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Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

I'm not accepting a job but rather a lifestyle.

It's called over-engineered culture fit. You've failed the culture fit portion of your hiring interview. Please find your own way out.

Remember (like, eight years ago) when you could get a job by doing good work and tolerating coworkers for a few hours a day? Now jobs mean you have to do good work, buy in to the koolaid, love your coworkers, and spend time with them before and after work too (or else you're not a "team player" or you're not "fitting in here"). You should definitely not hire people you can't stand, but there's a continuum between "this person has an abhorrent personality" to "no mad skillz pongpinging? NO HIRE!"

The startup tech industry is freezing out the leave-me-alone-i'm-working computer person archetype in favor of cheerleader/frat/bro/übersocial/drinkydrinky people. Who are you leaving behind?

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The media has brainwashed (very smart) software engineers into believing that working as a programmer in San Francisco is like being a painter in Paris in the 1920s; that for $116,000[1] in one of the costliest cities in the U.S. you should forgo a meaningful personal and family life and instead make it easier for brands to surface their tweets in people's feeds. That having an interesting job and work/life balance are mutually exclusive things.

[1]http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Twitter-Software-Engineer-Sa...

A lot of it has to do with extroversion vs introversion. The lone programmer working long into the night without seeing another human being is long gone. The work itself has become more social as collaboration tools get better and better. This necessitates programmers who, themselves, are more socially oriented. I'm not saying introverts can't be social. I am saying they don't excel at it, especially stuck in a 24/7 lifestyle that doesn't allow downtime without sacrificing your social status with the team. Having to choose between staying in your team's good graces and your own mental health is a horrible thing, but it's a choice a lot of us are being forced to make.

This does indeed leave the introverts high and dry. Speaking as a leave-me-alone-i'm-working introvert, I've seen this shift firsthand over the past 5 years. I'm convinced that, at this point, working another full time job isn't in my future. Contracting and a "lifestyle business" or two is where I'm headed. While I don't like the uncertainty of those two options, they're considerably less stressful for me than a modern office environment.

buy in to the koolaid, love your coworkers, and spend time with them before and after work too

A nice term for this is Affective Labor.

That term doesn't seem to fit here

>Affective Labor is a term identifying work carried out that is intended to produce or modify emotional experiences in people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affective_labor

Seems to imply that the work will be changing the emotional experience of a 3rd party rather than the parties doing the work.

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