I quit the tech industry • Hacker News Board

Re: I quit the tech industry

#551

Post by Dewie3 » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 8:13 AM UTC

JDiculous wrote: post #159

The 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…

> I totally agree with the author that the tickets we're assigned are all puzzles that I could lose myself in and inevitably get some feeling of satisfaction when I figure it out. But in the grand scheme of things, most of us aren't working on problems of real significance (eg. curing cancer, creating a more efficient battery).

So what? Most people aren't curing cancer, or doing anything more of value than their paycheck reflects. And maybe the value of our paycheck is really inflated, even. In the end we are just floating on a giant ~ball through space and maybe someday we'll have a cataclysmic event that undoes all of our social and scientific progress. Stop thinking that you have to be some special snowflake, relax, and maybe you'll find that you can find pleasure in the little, mundane stuff. In the end, they're all we really have.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#552

Post by GFischer » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 1:44 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #177

mvanvoorden wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Contradict each other. Of course no one WANTS to work but there are things that HAVE to be done. Like farming, hunting, building shelter. Chopping firewood to keep warm in the winter. You know, modern, made up problems like that. But those are not made up problems, those are necessities and cost only a minimal amount of time per day, especially if it can be distributed over many more people. Anyway, how does it cont…

> But those are not made up problems, those are necessities and cost only a minimal amount of time per day Minimal, LOL. What world do you live in? I suggest you pay a visit to Amish country some day and see how people unencumbered with "made up problems" live. Farming and other survival-related tasks are literally ALL they do. And it's all you would ever do without people sitting in offices and factories tending to…

Although I don't advocate living like the Amish, I think that reality is mostly not like what you describe.

Only a TINY percentage of office or factory workers are really working on problems related to farming, food, or "satisfying basic necessities" problems.

Most are working on problems much higher on the Maslow hierarchy of needs - for example, a LOT of work is devoted to advertising, and very often I believe it's zero-sum. A lot of other resources are devoted to entertainment, government, finances, etc.

Heck, agriculture is less 2% of the U.S. GDP.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#553

Post by exelius » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 4:50 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #485

exelius wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I know, I really understand what you're saying. And I am not saying a democracy is a better option. But I just don't think the things you're describing are attributable to top-down management. It certainly has never prevented the problems you've mentioned in any of the places I've ever worked. I agree that clear direction is needed, but your garden-variety middle manager isn't going to provide that. What he will usua…

Middle managers don't provide direction; they are communication points. As to how effective they can be, it all depends on how the org is structured. If it's a product-centric organization (i.e. P&L rolls up under product and operating costs are charged back to the product org) then it can work pretty well. If it's a functional organization (revenue rolls up through a sales org on a regional basis and is combined with costs at the corporate level) then there's really no amount of management that will make it a good place for developers to work -- under the latter model, finance is running the company and you're a pure cost center. The manager's primary focus will be cost control, not product quality. That's a bad situation to work under.

I agree with your second assessment, but it's more of an issue with the consultoware business model than anything. Most consultoware shops start up thinking they're going to get hockey-stick growth, but it turns out every implementation is super-custom and it ends up as a consulting business. Many companies fail to realize this has happened, and end up operating like a software company when they should be operating like a professional services company with hourly billing. Under a professional services model, if a customer wants a feature, you can quote them a price for developing and implementing it. Tech debt gets dealt with because it becomes a bottleneck for revenue growth when you can't charge clients to add functionality.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#554

Post by chrismarlow9 » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 7:07 PM UTC

artmageddon wrote: post #529

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been there before; I have a 2 hour commute door to door from central NJ to NYC, and back, each day. I don't know how viable it is for you, but do whatever it takes to make the change, assuming you're not tied to a mortgage and there just aren't any jobs nearby. After doing it for 6.5 years I was finally able to get it down from 120mins each way to 20mins each way, and it made such a huge difference in quality of…

This isn't the first time I've been in this position. Yeah my last few gigs were within 20 minutes, I thought that it wouldn't be so bad but realize now anything further than 20 mins isn't for me.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#555

Post by lsaferite » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 9:07 PM UTC

cbr wrote: post #401

lsaferite wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what sucks. As an American I'd still have to pay American income taxes. I cannot wrap my head around how we can say that's ok. Sure, there are ways to get around a portion of the taxes, but those involve things like never coming to the US for more than a set (short) amount of time.

> As an American I'd still have to pay American income taxes. And as an American you would still receive the support of the US government in case of war or other disasters.

And what of all the other countries that provide 'services' for citizens living abroad that DON'T make them pay taxes? Obviously it can be done.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#556

Post by tsotha » Fri, Jun 12, 2015, 5:51 AM UTC

steve-howard wrote: post #524

tsotha wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

In my experience, a careless engineer will create something brittle and unwieldy that works at first glance, declare success, and move on, leaving others to deal with a painful mess. A thoughtful engineer will think hard about design, comment where there be dragons, and often get rewarded by being reassigned to one of the aforementioned messes. The enduring tension of this line of work, in my opinion, is how to balan…

>The enduring tension of this line of work, in my opinion, is how to balance my desire to take pride in my work with my desire not to be a thankless janitor for the chronically cavalier.

That's a good observation.

Fortunately I've worked myself into the code troll position on my project - nothing goes into the mainline without my approval. Everyone knows I'll reject code that's not well thought through even in the face of looming deadlines.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#557

Post by copsarebastards » Fri, Jun 12, 2015, 1:16 PM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #534

copsarebastards wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It is also possible that this is just the way companies in our industry work today.

Yeah, I think that's true.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#558

Post by thorin » Fri, Jun 12, 2015, 1:26 PM UTC

fotoblur wrote: post #226

Unfortunately the world is a cruel place, and this guy wants freedom from it. I know, I took the 3-4 months off after quitting a job to do my own thing. I did earn a few dollars but nothing like what a business was willing to pay for my skills. We'd all like to be free to do what we want to do, but in all honesty only a fraction of 1% ever get to. And even those people serve a master. Did I ever find the answer, no.…

I've taken at least 12 months off since 2000. 4 months, 3 months, 4 months and a month as 2 sabbaticals, one time between jobs and one as parental leave. I also take around 6-8 weeks holiday a year. I could do with the extra money but it's not essential and life feels good if you have time to pursue other interests. I enjoy technical work but I also enjoy the outdoors, sports, travel and spending time with my family.

We're in an industry which has a good demand for work and pays well. It's important to take advantage of that when you can.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#559

Post by brightball » Fri, Jun 12, 2015, 8:47 PM UTC

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 see your points here, but these are trickier than you're making them out to be.

Using the numbers you're putting out here, if you put 20% down on a $500,000 home ($100,000 while borrowing $400,000) there's a couple of discrepancies.

First, paying off the mortgage early. You're right, once it's paid off you will be earning 0% interest. Assuming you don't pay it off early and go with the full 30 year schedule and I'm going to assume a 4% interest rate here, your total payment price will be about $875,000. By paying off early you're eliminating those losses. It's not that you're earning 0%, it's that you're not losing over -100%.

If your home goes up 10%, regardless of whether it's paid off or leverage you actually didn't make anything. You don't make anything on real estate until you sell it to cash out. Until then, any gains in a home that's paid off or mortgaged are identical. The only difference is if you didn't put 20% down and were also paying extra for PMI then the increase in value could get you out of PMI.

Yes, the money on your loan could have been earning interest. Instead it's losing interest so you need to find a guaranteed return higher than your mortgage rate. Guaranteed is the trick there. If you can pull it off with a whole life policy, then great. Without the guarantee market volatility comes into play. If you're a person who is comfortable taking out a loan to invest in something else, your perspective will clearly differ here though.

#4 is admittedly a very good an interesting point that I had not considered at all.

Regarding the mortgage interest being tax deductible, that only gets you back the equivalent you would have paid in income tax. 80% of it is still full interest.

I'll definitely look into the videos and whole life policies though. Anytime I talk about putting money into paying off a mortgage early I always have an equity line open on the house so that I can pull most if it back out for emergencies, including making the actual mortgage payments in the event of a lapse in income for some reason.

With that, available it makes it easier to avoid the foreclosure because you've got a way to use the equity to avoid default and by yourself time. You just have to open the line of credit when you aren't having bad luck.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#560

Post by brightball » Fri, Jun 12, 2015, 8:55 PM UTC

bcheung wrote: post #523

tmorton wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whole life policies are pretty terrible, because they're high-fee and opaque. It's very difficult to compare them like-to-like, and that's on purpose - each insurance company wants to sell a slightly different set of guarantees, risks, benefits and fees. Term life insurance is what you need to protect your family. 401ks, IRAs, then simple index funds are superior investment vehicles. Here's the really short guide to…

If you are going to have life insurance until you die, then whole life insurance is cheaper. 95% of term life insurance policies expire and are not renewed. The reason is because term insurance gets extremely expensive as you get older. WL is the same cost every year until you die. Include the cost of term insurance for a person who is 99 years old and term life is extremely expensive. It doesn't make sense to me to…

That's kind've the point though. Ideally, by the time you're out of the 30 year term for life insurance your investments and assets left to your family will be more than enough to pass on to them. With a 30 year term policy, you can pay $50 / month for 30 years from age 35 to 65 and if something ever happens you'll be able to leave $500,000 for your family. That's a total cost of $18,000 over 30 years for $500,000 in benefits which is an outstanding value.

Taking out loans against whole life policies isn't something I was aware of though. I'd be interested to know what type of rates you could get with the loans against that compared to home equity loans or equity lines of credit that you can also use to get at the money you put into paying off the mortgage if you need it.