Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate? • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by nickd2001 » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 6:12 PM UTC

jzellis wrote: post #160

I have been coding professionally for over 25 years, and I hate the industry with a passion. I hate the culture of it, the obsession with couching naked capitalist greed in semi-spiritual terms, the inflation of the trivial into the profound ("we're not just building customer relations PaaS, we're changing the way humans fundamentally interact with the universe around them"), I hate the entitlement ("ugh, why are all…

"The stuff I really care about (like climate issues), nobody is gonna hire me to do. " - writing from the UK where its been 37C today and is expected 40C tomorrow, I'd argue, yes people will pay you, and please do this! ;). Seems to me now, anything to do with using less fuel / energy, making heat pumps more efficient, carbon capture etc, is something people will increasingly pay for. The price of heating gas with the war in Ukraine is making alternative energy look much more worthwhile so other tech can be profitable. As for freedom or financial stability, I've achieved a reasonable compromise with a little frugality. Ys I have to work for someone else, however its public sector with a decent mission and nice colleagues. Sure I could get more money elsewhere but not worth it. I'd argue in our industry most people can achieve this eventually (so long as not living in very high house price area of course)

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

#292

Post by Pokepokalypse » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 6:28 PM UTC

xnorswap wrote: post #122

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I have a counterpoint to one of your comments wrt attitude concerning meetings: if I sit in a Teams call with 50 other people, mic muted, camera off, listening to some person I haven't seen before talk about some business development I haven't heard of before, it's not going to matter what attitude I have. No-one will notice "what energy I bring" into that meeting. None of it matters. It's just one more day of b…

I hear you, company wide status meetings can seem pointless. I've worked at places where there were large "company update meetings" for the whole company. They were only once a month but still frustrating to lose an afternoon to listen to every detail about who the sales team pitched to this month. Seemingly we had to have every detail of their job explained but the entire software development team had 5 minutes at m…

yah - our weekly 'all hands' seems to basically be: The Marketing Team marketing the marketing team to the rest of the company.

It's frustrating; and worse, we've had our CEO several times send group messages to scold people for having their camera off, or worse (my sin), camera on, but obviously doing work and not paying attention. It's pretty gross.

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

#293

Post by mxuribe » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 6:40 PM UTC

dolmen wrote: post #118

belval wrote: post #52

> 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. Have you considered just changing jobs? Not all places work weekend/have tons of meetings/micromanage. Maybe take time to assess what you like and dislike about your job and try to find a less stressful environment that fits your exp…

> As my girlfriend puts it "at the end of the day it's just a bunch of computers, no-one is dying". +1

But, sadly, many jobs and especially bosses in America portray things as if failure means that someone does in fact "die"...and that metaphorical death often is your job.

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

#294

Post by avgDev » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 6:44 PM UTC

popcorncowboy wrote: post #105

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…

Yep it's bullshit. Just don't imagine that the grass is any greener elsewhere. Most professions suck. Work/life balance for doctors is something they read about, lawyers have the highest suicide rates in the country, accountants grind soul crushing busy work, bankers call uppers "tie straighteners" to get them through the day, civil/mechanical engineering chews up the "weak" and cripples the "strong". Academia is a c…

Good point. I'm sometimes upset that I have to dig through a legacy database to figure out how to make my new web app work with it. I sometimes have to commit programming crimes to work around a legacy stored procedures that the company is unwilling to touch at that point. However, my job is relatively relaxed. My boss doesn't require any core hours from me and I go to the office every few weeks to touch base and attend meetings.

I then talk to friends who are doctors and pharmacists.....and I wouldn't be able to do their jobs. The pharmacist works 12 hours days. Mostly standing. She cannot leave for lunch. She rarely has a moment to text or do anything else at work. She under intense pressure to show up everyday. If she misses like 3 days due to any emergency she is going to get fired.

All I can say fuck that. Software development has its demons but most devs can make six figures changing the color of a button or creating relatively simple CRUD apps once they understand modern frameworks and databases.

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

#295

Post by g9yuayon » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

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.

I do the first part: finding smaller to medium company. Smaller companies have better visibility, more work than people can finish so everyone gets to work on big whales. There's in general a better comradeship too. Revenue per employee in good smaller companies are usually larger than that in big companies, so people don't have to fight for resources as much.

I'm not sure about "non-tech" companies, though. IT in non-tech companies are usually cost center, so there's usually insufficient investment in tech workers in those companies. Some line of work can be hard to find in non-tech companies: distributed systems, large-scale database systems, high traffic systems that require deep optimizations on throughput, latency, and etc.

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

#296

Post by qorrect » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 6:49 PM UTC

unforeseen9991 wrote: post #163

rlawson wrote: post #135

I've been in the industry 20+ years and have had my share of ups and downs. Some advice for what it's worth. Focus on what you enjoy doing and avoid what stresses you out. The industry is wide enough that you can likely find a job doing what you like in an environment you like. For me that meant being a little less ambitious in terms of income but working in a laid back environment with people I really enjoy and doin…

20+ years as well and this is spot on. I've also been up and down the ladder including coding, management, director, etc. I eventually decided I liked the technical path much more, and that freedom was a very important value for me, so I took the jump to be independent 10+ years ago. I originally started with multiple contracts doing various support and project work, these days i'm almost exclusively project work tha…

How do I get started doing being an independent ? Recently I have tried using Upwork, but am constantly being underbid in a race to the bottom.

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

#297

Post by TheRealDunkirk » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

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…

I think you're making a higher-level point than the big company-little company argument above, and it's the same point that is constantly reiterated about hiring: you quit bad BOSSES, not jobs. It's the bosses that make the environment and the work bad. If your management treats programmers like assembly-line workers, then that's the kind of programmer they'll get. At least, that's the kind of PROGRAMMING that they'll get, while certain people coast and look for something else. It's just bad management. You'd think that the CIO's and the CTO's of companies could possibly justify their titles by making sure this kind of environment didn't pervade in their companies, but, alas, that's not actually the sort of thing corporate officers care about.

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

#298

Post by mxuribe » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 7:04 PM UTC

scrozart wrote: post #86

You can program outside of "the industry". I work at a science institution that sits between NASA and the .edu sphere of influence. While we also have our own frustrations, it's generally wonderful and I'm a cog in a machine that is enriching the human experience. Are we a little behind on all the spiffy trends? Yep, but we're also not under constant pressure to adopt/adapt to spiffy trends. Do we make a little less…

> While we also have our own frustrations, it's generally wonderful and I'm a cog in a machine that is enriching the human experience. Are we a little behind on all the spiffy trends? Yep, but we're also not under constant pressure to adopt/adapt to spiffy trends. Do we make a little less than market? Yep, but it's still plenty and the benefits, including retirement and vacation, are amazing.

At this point in my life (48), this is almost exactly the kind of job that i want! Good for you on your job!

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

#299

Post by mxuribe » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 7:07 PM UTC

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #289

Pokepokalypse wrote: post #282

I tend to really like working startups. Massive corporations are usually very risk-averse, and you end up just mostly being a ticket-monkey. The problems you're tending to solve are mostly pretty boring - unless you're a rock-star and they've hired you to do cutting edge R&D (and in this case, can be the coolest and most rewarding gig out there). But at startups, there's always a shit ton of interesting problems to s…

Our team complained about frequent meetings, and managers reduced meetings to one daily meeting (our managers are competent though).

> ...our managers are competent though...

So....um, it sounds like you work at almost-a-unicorn! ;-)

Seriously, good for you!

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

#300

Post by badpun » Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 7:14 PM UTC

garagemc2 wrote: post #16

badpun wrote: post #2

I 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…

How did you find your job?

Practically by accident. I didn't know the job was so nice before I got into it. I might have helped my luck by moving to a niche area which is dominated by nerds (Scala, with a Haskel-like functional bend). So, if a company is allowing the use of such, frankly crazy, technology, then it means that it is treating its tech people seriously, or is ran itself by crazy tech nerds.