Yes I do love it, but have since moved on, now the arts hold more interest and, interestingly, promise, for me than computers per se. Though technology seems worthy of keeping tabs on, I now try to go days without if I can; it's much healthier for the mind, and body surely, to be analog, but technical things did and do develop my mental faculties. Luckily I have found many and more analog sources of challenging.thought processes and some I'd say even more complex than computers (unless it's compilers or some linear algebra, logic or hard science monster, which anyway weren't my field). It's unfortunate that I can't find time now to code a good old hobby project up.
Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
301–310 of 350 posts
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You have to do the opposite and increase your prices. Everything you do needs to be about value, not price. The market is bimodal and the first mode is a race to the bottom, so you need to find the companies that care about results more than price.
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my 2+ decades at Apple, I think I enjoyed working on frameworks more than I enjoyed working on applications for many of the reasons you mention. Your "customer" for a framework is a fellow dev. That can make all the difference in the world. Design and marketing generally take a back seat.
I've spent a good part of my career doing tooling for developers and customer service. The amount of "customers" is a lot smaller and they tend to be technically proficient and know what they want and need.
Eh. It can become a bad job too. When a tooling team has fulfilled its basic mission and things are good enough it can turn into a really bad job because it turns into a scrum death-march for features of questionable value and never ending bug fixes to fill time.
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#304As a survivor of more than 10 mergers/acquisitions at various stages of my career, I definitely think the industry is self-destructing. The embracing of the trend of the week, e.g., microservices, the Cloud, off shoring, outsourcing, insourcing, onshoring, PMP org structures, Agile org structures, open floor plans, remote work, etc., often with little planning or analysis has sapped a lot of the energy and appeal from the industry. When I started back in the 80s, the barriers to entry were higher and the teams smaller and more focused. As I neared retirement, a couple of years ago, "anyone" could be a developer, team sizes were substantially larger and less productive, with greater specificity in roles. Costs were higher, throughput lower. When I stopped working, I was very happy that I wasn't a young guy trying to make a successful career out of the industry today, given its current state.
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#305I 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…
> A market for lemons
Somehow I just visualized the job market as analogous to the romantic dating pool for people past say 35. That complaint about all the good ones being taken, and those who get back into the scene have baggage by that point and several failures along the way. I've never conceived of the job market like that, puts a whole new spin on it when I conceptualize it as such.
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#306[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
The retirement bit seems more like an American-centric thing. I've worked on various projects involving American and European companies, and to be honest the European workers seem much more content with their work-life. I can only assume that it is because of stronger labor laws, more relaxed work/life balance, etc. Some of my American (contractor) colleagues would work like dogs for 6 days a week, often from early i…
Yeah.. first shocking thing in my transnational company was that they only have 10 days of vacation vs our usual 30... and they envy us always for our 3week long vacations, while their is usually used up already with Christmas? Then those sentences here in multiple posts about it being normal to put in extra weekend days, wtf? Add to this they even completely had to return to office 5days a week.. ..and this is for h…
I do think you might have gotten a rather skewed view of the situation in the US. In the ten years I've been working professionally I've never had to work weekends, for example, and I currently have 30 days of vacation (plus another eight or so sick days). I realize the amount of vacation I get is unusually high, but I think three or four weeks is normal.
That said, while I am reasonably well compensated I don't make enough to retire early. At my current trajectory I'm not sure I make enough to retire full stop ... so I might just be working until I die after all.
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#308Take a job at a poultry processing factory for a month. That will heal your soul somewhat.
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#309Yep I can relate. I love computers and working with them. I do it all the time in my free time and have so many projects spinning, slowly but surely.
Professional Software Development is idiotic and a waste of consciousness. Or rather, it's a conversion of consciousness and focus into money (some for you - mostly for up-orgchart). Right now, it is pretty free money. Especially given remote.
Can't wait to fuck off.
Re: Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?
#310> endless meetings, constant micromanagement there are companies where this part is not true. We have one daily meeting. Engineers have The daily standup is more a way to stay "real people" to each other instead of a picture in slack. We could easily do the standup async, but talking to each other each day is good for keeping solid relationships.
Daily standup are one of the stupidest things the industry has come up with in the last 20 years. It's all part of the scrum BS which is nothing but structured/obsessive micromanagement. We have 2 weekly meetings back to back. Biz/Dev then Dev/Dev, both combined usually total an hour. When we need to call someone, we call someone.
Eh I don't know, I think daily standup is pretty great actually. It seems like by far the most time effective way I've ever seen to resolve blocking and resourcing issues. Trying to do that asynchronously wastes way more time IMO. It's especially good that it's at a known time so you can plan around it.I think teams just get this really wrong and waste a ton of time. A good standup should take like 5 minutes. I'll happily admit that it works a lot worse in a remote setting because of the overhead of a call, but I still think it's much better than trying to solve those problems async.
Also Scrum isn't about obsessive micromanagement at all. It's just an interface for engineering that the rest of the org can work with. Everyone else sees engineering as black box. Without a highly structured estimation and planning system eng is incredibly difficult to work with. Introducing some inefficiency within engineering to introduce clarity at the boundary is absolutely worth it for an org. Again, I think teams fuck scrum up pretty often, and like any process it can be, and often is, weaponized (eg: trying to use story points to measure velocity)