Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help • Hacker News Board

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#451

Post by gozzoo » Tue, May 05, 2020, 9:01 AM UTC

johndoe42377 wrote: post #445

This is actually quite common situation and it seems that the major cause is that tech is now saturated with "normies" (liberal arts college dropouts, SJW schizoids, etc) instead of math or biology majors like it used to be at the times of Bell labs or Xerox PARC or early Google. Abstract bullshit, misapplication of statistical methods is another cause. We are drowning in the sea of screaming narcissistic virtue-sign…

> math or biology

Biology?! I'm not even sure if math is in place here. I would put instead 'CS and engineering'.

People who do things that never existed before are rarely these who are good at math. These people are called engineers. They have different skillset and background and very different attitude towards solving problems.

Don't get me wrong, being computer engineer myself I have huge respect for both biology and math. I took a biology class recently and I do read math books.

> go back to concrete mathematics

I would say: go back to making things aka engineering

You get back the joy of building things by building things. Something that worked for me when I was in similar situation was working on some Arduiono projects. It's not only programming, you are making sometehing in the physical world as well. The projects are usually simple and small, you don't get burned out. The actual programming is pretty simple - you don't need design patterns, some havy framework or functional programming to make few LEDs blink or a mottor to spin back and forth.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#452

Post by nicbou » Tue, May 05, 2020, 9:01 AM UTC

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…

> 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

I've found a really nice perspective on this recently: An app can be a home-cooked meal [1]

It's okay to build things that aren't popular, that don't scale, or that aren't economically viable, for the delight of a few users.

1: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#453

Post by fxtentacle » Tue, May 05, 2020, 9:04 AM UTC

highlysyntropic wrote: post #265

fxtentacle wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of weird by now. They will happily offer you $200k in annual salary, but an office with a window where you could keep a potted plant is out of the question.

exactly, what the hell is that about? is it a form of abuse like trying to keep everyone under control? is it a form of psychological conditioning to remind you that you just a resource whose top priority is to be interrupted at any time so knowing that you don't really have any personal space sovereignty or privacy to your own thoughts or creativity but that you must answer and create only for the collective? I don'…

I believe the idea is that you don't notice time passing in an environment with purely artificial light, so you'll stay longer, work more. It's kind of the same reason why casinos and chicken farms don't have windows, either.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#454

Post by kristopolous » Tue, May 05, 2020, 9:06 AM UTC

kovac wrote: post #405

kristopolous wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't agree with this view. I agree with the original commentor's comment. I do this myself outside of work just to enjoy building something without the responsibility of having to maintain it with 20 other engineers for two more decades. However, even I can see that a team would get burnt if they built an enterprise software the way I code my personal email client. The problem here is that people forget that build…

ok, let's go back to 2014. I was working on a project, a web front end. The ticket was "change color of button". This sounded easy, modify the CSS.

However, the CSS was generated. From YAML. The YAML was generated from JSON. the JSON was pulled from mongo. The Mongo was updated through a strictly validated XSLT that had an enumeration of colors. Those colors did not include the button color we needed.

Don't worry! There was an ability to reroute the xml through the use of ruby mixins and then add the attribute by parsing the dom, editing it, then re-ingesting it later downstream so it gets out to mongo right.

oh and there's a cache layer at every point here. so make sure you invalidate it to see the change. every time.

I closed the ticket and did a few more like this for 6 weeks, mostly in ember - they were even crazier.

The product, an interface to some server software, had basic html with markup like this:

link

Like the most trivial stupidest simple code you can think of. 15 minutes of php, at most.

However, changing it to do something else was never direct. 4, 5, 6 maybe 7 different languages, servers, restrictions, databases, input and output formats ... absolute and total batshit.

I left. Company is worth over $100 million today, looks like I'm the loser I guess.

This isn't about having a dev and release branch, this is about endless layers of abstraction and insanity that make easy things 1,000 times harder and almost impossible.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#455

Post by jacobolus » Tue, May 05, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

bigDinosaur wrote: post #446

jacobolus wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m talking about rural Mexico up through the 1960s, within the living memory of elderly people (with some of the features I mentioned persisting today or only recently changing). The US South was like this at least through the first few decades the 20th century (after WWII the US Federal government made a tremendous effort to bring jobs and infrastructure to underdeveloped parts of the country), as were many parts o…

The past was fairly horrible, of course, but we've definitely lost elements of it which were good. For example, commerce where both parties know and care about each other on some level like you might find in a farmers market or similar. Remnants still exist, but the mass market replacement, supermarkets, are missing a lot that was once better in the past. We've certainly vastly exceeded any previous material lifestyl…

I really enjoy real markets. They can be found in many parts of the world including in developed metropolises, and still existed in many places in the USA within living memory.

Their illegalization and displacement by supermarkets has been at least partly a deliberate political choice, and I don’t think it’s an inevitable part of modern life.

(Working as a vendor in a market stall is not necessarily a great career though.)

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#456

Post by TheColorYellow » Tue, May 05, 2020, 9:09 AM UTC

throwaway0214 wrote: post #346

I've been working as an engineer in high paced roles at one of the FANGs for about 15 years now. I've gone through ups-and-downs in terms of what I call "creative energy", which I will refer to as coding "mojo". 1. You have a limited amount of mojo that you can throw at a problem. When you're young, this focus and energy is easy. You can throw it at problems that you may not be that vested in for a reward like money.…

This feels like the best advice in this thread.

Two questions:

1. What are your refresh tactics and any advice for what makes a good refresh?

2. What strategic advice would you give for preparing for that mid-life break?

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#457

Post by fxtentacle » Tue, May 05, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

unclebucknasty wrote: post #305

highlysyntropic wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly, what the hell is that about? is it a form of abuse like trying to keep everyone under control? is it a form of psychological conditioning to remind you that you just a resource whose top priority is to be interrupted at any time so knowing that you don't really have any personal space sovereignty or privacy to your own thoughts or creativity but that you must answer and create only for the collective? I don'…

I can't say for certain, but I would guess it has something to do with the idea that all people must be available to each other at all times for the sake of raw productivity. So if there is a problem there is no time to wait. You just walk right up to the person you need to speak with and get it resolved then and there. Open offices facilitate that feeling of persistent accessibility and production. No closed doors t…

You make a valid point. And I believe open office spaces are wrong for the same reasons that I believe agile is wrong: both assume that all work is fundamentally similar.

When I call someone and in the background I can hear 20 other people talk, I immediately assume that the person I called is not considered important in his/her company. Because high-level work needs uninterrupted quiet time.

For agile, it's similar. When you stop having different roles, then you implicitly assume that your lead architect and your junior trainee can do the same work, albeit at different speeds. If your architect has useful experience, that's an insult. Or it means that your entire product is simplistic enough to be built purely by trainees.

So both open office and agile effectively reduce your programmers to expendable grunts.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#458

Post by fxtentacle » Tue, May 05, 2020, 9:15 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #410

Thorentis wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the OP comment, and also with this one. It is important to understand two things in coping with the state of the world in my opinion. 1) The reality is you need to find validation and fulfilment outside of work, because in our current society you are just a drone. 2) Don't be depressed because it seems like this is how it's always been. It hasn't. Our work culture is broken. People never used to be so fa…

> Working the land, being close to home, running a family business, belonging to a small town of people you all known, having the social safety net of many people that are close to you and your family, being an independent contributor in the town's economy, etc. etc. This is how things were a few hundred years ago. I always wonder where and when exactly when people say things like that. Because whatever period I look…

It is like that right now in many small villages in Italy, Spain, Germany, and possibly other places I haven't visited.

This overwhelming sense of anonymity is in my opinion typical for US suburbs and US mega shopping malls.

Most other countries have smaller and more intimate town squares, optimized for waking rather than driving.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#459

Post by ohvirginia » Tue, May 05, 2020, 9:19 AM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #454

kovac wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with this view. I agree with the original commentor's comment. I do this myself outside of work just to enjoy building something without the responsibility of having to maintain it with 20 other engineers for two more decades. However, even I can see that a team would get burnt if they built an enterprise software the way I code my personal email client. The problem here is that people forget that build…

ok, let's go back to 2014. I was working on a project, a web front end. The ticket was "change color of button". This sounded easy, modify the CSS. However, the CSS was generated. From YAML. The YAML was generated from JSON. the JSON was pulled from mongo. The Mongo was updated through a strictly validated XSLT that had an enumeration of colors. Those colors did not include the button color we needed. Don't worry! Th…

I love this. you nailed it. modern tech stack is so bullshit. I won't mention the framework I detest most because that would be flame bait, but this.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#460

Post by Tade0 » Tue, May 05, 2020, 9:20 AM UTC

Having worked for clients from SV, Japan and a few European countries, including my own, I would guess that it's not tech in general, but SV and VC culture that's the reason here.

Case in point: no other crowd is so accepting of using drugs or other substances to increase work performance.

Yes, there is coffee as the most common of such means, but funnily enough I had to ditch it cold turkey to keep up with these people, because improving my sleep quality instead was more effective.

Bottom line is SV offers more reward, but puts more pressure so it's not for everyone - especially not for me who loves his job, but certainly isn't married to it.