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Comment by throwaway55421 | Hacker News Reader

I'm jaded about the entire industry, it feels like we've invented everything genuinely useful and now we're just doing make work.

I'm more bullish on technology in general and some of the software that can enable that (e.g. fusion research, CCS, self-driving cars).

But general purpose computing? The open source scene and people tinkering is cool. The commercial side is just pointless, I can't think of anything _useful_ (as opposed to merely being addictive) in the last ten years.

Whenever I speak to software developers in real life now I get the sense that they're just "not my people". No, I don't want to talk about social media VR, or advanced data mining, or facial recognition or whatever.

Even the more mundane stuff is like... okay, so you work at Amazon. Cool, I like to shop on my high street, err... let's talk about something else then.

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For both the internet, and the industry as a whole, I get jaded about how quickly we move on, without stopping to see if we really explored one "branch" to the extend it deserves.

We have moved too quickly during the last 30 years, and we're still not providing better solutions to our users. Not by a lot at least. The IT industry is more focused on solving the problems that we've created for ourself, rather than providing better solution.

I don't care about machine learning, data mining/science, social media, Kubernetes or scaling to 500 million users. Most problems can be solve easier and better with less. It's cool that we can do these things, but they get in the way of creating actual solution in most cases. Oracle makes hardware that allows you to run global businesses or infrastructure for small nations on a 2U server. People seem more interested in running a global marketing platform that will handle the scale of Black Friday, because god forbid that you couldn't tracking customers once a year.

Could we please focus on making good solutions to actual problems? Utilize the resources we already have? Most days I feel like most of my tasks could be solved just as well using 20 year old Unix tools.

I feel exactly the same way.

Feeling like the work I'm doing is at least somewhat important and/or useful is very important to me, and it's EXTREMELY difficult to find jobs in tech that aren't "make work" and just redoing something that's already been done, but in a slightly different way to try and trick some investors into giving you money for it. It's either that, crypto scams, or fintech.

It's gotten so bad in the past few years that I'm seriously considering a career change. I got into software development because it let me flex my creative muscles while also making money in a secure job. But at this point, the day-to-day is so painful for me that taking a serious pay cut might be worth it for my own sanity. After being in the field for around ten years, it gets pretty obvious where everything is headed and I just don't have the energy for it. I'm so tired of arguing about frameworks, build systems, how to plan and manage work, interpersonal relationships with people who are just entirely full of themselves and think they're doing the Lord's work by writing business-to-business software.

It’s the same for me, it feels like everything is boring, almost no new tech excites me and same feelings about talking to tech people, they are just regular people who happen to work in tech.

There's a back wave onto physical processes (energy storage and the likes) rather than the information layer. Maybe the digital side is mostly solved (and/or wrong) and large enough to be able to absorb all real needs. Meanwhile we need better real world processes.