False, this is a very germane topic for a startup forum.
Most wives WILL NOT go along with a plan to start an unfunded startup and WILL leave you if you quit your job and can't support them at the same level as before. In fact, most women have a "backup plan/husband" at all times.
You can read about hypergamy and monkey-branching to understand female psychology and need for security. It's universal, so it doesn't matter what country you're in, although some religions suppress it in practice.
I don't like the overwrought ("beta") presentation of the blog article, but the salient relationship points are very real. He's a lucky guy to have an understanding and agreable wife.
If you're a man and don't understand what I'm talking about above, then expect to be blindsided by your family after career changes, since this happens every day around the world.
To the dead comment that wrote "If you're a man and don't understand what I'm talking about above, then expect to be blindsided by your family after career changes": as if this thread didn't start by implying a "real man" would blindside the mother of his child with startup plans without considering her input. You condescendingly refer to female psychology and a need for security, without stopping to look at your own selfish motives that started all this?
Personal attacks (or whatever this is) will get you banned here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Edit: since you've been egregiously breaking the site guidelines a lot lately, we've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I'll stretch the analogy and say having a supportive spouse without being a supportive spouse is Kryptonite. I'll assume that should the OP's wife express that she was at the breaking point that he would be similarly supportive of her desires.
If both spouses expect the exact same support, it's difficult / impossible. I see most successful marriages where each spouse does what the other is not as good at doing, where they complement each other and don't resent that they ~always~ do one thing while the spouse ~always~ does something else.
Different kinds of support requests are very different.
"Please don't ask as much of me in the future, I am at a breaking point"
"Please do more for me in the future, I am at a breaking point"
You see the difference in these two? In the first you ask for yourself to do less. In the second you ask for your partner to do more. The second often leads to your partner also burning out and then nobody has any capacity to spare creating a horrible situation.
The super power isn't the support part, but being able to live with less part. Demanding high living standards and thus high workload from your partner is the kryptonite.
You say this like it's an inevitable part of life instead of picking just picking bad spouses or being bad at relationships.
When the husbands in these relationships lost their job did they try to get back out there? Did they help at home? Did they do anything about it? If my wife lost her job and showed no motivation to get another one then I'd probably divorce her too. Part of what I admire in my partner is her incredible work ethic.
Maybe instead of complaining about "gender roles" complain about people picking shitty spouses and not having hard conversations about these sort of situations before they actually happen.
You can pick a great spouse but some people change after kids arrive. My partner had a great work ethic too. But after our daughter was born, that supposedly great work ethic caused them to keep working at the same pace, destroying our relationship.
Admittedly, you also mention "bad at relationships" and that element was present on both sides as well.
There are people who "change" even after marriage. My father had one such experience when he decided to get married again and his new wife asked him to put her in the house contract as an equal owner. He didn't take that well because, she asked barely a week after the marriage.
For what it's worth, that was his second attempt to marry someone after he broke up with my mother. The first was with a woman who hated me in absurd levels to the point that she would attempt to choke me and throw knives at me because (according to my father, I was too young to actually engage her in any form of discussion) I reminded her of his previous relationship. And all that happened after 4 years of him being in a casual relationship with her.
Anyways, I don't know if I would call it changing or rather that there are people who try to hide their true colors until I get what they want.
> she would attempt to choke me and throw knives at me because (according to my father, I was too young to actually engage her in any form of discussion) I reminded her of his previous relationship. And all that happened after 4 years of him being in a casual relationship with her.
May I suggest that it is highly unlikely there were no warning signs. This level of violence does not come out of nowhere (neither in women nor in men). It tends to consequence of escalations. The hate toward the offspring itself should have been seen as warning sign.
Like, yes, dad is there victim of domestic violence too. But like with women who pick yet another abuser again, there is issue with partner selection, not knowing warning signs or interpreting them as passion or some variant of that.
If it’s reproducible, it stops being single examples. All your other sentences are variations of “Man up”.
In our society, we are used to seeing people getting at least vocal support when things get hard, harassment at work, inability to ask for higher pay, etc. We just forget that, when it’s men, the advice is “Ok maybe work gave you trust issues, but have you tried to man up? Why would you expect support from a spouse if you, yourself, aren’t self-supported?”
I agree that men do face some unique social challenges, but none of those are present here.
Yes, why should you expect support from a spouse if you aren't doing anything for yourself? This goes for men and women. Of course both parties should be allowed moments of vulnerability, but I thought it was pretty cleat that my statements were in the context of a long-term struggle. If my wife gets fired and has a bad week, I'll be there to support her and would expect the same in return. If she has a bad month, we'll sit down and have a serious talk about what she needs to do going forward.
If the only support you're getting is "man up" then maybe you should find yourself a different social circle and/or partner.
"He for she, she for he" means just that. It explicitly does not mean "He for she even when she isn't there for she, she for he even when he isn't there for he".
If you expect people to "support" you whilst you make no personal effort then perhaps you should reevaluate your outlook on life as a whole. That isn't how things should work in a healthy relationship.
Everyone would be better off if they just tried a little bit harder to be more mentally resilient. I don't understand people who act like suggesting this is wrong. Sometimes people need help, and sometimes they just need to deal with it because nobody else can for them. Not saying this is just hiding the truth.
> Everyone would be better off if they just tried a little bit harder to be more mentally resilient.
Yes, but this is not the world we live in. Awareness campaigns all go towards telling people to get support and talk about their mental problems. Maybe we are weakening people, I don’t know, I’m just saying that we don’t tell people to swallow up their problems, and in France for example, we’ve raised taxes to be able to fund a one-billion-euros plan to provide various kinds of help for those soft issues for women.
In fact, those very people tell men that they don’t speak enough.
But when a man raises a grave issue that blocks his progress, the answer is launched automatically: “Everyone would be better off if they just tried a little bit harder to be more mentally resilient”. In other words: “k bye!”
It’s not that we should or shouldn’t be resilient, it’s that we tell people to provide help to their spouse and expect help from them, only to notice that said spouse can be relied upon like a house of cards during difficult times.
Eerrrr. I know you mean well and I agree with 'choosing your partner' and it might be the most important of your choices in life. But. Losing a job can be utterly crushing and depressing. Bringing work ethic in what might be late triggered burnout or full on depression doesn't seem helpful as a partner. Yes, some people are lazy, but of your partner had a job they were doing with success or at least what you might consider 'work ethics' and then loses it, and can't muster 'putting themselves out there' there might something else you can do to help, rather than divorce? Therapy? Helping with finding a job?
Some years ago, I burned out, and was asked by my doctor to stay home, and this was followed by crushing depression. I was broken for months until I pieced myself back together, with help (therapy, meds, spending time with my kids...). My spouse says she was afraid I was lost, not going bacl to work, afraid I'd be broken forever. Thank heavens she just didn't ditch my ass, she helped me back and I'm watching myself more than ever, because I don't want that to happen twice.
Seeing the person you love falling apart in such a way (depression, burnout) can tempt you to reevaluate the person as a whole. But if you can't stay and help when I'm broken, what kind of partner are you? Sure there's a limit, and everyone must draw a line somewhere (and I'm pretty sure I decided mine before we married), but losing one's job isn't there for me.
I didn't skim it. It was precisely that part that prompted my comment.
There is no indication of 'why' she might show no motivation. The assumption here seems to be that she's a freerider, a burden, and not a partner with motivation issues. And I cited good reasons for lacking motivation. From personal experience.
Yes, there are people that become lazy, or show their laziness after some time hiding it behind an easy 0-producing job. And yes sometimes you discover that you don't like that in your partner and maybe you're now too different, etc.
But this hustle mentality, don't stop and think, just find a job, any job, gogogogogogogogogo, isn't how I want to be treated when laid off or broken in some way. There's a lot of talk on HN about mental health, burnout, depression, but also lots of people that seem to be OK to ditch a partner at the first sign of him or her not being 100% 'on' all the time.
There's many discussions to be had when you realize your partner doesn't want to work anymore. The first one is probably 'downsizing' as fast as possible. Can we live on one salary? How much time? What do we let go to weather this? Do you think it's temporary, do you want to switch careers? Are you ready to lose those comforts? Are you thinking about the near future? Do you have plans? Do I sit in them? do you want to try therapy? Maybe not all the questions on the same day. Decisions, together. And red lines if you must. Money, kids, health. Yours and your partners.
I was just saying, maybe someone you trusted and observed having fine work ethics (if that's what floats your boat) changing suddenly, is maybe sign of a problem you were supposed to be helping with, as the other person in this relationship.
If a lot of people are shitty in the same way we can try to find out what causes that and fix it.
There's a reason "you're not a real women" isn't an insult, but "you're not a real man" is. There's a reason men live 3-10% shorter than women and commit suicide several times more often (in my country 8 times more often). And there's a reason divorce law is absurdly sexist.
This is not to say "women are evil", there's no secret conspiracy to reinforce the gender roles, no "matriarchy" nor "patriarchy" keeping the status quo. It's simply people repeating what they were taught about life to their children because "that's the way it should be".
So the fix isn't to "find better spouses", the fix is to make people better human beings and live the way they want.
> no "matriarchy" nor "patriarchy" keeping the status quo. It's simply people repeating what they were taught about life to their children because "that's the way it should be".
That is the "patriarchy". It was never claimed to be a Dr Evil thing.
Another related concept in feminism is "toxic masculinity" and that name is even worse. If you're trying to solve a problem don't start by naming it "it's all their faultism".
Curiously I've never heard anybody call the same phenomenon happening to women "toxic femininity".
> There's a reason "you're not a real women" isn't an insult, but "you're not a real man" is.
One thing I might note is that a lot of these kind of harmful social constructs were applied to women 100 years ago. Things as trivial as wearing trousers and as important as voting or working would have been considered "not womanlike" back then. What has changed that is ~100 years of the feminist movement, which made all of these and more acceptable for women.
But there hasn't been and still isn't such a movement for men. And I would suggest that that's what we need.
People, generally, get married when they’re confident they found a good spouse and not a shitty one. It’s ok to empathize with people who get dumped or divorced unfairly. Especially in certain countries where the process is so destructive. Empathy isn’t a crime.
> Maybe instead of complaining about "gender roles" complain about people picking shitty spouses
No need for the whataboutism: gender roles exists and are deeply entrenched in some societies.
A simple measure is how often divorces end with the ex-husband having to pay spousal support to the ex-wife and not the other way around.
This is a clear indication of how the legal system expects men to be "providers" and, therefore, woman careers and financial independence to be less important.
Spousal support in USA is rare and usually time limited. Laws varry between states, but generally it requires ex-partner to be stay at home for longer periods. As in, you have to have stay at home mom/dad partner for it to kick in.
If you don't do traditional she stays at home with kids thing, you won't have to pay it. Because either it was you being at home or she had job too.
> Basically what women do at all time is weave a healthy psychological support net of people. We, the men, should learn to do the same.
That's not really how it works, though. The support net is given to women because, subconsciously, society understands the value of women. A civilisation where the women are unhappy and take their own lives is not going to work beyond one generation for obvious reasons. This isn't something that women work to achieve while men don't bother. Telling men they should just "get support" like a woman is similar to telling a poor person they should just buy a house because it's a good investment. It's not as simple as that.
Some guys started doing this. "MGTOW monks" and Men's Rights Activists, for example. They were quickly ostracized as hateful misogynists, despite their focus largely being on providing help, support, and motivation to rectify particularly-unique male problems. They have some demographic overlap with the maladjusted incel demographic so of course all communities get painted with that same brush.
Not sure why you’re downvoted because that has been reality for some of us I’m sure. Me included.
My pet favourite example is the ”you’re shit and going to fail. You should do what I did”. This is advice inevitably comes from very toxic personalities who are in serious trouble in one way or another.
Was excited to read a feel good story about good relationships and the ability to strike out on one’s own. Then got to the “~taxes~ theft” and it killed the buzz. Why even include that? Whole article built on the privilege of being able to build your own business but calling the thing that built the infrastructure to make it happen theft :\.
It takes some experience with writing to learn to remove asides like these that detract from the main point. It’s extra weird that they did this on the company blog. Hopefully a couple extra editing passes are done in the future.
There are other ways to build the infrastructure without the current (IMHO exploitative) tax system in the US, especially given how both income and services are taxed. I find it unfair to discredit the authors based on essentially a lighthearted expression of sarcasm on their frustration with such a system.
People often drag politics into things. If you don't notice it much and this sticks out for you, it's probably because they're politics you agree with.
Though I'm not sure how principled your objection is. Is it against misplaced political hot takes where you don't need them, or is it against those you find objectionable?
It is theft by definition. You either have to give up part of your profit as tax or you get thrown into a cage by men with guns.
It doesn't matter if you'll use the money to cure cancer, splash concrete on the ground, feed me or build the cage where I'll be thrown into. You took that money against my will.
Lots of people who are taxed agree with it, broadly agree with what it's spent on (at least in aggregate) and are content with use of force to prevent defectors.
I think I would like to read a blogring of people who think like this, as a sociological case study.
I find it extremely hard to even imagine the mindset of "taxes are fine". Some taxes, sure. Some benefits, sure. But when a plurality of my tax dollars goes to the department of defense, I get skeptical.
Please don't pick the most irritating detail in an article and then copy it into the thread to complain about it. This leads to significantly lower-quality discussion, especially when the detail is off topic. Instead, you should pick the most interesting aspect, or the one that generates the most interesting (i.e. least predictable) reaction in you; and of course it's always ok not to post.
One thing we're working on learning as a community is how to respond to the interesting parts of an article or situation and leave superficial provocations alone. Not easy, but important for curious conversation.
> Taxes is political and divisive and that does not belong here.
When an article contains a slight passing reference to a political provocation, that's a great reason not to copy it into the thread and create an off-topic distraction on HN. If it were the main point of the article it might be a different story, but it's obviously a generic tangent in this case.
When there's flamebait, we should just not take the bait. It isn't necessary and there are much more interesting discussions to be had.
You're right to reference the guidelines, which include:
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
-> " ....but it's obviously a generic tangent in this case.......
When there's flamebait, we should just not take the bait. It isn't necessary and there are much more interesting discussions to be had.
"
You got me here.
"there are much more interesting discussions to be had"
You know that thing people you will not change someones opinion on internet.
That has changed.
This insight is golden.
No waste timing on flamebaits when I can have better discussions about other things.
Some people resent what they perceive as too much taxes very strongly. Where do you draw the line between taxation and theft?
For example how do you call 50% taxes + 19% social wellfare taxes on top of that, actually a 69% tax bracket? Knowing that in addition to that, should you realize gains (say on stocks) on what you managed to save and put in the stock market, well, these gains are going to be taxed at 34%? What if auntie loved you and made a testament giving you her savings, what about 80% tax on that? Is that what auntie wanted, to give 80% to the state?
69%, 80%: when is it taxes, when is it theft?
I do personally think that in many countries we're way, way, way past diminishing returns due to the ultra high tax brackets and I don't buy the "but infrastructure" argument: it doesn't justify everything.
Cool read, always wanted to take my own idea to market and succeed with it, but never actually found that unique idea that someone wasn't already doing better, unfortunately. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" -William Gibson
Question for people in this situation - did you worry you wouldn't get to spend enough time with your kids? Work/life balance can be zero-sum and starting a new business generally leans hard on the work side of things.
Yes. I still worry about this all the time. But I get off around 4 or 5 every day, I take a 2 hour lunch every day, and I get to spend time with my 2 year old daughter until 9pm, then I spend time with my wife until midnight. I built my business around being able to do this. I don't want to "grind" to have a successful business, and you don't have to, although growth is of course slower than if you did sacrifice your personal life for your business more than I did. I ran it on the side for years because it gave me freedom to not grind every day, at least up until it got too big to do on the side. Towards the end it was definitely a grind. But the first few years when I was under $5k MRR were easy (relative) to do on the side because I chose boring tech and things just worked.
I'm where you were a while ago. We are having our first kid at the end of this year, and I have finally found a side project that aligns my passions and a potential market.
I'm scared of what's to come, knowing that I want to spend time with my kid while still being a good husband and making slow yet steady progress on my side project, all on top of having a full job. It feels overwhelming and I'm not even in it yet.
I feel you. Don't be scared; embrace the knowledge that your productivity will crater for a while. Everyone's got different needs, but you will find yours reprioritized for you once the baby becomes a reality. Step back down Maslow's pyramid to basics like sleep and survival of your family. And enjoy it—not much choice!
The ability to build a SaaS, sell it as a subscription to other is amazing. Compare with our old parents, without a computer, they need a huge chunk of money to setup a biz(buying equipment, office space etc).
Especially when you're one of the erly to market(look like keygen.sh is a great one) and can move fast enough, in a market that people are willing to pay more than $50 per month, it can grow very quick.
> losing the moments I had with my family because my mind was so overloaded and preoccupied with things that ultimately didn't f*** matter.
12-18 mo after joining most companies in my career, this was my feeling. It's awful. You literally fight to make things better in a company, to help the company earn a bit more profit.
There are the enviable? people who can just work the 9 hours, do the job, not get committed or emotionally invested, and then leave the job when they walk out the door. But for some of us, there's the vision of what could be, and the absurd obstacles preventing us from reaching the what could be. Even so, the what could be often just means a percent or two more profit for the company. If you're saving babies and solving world hunger, it matters. If you're helping telecom companies recover from problems related to the 1980s billing systems which they never bit the bulled and replaced, it ultimately means nothing.
> A weight was lifted off my shoulders.
Until you feel this weight, and you walk away, you cannot know what this feels like. For the author, in such a short sentence, it sounds immediate. For me, 6 weeks after quitting a permanent contract (which is the kind of guaranteed security we're not used to in the US unless you're exective with a golden parachute), I'm finally coming to grips with my freedom. It's like a sponge that has been squeezed into a 1cm cube.
If I could give my younger self advice, it would be to NEVER go work for a company unless you were absolutely passionate about their mission. Never work for the money. You could work for the money and die rich, never having lived authentically. Or you could live authentically, rich or poor, and die satisfied.
My advice would be the absolute opposite. "You are not your job, don't break your back making some other (probably already rich) dbag rich(er), take care of yourself and those you care about first and foremost".
It's entirely possible to live authentically without being particularly passionate about the field you earn your living in - I don't have a passion or "dream job" in the software field because I don't dream about labor. I'd much rather be skiing, building stuff in my shop or fishing. This doesn't mean I don't like my job or that I don't find it interesting or that I'm not a good/productive engineer - it simply means I derive meaning in life elsewhere.
But in your day job, if your manager hands you a task which you know is futile, or shortsighted, and a week or month later you're all going to regret the way it was done, do you just dig the ditch on the beach quietly, or do you fight for real progress?
[edit, added: why do anything without making effort to do it well? not that this is your attitude, but this sort of attitude is why a lot of software really sucks]
If you can have fun digging the ditch on the beach and dig the best damn ditch you can, why not dig the ditch? And because you don't _really_ care that much about the ditch, it's easier not to burn yourself out. After 8 hours of digging you feel no remorse from going home. On some days you might dig for 10 hours (best damn ditch you're ever gonna dig while having fun, remember?) and feel no remorse when you stop digging real early next Friday.
I would tend to agree actually that digging a ditch on the beach together with the kids, seeing it fill with water, frantically trying to keep the walls from caving in and ultimately loosing to the incoming tide regardless is much more fun than digging a ditch in a swamp somewhere because $EMPLOYER likes swamp ditches. But swamp ditches pay the bills.
I will happily dig beach ditches for employers, no doubt, but only with adequate shade and breaks (don't work 80 hour weeks), drinks provided etc.
At this point in my career I'm typically the one advising my manager(s) because someone else already paid me to make or watch someone else make the mistake we're considering making. Perhaps I've just been fortunate to work with mostly smart and reasonable people so my advice is usually respected or if it's not there's usually a good reason - if it was a consistent pattern that I was just being handed random, ill thought out tasks with no context or reasoning I'd probably question what I'd done to get myself into that situation in the first place.
I consider advising and guiding the engineering organization as a whole part of my job description but there's a point at which just doing the damn thing wins out over protracted debate and sitting in endless meetings. At that point my focus typically shifts to mitigating toil/drudgery/future maintenance for myself and my teammates - I've cursed the names of people I've never met because I've spent months undoing work with their name all over it and my driving motivation in situations like that is to not have my name be the one being cursed by whoever takes my place. I take pride in my work but I don't really tie my sense of self-worth to it at all, which I've seen end poorly for engineers who become emotionally invested in their pet solution or project. When you realize anything you come up with, even if it's the greatest, most beautiful, most elegant solution will likely be replaced/rewritten/become full of hacky bullshit within the span of a few years it makes it easier to accept that.
> But in your day job, if your manager hands you a task which you know is futile, or shortsighted, and a week or month later you're all going to regret the way it was done, do you just dig the ditch on the beach quietly, or do you fight for real progress?
I think the problem some have with your sentiments is that this scenario is as likely when you have a passion for something, and the control you have is the same as in the jobs you don't have a passion for. So the scenario is more one of:
If the company is giving you pointless tasks, and has erected walls, is it worth the pain in trying to bang your head against those walls - knowing that the majority of the times you will not make a dent to those walls? Being passionate can lead to a lot more pain with virtually nothing to show for that pain.
About half the jobs I had were for things I have some passion for. My experiences:
1. Jobs I had a passion for are all on the bottom half when it comes to my job satisfaction (without exception - no exaggeration).
2. Management in boring jobs are more likely to listen to me. If you're doing something that society puts a lot of value in (e.g. reducing world hunger), it will attract people who want glory, and they are harder to work with.
3. All the boring jobs have left me happier.
4. If I'm passionate about something, I will have my own definitions of success and metrics, and they never seem to align with the company's. What's the point of toiling away on something I'm passionate about if our goals differ? And then in the off chance I convince management to change, I'm as likely to get laid off as in the past. I know from experience how crappy it feels to accomplish something great, then be given the boot while they reap the rewards.
And finally, I'm one of those odd people who doesn't separate job work from personal work. And with the passions that I have, there is no job/company out there that aligns with it. So the logical step is to find a way to minimize time at work and use the spare time to do something more meaningful to me.
> why do anything without making effort to do it well?
Invert it back to you: Why do something well if it has no benefit to you? Especially when you could use that time/energy doing things that are meaningful.
People have different motives for doing things well, and they will do it if there is some payoff (and it need not be financial).
> not that this is your attitude, but this sort of attitude is why a lot of software really sucks
It definitely is, and that's unfortunately the point of stability when you look at the system as a whole. If you want better SW, work on the incentives. Don't expect people to go the extra mile that they will not be rewarded for. Time is finite. I used to work hard to make great SW, until I realized that I could use that time for more meaningful things. If my company rewarded me more than they do those who make crappy SW, I'd be more incentivized.
> There are the enviable? people who can just work the 9 hours, do the job, not get committed or emotionally invested, and then leave the job when they walk out the door.
If you’re working more than 8 you’re only robbing yourself of your life and your time, unless you’re a founder.
> If I could give my younger self advice, it would be to NEVER go work for a company unless you were absolutely passionate about their mission.
This constant theme of being “passionate” about the mission of a company that doesn’t care at all about you is so dystopian. What’s wrong with a job just being a job?
9 hours is the practical time you spend at the office. 8 hours is the theoretical time worked. In reality, it can vary from 9 hours of solid focused work (rarely) to 3 hours of productive work. But either way, you're at the office for 9 hours. And with commute, figure 10 hours total.
What's wrong with a job just being a job, for most jobs, is that it's 1/3 of your life being spent there. What excuse is there to do stupid, monotonous, or worse - counterproductive stuff for 1/3 of your life? I suppose if you're Hodor that's just fine. It's not fine for people who see potential and opportunities in every scenario.
Ok, if you're a checkout clerk at a grocery store, there's not a lot of room for improvement unless you start to focus on having some good human interactions with your customers. But on HN, I figure that's not most of us.
If you put the HN crowd on a road work crew, you know there would be a lot of workers who would identify significant opportunities for improving the process. Unless you're a monk, why would you do the slow and inefficient thing, excusing it as "it's just a job"? If you see a way to make your 8 hours of labor be worth twice as much to the company profit, or to the customers, or even to your joy and satisfaction, then why wouldn't you try?
I’m not saying checkout for 8 hours, or to not try. You’re right, it’s at least 1/3rd of your life, you may as well do your best. It’s just, I don’t see the reason why everyone has to be passionate about their “company” and drink the koolaid. The company doesn’t care about you, someone somewhere in some leadership position has problematic morals, the person sitting across from you may have checked out, and your life / well-being is being dominated by someone that only cares about you inasmuch as you can give them something that helps them. You didn’t elect anyone in this position to rule you and you may or may not have had any input in the colleagues that were hired to work with you. No wonder people are so unhappy and burnt out right now… So don’t give your “company” any more of your soul than you have to, and certainly don’t give them your passion. Save that for yourself, your family, your friends, your side projects. A day job is trading the best hours of your life for someone else’s gain, don’t give them more than you have to.
Ah yes, my confusion at your meaning. I don't drink coolaid often. But I hate spending my mental and creative energy on dead end roads.
If I were the boss, I would probably direct my staff toward a lot of dead ends as well. It's just the nature of not being omniscient. But I would hope that I would be open to the pushback from a worker who says, "Hey, I think we really should be doing Y, and here's why."
The boss may have no choice… They may have a mandate from senior leadership. Really the system as it is is optimized to extract value from people from whatever level they’re at, with zero regard for their happiness, unless it can marginally impact profitability. That’s why it’s important to just do you. Maybe one day you’ll be a boss, and you’ll make a bad decision, or be forced to make your direct reports do something you disagree with. If that day comes, just know that this is just a job, if you really care, try to make you’re direct reports lives as painless as you can. Your passion can be empathy, the well being of others, in trying to make your corner of the world better, but again, don’t put it into the company. The company isn’t a real person, it doesn’t care about you, it’s a legal structure designed to maximize value extraction.
> What's wrong with a job just being a job, for most jobs, is that it's 1/3 of your life being spent there. What excuse is there to do stupid, monotonous, or worse - counterproductive stuff for 1/3 of your life? I suppose if you're Hodor that's just fine. It's not fine for people who see potential and opportunities in every scenario.
The excuse is the alternative is not that common. Amazing jobs are a luxury. We can tune our perspective to one of a job being "just a job", while both capitalizing on the work and leisure time as best we can, or we can think ourselves failures for having them. Seeing potential doesn't easily translate to job security. I think privileged positions render technocrats out-of-touch with the majority.
> What's wrong with a job just being a job, for most jobs, is that it's 1/3 of your life being spent there. What excuse is there to do stupid, monotonous, or worse - counterproductive stuff for 1/3 of your life?
Absolutely agree, but there's middle ground. You can work at a job that you find fulfilling, and believe to be something positive for the world, without it being a passion. My belief is that people who are passionate about their jobs are driven to do foolish things, like stretching that 9 hour day to 10, 12, 14 hours far too often, because "X needs to get done by the weekend". Passion can also cause people to wrap way too much of their identity up in something, and if they aren't calling the shots at the job (that is, if they aren't the CEO or at least a C-level), it can really hurt their sense of self if (more like when) that job changes in ways that make them unhappy.
Certainly, do something worthwhile, something that you can feel good about. But leave passion for family, friends, and hobbies. Or, if you can swing it, a company you start yourself.
(It's funny, though, because I think the workforce does need passionate employees. Consider that many non-profits are staffed by people who are passionate about the non-profit's mission, yet the majority of those people won't have a say in the direction of their organization. If no one followed their passion when it came to employment, a lot of those jobs just wouldn't get done, since they often don't pay all that well. So I guess in a way I'm grateful to the people who work their passion projects, since they help the world go 'round.)
I think you can have both. During those 8 hours you are passionate sometimes about some project you are spearheading. Transferring that to your homelige is the problem. Go home at 5pm.
This is the reason I hop companies every ~2 years. The 3-6 month period after joining a new company is absolute bliss.
Because of this I am less attached to the work, there is more wiggle room, and I am less stressed about meeting deadlines.
Expectations from management will also be lower because you are a new-hire without any context. I'm not even going to get into the huge salary bumps you'll receive by hopping instead of waiting and fighting through performance reviews for a raise...
Most good raises come from quitting and changing jobs. The first few months, once you've passed the interview and been accepted, you have ridiculous room to be a loser (not suggesting you are) before the company will begin to recognize that.
Consequently, you may look around and see a lot of actual losers who are underperforming because they're lazy or inadequate.
Freelance, learning to play the consulting game, charging a lot, and negotiating unreasonable things (like pay me in advance for a year of income and you have my attention for a year for any project) is the way to go for people who feel this way. Or you build a SaaS or other business and make it work. Or marry rich.
> If I could give my younger self advice, it would be to NEVER go work for a company unless you were absolutely passionate about their mission. Never work for the money. You could work for the money and die rich, never having lived authentically. Or you could live authentically, rich or poor, and die satisfied.
I liked the article. It was an authentic (I assume) personal story. It wasn't a "strawman," or a "this is the way things should be" thing. It was a fairly plain-spoken personal chronicle.
I enjoyed it, and wish the author well.
For myself, I worked at a company that had a mission I was passionate about. I'm also a xenophile, and it was a Japanese company. I was fascinated by the Japanese commitment to Quality (at that company). I like working in teams; the more varied and exotic, the better.
I joined, planning on an 18-month stay (like my previous two gigs), but left, 27 years later.
I made some effort to find new work, after leaving that company, but became quite disillusioned with the process. I had acquired a "nest egg" that would allow me to retire, early. After a few insulting and rather demoralizing interactions with a few corporations, I decided that it was time to hang up my chinos, and write the code I always wanted to write, the way I wanted to write it; with no one taking a dump on it.
I have never been happier. I am probably working harder than I ever have, in my life, and having a blast.
Good to see you here again, completely off topic follow up: did you or your siblings ever end up writing about work your father did with three letter agencies?
No, I suspect that we have all the information that we will get.
He earned a bronze star, silver star, and a couple of purple hearts, during WWII (I only found one, but he was wounded at least twice -maybe they just award one).
It earned my parents a place in Arlington, with the whole caisson/21-gun salute thing, but we have no idea why he got them.
There was a big fire, in St. Louis, in the 1950s (I think), that destroyed a lot of records.
Forget hearing anything he did with The Company. He was one of the first field agents. I think he may have been recruited in the first year or so of the agency. We think at least one of his brothers may also have been a "company man," but we'll never know. He took that secret to the grave.
If you haven’t tried already and you’re interested, you might try filing a FOIA request for any documents that the company might have. The early days OSS / SSU documents are largely public information these days and when they’re not, it can be the result of an oversight that a request reviewer might notice if prompted. I don’t think much of anything from that era is currently considered to be sensitive information.
Oh I liked the article too... didn't mean to suggest otherwise.
My one Japanese company experience was in my early career, and it was discouraging. It has been so long, I can name NEC.
The colleagues were great, but on the occasions that executives from Japan were visiting, we were specifically told to look busy. And looking busy actually meant printing things out, walking around with papers, etc. Even in those dark, pre-eco times, I found it absurd. On the plus side, I got proper introduction to sushi and fell in love with that.
I can only imagine what a good situation one must have to spend 27 years there.
The corporation (I don't name it in postings, but it's fairly easy to figure out, if you visit my SO Story) is one of the top-shelf corporations in Japan. Their brand is/was pretty much synonymous with "Quality."
I have been into writing Quality code, since my very first engineering project, and loved the passion.
The engineers and scientists in Tokyo were awesome. The company got "first draft pick." Every single one of them had at least a Master's degree. Many Ph.Ds. Having their business card opened a lot of doors for me.
I found their reliance on Process (note the capital "P") to be absolutely infuriating. It worked extremely well on hardware; not so well on software.
I did my best to coax them out of their mousehole, but, in the end, the conservatives won, and the company has basically retreated to its roots; which may not work out so well, in the long run.
Process is about HOW you do things.
Product is about WHAT you make.
I do think that both are necessary but taken to the extreme as you see in Japan and US doesn’t lead to any easy reconciliation.
They definitely took it to extremes. The problem is that it’s a 100-year-old company, that has been making top-shelf optical equipment, costing many thousands of dollars, for that entire time. They have an awesome and undeniable track record.
It was pretty much impossible to get these (highly accomplished and talented) engineers to accept that their way (hardware and some firmware) would not work on software.
It usually ended up with them, labeling my efforts to introduce flexibility as some variant of “lazy, bad-quality engineering.” Hard sell.
I can’t go into details why, or the story behind the decision (or what I thought of it), but the company folded up all of their “offshore” development (we were one of their “foreign” offices).
It was no surprise to me. I was saddened, but not surprised.
I’m writing a fairly ambitious app for a 501(c)(3). It’s a “full stack” system; but not what that term usually implies, as I wrote the backend from scratch (as opposed to adapting something like Firebase or Django). The frontend is a native iOS app, in Swift.
> If I could give my younger self advice, it would be to NEVER go work for a company unless you were absolutely passionate about their mission. Never work for the money. You could work for the money and die rich, never having lived authentically. Or you could live authentically, rich or poor, and die satisfied.
My advice to my younger self would be to chase the money. Make as much as you can, as quickly as you can, so you don't have to work for someone else ever again. I've been passionate about my work before, and, with the exception of one employer, it led me to burnout and under-compensation for my hard work (with the executives of course still taking their fat paychecks). I think there's also a middle ground where you can get compensated fantastically for what you do, and also work on things that you agree with and think are ethically sound, but don't drive you to work past midnight regularly because you love it so much.
Unless you are running the show, your passion is irrelevant. The people who run the show will do whatever they need to do to line their own pockets, and if that means exploiting your labor, or changing the mission to something you're not so passionate about anymore (or, worse, something you're actively against), they'll do it, and they won't be apologetic about it in the least.
Ironically, I think a good way to be compensated while doing something you're passionate about is as a consultant/contractor, where you get to set your rates and schedule. If you're getting paid hourly, all the better, because you know that every hour you put into it is going to earn you more money. As a salaried employee, working harder just dilutes your effective per-hour rate. And as a contractor, it's a lot easier to quit and move on to something else when the company inevitably changes direction in ways you aren't happy with.
> If I could give my younger self advice, it would be to NEVER go work for a company unless you were absolutely passionate about their mission. Never work for the money.
There's something more here I think. It's perfectly fine to just have a job that pays the bills. But it's not fine if you take that job home with you. It's not fine if the job takes a mental or physical toll on your mind or body. It's not fine to be married to a job. Any job IMHO, even one that you're absolutely passionate about or whatever. Even if you're saving babies and solving world hunger or whatever it's not worth sacrificing your family/friend time.
Personally I make about half as much money at my current job as my last job, but I work half as many hours, and there's no expectation of being a "team player" or "work hard play hard" nonsense, no phone calls at night or on the weekends, I don't have email or teams/slack installed on my phone, I have an office with a door that I can close. (well, I used to, in The Before Times) I make decent money (it's hard to get paid poorly as a software developer) but it's not early retirement money or fancy sports car money the way my last job was. I show up, I do my job, I go home. It's a nice company that does nice things in the world, but I don't really care.
And I know all about the feeling of relief the author mentions.
The idea of searching for the "perfect" job where you're passionate about working for such a wonderful company-- to me that sounds unrealistic. Like watching too many Disney princess movies as a kid and growing up expecting that you'll marry Prince Charming, or being pretty good at football in high school and expecting to play in the NFL, or the musician who keeps trying to get their lucky break. The world... well it's just not like that.
We're a keygen.sh user for our Modality product at Auxon. It's excellent. Some folks on the team have experience with some of traditional "giants" in the space like Nalpeiron and Flexera. Working with keygen.sh is an absolute joy by comparison. It's not without a few oddities and caveats of its own, but the experience writ large is so incredibly positive that those few issues are easy to forgive and forget.
It's really interesting to get some backstage access to how this fantastic product came to be and what underpins the motivating thesis behind it.
From one founder (also with little ones and a fantastically supportive partner) to another, my hat's off to you. My many thanks to both you and your partner. Being able to just grab keygen.sh and integrate licensing into our product helped us go from MA to GA in about a week and was also essential in getting some investors over the hump to funding (because we could show traction and an easier path to more of it). As a result, I got to reduce my stress level and spend more time with my kids over the summer.
I don't think that's necessarily always true. I do think that it can be very, very dangerous if your business doesn't _exaxtly_ fit whatever the prevailing thesis du jour is for how VCs decide that unicorns are made.
The reason I say that is because you're basically dealing with two classes of customers at that point. One for your product and one for your equity, and if there's gross misalignment with either you're going to have a bad time. If the latter fundamentally doesn't understand the former, you'll have a bad time.
Great read. Thanks for sharing and congrats on your success!
I'm in a similar situation. I'm working on a thing and my wife has been supporting me for some time now.
Years ago she told me to leave my job and focus on my thing, but I was afraid. I've been working since I was 19 years old and I have trust issues. It was very difficult for me to believe in myself and jump into the void but I'm 42 and if I don't do it now I will never do it.
Anyway, I'm a couple of months from the first beta launch. I'm happy, anxious, afraid, hopeful... all at the same time. I hope I'll be able to write a similar blog post in a year or two.
Wish you and the wife the best! I do not have the courage to do something like that. Even though my wife would tell me the same thing. It is quite amazing to find someone that truly cares about you! Cherish it. I have trust issue as well with my crazy family life. I really look forward to reading your blog post about this. You got this!!
Venting about how much you dislike your job, and telling your spouse that you want to quit your job and quarter your income are 2 completely different things.
> was making about half of what my senior software engineer position at $CRYPTO_EXCHANGE was netting me
This seems like something one would certainly share with ones partner. The authors yearning for doing the side project also seems like something that would come up in conversations in a healthy relationship.
Disclaimer: I’ve never been married but have been in serious/committed long term relationships. And I’m not a therapist either.
Ta for sharing your experiences. It's quite clear that you are sharing some pretty raw bits of your life.
"I just finished reading 1984." - No one ever finishes reading that book, per se. It reads you and then spits you out.
"and I still don't have a go-to growth channel" - no idea what that even means. Me and a couple of chaps have been running a little IT business in the UK for 20 years. We have around 20 employees and t/o about GBP1.5M. Nothing fancy. If you can pay the bills and sleep at night, I call that a win.
> "I just finished reading 1984." - No one ever finishes reading that book, per se. It reads you and then spits you out.
Amen to that. Of all scifi books to use as the “things have come full circle” closer, this seemed deeply ominous and disturbing to me. It’s like some sort of “this could go super cool or all come unglued” season enders.
I wish this guy the best of luck and hope it just gets better. The beginning to a happily ever after. But if the tragic ethos of 1984 is his victory lap, my anxiety worries there’s a darker sequel to this story a few years down the road.
Once I got cussed out by a business owner. Showed it to my wife and she told me to quit my job. Said we’d figure it out, but that she didn’t want me working for somebody like that.
I knew it needed to happen but I’d been stressing about how to tell her for nearly a month. The amount of relief that came from her approval and endorsement was incredible. I was less nervous about quitting than I was nervous about telling her.
Lucky you. My wife tells me to quit my job because I hate it so much. The thing is, there's no alternative that pays the bills and she spends more on her hobbies every month than I do on the mortgage, and she doesn't help with family bills.
And I didn't want to talk to mine about my gaming addiction.
Thankfully I did, after seven years, and it saved our marriage.
Help her understand that this really impacts you, and you'd like to work on a solution together. She may be spending so much for a reason you may not be aware of as well. A healthy relationship must be able to have this type of communication. Keep trying. Best of luck, friend.
I would recommend relationship counseling to open up communication a bit. She need to learn why her spending triggers your anxiety. You also need to learn why fear shouldn’t drive your decisions. Most importantly, resentment is cancer. End it at all costs.
I can relate to this on a much milder level. Story time. I was once working at a startup that was doing very well (growing rapidly, getting investment) despite the founders being pretty incompetent. They didn't know what they were doing, and they wouldn't listen to me about how to do things better. I have no problem quitting a job if my bosses are incompetent or if I feel I'm not able to contribute, but in this case my girlfriend at the time was nervous about it when I brought it up, and I let that override my urge to quit. A couple of months later they fired me. I experienced a powerful wave of unfamiliar emotion when I read the "your fired" email and it took me a moment to analyze it and figure out that it was relief, a wave of relief.
It was one of the very few times in my life when I've let other people convince me to ignore my gut feelings. I'm not blaming my ex-girlfriend, it was my decision, but it was the wrong decision.
- - - -
For your amusement here are some details of the business: they had no QA department, the users were our QA. All of the business logic was in stored procedures in the DB which, as a result, was always on fire even as we continually upgraded the hardware. Our HTML was 25% white space because our PHP guy liked deep indentation. He was a terrible programmer but he was a co-founder and a friend of the DB/sysadmin co-founder so he couldn't/wouldn't be fired. I tried to explain to him once that arrays, linked lists, and hash tables were different things but he refused to believe me because the only experience he had was with PHP and JS. The DB/sysadmin guy was a total "Master-Blaster" (You know "Who run Bartertown!?" from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome), if the CEO asked him to do something he didn't want to do he would throw actual screaming fits or just lie to him and say "That's impossible." They built a skating half-pipe in the office even though none of them skated. It was madness. But the users loved us and the numbers went up and up, so investors were lining up to vie for the chance to give them money. Eventually they (the investors) sidelined the three co-founders and now the company is a Wall street darling and a household word. Go figure.
Us men with wives like this are empowered beyond measure. Treasure your wives gentlemen. When I was thinking about making a change in my career my wife immediately said do it and supported me 150%.
I wouldn't be the person I am today or have the success I have without my supporting wife.
One suggestion for your website: more articles on general advice for how to sell on premise software and what types of business models work best depending on software usage patterns and software delivery. People don't want more features, they want more advice.
Good for you I guess. Virtually no one has the privilege of being able to just quit their their shitty job and take a risk like that but nice if you can.
It was an app that spun up and managed environments for WordPress websites, including local envs, with 1-click deploys and DB migrations to most hosting providers. Eventually expanded out of WP to other types of apps. It flopped for various reasons, but the main being bad fit with co-founders.
It was a first to market competitor to https://localwp.com, who ultimately won out. gg
OMG, this reminds me so much of a very pivotal point in my life. It was way back in 1987, and I had quit my very stable job with a telecom giant (Bell Labs) to go to work with a bunch of buddies on a start up company, we had developed a very cool new network management technology for IBM SNA networks (google it, in the way back times that was the shit).
Anyhow, I had been working my ass off, night and day, like you do on gigs like that. My wife of 5 years thought I was cheating on her. HA ! that would have been a lot more fun ugh.
Long story short (you can fill in the blanks, fights etc.).
So one day comes where, the dream comes true, IBM offers to buy us out, but I was in sort of a fog and worried about my marriage and moving to Bocca Raton was probably not going to fly. I get called into my bosses office and he goes through my options, all foggy as hell to me at the time and I sort of grunt and point at taking my profit sharing pay out rather than moving. So OK, in my mind I had just got fired.
I go home and on the dinning room table there is a bunch of papers, divorce papers, my wife comes in and tells me she wants a divorce. OK, so I lose my job and marriage on the same day within hours. So what do I do? Well heck what any sane person would do. I grab my wind surf board and throw it in my Scout (wish I still had it, wife said it was a piece of junk, ha, worth a lot if I had kept it). I grab the dog, she knows the drill, hops in the Scout, I make a quick pit stop for a 6 pack of Pacifico and we are off to my favorite beach.
I take Heidi, my dog, on a couple of baby spins on the board, she loves that. Do a little shredding. Then back on the beach she sits and stares at me, you know dogs know. Sipping on my beer. And it hits me, duh, wait a second, what the heck did my boss say again about profit sharing ? My mind starts to clear, starts racing. I finish that one beer and head back to the house. I check the papers, Fuck ! I am a millionaire, 3 months from now when the deal closes. Oh, let's check those divorce papers, huh, it can be done in 90 days.
So suddenly I am a super helpful husband with the divorce, I will sign everything and run it to the court house of course. Let's just get this silly thing over with, you are totally right.
Anyhow, funny how stuff hits you. Anyhow, never married again. Did one other start up after that. Been done since. Never happier. That was, for me, that moment, I will never forget. I went from the depths of hell to bliss in a moment of clarity.
From the comment about cheating ("that would have been a lot more fun ugh") to the comment about how he became a "super helpful husband with the divorce" once he realized he would be a millionaire, the post gives the impression that the OP was all about himself and never truly cared about the experience and feelings of the woman he was married to.
On the plus side, at least the OP realized that he didn't want to be married and didn't make the same mistake twice.
I am selfish and self absorbed. Maybe a bit of a narcissist, working on it but self aware. And yes, you are completely correct, I realized marriage was not a good thing for me (or for the other person, hehe, that's how bad I am, had to come back and edit to add this as a second thought).
Being selfish means that you are concerned excessively or exclusively with yourself. In a relationship, you can't say "I didn't cheat and therefore I am not selfish." There are many behaviors that most people would reasonably consider "selfish" that don't involve infidelity.
Not sure what my personal history has to do with this obvious fact.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar or further into personal attack. Maybe you don't feel you owe the other person better, but it's not the kind of community we want here.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar or further into personal attack. Maybe you don't feel you owe the other person better, but it's not the kind of community we want here.
Just because a marriage (or relationship of any type) is ending doesn't mean that you have to stop caring about the other person and wanting the best for them. It also doesn't mean you have to go out of your way to treat them unfairly or poorly.
It's not hard to imagine an alternate scenario in which a different person would have at least made an effort to talk to his wife and understand why the marriage got to that point instead of making a V-line for the beach when she told him she wanted a divorce.
Again, the impression I got from comments made in the post was that the OP was self-centered and didn't care that much about his wife's feelings, which one might reasonably assume contributed to the breakdown of the marriage. The OP responded and, to his credit, confirmed "I am selfish and self absorbed".
> a different person would have at least made an effort to talk to his wife and understand why the marriage got to that point
What do you know about him ? Maybe he already knew why the marriage got to that point. What's the point of continuing when the two agrees that the marriage leads to nowhere and that they are both unhappy ? To be fair, as I read it, this sounds like a pretty sane divorce. And sane divorces are far from being the norm.
There are details missing from the story, and maybe the wife had raised the problems/divorce before and he ignored it. We don't know.
But if you get home and the papers are on the table as he mentioned, that is past the point of talking with your spouse about your relationship, it is the time to get out, think straight and then head to a lawyer to make sure all is done right.
(coming from someone that has been divorced for 5 years and am in good terms with my ex-wife, we help each other all the time and talk about things/life regularly as friends)
Nope. If the papers are out, better call Saul.
There was plenty of talkie talk before that.
Saul will tell you, once you've been served, No talking after that.
Yes, most correct comment. It would be impossible to convey all side of each side.
Most situations relationships involve a complex interchange of many emotions and other issues.
There is of course now way to explain all that here.
But that's wasn't the point, the point of the post was that I had a moment of clarity, of what was important to me and where my life was going. I got married because that is what society and family expected, I realized that was not for me.
But ya, if divorce papers are on the table, time to smell the coffee, the fat lady is singing, turn out the lights, time to move on.
> How much are you supposed to care about someone you married who wants to divorce you?
Well, if you dont care much about them, they are likely to divorce you. By the sound of it, this dude did not cared about relationship one bit. God knows what faults she had, beyond jealousy, because OP choosen not to trash the ex. Which is noble.
But she was done with relationship for reasons that had nothing to do with money. He was emotionally checkout out for months too. Expecting money windfall to fix that all is asinine. Even if she decided to cancel divorce for half those money, it would be marriage for money and nothing more.
Aside from the fact that you're judging someone you don't even know from across the internet... it was a highly abridged story and you are nit-picking the parts he explicitly said he left out for the sake of brevity.
I never told her specifically but she had to know, she saw how I was living after that, but she never complained about it. I mean, she filed before I found out, I checked with a lawyer, I am sure she did too. The timing was just such that 48 hour later I would have had to split it. But we stayed friendly for a while after but grew apart.
I am semi-retired now, I have many inventions to my name and very very comfortable. Still inventing, no start ups for me, too much work. I have a great situation, I work for an IPR company funded by a wonderful benefactor I met along the way in a semi-retired position. So I still contribute, but in a fashion that fits my life style at this stage.
Sorry to hear, I lost my best friend too- her name was Tinkerbell. I still miss her and her love and companionship, but I haven't been able to get another dog. Years on and still feels too raw.
I was more broken up over her than my ex wife.
I share your pain, hopefully you will find that kind of friendship again.
E- sorry thought you were OP, but thanks for pointing out what I'd clearly missed by a mile!
> I enjoyed being a part of new startups, those that were still "scrappy." But each time, once that growth-stage hit and managers started coming in to make things "more efficient", that's when I knew that those types of places weren't for me.
I used to be in this position but then I actually became pretty passionate about making sure startups can make it through the growth phase and still deliver.
Most wives WILL NOT go along with a plan to start an unfunded startup and WILL leave you if you quit your job and can't support them at the same level as before. In fact, most women have a "backup plan/husband" at all times.
You can read about hypergamy and monkey-branching to understand female psychology and need for security. It's universal, so it doesn't matter what country you're in, although some religions suppress it in practice.
I don't like the overwrought ("beta") presentation of the blog article, but the salient relationship points are very real. He's a lucky guy to have an understanding and agreable wife.
If you're a man and don't understand what I'm talking about above, then expect to be blindsided by your family after career changes, since this happens every day around the world.
I'm suffering from work burnout and are planning to quit my current job to pursue a more balanced, self-sustainable way working for myself. Seeing your post help me understand I'm not alone.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadMost wives WILL NOT go along with a plan to start an unfunded startup and WILL leave you if you quit your job and can't support them at the same level as before. In fact, most women have a "backup plan/husband" at all times.
You can read about hypergamy and monkey-branching to understand female psychology and need for security. It's universal, so it doesn't matter what country you're in, although some religions suppress it in practice.
I don't like the overwrought ("beta") presentation of the blog article, but the salient relationship points are very real. He's a lucky guy to have an understanding and agreable wife.
If you're a man and don't understand what I'm talking about above, then expect to be blindsided by your family after career changes, since this happens every day around the world.
Edit: since you've been egregiously breaking the site guidelines a lot lately, we've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
If both spouses expect the exact same support, it's difficult / impossible. I see most successful marriages where each spouse does what the other is not as good at doing, where they complement each other and don't resent that they ~always~ do one thing while the spouse ~always~ does something else.
"Please don't ask as much of me in the future, I am at a breaking point"
"Please do more for me in the future, I am at a breaking point"
You see the difference in these two? In the first you ask for yourself to do less. In the second you ask for your partner to do more. The second often leads to your partner also burning out and then nobody has any capacity to spare creating a horrible situation.
The super power isn't the support part, but being able to live with less part. Demanding high living standards and thus high workload from your partner is the kryptonite.
This blog post basically no different from the other "so I did X and now I'm a big success" anecdotal LinkedIn/Medium/Tweet thread posts.
Not everyone is allowed to break gender roles.
Edit: not going to promise this is the best reference/source, but it is at least one: https://time.com/4425061/unemployment-divorce-men-women/
When the husbands in these relationships lost their job did they try to get back out there? Did they help at home? Did they do anything about it? If my wife lost her job and showed no motivation to get another one then I'd probably divorce her too. Part of what I admire in my partner is her incredible work ethic.
Maybe instead of complaining about "gender roles" complain about people picking shitty spouses and not having hard conversations about these sort of situations before they actually happen.
Admittedly, you also mention "bad at relationships" and that element was present on both sides as well.
For what it's worth, that was his second attempt to marry someone after he broke up with my mother. The first was with a woman who hated me in absurd levels to the point that she would attempt to choke me and throw knives at me because (according to my father, I was too young to actually engage her in any form of discussion) I reminded her of his previous relationship. And all that happened after 4 years of him being in a casual relationship with her.
Anyways, I don't know if I would call it changing or rather that there are people who try to hide their true colors until I get what they want.
May I suggest that it is highly unlikely there were no warning signs. This level of violence does not come out of nowhere (neither in women nor in men). It tends to consequence of escalations. The hate toward the offspring itself should have been seen as warning sign.
Like, yes, dad is there victim of domestic violence too. But like with women who pick yet another abuser again, there is issue with partner selection, not knowing warning signs or interpreting them as passion or some variant of that.
In our society, we are used to seeing people getting at least vocal support when things get hard, harassment at work, inability to ask for higher pay, etc. We just forget that, when it’s men, the advice is “Ok maybe work gave you trust issues, but have you tried to man up? Why would you expect support from a spouse if you, yourself, aren’t self-supported?”
It defeats the idea of “he for she, she for he.”
Yes, why should you expect support from a spouse if you aren't doing anything for yourself? This goes for men and women. Of course both parties should be allowed moments of vulnerability, but I thought it was pretty cleat that my statements were in the context of a long-term struggle. If my wife gets fired and has a bad week, I'll be there to support her and would expect the same in return. If she has a bad month, we'll sit down and have a serious talk about what she needs to do going forward.
If the only support you're getting is "man up" then maybe you should find yourself a different social circle and/or partner.
"He for she, she for he" means just that. It explicitly does not mean "He for she even when she isn't there for she, she for he even when he isn't there for he".
If you expect people to "support" you whilst you make no personal effort then perhaps you should reevaluate your outlook on life as a whole. That isn't how things should work in a healthy relationship.
This is "have you tried not being poor" for mental health: it's not actually actionable advice.
Yes, but this is not the world we live in. Awareness campaigns all go towards telling people to get support and talk about their mental problems. Maybe we are weakening people, I don’t know, I’m just saying that we don’t tell people to swallow up their problems, and in France for example, we’ve raised taxes to be able to fund a one-billion-euros plan to provide various kinds of help for those soft issues for women.
In fact, those very people tell men that they don’t speak enough.
But when a man raises a grave issue that blocks his progress, the answer is launched automatically: “Everyone would be better off if they just tried a little bit harder to be more mentally resilient”. In other words: “k bye!”
It’s not that we should or shouldn’t be resilient, it’s that we tell people to provide help to their spouse and expect help from them, only to notice that said spouse can be relied upon like a house of cards during difficult times.
In this specific example, when women loose jobs, they are expected to take on most housework until they find a new job.
Some years ago, I burned out, and was asked by my doctor to stay home, and this was followed by crushing depression. I was broken for months until I pieced myself back together, with help (therapy, meds, spending time with my kids...). My spouse says she was afraid I was lost, not going bacl to work, afraid I'd be broken forever. Thank heavens she just didn't ditch my ass, she helped me back and I'm watching myself more than ever, because I don't want that to happen twice.
Seeing the person you love falling apart in such a way (depression, burnout) can tempt you to reevaluate the person as a whole. But if you can't stay and help when I'm broken, what kind of partner are you? Sure there's a limit, and everyone must draw a line somewhere (and I'm pretty sure I decided mine before we married), but losing one's job isn't there for me.
There is no indication of 'why' she might show no motivation. The assumption here seems to be that she's a freerider, a burden, and not a partner with motivation issues. And I cited good reasons for lacking motivation. From personal experience.
Yes, there are people that become lazy, or show their laziness after some time hiding it behind an easy 0-producing job. And yes sometimes you discover that you don't like that in your partner and maybe you're now too different, etc.
But this hustle mentality, don't stop and think, just find a job, any job, gogogogogogogogogo, isn't how I want to be treated when laid off or broken in some way. There's a lot of talk on HN about mental health, burnout, depression, but also lots of people that seem to be OK to ditch a partner at the first sign of him or her not being 100% 'on' all the time.
There's many discussions to be had when you realize your partner doesn't want to work anymore. The first one is probably 'downsizing' as fast as possible. Can we live on one salary? How much time? What do we let go to weather this? Do you think it's temporary, do you want to switch careers? Are you ready to lose those comforts? Are you thinking about the near future? Do you have plans? Do I sit in them? do you want to try therapy? Maybe not all the questions on the same day. Decisions, together. And red lines if you must. Money, kids, health. Yours and your partners.
I was just saying, maybe someone you trusted and observed having fine work ethics (if that's what floats your boat) changing suddenly, is maybe sign of a problem you were supposed to be helping with, as the other person in this relationship.
There's a reason "you're not a real women" isn't an insult, but "you're not a real man" is. There's a reason men live 3-10% shorter than women and commit suicide several times more often (in my country 8 times more often). And there's a reason divorce law is absurdly sexist.
This is not to say "women are evil", there's no secret conspiracy to reinforce the gender roles, no "matriarchy" nor "patriarchy" keeping the status quo. It's simply people repeating what they were taught about life to their children because "that's the way it should be".
So the fix isn't to "find better spouses", the fix is to make people better human beings and live the way they want.
That is the "patriarchy". It was never claimed to be a Dr Evil thing.
Also calling it "patriarchy" when it hurts both genders equally and is reinforced by both genders equally - is counterproductive.
Another related concept in feminism is "toxic masculinity" and that name is even worse. If you're trying to solve a problem don't start by naming it "it's all their faultism".
Curiously I've never heard anybody call the same phenomenon happening to women "toxic femininity".
One thing I might note is that a lot of these kind of harmful social constructs were applied to women 100 years ago. Things as trivial as wearing trousers and as important as voting or working would have been considered "not womanlike" back then. What has changed that is ~100 years of the feminist movement, which made all of these and more acceptable for women.
But there hasn't been and still isn't such a movement for men. And I would suggest that that's what we need.
This means that most people will end up being single, which is a actually a good thing in the long run.
No need for the whataboutism: gender roles exists and are deeply entrenched in some societies.
A simple measure is how often divorces end with the ex-husband having to pay spousal support to the ex-wife and not the other way around.
This is a clear indication of how the legal system expects men to be "providers" and, therefore, woman careers and financial independence to be less important.
If you don't do traditional she stays at home with kids thing, you won't have to pay it. Because either it was you being at home or she had job too.
Basically what women do at all time is weave a healthy psychological support net of people. We, the men, should learn to do the same.
That's not really how it works, though. The support net is given to women because, subconsciously, society understands the value of women. A civilisation where the women are unhappy and take their own lives is not going to work beyond one generation for obvious reasons. This isn't something that women work to achieve while men don't bother. Telling men they should just "get support" like a woman is similar to telling a poor person they should just buy a house because it's a good investment. It's not as simple as that.
Some guys started doing this. "MGTOW monks" and Men's Rights Activists, for example. They were quickly ostracized as hateful misogynists, despite their focus largely being on providing help, support, and motivation to rectify particularly-unique male problems. They have some demographic overlap with the maladjusted incel demographic so of course all communities get painted with that same brush.
When everyone around you shits on you and belittles everything you do, you're playing on expert mode.
My pet favourite example is the ”you’re shit and going to fail. You should do what I did”. This is advice inevitably comes from very toxic personalities who are in serious trouble in one way or another.
Many people feel that crypto should be treated like liquid money that can be bought or sold freely, and not like a taxable investment.
Though I'm not sure how principled your objection is. Is it against misplaced political hot takes where you don't need them, or is it against those you find objectionable?
It doesn't matter if you'll use the money to cure cancer, splash concrete on the ground, feed me or build the cage where I'll be thrown into. You took that money against my will.
I find it extremely hard to even imagine the mindset of "taxes are fine". Some taxes, sure. Some benefits, sure. But when a plurality of my tax dollars goes to the department of defense, I get skeptical.
One thing we're working on learning as a community is how to respond to the interesting parts of an article or situation and leave superficial provocations alone. Not easy, but important for curious conversation.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The article could be better without that part.
Taxes is political and divisive and that does not belong here.
Please check the guidelines before modding.
When an article contains a slight passing reference to a political provocation, that's a great reason not to copy it into the thread and create an off-topic distraction on HN. If it were the main point of the article it might be a different story, but it's obviously a generic tangent in this case.
When there's flamebait, we should just not take the bait. It isn't necessary and there are much more interesting discussions to be had.
You're right to reference the guidelines, which include:
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You got me here.
"there are much more interesting discussions to be had"
You know that thing people you will not change someones opinion on internet. That has changed.
This insight is golden.
No waste timing on flamebaits when I can have better discussions about other things.
Thanks Dang
Some people resent what they perceive as too much taxes very strongly. Where do you draw the line between taxation and theft?
For example how do you call 50% taxes + 19% social wellfare taxes on top of that, actually a 69% tax bracket? Knowing that in addition to that, should you realize gains (say on stocks) on what you managed to save and put in the stock market, well, these gains are going to be taxed at 34%? What if auntie loved you and made a testament giving you her savings, what about 80% tax on that? Is that what auntie wanted, to give 80% to the state?
69%, 80%: when is it taxes, when is it theft?
I do personally think that in many countries we're way, way, way past diminishing returns due to the ultra high tax brackets and I don't buy the "but infrastructure" argument: it doesn't justify everything.
I'm scared of what's to come, knowing that I want to spend time with my kid while still being a good husband and making slow yet steady progress on my side project, all on top of having a full job. It feels overwhelming and I'm not even in it yet.
The ability to build a SaaS, sell it as a subscription to other is amazing. Compare with our old parents, without a computer, they need a huge chunk of money to setup a biz(buying equipment, office space etc).
Especially when you're one of the erly to market(look like keygen.sh is a great one) and can move fast enough, in a market that people are willing to pay more than $50 per month, it can grow very quick.
Good job rolling it out and make it sustaisable.
12-18 mo after joining most companies in my career, this was my feeling. It's awful. You literally fight to make things better in a company, to help the company earn a bit more profit.
There are the enviable? people who can just work the 9 hours, do the job, not get committed or emotionally invested, and then leave the job when they walk out the door. But for some of us, there's the vision of what could be, and the absurd obstacles preventing us from reaching the what could be. Even so, the what could be often just means a percent or two more profit for the company. If you're saving babies and solving world hunger, it matters. If you're helping telecom companies recover from problems related to the 1980s billing systems which they never bit the bulled and replaced, it ultimately means nothing.
> A weight was lifted off my shoulders.
Until you feel this weight, and you walk away, you cannot know what this feels like. For the author, in such a short sentence, it sounds immediate. For me, 6 weeks after quitting a permanent contract (which is the kind of guaranteed security we're not used to in the US unless you're exective with a golden parachute), I'm finally coming to grips with my freedom. It's like a sponge that has been squeezed into a 1cm cube.
If I could give my younger self advice, it would be to NEVER go work for a company unless you were absolutely passionate about their mission. Never work for the money. You could work for the money and die rich, never having lived authentically. Or you could live authentically, rich or poor, and die satisfied.
It's entirely possible to live authentically without being particularly passionate about the field you earn your living in - I don't have a passion or "dream job" in the software field because I don't dream about labor. I'd much rather be skiing, building stuff in my shop or fishing. This doesn't mean I don't like my job or that I don't find it interesting or that I'm not a good/productive engineer - it simply means I derive meaning in life elsewhere.
[edit, added: why do anything without making effort to do it well? not that this is your attitude, but this sort of attitude is why a lot of software really sucks]
You may enjoy digging the ditch, but ultimately I would enjoy spending the same time on something more useful a lot better.
I will happily dig beach ditches for employers, no doubt, but only with adequate shade and breaks (don't work 80 hour weeks), drinks provided etc.
I consider advising and guiding the engineering organization as a whole part of my job description but there's a point at which just doing the damn thing wins out over protracted debate and sitting in endless meetings. At that point my focus typically shifts to mitigating toil/drudgery/future maintenance for myself and my teammates - I've cursed the names of people I've never met because I've spent months undoing work with their name all over it and my driving motivation in situations like that is to not have my name be the one being cursed by whoever takes my place. I take pride in my work but I don't really tie my sense of self-worth to it at all, which I've seen end poorly for engineers who become emotionally invested in their pet solution or project. When you realize anything you come up with, even if it's the greatest, most beautiful, most elegant solution will likely be replaced/rewritten/become full of hacky bullshit within the span of a few years it makes it easier to accept that.
I think the problem some have with your sentiments is that this scenario is as likely when you have a passion for something, and the control you have is the same as in the jobs you don't have a passion for. So the scenario is more one of:
If the company is giving you pointless tasks, and has erected walls, is it worth the pain in trying to bang your head against those walls - knowing that the majority of the times you will not make a dent to those walls? Being passionate can lead to a lot more pain with virtually nothing to show for that pain.
About half the jobs I had were for things I have some passion for. My experiences:
1. Jobs I had a passion for are all on the bottom half when it comes to my job satisfaction (without exception - no exaggeration).
2. Management in boring jobs are more likely to listen to me. If you're doing something that society puts a lot of value in (e.g. reducing world hunger), it will attract people who want glory, and they are harder to work with.
3. All the boring jobs have left me happier.
4. If I'm passionate about something, I will have my own definitions of success and metrics, and they never seem to align with the company's. What's the point of toiling away on something I'm passionate about if our goals differ? And then in the off chance I convince management to change, I'm as likely to get laid off as in the past. I know from experience how crappy it feels to accomplish something great, then be given the boot while they reap the rewards.
And finally, I'm one of those odd people who doesn't separate job work from personal work. And with the passions that I have, there is no job/company out there that aligns with it. So the logical step is to find a way to minimize time at work and use the spare time to do something more meaningful to me.
> why do anything without making effort to do it well?
Invert it back to you: Why do something well if it has no benefit to you? Especially when you could use that time/energy doing things that are meaningful.
People have different motives for doing things well, and they will do it if there is some payoff (and it need not be financial).
> not that this is your attitude, but this sort of attitude is why a lot of software really sucks
It definitely is, and that's unfortunately the point of stability when you look at the system as a whole. If you want better SW, work on the incentives. Don't expect people to go the extra mile that they will not be rewarded for. Time is finite. I used to work hard to make great SW, until I realized that I could use that time for more meaningful things. If my company rewarded me more than they do those who make crappy SW, I'd be more incentivized.
If you’re working more than 8 you’re only robbing yourself of your life and your time, unless you’re a founder.
> If I could give my younger self advice, it would be to NEVER go work for a company unless you were absolutely passionate about their mission.
This constant theme of being “passionate” about the mission of a company that doesn’t care at all about you is so dystopian. What’s wrong with a job just being a job?
What's wrong with a job just being a job, for most jobs, is that it's 1/3 of your life being spent there. What excuse is there to do stupid, monotonous, or worse - counterproductive stuff for 1/3 of your life? I suppose if you're Hodor that's just fine. It's not fine for people who see potential and opportunities in every scenario.
Ok, if you're a checkout clerk at a grocery store, there's not a lot of room for improvement unless you start to focus on having some good human interactions with your customers. But on HN, I figure that's not most of us.
If you put the HN crowd on a road work crew, you know there would be a lot of workers who would identify significant opportunities for improving the process. Unless you're a monk, why would you do the slow and inefficient thing, excusing it as "it's just a job"? If you see a way to make your 8 hours of labor be worth twice as much to the company profit, or to the customers, or even to your joy and satisfaction, then why wouldn't you try?
If I were the boss, I would probably direct my staff toward a lot of dead ends as well. It's just the nature of not being omniscient. But I would hope that I would be open to the pushback from a worker who says, "Hey, I think we really should be doing Y, and here's why."
The excuse is the alternative is not that common. Amazing jobs are a luxury. We can tune our perspective to one of a job being "just a job", while both capitalizing on the work and leisure time as best we can, or we can think ourselves failures for having them. Seeing potential doesn't easily translate to job security. I think privileged positions render technocrats out-of-touch with the majority.
Absolutely agree, but there's middle ground. You can work at a job that you find fulfilling, and believe to be something positive for the world, without it being a passion. My belief is that people who are passionate about their jobs are driven to do foolish things, like stretching that 9 hour day to 10, 12, 14 hours far too often, because "X needs to get done by the weekend". Passion can also cause people to wrap way too much of their identity up in something, and if they aren't calling the shots at the job (that is, if they aren't the CEO or at least a C-level), it can really hurt their sense of self if (more like when) that job changes in ways that make them unhappy.
Certainly, do something worthwhile, something that you can feel good about. But leave passion for family, friends, and hobbies. Or, if you can swing it, a company you start yourself.
(It's funny, though, because I think the workforce does need passionate employees. Consider that many non-profits are staffed by people who are passionate about the non-profit's mission, yet the majority of those people won't have a say in the direction of their organization. If no one followed their passion when it came to employment, a lot of those jobs just wouldn't get done, since they often don't pay all that well. So I guess in a way I'm grateful to the people who work their passion projects, since they help the world go 'round.)
Because of this I am less attached to the work, there is more wiggle room, and I am less stressed about meeting deadlines.
Expectations from management will also be lower because you are a new-hire without any context. I'm not even going to get into the huge salary bumps you'll receive by hopping instead of waiting and fighting through performance reviews for a raise...
Most good raises come from quitting and changing jobs. The first few months, once you've passed the interview and been accepted, you have ridiculous room to be a loser (not suggesting you are) before the company will begin to recognize that.
Consequently, you may look around and see a lot of actual losers who are underperforming because they're lazy or inadequate.
Freelance, learning to play the consulting game, charging a lot, and negotiating unreasonable things (like pay me in advance for a year of income and you have my attention for a year for any project) is the way to go for people who feel this way. Or you build a SaaS or other business and make it work. Or marry rich.
I liked the article. It was an authentic (I assume) personal story. It wasn't a "strawman," or a "this is the way things should be" thing. It was a fairly plain-spoken personal chronicle.
I enjoyed it, and wish the author well.
For myself, I worked at a company that had a mission I was passionate about. I'm also a xenophile, and it was a Japanese company. I was fascinated by the Japanese commitment to Quality (at that company). I like working in teams; the more varied and exotic, the better.
I joined, planning on an 18-month stay (like my previous two gigs), but left, 27 years later.
I made some effort to find new work, after leaving that company, but became quite disillusioned with the process. I had acquired a "nest egg" that would allow me to retire, early. After a few insulting and rather demoralizing interactions with a few corporations, I decided that it was time to hang up my chinos, and write the code I always wanted to write, the way I wanted to write it; with no one taking a dump on it.
I have never been happier. I am probably working harder than I ever have, in my life, and having a blast.
Good to see you here again, completely off topic follow up: did you or your siblings ever end up writing about work your father did with three letter agencies?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23812386
No, I suspect that we have all the information that we will get.
He earned a bronze star, silver star, and a couple of purple hearts, during WWII (I only found one, but he was wounded at least twice -maybe they just award one).
It earned my parents a place in Arlington, with the whole caisson/21-gun salute thing, but we have no idea why he got them.
There was a big fire, in St. Louis, in the 1950s (I think), that destroyed a lot of records.
Forget hearing anything he did with The Company. He was one of the first field agents. I think he may have been recruited in the first year or so of the agency. We think at least one of his brothers may also have been a "company man," but we'll never know. He took that secret to the grave.
Good idea!
My one Japanese company experience was in my early career, and it was discouraging. It has been so long, I can name NEC.
The colleagues were great, but on the occasions that executives from Japan were visiting, we were specifically told to look busy. And looking busy actually meant printing things out, walking around with papers, etc. Even in those dark, pre-eco times, I found it absurd. On the plus side, I got proper introduction to sushi and fell in love with that.
I can only imagine what a good situation one must have to spend 27 years there.
Cheers to your future endeavors.
The corporation (I don't name it in postings, but it's fairly easy to figure out, if you visit my SO Story) is one of the top-shelf corporations in Japan. Their brand is/was pretty much synonymous with "Quality."
I have been into writing Quality code, since my very first engineering project, and loved the passion.
The engineers and scientists in Tokyo were awesome. The company got "first draft pick." Every single one of them had at least a Master's degree. Many Ph.Ds. Having their business card opened a lot of doors for me.
I found their reliance on Process (note the capital "P") to be absolutely infuriating. It worked extremely well on hardware; not so well on software.
I did my best to coax them out of their mousehole, but, in the end, the conservatives won, and the company has basically retreated to its roots; which may not work out so well, in the long run.
It was pretty much impossible to get these (highly accomplished and talented) engineers to accept that their way (hardware and some firmware) would not work on software.
It usually ended up with them, labeling my efforts to introduce flexibility as some variant of “lazy, bad-quality engineering.” Hard sell.
https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/concrete-galoshes/
Let's not feature creep work life balance ;)
> I made some effort to find new work, after leaving that company…
I'm curious why you left, if you want to share!
It was no surprise to me. I was saddened, but not surprised.
(I'm ready to "retire" whenever personally, and then work on the code I want with the people I want to without financial expectation!)
Is it for profit or just for fun. I love to read stories like your's.
It’s coming along nicely.
My advice to my younger self would be to chase the money. Make as much as you can, as quickly as you can, so you don't have to work for someone else ever again. I've been passionate about my work before, and, with the exception of one employer, it led me to burnout and under-compensation for my hard work (with the executives of course still taking their fat paychecks). I think there's also a middle ground where you can get compensated fantastically for what you do, and also work on things that you agree with and think are ethically sound, but don't drive you to work past midnight regularly because you love it so much.
Unless you are running the show, your passion is irrelevant. The people who run the show will do whatever they need to do to line their own pockets, and if that means exploiting your labor, or changing the mission to something you're not so passionate about anymore (or, worse, something you're actively against), they'll do it, and they won't be apologetic about it in the least.
Ironically, I think a good way to be compensated while doing something you're passionate about is as a consultant/contractor, where you get to set your rates and schedule. If you're getting paid hourly, all the better, because you know that every hour you put into it is going to earn you more money. As a salaried employee, working harder just dilutes your effective per-hour rate. And as a contractor, it's a lot easier to quit and move on to something else when the company inevitably changes direction in ways you aren't happy with.
Get the money!
Though contracting rates are stuck low unfortunately, I never found anything better than 125/hr.
There's something more here I think. It's perfectly fine to just have a job that pays the bills. But it's not fine if you take that job home with you. It's not fine if the job takes a mental or physical toll on your mind or body. It's not fine to be married to a job. Any job IMHO, even one that you're absolutely passionate about or whatever. Even if you're saving babies and solving world hunger or whatever it's not worth sacrificing your family/friend time.
Personally I make about half as much money at my current job as my last job, but I work half as many hours, and there's no expectation of being a "team player" or "work hard play hard" nonsense, no phone calls at night or on the weekends, I don't have email or teams/slack installed on my phone, I have an office with a door that I can close. (well, I used to, in The Before Times) I make decent money (it's hard to get paid poorly as a software developer) but it's not early retirement money or fancy sports car money the way my last job was. I show up, I do my job, I go home. It's a nice company that does nice things in the world, but I don't really care.
And I know all about the feeling of relief the author mentions.
The idea of searching for the "perfect" job where you're passionate about working for such a wonderful company-- to me that sounds unrealistic. Like watching too many Disney princess movies as a kid and growing up expecting that you'll marry Prince Charming, or being pretty good at football in high school and expecting to play in the NFL, or the musician who keeps trying to get their lucky break. The world... well it's just not like that.
It's really interesting to get some backstage access to how this fantastic product came to be and what underpins the motivating thesis behind it.
From one founder (also with little ones and a fantastically supportive partner) to another, my hat's off to you. My many thanks to both you and your partner. Being able to just grab keygen.sh and integrate licensing into our product helped us go from MA to GA in about a week and was also essential in getting some investors over the hump to funding (because we could show traction and an easier path to more of it). As a result, I got to reduce my stress level and spend more time with my kids over the summer.
The reason I say that is because you're basically dealing with two classes of customers at that point. One for your product and one for your equity, and if there's gross misalignment with either you're going to have a bad time. If the latter fundamentally doesn't understand the former, you'll have a bad time.
I'm in a similar situation. I'm working on a thing and my wife has been supporting me for some time now.
Years ago she told me to leave my job and focus on my thing, but I was afraid. I've been working since I was 19 years old and I have trust issues. It was very difficult for me to believe in myself and jump into the void but I'm 42 and if I don't do it now I will never do it.
Anyway, I'm a couple of months from the first beta launch. I'm happy, anxious, afraid, hopeful... all at the same time. I hope I'll be able to write a similar blog post in a year or two.
> was making about half of what my senior software engineer position at $CRYPTO_EXCHANGE was netting me
This seems like something one would certainly share with ones partner. The authors yearning for doing the side project also seems like something that would come up in conversations in a healthy relationship.
Disclaimer: I’ve never been married but have been in serious/committed long term relationships. And I’m not a therapist either.
"I just finished reading 1984." - No one ever finishes reading that book, per se. It reads you and then spits you out.
"and I still don't have a go-to growth channel" - no idea what that even means. Me and a couple of chaps have been running a little IT business in the UK for 20 years. We have around 20 employees and t/o about GBP1.5M. Nothing fancy. If you can pay the bills and sleep at night, I call that a win.
Amen to that. Of all scifi books to use as the “things have come full circle” closer, this seemed deeply ominous and disturbing to me. It’s like some sort of “this could go super cool or all come unglued” season enders.
I wish this guy the best of luck and hope it just gets better. The beginning to a happily ever after. But if the tragic ethos of 1984 is his victory lap, my anxiety worries there’s a darker sequel to this story a few years down the road.
I still can't believe 1984 isn't required reading. I wonder if anything pertinent/worthwhile is any longer.
I knew it needed to happen but I’d been stressing about how to tell her for nearly a month. The amount of relief that came from her approval and endorsement was incredible. I was less nervous about quitting than I was nervous about telling her.
Props to you man. Well done.
Thankfully I did, after seven years, and it saved our marriage.
Help her understand that this really impacts you, and you'd like to work on a solution together. She may be spending so much for a reason you may not be aware of as well. A healthy relationship must be able to have this type of communication. Keep trying. Best of luck, friend.
It was one of the very few times in my life when I've let other people convince me to ignore my gut feelings. I'm not blaming my ex-girlfriend, it was my decision, but it was the wrong decision.
- - - -
For your amusement here are some details of the business: they had no QA department, the users were our QA. All of the business logic was in stored procedures in the DB which, as a result, was always on fire even as we continually upgraded the hardware. Our HTML was 25% white space because our PHP guy liked deep indentation. He was a terrible programmer but he was a co-founder and a friend of the DB/sysadmin co-founder so he couldn't/wouldn't be fired. I tried to explain to him once that arrays, linked lists, and hash tables were different things but he refused to believe me because the only experience he had was with PHP and JS. The DB/sysadmin guy was a total "Master-Blaster" (You know "Who run Bartertown!?" from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome), if the CEO asked him to do something he didn't want to do he would throw actual screaming fits or just lie to him and say "That's impossible." They built a skating half-pipe in the office even though none of them skated. It was madness. But the users loved us and the numbers went up and up, so investors were lining up to vie for the chance to give them money. Eventually they (the investors) sidelined the three co-founders and now the company is a Wall street darling and a household word. Go figure.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/10/when-...
I wouldn't be the person I am today or have the success I have without my supporting wife.
Thank you for sharing OP!
One suggestion for your website: more articles on general advice for how to sell on premise software and what types of business models work best depending on software usage patterns and software delivery. People don't want more features, they want more advice.
It was a first to market competitor to https://localwp.com, who ultimately won out. gg
Anyhow, I had been working my ass off, night and day, like you do on gigs like that. My wife of 5 years thought I was cheating on her. HA ! that would have been a lot more fun ugh.
Long story short (you can fill in the blanks, fights etc.).
So one day comes where, the dream comes true, IBM offers to buy us out, but I was in sort of a fog and worried about my marriage and moving to Bocca Raton was probably not going to fly. I get called into my bosses office and he goes through my options, all foggy as hell to me at the time and I sort of grunt and point at taking my profit sharing pay out rather than moving. So OK, in my mind I had just got fired.
I go home and on the dinning room table there is a bunch of papers, divorce papers, my wife comes in and tells me she wants a divorce. OK, so I lose my job and marriage on the same day within hours. So what do I do? Well heck what any sane person would do. I grab my wind surf board and throw it in my Scout (wish I still had it, wife said it was a piece of junk, ha, worth a lot if I had kept it). I grab the dog, she knows the drill, hops in the Scout, I make a quick pit stop for a 6 pack of Pacifico and we are off to my favorite beach.
I take Heidi, my dog, on a couple of baby spins on the board, she loves that. Do a little shredding. Then back on the beach she sits and stares at me, you know dogs know. Sipping on my beer. And it hits me, duh, wait a second, what the heck did my boss say again about profit sharing ? My mind starts to clear, starts racing. I finish that one beer and head back to the house. I check the papers, Fuck ! I am a millionaire, 3 months from now when the deal closes. Oh, let's check those divorce papers, huh, it can be done in 90 days.
So suddenly I am a super helpful husband with the divorce, I will sign everything and run it to the court house of course. Let's just get this silly thing over with, you are totally right.
Anyhow, funny how stuff hits you. Anyhow, never married again. Did one other start up after that. Been done since. Never happier. That was, for me, that moment, I will never forget. I went from the depths of hell to bliss in a moment of clarity.
Did your wife find out she lost out on millions? Was she angry? Did you reconcile?
What are you up to these days?
From the comment about cheating ("that would have been a lot more fun ugh") to the comment about how he became a "super helpful husband with the divorce" once he realized he would be a millionaire, the post gives the impression that the OP was all about himself and never truly cared about the experience and feelings of the woman he was married to.
On the plus side, at least the OP realized that he didn't want to be married and didn't make the same mistake twice.
I am selfish and self absorbed. Maybe a bit of a narcissist, working on it but self aware. And yes, you are completely correct, I realized marriage was not a good thing for me (or for the other person, hehe, that's how bad I am, had to come back and edit to add this as a second thought).
You are who you are.
I'd say the person you responded to read your story through the lens of their own personal history, but then I guess I'm guilty of the same.
Not sure what my personal history has to do with this obvious fact.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not hard to imagine an alternate scenario in which a different person would have at least made an effort to talk to his wife and understand why the marriage got to that point instead of making a V-line for the beach when she told him she wanted a divorce.
Again, the impression I got from comments made in the post was that the OP was self-centered and didn't care that much about his wife's feelings, which one might reasonably assume contributed to the breakdown of the marriage. The OP responded and, to his credit, confirmed "I am selfish and self absorbed".
What do you know about him ? Maybe he already knew why the marriage got to that point. What's the point of continuing when the two agrees that the marriage leads to nowhere and that they are both unhappy ? To be fair, as I read it, this sounds like a pretty sane divorce. And sane divorces are far from being the norm.
But if you get home and the papers are on the table as he mentioned, that is past the point of talking with your spouse about your relationship, it is the time to get out, think straight and then head to a lawyer to make sure all is done right.
(coming from someone that has been divorced for 5 years and am in good terms with my ex-wife, we help each other all the time and talk about things/life regularly as friends)
I would argue that's the point where the talking should start (ideally there is also talking before it comes to that, of course).
But that's wasn't the point, the point of the post was that I had a moment of clarity, of what was important to me and where my life was going. I got married because that is what society and family expected, I realized that was not for me.
But ya, if divorce papers are on the table, time to smell the coffee, the fat lady is singing, turn out the lights, time to move on.
Well, if you dont care much about them, they are likely to divorce you. By the sound of it, this dude did not cared about relationship one bit. God knows what faults she had, beyond jealousy, because OP choosen not to trash the ex. Which is noble.
But she was done with relationship for reasons that had nothing to do with money. He was emotionally checkout out for months too. Expecting money windfall to fix that all is asinine. Even if she decided to cancel divorce for half those money, it would be marriage for money and nothing more.
I am semi-retired now, I have many inventions to my name and very very comfortable. Still inventing, no start ups for me, too much work. I have a great situation, I work for an IPR company funded by a wonderful benefactor I met along the way in a semi-retired position. So I still contribute, but in a fashion that fits my life style at this stage.
Thank you for asking.
Wish you amd Heidi the best!
I am afraid Heidi is no more...
I was more broken up over her than my ex wife.
I share your pain, hopefully you will find that kind of friendship again.
E- sorry thought you were OP, but thanks for pointing out what I'd clearly missed by a mile!
I used to be in this position but then I actually became pretty passionate about making sure startups can make it through the growth phase and still deliver.
Most wives WILL NOT go along with a plan to start an unfunded startup and WILL leave you if you quit your job and can't support them at the same level as before. In fact, most women have a "backup plan/husband" at all times.
You can read about hypergamy and monkey-branching to understand female psychology and need for security. It's universal, so it doesn't matter what country you're in, although some religions suppress it in practice.
I don't like the overwrought ("beta") presentation of the blog article, but the salient relationship points are very real. He's a lucky guy to have an understanding and agreable wife.
If you're a man and don't understand what I'm talking about above, then expect to be blindsided by your family after career changes, since this happens every day around the world.
I'm suffering from work burnout and are planning to quit my current job to pursue a more balanced, self-sustainable way working for myself. Seeing your post help me understand I'm not alone.