Yes, I was surprised by that line. I tried to do that. 10 years ago I was a newly minted Ph.D. and my wife and I had to solve the 2 body problem and we compromised with our jobs so we could both be employed together in a nice town with a relatively low cost of living and a great place to raise a family. Our lives outside of work were fantastic! Great friends, nice house, lots of weekend activities, got my first pup (waiting my whole life to have my own place so I could have one), had my twins a year later.

But good God was my job (big company, lots of politics and bad management... the usual) absolutely soul crushing. I thought that I'd be able to make my peace with it in lieu of everything else which was near perfect, but the more time dragged on, the more it crushed me and sucked joy out of the other areas of my life. I will never forget the sense of existential dread that would overcome me every Sunday evening and the relief on Friday evenings.

Fortunately I was able to leave and take up an opportunity at a small startup in the ML/consulting space. It's entirely bootstrapped, so no VC people fucking everything up, and the management are incredibly nice and decent humans, and several of them I count as close friends. I love the work that I do, and I am almost always learning new things. I've been working here for 4 years, and I have never yet experienced that existential dread on a Sunday evening. Work is just another part of my life that I enjoy now, and it is incredible how happy and fulfilled I am with my life. My wife has fortunately experienced the same with the move and change in jobs.

I get hit up by recruiters for the big tech companies all the time and there simply is no reason why I would ever consider working at any of those companies to be another cog in the wheel. No amount of money can ever make up for what I have now.

So I would strongly encourage anyone who is in the situation described by OP or me above to try their best to switch jobs if possible. I can't fathom going through my whole adult life as unhappy as I was at my first job and I wouldn't wish it on even my worst enemy.

I appreciate reading your story. I'm ~6 years out of school having been in large companies and am wondering if it's normal to have the joy sucked out like I'm experiencing. If you don't mind me asking, how did you end up finding the small startup job? When I look at the job boards they're often dominated by the big guns or it's hard to sort through lots of small (oftentimes shady) postings - I don't know where to go to find small-by-design companies or similar mindset jobs.

I wish I had a better answer but like in almost all cases, it ends up being your network. In my case, my brother-in-law had been working for a few years at the company and he knew the founders as a couple of them were his mentors in grad school. So I knew enough about the company and when they needed to hire someone, him being able to vouch for me was enough to get me an interview with them.

That being said, I think places like ziprecruiter / indeed will still have job postings from smaller companies. The challenge, as you mentioned, is trying to figure out the good ones from the sketchy/shitty ones. Small companies can also be challenging if the management isn't great and they have bad culture. So I would definitely place a lot of weight on that if I were interviewing at smaller companies.

Try AngelList, lots of small companies and startups.

Funny enough, I just finished my PhD in December 2019. It's been hard getting interviews in the bay area (I want to stay close to family with older parents). I have great academic credentials but somehow I can't signal that to recruiters. I managed to snag an interview with a company I know I'll dread working for. The recruiter acknowledged it's a stress factory and weekends working where regular and I couldn't care less about their product.

I'm debating if I should take the job, assuming I pass the interview, to set foot in industry or keep searching continue working on a potentially monetizable passion project.

In this climate, I would probably lean towards taking up that job. You have a few good things going for you:

1. You have good academic credentials

2. You are trained in a "hot" field (my Ph.D. was in Physics but I've always loved software engineering and ML, but that was a very hard transition for me to pull off)

3. Getting a year or two under your belt is probably better than a large gap in your career if things continue to go south on the employment front. I suspect a decent number of ML/Datascience people are going to be laid off if they haven't already because they end up being more expensive and it isn't as easy to quantify their net impact / benefit to a company.

Just focus on how you can use your time at any job right now to improve your skills and round out your profile so you are a more attractive candidate for the kinds of jobs you'd like to target in a few years.

Also, if things bounce back in the next year, demand is still going to be high and you should be able to find a better job and switch relatively easily.

I think there's a tendency, when confronted with a person who is upset about having made their work their identity, to swing to the other extreme and advocate complete separation and dispassion.

Like everything else, we need to find balance. I like my job and think that in general I do good work. But I am not my work and my work is not me. It's a part of me, to be sure, and I feel connected to it, but work is a relatively small part of my identity.

It's rare that I can read this. I used to be equating my work to my soul. And it hurts badly when you're not surrounded with people in a similar mindset.

If you find that your skills and career make it unfeasible to find much realisation, then probably your best strategy is making work "just work" - there's a tendency to lying to oneself in this industry. The vast majority of developers are doing the equivalent of assembly line plumbing with a lot of delusions on top. This will hit sooner or later if you are not stupid.

really well put. "People have a deep need to relate as full human beings to their work." And those relationships can be very important - even though they might not outlast the time working together.

I think though that "meaningful work" is different from deeper meaning in life. Confusing the two causes suffering. I have worked at an adtech company with really good people. I helped start a nonprofit publication in Brooklyn full of college friends, artists and academics- which ended up being the sleaziest group of backstabbing grubs imaginable.

I have a manager right now whom I respect. He (CTO) gives good project guidance and makes clear decisions based on rational business reasons... I like him but have no illusions that he would fire me in a second if it were in the interests of the company. Keeping this in the back of my mind helps me modulate my response when I am frustrated or really almost any emotion to the excess.

Its possible to do very meaningful work without being friends. You can even be friendly and go out and drink together from time to time ... but always remember what you are there for.

You can find meaningful experiences out of work. They can even be "worklike". I am an EMT on weekends and I end up thinking about it during the week. The relationships at the corps are important but in the back of my mind I can understand that this activity is not exactly work. It could be but at the moment it is not. I am a systems engineer.

There is a lot to unpack in this. I strongly agree with you that work is about as central to our identity as can be.

I've been miserable at NYC tech companies with unlimited vacation and catered lunches... And a crappy attitude was at least 50% of that misery. (2 months of covid-19 and I find myself missing the commute at times)

When I was in school I worked for the university for free tuition. I was a groundskeeper and mowed and planted. I was outside. I occasionally drove a dumptruck to get loads of gravel or dirt. I worked with a guy who dropped out of highschool and played heavy metal in our truck as we drove around campus. When it rained we would hide out and play chess. He was an interesting dude full of contradictions.

I hated the job because I felt humiliated as a student working a menial job on campus. In hindsight I can see how important a job it was. It enabled me to get through school and afford a place to live. There were fun moments and good experiences (driving a full dumptruck down route18 is its own thrill...)

I was limited mostly by my attitude and a posture - who I thought I was. Dreaming about being somewhere else and avoiding people I knew.

I still catch myself engaging in that kind of behavior.

We do need to relate to each other as humans though work. This requires lots of re-calibration.