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Honestly I hate these self-absorbed, live-is-tough posts by Software Developers doing creative work in a nice air conditioned office. Get a real job, try milki

• sverige 8y ago
  I suspect many people's exhaustion may come from the suppressed awareness that the work on which they're spending so much time and energy is ultimately futile, ephemeral, and perhaps even harmful. I felt the same way some years ago and decided to completely change my life to focus on family time and work that provides a sense of real accomplishment. I'm a few steps lower on the social ladder, I suppose, but my life is so much better that I truly don't give a shit about that. Getting to the point where I was willing to change required going several layers deeper than I had gone before, though, and there were some very painful realizations along the way. Just a mild warning for anyone who might want to do the same thing. P.S. I truly enjoy weekends now. I previously felt much the same way about them as the author.
  • quickthrower2 8y ago
    Do you mind sharing your before and after job role?
    • sverige 8y ago
      To avoid the risk of seeming to be prescriptive, I'll just say that I had a reasonably sound resume with mostly middle management experience in litigation, insurance, telephone technology, and operations. (Those fields seem unrelated even to me when summarized, but there was a logical progression.) I am now working my dream job, which is solidly blue collar. It pays well enough, I still use my mind, and it is mostly not dull or repetitive. (I've worked a few of those, too, both white and blue collar.) There are a lot more of those kinds of blue collar jobs than many middle management types realize. Most of my old coworkers are long gone from my social circle, but in retrospect, that always happened when I went from one company to the next anyway.
• hassan_shaikley 8y ago
  Of our ancestors were like you we wouldn't have a 40 hour work week
  • Consultant32452 8y ago
    I dunno, I find it off putting when the 1% complain about how tough their lives are. It would be more palatable if it were surrounded by intense gratitude they are afforded off the backs of the less fortunate who are doing the grinding work of keeping the world functioning. But the gratitude is practically nonexistent.
    • VyperCard 8y ago
      I'd wish i was one of the 1%
      • Consultant32452 8y ago
        Global 1% is about $34k. $100k gets you to the 14th percentile in the US. $150k gets you to the 94th percentile. If you're a developer in the first world, you're incredibly rich and privileged not just by historical standards, but by real world modern standards.
        • glangdale 8y ago
          Global 1% is a daft standard for, well, anything. Most of those $34k in a first world country are going to be spend chasing goods that are incredibly expensive by both historical and real world modern standards (positional goods and goods subject to Baumol's cost disease). This leads to a bizarre narrative (especially roping in 'historical standards') - "hey, your health care may be dire, your education is haphazard, your food is non-nutritious and repetitive, and your living situation is precarious, but you have TV and better plumbing than a king from 100 years ago".
          • Consultant32452 8y ago
• pablasso 8y ago
  I get your point, but if there's no space for critique we wouldn't have any improvements ever. That someone else has it worse doesn't make it invalid.
• GuardianCaveman 8y ago
  So by your logic you can work 80 hours a week but because you’re inside an office and not a barn you lose you’re right to want a better work life balance? Where is the cut off for not being able to complain or is it like a spectrum? 20k wage with kids is bad you say what about 30k with 1 kid? Is that too easy? Cop in a good neighborhood? How good does the neighborhood have to be before you can’t complain anymore? You said a few hundred cows at 6 am is rough? What about 99 cows at 7am? People can be overworked in all kinds of jobs. Who are you the complaint police?
  • ianai 8y ago
    Right? This didn’t read at all like a whiney blog post, to me. 40 hours per week really leaves little else to do. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing for those 40 hours, because they’re not doing chores, socializing, etc.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      Consider that there are 168 hours in a week, and even accounting for 8 hours of sleep a day that's 112, subtracting 40 for work and you get 72. Lets call it an hour commute each way, that brings it to 62. So you actually have 62 hours of personal time every week to the 40 you spend at work. In other words, you could be getting 22 more hours of productive work done in your free time than you get done at work every week. This suggests that it isn't really a time problem.
      • Ftuuky 8y ago
        But you need some of those 62 hours to cook, eat, shower, shop, do chores, etc.
  • rayiner 8y ago
    > Where is the cut off for not being able to complain or is it like a spectrum? Wherever the cut-off happens to be, software developers are far past it.
    • 8y ago
• grecht 8y ago
  Developers and other people with great jobs know very well how privileged they are. That doesn't mean that they're not allowed to have problems and be stressed.
  • war1025 8y ago
    Many of them do. Certainly not all. There is also a certain level of knowing that you are privileged without understanding what exactly that means in how your life is different from people who are less fortunate. I'm sure I'm guilty of that more often than I'd like to admit.
• dpcan 8y ago
  There are two types of time: Time when you have to do something you don't want to be doing, and time when you are doing something you want to be doing. Everyone has these two types of time, regardless of what they choose to do during each. While you may do something you love, if you have to be doing it, it's still work.
• jorgesborges 8y ago
  What bothers me about these posts is that it seems to diminish any sense of personal responsibility for one's own happiness. Stop acting defeated and invest in other areas of your life where you can be more fulfilled. It may require changing jobs but it's better than slowly pissing your life away.
  • Top5a 8y ago
    >personal responsibility Blasphemy! I'd rather cry on the internet and collect sympathy points! Individual worth is derived solely from external validation by the social collective.
  • tastyfreeze 8y ago
    Absolutely, if you are unwilling to take the helm and steer yourself to happiness you might as well grab a shovel and start digging your grave. Happiness is not granted by existing. Happiness is created through deliberate effort.
• bradlys 8y ago
  Eh. Been in more manual labor oriented jobs before. It's mindless. I'm far more exhausted after thinking all day than I am from physical labor. I've also found that once you fulfill the basics in Maslow's, you can be less happy or satisfied. Before you were too focused on just surviving so the idea of contentment and satisfaction wasnt much of a thing. I envy the mindless jobs. Those people always seem so much more high energy when I meet them. It's the mind workers who look like zombies so frequently.
  • mymythisisthis 8y ago
    I've worked both. I always laughed at the ditch diggers when they complained about it being hard work (try writing reports to deadlines that have to be perfect). It was mindless work, ditch digging, tough on the body, but not hard. The ditch diggers do need to retire when 55, as their bodies are burnt out. But the job wasn't 'hard'. I firmly believe that we need to change society, a 3 to 4 day work week, with 1 or 2 days of free education. The ditch digger needs to learn a new skill for when they hit 55, the office workers need to relax and get their hands dirty doing mechanics.
• duncan-donuts 8y ago
  I started my career in the trades and I’m now a software engineer. You’re totally right. Software engineering is a pretty great job. The biggest difference I find is with the ability to turn off. When I worked in trades when the day was done it was done. The work was physically harder, but not as mentally tasking. With my work now I find that it can take me as much as 10 days[1] to truly stop thinking about the problems I work on. So, sure, we have it okay in software, but let’s not pretend it’s not difficult. 1) this is my own experience when I went on paternity leave for a month. Despite having a lot going on in my home life it took me over a week to let go of work and focus on my family.
• andrepd 8y ago
  Honestly I hate these self-absorbed, life-is-tough posts by farmers doing work in a nice spacious barn. Try having your entire village razed by US-backed troops, your family killed before your eyes, your daughter raped and dismembered and then yourself sold to slavery and working in a mine 18 hours a day. See where that goes? Nobody gets to complain about anything unless they're the absolute worst-off person in the world?
• jlg23 8y ago
  > I get it, figuring out how to get our software working can require a lot of thinking, but compared to most of the people out there its a sweet gig. Stop complaining. "The worst part is there is hardly any time for resting the mind and body. Our jobs can be mentally and physically demanding." I don't see how any other "too much" job is excluded; you are blaming the author for his background alone. For your example: If you have to milk "[n] cows every morning at x o-clock", you are done after n cows every day. If you design large software or manage larger projects, you are done once - when it's done. At least I don't take my physicial work home each day, but when working mentally I do this every day in worst case. I have done a lot from "both" worlds and honestly don't see much of a difference between aching bones and an aching mind for my private life.
  • raamdev 8y ago
    I have done a lot of both worlds and find an incredibly noticeable difference in my private life. Manual labor that has my body feeling ‘used’ at the end of the day makes me feel that I’ve somehow accomplished so much more than if I’ve only used my mind all day and I find myself generally happier on a day-to-day basis when I’ve been doing primarily manual labor all day. But I can’t seem to justify doing manual labor over the long term when I can make so much more money as a programmer using my mind. Since becoming a father, it also seems to have become harder to be willing to make less money for more general happiness, knowing that I can work remotely, have more free time for my kid, and make a lot more money in the long-run making money with my mind. It’s also hard to find manual labor jobs that don’t expose your body to something that is usually bad for your health over the long term. I try to find a balance by taking on, and volunteering to help with, major home projects whenever the opportunity arises, and exercising outdoors as much as practical, but I constantly feel like there’s a huge imbalance (I spend ~40 hours a week at my computer).
    • rootusrootus 8y ago
      I know people who've given up office jobs for manual ones for exactly the reasons you mention, and I envy them. But with two kids that is easier said than done.
• tastyfreeze 8y ago
  What exactly is a real job? Does a job have to physically difficult to be considered real? Why is a mentally taxing job any less real than a physically taxing one? Even meaningless work can be a real job. Some people enjoy working their asses off in the hot sun. Some enjoy sitting at a desk hacking code. Just because one job isnt like another doesn't mean it is less real.
  • lazyjones 8y ago
    > Does a job have to physically difficult to be considered real? Sitting for 40-50 hours a week and staring at a monitor is physically difficult, ask anyone with 20+ years of that under their belt.
    • rootusrootus 8y ago
      -raises hand- I have been working since the early 90s, mostly in 40-hour-a-week office jobs. I spend a lot more time now trying to mitigate the physical effects and I wish I could tell 20-year-old me to pay more attention to staying on top of good fitness, health, posture, etc, instead of assuming it would always be so easy.
• carc1n0gen 8y ago
  I worked a turkey egg production farm for 4 years before becoming a software developer. I can say without a doubt that the cognitive load software development brings has been worse on me than the 12 hour days on the farm ever were. Understandably that's just one guys experience though.
• kieranmaine 8y ago
  The post mentions they are mentally ill and medicated. "Stop complaining" is not an effective treatment for mental illness.
• rootusrootus 8y ago
  On the other hand, as with everything else, problems come in two sizes -- mine, and yours. And mine will always be much, much larger than yours. So don't spend too much time trying to decide if it's okay to complain about the difficulty of your life and go ahead and share your perspective. Someone else definitely has it harder, and someone has it easier, too.
• matwood 8y ago
  I know many will take what you said the wrong way, but I agree with your general point. Some perspective goes a long way. Even within the field of software engineering, we have a lot of choice and mobility job wise. Most do not have to work at companies asking for insanity.
• simook 8y ago
  I haven't read the post yet, but I did read this comment and wanted to share some of my thoughts. A real job can mean a lot of things to different people. For example, I consider my volunteer time as a board member at a non-profit organization to be a real job. Currently, It doesn't directly pay for my financial needs, but it pays in other ways. I think that it's important to acknowledge, recognize, and respect people for who they are, and what they are experiencing. The words we choose to use can have a significant impact. I hope you enjoy your weekend!