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What jobs don't have drawbacks though? I have been thinking a bit about this: 1. Doctor: In many cases, throw away your life and work 60+ hours and also you ne

What jobs don't have drawbacks though? I have been thinking a bit about this: 1. Doctor: In many cases, throw away your life and work 60+ hours and also you need to specialize and study long and hard. 2. Laywer: I don't know enough about the profession. The job doesn't transfer well to other countries. 3. Consultant: 60+ hour days are the norm, interviews tend to be based on quick thinking in the high school arena. To pass the interview, you need to have excellent and super quick high school level knowledge of: math, logic, social and political skills. This sound denigrating but I found it tough to do this quick. 4. Investment banker: 100 hours 5. Construction worker: your body will thank you later (/sarcasm). Programmers have a certain set of advantages and disadvantages (I agree with your disadvantages), but how is it worse than other white collar jobs?

dropit_sphere 7y ago
You're not wrong. The labor market is relatively efficient. Go on a reasoning chain with me: - what solves the problem nicely is to sell software. Selling good software can be one of the easiest and most lucrative jobs in the world. In practice no particular employee gets that---the company pays enough to motivate, but takes the rest. The solution, then, is to be the software company. So...start a startup? "What a novel idea Dropit, on HN of all places!" I have actually "done this" (or thought I was doing it) multiple times (failed every time), but looking back I can see a lot of trivial mistakes I made. But at least I can find some---with many code-for-hire fiascos, the mistake was taking the job in the first place. So my conclusion: accept the job you have, for now, while saving money and trying to have a good, normal life, and put some effort into seeking out new opportunities. FU money is a thing, as is FU market position.
- mettamage 7y ago
  A strategy I thought out today was as follows (note: I'm based in The Netherlands): 1. Get a job for 32 hours per week 2. Work 10 hours on week days and 8 hours on one weekend day (take the other weekend day of), so that you clock 58 hours per week. 3. Don't take up your vacation, safe it. 4. Take the other 6 months off. 5. Oh, and pay less taxes. You're handing in 20% gross, but net you're only handing in 15%. I think a schedule like this works for people like me, because I like to work hard and earn my freedom and then relax and doodle around for quite a while (i.e. 2 to 4 months) and then do a small side project and then work hard again. Since I'm at the beginning of my career, it sounds like an interesting experiment. Not for my situation, but for others: geo-arbitrage becomes interesting as you can literally fly to Thailand for 6 months and come back (a cheap retour ticket is found for around 400 euro's).
kube-system 7y ago
> 3. Consultant: 60+ hour days are the norm Dang, I thought 12 hour days were bad.

dropit_sphere 7y ago

You're not wrong. The labor market is relatively efficient. Go on a reasoning chain with me: - what solves the problem nicely is to sell software. Selling good software can be one of the easiest and most lucrative jobs in the world. In practice no particular employee gets that---the company pays enough to motivate, but takes the rest. The solution, then, is to be the software company. So...start a startup? "What a novel idea Dropit, on HN of all places!" I have actually "done this" (or thought I was doing it) multiple times (failed every time), but looking back I can see a lot of trivial mistakes I made. But at least I can find some---with many code-for-hire fiascos, the mistake was taking the job in the first place. So my conclusion: accept the job you have, for now, while saving money and trying to have a good, normal life, and put some effort into seeking out new opportunities. FU money is a thing, as is FU market position.

mettamage 7y ago
A strategy I thought out today was as follows (note: I'm based in The Netherlands): 1. Get a job for 32 hours per week 2. Work 10 hours on week days and 8 hours on one weekend day (take the other weekend day of), so that you clock 58 hours per week. 3. Don't take up your vacation, safe it. 4. Take the other 6 months off. 5. Oh, and pay less taxes. You're handing in 20% gross, but net you're only handing in 15%. I think a schedule like this works for people like me, because I like to work hard and earn my freedom and then relax and doodle around for quite a while (i.e. 2 to 4 months) and then do a small side project and then work hard again. Since I'm at the beginning of my career, it sounds like an interesting experiment. Not for my situation, but for others: geo-arbitrage becomes interesting as you can literally fly to Thailand for 6 months and come back (a cheap retour ticket is found for around 400 euro's).

kube-system 7y ago

> 3. Consultant: 60+ hour days are the norm Dang, I thought 12 hour days were bad.