Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help • Hacker News Board

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#141

Post by __throwawy1234 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #133

__throwawy1234 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, it's not cynicism, although it used to be until I really thought things through. It's just the truth. I have a great life, I have truly been blessed, and I am very thankful. But to me the glass is already broken. Things may come, things may go, the only thing I control is me, and I am at peace.

Again, that's a very healthy mindset to take no matter what the human condition is, but you don't have to take a scorched-earth perspective on life to adopt such a frame of mind. And for most people, who haven't developed such a frame of mind, that scorched-earth perspective can be really destructive. Additionally, the part about relationships goes further than simple nihilism. Plenty of relationships are real and go…

You seem eager to tell people how to think and to judge the properness of others' outlooks on life. Your concern is noted, have a great day.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#142

Post by taurath » Mon, May 04, 2020, 10:44 PM UTC

opportune wrote: post #112

deanCommie wrote: post #90

> Then I worked for a tech giant, and then for a high-growth unicorn. It shocked me how dilbertesque they both were. Full of politicians, and burnt out engineers in golden handcuffs who can't wait to get out, and meaningless business speak, and checked out employees who pretend they're "excited" about everything all the time. The young, wide-eyed engineers seem hopelessly naive to me now. I don't know this person. I…

Also, depending on the place, a lot of the dilbertesque politics and process are just having a safe/more conservative culture. Getting buy in, satisfying stakeholders, making sure the safe happy protocol is followed - it's so you don't end up in a situation where a junior engineer is tasked with fixing production while you bleed $5k/minute and someone gets fired for it. Instead you blame the process and fix it method…

> Getting buy in, satisfying stakeholders, making sure the safe happy protocol is followed - it's so you don't end up in a situation where a junior engineer is tasked with fixing production

Its also so you can get the thing you really want by sacrificing the thing you don't care about. You get to maintain longer term relationships which lowers people's defensiveness and allows you to move more liquid through the pipes because there aren't people limiting your flow out of defensiveness or because they don't believe in what you're doing.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#143

Post by peterwwillis » Mon, May 04, 2020, 10:46 PM UTC

You're an artist trying to find artistic and personal fulfillment in somebody else's art factory. That will never work.

You can try to make a living making your own art, and hustle and struggle the way artists do. Or you can work in a monotonous factory churning out someone else's art. The latter is easier, but it requires putting up with more bullshit. The former is harder, but you feel good about it. That's life.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#144

Post by kristopolous » Mon, May 04, 2020, 10:46 PM UTC

jblow wrote: post #82

battery_cowboy wrote: post #2

I'm having similar issues, and i think i found a way out: stop playing their game. Don't make enterprise software. Don't write unit tests. Don't accept pull requests. Simply write software for yourself and have fun doing it. Forget refactoring code into modules, just fucking code. Don't worry about deployment with k8s, just copy the Python script to your production folder and run it. Fuck all that shit about git bran…

This is right. The OP said he is "disillusioned with technology" but I didn't see actual technology being described as the problem with any point. So there's a conflation here happening between technology and "tech" companies. And I can only say the phrase "tech" companies while using sarcasm quotes around "tech", because almost nobody at any of these companies develops actual technology. And that's a big part of the…

There's a subculture that's reinvented the merits of software engineering to being as ornate and ceremonious as possible.

It doesn't have to work well, or be bug free, or compatible with the previous version, or address any real world need.

No! Instead it has to use fashionable technology and be extremely complicated so other programmers can see how incredibly clever they are!

Almost like they took a random bug from the issue tracker by looking at last nights lotto numbers and then they opened to a random page of Knuth by letting a fan blow on the pages for 5 minutes and said "alright, I'll solve this problem in that way! Surely everyone will acknowledge my genius!"

It may be a slow lumbering buggy pile of brittle barely functional code about to implode, but boy does it look nice!

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#145

Post by pnathan » Mon, May 04, 2020, 10:47 PM UTC

I love hacking on code, it's why I got into it. The Official side of it all can be a real bummer. I can always measure my burnout levels of Official work by how much I start hacking at home. I make a fairly distinct separation between work and home, always have. Even though I have worked late and passionately at times. :) I always enjoy the new file, the fresh project smell, the beauty of code.

There's something deeply joyous about the potential of an empty file and where you can take it. If I lost that joy, that would be very grievous.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#146

Post by fxtentacle » Mon, May 04, 2020, 10:47 PM UTC

TomMckenny wrote: post #132

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #39

I have also experience close to burnout and recovered multiple times, in the process I have lost very precious relationships, and entire years were spent in darkness. I also have friends who have been in tech for close to ten years, and are close to burning out though they would never admit to such. This is the nature of the beast, all things that appear glamorous on the outside ( Hollywood, Finance, Tech, many nonpr…

All accurate and objective and good for everyone to know early rather than late. Moving a bit further from the specifics, it's worth noting that this is not a natural state of affairs. Humans evolved to be in groups of about 30-100 people who they knew their whole lives and thus making catastrophic deception nearly impossible. Likewise vast sums of wealth did not exist nor total social and fiscal isolation surrounded…

Even at that time, psychopaths were still successful enough to pass on the genes for their trait.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Environment

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#147

Post by Aeolun » Mon, May 04, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

cosmodisk wrote: post #125

rwesty wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really, really bad advice. Mutiny is hardly an answer to the problem here. It will certainly temporarily avoid the problems you face but if you are a member of a team and this is truly how you act you will get chucked out very quickly. But since you bring up a few of the issues you are facing it's important to address them. I want to focus on unit tests to start. When I started my first programming job a coup…

While I dabbled with python and Delphi for a bit,my first real development was on Salesforce platform with their proprietary language called Apex. The first thing every developer learns on thos platform is that your code has to have at least 75% test coverage before it can be pushed to production.Testing was inevitable and ultimately part of anything I had to write. With time,I started reading more and more about dev…

But what do you do if your initial codebase is crap. You literally cannot test until you refactor 50% of it into something semi-sensible.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#148

Post by superfrank » Mon, May 04, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

deanCommie wrote: post #90

> Then I worked for a tech giant, and then for a high-growth unicorn. It shocked me how dilbertesque they both were. Full of politicians, and burnt out engineers in golden handcuffs who can't wait to get out, and meaningless business speak, and checked out employees who pretend they're "excited" about everything all the time. The young, wide-eyed engineers seem hopelessly naive to me now. I don't know this person. I…

I feel like a lot of times when people complain about a company politics, it's only because they are on the losing side of the issue. When it works in their favor it's just the company culture.

Mentally, I've started replacing complaints about politics with "nobody is listening to me".

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#149

Post by gfodor » Mon, May 04, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

throwaway839246 wrote: post #135

gfodor wrote: post #94

Most of your problems sound like they stemmed from VC. Similar story. It's a good, and hard, lesson. Two things one should not touch when it comes to building healthy companies in 2020: crypto and equity sales to VC. They're going to become fossils soon anyhow [1]. Read Rework by Basecamp. Read The Beginning of Infinity by Deutch. Read the Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Hamming. Watch some Bret Victor talks.…

> Most importantly, know that the future is bright and that our best days are not only ahead of us, but always will be. I've read (and watched) everything on your list of recommendations. Perhaps I should reread Deutch's chapter on optimism, but I don't have the same conviction that you do. Where does your conviction come from?

That we're in the middle of an exponentially growing creation of new knowledge, and that (echoing Deutsch) all problems are soluble. Now, there are exceptions to this, for example, a sudden existential crisis. But I prefer to be an optimist in those scenarios, given humanity's demonstrated ability to achieve great things. There's a lot of negativity in the press about the global response to COVID-19, but I take a contrarian view and expect historians to look back at the heroic deeds of healthcare workers and researchers to overcome this crisis as unprecedented in scale and speed. It has exposed cracks in our institutions, surely, but I see it has a crystalizing moment to remind us all how much we can achieve.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#150

Post by gorbachev » Mon, May 04, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

A thought occurred to me while reading this and the responses.

I had pretty severe burnout - who knew, working two jobs and studying full time isn't very smart - when I was very young in my career. In hindsight that was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It was even better that it happened early in my career when I didn't have dependents to care about or much of a career really.

Because of that I learned, unfortunately the hard way, that work is work and that's not your life. It took me a while, but I forced myself to stop worrying, thinking and in any way engage with work once the workday is done. I haven't taken work home in years.

Burnouts suck, the really bad ones are dangerous, too, because you lose your sense of reality, but, honestly, if people went through it once when it's relatively safe and you can rely on help to get through it, like I did, the rest of your life could/would be much better.