10 ms·

What's wrong with doing a boring job for a lot of money and then getting all the fun elsewhere? This actually seems to be the best way to do it to me

by usrnm 2y ago

Aeolun 2y ago
Doing the boring job at all is a waste of 50+% of your waking hours? By all means, do it if it makes the remaining 50% more enjoyable, but I think it’s possible to have both. I want to have my cake and eat it too.
- vincnetas 2y ago
  But you know, at the end there should be someone who is cleaning the toilets and taking out garbage. You eating the cake and having it is a bit selfish.
  - sokoloff 2y ago
    Me living in a 4 BR house with only our 4 family members instead of us taking in a stranger is also a bit selfish. Everyone does some level of selfish things; trying to shape work so that you find it enjoyable (and therefore likely something that others would also find enjoyable) is an acceptable form of selfishness to most.
  - vbezhenar 2y ago
    Just because someone's cleaning the toilet doesn't mean that everyone must struggle. Yes, life's not fair to everyone, some people starve right now, while other throw away kilograms of food. Some people clean toilets while other people were born with gold spoon in their mouth and will enjoy whatever they want for the rest of their lives. Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the worst offender to the world fairness, I think.
    - bumby 2y ago
      >Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the worst offender But there is something to be said that some people are born into situations that force them to adopt a very risk adverse posture. If you don’t have any safety net, “daring to work at a place that does not suck” takes on a different risk profile and doesn’t necessarily generalize well as a strategy.
  - bdw5204 2y ago
    Why can't we just automate the terrible jobs out of existence? There's no good reason why we can't have a machine that cleans the toilet or takes your trash out to the street. Plus a self-driving machine that picks up your trash.
    - xvilka 2y ago
      Because it's immensely hard. Moreso to do it cost-efficiently. Check the Moravec paradox[1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
  - jimbokun 2y ago
    I think it was Joel Spolsky, who said one of his responsibilities as CEO of a new startup was cleaning the toilets until they could afford to pay a janitor. I thought it was a good reminder to have an attitude of just seeing what needs to be done and doing it.
- digging 2y ago
  Possible, but unlikely today. I think the advice being converged on is not to let the possibility of 100% enjoyment ruin one's actual, real-life situation. Attain it if you can, but don't spend your life rueing its absence.
  - jimbokun 2y ago
    It's more so true today than ever before, where there are more companies than ever willing to consider allowing software developers, and some other kinds of knowledge workers, to work any where in the world. It gives you more opportunities to find that combination of work you find meaningful, coworkers you mesh with, flexibility, and decent compensation, than any other time in history I'm aware of. It's still not easy. Just easier than in the past.
    - digging 2y ago
      I completely agree. As you stay, it's still not easy, especially in the post-ZIRP economy. Do I deserve to work with a team of interesting people, on a product I can be proud of, on a team that gives me flexible work hours? I sure do. But finding it is a big challenge for me, so I'm still going to celebrate the freedoms my current job gives me until I can find the right one.
- pixl97 2y ago
  It is risk assessment/management. The non-boring companies I've worked for have had problems of wanting to work you at 150% of your schedule, quite often illegally. It is insanely rare that you'll get a job that keeps you busy (only) 8 hours a day constantly. Either the place is always on fire and has 12 hours of work a day, or you'll have it better managed and work will be bursty with the majority of the time under utilized. Spend that extra time being taught stuff on the company dime.
squarefoot 2y ago
Sometimes jobs aren't just boring, but one is constantly stressed by absurd deadlines or communication efforts with bosses/customers whose expectations are both in line with business practices and out of reality. You surely get back home with a nice check, but no energy or will to spend it on anything fun. Being good at forgetting the workplace and associated problems when one walks out of there is an art not everyone can master, especially among those who actually love their jobs.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I have a hobby that involves metalworking and building and it was strongest and I was at my most hobby-productive during a time I worked for a soul-destroying FAANG full of unreasonable expectations, stress, awful management, and so on. I think for the sake of your mental health, you really need to get good at "forgetting the workplace" and switching to fun mode. It's a skill like anything that you can practice. I know people who can't separate, and they take their misery from work and spread it into their home life. It's awful, especially for their family.
  - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
    I fully recognized that would be required when I was in that situation. The TV show Severance kept coming to mind. I think I only saw a couple of episodes and the basic premise of dividing your mind between work and home was too real and I had to stop. Thankfully I had an alternative and went back to startups. I could absolutely never accept dividing my brain like that, steeping in cognitive dissonance and just letting myself rot inside. Once you’ve felt the good life - where work is play and learning happens all day long - there’s no amount of money that can be accepted to lose that.
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  At Google I started to forget if I could even build things anymore. Doubted I would be able to pick up the skill of solving problems again if I left the company. I had strange and hard to interpret nightmares after realizing the company’s PR department had sold me a lie. At this point they are a traditional company. Thankfully I quit and the new job has been great.
smackeyacky 2y ago
Because it’s soul destroying knowing your talents are wasted for 40+ hours a week
- azemetre 2y ago
  It’s only soul destroying if you let it be. As someone who grew up in poverty and spent most of my 20s working at a call center and pawn shop, I feel like the luckiest person in my family with my soul destroying corporate job. It sounds cliche but happiness is truly a state of mind. You don’t have to wait for something in the future to be happy now.
  - spacephysics 2y ago
    The illusion paradigm By saying you want to be happy, you’re already telling yourself there’s a gap between your state currently and that you wish to accomplish “I’ll be truly happy WHEN” When comes and goes, rarely have I heard someone say “well I said I’d be happy when this happened, it’s happened, and now I’m happy. All done” Fully agree, it’s a state of mind. I’d also add most people who say they want to be happy don’t seem to be looking for happiness but rather contentness, but I digress
    - bccdee 2y ago
      > rarely have I heard someone say “well I said I’d be happy when this happened, it’s happened, and now I’m happy I've heard this, but only from people who had been in an very shitty situation and then got out. Happiness is a state of mind, but misery is a set of circumstances, and the latter precludes the former unfortunately.
  - mlsu 2y ago
    These conversations where highly paid software people complain about insanely minor things (the code linter is the worst part of your job??) are actually kind of nice to read, in a funny way. The privilege of having pixels be the most stressful part of your life... it's actually really nice to read that. Having perspective from hardship is good, and everyone will have at least some perspective at some point in their life when hardship is forced upon them. But hardship in and of itself isn't good. I'm happy it is being completely eradicated from life, at least for some of us.
jwr 2y ago
It sounds like modern day slavery, or perhaps more precisely "corvee" labor. You have to toil away on your master's land before doing your own thing. I find it unbearable, but sadly much of the world has to deal with it.
- Scea91 2y ago
  You don’t “have to”, you “choose to”. There are plenty of paths out there. Slaves or serfs actually didn’t have a choice.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    But I could only make a third the money doing the thing I really want to do! /s
- jimbokun 2y ago
  You are mocking the suffering of actual slaves by comparing a modern highly compensated office job to slavery.
  - chiggsy 2y ago
    And you are mocking his authentic feelings. Slaves are an abstract kind of human for him. Feelings are not comparable, right? Now this poor dude can't even vent a lil in an online forum? To the OP: When it sucks a lot, try singing. It really, really helps. Throw your head back and let it out of you on the way home.
  - jwr 2y ago
    Mocking was never my intention. Reading the discussion, I now regret posting any thoughts here and will try to avoid that mistake again.
AdrianB1 2y ago
In corporations is not a lot of money, almost never the market rates. In my big non-IT company I am paid at rates lower than any external company we contract for projects, even if their people are always lower qualified. Also there is the problem of having to deal every day with "professional managers" that don't know anything about IT, but make decisions based on magic 8 ball and their career interests. Similar to illiterate politicians in many countries.
- sukruh 2y ago
  If you were comparing what the other company was charging your company for their developers: Labor and software services have different markets. Because, among other things, tax/insurance regulations and the expectations of contract longevity are not the same. A software shop needs to charge 2-3x salaries to be profitable. I was referring to a theoretical free market for labor. If you were comparing salaries, either your company was compensating you with extra prestige, job security, etc. or you were underpaid.
  - AdrianB1 2y ago
    I am comparing manager/architect positions in Europe with long-term (5+ years) contractor positions in India. Yes, I know contracting is more expensive than employees, but not to this level. We use contractors because internal developers would be paid so bad, nobody would apply (and they don't).
    - pixl97 2y ago
      I'd say they pay bad so they don't have to have the local employees that would be protected by strong local laws. Contracting is effectively cheaper, mostly because the company doesn't care about the health of the local company/economy.
moooo99 2y ago
There is a difference between a job not being fun/being boring and actively dreading to do a job because of deadlines/management/etc The former is tolerable for many, the latter usually isn’t for long
JasserInicide 2y ago
Willing to bet that most people who take up something that pays much less don't have kids
martindbp 2y ago
8 hours is a long time to be bored every day.
consf 2y ago
[dead]

What's wrong with doing a boring job for a lot of money and then getting all the fun elsewhere? This actually seems to be the best way to do it to me

by usrnm 2y ago

What's wrong with doing a boring job for a lot of money and then getting all the fun elsewhere? This actually seems to be the best way to do it to me

Aeolun 2y ago

Doing the boring job at all is a waste of 50+% of your waking hours? By all means, do it if it makes the remaining 50% more enjoyable, but I think it’s possible to have both. I want to have my cake and eat it too.

vincnetas 2y ago
But you know, at the end there should be someone who is cleaning the toilets and taking out garbage. You eating the cake and having it is a bit selfish.
- sokoloff 2y ago
  Me living in a 4 BR house with only our 4 family members instead of us taking in a stranger is also a bit selfish. Everyone does some level of selfish things; trying to shape work so that you find it enjoyable (and therefore likely something that others would also find enjoyable) is an acceptable form of selfishness to most.
- vbezhenar 2y ago
  Just because someone's cleaning the toilet doesn't mean that everyone must struggle. Yes, life's not fair to everyone, some people starve right now, while other throw away kilograms of food. Some people clean toilets while other people were born with gold spoon in their mouth and will enjoy whatever they want for the rest of their lives. Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the worst offender to the world fairness, I think.
  - bumby 2y ago
    >Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the worst offender But there is something to be said that some people are born into situations that force them to adopt a very risk adverse posture. If you don’t have any safety net, “daring to work at a place that does not suck” takes on a different risk profile and doesn’t necessarily generalize well as a strategy.
- bdw5204 2y ago
  Why can't we just automate the terrible jobs out of existence? There's no good reason why we can't have a machine that cleans the toilet or takes your trash out to the street. Plus a self-driving machine that picks up your trash.
  - xvilka 2y ago
    Because it's immensely hard. Moreso to do it cost-efficiently. Check the Moravec paradox[1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
- jimbokun 2y ago
  I think it was Joel Spolsky, who said one of his responsibilities as CEO of a new startup was cleaning the toilets until they could afford to pay a janitor. I thought it was a good reminder to have an attitude of just seeing what needs to be done and doing it.
digging 2y ago
Possible, but unlikely today. I think the advice being converged on is not to let the possibility of 100% enjoyment ruin one's actual, real-life situation. Attain it if you can, but don't spend your life rueing its absence.
- jimbokun 2y ago
  It's more so true today than ever before, where there are more companies than ever willing to consider allowing software developers, and some other kinds of knowledge workers, to work any where in the world. It gives you more opportunities to find that combination of work you find meaningful, coworkers you mesh with, flexibility, and decent compensation, than any other time in history I'm aware of. It's still not easy. Just easier than in the past.
  - digging 2y ago
    I completely agree. As you stay, it's still not easy, especially in the post-ZIRP economy. Do I deserve to work with a team of interesting people, on a product I can be proud of, on a team that gives me flexible work hours? I sure do. But finding it is a big challenge for me, so I'm still going to celebrate the freedoms my current job gives me until I can find the right one.
pixl97 2y ago
It is risk assessment/management. The non-boring companies I've worked for have had problems of wanting to work you at 150% of your schedule, quite often illegally. It is insanely rare that you'll get a job that keeps you busy (only) 8 hours a day constantly. Either the place is always on fire and has 12 hours of work a day, or you'll have it better managed and work will be bursty with the majority of the time under utilized. Spend that extra time being taught stuff on the company dime.

squarefoot 2y ago

Sometimes jobs aren't just boring, but one is constantly stressed by absurd deadlines or communication efforts with bosses/customers whose expectations are both in line with business practices and out of reality. You surely get back home with a nice check, but no energy or will to spend it on anything fun. Being good at forgetting the workplace and associated problems when one walks out of there is an art not everyone can master, especially among those who actually love their jobs.

ryandrake 2y ago
I have a hobby that involves metalworking and building and it was strongest and I was at my most hobby-productive during a time I worked for a soul-destroying FAANG full of unreasonable expectations, stress, awful management, and so on. I think for the sake of your mental health, you really need to get good at "forgetting the workplace" and switching to fun mode. It's a skill like anything that you can practice. I know people who can't separate, and they take their misery from work and spread it into their home life. It's awful, especially for their family.
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  I fully recognized that would be required when I was in that situation. The TV show Severance kept coming to mind. I think I only saw a couple of episodes and the basic premise of dividing your mind between work and home was too real and I had to stop. Thankfully I had an alternative and went back to startups. I could absolutely never accept dividing my brain like that, steeping in cognitive dissonance and just letting myself rot inside. Once you’ve felt the good life - where work is play and learning happens all day long - there’s no amount of money that can be accepted to lose that.
teaearlgraycold 2y ago
At Google I started to forget if I could even build things anymore. Doubted I would be able to pick up the skill of solving problems again if I left the company. I had strange and hard to interpret nightmares after realizing the company’s PR department had sold me a lie. At this point they are a traditional company. Thankfully I quit and the new job has been great.

smackeyacky 2y ago

Because it’s soul destroying knowing your talents are wasted for 40+ hours a week

azemetre 2y ago
It’s only soul destroying if you let it be. As someone who grew up in poverty and spent most of my 20s working at a call center and pawn shop, I feel like the luckiest person in my family with my soul destroying corporate job. It sounds cliche but happiness is truly a state of mind. You don’t have to wait for something in the future to be happy now.
- spacephysics 2y ago
  The illusion paradigm By saying you want to be happy, you’re already telling yourself there’s a gap between your state currently and that you wish to accomplish “I’ll be truly happy WHEN” When comes and goes, rarely have I heard someone say “well I said I’d be happy when this happened, it’s happened, and now I’m happy. All done” Fully agree, it’s a state of mind. I’d also add most people who say they want to be happy don’t seem to be looking for happiness but rather contentness, but I digress
  - bccdee 2y ago
    > rarely have I heard someone say “well I said I’d be happy when this happened, it’s happened, and now I’m happy I've heard this, but only from people who had been in an very shitty situation and then got out. Happiness is a state of mind, but misery is a set of circumstances, and the latter precludes the former unfortunately.
- mlsu 2y ago
  These conversations where highly paid software people complain about insanely minor things (the code linter is the worst part of your job??) are actually kind of nice to read, in a funny way. The privilege of having pixels be the most stressful part of your life... it's actually really nice to read that. Having perspective from hardship is good, and everyone will have at least some perspective at some point in their life when hardship is forced upon them. But hardship in and of itself isn't good. I'm happy it is being completely eradicated from life, at least for some of us.

jwr 2y ago

It sounds like modern day slavery, or perhaps more precisely "corvee" labor. You have to toil away on your master's land before doing your own thing. I find it unbearable, but sadly much of the world has to deal with it.

Scea91 2y ago
You don’t “have to”, you “choose to”. There are plenty of paths out there. Slaves or serfs actually didn’t have a choice.
- ghaff 2y ago
  But I could only make a third the money doing the thing I really want to do! /s
jimbokun 2y ago
You are mocking the suffering of actual slaves by comparing a modern highly compensated office job to slavery.
- chiggsy 2y ago
  And you are mocking his authentic feelings. Slaves are an abstract kind of human for him. Feelings are not comparable, right? Now this poor dude can't even vent a lil in an online forum? To the OP: When it sucks a lot, try singing. It really, really helps. Throw your head back and let it out of you on the way home.
- jwr 2y ago
  Mocking was never my intention. Reading the discussion, I now regret posting any thoughts here and will try to avoid that mistake again.

AdrianB1 2y ago

In corporations is not a lot of money, almost never the market rates. In my big non-IT company I am paid at rates lower than any external company we contract for projects, even if their people are always lower qualified. Also there is the problem of having to deal every day with "professional managers" that don't know anything about IT, but make decisions based on magic 8 ball and their career interests. Similar to illiterate politicians in many countries.

sukruh 2y ago
If you were comparing what the other company was charging your company for their developers: Labor and software services have different markets. Because, among other things, tax/insurance regulations and the expectations of contract longevity are not the same. A software shop needs to charge 2-3x salaries to be profitable. I was referring to a theoretical free market for labor. If you were comparing salaries, either your company was compensating you with extra prestige, job security, etc. or you were underpaid.
- AdrianB1 2y ago
  I am comparing manager/architect positions in Europe with long-term (5+ years) contractor positions in India. Yes, I know contracting is more expensive than employees, but not to this level. We use contractors because internal developers would be paid so bad, nobody would apply (and they don't).
  - pixl97 2y ago
    I'd say they pay bad so they don't have to have the local employees that would be protected by strong local laws. Contracting is effectively cheaper, mostly because the company doesn't care about the health of the local company/economy.

moooo99 2y ago

There is a difference between a job not being fun/being boring and actively dreading to do a job because of deadlines/management/etc The former is tolerable for many, the latter usually isn’t for long

JasserInicide 2y ago

Willing to bet that most people who take up something that pays much less don't have kids

martindbp 2y ago

8 hours is a long time to be bored every day.

consf 2y ago

[dead]