Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”
Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
251–260 of 496 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#252I 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…
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…
When it gets downright tiresome is when being the project janitor puts me in conflict with young "tech leads" who denigrate those contributions because they've only ever worked on that one project where other people took care of those things for them. It's like the difference between living in a college dorm where everything's taken care of for you, vs. having a house and kids and bills of your own. Being a strict individual contributor with no cares beyond the one piece of code in front of me is just a fond memory.
Unfortunately, few companies will hire someone with 30+ years' experience just to write code, even for a salary appropriate to that role. Companies want to pay those lower salaries not only for direct work product but also for growth potential. The worst part is, I know they're not wrong. The only way to do the kind of work I really enjoy, and only that work, is as a hobby.
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two threads from replies here that are helpful: look at B2B SaaS or join enterprise IT . There are a lot of companies that are trying to modernize their tools and adopt agile ways of working, and if you're coming from a startup background you will bring a really valuable perspective and set of skills. I know Fortune 500 developers who are working on super cool DevOps enablers and internal libraries using modern tech.…
I worked for a good B2B SaaS, and while I was able to tell myself I'm not doing anything unethical or immoral, and while some of the customers were indeed very valuable (in terms of value to their customers) Fortune 500 companies - a large chunk of customers were adtech, dodgy mobile gaming, etc. So you're still just providing infrastructure for these guys and not really contributing anything useful to the world, you…
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#255Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#256I 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…
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#257Earlier 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…
I'm not sure I've worked directly with anyone recently who could pass a DOM test like that. Everything is React and and Axios and the browser (and HTTP, TCP, DNS, etc) is a mystery.
Edit: mystery isn't even the right word really, if you mention any of the other layers I've seen people get actually hostile.
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#258I left (mostly) when tech became a tool for greed and scummery. Was asked too many times to participate in completely legal yet morally abhorrent actions. Also saw that programmers were starting to be treated like factory workers where attendance and metrics like keystrokes per minute were more important than good well written and documented code. The final straw however was "move fast and break things". Basically pu…
The worst part is how this leads to more on-call and an increase in working off-hours.
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> the ephemeral nature of software [...] it's harder to motivate yourself It's been a few years since I left the industry, and I'd be surprised if any of the code I wrote professionally hasn't been superseded by now. Even worse, plenty of it was scrapped before it was even released. Of course, I knew this would be the case when I was writing it - that does indeed affect one's motivation.
Again the deadlines and lack of planning ahead bites. Look we just need this little feature now, it can't take long? And again, and again. You never get enough time to take a step back and re-evaluate design decisions (or, God forbid, plan ahead and do it right in the first place) and fix what wasn't done right. No, it's always this little feature that needs to be quickly hacked in, another branch, another special case, how it interacts with other past or future special cases is anyone's guess, and the code base that was already full of hastily hacked together barely-functional crap grows more and more poorly thought out crap. Tests? What tests? No tests, so if you dare go back and try quickly fix some poor design.. well, someone is eventually hopefully going to find out what you broke and give you a completely uninformative bug report. Updates? Well there's no ticket for that. And besides, something might break, because there are no tests. There's no ticket for tests.
Sometimes you might even wish that the whole thing would be discarded and done from scratch..
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#260I've made a few rules for myself regarding working in tech: 1. Do not work for a company where tech is not their primary product. If you are only a cost center, you will be treated like a second-class citizen. 2. Work for a smaller company. Your work is so much more impactful when you are not part of a mega-machine. 3. Work only remotely. The quality of life increase that comes with working remotely is massive, and I…
> 2. Work for a smaller company. Your work is so much more impactful when you are not part of a mega-machine. That depends. If you work for a small company working on a product few use, then what's the impact?