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Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

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Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

#251

Post by [deleted] »

wnolens wrote: post #201
nvarsj wrote: post #43

For me it’s the insane hazing ritual of the tech interview process that makes me want to leave the industry. I’m going through it again now, and honestly am pretty miserable. It has a large negative impact on the rest of my life and my mental health. When I was younger it was manageable, but the fact you have to do this even mid or late career every few years is insane to me. Wish I had gone into literally any other…

I'm there too, but trying to take a different mindset. For one, the requirements are utterly clear so you CAN systematically prepare and do well even if you lack the exact years of experience they're asking for. Two, the payoff is massive if you're in the US. I mean.. if you land at a FANGetc, you can literally put your feet up, buy a house anywhere, send all your kids to Harvard, and retire before your parents ever…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

#252

Post by slothtrop »

> I can't bare the devs that go out of their way to work weekends without being asked, I can't bare the endless meetings, constant micromanagement, bringing the stress home to my family.

There are programming jobs without any of this. Government is an easy example, but shop around and you'll find places with better work-life-balance, particularly if you're willing to sacrifice some pay.

Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

#253

Post by [deleted] »

wnolens wrote: post #201
nvarsj wrote: post #43

For me it’s the insane hazing ritual of the tech interview process that makes me want to leave the industry. I’m going through it again now, and honestly am pretty miserable. It has a large negative impact on the rest of my life and my mental health. When I was younger it was manageable, but the fact you have to do this even mid or late career every few years is insane to me. Wish I had gone into literally any other…

I'm there too, but trying to take a different mindset. For one, the requirements are utterly clear so you CAN systematically prepare and do well even if you lack the exact years of experience they're asking for. Two, the payoff is massive if you're in the US. I mean.. if you land at a FANGetc, you can literally put your feet up, buy a house anywhere, send all your kids to Harvard, and retire before your parents ever…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

#254

Post by Archelaos »

Apreche wrote: post #68

I 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…

> Get a job at smaller to medium sized non-tech company.

From my own experience, I can recommend the following approach for someone with a database background: Look for successful small companies. They typically have some homemade information management solutions that do not scale, such as using Excel where a database would be the right thing, etc. Then tell the management how much better such a database system would be: how much time they could save, how much more consistant and reliable their data might become, how many interesting key figures they could extract from it, etc.

When you are hired, you are usually the only person responsible for the new database project. This gives you all kinds of organisational freedom and limits meetings to occasional consultations with the management.

> I didn't think anyone would say yes to a 4-day work week

Do not set a fixed time per day or week, but instead agree on an annual time budget that is slightly less than what you might want to work. Do not agree on fixed project deadlines, but instead create a detailed to-do list with priorities. Work above average at the beginning of the year until March. After that, you should mention from time to time: "I am already x weeks over the planned time budget". You will then usually not be pushed to work more and can take days or weeks off at will to get back in line with the planned time budget. In December, no one will usually complain if you charge the company more when you are still ahead of the planned time budget. And if they do, just take a longer Christmas holiday.

Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

#255

Post by matheusmoreira »

oifjsidjf wrote: post #107
Apreche wrote: post #68

I 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 don't think this is what OP wants. He hates regular jobs. He wants to work on his inspiring projects, but doesn't know well how to monetize/market them.

My solution to that problem was to switch fields. Now I have a rather comfortable job and plenty of free time. I get to work on whatever I want and only if I feel like it.

Some days I wonder what it would have been like if I had chosen to program professionally. I try to maintain my skills just in case.

Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

#256

Post by darepublic »

Well I can sympathize for sure. I love programming but really discouraged by things I continue to encounter in the industry. And for the first time during the height of covid I basically "gave up" -- as in, I had a remote job where I only did the bare minimum to not get fired. This lasted for about half a year before I got tired of it and went to another job where I was more engaged again. I will say that working like this -- appearing at morning stand up, hemming and hawing over slowly implemented tickets, and then going back to playing video games and doing occasional PR reviews, getting more engaged only when shit looked close to hitting the fan -- took it's own toll and was maybe only marginally less stressful to me than trying hard.

I have no answer. Maybe my situation isn't even the same as OPs, since I tend to overwork myself, get disillusioned by feeling that others are not pulling their weight, and then I get burnt out and it sounds like OP is in a situation where they are surrounded by jerks like me. But I can relate to the struggle of work stress, and trying to prevent it from spilling over into personal life.

Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

#257

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

I can certainly relate. I've been programming for over 40 years, but I could only take about 10 doing it for a living.

I moved into information security. Where I have endless meetings and spreadsheets, although no micro management. But I write software in a way I enjoy outside of work.

I have to say that micro management is a bad sign in any role. I would certainly try to find a different role, even if you choose to stay in software.

Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

#258

Post by [deleted] »

nightski wrote: post #210
Footkerchief wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I work with experts in the business domain, often C-Suite as a consultant. I've come to understand the domains almost as well as them for the companies I work with. While this knowledge is invaluable, and critical to getting the solution right in my experience they still would be completely lost when it comes to a no-code solution. They generally only think happy path and have a really hard time understanding why you…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

#259

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

ornornor wrote: post #50

I feel exactly the same. Programming professionally for a decade sucked all the joy out of it. My personal hypothesis is that we’re increasingly being treated like assembly line workers. We’re not paid to think but to implement the poorly thought out hare brained schemes from the higher ups who have no clue about programming. This externalizes all the cost of poor quality software onto the developers (unmaintainable…

> "My personal hypothesis is that we’re increasingly being treated like assembly line workers."

Developers don't like hearing this but the vast majority of us _are_ effectively assembly line workers. We do little to no actual engineering, instead we plumb together pre-packaged framework, libraries, and software. We are treated as fungible because that sort of worker is intrinsically fungible; skill is involved in software development but not enough to elevate it from being a trade to being a profession. A symptom of this is the not infrequent HN posts complaining that "Nobody actually uses CS education in the real world"; assembly line workers don't need a degree to do their job either.

Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

#260

Post by drewcoo »

CornCobs wrote: post #181
vain_cain wrote: post #158

Earlier 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…

That might be the counter-anecdote that proves the rule.

In my own humble anecdotal experience, the less focused a company is on tech, the worse. Beyond that, if management is not from a software (or engineering) background, they will likely have no clue what to expect from programmers (because such hard things are simple and such simple things are hard) and the treatment will be . . . strange.

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