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

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

#51

Post by danenania »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #33
bargl wrote: post #17

There 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…

Are you a veteran who has experienced this? Because this sounds completely wrong to me. An experienced developer typically has no problem picking up new languages/frameworks/tools/etc. There isn't much value in familiarising oneself with arbitrary and invented things, of which there are many in our industry, and they are ephemeral. No, the real value is in knowing and understanding the discovered things. And since th…

I think a lot of the frustration comes not from the new languages/frameworks themselves, but all the endlessly re-invented support tools that surround them.

For example, learning React itself is great because you can pretty quickly see how it cleans up your UI layer. It doesn't take that long and adds real value to your projects.

Oh, but now you need to learn all the corner-cases of NPM, and now you need a new test framework, and now you need to figure out the incantations to get webpack x.y.z outputting just the right way. Oops now hot-reloading is broken. And the chrome inspector is lagging for some reason.

None of these are interesting or fun problems to solve, but they are a pretty substantial part of getting any new technology into production.

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

#52

Post by dijit »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #34
nugget wrote: post #11

Being on call and in a constant state of readiness to troubleshoot problems is tiresome. Even if problems rarely occur, the constant awareness of potential responsibility can quickly lead to burn out. The medical field has known this for a long time, and as a result, physicians get paid a lot of money to take extra call coverage. This is a very neglected topic of discussion within software development.

Former ops engineer here. Get out of ops. In the current climate, it is rare you'll find a role that compensates you for being on call frequently and the toll it takes on you.

This a thousand times. Ops is undervalued and expected to deliver a lot in today’s workforce. You get better respect and compensation for SWE. I wouldn’t reccomend this career unless you’re unable to do software engineering.

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

#53

Post by tsumnia »

A lot of issues have already been discussed, but one I haven't seen is the constant reminder that people and the Internet are terrible. Ignoring people that censor beheadings on YouTube and the Dark Web, I am very vividly aware of things Goatse, Blue Waffle, 1 Guy 1 Jar, Ogrish, early 4chan's \b\ and those mental images are very much burned into my brain.

Maybe its not every aspect in the tech industry or maybe its changing with the next generation or maybe I just got into tech at a very impressionable age, but I'm sure I'm not the only one that was exposed to that stuff early on.

I think that's a dark side. There's some generally fucked up shit out there and someone has to be aware of it to keep it far, far away.

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

#55

Post by jerf »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #33
bargl wrote: post #17

There 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…

Are you a veteran who has experienced this? Because this sounds completely wrong to me. An experienced developer typically has no problem picking up new languages/frameworks/tools/etc. There isn't much value in familiarising oneself with arbitrary and invented things, of which there are many in our industry, and they are ephemeral. No, the real value is in knowing and understanding the discovered things. And since th…

I'm an experienced developer and I have no trouble learning things. If anything I'm faster than an inexperienced developer because where they're learning a new concept (e.g., "closures") I'm just learning the local spelling of it and flavor.

However, I do get pissy when I have to keep learning things, and never get to exploit them, always having to learn a new thing for every single project. Having started in the web arena since before "backend" and "frontend" were even necessarily separated, I've long since abandoned the frontend. More recently, I've personally been frustrated by the local conditions that have made it so that every system I deploy has required me to learn a new configuration management system. It's not so much an "oh, I'm too tired and old to learn this" but more of a professional eyeroll, "oh, geez, gotta learn some other ephemeral technology to do this job, then gotta learn some other technology that is almost all the same but for the spelling for the next project, etc."

But web frontend development really takes the cake, at least in the domains I'm familiar with.

I don't mind learning, I even enjoy it. But if you spend all your time learning and never get to exploit, you're operating at a greatly reduced efficiency. At some point you need to stop learning and actually advance some projects.

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

#56

Post by monktastic1 »

I find the nearly infinite (and seemingly exponentially increasing) number of ways things can go wrong, and the frequently arcane knowledge required to fix them, incredibly mentally taxing. That's not what I want to fill up my mind with.

If this were all in the service of healing the world in some way, it might be worth it. But work is feeling increasingly disconnected from genuine human problems.

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

#59

Post by [deleted] »

also_jaded wrote: post #37

- any interesting/impactful work is immediately crowded by tons of other people willing to sacrifice more than you to own it. They usually win. - the prevalent engineering management culture is a form of psychological manipulation to turn engineers into cogs and make you feel like you are always behind and stressed. It emphasizes weekly bandaid fixes to long running problems. - you have to work hard to be promoted, p…

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by [deleted] »

also_jaded wrote: post #37

- any interesting/impactful work is immediately crowded by tons of other people willing to sacrifice more than you to own it. They usually win. - the prevalent engineering management culture is a form of psychological manipulation to turn engineers into cogs and make you feel like you are always behind and stressed. It emphasizes weekly bandaid fixes to long running problems. - you have to work hard to be promoted, p…

[deleted]
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