This is why we need to build software companies as co-ops and for everything else unionize.
Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
211–220 of 350 posts
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great comment. Thank you. I'm currently reading "Manifest. 7 steps to living your best life". It's pretty much exactly what you've described. It sounds like you're going through an amazing transformation. Embrace it and change your life. They don't come round often. Give that book a read when you get the chance :)
Will do, thank you. It took me many years to finaly come to the deep realization that sitting down by yourself and brutaly examining my own problems that the mind generates is the only way forward. The amount of resistance I felt to this was enourmous. I escaped by trying to browse internet, read books etc... for way too many years. Listening to 20hours+ of Krishnamurti's talk was what finally made me realize that th…
Have a pointer to any of these talks? I always found him to be impossible to grok, saying really ambiguous things to the point of being devoid of practical meaning.
But what you cite that you got out of him is a mindset that I got out of years of therapy and reading self-help books - that is, those methods utterly failed and so now if it doesn't come from my own mind (with a few exceptions), I can't take the advice.
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#213My plan was to work for really large companies with a high salary for ten years and then move on to smaller ones. I made this because where I'm from, software engineers don't make close to what they do at large firms and people were moving to my state in droves that had been in or around these larger businesses and thus had a lot more buying power than I did.
I'll share that working at a FAANG or larger tech business is soul crushing if you come from hobbyist programming and computing. Over the course of that time, I've learned to somewhat adapt. I still work on high tier roles, but I don't work on things adjacent to my interests anymore and I don't invest nearly the amount of time I used to. Think, good boundaries for work kind of thing. I'll still probably move to a smaller business, but this attitude bought me a little extra time.
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#214I think most people here can. That's why, when people have enough money to retire, they DO retire, and not continue working. Work for most people is trading time and physical and mental health for money. In our profession, we got it better than most, but the underlying principle is still the same. Also, there are definitely better and worse companies. I'm currently in the best job of my life (well paying, fully remot…
I really like the idea of looking at the job market as a market for lemons!
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Small/medium sized non-tech companies don't value technology and don't understand its importance. I work closely with IT departments within such companies through ERP implementations/localizations and can coroborate this. In my experience 9/10 non-tech companies with their own IT departments(1+ person) don't value and especially don't understand what their IT department does. On the other side, the people working w…
Counter-anecdote: I'm working at a non-tech company (we build the in-house technical software that everyone else in the company uses) and the experience has been great. We deliver real and immediate value, our clients are our colleagues and there's a great emphasis on UX, user testing and what not as a result. Yes, there are loads of other problems, especially on the technical side, because tech isn't the company's s…
I would love to get a job building internal tools that my company needs and uses but I haven't had any luck actually finding those kinds of jobs, so I always wind up building products.
Any advice on how to find those kinds of positions?
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Makes sense, but isn't it a choice? I'm just starting out in my career as a student and I don't have much to do except for my work, side projects and studies. I sometimes work on weekends but I don't promote it at all. This is not a standard I'm setting and I don't expect anyone to do the same. Obviously, when I'm with my family or friends, the whole scene is different; I want to get off work early. But I think you c…
I think I understand. Someone who doesn't have anything better to do might as well contribute their idle time to working, as long as it's voluntary and without expectation. I might agree were the worker a shareholder or founder or otherwise long hours were the explicitly stated, well-compensated expectation when hired. For the average full time employee, absolutely not, particularly not even for junior/entry-level. S…
Perfectly understandable. Thanks for the advice!
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time I hear about no code, I think about the code written by PROFESSIONALS that leads to list like Dan Luu's "Everything is broken": https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/ If professional at top quality firms with the best tools can't write code that works, how is "no code" written by people that don't understand going to work better?
No-code is more likely to be written by people who are direct experts in the business domain, unlike the telephone game that is the development cycle in most software orgs.
"No-code" programs are still programs; each visual node or block or whatever is isomorphic to a construct in some programming language. Being code, it has to be maintained, especially as business needs shift, and "experts in the business domain" have other, better things to do with their time than maintain a bunch of computer programs. Thankfully, there are people in the company who specialize in maintaining computer programs -- software engineers. Which means that ultimately, software engineers will be responsible for all that no-code, and in addition to the usual telephone game they must contend with rat-wrestling some near-undebuggable node graph that lives only in a proprietary tool into doing what they want rather than using the tools they're familiar with and best at (ordinary textual code, version control, debuggers, etc.). And, Syndrome style, the company ends up throwing away the valuable time and effort of real software engineers so some mid-level manager can pretend to be one (and walk away when they get bored of that).
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#218I highly recommend doing what I have done most of my career. Get a job at smaller to medium sized non-tech company. Every company, in any industry, has computers. They need you. You don't have to work with a bunch of tech or finance people. You can get a job working with chill people in some other industry with a better culture. When it comes time to negotiate, negotiate HARD. And not just for money, but especially t…
This is not inherently true - there is no hard and fast rule stating smaller companies are better to work at than larger companies by any metric.
I've worked at a broad spectrum of different sized firms with various titles ranging from analyst to engineer and have found no consistency between size of firm and work/life balance.
Ironically I've had a better work/life balance working for larger firms, but ultimately it comes down to your manager and how they manage the department.
One example - worked for a large investment bank building software and systems from scratch. Worked 6-7 days a week for up to 14 hours a day at times, but I honestly loved the work and was under no obligation to work that much. My boss and I had a great friendship outside of work and he would call my personal phone to remind me to stop working and do something else.
Any requested time-off was always approved by him, he would give me three weeks off for the month of December in addition to the PTO I had already taken during the course of the year.
Contrast this to a smaller (albeit one of the largest in their industry) company where we grinded every day 50-60 hours per week, PTO was a hard limit of 3 weeks per year and you were not permitted to take more than a week of PTO at a time and had to check-in every 5 days by e-mail. It was the worst job I've had in engineering. That said, there were brilliant folks working there but most left within a year. I sort of hope the company implodes but they're running away with success atm thanks in large part to the high quality engineers they hire (kudos to their hiring squad).
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#219I highly recommend doing what I have done most of my career. Get a job at smaller to medium sized non-tech company. Every company, in any industry, has computers. They need you. You don't have to work with a bunch of tech or finance people. You can get a job working with chill people in some other industry with a better culture. When it comes time to negotiate, negotiate HARD. And not just for money, but especially t…
I wouldn't worry about no code software. They usually can only get you a quarter of the way. Then the requests start coming in and then the client wants their custom workflow in the app and no code can't do it. It usually doesn't take much for the client to realize they need something more custom. I work in the GIS industry and its a great mix of always learning something new but not only working with tech people.
There's a lot of people who have been doing the no code thing to build solutions for at least a decade now not knowing a lick of how to write code yet still building fantastic websites that get hacked almost every time because they don't appreciate how to maintain them. Do I need to name names?
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#220Sure, I can relate. I work as a freelance developer and the closer I'm embedded with agile managed teams the more I wonder how anyone would do this for years and years.
Now my customers are mostly smallish till medium sized companies who need help to update their tech stack gradually. Which usually means inventing a lot of clue system and integration with working processes. It's tinkering. I work between two and five hours a day from home and have one meeting a week.