Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 496 posts

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

#171

Post by ratww »

karatestomp wrote: post #111
hackyhacky wrote: post #78

As a kid, I aspired to be a programmer. As an adult, I succeeded, and I stuck around for a good long while. There are a lot of reasons to like working tech, obviously: the salary, the flexible working environment, the prestige, the opportunity to build products that real people use, the chance to play with new technology, and of course working with occasionally brilliant colleagues. I tried to convince myself that th…

> I was spending more time wrestling with package managers, version conflicts, obtuse configuration files, pointless deadlines, egotistical colleagues, and almost zero time solving interesting problems on products that I care about. That squares with my experience of software development. It's like being a furniture maker but spending 80% of your time fixing your goddamn hammer because it keeps breaking and no better…

And when you're doing woodworking and has to do some repetitive task you make a jig or a template for your router.

This is something that you're supposed to know on the first day after you finish apprenticeship.

In the modern tech industry you need authorization from your product owner/manager and engineering manager just to build a new tool or abstraction to automate or speed up your own job, because god forbid you do anything that's not in JIRA.

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

#172

Post by jwr »

_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.

If I were to start again, I would look outside of my tech bubble. Go see a local workshop, baker, restaurant. Look into niche industries. There are plenty of inefficiencies and unsolved problems there. I think the best ones are where you deal with physical things (e.g. not just advertising or getting customers).

There are plenty of unsolved problems.

An alternative is to look for a problem that has been "solved", but not in a certain niche. For example, inventory control and tracking production seems to be a "solved" problem, but it turned out it wasn't a "solved" problem for small/medium-scale electronics manufacturing, which is the niche I'm in.

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

#173

Post by Zelphyr »

hackyhacky wrote: post #78

As a kid, I aspired to be a programmer. As an adult, I succeeded, and I stuck around for a good long while. There are a lot of reasons to like working tech, obviously: the salary, the flexible working environment, the prestige, the opportunity to build products that real people use, the chance to play with new technology, and of course working with occasionally brilliant colleagues. I tried to convince myself that th…

> Fundamentally, the problems I'm solving are not technology problems, but human problems.

This is what we’ve lost in our industry in the last 25 years, and to the worlds detriment.

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

#174

Post by __s »

Nextgrid wrote: post #168
ruffrey wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You apply. Talent is always wanting

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

#175

Post by asdfman123 »

yahyaheee wrote: post #82
hackyhacky wrote: post #78

As a kid, I aspired to be a programmer. As an adult, I succeeded, and I stuck around for a good long while. There are a lot of reasons to like working tech, obviously: the salary, the flexible working environment, the prestige, the opportunity to build products that real people use, the chance to play with new technology, and of course working with occasionally brilliant colleagues. I tried to convince myself that th…

This sounds a lot like toxic work culture, but unfortunately there’s a lot of that in tech

To me, it sounds like their problem is they aren't introverted enough for the job (which is totally fine, but just an observation).

All jobs will have x% of nonsense and y% of what you actually really enjoy doing, and I think as long as y >= 10% then you'll do okay.

Honestly, I like sitting by myself and grappling with tech problems. It's nice that I'm allowed to sit inside my own head and think all day. Maybe it's because I'm young enough that the problems I'm facing still seem somewhat novel. But perhaps it's true that OP is more extroverted and doesn't enjoy that nearly as much.

Good on them for finding a better career fit. If I had to interact with people all day, I would die.

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

#176

Post by rustyboy »

TheCapn wrote: post #131
rustyboy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone with a MS CS what would you recommend for transitioning to such a field?

Likely just find a system integrator in your area and apply. The guy who got me my job was a MS CS, my employer sought him out because they needed a guy for internal software projects. I did a hackathon with him and he hired me as his replacement when he moved to the gaming industry. My degree is Software Systems Engineering, most of my coworkers are Electrical Engineers or some form of Electrical Diploma. As long as…

Can you explain what to expect from a "system integrator" company or job? I did a quick google for those in my areas and they seem all over the place, not one mentions "PLC/SCADA"?

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

#177

Post by rustyboy »

explange wrote: post #113
rustyboy wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what your job title is? This sounds like an area i'd be interested in but having only experience with tech i'm not sure of any tips or tricks to finding these hybrid jobs.

My title is just 'researcher' - it's not a well-defined industry so titles are not standardised. Here's where I work in case you're interested: https://www.science-practice.com/teams/good-problems/ My route in was pretty idiosyncratic, and I think that's true of many people in these kinds of jobs. A more standard way to transition into this kind of research/consulting/policy work from tech might be go for jobs in tec…

Unfortunately i'm in the USA, but thank you that gets me started!

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

#178

Post by asdfman123 »

non-entity wrote: post #89
TheCapn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Find your way into Industrial Electrical work if you can. You get a strong mix of tech and electrical, moreso than Residential, can't really say the comparison to Commercial work though... My company (Automation & controls) is partnered with electricians for all the jobs we bid on. Having electricians that know wiring for specialized bus networks, how to do basic troubleshooting on control circuits and all that is am…

I recently became kinda intrigued by PLCs and even consider buying one just to play with it (idk maybe it's the novelty of it) and the various programming languages for them and how they can be so different. What kind of education do you need to work on this kind of stuff?

Could you get started with Arduino? (Disclaimer: I don't know a lot about what PLCs actually do -- maybe that's too basic for you.)

Right now I'm trying to hack my treadmill with an Arduino unit so I can control it with software, and I'm learning a ton. Plus it's not a huge investment.

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

#179

Post by non-entity »

clarry wrote: post #106

I left before I got into it. It seemed like the whole field went to web & mobile & saas, none of which I care for. And interesting things like OS research got largely killed by excessively complex hardware & software stacks and bloat that must be supported or nobody will look at the thing. Freedom got attacked (saas, centeralization, nat and other efforts to kill p2p, drm, browser & web apps to enslave you instead of…

> None of the job ads I saw had had anything in them that resonated with me.

I occasionally see ones that resonate with me, but either require an education I can't afford to obtain, or want over a decade of experience working in similar roles.

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

#180

Post by jwr »

Nextgrid wrote: post #125
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.

Making its money with ads doesn't mean anything anymore. There are plenty of companies that have paid products and still do user-hostile things including stalking, spam, dark patterns, etc. I paid full price for a Playstation 4. I still had to opt out of "enhanced data collection" and spend 15 minutes disabling every option on their bullshit attempt at a social network. Even the games themselves had their own telemet…

> There are plenty of companies that have paid products and still do user-hostile things including stalking, spam, dark patterns, etc.

This is a good point and I'm glad we're finally seeing some pushback. I would have a problem working for a company that does unethical things and I was surprised that so many people don't care. And before you tell me that people don't have a choice — perhaps some don't, but that certainly doesn't apply to all the crowd that moves to Silicon Valley to work for Google.

Post reply on HN