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Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry?

#181

Post by scarface_74 »

sopresatta wrote: post #31

No. But I live and breathe tech even in my spare time[1]. You gotta learn to roll with the sh-t and set boundaries. I hate to say it but turn off HN, this place a hype machine designed to make you feel bad. It's like "Roast and Toast" x 1000 on here, not reality. It's toxic in a very passive-aggressive way (rather than reddit toxic, which is just aggressive). I've been at this since 1988. (Made a few personal bad cho…

Most of the worlds 3 billion+ adults don’t have a “passion” for their jobs and do have an addiction to food and shelter. There is nothing wrong with working only to exchange labor for money.

The last thing I want to do when getting off of work is spend time coding and I haven’t written a single line of code that someone hasn’t paid me for in 30 years.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry?

#182

Post by protocolture »

pepoluan wrote: post #70
protocolture wrote: post #6

Pretty done. Employers: Making it an obligation that I act like we have in house tools that were meant to exist 3 years ago, doing everything manually. Customers: So beholden to their technical debt that they would rather pay ten times the opex than the capex to remove the debt. Shits me to tears.

Sometimes technical debt is kept rather than being fixed because "if we fix this some high-value technologically-challenged clients will no longer be able to use our service." This is actually solvable but will need an "out of the box" thinking.

Its nice to think that way but for my clients it isn't the case. Its simply friction and inertia.

The box I am in has my employer on one side, happy to have made the suggestion to move away from old technical debt, but happier still to reap the rewards of a customer who will pay massive amounts of opex to keep shit running. And on the other side the customer, too lazy to have any internal conflict over technical debt and paying massive amounts of opex is preferably than directors having arguments with each other.

None of their technical debt is customer supporting. They do supply serial keys via a truly ancient aspx website but they can also port the backend component that handles those serials pretty much instantly. It really is a choice.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry?

#183

Post by dehugger »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #171
dehugger wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look for large companies dealing in physical goods. I work on warehouse software for a company selling motorcycle helmets and bbqs. Its a great intersection of tech and industry.

That's pretty cool. I would expect most of that sort of company to be buying off the shelf products these days but I guess some still roll their own Thank you for the advice, I really appreciate that you took the time to do that. Very kind of you

Once you hit scale there are very few off the shelf solutions. Every major application is going to have some degree of customization involved.

Personally, I maintain a legacy codebase of a propietary application running several distribution centers. New feature requests, bug fixes, integrations, ever-changing business requirements mean its worth having staff on payroll to do it, as the contractor costs to do so are exorbitant.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry?

#184

Post by danaris »

trod1234 wrote: post #143
danaris wrote: post #79

Come to academia. I don't mean "become a professor"; I mean be a software developer at a college or university. They need them in large teams (IT department of a larger university) down to solo devs (working for a single department at a small liberal arts college—this is where I've been for 15 years). It's true that you won't get the same level of pay—frankly, I've been woefully underpaid—but, by and large, they're n…

I know a person that did this, 25+ years in industry. He was forced into retirement after half a decade of what sounded like tortured politics, gross mismanagement and fiscal waste. Many times they said they wanted something, he would do the legwork, collect requirements, and put up preliminary PoC, it would be approved, but then they scrap it at a cost of hundreds of thousands only 6 months later and then go with th…

I mean...sure, there are horror stories. There are horror stories in the corporate world, too. Any kind of large organization can become corrupt, misaligned with its own goals, or fully dysfunctional.

I'm very sorry about what happened to your acquaintance, but I guarantee their experience is not representative, based on 30+ years of living and working in and around academia.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry?

#185

Post by spacemadness »

scarface_74 wrote: post #177
spacemadness wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting I don’t? I have those things but the industry is still in a bad place and is doing a lot of damage to good people.

If you have those things, you are empowered to say “no”. I just came away from a 3.5 year stint at AWS - the most toxic of the big tech companies - the year before last. While many were losing sleep, overworking during their “focus”, I didn’t cancel a single vacation, refused to be overworked, and when they gave me the choice of accepting the severance and “leave immediately”, I accepted the severance without even li…

Good for you. But I’ve seen the psychological damage this current environment is doing to folks and it just excuses it away in some illusory realist stance. So maybe don’t speak for everyone like they’re failing for being human.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry?

#186

Post by scarface_74 »

spacemadness wrote: post #185
scarface_74 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have those things, you are empowered to say “no”. I just came away from a 3.5 year stint at AWS - the most toxic of the big tech companies - the year before last. While many were losing sleep, overworking during their “focus”, I didn’t cancel a single vacation, refused to be overworked, and when they gave me the choice of accepting the severance and “leave immediately”, I accepted the severance without even li…

Good for you. But I’ve seen the psychological damage this current environment is doing to folks and it just excuses it away in some illusory realist stance. So maybe don’t speak for everyone like they’re failing for being human.

I’m saying it only does “psychological damage” when you start treating your job as more than a transaction where you exchange money for labor. If you have savings you have the agency to say “no” to toxic environments and stop stressing over an organization that if you got hit by a bus would forget you ever existed before your body grows cold.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry?

#187

Post by eikenberry »

scarface_74 wrote: post #179
eikenberry wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you find these positions?

There are around 3 million software developers in the US, most working for regular old enterprise companies in most major metropolitan areas in the US. All of the job boards have openings for those positions. I spent my entire career from 1996-2020 working locally in Atlanta - 7 jobs in all - until my last three jobs that have been remote.

Which job boards? Monster is out of business and Indeed is so flooded with garbage that it is mostly useless.
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