Deadlines
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
— Douglas Adams
Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
91–97 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#92The interview process for developer/engineering roles.
It's not so much the process itself but the overall fact that your ability to get hired ultimately hinges on things that are trivial and shallow. In general I believe that skill and talent get rewarded, but everyone has a story about a job they landed out of sheer luck - they knew some obscure tool or framework that forced a hiring decision in their favor. Very few hiring managers are genuinely talented at spotting talent. Most rely on some level of cargo-cult knowledge, tribal shibboleths, and technical hazing rituals. Or they just hire lazily and optimistically, and then you have to work with those people because now you're one of them.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#93building mvp by working hard then getting replace because you can't put 5 to 8 hard each day.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#94Your business model is probably not going to be providing something useful to an end user. The tool will be a pretext so you get incidental access to data your surveillance system will exfiltrate.
--
The term "Tech" is malleable to mean both a business vertical, or the software-related division within any a company in any business domain. Expect strategic equivocation between the two.
Any bad action or decision from the non-technical people in a "tech" company is suddenly the fault of the nerds, they'll feel the heat and are expected to fix it (even if the problem is by definition not their problem to fix). Credit flows in the opposite direction, regardless of where it belongs.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#95There are limited truly impactful things to work on at any place. In places under the limelight, they would always be taken over by more experienced and smarter people (very few), most of the other work on tech around that which is important but not truly impactful.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#96I never feel good enough. Ever. Part of that is my personality - I'm very hard on myself. But especially on HN (for better or worse) it seems like everyday I see someone who is making more money or building a better business or someone who just is an amazing programmer and I still have so much to learn. It can be a positive motivator for continuous improvement but at the same time it can be overwhelming to feel like…
I agree with this sentiment--I mainly read HN/SSC and find the depth of knowledge extremely humbling. You really have to try hard to look at your status as absolute (or "compare yourself to yourself a week ago"), especially because it looks like we are wired to see relative status as more important (i.e. happiness derived from comparison to "peers").
It is a roller coaster of "I think I'm pretty good at this" to "jesus--I understand 10% of what these HN comments are talking about." It helps if I think about the alternative universe where I tried to do something with my political science minor. That usually does the trick. :-)
Re: Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 f…
Yep, this is why I'm much more inclined to go with something I know on the front end. I'm not against learning a new framework, but fighting the tooling is one of the more frustrating things.