Insist on reasonable work hours. Argue that it will maintain your performance long-term. Say it like you mean it, and don't settle for less. Be ready to leave if you must, in fact, and do not let the glitz/glamour of a well-known brand/company allow them to tread on you.
I quit the tech industry
441–450 of 565 posts
Re: I quit the tech industry
#442I feel like this before even starting my career...
I'm passionate about structuring knowledge, perception, society, art, sound. I'm good at creating concepts.
As a programmer I'm mediocre (I can learn what I need quickly and on demand, but I'd not open-source a library anytime soon). Yet I still feel like this still is the easiest way to earn a living.
My aim is to have the freedom of a digital nomad. Making money and tech (also as the execution of ideas and concepts) is just a necessity...
Re: I quit the tech industry
#443.. hang on let me write a blog post about how i'm quiting the tech industry
Re: I quit the tech industry
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are Warsaw and Krakov for families with children?
I can't speak for Kraków, as I've only had a family since being in Warsaw. I think Warsaw's great. Plenty of green spaces, lots of child-friendly environments, and it's pretty easy - if you choose - to find yourself living in a community of similarly-aged kids where they all look out for one another. The only downside I can think of is navigating stuff like vaccinations, doctors, and general bureaucracy. The majority…
I guess you can do the routine stuff in private health care, where they actually care about the quality of service (so they should be able to communicate in English). It's not really expensive too; in Warsaw appointment with a specialist (cardiologist etc.) is $25-$50.
For serious stuff (like surgery) it's best to go with public health care though.
Re: I quit the tech industry
#445This post expresses exactly how I feel. I am currently under a 30 days vacation and it has been incredibly good. In only three weeks I have studied lots of things that were postponed for months or years, worked on a personal project, exercised my body, slept well, read books, disassembled every old electronic device that was lurking for years to clean and fix it, went to a medical doctor to fix health issues that wer…
Posts like these make me a bit sad, how far some people get detached from reality of this world as a whole. I would hate it since i am part of this industry, byt maybe we really need some dev crysis, meaning 50% of software engineers unemployed, salaries plunge say to construction engineers level. Those fortunate to keep the job would be glad to be creative with what they have and maybe, but just MAYBE these pathetic…
I'm not developer but I work in IT. Facebook, Google and others are racing to the bottom and pushing it at the highest levels - even the president is on board. The idea is to flood the market with "coders" and then everyone will make $12/hr. That's your crisis and it's definitely coming.
Re: I quit the tech industry
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too late. Each of your example companies are beyond the point where becoming the next employee has a high likelihood of returning a windfall in 4 years. Life-changing equity tends to go to early (single digit) employees.
"Pay off the mortgage" equity, however, continues long after that. Yelp started in 2004, I really doubt that Eevee was a single-digit employee there. I know folks who started at Google as employee ~20,000 in 2008-2009 and ended up with "pay off the mortgage" equity, particularly if you're living in Las Vegas instead of Silicon Valley.
Agreed there's a big difference between "Pay off the $100K Las Vegas McMansion" equity and "Pay off the $1M Palo Alto starter home" equity. My guess is that the former is do-able if you find the right company (who will also let you work from your cheaper remote location). For the latter, I still don't believe you're going to see that without a gamble on a very early stage company.
And, since this is HN, of course I always need to preface with "Yes, I know you can point to a handful of outlier counter-examples, but they don't disprove the general case".
Re: I quit the tech industry
#447The author's rant is not specific to the tech industry at all, it's the case for practically all full-time jobs. Full-time jobs generally suck. Spending the bulk of every weekday in an office doing what you're told is not fun. If it was, then people would do it for free. Day to day work is generally unglamorous and boring. I think part of the blame is that tech employers permeate this notion that one must "love" thei…
This. I waste 2 hours a day commuting. 10 hours a week I'm sitting in the car doing nothing, for no real reason other than some company culture nonsense.
Re: I quit the tech industry
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate on this a bit ? I mean , is it feasible for the ordinary developer to engage in a multi-year risky R&D project that might ultimately fail resulting in nothing ? Most people barely have any time to code. It's just because Github is your Resume (TM) that makes most people crank out their own Javascript framework so they can have it on their resume. Could you give any examples of any such long term o…
There is big difference between doing new things, and doing the same things(again and again) with new tools. Take the this whole big data craze for example, almost every body I see who wants to use these tools doesn't have a use case for it. The same with NoSQL. Or Twitter's Storm. When you subscribe to this way of software development, you start shoe horning your use cases into wrong design paradigms, leading to a l…
Great comment and I completely agree with you.
Programmers have a tendency to detach themsleves from the business where software is there to maximize the profit. It doesn't matter whether it's written in PHP, Ruby, or [language of the year] [0]. But if you let the programmers go wild, many of them have a tendency to pick the hottest thing just because [some reason that has no advantage from business POV]. I guess that's the sign of boredom.
Programming is fun, playing with new toys is fun, but it should not be forgotten that it's part of the business.
[0] Well, it sort of matters. Dev time costs money, good tools and languages will make you write it faster therefore maximizing money. But that's not what I am talking about here.
Re: I quit the tech industry
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
>~53% high tax rate with only about ~$35K in income I'm sorry but you cant just go on to HN and make stuff up. You pay 20% on the first €33,800 income and only 40% on income over €33,800 if single. You pay 20% on the first €42,800 income and only 40% on income over €42,800 if Married with one income. You pay 20% on the first €67,600 income and only 40% on income over €67,600 if Married with two incomes. You pay 20% o…
Way to ignore USC (Universal Social Charge) and PRSI (Pay Related Social Insurance), these two alone + income taxes add up to over 50% rate on every euro earned above about 32-33K thats without even going into property tax which could also be taken out of your income (and probably water tax soon) The government has deliberately made the "income" taxes so complicated with 3 major different variables, and plenty of oth…
I found a handy calculator here: http://ie.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php
There's a UK one here, if you'd like to compare: http://listentotaxman.com/
(Both are very simple, it's 10 seconds to fill in the form.)
Re: I quit the tech industry
#450This is what burnout looks like. Unless Yelp has a toxic work culture, it's likely the author brought it on themselves by pushing too hard. After several months, the author will probably start thinking about work again, and begin the job search once more. Not to say that the author's points are invalid; it's a terrible feeling to have to spend your most productive hours working on someone else's problems. He or she m…
>He or she may find themselves drawn toward entrepreneurship.
The author may find the change refreshing, but I've never been as burned out as I have with my own company. It's like taking all of the other stuff, then adding an order of magnitude to the stress level. This comes from having responsiblity for everything, including the pressure of making it work overall (i.e. the dark side of the control and "freedom"). As well, you can frequently feel unappreciated by customers, staff, partners, etc. And, I've found myself far more sensitive to this than to the same from any manager or employer I've had.