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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?

#331

Post by blub »

stagger87 wrote: post #327
Nextgrid wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making its money with ads doesn't mean anything anymore. There are plenty of companies that have paid products and still do user-hostile things including stalking, spam, dark patterns, etc. I paid full price for a Playstation 4. I still had to opt out of "enhanced data collection" and spend 15 minutes disabling every option on their bullshit attempt at a social network. Even the games themselves had their own telemet…

The examples of paid products you used to support your point are not very good. The PS4 console was sold at a loss and Spotify is barely profitable. In short, you might have paid for them, but neither company made money from you based purely on those purchases. Both companies perform data collection to guess what, generate more ad revenue (through lots of channels).

Sony isn't having money trouble, they're huge. That's a sorry excuse.

And Spotify doesn't make much money because most of their users are freeloaders. Their poor business model should not become the problem of the paying users.

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

#332

Post by hawski »

wackget wrote: post #232
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…

> wrestling with package managers, version conflicts, obtuse configuration files The top answer also mentions this. Yours is currently second-top. I hope developers get the message. I'm SO tired of trying to navigate around the mountains of pure garbage every time I want to work on a new project. I long for the days when adding new functionality to your project was as easy as including a single external file, and whe…

In a way I think it's the current trend of rejecting GUIs. It certainly helps with automation, but I'm afraid we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

Does anyone remember Borland's VCL, Rox desktop or Acme from Plan 9? All vastly different, but all enabling great workflows. I would like to dive in GUI programming more, but I'm too picky regarding technologies. Closest to my ideal is Tcl/Tk and Lazarus it seems.

I say it as a guy spending most of his time in terminals for 15 years, mostly by choice.

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

#333

Post by nbardy »

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 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.

This is how I felt about myself, I spent my early twenty working a job living frugally saving and then quitting to work on my own projects. Failed entrepreneurship was a great lesson in how hard it is build things people want and how easy it is to build things you think people want. The difference is often very subtle small details, but asking the right questions to unearth those details in incredibly challenging.

The amount of things that someone will give their time or attention to our suprisingly small

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

#334

Post by joenot443 »

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…

Experiences like this are one of the major reasons I decided to keep my focus on iOS development rather than pivoting to full-stack as I was considering doing.

The iOS dev experience is far from perfect, and while YMMV, I definitely found I spent _much_ less time fixing my hammer when I'm building for a single platform using a single language in a (largely) excellent IDE.

Sometimes I think there must be engineers out there who enjoy the hammer fixing and glue-drying that comes with the rapidly changing full-stack development landscape.

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

#335

Post by scottishfiction »

Nextgrid wrote: post #291
scottishfiction wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even better, get out of the private sector (if you can). I'm very happy with what I'm contributing to the world at the BBC, and I'm paid 'well enough'.

The BBC might be an exception here but typically government projects always go to some BS consultancy that will take lots of money and deliver a shitty solution, or sometimes the problem or spec itself doesn't make sense but you're not allowed to talk to them and clarify/rethink the spec because reasons.

There are some notable exceptions aside from the BBC in the UK. The Government Digital Service is held in fairly high regard. I’m not sure about the states. There are no doubt examples at the BBC of what you describe, but mainly it’s pleasant smart people building useful things. There’s dysfunction, but it’s bearable.

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

#336

Post by austincheney »

munchbunny wrote: post #308
nitrogen wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript developers can't interface to the browser 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.

From that particular post, this line stuck out to me: Only 3 candidates were able to pass this code filter. The people that did pass either did well enough to pass or extremely excellent. The people that failed, maybe 19 of 22 people, all failed epically. In practice I highly doubt that the population of candidates is actually this bimodal. It might lean heavily below the hiring bar, but I have trouble believing that…

> but I have trouble believing that it's bimodal

It surprised me just as much. I cannot speak to the capabilities or thoughts of any given candidate. Ultimately the test was a test of using a single standard API that is based upon a standard model. If it were just a matter of instructions or syntax I suspect a candidate would gotten over that by either asking the right questions, trial and error, using a reference of whatever. I think what really destroyed people was a complete inability to perceive the page as a series of nodes all interconnected with various relationships.

> In my experience, if you give the candidate only one hour, access to documentation only helps with recalling past experience

That is only partially true in this case, because the candidates knew coming in they would have a code filter accessing a page using vanilla JavaScript. I cannot remember if I specifically mentioned refreshing on the DOM methods or not. I might have. This was 8 years ago. But they had at least a day prior notice to catch up on how to interact with a web page using JavaScript using only their code. The time pressure would have applied to the specific tasks asked of the candidates.

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

#338

Post by awayfrommypc »

volkk wrote: post #226
chuck3201 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have met people who are so focused on business/money that I find them repulsive. At the same time, I know some geeks who are the most bitter and angry humans ever. Even when they consider you smart and let you in their inner circles, all they do is complain about un-worthy developers or managers. It gets draining.

I am too old to hang out with negative people, also too old for people who are only interested in making money. So I searching for a new tribe, I think outdoors people are the happiest bunch. I just don't know what can I do.

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

#339

Post by [deleted] »

munchbunny wrote: post #308
nitrogen wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript developers can't interface to the browser 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.

From that particular post, this line stuck out to me: Only 3 candidates were able to pass this code filter. The people that did pass either did well enough to pass or extremely excellent. The people that failed, maybe 19 of 22 people, all failed epically. In practice I highly doubt that the population of candidates is actually this bimodal. It might lean heavily below the hiring bar, but I have trouble believing that…

[deleted]

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

#340

Post by hackyhacky »

wackget wrote: post #232
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…

> wrestling with package managers, version conflicts, obtuse configuration files The top answer also mentions this. Yours is currently second-top. I hope developers get the message. I'm SO tired of trying to navigate around the mountains of pure garbage every time I want to work on a new project. I long for the days when adding new functionality to your project was as easy as including a single external file, and whe…

I think it's a little unfair to blame developers.

I see the problem that our tooling is diverse and assembled from parts. You can pick a compiler from column A, a version control from column B, and GUI framework from column C, a message queue from column D, etc. And somehow, it's is possible to make them all work together. We love having that flexibility and choice.

But we pay a price in the added complexity of making all the pieces play together. A sibling comment mentions Turbo Pascal, as a contrast to today's programming environment. Yeah, Turbo Pascal was great, but it was also an all-in-one kit: you couldn't even use your own linker, you had to use the built-in TP linker. In a sense, it was a walled-garden Apple-style development environment. But it worked, it was easy, and it was fast.

The closest we have to that today is Visual Studio. I'd argue that the (mostly) all-in-one nature of Visual Studio and C# relieves a lot of the headaches of the more traditional open source toolset, at the expensive of less flexibility.

This is not an argument in favor or against the Microsoft world, just an observation.

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