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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?

#201

Post by chuck3201 »

normalnorm wrote: post #49

I love computers since I can remember, and started learning to code when I was still in basic school. This lead me to think that the tech industry was the obvious career for me. During my time in the industry, I felt miserable. I would say that the main reasons for that were: * Meaninglessness. Most of the projects are simply not necessary, they do not help society in anyway, they just exist to make someone else weal…

> I honestly believe that if the nerds told them to fuck off and started spending their time working on things they think are relevant, the world would become much better quickly. This won't happen, I know.

Most of the "creative nerds" I have encountered in this industry are arrogant, have grandiose beliefs about their own intelligence and have zero empathy for anybody who is not exactly like them. I don't think things would be much better if they ran the show.

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

#202

Post by kimi »

_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.

Find a problem that is un-sexy enough and work on it. Success is 99% persistence.

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

#203

Post by wackget »

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…

>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.

And yet, some kind of new and improved framework gets upvoted to the top of this website every week.

Seriously though, it truly disgusts and depresses me to browse Github and see projects which could have been accomplished with (literally) a single file being split into 10, 15, 20+ files, all wrapped up in some god-awful package managers.

No, developers; your JavaScript snippet does NOT need to be accompanied by two dozen .grunt, .yaml, .composer, .gulp, .jenkins, or .fellatio files.

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

#204

Post by Nextgrid »

wackget wrote: post #203
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…

>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 pre…

I half-jokingly suggest that we need package managers for Javascript package managers to abstract them away too.

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

#205

Post by hobs »

Nextgrid wrote: post #129
hobs wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A friend of mine works at a B2B business. Every week they have a "lead forensics" meeting where they somehow figure out which companies visited their website and then spam them with unsolicited sales calls/emails.

Indeed, there are definite bad actors as I alluded to, but just... don't work there.

If your company starts to go the route of evil, you can find another job with people who are less morally bankrupt.

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

#206

Post by benhurmarcel »

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…

It's the same for all kinds of work outside of academia.

I studied aerospace engineering and day-to-day it's exceedingly rare to need any math beyond basic trigonometry. 80% of the time it's useless meetings, emails, paperwork; only sometimes it's actually useful or fun. Some people study business for years and end up splitting their days between sitting in meetings and updating Gantt charts.

That's just how work is.

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

#207

Post by naringas »

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…

> we no longer use engineering as a means to an end to solve a business problem. Instead, engineering became its own thing

I hadn't though about why we over-engineer things this way. But I agree

I might add, based on the over-engineered (and, in general, badly designed) software I have worked with, that it usually comes about because it's never possible to change any aspect of the underlying architecture with the purpose of simplifying things.

We wind up with over complicated 'solutions' because we are simply unable to go back to simplify anything ever for any reason. The 'stake-holders' just don't think it's priority.

So all that's left is keep stacking clever solutions on top of bad decisions such that every new clever solution makes it even harder to go back to simplify.

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

#208

Post by hackyhacky »

awelkie wrote: post #158
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'm a PhD drop-out, and I'm reticent to give it another shot. Is it easy to find teaching jobs at the university level without a PhD?

In my experience, in the job market right now in the US, universities are positively salivating at the chance to hire experienced tech people into teaching roles. This is because lots of students want to study CS, and not a lot of people want to teach it (being that qualified people usually either go into industry, or go into research).

The salary may not be great, if you have experience and good student evaluations, you are in a strong negotiating position.

Some caveats: getting a university teaching job is a lot easier than getting a university research/teaching job. Previous teaching experience is a big plus, as is previous industry experience. PhD is nice, but not required (I don't have one).

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

#210

Post by Nextgrid »

naringas wrote: post #207
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…

> we no longer use engineering as a means to an end to solve a business problem. Instead, engineering became its own thing I hadn't though about why we over-engineer things this way. But I agree I might add, based on the over-engineered (and, in general, badly designed) software I have worked with, that it usually comes about because it's never possible to change any aspect of the underlying architecture with the pur…

In my case the problem is less about changing things because the product became over-engineered after several years, and more about products starting out over-engineered because some idiot wants to put React and Kubernetes and "managing a large team" on his resume when the business problem at hand could be solved by a handful of PHP files sitting on a shared host (not saying you should go to such extremes, random PHP files and shared hosts are bad for other reasons).
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