Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

trackinghappiness.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 128 posts

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#31

Post by gpm »

diminoten wrote: post #18
vinylkey wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think licensure is part of the definition of "engineer"

I didn't get a chance to see the comment before he edited it out, but in some countries (Canada I think?) "engineer" is actually a protected title, requiring licensure. I don't know what his point was, but as a "software engineer", I sometimes wonder if I should be called a "developer" and let my PE friend keep the "engineer" title, just for clarity's sake.

Canadian here - I'm pretty sure it's only the term "professional engineer" that's protected here, we definitely have tons of people being called "software engineers" who aren't licensed engineers.

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#32

Post by eswat »

patorjk wrote: post #5

In principle it's an interesting idea, however, I'm not sure how meaningful this kind of tracking is. Even the author seems to wonder about this - rating a work day as an 8, but realizing it was the relaxing he did that day that effected his happiness. And unless you're reflecting back weeks when making your rating, this kind of tracking could be susceptible to the idea of "boiling the frog".

Maybe compartmentalizing happiness scores to how one felt during work time, during personal time and overall for the day would help mitigate this.

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#33

Post by fallingfrog »

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.

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#34

Post by pvarangot »

tj-teej wrote: post #17
pvarangot wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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.

Oh absolutely, never worked/lived in the US so I'm not familiar with how the engineering culture there calls this workplace mental higiene stuff but yes, it's totally that skill.

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#35

Post by defined »

zeus_hammer wrote: post #3

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 als…

It's a bit late for me, with approximately 8500 < N <= 10000 working days. I can't even remember how I felt last week :)

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#38

Post by nomel »

plankers wrote: post #36

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.

With unemployment, happiness is very directly related to your your bank account balance, or the willingness for others to provide for you.

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.

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#39

Post by supernovae »

akudha wrote: post #19
guhcampos wrote: post #10

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…

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 wor…

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.

Re: Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career

#40

Post by mikekchar »

fallingfrog wrote: post #33

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.

Post reply on HN