Ask HN: What makes someone hate their job?
15 comments
I always break jobs down into four factors:
Knowledge – Am I building skills or knowledge that have value outside this specific company (algorithms, math, systems design, etc.), or am I just learning a bunch of internal trivia that won’t matter anywhere else?
Benefits – Financial compensation and benefits can make up for a surprising amount of dissatisfaction.
People – Do I like the people I work and interact with? Do we get along and have anything in common?
Laudability – Is the work noble, meaningful, or interesting? Highly dependent on the individual. For me, it’s education; for others, it might be science, healthcare, yadda yadda yada.
I'm usually reasonably satisfied if a job meets two out of the four.
Knowledge – Am I building skills or knowledge that have value outside this specific company (algorithms, math, systems design, etc.), or am I just learning a bunch of internal trivia that won’t matter anywhere else?
Benefits – Financial compensation and benefits can make up for a surprising amount of dissatisfaction.
People – Do I like the people I work and interact with? Do we get along and have anything in common?
Laudability – Is the work noble, meaningful, or interesting? Highly dependent on the individual. For me, it’s education; for others, it might be science, healthcare, yadda yadda yada.
I'm usually reasonably satisfied if a job meets two out of the four.
I have found that comp alone is not enough to make up for a miserable job. I hated every minute I worked at AWS to the point I couldn’t fake it and it was remote.
When I got Amazoned, one of my former coworkers was a director at a well known public non tech company and was going to create a position for me to be over their cloud migration and strategy. It was going to pay around $50K more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs my last year at AWS. I really hate leading migrations and infrastructure projects. I specialize in cloud + app dev consulting even though it pays less outside of working at Amazon and Google.
Speaking of Google, I also have/had a better than even chance of working there (GCP consulting division) making close to six figures more than I make now. But I’m not even tempted between my hated for working at large companies and working in an office
When I got Amazoned, one of my former coworkers was a director at a well known public non tech company and was going to create a position for me to be over their cloud migration and strategy. It was going to pay around $50K more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs my last year at AWS. I really hate leading migrations and infrastructure projects. I specialize in cloud + app dev consulting even though it pays less outside of working at Amazon and Google.
Speaking of Google, I also have/had a better than even chance of working there (GCP consulting division) making close to six figures more than I make now. But I’m not even tempted between my hated for working at large companies and working in an office
I agree
This is a good way of putting it. And whether someone is happy is indeed personal.
For me, company culture has always been a primary concern. Is the company a non-stressful place to work and am I working with grownups. That's a massive factor, and the reason I've left two previous jobs.
Laudability is also big. Or in other words purpose. Once all the sheen of working in the software industry wears off do you actually care about the work you're doing? That can go a long way in providing motivation.
But then there are some who are happy to grind out code for exorbitant amounts of money and no purpose. So YMMV.
For me, company culture has always been a primary concern. Is the company a non-stressful place to work and am I working with grownups. That's a massive factor, and the reason I've left two previous jobs.
Laudability is also big. Or in other words purpose. Once all the sheen of working in the software industry wears off do you actually care about the work you're doing? That can go a long way in providing motivation.
But then there are some who are happy to grind out code for exorbitant amounts of money and no purpose. So YMMV.
and company culture does that matter at all?
> …a long stint as a founder…
1. You're expected to work 10 hour days
2. You're expected to do the jobs of 3 people
3. You might not get paid on schedule
…
I’m honestly not sure I could answer this one, I’ve never really worked at a company that pushed a unified culture. At most of the places I’ve worked, the teams were pretty siloed and insulated, so each team ended up having its own “culture.”
>… when people say “culture,” what does that really mean?
1. Interpersonal interaction styles
2. Communication styles
3. What's incentivized
4. What behaviors are acceptable/unacceptable
…
You could have a culture that incentivizes "Psychological safety". Meaning people are allowed to speak up and disagree with stuff without fear of being fired.
You could have a "dysfunctional" culture. One example being where the norm is for individual members to convince other members that they are the smartest person in the room.
> What actually makes people hate their jobs over time? Is it pay/people/culture?
• A person and their team value different things
Another employee might consider software development as a "craft" and take pride in what they deliver. But the organization/team values "move fast and break things…tech debt be damned!" above everything else.
Pay - when I am not getting paid as much as I “should”. It’s all relative though. I don’t expect any company outside of BigTech to match BigTech comp (been there done that, not interested in going back).
Any job where I actually go into an office. But the company has to be “remote only”.
Autonomy - for the last decade I have mostly had complete autonomy on the “how” within very wide understandable guardrails when I led projects.
I don’t do side projects and never have during my 30 year career. So the company I work for has to be using marketable up to date tech.
Also I would hate to be on call.
I don’t care about the “mission”. It’s a paycheck.
Any job where I actually go into an office. But the company has to be “remote only”.
Autonomy - for the last decade I have mostly had complete autonomy on the “how” within very wide understandable guardrails when I led projects.
I don’t do side projects and never have during my 30 year career. So the company I work for has to be using marketable up to date tech.
Also I would hate to be on call.
I don’t care about the “mission”. It’s a paycheck.
Culture, in my opinion, is the sum of all behaviors in an organization. Behaviors are driven by incentives and disincentives. When we talk about culture we talk about the behaviors that are generally incentivized and disincentivized. Core values are a way to quickly distill and define the culture of an organization in such a way that it can be discussed and broadly understood.
I've also heard it said that culture is what you let people get away with.
> What actually makes people hate their jobs over time?
This varies widely from person to person.
Someone else in this thread said that a job where they were working 10 hours a day, doing the job of 3 people with missed paychecks would be a cultural no-go for them. For others, the opportunity to learn new things by doing the job of 3 people is a dream. But for most, missed paychecks would be terrible!
I generally believe that (with a few extreme exceptions) that there are not "bad" and "good" cultures. There are just cultures that we do or do not want to be a part of.
The other thing to remember is that people change. A "good" culture for you today is not necessarily going to be a "good" culture for you in 5 years.
I've also heard it said that culture is what you let people get away with.
> What actually makes people hate their jobs over time?
This varies widely from person to person.
Someone else in this thread said that a job where they were working 10 hours a day, doing the job of 3 people with missed paychecks would be a cultural no-go for them. For others, the opportunity to learn new things by doing the job of 3 people is a dream. But for most, missed paychecks would be terrible!
I generally believe that (with a few extreme exceptions) that there are not "bad" and "good" cultures. There are just cultures that we do or do not want to be a part of.
The other thing to remember is that people change. A "good" culture for you today is not necessarily going to be a "good" culture for you in 5 years.
I can tell you one culture that is always bad. A company owned by private equity where they aren’t interested in increasing profits by increasing revenues. But where they are interested in “finding efficiencies” and acquiring other companies to combine them and exit - either by going public or getting sold.
Yeah I disagree. I don’t have enough info to say that’s “bad.” Sounds like they’re not raising prices for the end consumer? What’s wrong with finding efficiencies? Is it more moral to let a company be inefficient? What’s wrong with buying and selling companies to make money?
See what happens when PE firms take over services like vets, doctors offices, home healthcare, senior care facilities or other essential services.
They also do things like if a restaurant chain owns the building and the land, they split them into separate businesses, sell off the company that owns the land and increase the rent making the restaurant itself unsustainable.
Then you have leverage buyouts where the PE firm loads the company with debt to make money for themselves and let the company rot.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-08-11/simon-schus...
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/private-equity-rol...
https://prospect.org/2018/10/16/vulture-capitalism-killed-se...
This is a different strategy than VCs like YC, they invest money because they want the company to grow. As an employee, a PE firm isn’t going to pay employees of the company it owns well or give good benefits.
Now outside consultants who are hired by the PE firms can make good money. I was first exposed to (in hindsight bad) cloud consultants as a dev lead who didn’t know AWS at the time. I saw what they were making and worked on pivoting to cloud consulting focused on app dev “application modernization” shortly after that.
I’ve been in cloud consulting since mid 2020 and recently I have worked on one project for a PE backed company
They also do things like if a restaurant chain owns the building and the land, they split them into separate businesses, sell off the company that owns the land and increase the rent making the restaurant itself unsustainable.
Then you have leverage buyouts where the PE firm loads the company with debt to make money for themselves and let the company rot.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-08-11/simon-schus...
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/private-equity-rol...
https://prospect.org/2018/10/16/vulture-capitalism-killed-se...
This is a different strategy than VCs like YC, they invest money because they want the company to grow. As an employee, a PE firm isn’t going to pay employees of the company it owns well or give good benefits.
Now outside consultants who are hired by the PE firms can make good money. I was first exposed to (in hindsight bad) cloud consultants as a dev lead who didn’t know AWS at the time. I saw what they were making and worked on pivoting to cloud consulting focused on app dev “application modernization” shortly after that.
I’ve been in cloud consulting since mid 2020 and recently I have worked on one project for a PE backed company
A really bad colleague can make a job miserable. I slightly bad manager can also make it suck.
In my 30 year experience across 10 jobs, a line level manager can’t be “good”, the most they can do is “not be bad”. They are completely useless in helping their reports get raises and promotions and they rarely control budgets.
For the 2 jobs I had before going into consulting (working full time for consulting companies) where I was a strategic hire, one of my requirements were that I reported to the director/CTO and not the line level managers. Someone who could actually sign off on a decision.
In consulting it doesn’t matter. The client drives the decisions.
For the 2 jobs I had before going into consulting (working full time for consulting companies) where I was a strategic hire, one of my requirements were that I reported to the director/CTO and not the line level managers. Someone who could actually sign off on a decision.
In consulting it doesn’t matter. The client drives the decisions.
What actually makes people hate their jobs over time? Is it pay/people/culture? And when people say “culture,” what does that really mean?