Ask HN: Why do you discover your job satisfying?

Phil Tadros · January 24, 2023

2023-01-23 22:30:40

When I had a jobs (I always have more than one, it’s a good idea), I liked it because I respected their paying me and I respected the product, and they respected me making their product more money than they give me. It’s a match made in heaven, until you get laid off, and then you don’t care because always have more than 1 source of income. Onward and upward!

I’m cofounder of a small company and wear many hats – writing code, roadmap planning, mentoring, product design, etc. The diversity of skills needed is fantastic and loads of fun.

But the biggest benefit is I get to set set the culture of the company without having to answer to anyone else. I worked for years in corporate tech companies (FAANG) and while I could create little pockets of healthy spaces, there were always people getting in the way of creating a truly psychologically safe place for people. It’s a huge relief not having to worry about that anymore and instead I can fully tap into the psychology of motivation, treat people with fairness and empathy, and be transparent without getting into trouble with leadership. It’s made the job more satisfying and everyone we work with gets along amazingly well while being incredibly supportive of each other.

I’m in the same boat, I’ve had a few experiences of really awful work environments in the past like what you described and while that was honestly bearable for the most part it’s just so much better being in companies where people actually give a damn about each other on a personal level.

It’s amazing how a few bad bananas can negatively impact a culture, isn’t it. The most attractive thing to me about entrepreneurship is what you described. FAANG companies so often have a few bad actors that set off a series of actions and reactions that lead to political, emotional turmoil. Better to make a culture yourself.

Coworkers will make or break a job for me.

I can enjoy even menial work if I’m surrounded by friendly people who like doing a good job.

I can loathe any work if I have to deal with unqualified, socially combative, or unnecessarily difficult coworkers.

The job also needs to be focused on delivering the product, not constantly fighting corporate dysfunction, attending meetings, and jumping through managerial hoops.

I do! I’m a server software engineer at a video game company. Here are some highlights:

– I get to work on a game that I enjoy playing. I’ve worked on some games that I didn’t care for (or I was not the target audience), and it’s still fun work, but when you genuinely like the game, and play it in your free time, ah! It’s such a joy.

– At my current company, I’m working with some of the most skilled people I’ve ever met. To be surrounded by awesome people is inspiring. Just by being themselves, they push me to be a better engineer, because I want to be able to stand alongside them and call them colleagues.

– I’m paid well! I’m certainly not in the FAANG salary range, but to be honest, I’m making more than nearly everyone I know outside of work. I count myself extraordinarily lucky, my salary is certainly outside the norm for my age group.

– In terms of the work itself: I enjoy problem solving and helping people out. I get to do a little bit of both every day. Those are the day-to-day fulfillments that I really appreciate.

Do you mind me asking how you got into server software engineering for a video game? Also, how is the work-life balance. I feel like I shy away from game dev because of the horror stories, but working on backend servers for an online multiplayer game sounds like a fun challenge.

I get regular emails from Tarsnap users thanking me for making it possible for them to recover data which they lost. The work itself isn’t all that satisfying, but knowing that it’s having a positive impact is very satisfying.

Interestingly, nobody has ever written to thank me for keeping their data secure. But I suppose security is something which is generally only noticed when it’s missing.

I’m at a big company that I ended up at by default not knowing how long I’d stick it out. At first I didn’t think I’d like it, the pace was far too slow coming from startups. Since then, I’ve been on numerous large and successful projects. What I enjoy most is working with the team, designing together, and leveling each-other up. The codebase is large and many parts are old, there’s a lot we’d like to change about it. We never get a full rewrite, but small and sometimes not-so-small parts of the system do get rewritten, or rather a replacement gets written and incrementally convert over to it. It’s great to see the system evolve and improve. It’s best when you have a good idea of the direction to go and take steps to get there. The tools are ‘boring technology’ but within that medium you learn to find ways to solve hard problems in compact and efficient ways.

Emergencies are rare, though I’m always on last line of support I never get paged except rare times I’m also on first line. Daytime support requests go to a person selected from a large rotation. About the only complaint is that shipping code can sometimes take a while go get through CI/CD as the test suite is large and arbitrary/intermittent failures can happen and take several tries in some cases. Meetings are either very project focused or larger informational ones can be watched async.

Work is remote, work from home, but we do have team meetings most days and often pair/screen-share working on specific problems. Sometimes we do mob-programming in larger groups. One thing that’s great is that deadlines are not decided too far in advance. Only when the work is approaching completion is a date chosen to align with an external event to release major features.

100% agree with this. I got into a similar role around the 6 year mark in my career. It was definitely an adjustment, but I just can’t disagree with the work life balance and support I get from being part of a bigger organization. It gave me a whole different perspective on what my career could be like. Sure my work isn’t as much coding as it used to be, but when I’m called upon I still crank it out.

Oh and of course the obligatory replybait: It’s the kind of existential work to a business that cannot be replaced by AI 🙂

Satisfying enough. Corporate red team at a big tech company, so I spend most days hacking first-party / internally developed software at said big tech company – usually developing exploits / PoC for novel vulnerabilities. But also sometimes longer engagements, including physical / SE at times. My favorite so far has been a long engagement where my team surreptitiously embedded ourselves into a build pipeline for a major tech product that goes out to 40m+ consumers, and added an innocuous flag to the source at build time as proof, starting from a physical break-in scenario without using our badges to enter the building.

The worst part of the job by far is drafting and editing reports. This sometimes goes on for several days.

I like it primarily because I get all the excitement of being a nation-state level adversary / threat actor / “bad guy”, with none of the legal/moral/ethical risks/harms – my work ultimately contributes towards making our products (and thus our consumers) safer from such threats.

I used to love having the freedom to figure out a need in whatever way made the most sense, without too much oversight, and working on things that actually helped people in the company. My only distractions from coding were Bi-weekly status meetings, and calls with future/current users to figure out their needs. Then scrum snuck it’s way in under the guise of agile, and I’ve been a ball of anxiety ever since. Always either late for a meeting, or an arbitrary deadline, and unofficially spending most of my time teaching people with way better educations than me. I’m addicted to the money and healthcare, and because my contract forbids it I have no portfolio to show prospective new employers. It no longer feels like freedom, or problem solving, it feels like I’m stuck doing busy work, even though it’s essentially the same job.

Purpose.

I work in R&D in the Medical Devices space.

I fully appreciate I could be making a lot more money in other domains (namely distributed systems) but for me the drive and happiness that comes with creating something that I feel _really_ matters is not easily replaceable.

I am not sticking around that long, this is my way of leaving things slightly better.

Algorithmic trader, quantitative researcher, ‘retail trader’ here. When your strategies are trend-heavy, most of the time you’re slowly bleeding out, waiting and doubting your simulations, wondering whether the market has fundamentally changed etc, but a few times a year it’s like you’re printing money and you finally don’t feel like an idiot anymore.

You want an honest answer? Because our profession pays well.

I love programming, and I do it as a hobby, but if it didn’t pay well, I wouldn’t do it as a job. I would do whatever job I am capable of that pays the most.

I am just beyond lucky that programming pays well, because being poor in this world sucks.

I don’t. Eventually I want to switch but just started. Only thing I like is it’s not very repetitive but main thing I want is problem solving. Maintenance is part of the job but yeah.

My current job is drudgery due to agile. But for most of my career I’ve found it enjoyable to have the kind of space and freedom and ownership of work that I don’t have now. Earning trust and getting to exercise my own judgment about what to work on every day without Jira and sprints. Owning entire projects rather than having work I could do myself split among 3 people and getting blocked or delayed at every step.

I don’t like tooling to get in the way of me doing my job. I work in infrastructure engineering (server ops) where due to the vast infrastructure doing things manually is not an option. Due to this I get to write a lot of code, which I enjoy. In a number of languages; some I enjoy more than others.

I also get to deal with the hottest platforms just enough (public cloud, on-prem K8s, etc) while getting to maintain the vast on-prem server infrastructure that is the majority of my job. I’m not a fan of Terraform, Ansible, Chef, etc (I don’t hate them and I’ve used them extensively elsewhere) so I enjoy that I’ve given the autonomy to write the actual code to do what needs to be done rather than use a platform that just takes in a config file.

So simply put, my job let’s me do the technical work how I want (with team collaboration of course).

In a big corporate but in the digital department that has a culture I can identify myself with: faster paced, use OKR, try to get better everytime, smaller teams. I am head of digital product (team of 3 direct reports).
But as others said the advantage of big corporations is that I have a good work life balance, good benefits and more or leas safe. We are just going through a massive cost saving but we try to keep internal employees – so far not really mass layoffs even if the numbers look bad.

On top of that the ability to look into the core business (not software) I can learn alot of things and evtl change jobs every couple of years easily.
Yea I admit I don’t enjoy every Monday but hey my overall life is pretty good in combination with that job.

I work at a fairly large organization (>1000 employees) as something of a jack-of-all-trades-having-to-do-with-software-development. There are several different groups within this org pursuing a variety of projects, many of which involve software in some way (sometimes as their main thing, sometimes in support of their main thing). Over the last decade+ of working there I have managed to develop a positive enough reputation with a wide enough network that I can choose from a variety of interesting opportunities. Some are longer works that I support for years, some are shorter prototyping or POC efforts, and some are stepping in for a couple of days or weeks to bridge a gap, implement a specific feature, or address a particular issue.

I also get to act in a variety of roles, from developer to architect to reviewer/advisor to tech lead. I’m working to move away from formal leadership of people or projects (I seem to have a confounding inversely proportional relationship with Formal Responsibility: the more of it I have, the less I am able to accomplish) and this may ultimately have a negative impact on my career-total-compensation; the org has formal personnel and project management tracks but not really anything for ICs. However, it is having a very positive impact on both my productivity and my mental health. It is a relatively recent change, so we’ll have to see what my raise looks like next year; maybe management will see my impact as an interconnected contributor as even greater than when I was a manager.

I am full-time remote with a pretty flexible schedule (attend all important meetings and get in my 80 hours every two weeks and it mostly doesn’t matter if I’m writing code at 10AM or 10PM) and generally I get to work with whatever coding tools I prefer (need to get my Emacs-Jira integration MVP finished though, because Jira is a tremendous productivity sink for me and some of my projects use it)

Somewhat. I’m definitely grateful that I found work in a mission-driven field (energy), where I’m a research manager for a non-profit. The day to day is a lot of grant administration, a little bit of research, a decent amount of helping the next generation of researchers implement their ideas. I stay because I believe in the mission and I can be effective in furthering it (and they pay is decent). This is probably all anyone can expect from a job, right?

It gives me money to pay the bills, save for retirement, and buy fun things. The work has challenges and matches well to my skills and experience. There are concrete outcomes I can point to as significant projects I’ve taken to fruition. And it isn’t so stressful or annoying that it negatively impacts the rest of my life too much.

I don’t love working and think I would retire if I could afford to do so. But it’s not too bad.

Good manager (treats us like adults, leaves us alone, trusts us to know what we are doing), good coworkers, good pay, good benefits, 401k match, lots of paid time off (11 holidays, 1 week off in the summer, no work Fridays during the summer, 1 day of PTO each pay period that rolls over year to year, and 6 week sabbatical every 5 years), beautiful campus, challenging work (never bored), good work/life balance.

Yep! I’m writing Ruby/Rails code (which feeds my soul), I get opportunity to play/flex/perfect in doing that, it’s for a good mission (teen mental health) and the team is great (particularly my manager, we have absurdly amazing communication).

There have been a couple of rough patches, note.

But it comes down: Daily, I get to use my mastery over something I enjoy doing; and “monthly” I get an impact on the world I’m proud of.

I love that feeling after successfully completing and handing off a project, the ebullient sense of elation. There’s nothing else like it in the world.

I’m a software engineer and solutions architect.

I’m a consultant for Red Hat. I’m assigned a number of clients at a time, travel onsite (or work remote) to fix or build their systems, and sometimes supervise small teams as part of larger engagements.

Red Hat gives me my assignments for the next few weeks or months, tell me what end result everyone wants to see, and sends me to go get it done. I’m 100% trusted to do the job, no micromanagement. If I need help I’m a phone call away from expert engineers in all of our products. I have a TS clearance, so I’m onsite more often than not because I’m working on disconnected networks.

While I technically have a manager, they’re more like a handler or mission control. He hands me my tasks, tells me the lay of the land, and gives me access to anything I need for the job. I’m not really “managed” on a day-to-day basis. Every engagement has it’s own project manager that I work with closely but even that is a peer relationship, no supervisory.

I travel constantly but love it. 200+ nights in a hotel every year for the past 5 years. My wife’s job is mostly remote, so she joins me on occasion, and I can get her plane tickets with my racked up mileage points.
I can “pay” for our vacations entirely with loyalty points (car, hotel, plane).

One thing I love about Red Hat is everyone pushes each other forward. Co-workers reach down and pull their colleagues up behind them. Never before have I felt such a sense that my colleagues have my back all the way. A very “we’re all in this together” attitude throughout the company. Also, while you’re always encouraged to move up the promotion ladder if you want, if you’ve found a niche that you’re comfy in then that’s supported to. There’s no up-or-out like some organizations, and no forced ranking thank Yoba.

tl;dr Red Hat completely trusts me to do my job, and does everything it can to help me succeed. It’s awesome.

Yeah, the product manager lets us trying a lot of technical things for the benefits of the long-term development of the project. And also a heavy trust in every teammate skills.

My biggest hits of satisfaction seem to come when I learn something and when I finish something. In between is exploration.

The biggest drags seem to be repeating work I’ve done before, and being told not to make something as good as I think it should be.

So, exploring, discovering new things, and using what I’ve learned to do something excellently. Which can be hard sometimes. There isn’t always something new that needs doing!

The only time in my life i was satisified with my job was at the start of my career when I spent a couple of years at CERN, there was a lot of freedom to try new things and technologies, you could generate great imapct and the people around was very nice.

5 years ago I got the opportunity to take over a project suite and was allowed to port from vb.net to c#, including build a new architecture that holds the work of a single developer for 10 years.
I love creating structure and consistency, so this was a very nice doing.
Today I just know almost every line of code in it and I can use the work to help my colleagues learning architecture.

I love coffee pauses. They are useful to “reset” your mind. Too much work will ruin your brain.
And sociality between co-workers is a must.

It’s a technical problem that feels like it should be easy to solve but turns out it’s not.

And also turns out it’s sufficiently difficult that not many people are interested in solving it/believe it can be solved. I’m here to prove them wrong.

Honestly, I feel satisfied when I succeed. My job has long periods of scrambling in the dark for relatively few periods where everything works and you’ve made something great. I like the feelings of accomplishments when it finally works

It’s much, much better than working in fields like Medieval peasants, and better than working any kind of manual labor job. It pays well, lets me live the lifestyle I want, and doesn’t drive me crazy. Being intellectually interesting is just a bonus.

Having worked at a few places that make consumer electronics, Apple is a breath of fresh air!

Here is how it goes when you find an issue with a qualcomm chip (which is what you are using if you want to make anything fast and portable): (1) they ignore you, (2) they tell you to fuck off, (3) they ignore you some more, (4) they tell you that because your design is not a 100% copy of their reference design, they cannot support you, (5) they delay, (6) they tell you that a new chip came out and you should try that, while not specifying if anything was actually fixed.

Here is how it goes at Apple: (1) you think you might have an issue, (2) in < 30 minutes you have a meeting/slack channel with the team that designed the chip and can clarify/discuss as needed.

It is incredibly cool to know that every part of the device is made in the same company – it means that no matter what your issue is, someone will care and try to resolve it!

I work at $BigTech in cloud consulting. I’ve liked the idea of “putting myself out of a job” for the last decade as I bumped around between smaller companies before 2020.

My job gives me the chance to do that – I see a problem, I work with the customer to come up with a solution, I design and develop an MVP, I teach their developers and DevOps folks and I move on to the next project.

Even though I work at a huge company, my project teams are small and focused and I get to wear a lot of hats – pre-sales, project management, developer, architect, Devops, etc depending on the project.

Working remotely is a huge plus.

Writing code is fun. The fundamental part of the job is something I enjoy doing. As you move up the ladder you do less and less, but it’s still there. Also the pay. I am still retiring ASAP but the day to day is bearable.

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