Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help • Hacker News Board

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#741

Post by lcall » Wed, May 06, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

Possibly related prior discussions, some of which include some comments of mine at my site where I try to discuss life perspective etc etc. Note that this is an attempt at collecting useful comments that could relate, NOT at an insinuation that the OP is lazy, a procrastinator, or other. But some comments were good, like finding balance, direction, etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22919697 ("ask hn: how do i overcome mental laziness?")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22124489 ("Procrastination is about managing emotions, not time (bbc.com")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22096571 ("Ask HN: I don't want to be a worker any more I want to be a professional")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20930439 ("how do you keep your programming motivation up?")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18903886 "Ask HN: How do you motivate yourself to keep working on a project? "

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19777976 "ask hn: how do you stay disciplined in the long run?"

(And I have, actually, put a lot at my web site (linked in my profile; hopefully skimmable for the parts that one finds helpful) that I think are relevant. Edit: like, for finding a family-like community almost wherever you go, search this page for "no one has to be alone": http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581716.html .)

For what it may be worth.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#742

Post by raindropm » Wed, May 06, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

ak217 wrote: post #674

fuball63 wrote: post #596

This is just my personal approach to being disillusioned with tech, but I think about it a lot so I thought I'd share. I think one of the most dangerous cliches we are taught when we are young is "do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life". It sets up the expectation that your passion and your job should be tightly coupled, and if they aren't, there's something flawed with you. Having a job where you…

It's often said that you should "Do what you love", but that's mostly bad advice. It encourages people to grind away their lives in pursuit of some mostly unattainable goal, such as being a movie star or a billionaire startup founder. And even if they do make it, often the reality is nothing like they imagined it would be, so they're still unhappy. Do what you love is in the future. Love what you do is right now. As…

>It's like having a baby. It's 5% cute, adorable moments, and 95% dirty diapers and vomit.

So true lmao, and you have to worry about them for several years until they are strong enough to walk their own path, even then, the worries at the back of your mind never goes away, they’re your kids after all, that’s why I will never have kids.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#743

Post by MaxBarraclough » Wed, May 06, 2020, 9:54 PM UTC

cblum wrote: post #727

jimbokun wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I seem to be in the minority that perceives it as unnecessarily complex for most tasks. My boss recently introduced Kubernetes to our software deployment. The first thing he said, though, is if you don't absolutely need Kubernetes, don't use it. It is extremely complicated and finicky and difficult to deploy correctly, and can bite you in subtle ways. Then he went on to describe, for our problems, how Kubernetes wa…

That's really cool of him. I do think there are options to achieve all of that - scale without manual intervention, etc. - without Kubernetes though. At least where I work, if I look at the deployment issues we have, those are all the product of bad decisions and lack of action due to higher priorities. There's no reason why there couldn't be more automation. They're building something new on Kubernetes which looks p…

> I do think there are options to achieve all of that - scale without manual intervention, etc. - without Kubernetes though.

Indeed. Haven't people been doing that since, well, cloud computing?

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#744

Post by MR4D » Thu, May 07, 2020, 12:15 AM UTC

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #44

MR4D wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. A bit depressing (and I don't even work in tech anymore!), but I think he nailed it - it's the rat race. It applies to anyone right now who feels stuck in a job with no meaning.

The whole album addresses this topic, it's very Pink Floyd-ian in the story that it tells through a nearly continuous track. "Pictures of Cats" is one of my favorites, an elegy for the 24/7 cycle of bad news and the toll it takes on us. Definitely worth a listen.

Thanks for the PF comparison - I'll go spend some more time with it. Back in the day I listed to Dark Side of the Moon until I wore out the record.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#745

Post by seer » Thu, May 07, 2020, 5:43 AM UTC

fjeifisjf wrote: post #618

seer wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, the best professional experience in my 15+ career in tech was one startup. There the founders were very into doing “work-life harmony” instead of “work-life balance”. They made a point to have their friends meet your friends and each colleagues’s friends. Our partners and spouses knew each other. There was a big push to make sure your work is not simply something that you work and leave in the office, bu…

That sounds like a work cult. We're all these families still your friends after leaving the company?

Yeah I admit it was a little bit cultish. Exactly what my partner complained of when I joined the startup. But as time went by it became a lot better.

I mean real cults short-circuit normal human tribal behavior for their own survival. And we usually consider it bad as the stuff the cult demands usually go against the society at large.

But in my case it was a rather productive and a moderately lucrative enterprise for all involved. Its just that instead of “oh honey your off to work see ya in 8hours” it was more “oh say hi to this and that for me” kinda thing. Just more human all around.

Anyway to answer your question - yeah we do stay in touch with some, not all of course.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#746

Post by golergka » Thu, May 07, 2020, 7:37 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…

But what if all the stuff that you've described is the most fun part of writing software?...

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#747

Post by gerbilly » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

gmtx725 wrote: post #507

throwaway839246 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is something I see people railing against all the time here. I'm young and new to the industry so I've never experienced anything other than open-plan offices. So maybe I just don't know what I'm missing out on but the idea of private offices/cubicles is really unappealing to me. I really like collaboration spaces, being able to see people's faces, being social, bouncing ideas off each other, pair programming et…

I'm not sure i can convince you, but I can say that going to school in the 70's and 80s was a completely different experience. We did a minimum amount of group work. Homework was not done collaboratively.

So to my generation, this bouncing ideas thing is less of a requirement because we're used to doing our own work.

If you look at scientific papers from fifty years ago, most had just a few authors, now many of them list eight or ten.

The team approach seems to be taking over the world. However, I would point out that most truly great work, think Nobel prize, or truly awesome engineering work (K&R, UNIX) has till now mostly been achieved by individuals or by small teams, and that there was a lot of focused individual effort put into them.

I don't mean to sound condescending at all, because the young are going to win out by default, you guys are the future and we are the dinosaurs. You preferences and work habits will become the correct ones (whether they are better or not).

However, I would suggest that you like open plan environments because this preference has been trained into you since early grade school.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#748

Post by throwaway0882 » Sat, May 09, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #717

throwaway0882 wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the "their whole lives" part and confuse "keep track of" to "know someone".

You are right, I am confused. How would I keep track of someone if I don't know them? This includes not just people but all of the animals that I interact with. My mom used to have a bird feeder and I spent countless hours watching the birds. I got to know several dozen as individuals, I was aware of their injuries and their style of eating (timid, brave, quick, slow). How might I keep track of them without knowing t…

> You are right, I am confused. How would I keep track of someone if I don't know them?

What are you talking about? Just because you have to know someone to keep track of them doesn't mean everyone you encounter you can track or care about.

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#749

Post by muyuu » Sun, May 10, 2020, 8:37 AM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #144

jblow wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is right. The OP said he is "disillusioned with technology" but I didn't see actual technology being described as the problem with any point. So there's a conflation here happening between technology and "tech" companies. And I can only say the phrase "tech" companies while using sarcasm quotes around "tech", because almost nobody at any of these companies develops actual technology. And that's a big part of the…

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…

Really well put. It's a combination of this phenomenon and a push for commoditising engineers/makers. Paradoxically it's based on "sound economics" - the clear advantage of commoditising "resources" and the clear advantage of anticipating a future stage (which in a massive asymmetry of information is what checkbox-investment appears to be addressing).

Re: Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

#750

Post by muyuu » Sun, May 10, 2020, 12:16 PM UTC

dkural wrote: post #225

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…

For what is worth, "there's the product you produce to trade time for money, and then there's you" is precisely what alienation from labor feels like, and you're advocating that one must just accept it. People have a deep need to relate as full human beings to their work. Trying to be content with finding self-worth only outside of work doesn't solve burnout. Work is a big chunk of our time and energy. Humans need to…

If you find that your skills and career make it unfeasible to find much realisation, then probably your best strategy is making work "just work" - there's a tendency to lying to oneself in this industry. The vast majority of developers are doing the equivalent of assembly line plumbing with a lot of delusions on top. This will hit sooner or later if you are not stupid.