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I quit the tech industry (2015)

eev.ee

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Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#171

Post by tristor »

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…

> To become really succesful in a tech career the demands are simply too great even if you are in the top percentile in IQ

I don't know if this is true. You have described one particular pathway, but as someone who was formerly a very senior level engineer and is now a pretty senior level PM, and is also a college dropout with no degrees and no appreciably meaning certifications (I have an A+, Network+, and Linux+ I got when I was in high school), I must tell you that there are many many many other pathways into tech. Some of the best programmers I've worked with were people who didn't even study CS, although they usually studied STEM (Physics majors in particular seem to always pop up in my peer groups). Some of the best PMs I have worked with studied "worthless liberal arts degrees" like English Literature. Many of both have no degree at all, just as I don't. Almost nobody I worked with did any impressive internships... or internships at all, rather than going and interning most people just worked on whatever was interesting to them and published either articles about it or the code.

I think the key to success in tech is pretty simple to describe (although harder to execute): Be passionate about technology and invest efforts into your passion areas.

Only some companies LC grind people, but if you want to be at one of those companies there's no gate on LC to enter your credentials before you sign-up... anyone can grind LC. What's far more important in my book, having hired many people, is that I work with and hire people who are actually interested in whatever it is that we are doing. I personally only work on products I find interesting, if I don't think there's any interesting problem to solve there, I go do something else. Nobody has ever asked anything about my lack of college degree in my entire career except IBM, and nobody wants to work at IBM anymore anyway.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#174

Post by throwaway894345 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #164
ctvo wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Nurses? I know a lot of nurses. They make decent (not outrageous) money, but their work environment is frequently a shitshow. Many are quitting. >Tenured professors? I know a few. I guess some of them are paid well, but they often make a lot less than their students. They do have job security (like tenured teachers). Doctors don't make money because they help people. They make money, because people with money think…

> I know a lot of nurses. They make decent (not outrageous) money, but their work environment is frequently a shitshow. Many are quitting.

You're conflating recent and broad economic trends with the specific conditions of a specific profession. Millions of Americans all over the country have been quitting and changing careers (it even has a name: "the Great Resignation"). This doesn't mean their conditions are shit, but rather that pandemic-era economic forces have been reshuffling our economy.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#175

Post by notriddle »

rainboOow9 wrote: post #53
21723 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually, when the money runs out, they return with their tails between their legs, often in shittier jobs that they'd have had if they'd stuck with it. You're right about the grass being greener. The tech industry is an absolute plague, but most other industries are just as bad. In the long term, and for most of us, the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.

But is the system really responsible for all of this? I mean, if we go back to a more "natural" state, with simpler jobs and with more direct impacts, are we actually happier? Is cutting woods all day long more fulfilling that a tech job? Or being a mason and putting block on top of each other for other people that you do not know about? Or is it just that in tech, we have the luxury to think about all of that, and t…

It's almost certainly true that the closer you got to the ancestral environment, the more fulfilling people's lives would be. That's hunter-gatherer society, not serf farming. In the grand scheme of things, brick laying and lumber are still pretty modern. The hypothesis is that, in the ancestral environment, your instincts would actually be working in your favor, so good things would actually feel good, and bad things would feel bad.

Of course, the logistics of undoing the neolithic revolution are mind-boggling. You're supposed to learn to be a hunter-gatherer over a lifetime, not to be thrust into it in the middle of your adult life. If some leader-type tried to abandon complex society right away, it would probably go about as well as the Cultural Revolution went. Lots of people accidentally picking the wrong mushrooms and killing themselves, because their parents never taught them how to tell them apart.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#176

Post by BlargMcLarg »

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…

So there are a few problems.

For one, that extra education? It often isn't seen as part of one's career. But for any course worth its salt, those years are still draining. It's a minor point, but also an overlooked one.

Second, there's the mismatch problem. Outside STEM, loads of people aren't getting jobs in their fields. Inside STEM (mostly tech, really), most people are getting tech jobs completely different from what they learned in school. Often uninteresting and/or boggled with politics and bureaucracy (read: majority of them are CRUD webdev jobs trying to appease corporate's whims).

Third, the job market is ravenous. Absolutely ravenous. Anyone not solidly mid career is discriminated against to some degree. Too old? Have fun being seen as a liability despite your experience. Too young? Here's a set of requirements you wouldn't learn in most corporations, schools won't teach you and somehow you're magically supposed to get this experienced in a corporate setting, noted as "requirements". Oh, and you better cite the company's values by heart and claim it's your dream job, even if their product is yet another luxury / minimal improvement driven to make profits, as there are 20 others lined up.

The whole burnout thing already starts before you enter your first job.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#178

Post by morelisp »

lostcolony wrote: post #122
morelisp wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Is it? I've never heard a person introduce themselves as "woman". I've heard people identify themselves with their pronouns plenty of times. In fact, given the links, literally all I see from eevee is their preferred pronouns, not "woman". I don't see anyone even calling out that she's trans (is she?), just correcting a misconception from the original comment that she uses he/him pronouns. Those particular pronouns m…

No post body was provided.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#179

Post by PragmaticPulp »

SenHeng wrote: post #142
robotburrito wrote: post #137

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.

If you absurdly reduce it down to that point then, yes, anyone can live cheaply in a rural area. But that's not the point. Financial independence is about the ability to live a good life without having to worry about next's day food.

> Financial independence is about the ability to live a good life without having to worry about next's day food.

Worrying about paying for food day to day isn’t why people seek out high-stress, high-pay jobs that are often in expensive cities.

If people just want enough financial security to reliably put food on the table there are a million ways to do that without getting a demanding career.

The people throwing themselves into demanding jobs and chasing promotions to maximize their salary aren’t doing it just to put food on the table.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#180

Post by tiborsaas »

robotburrito wrote: post #137

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.

Yes, but the "cabin" should look like this and should not be more than a 30 min drive from a major city:

https://offbeathome.com/snohomish-pyramid-house/

https://www.prefabcontainerhomes.org/2020/08/4x45-ft-shippin...

https://www.ignant.com/2015/08/11/a-minimal-concrete-house-o...

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