[fallmonkey]

"A common question I get is about work/life balance. And I view it a little different too now. At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying that it spilled the frustration in the “life” part"

This is the golden piece for me. I too recently left a big corp to a smaller place, expecting to sacrifice WLB and my free time - yet I ended up feeling happier and spending less time consuming short-form online contents, to the point that I even have more free time now! It never occurred to me that my self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job.

[bschne]

I once had a job where I somehow didn't get assigned much work for a long period of time right after starting — something about no projects having open staff positions, and them not being able to use me anyway because they were using up all the budget with the existing staffing already and didn't want to do "free work" for the clients.

For a while, I spent my days mostly doing tutorials, reading ebooks and papers, watching lectures, ...

Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible luxury to get a consistent salary and be able to do that! But the thing is, you can't help but feel utterly useless after a while. It's especially bad if everyone else has their projects, so you also don't really feel like part of a team.

[steelframe]

I joined a FAANG during the pendemic, and for the entire year I was there, I never got assigned a single task. Of course I kept myself busy trying to identify and solve problems around me, but I never had a deadline or anything associated with what I had chosen to work on. After a year I just couldn't do it anymore. A few acquaintances thought I was out of my mind and that I should continue milking that for all it's worth, but there's just something that makes me need to feel like someone else actually cares about what I do (or don't) do.

[scaramanga]

Human beings are just animals and we have a set of needs. Beyond physical needs like air, water, food, we have emotional needs. Those are things like the need to be seen, to be valued, to be among a community of our peers, and to have productive work to do for the benefit of that community.

Sounds like you had plenty of chance to fulfil your needs for free time, and the ability to pursue your own curiosity and carry out intellectual inquiry. Which is definitely nice, and which most people lack the time and space to do (I imagine friends and family telling you that it sounds like a dream job, etc.).

But I think anyone who has been in that situation knows that after a while, it's kind of a nightmare :)

[orzig]

I went through a period like that, I wish my manager had put some boundary (even admittedly artificial) around how long it would be, that it was going to be OK, and help me set some soft goal for that time. It would’ve made the exact same activities feel dramatically nicer.

[hamburglar]

Been there too. It felt a little paradoxical at first. It’s like a gift! But you really do start feeling really shitty about yourself because you know you’re useless.

[earthboundkid]

David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs has a good analysis of this. Standard capitalist theory is that people are lazy and will not work unless force to do so by threat of immiseration. But in reality people HATE bullshit jobs where you spend the day playing solitaire or whatever. People don’t want to burn themselves out but they do want to feel helpful. Good management is about helping people realize their natural desire to help out.

[Aperocky]

> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying

This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks? Does Meta not have those options?

The frustration feels almost artificial, if one does not want to get more work, then maybe just go boating or mountain biking. Watch some sports and play video games.

[tippytippytango]

It doesn't work like that. You have to be "on" even if you aren't working. That means you feel like you can't commit to anything substantial since you feel like you should be working. Fucking off on the internet is a coping mechanism to numb the pain of being in this limbo where you aren't working; but, feel like you should be working because you are getting paid a lot. In retrospect it's easy to see that there's this spare time available to do other things; but, when you are in it, it's not obvious where the boundary is between this extra time and where the work time should be. I know it sounds like a first world problem; but, it actually feels really awful to be in this spot because you can't even admit you are there to anyone without feeling like a slacker/loser/failure/time-thief, a torturous trap.

[2457013579]

As someone who worked remote at a large company and spent the last year or so doing this, I don’t think it’s a viable long term solution, at least for me. I’ve been traveling every month (7 times in other countries), spent countless hours gaming, got some certificates, etc, etc.. all the while still looked at as a “top performer” on my team. Due to the nature of bigger organizations (or at least mine), there isn’t an option for me to take on more responsibility or extra work (I can’t help but ask for these things too often and get general feedback of “slow your roll, that’s not how it works here”). I played around with the idea taking on a part time job or consulting or something, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I would find greater purpose/meaning spending my full headspace in a single job I was passionate about. This is definitely a first world problem, and I’m lucky to have the opportunity to be in this type of situation. It’s also not the same way everyone feels, since there are a lot of people that are at big organizations for long periods of time, but I share sentiment with the article and parent comment.

[fhrow4484]

>> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying

> This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks?

Where did he mention wanting more work? He mentioned unsatisfying work, I doubt doing interview loop recruiting people when you find your own work unsatisfying is gonna make you a good interviewer (and I'd hate to be the interviewee there). And take classes/training to what end? At 9 years in, I doubt there's many relevant trainings, and learning the intricate details of yet another internal proprietary system has limited returns.

> just go boating or mountain biking. Watch some sports and play video games.

None of these activities leads to finding satisfying, purposeful work, nor are they really good at negating the effects of the unsatisfying work.

[tjr225]

Sure, maybe it is "first world." That doesn't change anything. If I'm stuck at home making 80$ an hour and I hate it, then it doesn't matter how "first world" it is- I'm still going to figure out how to change the situation.

Are you saying that people who are dissatisfied with privileged situations shouldn't have opinions or write about them? Everything is relative.

[ethbr0]

> [Why not] join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks [...] go boating or mountain biking. Watch some sports and play video games[?]

(A) Because there's a fundamental cognitive dissonance to being able to say both "My job is important enough to stay in" and "My job is unimportant enough that I should spend a lot of time doing unrelated things."

(B) Because author doesn't want to pursue alternative hobbies with his work chunk of time. He wants to write exciting code.

(C) Because while employed, there's an expectation that you're doing the work well. If you feel like you aren't, even if you're doing as decent of a job as the system allows you to, it eats at you. Badly.

[Barrin92]

> if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks?

because it's never that easy. If you try to get work from somewhere else maybe your manager starts to think you're bored or not interested, you definitely can't just leave and go mountain biking because then you look even lazier. So at the end of the day in every gigantic organization a substantial amount of people sits around and does nothing, that's just how it goes.

it's not first world, it's just that in bug business you're just a salaryman.

[granshaw]

It’s probably that he has to “be available” and so can’t make good use of the working hours where he’s not doing active work

It’s a common obstacle to making good use of your time even when underworked and working remotely. Ideally one could find non-team settings where this wouldn’t be an issue

[seemaze]

Or contribute to your favorite flavor of open source!

[goodlinks]

Any job ive had regardless of pay, regardless of how good its been for how long, what the job market is like... after about 5-10 minutes wondering if I am adding value I will look for another.

I have one life, I need to have money to live but thats easy, actually having a positive impact is a reason to do something for someone else.

I dont necessarily apply but its its all i am thinking about untill I have value to add again: what am I doing here?

[srcreigh]

The point is getting a few hours of productive work in some enviroments takes more and more and more effort that it seems impossible to even keep trying.

[stepanhruda]

Definitely there, but author probably didn’t find those fulfilling. The rest are leisure activities, which might again not work when a problem solver is looking to apply themselves.

[wahnfrieden]

Try reading Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs for more perspective on this

[2457013579]

This hit home for me as well. I’m currently at a large company and looking for a smaller one where I can work more hours Thor the same money doing something more meaningful. I have a min/max mindset, probably like most people here, so it took me a long time to come to the realization that working longer hours for the same pay was a good thing.

[fy20]

The grass is not always greener. Plenty of small companies are also meaningless and have their own set of problems in different ways. Beuracracy is often replaced with toxic management.

[ethbr0]

If there's one underappreciated metric today, it's "quality of hour worked." I.e. how productive did you feel about an hour of your work, today?

Track that over time. Make radical changes if it starts plummeting, because otherwise you're going to be backfilling entire teams' worth of vacated roles.

[jokethrowaway]

Eventually you'll figure out it's all meaningless, no matter if it's big or small.

Find something that you enjoy doing, like you would enjoy a nice puzzle.

Purpose is all in your head.

[yourapostasy]

This kind of context is very difficult for me to wrap my head around. So much so that it strikes me as a kind of artificial ennui, maybe even a kind of humblebragging. I'm open to changing my mind though, so I'd really like to hear explanations/clarifications that would help me understand this sentiment more.

In even my most over-resourced client, there is never a paucity of improvements to make. Ever.

My current working conclusion after seeing this many times and doing what I can to informally coach the ones expressing this kind of sentiment, is that there isn't a lack of meaningfulness, or purpose, or other lofty language. There is a lack of will to go outside of their comfort zone, very often due to non-technical factors. Or a lack of a sense of joy in the craft in even the smallest details and accomplishments. And that's okay. It's the reason we use specialization.

But let's not kid ourselves. I've yet to walk into a client that is so on top of their to do list much less wish list that there is nothing to improve. We also need to recognize there is also a substantial subset of people expressing this sentiment who dislike implementing some improvement without significant recognition, praise, and advancement; these are the ones who seek the big, splashy wins over the steady, incremental attention to craft that accumulate into the 20-year overnight successes.

[lolinder]

I don't work for an FAANG, so if someone who does comes along I'll defer to them.

What I have gathered from those who do is that it's not that there's a shortage of problems to solve in the organization, it's that the bureaucracy is so thick that they couldn't solve extra problems even if they tried.

From your references to "clients" I assume that you work as a consultant of some description. Obviously, no one brings in a consultant without having a lot for them to do. Additionally, few orgs bring in a consultant with the intention of them doing only what they're told.

But if you're just one coder among tens of thousands, that's exactly what your organization expects of you. And that's what the people who tell these stories find so draining.

[cmrdporcupine]

These BigCorps are hiring like mad and paying big $$ to fill seats more for the purpose of starving their competition of brains than actually using the brains they hire.

The work is primarily organizational/drudgery and moves at a slow pace because of all the red tape and walls they've built around their projects in order to manage all the people. Endless incremental code reviews for small changes that get pondered for days and days. Design docs for trivial features written up and then basically entirely reworked by comments from people higher up who have more information but no time to do it because they're too busy being higher up and writing design doc comments all day. Horribly inefficient, painful to get anything done, and demoralizing.

Just left Google after 10 years. I found in that time I spent more time trying to find where I fit in and what work I could even do than actually doing any work. In some parts of the company, any interesting project was like a piece of red meat thrown into a pack of hungry wolves looking for "impact". Any project "given" to you quickly got competed with or downgraded in importance unless you got super self-promotional. There'd be talk about some new exciting thing coming down the pipe and you'd eagerly wait months for it to find out the work was either already parceled out or it didn't really exist.

I ended up seeking our "boring" organizations and projects within the company, in order to avoid the frustration and drama. But then motivation suffered.

Oh, and remote work has made them even more terrible because it's even more asynchronous and ponderous now. Can't tap someone on the shoulder and run something by them really anymore, it's just more "fork many threads of work and then spin on all the blocking issues waiting to make progress on any of them". Which sucks if you are the kind of person who is better at picking one thing at a time and sinking your attention into it, like me. So yeah, at some point you just start to lose focus out of sheer annoyance/frustration/boredom. And you're just there to collect the paycheck.

And maybe you feel guilty about it, but then, that was kind of the point. Maybe in your previous job you were a top contributor, potentially competing with BigCorp in some domain. Now you're not. They can push wheelbarrows full of money around to do the thing you were doing before, but at way higher scale and precision... but at the cost of way lower velocity because they've employed PhDs to nitpick over the comments in a protobuf description. (And if you leave and start your own thing and compete, they'll probably just come and buy it and bury it, too.)

They're bad for our industry and not so great for our brains... but good for our wallets. 10 years at Google messed up my passion and skills.... but it sure was good for my mortgage.

(FWIW, I thought in that time that I had lost my passion for coding. But two weeks after leaving to take some time for myself, I found myself firing up CLion and writing a synthesizer from scratch and loving it. Writing code is great.)

[bbananas]

Are you me? Every sentence is so familiar it hurt to read. I hope you’re still writing code!

[davemp]

Very well put, your comment resonates with my frustrations at a BigCorp.

> These BigCorps are hiring like mad and paying big $$ to fill seats more for the purpose of starving their competition of brains than actually using the brains they hire.

I used to apply Hanlon’s Razor to these types of hypothesis. After spending more time with the decision making class, the amount of psychopathic behavior and analysis I’ve seen has let me to reconsider.

[infinitone]

This is so true to the T.

[hutzlibu]

"self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job. "

Allmost every addiction is like this. A shallow replacement for the real desires unfulfiled.

[unkulunkulu]

I have been struggling with procrastination for years. It got catastrophically worse during pandemic: I was playing bullet chess online sometimes for like 6 hours a day every day. I have been working for like an hour a day for a year. And they still valued me as “above average”.

When I got to therapy, we traced it mostly to the internal critic (schema therapy). It was gone just like that with a flick of a finger almost! I have been productive and having fun with my life for two months leading up the this new year. When suddenly my manager decided that he does not stimulate me enough. He started getting deep into my ways of working saying something like “he does not understand how I perform my tasks and how they progress”, he started moving some not urgent tasks in ways he saw as better than my plans. He did not notice his direct spending 6-7 hours a day instead of 1 and he sarted really pushing and critiquing me and my teammate in a way that even our wives heard some changes during the zoom calls. It lead to a huge nervous breakdown for me. Two weeks passed by in a recess and now I slowly regain myself back.

But my views towards big corp are finalized: some cog a little bit higher than you can at some point decide that he has a right for any method to increase his perceived impact on team’s productivity and you will get hit.

I love myself a little bit more than this, gotta figure out the financial side a bit. The view towards “being fired” has shifted a bit too, now I think that if you’re not close to being fired based on your performance, the pay you too little and you work too hard (for them!) Work hard for yourself, don't work (too) hard for THEM!

Oh shit I must sound so priviliged, but yep this is the place I’m at right now

[ignoramous]

> TFA: Facebook has changed a lot since 2012. The types of projects that I thrive in were harder to come by. The magic was gone. Things I care a lot about, like quality, craft and focus, weren’t as important as scale, metrics and PSC. None of this happened suddenly, just a very slow process. That was one of the reason it was hard to leave.

> GP: It never occurred to me that my self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job.

The worker no longer trusts that they won't be a replaced by a machine. The investor no longer trusts that they will get a return on capital. The manager no longer trusts that they will have employment for life after more than a bad quarter or two.

With so much of our trust eroding, management is left with little else to hold on to, and so they grasp the false hope of blunt instruments like forced rankings and quarterly forecasting — no matter how illusory it all may be.

...We seem to have a false sense of joining something when we enter companies these days, just as Rousseau stipulated society had entered into a false social contract. This may be what's driving newer generations to look for "purposeful work" as they launch their careers: They are looking to take control by demanding meaning from work right from day one...

But Rousseau also had the idea that humans can remake themselves via their institutions, and Deming appears to share this belief.

This is what's so interesting about companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple. These rare birds tend to operate outside of our norms and customs: They educate their employees differently; they collaborate differently across silos and divisions; they incentivize people in different ways. Because of their overwhelming ability to make cash (either initially through giddy investors and eventually via customers) these companies appear to start out more like communes. They are Gardens of Eden where there is little fighting for resources and oftentimes even the core customers freely partake.

Moreover, these companies almost appear to be for the common good, and the management appears to instinctively follow Deming's philosophy. But what's even more striking is that efficiency and performance naturally improves inside of these companies without the standard methods that more established firms pursue. Sadly, there's often also a fall from grace that typically happens as these corporations become "normalized" and a more traditional battle for resources sets in.

Perhaps the answer lies deeper in what Deming was trying to say about "profound knowledge." As Deming implied, we work in complex systems with forces of good and evil always in play, and it may just be that the single most important responsibility of our top leaders is to artfully mold and shape this dynamic in a way that best suits their organizations — and produces a self-selecting ecosystem of workers, partners, customers, and shareholders who naturally align.

All of this implies a more-progressive approach to leadership. And yet we all too easily succumb to our Taylor-like impulses that assume the worst about workers — using automation to track productivity down to the nanosecond, if possible. Unfortunately, this tends to exacerbate the growing trust gap between workers that festers between our corporate silos and stymies the very productivity that we seek to enhance.

None of this is easy. And many of us will surely struggle with these issues throughout our entire lives. But in a world where the stakes appear to be getting higher by the minute, building lasting trust and cooperation across companies and communities — binding together people and long-calcified silos — may be the only way for the corporation to survive.

hbr.org, The management thinker we should never have forgotten (2016), https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-management-thinker-we-should-nev...

[Octabrain]

I totally understand you. I also did something similar recently. In my case, I’m leaving a company I’ve been working in for six months where I’ve been earning a very good salary but the lack of technical challenges, learning and political battles combined with nobody requesting me to deliver anything simply made me feel bored and miserable. Now I’m about to start in a new position from a different place where the salary is not that good (although still pretty decent) but I know from friends that are working there that the environment is much more satisfactory.

It’s simple, silly me, I consider work a big part of my life. And given the fact that I have to do it for living anyway, it *must be* gratifying.

[bipendulum]

Definitely for me too.

I currently work at a large fintech company and have a decent salary. I have been there for quite some time now so I have the reputation and trust in the organization however, I am having the worst time of my career. I can also barely work a few hours a day and I feel horribly burnout. Hence I made the opposite decision - to move to one of the FAANGs where I will massively shift my current WLB. I am confident that I made the right decision.

[zebraflask]

I think these kinds of complaints are interesting compared to other HN posts about - take your pick - startups trying to keep the lights on, startups closing their doors, bootcamp attendees looking for their first job, etc.

Whether intentional or not, the tenor of this blog comes across as fairly sheltered and not particularly sympathetic.

[lolinder]

It probably depends a lot on where you're at in your career, but it's pretty obvious that the blog resonates with a lot of people here. For many it probably resonates better than the struggles of a bootcamp grad.

It's not really fair to belittle stories like this with a "you know nothing of pain" mentality. Your startup founders and bootcamp attendees would sound similarly sheltered if set against stories of starving children in Africa. Should we all refrain from talking about our pains because someone else's pains are worse?

Humans struggle everywhere, with different things, and it's helpful for us to learn from people who've been through similar.