I just don’t want to be busy anymore • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by true_religion » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:36 AM UTC

carlivar wrote: post #130

paulryanrogers wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And SO and kids?

People with these sort of ideal solutions rarely have kids. The parent article is better advice in that domain.

In my experience, kids tend to just follow along with their parents habits.

Like one family I know eats dinner at 1 am, because that’s when the father gets home from work. The kids nap in the evening, and do homework past midnight.

I originally thought that was madness, but they have 6 kids and 4 have gone to Ivy League schools apparently it works for them.

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

#172

Post by over_bridge » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #107

Burnout, I feel, has more to do with how motivated and satisfied we are with our vocation, than whether or not we are “busy.” As many company owners will tell you, they have no problem with a crazy busy life, because they are so motivated and fulfilled by their work. For me, I was an engineering manager for 25 years. It was actually long periods of ennui, interrupted by short tornadoes of insanity and stress. Frankly…

> As many company owners will tell you, they have no problem with a crazy busy life, because they are so motivated and fulfilled by their work.

I feel like this is the obvious missing link between people like Elon Musk advocating 80-100 hour weeks and the rest of us. I only work 40 hours because I have stuff I actually care about to squeeze into the evenings. If I don't fit in my passion projects and family, then I might as well be an empty husk, not a person.

Completely different story when your main job is also your passion project which you own and derive great fame and fortune from. What else is he going to do? Take a break to work on something he cares about less in the evenings? I can work like a machine as well when I'm personally invested in the outcome and I'll 100% burnout if asked to give the same effort when I'm not.

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

#173

Post by itronitron » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #68

itronitron wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My two cents... if your inbound baby is your first then a lot of your prior concerns will naturally disappear. If it's not your first then that won't surprise you. Time to be selfish with your time and start distancing yourself from any colleagues that are a time suck. In my humble opinion, the author is either delusional or spinning a yarn when they say they have solicited advice from colleagues. No co-worker is goi…

No co-worker is going to give you advice that doesn't serve their own interests first. I strongly disagree. Plenty of people are self serving, but friendship and mentorship is possible in the workplace. This says a lot more about the places and people that you have worked with than something universal. Alternatively, if this is a mindset that you bring to interactions with co-workers, you might just be getting it ref…

>> This says a lot more about the places and people that you have worked with than something universal.

I guess I've had a bad run of it then.

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

#174

Post by bsharitt » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:38 AM UTC

I've been fairly lucky that for about 2/3 of my career I've worked in environments that have generally been pretty laid back. Though I did do a short stint just shy of a couple months at company that had just awful culture where everything was a crisis and it was always crunch time and 12+ hour days were the expected norm. I didn't stick around because of that(and also the job was quite different that what was discussed in the interview), and I don't know how or why people put up with that on a normal basis. Maybe if you were the founder or a very early employee with significant equity, but not just for a salary.

But even with my generally laid back workload at my job, I think the culture of the tech industry does seep in a bit and I feel like I need to be doing more. So I start side projects or go learn programming languages or some new tool, which aren't bad things in of themselves until they start to feel like an obligation and start sucking the vitality out of your life. I've started to keep those in check a bit better, mostly by keeping a further distance from the tech world by no longer following tech people on Twitter and drastically cutting back my time on sites like this one(I'm only here now because I finished watching a movie and it's tad early for bed, but to close to pick back up the book I was reading).

I almost want to say that the solution might be do tech work outside the tech industry, but I also spent a few years at mortgage company and with some defense contractors, and those are just soul sucking in different ways. Basically my cure has been to find hobbies and interests far away from anything related to my job.

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

#175

Post by viciousplant » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:39 AM UTC

bumby wrote: post #155

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 tough if you actually try to have a team-oriented mindset. I’ve worked in groups (hard to really call them a team) where everyone, everyone , stiff armed duties. The end result is that the hard stuff, or low status stuff, never got done. I get there’s a balance, but if you entered a career where you actually care about the mission, it’s hard to just see that mission suffer because people want to take the easy…

Have you ever thought how and why the “it’s not my job” attitude fostered? Most people at least myself on their first day working would never thought they would end up at some point as people they despised so much.

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

#176

Post by dreyfan » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:40 AM UTC

mooreds wrote: post #158

ryan_lane wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. You can still get rich from equity, especially by being an early employee. It's all a giant lottery though. The easiest way is to join companies that are obviously doing well and will likely IPO in 2-3 years. This is still a lottery, but one with much higher odds and a lower potential payout. You can make $600k-1m every few years in equity alone by hopping around these companies. If you ever wondered why so man…

How do you get RSUs if the company hasn't IPOed? I thought that RSUs were limited to public companies (since they are essentially grants of stock, not options).

You can get RSUs and RSAs from a private company, it's just often undesirable because you pay income tax on the valuation of the shares vested but you can't sell your shares until a liquidity event or IPO.

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

#177

Post by tra3 » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:43 AM UTC

lightbendover wrote: post #96

xyzzy123 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all incredibly difficult in a large company. The intake queues suck because _some_ teams respond to Service Now and some don't. Like, you'll have a pretty easy task which requires stuff from 3 teams, 1 you put in the ticket and they do it same day, the other sits there and never gets picked up, for the third you can't even figure out which team is supposed to do it let alone how you would contact them. So, th…

Your response is exactly why artificial boundaries should be set up. Most of these requests will not be important and they should either be dissuaded entirely or dealt with much later. The ones that are important (note: very infrequent) will be in the hands of someone capable of navigating internal politics despite the existence of a "stop bothering me" canned response. Every team I work with (very large company) lev…

Are you saying Inter-team coms in a large organization should be discouraged? Apologies if I misunderstood your post.

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

#178

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

xboxnolifes wrote: post #67

mberning wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a mental illness. Imagine somebody saying “I’m just a lowly brown person” or whatever. It’s crazy to think about.

It's not a mental illness. It's a strategically placed line to fend off a specific crowd that will call you out for complaining about something when you are in a perceived privileged position.

[deleted]

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

#179

Post by mewse » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:47 AM UTC

jugg1es wrote: post #118

My problem with the word 'burnout' is that it denotes some kind of final state. I'm sure I've had periods of burnout but it doesn't last more than a day or two. I had a third kid 4 months ago and my company is transitioning from a small to medium-sized company. I am the tech lead/architect on our company's flagship software and I am constantly struggling with the skill sets of my friendly but incompetent members of m…

If “it doesn’t last more than a day or two”, then I feel like what you’re describing isn’t the same level of burnout being discussed in the article; you’re noticing it and dealing with it before it spirals out of control. Which is a good thing! (and a life skill I wish I had learned much earlier in my life!)

But I’ve gone into that burnout spiral twice in my life; the most recent time (the worse one) was over a decade ago. That burnout was the result of nine continuous months spent in intense crunch on a project I hated but couldn’t leave, along with some other ongoing stressors.

After shipping that project, it took me more than two months of time completely off work before I even started to feel like I was a human again. And then two more months before I started to feel like I wanted to start doing work again. I was absurdly fortunate that I had enough long service leave saved up to afford to take the time I needed. (or alternately, the fact that I had all of that available time off which I hadn’t taken maybe wasn’t the best thing for my chances at avoiding burning out in the first place. That’s a totally valid alternate take on the situation!)

I do agree with your comment that burnout isn’t a “final state”; it’s something that most folks will recover from, given enough time, and it typically gets worse the longer you don’t deal with whatever’s triggering it.

For me, when I was in the middle of the burnout it didn’t feel like a thing I would ever recover from; I just wanted to be left alone in an empty room all day every day and never have to talk to anyone or think about anything ever again. And eventually my brain came back to me and I came out of the burnout. It took a long time, though.

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

#180

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:50 AM UTC

knightofmars wrote: post #144

dreyfan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude works at random jobs where you’re replaceable, absolutely. However if you’re a meaningful part of an early team with equity, this is quite literally how you can indeed get rich.

This was how you could get rich. Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I feel that these days VC and founders know all the right tricks to play to remove value from the contributors and reallocate it to the investors.

[deleted]