Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

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 nonprofits) is very rotten on the inside.

You can't change the past, but you can recalibrate your expectations and medidate on what went wrong. Here are some thoughts, and I will be very harsh:

1. Your co-workers may be amazing, but they were never your friends. You ran a business and rented their years to help them build a nest egg, of which you would claim the majority share had it hatched. Alas, the business failed and thus, you no longer add value to each other's lives. Move on.

2. There's what you love, and there's what you do. It's best to keep some distance: because no one cares about what you love. VCs are vultures and this is well known, but they are also reflecting the reality of the market. In the market you're just a vendor. Think about all the food stands that you have walked past in your life, within each stand is an immigrant family who slave away for decades hoping for a better life. Have you ever thought about them and gave them time/money for their suffering? No, you only cared them inso far as they can cook for you. This is how others saw you.

3. Big companies, and indeed most big institutions is made by a silent majority of the defeated. Many have experienced what you have said and have long made their peace. They found joy elsewhere, and found distance between themselves and their work.

4. Find self worth and self-love outside of your role in the machine, there's the product you produce to trade time for money, and then there's you. They are different things. Imagine Instagram influencers who post pictures of themselves but feel depressed when they don't get enough likes. This is you right now, you're looking for external validation from how big your integer is in some database. You have to look elsewhere.

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 branch naming conventions, or how you're supposed to use an object factory, just do whatever you want in the moment, bit by bit, until your software works most of the time then use it. Forget configuration, just hard code values for now. Don't worry about documentation, just do it.

Your expectations, and the expectations of others, are your enemy here.

At least, that's what got me out it. I'm still disillusioned with the world but it's manageable if I can realize I'm making a difference to my son and wife every day, and that's what counts for me.

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 feel creative, productive, and generally fulfilled is a great thing, but if you don't have it, that's fine too. Work the job as best you can, get whatever good parts you can strip from it (learning, socialization, coffee), and spend the other 8-10 hours a day doing things you actually like to do, tech or otherwise.

I try to walk the line of not leaving my friends and teammates out to dry, but also never "laying my body on the tracks" for the corporation. Your friends will return the favor; the company won't.

This definitely won't help you climb the ladder, and it won't garner you fame or fortune from your employment, but you'll be left with an identity and a soul that isn't controlled by profits. I've found it to be worth it, despite the prevailing culture.

Most of your problems sound like they stemmed from VC. Similar story. It's a good, and hard, lesson. Two things one should not touch when it comes to building healthy companies in 2020: crypto and equity sales to VC. They're going to become fossils soon anyhow [1].

Read Rework by Basecamp. Read The Beginning of Infinity by Deutch. Read the Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Hamming. Watch some Bret Victor talks. Ignore the negative memes about tech. They're all wrong, the rules get re-written every 10 years, and that is going to decrease in duration, not increase. You might be the person needed to re-write them.

Release your code. Teach. Share.

If you can, bootstrap. Give more than you take. Don't hire or work with assholes. Grow slowly. Don't over-lever yourself. Make something people not just want, but love. Know thyself. Don't outsource your thinking, build the thing only you can build.

If you are not working on the most important problem in your field, why not?

Most importantly, know that the future is bright and that our best days are not only ahead of us, but always will be.

[1] https://alexdanco.com/2020/02/07/debt-is-coming/

I'm bored of tech, apps, gadgets and all, despite the coollness factor. I was fascinated by technology when I was growing up, but I feel like the world's pressing needs and problems are not addressed because there's no "good money" to be made by solving them, which is absurd.

I wish beauty, wisdom and optimization would be better valued so we could find pleasure in designing things and cities with beautiful architectures with minimal negative impact on the environment. I wish we could redefine our position in the world as member of an ecosystem we should care for, instead of being merely consumers and "eyeballs" for advertisers.

I wrote nearly this exact message in my mood journal today. I haven't had it quite as bad as the author, but I'm extremely, and it feels like permanently, burned out of working for a business/corporation. I fundamentally hate it. I walked out of my first corporate job after a month and now that I'm on my second, all I can think about is walking out. I hate it. I hate it so much. Every single day feels like I'm ruining my life and disappointing every teacher, family member, and friend I've ever had. On the way to work I fantasize about getting in a car accident. Like the author, I can't think about intellectual things anymore - I was in a grocery store this weekend trying to decide between a $3.99 and $4.98 item and I couldn't figure out which was the lower number.

I've been thinking about quitting and going to work at a grocery store for a while. It's not going to pay well but it'll pay more than being dead if you know what I mean.

My startup experience isn't quite the same as this, but it shares some aspects, and I've had some similar feelings in my lowest moments in the aftermath.

It's now almost six years since I walked away from my startup, and I left feeling some combination of exhaustion, shame, resentment, anger and sadness.

As time passed, and the fog has gradually lifted on the state I sometimes think of as "startup drunkenness", I've often cringed as I've thought back and wondered "ugh, what was I thinking?"

My main focus since then has been self-healing, personal development work.

Out of necessity, when conventional approaches like talk therapy didn't offer much relief or insight, I've ended up seeking and adopting some unconventional approaches to personal growth.

It's turned out to have been the most worthwhile thing I've done in my life.

I've been able to go deep in uncovering and resolving the issues in myself, that date back to well before my startup life, but that very much affected how things played out in my startup and in other aspects of my life.

Just as the writer of this piece has come to question the entire technology industry, my own journey has enabled me to see that whilst many of my problems originated within myself and my past experiences, many were just as much a case of being in a dysfunctional environment, and indeed a dysfunctional world.

But it's taken a lot of work to know how to tell the difference, and what to do about it.

My life now is pretty good, and has been on a steady improvement path for at least 5 years. All the key indicators in my life – relationship/family/friendships, health and career – are going well and getting better, though it's an ongoing effort to keep things improving, and of course external factors like the current crisis throw up complications none of us can avoid.

When I've written here about this topic in the past, people often reply asking for details about on the kinds of healing and development techniques I've used.

What I've said then and I'll say again here is that people are welcome to contact me and I'll be happy to share info with them directly.

But I also wonder if it's time to get more serious with a discussion about how we can build healthier companies.

As I've become healthier and more confident, I once again have the hunger to build companies, and am full of ideas on how to build them in such a way that they are great places to work and positive in their external impact.

But I'm just one person, with one perspective.

I'd love to hear from others who want to be part of an ongoing discussion about how we can build the kinds of companies and organisations we all wish existed.

Anyone is welcome to contact me about any of the above; email address is in my profile.

> Then I worked for a tech giant, and then for a high-growth unicorn. It shocked me how dilbertesque they both were. Full of politicians, and burnt out engineers in golden handcuffs who can't wait to get out, and meaningless business speak, and checked out employees who pretend they're "excited" about everything all the time. The young, wide-eyed engineers seem hopelessly naive to me now.

I don't know this person. I wasn't there. I don't know which tech giant.

Certainly there are plenty of stories of large multinationals with dilbertesque politics, and checked out zombies.

But something tells me that this author's experience was only because he was comparing it to the glory days of his own startup where everyone was intensely invested and engaged.

The truth is there is a middle ground: employment. You are engaged insofar as you receive a paycheck, and you want to do good work to continue getting that paycheck. But you also care enough to do a good job because you're human, and because you want a raise or a promotion, or even a cookie from your peers that says "go you". You probably also like the specific job more than you would other ones.

The loudest stories rise to the top of HN, but I think most professional industry is just this. That doesn't mean it's unhealthy. Politics has purpose.

And when you yourself are cynical, everyone else's excitement rings hollow and you think they are pretending and are actually checked out..

I think the fundamental flaw is trying to be 'successful'. Playing that game invariably requires you to pretend to be what you think the market wants.

I would suggest you think about building something you want that you find fun. If you're a scuba diver, build a dive computer. If you're a woodworker make a tool for making the best use of a board. The most important thing is you absolutely don't plan on making it a world-changing multi-billion dollar anything. Make it, even sell it if you want, and enjoy the ride.

People will say you're burned out, and they're not wrong... but this doesn't address the substance of the issue. To be an engineer or a scientist today means tolerating a lot of the things you've mentioned. I would amend your list to engineers that had a passion for EE and value human life (who doesn't?) but took a job at Raytheon. The things you identify are valid issues. If you're worn so thin you can't ignore them, it has the effect of ruining your entire relationship with the art. The thing to remember is that this is not the fundamental nature of science or engineering, but the nature of practicing these things today under the framework in which we live. From there, maybe you can find places where you can practice your art which are less prone to these issues. You may have to compromise on career stability or pay. People are rarely paid well to do fun, low stress things. Maybe the best thing to do is stay out of tech professionally, and slowly ease back into programming as a hobby by working on small projects. I'm not sure. All I know is that with burnout it's somewhat challenging to untoast toast, but you will recover eventually. It's just always a bit slower than one would hope, but it does happen.

Another angle perhaps is working on clarifying to yourself the ways in which you got hurt, so programming may feel less painful. I found that learning about politics and history-- specifically the history of engineering-- really helped me sort out my feelings. It also gives a sense of clarity of where the rotten parts come from and maybe how to avoid them.

I've been working as an engineer in high paced roles at one of the FANGs for about 15 years now. I've gone through ups-and-downs in terms of what I call "creative energy", which I will refer to as coding "mojo".

1. You have a limited amount of mojo that you can throw at a problem. When you're young, this focus and energy is easy. You can throw it at problems that you may not be that vested in for a reward like money. It's also easy to recover. These times are great.

2. As you get older, mojo will become more cyclical. When you're in the troughs it will be difficult to focus your energy on a problem if you're not that vested with it. When you work on projects that fail, this will be extremely draining. At this stage, you will need to build "refresh" mechanisms into your schedule. It will help to work on non-tech yet creative passions on the side that have easy to reach end-states. I personally had this successfully going for over a decade.

3. Sometimes instead of being cyclical, your mojo will just totally flat-line. Sometimes it was too many death-march projects, sometimes it's personal health related, dealing with aging family members, or the stress of being a parent. If you haven't built in a refresh cycle that works for you yet, it's going to be very difficult to get your mojo flowing again. At this point more drastic measures are necessary. One piece of advice I heard was "take a break until you get really bored again."

After joining a project a few years ago that caused me to sacrifice my "refresh cycle", I found myself quickly in #3 as well. I wish I had better advice, but I'm planning to take some extended time off from the grind. [Advice to younger devs: this lifestyle requires active maintenance on your part to sustain and you won't know about this until it's too late. Save up and plan for a mid-career break.] I'm planning on working on some fun projects to expose me to new technology stacks and try to see what problems I can get excited about again and do some self-investments to open up alternative career paths. [I've always considered "retiring" into education at some point but maybe I'll play with a few different self-employment ideas first.]

Many of us engineers fancy ourselves as artisans who get to avoid working that 2nd job to pay for our art.

But the reality is that we pay the bill inside the companies we work for. Our art has to meet certain deadlines and specifications decided by others. We have to spend time in meetings about nothingness. Whether we get funded still comes down to dollars for value, with the exception that instead of the grants artists get, we call it salary.

Very little in life can be extracted from the fact that we must provide value to others and often on their terms, even if that value is doing little but filling up their meeting so they look very in charge.

I solve this by having a good book on my phone for when I am in meetings and ensuring that there are always many things I am doing beyond my job. There is plenty of opportunity for the purely fun "let's build something cool" type of engineering outside of work that can still contribute to your career.

Is technology the reason to wake in the morning, or is it curiosity that drives you?

Technology is a great place to find something new and interesting. And hey, there's lots of money to be made, and hopefully you've done well already. But curiosity can be for anything. Step away from technology. Find people doing things you don't understand, but look interesting. Try planting something. Read about history, archeology, psychology, philosophy. Visit museums. Technology and your relationship with it is like staying too long with someone you were in love with. Only over time can you rekindle the friendship, but for now your post is screaming out that you need space.

Many of us work with people whom we have never met in person, building products that are not real, to fill the needs of strangers whose jobs should unquestionably not exist. Furthermore, sometimes it feels impossible to do creative work on the side, as every input and output that is part of the process becomes a commodity to be tracked and sold. The Machine has not stopped. And it won't.

I think we are all sprinting towards an ambiguous neurological disaster. The more you think about the signs and symptoms, the harder it becomes to envision a future scenario, a future Self, where you stay in tech and do not burn out intellectually, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

The longer I work online, the more I understand how a digitally mediated life insulates us from the human experience. The question we all have to meditate on is whether the lifestyle benefits of working in tech, working remotely, outweigh the longterm negative effects on the psyche and the soul.

Take a break.

If necessary, a long break.

What you write sounds alarmingly familiar to me. It's probably not as simple as just calling it "burnout", but that may be one component of what you're going through.

I also learned the hard way that it's important to look after myself. And it took way too long when looking back today.

You seem to have invested way too much of yourself into this and maybe you have lost track of what's really important in life.

Take a break.

Feel free to contact me if you wanna talk.

There's a lot of good advice and insights in this thread. You have good reason for feeling this way, and all of the paths people have suggested - ways to move on and stay in tech; how to leave tech entirely; how to make it a hobby instead of a job; or some other middle ground - are valid ways to address this problem.

But, I may suggest an additional option: do something about it. Build a business that eschews VC culture, or become a VC who doesn't fit in among their blood-sucking peers. Run for office, and use those resources to address these problems. Teach other how to avoid these mistakes. You may have found your big problem to solve - put that engineering intellect towards deliberately, systematically solving the problems which burned you. That problem-solving attitude you learned for writing programs can be applied to other problems, too.

This is the most difficult solution to your feelings, and no one would fault you for taking any of the other paths suggested in this thread. But, if you're up for it, you could make a real impact and I think you would find it very rewarding.

You may enjoy listening to Jonathan Coulton's Solid State. It's a magnificent album about someone similarly disillusioned with tech.

The album is uploaded on YouTube, but this was the teaser that he uploaded before the album release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvVNxqosZ7s

The complaints are human behavior rather than technology, or the culture around it. There are places that are better than others, but you're going to encounter self interest and "dilbertesque" behavior everywhere.

Personally, I view learning to deal with work is an emotional skill you have to develop. Even if you get a job doing math all day in a research position, you need to be ready for the usual academic politics problems.

I hope this isn't controversial, but it's perfectly fine to dislike technology and even avoid it. There are technophiles and there are technophobes. Those who are attracted to technology and those who aren't. Some of us would like to live in London or New York, others want country life. Some of us love surfing and beaches, others climb the mountains.

There are PLENTY of things to dislike about the tech industry. More importantly, there are plenty of things to dislike about YOURSELF inside the tech bubble. So there isn't the right answer what you should or shouldn't do. Listen to yourself and that's your starting point.

I can share my personal experience. Generally speaking, I am a technophobe. I prefer old things that are hard to break. I understand that my dislike for the technology comes from the fact that I become too dependent on it (in multiple ways, including financially). I absolutely HATE this feeling. If you change the focus from 'technology' to 'yourself', you'll probably start understanding what exactly you dislike so much.

Then simply change it.

I think the only answer here is to stop clinging onto this 'life' you have.

The optimism you're seeking comes from looking forward to today, right now. Right here, right now. Everything is the present moment. If you do not find yourself in the present moment - this could be due to the weight of money, weight of the future, weight of obligations - then abandon it all.

You don't need anything. Just reclaim the time that is yours. If you have enough runway for a year, that's all you need. Think about it. Would you rather have 20 more years of this 'hint of dissatisfaction', or just one year of bliss? If not bliss, at least closer to what once was, where we all come from. Just people trying to have fun and not think of larger consequences. I would get off of anti-depressants, too.

As long as the primary motivator remains profit, rather than increasing the averages person Quality of life, technology will be used to replace people to their detriment, rather than to their advantage.

I'm sorry I have no good reason for you why you shouldn't be depressed. I'm afraid, depression might be the appropriate reaction to the state of things.

this does seem like burnout but there is something else at play here.

something which i have felt quite a lot is that in the 90s a lot of programming was creative and fun. it was to challenge authority.

it created things like winamp.. it really whips the llama's ass. when is the last time you heard of a recent startup with a title like that?

nowadays everyone around me is working on startups or talking to investors where they are simply falling in line.

the good old hacker spirit and the sheer disdain for authority and a great sense of wonder has gone. i see young kids, interns studying like crazy to get into faang, which drives me crazy.

in the 90s we didn't have that... there was only cool software like winamp... that too for free.. tell me a software as cool as that since ;)

It is here in HN that I first heard Pablo Neruda's "No culpes a nadie". Even though a fan of Neruda I somehow had missed this. Perhaps this speaks to you something too:

        ## Don't Blame Anyone

 Never complain about anyone, nor anything,
 because basically you have done
 what you wanted in your life.

 Accept the difficulty of improving yourself
 and the courage to start changing yourself.
 The triumph of the true man emerges from
 the ashes of his mistake.

 Never complain about your loneliness or your
 luck, face it with courage and accept it.
 In one way or another it is the outcome of
 your acts and the thought that you always
 have to win.

 Don't be embittered by your own failure or
 blame it on another, accept yourself now or
 you'll keep making excuses for yourself like a child.
 Remember that any time is
 a good time to begin and that nobody
 is so horrible that they should give up.

 Don't forget that the cause of your present
 is your past, as well as the cause of your
 future will be your present.

 Learn from the bold, the strong,
 those who don't accept situations, who
 will live in spite of everything. Think less in
 your problems and more in your work and
 your problems, without eliminating them, will die.

 Learn how to grow from the pain and to be
 greater than the greatest of those
 obstacles. Look at yourself in the mirror
 and you will be free and strong and you will stop
 being a puppet of circumstances because you
 yourself are your own destiny.
 
 Arise and look at the sun in the mornings
 and breathe the light of the dawn.
 You are part of the force of your life;
 now wake up, fight, get going, be decisive
 and you will triumph in life. Never think about
 luck because luck is
 the pretext of losers.

I've got a bit of perspective on this outside the technology area.

When I was young, I loved being outside, camping, hiking, being in the forest, learning about plants and animals, foraging for berries and stuff. I ended up going to school for biology and ecosystems mangement. I worked on a few scientific studies, the stuff I actually liked, then ended up helping manage a long term research and education project. Suddenly, we were dealing more with money, government organizations other biologists. We ended up getting sucked into a bunch of politics, had our grant money and data held hostage by the government, dealt with shady corporations who didnt give a fuck. I watched lots of money get wasted on nothing on other projects simply to make companies look good while real problems went unaddressed and ignored.

Came to learn of the chain off command, the biologists that officially must sign off on work who do nothing but collect money for signing their name on a paper and tend to be in the pockets of mining companies, logging companies, the gas oil industries and again give no fucks outside getting that sweet pay cheque for writing their name on a paper. We were threatened with loss of funding after finding an endangered species on an active mine site and deciding to share the data publicly.

I just generally came to realize, that all the science and saving the world I'd wanted to do, didn't really matter to the people who funded this work or to governments in general and I became fairly jaded to it all. I seen renowned biologists steal grant money from volunteer organizations and shit like that. Hell I even met David Suzuki, turns out he's like any other celebrity, as soon as the camera's off the caring stops.

Reality just ended up being so different and souless compared do everything I'd learned in school. I just don't have any motivation to continue with it. Since then i've gone on to do other things, and I've found them a lot more fulfilling than that thing I thought I wanted to do and enjoyed as a child.

Lots of great comments here and on the gist. My 2¢:

I graduated CS in 2000, and from 2007-2010 worked at Google. Towards the end of that time I was struggling hard to get anything done; even just dragging myself into the office was difficult. I began to believe I really was an imposter: good at programming contests, interviewed well, but incapable of actually accomplishing anything. That spring I quit, and spent the summer volunteered at a dance camp, where I worked 12h a day doing mostly manual labour. I had never been happier or more hard-working; the only thing that could dent my productivity in the slightest was if the kitchen ran low on grub.

I seriously doubted I would ever go back to working with software again. I had no desire to do it whatsoever; indeed, I had lost confidence in my ability to hack any kind of actual job.

For the next seven years I did a lot of dancing, traded my skills as a photographer for passes & expenses attend events I wanted to go to, volunteered doing manual labour and A/V work in the summers, and eventually started teaching dancing locally. The latter at least brought in a little income, though not nearly enough.

During those years I did (checks spreadsheet) a mere 18 hours of coding spread over a dozen days - mostly writing small tools to automate my photo editing workflow.

Then, in 2016, a good friend of mine proposed to more or less create a job for me, working on what might be described as a modern rewrite of LambadMOO. It was my dream job, offered to me on a plate, but I wasn't sure I dare take it. Fortunately he didn't take no for an answer, started back in 2017 and three years later I am doing better than I have in a long, long time.

Sure: I'm still a lazy bugger (here I am on HN instead of coding!) and there are days when I don't get much done. And I'm more like a 1x programmer. But I love this project, have worked harder on it than anything else I've ever had as a job, and am so grateful to have been reminded how much I enjoy programming (at least when I am working on something that I care about).

Because of the economic situation my contract is likely to end in the autumn. I am genuinely doubtful about finding something else as fun and motivating as this has been—but I no longer worry that no tech work will ever interest me again, or that I'm no longer capable of feeding myself with my technical skills.

As someone who took three years off once to backpack, came back, and who is disillusioned again, I guess my one piece of advice is to not have kids while you're working in tech.

If you do, you immediately get used to the income, and then you get addicted. Not in a "high" sense, but you start expecting the best things for your kids. And then you're stuck for the next 20 years.

I'd say spend the first five years with kids in a lower-income role (assuming that's where you are now). Get used to that. Then if you're tempted by tech career again you can try it out and jump back out if you want.

> Has anyone been through this who managed to recover their optimism and creative spirit? Please help me. What can I do?

Have you tried helping someone? If not, find someone who needs help, then help them.

This seems to be a good way to hack past the kind of burnout you're talking about.

It's best if the thing a person needs help with is something you like to do (or once liked to do). It won't even seem like you're helping them, but you will be. Even better if the person needs help with something you've wanted to learn how to do but never could manage fit in.

A magical thing happens when you help someone. You forget about yourself. Maybe for only a little while, but that can really help reset what's not working in life.

There are so many ways to help people. You can help them online, pseudonymously if you prefer. You can help them publicly. You can volunteer to do something for an organization that has things that need to be done.

Kids need a lot of help. The elderly need a lot of help. Recently unemployed people need a lot of help. There are organization serving all of them, and they can all use your help.

It sounds like you have skills and experience that could help a lot of people. You may have already helped someone just by sharing your own experience that happens to overlap with someone else's.

People in this thread are complaining about how bad work is, but I believe school is even worse.

With work, you're at least not a "slave". You're (mostly) allowed to quit if it gets really bad, and you're ultimately responsible for where you work, what industry etc. With school (I'm thinking from primary to high-school here), you have no right to decide on anything. If you're learning things that don't interest you in the slightest, have to spend most of your time doing pointless, boring work and are surrounded by people you either don't like or actively hate... well... deal with it. Your age isn't yet greater than <insert magical number here>, so you're not allowed to decide for yourself. There's nothing you can do, especially if your parents aren't willing to listen. As long as there's no violence/abuse, the state won't step in, and all attempts at rebellion will be promptly squashed. Even if your parents do listen and let you go to school somewhere else, it's usually not that different. The curriculum is standardized, so you still learn the same boring stuff, and if you are somehow out of the norm (this matters for teenagers a lot), you will be, no matter where you go. I'm a blind person who has lived through this in secondary. I've known a lot of people in similar situations, blind people, LGBT people, people from different racial/ethnic backgrounds etc. There have even been cases where that kind of situation let to suicide.

You can't let work be your whole life or it's going to eat you up. Everyone should read how things are done at Joel's company. Joel spolsky knows how to create a responsible work environment that is sustainable that won't burn out engineers. Here is his key advice: 20 hours of your work week you spend on your SE studies + medition/rest/yoga + administrative stuff + meetings. the other 20 hours is on coding. If you're doing more than 40 hours per week, your not sustainable, and you need to do something to change that. Working at a start up is no excuse, not enough runway is no excuse. The only time you should be working more than 40 hours a week is if you own the freakin company or at least 30% of it.

What do you want out of work, friends and stability or risk and glory?

Work is an inherently ego driven, protection from death task by stacking more human and capital cost onto the problem of death. You can find friends in that, but it's not a stable social relationship.

You're not burnt out, in the sense that you got burned. You seem to be handling that fine (write down your conflicts though!), it seems more like you ran out of fuel for the fire. The sparks are still being created but there's nothing to burn.

Get into the 'why' behind art, the symbols, the inspirations for techniques, it's a great indicator where other souls found fuel to burn. Find another part of your life that gives you enough fuel input to start a new fire. Snap a branch off your culture's hierarchy or history and use it as a second stick to your own stick and start a brush fire. If you're single find something your lovers want burnt off.

I think you're starting again with real skills and experience this time. If you're the kind of guy that needs to be burning, all the comments about the cycles of business, numbers, money and all that are not going to work for you.

Are you disillusioned with technology, or with the business of technology?

In my experience, the term "business" is short for "the business of exploitation". Exploitation is ugly, and I've had experiences that can be compared to yours.

Our occupation (if you're doing it right - and few are) is masochistic in nature. You suffer to grow, and you grow to suffer (sometimes quite a bit more) for greater pursuits next time. It's the definition of type 2+ fun (https://www.tetongravity.com/story/adventure/the-three-and-a...). If you did the type of things I do, it would be easy to see our primary job as the application of self-discipline to mitigate emotional and existential pain caused by consistently pushing your limits (past your fatigue plateau); and the creation of new solutions are side effects of the mental blender you are capable of holding yourself in for 8+ hours a day. If you've had family members beg you to quit jobs "for your health", you probably know what I'm talking about.

Knowing (as I do now) how the business works can change the context behind the work. Context can be the difference between being a hero, and being exploited. I like being a hero; I don't like being a victim. I will happily sacrifice of myself to make something that users will love, or something that will change the way things are done; I don't want to bleed to make some dickhead rich.

If you have the money to coast for a while, perhaps it's time to think about building a non-profit. A non-profit would be less likely to attract those looking to exploit. Boil what you want to do down to chunks that you can complete yourself, and make sure it's something you're willing to bleed for.

Because pop-technology is void of any sort of spirit, culture or enthusiasm. It's all buzzwords, sale pitches and wheel reinventing put in a new wrapper and walled gardens.

What restored faith in technology for me personally is libre software hacker movement. It's just so fun to enjoy technology without all of that fake sillicon valley culture.

It's fun to _own_ technology and understand it and be able to hack it and experience it with like minded individuals.

If you're burned out try to find job in libre software, it won't pay as much but as far as spiritual rewards - it's the most you can get from this medium.

I think a lot of this is linked to your gatekeepers' power dynamics. We start off thinking that through effort and talent alone we can change the world. Maybe we could but we bumped right into the gatekeepers -- the middle managers, the disconnected-from-reality CEOs, the people who only warm their seats without ever actually helping the company -- and the resistance from them is so strong that we eventually give up.

That's fine. I am not into religion but I quite like the Buddhist concept that there exist battles you can never win by fighting and the only way you can win is to never fight them in the first place.

Go and find your happiness elsewhere. That is very okay.

As for how to get back to technology, well, following HN is a pretty good way to get inspired for ideas. Just do them without the idea that you'll make money and you could find happiness practising technology again.

Everyone who reads Hacker News should also consider if there is a political component to this. The guidelines for Hacker News encourage us to keep politics out of the comments, and most of the time that is an advantage, but there are cases where politics might be a contributing factor that needs to be considered. I see some comments here that say "This is such a USA experience, it is different in my country." Well, why is that? If it's true that there is something in the USA that contributes to burnout, would it be useful to consider the political situation in the country? Surely there are cases where the macro circumstances impact people's personal lives?

I feel like every engineer, at some point in their life, learns that engineering is a discipline devoted to producing value, typically business value, not one devoted to building cool shit. All else is just dealing with the implications of that.

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.

That was good. Thank you.

Ever go swimming in a pond? It's not like a swimming pool. In a swimming pool, the water is clear, the bottom is sound, humans are the only creatures there, and you can be somewhat assured of your safety. In a pond, you can't see very far in the water, the bottom is mucky and soft, there are all sorts of other creatures, and something bad may very well happen to you.

A swimming pool is not a natural system. It takes lots of work and diligence to keep it running, and even then, bad things happen. Fortunately, a swimming pool is a system with a mostly finite set of parameters to change and a similarly-small set of outcomes to manage.

Technology, startups, and BigCorps are natural systems. They're like the pond; they evolved over time without any one person managing any of it.

It took me a long time to realize that many things in life were like that pond when I was thinking most of the world was like a swimming pool. There's nothing wrong with diving into various ecosystems that have emerged out of human complexity. In fact, you can find pleasures there you can find nowhere else. But there are significant differences that nobody tells you about. These systems are emergent, they have tons of variables you might never encounter or understand, and they change based on the actions of thousands, perhaps millions of people, all of whom are not aware that they are, in effect, managing the system. (Even if they knew, no one person has the mental ability to manage all of that.)

I said all of that to say this: natural systems do not have your best interests in mind. You form a startup? Ok, there's a preexisting set of "ramps" you are supposed to get on: bootstrap, niche, unicorn, etc. People who see you in the startup world see you as being on one of those ramps. That is how they process your existence. Same goes for BigCorps: the rule there is to get along, not make waves, and have people think of you as energetic, competent, and friendly.

These are not necessarily bad systems, but you have to keep in mind everyday you interact with them that it is ultimately you who are responsible for your emotional and personal safety, not the system (No matter what they might say to you)

So yes, be disillusioned. It sounds like you've earned it. Then reflect, learn, heal, and engage differently. You've been through a tough experience. I wish you the best. If you're half as smart as you sound, you've got this.

Looks like you are getting a lot of advice. Meh, I will throw my 3 cents in....

Buy a guitar, or whatever musical instrument interests you.

Play music, where no one can hear you if possible

Get a sketch book and a set of sketch pencils.

Draw things you see, birds trees... don't show them to anyone, do it for you. or paint set. take an art class.

Buy a trail bicycle and go for a ride on a trail in the wilderness.

You get the idea. . .

It happens to everyone. Maybe because you are loosing confidence in yourselves, you should start writing books, diaries or articles. That's how I started https://gauravtiwari.org. I was down with expectations, bored with studies and had no good friends. My blog kept me feel a little when readers started pouring in. After a couple of years, it went to be come a professional homepage for me and nowadays I showcase my portfolios with it

"I lost many friends". No,you did not.Those weren't your friends. Not sure if various feelings mentioned in the post are targeted correctly. Yes, there's lots of politics,bs,and coolaid drinking in a lot of companies,but that's the nature of what we humans are. There are a lot of very rewarding and interesting jobs out there that don't have all that bs attached to them,just don't be shy to look a bit further.

Dude, you just got to get the fuck out of Silicon Valley. Tech in general has been raided by finance douches. You need to find a medium sized, profitable company somewhere not in california, new york, or florida, and go work there. You can mentor people and enjoy your life outside work and generally explore tech as you please.

I have experienced all of the negative emotions the OP experienced, although his seem to be more acute.

Some things which have helped me are to stop thinking about succeeding or advancing in life. Those goals are so high up most people don't even get close. OP got very close by being funded, and it sounds like the whole experience was a let-down over and above the business failure. It sounds like the OP has let go of those dreams, which is necessary especially once you know the dark side of those dreams.

Most people are just trying to survive. They have little control over their lives, and that relieves some of the self-blame when things go badly. It is okay to not be in control, to need help, to lose. That's where most people are. You have friends and allies.

Now that you know how the system works, would you feel better about yourself had you succeeded? Would you feel guilty?

I think OP is being too hard on himself, and he should look back on that experience with pride. "I was good enough that they gave me a shot." You could have been a contender. You actually landed a punch.

I've been thinking about why so many software developers feel this way, and among other things tried to explicitly distinguish[1] between three activities:

1. Programming

2. Coding

3. Software engineering

I had defined them as follows:

1. Programming is solving explicit problems in a verifiable manner.

2. Coding is expressing a programming solution in a formal language.

3. Software engineering is building a product for the real world.

I believe most of us here (and the OP) have this kind of relationship with the three, best case scenario:

1. Love programming.

2. Enjoy coding.

3. Tolerate software engineering.

Burnout, depression and disillusionment rarely come from 1 (pure, strict math world), might occasionally come from 2 ("bad" languages, "messy" frameworks, etc), but generally comes from 3 (business, politics, communication, value, finance).

Perhaps, it's a good idea to pinpoint the intrinsic "passion" (whatever you wanna call it) and differentiate it with accidental complexity of the real world.

(edit: formatting)

---

1. https://rakhim.org/2019/11/coding-vs-dot-programming-vs-dot-...

Sometimes I feel this way when I have unaddressed issues in my life. And I don't necessarily mean emotional/psych things; Sometimes it is as simple as having a messy room/harddrive, or some things that have sat on the backburner for far too long. Take a step back and see if you have any of those things, then address them deliberately, and see if you feel better.

Tech has one truly good aspect: Lots of cash to go around. Extract as much shmoney as you can from corporations until you can be financial independent of them and peace out middle fingers in the air.

It sounds like the person is disillusioned with people and the industry more than the tech itself.

And yeah, jobs suck (even the good ones), but I think a bigger problem is the lack of friends and other social supports to make it OK that your job sucks.

The author writes they poured "every ounce of energy" in to their company. They were putting time in to the company instead of their human relationships, and unfortunately it bit them.

I've posted this once or twice before, but I always come back to this remarkably insightful comment by HN user dexwiz a while back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20470085 """ The Screen and the Job have displaced almost everything else is our lives. Loneliness is just a primary symptom.

The Screen, whether it’s TV, computer, or phone, has supplanted almost all social interactions. This manifests itself in things like SitComs on TV (just a bunch of friends or family hanging out) or Social Media on phones. It’s very easy to fill the social needs of right now with a Screen. But under even a minuscule amount of self reflection these are revealed as hollow substitutes for real human interaction.

The Job has completely taken over as a driving force in evaluating choices. The average person has to consider all options in the light of both the current employer and the specter of tomorrow’s. Moving across the country for a high paying job? Great! Moving to be closer to friends? That’s a career killer.

No wonder we are lonely. We make choices in the short term that optimize happiness, often at the expense of our relationships. Ghosting is not just for dates now. Then turn around and make choices in the long term that optimize employability at the expense of all else.

"""

Please help to undo the disillusioning? :)

This is actually a very good time in your life. You can learn a lot about yourself and the world. The problem is not that you've got disillusioned: you're not disillusioned enough. What if that happy state you want to re-create was an illusion too?

You want to get the motivation back and get rid of the demotivation you've accumulated through the years. But what if motivation is an illusion? Doesn't it strike you as odd that instead of doing something we often try to create a motivation that would then make us do what we wanted to do in the first place? What if we could skip that extra step and just do the original thing? :) (And this doesn't mean to substitute positive motivation with negative or something like that. Just no motivation at all.) Similarly, what if instead of suffering from the bad feelings you could just let these feelings be without being driven by them?

I am in the same boat. 6 months ago, I quit my job because the management and engineering team I worked with were extremely difficult to work with. I had poured my heart out in the company. Grew the team from 1 to 6 developers. Worked extreme long hours because I enjoyed building the product. I knew I didn't want to code after that. I enrolled in an online business management program. Joined a two people company as an intern two weeks ago. I am finally getting excited about building something new from scratch and I am learning quite a lot at the same time. Take a break and spend time doing the things you love. You are extremely smart and aware about the problems you face. Learn that thing you always wanted to learn. You might get disinterested and may want to quit it but it's very important to keep at it. If you join a team, I would advise you to join a small team with less or no politics.

I think building modern software is not programming any more. Now is about putting together libraries and open source plumbing, doing a bit of customization then testing, testing, monitoring, then figuring out why things aren't working.

I remember writing a lot more simple stuff. Whole applications with maybe a handful of libraries. It was great.

There is burnout, then there is just being "done." If you're out of software and happy, then great. I think we reach a point where the draw of money + realization that software is horrible kind of collide and end up shaking you, making you realize life is short and limited and that there must be something more meaningful. Is that a bad thing? Only if you don't do something about it. you have an incredible opportunity to do good somewhere somehow. You'll need to fix your "charged emotional responses" and "reactivity" by learning to be with em instead of running and grasping, but there-after, you are freed of the animal-instinct burden. It' s a hard path to find and harder still to walk, but it's there. No words can capture it or give it, no thinking will show you the way out.

I would recommend hacking. Not cracking, mind you, but tinkering. Focusing not on building a product, but on toying for just a few hours with something you find cool, and have fun with it.

This is what made it for me when I started being disillusioned with my work (I became a developer thinking the internet would bring direct democracy like printing brought democracy, and instead it brought mass surveillance and complotism).

I play with the decentralized web (dat), with raspberry pi, with system programming, with whatever new (to me) I feel like. And just like that, I'm happy again and enjoying my craft again. I just want out of "the industry" and can't wait to have saved enough to be able to do that (gladly, this is a work line where we're lucky enough to be able to retire early, if we're good with simple life).

There are employees that work for the money. They are not your friends outside of work. They would rather get a promotion or a slightly better paying job than dream of starting their own company. They are not passionate about the project, and will not answer emails or call after hours. They are always the first to leave for lunch, and the first to clock out for the day.

They are suckers. Wait til they realize that they wasted their time building someone else's wealth instead of their own.

That's the sales pitch. That's what I believed when I joined the world of technology. And I felt sorry for them. I have the impression that you felt that at some point. No one else has your passion. I was lucky that reality quickly came to slap me on the face.

I co-founded a company with 4 other people and we were living the life. We were featured in techcrunch, investors lined up to throw money at us, we had a celebrity hanging with us. The paparazzi were never too far. But then, we worked together.

I realized I couldn't work with the CEO. Every other word he used was Hunger, passion, success, haters. I dropped those words from my vocabulary. He believed what I believe to the extreme. It was unpleasant to see it with my own eyes.

When our finances met reality, the clashes begun. I paid our office rent for a little while until I saw that it was in vain. Rather than go through my savings, I asked everyone to get a job until we can weather this downturn. Two people did. The other two threw my own words back at me. I lacked the passion and hunger for being in a start up. I stopped paying rent.

Long story short, it's been 2 years since the landlord changed the locks in the office and the CTO, who was secretly living there, has been kicked out. He has been homeless ever since. He has all the talent in the world, but he would not get a job and sit next to those suckers again.

Completely buying into the startup story does more harm then good. The first thing to remember is that when you have your own company, you'll have to hire employees. And no one can have the "passion" of the founders. The second thing, is that thinking that employees are suckers, gives you mentality of superiority. You feel above others, and end up being an unpleasant person to work with.

There is nothing wrong with being an employee who gets paid to solve a problem. In fact, it's the most important thing in a company. An employee that solves problems then disappears until the next day.

This makes me wish I posted a few years ago when I first started at a FAANG. I was fresh out of college and worked on an email product which was in an area I was interested but quickly learned how enterprise software is actually made. There is one interesting part which is the core and that’s the MVP. Working in this stage is exciting and fun to make and then there are years and years of slog smoothing out the edges and making it ready for production, which left me similarly disillusioned especially when my view of the real world fresh out of college was that every product that exists is interesting and perfect. Long story short, I worked on that boring project for two-ish years and saw the horrible political environment begin to deteriorate my once-ok team. I say once-ok because I convinced myself during that time that I liked my work because by all measures of society, I was successful, and having no knowledge of other teams I didn’t think there was an alternative. This was all I ever knew and thought every team in tech is like this. Which for the most part is actually true. Despite what Google and other big tech companies’ flashy recruiting and marketing, something like 99% of the engineers in those companies are doing boring shit to keep the money flowing . I also went through the exact same thought process where I thought my spirit had been drained and I could never get the excitement back because of this realization. I also often wondered if I had been permanently changed because of the experience and thought I would never feel creative again. However I made a big decision and took the leap to join a new team and couldn’t have landed in an environment that is more the polar opposite. And that is what gave me my spirit back. You need to find a product in a FAANG, or startup that you actually are passionate about and get to grow your own team and that will give you your passion back. Find a position which is an exact match for your skills and do not settle at all. If a position is not perfect do not even consider it and ask as many probing questions as you need and contact current members of the team to check for inconsistencies. Good luck and I hope you can find another project that brings you passion.

I've seen this again and again: good, honest people trying to do their best in their day to day... but unavoidably, whenever we reach a larger scale scenario, everything breaks. And it's not technology. It's people. You can live happy with a few friends, or many friends, as long as you stay in your small world. Even working on complicated things. But when you start trying to scale up and translate the magic to the big world, it becomes too much, because it's impossible. It's so messy and complex and there are so many parts out of your control, that you can't attempt to care and not end up hurt, to do things right, because no one has such power in a world this complex. The business landscape around technology is terrible... but that's just like any other large-scale landscape. Tech might scale well. What never scales nicely is adding more and more people to ambitious projects. We don't scale well.

So... Do not attempt to align your ambitions with money or the big world. Try to find a job where you can directly see the benefits of your work, and where you only need to think about "the people physically in front of you". Your curiosity is still there, it's only overshadowed by all the other problems you had to face. But they are separate things. It might take a while to see them separately again, but it's possible. You just need to identify this and stop pushing yourself in the directions where they overlap.

My response to this was to just recognize "I will have no control over outcomes unless I start playing corporate politics". I stopped reading up on the newest frameworks and started understanding finance and org behavior. Then I went and got an MBA.

Ultimately engineering is an entry-level job. Yes there are more senior engineering roles, but they all involve progressively more political involvement the higher you go. Turns out technology organizations are basically like every other hierarchy in human history.

You have been though trauma - whether or not it was self inflicted or your fault or anyone else's fault is nto the issue here at the moment. You are still in the midst of it (gathered from your writing) and it will pass (hopefully).

Look around and see if there is something you can do that involves service to your community (however you define that). For me volunteering as an EMT on weekends has helped me a lot.

Finding something where you feel like what you are doing is meaningful - even if in a very local small way - gets you grounded.

Good luck!

To address the writer I say to you that splendid and amazing technical achievments do not really lead to long term satisfaction unless they coinside well with a well defined long term buisness objective. I am an entrepenur also but I'm a small time life style technologist. I have a small means and I'm happy with it. It gives me freedom most of all. Think of all those big shot names that people were celebrating great valuations.If I only made one penny in my life its more than they have netted this whole time and probably ever will. Softbank is the poster child for stupid businesses. An app that will help you walk your dog. They billed a quarter billion for it. So if you lost people a billion say they are lucky because so and so would have lost you two!

The point is you are young and learning what failure tastes like. Its ok to be happy. Its ok to do all your internet browsing on a commodore 64. There are people crazy enough to do that.

Technology, science, and learning is good for its own sake only if it doesn't dominate your life. Don't make that stuff the ends in life. Remember technology are tools they are means. Archamedes made his best discovery just taking a bath.

Take a break and enjoy life. Maybe watch a movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibuiUXOTE4M

Accept the world for what is vs. what you want it to be.

As child you revolted against reality by escaping into sci-fi. No judgement here.

I find that sci-fi, especially good sci-fi is more digestible form of philosophy.

As you aged and achieved comfort and "success" the world has revealed to be unfair. You always knew it to be the case but now you see it. The lies. The callous nature. The straight up self surviving people that seem to be self-satisfied without even a hint of guilt you get for accidentally swapping a fly.

You have guilt for not being as happy as you should be given how lucky you are despite all the things that didn't quite work out the way you wanted them to. And yet, wake up every day you must. Do something. You have companionship, yet another privilege you can feel guilty for not appreciating it enough.

So how to fix this? Stop expecting the world to be something it is not. Stop hoping for humanity. This is not a sad thought, but once you accept reality. Then and only then can you figure "okay, now what". What problems do I want to solve, which people do I want to help.

You realize you can't help everyone. So focus. Appreciate the gratitude you get by serving others. Could be family or your community, but big nameless though important causes won't feed your soul.

Check out some stuff on The Myth of Sisyphus. This may help you in your journey. What we fear to enslave us is the thing that may actual free us. The obligations of life provides the purpose that freedom never give.

From the Gita (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita) to help you :

Karmanye vadhika raste, Ma phaleshu kadachana Ma karma phala he tur bhuh, ma te sangotsva karmanye

You have a right to “Karma” (actions) but never to any Fruits thereof. You should never be motivated by the results of your actions, nor should there be any attachment in not doing your prescribed activities.

There's a lot to dislike about business. Money complicates any relationship. On top of that, big business attracts big sharks that only care about money. But why be surprised? That's their job!

In short, it's no wonder that things go wrong in the startup world. Heck, most startups fail and as the old adage goes, "...failure permits no alibis". If you fail more often than not you WILL be crucified, especially by the people who's money you've lost. Imagine you're a general and you have just lost a battle. Do you expect your superiors to like you afterwards? Or your soldiers?

What IS a wonder is that we get anything good done at all, and we DO. Look at all the amazing products you use every day. It's insanely hard to pull this off, it requires one to have thick skin along with passion and optimism, all rolled up into a neat package. In short, you've got to have both.

But I'm curious as to what's wrong with "technology"? Technology is just something humans do, it's a form of crafting. We make stuff for fun and to make our lives easier. There are businesses built around said that complicate things on a human level, but without that infrastructure civilization is not possible.

It was business and politics that ruined technology for you, not technology itself. There's a reason why people warn you against turning your hobby into a career.

On the surface, it seems like a perfect idea to make a living by doing what you love, but it ceases to be fun. You won't be able to do only what you love and what your whims and desires guide you to do, instead you have to do all the things you don't really like, whatever is desired by others willing to pay. Your most marketable skill in tech may be something you don't really enjoy doing.

I was the "computer kid" growing up and in school, so obviously that influenced my choice of education and career. I used to tinker endlessly with new devices, Linux distros (did Linux From Scratch installs, all that), and programming, but I just don't really care to do that anymore. I've hopped off the gadget bandwagon and only ever upgrade when something eventually breaks. It is no longer a fun hobby for me to upgrade my PCs endlessly or to tinker with new features and perusing changelogs to check for them. Tech feels too much like work now.

Instead, I've picked up on some old creative hobbies, like miniature painting and crafts, something analog and tactile. I tinker with paint mixes and techniques, work on my artistic side.

I know 3D printing is becoming very big in that space too, but I am consciously trying to avoid it. It is tempting though, and luckily pretty far removed from where my career has taken me.

Burnout is something that just happens, in your case it was due to business nonsense and politics, which is what usually happens. Do what makes you have, not what used to make you happy.

I can't know where you're working or worked, but please don't think that this is every tech job in every company. There are plenty of smaller businesses doing great work where you get to have your say, good colleagues and some (at least) moderately interesting problems to work with.

My last 3 jobs (over 10 years) have all been with companies in the size of 30-50 people, with 20-50% being product/engineering, working on a SaaS product. My jobs have been nothing remotely like the Silicon Valley TV-series, so I'm quite surprised and appalled when people say how spot on (even if it's a mocking caricature) the show is. And your description of Dilbertesque politics fall very much in that same category.

Will smaller companies have the Big Engineering Problems that FAANG companies have? Of course not. But there's a huge middle ground in lots of different sectors. I'm working for a company that makes a platform for childcare centers, and we have a ton of challenges and opportunities - not what I'd expected 10 years ago. But the work is rewarding, even if I don't get to have a lot of challenges revolving super hard algorithms, huge data sets or whatever else might be all the rage. Most of our challenges is scaling on a budget, nurturing expertise in different areas in a 10-person team, translating feature requests between customer lingo to something we can implement, and many more similar not-wild-and-crazy tasks.

I do feel lucky, but I also do not feel like I was lucky and somehow found three magical unicorn companies to work for. And there's plenty of things that could be better, and I could make more money working at bigger companies but in my mind it's not worth the trade-off.

I can't contribute a lot; I'm not a programmer, and I've never started a company. Though I've always loved tech, I guess I was never that idealistic about anything. I've ridden the IPO bandwagon, done the acquisition thing, done the bigcorp thing. I've been "in the industry" for 25 years and I guess I've burned out a few times, but usually it was about the company I worked for and team I worked on at the time.

It doesn't sound like the poster's complaints are anything tech-specific, just that (s)he chose to deploy their optimism in the general direction of the tech industry, and can't deal with the fact that the industry just doesn't work in an altogether idealistic, altruistic manner. I question whether their subsequent employment is truly "better" in those regards, or if their standards are merely lower/more cynical.

I don't know how to say "don't have expectations that high" in a way that's any more useful than telling a depressed person to "stop being depressed", but while I can see WHY they've burned out, I just can't come up with a "solution".

You're an artist trying to find artistic and personal fulfillment in somebody else's art factory. That will never work.

You can try to make a living making your own art, and hustle and struggle the way artists do. Or you can work in a monotonous factory churning out someone else's art. The latter is easier, but it requires putting up with more bullshit. The former is harder, but you feel good about it. That's life.

1. Insist on work life balance, a40 hour work week, and stick to it. Employers very much do exist which want this just as much as you do. 2. Ensure you get plenty of unstructured time (play time) and also rest every day. 3. Realize that your employment does not define who you are. 4. Not all employers are awful. Seek out employers from publicly traded, midsize companies with profit motive (no government jobs/insurance companies, but no startups either). I find these jobs to be the "funnest", though I am currently a cog in the machine if a large company. They are fun because there's no time for politics, but there's no huge rush either, just get your job done and do it well. If you cannot switch, do whatever you need to do to stay sane in your current environment. Take care of you. 5. Exercise creativity -- a few minutes of "fun" programming a day -- and it will get fun again. 6. See a therapist. "Burnout" generally is accompanied anxiety and/or depression. It is certainly helping me.

Burnout can be temporary. But it requires work to overcome it.

Perhaps you need to find a new domain where you could apply your skills. Why not inventing computer models of diseases for the drug research. The FDA has already accepted a model in place of an expensive clinical trial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modelling_biological_systems

I think what you're disillusioned with is capitalism.

Try building something you could never make money off of. Something useless, but fun. Try divorcing technology from the vultures and the dilberts.

Here are some technologists doing useless, joyful things:

https://twitter.com/MatthewRayfield

https://twitter.com/Foone

https://twitter.com/_naam

Best of luck.

This isn’t how life as a software engineer has to be. I work for a small software company, which hasn’t taken any investment money, and is experiencing slow growth. The entire company is remote, and I love my coworkers, who I see daily, but only see in person a few times a year. I make enough money to live very comfortably with my family.

A lot has to do with your perspective on life. If work is life and it is what you get your value from, you’re bound to be disappointed if you work for someone else.

I can’t finish up this comment without mentioning that I’m a Christian, and I find value not solely in the work I do (what if I get injured and can’t work) or in my family (they’re human and far from perfect), but in being loved by God. Most people are gonna call that stupidity or the result of brainwashing or naïveté, but it’s a comfort few people have when the world turns upside down due to global pandemic and recession. I’m not here to argue religion with anyone, just to say that a Godless life can be a hopeless one.

> Then I worked for a tech giant, and then for a high-growth unicorn. It shocked me how dilbertesque they both were. Full of politicians, and burnt out engineers in golden handcuffs who can't wait to get out

Sorry this surprises you, OP. It's called "work" (I'm not intending to be condescending). People pay you to do something and you do it, having entered unto that mutual agreement. Nobody promised you it would be efficient or fair (yet it's much more efficient and much more fair than it was say 50 years ago).

It's not just you. It's many people. Being paid a lot to do very little seems to have some bizarre side-effects to people's psyche.

For anyone reading this, take charge of your personal life. Find people and invest your time, and causes and invest your money.

So many people lament the inequality in the world but do nothing of their own will to change it. Are we all so paralyzed we can't make personal decisions and instead cry out why our government isn't doing more?

"I do a lot of sports now and hang out with my non-techy friends and my wife. I cook a lot."

This implies that you didn't do these things before. Which implies that you were overworked, didn't take care of yourself and naturally you burnt out. I don't think it is an issue with tech, it is an issue with you prioritizing work over everything else.

> I was drawn to programming, science, technology and science fiction ever since I was a little kid. I can't say it's because I wanted to make the world a better place.

One of the main sources of burnout if feeling that your work is meaningless and only benefits the company owners.

Even if we are unaware of it.

The advice of doing things you love as personal projects might not be enough.

I wish I got to know you and your experience a bit better. But perhaps you didn't work on things that were ambitious enough? Some causes where technology need coders like us are so daunting and scary that it can be good for our personal motivation. Yes, I mean for you to seek out some fear and trembling. For me, if the project is too definite, too attainable, it feels like there is little exploration.

It's natural for us to go towards jobs and projects that feel secure. However security can often bring about boredom and bitterness if you let it take over you everyday.

I'd disagree with the statement that those people weren't your friends. Friends come and go (family too!), live and enjoy great people in the moment. There is nothing wrong with enjoying fleeting moments with people. If they become friends for long time; great. If not, it was fun while it lasted. Not everything has to evaluated for long-term ROI.

A thought occurred to me while reading this and the responses.

I had pretty severe burnout - who knew, working two jobs and studying full time isn't very smart - when I was very young in my career. In hindsight that was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It was even better that it happened early in my career when I didn't have dependents to care about or much of a career really.

Because of that I learned, unfortunately the hard way, that work is work and that's not your life. It took me a while, but I forced myself to stop worrying, thinking and in any way engage with work once the workday is done. I haven't taken work home in years.

Burnouts suck, the really bad ones are dangerous, too, because you lose your sense of reality, but, honestly, if people went through it once when it's relatively safe and you can rely on help to get through it, like I did, the rest of your life could/would be much better.

Lots of comments, not sure if anyone said this already.

If you're disillusioned because of the current Orwellian state the world is in (everything tracking you, hard locked in into ecosystems, etc...) Please know that this is not technology, technology has always been and will always be great. It's the business model that fucked us.

Count the I-s in your text. Why would you want to program for yourself if you are already happy and mentally engaged otherwise? You will want to build something once you find a problem that you can solve for somebody else.

Or think of a product that you want all by yourself that is not available right now. Use programming to make it real.

I'm kind of there, too, though I was never as successful are you (I infer).

As far as sleeping well at night, unless you were a sadistic bastard to your employees, I think all else is (or should be) easily forgiven.

If you behaved monstrously to anyone (and I've been on the receiving end of a couple of those deals), you might apologize. Don't expect that it will be received well, but that's really all you can do.

Beyond that, I think you've mostly just discovered the nature of our reality. The Buddhists call it suffering, or just the inherent broken-ness or insufficiency of the world. Ecclesiastes knew it as well, along with many Western philosophers who followed.

What's to be done? Not much. Try to enjoy your life, which is almost over anyway. Try to have good time with your wife and whatever friends or people may be around. Eat, drink, and be merry, as you can. Godspeed.

I believe this kind of disillusion could not only simply explained by burnout. It's more like the Blue pill vs Red pill thing. Once you learned, you cannot unlearn. Blue pilled people are totally okay with these things, while some Red pilled people cannot get rid of their cynical views, and the feeling of defeating.

I work for a tech consultancy, apart from programming stuff, I also need to propose technical solutions to the clients, presenting slides with buzz word technologies which are actually very mediocre for me. Everybody else seems to be excited by those technologies. I can bear with it but sometimes I have same feeling as OP. If I own a startup doing similar business I would directly choose totally different sets of novel technologies that are much smaller, faster, outperform those solutions in almost every dimension.

Technologies are usually overlooked or being witch-hunted for tens of years. What we usually do today, there were a small bunch of people already knew them quite well more than half a century ago. That might mean now, you can already do what people usually do tens of years later, but too few people would agree with you. Just like John Barkus have to face "FORTRAN is extremely inefficient" bullshit for quite a while. After FORTRAN got rid of the inefficient reputation, he was interested in functional programming back in the day, while functional programming was even being witch-hunted till this day.

Imagine you have been thrown back to 1995, and a part of your job is to declare the "Blub Programming Language™"'s novelty over other languages to everybody (that would be a real job since there were so much marketing on the "Blub Programming Language™" back in the day), while there are even no basic things like parametric polymorphism and higher-order functions such as map and filter. Everybody was in hype, and completely ignore your cynical view on "Blub Programming Language™", despite the fact that those novel concepts are: very useful / straight forward to learn / already well established in the 1960s.

OK, so I've had no experience with startups. About the closest I came was flirting with biotech in the 80s. But for sure I've had my share of abject failure, anxt, depression, and all that.

Until my 30s, it was all about doing what interested me. In a word, having fun. I didn't care at all about money, and didn't need much, given my lifestyle in college and grad school. I also didn't care much about relationships, mostly because I was so incompetent about them.

I did go through a phase of seeing how much money I could make. At least, as a consultant. Probably because I was so incompetent building businesses.

But somewhere in the midst of that, I fully got that it's all a game, and that stuff means whatever we say it does. In some Landmark course about managing yourself as if you were a business. And then it became fun again.

I work in academia and get mild burnout twice a year (after the semester ends). I have actually found Churchill's advice on overcoming burnout quite helpful -- in short, find several real (physical) hobbies like painting or gardening.

Here are some excellent quotes from Churchill's small book "Painting as a Pasttime":

Painting as a Pastime by Winston Churchill

The tired part of the mind can be rested and strengthen, not merely by rest, but by using other parts.

It is no use saying to the tired 'mental muscles' – if one: such an expression – 'I will give you a good rest,' 'I will go for a long walk,' or 'I will lie down and think of nothing.' The mind keeps busy just the same. If it has been weighing and measuring, it goes on weighing and measuring. If it has been worrying, it goes on worrying. It is only when new cells are called into activity, when new stars become the lords of ascendant, that relief, repose, refreshment are afforded.

To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real.

The need of an alternative outlook, of a change of atmosphere, of a diversion of effort, is essential.

The most common form of diversion is reading.

'What shall I do with all my books?' was the question; and the answer, 'Read them,' sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands.

Since change is an essential element in diversion of all kinds, it is naturally more restful and refreshing to read in a different language from that in which one's ordinary daily work is done. To have a second language at your disposal, even if you only know it enough to read it with pleasure, is a sensible advantage.

To restore psychic equilibrium we should call into use those parts of the mind which direct both eye and hand. Many men have found great advantage in practicing a handicraft for pleasure.

But best of all and easiest to procure are sketching and painting in all their forms.

We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joyride in the paint-box.

The description about the contrast between an easy, soul-less corporate environment and the insanely difficult startup environment where you get torn apart by vultures resonates very strongly with me.

I think anyone who has worked for a good mix of startups and corporations will understand the extreme difference. And yes, being around a bunch of highly optimistic people inside corporations is depressing.

And it's depressing that people get paid more to do useless bureaucratic things while in a corporation than adding real value whilst in a startup.

I blame Federal reserve banks and fiat money for this. That's why I work in cryptocurrency space now. Cryptocurrency allows you to get profit from systemic inefficiencies just like corporations but you get that nice efficiency, value-creation feeling of a startup.

I don't know how well this will go down in HN, but here's my take/secret:

Corporations and business aren't programming/tech/ science. Startups aren't tech. University and academics isn't science. Faculties aren't science. Peer review isn't science. Venture capitalists aren't tech. Silicon valley isn't tech/ science. "The web" isn't tech.

Let's try another analogy: modern art and art dealerships and art galleries aren't art. Art is taking a photo you like, or painting something you want to paint or building something you want to build. Working at it because you want it and you think it will be beautiful or purposeful: once you're trying to make business and money and find out what's popular and build reputation and sell you tend to stop doing art and start doing something else.

So to bring it back to tech and science.

Science is just the process of systematically trying to use experimentation, empiricism and reasoning to find out what you don't know. That's it! The rest is some combination of empty shells, dressing and propaganda.

Flashing LEDs isn't tech.

Tech is just tools used for some purpose, be it practical or enjoyment. Nothing more. A hammer is tech. A rock is tech. A string can be tech.

I program in R and python and get paid for it these days. But I try to not bring it home, because it's not tech, and it's not science and it's not programming. When I'm programming I'm usually in emacs and lisp. I do photography to produce things I think are beautiful. I cook to provide tasty and healthy and enjoyable experiences for my family (and a scientific mindset can be quite helpful there). I apply science just continuously in life. And I hack together things in tech because I enjoy it and to make my life easier: why just this weekend I made our living room into a video conference centre for our corona virus quarantine: my phone is the webcam and streams wirelessly to the computer, my computer streams wireless display to my TV, my TV routes sound back out through the AV unit, and the room is lit with customisable hue lighting. All done for a few bucks of software and it'll never sell a unit and I don't care, because money and selling isn't tech.

Many here will attempt to give you a justification or rationale to your predicament. I've discovered, through my own experience, that this way of coping is predominate in technology (when a problem reveals itself, find a solution). Sometimes this is the right way to approach it. For example, If you know the end you are seeking, finding a means and sticking with that way of being will eventually get you closer to that end. But if you don't know the end, you revert back to the means with which you are most familiar: attempting to solve it rationally. I've found this approach to be unfruitful. This sort of thinking is something I dwell in quite a bit. I'm happy to be a sounding-board for you if you want.

I worked in tech for 23 years, as an employee, freelancer, consultant, and business owner. I did development, devops, testing, management, sales... and after working my way through burnout several times and seeing the industry change in ways I don't like, I walked away to a new career. While not perfect and nowhere near as intellectually stimulating, it sure beats what I experienced in tech from an emotional and mental standpoint. So while "find your passion" is a little trite, there is something to be said for "find something that doesn't drain you every day, that pays your bills, that you might even enjoy, that enables you to live how you wish."

You may be disillusioned with technology, but to me, it seems that what disillusioned you was capitalism.

The problems you described are not technological, they're political. The Vulture Capitalists can be dishonest because they don't pay for their lies. The soulless corporations waste their time with political squabbles and poorly managed project because they capture enough profit to afford such inefficiencies. Burnout is not a problem because we still have a lot of younger and hopeful people to replace the burnt out ashes.

I personally see only two solutions: get out of the system, or change the system. Perhaps both. Note that the second one requires collective action.

Everyone has different talents. Without those bloodthirsty vultures we would have a hard time allocating capital to the right projects.

My experience with straddling a bunch of different worlds is that people in technology are often just impossible to satisfy. Mad because the ping pong table doesn't have exactly the brand of ping pong balls they wanted.

IMO it comes down to that the time in front of a screen to become a great programmer is not exactly great for mental health.

You have to use the great problem solving skills you have to solve this problem for your own brain though and stop blaming the external world. There is nothing more that could be done to make you happy.

The software engineer is the worker of the 21st century. In many organizations he/she is at the bottom of the pyramid. Some organizations like to insist on that point. Take it or leave it.

[Edit] try replacing software engineer with teacher, nurse.

That's just how life is, how business is. people are driven by motivation (a lot of times by money) you didn't lose any friends, if they are with you when you have something and now they're gone, they never were your friends.

I like to code, I do this since I have 13 (I have 30 now), I didn't start this to make money, I do this because I like it and I would do this even if I were not paid for

I worked with a lot of good people, but they are just coworkers, not my friends. you must figure out the difference and find your purpose. Maybe tech is not for you and that's ok if you are happy doing non-tech stuff you should focus on that.

It makes me think that maybe what’s so toxic nowadays is the expectation that the job is glamorous and exciting. For me the reality is still the same as 90’s dad’s enterprise software company, but with a big shiny layer of marketing.

Yo! I'm with some people building a community that I think could really resonate with what you're looking for out of your future. It's sort of but not really an incubator of people, and one of our number (who themselves has a hell of a story) is explicitly looking to upend the VC model for basically all of those reasons. Another is the only _liked_ advertiser on Reddit. I'm taking our toy sort-of-but-not-really chat bot and turning it human augmentation for domestic abuse clinicians. It's the first time in my career (~10yrs) that I've been excited about morning "standups".

Email me or some such :)

I call this phenomenon: the meaning crisis and yes we should do something about it : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY

Whne you accept VC money they will expect, demand results, they dont care about the consequences to you or your staff, they want a return on their money. Your're making a deal with the devil, but in return what are you really expecting or what do you want? A great company delivering great products or immense wealth? The impression I get is that everyone or at least the vast majority want Bill Gates level money, they want to be as rich as Zuckerberg. They want their own space program like Bezos. Deliver a great product in your own time, at a smaller scale and be happy with a reasonable profit.

I've been feeling burnout, although not to the same extent as OP, for many of the same reasons. The main difference is I never stopped loving programming or the creative aspects of making things. Ideally I'd like to be a full time hobbyist programmer, but that seems out of reach financially. If you want to get back into making stuff I suggest doing zero pressure hobby projects focused on whatever you enjoy about the process of making (not around a mission, or users and definitely not around money) and don't actually worry about finishing. Just focus on the act of making stuff happen

This kind-of explains how I felt when I was working in software. After we launched a successful product, I lost all motivation to continue open source for some time and eventually I lost my interest in the tech we were working with as well. Still to this day, my commits went down from >1k/yr to less than 10.

What helped me was changing to a different industry. I went into electric vehicles and now I write drive by wire firmware. It was really interesting to find that certain industries NEED help from those that know how to write and scale software, because they are traditionally led my the dinosauric.

As there is not really an educational background given, I'd suggest learning a new programming language or starting with SICP or other cool programming books, which have the potential to give the reader and eager learner many "Aha!" moments and insights. That should make programming interesting again. There is always more to learn about code and programming.

Or alternatively, do something else, until you get an interesting idea or need a tool for what you actually want to deal with and code it up. This can reinforce both, programming and the actual activity, that one wanted to do.

Why do you need to express creativity only through technology? You can make many beautiful and useful things that have nothing to do with software. Two examples that I've enjoyed are woodworking and welding.

Many here will attempt to give you a justification or rationale to your predicament. It's the way of coping with problems that technology teaches you (when a problem reveals itself, find a solution). Sometimes this is the right way to approach it. If you know the end you are seeking, finding a means towards it works. But if you are trying to determine the end, unthinkingly continuing down the same means is not going to satisfy your unease. This sort of thinking is something I dwell in quite a lot. I'm happy to be a sounding-board for you if you want.

Three years in and my conclusion so far is that work is nothing more than a mean to earn a living, and my free time is the time I can actually read/program about interesting stuff. The pragmatic attitude is therefore to stop caring much about work and especially not give it more time than expected.

Lots of jobs for developers but very hard to find a job that is actually inspiring at all. I just stop struggling to find a sense to it and stopped giving a fuck. It's relatively big money for relatively easy work, we shouldn't be complaining in a first place.

Think of an interesting non-software related domain that you enjoy and then use software to solve a problem in it. 10 years ago I scraped a run logger app backend for my running statistics and did data analysis on my GPS tracks that helped my training (things that Strava is doing today).

Don't make it into a product or publish it or do anything else that creates pressure on you. Just do it to solve your own problems. Be ok with the vast majority of those projects never being completed. The deal is to learn something and enjoy the pure act of creating something.

This seems like a textbook burn-out case.

What you need is detachment.

Real world is ... what it is. Good intention is not enough for good things to happen. Our system seems to be programmed in a way, that it can go worse it will, until it hits the brake.

So relax, the world is what it is. What needs to be changed is our perception. Plus, tech should define a person, it can be part of identity, but don't let it take hold of it. After all, technologies are just manmade tools, they are fancier but no different than knives and sticks. Why let a tool define what you are and what you should be?

You're disillusioned not with tech but with greedy political idiots who ru(i)n it. Fundamentally it's all simple with tech. You calculate things and apply your logic and experience and then you get a working system if you've done it correctly. No exceptions.

It's when you deal with self-interest and greed of business-people that are just there to bleed you dry you encounter problems.

My advice would be to limit your exposure to all things business in tech and just sit in the corner doing what you can do best: writing programs. Then it becomes fun again.

Your disillusion really resonates with my experience, and likely many others. The thing is, if you had succeeded in all you wanted, you would still be asking the same questions by now.

There are times for disillusion in everyone’s life.

Look at it as an opportunity. A moment in the now - where you are not only open to, but also craving, for a new direction or a different mindset on the direction to move forward.

I strongly believe in correct forward.

That means valuing your previous experiences, valuing feedback from others in the present, and striving for better in the future.

I would say you are two thirds there buddy!

I love hacking on code, it's why I got into it. The Official side of it all can be a real bummer. I can always measure my burnout levels of Official work by how much I start hacking at home. I make a fairly distinct separation between work and home, always have. Even though I have worked late and passionately at times. :) I always enjoy the new file, the fresh project smell, the beauty of code.

There's something deeply joyous about the potential of an empty file and where you can take it. If I lost that joy, that would be very grievous.

That's a thing that's not related to tech IMO.

You can hear a lot of young talented and passionated going deep and hard into what they love. But it seems that successful or not, there are some bits that are important in a normal life that intense personal pursuit wont provibe. Stability, belonging to a group come to mind. Even though in many jobs colleagues come and go, when you have a stable job with people you get to know, it's a plus.

I also wonder if it's not partly a personality trait. Or at least a temporary space into ones life.

Have you thought about looking for a job with a tech related non-profit? I joined one a few years ago after spending my entire career in the traditional for-profit tech space and I have been amazed at the difference between the two worlds. Most of the negative aspects of the VC driven tech world that you talk about don't really exist in the non-profit space. It's not all sunshine and roses, but might be a great way for you to get back to what you used to love as well as contribute to something meaningful.

OP is simply 'disillusioned' with corporations and business. And 'disillusioned' is the wrong word; he has simply learned 1st hand what they are like [a load of bullshit].

I think they found the answer, work outside of the tech industry. You can code in your free time for fun and personal development, do open source, or find a way for programming to add value to your workplace or community. I went from data science to day labor and I’m much happier.

Eventually I’ll save up and start a local business and I can always integrate technology as needed. Tech companies start with the premise of business following from technology and that’s not something I believe in or find meaningful anymore.

You get back the joy of building things by building things. Something that worked for me when I was in similar situation was working on some Arduiono projects. It's not only programming, you are making something in the physical world as well. The projects are usually simple and small, you don't get burned out. The actual programming is pretty simple - you don't need design patterns, some heavy framework or functional programming to make few LEDs blink or a motor to spin back and forth.

It’s a bit of a paradox when you try something audacious like a startup.

I raised money, had 6 full-time employees and went hard and a year in realized it wasn’t going to work. It sucked, the stress, the grind, the failure.

That experience has left me in the same state where you realize If you can get a startup off the ground that you can actually do anything you really want to go after.

But the flip side is you also now how have a taste for how bad it can go (if it failed) and now I find I can’t take a step towards anything without that fear.

I think burnout is about reducing the perceived world to a shallow mental model, getting locked in it voluntarily and getting depressed as a result. But it's a 3 wall prison cell: it works so long as the prisoner doesn't bother to look around to notice the missing wall.

My approach is to find curiously unexplainable things. The moment our mind spots a glitch in the matrix, an odd difference between the well known mental model and observations, it becomes excited and tries to fix the model.

You've got to restore the suspension of disbelief which resulted from your burnout.

If you have enough money to take some time off, do so.

The world is a shitty place ; The world doesn't care about what you can offer ; The world doesn't care for you ; The world doesn't even care for itself ; The world just doesn't care

The world won't be fine but that's not your fault.

The alternatives are either cynicism or escapism.

Protect yourself from toxic environment, grow inward, enjoy the beauty in life that you can find.

100x "your coworkers are not your friends." Especially if you are the boss. That doesnt preclude you from being friendly. But that doesnt make you friends.

You need to think about the motivations behind all of the parties you’re interacting with. Why did those investors give you money? Because they, and possible their LPs (their bosses effectively) wanted to make more money with their money. That’s it. That’s their whole job. Had you known this, you wouldn’t have been surprised when they acted how they did in order to return any capital possible once it was clear they were not making a return.

Bill Watterson, of Calvin and Hobbes fame, gave advice that I've found helpful over the years, "To create your own life's meaning is not easy but it's still allowed and I think you'll be happier for the trouble."

https://zenpencils.com/comic/128-bill-watterson-a-cartoonist...

> Many of the investors turned out to be bloodthirsty vultures

> I lost many friends

> This is just the reality of what happens to people when extreme stress ends in failure

> So the worst case scenario is that you get eaten by vultures and lose friends. And the best case scenario is that you're in a soulless machine that turns everyone into an automaton

You're not disillusioned with technology. You're disillusioned with humanity (as you probably ought to be.)

> But eventually I started exercising, went on anti-depressants, and started therapy. Then I got a job that has nothing to do with technology. Slowly my happiness returned, and with it my ability to focus. I do a lot of sports now and hang out with my non-techy friends and my wife. I cook a lot.

Sounds like the issue had less to so with technology and more to do with lack of work-life balance and unaddressed clinical depression.

I work in semiconductor manufacturing and I'm in the same boat as OP.

I'm not enjoying the work anymore...working from home has helped somewhat with the burnout but the social isolation is getting to me too. At least I don't have to see my coworkers and boss who have stopped caring a long time ago.

Not sure what I am going to do if I just outright quit. My wife is supportive but I can't just sit at home doing hobbies.

I think the biggest problem is all the enthusiasm / money / speculation around every piece of “tech” being the next “big thing”

I’m wondering this for you and myself:

could you be happy and fulfilled letting go of the “tech” dream, and instead focus simply on solving problems for people we care about with people we care about?

Maybe some solutions use software maybe some use rope. Who cares with what.. are the people better off?

Are you disillusioned with technology? Or maybe is it the VC growth model that you are disillusioned with?

I made a short deck about it a while back, might be of interest:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1oynXnYdZQGincUQUj4g2...

There are 2 things you can do.

1) quit this ecosystem completely, go to countryside grow fruits, raise animals in farm.

2) Find a software job where you are a billable resource, aka consulting. You do this for x$/h. If you are good no one will bat an eye. You don't have to deal with investor, upper management. Every month you put y hours for x*y $ no bullshit. If you smell bullshit you walk out.

My solution to this is to keep my programming as a "hobby", to only do it for love without regard for money - and have an unrelated day job to fund my living expenses. This is also what Derek Sivers recommends https://sivers.org/balance

On mobile I couldn't get whole lines to wrap at my screen edge, couldn't figure out a way to view the raw txt instead of that weird web page. Opened termux, installed w3m, opened the url there, and then was able to view whole lines without repeatedly scrolling left and right. Maybe this will help someone else as well.

Leaving aside the organizational bullshit issues, a big frustration with IC work is that to be productive at it I have to essentially shut-off my brain during the rest of my life, as I simply don't have the mental energy to do deeply technical things outside of work while being productive at coding for work.

My most recent solution: At work, I work.

After work ... I bought an iPad and started making little songs using Garageband. I have total creative control, and tinkering away with music is fun for me.

Another generation used to build model railroads in their basements. I don't get it, but they had total creative control.

I'd say keep doing what you do and seem to like now. The rest may come back. One day you might think of an interesting idea would want to try it and then before you know you'll be already doing things to make that idea come to life. Just do not try to force things upon yourself.

> I can't say it's because I wanted to make the world a better place.

i see you saying this, but i don't think you believe this. the way you ended your essay sounds like you do want to make the world a better place through technology.

i am myself burnt out on technology, and i have come to a realization on something that's been burning a while. the simple fact of the matter is that society cannot be helped with technology. just get over that dream. this is all very clear in today's global health crisis. quite nearly all the problems are emphatically not technological in nature and cannot be solved with more technology.

it sounds like to me that you are actually happy but aren't happy with how or why you're happy. maybe that is something to work on? i'm not that old, but as i have aged, i see now that life is a blip. this drive to make a so-called mark is a fool's errand. just enjoy life locally and quit trying to have a global effect. so be happy that you've found some happiness.

i say "so what?" you can't read science fiction. why is that a mark of demerit? read dramas. read thrillers. read westerns. read comedies. there's a ton of material out there that has nothing to do with science. despite science's progress, it still cannot answer or even come close to exploring areas of life that we experience.

stop caring about products. think about things in emotive terms. if you like programming and creating and mathematics, maybe get into creative coding? use your technical ability to search for new expression. maybe use programming to explore your knot theory excursion. maybe volunteer your time to help people or communities who need technology help (i think one can help society on a very local level with a certain amount of technology).

i don't understand why you want to force a path. if a path is closed, it's closed. it doesn't make sense to be happy on your path with tons of other paths out there but to stand in front of the closed path asking "why?". move on and explore.

in dealing with depression and anxiety, the most powerful thought is to understand that you can't change the world. it makes no sense to try and change it, as you'll bury a deeper hole. all the drugs and therapy are meant to be catalyst to a realization that you can't bend the world as if you're gravity and that you must learn to ride the wave in a healthy way and make small adjustments to go where you want to go.

Well, why getting yourself burned in a startup? Take a reasonable sized company with a traditional business you like but do not love and work there as an employee, best in a country where employee rights mean something.

Being a corporate black matter developer is actually quite good.

The mistake you've made is worrying about what has been lost as opposed to what could come. 7 billion people and counting, keep going man.

Always assume money brings out the worst. Always assume your relationships will change. Life becomes easier.

Both at the beginning and in the end the answer is always simple: hope. Not all people. There are good ones, even in technology. There are coworkers with whom your shared emotional experience was authentic. There will be more.

Try moving to a new city. I had a similar experience and moved from SF to NYC. NYC is less of a techie bubble than SF. You didn't mention where you live, but I just assumed it's somewhere in the Bay area.

You're disappointed with the Silicon Valley bubble, not technology perse

You aren't disillusioned with technology, you're disillusioned with people.

That's not an excuse for the way people behave, but it's a useful thing to keep in mind when trying to think about how to change the problems. They're behavioral, social, and organizational problems, not technical ones.

Meaningful change can only come through those avenues, then, like politics. Of course, that's an ugly field on its own... if you prefer to keep a tech lens on it, you can try to design products to push society in certain directions, but you could also work towards that without doing any sort of technological work at all.

These sorts of things are the strongest sorts of anti-libertarian arguments I know of. The "market" necessarily devolves to the people who are willing to push the boundaries the most, because it's near-impossible to know all the bad actors exhaustively in advance, and because so many people are willing to compromise - at least somewhat - in their pursuit of personal security.

I would recommend looking and producing Art. Software-perls or paintings, poems whatever you like and admire. The more artist you are the more you suffer from applied art, it is not your fault :-)

Working on commons as a developer for France's state startups incubator as a freelance, without the burden of the internal HR, was a blessing for me after my private startup experience.

Talk about the worst miswording of an essay title, and/or mischaracterization of the situation.

> Extremely disillusioned with non-tech folks dominating and causing misery in every aspect of technological pursuits

FTFY

The soulless corporation is far from exclusive to what you call "tech". "Tech" is when they also put up a foosball table and paint the walls in bright colors.

Having worked for clients from SV, Japan and a few European countries, including my own, I would guess that it's not tech in general, but SV and VC culture that's the reason here.

Case in point: no other crowd is so accepting of using drugs or other substances to increase work performance.

Yes, there is coffee as the most common of such means, but funnily enough I had to ditch it cold turkey to keep up with these people, because improving my sleep quality instead was more effective.

Bottom line is SV offers more reward, but puts more pressure so it's not for everyone - especially not for me who loves his job, but certainly isn't married to it.

Been there. Still slightly am. It's tough. Expand your hobbies and invest in them as you have tech. See where it ends up. It(s) kind-of work(ed/ing) for me.

Take a week off, step away from the keyboard, find some humans, animals, get a hobby or go back to the one you had. Watch that Naval Ravikant Joe Rogan podcast.

>For a long time I couldn't focus on any remotely intellectual pursuit. I even thought I permanently damaged my brain.

He didn't appear to mention the presumed cause of this. Stress?

As to the rest of the contents, it's a mistake to assume that two experiences given labels of "high-point" and "low point" having a common feature implies that all other experiences of the same species (presumed to be on some spectrum that they bookend) also share that feature. Maybe were he to have worked for a smaller scale established company, he would have found his experience to be less unpleasant.

Maybe look at bonding more with your community and worry less about tech / work / business. Family and community are where you find joy in life.

He's not disillusioned with tech it seems, but with the business of tech.

Hyped startups and humongous companies. It's not surprising.

Fortunately, there are other choices.

The solution for me in the past has been a religious approach to work-life balance: LEAVE THE OFFICE AT 5 PM. Every day.

Sure have some leeway for the real genuine emergencies, but fixing a random bug or "finishing this off" is not worth hanging around after 5 for.

I did this and went from feeling burnt out, drained, and ultimately crushed at the end of each day, to leaving the office "hungry" and looking forward to coming back in tomorrow to continue fixing that bug or finishing off that thing or whatever with just enough energy remaining to get me through to 5pm again. Life is too short to "dedicate" yourself to a job.

TL:Dr - just do your job, don't be your job.

FYI there's some good advice on the gist, too.

No one has mentioned Finite and Infinite Games.

I am leader of a group, Freedom Club, that seeks to address this. Please message me if you're interested in FC.

The issue is that even the venture capitalists and the the managers have own oppressors and there is no external solution to the issue that this person is facing.

I remember one time a manager explaining to me how incredibly aggressive and unrealistic targets the CEO sets for them and that is why we were getting the push. The reason is that the CEO is a result-based position and is receiving unrealistic pressure from the board of directors. On the other hand the members of the board of directors are trying to keep the company afloat and avoid this being their next-in-a-row investment failure so that they can officially be classified as "serial loser". In this world you are either oppressed by someone else or by pure reality. The Hollywood image of a 1920s oppressive capitalist smoking cigars all day and thinking of who's life he should destroy in the name of profit is laughable nonsense. That is just not how the world works.

I generally agree with this person's premises, but I reject his conclusion. He basically got the slap that he deserved, since there was a huge disconnect between his model of reality and actual reality. I know because I used to be this person and am currently recovering from what this person is experiencing. The solution can only come from within and as far as I can tell it involves finding inner peace and at the same time adopting a highly disagreeable personality traits.

This isn't going to be a popular response, but I read your entire article and I have the following advice.

First, what toy wrote tells me you started your business because you consider yourself to be highly intelligent and capable and you believed that you should be in charge. What you've said about how your business failed and how few people still want anything to do with you afterwards tells me you were not prepared, you do not understand how to run a business and you lack even a minimal competency when it comes to leadership. I do not want you to think I am being harsh and unfeeling, I am being critical because it's what you need to know if you ever intended to work in the tech industry again.

Almost everyone wants to be in charge and believes they could succeed in such a role given the chance. Of those who attempt to start their own businesses only about 10% have what it takes to merely stay in business. Fewer than 3% of business leaders have sufficient ability in the field they already work in to create a genuinely profitable business, and less than 0.3% have what it takes to found an industry disrupting company.

Investors will always behave the way you described because they're basically playing roulette and they've bet on a bunch of things in the hope that 10% of their investments will pay off because they know the statistics I just told you. Your friends abandoned you however, because as a boss you make them promises and promising things to your friends which you probably cannot deliver always damages the relationship.

Finally, it's time for my advice. One, you need to remove your ego and emotions from your work as this will always eventually damage working relationships and burn you out. Two, work is always a marathon, never a sprint. A lot of startup guys will tell you that you have to work 70 hour weeks, but this is not maintainable and will just result in failure later on as opposed to delayed sustainable success. Third, if it wasn't clear from my initial statements, you are not well suited to being high level management and changing that about yourself would likely take so long as to waste the rest of your career in pursuit of a highly stressful goal that is unlikely ever to feel worth the effort. I suggest you take an engineering position or stick to no higher than mid-level project management at an established company. Finding somewhere relaxing where you can limit your work hours to 40 or less per week is the only real chance you have at reversing the burnout, but only if you can remove your ego and emotions from your past and future professional work. I strongly recommend mindfulness meditation to help with getting past your former business failings and MO e forward into a career that you can find fulfilling.

Do not listen to anonymous people online but talk to a professional like a coach or psychologist.

You're not disillusioned with technology. You seem to have a great deal of interest and faith in technology.

You seem disillusioned with Capitalism.

The unfortunate truth is that Venture Capitalists run the entire tech industry, and they simply do not care about technology for technology's sake. They care about making money, for money's sake. No matter how innovative and impressive your technology may be, they are only measuring it in dollars.

If you are forced into a decision where you have to make your technology worse to make your bottom line better, you will be expected to make your technology worse ASAP. If you don't do it, the capitalists will take their money and go home.

You should look into some more altruistic tech projects. I have friends that work at a digital accessibility company that is funded almost entirely by donations. They seem to be in the unique situation of being funded for making software that works best for the users, not for making software that earns the most for their investors, as their investors expect no returns on their donations.

But as long as you're working in the commercial tech sector, you're going to have to deal with VCs who don't care one bit about the tech you're producing, only that it maximizes their returns.

Study leadership. Surprisingly technology lacks good leadership, and thus creates toxicity.

And I am extremely disillusioned with websites that require horizontal scrolling on mobile

It sounds like the author might have been better off turning into science than technology.

> I lost many friends.

They weren't ever your friends. People at work rarely transcend beyond co-workers and into actual friendship. If all you do together is work and around-work activities, they probably aren't your friends. You're effectively people locked in a cage together that happen to get along.

If you get together on days you don't work together then they might actually be your friend. If they've met your non-work friends they might be your friend. If they attend your birthday party where they don't work with 95% of people there they might be your friend.

If you don't invite them to those things you don't actually consider them a friend. If you hold any power over someone (e.g. CTO-employee relationships) and they do this stuff they still might not be your friend. But if they don't do any of this stuff they definitely, 100% are not your friend.

Also, one of the best ways to fuck up a friendship is to hire them. You need to be sure you can properly separate business and friendship if you ever do this.

> Then I worked for a tech giant, and then for a high-growth unicorn. It shocked me how dilbertesque they both were. Full of politicians, and burnt out engineers in golden handcuffs who can't wait to get out, and meaningless business speak, and checked out employees who pretend they're "excited" about everything all the time.

I left my big city office job to work remotely (after a 2.5 year "sabbatical" traveling the world) precisely because I couldn't stand that sh anymore. Remote work isn't a panacea and does have its cons, but no way in hell I'd trade it back for any office job.

In terms of finding one's "spark", I can relate. I used to be pretty starry-eyed too, majoring in math (because I enjoyed it, not for job opportunities or money), and working on a bunch of different kinds of projects for fun. As I've gotten older and had to succumb to the working world, I've also gotten more and more disillusioned over the years. I've felt my creativity and passion diminish.

I'd say part of it is from getting older, part of it is just a byproduct of our capitalist system that forces everyone to rent themselves out for money to rich people who want to make more money and become cogs in the "dilbertesque" machine exactly as you described. As bad as it is, it wouldn't be half as bad in my opinion if we could at least talk about it honestly, but sadly this can get you fired.

I don't have the solution, but I'd say to start by being less hard on yourself because most of those burnt out engineers are in the same position as you, they just didn't have the conviction or courage to follow through and leave. Accept that one's job is purely impersonal and just for money and co-workers are just business relationships, and don't expect more than that or you'll inevitably bound for disappointment.

Clarify what your goals are. Do you want to make money? Improve society? Work on intellectually challenging problems? Be happy? Those are all very different goals with different solutions.

And thanks for writing this post. The enormous reception is proof that you're not alone here, that a lot more of us feel the same way as you than you think. It's a sad reflection of our system, but short of a revolution all we can do is do the best we can. FIRE (financial independence) is the only true freedom of time.

Not entirely sure how anything OP describes has anything specific to do with tech.

Having read this a second time, I suspect that "technology" here is represented by "web framework launch Silicon valley velocity board IPO tickets vulture-capitalist 'go big or go home' standup burnrate" and little else.

Not all technology is like that. Technology happens without the constant churn of frameworks popping in and out of vogue, without a dependency being drug into the Google Graveyard on little notice, without scrum and story points. Technology happens without a single investor around. Technology happens outside of California ... it even can occur in the flyover states.

First, go make something with your hands. Or learn to. Makerspaces are shut most likely and of course Techshop folding was a drag but ... make something other than a sandcastle of bits that will be washed away when the moon of fashion drags a wave of fickle adherence over your hard work. Smash it or give it away. Now do it again, and again. You will like your third version.

Make something for yourself, that no investor will ever see. You will not make a dime out of it. Go ahead and program something to automate a personal itch. Maybe you just want to see what movies are around within fifty miles and then you won't to pick a theater; try prying that data out of some feeds and re-organizing it. Write something that alerts you on Wednesday when a new moon is going to be on a Friday or Saturday night so you can go to look at the stars somewhere far from the city. Do it without unit tests or deployment or CI/CD or a single git command.

Look for a problem where you work with the data, not with the UX or presentation or reaching for Bootstrap. Something where the web is not involved.

I can tell you what the lesson here is but you should do these things and figure out why it all feels so different and what you didn't like about ... before.

The author needs to try BSD

@mGBUfLn9, you point your finger in every directions but your own. There is one sentence where you pretend to do so, but you ever so quickly declare yourself not guilty.

"I lost many friends." That was entirely your choice. On a daily and hourly basis you chose striking it rich or satisfying your vainglory over people and relationships. You could have chosen to do this software as a side project, or via slow bootstrap, sans the shark investors. You didn't.

"But I can sleep at night fine. So I eventually decided it's mostly nobody's fault," then "hang out with my non-techy friends and my wife". Clearly you haven't put two and two together.

Let me guess: Your startup's business model was based on selling advertising, selling data on its users, and/or exploiting people in the "gig economy". Yet it's only your investors that you call "bloodthirsty vultures".

You blame everyone but yourself for becoming "soulless". Your very use of this word reveals a great lack of soul. You misuse it to describe working like a machine, an automaton. The nurse who is working like a machine to save lives at great risk to her own has the most wonderful, beautiful soul. What makes you soulless is that you're only thinking about yourself and "new products" (ways to make money) without any hint of a conscience troubled by the decisions made and actions taken in pursuit of those profits, and what that says about who you are. Or maybe the depression was a conscience trying hard to speak out, but it got snuffed by drugs rather than getting heard.

You can't "see past the cynicism" when you are the cynicism.

Spend less time figuring how much you can get and more time one what you can give. Ditch your transactional mindset. Give for giving's sake. Use your talents to make the world better, fuck the profits. Chose the more moral job over the more profitable one. The people you'll work with in those jobs will have lots of soul and it will rub off on you.

---

[I know this post will not be well received here on Hacker News, the techie Twitter. It's like walking into a church in the middle of Sunday service and to rail against organized religion and the hypocrisy of the worshipers.]

https://gist.github.com/mGBUfLn9/7cadffcf7c3c23b7376350165a6...

I'm not sure if its the internet which allows us to think more/faster and more global but i do have the general thought that a ton of things we do as humans is not worth while doing.

I would love to start today stopping capitalism and inventing a new system which optimizes for life stability, good food, travel, piece, sustainability and time with others.

Instead we optimize for revenue, growth and because everyone thinks they can do it better, they have the business idea, everyone likes to earn money.

Whats my conclusion? I try to optimze my work by making sure i control certain aspects, do what i think i enjoy and is more or less useful. But my goal is to stop working with 50 or so.

Funny enough, your story is strange though, you probably did not create your startup because you thought you would change the world, did you? Or did you do it because you thought its life fullfilling, it earns you respect and money?

go watch some tv.

get properly angry at the amount of bullshit and disinformation that thing spews out regardless of stated or implied affiliation.

compare with herds of people who don't trust science but can't stop themselves from telling everyone about their favorite kind of youtube shaman.

realize some people have it worse. nothing to be happy about except that it could be worse for you and it isn't.

figure out a way to fix democracy and reconcile free speech with the internet. or help humanity go to mars or fix climate catastrophe.

wield data and algorithms against forces of evil. with luck you won't think of yourself as a cog.

or take up gardening. freshly picked strawberries are my favorite.

This is exactly how I feel, almost every word of it.

My experience is limited, but what you're listing above to me sounds an awful lot like some fundamental issues with capitalism and not fundamental issues with technology. I can't speak to the rise and fall of your company, but I can speak with some confidence on your experience at a Tech Giant(tm) and a unicorn startup, having some experience with both and certainly many friends who work at both types of company.

Any Tech Giant office is going to be an absolutely miserable working environment. I had one interview with a larger company and I was struck by how openly bored my interviewers were. Obviously, YMMV and some places may be better than others. But having enough friends, even newly minted college graduates with a "six figs or bust", burn out after 6 months in a development role, it was enough to pretty much convince me to avoid them forever.

Furthermore, the "unicorn" startup is going to be extremely similar to a tech giant but with more desperation. You're joining a team of people who, in all likelihood, have very little attachment to the product and have read a few HN articles about how this is going to be the next big thing. Plus you have the young, fratty egos in play. A lot of these places are going to cover up the fact that it actually sucks to work there with "hey free keg at lunch!! haha don't have more than four ;)"

This might be too hot of a take for HN, but there is, in fact, NO job that you can work at and be valued as a person. You're appreciated for whatever value you bring into the company, but don't fool yourself into thinking that there is anything but a monetary string tying you together. You're not looking at anything wrong, you don't need an attitude shift, the system is broken from the ground up and we're forced to be participants, otherwise we won't make rent.

Find something you don't mind doing; I'd recommend looking at smaller companies with leaders who worked a long time at larger companies. In all likelihood, these companies were founded after the leaders experienced something similar to what you did. But it is your birthright as an American (citizen at least) to be perpetually unfulfilled.

> I got into knot theory.

Didn't know there was such a thing.

Look at Maidsafe and SAFE Network :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23050160

Oh the sweet ennui of the priviledged technical manager class. I hear the world's smallest violin playing, My heart pumps purple piss for you.

I anticipated this was in the vein of, "It's all horrible, fundamentally antiquated shit that barely works and is preserved by inertial debt and captive markets of hegemonic corporations," not about the ennui of alienation in the bowels of Moloch[0]. xD

0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Change the problem, keep yourself.

Oh my god - I can 100% relate!

>So the worst case scenario is that you get eaten by vultures and lose friends. And the best case scenario is that you're in a soulless machine that turns everyone into an automaton.

If you're going for the gold, yes, that's what you may have to deal with.

If you're content working for yourself and not selling out to venture capitalists, life can be pretty sweet.

Do whatever keeps you happy

A view of technology:

Watch an old movie and notice the many improvements in economic productivity, standard of living, quality of life.

E.g.: To get salt, had to travel to the local village. For this had to saddle up or harness a horse or two. Now can get the salt delivered or eat in a restaurant or drive to the village on a smooth road in a car with HVAC.

Car tires used to wear out in about 15,000 miles and were so vulnerable to rupture that had to carry a spare and know where the bumper jack was and how to change a tire. Now can get 75,000 miles from a set of tires.

Ever mess with a carburetor and ignition breaker points? Now have electronic engine controls with fuel injection. So, less maintenance, better fuel economy, fewer oil changes, longer engine life.

It goes on this way for cars and transportation more generally.

See how houses were built: Saws, hammers, and plaster. Now have electric saws, studs, beams, and panels already cut to size, and wall board. E.g., I had some wood to cut, with a saw got halfway through the first cut, then rushed out and got a circle saw, zip, zoom, cut all the pieces and they look really nice. Needed to drill some 1" holes; set aside the brace and bit in an old tool chest, got an electric drill, and done, really well, really nice clean holes, zip, zoom. Got the 1" spade bit on-line!

It goes on this way with hand tools, kitchen tools, yard tools, auto maintenance tools, etc. MUCH easier. E.g., kitchen tools can be awash in stainless steel; used to have to use expensive silver or rusty iron.

I do a single serving pizza I make myself: The ingredients for one pizza cost right at 40 cents with the flour at 9 cents. Fantastic agricultural productivity, along with the associated supply chain.

Tech has contributed to all of those.

I go to Google several times a day and to Amazon at least once a week. So, lots of use of tech.

Shopping, buying on-line, the shipping, tracking, paying -- lots of tech there, too.

Software? It can be a lot of fun! So, write some code, try it, get back errors, fix the errors, for that maybe put in some statements to trace the execution, and finally get it to run as desired. From then on, it won't wear out! And with that software often can just click on an icon or type in a short command and get the intended work done automatically! Boom!

A huge, biggie: Get rid of the typewriters! Beyond that, since I'm in math, get TeX for typing the math!!! Finally with TeX, the typing is no longer more work than the math, even math research! It took a LOT of transistors, processors, and computing just to get rid of the typewriters and get us to TeX.

Then get some astounding wonders, some of the most astounding astronomy yet: https://www.universetoday.com/145935/supermassive-black-hole...

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2020-080&fbcl...

A LOT of tech there!

Now that we know when the next big flash will come, we can have the telescopes looking and have the gravitational wave detectors expecting -- a prediction is for a big signal!

For work in an organization, it's long been with a lot of goal subordination, suck up to those above, piss on those below, and try to sabotage the people down the hall. But now with tech there are some advantages:

Clean, indoor work, no heavy lifting.

Safer work, e.g., won't get finger cut off in a saw or have a load of bricks fall on your head. Won't inhale or ingest stuff that will injure or kill you.

Won't get thrown off a horse or kicked by a mule.

Maybe will get a better tech job.

Maybe will find a good startup opportunity and get rich, as rich as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan, Ford, etc., heavily just from typing with fingers.

For my laptop, my incremental backups are at 11 GB -- time to do another full backup! I just got two new SATA hard disk drives, 7200 RPM, 6 Gbps data transfer rate, 4 TB per drive (no use of shingled recording)!! IIRC, $65 each! Amazing!!!

Just got in the USPS mail, ~$10, the Rostropovich performance of the Dvořák cello concerto, B minor, with the Berlin Philharmonic and von Karajan: I lost my first copy in my recent move so wanted a replacement. Fast, easy search, ordering on-line! It's playing now: I've paid a LOT of attention to classical music and this performance is a good candidate for the most careful, passionate, and lyrical music and performance, art, "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion", ever. Could never dream of such.

Net, a lot of good in tech!

Sounds like several bad work experiences in a row, but all with companies on a specific spectrum: hot startup -> unicorn -> megacorp. That's a particular flavor of company, and kind of a rough treadmill to walk on.

There are a lot of small to mid-size tech companies that actually make money, though maybe not unholy mountains of it, where work-life balance is great and people just want to make something customers love. There are also many agencies that fit that bill.

This risks sounding too simplistic, but in life I've found that work tends to fall into three categories:

1. People who want to get as rich as they possibly can. 2. People who want to make a living and enjoy life. 3. People who want work to be their passion.

I've learned to avoid #1 and #3.

Re: #1, Many of the best ways to get as rich as possible involve screwing other people over. The people who play that game and enjoy it end up being pretty cutthroat, because that's kind of the point. If that's not you (and it's not me), then it's not fun to be part of.

Re: #3, vocational "passion" is just hard. Sometimes this is because the dream is so big -- end world hunger, or something. Sometimes the dream is so popular -- become a world-famous artist, etc. This is where you'll find the dreamers and the starving artists. The people who thrive here sort of live in their own world where the more mundane concerns of life don't matter to them, otherwise they'd burn out and give up.

A lot of people think they need their work to be either about Riches or Passion (or worst of all, both), and so they go down those paths and find stress, exhaustion, and misery instead of happiness.

Meanwhile, in boring old Path #2, you have a whole lot of people who work from 9-5 and then go home. They think their job is kind of interesting, but they don't think they're "changing the world," and that's okay. The happiest folks here tend to be craftspersons who know how to make some kind of thing, and whatever it is, they make nice ones.

As for me, I spent years that I look back on now as a sad waste of time hunting for #1 and #3, before one day having basically no choice but to take a "kinda okay" job so I could buy groceries. I was badly burned out, and I decided I needed a break, that I'd take six months and just "work a stupid job" to recover and pay off my credit cards after my experiment in running my own business fizzled out. And after six months I realized I was the happiest I'd ever been.

Life is kind of weird. It's not glamorous or sexy to just work a regular job and go home at 5pm. But it can be the foundation of a really happy, satisfying life.

I don't know if that will help you or not, but, I hope some part of that is useful to you. Many people have been where you are now. It'll get better.

Good luck!

It's the people. Driven to do bad out of fear.

Tech is capitalism at its best and worst, with the best being bad for a lot of people. Self imposed hardship and self sacrifice is the name of the pursuit. Everyone is a chaser. You then have VCs and angels and business partners with immense leverage over these struggles, often struggling themselves.

This brings out the bad in a lot of people. Cheating, backstabbing, and a general lack of integrity. Pervasive, regardless of status or level.

I didn't understand this at all, but it turns out much of it is driven from fear, as most actions inevitably are. And it gets worse with rising stakes, so its worse at higher levels.

Integrity is expensive. Kindness is expensive. Empathy is expensive. And competence is rare.

So good meaning, goodhearted, friendly people fail to sustain their good nature when shit hits the fan. And shit is always hitting the fan. People will act good until they cannot afford to. Or think they can't. Until they're scared. And that's the saddest part. They think they have to cheat. They then witness others do it, and think its just the way. Not me we tell ourselves, but sooner or later, the ultimatum presents itself: be good or survive. And we've seen the fallen. Chances are we've been a victim of one. Or work for one. Or deal with one. Or sit next to one. And the one thing they're good at is survival. No wonder there are so damn many of them.

Then what is the answer?

Don't trust anyone. Ergo, integrity is the luxury most often enjoyed alone.

But.

If you enjoy your own company, then that's a start. If you have an incredible product or service, then that's a start. If you don't need anyone's help, then that's a start. And if you have a warm home you can return to, then that's a start.

The one thing that will make your life easier is obvious.

Kick ass.

Just be so good, and run with it, or don't bother. That should be the motto of every entrepreneur. Or any endeavor, for that matter.

You're jumping into a snake pit. That's a given. Bring a flamethrower, or don't bother.

Every kick ass startup kicks ass.

If your ass is being kicked, you're doing it wrong, and you're wrong. You'd be right to get out as soon as possible.

The title should read "extremely disillusioned with capitalism" because, well...this is it. That's how it goes. Of course your investors tore your company's carcass to shreds. Yeah everyone is overworked and pretending to enjoy slaving away in golden handcuffs. That's the system.

Answer is simple to me. You conflate creative actions with making products. Capitalism got you.

I read it as 'extremely disillusioned with business/capitalism side of technology'.

I think is normal and everyone sooner or later crash into it. Then one becomes like a drug dealer: I sell it but I don't use it (technology, of course).

Sounds like a bad case of capitalism. Doing skilled work you're proud of, with people you love and respect is one of the most rewarding things you can do. Doing it to make line go up is what prostitution is to enthusiastically consenting sex with people you love and respect.

It's not a suprise your playing a lot of sports. Depending on the sport you can momentarily tick those boxes. But your not left with anything afterwards.

Find something that needs doing in the world, find people who feel the same way. Try science fiction as a practice.

I went through a similar progression. A couple of observations:

1) Part of what you experience is just gaining wisdom with age. You see how things really work, and you get disillusioned. The thrill of early experiences, does diminish over time. And that's not just software. The thrill of your first bicycle ride, is not reproducible. The sense of freedom you had, after that, riding around unsupervised -- that goes away too, obviously.

2) The word "tech" has changed radically over the years. I joined my first "high tech startup" in 1988. We really were doing technology that was just barely feasible at the time. The entire company was seven people -- founder, biz/ops guy, VP of engineering, four engineers. That was FUN. Figuring out how to solve these problems, seeing the parts come to life, seeing the whole thing come together, seeing it work for users as planned. In an environment like that, you really feel like you are doing something special, that you are lucky to be there, and you just want to spend all of your time on it. The fact that it might actually be worth serious money someday -- even better.

This incredibly exciting sense of being in a tech startup spread. Large companies would entice you by saying, this group is just like a startup within Megacorp. And I never understood how that fooled anyone. In that situation, you aren't scratching your itch, you are scratching Megacorp's itch, and that's a lot less exciting. There aren't seven of you. Outside your group, there are 700 or 7,000 or 70,000. Maybe you get a little bonus, or equity, but you don't own a chunk of the company YOU started.

However, Megacorp and similar companies definitely saw the advantage of getting their employees to commit to their work in the manner of startup employees, and so you get places like Google that gradually switch the incentive. First you want to be there all the time (back when Google was a startup). Then they make it enticing to be there all the time (campus, massages, gourmet dining, on-campus laundry and exercise, etc.). And finally, it's just expected. Being available and productive (or at least seeming to be) 24/7 is just the way things are at Megacorp these days.

And then finally, the last piece of it goes away: the interesting tech. "Tech" companies are no longer solving barely solvable, new problems. They are doing more of the same, implementing dull and possibly harmful goals for the sake of Megacorp. Megacorp is no more a tech company than it is an electricity company. It uses both to meet its goals, and you are merely someone familiar with either bits or electrons, using them in well-worn ways for the sole purpose of enriching Megacorp.

This is both a great pop song, and the lyrics really capture the disillusionment that sets in, although in a very different environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1-EPTAFE0o

Text of the gist since it's a bear to read on mobile:

"I was drawn to programming, science, technology and science fiction ever since I was a little kid. I can't say it's because I wanted to make the world a better place. Not really. I was simply drawn to it because I was drawn to it. Writing programs was fun. Figuring out how nature works was fascinating. Science fiction felt like a grand adventure.

Then I started a software company and poured every ounce of energy into it. It failed. That hurt, but that part is ok. I made a lot of mistakes and learned from them. This experience made me much, much better. I'm satisfied with that.

What's not ok is how things ended. Many of the investors turned out to be bloodthirsty vultures who tore the carcass to pieces. Had we IPO'ed, these same people would have stood there with giant smiles telling everyone how they'd always known we were special and how they'd supported us all along.

I lost many friends. Throughout the whole thing I was lucky to meet many brilliant, creative, talented people. Together, we worked so hard. Now we don't talk.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how I contributed to these failed relationships. I learned a lot from that too. It wasn't my finest hour, but I can sleep at night fine. So I eventually decided it's mostly nobody's fault. This is just the reality of what happens to people when extreme stress ends in failure.

Then I worked for a tech giant, and then for a high-growth unicorn. It shocked me how dilbertesque they both were. Full of politicians, and burnt out engineers in golden handcuffs who can't wait to get out, and meaningless business speak, and checked out employees who pretend they're "excited" about everything all the time. The young, wide-eyed engineers seem hopelessly naive to me now.

So the worst case scenario is that you get eaten by vultures and lose friends. And the best case scenario is that you're in a soulless machine that turns everyone into an automaton. I know that's not the whole picture. It's not even most of the picture. But that's the part I can't unsee.

For a long time I couldn't focus on any remotely intellectual pursuit. I even thought I permanently damaged my brain. But eventually I started exercising, went on anti-depressants, and started therapy. Then I got a job that has nothing to do with technology. Slowly my happiness returned, and with it my ability to focus. I do a lot of sports now and hang out with my non-techy friends and my wife. I cook a lot. I got into knot theory. I find it fascinating and can do it for hours. I'm surprisingly not bad at it. So I know I still have my faculties.

But I still can't program, can't write, can't think of new products, can't read science fiction. I'm mostly happy, but there is always a hint of dissatisfaction underneath. I miss the creative, optimistic person I once was. I want to see past the cynicism. I want to write programs and make things. I want to work with a ragtag team again to bring something to life that didn't exist before. I want to learn how to see past the bullshit and be creative again. But I can't get myself to do it. I hear the call and I know there's still a spark. But when I take even the smallest step everything turns bleak and mundane. It's like the magic has been bled out of me and I don't know how to summon it back.

Has anyone been through this who managed to recover their optimism and creative spirit? Please help me. What can I do?"

Well aware of the irony of posting this comment on YCombinator's HackerNews, but... sounds very much like the title of this should really be "Extremely disillusioned with capitalism. Please help"

There's very little in the content of the gist that's specific to software or technology. This isn't sectoral it's just about for-profit businesses.

Sounds like you are not disillusioned with technology but with capitalism.

Interesting way to post the question, if we are truly "done" with tech.

I'd say a LiveJournal entry might be more apropos. :)

TL;DR: Maybe tech isn't your gig. It's important to find what is.

First, my heart goes out to you. It really does stink to be where you are.

I'd say it's a matter of expectations. The "conventional wisdom" is "Don't have expectations, and you won't be disappointed."

Sounds good. I have yet to meet anyone that truly meets that bar.

We all have expectations. It's human nature.

The deal is how we react to those expectations.

I get my expectations trounced on a regular basis. That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.

Except for Dilbert's corollary: "That which does not kill me, leaves me weak and exhausted."

When you signed up for a tech career, why did you sign up for it? What did you expect?

In the 1980s, there was an explosion of doctors and lawyers. Medical schools were so crowded that people had to study abroad.

The reason was that a doctor could look forward to a six-figure salary (and a six-figure insurance bill); right out of the starting gate. Lawyers...maybe not as much, but LA Law was a popular show, back then, so everyone thought it was the best career move ever.

That resulted in a ton of mediocre doctors and lawyers. They didn't love what they did.

My father was a Harvard-graduate lawyer. Top of his class. Silver Star war hero (planted in Arlington). He could have written his own checks.

But he hated it, and joined the CIA, instead (which he later quit in disgust). I think he felt that he should have learned a different career, all his life. He was never happy, and that broke my heart.

SO HERE'S WHERE I MAKE IT ALL ABOUT ME:

It also taught me that it's really important to be happy with my vocation.

So here I am...refactoring myself to be happy.

I was a manager for a significant part of my career. I was very good at it.

And hated it. Being good at something is not the same as being happy doing it.

I love tech. My worst nightmare is to feel the way you do (talking to the poster). Nothing gives me more joy than to craft a superb application, and know that it is as close to perfect as God will allow.

That means that I have to be careful who I let have any control over my work. The current tech scene is absolutely nuts about money and prestige. People are more than willing to peddle cow flops, if they can buy a Tesla with the proceeds.

Others use money as a leash and a lash, to tie us down and force us to do their bidding.

People like me are nothing but transient resources to be used up and discarded.

So I have enough set aside to be...OK (not rolling in dough); even after this current kerfuffle. It allows me to be picky about what I do, and who I let have control of my work.

I'm really really into quality software. You might say that I'm obsessed. To me, it's a craft.

Think of me as the old Swiss guy, making cuckoo clocks in his garage. There's not much of a market for cuckoo clocks, but my clocks are gonna be the best clocks you can get. I won't let anyone force me to use crappy pine, when walnut is what works best, and I won't mass-produce them.

But I'm a happy little old clock maker, and if anyone wants really good cuckoo clocks, they know where to go. They just have to work with me, and not expect me to be hog-tied by bling.

I sincerely wish you the best, and hope you get your groove back.

Interesting venue to post this on. But as it's the afternoon in the US workday, it's a fair chance that many responses will come from US tech workers who are slacking off or taking a break from their job and were enticed in by the headline.

Given the culture of HN comments I reckon you'll get grooming tips and pointless anecdotes, condescending advice, or unhelpful peptalks.

What I'll say is that you probably are disillusioned with it because you saw how illusory most of it is. The best stuff is always produced by very small, tightly-knit teams, in an environment where creativity is allowed to flourish. In a monoculture like tech giant / unicorn startup, you're living in the Silicon Valley series bro and that's all there is to it.

There are lots of engineers out here on the internet doing fun things. We just don't spam github shit or write fancy landing pages to shamelessly promote ourselves. Join us.

I think you haven't even hit bottom yet. Reality is much, much worse. There are notable exceptions, but the overwhelming odds are that every single relationship in your life-- your wife, family, friends, etc-- are just as dishonest and transactional. Think about it. If you really screw up badly, your wife will leave you, your friends won't return your calls and will refer to you only in hushed tones clucking about "what a shame it is". Their support of you isn't some inherent validation of You as a being, it's in support of you as you exist in society and in the larger world.

We have spent years, even decades, cultivating and grooming our own prisons. In the end, everything we cherish and value will be destroyed. It is 100% certain and there is no way around it. It's such a bleak thing to consider, yet at the same time it is an absolute truth.

After wrestling with these facts for years, I have come to understand the Zen koan about cherishing every moment drinking tea from a glass because to the master, the glass is already broken. Control of the larger world and the people within it are an illusion. In many respects, you are already dead and forgotten. The only thing you can do is admire the stunning beauty and sheer improbability of it all, and to be as kind as possible to those who deserve it, and to many who do not deserve it.