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Fuck being productive

dostoynikov.bearblog.dev

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Re: Fuck being productive

#271

Post by throwaway2037 »

nly wrote: post #147
badpun wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To retire in 10 years you're going to have to be able to live comfortably on something like 1/3rd of your take home pay. That's very easy if you don't have kids - just don't get on a hedonic threadmill (and, if you're already on it, start gradually getting off). I'm not a parent myself, so won't speak about the "with kids" situation.

Rent isnt a "hedonic treadmill". Neither is food or energy. These are the 3 areas seeing the most inflation right now. Rents in London are up 20% in a year, food almost the same, and energy ...well, everyone knows what has happened to energy. The average Londoner is paying almost 40% of their take home pay on rent, so saving 2/3rds is already impossible. Even as one of the lucky ones earning a top 1% salary, I _still…

You can rewrite as:

The average ${global_alpha_city_dweller} is paying almost 40% of their take home pay on rent

There is nothing particular about London in this context. What about New York City or Sydney or Hongkong or Singapore? Pretty much the same. (Tokyo is an odd duck.)

Also, this:

    Even as one of the lucky ones earning a top 1% salary, I _still_ pay 40% of my take home pay on a mortgage
Frankly, you overborrowed. It's too much.

Re: Fuck being productive

#272

Post by kortilla »

lisasays wrote: post #236
kortilla wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't care about the products we build for someone else (why should I?) This mindset is how you kneecap your career. You’ve pigeonholed yourself into the foot soldier category when it becomes immediately obvious to managers that you aren’t thinking about what’s actually good for the company. You may already know this, but it needs to be explicitly called out that taking that approach to your business relationship…

My spin would be: "This is how companies kneecap employees, by forcing them to think this way." "But how could this ever be possible, in a field with high salaries and a permanent shortage of skilled workers?", you ask. By constantly punishing us for caring. By continually providing shitty office space, and bullshit-driven work cultures and interview rituals. And just plain lying, toxic managers and co-workers to dea…

I’m telling you from experience as a manager that this is wrong.

People who take ownership and initiative for the things they work on get quickly promoted. If they don’t, there is usually some other issue (difficultly to work with) explicitly holding them back.

I have seen many otherwise great engineers take the mindset of “I’m paid to do X so I don’t care about making sure X is the right thing” and they just sit at the senior level their whole career. It’s not bad with current comp levels by any means, but they never move beyond it because they constantly telegraph that they aren’t interested with that attitude.

Keep a clock puncher mindset and you’ll get treated like one.

Re: Fuck being productive

#273

Post by badpun »

_jdzr wrote: post #191
badpun wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Often if there’s high unemployment there’s a window to be the job maker. How so? On the one hand, there's plenty of unemployed, desperate people, so you can probably get them as employeed for very cheap - but, on the other hand, people are in dire economical condition, so it's hard to sell them anything. I guess, producing stuff for the international market could work well though.

> so you can probably get them as employeed for very cheap Not everything is about money or paying for things. >but, on the other hand, people are in dire economical condition, so it's hard to sell them anything. Buying and selling things is a very American construct and tells like 1/4 of the story when it comes to trading. I grew up in a rural area of the US. Lots of folks are poor but wealthy beyond measure. Barter…

> Not everything is about money or paying for things.

Not everything, but surely running a business is one of those things that IS about money?

Re: Fuck being productive

#274

Post by badpun »

nly wrote: post #147
badpun wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To retire in 10 years you're going to have to be able to live comfortably on something like 1/3rd of your take home pay. That's very easy if you don't have kids - just don't get on a hedonic threadmill (and, if you're already on it, start gradually getting off). I'm not a parent myself, so won't speak about the "with kids" situation.

Rent isnt a "hedonic treadmill". Neither is food or energy. These are the 3 areas seeing the most inflation right now. Rents in London are up 20% in a year, food almost the same, and energy ...well, everyone knows what has happened to energy. The average Londoner is paying almost 40% of their take home pay on rent, so saving 2/3rds is already impossible. Even as one of the lucky ones earning a top 1% salary, I _still…

> There's no real escape.

I agree. Living in London is for people who don't mind to work till they're old. I lived there for nearly a year and concluded that, while it's obviously an awesome city, it's not worth spending an extra decade (or more) working just to pay off mortgage to live there. I chose to live in an less awesome city, and thus am already retired at 42 years old.

Re: Fuck being productive

#275

Post by jillesvangurp »

deprecative wrote: post #212
jillesvangurp wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a good, productive engineer, your boss will bend over backwards to not lose you. Or they should be. Your negotiation power is a lot stronger than you think. Plenty of jobs out there and it never hurts to remind them that they are replacable. I've enjoyed the work conditions I mention throughout my career. I'm 48 now. But of course I work in a part of the world where this stuff was sorted out decades ago. 4…

> Being a wage slave is a choice. If you don't like your life, change it. It's incredibly unfortunate that instead of using a shred of empathy to see that your situation isn't the situation of nearly everyone else in the industry, or alive for that matter. "If you don't like your life, change it" screams "I have no idea what I am talking about" because you're failing to see that situations elsewhere are different. Ta…

Sounds pretty miserable. Come to Europe and enjoy life. Plenty of work here in Germany or elsewhere in Europe and pretty easy to get a visa if you have skills. Berlin is absolutely crawling with smart people from the US living a great life here.

Re: Fuck being productive

#276

Post by notaimbot »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #38
88913527 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you care about the products, the emotional investment in your work might propel your income, which is the reason why you're working in the first place, so ostensibly a follow-on goal of that might be to raise your income.

This is an interesting theory. My experience has been quite the opposite, in that typically jobs that people care about and connect with on an emotional level are those which pay relatively little. Teaching, social work, caring, and so on.

a huge part of the gaming industry basically

Re: Fuck being productive

#277

Post by FredPret »

sureglymop wrote: post #268
FredPret wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an adult second-language learner, my advice is not to even bother learning a second language unless you have to, or would love to. You can get proficient quickly, but much of the language's beauty will lie in the subtleties which will take decades of effort to learn. And there's the accent, which you'll never lose. The best time to learn a language is between 0 and 10 y.o.

I would disagree. You might already know a language that is very similar to another language because they stem from the same proto-language. Then it won't be that hard to learn. And many times the more you know it will help you with other languages. If you know French and English you'll probably have a pleasant time learning Spanish. You can get the subtleties by interacting with locals, and with the internet you can…

OK, so then you fall into the love it category.

For people who already know English and aren't super into linguistics like you, the answer to "should I learn to speak x" is no.

Re: Fuck being productive

#279

Post by leonroy »

Sure - it sucks doing self-learning and working in your own time but when else are you supposed to polish your skills beyond what work projects give you latitude to do?

For example I was in a tech company where XMPP was the core of every one of our products. There were almost no REST based APIs in the company and we had our own protocols and APIs which made much of what I did very specific and non transferable. Day in and out I worked with XML, asynchronous messaging and increasingly niche tooling as XMPP became less and less relevant and HTTP based APIs like REST-JSON and WebSockets displaced it.

It wasn’t hard to move jobs but it wasn’t easy either. I had to spend a month or so in my own time learning REST, JSON, WebSockets and Spring MVC in order to pass interviews.

I think constant productivity culture leads to burnout but there’s got to be a middle ground between doing nothing after hours and hustling non-stop.

Re: Fuck being productive

#280

Post by pallas_athena »

damnitpeter wrote: post #57
myth_drannon wrote: post #27

Next step: reading Charles Bukowski and just absolutely not giving a f*ck. I always seen him as the ultimate slacker and hoped some of that energy will trickle down to me when I was being workaholic. On another note I really liked "How to Be Idle" by Tom Hodgkinson https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/623922.How_to_Be_Idle In case you get some guilt feelings.

Any favorites from Bukowski to recommend? Always been interested but not sure where to start.

I would also recommend "Pulp", but it's pretty different from everything else he wrote
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