Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

I have almost 30 years of working under my belt, and as I commonly tell people, I love my Job, but hate the Industry, and here's why:

When I started out (mid 1990s), Corporate IT was still very much mainframe based; Desktop PCs were just starting to appear on office desks. I had the good fortune to work on both early on. It was very much a fast moving environment where keeping things running was the only thing that mattered. We were the 'gurus' who knew how this stuff worked. Stuff that to most people was incompressible. The internet as we know it now, didn't exist. If you were lucky enough to be able to connect to it, most of the places worth visiting were FTP sites. There were a few websites, but nothing of substance. USENet existed, so did IRC and Gopher. You had to put the effort in to get driver updates, and new software to solve a problem.

Without easy access to information for people to solve their own IT problems, it fell to others who were prepared to put in the hours to learn the systems, and read the books. We were the gatekeepers of this wonderful new world.

However, all industries grow up, and IT grew up so fast it was alarming. Overnight it felt that everyone was getting an IT related job, and new associated professions were appearing all the time. Whereas it was just us SysAdmins and a few managers happily spinning the plates and keeping things running, there was suddenly Tiers of Middle Managers, Project Managers, IT Security, Operations, and Developers who only knew their IDEs (or text editors) and didn't even know how to use the system they coded on. Each platform had it's own ship of people doing discrete roles. What was once a nice lean new-frontier of discovery became a bloated enterprise of form-filling and endless meetings, with pointless authority figures whose only reason for existence was to slow things down.

This massive influx of people also brought in people who had no right working in the industry, and a lot of things went wrong, which resulted in the biggest issue I have with it.... a lack of trust. It doesn't matter that I have decades of experience on system X or Y, some bean-counter or form-filler will force me to get my work checked and approved, each and every time because that's the process now. No other industry with experienced veterans would treat them like this, but in IT it's considered normal. I am sick and tired of explaining to people who have no technical acumen at all, that my suggestion, design, or solution is based on my extensive experience only to be basically told 'yeah well, we will check with other people anyway as we don't believe/trust you.'

I think IT is a horrible industry now - and because it pays well it continues to attract people who have no business being in it. All I do now is count the days before I can exit it, and do something better with my life.

I still love computers. I tinker with them every day, I write code my own enjoyment and love fixing hardware, but the industry I use to love, now sucks.

I think the feeling is analogous to people who love music but hate writing jingles for commercials, or people who love painting but hate decorative painting peoples homes.

I guess the obvious one analogy is people may love writing, but hate writing dry reports for bureaucracy of a company.

The size of the team, the bureaucracy, and the pointlessness of many projects sucks the soul out of many artists.

Check out research labs. Pay isnt as competitive as FAANGs but you get to work with a lot of smart people and to work on cool stuff. Also since they tend to be gov related the stress is lower

I highly recommend doing what I have done most of my career. Get a job at smaller to medium sized non-tech company. Every company, in any industry, has computers. They need you. You don't have to work with a bunch of tech or finance people. You can get a job working with chill people in some other industry with a better culture.

When it comes time to negotiate, negotiate HARD. And not just for money, but especially time. Ask for so much that you think they will laugh or be scared away. If they say no, you lose nothing. Eventually the right opportunity will appear. I didn't think anyone would say yes to a 4-day work week, but I kept asking. Eventually someone said yes.

The one worry I am having these days is how long this strategy will remain viable. As SaaS and low/no code solutions proliferate, it makes little sense for non-tech companies to build when they can buy. This is especially true as engineer compensation continues to rise. Engineers who congregate at SaaS companies can build better products than a handful out on their own who are building a solution for just one company. Increasingly, the only engineers that non-tech companies need are people to manage their data, people to glue the SaaS APIs together, and maybe some frontend people to put a custom interface on it.

yeah how dare he not approve of you working weekends for free, the nerve