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Comment by Porthos9K | Hacker News Reader

If I had ever been OK, I wouldn't have gotten into tech in the first place.

Why do you say that? I think there's a lot of things that are really great about tech industry and there's some things that aren't so great. What's been your experience?

This field fucking sucks.

I'm tired of being on call 24/7/365.

I'm tired of having to explain why plaintext passwords are bad.

I'm tired of being taken advantage of for being a generalist.

I'm tired of ex-google asshole bosses with massive egos.

I'm tired of carrying a laptop with me "just in case".

I'm tired of the constantly shifting "popular" technologies.

I'm tired of spending weekends indoors studying for work, instead of work giving time to learn.

I'm tired of pretending to find conferences on monitoring systems exciting.

I'm tired of my coworkers and bosses being high at work.

I'm tired of JIRA.

I'm tired of consultants telling us how we're using JIRA wrong.

I'm tired of the politics behind technical decisions.

I'm tired of having to learn another DSL.

It all feels unreal. Can't wait to get out of this field.

What will you do next? You can be rid of all these problems if you start raising chickens in the woods and selling eggs and poultry.

No need to be patronizing.

Sorry, didn't mean to sound insulting, my wife and I routinely discuss leaving our programmer jobs to move out into the woods and raise chickens.

Ah sorry. That does sounds relaxing, even in jest.

I'm trying to get out of for-profit tech and into the non-profit space to do data/FOIA/investigative work. It's still "tech work" at the end of the day, but without the deep dread of making rich dudes richer.

You can join a research lab as a software engineer, or even start a PhD.

Need a degree for both of those.

How much acreage would I need for that? Serious question.

I think a chicken run & coop is like 100 square feet total for a half a dozen chickens. Not sure though, I'm still just a development director. :)

It might be your job. Almost none of it applies to places I have worked at.

Would like to know where you work.

Sounds like you just need to get out of the valley.

> I'm tired of being on call 24/7/365.

You don't have to be on call. You can find a company where this is a choice (gives benefits / additional salary but not mandatory).

> I'm tired of spending weekends indoors studying for work, instead of work giving time to learn.

You shouldn't. Weekends are there for a reason, they are necessary to rest. You should try to change company if this is not the case.

I believe most of your points exist in all fields, in their own way. Good work-life balance is important to handle them.

You forgot the crown jewel of all: Tech interviews which consists of completely unrelated questions to the position itself

And pretending to be just as eager and passionate as a CS grad who knows how to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard but has no idea how to humanely extract actionable requirements from non-technical stakeholders.

So get out of it, were you forced into tech by someone? then it's a legal issue, nothing to do with the field.

this feels so familiar!

anyway none of those things are gonna matter in 20 years, but you probably know that. Do you have friends in tech to vent to?

It sounds like your job sucks more than your field. And I'm not saying that to discredit your point of view. I know. I've been there. My last job was pretty bad and it left me wondering whether I hated the job, or the field. I ended up at a far better job in the same field (not without it's drawbacks, of course) and it turned out to definitely be the job all along.

This isn't my experience with just a single job. This is my experience in the perspective of a sysadmin/SRE/devops "track". Maybe it's different for programmers, but the overall spirit of my post happens at most of the places I've worked at.

Change jobs; you are not a wage slave. I come to work at 8 AM and leave at 4 PM on the dot every day no matter the situation. I can care less about the company I work for because it isn't my prerogative to care, but instead, I am paid to build what they tell me to build, and we exchange my abilities for currency. In no way am I willing to give up my dignity or health in any way in exchange for currency.

No matter how many times you change jobs, if your income comes from wages and not capital gains then you're still a wage slave.

I say it because I can.

I say it because for me, it's true.

I've been in therapy for the last six months, figuring that it a more constructive way of coping with being a middle-aged man than getting a mistress or a motorcycle.

You know what I learned yesterday? I learned that I've been autistic my whole damn life, and never got properly diagnosed.

I got into tech because when everybody around me told I was a selfish, misanthropic asshole, I believed them. When the adults around me told me by getting into tech I wouldn't have to deal with people, I believed them, too.

My entire adult life is built on one half-truth and one outright lie.

The lie is that getting into tech would let me avoid dealing with people. I think everybody here knows that that is arrant bullshit.

The half-truth is that while I do often come across as selfish and misanthropic, it's possible that these qualities can be attributed in part to having grown up with an undiagnosed autistic spectrum disorder.

I've spent my entire life faking it, burning myself out to pass for neurotypical while also pretending to be passionate about building yet another government web application with ETL and batch processing. If you were me, you might wish for the Butlerian Jihad too.

Oh, and I work for Accenture. Work there long enough and you'll start thinking that maybe the Wobblies[1] have the right idea.

1: https://iww.org

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