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Ask HN: Anyone else tired of working in tech?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of working in tech?

#41

Post by cableshaft »

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #26

No because I used to work at McDonald's and loading trailers from warehouses before working in tech. That gave me perspective that lasts even to this day. I'm not saying this is true of OP but I've met a few people who constantly complained about working in tech and one thing I noticed is a lot of them never worked a really shitty/physical job. It blew my mind in university meeting people who's first ever job was a s…

I miss my fast food job (and especially my retail job), to a certain extent. I also worked in a warehouse and a factory for a bit, and there are certain things I miss about those as well. I don't miss the low pay though. And my health is no longer good enough (in part because I've been too sedentary in office jobs the past 20 years) that I can no longer stand for hours at a time (not even that, I can no longer stand in place for more than a few minutes at a time).

I could completely forget about my job when I got home, didn't have to somewhat keep a framework of some giant corporate spaghetti code soup in my head to a certain extent for months or years on end, and interacted with people way, way more than I do now, and made deeper friendships with my coworkers.

Also there was no risk of me working on something for six months and it get cancelled or shelved before it gets used by anyone. At least in fast food and retail jobs you're helping multiple people (sometimes hundreds of people) every day. In my corporate career I've often ended up working on software that only has a handful of high paying clients, or only used internally and not client facing.

If I could justify the insane pay cut and could manage it physically I'd probably do something like be a barista nowadays. Or be a teacher, maybe.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of working in tech?

#42

Post by tacostakohashi »

atlgator wrote: post #40

I think what people are actually tired of isn't "tech" — it's the gap between what they thought the job would be and what it's become. When most of us got into this field, the implicit promise was: learn hard things, solve interesting problems, build stuff that works. And for a while, that's what it was. The disillusionment isn't really about AI or crypto or whatever the current hype cycle is. It's that the job has s…

The problem you are getting at is alienation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

Over time, tech work has become totally disconnected from real world users and customers, and everything has become intermediated by JIRAs and tickets, sprints, product managers, and process, so that the developers are interchangeable cogs, with no real domain knowledge or user relationships.

As much as people say AI is killing jobs, even before that, interesting jobs were mostly being killed anyway by agile, sprints, and product managers anyway, to the extent that replacing those kind of jobs with AI is no great loss.

Loading trucks, and manual labor, can potentially be quite satisfying, especially if it's your truck, or your business, or your product being loaded.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of working in tech?

#43

Post by karakoram »

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #26

No because I used to work at McDonald's and loading trailers from warehouses before working in tech. That gave me perspective that lasts even to this day. I'm not saying this is true of OP but I've met a few people who constantly complained about working in tech and one thing I noticed is a lot of them never worked a really shitty/physical job. It blew my mind in university meeting people who's first ever job was a s…

Yep, the whole industry is not in good place right now but tech is still a sure-fire way of netting $1Mil+ after a 5-10 year career, with the most freedom and in the most flexible way.

Several people I know who went to a good university and landed big tech/quant jobs early became millionaires (liquid 1,000,000) after 5 to 7 years. Some got lucky and reached this milestone way earlier.

Medicine takes 12+ years of education before bearing any fruit and finance has very little freedom.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of working in tech?

#44

Post by haute_cuisine »

tacostakohashi wrote: post #42
atlgator wrote: post #40

I think what people are actually tired of isn't "tech" — it's the gap between what they thought the job would be and what it's become. When most of us got into this field, the implicit promise was: learn hard things, solve interesting problems, build stuff that works. And for a while, that's what it was. The disillusionment isn't really about AI or crypto or whatever the current hype cycle is. It's that the job has s…

The problem you are getting at is alienation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation Over time, tech work has become totally disconnected from real world users and customers, and everything has become intermediated by JIRAs and tickets, sprints, product managers, and process, so that the developers are interchangeable cogs, with no real domain knowledge or user relationships. As much as people sa…

I think the main problem is tech workers finally became a commodity. It was a brief time when hiring was hard and it was possible to get some sense of power because you could freely walk away or because you were a craftsmen.

Over the years, power slowly returned back to management and the industry figured out how to slice the creative role into small cogs: QAs, FEs, BEs, SREß, OPSs, POs, PMs. It's ten people now instead of three crafsmen. They can now follow a very strict process to produce average software with a lot of overhead. Customers don't care because one half is forced to use it and the other don't have a taste of what good software is. Partially, because they use abysmal MS products. Apple briefly showed to an average Joe what is possible when people care, but they're slowly losing it.

Now it's node/js everywhere and fierce competition being a ticket taker. People with no passion who are here just for the money and who don't care about the code. People who are here to play promotion politic games. Coding is a regular job now which pays decent and has low barrier to entry. You can fake it very far now with AI assistance.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of working in tech?

#45

Post by lyaocean »

I hit this twice. What helped was separating burnout from career mismatch: first fix sleep/on-call/calendar load for 6-8 weeks, then decide. If you still feel flat, move closer to a domain with visible outcomes (healthcare, logistics, education, local government) and keep tech as the tool, not the identity.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of working in tech?

#46

Post by fuzzfactor »

SenHeng wrote: post #37
fuzzfactor wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever done anything else that you always wanted to do? That can be a feeling all its own :)

Despite (or maybe because of) my upbringing, I’ve had the fortune of mostly doing things I wanted to do. Not exactly as I wanted, but more or less in the general direction. Which is why I’m now in the position to choose whether to study to be a CPA or go back to work.[0] [0]: https://senhongo.com/blog/sabbatical-update/

It can take a long time to get in position like that, a lot of focus or both.

Maybe not focus first on the goal(s) but the improved ability to keep options open.

I think I've always been comfortable having more viable options than I would ever be able to act on in one lifetime.

Always needed something to fall back on anyway.

It would be self-defeating to think that not doing all these things is failing to live up to your potential though, when just having more diverse options open when you need or want them is a feeling not everybody has.

Maybe a good way to bring the option of a sabbatical onto the table, is to have it on the menu to begin with.

Very inspiring :)

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of working in tech?

#47

Post by tokenless »

tacostakohashi wrote: post #42
atlgator wrote: post #40

I think what people are actually tired of isn't "tech" — it's the gap between what they thought the job would be and what it's become. When most of us got into this field, the implicit promise was: learn hard things, solve interesting problems, build stuff that works. And for a while, that's what it was. The disillusionment isn't really about AI or crypto or whatever the current hype cycle is. It's that the job has s…

The problem you are getting at is alienation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation Over time, tech work has become totally disconnected from real world users and customers, and everything has become intermediated by JIRAs and tickets, sprints, product managers, and process, so that the developers are interchangeable cogs, with no real domain knowledge or user relationships. As much as people sa…

> Over time, tech work has become totally disconnected from real world users

While we used to use Excel and now use Jira, in my experience even 25 years ago never spoke to users. Spoke to their proxies in house. If lucky those proxies are from the industry and were end users once.

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