> In 2020, the pandemic destroyed bucket #3 for most people. We were no different. Friends from back home in Canada couldn’t visit us. Even meeting up with local friends became hard. In January 2021 I tore my achilles tendon playing pick-up basketball. There goes bucket #2.
> Only then did I realize bucket #1 had been running low for a while.
I'm somewhat puzzled. If the author is struggling to socialize with friends (bucket #3) and struggling to pay attention to physical health (bucket #2) then why does he think that this is going to help improve work-life balance:
> I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now.
I can empathize with the desire to get caught up in a high-energy startup (it's fun!) but this whole blog post reads like someone trying to replace an increasingly disappointing personal life with excessive workaholism. Filling your days with extra work can fill the "bucket #1" (career) but it seems like a nail in the coffin for the author's problems with bucket #2 (physical health) and bucket #3 (social life).
Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years.
Something I try to do whenever I read articles like this: Whenever you see the name of the giant corporation that the author worked at, replace it with "my team". Google has over 100,000 employees, so there's no real "here's what it's like to work at Google". At that scale, there is too much variance for any simple neat summary (though there are certainly trends and commonalities).
I've met people who worked at Amazon who described it as a hellscape of misery and others who felt it was incredibly rewarding. There's been times when I worked at EA when I loved my job and times when I hated it.
A single data point is useful, but it's only a single data point. I'm glad the author found a better job that fits what they're looking for. That's all any of us really want in our careers.
I was at amazon for over 10 years. The burn out hellscape culture, often where you’re managed by some H1B manager who’s afraid of themselves getting fired (and having to leave the US) if they don’t meet their forced attrition quotas: it’s real. I spoke with those managers and heard it directly from them.
Yeah there are teams coasting by. Of course, there are engineers working 60 hours a week who will tell you about their excellent work life balance. Some of it is relative.
I respectfully disagree. There is a "What it's like to work at Google."
Google has a culture. Large companies have a way of operating. I don't think any of OP's comments are at all off-base for Google. A lot of what OP wrote is fundamental to any organization with tens of thousands of people.
And you know something? That's fine. I know people who are very happy there, and I know people who are miserable there. There are times in my life when /I/ would have been very happy in that sort of place, and there are times in my life when /I/ would have been completely miserable there.
A lot of that comes down to personality, and a lot of that is situational.
For example, I want a very different employer if I don't have kids and can throw my life into work than when I'm dealing with a difficult family situation. I've been in both situations.
I would be completely miserable at Google _right now_. It might have been a dream job out-of-college, and it might be a great job again in just a few years.
While I agree with this sentiment, I wouldn't be so quick to completely dismiss pervading company cultures.
I think a better suggestion would be to say that when you read articles like this you should ask if the author has the right perspective to know what the truly common elements of a company's culture are or if they're extrapolating from a single data point.
Plus, people seek different values from their work, and even those values also change over time. So, yeah, what really matters is the number of data points.
Still, Google is obviously not the hacker-driven company it used to be 10 years ago. Almost all data points suggest that Google lacks internal vision and leadership (likely outside of a few key areas). This sounds like a typical multi-national corpo w/ a lot of money to burn.
If there is a company that is a hellscape for 30% of its employees, and works just fine for most of the rest, then I would describe that company of having a hellscape culture. The existence of positive experiences doesn't change the fact that a lot of these bad experiences, at Amazon, at Google, are directly due to corporate policies, incentives, and the decisions of upper management.
Same for Microsoft. In spite of the top-management-spirit teams were totally different in their stress levels, WLB and daily routines.
The same actually implies to those small "Used By X company" when you evaluate products, I have seen those claiming to be used by Microsoft while knowing it was just a short term evaluation that ended with nothing but MS is still paying for a licence.
I am noticing a (darkish?) pattern in these recurring “I transitioned jobs” reports. Worryingly, they represent many of the words I imagine myself writing if I were again a blogger.
It’s basically the honeymoon/wanderlust cycle. Person gets job. It is a dream job. It is described as a dream job because of reasons a1, b1, and c1. Delta t passes. Things have changed. Because of reasons x1, y1, and z1, job is no longer a good dream job. It’s now a bad dream/nightmare job. Person has awakened now, and for reasons, a2, b2, and c2 is living a new dream. Blink, flinch, repeat.
The nagging suspicion is that while things change, they don’t so much actually. They shift around. What does change is how we come to see things. At one point, we convince ourselves things are awesome. Later we believe it’s not. Which is the real truth we ought to accept? It’s like trying to measure the one way speed of light. You can’t, just the sum of the round trip.
So do we make the assumption that somewhere in the middle of this good-to-bad cycle is the reality? Or suspect it was always that bad, we were just able to initially gaslight ourselves? Or perhaps that it was and still is good, we’ve just let the negatives creep in and take over?
Some would philosophize that all happiness is an illusion. Or a choice. Or whatever.
But what frustrates me about this (having been through this cycle 3-4 times now), is that it is not a universal life experience. I have relationships with family, friends, and various institutions that grow stronger and stronger over time. They do NOT loop like work relationships do. Is there something inherit in work relationships that makes this loop inevitable? Do all experience it, or only a certain mindset of persons? Are there cases where this loop is broken, but they just rare enough, you don’t hear about them? Should I despair or hope?
Everyone is welcome to point out the contradictions in this article and talk about the silliness of walking away from the comfort of FAANG workload and compensation while talking about "work life balance",... that's your right, and you're probably correct in one interpretation...
But Google is terrible for our industry. On the whole. And for many people who are trying to get satisfaction out of their work.
For innovation generally, and a terrible employer for people like TFA writer (and myself). The more people who quit to go to startups or smaller companies, the better, because it will ultimately accelerate technology and innovation.
This is precisely why compensation at Google is what it is: to capture a chunk of talent and cordon it off from the potential of creating value elsewhere... to keep the revenue firehose running there but most importantly to make sure none of that revenue firehose ever diverts elsewhere.
All the talk of "innovation" there amounts to: we want your intellectual property, yes, but if we can't get it or it's not worth much, we mostly want you to not create intellectual property elsewhere (or for yourself). And we'll pay absolutely handsomely to make sure that nothing you ever think of or write contributes to the success of anybody else.
That's how a behemoth like Google survives.
I'm surely not the most amazing engineer in the world, but at Google I was a mediocre one. Not technically, mind you, but organizationally: I was terrible at playing the game, writing the design docs and getting the comments, presenting my work to other people, snatching "impactful" projects before others could take them... and showing it all off to perform the promo dance. I sucked at that, and that is primarily what success at Google is about...I failed at it... Except they didn't care, that was all fine, there was plenty of space to just plod along... because they don't need you to succeed. Just not succeed somewhere else.
But before Google I aggressively contributed to the success of some of the companies I was at, including ones competing with Google. Once I was at Google, I was no longer doing that. And, actually, it became clear to me... that was my actual value to Google...
> Enough equity that if I’m right about what Replit can become, I’ll come out ahead of staying at Google.
How often is that viable?
For me, I work at a FAANG like company and I kind of hate it. I'm doing work that touches 1-2 billion people but it's just not fun. For me, WFH sucks. My best times were in small companies with small teams where people had to work together to do stuff where as my FAANG job you just pull off of piece of the never ending list of work to do and do it.
I do feel the golden handcuffs though. I need the money to retire. I'd give it up for a job I was sure I'd like, for one that I think has a reasonably okay chance to succeed, and for one where if it succeeds I feel like I got a reasonable %.
To try to be clearer on those last points. I wouldn't need to replicate my FAANG like compensation. I just need to believe that when the company does well I don't feel that all I did was make the boss rich (which can be the case in small companies)
But, I no longer know what kind of job I'd be happy at.
> Enough equity that if I’m right about what Replit can become, I’ll come out ahead of staying at Google.
This is why it is so hard to financially justify working for a startup. To cover the risk requires large outsized gains. And financially the 15 percentage points drop in salary could easily be say a 50% drop in disposable income.
Yet the pleasure is worth the price.
And the above ignores any longer hours (I personally struggle to value my time or satisfaction, in either dollars or opportunity costs).
I like this post a lot and respect the jump. However... Replit? I needed a browser IDE for some work about ~4 years ago and used their product briefly before switching to Cloud9 (now owned by Amazon). Nowadays, GitHub has Codespaces which is really slick. I don't see Replit as a company that is going places. I'd guess that Cloud9 was acquired by Amazon for 50 million? Maybe I'm missing something.
> Somebody once described balance to me as three buckets filled with water. One for career, a second for physical health, and a third for social and family life.
click
I've heard about this concept often but this time reading it, I think I finally found out why it's not working for me..
Where's the fourth bucket? Where's the me bucket?
Maybe not everyone is like that, but, even though I enjoy, and find meaning in both career, exercise and family+friends, it all drains me, it exhausts me, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, and the only time I can recharge is during long unstructured stretches of time alone without external responsibilities.
Do people not generally need the fourth bucket or what?
I totally agree with you! For me some time alone with myself not spent working is essential for my psychological well being! Luckily enough I always manage to get a daily dose of me time!
Totally agreed! Unstructured downtime is crucial. For many people you might also add a fifth bucket for their spiritual life (or maybe that overlaps enough with what you're describing).
>I hadn’t been coding regularly for about 5 years. But thankfully their interviews were practical. I spent evenings and weekends refreshing my skills enough to pass.
Can we agree how screwed up our joke interview culture is when a Google engineer with 10 years experience has to brush up interview skills? Come on.
Wait, they left Google for work life balance, to work more hours at a startup. Whaat?
I think I get what they're saying though - they were fundamentally unhappy with their ability to make an individual impact at Giant Corp. Well, that's pretty normal and probably a reason for a lot of people's unhappiness at big companies.
A startup can help satiate that need, or even a small company.
Arguably a healthier approach is to detach one's self identity and satisfaction from work, and get that from non-work things. Easier said than done though. Inevitably this person is going to burn out hard when the start up they go to fails expectations.
> Somebody once described balance to me as three buckets filled with water.
I'm not agree with this. I think physical health should absolutely be the number one priority.
Let me just put it coldly here: career can be re-established, friend can be re-found, losing family is a painful struggle but it's not impossible to start from scratch. But physical health, once you lose it, you'll likely lose everything else too. The same thing is also true for mental health.
That said, I would not put my health on any kind of trading table, it's the only thing that I actually own, and I can't afford to dis-own it.
Also, I don't think it's a "three buckets problem", someone probably invented it so they can talk about such thing safely in front of their boss.
You work to improve your life, and you need a good life so you can and know how to improve the life of the others (through the product you helped making). It is hard for someone to generate good results if they're living in miserable condition. A good boss should know this.
> Let me just put it coldly here: career can be re-established, friend can be re-found, losing family is a painful struggle but it's not impossible to start from scratch. But physical health, once you lose it, you'll likely lose everything else too. The same thing is also true for mental health.
You may want to consider rating mental health higher than physical health. They are correlated, but if in doubt and/or if you need to choose, mental health is the one.
And that's where the social/family component comes in. And the work component. Both contribute to mental health. Just as physical health does. But if work and family/friends "buckets" suck, then no matter how tip-top shape you get physically, mental health will suffer.
Therefore, it makes sense to not place the physical health bucket over the other two. All has to contribute to mental health.
Strange, could’ve switched teams and had 1 and 2 without the hassle. Given what’s happening with the markets I doubt the equity will end up turning up much.
Who else read this and found that the issue had nothing to do with work-life balance, but with Google now being a “bullshit job” company? see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
While the idea that "bullshit jobs" are common may itself be bullshit [1], one can imagine that at companies like Google whose major task is preserving their current market position rather than innovating to enter new markets, and who allegedly employ smart engineers simply to prevent their competitors from employing smart engineers, there is a higher than usual level of bullshitness.
[1] From Wikipedia: Using data from the EU-conducted European Working Conditions Survey, the study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful."[14] The study also found that while there was some correlation between occupation and feelings of uselessness, they did not correspond neatly with Graeber's analysis; bullshit "taskmasters" and "goons" such as hedge-fund managers or lobbyists were vastly satisfied with their work, while essential workers like refuse collectors and cleaners often felt their jobs were useless.
I wonder if this article would be the same if the author wasn’t making google money for 10 years. Having all that money let’s you quit to a 40 person startup and be guilt free.
It's a shame that that incident seems to dog them around on HN so much. I don't like what the CEO did in that case either, but I don't think their entire company should sink due to that one incident
> but middle managers are clever enough to word OKRs in a way that makes them all think they’re getting what they want.
I chuckled at this one. Middle managers gonna middle manage.
I know a lot of this behavior is simply due to the position in which they are where senior managers and execs wont take no for an answer. But you have to make tough choices: If you don’t believe deep down that you can deliver, push back hard rather than playing games.
> This sounds simple, but expenses for a family of three with a house in the Bay Area are no joke. It wound up being ~85% of my Google salary.
I live in the Bay area, but under exotic conditions. I would like to stay but when I do the math on the cost of staying, the numbers seem crazy to me. Like $500,000 annual to stay in this area, married with 2 kids in college. Am I don't the math wrong?
It's not entirely clear, but I suspect the author is referring to their base salary at Google. The fact that Replit, a startup, provided a salary capable of covering his expenses (which were equal to 85% of his salary) is another clue that he's not included RSUs in the calculation.
> I would like to stay but when I do the math on the cost of staying, the numbers seem crazy to me. Like $500,000 annual to stay in this area, married with 2 kids in college.
Bay Area is definitely livable on far below $500K.
The "2 kids in college" makes your math impossible to guess because that could be anywhere from a minor footnote to the entirety of your budget if you're trying to pay full sticker price tuition in real-time with no prior savings (which almost nobody does, but it would make the math look terrifying). That's not really a feature of the Bay Area, though, because you'd carry that college line item on your personal budget wherever you moved.
The math depends largely on what sort of housing situation you are assuming. As you probably know. $1.5-$1.8MM is a small (1200-1500 sq ft.) 3bd/2bth ranch house in a San Jose suburb with mediocre schools and strip mall culture. (e.g., https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1995-Majestic-Way-San-Jos...)
It goes up from there. Townhouses are getting close to $1.5MM now in the same area. I haven't followed prices in SF recently, but they are no better I assume. I think you'd be priced out of a small house on the peninsula at $500k/year.
If you're paying for college times 2, I don't know, $500k sounds kind of minimal with 7-10k a month mortgage if you want any sort of ability to save a meaningful amount of money.
Keep in mind you'll be paying $30k+ a year in property taxes every single year for the privilege of that house.
If you're trying to recreate the mid-west lifestyle of a 3-bedroom, 2,500 sq ft house with a big yard, new cars, in an excellent school district, then yeah, it's going to be expensive as hell.
You're almost certainly doing the math wrong unless you are doing a comparison like "I live in a 3k square foot house with top schools and a 10m commute and need the exact same in the bay area".
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|3 years ago|reply
> Only then did I realize bucket #1 had been running low for a while.
I'm somewhat puzzled. If the author is struggling to socialize with friends (bucket #3) and struggling to pay attention to physical health (bucket #2) then why does he think that this is going to help improve work-life balance:
> I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now.
I can empathize with the desire to get caught up in a high-energy startup (it's fun!) but this whole blog post reads like someone trying to replace an increasingly disappointing personal life with excessive workaholism. Filling your days with extra work can fill the "bucket #1" (career) but it seems like a nail in the coffin for the author's problems with bucket #2 (physical health) and bucket #3 (social life).
Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years.
[+] [-] munificent|3 years ago|reply
Something I try to do whenever I read articles like this: Whenever you see the name of the giant corporation that the author worked at, replace it with "my team". Google has over 100,000 employees, so there's no real "here's what it's like to work at Google". At that scale, there is too much variance for any simple neat summary (though there are certainly trends and commonalities).
I've met people who worked at Amazon who described it as a hellscape of misery and others who felt it was incredibly rewarding. There's been times when I worked at EA when I loved my job and times when I hated it.
A single data point is useful, but it's only a single data point. I'm glad the author found a better job that fits what they're looking for. That's all any of us really want in our careers.
[+] [-] ozzythecat|3 years ago|reply
Yeah there are teams coasting by. Of course, there are engineers working 60 hours a week who will tell you about their excellent work life balance. Some of it is relative.
[+] [-] blagie|3 years ago|reply
Google has a culture. Large companies have a way of operating. I don't think any of OP's comments are at all off-base for Google. A lot of what OP wrote is fundamental to any organization with tens of thousands of people.
And you know something? That's fine. I know people who are very happy there, and I know people who are miserable there. There are times in my life when /I/ would have been very happy in that sort of place, and there are times in my life when /I/ would have been completely miserable there.
A lot of that comes down to personality, and a lot of that is situational.
For example, I want a very different employer if I don't have kids and can throw my life into work than when I'm dealing with a difficult family situation. I've been in both situations.
I would be completely miserable at Google _right now_. It might have been a dream job out-of-college, and it might be a great job again in just a few years.
[+] [-] CSMastermind|3 years ago|reply
I think a better suggestion would be to say that when you read articles like this you should ask if the author has the right perspective to know what the truly common elements of a company's culture are or if they're extrapolating from a single data point.
[+] [-] esjeon|3 years ago|reply
Still, Google is obviously not the hacker-driven company it used to be 10 years ago. Almost all data points suggest that Google lacks internal vision and leadership (likely outside of a few key areas). This sounds like a typical multi-national corpo w/ a lot of money to burn.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Cheezewheel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2rsf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disambiguation|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nso95|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] travisgriggs|3 years ago|reply
I am noticing a (darkish?) pattern in these recurring “I transitioned jobs” reports. Worryingly, they represent many of the words I imagine myself writing if I were again a blogger.
It’s basically the honeymoon/wanderlust cycle. Person gets job. It is a dream job. It is described as a dream job because of reasons a1, b1, and c1. Delta t passes. Things have changed. Because of reasons x1, y1, and z1, job is no longer a good dream job. It’s now a bad dream/nightmare job. Person has awakened now, and for reasons, a2, b2, and c2 is living a new dream. Blink, flinch, repeat.
The nagging suspicion is that while things change, they don’t so much actually. They shift around. What does change is how we come to see things. At one point, we convince ourselves things are awesome. Later we believe it’s not. Which is the real truth we ought to accept? It’s like trying to measure the one way speed of light. You can’t, just the sum of the round trip.
So do we make the assumption that somewhere in the middle of this good-to-bad cycle is the reality? Or suspect it was always that bad, we were just able to initially gaslight ourselves? Or perhaps that it was and still is good, we’ve just let the negatives creep in and take over?
Some would philosophize that all happiness is an illusion. Or a choice. Or whatever.
But what frustrates me about this (having been through this cycle 3-4 times now), is that it is not a universal life experience. I have relationships with family, friends, and various institutions that grow stronger and stronger over time. They do NOT loop like work relationships do. Is there something inherit in work relationships that makes this loop inevitable? Do all experience it, or only a certain mindset of persons? Are there cases where this loop is broken, but they just rare enough, you don’t hear about them? Should I despair or hope?
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|3 years ago|reply
But Google is terrible for our industry. On the whole. And for many people who are trying to get satisfaction out of their work.
For innovation generally, and a terrible employer for people like TFA writer (and myself). The more people who quit to go to startups or smaller companies, the better, because it will ultimately accelerate technology and innovation. This is precisely why compensation at Google is what it is: to capture a chunk of talent and cordon it off from the potential of creating value elsewhere... to keep the revenue firehose running there but most importantly to make sure none of that revenue firehose ever diverts elsewhere.
All the talk of "innovation" there amounts to: we want your intellectual property, yes, but if we can't get it or it's not worth much, we mostly want you to not create intellectual property elsewhere (or for yourself). And we'll pay absolutely handsomely to make sure that nothing you ever think of or write contributes to the success of anybody else.
That's how a behemoth like Google survives.
I'm surely not the most amazing engineer in the world, but at Google I was a mediocre one. Not technically, mind you, but organizationally: I was terrible at playing the game, writing the design docs and getting the comments, presenting my work to other people, snatching "impactful" projects before others could take them... and showing it all off to perform the promo dance. I sucked at that, and that is primarily what success at Google is about...I failed at it... Except they didn't care, that was all fine, there was plenty of space to just plod along... because they don't need you to succeed. Just not succeed somewhere else.
But before Google I aggressively contributed to the success of some of the companies I was at, including ones competing with Google. Once I was at Google, I was no longer doing that. And, actually, it became clear to me... that was my actual value to Google...
[+] [-] pronlover723|3 years ago|reply
How often is that viable?
For me, I work at a FAANG like company and I kind of hate it. I'm doing work that touches 1-2 billion people but it's just not fun. For me, WFH sucks. My best times were in small companies with small teams where people had to work together to do stuff where as my FAANG job you just pull off of piece of the never ending list of work to do and do it.
I do feel the golden handcuffs though. I need the money to retire. I'd give it up for a job I was sure I'd like, for one that I think has a reasonably okay chance to succeed, and for one where if it succeeds I feel like I got a reasonable %.
To try to be clearer on those last points. I wouldn't need to replicate my FAANG like compensation. I just need to believe that when the company does well I don't feel that all I did was make the boss rich (which can be the case in small companies)
But, I no longer know what kind of job I'd be happy at.
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|3 years ago|reply
And you know what? That's exactly what Google wants.
Keeping you out of the job market and out of competitors' hands is worth every penny to them.
I don't have the answer for you about what's next, because I quit in December and haven't picked up anything new yet. But, yeah. That's my take.
[+] [-] kornish|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway98797|3 years ago|reply
we all end up in the same place—six feet underground
[+] [-] robocat|3 years ago|reply
This is why it is so hard to financially justify working for a startup. To cover the risk requires large outsized gains. And financially the 15 percentage points drop in salary could easily be say a 50% drop in disposable income.
Yet the pleasure is worth the price.
And the above ignores any longer hours (I personally struggle to value my time or satisfaction, in either dollars or opportunity costs).
[+] [-] sdo72|3 years ago|reply
+ enough salary to pay my bills
+ I work more hours" and even "on the weekend now"
+ enough equity
All of these are actually worse or much lower chance of being better compared to a job at Google.
[+] [-] vesche|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dusted|3 years ago|reply
click
I've heard about this concept often but this time reading it, I think I finally found out why it's not working for me.. Where's the fourth bucket? Where's the me bucket?
Maybe not everyone is like that, but, even though I enjoy, and find meaning in both career, exercise and family+friends, it all drains me, it exhausts me, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, and the only time I can recharge is during long unstructured stretches of time alone without external responsibilities.
Do people not generally need the fourth bucket or what?
[+] [-] freedom2099|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zemvpferreira|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackblemming|3 years ago|reply
Can we agree how screwed up our joke interview culture is when a Google engineer with 10 years experience has to brush up interview skills? Come on.
[+] [-] aeyes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gniv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kadenwolff|3 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1524166696461864962?s=20&t=...
[+] [-] nvarsj|3 years ago|reply
I think I get what they're saying though - they were fundamentally unhappy with their ability to make an individual impact at Giant Corp. Well, that's pretty normal and probably a reason for a lot of people's unhappiness at big companies.
A startup can help satiate that need, or even a small company.
Arguably a healthier approach is to detach one's self identity and satisfaction from work, and get that from non-work things. Easier said than done though. Inevitably this person is going to burn out hard when the start up they go to fails expectations.
[+] [-] nirui|3 years ago|reply
I'm not agree with this. I think physical health should absolutely be the number one priority.
Let me just put it coldly here: career can be re-established, friend can be re-found, losing family is a painful struggle but it's not impossible to start from scratch. But physical health, once you lose it, you'll likely lose everything else too. The same thing is also true for mental health.
That said, I would not put my health on any kind of trading table, it's the only thing that I actually own, and I can't afford to dis-own it.
Also, I don't think it's a "three buckets problem", someone probably invented it so they can talk about such thing safely in front of their boss.
You work to improve your life, and you need a good life so you can and know how to improve the life of the others (through the product you helped making). It is hard for someone to generate good results if they're living in miserable condition. A good boss should know this.
[+] [-] wildmanx|3 years ago|reply
You may want to consider rating mental health higher than physical health. They are correlated, but if in doubt and/or if you need to choose, mental health is the one.
And that's where the social/family component comes in. And the work component. Both contribute to mental health. Just as physical health does. But if work and family/friends "buckets" suck, then no matter how tip-top shape you get physically, mental health will suffer.
Therefore, it makes sense to not place the physical health bucket over the other two. All has to contribute to mental health.
[+] [-] deepsquirrelnet|3 years ago|reply
- a huge number of people and teams pigeonholed into narrow specializations
- a huge number of corporate interfaces, silos and bottlenecks
- ever increasing bureaucracy to maintain the fragile infrastructure of personnel
- depersonalization of employees as the role they were confined to, rather than the talents they possess
[+] [-] nso95|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endisneigh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzzbra|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ciphol|3 years ago|reply
[1] From Wikipedia: Using data from the EU-conducted European Working Conditions Survey, the study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful."[14] The study also found that while there was some correlation between occupation and feelings of uselessness, they did not correspond neatly with Graeber's analysis; bullshit "taskmasters" and "goons" such as hedge-fund managers or lobbyists were vastly satisfied with their work, while essential workers like refuse collectors and cleaners often felt their jobs were useless.
[+] [-] cassac|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hstan4|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marktolson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexyz12|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alephnan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d3nj4l|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pm90|3 years ago|reply
I chuckled at this one. Middle managers gonna middle manage.
I know a lot of this behavior is simply due to the position in which they are where senior managers and execs wont take no for an answer. But you have to make tough choices: If you don’t believe deep down that you can deliver, push back hard rather than playing games.
[+] [-] killjoywashere|3 years ago|reply
> This sounds simple, but expenses for a family of three with a house in the Bay Area are no joke. It wound up being ~85% of my Google salary.
I live in the Bay area, but under exotic conditions. I would like to stay but when I do the math on the cost of staying, the numbers seem crazy to me. Like $500,000 annual to stay in this area, married with 2 kids in college. Am I don't the math wrong?
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|3 years ago|reply
> I would like to stay but when I do the math on the cost of staying, the numbers seem crazy to me. Like $500,000 annual to stay in this area, married with 2 kids in college.
Bay Area is definitely livable on far below $500K.
The "2 kids in college" makes your math impossible to guess because that could be anywhere from a minor footnote to the entirety of your budget if you're trying to pay full sticker price tuition in real-time with no prior savings (which almost nobody does, but it would make the math look terrifying). That's not really a feature of the Bay Area, though, because you'd carry that college line item on your personal budget wherever you moved.
[+] [-] kilbuz|3 years ago|reply
It goes up from there. Townhouses are getting close to $1.5MM now in the same area. I haven't followed prices in SF recently, but they are no better I assume. I think you'd be priced out of a small house on the peninsula at $500k/year.
If you're paying for college times 2, I don't know, $500k sounds kind of minimal with 7-10k a month mortgage if you want any sort of ability to save a meaningful amount of money.
Keep in mind you'll be paying $30k+ a year in property taxes every single year for the privilege of that house.
[+] [-] refurb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmpz22|3 years ago|reply
You’d need to show your estimated incomes and expenses and explain your retirement goals.
As a Bay Area native it seems high unless you’re paying $50k/yr for expensive colleges.
I’d expect the same to be doable with a reasonable social life and vacations for 300k (still a lot).
Many make do in the same situation for far far far less.
[+] [-] opportune|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tshaddox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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