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Comment by f1yght | Hacker News Reader

I think the hard thing about mental work is you never feel like you've finished something. There's always more work to do and new features to build. The appeal of something like woodworking is it has a finish, and you have a tangible thing at the end. I think lifting and running scratch the physical exertion itch that the desk job leaves me with.

At the end of the day, if you have a pretty easy going role that pays well enough you can always take the big pay and fill your time with hobbies and what not that do bring you joy and fulfillment.

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This is the killer for me. I've never found tech work fulfilling, personally, and I never expected to. But what has burned me out is the sense of being perpetually behind because there's no finish line; infinitely marching onward without ever feeling you've accomplished something. Every morning I open the same files.

My friends outside tech often talk about the satisfaction and relief they feel after completing a big project, and the relatively peaceful lull between such projects, and it just sounds so nice. Doesn't matter whether it's a big event they planned, a tour they went on, or a structure they welded. When something is done it's done. They get to move on personally and professionally.

It used to feel like a job change would provide that sense of momentum, but even that's disappearing now that every product (at least from my designer's perspective) feels more or less identical these days.

Yes you can do that, but on the other hand, can hobbies really balance it out, considering the amount of time you spend working? 40 hours per week for 2-3 decades is a very long time to be feeling unfulfilled, even if you get the twilight hours and a few weeks a year to do something interesting. And by the time you retire you've lost your creative energy.

It really depends what you're working on. If you go to a one product company you'll be stuck forever improving it. In other niches, for example embedded-ish, you can have multiple solutions churning the customer's bits in production in just a couple years.

And then component changes and interop issues force you to recall in excruciating detail that project you were “done with.”

Yea but with a bit of luck it will feel like a new project ;)

The exact reason I like cooking. It has a start and a finish with a tangible result.

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