Disillusioned by Tech in 2022 | Hacker News Reader

Disillusioned by Tech in 2022

72 pointsthrowawae166 comments

Anyone else feeling utterly lost and disillusioned by the tech industry in 2022?

Speaking as a developer with over a decade of experience..

Web3 /cryptocurrency / NFTs make me feel like I’m taking crazy pills, turning even successful, veteran startup founders and respected VCs into shills.

Google search is worse, by nearly all accounts, than in was a few years ago.

Social media, more divisive than ever, is pressure testing the fabric of society.

Shopping on Amazon is like navigating a minefield of low quality garbage products flooded with fake reviews.

Streaming content is more abundant than ever, while the average content quality is, subjectively, rapidly diminishing.

On the job hunt within the past year, rarely I interviewed with a company that was working on anything even remotely interesting or groundbreaking.

As a consumer, I’m struggling to remember the last time I felt elated by a new app, website, or piece of tech.

Yet, despite all this, despite what feels like a downward trajectory, market caps are unfathomably high, and tech salaries are sitting at all time highs.

What’s going on?

How’s everyone else feeling?

View on HN

I can't relate at all. The progress in artificial intelligence in all categories is fascinating and is in the modern day what electricity was at the turn of the century, during the time of Tesla and Edisson. It is not even fully understood how some state of the art AI achievements actually work to achieve the results, and what it has been able to solve in terms of previously unsolvable problems in computation has been fascinating.

The rapid consumerizaton of AR/VR tech is also pretty amazing given what the expected timeline for it was back in say 2015, when everyone was connected to a $2000 computer with wires and two sensors to play the one or two demos available.

A person's view of the world is usually just a rorschach test for their personal life. If you think the tech industry is slow/useless/uninnovative at the moment it likely just means you aren't personally doing the interesting work. You could change that by spending time learning the interesting tech and switching jobs to it, but the cynicism isn't relatable for those of us who deliberately work on interesting problems and continue to learn new and complex new things, rather than collect easy paychecks for boring work (they chose to do) then complain that life isn't exciting enough.

Condescending bits aside, I appreciate your reply.

I do feel like some AI advancements instill that fleeting sense of magic, while others work so well that we (consumers) reap the benefits without even realizing it.

Can you share some specific AI advancements or projects that you’re particularly excited about?

I'd be more optimistic about AR and VR if it hadn't been almost immediately monopolised by Facebook and Google. Now instead of actual creativity we get VR Walmart, using 3D UX decisions that game developers realised don't work in a 3D space back in 1997.

I agree with you, but at least Valve's in the sphere, doing their thing.

It's been two and a half years since the Index launched. I'm a bit surprised there hasn't been a refresh or update for the hardware.

> If you think the tech industry is slow/useless/uninnovative at the moment it likely just means you aren't personally doing the interesting work.

Fair, but when I’m looking at the interesting work it’s clear they’re looking for established domain experts, not some guy who hacked some shit together because he was interested in it.

Also, I feel like it’s really easy to target interesting work and still end up doing the boring shit. Take the whole data science thing. How many jokes have you seen about eyed individuals stuck cleaning data from excel spreadsheets, or people who want to be hackers, digging into and analyzing wild zero-day threats, but instead get stuck in the majority of boring organizational/operational security work.

Disclaimer: obviously boring and interesting are highly subjective.

>The progress in artificial intelligence in all categories is fascinating and is in the modern day what electricity was at the turn of the century

I personally don't buy into this analogy which I think its just a marketing ploy. The advance in AI is incremental in reality. Before neural networks have been widely implemented, other machine learning algorithms had been working fairly well. The highly non-linear models with hand-crafted domain-specific constraints just fit the data better and push the accuracy higher. But fundamentally, the way we treat data and prediction is not very different from other machine learning models.

I'm not even expecting technology to get better anymore, I just wish the quality of software wasn't constantly decreasing. I've turned off automatic updates for most of them, e.g. MacOS, Android Apps, Firefox. Just can't stand the constant messing up of UIs that may have worked or were at least not as bad as the next version with more bloated features.

Beautiful talk on that topic by Jonathan Blow, called "Preventing the collapse of civilization": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

I've been jumping back into desktop Linux in a big way just because of this. It may be a big step backwards in usability, but there's the satisfaction of knowing that what you've got does exactly what you want, and nothing more.

Is that the case? It's been some time since I last used a desktop Linux, but my experience at the time was always that some unrelated package update broke some other software unexpectedly. Maybe this is better now. On the Mac, at least I know when I update Firefox I only break Firefox (but that for sure) :D

Stop using the bleeding edge crap and install debian stable. It works, never breaks. Gets security patches all the same. I'm happy to get new browser features once every 4 years, since I mostly don't need them anyway.

I want you to know. You're not alone, and I feel the same things.

Hacker News is not the place to go if you're looking for cohorts who feel the same thing.

People on this website are ... I don't know the right word, but I think the best way to phrase it is - lacking the sensitivity and awareness to really step back and evaluate if technology has been making the world a better place. This isn't to say technology can't do that, but what the human race has been doing with technology really is a bummer. We have every means to push ourselves forward, step up, and take care of each other. Hell we're post scarcity! But everyone is running around doing VC this, startup that, and how everything is going to be changed my "my really great idea" which is stupid. I had a brother-in-law, an executive of his company bragging about how he was using some of the smartest people he ever knew solve logistic problems for maximizing profit in the stupidest ways. I reply to every recruiter explicitly asking them how each role they're offering is genuinely helping the world a better place. I explicitly go out of my way asking for jobs to fight climate change and no one responds.

Personally I am confounded by the money making impetus of everyone.

I FEEL exactly how you're feeling, and I'm not sure how to get away from it or fix the state of things.

A lot of people will come out of the woodwork and provide thought-terminating statements like "be the change you want to see", or "be the light", or anything else that's really meant as a way to disengage the discussion without really addressing the issues. And let me tell you I have put my best foot forward in my personal endeavors to create solutions and tools that really try to help others out. But at the end of the day, we all rely on each other to be the communities that help each other, and it's not up to one person to carry that weight. We all need to recognize that this isn't right, and the direction we're headed isn't right. And, this is completely ignoring the big elephant in the room that despite all the technological "advancements" we're making, the planet is burning alive, with us on it, and we really won't have anything in the coming years.

I'm rambling, and I don't have a solution or words of advice. But, I want you to know you're not alone. Feel free to reach out if you're ever looking for a cohort to chat with. We can be grumpy together.

Long ago, in the 90's, before the internet, there was a belief and a saying.

We believed that computers would increase people's thinking skills, would make them smarter.

The saying, by a famous snake oil seller back then was that computers were "bicycles for the mind" in the sense that they'd make the mind's efforts more productive. There are still videos around with that guy saying that.

We were soooo wrong...

I think the crab bucket of cynicism that is HN often forgets just how successful the internet has been, in terms of increasing productivity, educating people, inspiring them and bringing them together.

I also think humanity still at the beginning of that process, not the end. The internet has just gotten big enough and popular enough to be truly dangerous, that's what's required for it to be truly revolutionary in the way the printing press and radio once were.

hamster wheels for the mind maybe

I guess it depends on what motivates you. To me there is huge opportunity and exciting new approaches in “boring” areas like enterprise software.

we are witnessing a once in a generation reset where we get to make the lives of millions of corporate programmer and operations folks a bit better. Look at what Pulumi, Tanzu, Spotify/Backstage, Crossplane, Tailscale, Chainguard, Gitlab, Etc. are all doing.

The last reset like this was in the late 90s with Java. There’s still tens of billions of dollars being spent on IBM, Oracle, etc. that could be better spent. Channeling that all to Google, AWS, etc. isn’t going to solve things. There’s a vibrant ISV ecosystem out there.

(Disclosure , I work with VMware).

Don't forget all the moronic ideas for the fucking stupid metaverse, aka Microsoft Bob 2.0, where you can have all the annoying inconveniences of everyday life with the displeasure of wearing a stupid headset in the comfort of your own home.

> Anyone else feeling utterly lost and disillusioned by the tech industry in 2022?

Yeah, my interest in computers and computing is nearly dead. There’s just nothing “hot” and “new” I see that really interests me. Perhaps this is because with experience, computing have mostly lost that magical appeal that led me to strive to figure out “how does this work”.

Every now and then it’s revived, but it never lasts so to the inaccessibility of the things that interest me or because it’s ultimately useless.

I’ll hopefully be leaving the industry in not too long. The money is very nice, but I’m not FAANG, so it’s not quite enough to keep me entrapped.

Also, not that this hasn’t been the case for a while, but I realized programming as a profession is almost nothing like what drew me into it originally.

Nice. I have another 20+ years because the money isn't nice for me. I'm hating every minute of it.

What would it take to not 'hate every minute'?

Some combination or degree of interesting work, respect, less politics, more pay, hope for a better future, etc.

Damn, sounds like the place you work at sucks. Any risks to a switch? You can at least guarantee the pay thing before leaving (i.e. they tell you the salary, but can't promise respect)

I specialized in obscure tech with basically no market, my wife has given me constraints, my area is not good for tech jobs. I'm pretty much screwed and will just coast in my current job. Hoping I can make to 20 years. It's really going to suck though.

That sounds very risky, don't have all you eggs in one basket.

Remote work is likely to continue to grow, find something your interested in, diversify your skills, take your time (not some hot tech of the week), create more options for your future.

Chin up, things often change for the better don't give up hope.

I'm already screwed. I don't think it can get worse than that.

I agree with some of your points, and yet offer that maybe nothing is "wrong".

When engrossed in the tech world, everything about it seems so important. Money has a way of making it seem that way. But most of it is inconsequential, even if it's minting billionaires and they tell you they're "changing the world". Meh. Go volunteer in a hospice to give your crisis of meaning a real stir.

I've never been more excited about tech in my lifetime.

Fusion, Quantum Computing, Carbon Capture, AI, Robotics, Space Travel, Bioengineering. So many fields are undergoing massive revolutions. More I'm sure I'm forgetting or don't know about too.

My biggest problem is that I have to pick what to work on. I'm currently going with VR which I've fallen in love with the same way I originally did with computing.

At some point I plan to make some educational experiences that touch some of the other areas I mentioned so I can explore those ideas more too.

I share your excitement, but there is a problem. How can you get hired and paid in those innovative industries?

If you are 20 - you are in a good position to get appropriate degree and start building your career. If you are 35+ with family and wrote backends and microservices - it is not that easy to move. How can you get into robotics, space travel, VR - will anyone hire you based on some pet projects? How many current engineers are able to go back to a school and get an MSc in Robotics and then start again as junior engineers?

I mean some of those seem pretty cool, but Quantum computing and Fusion get shit in all the time for being decades old academic endeavors with no fruit to bare.

I honestly just take it as a somewhat more extreme version of Sturgeon's Law. But because of how much money there is to be made, we not only have creators who aren't up to the task, we also have so many who are, but perverse incentives prevail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

I recall someone saying many, many years ago saying the best and brightest of the generation aren't going to work on curing cancer or sending humans to Mars. Instead, they go work for Wall Street to make billionaires even bigger billionaires.

More recently, I recall someone saying (possibly right here on HN) that the best and brightest aren't going to work on curing cancer or sending humans to Mars. Instead they go to work for Silicon Valley companies to optimize the process of posting cat pictures online.

Feel pretty good about it. Read some non-technical books like "Wealth of Nations" to zoom out to the big picture of value exchange if you're feeling disillusioned by crypto. Philosophy can be a remedy.

HN, and the startup community in general, is not the entirety of the tech industry.

There are plenty of jobs that are just good old functional tech - build CRUD apps and approval cycles to automate business processes. Document Management and other bureaucracy-optimizing solutions. Accounting, asset management, communications...

Admittedly, those jobs are what most people around here refer to as "boring". But boring jobs are plentiful and avoid all the crap you listed out. They give you paychecks (smaller ones), and your work is fairly stable.

But you do have a choice in this industry - roll with the shiny new stuff for higher risk and higher rewards and deal with all the crap. Or roll with the boring stuff and have a career that is less exciting, but runs on a more even keel.

Basically feel the same. Also 10 years in. I wish I was seeing some wage growth. I'm not even at the software dev median.

While this is tangently related to your point, with the extremization of data mining as the core of online experiences, I am moderately disappointed by how the pandemic turned most major tech companies even further to increase the addiction (reads "engagement") of users in their business models, explicitly aiming to replacing real-life experiences and maximizing screen time.

All of this, agreed, while the "web3" appearing everywhere does not particularly help to take this market and the competence of most long-time leaders seriously any longer.

I agree with all of the things you've said, and I believe this to be a supremely positive thing.

Now that everything is laid bare and there's obvious failure everywhere, you have the opportunity to create something new.

Over a decade of experience is not actually that much (no offense). You might not remember what it was like when the tech industry actually was innovative, and many of those periods have been fairly insane. My advice is to embrace the disappointment and harness that to do something you find meaningful.

> you have the opportunity to create something new.

> My advice is to embrace the disappointment and harness that to do something you find meaningful.

I mean maybe if you are already wealthy, we’ll connected and have ideas that will survive in the current commercial culture.

> I mean maybe if you are already wealthy, we’ll connected and have ideas that will survive in the current commercial culture.

You're thinking about this wrong. I've had a company fail and ended up living in my car. I was majorly in debt. The Texas AG filed a lawsuit against me which was super no-bueno. I ended up living in literal garages all over the country for years.

And yet, I was not disillusioned by what I did. I was disillusioned by all the crap I saw, but not my stuff.

To be a bit mean to the OP, nobody should expect the world to provide you fulfillment if you're not willing to create it yourself. Quit worrying about what exists or what "will survive in the current commercial culture" and find something to do yourself or a group to work with that's doing something interesting. Blaming the world for not being up to your satisfaction is old-man-yelling-at-clouds territory. The OP is too young to be that disillusioned.

This is such a great advice, thank you for illustrating it with such an impactful and personal background story.

Realign your expectations. Yes, everything is terrible. So might as well have fun anyway, right? Take the world as it is, and find a way to be joyful within the constraints of reality.

You don't want to put on a VR headset, head into the "metaverse" with your web3 crypto wallet, wearing your favorite NFT backed digital outfit and calmly try to phrase "buy honey wheat bread" in a VR grocery store to an AI bot that thinks you are buying honey? And then rephrase it 3 different ways without success, get frustrated and just click a couple links on your phone to order it.

This does feel similar to the dot com boom/bust cycle that happened which possibly pre-dates your work experience by a decade. There will be some interesting useful technology and companies that survive this boom/bust cycle. I don't have a crystal ball but maybe the test is if you can explain what a company does to a grandmother and she understands it then its probably okay (not withstanding competition, market cycles, etc.)

The last time I was elated with some technology was when the iPhone came out, so I could ditch the flip phone and ipod I was carrying.

I think you have achieved the ability to see through the illusions (aka bullshit) companies try to create.

Focus on things within tech that excite you, tune everything else out. Who cares about Web3 (if it ever happens) until it actually impacts your life.

Most of these are just misapplications of tech by other people, you don't really need to participate if you don't want to.

I'd hesitate to even call this stuff "tech" - search engines, streaming video, online retail and social networks were new 20 years ago, but now they're just part of the mainstream.

Objectively computers are faster than ever and there are more ways to apply that power.

And yet modern advances point to tech bros trying to limit the USERS power of that internet.

It's already impossible for a lot of people to host their own web server from their home, to own the media they purchase without it potentially being erased by the vendor at a whim, to opt out of social media without a massive social (and professional) hit and computer power is being wasted on shitty electron apps and built-in OS adware.

Oh, on the subject of computer power being wasted, on a global scale it's being wasted on crypto, another attempt by a bunch of elitist executives to invent something that allows them to invent a new financial system in which they're still on top, but allows them to more easily commit tax evasion and money laundering.

All of our tech advances have largely been from massive companies trying to add scarcity to a system we invented that absolutely doesn't need it. Can't copy a MP3, can't copy an EXE, and now, you can't copy a JPG.

Yes, we do in fact have to participate in these dumbarse discussions. The choice to simply walk away from these things, particularly AS a tech worker, is bullshit artistry.

Remember to right click and save.

> It's already impossible for a lot of people to host their own web server from their home, to own the media they purchase without it potentially being erased by the vendor at a whim

You're using this defeatist word "impossible", but it is not impossible - it is inconvenient. Work on making it more convenient, so that it won't seem impossible.

What makes the most noise in tech is things that can make money. And making money occurs by becoming a middleman, which is the polar opposite of the tech liberation dream. "Web3" has some interesting technology, but it's drowned out by money-seeking hucksterism - the exact same way we got "web2".

Aside from the start of bubbles where capital is still in exploratory mode, you're never going to get significant funding to write code that empowers users. Write it anyway!

You correctly point out a lot of the crap, but there's good news too.

One thing that's really cool is the explosion of new programming languages. In the last decade or two, we've seen Clojure, Rust, Go and a whole bunch of others come out. And it's not just that a lot of these languages are better in a technical sense, many of them are also a lot of fun to code in, which after all is why most of us got into programming in the first place.

The past decade or so has also seen desktop linux become a delightful daily driver. And, as much as I love to bitch about electron, it's made a lot more new apps available for linux.

Let's also not forgot Bitcoin coming into it's own. With all the noise in the space it's easy to forget that at as recently as 15 years ago, decentralized digital money was thought to be an impossible problem to solve.

Considering the current state of energy usage and the environment, I can't really call bitcoin a win

I would sum it up as scale beyond the ability to moderate quality

I think you need to separate "tech" from "web". I don't mean that in the sense of the "every company is a tech company" now, but more along the lines of there being so many threads of tech.

I'm a believer in Web3, though I completely understand people who are not. We'll just have to see where that plays out.

Most of my time is spent in neurotech. Fascinating stuff, and opportunity to have a huge impact on the lives of billions of people. We're specifically focused on sleep.

Wearables and sensors is also a fascinating area.

AI isn't just used to server you better advertisements. There's AI in health tech improving patient diagnosis, and will bring the cost of health care down (except in the US). AI is also used in engineering and design to help reduce material use.

You say the quality of streaming content is going down, and I tend to agree, but I also think these things go in waves, so I don't think storytelling is broken forever. But on the other side of media creation, how about the incredible CGI we have and how that is becoming more accessible to more people.

I do like your examples of Social Media and Amazon. I am mostly post-consumerist, and only purchase kindle books from Amazon. I used to be a big fan of Facebook, but most people I know have stopped posting, so it wasn't interesting anymore.

We don't need more "things" from Amazon, I hope people move to having fewer, better things.

I think Social Media is an ongoing experiment. It will still exist in the future, but I'm not sure we'll recognize it as we do today. I see so many people moving to tiktok, which as far as I can tell is a different experience to our older social medias.

So, in general, you're right to be jaded about the things you mentioned, but I also think we'll look back at this time as the golden age.

Web2 was like early industrialization, we're learning the lessons from that, we still have lots of work to do.

I can pretty much relate - I cannot wrap my mind around Web3 /cryptocurrency / NFTs either. Fortunately, they have no bearing on my life whatsoever, so I tend to ignore them.

I think I get your feeling: there are giant Internet-based monopolies out there (e.g. Facebook, Amazon, Google...) which seem to be driven entirely by greed and power. Google's "Don't be evil" disappeared long ago. Those monopolies are no longer a force for the good and their technological allure has faded over the years.

If you are looking for exiting technology, you need to look outside the Web. I find autonomous driving and robotics really fascinating. I mean , the SpaceX rocket boosters return to Earth in a powered landing - how cool is that?

I get the feeling! I wish I could guess your age - I remember feeling the same years ago when everything, it seemed, started moving to web. Totally ignored the frontend movement because of it.

I think it’s the coming of age - next generation is taking the helm. As you get older you starting thinking the best is in the past - each generation does it with them “good old days” feelings.

I’ll leave you with my fav. quote when I encounter such duality…

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” ~Charles Dickens

I don't read the news, don't use Amazon, and all I use Google for are searching and email. I don't watch streams, listen to few podcasts if any, and generally don't bother with social media.

So the answer is that you just stop caring, stop paying attention to it all. Stop feeding garbage onto your mind. It will eventually fade from your life, and you realised you are better off without them.

I'm content now. I build things my way, and don't care how others do it, how the new tech looks, nor of the state of the world, the web, the narratives. It's just noise, and I have earplugs now.

Personally, no. The era of "exascale-science" is upon us, and it can be terribly exciting.

It's easier to create content (and data). Easier to monetize (sometimes outrageously so). And in many ways the content being created is more authentic in character than at any time in human history.

And yet every interaction feels transactional, like a consumer oriented branded lifestyle experience.

Probably the most "real" thing to watch in 2022: twitter feeds of Afghanistan. A rare window into historic tragedy. Guaranteed to leave the casual observer feeling helpless and bit as if hope has departed from the world ;)

I am in medical industry. Once I couldn't fathom why a company making a messaging app could think they were "changing the world". It dawned on me that value and meaning can be relative. You can always spin the arguments and convince yourself what you are doing is meaningful, or as least to your employees. For example, didn't Amazon empowered consumers very wide choices that's previously not available? Didn't they created tens of thousands jobs across diverse geographical areas?

I'm curious - what is the compensation like for a SWE working in med-tech? i.e. software that drives mission (and life) critical things during surgery, etc.?

I would hope such people would be compensated and treated very well, but I fear I would not be surprised at all of they were paid significantly less than a SWE working on optimizing better ways to post kitten pictures online.

You are right. The base salary could be similar to tech but bonus and stock are generally way lower. My company has problem keeping SWEs.

Are SWEs (and tech employees in general) considered a cost center there? If so, who is the profit center? Sales?

Yes R&D is cost. Sales is profit.

I do feel like you, and think mankind is doomed for real in the short term. But then I enjoy a period of disconnection from news, social media, the Internet in general...and that feeling is mostly gone, while finding joy in other activities.

These are times filled with daily overflowing streams of varied information that can leave us hopeless and disillusioned. Cutting that off to some extent can help, without leading to a total disconnect.

First off, "respected VCs" turning INTO shills, as if that's a recent phenomenon?

Ok, snarky comment aside, I agree with you on that point, and all the other points too.

I think the feeling of elation took a nose-dive when the fake-it-till-you're-acq-hired plans took greater precedence. And actually BEING acquired often meant the product got tanked. So, yeah, as a consumer I share your disappointment on that front.

I've found it that in my social circles, people working in tech are the ones most wary of stuff like crypto and NFTs. Starting from when BTC first started hitting the news many years ago to NFTs and Web3 today.

Granted some big names in tech are also some of the biggest proponents too.

Agree 100%. I feel like the usability of the web peaked somewhere between 2000-2007. Ever since then it's been surveillance capitalism, manipulative social media, media consolidation, poorer quality news that's more beholden to large money interests, and disinformation.

Naturally... More time you invest in virtual tech, less you'll have to actually do something in real life. And it brings feelings of loose control about our own lives. We are overdose by consumption of everything and forgot how to live our lives.

It is just normal process I guess.

It seems to me like 80-90% of the tech industry these days is just building shitty web apps that nobody needs or asked for, purely designed to leech money out of some piece of the system to enrich the founders

My interest is in climate change mitigation and I'm seeing articles about recycling plastics, ocean cleanup, carbon capture and so on. Exciting stuff and it's just getting started.

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