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Comment by dudul | Hacker News Reader

God do I hear you. If I could make the same money painting houses or working in a library I would do it in a snap.

It's probably mostly me, but tech today seems so boring, dumb, and shallow. It was so much more fun 10 or 15 years ago.

Maybe it's not tech and it's just that you were younger 10 or 15 years ago?

15 years ago I remember a lot more experimentation was encouraged and a lot less process. I could have an idea and get an enthusiastic "go for it". I could improve the way we deployed code. We had some semblance of "agile" but it was much more informal. I had passwords to everything.

Now everything is locked down. Everything is decided. The technologies are chosen, the process is complete and rigidly enforced. I pull tickets off the board at the start of a sprint. I finish the tickets. Day in and day out.

I think this is more of an organisational thing, as well as likely your team within the organisation

I can't tell the last 3 companies I worked for apart. It seems like a large percentage of companies today operate the same way. "Agile with 2 week sprints" never ending death march.

(As someone who often works for smaller orgs) It doesn't HAVE to be that way. None of the smaller orgs I've worked for use those systems. Only the big techy ones with a lot of bureaucracies do. They pay better, but you do much less, and push around a lot of paperwork instead of code. There ARE alternatives. Your average small town non-IT company probably still needs developers here and there, and they won't have the resources for the overhead of Agile bullshit. You'll typically have the keys to the kingdom and have to make shit work with very limited resources and a tiny team, but it's a heck lot more fun.

I tried a big corpo job for a bit, ugh, never again.

The things people experimented with 15 years ago are mostly settled now. Maybe you'd like a research engineer job in a lab or startup?

The main difference I've experienced is how people take themselves so seriously. The incessant hustle culture is so laughable, especially when you're working on a dumb app.

The tech itself is also an issue as you said. 15 years ago I was writing code, or at a minimum reading code to make it work. Now it's all these off the shelf AWS/GCP things that sort of work but you spend days to glue them together. You keep relearning the same thing because they all use slightly different versions of the same scripting language just because.

You are probably not in the right company. A lot of startups are what you are describing.

I was in tech for 35+ years - yes, I'm old. I'm out now not because I don't like the work, I really do and I'd prefer to be doing interesting work. I'm out because I'm tired of the interview games that are played now - that and I've pretty much got my retirement nestegg saved up.

Tech has definitely changed. Having to go through 8 or 9 rounds of interviews for one position only to find out you weren't selected at the end (that is if they don't just ghost you) wasn't a thing when I got into this line of work. In fact most of my early jobs I got after only 1 or 2 interviews for maybe a total of 90 minutes.

Part of it is that companies are just so damn afraid to hire the "wrong" person that they just can't make a decision. Part of it is because there are so many people looking for tech jobs right now that companies feel like they can play these silly games. More people need to refuse to play.

I still remember my 1st interview for my 1st job out of college: "You know java?" "Yes" "when can you start?"

I'm downright awful at the interview game and it causes me so much anxiety that I turn into a complete moron when I have to code in front of someone. Also the process involves completely different skills than the job actually requires.

You can make quite a decent income painting houses. I did it for awhile, got really good, and live in a very nice area. Painting a house can get you a ~$10k paycheck for ~2 weeks of work. Of course there are lots of variables here. Competition, slow seasons, bad customers, etc. It's stressful, and can be back-breaking.

I remember wishing to sit in an office all day, programming, in AC, making lots of money. But, man, I miss the freedom and fun.

I've thought about doing something like this. I have the income to buy all the equipment I could need, sprayers etc. Was also looking into pressure washing.

> Was also looking into pressure washing.

Why not both?

As pressure washing is necessary before painting a house. You can offer both services and just add to your customer base. I'm rethinking my life now and wondering if I should start it up again as well, lol.

Yeah after talking about it here, it immediately made sense to me to combine them. I've thought about just banking some income for a couple of months and buying the best equipment I can afford and then starting something. Also it's dumping snow right now so there won't be much house painting / pressure washing going on.

> It's probably mostly me

It's not.

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