Academia is just so much more relaxed for the employee. Especially in Europe.
Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
271–280 of 496 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#272I 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…
You've done well to stick with these things, and I do agree with your point, but I think almost any company can fall afoul of these practices...
- Optometry practice management software... targeted at maximising in-store sales with prescriptions that are difficult to use elsewhere, encouraging dark-patterns in sales tactics, etc.
- Insurance benefits processing and customer service systems... that attempts to minimise payouts, potentially by adding burden on the customer through the customer service process.
- Professional soccer/football training iPad apps... arguably sports doesn't bring as much benefit to the economy as equivalent spending elsewhere.
- phone/pbx, Audio and video communcations, tie in with the web... for premium rate phone lines that users with little choice are forced to use, such as those installed in prisons in the US.
- mapping systems to evaluate water scarcity and agriculture water use... for Monsanto.
- government benefits systems... that optimises to minimise payouts or contains unnecessary checks and hurdles.
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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been a few years since I left the industry, and I'd be surprised if any of the code I wrote professionally hasn't been superseded by now.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.
I can tell you that working with legacy turd (that will probably run for another decade or more) isn't necessarily much better. 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 wh…
I prefer working with legacy turds over steaming hot new shit, but I have a hard time finding companies who will pay me for that work. Everybody wants the steaming hot new stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#274I 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…
> This won't happen, I know.
Ah, don't be so negative. I'm gonna do it or die trying.
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If the bar is "I don't want any code I write to be used for purposes which I do not personally endorse" then yes, it's probably a good idea to go work for a mission-driven non-profit and never make open source contributions to anything ever again
Or just work in a company that is ethical and provides something useful. I'm just saying working for B2B SaaS is not necessarily covering that base.
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#276I 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…
SRE/ops especially feels like a huge job security grift.
Every cloud provider is wrapped in HTTP REST APIs but the cloud era version of a UNIX neckbeard has a DSL or CLI tool to peddle.
Sorry, gang. Doing just fine with a monorepo of JS, Python, and Go packages that wrap the APIs for a variety of providers. New infra is just a new language dependency file away, and I don’t have to learn your semantic wank.
So glad you had a job at FAANG, but outside ITs reality distortion field, we’re plenty productive and you’re just another human.
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#277Open offices and the extreme micromanagement known as "agile".
Both are so toxic to mental health that I had to move away.
I haven't really left the industry itself but I've moved away from a pure engineering role (which is my true passion) to a more specialized role which is ok but not as enjoyable. But, I don't have to deal with open offices nor agile, so it's a win.
The other aspect that makes me sad is that what we call tech companies today, aren't. Their product isn't tech. Netflix is an entertainment company. Google and FB are advertising companies. And so on. Very few actual tech companies in SV today.
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
US or Europe? If Europe, would any of them hire a filthy American? ;)
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#279I 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…
> 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.
This is why I quit being a software engineer as well (I didn't leave the tech industry altogether tho, just switched career trajectories a bit).
I spent years trying to talk some sense into the people pushing that and trying to explain (it's as much art as science) but in the end the Scrum people won. So, I moved over to devops and consulting where most of the time I'm helping people with stuff, and the long death-march sprints to satisfy an arbitrarily deadline that nobody cared about until it got put on paper two weeks ago, and still doesn't matter except it will turn some spreadsheet field red that draws the Eye of Sauron from higher ups, are mostly over now. I get my coding fix by working on open source projects, and it's way more fulfilling.
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#280I 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 think creative nerds are the life-blood of the industry, but they tend to be shy and not assertive, so they have their life controlled by the "business types". 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.
I recently saw a video about Boeing that concluded that the whole debacle was due to it straying aware from its commitment to good engineering and to trying to please the wall street. It traced back to the source of decline as the purchase of McDonnell Douglas which was mainly done due to Boeing management feeling that they needed better "business types", which was all that McDonnell Douglas.
Slowly, but I am seeing an acceptance and respect towards the nerds/engineering instead of hype men & impressive stock figures. Wall street types are seen as the hyenas/fox in a sheep's skin that need not be celebrated and looked upto.