Wake up earlier and do sports outside before starting to work
Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?
21–30 of 73 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?
#22If you don't mind me saying this, one thing that gets overlooked often in situations like the one you explained is that the team is part of the system that needs modernisation . In fact, the team needs to lead the modernisation effort. It needs updating before the rest of the system can be. From your explanation it sounds like you expected to find a modern and skilled team maintaining a legacy project. That is not at…
I didn't want to get into this in my original post, but this is definitely part of the problem. The development team needs modernization. We have a lot of excellent developers, but these developers have spent many years developing on a tech stack of PowerBuilder, COBOL, and SQL stored procedures. API development, testing, deployment, and maintenance are not anything that they have worked with before.
Finally after months of me complaining, the management team has gotten the approval to hire one additional developer who has experience with API development. To be honest though, I am skeptical if one developer is going to change anything, and I can imagine that a lot of skilled developers won't be staying here long when they see that we don't really have the personnel in place to deliver on the vision that the management team has set.
I definitely am not a people manager (nor do I want to be again, been there done that), but I can imagine that our engineering manager is in a tough place right now too. A lot of the development team are close to retirement age and he can't really push them too much due to the fear of them leaving and taking their years or decades of domain knowledge with them.
Re: Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?
#23This is why I was always happier as a worker bee, over being responsible for an entire team or org.
You outlined the root cause: “our development team simply does not have experience with building, testing, shipping, and maintaining APIs, which has made my job as a PO/PM considerably more difficult.”
Do you have any authority or influence to change this, either through training, bringing in consultants (be very careful with this one), or worst case via hiring/firing?
Re: Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?
#24>when we have to meet with customers and mention that modernization and system integrations are our top priority according to the management team, yet we can't even ship a few GET endpoints after six months of work...
If the company pays to do a project where nothing happens for six months and it keeps paying, they are probably okay with a result, otherwise they would listen to your constructive proposals on how to improve the process. Or fired you. Do they say they like what you do there or not? It's important to have a perspective here.
There are two ways to deal with it -- one is reframing it. Sure, it's not the most exciting project, but doing the boring stuff and being persistent at that is a challenge of it's own. Challenge doesn't have to be technical, especially for the product owner.
Second is to give it less time and space in your mind. Physically not being in the same environment, closing the laptop, taking a lunch break and taking a walk. You are not supposed to care about something more than the company owner and your boss anyway, unless you have a direct financial incentive tied to results of the project (which in Sweden your probably not have).
While you give less time and space to the annoying part of the job, find something that displaces it. Vibecode an open source project, learn Arabic, Japanese or whatever, go skuba diving on vacation, do some serious gaming or religion. Something bigger than work.
Re: Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?
#25Wake up earlier and do sports outside before starting to work
This definitely helps and honestly should be done even the job isn't toxic! If for any reason sports is not possible, brisk walking is very effective as well.
Re: Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?
#26"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"
I was laid off from a very well paying job and to support my family I had to take up a worse paying job with similar problems to the one you described.
Yes. Ive had dark thoughts sometimes. I dont know the answer. It helps to distance oneself and treat the dark thoughts passively, as in if I wasnt in this situation these ideas would not be coming to me, or something like - these are just thoughts and I acknowledge them and let them pass.
Few of my friends did not have good results with medication.
I am also detached from my job, its only purpose is to make enough money to no longer need doing the job. Today I work to live and see tomorrow and the same thing tomorrow again.
I suggest talking to someone elder and with a more positive outlook on life, not from work. Preferably retired.
In summation- You are not your job friend. Not should it give meaning to your life. Live to fight another day. It helps to detach oneself.
Re: Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?
#27"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" I was laid off from a very well paying job and to support my family I had to take up a worse paying job with similar problems to the one you described. Yes. Ive had dark thoughts sometimes. I dont know the answer. It helps to distance oneself and treat the dark thoughts passively, as in if I wasnt in this situation these ideas would not be coming to me, or something l…
Finding hobbies and working out didnt work for me. People say it works. It doesnt for me and sounds cliched.
But dont let it fool you in the manner that these things work for others but not for me, I must be doomed then.
Again detach yourself and wait for better times.
Re: Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?
#28If the job market is so competitive, then surely there's someone out there with experience building APIs?
Re: Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?
#29If you don't mind me saying this, one thing that gets overlooked often in situations like the one you explained is that the team is part of the system that needs modernisation . In fact, the team needs to lead the modernisation effort. It needs updating before the rest of the system can be. From your explanation it sounds like you expected to find a modern and skilled team maintaining a legacy project. That is not at…
I didn't want to get into this in my original post, but this is definitely part of the problem. The development team needs modernization. We have a lot of excellent developers, but these developers have spent many years developing on a tech stack of PowerBuilder, COBOL, and SQL stored procedures. API development, testing, deployment, and maintenance are not anything that they have worked with before. Finally after mo…
Ah, then I'd say this is definitely not a good job for you.
I would suggest just leaving as soon as possible. I know it's hard and I know the current market is difficult, but do make a firm decision to, if not immediately, leave in a fixed time frame, say in two months or before the new year or something else but put a limit on it. Not only will that push you into doing it, but seeing a clear exit will probably help with your peace of mind.
Re: Ask HN: How do you survive a job you hate which is slowly making you sick?
#30tbh I envy your position, you have a real opportunity to blow people away showing them what real modernization looks like. Like Prometheus bringing fire to humans.
I don’t understand why you haven’t just let an AI agent do all the tasks your incompetent coworkers take months to do.