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Surviving Disillusionment

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Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#171

Post by shay_ker »

mdorazio wrote: post #142
slumdev wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many doctors would still do the job if they got paid a middle class salary? Nearly all of them. The most common specialties do pay middle-class salaries. The very highest salaries (almost all in surgical specialties) skew the mean quite a bit, but the median is not as high as you think it is. It hasn't been a lifestyle profession for 20 years.

For those questioning this, see [1] for a decent list by state. The median doctor makes less than a FAANG employee, and that's after many more years of debt-fueled education and residency. [1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Ph...

They certainly make less money, but it's still, in general, a high salary.

How many doctors would there be if the salary was 60k?

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#172

Post by shay_ker »

burntoutfire wrote: post #72
shay_ker wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many doctors would still do the job if they got paid a middle class salary? It's pretty clear, to me at least, that very few would even bother. Veterinarians are a good comparison - there's very few, low salaries, passionate about animals, and high suicide rates due to unending debt. Yes - some doctors end up volunteering with Doctors without Borders & similar non-profit groups. Some engineers have gotten more po…

In Poland, being a doctor paid a pittance up until around 2005. Your only shot at a decent income was taking bribes (the medicine is socialized, so doctors are in charge in state's resources and, when bribed, will direct them at you) or starting a private practice, but for that you'd usually have to be 40+ years old. And yet, people did become doctors and worked hard. It was still a respectable profession, and hard t…

Sure I'm not saying there will be 0 doctors if the salary was lower, but there would certainly be a lot less.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#173

Post by mdorazio »

shay_ker wrote: post #171
mdorazio wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those questioning this, see [1] for a decent list by state. The median doctor makes less than a FAANG employee, and that's after many more years of debt-fueled education and residency. [1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Ph...

They certainly make less money, but it's still, in general, a high salary. How many doctors would there be if the salary was 60k?

You mean if they still made more than most public school teachers? I’d be willing to bet a lot. People who choose professions that directly help people tend to be motivated by more than money.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#174

Post by Shacklet0n »

cyberdrunk wrote: post #167
Shacklet0n wrote: post #141

I worked in software for 15 years after graduating B.Sc. engineering (electrical). As a software engineer, I Worked in pharma, aerospace, heavy industry (mining), logistics and some general web development as well. I got so fed up with the industry BS; tool churn for tool churn's sake, brogrammer culture, etc. Particularly sick of BS mantras like "move fast and break things"; the attitude that technology is necessari…

Presumably you could also do a lot of embedded software work that solves similar problems as controls?

Yes, and I am considering moving more in that direction. I've actually quite enjoyed specifying and implementing safety-critical PLC software in my new career. But I'd really like to invest more time in formal specification and verification, particularly in embedded software!

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#175

Post by dang »

cambalache wrote: post #103
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think getting older is part of it. I used to love learning about different assembly architectures and spent lots of time on it, but as I got older a couple things happened: one, other things take up more of my time. Two, I already know a lot about assembly, so I don't get much from learning a new architecture that is probably only marginally different from one I already know. I remember discovering HN around 2008 w…

> I remember discovering HN around 2008 when I was a teenager. > Now, it's rare for me to come across something I don't understand And here I was, reading you thinking you were Donald Knuth, I think you vastly overestimate the breadth and depth of your knowledge.

Hey, I appreciate your feeling for intellectual humility, but please don't express it as a personal attack. That just turns a noble feeling into a nasty one. Plus it's against both the rules and the intended spirit of the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#176

Post by unphased »

mianos wrote: post #95
unemphysbro wrote: post #35

The reason I got into tech/coding as a teen was the diy punk rock ethos. I remember spending weeks trying to figuring out if I could break drm in the latest video game ('tricking' starforce in splinter cell 3 was such a cool thing). Then I moved on to academia where I felt the ethos extended. Academia was life consuming and by the end I just had to leave. Now that I'm job hunting post-phd, I'm trying to rekindle that…

You will find there are still a lot of companies that value people and broad skills. Some company leadership principles are even anti leadedship principles and factory pop-out leet coding developers.

> companies that value people and broad skills

This. They're out there. I had to go through a lot of them to get to where I am now and the journey has been worth it. Also, there are lots of little tricks that you can use to make the journey more comfortable. Some of it is technical and some of it is EQ-related/interpersonal. It's very important to step outside the box and think about what kind of work you could be proud of achieving, and then you can take steps toward honing the skills that will get you there.

For instance, an example of little things that make your job related duties more streamlined will surprise you with how much of a difference it makes for making the daily routine more enjoyable. It really adds up.

The example: We have to fill in timesheets every 2 weeks. Well I sat down one day and spent an hour writing a bookmarklet in js that autofills the timesheet, hacking through the silly event handlers so I don't have to manually click and type on 20 cells. I even had to come back to it a few months later to add in logic to handle PTO and Holidays... I'm so glad I wrote it. Shared it with my coworkers too, which greatly increased its return on investment.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#177

Post by Baeocystin »

jasode wrote: post #168
Baeocystin wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhones are boring compared to 8- or 16-bit computers, if what you are interested in is how the thing works. Every aspect of the iPhone's design is meant to conceal anything other than exactly what Apple thinks you should be able to do. It's maddening... if you're the type to be fascinated with the nature of systems. That's not age speaking. They are just two fundamentally different things.

>iPhones are boring compared to 8- or 16-bit computers, if what you are interested in is how the thing works. [...] That's not age speaking. They are just two fundamentally different things. The iPhone was just one example. It doesn't matter whether the new thing is Android, or Raspberry Pi, Arduino, or latest FPGA from Xilinx/Altera. Even though all of those can do much more advanced things than the toy computers I…

I don't think it's strange at all to claim a less-powerful system can be more fun that a more-powerful one. There's something to be said for systems that are simple enough that you can, with some effort, hold the whole machine in your head, so to speak. That was the feeling I got with my C=128. Anything much past that, and you have to resort to simplifications. Which is fine, but may be less satisfying, depending on what you were getting out of it in the first place. Getting really in to the edges of JavaScript on its own is a very different feeling than getting in to the edges of the system-as-a-whole, right? Barry Schwartz' The Paradox of Choice gets in to this to some degree, and is an interesting read.

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#178

Post by pgt »

daniel2x wrote: post #60
pgt wrote: post #48

My monastery is Lisp (mainly Clojure) and the ritual is functional programming. It keeps me sane and in software. But today, and for the next two weeks I have to deal with the hell-hole that is the JavaScript/NPM/Webpack ecosystem and it made me want to quit my job. This is why I warn people about Lisp: it can ruin you and make you unproductive for a long time if you are forced to use inferior tools.

Thoughts and prayers.

I experienced your comment as snarky. What did you mean?

Re: Surviving Disillusionment

#179

Post by madrox »

jodrellblank wrote: post #136
madrox wrote: post #31

There was a post on HN a couple days ago about a loss of tech optimism. I've been searching for a bit and unable to find it for linking. It (and the associated comment thread) had no answers. This feels like as close as you can get to an answer. My advice to anyone struggling with disillusionment in tech: get a job doing software at a non-tech company with a mission you care about. You'll remember that technology is…

Was it "No more bold visions of the future"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24882565

That was it! Thanks! I would add the link if I could still edit
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