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Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

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Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#151
> Has anyone been through this who managed to recover their optimism and creative spirit? Please help me. What can I do?

Have you tried helping someone? If not, find someone who needs help, then help them.

This seems to be a good way to hack past the kind of burnout you're talking about.

It's best if the thing a person needs help with is something you like to do (or once liked to do). It won't even seem like you're helping them, but you will be. Even better if the person needs help with something you've wanted to learn how to do but never could manage fit in.

A magical thing happens when you help someone. You forget about yourself. Maybe for only a little while, but that can really help reset what's not working in life.

There are so many ways to help people. You can help them online, pseudonymously if you prefer. You can help them publicly. You can volunteer to do something for an organization that has things that need to be done.

Kids need a lot of help. The elderly need a lot of help. Recently unemployed people need a lot of help. There are organization serving all of them, and they can all use your help.

It sounds like you have skills and experience that could help a lot of people. You may have already helped someone just by sharing your own experience that happens to overlap with someone else's.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did throw everything away. I walked away from ~$10M, so this isn't the problem. To live in the present moment one has to unsee the cant. That's the difficult part. How to keep the mind from focusing on all the bullshit that it can't unsee. The burnout, the disillusionment, the politics, the faded friendships. That's what's hard.

I get what you mean. It's hard to let go of these realities we see. I see it all the time in my corp. And I am convinced, too, that it's hard to do fun/interesting things in technology. It honestly baffles me at times, how we just throw away our time so recklessly, so soullessly. We spend years and years in some place, and eventually all that we used to have dissolves. No more friendships, community, family, everythi…

> we just throw away our time so recklessly, so soullessly.

> No more friendships, community, family, everything is just ulterior motives.

> The reason people are in the golden handcuffs is because they always want to hold onto tomorrow - a tomorrow that may never come.

> People are so vile, greedy, self-centered - even ourselves at times.

> These are just my conclusions.

Just an observation, but these conclusions of yours seem to to revolve a lot around judging and directing resentment at other peoples' priorities and the authenticity of their motivations.

In particular, family, community and friendships are things that help people get through their otherwise mundane workdays. For many, they're not lies or illusions, but rather, the very things that make dealing w/ occasional BS in the professional world worthwhile.

Perhaps it's a sign that you might benefit from more focus on yourself and your own process and purpose, instead of focusing on others, whose purpose and process you can't control.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#153

The complaints are human behavior rather than technology, or the culture around it. There are places that are better than others, but you're going to encounter self interest and "dilbertesque" behavior everywhere. Personally, I view learning to deal with work is an emotional skill you have to develop. Even if you get a job doing math all day in a research position, you need to be ready for the usual academic politics…

Technology itself is what breeds these environments though. Humans haven't changed much, what has changed is our environment. You actually kind of hint at it in your own writing. The behavior is everywhere.

>Humans haven't changed much

You are correct, and humans have been greedy, manipulative, and self-centered since the beginning of time. We often don't even see it in ourselves. I'm sure many of these people who contributed to his disillusionment probably thought they weren't too bad...especially when compared with some other person!

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#154
You aren't disillusioned with technology, you're disillusioned with people.

That's not an excuse for the way people behave, but it's a useful thing to keep in mind when trying to think about how to change the problems. They're behavioral, social, and organizational problems, not technical ones.

Meaningful change can only come through those avenues, then, like politics. Of course, that's an ugly field on its own... if you prefer to keep a tech lens on it, you can try to design products to push society in certain directions, but you could also work towards that without doing any sort of technological work at all.

These sorts of things are the strongest sorts of anti-libertarian arguments I know of. The "market" necessarily devolves to the people who are willing to push the boundaries the most, because it's near-impossible to know all the bad actors exhaustively in advance, and because so many people are willing to compromise - at least somewhat - in their pursuit of personal security.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#155
> Then I worked for a tech giant, and then for a high-growth unicorn. It shocked me how dilbertesque they both were. Full of politicians, and burnt out engineers in golden handcuffs who can't wait to get out

Sorry this surprises you, OP. It's called "work" (I'm not intending to be condescending). People pay you to do something and you do it, having entered unto that mutual agreement. Nobody promised you it would be efficient or fair (yet it's much more efficient and much more fair than it was say 50 years ago).

It's not just you. It's many people. Being paid a lot to do very little seems to have some bizarre side-effects to people's psyche.

For anyone reading this, take charge of your personal life. Find people and invest your time, and causes and invest your money.

So many people lament the inequality in the world but do nothing of their own will to change it. Are we all so paralyzed we can't make personal decisions and instead cry out why our government isn't doing more?

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point, laced with justified indignation. As a graybeard, I've seen multiple generations of "how to do software" and the most recent are the least fun. A lot of this is driven by the agile approach. It's tailor-made for dev burnout: from the endless tight cycles that force people into an infinite loop of productivity with scant satisfaction that comes with "completion", to all of the tools and philosop…

I'd add open office plans to this. It's awful. You never quite get to focus, you don't build the rapport with your team, you don't get to customize your physical environment. Development really became a white collar version of the assembly line.

It's kind of weird by now. They will happily offer you $200k in annual salary, but an office with a window where you could keep a potted plant is out of the question.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#158

A view of technology : Watch an old movie and notice the many improvements in economic productivity, standard of living, quality of life. E.g.: To get salt, had to travel to the local village. For this had to saddle up or harness a horse or two. Now can get the salt delivered or eat in a restaurant or drive to the village on a smooth road in a car with HVAC. Car tires used to wear out in about 15,000 miles and were s…

What brand tires do you buy?

For regular tires, it's been so long I don't remember in detail.

When I was growing up, 13,000 miles on a set of tires was about all we got.

The deal now, and for at least 20 years, is better rubber compounds for the tread, mesh under the tread to keep the tread from flexing on the road surface, and better cord, maybe Kevlar, for the rest. Now a lot of tires are super tough things.

For a Chevy S-10 Blazer, I bought some Cooper snow tires a few years ago, but I don't drive very much now so have put only maybe only 10,000 miles on them -- they show none or nearly no signs of wear yet.

I drove a Buick Turbo T-Type, heavy car but fast, for about 220,000 miles with just the original tires and one set of new tires. The new tires didn't wear as long as I hoped -- they sold me luxury, smooth riding tires, and I don't give even as much as a weak little hollow hoot about smooth, luxury.

I put 200,000+ miles on a Chevy Nova with just the original plus 1 or 2 sets of new tires; similarly for a hot rod Camaro. Then I was getting tires from Michelin.

Ballpark, the change I see is 13,000 miles growing up and 75,000 miles when I was doing a lot of driving.

But there are some exceptions: There are some luxury, smooth riding tires that, AFAIK, don't last as long. Some high performance tires have significantly higher coefficient of friction and, thus, shorter tread life. Maybe front wheel drive can chew up tires. Full time four wheel drive maybe shouldn't but I suspect does chew up tires. Soft suspensions tend to scrub the tires on the road.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#160
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really, really bad advice. Mutiny is hardly an answer to the problem here. It will certainly temporarily avoid the problems you face but if you are a member of a team and this is truly how you act you will get chucked out very quickly. But since you bring up a few of the issues you are facing it's important to address them. I want to focus on unit tests to start. When I started my first programming job a coup…

I don't think the GP's advice is meant for team projects. > "Don't make enterprise software. [...] Don't accept pull requests. Simply write software for yourself and have fun doing it."

Yeah, this isn't for work, this is meant to reignite your passion via personal programming.
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