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Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#301

I haven't left myself yet, but at almost-55 I know a fair number who have. Here's what I know of what their answers would be. The first simply had another passion - travel. Work was just a way to pay for that. Eventually went to work for an agency, been there a long time and AFAICT couldn't be happier (despite being less well off materially). I've known a couple of others who fit this pattern. One left the industry t…

I had a coworker at BigCo who would disappear for a month every summer. I wasn't paying attention to other PTO days through the year so I assumed that extra PTO for work anniversaries added up faster than I thought.

Turns out they were just taking a leave of absence, every year, to travel, and just eating the pay cut.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, people worry about age discrimination a lot because there aren't a ton of older programmers around. But when the discussion comes up, people don't talk much about the reasons you describe. Sure, bad programmers age out because they were never great at programming in the first place. But I would assume the HN crowd falls in the top half of competence because there are so many people here who seem smarter abo…

> If you're good, you don't have to worry. You don't have to worry about keeping your current job, but getting a different one becomes a lot harder. Your 27 year-old interviewer might be thinking "You're my dads age, and my dad is crusty. No way you can wrap your head around lib-of-the-week.js"

> You don't have to worry about keeping your current job

Depends on the job. There are employers who recognize the value of somebody who has broad experience, and who can/will do things that are necessary but not fun. There are also employers who only measure hands-on-coding skills, and/or who insist that everyone should be on a "growth path" even if they're already at a higher level than most will reach. Good people don't have to worry at the first kind, and very much have to worry at the second.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#303
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most all the systems I have worked on its more about screwing the user from a technical perspective than a deliberate business action, though there have been some of those too. Either way it all comes down to some combination of mental laziness and no ethics. There is no ethical code, that I am aware of, for writing software. Here are my experiences as a web developer: * Frustration at the general technical incomp…

IEEE Code of Ethics: https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html ACM Code of Ethics: https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics There are incompetent people in every industry. So what. Hiring is an arcane mystery in every industry where productivity can't be quantified. So what.

Hiring is hard even in places where everything is quantified, such as baseball! Only a few teams have consistent success signing good value contracts even with all the statistics available.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#304

I’m 38 and working as a developer at a well-known investment bank. I’ve been thinking of running my own specialty coffee shop. Been working as a developer for my whole life (front-end primarily). The day to day work is okay, and the problems are challenging. Definitely not working on mundane CRUD apps, but still it isn’t as fun as it used to be in the past. I started with programming because I found it rewarding to b…

What do you suppose would happen if you started bringing specialty coffee in to work and to technical events?

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This describes a lot of software. No doubt. It's depressing and disturbing. But not any of the systems I've worked on over 10 years. You may not get the absolute top salaries working on more meaningful projects, but there's plenty of them. Here are some examples that I worked on. To a fault, most of these places over-focused on the business and under-focused on exceptional engineering. Nonetheless, there's a lot of m…

You've done well to stick with these things, and I do agree with your point, but I think almost any company can fall afoul of these practices... - Optometry practice management software... targeted at maximising in-store sales with prescriptions that are difficult to use elsewhere, encouraging dark-patterns in sales tactics, etc. - Insurance benefits processing and customer service systems... that attempts to minimis…

These are great points. I'm reminded of a comedy TV show, The Good Place, where it turns out nobody has gone to "heaven - the good place" for a long time because there are too many unintended consequences of a person's actions. Buy an organic bamboo T-shirt? The company dumped waste into river. Vegan? You produced a bunch of single plastic plastic packaging.

It highlight the need to be diligent in daily decisions day-by-day. And when working somewhere that's doing something borderline, or totally unethical, working to move it in the right direction. I hope I can be aware enough to create a net benefit. The problem is knowing enough of the consequences of any action to evaluate if it's a net benefit. That's really hard, but I have to believe that toiling away _trying_ to make net positives happen will _actually_ result in net positives happening. Doubting I could ever make net positives happen leads to cynicism and ensures nothing good will come of my work.

(and thank you for bringing up point about benefit systems - that's the next gig for me, I will work to not be part of the problem)

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#306
post #2

I turned 40, so they took me out the back and shot me. As is tradition.

My first mentor was about the same age I am now, and still one of the best I ever had.

Staying sharp and engaged is tricky. It's easy for a person to become apathetic upon realizing how much churn and mis-spent energy there is in the industry, and when you're old and apathetic they assume that means it's time for the glue factory.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#307

I wish I could leave. The tech industry nowadays is no longer about solving real-world problems and making the world a better place, instead it's all about screwing the end user in every single way possible, whether it's ads, stalking and privacy violations, spam ("marketing" as they call it) or just plain fraud where the company is happy to take the money but can't make it right if things don't go to plan and the cu…

There's tons of good tech work out there - go into the B2B and less B2C.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most all the systems I have worked on its more about screwing the user from a technical perspective than a deliberate business action, though there have been some of those too. Either way it all comes down to some combination of mental laziness and no ethics. There is no ethical code, that I am aware of, for writing software. Here are my experiences as a web developer: * Frustration at the general technical incomp…

JavaScript developers can't interface to the browser I'm not sure I've worked directly with anyone recently who could pass a DOM test like that. Everything is React and and Axios and the browser (and HTTP, TCP, DNS, etc) is a mystery. Edit: mystery isn't even the right word really, if you mention any of the other layers I've seen people get actually hostile.

From that particular post, this line stuck out to me:

Only 3 candidates were able to pass this code filter. The people that did pass either did well enough to pass or extremely excellent. The people that failed, maybe 19 of 22 people, all failed epically.

In practice I highly doubt that the population of candidates is actually this bimodal. It might lean heavily below the hiring bar, but I have trouble believing that it's bimodal. My own personal experience has been that it looks a lot like a normal distribution where the hiring bar is just two standard deviations above the mean (which would imply that you give offers to about 1 out of 25 people who apply, which sounds approximately in the right ballpark).

As a consequence, if your question is producing bimodal results, I can't help but wonder whether it's a good interview question, because knowledge tests exhibit much of the same type of distribution of outcomes.

In my experience, if you give the candidate only one hour, access to documentation only helps with recalling past experience, because one hour is too much time pressure to actually calm down, pick through, and digest documentation on something you haven't seen before. If you knew the DOM functions existed and just needed their names, it'll work, but if you're unfamiliar with what the DOM already offers, even if you could learn it fine on the job, you won't learn it fine under time pressure. I recently adjusted one of my interview questions specifically to reduce the need for looking up documentation because I noticed exactly this phenomenon.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#309
post #23

I left it before I really got started, and looking back at it now, I don't regret it. In my mid-twenties I decided I'd rather be an electrician. I don't sit on my ass all day. I get to meet new people, and see new places all the time. Some places that few ever get to see. Power plants, clock towers, police stations, homeless shelters, church attics. All sorts of stuff. Not all of it equally exciting, but a lot of it…

I got into software mostly for the money so I can fund some extended travel, and when I get back from that extended travel I don't plan to go back into software.

My BF's dad owns an electrical company, and I know BF will most likely end up working there - I've considered in the past joining him. This post is encouraging because it seems like I could get all the movement and outdoor time that I'm missing with coding, and also be building stuff that's useful to people.

Do you see many female electricians? I suspect there are few - any ideas as to why? Is there a lot of heavy/difficult physical labor that I would be unable to do?

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#310
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think B2B is a much less predatory place - most of the businesses have real money, want a real thing to help them make more of it, and are engaged in the process of making that work. There's plenty of bad actors (like any biz) but most of the time when I ship features everyone is happy, and no one is taken advantage of.

A friend of mine works at a B2B business. Every week they have a "lead forensics" meeting where they somehow figure out which companies visited their website and then spam them with unsolicited sales calls/emails.

I think DataDog does this. I've vowed to never advocate for their products because of their relentless salespeople and however they got a hold of both my business and personal emails.
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