Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

He's not disillusioned with tech it seems, but with the business of tech.

Hyped startups and humongous companies. It's not surprising.

Fortunately, there are other choices.

Having read this a second time, I suspect that "technology" here is represented by "web framework launch Silicon valley velocity board IPO tickets vulture-capitalist 'go big or go home' standup burnrate" and little else.

Not all technology is like that. Technology happens without the constant churn of frameworks popping in and out of vogue, without a dependency being drug into the Google Graveyard on little notice, without scrum and story points. Technology happens without a single investor around. Technology happens outside of California ... it even can occur in the flyover states.

First, go make something with your hands. Or learn to. Makerspaces are shut most likely and of course Techshop folding was a drag but ... make something other than a sandcastle of bits that will be washed away when the moon of fashion drags a wave of fickle adherence over your hard work. Smash it or give it away. Now do it again, and again. You will like your third version.

Make something for yourself, that no investor will ever see. You will not make a dime out of it. Go ahead and program something to automate a personal itch. Maybe you just want to see what movies are around within fifty miles and then you won't to pick a theater; try prying that data out of some feeds and re-organizing it. Write something that alerts you on Wednesday when a new moon is going to be on a Friday or Saturday night so you can go to look at the stars somewhere far from the city. Do it without unit tests or deployment or CI/CD or a single git command.

Look for a problem where you work with the data, not with the UX or presentation or reaching for Bootstrap. Something where the web is not involved.

I can tell you what the lesson here is but you should do these things and figure out why it all feels so different and what you didn't like about ... before.

I have a different take on this. "do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life" isn't a dangerous cliche, it is in fact true (note that many cliches are cliches because they are obvious truisms). The problem is that it has a number of caveats. One of which is that it is impossible to "do what you love" while taking direction from other people unless their goals and ideals are 100% aligned with your own, which is pretty much never the case. It doesn't matter who those people are, they could be the vulture capitalists mentioned in the post or they could just be your manager. It doesn't matter if you're able to have a beer with them at the end of the day if you have different motivations for doing the work that you're doing.

The other environments mentioned, a tech giant and a high growth unicorn, are obviously composed of people playing the same pathological game. They're all publicly working towards whatever goals the company has set while privately pursuing their own. I think most of this is inescapable with the way we currently structure corporations. Even when you purposefully try to avoid this outcome it still happens.

I think groups of people are able to achieve and maintain a sort of synchrony that allows them to "do what they love" together. You hear about it and sometimes are lucky enough to be there for it when different places, communities, or companies have that "golden age" where things are lined up perfectly, people are building on each other's work, and every day just seems to flow naturally. Often after the fact it gets derided as drinking the kool-aid or a reality distortion field but something happens when everyone buys in to the dream. I think we've lost a lot of that, we're too cynical and have convinced ourselves that it's not real and that's pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy since it leads to a permanent state of disillusionment. That's where we wind up just clocking in and out, doing an honest days work and narrowing our lives down to whatever is left over. You sell half your life to buy the other. In my mind that's much more dangerous than chasing your dreams.

Do you enjoy cleaning up their mess? If so, is it not the perfect environment, where everyone is doing something they do best and enjoy?

Or do you dislike cleaning it up? In this case, why do you do it? Noblesse Oblige?

Asking because I love refactoring. I also love pushing features fast. But I absolutely dread having to do "perfect code" in the first try. I keep trying to push this idea (inspired by Mythical-Man-Month) here in HN that a perfect team would have people "working fast and breaking things" with people working behind them that love refactoring everything cleaning it up.

> spend the other 8-10 hours a day doing things you actually like to do

How many hours are in your day? I don't even have kids and I don't even have 4 hours in a workday doing things I actually like to do.