I don't want to sound an asshole, but I will sound an assholle nevertheless.
I was damn happy as one can be at 3.5 years in my career. 10 years in, I feel like my happiness and awesomeness has been slowly consumed by corporate politics, unfair promotions and layoffs, bad work ethics and the such.
I still like my work. I really really enjoy it when it's productive, and I still feel amazed to see the green checkmark on my CI after a long and challenging git push - but after so many years and a couple companies it's just work.
There are some real cool places and projects to work though, you just need to dig through the "look we're cool let us enslave you" crap.
What hurts is when you decide to switch to another company, which has good rep, and finally find out: it's the same. Everywhere.
After the big bosses do stupid shit, they get promoted elsewhere, leaves you fix the broken plates, rince and repeat until a merger, bankruptcy, or major reorg.
Meanwhile middle management gets bigger and everything gets slower. Good employees leave, bad one get promoted to middle management, and you wonder why you're stupid enough to stay there.
Some days, I am just like a zombie - I still get work done, but just don't enjoy it. That said, my colleagues are nice and I have some freedom in my work (though the work itself is boring) which is more than what most people say. So I feel guilty complaining about it (I can't easily change jobs).
After working so long, I've come to the conclusion that the best way (and maybe the only way for most people) to enjoy work is just work for self. This is easier said than done.
Those "real cool places" you mention, there are very few of those.
lots of places can appear to be "Real cool places" but I find no matter how cool the place is - the stuff you don't like about working in corporate companies - is almost universal - especially if you're not particularly fond of playing the career ladder/dog eat dog games.
I was there at about 10 years, now after 12 years I'm happy again because I realized that when I was happy it was because I was ignoring the corporate politics, the unfair promotions and the bad work ethics. Now I learned to be vocal about it when it impacts me and delegate the responsibility of fixing it or giving feedback, and ignore it when it doesn't affect me... maybe give a heads up there, like, "hey maybe they are just spewing bullshit to keep you busy and really need to solve some issue between them! be careful!" and then get back to what I need to do.
Yes my work now as senior whatever or whatever whatever manager is not as easy as Jr. Sysadmin, but it's rewarding if the organization is functional, once I learn the ins and outs and after figuring out what to worry about and what to not worry about.
"figuring out what to worry about and what to not worry about"
I think that is the "know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em" skill which is totally necessary to be content while working in an office environment.
I feel exactly the same way and also just hit the 10-year mark. I'm literally working at the worst place I have ever worked at in my career. Next Friday will be my last day.
I'm seriously considering trying to get out of tech forever after this last gig. I'm moving to Asia in a few weeks to try to work on bootstrapping a small company.
Sounds like a good plan. No sure if it helps, but I thought about changing domain as well after a horrible gig (actually two in a row...). Following a short sabbatical / studies break I just changed industry. Turned out I love logistics simply too much to do anything else.
And yeah, there is no need to waste time for a job that is only driving one crazy. Enjoy Asia!
Same here. Ten year check, worst company ever check. I never ever walked out during the trial months but this time I did and it was liberating. I will stay in tech, but after this "experience" my expectations just went down to zero. Whatever will be, will be.
It's quite funny how many IT persons I face when dancing (in my case Argentine Tango). But I start to believe that it's because it gives you another dimension/mindfulness of life than putting bits in the right order does, but at the same time is quite nerdy.
I do recommend it immensively though, especially if you get of a gig and have a bit of spare to learn the dance intensively for a few weeks. Game changer.
I've had a similar experience. So much hype about each new place I've joined only to find the same levels of corporate political crap. What kills me is the lack of care about the quality of the product. "Good enough" is never actually good enough for me and when you are the only one (or at least in an extreme minority) in the entire company that cares about that, it's incredibly demotivating.
I've recently joined a very early stage startup at a pretty high level. I'm in charge of an entire class of product (mobile native apps) and it's been the best experience of my career so far. It's stressful and tough but I'm 100% in charge so I can care as deeply as I want and it's up to me to make it work. Very rewarding vs the typical Corporate slag.
> the quality of the product. "Good enough" is never actually good enough for me
I hear you loud and clear. One way to get a higher standard of quality may be to switch industries. In aviation, where bugs can cost lives, there tends to be a higher standard. You may still find the bar of your co-workers isn't as high as yours, but it will definitely be higher than at a consumer-products or web-facing company. I know, I've interviewed at a few of those and turned down follow-up interviews and offers because they don't care enough about quality to do QA.
"Devs push to prod; rollback and page someone if it breaks" isn't acceptable when the customer isn't able to take 300 aircraft out of service every week to load your latest release.
The only places I found where this was not the case were companies / teams in a state where their existence and viability depended on churning out high quality software. Crisis situations with pressing needs have the doubly added advantage that they are irrational choices for those consumed by corporate politics.
Crises are amplifiers of both positive and negative. I previously worked at a company in prolonged existential crisis, and while my team (working on a potential way out) and immediate management was great, there was a whole lot of backstabbing and irrational/incompetent/powerplay decision-making happening elsewhere in the continually shrinking org as people played musical chairs.
In the end, we delivered the project, but the company was acquired and everybody got laid off anyway...
~10 years here too, it's not so much corporate politics that bugs me, but the apparent futility of what I've done. I've had a number of assignments but it's all roughly the same - rebuild this existing thing over the span of two years, but this time in $technology.
It's often rebuild projects for rebuild's sake, and not because the old one is bad, but because the old one's developers are gone and nobody wants to invest the time and effort it takes to get to know the codebase.
~5 years ago I was probably at my most productive, churning out something like 5000 commits a year or thereabouts; thinking back, I realize that nobody in their right mind would even try to understand everything that I've built during that time.
Last year we were asked back to that customer again, this time to rebuild the application but in $new_tech_of_the_month. That really gave me a sinking feeling - like, I and my colleagues spent over 2.5 years on that application, and now it's just getting thrown away (we're talking >100 application screens here) because someone higher up decided Angular was no longer cool and everything had to be done in Polymer?
I mean if they had only properly maintained the application since I left. But nope, bumble along for 3 years and just toss the lot.
TL;DR, a lot of software is throwaway and effort is wasted.
Could be perhaps because Angular 1.x is not going to be maintained in the next 2 years so there are some security issues with that. And obviously, effort was not wasted since people used the application during those 2 years and you hopefully learned some stuff.
No code lasts forever. 2.5 years is a pretty good run for anything. If the company grew in that time, then they need to revisit all their processes including all those application screens. This sounds pretty normal.
I don't think the effort was wasted; you made money and hopefully had fun while doing it. The system was probably useful to the customer either directly or indirectly (by testing a hypothesis, for example).
Same here, not in the tech industry but it is everywhere the same to a certain degree. Now, also ten and something years in, I try to push myself into the direction of NOT looking at the career ladder anymore. Shocking how haed that is actually.
The thing I relized that is helping a lot is doing stuff that a) builds on my interests and experience and b) is a intellectual stretch.
Otherwise I run the risk of being bored and running out of patience with the politics around me. Lucky me for now this working out okish to fine sometimes.
Ah, and having colleagues that a fun to work with!
> I try to push myself into the direction of NOT looking at the career ladder anymore
I had the opposite thought. I never used to look at the career ladder, when recently I realized that I might need to, in order to get a more satisfying/challenging job.
I entertained that thought for a bit, but then realized that I enjoy my personal life and projects more, and that it would probably make me enjoy my work less if I were career-focused. Plus, I like my current team and job enough as it is, so it wouldn't be worth it. Now I just try to be mindful of doing things that will advance my career (basically being a valuable employee), but not at the expense of my personal life.
Corporate and office politics are so frustrating the higher you climb the corporate ladder. I'd love to be able to show up to work and for everyone to do their job and leave emotions and what not out of it.
You sound an awful lot like me. The first 3.5 years was great, maybe even stretch that to the first 5 years. All downhill from there.
I'm starting to understand why everyone says the best jobs are never on public display and you should network and making a brand for yourself. Working actively on that now, will see where that brings me. Also working on my own projects. The most important point for me is to try to make it better.
I don't know about OP's environment, but the larger the codebase, the less feasible running every test locally as you go becomes. You run relevant tests locally as you go, but depending on the change it might take a long while to run ALL tests that could possibly be impacted.
They wouldn't call it work/life balance if work was really part of your life. It's dead time, lost time. I've always felt that way anyhow. You can convince yourself otherwise maybe, if you're a musician or something. For most people though that's the truth of it.
I think you have it the other way around. People for whom work is dead, lost time really need to get their work/life balance sorted out. If you view work as part of your life, then it's a much less binary view of prioritisation. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't prioritise. It just means that the prioritisation is more nuanced than: do what I don't like for 8 hours and then do what I do like for the rest of the day.
In my way of thinking, there are a lot of things you have to do in your day that you may not really want to do. For example, you've got to brush your teeth. I don't have a "brush my teeth"/life balance. I brush my teeth because I want my teeth brushed. Sometimes I enjoy brushing my teeth. Spending some time to look after myself can be very rewarding. Most of the time, I'm thinking about my other priorities.
The same goes for cleaning the house, doing your dishes, doing your laundry, cooking, doing yard work, visiting your family, washing your car, fixing things around the house, etc, etc. At various times, those tasks are the highest priority even though you might not want to do them. You still have to do them. But people who find a way to enjoy at least some of those tasks are going to be a lot happier overall than people who don't.
I think you are right that for most people that the binary point of view is the truth of it, but to be perfectly frank, for most people their only free time is being taken up by watching people being nasty to each other on reality TV shows. Just because it is common, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
You've got 8 hours of your day being taken up by work. You've got lunch at work. You've got your commute. You've got getting ready for work. You've got unwinding from the stress of work. That's a crap load of your life! You can waste it being miserable if you like, but I really don't recommend it.
In any job there is something you can find to enjoy. You may not enjoy it every single day, but the more you succeed in getting into the enjoyment zone, the better your life is going to be. Or at least, that's the way I look at it.
Well I think my point is that it feels completely different when it's self directed. I built a shed this summer with my brothers- and it didn't feel anything like work does- it felt joyful, playful. I get some of the same feelings when I'm working on my own programming projects. But at work? No, I'm creating something for someone else, to make someone else richer, and if I left tomorrow nobody would care.
You might be able fool yourself for a while with the power of positive thinking but a happy servant is still a servant.
"Rick, the only connection between your unquestionable intelligence and the sickness destroying your family is that everyone in your family, you included, use intelligence to justify sickness.
You seem to alternate between viewing your own mind as an unstoppable force and as an inescapable curse. And I think it's because the only truly unapproachable concept for you is that it's your mind within your control. You chose to come here, you chose to talk -to belittle my vocation- just as you chose to become a pickle.
You are the master of your universe, and yet you are dripping with rat blood and feces. Your enormous mind literally vegetating by your own hand.
I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I'm bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is it's not an adventure. There's no way to do it so wrong you might die. It's just work. And the bottom line is, some people are okay going to work, and some people well, some people would rather die.
Each of us gets to choose."
I think it's not a matter of the field (engineer or musician), but rather a matter of personality. I know some people who really take pride in their accomplishments at work, as if the project they worked on is really part of what they were proud to achieve in their life as a whole. I also know other types of people for whom being an employee merely means being at the service of a project that isn't theirs, which will therefore never deliver any actual satisfaction. For this latter category the true way around is to find a way to live by monetizing their own ideas and projects, either by trying to create their own company, or by trying to monetize open-source stuff, etc
Time is not wasted if you enjoy wasting it. The life part can be dull for some as well. If all your work time is lost time, it's time to change routines or perspective, don't be satisfied with less.
I was very unhappy with my job for the first 12 years between two jobs. Except for one brief period of a year.
I had been a hobbyist hacker for 10 years, since 6th grade, including four years in college. I then got my first job that I was greatly over qualified for as a computer operator. But that was my best opportunity to get to a big city because I had been an intern at the company the prior year.
I changed jobs 3 years later, got a nice 20K bump and another 10K bump over the next year, learned a lot and I thought I was doing well. That year and the next year was great.
Over the next 7 years, no growth in skills and only making $7K more over that time with measly raises and bonuses being cut, I hated my job but I felt so unqualified that I didn’t make a move and I was just miserable.
I finally woke up and changed companies and started back gaining new skills and seeing a salary increase.
Over the next 10 years, I can honestly say I never hated my job for more than a month. Once I started hating my job and I learned all I could, I had the skill set and the optionally to jump ship. Even if I didn’t leave immediately, I never felt “stuck”.
I guess that’s just a long winded way of saying that I only hate my job when I don’t feel like I’m growing and/or have any optionality.
I also realized that I work next in small companies with little red tape.
> Over the next 10 years, I can honestly say I never hated my job for more than a month. Once I started hating my job and I learned all I could, I had the skill set and the optionally to jump ship. Even if I didn’t leave immediately, I never felt “stuck”.
How often did this happen? Did you have problems with being perceived as a job hopper?
It’s about having a story to tell and yes you do have to be able to have a good explanation without sounding negative. It also helps that I have the CTO of the first company as a reference and the hiring manager of the third company as a reference who had the same issues I had.
1. The company went out of business - that was an easy one.
2. Large company hired fast to develop a new .net project but two years in all of the business was on their legacy PHP product, no one wanted to do PHP. There is no money in saying “I developed a PHP app”
3. Cant go into details without doxing myself but it was highly political and we working in a remote office away from the seats of power.
4. It was a contract to perm and when they gave me a permanent offer they told me up front that they didn’t want to be a software development shop but they wanted me to lead two initiatives. I saw the writing on the wall.
There were other reasons for leaving the 2-4 one but that’s the story I tell which are all true.
He’s still very young. When I was his age and even for many years prior I loved working, genuinely enjoyed it and was eager to be there, in the milieu, in the flow, killing problems, etc.
Come back to me when you’ve been at it for 30 years. At year 5 or 6 of working FT professionally, which came after ten years of working through college, I started getting jaded, same thing, same stupid “mistakes” (choices really), etc. Towards the end of my sixth year, I ended up getting a full, unfiltered view of inequity and the brutal sausage making that is all sizable organizations.
30 years in you realize that sitting all day and killing it to 2am takes a huge toll on your body and even 8 hour stunts may not be all that good, standing desk or no.
By the time you lose your youthful bliss, it’s too late to start saving. You need to take it on faith that future you has seen more of the operational realities of the world and this has not improved their existence.
The whole FIRE thing is a way to package and sell stuff; the dominant bloggers In the community who are “retired” are doing between 40k and 500k a year in web ad revenue. They mostly do not actually live the life they are suggesting: they have not retired, they’ve changed to a higher risk career. (Exception: earlyretirementnow.com ).
That said, like sites dedicated to exercise or eating well, the basic message is a good one and not a new one (see The Richest Man In Babylon, Your Mobey Or Your Life, etc.). So in that sense, anything that sells the mindset is a net good.
In my (relatively short) life, I've always been far more happy in my periods of unemployment than when I was "gainfully employed." Don't expect a single person on HN to share this view, but there it is.
Which shows that happiness is not contingent on employment, but on bank account balance, which is not the philosophy a lot of people push when they say lack of work will ruin people.
I don't understand these people who can't find things to keep them occupied outside work. I don't have enough hours in the day to do all the things I want to do. Work is just 8 hours per day that I can't do those things.
I suspect that being a trust fund kid ruins it for you anyway. If you were born that way you'll have a harder time enjoying it because this has always been your baseline and you don't really know what life without is like. Now if you started out normal but became trust fund level rich, then I reckon there is a higher chance you'll actually appreciate it. So, don't feel bad, things feel more rewarding when you've earned them but not as much when they were given to you without effort on your part.
I envy you :) I always had this fear deep inside that I will run out of money and boom, poverty awaits (even now, that I have a more than decent salary).
This is great! I wish I'd started doing something like this long ago. The closest thing I've found to this that I'm able to at least remind myself to use regularly is this, https://daylio.webflow.io/
It'd be interesting to leverage something like this to decide when I should take vacation... If my happiness is slowly decreasing and visualized like this, it'd serve as a nice reminder to schedule some vacation. I'd also be interested to see how long after vacations the "high" wears off
I've always wanted to make a CLI with the same functionality, will definitely check daylio out. Data export is a big deal for me when it comes to using journaling type apps, because who knows if the developer is going to support iOS 13,14,15.. in the future.
I just tried this one, (and another one, Journal which both seems to be Google 'editors choice'), but I found that both only had 5 possible moods (basically: exstatic, good, meh, bad, terrible) , and I fear me data will just be 90% "good".
Do you know if it can be configured to have more levels? Or if other apps have more specificity?
Try MoodDiary[1], it has a scale of 10 but also allows tracking multiple metrics (e.g. I track 4 metrics: sleep, mood, energy level and overwhelmed vs. undercontrol)
That's a nice idea, yes. If the happiness on non-work days is getting increasingly bigger compared to work days, at some point you should receive a bleep with "hey take some vacation will you?"
Nope. Not happy. I make enough money now that salary is no longer a major consideration when it comes to my job satisfaction. I move around every couple of years, hoping to get more challenging assignments, more responsibility, etc., which never materialize. It really is the same crap everywhere I go. Office politics, PHBs, incompetent coworkers, etc.
I've decided I'm not a "cultural fit" for corporate environments. But I've been working in corporate environments so long, everybody assumes I wouldn't be fit for anything else.
Really interesting. It must take such discipline to collect this data for 3.5 years.
Trying to answer the question of "does work make me happy?" is much more complex than comparing happiness levels between work and non-work days - they are not independent. How much of your happiness of a non-work day is precisely because it is a day off? An imperfect analogy would be the feeling of enjoying a holiday but also being glad to be home at the end of it.
You're right. It's much more complex. Comparing happiness levels between work and non-work days was one way of trying to answer it. This method is still distorted by a lot of things, like you mention. I'm open for any different methods! If you have any ideas, I'd love to know :)
It takes me about 3 minutes every day to track happiness, and the advantages go much further than just the collection of data. It's also a moment of self-reflection and meditation in a way. It puts my mind at rest.
Readit News
I was damn happy as one can be at 3.5 years in my career. 10 years in, I feel like my happiness and awesomeness has been slowly consumed by corporate politics, unfair promotions and layoffs, bad work ethics and the such.
I still like my work. I really really enjoy it when it's productive, and I still feel amazed to see the green checkmark on my CI after a long and challenging git push - but after so many years and a couple companies it's just work.
There are some real cool places and projects to work though, you just need to dig through the "look we're cool let us enslave you" crap.
What hurts is when you decide to switch to another company, which has good rep, and finally find out: it's the same. Everywhere. After the big bosses do stupid shit, they get promoted elsewhere, leaves you fix the broken plates, rince and repeat until a merger, bankruptcy, or major reorg. Meanwhile middle management gets bigger and everything gets slower. Good employees leave, bad one get promoted to middle management, and you wonder why you're stupid enough to stay there.
Deleted Comment
After working so long, I've come to the conclusion that the best way (and maybe the only way for most people) to enjoy work is just work for self. This is easier said than done.
Those "real cool places" you mention, there are very few of those.
Yes my work now as senior whatever or whatever whatever manager is not as easy as Jr. Sysadmin, but it's rewarding if the organization is functional, once I learn the ins and outs and after figuring out what to worry about and what to not worry about.
I think that is the "know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em" skill which is totally necessary to be content while working in an office environment.
I'm seriously considering trying to get out of tech forever after this last gig. I'm moving to Asia in a few weeks to try to work on bootstrapping a small company.
And yeah, there is no need to waste time for a job that is only driving one crazy. Enjoy Asia!
Deleted Comment
just curious which Asian country?
I've recently joined a very early stage startup at a pretty high level. I'm in charge of an entire class of product (mobile native apps) and it's been the best experience of my career so far. It's stressful and tough but I'm 100% in charge so I can care as deeply as I want and it's up to me to make it work. Very rewarding vs the typical Corporate slag.
I hear you loud and clear. One way to get a higher standard of quality may be to switch industries. In aviation, where bugs can cost lives, there tends to be a higher standard. You may still find the bar of your co-workers isn't as high as yours, but it will definitely be higher than at a consumer-products or web-facing company. I know, I've interviewed at a few of those and turned down follow-up interviews and offers because they don't care enough about quality to do QA.
"Devs push to prod; rollback and page someone if it breaks" isn't acceptable when the customer isn't able to take 300 aircraft out of service every week to load your latest release.
In the end, we delivered the project, but the company was acquired and everybody got laid off anyway...
It's often rebuild projects for rebuild's sake, and not because the old one is bad, but because the old one's developers are gone and nobody wants to invest the time and effort it takes to get to know the codebase.
~5 years ago I was probably at my most productive, churning out something like 5000 commits a year or thereabouts; thinking back, I realize that nobody in their right mind would even try to understand everything that I've built during that time.
Last year we were asked back to that customer again, this time to rebuild the application but in $new_tech_of_the_month. That really gave me a sinking feeling - like, I and my colleagues spent over 2.5 years on that application, and now it's just getting thrown away (we're talking >100 application screens here) because someone higher up decided Angular was no longer cool and everything had to be done in Polymer?
I mean if they had only properly maintained the application since I left. But nope, bumble along for 3 years and just toss the lot.
TL;DR, a lot of software is throwaway and effort is wasted.
The thing I relized that is helping a lot is doing stuff that a) builds on my interests and experience and b) is a intellectual stretch.
Otherwise I run the risk of being bored and running out of patience with the politics around me. Lucky me for now this working out okish to fine sometimes.
Ah, and having colleagues that a fun to work with!
I had the opposite thought. I never used to look at the career ladder, when recently I realized that I might need to, in order to get a more satisfying/challenging job.
I entertained that thought for a bit, but then realized that I enjoy my personal life and projects more, and that it would probably make me enjoy my work less if I were career-focused. Plus, I like my current team and job enough as it is, so it wouldn't be worth it. Now I just try to be mindful of doing things that will advance my career (basically being a valuable employee), but not at the expense of my personal life.
You are not an asshole. Bootlickers gets promoted and stupid managers are biased towards them
I'm starting to understand why everyone says the best jobs are never on public display and you should network and making a brand for yourself. Working actively on that now, will see where that brings me. Also working on my own projects. The most important point for me is to try to make it better.
How is this "amazing"? Can you not build a branch locally to see if it works as you go? Have you no facilities to run local tests?
In my way of thinking, there are a lot of things you have to do in your day that you may not really want to do. For example, you've got to brush your teeth. I don't have a "brush my teeth"/life balance. I brush my teeth because I want my teeth brushed. Sometimes I enjoy brushing my teeth. Spending some time to look after myself can be very rewarding. Most of the time, I'm thinking about my other priorities.
The same goes for cleaning the house, doing your dishes, doing your laundry, cooking, doing yard work, visiting your family, washing your car, fixing things around the house, etc, etc. At various times, those tasks are the highest priority even though you might not want to do them. You still have to do them. But people who find a way to enjoy at least some of those tasks are going to be a lot happier overall than people who don't.
I think you are right that for most people that the binary point of view is the truth of it, but to be perfectly frank, for most people their only free time is being taken up by watching people being nasty to each other on reality TV shows. Just because it is common, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
You've got 8 hours of your day being taken up by work. You've got lunch at work. You've got your commute. You've got getting ready for work. You've got unwinding from the stress of work. That's a crap load of your life! You can waste it being miserable if you like, but I really don't recommend it.
In any job there is something you can find to enjoy. You may not enjoy it every single day, but the more you succeed in getting into the enjoyment zone, the better your life is going to be. Or at least, that's the way I look at it.
You might be able fool yourself for a while with the power of positive thinking but a happy servant is still a servant.
"Rick, the only connection between your unquestionable intelligence and the sickness destroying your family is that everyone in your family, you included, use intelligence to justify sickness. You seem to alternate between viewing your own mind as an unstoppable force and as an inescapable curse. And I think it's because the only truly unapproachable concept for you is that it's your mind within your control. You chose to come here, you chose to talk -to belittle my vocation- just as you chose to become a pickle. You are the master of your universe, and yet you are dripping with rat blood and feces. Your enormous mind literally vegetating by your own hand. I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I'm bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is it's not an adventure. There's no way to do it so wrong you might die. It's just work. And the bottom line is, some people are okay going to work, and some people well, some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose."
Wow, absolutely agree.
I had been a hobbyist hacker for 10 years, since 6th grade, including four years in college. I then got my first job that I was greatly over qualified for as a computer operator. But that was my best opportunity to get to a big city because I had been an intern at the company the prior year.
I changed jobs 3 years later, got a nice 20K bump and another 10K bump over the next year, learned a lot and I thought I was doing well. That year and the next year was great.
Over the next 7 years, no growth in skills and only making $7K more over that time with measly raises and bonuses being cut, I hated my job but I felt so unqualified that I didn’t make a move and I was just miserable.
I finally woke up and changed companies and started back gaining new skills and seeing a salary increase.
Over the next 10 years, I can honestly say I never hated my job for more than a month. Once I started hating my job and I learned all I could, I had the skill set and the optionally to jump ship. Even if I didn’t leave immediately, I never felt “stuck”.
I guess that’s just a long winded way of saying that I only hate my job when I don’t feel like I’m growing and/or have any optionality.
I also realized that I work next in small companies with little red tape.
How often did this happen? Did you have problems with being perceived as a job hopper?
It’s about having a story to tell and yes you do have to be able to have a good explanation without sounding negative. It also helps that I have the CTO of the first company as a reference and the hiring manager of the third company as a reference who had the same issues I had.
1. The company went out of business - that was an easy one.
2. Large company hired fast to develop a new .net project but two years in all of the business was on their legacy PHP product, no one wanted to do PHP. There is no money in saying “I developed a PHP app”
3. Cant go into details without doxing myself but it was highly political and we working in a remote office away from the seats of power.
4. It was a contract to perm and when they gave me a permanent offer they told me up front that they didn’t want to be a software development shop but they wanted me to lead two initiatives. I saw the writing on the wall.
There were other reasons for leaving the 2-4 one but that’s the story I tell which are all true.
Come back to me when you’ve been at it for 30 years. At year 5 or 6 of working FT professionally, which came after ten years of working through college, I started getting jaded, same thing, same stupid “mistakes” (choices really), etc. Towards the end of my sixth year, I ended up getting a full, unfiltered view of inequity and the brutal sausage making that is all sizable organizations.
30 years in you realize that sitting all day and killing it to 2am takes a huge toll on your body and even 8 hour stunts may not be all that good, standing desk or no.
By the time you lose your youthful bliss, it’s too late to start saving. You need to take it on faith that future you has seen more of the operational realities of the world and this has not improved their existence.
The whole FIRE thing is a way to package and sell stuff; the dominant bloggers In the community who are “retired” are doing between 40k and 500k a year in web ad revenue. They mostly do not actually live the life they are suggesting: they have not retired, they’ve changed to a higher risk career. (Exception: earlyretirementnow.com ).
That said, like sites dedicated to exercise or eating well, the basic message is a good one and not a new one (see The Richest Man In Babylon, Your Mobey Or Your Life, etc.). So in that sense, anything that sells the mindset is a net good.
With employment, there's usually a lower limit since there's a reasonable change you're able to eat and stay out of the rain.
I don't understand these people who can't find things to keep them occupied outside work. I don't have enough hours in the day to do all the things I want to do. Work is just 8 hours per day that I can't do those things.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
It'd be interesting to leverage something like this to decide when I should take vacation... If my happiness is slowly decreasing and visualized like this, it'd serve as a nice reminder to schedule some vacation. I'd also be interested to see how long after vacations the "high" wears off
Do you know if it can be configured to have more levels? Or if other apps have more specificity?
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.jonathansau...
I've decided I'm not a "cultural fit" for corporate environments. But I've been working in corporate environments so long, everybody assumes I wouldn't be fit for anything else.
Trying to answer the question of "does work make me happy?" is much more complex than comparing happiness levels between work and non-work days - they are not independent. How much of your happiness of a non-work day is precisely because it is a day off? An imperfect analogy would be the feeling of enjoying a holiday but also being glad to be home at the end of it.
It takes me about 3 minutes every day to track happiness, and the advantages go much further than just the collection of data. It's also a moment of self-reflection and meditation in a way. It puts my mind at rest.