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What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

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Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#111

Post by jonpress »

I have seen several people on LinkedIn describe themselves as 'Visionary Entrepreneurs' - One of them had never even started a company company in his life - Just deciding that he was 'going to do it' was sufficient to convince himself that he was actually an entrepreneur (and a visionary one too!). A more accurate word to use there would be 'illusionary'.

I'm 25, I have been an employee at 4 different startups and 1 big company, I have 2 failed projects of my own under by belt (long term side projects - Working late nights and weekends and for a total of 6 years). I have one somewhat promising project in the pipeline, but I wouldn't call myself an entrepreneur - I think being an entrepreneur these days implies that you got VC funding.

My previous 2 projects failed in a large part due to strong competitors who were really well funded - On my own, I just didn't have the manpower to compete with that (not in those particular fields). Regular people who have a vision and really care about a product (and enjoy working on it) unfortunately cannot compete with well funded entrepreneurs. VC funding creates very loud noises in the market and your target users just cannot hear about your small project/company through all that noise.

I'm actually hoping that the economy will crash this year - That would clean out my current competitors - I'm sure most of them will give up as soon as VC money disappears.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#112

Post by fat0wl »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #68
fat0wl wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you downvoted this can you please explain why? I am actually desperate for reasons not to be so cynical about my job so i can at least scrape something out of my days until i find a better place... I wish I had a sunnier view of things but I am someone who wants to work hard but feels like an ant on an ant farm. ppl have advised me to go into startup scene but all the startups i've interviewed at in NY are mock co…

I didn't downvote, but maybe it was the tone. "These ppl are pure scum" qualifies for me for others than some devs with other motivations than what I have. There are definitely good jobs which one can be passionate about out there. I didn't easily find that job myself when I was sick of my job and ended up creating it instead. This industry offers so much potential that I feel it is nearly only a matter of looking ar…

thanks... I think the reason I get a bit heated is because I come from an arts background actually. There are a lot of slippery slopes in industry, and now I am on one. It disgusts me when I see that my peers are just tumbling over one another to reach the bottom first, just to put another $5/hr on their rate whereas I used to work with people who didn't care if they spent their whole careers as penniless musicians so long as they got to experience the feeling of genuine pursuit of passion. I see a lot of devs implementing a mess of seriously nasty sweat-shop code with tools/langs they only embraced because of some perceived gap in the market. It seems unethical to me as a developer to do things in an inefficient manner, or its at least sad in that it means you have no sense of personal efficacy or investment in your own growth (beyond how a corporation views you).

A lot of tech feels like a very spiritually empty game, and I resent it for becoming this gruesome when really programming can be a beautiful pursuit as well. I'm trying to be patient, there is a company that has expressed interest in me that is much more into embracing proper design paradigms and modern approaches at least. At my current gig we are handcuffed by lots of legacy code, layers of bureaucracy, "Senior Devs & Architects" who are really at about junior level, and people who are difficult just for the sake of slowing down the pace of work.

Even in academia, I saw a lot of music tech students receive their masters degrees only to promptly jump into a tech bootcamp so they could then assume the position of low-end web dev rather than use any of the audio research skills they spent years trying to assimilate (bit of pot calling the kettle black here but I purposely ditched Ruby for a Java-based job so that I can get back into coding DSP & performance-intensive research apps -- I also spend a lot of time decompiling audio libs).

Living with this job for 2 years has been maddening & I am relieved that I have enough on my post-academia resume now to escape it one of these days. I really need to meet artists who code. Have even been considering going into indie game programming just to meet more of those types, though really my passion is more in electronic art than gaming (but electronic art is barely an industry at all outside advertising!)...

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#113

Post by innguest »

fat0wl wrote: post #38
BatFastard wrote: post #13

Seems like some people are missing the point. He loved it when people enjoyed tech for the pure "creation" and "exploration" aspect. Not the money money money that it has often become. I also disagree with him on this point. I see a huge amount of new ideas and work from people who just like to create, but it tends to be at a more grass roots level like the Arduino community, or the hackerspace groups. So I say to hi…

i went on a rant about this stuff in a recent comment asking about Tech Bootcamps that i deleted half of cuz i knew it would just piss ppl off & was a waste of breath (all other comments were pretty much from ppl who lOoooOooOove 'em, half commenters had vested interest). but yeah tech bootcamps, consultant scammers, open source hipsters.... i see this stuff is rampant & it seems to be a downer in cyberspace. I code…

Thanks for writing this. HN is full of touchy-feely folks, hence the downvotes. For many, it's hard to look past tone. They react emotionally. Sure, maybe your grammar could be better or maybe if we forced everyone to have perfect grammar we'd never had read your post.

I also have been dissatisfied with the industry and what it has become. I got into this to create solutions, not to glue others' solutions together. This isn't fun anymore. I'm looking for something more artistic like concept art drawing. I like what you said, "can't wait to get the CRUD out of my eyes"!

I also agree on the startup point you made. Everything is about ads and how to make them better. Yawn to the max. So uninteresting. I'm afraid I don't have a cure for your cynicism. But I want to leave you with something. I was watching an instructional video of an artist teaching environment drawing technique. He said one of the fun things about drawing professionally is he has been doing it for 50 years and it's still interesting to him. Programming is mercurial and will have different "interesting" periods that will appeal to different people as it progresses. This era in programming is not my favorite.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#114

Post by icedchai »

astrodust wrote: post #66
navyrain wrote: post #35

What is omitted from the article is the difference in the _size_ of the tech industry during the last 20 years. In 1995, the year the author romances, he emphasizes that doing anything in tech was hard. Two decades later, the hard problems have not gone away; the industry has broadened such that there are more opportunities across the entire spectrum of "noble challenge". There are more opportunities in making fluff,…

It did seem like everyone plus dog had a startup in 1995 and most were working on the absolutely stupidest ideas possible just that they were more B2B focused than B2C in that era. I'd argue the CueCat ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat ) was the iconic culmination of five years of feverish insanity.

1995 was actually a few years before the insanity took hold. Most people still didn't know what the Internet was back then.

1998-2001 is when things got really crazy. Arguably things getting almost as bad now.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#115

Post by notacoward »

georgemcbay wrote: post #102
notacoward wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I'll probably get slammed for saying this here, of all places, but if you manage to push out a product in six months then either you're brilliant or what you're doing just wasn't that hard. The thing is, every single person in this position assumes that they're in the first group, but it's not even possible for more than a few of them to be right. Even accounting for the nine out of ten startups that fail,…

I've met a couple of the relatively recent "tech luminaries" often waxed poetic about in terms of their technical genius and found their understanding of actual technology (as it relates to overall software development) to range from very superficial to non-existent. OTOH they are wildly rich and I am a wage slave, so I guess the joke's on people who think the actual quality of the technology matters rather than the…

You're absolutely correct that the actual quality of the technology is not the main determinant of success. Neither is how it's marketed. The biggest factor is the time and place in which both are done, and therefore how their product matches up against buyers or competitors. That's almost entirely beyond the "brilliant" entrepreneur's control. I don't begrudge them their success, but I also don't take it as proof of anything above base-level competence.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#116

Post by fat0wl »

innguest wrote: post #113
fat0wl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i went on a rant about this stuff in a recent comment asking about Tech Bootcamps that i deleted half of cuz i knew it would just piss ppl off & was a waste of breath (all other comments were pretty much from ppl who lOoooOooOove 'em, half commenters had vested interest). but yeah tech bootcamps, consultant scammers, open source hipsters.... i see this stuff is rampant & it seems to be a downer in cyberspace. I code…

Thanks for writing this. HN is full of touchy-feely folks, hence the downvotes. For many, it's hard to look past tone. They react emotionally. Sure, maybe your grammar could be better or maybe if we forced everyone to have perfect grammar we'd never had read your post. I also have been dissatisfied with the industry and what it has become. I got into this to create solutions, not to glue others' solutions together. T…

heh yes its funny i dont karma points seriously, i was mainly interested in hearing some qualitative sort of discussion but the main complaints i got were about grammar & negativity, neither of which i am particularly apologetic about. anyway, glad u appreciated & provided a thoughtful response :)

i think you are right about the "mercurial" nature. my boss says it used to be much more fun before lots of mature libraries & package software existed. It was literally about algorithm design at all points. Now things are more about vetting existing technologies to see what the most widely-accepted & reliable standards are. And honestly, there are design patterns you can learn from that but realistically I've been in enterprise Java for 2 years and with that small amount of experience, I am already finding that 99% of the work we do is trivial. Anything that would be over my head is provided in a vendor API, and with modern code we can keep our own domain logic slim enough that it almost never gets out of hand.

I think there is still a lot of interesting stuff to accomplish with code but as others pointed out, the industry is sortof over-expanded. Ideas are not leading programming so much as programming is leading to iteration through mundane ideas. The boring startup problem is the result of there being way less thinkers in the industry than do-ers, I'm sure... or that entrepreneurialism is in reality just planting the seeds of micro-corporations rather than acting as an incubator for mind-bending ideas.

Having to be a part of this mundane period is probably my fault (for straying from art toward a career in programming) but maybe I can redeem myself somehow & take a last shot at heaven. I've been thinking of starting my own company, but as a deep-sleeper cell for DSP algorithms development... continue my machine learning / AI research from my master's degree, develop some really powerful tools with heavily optimized algorithms, then try to integrate them into the commercial space (audio editing software, most likely). Hmm... we'll see. Best of luck, again I appreciate u taking the time.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#118

Post by scrollaway »

fat0wl wrote: post #65
logfromblammo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider revising your writing style to be more formal and less conversational. Make an attempt to use punctuation where appropriate, especially with respect to commas and capitalization. Grammar errors will impact a reader's perception of you, regardless of whether your original intent had true merit or not. Your goal should be to communicate exactly the ideas you wish you convey, as concisely as possible. Natural l…

lol that is too true.... i don't mind conversational hippie-styling but HN is the one forum where i get regularly shredded for it

I have a casual and uncaring writing style in many places, but HN is not one of them. This is a place where I enjoy writing properly and reading properly-written comments, mostly because it forces commenters to put some thought into what they write.

When you're here, you know that the majority of comments will have something insightful to add to the discussion and you do not feel like you're wasting your time reading them.

Don't hate on this mindset. It's not appropriate everywhere, but it's not just a hippie concept, it has merits here.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#119

Post by saschajustin »

jacquesm wrote: post #39
saschajustin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Young people, new programmers, and other groups who have no power are not responsible for the nature of a field. Old people control the nature of every field. Old greybeards are the ones who made computer science this way--it's just those greybeards that this man disaproves of. This man isn't a billionaire VC, a tenured Comp Sci professor, an author of programming books, or a CEO hiring and training the kinds of empl…

One young guy named Linus Torvalds upset a whole pile of holy applecarts, as a student, no less, a guy called Mark Zuckerberg built one of the most visited websites on the planet, two other guys built the most frequented search engine while still in college and so on. He doesn't care at all about not being in charge. He cares about people not wanting nor caring about getting some deeper levels of knowledge required t…

Linus is 45 years old. He's not a millenial, he's a greybeard.

Zuckerberg never made any technological advances. His company was a market success but it was based on LAMP... nothing technologically novel about it. Not even the concept was novel--it was a direct myspace rip off.

I'm sure there will be millenials who have an influence on the technology and direction of software. But they certainly aren't the people in charge TODAY and they certainly are not responsible for the state of tech today.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#120

Post by saschajustin »

wpietri wrote: post #27
saschajustin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insane to think that the least powerful members of a field are the ones controlling it. Is the medical field controlled by medical students, or by 60 year old medical authorities? Is chemical engineering controlled by new graduates, or by 60 year old engineering authorities? It's completely ludicrous to imply that programming is somehow being led astray by young people. Young people have no power. They do what t…

This is probably a good rant for some other topic. But Zuckerberg is only 30, even now. The people I see turning up at entrepreneurship events and in the fundraising news aren't 60. They're ~25.

Zuckerberg dances to the tune of the greybeards just as I do. Did Zuckerberg code the backend of facebook? Hell no. He hired people to do it. What programming technologies did those people use? Styles and methods passed down by greybeards. Techniques learned at Stanford University. Techniques learned from Hacker News.

Zuckerberg himself played the tech tune sung by greybeards before him--LAMP was not invented by millenials. LAMP was not popularized by millenials. Zuckerberg's Facebook was a LAMP project.

Of course people showing up at newbie events are newbies!

The people pulling the strings sit in boardrooms, academic boards, they have office hours, people come to them!

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