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I quit the tech industry (2015)

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Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#131

Post by ghaff »

ctvo wrote: post #124
towaway15463 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting that you don’t consider landscaping, juice bars, and wind surfing schools as beneficial to the economy. Could it be that these highly educated and intelligent people you are talking about see things differently? Perhaps after 5 years in tech they realize that none of the companies they’ve worked for are actually providing any benefit to society and are perhaps even a net negative. That realization is…

A baker, landscaper, or small business owner doesn't need to do 10 years of additional education at specialize schools, not that they're less beneficial. The charitable reading of the OP's comments would be that it's an inefficient use of society's resources to invest in the education of these folks only to have them leave their respective fields after a short amount of time. The broader question is how do we change…

A ton of people, including many in technical or technical-adjacent roles, don't really directly use a lot of what they learned in school. Yes, learn how to learn, critical thinking, etc. But directly use what they learned in XYZ class? A lot less.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#132

Post by lostcolony »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #101
nnoitra wrote: post #62

To become really succesful in a tech career the demands are simply too great even if you are in the top percentile in IQ. To go to a good university you literally have to be super focused in high-school and do all sorts of extracurricular activities and basically things that look good on a college application. No one cares if you were a caretaker for your grandma. But then once you are in university you haven't even…

> If you have intrinsic interest in CS that will get destroyed pretty quickly because you may be put on to some super boring project. Potentially unpopular opinion: This is why I’m actually very bullish on graduates from famously demanding colleges like Ivy League and other competitive universities. To graduate, you can’t just be smarter than average and coast your way through to graduation. You actually have to work…

Are Ivy League colleges famously demanding? I haven't seen their CS departments on any rankings or similar that would imply they're particularly good. Law, sure, but CS? And given some of their most notable graduates, and what it took both to get in, and what led to their successes on getting out, I'm not sure "working hard" would be the description I would give it (though, of course, it's the description they would give, since meritocracy sounds a lot better than oligarchy/good old boy network).

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#133

Post by logical_ferry »

oldandboring wrote: post #104
21723 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that, while it may not be selfish to have kids, most people who are having kids do it for selfish reasons. They don't want to "die alone". They want to show that they can afford it. They want to vicariously get into Harvard and work in publishing (if traditional publishing still exists in the 2040s at all) and live some imagined high life... even though the probabilities are minuscule and most children are…

If you do end up having kids, I hope you come back here and re-read what you wrote, just for lolz. Privileged young people without kids have this whole philosophy that just all adds up on paper. Reminds me of listening to libertarians and communists. Source: I have kids.

I love people like that. They have a whole philosophy constructed around this and that. I laugh at the amount of thought that went into the reasoning why they would rather not have kids. When they start dishing out these little nuggets of wisdom I just think to myself "it's better you stay childless". Imagine the little wise-ass this guy would raise. Poor child.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#134

Post by Dudeman112 »

slategruen wrote: post #84

So, what could you advice for people who's about to enter the tech industry? I've been having extreme senioritis for more than two years and one of the reasons, I think, is fear of entering this industry. Don't get me wrong, I love tech and all, it's just that I don't think my personality fits the standard employers look for. I don't want to constantly learn new skills just to prove my worth. Yes, most jobs nowadays…

>don't want to constantly learn new skill

For programming at least this is seriously overblown everywhere. Might be legit for regular IT stuff

You don't really have to do it on your own time, and the new stuff you have to learn is most of the time same shit, different face.

Good fundamentals make it all feel the same overall blob of knowledge with different expressions for the same stuff

Won't stop the people doing the hiring from asking for experience with the different face for the same shit they are doing, of course.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#135

Post by sokoloff »

ctvo wrote: post #124
towaway15463 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting that you don’t consider landscaping, juice bars, and wind surfing schools as beneficial to the economy. Could it be that these highly educated and intelligent people you are talking about see things differently? Perhaps after 5 years in tech they realize that none of the companies they’ve worked for are actually providing any benefit to society and are perhaps even a net negative. That realization is…

A baker, landscaper, or small business owner doesn't need to do 10 years of additional education at specialize schools, not that they're less beneficial. The charitable reading of the OP's comments would be that it's an inefficient use of society's resources to invest in the education of these folks only to have them leave their respective fields after a short amount of time. The broader question is how do we change…

Most of society's direct expenses in their education is in the K-12 phase, not in the undergrad or graduate schooling. A baker, landscaper, and a computer programmer all had very similar levels of direct educational investment. I don’t think the computer programmer has any different obligation back to society than any of the others.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#136

Post by kory »

nnoitra wrote: post #62

To become really succesful in a tech career the demands are simply too great even if you are in the top percentile in IQ. To go to a good university you literally have to be super focused in high-school and do all sorts of extracurricular activities and basically things that look good on a college application. No one cares if you were a caretaker for your grandma. But then once you are in university you haven't even…

A lot of us like the competition and continuous push to improve to keep up.

I am one of those people. This is the environment I've known since high school.

I love it because otherwise there'd be no big challenge to overcome, nothing straightforward to strive for. And this career is one of the few that gives me a very favorable shot at becoming wealthy. That is, wealthy enough to own a home in a beautiful, expensive state while not needing to work until I'm 50+. All without absolutely insane hours after finishing college.

Overall, I'd just be so BORED without the constant push to improve & learn this industry provides. Clearly that isn't for everyone, and obviously the equation changes as one gets older and settles into family life. That's what management is for (I'd say the best managers still dive deep into the newest tech and have a great understanding of everything their organization does, though many I've seen don't do this and still are competent).

If anything, I get the itch that I'm not doing enough all the time. I'm strongly considering entrepreneurship after my current gig for the challenge of that work environment.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#137

Post by robotburrito »

Seems like a huge # of techies I meet out here are trying to reach a million dollars in savings in a job they hate so that they can "go live in a cabin in the woods." I try to tell them that my Cousin has been doing that for 40 years, and he dropped out of high school and worked at a gas station.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#138

Post by ctvo »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #123
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> companies they’ve worked for are actually providing any benefit to society and are perhaps even a net negative Right? When I started out, 1/3 of my interviews were with gambling machine companies, another was with a company that only existed to arbitrage betting odds for their own profit, and one was some kind of quasi-AI surveillance thing. A lot of GDP is generated on completely parasitic activities, and you can…

I'm doing that now. For free. I've written infrastructure software that has, without a doubt, saved a lot of lives, and will continue to do so, for many years to come. I've been working on a client implementation that leverages that software, for the last couple of years. It's approaching ship (but still a ways off). One of the goals of that project, is to help train a few young friends in the ins and outs of what it…

> Society (especially US society) does not value vocations that help others. Teachers are incredibly well-educated, but treated like dirt. The same with social workers. We value individuality and selfishness. In fact, we actually deify these qualities.

What about doctors? Nurses? Tenured professors? Blanket statements are fun but probably miss the more nuanced issue.

Systemically public education is broken leading to us undervaluing teachers in many public school districts. The same for social workers -- the US doesn't have robust social safety nets so social workers can provide less help. Perhaps that's why they're not viewed as favorably? The same budget constraints apply to their salaries, making it so the more qualified ones go into private practice perhaps?

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#140

Post by logical_ferry »

goodpoint wrote: post #126
logical_ferry wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I have never put in the same sacrifice/money to charity.

...hence the keyword "imagine". Plus, you make strong claims like "nothing less selfish" and yet you have never made sacrifices for anything other than kids... maybe there's something to think about.

Imagine, making sacrifices for your kids and not for the Amazon forest.
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