Ask HN: I feel trapped in my job and city
1. The job is meaningless. When I first started in the field I thought I enjoyed it, but now I see that the bonuses were what excited me about the job, not the actual work.
2. Although the money is good, an 'adequate' house in London would cost at least 10 times my salary. I'm renting a flat with my partner. It's a reasonably decent flat by London standards, but because we're renting we can never really make it a home.
3. London is a horrible place to live. I have no affinity for it whatsoever. Even if I could afford a house I would not want to live here.
4. My home town is an hour flight away but if I were to move home I would most likely take at least a 2/3 pay cut. I would prefer to live back home. But doing that would ruin any chances I ever had of being able to retire early.
5. My parents, like most boomers, had a much better standard of living when they were my age. My father had a pretty average salary, bought a massive house for a reasonable price, and saw his wealth multiply many times over. It's not like that for my generation.
My partner is in a similar job to me and he is making multiples of what I'm making (although it's more stressful than mine). Luckily for him, he hates his job less than I do, so he could probably stick it out a few years longer.
I have just come back from 2 weeks holidays at home with my parents and was pretty much in tears this morning starting another day at work. It's so hard to muster up any motivation for the job, especially now that the company is in a dry period pnl-wise. I much prefer my home town to London, but I can't expect my partner to move back with me, as he is doing extremely well in his career and it would be career suicide for him.
I have racked my brain trying to figure out what field I would prefer to work in, but I can't think of anything. I just go round in circles thinking about it. Given that anything else would involve a massive pay cut, I think I would regret leaving the job I'm in. I could probably grind leetcode for a couple of months to try to get into Google, but I would find working at Google utterly meaningless as well. I have the ability to work hard to pass an interview, but I've been working for long enough now that I find it difficult to muster up any enthusiasm during job interviews, which is probably a red flag for potential employers. I'm no longer young and excited about this stuff!
I'm interested in computers and programming in general, but doing it for a living ruins the joy. I would love to be able to retire and get into meditation / travelling the world / learning about things for fun.
264 comments
[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadAfter working for years at a large company, I am happy with a much smaller company, working directly on products. Happy as I could be, it still is work though. You feel more connected with the work when its usage isn't so distant.
Sounds like you have some burn-out. Maybe looking at other industries than finance would help? Take a break/sabbatical and do fun programming?
But you need to quit. You’re on a collision course with a burn out. Avoid at all costs. This will mentally scar you for the rest of your career. It’s no joke.
The important part is to get control back over your life. Your happiness.
My advice would be to jot down all your options and how they relate to each other and then go over them _with_ your partner. Maybe have them read your Ask HN post and everyone’s reply if you haven’t shared your doubts / feelings yet. If your partner wants you to be happy, and you want to be happy together, this is a problem the both of you need to solve.
Best of luck!
I personally decided to work for startup with equity as for me it is most interesting work. I also switched to investing and enjoy this extra skillset and income and maybe you might too.
Also you said your partner is making 10x, so why do you even work? My wife makes 10x less and she works mostly for fun because it's marginal change to our way of living. Don't sell yourself if you don't have to. Why are you so obsessed on salary you probably don't need instead of living best of life? You are already old (sorry)
Have you talked to your partner? "... I can't expect my partner to move back with me..." Maybe he's more burned out then you think.
I have no idea how you spend your money from your post but maybe take a long look at your life style. Try to figure out what makes you happy and spend time on it. The less you spend the less you need to make to retire early. You may have heard this all before, but I like this post. https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
As an aside, I've recently (re-)discovered I enjoy manual labor so have been doing yard work more. Something about it is meditative. The tasks take a long time but are simple and don't require thinking. Looks good when it is done and feels extra rewarding to actually have to sweat to get it done.
A better job can make a big difference, perhaps one that will allow you to spend more time visiting home (remote work supported).
We can't answer this for you and really nobody should try since you didn't provide any areas of your life that you find meaning in or industries you'd be interested to work in.
Most jobs out there aren't going to have any meaning and the ones that do wont don't pay as much as you want since you've indicated in other comments that pay is important to you.
Heres what I'll tell you. Accept the fact that most jobs you have and most jobs everyone have are meaningless, put your 30,40,50 hours a week in at your current job and find meaning outside of work and just realize that work is a means to an end.
Or, quit your current job, find something remote realize that you'll probably take a pay cut but with that you might be able to get a reduction in hours that you can spend more time doing what you want and be back in your home town with your family.
It seems to me the London location is a constraint not because of your job but because of your partner. So I'm going to play devil's advocate and say that you may as well capitalize on that and get a job that can't be remoted away and get as much out of it as you can before you both decide you've had enough and move away.
Internal transfers are pretty easy too; it's not unheard of to switch teams every 18 months or so, so when you get sick of working on whichever huge distributed system you start with, you can go work on consumer hardware, one of the various operating systems, Google Maps, the Chrome browser, a site like Google Docs, one of the many iOS apps, one of the Cloud products, etc etc.
Working at Google isn't the wonderland some articles paint it to be, but it's definitely not boring, and there are lots of interesting people and projects around. You might not find your job itself to be super meaningful, but being surrounded by thousands of other engineers who all would like some meaning in their lives makes for an interesting community, and tons of fun little at-work side projects.
I'm interested in computers and programming in general, but doing it for a living ruins the joy.
Well... maybe. But maybe it's just the soulless nature of quant finance that ruins the joy. You need to quit your job, because you hate your job, and try something else. Anything else! Don't conclude that you hate programming for a living just because you hate programming at a quant finance job.
Google and the other huge tech companies is one reasonable thing to try. Yeah, it might not be the most inspirational job in the world, but based on the experience of my personal network, it's far more interesting to work at Google than it is in quant finance. If I were you, I would also check YCombinator companies for ones that are willing to hire remotely in a European time zone, since it sounds like you don't really want to live in London.
How long have you been working at this job? You might just be burned out for the specific company and colleagues.
If I could switch companies easily I would. But you need to be insanely good at math/statistics to pass the interviews, which I'm not, and you need to show enthusiasm for the role, which is difficult.
Can you try to get into the hiring committee at your current employer? You'll get some free practice.
Then the past few months I've had several other big tech companies reach out and told them I'm not going to interview this summer.
I recently had a former Microsoft Program Manager tell me that "the more experienced the person being interviewed the worse they are at interviews because that haven't used that part the brain in 20 years".
The interviews are such a pain now make me kind of wish I was doing something other than Computer Science.
(I don't know OP personally and I'm not commenting on them specifically, they could be amazing)
I would say that your first concern is to find something that you actually want to do. When you leave to get away from a job you will probably end up in the same space and the cycle will start again
The money you get paid to work in London is in part because how expensive London is, so moving home with a pay cut may actually see you better off
Be careful of how this will affect your relationship. You don't want to get to the point where the line "I put up with is this shit for your career" leaves your mouth
Sports data (odds and pricing) is another area that ML could get you a job
https://80000hours.org/job-board/
I think you need to really weigh the options and give it serious thought. If you're so miserable that working made you cry, and you don't like the city you're living in, I think you need to strongly consider putting your needs first. If you're miserable, I can guarantee you that the people that really care about you will also be miserable... so you're doing them a disservice by continuing to be miserable.
It seems like you already know what to do. You really liked your hometown. You don't like London. Just go home and see how it goes. If it doesn't work out, you can restart. If it does, then great. Life is so short, don't spend it being miserable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq9OpJYck7Y (recitation only)
Mebe you feel bedder fta listenin to dis.
How are you so convinced you'll hate Google as well? The big plus of working at FAANG is that they have lots of projects and you can switch to something you are interested in. You don't to working on ML in Ads, you can always switch to compilers (dart?), databases (spanner?), VR (daydream?) .. the list goes on. Of course the rat race for promotions, and perf can get disheartening, but you can reach a terminal level (L4) relatively quickly and then focus on what genuinely interests you.
for every developer working on Go there are 1000 working on the most banal corporate crap you can imagine.
I'm not saying its a bad tradeoff - plenty of money. but if you care about what you do with your time, it might not be for you.
Another way to do it is to ignore the official process and go make friends on teams you're interested in. If you're looking for Go jobs, maybe just do a code search and figure out who's writing a ton of Go, and see if any of those look like fun. I know there's a lot of Go code in Cloud, which is usually hiring. There's some Rust in Chrome and Chrome OS, if you're into that.
I've never done a 20% project myself, but I hear those are good too. I gather that lots of little teams hardly ever get headcount, and starting out as a 20 percenter is the only way to get into one of them.
You share a lot of details about what you don't like and what you wish were better in your post. Perhaps HN can help you in a different way if you write about what you want to do and what you like (careers, cities, dreams and ambitions etc).
> I have racked my brain trying to figure out what field I would prefer to work in, but I can't think of anything.
I assume you mean that you want to do some things but can not make the money-partner-city-family proximity balance work.
If you share what you really want, even if it is totally impractical, HN might be able to find a way to make things work.
On the other hand, if you don't have some idea for what you'd rather be doing, I recommend seeing a therapist. When the world appears uninteresting in all dimensions, it's a sign to seek help.
Somehow some people are lucky enough to be at the sweet sport between what they like to do and what they're able (in the sense that they are in a situation where they can express they qualities,...) to do. But for one match there are so many mismatches, just a question of luck.
This is a shot in the dark but I feel like a lot of my mental state has been caused by covid, missing regularly seeing my friends, family and the alienating nature of interacting with my colleagues only via screen. Because of this I have resolved to not make any large decisions until covid is completely over, since it's hard for me to assess how much differently I will feel once things get back to normal. Till then I save as much as possible to give myself more options.
You have made respectable gains and come out ahead numerically/financially and there are certain winnings to be had staying in the race.
In the process you have become a financial professional based on your computer science ability.
Where naturally financial success is everything and upside is more important than in most alternative endeavors.
With a keen focus for upside potential, you have forged a lucrative path but this has taken you far from the mainstream where almost all other professions do not have nearly that kind of focus.
In co-operation with your partner you could maybe relax your focus a bit in a way determined to broaden your horizons at the same time.
Bring other pathways into your field of vision and just see how they look, those closest to where you are now will be the clearest but over time you may see great distances in completely new directions.
One thing to think about with pure financial operations is there is so much money there because it's wealth that has been previously created then accumulated over a period of time. In London I expect you are handling lots of wealth that was created long before anyone living was even born.
With a good nose for the upside, one close alternative application might be to migrate to a position where most or all of your energies are employed or available for creating new wealth in your own lifetime. People do love it. A slight change like that can even make for a whole new outlook.
In the long run you may not always be a financial professional anyway and there are so many other types of success. You don't have to keep it going forever, there are so many other professions if you choose, but looks like you will always be a computer scientist of high caliber.
So I see nothing but upside.
Edit: I'm aware this is a very privileged situation to be in, honestly that doesn't help much with coping though and everyone wants to be happy. I seriously had just decided I never would be. Even that (temporary?) feeling is mind-blowing
Why not try spending 25% of your work day on a business project you love? Make it profitable and do it full time.
Housing and location can be solved by switching to remote and moving somewhere more rural if you're up for that.
But it sounds like you've already come to the conclusion both of those things would lead you back to where you are now.
For you friend I prescribe reading Sidartha.
It almost sounds like you don't know what you want to do.
See https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&r...
Things you love doing without looking at the clock?
The general advice is to sit down with your partner and plan out the outside-work five-year and ten-year plan. Does it involve kids? Moving? Founding a startup? Having a proper weekend hobby or starting already on checking off bucket lists?
The only way out of a rut is change. The longer you leave it, the worse the choices will be.
A thought: instead of focusing on what the job is, find a job where you care about what the job accomplishes. You're in quant finance. Does that excite you? I'll bet not, or else you wouldn't be where you are right now.
Everyone needs software these days. Charities, non-profits, lots of companies that are doing good for the world. They all need software people, technical people, and what they accomplish might be of more interest to you than the specifics of how you accomplish it.
Maybe you are expecting too much from your job in terms of fulfillment/meaning? Or too little?
Community and people make our lives richer than money. Maybe find a job just as meaningless but with people you really enjoy working with?
Keep taking time for yourself and dig into this. What do you need the money for? Why? Why do you think retirement will be meaningful? What is meaningful to you? How can you optimize for that?
I cannot recommend enough the value of finding a trusted therapist during such a time. Such a person can be difficult to find and you shouldn’t stop trying if the first person you see isn’t a good fit. (This probably doesn’t work for everyone.)
Once you feel like you have your feet under you again, quit your job. If you’re able, take a job that prioritizes your happiness over your salary. I took a pay cut for greater job satisfaction and the trade off was worth it (for me; again, this won’t be the same for everyone).
I quit my FAANG job with no backup in place during the pandemic and so far have done a bit of traveling. No one blames me. It's 2021, the year of the burnout. For me the breaking point was watching the movie Whiplash where everything is given for the career and thinking it all seemed reasonable. The movie wasn't intended to be perfectly reasonable at all.
I've lined up another job already but will still be a little while before i start that. I was never that bothered by unemployment at any point except that i may have had to move back to my home country if i didn't line up the next job within the visa grace period. But that's not as much of problem as a mental break. One of the nice things about having some savings is that you can prioritize your mental health now even if it cuts into your early retirement plans.
Maybe you don't get another job for a while but if you are on track for early retirement being unemployed in 2021 isn't going to break you.
You're burnt out in 2021 after the chaos of a pandemic. Completely understandable. Do what you have to do.
> Given that anything else would involve a massive pay cut
That's one solution right there: talk to your partner obviously, but it looks like you could quit the job that you hate, and could still maintain your lifestyle using your partner's income. Then find something to do that you actually enjoy. I hope your partner would be happier when you're happier.