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> I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. This is what I'm (slowly) learning as well, even though I'm not enti

> I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace. This is what I'm (slowly) learning as well, even though I'm not entirely sure I want to. Working on projects where you care but almost nobody else does does that to you, but I'm afraid I won't be able to make it back to a position where I can care for projects.

hughrr 5y ago
Don’t sweat it; it might be healthy. I have made it a feature of my life that I don’t actually care about work and will not be changing it. It turned out that I’d spent at least 20 years being tricked into caring for things which ultimately someone else leveraged most of the benefit for with measly returns by proportion on that investment of time back to me. Never a thank you, always difficult to extract any entitlements from it. Another thing to note is my father who had completely invested his entire life into this way of thinking and is currently spending his retirement with bad mental and physical health. That’s the end game these working practices tend to lead into. It’s true that you should work to live, not live to work.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  But your life is spent at work, so if you don't care, your life is spent doing something you don't care about.
  - np- 5y ago
    You can care about your career and your self improvement while still maintaining healthy boundaries around the mental effort expended for your job. We’re in it for a long time but jobs come and go
    - DarylZero 5y ago
      That's not what I'm talking about. Your working life is where you act on the world outside of yourself. If you don't care about what you're doing, you're spending most of your influence on the world on something you don't care about.
      - np- 5y ago
        Why not? You can care about delivering beautiful code. You can care about ensuring the workplace is a pleasant place to work for all. You can care about your relationships you’re building. You may even be a huge fan of the product you’re building. That doesn’t mean you need to shit a brick when someone comes running in with their hair on fire—it’s not a binary proposition. Caring about things can be done “a la carte” and you can simply just not care about the bullshit
        lostdog 5y ago
        Exactly. You can even care about your product and its users, but not care that it went down for a couple hours last tuesday or launched 4 weeks later than a made-up deadline.
        apohn 5y ago
        At least to me, of the best things about this attitude is that the working culture starts to matter a lot when you search for jobs. That's what you care about. You look for places where relationship building is important and people try to get along and support each other. Other stuff starts to matter less. Lots of places basically put so much pressure on you to deliver that being a decent human being becomes impossible. If my choice is between working at a boring job where I can support my colleagues, and an exciting job with cool tech where people are having mental breakdowns and nobody has the mental space to support them, I'll take the boring job where people don't care about stupid directives and dealines from above.
      - CPLNTN 5y ago
        I agree, and I still don’t have an answer for this dilemma. I don’t know if I’m the problem, or if it is the structure of our society.. In the meantime the only thing that I know is that I have to choose between not caring and feeling like I’m wasting most of my day, and caring with the potential abuse of an employer
  - hughrr 5y ago
    Not much of my life is spent at work. I spent the last 10 years optimising the ROI from work down to a suitable compromise of time vs money.
  - pnutjam 5y ago
    Next time around I'll be sure to get born wealthy so I don't have to worry about it. But it's incredibly privileged to be able to do the sort of work we do compared to standing in a factory production line or working away from family. I enjoy my work, but I know if the company fails it's not my fault and I will be working somewhere else tomorrow.
indigochill 5y ago
I think it's healthy to not care about something you have no real stake in. But you can compensate for that condition in a day job with hobbies or pets or friends or generally something to care about outside of work. I personally do a number of regular social things outside work as well as occasionally writing and producing music on a purely amateur basis, where the only reason to do them is _because_ I care.
np- 5y ago
What I’ve found is that you can care about things like craftsmanship, problem solving, and quality while not being bothered by the day to day short term project level thinking.
- CPLNTN 5y ago
  The problem is that writing good code requires more time than writing shitty one.. and if there is a lot of external pressure to finish the project, it’s quite difficult for me to stay focused on quality
  - np- 5y ago
    That's fair, and I'm not saying it's as easy as flipping a switch. We are all social human beings wired to easily get caught up in the day to day panic, especially when someone is breathing down your neck. But you need to consider that somebody breathing down your neck does _not_ have your best interests in mind. You are master of your own career, and any shitty code you deliver will have your signature on it. It's all about setting boundaries and being able to push back when people are unreasonable. This is where the "not caring" is an invaluable skill. You are an immovable mountain in the face of a hurricane. At the end of the day, YOU are the professional. If an amateur decides that you are going too slow, that doesn't mean anything--they can feel free to hire more engineers or whatever needs to be done, but the onus is on _them_ to ante up. No matter how much you love your job, you're probably going to have multiple throughout your career so you need to focus on yourself first and foremost.

hughrr 5y ago

Don’t sweat it; it might be healthy. I have made it a feature of my life that I don’t actually care about work and will not be changing it. It turned out that I’d spent at least 20 years being tricked into caring for things which ultimately someone else leveraged most of the benefit for with measly returns by proportion on that investment of time back to me. Never a thank you, always difficult to extract any entitlements from it. Another thing to note is my father who had completely invested his entire life into this way of thinking and is currently spending his retirement with bad mental and physical health. That’s the end game these working practices tend to lead into. It’s true that you should work to live, not live to work.

DarylZero 5y ago
But your life is spent at work, so if you don't care, your life is spent doing something you don't care about.
- np- 5y ago
  You can care about your career and your self improvement while still maintaining healthy boundaries around the mental effort expended for your job. We’re in it for a long time but jobs come and go
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    That's not what I'm talking about. Your working life is where you act on the world outside of yourself. If you don't care about what you're doing, you're spending most of your influence on the world on something you don't care about.
    - np- 5y ago
      Why not? You can care about delivering beautiful code. You can care about ensuring the workplace is a pleasant place to work for all. You can care about your relationships you’re building. You may even be a huge fan of the product you’re building. That doesn’t mean you need to shit a brick when someone comes running in with their hair on fire—it’s not a binary proposition. Caring about things can be done “a la carte” and you can simply just not care about the bullshit
      - lostdog 5y ago
        Exactly. You can even care about your product and its users, but not care that it went down for a couple hours last tuesday or launched 4 weeks later than a made-up deadline.
      - apohn 5y ago
        At least to me, of the best things about this attitude is that the working culture starts to matter a lot when you search for jobs. That's what you care about. You look for places where relationship building is important and people try to get along and support each other. Other stuff starts to matter less. Lots of places basically put so much pressure on you to deliver that being a decent human being becomes impossible. If my choice is between working at a boring job where I can support my colleagues, and an exciting job with cool tech where people are having mental breakdowns and nobody has the mental space to support them, I'll take the boring job where people don't care about stupid directives and dealines from above.
    - CPLNTN 5y ago
      I agree, and I still don’t have an answer for this dilemma. I don’t know if I’m the problem, or if it is the structure of our society.. In the meantime the only thing that I know is that I have to choose between not caring and feeling like I’m wasting most of my day, and caring with the potential abuse of an employer
- hughrr 5y ago
  Not much of my life is spent at work. I spent the last 10 years optimising the ROI from work down to a suitable compromise of time vs money.
- pnutjam 5y ago
  Next time around I'll be sure to get born wealthy so I don't have to worry about it. But it's incredibly privileged to be able to do the sort of work we do compared to standing in a factory production line or working away from family. I enjoy my work, but I know if the company fails it's not my fault and I will be working somewhere else tomorrow.

indigochill 5y ago

I think it's healthy to not care about something you have no real stake in. But you can compensate for that condition in a day job with hobbies or pets or friends or generally something to care about outside of work. I personally do a number of regular social things outside work as well as occasionally writing and producing music on a purely amateur basis, where the only reason to do them is _because_ I care.

np- 5y ago

What I’ve found is that you can care about things like craftsmanship, problem solving, and quality while not being bothered by the day to day short term project level thinking.

CPLNTN 5y ago
The problem is that writing good code requires more time than writing shitty one.. and if there is a lot of external pressure to finish the project, it’s quite difficult for me to stay focused on quality
- np- 5y ago
  That's fair, and I'm not saying it's as easy as flipping a switch. We are all social human beings wired to easily get caught up in the day to day panic, especially when someone is breathing down your neck. But you need to consider that somebody breathing down your neck does _not_ have your best interests in mind. You are master of your own career, and any shitty code you deliver will have your signature on it. It's all about setting boundaries and being able to push back when people are unreasonable. This is where the "not caring" is an invaluable skill. You are an immovable mountain in the face of a hurricane. At the end of the day, YOU are the professional. If an amateur decides that you are going too slow, that doesn't mean anything--they can feel free to hire more engineers or whatever needs to be done, but the onus is on _them_ to ante up. No matter how much you love your job, you're probably going to have multiple throughout your career so you need to focus on yourself first and foremost.