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How did I get so unhappy working in tech?

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

#151

Post by eru »

twblalock wrote: post #89
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…

Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made. Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in. Almost all problems are really people problems, and people problems can only be solved by communicating with other people. Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed. To succeed you…

> Almost all problems are really people problems, and people problems can only be solved by communicating with other people.

I must dissent.

You are right that many problems look like people problems. But in all honesty, we have no clue how to solve people problems.

Talking can sometimes work, but it's not a panacea. Otherwise parliaments would have solved all problems by now.

A shockingly large amount of time, you can solve people problems by turning them into technical problems, and thus amenable to technical solutions.

To give a silly example: if people keep walking in on you when you are on the loo, a flippable keep-out sign or a simple lock on the door is a much better solution than talking to the intruders.

Less silly: if people keep breaking your build, you might be tempted to say that the solution is to clearly communicate with them to let them know that breaking the build is not OK.

The technical solution is to set up a pre-merge check that makes sure everything compiles and your automated tests succeed.

Guess which of the two approaches works better in practice? Especially when people are under stress to deliver?

(Know, if your co-workers find ways to deliberately bypass the pre-merge checks, _and_ also keep breaking the build; then this should probably be treated as a people probably. Your company should give them a warning once, and then probably fire them on the next offense.)

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

#152

Post by cableshaft »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #138
DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been having similar thoughts recently. With just 4 years into my career (working at a FAANG for last 2), I too am looking around for a job. But it all looks the same corporate BS, providing "business value", grinding for promotion, being a small cog in a enormous machine, dealing with middle managers and their egos and endless insecurity, estimations and deadline chasing, I feel so done and tired. Add the bull…

same, i'm in a job where i can sort of coast, it's stressful, the people mostly, but the work is easy. i lost interest in dealing with all the bs and whenever i try to look at the job market i just feel too demoralised to go through all the hoops just to get another job where i will be dealing with the same or new kind of bs. i feel like this may be my last coding job after 15 years, maybe i can do another 2-3 more.

What do you think you might do after coding? Management or a different field entirely? I've considered management but I also don't really want to deal with people bullshit, and I'm having a harder and harder time listening to bullshit business meetings in general, and I imagine there'd be a lot more of those.

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

#153

Post by spaetzleesser »

onion2k wrote: post #77
spaetzleesser wrote: post #53

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." Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions…

Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions. I did that too. Quite often the project failed after those months because we'd built the wrong thing, or the landscape had changed, or the customer had failed to spec what they needed well enough. This was the "Waterfall" methodology, and Agile, with all its meetings, is specifically designed to fix that problem.

They failed because you were overmanaged and leadership didn’t trust people to do the right thing. We were very agile back then, iterated quickly towards the goal but we didn’t do rituals, stand ups and other ceremonies. We just talked to each other and stakeholders.

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

#154

Post by spaetzleesser »

csande17 wrote: post #106
onion2k wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions. I did that too. Quite often the project failed after those months because we'd built the wrong thing, or the landscape had changed, or the customer had failed to spec what they needed well enough. This was the "Waterfall" methodology, and Agile, with all its meetings, is specifically designed to fix that problem.

My favorite Agile failure case is when you have all the meetings and still fail, because you spent all your time on Agile paperwork instead of designing and building a product.

You just didn’t do enough stand ups /s

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

#155

Post by cableshaft »

gumby wrote: post #66

> I knew nothing about the bitterness that seeps into your soul when you’re working in tech. I wonder if the author got into “tech” because it seemed like a lucrative career and, as they say elsewhere, it looks to the outside world like they are doing something useful. I’ve only been working “in tech” about 40 years and pretty much every day feels exciting to me. That the author feels differently doesn’t mean there i…

I've been working in tech pretty much my entire career (about 20 years at this point) and I haven't had an 'every day is exciting to me' situation in at least 10 years.

There's so much bullshit everywhere nowadays, and despite a red hot tech market I'm having difficulty getting decent job offers outside of healthcare, insurance, b2b, and fintech, which I'm guessing are probably the worst fields for that bullshit (part of that is probably where I live, admittedly, those are the biggest industries here).

Finding some fun again playing around with VR development in my spare time, though. Maybe I'll make the shift to that in a year or so after I build up more experience at it, make a small game or two, and start feeling excitement again.

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

#156

Post by spaetzleesser »

tuyiown wrote: post #112
spaetzleesser wrote: post #53

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." Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions…

> Hard to accomplish anything that requires experimentation over months until it works. That said, the industry matured so much that experimentation that fold up as planned are generally doomed by large structural issue in the approach. 20 years ago, tweaking and digging your way in trench was the expected path since having to work around implementation details and bugs happened whatever you wanted to get done.

We are still fiddling endlessly with edge cases in Kubernetes or AWS. I don’t see much difference.

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

#157

Post by pragmatic »

malka wrote: post #130
0xedd wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have yet to meet a company where a developer's opinion is taken into account in software architecture and solution design. And, usually, like some other guy here said, they aren't invited to these types of meetings, at all. The best line I heard, from a team lead that wouldn't back a "don't implement a task queue using postgresql", was "because I don't understand it/am not familiar with it [the alternative solution,…

Why do you care ? If top monkey want to spend money on stupid shit, I'll happily indulge it. It is not my money that is badly spent anyway.

I envy you if you can go through your whole career like that.

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

#158

Post by SenHeng »

tome wrote: post #95
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…

I'm generally puzzled by the HN conventional wisdom against meetings, and I'm puzzled by this thread specifically because there doesn't seem to be a single commenter who is as much as just fine with meetings. Am I really in such a small minority, or has HN turned into an echo chamber on this issue, where no one with a countervailing opinion dares to get a word in? Having a meeting interrupt my work ranges from slight…

I'm on your side but that's because my team is small and any meeting I'm attending means my input is required. The daily standups are helpful in knowing what is the progress of the overall project and whether I should stop to help somewhere else, and also gives me a chance to talk with my colleagues. I suspect most of the people objecting here aren't attending discussion based meetings but heres-the-latest-news type of meetings.

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

#160

Post by david38 »

0xedd wrote: post #109
twblalock wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made. Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in. Almost all problems are really people problems, and people problems can only be solved by communicating with other people. Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed. To succeed you…

Have yet to meet a company where a developer's opinion is taken into account in software architecture and solution design. And, usually, like some other guy here said, they aren't invited to these types of meetings, at all. The best line I heard, from a team lead that wouldn't back a "don't implement a task queue using postgresql", was "because I don't understand it/am not familiar with it [the alternative solution,…

I have yet to work at a company where the developer’s wasn’t the primary opinion that mattered.

Pro tip: avoid working working at companies that follow HIPPO (highest paid person’s opinion).

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