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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?

#421

Post by perl4ever »

robohoe wrote: post #50
scirocco wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, if you ask a pilot today on advice... They will say, get a university degree and look elsewhere than aviation

We always think that grass no the other side is greener, but not really. It's yellow :( It's the same with how a lot of tech folks idolize farming. In reality it's a tough job with long hours and cold weather.

People romanticize all sorts of things, welding, nursing...

My grandfather was a farmer and died after an accident cleaning something with gasoline. Sounds dumb (I don't know the details) but farmers tend to have accidents like that because the whole job is working with dangerous machinery, chemicals, and animals, and a "family farmer" has an incentive to take risks someone working for a corporation doesn't.

I remember a news story about a farmer who passed out from breathing something toxic, so his oldest son goes to get him, he passes out too, his wife goes...the whole family died like that one after the other.

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

#422

Post by mylons »

joenot443 wrote: post #334
karatestomp wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I’ve been thinking about pivoting into iOS dev. swift seems perfectly fine, and the restricted eco system seems paradoxically liberating

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

#423

Post by fluroblue »

sabman83 wrote: post #247

I 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…

Did you have to do any training for that? I’ve been contemplating leaving tech and have always been interesting in your area.

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

#424

Post by perl4ever »

collyw wrote: post #348

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 reas…

"How to avoid deadlocks in Java"

I'm curious, this is not something I've needed to know, but what would be Java specific to an answer?

If I was asked about deadlocks, I would say "always acquire resources in the same order".

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

#425

Post by swat535 »

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…

Honestly, I don't know if there is such a thing as the perfect job.

I suspect the daily grind becomes apparent regardless the career choice.

I can imagine how doing the same thing for 20+ becomes dull and uninteresting, especially if you have arbitrary deadlines, superiors to report and so on.

The way that I personally cope with this is, accepting the fact that my job is a job and at the end of the day, the only thing that really fulfils my life are good health, exercising and spending time with loved ones.

Whilst I try to enjoy my job as much as I can, it's just a means to an end.

I think a trap that some of us fall into is letting our careers define who we are and once that happens, it becomes very easy to lose the sense of self.

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

#426

Post by lainga »

jonny_eh wrote: post #243
ativzzz wrote: post #235

I'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…

> 2. Work for a smaller company. Your work is so much more impactful when you are not part of a mega-machine. That depends. If you work for a small company working on a product few use, then what's the impact?

I guess I'd rather be the town baker than work at Wonder-Bread.

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

#427

Post by achillesheels »

bythckr wrote: post #280
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. I recently saw a video about Boeing that concluded…

I'd love to see that video. I would call this "Chipotle Syndrome". It is a long-held hypothesis I have that MBAs are subjectively-motivated rent-seekers looking to pad their resumes and they do so by transient boosts in, say, profits - most infamously by sacrificing product quality (e.g. outsourcing) - leaving the future of the company poorer as they chase the golden parachute. Chipotle is a famous example of a founding team going public, bringing in MBAs, and then having to constantly appease Wall St. rent-seekers until, voila, their food quality suffers; likely because of labor cutting costs introducing unskilled labor to a relatively speaking complicated food preparation scheme.

Meanwhile Wall St. simply downgrades, the MBAs shrug their shoulders and speak about drive-thru ordering as an innovation, the Founders get ousted, and people become sick.

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

#428

Post by throwaway286 »

volkk wrote: post #234
throwaway286 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lived off savings, studied new programming languages, deep learning, leetcode, etc.

hows that going?

It was fine for a while; I'm definitely the best at solving algorithms problems than I've ever been, but I want the structure of a job now.

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

#429

Post by throwaway286 »

honkycat wrote: post #363

I will tell you when I can get back in. I quit my job in January before the economy crashed. Took a month sabbatical which is looking like it will an indefinite sabbatical. 9 years professional experience, four year Computer Science degree, multiple reviews of my resume and cover letter by trusted friends in the industry. Stable work experience where I am not hopping around a bunch. Important position at a successful…

I have 10 years experience, no degree, and yeah, submitting my resume online seems like throwing it into a black hole. And I have always been one of the top performers at my previous jobs. I did get about 20-25% interviews though, so I guess I just need to apply to a large number of jobs and I'll eventually get through.

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

#430

Post by strzibny »

Nextgrid wrote: post #149
BerislavLopac wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, to me (also in London, and struggling to find a job right now) it feels like everyone is doing Django these days... :D

All the permanent Django jobs I see also have over-engineering such as insanely complicated front-ends (that actually perform worse than good old HTML) or Kubernetes (when the entire product could be served off a single bare-metal server) or similar, not to mention they are BS startups doing user-hostile things.

Bare metal? A cheap VPS for many...
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