On senioritis, hating your job, and other flavors of dissatisfaction

After returning from 12 weeks of work this summer, I found that getting into the college rhythm I was used to– of classes, exams, and assignments on repeat– was more difficult than I remembered… bordering on impossible. My usual try-hard instincts weren’t kicking in like they used to. Between struggling to wake up in the morning, skipping all but one of my lectures (for which attendance is part of the grade), and reallyyyy resisting (but usually failing) the urge to just put all my assignments into ChatGPT, I realized that I was coming down with senioritis without the privilege of being a senior.

I couldn’t really place my finger on why exactly this was the case… it was so unlike my usual self. I could tell that the fulfillment I was receiving from going through the robotic, mundane actions associated with schoolwork had decreased, but why? We’ll return to this question in a bit.

“Work” vs. “Life”: a Tale as Old as Time

Let’s talk about a buzzword that tech bros and others alike like to throw around: work-life balance.

This term, in itself, is an oxymoron. Life is a term that should encapsulate all that we do while conscious, breathing, and moving. The only thing that lies outside of life is death. So if the two ends of the spectrum of one’s existence are life and work, does that not make work synonymous with death?

Factoring out sleep, our 40-hours of work per week take up about 35% of our waking lives. And 40 hours for a lot of people is modest, with many jobs requiring overtime and work on the weekends. Moreover, later hours in the day during the work week are usually uneventful, with work tiring us to the point at which our day ends when we excitedly leave the office at 5. So, it’s fair to say that we have a deep societal problem if our careers are synonymous with our deaths… we have a deep societal problem if 35% of our waking lives are spent doing something that is comparable to the experience of dying.

It’s true that for most, work isn’t that pleasant of an experience: we have deadlines and assignments that cause us stress, we have managers who have unreasonable expectations or are completely unresponsive, etc. Many say that we work because we have to; and because it isn’t a fully voluntary action, we don’t consider it as a part of the “life” that we build for ourselves. But we do other things in our lives that aren’t purely sunny days and clear skies. One of these is working out; it causes stress on our bodies, it can be super fatiguing, and it comes with the risk of injury. But we still do it. And for people who work out regularly, 100% of them will say they “love it” and “can’t imagine their lives without it”. Most people won’t say this about their work.

So what’s the difference?

I’m sure there are some people that genuinely love pushing metal and the feeling of fatigue in their muscles (I, for one, really love the feeling of being sore). But the feeling of muscle fibers tearing in our bodies isn’t what keeps us coming back to the gym– it’s the personal gain that we recognize and predict will come out of working out. It’s the mental and physical growth we see for ourselves, and it’s the amazing feeling of success and overcoming adversity that we get from the struggle. Why don’t we feel the same way about our jobs? Why don’t we feel similar levels of satisfaction from overcoming the many adverse situations that make up our work?

It’s because work is missing one thing: ownership.

When we work out, we own the process; we are doing it purely for ourselves, as it really doesn’t benefit anyone else. As soon as we recognize that we aren’t doing it to benefit someone else, it becomes imperative that we achieve what we perceive to be beneficial to ourselves, or else we’re just wasting our time. And wasting our time doesn’t feel great.

Let’s contrast this with our jobs. We don’t own our work; in fact, we are getting paid to produce and give what we produce away. We see it as an external “force”, and a set of external expectations we must meet. Inherently and automatically, we don’t approach it with the same passion with which we’d approach activities for which we set the expectations and goals.

With this lack of passion and the resulting robotic work we produce, we are left with some cognitive dissonance: there’s an unenthusiastic, corporate slave version of ourselves, who is just going through the motions of work, and there’s a passionate version of ourselves that fully invests in the activities we deeply care about, whether that’s reading, working out, spending time with a significant other, or anything of the sorts. Humans don’t like cognitive dissonance, and our solution to these inconsistencies is always to justify. We justify to ourselves that we are unhappy with our jobs, our managers are horrible people, or any other external factors to which we can attribute our lack of drive. After all, it’s easy to relieve oneself of ownership.

There are other areas of our lives that we see this. For example, how engaged would you be when cat-sitting your friend’s cat? Versus your own? How about the engagement and investment you can muster for a group project for a class? Versus a project you ideated and started on your own?

Passion is driven by ownership– ownership of a product, an outcome, a process, a relationship… could be anything really. It’s like owning part of a company; when you monetarily stand to gain or lose based on its performance, you instantly care more and will invest more in its success. This gain or loss can be socially, economically, physically, mentally, etc.

So now, we can explain my senioritis. Completing and submitting assignments, to me personally, comes with no elements of ownership; I have no influence over what I’m doing, planning how I’ll do it, or choosing the best path of execution. I just execute. So the passion is nearing zero these days, especially after working in industry on a real product, where I was able to find such ownership. I guess at this point, I’m just trying to graduate.

Ok, let’s return to the discussion at hand. If the goal is to not hate our jobs, this begs the question: how we can introduce ownership into our work?

Owning Your Work… Even in Big Tech

In a tech career, it’s often hard to find fulfillment, especially as the size of the company you’re working for gets larger and larger; after all, how much ownership can you have working on a small feature in a layered, complicated product? I haven’t even worked full-time before, just an internship at a large tech company. How much ownership can an intern working on a self-contained project really have on the scale of a fully-fledged product making billions? You can’t help but feel like an atom in a universe of more brilliant, accomplished atoms.

But, my argument today is that there’s always ways to find ownership, and that we should actively be seeking to find an aspect of our work that we own to overcome this morbid feeling of being stagnant, unmoving, and bored with our jobs, causing at least 35% of our conscious lives to be filled with a feeling comparable to that of death.

Many who have faced this situation will say that they took the path of leaving big tech to do their own thing. Startup culture, by definition, involves ownership, and is accompanied by passion and drive. Many will also say that they left big tech for a smaller company, where they could naturally have more ownership of the part of the product they work on.

But there are many reasons you might not want to do this; let’s face it, big tech is comfortable. It’s kinda nice getting free food and discounted hotel stays… Aside from this, big tech offers a breadth of experience that smaller companies might not; anything you’re interested in working on, there’s probably a team who does just that. I see the arguments for both sides here, so it’s not always possible to advise someone to just leave big tech and move elsewhere.

It’s not hopeless, however. We can talk about ownership more atomically than on the scale of entire products.

Peeling Apart Why Ownership is so Powerful

What happens when you own something? You really understand its “why”. You really, really, deeply internalize and understand it. And this is only fully possible when you choose what the “what” should be based on the “why”. That is, you choose the best course of action because you really recognize, understand, and see the importance of the inspiration behind it. It’s all about influence and ideation. So can we replicate this?

Ownership needs to be actively seeked. It can come in the form of owning a part of a product, or it can be any solution that you create. But the key is that you are involved in the design: you recognized some cause as important, and created the solution because you believed in its importance.

This past summer, I was one of about 350 interns in LinkedIn’s Sunnyvale office. And of the 10 or 15 that I would interact with frequently, I was one of 2 or 3 interns who would react to the typical “how are you liking LinkedIn?” with “I love my job”. Again, it’s hard in big tech to find this ownership. I was lucky enough to be nudged in this direction by my manager, mentor and others on my team– in the direction of taking ownership of my project and the part of the product I was building. It took me a few weeks, but I experienced a perspective shift during which I finally stopped executing and implementing just for the sake of delivering. I started designing not to meet deadlines but to create beautiful products. And it made my work much more fulfilling.

Once you find an opportunity for ownership… own it. The benefits of this go beyond fulfillment; this perspective actually improves your work. It allows you to approach problems with a design mindset, where you’re actively looking for reasons to justify your decisions rather than blindly executing. It allows you to build things at scale, maintaining a forward-thinking mindset with your product’s trajectory taken into account; after all, if you own something, you will do everything you can to make it thrive. Contrast this to an assignment for a class, where your end goal isn’t getting your work to its best possible state, it’s merely a grade. With this mindset, you build with more care, and you can in turn justify what you build more honestly and credibly.

Check out this quote from A Million Miles in A Thousand Years, by Don Miller (highly recommend if you like “meaning of life” types of books):

I’ve wondered if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don’t want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgment.

Life becomes more brilliant when we take ownership of each and every one of our actions, each and every one of our decisions. Ownership isn’t easy, because it comes with responsibility. But with ownership comes a more vibrant life; it allows us to really live things out to the fullest.

And isn’t that what life is really about?

Finding Ownership in Tech was originally published in Better Programming on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.