Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?

I don't understand why you ever would. Your product is your product. It's defined by what it does, not how it does it. It's all about customer experience. Product market fit. That can and should be determined by market research, user experience design testing and prototyping. Developers are there to build with quality and to appropriate scale based on business strategy.

If you open a restaurant, is the menu written by a chef or by the guy who built the oven? Are movie scripts written by the camera operators? What industry asks it's technicians to decide what to create?

I actually just quit a job because developers were running the show way too much. Nothing was ever delivered to expectations or satisfied user needs. It was extremely frustrating for me to just be throwing code over the wall.

Dehumanization isn't just the tech industry. It isn't even just industry. Our philosophy has dehumanized us.

Yes, the tech industry can be dehumanizing. (So can technology.) Yes, industry can be dehumanizing, as they try to wring every last cent out of you without concern for what it does to you as a human. But I think the problem runs deeper than that. It's basically a question of who we think we are.

As a society, we no longer believe in God. We believe in the physical universe - in matter and the laws of physics. That means that all we can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics. That's all we can be, because there is nothing else.

In particular, we can't have any free will or any ability to make a real choice. Matter that obeys the laws of physics doesn't choose anything - it just obeys the laws of physics. We're just machines made of atoms obeying the laws of quantm electrodynamics, which make up biochemicals obeying the laws of biochemistry, which make up neurons obeying the laws of neurology - and nothing more.

We can't love in the real sense of the word - choosing what's best for the one we love - because we can't choose anything. Even the lesser flavors of love are just a matter of biochemicals and neurons just doing their thing.

There's no real beauty in any objective sense - there's just certain things happen to hit our neurons in a certain way.

For that matter, there's no truth, either, and not just in the postmodern sense. If our brains were built by evolution, they were built to give a good enough answer fast enough. They were not built to find actual truth, even were such a thing to exist.

So in this view, free will, love, beauty, and truth - everything we thought of as making us human - are dead. We're just machines, just like the computers on our desks. As more and more people believe this (and start to act like it), it becomes more and more rare to be treated in a genuinely human way.

The systems are too damned complicated and poorly architected. Can’t just work on mastering any single piece in isolation.. has to be verticals!!

Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, it was strange to see 22 year old recent graduates arriving and immediately making six figure salaries while constantly complaining about homeless people and describing certain areas with large black and Latino populations as "sketchy"/"ghetto"/"unsafe".

It was very surreal (and sad) watching the demographics become much more homogenous in the little corner store in the Castro I worked in. Our customer base was once incredibly diverse, lots of LGBTQ folks, and also lots of families. Slowly it became predominantly white and East/South Asian, young, single, and affluent. We went from seeing EBT card usage drop from about 4-5 customers a day ($200 daily average) to one (literally) every 3 and half weeks by the end of 2016.

In a similar vein: every tech company I've known whose product involves manual labor (think: delivery, cleaning, retrieving scooters, packing/receiving, food preparation, etc) treats and thinks about the workers doing the manual labor very differently than the creatives, engineers, product folks, sales leads, etc. The employees doing the manual labor are held to very different standards of productivity and timeliness, often don't get benefits, definitely don't get equity, and generally enjoy little room for advancement, and often they will be employees in all but name and rights (1099).

Some of this is understandable to a point as their work is mission critical -- if your cooks show up late constantly and your product is "Uber but for tapas", then your customer experience is going to suffer. But a tendency I've observed personally and heard from friends in those jobs is that it seems acceptable for manual workers to be shouted at, threatened, and generally be treated abusively, while the same certainly wouldn't be ok if directed at someone making salary. Meanwhile as an engineer if I have a zero day, no one says a word to me, or if they do they're very polite about it.

> If you don't love to learn and to apply the things you have learned the tech industry really isn't for you.

Should that be the case though?

I'm actually skeptical that a lot of the new things are actually as valuable as we think they are. We tend to allow our feelings on technology to bias our estimates on productivity. I've heard tons of developers opine at length about how some new library, language, or platform increases productivity. It usually boils down to the "niceness" of the thing and how they feel using it, or some sample project that only measures time to first deployment, and not the overall maintenance burden. None of it is ever actually measured.