Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry? • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by jjav » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

ScottFree wrote: post #294

jjav wrote: post #277

Open 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…

May I ask what the specialized role is? Management? Sales Engineer? Business analyst? Data science?

I did independent consulting for a while and currently back with a larger company in a roving architect/advisor role so it is similar to consulting. It is nice in that I get to work with all the engineering teams but I greatly miss owning a product and doing hands-on development.

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

#312

Post by bernus » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

After I sold my company to FAANG, I moved back to my hometown and bought a house. Don't plan on ever going back.

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

#313

Post by lappet » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

elroyjetson wrote: post #43

I left after over 25 years. I love programming and love working with Linux, but the jobs always came down to "help us steal peoples personal information so we can slam them with spam for products the neither want or need." It was unfulfilling. I went back to school and got an MA in history. I teach humanities though I still teach a couple of programming classes. I miss it a little. I would go back in a heartbeat for…

wow, I plan to study history at some point. Is it possible to study part time, do you think?

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

#314

Post by bob90 » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

7 years in the industry here. Did not quit get but looking for a way out. My experience in the industry (France) is that I never met a company that seemed to know what they were doing. I feel like there is this whole industry of mediocre skills building software badly again and again and again. Same mistakes same "great ideas", same maturity as High schoolers. I mean I've worked with aircraft engineer, the difference in maturity and skill is astounding.

Well my case is biased of course by my limites experience but that experience really bums me out.

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

#315

Post by david_w » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

apohn wrote: post #181

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…

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…

Luxottica is an unusual case. Most monopolies aren't that durable and Luxottica has challengers now. Also, the law in the US which says you can't buy glasses unless you have had an eye-exam in the past year is an anomaly amongst nations.

The functionality delivered by products is not screwing people unless you're talking about surveillence capitalism ala Google et.al. Capitalism and the pricing of goods is how we incentivize people to bring things to market and more importantly how we allocate resources. No one, anywhere, through any scheme has ever replaced the market for performing these functions and thereby driving civilization and invention forwards.

People keep believing they can (socialism/Venezuela), or give up on the project entirely after decades of trying (communism/ China / Russia). Maybe one day someone out there qwill have a genuinely new idea which works. Until then you have a right to feel good about contributing, in whatver little customer support / feature adder / managerial capacity you do, to the forward progress of society generally and the amazing, rocket-like increase in wealth absolutely everyone on this earth is experiencing relative to the past 30,000 years.

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

#316

Post by ratkinson » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

checkyoursudo wrote: post #60

I started out in technical writing a little more than 20 years ago with a masters degree, which turned into building websites. I built websites for a few years, when I became involved in a lawsuit with family/community/environmental org in a really novel and interesting area of law at the time. I thought that was quite enjoyable. So I decided to go to law school and become a lawyer, which I did. Then I was a lawyer f…

I love your mentality checkyoursudo. I started in civil/environmental engineering before getting into software development. For the past 5 years though I have been thinking about cognitive science in my free time and all of my idols are psychologists and neuroscientists. Might I ask where are you pursuing a masters in cog sci? This is exactly what I have wanted to do but the schools offering these programs are few from what I have seen. I'm in central florida currently.

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

#317

Post by danpalmer » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

ruffrey wrote: post #305

danpalmer wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 minimis…

These are great points. I'm reminded of a comedy TV show, The Good Place, where it turns out nobody has gone to "heaven - the good place" for a long time because there are too many unintended consequences of a person's actions. Buy an organic bamboo T-shirt? The company dumped waste into river. Vegan? You produced a bunch of single plastic plastic packaging. It highlight the need to be diligent in daily decisions day…

Nice one. Just think about the user/consumer in any of these things. Does the thing I'm building help them, or only help the company I'm working for?

Be pragmatic. If the company provides a good service but doesn't survive, then that good service no longer exists! Some amount of optimisation for sales is likely necessary, but I think there's a line where things turn user-hostile, even in subtle ways.

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

#318

Post by tmpz22 » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

proverbialbunny wrote: post #297

asdfman123 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to Stanford undergrad and honestly, the Bay Area tech scene (and Seattle from what I've noticed) looks unappealing to me. The culture is a turn off. I'd much rather have a 40 hour a week job somewhere else, where everyone understands it's a job and you can be your own person at home. It's hard to articulate, and I could write much more about it, but it's almost like the identity you have to don to fit in there…

There is a lot of things that could be said here: 1) I switched from being a software engineer to a data scientist in 2010, in part because of the culture. I totally get not enjoying the culture, though I do recognize how much it varies from person to person and company to company, so I try not to stereotype. But on some level, I get it. 2) We're opposites in some way. I've been writing code since I was 8 years old,…

> You're on ycombinator, the center of Bay Area tech culture

Citation needed. I think YC users think they are the center of tech (or the universe?).

What would be that actual proof that it was? Do we know how many users HN has? What % of VC actually spend time here? What % of meaningful founders actually spend time here? Ya the CEO of github will drop a post on a major thread concerning his company, but so what?

Honestly the more time I spend here the more I see two notable demographics: cynics trying to feel superior (like myself), and people trying to justify their own salary and lifestyles via a fat FANNG paycheck.

P.S. and college students / recent grads who know everything.

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

#319

Post by newhotelowner » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

Worked as a Frontend engineer. Now a hotel owner.

Few reasons why I left:

- Wanted to try something different.

- Incompetent management (Biggest reason), and politics at the workplaces.

- I am not good at expressing my self. Not good at kissing asses. Political correctness and all the stuff/

- Getting old (40)

- Single earner in the bay area with family. I couldn't afford a house in the area that I was living in. I didn't want to drive far for a job. I had the money for a downpayment, but paying $4000-6000 in a mortgage + taxes seems scary. I end up buying a rental property.

- The majority of the family is in the east coast.

So far, no regrets. I am not sure how this COVID-19 will affect the future.

I love writing frontend code (don't like react or other frameworks). Whenever I am bored/feeling down, I write code. I write my own utilities that I needed to get stuff done for my business. I was using JS for theming in one of my 5 years old PWA. Yesterday, I updated to CSS variables.

After all, technology is the future. Not sure any better place then hacker news.

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

#320

Post by apohn » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 6:26 PM UTC

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.

If you take what I said to the logical extreme then sure.

What I was trying to say was that it's very black and white thinking to say something like ads = exploiting users and healthcare = not exploiting users.

Since Facebook usually comes up when people talk about unethical companies, let me use them as an example. Let's say there is a team that improves ad targeting by 5%, helping to reduce the number of irrelevant ads people see. Let's say there's another team that reduces data center electricity's utilization by 5%, which helps the environment.

Is the ad team more or less ethical than the data center team if they are basically both supporting the same end goal?

I don't work for Facebook if that matters. And I have no answers to any of the questions I posed above outside of my personal preference to not work in online advertising unless I need to do it to survive.