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

When you turn a hobby you love and are passionate about into a job is ceases to be a hobby you love and are passionate about and starts being a job. This might seem like a tautological statement but it's something people don't really think about until it's pointed out to them.

My advice is to reframe your thinking and start treating your job as a job - a source of income not a source of personal fulfillment.

Beyond that, there isn't a sole "tech industry" or "software industry" a lot of different types of companies employ software developers. I've been a software developer for more than three times as long as you and I've never experienced "devs that go out of their way to work weekends," "endless meetings," nor "constant micromanagement." Perhaps a job outside of a company that calls itself a "tech company" suits you best?

Find a different company with a different working culture.

My devs are not required to work more than 40 hours in a week and I go out of my way to ensure they don't have to endure any kind of crunch time.

Makes sense, but isn't it a choice?

I'm just starting out in my career as a student and I don't have much to do except for my work, side projects and studies. I sometimes work on weekends but I don't promote it at all. This is not a standard I'm setting and I don't expect anyone to do the same.

Obviously, when I'm with my family or friends, the whole scene is different; I want to get off work early. But I think you can work on weekends if you feel so because some people have nothing better to do and that's their escape.

> Small/medium sized non-tech companies don't value technology and don't understand its importance.

I work closely with IT departments within such companies through ERP implementations/localizations and can coroborate this. In my experience 9/10 non-tech companies with their own IT departments(1+ person) don't value and especially don't understand what their IT department does.

On the other side, the people working within such departments are in my experience just terribly bad at sticking up for themselves, and explaining what needs to be explained. They don't draw lines where lines need to be drawn and they see themselves in the same way as the management/leadership does.

I have been coding professionally for over 25 years, and I hate the industry with a passion. I hate the culture of it, the obsession with couching naked capitalist greed in semi-spiritual terms, the inflation of the trivial into the profound ("we're not just building customer relations PaaS, we're changing the way humans fundamentally interact with the universe around them"), I hate the entitlement ("ugh, why are all these poors and their sleeping bags in my way when I try to e-scooter around the city I moved to six months ago?").

I used to be lead dev and CTO of startups, and now I do part-time IT work for a law firm and spend the rest of my time working on my own projects, which are code and music and writing and some inventing and puttering. It's nerve-wracking because I make jack shit and my wife and I live in poverty in England, where my Yankee paycheck doesn't go very far.

But when I apply for better gigs and get hit with the code quizzes and the "culture fit" nonsense and the bullshit, I just can't, man. I'm 44 years old, I don't care about having a free IPA fridge in the office and SCRUM and sprints and learning an entirely new framework du jour every six weeks and all that shit. I work for money, period. The stuff I really care about (like climate issues), nobody is gonna hire me to do. And I've spent enough time trying to turn my own projects into actual businesses that I know I'd rather gnaw my own arm off than have to put up with another meeting with some VC asshole where they want to gut everything that's interesting about my ideas and shoehorn in NFTs or some other stupid goddamn thing.

You gotta decide whether you value freedom or financial stability. Some people find both, but I think it's rare. Most people just decide what they can live with. Me, I'm still trying to figure it out as the first gray shows up in my beard.

Vaya con Dios, man. I don't have any answers for you, but at least know you're not alone.