By the sounds of things actually they could, because dropping 10k employees wouldn't fix the culture, so you would have whatever 10k employees worth of work less done. If they fixed all the culture and mis management and actually tried to get 30hrs of work out of the employees they could probably drastically reduce headcount for the same output, or, drastically increase output for the same headcount. Likely you'd end up doing a bit of both, because you'd figure out who's who, but instead the company sounds like it'll just get slowly run into the ground.
Overhiring and underworking is basically the norm in this industry. I mean, twitter laid off 70% of its employees and no one noticed any difference. But imagine if hospitals laid off 70% of doctors and nurses, or if the police laid off 70% of police officers. They wouldn’t function. Tech bros like to think they’re more special than the rest, when in reality it’s the opposite.
Having gone from a job that i was coasting at to a job i actually really enjoy and am engaged in, it makes a huge difference for happiness. Coasting is fine every now and then, but when you really find a job you like, that joy will spread to all parts of your life
In all seriousness, coasting is more tiring than hard work. It drains your soul. The fantasy of it may seem relaxing, but the reality is that you never feel secure, and you never feel proud of yourself. Also, you never get that time back. So the next time you’re put into a position where you can’t coast, you’re gonna look back and realize that you wasted so much of your own potential, and you’re years behind your colleagues both in skills and experience. Do. Not. Coast.
Coast in one but either: - get a second job where you actually work - contribute to open source - dedicate time to your hobby project and finally deploy it
I found myself coasting in the last few months. I agree 100%, it drains you. And unfortunately I can't even change it at my current job, so I am looking for a challenging job instead.
@@vitorguidorizzzi7538 I’m highly skeptical of anyone who claims they can maintain two jobs even if they coast. What if you have a conflicting meeting? You gonna attend both meetings at once? Always miss one meeting? Alternate which meeting you miss? Doesn’t make any sense to me.
As an ex-coaster, he's spot on. Dont forget if you're in a small firm, wait till your manager leaves then leave 10 minutes after to leave, not a single second more.
If you're in a small firm, your manager could be an actual manager and work until 9-10pm. So it doesn't really apply.. In my experience, small firms are closely managed and very productive. Depends whats the scale you are talking about. I worked in a firm of a total of 30 employees with 6 devs and we were really productive.
That can't be working very well, at least not long term. It's like trying to get a monopoly on silver or gold or something, the supply grows and you lose!
One of the most difficult places to land via their interview process, meanwhile, their employees do this degenerate stuff and there are employees that can't even debug their own code. lol CLASSIC
This comes at the perfect time. I'm in a cloud engineering contract and I'm kinda in that situation. Lots of docs, lots of busy work, and a lot of tl;dr salsa that managers like. It's not like we don't work for 6-8 hours a day (most times), but the things on the papers, or the way the managers advertise us, compared to what we actually do... sooo different.
Quality Content. I've done something similar in my career, albeit not so aggressive as only working 10 hours a week. More like working just 30 hours a week but making it look like I'm god's gift to my company. I follow the 80% rule. At any given time, i'm operating at just 80% of my capability. That way, during crunch that will inevitably happen, I can just turn up to 90% and get things done and make it look like i gave 150% during a difficult time for everyone. On the other end, i'm avoiding burnout because I'm not working all day every day. Has worked for me in my short 9 year career and now I make a quarter million a year. Great vid though i'd advise people not to be this aggressive because as he said, your soul will suffer.
This is the fear most organizations have with remote work. But what they don't realize is that people coast in the office as well. The secret is to create an environment where people love their work and feel empowered to make it better. Engineers want to BUILD something. They want to point to something and say "I built that." Harness that.
@@pseudocode1 undoubtedly, but you never actually contributed to anything. I mean let's say the guy keeps doing this for another 5 years. In those 5 years what have you learned? Sure, the money is amazing. 400k for 10 hours of work is insane, but I can't see this being fulfilling long term. I'm not quite there yet, I'm only a second year CS undergrad but I've experienced first hand how much happiness fulfilling work gives you. Used to work as an entry level data entry job part time, the work only took about an hour and a half and I just spent the rest of the time scrolling reddit, watching youtube. Finally snapped and decided to work at a restaurant a friend works at. I learned how to prepare ingredients, knife skills and cooking on the wok. Seeing myself get better every time I come to work gave me so much more enjoyment compared to that data entry job despite being easier.
More and more stories like these keep popping up. After I wrote my viral blog article last March ("I've employed in tech for many years, but I've almost never worked"), many people have reached out to me to share their stories, which are very similar to this one. What they all have in common is that they are miserable in that situation. We don't get into this profession to sit idle and do nothing, let alone pretend to work all day. It is soul draining.
@@ThePrimeTimeagen In the other side of things, don't you think it's a little rich to cater to the "depressive" side of people earning this much while a lot of people who want to do more and thus earn these big figures are kept outside the bubble? I mean, is traditional corporate culture the cause of this mess or is just a case of people taking advantage of a situation and then feeling regret after not managing their finances correctly?
@@luizfcavalcantiI think it depends on the company. I think there are definitely guys who don't care and are purposefully getting by doing the bare minimum. But at the same time I've been in workplaces where there isn't much to do, and from what i can see, it's from the insane red tape in highly regulated industries that slows work pace down to a crawl. I've been in a place where even when you try to make work by doing or creating something of value, there's some process or procedure somewhere that says you can't do it because of some crazy rule, because the customer won't allow it, or you're waiting on approval for something that'll take weeks to do a simple task you could do right away in a more normal paced working environment. Although I didn't find it depressing, just annoying
I get that, on the other hand so many people would love to have this problem in our instead. We just have to work towards something actually fulfilling.
I can attest to this being the culture in other big tech companies as well, unfortunately. It's actually worse than the OP makes it out to be because if you're actually earnest and give a shit it is damn near impossible to advocate for folks who are actual high performers and/or show a lot of potential because the folks who can fake it and make it don't want the gravy train to stop, so they do their best to block those folks who might call them out during calibration.
You know what’s really the worst here? That the media will catch that crap, make a big story about how everyone in the industry is like that and then the shit hits the fan - all of the sudden you have hordes of people on the internet hating the profession because “we do nothing for a lot of money”… people just don’t understand that it’s only a few outliers. They will throw rocks at us all.
I don't think it takes the media to do that. All it takes is some cult of personality like Elon to imply people don't work hard enough and the mob will follow. The last thing any industry needs is hyped idea guys that think "rebuild the whole thing" is just a thing you can do with a fifth of your company.
In my experience as someone who tries hard to be a high performer and get things done, this is the rule, not the exception or outliers. There's a reason that Twitter could fire most of its staff and the product be largely unaffected.
this video just proves that the promotion system is not a meritocracy and one should know how to properly share their successes. assess your position and take a decision. if your job brings interesting scenarios that help you grow your skills and actually make use of your skills that can be leveraged into a promotion, it feels amazing. if your're stuck on a position filled with coasters and on a project without direction, just play the game and make use of the free time to develop your skillset. As you said, nothing feels worse than not doing anything and not improving. If you're not doing anything than use the free-time to grow. great video!
So true. That sums up my most recent experience. I've seen other engineers coasting and management have no clue. The real one that get things done are overlooked and maybe not even promoted. I think coasting is a much more bigger problem at the larger companies.
13:50 The worst thing that ever happened to me as an electronic designer (5k a month, 65k ish a year) was enforced coasting. I got done with one project and got assigned another project that just wasn‘t able to move forward for weeks for external reasons. I sometimes cleaned and tidied up my workspace 2-3 times a day because I was bored out of my mind, it was actually awful.
I really value that part near the end about fighting negative perception. It really does feel like an endless loop where you feel like you're drowning but have to swim faster and faster. Like in my case, I felt my output was fine, but then I got put on a new project dealing with stuff I've never seen before that other devs had specific tasks to spend time researching and getting acquainted with first and my output slowed, and like I could say "yea well I have to learn while I write" but at this company its about tickets finished period. Doesn't matter the quality, if it even works or anything else. Was the ticket finished or no? This doubly compounded with the fact I just can't do it. Like for sure I tend to have a problem with over engineering things to make them where I would feel good using the thing/tool/feature as an end user, but at bare minimum, I just cant put out code that only on paper does the job, and that just makes me look worse when for everyone else, the standard was literally to put out broken code as fast as possible, and continue to make more tickets as users reported how broken the code you put out was. This was only rewarded too, so this left me in a trap of trying to work harder and harder till I just hit this level of burnout where I just stopped working. Like my output just dropped because I just didn't want to do it anymore. Luckily there were mass layoffs and I was one of the people laid off, because I just don't know how I could mentally manage continuing in that situation. Honestly, I really need to as a developer, from a personal wellbeing point of view, stop focusing on what my job theoretically is, and the actual KPI's the company actually values, because ultimately, its not my thing. At the end of the day, I don't own it, and it's the company who suffers the consequences of bad code, not me. So if their KPI's tell me to make bad code fast, I should just make bad code fast, and make sure I report the shit out of how much """progress""" I'm making. Forget try harding odd/difficult problems. Find a crappy bandaid that half doesn't work, and get them metrics going. My only saving grace at that job was a killer project lead who was overworked to shit wearing 3 hats while having one title who just straight up told me I could be making more working less hard elsewhere in confidence, and who made me feel sane by confirming just how absurdly skewed the perverse incentives at this company were. Anyways, thanks to all that read, and this video legitimately gives me some new perspective to think about with regards to work not actually being valued, but the appearance of work.
"If they tell me to make bad code fast, I should just make bad code fast." This feels really relatable to my current situation. I'm already scared of being fire but I guess in the end, you just gotta do what you can... or what you're told to do
@@meiyosei78 I do a Uni project with a narcissist who insists more than I can fight back, and he values code that theoretically should work, and he interprets assignments as step by step guides. Is he the sort of person that will be my boss after Uni? Because I've tried everything. He's like a wall.
I, from time to time, import useless libraries to the project of a company, and learn it at their expenses to decide whether I should use it or not in my own personal project 👼. I also push that stuff to github anyways, because it looks like "work"; people never think it's malicious.
Even if you limit your work hours by coasting, it means that you can still build awesome things, just a personal project and maybe even surpass who you work for by owning a company or two... Maybe do both and have a larger income...
this pretty much matches what a friend at google Romania said "we get to fix what teams in the rest of europe breaks and get passed extra tasks even when we are full already" because of being overworked hes girl friend left (for the best since she was with him for the money), hes mother had to come visit because he burned out, he didn't even register going to the WC or what he eats
Sorry, but who's at fault here? Romania has decent employee protection laws, nobody is forcing this dogshit corporate bootlicking behaviour, it is programmed into you starting from school onward.
I've heard similar stories from big tech companies in greece too. Everyone idolises these jobs, and desperate fresh grads end up getting destroyed by jobs. The smart few use that as a ticket to get jobs at better countries, but many just soft-quit their career and look for comfy jobs after experiences like that.
What is being described here is an effect of a large mature corporation with healthy financials that can afford overhead without running into any kind of trouble. They prioritize internal peace, procedures and culture over cut throat productivity gains and that's fine. You can find similar examples outside of hitech and if you find yourself in that kind of situation you can consider yourself lucky, except... It won't last forever and aside from soul-crushing aspect of prioritizing compliance over achievement, there's an element of getting used to the comfort of all of that. It is very difficult to readjust to a more demanding and stressful environment outside of that bubble if you ever have to look for another job at a much less established place. Not saying it's bad, just not particulalrly ustainable in the long run (but then again, what is?)
You have to really be bad at your field to think this is a "lucky" position. It is extremely demoralizing to be stuck doing nothing when you expected to come in and utilize and grow your skillset.
@@kv1293 Granted, it depends. It's generally to be better in a position of high risk - high potential reward, especially when you're younger. In a large corporation, however, that attitude is usually allowed within certain areas while other areas prioritize compliance over aggressive achievement. I don't judge one way or the other, esp when people with families & kids prioritize collecting paychecks over risky highly-competitive cutthroat competition exhilarating environments. Neither do I judge mature corporations that choose to retain former kind of people. To each their own
This is precisely the reason startups must be funded to creatively destroy the companies who are resting on their laurels. The reality is that mature companies are sitting on their prior achievements. It's culture from the bottom to the top. There is no glory in a mature company, only status. The fat must be trimmed, it's only a matter of time.
@@CMCDragonkai Yep, culture is an unstoppable force and you can't change those things from within. Startups have a whole different set of incentives and end up breaking things where more established players can't or aren't necessarily incentivized to.
I feel your ending statements. I'm dead broke (at least I don't have kids to worry about), and I'd rather be awesome than coasting, no matter the price difference (within reason, obv). I've had (and have) really easy jobs where all I have to do is show up almost on time, put in my 8 hours, and punch out, but every job like that I've found that it just feels like the void is eating my soul. The apathy I've felt in those jobs was _intense,_ as counter-intuitive as that is. But I'd sure as hell rather coast and be rich than where I am now, which is neither awesome nor rich. I ain't above gaming the system if the alternative is being broke and mediocre.
This is a good example of Parkinson's Law: The work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion and the reality that most people simply get rewarded with more work.
yeah. when I worked at Microsoft (a decade+ ago), I often saw the flip side of this coin. A lot of people trying to throw others under the bus, and all the team and reporting turn over meant if you were unlucky, you would not get promotions for a long time, even if you busted your ass. large companies trend to mediocrity, one way or another. It starts in earnest at the dunbar number, and orgs have to actively fight it.
I was let go from Microsoft last year. It still happens. I couldn't believe one of my coworkers wasn't a senior, he was basically leading the whole team. He wasn't even a senior when they laid him off.
You can pretend to work and get away with it everywhere. I work at a small startup where at one point we were 8 engineers, and we had someone definitively coasting. This is not unique to big tech, though it will obviously be easier to pull off and for the same percent of coasters you will have more coasters due to the scale/number of big tech employees.
this isn't just a google thing, most swe jobs unless you're on crunch will be really chill, that is why people can leverage 2,3 or more jobs at the same time if wfh
Prime's concluding comments are the better advice and what I am glad I stuck around for. Work is a gift! Handle it responsibly and it can provide a lot of happiness.
I was the only American on a all Asian social media team ( shocker, this company is a bubillion miles away from profits ). Gaming the promotion system was like a cultural point of pride.
I want work at a steady but relaxed pace, but I still want to get stuff done. The problem I have currently is that there's too much to manage at any given time.
Master your home life, or anything else. Not saying coast at work, but that doesn't have to be the focus. And if you're spending even a third of your non-paid hours towards your job, say learning RUST so you can use it at your job, that's exactly what it is. Unpaid work. Are you willing to work two jobs just so you can look good at one, with the other job not paying at all? People need to realize there is a difference between "work hard" and "work long unpaid hours" or even the dream "work long paid hours". Hard is being focused on the task you're in when you're in, it has nothing to do with being able to check out afterwards.
What he says is exactly the same in my company. Nothing surprising at all. It is psychology that happens everywhere constantly not even only with developers. It’s NEVER about hard work. NEVER!!! Except for the foot people. They are fucked completely. They can’t hide.
The specifics may be unique to Google, but it's almost eerie how much the performance evaluation system sounds like every other mindless corporate job.
I have had jobs like this for most of my life and it has made me extremely depressed to where I am drinking myself to death. Humans need purpose and fulfillment in their life, not 1's and 0's in a bank company computer.
At 10 hours a week for $400k, you focus on other endeavors in your newly acquired free time. The good things you make won't be for the company you work for.
David Graeber, "Bullshit Jobs" It's an interesting book. Graeber talks extensively about all these jobs and aspects of our economy where essentially people end up "doing" work/jobs because the market/our society demands that people must work, regardless of whether the work actually needs to be done. Originally I had a nice and detailed explanation of the phenomenom here but I realised I wasn't doing a very good job at explaining it without making this comment extremely long, so just read the book.
It’s messed up because once you’re inside, even bs jobs require long hours and lots of effort. But if they weren’t done, nobody would actually be even slightly inconvenienced
This highlights a much bigger problem, which is that we manage as if we have objective measures, when we clearly don't. This allows people to coast, encourages them to game the system (because if they don't, then even when they work well/hard, they could be poorly judged), and allows the system to be gamed against the developers (which he alluded to with the performance review that no matter how well you perform, you've already lost). This all sounds legit. This is a symptom of the commodification of software development.
WIth 25 years working experience I have done periods of where I lived my work and other periods of coasting. Neither are great. Because of my experience of working hard, I can get things done in a short time so that I can "sleep" the rest. As said, its draining to knowing that you are vastly underperforming, even if your manager are giving you lots of praise. I like to aim for a balance where I work like 30 hours per week. Its still not the same satisfaction as when you get to the weekend and have done a great job, but I feel its an ok balance.
This sounds like every job I've ever had. If the boss thinks you are a hard worker you can be caught slacking and even apologize, but be told "Oh, you're okay. I know you do your work." I have literally been caught slacking with a coworker and had them be reprimanded, but been told the previous statement at 3 different jobs.
That's a dream situation if you're also working on your startup on the side. All the benefits of building a project you believe in, and all the stability of working at FAANG. You have to have something meaningful on the side (doesn't even have to be technical, could be family/charity/etc). Without actual work, you turn into a retiree. They run out of purpose. Eternal vacation is brutal.
I know it's brutal, my heart races just thinking about it... but I'm also a big fan of doing absolutely nothing. I'm prone to the abyss. Without my wife, I could EASILY end up with dementia - I'd be training for the Nothing Olympics.
13:22 When you’re putting in 60-80 hours a week, it shows you’re really into the project and probably juggling a lot of it. If you need to cut back to regular hours, hopefully, everyone gets it and appreciates all the extra time you put in earlier, instead of thinking less of you. They should be cheering you on to take some time for yourself - that’s what a good team would do, right?
Lol. I feel this. I used to come into the office before both directors every morning. I stopped as I was promoted to senior but the manager promotion never came, even when they'd both trash talk my manager (who is bad, to be honest) and asked me countless times if I think I could do his job). All of a sudden, both directors are asking me what was wrong and why I was only coming in on my contracted hours.
@@HaggisMuncher-69-420 Damn, that’s some seriously toxic leadership on the director’s side. In my opinion, you should’ve seen the red flags when they started trash-talking the manager. That’s pretty low, even if he is bad and they disagree with him. They shouldn’t openly trash talk about him in front of his direct reports!
If this is true, then it casts doubt on claims made by DORA and the recent ‘Software Engineering at Google’ by Winters et al of how high performant Google is and how accurate their performance metrics are.
I'm in finance and this is exactly the same thing. They value the thinker, strategist, documenter due to the nature of you, the worker bee, albeit a highly skilled one, being one of many replaceable cogs in a large machine. Why would reward and value the cog in the machine vs valuing the implementer of the cog? Regardless of the truth or facts, perception is reality.
I too get really happy when I build good things. But I want good memories with my daughter, so until she’s in college I’m dutifully studying notes from these coasters. I can always get back on the 20 hour days building cool shit after she leaves the house.
That was my exact same experience at a medical pharmacy company, its easy to bullshit everything, and honestly I just can't live with myself with how stupid it is, I can see EVERYONE doing it too. It's literally the corporate culture!!!
People jeep blaming corporate culture but they need to look at the mirror. Just because you can do something unethical and get away with it doesn't mean you should. It's a choice.
In Russian this is called "vranyo," a type of lie where two or more people lie to each other, know that the other people are lying, and choose not to say anything.
Game developers? Why? So you can sit in your obese ass with your cheeto dust fingers and hammer buttons all day? Sounds about right for someone like you.
No one ever stopped Jay Leno from having two jobs, yet we shame tech employees for doing the same thing. Save/invest everything from one job while you cover all your primary expenses and emergency savings from the other.
People will argue 'knowledge work', but AI is going to make short work of that knowledge work. It's not quite advanced enough now, but in a year you can bet it'll be able to spit out an advanced algo for some tricky problem just fine and make any decent dev a 10-100x dev.
Im 28 and I’m overemployed making 410k a year three jobs. I work at one social media tech, gaming company (sports title, top 3), and a supply chain company. I work like 50-55hr weeks. I love it
This sounds like the statistic I've heard that in a gunfire battle most people miss intentionally and do not even want to shoot unless commanded and there is a very few number of people who do all the killings
@8:03 => reward complexity / poor design & execution. This is universally true. Well planned execution is rarely rewarded because it's passed off as must have been easy, or simply not recognized.
People really underestimate how frustration can affect their well-being. Even if nobody stresses you out and the pay is good, if you don't see a reason for your work (aka a bullshit job), you always think, "What am I doing with my life?". For me, it was time to find purpose, and damn, it was a good choice!
Much of this won't work unless you work for a very very large company. For example, #9. Once they start to realize you are lazy, you transfer, but managers talk, and unless they have many layers of separation between them, your reputation will follow you within that company.
20 and 21 can not be more true, and I think start doing it next year. The big plus is that you are the new guy and they don't expect much from you and still getting the good salary
Most people are saying that you have to do this 7 years and retire... I think after one year you can retire if most people in Romania don't see 10k a year, and they are still alive , also in the UK average wage goes around 25k-30k a year. Put everything in dividends and enjoy a life of sitting home laid back without any stress. (It does sound boring, but this is what some achieve for)
I didnt know you played! I picked up the mandolin 5 years ago, and getting gooder at it has been THE most fulfilling personal project I've undertaken. I played violin/fiddle growing up, but it was always something I did because I felt like I should. I ended up developing an unhealthy relationship with the instrument that led me into a 7 year dry spell where I played almost nothing. I bought my mandolin while I was at a bluegrass festival in 2018 with a wild hair and a hunch that playing it might not come with the same musical baggage that I'd accumulated with the fiddle. Sure enough! Immediately started playing like 4-5 hours every night and having an absolute blast. Over the last few years I've grown into the musician that I'd wished I'd be for the greater part of my life. All it took was actually having fun lol.
This must be how Google can simply lay off 10000 people without falling behind.
yep
By the sounds of things actually they could, because dropping 10k employees wouldn't fix the culture, so you would have whatever 10k employees worth of work less done.
If they fixed all the culture and mis management and actually tried to get 30hrs of work out of the employees they could probably drastically reduce headcount for the same output, or, drastically increase output for the same headcount. Likely you'd end up doing a bit of both, because you'd figure out who's who, but instead the company sounds like it'll just get slowly run into the ground.
Maybe this is because it's only 6% of the company?!
I have been saying it for years. IT was too bloated. Companies can't manage what they hired people for when they just hire that much
Overhiring and underworking is basically the norm in this industry. I mean, twitter laid off 70% of its employees and no one noticed any difference. But imagine if hospitals laid off 70% of doctors and nurses, or if the police laid off 70% of police officers. They wouldn’t function.
Tech bros like to think they’re more special than the rest, when in reality it’s the opposite.
Having gone from a job that i was coasting at to a job i actually really enjoy and am engaged in, it makes a huge difference for happiness. Coasting is fine every now and then, but when you really find a job you like, that joy will spread to all parts of your life
it as they saying goes:
"Do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life." - as unrealistic and idealist this may be these days.
coasting for 400k a year hits a bit different though
Until you realize that no matter what the job is, its ultimate goal is just to make money, helping destroy the environment in the process.
@brinckau muh environment
Happiness is not my goal. But for those it is, job satisfaction is certainly an aspiration.
Fake it till you fake it…
😆
Fake it till you dont need to make it
More like make it until you can fake it.
fake it till u fuck it
He just added 7 years of technical debt
In all seriousness, coasting is more tiring than hard work. It drains your soul. The fantasy of it may seem relaxing, but the reality is that you never feel secure, and you never feel proud of yourself.
Also, you never get that time back. So the next time you’re put into a position where you can’t coast, you’re gonna look back and realize that you wasted so much of your own potential, and you’re years behind your colleagues both in skills and experience.
Do. Not. Coast.
The might work on hobby projects?
Exactly, if you're spending the time on your business or projects whilst getting paid for it....
Coast in one but either:
- get a second job where you actually work
- contribute to open source
- dedicate time to your hobby project and finally deploy it
I found myself coasting in the last few months. I agree 100%, it drains you.
And unfortunately I can't even change it at my current job, so I am looking for a challenging job instead.
@@vitorguidorizzzi7538 I’m highly skeptical of anyone who claims they can maintain two jobs even if they coast. What if you have a conflicting meeting? You gonna attend both meetings at once? Always miss one meeting? Alternate which meeting you miss? Doesn’t make any sense to me.
People often talk about impostor syndrome, but rarely about being an impostor.
yep. It's not a syndrome to know your limits.
It's easy to be a 10x engineer when a 1x engineer does nothing.
10x0 is still 0
@@rayrayray thats why its ez
@@rayrayraywe got a 10x mathematician here
As an ex-coaster, he's spot on.
Dont forget if you're in a small firm, wait till your manager leaves then leave 10 minutes after to leave, not a single second more.
Brilliant !!!
100% true
If you're in a small firm, your manager could be an actual manager and work until 9-10pm. So it doesn't really apply.. In my experience, small firms are closely managed and very productive. Depends whats the scale you are talking about. I worked in a firm of a total of 30 employees with 6 devs and we were really productive.
I did that but after 5 minutes in stead of 10 and I ran into him coming back to collect something.
Google and Facebook have made a practice of taking talent off the market to prevent competition. This is likely a bit of that as well.
That can't be working very well, at least not long term. It's like trying to get a monopoly on silver or gold or something, the supply grows and you lose!
"talent"
One of the most difficult places to land via their interview process, meanwhile, their employees do this degenerate stuff and there are employees that can't even debug their own code. lol CLASSIC
"it really makes me happy when I build good things". Truer words haven't been spoken.
This comes at the perfect time. I'm in a cloud engineering contract and I'm kinda in that situation. Lots of docs, lots of busy work, and a lot of tl;dr salsa that managers like. It's not like we don't work for 6-8 hours a day (most times), but the things on the papers, or the way the managers advertise us, compared to what we actually do... sooo different.
Quality Content. I've done something similar in my career, albeit not so aggressive as only working 10 hours a week. More like working just 30 hours a week but making it look like I'm god's gift to my company. I follow the 80% rule. At any given time, i'm operating at just 80% of my capability. That way, during crunch that will inevitably happen, I can just turn up to 90% and get things done and make it look like i gave 150% during a difficult time for everyone. On the other end, i'm avoiding burnout because I'm not working all day every day. Has worked for me in my short 9 year career and now I make a quarter million a year. Great vid though i'd advise people not to be this aggressive because as he said, your soul will suffer.
doing nothing at work is harder than actually building something
I had the same experience at Google tbh, after switching to Amazon tho with their sprint culture it's a lot harder to "get away" with being lazy
Still possible, but yeah, it's true
If there was an Article of the Year award for ThePrimeTime, this would definitely be up for promotion come management review time
:chefkiss:
This is the fear most organizations have with remote work. But what they don't realize is that people coast in the office as well. The secret is to create an environment where people love their work and feel empowered to make it better. Engineers want to BUILD something. They want to point to something and say "I built that." Harness that.
building wealth for little input is a win
I was coasting much more while in office
@@pseudocode1 undoubtedly, but you never actually contributed to anything. I mean let's say the guy keeps doing this for another 5 years. In those 5 years what have you learned? Sure, the money is amazing. 400k for 10 hours of work is insane, but I can't see this being fulfilling long term. I'm not quite there yet, I'm only a second year CS undergrad but I've experienced first hand how much happiness fulfilling work gives you. Used to work as an entry level data entry job part time, the work only took about an hour and a half and I just spent the rest of the time scrolling reddit, watching youtube. Finally snapped and decided to work at a restaurant a friend works at. I learned how to prepare ingredients, knife skills and cooking on the wok. Seeing myself get better every time I come to work gave me so much more enjoyment compared to that data entry job despite being easier.
Basically like building your own projects, with none of the deadlines, none of the risk, and a guaranteed income. It's the dream!
that's my current job bro. $120k not US , based in Asia . Works on project that I started , quite fun ngl
@@gokusaiyan1128where you based bro? HK? Singapore? What do you do? Data/Eng?
@@mikealexander5428 When you have the magic recipe you dont go around giving it to everybody so they ruin it.
More and more stories like these keep popping up. After I wrote my viral blog article last March ("I've employed in tech for many years, but I've almost never worked"), many people have reached out to me to share their stories, which are very similar to this one. What they all have in common is that they are miserable in that situation. We don't get into this profession to sit idle and do nothing, let alone pretend to work all day. It is soul draining.
getting by by doing the ABSOLUTE minimum will only bring despair and so its not surprising how many people are sad in those situations
@@ThePrimeTimeagen In the other side of things, don't you think it's a little rich to cater to the "depressive" side of people earning this much while a lot of people who want to do more and thus earn these big figures are kept outside the bubble? I mean, is traditional corporate culture the cause of this mess or is just a case of people taking advantage of a situation and then feeling regret after not managing their finances correctly?
@@luizfcavalcantiI think it depends on the company. I think there are definitely guys who don't care and are purposefully getting by doing the bare minimum. But at the same time I've been in workplaces where there isn't much to do, and from what i can see, it's from the insane red tape in highly regulated industries that slows work pace down to a crawl. I've been in a place where even when you try to make work by doing or creating something of value, there's some process or procedure somewhere that says you can't do it because of some crazy rule, because the customer won't allow it, or you're waiting on approval for something that'll take weeks to do a simple task you could do right away in a more normal paced working environment. Although I didn't find it depressing, just annoying
Try having an actual shitty and hard job for a low wage and your "miserable" situation will suddenly not seem so bad.
I get that, on the other hand so many people would love to have this problem in our instead.
We just have to work towards something actually fulfilling.
As a hands-on technical manager, I would completely shred that person.
As a non-technical manager, I would worship that person.
I can attest to this being the culture in other big tech companies as well, unfortunately. It's actually worse than the OP makes it out to be because if you're actually earnest and give a shit it is damn near impossible to advocate for folks who are actual high performers and/or show a lot of potential because the folks who can fake it and make it don't want the gravy train to stop, so they do their best to block those folks who might call them out during calibration.
You know what’s really the worst here? That the media will catch that crap, make a big story about how everyone in the industry is like that and then the shit hits the fan - all of the sudden you have hordes of people on the internet hating the profession because “we do nothing for a lot of money”… people just don’t understand that it’s only a few outliers. They will throw rocks at us all.
I don't think it takes the media to do that. All it takes is some cult of personality like Elon to imply people don't work hard enough and the mob will follow. The last thing any industry needs is hyped idea guys that think "rebuild the whole thing" is just a thing you can do with a fifth of your company.
Leave it to right wing media lol
and what would be the problem of that?
In my experience as someone who tries hard to be a high performer and get things done, this is the rule, not the exception or outliers. There's a reason that Twitter could fire most of its staff and the product be largely unaffected.
most people do absolutely nothing, a few overperformers keep the wheel spinning
this video just proves that the promotion system is not a meritocracy and one should know how to properly share their successes. assess your position and take a decision.
if your job brings interesting scenarios that help you grow your skills and actually make use of your skills that can be leveraged into a promotion, it feels amazing.
if your're stuck on a position filled with coasters and on a project without direction, just play the game and make use of the free time to develop your skillset. As you said, nothing feels worse than not doing anything and not improving. If you're not doing anything than use the free-time to grow.
great video!
Sounds like a nightmare. Although the thought of doing that to essentially steal money from Google is very alluring.
That Google stole from everyone else
@@paulholsters7932 exactly
As a Google employee with 10 years of work experience in the company. I approve this message !
And here I am still unemployed expecting to do _actual work_ at a FAANG like a sucker based on the interviews that I've had the past few years.
So true. That sums up my most recent experience. I've seen other engineers coasting and management have no clue. The real one that get things done are overlooked and maybe not even promoted. I think coasting is a much more bigger problem at the larger companies.
13:50 The worst thing that ever happened to me as an electronic designer (5k a month, 65k ish a year) was enforced coasting. I got done with one project and got assigned another project that just wasn‘t able to move forward for weeks for external reasons.
I sometimes cleaned and tidied up my workspace 2-3 times a day because I was bored out of my mind, it was actually awful.
I really value that part near the end about fighting negative perception.
It really does feel like an endless loop where you feel like you're drowning but have to swim faster and faster. Like in my case, I felt my output was fine, but then I got put on a new project dealing with stuff I've never seen before that other devs had specific tasks to spend time researching and getting acquainted with first and my output slowed, and like I could say "yea well I have to learn while I write" but at this company its about tickets finished period. Doesn't matter the quality, if it even works or anything else. Was the ticket finished or no?
This doubly compounded with the fact I just can't do it. Like for sure I tend to have a problem with over engineering things to make them where I would feel good using the thing/tool/feature as an end user, but at bare minimum, I just cant put out code that only on paper does the job, and that just makes me look worse when for everyone else, the standard was literally to put out broken code as fast as possible, and continue to make more tickets as users reported how broken the code you put out was. This was only rewarded too, so this left me in a trap of trying to work harder and harder till I just hit this level of burnout where I just stopped working. Like my output just dropped because I just didn't want to do it anymore.
Luckily there were mass layoffs and I was one of the people laid off, because I just don't know how I could mentally manage continuing in that situation.
Honestly, I really need to as a developer, from a personal wellbeing point of view, stop focusing on what my job theoretically is, and the actual KPI's the company actually values, because ultimately, its not my thing. At the end of the day, I don't own it, and it's the company who suffers the consequences of bad code, not me. So if their KPI's tell me to make bad code fast, I should just make bad code fast, and make sure I report the shit out of how much """progress""" I'm making. Forget try harding odd/difficult problems. Find a crappy bandaid that half doesn't work, and get them metrics going.
My only saving grace at that job was a killer project lead who was overworked to shit wearing 3 hats while having one title who just straight up told me I could be making more working less hard elsewhere in confidence, and who made me feel sane by confirming just how absurdly skewed the perverse incentives at this company were.
Anyways, thanks to all that read, and this video legitimately gives me some new perspective to think about with regards to work not actually being valued, but the appearance of work.
I'm supposed to sleep now but that hurt. I hope I'll get to do good deeds when I start working or I'll suffer.
"If they tell me to make bad code fast, I should just make bad code fast."
This feels really relatable to my current situation. I'm already scared of being fire but I guess in the end, you just gotta do what you can... or what you're told to do
@@meiyosei78 I do a Uni project with a narcissist who insists more than I can fight back, and he values code that theoretically should work, and he interprets assignments as step by step guides. Is he the sort of person that will be my boss after Uni? Because I've tried everything. He's like a wall.
burn out is real
I, from time to time, import useless libraries to the project of a company, and learn it at their expenses to decide whether I should use it or not in my own personal project 👼.
I also push that stuff to github anyways, because it looks like "work"; people never think it's malicious.
Even if you limit your work hours by coasting, it means that you can still build awesome things, just a personal project and maybe even surpass who you work for by owning a company or two... Maybe do both and have a larger income...
this pretty much matches what a friend at google Romania said "we get to fix what teams in the rest of europe breaks and get passed extra tasks even when we are full already"
because of being overworked hes girl friend left (for the best since she was with him for the money), hes mother had to come visit because he burned out, he didn't even register going to the WC or what he eats
I'm scared to ask what country that is
He edited to clarify - Romania
Sorry, but who's at fault here? Romania has decent employee protection laws, nobody is forcing this dogshit corporate bootlicking behaviour, it is programmed into you starting from school onward.
I've heard similar stories from big tech companies in greece too. Everyone idolises these jobs, and desperate fresh grads end up getting destroyed by jobs. The smart few use that as a ticket to get jobs at better countries, but many just soft-quit their career and look for comfy jobs after experiences like that.
This is actually disheartening for people who perform well but seems fairly realistic, especially the recency bias on performance reviews.
What is being described here is an effect of a large mature corporation with healthy financials that can afford overhead without running into any kind of trouble. They prioritize internal peace, procedures and culture over cut throat productivity gains and that's fine. You can find similar examples outside of hitech and if you find yourself in that kind of situation you can consider yourself lucky, except... It won't last forever and aside from soul-crushing aspect of prioritizing compliance over achievement, there's an element of getting used to the comfort of all of that. It is very difficult to readjust to a more demanding and stressful environment outside of that bubble if you ever have to look for another job at a much less established place. Not saying it's bad, just not particulalrly ustainable in the long run (but then again, what is?)
You have to really be bad at your field to think this is a "lucky" position. It is extremely demoralizing to be stuck doing nothing when you expected to come in and utilize and grow your skillset.
@@kv1293 Granted, it depends. It's generally to be better in a position of high risk - high potential reward, especially when you're younger. In a large corporation, however, that attitude is usually allowed within certain areas while other areas prioritize compliance over aggressive achievement. I don't judge one way or the other, esp when people with families & kids prioritize collecting paychecks over risky highly-competitive cutthroat competition exhilarating environments. Neither do I judge mature corporations that choose to retain former kind of people. To each their own
This is precisely the reason startups must be funded to creatively destroy the companies who are resting on their laurels. The reality is that mature companies are sitting on their prior achievements. It's culture from the bottom to the top. There is no glory in a mature company, only status. The fat must be trimmed, it's only a matter of time.
@@CMCDragonkai Yep, culture is an unstoppable force and you can't change those things from within. Startups have a whole different set of incentives and end up breaking things where more established players can't or aren't necessarily incentivized to.
Absolutely scary. Just wow. So if you have a great first impressions you are good to go otherwise doomed before you start.
The jobs where I made the most money as a contractor, were always the easiest with the fewest hours too...
I feel your ending statements. I'm dead broke (at least I don't have kids to worry about), and I'd rather be awesome than coasting, no matter the price difference (within reason, obv). I've had (and have) really easy jobs where all I have to do is show up almost on time, put in my 8 hours, and punch out, but every job like that I've found that it just feels like the void is eating my soul. The apathy I've felt in those jobs was _intense,_ as counter-intuitive as that is.
But I'd sure as hell rather coast and be rich than where I am now, which is neither awesome nor rich. I ain't above gaming the system if the alternative is being broke and mediocre.
donate to worthy causes, if you find yourself coasting... it will redeem your soul
This is a good example of Parkinson's Law: The work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion and the reality that most people simply get rewarded with more work.
yeah. when I worked at Microsoft (a decade+ ago), I often saw the flip side of this coin. A lot of people trying to throw others under the bus, and all the team and reporting turn over meant if you were unlucky, you would not get promotions for a long time, even if you busted your ass.
large companies trend to mediocrity, one way or another. It starts in earnest at the dunbar number, and orgs have to actively fight it.
I was let go from Microsoft last year. It still happens. I couldn't believe one of my coworkers wasn't a senior, he was basically leading the whole team. He wasn't even a senior when they laid him off.
Google, I will write technical artifacts and fix bugs for only half this salary!
You two?
Man this sounds like university and it's group projects.
You can pretend to work and get away with it everywhere. I work at a small startup where at one point we were 8 engineers, and we had someone definitively coasting. This is not unique to big tech, though it will obviously be easier to pull off and for the same percent of coasters you will have more coasters due to the scale/number of big tech employees.
this isn't just a google thing, most swe jobs unless you're on crunch will be really chill, that is why people can leverage 2,3 or more jobs at the same time if wfh
7:12 - Employee B is _peak_ “enterprise grade” engineer! 👏
It actually hurt listening to it. How is the system soo broken
Prime's concluding comments are the better advice and what I am glad I stuck around for. Work is a gift! Handle it responsibly and it can provide a lot of happiness.
Hiring is a zero-sum game, so this means that good engineers are necessarily being put aside for people who know how to game the social system.
I was the only American on a all Asian social media team ( shocker, this company is a bubillion miles away from profits ). Gaming the promotion system was like a cultural point of pride.
I would hate working with this person.
I want work at a steady but relaxed pace, but I still want to get stuff done. The problem I have currently is that there's too much to manage at any given time.
A very detailed "How to": How to be part of the 80% employees in Pareto principle "20% of the employees, do 80% of the company work"
Master your home life, or anything else. Not saying coast at work, but that doesn't have to be the focus. And if you're spending even a third of your non-paid hours towards your job, say learning RUST so you can use it at your job, that's exactly what it is. Unpaid work. Are you willing to work two jobs just so you can look good at one, with the other job not paying at all? People need to realize there is a difference between "work hard" and "work long unpaid hours" or even the dream "work long paid hours". Hard is being focused on the task you're in when you're in, it has nothing to do with being able to check out afterwards.
What he says is exactly the same in my company. Nothing surprising at all. It is psychology that happens everywhere constantly not even only with developers. It’s NEVER about hard work. NEVER!!! Except for the foot people. They are fucked completely. They can’t hide.
The specifics may be unique to Google, but it's almost eerie how much the performance evaluation system sounds like every other mindless corporate job.
I have had jobs like this for most of my life and it has made me extremely depressed to where I am drinking myself to death. Humans need purpose and fulfillment in their life, not 1's and 0's in a bank company computer.
Not first lol but Prime I love your Vim and Neovim stuff you are the one who got me into Neovim and now I am using it as my main editor.
dw the ladies always want a man who comes 2nd
At 10 hours a week for $400k, you focus on other endeavors in your newly acquired free time. The good things you make won't be for the company you work for.
It was at the 9:30 mark that I had to take a pause and a short mental health break. This was extremely accurate to my team's perf review.
When I was in school there was a prof who did a single 1 hour lecture each semester $1,000,000 a year.
Its the same at amazon, you have to be especially bad to get fired on some teams.
I think Google should fire a few more engineers
This applied at Big4 firms and also firms like Accidenture, etc. Laddering against rival employees, levels (L12 to L1), "up and out" policies, etc.
David Graeber, "Bullshit Jobs"
It's an interesting book. Graeber talks extensively about all these jobs and aspects of our economy where essentially people end up "doing" work/jobs because the market/our society demands that people must work, regardless of whether the work actually needs to be done.
Originally I had a nice and detailed explanation of the phenomenom here but I realised I wasn't doing a very good job at explaining it without making this comment extremely long, so just read the book.
It’s messed up because once you’re inside, even bs jobs require long hours and lots of effort.
But if they weren’t done, nobody would actually be even slightly inconvenienced
This highlights a much bigger problem, which is that we manage as if we have objective measures, when we clearly don't.
This allows people to coast, encourages them to game the system (because if they don't, then even when they work well/hard, they could be poorly judged), and allows the system to be gamed against the developers (which he alluded to with the performance review that no matter how well you perform, you've already lost).
This all sounds legit.
This is a symptom of the commodification of software development.
WIth 25 years working experience I have done periods of where I lived my work and other periods of coasting. Neither are great. Because of my experience of working hard, I can get things done in a short time so that I can "sleep" the rest.
As said, its draining to knowing that you are vastly underperforming, even if your manager are giving you lots of praise.
I like to aim for a balance where I work like 30 hours per week. Its still not the same satisfaction as when you get to the weekend and have done a great job, but I feel its an ok balance.
This sounds like every job I've ever had. If the boss thinks you are a hard worker you can be caught slacking and even apologize, but be told "Oh, you're okay. I know you do your work." I have literally been caught slacking with a coworker and had them be reprimanded, but been told the previous statement at 3 different jobs.
That's a dream situation if you're also working on your startup on the side. All the benefits of building a project you believe in, and all the stability of working at FAANG.
You have to have something meaningful on the side (doesn't even have to be technical, could be family/charity/etc). Without actual work, you turn into a retiree. They run out of purpose. Eternal vacation is brutal.
you have to do a lot of soul sucking pretending
MAANG now
I know it's brutal, my heart races just thinking about it... but I'm also a big fan of doing absolutely nothing.
I'm prone to the abyss. Without my wife, I could EASILY end up with dementia - I'd be training for the Nothing Olympics.
13:22 When you’re putting in 60-80 hours a week, it shows you’re really into the project and probably juggling a lot of it. If you need to cut back to regular hours, hopefully, everyone gets it and appreciates all the extra time you put in earlier, instead of thinking less of you. They should be cheering you on to take some time for yourself - that’s what a good team would do, right?
Lol. I feel this.
I used to come into the office before both directors every morning.
I stopped as I was promoted to senior but the manager promotion never came, even when they'd both trash talk my manager (who is bad, to be honest) and asked me countless times if I think I could do his job). All of a sudden, both directors are asking me what was wrong and why I was only coming in on my contracted hours.
@@HaggisMuncher-69-420 Damn, that’s some seriously toxic leadership on the director’s side. In my opinion, you should’ve seen the red flags when they started trash-talking the manager. That’s pretty low, even if he is bad and they disagree with him. They shouldn’t openly trash talk about him in front of his direct reports!
The CL mentioned in the note is Common Lisp, isn't it?
The legendary programmable programming language, king of expressiveness and simplicity.
If this is true, then it casts doubt on claims made by DORA and the recent ‘Software Engineering at Google’ by Winters et al of how high performant Google is and how accurate their performance metrics are.
I'm in finance and this is exactly the same thing. They value the thinker, strategist, documenter due to the nature of you, the worker bee, albeit a highly skilled one, being one of many replaceable cogs in a large machine. Why would reward and value the cog in the machine vs valuing the implementer of the cog? Regardless of the truth or facts, perception is reality.
I too get really happy when I build good things. But I want good memories with my daughter, so until she’s in college I’m dutifully studying notes from these coasters. I can always get back on the 20 hour days building cool shit after she leaves the house.
That was my exact same experience at a medical pharmacy company, its easy to bullshit everything, and honestly I just can't live with myself with how stupid it is, I can see EVERYONE doing it too. It's literally the corporate culture!!!
People jeep blaming corporate culture but they need to look at the mirror. Just because you can do something unethical and get away with it doesn't mean you should. It's a choice.
@@pyrocentury maybe you have no clue wtf im talking about.... there is no changing the place, also I did do the ethical thing... I left
This is best advice and video ive seen in many many months, actually Im gonna read this one more time as its extremely accurate
Honestly even if I coasted like that I'd just end up spending more time on personal projects, so it wouldn't be a time gain
Im on a similar boat. Remote SWE making over 200k a year with about 5-10 hours of work a week for the past 4 years
In Russian this is called "vranyo," a type of lie where two or more people lie to each other, know that the other people are lying, and choose not to say anything.
Чего блядь?
sounds fun, but sadly "враньё" just straight up means "lie", no unusual connotations like this attached.
Daily reminder that the best developers are game developers and systems programmers
Game developers?
Why? So you can sit in your obese ass with your cheeto dust fingers and hammer buttons all day?
Sounds about right for someone like you.
No one ever stopped Jay Leno from having two jobs, yet we shame tech employees for doing the same thing. Save/invest everything from one job while you cover all your primary expenses and emergency savings from the other.
that's kinda dumb for him to be revealing this. not that much people works on Google for 7 years straight. I bet he'll be easily identified.
This is why large organizations will never outpace a team of passionate experts....
You just know Sundar Pichai will watch this eventually and SHTF at Google!
People will argue 'knowledge work', but AI is going to make short work of that knowledge work. It's not quite advanced enough now, but in a year you can bet it'll be able to spit out an advanced algo for some tricky problem just fine and make any decent dev a 10-100x dev.
These stories are crazy. I wonder what percentage of the workforce is like this.
The majority of coporate America white collar office are complete bs jobs
like 90%
Im 28 and I’m overemployed making 410k a year three jobs. I work at one social media tech, gaming company (sports title, top 3), and a supply chain company.
I work like 50-55hr weeks. I love it
That is a gem, and it is exactly the same at Amazon, Microsoft...
Nothing is as satisfying as true competence
This could all be by design. Feed 100 lines of good code to a model. Then feed it 1,000 lines of broken code and a 10,000 word doc.
This sounds like the statistic I've heard that in a gunfire battle most people miss intentionally and do not even want to shoot unless commanded and there is a very few number of people who do all the killings
@8:03 => reward complexity / poor design & execution. This is universally true. Well planned execution is rarely rewarded because it's passed off as must have been easy, or simply not recognized.
People really underestimate how frustration can affect their well-being. Even if nobody stresses you out and the pay is good, if you don't see a reason for your work (aka a bullshit job), you always think, "What am I doing with my life?". For me, it was time to find purpose, and damn, it was a good choice!
Hiring some of that smartest people in the world is a double edged sword.
Much of this won't work unless you work for a very very large company. For example, #9. Once they start to realize you are lazy, you transfer, but managers talk, and unless they have many layers of separation between them, your reputation will follow you within that company.
Being busy is different than being positively effective
Can you find a google employe who can tell you why the search results are so fu*ked up lately? And why they manipulate the shit out of them?
20 and 21 can not be more true, and I think start doing it next year. The big plus is that you are the new guy and they don't expect much from you and still getting the good salary
Most people are saying that you have to do this 7 years and retire... I think after one year you can retire if most people in Romania don't see 10k a year, and they are still alive , also in the UK average wage goes around 25k-30k a year. Put everything in dividends and enjoy a life of sitting home laid back without any stress. (It does sound boring, but this is what some achieve for)
Meanwhile, there is me who tries hard to do stuff and never got a change (an interview) at meta, google, amazon etc..
so they have all this super duper difficult interview/hiring process, but once you get in....
You can build good things outside of work, help with open source projects, start your own business etc.
I didnt know you played! I picked up the mandolin 5 years ago, and getting gooder at it has been THE most fulfilling personal project I've undertaken. I played violin/fiddle growing up, but it was always something I did because I felt like I should. I ended up developing an unhealthy relationship with the instrument that led me into a 7 year dry spell where I played almost nothing. I bought my mandolin while I was at a bluegrass festival in 2018 with a wild hair and a hunch that playing it might not come with the same musical baggage that I'd accumulated with the fiddle. Sure enough! Immediately started playing like 4-5 hours every night and having an absolute blast. Over the last few years I've grown into the musician that I'd wished I'd be for the greater part of my life. All it took was actually having fun lol.