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I quit the tech industry

eev.ee

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Re: I quit the tech industry

#471

Post by cafebeen »

sosuke wrote: post #209
serve_yay wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boy oh boy, that really puts a different spin on this post, doesn't it. I wish I had the cash to throw this kind of tantrum.

That's what it looks like from the outside doesn't it? His pain is real certainly, and like all experience relative to his situation. When you look at it from a perspective of responsibility without an option to stop working, or the fear of not finding work with which you can fulfill your responsibilities his position is a lot tougher to identify with. I hope I can work hard enough to someday be able to have the luxu…

Reminds of the idea of the hedonic treadmill:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

Re: I quit the tech industry

#473

Post by exelius »

moron4hire wrote: post #306
exelius wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Developers cannot reliably estimate software timelines. That often comes with experience and age, but many never learn that skill. It is a skill like programming itself. It comes with practice. This is true. But this is the problem that Agile is supposed to help solve -- with the caveat that most companies don't do true Agile. I guess people are now calling it Continuous Delivery, but the idea is the same: you d…

Process doesn't work, it can't work, because Process isn't the problem, it's top-down management infrastructure. Process is orthogonal to that. In a top-down management style, your so-called "Lead Developer" is just the first head on the chopping block. They're leaders of puppet regimes. If the real leaders don't like them, they install a new one. It comes in many forms: layoffs, "performance" related dismissal ("you…

Any company of a certain size must convert to a top-down management infrastructure. I've seen what happens in large companies that don't -- you get 15 teams building different versions of the same product, and internal politics decide whose version becomes the 'official' one. But invariably, the internal user community settles on the one that's actually best for their use case, so you end up having to support 3 or 4 versions of every product you create. It's an absolute support and integration nightmare.

You talk about a business like it's supposed to be a democracy. It's not. You need clear direction, and democracy is messy and opaque if your company is too big for you to know the name of everyone who works there. Now the way you describe top down management is a bad implementation of it -- executives need to work to develop their middle managers -- but every company eventually has to convert from a democratic decision making process to a chain of command.

I've been working recently with a number of household-name startups that are having this exact issue. They've hit a plateau in their growth because the culture is dead-set against top-down management, but the company is now too big for people to self-organize. Engineering initiatives that would have taken 2 months in startup mode now take 2 years because they have to go back and rebuild half their systems to make them flexible enough to support the multiple use cases that they now have. Or because they were a startup, they didn't worry about geographic redundancy because that wasn't part of the MVP. So it was put off for later, and now they're a billion dollar company operating out of a single datacenter because their databases and applications were built without multi-datacenter being a requirement. Product can't even reliably tell engineering what features to implement because nobody on the product side has enough authority to shout over the crowd.

So having an infrastructure that cares about feedback is good, but the infrastructure also needs to empower people to do something about said feedback.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#474

Post by tsotha »

cmdrfred wrote: post #456
kamaal wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we stop using the word 'smart' as a synonym for cheating and fraud please? There is nothing smart about faking and pretending to contribute while doing nothing. All the while taking the rewards and benefits which should actually be going to people who do the real work. This even on a short period of time creates an environment which causes the real contributors to go better places leaving the overall ecosystem st…

Stealing credit for other peoples work aside. The hacker mindset to me is to do things in the simplest way possible. Programmer: "I managed to migrate the database with the program I wrote over the past two months" Hacker: "I migrated the database with 3 lines of code"

Programmer: "But you didn't account for all the edge cases. Your solution seems to work at first glance, but now someone else is going to have to redo what you've done and fix the data problems that resulted from the half-assed job you did."

Re: I quit the tech industry

#475

Post by Dewie3 »

mpdehaan2 wrote: post #139
probablyfiction wrote: post #17

This 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…

While not burnout related, I found out a while back, and this is somewhat paradoxical, that if I care TOO much, I'm less happy. What happens is I notice all the stuff I can't fix, or need to fix, and other people get stressed out making them fix it. The end result is that I stop caring quite as much (I still care), get happy, and then start caring too much again. It's especially hard at times when you have a lot of e…

> I found out a while back, and this is somewhat paradoxical, that if I care TOO much, I'm less happy.

I have a feeling that this realization might be central to a part of Buddhist philosophy/mindset.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#476

Post by pjungwir »

bcheung wrote: post #470
pjungwir wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Dave Ramsey" approach of paying down debt rather than investing is appealing to me, and I think a lot of people ignore the extra risk of investing. If I can make 4.5% risk-free paying off a mortgage vs 6% in stocks, I'd pay off the mortgage. But here is another consideration I've never seen discussed before: mortgage interest is static, but investment returns are dynamic. My mortgage interest rate is fixed for 3…

Not a fan of Dave Ramsey. He's great if you don't know finance but his advice is geared towards people in the poor and lower middle class brackets that want to stay there. Same with Suze Orman. Get an overfunded whole life policy and put the extra money into that. Google "Infinite Banking" or "Cash Flow Banking" to understand how it works. Current guaranteed rates are 4.5% with dividends it comes out to around 5.5% (…

I really appreciate your comments! So what are the downsides of a whole life policy? It can't all be pros and no cons, right?

Re: I quit the tech industry

#477

Post by exelius »

aaggarwal wrote: post #224
exelius wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working lots of short-term contracts are fine when the economy is good. But when the economy goes bad, you'll see those contracts dry up very quickly. Then you're looking for a full time job along with everyone else who was doing short term contracts at a time when companies are scaling back hiring. Most of you are going to have a bad time. A full-time job offers some protection from volatility. I'm not going to pret…

I am not even sure now that this will work in good economic times, since there is saturation in contract-based assignments, with agencies hiring programmers on very low rate in developing countries. All I can take away from this is that, one needs to have experience and a great network (potential clients) before thinking about contract work. Thank you for your input.

Yes, a great network is essential. But there is plenty of room for independent developers; just target some of the less prevalent tech like Ruby, Erlang, node.js, etc. Most of the big shops go after Java, Oracle, SAP, etc. and don't bother with some of the smaller technologies because there's not consistent enough demand to support their scale.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#478

Post by Dewie3 »

neverartful wrote: post #288
mpdehaan2 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not burnout related, I found out a while back, and this is somewhat paradoxical, that if I care TOO much, I'm less happy. What happens is I notice all the stuff I can't fix, or need to fix, and other people get stressed out making them fix it. The end result is that I stop caring quite as much (I still care), get happy, and then start caring too much again. It's especially hard at times when you have a lot of e…

Having too much passion? IMO, passion is not sustainable. I believe that dispassionate works much better over the long term. Of course, ymmv.

Maybe it's just a question of managing to remain detached from caring too much about all the yucky stuff. If you are passionate about a field, it goes to reason that you are much more prone to also worry when you see things that are less than good about. Then you think how it should be different. Then you realize that it won't happen soon. Maybe you realize that you don't have the power to help change it. Now you feel powerless and depressed over the state of affairs -- and you care a lot about the state of affairs, since this is the thing that you're passionate about. Meanwhile, someone more disinterested don't care too much if everything is going to hell. He might not be as happy with what he does, but he has more peace of mind.

I think you can try to manage to detach yourself from the negative focus that passion can lead to. To try to numb your passion seems like a less good option.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#479

Post by eevee »

mpdehaan2 wrote: post #139
probablyfiction wrote: post #17

This 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…

While not burnout related, I found out a while back, and this is somewhat paradoxical, that if I care TOO much, I'm less happy. What happens is I notice all the stuff I can't fix, or need to fix, and other people get stressed out making them fix it. The end result is that I stop caring quite as much (I still care), get happy, and then start caring too much again. It's especially hard at times when you have a lot of e…

This resonates, definitely. I don't "care" about these problems in the sense that my heart can't really be in them, but they are still blinding obstacles for me and my coworkers that I would like to resolve, and it's easy to get... very invested in them.

Until the day I realize all the low-hanging fruit is fixed and everyone else is pretty much content to put up with what's left, making it much harder and much less rewarding to continue.

I have enough trouble with searching for a finish line in projects I start myself, so I guess I'm tired of doing it when it's not even my race.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#480

Post by ghaff »

mark-r wrote: post #321
jlongster wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wanted to make $200,000 or so from a successful personal project on the side, just so that I could pay off my mortgage so I didn't have to worry about it anymore. But when I think about really getting that money, I realize I wouldn't do that. If my mortage is $1200/month, I just bought myself 166 months, or ~14 years. If the idea is to quit your job and invest in a company, that's not the smartest move. Y…

Paying off a mortgage is just like any other investment - you need to look at the terms to see if it's worth doing. It's very illiquid, you can't get your cash back without getting another mortgage. On the other hand, it's a guaranteed rate of return that's probably significantly more than any other guaranteed rate you can find. If you think you can do better with a different investment then go for it. But remember,…

>It's very illiquid, you can't get your cash back without getting another mortgage.

Well, you can take out a HELOC but you're right that's more or less the same thing as getting another mortgage--albeit with more flexibility.

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