This isn't the right metaphor. I'm not trying to force a path; I have a very strong internal sense of a general direction I need to go. But there is no path in that direction. So I'm trying to forge one.
As for why that direction, I don't know of course. But if I were to speculate it's because I have a strong intuition that that's where my personal growth is.
> If you're the kind of guy that needs to be burning, all the comments about the cycles of business, numbers, money and all that are not going to work for you.
No, they are not.
As to the rest of your post, I get your metaphors, but the path from understanding the metaphors to understanding how to turn that understanding into action is longer than you might think.
Could you give specific examples from your own life or from the lives of others? What does it mean to write down your conflicts? Is it writing down what all the subpersonalities want that's usually conflicting? And what do I then do with it? What does it mean to snap a branch off your culture's hierarchy or history? Become an activist? What does it mean to burn off what my lovers want burnt off? So far I've only burnt off what my lovers wanted me to keep, which is why they're not lovers anymore.
I appreciate your advice, but I need more specific guidance for it to work. Would you be willing to take the time to write that here? Also, could you tell a little bit of your own story? Who are you? What is your life like? (I'm not just asking out of curiosity; in this case it's important to know for the advice to work)
Exactly. If you label it as a "problem", you will continue seeking and believing that, if only you had the right knowledge, you'd be able to have a "solution". Or. if you had an answer that was at least convincing enough to yourself, then that's sufficient. Unfortunately, I don't believe it's that simple. You can dismiss this as a problem, find a valid solution, and move along. Or you can become familiar with what it is like to be with this unease and let it speak for itself. I'm not saying this will work for you, but I want to make present the falsity that pure rationality will be able to solve problems like these.
I have interacted with some of the orgs in the list below. I'm fairly certain that they are all 501.3c orgs but hopefully this will give you an idea. I've tried to think of orgs that are mainly tech focused. Hope this helps.
Volunteer Match
Give Lively
UPchieve
WeVote
Learning Equality
> Most importantly, know that the future is bright and that our best days are not only ahead of us, but always will be.
I've read (and watched) everything on your list of recommendations. Perhaps I should reread Deutch's chapter on optimism, but I don't have the same conviction that you do. Where does your conviction come from?
That we're in the middle of an exponentially growing creation of new knowledge, and that (echoing Deutsch) all problems are soluble. Now, there are exceptions to this, for example, a sudden existential crisis. But I prefer to be an optimist in those scenarios, given humanity's demonstrated ability to achieve great things. There's a lot of negativity in the press about the global response to COVID-19, but I take a contrarian view and expect historians to look back at the heroic deeds of healthcare workers and researchers to overcome this crisis as unprecedented in scale and speed. It has exposed cracks in our institutions, surely, but I see it has a crystalizing moment to remind us all how much we can achieve.
What you're looking for is probably not conviction.
Conviction comes from seeing the state of things not being right and seeing a vision of what the state of things being right looks like.
If you don't have conviction, you probably don't have a vision of the state of things being right. That's why most of the world doesn't have conviction - either they lack vision on how the world should be, or their vision of how the world should be lacks the element of being visionary.
I would ascribe 3 things for you to consider:
1) You sound similar to someone who got cheated on and can't date again. You probably need some help handling emotions like betrayal.
2) Betrayal is really difficult to get over and (sorry to say) but you may never really get back to normal. This is the inner psychologist talking, sometimes wounds leave scars that don't fade.
3) If you can't survive an environment with politics and betrayal (which is good, it means you have a simple and pure heart), you will have to live with the fact that your mission is probably not found in the business world.
4) There are many missions out there. Find the one that resonates with your personal values. OR, surround yourself with people that resonate with your values, and take on their mission.
I don't think it's good to go back to what killed your inner child. That reminds me of being in an abusive relationship.
I'd add open office plans to this. It's awful. You never quite get to focus, you don't build the rapport with your team, you don't get to customize your physical environment. Development really became a white collar version of the assembly line.
It's kind of weird by now. They will happily offer you $200k in annual salary, but an office with a window where you could keep a potted plant is out of the question.
"remember that sad library basement with the rows of depressing tables and power strips where you cried during finals in undergrad? welcome to your office for your next 40 years."
is it a form of abuse like trying to keep everyone under control? is it a form of psychological conditioning to remind you that you just a resource whose top priority is to be interrupted at any time so knowing that you don't really have any personal space sovereignty or privacy to your own thoughts or creativity but that you must answer and create only for the collective?
I don't feel I have a clear picture on what it's about any insights?
I can't say for certain, but I would guess it has something to do with the idea that all people must be available to each other at all times for the sake of raw productivity. So if there is a problem there is no time to wait. You just walk right up to the person you need to speak with and get it resolved then and there.
Open offices facilitate that feeling of persistent accessibility and production. No closed doors to slow anyone down, and no notion that you are there to do anything but work every minute of every day. So why on Earth would anyone need privacy?
This is full-on agile ethos. And, for the same reason, agile is also responsible for the reversal of telecommute policies at some companies.
You make a valid point. And I believe open office spaces are wrong for the same reasons that I believe agile is wrong: both assume that all work is fundamentally similar.
When I call someone and in the background I can hear 20 other people talk, I immediately assume that the person I called is not considered important in his/her company. Because high-level work needs uninterrupted quiet time.
For agile, it's similar. When you stop having different roles, then you implicitly assume that your lead architect and your junior trainee can do the same work, albeit at different speeds. If your architect has useful experience, that's an insult. Or it means that your entire product is simplistic enough to be built purely by trainees.
So both open office and agile effectively reduce your programmers to expendable grunts.
I have read somewhere that there is often _less_ face-to-face communication in an open landscape than with single offices. Possible reasons include an unwillingness to disturb everyone else, and that people in such situations tend to turn inward in order to isolate themselves from everything and everyone around them.
Also (and somewhat contradictory to the above), I expect that, if your colleagues are _too_ easily available, you'll be running to them with a half baked question in your head, only to blurt it out before realising you didn't think it through, and wasting both their time and your own. But before you go knocking on someone's office door to ask a question, you really want to be sure that you know what you want to ask, and that you understand the problem well enough for the answer to make sense to you. Which leads to a better conversation, less time wasted, and better learning.
In practice, this sucks. I have been both the asker and the reciever of the open floorspace surprise question. The reciever looses their train of thought and will struggle to give a decent answer off the cuff, the asker gets a shitty response as a result, and probably has to ask someone else more questions. Far better would be an email, and definitely not slack.
I understand but I think this is wrong. there's a benefit to asynchronous work and having multiple tasks in your queue that you're chipping away at its like the idea of task scheduling on a single processor I just think asynchronous is fundamentally more efficient for humans because they can maximize their productivity per task. And asynchronous "get back to you" allows there to be like a homeostatic equilibrium of priorities and allows everyone everything to get addressed. like hardware interrupts, and giving everyone that power, when it has a knock-on effect as well to whatever you working on it just doesn't make sense to me as something smart. I think it decreases productivity.
I believe the idea is that you don't notice time passing in an environment with purely artificial light, so you'll stay longer, work more. It's kind of the same reason why casinos and chicken farms don't have windows, either.
This is something I see people railing against all the time here. I'm young and new to the industry so I've never experienced anything other than open-plan offices. So maybe I just don't know what I'm missing out on but the idea of private offices/cubicles is really unappealing to me. I really like collaboration spaces, being able to see people's faces, being social, bouncing ideas off each other, pair programming etc. If I really need to put my head down and do some quiet work I can put some headphones on or move my laptop to a booth or quiet space. So I really don't see what the problem with open-plan is but I'm open to being convinced I'm wrong.
I have similar views on wfh, fwiw. Like 1-2 days a week is fine for me but full time remote is far too isolating IMO.
Back when I had a cubicle, I had a second chair and a white board in my cube, and people would come for a visit when they wanted to talk about something, and we'd draw on the whiteboard, and we were social and bouncing ideas off each other. Now, I'm in an open floor plan office, and when the guy who sits literally next to me wants to talk to me, he sends me something over slack. I think people don't want to disturb each other in an open floor plan office, so they rely on these IM tools more? I don't know, but I know it's way, way less social now than it was when I had my cube.
But what about the serendipitous things, like the unplanned conversations that lead to fruitful ideas, or the guy you're not directly speaking to overhearing your conversation and solving your problem for you? It seems to me you would lose all of that in an environment where you have to deliberately make the effort to enter someone else's closed space to talk to them.
Those still happen in common spaces, having an office or a cubicle won't eliminate those. The difference is, with your own space you can do deep work on your own terms. No longer is your train of thought constantly interrupted, and if someone does have a question or wants to meet or just hang out and shoot the shit, they can shoot you an email for a good time where you can devote them your full attention. Academia doesn't have this problem of isolation of ideas, and every professor there is has an office. Communicating to your colleagues is a company culture issue, not a physical space issue.
Fresh out of undergrad, open office layouts feel familiar to the long hours spent sitting at big tables in library basements, so I can see why some people like it initially. After a few years, you will be pining for four walls and a door to get anything done.
Fair enough, it obviously works for you. But on just a couple of points:
> The difference is, with your own space you can do deep work on your own terms. No longer is your train of thought constantly interrupted
What's wrong with headphones for deep work? Or appreciate not everyone has these, but where I work atm we have small 'quiet zone' booths where you can take your laptop if you really want to focus deeply.
As for being interrupted, again maybe it's just a company culture thing. Where I work people are generally pretty respectful if they see you with headphones on intensely focused on something, they'll probably just ping you a message on slack asking when's good to talk. But equally if people have headphones off, open body language- everyone feels happy to strike up conversation and there are no barriers in the way of collaboration.
I'm not sure i can convince you, but I can say that going to school in the 70's and 80s was a completely different experience. We did a minimum amount of group work. Homework was not done collaboratively.
So to my generation, this bouncing ideas thing is less of a requirement because we're used to doing our own work.
If you look at scientific papers from fifty years ago, most had just a few authors, now many of them list eight or ten.
The team approach seems to be taking over the world. However, I would point out that most truly great work, think Nobel prize, or truly awesome engineering work (K&R, UNIX) has till now mostly been achieved by individuals or by small teams, and that there was a lot of focused individual effort put into them.
I don't mean to sound condescending at all, because the young are going to win out by default, you guys are the future and we are the dinosaurs. You preferences and work habits will become the correct ones (whether they are better or not).
However, I would suggest that you like open plan environments because this preference has been trained into you since early grade school.
Private offices suck. The environment you want is ~5 developers per office. You get to build rapport with your coworkers, customize the physical space together, collaborate, differentiate yourselves from other teams. But you don't have to deal with Heather in recruiting telling Judy about the details of her wedding dress.
Would you share yours? I'd really like to hear from an older person. I'd imagine you know 10x of what I do now. It would be incredibly helpful if you could share some of what you've experienced and learned.
My first burnout was pure depletion of energy. I was young, passionate, and believed in doing the best work I could. I was addicted to work and pushed myself to deliver. I did, and built a career. I left after almost a decade at that company and went to a new job that had 20x the employees and was well resourced.
I got to kick back a bit and the job was more about delivering accurately and not delivering volume. I spent the first 3 years in that position recovering from prior burnout while still working. I got bored, so I quit and started a business. I worked myself for years right into the ground, burned out again. I took a few months off and relaxed. I ended up geting bored again before I fully recovered and went back to work.
I changed career tracks and switched technologies figuring this would give me a challenge and excitement. A new profession, systems, and rules of engagement. I was truly excited at first and I worked hard. Then I burned out again, before having recovered from prior burnout. This time it isn't due to lack of work/life balance, its due to lack of technological and social satisfaction.
At first I thought it was a bout of imposter syndrome as it's a new career but as time went on I realized it's more about the industry, the direction it's going, and the effects of people getting into STEM for money and not because they're technologists. It's a lot of younger folks who boast about their adderall abuse, get excited to give presentations, and other stuff that I'm really not interested in.
I'm stuck in burnout #3 now. It’s easier to burn out after the first one. I don't have the ability to make a risky move at the moment, I have people who depend on me. I don't know what my next move is now but as you age and your responsibility grows your options shrink. I think I might ride out the virus and look for a new job in the hopes a new environment will give me a push to keep going.
> as you age and your responsibility grows your options shrink
This is common but not a universal experience. I do have much more responsibility now, but also a lot more options; unlike in our youth, we have no unsecured debt, don't live paycheck to paycheck, and have savings, which gives me the ability to plan ahead.
Mostly guessing, but I think I'm like halfway between you and the commenter you're replying to. I've been where you are, not from the exact same path, but what you're feeling is familiar to me.
My two cents: I find joy doing challenging work on products that are useful to a bunch of people without needing to be "the next big thing". But what I find more joy in is my life outside of work, in spending time with and taking care of my extended family (including my close friends). The most success I've had with this so far has been at a big tech company. This is for a number of reasons: the product I work on is more likely to be useful to lots of people that way (because a lot of the marketing work has been done already), which also makes the work challenging (because scale brings challenges), and compensation and work-life balance are good so I can spend a lot of low-stress time focusing on family. I personally find the most joy working on things that mostly make money through charging people money for services because it feels like the most honest way for my salary to be paid, but I'm not sure how much that relates to this, it might just be a personal preference. Reading your post, I wondered whether you misinterpreted your big-tech coworkers. They might not have been checked out, they might have just been doing their work while having other interests that were more important to them. That is my interpretation of the people I work with (and of myself). I think it can look pretty lame to excited young people, but it's actually the opposite; what's lame is being super into working rather than other better things.
But as a follow-on, something I've been thinking about recently is whether I can take the useful skills I've built through a career in tech and apply them elsewhere, supported by the savings I've been able to build up. I'm not sure what that looks like, but being able to gather, process, analyze, and operationalize data seems important for lots of things, and that's something I know how to do (and I'm not alone here, software is largely about processing data). But I don't know what the most useful thing is to do with those skills; right now what seems important and in demand is epidemiology, but it's probably too late to become useful to this moment. Probably something in the broad sustainability space is more forward-looking. I'm still looking around.
I guess the two points I'm trying to make are: 1. You may be able to find joy by having more modest expectations, and 2. There may be other useful things to do with the skills you built, you should keep your eyes open for them.
Thank you, I will consider it. I wonder what subset of these problems can be solved, and what subset is a fixed property of the human experience. I don't know yet. This is a massive problem, and a business is likely not the right vehicle to solve it. Political office might be, but everyone (myself included) seems disillusioned with that too. I'll think about it.
> Now that you know how the system works, would you feel better about yourself had you succeeded? Would you feel guilty?
I think about that sometimes. Had I been one of the young optimistic CEOs running around talking about how to improve the world completely unaware of the tech underbelly, what would my life be like? If I had a button in front of me that would teleport me into that life, would I press it? I'm honestly not sure, but I'm leaning towards no. I want to learn how to integrate all this and learn to operate knowing what I know. I don't think I'd choose staying hopelessly naive for another thirty years. (Then again, I don't think they'd press the button to teleport into my life either.)
well based on that belief I think you might have your answers to why you went through this experience. you clearly value discovering both sides of things and you say you want to integrate that. The positive take I have on that is you want to integrate all of that information positive and negative into something stronger and more real. that's ultimately more creative and future looking then the CEO kiddies who just ride the wave of success.
not to pep talk at all but possibly you could be setting yourself up for something great in future. jobs had a pretty terrible time getting fired by the Soda executive.
the thinking of it this way and I'm just brainstorming here perhaps any resistance you have to moving forward with this new perspective could be related to the fact that you're comfortable with how you now see yourself. no longer the hundred percent optimist doing something positive for the world. it's a more compromised position. you're more embracing the shadow side as well. I can understand why that would be hard but depending on your path it might be useful and could be your destiny.
A lot (most?) of the responses in this thread are "learn to leave work at work, fuck greedy capitalism, enjoy your family and hobbies". And most of those responses sound to me like they come from people with a lot of unresolved resentment and cynicism. I know that I can't do that.
But my god, the integration is hard. No one really prepares you for it. The old role models don't work because they're unwittingly or deliberately blind to this. (For example, I've never heard pg talk about this, even though ycombinator is practically a factory that inputs idealistic people and outputs people with experiences like mine) Biographies cover this quite superficially; you basically never hear from the person in their darkest hour.
I'm sure many people have gone through this, but to me it really feels like uncharted waters.
> For example, I've never heard pg talk about this
I remember him writing somewhere that he does not have another startup in him - that, at best, he can now do the YC. It's kind of a hint that doing a startup sucks.
BTW you may want to try reading Jacob Fisker's "Early retirement extreme". He's an ex-astrophysicist who became disillusioned with the way modern society is organized and wrote what is essentially a philosophy book about how one can live differently.
Re pg saying that, that's sort of different to what OP is saying. It's not just a general "startups suck" or "it's hard". It's a specific critique of the structural abusiveness of the industry which pg is actually a part of propagating these days.
I hear you, it does sound super hard, never seen it addressed in the "SV lore" and you could be onto some uncharted waters, would could spell opportunity. Whaddayathink?
Good to hear you're sounding a little better, because it must be super hard to go through that.
Re pg, it's obvious to me why nobody mentions this. It's not part of the narrative, which is designed to produce useful slaves (darts) to throw at a bet (target), with a blindfold on.
If you wanna chat more about it, you can mail me [email protected]. I have a feeling it could be interesting.
This isn't the right metaphor. I'm not trying to force a path; I have a very strong internal sense of a general direction I need to go. But there is no path in that direction. So I'm trying to forge one.
As for why that direction, I don't know of course. But if I were to speculate it's because I have a strong intuition that that's where my personal growth is.