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Comment by danny_taco | Hacker News Reader

The main reason we all work for someone else is for money but there is something to be said about the things we build at work and not caring about them. This is something that took me a long time to realize but you need to stop thinking about software as a field and start thinking of it as a skill set. From there figure out what interests you. Wildlife, economics, vehicles, etc. or whatever, and then use your skill set to work on what field of your choosing.

Working on something that doesn't interest you just for the sake of technology is not something that will ever make you happy. If you truly have no interest in anything then that's another problem on itself.

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I think what you've laid out here is invaluable. My skill-set is mostly geared towards sysadmin work, and I loathed working for corporate places, being on-call, dealing with immediate emergencies (which were all superficial), stressed over attending bullshit meetings.

I saw my local library was looking for a sysadmin, it did come with a pay cut, but damn if it isn't a quarter of the responsibilities, fulfilling work, no direct manager, pension, decent healthcare, and I write my own schedule.

No one questions what I do and I have full freedom to come and go without needing to "check-in" with a c-suite.

Will I get rich working this gig, absolutely not but the sense of accomplishment knowing my skill-set is helping the community directly, and those less fortunate fills the pay gap I never thought it could.

It doesn't hurt that it shortened my commute and I do so by bicycle now.

Much much happier now.

This sounds awesome!

> it did come with a pay cut

> a quarter of the responsibilities […] and I write my own schedule […] it shortened my commute

You should factor that into the pay calculation. It’s possible you didn’t get paid less per time-effort.

In the end, money is just a means of exchange by which we try to buy happiness. Well, food and shelter first, but once you've got those covered, it might be more efficient to work for happiness directly instead of trying to buy it with money made on a soul-sucking job.

> it might be more efficient to work for happiness directly instead of trying to buy it with money made on a soul-sucking job

I stuck with a stressful job I didn't enjoy because the pay was too good to ignore, with my sights set on achieving financial independence. After all was said and done, the money wasn't worth it; all I got was a bitter taste in my mouth from years of grinding myself down.

A better plan would have been to spend time figuring out what sorts of jobs would be better aligned with my life goals.

> pension, decent healthcare... > Much much happier now.

Many of us in the US would also be, working for less money and responsibility if we had those.

I traded private for public service over a decade ago and I will never go back regardless of much more pay there is. My product is now the service to my community and pay is straight up compensation for my time and effort. No demands of loyalty, no dangling stock options, no C levels idiots with bright ideas ... just bureaucracy and a semi clear mandate. Its still work and id cut way back if I became wealthy but profits are the farthest thing from our organizations goals.

>My product is now the service to my community

is it though? Your product now is service to a government that may or may not just bomb brown villages for fun.

Very romantic, until you realize that nowadays working on what you like won't even pay your rent + utilities + food.

I am beginning to think we need HN for non-privileged people. A lot of "insights" on this forum come off as extremely deluded and living in a very positive bubble.

Now tell me, how do I get a huge break from programming while never losing a penny from my income? "Live within my means" would be your response perhaps? I still want to buy a house though.

Like come on. Sometimes I also wonder if people didn't start using ChatGPT for commenting on HN for clout.

Some people never watched Dirty Jobs and you can see it in posts like the grandparent.

Having a job you clock into, giving your best effort at that job, stopping work at 5 PM, and then going home and do the things you're passionate about that don't pay the bills is the way that the vast majority of people live. It's only the rich and deluded that think that this isn't the reality for most people, and that's because they're so disconnected from what it's like as an actual member of the working class.

Big petite bourgeoisie masquerading as a worker going on here.

Honestly this is something I find working as a software developer in offices... Many of my peers have never worked shitty jobs.

I've worked fast food, I've worked retail (during the launch of the Wii, even, which was an insane time), I've detailed cars, I've worked in a call center.

That's just what I had to do to avoid being buried under student debt.

I think a lot of people working in offices never had this experience. If they worked at all during high school or university it was cushy office jobs wherever their parents worked.

This doesn't generally apply to immigrants, though. That's a whole other thing.

I agree wholeheartedly, and maybe a bit to the extreme. Worked in pizza shops and factory jobs in and out of HS until I figured out I really didn't want to do that type of stuff the rest of my life. So I enlisted in the 2000s and carried a rifle for five years, one of those for a year in the ME. It was terrible, but it paid for a CS Bachelor/Masters and gave me a perspective on how shitty things really can be.

I am completely aware of my viewpoint being extreme and keep myself in check when someone presents something that I would consider a first world problem. But make no mistake, many people in the US and Western world should be counting their blessings much more often.

I think you are overlooking how in this modern economy many people do in fact go and work their next job at 17:30 rather than going home to relax.

Dirty Jobs may show some some clocking in and out of only one job and then going home to relax but as a television show that is highly selective of what it decides to show it is not a representative window into how the mass amount of people on this planet live (just like HN is not such a window either).

Simply reading the local news tells me more about the economic hardships of the common worker than a reality tv and internet forums ever could. And those hardships are harsh in many cases.

I agree. I find it highly pointless to spend one's leisure time learning new tech stacks, working on hobby projects just so that you can show them to an employer. Finding actual real-world problems that you care about to solve, that's way more satisfying. Intrinsic motivation beats extrinsic motivation.

I loathe the process of grinding some questions or stacks for interviewing. At some points in my life, I decided to learn what I love and pick a suitable company instead. Not every has the desire to work at a certain company for the quote status.

That's all fine and dandy, but more often than not you get into the field and you discover your whole interest that got you into the field isn't really how the field works in practice. There's an old saying about not making a job out of something you love, because having to do it for money versus out of your own interest will make you grow to hate it before long.

> There's an old saying about not making a job out of something you love, because having to do it for money versus out of your own interest will make you grow to hate it before long

I hadn't heard the saying you describe literally, though I've heard many variants of "find your passion" such as "find a job you enjoy doing and you will never have to work a day in your life." (Attributed to Mark Twain, Confucius, and others though the true origin seems to be obscure.) Which makes little sense to me since being paid to do something tends to destroy intrinsic motivation.

Perhaps there's a crystallized version of your saying such as "the fastest way to turn your passion into drudgery is to get paid for it."

Fortunately my passions are things I'm unlikely to get paid for - watching netflix, eating snacks, etc..

Big +1, work on something that bothers you in your personal life or something that interests you in your personal life. It will always undoubtedly be more fulfilling compared to simply "working for the man."

One risk I've heard of second hand. If you work on your personal-interests or hobbies ... then that might cease to be fun and just become "work." I've not had that experience (I've always found the projects in my career interesting even if they have non-fun overhead at times) but it is something my wife and others have reported.

Finding the perfect balance is the tricky part. I do I.T. consulting on the side, but I am not stringing myself out for a customer. Its one of the expectations when I offer my services.

No I will not be on call, no your computer turning on isn't a emergency and I will not drop everything to hit the power button.

If they don't like the terms, they're more than welcome to pay double my asking and pay a monthly retainer.

Surely it's a risk, I think with all things balance is critical. However, I've personally found the grind that can come and go with delivery dates and peculiar debugging are far more satisfying and easy to commit to when the medium is a personal passion/interest.

> From there figure out what interests you. Wildlife, economics, vehicles, etc. or whatever, and then use your skill set to work on what field of your choosing.

Unfortunately the wildlife, economics and vehicle companies won’t hire me because I’m not an established domain expert in wildlife, economics or vehicles.

To be a bit more concrete I’ve actually applied to jobs in some of the industries you’ve noted recently, particularly wildlife. I applied for a job that seemed pretty cut and dry: Doing mostly .NET CRUD work for an application supporting [wildlife domain]. It didn’t pay well but it genuinely seemed like a domain I would like and Delma technical view the job was a perfect match for my resume. The application had several binary yes/no questions I had to fill Out mostly along the lines of “Do you have experience in X”. For 90% of the questions my answer was yes. But there was one question basically asking “Do you have experience writing software for our hyper specific domain”. I suppose I could have lied and said yes, though that just meant I’d be rejected after wasting my time and the organization’s time, so I answered truthfully “no”. I was rejected not long later and while it’s impossible to know the exact reason I have my suspicions.

Not true for everyone, I’ve worked in fields that are very interesting to me and felt bored, then worked in fields that are not at all interesting to me and I really enjoyed it. I’ve found my day to day happiness has less to do with the actual thing I’m making with software and more to do with who I’m making it with and if I feel I’m growing somehow through it.

>>From there figure out what interests you. Wildlife, economics, vehicles, etc. or whatever, and then use your skill set to work on what field of your choosing.

Nonsense. The lack of passion arises from resentment and by being treated unfairly. While things like communism where everyone is treated equally is demoralising to the key contributors, extreme inequality in compensation is equally demoralising. You need some middle ground.

Without stake(financially), no one is going to spend their whole lives to make other people rich. It doesn't even make logical sense if you think about it carefully.

This is an enlightening point, to distinguish between our skill set and field of work. And each field brings certain types of people, some of whom you'll find it better to work with.

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