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Ask HN: How do you get out of the corners?

2 points by thrway_pku890 ↗ HN
I feel I'm constantly painting myself in a career corner.

I'm now in my third in a row role/company that I hate. Maybe I hate this line of work. Dunno. I find it very difficult to bear with shitty colleagues each with his own agenda, trying to understand shitty designs and code made long before me, learning shit, drink the corporate cool-aid (always the same shitty taste regardless of the company), being an eternal newbie (in this job you remain that unless you are Peter-principled), sitting my ass in a fucking room all day long, and generally spending my life away in front of a screen just for fucking money (not even good money).

But I have a kid to raise and bills to pay.

Honest to God, I was in a hospital a few days ago and the workers there were cleaning old men shit, and whilst I wanted to throw up one part of me was yelling that what they did was MEANINGFUL whilst the shitty products I work in nobody gives a fuck whether they exist the next month (and probably the world would be a better place if they did stop to exist).

Sorry for the rant. Just looking for ways out/forward.

8 comments

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jjgreen
Maybe become a nurse then? (Shitty hours though.)
ofalkaed
A job should be what enables you to do those things in life which are important to you, not be what is important in your life. Which is not to say a job should not or can not be important, just that if you try and derive your meaning in life from your job you likely will never be happy. So those nurses and doctors do something important, after work they go out and bitch about how it is all meaningless because no matter how much they try and help people those people largely ignore the doctors and nurses and do nothing to actually improve their health beyond going to the hospital when they have no other choice.

So you sit in front of a screen for money, will your life be more meaningful if you stopped doing things for money? Tell your family they are going to have to do without money because you need more meaning in your life, I am sure they will understand. If you can not find meaning outside of your job what makes you think you can find meaning through a job?

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mintaka5
office work sucks m8. i left my coding career behind this past sept. and have no regrets. i lost all my stress-weight, stopped having anxiety attacks, and my life is generally better. GET OUT OF THE CORPORATE OFFICE. people who work in those environments are not capable of actual work, and most of what they produce is busy-work linked to more busy-work, so they can say they do work. and to add to that they posture themselves using office politics to sustain a position that doesn't really mean or do anything, but they politically align themselves in a way that makes them and their hollow job seem really important. ya know what that results in? other people (good or bad ones) getting shitcanned as a result for no good reason. there is no job in the corporate office environment that will ever give you 100% what you want out of it, because someone else is always taking that away from you to pitch themself. i can not reiterate this point anymore than GET OUT! no one in that environment cares about you. GET OUT. find your happiness on your own. GET OUT and stay away from shitty corporate people. the corner you're in is where they want you. TILT THE CORNER AND GET OUT!
scyzoryk_xyz
I work in surgical simulation tech and it boggles my mind how much there is to be improved in that world. Sounds like you like medicine - look for your line of work but with medical systems. Or switch careers to something in a medical environment. There is so much good work to be done!

That being said, it also sounds like there is a you problem going on and that’s disturbing as you are raising a fellow human. Might want to get that looked at.

thrway_pku890
Thanks for the pointer. Will check out that direction.

There is not a me problem though. Not in the sense of me being maladjusted to a fucked up world. If by checking out you mean see a therapist to beef me up against the way we live and/or medicate myself out of it then no thanks. That'd be throwing in the towel which if I were to do I wouldn't reach out here and elsewhere. Also tried talking with a few therapists. How to put it kindly? All they cared about is taking my money and ensure that I'm already convinced that they will help me (but it's part of their damned jobs to convince me they are not useless). So, thanks but no thanks. I'll keep looking but the sample so far was subpar.