Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help • Hacker News Board

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#621

Post by fjeifisjf » Tue, May 05, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #348

Thorentis wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I really get the sense that so much of the first world's unhappiness right now is due to compartmentalising (the containerising if you like) of our lives. Division of labor is a tragedy. In the long run, it destroys the soul.

And non-division of labor starves the body of actual food, shelter, and medicine.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#622

Post by nikofeyn » Tue, May 05, 2020, 2:49 PM UTC

throwaway839246 wrote: post #427

nikofeyn wrote: post #407

> I can't say it's because I wanted to make the world a better place. i see you saying this, but i don't think you believe this. the way you ended your essay sounds like you do want to make the world a better place through technology. i am myself burnt out on technology, and i have come to a realization on something that's been burning a while. the simple fact of the matter is that society cannot be helped with techn…

> i don't understand why you want to force a path This isn't the right metaphor. I'm not trying to force a path; I have a very strong internal sense of a general direction I need to go. But there is no path in that direction. So I'm trying to forge one. As for why that direction, I don't know of course. But if I were to speculate it's because I have a strong intuition that that's where my personal growth is.

what is that direction?

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#623

Post by CrazyStat » Tue, May 05, 2020, 2:50 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #463

nicbou wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I've found a really nice perspective on this recently: An app can be a home-cooked meal [1] It's okay to build things that aren't popular, that don't scale, or that aren't economically viable, for the delight of a few us…

OT: someone close to me never tastes the food they cook, I can't understand that. You don't know how long to cook it, or how to season it, or if the balance of sour/sweet/salt/umami/whatever is right at the point you can fix it ... But that's more an analogue of "use your program before you release it".

When I'm cooking food that I'm going to eat myself I try to limit tasting. If I taste a lot I'm likely to end up with sensory satiation and won't enjoy the meal much by the time I sit down at the table. Just smelling the food while I'm cooking it can trigger this for some dishes (typically curries and other similarly pungent dishes).

If I'm cooking a dish that I've cooked at least three or so times before I generally have a good idea of how things should be going and I can get away with only tasting once or twice at the end.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#624

Post by fjeifisjf » Tue, May 05, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #209

paypalcust83 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UB started with the right observations, but arrived at the wrong means prescriptions. He wandered off alone into the weeds, in both senses. A wiser realization is that it's those in established power and the rich who are actively or willfully ignorantly sabotaging the planet and condemning billions of people to relatively more poverty, misery, disease, and death. A million people nonviolently showing up to the seats…

"Nonviolently showing up"? I might or might not agree but let's face it, most of us won't even bother to show up at a voting place on election day. People just don't care. Maybe they'll kvetch to their acquaintances about how bad the other side is, but overall there's a lot of complacency. Similarly, you don't need to arrest corrupt politicians, you just need to not vote for them. Support a primary challenger if they…

Voter turnout was over 50% in 2016 and 2018, even after the effects of voter supppression.

And you don't need 100% turnout for an election to work; you only need a nearly unbiased sample.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#625

Post by beshrkayali » Tue, May 05, 2020, 2:52 PM UTC

aclissold wrote: post #605

beshrkayali wrote: post #590

Lots of comments, not sure if anyone said this already. If you're disillusioned because of the current Orwellian state the world is in (everything tracking you, hard locked in into ecosystems, etc...) Please know that this is not technology, technology has always been and will always be great. It's the business model that fucked us.

Is it the business model, or the people apathetic to its problems?

Business model for sure. Primarily the people who couldn't find a way to make money other than selling their users (at best), and of course the users themselves who knew and still normalized it.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#626

Post by fjeifisjf » Tue, May 05, 2020, 2:53 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #466

yqx wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it also matters how those billions live, and considering that the vast majority live in extreme poverty the picture becomes less rosy. Not to speak of the ecological disasters of climate change and pollution this is causing, which also has an impact on our well being. Modern agriculture and medicine have in a way made it possible for all those people to be alive at the same time. I agree with your last sentence s…

> the vast majority live in extreme poverty For that matter, the whole point of the primitivist argument is that humans have been quite happy about living in extreme physical deprivation for most of their history. It's only when the social milieu is totally FUBAR that "poverty" as we know it becomes a cause of deep unhappiness and dysfunction. Also as the OP shows, people can also be quite unhappy with their life des…

> humans have been quite happy about living in extreme physical deprivation

Citation desperately needed.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#627

Post by stratosmacker » Tue, May 05, 2020, 2:53 PM UTC

tonyarkles wrote: post #574

cblum wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you get into that space? What was your background? I hope you don’t mind me asking.

I don't mind at all! Although I hate the question, because it's not a particularly actionable answer for most. I started writing out the whole story, but in a nutshell: my formal background is a dual EE/CompSci bachelors, followed by an Masters in CompSci that focused on distributed systems. When I was a kid, I learned to program very young: Basic around 8, C in DOS around 11, C on Linux around 13. I fiddled with ele…

That's awesome. I was an electronic fiddler as well as a kid, CS student, and it landed me a gig building IOT devices back in 2016. Unfortunately that company crashed, and I ended up in "cloud" systems stuff.

If you ever need any new hires... /u/cblum and I would like to have a word

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#628

Post by read_if_gay_ » Tue, May 05, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

fjeifisjf wrote: post #615

Thorentis wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I take issue with this drone nonsense. If you are helping people for money you are doing good with your life. If you are comfortable at work and not being physically or emotionally abused, there's absolutely nothing wrong with being a "drone". Not everyone should be a celebrity changing the world in their own big way. Imagine if the whole world was being constantly reshaped in 7 billion ways!

I think what drone means isn't that working typical office jobs at megacorps is bad and you should rather go and try to change the world, but that you are very replaceable in such jobs and there's not really a personal connection and that is the issue.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#629

Post by ehnto » Tue, May 05, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

doppel wrote: post #465

I can't know where you're working or worked, but please don't think that this is every tech job in every company. There are plenty of smaller businesses doing great work where you get to have your say, good colleagues and some (at least) moderately interesting problems to work with. My last 3 jobs (over 10 years) have all been with companies in the size of 30-50 people, with 20-50% being product/engineering, working…

I have always worked with smaller companies as a rule, somewhere between 5-30 people usually. I don't live in the valley, so the startup game isn't even on my radar, and the companies are already making money solving problems so all the VC infused "Change the World" attitude isn't required. I don't have to care about IPOs, stock options or whatever.

There are still so many interesting problems to solve at smaller companies, often really niche problems that have no or little prior art meaning you get to really break ground. You are also tailoring software to work on problem sets of an entirely different domain to software. In FAANG style companies you're writing software that solves software problems, which is a layer of abstraction too far for me personally.

Being smaller companies they're often involved in the community as well. Software is so often ephemeral and disconnected, there have been years of my career where I never spoke to anyone who actually used my work. I'm not sure the client always tested it either, so it could feel like I was writing software for no-one. It is nice to be connected to the real world and users/clients more directly.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#630

Post by SketchySeaBeast » Tue, May 05, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #533

sudosysgen wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why you should simply strike. 10% of the US population striking would exert immense power and make the ruling class crumble.

10% of the US population is currently unintendedly striking. I don’t see the ruling class crumble yet.

If we consider this striking, it would appear that a large portion of the population (I don't know the actual percentage), composed of all walks of life, has decided it's of the utmost important to union bust and push people back to work without really making any attempts at resolving anything, and even with the knowledge that forcing people back to work will result in additional loss of life. "Sure, the mine is collapsing on people and giving you all black lung, but if you don't get back in there the town will shut down".

Doesn't really bode well for any future mass action.