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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?

#221

Post by ves »

ativzzz wrote: post #198
apohn wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is a philosophical argument, but lots of those industries indirectly screw their customers. Optometrists who sell frames generally sell brands from companies like Luxottica who have made eyewear really expensive. The entire insurance industry is one of the major reasons healthcare is expensive and ruins the experience people have with patient care. All of this various from country to country of course. I coul…

By this logic, every company screws over everyone and business is bad overall.

That’s an unfair conclusion. Those examples were pretty specific and I, at least, see no reason to generalize (except maybe the insurance one), except perhaps along the lines of “serving exploitative monopolies is bad”

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

#222

Post by karatestomp »

naringas wrote: post #215
ratww wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

at the other extreme, everybody does whatever the day requires and JIRA is just an annoying after thought that for some reason (the agile coach tells us to?) we have to keep up to date and yet is always outdated.

It's my opinion that coordinate-work-among-the-team and communicate-work-to-management should not be functions performed by or in the same tool, and that most of the team should never need to touch the latter tool.

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

#223

Post by indigochill »

Zelphyr wrote: post #173
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.

There's a scene early in "Halt and Catch Fire" (IMO the best tech-focused fiction show, basically a Mad Men take on the early breakthroughs in computing from personal computers through to the internet) where Joe the salesman tells Gordon the engineer, "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing."

That's been my motto since I heard it there.

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

#224

Post by nradov »

austincheney wrote: post #191
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…

In most all the systems I have worked on its more about screwing the user from a technical perspective than a deliberate business action, though there have been some of those too. Either way it all comes down to some combination of mental laziness and no ethics. There is no ethical code, that I am aware of, for writing software. Here are my experiences as a web developer: * Frustration at the general technical incomp…

IEEE Code of Ethics: https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html

ACM Code of Ethics: https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

There are incompetent people in every industry. So what.

Hiring is an arcane mystery in every industry where productivity can't be quantified. So what.

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

#226

Post by volkk »

chuck3201 wrote: post #201
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 thin…

+1 for this. The "business" folk might be filling your day to day with features that only improve conversion rates which is soul draining, of course, but nothing feels worse than working on something interesting surrounded by these wannabe wozniak "nerds" that instill this unspoken aura of "youre too dumb to be in the room with me." THOSE are the people that i hate the most in this industry.

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

#227

Post by JamesBarney »

s1k3s wrote: post #140
JamesBarney wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the things that you think other devs would label over engineering but was instrumental in your project not becoming an unmaintainable mess?

An example I often see is database normalization. Why use 5NF when we can simply do with 3NF? Fast forward this a few months later and you end up doing pattern matching on blocks of text instead of querying indexed columns.

Ahh, it's far more uncommon for me to feel like a database is over engineered. It's much more common to find a codebase has 7 levels of indirection but the database fails to accurately and completely represent their business domain.

When I do feel a database is over engineered it is almost exclusively adding complexities to the database to handle a contrived or rare examples. With the most common being "splitting one table into 2 because a one to one relationship is actually a one to many once every 5 years", or "adding a join table because in Joe's 30 year career there was that one time multiple companies jointly sold us a single product"

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

#228

Post by rvz »

mongol wrote: post #193

What is "tech industry" really? Companies selling tech? Or using tech?

Very good question. Most companies that started out from being supermarkets, fashion or restaurants who then have an app on the App Store and use tech made from FAAMNG companies now call themselves "tech companies" which they clearly are just are using them; thus are "tech-enabled".

Companies involved with both creating, producing or contributing to actual "technology" like CPU design, OSes, SDKs, compilers and toolchains which most of the FAAMNG and semiconductor companies do fit the definition of a "tech company".

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

#229

Post by dvtrn »

ScottFree wrote: post #194
asdfman123 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, people worry about age discrimination a lot because there aren't a ton of older programmers around. But when the discussion comes up, people don't talk much about the reasons you describe. Sure, bad programmers age out because they were never great at programming in the first place. But I would assume the HN crowd falls in the top half of competence because there are so many people here who seem smarter abo…

> But when the discussion comes up, people don't talk much about the reasons you describe. Which people you're talking about? The survivors who are still working in the field? Or those who had heart attacks at their desks at 50?

Dead programmers don’t commit code much less talk, now do they?

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

#230

Post by notacoward »

asiachick wrote: post #216
notacoward wrote: post #28

I haven't left myself yet, but at almost-55 I know a fair number who have. Here's what I know of what their answers would be. The first simply had another passion - travel. Work was just a way to pay for that. Eventually went to work for an agency, been there a long time and AFAICT couldn't be happier (despite being less well off materially). I've known a couple of others who fit this pattern. One left the industry t…

> The first simply had another passion - travel. I thought engineering enabled travel. I met countless "digital nomads" traveling the world, doing 20 hours of work a week at cafes. Making bank and getting to travel all they want.

In this particular case, it was adventure travel - savannahs in Africa, mountains in South America, icebergs in Antarctica. It was also 25 years ago. The "digital nomad" thing wasn't an option for this person.
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