Comment by jameskegel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jameskegel | Hacker News Reader

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> Until basic income comes along I think we have to just get over it. Most jobs aren't going to provide you with fun for 8 hours a day. I feel like the older I get the more I understand that a job is a way for me to trade time for money, I don't have to (or should expect to) like it.

This is something I think is a fault of my generation (née 1985), when we started to create this fairytail narrative of participation trophies, and tech-places covered in brightly colored toys and snacks, where every developer constructed their cube from Mountain Dew and Surge cans. This is not reality, and for a while we were able to fool our minders into believing that this is just "the silicon valley way" but increasingly, those few that just 'buckle down' and work hard in a normal setting are outperforming the ones that took ridiculous valuations and then squandered them on perishables and amenities.

I think what we're witnessing here is the maturation of our industry; it's not so much the wild west anymore, and nobody is generating breakthroughs in tech every week like we were in the 90's, everyone should act accordingly. These are jobs, we do our jobs then we go home, if we like our homes and things and activities, we need to go back to our jobs. There is a balance that must not be disturbed.

These are jobs, we do our jobs then we go home, if we like our homes and things and activities, we need to go back to our jobs. There is a balance that must not be disturbed.

It would be interesting to peek ahead a few centuries and see how much they agree with this.

Luckily "a few centuries ahead" is not the setting for this article, this discussion, or the current period. I'm not sure what relevance this has, when I'm sure the 'theys' from centuries before would have quite a few things to say about the way we live today, and it would be an opinion equally irrelevant.

There's no such thing as "a balance that must not be disturbed," and such beliefs tend to lead people into an unfulfilling life.

Throughout this thread, there is an undercurrent of "Shut up and put up with it, you have it pretty good." But everything is a balance, and the balance can swing both ways.

There is huge variation between developers' paychecks. I've seen devs who can barely afford food, let alone expensive toys. And not because they're unskilled.

Also, not everyone can simply go to a job and then go home. Some are forced to do remote work for medical reasons.

There are valid reasons to speak up.

To be honest, I'm not sure if this kind of thinking is conducive to getting good work done. If someone is smart, self-motivated, and so on, you can mostly count on them to work hard on important stuff given a bit of direction. The "work sucks, do your job" attitude is, in my experience, one way to get workers to check out, stop caring, and start maneuvering politically so that they can do the minimum amount of work necessary to not get fired. If you add to this that the threat of firing means little to a lot of younger folks with ability and a network, since they have very few financial liabilities and can easily find another entry-level job anyway, you risk easily creating a bunch of unmanageable low-effort workers. The worst part is that managers seem to kick into "just do it" mode when things are most precarious for the organization.

This seems to be common in other industries with liquid job markets and little financial benefit to staying in one company over another, ex young people in low-end retail jobs who live at home

One nitpick: we never asked for participation trophies. It was the last generation that invented that and foisted it on it.

Neither I nor any one of my peers ever liked "everyone's a winner" day, but when you're kids in school you kinda go along with what the adults say.

The rest, I agree with you. I just think it's important to make it clear that, especially when you're young and inexperienced, you're much more susceptible to other people telling you your job is your life.

Not that it's impossible to get past that, other people feeding us that garbage, but most of us aren't that clued into the world at a young age.

There's still a huge divide in terms of talent, the vast majority of programming jobs outside silicon valley seem to be working on legacy code that is terribly architected (think Java apps written in a procedural style, etc) whereas top companies are making full use of more modern approaches and tools. It will be a very long time things even out and programming jobs are similar across the board.

> the vast majority of programming jobs outside silicon valley seem to be working on legacy code that is terribly architected

How can you say things like this? The internet is the great equalizer of distances; it does not matter what geographic location you live in, you could be working on anything.

On a sidenote, I can't tell if you are trying to be deliberately offensive or if you're someone who's never left SV.

>How can you say things like this? The internet is the great equalizer of distances; it does not matter what geographic location you live in, you could be working on anything.

It really is not. Culture matters. If you're from a conservative place, your boss and colleagues are likely to be conservative. It'll be JEE for you until the end of time.

Generally I don't necessarily think top companies are the ones using the newer stacks, with the exclusion of a few technology companies, but it's more so the newer companies that are.

Once a company builds a system, they don't want to spend to build it again. They'll bandaid the hell out of it. As long as it's doing what it's supposed to do. They're like farmers with these old beat to hell tractors. They're ugly and bitchy but they work, why spend $100K on a new one?

> legacy code that is terribly architected (think Java apps written in a procedural style, etc)

If anything, the hallmark of legacy Java is excessive object orientation for the sake of it. FactoryFactoryFactories. By comparison, in these more enlightened times, a class method to construct an instance may occasionally be countenanced without the programmer being burnt at the stake.

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