I quit the tech industry (2015)
eev.ee
eev.ee
But we don't yet think of the effects on the workforce as social externalities. Industrial safety has made the workplace a much safer space physically, but not mentally.
The reality is, a great many jobs make us sick. Depression, anxiety, heightened aggression, sedentary atrophy, getting overweight because there's no time for the gym... the modern office workplace is no heath-farm. And Google throwing a few coloured bean bags around, or providing healthy food and gym equipment is only a sticking plaster if the foundational culture is toxic.
What is the cost to society? I have no idea, or how to even measure it.
But I have a few observations.
I meet lots of people who "got out of tech". People with PhDs who became landscape gardeners or opened a juice bar. I meet smart and engaging people in their 30s who dropped out of games or media careers.
The cost (to society) of educating a graduate is, what, $100,000? Average post-grad education is another 4 years. Then it costs approximately 20% of someones salary to hire and onboard them.
For what? So they can drop out after 5 years and go open a wind-surfing school?
In a way, these people, the workforce/pool are a national asset, and it could regarded a tragedy of the commons that harming them is inflicting an externality on the whole industry. By culturing inhospitable, mentally harmful environments the tech industry is pissing in its own drinking water.
Unfortunately we're not good at handling externalities we can't easily measure.
""" She has said that the real inconvenient truth is not just that there is environmental pollution, which there certainly is, but that there is also social pollution. The work hours that companies are demanding of their employees are causing the breakup of marriages, burdens on raising children, and general disruption to family life. And the family unit is an important source of social support.
You can see this in stories from my book — the GE guy who’s on the road all the time and never sees his kids until he finally decides to quit. So she coined the term “social pollution,” and I think it’s a wonderful term. """
""" t’s true. He takes three points and puts them together. The first point, which is consistent with data reported by the World Economic Forum and other sources, is that an enormous percentage of the health care cost burden in the developed world, and in particular in the U.S., comes from chronic disease — things like diabetes and cardiovascular and circulatory disease. You begin with that premise: A large fraction — some estimates are 75 percent — of the disease burden in the U.S. is from chronic diseases.
Second, there is a tremendous amount of epidemiological literature that suggests that diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome — and many health-relevant individual behaviors such as overeating and underexercising and drug and alcohol abuse — come from stress.
And third, there is a large amount of data that suggests the biggest source of stress is the workplace. So that’s how Chapman can stand up and make the statement that CEOs are the cause of the health care crisis: You are the source of stress, stress causes chronic disease, and chronic disease is the biggest component of our ongoing and enormous health care costs. """
The arguments against it are entirely abstract and ungrounded.
What natural law says it's better to spend time with/live only with people who are related to by blood? The only necessity for reproduction is sexual intercourse. A family is susceptible to the same abuse and corruption as any other arbitrary power structure.
The arguments against it are the divorce rates, and they are not abstract or ungrounded.
What says that the parent will necessarily be the "best" person for their child through their whole life, and not someone else? That's arbitrary.
You see no issues with swearing life long loyalty to blood relations? That's just going to be the optimal solution in every case? That's making it a little bit too easy don't you think?
It's also just as natural for people to branch out and leave their families, as it is to stay close to their families.
And I think it's irrelevant to the discussion of shortening working hours, and a bad example because it's another oppressive construct.
It's like arguing for shortening working hours so that people can go to church more, and church is healthy. Really? That's highly debatable, and obviously another power structure which is also old fashioned and has seen decreasing success.
How about just shortening the working hours so that people can be more, free? And do what they want?
This one is so debatable because the definition and theological implications of Church 'healthiness' depend upon many different variables and can differ subtly across all Churches.
Church isn't a 'power structure' though. It relies on voluntary participation. You can walk out of Church whenever you want.
Doing what you want tends to be quite narrow, hedonistic and unsatisfying in the end. It's easier to make the argument for free time from higher principles.
Well I guess we can say that we have a fundamentally different view on what constitutes development and improvement of life and society.
Freedom is the ability to swim in any direction you want, so go ahead. Do whatever you want. The map of your possible options already exists and the institutions are just one or many worthwhile places to visit. When people do whatever they want it quite often ends up on a place on the map where there is a lot of hedonism and not much in the way of higher meaning or valuable aims.
As a dispassionate observer it is my inclination to suggest that people will take the argument for more free time off work in the favour of church and family as an easier argument to make, given it's connection to a higher meaning and relatable values. A boss will likely see anything connected to 'wants' as room for more work.
Yes some marriages end in divorce and families disconnect in some cases, with various outcomes. The family still exists even if no-one participates in it. The guy is being overworked and unable to see his kids, I'm all for that guy seeing his kids. It can have huge knock on effects if it's ignored. You aren't forced to participate in family.
Family is built from natural impulses, biological connections and installs in the children an inheritance of values, schooling and relationships. There are reasons from first principles for families and the surrounding neighbourhood, city and country benefits from families. You can't hand-wave away the meaning of family as 'power' and 'arbitrary'.
And we are trying to move into the future, not the past.
Are nuclear families really so important and successful that we need more of it? Is this really an undebatable absolute truth that should be forced on people? Let people decide on their own if they want to spend their new found free time on families or something else.
Edit: the "special status" is loyalty, and loyalty is bad if we are trying to live in a meritocracy.
The dark cynic in me says that in a country with a for-profit health system all these effects are considered good features of the workplace.
Looking around me, I do know a fair amount of people quitting tech. To become a sport or management coach, a sound designer, a bar owner, a writer, etc. But a lot of those people seem to struggle even more now than they were when being in tech.
You're right about the grass being greener. The tech industry is an absolute plague, but most other industries are just as bad.
In the long term, and for most of us, the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.
Or is it just that in tech, we have the luxury to think about all of that, and to potentially take several years without working much thanks to our high salary?
Of course, the logistics of undoing the neolithic revolution are mind-boggling. You're supposed to learn to be a hunter-gatherer over a lifetime, not to be thrust into it in the middle of your adult life. If some leader-type tried to abandon complex society right away, it would probably go about as well as the Cultural Revolution went. Lots of people accidentally picking the wrong mushrooms and killing themselves, because their parents never taught them how to tell them apart.
How so? Countries with blown-up systems typically become more shitty, not less.
> How so? Countries with blown-up systems typically become more shitty, not less.
1775 [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War
(I'm not saying anything one way or t'other, just pointing out a little history)
People are trying to figure out their lives or how they want to live. There is nothing wrong in coming back to what they had quit. Making fun of other people's life choices is very immature in my opinion.
It's a writing style (mannerism?) but not necessarily ill-intentioned.
The comment happens to be against the status quo and for the every day person and that has a higher chance as being seen as something that is unusual and more negative than it actually is.
Beware of bias when attributing value to someone else's struggles. "happiness" and "fulfillment" are innate personal perceptions. And they are the aggregate not just of one's job, but of one's circumstances in life on the whole.
For one person, the struggle associated with being a writer might be totally worth it. For someone else, it could be entirely the wrong road to follow. Thing is, the only person who needs to figure out what path in life is the right way would be... that person. That's what personal responsibility, freedom, agency, independence,... is all about.
In a way, the big trap in this debate is ending up shoehorning people into different boxes. Just because someone graduated with a tech degree doesn't mean they can't do something else in life. Even when that pursuit is, arguably, harder then just sitting in a chair and struggling with - say - Homebrew, trying to install a different versions of Node.
[Developed] societies have been systematically failing at addressing externalities for the last hundred years.
We do have many scientific methods to measure pollution, climate change, mental health, physical health, income inequality.
The socioeconomical system is designed to prioritize economical growth [for large company owners] over everything else.
I don’t think there’s a damned thing you could change in the work environment to fix that, it’s the work itself that is the problem.
Right? When I started out, 1/3 of my interviews were with gambling machine companies, another was with a company that only existed to arbitrage betting odds for their own profit, and one was some kind of quasi-AI surveillance thing.
A lot of GDP is generated on completely parasitic activities, and you can do a lot worse for society than running a "soft" business ethically and happily.
For free.
I've written infrastructure software that has, without a doubt, saved a lot of lives, and will continue to do so, for many years to come. I've been working on a client implementation that leverages that software, for the last couple of years. It's approaching ship (but still a ways off). One of the goals of that project, is to help train a few young friends in the ins and outs of what it takes to create shipping software.
These projects would be worth a lot of dosh, if I were to hang a sticker on them.
But I did them for no money.
Society (especially US society) does not value vocations that help others. Teachers are incredibly well-educated, but treated like dirt. The same with social workers. We value individuality and selfishness. In fact, we actually deify these qualities.
It's an issue, but one I have no ideas how to solve. I think that the right to spend money on what we want is an important one, and I won't gainsay anyone else's right to do that. If driving around in a Model X and having a model (of any gender identification) on your arm is your priority, and you have worked hard for that, then Godspeed and good luck. I have different priorities, and the story of how I got them is long and winding. Not so many folks have backgrounds like mine, and not many that do, have developed priorities like mine.
I am grateful to be in the position I'm in.
What about doctors? Nurses? Tenured professors? Blanket statements are fun but probably miss the more nuanced issue.
Systemically public education is broken leading to us undervaluing teachers in many public school districts. The same for social workers -- the US doesn't have robust social safety nets so social workers can provide less help. Perhaps that's why they're not viewed as favorably? The same budget constraints apply to their salaries, making it so the more qualified ones go into private practice perhaps?
I know a lot of nurses. They make decent (not outrageous) money, but their work environment is frequently a shitshow. Many are quitting.
>Tenured professors?
I know a few. I guess some of them are paid well, but they often make a lot less than their students. They do have job security (like tenured teachers).
Doctors don't make money because they help people. They make money, because people with money think what they do is important.
[UPDATE]: Note the downvotes. I didn't post anything that attacked anyone. I made a "blanket statement" that has been made millions of times, and is, regardless, quite true.
I also talked about some projects that I've done (a few that are easily accessible, for anyone interested). These were not mentioned to be "snotty." They are simply what I have done, out of Gratitude and for deeply personal reasons.
Don't like to look at things that make us uncomfortable? Join the club. However, it often makes us better people.
You're conflating recent and broad economic trends with the specific conditions of a specific profession. Millions of Americans all over the country have been quitting and changing careers (it even has a name: "the Great Resignation"). This doesn't mean their conditions are shit, but rather that pandemic-era economic forces have been reshuffling our economy.
I think that the Great Resignation is even more obvious in nursing because of nursing contracts. Nurse contracting became really popular when the pandemic started because the hospitals were overwhelmed and contracts were ridiculously lucrative. Hospital management is always so short sighted that they just don't want to raise the pay of their core stuff. Core staff is paid on average $35/hour. Nursing contracts start at $60 and can go much higher. This has lead to the situation where the core staff resigns en masse and goes to work as a contractor (sometimes even at the same hospital).
The hospital where my fiancee is contracting now has literally 0 core nursing staff left. There is not a single full time nurse employed in the whole hospital. Problem is that the contractors leave after ~3 months and go look for a more high paying contract so they are rarely at the same hospital for a long time.
The result is that you don't have a single nurse in the hospital that actually knows that hospital's procedures, doctors, people to call, storage lockers, and all of that institutional knowledge that you need to have to be effective.
I don't think it's "US society", as much as it is urban and suburban society which has become dominant over the last few decades. Traditionally in the US, people were a lot more communal--neighbors and families would share farm equipment, help each other through busy seasons, watch each other's farm while the other was away, help raise each other's kids, etc. Maybe the problem isn't our Americanism, but rather the lack of it, and maybe the solution is figuring out how to integrate more of it into our modern society rather than doubling down on our increasingly isolated, me-first sub/urban existences.
And I assume you acquired the means to do that for free by.. doing the opposite for long enough to buy you freedom to do so? Or marry/born rich?
> And I assume you acquired the means to do that for free by.. doing the opposite for long enough to buy you freedom to do so? Or marry/born rich?
By working my butt off for over 30 years, making a rather humble salary, but never living large, avoiding personal debt like the plague, driving old cars, or crappy company cars, living in apartments and a small house, saving 25-40% of my earnings, investing in conservative, yet still a bit aggressive, funds, and then, after leaving a job I stayed at for nearly 27 years (at a famous Japanese imaging corporation, that makes optical equipment), being rejected (sometimes, quite rudely) by every place I applied at, for being too old.
The first project I mentioned was done over a period of ten years, as a "side project," while I worked as an Engineering Manager (a job I hated). I did it because my life was, literally, saved, by an organization, and I wanted to Give Back.
There are many reasons to do things that don't involve avarice, ego, anger, or cynicism. I want to make the world a better place. My resources are limited, but I have some ideas on ways to multiply my impact.
I'm finding it really hard to do. Even if I wanted to make the personal sacrifice (and thus sacrifice my future children's stability and environment..) for more virtuous pursuits for far less compensation, I have a hard time believing in any organization's ability to affect meaningful change.
I'm trying to start small by helping my one friend who is a doctor to streamline her office tech. I think I could give her 20% of her time back performing repetitive tasks.
Sounds like a worthy cause. The ten-year project that I mentioned was actually ready to go, after a couple of years. All the rest of the time, was spent, talking about it, and trying to help people use it, until it went viral, and was taken over by a fairly accomplished team.
Thanks to them, it has become a lot bigger than I could have made it.
If you contact me, I’m happy to share it. It’s aimed at a very specific demographic.
Organisations are generally pretty shit at achieving anything.
But the good news is that individuals can and do make a difference and ultimately change things. It's the small wins that count. Changing one person's habits. Getting one more friend to drop BigTech. Getting one teacher to rethink the effect of over-connectedness on our children. Showing one person the problem of e-waste and seeing them jail-break an old phone instead of buying a new one.
You overcome the myth of "the they" (the hordes of mindless "users" who just want convenience uber-alles that we always hear about on HN) one real person at a time.
Then you start to see friends and colleagues reflecting good values back at you. Help your doctor friend streamline her time with real computing tools, but also make it clear that you're not a charity, or a mug and that what you're doing comes with a message that you expect her to pass on. The health message about harmful technology [1] should resonate with doctors. Encourage her politely to change her lifestyle just as you would commit to changing your diet and exercise if she told you to.
I don't really agree with this part. You can't demand that another adopt your morals, certainly not genuinely by offering conditional help. I avoid people like this, because they think they've figured out what's best for someone else and judge everyone who doesn't think the same.
Just aim for the highest good, and course correct since chances are you don't know what that really is. Others will join or oppose you, that's feedback.
I'm not trying to replace that company with my free labor. Mostly looking for ultra low hanging fruit - like scripted replies to FAQs that burn 15 mins/day replying to.
I definitely didn't say that. At least three of my friends now do those things. They're very happy. And they add a lot to the world, at the least by the smile they wear each day.
The broader question is how do we change that? Is it worth squeezing an extra 1-2 hours a day of productivity from people to have them burn out in 5 years vs. a more steady 25 year career?
True that K-12 costs more, but public assistance in higher education is substantial [1]. From grants, subsidized loans to directed money into public universities, it's a sizable investment at the state and federal level. It'd be more efficient to take that money and invest it directly in vocational schools if we knew people would utilize it and then swap careers due to burn out.
1 - https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...
Edit: Updated reference to 2019 version.
For one, that extra education? It often isn't seen as part of one's career. But for any course worth its salt, those years are still draining. It's a minor point, but also an overlooked one.
Second, there's the mismatch problem. Outside STEM, loads of people aren't getting jobs in their fields. Inside STEM (mostly tech, really), most people are getting tech jobs completely different from what they learned in school. Often uninteresting and/or boggled with politics and bureaucracy (read: majority of them are CRUD webdev jobs trying to appease corporate's whims).
Third, the job market is ravenous. Absolutely ravenous. Anyone not solidly mid career is discriminated against to some degree. Too old? Have fun being seen as a liability despite your experience. Too young? Here's a set of requirements you wouldn't learn in most corporations, schools won't teach you and somehow you're magically supposed to get this experienced in a corporate setting, noted as "requirements". Oh, and you better cite the company's values by heart and claim it's your dream job, even if their product is yet another luxury / minimal improvement driven to make profits, as there are 20 others lined up.
The whole burnout thing already starts before you enter your first job.
Most people joining the tech industry today aren't doing it because they're particularly good at it, or they want to. It's the best way to raise capital to do something else.
Are you positing that there are loads of healthier jobs or healthier ways to do office work (without foregoing the actual productivity)? Or maybe that work itself is inherently unhealthy (which I kind of believe, but at least until we have automation meeting our physical needs 'work' seems healthier for society).
Bold of you to assume office work involves "productivity".
You remember the Tom Sawyer story, where he gets the others to paint the fence for him? Work is very much "in the mind". You can have the work of Sisyphus and get to love the rock. In the best cases work is the making of some people. It can liberate you from boredom and self indulgence. An artist or poet talks about their "work" in an entirely different spirit. We must not equate indentured servitude, wage slavery, and pointless anxiety driven makework for "real work".
> without foregoing the actual productivity
Please don't fall for that 18th century factory-owner terminology. Producing what? Productivity is a slippery word. Unless you're a farmer most of us can't point to anything tangible we produce. The best we can hope for is to help fellow human beings in whatever small way we can each day. Increasingly that is done by subverting the system. Worthwhile work occurs despite, not through the systems we inhabit.
I'm explicitly not doing that. My whole comment can be rephrased as: "if we can meet society's needs with less soul-crushing, we should do so, but some of the soul crushing may be inherent (needing to work to meet our own physical needs can be inherently exasperating for some)".
> Please don't fall for that 18th century factory-owner terminology.
I'm inclined to defer to credentialed economists over arbitrary Internet strangers.
We can absolutely "meet society's needs". We already do, amply, and have for many decades. The problem is that we've over-supplied needs, and replaced huge tracts of activity pandering to wants and whims. It is that over-provision that is at the root of so much of the soul crushing emptiness.
> I'm inclined to defer to credentialed economists over arbitrary Internet strangers.
Of course. I know the square root of jack about economics. But I do know how to read what credentialed economists write. So I think the difference may be in our choice of credentialed economists. Here's one take [1]. But who I am really echoing is Yanis Varoufakis, who says it much better than either Thompson or myself, that we've a very poor idea what "productivity" really is.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201230-how-the-pandem...
Yes, we have plenty of resources to feed everyone and provide people with the things that I personally value, but defining "productivity" in terms of one person's values and then organizing society to optimize for that "productivity" (in other words, a sort of planned economy) is a much worse oppression than laboring for one's own values. If that's not what you're getting at, then please state it plainly because we're several comments into this exchange and it's still unclear what solution you're imagining.
Are you including undergrad or just grad programs? If we include undergrad and do ballpark math: government pays 40 billion in grants per year, there are 20 million students, so that's 2 thousand per student cost to society
Whereas I'm paying upwards of 30k. The cost is on me, not on society. Although I'm just an anecdote so I'm curious to hear from others
What I'm most worried about in leaving my career as a solutions architect is that the ability to start and build a business of my own seems insurmountable when you consider the world's reliance on social media and popularity/wealth as a requirement for success. There are so many people doing absolutely the same thing these days, and so many people that present the image of success and popularity in being an entrepreneur in pretty much every field that valid/great ideas get drowned out so easily... If everyone is doing the same thing, and many people are faking their success, coupled with wealthy individuals that can easily copycat ideas, it creates massive barriers to organic success.
There is usually only one page on most sites for publications, that's often a wild and crazy mashup of posts from all disciplines and fields of interest. Our attention spans are also shrinking because of short form content, that makes it very easy to view something important, but also forget it 5 seconds later, so even marketing is overwhelming to most of the people that would support independent business.
Sites like Reddit started out great, but now subreddits are often run with other intentions than open communication... Many mods secretly steer business in their own directions because of the flood of competition, and it feeds deceptive marketing techniques and brigade culture.
I don't want to be stuck in complaining, I think the world really needs to evaluate how much we are fostering "monopolistic dynasty" culture and nepotism on the Internet, and how it's destroying capitalism... We all really need to bring back a sense of distributing speaking time among wider ranges of audiences and speakers, and fostering discussions that aren't based on popularity and wealth as indicators of validity... The very same culture that has negatively infected the workplaces we might want to leave.
In the face of so much disruptive potential, so much surplus of intellect, and so much human energy unleashed by automation and fossil fuels, the strategy of the incumbents has been to stifle it.
I mean, isn't that what the entertainments business has been focused on for the past 40 years, with DRM etc? What some parts of the tech industry does is actually anti-technology. We have a kind of job creation scheme with one person digging a hole, while another fills it in. Some computer scientists working to create innovation, and others overtly set on stifling it. To ignore that adversarial aspect is to completely fail to understand modern technology.
Productivity is the goal, right? Increasing worker happiness and reducing stress should be the focus. I think this will produce the largest effect on productivity.
Instead, we get sociopathic slave-driving at work: a narrow focus on KPIs, mandated hours of work and methods of working, prostration from micro-management (it can go on forever).
Working environments are low-trust and hostile, with no focus on what truly makes a worker happy, and what actually makes them productive!
- Lawrence from Office Space
Worrying about paying for food day to day isn’t why people seek out high-stress, high-pay jobs that are often in expensive cities.
If people just want enough financial security to reliably put food on the table there are a million ways to do that without getting a demanding career.
The people throwing themselves into demanding jobs and chasing promotions to maximize their salary aren’t doing it just to put food on the table.
It is in order to put food on the table. Not today but for the next 20 years after you're no longer earning an income. Also, other hobbies that cost money.
Early retirement is very expensive. Even if you reduce your expenses.
In theory, the higher your income the sooner you can get there.
Financial Independence / Early Retirement is not about having a low stress job.
It's about living on your own terms, or some semblence thereof, and not having to continually put out for people.
For me it's about recharging. Something about being on computers all day makes me dislike the suburbs. I don't dislike my job, but i really enjoy being in my yard, growing things, the simplicity of maintaining my yard/gardens, etc.
Not everyone, of course, but this theme plays out far too frequently in FIRE communities.
I have a miserable high paying tech job that I would absolutely not do if I wasn't being paid so well.
Maybe I'm delusional, but I believe this is my best strategy for buying my freedom.
The way I see it, it takes about $3M to bond yourself away from a lifetime of servitude. That much capital would allow me to pay myself a middle class income without any time commitment.
The best answer would have been to have rich parents with a large trust fund so I could go pursue my interests without worry. I don't have rich parents, but that doesn't change my requirements.
So instead, I'm going about acquiring the funds I need by whatever legal means I can, which in practice means job hopping at tech companies, looking for equity payouts, and buy/borrow/die with companies and funds that I anticipate to be around for 50+ years.
Of course, I don't get to have kids with this strategy, but ethically I wouldn't want to birth a child into a life of bondage under capitalism anyway. It happened to me and I'm not particularly keen on how it's going. At $10M+ I may reconsider, but I don't expect to get there in my lifetime.
How does anyone read fringe nonsense like "ethically I wouldn't want to birth a child into a life of bondage under capitalism" and not roll your eyes hard enough to get RSI?
The thing is, your 30-35 hours at a cushy office job isn't just 30-35 hours of fungible time - it's a commitment to a lifestyle that revolves around office work. A lot of folks talk like a person who has a job has the same amount of freedom as someone without a job, just minus the time they spend in the office. That's part of it, but there's also the loss of spontaneity/flexibility/control.
If those are things you really prize, then it can be perfectly rational to optimize your life for the maximum number of years in which you have total control (i.e. you're not working). If that's what you want to do, then it makes perfect sense to work as much as humanly possible and save as much money as possible on any year in which you're working at all, since you're giving up that total control of your life whether you're working 20 hours or 80. Then, when you've got enough money, you get total control of your life for as many years as possible. Depending on what you value, it can be a totally reasonable optimization.
You forget the age effects: when you're 80 you will have less control on the basics (like, control over being able to run for a few hours without pain)
> Then, when you've got enough money, you get total control of your life for as many years as possible. Depending on what you value, it can be a totally reasonable optimization.
No, the FIRE logic seems self-inconsistent to me: if you do believe in this "control" part, it's not a reasonable optimization!
A much better logic would take into account the age effects to conclude it's better to enjoy life as much as possible until say 40, then slave away to repay the debt incurred.
Or even better- die in debt!
> A lot of folks talk like a person who has a job has the same amount of freedom as someone without a job, just minus the time they spend in the office. That's part of it, but there's also the loss of spontaneity/flexibility/control.
Personally, I disagree with the FIRE logic for other reasons: I believe it's better to participate to society, to do great things together as species, as a team!
I've seen some people call it "team mankind" or "team earth" and I wholeheartedly agree: we've accomplished miracles at the planet level!
Why go FIRE and be lonely? Isn't that waiting for death?
Having a job means participating to society, which is not just a net-negative of losing "spontaneity/flexibility/control", but doing interesting things with other people, which requires coordination/synchronization and therefore entails some degree of a loss of control.
However, I personally believe it's for the better, not just at the species/planet level, but at the individual level: I like having colleagues. I like the small talk. I like being part of a multiple persons effort. And so are you, unless you've got some quirks, because most humans are pro-social.
You know as I get older I've come to think the two ways to go out are with either 8+ figures in the bank (assuming you have unethically birthed a few offspring into bondage, of course), or owing as many people as much money as possible. You either have enough to leave more than a token amount to your kids (so they can escape their bondage) or you lived as good as a lifestyle as possible and got it relatively cheaply.
I'm kidding, but only mostly.
I really value being able to sleep until I am rested and wake up without an alarm.
I also want to be able to act on things when spontaneity strikes. Whether that's doing a marathon coding session to solve a problem, staying out late with a new group of friends, or deciding I'd like to go travel somewhere today.
Also freeing up the area of my brain that is filled with perpetual worry about my employer's expectations has got to be a good thing, even if I'm not sure what would fill the void.
The anxiety and depression that come from knowing I have to sleep because I have to wake up to an alarm tomorrow so that I can solve some arbitrary problem for my employer is pretty much killing me.
The other problem is that once I tap out, I'm going to have a resume gap that may make it hard to find high paying work again in 5-10 years should the need arise. Because that's how our system works, I need to secure all the funding I need now, because I know I may not have access to it again.
We have access to all of the world's knowledge now, but I don't have time to sponge up as much of it as I want. It's like we live in this amazing future but I use it to maintain obscure software systems all day.
I sort of feel like this episode of The Twilight Zone ("Time Enough At Last"): https://youtu.be/oLoNGRVeC7Y?t=65
I mean, having crippling anxiety and depression because you have to wake up at a certain time definitely isn't normal, by any means.
I understand the economic issues (and de-facto coercion) you are referring to.
But at the end of the day -- whether it's "bondage" or not is all in your head. Especially if you let it go so far as to block you from having children. In fact this outlook seems to fall under the very definition of "prisons we build for ourselves".
But teams also benefit from having at least a few people innately interested in tech (too much “passion” is probably bad too). If lots of people consciously take the mercenary position, it can damage the whole team’s morale because unsurprisingly the necessary but unglamorous work gets de-emphasized more than usual. This eventually drags down everyone’s performance and increases the likelihood of stressful events like outages.
As long as they can do the job effectively, none of that hurts you or I.
https://offbeathome.com/snohomish-pyramid-house/
https://www.prefabcontainerhomes.org/2020/08/4x45-ft-shippin...
https://www.ignant.com/2015/08/11/a-minimal-concrete-house-o...
I've found the result of quitting to be a mixed bag. Yes, the work is more gratifying because it's "yours," but are you really impacting the world more? You're either building and replacing the bureaucracy that you hated, or you're just too insignificant to warrant the bureaucracy. Also, not being paid a ton of money really sucks.
Have to means having no debt,.my own land and low living costs. Basically being independent. Then using my career to work 50% with a good salary remote.
If I would not do that, I would do the same as you and look for something good to work on.
For me I would go and find a company which does things for agriculture or other things which helps us all.
Working 40h feels wrong though.
Then you get promoted and oversee the same procedure of poisoning humanitys well executed by a younger generation.
That's because hiring is marketing; they're selling a job to you, you pay them in your labor and attention span. Nobody will be attracted to a job where the description says what it is - e.g. "legacy enterprise java application maintenance". Nobody wants to work a job that is just to fill a seat.
Stuff needs doing, I think there wouldn’t be a shortage of people to do it provided the pay is competitive.
In fact I think job happiness would be better if your actual job is more aligned with what you signed up for.
I guess part of the problem is that the companies themselves don’t want to admit they need maintenance workers because they want to be innovative entrepreneurial company where everyone is doing something innovative and new and exciting!
You're impacting your own world more. It may be for better or worse, but you're giving yourself more control. For many folks, that's not a good thing - there's value in structure/hierarchy/rules. However, you personally don't often get as much of that value directly.
Working 'on your own', gives you then potential to capture more of that value (from your own structure/rules/etc), but it's also not trivial to do better than a larger org. Much depends on what you're measuring - money? freedom/flexibility? sense of satisfaction? Decide what the goals are first, then work towards that, and make adjustments as needed.
Come on.
That all being said, the first part of the post is relatable. Tech jobs really can suck the life out of you. And, at least for me, working for other people is really soul-draining. I felt this same way, dreading going back to work even when I was on vacation, the last time I worked on someone else's payroll.
Judging people because they had a windfall that enabled them to do something good is crab mentality.
There you go. These type of post piss me the hell off!!! This type of person you will see making a video on YouTube convincing many other to quit too. They managed to buy their time back which is cool but they should be upfront with it from the off.
No wonder some kids today are confused. Spend too much time on social media watching content from these type of garbage users
Until then I'll have to work on these minor feats of engineering. lol.
Fun fact, it helped to tell people my goals and I could have brass tax conversations about peoples careers. As a mentor, once you move from 'how you can help the company' to 'how you can retire early by selling what the company thinks it needs', you can drop so many facades.
My advice to my former self would be to take extended time before it became a borderline personal crisis. The funny thing about that opportunity cost - I’m now spending time just building the energy to use this time away for things I find personally interesting.
Had I taken the time sooner, it probably could have been shorter, and I’d probably enjoy the first bit of it more.
I quit the tech industry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9691002 - June 2015 (548 comments)
Pretty much sums up my nightly routine.
> Do you have any internal libraries or systems or platforms at your company? Do you think no one else has ever had the same idea and built the same thing?
Sometimes (most of the times?) it's not about being the first one solving the problem in a specific way, but about solving it with the skills and knowledge you have, the best you can, because at the end it's your problem if you took responsibility of it.
Personally think that relativizing problems is key, and can find joy in the process of solving them. Food for the brain and personal achievement. Whether it's important or remarkable for anyone else is anyone else's problem.
Anyway, none of that matters if the problem isn't interesting for you or you don't care about who you are enabling by solving the problem, doesn't matter if it's a worldwide new problem or a well-known-and-solved one.
By looking newer posts at the blog, he/she/they is having fun and writing about problems that aren't novelty, but are anyway personally interesting.
You'll have to learn a few when you start. That's okay. What you're feeling as senioritis is basically "I've been doing this same shit for the past 4+ years", and by this point, even in a 'new' class, it feels largely the same, and it's a bump on the road to the outcome you want, and no longer interesting.
Remember how you felt as a freshman though? Coming in when you knew nothing/comparatively little, and having to actually learn something, everything ahead was just one big mess of possibilities?
Well...that's what getting a job offer for the first time is. For about 4-6 months. After that, most of the time, the rose tinted glasses come off and you realize "oh. I know what I'm doing at this point. I've learned what I need to learn. And there's not really anything left except for me to come in, work toward a known outcome, and then go home". Companies don't adopt new technologies if they can avoid it. They don't care about you learning new things. They just want you producing, so they can capture the value you generate and pay you a part of it. What's left to learn is the business domain and the specific combination of decisions others made in the past that you now have to navigate.
Which, if you have a rich enough life outside of work, the job isn't too demanding, and are paid enough to be comfortable, can be fine for some people. The feelings of security a predictable, well paid job provides can fund what they actually care about in life. For others, it feels like they're spinning their wheels on the activity they spend the majority of their time on and they want something else.
How you, personally, respond, is going to be something you figure out as you go. And it can change. I was a lot more "I need fulfillment from my job" when I was younger; now I just need a good enough paycheck and enough freedom in hours and such (WFH is a must) to be able to do the stuff I actually care about and find value in.
So my advice is don't worry too much about it. Mentally prepare for the process of applying all over the place and potentially not getting an offer for a while, but once you get something you'll almost assuredly be excited and eager to prove yourself, and you can start figuring out what is important to you.
For programming at least this is seriously overblown everywhere. Might be legit for regular IT stuff
You don't really have to do it on your own time, and the new stuff you have to learn is most of the time same shit, different face.
Good fundamentals make it all feel the same overall blob of knowledge with different expressions for the same stuff
Won't stop the people doing the hiring from asking for experience with the different face for the same shit they are doing, of course.
And start ups are fun. https://zachholman.com/posts/the-basement/
In other words have boundaries.
Have a life. Do stuff on the weekends and evenings. Hell, have a remote job? Do things in the middle of the day.
Do just enough at work to get a raise and not screw over your coworkers and no more.
After 20-some-odd years in the industry... oof.
Sometimes it feels like groundhog day. You might have thought about web application authorization. You may have implemented it a few times and figured out how it ought to be done. And you might think that after twenty years it would be a solved problem.
But you would be wrong.
You're going to encounter yet another web application with a bespoke authorization system. It's going to take a shotgun approach to validation and nobody will be able to tell you if it works the way it's supposed to or not. The tests pass (if there are any). It might have errors in it but we haven't had any reports yet. We hired a pentester last year and they didn't find anything. It's probably fine.
So you add a new feature and you need to extend this authorization system to handle it and you spend most of your time trying to make sure things continue working instead of focusing on what matters. The same thing over and over again. The same libraries, the same mistakes, the same solutions.
I don’t see how anyone can do this unless they contribute nothing to their families or extended families.
Sounds to me like a very selfish view of life. Most people in the world have either ailing parents and/or spouse and kids to take care of.
And those people only make those contributions out of a selfish desire to keep their environment from changing and for their own self-satisfaction of "making a difference".
It's not selfish not to have kids. And in western countries, spouses/parents can take care of themselves financially.
I don't think I'll have kids. It's the one vote I've got. Why would I stake anything I care about on a society that will almost certainly fail them?
In my experience, kids can be exhausting at times, and take a lot of dedication and time that you could otherwise spend on selfish persuits, so having kids for selfish reasons sounds insanely misguided to me. It's rather that despite all those sacrifices, kids enrich your life, and they allow tremendous opportunity for self-growth and a host of experiences that are hard to replicate otherwise.
As someone who doesn't want my own kids (but like kids and spend time with them), I feel no need to have my own
What is an example of a non-selfish reason someone would have kids?
This is the reason why most people have kids. This doesn't entirely contradicts the parent post though: People are having kids for their self benefits.
Which are entirely different reasons than the parent poster gave.
This whole meta discussion of whether it's done for "selfish" reasons is largely not valuable, as every decision one makes in their life can be framed as being entirely selfish.
As other people said, these are by-the-book examples of selfish justifications. (And no, I'm not saying that ALL parenting is selfish)
And this is without considering climate change. If you consider it, having kids is very selfish.
There is also an argument that people choose not to have kids because they are too lazy and self-involved to care for another person.
Anyway, if someone does have the capacity to care for others, and wants the experience of raising children, adoption is an option as well, and doesn't require one to create more humans
Imagine putting the same sacrifice in donating money or otherwise contributing to a charity that does important work.
And you only get a "thank you" letter. Does it feel the same?
If you are as selfless as you said it should not make a difference.
Plus, you make strong claims like "nothing less selfish" and yet you have never made sacrifices for anything other than kids... maybe there's something to think about.
If one actually only cared about performing a service for the child and/or future society why do the exact genes matter?
Unless one actually thinks ones own genes are so superior that they're a service in their own right, in which case, one should be having as many children as possible.
Conversely, if one thinks that by having a child is some kind of cost, either to the child or society (or anything other than oneself), it can be a selfless choice to not have the child, even if you personally wanted one.
Source: I have kids.
Doing so was a deeply bitter pill to swallow, both in terms of the choices available and the sunk cost of previous opinions.
Working on yourself is a lifetime of effort. I suggest you focus more on that and less on casting aspersions on large groups of people for whom you know little about.
Of course, if they do, and they're offloading the burden on to other people (a partner who now has to take up more work on their own, for instance) then that's different.
If I thought I had to be a line engineer making things for someone else forever, I'd probably have to quit just to regain some sense of control. It's good work if you can get it, but it won't be my forever.
One solution is to work 80%. Or even 60%. You can still make plenty of money to support yourself, and you can be happy while doing it.
AFAIK @eevee [1] identifies as she/her [2].
But I also got contacted by a recruiter that did a fantastic job. He found a company that was a great fit for me, and that had no problem with part-time.
My advice would be : answer everyone telling you're looking for a part-time position. It's long, it's difficult and it's time consuming, but it's not impossible.
I sincerely wish her luck.
To go to a good university you literally have to be super focused in high-school and do all sorts of extracurricular activities and basically things that look good on a college application. No one cares if you were a caretaker for your grandma.
But then once you are in university you haven't even won yet. Now you have to study hard CS classes and do side-projects and apply to internships and practice LC just to get in and even then you aren't done. You need to be super focused at your internships as well to get a full-time offer and even then you aren't done.
Got a full-time offer? Well now the expectations are a lot greater and you are in competition with other super ambitious people that don't mind working during weekends. It's just a lifestyle that doesn't leave off much time for anything else. And it never gets easier you just have to start at maximum speed and keep accelerating. The technology changes very frequently and ageism kicks in really early as well. I'm not suprised at all that people quit tech careers. Life is simply put short.
Basically the path is like this:
1) Be super good in HS to go to a good school
2) Work super hard in college to get good grades
3) Study super hard part-time doing LC and side-projects to get good internships
4) Do super well on internships to get a full time offer
5) Keep doing well to get promoted
If you have intrinsic interest in CS that will get destroyed pretty quickly because you may be put on to some super boring project. There is a vast chasm between programming for fun and programming under a deadline for a jaded boss with a limited budget who's only concern is squeezing as much productivity out of their employees.
We made programming to be fun and now companies just implicitely expect you to code for fun during your free time. If you don't you simply won't be good enough to pass the interviews.
> My bonafides: I’m a college drop-out with a background in mathematics who went from teaching and having almost no coding experience to working at a big tech company in SV in ~3 years. The result is not typical, but I’ve seen it repeated enough to know that I’m not just a fluke. I recently saw another college drop-out make the jump in 18 months.
And then you had ultra high discipline to work hard for 3 years on top of that to break into software engineering. You didn't skip the process you just did it a bit differently but roughly in the same ballpark of difficulty,
Potentially unpopular opinion: This is why I’m actually very bullish on graduates from famously demanding colleges like Ivy League and other competitive universities. To graduate, you can’t just be smarter than average and coast your way through to graduation. You actually have to work hard and be able to self-motivate to do hard things even when it’s not intrinsically interesting.
That doesn’t mean that graduates from average colleges can’t work hard, of course. It’s just much harder to tell if someone has learned to work hard or if they just coasted through life up until this point if you can’t look at their resume and see any particularly difficult achievements.
Yes, absolutely. They demand a lot of hard work, much more than your typical public university. As you go through life however, you start to realize that accomplishment comes from working hard on the right things - a subtle but important distinction from plain old hard work.
Imagine that you are running and come to a wall. You are big, strong, and have lots of resources at your disposal. You almost certainly can bust through the wall and keep going. Do you do it? Or do you check to see if there is an unlocked door around the corner? The reward for you is exactly the same (a grade of A in the class; a promotion at work) and you aren't the person that has to clean up the mess you leave behind. What do you do?
The Ivy League schools have plenty of people that would choose one option and plenty that would choose the other. The other schools don't have very many people for which busting through the wall is even an option, which is definitely not the same thing as "working harder"
I am one of those people. This is the environment I've known since high school.
I love it because otherwise there'd be no big challenge to overcome, nothing straightforward to strive for. And this career is one of the few that gives me a very favorable shot at becoming wealthy. That is, wealthy enough to own a home in a beautiful, expensive state while not needing to work until I'm 50+. All without absolutely insane hours after finishing college.
Overall, I'd just be so BORED without the constant push to improve & learn this industry provides. Clearly that isn't for everyone, and obviously the equation changes as one gets older and settles into family life. That's what management is for (I'd say the best managers still dive deep into the newest tech and have a great understanding of everything their organization does, though many I've seen don't do this and still are competent).
If anything, I get the itch that I'm not doing enough all the time. I'm strongly considering entrepreneurship after my current gig for the challenge of that work environment.
I don't know if this is true. You have described one particular pathway, but as someone who was formerly a very senior level engineer and is now a pretty senior level PM, and is also a college dropout with no degrees and no appreciably meaning certifications (I have an A+, Network+, and Linux+ I got when I was in high school), I must tell you that there are many many many other pathways into tech. Some of the best programmers I've worked with were people who didn't even study CS, although they usually studied STEM (Physics majors in particular seem to always pop up in my peer groups). Some of the best PMs I have worked with studied "worthless liberal arts degrees" like English Literature. Many of both have no degree at all, just as I don't. Almost nobody I worked with did any impressive internships... or internships at all, rather than going and interning most people just worked on whatever was interesting to them and published either articles about it or the code.
I think the key to success in tech is pretty simple to describe (although harder to execute): Be passionate about technology and invest efforts into your passion areas.
Only some companies LC grind people, but if you want to be at one of those companies there's no gate on LC to enter your credentials before you sign-up... anyone can grind LC. What's far more important in my book, having hired many people, is that I work with and hire people who are actually interested in whatever it is that we are doing. I personally only work on products I find interesting, if I don't think there's any interesting problem to solve there, I go do something else. Nobody has ever asked anything about my lack of college degree in my entire career except IBM, and nobody wants to work at IBM anymore anyway.
I could probably not have even gone to college, it was just getting the first job that mattered. Probably wouldn't have gotten into Google or whatever with that first job, but it isn't hard to work your way up if you interview well.
Maybe we disagree about what "really successful" means. I personally feel that the way things are now if I was actually motivated to make as much as possible I could get promoted and ladder my way up about as far as I wanted to in this industry, but I have no desire to do this because I make plenty of money and only work about 25 hours a week. If I wanted to I could also go work for some exciting startup, but I would have to work a lot harder which is something I don't want to do.
The point being that what you do in high school, college, or even most of your career doesn't really matter that much if you are smart and can actually figure out what you are doing.
- no constant meetings - no / less legacy code or dealing with systems that cannot be changed easily because they support a million customers - the problems feel (at least to me) like our problems instead of your shitty problem that I need to deal with
It's not all roses, but substantially fewer meetings and directives from leaders I rarely see is half the battle.
Guess it’s working for them? I donno
I'm very glad to work in an industry where people can trade 5-10 years of their lives and then move on to other things that deeply matter to them. My only hope is that those people realize how fortunate they are. The vast majority of people will simply not have that opportunity.
For example, many schools have programs which cater to technical people. Most of them also require such students to study unrelated electives. I chafed at that at first ("but I know what I want to know"); later on in life I greatly appreciated it. I didn't know enough to know what I wanted to know.
Life can be more than doing what's expected or trendy ... as most of history shows us. A lot more. I enjoyed reading about someone making that leap. It has its perils, yes. But. A couple of quotes from Joe Campbell (learned about him in one of those non-tech courses):
"If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's."
" People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality."
So basically it is possible, and I think in the US too you can negotiate to work less hours.
Really bluntly, just as value-per-hour starts falling off rapidly after some point, it also increases super-linearly up to some point before that. Most overhead is constant regardless of if you work 24 or 40, you'll miss opportunities when you're not there, and you'll need to spend more time catching up when you are. That doesn't mean you can't work effectively, but I've watched multiple junior-mid devs think they've hacked the system but instead just forgo most learning/advancement opportunities.
If you're happy with the current salary and don't need any more fulfillment from your career than turning-the-crank, I guess go for it.
(In the US they'll just fire you, maybe even just for asking.)
"I'm wealthy enough to retire and not work another day in my life. Oh, woe be unto me"
AFAIK @eevee [1] identifies as she/her [2].