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Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#161

Post by southphillyman »

Nextgrid wrote: post #64

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 cu…

This seems like an issue which is heavily skewed towards start ups and tech companies, which are ironically generally viewed as the most attractive companies for tech workers to work at.

The pay will be lower but there are opportunities out there where you can genuinely work towards helping people with technical solutions. Both the local research hospital and world class children hospital in my area always have data science openings and positions like that for instance

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#162

Post by Nextgrid »

hkmurakami wrote: post #147
Nextgrid wrote: post #64

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 cu…

I have no inside look and can only comment as a user, but isn’t a company like gusto providing a genuinely valuable service? As a small time startup operator I was happy to pay for their product.

Companies like that are relatively niche and usually already have all the talent they need. Not to mention, even if it looks good on the surface there could still be bad things hiding under the hood. A friend of mine works at a niche business selling network hardware, sounds innocent enough - and yet they are using creepy analytics to infer which companies visited their website and then spam them with sales calls.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#163

Post by ruffrey »

Nextgrid wrote: post #64

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 cu…

This describes a lot of software. No doubt. It's depressing and disturbing.

But not any of the systems I've worked on over 10 years. You may not get the absolute top salaries working on more meaningful projects, but there's plenty of them. Here are some examples that I worked on. To a fault, most of these places over-focused on the business and under-focused on exceptional engineering. Nonetheless, there's a lot of money to be made solving real business problems.

- Optometry practice management software

- Insurance benefits processing and customer service systems

- Professional soccer/football training iPad apps

- phone/pbx, Audio and video communcations, tie in with the web

- mapping systems to evaluate water scarcity and agriculture water use

- government benefits systems

Again, user Nextgrid isn't wrong. If you're willing to take say, up to 90% of the highest salaries available, rather than only the top 10% of salaries, there are huge amounts of non-advertisement problems to solve. Rightfully, this comment exposes the depressing cynicism which develops when building manipulative software.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#164

Post by jmstfv »

non-entity wrote: post #152
_davebennett wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you propose finding those real problems to solve? I know that every problem I encounter in my life (or work) has already been solved 100 times over.

Yeah in honestly shocked at how many niche problems. I encounter that have ready solutions. If I ever find a truly unsolved problem, in likely to assume that its just too hard to properly solve at the time.

> If I ever find a truly unsolved problem

Why do you think you need to find a truly unsolved problem? If all you want is a profitable, sustainable business, look at what companies are already paying for, and build a product that solves one of those problems. It doesn't have to be a carbon copy of an existing product. You can differentiate by price or combination of features. Or you can target a different niche. Competition is a signal that there's money to be made in the market.

It won't be easy, and you will have to learn sales & marketing. But it is doable. If there are X companies in the market, there's likely a place for another one (as long as this isn't a winner-takes-all type of market).

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#165

Post by ScottFree »

_davebennett wrote: post #146
jwr wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can relate to your point of view, which is why I don't work for "the tech industry", but instead have my own SaaS. This lets me stay close to tech (I love programming in Clojure and ClojureScript!), do what I enjoy, and not have my soul sucked out by evilness and stupidity of today's adtech world. I have a product which solves a real problem and I'm getting paid by customers who appreciate that their workflow is so…

How do you propose finding those real problems to solve? I know that every problem I encounter in my life (or work) has already been solved 100 times over.

So solve it for the 101st time, but better. Everything is broken and nothing works. So, build something that isn't broken and does work.

I just found out yesterday that AWS Amplify doesn't have a manual deploy button. It's only job is to build and deploy an app and there is nowhere on Amplify itself where you can press a button and kick off a build! Junk like this is everywhere now. It's a golden opportunity for people who know what they're doing.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#166

Post by asdfman123 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #133
BerislavLopac wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could always switch to a company that doesn't make its money with ads I always thought that I would be able to switch to any programming job I wanted, and that the only decision would be between making a lot and roughing it up (like the GP), or working for a better cause for less money (as you propose). But now I find it -- after 25 years of professional experience -- nearly impossible to find any job. Maybe it…

This is my observation as well, and it was even before the coronavirus. The majority of tech jobs in London are bullshit startups chasing after AI, blockchain or the latest JS framework. It's very rare that a real company hires (presumably because they have all the talent they need and don't need to hire for the sake of "growth") and when they do it's often a bad fit for my skills (Python/Django).

That strikes me as odd because I've found that nearly every company of a certain size has a programming team these days.

You might have to change tech stacks and rebrand yourself to appeal more to enterprisey jobs, but that's more of an issue of marketing than anything else. It will be a small transition, but once you do that you'll be fine.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#167

Post by scottishfiction »

godtoldmetodoit wrote: post #145
Nextgrid wrote: post #64

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 cu…

Get out of the VC backed world then. Plenty of stodgy old enterprises that make actual useful stuff need good IT talent, and they pay well enough. These environments come with their own set of issues, but I've never felt like I'm working for companies where I am scamming the end user. Just stop working for shit companies producing stupid shit, money isn't everything.

Even better, get out of the private sector (if you can). I'm very happy with what I'm contributing to the world at the BBC, and I'm paid 'well enough'.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#168

Post by Nextgrid »

ruffrey wrote: post #163
Nextgrid wrote: post #64

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 cu…

This describes a lot of software. No doubt. It's depressing and disturbing. But not any of the systems I've worked on over 10 years. You may not get the absolute top salaries working on more meaningful projects, but there's plenty of them. Here are some examples that I worked on. To a fault, most of these places over-focused on the business and under-focused on exceptional engineering. Nonetheless, there's a lot of m…

Curious, how do you get jobs/contracts around these examples? My understanding is that most of these industries already have the talent they need (or have a preferred supplier they work with).

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#169

Post by blendo »

Why did I leave? I retired after programming for over 40 years.

I started with Fortran while in the US Air Force (yay CDC 6600 and VAXen), got my CS degree, got out, worked in C/C++ and TCP/IP in the early '90s (yay SunOS), got married, moved to a big buy-side investment manager (meh Solaris), more C++, then Java. Lots of Sybase (yay JDBC).

7 years ago I quit after our big company was bought by a bigger company (yuck Perl).

Took 6 months off for a sabbatical (yay Rome. wow Bernini), then entered my "encore" career at a public safety agency. Introduced Python to that org, of which I am slightly proud. As always, plenty of RDBMS (Pro tip: don't run Oracle on (yuck) Windows Server 2008).

Regrets? Just that it's a shame programmers tend towards philistinism, and that office culture and beer culture overshadow any appreciation of history, philosophy, and the arts.

Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

#170

Post by asdfman123 »

hobs wrote: post #122
adrianN wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could always switch to a company that doesn't make its money with ads. For example I work for Snowflake and I don't feel like I'm building stuff to screw the end user at all. I just make our database better. I also worked for Siemens. There too I didn't try to screw any users, I just tried to make trains run cheaper, faster and more reliably.

I also think B2B is a much less predatory place - most of the businesses have real money, want a real thing to help them make more of it, and are engaged in the process of making that work. There's plenty of bad actors (like any biz) but most of the time when I ship features everyone is happy, and no one is taken advantage of.

I went to Stanford undergrad and honestly, the Bay Area tech scene (and Seattle from what I've noticed) looks unappealing to me. The culture is a turn off.

I'd much rather have a 40 hour a week job somewhere else, where everyone understands it's a job and you can be your own person at home. It's hard to articulate, and I could write much more about it, but it's almost like the identity you have to don to fit in there feels too all-consuming.

I don't want to pretend I'm changing the world instead of just installing a new social hierarchy run by the meritocratic elite. I don't want to pretend that programming is my only hobby -- I want to do other things than learn new Javascript frameworks at home. I like my nice 3 bedroom house which is just minutes from downtown and is less than 3x my annual income.

It's admittedly an outsider's perspective but the only reason I would go back is to save up money for a few years then go somewhere else.

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