I quit the tech industry
eev.ee
eev.ee
* Raises hand *
I was the first dev hire at Datacash and wrote their back-end servers. Datacash only came into existence because an earlier (circa 1995-96) startup trying to sell stuff via the web couldn't handle payments without a card reader and a dialup connection. Handling payments properly is hard, especially as if you do it right (and your business grows) you turn into a juicy big target for black hats everywhere.
I also resemble the OC's burnout, except fifteen years down the line and mostly recovered ... by not working in tech any more. I'm a novelist and I set up and do my own projects more or less in my own time and (as a much earlier tech burnout case said, in Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine") I try not to deal with any time frame shorter than a season.
Yes, there is life after you quit your last high pressure tech sector job. And yes, you can find things to invest your personal interest in that don't chew you up and spit you out and which earn you a living. The problem is with the way corporations are internally constituted -- especially with hierarchies of control and command where the people at the top don't have any deep understanding of the problems the people at the bottom are engaged with.
Not to say that the author's points are invalid; it's a terrible feeling to have to spend your most productive hours working on someone else's problems. He or she may find themselves drawn toward entrepreneurship. There's nothing quite like working on your own idea...especially if that idea is going to make you cash.
Office culture is draining. Some people aren't cut out for it. Additionally, programmers tend to push themselves too hard for too long out of a misplaced sense of loyalty to the company. They're being paid huge sums and sometimes feel that they need to work extremely hard to deserve what they're being paid. They don't see that the work they do is extremely valuable in and of itself. Employment is a business arrangement; a coder doesn't owe the company anything more than their agreed-upon hours of work.
If/when the author does return to work, it's likely they will be much more likely to put themselves first and the company second. They'll likely have a plan to escape working for someone else ever again.
When we reach a threshold of income and financial stability, some of us forget to evaluate why we're working.
As it turns out, I haven't reached this threshold yet so have to carry on working, but it is probably a good idea to look around and ask "why am I working?" if there's no real need for fulltime work.
I would do it once you have a steady foundation and some savings to fall back on should these contracts not materialise for a while.
Working fulltime is alright (it means you can be stable for a while) but not all of us are paid huge sums :-(
The problem is it's easy to get worse than that add a 1h each way commute and 10 hour days, and skip vacations that's half your waking life. ~(60 * 50)/(16 * 365) And of course you need a few hours a day just for prep time and meals etc so quickly you only get free time to relax on the weekends.
If you work a salary job and don't feel up to it for at the moment, you can coast for half a day and get your shit together. On your own, that's a half a day of lost money. My brain needs breaks, and I just can't do code 40 hours a week and not burn out. I've tried. It just hasn't worked. So that downtime is a requirement, and you lose money for it.
The best part is that a decent programmer can make a moderate income working relatively little. Or you can make a lot of money if you work very hard. It's your choice at any given moment. But don't underestimate the drain of having to work for one to three people at a time, managing your time, and making sure the pipeline doesn't run dry all at the same time. It's pretty annoying/stressful when two important clients have deadlines on the same day. It's not like you can just pull in more help. Or if you can, you then have two problems - you have to go out and find the help, manage it, etc.
I don't think I could bill more than 25 hours a week and keep my sanity. But I'm not exactly a workaholic, and 25 hours a week is a pretty good living.
Milage may vary.
Also: I found it extremely difficult to date or maintain a relationship while consulting.
A full-time job offers some protection from volatility. I'm not going to pretend that nobody has ever been laid off from a full-time job, but if you work contracts you have ZERO job security. And contractors are the first thing to go in cost cutting mode.
If you go the independent contractor route, make sure your emergency fund can cover 18-24 months of expenses. Also, recognize that while the pay may be higher, if you're in the US you also are on the hook for 8% payroll tax that your employer would normally pay on your behalf.
If you go this route, you need to adjust your definition of "well off". If you are looking to keep pace with your friends working at Google and making $150k, that's pretty unlikely. But you can probably pull $60k and still meet your savings goals, and $60k/yr is more than enough to live comfortably on. And that number won't be static; some years you might make $100k and some years you might make $20k. You need your savings to be able to survive the lean years.
All that said, based on your comment I assume you have no work experience. Why would you hire yourself for a short-term contract over someone else? Go work somewhere full-time for at least a few years until you have a good answer for that question. You almost certainly have a whole lot of tradecraft to learn as well. Once you've built up some experience (and some contacts) you can think about contracting.
You are on the hook for more than just that. Federal, state and often county taxes (gross receipts, business licenses) will need to be paid. Plus you will need to acquire health insurance, fund your retirement, pay for needed business expenses, etc. Not to mention, most contracts you sign, will require that you also carry some form of business insurance (errors and omissions for example). All these things will slice and dice your hourly rate down severely.
This is just my opinion and I can only speak from a US perspective, but yes and no. The ones who are able to do this have already gotten a 10+ year head start and have built up a deep network from which to source work from. The ones who are starting out today are more than likely having a very tough go at it. Competition for contracts is much more intense compared to 10, 15 years ago and you really need to bring more to the table than just "javascript developer" or "wordpress consultant".
I know there exists this love-affair on HN with running off to become independent contractor, live on a beach writing code and making your own hours. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the reality though is that in the end you are building a business (even if it's just you). All the energy, time, risk and money that it takes to run a regular businesses will be just the same with running your own consultancy. The downtime you think you will have to yourself in-between contracts will be eaten up by having to find the next contract. If you happen to unfortunately live in or near a city with a high cost of living, the pressure will be even more intense.
The thing you have to understand about contracting (and really any paid work, I've noticed the same effect as a big-company employee) is that people will pay a large premium for a track record of delivering working solutions. When you first start out, your asset is "I know this programming language", your clients just want someone who knows that programming language, and you're competing with all of these people on oDesk and eLance who also know that programming language. After you've delivered successfully on your first couple projects, your asset is "I delivered on these projects and it made my clients $X", your clients want someone with a track record of delivering on projects with minimal handholding, and you're competing only with other people who have had wins of similar magnitude. The supply of these is much lower and the demand is much higher, and so you can charge much higher rates.
I would avoid oDesk type rates at all costs. You're better off going to small business networking groups and making simple brochure sites and wordpress installs for $1000-$2000 a pop.
That leaves the contracting route. The issue there is you now end up a salesman. The people I know who are good contractors are businessmen first, software engineers second. They know how to close deals, attract clients,and have excellent "soft skills." They are mediocre developers. Not because they couldn't be excellent developers or were excellent developers before becoming contractors, but simply because their work day is no longer centred around engineering. This is fine if what you want is to run a business and be a businessman. Not so much if you're trying to escape the trappings of business to find more time to devote to focusing on just developing.
This is all anecdotal of course, I'm sure there are contractors who see a wide range of experiences that differ from mine.
(Exceptions, anyone?)
We programmers are quite lucky. At its worst our work is only frustrating. And we are well compensated, usually.
Don't get me wrong; programming itself can be lots of fun. But what you get paid for isn't the fun stuff. I doubt there is anyone who gets excited about upgrading and debugging aging Java applications.
a) Even if it's a job I would do for free, you need to pay me because I need money in order to live.
b) Even if it's a job I do because I love it, you need to pay me to ensure that I do it at the pace and with the guarantees you need.
I wouldn't call either of these "nasty", although the first is arguable at a global scale.
It's also a question of time management. I can only do N things in a week/month/year. If you want one of those things to be your thing, you're going to have to convince me to priorities it over other things. Money is a quick and convenient way to do that.
There are myriad reasons why people form firms and a body of literature around it. Start with Coase's Nature of the firm :
I don't believe this is true. Almost all people need to earn money to live a reasonable lifestyle, society as it is.
Considering the number of hours in the day: enjoyable, non-nasty tasks may be off the radar unless they are paid.
I feel like what you are saying is an excuse for employers to treat employees poorly. "We're paying you, so..."
It doesn't have to be this way.
How much fun? Whatever you think is fun, I'm pretty sure I can think of something more fun. That's not me saying I know what is fun, just saying it is a subjective term. Also, what is fun today may not be in 2 weeks time.
Even if someone loves doing something they can still ask to be paid to do it for other people
Unfortunately, I can't pay my rent with 'delightful work'.
I think this misses the point that a) you need people to do the fun awesome stuff at scale (you can't do everything), and b) you may not have the skills to do the fun awesome stuff yourself.
Practically speaking, I think you're right, but you don't have to accept that as the status quo.
>> If it were actually fun, people would be doing it for free
The trick is combining fun with career. Doing fun things for free is not scalable as we do kinda need money to survive.
No, generally speaking, it just means that the work you do has some value for the people paying for it, since they need it done and they lack the skill, the time or the will to do it.
It says nothing about how fun or stressful or nasty the work is for you (it might be fun for you and boring for someone else).
Maybe if I did something part time that could work, because I don't want to spend more than 20 hours a week working.
(Shameless plug: one of my arrangements is ending soon and I'll be taking on more devops and automation work; at every place I've been I've added pretty big multipliers to engineering output in a fairly short amount of time, and my email's in my profile if that appeals to you.)
I suppose it depends on the business model the software is part of. If you want a pace that is compatible with proper engineering I would suggest looking into companies that deal with products whose lifetime is measured in decades such as CAD vendors or other highly technical software.
All freshmen to software engineering have this weird idea that a piece of code can ship once it builds and just shipping as much code as much as possible is the best road to maximize productivity.
Until they get hit in their faces time and again by recurring bugs and they start to understand that the way to manage long term software profitably is by making sure as few bugs as possible leave the software engineers desk, at which point best practices and long term planning starts to take hold.
That's at least my view, YMMV to a large extent, probably.
Just like juggling is a matter of throwing as many balls in the air as fast as possible ("What do you mean they come down again?")
1) Developers cannot reliably estimate software timelines. That often comes with experience and age, but many never learn that skill. It is a skill like programming itself. It comes with practice.
2) Break down in communication between management (product managers) and engineers who are writing code.
On the first part. Usually junior software developers simply have not had experience shipping software in a full software cycle. From initial requirements, to design, to deployment, to maintenance. They did projects perhaps in school and homework exercises. Later some eventually learn that they chronically underestimate the time, and just start adding a factor (2x) to what their initial estimate is. That is a step up. But many never learn. There is also a race to the bottom -- the ones that promise shorter timelines get promoted and seen as smarter, more aggressive, better team players. The ones that are realistic are seen as maybe "taking it easy", "not working hard enough". Then everyone sees who gets promoted and show doesn't and learn -- "Aha I need to be like cool cowboy coder Joe over there, he is now running his own department". And so it spreads. Notice how there is often no feedback loop to punish the cool cowboy coder after the project is not delivered on time.
On the second part -- even if there are engineers who know how to estimate the time, nobody asks them. Because the person who promised the feature already played golf with the customer and told them they'll get the new shiny toy in 6 months. That person might have never been a developer, they might have an MBA or where a football coach or something like that. And they usually have a higher position in the company. So they promise and then everyone is pushed to deliver on that deadline. If it fails the failure is usually attributed to the engineers doing the work because they haven't worked "hard enough".
This is true. But this is the problem that Agile is supposed to help solve -- with the caveat that most companies don't do true Agile. I guess people are now calling it Continuous Delivery, but the idea is the same: you don't tell people when a feature will be done, only when you will be working on it. But even then, even with experienced estimators, the rule of thumb is to add 15-30% to their estimates.
> 2) Break down in communication between management (product managers) and engineers who are writing code.
Totally agree that this is very common. Unfortunately, the best way to solve this is with process, and developers hate process. But developers often don't realize that they can use the process to their advantage: a strong engineering lead can refuse to accept poorly defined requirements. That allows you to push back on product to force them to define the requirement better.
IMO this breakdown is caused by just that: developers who say "oh yeah, I can do that", then start working on the problem and realize that there are a lot of undefined edge cases. If they promised it to the client in 6 months, fine, but define what "it" is.
From the perspective of an MBA, if we have to bring in a contractor to implement it, fine. I know where I can go to hire certified rockstar contract developers at $200/hr, which I will do if the client is lucrative enough. There is no feature I can think of that would take more than 6 months of development.
In a top-down management style, your so-called "Lead Developer" is just the first head on the chopping block. They're leaders of puppet regimes. If the real leaders don't like them, they install a new one. It comes in many forms: layoffs, "performance" related dismissal ("you're not getting enough done!" because of all the rejected requirements docs), even reassignment to "re-engineering initiatives" that have no real chance of seeing the light of day.
Finding a management infrastructure that actually cares about feedback is incredibly rare. I have personally never found it, in 10 years across 6 companies. No amount of process is going to change a bad manager.
You talk about a business like it's supposed to be a democracy. It's not. You need clear direction, and democracy is messy and opaque if your company is too big for you to know the name of everyone who works there. Now the way you describe top down management is a bad implementation of it -- executives need to work to develop their middle managers -- but every company eventually has to convert from a democratic decision making process to a chain of command.
I've been working recently with a number of household-name startups that are having this exact issue. They've hit a plateau in their growth because the culture is dead-set against top-down management, but the company is now too big for people to self-organize. Engineering initiatives that would have taken 2 months in startup mode now take 2 years because they have to go back and rebuild half their systems to make them flexible enough to support the multiple use cases that they now have. Or because they were a startup, they didn't worry about geographic redundancy because that wasn't part of the MVP. So it was put off for later, and now they're a billion dollar company operating out of a single datacenter because their databases and applications were built without multi-datacenter being a requirement. Product can't even reliably tell engineering what features to implement because nobody on the product side has enough authority to shout over the crowd.
So having an infrastructure that cares about feedback is good, but the infrastructure also needs to empower people to do something about said feedback.
For every SV-brand startup, there are dozens of small-time consultoware shops serving their local market. They're the kind of places that have been around for 20 years and still only have 100 employees each. They can't ever seem to grow beyond that size because the one-way communication flow from sales to development keeps them in massive technical debt.
I agree with your second assessment, but it's more of an issue with the consultoware business model than anything. Most consultoware shops start up thinking they're going to get hockey-stick growth, but it turns out every implementation is super-custom and it ends up as a consulting business. Many companies fail to realize this has happened, and end up operating like a software company when they should be operating like a professional services company with hourly billing. Under a professional services model, if a customer wants a feature, you can quote them a price for developing and implementing it. Tech debt gets dealt with because it becomes a bottleneck for revenue growth when you can't charge clients to add functionality.
Estimation (i.e. pulling numbers out of your posterier) is not necessary (or usually desirable). What you want to do break down the problems into roughly equal size pieces -- the more the better. Each piece will take a certain amount of time. You can measure this and record the average. This becomes the estimated amount of time for each piece. Obviously the estimate has an error with some kind of distribution (my sleep adled brain is unable to remember what a likely distribution for the amount of time something takes).
It doesn't really matter because the sum of all the pieces will give you an estimate for the overall completion time for all the pieces. This estimate will have a normal distribution.
If you write down a list of all the pieces in priority order, you can draw a line at one piece of functionality and determine when it is likely to be completed, along with error bars.
Of course you are unlikely to actually to do the things on your list because if you were able to correctly guess all your requirements before you started the project then you would be in fantasy land. So what you do is tell the stake holders that this is what you are going to do unless they tell you that they want to change their mind.
Of course when you start they will say, "We're not going to change our mind. We're 100% certain that this is right". To which you reply, "Excellent". Every 2 weeks or so, once you have done some work and can show it to the stake holders, you should also have a list of new ideas. You should explain these new ideas and say, "Do you want to change the list to add these new ideas". Whether they say "Yes" or "No", you should reply with, "Excellent" and carry on.
Often the stake holders will have an "emergency" and decide that they have new opportunities which change your list. To this you should say, "Excellent" and change the list.
You should release whenever your stake holders are happy to release.
In this way, you have given the best estimate you can to help the stake holders plan. Any changes to the plan will be made by the stake holders themselves at the earliest possible time. You don't get caught up trying to deliver at any particular date because the stake holders are aware that they are changing the deliverables. You may have to ask them where they want to draw the line and give them new estimates for completion every time they change something, just to reinforce this idea.
The really tricky bit is breaking the work down into small enough pieces. This is very, very difficult and requires a lot of experience. The sucess or failure of the above will very likely rest on the ability to do this, so expect to pay a lot of money for someone with a proven track record doing it. It is often worth hiring a consultant if you have nobody on staff with this experience.
Hope this helps.
I'm specifically talking about projects which go like this:
1) A set of high-level business requirements are put together, and given to a tech lead to estimate.
2) The tech lead's estimate, based on the requirements as-given, is used to determine a budget for the project, and probably a schedule as well.
3) Once the budget and schedule are approved, the project commences.
4) As development begins detailed software requirements are worked out, which usually exposes holes in the high-level business requirements that need to be fleshed out as well.
5) The estimates are never updated, and any attempt to increase the budget due to the new requirements are seen as a sign of failure.
What I see happening in #4 is two kinds of scope creep. The first kind is the sort everyone is familiar with: a requirement was missed, a new feature needs to be added, and since this wasn't in the original budget the budget needs to be increased. It's easy to identify these new/changed requirements, easy to see the big chunk of time needed to implement them, and easy to make prioritization decisions about the new requirement vs the other original requirements, so that maybe something can be dropped in order to avoid increasing the budget.
But there's a second kind of scope creep, and it's insidious. It comes from turning high-level requirements into detailed requirements into implemented and tested code. Every decision a developer needs to make about how to implement a feature is an implicit detailed software requirement, and you just can't know how many of those decisions will be needed or what their impacts will be until you get into the details. The time needed for these all add up, and I consider them to be scope creep because they aren't part of the high-level requirements used for the estimate and budget. We try to add padding for them because we know they're going to happen, but if you add sufficient padding across-the-board for all of the detailed requirement decisions that might be needed your project will never get approved. So we pad insufficiently, hoping that some of the requirements will be easier to implement than we estimate to cover the ones that aren't, and we don't manage this kind of scope creep at all. It's invisible, because it's just adding a few minutes here, a few minutes there, until our estimates have been blown away and we're over budget and we can't really say why.
The two types of scope creep is a good observation, I'll have to remember that idea.
I am probably naive, but I think if we say: the situation is now X and I want to be Y, we can find a way to get there.
This works in our context (and has worked for many decades apparently). But I doubt this scales to a large size.
(Unless you work at Palantir, in which case I feel silly).
Of course that was just one variable and it wasn't isolated. There could have been other factors and reasons for the said result and it might not have had anything to do with "no MBAs" rules.
I just presented it as a reference or what others do as a "solution".
These are all real human struggles. I have them for sure. I just wish you find a place with self aware leadership that endeavors to keeps these emotions in check. Usually startups with leaders who have families are a little better because their family essentially forces them to focus on someone else, at least a little.
Disagree. Developers can provide reliable low risk estimates that will most certainly be rejected or truncated by management.
The problem is not estimates, the problem is every manager fantasizing that their Captain Kirk strategy,
"I'll have it fixed in 4 minutes, Captain"
"Do it in 2."
> the problem is any manager
If your greater point is that some developers really are poor estimators, I agree, but all of them operate under pressure to err on the optimistic side.
1. Every manager does that
2. Every manager that does that is the problem
3) Developers are expensive. If you have a team of 5 developers each being paid a salary+benefits of $1,500-$3,000 per week and they tell you a feature will take four weeks, management does a little mental math and says holy shit, that's a lot of money and it's understandably tempting for them to want to see if that team really needs four weeks, or if maybe it can be done in three weeks. (Meanwhile, as you said, the feature will probably actually take six weeks because developers cannot reliably estimate...)
4) Developers have a hard time saying "no." We have a culture of working crazy hours. Management knows this and often intentionally or unintentionally exploits it.
I found out a while back, and this is somewhat paradoxical, that if I care TOO much, I'm less happy. What happens is I notice all the stuff I can't fix, or need to fix, and other people get stressed out making them fix it. The end result is that I stop caring quite as much (I still care), get happy, and then start caring too much again.
It's especially hard at times when you have a lot of energy and want to make something work and you have to fight others who don't want to make it work. 8 hours plus of your day is a lot, so you want it to count, to matter, and that makes you care, to define yourself by that work, and that makes it hurt more. The alternative though, is just collecting the paycheck, which is also bad!
The trick is finding a balance and making sure you also define yourself by other things. And this is a very hard thing for creative folks to do, because it feels like their art, and it's easy to always want to hit the next target/goal/feature, in a never ending wave. The catch is they don't stop. It's a continuum. One of my first jobs as a kid was in a grocery store, and I learned clearing out the line was impossible, and the beeping doesn't stop. It is madness to want the beeping to stop because people from other lanes just come over to yours, and it won't.
I'm not great at this, but you just have to enjoy the people and the things along the way - as there's not a destination.
If you block these expressions then you get a lecture/dissertation, chock full of info, but not a dialog within a community.
So the question is: what do you see HN to be: a knowledge repository or a place that allows technology-minded people to share and belong?
"They’re interesting for a while, but they’re also the same self-inflicted wounds everyone seems to deal with — why is this slow? why is this broken? how can we keep this old code limping along indefinitely without having to rewrite it? how does this thing a former employee wrote even work? They’re cute puzzles, and I can get into solving them for a while, but I don’t care about them. Because they aren’t my problems; they were just dumped in my lap, along with a canvas sack with a dollar sign on it."
Companies that write their own software create something where nothing existed before--and so by definition, all of their problems are self-inflicted.
Shit gets old, fast.
Decisions which are made after much thought, planning and running things from a long term perspective turn out to last really long freeing your time up to pursue new projects.
Jumping on to a new framework every few months because its trending on the internets is the reason why every one is in a hurry(to achieve a pointless goal) to do work which has already been done, over and over again.
I mean , is it feasible for the ordinary developer to engage in a multi-year risky R&D project that might ultimately fail resulting in nothing ?
Most people barely have any time to code. It's just because Github is your Resume (TM) that makes most people crank out their own Javascript framework so they can have it on their resume.
Could you give any examples of any such long term one man personal R&D efforts ?
This doesn't happen just in the backend. It happens even with FE frameworks. How many people have a use case for react or other jazzy frameworks?
A crude example I can give you is, this is like developing all your applications in awk or sed because that's fashionable currently. You are shoe horning your problems into solutions paradigms they don't belong to.
Programmers have a tendency to detach themsleves from the business where software is there to maximize the profit. It doesn't matter whether it's written in PHP, Ruby, or [language of the year] [0]. But if you let the programmers go wild, many of them have a tendency to pick the hottest thing just because [some reason that has no advantage from business POV]. I guess that's the sign of boredom.
Programming is fun, playing with new toys is fun, but it should not be forgotten that it's part of the business.
[0] Well, it sort of matters. Dev time costs money, good tools and languages will make you write it faster therefore maximizing money. But that's not what I am talking about here.
I was just talking with a friend that is really frustrated because in his view his team is not only trying to deal with a bunch of tech debt, they are trying to move so fast that they net create more tech debt every week. And he feels like he's the only one who will look at this squarely; everybody else just finds their little puzzles to work on. I expect eventually he'll quit and go somewhere modestly less pathological.
The root issue is not that the problems are self-inflicted. The shit-rolls-downhill ethos means that they are to the company, but not really to an individual worker. So most developer experiences are of dealing with an unending stream of unnecessary dumb puzzles, rather than challenging problems with real meaning.
This is not how it has to be. I've been on projects where the code got incrementally better each day. Where we spent most of our time on things that mattered to us and to the business, instead of sweeping up after the elephant parade.
That's exactly what I meant by self-inflicted: thank you for stating it clearly!
I don't mind working on genuinely hard problems, even if we can't get anywhere. It's dealing with lots of unnecessary silliness or trying to get one more month out of the shitty legacy code that drives me nuts.
Corporate code just mirrors corporate structure after a while. More and more lines, where other people are or were responsible, where any reason has been driven out (your learning experience by asking "why is this written or designed like this" gets short circuited with a quick "well, who knows") - which slowly but surely spirals down quality, engagement and fun.
Or at least I should say a lot of OSS projects are corporate, so they feel the same way. The for-fun stuff can be, but it can also wear you down. There's a lot of hate among users of projects that you are directly exposed to, where a paying customer can often be a lot easier to talk to. It's weird.
It's ok and fun when you have a few users, but when you have lots, you find they can be really hard to scale -- so many different points of view, so many different conflicting needs, "managing" people you don't pay, trying to break up disagreements, many more points of compromise, etc.
See the Napoleon anecdote:
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/12/27/dumb-and-gets-thing...
There is nothing smart about faking and pretending to contribute while doing nothing. All the while taking the rewards and benefits which should actually be going to people who do the real work. This even on a short period of time creates an environment which causes the real contributors to go better places leaving the overall ecosystem starved of much needed work.
Programmer: "I managed to migrate the database with the program I wrote over the past two months"
Hacker: "I migrated the database with 3 lines of code"
The enduring tension of this line of work, in my opinion, is how to balance my desire to take pride in my work with my desire not to be a thankless janitor for the chronically cavalier. Not to mention that there's value in a product that gets out the door while the competitors are still trying to make things perfect.
That's a good observation.
Fortunately I've worked myself into the code troll position on my project - nothing goes into the mainline without my approval. Everyone knows I'll reject code that's not well thought through even in the face of looming deadlines.
I think you can try to manage to detach yourself from the negative focus that passion can lead to. To try to numb your passion seems like a less good option.
The solution I have found is to practice losing myself in work (achieve flow) and yet not be attached to the result. If it were your checkout line I'd try to be completely focused on dispatching the clients with efficiency and courtesy without looking at the length of the line.
Focused and productive work is a reward in itself. You leave the office feeling energized and the day flies by. The paradox is that by not caring about the result you often produce your best work.
I have a feeling that this realization might be central to a part of Buddhist philosophy/mindset.
Until the day I realize all the low-hanging fruit is fixed and everyone else is pretty much content to put up with what's left, making it much harder and much less rewarding to continue.
I have enough trouble with searching for a finish line in projects I start myself, so I guess I'm tired of doing it when it's not even my race.
Pulling back and seeing it as just work, just time you are selling to someone else, clears my head and paradoxically makes me a better co-worker both in attitude and performance. Then I slowly get drawn back in and depressed again.
Its a cycle, but at least I can see it happening now rather than just getting burnt out.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking this. It is the case some of the time, but not all of the time.
When I first started working in tech in the mid-90s, it was only a year or two before I was considering going back to school in music or to get an MBA. Since about 2004, I've known that I would like to abandon the tech industry. It is now 2015. I have dreams of opening a restaurant, retail store, starting any kind of business, becoming a professional writer, etc. But, this is where I am.
All that said, I read the tech and science news everyday. My relationship with tech is love/hate. I can't get enough of it and will obsess about it or coding something at home, but I know it makes me unhappy.
I feel I'd be better off just being a caretaker of some sort, or in some sort of service industry. I've talked to several developers over the years that dream of being a groundskeeper. This is reality for some of us out there.
I'm personally dealing with it by losing weight and working towards the goal of being independent from an employer.
Here are some ideas for those that feel burned out or hate their job:
* Get a hobby OR focus on your family/self and stop trying to be so much.
* Pretend you are going to quit and seriously look into how you could make your dream happen, even if it seems financially irresponsible.
* Keep a watch on cheap plane, train, etc. tickets to figure out how to escape your life, or think about where you would go to get away from it all.
* Find a place where you can go to just chill-out and think.
* If you have sleep apnea or feel tired a lot and don't dream at night, consider going to a doc to get CPAP or an oral device and dedicate yourself to losing weight.
* Talk to a psychiatrist and get some meds.
* Find a friend/person you can talk to about it.
* Do your best to stop thinking negatively for some period of each day, or all day, even if it is so normal to be negative that it seems fake not to be that way.
* Don't be afraid to cut back hours at work. If they fire you, so what. And if you think they would kill you if you stopped, run away. You will be ok.
I was trying to do a class a semester and work at the same time at a startup as a junior full stack engineer for something I truly couldn't care less about (advertising).
I think the key thing that's making me look forward to my next position is 1: I found a spot where I'll have an office thus eliminating much of the distractors that are present in these ridiculous open office layouts. Creative people are distracted very easily [0] and the open office layout was really destroying my love for being an engineer. It was very funny because when I'd come home I'd be exhausted, but if I sat and tried to do my homework I'd actually get more done when I was exhausted because there weren't 100 people walking around me.
2. The office has a window. I hated working in this cramped, open, shared space we had for a while. The closest window was probably 25 feet away in a small conference room. And there was nothing on the walls.
3. This new position that I haven't quite accepted yet gives me the opportunity to write one day a week to create entries for a technical blog and writing is something I'd like to do anyways so the opportunity to be able to contribute to the tech community in that manner is tremendous.
4. This is a recruiting firm so I'll actually hopefully get to see some people get hired because of the things I do! How neat to have a real world impact.
5. They do lots of charity events so I can always respect that. Lots of companies focus on the parties but parties are just a way to escape in a lot of ways, I think giving back will feel tremendous.
6. I'll be helping to work out what to do next with the CEO, this could potentially be stressful, but I really love the idea of having the opportunity to develop performance indicators, plan out entire systems, and build a team. This allows me to be more than just a cog in the machine or one man on a team, it allows me to feel like a real god damn fuckin engineer. A contributor. I have so many ideas all the time, why not be employed somewhere where I'm more than just feature X, maintenence Y, and feature Z ad nauseum?
That being said there are a few downsides such as not being able to have a close mentor. I am still relatively junior. This means I'll have to work a bit harder on my own in order to stay fresh and keep building my skills which means some homework time with Code Complete and other resources like that. I may ask for them to hire me a mentor every fortnight for half a day so that I may improve and to keep the quality of everything I do for them up to snuff.
So, while I'm a bit apprehensive about starting up again (thats a lot of weight on my shoulders!), I'm very excited to start at a place where I think I'll really be able to have an incredibly positive impact in the environment that I really feel will have the most positive impact on my performance and well being. If I'm easily distracted by people slurping sodas, why is it that most of the choices for offices for tech workers force me to accept that the only acceptable place for me to do incredibly complex engineering work is near people making jokes and slurping sodas?
I may have taken a small pay cut (although bonuses will hopefully make up and then some if I really shine) but for me to finally have the opportunity to do engineering work in an office, and to be a part of the decision making process, and to have duties beyond just feature A and feature B including nontechnical technical writing, that excites me.
So I guess my advice is, maybe instead of seeking meds (although therapy on its own I'm sure might be incredibly good (I've not been yet (although it wouldn't surprise me if I probably should have))), maybe do some introspection and figure out exactly what it is that is draining you day after day and then try to change those.
For me, I think, it was an inability to get into the zone at work, thus making me spend so much of my energy just on maintaining a decent level of focus. When I'm home, I don't need that and the time flies whenever I actually sit and do work. To get rid of that energy drain should be tremendous for me. Maybe you guys will see some tech articles by me in the future, I sure hope so ;-)
I've talked to several developers over the years that dream of being a groundskeeper.
It's funny how when we're young we'll look at a job like that with a sort of scorn as if we've got better things to do, but then as you get older you long a little for those nice summer days of cruising up and down the fairways, just you and your machine.
I don't think I'm ready to quit tech anytime soon as I do enjoy it and feel like I might eventually make some lasting impact somewhere, but thinking ahead towards "retirement", there's something appealing about the idea of heading down to the local country club, filling out an application and collecting my $10/hour to cut rough 3 days a week.
Totally... also, there are some places that hire summer students and pay kind of lousy money and have rough conditions. But there are other places that will prefer to hire someone older, stabler, long term, and recognize that they won't be able to hold onto such a person without at least paying a living wage. That could be alright. More like $15-20 an hour for relaxed, reasonably well respected work with plenty of exercise and outside time.
As much as I loved that job, though, there's no way I could do it for a living. There's a reason it's only high school and college kids that do it -- the pay is horrible. Which is honestly fair, since the job's not very intense.
But there's a reason a lot of guys end up as golf course rangers in their retirement years.
The problem with a job like this is the lack of variety. Cruising up and down the same fairways for the seventeenth year can really get to you.
Do you have experience with this? I'm afraid if I'm on meds, I'll end up neglecting my life even more, rather than taking these strong hints from my mind and body that this isn't the way it should be.
I would absolutely love to hear any perspective on this from anyone.
I was afraid to go on meds, but I'm very glad that I did. I have stopped neglecting my life, because I am able to go about my day without that 1000 pound rock on my back. It makes life much, much easier.
They are not "happy pills" in the sense that they make you relentlessly optimistic, but they take away the incredible pessimism and irrational despair that characterizes depression. I still have good and bad days, but they are related to actual events and not just relentlessly bad for no reason.
They are not without side effects (which thankfully for me have been very mild and have gone away after a few months - mild nausea if I take them on an empty stomach, some sexual stuff for a few months) but on the balance it's been incredibly positive.
You might hear some doubts about their efficacy, but from what I've read it's proportional to how badly off you are - the worse you're feeling, the more likely it is due to a chemical problem rather than just everyday sadness.
I wouldn't be afraid of neglecting yourself more. It's difficult to describe the effects of antidepressants, as their onset is extremely gradual (weeks to months) and it's been a while for me, but they basically shift the average mood up from "everything is kinda awful" to a more neutral equilibrium.
Antidepressants aren't the only option. Therapy is also effective, and if you feel that you're neglecting your life it does give you a place to talk about it.
When I tried bootstrapping my startup years ago with periodic contract work the albatross around my neck wasn't anything to do with the company, it was the mortgage and other home expenses that continually made it harder and harder to go without a steady income.
People always focus on income without looking at expenses as much, but the closer you can get those expenses to zero the wealthier you really are since you NEED so much less cash flow. It's a huge multiplier.
If I had the ability to pay off all my debt overnight, using my time the way I want to would be a whole lot easier. I absolutely sympathize with the author here. There are several things that I want to build but I have a full time job, a wife and 2 kids. At some point I had to decide that being a good father and husband is more important than pursuing those entrepreneurial dreams. There's only so much time in a day.
I'm lucky in that I have a great job with a company who's mission I fully support and ownership that treats their employees better than any company I've ever seen. It makes it significantly easier to put the company over personal ambitions.
Time and a place for everything.
But when I think about really getting that money, I realize I wouldn't do that. If my mortage is $1200/month, I just bought myself 166 months, or ~14 years. If the idea is to quit your job and invest in a company, that's not the smartest move. You're better off stocking away $72,000 so you don't have to worry about your mortgage in 5 years, and investing the rest in the company (you will not be making money for a while, and on top of paying your own salary, you will need to buy advertising).
If the idea is to avoid the interest on your loan, and be completely emotionally free from that debt, than by all means do it. This would work well if you are just going to do consulting since the cash flow swing isn't as dangerous.
I remember when I finally got around to doing the math on my first mortgage and realized I was actually going to pay close to triple the sale price of the house if I waited the full 30 years. The real trick, if you don't want to pay off the whole thing, is to make a lump sum payment to pay down about half of the mortgage early. It's the first 10-15 years on a 30 year where the payments are so interest heavy that you're really just throwing away money.
Get about halfway to payoff as fast as you can though and those payments are a whole lot closer to just paying back a cash balance.
Did you adjust for inflation? Even at today's inflation rates, the dollars you pay in 30 years will be worth considerably less than the dollars you pay today. There's also an opportunity cost issue. Paying off your mortgage means not putting the money somewhere else.
> you're really just throwing away money.
No... you're paying for access to a resource that you don't have yourself. There's more utility in that than in literally throwing the money in the garbage.
I invested with steady 12-14% returns for 10 years and then watched it all get wiped out. The interest rate on paying of debt doesn't change. Granted, at current rates it's a lot tougher to make the argument for mortgage interest vs other types of debt.
Nobody ever shows a compound interest chart with anything other than a steady interest rate (aka - 30 years of 10% return = millionaire!). A single negative or downturn can have a pretty dramatic effect on those projections. If you look at those same projection charts and take the amount you'd look to invest over the first 10 years, but put into into debt payment instead of investing so that you get everything paid off, then take that same amount you would have been investing, start investing it plus the money that you're no longer paying in monthly expenses then you'll find the end of the 30 year period to be an almost identical result. The only difference is that after 10 years you've eliminated virtually any risk of personal bankruptcy.
If you can find something with a guaranteed long term return higher than the mortgage interest then it's another ballgame, but those are pretty hard to come by. Right now dividend investing seems to be the closest approach that generally lets you ignore the actual interest rates over time and instead focus on building cash flow.
But this is one of those topics that is part math, part point of view and part personal comfort level. This was just my perspective.
There was a point a few years ago where liquidating the investments could pay off the mortgage. To me it seems that you can get some of the benefits of the emotional release of being debt free if you have the capability to liquidate and clear debt.
While many people will make the argument that instead I should have paid the minimums and had more money invested with the net effect of reaching the liquidate/pay off point, I agree with the reasoning behind your argument: market volatility will not wipe out debt that has been cleared.
Exactly. NYTimes had an interesting visualization a few years ago that tracked the S&P 500 to show real-world results. It really shows the effect that doldrum years can have on returns:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110...
I'm guessing you mean that all your gains got wiped out, not that your investments all went to zero.
On the other hand, a lot of people spent years paying on a mortgage only to get foreclosed on and lose everything including their principal. ie, that investment went to zero, or maybe even negative.
There's a lot to be said for paying down your mortgage, but remember that until you've completely paid off the mortgage all of your equity is at risk.
Even Mark Zuckerberg has a mortgage...
General rule of thumb when deciding between eliminating debt or investing is to compare if the debt interest is greater than investment interest (investment rate of return).
If (debt.interest > investment.interest ), pay off debt first. Else, invest.
I disagree with this tremendously. With your strategy, essentially what you are doing is buying stocks on margin. This magnifies your profits if things goes your way and magnifies your losses if things go against you.
Think about it this way - Interactive Brokers is an online brokerage with extremely low margin rates which are often half of current mortgage rates (see https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=interest&p...). Using your logic, the right thing to do is to leverage yourself to the hilt for every penny Interactive Brokers will loan you at 1.63% or less and cross your fingers you make the right investment choices otherwise you're bankrupt.
Buying investments on margin, no matter how it is done, is extremely risky. You might understand those risks and have a high enough risk tolerance but please don't pretend investing on margin is a general rule everyone should follow.
You make the world a better place.
It's the same thing. If it makes sense to keep $300,000 in debt to keep a $300,000 investment then it makes sense to go into $300,000 debt to make a $300,000 investment.
Whether that debt is a mortgage on a primary residence for a tax-equivalent-rate of 2.75% or margin interest for a tax-equivalent-rate of 1.63% makes little difference. This is what people who keep a high mortgage and invest the proceeds of that mortgage don't get. They are doing the equivalent of investing on margin which is extremely high risk. They could lose a large portion (or even all) of their investment and still be left with the debt.
That's not what I meant, definitely wouldn't borrow to invest so much as decide to invest (if I came into a new chunk of money) money on hand.
I'm not sure where the assumption is that I meant to invest on margin - it feels like I'm missing something.
When you do margin trading you take on debt to allow you to buy more stock. In your case, you aren't actually "taking on" debt technically, but you choose not to pay it off so that you can buy more stock.
After all, the scenarios break down to debt + more stocks or no debt + less stocks.
Obviously there are some differences, but I hope that explanation of the analogy made sense. The point is, by investing money instead of using it to pay off debt you are increasing your risk and reward whereas when you pay off debt you decrease it.
Except the money you spend on your mortgage is year 1 is worth a lot more than the money you spend on it in year 30. Especially with rates where they've been the past several years (our mortgage is 3.25%), cash flow is really the only upside to paying off a mortgage decades early.
In my limited experience, the freedom of not having a mortgage and a car loan, or any other type of debt, far outweighs the benefits of just cash flow. We now have a sense of freedom we didn't have Before. I think it is going to be very individual how one reacts to it, but for us having a minimal mortgage or none has made a big difference for us. Taking risks, having run startups for the last 20 years, this was a major contribution to being able to do this.
So it is hard to say exactly who took on that debt, but someone probably did.
For more on how debt creates money, read up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking. And the person you replied to is exactly right - our entire economic system only works right if there is a lot of debt to go with it.
I am not saying debt isn't a fundamental part of policy, but in a place like Sweden actually not having more debt than you can handle is possible. http://www.scb.se/sv_/Hitta-statistik/Artiklar/Bostadslanen-...
If you think you can do better with a different investment then go for it. But remember, someone with a lot more money than you decided that their best bet was to finance your mortgage.
It would have indeed worked out over the past few years. The conclusion for guaranteed or very low risk investment returns is far less obvious and probably has more to do with liquidity and psychological factors.
Well, you can take out a HELOC but you're right that's more or less the same thing as getting another mortgage--albeit with more flexibility.
Infinite Banking (using overfunded, dividend paying, whole life insurance) currently has 4.5% guaranteed floors with actual rates with dividends currently at 5.0 - 5.5%. Lots of other benefits as well, life insurance, and being able to borrow money against your policy any time you want for any reason, no questions asked.
Also, a 4% mortgage is only 4% of the whole balance in the beginning. At the end it is 4% of a very small balance. If you use level payments you effectively cut the interest rate in half to make comparison.
Taking out a $10,000 loan at 5% and investing it at 5% results in a profit.
Year 1 - Make a $1000 payment, $9000 balance (5% is $450). Your investment is $10000 at 5% or $500. $9000 loan and $10,500 in investments.
Year 2 - Make a $1000 payment, $8450 balance (5% is $423). Your investment is $10,500 at 5% $525. $8450 loan and $11,025 in investments.
...
Year 1 - Make a $1000 payment, lose $500 interest for a $9500 balance. Your investment yields $500 interest, but you had to withdraw $1000 to make the payment, so you're at $9500.
Year 2 - Make a $1000 payment, lose $475 interest for a $8975 balance. Your investment yields $475 interest, minus the $1000 withdrawal leaves you with $8975.
And so it goes, down to the end. Compound interest works both ways.
Remember what I said above: somebody thought that investing in your mortgage was the best return they could get. Are you willing to bet against them?
It's simpler and more accurate to say that the interest is added to the loan balance and then payments are subtracted. They don't subtract interest from payments, they add it to the balance. Extra payments don't have any interest applied to them, they go straight to principal.
The comparison though is between paying your extra cash flow towards a mortgage or investing it. You don't take money from the investment to pay the mortgage. You pay the minimum to the mortgage and then invest the difference.
As far as why banks want to do loans, you have to understand how banks work. What banks do is different.
Banks take money from deposits and then loan that out. They pay 1% interest on saving account deposits and charge 4% on loans. They are effectively purchasing something at $1 to sell for $4. That's a huge markup (400%). Of course banks want to do loans. They also have fractional reserve working in their favor. They can loan out more money than they actually have in deposits because the money is created out of thin air.
This is the same model used by savvy investors. They make investments using Other People's Money™.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12NGCBeup3rCygMsSbcOn...
As for the origin of mortgage money, you're forgetting about the secondary market. Lots of loans originated by banks get bundled up and sold off. That's a very lucrative business for some banks, because they can collect fees for the origination and get their money back right away with no risk.
In other words, someone who took a mortgage 4 or 5 years ago are probably now paying close to zero interest, and anyone who takes a new mortgage now has to pay close to 1.5% interest (which is almost completely composed of the margin). And when/if the economy picks up in 3 to 4 years, that person with the 1.5% margin is going to be paying a lot of interest..
It's also very difficult to get a mortgage with a fixed interest at least in Finland. Not unheard of, of course, but the terms are likely pretty bad.
Get an overfunded whole life policy and put the extra money into that. Google "Infinite Banking" or "Cash Flow Banking" to understand how it works.
Current guaranteed rates are 4.5% with dividends it comes out to around 5.5% (in the current market, it tends to follow interest rates very closely). That's 4.5% guaranteed for life from companies that have been around longer and still posted profits through the great depression, dot com crash, and 2008 housing crash.
Gains grow tax free and if you take it out as a loan it is tax free as well. Any money you withdraw is tax free up to the amount you have contributed so far.
You can take out a loan for any purpose, for any reason, at any time. If you don't pay back the loan the company could care less because they are getting the interest and it just comes out of the death benefit. Actually, they prefer you don't pay it back because they make more interest. So it really is win/win. Tax free "withdrawal" for you and more interest for them.
Also, it's a loan against, not a loan from. That means you are borrowing money from the insurance company not your money. The entire balance is still compounding.
And, as an added bonus, you are getting permanent life insurance for your family.
Some risks with paying off a mortgage earlier:
1) Equity in a home earns 0% interest. You're money is not compounding. Got $500,000 in equity. Guess what, that $500,000 is earning 0% interest.
2) Your leverage is decreased when you pay off your mortgage. If you have only 20% down (500% leverage) and your home goes up 10% then you just made a 50% gain. If you pay off your loan then your 10% gain becomes a 10% gain.
3) The money you put into your loan could have been earning interest. Yes, you're paying money on the mortgage interest but the mortgage balance is decreasing while the investment balance is increasing.
You can think of it this way. Should you take out a loan at 5% to invest at 5%? The answer is yes, you will come out ahead. The reason is that you are only paying 5% of the whole amount in the beginning. Towards the end you are paying 5% on a very tiny balance. If you pay in level payments then your loan is effectively costing you 2.5% while your investment is getting 5%. It's net positive.
4) Paying down your mortgage means you have more money at risk and less options. If you have some bad luck and default then the bank gets first right to all of your equity. If that equity is stored in a whole life policy it is protected from creditors (may vary from state to state but most are pretty generous). If the bank stands to lose a lot of money they will work with you and give you some flexibility, lower rate, allow you not to make payments for a while, etc. If they can just foreclose then they will do that. The reason a foreclosure is more favorable when you put in more equity is because they can sell it at a lower market rate and still get their money back. If it is underwater and you have very little equity then they would be forced to take a loss from the foreclosure.
5) Your mortgage interest may be tax deductible depending on your circumstance. You are giving that up.
Todd Langford has a really good series of videos that talks about finance and opportunity costs:
1) It can tie up cash flow. If you don't make the minimum payments your policy can "eat itself" until it lapses, at which point you lose that money. That being said, there is a large degree of flexibility when designing policies. Set the minimum low and contribute more. Fall back to the minimum when times get hard. If you are further into the policy it can self-fund (basically the dividend payments can cover the premiums and then some). At that point, you don't need to continue any money whatsoever to continue the policy. Most people still contribute money though since it is effectively free interest.
2) It has high load in the beginning. It typically requires 7 years just to break even. The first 3 years you typically will be losing money. It's only designed for long term.
3) You have to be able to qualify for insurance. If you can't you can insure someone you have an interest in parent, child, spouse, sibling, nephew, etc.
You're basically trading a little bit of flexibility with your cash flow in the beginning. If that money is going to be going towards investments anyway though, it really is a good strategy.
Also, you can always take out a loan against in the policy to invest in something else. If you have a decent investment you're actually getting increased leverage.
See this video for how this strategy can be used with real estate investing to get much higher returns:
Here's the really short guide to life insurance: http://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/insurance
Plus there are the tax and loan benefits of WL. They are inferior with 401k and IRA plans. You can't take out a loan whenever you want. You can only take out a certain amount (usually up to 50%) and only under very strict circumstances. There are maximum contributions with 401k. No so with WL. 401k's are taxed as ordinary income. There are more fees over the longer run with 401ks (2-3% every year vs just high front load with WL). You can't withdraw before 59.5 without penalties (except for 72t). There are strict provisions on when you have to pay the loan back.
With WL you can take out your money whenever you want with no penalties. You can take out loans whenever you want and pay them back whenever you want or just not pay them back at all. Most smart people will just take out loans against their policy and effectively access their money tax free. You can't get that with 401k and IRAs.
Taking out loans against whole life policies isn't something I was aware of though. I'd be interested to know what type of rates you could get with the loans against that compared to home equity loans or equity lines of credit that you can also use to get at the money you put into paying off the mortgage if you need it.
Using the numbers you're putting out here, if you put 20% down on a $500,000 home ($100,000 while borrowing $400,000) there's a couple of discrepancies.
First, paying off the mortgage early. You're right, once it's paid off you will be earning 0% interest. Assuming you don't pay it off early and go with the full 30 year schedule and I'm going to assume a 4% interest rate here, your total payment price will be about $875,000. By paying off early you're eliminating those losses. It's not that you're earning 0%, it's that you're not losing over -100%.
If your home goes up 10%, regardless of whether it's paid off or leverage you actually didn't make anything. You don't make anything on real estate until you sell it to cash out. Until then, any gains in a home that's paid off or mortgaged are identical. The only difference is if you didn't put 20% down and were also paying extra for PMI then the increase in value could get you out of PMI.
Yes, the money on your loan could have been earning interest. Instead it's losing interest so you need to find a guaranteed return higher than your mortgage rate. Guaranteed is the trick there. If you can pull it off with a whole life policy, then great. Without the guarantee market volatility comes into play. If you're a person who is comfortable taking out a loan to invest in something else, your perspective will clearly differ here though.
#4 is admittedly a very good an interesting point that I had not considered at all.
Regarding the mortgage interest being tax deductible, that only gets you back the equivalent you would have paid in income tax. 80% of it is still full interest.
I'll definitely look into the videos and whole life policies though. Anytime I talk about putting money into paying off a mortgage early I always have an equity line open on the house so that I can pull most if it back out for emergencies, including making the actual mortgage payments in the event of a lapse in income for some reason.
With that, available it makes it easier to avoid the foreclosure because you've got a way to use the equity to avoid default and by yourself time. You just have to open the line of credit when you aren't having bad luck.
" I stay up hours later than I mean to, not even doing anything, just trying to put off sleeping — because the next thing I experience will be waking up and going back to work."
This is straight up depression. We need to stop using office-cliches like "burnout" and start addressing the very real mental health issues in the tech industry. Maintaining my mental health is like staying in shape, eating right, etc. Only as an adult have I learned how much work it takes to stay mentally healthy and not fall into these traps. Things like pacing yourself, recognizing when you're stressed, being able to say 'no,' taking enough breaks, having a dialogue with your boss/clients on what your realistic expectations should be for this project, self identifying with your job too much, not having outside interests outside of tech, etc all matter.
Techies seem to love stress. We're competitive, asocial, difficult, etc. No wonder stuff like this is so common. How many high profile tech suicides have we had in the past few years? We're doing the opposite of staying mentally healthy. Turns out human beings are incredibly delicate creatures, but no one wants to admit it as to not look "weak."
The funny part is I find myself dreaming of going back to stocking shelves at a grocery store like I did in high school. I'd never make enough money to support myself doing something like that though. I romanticize the Peter Gibbons move to go work in construction even though I know I probably wouldn't be happy doing anything. I long for stress free days. Especially when most of the stress I experience is just completely artificial or manufactured by my boss or company. Most of the problems I have at work shouldn't bother me after hours but they never leave.
It's getting worse though. I've soon reached the point where I really can't give a rat's arse about my job. The software I get to develop doesn't help making the world a better place. It doesn't help people, other than making rich people richer. It doesn't advance mankind. Not does it bring joy or excitement to anyone. It's just so pointless, drab and dull.
I didn't always feel like this. I used to work for a depressing place. But since I started working for my current company, the culture, the people, have made it worthwhile.
> The symptoms of burnout are similar to those of clinical depression; in a study that directly compared depressive symptoms in burned out workers and clinically depressed patients, no diagnostically significant differences were found between the two groups: burned out workers reported as many depressive symptoms as clinically depressed patients. Moreover, a study by Bianchi, Schonfeld, and Laurent (2014) showed that about 90% of burned out workers meet diagnostic criteria for depression, suggesting that burnout may be a depressive syndrome rather than a distinct entity. The view that burnout is a form of depression has found support in several recent studies.
I agree.
Boys and girls, as you likely know, burnout is real. But, you can manage it. I'll tell you what I do. Here's the secret:
Put yourself first.
Now, that sounds quite selfish on first-blush. What exactly does that mean?
For me, it means I take care of my health, first and foremost. Before the day is started, before the family is awake, I head off to the gym to be with The Iron. Henry Rollins wrote about it much more eloquently that I can, so I urge you to take a moment and read his words [1].
Once you've been with The Iron, nothing can stop you. Sure, you will still have rough days. But, I will tell you that, having been with The Iron, you will know that there is nothing that can bring you down. You will know that you have earned it for yourself on that morning. There is very little that can shake you when you know that. When all else fails around you, when software fails, when management fails, when fear, doubt, uncertainty and self-pity come rumbling toward you like a freight train, when friends forsake you... I am here to tell you that you will gently remind yourself in the midst of the storm:
"I rolled out of the rack to bring it. When most of the world around me was asleep, I paid the price [2], and that is what truly matters today."
And, over time, you will build that attitude, and you will find that you are unshakable. You will find that you will manage your time to make it happen. You will find that, even while you work hard at work, you will not let it control you. The work will always be there; the inbox will always be full, so put yourself first.
You will find that you will start eating right, because you realize that there is a price to be paid in order to stave off feelings that certain foods can cause. The roller-coaster of junk food and caffeine will fade from your life, because you will find that they have a net-negative impact regarding how you want to feel and perform. You may even find that you want to start meditating, to balance the mind.
I know it's old advice. I know that it sounds cliche. But I urge you to try it. Do it for yourself. If you can't do mornings, then do it when you can. Mornings just set the tone for me, but do what works for you.
Take time to put yourself first, every day.
[1] http://www.oldtimestrongman.com/strength-articles/iron-henry...
[2] I'm very fond of Vince Lombardi's words here:
Football is a great deal like life in that it teaches that work, sacrifice, perseverance, competitive drive, selflessness and respect for authority is the price that each and every one of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.
To achieve success, whatever the job we have, we must pay a price.
Success is like anything worthwhile. It has a price. You have to pay the price to win and you have to pay the price to get to the point where success is possible. Most important, you must pay the price to stay there. Once you agree upon the price you and your family must pay for success, it enables you to ignore the minor hurts, the opponent's pressure, and the temporary failures.
I've never known a man worth his salt who, in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn't appreciate the grind, the discipline.
A man can be as great as he wants to be. If you believe in yourself and have the courage, the determination, the dedication, the competitive drive, and if you are willing to sacrifice the little things in life and pay the price for the things that are worthwhile, it can be done.
I wasn't aware of any of the references that you used (e.g., "Brodin", "Wheymen") until I looked them up just now.
I suspect that you're joking, but for the benefit of other readers regarding my intention:
I would personally find it terribly unfortunate if what I've sincerely written in my original post above were to be misconstrued in any way with the Brodin references, which come across as a part of "bro" culture; this was categorically not my intention.
Strength training is for everyone, and both the physical and mental aspects of exercise of any type (e.g., cardio, strength, yoga, etc.) are beneficial to everyone.
All the best :)
Actually, to achieve success, we must do the job.
Some people find lifting heavy weights and whatnot helps them do that. I certainly have. Others find it's quiet contemplation under a tree. I've done that too, in another place, not here.
Time and chance happen to us all, and having a deep toolkit of techniques for dealing with the truly astonishing variety of slings and arrows the world can huck in our direction is at least as important as our dedication to any one of them. Because when we fail--and we will fail, if we truly strive to achieve anything interesting or important--having a different set of techniques to catch ourselves can come in handly.
For myself, the secrect of my success is being able to go on in the certainty of failure, because taking one more step forward is worthwhile, even when I know the destination is unreachable. And sometimes I'm wrong, and reach it anyway.
Or being in a job or a situation that didn't fit them and they exceeded their capabilities or their ability to deal with stress.
Yelp, or for that matter any job, is not an elementary school that you are assigned to that you can't change because you are 6 years old. It's a job. People have all sorts of capabilities that allow them to work or not work at a particular career or company.
Also you probably have other priorities in life so remember those every day rather than look back two years later saying "how did I forget everything else in my life?" It can be done. Stand up for yourself, and what you want out of life.
[I've worked 20 years in Silicon Valley, currently at Netflix.]
Yelp's business model is quasi-extortionate. Even if the work environment itself was OK, writing code all day for that purpose would certainly leave me feeling pretty crappy about my job. That kind of thing doesn't wash off very easily if you have a conscience.
Everyone who works in finance just lol'd.
But seriously, relative to the value a good hacker adds to the business, "huge sums" is probably not an accurate characterization of engineer comp.
Of course, he still tried to pursue them in his spare time but then he just didn't have enough time to do them as much or as well as he wanted.
Is this really burnout though? I ask because I relate to much of this situation, but I actually love my job, my company, and my coworkers. It's very interesting and I am very happy working. I just wish there were more time because there are still other things I would like to work on and I'm only getting older.
I don't mind inheriting other people's problems, and I don't mind coming into the office - I find it's helpful to swim with the school, so to speak - but sometimes I can better solve a problem out on a good bike ride or will have an epiphany about team dynamics while playing basketball, and after that, the next hour of work is worth more than two weeks of sitting around.
It's difficult to quantify, it's difficult not to get lazy, and when you _fail_ to achieve your goals, people feel better if they watched you toil. I think it's human nature.
The author may find the change refreshing, but I've never been as burned out as I have with my own company. It's like taking all of the other stuff, then adding an order of magnitude to the stress level. This comes from having responsiblity for everything, including the pressure of making it work overall (i.e. the dark side of the control and "freedom"). As well, you can frequently feel unappreciated by customers, staff, partners, etc. And, I've found myself far more sensitive to this than to the same from any manager or employer I've had.
I think the reality is probably more complicated. Probably Yelp pushes to much work on its employees and the author allowed it to happen.
To be honest, I think more tech jobs are toxic than not; it's very hard to find a good tech job, and even when you do, a good tech job can turn toxic as quickly as a manager leaving. I've always been aware of this and tried to put myself first, but it's not always an easy or even possible thing to do.
There are certainly roles where software can be an end itself. Academic paths focused specifically on software, open source, perhaps some R&D shops (think Guava guys). But in most companies it's a means to an end.
This article makes some good related points on the topic of technical debt and what amount of it is optimal for enterprises.
http://bigeng.io/post/118399425343/why-the-way-we-look-at-te...
Yeah, I think that's true.
BUT if I was offered a job with guaranteed employment and steady wages and (gaaasp pension!) like being a teacher I would go for it. Having kids changes your perspective.
I would have been financially much better of if it wasn't for punitive taxes in Ireland, here you reach ~53% high tax rate with only about ~$35K in income. And then there are new property/water taxes they brought in now as well as 23% VAT :( All of these taxes really make you ask yourself "why bother work harder and longer" and really kill any incentive to work. And no we do not get free healthcare here still need to pay for medical insurance out of aftertax earnings. And as a business owner I do not qualify for the full welfare if things go to shit, despite paying high rate of social taxes.
edit: Now that I read my rant in second half of my past, no wonder no good startups come from here, the atmosphere is toxic to entrepreneurship.
But hey look over there at the news yet another multinational setting up to launder/funnel money onto somewhere warmer and seems like a housing bubble is re-inflating again.
--------
edit: last year i arranged my salary to remain under the high tax rate band Gross: €32.6 K Net (after PAYE,PRSI,USC): €25 K
The accountant said that above this €32K line i would have lost about ~53 cents in taxes for each €1.00 earned by ending up in the highest tax band...
So I left the extra money in company (corporation tax 12.5%) and will spread out my wages over few years, tho is risky practice if the company gets sued and loses the money.
There is an option to pay into a pension but with the pension funds being so mismanaged and the government actively robbing all pensions and destroying the pension reserve that would be downright stupid.
According to Wikipedia, it does:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_Republic_of_Ire...
"The taxation of earnings is progressive"
Which makes the OP's post rather confusing.
Does any country out there not tax progressively?
I just can't imagine it - "Great, you got a pay rise! Now you get to take home less, until your pay rises by another $5,000!"
Edit: On second reading, I think I understand what the OP is talking about: leaving money in the company they operate, which pays out (I guess through dividends?) at a lesser tax rate than if it were paid out directly as wages. I'm pretty sure this is a standard technique in the rest of the world, and not particularly unique to Ireland.
If the money does not actually leave the company and go into his pocket, the only taxes that would need to be paid are those (low) corporate taxes.
Of what value is money you can't have in your pocket and spend, of course, is an exercise for the reader, but presumably it could be paid out as personal income over a greater number of years (if the company survives that long) without ever paying $0.53/1.00 in personal income taxes on any portion of that money.
Does any country out there not tax progressively?
I just can't imagine it - "Great, you got a pay rise! Now
you get to take home less, until your pay rises by
another $5,000!"
This misunderstanding of how tax brackets is so widely pervasive that I can only assume it's the work of enemy action: people who want to reduce income taxes, or to move the tax burden to the poor by implementing a flat tax rate.
If he is not hurting for cash and he could defer it until next year (or year after that) with no penalty at all and (arguably) negligible risk, thus paying the lower personal income tax rate on that dollar, why not do it?
I don't see what part is misunderstood. If you're being paid by your employer, obviously you want to take the raise regardless of higher taxes. If you are your own employer, both entities are paying taxes and each dollar of taxes paid is coming out of your own pocket.
> each dollar of taxes paid (by either entity) is coming out of your own pocket
You can keep it in pocket A, the corporation, and pay taxes once (on profits only, I guess), or move it to pocket B and pay taxes a second time also, at a much higher rate (and on overall income, again a larger basis than it would be to count up personal profits.) If you can replace some personal expenses with corporate expenses, end-around pocket B completely, now your business has also made less profit, so pays less corporate tax. I am not a tax accountant (or even remotely skilled in taxes) and this is not tax advice, but it makes pretty good sene to me. Certainly some part less than all of what I suggest would be considered illegal tax dodging or corporate malfeasance.
Sounds like a good incentive for CEOs/majority owners of small businesses to live frugally and to refrain from looting their corporate coffers excessively. Sure, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but it also seems very clear to make the case that two whole birds in the bush are worth more than 0.94 birds in the hand.
You are thinking like an employee.
The tax system here puts a huge disincentive to work hard and earn a lot, at least there is an option if you have your own company to defer and stretch your wages over longer period BUT that comes with all sorts of risk since IT IS NOT YOUR MONEY but company money and corporation tax.
That's why I moved out of core tech and became a librarian (which is still pretty tech) in a more regional city. Lower wages but slightly more affordable houses mean I might still have a chance at giving my kids a mortgage one day..
Anyways to answer your question, play around with calculator http://download.pwc.com/ie/budget-2015/index.html
A single 30 year old (average age of HNers?) earning €100K will receive €58,869 after all the income taxes
From this money he/she will have to then pay water tax, local property tax (if renting the landlord will pass it on), VAT of 23% on almost everything and so on, and god help you if you buy a car!
---
41% is the highest tax band BUT there is also USC and PRSI tax which needs to be paid which brings up the highest rate to above 50%
basically there are a lot of hidden taxes and it is a very complex tax system which allows the government to make the figures appear palatable
I do sometimes wonder what kind of self-awareness people have of their status.
http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer...
A lot of HN readers are from US and would be shocked at the tax rates here (on everything) and they further shocked as to how little we get to see for our tax money (no free healthcare etc)
What a crappy system, to simultaneously make it great for corporations and bad for workers.
There have to be some other major upsides that I'm not understanding. It's a pretty country, that's something :)
The US always appears to have a much lower tax rate but once you compare similar lifestyles things are not as different as you might imagine.
BUT here in Ireland the government has made it an artform in introducing indirect hidden taxes which on a quick glance one might miss and quickly add up. for example: Americans would be shocked not only at our petrol prices but the total cost of running a car (and no the public transport is not great) for example and property taxes have come in and are widely expected to rise year on year and will probably be at US levels in 10 years.
I have been to the US many of times and traveled across almost all the states so it is not just case of "grass is greener on other side"
15000*27/12 = 33750CZK/month = 42.5% taxation
Add VAT 21%, petrol tax 52%...
Also source on that petrol tax? According to http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/07/23/uk-czech-tax-idUKKB... it seems to be one of the lower in the EU, as the cut would have "put Czech petrol taxes below minimum rates allowed in the European Union"
I just put it into the calculator and the number for 2015 is: 59,019
This results in an effective tax rate of 40% approximately (this is with a property tax and water tax)
The Property tax being so low is one of the causes of the housing bubble. And some people blow their (yearly) water tax on a night at the pub.
And believe me income taxes are not that much better in other places (or there are other issues)
Yeah, healthcare could be better, but it's not a big issue (as opposed to something like the USA)
Then, the EU went back to them and told them they couldn't keep doing this, and very soon (is it 2016?) they will rack up corporate tax and make a fortune. And if you're Google, you built a large office and hired thousands of people, you're not going to leave anytime soon.
What is happening, rightly so, is the dismantling of some mechanisms which allowed large corporations to avoid paying the corporation tax at all. I think, though not sure, that this includes dismantling the double-irish arrangement where companies declared the majority of their income as expenses for licensing the product/brand etc from a parent company.
You think? I don't think big business tends to fall into the sunk cost fallacy like we do. It may take a year to move out, but if they save no money in Ireland over the US, why stay?
Plenty of people have said that about other employers in the past and come into work one day to find the doors locked.
In my case I could move from Dublin to Silicon Valley and make 30% to 50% more cash and pay way less in taxes, I would be an idiot to not consider it.
You expect to walk into an 80k a year job straight out of college? Everyone has to start somewhere. If I was a graduate, I'd much rather be working sub 30k for IBM than sub 40k for Dublin's next Groupon killer/Airbnb for iguanas.
And I can walk into an 80k job outside of Dublin. Considering the cost of living in Dublin vs the salary for tech grads versus... anywhere else in the world, you'd be crazy to stay.
London, Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris... all way, way more expensive than Dublin.
But if you can find a job that will pay 80k euro equivalent to a graduate with a computing degree from a Dublin university and zero industry experience, you should definitely take it, 100%, and I wish you the best of luck.
Describing people who want to do this as 'idiots' was too harsh of me. It just makes me sad to see young people leaving the country.
From a brief google, Tokyo looks comparable to Dublin, but the others, yes. However, I wouldn't take a job for 30k living in any of those cities either, that's just nuts. However, it is absolutely possible to get jobs in places where your ratio of cost of living to salary is better than it is in Dublin, even before you factor in how much more you would take home before you end up paying the nuts VAT rates, PAYE, PRSI, USC charges that push you into almost 53% tax at 32k euro. I moved to Edinburgh when I graduated, and forgetting about my salary, my rent is a good 300 euro less a month, my transport bills are lower, I live in a nicer flat than I did before, and general costs of living are lower than they were in Dublin. I have more disposable income than I would have had on the same salary, and the ballpark offers that I have received here are the same as, if not better than home.
The reddit thread in [1] has plenty of people who came out at over 80k euro starting salaries. I'm not saying that everyone can get it, but there are some available.
http://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1oiwc2/ne...
I ended up moving to Canada where I earn the equivalent of 36k euro working in a startup. I would say that living expenses are comparable.
To expand on this: one can operate as a sole trader company, and enjoy the 19% flat income tax rate. You can also register your company for VAT, and then claim back the VAT on company purchases.
The only other cost is ~$270 / ~240 EUR / ~180 GBP per month in social insurance taxes.
I've been here for the last five years, and the low cost of living (very low cost outside of Warsaw) combined with low taxes makes Poland a very forgiving place to be when your first few side businesses inevitably fail.
(for that matter, the startup community here in Warsaw, centred somewhat around Reaktor - http://reaktorwarsaw.com - is really picking up steam)
If you do what I do - remote consulting for clients in the UK and USA - and you have the talent to charge western rates, you can build a sizeable nest egg in next to no time.
Agreed, it always feels scandalous to me whenever I hear this fact.
No idea how it works in practise. I known plenty of Americans who have settled in Poland for a good portion of their lives, so it must be possible to overcome the burden.
Maybe it's one of those things where, as long as you can afford to pay a good accountant (and you really should be able to afford it in Poland), they take the pain away for you?
On personal income. It sounds like the UK's "IR35" loophole - if you leave the money in the company you don't have to pay tax on that. So you can accumulate capital in the company.
Of course, you must be genuinely living abroad to apply for this. This means either spending enough time outside of the US (> 330 days in a tax year, if I recall correctly) or have enough proof that you are really living abroad (things like primary residence in your name, bills, bank accounts, mortgage, insurance, kids at school -- regular every day stuff).
Now if you want to game the system and just "kind of" live abroad in order to take advantage of the income exemption, that's a different story.
I know about being an expat and how to avoid SOME of the taxes. Point is, unless you make under that limit and don't spend more than a month per year in the US, you are liable for US taxes. They give credit for foreign taxes paid, but you'll basically be paying the US income tax rates when it's all done. Not to mention the sheer stupidity of having to file in the first place.
If you can structure your work and business correctly, I'm sure you can bypass such taxes. Assuming you don't want to renounce your nationality!
I mention that there are ways to avoid some of the taxes. I've BEEN an expat so I know how it works.
I also know that I still had to pay taxes even when I stayed out of country long enough just due to income levels. Additionally, with all of my family in the US it was pretty hard to stay out of country enough to avoid taxes.
Am I saying you shouldn't move out of the country? NO! I loved living in Europe. And if you live in a low cost of living country you will save lots of money if you get a US salary or contracts. What I am saying is that as an American you'll likely end up still paying US taxes and you'll still have to file with the IRS every year.
http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Forei...
The penalty is 0.1666% per month you didn't have qualifying health insurance for any 3+ month period(s) you didn't have it, e.g., if you didn't have insurance in the months of February-April, you'd be assessed a fine of 0.5% of your income.
And as an American you would still receive the support of the US government in case of war or other disasters.
Off the top of my head:
- The state's still transitioning from a post-communist economy.
- Wages are very low.
- Relatively high emigration rate "brain drain" (although people are starting to return).
- More supply, less demand.
You can buy a brand new apartment close to the centre for somewhere around $2000 per square metre / $200 per square foot. Depending on how your housing market work, that's either scandalously high, or shockingly low.
It is however, very very affordable as soon as you start earning a reasonable wage.
Remember, the average wage in Poland (according to GUS) is around $12750 yearly, so a $550/mo apartment (the average, from what I know amongst friends) in Warsaw is quite expensive for the average Pole.
So, why are wages so low? Well, we'd like to know as well :).
You have to learn the Cyrillic alphabet on top of learning a Slavic language though! I tease, I tease.
Isn't Bulgaria due to join the Schengen area pretty soon? Inside the next couple of years, at least?
Isn't Bulgaria due to join the Schengen area pretty soon? Inside the next couple of years, at least?
The problem is that both countries are still considered too corrupt for inclusion into the Schengen treaty. Romania seems to have cleaned up their act better then Bulgaria, but there are still grave doubts that the countries behave according to the treaty and don't, for example, sell visas to people, who are not eligible for them.
To the best of my knowledge, both countries are still on an waiting list, but given the current anti immigrant sentiments in most of central Europe this could take a few more years minimum.
Note that I'm not singling out the countries as crooked I'm just stating facts. Organized crime, for example, is still a huge problem in Bulgaria and corruption is still a huge problem in both countries. [1]
The only problem is communication with government, rather impossible without polish.
Very true - and very difficult at first, if your Polish is rather poor.
That said, my Polish was terrible, and I managed to bluster through it.
I recently helped an acquaintance through the process, and it turned out I'd done it the wrong way around. First hire a good accountant (mine costs slightly more than usual at $100/mo, thanks to processing many many many invoices/mo), sign over power of attorney for submitting tax documents, and they'll take care of the rest for you.
I think Warsaw's great. Plenty of green spaces, lots of child-friendly environments, and it's pretty easy - if you choose - to find yourself living in a community of similarly-aged kids where they all look out for one another.
The only downside I can think of is navigating stuff like vaccinations, doctors, and general bureaucracy. The majority you'll be fine with, but some working Polish - and having Polish friends - will be helpful as English is in short supply in some vital areas.
In fact, they're bad enough that I actively campaign against them.
Whoops, turned into a rant there by accident, sorry about that :)
I'd say, so far, Georgia is one of the most capitalist states in Europe.
If you are employed you have no choice but to pay for private insurance:
* Family with 2 kids ~ €2600 per year
* Singe person ~ €500-€1000 per year (dependant on age etc)
Tho the costs for health insurance are rising of course...
Got offered a full-time job in the tech industry with (gaaasp pension!) outside of Dublin, 5 minutes from my front door, with better salary, bonuses and healthcare. Things can work out well (and I really don't mean to sound patronizing here) with patience and a bit of luck.
While it seems to have become the trend to rail against traditional 40 hour/week jobs, the stability they can offer it extremely enticing to people with families. Eevee lives with 3 other grown adults and no children.
As someone looking to make the jump from a traditional job to financial independence (and self employment), I've noticed that people like Tim Ferris and Ramit Sethi all have one thing in common: no children. They are able to take the risks they can because when they fail, it's only on them.
With kids and a house, it's no longer the case. The people I follow who have successfully made the transition (Mr. Money Mustahce, Simple Programmer) have all used the traditional job as a means of support until they were ready to launch.
Also, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with just wanting to put in 40 hours and go home.
Yes, it does feel 'transitional' but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I really like the company that I now work for, and I still have time to work on 'side projects' at home whenever I feel like it. It's also a hell of a lot stressful. I have the ability to 'let go' of work stress a lot easier than ever before.
(I kid you not, these are often listed as perks in tech job ads)
Obviously startups are not the place to look for a pension but I haven't even heard of established companies in tech offering them.
Seems like a dead-end career if you care about retiring and sending your kids to a decent school (if that's what they want). My grandfather-in-law was set for life when he retired as a mechanical engineer. I'm in my mid-30s and I don't see my career ever ending and my financial future seems like it will always be at risk no matter how I invest and manage my savings.
What kind of company, might I ask, offers such a rare thing?
These days its better handled by a federal/social investment fund that all companies contribute to and then pays out to each individual. But that's basically social security.
I'm a bit of a socialist living in the U.S. - I believe in higher taxes on higher earnings and universal healthcare - but what in all that is holy do you get for your tax money??
The OP's overstating their case a bit, see the tax calculator here: http://services.deloitte.ie/tc/ (you'll get close to 60k in your pocket from 100k.)
The wikipedia article's pretty comprehensive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_Republic_of_Ire...
This punitive tax regime makes you question as to why bother working longer and harder and kills any will to start new projects since you know you will be robbed if you ever (in the unlikely minority) become successful
AND to add insult to injury you do not get much for your taxes and from your after tax income you endup paying all sorts of further hidden taxes just to live here.
Honestly, I'm genuinely not scandalised about the rates you've listed; they seem pretty standard for Europe.
This punitive tax regime makes you question as to why bother working longer and harder and kills any will to start new projects since you know you will be robbed if you ever (in the unlikely minority) become successful
A top rate of 50% isn't that scandalous. It's a lot, and there are plenty of means to reduce it. Personally, I'm far more concerned about getting the point where the top tax rate is a serious problem for me in the first place.
AND to add insult to injury you do not get much for your taxes and from your after tax income you endup paying all sorts of further hidden taxes just to live here.
I fear that if you think living elsewhere is going to result in a major change on your life from the tax rate alone, the options are few and far between. I've heard that you either love or hate Dubai, for instance.
(of course, there are always exceptions on prices of e.g. clothing, computing goods etc. etc. Always idly tempting to imagine moving somewhere that doesn't have VAT!)
Frankly, not much. I was born and raised in Ireland, and left a few years ago from Scotland. In comparison to Scotland (and the UK in general), the quality of public services in Ireland is a joke.
I'm sorry but you cant just go on to HN and make stuff up.
You pay 20% on the first €33,800 income and only 40% on income over €33,800 if single.
You pay 20% on the first €42,800 income and only 40% on income over €42,800 if Married with one income.
You pay 20% on the first €67,600 income and only 40% on income over €67,600 if Married with two incomes.
You pay 20% on the first €37,800 income and only 40% on income over €37,800 if a single parent.
thats without even going into property tax which could also be taken out of your income (and probably water tax soon)
The government has deliberately made the "income" taxes so complicated with 3 major different variables, and plenty of other minor nuances dependent on the persons circumstance
In my case for 2014:
----
Gross Pay €32,876.69
Income Tax €4,941.44
USC €1,620.17
PRSI €1,315.08
Net Pay €25,000
----
Thats for tax year 2014 (wasn't married yet, own company director), any euros earned above this I would have had to pay a rate of 50%+ tax (income+usc+prsi),
This year it is a little less (few hundred euro) due to getting married and budget 2015 being a tiny bit more forgiving.
You have ignored PRSI and USC and ignored that company directors lose a good chunk of their tax credits (and to add insult to injury no longer qualify for full welfare when things go bad!) for bothering to start a company, I suppose you work for someone else and do not comprehend how toxic the tax regime is towards small businesses. Revenue views all small business and sole traders with absolute disdain the EXPECT them all too be crooked and ASSUME you are guilty of tax fraud and place the onus on you to PROVE you are innocent of any tax misdoings (which costs time and accounting money)...
There's a UK one here, if you'd like to compare: http://listentotaxman.com/
(Both are very simple, it's 10 seconds to fill in the form.)
The lead seems buried here. This isn't someone quitting, this is someone in a position of incredible privilege, essentially retiring (or at least going on "funemployment" for a little while).
There are far darker ways to make far less money, that are far more worthy of dramatic storm cloud drawings. Maybe once they see past their burnout they'll realize how incredibly privileged they were to even accomplish what they were able to (working remotely no less!) in the first place. Burnout really is a sad and scary thing.
Knowing that other people have it worse — or even that I used to have it worse — doesn't make it any better.
I'm happy for you. Even a tiny bit jealous. But it does in the end make the whole post sound like a humblebrag to me.
You're both right of course, and then some of them turn around and say "it isn't about money" or "don't make it about money". Sigh, it isn't unique to tech at all by the way.
I hope I can work hard enough to someday be able to have the luxury of that choice and that I'll remember my current perspective at that time.
And, since this is HN, of course I always need to preface with "Yes, I know you can point to a handful of outlier counter-examples, but they don't disprove the general case".
Single-digit employees more often than not get screwed when considering the greater risk they take (risk not too much lower than the founders, who usually keep several tens of percent ownership). 1% of a company post-seed dilutes a lot after a few VC rounds, so you end up with a great strike price, but not much more %-wise (what really matters) compared to later hires.
Also I think you (as many do, and as I used to) vastly overestimate what retirement money is. In general you can take your yearly expenses (not income), multiply that by around 25, and that's all you really need to retire on, and keep the same lifestyle. (Sure, if you want to increase the cost of your lifestyle, add a couple kids, etc., you need to take that into account.)
I think the reason these posts get upvoted is more because the things that the author talked about are things many of us deal with. I've definitely had times when I stayed awake later than I should have just because I knew that if I went to sleep, the only thing waiting for me was work. I guess sometimes I feel like there just isn't enough time in the day and I don't even get to relax before it's over.
I like to believe that posts like these where the author isn't actually quitting would be upvoted as well. Of course, the issue is that those posts don't exist likely out of fear that the employers would find out.. So then we are left only with the people who have the luxury of leaving writing about these topics.
Additionally, you probably can do better investing, but we don't know when he took out his mortgage. I got a mortgage in 2000 and the rates were much higher. A guaranteed 6.5% return on my investment? Not too bad. Refinancing can be expensive, and depending on what remains on the mortgage it may not be worth it.
So really, it's almost impossible to speculate on whether paying of the mortgage was a good idea until we know more of the details. I admit I would be inclined to pay it off just for the certainty and the immediate lowering of expenses. Investing can take time to return, possibly more time than he has.
I deliberately left out actual numbers, but I don't know how to be any more tactful than that. Sorry.
Full-time jobs generally suck. Spending the bulk of every weekday in an office doing what you're told is not fun. If it was, then people would do it for free. Day to day work is generally unglamorous and boring.
I think part of the blame is that tech employers permeate this notion that one must "love" their work. So we feel guilty for not enjoying cleaning up somebody else's legacy code, fixing that tracking bug, or god forbid solving an IE8 bug.
I totally agree with the author that the tickets we're assigned are all puzzles that I could lose myself in and inevitably get some feeling of satisfaction when I figure it out. But in the grand scheme of things, most of us aren't working on problems of real significance (eg. curing cancer, creating a more efficient battery). Most of us are just reinventing some form of wheel. And most of the problems we solve as implementors don't pertain to us. Rarely do we capture any of the fruits of our labor aside from a "great job!" and a 10% pay bump at the end of the year if we're lucky.
We as employees need to change the culture of employment. Nobody should have to pretend to enjoy grunt work. Work should be about the output you produce, not face time or tracking hours. Being in an office 8 hrs/day and never seeing the sun is depressing, and it's time we acknowledge that and fight to improve the situation.
We can start by demanding that remote work be accepted by our employers. That immediately gives us back our entire commutes (even just one hour a day is huge when you spend the majority of your waking hours in an office and thus only have 6 hours of real free time). And we can demand the freedom to work on our own schedules rather than being confined to 9-5, which we all know for most people is bullshit because we're not on an assembly line and our most productive work doesn't necessarily follow a 9-5 schedule.
I used to commute somewhere between 3-4 hours on average each day. Then I started doing part time remote. Now I'm full time remote. I get 4 hours of my day back. Sometimes those for hours end up still being working hours but I guess that's better than being stuck in traffic with the rest of the drones. I still have to travel so I end up with 60 hours weeks when I do but going remote has helped me get a little chunk of my life back. Not enough to make me enjoy what I do but I hate it a very tiny bit less.
I would suggest that maybe 8 hours a day is too much (France has a 35-hour week and, as I recall, is still ridiculously productive) but let's not kid ourselves — I doubt most people commenting here actually work only 8 hours a day.
So what? Most people aren't curing cancer, or doing anything more of value than their paycheck reflects. And maybe the value of our paycheck is really inflated, even. In the end we are just floating on a giant ~ball through space and maybe someday we'll have a cataclysmic event that undoes all of our social and scientific progress. Stop thinking that you have to be some special snowflake, relax, and maybe you'll find that you can find pleasure in the little, mundane stuff. In the end, they're all we really have.
> I don’t know how to turn this into dollars yet. Hopefully I’ll figure that out.
Well, good luck. I'm just afraid the reality will kick in soon. Tech industry is by far not the worst way to get some food for fifty picnics; many others are much more soul-crushing, with less chance to retire early.
It's easy to forget the plethora of shit jobs out there once you've been doing software development/ops/IT for a while. Sure, its painful, and some companies more than others, but I agree with another poster that often it's more what you put on yourself versus what's forced on you (at least in my case I think that was often true). I guess it's vital to look for that work/life balance and a company that will offer that (not just lip service); or do your own thing, but that can be pretty hard work too - it's not just coding then, it's all the roles, even the ones you hate.
If there were an easy answer, we'd all be doing it.
[edit] added bit.
No one pushes barriers anymore. Rarely anyone makes anyones life better by doing things radically different. We keep reinventing the same wheel again and again. I've been paid handsomely in the last 5 years by doing pretty much the exact same things, using different frameworks for different (and at times the same) companies.
I think if we realise this and become comfortable with it, it'd be good for income (if perhaps not soul destroying creatively).
In computer science, we stand on each other's feet. -- Brian K. Reid
"No one pushes barriers anymore". No one that you may have seen. Look around, folks do it all the time. Examples abound.
"Rarely anyone makes anyones life better...". Become a teacher, a nurse, a social worker, a friend, a good neighbor, volunteer to work with the poor, etc. etc.
"...by doing things radically different". This is one of my biggest beefs with our tech culture. We're arrogant. We need to step back and realize that a great deal was invented and accomplished before we were born. Many billions of people have passed through life on Earth before us. Some did "radically different" things, but more likely, most did not. What makes you or I so special to think that it's something we're entitled to. Of course we should strive to do our very best and have high goals, but our expectations really should be tempered by reality (not our ego).
"I've been paid handsomely in the last 5 years by doing pretty much the exact same things...". How do you think these roles think about doing the exact same things? Painters, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, bus driver, accountant, sales executive, restaurant owner, sales clerk, etc.
2 parting thoughts: (1) count your blessings, not your problems, and (2) if you're as smart and talented as you think you are, you should be able to improve the situation for yourself and others.
I think there are some personality types that are suited to traditional jobs though, since most people don't share my concerns when I tell them how terrible it is to have a job. Because of this, I think more people like the author of this post should pursue non-traditional lines of work without feeling guilty. Perhaps our current economic set-up doesn't allow everyone to be happy, but more people could be happy than they currently are.
I also know that there are always people that aren't as lucky and privileged and that it shouldn't be the argument to end all arguments because otherwise no progress will ever be possible.
I don't mean that as a negative criticism to those people in any way, either. Most of my friends openly admit that this is the case for them -- they can't even work from home (when given the option) because they don't have the discipline to actually get their work done unless they have a boss telling them when to work and what to work on. It's just the way some people are wired, and it doesn't help that it's the way society and schools try to raise us to be.
I, personally, hate it, though. I don't know why anyone would feel guilty about that. I mean, maybe if all you wanted to do was sit around and do nothing all day -- but that's not me. I enjoy working, as long as it's meaningful and under my control (at least to an extent). There's nothing wrong with building up side streams of income (through things like real estate investments or online businesses) with the intention of ultimately going full time on them.
* Ok, 80% to 90% might be a bit high. I just threw out a big number. But I'm sure it's the overwhelming majority of people.
I'd argue that a huge fraction of them would develop those traits if they had to, i.e. if those comfy jobs didn't exist so readily
Now I am really thinking on leaving my full-time job, because the vacation is coming to an end. But how to make money? If I could have a stable but low income without wasting too much time, it would be great. Mainly if that income came from a source with which I care about.
It sucks. Life, I mean.
I would hate it since i am part of this industry, byt maybe we really need some dev crysis, meaning 50% of software engineers unemployed, salaries plunge say to construction engineers level. Those fortunate to keep the job would be glad to be creative with what they have and maybe, but just MAYBE these pathetic rants won't surface as much.
As for you, simple advice - sort out your life, you know better than anybody else what you want, and you're the only one who can do it. it's quite easy, just that some decisions require sturdy balls, not moaning on internet forums :)
As for my salary, unfortunately, software workers here in Brazil are actually earning way less than some construction engineers. In fact, if I had had a degree in Civil Engineering I would be way better off than with my current Computer Science major.
Again, I see you have a point, but internet forums are here for that exactly: discussing -- with moanings included.
The author isn't quitting the industry. He is basically going independent, with an undetermined business model.
Even if you created multiple revenue streams - write a book, produce a game, Patreon, etc. - which appears to be your intent, you essentially are the business at that point, no? At least that's how I'd view it.
I attended my first (and last) Hackathon a couple of weeks ago because it was immigration themed and so I thought I could meet some smart, thoughtful people. The pitches were mostly terrible with a few more decent ones sprinkled through as you would expect from a Hackathon.
One of the pitches that was made though, was "Greendir", a Tinder for Green Card marriages. Now, I fully support the guy's desire to pitch whatever idea he chooses but it was depressing to me that Greendir turned out to be the most popular app on the pitch board and the one the most people indicated they wanted to work on. It just seemed to me to be the epitome of the "we're in it for ourselves", move fast and break things, easy X-meets-Y description, get rich quick schemes attitude that is increasingly gaining mindshare in the tech industry.
It really made me wonder, what did these people come to this weekend to do? Why were they giving up their precious time? Because they wanted to be entertained and have a laugh? Or because they believed their powers could be meaningfully leveraged to solve hard problems that have the potential to fundamentally alter people's lives? Furthermore, what impression does it give to the newly entering workers in the tech field who use events like hackathons to get connected into a community of peers and who subconsciously absorb the value of those peers?
Fortunately, I'm seeing the other side of the picture too. I'm in the process of building a startup right now with a serious social mission (we want to get people excited about donating to charity by doing for charity what Whole Foods did for organic foods). I reach out to my network and I see my friends who came up 5 - 20 years ago in tech having the same frustrations by the triviality that's morphed the industry over the last couple of years. The outpouring of support has exceeded, by an order of magnitude, that of any previous startup I've worked on and I think it's precisely because there's a real yearning to see entrepreneurs solving hard problems with large impacts.
Idealism
> It just seemed to me to be the epitome of the "we're in it for ourselves", move fast and break things, easy X-meets-Y description, get rich quick schemes attitude that is increasingly gaining mindshare in the tech industry.
Reality.
While I can definitely understand the belief that given incredible evolution of technology in the past few decades will be a force for good and change, always remember technology is just a tool. People have not fundamentally changed in a very long time.
Technology & economic development has eradicated illnesses, brought billions out of hunger, enabled new political systems and unlocked creativity as a career option for a large middle class. But it's technology in the broad, expansive sense, not the narrowly focused, web & mobile app economy that is what's meant by "tech" in the Bay Area.
I believe technology will be the downfall of humankind; but the work is interesting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/us/taking-a-tire-iron-to-t...
I grew up with parents who were constantly in more debt than they could handle and constantly reminding me of it. I would rather not be anywhere near that situation again, even if keeping moderate debt would've worked out a little better in the long run.
Too many people take on unnecessary debt (big house, new cars, toys, ...) It seems like many are at peace with their debt.
Going into debt for anything more than a modest house (rather than paying rent) doesn't make sense to me.
There are huge upsides, such as that my payment is locked in (I have a fixed rate mortgage), so no egregious rent increases, and we can do anything we want to the house (remodeling, landscaping etc.) to make it our own.
The only way you can get hosed is if housing prices drop and simultaneously you are forced to move, which doesn't seem too likely for me. Many people got crushed in the housing crash, but generally that was because they took on loans that they couldn't afford, with an adjustable rate loan, or they were planning to flip the house and got caught holding the bag when prices plummeted. Those who bought for the right reasons (a place to live rather than an investment) have no downside to their house being worth less than when they bought it.
I guess you could say I am at peace with my debt, in that I don't lie awake at night worrying about all this money I owe, since I'll never have to pay it all back at once anyway.
I'm actually in the process of a cash-based home buy... the potential extra earnings of not fully owning my home aren't worth the mental anguish it would cause.
I have the luxury of working a 4/5ths time (four days a week job). I'm still a programmer. At a university. That also allows me to work reasonable hours on that 4/5th time job, take personal days for personal business, etc. And most of what I write is open source, which is very nice. It's definitely still a trade-off, it's a very frustrating place to work sometimes, I don't always get to work on interesting problems (but sometimes do, in some periods often), I don't have enough colleagues to work on the _really_ cool stuff that would take more IT resources than my employer is willing to devote to what I think would be the really cool stuff. Etc.
My impression is that trying to start your own business will end up taking _more_ of your time than a 'full time job', not less. But if you end up finding that time more rewarding to spend, then, great.
Isn't this one of the reasons behind the FOSS movement? That we as programmers are often repeating the same uninteresting tasks, so perhaps we should just freely share what we've done so that we can all work on something more interesting.
And in the Libre sense of Free -- in the GNU sense (and perhaps I've interpreted it wrongly here) -- this is why GNU is not just "something to make our lives better". It is rather a moral responsibility towards your fellow users, which includes programmers who use your code, not just end users. Because if people don't share, you end up with people like the author of this article: burnt out on writing something that's been written before.
Of course how this meshes with the real world of capitalism is a whole other story. I'm not saying it's not viable: Stallman of course mentions selling support in the GNU Manifesto, and the article also mentions Patreon.
Note that I'm not saying GNU is the One True Way, but rather trying to stimulate a discussion about something I don't fully understand but have been thinking about lately and which I believe touches upon one of the core issues that prompted the author's action.
"I’ve only worked for two tech companies, in radically different fields. The only things they have in common are that their main products are websites with tertiary features that let you buy things. Yet both of them ended up scrambling to write their own payment platforms from scratch. What the fuck is going on?"
I'm currently working at a tech company that is trying to increase the survival rate for cancer patients. Others are working at companies that are providing medicine or support for folks who have no access to medical facilities. The point being that the experience of two tech companies is insufficient to evaluate the entire industry.
And the bigger point is that how you spend your time is your choice. Take the fact that you are getting burned out in your current job to inform your decision on your next one. That is the key to not getting completely burned out.
My own views are that the software industry has reduced its 'professional quotient' a lot, to probably near zero, and hence all this chaos. I used to work in 'well-run and large companies' prior to the internet days, and in some sense we are a victim of the post-internet (mid-90s' post-Netscape) runaway success.
There is no professionalism in the industry anymore, and paradoxically it could be due to the 'open source model'. Don't get me wrong, I like open-source with all that emphasis to openness, freedom etc.. but it has led to the ruin of the small developer. It is forcing a lot of us to jump into the 'entrepreneur/solopreneur' bandwagon.
The openness part described above also includes anyone to jump into the industry (unlike say the medical, or civil-engineering profession; after all do you want a 'hacker heart surgeon' or a 'hacker bridge builder?'). The professionalism is completely mocked at, and all this hero-worshiping of start-up culture etc.. has ruined it.
OTOH, I am not arguing in favor of high-barriers of entry etc... Honestly I don't the answer on how to fix it....
For me, the first couple of weeks was just reminding myself that I still existed – that my "flesh sack" was still there, and would still be there despite the fact that I didn't have a job. Of course, all of the questions about "what will [I] do next?" didn't help this existential crisis.
I gradually got over it. My main metric for my days was reconnecting with the sense of "flow." For enjoying what I was doing in the moment. Thankfully, for me, I could still find that in something that resembled work.
I knew there was something in my brain that I had to discover, so after the first year, I fled SV, away from all of the noise. Two more years of experimentation later (finally supported by some freelance income), I scored a book deal on a topic that was a perfect amalgamation of my curiosities and interest.
I hope you find a similar sense of satisfaction! Just find the joy in what you're doing, and don't let others' expectations create worry for you.
He did it.
Can you not fathom the idea that Eevee simply saw and accepted the truth: that the job at Yelp was not personally meaningful?
so you're successful, and an unquantifiable amount of that success was an accident of which family and socioeconomic background you were born into, and op wants you to feel shame because of that?
that's ridiculous. it's a free country: do what you want and don't worry about the haters.
However, the blog post seems a bit braggy. A lot of us experience the same things, but we don't have a safety net(other than the gubmit I guess), it breeds jealousy. If I were in the same situation I would have left off the part about cashing out and paying the mortgage and not created a patreon without something to back it up immediately.
It would have been better if it just listed the reasons you're leaving and maybe some insight into how you might fix some problems.
And then add kids to the equation! I left my full-time job for part-time contracting (ahem consulting!) just over a year ago. I work about 60% of the hours that I previously did, make about 80% of what I did, and spend the rest of the time with the family and catching up on "life". Not sure if it's a longterm solution, but I'm enjoying watching my family grow.
But then I realize I've been doing the day-to-day for so long that I have accumulated the trappings thereof: mortgage on a house, two cars, a "comfortable" lifestyle.
To leave puts it at risk. I fear not being able to make it solo. The startup idea will take too long or fail if I bootstrap it. We'll have to move. Downsize. Change our lifestyle. Affect the kids. And a downward spiral of thoughts like that.
So I'm back at my cubicle today. Wishing I was working from home to watch the new baby grow while I code.
I'd never tell someone to not work hard or to strive for things they want to accomplish. But be able to step back and look at the big picture. Life is too short. Don't forget to enjoy it while you can.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9677863
I hope that you translate your passion into using technology to truly help make the world a better place.
You could argue "well at least those coal miners didn't live in Ethiopia or Rwanda"
There is exactly one person on this planet at any time who has it worse than everyone else, everything else is just relative.
What the OP realised is that money is no good if chasing it wrecks your time. Is he lucky to be able to choose another way? Yes, but that doesn't make his decision any less valid.
I am in the exact same situation as him (without the equity large enough to cover my mortgage), but I recognize my last employer was actually good to me, my unhappiness was not their fault.
This from someone whose accomplishments include mobile advertising and an app that recapitulates hotlinked YouTube annotations? If you're going to make the argument personal, you'll do well to ensure first that doing so won't undermine the moral high ground you're attempting to take.
I wouldn't hold out too much hope for that. It sounds like they quit because they would rather play with pokemons.
The only thing I am sad, is that I can't do what he did.
It's not often you get that group of guys together in the same room with a good idea and a VC, but when you do it's a fun thing to watch.
I'm passionate about structuring knowledge, perception, society, art, sound. I'm good at creating concepts.
As a programmer I'm mediocre (I can learn what I need quickly and on demand, but I'd not open-source a library anytime soon). Yet I still feel like this still is the easiest way to earn a living.
My aim is to have the freedom of a digital nomad. Making money and tech (also as the execution of ideas and concepts) is just a necessity...
By all means if you're unhappy change your lifestyle -- and pronto -- if you can eek out an existence in a more fulfilling way then get to it, but don't try telling everyone they work in a "stupid, backwards, fledgling industry" because you didn't like your job.
Just another "woe betide me"-disaffected-techie rant.
I was re-reading one of Paul Graham's earlier essays, the ones I read while at the tail end of high school and beginning college and it basically says give the hackers direct access to user feedback and they'll do the right thing. I don't know what happens but along the way all these companies that started out like that have just introduced layers and layers of people between the user and the hacker so much so that the hackers opinions about what's the right thing to work on right now are ignored.
Maybe it's just time to get back to that and take that exit strategy; just work on a small cool product that you own where you get user feedback immediately where you decide the priority.
Funny you should say that, since the sense of dread seemed to motivate this decision pretty heavily. Seems like the emotion was pretty useful as a sort of "burnout immune system".
I wonder how much of a role does this play in (not) caring about your employer's problems...
As much as I can understand the benefits of working remotely on occasion, doing it all the time will cause a kind of disconnect all by itself. You see the problems as your employer's problems, instead of your team's problems. Your are fixing your employer instead of helping your teammates.
Most work is a group effort. Group efforts require the feeling of belonging to a group to be effective. You just cannot get that if you work remotely. Real human interaction cannot be faked or successfully replaced by electronic means.
Working remotely a couple of days a week is probably beneficial. It alleviates the pressure of constant interactions preventing some tasks from being accomplished. Especially for us technical folk, where the dominant personality is not one that draws energy from other people. We still need to interact though.
Remote workers can be very effective with the right tools. Hundreds of companies are switching as we speak. I work at Sococo, and we enable it! Some of our clients have actually closed their offices and gone entirely remote, and they love it.
I wonder if someone told all the (paid, for the sake of argument)devs working on Open Source projects that they can't have the feeling of being part of a group since they are scattered all over the world.
If you really bond with your teammates, but still see the same recurring problems, you'll almost certainly develop an 'us v them' mentality against 'management', justified or not (though, it likely will be justified if you're seeing jr-level mistakes constantly promoted as the next magic bullet).
Coders have a lot of power in this day and age. Let's start using it to help people and do good work in the world. I'm so tired of meaningless tech achievements, one after another. Elon Musk may get us to Mars, he may help us reduce our energy usage, but we'll still be the same depressed people if we don't work on improving the system.
I entertain the thought of selling what I'm working on some day for a big payout, but that's a completely optional scenario for me. Because of the simple fact that I've never been happier in my life.
I feel like my work I do now actually matters. And even if it never makes me a dollar, it brings me joy. And that's what life's all about in the end ( to me at least ).
I wish you all the best and in my opinion you certainly made the right choice.
One note: getting the combination of automatic income right was a learning curve, if you ever want to know what works for me, feel free to reach out.
My automatic income combo in rough outlines is:
1. Invest, make sure you diversify. At least 10% return should be possible with a smart combination of stocks, ETF, etc. This should be considered your rainy day fund that hopefully you never need.
2. Open an online shop. A lot of us engineers are so good at 'the internet' that finding a product or category of products where the e-commerce offering can be improved on. You'll never beat Amazon in price, so you have to beat them in curation. Just sell whatever gets you excited. That usually works best. I have 2 online stores that I have automated and staffed to the point they basically run on auto pilot.
3. Aside from selling someone else's products also make something yourself and sell it. Physical products or anything that requires too much support is probably not the best idea here. For me building and selling in app apps, themes, add-ons to products that come with their own audience and market works really well here.
If you want details, I've added contact info in my about.
Humans aren't really "built" to cooperate, right? I think almost all could accomplish far more if it would be easier/more obvious to work together. We call competition healthy, and it might be, but it also takes the focus away from cooperation.
It takes a lot of effort to make others (peers, customers, managers,...) work together. And if some don't (which is often the case), the amount of effort required grows exponentially. Although the satisfaction is huge, it's easy to think the cost is greater than the benefit.
Just a guess of course, but maybe this is what the author lacks in his/her career? Too little cooperative efforts on the tasks he/she performed?
My conclusion was that I needed to be more in tune with the/a business that I'm ultimately trying to serve, and therefore to be closer too it. Because until then it all seems like pointless bit shifting.
Banging your head against a wall on unsolvable problem? Lets take kids for lunch, some swimming on beach. I will resume head banging at evening, but problem is usually cracked before that.
Somehow I don't feel much sympathy for this person. Many of us have been working miserable software jobs for years, but we still give it our all and don't throw in the towel.
Yeah it's great that this person made it through, but it's a crappy example for the rest of us.
Shit, I get this and I'm not even in a particularly toxic work-place. Hell, I'd even go as far as to say it's the best place I've ever worked at (and it had some stiff competition, over the years).
That sentence resonated with me, i'm sad to say. Not a good sign.
EDIT: After having stewed on it for a few moments, I'm not sure me saying 'Not a good sign' is actually correct.
Lots of truth to this, but look we all have mortgages and what comes across as "asshole" is the complaining. We all have a mortgage, why are you a special special snowflake?
Find yourself a tiny niche, fill a need for just enough people that you can keep yourself gainfully employed doing something you care about, and not have to worry about hiring other people to work under you and all the other shit that comes with building a company. Stay small and lean. You won't get Facebook rich, but maybe you'll be happy.
Regardless of all the perfectly valid reasons for being unhappy in what most people consider a cushy job (the author seems perfectly aware of that), this could possibly be an important factor here.
Working remotely means you only get a small slice of what most people get out of their job. Again, this is perfectly fine if you're not "most people", but if you've never known anything else than that may play a considerable role in being dissatisfied with having a job.
> I currently work for Yelp from the comfort of my home in Las Vegas. I live with my ridiculous cat, my partner, her three cats, her husband, his dog, and our boyfriend.
Now it makes more sense. In my limited experience, when you're working remotely, you feel disconnected from the mothership. To this, add some work stress, and it's easy to get disenchanted.
PS: I don't really know how to parse that sentence. No wonder NLP is so hard! ;-D
We'd all like to be free to do what we want to do, but in all honesty only a fraction of 1% ever get to. And even those people serve a master. Did I ever find the answer, no. I think what its going to take is a huge leap in what we call work.
It's something I've always wanted to do, but been waiting for that next level of financial security before I do so. Problem is, every time I reach the target, I'm not satisfied with it and want to make a bit more money before I can back off. It's a vicious circle into an ever looming burn out.
We're in an industry which has a good demand for work and pays well. It's important to take advantage of that when you can.
Not trying to make comparisons here. I was exactly the same prior to fatherhood. But now I wonder how I let all the time go to waste before. Half a day available would be great!
Point 1 "unless X has a toxic work culture,it's likely the author brought it on themselves by pushing too hard."
An overstatement unless you know what he faced. You were hired for your problem-solving ability where pushing hard can be expected at times. In reality this could be he's not pushing too hard so much as the existing environment which leeches effort and adds burden to every step. Toxic culture is somewhat unlikely but what if he inherited a huge technical debt, this happens a lot.
Point 2 it's a terrible feeling to have to spend your most productive hours working on someone else's problems. He or she may find themselves drawn toward entrepreneurship
Wrong. IMO you can either work as a product engineer role building something new (hopefully) or as support role integrating products/fixing glaring bugs crappy code/migrating systems. The latter is not exciting. A developer MUST be capable of both and SHOULD be given at least an opportunity for both. It does not have to be in your own startup. I maybe a coder but I am not a horseshit shoveler.
Point 3 Office culture is draining. Some people aren't cut out for it.
Why ? It doesn't have to be. Even then why assume work culture is the culprit here and he is not cut for it.
Point 4 Additionally, programmers tend to push themselves too hard for too long out of a misplaced sense of loyalty to the company. They don't see that the work they do is extremely valuable in and of itself.
Translation the coder has to see the fine line of enthusiasm between "working already" and overzealous. Seems like a hypothetical problem unless you tell why is it relevant here. About the "work" you say, you should tell what "work" is. It is not just the stationary lines of code lying on repository, but the amount of effort that went to write it, debug it and will go to maintain it. A badly written project demands higher effort to keep it running than what you could imagine.
Point 5 a coder doesn't owe the company anything more than their agreed-upon hours of work.
I know that is the agreement. But I don’t know if you have seen places where boss wants work in a deadline and not hours a coder spends and wants it done. You should remind him that then.
I feel this every day being in the tech industry and as a Navy Vet I almost giggle when I hear what stresses people out. I'm sure the Navy prepared me better for dealing with stressful situations but unless there's a gun pointed in my direction I rarely find anything about the tech industry, my work load, or stuff I'm working towards as stressful. Again, it's all about finding balance and being able to put things into perspective. If you have no context about what is really stressful, than everything becomes stressful.
If you know useful stuff, people will always offer you a bag of money to help them out. It is extremely rare that you get the bag of money and you get to do exactly what your passion is. Heck, most of us just have some vague idea of what our passion is anyway. So it's always some sort of compromise.
But with contracting, you should be looking at a fixed amount of time working, then a fixed amount of "downtime", then back to the market again. You should ask for enough money in the bag (or adjust your expenses) so that both the uptime and downtime is included in the payout. Otherwise you become a prisoner of your own lifestyle -- which is a godawful place to be.
So that you don't care about the virtual problems you solve for virtual company X, is perfectly normal and healthy. They are not your problems, they are not even remotely life-threatening, and so they are not relevant for survival.
Jobs are just created to keep us busy, as I said before. If we imagine a world without money (realistic or not), about 90% (educated guess) of jobs would not even exist anymore, as those are just jobs that do some money-related thing: Banking, insurance, financial advice, most lawyers, any administration department at any organisation. Indirectly even more jobs would disappear, because there is no need to compete financially, which means for example all R&D in a specific field can be brought together, as no one has to invent their (still unpatented) version of their wheel anymore.
We would be in a world where only work is done that is needed, that is directly involved with our survival, curiosity or entertainment, and no 'need' is created by some virtual dependencies. We would live in a world where everybody has the time and freedom to pursue their own dreams, without having to be afraid they will get in trouble later (because no pension built up etc).
We would also able to always pursue the most efficient and sustainable way to do something, as money is out of the equation. No more fraud, no more oil leaking in the oceans, no more rainforests cut down, and with all the empty offices due to disappeared redundant jobs, the demand for resources will be down and we wouldn't have to build any new houses or shelter for many years to come.
So yes, wake up and stop working and go exploring. Travel the world, find a skill that is directly useful to people, as helping out people will make you happy and you will get food/shelter in return even without asking for that. See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7SVLaDdvDY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCFe2KnBuJ0
Anyway, don't worry about financials. I went travelling in 2013, through Europe and Canary Islands, and spent about 5000 euro's in 18 months. With what I've learned now, I could spend twice the amount of time travelling with the same money.
At the moment I'm (unfortunately) working in IT again, because I haven't found the way yet to earn bread on the road. When I started travelling I knew nothing, now I know what to do and so this will be the last time I will spend many hours a day in an office, as my salary will buy me all the gear I need to make a(n easier) transition.
Anyway, whatever you do, don't lock yourself up in a stone prison for the rest of your life. Become your own boss. Don't spend your life realizing other people's dreams and wealth, because you WILL regret it when you are a pensioner, as then you find out you forgot to live your own life and there's no energy left for it now.
And
> We would be in a world where only work is done that is needed
Contradict each other. Of course no one WANTS to work but there are things that HAVE to be done. Like farming, hunting, building shelter. Chopping firewood to keep warm in the winter. You know, modern, made up problems like that.
> We would live in a world where everybody has the time and freedom to pursue their own dreams, without having to be afraid they will get in trouble later (because no pension built up etc).
There is very little time to pursue anything other than survival in a subsistence existence. And you better hope you have children to take care of you when you're physically unable to complete the work.
The fact that people have any time at all to dedicate to non-survival-related pursuits should tell you how important all that work that we're not "meant" to do is in the broader scheme of things.
But those are not made up problems, those are necessities and cost only a minimal amount of time per day, especially if it can be distributed over many more people.
Anyway, how does it contradict? With jobs I mean modern (office) jobs, and I'm clearly saying in the other sentences that it's about _needed_ work.
How is there no time to pursue anything? When I was travelling and not working at all for two years, my quest for survival meant that I had to get food and water and had to keep my shelter clean and working. I 'worked' like 4 hours a week on this.
There is a lot of time to pursue, like helping other people out, learning to play an instrument, making art, building things. If there is any hard physical work to do, we have machines for this, and otherwise always other people around who can help.
All the work we are not meant to do is any work that doesn't produce anything for our survival. That is everything money-related, everything entertainment-related, and everything that is done redundantly because of patents/copyright.
So collectively we would have ALL the time, not less, and then surviving is just peanuts in that case.
Minimal, LOL. What world do you live in? I suggest you pay a visit to Amish country some day and see how people unencumbered with "made up problems" live. Farming and other survival-related tasks are literally ALL they do. And it's all you would ever do without people sitting in offices and factories tending to "made up problems" in order to make your life simpler.
> How is there no time to pursue anything? When I was travelling and not working at all for two years, my quest for survival meant that I had to get food and water
Were you hunting and farming or scraping together a couple bucks so you could head down to a store or restaurant to get food? You would not be able to do that without an army of people in farms, factories, and offices making the whole thing work.
> If there is any hard physical work to do, we have machines for this
Who builds the machines? A bunch of people tending to "made up problems" in offices and factories.
It's very tempting to think you've unlocked the meaning of life after slumming through Europe for a year and a half but you're totally ignoring the fact that there are numerous people working on "made up problems" in tech, agriculture, and manufacturing making it possible for you to do that. You absolutely do not want to revert to an agrarian lifestyle. It's not fun. Realize that some of these "made up problems" in the first world help you actually live a better life than a life of subsistence would.
The flipside of a completely agrarian society is very little safety net. Crop disease? Drought? Animal sickness? Broke your leg? Life just got a lot tougher. Like, life or death tougher.
Not all modern work, just all the work that has directly or indirectly to do with money and jobs that come forth out of that (like the cleaning crew or receptionist of an insurance company or bank).
We do a lot of redundant, unnecessary work, just for the sake of working, without ever consciously asking ourselves what the use of this work is and who is actually helped with this. Unconsciously this question comes by a lot, and that makes people burn out in the long run.
Drop your assumptions and prejudice and read my posts again. We are actually able to make our lives easier and more comfortable, but instead we let ourselves be fooled and forced into doing robotic labor, never-ending jobs, and repetetive tasks. Just because we are told it's necessary and makes our lives more comfortable.
And then the point of doing this work would be...? There's a reason "money" is a universal concept: it's compensation for time spent working on things that aren't necessary for the survival of an individual person. Remove that and you've removed motivation for people to do things that they don't want or need to do. Your line of thinking does not scale to society at large.
> We do a lot of redundant, unnecessary work, just for the sake of working, without ever consciously asking ourselves what the use of this work is and who is actually helped with this.
I don't know about you, but I work so I can be paid and live a more comfortable life. I'm pretty sure that's most people's motivation. And perhaps working on nonsense is a Valley thing, but my coworkers and I certainly work on software that improves the lives of others. Perhaps you should try to find a company like that instead of declaring that everyone works on useless junk, money is pointless, and we can all be farmers on 4 hours per week of work.
I'm just taking money out of the equation, which means there will still be a lot less jobs to do, resulting in way less work load.
Of course machines need to be produced and maintained, but only a fraction of what we build now, and as there is no reason to exercise planned obsolescence or nibble on the costs by choosing inferior materials, these machines have a way higher quality than we make now.
Another difference is that whatever work is still done, this will be done by people actually wanting to do this, out of interest and passion.
Without incentive (financial or otherwise), that is what happens. Who's gonna run electric plants? We don't _actually_ need electricity if you wanna get technical. Planes? Maintain roads and bridges? Be an ISP?
Pretty much all of the things we take for granted today were created because of financial incentive. After all, if we're all trying to not work as much as possible, why would anyone _choose_ to do more than they have to to survive?
Only a TINY percentage of office or factory workers are really working on problems related to farming, food, or "satisfying basic necessities" problems.
Most are working on problems much higher on the Maslow hierarchy of needs - for example, a LOT of work is devoted to advertising, and very often I believe it's zero-sum. A lot of other resources are devoted to entertainment, government, finances, etc.
Heck, agriculture is less 2% of the U.S. GDP.
Reminds me of:
The author decided he needs a change in his life, there is no arguing there.
But what makes the author so confident that quitting the job is the solution?
It's also burnout; the dude is sick of working on something that he doesn't particularly care about anymore. I bet if Yelp offered him a few days a week or 1 week per month to work on whatever he wants he'd be happier and wouldn't be burnt out.
"Hackathons" are not a silver bullet solution to trying to get people to have ownership over the solutions to problems they are solving for themselves, their department, and the company.
* Corporate and management issues / misalignments * Uninteresting work content (e.g. fixing old bugs all the time) * Time and energy drain
I've been reading the two books about Google culture recently (Work Rules! and How Google Works), both of which cover similar issues and (ostensibly) how Google has responded to them. I understand there must be a huge pool of people out there in similar situations, many of whom are the best of the best. It's also clear that a few large companies are trying to figure out how to appeal to this group, while most large companies continue to be consumed by egos and the day to day grind and fail at this.
The most important benefit to having my own company has (by far) been the time management. I feel like I could have the proper amount of time and energy to devote to a child or two, which would have been unthinkable in previous jobs (mine were in consulting, but the same seems to apply to tech).
However, I've also learned a lot about communication from my company, especially when it comes to things that would cause unhappiness or conflict (not agreeing with management, setting boundaries around time, etc). The biggest leap was realizing that if people react negatively, 1) you don't want to work with these people, and 2) there are a ton of people out there who want to work with you because of this. I hope the OP is able to find people who share his/her extremely positive traits to work with.
(Incidentally, I've learned a lot about communication from the poly community as well, and I'm not at all surprised to read OP's about section after reading this post.)
It seems like hokum re-reading that last paragraph. I wish I was better with words to portray what I'm trying to get across but its just something that's been on my mind in the last month or so. I feel into another slump similar to what our article's author describes. You get caught in a cycle of "I'm tired because tomorrow will suck" and don't use that time to regenerate and recover. When my car hit the tipping point last week and I was forced to get my hands dirty it broke that cycle. I came out from under with a true sense of accomplishment; beaming with pride for what I had done and suddenly Monday's problems were on the wayside.
To swing back to what I tried saying originally though; having a job where I produce factories, networks, systems that clients look, touch, and interact with just gives the same feeling of pride that I never achieved when building services for IPTV products, billing software features or other data applications. I'm certain there's a whole host of people that drool at some of those domains but if that's not your "thing" then you'll never be happy. I wasn't, the author likely wasn't but that's not to say she can't find happiness anywhere in tech. And to believe that leaving it all behind for a mystery won't solve those same problems that put her where she is now. "The Grass is Always Greener" will wane and she'll miss being among peers and those who she can share her problems with. A girlfriend in the medical industry just can't converse on the same level as other tech's can, its where I reach out to coworkers, peers, friends to blow off some steam. I wish her the best, I just hope she figures out where the true problems lie or where her true calling is before she regrets distancing herself from an industry that she has obvious passion for.
Wait and sit for a profitable idea doesn't look like a very good idea.
I'd go to AngelList and join an existing startup, rather than going on my own.
> Or another job at all.
To me, this is a love letter to tech. What other industry pays you near-FU money for uncreative grunge work?
I hope he finds happiness from his new path in life. Goodness knows he wasn't finding it in his previous one.
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4b8/index.htm
Perhaps some of the angst stems from this bias. I wonder how well Yelp handles remote workers.
Most of "the basics" in my life are automated; bills are on autopay, I send my stuff to the post office by drone truck, and so on.
It can be very alienating - there are days that I don't see a human being or speak a word with anyone.
The solution is to make sure you actually try to be around people on weekends.... and you MAKE yourself do it. It's way too easy to turtle up.
To this I say -- are you fucking kidding?
Working like we do is already fairly unnatural. Taking medication to allow yourself to continue doing something unnatural, which you don't even like, has to be the one of the most dehumanizing things I can think of. That's modern day, self-induced slavery if you ask me.
And yes, I have experience with this. In college, I met with a psychiatrist about depression-related symptoms. I described my life circumstances (school, work, relationship, etc), and after just one 45-minute session he prescribed me SSRIs. They did nothing, except creates horrific withdrawals as I started coming off them. Then I made the real changes: I ended my toxic relationship, quit my cubicle job, and used my savings to have an enjoyable life for about a year. Then I finished school.
The OP seems to have had a pretty sweet set-up (remote, high-paying job, etc) but misery is still misery. Another comment mentioned burn-out. In my experience burn-out rarely has to do with the volume of work, but rather the mental anguish experienced. I've been burned out working 9 to 5; and energized beyond belief working 12 hour days on my own business.
Here's some advice worth considering for those in similar situations. Quit your job, or figure out how to go part time. Your company won't mind, you're quite replaceable most likely. Really cut down on your expenses; get roommates if you have to (this can be more than a financial improvement -- socializing and having good friends improves your quality of life).
And my god, quit consumer culture. That thing you think you need to buy with your next paycheck? You probably don't. What you need is: a roof over your head, food, laptop/phone, and a gym membership. What's the grand total of all this, maybe $1K/mo? (Depends where you live I suppose.) I'm assuming you're a single mid-late 20s male if you're reading this. What else would do you really need to be happy and spend your time working on your own tech projects?
Best of luck to the OP and anyone else doing something similar.
Erm... what about I don't know the most human thing before all that... some companionship?
Frankly, i find thats actually the real reason for most of these burnouts/crashes. Humans are the most social creatures in the world and this trait is diminished by our tech culture.
How many times have you bailed on friends, or skipped meetup-type events because you're just too drained from doing shit you don't want to do for half your waking hours?
Both medications, and lifestyle changes could help. It depends on the situation and the person.
Given the context of trying to use it to cope with a job that makes one miserable. Is that really so difficult to understand? Obviously I don't denounce all medication use in general, and I'm only referring to a fairly specific situation (of the OP).
>Both medications, and lifestyle changes could help. It depends on the situation and the person.
And given the situation of one being miserable with their job, I believe that medication is in general not the right answer. At least statistically I reckon it's the wrong answer in the majority of cases. Certainly it's not necessary, even if forking over the money could help one cope. The whole point of my post is -- why would one want to cope in this type of environment in the first place?
Same goes for ADHD medication for boys (yes, predominantly boys) in grade school because they can't sit still and concentrate as they're expected at such a young age. I find it absurd how commonplace this is becoming. Humans have not fundamentally changed their genetic makeup in the last few hundred years. It's much more likely the case that the environment has become unreasonable, rather than that the kids are failing their roles as humans.
But wait, if you want mindless drones who do as they're told, contribute to bottom lines, buy shit they don't need to satisfy misery they don't understand, then by all means, humans are failing. Let's fix that. Let's over-medicate. Let's teach people how to cope with a life devoid of meaning and passion.
These are the trends I see when I tune into mainstream narratives and general societal expectations. And it pisses me off. Can the right medication help a small subset of the population who are a few standard deviations off in terms of brain chemistry? Of course it can, that goes without saying. Doesn't mean we're not facing some disturbing trends in the developed world.
And I'll express myself however I please within HN's guidelines, thank you very much.
> But wait, if you want mindless drones who do as they're told, contribute to bottom lines, buy shit they don't need to satisfy misery they don't understand
Jesus, what a straw man that is. My approach here is to suggest ways for this man to find contentedness, maybe even happiness. That can validly include medication. Yours is to push an agenda against a type of work life you don't like.
I've felt very similarly over the past few years, and I'm working to build enough of a war chest to make it a reality. I'm not depressed, I'm not burned out (at least not in a general sense; I do occasionally burn out on specific aspects and feel the need to pull back)... I just don't derive too much pleasure building the same things over and over for other people who don't actually understand technology work and have different priorities than I do. I've been much luckier at my current job, but I still feel that way occasionally.
I'm no expert or anything, but I expect this is pretty much the same in any industry. People really don't care about your work until they need something or you're blocking them.
To quote what I wrote above,
>Can the right medication help a small subset of the population who are a few standard deviations off in terms of brain chemistry? Of course it can, that goes without saying. Doesn't mean we're not facing some disturbing trends in the developed world.
I am not deriding "the entire concept of (responsibly) using medication to treat depression when appropriate."
Rather what I'm suggesting is that the vast majority of people in the OP's situation, or something analogous, are not these brain-chemistry outliers who require medication. Instead, I suggest that the unnatural environment created by office cubicle/computer wage slavery runs counter to human nature, particularly with respect to one's happiness.
I hope it is very clear at this point what I am saying, and that I am not deriding the use of all medication, but rather, speaking with respect to a particular environmental example.
the irony of course, is that anger and humiliation and frustration drive you to start your own company, but if you succeed, you will basically deal with new instantiations of the same old problems, except this time it's all your fault and they still need to be fixed. now 'that guy' is you. congratulations! you've made it.
technical debt, constant stressful fire-drills, ludicrously overloaded schedules, demands on your time and patience, inane re-inventions of established technology, etc. plus a whole host of others ('unknown unknowns') that you can't even begin to fathom as someone who was paid handsomely to care only about the technical problems in an organization.
but, of course, you will be king shit sittin' pretty at the top of the whole shit-heap by then, and see the entire heap of shit from a new, exciting, gilded perspective. and this is, in and of itself, worth something. in fact, it can be worth a shitload.
they don't call it an exit strategy for nothing!
And then he has the gall to ask for donations? Seriously? Can this post be laden with slightly more privilege?
Sadly, it probably was laden with even more obnoxious privilege and what we are reading is the edited version. I'm in my late twenties and I am constantly amazed by how pathetic, obnoxious, and truly useless the younger generations have made themselves. This person wants donations to play with pokemons after letting us know they paid off their mortgage.
My only hope is that this blog post prevents this person from ever being hired again.
Please don't use HN this way. You're more than welcome to make substantive comments, but pouring vitriol in response to something annoying harms the discourse here. We all have the temptation, but it's important to resist it. Otherwise—long experience shows—the community becomes toxic.
It's especially cowardly to use what appears to be a throwaway account to wish that a personal, inoffensive blog post "prevents this person from ever being hired again."
The mental change is tremendous - I don't have a manager harassing me, I do everything on my own schedule. I can switch between whatever projects I want, whenever I want.
The only thing that I miss is working with the people who are smarter than me.
Best wishes
We in the USA are wealthy enough as a society that we all could thrive on 15 or so hours of work a week, if we didn't have to subsidize the fortunes of billionaires.