Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help • Hacker News Board

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#641

Post by abdullahkhalids » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:13 PM UTC

orestarod wrote: post #595

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps this will change your mind to some extent https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10933-what_the_world_can_learn_f... Specifically talks about how Hong Kong protestors have almost no formal hierarchical structures (to avoid the Chinese state arresting the leaders), yet remain highly functional and effective.

To have a group of protestors who volunteer for a commonly accepted goal among them be organized, functioning and effective without hierarchical structures is vastly different from having a whole society functional and effective without hierarchical structures. What every system first and foremost must face is how conflicts are resolved, because conflicts of every level of severity will arise without fail. A group wi…

You should watch the talk. She specifically talks about how disagreements and conflicts are resolved.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#642

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:17 PM UTC

rabidrat wrote: post #639

fuball63 wrote: post #596

This is just my personal approach to being disillusioned with tech, but I think about it a lot so I thought I'd share. I think one of the most dangerous cliches we are taught when we are young is "do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life". It sets up the expectation that your passion and your job should be tightly coupled, and if they aren't, there's something flawed with you. Having a job where you…

> 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.

Sounds like you might have some hours tied up in a commute? If so, listen to the things you like to do in the form of podcasts during that time.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#643

Post by pharke » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:23 PM UTC

wvlia5 wrote: post #632

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…

This evolutionary take on matters feels like a template " Unhappy about ? Well, in the stone age wouldn't have happened, therefore, genes/anatomy not adapted and blah blah. Addicted to ? Well, cro-magnons found it hard to and genes/biology adapted to move us to . So now that we have solved the problem, you still have these genes that get you addicted to ... " It was an interesting thought the first few times that I e…

I disagree, I think it's important to remind ourselves of the inbuilt limitations of our mind and body. The same way you need to remind yourself that even though sugary food tastes good, too much of it will cause a lot of problems (and for the same reasons). We shouldn't leave it at that though, serious thought needs to be put towards how we can overcome these problems.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#644

Post by dblank9 » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:23 PM UTC

There's a lot to dislike about business. Money complicates any relationship. On top of that, big business attracts big sharks that only care about money. But why be surprised? That's their job!

In short, it's no wonder that things go wrong in the startup world. Heck, most startups fail and as the old adage goes, "...failure permits no alibis". If you fail more often than not you WILL be crucified, especially by the people who's money you've lost. Imagine you're a general and you have just lost a battle. Do you expect your superiors to like you afterwards? Or your soldiers?

What IS a wonder is that we get anything good done at all, and we DO. Look at all the amazing products you use every day. It's insanely hard to pull this off, it requires one to have thick skin along with passion and optimism, all rolled up into a neat package. In short, you've got to have both.

But I'm curious as to what's wrong with "technology"? Technology is just something humans do, it's a form of crafting. We make stuff for fun and to make our lives easier. There are businesses built around said that complicate things on a human level, but without that infrastructure civilization is not possible.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#645

Post by freedomben » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

ratww wrote: post #637

sanderjd wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> incompatible programming philosophies This really hits home for me. I'm at my most miserable when working with people who value doing things fast more than doing them well. I suspect those people are also at their most miserable when working with me. I see them as creating work that I'll have to do eventually to clean up their mess, and I suspect they see me as an insufferable gatekeeper.

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-Mon…

I'm not the GP but I fully agree with what he said, so here is how I would answer your question:

I HATE cleaning up people's messy code. It's 10x easier to do it right the first time. Messy code to me is most messy because it's unclear what is being done. It often comes with insufficient tests, which makes refactoring dangerous.

To me it's a lot like walking into a messy house vs. a clean house. If the house has clutter everywhere, or has a smell from being dirty, then it's not comfortable to be in. If I have to work in it, or clean it, I'd much rather start with a well-organized clean house.

Refactoring is also not fun at all for me. I also LOVE pushing features fast. I don't obsess over "perfect code" but I do obsess over following best practices and stopping for a few minutes to think through a design.

My workflow is:

1. Get it working, minimal effort, PoC

2. Get tests written and passing.

3. Refactor to good code. Perfect is the enemy of good, but it doesn't get committed until it's readable, maintainable, tested, documented.

Sometimes I probably am a little slower than I otherwise could be, but people are often blown away at my ability to iterate and add features quickly. This is because my code is well organized, modular, DRY, and well tested. It takes a little longer the first release, but it more than pays for itself speed-wise as tech debt stays minimum and hackability is high. With over 10 years experience now with this method I'm convinced that it's the only sane way to do things. Anything else is sabotaging your own future.

If I really don't have time to do it right the first time, I know it will be hard to iterate on, it will have bugs in prod, and it will never be pleasant to work in. It takes 10x longer to refactor an existing app to be good code than it does to do it during development when it's all fresh in mind. The best hope is that it has a good spec so it can be re-written from scratch.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#646

Post by darreld » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:31 PM UTC

dkdk8283 wrote: post #109

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #39

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…

> I also have friends who have been in tech for close to ten years, and are close to burning out I realize the audience here is probably mostly younger folks but 10 years doing anything is not that much time IMO. I think a 3rd or 4th burnout at 30 years of service is a lot harder to recover from, but I’m biased from my own experience.

This thread has really triggered something in me. I am 63 and recently retired from a gov job, which I hated for years. I just thought I hated my management, which I did. I did recognize symptoms the last couple years (sometimes I was physically unable to work while staring at the screen). My plan was to take a couple months off and then take a contract position doing development. I have been unable to even look earnestly since I secretly cannot stand the idea of going into another enterprise situation. It all seems to me to be utter bullshit. I realize that even though I have had burnout issues a couple times over the last 30 years, this is a major case of burnout that I am experiencing. I have always identified as a programmer, not just worked as a programmer. That was a mistake. I am currently unable to fully retire but now I can think about what else I should do. It is funny how profound this is to me right now all due to simply reading comments.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#647

Post by pharke » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:32 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.

I don't think you can categorize layoffs as unintentional striking. Businesses are capable of laying off a lot of their workforce without crumbling, they just wind up running leaner and pruning some of the growth they had in the last few quarters. Striking means you organize enough of the employees that once they're gone the business cannot operate, no work gets done and there's an active effort by the strikers to advertise that the business is not operating in order to put further pressure on them.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#648

Post by vmception » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

s5300 wrote: post #447

vmception wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I am a condescending dick - to people with no skills, no capital, no ability to execute. They don't typically bring anything to the table! I happened to internalize the idea of a co-founder with somewhat of a network to resurrect an idea that needed to be funded, and I can say that yes it did get me/us taken more seriously. I'm finding solidarity in this thread amongst the engineers that also are annoyed with ov…

Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but the "solidarity" amongst engineers in this thread is somewhat close to "fuck the money, be more of a moral ethical human" which is so, so far from what you've described. I don't think you should automatically lump yourself in with them. Yes, I, and many others, have something close to the same feelings you do towards these types. However, we don't pride ourselves on being manipul…

we didn't get funded on that future a brighter place trope.

its just as fine if they're a complete sociopath, they got an executive position after all (just like me).

cash out, move on. don't get neumann'd

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#649

Post by jeirieo9 » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

fuball63 wrote: post #596

This is just my personal approach to being disillusioned with tech, but I think about it a lot so I thought I'd share. I think one of the most dangerous cliches we are taught when we are young is "do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life". It sets up the expectation that your passion and your job should be tightly coupled, and if they aren't, there's something flawed with you. Having a job where you…

I don’t agree that a meme like “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” means as much as you do.

I think watching people exist in the same literal loop of agency for 50 years is vastly more important than an arbitrary set of sounds. If the sound is a key to a cognitive idea, and the idea is “climb ladder for 50 years” literally?

The sounds and idea is mapped to a literal behavior. Focus on climbing a ladder. Why? Because that’s what we focus our agency on. Ladder to where? Up.

What?

Nobody should be set on an objective like climbing ladders to nowhere.

Do what you love. Be prepared to give it up and learn to love something new, and you’ll learn to love to learn and not get anxious about climbing ladders to nowhere, thus burning out.

People with a lot of money are able to make a lot of money and make it look easy. Climbing the ladder to where you can add two big numbers to get a bigger number based on a sense for generating new emotional objects but utility that’s more of the same is asinine and unfair.

You’re all building the analytics engines they’re using to push you to discover. IMO until a hardware revolution comes, software is hitting endgame for the masses.

My data set isn’t so large I can’t analyze it with anything more than an Nvidia card.

Why do we need the cloud when iPhone SE has an AI chip?

There’s novelty to consider for consumers. User experience sucks. Maybe some graphical toolkits for home users to leverage their graphics cards more easily?

Stop thinking “technology = cloud” which is a meme driving their business not your creativity and satisfaction.

The days of wanking DSLs are coming to an end as automation makes stamping out websites trivial. We know what UIs people will use well enough for business. It’ll happen. It’s all just text, after all.

Don’t get hung up on corporates demands for tech that looks like X.

Make tech.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#650

Post by namelosw » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

I believe this kind of disillusion could not only simply explained by burnout. It's more like the Blue pill vs Red pill thing. Once you learned, you cannot unlearn. Blue pilled people are totally okay with these things, while some Red pilled people cannot get rid of their cynical views, and the feeling of defeating.

I work for a tech consultancy, apart from programming stuff, I also need to propose technical solutions to the clients, presenting slides with buzz word technologies which are actually very mediocre for me. Everybody else seems to be excited by those technologies. I can bear with it but sometimes I have same feeling as OP. If I own a startup doing similar business I would directly choose totally different sets of novel technologies that are much smaller, faster, outperform those solutions in almost every dimension.

Technologies are usually overlooked or being witch-hunted for tens of years. What we usually do today, there were a small bunch of people already knew them quite well more than half a century ago. That might mean now, you can already do what people usually do tens of years later, but too few people would agree with you. Just like John Barkus have to face "FORTRAN is extremely inefficient" bullshit for quite a while. After FORTRAN got rid of the inefficient reputation, he was interested in functional programming back in the day, while functional programming was even being witch-hunted till this day.

Imagine you have been thrown back to 1995, and a part of your job is to declare the "Blub Programming Language™"'s novelty over other languages to everybody (that would be a real job since there were so much marketing on the "Blub Programming Language™" back in the day), while there are even no basic things like parametric polymorphism and higher-order functions such as map and filter. Everybody was in hype, and completely ignore your cynical view on "Blub Programming Language™", despite the fact that those novel concepts are: very useful / straight forward to learn / already well established in the 1960s.