Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 496 posts

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

#341

Post by hackyhacky »

jseliger wrote: post #183
awelkie wrote: post #158

Earlier 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?

If you have a masters and are willing to be a relatively low-paid adjunct, my impression is "yes," particularly in CS, where relatively few people want to be adjuncts. I don't think it's easy to find jobs that pay at middle-class levels in many larger cities.

Again, just my two cents, but in looking for full-time, contract-based, permanent, non-tenure-track teaching positions in the northeast of the US, I found no shortage of schools eager to make offers to someone with the right background. Here, "right background" means previous teaching experience, good evaluations, and extensive work in industry, as well as a killer demo lecture.

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

#342

Post by hackyhacky »

ScottFree wrote: post #278
hackyhacky wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? ;)

I have experience teaching in eastern Europe as well. It's been hit-or-miss. It's best if you're flexible and don't fixate on any particular location.

If you need a visa and work permit, it really complicates matters: I highly recommend acquiring European citizenship if at all possible. (I did, which had the side-effect of immersing me in genealogy as a hobby.)

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

#343

Post by hackyhacky »

asdfman123 wrote: post #175
yahyaheee wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds a lot like toxic work culture, but unfortunately there’s a lot of that in tech

To me, it sounds like their problem is they aren't introverted enough for the job (which is totally fine, but just an observation). All jobs will have x% of nonsense and y% of what you actually really enjoy doing, and I think as long as y >= 10% then you'll do okay. Honestly, I like sitting by myself and grappling with tech problems. It's nice that I'm allowed to sit inside my own head and think all day. Maybe it's b…

You may be right. When I was younger, I was a lot more willing to focus on purely technical problems. I'm still an introvert, but let's say that I'm "extrovert-curious."

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

#345

Post by talmr »

I'm in it as a self-taught engineer mostly for the easy money, but honestly I am finding that I don't really thrive any more. I managed to get myself into this industry and four years later I'm a senior software engineer making decent buck. However, it really isn't satisfying at all. I feel like I'm only in it because this is the easiest six figure job in the world and I'm just in it for the health insurance.

I used to be a business consultant and made a career pivot because I got burned out from working 60-80 hours a week and flying 100k+ miles each year. I loved all the projects I worked on, and many of them were very large scope (50m to 300m+ USD) with tremendous impact. I got to work with people in the senior leadership positions at multi billion dollar multinational corporations, and we were understanding their problems and coming up with solutions. It was so much freaking fun.

I barely feel that at my current work, where I'm just working on a CRUD app lol. It is so boring. I don't really care anymore about code juggling, because anyone can figure it out if they have a little dose of motivation. At first it was fun to be a "problem solver", but not like this.

I'm not really that interested in becoming a specialist. I look around at work at some of my colleagues who have years of experience in their specific subset of work, and they only know and care about that thing. These are highly qualified experienced people, but I really don't want to be like that. I like to get a low-level understanding of things I am personally passionate about, and I love learning so I try to get a high to mid level understanding of everything else. I'll fuck with dev ops, database performance, product strategy, marketing, sales, mobile app dev, whatever else that I find interesting.

Being a software engineer at a larger company does not satisfy me one bit, and it really sucks when you realize you're only in it because it is easy money.

I'm working on my own ideas now, and I'm learning as much as I can during this COVID remote time to make it on my own.

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

#346

Post by Balanceinfinity »

rustyboy wrote: post #105
Balanceinfinity wrote: post #36

I realized that I was only a so-so programmer. the real ninjas were so passionate and knowledgeable; I was only successful because of brute force and overworking. I moved on to a career in the law - which is a much more natural fit for me.

Are you a lawyer or are there jobs that you find stimulating without the overhead of getting accredited/years of school?

I'm a lawyer, but talented paralegals (typically just a college degree) can do very well. Especially ones who can master ediscovery - the production of documents stored electronically.

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

#347

Post by hackyhacky »

asiachick wrote: post #214
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 looked into teaching programing once. What I found has horribly designed classes teaching in poor ways and I could tell the likelihood of me being able to re-write some of the curriculum was close to zero and I'd have to deal with tons of school politics. Have you somehow avoided this stuff?

That doesn't correspond to my experience at all. Where did you find that situation?

I imagine it might be different in secondary school education, but at the university level, I find that no one really cares what I do, as long as the students don't complain. I always redesign the curriculum to suit my tastes and interests, and I've never gotten any pushback from admin.

Basically, the department assigns me classes to teach, and after that I'm on my own. Once a semester a senior faculty member observes my lecture, mostly to make sure that I haven't shown up drunk. The only politics I'm exposed to is on the hiring committee.

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

#348

Post by collyw »

I am ready to leave.

18 years experience. My Current job the tech lead is a diva, doesn't listen to anyone else and just add more and more to our enormous codbase. There are now 3 devs. The other two just basically clean up behind him as he builds technical debt. Trying to discuss is likely to end up in an argument.

I have had a could of technical test recently and failed them both. Today I was given a number of reasons, for example was missing test x,y,z, when the spec said if you were pushed for time, write down the test you would do (which I did - along side that I actually provided the most complex test to implement, to check the timing of the cache refresh). I was advised I should have provided mocks (which would have taken ages to set up for example). They preferred a REST API to the HTML that I gave as output despite the specs asking for a "page". A couple of whitespace errors that made pylint complain. I hard coded some URLS rather than make them configurable (it's a test, not a production application) and didn't provide a setup.py (which was never asked for). Am I expected to be a mind reader? "It should only take you two or three hours"

Before that was a computer science fundamentals quiz for an hour and a half where I had forgotten thing from a couple of decades ago. How to avoid deadlocks in Java (I haven't done threading in years, I said I would need to reads up on it again) and what happens when hash tables have a collision. Again, couldn't remember off the top of me head as it was 20 years ago.

Does no on value the art of trying to keep code simple and maintainable? How do I demonstrate to prospective employers that I am good at this and stop wasting my time with nonsense described above?

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

#349

Post by sushisource »

matonias wrote: post #124
peckrob wrote: post #108

I stated my career early - while I was still in high school. I went from bagging groceries and doing checkouts at a grocery store to programming for a local company my senior year of high school. I continued doing this for my first couple years of college. But then dot-bomb happened and it looked like the party was over. I looked down at the job opportunities after graduation. I didn't really want to spend the rest o…

Wow, what a story. > A good group of coworkers (for me) who legit really care about protecting these astounding natural resources. And a feeling that you're really making a difference and reaching people. This feeling of 'feel' for a thing, its what I miss in tech personally. Companies offer a service, want a happy customer and make money that way. But a 'feel' for the actual goal and way its done usually lacks. Too…

Agreed. People so rarely bring passion to the job. In fact, they often react with hostility when encountering someone who is genuinely passionate about software (to my mind, because they feel it reflects back on them poorly).

I think the industry is totally wrong about the type of activity that programming is. It's a creative endeavor, not a mechanical one. The best people are the ones who derive joy from it, not just a paycheck.

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

#350

Post by hackyhacky »

bythckr wrote: post #231
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…

What advice do you give your students in handling work-life balance?

They don't ask. If they did ask, I'd say that tech employers are designed intentionally to subsume as much of your life as they can. If you want to have your own life, you need to stake a claim.

More controversially, I'd say that any labor relationship is necessarily exploitative, and doing any work beyond the minimum means that you are giving more than you're getting and thus being abused. But that's not advice for having a prosperous career. :)

Post reply on HN