some physical labour jobs will mess up your body, but there is nothing healthy about sitting in air-conditioning staring at a computer. I used to work in a physical labour job when I was younger. I had to quit because they were making sure nobody would get full-time steady work. The difference in my mental and physical state going from outdoors physical (but not extreme, body breaking stuff) to office work was extremely noticeable.
My career has looked like tech startup (fullstack programming) -> finance sales -> B2B tech sales -> unskilled labor -> skilled labor (HVAC/Electrician/Plumbing, etc. for OPSEC reasons, won't specify)
Skilled physical labor is where its at.
Unskilled labor is basically a few steps removed from being a slave. 10 hour days (many times 11-12) at bottom-barrel wages, working as fast as you can (because corporate tracks efficiency. Yes, it's actually quantified! HAHA), and getting injured no matter what. It's mind-numbing. I hated it.
Now I've been doing a skilled trade, and I feel rejuvenated from being burnt out of white collar/office shit. Get to work around 6-7am, leave around 2-6pm (depending on workload. Usually it's around 3. However, this is with paid overtime. Once you start making the big bucks, your overtime becomes obscene). If you work for a small shop/family-like environment it's very laid back. You develop the stamina needed in about 6-8 weeks, and after that you get very fast at everything physical you do.
There's a lot of learning involved (especially keeping up with your state's local building code), but once you know the code and how to use the tools, you basically don't need to relearn the latest way to build something, or spend weeks trying to wrap your head around a tool, or hours late at night wracking your brain trying to decipher shitty mandocs and undocumented APIs, or troubleshooting/debugging while simultaneously wanting to blow your brains out.
Everything is simple to learn, troubleshoot, and wrap your head around; it's all in the physical world.
Fuck office jobs. Fuck unskilled labor work. Being a farmer is almost like being a glorified landscaper.
Nonetheless, I don't see myself doing this forever, so I'm working on a side business so I can break out of the labor class, and join my fellow capital-owning brothers.
100% agreed, and well put. Tbh on a very quantitative level, our jobs are fantastic. The lack of that visceral satisfaction is real though, and you turn into an automaton after awhile. Do the work, get the pay, etc. You want to quit and mix it up, but you won't make 1/3rd the same in other jobs.
I think the path is to "ruthlessly compartmentalize" your life. When you are getting the job done, do it well and efficiently, and have things like a standing desk and do stretches and look away from the computer etc. Then when you did enough work for the day, completely do a 180 and go out for a run, practice a language, etc. Make the most of your time.
Sorry to be that guy, but it's funny to me Seneca identified this exact thing thousands of years ago. He said something like, we must not take on tasks which are not so much huge as generate a proliferation of smaller tasks.
I work for a big company (F500), and one thing that always bothers me is the out of nowhere Slack messages that are three paragraphs long, by someone I have never met within the company. If I start helping them right away, they are happy to keep me online for the next hour while my flow is gone, god knows where.
I am trying to find the nicest way to say: "This should be an e-mail conversation, please send email.", but I wish I could somehow start an email draft that is saved and shows up in some to-do list somewhere.
Create an intake queue and direct them to that. Service it on a stated SLA that you decide. Do not respond directly to ad hoc requests (outside of perhaps company wide campaigns that you are in risk of missing).
This is all incredibly difficult in a large company.
The intake queues suck because _some_ teams respond to Service Now and some don't. Like, you'll have a pretty easy task which requires stuff from 3 teams, 1 you put in the ticket and they do it same day, the other sits there and never gets picked up, for the third you can't even figure out which team is supposed to do it let alone how you would contact them. So, the hunt begins, and this requires talking to actual humans. Sometimes there are 2 or more teams who could do your thing in different ways but none of them want to.
This is made worse by some parts of the company on webex, some on slack, some only available on teams, some teams responsive to email and others not really etc.
The only thing that makes the whole engine work is an informal network of people that trust each other who glue the whole thing together behind the scenes.
The OP's problem is that large company communication is universally dysfunctional and the "glue" network between them and the people who need things from them is not strong enough. It helps to have a strong informal networker in the reporting chain. This is usually some kind of team lead and everyone accepts that their productivity will be destroyed because "everyone knows who they are" and contacts them out of the blue with their wacky requests. They should then prioritise and route appropriately.
If leaders are not amenable or functional in this way they get routed around and "person you contact to get things done" increasingly diverges from formal leadership.
IMHO, a keen eye for how the organisation actually functions, careful relationship management and knowing which levers and channels to use to get things done are the skills of a 10x person in enterprise.
Your response is exactly why artificial boundaries should be set up. Most of these requests will not be important and they should either be dissuaded entirely or dealt with much later. The ones that are important (note: very infrequent) will be in the hands of someone capable of navigating internal politics despite the existence of a "stop bothering me" canned response.
Every team I work with (very large company) leverages this approach, their productivity would be Nil if they left a direct channel wide open. Back channels exist only where they should exist.
I actually prefer 3 para slack messages rather than 5 messages: "Hi", "you there", "needed to discuss something", "ping me when you are online", "talk to you soon" because I enable notifications and this junk keeps on notifying - only some people.
Work force from India here. There are a lot of companies where whatsapp works as a communication medium. Apart from email, slack etc.
It is taken for granted that team is available on personal communication channels and can be bombarded with messages anytime of the day. Right now I am on about 6 work related whatsapp groups. And this is pretty pretty common that we don't even realize that it is a problem. For all the moaning about 'westernization of culture' I seriously wish they pick this one leaf to realize how the world outside is and how it would help personal lives.
Seems like it'd be nice to have a bot that you could add, so you could click a button on the message and respond, "Hey, would you mind giving me your email and I'll follow up on this as soon as I get a few minutes?", and then when they respond, have it create an email draft with the previous message quoted and with their email pre-filled.
A nice in-the-middle solution that a number of people might appreciate!
1. A friend used to say "a human being can do 5 plus or minus 4 things" while holding his hand up and slowly closing one finger after the other ending up at 1. Your comment reminded me of that.
2. I can do a long list of 5-20 minute items. I can also do couple of big ticket items. Just not in the same day. I wish I knew that my Monday would be the long list and I would not mind. We have an on-call week, and that week I do not even pretend to look at big ticket items, but the challenge is that the small things do not stop appearing even when it is not the on-call week.
I feel that throwing in little quipits like that are an easy way to keep the discussion about your article as non-political as possible. It seems counter-intuitive, but if someone comes along and actually brings up the race issue, and it isn’t mentioned in the article, it’ll start a spiral of political/racial arguments that distract from the original article. These little remarks deflect most of it.
That’s my point, by bringing it up in the article you can deflect most of the comments that would _try_ to turn the discussion towards race. Whether the author genuinely feels like that or not... who knows.
Yes. And I think his point is that you shouldn't cater to extremist behaviour. Which I agree as well. Don't pick a side as a defence. Just censor any attempts to start the war.
Covid, burnout, opioids, and the commandment that we should feel guilty and shitty about all the privileges (real or imagined) that we were born with. The killer epidemics of our time.
It's not a mental illness. It's a strategically placed line to fend off a specific crowd that will call you out for complaining about something when you are in a perceived privileged position.
Yeah it's getting to the point where I am wary about getting too close to other white people - especially in a 'professional' context like software - because they tend to react badly if you don't self-hate as well.
One way to define "busy" is that your time has a high opportunity cost. You could get ahead on the project, which seems to be worth a lot. And it makes you feel bad about playing a board game with your kid or going shoe shopping with your wife. Tactically, working on the project always seems like a win.
But strategically, it's not. You need to do those "boring" things that make up some of the best aspects of life, and help you build deeper relationships.
If you need to work to put food on the table, then work. Your family will feel you around because your contributions are meaningful, and you can still build great relationships. But if you are just working to get a bigger house or a new car, then it's not really the same thing.
Can confirm. Left my job in the software industry with no plans to return. Everyone asks how my break is going and I say “fine”, but I’m retired at 40.
The idea of being back at work in some 9-5 or 8-6 where my brain is still trying to solve the problems of the day as I lie in bed are over. Certainly a lot of parents can sympathize with the itch of “if I can get the kids to sleep I can get a few more hours in”. No more of that. I can finally be present. I’m done competing with smart people who have no kids, and an industry that expects workaholics.
I wonder if there are any HR types monitoring this thread. If so, I wonder what they will bring back to the companies that they work for.
I voluntarily participate in an employment contract. I like what I do and am good at it. I could work harder but I work what I consider a “fair” amount. Many weeks that is less than 40 hours of my time but sometimes it’s more - if there is an emergency or a crunch time for a reasonable goal, esp if the goal date is not arbitrary.
I really don’t like the idea expressed in some threads here that “I should stop caring about my employer’s goals”. If you don’t care about their goals, then the ethical decision is to quit. They’re not asking you to compromise your principles; they’re offering to pay you in exchange for supporting their goals.
I think a lot of the ideas on this topic are a little bit muddled. If your employer sets unreasonable goals then you’re not doing you or them a favor by trying to meet (much less actually meeting) those goals. If they try unreasonable shit and it works then they will keep on doing unreasonable shit until it bites them, and make everyone miserable in the process.
But not killing myself to meet the unreasonable goal my manager agreed to is not the same as just slacking off all the time. I’m a professional and consider myself ethical and I don’t see a huge ethical difference between stealing and accepting pay for work I didn’t do.
>If you don’t care about their goals, then the ethical decision is to quit.
What if I don't suscribe to your "ethics"? Sure, if you own the company I'm employed at, you can fire me. But you can't force your arbitrary ethical standard on anyone else in any other case.
>they’re offering to pay you in exchange for supporting their goals.
They're offering to buy my work in order to support their goals. Not making me care. I have my own goals and I only care about those. There is no benefits at all for me to care about their goals aside from feeling good about being a good worker bee who cares about the hive if I drank the yuppie corporate kool-aid (I didn't). Both the company and me have to make sure that our work agreement satisfy both their goals and mine, or someone is gonna be unhappy. There is a power imbalance in that relationship due to supply and demand of both work and workers, and I'm thankful I'm a skilled professional in that regard.
>I’m a professional and consider myself ethical and I don’t see a huge ethical difference between stealing and accepting pay for work I didn’t do.
Do you uphold the same ethical standard from the company you work for? In a market economy, the incentive of the company is to pay you as little as possible for your work. If they're able to buy your work for less and they don't do it, they will get run over by the competition who will get the edge. Is that unethical?
Ethics and morals are not based in anything concrete and are made to domesticate you. If someone is explaining to you what is good or evil or just, they're trying to make you behave in a certain way to their benefits. Companies that wants "team players" and people "having a personal investment in their work" want complacent workers that will do more for less.
The one thing I don't understand is this mentality of self sacrifice that to me seems core to all this. 'who am I but a privileged white chic taking up space', to me, says all. You are never a privileged space taker. You're all you have and there rest of the world is in a way far less important than you.
I am only 32, but I luckily (maybe cause I am slightly on the spectrum and approached things in a super logical way) found out that I only actually work 3-4 hours a day, and the rest was meetings/lunch/cooler chat. So I stopped caring about those extra hours, and refused to go to meetings where I wasn't needed or didn't need to be meetings. I made sure I did all my work in 5-6 hours daily. I am good at what I do, but I never signed up for extra, I never stayed late. Sure I am on-call, and I have had a share of 3 am pager alerts, but those are far and few between.
I have always had very little burnout if any. I don't work on as many side projects lately, but I am keeping sane. I work 10-4, sometimes a little later. and I don't feel sorry about it. I get my stuff done, I get more done than most others, maybe less than some of the all-stars, but I know I am not underperforming, and thats fine.
I love what I do as a programmer, I plan to do it for many years, but I will never sacrifice my work-life balance for any company. Especially with my first child on the way.
I think because of this, I get more done, and seem to do more than the others, when in reality, I am doing a bit less, or at least waste less time.
It's called depression, not burnout. It's an evolutionary response to factors in your life that lead you towards thanatos and away from eros, allowing you the super-power of obsessive negative thought and absolute joylessness (anhedonia), so you may bide your time and fight them with the abandon of one who no longer cares about their own safety. Some choose to call it a genetic disease. I like to think of it as a valid, genetic structure that happens to have some rough edges and expresses itself too readily.
No. You're looking at things from superficial perspective.
The only single reason we're all in this rate race is gene competition. Remove gene competition, suddenly there is not more need for constant growth, for economic growth, for countries to overwhelm other countries. For groups to fight other groups.
The real reason why we haven't dialed back on 40 working hours per week is that the first country that does it will lose an edge against the others. In the long run it means that country loses power. Maybe the other countries will then "override" it or control it. The people of said powerless country will face the fear of being at the mercy of the ones that continued on a race to growth. Our whole society is nothing but at the mercy of our genes still competing with each other. That's all there is to what we're doing. All of this is still instinct-driven. And 99% of us are blind to that.
> At first I tried to stay in denial, flooding myself with positive affirmations in an attempt to manifest mental calmness.
> “No way I’m burned out. Look at all the women that are actually suffering. Who am I but a privileged white chic taking up space.”
That's self abuse, mentally tearing yourself down, that is not positive affirmation. Trying to take an objective stock of your context is reasonable, however comparing yourself to those less fortunate is not a positive affirmation.
My problem with the word 'burnout' is that it denotes some kind of final state. I'm sure I've had periods of burnout but it doesn't last more than a day or two.
I had a third kid 4 months ago and my company is transitioning from a small to medium-sized company. I am the tech lead/architect on our company's flagship software and I am constantly struggling with the skill sets of my friendly but incompetent members of my support teams.
We are also trying to move 14-15 customers from single-tenancy to a brand new multi-tenant platform that uses a totally new stack at the same time we are transitioning all our processes.
It's INSANE.
PS: Writing this comment was really helpful for organizing my thoughts for the meetings I have this week. Hopefully I can communicate more effectively to leadership about what is happening. Thanks hackernews.
> My problem with the word 'burnout' is that it denotes some kind of final state. I'm sure I've had periods of burnout but it doesn't last more than a day or two.
I hope it's not a final state.
I got burnt out hardcore a few years ago after giving 18 hour days, 7 days a week for 3 years without a break.
When I left, I took 6 months off to try and recharge, except by the end of the 6 months i developed a fear/anxiety/hate of anything technology related, and fell apart physically and mentally.
It's like the mental and physical consequences of working that schedule didn't catch up with me until I stopped.
So I took another 6 months, seeing a professional who prescribed a few things to help.
So after 1 year of not working, I'm back in technology. But I still hate it every day.
I've lost all passion for anything technology related.
I wish I had skills in another area other than technology so I could change careers, but I'd be starting at the bottom which isn't necessary a problem but I'm the primary breadwinner in the family so money becomes the problem.
I'm not sure what I'm getting at, I think for me right now burnout does indeed feel like a 'final state'. I hope one day I can get back to the point where it only lasts for a few days at a time.
If “it doesn’t last more than a day or two”, then I feel like what you’re describing isn’t the same level of burnout being discussed in the article; you’re noticing it and dealing with it before it spirals out of control. Which is a good thing! (and a life skill I wish I had learned much earlier in my life!)
But I’ve gone into that burnout spiral twice in my life; the most recent time (the worse one) was over a decade ago. That burnout was the result of nine continuous months spent in intense crunch on a project I hated but couldn’t leave, along with some other ongoing stressors.
After shipping that project, it took me more than two months of time completely off work before I even started to feel like I was a human again. And then two more months before I started to feel like I wanted to start doing work again. I was absurdly fortunate that I had enough long service leave saved up to afford to take the time I needed. (or alternately, the fact that I had all of that available time off which I hadn’t taken maybe wasn’t the best thing for my chances at avoiding burning out in the first place. That’s a totally valid alternate take on the situation!)
I do agree with your comment that burnout isn’t a “final state”; it’s something that most folks will recover from, given enough time, and it typically gets worse the longer you don’t deal with whatever’s triggering it.
For me, when I was in the middle of the burnout it didn’t feel like a thing I would ever recover from; I just wanted to be left alone in an empty room all day every day and never have to talk to anyone or think about anything ever again. And eventually my brain came back to me and I came out of the burnout. It took a long time, though.
Not to suggest this covers everyone or fixes everything, but I think anyone who feels uncomfortable about being completely offline and unreachable outside standard hours really needs to explore that deeply.
I think there’s a % of people who are convinced that they must do it for job preservation. And I think a far smaller % of them are actually right.
I worried about this a lot. Then it got to the point of being so burned out that I was ready to quit. So I realised I had an opportunity to experiment: delete all work stuff from phone, HARD exit at 5pm (I will hang up on slack conversations), and never work outside core hours. It worked beautifully and I just feel frustrated I didn’t realize this years ago.
She sounds cool, and like she's got her head on straight. Good on her.
I also reduced my availability, it is not so much career suicide as "career murder". You look at your career as it is laid out before you, you say, "yeah, no... no thanks". You weed it and you grow something different in it's place.
In a large and healthy team, when you slow down, others who are ready and willing step up. They are going to need mentoring. If you can turn your reduced availability into a new crop of future leaders, your boss is going to thank you for the service. (Well, it also helped that I noticed what was happening and told my boss to thank me!)
The are lots of places along the line where my experience could have gone differently, for the worse. But it didn't, and I hope the author is as lucky as I was.
Burnout, I feel, has more to do with how motivated and satisfied we are with our vocation, than whether or not we are “busy.”
As many company owners will tell you, they have no problem with a crazy busy life, because they are so motivated and fulfilled by their work.
For me, I was an engineering manager for 25 years. It was actually long periods of ennui, interrupted by short tornadoes of insanity and stress.
Frankly, I enjoyed the insanity and stress, more than the sitting around, waiting to be useful. I hated it so much, that I tasked myself with a great deal of extracurricular work; just to avoid going nuts (some would say it was not avoided successfully).
Nowadays, I’m basically “retired.”
Except I’m not. I work harder, every day (like, 7 days a week), than I did while I was getting paid.
> As many company owners will tell you, they have no problem with a crazy busy life, because they are so motivated and fulfilled by their work.
I feel like this is the obvious missing link between people like Elon Musk advocating 80-100 hour weeks and the rest of us. I only work 40 hours because I have stuff I actually care about to squeeze into the evenings. If I don't fit in my passion projects and family, then I might as well be an empty husk, not a person.
Completely different story when your main job is also your passion project which you own and derive great fame and fortune from. What else is he going to do? Take a break to work on something he cares about less in the evenings? I can work like a machine as well when I'm personally invested in the outcome and I'll 100% burnout if asked to give the same effort when I'm not.
Seems many people here relate to work burnout in general. How many others like myself are burnt out from the constant learning from work? This in comparison to what you’re doing with the tools you’ve already learned. Still 5ish years into my career and get drained
I agree with a lot of this. I like my job, I don't want to be cynically detached from it, but it IS just a job. So much of this so-called hustle culture is a product of us all internalising the values of our exploitative economic system. Left as we are increasingly alone in the marketplace, we feel the need to run faster or get left behind. It's just a job, other things are more important unless you're one of the very rare few who are doing mission critical work, saving lives or looking after people. Work hard enough but sensibly, keep a balance. I promise you that on your deathbed you won't be wishing that you worked even harder.
We are too often caught up in the inertia of our life, telling ourselves lies like 'the future will be better', 'just a little more', 'what are they gonna think about me if...', 'this salary raise is very important'.
Once you step out and remind yourself your time in this world is limited, a list of priorities will start to take shape, based on the following questions:
1. which cause is worth it for you to spend your effort and money?
2. which activities bring you pleasure and joy?
3. which are the reasonable sacrifices to fullfill 1 and 2?
There is no universal answer to those questions but everything starts with slowing down, gaining perspective and diving in
I've been fairly lucky that for about 2/3 of my career I've worked in environments that have generally been pretty laid back. Though I did do a short stint just shy of a couple months at company that had just awful culture where everything was a crisis and it was always crunch time and 12+ hour days were the expected norm. I didn't stick around because of that(and also the job was quite different that what was discussed in the interview), and I don't know how or why people put up with that on a normal basis. Maybe if you were the founder or a very early employee with significant equity, but not just for a salary.
But even with my generally laid back workload at my job, I think the culture of the tech industry does seep in a bit and I feel like I need to be doing more. So I start side projects or go learn programming languages or some new tool, which aren't bad things in of themselves until they start to feel like an obligation and start sucking the vitality out of your life. I've started to keep those in check a bit better, mostly by keeping a further distance from the tech world by no longer following tech people on Twitter and drastically cutting back my time on sites like this one(I'm only here now because I finished watching a movie and it's tad early for bed, but to close to pick back up the book I was reading).
I almost want to say that the solution might be do tech work outside the tech industry, but I also spent a few years at mortgage company and with some defense contractors, and those are just soul sucking in different ways. Basically my cure has been to find hobbies and interests far away from anything related to my job.
Unsolicited advice: I suggest taking maximum paternity leave if feasible. I first took leave on my 3rd child, and feel stupid I didn't do it prior. Ironically, I was unable to convince two other colleagues to do the same.
It took about 4-5 weeks into the leave to finally relax, for my mind was wired to expect frequently recurring deadlines, so I was always paranoid of missing (nonexistent) deadlines. I didn't realize how messed up I was until I took a break.
It was liberating to just sit in a rocking chair every night putting the baby to sleep and thinking of nothing else. Maximum happiness.
My two cents... if your inbound baby is your first then a lot of your prior concerns will naturally disappear. If it's not your first then that won't surprise you. Time to be selfish with your time and start distancing yourself from any colleagues that are a time suck.
In my humble opinion, the author is either delusional or spinning a yarn when they say they have solicited advice from colleagues. No co-worker is going to give you advice that doesn't serve their own interests first.
No co-worker is going to give you advice that doesn't serve their own interests first.
I strongly disagree. Plenty of people are self serving, but friendship and mentorship is possible in the workplace. This says a lot more about the places and people that you have worked with than something universal. Alternatively, if this is a mindset that you bring to interactions with co-workers, you might just be getting it reflected back to you.
> No co-worker is going to give you advice that doesn't serve their own interests first.
This just isn’t true, unless you’ve managed to find a supremely hostile workplace.
I’m always shocked at how cynical some HN comments can be about coworkers. I’ve had my fair share of bad coworkers over the years, but I’ve also found numerous wonderful friends and built lasting relationships with many people.
This idea that all coworkers are inherently out to get you is bizarre.
I'm not saying they are inherently out to get you, my point is that they're advice is going to be based first on what works for them and not necessarily what best works for the person seeking advice.
I suppose my larger point is that if a person's main source of stress is coming from the workplace then it's better to seek insight from sources external to the workplace.
I am in my early thirties and have been a hobby developer since I was about twelve. I've always wanted to write code as a daily job, but that idea fades further and further as I settle into how little I actually have to do in my current position for pretty good pay.
The idea of "legacy" and the "craft" certainly poke at me often. I am able to develop software for myself that automate much of my job, allow me time to spend with my young family, and maintain my home. I sometimes wish I had the title, and had something I could point at and tell my son "Dad helped build that," one day, as my father did when we would pass a new sub-division of homes that he helped build. However knowing how much drive it takes to stay on top of the newest stack, etc, almost makes me want to strive to stay where I'm at: 40 hours and no more, relaxed, working from home, being with family, with the same salary I would have as a mid to senior dev... life certainly isn't always about the easy decisions.
Another day, another woman realising that the career they've been told to pursue isn't what it's cracked up to be. These are getting pretty common now.
> And I for one, no longer want to sprint in this rat race.
Great, but you'll have to downgrade your lifestyle. No more road trips around Europe [0], for example. I notice that is distinctly missing from the article. Leaving the rat race doesn't just mean you stop running, it means you stop running in the same direction as everyone else.
Eddie Murphy’s joke about relationships boiling down to the other person asking ‘well what have you done for me lately’ is pretty much the gist of many careers. I’m pretty sure I shipped some impactful stuff this year, but lately, well - what have I done for the company lately?
This can work in two ways. The first is you can be a victim of this and feel betrayed. The second is, you just have to realize another chance will come along where the thing you did most recently will be recognized.
It’s like poker hands. Don’t think you suck because you got a bunch of bad hands in a row. Don’t bet on those hands, and don’t bluff. Just wait until you are ready, because those face cards and pocket aces are coming.
Ever since I got my first job over 10 years ago I've wondered why there is still an 8 hour work day, at least in this profession. If you're a highly intelligent, capable person, and you're working on something cutting edge that consumes you, and you want to sleep under your desk to get it done -- then sure, go ahead. But the vast majority of people don't do that. So 6 hours with a lunch break included seems fine to me, maybe even too much. Just ban social media, news or whatever. Look at Youtube videos on your own time, post on HN on your own time. Come to work fresh, leave fresh, and I think people will be more productive in the long run.
"If I’m honest, I’ve been running on fumes for a while. But there were enough milestones along the way to keep chasing that next moment of reprieve. The vacation. The promotion. The vaccine. The remodel.... But then the fumes ran out. And a bunch of life things hit at once, and I couldn’t see any reprieve in my horizon."
By no means do I mean to criticize the author for writing this. I only want to encourage everyone else to take this lesson seriously. I've banged this drum before on HN but it can take quite a bit more banging: Take burnout seriously. Take the initial signs of burnout seriously. If you're vaguely nervous about the possibility that you're burning out, take it seriously.
Don't shy away from it. Take this to heart: If you're sort of starting to burn out, and you acknowledge it, there are steps you can take to prevent it from ever happening! There's every reason to acknowledge it to yourself. It is ignoring it that may cause the bad outcome.
I can speak only for myself in that when I have sensed burnout coming on, I take time off. Sometimes with little notice, because I notice I need it. I get my projects changed. I evaluate my life goals before it's a problem. And I've never really suffered a real burn out yet here at 42, even through some bad times.
While I've not had to do this myself, I also strongly encourage extreme self honesty. It's sad to study for some years and then be in a career for longer only to discover it's not the career for you, but it's less sad that staying there. Do you want to be in the brewery business? Do you want to become a carpenter? Be honest.
(Though I do also offer just a bit of warning that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence; do take that into account, too.)
In my 20s / early 30s I worked an insane amount of hours. I got a ton of skills and progressed quickly.
After having two kids, I’ve slowed down a lot, but I believe i can still have just as much impact. I focus my time now, I have hard conversations, I say no to the majority of the things I would have said yes to.
It’s definitely more challenging, but I’m able to keep up by growing in new ways, so keep your head up, you can have a life and get things done. You have to simplify, that’s the hard part.
Once you realise it’s the same old thing.
Yes I could get a rust job maybe or whatever, but it’ll be sprints, managers, something not working try to logically figure out, estimates, user stories, etc. it’s just very sameish! The dope hits get less and it’s more of a nuisance to earn money. And companies tend to become more bean county with time so you need to hop to keep it reasonable and more engineering focused not kpi hoop backflips.
It's your life; you do you. You only live once. Try to recuperate and find things that deal with your burnout slowly. Be a hands-on parent to your children if you love to. After all, you can only decide for yourself.
What is with Medium limiting these articles for logged in users but allowing us to read them in incognito mode? It's like they want to make the experience worse if you are logged in.
“I make lifestyle choices that do not involve a screen outside of work hours.” This is my line for the past 13 years to apologetically explain why I do not write code in my personal time. Why do people still rely on this as an indicator of passion, or dedication, or competence?
It is also my line to explain why I do not have work Slack or work email on my phone.
Even with all these safeguards in place, I still managed to have a crazy burnout from a project. Migraines and hypertension that eventually landed me in the ER and necessitated a month away from work to recover. This taught me that working a normal 40-45 hour week is not enough. Active self-care is necessary outside of those hours.
Tl;dr: Working less is not enough. What we do when we don’t work also matters.
I can think of a few reasons for not caring after all these decades.
. It's both sad and funny to see things you helped design become obsolete, selling for mils on the dollar or end up in a recycling heap.
. Careers often are all about designing the same thing over and over. Even products that appear different to the user often have similar logical plumbing.
. Tech really does change over time and you don't care about the new. (for example) I could give a rip about anything involving the internet but that's where all the money flows.
YMMV, but on Android in Chrome app, long press and "open in incognito tab" made it readable for me. Also, seems poster is not OP. In a side note, I would love it if HN links were color-coded or otherwise marked as free, closed-garden, soft paywall, or paywall.
It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far.
I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right.
You're probably not going to get rich from working a day job. You're replaceable, and if you left your job tomorrow then you'll soon be forgotten. This is true for the majority of software engineers.
In that context, why do so many of us take on so many unnecessary responsibilities? It's tempting to say "Well, my employer assigned them." But how often do you tell them no, or try to present a different approach that just so happens not to involve you?
I know someone who is a chronic yes person. They will almost never say no, and they're pretty stressed day to day because of it. Whenever I point out that they're taking on too much, they say that they disagree and that it's their career.
That's true, but they won't get rich from that career, so I don't understand why they care so much about it.
Just remember to say 'no' for yourself from time to time. You often don't need to take on as many responsibilities as you have.