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I quit the tech industry

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Re: I quit the tech industry

#531

Post by steve-howard »

nomel wrote: post #497
lighthawk wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's likely the author brought it on themselves by pushing too hard. Don't fall into the trap of thinking this. It is the case some of the time, but not all of the time. When I first started working in tech in the mid-90s, it was only a year or two before I was considering going back to school in music or to get an MBA. Since about 2004, I've known that I would like to abandon the tech industry. It is now 2015. I h…

> * Talk to a psychiatrist and get some meds. Do you have experience with this? I'm afraid if I'm on meds, I'll end up neglecting my life even more, rather than taking these strong hints from my mind and body that this isn't the way it should be. I would absolutely love to hear any perspective on this from anyone.

Meds can have disruptive side effects that make them difficult to adjust to. This is the primary reason I don't take them now. This is not true for everybody, and the side effects often wear off after a little while.

I wouldn't be afraid of neglecting yourself more. It's difficult to describe the effects of antidepressants, as their onset is extremely gradual (weeks to months) and it's been a while for me, but they basically shift the average mood up from "everything is kinda awful" to a more neutral equilibrium.

Antidepressants aren't the only option. Therapy is also effective, and if you feel that you're neglecting your life it does give you a place to talk about it.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#532

Post by steve-howard »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #212
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…

This isn't burnout: " I stay up hours later than I mean to, not even doing anything, just trying to put off sleeping — because the next thing I experience will be waking up and going back to work." This is straight up depression. We need to stop using office-cliches like "burnout" and start addressing the very real mental health issues in the tech industry. Maintaining my mental health is like staying in shape, eatin…

I wouldn't say burnout is just an office cliche, but your point appears to be supported by current research. Quoth the wiki:

> The symptoms of burnout are similar to those of clinical depression; in a study that directly compared depressive symptoms in burned out workers and clinically depressed patients, no diagnostically significant differences were found between the two groups: burned out workers reported as many depressive symptoms as clinically depressed patients. Moreover, a study by Bianchi, Schonfeld, and Laurent (2014) showed that about 90% of burned out workers meet diagnostic criteria for depression, suggesting that burnout may be a depressive syndrome rather than a distinct entity. The view that burnout is a form of depression has found support in several recent studies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnout_%28psychology%29

Re: I quit the tech industry

#533

Post by eevee »

peu4000 wrote: post #527
eevee wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am definitely hecka privileged. What would you have me do? Keep working a job I don't enjoy, out of guilt that other people have to do the same?

You should definitely do what makes you happy. However, the blog post seems a bit braggy. A lot of us experience the same things, but we don't have a safety net(other than the gubmit I guess), it breeds jealousy. If I were in the same situation I would have left off the part about cashing out and paying the mortgage and not created a patreon without something to back it up immediately. It would have been better if it…

I wrote it because it was what I wanted to write, not as a formal teardown of the tech industry. You may notice that I didn't submit it to HN.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#534

Post by foobarian »

copsarebastards wrote: post #505
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…

> Unless Yelp has a toxic work culture, it's likely the author brought it on themselves by pushing too hard. I think the reality is probably more complicated. Probably Yelp pushes to much work on its employees and the author allowed it to happen. To be honest, I think more tech jobs are toxic than not; it's very hard to find a good tech job, and even when you do, a good tech job can turn toxic as quickly as a manager…

It is also possible that this is just the way companies in our industry work today. I keep seeing junior developers who somehow think that their job is to write beautiful, elegant software with well designed architectures etc., while in reality the goal that matters is to get product out the door. When they get yelled at for going 2x over time because they ended up refactoring many times more code than necessary they get discouraged. I think it's just a matter of arriving at the right expectations, which sometimes takes time and experience.

There are certainly roles where software can be an end itself. Academic paths focused specifically on software, open source, perhaps some R&D shops (think Guava guys). But in most companies it's a means to an end.

This article makes some good related points on the topic of technical debt and what amount of it is optimal for enterprises.

http://bigeng.io/post/118399425343/why-the-way-we-look-at-te...

Re: I quit the tech industry

#535

Post by svachalek »

skynetv2 wrote: post #264
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…

I hear Netflix also has a very high pressure culture and if people cant cope up, they are given a generous severance and asked to leave. is this right? how long can a person survive in such environments?

There's a lot more to being a professional than being good at the technical aspects of what you do. Communicating, coordinating, scheduling, etc. all play at least as much of a role in getting the job done. I think if you are handling those aspects of the job well, you shouldn't feel like your pants are on fire everyday, no matter where you work. [Edit: assuming it's not some kind of sweatshop. Don't waste years of your life at one of those.]

Also you probably have other priorities in life so remember those every day rather than look back two years later saying "how did I forget everything else in my life?" It can be done. Stand up for yourself, and what you want out of life.

[I've worked 20 years in Silicon Valley, currently at Netflix.]

Re: I quit the tech industry

#536

Post by moskie »

kelnos wrote: post #522
moskie wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that this post screams clinical depression to me. Yes, he's also describing a shitty job, one that he will probably benefit from quitting. But it is also common for the feelings he's having to be the result of more than just a shitty job. Also, people in healthy mental states prevent these situations before they get to the breaking point. There's so many factors to consider, and none of us have all the i…

I don't see it that way at all, and I'd like to suggest that attempting to diagnose clinical depression from a blog post seems a bit ridiculous. She doesn't sound depressed; she sounds like someone happy to be mostly financially independent and able to pursue whatever projects she wants, not something someone else is telling her to do. I've felt very similarly over the past few years, and I'm working to build enough…

I pretty much agree with what you're saying, I just take issue with zxcvvcxz using the mere suggestion that it could be something more, and something that might be helped by medication, as an excuse to deride the entire concept of (responsibly) using medication to treat depression when appropriate.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#537

Post by steve-howard »

jimwalsh wrote: post #166

Work-Life-Balance, such a great lesson many 20 somethings should make an effort to learn before they destroy the passion they have for whatever it is they are passionate about. I'd never tell someone to not work hard or to strive for things they want to accomplish. But be able to step back and look at the big picture. Life is too short. Don't forget to enjoy it while you can.

When you fall down the rabbit hole of burnout, there's not much help for you. Work sucks, but then you come home from work and you're exhausted and you don't have time to go work on a side project or nurture a non-tech hobby or really do much of anything but stay up way too late because, as the author said, you're not ready to wake up and have it be tomorrow again.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#538

Post by thwarted »

omouse wrote: post #323

This is precisely why Google had 20% time and why other companies have hackathons; that ramp-up time to get anything done is definitely required. It's also burnout; the dude is sick of working on something that he doesn't particularly care about anymore. I bet if Yelp offered him a few days a week or 1 week per month to work on whatever he wants he'd be happier and wouldn't be burnt out.

I worked at Yelp for five years and was there when Yelp engineering first started doing "hackathons". People worked on some interesting stuff during them, but very little of it was meant to be production ready and useful (vs toy) projects saw little exposure outside of the company or the engineering department itself. Lots of things were meant only to scratch our own developer itches or impress co-workers, like internal engineering tools (which have their own value). I attribute this to "yelp the public facing product/service" having a master plan that is determined outside of engineering proper—nothing wrong with that, it is what it is. So if you had some cool idea to, for example, revamp the UI/UX of the business photos page, you could work on that during the hackathon, but it was only a hackathon project. This encouraged people to work on throwaway toy projects or experiment with deep backend stuff during hackathons to blow off steam vs something that someone could point to publicly. Not to say that no hackathon projects ever were exposed non-internally, but it was a very small percentage. Some people used hackathons to catch up on regular work while many other people were working on hackathon projects. Maybe it's changed since I left.

"Hackathons" are not a silver bullet solution to trying to get people to have ownership over the solutions to problems they are solving for themselves, their department, and the company.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#539

Post by wpietri »

angersock wrote: post #268
zippy786 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what is fundamentally wrong with the industry. Often those who don't care or don't do much are the highest paid and get more reward that the ones who care the most and always try to do something. Obviously, the environment eventually turns those who care into someone not caring as much. Eventually not caring at all, thus a toxic environment is formed. Some may also feel that this is the norm in most companies…

The author kinda hints at the key right here: "They’re interesting for a while, but they’re also the same self-inflicted wounds everyone seems to deal with — why is this slow? why is this broken? how can we keep this old code limping along indefinitely without having to rewrite it? how does this thing a former employee wrote even work? They’re cute puzzles, and I can get into solving them for a while, but I don’t car…

That section meant something to me too, but something different.

I was just talking with a friend that is really frustrated because in his view his team is not only trying to deal with a bunch of tech debt, they are trying to move so fast that they net create more tech debt every week. And he feels like he's the only one who will look at this squarely; everybody else just finds their little puzzles to work on. I expect eventually he'll quit and go somewhere modestly less pathological.

The root issue is not that the problems are self-inflicted. The shit-rolls-downhill ethos means that they are to the company, but not really to an individual worker. So most developer experiences are of dealing with an unending stream of unnecessary dumb puzzles, rather than challenging problems with real meaning.

This is not how it has to be. I've been on projects where the code got incrementally better each day. Where we spent most of our time on things that mattered to us and to the business, instead of sweeping up after the elephant parade.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#540

Post by kctess5 »

eevee wrote: post #331
xienze wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, assuming you also have a job. Having no job (and no desire to get a job) and little savings (the author says it almost all went to paying off the mortgage) is a little stressful, to say the least. In this situation having a big pile of cash and a mortgage would be preferable.

I do also have some pre-existing savings; I just don't want to use them if at all possible (and have to start all over, sob), so I've been deliberately pretending they're unavailable.

I understand what you're saying, but a technical note: you say "start all over," but I think that is untrue. You would be starting from the position of having no debt and owning your home outright (a positive net worth.) That's an excellent position to be in, in terms of trying to build savings. Congrats on the mortgage! :)
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