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Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

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Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#161

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.

Pure toxic more common in webtech, gaming, and IT than other places. Although toxic webtech culture is kinda bleeding into software in general. Big corp and gov have different issues.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#162
post #95

I'm having similar issues, and i think i found a way out: stop playing their game. Don't make enterprise software. Don't write unit tests. Don't accept pull requests. Simply write software for yourself and have fun doing it. Forget refactoring code into modules, just fucking code. Don't worry about deployment with k8s, just copy the Python script to your production folder and run it. Fuck all that shit about git bran…

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…

This is advice meant for personal projects, not work. Sorry if I didn't make that clear enough, but I thought it would be clear from context.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#163

I have also experience close to burnout and recovered multiple times, in the process I have lost very precious relationships, and entire years were spent in darkness. I also have friends who have been in tech for close to ten years, and are close to burning out though they would never admit to such. This is the nature of the beast, all things that appear glamorous on the outside ( Hollywood, Finance, Tech, many nonpr…

Well said. External gratification won't solve anything.

Any advice to someone new in the industry to avoid burnout?

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#164
It is here in HN that I first heard Pablo Neruda's "No culpes a nadie". Even though a fan of Neruda I somehow had missed this. Perhaps this speaks to you something too:

        ## Don't Blame Anyone

 Never complain about anyone, nor anything,
 because basically you have done
 what you wanted in your life.

 Accept the difficulty of improving yourself
 and the courage to start changing yourself.
 The triumph of the true man emerges from
 the ashes of his mistake.

 Never complain about your loneliness or your
 luck, face it with courage and accept it.
 In one way or another it is the outcome of
 your acts and the thought that you always
 have to win.

 Don't be embittered by your own failure or
 blame it on another, accept yourself now or
 you'll keep making excuses for yourself like a child.
 Remember that any time is
 a good time to begin and that nobody
 is so horrible that they should give up.

 Don't forget that the cause of your present
 is your past, as well as the cause of your
 future will be your present.

 Learn from the bold, the strong,
 those who don't accept situations, who
 will live in spite of everything. Think less in
 your problems and more in your work and
 your problems, without eliminating them, will die.

 Learn how to grow from the pain and to be
 greater than the greatest of those
 obstacles. Look at yourself in the mirror
 and you will be free and strong and you will stop
 being a puppet of circumstances because you
 yourself are your own destiny.
 
 Arise and look at the sun in the mornings
 and breathe the light of the dawn.
 You are part of the force of your life;
 now wake up, fight, get going, be decisive
 and you will triumph in life. Never think about
 luck because luck is
 the pretext of losers.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#165

> I lost many friends. They weren't ever your friends. People at work rarely transcend beyond co-workers and into actual friendship. If all you do together is work and around-work activities, they probably aren't your friends. You're effectively people locked in a cage together that happen to get along. If you get together on days you don't work together then they might actually be your friend. If they've met your no…

I feel that Americans tend to use the term "friend" a lot more casually than, say, the Japanese. In Japan, your boss is never your friend. Neither is your teachers, colleagues, parents or siblings. A "friend" in Japan is somewhat closer to a soulmate, and not surprisingly we don't have many (for some people, not at all).

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#166
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

That's how I read it too. I've recently started doing that and it's been a breath of fresh air. I don't really like the stuff I work with, which is services. I think I've become good at it given the feedback I get from my peers every review cycle, but I really don't like it. I felt burned out for a long time because of that. Recently I've simply been doing what I'm interested in, in my spare time. That's learning abo…

It's hard to do just the fun stuff because that's not what makes good software. It's the unit tests and pull reviews and such that make the software reliable and covering all the niggling edge cases. And that ultimately is what makes a piece of software good.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#167

I have also experience close to burnout and recovered multiple times, in the process I have lost very precious relationships, and entire years were spent in darkness. I also have friends who have been in tech for close to ten years, and are close to burning out though they would never admit to such. This is the nature of the beast, all things that appear glamorous on the outside ( Hollywood, Finance, Tech, many nonpr…

All accurate and objective and good for everyone to know early rather than late. Moving a bit further from the specifics, it's worth noting that this is not a natural state of affairs. Humans evolved to be in groups of about 30-100 people who they knew their whole lives and thus making catastrophic deception nearly impossible. Likewise vast sums of wealth did not exist nor total social and fiscal isolation surrounded…

> Moving a bit further from the specifics, it's worth noting that this is not a natural state of affairs. Humans evolved to be in groups of about 30-100 people who they knew their whole lives

Yup, there are still some anarcho-primitivists who think technology was a bad deal for us humans overall, and that living in a tribal setting of hunters-gatherers is best. The infamous "unabomber manifesto" was broadly advocating for this worldview, albeit with a very negative, nihilistic twist to it as one might expect. Kinda ironic to point that out when you look at OP's nearly-utopian attitude to tech, of course.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#168
My most recent solution: At work, I work.

After work ... I bought an iPad and started making little songs using Garageband. I have total creative control, and tinkering away with music is fun for me.

Another generation used to build model railroads in their basements. I don't get it, but they had total creative control.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All accurate and objective and good for everyone to know early rather than late. Moving a bit further from the specifics, it's worth noting that this is not a natural state of affairs. Humans evolved to be in groups of about 30-100 people who they knew their whole lives and thus making catastrophic deception nearly impossible. Likewise vast sums of wealth did not exist nor total social and fiscal isolation surrounded…

Even at that time, psychopaths were still successful enough to pass on the genes for their trait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Environment

... as were those that think biology predetermines everything
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