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Comment by bpchaps | Hacker News Reader

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bpchaps

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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

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. :)

Would like to know where you work.

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

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?

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

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