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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?

#351

Post by munchbunny »

austincheney wrote: post #336
munchbunny wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but I have trouble believing that it's bimodal It surprised me just as much. I cannot speak to the capabilities or thoughts of any given candidate. Ultimately the test was a test of using a single standard API that is based upon a standard model. If it were just a matter of instructions or syntax I suspect a candidate would gotten over that by either asking the right questions, trial and error, using a reference of…

I think what really destroyed people was a complete inability to perceive the page as a series of nodes all interconnected with various relationships.

Fair enough. :) I've experienced a similar issue with interview questions where they often floundered on the question because they hadn't ever spent time digging under the surface. For example, I notice that a lot of (typically junior) developers seem to only think of JSON as a representation for hierarchical objects but never really spent time thinking about the typed-ness of its keys/values or the limits of what JSON can actually represent. An interview is a bad time to be confronted with that realization.

I cannot remember if I specifically mentioned refreshing on the DOM methods or not.

Well, it was a long time ago, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just talk about what I've experienced. I go back and forth about how specific I should be about the type of questions I might ask. On the one hand, it seems kind of foundational that someone writing web frontends is aware of the DOM and how it works, even if they never directly interact with it. On the other hand, I think questions need to control as much as possible for the "preparation" factor because some people simply interview better or have more time to study.

It doesn't seem too crazy to me today that a competent FE dev these days might have spent their whole career in React, and therefore they don't really have a strong grasp on the DOM. If you had asked when I first started doing web FE development, that would have been crazy! But frameworks got a lot better and a lot more comprehensive since then.

I recently had an interesting experience asking a question involving dealing with UTF-8 encoding. I figured "everyone knows about UTF-8 right?" I retired the question pretty quickly once I realized that bit manipulation is not actually something you have to be even remotely familiar with in order to be a functional developer today in the vast majority of programming tasks, and therefore it wasn't even a good fizzbuzz-type test.

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

#352

Post by hackyhacky »

milquetoastaf wrote: post #160
hackyhacky wrote: post #78

As a kid, I aspired to be a programmer. As an adult, I succeeded, and I stuck around for a good long while. There are a lot of reasons to like working tech, obviously: the salary, the flexible working environment, the prestige, the opportunity to build products that real people use, the chance to play with new technology, and of course working with occasionally brilliant colleagues. I tried to convince myself that th…

Can you elaborate more on how you got into the teaching position? This is a path that intrigues me as well but I also had mediocre grades and I never even tried to go to grad school. However I have been quite successful in my career (worked for the NYT and currently for a FAANG) but like you I am getting burnt out by the daily realities of the industry.

It was by chance. First, I started teaching English as a foreign language in Europe: that provided a useful background in pedagogy, although has nothing to do with computers. Second, I was offered an adjunct position at a university where I was a student, which gave me a taste of teaching CS.

You'll probably need at least a Master's degree if you want to teach, but a strong industry background might be enough. You might try approaching a local university (don't discriminate, even community colleges need teachers) about teaching one class a semester. If you like it, you can try a better school or go for a full-time position.

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

#353

Post by collyw »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #297
asdfman123 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to Stanford undergrad and honestly, the Bay Area tech scene (and Seattle from what I've noticed) looks unappealing to me. The culture is a turn off. I'd much rather have a 40 hour a week job somewhere else, where everyone understands it's a job and you can be your own person at home. It's hard to articulate, and I could write much more about it, but it's almost like the identity you have to don to fit in there…

There is a lot of things that could be said here: 1) I switched from being a software engineer to a data scientist in 2010, in part because of the culture. I totally get not enjoying the culture, though I do recognize how much it varies from person to person and company to company, so I try not to stereotype. But on some level, I get it. 2) We're opposites in some way. I've been writing code since I was 8 years old,…

What do you need to learn to make the switch? I know SQL pretty well. I don't now a lot of stats, but I doubt its beyond me to learn.

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

#354

Post by [deleted] »

Nextgrid wrote: post #64

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…

[deleted]

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

#355

Post by collyw »

wackget wrote: post #203
Nextgrid wrote: post #64

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…

>Technology-wise, we no longer use engineering as a means to an end to solve a business problem. Instead, engineering became its own thing and most companies encourage and reward those who opt for over-engineered solutions, which means you spend more time fighting with dozens of layers of abstractions and chasing the latest JS framework instead of actually delivering functionality. This is mostly a symptom of the pre…

I have been dealing with this at work today. Docker on Google cloud with a VPN. A two line change took at least half an half an hour to test out. Then log into the container and I can't even run less on the logs to try and work out what was wrong. I can't even remembr the problem that docker was supposed to be solving but someone added it in.

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

#356

Post by collyw »

dmux wrote: post #137
ehnto wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead, engineering became its own thing and most companies encourage and reward those who opt for over-engineered solutions, which means you spend more time fighting with dozens of layers of abstractions and chasing the latest JS framework instead of actually delivering functionality. I've been thinking about this in relation to the concept of incidental complexity lately. Every year there is more and more toolin…

>Every year there is more and more tooling and configuration to do before actually coding anything. I've become increasingly worn-out from this as well. It's strange that as an industry we parrot the "premature optimization is the root of all evil" line, yet we build out our tech stacks as if we were all part of FAANG.

I am going to start showing everyone the Stack Overflow architecture, a beautiful example of scaling up rather than the monstrosities generated by scaling out. There is the promise of cheaper hardware, but the developer costs must cancel this out, no?

https://stackexchange.com/performance

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

#357

Post by jameshush »

hackyhacky wrote: post #78

As a kid, I aspired to be a programmer. As an adult, I succeeded, and I stuck around for a good long while. There are a lot of reasons to like working tech, obviously: the salary, the flexible working environment, the prestige, the opportunity to build products that real people use, the chance to play with new technology, and of course working with occasionally brilliant colleagues. I tried to convince myself that th…

Thanks for sharing this. What you described in your past is EXACTLY how I feel now, and how I have felt over the last couple of years. Especially the line "I should have just found a better job, and I did, several times" is EXACTLY how I feel too. You've even nailed exactly how I feel with "I was spending more time wrestling with package managers, version conflicts, obtuse configuration files, pointless deadlines".

I really enjoyed teaching guitar and talking to people when I was younger so I've slowly been creating educational content on LinkedIn and YouTube for software engineers. The main thing preventing me from taking a jump is my immigration status (I'm not American and I'm working on my green card right now). I'm glad this is working out for you!

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

#358

Post by collyw »

naringas wrote: post #207
Nextgrid wrote: post #64

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…

> we no longer use engineering as a means to an end to solve a business problem. Instead, engineering became its own thing I hadn't though about why we over-engineer things this way. But I agree I might add, based on the over-engineered (and, in general, badly designed) software I have worked with, that it usually comes about because it's never possible to change any aspect of the underlying architecture with the pur…

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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

#359

Post by jackcosgrove »

sopooneo wrote: post #263
Nextgrid wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, how do you get jobs/contracts around these examples? My understanding is that most of these industries already have the talent they need (or have a preferred supplier they work with).

I freelanced for a few months for a local high-end cabinet maker. I helped them integrate their online ordering system with the automated fabrication equipment. It was, by far the most I have ever enjoyed programming. Coordinating with super skilled crafts-people to help them eliminate the redundant parts of their work was just so cool. And by weird coincidence to this post I've recently been browsing around trying t…

That type of work is too infrequent for most companies to justify hiring a dedicated developer.

You should work for a system integrator if you want to do that kind of work with regularity. The integrator contracts you out to those companies as needed, and you develop a niche and maybe customers start asking for you by name. In the best cases the integrator is your employer and offers full benefits, as well as absorbing the costs of downtime.

That business model can also be abusive for obvious reasons. I can recommend a good company if you're interested.

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

#360

Post by silveroriole »

ruffrey wrote: post #163
Nextgrid wrote: post #64

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…

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…

“Up to 90% of the highest salaries available”? I’ve worked on one of these and you’re more likely to get 60-70% of what you could otherwise be earning in some mediocre fintech company, let alone top salaries. Which is a much harder sell for most people.
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