Know your worth. Don’t hustle out of constant fear you’ll be fired. Don’t answer the phone after 5. Work 40 hours or less. Work is a distraction from life; It isn’t life. Do as little of it as you need to, to achieve your financial goals. Have concrete financial goals. Don’t listen to fearmongering coworkers who have put themselves perpetually on call. If the company loses a customer because you don’t answer your phone, that’s on them not you. And they need to correct their staffing and expectations. Don’t be afraid to ask for more money. Don’t be afraid to quit and find another job. The overwhelming majority of your raises will come from changing jobs. Your company doesn’t care about you. It’s not a family. You’re there because they pay you to be. HR isn’t your advocate. Stock options are a lottery ticket, not a proper form of compensation. Practice being tolerant of some louder, younger engineer having loud opinions about how to do something because ultimately the way they do it wrong probably won’t matter much. Don’t obsess over software purity. If you need your code to be beautiful and elegant at all times, take up a side hobby instead. At least one person will have different opinions on each one of these points.
Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?
91–100 of 339 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?
#92I simply don't work much anymore. Below 10h a week on average. I haven't set an alarm for years anymore and sleep 9h a night That made me quite happy.
That sounds like the advice is basically to be rich and go into semi-retirement. Not sure how generally applicable that is.
I don't know either.
I did it mostly by lowering my costs of living.
Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?
#93I simply don't work much anymore. Below 10h a week on average. I haven't set an alarm for years anymore and sleep 9h a night That made me quite happy.
I've done the same for more than a decade now. It's pretty nice indeed, especially the sleep without an alarm.
I've also found that just directly making myself happy, by following urges and wishes, is a local maxima. I get a lot higher peaks of happiness by helping others. Thus a great factor in improving my overall happiness has been spending a bunch of that freed up time on altruistic work. Usually unpaid, just wanting to help others with those same skills that allow me to spend so little time working on my career.
Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
My twenty-year-old self wasn't ready to hear this, but it's absolutely true. Fulfillment follows from meaning, and meaning flows from responsibilities we bear.
As a twenty three year old. I'm curious to know more. why take on responsibility through having children? Why not pickup any other type of responsibilty? like, community service, tutoring/helping kids from less fortunate places or in the worst case even Picking up more responsibility from work? Is it more of a genetic thing where it makes the pain of responsibility more pleasurable? I'm even more curious to know if y…
Major issue is Community service and tutoring/helping kids lack involvement. If you can be fully invested and involved then that's definitely better way to do. But most people can get much more involved easily when it's thier own children.
Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?
#95Use your career/job to support your life, then get a life. Become an artist, author, clown, or build some awesome technical system because you want it to exist. GPL it. Don't ask for anything, especially not happiness, from your "career". I put it in quotes because it's conceptually bankrupt. https://www.roystonguest.com/blog/why-happiness-is-not-a-des...
> GPL it.
MIT/Apache/BSD it, IMO.
Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
My twenty-year-old self wasn't ready to hear this, but it's absolutely true. Fulfillment follows from meaning, and meaning flows from responsibilities we bear.
As a twenty three year old. I'm curious to know more. why take on responsibility through having children? Why not pickup any other type of responsibilty? like, community service, tutoring/helping kids from less fortunate places or in the worst case even Picking up more responsibility from work? Is it more of a genetic thing where it makes the pain of responsibility more pleasurable? I'm even more curious to know if y…
> Is it more of a genetic thing where it makes the pain of responsibility more pleasurable?
Is responsibility painful?
Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?
#97Get a gym membership and go every day. If you have trouble going routinely sign up for classes or a personal trainer so you feel more obligated to go on a regular basis.
Heh, that sounds like a nightmare for me personally. If going to an artificial place to get tired every day works for you, that's great, but this is not generally good advice. If it's purely about physical fitness (I'm really not quite sure what your goal with this method is, perhaps you could edit to clarify), going into nature to cycle or jog is much better due to the nature-happiness correlation (e.g. https://jour…
> Heh, that sounds like a nightmare for me personally.
I will share my anecdote with you.
I did light jogging and weights in the gym, 3x a week. Then in 2020, the gyms shut down. COVID was raging throughout my country. I stayed at home all day and worked from home.
I struggled with work ever day. I felt work was too hard. Not being in the office and not being able to whiteboard with teammates felt like a rapid change i didnt know how to handle.
My stress and anxiety shot up to an all time high. I would work from 9am-6pm, keep thinking of work into the night, and feel tired, exhausted.
I was desperate to get some sense of my former life back. I started ordering food on Uber Eats and Door dash for comfort.
I tried eating healthier options, but my weight ballooned by 20lbs. I went from being able to do 30 push ups in one set to not being able to do 3 push ups.
This year, I rejoined a gym. I started going 5 days a week, even if it meant just sitting idle for 15 minutes of my 35 minute work out.
I not only lost a bunch of the weight, I got much stronger. I learned to realize when I was feeling anxious or stressed, and my exercise actually helped me overcome it. Regardless of the work situation or tight deadlines, I wouldn’t skip the gym. I wouldn’t skip meals anymore. I’d drink lots of water.
Now - my health comes first. And for the most part, I’ve gained more peoples respect in my professional life. My company didn’t lose any money because I started valuing myself as a person. My company didn’t fire me either.
Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?
#98What made me happy is more money. The more I have, the more security (for the future) I could provide to my family.
Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a twenty three year old. I'm curious to know more. why take on responsibility through having children? Why not pickup any other type of responsibilty? like, community service, tutoring/helping kids from less fortunate places or in the worst case even Picking up more responsibility from work? Is it more of a genetic thing where it makes the pain of responsibility more pleasurable? I'm even more curious to know if y…
> Is it more of a genetic thing where it makes the pain of responsibility more pleasurable? Is responsibility painful?
It's a trade off, I think.
When you have responsibility you are sacrificing something to complete that task. so yeah, responsibilities come with a baggage and the baggage are some times painful.
Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a twenty three year old. I'm curious to know more. why take on responsibility through having children? Why not pickup any other type of responsibilty? like, community service, tutoring/helping kids from less fortunate places or in the worst case even Picking up more responsibility from work? Is it more of a genetic thing where it makes the pain of responsibility more pleasurable? I'm even more curious to know if y…
Major issue is Community service and tutoring/helping kids lack involvement. If you can be fully invested and involved then that's definitely better way to do. But most people can get much more involved easily when it's thier own children.
But having kids is all-in: there is no turning back and no flexibility
I would feel so much more limited and bounded in what I can do in the world, because my own financial future and my own mortality would be way more relevant with dependents.