23 ms·

This is an awesome question. I hope someone has good strategies for you. Life should be spent doing the things you find worthwhile, and the fact is, not all of

• lmueongoqx 6y ago
  I'm surprised once again by the nice and helpful community on HN. I anticipated most comments would be people telling me to get my head out of my ass and get to work. I hope you find a way to chill through life.
  • busymom0 6y ago
    I think you question is very sincere and VERY UNIQUE for this community because every other question is asking for the exact opposite. That's why there are a lot of interesting replies as well as a lot of interest in the question itself. Is your hobby/"passions (which are not monetizable)" expensive? And are you 100% certain they are not monetizable? In today's world, I have yet to see something which is not monetizable. Unless you are referring to something which is too competitive - even that can be monetized....though monetization itself might require too much work which goes against your requirement so I understand.
    • candu 6y ago
      YMMV, but I've also found that treating all side projects as potential businesses sort of...takes the intangible quality of magic / fun / joy out of those side projects for me. For OP: it's OK to not want to monetize everything you do, even if those things might potentially be monetizable (which most things are, as the parent comment mentioned) - past some point, the incremental value of really, truly enjoying more of your time can have way more value than even fairly large amounts of additional money. Where that point lies exactly is a matter of debate, and probably depends greatly on how you place value on intangible experiences vs. tangible things. From experience, many people in the tech industry are well past this point but don't realize it, largely because we have a cognitive bias towards comparison with those around us. (Also, the above framing suggests strongly that we can learn to change where that point is for ourselves.)
    • SamBam 6y ago
      > In today's world, I have yet to see something which is not monetizable. Plenty of artists out there who love making art, and yet their art is simply not sellable. For many people this would be a source of disappointment, but for a lucky few they may realize they just enjoy creating art for its own sake, and not to sell it.
    • dkersten 6y ago
      > And are you 100% certain they are not monetizable? I learned that once I try to monetize my hobbies, there’s a very real risk that they become stressful and no longer fun and invigorating. Sometimes it’s best to keep hobbies as just hobbies. Or, at least, make sure you have some hobbies that will only ever stay hobbies. Nothing wrong with trying to do monetize something you love, just don’t let it be the only thing you love to do, so you still have something when you have a stressful day doing the first thing.
      • nataz 6y ago
        This is one of the most important lessons driven people have to learn!
        • 6y ago
• ethbr0 6y ago
  As someone who sympathizes with your comment ("tech stack complex and fugly") and has made moves both ways in terms of salary (high to low for QoL -25%, then low to high again +50%), start with your requirements. OP did a great job of saying "Here's what I need." Until that's staked out, you don't know what's too little, enough, and too much. But generally, minimizing and controlling costs (critically, through city choice) affords you flexibility. High costs = must work high paying job. Low costs = choice between working less, taking a job you enjoy more that pays less, or working more & saving. I'll probably switch back to a lower paying job in the next 6 months or year, because I'd rather work on something I love, and because I'll have the financial flexibility to do so.
  • elyobo 6y ago
    Partner choice and choice whether to have children are other critical considerations in cost control.
    • fsloth 6y ago
      "Family as the main instrument of cost control" - now that is bleak :D
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • Jedd 6y ago
        I think it's only genuinely bleak if your starting position is that family is assumed, rightful, and ineluctable - and electing to not head down that path is purely a fiscal decision.
        • elyobo 6y ago
          Agreed, and I didn't meant to suggest that it's purely a fiscal decision, just that there _are_ fiscal elements that one should be aware of.
      • 6y ago
• iso1631 6y ago
  My job allows me to go back stage at Glastonbury and track-side visits at the Olympics, front seat views of royal weddings, orchestral pit on last night of the proms, and I have a fairly sedantry job of mostly pushing buttons. Colleagues have spent days in jungles building bridges to drive cars over them, have got to know people living in random villages from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and share in their culture, have met and quizzed world leaders, have been to Antarctic bases, and have exposed and brought down criminal networks making lives miserable for thousands of people. I guess you'd define that as "glorious toiling", but I could have 10m in the bank and never have to work again, but get to do very little of that.
  • JamesAdir 6y ago
    What's your job?
    • harel 6y ago
      Works at the BBC if I had to guess...
      • iso1631 6y ago
        A lot of OBs are outsourced
  • burntoutfire 6y ago
    > My job allows me to go back stage at Glastonbury and track-side visits at the Olympics, front seat views of royal weddings, orchestral pit on last night of the proms, and I have a fairly sedantry job of mostly pushing buttons. I had a similar job once, where I worked in TV coverage of final table of WSOP (World Series of Poker). I was around the poker celebs at the time, preparing talking points for my boss who interacted with them, even have somewhere a photo of me sitting at the final table. My ultimate conclusion is... so what? Beyond a cool story to share with people interested in poker, there's little value in that for me, and I was a poker nerd then.
    • 6y ago
• Hypocritelefty 6y ago
  Hackernews is a meme hive
• tootie 6y ago
  After 20 years of working and a sense of genuine burnout, I landed a "Dream Job" a few months ago where I'm doing tech leadership at a mid-size non-profit. We have a small familial team, a set of worthwhile and genuinely beloved public services and mission of doing good. There's still politics and revenue issues and all the sorts of stuff that a go along with any company, but it's a lot less aggressive. Work-life balance and diversity are genuinely respected. I'm busy, but it's not crazy. In my past I worked on so many gigs for companies I didn't care about or downright disliked. Building tools to grab eyes or sell crap no one needed. Working somewhere with a positive mission is so much more valuable to me than working on a cool tech stack (our stack isn't too bad, but we're not cutting edge either). I feel better about work than I have in a long, long time. And before anyone asks, no we're not hiring. One tradeoff is that it's a very slow growth environment. We don't have VC funds to burn and our business model is very mature.
  • louwrentius 6y ago
    Congratulations, sounds indeed like a good working environment.
  • devilduck 6y ago
    That's great for you but what does it have to do with the OP?
  • 3minus1 6y ago
    Man I'm so cynical. As soon as I see "I landed a great job a few months ago," my thought is just wait a few more months. I hope the job stays great for you.
    • tootie 6y ago
      I think I've already seen the ugly side and decided it's not ugly enough to discourage me.
    • mto 6y ago
      Yeah that's cynical ;). I for example am with my current startup for 5 years now and can hardly find anything to complain about. Previous job was 4 years and was also ok although there it was a bit too much management for me me ;). Before that I've been freelancing for 10 years where most of the time was also with the same company and also fine (there it was more that I got bored of software dev itself and did my PhD afterwards to get to more special topics than the generic embedded/network development I did back then)
• gopalv 6y ago
  > I'm basically in a job that is quite important for my org, I get compliments for good job, but I hate most aspects of my daily work There's a class of "crystallized intelligence" jobs which are about what happened before rather than what you do today. There's an intersection between that sort of knowledge and a certain fluid intelligence to slot it in where things fit. I'm in one of those jobs right now, where the last six years of what I've read/absorbed is more valuable (as a sort of fast cross-reference in my brain) than what I actually do right now. I'm the guy with the picture that's on puzzle box, rather than having to place each puzzle piece. I've tried really hard to make myself obsolete and do something else, but it has backfired spectacularly. I've written down all of this in documents, trained other people to do the same thing over the years, even built tools to replace the easy parts (right now there's an intern doing the next pass of that automation) the effect of which has been to lighten my workload even more & I'm not missed if need to take a couple of weeks on a roadtrip or something. To do this, I've had to do something which is not volume driven (i.e my output is not a factor of time), so moved away from building web applications to profiling/optimizing all kinds of networked applications, where the ability to cut through the stack is useful, but for any given layer there's someone who does it "professionally". This is of course not a long-term parking spot for me, but I'm useful and in essence acting as "an elder" store of information about the past & a slightly clearer view of the future.
  • busterarm 6y ago
    I feel like I'm in a similar position on the automation side. I've automated so much of what I'm responsible for that it mostly runs itself without issue. There are certainly stretches of time where I work my ass off, but mostly it's days of a couple of hours of light work and then being available to help people via Slack the rest of the day.
  • gen220 6y ago
    > I'm the guy with the picture that's on puzzle box, rather than having to place each puzzle piece. This is such a great phrase! It so succinctly captures a situation I think we've all observed many times, but I've always struggled to encode it in words. > I've tried really hard to make myself obsolete and do something else, but it has backfired spectacularly. How has this backfired, I'm curious? I'm imagining that the future-you's fail to seamlessly slot-in, and management types don't have an appetite for broken eggs on the way to an omelette, when they already have an omelette in you? > I'm useful and in essence acting as "an elder" store of information about the past & a slightly clearer view of the future. I wonder, do you feel any anxiety about this? As in, you're valuable at $COMPANY_X, but you're not challenged to better yourself beyond what you already are. Much of your value to $COMPANY_X derives from skills and knowledge that are specific to $COMPANY_X / $INDUSTRY. For me, the anxiety would come from the question "sure, I have this here and now, but would I be able to reproduce this elsewhere, or what this a fluke?", and it would increase with tenure. :) Curious to hear your thoughts on this, too.
• kiliantics 6y ago
  I think it says a lot about our society, that this comment is the most highly upvoted in a forum such as this. It's clear that if we decided to let everyone's basic needs of food, shelter, healthcare, and transport be met unconditionally, the world would look very different. It would not cost us much, maybe even less than we pay in taxes now, but I feel certain it would make everyone's lives significantly better. The lack of unnecessary stress and "soul-destroying toil" that anyone would be forced to endure is surely worth it. The only downside I see is that no one could get as extraordinarily rich as a very few people can today. I don't see how most of us can't be fine with that.
  • j333t 6y ago
    This situation seems ideal, but how would you get people to do the grunt work? This is one thing the current system takes care of with threats, for lack of better words.
    • agent_simon 6y ago
      Automation should take care of that
    • irishcule 6y ago
      What if it was rotated among "everyone"? I think people would be happy to do grunt work for a week (probably even a month or two) if it meant that they get all the rest of their time back to do what they want.
• lhorie 6y ago
  > I'm basically in a job that is quite important for my org, I get compliments for good job, but I hate most aspects of my daily work since the tech stack is complex and fugly I think a lot of people can actually relate to this. IMHO, a good way to think about it is to consider that there's more granularity to work than a black-or-white "I like my job" / "I hate my job". Maybe you dislike meetings, but enjoy the feeling of triumph after fixing bugs, or maybe it's vice-versa. Maybe you enjoy helping coworkers get unstuck with your expertise despite working on a crappy stack. Maybe you take satisfaction in seeing the burndown chart go down each week, or maybe thinking about how to be a better tech interviewer is something that interests you. There's usually _something_ - even if it's a small trivial thing - that is nice about your day to day. I often think of it in terms of parallels to meditation: honing self-awareness skills lets you realize small things that you might not have been aware of before. Walking to the supermarket might be a tiring chore, but hey look I never noticed that tree blooms beautifully in march, or hey I started to notice a small difference in my stamina, etc. You are in charge of your (limited) attention span, and you can choose to focus on the positive things - no matter how small - and let the rest naturally fall by the sidelines.
• rkane 6y ago
  "I probably _appear_ motivated but I'm just a neurotic who hates failing." I feel seen.
• croh 6y ago
  > I'm basically in a job that is quite important for my org, I get compliments for good job, but I hate most aspects of my daily work since the tech stack is complex and fugly. I probably _appear_ motivated but I'm just a neurotic who hates failing. If I didn't need to feed and house my family I would have moved to a lower paying position long ago that is intrinsically more motivating. I too hate failing. And many times end up working extra to get things done properly. This keeps me in very different position where my manager, team relies on me, praises me but end of day it takes toil on other parts of life. I have seen many people in my career, who just don't work, don't bother about product at all, do things at last moments, have literally zero affection for the craft and still survives in industry. I really envy them. I am grateful to have good paying job in pandemic while many people laid off. But these days what I really need is to close my laptop at 5 pm WITHOUT ANY WORRY.
• rijoja 6y ago
  "Beyond that you are toiling, and if you like your job, it's glorious toiling like gardening (pleasing, but not important, but you love it, so it's great) or terrible toiling for living that eats your soul." How beautifully put.
• dfsegoat 6y ago
  > Success and "loving your job" have nothing in common in my experience. This was something I have been "feeling" to be true recently, but really needed some independent validation.