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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Left the "industry" early for similar reasons. It used to be fun when it was looser, more bottom up. I was spoiled perhaps — but I can tell you the job ain't what it used to be.

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A lot of companies grew a lot, there's a lot of economic stress/caution, budgets are tight for things like travel, a lot of scrutiny around goals/performance measurement/financial metrics/etc. While there are certainly pockets of interesting activity, I see larger companies certainly battening down hatches. Was talking to someone just last night who is counting down the days to their next vest then they're out. I have to believe a lot of employee survey results at the moment are a train wreck.

I wonder though about the younger engineers who are just entering or have only recently entered the field. Do they even know what it used to be like?

I have met new engineers though that seem to enjoy the current structure of modern software engineering with all its unit tests, code reviews, lint, etc. Perhaps they would not have enjoyed the more freewheeling era that I thrived on.

I suspect a lot of engineers who grew up in a very process-oriented environment would find the way things were often done a couple decades ago to be utter chaos. It depends on the size of the company as well, of course, but a lot of process-oriented tooling like git, ticketing systems, CI/CD, etc. have become pretty widespread standard practice.

Yes, it was utter chaos, and we liked it that way because we were the ones driving the clown car, ha ha.

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