What's FE/BE?
Frontend / Backend
Oh, of course. Thanks.
Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
351–360 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
This blows my mind that in the US one can make such insane money in tech while still being a slacker and retire early with a dream house bought and paid for while in Europe devs are slaving away through SCRUM powered meat grinders burning themselves out for a 3% salary increase on a pitiful 40-80k/year, no stock options, without any hope of early retirement or owning a decent home without a 30 year loan or financial…
This is just my experience, but that isn't true at all. I work in the US for a huge European based Multinational with an HQ is Western Europe, Dev offices in Western and Eastern Europe, US, and Asia. There are plenty of devs all over the world who are slackers, but who know how to play the visibility and politics game well enough that they are perceived as high value. I've worked for two other Multinationals and with…
>but that isn't true at all. I work in the US for a huge European based Multinational
That's very specifically anecdotal. Not all cities in Europe are hot markets flooded with big corps like this one. Not that you're wrong, but your experience doesn't apply everywhere.
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook hires tons of zero passion 10am-4pm engineers. It might not be deliberate slacking but it’s definitely not hard working.
I'm not sure which team you are talking about because many people here in Ads are working 9-9-6.
Is it the performance review cycle pressure promoting such hours? That's firmly in the burnout territory even with high (500k+) comp...
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#354Post your real name here and then email this posts link to your PM. Then, once you lose your job, you will no longer be slacking at Google. This will definitely push you a bit.
Why PM?
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#355The way I deal with that is by experimenting. Not taking the fastest/easiest route but instead trying to do something interesting.
There are some downsides to that of course. I mean, I am purposefully reinventing the wheel. Sometimes, it fails, and short term productivity takes a hit, but I consider it a long term investment. Because next time I see the problem, I know what not to do, and why.
This presuppose you are not at 100%, because you sometimes need to catch up with your mistakes, but since you are at 10%, that shouldn't be a problem ;) Being at 100% is a bad idea anyways, because you can't take a step back.
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#356Paul Graham's recent essay " rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html> should speak to you. You've learned how to hack the test: Big companies don't reward you for doing great things, serving the users, etc. They reward you for pushing particular buttons, and you've learned how to push those buttons, and while that's freed up your time and given you financial stability, it's rotting your soul.
Quit. Join a small company, where you'll have the freedom to work the way you want, the inspiration to do so, and the certainty that you'll be judged properly. It'll lead you to do great work again, work you're proud of and that makes you feel good and that really makes a difference.
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software engineering just isn't that hard. Tedious yes, but not remotely difficult. We've been fed the narrative of economic success that many folks have forgotten what personal success looks like. You can be successful in your career and still feel like a failure. Therapy is the answer here. You have to un-brainwash yourself from the notion that your job is your life and figure out what really matters to you. Then f…
> Therapy is the answer here. You have to un-brainwash yourself from the notion that your job is your life Yeah, but where is the guarantee that therapy really un-brainwashes instead of re-brainwashing you to just be content with a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. I guess it is a totally rational strategy if you want to maximize happiness (whatever that means) but it still feels like a cop-out.
It's a cop out to try and find a way to be happy regardless of your circumstance in life? What standards for life is that?
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#358Hi there, I did the exact same thing as you (at Google Sydney), before eventually deciding that I must strike out into the wilderness. In the few years since I left; I worked as a solutions architect managing a team, a team lead, a remote dev, and now in a startup. Front-end, back-end, flip-side, all the ends. So I've been deliberately trying different angles of my career to see what suits. I'd describe this process…
> make the most of it by progressing deliberately in your social life
Ironically the Bay Area is among the worst places on Earth for improving your social life if you're straight and male. I noticed that you don't live in the Bay Area, you're married, you probably meant a much broader meaning of "social life", so your experiences are likely very different. But the typical clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respectful, male SWE in the Bay Area making $120K+ a year in his 20s or 30s, who should be a magnet for women, turns out to be living in one of worst places because of male-female ratios among singles (and some other cultural factors).
My advice would be work hard, save your money, travel when you can to better locales to improve your social life, but with the eventual goal of permanently moving out when you've saved enough. If you pick your destination within the USA well, dating prospects will improve greatly, and if you look worldwide (and can overcome the language and immigration issues), it could improve dramatically.
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> You mention 40/80k per year being pitiful? This kind of remuneration puts you in the top 10%/5% of France population easily. That just means the rest of the population is poor, not that you should accept less. This is called a fallacy of relative privation. So what if you have to subsist on ramen and can't afford a place to live with less than an hour and a half of commute. Think of all those starving children in…
While I agree with you on some points, the cost of life in European countries is not the same as USA.
The taxes are also much higher in Europe, especially on those compliant "upper middle class" techies we're talking about here. For anyone with basic understanding of arithmetics it's not even a question that EU techies are woefully underpaid, which is why all the good ones work in the US or for EU subsidiaries of US companies which actually respect the engineers.
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
This blows my mind that in the US one can make such insane money in tech while still being a slacker and retire early with a dream house bought and paid for while in Europe devs are slaving away through SCRUM powered meat grinders burning themselves out for a 3% salary increase on a pitiful 40-80k/year, no stock options, without any hope of early retirement or owning a decent home without a 30 year loan or financial…
> in Europe devs are slaving away through SCRUM powered meat grinders burning themselves out for a 3% salary increase on a pitiful 40-80k/year There is so much wrong in this sentence. First, there is no more “meat grinders” in the US than in Europe. I worked at Microsoft and Criteo in Europe, and the slacking there seems to be on par with what OP describes. You mention 40/80k per year being pitiful? This kind of remu…
>there is no more “meat grinders” in the US than in Europe. I worked at Microsoft and Criteo in Europe, and the slacking there seems to be on par with what OP describes.
That's very specifically anecdotal. Not everyone in Europe works or has the opportunity to work at big wealthy corps like the ones you mentioned. Europe is not as clustered as SV so the quality and pay of jobs varies immensely on your location. I can assure that outside such monopolies like Microsoft where the money comes in regardless if people work or not, the meat grinders are real.