Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help • Hacker News Board

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#701

Post by jacobolus » Tue, May 05, 2020, 7:54 PM UTC

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #524

jacobolus wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Working the land, being close to home, running a family business, belonging to a small town of people you all known, having the social safety net of many people that are close to you and your family, being an independent contributor in the town's economy, etc. etc. This is how things were a few hundred years ago. Let’s not overglamorize rural poverty. This life came with 20–40% infant mortality and a very high rate…

> In the best case food was mediocre (mostly bread or porridge or similar) > The local nobles took every liberty with peasants: robbery, beatings as sport, rape, murder. The roads between towns were plagued with bandits. You are cherry-picking examples that are in no way representative of the life of most humans. Plenty of evidence shows otherwise.

My “cherry picked examples” are the life stories of people I have personally met (and with high likelihood of your own ancestors and their neighbors within the past 150 years – certainly of my ancestors ~5 generations ago who were European peasants). It obviously wasn’t the case that every peasant was raped and then murdered by a local lord, but such violence was common and a constant threat.

Rural peasants were and are typically a foot shorter than people living in wealthy industrialized countries today (or people in hunter–gatherer tribes for that matter). Almost all of their calories come from staple starches, which they supplement as best they can. Periods of extreme hunger are common enough that most peasants experienced them at least a few times over a lifetime. What kind of good nutrition do you think people have/had?

Life expectancy was under 40 years old. Even life expectancy after age 5 was pretty short.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#702

Post by sanderjd » Tue, May 05, 2020, 7:56 PM UTC

edraferi wrote: post #667

sanderjd wrote: post #564

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> 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.

Maybe you should switch to a different programming domain. For example, embedded systems and security software tends to value correctness a lot more than e-commerce does.

This is less a current problem than a phenomenon I have seen over time. I do agree that different technologies attract different kinds of philosophies and it's definitely something I keep in mind when thinking about what to work on.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#703

Post by growlist » Tue, May 05, 2020, 7:58 PM UTC

Veen wrote: post #675

growlist wrote: post #663

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> Give them the minimum to keep them happy and keep your job and focus the rest of your energy on something that will benefit you. In my experience this is the type of person in your team that - instead of consulting colleagues to arrange holidays cooperatively and ensure there's cover available, and that parents do ok given the extra encumbrances they're subject to etc. etc. - goes ahead and books out a whole year's…

You may think they are unpleasant, but they may be happier for it. Perhaps they prioritize their time with friends and family above their relationships at work. They're turning other people's loyalty to the company and solidarity with colleagues to their advantage. It's not an irrational strategy if it maximizes happiness.

This person came from the public sector. Draw your own conclusions.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#704

Post by blaser-waffle » Tue, May 05, 2020, 7:59 PM UTC

Gravityloss wrote: post #696

eloff wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Job progression up the ladder is mostly inferior to lateral progression to a new company. That's partly why people stay such a short time in a role. You'll get no loyalty, humanity, or recognition from the company. Give them the minimum to keep them happy and keep your job and focus the rest of your energy on something that will benefit you.

Have you worked in HR or management where these career paths are created? Why doesn't it make sense to keep really good employees? If you know they are really good? Why does it make more sense to let that person go and pay some "maybe good" person up front much more?

Conventional wisdom, plus a few studies, has shown that if you want to get 15% or more of a raise, you need to jump somewhere else. Since they're hiring from the market, they have to offer (decent) market rates, while your current job is going to keep paying you at whatever rate you agreed to.

After a while it becomes a self-fulling prophecy -- they know you're jumping in 2-3 years, so they're not even going to try to keep you.

The talent pool isn't shrinking, either, so there will be more devs, and more IT guys -- be they in Seattle, or India -- as things more forward. This means they can probably find someone to replace you, and while it may be a loss of productivity, the lower salary (relative to increasing yours) may offset the costs.

Plus inside threats are big -- a senior dev-ops guy who has been there for 8 years knows how to break things just right, skim things off the top, or just take a "agent fee" from some vendors to push for their product to be rolled out. Keep em under a 3-4 years and they can't get their roots in enough to damage things.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#705

Post by advertising » Tue, May 05, 2020, 8:00 PM UTC

It’s a bit of a paradox when you try something audacious like a startup.

I raised money, had 6 full-time employees and went hard and a year in realized it wasn’t going to work. It sucked, the stress, the grind, the failure.

That experience has left me in the same state where you realize If you can get a startup off the ground that you can actually do anything you really want to go after.

But the flip side is you also now how have a taste for how bad it can go (if it failed) and now I find I can’t take a step towards anything without that fear.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#706

Post by Gravityloss » Tue, May 05, 2020, 8:31 PM UTC

blaser-waffle wrote: post #704

Gravityloss wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you worked in HR or management where these career paths are created? Why doesn't it make sense to keep really good employees? If you know they are really good? Why does it make more sense to let that person go and pay some "maybe good" person up front much more?

Conventional wisdom, plus a few studies, has shown that if you want to get 15% or more of a raise, you need to jump somewhere else. Since they're hiring from the market, they have to offer (decent) market rates, while your current job is going to keep paying you at whatever rate you agreed to. After a while it becomes a self-fulling prophecy -- they know you're jumping in 2-3 years, so they're not even going to try t…

That didn't answer my question at all. You said "if you want to get a 15% or more raise, you need to jump somewhere else". That's just coming out of thin air or based on "other companies do it". If you do work in HR or as a manager, what's the rational basis deciding just that number?

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#707

Post by asdff » Tue, May 05, 2020, 8:39 PM UTC

fuball63 wrote: post #671

rabidrat wrote: post #639

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> 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.

I'm coming from the 8 hours sleep, 8 hours of work, 8 hours of other stuff. There will obviously be things like chores and eating in there, but I think there is meaning and purpose derived from those things as well.

The other stuff column goes far too fast.

It takes me two hours from waking up to walking into work, so now we are at 6 hours. Then it takes me an hour to get home, down to 5. After prepping, cooking, eating, and cleaning dinner, as well as making lunch for the next day (usually just packaging leftovers), I lose another hour at least, 4 hours left. Getting ready for bed is a whole process, and the average human takes 14 minutes to fall asleep, so call it a half hour there, and throw in a half hour for just misc. waste time throughout the whole day for good measure, and you are left with three hours, or 12.5% of your day, that is truly yours. If you need to run an errand after work or do some chores, that time evaporates.

I guess you can strive to make productive use of those 180 minutes, but after a whole day it's hard to work remotely efficiently. A quick peek on HN turns into a 30 minute stint. I love playing guitar and reading books, both make me quite happy, but I find sometimes there just isn't enough time to engage in these hobbies, which makes me depressed. Sometimes I indulge on the dopamine hit of playing guitar for an hour or two, which makes me very happy, but at the cost of sleep, which ruins productivity and energy the next day, I get less done, and fall to a new low.

Sometimes I wonder how older generations of my family coped with full time factory work half a century ago, then I remember all of the raging alcoholics and realized that no, they didn't really cope well with this post industrial revolution work week construct either.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#708

Post by asdff » Tue, May 05, 2020, 8:54 PM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #157

throwaway839246 wrote: post #130

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I'd add open office plans to this. It's awful. You never quite get to focus, you don't build the rapport with your team, you don't get to customize your physical environment. Development really became a white collar version of the assembly line.

It's kind of weird by now. They will happily offer you $200k in annual salary, but an office with a window where you could keep a potted plant is out of the question.

"remember that sad library basement with the rows of depressing tables and power strips where you cried during finals in undergrad? welcome to your office for your next 40 years."

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#709

Post by asdff » Tue, May 05, 2020, 9:01 PM UTC

unclebucknasty wrote: post #305

highlysyntropic wrote: post #265

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exactly, what the hell is that about? is it a form of abuse like trying to keep everyone under control? is it a form of psychological conditioning to remind you that you just a resource whose top priority is to be interrupted at any time so knowing that you don't really have any personal space sovereignty or privacy to your own thoughts or creativity but that you must answer and create only for the collective? I don'…

I can't say for certain, but I would guess it has something to do with the idea that all people must be available to each other at all times for the sake of raw productivity. So if there is a problem there is no time to wait. You just walk right up to the person you need to speak with and get it resolved then and there. Open offices facilitate that feeling of persistent accessibility and production. No closed doors t…

In practice, this sucks. I have been both the asker and the reciever of the open floorspace surprise question. The reciever looses their train of thought and will struggle to give a decent answer off the cuff, the asker gets a shitty response as a result, and probably has to ask someone else more questions. Far better would be an email, and definitely not slack.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#710

Post by asdff » Tue, May 05, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

gmtx725 wrote: post #526

jwalton wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I had a cubicle, I had a second chair and a white board in my cube, and people would come for a visit when they wanted to talk about something, and we'd draw on the whiteboard, and we were social and bouncing ideas off each other. Now, I'm in an open floor plan office, and when the guy who sits literally next to me wants to talk to me, he sends me something over slack. I think people don't want to disturb e…

But what about the serendipitous things, like the unplanned conversations that lead to fruitful ideas, or the guy you're not directly speaking to overhearing your conversation and solving your problem for you? It seems to me you would lose all of that in an environment where you have to deliberately make the effort to enter someone else's closed space to talk to them.

Those still happen in common spaces, having an office or a cubicle won't eliminate those. The difference is, with your own space you can do deep work on your own terms. No longer is your train of thought constantly interrupted, and if someone does have a question or wants to meet or just hang out and shoot the shit, they can shoot you an email for a good time where you can devote them your full attention. Academia doesn't have this problem of isolation of ideas, and every professor there is has an office. Communicating to your colleagues is a company culture issue, not a physical space issue.

Fresh out of undergrad, open office layouts feel familiar to the long hours spent sitting at big tables in library basements, so I can see why some people like it initially. After a few years, you will be pining for four walls and a door to get anything done.