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

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

#281
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Connect with a recruiter (or five) and tell them that's what you want. They exist to act as a filter, and if you work with several from multiple companies/geographies in addition to doing your own searching, you'll eventually find what you're looking for.

In my experience, recruiters basically keep your name and skillset on record and don't take into account any of your other wants/needs.

Agreed -- and, even worse, in my experience they don't even know about more than 20% of the opportunities.

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

#282
I tend to really like working startups.

Massive corporations are usually very risk-averse, and you end up just mostly being a ticket-monkey. The problems you're tending to solve are mostly pretty boring - unless you're a rock-star and they've hired you to do cutting edge R&D (and in this case, can be the coolest and most rewarding gig out there).

But at startups, there's always a shit ton of interesting problems to solve (usually too many by too few people - depending on the stage). This frees me up to be creative, and also to pick and choose my priorities.

As far as your specific complaints: - 'I can't bare (sic) the devs that go out of their way to work weekends without being asked'; IMO this depends on personal disposition, and also team culture, and sadly, it's hard to find a place to work where they don't try to force people to burn out one way or another. This does kind of suck when you've got team members that do this and kind of fuck things up for everyone else.

- 'I can't bare (sic) the endless meetings, constant micromanagement'; Again, this is mostly team culture, and how teams are organized, and there are ways to fix this, but in my 25+ years of experience, once an organization heads down this path, it's very difficult to fix. It's the route to becoming ineffective as a group, and it is soul-crushing to be a part of this. I'd encourage anyone in this situation to get out of it ASAP. Complaining will never ever fix it. Micromanagement, of course, is 100% just incompetent managers. Which is also difficult to fix.

- 'bringing the stress home to my family'; I think this is more of a personality issue with the individual. 10 years of therapy, and I wasn't able to make headway on this. Some jobs were absolutely worse than others. Personally, when I've had management who goes out of their way to compliment my work verbally, this goes a long way to relieving my anxiety and stress. It's very helpful and costs the company next to nothing. But at the end of the day, even those companies, I've had to deal with either company failure or layoffs (which is a form of company failure), and that just validates why I'm stressed. So it comes down to how you deal with that stress, and the only way I can see it is to be independently wealthy so you don't need to work in the first place. That's just my internal rationalization though.

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Get a job at smaller to medium sized non-tech company. Every company, in any industry, has computers. They need you. I personally had the worst experience at such jobs. Small/medium sized non-tech companies don't value technology and don't understand its importance. If it works, you're invisible and just a cost center, if it doesn't you're to blame. For work/life balance I've found big tech corps the best (not FAAN…

The world is different now. It's 2022 and the value of technology is far more clear to the average person.

but mostly not so much if the person has an MBA.

Sure, it's a gross generalization, but after 25+ years in this industry, I stand by this bigotry.

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

#284

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…

>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.

Dunno, when I see loose ends in specification, I report them to analysts with proposals how it should work to be useful for business logic. Well, maybe I am paid to think. What's the profit from doing a shitty job and then suffer from damage you inflicted on yourself?

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

#285
Honestly, just be happy to be making good money and try to leave the rest at work. Other industries aren't better. You'll constantly be chasing a unicorn.

I can definitely relate but am in a different industry. So starting a start-up. But still have the other job. Until the start-up makes money or at least is enough to get some funding.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, it's just an IQ test in disguise, which do have empirical evidence they predict your future performance at intellectual work.

There is empirical evidence for that? Where? Where are the 170+ IQ employees churning out magnificent solution after magnificent solution, rather than being stuck in the same rut as everyone else?

170+ IQs are extremely rare. That's 4.67 standard deviations above the mean. That should be about 0.0002% of people, or 14,000 people in the entire world, and that has to be shared with every other occupation that exists.

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

#287
post #52

> I can't bare the devs that go out of their way to work weekends without being asked, I can't bare the endless meetings, constant micromanagement, bringing the stress home to my family. Have you considered just changing jobs? Not all places work weekend/have tons of meetings/micromanage. Maybe take time to assess what you like and dislike about your job and try to find a less stressful environment that fits your exp…

Sometimes people die, depending on what you work on.

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

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, it's just an IQ test in disguise, which do have empirical evidence they predict your future performance at intellectual work.

The tech part maybe, and the tech part is only a small part of the entire interview. On top of that, since IQ tests exist, you don't need a bad proxy to test IQ. Leetcode-style tech interview segments aside, that still leaves the myriad of other things happening during the hiring process which either do nothing, or function as poor proxies for other things. Personality testing through mundane questions, for example.…

> On top of that, since IQ tests exist, you don't need a bad proxy to test IQ.

Yes you do. Because administering an IQ test is forbidden

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

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

#289

I tend to really like working startups. Massive corporations are usually very risk-averse, and you end up just mostly being a ticket-monkey. The problems you're tending to solve are mostly pretty boring - unless you're a rock-star and they've hired you to do cutting edge R&D (and in this case, can be the coolest and most rewarding gig out there). But at startups, there's always a shit ton of interesting problems to s…

Our team complained about frequent meetings, and managers reduced meetings to one daily meeting (our managers are competent though).

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

#290
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to get a job building internal tools that my company needs and uses but I haven't had any luck actually finding those kinds of jobs, so I always wind up building products. Any advice on how to find those kinds of positions?

Connect with a recruiter (or five) and tell them that's what you want. They exist to act as a filter, and if you work with several from multiple companies/geographies in addition to doing your own searching, you'll eventually find what you're looking for.

connecting with recruiters is a meme.

they're basically glorified salespeople. they would only reply to you if they thought there was quick money to be made.

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