1/11/2025 at 5:19:20 PM
I've burnt out. It was horrible. I am doing much better now!The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.
In many places if you get hurt/burnt out on the job the upper seats are looking for any reason to curb stomp you. There's no reason to give a company your all unless you have an actual stake in it or they are there to hold you up when you're dragging. I've worked at multiple places where influential people died, yes dead, below average life expectancy, - on the job - and corporate did everything they could to not even pay out on their legal obligations (life insurance, D&D). In some cases employees joked or snickered about the person who died later on - in meetings.
In tech. I've found that you're not on your own but you are at the mercy of who is in charge of your schedule and rates your performance. If you lose trust in that person your best option is to leave as quickly as possible. Otherwise they will do what they can to destroy you for as much 'profit' as they can claim. Being clear. It is not about realized gains, it could even be at great detriment to a company. It is about short-term line item claimable gains. "We got 4 good months out of her...", "they were terminal and now they will be working somewhere better for them...", "he really wasn't closing as many tickets as the rest of the team...", "they weren't helping as many team members as the rest of the team...", "we never needed someone with an advanced degree...", etc.
Check in with yourself regularly. Know the signs of burn out. The company you work for does not depend on any person caring about you in the slightest.
by nostradumbasp
1/11/2025 at 7:45:29 PM
> The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.It really depends on your personal psychology. After I burnt out in a demanding role that I adopted as a big part of my identity, I joined a new company vowing to not take work as seriously (I remember telling myself, "if excess effort isn't rewarded, the optimal strategy is to maximize compensation, minimize necessary effort, and eliminate excess effort").
After a few months of recovery and ruminating on why I still felt so bad (plus therapy), I learned a few things about myself:
1. I feel like garbage when I'm half-assing something at work or not giving my all -- especially when the people around me are putting in the work.
2. When I am giving my all and I feel like I'm not being recognized, I begin to lose motivation and burn out. Simple tasks become very laborious. This is a gradual, months-long process that is difficult to recognize is happening.
3. When I start to burn out, I am forced by my mind and body to half-ass things, which makes me more demotivated, which exacerbates the burnout.
Putting these insights into action, I've so far been able to keep burnout at bay by finding roles where I can give work my all, receive recognition, and be surrounded by others who are putting in similar effort. This doesn't mean blindly trusting the company or destroying my work-life balance -- I believe that "recognition for hard work" includes proactively protecting hard workers from their workaholic tendencies and giving them the flexibility to take breaks. I'm lucky to work with really great people where I frequently pass along responsibilities or take work from others to avoid over-stressing any one person and enable things like multi-week vacations. I have no idea how I will change my approach if I lose this workplace dynamic or pick up more forcing functions on my workday (e.g. having kids) in the future, but it's working pretty well for me right now.
All of this is to say: for me, the low-trust "do the bare minimum to stay employed" approach didn't actually help me get out of burnout into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of. People are wired differently, so I want to caution against a one-size-fits-all approach.
by Centigonal
1/11/2025 at 10:44:02 PM
Yours has got to be one of the best comments that I've ever read on hacker news.> for me, the low-trust "do the bare minimum to stay employed" approach didn't actually help me get out of burnout into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of
What you just described (so vividly) is meaning, and (likely) "flow" too. Meaning must be there for everyone, in their efforts; the need for meaning is universal. (We can call it intrinsic motivation too.)
Some say that you can find meaning outside of work, and then can mostly ignore work; and it's also said (correctly I guess) that "psychological richness" (closely related to resilience) is important: drawing meaning & satisfaction from multiple sources.
Sure, but I have a practical problem with that: if you need to work 8 hrs/day to cover your family's needs, you don't have time, energy, or opportunity left to find meaning elsewhere.
And, as others have repeatedly said it here, if you are a full time employee making quite beyond your (family's) needs, and think about decreasing your working time (giving up excess money, but regaining much needed time & freedom), that is what is strictly forbidden by the runners of the Village of Happy People. You will find effectively no jobs that let you work (say) 5 hours per day, for 62.5% of your original salary. That way, you'd just not be a good slave, a good cog in the machine. Society is engineered such that you must not have free time.
Therefore the only practical option is to find (or create) work that provides meaning for you intrinsically. I see no other option. You can be an employee or run your own business, the same applies. And, unfortunately, this is unattainable for most of society.
by EtCepeyd
1/12/2025 at 11:34:52 AM
My favorite quote from one of my favorite books, Anathem by Neal Stephenson (copied from GoodReads):"Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story."
Some people need to have their "story", otherwise they end up miserable, regretting their wasted lives.
by Cosi1125
1/12/2025 at 9:35:03 PM
If someone’s ‘story’ improves in notability, attractiveness, attention grabbingness, etc… wouldn’t someone else’s ‘story’ have to decrease in the same?As human attention is finite. Or is it suggesting that the ‘story’ can somehow qualitatively improve, without limit, while actually occupying less physical time?
by MichaelZuo
1/13/2025 at 8:57:30 AM
"Stories" are not a finite resource. In the book, Yul tortured his friends (and whoever was the audience) with his adventures and was a rather poor listener himself, but for Jesry and other avout (monks-scientists) it was always mutual – discussing their research, sharing findings, seeking out help, etc.Your story is something intrinsic; you can decide how you want to share it with others.
by Cosi1125
1/13/2025 at 4:37:54 PM
Sharing requires actual time…? Certainly more than zero.by MichaelZuo
1/12/2025 at 1:16:23 AM
I appreciate the kind words!The second part of your post is something I've thought about a lot. There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:
- Less communication overhead due to fewer people
- Constant availability (less need to pre-plan meetings, etc to match everyone's hours)
- Less complexity WRT HR, payroll, taxes
- Employees still have to pay for full healthcare, so the employer either provides this or pays a 1099 salary premium (the US's terrible approach of tying health insurance coverage to your employer rears its ugly head yet again)
- Fewer SaaS seats to pay for
Some of these are more solvable than others, and allowing more people to work part-time in tech is definitely swimming upstream, but I do wish more businesses would try.
Sahil Lavingia (Gumroad) is one person leaning into this approach with great success: https://sahillavingia.com/work
by Centigonal
1/12/2025 at 12:39:53 PM
- Employees still have to pay for full healthcare, so the employer either provides this or pays a 1099 salary premium (the US's terrible approach of tying health insurance coverage to your employer rears its ugly head yet again)Health insurance coverage is not tied to an employer. Being able to pay for health insurance premiums with pre tax income is tied to an employer.
The benefit to the (large) employer is that it makes it harder for their employees to compare competing employment offers, and adds a little more friction to an employee who might be considering switching jobs.
The administrative costs of implementing benefits so that pre tax money can be used to pay for them also serve as a barrier to entry for smaller employers (helping large employers), since these costs cannot be amortized over a large number of employees.
But beside all that,
> There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:
It’s just cheaper, in all ways, to have fewer employees. Less people to trust, less people an employer is liable for, less hiring/terminating costs. The cost of burnout is clearly not a significant factor considering the lack of success of businesses full of part time employees.
by lotsofpulp
1/12/2025 at 2:53:48 AM
> You will find effectively no jobs that let you work (say) 5 hours per day, for 62.5% of your original salary.Not in the US anyway. It’s exceedingly common in the Netherlands to work 32 or even 24 hours a week.
by Aeolun
1/12/2025 at 4:37:34 AM
Huh, in tech companies?by amrocha
1/12/2025 at 11:12:45 AM
Absolutely. Totally normal in the Netherlands. I do this (28 hours). My wife too (32 hours). We've got a kid to raise and a house to look after. We earn more than we need, so why work more hours?by Freak_NL
1/12/2025 at 2:29:29 PM
That’s awesome. I chose Japan as my place to live, but NL was a close second. I’ll have to think about it again next time I move.by amrocha
1/13/2025 at 1:55:28 AM
Wow, amazing. Super progressive.by EtCepeyd
1/13/2025 at 6:11:17 PM
As I believe Deadpool said in the most recent Deadpool and Wolverine movie - ‘The Dutch are never going to the moon, but damn do they know how to live.’by lazide
1/12/2025 at 10:19:33 AM
It's not only common you can in many instances force your employer to lower your hours and keep you on.by Tknl
1/12/2025 at 3:31:20 PM
Think I'm starting to see why so many people immigrate to Europe. European labor laws and lifestyles are so reasonable. No wonder American life expectancy is so bad.by nostradumbasp
1/12/2025 at 6:18:08 AM
Switzerland too. It's pretty common for parents to work 80% or 60%.by snovv_crash
1/12/2025 at 11:37:55 AM
Is that typically shorter days or fewer days?by chgs
1/13/2025 at 6:54:55 AM
Fewer days.by snovv_crash
1/12/2025 at 5:31:51 AM
Yah, France as well. My boss was at 30h / week.by dopidopHN
1/12/2025 at 1:42:14 PM
Belgium and Germany too.by gloflo
1/13/2025 at 7:36:28 PM
Totally agree with this.The thing is, there are at least four major factors that lead to the energy depletion of burnout:
- physical (i'm unhealthy, don't sleep, eat or exercise well)
- mental (i'm distracted and interrupted constantly or don't let my brain rest)
- emotional (i work in a culture of terror with people who trigger me)
- meaning - (i simply don't care about what i'm doing and neither do my colleagues)
all of these are necessary, and none are sufficient. most orgs and people are breaking along more than one of these dimensions, and the co-morbidity makes it hard to diagnose the cause of burnout.
by vonnik
1/12/2025 at 12:04:54 AM
You can't expect 62.5% for 5/8 hours, you have other costs to them for benefits etc.by cma
1/12/2025 at 1:31:37 AM
I think it’s assumed that in a society that would allow for such things benefits wouldn’t be handled at the level of the employer.by threetonesun
1/12/2025 at 1:59:56 AM
Quite the opposite. Employees under 28 hours a week don’t have to be provided health benefits at all, and typically aren’t in industries like retail that mostly employ front line workers on a part time basis.Part time help is cheap.
by trollbridge
1/12/2025 at 7:07:04 AM
I'm a contractor because I work remotely for a foreign company, and they denied me paid holidays with this argument. The cost of vacation is proportional to worked hours. There's a lot of questionable math in HR land though.I could see maybe the argument against this because of paid accounts in remote systems: google suite, office 365, bamboo, github, etc. compared to reduced use, but they set those up anyway for other people in the company who don't use them (non-devs, etc) and I don't believe the cost per user is significant.
Do you mean tax costs? AFAIK typically country requirements for benefits are proportional to time worked, so part timers don't get all the benefits. Which benefits are you talking about specifically?
by rendaw
1/12/2025 at 6:19:06 AM
Productivity per hour increases though, so it compensates.by snovv_crash
1/12/2025 at 8:43:45 AM
I could see it going down if you do something like more work or work like hobbies in the other time instead of more leisure.by cma
1/13/2025 at 6:56:05 AM
That is entirely independent of working shorter hours though.by snovv_crash
1/12/2025 at 2:11:40 AM
Those might not be proportial, disregarding fixed costs, on some places those costs/deductions are usually based on a percentage of the given salary or hours worked (Not so in the US, as I'm given to understan)by joseda-hg
1/14/2025 at 4:14:52 PM
I was so surprised when I realized stat holidays were paid as a % of the previous 30 days salary in canada.by BehindBlueEyes
1/12/2025 at 9:22:16 AM
> What you just described (so vividly) is meaningIn line with Victor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, which explores (among other things) why some Holocaust survivors thrived and some didn’t. Frankl himself was a survivor.
by KwisatzHaderack
1/11/2025 at 11:05:15 PM
I tottaly agree with this sentiment. Still looking for the right balance, but half assing things for me doesn't result in feeling better.Finding the unicorn job isn't the right thing to predicate your happiness on. One thing I like the idea of and am just starting to try is reminding myself why I'm doing the job. What are my bigger goals that it is contributing towards? I know we all know this at some level, but I think it can help to remind ourselves there is a purpose/meaning to why we do our jobs, even if we don't intrinsically get meaning from them.
I can't remember where I read this idea... but somewhere recently.
by curmudgeon22
1/12/2025 at 2:24:56 AM
Let me try to be more clear, I don't half ass. I just take a 10 minute walk when I get stressed. I take 10 minutes to think through something without touching my keyboard even though the keyboard monitor is monitoring. Once I'm past 8 and a half hours I turn off my computer almost regardless of the circumstances. In certain emergencies I won't, but most of the time that meeting actually is not more important than eating dinner with my family and getting bullet points the next morning.I hope this helps explain more what I meant by what I was saying. I'm not saying "become terrible at your job and produce poor quality". I am saying, "deliver good enough quality within your means". If your boss says "your current code is good enough for the demo", ship the damn thing as is, don't go rushing to add more features and retesting everything until 4AM.
If a deadline really is too short, say it is too short early on. Keep working, but don't put on a cape and deliver because someone said they wanted something they can't have without causing you to lose sleep for two weeks. People die from stuff like that, it is not worth it.
by nostradumbasp
1/14/2025 at 4:41:37 PM
I've learnt this lesson the hard way recently.I dislike my projects failing and missing deadlines. So in addition to pushing back against unrealistic expectations, I caught other people's dropped balls and filled the gaps of un-backfilled roles. On top of that when there was down times, instead of resting, I took on fun side projects that had higher impact for my employer than the work actually assigned to me.
They got me with praise and guilt tripping, until last year, all the little "do this one more thing", "can you ship it 1 day earlier" had turned into me delivering by myself as much work as the rest of my team on ~20h weeks (because the other 20h I was unable to function due to burnout). We're siloed into different projects so I never realized I was doing 5x the work rather than 20% extra until a new reporting tool visible to each other was used...
So this year, I'm not doing side projects, fixing other people's messes or doing other people's work. I've told my manager and he's bringing an extra person to the team. I'll do my work and I'll do it well but I'm a contractor paid half what my FTE counterparts are, and it's not like there is a path to promotion so I'm not going to compromise my health anymore to do the work of 4 extra people for free. Not in any future job.
Point is, check your workload and if you're doing more than what you're paid for: that's where you can take back the time to find meaning in different things. It's not slacking if you're delivering a day's worth of work in a day, no matter how much HR BS tries to guilt trip you into thinking that.
by BehindBlueEyes
1/12/2025 at 6:51:50 PM
>... keyboard monitor is monitoringI would say get out as fast as possible.
by nuancebydefault
1/12/2025 at 6:57:16 PM
That would be part of the medium term plan. Have to hang on as long as I can for now though.by nostradumbasp
1/12/2025 at 12:57:05 AM
Does not help when the answer is "to not starve and not lose your house for missing three mortgage payments, stupid" though.I am here to periodically remind HN that no, not all programmers here are millionaires who only work not to get bored.
by pdimitar
1/12/2025 at 1:20:04 AM
There is a middle ground where you’re not at risk of missing next month’s mortgage payment, but downshifting or changing careers might mean you take a lot longer to reach retirement (or “financial independence” if you don’t like the word retirement).by anon7725
1/12/2025 at 1:37:51 AM
There absolutely is this middle ground, agreed. But personally, I've been very stupid with money. I let my passion for technology and the illusion that I will always be in high demand get the better of me and I am currently paying heavy interest, so to speak, in ruined health, both physical and mental, and having to look for a job in tough market with age discrimination sprinkled on top.Oh well.
by pdimitar
1/14/2025 at 4:46:32 PM
That's rough. Hope you find the job you need soon.I wish money management was taught in schools. My family didn't have money so how were they supposed to teach me about compound interests. And those growing up in money may not realize its value...
by BehindBlueEyes
1/14/2025 at 6:47:09 PM
Thanks. I wish would-be parents had psychological evaluation at least. My mother and father were 95% inept to be parents. They did the very bare minimum and then one of them died and the other was, shall we put it softly, just a drag for 22 years until she died less than two months ago as well.Pain inside does make one do stupid crap. Definitely applies to me. Now I am trying to heal and be more rational with money at least. The rest will follow more or less automatically; removing stress is itself healing.
by pdimitar
1/12/2025 at 12:50:40 AM
My takeaway from your comment is that you should not be an employee; you should be a business owner. That way you can give your all and feel great about it because it will also (hopefully) lead to better and directly measurable outcomes.by pdimitar
1/12/2025 at 1:17:16 AM
Not necessarily. I'm similar to OP in that I get depressed if I'm not doing my best, but I also have a family with young kids. There's no good way for me to get from where I am to business owner—either I'd be risking my family's livelihood on something uncertain or I'd be working in my free time to build a stable business instead of spending time with them.The compromise I've arrived at is that I give it my all during a very strict time box. I work remotely, so at 9am I start work, I take an hour for lunch, and I check out at 5. With no commute that leaves just over half my workweek waking hours for my family.
During working hours I do it all—I perform my job very well and am lucky enough to be in a place where it's recognized in very measurable ways (promotions, autonomy, and recognition). But I don't give my employer extra time.
by lolinder
1/12/2025 at 1:39:24 AM
Thanks for the insightful comment. I have tried no less than 30 separate approaches for... a bunch of stuff really... and nothing worked.The only thing that actually seems to net me results these days is indeed extremely strict, zero excuses unless the nukes are flying, time-boxing.
Reassuring to see that it works for somebody else as well. Thank you.
by pdimitar
1/12/2025 at 1:03:19 AM
Yes, this is correct. This is my eventual end goal, and a lot of my career so far has revolved around obtaining the skills, connections, and runway money I need to make that leap.by Centigonal
1/11/2025 at 9:31:51 PM
What industry did you find this unicorn job in? I feel exactly as you described in your list.by sgarland
1/12/2025 at 12:58:56 AM
I work at a ~100 person tech consulting firm[1], although I joined when we were closer to 30. They actually found me through HN!We mostly design and build data/devops/mlops/cyber platforms for big banks and other finserv companies - lots of Databricks, AWS, and GCP services.
[1] https://bit.ly/4j5cC5T (I'll expire the link in a few days for privacy reasons)
by Centigonal
1/12/2025 at 12:01:00 PM
Any reason a lot of the Rearc jobs are outsourced to India?by firesteelrain
1/12/2025 at 1:22:50 PM
What is wrong with that?by throwaway2037
1/12/2025 at 1:27:48 PM
Takes away jobs from Americans and exploits cheap Indian labor.by firesteelrain
1/12/2025 at 2:49:58 PM
Another way to phrase that: it allows Americans to focus on jobs where they add most value, leading to a higher standard of living for both Indians and Americans. You should read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage (and so should Trump)by speleding
1/12/2025 at 3:35:11 PM
I don’t really care about the standard of living in India. It is of no concern for me. And the only reason I am commenting is because the linked company is what was brought up. You would be able to find other examples.But, these positions are easily done by a highly skilled American workforce: Cloud Engineers, Lead Cloud Engineers, Cybersecurity Engineers. That’s what is being advertised.
by firesteelrain
1/12/2025 at 3:56:48 PM
Read the link: outsourcing results in an improved standard of living in America. Even if Americans are capable of doing those jobs themselves. It’s counterintuitive, I know.by speleding
1/14/2025 at 6:53:06 PM
TLDR but i searched the linked page for america and the only mention is a theory, no proof:"In 1930 Austrian-American economist Gottfried Haberler detached the doctrine of comparative advantage from Ricardo's labor theory of value and provided a modern opportunity cost formulation. Haberler's reformulation of comparative advantage revolutionized the theory of international trade and laid the conceptual groundwork of modern trade theories."
by BehindBlueEyes
1/14/2025 at 7:03:13 PM
Sure, if you think about it, layoffs are actually good for employees career growth and the chocolate ration went up to 20 grammes per week.by BehindBlueEyes
1/12/2025 at 4:02:11 PM
I did read the link and my beef is not with outsourcing in general. Many articles I found say that new roles in areas such as AI, cloud computing, and advanced manufacturing often emerge, providing Americans with more lucrative opportunities in cutting-edge fields. This is the counterintuitive part because Rearc is outsourcing highly skilled jobs that should be done by Americans if we follow the outsourcing is better logic. See my point?by firesteelrain
1/13/2025 at 8:51:42 AM
If the jobs are being outsourced then the American company doing the outsourcing apparently saves money. Whether that money eventually ends up in the pocket of the people you want (e.g. workers versus shareholders) is a different debate, but in theory it should also mean there are other higher paying jobs in the labour market in the US otherwise salaries would drop to match the outsourced ones.by speleding
1/17/2025 at 7:50:11 PM
That’s some serious mental gymnasticsby firesteelrain
1/11/2025 at 10:01:47 PM
+1, very curious. I yearn for the working environment the parent comment describes.Can it only exist in medium and small companies?
by j_bum
1/11/2025 at 10:54:27 PM
It can only exist in high margin companies. The trick is to find business environments with some 'slack' in the funding, because that slack tends to propagate. I have made a career out of finding environments with high slack and avoiding environments with low slack.by idiotsecant
1/12/2025 at 12:55:19 AM
Do you have any actual script, as in, exact questions to ask during interview, so that executives and/or techies would answer clearly whether their company has financial slack?by pdimitar
1/12/2025 at 1:25:45 PM
Revenue or profits per employee is a good start.by throwaway2037
1/13/2025 at 7:33:13 PM
relevant:Slack, by Tom DeMarco https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici...
by vonnik
1/12/2025 at 1:16:11 AM
By slack do you mean high margin or high revenue per employee or something similar? Or a large war chest/lots of runway?by anon7725
1/12/2025 at 3:38:54 PM
Definitely, large war chest and lots of runway always helps. Also high margin may be good or bad but high revenue per employee(i.e. consulting firms in government, defense, finance, energy etc. sectors) are the most human friendly places to work at.by n_ary
1/12/2025 at 12:47:01 AM
Just curious… How do you find out there is slack before actually getting the job?by onemoresoop
1/12/2025 at 11:21:17 AM
One hint might be found in yearly financial reports. It depends a bit on the country if you can access those reports from non-publicly traded companies. Are they debt-heavy, or do they have enough free cash flow? What if all customers disappear the next day, can the business continue for an extended period of time?by mrngm
1/13/2025 at 1:28:07 AM
Is that indicator of slack though?by onemoresoop
1/11/2025 at 10:29:19 PM
The only thing I can think of (and this is purely speculative, though I’ve interviewed at one and enjoyed the experience; didn’t move forward due to relocation concerns) is a quant trading firm.by sgarland
1/12/2025 at 12:53:10 AM
Pardon the apparently naive question: are those places not filled with the most horrible vultures on the planet? That is what I would think but it seems like I am horribly wrong.Could you elaborate some more, please?
by pdimitar
1/12/2025 at 1:01:47 AM
I’ve never worked at one, but I interviewed at HRT. The interviewers were all quite kind, and more importantly to me, they asked difficult questions relevant to the role. Specifically, the role was for DBs, and the questions (beyond “can you do some basic coding”) were all low-level RDBMS or Linux. I hate Leetcode, doubly so when I will never, ever be using those skills on the job.Given that those places are also doing stuff like writing their own network stack to reduce latency, I get the impression that they know their shit.
by sgarland
1/12/2025 at 1:24:49 PM
> are those places not filled with the most horrible vultures on the planet?
by throwaway2037
1/12/2025 at 3:35:09 PM
On the contrary, I believe this is a misinformation widely spread by non-technical people about their grit. They actually do some really interesting(definition may differ from yours) work and paces are very sane.However, given their pay and other contractual limitations, it can be very attractive and fiercely competitive to land a job unless you are really good. Hence the the fake “vultures” rumor to gate keep.
P.S. Worked at one briefly and figured that I will become unemployable in regular market soon if I ever plan to leave… and not work in this industry anymore.
by n_ary
1/13/2025 at 1:27:24 PM
Why would you be unemployable?by spacemanspiff01
1/11/2025 at 10:50:06 PM
I found it in a corner of my $MEGACORP, but TBF, my corner is a former startup that was acquired and retained a lot of the brains.by weakfish
1/12/2025 at 1:10:00 PM
Wow. How I long to be in the position you are! I got burnt out, and then learnt to emotionally detach myself from my work so that I don’t get hurt by things that are beyond my control.But I sorely miss not being 100% dedicated. What I do for work has always been a big part of my identity. And half-assing something feels like not being true to myself.
by spot5010
1/13/2025 at 10:28:06 AM
I think there's a paradox, that if you give too much to your employer, you burn out and then can give them nothing. Therefore, one should give the correct level of engagement , its not disengagement, but, being engaged enough to do the job well while still having a life outside work eg with family and friends. Its possible to work somewhere where your colleagues appear more dedicated than you, for example if they work the weekend and you don't. That doesn't mean you're less committed to your job, in fact it could mean you are more committed, because you know that working weekends is pointless as it leads to extra bugs thus being overall less efficient. In summary, work hard and diligently, while taking necessary breaks, getting required exercise and sleep, recovering properly if ill at ay time, and not working silly hours. so... a bit like a typical European ;)by nickd2001
1/14/2025 at 5:01:31 PM
Europe has great employee protection but it is not always this panacea either everywhere.When I worked in Paris, I started at 10 am (to avoid rush hour on the subway), but rarely left before 7 or 8 (instead of 6) and it wasn't uncommon for me to stay until 11pm. I was "cadre" which means you need to deliver on tasks but get no overtime pay with the idea that workload is realistic but flexible: finish early and you're done, run late it's on you to deal with it. Needless to say the balance often tilted one way and not in my favor.
One reason was the culture at that company was to take many coffee breaks, long lunches, go for drinks after work and return to the office after etc. That means the days were pleasant and relaxed most of the time, but you made up for it by spending more time at work. I actually enjoyed it at the time, but I don't think I'd do now.
This was quite typical in my experience. Other companies would pay for overtime but only if you worked after 9pm (because 6 to 9 is for dinner). They'd cater pizzas during that time and folks would end their day at 9, and do just the 3h unpaid overtime while eating pizza in front of their pc.
Just saying, Europe has some great labor laws, but it's not all roses and rainbows either. Employers may still try to exploit you as much as they can within those laws (and sometimes by breaking it, I think lawsuits against employers (aux prudhommes) are a lot more common and employees win them quite often.)
by BehindBlueEyes
1/13/2025 at 8:54:32 AM
> And half-assing something feels like not being true to myself.Been there many times, but I found that it’s best to aim for good enough, given the resources and constraints, than 100% all the time. I’m a recovering perfectionist, so it’s not always easy to reach that balance, but I try it anyways. When I do not, my anxiety kicks in, and I’m forced to slow down.. I use to be able to ignore it (the anxiety) and keep pushing, but not anymore..
by jventura
1/12/2025 at 2:46:35 AM
Thanks for writing about your experiences. I went through the same series of realizations as you over the past few years.> What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of.
I have this in bursts during the off-season and that's where I feel like I'm most productive and useful. But the off-season is getting shorter and shorter and I'm compelled to find something else.
by hebocon
1/12/2025 at 10:46:39 AM
I share your psychology.. sadly I never found a place with high drive people (colleagues or hierarchy), for a while I did hard tasks for their own sake but after a while this difference in mindset across the company has diffused in me and I'm ground to a near halt (you know when the simple thought of opening a source file makes you sick to your stomach).Did you find that job through a friend or by interviewing ? if so did you find ways to filter low drive teams ? I sometime mention I seek high speed but I don't think I can trust HR on this.
by agumonkey
1/11/2025 at 6:42:54 PM
The trick is to stay out of product meetings and not actually care how cool and interesting and useful the product can or will be. Only give feedback to your inner circle (manager, peers) when asked about it. Most importantly, enjoy the tasks assigned to you however dull or basic they may be after you mastered them. Be proud of your work.EDIT: These are things to do together if you have no agency at a company to change it. If you need help getting agency, work with your manager to get data to back up your arguments.
by righthand
1/11/2025 at 7:02:02 PM
I've found some combination of agency, upside, and interesting problems to solve are the recipe for not burning out.Not working for a jerk manager / at a company with bad culture helps, but is not sufficient. I've burned out in a "nice culture" company faster than a "cutthroat culture" company because the nice guys didn't allow much agency.
by steveBK123
1/11/2025 at 7:21:39 PM
> The trick is to...It's hard to do any one of those, let alone more or all, when you're approaching burnout.
> - stay out of product meetings
I started to avoid product meetings. Still burned out.
> - not actually care how cool and interesting and useful the product can or will be
I started to not care how cool or interesting or useful the product can or will be. Still burned out.
> - Only give feedback to your inner circle (manager, peers) when asked about it
I started to only give feedback to my inner circle. That was even more painful, and still burned out.
> - enjoy the tasks assigned to you however dull or basic they may be after you mastered them
I could never enjoy tasks assigned to me when they're dull and basic things I've mastered.
> - Be proud of your work.
As for being proud of my work... well I'm always proud of my work. I still burned out. I don't want to even touch the things I'm proud of.
Everyone's story of burnout is uniquely different. There's no single magic bullet that works for everyone.
by inetknght
1/11/2025 at 8:13:21 PM
You neglected two of my suggestions.> I could never enjoy tasks assigned to me when they're dull and basic things I've mastered.
If you do need more interesting work and can’t shift teams then find a new job. You will eventually find yourself needing to do the same again after you’ve mastered the new challenge. Keep it up and you will run out of leaps. However if you want to exist in a place for a while you need to accept that not every project, task, idea will be exciting work. Once you accept this, it also opens up doorways with what else you can do with your time. Since you have a mastered skill set, these menial tasks should not be weighing you down to free yourself from the drudgery of work.
> As for being proud of my work... well I'm always proud of my work. I still burned out. I don't want to even touch the things I'm proud of.
You should always be critical of past mistakes and look to correct but you should always put your best effort forward. That is what pride in work means. You shouldn’t have to admire every piece of work you deliver as a masterpiece, which is what I assume you mean by wanting to touch it. You should always carry a positive mindset about your work and not treat each success and failure in your life as some sort of definitive legacy. Invite in and operate under best intentions.
A lot of my advice is about how it works in harmony, not some quick instant burnout solution. Resting is important as well (breaks, vacations).
Anecdotally I was recently hired at a company that is in dire straights. This weighed on me heavily for the first six months, eventually they shrunk my team. However I cannot afford to get burned out. So the only options are to extract as much of the burden from me by being a cog in a bullshit factory or find a new job in a psychotic job market.
by righthand
1/11/2025 at 11:17:57 PM
Not sure why you got flagged.This is good advice, work is not a one size fits all solution for self actualization. Most workers just want to fill their requirements and do something meaningful to them with the rest of their time.
I especially like your point about enjoying the fruits of mastery of a task.
by beacon294
1/12/2025 at 2:59:46 AM
> Not sure why you got flagged.They replied to the one that told them their magic advice didn’t actually help them (and they still burned out) with some variety of “That had nothing to do with my advice, you just did it wrong.”
That’s… not cool.
by Aeolun
1/12/2025 at 5:13:05 PM
I didn’t say they did it wrong. The commenter tossed out two pieces of my advice as not relevant and I wanted to reinforce that all the advice was linked. Not a pick-3 three, toss two situation. What is not cool is having some sort of animosity or negative reaction because I chose to reinforce the ideas.Someone who is not willing to listen or reconsider will easily be susceptible to burn out again. Especially to advice only intended to help not criticize.
by righthand
1/11/2025 at 7:28:36 PM
Be proud of your work.I was just thinking the other day that all of the code I've written for companies is now dead and gone. I wrote some really elegant, interesting stuff at a few companies and now it's only a memory in my head.
I should've gone into civil engineering.
by snozolli
1/12/2025 at 1:11:09 AM
Amen to this. Of the biggest frustrations I've had in my career, at the top of the list is working with engineers who do not take pride in their craft. I'm amazed at the number of people that just dial it in or make minimal effort. Perhaps some of these people are burned-out, but surely not all.My goal was to get whatever I was working on not just "done", but "done-done". To a state where, if I walked away, it could live on in a working manner and be easily maintained by someone else. That meant having good test coverage, up-to-date documentation, instructions on how to get started with the repo, notes on dependencies, etc. Sometimes that someone else is future me, six months or six years later.
I experienced burnout early in my career, in the dot-com era, and it became especially acute when then the bubble burst. All those long hours (mostly) for naught.
The best times were at companies where everyone was all-in and we each had each-others back. Rare, but amazing when it happens. These were all at startups.
by dougdonohoe
1/11/2025 at 8:55:17 PM
I've gradually come to a similar conclusion. The only antidote is to make sure the work you're most proud of are all open source. It's most likely going to be code you wrote in your spare time.My GitHub has a few pieces of code that I'm really proud of. And some companies actually ask for code I'm proud of as part of the interview process, so I have that ready and it helps.
by kccqzy
1/11/2025 at 8:29:33 PM
That’s okay, the only person that cares about your legacy of code is you. Be proud that you’re capable of the work, not that you have a commit history when no one is asking for that.by righthand
1/11/2025 at 9:10:00 PM
Buildings fall down eventually, too.Worth remembering we write code to create human value. Somewhere, in some way, your elegant code actually ran and did a thing that led some number of humans to be enabled or understand or somehow be affected by it.
by lubujackson
1/11/2025 at 9:42:32 PM
Personally, I find this aspect of the work somewhat profound.My graveyard of projects and dreams stretches out behind me and I feel saddened to know that these articles representing portions of my life never achieved what I had hoped for them.
However, I've come to view my work like a mandala or some representation of our mortality itself; our works and our lives are temporary.
We can make the most of the brief moment that we have – whether that be through work or through parenting or through base jumping – whatever that may be for each of us, or we can choose to do nothing with that moment, knowing that it's ephemeral and will be gone soon anyway.
I choose to try making each day's the best code I have ever written; I want it to be "beautiful" and maintainable in spite of knowing that it will be refactored, deleted or decommissioned at some point.
by tres
1/12/2025 at 12:20:44 PM
My oldest code still in production is 20 years old.Work for non tech companies if you want it to last. Some industrial code is even older - my company has just removed some devices that requires a floppy disk to update
by chgs
1/12/2025 at 3:11:26 AM
It’s ironic that the absolute shittiest code I’ve ever written right when I came out of university, has been and still is powering a bunch of company websites for 15 years.by Aeolun
1/11/2025 at 7:16:43 PM
"enjoy the tasks assigned to you however dull or basic they may be after you mastered them. Be proud of your work."Ohhh, this is freakin hard to me. Bunch of users are complaining about feature not working properly in our Enterprise product, but it's not impactful enough to fix, because those users are not going to complain to their CEO/COO about broken feature in our product, because they themselves might be labeled as COMPLAINER and eventually kicked out.
What's impactful? Of course new shiny AI-powered green button, it's so amazing, project created by a super talented story teller engineer and who is good at selling it to leadership. Does it impact metrics? Yes, of course, those metrics are also crafted specifically for that feature. (more time user spends on that page, more impactful. Is it? maybe users are confused or can't find what they're looking for? Can you tell it to leadership? Ohh they approved this metric and project, are you against VP+ leadership's decisions?)
And we wonder, why do we have double digit customer churn rate.
by tuyguntn
1/11/2025 at 8:32:28 PM
If this is hard then you’re ignoring the rest of my comment for one sentence. These need to happen together as each piece supports the other one. Stop caring about what your companies crappy product could be if you have no agency to change it.by righthand
1/11/2025 at 7:51:52 PM
> And we wonder, why do we have double digit customer churn rate.What is the employee churn rate?
by fn-mote
1/12/2025 at 5:19:37 PM
double digit as well :)by tuyguntn
1/11/2025 at 7:32:21 PM
For what it's worth, I've found success in not getting burned out by literally doing the opposite of this (save for the being proud of my work part).by pgwhalen
1/11/2025 at 8:21:39 PM
Sure, I’m not saying being involved isn’t a great way to live your working life. However not being involved is a great way to avoid burnout by reducing stress factors.by righthand
1/11/2025 at 9:47:42 PM
That's funny I usually think the opposite. I derive no satisfaction from writing software for dubious ends. Understanding product value and/or helping to determine priorities makes things feel more tangible. Maybe better to say that you should find your own happy place.by tootie
1/11/2025 at 10:09:41 PM
The problem is you can control the first but not the latter. You can control doing quality technical work. You cant really control whether what you do has much value (the market decides that, not you)by AznHisoka
1/11/2025 at 6:52:08 PM
This is so hard! It leads to poor products/the loudest voice wins. Rarely is there a coherent long-term vision. Even at the benefit of the single participant/employeeby cobertos
1/11/2025 at 8:28:08 PM
I would argue you’re still caring too much. If you can abstract your care into another project either at the company or in your personal time the crappy product won’t matter. If you have to speak against someone, get data to back yourself up. Or get the loud mouth hooked on data and solve it that way.by righthand
1/12/2025 at 7:56:24 AM
How not caring is a solution when actually it is one of the symptomsby szundi
1/11/2025 at 11:00:49 PM
[dead]by ChoHag
1/11/2025 at 7:42:52 PM
I burned out bad running a startup and shutting it down during Covid. I managed to recover since then.There are lots of causal factors leading to burnout. It’s basically a long term energy imbalance along multiple dimensions.
One of those dimensions is attentional fatigue caused by our messy digital environment:
https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
But there are other factors that feed into it: physical, emotional, social.
I highly recommend attention span by Gloria Mark, The Power of Engagement by Jim Loehr, and for those who want to change their life, Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg.
by vonnik
1/11/2025 at 5:43:53 PM
> The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.I'm here, but it just seems like a temporary fix. I can't imagine doing this for the rest of my life, but I need money and health insurance. What's the alternative, what did you end up doing?
by fullshark
1/11/2025 at 6:25:22 PM
I don't have all the answers. I don't even know your situation. For me, I am still in tech. Like everyone else, my family needs the money. Once in a while I do something that satisfies me personally as well as the company I work for. rt Alternatives? Well, I think anything you can start up on your own where you have the autonomy and can dictate your hours/balance would be your medium term goal. I'm working towards mine, but I think its different for everyone. Contract working, consultant working, small personal business with a reduced hours main stream 9-5.My assumption is people like us, we care a lot, we are smart, we are capable, and when we get stuck in corporate swamps our inner candle starts to go out. We just need to find ways to spend less time in the swamp.
by nostradumbasp
1/11/2025 at 7:59:07 PM
There’s a lot of different ways to be miserable in this world but one in particular that seems to hit a lot of people in our industry is not knowing what you want.So many people followed a path laid out by others for so long—-study hard, do extracurriculars, go to a good college, study hard again, do internships, get a job with a prestigious company, work towards promo.
At some point, generally in late 20s but can be before or after, many such people realize that they have if not everything they ever dreamed of then at least a lot of what they worked towards. But they still aren’t happy because in all those years they never figured out what kind of people they actually were—what it is that would make them happy.
We all need money, but do you need that much money? If yes, then ok. Try to think about what you need the money for in the next stupid meeting about story points. But if no, then you have options.
by bradleyjg
1/11/2025 at 9:51:04 PM
I think it's not as simple as thinking: there is this one kind of person you are and it's a constant and you need to figure out who that is and how to be that person to be happy.People change a lot. There's no golden idol person in my future that would make me happy if only I could break free and become that person. That person changes constantly.
I think we are unhappy because we've been fed a lie that that person is just over the horizon and you're not living your full life properly unless you become that person. The problem is that that person changes constantly. It's always out of reach and who's to say you will be happy once you get to that point?
A change in mindset is the cure. But a change in mindset does not cause economies to scale, shareholders to get value and cause the wheels of industry to move. We are always arriving for something we think will save us.
by polishdude20
1/12/2025 at 10:40:08 AM
What gets me more is the constant narrative of the pursuit of happiness as the end goal, which drives people into painting the perfect future in their imagination where their relationships have zero friction, they enjoy every day in the office, etc.Because you just can't think "what would make me happy" without involving people who aren't even around in the present moment. In fact, if somehow someone manages to come up with a way to satisfy happiness by ignoring their environment then that person deserves my sympathy, because the goal is not to be "happy no matter what goes around you": That requires detachment.
by Arisaka1
1/11/2025 at 7:07:37 PM
Do that while your mind figures out how to make money work for you.Everything is temporary, even you. You only need enough money for you to live from your 401k/rented houses/investments.
Also, be on the lookout for new opportunities.
And if you are a bit masochistic just try to work on something boring. Helps with "not caring enough, I'm just the computer equivalent of a payroll accountant, pay me and you'll get your payrolls on time".
by javcasas
1/11/2025 at 7:33:38 PM
> Everything is temporary, even you.Glad to see some good old Buddhism philosophy at work. I am much happy now once I start thinking the same
by gloryjulio
1/11/2025 at 5:46:49 PM
At work it is clear. 25% growth per year or we are all out of work. What more do you need, we are all in the same boat from the CEO on down.We used to run companies and share stock. Now private equity hands out money and goals and if the goals aren't met your company that is doing great and turning 15% per year evaporates on the next recap.
by datavirtue
1/11/2025 at 6:36:24 PM
If you have to grow 25% every year just to stay afloat, I hate to break it to you but your business model is shitby mcmcmc
1/11/2025 at 7:18:57 PM
Private equity is not happy with 15% because they can get that by parking their money in a REIT. They are shooting for the moon, period. Once you take their money their is no backing out. It's to the moon or close up shop.by datavirtue
1/12/2025 at 1:37:45 PM
What REITs have 15% return? That seems improbable.by throwaway2037
1/11/2025 at 7:04:02 PM
I think he's saying they have to grow 25% per year to please their PE overlords.by santoshalper
1/11/2025 at 7:12:41 PM
Ah. Well then yeah, I think it’s safe to say the business model of PE wealth extraction is broken. That or businesses that need to take on PE funding are probably not very sound.by mcmcmc
1/11/2025 at 8:50:21 PM
PE is what happens when a company dies - PE is how the carcass of the company rots.by TeMPOraL
1/11/2025 at 6:30:23 PM
I'm not out of work just because one company goes under, thoughby 01HNNWZ0MV43FF
1/11/2025 at 6:19:23 PM
I've tried the "don't care too much or too little" dance, and it's only a temporary fix, at least for me. It's really hard to walk that tightrope.by Trasmatta
1/11/2025 at 6:37:32 PM
I just watch this monthly, it helpsby goodcharles
1/11/2025 at 7:28:32 PM
I watched through some of this. This all seems very wise and well-informed. However the answer given is to spend a lot of energy attempting to work the system in fairly subtle ways to get the outcome you want - that the organization will accept your well-intentioned contributions to their functioning and eventual profit. All it takes is one or two people in the right place that don't share the same goal or are just really not that good to turn that into an exercise in futility.by convolvatron
1/11/2025 at 7:30:51 PM
541 views, on an 8 years old video. How many of those are you responsible for? Anyway I put it on my watch later list, thanks!by evjan
1/11/2025 at 9:49:47 PM
I just watched this — pretty good talk, thanks for linking it.by peterldowns
1/11/2025 at 6:21:08 PM
>> but you are at the mercy of who is in chargeOnce you realize that that person is an idiot or is against you it kills you psychologically because you realize you are in a dead end.
by NotGMan
1/11/2025 at 6:40:24 PM
Hi definitely not a G Man.Personally, idiots are fine as long as they listen to their team-mates when it matters. Maybe that means they aren't idiots... Anyway, adversarial bosses and extremely poorly managed projects are the issue for me. That is a dead-end with possible health issues and career [Vio]ing sprinkled on-top. There's no helping it either. Digging harder just keeps the murderer's [Psy]hes cleaner. That's the trap I see a lot of people fall into.
by nostradumbasp
1/11/2025 at 6:42:14 PM
>> and rates your performanceI think in practice it is much more complicated than that. While org charts largely a tree, the influence graph is often very different. It isn't like the immediate manager can just fire anyone they feel like without consequences in most orgs.
by osigurdson
1/11/2025 at 6:50:37 PM
Yea but your immediate manager can easily set a person up for complete failure and broadcast only the failings. I've seen it happen to different people on many occasions. Basically the old "balance these 12 things 1 of them, the 1 you drop will end up being me and my buddy bosses most important item and the other 11 are worthless". Or "no need to attend that meeting" and if you don't show oh boy strike one. Positions of influence are super easy to game.by nostradumbasp
1/11/2025 at 9:24:45 PM
It depends to the extent that the org chart == influence graph.by osigurdson
1/11/2025 at 7:59:30 PM
> It is not about realized gains, it could even be at great detriment to a company. It is about short-term line item claimable gains.It's not even about that.
People need to realize that inflicting suffering on those "under" someone is one of the main motivators of human behavior.
It's innate and it exists because the abuser get tremendous benefits, including health-wise.
by 77pt77
1/11/2025 at 8:32:37 PM
I see what you mean, but I disagree that this is an innate trait in human beings. I believe it is sometimes socialized, poor understanding of zero-sum games, etc.Often-times its just garden variety psychopathy, narcissism, and other dark personality traits. For those people its definitely innate. Unfortunately psychopaths pathologically do everything they can to position themselves into seats like management/leadership. It's kind of a tricky situation for other-wise mentally well people.
by nostradumbasp
1/11/2025 at 5:52:32 PM
Individual self-reliance and coping only goes so far. I think OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of capitalism increasingly squeezing every once of joy out of people's lives, and demanding more labour from fewer people under dehumanizing conditions.From a Marxist perspective I think we're seeing the synthesis of deeply individualistic capitalist culture, and the renewed awareness of class consciousness and workers rights. In the past these kind of conflicts have led to the 5 day work week, The New Deal, etc. But the same conditiona can also lead to far-right authoritarianism.
by bdndndndbve
1/11/2025 at 6:08:08 PM
Love seeing this kind of analysis on HN of all places. At least today we can hope that our understanding of history will lead to people being less electorally friendly to the fascist right than they were the first time around.by achierius
1/11/2025 at 6:42:02 PM
The trend among men, sadly, is a flight from higher education. It used to be a status symbol, but since more women are entering STEM fields men are increasingly looking for alternative credentials like bootcamps. This is a common phenomenon in many fields across time, where men flee "feminized" work and it becomes less prestigious.A side effect of higher education becoming "low status" is that men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history. Which makes them more vulnerable to radicalization.
by bdndndndbve
1/11/2025 at 9:47:15 PM
Who is so fragile that they care about the gender of their coworker? This isn’t oil rigs or combat roles, where brute strength has legitimate value.by sgarland
1/11/2025 at 11:42:27 PM
This is a proven trend that's happened in multiple fields. It's not about the gender of your individual coworkers, it's about the relative prestige of a field. When women become more prevalent the credential or field becomes less valued and men flee.by bdndndndbve
1/12/2025 at 12:54:56 AM
Either I’m dramatically misunderstanding, or others are. I’m asking, why does women entering a field make it less prestigious? Who are these snowflake men that can’t fathom working alongside women?by sgarland
1/12/2025 at 4:14:17 AM
Discrimination and disparities have self-reinforcing loops. There is a gender pay gap. This is a very complex problem with multiple causes and effects: sexism, maternity leave, married couples making the rational economic decision that the lower earning spouse looks after the kids at home, etc. A person looks at a field, sees that it's lower pay and prestige, and sees that it's filled with women. If they are more sexist than average they draw the conclusion that women's work is worth less and justify discrimination's effects as caused by innate differences. Even if they are less sexist than average they are concerned that other people's sexism has demonetized that line of work. Thus the rational move is often to also perpetuate the disparity by avoiding the "pink collar" job, or not care that a high end job has features unfriendly to women. Advantage begets advantage. The inverse is also true.Jobs, gender, salary level for a given job, gender roles, and whether child care is considered "work" are all social constructs.
by supertrope
1/12/2025 at 3:12:46 AM
Have you been paying attention to the sort of people who have been grabbing all the power in this country of late? Those people.by TylerE
1/11/2025 at 11:24:26 PM
I had some mandatory philosophy at STEM university. It utterly failed to evoke any intellectual curiosity, perhaps even inoculated us against trying to get interested. And don't let me start on history education.by rini17
1/11/2025 at 7:59:26 PM
Interesting.> men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history
And to be clear this includes prestigious nationally-ranked “tech” schools, right? Possibly even those with lip service to a liberal arts education where one can actually be excused from “distribution requirement” courses based on their high school experience. (Oh, you support that? Well… maybe I did too, but I sure didn’t understand the connections. Maybe a class would have helped.)
by fn-mote
1/11/2025 at 8:07:32 PM
I'm not sure if I understand your point, but the point is there's a kind of credentialing treadmill where once women get into a particular field or class of institution it loses prestige and men flee to alternatives which become more prestigious. An example is undergrad biology becoming predominantly women and being seem as the "easiest" STEM major.I think if you see a majority-female CS class graduating from Stanford it is a sign that VCs and other power brokers will begin weighting that credential less.
This is complementary to the anti-intellectualism that's already baked into fascism. Rich people like Peter Thiel have already started paying people to "not go to school" as an anti-intellectual backlash against inclusion and diversity.
by bdndndndbve
1/12/2025 at 1:33:29 PM
Can you get a good job with only a 1st degree in biology? I doubt it.by throwaway2037
1/11/2025 at 11:40:39 PM
[dead]by fc417fc802
1/11/2025 at 9:27:27 PM
My observation is completely the opposite. Higher education is the source of today's youth radicalization. Harvard, Columbia, UPenn are all ground zeros of radicalization that we as society going to suffer from for decades.by myth_drannon
1/11/2025 at 11:45:14 PM
What kind of radicalization do you mean? The kind that tries to violently overthrow the government after an election they don't like?by bdndndndbve
1/13/2025 at 2:11:07 AM
The same leftist university students that brought Islamic revolution to Iran and cultural revolution to China. It all starts with universities. Today's protesting students from Columbia are tomorrow's political elite and mark my words, Germany's 30s will look like a walk in a park comparing to what will be in US.And regarding your Idaho farmers and other nutters with horns on the head, they are too irrelevant and dumb to cause anything serious even in large numbers.
by myth_drannon
1/12/2025 at 3:48:40 AM
Yet people with lower education were (again) more likely to vote for the most radical president in the US history.Social media and its propagandists are the source of modern radicalization, together with failure of neoliberalism to produce growth that benefits the little guy. The university far leftist radical and rural Trump voter have lots in common in hating the status quo. They just blame different things, often the wrong ones like migrants or white privilege.
Everyone not in the billionaire club should hate neoliberalism.
by hjgjhyuhy
1/11/2025 at 7:09:02 PM
> Individual self-reliance and coping only goes so far. I think OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of capitalism increasingly squeezing every once of joy out of people's lives, and demanding more labour from fewer people under dehumanizing conditions.Yes. The US lost the general pattern of an 8 hour day, a 40 hour week, time and a half for overtime, and employment duration measured in decades. Most people can handle that.
Most people cannot handle 996 work, "clopeners"[1], and "side hustles" for long.
That's really it. The US just needs to get back to what were normal labor practices from the 1950s to the 1970s.
The key item here is paid overtime at a higher rate. That makes it uneconomic to have people at work too long. It's cheaper to hire an additional person.
"Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will." - Knights of Labor, 1888.
[1] https://calchamberalert.com/2023/04/14/clopening-schedules-g...
by Animats
1/11/2025 at 8:45:36 PM
> "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will." - Knights of Labor, 1888.There's another failure mode of modernity, that makes this quote a sleight of hand: commute. Commute takes another hour or three out of the "rest" and "what you will" sets.
by TeMPOraL
1/11/2025 at 10:10:14 PM
Also, for families, that was eight hours of paid work from one parent, not both...by rvense
1/12/2025 at 2:01:52 PM
In 1888, the mothers and any kids old enough to help had essentially full-time jobs with the housework. And mandatory education stopped much younger than today, IIRC from 10 to 14 depending on the country (assuming they had mandatory education at all, which some didn't), so they had more time than you may expect for helping with the household.There were mechanical washing machines and vaccum cleaners back then, even before electricity, but even that was all harder work than now.
by ben_w
1/12/2025 at 2:49:59 PM
There was a magic period of time after electric-powered washing machines became ubiquitous, but before the market adjusted to women entering the labor force, when you could sustain a home on a single income, and women (and then men, too!) actually had a choice between staying at home to care for house & kids, and having a career. Alas, now the choice is gone, and everyone has to have a job. Sucks for the kids, as now both parents need to go to work, whether they want it or not.by TeMPOraL
1/12/2025 at 12:57:42 AM
If it wasn’t for wasting an additional 2 hours a day on commute…by onemoresoop
1/11/2025 at 7:36:57 PM
It is insane that 8 hours of work per day was considered a reasonable target, back when they didn’t have modern automation. Where did we go wrong? Feels like somewhere we switched from just trying to do the work that needed to be done, to trying figure out a way to generate enough work so that we’ll be needed.by bee_rider
1/11/2025 at 8:43:50 PM
> Feels like somewhere we switched from just trying to do the work that needed to be done, to trying figure out a way to generate enough work so that we’ll be needed.Modern economy is set on the premise that there's always some way to make money, meaning there's always more work that could be done (regardless of whether that work is actually useful).
by TeMPOraL
1/11/2025 at 11:01:11 PM
I think it's worse than that; people need to be kept busy and on their toes at all times, lest they start thinking.by EtCepeyd
1/12/2025 at 4:46:03 AM
"Idle hands are the devil's workshop."A lot of big cities have youth programs out of fear kids will otherwise join gangs. As an adult if you have a big mortgage payment or rent is high you must hustle. Some of this rat race is optional. Advertisers tell us making yet another purchase will solve your problem(s) or insecurity. Ironically if everyone lived modestly that would trigger a recession.
by supertrope
1/11/2025 at 11:46:27 PM
It's not just thought, but also effort. If you have downtime you have time to organize and advocate for yourself. If you have savings you can withhold labour. The ideal conditions for capitalists are that every worker has the bare minimum to be alive and if they miss work they don't receive that minimum.by bdndndndbve
1/11/2025 at 8:11:34 PM
This is the point of dialectical materialism - before the 8 hour workweek there was an even longer work day with worse conditions. The people born into those circumstances struggled against capitalists (in the sense of people who have capital) to make 8 hour workdays the norm. The next generation was born with 8 hour workdays being standard, and capital pushed back and squeezed in other areas where labour wasn't resisting. Capital has now squeezed so hard that labour is organizing again and realizing they need to fight to retain any of their rights.by bdndndndbve
1/11/2025 at 8:33:24 PM
Teen Vogue had a good article on this back in 2022.[1] Similar to the OP here, but better written.by Animats
1/12/2025 at 9:07:07 PM
Australia just made wage theft a criminal offense.[1] Maximum penalty for employers is 10 years in jail. Became effective January 1, 2025.This is going to be interesting.
[1] https://www.employmentlawhandbook.com.au/bulletin/new-laws-c...
by Animats
1/11/2025 at 6:47:29 PM
I do agree with you. People need to band up with one another and work this out together. In the mean time though, most people are already in a situation where its far too late unless they can shake their situation and start new somewhere else.I think anyone who has turned on the news in the last 9 years, what technologies and companies are trending, can predict which way things are going to go. Again though, we all need to come together for that too...
by nostradumbasp
1/12/2025 at 11:45:13 AM
>> I think OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of capitalism increasingly squeezing every once of joy out of people's lives, and demanding more labour from fewer people under dehumanizing conditions.Let's have a look at China, or the former communist countries (soviet union etc). All people in those communist regimes are slaved, being under surveillance and often suppressed (except the regime, of course), with the government being the suppressor (as opposed to greedy companies). History is full of evidence, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway
Thinking capitalism is the culprit is naive. Power will find its way. Legal regulations of working hours, holidays, health insurance as well as unions work very well for most modern western countries. In many countries there's a constant fight between unions and companies. That is a good way to balance power. No need to bring back cruel communist regimes.
by Ko224bt
1/11/2025 at 7:25:24 PM
> It is about short-term line item claimable gains. "We got 4 good months out of her...", "they were terminal and now they will be working somewhere better for them...", "he really wasn't closing as many tickets as the rest of the team...", "they weren't helping as many team members as the rest of the team...", "we never needed someone with an advanced degree...", etc.This resonates with me. The org chart cares about headcount - it doesn't matter to them who fills the count. Only plausible heads who could pass some random interview. The upper bosses don't see you as human, only as chess pieces to move around to fit a narrative.
If the narrative against you shifts to the negative, there are many ways to justify your exit. They don't care if you die, or your children go hungry, or you lose your house or healthcare. What they care about is narratives that justify their own existence in the org chart. They don't even care about the services or products they build. It is just about their own existence. Every other effort be damned.
Reader, now that you are aware that they don't care about anything - and certainly not about you - it is really up to you to secure yourself financially, physically, emotionally and preserve your time. If they come at you with reviews or other BS, you should consider your time is up, safeguard yourself, and sabotage them if you can.
This is fair. Remember that you are playing with the same rules as them. If they can't care about engineering, you sure as hell don't need to. If they care about politics, you sure as hell play it with them.
Take it as a toxic game but secure your life - as far away from corporate toxicity as possible.
by nine_zeros
1/11/2025 at 8:44:25 PM
There are tons of companies that don't even produce things anymore, all they do is buy and sell other companies as a "portfolio". Really weird to think about!Let me advise against sabotage. There's a saying about seeking revenge and digging two graves. The truth is, this whole thing is unsustainable, and will collapse on it's own. No one actually has to do anything to sabotage something like this.
I recommend instead to "document" and "socialize". The people who operate this way are sloppy, greedy, and think they are invincible. Don't do anything to convince them they are though. They are always, and I mean always, fucking up. Spread the good word of your documented and likely illegal treatment to a pro-bono employment lawyer before or after a likely illegal lay-off and get a severance as a settlement avoiding court entirely (if you wish).
Socialize with others you trust in your industry about the treatment at the companies that operate this way. Be weary of slander, that's what documentations helps with. Word travels fast. In the old days this was how people dealt with societal outcasts. With the internet, this is easier than ever.
That said, I can't control what someone decides to do but I will share. One of the "worst" things you can do at a company like this is be really nice to people inside and outside your team, and do your job within your means. It drives the creatures up a wall. Sometimes after you leave even if not by your own volition, others will follow suite by their own accord.
by nostradumbasp
1/11/2025 at 9:59:27 PM
I'm currently recovering from burnout and the trick of not caring just does not work for me. This is my 2nd burnout and even though I learned that trick among other things from the 1st, it just does not work because I think it's a problem that stems from my personality. I care too much about various things that are related to my work.by harha_
1/12/2025 at 1:30:29 AM
Same, I am in my 40s and so far have never found a way to not care. I am simply that kind of person and I have screamed and raged against it many times, still couldn't change. If I stop caring I'll become somebody else entirely; it will profoundly change everything I do in every venue of life, intimate life / marriage included.I just can't see it ever changing.
But, as people love to say, everyone eventually gets to their own level of incompetence. This is definitely mine. I want to be able to segment my not caring and I am trying various things; nothing so far works but some measures have netted very small results -- like being dead-tired and suffering from 3 separate heavy health conditions, for example. If that can be counted as "a measure that works", that is. :D
by pdimitar
1/12/2025 at 3:08:18 AM
I have the same issue, but I’ve found that the trick is for me work on things I care about, even if that’s not necessarily the main goal of the organisation. Just find things that have enough overlap that nobody in leadership can say you’re not working towards useful goals.I’m not sure how replicable it is in a different org though, and I’m not likely to leave to find out xD
by Aeolun
1/13/2025 at 11:33:57 AM
It is so depriving to interview for new position the very same way with the very same narratives after three positions you don't really care about. Yes, I am a serial no-caring person now into three of my recent jobs after the initial months of inflated and intentional self blinding positivism pulled over my mind to numb it from fear of growing futileness. Previous two was left before even havin a new place, now I have children and it is so desperate economic reasoning stuck in a hopeless and unreliable situation that the demotivation is closing on unbearable poisoning my private life (this is what I want to show to my children?). I am trying to convince my wife (and in fact myself too) of working for myself instead. Different risky, but just different, not more. Staying is also risky. I am at the mercy of a disliked and faceless organization. People come and go, we were just aquired by an investor aiming at squeezing out more money, yes, not the product or activity is in the focus but pure money, the rest is secondary, whatever is fine as long the income grows, need to feed now the advisors and investors and lawyers and bankers in addition of the current organization, and in a shorten timeframe because there are clear goals about income for the next 5 years. About the income, the faith of the product is a secondary, indirect/dependent matter. People want their money back very soon, plus more. I can become an obstacle in any minute when they figure out they need no R&D for income in the next 5 years, just like with VMWare and Broadcom and similars. I find myself in a situation like shown in this The Economist article [1] with no hope finding better, as the others I am actively interviewing are already went through the same or going through the same currently:"Identify a mature business, ideally one that is critical for customers. Buy it at a decent price. Cut it to the bone by reducing the workforce, eliminating less lucrative products and slashing research-and-development budgets. Jack up prices for captive clients. Harvest the cash. Fork lots of it out to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases, which big tech tends to shun. Take what is left and repeat."
Why try hard if I will end up in the same ditch not trying hard?....
[1] https://www.economist.com/business/2024/12/19/meet-the-most-...
by mihaaly
1/11/2025 at 8:27:16 PM
> The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.Unfortunately this situation isn't able to be earnestly evaluated in the US without enormous effort to reform labor law. (Or if it is earnestly evaluated it obviously biases the needs of the employer rather than the entity that matters.)
by PittleyDunkin
1/12/2025 at 10:38:06 AM
> The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.how to balance that with the fact that you wanted more than just waking up for a paycheck by working in this field ? being passive and bored (reminds me that bore-out exists too) is not how i envision a happy life
by agumonkey
1/11/2025 at 6:24:15 PM
It's like impedance matching.by HPsquared
1/11/2025 at 5:53:15 PM
[dead]by cindycindy
