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

Ask HN: How can I enjoy my job?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 31 posts

Re: Ask HN: How can I enjoy my job?

#21

Post by andyhmltn »

idontlikemyjob wrote: post #10
nathan_edwards wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear about your situation dude. There are some good tips from everyone here. Maybe try getting a better work/life balance going on. Come in to work later and leave earlier, 12 hours on anything can be draining. Hopefully that improves things for you.

I've been considering this lately, and perhaps I'll give it a try. My concern is that, by coming in later, I lose the advantage of coming into early, which is the ability to do more work when there is no one around to interrupt me.

Why not speak to your boss and explain this? Come in earlier but leave earlier as well. You still do your standard 8 hours, but just at different times.

Re: Ask HN: How can I enjoy my job?

#22

Post by Gigablah »

idontlikemyjob wrote: post #11
mcs wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless your work hours are being explicitly questioned, you perhaps are being a self conscious to the point of being unhappy. There is also a difference between being physically present for 12 hours and being productive. I don't think anybody would for a minute guess you are productive for 12 hours. If you actually are, you are way more valuable to the company than they are paying you and they would be damn fools to…

Understood. I did not mean to imply that I'm productive the entire time. In fact, I don't believe in working 12 hours days specifically because I agree that virtually no person can put in 12 hours of productive work in a single day. I take time to eat breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner while at work. I also take off at 5:00 some days to exercise, not to mention the fact that I take a 20 minute nap every day direc…

If it makes you feel better, we used JIRA extensively at my previous employer and it didn't come close to painting an accurate picture either.

Re: Ask HN: How can I enjoy my job?

#24

Post by courseeplus »

Ragu wrote: post #19

First of all you need to love your profession. Then take deep analysis why i'm working here. Then you will get the answer. Plan your day with Do's and dont Do's list. Then execute step by step. Take a nap and share your thoughts with your co workers boldly

nice thought

Re: Ask HN: How can I enjoy my job?

#25

Post by _navaneethan »

If you still not tired of changing your company, please change the company till you get tired.There is no wrong.

Job is same wherever you go, only tools can be changed that you can't decide.Start enjoying all the tools.

this life is temporary.you got only limited time.If you like doing wrong things that will not give hurt to others, just do the wrong things.enjoy the journey.

Because I am going to change the company next month from this company where i joined before 5 months only. :)

Re: Ask HN: How can I enjoy my job?

#26

Post by RogerL »

idontlikemyjob wrote: post #11
mcs wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless your work hours are being explicitly questioned, you perhaps are being a self conscious to the point of being unhappy. There is also a difference between being physically present for 12 hours and being productive. I don't think anybody would for a minute guess you are productive for 12 hours. If you actually are, you are way more valuable to the company than they are paying you and they would be damn fools to…

Understood. I did not mean to imply that I'm productive the entire time. In fact, I don't believe in working 12 hours days specifically because I agree that virtually no person can put in 12 hours of productive work in a single day. I take time to eat breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner while at work. I also take off at 5:00 some days to exercise, not to mention the fact that I take a 20 minute nap every day direc…

Do your check ins in the morning - 7, 8, 9 am. You will build a body of work that no one can dispute.

Though it doesn't sound like this place is for you, so perhaps that is just rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.

Re: Ask HN: How can I enjoy my job?

#27

Post by idontlikemyjob »

RogerL wrote: post #26
idontlikemyjob wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understood. I did not mean to imply that I'm productive the entire time. In fact, I don't believe in working 12 hours days specifically because I agree that virtually no person can put in 12 hours of productive work in a single day. I take time to eat breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner while at work. I also take off at 5:00 some days to exercise, not to mention the fact that I take a 20 minute nap every day direc…

Do your check ins in the morning - 7, 8, 9 am. You will build a body of work that no one can dispute. Though it doesn't sound like this place is for you, so perhaps that is just rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.

That is a very interesting (and kind of dark) metaphor. Haha. :)

Re: Ask HN: How can I enjoy my job?

#28

Post by idontlikemyjob »

Gigablah wrote: post #22
idontlikemyjob wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understood. I did not mean to imply that I'm productive the entire time. In fact, I don't believe in working 12 hours days specifically because I agree that virtually no person can put in 12 hours of productive work in a single day. I take time to eat breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner while at work. I also take off at 5:00 some days to exercise, not to mention the fact that I take a 20 minute nap every day direc…

If it makes you feel better, we used JIRA extensively at my previous employer and it didn't come close to painting an accurate picture either.

It is all about how you use the tool. For instance, our "tasks" (similar to bugs, perhaps) are generally large and not well defined. This makes it hard to break a large task down into smaller tasks. Without smaller tasks, it appears as if you're doing nothing at work all day.

Re: Ask HN: How can I enjoy my job?

#29

Post by josephschmoe »

|Discussions about which design is better are pointless to me. Why don't we just try both and let the data decide?

This seems to indicate to me that you are stuck in the "expert beginner" phase of development. That's bad - but it's not necessarily your fault. And you're obviously making moves to try to escape this trap.

What you need - or at least what worked for me - was going out of my way to learn as much as I possibly can about the field I'm interested in, and even accepting that I might need to re-learn some things or reconsider some of my notions (for me, the biggest one was my low tolerance of messy code and extreme sense of organization - I worked on mastering refactoring tools to make it easier to fix messy code quickly if I need to, so I've given myself a higher tolerance for writing it).

I don't mean this badly. I'm still an expert beginner in plenty of things - it's just important to be humble and try to escape it so you can get some perspective. Perspective isn't something your environment will probably give you, you need to make it for yourself.

http://www.daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of...

Re: Ask HN: How can I enjoy my job?

#30

Post by josephschmoe »

idontlikemyjob wrote: post #3
yunyeng wrote: post #2

Why don't you take your time doing outside backend projects ? Spend less time for the company you are working and more time for your own backend enjoyable projects. It's not like they fire you at the point, just take things slowly at work and try to focus your own projects which you enjoy.

To the contrary, I am worried that if I work any less, they will fire me. I get into work at 7:00 AM every morning to an empty office. Others join me around three hours later, but I understand that since nobody sees me come in there is a misconception about the hours that I work. I leave at 7:00 PM. I would like to write a Python interpreter in Python, though. That sounds like a lot of fun. :)

I remember this phase of my work.

I solved it by producing content no one could possibly question the value of, then becoming an expert on that content.

It's easy to work 40 hours per week if the company would see you as valuable if you worked 0.

And since you outpace your coworkers, I can't see why you can't do this.

Post reply on HN