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How to feel engaged at work: a software engineer's guide

302 points by ntide 4y ago

sharemywin 4y ago
This article was actually interesting.
imwillofficial 4y ago
I won’t spoil the article, but the advice is great. I’ll give number 4 a try. But the hobbies page of Wikipedia is too long and unorganized for my tastes. Anyone have any cool hobbies?
- greggsy 4y ago
  I used to collect catalogs when they were still paper based. I’d punch ‘order catalog’ into Google and find all sorts of weird manufacturers and retailers selling specialty crap. Taxidermy supplies, figurines suppliers (from Hummel to Gundam), not to mention the tomes from electronics and engineering distributors like R.S, which are still available (usually at a fee). Sure you can do it just browsing an ecommerce website, but it’s not the same. I think I just liked seeing a snapshot of a specific industry’s craft. I opportunistically go to random trade fairs when I’m travelling now - there’s always one or two in a given major city. Similar ‘snapshot of an industry’ experience.
- ryanchants 4y ago
  I mostly just dabble in a bunch of things. I started by looking at what classes are offered in my city, and started signing up for random ones. So far, I've done some leatherworking, metalsmithing, weaving, archery, bike repair, American sign language, etc. I also cook a decent amount, and am always trying new recipes. Trying to add fermenting and preserving to the list this summer. And I've recently reached out to an instructor for guitar and singing lessons.
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  “1:1 podcast with you as the guest” Anyone can call me and say hi. We chat about anything you’re passionate about, pair program or… rant. I’ve met a tonne of fascinating people this way. Another neat side-effect of that was filling my backlog with new project ideas (mostly thanks to rants). Come and say hi! http://sonnet.io/posts/hi/ http://sonnet.io/posts/hi/
- yaysyu 4y ago
  Bouldering seems to be really popular amongst Software Engineers I know. Taps into many things that Software Engineers typically like. Walls often require problem solving as well as physical ability. Walls are shorter than rock climbing walls (fast iteration cycles/“dev loop”) Lots of different difficulties for a clear sense of progression. Indoors (usually). Can be done solo.
  - gus_massa 4y ago
    I make math problems for Math Olympiads for kids, and bouldering feels similar. To build an interesting wall it must not be obvious, but it must be solvable. From time to time I fell in the rabbit hole of a YouTube channel that explain unusual solutions "Beta Break!" by Albert Ok: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsfWe31L6Quop7WDY7ky711o_Jhp4LKaS https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsfWe31L6Quop7WDY7ky7... (Note: I only climb stair, and only if they are not too stepped :) .)
  - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    Bouldering has to be the nerdiest sport. You spend most of your time sitting and problem-solving with intermittent short bursts of work, you can do it at any level of fitness, and there's no competition. I'm kind of surprised nobody has combined a math game with it yet, where as you climb you uncover numbers that tell you where the next hold is so you can't pre-plan your route.
    - camtarn 4y ago
      I remembered coming across an interactive bouldering game a while ago, which used a projector to light up holds to create a custom problem each time. I couldn't find it with a quick search, but I did find this list of bouldering wall games: http://www.canadarockclimbing.com/games.html http://www.canadarockclimbing.com/games.html which includes 'Pointer', where a partner uses a broomstick to point out the next hold in the sequence just as the climber has reached the previous hold.
  - _huayra_ 4y ago
    Every one of my coworkers who boulders gets injured (usually lightly) on a regular basis. After climbing (on a rope) for more than a decade, I've never had an injury. Due to the fact you have to ramp up the per-move difficulty much faster on a bouldering problem as the grade increases, the chance per injury on any given move is much higher (e.g. if you chopped a bouldering-sized section out of a 5.12a, it wouldn't be that hard of a problem, but having to do 3-4x such problems in a row is much more grueling). The types of injury one gets from such intense exertion will impact one's ability to type too (e.g. finger pulley injuries, elbow injuries either in terms of the rotation of one's wrist or spraining if one does the typical "fall off the wall and put your hands behind you" thing I've seen on the bouldering wall). > Can be done solo. I'd argue this is a bug, not a feature. I've made so many great friends at the climbing gym by just asking people on the autobelays if they want to pair up for roped climbing (or joining an odd-numbered group of people to even it out), yet I see so many boulderers just silently do their thing with their airpods in. For software engineers who don't get a lot of reps in social situations in the nature of our jobs, this is a very easy venue to learn to meet new people in a low-stakes situation.
- VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  3D printing is a fun hobby that combines engineering skills with actual useful stuff. Just printed a set of tablecloth clamps for camping. Speaking of, camping! Nice to get some fresh air and away from screens for a bit. And I love cooking over an open fire. Speaking of, cooking! Once you get a little practice, you can really dazzle yourself and others with some delicious food. Especially when you realize that cooking is not actually as fiddly as it seems. Once you have enough experience under your belt to substitute and improvise and just throw something together the real fun begins. I recommend https://www.youtube.com/c/GlenAndFriendsCooking https://www.youtube.com/c/GlenAndFriendsCooking . Just pick a recipe and go for it, and Glen has very practical advice about exactly how unnecessary the fiddly parts of cooking are. Other things I do: retro video games and related electronics projects (currently building a supergun to play arcade games at home), learn yo-yo tricks, read books, garden, play music. Lack of hobbies isn't the problem. If someone would pay me a salary just to do my hobbies I'd be extremely happy.
  - PretzelPirate 4y ago
    I’d love to get into 3D printing, but the sheer amount of waste I’d produce is too much for me. I looked into recycling wasted filament into new filament, and all the reviews of different devices made it seem very hit or miss. Is there a good way to not generate plastic waste and still get into 3D printing?
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      If you print things that you'd buy anyway the packaging would make up for a good bit of waste plastic.
- wincy 4y ago
  I got into 3D printing miniatures and statues and stuff during the pandemic. Spent one of the stimulus checks on a good resin printer, was astounded by the quality. Then realized the filament printers were a better idea for some prints and bought 3 of them. Then I wanted painted stuff, so I bought some cheap store paints, they were okay so I bought some hobby paints which were excellent. It really wows people instead of getting them some cheap present for Christmas printing them a cool statue and painting it up. Another thing is that 3D printers are still very hacker ish so for me another fun part was analyzing what upgrades were actually functional and helped me print faster/more accurately and only doing those upgrades. This includes software side like compiling your own open source firmware and integrating a general purpose CPU in a Raspberry Pi to do the gcode processing. It’s a good way to do low stakes configuration and compiling of software so it’s something I’m capable of as an SWE and it’s fun to tinker with since the worst that’ll happen is I’ll have to reformat my printer.
VyseofArcadia 4y ago
I found this to be an incredibly depressing article. It boiled down to, "think about pleasant things that aren't work." For example, > Pick an activity that you've always wanted to try. Don't have ideas? Try Wikipedia for a good list of hobbies I already have plenty of hobbies, and I'd rather work on any of them than be at work! I've always been very self-motivated. I want to work on what I want to work on. Being forced to work on things that I don't care about in order to draw a salary sucks, and no amount of > Schedule a 30-minute time block to freely jot down questions that spark your curiosity as an engineer. (They don't have to be about work.) is going to change that. If anything, it makes it worse because now I would rather be investigating those questions than working!
- smashface 4y ago
  Perhaps not depressing but certainly unhelpful. If I'm spend time thinking about other more interesting stuff, I tend to get sucked into those things. Which just means I've got zero focus on stuff I need to get done.
- NAHWheatCracker 4y ago
  These were my thoughts as well. The article has nothing to say about being engaged at work. It's all non-work suggestions. The best interpretation I could infer was that if you are engaged outside work, you'll be able to be more engaged at work? My feelings about cause-and-effect are the opposite. When I'm disengaged at work, I'm less engaged outside of work. I'll try to do hobbies and stuff outside of work but it makes the contrast more drastic, which makes work less bearable.
- deleted 4y ago
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- jebarker 4y ago
  I thought point 2 addressed engagement well. If you can get behind the purpose of the whole company, then understanding why your particular cog is important to the machine will help keep you engaged.
  - 4y ago
mertnesvat 4y ago
I liked the article and the wikipedia page for hobbies is very interesting, I've found some gems... - Magnet Fishing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_fishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_fishing) - Binge watching ( didn't know it can be called as a hobby - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binge-watching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binge-watching ) - Constructing languages ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language ) - Tea bag collecting ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_bag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_bag )
- VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  +1 for constructed languages. Fascinating hobby. I've dabbled myself. Bonus: Tolkien would approve.
newaccount2021 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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tstrimple 4y ago
I know that this wasn't the point of the article, but please don't ever do this. > Why do web applications have no sound? Why can't we make boring internal tools come to life with sound, in the same way that UI on a Nintendo Switch pops and clicks and whistles?
- dairylee 4y ago
  Sound can work well on the web[1], as long as it isn't over the top, there's no reason it couldn't be used more. I've been considering adding some sounds[2] to the project I'm working on. 1: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/react/announcing-use-sound-react-hook/ https://www.joshwcomeau.com/react/announcing-use-sound-react... 2: https://github.com/snd-lib/snd-lib https://github.com/snd-lib/snd-lib
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    If you add sounds to anything on the web, please, please, make a top-level, easily identifiable mute button.
    - twblalock 4y ago
      And mute the sound by default!
dnndev 4y ago
This feels more like how to not be miserable than stay engaged. I would have accepted do it for the money they pay you so much money you can retire early and end the misery.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
Burning Man taught me an important lesson about expectations and satisfaction. You can't go to Burning Man and expect everybody else to give you a good time all the time, or you can end up bored, bummed out, and alone in a crowd. If you want a fun time, bring it with you. Don't spectate, participate. Give yourself a small purpose and spend some of your work day on it. Make it something that feels rewarding. Remember, 1/3 of your life is spent at work. Maybe you only want to focus on the technical. That doesn't mean only becoming an expert in one domain, but also pulling in knowledge from other domains for perspective and inspiration. Maybe you learn how the operating system works, or embedded design. Maybe learn how car ECUs work. Maybe in learning about cars you notice different companies make different designs, decisions, priorities, leading to different outcomes. Maybe you learn about NUMMI and the Toyota Production System. Then maybe you hear tech buzzwords that come from Toyota and find out how they're related. Then maybe you take all those non-technical ideas back into your technical work. If you like to solve problems, you don't have to stop at technical ones. You can work on organizational problems, financial problems, logistical problems, communication problems, architectural problems. There's a million problems outside your domain of expertise, and you can learn about all of them. Your biggest problem is an overabundance of choice. If you like to help people, you don't have to help just your immediate team. You can look at other teams and see if they need help. Maybe not even business help, but personal help. Maybe you'd like to join an employee resource group, or organize one; or a charity bake sale, or a hackathon. Or work on convincing your job to have a donation matching program, or finding a local charity to reinvest some percentage of profit into, or convincing execs to give everyone the day off on election day.
AlwaysRock 4y ago
Eh. These all seem fine. My route? I work less. I have a typical 9-5 but 1-2 days a week I leave a little early and go to do something engaging. Never when I have meetings. Never when I have deadlines. Never when someone is waiting on something from me. But I, and I suspect most engineers, have the capacity to get my work done for a week in less than 40 hours. I used to spend time dicking off on my computer to fill the time. Now I don't. I go do something I want to do. I find that I'm much more engaged in my work because I am actually using all my time to get things done. I'm not watching the clock till its time to leave for the day. I'll probably get hate for this but its incredibly sustainable since I'm not working at a start up anymore. I suspect whenever I take on another job search I'll only consider 4 day work weeks since that's similar to what I'm doing now.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  Is your manager just next level laid back? I feel like most places are going to notice and be bothered seeing the yellow circle on your Teams or Slack status consistently for long periods of time.
  - dangerlibrary 4y ago
    If managers are spending their days watching the color of the circles next to their team member's names, maybe the managers need more work to do in order to "stay engaged" at work. Of all the bad heuristics for trying to determine whether someone is being productive, this has to be near the bottom of the list. It's the digital equivalent of measuring engineer productivity by looking around the room and seeing who is at their desk. Except that it can be trivially gamed by a simple mouse jiggler script.
    - adamsmith143 4y ago
      Totally agree but from a SWE perspective on any kind of Agile/Scrum team I think the expectation is usually that you pick up another task if you finish early and there's still time during a sprint for example. This also obviously breeds other bad incentives i.e. the faster you work the more work you get.
rmah 4y ago
In my experience, one of the key factors of being engaged with one's work is feeling a sense of progress or accomplishment. Few things sap motivation more than the feeling that you're just spinning your wheels and nothing is getting done. I realize that if you're not a team lead or manager, this is difficult to implement. However, sometimes physical manifestations of progress can make progress feel more tangible. For example, if you have to churn through tickets, make a little card for each one. And push them from a pending pile into the done pile as you go. This makes your progress more visible and tangible than a number on a website. Of course, a big "to do" pile may demotivate some folks. YMMV. Just a bit of food for thought.
alkonaut 4y ago
My motto is: I don't want to work on a CRUD app. I want computer science to actually be part of what I do. Not parsing and validation and deployments and migrations. But finding these jobs where actual "what you do with the data" is the majority work, and the fluff around it is a minority, is HARD and such jobs seem to be more far between. Perhaps because the software jobs that used to be difficult algorithmic problems are now so specialised (Data scientist, Game engines, AI, ...). And that's a bit sad. For those of us who get a kick out of not making a Todo app in an ever cooler JS framework but instead like to write the synth/raytracer/fluid sim/game/, the job market has become pretty boring. Luckily I have a job that ticks the boxes, but it's hard to find another.
- dominotw 4y ago
  agree with this 100%. I am considering going into management purely because i cannot get myself to write another screen to db crud app. Just the thought makes me depressed.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  IMHO those jobs are exceedingly rare, because all the roles with difficult algorithmic problems seem to have the grind around them as the majority of work that needs to be done. You mention data science, well, if you're doing serious data analytics two thirds or more of your time is converting data from one form to another and handling its flow; if you're doing cutting edge AI research, most of your time is devoted to 'plumbing' required to run these experiments, and only a minority to the algorithms you're researching. The same is pretty much everywhere, so if you find a job where that does not apply, that's quite exceptional.
- ransom1538 4y ago
  There are tons ways to escape: security, sre, engineering sales, etc etc.
  - catmanjan 4y ago
    Those are all just CRUD with a different title
beepbooptheory 4y ago
These things are always a little funny for me, I'm just a longtime wannabe dev and the thing that makes me disengaged in my jobs is just wanting to code all the time. I guess the grass is always greener.
iancmceachern 4y ago
It's not your job to feel engaged. It's your employers job, your bosses. You can feel how you want to about it.
- Tabular-Iceberg 4y ago
  While objectively true, it's silly for employers not to exploit the psychology of the engaged employee for the employer's gain.
  - iancmceachern 4y ago
    I disagree. It's exploitive for people in a position of power to exploit the psychology of the folks that are in their care. You use the word exploit, exploiting folks isn't good or moral, in any case. It's never ok to exploit folks. If we say we are aligning the interests of the employer and employee that's different. If we are saying a rising tide raises all ships, we all do well when we all do well, etc. That's different. None of that is exploitive, it's inspiring. There is a difference between inspiring and aligning people in powerful ways, and exploiting them. One is ok, one is not. One leads to true long term success and prosperity, one leads to short term success but long term failure, a flash in the pan.
    - Tabular-Iceberg 4y ago
      I was admittedly being facetious, but my point is that those who push the "work is for working, not for having fun" line are neither doing the employers nor the employees any favours. The other side of the coin is that what employers do to try to improve engagement is usually ineffective and often quite demeaning. What Erik Dietrich calls "carnival cash". You just can't fake the sense of producing something useful for the customers and in return getting your fair share of the proceeds.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
> make time to be curious. This is kinda dangerous advice, because I've been involved in countless CRUD apps where the developers were bored and made things more interesting for themselves; NoSQL databases, difficult programming languages like Scala, microservices, CQRS, infrastructure-as-code that was never used in practice (it was wishful-thinking-as-code), home-rolled frameworks (one involved the CTO / lead developer to basically work from home and stay underwater for six months before coming out with a C# framework; it was just e-commerce that used a 3rd party to do all the heavy lifting), etc. Heed the magpie developer. Choose boring technology. Eat the shit sandwich or move on if you think CRUD is beneath you.
- nixlim 4y ago
  100% agree and can relate. Part of our "estate" is exactly that type of a project - all that was required was a CRUD app, what we got and have to maintain is an app written in functional style written with 3 layered frameworks using Hexagonal Architecture. In answer to the question "Why?", the response was - "We were bored."
- Tabular-Iceberg 4y ago
  I wonder if a plain old CRUD app in a fill-in-the-blanks framework really is the best kind of job for a developer. I'd like to try it at least once in my career and see if there is any truth to it. It would also be nice to have a job solving interesting computer science problems, like building compilers, tools, optimisation systems, etc. But that's unlikely unless you're actually a genius, or at least an accomplished academic, but some of the things you have to do to get ahead in academia seem even more demeaning than writing CRUD apps. Instead every single job in my career has been the mess that you describe, and I'm starting to lose hope that there is anything other than it in this industry. I think it's the absolute worst of both worlds. You're solving completely trivial problems, but you're forced to do it in the most convoluted way possible. You sit all day racking your brain under maximum cognitive load trying to accomplish something so trivial and mundane that every single fill-in-the-blanks framework already does for you out of the box.
- kerblang 4y ago
  This is reasonable advice but it carries the assumption that "simplest is easiest". It is in hindsight. People sometimes say "It's easy to make a complicated solution for a simple problem, but not the other way around," and it's painfully true, as Rube Goldberg noticed. But of course that means we actually have a real challenge if we get our priorities straight. There are still tedious/repetitive things that come up, though, and if the repetition is bad enough, then there are opportunities to do something clever... But again: Can it be done simply enough to make it worthwhile? Another challenge. And sometimes you just gotta do the dirty work dirty, and hang in there. Admittedly that is part of any job done well, in the long run.
EddieDante 4y ago
Why would I want to be engaged at work? I just want to do my job and get paid. I think that expecting emotional fulfillment or meaning from my job is a trap, a way to con me into working more while accepting less pay than I deserve. Work won't love me back, so why should I love my work? I lost interest in unrequited love back in high school when I outgrew my Young Werther phase.
- bsedlm 4y ago
  but I want my work to be engaging... it seems like I want this out of an existencial instict; one which the modern world has completely disregarded. I want it, but I know (and I agree with your stance) that I will not find it in any "industry" work; academic work, on the other hand, does rely on this kind of self-motivated engagement much more than industry but has other problems.
  - EddieDante 4y ago
    > it seems like I want this out of an existencial instict; one which the modern world has completely disregarded. Has the modern world completely disregarded this existential need, or have capitalists weaponized it against workers?
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  > "Why would I want to be engaged at work? I just want to do my job and get paid." Because a career spans 40-50 years of being employed in one's profession. As the slow but steady stream of Ask HN's that boil down to "How do I get out of the software industry?" highlight, one pretty must has to derive at least some minimal enjoyment of their profession to help avoid becoming jaded or burnt out.
chomp 4y ago
> Why do web applications have no sound? Collective trauma in the current web application-building cohort from the dark days of the 90s/00s?
alfor 4y ago
99% of effort is wasted. (Naval) This is especially true with code where the cost of replication is zero. Most company goes out of business, most programming project don’t get completed or get unused by the actual customer. In a large company it’s even worse as you are far from the user and the chance that what you work on is unused get through the roof. But there is a tiny chance that what you do become massively useful (http, bitcoin, etc)
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ohwellhere 4y ago
Here's my advice on the same topic after living through burnout and "blah" several times: Make your job the union of what you're interested in and what is valuable to the business. You have to know what is valuable to the business; that knowledge is challenging to acquire but will _always_ help you in any role. It has to be true and verified with stakeholders, not your gut. There are soft skills involved here. You also have to know what you're interested in, which is also not easy after building CRUD apps for years. And you have to sell it — more soft skills. If you can — you can! — the result is a job description or project that you helped co-create, that you own in the most meaningful sense of the word, and that you're more excited to work on. The add on results is that you are more valuable to that specific company, and you've leveled up soft skills and business thinking that makes you more valuable to any company. I've done this consciously several times in at least 4 companies of various sizes. I've ended up building a new mobile architecture platform and library, a data warehouse and ETLT pipeline, multiple projects in languages I wanted to learn, new frameworks and libraries for various other industry-specific web dev things, and a few rewrites of legacy software. I still feel blah a lot of the time, and still think my path through this industry has been... non-optimized to say the least, but I have a path that helps me reengage when I have the energy for internal sales.
- lupire 4y ago
  Do you mean intersection, not union? Union is kind of a fantasy, getting paid to have your own fun.
  - ohwellhere 4y ago
    Yes, I did mean intersection, thank you.
lmarcos 4y ago
I don't need to feel engaged at work. I feel engaged with my career though. A job is just a temporal contract I do for money. I do my best (thankfully I'm not bad at it since I love my career), but usually I don't give a damn about feeling engaged with my current employer.
Tade0 4y ago
> "Oh, I'm just building another CRUD app", Sometimes that's all there is to it. This is work - fulfillment is optional. For this reason I try to engage in a measly paid, but interesting project from time to time. I'm currently in one. I won't be buying that apartment I wanted any time soon, but I can say with confidence that I like my job.
mattlondon 4y ago
I want to be less engaged! Leaving work behind both physically and mentally at 5pm is important to me. I want to treat my work as a necessary "transaction" and don't want to devote any additonal energy to it than is required. Save your mental energy for your own life and activities. Sure we all want our work to be fulfilling, but from experience I would urge against getting too "into" your work.
- some-guy 4y ago
  "Fulfilling" work is a huge privilege. As a high school dropout who eventually did community college to a degree in computer science at a UC, I've worked all kinds of minimum wage, soul-sucking jobs in between. Just having enough money and free time now to do anything else besides my job has been such an amazing gift, and I could give two shits at this point if I sometimes have to deal with a GWT codebase regularly.
jcadam 4y ago
My level of engagement is directly proportional to the pay.
HellDunkel 4y ago
It is utteriy pointless to convince yourself to be exited about your job if you cant feel it. And it wont last long. If you decline your own emotions its not going to end well.
bradlys 4y ago
To me - this article reads a lot like pure copium. This is the advice from a selfish manager who refuses to invest in their employees and instead tries to be extremely transactional and harvest as much as they can before PIPing them and managing them out. Engagement is almost entirely dictated by your employer - not the employee. You need a good manager, good team, and decent work to stay engaged.
posharma 4y ago
Why is someone's name humorous? The name Mr. Tu is humorous to the author of the post. I find this mildly insulting.
- PretzelPirate 4y ago
  Because the author’s name is “Jason Tu”. That’s what they said “no relation”.
  - posharma 4y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. Didn't notice that.
sinenomine 4y ago
My earlier advice continues being relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25509941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25509941
- dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  That was a nice read.
kqr 4y ago
Another way to do this that isn't about escaping from your boring work is... well, making your work more interesting. Have a good idea? Coordinate with the right people and go for it. Even if nobody asked you to. You should never feel like you need someone's authorisation to do a good job. Becoming free anywhere, even within one's regular work, is not about asking for freedom -- it's about insisting to act as if one is already free. Or, as Grace Hopper put it, "it's far easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission." ---- Sometimes this will lead to wonderful things. Sometimes, sure, this will get you into a mess, but honestly, weren't you sort of already? Spending a 25 % of your life somewhere you are unable to engage is messed up.
- imbnwa 4y ago
  This is what I try to do, but at the org I work for there's a low key assumption that Devs are too stupid to do anything but what can be implemented in a sprint, no matter the complexity of the problem (which obviously leads to poor engineering outcomes). Teams are criticized when there're no 0-burndowns by people upstairs so everyone adapted by vastly simplifying solutions/work to fit that expectation.
  - ornornor 4y ago
    Be careful. Stay at one of these places too long, or work at too many in a row, and you’ll end up so burned out that you won’t be able to even entertain the idea of programming ever again for quite some time. Been there, got the t-shirt.
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Buttons840 4y ago
How do I find work that is worth being engaged in?
novakinblood 4y ago
Why did I read this as “How to feel enraged at work”? Complacency modification?
ulisesrmzroche 4y ago
Adding my voice to the consensus that this article is trash. As always, the blackest of falsehoods are dressed up in platitudes.
jowdones 4y ago
There was an article on HN a while ago saying that basically the secret to productivity is ... slack. In other words, excess capacity. I used to have a tight schedule switching from tasks to learning to meetings to more tasks and more learning, 50 minutes work, 10 minutes break, relentlessly, like a robot. Then I realized I'm not a fucking robot. Now I work 2 hours per day at most. Complete my tasks and can do this shit in a sustainable way as opposed to burning myself for what? I'm super engaged. For two hours tops :D
- ornornor 4y ago
  What do you do for the rest of the time? I had a job like this where it was 80% bullshit so I’d either only need a couple hours a day to get actual stuff done, or I’d work a full day and then spread out my commits and PRs throughout the day. While in office, it was pure agony. I was bored out of my mind. While pandemic remote, it was slightly better (never played as much PS4), but it was not freeing either because I had to answer random voice calls or attend hours long BS meetings and keep paying attention in case I was asked something. So it was like working but worse.
stretchwithme 4y ago
Something that might is timing WHEN you start drinking coffee in the morning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bjxFnAIAiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bjxFnAIAiI
Wistar 4y ago
I misread this as "How to feel enraged at work," and thought that I really didn't need any guidance.
topheroo 4y ago
I try to always work on something that’s contributing to something I care about in the world. I find that motivation is less of an issue if there’s intrinsic value to the work I’m doing.
nunez 4y ago
This article means well but these tips are mostly platitudes. What I want to read is how people who do not care about work (i.e. people who are borderline anti-work) find work that is meaningful. I do not believe that people aspire to not have purpose. I do believe that many people's work life is misaligned with their true purpose OR they don't know what their purpose is. I'd love to read more articles like that. (I naturally love the work that I do and tend to invent work by solving problems that people think are worth solving. I cannot relate to people who straight-up don't want to work. Articles like the above would help me understand their mindset.)
- redisman 4y ago
  99% of jobs are not interesting or fulfilling.
boredemployee 4y ago
let's be honest here, many IT jobs could get the work done in 20h/week. all the rest is a fucking circus.
afarrell 4y ago
> Imagine you are the CEO Warning: If you take this farther than idle speculation, it is a good way to burn yourself out trying ineffective strategies to drive organizational change.
- redisman 4y ago
  Practicing your “circle of control” is one of the best things I’ve done for my mental health. I’m not going to worry about a VPs problem. That’s the whole point of not being a VP
afarrell 4y ago
> Stay hungry, stay foolish. If you want to feel disengaged at work, neglect your diet and make foolish choices that break people’s trust. If you want to feel engaged at work, eat lunch with your coworkers and talk philosophy.

302 points by ntide 4y ago

This article was actually interesting.

I won’t spoil the article, but the advice is great. I’ll give number 4 a try. But the hobbies page of Wikipedia is too long and unorganized for my tastes. Anyone have any cool hobbies?

greggsy 4y ago
I used to collect catalogs when they were still paper based. I’d punch ‘order catalog’ into Google and find all sorts of weird manufacturers and retailers selling specialty crap. Taxidermy supplies, figurines suppliers (from Hummel to Gundam), not to mention the tomes from electronics and engineering distributors like R.S, which are still available (usually at a fee). Sure you can do it just browsing an ecommerce website, but it’s not the same. I think I just liked seeing a snapshot of a specific industry’s craft. I opportunistically go to random trade fairs when I’m travelling now - there’s always one or two in a given major city. Similar ‘snapshot of an industry’ experience.
ryanchants 4y ago
I mostly just dabble in a bunch of things. I started by looking at what classes are offered in my city, and started signing up for random ones. So far, I've done some leatherworking, metalsmithing, weaving, archery, bike repair, American sign language, etc. I also cook a decent amount, and am always trying new recipes. Trying to add fermenting and preserving to the list this summer. And I've recently reached out to an instructor for guitar and singing lessons.
rpastuszak 4y ago
“1:1 podcast with you as the guest” Anyone can call me and say hi. We chat about anything you’re passionate about, pair program or… rant. I’ve met a tonne of fascinating people this way. Another neat side-effect of that was filling my backlog with new project ideas (mostly thanks to rants). Come and say hi! http://sonnet.io/posts/hi/ http://sonnet.io/posts/hi/
yaysyu 4y ago
Bouldering seems to be really popular amongst Software Engineers I know. Taps into many things that Software Engineers typically like. Walls often require problem solving as well as physical ability. Walls are shorter than rock climbing walls (fast iteration cycles/“dev loop”) Lots of different difficulties for a clear sense of progression. Indoors (usually). Can be done solo.
- gus_massa 4y ago
  I make math problems for Math Olympiads for kids, and bouldering feels similar. To build an interesting wall it must not be obvious, but it must be solvable. From time to time I fell in the rabbit hole of a YouTube channel that explain unusual solutions "Beta Break!" by Albert Ok: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsfWe31L6Quop7WDY7ky711o_Jhp4LKaS https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsfWe31L6Quop7WDY7ky7... (Note: I only climb stair, and only if they are not too stepped :) .)
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  Bouldering has to be the nerdiest sport. You spend most of your time sitting and problem-solving with intermittent short bursts of work, you can do it at any level of fitness, and there's no competition. I'm kind of surprised nobody has combined a math game with it yet, where as you climb you uncover numbers that tell you where the next hold is so you can't pre-plan your route.
  - camtarn 4y ago
    I remembered coming across an interactive bouldering game a while ago, which used a projector to light up holds to create a custom problem each time. I couldn't find it with a quick search, but I did find this list of bouldering wall games: http://www.canadarockclimbing.com/games.html http://www.canadarockclimbing.com/games.html which includes 'Pointer', where a partner uses a broomstick to point out the next hold in the sequence just as the climber has reached the previous hold.
- _huayra_ 4y ago
  Every one of my coworkers who boulders gets injured (usually lightly) on a regular basis. After climbing (on a rope) for more than a decade, I've never had an injury. Due to the fact you have to ramp up the per-move difficulty much faster on a bouldering problem as the grade increases, the chance per injury on any given move is much higher (e.g. if you chopped a bouldering-sized section out of a 5.12a, it wouldn't be that hard of a problem, but having to do 3-4x such problems in a row is much more grueling). The types of injury one gets from such intense exertion will impact one's ability to type too (e.g. finger pulley injuries, elbow injuries either in terms of the rotation of one's wrist or spraining if one does the typical "fall off the wall and put your hands behind you" thing I've seen on the bouldering wall). > Can be done solo. I'd argue this is a bug, not a feature. I've made so many great friends at the climbing gym by just asking people on the autobelays if they want to pair up for roped climbing (or joining an odd-numbered group of people to even it out), yet I see so many boulderers just silently do their thing with their airpods in. For software engineers who don't get a lot of reps in social situations in the nature of our jobs, this is a very easy venue to learn to meet new people in a low-stakes situation.
VyseofArcadia 4y ago
3D printing is a fun hobby that combines engineering skills with actual useful stuff. Just printed a set of tablecloth clamps for camping. Speaking of, camping! Nice to get some fresh air and away from screens for a bit. And I love cooking over an open fire. Speaking of, cooking! Once you get a little practice, you can really dazzle yourself and others with some delicious food. Especially when you realize that cooking is not actually as fiddly as it seems. Once you have enough experience under your belt to substitute and improvise and just throw something together the real fun begins. I recommend https://www.youtube.com/c/GlenAndFriendsCooking https://www.youtube.com/c/GlenAndFriendsCooking . Just pick a recipe and go for it, and Glen has very practical advice about exactly how unnecessary the fiddly parts of cooking are. Other things I do: retro video games and related electronics projects (currently building a supergun to play arcade games at home), learn yo-yo tricks, read books, garden, play music. Lack of hobbies isn't the problem. If someone would pay me a salary just to do my hobbies I'd be extremely happy.
- PretzelPirate 4y ago
  I’d love to get into 3D printing, but the sheer amount of waste I’d produce is too much for me. I looked into recycling wasted filament into new filament, and all the reviews of different devices made it seem very hit or miss. Is there a good way to not generate plastic waste and still get into 3D printing?
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    If you print things that you'd buy anyway the packaging would make up for a good bit of waste plastic.
wincy 4y ago
I got into 3D printing miniatures and statues and stuff during the pandemic. Spent one of the stimulus checks on a good resin printer, was astounded by the quality. Then realized the filament printers were a better idea for some prints and bought 3 of them. Then I wanted painted stuff, so I bought some cheap store paints, they were okay so I bought some hobby paints which were excellent. It really wows people instead of getting them some cheap present for Christmas printing them a cool statue and painting it up. Another thing is that 3D printers are still very hacker ish so for me another fun part was analyzing what upgrades were actually functional and helped me print faster/more accurately and only doing those upgrades. This includes software side like compiling your own open source firmware and integrating a general purpose CPU in a Raspberry Pi to do the gcode processing. It’s a good way to do low stakes configuration and compiling of software so it’s something I’m capable of as an SWE and it’s fun to tinker with since the worst that’ll happen is I’ll have to reformat my printer.

VyseofArcadia 4y ago

I found this to be an incredibly depressing article. It boiled down to, "think about pleasant things that aren't work." For example, > Pick an activity that you've always wanted to try. Don't have ideas? Try Wikipedia for a good list of hobbies I already have plenty of hobbies, and I'd rather work on any of them than be at work! I've always been very self-motivated. I want to work on what I want to work on. Being forced to work on things that I don't care about in order to draw a salary sucks, and no amount of > Schedule a 30-minute time block to freely jot down questions that spark your curiosity as an engineer. (They don't have to be about work.) is going to change that. If anything, it makes it worse because now I would rather be investigating those questions than working!

smashface 4y ago
Perhaps not depressing but certainly unhelpful. If I'm spend time thinking about other more interesting stuff, I tend to get sucked into those things. Which just means I've got zero focus on stuff I need to get done.
NAHWheatCracker 4y ago
These were my thoughts as well. The article has nothing to say about being engaged at work. It's all non-work suggestions. The best interpretation I could infer was that if you are engaged outside work, you'll be able to be more engaged at work? My feelings about cause-and-effect are the opposite. When I'm disengaged at work, I'm less engaged outside of work. I'll try to do hobbies and stuff outside of work but it makes the contrast more drastic, which makes work less bearable.
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jebarker 4y ago
I thought point 2 addressed engagement well. If you can get behind the purpose of the whole company, then understanding why your particular cog is important to the machine will help keep you engaged.
- 4y ago

mertnesvat 4y ago

I liked the article and the wikipedia page for hobbies is very interesting, I've found some gems... - Magnet Fishing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_fishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_fishing) - Binge watching ( didn't know it can be called as a hobby - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binge-watching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binge-watching ) - Constructing languages ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language ) - Tea bag collecting ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_bag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_bag )

VyseofArcadia 4y ago
+1 for constructed languages. Fascinating hobby. I've dabbled myself. Bonus: Tolkien would approve.

newaccount2021 4y ago

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tstrimple 4y ago

I know that this wasn't the point of the article, but please don't ever do this. > Why do web applications have no sound? Why can't we make boring internal tools come to life with sound, in the same way that UI on a Nintendo Switch pops and clicks and whistles?

dairylee 4y ago
Sound can work well on the web[1], as long as it isn't over the top, there's no reason it couldn't be used more. I've been considering adding some sounds[2] to the project I'm working on. 1: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/react/announcing-use-sound-react-hook/ https://www.joshwcomeau.com/react/announcing-use-sound-react... 2: https://github.com/snd-lib/snd-lib https://github.com/snd-lib/snd-lib
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  If you add sounds to anything on the web, please, please, make a top-level, easily identifiable mute button.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    And mute the sound by default!

dnndev 4y ago

This feels more like how to not be miserable than stay engaged. I would have accepted do it for the money they pay you so much money you can retire early and end the misery.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

Burning Man taught me an important lesson about expectations and satisfaction. You can't go to Burning Man and expect everybody else to give you a good time all the time, or you can end up bored, bummed out, and alone in a crowd. If you want a fun time, bring it with you. Don't spectate, participate. Give yourself a small purpose and spend some of your work day on it. Make it something that feels rewarding. Remember, 1/3 of your life is spent at work. Maybe you only want to focus on the technical. That doesn't mean only becoming an expert in one domain, but also pulling in knowledge from other domains for perspective and inspiration. Maybe you learn how the operating system works, or embedded design. Maybe learn how car ECUs work. Maybe in learning about cars you notice different companies make different designs, decisions, priorities, leading to different outcomes. Maybe you learn about NUMMI and the Toyota Production System. Then maybe you hear tech buzzwords that come from Toyota and find out how they're related. Then maybe you take all those non-technical ideas back into your technical work. If you like to solve problems, you don't have to stop at technical ones. You can work on organizational problems, financial problems, logistical problems, communication problems, architectural problems. There's a million problems outside your domain of expertise, and you can learn about all of them. Your biggest problem is an overabundance of choice. If you like to help people, you don't have to help just your immediate team. You can look at other teams and see if they need help. Maybe not even business help, but personal help. Maybe you'd like to join an employee resource group, or organize one; or a charity bake sale, or a hackathon. Or work on convincing your job to have a donation matching program, or finding a local charity to reinvest some percentage of profit into, or convincing execs to give everyone the day off on election day.

AlwaysRock 4y ago

Eh. These all seem fine. My route? I work less. I have a typical 9-5 but 1-2 days a week I leave a little early and go to do something engaging. Never when I have meetings. Never when I have deadlines. Never when someone is waiting on something from me. But I, and I suspect most engineers, have the capacity to get my work done for a week in less than 40 hours. I used to spend time dicking off on my computer to fill the time. Now I don't. I go do something I want to do. I find that I'm much more engaged in my work because I am actually using all my time to get things done. I'm not watching the clock till its time to leave for the day. I'll probably get hate for this but its incredibly sustainable since I'm not working at a start up anymore. I suspect whenever I take on another job search I'll only consider 4 day work weeks since that's similar to what I'm doing now.

adamsmith143 4y ago
Is your manager just next level laid back? I feel like most places are going to notice and be bothered seeing the yellow circle on your Teams or Slack status consistently for long periods of time.
- dangerlibrary 4y ago
  If managers are spending their days watching the color of the circles next to their team member's names, maybe the managers need more work to do in order to "stay engaged" at work. Of all the bad heuristics for trying to determine whether someone is being productive, this has to be near the bottom of the list. It's the digital equivalent of measuring engineer productivity by looking around the room and seeing who is at their desk. Except that it can be trivially gamed by a simple mouse jiggler script.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    Totally agree but from a SWE perspective on any kind of Agile/Scrum team I think the expectation is usually that you pick up another task if you finish early and there's still time during a sprint for example. This also obviously breeds other bad incentives i.e. the faster you work the more work you get.

rmah 4y ago

In my experience, one of the key factors of being engaged with one's work is feeling a sense of progress or accomplishment. Few things sap motivation more than the feeling that you're just spinning your wheels and nothing is getting done. I realize that if you're not a team lead or manager, this is difficult to implement. However, sometimes physical manifestations of progress can make progress feel more tangible. For example, if you have to churn through tickets, make a little card for each one. And push them from a pending pile into the done pile as you go. This makes your progress more visible and tangible than a number on a website. Of course, a big "to do" pile may demotivate some folks. YMMV. Just a bit of food for thought.

alkonaut 4y ago

My motto is: I don't want to work on a CRUD app. I want computer science to actually be part of what I do. Not parsing and validation and deployments and migrations. But finding these jobs where actual "what you do with the data" is the majority work, and the fluff around it is a minority, is HARD and such jobs seem to be more far between. Perhaps because the software jobs that used to be difficult algorithmic problems are now so specialised (Data scientist, Game engines, AI, ...). And that's a bit sad. For those of us who get a kick out of not making a Todo app in an ever cooler JS framework but instead like to write the synth/raytracer/fluid sim/game/, the job market has become pretty boring. Luckily I have a job that ticks the boxes, but it's hard to find another.

dominotw 4y ago
agree with this 100%. I am considering going into management purely because i cannot get myself to write another screen to db crud app. Just the thought makes me depressed.
PeterisP 4y ago
IMHO those jobs are exceedingly rare, because all the roles with difficult algorithmic problems seem to have the grind around them as the majority of work that needs to be done. You mention data science, well, if you're doing serious data analytics two thirds or more of your time is converting data from one form to another and handling its flow; if you're doing cutting edge AI research, most of your time is devoted to 'plumbing' required to run these experiments, and only a minority to the algorithms you're researching. The same is pretty much everywhere, so if you find a job where that does not apply, that's quite exceptional.
ransom1538 4y ago
There are tons ways to escape: security, sre, engineering sales, etc etc.
- catmanjan 4y ago
  Those are all just CRUD with a different title

beepbooptheory 4y ago

These things are always a little funny for me, I'm just a longtime wannabe dev and the thing that makes me disengaged in my jobs is just wanting to code all the time. I guess the grass is always greener.

iancmceachern 4y ago

It's not your job to feel engaged. It's your employers job, your bosses. You can feel how you want to about it.

Tabular-Iceberg 4y ago
While objectively true, it's silly for employers not to exploit the psychology of the engaged employee for the employer's gain.
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  I disagree. It's exploitive for people in a position of power to exploit the psychology of the folks that are in their care. You use the word exploit, exploiting folks isn't good or moral, in any case. It's never ok to exploit folks. If we say we are aligning the interests of the employer and employee that's different. If we are saying a rising tide raises all ships, we all do well when we all do well, etc. That's different. None of that is exploitive, it's inspiring. There is a difference between inspiring and aligning people in powerful ways, and exploiting them. One is ok, one is not. One leads to true long term success and prosperity, one leads to short term success but long term failure, a flash in the pan.
  - Tabular-Iceberg 4y ago
    I was admittedly being facetious, but my point is that those who push the "work is for working, not for having fun" line are neither doing the employers nor the employees any favours. The other side of the coin is that what employers do to try to improve engagement is usually ineffective and often quite demeaning. What Erik Dietrich calls "carnival cash". You just can't fake the sense of producing something useful for the customers and in return getting your fair share of the proceeds.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

> make time to be curious. This is kinda dangerous advice, because I've been involved in countless CRUD apps where the developers were bored and made things more interesting for themselves; NoSQL databases, difficult programming languages like Scala, microservices, CQRS, infrastructure-as-code that was never used in practice (it was wishful-thinking-as-code), home-rolled frameworks (one involved the CTO / lead developer to basically work from home and stay underwater for six months before coming out with a C# framework; it was just e-commerce that used a 3rd party to do all the heavy lifting), etc. Heed the magpie developer. Choose boring technology. Eat the shit sandwich or move on if you think CRUD is beneath you.

nixlim 4y ago
100% agree and can relate. Part of our "estate" is exactly that type of a project - all that was required was a CRUD app, what we got and have to maintain is an app written in functional style written with 3 layered frameworks using Hexagonal Architecture. In answer to the question "Why?", the response was - "We were bored."
Tabular-Iceberg 4y ago
I wonder if a plain old CRUD app in a fill-in-the-blanks framework really is the best kind of job for a developer. I'd like to try it at least once in my career and see if there is any truth to it. It would also be nice to have a job solving interesting computer science problems, like building compilers, tools, optimisation systems, etc. But that's unlikely unless you're actually a genius, or at least an accomplished academic, but some of the things you have to do to get ahead in academia seem even more demeaning than writing CRUD apps. Instead every single job in my career has been the mess that you describe, and I'm starting to lose hope that there is anything other than it in this industry. I think it's the absolute worst of both worlds. You're solving completely trivial problems, but you're forced to do it in the most convoluted way possible. You sit all day racking your brain under maximum cognitive load trying to accomplish something so trivial and mundane that every single fill-in-the-blanks framework already does for you out of the box.
kerblang 4y ago
This is reasonable advice but it carries the assumption that "simplest is easiest". It is in hindsight. People sometimes say "It's easy to make a complicated solution for a simple problem, but not the other way around," and it's painfully true, as Rube Goldberg noticed. But of course that means we actually have a real challenge if we get our priorities straight. There are still tedious/repetitive things that come up, though, and if the repetition is bad enough, then there are opportunities to do something clever... But again: Can it be done simply enough to make it worthwhile? Another challenge. And sometimes you just gotta do the dirty work dirty, and hang in there. Admittedly that is part of any job done well, in the long run.

EddieDante 4y ago

Why would I want to be engaged at work? I just want to do my job and get paid. I think that expecting emotional fulfillment or meaning from my job is a trap, a way to con me into working more while accepting less pay than I deserve. Work won't love me back, so why should I love my work? I lost interest in unrequited love back in high school when I outgrew my Young Werther phase.

bsedlm 4y ago
but I want my work to be engaging... it seems like I want this out of an existencial instict; one which the modern world has completely disregarded. I want it, but I know (and I agree with your stance) that I will not find it in any "industry" work; academic work, on the other hand, does rely on this kind of self-motivated engagement much more than industry but has other problems.
- EddieDante 4y ago
  > it seems like I want this out of an existencial instict; one which the modern world has completely disregarded. Has the modern world completely disregarded this existential need, or have capitalists weaponized it against workers?
ThrowawayR2 4y ago
> "Why would I want to be engaged at work? I just want to do my job and get paid." Because a career spans 40-50 years of being employed in one's profession. As the slow but steady stream of Ask HN's that boil down to "How do I get out of the software industry?" highlight, one pretty must has to derive at least some minimal enjoyment of their profession to help avoid becoming jaded or burnt out.

chomp 4y ago

> Why do web applications have no sound? Collective trauma in the current web application-building cohort from the dark days of the 90s/00s?

alfor 4y ago

99% of effort is wasted. (Naval) This is especially true with code where the cost of replication is zero. Most company goes out of business, most programming project don’t get completed or get unused by the actual customer. In a large company it’s even worse as you are far from the user and the chance that what you work on is unused get through the roof. But there is a tiny chance that what you do become massively useful (http, bitcoin, etc)

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ohwellhere 4y ago

Here's my advice on the same topic after living through burnout and "blah" several times: Make your job the union of what you're interested in and what is valuable to the business. You have to know what is valuable to the business; that knowledge is challenging to acquire but will _always_ help you in any role. It has to be true and verified with stakeholders, not your gut. There are soft skills involved here. You also have to know what you're interested in, which is also not easy after building CRUD apps for years. And you have to sell it — more soft skills. If you can — you can! — the result is a job description or project that you helped co-create, that you own in the most meaningful sense of the word, and that you're more excited to work on. The add on results is that you are more valuable to that specific company, and you've leveled up soft skills and business thinking that makes you more valuable to any company. I've done this consciously several times in at least 4 companies of various sizes. I've ended up building a new mobile architecture platform and library, a data warehouse and ETLT pipeline, multiple projects in languages I wanted to learn, new frameworks and libraries for various other industry-specific web dev things, and a few rewrites of legacy software. I still feel blah a lot of the time, and still think my path through this industry has been... non-optimized to say the least, but I have a path that helps me reengage when I have the energy for internal sales.

lupire 4y ago
Do you mean intersection, not union? Union is kind of a fantasy, getting paid to have your own fun.
- ohwellhere 4y ago
  Yes, I did mean intersection, thank you.

lmarcos 4y ago

I don't need to feel engaged at work. I feel engaged with my career though. A job is just a temporal contract I do for money. I do my best (thankfully I'm not bad at it since I love my career), but usually I don't give a damn about feeling engaged with my current employer.

Tade0 4y ago

> "Oh, I'm just building another CRUD app", Sometimes that's all there is to it. This is work - fulfillment is optional. For this reason I try to engage in a measly paid, but interesting project from time to time. I'm currently in one. I won't be buying that apartment I wanted any time soon, but I can say with confidence that I like my job.

mattlondon 4y ago

I want to be less engaged! Leaving work behind both physically and mentally at 5pm is important to me. I want to treat my work as a necessary "transaction" and don't want to devote any additonal energy to it than is required. Save your mental energy for your own life and activities. Sure we all want our work to be fulfilling, but from experience I would urge against getting too "into" your work.

some-guy 4y ago
"Fulfilling" work is a huge privilege. As a high school dropout who eventually did community college to a degree in computer science at a UC, I've worked all kinds of minimum wage, soul-sucking jobs in between. Just having enough money and free time now to do anything else besides my job has been such an amazing gift, and I could give two shits at this point if I sometimes have to deal with a GWT codebase regularly.

jcadam 4y ago

My level of engagement is directly proportional to the pay.

HellDunkel 4y ago

It is utteriy pointless to convince yourself to be exited about your job if you cant feel it. And it wont last long. If you decline your own emotions its not going to end well.

bradlys 4y ago

To me - this article reads a lot like pure copium. This is the advice from a selfish manager who refuses to invest in their employees and instead tries to be extremely transactional and harvest as much as they can before PIPing them and managing them out. Engagement is almost entirely dictated by your employer - not the employee. You need a good manager, good team, and decent work to stay engaged.

posharma 4y ago

Why is someone's name humorous? The name Mr. Tu is humorous to the author of the post. I find this mildly insulting.

PretzelPirate 4y ago
Because the author’s name is “Jason Tu”. That’s what they said “no relation”.
- posharma 4y ago
  Thanks for clarifying. Didn't notice that.

sinenomine 4y ago

My earlier advice continues being relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25509941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25509941

dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
That was a nice read.

kqr 4y ago

Another way to do this that isn't about escaping from your boring work is... well, making your work more interesting. Have a good idea? Coordinate with the right people and go for it. Even if nobody asked you to. You should never feel like you need someone's authorisation to do a good job. Becoming free anywhere, even within one's regular work, is not about asking for freedom -- it's about insisting to act as if one is already free. Or, as Grace Hopper put it, "it's far easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission." ---- Sometimes this will lead to wonderful things. Sometimes, sure, this will get you into a mess, but honestly, weren't you sort of already? Spending a 25 % of your life somewhere you are unable to engage is messed up.

imbnwa 4y ago
This is what I try to do, but at the org I work for there's a low key assumption that Devs are too stupid to do anything but what can be implemented in a sprint, no matter the complexity of the problem (which obviously leads to poor engineering outcomes). Teams are criticized when there're no 0-burndowns by people upstairs so everyone adapted by vastly simplifying solutions/work to fit that expectation.
- ornornor 4y ago
  Be careful. Stay at one of these places too long, or work at too many in a row, and you’ll end up so burned out that you won’t be able to even entertain the idea of programming ever again for quite some time. Been there, got the t-shirt.

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Buttons840 4y ago

How do I find work that is worth being engaged in?

novakinblood 4y ago

Why did I read this as “How to feel enraged at work”? Complacency modification?

ulisesrmzroche 4y ago

Adding my voice to the consensus that this article is trash. As always, the blackest of falsehoods are dressed up in platitudes.

jowdones 4y ago

There was an article on HN a while ago saying that basically the secret to productivity is ... slack. In other words, excess capacity. I used to have a tight schedule switching from tasks to learning to meetings to more tasks and more learning, 50 minutes work, 10 minutes break, relentlessly, like a robot. Then I realized I'm not a fucking robot. Now I work 2 hours per day at most. Complete my tasks and can do this shit in a sustainable way as opposed to burning myself for what? I'm super engaged. For two hours tops :D

ornornor 4y ago
What do you do for the rest of the time? I had a job like this where it was 80% bullshit so I’d either only need a couple hours a day to get actual stuff done, or I’d work a full day and then spread out my commits and PRs throughout the day. While in office, it was pure agony. I was bored out of my mind. While pandemic remote, it was slightly better (never played as much PS4), but it was not freeing either because I had to answer random voice calls or attend hours long BS meetings and keep paying attention in case I was asked something. So it was like working but worse.

stretchwithme 4y ago

Something that might is timing WHEN you start drinking coffee in the morning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bjxFnAIAiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bjxFnAIAiI

Wistar 4y ago

I misread this as "How to feel enraged at work," and thought that I really didn't need any guidance.

topheroo 4y ago

I try to always work on something that’s contributing to something I care about in the world. I find that motivation is less of an issue if there’s intrinsic value to the work I’m doing.

nunez 4y ago

This article means well but these tips are mostly platitudes. What I want to read is how people who do not care about work (i.e. people who are borderline anti-work) find work that is meaningful. I do not believe that people aspire to not have purpose. I do believe that many people's work life is misaligned with their true purpose OR they don't know what their purpose is. I'd love to read more articles like that. (I naturally love the work that I do and tend to invent work by solving problems that people think are worth solving. I cannot relate to people who straight-up don't want to work. Articles like the above would help me understand their mindset.)

redisman 4y ago
99% of jobs are not interesting or fulfilling.

boredemployee 4y ago

let's be honest here, many IT jobs could get the work done in 20h/week. all the rest is a fucking circus.

afarrell 4y ago

> Imagine you are the CEO Warning: If you take this farther than idle speculation, it is a good way to burn yourself out trying ineffective strategies to drive organizational change.

redisman 4y ago
Practicing your “circle of control” is one of the best things I’ve done for my mental health. I’m not going to worry about a VPs problem. That’s the whole point of not being a VP

afarrell 4y ago

> Stay hungry, stay foolish. If you want to feel disengaged at work, neglect your diet and make foolish choices that break people’s trust. If you want to feel engaged at work, eat lunch with your coworkers and talk philosophy.