undefined | Better HN

0 pointsfsociety11mo ago0 comments

Upvotes for you. I have also worked a ton of odd jobs out of necessity. Many doing things that would frankly disgust most people, or people would say is a worker’s right violation, or is a safety violation. I enjoyed these jobs more despite the conditions.

Financially it is great, no doubt about that. Take away the money and it’s a terrible job - despite loving programming, design, and engineering. And I mean, I love design, programming, ambiguity, and the constant learning required.

My largest source of sanity in this career is to spend extra time at work doing the things that I love in my position. Ironically, I get high performance ratings because of this - but have to fight to spend my time on it.

Modern tech companies and culture suck, even the best ones that I praise. I can’t even blame anyone at this point because it is hard and I have not started a company that tries to be better. I'm not even sure I would do better, to be honest.

0 comments

trchek11mo ago

Thanks I appreciate it, re safety violations, yeah some of it was those laws were just badly applied across the board, and it was hard to find a place without some degree of violating the letter of the law, so I think they just got flippant.

Re “source of sanity” I’ve caught myself doing the same with extra work, but sometimes it backfires when the little fun tool you wrote solves the purpose so well that it becomes the company standard and then the politics comes in, I don’t mean the “oh we need this feature super badly that breaks a bunch of other things can you do it for us” that’s just having a successful project. I mean when it starts figuring into political finger pointing and you’re forced to be involved in it all since you are the creator of a tool tangentially involved in some inter office politics. I’ve not figured out how to avoid that yet.

weiliddat11mo ago

It seems insane sometimes that politics makes everything take so long that a decent engineer could’ve written all 3 solutions and validated them in 3 days, but no we want to discuss in this ticket over 3 weeks whose responsibility it is depending on which approach it is or what hypothetical scenarios this will bring (no one really knows anyways so we should’ve just tested it).

Unfortunately that has also pushed lots of good engineers to either disengage or work extra hard to push things through despite organizational problems (I seem to alternate between both but I feel too responsible to really disengage).

Often I wonder why can’t it be easier?

jffhn11mo ago

>My largest source of sanity in this career is to spend extra time at work doing the things that I love in my position. Ironically, I get high performance ratings because of this - but have to fight to spend my time on it.

Why do you have to fight if it's extra time? And couldn't you avoid the fighting by just doing it on regular time?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse