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Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

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Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#431

Post by IAmNotAFix »

Three years in and my conclusion so far is that work is nothing more than a mean to earn a living, and my free time is the time I can actually read/program about interesting stuff. The pragmatic attitude is therefore to stop caring much about work and especially not give it more time than expected.

Lots of jobs for developers but very hard to find a job that is actually inspiring at all. I just stop struggling to find a sense to it and stopped giving a fuck. It's relatively big money for relatively easy work, we shouldn't be complaining in a first place.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#432

Post by AndrewThrowaway »

wmij wrote: post #280
battery_cowboy wrote: post #2

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…

> Don't write unit tests. Don't accept pull requests. Simply write software for yourself and have fun doing it. There's a careful balance here though right? For most projects your first users or clients are the unit tests. Why not have a future of repeatable client/user tests that insulate from regressions and to be your wingman to navigate future iterations? Also for me, I still review and accept my own pull request…

You are sooo missing the point...

Lets change the story to be about an artist being burnt out of art industry. Suddenly he has to deal with all the grant money, politics of the gallery etc. Feels like he doesn't want to do anything with art anymore.

And somebody in the thread suggests the artist just go to the nature and paint and don't think about any art styles and acceptance of peers and trends and etc. Just give yourself to painting and don't think about anything. Just paint with a coal on stones and loose yourself in it.

And you comment would be something like "There's a balance here though, you still need to paint on canvas with acrylic or something, otherwise you won't be able to validate your art in the future for you to progress etc."

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#433

Post by mesaframe »

isakkeyten wrote: post #424
mesaframe wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, what if you want to improve? What if you actually want to write better code? Robust code is something you earn.

But what is good code? What is bad code? I know what is slow code and what is fast, but not always fast is good and slow bad. So basically, good/bad code is mainly around maintainability. And if you are the only person that maintains it and can maintain it then you only need the code to be 'as good' as your ability to retain the memory of it's structure.

I don't know how your comment is contributing to the conversation. No one asked about the definition of good code. The definition was assumed to be understood.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#434

Post by pdimitar »

I think a lot of this is linked to your gatekeepers' power dynamics. We start off thinking that through effort and talent alone we can change the world. Maybe we could but we bumped right into the gatekeepers -- the middle managers, the disconnected-from-reality CEOs, the people who only warm their seats without ever actually helping the company -- and the resistance from them is so strong that we eventually give up.

That's fine. I am not into religion but I quite like the Buddhist concept that there exist battles you can never win by fighting and the only way you can win is to never fight them in the first place.

Go and find your happiness elsewhere. That is very okay.

As for how to get back to technology, well, following HN is a pretty good way to get inspired for ideas. Just do them without the idea that you'll make money and you could find happiness practising technology again.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#435

Post by ozim »

Thorentis wrote: post #233
TomMckenny wrote: post #132

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…

I agree with the OP comment, and also with this one. It is important to understand two things in coping with the state of the world in my opinion. 1) The reality is you need to find validation and fulfilment outside of work, because in our current society you are just a drone. 2) Don't be depressed because it seems like this is how it's always been. It hasn't. Our work culture is broken. People never used to be so fa…

Let's go further with it and read "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind".

Not to spoil too much but those people working land were cripples as well. Hunter gatherers had perfect life because unlike peasants they could enjoy their life instead of returning to the work in field.

Now think about how hunter gatherers were exposed to risk. What kind of stress they had everyday. Look at current animals how they live. It is some kind of freaking horror.

You an see I am not a fan of Harrari's book because it is "earlier it was so much better" without any real stuff in it.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#436

Post by throwaway839246 »

mboperator wrote: post #398
throwaway839246 wrote: post #6

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 can relate to a lot of the things you've stated. I won't get into the specifics but I understand your experience of working at a tech giant. In my case, I decided to try to "play the game" for a while. After a few years, I realized clout, money, and the things it afforded were ultimately meaningless to me. Things like mentoring young engineers, hobbies, and organizing local student hackathons definitely took the ed…

Something I've always wondered about that maybe you could help me with. What does it mean to say that "Jesus died for our sins"?

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#437

Post by dchyrdvh »

I think burnout is about reducing the perceived world to a shallow mental model, getting locked in it voluntarily and getting depressed as a result. But it's a 3 wall prison cell: it works so long as the prisoner doesn't bother to look around to notice the missing wall.

My approach is to find curiously unexplainable things. The moment our mind spots a glitch in the matrix, an odd difference between the well known mental model and observations, it becomes excited and tries to fix the model.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#439

Post by drumhead »

Whne you accept VC money they will expect, demand results, they dont care about the consequences to you or your staff, they want a return on their money. Your're making a deal with the devil, but in return what are you really expecting or what do you want? A great company delivering great products or immense wealth? The impression I get is that everyone or at least the vast majority want Bill Gates level money, they want to be as rich as Zuckerberg. They want their own space program like Bezos. Deliver a great product in your own time, at a smaller scale and be happy with a reasonable profit.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#440

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway839246 wrote: post #400
friendlybus wrote: post #374

What do you want out of work, friends and stability or risk and glory? Work is an inherently ego driven, protection from death task by stacking more human and capital cost onto the problem of death. You can find friends in that, but it's not a stable social relationship. You're not burnt out, in the sense that you got burned. You seem to be handling that fine (write down your conflicts though!), it seems more like yo…

> If you're the kind of guy that needs to be burning, all the comments about the cycles of business, numbers, money and all that are not going to work for you. No, they are not. As to the rest of your post, I get your metaphors, but the path from understanding the metaphors to understanding how to turn that understanding into action is longer than you might think. Could you give specific examples from your own life o…

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