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Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

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Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#241

Post by icedchai »

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #83
eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have experienced everything you cited. Especially the death threats. Even when we shut off a customer for non-payment we would sometimes get them at my one job. The negativity seems to be pervasive at companies where tech is viewed as a cost center. At those kind of companies, IT tries to be proactive at first, but being proactive usually costs money, so it's often ignored. And then a failure happens as a result of…

>As for IT being understaffed, I do think this problem could be improved if companies invested more in their employees (e.g. training). And maybe took more chances on peoples capability, instead of requiring 2-3 years of experience on a range of skills prior to hiring them. I disagree. There are people who graduate with a 3 year degree and they know absolutely nothing. I've interviewed 7 CCNAs with 3 year degrees in…

This is sad. I taught myself this when I was 18... over 20 years ago. Someone dropped a router in front of me and told me to get a T1 line up and running.

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#242

Post by LouisSayers »

coroxout wrote: post #215
shade wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've commented on this previously, but I think there's some aspects of the tech industry that really do lead to burnout, depression, and cynicism among the people who work in it - and this applies to both software dev and IT support. We spend so much time dealing with tools that tend to be extremely pedantic and detail-focused. We're constantly thinking about all of the stuff that's gone wrong with our applications p…

"We're constantly thinking about all of the stuff that's gone wrong with our applications previously, what new things could go wrong with them now" I really feel this. I'm supposed to be half coding and half support but the support has expanded to fill all my time and I don't write anything more than 30-line kludges that only I will see any more. That's partly just the nature of support always taking up all the time,…

You can try your best but bugs seem to me to be a necessary tradeof for “getting stuff out there”. Some are generally acceptable given that the applications we write these days generally aren’t for life threatening devices etc.

What I’d do in your situation is bring these issues up with the team and think of what if anything you can do to help reduce the amount of support tickets coming through.

I’d look at reoccurring support tasks and prioritise the proper fixing of these based on the frequency these tasks come up.

I’d raise specific bugs that have come about recently and ask if you as a team could have prevented these in any way. What lessons do these have for the future?

Maybe you can get a “story sign off” from the product owner once tasks are done you demonstrate that the feature works as expected.

Another thought is to write up more formal acceptance criteria with various scenarios in story cards “As a, I would like, so that”, “Given When Then” kinda stuff. Might need to google on that one.

Anyway, I think if you take the actions you can take and maybe reframe the way you think of bugs, you can rest a bit easier. Just remember it’s a team effort, and hopefully your team members can help pitch in to help solve these with you.

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#243

Post by sesteel »

hindsightbias wrote: post #102
sesteel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Detaching emotion from the outcome is key. I've heard it described as professional distance or professional objectivity and it is a key component of maturity. It is more prevalent in other industries, but tech has grown so fast that we have a serious mentoring problem. There isn't enough good mentors, people with decades of experience, to go around. I grew up in part of the industry where people had been working for…

> 3 decades ago IT used to be a comparatively stable environment if you were supporting servers or infrastructure. How do you mentor someone in environments where chasing the latest fad every year is the norm?

I guess that is what "leaders" and mentors are supposed to do; lead people around or away from problems. The fact that people feel like they are "chasing the latest fad every year" is in and of itself a problem. They obviously are missing out on the financial advantage stability provides and getting poor returns on their investments. A shop like that might be better off running on all junior staff. So, in my humble opinion, either the wrong people are in charge or employees are misplaced, which again, reinforces that the wrong people are in charge.

A piece of hilariously cynical advise I got from one of those people with decades of experience was, "If you can't change your workplace, then change your workplace." Which is to say, if you don't feel empowered to make changes, then you need to think about why you are there. Is your role simply to be a cog? Hopefully, you are still improving in some way, but if not, you can probably find a better use of your time.

Regarding your question (yikes). Things are very cyclical and problems tend to be recurrent in some form. Thus, things that are new tend to be like things that have existed and some old lessons still apply. Generally, I've tended to mentor on processes, expectations, and alternative techniques.

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#244

Post by rak00n »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #162
danans wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But why is my own intellectual curiosity more important than whether someone else gets to eat? It's not, but unless you are working on something that is directly impoverishing someone to this point, then the economic or social system that allows people to go hungry and without basics is more to blame than your particular role. People don't go hungry anymore due to lack of societal resources. It's due to either a la…

And get downvoted when asking how it's ethical to allow a small fraction of people to own unlimited wealth when 25% of Americans don't have clean tap water. :3

It's actually 63 million people, roughly 20%.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/08/14/63-million-am...

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#246

Post by kazinator »

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #83
eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have experienced everything you cited. Especially the death threats. Even when we shut off a customer for non-payment we would sometimes get them at my one job. The negativity seems to be pervasive at companies where tech is viewed as a cost center. At those kind of companies, IT tries to be proactive at first, but being proactive usually costs money, so it's often ignored. And then a failure happens as a result of…

>As for IT being understaffed, I do think this problem could be improved if companies invested more in their employees (e.g. training). And maybe took more chances on peoples capability, instead of requiring 2-3 years of experience on a range of skills prior to hiring them. I disagree. There are people who graduate with a 3 year degree and they know absolutely nothing. I've interviewed 7 CCNAs with 3 year degrees in…

This is obviously some command to run on a Cisco router. A CCNA certification is squarely about knowing networking from a Cisco equipment point of view. So this would be like some "Unix certified engineer" not knowing "ps" or "netstat", right?

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#247

Post by thwiv »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #162
danans wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But why is my own intellectual curiosity more important than whether someone else gets to eat? It's not, but unless you are working on something that is directly impoverishing someone to this point, then the economic or social system that allows people to go hungry and without basics is more to blame than your particular role. People don't go hungry anymore due to lack of societal resources. It's due to either a la…

And get downvoted when asking how it's ethical to allow a small fraction of people to own unlimited wealth when 25% of Americans don't have clean tap water. :3

Where did you get that statistic?

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#248

Post by tomxor »

> I started asking myself questions like — "Even if the projects I'm doing succeeded beyond my wildest expectations, how would it affect people?

If you only derive meaning from end results programming is probably not for you. It's a craft that requires you to enjoy the process as much if not more than the end result.

But if you want to get philosophical then the other thing about functional information, just like any technology is that you usually cannot predict the complete effect on society. If you create useful things that are at least not intentionally malicious or dangerous, then you will likely be doing a net good.

...The magnitude of this good can never accurately be predicted, however a decent heuristic is how _general_ it is - e.g if you are making something as contextually contrived as a shopping app to try and "help people keep track of what they need to buy", your net good is going to be pretty fucking low, and I know focusing on the smartphone app bubble tends to result in mindless crap like this - so if you were doing that, then fair enough I'd quit too... On the other hand - go make some contribution to a fundamentally new piece of code solving a _real_ problem and the possibilities are much greater.

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#249

Post by xyzzyz »

rak00n wrote: post #244
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And get downvoted when asking how it's ethical to allow a small fraction of people to own unlimited wealth when 25% of Americans don't have clean tap water. :3

It's actually 63 million people, roughly 20%. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/08/14/63-million-am...

As many as 63 million people — nearly a fifth of the United States — from rural central California to the boroughs of New York City, were exposed to potentially unsafe water more than once during the past decade, according to a News21 investigation of 680,000 water quality and monitoring violations from the Environmental Protection Agency.

I'd say that "exposed to potentially unsafe water more than once during the past decade" is pretty far from "20% of Americans don't have clean tap water". If anything, I'd rather say it's impressive that 80% of Americans haven't been exposed to potentially unsafe water more than once in a decade!

Re: Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist

#250

Post by ben509 »

zanny wrote: post #190
BucketSort wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was your reasoning that lead you to believe that the social/political problems of the world won't be fixed with technology? I personally have come to the opposite conclusion. I think we need systems to help us reason about and model various social and political issues. Many issues of today go unresolved because they are hidden by complexity. We need systems to help us navigate this complexity. I'm tired of seein…

We have seen demonstrable evidence for over twenty years now that if you build a way to more easily inform yourself on reality, facts, historical accuracy, etc that people would rather use that system to justify their own preconceptions and biases than seek out truth that might influence their beliefs. Technology can only supplement a mindset where people are agreeable to solving problems in the first place. Most soc…

>We have seen demonstrable evidence for over twenty years now that if you build a way to more easily inform yourself on reality, facts, historical accuracy, etc that people would rather use that system to justify their own preconceptions and biases than seek out truth that might influence their beliefs.

I'm fairly certain the problem is the systems are written to reward those behaviors. It's technically not hard to solve that, but modern social media companies have this baked into their business model.

(Yes, I have a scheme in mind that solves it, sorry not sharing :-)

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