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Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

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161–170 of 171 posts

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#161

> what do you think? I think you're not actually here to get advice, but to lament the state of things. You need to grow up. You have no respect for these people outside your profession, whose work you do not understand. You're blaming the environment for your personal unhappiness. Nobody is forcing you to stay in your lane. There's an endless amount of things you could do, you just don't want to take the risk, other…

Please don't cross into personal attack on HN. We've had to ask you this before. If you keep doing it we're going to end up having to ban you, so please just don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#162
I have been feeling the same way as you. I excelled working at Amazon and a few other companies for a decade, but I decided that the nature of the work just wasn't for me anymore.

I felt like I was building systems that would fundamentally make everyone's lives worse, and at the request of reprehensible executives who can't justify their behavior. I couldn't help but see the bloated disaster of whatever organization I was in, how most of our problems came from lack of communication and a few people's personal agenda, and pitied us all that we had to spend our days in a chattering, dimly-lit concrete box hunched over our screens.

When you learn programming, it feels like it gives you incredible agency. That, I think, is the reason that many people take up jobs with computers. The parallels to wizards, dark magic, and alchemy present in classic programming texts like SICP is no accident, with programming you really do create something from nothing!

The issue is that it gives people /too much/ agency, more so than any medium-sized business has any intention of giving to a mere employee. Many popular websites could be programmed and maintained by a very small group of people, but it is in the business's best interest to split the work into many microservices such that the loss of any one employee doesn't even slow team velocity. Scrum isn't a way of estimating projects, it is a regime for developing a 100% replaceable workforce.

On the other hand, the agency you feel when programming is actually very ephemeral and abstract. Most code at a tech company of any size is lucky to exist for more than a few years. And while you are physically programming, you are really a human ape checked out at a computer screen frying your brain on meaningless puzzles.

Now this isn't so dire--in fact it is no worse than what the rest of the workforce has to put up with, other than the fact that for some reason at this job people are supposed to have some internal "passion for building". So I assessed how I wanted to actually spend my days, took my poorly-managed 401k and savings and picked up a retail job. I'm ramen-retired, meet new people all day and help them figure out what they want. I haven't had to debug Kubernetes for months! I might not get paid like I used to, but I feel better than I have in years.

I'm sure that other people have better ways of coping with tech than I did, and I don't really feel any ill-will to those in the industry, I mostly just don't understand how they do it.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#163
I've worked for 10 years for a prominent Open Source company. Prior to that, I worked 8 years for a big data company and prior to that 12 years for a company that wrote banking software.

I can say with no reservations that Open Source is chock full of very smart people, many who love programming for the love of programming. (There are some who are in it for the money, or who go about it from a commercial angle. They can be strong contributors, too.) I'd highly recommend looking at ways to earn a living in Open Source, if passion for programming is what motivates you.

Good Luck!

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#164

> entering the industry in the early to mid 2010's i found a landscape filled with self serving product managers, conmen [...] > [...] the hacker ethos was lost. the culture changed I'm 41 so I probably entered the IT industry a decade before you. Nothing changed. It was always like that. And I just strongly suspect it's not just IT. That's basically what 'work' and 'business' is. Basically start having life outside…

> You could just reach back and look at the stuff you did that made you tick. Try to rediscover and extend it. I'm sure dreams of developing groundbreaking technology in business setting wasn't the only thing that made you interested in technology.

This right here is some good advice. Thanks! :)

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#165
post #162

I have been feeling the same way as you. I excelled working at Amazon and a few other companies for a decade, but I decided that the nature of the work just wasn't for me anymore. I felt like I was building systems that would fundamentally make everyone's lives worse, and at the request of reprehensible executives who can't justify their behavior. I couldn't help but see the bloated disaster of whatever organization…

> Now this isn't so dire--in fact it is no worse than what the rest of the workforce has to put up with, other than the fact that for some reason at this job people are supposed to have some internal "passion for building". So I assessed how I wanted to actually spend my days, took my poorly-managed 401k and savings and picked up a retail job. I'm ramen-retired, meet new people all day and help them figure out what they want. I haven't had to debug Kubernetes for months! I might not get paid like I used to, but I feel better than I have in years.

What kind of retail do you work in? Something technical?

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#166
post #35

I 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…

> 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. This an incredibly inaccurate assertion. I'm not aware of a single business person would ever say, "I think we can win simply on positioning." [1] While people may not understand/appreciate the pressures…

We are talking about the difference between a functional engineering culture (or mediocre) and a great hackerculture-based culture.

In both cases, the product has to work and be stable however in a mediocre culture the cost of adding features goes up significantly over time, while if you have a really great team then the cost of adding features compresses or remains similar to the early stages.

This mostly comes down to good technology choices, unassuming code, fast tests, optimized developer flow and really solid architectural choices.

I was not talking about plain bad engineering cultures like no testing, modifying code in production, copy-paste development,...

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#167

I'm wondering the same thing. There are also a lot of people in HN who share the same view. Maybe people can also think more about how to bring the hacker ethos back? Or prove if it's not economically feasible?

I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible. It will depend on the culture and value system of the company.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#168
Having been working in 80's and 90's I can definitely say you're romanticizing it. The people you're referring to were the exceptions, not the rule. All the problems we have today were present back then, too. We also bashed the waterfall methodology back in the 80's! The biggest difference between now and then is networking is cheaper, easier to configure, more reliable and waaay faster!

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, start your one thing. I’ve never worked a W2 job and I’ve been able to work on interesting problems my entire career.

Curious, what type of interesting problems did you work on?

Inventing a novel approach to telephony timing issues when voip was new.

Working in countless industries.

Inventing asynchronous technology for an industry specific use case.

Using amalgamation of existing technologies to resolve industry specific issues.

Loads of others.

If you are young and healthy without crushing debt. Don’t go looking for a job. Go find an adventure.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shit, are you me? That's what I said, I suppose there are lots of people in their early 30's having a dilemma. I'm also struggling with something similar, but I recognise I have much to attain in level of expertise but do I want to do that? Is another question.

> I suppose there are lots of people in their early 30's having a dilemma I'm approaching my 40s and I've had this dilemma since I was 25. I used to strive for being a top performer despite my hatred for working in this industry. I accelerated through the lower ranks and significantly increased my salary, but my happiness plateaued very early on. Over the last few years I've learned to lay low and give just enough to…

>The Gervais Principle

I cannot thank enough for the article, absolutely nailed it. I have seen & been part of a startup growing from a mid stage to a unicorn and now after reading it I can connect the dots, it all make sense in such exhilarating way. My journey till now has been from over performing looser to a looser which is not bad. I'm seeing a pattern though, every 8-9 month I over-perform become a looser then get completely disillusioned and go off to a backpacking retreat. This worries me a bit now.

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