Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help • Hacker News Board

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#571

Post by Zenbit_UX » Tue, May 05, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

kasey_junk wrote: post #563

dgudkov wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds so American to me. I grew up in Eastern Europe and general attitude towards work, life, and friendship is so much different. Some of the best friendships I've made were at the companies I worked for. I've seen cases where people make so good friendships at work that it even makes them postpone switching jobs to move up the career ladder. Work is not everything in your life. Work is important for sure, but…

More likely selection bias for people that comment on threads like these. I’ve worked in finance and vc backed tech for my whole career. I don’t agree with any of the sentiments expressed in the threads like these. I’ve got friends from every job I’ve had in the last 20 years who I still see routinely including some of my best friends.

Sure, I think many of us can claim the same but the difference is you probably weren't the CEO or the boss like in OPs story. I think that changes things drastically. A boss can delude themselves into thinking employees are their friends, some even go so far as to claim employees as family. I generally stay away from small companies that pull this shit. This blurring of lines complicates every aspect of your job and leads to some very uncomfortable situations like asking for a raise, negotiating, etc...

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#572

Post by seneca » Tue, May 05, 2020, 1:09 PM UTC

tomhoward wrote: post #378

My startup experience isn't quite the same as this, but it shares some aspects, and I've had some similar feelings in my lowest moments in the aftermath. It's now almost six years since I walked away from my startup, and I left feeling some combination of exhaustion, shame, resentment, anger and sadness. As time passed, and the fog has gradually lifted on the state I sometimes think of as "startup drunkenness", I've…

Meta response, but why do people write like this? I see this all over linked-in. Dramatic phrasing "But I'm just one person", coupled with the linebreak per line of text.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#573

Post by sanderjd » Tue, May 05, 2020, 1:14 PM UTC

dkdk8283 wrote: post #246

throwaway839246 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you share yours? I'd really like to hear from an older person. I'd imagine you know 10x of what I do now. It would be incredibly helpful if you could share some of what you've experienced and learned.

My first burnout was pure depletion of energy. I was young, passionate, and believed in doing the best work I could. I was addicted to work and pushed myself to deliver. I did, and built a career. I left after almost a decade at that company and went to a new job that had 20x the employees and was well resourced. I got to kick back a bit and the job was more about delivering accurately and not delivering volume. I sp…

> as you age and your responsibility grows your options shrink

This is common but not a universal experience. I do have much more responsibility now, but also a lot more options; unlike in our youth, we have no unsecured debt, don't live paycheck to paycheck, and have savings, which gives me the ability to plan ahead.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#574

Post by tonyarkles » Tue, May 05, 2020, 1:14 PM UTC

cblum wrote: post #429

tonyarkles wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading through this thread, and looking in the mirror, it's reinforcing the fact that I, too, am becoming a graybeard. > Likewise, with CI/CD. And don't get me started on the monkey-work that is TDD. You might argue that it improves code quality. But, it's hard to make the case that it improves job satisfaction. If you move more work from the creative, problem-solving bucket into the busy-work bucket, the result wil…

How did you get into that space? What was your background? I hope you don’t mind me asking.

I don't mind at all! Although I hate the question, because it's not a particularly actionable answer for most.

I started writing out the whole story, but in a nutshell: my formal background is a dual EE/CompSci bachelors, followed by an Masters in CompSci that focused on distributed systems. When I was a kid, I learned to program very young: Basic around 8, C in DOS around 11, C on Linux around 13. I fiddled with electronics some, but didn't really get it. I took the EE part of my schooling specifically because I wanted to learn more about how computers worked "under the hood" so to speak.

From there, I ran a web consultancy for a while, and ended up with a client that had a more math-heavy project. And then another client showed up with a project where a microcontroller made sense, and then another... My business partner was moving across the country, and I was enjoying what I was working on quite a bit more than I was in the web/mobile space, so we decided to part ways. I still do the occasional web/mobile project, but they're generally hardware-related (e.g. the Bluetooth connectivity portion of an IoT-type system). Over the years I've accumulated probably $15-20k worth of equipment and software license, and the customers keep showing up!

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#575

Post by bawana » Tue, May 05, 2020, 1:17 PM UTC

seppin wrote: post #279

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #39

I have also experience close to burnout and recovered multiple times, in the process I have lost very precious relationships, and entire years were spent in darkness. I also have friends who have been in tech for close to ten years, and are close to burning out though they would never admit to such. This is the nature of the beast, all things that appear glamorous on the outside ( Hollywood, Finance, Tech, many nonpr…

> There's what you love, and there's what you do. It's best to keep some distance: Underrated piece of advice. Keep the way you make money and your passions separate. You love photography? Great, do it on weekends. If you become a pro you'll end up photographing weddings and hating your life and the thing you thought you loved.

You can learn to hate anything by force feeding yourself too much of it too fast.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#576

Post by Voxoff » Tue, May 05, 2020, 1:17 PM UTC

seneca wrote: post #572

tomhoward wrote: post #378

My startup experience isn't quite the same as this, but it shares some aspects, and I've had some similar feelings in my lowest moments in the aftermath. It's now almost six years since I walked away from my startup, and I left feeling some combination of exhaustion, shame, resentment, anger and sadness. As time passed, and the fog has gradually lifted on the state I sometimes think of as "startup drunkenness", I've…

Meta response, but why do people write like this? I see this all over linked-in. Dramatic phrasing "But I'm just one person", coupled with the linebreak per line of text.

I see it as the emergence of post modernism in popular culture. People don't feel comfortable claiming knowledge of some 'truth' - relativism is too ingrained. You could say it derives from kindness and a desire not to impose nor offend; or (if you're Pascal Bruckner etc) an underconfidence in ourselves, our enlightenment.

Obviously, I'm extrapolating like crazy. But start to notice the 'my truth' qualifications - everyone does it now.

Just my perspective hehe

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#577

Post by wlll » Tue, May 05, 2020, 1:19 PM UTC

not_a_moth wrote: post #570

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…

Rails was engineered around developer happiness, and I kind of miss those days. And while React is cool I'm still kind of resentful that companies insist on using React and adding a whole Node env when basic jQuery would have done the job. Web development could be stupidly simple if we wanted it to be. I feel like it got too easy, and suddenly there were waves of bootcamp grads, and a lot of developers resented that.

Well, I refuse to use Javascript because I hate it, and it's ecosystem, and I've managed to do just fine job-wise. I think not doing JS is still an option.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#578

Post by wlll » Tue, May 05, 2020, 1:22 PM 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 write unit tests.

I have written personal projects both with and without tests and every single time I don't write them I wish I had, usually pretty quickly. The time you save by not writing those first few tests always seems to be lost, and then some, pretty quickly in the extra manual testing that is required.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#579

Post by 1234letshaveatw » Tue, May 05, 2020, 1:22 PM UTC

dgudkov wrote: post #488

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #39

I have also experience close to burnout and recovered multiple times, in the process I have lost very precious relationships, and entire years were spent in darkness. I also have friends who have been in tech for close to ten years, and are close to burning out though they would never admit to such. This is the nature of the beast, all things that appear glamorous on the outside ( Hollywood, Finance, Tech, many nonpr…

This sounds so American to me. I grew up in Eastern Europe and general attitude towards work, life, and friendship is so much different. Some of the best friendships I've made were at the companies I worked for. I've seen cases where people make so good friendships at work that it even makes them postpone switching jobs to move up the career ladder. Work is not everything in your life. Work is important for sure, but…

I have often observed outsiders making sweeping generalizations regarding the shortcomings of the USA based off of a few internet postings.

So many of my friends and neighbors came here voluntarily- They seem happy, but deep down they must be filled with so much remorse!

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#580

Post by cpcallen » Tue, May 05, 2020, 1:25 PM UTC

Lots of great comments here and on the gist. My 2¢:

I graduated CS in 2000, and from 2007-2010 worked at Google. Towards the end of that time I was struggling hard to get anything done; even just dragging myself into the office was difficult. I began to believe I really was an imposter: good at programming contests, interviewed well, but incapable of actually accomplishing anything. That spring I quit, and spent the summer volunteered at a dance camp, where I worked 12h a day doing mostly manual labour. I had never been happier or more hard-working; the only thing that could dent my productivity in the slightest was if the kitchen ran low on grub.

I seriously doubted I would ever go back to working with software again. I had no desire to do it whatsoever; indeed, I had lost confidence in my ability to hack any kind of actual job.

For the next seven years I did a lot of dancing, traded my skills as a photographer for passes & expenses attend events I wanted to go to, volunteered doing manual labour and A/V work in the summers, and eventually started teaching dancing locally. The latter at least brought in a little income, though not nearly enough.

During those years I did (checks spreadsheet) a mere 18 hours of coding spread over a dozen days - mostly writing small tools to automate my photo editing workflow.

Then, in 2016, a good friend of mine proposed to more or less create a job for me, working on what might be described as a modern rewrite of LambadMOO. It was my dream job, offered to me on a plate, but I wasn't sure I dare take it. Fortunately he didn't take no for an answer, started back in 2017 and three years later I am doing better than I have in a long, long time.

Sure: I'm still a lazy bugger (here I am on HN instead of coding!) and there are days when I don't get much done. And I'm more like a 1x programmer. But I love this project, have worked harder on it than anything else I've ever had as a job, and am so grateful to have been reminded how much I enjoy programming (at least when I am working on something that I care about).

Because of the economic situation my contract is likely to end in the autumn. I am genuinely doubtful about finding something else as fun and motivating as this has been—but I no longer worry that no tech work will ever interest me again, or that I'm no longer capable of feeding myself with my technical skills.