Academia isn't dying and you can definitely build a lot of things that are much more advanced than what most companies are doing.
Now if you want these things to be used right now, yes academia isn't the environment you are looking for.
Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo
31–40 of 171 posts
Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo
#32We should start something. Any ideas of things that we can hack on?
Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo
#33First I would take a step back and try to view the situation with less judgment. It's easy to look at the past and mythologize it and imagine it as perfect. Maybe there are more MBAs and executives and thought leaders today but the past you're romanticizing would have its own frustrations and road blocks. The other thing it sounds like you're doing is looking around for a great opportunity rather than zeroing in on a…
Not to deny the obvious frustration of the poster, but it's sad to see such wise and calm advice currently being downvoted.
Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo
#34Defintely start your own company. You spent enough time in the industry to know what problems are worth solving. Take a very specific problem and solve it better than any generic solutions available. Be the king of your narrow niche market, and when you're successful maybe broaden it. My favourite stories of engineers bootstrapping their own business with no investors, no employees, no MBA: Sidekiq https://www.indieh…
How do you address his argument with the chances of success being too low?
Keep trying.
Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo
#35I think you want to seek out companies where the main business risk is technology risk still. That would be database companies, developer tools, artificial intelligence startups, operating systems, ...
Probably drones and sensor-companies also qualify but don't really know much about that industry.
SpaceX's reusable rocket is a great example of technology risk and so is Tesla's affordable electric car.
Most startups today don't take these types of risks, SaaS is well-understood. The risks these companies take (in the eyes of investors) are in matching product features to the market and profitable go-to-market.
If you want all management to defer to engineers and their needs then you need to seek out a company where the success of those engineers will make or break the company.
That said, I think product and businesspeople are often not aware that having really solid tech yields dividends for years to come and will help them outcompete any peer as well increase the acquisition likelihood. Saas-companies should have a strong engineering culture, but unfortunately it's not a requirement to be a successful company in this category.
Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo
#36There are still FLOSS projects that still have that hacker culture you mention. You can still build things and feel good, though you probably won't get paid. Check their mailing lists, Github issues, IRC chats, Slack or whatever channel these projects use for communication, there are big discussions in what technical decisions to take. These projects always need help and also have different problems to be solved.
It might fill that gap you have (at least it did for me).
In the end you will see your job just as an income source but most of your passion will be in contributing to FLOSS projects, if you get paid for contributing to FLOSS even better.
You mention those 80s 90s hacker ethos, be like that, be curious, try checking someone's else code, play it with, read what things need to be improved, hack it and show it.
Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo
#37In the old days people who thought they had a business idea would get a bank loan. You don't need VC money if you believe in your idea and think it can be successful.
Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo
#38Get involved in the decentralization space (and not just cryptocurrencies). The hacker ethos is still alive and well there. Plenty of smart people trying to change the world like the hackers of the 80's and 90's and it's all fresh and new. Decentralized services (like IPFS, Sia, Ethereum, Scuttlebutt, Matrix, etc) are the new frontier for development and there's so much cool stuff being created.
>and not crypto currencies
>Ethereum
I understand that Eth is more than a cryptocurrency, but as your comment demonstrates, dividing those worlds isn't always quite so simple.
Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo
#39Tech ultimately doesn't matter. It's all about solving problems you (and by association the business) run into.
The hacker ethos never really existed.
My suggestions is to try and get into management because they need more people like you who can advocate for tech properly.
Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo
#40There's a wide community of people feeling just like you, assembling in "Maker communities", as they call it.
Good entry points are the IndieHackers podcast, and conferences like MicroConf (watch their conference talk recordings here, especially Patrick McKenzie's aka patio11 [0])
The basic idea is to create a sustainable job you love for yourself, the people that depend on you, and many others. The antithesis of "Our incredible journey", aka VC sellout.
Once you've done this, you can do whatever you want. Build a game company. Pursue academia [1]. Join the demoscene, tour the world, join demo party competitions and write sick 64k intros. Commit to open source and help the Haiku project. Hang around at your local hacker space and help create an independend mesh-based ISP.
I know exactly what you're talking about. I watched the Netscape documentary "Project Code Rush" [2] with Jamie Zawinski and loved the spirit and the feeling of doing something important. It feels like it's in such a stark contrast to many people's reality, pushing JIRA tickets in a toxic AdTech startup. However, I think it's an illusion. There never was a "golden age", and people simply forget that bullshit jobs always existed, you just don't see domcumentaries of them, nobody would watch them. For me, what helped me was realizing that the world, or the "industry" doesn't owe me anything, and I'm completely on my own, and if I want to do something meaningful, well, I'll have to create my own sustainable job to support myself and my loved ones.
There's a longer writeup by Alex Hillmann (who runs "Stacking the Bricks", with Amy Hoy) here [3], I'm just scratching the surface of the basic idea here.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHoBKQDRkJcOY2BO47q5Ruw/vid...
[1] Side note: academia seems mostly only broken in the US at the moment. In the rest of the world, it seems just fine - apart from the usual problems academia inherently has, but at least you can pursue an academic career without accumulating debt here in Europe. If you feel like it, why not move?