Ask HN: Are you happy with your current job? I know some jobs feel like a grind on some days, but for those who have a legitimate, heaving disinterest every work day, how do you get to the end? What pushes you to the next day? |
Ask HN: Are you happy with your current job? I know some jobs feel like a grind on some days, but for those who have a legitimate, heaving disinterest every work day, how do you get to the end? What pushes you to the next day? |
What kills me is the relentless manner in which work attempts to make inroads into my personal time. I hate late-night meetings, especially those that start beyond 11 pm. I hate the fact that most of my co-workers are online and working well past bedtime, and on most weekends. I hate that most think nothing of installing the office messenger app on their personal phones to "be more available". The (pre WFH) office commute, while it was a pain, was an effective moat between work and home. WFH has since brought down that moat.
The other thing that gets my goat is the "peg yourself at 100% CPU all the time" culture that Agile has fostered. Before Agile took over my world, I found that my best ideas came during downtime, when I was able to explore the codebase and play with it. There's no downtime at work anymore.
What keeps me going is the fact that I need the money.
I fled a toxic startup for my current workplace about a year ago. Many things are better here. I'm pretty decent at what I do but no good at leetcoding, so interviews are a hard proposition for me.
The 11 pm meetings are an unfortunate consequence of timezone differences and the madness that is DST. I wouldn't mind it so much if they switch about the timings a bit (my evenings sometime and their evenings sometime), but not everybody thinks too much about these things, I guess. I can't kick up a fuss about it because I don't want to be a snowflake.
The working on weekends ... is again a sad consequence of covid-related WFH combined with workaholic tendencies that some of the senior folks have. I strictly stay away from my laptop on weekends, but I'm definitely and painfully aware that many co-workers including my boss are available on most weekends. I try not to let it bother me, and there are no spoken or written injunctions, but it's hard to hold your own against this all the time.
The money is decent. It's definitely not top-tier, but I'm not looking for top-tier pay in any case. A sane workplace is my holy grail :)
It doesn’t help that I am perverse enough to always strive for the most senior position I can get in, when I change a company, which always turns out to be incredibly difficult and a destroyer of self confidence.
I am currently at a FAANG at a senior level and I am not kidding when I say I do not know what the hell I am doing, technically speaking. I try to counter balance this by working like a dog, but it is not sustainable. I spent a lot of time thinking about this and I think people talk about impostor syndrome but I am just a true impostor. Compared to some of my peers I am better at sweet talking and so I end up getting opportunities I am not qualified for (“tricking” management is somewhat a very easy game for me), and then suffer.
I need some sort of catalyst in my life to change all this. I rationally know this is destroying me, but my brain just keeps telling me: “stop complaining you fool, you are incredibly privileged and lucky and are making the money of your life, people would kill to be in your shoes. Just work harder and shut up before you are truly caught in your incompetence and the well dries up”.
I’m thinking 2022 might be a good time to talk to a therapist, things have been getting consistently worse yoy as I grew more senior professionally.
But, you can also just realize that life and especially corporate jobs are just a game and don't take it so seriously that you deteriorate from within. Just cruise, try your best for a few months, and if you don't like it after that time period - then change gears or just go into slow cruise mode
Good lord. You need to quit for two reasons: Your mental health will evaporate the longer you do this, and you're taking up space from someone who knows what he's doing and is currently out of work.
What helped me:
- Have a light at the end of the tunnel, i.e. issuance of my permanent residency which would put an end to the suffering.
- Have a VERY rigid separation between home and work. 2 laptops, 2 phones. As soon as 6 o’clock hits work phone gets turned off and put on a shelf.
- Personal side projects that kept me interested in IT and helped me uphill. This bit is important to make sure you don’t start associating your vocation with mental pain and understand that the industry is still fun, your job just sucks.
- Regular exercise.
- Taking regular breaks during workday, have lunch outside with a friend, etc.
- Participate in meetups and other community events, volunteer your time to help others (gives meaning).
It’s a tough situation, so good luck. If you can leave though - I would recommend it. Life is too short to work in an environment you hate.
I can give the most basic instructions, describe exactly how to do something, even go so far as to show how to do it, and yet I still have key individuals who will stare at me blankly and then ask me to repeat myself multiple times... And then when I come back to check up on them, they've messed everything up, totally disregarding everything I've said/showed them.
My boss expects me to hand-hold, but this is not doable. I can't hover over people 24/7 when, even with no regard as for how they do things, they still can't manage to get things done in a timely manner. They've all been trained time and time again, so it's not like they haven't been shown how to do things and what the expectations are. Most of the freight has been run by management for months now because of this, and I'm almost at wits end. But with the current state of things, finding competent workers is nearly impossible, and keeping them is even more difficult when they see the absurdities around them.
So far I've managed to cope by living moment to moment. When I work on something, I do my best to tune everything else out. I try to get in the 'flow', losing myself while I work mindlessly. Each day is still getting harder, however.
I'm also getting the opportunity to do more technical leadership sort of tasks - mentoring, hiring, planning, designing architecture, etc. - but I am not a manager or directly responsible for anyone. It is a lot of new responsibility, and a challenge, but I like it.
The biggest downside of my current position is the sheer amount of cruft I have to deal with - the extra time everything takes because of how big/complex all the systems are, the slowness of local development, etc. - and the fact that I'm more extroverted than many of my colleagues, so the "work social life" suffers. (We are a full remote org, but I don't think it's about that as much as about working with people who would prefer to do their own thing asynchronously whenever possible.)
I don't know whether these will be fatal issues in the long run, but I also don't really care. I don't intend to spend more than another five to ten years in technology before finding something else to do with my life, preferably something creative, and something that will give me more time to have and raise kids. My significant other is also in a lucrative career path, so I feel this is an achievable goal. Hopefully, I will be happy in my current position until then.
What really keeps me interested in this job is the field work. Periodically I'll need to travel to the customer's facility, and that work is much more hands on. I'll often be "debugging" with a multimeter and screwdriver, on my knees or back in an electrical panel, or making code fixes that I can see affecting moving machine parts right in front of me.
It's one thing to work on something like traditional software which only directly changes stuff on a computer screen, but I get I get awfully bored and disinterested without some "real", physical results of my work. From what I've learned speaking to others and reading here, I'm not alone. To be honest I don't think I would last for very long at any job without being able to work with my hands.
I was pretty quick to accept my current position and I have since recovered from the depression. I don’t see myself staying here more then a couple years. Hopefully inflation will have leveled out by then and I’ll have the energy to put into getting a ‘dream job’. In the mean time I’m enjoying life and learning new things for the joy of it.
Definitely gonna be finding a new job soon. But for now, it pays the bills and I have other stuff to keep my mind off it when I'm not here.
It's not that it's bad for the company, it's bad for the employee who runs themselves ragged to beat a schedule that wasn't meant to be beaten.
I started out as a developer. I learned how to build web stuff, I built massive global systems, I designed and built a successful product, then I got bored.
I then became a team lead, then led multiple teams, then defining company wide engineering processes, then I got bored.
I then became a product manager. I grew a product to success, moved into growth marketing, and then got bored again.
I then led an innovation group, a cross functional team of developers, designers, marketers, customer service, etc. We did some cool stuff, then I got bored again.
I became convinced I could no longer work a corporate job. I started a few solo tech businesses with some success. I developed the MVPs, talked to customers, got some initial growth, and then I got bored.
I haven't worked at all in about a year. I've been focusing on my personal well being. I've been investing in hobbies and other personal things. It was a nice change of pace. I'm starting to get bored again.
Now I'm thinking about going back to corporate life, getting a product manager or engineering leadership job, and just half assing it like everyone else, so I have energy to also devote seriously to myself.
Who knows how that will go.
I feel very fortunate, after having worked for many years in less satisfactory positions. I am motivated by a connection with my colleagues, and our shared commitment to the success of our company. I am grateful that I can be part of something I believe in and provide for my family.
It helps that our company is transparent, equitable, and trying to be a force for good in the world while also running an effective business. We are geared toward long term sustainability much more than short term benefits, and it seems to be paying off.
I've been at my current job for over a year and a half, and it hasn't felt like a grind at all. Any time I am not in the mood to work, or have familial obligations, or I'm tired, or not feeling well, it is strongly encouraged that I take a break. Everyone brings their best and whole selves to work, and I see myself working there for years to come.
This past summer they brought in some "Agile" consultants which ramped up the process and micromanagement to 10.
So far we've tried to bring on two people these past 3 months, both quitting 2 months after joining.
I've tried to be candid with my boss, but things don't seem to changing so on to [perceived] greener pastures (it's also a 40% pay bump but money was not why I started looking).
I don't mind if a job is a grind, but if you are actively unhappy, without something specific like that to look forward to, it is time to be seeking out change in your work. Either by talking to your leaders about fixing your current job, or finding a new one.
(no affiliation, shorter work week advocate)