161–170 of 171 posts
>> caring about the results of our actions but having no meaningful control over those outcomes This really dies sum it up in a useful generic way. Ultimately the balance of this sentence will differ from context to context, but the equation ultimately has to balance. Put another way, if you care a lot, but have no agency, then ultimately you will be frustrated. If you care a lot, but have no resources, then again, y…
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Yeah, i totally agree. The more years I have behind my belt as developer the less I care. I do what I'm paid for. I do it to best of my abilities, but I don't care much. I care for my wife, my unborn child, my dog, myself. Seriously live is so much more than work and code. I learned to balance myself. I need job for $ and that's it. If I won lottery I would still code, just not as much (2 h/day) and only fun stuff. W…
Do you still learn new practices/technologies/stacks/...? I'm asking because that's my problem. As I start to care less, I also care less to keep myself up to date with new tech stacks. Consequently, it's becoming painfully aware to me that if I were to lose my amazingly well-paid job in which I (feel like I truly) excel, it'd be a pain to look for a new one. Because of my niche, I would, most likely, have to go down…
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The real problem is that the public option got replaced with marketplaces and employer-provided insurance got enshrined in the law. If we Americans were serious about having a free market we’d do the following: - ban employer-provided insurance entirely. - provide tax breaks for employers who provide insurance stipends to their employees - provide tax breaks for people to buy insurance on the marketplaces - make open…
Frankly I'm a little confused what you are in favor of. On the one hand you seen to want a public option while on the other hand you seen to be in favor of a free market.
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How did you get yourself out of these? I find I just don’t have ambitions for anything anymore. I simply exist without any hope/expectation of joy/excitement. I used to be more energetic and fairly optimistic. I’m not even stressed and have overcome a few minor health issues that used to bother me. Yet at this point, I can’t help but feel the best years have passed and now it just a slow decline to the end. (But no t…
> I find I just don’t have ambitions for anything anymore. I simply exist without any hope/expectation of joy/excitement. Been there. It gets better, but you will have to change some things. This is what worked for me: allow yourself to have fun. It is not frivolous. It is not insignificant. It is an important part of a fulfilling life, so make time for it. Literally carve some time for it and put it in your daily/we…
The act of "scheduling" fun makes it hard for me to actually have fun - it feels like a chore. Fun is only fun (to me) if it's spontaneous.
Obviously, that creates quite a vicious cycle... I'm stuck in one right now, actually. I'm just grinding, hoping something's gonna change. I doubt it will, though.
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Not really. The specifics about how a product is differentiated might seem like irrelevant minutia (fps or rendering times, for example) to an outsider while still being critical for market success. Installing people into senior positions does not make them better at recognizing these factors, or more incentivized to care. The point is that a senior can use your argument to trivialize the efforts of an engineer, seem…
I don't see that as the point, or at least it wasn't mine, but I'd probably disagree in most cases anyway. What is critical for market success isn't for someone to bet their time on unless they stand to directly control the outcome of that market success, kn what would otherwise be labelled agency or a stake in it. If I'm over here spending my late nights trying to pare down our webpack bundle, but my actual day is a…
Management that denies engineers this sense of ownership and achievement is a likely cause of burnout. I think we agree mostly agree, but in my view management shares responsibility in this case.
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I'm sure most of us have worked for shit companies that have taken advantage of us. In those cases, I think your points can be helpful. But I'd also suggest that it's possible to find companies that align with your values, both around work/life balance and around the way the work gets done. That's certainly a skill that I've had to work to develop. And I've had some major misses along the way. But it's probably also…
> But I'd also suggest that it's possible to find companies that align with your values, both around work/life balance and around the way the work gets done. How? I keep reading this in similar discussions, but I haven’t found practical advice on how to actually do that. And I can’t trust myself because I keep joining shitty companies on that front one after another.
I think my proxy for work-life balance is days of PTO. I'm typically going to take ~20 a year. That's what I need to recharge and avoid burnout. In a interview with a manager I would ask:
"So, in the job description it says you have Flexible PTO, what does that actually look like here?"
Usually they'll give me some sort of range or average.
A way to cut down on the chances of working for shitty leadership is to ensure you work with high performers. (not foolproof, but helpful) High performers don't like working for shitty leadership. I borrow my proxy for high performance here from the excellent book, Accelerate (Forsgren, Humble, and Kim), and look for the engineering org to implement CI/CD as well as IAC (Infrastructure As Code). I'll ask about these during question time of the technical interview, as well as other things I care about (testing philosophy, etc). I'm sure there are really great organizations that don't do CI/CD or IAC, but I would have to know _for sure_ that they were great, to work for them.
These are obviously super high level proxies for organizational health from the perspective of an engineer. But reading up on organizational health more broadly can help you identify some red flags these proxies don't cover. Check out The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. It's a fantastic book on organizational health.
Lastly, networking can be very challenging but also very helpful here. It's not something that comes easy to me, but it has helped tremendously in figuring out which companies in my community I do and do not want to work for. This could be less relevant now that almost everyone is cool with remote work. But even my most recent job post-covid, was something I found because of my network. Go to meetups. Go to conferences. Get coffee with people who do similar things. It can really pay off.
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I don't see that as the point, or at least it wasn't mine, but I'd probably disagree in most cases anyway. What is critical for market success isn't for someone to bet their time on unless they stand to directly control the outcome of that market success, kn what would otherwise be labelled agency or a stake in it. If I'm over here spending my late nights trying to pare down our webpack bundle, but my actual day is a…
When you have a certain level of investment of time and effort, you don't have to be John Carmack (owner/founder with your name in the end titles) to care about it. Many people feel pride and ownership of code and parts of products they created, and their investments are responsible for the at least some of the success of the products. These achievements can become defining for their careers, and I think it's appropr…
You own it if you own it, keep your personal investment at arms length, lest you become a Jason Bateman character desperately putting in those extra hours so one day hopefully you'll be blessed with that VP position or w/e.
That said, of course if you've achieved something within a fairly tight constraint, ideally you're compensated or recognized somehow for it. Extra worthwhile hours should also be compensated for obviously. But if nobody is willing to pay you for it, it's probably your own undoing.
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In short, depression, to me, was total and absolute hopelessness. Burn out, on the other hand, brought me dread, anxiety, exhaustion, and the feeling of being trapped in a pointless but never-ending cycle. If I were to dive into more details, depression gave me a rock-solid certainty that I could never be happy, or meaningfully enjoy life in any meaningful way. There might have been some joyous and light-hearted mome…
I want to thank you for sharing and to return the favor by sharing some of myself. Don't feel like you have to respond or even read it. I just feel bad for asking you to share without providing you with anything back. I'm a afraid I'm going through something similar myself, and it's incredibly valuable for me to read what you've gone though and relate that to myself. I honestly have no idea how I'll handle this or wh…
> Maybe I did actually deserve to be yelled at.
Almost certainly not. Even when someone has done a bad job and it causes frustration, yelling doesn't solve the problem; it typically only makes things worse for all parties.
You have value outside of your job. Believing and remembering that can help make the challenges at work less depressive. That's often lost on a forum like this where technical prowess is highly valued.
> I don't know if I even like software anymore
That's fine. Some people might consider that impeccable timing before an LLM replaces our software jobs anyways. If you've succeeded in software to any degree, you've probably learned how to learn. I bet you can do it again in a different field.
> I'm working on somehow getting a new job
I run a small company - link in profile. We make high performance CAD software in C. Reach out if you're interested or just need someone to talk to.
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Highly explanatory, certainly. And knowing about them is arguably much better than not knowing, but I'm not necessarily on board with "bring you peace". I feel like I run into them a lot, and it's consistently awful handling it in practice, since they seem to delight in refining their skills at social and psychological manipulation, and they position themselves to use the mediocre herd as a weapon. Some methods of ch…
I have dealt with it too. If you are someone of noble intent who is capable of feeling emotions and doesn't ride the apath line it's hard. Your goal should never be to defeat them, they will smell blood in the water and go after you relentlessly. It's how they operate. The best advice I have is remain honest, don't play their games, document anything said in unrecordable media, and use the fact that they don't know h…
Thanks for raising the point, and know that this exchange inspired me to start reading up in greater detail.
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When you have a certain level of investment of time and effort, you don't have to be John Carmack (owner/founder with your name in the end titles) to care about it. Many people feel pride and ownership of code and parts of products they created, and their investments are responsible for the at least some of the success of the products. These achievements can become defining for their careers, and I think it's appropr…
All of that should be predicated on the answer to the question "How much of the outcome of this work do I truly have influence over?" and if the answer is none, and those extra hours making sure your code is really nice, should only be spent within the constraints you're being paid for. Are your requirements fulfilled, but you were pretty fast and have a bit of extra time to clean things up? Great, that's fine. If yo…
What I am saying is that value in a product can be "discovered" along the way. An engineer that demonstrates how to add value through individual efforts will probably experience burnout if management chooses to ignore their efforts. But more mature managers will figure out how to work with it.