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I just don’t want to be busy anymore

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Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#291

Post by systemvoltage »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #109

One thing that helped me is not to care so much about my employer's goals. It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far. I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right. You're probably not going to get rich from working…

This is a terrible way to live a life. This cynicism would be evident to others, create a toxic pathologically depressing environment and then pull others down with it.

I can’t believe I’m reading this on HN, a place that used to be full of optimism and accepting grand challenges, looking upto leaders and doing hard things others shy away from.

I know this is a taboo to compare with Reddit, but lately I have to pinch myself and ask is this really HN!?

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#292

Post by emgo »

gregd wrote: post #2

As a 54 year old Software Engineer, who has had a nice IT career for over 26 years, I'm spent. This is coming from someone who has always had a growth mindset and had a really hard time sitting still. I used to loathe naps and felt like I was missing out if I took one. Now, I take a one hour nap almost daily and I'm finding that after 1pm I'm basically fried (I start working around 7AM). I'm not sure what to do about…

The work that you're saying you do daily from 7am-1pm, do you feel satisfied about it at the end of the day? Does it create meaning for you on the grander scheme of things? (based on what your personal values are, and you personally find meaningful)

If not, then it's probably time to switch employer, to one that has a product/mission that is aligned with a topic/field that would bring more meaning into your life.

If that's not possible, you could try spending one less hour per day on that job you have, and invest that hour in something that creates meaning in your own terms.

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#293

Post by gregd »

webdev777 wrote: post #83
gregd wrote: post #2

As a 54 year old Software Engineer, who has had a nice IT career for over 26 years, I'm spent. This is coming from someone who has always had a growth mindset and had a really hard time sitting still. I used to loathe naps and felt like I was missing out if I took one. Now, I take a one hour nap almost daily and I'm finding that after 1pm I'm basically fried (I start working around 7AM). I'm not sure what to do about…

I thought by the time you're 54 you could retire. I'm much younger and I could retire in a couple of years. What is your saving rate? - you can read more here https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ Your job starts at 7am? You could start later, like 10. Have your 2-3h lunch time. Finish at 6pm. Change jobs until you find a job like that. There are plenty, I can assure you.

Invariably, comment threads like this, pop up when I provide some current thoughts about my career. A career that quite a few HN readers share apparently, but that's where the similarities end.

Quite a lot of you didn't grow up in abject poverty and it shows.

The hole this puts you in, 99% of people have a really, really difficult time climbing out of and describing what this process is like, is lost on a lot of people. My biological mother made extremely poor choices and never took my future into consideration. We were housing insecure and we were food insecure. My personal safety was at times in jeopardy.

I've been in survival mode most of my life. It's only the last 5 years that I was in a position to finally make thriving choices for me AND for my family. It was only this month that I finally made the ultimate thriving choice to live in a place that I've dreamt of living in since I was a kid. I'm not even going into any other details about what effect this has on you as an adult, like homelessness, how expensive being poor is, etc.

So I'm only left feeling like laughing (and sometimes crying) when someone mentions savings. Shit, it's only been in the last 10 years, that I got over mentally calculating the cost of everything I put in my shopping cart, to make sure I could afford it. To this day, I still have anxiety over swiping my card in front of people at the grocery store, thinking that surely it's going to be declined (it hasn't in years).

I'm only just now able to start dedicating some of my salary to a savings account (or other investments). There is no time left to ultimately retire with anything matching my current salary, so I've resigned myself to work until I literally can't anymore and with a remote IT job, sitting at a desk, that sounds like 30 more years or more.

Change jobs? I guess you missed the part where I'm encountering ageism? I've had to lop off a decade of my experience in order to try to not appear older with my experience alone.

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#294

Post by rizzaxc »

pjerem wrote: post #279
rizzaxc wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt most doctors' end goal is to get rich The world is cynical but not that depressing dude

I agree with you but it’s easy to not have this end goal when you are already rich just by doing your job.

I dont follow. Do you mean doctors are rich so they dont have to care? Last I checked a doctor needs 10 years since high school to make any real money. A fresh grad in SV needs 4, sometimes 3. By the time the medical student can legally be called doctor, you and I are already making "obscene money" by their standard

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#295

Post by systemvoltage »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #278
henrikschroder wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far. The only reward for a job well done is more work. The quicker you realize that, the happier you'll be.

I feel genuinely sad for people who believe this. As someone who is extremely critical of my own work, the feeling of walking home knowing I really did something well is so awesome.

Also, spending your career in cynicism guarantees depression of some sorts. It makes you dull, you’ll have poor friends, you’ll attract the worst of people, you’ll create a toxic workplace that would resemble some of the worst run government departments. Impossible to fire, useless bloat of people that have zero interest in improving themselves or others, and life a fulfilling life.

Sad. But on the bright side, those that excel at what they do are going to be disproportionately rewarded. I love this aspect of society and certain political ideologies want to destroy this.

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#296

Post by lelanthran »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #109

One thing that helped me is not to care so much about my employer's goals. It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far. I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right. You're probably not going to get rich from working…

> I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right.

You're more correct than you think! https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

The TLDR of the above is:

1. There is usually only a single promotion-role on offer.

2. That promotion will go to the best performing employee (whatever metric is used).

3. If you're not the best performing employee, then do only the bare minimum to avoid being fired.

4. Doing the bare minimum to avoid being fired frees up the employee to concentrate energy and efforts towards jumping the corporate ladder (new project, etc).

Note that #4 is an "up or out" proposition: if the employee fails to gain power/influence in the company, then that energy can still be used to land a higher-level position at a different corp using the "new project" effort as an indicator to other companies that the employee has more power/influence than they actually possess.

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#297

Post by luckyandroid »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #109

One thing that helped me is not to care so much about my employer's goals. It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far. I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right. You're probably not going to get rich from working…

There's a balance needed with smaller companies. I, for a long time, chose not to care about the company's goals and just hit the daily tasks, and for a while it worked and I did very well. But eventually the management had a build up of stress, realising that THEIR choices of assigned tasks were not taking us properly to the goals, and let out the stress on the development team to a point where a few of us quit.

This isn't an objection to "not caring about employer's goals", far from it, it's clearly an issue with management teething problems as they try to expand a relatively small company and don't know how to do it. But I've found that caring a little bit about the goals, trying to see what they're aiming for and having that inside view of why we aren't getting there, allows me to bridge that gap, offer better advice to management and help the entire team have a less stress filled day, at the expense of some of my own peace of mind.

It'd be easy for me to say "well that's managements issue" but I can't ignore that management issues trickle down to the rest of us, which is much more obvious in smaller companies.

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#298

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #109

One thing that helped me is not to care so much about my employer's goals. It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far. I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right. You're probably not going to get rich from working…

I totally agree. Don't be "pro-active" be "re-active" - is my way of putting it.

Frankly, most orgs will not reward pro-activity, in fact you can even be punished for it, since if a problem is not yet known by stakeholders then why are you solving it.

There have been times in my career where I spotted issues from other teams on preview or staging servers and helped to fix it. Then I later got blamed (or dragged into the subject) when a similar issue occured on live which I had no association with.

It's better to just sit back and do the minimum, but do it well and professionally. Most importantly, don't make yourself too available:

> Don't respond immediately to messages and emails.

> Don't propose solutions, that you will have to own (at least partly).

> Don't answer questions outside of your responsibility space - even if you know the answer. Instead, direct people to others who should be answering those questions.

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#299

Post by luckyandroid »

luckyandroid wrote: post #297
sillysaurusx wrote: post #109

One thing that helped me is not to care so much about my employer's goals. It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far. I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right. You're probably not going to get rich from working…

There's a balance needed with smaller companies. I, for a long time, chose not to care about the company's goals and just hit the daily tasks, and for a while it worked and I did very well. But eventually the management had a build up of stress, realising that THEIR choices of assigned tasks were not taking us properly to the goals, and let out the stress on the development team to a point where a few of us quit. Thi…

Oh, and a mention on 'saying no' - it's very hard to convince an employer to start saying no to customer demands even when they agree with all the reasons set out in front of them, especially when they've had a decade of doing nothing but bespoke work for them. It's taken a year but we're finally at the point we can firmly stand our ground as a dev team and say "no we're not working on that", or "push to Q4", and ignore the "we need this done TODAY" type of demands that have plagued us for years.

Re: I just don’t want to be busy anymore

#300

Post by fuy »

lelanthran wrote: post #296
sillysaurusx wrote: post #109

One thing that helped me is not to care so much about my employer's goals. It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far. I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right. You're probably not going to get rich from working…

> I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right. You're more correct than you think! https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... The TLDR of the above is: 1. There is usually only a single promotion-role on offer. 2. That promotion will go to the best performing…

I feel this is missing a lot of details.

Even if there's a single promotion per team per year (and there are certainly companies where promotions are not limited like that), that means that, in a team of 4 people, 50% will be promoted in 2 years. So if you like the job and plan to stay for a few years, I fail to see how this tactics is even remotely close to optimal.

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