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How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

thebuffgopher.substack.com

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Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#51

Post by gavinray »

smackeyacky wrote: post #43
formerkrogemp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good research. Is this going to become common from now on? What do we do when AI content and human content are indistinguishable?

We'll do what we always did: ignore the drivel and the disjointed garbage and sift out the information. In this case, it doesn't matter whether it's GP-3 or not, it is a no-content blog post of which you can find hundreds of thousands of other examples, none of which have any new information in them. We get it: the way some people have built up tech careers as being something exciting can prove to be very disappointi…

Yet this can sit on the first page and novel + interesting technical content disappears with ~2-3 votes, never to be seen again frequently.

Oh whale.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#52

Post by sidlls »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #45
sidlls wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not obscenely overpaid. We're relatively more well paid than other workers in our class, but we're still generally getting the short end of the stick. Even people in my boat. I recently won a decent IPO jackpot at the company I have worked for a few years--have $3MM or so in investments as a result. The CEO has well over 100x that, and well over 10x any IC who's been at the company from day 1. There's no good…

> We are not obscenely overpaid. Everything following this line seems to point in the other direction. Just because a smaller percentage of higher-ups received more doesn't mean you / we are not obscenely overpaid, it just means "they" are phenomenally obscenely overpaid and at the top of the exponential scale of "what's wrong with shit these days". Teachers and nurses, as the pandemic demonstrated, are essential to…

Laborers at most levels in our society deserve better compensation and treatment. The lower on the socioeconomic ladder, the more so.

That some are underpaid compared to the value they deliver than others isn’t controversial to me. What is controversial is the suggestion that because some in the labor class are somewhat better paid they shouldn’t complain about also being underpaid relative to the value they provide.

I have more in common with the $35k/yr teacher than with the CEO of the company I work for. Not just because of relative economic position, but because I have personally been more or less homeless and impoverished in my life at various points.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#53

Post by spaetzleesser »

ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

"Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. The focus required to deep dive into complex issues get's broken with meetings that developers shouldn't be attending. You can attend meetings or you program rarely can you do both effectively on the same day and rarely can you get the focus you once had."

Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions. Nowadays you have to attend meetings and always have somebody breathe down your neck. Hard to accomplish anything that requires experimentation over months until it works.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#54

Post by galoisscobi »

ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

> Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever.

How do people deal with this? I'm expected to take on more and more meetings and my time to do deep work diminishes as I go on. I'm curious to learn more from people who are handling this well.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#55

Post by Trasmatta »

ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

Re: meetings, I really think we need more tech companies taking the initiative to cut out meetings entirely. I think many companies would be shocked to find out that work would continue on, productivity would actually go up, and reported employer happiness would improve.

I think it would be a "2020 remote work" style revelation for many teams. Many teams thought remote work would never work out for them, but when they were forced to do it, they found it actually worked great.

That being said, I doubt many companies would ever find the idea tractable. So we should start with something simpler: you should never schedule more than 2 hours worth of meetings for your developers in any given week. And those 2 hours should be very carefully considered, such that they don't segment their day.

The amount of wasted productivity that comes from endless meetings is staggering. Not to mention the mental health hit of trying to do challenging knowledge work while having your day constantly interrupted.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#56

Post by Trasmatta »

sibit wrote: post #50
ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

> Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. The focus required to deep dive into complex issues get's broken with meetings that developers shouldn't be attending. You can attend meetings or you program rarely can you do both effectively on the same day and rarely can you get the focus you once had. I recently started a new job where we have weekly recurring "standups" with clients. Most of the gaps b…

I'm curious, how did your boss respond to that?

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#57

Post by KerrAvon »

emerged wrote: post #22
stephentmcm wrote: post #6

GPT-3 post? This rabbles with no direction and feels like something AI would write. There's also an odd jump at the end like it's trying to talk about gaming/MtG but doesn't at the same time.

Author is 20 according to bio. It’s probably reasonable to expect GPT-3 and 20 year old tech guys to sound very very similar. The tech will make its way up the age ranges.

No post body was provided.

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#58

Post by Trasmatta »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #53
ipaddr wrote: post #44

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't…

"Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. The focus required to deep dive into complex issues get's broken with meetings that developers shouldn't be attending. You can attend meetings or you program rarely can you do both effectively on the same day and rarely can you get the focus you once had." Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions…

God, the thought of being treated like a skilled professional and trusted to actually do your job, rather than a code monkey who has to report their progress every single day on how many of the endless "user stories" they got done the previous day...

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#59

Post by rablackburn »

Trasmatta wrote: post #56
sibit wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. The focus required to deep dive into complex issues get's broken with meetings that developers shouldn't be attending. You can attend meetings or you program rarely can you do both effectively on the same day and rarely can you get the focus you once had. I recently started a new job where we have weekly recurring "standups" with clients. Most of the gaps b…

I'm curious, how did your boss respond to that?

My bet would be something like:

"haha, yeah it's ridiculous, right?"

IME it's sadly common for an organisation to have a Problem, for everyone to acknowledge there is a Problem, for someone to even come up with a roadmap to solve the Problem...and yet nothing will change because there is some ineffable disconnect between knowing and doing.

Really it seems to come down something like "well, if we're going to go to all the effort to change something, we better do it right. If you can't prove the change you're going to make is going to solve this issue perfectly forever it's better to leave it as it is right now. rather than waste all that effort"

or, "good idea, let's add a weekly meeting to monitor fixing this issue"

Re: How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

#60

Post by rablackburn »

jaggederest wrote: post #41
stephentmcm wrote: post #6

GPT-3 post? This rabbles with no direction and feels like something AI would write. There's also an odd jump at the end like it's trying to talk about gaming/MtG but doesn't at the same time.

Here's the GPT-3 continuation when prompted with the first full paragraph: And now that it has come full circle—when I'm finally able to find a job at an agency and find myself not only at work but at home. It seems crazy that I don't have to figure out how to fix my broken life. There are so many things I need to learn. When I go to work every day, that's when I remember a lot more about how I came to see TechCrunch…

> Much less coherent, to me, but you'll get different results every time you try I suppose!

Give the mechanical Turk a few minutes to find your post and tweak the response to that specific prompt ;)

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