We opened a hostel ( https://www.hostelofmaine.com/ ). No regrets. I have always intended to get back into tech in some capacity, and just identifying how that will work and when is the best time is the trick. Still follow HN because some of the content is really good, and keeping an eye on tech's big picture changes is important to me.
Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
371–380 of 496 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#372I 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…
> 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
I think you're overstating it. This is true of much of the industry, maybe even most in certain bubbles like San Francisco, but it's far from all.
> Technology-wise, we no longer use engineering as a means to an end to solve a business problem. Instead, engineering became its own thing and most companies encourage and reward those who opt for over-engineered solutions
I think there's more truth to this, although I still think it's far from all of the industry. There's also a little bit of a good reason for it: tech companies have figured out that when you let engineers work on things they find interesting or exciting, they tend to work much harder and longer. In some sense this isn't a bad deal for those programmers either, if they're getting to do something they love instead of something they hate.
What it does lead to is a weird situation where doing something in a way that's only 80% efficient in terms of effort because of over-engineering, may still end up being economical because it leads to 200% effort from the people working on it. I think this is the root of a lot of the technology decisions being made today. Which, again, is really weird and seems questionable, but it also seems to work out pretty well for all parties most of the time.
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#373I 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…
I had a coworker at BigCo who would disappear for a month every summer. I wasn't paying attention to other PTO days through the year so I assumed that extra PTO for work anniversaries added up faster than I thought. Turns out they were just taking a leave of absence, every year, to travel, and just eating the pay cut.
When you're at $500k/yr, losing <$50k/yr isn't really that big of a deal.
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#374As 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…
A couple years ago I nearly got the opportunity to teach at a Bootcamp (one of the non-scammy ones). I got turned down very late in the process mainly on lack of experience, but I really felt strongly that I would enjoy it, and be good at it. One of my strongest skills is articulating concepts, and there's something enticing about forever remaining adjacent to that part of the journey where code is really exciting, before it becomes a drudgery.
Anyway. I hadn't really thought about it in a while, but maybe I'll try for that again in the future. I don't hate bit-slinging quite yet ;)
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#375I left it before I really got started, and looking back at it now, I don't regret it. In my mid-twenties I decided I'd rather be an electrician. I don't sit on my ass all day. I get to meet new people, and see new places all the time. Some places that few ever get to see. Power plants, clock towers, police stations, homeless shelters, church attics. All sorts of stuff. Not all of it equally exciting, but a lot of it…
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Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#376I 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 yo…
My outfit has five separate teams to protect us helpless devs from SRE/Ops cloud CLI's and dashboards: devops, appops, SRE, infosec, and IT technology. The things is cloud providers and cloud wrapper companies all pay bribes to managers. The company becomes all about SRE/ops instead of app development. The infosec team is currently running the company's cloud strategy, lol. App developers are not even allowed to deploy code. Naturally though, on-call pages still come to us. I just look at the errors and think, "that's nice, whelp I can't deploy anything so I will close this." I would quit but Covid-19.
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#377Worked in IT for a dozen years doing network administration. I felt alone and irreplaceable. The job was nice enough to afford me time to study nursing for a career change. I hired my replacement as I started school assuming quick termination. As luck would have it, they gave me a raise when I went part-time and I no longer had to do any projects I didn't care for.
When I started my nursing job at the hospital I continued to work with my old company once per week. Now that I'm super busy as a nurse and continuing my nursing education, I fear my old tech job will really end soon. I kinda like it once per week!
I love my new career. I get to work closely with people and help them through tough times. It's very rewarding and my new colleagues appreciate my tech background. I've gotten 2 raises since I started 6 months ago and now make more than my old job working only 3 days per week. The job is not easy, but when I go home, someone else is doing the job so nobody is calling me urgently to get something done.
At the same time, I moved from a small company to a large company. The benefits are good and the perks are complete. Since I started my job as a nurse I have received almost 200 hours of professional development training. Useful classes that apply towards making me better at my job. In my old tech job, I went to an annual trade show and that was about the extent of training.
Anybody else have a job like I did in tech? I had infinite projects to do and unlimited time to do them in. It was weird and not conducive to productivity. Now every day I go to work, I know I will do something important. My patients will be grateful and my employers will support me. Yeah, no regrets here!
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#378I worked in the industry for over 10 years and I have a PhD in Computer Science. In my last job I felt miserable from Day 1. I had reached a point where coding brought me no joy. In all of my job, at the end of the day, I was serving ads to users. I was also an average developer and part of that is because I never found the motivation to keep improving. I was only so much interested in getting things done and never i…
Wow what a career change! Congrats and thank you for sharing your story!
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#379I'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…
I work for a small company where tech is elementary for the primary product, and even has become a (small) product of its own. I used to work one day per week from home, which suited me well, but since the bloody Corona crisis, I've been working from home full time, and I don't like it, at all, and video conferencing even less. Although I am nerdy-ish and introvert, it seems I do need to connect to physical people from time to time.
Re: Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a coworker at BigCo who would disappear for a month every summer. I wasn't paying attention to other PTO days through the year so I assumed that extra PTO for work anniversaries added up faster than I thought. Turns out they were just taking a leave of absence, every year, to travel, and just eating the pay cut.
When you're at $500k/yr, losing <$50k/yr isn't really that big of a deal.
And most countries would give you 4 or more weeks annual leave