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

Surviving Disillusionment

spakhm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 179 posts

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#71

Post by shadowgovt »

We used to sign off on planning discussions in a team I was in with the phrase "Unless, of course, none of that happens because I quit this job and embrace the life of a humble dairy farmer."

The joke was twofold: first was the things the author discusses here, but second was enough of us had come from farms to know how little doing that would actually improve things. Schedule drudgery is nothing like the work of getting up at the crack of dawn to tend a farm. Pivots and rescheduling is nothing like the uncertainty of losing two-thirds of your crops to a bad season or half your cattle to a disease outbreak. if you hate corporate bureaucracy, try dealing with the EPA or the farm subsidy programs.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#72

Post by burntoutfire »

shay_ker wrote: post #32
cycloptic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would they though? I think that's a shallow outlook, the importance of saving lives doesn't lessen once you become wealthy. Everyone has to watch their friends and family get old and sick eventually. Compare that to a lot of technology jobs. I think my friends and family will be fine if the schedule at Netflix slips and they have to wait a few years to watch sitcoms in 8K. (Edit: I don't mean to disparage anyone work…

How many doctors would still do the job if they got paid a middle class salary? It's pretty clear, to me at least, that very few would even bother. Veterinarians are a good comparison - there's very few, low salaries, passionate about animals, and high suicide rates due to unending debt. Yes - some doctors end up volunteering with Doctors without Borders & similar non-profit groups. Some engineers have gotten more po…

In Poland, being a doctor paid a pittance up until around 2005. Your only shot at a decent income was taking bribes (the medicine is socialized, so doctors are in charge in state's resources and, when bribed, will direct them at you) or starting a private practice, but for that you'd usually have to be 40+ years old.

And yet, people did become doctors and worked hard. It was still a respectable profession, and hard to get into. Maybe Poland is (or was) just less materialistic than the US.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#73

Post by jkmcf »

Brewing beer and baking bread are canaries in a coal mine. If you find yourself interested in either of those, quit your job immediately and go to Akihabara for a month.

Home-baked bread is amazing and worth the 15-30m of your daily life every now and then. In America, it's inconvenient/expensive to get really good bread. Brewing beer is more effort, but I bet people find the process and reward fulfilling and wholly worthwhile.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#74

Post by mattgreenrocks »

Disillusionment was a crucible for my career. I went through it and wouldn't have it any other way. On the other side of it you attain focus on what is valuable to you, which is singularly useful for evaluating subsequent jobs. However, the crucible for me consisted of: depression, burnout, tendonitis.

It sucked.

From that, I decided I'd never do webdev again, including so-called backend. The web as a medium is not where I'm supposed to be. I can't stand the culture, the churn, the faux openness, the re-invention of things that already exist. I don't care. In fact, I'd rather do another job entirely than webdev. And I considered that for a long while. I took a long, winding journey away from software and eventually back into it, through things like LLVM, Haskell, Rust. Slowly, I began to discover people with whom I shared a technical aesthetic actually existed, and were much smarter/capable than I was. This was humbling and exciting, as it started to paint a picture of what I wanted to work toward.

One priceless realization: the people with the technical career I wanted weren't the ones always featured on HN or elsewhere. HN's startup focus tends to suck all the air out of the room of other interesting domains.

Professionally, I started seriously investigating domains that weren't web/data-related. (I also decided I wouldn't tell anyone about this, because Smart People like to say things like, "but then what job would you get? Every job is a web job, Jeff Atwood even said so!!!") I'm doing quite fine now.

Focus, in both the moment-to-moment attention and long-term vision sense, is a superpower. Without disillusionment, I don't think I'd have it.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#75

Post by stdbrouw »

> Yet I haven't heard of a single doctor who quit his practice and moved to Colorado to run a ski lodge.

I don't know if that's true. Eurostat has these "proof of concept" statistics that try to look at how many people with a particular kind of degree are or are not working in a relevant field, and while I do seem to remember that STEM was a bit worse than other fields, the overall message is that there are an enormous amount of people who do work that is unrelated to their degree, whether that's an art degree or a teaching degree or computer engineering.

(https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/experimental-statistics/sk... if you're curious.)

Anecdotally, too, I've definitely heard of teachers who pursue other careers even though they love working with kids, architects who became brewers, physicists who became writers, lawyers who became journalists, farmers who became coders, and so on.

Perhaps tech is worse, but I think there's something universal about throwing everything you have into your passion (which is also your career) and burning out when it turns out to be a total slog with zero impact on the world, then pursuing a second career in which you are much happier because you got a fresh start but more importantly because you acquired a more relaxed attitude to work and life that comes with age.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#76

Post by dunkelheit »

bobthechef wrote: post #69

Maybe people are failing to understand that work is often uninteresting. The expectation that it will be and must be can itself be a cause of despair. From the economic perspective, no one cares whether you find your work interesting. You don't either when you buy a product or a service. Someone is paying you for some product or service, not to make your life fun. That's your problem. You think everyone else is havin…

To the first order this is correct, but don't forget that people are much more productive when the work is engaging. As a contrived example, suppose you waste a third of your time on some wacky things to make your work life more fun and become 5x more productive as a result. From the economic perspective it is a bargain! OTOH, if a lot of capable people are leaving the industry or operating at 0.2x capacity as a result of burnout, it is a massive economic inefficiency.

Agreed on the goofy gimmicks part though. They get old very fast.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#77

Post by ak39 »

He doesn't speak of ageism in our industry. A lot of the frustration comes from realising that experience in our industry is short-changed for ageist hiring and compensating policies.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#78

Post by pdonis »

trustfundbaby wrote: post #70

I'd like to chip in with a slightly different take ... as a minority engineer, one of my greatest sources of frustration and disillusionment is how an occupation that is ostensibly lends itself to much clearer and objective outcomes and approaches is anything but. There is an unfairness that is so hard to see if you're not a minority in tech, that leads to lots of minority men just saying 'fuck it, this isn't worth i…

> It really sucks to find out that the whole idea of it just being about the code, meritocracy blah blah blah ... isn't really true.

Have you considered starting your own company so you have control of how employees are treated?

More generally, this seems to me to be a potential solution to the disillusionment problem described in the article that is not often considered. Bad management and bad treatment of employees should be bad business; but for that to be the case, companies that do those things have to face competition from companies that don't.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#79

Post by screye »

trustfundbaby wrote: post #70

I'd like to chip in with a slightly different take ... as a minority engineer, one of my greatest sources of frustration and disillusionment is how an occupation that is ostensibly lends itself to much clearer and objective outcomes and approaches is anything but. There is an unfairness that is so hard to see if you're not a minority in tech, that leads to lots of minority men just saying 'fuck it, this isn't worth i…

I would be interested in knowing a bit more about your experiences. As a South-Asian in tech, I have no clue what it is like to be a minority in tech.

While I can to some extent understand how being a woman might be difficult, I am not quite sure what aspects of being a racial minority affect your performance at a tech job.

If you could enumerate some of those blindspots, I'd really appreciate it.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#80

Post by WJW »

im3w1l wrote: post #20
cycloptic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would they though? I think that's a shallow outlook, the importance of saving lives doesn't lessen once you become wealthy. Everyone has to watch their friends and family get old and sick eventually. Compare that to a lot of technology jobs. I think my friends and family will be fine if the schedule at Netflix slips and they have to wait a few years to watch sitcoms in 8K. (Edit: I don't mean to disparage anyone work…

A doctor gets to see the smiles that are the fruit of his labor. The engineer gets to see some metric move by a tenth of a percent.

That is a pretty optimistic view of the medical world. Almost all doctors also have to deal with massive bureaucracy, endless budget shortages, 16 hour workdays, night shifts and people under their care dying despite their best efforts.
Post reply on HN