This is changing, but the lack of focus on physical health is a major problem that is literally shortening the lifespans of young developers. Getting up, moving around, stretching, and taking physical breaks throughout the day will prevent all kinds of physical problems down the road, but unfortunately, because young people can sit and grind for 8+ hours, we don't do this.
Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
41–50 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#42Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#43The growing divide between the haves and have-nots. I have found that people in tech are generally completely oblivious to the massive amounts of impoverished people around them and have no idea how to help them. Also the technical advancements that we are seeing nowadays mostly seem to help people who are already well off. It is difficult to find good tech companies that have a high social good output.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#44I think there's a few things about the software industry that make it really easy to become depressed, cynical, and jaded. We spend quite a lot of time being pedantic, fixating on all kinds of specific details, and especially, thinking about many different ways our applications can go wrong. In the context of writing robust software, that's a good thing, but it can also be really difficult to turn it off in the other parts of your life.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#45There is an expectation and honestly a need to keep up with changes to the industry that I haven't seen in other fields. Any older dev has had to transition at least 1-2 languages and it's not an easy step. That doesn't even start covering how fast javascript frameworks are moving. Oh, hey you learned Angular, that's so 3 years ago we don't do that here. We use Vue.js which is better because _________. Vue will be re…
Is it really that much of a problem? Admittedly I have no experience with JavaScript frameworks, but I do backend work and have switched projects and companies very often over the last 8-10 years. I have had to use C#, Java, PHP, Go, Node/TypeScript and even some OCaml, and every single time a few weeks to ramp up and get used to the new syntax has been enough.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#46- Alpha male posturing - People expect you to care about your job.
> - People expect you to care about your job.
What I think is funny about this is that the actual expoiting slave driver bosses will accept sometimes that you do what you get paid for and then go home. They won't tell you so, but if you are able to read faces you can see them smile a little with respect if you refuse to get exploited. But some of the engineering colleagues will never accept that. 24/7 is the requirement. Even if nobody, not even them, gets anything out of it.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#47There is an expectation and honestly a need to keep up with changes to the industry that I haven't seen in other fields. Any older dev has had to transition at least 1-2 languages and it's not an easy step. That doesn't even start covering how fast javascript frameworks are moving. Oh, hey you learned Angular, that's so 3 years ago we don't do that here. We use Vue.js which is better because _________. Vue will be re…
All this talk of JS getting new frameworks every few months is just BS. Front end development has evolved a lot in the last few years, completely out of necessity. But it is stabilizing because we’ve discovered the patterns that make sense for DOM development. You should fully expect React and Vue to be around more or less in their same forms for the next 10 years.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#48I'm inside most of the daylight hours. This isn't so bad when it's nasty weather outside (for me this is when it is hot and sunny, apparently there are actually people who like that kind of weather so YMMV), but when it is nice outside and I'm stuck inside...
Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#49In the Silicon Valley there's this feeling of monotony - that everyone is doing the same thing. Given the price of housing you can make a pretty good guess everyone is trying to either save up to move out or pay off a house here. Everyone is either trying to come up with a way to enter the hottest trendiest startup idea or doing indie games. Most of the meetups are tech/work-related and even the non-tech meetups are flooded with male, glasses, 20-30 something engineers. It's almost like everywhere you go you can't escape the pressure of work.
Personally it almost seems like the whole interview process was made to continue the whole tradition of getting high SAT or GRE scores for college, this time swapping college with the FAANG companies. We basically took all the problems with a standardized test-based education system and moved it to jobs.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#50"Always Be Coding" -- people who spend their time on work/passion project/open source projects are somehow valued more than those who spend their time on work/non-technical pursuits.
It's truly awful that this is expected in tech.