[fallmonkey]

"A common question I get is about work/life balance. And I view it a little different too now. At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying that it spilled the frustration in the “life” part"

This is the golden piece for me. I too recently left a big corp to a smaller place, expecting to sacrifice WLB and my free time - yet I ended up feeling happier and spending less time consuming short-form online contents, to the point that I even have more free time now! It never occurred to me that my self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job.

[bschne]

I once had a job where I somehow didn't get assigned much work for a long period of time right after starting — something about no projects having open staff positions, and them not being able to use me anyway because they were using up all the budget with the existing staffing already and didn't want to do "free work" for the clients.

For a while, I spent my days mostly doing tutorials, reading ebooks and papers, watching lectures, ...

Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible luxury to get a consistent salary and be able to do that! But the thing is, you can't help but feel utterly useless after a while. It's especially bad if everyone else has their projects, so you also don't really feel like part of a team.

[steelframe]

I joined a FAANG during the pendemic, and for the entire year I was there, I never got assigned a single task. Of course I kept myself busy trying to identify and solve problems around me, but I never had a deadline or anything associated with what I had chosen to work on. After a year I just couldn't do it anymore. A few acquaintances thought I was out of my mind and that I should continue milking that for all it's worth, but there's just something that makes me need to feel like someone else actually cares about what I do (or don't) do.

[JGM_io]

What you feel is the "Competence" part of core motivation according to deci & ryan "self determination theory". Their original paper is from 2008 i believe and states people need the perceived Autonomy to choose their life, perceived Competence over that choice and the perceived Relatedness that others respect and encourage your activity of choice.

So it's very understandable that if 1 of 3 is missing your psyche becomes strained.

I used to study this theory as part of my game design interests and found it extremely useful to analyse a lot of stuff from your own situation to a game or even customer experience. Just be aware of the word perceived here... allowing the theory to be used for dark patterns.

[ztjio]

SDT's from the 70's, not 2008. However, in 2009 Daniel Pink published a book that seems to basically neatly package up SDT in a much more directly consumable way, maybe that's where your timeframe is coming from? I actually think Pink's take has some insight but it's not very scientifically oriented.

[asxd]

As another person who left a FAANG company because I found the work meaningless, I can assure you that what you were feeling is real and you probably made the right choice. My life is significantly more enjoyable now that I’ve joined a smaller company where the job actually motivates me.

For what it’s worth, almost everyone I talked to before leaving had the same take as what you described—that I should do the safe thing and just keep working there because the pay was high and it was relatively easy. I thought I was going crazy, because it seemed so obvious to me that I needed to move on.

[scaramanga]

Human beings are just animals and we have a set of needs. Beyond physical needs like air, water, food, we have emotional needs. Those are things like the need to be seen, to be valued, to be among a community of our peers, and to have productive work to do for the benefit of that community.

Sounds like you had plenty of chance to fulfil your needs for free time, and the ability to pursue your own curiosity and carry out intellectual inquiry. Which is definitely nice, and which most people lack the time and space to do (I imagine friends and family telling you that it sounds like a dream job, etc.).

But I think anyone who has been in that situation knows that after a while, it's kind of a nightmare :)

[orzig]

I went through a period like that, I wish my manager had put some boundary (even admittedly artificial) around how long it would be, that it was going to be OK, and help me set some soft goal for that time. It would’ve made the exact same activities feel dramatically nicer.

[hamburglar]

Been there too. It felt a little paradoxical at first. It’s like a gift! But you really do start feeling really shitty about yourself because you know you’re useless.

[earthboundkid]

David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs has a good analysis of this. Standard capitalist theory is that people are lazy and will not work unless force to do so by threat of immiseration. But in reality people HATE bullshit jobs where you spend the day playing solitaire or whatever. People don’t want to burn themselves out but they do want to feel helpful. Good management is about helping people realize their natural desire to help out.

[Aperocky]

> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying

This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks? Does Meta not have those options?

The frustration feels almost artificial, if one does not want to get more work, then maybe just go boating or mountain biking. Watch some sports and play video games.

[tippytippytango]

It doesn't work like that. You have to be "on" even if you aren't working. That means you feel like you can't commit to anything substantial since you feel like you should be working. Fucking off on the internet is a coping mechanism to numb the pain of being in this limbo where you aren't working; but, feel like you should be working because you are getting paid a lot. In retrospect it's easy to see that there's this spare time available to do other things; but, when you are in it, it's not obvious where the boundary is between this extra time and where the work time should be. I know it sounds like a first world problem; but, it actually feels really awful to be in this spot because you can't even admit you are there to anyone without feeling like a slacker/loser/failure/time-thief, a torturous trap.

[ravenstine]

And even if you can manage to find things to do to occupy the time and appear busy, you'll be lucky if management considers the importance of your work and schedule it with the rest of your workload. One too many times have I had to find something to do and spend weeks or months on that thing only to have management tell me to immediately stop working on it even though that thing was actually important. This may not seem different from just being "on", but I find that having real work be tossed in the garbage is even more demoralizing than milling around and not really doing anything.

[Damogran6]

I'm on the part of my career journey where I've realized you're _JUST_ exchanging time for money. They want you to work on something that gets thrown away? It paid for the mortgage, it made a car payment, it's thrown away JUST like 99.9% of the stuff I did for the first 10 years of my career.

It's GOING to happen, best not to get too caught up in it.

Going into SIEM build #8 in my life....it's just another SIEM. I take my enjoyment in the people, the compensation is adequate, it's contributing to a retirement that's getting nearer and more comfortable all the time. I try not to get too hung up on the work product.

[scaramanga]

I really find interesting the juxtaposition here.

On the one hand, if the person is not given productive work to do and decides to just go for a jog then they must be racked by guilt for being a slacker, like GP.

But if our organisations are diverting people's productive energy into unproductive waste, they need not feel any guilt about it at all since it is absolutely self-evident that this is the best and most productive of all possible economic systems.

In the first case, you are maladjusted because you are performing self-punishment to appease feelings of guilt about failing to live up to your own ideals. Another way to think about it is that you are just experiencing the inability to reconcile your basic human need to be a productive member of your community with the reality that your community is dysfunctional and has no interest or ability to provide a healthy psychological environment for its members.

In the second case, you are well-adjusted because you recognise that the society is just a machine and you are using the machine to get whatever you can out of it. Okay, it's not providing for the health and wealth of the community and the emotional needs or psychological well-being of it's constituents is either a non-goal or a goal it fails to achieve. But it does pay money. And you definitely do need money because money can provide for your physical needs. And while it can help with your other needs, you've already traded off the majority of your time and energy so, at best, you can maybe balm some of the damage that's been done by having a huge part of your life voided out.

I sometimes wonder, if I were some alien species keeping humans as animals in a zoo, would I would want to view them in this condition, or would it be too disturbing to see animals being maintained in an environment that is so impoverished?

[netizen-936824]

>it is absolutely self-evident that this is the best and most productive of all possible economic systems.

It isn't very self-evident from my perspective, could you please explain how?

[62951413]

Isn't the main risk here not acquiring new production experience and so reducing your chances for finding the next gig? As in "adding new buzzwords to your resume" basically.

When they ask you in three years about how you have spent the time. If you convert XML requests to JSON messages for a living and not even with Spark.

[Damogran6]

Aspirationally, you should be getting to the point where you care less about the underlying technology (you're smart, you can pick up whatever tech they want to use this week), you're paid more because you have the scars and experience that can be better applied to the tech du jour.

[RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u]

> [...] having real work be tossed in the garbage is [...] demoralizing [...]

This happened to me a few years ago. I got assigned to work on a small greenfield project solo. I had virtually full creative control, and it would solve a real imminent problem for the team. Sounds like a dream project, right? And it was for the ~1 month or so I worked on it, got positive feedback from the team, etc. However, with a stroke of a (figurative) pen, the project's no longer needed and was scrapped. The manager found more money in the team's budget.

I can't say I disagreed with the decision: often it _is_ better to just throw money to make a problem go away. I felt bummed out nonetheless. _That_ I could live with, but getting dinged for "being unproductive for a month" during performance review, now that really stung.

My story might have a happy ending though. A few months ago the same problem resurfaced, this time due to a different, company-wide constraint. The lead dev solicited solutions, and I couldn't help but feel a bit smug inside when I said "um, remember that project I worked on a few years ago? I basically have your solution on a platter." We'll see: who knows maybe the manager will somehow carve out an exception for our team. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Aeolun]

> getting dinged for "being unproductive for a month" during performance review

I don’t think I could have lived with that if that was done to me. I’d either resign on the spot or shortly after.

[RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u]

Without divulging specifics, around the same time something happened in my personal life. I needed, and family members who depended on me needed, the money and stability.

A bruised ego is a small price to pay for the safety of my family and dependents, so I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it. dang, erase that GP.[0]

[0] With apologies to _In The Pale Moonlight_

[delgaudm]

I find it helps to be cynical in these situations.

> I felt bummed out nonetheless.

Why? Don't get emotionally involved with work done for the company. They want to toss it? Why give moments care. Your time wasn't wasted. It was done doing what they asked in exchange for pay. That's it.

>_That_ I could live with, but getting dinged for "being unproductive for a month" during performance review, now that really stung.

And that's why, you shouldn't care or get emotionally involved in the work you create for the company. The company clearly, demonstrably doesn't care about you. They do not care about you. Why should you care deeply about work you create for them?

[ravenstine]

It's ultimately not good for the spirit. Yes, some people can tolerate the bullshit. Likewise, there are people who are willing to be poop divers for sewage treatment plants (though this is an imperfect analogy I want not to offend those who are fine doing far less meaningful work). This doesn't mean everyone can or should be poop divers.

Sure, everyone should be prepared to tolerate a level of meaningless and nonsense in the corporate world. I fully agree that one should not become too invested in work that ultimately serves the company.

Nevertheless, if humans were meant to live as sysipheans, by now we would have found more straight-forward ways of doing so, and we might even take pride in doing pointless work. Yet few if anyone is openly proud of doing nothing and still getting paid even when there's no social recourse. Naturally, when enough time passes and a person has yet to be able to actually contribute to the system, they are liable to be alienated. And why shouldn't they? If they can sit around for months or years being practically useless while still having to trade one's finite time for the privilege of food and shelter, there may be a breaking point where they can't make logical sense of the situation anymore. Where's the excitement? For many, we spend more hours at work than at home, especially if you discount sleep, and those hours are usually tired. That time at work had better mean at least something at some point; how is one then supposed to feel when they've reached senior status and... the situation is exactly the same or quite possibly worse?

It would be nice if humans could get more fulfillment out of their personal lives, but that usually doesn't come by default and rather requires considerable work on top of one's day job; family, friends, and social status all require work, and may of us don't even have adequate time for those. Is it reasonable to put a sapient mind through the anguish of being irrelevant in nearly every aspect of their lives for the promise of a distant retirement and expect them to not feel a sense of disengagement because the world is constructed in such a ridiculous fashion?

This isn't to say that you are entirely wrong, but I have to wonder if you believe that in every fiber of your being, because otherwise you could have been a burger flipper or a circus clown instead of the occupation that brings you to HN. I assume that you have a set of skills that came to you at least somewhat naturally, and that if you were unable to ever properly execute those skills that those skills (and thereby you) would seem worthless to yourself.

In my personal opinion, life is way too short to deal with meaninglessness for extended periods. If your job continues to be meaningless after years of experience, chances are you are doing the wrong thing and can benefit from a course correction.

[stank345]

What you're saying makes sense, but sentiment like this makes me long for a post-capitalist conception of work where everything's not purely transactional and we can do meaningful work that we feel proud of. I think artisans or craftspeople had that historically and it's something we require to feel fulfilled.

[wreath]

Someone here on HN once mentioned that they cleaned or worked on their deck or whatever while working and nobody cared. I did the same (well, no deck but other stuff) when i had long stretches of downtime or notice that nobody else cares as much as I do about the project. Same result, nobody gave a fuck really. I don't think it's sustainable, but whatever.

[quickthrower2]

Ideally the thing you spend time on should be something you can use outside the org. E.g. learn k8s.

[Juliate]

That’s if you’re not already frozen regarding the field.

I’m exactly in this spot right now. And yes, self-training on side quests like k8s or anything related to the field looks nice on the paper.

The problem comes from when 1/ you already associated all these training with the field you’re working in, and it feels helpless and boring, 2/ you still feel somehow disloyal to use your time like that.

[orzig]

Yeah, a good manager can fix that in 30 seconds (by giving you explicit permission to learn), but a surprising portion don’t think too.

[spookthesunset]

Last two years of my life was this. Sitting at home with nothing meaningful to do but still having to park my butt in my kids bedroom.

[pdimitar]

So why didn't you use your time better and invest in other skills you want to have?

[Damogran6]

"Why don't you just not be sad?"

[pdimitar]

I didn't say or even imply that and it's unfair to interpret it that way.

Distract yourself in a positive manner. Don't dwell on meaningless thoughts that you'll never defeat. Only way to win is to do something else with your time.

It's fine if you don't think that's the solution but straight up misrepresenting what has been said to you is not cool.

[granshaw]

I’d like to find contracts that are purely delivery based and not part of a team setting. And do value based pricing so if I finish quickly, I’m truly off the hook and have my own time back

[thematrixturtle]

Bingo. Working from home also exacerbates this, since there is no longer a physical division between "work" and "home", plus there is virtually no social pressure not to slack off.

[osigurdson]

I think that works both ways. If you want to work more, it is easier to do from home as there is less social (i.e. family) pressure to come home from the office. The key is to find a workable balance.

[pdimitar]

...And the problem is, what exactly?

[chasd00]

Lack of self discipline. If you’re going to wfh you have to be disciplined enough to work during work hours and not work during non work hours.

[pdimitar]

Well, it pays off to be aware of the issue at least, right?

I too have grappled with this for a while but I believe this struggle was for the better and it eventually led to reduced stress. Nowadays when I mentally proclaim "I am done for the day!" I know that I did my best and that I have put enough hours / effort to not feel guilty about not putting more.

So yeah, you are right. I just think people should go through this fight for discipline because it's ultimately better for their mental health when they learn to put boundaries.

[pdimitar]

So don't admit it to anyone. Work on it by yourself or by sharing it on HN / Reddit / etc.

It still reads too much as a very first world of a problem to me, admittedly. I recognize that us the people need to have a goal and a direction, otherwise we start feeling like aimless leaves on the wind -- but you can still do a ton of things at home (if you work remotely which you should) while checking your Slack and email every 15 minutes, no?

But if it really bothers you so much then you have to make a choice between (a) prestige / a lot of money / boredom and (b) enjoyment / medium money / purpose. Apparently in big corps you can't have both. Being stuck in a FOMO feedback loop and being unable to choose between either path is very toxic and produces a lot of internal pressure. At some point you have to choose for the sake of your mental well-being.

...Or, as other commenters alluded to, find a job that allows you to combine them. I do doubt that many other companies can give salaries in the $250K - $500K annual range though. But who knows.

As a general observation throughout my life, us the Homo Sapiens seem to suck super bad at picking a side and/or to leave a toxic relationship before it starts to poison us long-term. We must proactively work hard to periodically challenge our priorities and reassess our situation. So if you are up for an advice from a stranger: do that and do it often, something like 2-3 times a month, for whatever period of time, until you feel you finally are where you belong. We the people hold on to things for way too long. It seems to be our default mode of operation.

It also doesn't help at all that our current civilization seems to thrive on bombarding people with FOMO, sigh. But we gotta adapt and find our own way through it all regardless.

[granshaw]

You can take on a little more risk, esp if you have a spouse with employer health insurance, and be a contractor. Hitting the $300k annual ballpark is pretty doable even with giving yourself about 20 days off a year, even while working at startups and places where their employees don’t get near that

[anothernewdude]

I just got a second job. Keeps me busy rather than just spending time waiting all day.

[heurist]

Side gig/project is the answer here. If you're not doing 6-8 hours of active work per workday and no one is complaining you might as well use the rest for yourself. Make sure it's something where you can exercise creativity and/or learn.

[croh]

terrible time. you feel like losing the game, falling behind from all new cool-aid drinks. You feel like your friends and colleagues are working on something cool, and then suddenly re-org happens and you wonder is your career on right track ?

[2457013579]

As someone who worked remote at a large company and spent the last year or so doing this, I don’t think it’s a viable long term solution, at least for me. I’ve been traveling every month (7 times in other countries), spent countless hours gaming, got some certificates, etc, etc.. all the while still looked at as a “top performer” on my team. Due to the nature of bigger organizations (or at least mine), there isn’t an option for me to take on more responsibility or extra work (I can’t help but ask for these things too often and get general feedback of “slow your roll, that’s not how it works here”). I played around with the idea taking on a part time job or consulting or something, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I would find greater purpose/meaning spending my full headspace in a single job I was passionate about. This is definitely a first world problem, and I’m lucky to have the opportunity to be in this type of situation. It’s also not the same way everyone feels, since there are a lot of people that are at big organizations for long periods of time, but I share sentiment with the article and parent comment.

[boppo1]

What do you do for a living/ what was that job? Current job?

[fhrow4484]

>> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying

> This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks?

Where did he mention wanting more work? He mentioned unsatisfying work, I doubt doing interview loop recruiting people when you find your own work unsatisfying is gonna make you a good interviewer (and I'd hate to be the interviewee there). And take classes/training to what end? At 9 years in, I doubt there's many relevant trainings, and learning the intricate details of yet another internal proprietary system has limited returns.

> just go boating or mountain biking. Watch some sports and play video games.

None of these activities leads to finding satisfying, purposeful work, nor are they really good at negating the effects of the unsatisfying work.

[ravenstine]

Right. "Just learn k8s, bruh." It's like ok, maybe, but if the problem isn't so much a lack of work then you're really juat apinning your wheels learning for the sake of it.

Another issue is evaluating whether the juice is worth the squeeze. It's easy to say "learn a new skill bruh", but what happens when you spend the time learning something, you get hired at a new job relevant to that skill only to run into your original problem all over again? The risk of that is significant, and in the world of tech it's extremely difficult to know what a position at a company is really like because so many of us are kissing ass, and we are avoidant of any real criticism or confrontation.

None of the argumenta here are necessarily wrong, but speaking as if there are clear solutions that those complaining aren't seeing and calling this a first world problem is pretty dismissive.

[pdimitar]

Or you can not tie your identity to work as much as you do, and feel instant relief?

[tjr225]

Sure, maybe it is "first world." That doesn't change anything. If I'm stuck at home making 80$ an hour and I hate it, then it doesn't matter how "first world" it is- I'm still going to figure out how to change the situation.

Are you saying that people who are dissatisfied with privileged situations shouldn't have opinions or write about them? Everything is relative.

[pawsforthought]

Absolutely. I dislike the offhand dismissal of things as first world problems, most especially because, if we can find a way to a future where the rest of the world catches up in living standards, these will be everyone’s problems.

[ethbr0]

> [Why not] join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks [...] go boating or mountain biking. Watch some sports and play video games[?]

(A) Because there's a fundamental cognitive dissonance to being able to say both "My job is important enough to stay in" and "My job is unimportant enough that I should spend a lot of time doing unrelated things."

(B) Because author doesn't want to pursue alternative hobbies with his work chunk of time. He wants to write exciting code.

(C) Because while employed, there's an expectation that you're doing the work well. If you feel like you aren't, even if you're doing as decent of a job as the system allows you to, it eats at you. Badly.

[Barrin92]

> if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks?

because it's never that easy. If you try to get work from somewhere else maybe your manager starts to think you're bored or not interested, you definitely can't just leave and go mountain biking because then you look even lazier. So at the end of the day in every gigantic organization a substantial amount of people sits around and does nothing, that's just how it goes.

it's not first world, it's just that in bug business you're just a salaryman.

[scollet]

> bug business

Ship it

[erwincoumans]

Move fast, bug things.

[granshaw]

It’s probably that he has to “be available” and so can’t make good use of the working hours where he’s not doing active work

It’s a common obstacle to making good use of your time even when underworked and working remotely. Ideally one could find non-team settings where this wouldn’t be an issue

[seemaze]

Or contribute to your favorite flavor of open source!

[amelius]

I imagine React was created by Facebook slackers.

[goodlinks]

Any job ive had regardless of pay, regardless of how good its been for how long, what the job market is like... after about 5-10 minutes wondering if I am adding value I will look for another.

I have one life, I need to have money to live but thats easy, actually having a positive impact is a reason to do something for someone else.

I dont necessarily apply but its its all i am thinking about untill I have value to add again: what am I doing here?

[srcreigh]

The point is getting a few hours of productive work in some enviroments takes more and more and more effort that it seems impossible to even keep trying.

[stepanhruda]

Definitely there, but author probably didn’t find those fulfilling. The rest are leisure activities, which might again not work when a problem solver is looking to apply themselves.

[wahnfrieden]

Try reading Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs for more perspective on this

[2457013579]

This hit home for me as well. I’m currently at a large company and looking for a smaller one where I can work more hours Thor the same money doing something more meaningful. I have a min/max mindset, probably like most people here, so it took me a long time to come to the realization that working longer hours for the same pay was a good thing.

[fy20]

The grass is not always greener. Plenty of small companies are also meaningless and have their own set of problems in different ways. Beuracracy is often replaced with toxic management.

[ethbr0]

If there's one underappreciated metric today, it's "quality of hour worked." I.e. how productive did you feel about an hour of your work, today?

Track that over time. Make radical changes if it starts plummeting, because otherwise you're going to be backfilling entire teams' worth of vacated roles.

[jokethrowaway]

Eventually you'll figure out it's all meaningless, no matter if it's big or small.

Find something that you enjoy doing, like you would enjoy a nice puzzle.

Purpose is all in your head.

[yourapostasy]

This kind of context is very difficult for me to wrap my head around. So much so that it strikes me as a kind of artificial ennui, maybe even a kind of humblebragging. I'm open to changing my mind though, so I'd really like to hear explanations/clarifications that would help me understand this sentiment more.

In even my most over-resourced client, there is never a paucity of improvements to make. Ever.

My current working conclusion after seeing this many times and doing what I can to informally coach the ones expressing this kind of sentiment, is that there isn't a lack of meaningfulness, or purpose, or other lofty language. There is a lack of will to go outside of their comfort zone, very often due to non-technical factors. Or a lack of a sense of joy in the craft in even the smallest details and accomplishments. And that's okay. It's the reason we use specialization.

But let's not kid ourselves. I've yet to walk into a client that is so on top of their to do list much less wish list that there is nothing to improve. We also need to recognize there is also a substantial subset of people expressing this sentiment who dislike implementing some improvement without significant recognition, praise, and advancement; these are the ones who seek the big, splashy wins over the steady, incremental attention to craft that accumulate into the 20-year overnight successes.

[lolinder]

I don't work for an FAANG, so if someone who does comes along I'll defer to them.

What I have gathered from those who do is that it's not that there's a shortage of problems to solve in the organization, it's that the bureaucracy is so thick that they couldn't solve extra problems even if they tried.

From your references to "clients" I assume that you work as a consultant of some description. Obviously, no one brings in a consultant without having a lot for them to do. Additionally, few orgs bring in a consultant with the intention of them doing only what they're told.

But if you're just one coder among tens of thousands, that's exactly what your organization expects of you. And that's what the people who tell these stories find so draining.

[yourapostasy]

> ...it's that the bureaucracy is so thick that they couldn't solve extra problems even if they tried.

This is why I called out "...very often due to non-technical factors" of what I found when I dug deeper. It is very rare I find the bureaucracy "too thick", and much more often, I find first a lack of communication, and if the communication is clarified, second I find a lack of desire to work on unglamorous, tedious, time-consuming aspects of the extra problems.

A frequent example: developer has an idea how to improve and existing process. Developer is informed they need the buy-in of SRE, Devops, and NOC teams. The presentations are made, and the team representatives/managers/directors Swiss cheese the idea pointing out all sorts of gaps to address. Endless forms to fill out, approvals to obtain, more presentations to give. Developer is dejected, and comes onto HN to say it's impossible to improve at BigCo.

When I ask what could it hurt to reach out more than halfway to those teams and find out what it would take to use this experience as an exercise to create and document a "minimal integration with stakeholder teams" package that all future projects can base themselves off of, I get met with "but it's not worth it", or "that's too much hassle", and similar fend-off-the-now-not-so-quick-hit-project explanations.

Except here's the clincher for me: I have yet to meet a BigCo team that has done this even for their big projects. No one wants to do the documentation work, nor the documentation maintenance work, because assistive infrastructure enablement isn't incentivized on annual performance reviews, only what sounds like "new progress" going up the leadership chain.

Every project ends up as a bespoke process to integrate into other teams' processes and mechanisms. The bureaucracy is so thick because no one spends the time trying to document, much less automate what processes look like from other teams' perspectives. And this is one of the pillars of my current working conclusion: everyone agrees there is constant documentation maintenance that needs to be performed everywhere, but in all these discussions, extremely rarely do I see someone say, "yeah, I use the extra time to learn some new procedure/tech, and update the onboarding/how-to documentation from the perspective of a newbie" (hugely valuable IMHO), and tons of other people slapping their foreheads and scurrying off to do the same.

Even thick bureaucracy its very self can be addressed with extra time, and that is arguably one of the most frictionless actions to take; pick up the phone/chat/email and start writing what you find out. That so, so few people kvetching about all this "boring extra time" make this frictionless action their revealed preference signals volumes to me.

I want to stress it's fine that people don't want to do this kind of work. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. But so far I haven't bought into the commonly-accepted wisdom why "soul-crushing extra time" exists in our industry, with exceptionally rare variations (like defense-related highly-compartmentalized or similar contexts).

[cmrdporcupine]

These BigCorps are hiring like mad and paying big $$ to fill seats more for the purpose of starving their competition of brains than actually using the brains they hire.

The work is primarily organizational/drudgery and moves at a slow pace because of all the red tape and walls they've built around their projects in order to manage all the people. Endless incremental code reviews for small changes that get pondered for days and days. Design docs for trivial features written up and then basically entirely reworked by comments from people higher up who have more information but no time to do it because they're too busy being higher up and writing design doc comments all day. Horribly inefficient, painful to get anything done, and demoralizing.

Just left Google after 10 years. I found in that time I spent more time trying to find where I fit in and what work I could even do than actually doing any work. In some parts of the company, any interesting project was like a piece of red meat thrown into a pack of hungry wolves looking for "impact". Any project "given" to you quickly got competed with or downgraded in importance unless you got super self-promotional. There'd be talk about some new exciting thing coming down the pipe and you'd eagerly wait months for it to find out the work was either already parceled out or it didn't really exist.

I ended up seeking our "boring" organizations and projects within the company, in order to avoid the frustration and drama. But then motivation suffered.

Oh, and remote work has made them even more terrible because it's even more asynchronous and ponderous now. Can't tap someone on the shoulder and run something by them really anymore, it's just more "fork many threads of work and then spin on all the blocking issues waiting to make progress on any of them". Which sucks if you are the kind of person who is better at picking one thing at a time and sinking your attention into it, like me. So yeah, at some point you just start to lose focus out of sheer annoyance/frustration/boredom. And you're just there to collect the paycheck.

And maybe you feel guilty about it, but then, that was kind of the point. Maybe in your previous job you were a top contributor, potentially competing with BigCorp in some domain. Now you're not. They can push wheelbarrows full of money around to do the thing you were doing before, but at way higher scale and precision... but at the cost of way lower velocity because they've employed PhDs to nitpick over the comments in a protobuf description. (And if you leave and start your own thing and compete, they'll probably just come and buy it and bury it, too.)

They're bad for our industry and not so great for our brains... but good for our wallets. 10 years at Google messed up my passion and skills.... but it sure was good for my mortgage.

(FWIW, I thought in that time that I had lost my passion for coding. But two weeks after leaving to take some time for myself, I found myself firing up CLion and writing a synthesizer from scratch and loving it. Writing code is great.)

[bbananas]

Are you me? Every sentence is so familiar it hurt to read. I hope you’re still writing code!

[davemp]

Very well put, your comment resonates with my frustrations at a BigCorp.

> These BigCorps are hiring like mad and paying big $$ to fill seats more for the purpose of starving their competition of brains than actually using the brains they hire.

I used to apply Hanlon’s Razor to these types of hypothesis. After spending more time with the decision making class, the amount of psychopathic behavior and analysis I’ve seen has let me to reconsider.

[cmrdporcupine]

I don't think it's psychopathic or malevolent beyond what's normal for capitalism. It's how you win at making money. In any market you're either disrupting or at risk of being disrupted. There's multiple strategies you could take for the latter. And it certainly helps if you have a firehose of money (ads revenue).

Not speaking from any inside knowledge, BTW. Just my philosophizing.

[davemp]

That may be a legal/valid strategy, but it seems pathological. Instead of spending money on unproductive employees, these companies could just pass their excesses down to share holders. If a specific company is out competed fairly, oh well, companies don’t need to last/grow forever. The share holders will hopefully have allocated the returns more efficiently (maybe in the new competition).

I see it as an invasive vine using all its spare energy to block out the canopy and choke out the forest. Rather than a native tree that uses spare energy to bear fruits, which nourish various critters who in turn contribute to a more efficient and robust ecosystem.

[infinitone]

This is so true to the T.

[hutzlibu]

"self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job. "

Allmost every addiction is like this. A shallow replacement for the real desires unfulfiled.

[unkulunkulu]

I have been struggling with procrastination for years. It got catastrophically worse during pandemic: I was playing bullet chess online sometimes for like 6 hours a day every day. I have been working for like an hour a day for a year. And they still valued me as “above average”.

When I got to therapy, we traced it mostly to the internal critic (schema therapy). It was gone just like that with a flick of a finger almost! I have been productive and having fun with my life for two months leading up the this new year. When suddenly my manager decided that he does not stimulate me enough. He started getting deep into my ways of working saying something like “he does not understand how I perform my tasks and how they progress”, he started moving some not urgent tasks in ways he saw as better than my plans. He did not notice his direct spending 6-7 hours a day instead of 1 and he sarted really pushing and critiquing me and my teammate in a way that even our wives heard some changes during the zoom calls. It lead to a huge nervous breakdown for me. Two weeks passed by in a recess and now I slowly regain myself back.

But my views towards big corp are finalized: some cog a little bit higher than you can at some point decide that he has a right for any method to increase his perceived impact on team’s productivity and you will get hit.

I love myself a little bit more than this, gotta figure out the financial side a bit. The view towards “being fired” has shifted a bit too, now I think that if you’re not close to being fired based on your performance, the pay you too little and you work too hard (for them!) Work hard for yourself, don't work (too) hard for THEM!

Oh shit I must sound so priviliged, but yep this is the place I’m at right now

[ignoramous]

> TFA: Facebook has changed a lot since 2012. The types of projects that I thrive in were harder to come by. The magic was gone. Things I care a lot about, like quality, craft and focus, weren’t as important as scale, metrics and PSC. None of this happened suddenly, just a very slow process. That was one of the reason it was hard to leave.

> GP: It never occurred to me that my self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job.

The worker no longer trusts that they won't be a replaced by a machine. The investor no longer trusts that they will get a return on capital. The manager no longer trusts that they will have employment for life after more than a bad quarter or two.

With so much of our trust eroding, management is left with little else to hold on to, and so they grasp the false hope of blunt instruments like forced rankings and quarterly forecasting — no matter how illusory it all may be.

...We seem to have a false sense of joining something when we enter companies these days, just as Rousseau stipulated society had entered into a false social contract. This may be what's driving newer generations to look for "purposeful work" as they launch their careers: They are looking to take control by demanding meaning from work right from day one...

But Rousseau also had the idea that humans can remake themselves via their institutions, and Deming appears to share this belief.

This is what's so interesting about companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple. These rare birds tend to operate outside of our norms and customs: They educate their employees differently; they collaborate differently across silos and divisions; they incentivize people in different ways. Because of their overwhelming ability to make cash (either initially through giddy investors and eventually via customers) these companies appear to start out more like communes. They are Gardens of Eden where there is little fighting for resources and oftentimes even the core customers freely partake.

Moreover, these companies almost appear to be for the common good, and the management appears to instinctively follow Deming's philosophy. But what's even more striking is that efficiency and performance naturally improves inside of these companies without the standard methods that more established firms pursue. Sadly, there's often also a fall from grace that typically happens as these corporations become "normalized" and a more traditional battle for resources sets in.

Perhaps the answer lies deeper in what Deming was trying to say about "profound knowledge." As Deming implied, we work in complex systems with forces of good and evil always in play, and it may just be that the single most important responsibility of our top leaders is to artfully mold and shape this dynamic in a way that best suits their organizations — and produces a self-selecting ecosystem of workers, partners, customers, and shareholders who naturally align.

All of this implies a more-progressive approach to leadership. And yet we all too easily succumb to our Taylor-like impulses that assume the worst about workers — using automation to track productivity down to the nanosecond, if possible. Unfortunately, this tends to exacerbate the growing trust gap between workers that festers between our corporate silos and stymies the very productivity that we seek to enhance.

None of this is easy. And many of us will surely struggle with these issues throughout our entire lives. But in a world where the stakes appear to be getting higher by the minute, building lasting trust and cooperation across companies and communities — binding together people and long-calcified silos — may be the only way for the corporation to survive.

hbr.org, The management thinker we should never have forgotten (2016), https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-management-thinker-we-should-nev...

[Octabrain]

I totally understand you. I also did something similar recently. In my case, I’m leaving a company I’ve been working in for six months where I’ve been earning a very good salary but the lack of technical challenges, learning and political battles combined with nobody requesting me to deliver anything simply made me feel bored and miserable. Now I’m about to start in a new position from a different place where the salary is not that good (although still pretty decent) but I know from friends that are working there that the environment is much more satisfactory.

It’s simple, silly me, I consider work a big part of my life. And given the fact that I have to do it for living anyway, it *must be* gratifying.

[bipendulum]

Definitely for me too.

I currently work at a large fintech company and have a decent salary. I have been there for quite some time now so I have the reputation and trust in the organization however, I am having the worst time of my career. I can also barely work a few hours a day and I feel horribly burnout. Hence I made the opposite decision - to move to one of the FAANGs where I will massively shift my current WLB. I am confident that I made the right decision.

[zebraflask]

I think these kinds of complaints are interesting compared to other HN posts about - take your pick - startups trying to keep the lights on, startups closing their doors, bootcamp attendees looking for their first job, etc.

Whether intentional or not, the tenor of this blog comes across as fairly sheltered and not particularly sympathetic.

[lolinder]

It probably depends a lot on where you're at in your career, but it's pretty obvious that the blog resonates with a lot of people here. For many it probably resonates better than the struggles of a bootcamp grad.

It's not really fair to belittle stories like this with a "you know nothing of pain" mentality. Your startup founders and bootcamp attendees would sound similarly sheltered if set against stories of starving children in Africa. Should we all refrain from talking about our pains because someone else's pains are worse?

Humans struggle everywhere, with different things, and it's helpful for us to learn from people who've been through similar.