It depends on what you mean by apathy. I'd look up the definition for you, but honestly I can't be bothered. Hyuk hyuk.

Anyway: I am incredibly productive in my ops job, where I feel like the platforms I support are largely meaningless and do nothing but drive efficiency to achieve nothing important for no one in particular.

I feel I am driving 'value creation' for people whose wealth is already immeasurable, in a way that it's like it's without beginning or end and perhaps does not even really exist.

Running thousands of watts worth of automated infrastructure capable of serving gigabytes of traffic at sub millisecond latency, over multipath anycast triple redundant n-tier software defined fuckin' whatever, so that your loading spinner shows up bit faster.

Like a literal hamster wheel.

And all that said I am neither unhappy nor close to burn out. I have absolutely no passion for my job, but I do for the things that it allows me to do. Work is always, for everyone involved, a means to an end:

For the company, that end is whatever it is producing, widgets for the widgetless, convincing people that widgetlessnes is terrible, tracking widget purchases to better market more advanced widgets to those that desire them, or whatever.

For me, it is my salary: The thing in life that grants me the affordance to do what it is that I actually want to do. That which I have pathos for, it could be.

Honestly, a lot of people I deal with are the same: If they could leave their nine-to-five in tech and make an equivalent living doing interpretive dance or painting while doing handstands or competing in spoken-word free-verse poetry competitions, y'know, the thing it is that they want to do that is worth absolutely nothing to anyone else, they probably would. I would write bad novels from the back corner of a dimly lit cocktail bar.

I can't do that for a salary anything near like what I make now, so I do it in my free time.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

This isn't on topic, but assuming you were serious about writing novels in your free time - I enjoyed this comment so much I read it several times, and probably will come back and read it again at some point in the semi-distant future. You have a wonderful way with words.

I was serious about the writing and the cocktail bar.

I owe you a heartfelt thank-you: It plainly and honestly brings me an incredible happiness when people compliment my writing.

For what it's worth, I screenshotted your comment to send to some friends before I'd even gotten to the part where you mentioned that you write.

Well, fwiw, I had the same reaction. You made me laugh and at the end I thought, that was a damn well-written HN comment.

> I have absolutely no passion for my job

Are you talking about the job itself, or the thing being produced?

I don't care about the products my company makes, and I think that's a good thing, at least for me. When I've cared deeply about the actual thing being made in the past, that led to emotional attachment, which sucks when your idea doesn't win. It also led me to tend to bias effort towards my own particular hobby-horse, instead of what the data or the plan told me.

Now, the job itself is different - I care what activities I spend my time doing and who I do it with. Make me do things that bore me, and I will eventually do a bad job, because I'm a bit undisciplined. And shitty or incompetent people will chase me off faster than anything else except obvious management disfunction.

I don't care about either of those things.

I'm an internet plumber, or maybe a computer mechanic. I keep the lights on the a/c working, and it's not for me to question wherefore.

I do my job and do it well because if I'm doing it I may as well do it right, but that's a philosophy for life in general.

Nah, sounds like you're doing fine.

I'd point out that (IMO) you feel like you DO provide value, that you are good at what you do, recognized for it, and there aren't active negatives in your work environment. All that's lacking is a meaningful "greater purpose" that results from the value you provide. Which is fine, although may eventually transition to less than fine.

Thanks. I didn't really think I wasn't doing well enough, but affirmation is always welcome.

As for producing value, yeah, I absolutely crush it in terms of value. I'm spitting out value left and right. If you could measure the amount of value I produce, it's an ever growing number, way way way in the black, guys on the stock market floor screaming 'buy buy buy'. Value practically oozes from my pores. If value were electricity, I could power a small city.

Not sure what that means, though.

Sounds like a reasonable quest for Step 2.

(Step 3 is profit)

I just spent a month doing something enjoyable difficult, but that even if I'd succeeded, would not have produced even close to a month's paycheck worth of value. I'd say "trade?" except there's not much upside to offer.

But seriously: Consider "accuracy" versus "precision". Reaching accuracy from precision is calibration; but AFAIK there's no way to reach precision from accuracy.

You're producing value. Now it's just a question of aligning that value with, well, broader value. Which you can take your time to do.

Apathy is comparatively rare, yes. (Sorry for the HN crowd for not getting into the data here, not enough time right now.) That's because the previous level is usually so painful that people end up changing something. Especially in engineering the market is so much better than in practically any other field that people who don't move out from the previous phase ('I hate everyone around me') mostly do this because they have something else going on in their lives. This, however (other things going on) is something that _prevents_ further burnout, because one of the best burnout prevention method is _purpose_. Example: working in a call center is mostly extremely stressful. Having a purpose like 'I do this to so that I am able to finish my degree' is an useful thing to prevent burnout. Working hard like hell on a startup for 6 months with a clear purpose usually doesn't cause a burnout (can cause other problems tho').

People who end up in the 'apathy' phase usually do so because they somehow lacked the purpose, the means of changing their situation and also the realization that things are going very badly. If you think that you're in the apathetic phase then you're likely not, because you still have some self-reflection.

Can confirm. I don't have the luxury of burnout, as the the primary breadwinner for a larger than anticipated family (yay twins!). So I hover just above breaking point, and only occasionally dip my toes in no longer having any F*s to give.

On the flip side, if I didn't have the family with young children, I'm positive my life would be so much less stressful, that burnout risk would be slim to none...

Apathy at work is only possible if you have a nothing-required job where you can't get fired for not working. It happens, but commonly employers will notice and fire such an employee.

To quote office space:

"That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."

That describes a big chunk of my co-workers when I worked at a Fortune 500. At bigger companies it is unfortunately particularly easy to coast along that way.