Comment by robocat

3 years ago

The article finishes with:

  At the end of the day, your life happiness will not be dominated by your career.  Either talk to older people or trust the social scientists who have: family, faith, hobbies, etc etc generally swamp career achievements and money in terms of things which actually produce happiness.  Optimize appropriately.  Your career is important, and right now it might seem like the most important thing in your life, but odds are that is not what you’ll believe forever.  Work to live, don’t live to work.

I paraphrase the article as: (1) these are the real rules, (2) you must know and internalise these rules because playing the game is compulsory if you “choose” to work, (3) you must not fall for fairytales.

> playing the career game

The audience for this article is engineering graduates starting a career, not artists searching for meaning. “Programmer” is right there in the title. Whether you want to play the career game or not, it is one of the few games most of us will play, unfortunately. Totally agree that the game has its compromises.

5 comments

robocat

Reply
klabb3  3 years ago

> The audience for this article is engineering graduates starting a career, not artists searching for meaning.

Totally agree, I understand how it could sound irrelevant or pretentious. There are a couple of reasons why I wrote this comment, and I assure you it’s all in good spirit:

First, some young people who love programming don’t want to play the career came, and there is space for them as well. I read the article as “you must play to get anywhere” (my interpretation). You can do your thing, either alone or at a company, and simply not care.

Secondly, I know many who have more money than they could dream of earlier in their lives, but they’ve readjusted and moved the goalpost, and keep grinding seemingly because of peer pressure and habit alone. Some of them are miserable for no reason.

Third, working in order to play another game that you really like (family, hobbies, travel) is perfectly fine. Many people in my generation think that you must play all games at once, and they get exhausted. But no need – not giving a shit is sometimes the highest virtue.

onion2k  3 years ago

I think this used to be true when a single blue collar income was enough to provide your family with food and shelter and a bit extra. Today if you're not earning an above average wage you just can't have the family, hobbies, etc. Life got a lot more expensive.

The pursuit of money isn't what makes people happy, but a lack of money definitely stops people being happy.

tomcam  3 years ago

I’m on the wrong side of 60 and have loved being a programmer for 4 decades. I don’t mind saying it’s a substantial part of my identity.

  • edgyquant  3 years ago

    By wrong side I assume you mean you’re my age (30). We should all be lucky enough to acquire the wisdom of a 60+ year old.