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Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

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Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#721

Post by firecall »

tallgiraffe wrote: post #383
firecall wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been there, and am still recovering from burn out and a nervous breakdown. Corporates can be hell for me. I used to just want to drive my car into a tree on the way to work. I was so dead inside. Just nothing going on. I'm working from home now. But i'm still burnt out and recovering. I have no creativity. Things that should be straightforward seem pointless and repetitive. When I sit down at my computer I'm fil…

This whole thread, and your comment in particular, resonates. At the very least, knowing this might be the unspoken norm, rather than a personal challenge, that alone helps a ton.

Good to hear.

I saw a CBT Therapist for depression and anxiety issues. That helped.

I now guard my mental health like the crown jewels. I have to, because without it nothing else happens.

I HAVE to be careful - if I sense myself slipping then everything is at risk - relationships, my job, everything...

So I'm glad it helped!

We are not alone - there are more of us than we realise I think! :-)

It's a certain kind of cruelty to keep people locked in offices for over 8 hours a day under constant scrutiny.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#722

Post by BenjiWiebe »

ay wrote: post #91
makapuf wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats exactly what i did while working on dreaded big data. Got myself a microcontroller, implemented a small arm console and write fucking low level C code optimized the heck of cpu cycles for tiny games, no code reuse, no interfaced, no deadlines, no refacto, no security, no network, no politics. Barely version control (with appropriate "update" commit messages). Kept me sane while doing those things at work.

+1 on the small 1-2 weekend tangible projects, that you may have wanted to build before, but never got to, they are great for morale. This weekend I implemented RS232-powered RGB LED that is controlled attiny85, which reacts to strings sent to that very same RS232. A gross violation of standard, probably, but it works! It definitely added a lot of joy. I typed “git init” only after I finished the first working versio…

For even more fun with low level breaking of standards, bit-banging rs232 is fun and very doable. Don't use timers for timing either, just spin the cpu the right number of times. :)

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#723

Post by theanine »

awake wrote: post #568
theanine wrote: post #300

I wrote nearly this exact message in my mood journal today. I haven't had it quite as bad as the author, but I'm extremely, and it feels like permanently, burned out of working for a business/corporation. I fundamentally hate it. I walked out of my first corporate job after a month and now that I'm on my second, all I can think about is walking out. I hate it. I hate it so much. Every single day feels like I'm ruinin…

I'm going through similar feelings right now and I tend to bounce in and out of this state every couple of years. I think the root of it is depression and anxiety. I would seek mental health care before you make a life altering choice. If you had the flu you would go to the doctor, you wouldn't wake up and say wow I'm so tired I should quit my job. Mental health is no different. Medication, therapy, and changes to yo…

I do see a therapist and it's helped a lot. I think I'm just struggling now because I haven't been able to be seen during quarantine.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#724

Post by unemphysbro »

_coveredInBees wrote: post #281
dkural wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what is worth, "there's the product you produce to trade time for money, and then there's you" is precisely what alienation from labor feels like, and you're advocating that one must just accept it. People have a deep need to relate as full human beings to their work. Trying to be content with finding self-worth only outside of work doesn't solve burnout. Work is a big chunk of our time and energy. Humans need to…

Yes, I was surprised by that line. I tried to do that. 10 years ago I was a newly minted Ph.D. and my wife and I had to solve the 2 body problem and we compromised with our jobs so we could both be employed together in a nice town with a relatively low cost of living and a great place to raise a family. Our lives outside of work were fantastic! Great friends, nice house, lots of weekend activities, got my first pup (…

Funny enough, I just finished my PhD in December 2019. It's been hard getting interviews in the bay area (I want to stay close to family with older parents). I have great academic credentials but somehow I can't signal that to recruiters. I managed to snag an interview with a company I know I'll dread working for. The recruiter acknowledged it's a stress factory and weekends working where regular and I couldn't care less about their product.

I'm debating if I should take the job, assuming I pass the interview, to set foot in industry or keep searching continue working on a potentially monetizable passion project.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#725

Post by _coveredInBees »

unemphysbro wrote: post #724
_coveredInBees wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I was surprised by that line. I tried to do that. 10 years ago I was a newly minted Ph.D. and my wife and I had to solve the 2 body problem and we compromised with our jobs so we could both be employed together in a nice town with a relatively low cost of living and a great place to raise a family. Our lives outside of work were fantastic! Great friends, nice house, lots of weekend activities, got my first pup (…

Funny enough, I just finished my PhD in December 2019. It's been hard getting interviews in the bay area (I want to stay close to family with older parents). I have great academic credentials but somehow I can't signal that to recruiters. I managed to snag an interview with a company I know I'll dread working for. The recruiter acknowledged it's a stress factory and weekends working where regular and I couldn't care…

In this climate, I would probably lean towards taking up that job. You have a few good things going for you:

1. You have good academic credentials

2. You are trained in a "hot" field (my Ph.D. was in Physics but I've always loved software engineering and ML, but that was a very hard transition for me to pull off)

3. Getting a year or two under your belt is probably better than a large gap in your career if things continue to go south on the employment front. I suspect a decent number of ML/Datascience people are going to be laid off if they haven't already because they end up being more expensive and it isn't as easy to quantify their net impact / benefit to a company.

Just focus on how you can use your time at any job right now to improve your skills and round out your profile so you are a more attractive candidate for the kinds of jobs you'd like to target in a few years.

Also, if things bounce back in the next year, demand is still going to be high and you should be able to find a better job and switch relatively easily.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#726

Post by cblum »

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 great, thanks for sharing!

We have similar backgrounds in a way. I started coding as a kid too, at age 9. First Basic, then Pascal. Picked up C in my teens. Also tinkered with electronics and was part of an online robotics mailing list that was a lot of fun. It was very hard for me to get parts, living in the middle of nowhere in rural Southern Brazil, but some folks in the mailing list were super cool and shipped me parts from the US. I live in the US now.

I'm a CS major but took electives in embedded systems in college, and those were some of the most enjoyable classes I took. I'm now working on recalling some of that. Ordered some PIC parts and I'm currently taking an edX course on ARM programming.

My only problem right now is, I have no idea how I'd get into that space having a whole career built on server-side software.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#727

Post by cblum »

jimbokun wrote: post #712
cblum wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really expect just to do the fun stuff at work, but modern technology seems to progressively burn me out more and more. I was drawn to software at a time when it seemed like we had control over things. With the advent of the cloud I feel like that control keeps slipping away more and more. Kubernetes is my new nemesis. I seem to be in the minority that perceives it as unnecessarily complex for most tasks. Som…

> I seem to be in the minority that perceives it as unnecessarily complex for most tasks. My boss recently introduced Kubernetes to our software deployment. The first thing he said, though, is if you don't absolutely need Kubernetes, don't use it. It is extremely complicated and finicky and difficult to deploy correctly, and can bite you in subtle ways. Then he went on to describe, for our problems, how Kubernetes wa…

That's really cool of him.

I do think there are options to achieve all of that - scale without manual intervention, etc. - without Kubernetes though. At least where I work, if I look at the deployment issues we have, those are all the product of bad decisions and lack of action due to higher priorities. There's no reason why there couldn't be more automation. They're building something new on Kubernetes which looks promising (though I really hope that as an app developer I don't have to think of Kubernetes things, which just irk me), but the current platform would work well too if investment was made into automating the parts that aren't automated.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#728

Post by cblum »

stratosmacker wrote: post #627
tonyarkles wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

#729

Post by gmtx725 »

asdff wrote: post #710
gmtx725 wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

Fair enough, it obviously works for you. But on just a couple of points:

> 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

What's wrong with headphones for deep work? Or appreciate not everyone has these, but where I work atm we have small 'quiet zone' booths where you can take your laptop if you really want to focus deeply.

As for being interrupted, again maybe it's just a company culture thing. Where I work people are generally pretty respectful if they see you with headphones on intensely focused on something, they'll probably just ping you a message on slack asking when's good to talk. But equally if people have headphones off, open body language- everyone feels happy to strike up conversation and there are no barriers in the way of collaboration.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#730

Post by highlysyntropic »

Clubber wrote: post #666
highlysyntropic wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

It's a cost saving measure justified by facilitating communication evoked by people who do nothing but "communicate" for a living.

Cost saving's probably what is is, eh? Why should the cattle/chattel have their own pens/stables? Let's just put them all in their together.

The crazy extension of this is "free desks" where basically every place is a workstation, and you don't have any space to call your own.

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