Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help • Hacker News Board

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#391

Post by cryptica » Tue, May 05, 2020, 7:07 AM UTC

The description about the contrast between an easy, soul-less corporate environment and the insanely difficult startup environment where you get torn apart by vultures resonates very strongly with me.

I think anyone who has worked for a good mix of startups and corporations will understand the extreme difference. And yes, being around a bunch of highly optimistic people inside corporations is depressing.

And it's depressing that people get paid more to do useless bureaucratic things while in a corporation than adding real value whilst in a startup.

I blame Federal reserve banks and fiat money for this. That's why I work in cryptocurrency space now. Cryptocurrency allows you to get profit from systemic inefficiencies just like corporations but you get that nice efficiency, value-creation feeling of a startup.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#392

Post by senderista » Tue, May 05, 2020, 7:10 AM UTC

rwesty wrote: post #95

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 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…

Unit tests are time-consuming and tedious to write, and generally deliver poor effort-per-bug-found except for initial development (especially since they often displace cross-component tests which tend to catch more bugs). And the cases they test simply reflect the prejudices and lack of imagination of the author. A far better alternative IME is to use generative testing (e.g. property-based testing), which automates the tedium of generating test cases, and finds far more bugs to boot. Bonus: you'll understand your code much better after you're forced to identify and formalize invariants ("properties") in order to write your tests!

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#393

Post by _pmf_ » Tue, May 05, 2020, 7:11 AM UTC

The soulless corporation is far from exclusive to what you call "tech". "Tech" is when they also put up a foosball table and paint the walls in bright colors.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#394

Post by senderista » Tue, May 05, 2020, 7:13 AM UTC

throwaway839246 wrote: post #130

unclebucknasty wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point, laced with justified indignation. As a graybeard, I've seen multiple generations of "how to do software" and the most recent are the least fun. A lot of this is driven by the agile approach. It's tailor-made for dev burnout: from the endless tight cycles that force people into an infinite loop of productivity with scant satisfaction that comes with "completion", to all of the tools and philosop…

I'd add open office plans to this. It's awful. You never quite get to focus, you don't build the rapport with your team, you don't get to customize your physical environment. Development really became a white collar version of the assembly line.

Fortunately it looks like open office plans will be a casualty of COVID-19...

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#395

Post by garagemc2 » Tue, May 05, 2020, 7:15 AM UTC

gaze wrote: post #308

throwaway839246 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the advice. This all sounds right. > I found that learning about politics and history-- specifically the history of engineering-- really helped me sort out my feelings. Is there any specific reading you'd recommend?

David Graeber's Bullshit jobs might be an alright place to start. I also just enjoy indulging in the history of places like Tektronix in the 1960s by reading oscilloscope repair manuals... learning about Bell Labs, the Rad lab. It's nice to read about healthy engineering cultures to believe such a thing is possible.

ha Bullshit jobs is a great place to start.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#396

Post by senderista » Tue, May 05, 2020, 7:15 AM UTC

battery_cowboy wrote: post #289

highlysyntropic wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is awesome. You, sir, took the red pill. BTW, do you work for Tesla? The batteries in your name.

I worked with Tesla grid batteries (powerpack installations) at my last job, but I'm currently looking for work. I just got tired of "engineering" my personal projects, i just "program" them now!

That's a great approach. I personally enjoy coding novel or obscure data structures which I'd never get to implement at work, but hopefully might be useful to someone.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#397

Post by _pmf_ » Tue, May 05, 2020, 7:16 AM UTC

tonyarkles wrote: post #245

woah wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No unit tests?? You should just recommend never running your code if that's where you're going.

The thing that unit tests are really good for is providing a safety net when you make changes. And I love them. I have a few multi-year projects that sit and do their thing for months at a time with no changes; when I come back to them with a client request, the test suite is awesome for making sure that whatever I just changed didn't break something else (alternatively, the tests point out an assumption I made when…

> The thing that unit tests are really good for is providing a safety net when you make changes

In all projects I have worked on, extensive unit tests were not a safety net against regressions, but a safety net against change.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#398

Post by mboperator » Tue, May 05, 2020, 7:20 AM UTC

throwaway839246 wrote: post #6

throwaway123874 wrote: post #5

I think the only answer here is to stop clinging onto this 'life' you have. The optimism you're seeking comes from looking forward to today, right now. Right here, right now. Everything is the present moment. If you do not find yourself in the present moment - this could be due to the weight of money, weight of the future, weight of obligations - then abandon it all. You don't need anything. Just reclaim the time tha…

I did throw everything away. I walked away from ~$10M, so this isn't the problem. To live in the present moment one has to unsee the cant. That's the difficult part. How to keep the mind from focusing on all the bullshit that it can't unsee. The burnout, the disillusionment, the politics, the faded friendships. That's what's hard.

I can relate to a lot of the things you've stated. I won't get into the specifics but I understand your experience of working at a tech giant.

In my case, I decided to try to "play the game" for a while. After a few years, I realized clout, money, and the things it afforded were ultimately meaningless to me.

Things like mentoring young engineers, hobbies, and organizing local student hackathons definitely took the edge off. But ultimately so much of it, even the things for the community, was ego-driven. Trying to make the world a better place, a lot of the time, is ultimately ego-driven.

I tried many things but only found lasting peace in turning to God. Jesus died for your sins and I can testify that having faith in Him has lead me to a new, more meaningful life.

Life isn't necessarily easier, but every day is imbued with tremendous meaning.

You're clearly thoughtful, probably competent, and without a doubt, the Lord has a plan for your life. You just have to take the first step and accept Him as your savior.

My emails are always open. Good luck, I am praying that you coming out of this season stronger than before.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#399

Post by mirimir » Tue, May 05, 2020, 7:22 AM UTC

OK, so I've had no experience with startups. About the closest I came was flirting with biotech in the 80s. But for sure I've had my share of abject failure, anxt, depression, and all that.

Until my 30s, it was all about doing what interested me. In a word, having fun. I didn't care at all about money, and didn't need much, given my lifestyle in college and grad school. I also didn't care much about relationships, mostly because I was so incompetent about them.

I did go through a phase of seeing how much money I could make. At least, as a consultant. Probably because I was so incompetent building businesses.

But somewhere in the midst of that, I fully got that it's all a game, and that stuff means whatever we say it does. In some Landmark course about managing yourself as if you were a business. And then it became fun again.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#400

Post by throwaway839246 » Tue, May 05, 2020, 7:26 AM UTC

friendlybus wrote: post #374

What do you want out of work, friends and stability or risk and glory? Work is an inherently ego driven, protection from death task by stacking more human and capital cost onto the problem of death. You can find friends in that, but it's not a stable social relationship. You're not burnt out, in the sense that you got burned. You seem to be handling that fine (write down your conflicts though!), it seems more like yo…

> If you're the kind of guy that needs to be burning, all the comments about the cycles of business, numbers, money and all that are not going to work for you.

No, they are not.

As to the rest of your post, I get your metaphors, but the path from understanding the metaphors to understanding how to turn that understanding into action is longer than you might think.

Could you give specific examples from your own life or from the lives of others? What does it mean to write down your conflicts? Is it writing down what all the subpersonalities want that's usually conflicting? And what do I then do with it? What does it mean to snap a branch off your culture's hierarchy or history? Become an activist? What does it mean to burn off what my lovers want burnt off? So far I've only burnt off what my lovers wanted me to keep, which is why they're not lovers anymore.

I appreciate your advice, but I need more specific guidance for it to work. Would you be willing to take the time to write that here? Also, could you tell a little bit of your own story? Who are you? What is your life like? (I'm not just asking out of curiosity; in this case it's important to know for the advice to work)