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Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

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Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#141

Post by gcheong »

idoby wrote: post #19

Shit, are you me? You're just being over 30, welcome. Those documentaries you watched on your old CRT TV while growing up were showing you fiction. The tech industry is an ad mill. Academia is about innovation killing fiefdoms. What you need to realize is that for an institution, the first priority is maintaining homeostasis, and that means not letting you do something that might risk resources or upsetting the estab…

"Those documentaries you watched on your old CRT TV while growing up were showing you fiction."

Ironically perhaps a truer picture of the industry was probably the fiction series "Halt and Catch Fire".

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#142

Post by lasereyes136 »

Don't romanticize the past. The hacker ethos was alive in only a few companies in the 80s and 90s. There have always been people that want to grad most of the upside of any company or activity.

It can be hard but you should define your values, come up with questions that might show your values at work at a company, and start asking those questions. If a company doesn't want to answer your questions, it isn't a fit. Ask as many people at the company the same questions so you get a variety of answers. See of they have compatible answers, they don't need to be the same as people have different perceptions and ways of expressing themselves but the answers should hang together or they are not telling you the truth.

Many corporate tech jobs are sitting around being a pawn in other people's power games. If you can't accept that, find another place to work.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#143

Post by lasereyes136 »

bitcrazy wrote: post #51

I might be the same as you, except like 3 years ahead. I too felt the exact same way, so I left my cushy job (which paid pretty well) to start my own thing. 3 years later, and still bootstrapped, I'm starting to see why things are the way they are. Not trying to sound too depressing, but at the end of the day, money is what matters, and the status quo is the most optimized form of money-making there is. Profit-seekin…

> This might go against the grain here, but my advice: change the attitude, unless you want to remain depressed.

Great advice. It is up to you to decide how you feel about your situation. There are no perfect answers, just ones that fit you better. Find the set of trade-offs you can live with.

> I also realize the whole "everyone else is a conman" thinking is quite wrong.

While true, there are a good number of people with agendas that aren't in your best interest. Take a queue from those people and look out for your best interest. Move on when you find something that fits you better.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#144

Post by companyhen »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #29

Get involved in the decentralization space (and not just cryptocurrencies). The hacker ethos is still alive and well there. Plenty of smart people trying to change the world like the hackers of the 80's and 90's and it's all fresh and new. Decentralized services (like IPFS, Sia, Ethereum, Scuttlebutt, Matrix, etc) are the new frontier for development and there's so much cool stuff being created.

Was going to suggest this.

Another project to look into is Arweave, they've developed a really nice solution to make data permanent and censorship-resistant. Great small dev community, looking for more to join in and build with them.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#145

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

flanker wrote: post #117
idoby wrote: post #19

Shit, are you me? You're just being over 30, welcome. Those documentaries you watched on your old CRT TV while growing up were showing you fiction. The tech industry is an ad mill. Academia is about innovation killing fiefdoms. What you need to realize is that for an institution, the first priority is maintaining homeostasis, and that means not letting you do something that might risk resources or upsetting the estab…

> Shit, are you me? That's what I said, I suppose there are lots of people in their early 30's having a dilemma. I'm also struggling with something similar, but I recognise I have much to attain in level of expertise but do I want to do that? Is another question.

> I suppose there are lots of people in their early 30's having a dilemma

I'm approaching my 40s and I've had this dilemma since I was 25. I used to strive for being a top performer despite my hatred for working in this industry. I accelerated through the lower ranks and significantly increased my salary, but my happiness plateaued very early on. Over the last few years I've learned to lay low and give just enough to not get fired. I couldn't care less about the company or my work, I just want to clock out at the 8 hour mark - and not a minute later - then go work in my garden. I found this to be the optimal balance between financial security and my happiness.

If you've ever read "The Gervais Principle" - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... - you can classify me as a "Loser" on that spectrum.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#146

Post by b_t_s »

Exmoor wrote: post #123
scotty79 wrote: post #109

> entering the industry in the early to mid 2010's i found a landscape filled with self serving product managers, conmen [...] > [...] the hacker ethos was lost. the culture changed I'm 41 so I probably entered the IT industry a decade before you. Nothing changed. It was always like that. And I just strongly suspect it's not just IT. That's basically what 'work' and 'business' is. Basically start having life outside…

Yes, the vast majority of software engineers in the 90's were working on really mundane products guided by selling units. I would argue it was significantly worse back then because it was a lot more difficult to engage with peers outside your own company and the tooling people used was significantly more likely to include a lot of proprietary niche products.

heck yea. There was no github or stack overflow, or the thousands of online forums and offline meetups we have now. Maybe it was better in silicone valley, but in the rest of he world it was pretty dreadful. My career doesn't go back to the 90s, but even in the mid oughts writing firmware, the only people I could find working on the same tech stack as me were the 4 other devs on my team, and if we had a "stack overflow question" we had to just keep banging our heads against it or ask a manager to call the vendor's sales rep to find us an engineering manager who could arrange a conference all with a dev. And there were delights like knocking on a teammate's door to ask how much longer they'd have FooBar.c locked, because you need to edit it too and version control didn't support 2 devs editing the same file. Sure, foundational projects were easier to find back then, but _lot_ of things were a _lot_ worse back in the "good old days".

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#147

Post by MattGrommes »

cynusx wrote: post #35

I think you want to seek out companies where the main business risk is technology risk still. That would be database companies, developer tools, artificial intelligence startups, operating systems, ... Probably drones and sensor-companies also qualify but don't really know much about that industry. SpaceX's reusable rocket is a great example of technology risk and so is Tesla's affordable electric car. Most startups…

Agreed. I worked at an insurance company early in my career and even though we were updating the company to the newest technology for all the internal apps and theoretically making everyone's lives easier, we were still just kind of a necessary evil because the company could have gone back to using paper if they needed to. I decided to move to companies where software was the focus and that worked very well. I got a lot better, worked with people more like me, and was appreciated a lot more by the companies I worked with.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#148

Post by maximente »

don't take this personally, but you sound lazy, afraid, and without a mission in life. if you're seriously considering what you yourself have called an "irrelevant" and "outdated" thing that will take up, in all likelihood, multiple years of your life, you're clearly stalling.

write down what you want out of life. without this, no decision matters because any decision just advances time without working towards a goal. perhaps "making intellectually curious stuff for a living" ends up on there, perhaps it doesn't. but without this, nothing matters because there's no direction.

i have no idea what success looks like to you, but i'm fairly sure you can bootstrap yourself with a 24 month window of $2000 living expenses. so, if you have $0 today, save up $50k and you have a 2 year runway. if you can't figure out how to save $50k quickly with 7 years exp as an SWE, or live on less than $2k/mo, you're not even trying. with that, you have 750 days to figure out/demonstrate to the world that you are worth $2k/month. that is eminently doable, imo.

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#149

Post by tarsinge »

Regarding the landscape my explanation is that it hasn't really changed: the kind of companies driven by hacker ethos were a very tiny part in the 90's, the most part of the industry was enterprise software development. The catch is that nowadays companies are so good at marketing that most engineers fail to see that most SaaS companies are just the new incarnation of the same corporate MBA/sales driven world that existed before. In Office Space or in Neo's software company in the Matrix how were treated engineers? What were their expectations, were they thinking they were changing the world? A lot of dissatisfaction nowadays seems to come from that dissonance of what we think/are selled we do, vs what we really do. It helps to picture the typical front-end dev job as what would have been done with J2EE a few years ago in an enterprise setting. Technology and fashion has changed, but not the core of the industry and the enterprise world.

Edit: also to more specifically answer your question, I'm about the same age, and what I do is take any hacking/fun driven activities outside financial constraints (i.e. hobbies). Game development, learning niche languages, anything becomes possible to explore with freedom. I also started my own business, but I'm not sure it would suit you because it's the same game, except if like me you see entrepreneurship as hacking (just be aware the hardest problems will usually not be solved with code).

Re: Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

#150

Post by one2know »

mywittyname wrote: post #100
kube-system wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two worker classifications in the US which refer to the tax forms they get: "W2": An employee. A regular job. "1099": Independent contractor, freelancer.

To expand on this, the differences come down to taxation. There are taxes in the use called FICA that are half-paid for by the employer for W2 workers and not covered for 1099 employees. Also 1099 workers are able to deduct business-related expenses from their income ta.

The most important distinction is clients large and small will try to rip off 1099 workers. The state labor office will not help 1099 workers. They must hire lawyers sometimes to get payment.
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