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I don’t want to work in a place where any budget cuts result in people saying there is no fun to be had anymore. That’s a pretty negative environment. It seems

• scarface74 4y ago
  I go to work exclusively to trade labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. I don’t go to work to have “fun”. I don’t hate my job any more than I hate breathing. They are both necessary for my survival.
  • dontreact 4y ago
    I’m sorry if you feel that way. If there is absolutely nothing you can find that is fun about your job then honestly yeah I would rather not have you on my team because it sounds like it would be a pretty bad time working together.
    • serverholic 4y ago
      Don’t high road him. Do you really think most engineers truly enjoy their jobs? Imagine a world where their needs are taken care of outside of work. Do you really think they’d stick around?
      • dontreact 4y ago
        I don’t know what the percentages are. All I know is there are many people who can enjoy some aspect of work, and I would much rather work with them than with someone who can’t enjoy anything about the work. People who are completely apathetic and find no enjoyment in any aspect of work probably are also best off working together.
        • qbasic_forever 4y ago
          They didn't say they have no fun at work. They're simply saying that work is not a source of fun in their life--perhaps they find true joy from their family, hobbies, outdoors, etc. If their work suddenly implodes and goes away they will have no sense of loss or concern, it was simply a place to trade labor for capitol and nothing more.
          • scarface74 4y ago
            In fact you are right. My wife and I are going to be doing the digital nomad thing starting later this year and fly around the country staying in hotels. My job working for $BigTech remotely affords us that privilege. It’s going to be much more “fun” exploring the US than anything I’m doing at work.
            • dontreact 4y ago
              Hey as long as you enjoy some aspect of work that is fine. If you find things you enjoy more outside of work and derive true meaning from things outside of work, then that's amazing. All I was saying was _IF_ there is absolutely nothing you enjoy about work, then I imagine it would be quite difficult to enjoy working with you.
              • scarface74 4y ago
                Why do I need to “enjoy” my work to do a good job? I don’t hate my job. It’s a means to an end.
                • dontreact 4y ago
                  You don't have to view your work as a source of fun or fulfillment to be enjoyable to work with. And I also don't think you need to enjoy anything to complete tasks well, but if you don't take any joy at all in anything you work on, it's probably not very fun to work with you.
      • Tehnix 4y ago
        I definitely think many do, and a lot more compared to any other industry. Many of us are fortunate to be able to have our hobby (programming) be our day job. Do all of us enjoy it? Of course not. Do more than any other industry? I would honestly highly suspect so, yeah. Of all the colleagues I have worked with, the ones that I enjoy to work with are the ones that enjoy their work and are curious and passionate about their craft. EDIT: There's actually a pretty big generational shift in how work is perceived. Newer generations both bring more of themselves into work, but also expect much more from it. These days, work being a simple 9-17 is simply not good enough anymore, given the alternatives. If you find no enjoyment in any type of work at all, I feel bad for you, because we spend such an enormous portion of our waking hours in the work at work :(
        • scarface74 4y ago
          Go over to r/cscareerquestions and see how many are interested in CS because they “get paid for their hobby” and how many are willing to “grind leetCode” for months on end to “get into a FAANG” because of compensation.
        • danwee 4y ago
          Not all programming is the same. You may love working on automation and Python... but your day to day job is CRUD web apps using Django. Same tools, but totally different stuff.
      • ghaff 4y ago
        I agree that many do. But I also think that if many of them won $50 million (or whatever) in the lottery tomorrow, they would, at a minimum, immediately renegotiate the terms of their job.
    • iterati 4y ago
      Finding fun in things you do is different for going to work for fun. When I still worked in an office and commuted, I'd very rarely attend any out-of-work activities. I have my own life and getting home at 10pm so I can have some beers with coworkers after work doesn't fit with my lifestyle.
  • qbasic_forever 4y ago
    Exactly. And lol that the corporate ruling class wants to call you a "quiet quitter" that isn't a team player because you aren't willing to sacrifice yourself to further enrich them.
  • eastbound 4y ago
    Different levels of maturity (see Tribal Leadership). P2 - Apathetic member P3 - Performing-but-solitary performer P4 - Performing-and-coach in the company P5 - Collective intelligence and ability to introduce P3-P4 to other P3-P4 because they’ll do awesome work together. You may be at P2, but the risk of communicating too much about it, is to demotivate potential P3 into P2.
    • danwee 4y ago
      Nice scale. I'm definitely a P2 but I fake being a P4 mainly because companies pay more. I couldn't give a damn about the product I work on, but I'm good with computers and I'm good with people, and getting more money for doing P4 level work is worth it.
    • scarface74 4y ago
      There is a huge difference between apathetic and putting in my best work for 8 hours that they pay for and logging off and enjoying life.
      • eastbound 4y ago
        And THAT’S the employees I like best. For me that’s the ultimate goal: Being able to develop a personal life (7hrs work in France), but being correctly dedicated when at work. I’m not an experienced manager so I suppose this is a pipe dream. We need to account for employees with newborns and divorces, how we can modulate work for them.
        • scarface74 4y ago
          Enjoying life for me == traveling the US and occasionally Canada and Mexico doing the digital nomad thing with my wife.
    • malandrew 4y ago
      Can you provide a reference for the framework you’re using?
  • afpx 4y ago
    A lot of us have "enough money" that food and shelter became boring years ago. Diminishing returns happens pretty quickly. So, when money no longer matters as much, fun becomes pretty important.
    • malandrew 4y ago
      If I have “enough money” then the institutional investors certainly do. I’ll gladly take more money than I need and give it to my family who aren’t fortunate enough to earn tech salaries and yet have “enough money”
      • afpx 4y ago
        I always ask for competitive compensation. I definitely find uses (for helping others, like you say). But, if most companies are competitive, how do you decide which to pick?
    • scarface74 4y ago
      When money no longer matters, the list of things that I can do that are more fun than finding ways to serve ads to enrich a company that is worth over 1T is a mile long.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • inanutshellus 4y ago
    You're reducing the relationship to that of the proverbial cog. "I provide the teeth, you provide the torque, I get money, you get profits. Anything else is wasting company resources." ...Where's the joy in that, and what benefit is there to rejecting company-funded efforts to inject joy?
    • qbasic_forever 4y ago
      When the company misses profit expectations you can be damn sure they'll rip out cogs and throw them on the street without a second thought to save money and get profits up again. Don't kid yourself or fall for corporate propaganda. You are a cog and you will be treated as such.
      • inanutshellus 4y ago
        You're changing the context and thus missing the argument. We were talking about Google "slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic." and GP opined that he only wanted to show up for a paycheck and not get any extra benefits like travel budgets. You've reversed the context to "You ARE a cog!!!" which is irrelevant to GP preferring to decline extra benefits when they exist.
  • geodel 4y ago
    Good point. Seems like Google and similar companies are really filled with 30-40 year old children. Will throw tantrums if favorite food or TV shows are not provided when demanded.
    • laweijfmvo 4y ago
      Maybe, but consider this: when you join a company like Google, you get a top-of-industry offer, for sure, but they often low-ball you regardless, relatively speaking. The recruiter justifies it with perks like this (free meals! free gym! snacks! swag! off-sites! whatever). Then the pandemic hits and all that stops, but most of us understand. The stock however, explodes, and the executives go from 10- to 11-digit wealth. Then we come back to the office, at Their behest, and the second the stock (and THEIR compensation) starts to droop, they instantly cut everything. Likely not many SWEs at Google are struggling for food; but wouldn't you be at least a little pissed off?
      • scarface74 4y ago
        Alternate take: by the time BigTech salaries had gotten so out of whack from none BigTech salaries that the cost of living differences between moving to the west coast made sense, I already was in my mid 30s, newly married with the big house in the burbs with two (step)sons and it just wasn’t appealing to me. By the time my youngest graduated in 2020 and I again had the opportunity and willing spouse to get a job at BigTech as a software developer and move across the country, I still wasn’t interested. I kept talking to the recruiter and she suggested another software engineering adjacent job that ended up paying 20% less, but was permanently remote, I jumped at. I have an entire room in my own house dedicated to cardio equipment and weights and my wife has another room dedicated to her dance studio and workout area. Why would I care about a “free gym” and “free food”? I don’t need “free laundry service”, the only time I dress in anything approaching business casual is when they fly me out to a customer site or a team meeting.
        • unity1001 4y ago
          > BigTech salaries had gotten so out of whack They didn't. No one's salary ever has gotten out of whack, ever: It is estimated that those who take the most share out of the economic value that they generate are upper-level tech employees. And even them take only up to 10% of the actual economic value they generate. Which means that the rest of the population get much less. The system is atrocious. So no. Big tech salaries haven't gotten out of whack. No employee was ever able to get a noticeable share of the economic value that they generate, and those who get most get at most 10%.
  • mepiethree 4y ago
    If you have to do it for 8 hours a day anyway, might as well enjoy it
  • travisgriggs 4y ago
    I really wish I could figure this trick out. I envy people who are able to say this. Having gone through multiple burnout angry mood swings over the last few years, I would love to be able to do this. My basic problem (I think) is that I get bored of this disposition. I like to be creatively engaged. But it’s 8+ hours of 5/7s of my waking time!! I don’t spend anywhere near that time sating my appetite, and my hindbrain wants to be the “breathing specialist” on the team, so I cede that to him. I just struggle to go on autopilot and do the disengaged worker bee thing, watching the day go by, caring only as much as needed to deliver nominal output. Every time I try this approach to save my sanity, the “newness” is cool for a couple of days, and then I find myself gradually reinvesting again, because 8 hours of “it doesn’t mean anything to me, I’m just sitting here wiling the time away pondering what interesting things I might be able to do in the scant remaining non-work hours” robot mode just bores the heck out of me and sucks my soul dry. If you’ve got advice on how to get to this mode that doesn’t involve an IV drip of alcohol induced euphoria, I would love to hear it.
    • strgcmc 4y ago
      Set aside work/career for now. What do you do in your personal life? Have you had any experience with celebrating small (even tiny) milestones or "achievements? Recent example: I recently moved house. Many of my books and lower-urgency work resources are still in moving boxes. I think I need a new bookshelf, so that I can unbox some stuff. I take pleasure in the act of putting together the bookshelf. It is a 30-60min task, it is trivial in the grand scheme of things, but I feel accomplished about doing this proactive step to improve my working environment. Plus I like the new shelf I picked, I like the way it looks, the design itself gives me some small amount of pleasure. Rinse and repeat. Maybe not every day, but every week, there will be some small/tiny/insignificant victory like this. Learning to appreciate them, will not necessarily bring you lifelong joy or self-actualization on its own, but it will do wonders for improving your relationship and emotional balance with respect to work. Sometimes a big project goes wrong, everything is on fire, my boss is asking me to do some crazy unreasonable thing (but at least, a good boss doesn't ask this unnecessarily, and only very rarely), whatever... but still there are always some minor victories to celebrate, or at least partial progress: - hey I stopped the bleeding on that production outage -- at least other teams know where to look for deeper fix - hey I sketched out an outline for that documentation that everyone keeps asking about -- even if the content isn't there, at least people know this is where new content should go - hey I wrote down all my tasks for tomorrow -- so even though I didn't finish things today, I can still log off and forget about them, then pick them up again in the morning EDIT: Or, to put it another way: - don't think about the problem as, "how do I learn to accept tedium or chores, and not get bored/frustrated/angry about them?" - instead the problem should be, "how do I find contentment in the small details of life, that I previously overlooked as simply being tedious or boring?"
• hackerlight 4y ago
  > I don’t want to work in a place where any budget cuts result in people saying there is no fun to be had anymore. Small and scrappy is fun for many. I don't want to work in a megacorp with forced annual trips organized by a large HR department. I want to work on and build interesting things with smart colleagues who are similarly engaged and motivated.
  • yojo 4y ago
    The folks at Google are already working at a megacorp. That small and scrappy ship sailed two decades ago. If I had to guess, most Google engineers aren’t working on cool greenfield stuff, they’re maintaining and extending huge legacy projects with decades worth of cruft, where minuscule changes take days to land. If you want great engineers to work on that stuff, you need to pay them and shower them with perks. Otherwise they’ll move somewhere small and scrappy that’s actually fun.
• laweijfmvo 4y ago
  Same. I don't hate my job, and often enjoy it, but the second I was paid a cent less than promised I'd be looking for a new one.
• adamsmith143 4y ago
  Google spent a decade throwing every perk imaginable at it's engineers, from swag to massages to free food, etc. Now people are getting upset that they're cutting back despite making more money then ever and they are confused?
• unity1001 4y ago
  > we should try and find ways for the work itself to be fun No. Those who are pocketing the $72 billion/year net profit should do that. Not you. If you are doing that yourself without being compensated for the value you generate, you are being exploited.