How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not

Exactly. In this particular case, it was fun because I recognised the problem and had/took the freedom to get to the bottom of this and fix it as thoroughly as I could. I could easily have decided to accept that the big import process took an hour, but I stubbornly thought it could be faster, and reduced it to 3 minutes. Biggest dopamine boost ever. Still coasting on that. And in doing so, discovered a bunch of bugs, undocumented behaviour users depended on, and ended up addressing all of it in the way I wanted.

That freedom was absolutely key. The same job could have been frustrating and stupid if someone else had been ordered to do what I did.

to play devils advocate, you can try to “love what you do” while continuing to better your circumstances. No?

The quote doesn’t suggest “the job/career you have now is perfect for you, ignore all red flags”.

If you do what you love, then you love what you do.

If you love what you do, you didn't necessarily get there by doing what you love.

Reminds me of: a duck is a bird but a bird isn't necessarily a duck.

I agree it's not the opposite.

I think the subtle difference is "Do what you love" is passive one is not actively doing anything. They have ideal in their head that may not match reality. "Love what you do" in my eyes is being present and actively loving the moment while doing the work.

A very common example is art. Most people love to draw things like characters or landscapes. But the real world application of art is usually ads, logos, and posters.

There's significant skill overlap, but little passion overlap.

It’s a flip on the framing, and a non trivial one.

One is love what you do - which assumes regardless of what you’re doing, love it.

The other, do what you love - means choose things that make you love them.

They’re completely opposite in what choice they’re telling people to make.

I agree. While depression and negativity leads you to see things practically rather than in an optimistic and hopeful way, the quality of life and satisfaction in a little optimistic world is much better. I am yet to read Daniel Kahneman but he talks about optimism a lot.

That's the kind of optimistic attitude I'd expect from Emperor Vespasian, builder of the Colosseum. You're role-playing your persona really well!

It's not difficult to imagine a number of scenarios where that perspective could bite you in the ass.

If you have a false impression of a person's character because you've jedi mindtricked yourself into not thinking the worst of people, you might end up trusting an untrustworthy person.

If you are in a toxic work environment, and you convince yourself it's not so bad, you might end up staying in a situation that is actively harming you.

We are speaking in the abstract and I can't comment on anyone else's experience. But I personally find toxic positivity and the endless drive to be more productive much more dangerous than being too negative.

Personally, I employ/enjoy a highly skeptical form of optimism.

I think things could be great, but there are many obstacles along the way to be aware of.

The trick is to be positive about yourself and the people you can trust, but slightly negative about the world at large.

It isn't true, it is obvious bullshit.

It is like making the argument that the most accurate view of life is doing nothing because we are all going to die anyway.

> admitting that companies are quite toxic and more often than not working against you, that most people around you is probably an incompetent if put under a microscope and that the things you’re working on aren’t exactly changing the world for the better

It would be so much easier to deal with if I wasn't surrounded by people, especially management, that act like we're on a mission from $DEITY. Seriously, I can get over on working on whatever inane unimportant thing. It's the entire circus acting like we're not that drives me nuts.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't imagine plumbers get talks along the lines of "We're top-notch leaders in our industry for fitting pipes! True innovators. Pushing the envelope. We are world-renowned for our culture and are continually pushing the limits of what's possible. Every day we inspire people to live their best lives and be their true selves. " Add on to that, plumbers are actually important! And they know it.

Related: did you do anything specific to help with your depression? I've been getting into TMS / ketamine / whatever else territory for mine.

>CBT can definitely veer into gaslightning territory. But then, if it helps you cope, so what?

That's myopic. There's only so much "reframing" you can do before the tension begins to rear its head. Serenity now, insanity later.

Strongly disagree. I've seen bad code or maintenance in all the languages. Sure, some ecosystems seem to attract worse practices, but the absolute best software engineering principles I ever learned in my multi-decade career were at a Rails shop. Everything was extremely well maintained, tested, CI/CD were great even before that was a thing. Not to start flame wars about refactoring or what it means to maintain code more, but that place was absolutely full of people who cared and kept those projects at the highest of caliber grade. You can find good, bad, and ugly in every ecosystem but I personally don't think Rails was ever even remotely bad. You can have an amazingly well-maintained setup and still be super productive. It's really about the people and the company spending the time, money, and energy to care. (Edit: typo)

One of the largest codebases I've ever worked on, generating billions in revenue every year to this day, is in Rails. Over a thousand hands have touched it, and none of the original people are still around to hold an empire.

I'm with you on the general lack of discipline enforced by Rails; this codebase isn't fun to maintain, precisely for that reason. All the same, I don't think your critique is fair or even that accurate.

But that's from my POV working at bigger companies. Maybe it looks different as a freelancer for smaller shops.

First, props for your candor. It’s refreshing.

I do wonder if Rails is so bad compared to other frameworks that it deserves such a distinct treatment.

Over the decades I’ve worked with at least half a dozen popular frameworks that fit this description, is the same for you or is Rails truly unique in this regard?

This must be a god level troll post.

Hard disagree. I work on one of the largest Rails codebases out there. Millions of lines of code running in a monolith. I have learned more in this shop about scaling, observability, mature system designs, zero downtime upgrades, deploys, etc…

I been in this field for almost 30 years and have worked with whatever tech the job required. Still I learned more at a Rails shop with more than 200 engineers all working in the same monolith shipping to production multiple times every day.

Can confirm, I'd charge a laaaarge premium to ever work on an existing Rails codebase again.

Did it several times over a period of 15 years and they were always a wreck and unreasonably painful to work with. Every single time.

I'd start a green field one, no problem, provided I get veto on gem choices ("Let's use some twee fucking template language that's a ton worse-performing than the default and doesn't let you programmatically control nesting levels / end tags because it's terribly designed" yeah how about we don't do that because it's going to make my life a living hell) without charging a premium. But no more onboarding to rails codebases without enough money to make it worth my hating every second of work for the (assuredly short) duration.

... and I like Ruby!

I wouldn't really call it a pet theory at this point; HN's front page daily further shows that LLMs suck at magic and excel at boring code, seeming quite immune to boredom. But I would argue what makes the difference for LLMs is not verbosity but locality, whether syntactic or analytical ie whether the type is just written here or you have an LSP server to query for it, the distinction is, being able to point to an arbitrary symbol and get lots of rich context about it.

It's a game changer for human devs also, and not really one I would expect a serious Rails habitué to necessarily evaluate in a way that's reliable. What did someone call that once, the "Blub Paradox?" Silly name, but that's this industry for you.

Ruby is a fine toy and an awful tool, the other Perl that Python killed.

Rails should have incurred some kind of criminal indictment.

I wish I hadn't mentioned either, because now no one will talk about anything else.

Analyze the whole program? I steadfastly refused to ever attempt do that. "method(:foo).source_location" from the Rails console and I've got the only answer that matters. Most functions were monkey patched at least once anyways, so you'd never know by searching for the implementation where it was.

Came back? Everyone and their cousin is falling over themselves to get on the AI train[1], and spending incomprehensible amounts of energy trying to "lint" their way to sanity as if the python ecosystem isn't fighting tooth and nail to "be dynamic"

So, yeah, I look forward to the cycle tacking in the other direction but today ain't it

1: to say nothing of the fact that model servers exist so why the fuck are you writing business logic in a language that DGAF just because your data scientists have a hard-on for pytorch

I said "empire builders," not "engineers." Nor did I say "held hostage."

My perspective on this is that of a working engineer who made a deliberate choice, now nearly 15 years ago, to avoid ending up stuck in the same decreasing-radius career spiral I saw Rails leading me toward - so I went and did some other things, then spent a decade building modern TypeScript instead, mostly on Kubernetes, without losing the ability to knock out a quick one-off script or architect a system top to bottom as I need. It's worked out splendidly for me! I suppose I might have done as well if I decided differently, but I admit I don't see how.

It does cause serious problems if you ever start needing engineers, though, unless you're a better politician than people who imagine themselves skillful politicians almost ever are.

What country were you searching in? I'm an American work-from-home Rails + React engineer (admittedly with 12 years of experience), and I'm in the 96th % income bracket for individuals of my age (mid-40s). And I just started this position a month or two ago, so it's not like I got this job during the time of ZIRP.

IMO it completely depends on the company you're working for. I've seen job ads targeting my skill level offering $200k/year, and others offering $130k or even less. There will always be companies out there either trying to lowball people, or who genuinely don't operate in a vertical which is profitable enough to pay top-band salaries.

I mean, if you want to tie your fortunes to one team and company forever, then sure, it can make sense.

I've had decades like that in my career, which began in the nineties. It would be nice to have another such decade; I don't enjoy always keeping one eye on the exit and my back to the wall, rather than being able to count on a given environment to stay stable enough long enough with enough upside to really repay my investment.

This doesn't feel to me like such a decade, though. Too much is changing too fast.

......and the tech stack is usually obvious in the job posting.

If it's that vitally important to you to only work at jobs with tech stacks that will "advance your career" beyond that job, why would you even apply to a job that doesn't show one you consider worthy?