Uncanny Valley (2016)
nplusonemag.com
nplusonemag.com
I think we should question if blindly pushing people into tech actually works/is a good idea or if it’s just a recipe for disaster for all involved.
I had loved tech long before I started working in the industry, and when I first started everything was fresh and new. I saw wide, interesting vistas ahead of me. Learning whatever I had to learn was a joy, and I did it well. Even offices themselves were new and different to me. I was impressed by their opulence, access to cool tech that I couldn't afford on my own, by the professionalism and competence of the people I worked with. I felt I could learn a lot from them, and I did.
That lasted maybe a few years. Then I burnt out from overwork and from feeling undervalued and treated like crap by people who didn't understand what I did and thought themselves superior to me. People were lied to and manipulated for profit, treated like replaceable widgets, and thrown out on a whim. Corporate cheerleading speeches and "morale boosting" or "team building" activities were nauseating, two-faced affairs where management pretended to believe in the bullshit they were dishing out and their underlings pretended to love swallowing it. No one was fooled, but the charade continued.
The grand technological vistas I had seen ahead of me had dwindled as I learned and mastered the truly novel, interesting things I had to learn. What was left to do became repetitive and boring, and I really couldn't care less about being the cog in the machine that was designed to make the owners of the company and other bigshots rich. Instead of being interesting and challenging, over time I started viewing learning new tech as just an endless, tedious chore of learning irrelevant minutia, and every time I've gone back in to the industry after that first burn out, I've burnt out more and more.
Honestly, I don't know how some people keep up their enthusiasm for technology over the decades, in the face of so much stress, corporate bullshit, and endless repetition. I just get way too bored and fed up with all that before long.
For instance, when I first started learning to code I was interested in making video games. Along the way there were all kinds of concepts in real-time rendering which had intrinsic interest and which I enjoyed learning on their own (e.g. even ones I never put into use). However, if it weren't for the intensifying factor of what I might use those ideas for, and without having the potential applications in mind to get me through the boring parts—I don't think I would've enjoyed learning the material all that much.
If you end up spending your time coding to develop things which you find pointless, for people whom you don't respect, it may be even worse than mere lack of motivation.
The only solution I've found is to earn money in other ways, while working on tech things in my free time if/when I feel like it—or to find a position at a small company that you believe in. I've found the first to much more doable so far, but I do keep an eye out.
I love programming. I just hate the bullshit that usually comes with getting paid for programming in this industry.
Ironically, I program both at work and after it - at work because it's (still) a very cost-effective way of making money, and after to actually do something that I care about.
I think my ideal would be to at least for a while go back to the grocery store where I used to work (3 days a week, 10 hour shifts), while working on other projects in my free time. I've found this works best for me because it necessitates regular physical/social activity which is important for balancing the other work...
G'luck!
It described a culture an iota short of entirely alien to my own experiences, in an area bounded roughly by Madison, Wisconsin; Nashua, New Hampshire; Orlando, Florida; and Memphis, Tennessee.
When my employers have served up the corporate Flavor-Ade, my co-workers and I sipped politely, then discreetly took turns purging it in the bathrooms and pouring our cups out into the potted plants. Even when I did my tour in a startup, the culture-forcing was never that cringe-inducing. We all knew that it was the boss's job to sell the bullshit to the investors, and our job was to give him something to sell, rather than buy it all ourselves.
I think this may be more about San Francisco/Silicon Valley culture than it is about tech culture.
To anybody for whom this article resonated a little too strongly, you might be better off doing exactly the same work in an earlier time zone, in places less dominated by the billionaire boys' club. I love tech, but I can't imagine anyone loving technology so much that they can stand to work in a culture that warps it into shapes bizarre, sad, or repulsive.
Is all the extra pay and extra career opportunity worth it? Every time SF/SV culture comes up, someone always does the calculation where someone who can just suck it up for a few years comes out leagues ahead financially. But isn't the goal to be happy?
The impression I get is that this experience or this kind of existence is particularly common to office workers in general, and 'soft skill' office workers in particular.
I've mentioned this before, but in any company I've worked at, the least happy people seem to be those who are in management, sales, social media, etc., and the most happy ones are support staff (secretaries, reception, etc.) and the ones with a more clearly defined type of job (don't know what the right word for it is): programmers, accountants, legal, etc.
And while I have some theories as to why this is the case, mostly I'm just baffled at how much of this I see, how many of my friends tell similar stories, and yet everyone keeps wasting their daylight, health, youth and productive hours doing this.
I do know I'm sort of 'lucky' to not need much money, and definitely lucky to be able to work as a freelancer in a field that I love. But it's not like the people I'm describing have no options. If you live in one of the richer parts of the world you almost always have plenty of options.
And then...
VENTURE CAPITALISTS HAVE SPEARHEADED massive innovation in the past few decades, not least of which is their incubation of this generation’s very worst prose style. The internet is choked with blindly ambitious and professionally inexperienced men giving each other anecdote-based instruction and bullet-point advice. 10 Essential Start-up Lessons You Won’t Learn in School. 10 Things Every Successful Entrepreneur Knows. 5 Ways to Stay Humble. Why the Market Always Wins. Why the Customer Is Never Right. How to Deal with Failure. How to Fail Better. How to Fail Up. How to Pivot. How to Pivot Back. 18 Platitudes to Tape Above Your Computer. Raise Your Way to Emotional Acuity. How to Love Something That Doesn’t Love You Back. Sometimes it feels like everyone is speaking a different language — or the same language, with radically different rules. At our all-hands meeting, we are subjected to a pep talk. Our director looks like he hasn’t slept in days, but he straightens up and moves his gaze from face to face, making direct and metered eye contact with everyone around the table. “We are making products,” he begins, “that can push the fold of mankind.”
I wonder if most people in that world understand how bizarre and grotesque it is to everyone else looking in?
I'm quite confused :\
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
To make things worse, the startup life is so seductive and demanding that it excludes a lot of other potentially rewarding life choices which the author's peers enjoy. The author feels that startup workers are victims of operant conditioning and lack real independent agency in their lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning
It's been pointed out that unpredictable rewards really screw up brains, causing them to obsess over the payout despite the overall returns being low. The author feels that startups and gambling have a lot in common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop
In the author's case, the conditioning is so strong that, when she thinks back on her experience with the startup, she's still seeing herself as part of it even three years later and she still feels the same compulsion.
It still seems like a bit of a stretch to infer that from the text, this feeling upset because of her own brain being manipulated by random rewards making the payoff seem higher. But it's a self-consistent interpretation and better than any that I have so I'll take it.
Thank you for taking the time to write it!
Take out the rage and it becomes plain that what you've written here is too generic to have much substance. Curiosity requires a gentler touch and a more specific one.
For example, if you have personal experience with things related to the article, sharing something about those, the way you would to peers in a good discussion, would make for an entirely better comment.
I puzzled over this dynamic for years but it seems clear to me now: the issue is genre/medium fit. In the case of the GP comment, the genre is the diatribe. A scathing diatribe in a small literary salon or journal, like n+1, is one thing; on a large, public, internet forum it's another. In the first case it's interesting and leads to interesting responses. In the second it's a fast track to the bottom of the barrel, a snake in Snakes and Ladders.
Imagine if anyone who felt like it could reply to any n+1 piece and n+1 had to publish all of them as new pieces without editing. What would happen to quality? It would tank. Personal projection, simple misunderstanding, dimwittedness, windbaggery, reversion to the mean: every known factor would work against you. Extrapolate further and this would kill n+1.
In both cases—a small literary forum and a large internet one—the goal is more complex, more interesting formations, but the way to get them could not be more different. The more I learn about this, the more I appreciate McLuhan. Most of the issues on HN derive from the medium, not what people post to it.
On the contrary, the comment didn't share any specific experiences. "The reality the rest of us have been living our entire lives" is rhetoric, as generic as the rest of the language there.
Here's the thing about generics: the larger a topic, the fewer things one can meaningfully say about it. The fewer things one can say say, the more repetition there is, because you end up cycling through those same few things over and over ("mindless rich pissing away millions", "asinine apps and gadgets", etc.) Curiosity withers under repetition; HN is a site for curiosity; therefore generic comments aren't suitable here.
A fine way to turn a generic comment into a specific one, and thus get the needle back into the desired range, is to drop the rhetorical veneer and share something of the motivating specifics. That's what I mean by personal experience. Anyone who feels that strongly has good reasons to feel that strongly. To share some of those reasons in a neutral, informative discussion would be more in the spirit of this site.