Lemur wrote: ↑Tue Oct 19, 2021 1:59 pm
(on business roles and type As/ type Bs)
I'm a bit older than you (40 this year), so I've managed to perform the "burnout followed by transition to business role" routine a couple times already. Unfortunately, I can't really hack it on the business side - it's usually a giant mess, nothing makes sense, we're happily marching towards a cliff (or, at best, spinning in circles) - and nobody gives crap. When asked to work in these conditions, I'd basically need to convert into a spineless, smiling (and secretly dying inside) shadow of a man like most of these business folk I believe are. Programming is better than that, at least it doesn't take my integrity from me.
It may be better in smaller organizations - the business roles in startups I've worked for seemed relatively no-nonsense. Unfortunately, my business exp. was only in large, hopelessly dysfunctional organizations.
EDIT: one more thought here. The problems in business are much less well defined and much more open-ended. These conditions make for a great personal/hobby project or even PhD subject, but create a lot of stress when operating in business environment. Whereas, with coding, I just have to fix bug X or add fairly-well-defined feature Y.
In general, in a typical business, the business people make the most because their job IS the hardest. Only in tech, the coding got so bloody hard that it can match the difficulty of management's job - and, in result, the grunts often make as much as their managers.
I barely care for the technical puzzles these days...guess that is why I'm doing management / business work lately and powerpoint. The drive is lost after a while and it is hard to get excited when you've been there done that. Occasionally, I get the drive to fix something when no one else can figure it out but mostly I try to delegate that stuff when I can.
Getting better at technical stuff (mostly, mastering the hyped tech of the era) is a self-serving goal for me, because it will lead to more money. It's motivating, I can get behind that.
Another point of low energy - there are a lot of things I want to do right now but can't (or just don't have the will too) simply because having a job is like having a real life RPG mana bar and mine drains me by 5:30PM. Sometimes you even have to save some of this mana for more work later...And creative activities sometimes only work when you've a certain amount of mana but you can't execute (don't bother too) because you can't put your heart in it like you want too.
Similar here. A full-time job in software means basically I have almost no life. Beyond basic maintenance (daily walks, some gym) I maybe manage to read a book a month, see a friend or family a couple times per month, play Magic for 2-3 hours on weekend (too tired to play more) and that's mostly it. The rest is vegging. A bit like a life of a monk - ora et labora, but without the prayer and with vegging in front of the laptop in the evenings. I imagine the rhythm and monotony are similar.
Some say that "you need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable", "push through the pain", i.e. that it should be possible to say do some hobbies in the afternoon even when tired, if only one can make oneself do that. I've tried that many times, and it usually leads to crippling headaches after a week at most. So, in my case, it looks like a genuine physical limitation. That's why it makes sense to maximize income and just get it over with in a couple of years.