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I quit the tech industry (2015)

eev.ee

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Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#181

Post by barrysteve »

jseban wrote: post #125
thebean11 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing that there's zero biological programming specific to children or blood relatives?

No, but I'm arguing that it's very unreliable, often fully backfires and becomes actually destructive, and that in our modern society there are other factors that are much more relevant to people's success in life, and blood relations I would say is fully arbitrary. It's also just as natural for people to branch out and leave their families, as it is to stay close to their families. And I think it's irrelevant to the…

> so that people can go to church more, and church is healthy. Really? That's highly debatable, and obviously another power structure which is also old fashioned

This one is so debatable because the definition and theological implications of Church 'healthiness' depend upon many different variables and can differ subtly across all Churches.

Church isn't a 'power structure' though. It relies on voluntary participation. You can walk out of Church whenever you want.

Doing what you want tends to be quite narrow, hedonistic and unsatisfying in the end. It's easier to make the argument for free time from higher principles.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#182

Post by [deleted] »

sunderw wrote: post #28
radiKal07 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are barely any 80% jobs and the 60% ones are almost inexistent

As someone working 50%, I can relate. I answered more than 100 messages last year on LinkedIn from companies/recruiters interested in my profile, and got to the end interview part twice (the answer was always 'working half time is not possible for us', sometimes after wasting a few hours of my time...) But I also got contacted by a recruiter that did a fantastic job. He found a company that was a great fit for me, an…

[deleted]

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#184

Post by stitched2gethr »

This is why I quit working at big companies. I'm in my second position at a startup and I couldn't be happier.

- no constant meetings - no / less legacy code or dealing with systems that cannot be changed easily because they support a million customers - the problems feel (at least to me) like our problems instead of your shitty problem that I need to deal with

It's not all roses, but substantially fewer meetings and directives from leaders I rarely see is half the battle.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#185

Post by spencerchubb »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #37

We talk about externalities. A chemical company pours toxins into a river, an automaker knows its products kill X people per year. These are tangible, understandable. But we don't yet think of the effects on the workforce as social externalities. Industrial safety has made the workplace a much safer space physically, but not mentally. The reality is, a great many jobs make us sick. Depression, anxiety, heightened agg…

I'm curious how you got the estimate of $100,000 cost to society to educate a graduate?

Are you including undergrad or just grad programs? If we include undergrad and do ballpark math: government pays 40 billion in grants per year, there are 20 million students, so that's 2 thousand per student cost to society

Whereas I'm paying upwards of 30k. The cost is on me, not on society. Although I'm just an anecdote so I'm curious to hear from others

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#186

Post by wnolens »

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…

> But I did them for no money

And I assume you acquired the means to do that for free by.. doing the opposite for long enough to buy you freedom to do so? Or marry/born rich?

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#187

Post by wollsmoth »

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…

>calling out the pronouns she uses to identify herself seems like a perfectly natural response to correct someone using the wrong pronouns

I feel like this pronouns thing started up in just the past few years. To me it seems more natural to say someone is a man/woman. If someone doesn't fit into one of those boxes then I think it makes sense to clarify the preferred pronouns.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#188

Post by linuxftw »

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…

People save money doing a job they hate to one day start a business they don't hate all the time. The key part of this story is 'raising capital.'

Most people joining the tech industry today aren't doing it because they're particularly good at it, or they want to. It's the best way to raise capital to do something else.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#189

Post by throwaway894345 »

csande17 wrote: post #153
throwaway894345 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reality is, a great many jobs make us sick. Depression, anxiety, heightened aggression, sedentary atrophy, getting overweight because there's no time for the gym... the modern office workplace is no heath-farm. And Google throwing a few coloured bean bags around, or providing healthy food and gym equipment is only a sticking plaster if the foundational culture is toxic. What is the cost to society? I have no id…

> Are you positing that there are loads of healthier jobs or healthier ways to do office work (without foregoing the actual productivity)? Bold of you to assume office work involves "productivity".

I'm not saying that office work is a particularly productive form of work, but rather that there is some work product that gets done and it's difficult to increase the mental health aspects of office work without directly trading off on productivity.
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