Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

have Bsc in CS, worked as software eng. for ~7 years.

tbh, i'm completely disillusioned with the industry and people in general. my expectations coming into the industry were based on the hacker ethos from the 80's and 90's, where a group of passionate and crazy smart people worked on tough and important problems, pulling engineering miracles daily. i'm talking about netscape and jamie zawinski, xerox and alan kay, l0pht and mudge, valve and gabe newell. legends.

entering the industry in the early to mid 2010's i found a landscape filled with self serving product managers, conmen (i think they call them executives and MBAs), and a populous of engineers that cared nothing for the tech or the work, and didn't need to as there were no real challenges to tackle.

perhaps i made bad career choices but what's frustrating is that the industry seemed to shift into something else. in other words, the hacker ethos was lost. the culture changed. instead of engineering-centric one it shifted to sales and "growth" and hype. engineers have become relegated to the "peasant" cast, working the fields so that the ceo can sell the company for an inflated sum and move on to the next con (sorry, startup).

as i see things, my choices are either to open a company of my own, making what i believe in, or go back to academia where i'll have more spare time to pursue my interests. but academia is dying, and dare i say irrelevant. it's an outdated concept for a world where i can get "educated" on a subject within a week using the internet, at least enough so i can accomplish what i need. i'm not going to discover the higgs boson, nor do i want to become an expert in a singular domain. i want to build things.

so that takes me back to creating a business around something i believe in. but, it'll have to be bootstrapped (vc money is just another boss), so the chances for success are extremely low.

what do you think?

Add to that: we tend to romanticise the past, and also the fact for every John Carmack there were thousands of behind the scenes people simply doing a job and maybe you'll see that the reality today is not much different.

The hacker ethos you envision does exist to some extent, I've been part of small units of people pushing boundaries, and it's deeply, deeply difficult work. Persistent frustration is the name of the game, and often a years worth of work will be rendered completely useless by something that happens a few weeks after you've completed something grandiose.

What I'm trying to drive at here is that there is a hacker ethos in large or small companies, but I don't think it's what you believe. And you have to seek it out, you don't "get a job" doing those kinds of things- passionate people seek passionate people.

Yep.

> it'll have to be bootstrapped (vc money is just another boss), so the chances for success are extremely low.

Also a lot of VCs are creeps. I've had a mate get pre-emptive death threats from one, another big one in London was found wandering the tube (subway) molesting women.

Bootstrapping is possible. You sound like a dev. I suggest making a minimal SaaS devtools product for something that bothers you.

I bootstrapped a website verification tool for 5 years, it's definitely possible.

If you're in the US, you can join an accelerator.

I mention this because "conmen (i think they call them executives and MBAs)" is a pretty broad brush to paint with, and if I had to take a guess, I'd think there's some association between your disillusionment with engineering as a profession and a soft-skills delta that might help you otherwise advance in your field and navigate corporate culture -- or culture generally.

This is all relevant because you may find yourself having a harder time with customer acquisition while running your own business if you don't re-examine your current world view.

That's probably step 0, at least if I were to try and build a mental model from what you wrote here.

An excellent resource: https://www.manager-tools.com/all-podcasts?field_content_dom...