If you enjoy coding so much that you don't get enough of it at work, contribute to or start an open source project, or create a proprietary software product to sell for your own profit. Don't donate free work to the company that's already paying you a salary for a set amount of effort.
Well, I think the scale of the problems you can takle on your own in an open source project vs. as part of an established game dev studio team is quite different.
Please don't project your own perspective on other's people work/life balance and consider it as the only valid way that things can be.
The pride some people have in their ability to tolerate bad conditions is a little silly. I don't understand how you can look down on people who want a better work environment
I was brainwashed in Windows that the grit made me a better developer. They’d always say “a Windows X is an <other org> X+1”. They also convinced employees that if they ever left the org they’d never get back in because they’d lose the cache and not be assumed to have the competency of your level.
More generally, will you please (a) not post unsubstantive comments to HN, and (b) edit the nasty swipes out of the comments you do post? We're hoping for a bit better than that here.
Are you kidding me? 2.5 billion people still don't have access to proper sanitation, and they're not depressed - and you think it "brave" of young people in the West to deal with the horribleness of _Brexit_?!
The commentary in this thread just blows my mind. I'm astounded in an era of regular travel just how sheltered people in the West are.
> Teenagers face far greater economic insecurity than before, and are more acutely aware of it. What will the workforce look like when they graduate highschool? Jobs that teenagers would have been invited to do are being replaced with automated checkouts and computer vision algorithms. Teenagers are required to go into more debt than ever, to escape this lack of opportunities via education.
Sometimes it blows my mind that even in "educated circles" of the west there's such a blatant lack of perspective on the rest of the world. We still live in a world where 3 million people a year die of diarrhea - and you think economic insecurity is the reason Western kids are depressed?
No, this is not why teenagers are depressed. If that were even remotely true every teenager on Earth not from a G8 or Scandanavian country would be jumping off a ledge by the time they're 14.
People in area where their friends die of diarrhea are depressive too. They get sad, they suicide, they have traumas and mental problems. They self medicate with alcohol, drugs, excessive risk and what not to make pain go away.
That does not make it impossible for rich countries people to be depressed due to economy going down relatively.
Nerds have been trying to seem edgy railing the "work smart not hard" mantra for decades. It's a nice way to seem clever and enlightened, but it doesn't really make any sense.
> Why am I celebrating mere effort? Celebrate creativity, insights, breakthroughs, rebellions, anything but mere effort
Uh, why not do both? You know who really succeeds? the person who has creative breakthroughs AND works harder than everyone else.
What on earth are you talking about? You think the average American student is participating in 4+ team sports during a given week?
There are hundreds of millions of people around the world who's parents are spending their life savings to send them to a broken down public school, and anything short of an A+ means abject poverty (I mean real poverty, not the American "I can't afford my iPhone bill poverty") for another generation of their family name. My dad is the only person in his small shanty town who made it out, and he studied 16 hours a day, 7 days a week - all to achieve a decent middle class salary and drive a Toyota Camry. I was an exceptionally gifted student thanks to him, graduated at the top of my class, and now, again, barely eek out a middle class life
Not to mention the societal aspect - in many Asian cultures anything short of an A and you're an abject societal failure and a generational disgrace. Western-raised people don't have a clue what that kind of pressure feels like.
Anyone who thinks American schools are stressful are completely delusional about how the rest of the world works. Americans have had life too easy for too long - depression is simply a symptom of an overly easy life. It's the same reason depression & mental health issues overly present in zoo animals.
Suffering and struggle are necessary for a fulfilling, happy life - the West hasn't been exposed to real suffering in over half a century.
