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

I'm there too, but trying to take a different mindset.

For one, the requirements are utterly clear so you CAN systematically prepare and do well even if you lack the exact years of experience they're asking for.

Two, the payoff is massive if you're in the US. I mean.. if you land at a FANGetc, you can literally put your feet up, buy a house anywhere, send all your kids to Harvard, and retire before your parents ever dreamed.

Three, prepare slowly over time. I would do one or two leet code questions a month. Pickup a trick here and there. When I hating my job now, I do a few per week. Now I've accrued most of the knowledge about these questions and interviews are a lot easier

I think you mix a lot of different problems into one.

>I can't bare the endless meetings, constant micromanagement

This _can_ be fixed. Even if by switching team or even jobs. With some experience you start to understand in what teams and under what management you work best. A lot of us hate micromanagement. And I can tell you there are a lot of teams without this problem. I would say that micromanagement is the least common problem from what you mentioned here. Simply because it usually leads to overall inefficiency. Also this one you can actually fix by talking with your manager. Maybe they just don't trust you or overprotect you. Nobody wants to do your job ;).

Endless meetings are harder to fix. If your level is high enough you can try to fight it. But usually it is easier to just switch the team and even your work area. Do something lower level, further from API. Even in the worst business-centered jobs there are places where they need to you solve technical problems. Simply because meetings won't solve those technical problems ;).

> I can't bare the devs that go out of their way to work weekends without being asked

this one is on you. It shouldn't affect you personally, unless they ping you on the weekend for 'quick lgtm'. I understand it can be annoying, especially when they advertise such work as something heroic. You either need to stop caring about that or try to explain to your manager that promoting such behaviour in the team demotivates others. Actually I once was one of those 'work during weekend' guys. I had my reasons. After complains from my friends in the team, I simply stopped announcing any such work, so unless anyone specifically wanted to check commit time, they were completely unaware if I actually did something on the weekend. It worked relatively well. So while I sometimes like to overtime, I'm sure it is unhealthy for the whole team to advertise/promote someone for doing so.

I work at a private school and do a lot of data work that involves a substantial bit of programming. I CANNOT imagine a better work environment in terms of getting to enjoy the bits of tech that I like without all of the negative stuff that I see out there. The one thing I certainly lose out on is strong programming peers and people to learn deeply technical things from, but everything else is a positive: culture is excellent, I get to participate in all sorts of things that aren't programming related, have the freedom to tie technical itches that I want to scratch with work projects, etc. It's truly awesome, but something I would only recommend for someone who is looking at their job more wholistically and is ready to embrace some really major QoL gains with a very appreciable downside of probably developing less "technically" than you would at a traditional shop.

My last few jobs have been replacing no-code setups. It certainly doesn't take teams long to figure out how bad the current offering suck. Sometimes only 3-4 integrations in.