Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

> I love building and working - always have, always will. ... but the industry is literally destroying my soul and it has recently become crippling.

Then alea iacta est, you have thrown your dice, and must destroy it before it destroys you. You must "take back tech", by building and working against all that you see around you. Welcome to the exhilarating challenge of being a real hacker and entrepreneur.

What you are feeling is valid. Do something about it!! I know a guy who built his own open source server and now makes a living out of providing support.

Admittedly that case is a longshot. But there are other things you can do. Let's brainstorm for a bit and think about it. It can be solved.

I also hate this industry. There is a path for us, we just have to find it.

When you can't easily enumerate the possibilities, you have to assume success is by chance. I've worked in great companies, with great people. The people who weren't great still taught me something about being a team. I consider myself very lucky.

At times, I end up frustrated. It seems I leave companies after 6-7 years, because I stop moving forward. When I find myself in a rut, I try to put myself into new situations, so I can find new opportunities to be lucky. That may be internally in the company, project or team. Or it may be moving to a new country. Or, it can be turning inwards and focusing on improving my interpretation of the situation. The situation is rarely bad, even if I may feel down about it. The only constant is change, as they say.

Yes, I can relate to personal stagnation, to the Hedonic treadmill and that opportunities that sound good in shallow waters often sink when you go out deeper. But I'm not going to say I hate the industry. I haven't uncovered even 0.1% of it. Plus, I'm still hoping I can help make it better by being a part of it.

That sounds like a Big Company problem.

There are hundreds of thousands of software development jobs in companies where the whole software development department are fewer than 10 people.

If you absolutely abhor integrating software between teams then they can be a breath of fresh air.

That said, you will very likely find other frustrations, from their (lack of) tooling, greater impact of colleagues, more idiosyncratic approaches to development, lack of onboarding / documentation.

But if you're keen then they can be great places to work. You can make a real stamp on how they work and feel like more of your time is delivery.

But you will have to juggle different concerns. You might turn up and find they don't have a bug tracker or source control. Or worse, they do have source control but their entire knowledge of git is "git commit -m 'Checking in end of day'" (and "delete; git clone" for when Things Go Wrong).

I feel exactly the same. Programming professionally for a decade sucked all the joy out of it.

My personal hypothesis is that we’re increasingly being treated like assembly line workers. We’re not paid to think but to implement the poorly thought out hare brained schemes from the higher ups who have no clue about programming. This externalizes all the cost of poor quality software onto the developers (unmaintainable code, constant outages…) while reaping the short term benefits for themselves (promotions, raises).