120 karma · joined March 23, 2012
The point is that it's 2 sides of the coin under regulation vs over regulation. And no system is ideal on both sides of Atlantic
On the bright side I could sleep as much as I wanted in the morning and do chores in first half of the day.
What helped me with motivation is Daily Standup with my team where you have to report about your L24 progress and what you're going to be N24. This added enough stress to increase my motivation to do stuff. I couldn't show up with nothing or lie my way out of it. Also US comp was pretty big motivator. Geo arbitrage etc.
I'm not sure why one would put the weight of the impact of your work on yourself. You've been trained to do certain job, you've been hired to do the job, and you are doing it. You can have moral quarrels with the company mission(like working for defense), but you can't change the whole industry's direction.
Do people who invented printing press and made all the scribes obsolete need to think about their impact on the world? Does inventors of the car who put all horses out of work need to think about their impact? Does people who invented atomic bomb need to put a weight of the devastation that it brought on their chest? All those things have 2 sides, it improved life in one way and worsened it in others.
Professional deformation - is when you treat everything in life as a puzzle that needs to be solved. And when you switch your focus from engineering to societal problems and try to solve that, unfortunately it's not working like that. Sometimes life is just a chaos and it's not your or anyone else fault.
It's just a job.
In short: installed immich(instead of Synology Photos), Beszel, Paperless-ngx(configuration pending), moved a bunch of tools out of my HTPC VM in to separate VM, did a proper backup of my proxmox cluster and set up cloud-init template with new ubuntu.
Due: gitops style deployment and terraformation of infrastructure(provision proxmox VMs via terraform) and auto redeployment of docker containers across 5 machines. Probably would need github runner in my network. Also Authelia is still missing in my lab, I need to get to that soon
Rather use apps like Authy or Ente on your phone(something that you have) that could sync.
I remember about 20 years ago my friend had a huge catalogue of 100s of disks with media(anime) and he used some kind of application to keep track of where each file is located across 100s of discs in his collection. I assume that software must have improved for that sort of a thing?
I also tend to forget things, but I took a different approach. Instead of relying on my phone to remember for me, I trained the device nature gave me—my brain! Let's face it, we’re already bombarded with notifications, stuck in a cycle of constant interruptions, making it hard to focus. Push reminders only add to the noise. My wife’s phone, for example, keeps reminding her to "Drink water," yet she always ignores it.
So, I chose a different path—training my memory. I started using an app called "When did I...?". It works similarly: you create a list of things you want to track and tap them when you complete them. If you forget, you can log past events. This process forces me to recall when I last did something, reinforcing my memory while also allowing me to add small notes for reference.
Over time, I found that reminders now pop up in my head naturally, and I can always check the app for confirmation. Plus, it integrates with Siri Shortcuts. For instance, when I finish a swimming workout, my watch automatically logs "Swimming" in the app. I don’t have to remember to track it manually, yet I can always see when I last swam and know when it’s time to go again.
Hope this helps on your journey!
I would concentrate on this. Why are you feeling this way? Is it possibly because you compare yourself to others? Or you compare yourself to the "ideal world" that lives in your head based on the things that you read on the internet and experience of others?
I'm sure you have lots of positives in your life right now. Are you starving? Do you have roof over your head? Do you struggle from any health problems or mental diseases? Are you addicted to anything? Do you have friends? Do you spend enough time with them? Can you exercise? Can you pay your bills? Do you have savings to whether turbulent times?
I bet if you switch focus to something that you already have and where you already at it will help you. Switching mindset where you think not from backtracking from Ideal situation back to your life, but to switch that to start thinking from where are you now, and what are the next smallest step that you can take?
That said, posts like this are common on HN. People burning out and get disillusioned with their jobs. Or loose meaning in tech.
Could this be because 15-20 years ago in order to get in to the industry you had to have a certain passion and curiosity in order to get through the forest of very technical tools and programming languages in order to run anything. Industry was not mature and there was a lot of hype around it's wins, it was literally changing the world. Software was eating the world quickly. Books like "Passionate programmer" and "Secrets of the Rock Star Programmers" were promising us the land of endless rewards if we pour our whole selves in to the job and forget about anything else.
But nowadays, 20 years of growth, billions of LOC and millions of people came in to the industry. Now we've got the understanding that it was just a job after all. And instead of pouring your self in to it, the sustainable way is to treat it like a job and also have a life outside of it. Hedge your bets if you will, because life is more than tech
edit: not sure why the data on that website has been blurred, but it's still available in HTML