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Wellness Wednesday for November 2, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I could easily be extrapolating incorrectly from my life, but I feel like most industries must have ability to jump jobs and maximize comp, i.e. optimizing a career instead of a single job.

I'm in a career where working hard is pretty mandatory and everything you do is minutely tracked so you can't really get away with slacking hours unless you're in a less demanding, lower paid job. I grinded at multiple high paying jobs jumping around trying to find the 'cushy' gig but wasn't able to and eventually burned out real hard from stress.

Both at least moderate overstatements. I think my willingness to career optimize (grind leetcode, quit a job) matters more by far.

Anecdotally I know a lot of programmers, and they tend to have pretty damn sweet gigs. Folks like you making hundreds of thousands a year for like 30 hours a week. Sure being willing to optimize your career is part of that, but I think it's pretty rare to find that level of compensation for anything less than 50-60 hours of work in any other field. Maybe I'm wrong but that's the imperssion I get from the outside looking in.

but would it be more fun? I am convinced I'd hate to live in a shittier house/city.

Well that's the thing - it's a tradeoff. To put it another way, most people probably already live in a shittier house/city but don't have the option of either working less or making globs and globs of money.

To your question about would it be more fun, I guess it depends? For me I would love to be good enough / in demand enough to pick and choose companies I work for, and ideally join a team I really like while doing something I truly care about. Unfortunately that takes quite a bit of career capital, and in some cases actual capital if I would want to find a well paying job like that.

All this being said I have managed to find a good role for myself that I enjoy, but only by going all in on a startup and agreeing to take a pretty big risk working for a few months without any pay, only sweat equity.