The joy of not having many clients yet, haha. Also sorry that I haven't responded to the email. :( I currently have 451 from readers and have had to accept that I can't get to all of them.
I am the author and was puzzling over how to respond to this, but yeah, this is basically it. I still have very little tolerance for a certain level of incompetence (don't work at a hospital if you're going to crash prod repeatedly, sorry, this isn't adult day care), but most of my readers are better software engineers than me, and every day I have to humble myself and ask one of them how to do something stupidly simple, like "Is there a better way to develop pipelines than watching GitHub Actions fail, tweak the code, repeat?"
I spend a lot of time talking to non-I.T people due to my partner being a veterinarian and the local improv/music scene. The absolute disdain people have for the idea of sitting at a desk and taking orders from pointy-haired manager is humbling. They're very envious of things like remote work, etc, so we have it pretty cool in lots of ways, but I think there's something to learn for many programmers on the mental health/spirituality front from that contempt.
The happiest psychologist I know is many, many times more content than the happiest programmer I know at a corporate job. The most passionate software engineers I know might be able to claim similar joy, but they have overwhelmingly quit their corporate gigs and fly solo.
"contempt" isn't the word I'd used to describe my feelings towards this existence. It would be more like a deep, existential sadness. That life can fall into these local minimums of optimization - where everything is, on average, good.
- I'm happy, but not very
- I'm financially successful, but not very
- I like what I do, but too much
- I'm comfortable, but not too comfortable.
It's like my entire personality, likes, and dislikes have been smeared into a 2-dimensional caricature and propped up by a couple supports, for everyone to see and admire. This sort of existence is safe, inoffensive, and unremarkable.
Love your blog btw, it gives me confidence to be more like myself in my own life.
I read about some research recently where the researcher asked people how much money they earned and how much they would need to feel financially secure. No matter how much they earned they all felt they needed about 50% more.
It seems we are programmed to feel mildly dissatisfied no matter what our circumstances. I guess that is what drives us on.
This point of view is very popular and I've seen zero evidence for it throughout my entire life. Consider you might be living in a bubble where "the hedonistic treadmill" tired trope makes perfect sense... and that bubble is fairly small. Ever thought of it?
Practically every person I ever asked told me more or less this:
"Yeah sure, who would not want 100K a month? But I am not willing to forfeit my personal and family life for it and that kind of money always comes with a catch. Nah man. I'd be happy with 20K a month but it ain't ever happening while there's always the next a-hole CEO who wants a bigger yacht than his bros in the golf club."
So yeah, I heard your take many times and I have not seen it out there. Not once.
Assuming you were responding to my statement "It seems we are programmed to feel mildly dissatisfied no matter what our circumstances." I can't see how that squares with the paper I talked about. Of course you can raise your anecdotes but that proves nothing.
>> The most passionate software engineers I know might be able to claim similar joy, but they have overwhelmingly quit their corporate gigs and fly solo.
Yes, I'd agree with this. You make more money in a corporate gig, but if you're doing it for passion, not money, then the money doesn't overcome the corporate shackles.
> The most passionate software engineers I know might be able to claim similar joy, but they have overwhelmingly quit their corporate gigs and fly solo.
I have done the solo thing and have come to realize I much prefer coding for others. There’s just too much annoying bullshit in running a business and I don’t need to deal with almost any of that as an employee despite getting basically all the same freedom, impact, and influence as a high level engineer.
There’s even a point where things switch from your boss telling you what to do to your boss asking you what to do.
Agreed. Managing, fundraising, legal, roadmaps, payroll, hiring, sales, marketing, customer support etc. If you're a coder running a company, it's likely you might not get to code at all, or ever again if you're very successful. I wouldn't do my own business if my hope was to be more hands-on with software dev unless you find a partner to whom you outsource all of the above, but now you're back to the situation where you don't have full control anymore.
If you're happy with not having a bigger slice of the pie, it's easier to just focus on SWE as an employee and let someone else figure out all of the other stuff unless you really crave the company building aspect.
I will never recover from this psychologically or financially. My life will be neatly divided into before this comment, and after this comment, and ever shall I long for the former to no avail.
It sounds like you'd be a brilliant developer by most standards, but have the curse of understanding the gap between yourself and a top 0.0001% Linux kernel contributing supergenius. Drop my consultancy an email in case we do enough revenue in 2025 that we want to hire for 2026!
We've been floating the idea of giving everyone on the team Wednesdays off, fully paid, to read non-technical material while they're benched. We haven't done it yet because I pay rent and am worried that maybe we aren't good enough at sales to generate that much surplus... but deep down, I think it'll make a smarter team and that'll pay for itself.
And the only reason that it's non-technical material is that it's just assumed that people are reading every other day, and we thought a break into psychology/fiction/whatever would keep the brain well-oiled.
Speaking of, I found interesting (and thinking about it some more, I am not even sure why I find that interesting...) that you seem to be exclusively talking about technical books in this posts, yet "tech book" is only directly mentioned once, towards the end.
Probably because my audience is probably 90% software engineers, and many of them have more experience and technical skill than me. I only really dare to advise people in the first 1-3 years of their tech journey on actual tech topics.
I studied with some very cool people. One joined my consultancy, and the other won a million dollars in a machine learning competition before we graduated.
Unfortunately, yeah, we were all removed from the workforce in a conventional sense almost immediately. I run my own business and most of our clients are American, my co-founder became an executive within four years, and the last guy went into private consulting for the mining industry.
I know of a local business with a great engineering culture, and they told me that they've run forty in-person interviews to fill a single slot in the past. And their team is really overloaded with Americans that immigrated to Australia for non-career reasons.
>And their team is really overloaded with Americans that immigrated to Australia for non-career reasons.
Which is ironic given how bad everything has gotten since the end of covid. From my circle of friends _everyone_ has left and I'm half way tempted to move to Switzerland to work for a competitor in the field who offer American salaries with European social services.
LLMs are actually great for book recommendations. Still not quite as good as looking up "HN best book on unit testing" for most topics, but great for niche things.
But, to be honest, my go-to move these days is joining a community and asking a well-regarded expert. I get all my recommendations from readers these days.
But yeah, broadcasting has been great for my career. I don't even broadcast maximally employable things (but maybe that's a way to stand out) and am not even trying to get hired, but putting yourself out there does good things.
2 in particular is huge.
It's super weird seeing my country make headlines, but only in a way where I don't recognize the place they're talking about at all.