231–240 of 496 posts
As a kid, I aspired to be a programmer. As an adult, I succeeded, and I stuck around for a good long while. There are a lot of reasons to like working tech, obviously: the salary, the flexible working environment, the prestige, the opportunity to build products that real people use, the chance to play with new technology, and of course working with occasionally brilliant colleagues. I tried to convince myself that th…
As a kid, I aspired to be a programmer. As an adult, I succeeded, and I stuck around for a good long while. There are a lot of reasons to like working tech, obviously: the salary, the flexible working environment, the prestige, the opportunity to build products that real people use, the chance to play with new technology, and of course working with occasionally brilliant colleagues. I tried to convince myself that th…
The top answer also mentions this. Yours is currently second-top.
I hope developers get the message.
I'm SO tired of trying to navigate around the mountains of pure garbage every time I want to work on a new project.
I long for the days when adding new functionality to your project was as easy as including a single external file, and when code repositories didn't automatically come with ten different utterly useless metadata files.
I wish I could leave. The tech industry nowadays is no longer about solving real-world problems and making the world a better place, instead it's all about screwing the end user in every single way possible, whether it's ads, stalking and privacy violations, spam ("marketing" as they call it) or just plain fraud where the company is happy to take the money but can't make it right if things don't go to plan and the cu…
1. Do not work for a company where tech is not their primary product. If you are only a cost center, you will be treated like a second-class citizen.
2. Work for a smaller company. Your work is so much more impactful when you are not part of a mega-machine.
3. Work only remotely. The quality of life increase that comes with working remotely is massive, and I am not willing to give that up.
Of course this is not always going to be realistic. For one, working for a company that sells tech does not mean that you will be treated well, but it is more likely. Smaller companies, and remote only tend to pay a bit less (and definitely less than a FAANG), but still more than plenty to live a great life.
Who knows where life will lead me, but I will try to stick to these points.
I had been at the company for over a decade, and had gotten quite lucky in the RSU lottery & thought, wait, I have enough money to last forever, so why do I do this to myself?
My health was bad, I was overweight, smoked, was depressed. I felt like it was going to kill me if I stayed another decade.
So I quit. In the years since, I stopped smoking, lost 1/3 my bodyweight & really got my shit together. I dink around on personal projects and learn new things. I follow HN because I'm genuinely interested in tech & now I can pursue what things I want, rather than those I need for $JOB or $NEXT_JOB.
I miss the good people I used to work with, but this is almost completely offset by how much I don't miss the assholes and the hassles (annual review, recruiting, meetings, explaining basic math to MBAs, etc).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can relate to your point of view, which is why I don't work for "the tech industry", but instead have my own SaaS. This lets me stay close to tech (I love programming in Clojure and ClojureScript!), do what I enjoy, and not have my soul sucked out by evilness and stupidity of today's adtech world. I have a product which solves a real problem and I'm getting paid by customers who appreciate that their workflow is so…
How do you propose finding those real problems to solve? I know that every problem I encounter in my life (or work) has already been solved 100 times over.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/06/where-theres-muck-...
I wish I could leave. The tech industry nowadays is no longer about solving real-world problems and making the world a better place, instead it's all about screwing the end user in every single way possible, whether it's ads, stalking and privacy violations, spam ("marketing" as they call it) or just plain fraud where the company is happy to take the money but can't make it right if things don't go to plan and the cu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I was spending more time wrestling with package managers, version conflicts, obtuse configuration files, pointless deadlines, egotistical colleagues, and almost zero time solving interesting problems on products that I care about. That squares with my experience of software development. It's like being a furniture maker but spending 80% of your time fixing your goddamn hammer because it keeps breaking and no better…
It's the same for all kinds of work outside of academia. I studied aerospace engineering and day-to-day it's exceedingly rare to need any math beyond basic trigonometry. 80% of the time it's useless meetings, emails, paperwork; only sometimes it's actually useful or fun. Some people study business for years and end up splitting their days between sitting in meetings and updating Gantt charts. That's just how work is.
I wish I could leave. The tech industry nowadays is no longer about solving real-world problems and making the world a better place, instead it's all about screwing the end user in every single way possible, whether it's ads, stalking and privacy violations, spam ("marketing" as they call it) or just plain fraud where the company is happy to take the money but can't make it right if things don't go to plan and the cu…
I know Fortune 500 developers who are working on super cool DevOps enablers and internal libraries using modern tech. The good places are not your dad's IBM WebSphere configuration shop anymore.