To the OP, I think you have a few options. On one hand you can keep taking short jobs / consulting or try to build some sort of simple SaaS business that you can just maintain. Alternatively you can try to find work that is meaningful to you - perhaps at a nonprofit or government job, or by building your own company or organization.

On a related note, I recommend reading Tribe by Sebastian Junger, which goes into great detail on how western society is arguably terribly unfulfilling.

I remember interviewing one very sharp engineer who was desperate to get out of Facebook. He had been attracted by the exciting problems, but after a few years he was entirely sick of spending most of his time trying to shift metrics by fractions of a percent. Metrics whose only real meaning was, at best, increasing the money flowing into Facebook. And all of that was years before the recent revelations on the dangers FB poses and how little they care about that.

My current solution to this problem has been to work for an effective not-for-profit. It still has its problems, but my colleagues at least care about actual impact, and I'm still excited for the chance to make a dent in problems I care about.

(As an aside, I'll note that it's also possible to find meaning in commercial work. I love building things for users, and I'm happy to charge for them when we're creating real value. But given American managerial culture, user benefit is often at best a side effect at many companies.)

If you added 'For myself' at the beginning it would make more sense as an argument.

Assuming others feel the same about work, or that they only spend half their waking time there is pretty short-sighted.

I, for one, place no worth on a person by what they do, or what I do, to make a living.

As far as I'm concerned, we are not our jobs, and I am sure quite a few people are living their lives with unfulfilled potential because they will never be given the opportunity to find out what they are truly good at or capable of. They are spending most of their lives trying to survive while making the rich richer.

To me it's a sad state of affairs all the way around.

I think there were some helpful ideas in that book, but also the author took a lot of liberty in the interpretation of data he cited.

For example, he spends a lot of time discussing lower rates of reported suicide at wartime, as if people go around attributing suicide as a cause of death to bodies they discover in a war zone. Or that someone who loses their life acting reckless in battle must be is inherently a happier person than someone who takes their own life some other way.

That's not all we know about OP though.

Maybe it's the desire to stick with a profession you hate in practice is caused by some kind of disease.

Why you want to find disease here is unclear.

The continued attempt (this post) does not align with the inability to perform the job in nearly any capacity.

They clearly distinguish between great jobs and not great jobs.

They ask for advice on either finding great jobs, or tolerating not great jobs.

This is quite obviously not the behavior of someone who is continuing to do something they hate. They are asking how to find a job they don’t hate, or how to not hate a job they find. This is the opposite of what you are claiming them to be doing.

If they can’t find a way to do either of these two things and they keep working in the field, then you might have a point. But right now they are asking the obvious and sensible questions that a healthy person experiencing dissatisfaction with their career should ask.

Your attempt to portray them as diseased still makes no sense.

Seems to me your reaction to the world is appropriate and correct. The world we’ve created for ourselves is devoid of meaning. Most work is performative, and entirely pointless, IME.

So you need to make your own meaning. A significant-other helps. As do pets, and though I don’t have then myself, children provide meaning for a great many people.

For me, the best I can do at work is find a sort of Zen-like contentedness with the work. Working carefully, slowly, deliberately, doing my best with minimal effort; these things bring me to my place of Zen.

When I get tired of a job, I leave and look for something new. I show precisely as much loyalty to my employer as they show me; aka none. As others have said, life is too short. Define your own version of success and pursue that. Chasing someone else’s version of success is a fools errand.

Sounds interesting. Do you have tips on how to get and stay into the Zen mindset when there are deadlines?

Also get good at not getting mad about it! If your work is truly meaningless and/or performative, then the deadline has no real power. Its just social pressure… but tread carefully as it can also put a target on your back and put you in the unemployment line!

You’ll know you’re in your Zen state when problems just roll off you and your emotions aren’t your guiding force.

It seems 90% of the time the company involved in the above scenarios is some sort of “marketing analytics platform to grab more insight from your customers allowing you to make actionable decisions!” Again. And again, and again.

Why does it seem like there are 2 billion companies doing the exact same thing (ie tracking users, probably in the grey-ish ethical zone, and throwing a bunch of garbage buzzwords around like “synergy”)? I suppose that’s where the money is flowing but it just seems so soul sucking to me.

As an example, think about Coke vs Pepsi vs everybody else who makes a cola. The products are very stable and basically equivalent. So billions get spent on manipulating customers. That means plenty of opportunity to create tools that aid in that manipulation. (Which is already an ethical grey zone, so it's no shock that people will go further.)

To me, and I'd imagine to you, this is absurdly pointless and wasteful. I'd be perfectly happy to ban most advertising, freeing up hundreds of billions per year, plus untold amounts of human time and attention. But for people who just want to make money, they seem willing to look past the vast waste.

I think the solution is to find work in areas beyond the markets where a few dominant companies are engaged in trench warfare over customers for stagnant, good-enough products.

There are a couple things you can do:

- Accept it, do as little work as you can get away with, and find fulfillment outside your job. Maybe get a stand-up desk and do some light exercise while working, to ease the feeling of wasting your time.

- Find a useful job. Non-profits, government services, and research organizations are good places to look, but there are lots of private sector jobs that produce useful things even while squeezing out profit.

I work at a public research organization, creating tools to collect, process, and share climate data. All of my co-workers are fairly happy and motivated, because the work we do is useful. I'm currently working on a CRUD app to make it easier for researchers to submit reports to the grant organization. The product is dull, but I'm happy to work on it because it will let our researchers spend less time on administration and more time on climate science.

I’m somewhat convinced if everybody did this we would have far less problems. So far this year I’ve kept that resolution, swimming 1250 meters Monday-Friday. It improves my sleep and helps my diet too. My ability to ward off negative thought patterns is the main difference affecting my mood.

Having been a bit burnt out on corporate life, I had decided to try this path out almost a year ago. My lab is in kidney research, and it has been a breath of fresh air to constantly be talking with various doctors and researchers across the US instead of simple businessmen. It has also be extremely heartwarming to hear from patients about the direct impact this research has had on their quality of life. Had someone recently speak to us, their story of struggle, and the love they had for this work legitimately brought a tear to my eye, extremely motivating stuff.

The pay is far from competitive (I have no degree, helps a LOT if you do though!) and as with any job, there are going to be day-to-day stressors. With that said, the plus includes sane working hours, lots of PTO, and typically many of these places offer top-of-the-line health care. I'm sure I'll head back to startup land eventually, the grass is always greener, but for the time being I have been able to get some excellent quality sleep, waking with excitement for what each day ahead holds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes

in fact for most people the situation is significantly worse, OP is in a privileged position in a relatively well paid industry with relatively non-menial work and is still complaining. there is no other way around it, there is something wrong with OP.

and before all of this corporate stuff developed, people were mostly farming all day which is hardly an improvement.

depression need not enter the picture. imo being a privileged baby having way too high expectations of what life is supposed to give you is all explanation necessary in this case. imo OP needs to stop being a baby and grow up. this might be caused by reading too much about how awesome other people have it and being jealous / not able to cope that OP is not in the same situation, but whatever the cause, the effect is obvious.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_crisis

You sound angry and defensive about your own solution to the problem. It’s not obvious how that is a more healthy response than to be depressed about it.

>imo being a privileged baby having way too high expectations of what life is supposed to give you is all explanation necessary in this case. imo OP needs to stop being a baby and grow up.

I have a ton of debts and I've spent about 90% of my life living in poverty, I've spent my first year of college sleeping on the floor of a storage room with no shower or toilet. Does that look like privilege to you?

Maybe you're too simple minded to realize that just because you have it a bit better than some people doesn't mean you're in a good situation. What's the point of being safe if most of your life is spent making some rich guy's life better? The fun I got after work was never nearly enough to outweigh the stress and the waste of time at work.

According to your way of thinking a fed homeless man should be happy because he is fed. A hungry homeless should be happy because he is not handicapped. A blind homeless starving man should be happy because he's not also deaf and an amputee. Where does it stop exactly? At death? Everyone who did not yet die of torture should be happy, otherwise it just mean they're a privileged baby who is expecting too much of life?

I'll take OP's assessment on its own merits and validate it and say the screwy work situation out there can be depressing.

Another interesting thing with replier is how he is trying to isolate you. You are alone in his view, or at least marginal, and have some deeply rooted defective aspect. The truth is OP is not alone in his thinking, as other posts in this thread can attest, and link to places like /r/antiwork where you can find more who think like this. You can see the move here to try to keep you isolated, and dull you on organizing together with others of a like mind.

Seriously I had more positive impact on more people's lives as a poverty wages barista than I do as a six figures software dev. That is depressing.

Did you fill out the HAM-D questionnaire in your head based off his post?

Saying someone who is considering suicide might instead consider talking to their doctor doesn’t seem all that controversial to me?

Honestly absolutely nothing is going good in my life right now, and I'm STILL HAPPIER than when I had a 9-5 job.

I'm in a better place mentally without a job, without any meds and without money, than with a job, a ton of money and a treatment.

It doesn't, and if they said that, I wouldn't have replied that way.

Are you actively building meaningful relationships, maintaining the old ones and seeking out new ones? Are you involved in communities around shared values? Do you invest in personal goals outside your career (hobbies, music, art, etc)? Are you challenging yourself physically in some sport or activity your passionate about?

Work is a big part of the picture, but if you are focused on growing intellectually, socially, spiritually, and physically (whatever those may look like to you) a job takes a much smaller role.

Yeah, but an important part, often close to 1/2 of your waking life (minus commute and chores and such).

A well-balanced life can only be achieved with a satisfactory job that is meaningful.

You don't want to tell your grandchildren that what you did in this world is make people click more ads, regardless of how juicy the tech was at that time.

>> A well-balanced life can only be achieved with a satisfactory job that is meaningful.

I partially agree but add the bigger question is *what is meaningful*? No job is inherently meaningful. A BS job might be fine for a time if it fulfills a bigger goal. A great job could be pointless if you have no direction in your life.

>> You don't want to tell your grandchildren that what you did in this world is make people click more ads, regardless of how juicy the tech was at that time.

I see what your getting at, but I still think it's a framing problem. Seeing "what you did in the world" as the outcome of your job is exactly what I mean by placing too much existential weight on your job. I'm fine telling my grandkids I slung ads if it satisfied my goal of intellectual development and funded the lifestyle I wanted for myself and my family

Even if you get to a job with a point, like doing something meaningful or for the good of society, it's not necessarily going to feel great from day-to-day, and might be even more disillusioning (speaking from experience here). I find that I just care about it less when other things in my life are going well.

Yes you are right 100%.

Few years ago I tried to raise cash for a devtools startup

I met with lots of VC. It was a fascinating yet horrible experience.

VC were not even interested in discussing about the product itself. They just wanted the growth numbers...

They couldn't care less about the problem I was trying to solve.

Software industry and Startups has evolved a lot from two decades ago.

20 years ago startups were built to be disruptive and bring innovation to the mass.

Today they just apply the YC model on repeat until the founders can make their exit and move to another startup...

Most Founders these days are just in for for the money and the fame , they want to appear on "Forbes" ,"Washington Post" and escape the boredom of Entreprise. In reality they don't care about actually solving problems , R&D nor software at all.

I'm not gonna blame them , why make something actually great when something mediocre will make you rich and famous ?

I was fortunate enough to find a job in banking with remote work , I only work 5-10 hours / week with a very high salary.

My team is full of incredible people super funny who don't commit their personal life on a shitty job to pay their bill , nor try to turn two founders from Berkley from multi-millionaires to billionaires.

I've worked in startups with 300M in the bank , SME , Enterprise , I've done them all ! No one cares about software, trust me after 10 years of experience I can tell you that no one cares about software !

All modern startups care bout is money !

I can only recommend you to find a boring job in a fortune 500 thats lets you have a fulfilling private life , I've done this choice and I'never been much happier in my entire life !

I really like my job - work on innovative product lines with a small close knit team. I got here by just working on ideas/probelms that interested me and selling that company to the current one.

Go do something you like. Also go to a therapist.

Most jobs are pointless in the global scheme of things.

First, I disagree you should measure mans life on global scale, and secondly I disagree jobs are pointless.

The meaning to many jobs comes from the impact to the community, the people around the employee - "stakeholder value" is the term someone would use. Nurse, cleaner, garbage car driver, teacher, doctor, airplane pilot - all have impactful jobs that create a physical and psychological imprint on the world.

If you seek global impact - I don't think a single human being can have much of that - and seeking global scale effects reeks of megalomania.

I personally try to distance my self-image from my job, I see it as a way to pay my bills and save up some money, but I try so that it does not define me, and I definitely do not try to build up friendships there, I guess I have enough friends everywhere else to have the need to socialize with people I barely share things in common.

Moreover, there are so many people destroying themselves mentally and physically with over-work because they believe that they have to love work (as they would a hobby or something similar), but I think that does not have to be the case, I actually believe that there are a lot of activities that CANNOT be monetize which are also quite enjoyable, around which I can center my life, e. g. playing tennis, drawing, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I actually love to code. I love my side projects. I hate to be told what and how to code at "normal" work.

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/tech/

[2] https://citizenlab.ca/2019/11/whatsapp-attributes-hack-of-14...

[3] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...

I'd first start by reading this blog https://noncombatant.org/2016/06/20/get-into-security-engine... and everything it links. Then study them to start getting a breadth of knowledge in the security space.

In parallel, I'd recommend studying real security vulnerabilities in products that use technologies that you have a background in. For example, if you are interested in both Web technologies and C++ ,I'd start studying Google Chrome, specifically it's Javascript engine V8 [1]. There is an entire cottage community of both offensive and defensive people looking for vulnerabilities in chrome so it's a good way to get started because there's a lot of information out there. One amazing thing about security engineering is that you get to learn how all of these amazing technologies work at a deep level, because you need to understand it almost as well as the developer to find security vulnerabilities in it. For example, I have a very deep understanding of how technologies like RTC, Browsers, Sandboxes, and the IOS operating systems work from auditing their code and finding security vulnerabilities.

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=Security_...

I think there's a whole sub-conversation to be had about how work is perceived in different cultures. It seems to me like Americans are much to focused on what you're describing, which is that work has to be pleasurable. In my eastern European family, there was never any doubt: Work is about making sure you have food on the table, and a roof over your head.

That's not to say I'd take any job, if I was morally opposed to the work (See: Working at F̶a̶c̶e̶b̶o̶o̶k̶ Meta) I'd go elsewhere. But not being in love with my work is fine. I don't hate it, I'm just indifferent to it, and it funds my actual life outside of work.

As for not wanting to off myself? I think that comes back to that cultural aspect. I could never imagine wanting to end my life just because my job isn't amazing, because I never had a preconception that it could be. I don't feel like I'm "missing" anything by not loving my job, because I love my life.

So I spend my time on what I enjoy doing. Which up to a point is my day job. Overall I find my job as enjoyable as any hobby I've had plus I get paid for it. I get to solve problems and watch the outcome of my solutions play out. My employer isn't aiming to save the world but they also doesn't destroy it.

What matters to you?

For myself, I've had some great jobs, and some that just pay the bills. There are things I won't work on (gambling, weapons).

Even the jobs that pay the bills have been mostly OK, in that I've learned new things and met some lovely people. Sometimes they have led to better jobs indirectly. A very few jobs, with micro managers and bullies, I've resigned from.

Please consider reaching out to these good people:

https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org

I'm doing pretty good mentally without a job.

or try learn some foundational math and do some weird yoga from youtube, if not yet) keep going until you find that things you undrestand can do are above what others swe can do.

or became stoic and force discipline on self)

and stop coffee if you do) or other stimulants.

> “Instead of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.”

OP is not finding work dissatisfying because they are depressed, if they ever were depressed it is because software engineering today is a meaningless, valueless trudge ultimately to shift around some investor's money.

If the situation doesn't depress you it's only because you don't see it, but seeing it and reacting to it as the OP does is the only reasonable reaction. It is not a symptom of the sickness of the individual but of sickness of the larger system manifested in the individual.

To the OP: as a general rule I wouldn't seek out advice like this on HN, more comments will be undermining you and your observation of reality than will give you any meaningful advice.

What has worked for me is finding work that isn't repulsive (e.g. not actively and directly contributing to individual or ecological harm, of course they all do in some sense but many do it so directly you can't even look away without extreme cognitive dissonance), for a team of people that treat you as a human (no company will do this, but there are teams). No work is meaningful because we are in a bubble (not just finance) of unimaginable scale, in some capitalist fantasy land detached from reality (we aren't even really generating profits any more rather than shuffling around surplus value).

Acknowledge that you need a job to provide income, not meaning. Find other sources of meaning in your life (think Candide's garden), and try to keep sane.

1. While the work is boring, taking pride in doing a good job is enjoyable. I’m happier the days I go home and feel I have done a good job than those days I do nothing.

2. Realize it is just a job. Tomorrow I am going hiking, on Monday climbing and on Tuesday I have a date. Filling my weekends and evenings with things I love makes going through a boring workday easier. My job exists to pay for my life and let me do things I enjoy. Do not seek happiness in work.

You may be naive, but this is right. Try not to see it as such a bad thing.

It sounds like you're looking for a job that does some good for the world and isn't concerned with efficiency.

All the jobs that promise this are lying to naive people to exploit them for profit.

The reality is that even the non-profit world is concerned with the cost of labor. As a SWE, you're essentially a high paid laborer.

"I'm kind of looking for a job" sounds like you're thinking about making a religious conversion to join "the employed". Jobs aren't where your identity should come from. Rethink your position as "I need to trade some of my time for money" and the labor market will make a lot more sense.

> People who work 8 hours a day, mostly for a paycheck, how do you cope without wanting to off yourself?

I'm betting that I'll be able to do the time<->money trade efficiently enough that I'll be able to stop working eventually.

As you're working and acquire capital, you need to invest as much of the capital that you earn as possible.

By investing, you're employing laborers (usually by proxy of a company) to produce capital for you.

Once your capital can produce more than your labor, you have achieved "financial independence" and no longer need to be concerned with finding work.

Given that anyone with basic coding skills can get a job paying $150k+/yr without too much effort, and all work is remote, you should be able to invest about $100k/yr without too much trouble. Without having other financial obligations, you should be able to hit financial independence in about 5-10 years.

Here are some suggestions for transitioning to a better job in software development:

1. Look for a workplace with smart colleagues, even if the product is a bit workaday. You will become a better engineer by working with people who are better than you.

2. Software development is done in many domains. If you are bored, it may be because you are bored of the domain. Change it up and go to someplace that's very different. For example, if you work in banking, you could move to a bio company.

3. Spend time on your own learning skills, whether they be programming languages, databases, web dev frameworks, or cloud native stacks. Doing small projects or even just reading and playing around with small examples while reading books can be a thing that you do every day or week to add some variety to your work.

4. Interview and change jobs more often. Always having options lined up is useful because you can move to another job. Nowadays the average tenure is barely more than two years. If you take 6 months to make the move and 6 months to settle into a job, you will be spending perhaps a year in productive, sometimes boring mode. It's terrible for the quality of the software that's produced, but you will solve your problem.

If you move away to another line of work, chances are you will be compensated way less. As you grow older and accrue responsibilities such as kids, you will care more about providing for them, and being in software development is still a great way to provide for your family while securing your retirement etc. I'd think a lot before moving away from software dev, because it pays quite well. Even doing part-time work in a different area while doing software development (e.g., as a consultant) is better than moving away completely from software development.

Research is not for everyone but you could consider it.

It sounds like you’d be happier doing solo work. Maybe make a good library, piece of software, saas application etc. working for yourself and having time to do what you want to do is great for many people.

Find something that you are comfortable doing to make money. Who knows, maybe you will enjoy it.

It's also valuable to be open to "boring" jobs -- that is, jobs that don't sound on paper like they'd be exciting -- as they might turn out to actually be jobs that do make you happy for reasons beyond the specifics of the position: a good "work culture" counts for a lot of happiness, even if what you're doing isn't something that's going to wow people at parties. My favorite jobs have ended up being at companies that probably don't sound particularly exciting -- a database company, a group making an underrated virtual assistant. Conversely, some jobs that I've had at ostensibly more exciting places, like an early virtual world company and an aerospace company, were kind of train wrecks. (The latter was at least as much my fault, as I was sufficiently enamored with the idea of working for them that I didn't admit I was absolutely not right for the job even though I picked up on it early.)

it's simple really-- make no attempt to pretend you have freedom! acknowledge that, unless ww3 comes and the entire system that runs our world is upended in a likely radioactive manner, we are but hamsters running in wheels.

why do the hamsters run? some enjoy running, some only for food and water, others because they feel compelled to fit in with the other hamsters.

but if you are looking for a way to exist in this system without having money, be prepared for quite the journey!

Sometimes I want to off myself too, but work isn't why. I have the unhealthy habit to overwork when I'm feeling that mood tho, so it's different for everyone. I'd suggest you try isolate the feelings you're having to understand whether working for a paycheck is really their source

My first job out of college was working as a programmer in a university research lab. It paid a lot less than working in industry, but was incredibly fun and fulfilling.

The things I got in exchange for the low salary were a ton of autonomy, interesting work to do, the knowledge that my work had value, direct contact with my users, and a relaxed environment surrounded by smart people doing interesting work. A grad school environment, without the stress of publish-or-perish.

We did publish a paper on our software, and asked anyone who used the software to cite the paper in their publications. That paper has thousands of citations now.

This was in the 1990s and I'm sure the compensation penalty for this kind of work is even greater now. The caveat here is that I was young and single, with no family to support, in a city with a low cost of living, and I was very happy living a low-rent, quasi-bohemian lifestyle. But I wouldn't trade that experience for more money now, even considering the compounded investment returns I've missed out on.

Think about what are the problems that are actually worth fixing in the world and make your way up from there. Give it time, don't force it. It might also be worth checking out techniques that can help generate ideas: https://medium.com/ideas-into-action/ikigai-the-perfect-care...

And even in situations where the job itself is not that meaningful, there are lots of other areas you may be able to focus on. Building relationships, learning about how software is built...

You sound either too idealistic or you are a bird that needs to fly on their own (as in try your own thing). There is no point complaining about SWE jobs because frankly, it is a privilege to get paid anywhere from average 80K to 400K in SWE when tons of people struggle to make ends meet. Look outside of HN echo chamber and talk to people who are not SWEs and see what they say.

You are asking for advice from "people who have great jobs". Why would that matter because the definition of "great job" comes from YOU not us. So find that definition and you will have your answers.

1) Filter down to companies that don’t actively harm people/society (this narrows things quite a bit!)

2) Take pleasure/pride in the purely technical aspects of things: making a good system, a good UX, making things performant and elegant and robust, even if the end purpose feels very boring and/or pointless

Sometimes you can do a bit better than that- I’ve had a job whose product felt interesting but pointless, and I’ve had one whose product felt boring but arguably made some people’s lives better. But you have to go pretty far off the beaten path to find one that’s truly fulfilling on all axes. For me, my job is about the paycheck and some base satisfaction from technical execution. For everything else, there’s my free time (and to that end: work life balance is important too!)

Siva7 is partially correct that coming to this realization is depressing af and can lead to a feedback loop of negativity that's hard to break.

It isn't you though. Really, there are tons of useless roles and companies. See the book Bullshit Jobs.

Also, 40 hour work weeks are just ridiculous unbalanced. It's more like 50+ hours when factoring in commuting and lunch etc.

I'd offer a few solutions.

1. If you focus on what your life goals are, or what fun things you can do with the money that a full time job brings it can make it more bearable. 2. Find a gig that you can work 32 hours a week—makes all the difference. 3. Build or buy a small business and work your own hours on something you care about. www.empireflippers.com; www.bizbuysell.com

A lot of exercise helps too.

But there are tons of other kinds of SWE jobs out there that aren't about squeezing another fraction of a percent of profit out of some process - positions with non-profits, development jobs in medical research of all kinds, or even early stage startups where you get to play a bigger role in the product development. You probably won't make FAANG money, but you can do just fine for yourself in a position where you feel like you're doing something more meaningful.

Once you figure out what you would want to do, you can actively search for a job doing exactly that instead of passively evaluating job offers that you come across. Or, if such a job doesn’t exist, you can look for a job that pays well enough to enable you to do what you want.

It’s great that you’re thinking about what would make your life more fulfilling. The flexibility to choose what to work on is a great stepping stone in that direction.

Also be very clear. Every single job will have a component that feels like a slog. The question is ultimately if the trade off is worth what you are looking for/ what interests you.

Also, not to play armchair therapist, but I’d you’re seriously thinking about harming yourself because of whatever work environment you’re in, it may be worth talking to someone. Even when I had to work at places for a paycheck, the alternative wasn’t suicide. Find things elsewhere that fulfill you. Friends, family, and general human connection seem to be pretty standard for maintaining some level of happiness, but ultimately your life’s journey is your own.

Try looking at job postings by universities, you may be able to find software jobs working with a lab, teams of labs, or some department. There may also be opportunity in the private sector as well for similar work.

Plan to move but start now.

Knowing that work is just the means to fund my life, rather than being my life.

              WILL
  What do you mean "cop out?" I mean, w-w-what's
  wrong with layin' brick?
  
              SEAN
  Nothing.
  
              WILL
  There's nothing wrong---That's some-- That's
  somebody's home I'm building.
  
              SEAN
  Right. My dad laid brick. Okay? Busted his ass so I
  could have an education.
  
              WILL
  Exactly. That's an honorable profession. What's wrong
  with..with fixing somebody's car. Someone can get to
  work the next day because of me. There's honor in that.

Work can be the same: people often enjoy the process itself, imperfect and full of ups and downs as it may be. This can be especially true for SWEs because the role has creative and/or intellectually stimulating aspects to it.

The idea of deriving happiness from your actions has been explored at length by disciplines like Buddhism, and it boils down to being aware of where your attachments lie.

You might, for example, think happiness is lying on a beach sipping on Pina coladas or whatever. But fulfillment generally requires achievements of some sort, and on an ongoing basis. You can't really achieve fulfillment without effort/work, pretty much by definition. So a more productive/pragmatic way of thinking is to align your need for subsistence to the pursuit of fulfillment.

By remembering that we are some of the luckiest people on earth. We get paid obscene amounts of money to sit around in our underwear at home tapping out letters on a keyboard. The sweat, toil, and hard work of an entire family in some third world country generates only a tiny fraction of my compensation as a fat, entitled first world bourgeois that was born into the lottery ticket of a first world life and education. Never forget that.

>Maybe I'm naive, but it just seems that almost every job out there is about squeezing more profit out of people, and absolutely nothing else, and it doesn't really make me want to work.

Companies exist to make profit. You can play the game and win the prize, or you can call foul, take your ball, and go home. The choice is yours.

Call yourself a contractor or consultant and embrace that. Do not try to look for meaning in a 'job' someplace. As nice and as enticing as some of those may seem at time, that is probably not where you should look to draw identity and meaning from (at least not primarily).

Going from project to project every 3-6-9-12 months or so - you'll be able to focus more on yourself, your skills, etc, and have less ties to 'company X'. This will force you to realize that your identity isn't tied to company X.

Disclosure - I've never worked full time for any one company for more than 22 months. I don't really quite 'get' how other people do it long term either. I mean... I understand how it happens, but have not felt compelled.

Most of the time when I see those "lets save the world"-organisations it seems to me that they are either moonshot ideas with 1/100 chance of success or they are doing trivial work, duplicating the efforts of already existing organisations or doing things that have no measurable impact at all. I honestly think I would feel less satisfaction working for them. Sometimes I even see them bidding on each others names on Google Ads to capture donations from each other.

Not everybody has an entirely transactional relationship to their work and that's okay. Where you get yourself into trouble is if you let highly transactional people exploit the fact that you might be mission driven.

There are a two big reasons for this. In some companies, a lack of profitability, or a desire for short term speed above all else, means that managers aren't given the space and resources to do their job well. A good manager will not stay in places like this for long. Even in companies where managers have resources and room to succeed, I think that companies very rarely train managers to do their job well. Often management is a promotion from IC to person in charge of making sure ICs ship products on time. But how to do this is not taught at any point in an IC's career. The trade offs involved in shipping products on time are counterintuitive: the things that work best over a 1 month time scale will kill your productivity over a year time scale.

If you feel like you have the raw materials to be good at what you do (you have the skills, you're interested, you have the time and can be dedicated) but you feel like your job isn't fulfilling, my advice is to start thinking about who you want to work under (or what kind of person) and include that as a top criteria in your future career moves.

I work at a major tech company and, yes, ultimately my team's goal is to increase company (and shareholder) profits. But my goal as a manager is to translate my teams directives into work that actually adds value to our customers, improves the work of our stakeholders, and uses the skills of my team in new and interesting ways. Yes, some work we have to do isn't the most fun, but everyone understands why and we're all bought into minimizing the work that sucks so we can get to the parts that are exciting.

I think that one doesn't have to choose between being a nerd, and being a normie. I realized this when I met people who were really nerdy and did meaningful work at small tech companies, and at the same time they were really social people who were fun to be around and did all the normie stuff afk.

I hope to find meaningful work, rather than stop working all together. And I don't think that doing meaningful work is going to affect other aspects of my life negatively as long as I keep boundaries.

I maintain a (short) list of companies that I find interesting, either because I had a good contact with one of their employee or because I'm interested in that particular field they happen to be in. When I look for a job I contact them directly (regardless of any job ad they might have posted or not).

I believe the worse companies are the ones hunting harder for employees (that's probably true on the other way round too), which might biases perception towards "all jobs are dull". Hunt for them instead of being hunted.

If nothing else works then maybe what you really want inside is to build your own business?

This isn’t a retort, it’s an actual question that might be worth exploring in your mind: What do you expect? You’ve arrived at a conclusion that’s a bit of an outlier, so you may find that some of your expectations are different than most. Obviously that doesn’t mean they are right or wrong, but they could be the source of your frustration and might be the key for you either finding something that works for you or challenging your expectation to see if it really holds up.

You can conclude that it's all or almost all pointless, but really points and meaning are made by individuals. They exist, just not "out there" like electricity, only within brains. So for yourself it's mostly just a perspective issue. Even among people who 'cope', the same job and work can feel one way or the other at different times, when it feels one way there's really no coping involved.

Maybe try taking something that gives you a close feedback loop with paying customers -- that is, you yourself talk to them, there's a direct connection between your work and its effects on them, even if you're not the Decider or whatever for overall business goals. When you see how happy they can be about paying for your stuff (even stuff you think is kinda meh), it's less about "squeezing" them, and more about keeping them happy, seeing them happier when their additional needs are listened to, and continuing to deliver value in mutual exchange. This isn't a sure thing to change your perspective and your gigs may have been that close anyway, but I find it helpful to have that context rather than something super far removed. (Though even then if you trace some lines out you can find meaning in your own cog -- try doing it in reverse, too, consider some brass on some trivial object near you like a doorknob or a pencil wrapping below the eraser. Where was that brass made? Where was the iron and zinc mined from? What were the miners' tools made out of, how were they made? How was it transported to its present location? There were lots of people with jobs small or large involved in every thing around you.)

Job length has a quality of its own, too. 6 months is often not enough time to really see the fruits of your labor. It's an interesting feeling to build something collaboratively and incrementally over longer periods (one year, three years...) with early adoption at first and lots of limitations or problems and broader adoption later with more flexibility and fewer problems.

--Engineering - infrastructure, public works, buildings and facilities --Healthcare - hospitals, medical devices, pharma --Energy - solar, wind, natural gas --Public utilities - water, electricity, gas --Food and beverage --All kinds of manufacturing

There could be various opportunities at companies from the above to create a small impact at relatively low stress for a place that does something useful.

Maybe take a sabbatical and get an entry level construction job -- you might find a whole new appreciation for what you have. Or, you might discover that 'real' physical work is more enjoyable and meaningful.

In both cases you won't be very happy. The trick is finding a balance between sort of meaningful and interesting work that also pays well enough. If you are lucky you can get that in something like a FAANG.

Also happiness is relative to the person you need to find what it means to you.

Go find something to do that you find meaningful. It may not be in computers. Maybe you'll enjoy making art, crafts, music. Maybe you'll enjoy helping people directly, like teaching or social work. Maybe you'll work with nature. Maybe you'll develop a new beer brand.

You will be working harder and struggling more initially, but you'll be enjoying what you do more. Good luck to you!

Think about what you want to do, who you want to help, and look for charities or NGOs that do that.

> People who work 8 hours a day, mostly for a paycheck, how do you cope without wanting to off yourself?

1. Living isn't free. Unless you own and operate your own farm, someone right now is doing work to make it possible for you and I to live. Cavemen since the dawn of time had to forage and fight to survive. (I regard millionaires and the like as exceptions to the rule, most of us don't have access to the factors that enable someone to become a millionaire.)

2. Work will set you free. Or rather, freedom is an illusion. You're constrained by society, nature, etc. no matter what you do. Not having the responsibility to work every day doesn't make you more free or your life more meaningful. Alternatively, money gives you a lot more options and choices.

3. You should want to live your best possible life, and working towards that requires effort. Nobody really wants to work for someone other than themselves, but building your own revenue streams is hard so trading labor is a decent compromise. Money is a means to an end.

4. Work is an outlet for you to feel useful. You may regard a given job as pointless, but someone is paying for it. Someone values you and your labor. It's nice to be payed and praised for it.

5. It's not all about work. It's possible to earn and still have a life you enjoy outside of that. Cultivating that balance takes effort.

6. We have it _really_ good compared to the other 99% of the labor market. My GF works in corporate law, which is a particularly nasty counter example. She earns about 10% more than me, but puts in about 60% more hours than I do. In fact, she's on her computer working right now.

7. Some amount of suffering in life is unavoidable. Working is hard, but so is being unemployed. Pain avoidance is a tough bias to overcome. Making peace with the inevitable gives some strength in facing it.

> People who have really great jobs(not talking about money ofc), how did you find them?

I said how I consider my current job boring + pointless.. but it's a hell of a lot better than my last job, and the job before that.

Big things start small.

An observation: a lot of programmers get into it because they are interested in programming itself. Entering the industry can be frustrating because it is no longer about programming, it’s a means to an end.

Nothing wrong with being interested in programming (it’s what makes you good at it) but it helps to have an end you care about as well.

Go do that.

If it doesn't pay enough to live on then get a job that brings in the money to allow you to do it in your spare time.

- All work is meaningless, so I started seeking the ones that pay the most (banks, hedges, FAANGs).

- By making a lot of money early, I plan to soft retire in five years (with 35) - I will take a loooong vacation, then work as a freelancer / consultant as I please.

- Without the fear of starving or being old without cash, I will pursue stuff I like.

PM me in five years and I will tell you whether I succeeded.

And who knows, maybe one of them will one day start a company that will really change the world for the good.

I just shut it down while working and think what I want to achieve and do outside of work. Alternatives, are not really that much more meaningful. Even traveling gets boring after a while.

The saddest part isn’t that I think my abilities are useless. Rather, it seems that the people above me who control where the money flows seem very short-sighted with their investments.

Hunter-gatherers deep in the Amazon have a lot of control over their lives but you do not. Work in your context is alienating and for someone else's benefit. The main "benefit" for you is taking away enough of the wealth you're creating to survive until the next day so that you can continue to enrich the heirs who collect the profits and dividends of your labor.

My advice is to become more aware of this and then go to work full time. Realize your boss is your enemy. Realize your coworkers for the most part are in the same boat as you and are generally allies. Expecting your company is your family, and that your boss is looking out for you, that your work is not alienating and fulfilling will lead to depression.

There are things you can do to make your life more tolerable as time goes by. There are things you can do to join with workers all over the world to end capitalist exploitation, which can at times be very fulfilling. A lot of it is contained in this thread. One common thread is deal with the company like any other unpleasant thing - clock in, don't expect anything back from it but misery and a percentage of the wealth you create. Anything positive you feel or do will be on your own, or with other workers. Company are mechanisms to expropriate surplus labor time from workers to benefit heirs. How can you expect fulfillment giving so much of the time of your life to such an enterprise?

"We will not be engaging in discussions around architecture and design. You will be expected to complete the assignments given to you on the schedule dictated."

It's called a business. Maximizing profit is their entire point.

Maybe you need to think hard about what you DO want to be accomplishing. Energy? Education? What problems do you believe in.

When I don’t find it I have to stop.

This is why I love being independent and working short gigs.

Even though i have nothing against “squeazing more profits”.

Its just somehow doesn’t motivate me to work on someone else’s profits.

Sticking with it for more than 5 years… the jobs ended up being great

https://80000hours.org

Don't really care what the puzzle is a picture of.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/

Capitalism has it's faults, but just complaining, without a constructive alternative can lead to way worse outcomes.

If you check the sidebar of that subreddit you'll find anarchism and mutualism as the solutions to the problems it identifies.

What makes people believe that further attempts at implementing this utopia will not just end as another cases of fascism with red flags? Certainly so far all previous attempts ended up this way, and there was a good amount of them so the sample size is not small.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative_politics

Then again, it's been tried plenty of times. That's what cooperatives are, family farms are, what you owning your laptop as a programmer are. We just cut down on the coup d'etats and union busting and expand that kind of democratization of the work week to everyone.

It's also a silly argument considering you could have said the same before agriculture and before capitalism succeeded.

These are just different kinds of organization within capitalism. Clubs are a thing too, you know.

These aren’t ‘solutions to capitalism’.

> It's also a silly argument considering you could have said the same before agriculture and before capitalism succeeded.

It’s only a silly argument if someone presents a solution. So far nobody is doing so.

Unexplained labor still exists deep in the Amazon and elsewhere, but mining companies finding new traces of valuable minerals are extinguishing the last of the old free way.

I say give it your best shot!

Classic "mudding the waters" line, it could be written by a plugin these days. The fact that you don't agree with the alternatives doesn't mean they aren't out there and people "just complain".

Find what motivates you in life and build your life around that. Capitalistic industry is fundamentally about profit. If not monetary then power and prestige.

The general mood matches yours. Lots of people are feeling apathy. Prioritizing of profit over people creates dehumanizing social institutions and drives mental health issues. It's really simple and obvious.

People who are too caught up in the glitter of shiny coins can't see the writing on the wall. Either we as a whole are headed for a big change or those who feel that way are headed for a big change in how they relate to the overall whole. Likely both.

for real tho, it might

404krel at gmail dot com if you want some guidance

Since, by this definition all businesses are useless, corresponding jobs will sound pointless too. But you can always find something interesting to work on while on a job. Don’t forget you are in-charge of your career and there is plenty of time to shape it the way you want.

I would suggest you spend time doing other things, find work that is truly meaningful to you.

In this world people will look at you strange if you pursue meaning over money, but I think that’s better than a life of burnout and economic exploitation

Not only are many (most?) of SWE jobs quite questionable in their value, but they are also very inefficient in my experience, at least in bigger organizations. So you're not only dealing with the dissatisfaction of doing something that's pretty meh (at best), but also with the boredom of being super inefficient and knowing you could do so much more with your time.

Of course, we're all free to leave and do something else. But it's not easy to go against the current.

To do that, I spent weeks comparing one map to another to find minor issues, wrote 100s of pages of documentation I'm sure only the project lead and a lawyer read; spent a week reformatting it from bullets to tables at the managers request and then putting it back to bullets for the lawyer; spent 6 months dragging and dropping in a GUI work flow tool on a product I know exactly 2 people used; had to fly 12 hours on 3 different plans to a tiny Midwest city every other week, missing my wife and new born son every moment; write nothing but data entry forms for a year on a terrible back end and then spend another year converting those forms to a slightly different backend; have 90% of the work I did thrown out without reaching operation because two bureaucrats got into a fight; and spent an enormous part of my time trying to figure out how to configure networks when I hate networking.

Every single one of my "good" jobs that I found meaning in is because I choose to find meaning in it. I may have been doing something pointless or icky, but I actively choose to have faith that it was going to advance the larger project I'd signed up for.

Some jobs suck because of a toxic culture or individuals. I've had that happen and removing ones self from the environment is the right way to progress.

Most often though jobs, including software engineering jobs, aren't toxic, just boring some/most of the time. Often the realities of making money feel icky too. That's normal. For me though, so long as I find value in the overall thrust of what my project / company is doing I find myself relying on faith that whatever menial task I'm working on probably moves us closer to the big goals. Although I still try to make sure to eliminate pointless tasks once they've been demonstrated to be pointless.

I think you are likely depressed, but I think I read downthread you are seeing someone for that. I suspect also you need to work on identifying what you value and create priorities. It sounds like money is not a major motivator/priority right now for you. What are you motivated by? What is important to you?

It's quite possibly not in software engineering right now. My wife's team had a mechanical engineer decide they were burnt out and go work an assembly line for 4 years. They took a 30-40% paycut but we're happier. Then they got bored of that and came back to engineering. I've have college friends who decided not to use thier (expensive) degrees because they decided they wanted to do something else more and none seem to regret it, even if they could have made more money in their degree area.

Also consider working in the public sector. The work isn't necessarily any more interesting and the pay can be lower but "squeezing out profit" isn't generally what you are doing.

There is also the answer that work is just work- many people find thier fulfillment outside of paid work and just accept that they'd rather do mental drudgery in an office then physical drudgery in a warehouse, truck, or field. Even though I generally enjoy work I enjoy my family and non work passions more and have regretted everytime I choose to prioritize work over them for more than a couple days at a time.

In sum, figure out what you about, try to view work differently, and maybe try something different for work.

> People who have really great jobs(not talking about money ofc), how did you find them?

It's been a whole construction of myself really, and I feel like it's still going on.

- When I was younger, I used to see only the flaws in things, and I was never happy with anything. Later on, I managed to discover that nothing's perfect, but most things have good aspects, and it's all about a balance. And even that sometimes, good things need bad things to be good.

- My first job was at a smartphone OEM, where we released new models at stupidly fast pace, with very little quality. I felt I was very helpful, because the devices would ship anyway, whether I was there or not, and I helped improved the quality of the device. I had direct contact with users and RMA, and I felt useful for each individual I managed to help. However, as I said, the devices we released were pretty bad (but dirt cheap, pretty much stealing money from shareholders to give it to customers), and I witnessed how those decisions were made, and why. Really, that was putting in real-world my economy lessons. If there is some way to make more money, this path will be taken, no matter how benevolent the involved people are. Business incentives are everything. For that company, the aim was to sell to supermarkets, which only care about specs over price ratio, and nothing else. So it optimized specs over price, and made device that were unusable in 3 months.

Once, I understood that business incentive are everything, I went to a sector without the business incentive to output models as fast as possible, but the exact opposite. In France, ISPs provide the home gateway and the tvbox, as part of the subscription. So ISP wants to provide the best service, without replacing the user's hardware every year, because it costs the ISP money, so they keep software upgraded and optimized as long as possible.

- So I went to a new job (not gonna lie, I didn't exactly choose that one), for the biggest french ISP. I initially was afraid of the very big corp (Bigger than Google), but I still did go. I still learnt many things technically, and felt that what I was doing could be useful. Well I was right being afraid of big corp, because well, what I did never became actually used. But still, I learnt a lot again on how companies work, and while I initially have a bad opinion of big corps, I didn't have actual reasons to have those bad opinions, now I do! I even realized how and why big corps are not necessarily a bad thing for the world. But definitely not a good match for me at my age. I can't really sum up those things I learned, but there has been one metaphor that convey parts of it. A big corp is a galley. It's pretty slow by modern standards, but it can pretty reliably go anywhere. There is a captain, but if everyone paddle backwards, the ship doesn't go where the captain wants it to go. Really, the ship, simply goes to the mean of where the people paddling want the ship to go. This means that there is no real decision ever made by one person, but that decisions emerge from flock behavior. (Not sure that metaphor works really well, but anyway)

So I left that job. I still wanted that business incentive to do "good" things. I turned to a company that I liked when I was younger, even though back then I didn't even envision going there, which is a much smaller ISP. So I erased the ecological cost, and the horrible UX of my first job, and went to a company-style that suits me more.

I'm definitely happier with my job than before. I still see dark dots here and there, and I still dream of what I could do next (An Android-based OS for any smartphones, with real competitive market for all apps and services, with business incentives to keep upgrading Android on smartphones for as long as possible), so it's not all white, and I think it's still likely I'll move to another job later, but I'll know what I'm trading.

So, I initially said I don't know what to recommend you, I'll try anyway: - Never regret taking any job, but instead, focus on what you learned from that experience. I tried that job, because of XXX, turns out XXX was actually a bad idea for me, but that job had YYY that I didn't expect, and YYY was good, so maybe I should focus on looking for YYY. - Focus on things you want from a company, rather on things you won't to evade - You could try looking for companies based on things you think should be done. Like for instance "it would be nice to help musicians sell their music without fighting labels". Well, based on that you should go work for bandcamp! - Don't hesitate to go "off-road": If based on previous item you think things unrelated to SWE, like if you think saving whales is important, well it's likely there is a whales-saving organization who would welcome a web maintainer, even if they are not actively looking for it, so go ask them.

Anyway, I wish you a good luck finding your path

I only work 8 hours a day. That leaves plenty of time for the boozing and buggering that a 40-hour work-week can buy.

But it's probably great for lengthy philosophical discussions :)