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Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

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Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#411

Post by cblum »

makapuf wrote: post #36
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…

Thats exactly what i did while working on dreaded big data. Got myself a microcontroller, implemented a small arm console and write fucking low level C code optimized the heck of cpu cycles for tiny games, no code reuse, no interfaced, no deadlines, no refacto, no security, no network, no politics. Barely version control (with appropriate "update" commit messages). Kept me sane while doing those things at work.

Interesting, I’m on the same boat. Embedded systems and low-level coding are my beacons of sanity.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#412

Post by mesaframe »

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…

But, what if you want to improve? What if you actually want to write better code? Robust code is something you earn.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#413

Post by KozmoNau7 »

It was business and politics that ruined technology for you, not technology itself. There's a reason why people warn you against turning your hobby into a career.

On the surface, it seems like a perfect idea to make a living by doing what you love, but it ceases to be fun. You won't be able to do only what you love and what your whims and desires guide you to do, instead you have to do all the things you don't really like, whatever is desired by others willing to pay. Your most marketable skill in tech may be something you don't really enjoy doing.

I was the "computer kid" growing up and in school, so obviously that influenced my choice of education and career. I used to tinker endlessly with new devices, Linux distros (did Linux From Scratch installs, all that), and programming, but I just don't really care to do that anymore. I've hopped off the gadget bandwagon and only ever upgrade when something eventually breaks. It is no longer a fun hobby for me to upgrade my PCs endlessly or to tinker with new features and perusing changelogs to check for them. Tech feels too much like work now.

Instead, I've picked up on some old creative hobbies, like miniature painting and crafts, something analog and tactile. I tinker with paint mixes and techniques, work on my artistic side.

I know 3D printing is becoming very big in that space too, but I am consciously trying to avoid it. It is tempting though, and luckily pretty far removed from where my career has taken me.

Burnout is something that just happens, in your case it was due to business nonsense and politics, which is what usually happens. Do what makes you have, not what used to make you happy.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#414

Post by zozbot234 »

arvinsim wrote: post #385
GuiA wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can have the viewpoint that on average humans were likely happier 30,000 years ago, and that technology was a bad deal for us overall, without advocating that the solution is bombing society back in time.

I don't think technology is the problem. I think the institutions that install or preserve the structures that cause a lot of people misery is the problem.

There's a reason for those institutions, though. Within any social group larger than a primitive tribe, you can't coordinate pro-social behavior or resolve disputes without some formal institutions and structures of sorts. We've got to give the anarcho-primitivists credit where credit is due: at least they understand what it would take to get actual anarchism to work!

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#415

Post by throwaway839246 »

JSavageOne wrote: post #406

> 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. I left my big city office job to work remotely (after a 2.5 year "sabbatical" traveling the…

> Clarify what your goals are. Do you want to make money? Improve society? Work on intellectually challenging problems? Be happy?

Thank you, that is excellent advice.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#416

Post by badpun »

throwaway839246 wrote: post #318
HAPMCEZ wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well based on that belief I think you might have your answers to why you went through this experience. you clearly value discovering both sides of things and you say you want to integrate that. The positive take I have on that is you want to integrate all of that information positive and negative into something stronger and more real. that's ultimately more creative and future looking then the CEO kiddies who just ri…

A lot (most?) of the responses in this thread are "learn to leave work at work, fuck greedy capitalism, enjoy your family and hobbies". And most of those responses sound to me like they come from people with a lot of unresolved resentment and cynicism. I know that I can't do that. But my god, the integration is hard. No one really prepares you for it. The old role models don't work because they're unwittingly or deli…

> For example, I've never heard pg talk about this

I remember him writing somewhere that he does not have another startup in him - that, at best, he can now do the YC. It's kind of a hint that doing a startup sucks.

BTW you may want to try reading Jacob Fisker's "Early retirement extreme". He's an ex-astrophysicist who became disillusioned with the way modern society is organized and wrote what is essentially a philosophy book about how one can live differently.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#417

Post by dguest »

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…

In my field you're describing "playing the game", ironically.

In academia the aim is to get a proof of principal, write a short paper, and move on. If you care about reusable code you are building a foundation for someone else's success, but not necessarily your own.

Neither side is wrong, it's just a different game.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#418

Post by JSavageOne »

jacobolus wrote: post #401
JSavageOne wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody's glamorizing rural poverty, the point was that our over-compartmentalized work culture is a relatively very recent phenomenon with negative consequences for many people such as decreased work satisfaction, decreased sense of social safety net/community, and loneliness. It's kind of annoying how every time someone discusses aspects of society that may have regressed from the past, somebody chimes in to remind…

There are a lot of negative aspects to a career spent «working the land» and «living in a small town where everyone knows everything about you, anonymity/privacy are impossible, and you depend on your neighbors for survival» even if you leave aside the «before modern technology» part. But the previous commenter was explicitly talking about the supposed golden time of rural life a few centuries ago. In practice it was…

> But the previous commenter was explicitly talking about the supposed golden time of rural life a few centuries ago.

No they weren't, like I said in my last comment, they were talking about the negative effects of the modern overcompartmentalization of work. It's not hard to see that there are certain benefits to working for oneself in one's own home vs. being a cog on an assembly line in some factory.

I imagine they were talking about farmers, not peasants. By the way the average medieval peasant had more time off than the average American worker since the work was seasonal. The takeaway there isn't "let's return to medieval technology and start living like medieval peasants again", it's "maybe there's something wrong with our society if despite the enormous technological advances from the past, certain elements of society like autonomy over one's time have regressed, controlling for technology".

Again, the original commenter was not arguing that we should all start living like the Amish. It's a failure of reading comprehension if that's how you interpreted it.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#419

Post by ikeyany »

theanine wrote: post #300

I wrote nearly this exact message in my mood journal today. I haven't had it quite as bad as the author, but I'm extremely, and it feels like permanently, burned out of working for a business/corporation. I fundamentally hate it. I walked out of my first corporate job after a month and now that I'm on my second, all I can think about is walking out. I hate it. I hate it so much. Every single day feels like I'm ruinin…

Have you been to therapy? Even if it's just to confirm that what you're experiencing is real and not in your head. It seems like it would do you some good.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#420

Post by badpun »

mlazos wrote: post #340

This makes me wish I posted a few years ago when I first started at a FAANG. I was fresh out of college and worked on an email product which was in an area I was interested but quickly learned how enterprise software is actually made. There is one interesting part which is the core and that’s the MVP. Working in this stage is exciting and fun to make and then there are years and years of slog smoothing out the edges…

> This makes me wish I posted a few years ago when I first started at a FAANG. I was fresh out of college and worked on an email product which was in an area I was interested but quickly learned how enterprise software is actually made.

A FAANG email product is not enterprise software. I suspect that what you've seen in your product was, compared to typical enterprise software, a pinnacle of human achievement. Get a job in a bank and you'll see.

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