Comment by throwaway_43793 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway_43793 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

throwaway_43793

I feel that most of it is pointless. I'm past the stage where I can argue with people over stupid engineering architecture decisions. It's all full of BS and ego.

Most people would rather die defending their favorite language/stack/framework than change their POV. I'm tired of wasting my time on countless meetings trying to "convince my engineering team-mates to write tests/use strongly typed languages/avoid new-age BS like lambda/k8s".

Sure, leadership feels like BS as well, but at least this BS IS the job. With coding, the job is to write code, which usually ends up being 20% of the work time anyway, so I'd rather do BS all-day and get paid for that (often times bigger salary), while doing my own thing with my own architecture and framework, than try to explain my manager why it takes 7 days to change the width of the button because the app is so over engineered that any line you touch creates a butterfly effect that can bring the entire organizations to bankruptcy.

I get it. I freelance for small companies that don't have all of that nonsense, usually working directly for the owner or a stakeholder who can make decisions.

I gave up with the technical arguments a long time ago, too much effort trying to swim against the current. You get less of that outside of the software industry -- I worked for a long time in enterprise logistics where the team had to focus a lot more on solving business problems and a lot less on "best practices" or the latest language or framework. Not exciting but not as likely to induce rage, either.

I've worked for my own company for 30-some years. Occasionally I consult for a big corporate.

Each consulting gig reminds me why I'm not cut out for that world. It's everything coding is not. But when a corporate hires me to write some code, I understand that the corporate BS is the job .

I still love coding. But working for a corporate is not coding (at any level). Coding is what you get to do when there's a gap between meetings.

I know jobs are hard to get right now. But you might find more joy working in a small company, with people who already fit your preferred tech choices. I will say there's somewhat less job security and a lot less pay, but equally there's no bs and there's more freedom to actually code.

Sounds like you might enjoy switching jobs with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42289955 (not because of the "seniors" bit, but the more general thing where they're rewarded for biz outcomes and don't have any tech colleagues)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com