Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

> I'm tired. I'm tired of the artificial deadlines

I think the ephemeral nature of software really plays poorly with the artificial deadlines, and the artificial importance of some projects in general.

Eventually you recognize the pattern, and there's no logical way to justify it, so it's harder to motivate yourself. You know the deadline isn't real, and you know the software will be rewritten next year with some new technology. You may even be rewriting last years right now.

Tooling churn hurts here as well, because eventually after enough iterations, new tools are just in the way of getting real work done. You know it's not gaining you anything by putting in the effort to learn Toolchain X, because arbitrarily different Toolchain Y is about to become the new industry fad, and will make all that prior arbitrary knowledge pointless.

Some of my favourite years in software were when I worked at an eCommerce agency that served only one framework. Learning I invested directly impacted my work for the coming years. I began to master the tools, which feels amazing. I could also see the real world effect the software had. Sure, it was simple, selling products to people. But commerce is an interesting problem space, and a fundamental part of society, so it was neat to be a part of it and see real companies I worked with grow because of my software.

I wish I could leave.

The tech industry nowadays is no longer about solving real-world problems and making the world a better place, instead it's all about screwing the end user in every single way possible, whether it's ads, stalking and privacy violations, spam ("marketing" as they call it) or just plain fraud where the company is happy to take the money but can't make it right if things don't go to plan and the customer is left holding the bag.

Most tech products nowadays aren't there to solve a real problem and aren't funded by customers buying them because they are good; instead they're funded by some VC scum and they're there to capture the market (or rent-seek) and prevent a legitimate business from starting (nobody can compete with free or below cost).

Technology-wise, we no longer use engineering as a means to an end to solve a business problem. Instead, engineering became its own thing and most companies encourage and reward those who opt for over-engineered solutions, which means you spend more time fighting with dozens of layers of abstractions and chasing the latest JS framework instead of actually delivering functionality. This is mostly a symptom of the previous point where showing "growth" and bragging about your (over) engineering is more important than actual profit.

Unfortunately there's just nothing out there that pays as well so I have no choice but to tough it out.

My employer has no finance department, just an accounting department. The staff in the accounting department have their quirks at time, but in general are very easy to deal with, and grateful for help.

What did you end up switching to?

Never enjoyed it. I knew from the second day of my first tech job that it wasn't what I wanted to be doing, but I blamed the job itself rather than the industry. Moved on after a year and tried other tech jobs (different size companies, different types of software), but they were all essentially the same.

I like building things for people to use, but as a programmer found myself very isolated from users (even at small companies). It felt like I was doing the hard work of building a product but then someone else got to do the fun part of showing it off, while my reward was just... more programming.

Also, I found the job extremely boring at times, extremely difficult at others. I decided that the stress wasn't worth it, especially when my work was having a limited impact.

Finally, I'm not in the USA so tech jobs had no "golden handcuffs". Many other jobs were available that paid as well as a Software Engineer.

I still work on personal programming projects, where I can be much more involved in the whole product and not just the code. I can also choose to only work on things that I really care about and/or that I feel can make a real difference.