Emotionally detaching. I was a workaholic from age 16 until 33 and this was my primary identity. I used to always be proud of the work I did, no matter how lame the company or how many times I was screwed over. Then one day my father died, and I was fired from a company who I truly believed in and for whom I had sacrificed.
This sounds cynical, but it's really peaceful. With the emotional energy and sheer time saved I am able to cultivate strong relationships, passionate devote myself to music, be a better father/husband/son, discover new interests that have nothing to do with the internet.
I frequently espouse the virtues of a "Fuck you, pay me" work attitude, and I recommend everybody examine their relationship with their careers and ask themselves if on their deathbed they will wish they had worked more.
The deathbed perspective is highly effective at sorting out what really matters. I've struggled with health issues for a few years now, and I ask myself regularly, "If I were to die in 6 months, would I be satisfied with having spent the last 6 months of my life doing this work?"
Often the answer is yes. A job is a good thing. Currently, I work for a company doing meaningful work, with a decent team, and a product that is heading the right direction. I get a decent paycheck to support my family and let us have some fun, and go home and see my family earlier than most.
On the flip side, if the organization changes, the answer can flip to no and it becomes time to leave. Sticking with a place that used to be a "Yes" after it turns to "No" is a painful experience, and people frequently stick around too long because of how things used to be. This is where the emotional detachment matters -- It is critical to your well-being to recognize when that answer flips.
IME another benefit of this is you can attract a more reasonable class of people at work.
When you can be manipulated by guilt and "the VP wants this tomorrow, it's high visibility", the most manipulative people in your org are going to latch onto you and praise you. If you are emotionally detached from this type of behavior, other people who are emotionally detached will be more willing to associate with you because they do not fear getting sucked into projects created by those manipulative people.
Note that emotionally detached does not equal lazy or bad worker. Some of the best people I know are emotionally invested in their work (e.g. being an awesome developer), but they are not emotionally attached to the manipulative drama you see in every office and being the knight in shining armor who comes running in to put out fires that somebody else created.
That hits close to home for me recently. I was very attached to the company I work for that I sacrificed myself for it. I've, in a way, lost who I am as a person, and became more-or-less a tool that produces code. Not a human at all.
About a month ago, I put in leave for the first time in 4 years. I rarely take the day off, so this was a big deal. And, I felt kinda guilty doing it. Even though the rest of the team took their time off, I felt I had to be the responsible one.
Well, the week before the leave was to occur, we had an "important demo" to get ready for. This demo was something out of the blue, but I was asked to still work during my leave. I said "OK" an was really pissed.
That night I couldn't sleep. I felt that I put in all my quality work, why can I not take my proper leave like everyone else? The next day, I put my leave back in and took a nice restful week off last week!
The world didn't end. I'm still employed, and the demo (the all important demo) was canceled because other devs haven't even finished their work.
It felt good to be detached emotionally. Never again will I sacrifice my personal time again at work. Its not worth it to yourself, and also to the company.
>It felt good to be detached emotionally. Never again will I sacrifice my personal time again at work. Its not worth it to yourself, and also to the company.
If you happen to fall into emotional attachment and feeling guilty again, don't beat yourself up for feeling those things. There's a big gap between not taking time off in 4 years/feeling guilt and being able to emotionally detach. Sometimes it takes years to reorient your life and values away from feeling guilt for asking for what you want. Many times the people who have manipulated you will refuse to accept you are trying to change and this will make it much harder.
Four years without leave sounds really overboard. In Europe the law mandates every worker to have a one-month leave each year. Not granting the leave is illegal by the employer. Just keep in mind that in a capitalist society the work is never your everything as an employee. You're exploited one way or another and should detach yourself from the company in some way. There might be different circumstances where the employees' interests align better with the employers', but in general this fact always holds.
Yeah, I'm not afraid to put in long hours here and there. But I refuse to make a habbit of it, and have clear lines in the sand of how much extra time I'll put it.
I also adopted a similar work approach earlier this year. Worked crazy hard 16-33 y/o with extra non-paid hours. I now manage all work shoved on my plate as a priorized backlog and no longer allow people to drive the priorities given to me. I am somehow in a high level position with many teams to manage and avoid at all costs offloading tasks to others without these items being filtered through my lisl first. I always make sure that I won't interrupt someone else's current tasks.
I also have discovered the power of requesting to people that they send me an email with all the detailed informations for a particular task. With IM such as slack these days, people tend to throw away their responsabilites on others cause it's just so easy to do.
Overall, I think that being more calm and facing the truth than I no longer want to accomplish more than 40h a week as resulted in me working better without any comprises.
It seems intuitive to me that the thing you pour your intellect, attention, and care into for 7-9 hours a day 5 days a week should be meaningful and fulfilling.
On the other hand, hanging meaning and mission over one's head seems like a great way to manipulate and underpay them, and being susceptible to this seems like a great way to become a useful idiot.
Squaring these two views is something I struggle with.
It's tough because I think the group mentality is part of what can really make a company able to produce the value it can (more than just the sum of its parts and all that), so I feel that mentality can come from a genuine place, but it is also used manipulatively. How we tell the difference is a problem I'm currently incapable of solving.
It's a fine line indeed, and it's probably impossible to draw a hard line like that. Sometimes you're above it, sometimes below.
But the main thing is that you guard yourself from feeling disappointed afterwards. This disappointment comes from a wrong view on the whole situation.
So basically anything that you do extra for the company, you do because it gives you gratification at the moment. Don't expect to be compensated afterwards, because you won't.
But of course compensation for your work is more than money alone, and it's perfectly fine to get gratification from seeing what you created, working on something that excites you, etc.
I think it's easier to cope with this tension if you embrace the other parts of your life that are meaningful, as OP is alluding to.
It's a lot harder for a company to manipulate someone if they have alternate ways to derive meaning and emotional support. For me, this involves always having a side project that's fulfilling.
I think this sincere desire for unexploitable meaning is why a lot of engineers try to start startups.
I work at a nonprofit (thankfully not for peanuts), and I know that many of them take advantage of this. They use the "passion" of the employees as an excuse to pay way less than market rates, even if they've actually got the money.
One friend of mine is a developer at a nonprofit, and I know he's earning in the 25th percentile for his skills and experience in this region. I am certain his passion for the cause helped lead to this. Ironically, this situation has, over time, eroded his passion for the cause!
Nonprofits lose a lot of good people doing this, but they don't seem to care. Maybe because they've always got fresh meat ready to take someone's place? Maybe because donors always pressure for low overhead costs? Hard to say, but it's foolish. Only harms everyone involved.
I mostly agree with you, but I wouldn't entirely blame nonprofits. There's a lot of public pressure on nonprofits to reduce costs as much as possible because everyone is obsessed with "overhead". This TED talk explains the problems with this situation really well:
Choice quote: "so in the for-profit sector, the more value you produce the more money you can make, but we don't like non-profits to use money to incentive people to produce more in social service. We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyone would make much money helping other people; interesting that we don't have a visceral reaction to the notion that people would make a lot of money not helping other people."
I think you're misinterpreting what he's saying (which might be my fault for expecting the quote to make sense outside the context of the talk). The quote is referring to the fact that we frown on people making money from running charitable organizations that help people, but making money from running a for-profit business that helps nobody is considered fine and admirable.
In trying to find this balance, it helps to understand what you can and cannot emotionally detach from. For example, it may be important to feel you are doing meaningful work. But it's important you emotionally detach from "under all circumstances."
Many people use manipulation and guilt to get other people to do what they want under totally unreasonable/unrealistic circumstances. If you are able to emotionally detach from being affected by this type of behavior, they lose the control they have over you. You're then in a much better position to dictate a situation where you can a) work on stuff you find meaningful, b) provide high value to the company) and c) do it on your terms. Sometimes the only way to do this is to switch managers and/or jobs.
But why do that if it only makes things worse for you in the end? Better to find meaning in things you don't have to delude yourself about and view your job as what it probably is: just a means to sustain your quality of life.
good point, I think GP's counter is a counter only if you accept as a premise that you must find fulfillment in your work. Otherwise this point undercuts it by attacking that implicit premise.
I have my own personal goals. The company has some goals. As long as there's some overlap between those, and I can achieve both goals at the same time, then we're all good.
Actually I've noticed that many of the new grads recently all go home early and really dont care that much. I'm not sure if they're sensible, or maybe attracted to the industry because of the jobs and money and aren't really that interested in tech. Or just dont know what a tough job market looks like. But seems different now.
> I frequently espouse the virtues of a "Fuck you, pay me" work attitude...
One can enjoy the company they work for, but at the end of the day, they're not family and the loyalty only goes one way. Employment is a business contract and business is about making money. A company is going to try and wring everything they can out of you, so you should absolutely do the same.
There was a deathbed survey where they asked everybody what they would do different and virtualy all of the correspondents answered that they would have spent more time with family and worked less
The crazy part about overworking in the software development industry is that, at least from where I am (TN, US), job opportunities are abundant. I could maybe slightly understand working the crazy hours if ours was an industry where jobs were scarce or competition was cutthroat, but I've never had issues getting work. Yeah, maybe I won't be working on the sexiest thing, or making as much as I'd like, but I'm going to land on my feet pretty well.
My little bit of advice: save enough money for your emergency fund. I recommend at least six months worth of expenses. Not just for your primary bills, either, add up how much you actually spend in a month on everything and save 6 times that. That way, if you end up in a shitty situation, you can walk away and not have to worry about money, and you don't have to start eating ramen noodles everyday. I feel like money (or the lack thereof) is usually the reason why people put with so much crap. You don't need FU money, just enough to give you a comfortable runway to getting a new job. If you're even a halfway decent developer and you're in a decent market, six months should be plenty of time to get a new job.
The great thing about quitting before you find the next job is you are now full time job hunting, and can spend time prepping like you can never do when you have a job (especially a shitty one you are trying to escape). You are less likely to be desperate (as long as you have the money), so can be more fussy and pick a great job.
Totally agree. Also, in corporate environments a lot of times “work” is something done to make higher ups look good. Most “urgent” work also falls into this category. It’s usually optional nonsense that could wait.
This was a hard lesson to learn for me as well. It is something I strive for now though even running my own business. I maintain boundaries like strict work hours and try to keep my work away from my life outside of work.
After 5 jobs, I can tell you it will never be an easy call, even if you dont really like the job, company is sinking, bad management, etc. But like the initial commenter said, less attachment helps and time will perspective.
I've taken the attitude that I should be as dispassionate as possible to the work I do. Which doesn't mean don't care about the work I do, but there's a point where I become a perfectionist over the projects I truly care about.
It was actually one of my managers who told me to get some perspective about it, it was very hard for me to realize that my work ultimately doesn't define me.
It kind of blows my mind that people actually get attached to their work like that. I have friends to are like this but I just don't get it. Personally I just have never cared nor even been able to care about company problems beyond what I am asked to do to get paid in a narrow sense.
The people I know who have the approach you have now seem to have a harder time finding a job, because every employer expects their engineers to be passionate about whatever it is they're disrupting which signals that they'll work without counting their hours. What is your secret?
This is something I struggle with every single day for the last year. I value how much I get out of work in terms of learning and improvement and have had a pretty ok last couple of stints with a lot of things happening outside of my control.
I would not use the same language you use, but certainly one should see a job for what it really is: an agreement to do work for money that will be kept up as long as it is in both parties best interest, aka a business arangement.
I think the sad truth is that most people learn this the hard way. You care too much until you feel badly betrayed by the company or get totally burned out. Then you realize one of the major causes was the emotional attachment and you need to let it go.
After
10+ years in the industry, I let myself fall the “passion at work, coworkers are your friends, etc”. I don’t know why... I guess I was a bit tired to be always cynical and let my guards down. After quitting, I then realized that I was a fool and that hurted even more.
Made this mistake too. When I started back in paid employment I set myself ground rules of working when I am work, no email/messaging outside of work, arrive on time, leave on time, no overtime paid or unpaid, not thinking about work when I am not there, no socialising with colleagues and keep personal chit-chat to a minimum.
I found that this made me a better employee - focused on completing work quickly during the working day.
Easier to set these ground rules when you start with a company, also easier to set when you are 40 than 20.
This sounds cynical, but it's really peaceful. With the emotional energy and sheer time saved I am able to cultivate strong relationships, passionate devote myself to music, be a better father/husband/son, discover new interests that have nothing to do with the internet.
I frequently espouse the virtues of a "Fuck you, pay me" work attitude, and I recommend everybody examine their relationship with their careers and ask themselves if on their deathbed they will wish they had worked more.