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 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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
[+] [-] sillysaurusx|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mouzogu|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nly|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SubuSS|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] bumby|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] resonious|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] abhiyerra|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snarf21|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreyfan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h0l0cube|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vidarh|4 years ago|reply
More importantly, if it helps you deliver what you agree to deliver on time with more consistency, people quickly learn to appreciate that.
[+] [-] caminante|4 years ago|reply
It's interesting to audit what you do v. your ACTUAL job definition, especially when it comes to blurred responsibilities.
Tell your friend this realistic boss saying:
> If you work hard, put in extra hours, and push to be the best, then "I" get a new Ferrari next year!
[+] [-] krallja|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leokennis|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Chyzwar|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] luckyandroid|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jollybean|4 years ago|reply
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.
Do your job well, go home, and forget about it.
[+] [-] iainctduncan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lelanthran|4 years ago|reply
You're more correct than you think! https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
The TLDR of the above is:
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.
[+] [-] Lammy|4 years ago|reply
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”?
[+] [-] pjmlp|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] exnor|4 years ago|reply
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.
Steve Jobs did an interview in which he more eloquently expresses this ethos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw
I think a lot of entrepreneurs feel this, but it isn't just limited to starting companies. There are so many ways each of us can make an impact.
[+] [-] amelius|4 years ago|reply
Perhaps they have company shares?
[+] [-] jjulius|4 years ago|reply
I'd honestly be replace "software engineers" with "all jobs"; your post is highly relevant to most fields.
[+] [-] beckman466|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geodel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thallukrish|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roguas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomerbd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] henrikschroder|4 years ago|reply
The only reward for a job well done is more work.
The quicker you realize that, the happier you'll be.
[+] [-] gregd|4 years ago|reply
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 afraid this is a permanent state now.
[+] [-] mmaunder|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lightbendover|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lr4444lr|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fixingproblems|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MattGaiser|4 years ago|reply
Couple big ticket items? No problem. Long list of 5-20 minute items, or even worse, conversations of indefinite length? Exhausting.
[+] [-] jwond|4 years ago|reply
It’s sad that so many white people have been conditioned to think this way.
[+] [-] dccoolgai|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmod600|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] blobbers|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] efitz|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] timwaagh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Daegalus|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] WealthVsSurvive|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|4 years ago|reply
> “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.
[+] [-] jugg1es|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|4 years ago|reply
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.