Hacker News Reader

I went to university, went to grad school, got a PhD in a hard science, saw that science was a dead end career choice and tried to change career.

I have ended up in IT, although I have never written code for my role, or actually done anything technical for my job. It was immediately into the writing documents, architecting infrastructure and systems that I have no fucking clue about. At no point have I gained any experience about using or building anything, it's all bullshit designs and documents that I pull out of my ass so I can keep my job and not end up homeless ( I make under 40k being a non american). I spend my evenings desperately studying things that I HATE so I can at least have some grasp of what the hell they are before I have to design some complex system using different pieces of tech BUT AT NO POINT HAVE I USED THE TECH. I hate it so much and get rejected for any and all job applications to actually do something and solve problems that I apply for.

I sometimes wish I had never gone into IT, never gone to uni, and just carried on with the unskilled manual labouring job I had on weekends before uni. At least I would be doing something.

I hate IT and I hate tech. If I could do this for a few years and have the fuck you money of a few hundred k in the bank then I would put up with it, but that's not the case.

> It was immediately into the writing documents (...)

More or less the path I took after finishing my Masters. Thankfully, at the time, I thought "leetcode-style" problems were cool. After a few months I got a remote interview from an online contest and got a "building stuff" position in SV. Can't say I've achieved happiness but financially it was so much better.

Enterprise architecture and UML diagrams, along with lots of text and diagrams. No pseudocode or leetcode to be found, only class diagrams at best. Not enjoyable. I don't understand how to get out of this position in all honesty.

I have meetings, I write documents. I offer sage advice on best practice. That's it. It's not IT anymore, it's just make-work.

My careers have followed a similar route. When I graduated from college, I took a particular job because I didn't want to sit in an office all day. But as I got better at that job, my work increasingly became telling other people how to do the work, and ten years later I ended up in the office most of the time.

I quit that job to start my own company, again, so I could have the freedom to do things outside of an office. And again, as more people joined the company, I spent more time managing the company and writing reports and doing things other than being hands-on with the thing I started the company for. After another ten years, I closed the company.

Now I'm happy writing code. And another ten years in, my job is increasingly not about writing code anymore, but about ideas and processes and meetings and telling other people how to do things. The heads of departments completely unrelated to mine invite me to their meetings just so I can listen and write reports about what I heard later. Now, no matter how hard I try, I spend more time in Microsoft Word than writing code.

There seems to be something about the business world that removes people from the jobs they're good at. Sure, lots of people strive to be the Senior Lead Corporate Upstairs Middle Manager Grade IV. But some people are just happy doing work, and at some companies it's hard to stay in those roles.

At this point in my life, I'd rather be Lazlo Hollyfeld than Professor Hathaway.

> There seems to be something about the business world that removes people from the jobs they're good at.

There's not much business value in just having one person be really good at something. It doesn't scale. The state of coding and information technology means you can't maintain exponential or even logarithmic scaling of your own abilities to produce business value. At some point, the only real thing left to do is to do your best to produce more people who can do what you do. 10 people that are 15% as good as you will outproduce you.

10 people that are 15% as good as you will outproduce you.

That only seems to make sense if those 10 less-productive people make one-tenth the salary of the single productive person.

I've seen this in action. I know of a company that hired a whole room full of know-it-all high school drop-outs to write code, rather than one or two trained college graduates. That company went out of business in a matter of months.

The economics of software development completely abstract out the costs of developer salaries. Software is not a capital-intensive industry, it's labor-intensive. They don't need to wring costs out of the production pipeline, they need to wring more production out of it. Any added cost is worth it.

Companies all want to have software biz economics, but few of them actually know how to run a software business. A room full of high school dropouts is each going to have 1% of the productive capacity of one top-level resource. College grads will have roughly 5%. With decent leadership and mentoring that can go up to 10%. Within a few years they'll hit 10-15%, becoming 'senior engineers'. Title inflation happens because titles, and their requisite salaries, don't matter for the industry. It's the same in finance, so you see a zillion vice presidents.

It makes no sense for a company with hundreds of devs to take a top-level resource and waste their talents on writing code. Top level resources write code to stay sane and relevant, not because the company needs their code.

Aah meetings. The bane of happiness all around the world. They can even be graded on how bad they suck.

Best are the ones with > 10 people. You know beforehand nothing gets done in it and no one cares. So you just nod along and drop a word here and there and work on something you anyway have to do in parallel.

Worst are the ones where your boss is present and may be 3-4 of your peers. You are supposed to look enthusiastic, offering opinions, ideas and all kinds of projections, d*ck measuring and mud slinging all in a non combative politically sly manner. And probably even nod approvingly at the silly ideas of the one above you.

Maybe you just need more hobbies or interests outside of work. Working remotely and making good money gives you a lot of freedom outside of work hours, and even during work hours it sounds like nobody will notice if you spent half the day painting or woodworking. I don't think it's necessary in life to be in love with your job - most people out there aren't.

I struggle with this. Sometimes it just doesn't take "full time" to get all my work done. I hardly ever have work roll to a future sprint, but I feel obligated to sit next to the computer in case people have questions I can help with.

I think later this year I might want to move to a product focused company instead of the consulting agency I'm at now, but I'm not sure if that will help in the way that I hope it will.

Regarding Forensics - if you were going to work in computer forensics, I did that for a bit after grad school. I didn't last 6 months: aside from a couple corporate espionage cases, everything else was child porn/abuse. Important job, but soul crushing digging through personal machines seeking that for 40 hours a week.

No, it was real forensics, dead bodies etc. Very interesting, but you needed a strong stomach for it.

I think you need to find some sort of "savior" in a hobby or something more than that. But maybe a hobby is going to be enough and you need something bigger in picture...maybe take some volunteering work. Anything that satisfies your search for meaning of life.

Thanks. I've been seriously considering Volunteering recently.

No problem. Find something that can give you some peace and that should be good. Good luck.

Sounds like you really want to be a mid-career IC. I think you should do your best to change jobs until you find what you're looking for, even if it means a pay cut.

Not all changes have to be dramatic: you don't have to upend your life. Maybe just see what things are like at a new company?

I know exactly how you feel. Wish I’d chosen a different field such as Mechanical or Electrical Engineering to IT.

Don't they have even more meeting to go to and documents to write? Things in the physical world require a lot of approvals and consideration before are given a sign-off to proceed to implementation.

Yeah, there are a ton of meeting for those roles as well (possibly more since they have firm hardware prep needs, usually official standards to get approval for, etc.). Reading through the requirements docs and planning years out for a product release being done by the electrical engineers on a new device, made me thankful software was so agile.