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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

#331

Post by mettamage »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #227
torgian wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m afraid of ageism too, and I’m 39. I’m lucky to work for a company that looked beyond this and saw my skills as a self-taught programmer, and took me on with a freelance contract. My main concern is continuing to find work whenever this current job ends. It’s a good field, and I enjoy it because it’s helpful to society ( nursing related software ) but I know I’m not the greatest programmer out there. My current gi…

Early 40’s and I feel very lucky to have a job. I feel certain that once I hit 50 I’ll be unable to get hired. I think the trick is to make sure the job you have by 45 is somewhere that will be willing to keep you as you age.

Honestly, I'm thinking about how to convincingly lie about my age when I'm that age. It's part of the reason why I don't smoke and don't do much alcohol.

And by the way, I hate lying. I know I can do it relatively well, but I almost never do it because I hate the ethical implications and the memory implications of it. The thing is though, when it comes to companies, they have warped things so much that I'm willing to not stand by my own principles. It really feels to me that they threw a backhanded punch first. Fine, they can do that, but then I can throw one back and encourage other people to do so as well.

Oh, and if I'd be in the interview chair as an interviewer, I'd rather look at someone's experience and transferable skills and throw the whole ageism thing out of the window.

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

#332

Post by yibg »

lelanthran wrote: post #322
yibg wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of staff got rich from the Uber / Airbnb / snowflake etc IPOs though.

> Plenty of staff got rich from the Uber / Airbnb / snowflake etc IPOs though. GP said "anymore", so I assume he was talking about newer startups.

A lot of the recent IPOs are pretty big, and while I don’t have insider info I assume at least the early employees did well. Robinhood, snowflake, UiPath, Toast, Roblox, Coinbase etc. we are not short of large tech IPOs.

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

#333

Post by gitanovic »

mabub24 wrote: post #106
mmaunder wrote: post #89

I think it’s pretty clear we have an epidemic of burnout on our hands. I think it’s a new phenomenon. And I think immersive online experiences are the underlying cause. I’ve lived much of my life for the past 30 years in virtual spaces of one form or another, from MUDs to IRC to MMORPGs to early and then fully evolved social media. As commercial virtual space showed up, I noticed the engagement hooks and potential fo…

I think there is another angle to this, which is that the distinctions between "being at work" and "clocking out" have, for many people who work online all day (and especially for many new to WFH people these past 2 years), faded and faded until now people feel like they are permanently on-call, permanently at the whim of their employer's/manager's/colleague's demands. A solution, in addition to interacting with real…

I am also this kind of person (0 contact outside work), and I also want to add that I had to (strongly) push back when I was contacted on my private phone while on vacation.

I literally had to tell my colleagues RTFM and don't bother me on my time off.

World kept spinning

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

#334

Post by vidarh »

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…

The irony is that I've consistently gotten more respect by saying no than saying yes. If you say yes all the time, you become the person people go to when they want to dump things on someone. When you say no when you're busy, people quickly learn to respect your time more, and they'll be far more grateful for your time when they get it.

More importantly, if it helps you deliver what you agree to deliver on time with more consistency, people quickly learn to appreciate that.

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

#335

Post by eafkuor »

sbarre wrote: post #53
gregd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is that I'm a Software Engineer as well as a Business Analyst and Project Manager. I'm also managing a dev team, so it's really difficult to only work 6 hours a day. Hell, I can't even do all my work in a 40 hour work week. Yes, I realize this isn't a me issue and I'm looking for other work. The problem is that I'm encountering a lot of ageism in this field too.

If you happen to live in Canada, email me, my HN userid at gmail. Honestly, you're doing 4 jobs, and I assume only being paid for one. Fuck that noise. I work for a big company that has, in my opinion, good work/life balance and a great work culture, and we're always hiring. Ageism is not a thing where I work (I am almost your age). Can't promise anything but some guidance on what to apply for and some personal anecd…

> Honestly, you're doing 4 jobs, and I assume only being paid for one. Fuck that noise.

I just wanted to highlight this. Pure gold.

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

#336

Post by falcor84 »

thewarrior wrote: post #128
mmaunder wrote: post #89

I think it’s pretty clear we have an epidemic of burnout on our hands. I think it’s a new phenomenon. And I think immersive online experiences are the underlying cause. I’ve lived much of my life for the past 30 years in virtual spaces of one form or another, from MUDs to IRC to MMORPGs to early and then fully evolved social media. As commercial virtual space showed up, I noticed the engagement hooks and potential fo…

I think this comment touches on something very deep. Spending time in online spaces seems to be profoundly damaging to our mental health. What exactly is it about online spaces that does this ? It’s little wonder that many are burning out after a year of being perpetually online. However I would also like to add that the amount of uncertainty in the world and in our jobs has gone up. You never really know if you’re d…

> You never really know if you’re doing “enough”

I think you really hit the nail on the head here. We really do, almost all of us in this modern tech world, have an order of magnitude more leverage in our day-to-day activities than the previous generation did. We have a theoretical (though very uncertain) capability of making a marked difference to a chunk of the world (e.g. affecting thousands of people) by putting in an extra hour of work, often without necessitating the involvement of anyone else. To paraphrase uncle Ben, this great power can then put a heavy personal responsibility on our shoulders, even if there isn't a pointy-haired boss breathing down our neck.

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

#337

Post by Pelic4n »

efitz wrote: post #142

I wonder if there are any HR types monitoring this thread. If so, I wonder what they will bring back to the companies that they work for. I voluntarily participate in an employment contract. I like what I do and am good at it. I could work harder but I work what I consider a “fair” amount. Many weeks that is less than 40 hours of my time but sometimes it’s more - if there is an emergency or a crunch time for a reason…

>If you don’t care about their goals, then the ethical decision is to quit.

What if I don't suscribe to your "ethics"? Sure, if you own the company I'm employed at, you can fire me. But you can't force your arbitrary ethical standard on anyone else in any other case.

>they’re offering to pay you in exchange for supporting their goals.

They're offering to buy my work in order to support their goals. Not making me care. I have my own goals and I only care about those. There is no benefits at all for me to care about their goals aside from feeling good about being a good worker bee who cares about the hive if I drank the yuppie corporate kool-aid (I didn't). Both the company and me have to make sure that our work agreement satisfy both their goals and mine, or someone is gonna be unhappy. There is a power imbalance in that relationship due to supply and demand of both work and workers, and I'm thankful I'm a skilled professional in that regard.

>I’m a professional and consider myself ethical and I don’t see a huge ethical difference between stealing and accepting pay for work I didn’t do.

Do you uphold the same ethical standard from the company you work for? In a market economy, the incentive of the company is to pay you as little as possible for your work. If they're able to buy your work for less and they don't do it, they will get run over by the competition who will get the edge. Is that unethical?

Ethics and morals are not based in anything concrete and are made to domesticate you. If someone is explaining to you what is good or evil or just, they're trying to make you behave in a certain way to their benefits. Companies that wants "team players" and people "having a personal investment in their work" want complacent workers that will do more for less.

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

#338

Post by rightbyte »

mrtksn wrote: post #328
akie wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the end, those who own the apartments and the buildings will always be able to capture a significant part of the economical output of a city or country. All that clever software that increased the company's revenue by 10%? A large part of those additional earnings ended up in some landlord's pocket. We're all just working around the clock so that landlords can increase their rents and sip cocktails.

That’s my main issue with the way our society is structured. There’s a class difference between those who own a property and those who don’t even if they do the exactly same job. I don’t even talk about the people who have not done single contribution to the society and live of on the rent of inherited properties. It’s like the peasants who work all day and have nothing when people from blue blood are having generati…

Ye. You need to own "the means of production", which in eg. New York or SV is the house you live in, since the house is the reason you can work close to the easy money.

A friend is thinking about to open a restaurant in a very attractive location, but I said, if you don't own the property the restaurant is in, the land lord will just increase rent until the any profit is barely OK anyways. There is no money in that.

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

#340

Post by nicoffeine »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #268
whatever1 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In America we pay on average ~$3000 per day of stay in the hospital. How much extra do we have to pay to have enough nurses so that we don't work them to death? Why British hospitals have a fraction of that cost (1/10th)? Oh yes, it is because they decided that it is not a moneymaking business. Overworked employees should not blame themselves for not being able to keep up with unreasonable hours. They should blame th…

It feels good to have a villain to blame, but in a complicated problem, there are often complicated reasons. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/08061... Hospital profits are part of the costs, but doctors and nurses here are also paid more than elsewhere. Doctors in the US are paid multiple times as much as doctors in the UK, and supply restriction is a big part of why that is possible. There are…

It's not that complicated. When we setup competition for infrastructure, we needlessly duplicate management, marketing, accounting, and everything else that does not directly result in the service being provided. The US is doubly idiotic by creating huge financial barriers for anyone who wants to enter healthcare. We make the problem even worse with a system that encourages people to delay treatment for problems that get more expensive to treat over time. The less money you have the more you delay, so the entire system eventually ends up overpaying for a worse outcome.

This doesn't factor in all the time spent dealing with inscrutable billing practices for fully insured people having routine medical procedures, or the tens of thousands who are bankrupted every year by the same practices. We recently took our daughter to the ER, which is supposed to be a $400 copay. We now have three separate bills from that visit totaling $1100, and I have no idea how many hours it will take to sort out. The same billing department sent us a $380 invoice six months after her birth because (in their description) they forgot she was there.

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