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"The experience was physically taxing, he was diagnosed with tendonitis after moving hundreds of boxes a day, but it pulled him out of his depression and helped him gain perspective and a deeper sense of meaning".......

I have mixed feelings about this. What this has proven is working at amazon warehouse sucks, and is not sustainable.

I've had many physical shitty jobs in my 20's. Then, I had some health issue and could no longer keep doing that to my body, so I went back to school and got a CS degree.

I sometimes get depressed and miss physical work, but then I remember how shit it was and how an injury would prevent me from working. As a dev I think I'm going to be able to earn money as long as I'm alive and have a functioning brain.

I guess once you have enough money then maybe someone might find that work fun? Obviously it helped the writer with depression. However, if he ever gets permanently hurt and it affects his daily life I have a feeling depression will come back in full swing. Office work is much much safer.

There are ways to help people through tech and have much bigger affect then moving boxes for a shitty company.

Edit: What helps my depression is connecting with people outside of work, helping people in my community, doing projects around my house and spending time with my son. Additionally, I try to make good choices when spending my money and limit my spending on stuff I don't need, as I dislike excessive spending.

Edit2: Some great comments below. This is very much poverty/shit job tourism, which the writer can escape at any moment. This is some BlackMirror type of content. Guy makes it big in tech, retires, now works shit job people are trying to escape to cure his depression. He then writes about it on a blog. Now, other non-aware devs might be reading it contemplating leaving their jobs to do a REAL job.




> What this has proven is working at amazon warehouse sucks, and is not sustainable.

This person went from a 23-year career sitting at a desk to doing physical labor all day. Any physical labor is going to take a toll on someone in their 40s who hasn't been doing physical labor.

I have a lot of people in my extended social circle who are in physical labor jobs. Amazon Warehouse jobs are always viewed as the "easy" fallback option: Doesn't pay as well as the hard physical labor jobs, but it's also viewed as the safe, comfortable option. Obviously, someone coming from a 20-year desk job is going to have a different perspective when thrust into a job with any physical demands.


I also have people in my extended social circle who are in jobs that involve a lot of physical labor. As we all enter our late 30s-early 40s give or take, and they realize what a toll it's taking on their bodies, most of them are trying to get out of it, or have gotten out of it. They realize they aren't going to be physically able to do it another 25 years, and their bodies are going to get increasingly wrecked.

From what I've heard (including from acquaintances who have worked there), a job at an Amazon Warehouse takes a toll on your body for sure. For sure it's hardly alone in being like that.

(The people in my extended social circle who are in jobs involving physical labor are perhaps more likely than most physical laborers to have people in their social circle who sit at desks, and to be able to access networks and resources to shift out of physical labor to make a living).


> As we all enter our late 30s-early 40s give or take, and they realize what a toll it's taking on their bodies, most of them are trying to get out of it, or have gotten out of it. They realize they aren't going to be physically able to do it another 25 years, and their bodies are going to get increasingly wrecked

This is why when you see people who do physical labour well into their 40s they almost always have substance problems. Job takes its toll on them and drugs are what let them push through.


You can also write a very similar rant about how sedentary desk jobs are not sustainable with all the obesity related life shortening conditions it leads to :)


The solution to obesity is eating less and going on a walk or two during the day. The solution to your back getting blown out by moving boxes is… giving up your job.

That’s the whole point.


I think the takeaway is none of us is getting out of this alive.


That's something I think we need to spend a lot more time acknowledging. The preeminent idea makers that have created a lot of our modern framework of thinking about the world were not very good at answering the question "what's the point?"

Slow loss of ability to function and then death is inevitable. People are not going to be optimal workers their whole lives. We still need to keep the machines running, which is incredibly difficult and probably always will be due to the majority of us being limited bumbling morons, and the safeguards we need to put in place to prevent the morons who think they aren't morons from messing up the efforts of the minority of competent productive people hiding out there. But being the best worker for as long as you can is not the point of life.

This sounds trite to most modern thinkers, but it's not: genuine, actual, familial support, acceptance and loyalty between you and your tribe is something that can transcend the trials and tribulations of life and our inevitable death. Another ingredient in acceptance of the human condition is acknowledgment of the mysteries of the world and the strangeness of human perception and consciousness. Neither of those are sufficiently reflected upon in any organized manner like they used to be.


We all will die eventually.

But till then I actually would like a healthy balance of mental and physical work.


Obesity and weight gain in general is mainly caused by diet, not exercise. You can run 12 hours a day but if you eat 10k calories a day, you're going to end up fat.


I think the mainly part is correct, but 12 hours of running like 6-7k calories for an 150 lbs. person. As you get heavier it’s going to go up fast (and non linearly)—essentially any kind of extreme exercise is going to put an upper limit on your weight.

I’m unsure if your body can even process 10k calories in day. The basal metabolic rate for a 1000 lbs person isn’t that high.


They were making a point with an exaggerated example, not suggesting that 12 hours of running or 10k calories/day is actually reasonable.


I never said that the OP implied it was reasonable. My point is that there's a level of activity at which you likely can't eat enough to get fat.


Michael Phelps is probably the only most valid extreme example!

https://olympics.com/en/featured-news/michael-phelps-10000-c...


Lots of ultra distance runners and cyclists eat and burn more than that. The point is with sufficient exercise it is almost impossible to stay fat.


And the counterpoint is that most people aren't able to do that much exercise. Because it's A LOT. Basically full time athletes or highly physical workers. So that excludes all people with a sedentary or only partially physically demanding work.


Sufficient is a lot. If you eat a fast food meal (burger, fries, soda) above maintenance you're looking at half a marathon to burn that off. And most people aren't pro cyclists that are able to sustain 400 watts+ for a hour.


Sufficient is a lot, but it’s nowhere near as extreme as that example makes it sound.

That’s a half marathon for a 150 lbs fit person, running efficiently. A 250 lbs person who is a little out of shape will burn that in a 2.5 hour walk.

Obviously 1300 calories a day above maintenance is extreme for most people, but energy expended scales non linearly with weight. There are also a lot quicker ways to burn calories than marathon running.


Written like someone whose knees have never been blown out on the job


Both can be true.


Perhaps, but the epidemic of sedentary lifestyle has lead to a large suite of problems, ranging from miserable back pain to cardiovascular problems to diabetes. The average office worker can barely run a mile, do a pullup, squat below parallel with their bodyweight, or climb a flight of stairs without panting.

Some of us spend hours a week compensating for this. If lifting boxes and carrying them around all day long paid a fraction of the salary I have, I think I would take it in a heartbeat. It sounds delightful. You prefer to be in meetings for 6 hours a day and scramble to code in between them? And let me guess, no neck pain and daily headaches for you right ?


Its one thing to do hard physical exercise, like gym work, cycling, swimming, running etc for like and hour or two everyday, and then get good rest- Work in the time there is in between. This is actually far healthier than a full time job doing hard physical labor. There is certain thing call physical wear-and-tear which is real, together with injuries, and you won't be getting paid nearly as well or with the same benefits and perks. Eventually your mind will find a job repulsive that doesn't pay as much.

I also heard some where at some point nearly every one working these hard labor jobs indulges in after work drinking as a means of pain relief analgesic.

The thing that you describe about the average working job Joe, is really physical abuse in the exact opposite direction to the extreme physical labor. Both are bad. Balance is how you enjoy life.


Sports are the better answer for improving physical fitness. I do moderate weightlifting and HIIT-style MTB/cycling 5-10 hours per week, and when I took up a short gig to unload shipping containers, I was far more muscular and athletic than the other workers.

The job descriptions for manual labor positions that say “It’s like getting paid for going to the gym!” is deceiving. Yes, you will develop a fortitude and lean strength. It’s very hard work. I was battered after a week. But the physical payoff isn’t worth it and the life-long risks are severe.

It’s super depressing to work alongside a 19-year-old recent high school graduate, who jokes to you about his chronic lower back problem, while he angrily tosses 2,000+ oft-heavy boxes onto the sorting line. It shouldn’t be our children doing the crippling work.


Erm you can definitely make six figures doing physical work. Have to imagine that’s a pretty decent fraction of your salary. You’re not going to do that though, because that work is hard and desk/computer shit is easy af in comparison with banger pay & benefits. Cool story though I guess.


>> You prefer to be in meetings for 6 hours a day and scramble to code in between them

How did we possibly get to this and what shareholder or customer thinks this is a good idea?


It's the 2000s, talking about problems ad nauseam without solving them unless pressing has been the status quo for a few decades now.


Sure, but companies that only talk and don't do should die out by natural selection. Why isn't this happening?


Inertia, being carried by past success, delivering juuust enough new value that their clients don't switch away from them.

Or their clients have inertia and continue to use their product long past the time they should have moved to a competitor who is innovating.

I don't know. I think there's a lot of dead weight in the big corporations that is being carried along. I think you can see this a lot in marketing departments with massive budgets. They spend their money marketing to other big companies. Those companies are spending their money marketing back to them. It's like a shell game where a lot of money is moving but nothing changes.


I too had many shitty jobs in my early 20's and reading this article kinda triggered those job's bad memories and how much I hated working at those places. I remember even after getting into tech many years later I would sometimes have dreams where I would be back in one of those jobs having a minor case of PTSD.

That being said there are other ways to do the type of career shift that the author wants. My Wife's cousin who worked as a electrician near SF mentioned to me one of his co-workers was a former sr. director at Oracle who got burned out and wanted to try something new. I asked him how they liked the new career and he said she loved it. That job payed well and didn't require the forced degradation seen at amazon warehouses, plus you get to interact with interesting people and travel to different locations frequently.


A senior director at Oracle likely had enough money to be able to afford to take classes while not working (and not going into debt), get an apprenticeship (mandatory for electricians) working for peanuts, and then spend a bunch of money on advertising and/or leverage all his business contacts (as everyone, especially the wealthy, need electricians at some point.) He could afford to pay $$$ for all the electrical code books that non-master-electricians are required to memorize (and pass tests on.) He likely didn't have to worry about health insurance, wasn't carrying any debt, had a reliable car, etc.

Dear everyone in this discussion: stop pretending like people working Amazon Warehouse jobs can just switch gears, and especially stop citing examples of rich, educated, privileged people doing it as "proof" it can be done.

It's pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps nonsense. These sorts of jobs are so physically demanding that you end up exhausted at the end of a shift and there's not much energy for other things unless you're pretty young....and unlike wealthy connected people, they don't have the personal/professional network.


I don't think you "get" what I was trying to say. I had mentioned a actual person - this was a woman and not a man btw(I mentioned that, I guess you didn't read my post close enough), who moved out of a engineering director position and was now a electrician. They don't own their own electrical business, they are just another electrician on the job. And yes they probably are very wealthy but wanted to switch careers like the author of this post and really enjoyed going into manual labor and getting out of tech. I don't know what else there is to argue about?


I used to do landscaping. One morning I pulled my then-girlfriend out of bed by the legs because I was dreaming about dragging a tree into a hole. I moved a lot of heavy trees and shrubs in that job. Haha, memories!


I don't think the author is recommending their experience. He's merely talking about what he did and what happened. We've known for millennia that physical work sucks. That's why the lowest echelons of society always end up doing the worst of it. This, I think, is why previous generations were so emphatic about college education. In their experience, it was a ticket out of doing physically taxing work.


Overly taxing and dangerous physical work sucks. Working in a professional kitchen is some of the most fun and (non-monetary) rewarding work I've ever done.


Maybe Amazon should take a cue from the service industry and have a lot more sex and drugs in their warehouses. Right now it's all misery and desperation.


> service industry and have a lot more sex and drugs in their warehouses.

Nope.

The business insurance usually requires drug free or zero tolerance policies, especially with forklifts, unmanned delivery robots, trucks, conveyors, and all other hazardous warehouse conditions around.


Heh, business insurance is one thing. Some of the guys I’ve worked with are another. One swore up and down he couldn’t be functional before a toke and getting lifted was safer for us all.


And after 5 years you start to have feet, knees and leg issues. My sister worked at (very)good restaurants for six years, there is a reason why she started college at 23. It got easier when she got to 'second', since she could reserve herself the "easy" cleaning tasks and the inventory, but still.


I’d love to hear more about your experience working in a professional kitchen.


Definitely. My dad always recalled working on the Navy Ship yard and how cold it was before saying to himself, "F--- this" and going to college to become an accountant.


He is recommending the experience though:

> If I had it my way, tech workers wouldn’t take sabbaticals just to climb Machu Picchu or see Antarctica — some subset of them, the set for whom the malaise I’m describing resonates, would instead take their sabbatical at an Amazon warehouse.


I thought you were kidding, but this is actually in part 2 of the interview.

I guess the author is happy about transitioning from depression to living in a fantasy world with no basis in reality, but I think most of us would prefer to keep our vacations... vacations


>I have mixed feelings about this. What this has proven is working at amazon warehouse sucks, and is not sustainable.

Sure it is, as soon as you realize employees are replaceable commodities that get used up like break pads.

Sustainable for the individual? Obviously not. Sustainable for amazon. Of course, which is why it won't be changing.


It's not sustainable for amazon-ish [1]. They offer higher wages than competitors because they need to keep accumulating new employees or convincing old ones to come back.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+run+out+employees+to+...


> They offer higher wages than competitors

Do they? Ten years ago Walmart distribution center workers were making what the writer says he made at Amazon, which is itself surely the result of recent increases. No idea what Walmart pays today, especially in these post COVID-induced work and price changes. Four or five years ago, on the other hand, I'd heard Amazon was around $13 to $14.


8.1% inflation to Amazon's rescue! Just in time. Whew, that was a close one.


Experienced both sides too. Some physical jobs suck and some bosses really suck, but some are also great and massively rewarding even though pay may not reflect that. Really depends on the company, the match of body+job, and importantly the Country - worker protection laws.


My mother-in-law was a nurse at an orthopedic surgery center. She always said the major classes of patients she saw were:

1. old folks getting joint replacements 2. young athletes 3. middle aged construction workers or laborers


Pretty much this. It's like people whose dream is to retire on a farm

You don't know how much work it entails. You have no idea

Actually working at AMZN is easier than a Farm. Hands down.


Loudly laughed at the Black Mirror part :) True, I also agree this is kind of a privileged shit job tour


I met a young software developer who got a night job loading UPS trucks instead of joining a gym. It seemed to work for him, although it's probably not sustainable.


Physical work is great in a controlled environment. Hence, the gym. No need to destroy ones body doing physical labor, if it can be avoided.


Tendonitis is also common in SDEs, do you think IT industry also non sustainable?

The work condition in Amazon warehouse sucks not because Amazon wants it happen but just 1. because you want buy something at a mouse click not wanting to get it yourself, 2. other retailers do not want pay as much as Amazon did.

You are winning a game does not mean you get to choose the rules.

It is astonishing how people today are only think everything as one step process and just fire his/her original thoughts without the capabilities of observing the system as a whole. And particularly worrisome for a tech forum.


Software development is taxing on your brain the same way physical labor is taxing on your body. It’s depressing, soul sucking work. You’re stuck inside, staring at a screen for 8+ hours a day.


If all jobs had the same salary, benefits, career path, etc, there is no way I'd trade software development for a job involving strenuous physical labor.


I would. I enjoy working on software, but honestly, the most satisfying job I ever had was a janitor, cleaning office buildings. Seriously. The job was at night - I'm a night owl. The job was performed almost entirely in solitude - I hate people LOL. I could listen to music all night and it never interrupted my work. No meetings or drawn out decisions. No "case of the Mondays". I worked my butt off physically, but at the end of my shift, my brain was still totally fresh. I used to look at it like I was getting paid to exercise because the work was so physical. I slept like a damn baby when I was a janitor. But, most of all, I really enjoyed cleaning: coming in at night, looking at a total disaster area, working my butt off, then leaving just before dawn with everything looking spotless. I took pride in it.

Kinda funny how most of the software projects I work on now are around hygiene, cleaning up old code and dead configs, stuff like that. Once a janitor, always a janitor.

Oh yeah, the worst thing about being a janitor isn't the pay. It's being treated like shit by literally everyone. People can be assholes, especially when they're talking to the janitor.


Man, I'd go back to being an archaeologist in a heartbeat. I like software, but the whole corporate thing gets old real fast.


Archeology sounds awesome, but I imagine it’s one of those highly academic fields where barely anyone makes it.


There's a surprisingly large number of jobs, but making even middle class income is difficult unless you're one of the dozens of people that get a staff job with the government or win the academic lottery and get a tenure track position.


do both. archaeology software


Or software archeology! (going through interesting old code bases and documenting them for posterity).


I would. Imagine getting paid to be outdoors in the sun getting exercise. Imagine not having to spend an extra hour each day in a crowded gym doing boring repetitive movements because your sedentary job would ruin your body otherwise. Imagine not having posture and back problems at age 30. Imagine having the output of a hard days work be a physical object you can point to your son and say “see? I made that”.


> Imagine getting paid to be outdoors in the sun getting exercise.

Combine that with - imagine being outside when it's cold, windy and raining - and you still have to do an 8 hour shift in those conditions. At minimum, it sounds like a fast-track to arthritis (a painful and non-curable condition that will plague you for the rest of your life). Or, imagine doing hard, physical labor for 8 hours in sweltering heat, which makes other human people avoid going out at all.


You just described what a weekend home project is like, not a real blue-collar job.


A lot of physical jobs will happily ruin your body, and give you posture, back and knee problems at age 30.


If you think desk jobs are bad for your posture and back, I have some bad news about physical labor. But don't take my word for it: try it sometime.


If you are an American SWE or have a corresponding salary, you pretty much only have to work for 10 or so years before retiring, assuming you learn how personal finance works and learn to live without a fancy car or any status-related possessions.

Heck you could do it in 5 years if you are a FAANG employee.


I’m not sure you could do it in 5 years at a FAANG even if you saved every penny (literally zero living expenses.)

Because if you start a career at 22, that means you retire at 27, and have to have enough saved up for something like 40 years before social security kicks in. That’s a long time to be living off of savings. Can you have enough that you can live off the interest in your investments? Depends. You’d need near-zero-risk investments because you don’t want to get wiped out at the next recession (they happen every 10-ish years) and those tend to have low yields.

Source: I’m 10 years into a faang and I have a bunch saved up, but I’m still in my 30s. There’s no way I could retire now with my wife and kids depending on me, the amount I make on the interest of my investments isn’t nearly enough and is too risky.


I'll admit 5 years was hyperbolic and unrealistic, perhaps something reserved for the most promising workers at those FAANGs. But if you are 10 years into your FAANG career, you should be earning at minimum in the 300K net/210k take home range, and have done so for years. At this point you must be trading freedom for creature comforts or status goods if you are not financially independent.


What’s financially independent mean at age 35? Say you saved 200k every year (which isn’t even technically possible given that the typical tax rate for 300k means a smaller net than that.) You have 2 million in the bank. Can you live off 2 million for 30 years (social security age) while supporting a family as the sole earner, for that long? You gotta be really confident in your investments to take that plunge.


Well it depends on your personal circumstances. As per the 4% rule, you can definitely live off $80K with a family. That's above the US median wage by a large margin. You could live on $40K too, which is terrible if working but completely different if not. Again, this will depend on what you value in life.

Think about what not having to work actually means. There's a list of advantages that is too large to properly enumerate. Being able to see your children. Eating correctly and cheaply. Engaging in intimate relationships with vigor, time and energy. Being in great health. Fixing maintenance problems yourself. No career forcing you to live in a particular place. Traveling inexpensively when you want. Less obesity, stress and copium. Have hobbies and self-actualization. All of this in years that still qualify as your prime instead of when your body is failing you. The same salary when not working is like operating in a different world.

And ironically this would also give you the time to pursue entrepreneurship or any number of money-making ventures if you are so inclined. Heck, just go part-time if you miss it. If you are a FAANG person you can have a higher salary than people's full time.

Most people will not have that opportunity. I certainly won't, barring some miracle. But you have it. What will you do when you retire at 55 and realize that pretty much all of the really healthy years of your life have been spent in an office? Great, you've got a comfy retirement but it's too late.


The premise is you only need about 20-25 years of expenses saved up and have like a 90+% success rate given history. That's what the FIRE ideology started with. Anything beyond 25 years is security/luxury. For a single person not having others depend on them and willing to locate away from any expensive mega-/metropolis, FAANG did make that doable in 5-10 years.

Of course there is never a guarantee.


> The premise is you only need about 20-25 years of expenses saved up

What happens in 20-25 years, if you’re 35 now? Your net worth hits zero right when you turn 55-60, and have years left until you get social security? All so that you can live with zero luxuries for the best years of your life, and have no family to pass anything onto?

I’m sorry but it just seems like a huge misplacement of priorities to me, to forego so much potential to retire that early.

To me, the priority is the ability to simply say “fuck off” to my boss if I’ve had enough one day, and have enough saved up to absorb the mistake, if it turned out to be one. Having that fallback in the back of my mind means I’ve basically already won, I’m just racking up the score until that day comes. But until that day, there’s zero reason not to continue banking everything I have. Deciding “that’s probably enough, I should walk away now” at age 35 seems like one of the biggest mistakes you can make. 50? Maybe. 45? Maybe not. But 35? Huge mistake IMO.


Genuinely wondering how you came up with that. How much do you think Americans have left after taxes and living expenses?


I'll walk back on the five years FAANG claim as I was venting a bit. But let's say you earn $200K (you'd start with less but end up with more at the 5 year mark), $135-165K take home, $105K if you save 70% of your salary. If we count compound interest, investments, stocks, healthcare savings due to generous SWE contracts, you could definitely achieve freedom if you wanted to with the 4% rule. It would require abandoning some luxury, but even on 30% of your take home salary you would have a decent lifestyle, more than most make total. And then you'd be in a position to do what you want, be as healthy as you need to be, no longer a need to buy things to make you forget about your servitude. You could travel on the cheap with longer flights because you would have time to do so.

Let's say I'm wrong, and it's more like 15-18 years. Well, that's still much much much better than what most people get. You can have decades of your life back. How much of your freedom are toys and consumption worth?


Ok, but then you'd have spent your entire unrecoverable youth working for a FAANG. I realize this doesn't bother some people, and I don't understand that.


Of course it bothers people. But it's better than losing the last functional decades as well.


If being a security guard paid half instead of a tenth what I made as $BIGCO software developer, I’d switch back immediately.


Working at amazon as an order picker is depressing, soul sucking and can wreck your body for the remainder of your life.

Devs can get by working few hours a day, some barely do any work at all.

I refuse to stare at a screen 8+ hours a day. I take healthy breaks and create boundaries.

I rarely have to solve puzzles at work. The grunt of the work is almost the same thing over and over.


Devs can get by working few hours a day, some barely do any work at all

Not sure how others here feel, but I have to say that when I've found myself in situations where there isn't much work to be done I find it utterly soul destroying.

Always feel guilty doing anything else in down-time when I'm billing a client and so sometimes end up sitting in a weird stand by mode, feeling like I'm somehow being lazy.


It's not lazy. If I go for a walk I'm actively thinking about projects. I have solved many problem by just clearing my mind and taking breaks.

Building software should not be paid by the hour. It's a weird thing.

If I can build a piece of software in 10 hours, and another dev needs 40 hours....it seems kind of odd to pay the slower less resourceful dev MORE for a slower delivery?


So I consider taking a walk to clear your mind part of work for sure. I also consider reading HN or other engineering news/continued education sites to be part of work. And taking a coffee break to chat with co-workers about whatever (back when we worked in an office), including big-picture stuff and non-work related stuff, sure, that too.

That's all part of work when you do this kind of work. You can not just write code 8 hours a day, indeed, it's impossible, and if an employer tries to make you work that kind of sweat-shop environment (sometimes it seems like that's the actual goal of some Scrum implementations), it won't actually get them your best or even most productive work.

But there are people on HN who say that they literally spend the majority of their day the majority of days just doing things that are not work at all. I dunno, watching TV, running errands, riding their bike, mindlessly social media'ing, playing video games. Like they only spend a few hours a week on anything related to work at all.

I agree with GP that for me that's utterly soul-destroying, I end up feeling useless and unmoored. (The other day on the radio I heard someone reference a study that busy-ness to life satisfaction graphed as an upside down U, if you have too little free/leisure time you are unhappy, but people with too much are unhappy too, there's a sweet spot in the middle. Perhaps that's what we're talking about here).

But maybe different people are different.

Or maybe in new remote world, if you spend that time on projects you find rewarding (writing poetry, I dunno) instead of just goofing off, then it's not really "leisure" anymore, and you won't have that problem. If also you don't have any ethical problems with it (maybe your employer is awful and deserves to be drained of money), or just worry about getting caught.


Yep. Same here, at my level of experience can deliver work in high-quality at a fraction of time required for a junior. Instead of burn-out, use the extra time to enjoy other things and keep learning/improving.


You can always add metrics to your functions, refactor your code, improve your deploy process, write more tests, etc.


Exactly. Not all forms of development require deep thought mode, and a lot of them add value to your overall productivity and code quality.


Dev work is not digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screw driver, but it is forcing your brain to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.

https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks


You might be surprised to learn that for every dev working “few hours a day” or barely doing anything at all, there is another engineer doing all their work for them - usually in a constant state of fending off burnout due to having to do other peoples’ work in addition to their own.


That other engineer is actually a problem. He is accomplishing nothing by grinding 8+ hours a day and will burn out, most deadlines are bullshit.

Nobody can sustain that much work for a long period of time.

I would much rather be a good well rounded reasonable dev than someone doing others work. That is a huge red flag. Every dev should be responsible for THEIR work, not their team mates. Unless of course they are doing code reviews.


> most deadlines are bullshit

Arbitrary deadlines are bullshit but I never mentioned deadlines. At the end of the day, people get paid to do a job and businesses earn revenues by doing things. Someone needs to do those things, and if these hypothetical developers "barely doing any work at all" aren't doing it, someone has to at the end of the day or everyone is going home.


Is it? In my career, over 20 years by now, I've not seen that one often. When it happens, management has to be on vacation too, as it's not that hard to see that someone is doing all the work. I have seen this continue just once. It had to do with the place having very poor pay. Management wasn't firing the slackers because that's all they could hire at their rates. The hard working engineers just weren't wise enough to realize that they could often do a bit less work for a lot more pay somewhere else.

What is more common is that effort levels are similar within the same department, but wildly different across companies. I've worked at places where people considered themselves slackers when they were doing 60 hours plus on call time. I've also worked at others where entire teams did about 2 hours of actual work a day, and the rest was spent on long lunches, ping pong and retro consoles.


The trick is to avoid becoming that developer.


I think the trick is to give and take. And maintain teams that give and take.

Sometimes I need to take my foot of the gas. But I also appreciate that, when I do, someone else has to pick up the slack.

When I encounter teammates who only take, take, take, and never give, either they leave or I do (depending how much influence I have over their employment)


The trick is that everyone is both in my experience. I had weeks where i worked barely 10 hours (well, a week actually, but in my defense, the onboarding was shit), including meetings and mails. Most of the time once i understand what i have to do (and that can take some time), i'm around 20 to 30 hours. But i know i can whip myself and work 45 full hours (legal duration in my country is 35), as i did during august when the team was on vacation and we had a lot of fires to tend to, for two weeks.


it's all relative. a lot of jobs are depressing.

I'm a long time paramedic who has seen more people die than I care to remember.

some days I'd rather be an order picker at Amazon. It's a lot easier to clock out and not bring work home with you. I might actually make more money at Amazon, to be honest.


Not to mention the perverse association you develop with the computer being a requirement for getting work done. My dopamine is so tied to ticking off boxes by finishing computer work that tasks like cleaning the kitchen have an empty feeling.


My son in law was visiting the other week and asked me about my tech job. I told him that it is like taking a calculus exam everyday of the week, where I am not exactly sure what the course material is that day, or that it is a chapter I have not seen yet.


Also being forced to use inferior tech just because of hiring reason is like getting waterboarding.


  "Office work is much much safer"
Not sure about that, given increased cardiovascular disease risk


> This is very much poverty/shit job tourism

I was thinking this too while reading it. Good for him I guess but there's sort of an eat pray love tone deafness to writing an article about the experience.


The author was pretty clearly self aware of their unique context:

"I am not going to bill an Amazon job as some sort of upper-middle-class panacea, something you go do just like you go enroll in survivalist camps or silent retreats. The job can be dehumanizing, physically wearing if not outright painful, and mind-numbingly boring if you can’t invent little games for yourself while lifting 300 boxes an hour for eleven hours straight."

It doesn't invalidate their experience.

Something I've started trying to do more consistently when reading stuff on the web is instead of asking myself, "How can I discredit or discard this author's point?" Instead, I try to ask, "What can I take of value from their writing?"

There is always ample reason to disagree with something you read. There's an edge case the missed, an exception they overlooked, a tragedy even worse than theirs, a privilege they failed to properly check, a mistake they made in their past, etc. It's not interesting to poke holes in what you read because you can do it in almost everything. Any property that is true of all writing is essentially meaningless.

Instead, I try to seek out what is true and useful in it and just ignore the parts I don't agree with. (And I certainly try to comment on those parts less.) In this case, we have an upper-middle-class successful software person who still found themselves struggling with depression despite "winning" at all the things our culture says we're supposed to do. And this person had a real, true experience where a shitty job at Amazon dramatically improved their mental health.

That's clearly telling me something interesting about our need for structure, for work that feels grounded and tangible, and likely to spend more time using our bodies.


The public is catching on to how sucky it is: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/22/amazon-wo...


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The most sinister thing about it is that we do need to honor those people who work incredibly hard and undesirable jobs, but by compensating them, not just worshipping them like heroes. Mike Rowe and the cabal that funded his character attempt to make the viewer feel self-righteous satisfaction merely from empty recognition of merit.

He argues against a minimum wage because some jobs are ‘stepping stones,’ but this runs counter to his whole narrative. Further, a proper trade skill training infrastructure a la unions or guilds would allow for experience ranked compensation. I get that people are wary of corruption and protectionism in unions, but it seems relatively fair in an adversarial market system.

(I’m also aware that simply expressing the need for higher compensation/benefits here is going to sound like bootlicking to smug leftists, but I would respect the dirty job of literal bootlicking.)


The reason I as a dev earn a lot more than our order picker where I work is that the software I have built is speeding up everything. I created massive improvements in efficiency. My high salary is justified because my work has a much bigger impact on the finances.

It is that simple. I interview often to get a true market rate. Nobody would pay me what I'm making if the market for devs wasn't this good.


You're paid what it costs for you not to work somewhere else. This is largely decoupled from how much value you create.

The only kind of compensation that is correlated to value are sales commissions, which most devs don't make.

A lot of us get deluded from the fact that we're highly skilled labor that takes a ton of training and skill sets most people don't have, while at the moment we make products with zero marginal costs. It's not the latter that's as important as the former.


> You're paid what it costs for you not to work somewhere else. This is largely decoupled from how much value you create.

I bet quite a number of HNers have liked a given workplace, but done the "job boomerang" where they jumped over to a much higher paying (but less desirable to them) job, only to jump back to their preferred place at much MUCH higher pay.

I hate interviewing as much as the next person, but it is the only way to actually get closer to what one is worth.

Trying to just save up for when the AI gets so good all of us will be going to FCs like this story /s


> is that the software I have built is speeding up everything.

Your high salary isn't "justified" by anything except current market supply and demand.

Which is to some extent, very much the natural case in point: a software developer is no value to me if what I need is a carpenter.


Supply and demand only work in the short term as an explanation why something costs the amount it does _right now_. Once enough time has passed for the markets to adjust then there is something fundamental that causes them to be stuck at a given level.

Software development is applied autism. There aren't many people on the spectrum and the ones of us lucky enough to be interested in computers (instead of say model trains) are making out like bandits because there's no one else who could do our jobs.

OP already covered why there's such a high demand for us. When you have a limited supply and unlimited demand wages increase. Or to put it another way: there are no other professions that can make 10 million for their employers in an afternoon by thinking really hard.


> Supply and demand only work in the short term as an explanation why something costs the amount it does _right now_. Once enough time has passed for the markets to adjust then there is something fundamental that causes them to be stuck at a given level.

[citation needed]

> Software development is applied autism.

[citation needed]

> Or to put it another way: there are no other professions that can make 10 million for their employers in an afternoon by thinking really hard.

The entire finance industry called and wants to have a word. Not that I'm a fan of theirs, but perhaps you should think harder next time before you post.


The financial industry doesn't make money out of bits and bytes. They make money out of other money and lose all of it every 10 years or so. We're seeing it real time today hilariously enough.


so how much does an $avgDev make?


A pretty average number of course.


It's not propaganda, it's a perspective. He's pretty involved in activism on the behalf of trades work, not just the mouthpiece of some think tank ad campaign.


> not just the mouthpiece of some think tank ad campaign.

Uh huh. Here's his "worker's pledge." It is literally "be a good little peasant worker drone" bullshit:

    I believe that I have won the greatest lottery of all time. I am alive. I walk the Earth. I live in America. Above all things, I am grateful.

    I believe that I am entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Nothing more. I also understand that "happiness" and the "pursuit of happiness" are not the same thing.

    I believe there is no such thing as a "bad job." I believe that all jobs are opportunities, and it's up to me to make the best of them.

    I do not "follow my passion." I bring it with me. I believe that any job can be done with passion and enthusiasm.

    I deplore debt, and do all I can to avoid it. I would rather live in a tent and eat beans than borrow money to pay for a lifestyle I can't afford.

    I believe that my safety is my responsibility. I understand that being in "compliance" does not necessarily mean I'm out of danger.

    I believe the best way to distinguish myself at work is to show up early, stay late, and cheerfully volunteer for every crappy task there is.

    I believe the most annoying sounds in the world are whining and complaining. I will never make them. If I am unhappy in my work, I will either find a new job, or find a way to be happy.

    I believe that my education is my responsibility, and absolutely critical to my success. I am resolved to learn as much as I can from whatever source is available to me. I will never stop learning, and understand that library cards are free.

    I believe that I am a product of my choices – not my circumstances. I will never blame anyone for my shortcomings or the challenges I face. And I will never accept the credit for something I didn’t do.

    I understand the world is not fair, and I’m OK with that. I do not resent the success of others.

    I believe that all people are created equal. I also believe that all people make choices. Some choose to be lazy. Some choose to sleep in. I choose to work my butt off.


I find this to be empowering, not offensive. Seems like it's mostly telling you that some things are in your control and some aren't, and that you're responsible for the stuff that's in your control. Frankly, this would be great for an entrepreneur.

I've had plenty of crappy jobs/bosses, but I can't think of one job where being bitter, entitled, or negative would have helped me.


It can be empowering if you take it at face value. The obvious subtext is that it is something used to discourage the worker from seeking collective action or improving their working conditions. If you applied these ideas in real life we'd still be living with Victorian-style working conditions, and we'd be unable to do anything at all against structural economic problems that determine livelihoods way more than any personal responsibility or gumption.

Heck even the part about showing up early etc. to distinguish yourself is naïve even in the best light when you've spent time at a job.


"I believe that I have won the greatest lottery of all time...I live in America." And this is the point where my bullshit detector overheated and exploded.


You have to understand that most Americans are indoctrinated to believe that America is “the best” from the moment they are born. I have lived and worked in the US, Europe, and Australia and can truthfully say that you have won the lottery if you are born in any of the rich western democratic country. And I personally don’t put the US as #1 on that list.


Oh I've lived here my whole life, and trust me, I know the score.


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> The dude is literally bankrolled by the Koch Industries.

This is just a straw man. Who cares who pays him? I could say the same thing for:

Typescript. It's literally bankrolled by Microsoft, insert quip that says Typescript devs can't have good intentions here

Tensorflow. It's literally bankrolled by Google, insert quip that says tensorflow devs can't have good intentions here

React. It's literally bankrolled by Facebook/Meta, insert quip that says React Framework devs can't have good intentions here

Etc.


Maybe you don't care, but I care and so do many people. I'd argue you should also care.

Knowing where the money comes from is fundamental is so many aspect of our society.

Getting a loan from a bank will require you to disclose some information about your money getting activities. Why? First to make sure nothing illegal is going on, and second to make sure you will be able to pay back the loan.

Running your political campaign will require you to disclose how it's financed. Again why? Because people realized long ago that you don't bite the hand that is feeding you or something. Meaning you should expect a strong bias by that politician for their backers.

And so why care about a public figure getting money from the Koch Industries? Because it adds a crucial information on how to process the opinions coming out of that public figure.

Yes it's possible that the source of money doesn't affect anything, but it's also highly possible that it does and many times it does, so why not care about it?


All of those are true! Those projects serve their corporate masters, not you-the-user.

If you get some benefit from using them as a dev, it's either incidental or part of a larger plan to lure you into their corporate "ecosystem" (think: why is React so much more dominant than Vue or Svelte?)


It’s not a straw man if I am replying directly to a claim:

> not just the mouthpiece of some think tank ad campaign.


This was the first I'd heard of this and thought it sounded interesting, so I looked into it.

If I were a fact-checker, I guess I'd rate this as "mostly false". He's not "bankrolled by Koch Industries", but he runs a non-profit which publicly discloses donors and one of the Koch brothers donated some money to it.

But it did lead me down an interesting far-left rabbit hole, where the worldview is that a guy saying "respect people doing blue collar jobs" and encouraging people to keep working to improve their lives is treated as a nefarious enemy, so that was fun. A good reminder that QAnon doesn't have a monopoly an eyeroll-inducing political views.


What a hot take, I may have spent too much time on the internet myself today.


I didn't know about Mike Rowe before this post. Thanks.

Wiki says: <<He is known for his work on the Discovery Channel series Dirty Jobs and the series Somebody's Gotta Do It originally developed for CNN.>>

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Rowe


Better than destroying your body for no pay in a command economy.


More capitalist propaganda. You're incorrect... workers do get paid in a command economy. Of course there isn't a command economy on earth, so this is pointless whataboutism on your part, but like I said... capitalist propaganda.


Considering how much physical jobs can pay, I’m not sure where you got “low pay” from.

Plenty of non-physical jobs that are low pay as well.


I'd never heard of this guy before this morning (and I was happier then). Given his image, you'd think his Wikipedia page would be quick mention if he'd ever held a blue-collar job himself. Far as I can tell, however, he has only worked a a TV personality and opera singer.

Given that, and the fact that his spiel below is exactly what I'd want my employees to believe if I were a rich sociopath, my conclusion is that he's a shill, pure and simple.




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