Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry?

I'm a self taught dev that worked my butt off and endured years of "we promote internally" lies at multiple companies to finally get paid to write code.

I've been job hunting since I was laid off last November, and I'm just over it. Everyone is unicorn hunting for X years in Y framework and if you don't have exactly that you need not apply. Meanwhile FAANG, Microsoft, and Intel keep handing out pink slips.

I still love coding, I've spent most of my non "job applications and existential dread" time since layoff building projects. But the thought of working for another company run by braindead execs that want to shove AI into everything, or sitting through another round of Becky from HR (whose most technical skill is sometimes using excel) asking me "so why do you want to work here" fills me with revulsion.

I've taken to telling people with absurdly high meeting count hiring processes and one way video screenings that I'm not interested. I find myself excited about the prospect of doing almost anything other than sitting through another planning week at some company that swears up and down they are "doing Agile."

I'm furious at how companies have decided to kick us to the curb, outsource our jobs to the cheapest country they can find, or whatever AI company has the tastiest complimentary crayons this week. I'm furious at the RTO nonsense everyone is increasingly pushing, because their managers are so awful at their jobs they can't figure out how to replace interrupting us in person with interrupting us via a slack message. I'm furious, and tired at the same time.

Anyone else?

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Hi! I've been doing this since 1994 (I started in the industry instead of going to college). I feel this way approximately once every 7-8 years. What I think I've learned is that I make stupid decisions reacting to those feelings.

Do those cycles happen to correspond with the tech market crashes? =)

No, my last one happened at a market peak.

Sometimes the peaks correspond with the most batshit eyebrow raisers from other parts of the company.

Everyone technical has their "Did I just hear someone say that with a straight face?" limits.

Oh, the seven year itch. I didn't think it would apply to work, but it makes sense that it would.

> I make stupid decisions reacting to those feelings.

Yea it seems like the right thing to do is to step away and take a sabbatical to cool down, and then remember that we like money, and that it's just part of the game to get paid.

Keep playing a wicked game whose rules are stacked against you for the shiny trophy. I’ll see you in therapy in a few years.

I guess another bit of advice is to do whatever you need to do to avoid ending up talking like this.

I mean the grandparent poster isn’t wrong. This whole system is stacked against us.

It’s difficult to keep moving knowing that we don’t have the ability to opt out of the way our whole society works. This is a very broad discussion that I know has many different facets to it, but the grandparent poster seems to be calling out what a lot of people believe is true.

I think when you start talking like this, you're winding yourself up, which is just not a good way to confront tough decisions.

> It’s difficult to keep moving knowing that we don’t have the ability to opt out of the way our whole society works.

Pretty much nobody ever did, in any society, with few exceptions. "Going to America" was one exception, and then "going west". But for most people, for most of civilization, that has never been an option.

And, in fact, the whole system is stacked against us less than it has been for most of the history of civilization. You aren't a serf. You aren't a slave. You aren't an indentured servant, or bound to a ruler or leader in any way.

But I think what many people are feeling is the first derivative. There was a time when the system worked better for people (at least for white males) - say the 1950s or 1960s. People can feel the first derivative being negative. They feel the loss of something. I think that's behind the surge of this sentiment.

> There was a time when the system worked better for people (at least for white males) - say the 1950s or 1960s

Even before adding qualifiers like “in America, in certain industries”, etc. You have to be very specific about what you mean by better and how you measure it.

There are certainly things that are worse now than then, but most of the time when someone actually measures it’s mostly true things were worse in the 50s and 60s.

Yes because white straight males have it so hard in America now all the statistics show it…

Is Reddit bleeding into HN now? The anti-work subs often feature these whiny hot takes like "woe is me, I don't get to do whatever I want" followed by a comical self-impressed implication that there's a great academic discourse behind this profound thought. Not used to seeing it here though.

I don’t think it’s specifically Reddit, but more like “normal life” bleeding into HN. The tech industry (and therefore, HN) has this weird “positive thoughts only” vibe where everything negative is considered whiny and curmudgeonly (as the newest HN posting guideline puts it).

Uncritical “this is great, that is awesome, things are wonderful” posts get a pass here and are not held to some high academic discourse standard, while “things are not so great, life is not that good” posts get responses like we’ve seen in this thread.

On the contrary, there are plenty of things to complain about and I personally find HN to be a tough, even cynical, audience. The guidelines don't say you can't be negative, you just have to explain your reasoning.

One doesn't have to subscribe to toxic positivity to see the childish absurdity of a statement like "It’s difficult to keep moving knowing that we don’t have the ability to opt out of the way our whole society works."

Regarding the childish statement: I think we’ve all felt like that at some point in our lives. If you haven’t, I kind of envy you. I can admit that when I had a child I agonized over the fact that I was bringing a life into this pretty terrible world without considering whether that new life wanted to be in it. Nobody actively consented to being part of society, it’s just a default. And it is extremely difficult to opt-out. I don’t think that’s a particularly absurd belief.

I have felt like that. When I was a child.

And you totally can opt out. You can go live in a mud hut in the woods. People do it all the time. But we both know that's not what the original commenter means by "opting out of society". They mean "I want to opt out of contributing to society while somehow still enjoying its benefits". Sorry, but it just doesn't work that way, and it is indeed childish to think that it should, at least as long as those benefits come from the contributions of other people.

Hi, I don’t fully disagree with you, but a gentle reminder that for many “contribution” is itself out of reach.

An aside: I remember when I was a child, my dad’s favorite coffee mug was black ceramic with a white monotype slogan “Life’s a bitch and then you die”. If that made you chuckle, maybe you’re in a pretty good spot :)

First I’d like to state that if you look at my post history I’ve been here far before the bleed in from Reddit. Your whole response is pretty cynical and leads in the negative direction so I don’t know how you would want to have a positive interaction with your comment, but I’ll try anyway.

Regarding “woe is me, I don’t get to do whatever I want”. No, that’s not the way that I’m thinking. It’s more that people CAN feel this way at one point or another in this society of ours. The original comment that I responded too was simply belittling the op for having those types of thoughts. It’s valid and important to address those feelings. Whether or not you can do anything to change the way society is based on those is another story.

I do believe that there is an actual discussion to be had about adjusting our society to allow for a more healthy balance, that’s not stacked against the middle and lower classes. I love my craft as a software engineer and I plan to continue working even if I make it to retirement. It’s just that the system we live in could be more kind to the people in it.

I love HN, but this type of mentality is pretty toxic and isn’t conducive to the healthy conversations that I enjoy in it AWAY from Reddit.

Fascinating! Try talking anyone working in literally any other industry and tell me more about how the whole system is stacked against software developers.

The person who told you you'd forever have a job working in tech lied.

What do you mean "we?"

I don't "like" a hammer, but I appreciate what I can do with it.

I think of money as more like a love/hate/appreciate relationship. I hate what I have to do to obtain money, but I love living indoors, so I appreciate the benefits having money provides.

I assume by industry you mean software development. And I’m not tired of that. Where else can you be integrally involved in different businesses? Communications, medical, education, e-commerce for anything/everything. We get to play in a lot of different playgrounds and potentially have a huge impact. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.

I am tired of the interview process. Here’s a take home assignment that you’ll code in isolation without feedback or interaction from us. Completely opposite of how you’d do the job. You’ll have to justify any assumptions you make. And if we don’t like your justification, pass.

Took 2 days on the assignment - this is kind of simplistic, not what we’d expect from a senior dev. Pass.

Take 4 days on the assignment - what took so long? We’d expect a senior dev to knock this out in 2 or 3 days. Pass.

Maybe we’ll tell you’re out. Or we’ll just ghost you. Depends on how our recruiting team is feeling that day.

Behavioral is generally where I “blow” it. I won’t lie and answer the “so tell me a time about xyz”. Sometimes xyz was terrible, and I didn’t handle it well. I know how I’d handle it now and can articulate that. Sorry. We’re looking for someone that handled this exactly right already.

Personally I screwed myself over the years by not chasing titles. I’ve done Staff and Principal level stuff. For years. But I didn’t fight for the title. So I generally get screened out of those pretty quickly because past titles don’t match what recruiting team has been told to look for.

But this is the price that must be paid. So I can work/play in a lot of different playgrounds. Keep applying. Keep trying. Eventually I’ll find something.

To my eye you seem to be extolling the virtues of the work. Which I still love.

For sure. I love my side projects and my jobs. I love writing code and designing systems. I’m burned out on the game I must play (and be good at) to be afforded the chance to write code, design systems, and be paid.

Isn't that part "the industry" being what it is?

Yeah. I just try to separate them in my mind or I’ll quit trying :) Not ready to retire just yet.

I just say no to take home assignments. Just no.

You can think of it in terms of time commitments. I could have applied to 30 places. I don't have four hours or 16 hours or whatever, times 30 different places. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Or you can think of it in terms of, they can waste hours of my time at the price of maybe 5 minutes of their own. This leaves them less incentive to be efficient.

Net result: They're not respecting my time. They're probably not going to respect me in other ways. So, no. Just no. I'll look somewhere else.

Oh yes. It's dog eat dog but among very lazy privileged dogs.

Don't confuse business with a humane enterprise. It operates according to a vague informal internal calculus, has little loyalty to staff or communities and will happily eat skilled, conscientious contributors. The utopian stuff about being intelligent and progressive is hyperbole; a side effect of a privileged class of the labor sector for 50 years for the simple reason of growth. Morals and ethics are after-thoughts. Communitas is to the FAANG nothing more than growth. As smart as this class thinks it is, it will wither and die when the corp welfare dries up.

Wtf are you talking about “priveleged”?

Many people worked day and night to become a well paid engineer. And some rich founders of companies still do, coming from nothing.

I’ve seen way more people struggling with mental health issues largely from overwork and stress than overly privileged. I think I’ve once or twice worked with an engineer that was kinda lazy but that’s out of hundreds of people I’ve worked with closely over the years. The only people who gain from calling engineers lazy and privileged are executives. All it does is widen the stick used to flog you.

> The only people who gain from calling engineers lazy and privileged are executives

also commies and alternatively-minded people

Who says commies these days in all seriousness? Alternatively minded people sounds like something out of a Facebook boomer fever dream.

why so serious? :)

> Who says commies these days in all seriousness?

Conservatives. And commies.

I was feeling burnt out until I got a pretty cool job a couple of years back. Instead of corporate crap we're building a product for scientists. I'm working on a small team with minimal interference. It feels good.

The downside is that this kind of job is rare. If/when this ends I'll probably need to go right back to the corporate grind. I don't have any other marketable skills, nor a financial runway, so.... realistically I need to do this until I die/retire.

I'm both excited and terrified about how the AI thing is going to play out.

I'm a fan. It's obviously the future. But I think it might entirely replace us, or at least 95% of us.

I also work for scientists and researchers, and it's a whole different atmosphere. Being research-driven instead if profit-driven makes all the difference. It's a great gig...at least until the funding dries out.

Yepppppppppppp

I imagine this won't help right now, as you and everyone else need work immediately, but for the future I'd suggest you research opening a small software development business with other programmers or, even better, a cooperative. This requires learning business management, and assuming risks, but as you see it isn't like normal job really provides security.

The main advantage is that under this arrangement the people who are your bosses, or otherwise rule over that you do, in a normal corporate job, such as sales people and accountants, become your employees and have to answer to you and your peers. Technical merit and knowledg becomes the driving force, not fantasy sales pitches and bean counting.

The main downside, besides the business risk, is likely going to be lower pay. But you'll be doing what you find valuable, so you'll have much higher enjoyment at what you do.

I've been thinking really hard about it. Just gotta pay the bills until I can find something that works.

Work is an intersection between what the company wants and what I'm willing to do. I can leave the company, try to change it from the inside and accept the consequences, or adapt to the situation until I can find or create something better.

But I find that whinging that work should fit my worldview becomes dis-empowering quickly. The temporary dopamine hit from getting sympathy venting and believing that the rest of the world is crazy makes me feel like something has changed when nothing has or perhaps will. And that just causes me to feel worse over time.

It's also interesting to see how opinions of what is fair, right, reasonsable, etc start to change as the contributor becomes a manager of a team and then an owner. The individual's context can have a lot to do with shaping the opinion.

Pretty done.

Employers: Making it an obligation that I act like we have in house tools that were meant to exist 3 years ago, doing everything manually.

Customers: So beholden to their technical debt that they would rather pay ten times the opex than the capex to remove the debt.

Shits me to tears.

Oh that's an entirely different flaming dumpster, but I feel that too.

Sometimes technical debt is kept rather than being fixed because "if we fix this some high-value technologically-challenged clients will no longer be able to use our service."

This is actually solvable but will need an "out of the box" thinking.

Its nice to think that way but for my clients it isn't the case. Its simply friction and inertia.

The box I am in has my employer on one side, happy to have made the suggestion to move away from old technical debt, but happier still to reap the rewards of a customer who will pay massive amounts of opex to keep shit running. And on the other side the customer, too lazy to have any internal conflict over technical debt and paying massive amounts of opex is preferably than directors having arguments with each other.

None of their technical debt is customer supporting. They do supply serial keys via a truly ancient aspx website but they can also port the backend component that handles those serials pretty much instantly. It really is a choice.

Software engineer from the 1970s here - it's run its course. It's like the music industry; it was what it was until it no longer was anymore. AI replaces processes, which replaces people. Qualified and educated software engineers coming out of Asia are cheap and plentiful, and the majors are stocking up on them and dumping the end of career Caucasians. Don't waste your time; unless you have a great idea then code that bitch and see if anyone will buy it. Develop people skills, get an MBA, learn to sell. AI can't do that (yet). And, yes, it's all about 'realizing the value' which means revenue generation and cost savings. Loyalty died decades ago.

I actually don't think AI is nearly as much an issue as office admins taking over and making professional collaboration somewhere between intractable and impossible.

Have better tools made software engineers irrelevant before? Lol no. They've meant more software which meant people needed more software engineers. AI is exactly the same.

It's like saying Ford's assembly line killed the automobile industry.

> Have better tools made software engineers irrelevant before? Lol no.

Yes that is true. But now we have a situation where in 5 years, the pool of available software engineers might grow from, I don't know, 10million people to 200million. Just like every person became a photographer with smartphones. This makes being a software engineer not a great career anymore. Unless you are a great programmer, just like the great photographers. But that will be a way smaller pool than the current highly paid software engineers.

Yeah I don't know, you already have to be really good (like able to do distributed systems architecture) just get a job. No one is paying script kiddies.

> No one is paying script kiddies.

Aren't they? I work with a few people that I'm sure the productivity would be higher without them, and that is not my first team like that. As I'm not the owner, I don't care, better to get this money out of tech to people's pocket. Stocks are already too high.

Do you have any friends who work minimum wage jobs? If not, find some and talk to them. I find it's EXCELLENT motivation to stay in this industry no matter how crap it seems.

I absolutely resonate with how you feel and what you have written though.

I moved from software to a minimum wage job. The jobs themselves were similarly enjoyable but software had better management and people treated me better when finding out what I did, while the minimum wage job gave me more exercise and a better connection with customers.

Note that many companies are pretending to hire in order to look successful/growing. They might be willing to hire if some unicorn candidate comes along, but in practice the job ad is just marketing.

Saw that article a while back where even Glassdoor was admitting something like a third of their job posts were probably ghost jobs. I think that's hurting everyone though, all for the same reasons.

I think it's basically become de rigueur, standard HR advice at this point. The the amount of fake job listings is off the charts, to the point you should assume it's fake until proven otherwise (on this side of the pond anyway)

Yeah I never apply to job ads these days unless I already know someone at the company. It's a complete waste of effort.

It is funny how 10 years ago, this situation would be perfect for some startup to disrupt the market but they just don't come anymore. Innovation is dead.

It sounds like you have burnout and a burnout-related attitude issue, it is understandable but not always helpful. A lot of people find professional help talking through this to be very beneficial.

I found working at a restaurant as a cook delightful for 6 months, it wasn't at all fair as I was also still living off severance but it was very relaxing having straightforward work that was always done at the end of the shift as well as a creative outlet where I could do something with my hands.

The frustration is understandable but now you've got to find your new direction either a new way to approach tech work to increase your marketability and to find jobs where you'll be happier or a different direction and something different to do. You can be furious but unless you channel that into something positive it's just hurting yourself. Let yourself be mad for a while and then make yourself ready for whatever is next.

After 35 years in tech and 10 years with the same company, today is my last day at a Fortune 100 tech firm. I left voluntarily with no new job lined up.

Never felt so relieved.

I realized that the depression I was experiencing was caused entirely by leadership, not my job. No matter which products I worked on, the same feelings of depression and ultimately loathing of the environment and process kept returning.

Don't get me wrong. My employer is world-class, and the benefits were amazing, but the software development and engineering culture are destroying their employees.

A sabbatical to rethink my career is in order.

I've saved for the past 20 years and realized that unless I take time now, I might never have the real opportunity to enjoy life the way I’ve dreamed. I now have two years of savings set aside, so we will see where life takes me. I might work for myself or simply step down from technology development into a new role.

Modern software engineering is killing its employees. Global teams across time zones working from 5:00am to 10:00pm., on projects that aren’t even mine—just because someone else left and needed someone competent to pick up the slack and carry the project to completion. Leaders overpromise and commit to deadlines without even asking if the solutions are feasible. Being reprimanded when you push back and say that the solution they just promised isn’t realistic or even possible.

I think we're going to see more of this. The general result of all the RIF/outsourcing seems to still be that the onshore employees workload increases and they burn out.

I'm genuinely glad that you said enough is enough. I hope you go make something rad and never need to go back to that world.

One more comment and a bit of advice for junior product and engineering staff. If someone else leaves, make it clear to your leadership that you cannot be expected to always pick up the slack. Don't get stuck in the cycle where leaders learn they can dump tasks on you and never backfill for the skill set. Becoming an essential team member will lessen your chances of getting promoted, and you will have very limited career change opportunities..

Sounds great until they’re PIPd. And I fully agree with you. The industry is hellbent on working people into the ground because they’re drunk on their newfound layoff powers. They absolutely love the turn around in their favor and I’ve personally witnessed management using horrible psychological tactics to overwork people in this environment. This industry really disgusts me, but hey, at least they’re going masks off finally so we can see them for what they really are.

I don’t care what people say online, I’ve seen excellent engineers treated like trash recently, some of which are also thinking of leaving the industry. That’s everyone’s loss. I’m so tired of all this short term thinking.

It’s a lose-lose situation: if you are getting your work done and not sweating, then you are seen as having more capacity, and you’re given more work until you are visibly at your breaking point. If you -are- dropping things because you’re overbooked, then you’re seen as performing poorly and get PIPd.

That’s why you should always have - an emergency fund, an up to date network, resume and career document.

If you live in any major city in the US, as a software engineer you are probably making twice the local median wage and should be able to build up savings.

Are you suggesting I don’t? I have those things but the industry is still in a bad place and is doing a lot of damage to good people.

If you have those things, you are empowered to say “no”.

I just came away from a 3.5 year stint at AWS - the most toxic of the big tech companies - the year before last. While many were losing sleep, overworking during their “focus”, I didn’t cancel a single vacation, refused to be overworked, and when they gave me the choice of accepting the severance and “leave immediately”, I accepted the severance without even listening to what I could do to possibly stay, reached out to my network, started interviewing and went to NYC for a week two weeks later to go to the US Tennis Open.

I had an offer ten days after my last day.

The next year in 2024, I got an invite at 7 PM for a “1-1” with my manager the next morning at 9 AM. I told my wife I’m about to be let go probably. She asked me was I okay. I said yes, set my alarm and rolled over and went to sleep.

I said thank you to my manager, asked them about the process to turn in my laptop (worked remotely) and asked about my severance and started interviewing that day - I had an offer within two weeks - staff architect working full time at a cloud consulting company.

I’ve been working since 1996 and I’m in my tenth job. I don’t panic, I don’t work over 40 hours a week unless I’m spending time learning something new to me, I don’t sacrifice my health or well being. I’ve been through the dot com bust, the 2008 recession and the shit show of the last three years.

It’s not “doing damage” to people who stay prepared. I don’t do the leet code grind. I don’t do take home test. I’ve never struck it rich in either BigTech or startups and I was a mostly your standard enterprise dev until 2020.

I mentioned my background here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44377380

Good for you. But I’ve seen the psychological damage this current environment is doing to folks and it just excuses it away in some illusory realist stance. So maybe don’t speak for everyone like they’re failing for being human.

I’m saying it only does “psychological damage” when you start treating your job as more than a transaction where you exchange money for labor. If you have savings you have the agency to say “no” to toxic environments and stop stressing over an organization that if you got hit by a bus would forget you ever existed before your body grows cold.

> Leaders overpromise and commit to deadlines without even asking if the solutions are feasible.

Because salespeople promised the client.

Terrible.

Solidarity my friend. I'm doing the same.

Offshoring massively increasing, Scrum, story points, poor leadership with no vision, pointless projects, working across timezones, different language levels, having to understand 2-5 cultures, no in-person interaction with my colleagues, haughty Product Managers...totally burnt out.

How have you been in the industry for 35 years (myself 30 years in a year) and not had the optionality to say “no” to being overworked? I’ve worked for 29 years across 10 companies from 60 person startups to two F10 companies (including one FAANG) and always knew the worse case for saying “No” is that they could fire me and I just get another job.

I was at Amazon warehouse for a year, I was getting contract offers for 6 months I was like f that wanting security. Eventually I took one and I'm at it now, six fig job. It was crazy though like impossible to get hired unless you went through a recruiter. I don't have a degree but have years of work exp.

Edit: I did see some news thing about trying to undo/keep 174.

Yeah, I've heard about that 174 stuff too. Even if it was changed tomorrow and it was the actual reason for all the stagnation in hiring that some people say it is, I would expect it to take months for that impact to start showing up.

Anyone who can engineer software systems is likely able to engineer some kind of company. Not the path for everyone, but it is one way of moving forward without staying linked to the industry.

The idea has been very high up on my list. But I need to pay the bills until I can put something together. I'm not interested in the current trend of "building" a company that burns VC money to prop up a garbage product just long enough to be sold and enshittified.

Do you mean engineer a company as in start one, or work in business side of existing company?

The core issue here isn't just market conditions or bad hiring practices. It's that tech _workers_ have spent decades thinking they were somehow different from other _workers_, that they were 'partners' with capital rather than the labor behind it.

You're experiencing what people in every other industry have dealt with for generations: being treated as a disposable cost center when it's convenient for ownership. The solution isn't individual resilience or '''grinding harder''', it's collective action.

Tech workers need to organize. We need unions. We need to stop pretending that stock options and ping pong tables make us anything other than workers whose interests are fundamentally opposed to those who fire us on a whim to boost quarterly numbers.

The people who laid you off, who are outsourcing jobs, who are trying to replace workers with AI — they are not on your side! They never were! This is class warfare, and we tech workers have been deluding ourselves supporting the wrong side.

I've been in a union before. The benefits were bad, the pay was bad, after negotiations they were still bad. The union said "we tried." So I have trouble seeing them as the panacea that is marketed.

I think we need more cooperatives not unions

Are you trying to extrapolate from a single data point? Yes, some unions are bad. Obviously. In no way does this invalidate the benefits of unions in general, especially when compared to the tyranny of unrestrained corporatism.

Sounds good, doesn't work. Source: ask rail workers in the U.S. under Biden.

In some way, software development is going the way hardware development went years ago. The engineers built tools and modules that put most of them out of work. Who designs amps or discrete circuits these days? Once you design a piece of hardware that works well, it can be re-used ad-infinitum, and most hardware today is really firmware running on microcontrollers. So it is a natural evolution that software is becoming automated. Unfortunate, but also an opportunity to do more interesting things. It is the managers that need to be replaced unless they can see further than the tecchies, and I have known some that do, usually they are ex-tecchies.

> The engineers built tools and modules that put most of them out of work.

Yes, but no. I'm in hardware. I deal with hardware engineers. This part of the industry is alive and well. You might not see it, but it's there.

> Once you design a piece of hardware that works well, it can be re-used ad-infinitum, and most hardware today is really firmware running on microcontrollers.

Yes to the first part, it's just like code. Write once, then run it perpetually. Except that isn't really the case. There are still jobs for maintaining COBOL systems. Likewise, legacy hardware needs to be replaced, improved, or repaired. Old companies die, new ones swoop in and capture market share. My employer is the only manufacturer I know of for a legacy system component. They have a captive market because no one else wants to take the two weeks in CAD, and phone time with the contract manufacturers. This kind of thing is everywhere.

> So it is a natural evolution that software is becoming automated.

Again, yes, but no. We automate things as a matter of course. We are engineers. This doesn't mean fewer jobs, it means a shifting job market. IE loom operator vs hand weaver.

I'm still trying to get my foot in the door. Ever since I started building 'raw' pages for people who had either "business ideas" or ran a 100 person sales team, no one has known or respected the difficulty of what goes into what we build or how it is actually a better solution than whatever they were asking for originally. Maybe once I actually break into the industry i will finally find a manager who understands what the solution is and how we get there in six months and equates that to a proper working solution instead of a internal-politics motivated project to get and edge over some other dept.

I feel that right in my soul. The other side of the coin is they are currently destroying the talent pipeline by keeping smart motivated people out of roles where they could learn fast and grow. The myopic strategy(or lack thereof) is astonishing to me.

You are delusional. I remember when I was starting (over 10 years ago), I worked with a guy who had a PhD in physics. We were doing WordPress stuff and I was getting paid higher than him (to add insult to injury I was based in a cheap third-world country and he was UK based). Since I've interacted with him a bit, I got to discover that he was very smart, mathematically inclined and did actually write correct English.

There is still no demand for physics. There is a world where we are heading for another bull market in tech but there is a also a world where this slump remains here forever. My guess is on the latter. The talent in the global south has considerably caught up in the last 15-20 years in terms of skills, language and numbers.

I would guess that of every 10 dollars spent in tech nowadays, 9 go to big tech, really Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft. We won't have another tech boom anytime soon, unless they start buying companies like crazy again

Ive been around since 2004. I've seen this cycle a few times now in the industry.

An accountant, proper CPA, needs like 5-10 hours of training per year to keep on top of their industry.

IT? Are we on mainframes? no we moved to individual pcs? I mean we moved to the mainframe in the cloud? No we moved to individual ai on GPUs? No we moved to the ai in the cloud?

IT is constantly changing and 10 hours per day of training isnt enough and if you're caught on Y framework when the industry moved on from that framework. Then you're SOL. Not many people still got those fortran jobs.

Not done, but hedging my bets. I started licensed life insurance business, also a licensed day trader. I have 40 years of experience. Got laid of in 2003, 2021, and recently 2025 a few months ago. Software development is now just a hobby for me now. From what I have seen the job market is very specific. The recruiters are only looking for rare skill sets, but also folks who have the update skill sets for cloud migration projects. What has made the field bad is fragmentation of development. C/C++ was the meal ticket years ago. I remember in 2003 I had to get a java programmers cert just to get a job, back then 1000 people would apply for 1 job, then in 2004 the job market opened back up.

After a few months I finally got a job interview this week. Someone called back from a previous job I worked on.

I have noticed that a lot of places development is offshore in India or eastern europe.

It's not just ai that is taken jobs, but also cutbacks in government contracting. The tech layoff wave that started in 2022 was partially fueled by a change in the US tax code, specifically Section 174 of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). This change significantly altered how companies could deduct research and development (R&D) expenses. Previously, companies could fully deduct R&D costs in the year they were incurred, but the TCJA mandated that these expenses be amortized over several years (5 years for domestic and 15 years for foreign). This resulted in higher tax burdens for tech companies, especially those heavily invested in R&D.

I was very close to quitting software development but luckily I didn’t. I was frustrated with work-life balance, interview processes, etc.

Here people are comparing software development with minimum wage jobs and saying you should be thankful. Ok try comparing with equivalent jobs.

Many non-tech corporate jobs have similar or better work life balance. I have friends who were recently hired with one or two interviews. Pay may not be as high but their stress levels also seem a lot lower.

So I came close to switching career, took classes, talked to potential employers, they seemed eager to hire me. But I got cold feet. I thought about my dreams and decided to pursue one of my hobbies as a side business with ultimate goal of doing it full-time. At this point, job is simply a means to end

Yeah, I have heard that one way to ruin a hobby is to monetize it. Maybe it will happen to me eventually but I don’t feel burned out anymore. I’m energetic every morning, I work hard at my current job because it is providing seed money for my dream business.

This is to say go ahead try switching industry, take classes, make new friends, figure out something. Talking to various people actually helped me figure out my dreams.

First time?

I don't know your background or experience but I do know there are a lot of people in tech now who have never experienced a recession. Also, this startup image (which persisted to these being big companies) of them being employee-friendly, maverick and casual was really just a function of the boom times.

That veneer is long gone. We are now in the era of permanent layoffs to suppress wages and every one of us that can be replaced by AI will be.

I think for many tech workers, they're in for a rude awakening that they're just like any other worker and not special or somehow immune to the adversarial nature of the employer-employee relationship.

Back in 2000 and 2008 it took sa few years but the jobs came back. One might assume that'll happen again but I'm honestly not so sure. 2008 saw the elimination of a whole class of entry-level professional jobs for millenials that never came back.

Thing is, I don't think much of the economic activity in the tech sector is actually creating value anymore. Big tech are milking their respective golden geese until they inevitably die. Startups are largely just angling for a buyout in the AI gold rush that'll largely benefit the founders and the employees not so much.

Nobody really has products anymore! Big Tech’s only product is their stock price and will do pretty much anything to improve it. Small Tech’s product is themselves and they are just trying to sell that product to Big Tech, so that they can have their exit and then spend their time working on Big Tech’s stock price, too.

Also: I lived through both 2001 and 2008 and today seems very different. During the previous downturns, life was still basically OK for those who managed to keep their jobs. All they needed to fear were the next round of layoffs. Today, executive leadership seems hell bent on both reducing staff AND griefing those employees they keep in various ways to make sure they know their place. Perks and benefits disappearing, compensation frozen, expanding work expectations, general antagonism, and so on. I don’t remember any of that happening in previous downturns.

Sometimes I feel like the guy in the mongodb is webscale video and just want to go get a farm out in the country and shovel pig shit all day.

That video keeps coming up in conversations all over. It's like the universe is trying to tell me something. I just wish I knew what it was. =)

I imagine that shoveling pig shit all day gets old very quickly. It's very easy to try working at a farm and seeing if you like it.

One of the jobs I’m most thankful of having was my very first one. On a farm. Dealing with pigs.

You can have that job. I’ll put up with 8 bosses, tps reports and air conditioning.

If you have the money, there's nothing wrong with quitting and doing your own thing for a while. Alternately, working for a fundamentally different kind of company can be rewarding. I found working at a small business (a sales company where tech was an afterthought) to be delightful and weird; everything was non-standard and many roles were just not hired for, but everyone's door was open and there's no bureaucracy, so whatever I wanted to be would be in my domain. The workload was low, so I made my own work and got into Facilities work, learned how to check the fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, and elevators. -And you know what? I opened up some of the smoke detectors and detected prior smoke in them; visual charring and melted plastic. The smoke detectors had been recalled for catching fire. I filed for replacement costs from the company, and now our smoke detectors won't burn the building down, which I think's pretty neat.

I wish I had "do my own thing for a while" money. Sounds like you found a nice place to still do something useful but catch your breath. I'm hoping I can find something similar.

Seriously. And even if you do have savings, for every N years you dig into that savings, you are sacrificing XN years of retirement savings that you are very likely to need later. Where X is always greater than one, and significantly greater depending on your age when you take that nice sabbatical.

I didn't intend to say "do your own thing" to mean "make no effort to generate any earned income." You could instead slow down and take on a la carte freelance/contract work. -Or you could take a risk for a couple years, and maybe your project launches into the abyss of space, never to be seen by a single soul; at least you'll have something to show for your work gap years.

-But I would caution against treating life too much like an Excel spreadsheet, too. It's never going to turn out anything like you plan, and I'd advise to critically examine wealth advisor boilerplate. At least for federal US tax code filing HoH (which is what I'm familiar with), we get >$60k tax-free to realize in long-term capital gains each year. If you can generate what you need now to live on with investment growth at least matching inflation -- and I'll point out you can get a serviceable house on an acre in a safe neighborhood for <$150k in most US states if you're willing to live away from a major metro -- you can likely generate enough to live on in retirement, especially if social security and medicare still exist. I take ~$20k/year in contract work and keep my unearned income under $11,950 for EITC purposes, with remainder/majority of my annual deduction eaten at least partially by my daughter's capital gains (she gets SSI survivorship which I dump directly into an individual/unsheltered brokerage account), and without mortgage payments, things are peachy -- I don't even spend that much per year.

Yes, you aren't alone

I'm exhausted and burned out too. I'm fortunate that I can take some time away from work to recover and hopefully regain some passion for this, but I'm strongly considering retraining for a different industry

I'm happy to talk, as someone also going through the same stuff. Let me know, I can drop some contact info

I'm not terribly hard to find, but vibe checking all the Ask HN readers is about as much "talking about it" as I really want to do. I normally try to keep focused on the positive and use my time constructively. Happy to make a connection to do the latter though.

What industry are you thinking of moving towards?

I'm not sure. I was thinking about going back to school and re-training entirely. Maybe electrical engineering or something. Some days I just want to be a plumber or electrician.

I've been working in web and I really do like building front ends, but I'm very tired of being "full stack", especially when the stack is a cobbled together mishmash of microservices and cloud architecture that just keeps growing in complexity

I just want to be able to focus on one thing and get good at it. Being "full stack" feels like it's preventing me from really focusing in and becoming an expert on any one thing

Unlike professions like medicine, software industry had been permissive. And there were history major becoming CTOs of leading finance companies, which leaked every consumer recoreds. Once the industry will gets rid of the pretenders, the deserving people will find their place.

I hate this elitist HN argument and I have a degree and a long interest in software dev since I was a child. It’s vacuous gatekeeping at best and doesn’t explain the state of the industry. Yeah I know, bootcamps, blah blah. I’ve worked with great engineers who are also getting treated horribly.

In many respects, the industry is destroying itself right now, it is a rotten system.

Blind people have taken hold of the reigns, and they believe that they can do whatever they want because you don't have a choice. This continues right up until it can't, and they learn the hard way that there is always a choice.

Quite a number of us feel this way, and its not just dev work either.

Many SA's, SREs, IT Architects etc all feel these things, and there is a lot of nonsense across the board both with and without AI.

The borderline coercive exploitation, and market manipulation of factor markets, are driving a lot of people to other areas disruptively at great personal loss.

This transition naturally happens anytime the personal costs of work involved exceed the pay being provided in a workplace or business sector, and these blind people believe they can get ahead, and continue full steam ahead by imposing costs on others through chaotic distortions, without any real consequence.

Someday they will the consequence that shows they are wrong, but they won't recognize it, and those consequences are real.

Let them get what's coming to them, and just step out of the way. Do what's best for you.

It sounds like you should look at taking a break/breath then begin retooling so you can do something that you can support yourself with, and just let those people who are exploiting others burn themselves down. Karma can be a bitch.

Goodwill in such environments inevitably runs out, and people quiet quit and just collect a paycheck. Any intelligent person rolls back their individual production as the pay gap vs. personal cost increases. It is not your job to educate these suka people, and they wouldn't listen to you if you tried.

I would suggest meditating a bit on what exactly drives you and aim towards productive activities that follow that path, and finding like-minded people who do listen, this is quite hard today given Ahriman's influence but is still doable.

Inner clarity is inner strength.

Just try to bear with it and keep applying, and prepare answers for the "stupid" questions, these are not going to go away. And yes, uncertainty is always tough.

You are also right in that the more deliberate way to get an increased salary or position is to change jobs. Yes, it happens internally as well, but it's harder to achieve. Also, going through multiple jobs is better for both experience but also in seeing what the industry actually looks like. When you work at the same company for many years, especially if that's pretty much the only job you've had, then you have just one data point, which is to say, you really don't know much.

The job market isn't booming, though it does seem to be picking up.

The tech industry was always a little slimy but it's out of hand now. I've lost too much respect for the role of innovation in this current version of our society. We've passed a point where it's used against people more than for people.

Day after day here watching people with no substantive activity on their account spam their endless shovelware slop projects, I just can't feel like I want to be a part of this anymore.

"Used against people." Those are good words. I am also deeply tired of that. I'm absolutely guilty of being one of those idiots that still thinks we could have nice things and products that work for reasonable prices if we just cared a little.

So much of tech now treats their customers as cattle to be corralled and milked, rather than humans with agency and needs to fulfill with a product. Most of the innovation happening is either in “stronger, more expansive corralling” or “more efficient milking.”

Sure, but just keep in mind a couple things:

One it’s a down market, the worst since the dotcom bubble. Companies are going to be needlessly selective to keep the hiring people busy, and also to get people who are the most desperate and motivated as they’ll probably get them cheaper. Being self taught may not matter practically speaking, but it's not doing you any favors right now unfortunately.

The other thing the bear in mind is - this is the norm at a lot of industries, we in software have just frankly had it really easy for a couple decades now. What seems unreasonable to you is what lot of people have to go through even in a good market.

I sometimes get feelings or down and up markets (namely my checking account) but do you have any good reliable sources on market trends for tech employment?

FRED has some data

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JPNM

Fucking nice. Thank you

Another is: https://hnhiring.com/trends

I just released this song… maybe somewhat related to these feelings.

The lyrics were inspired by Anthony de Mello's observation that most of us are like people on a bus, passing through the most beautiful country imaginable, but the shades are drawn and we are arguing about who has first place on the bus.

The music and song title were inspired by Warren Zevon - Lawyers, Guns And Money.

So inspired by two great philosophers.

https://lynkify.in/album/bus-rides-shades-and-windows/auUoEf...

Maybe someone should tell the business leadership and politicians to stop pulling down the shades on our behalf.

If you're willing to leave Silicon Valley, there are a lot of small companies out there that need one or two or a handful of decent software developers to do useful but non-cutting-edge work. They can't pay Silicon Valley money, obviously, but you get to be a lot closer to other kinds of work, which you might find satisfying in its own way.

I actually specifically look for those smaller companies. I don't live in Silicon Valley, nor have I ever made Silicon Valley money. I've never wanted to live there and I haven't wanted to work for FAANG since Google did away with "don't be evil."

If you happen to know where they are posting jobs, aside from the normal terrible job sites because I've been on them since November, I'm interested.

I wish I had something more specific for you, but my experience is more on the demand-adjacent side (as an EE) rather than directly on the software side. The companies I've worked at have posted on the regular job sites but mainly worked through recruiters. Companies do often post announcements on their LinkedIn, if they have one.

I share your frustration with the fad-driven, cramming-AI-into-everything, rent-seeking model of modern software, and I wish you luck in your search.

No LinkedIn, I couldn't take another "this is what appendicitis taught me about B2B sales" post. But I bothered all the recruiters I know and fed my resume into the paper shredder of all the companies candidate portal early on.

I suspect all those great little companies are either laying low or staffed up with the glut of ex-<prestigious name> devs. Or the huge pool of ex federal employees who have lots of experience in "legacy" systems.

Well, you can either be righteous with your pride or go on LinkedIn where the jknd snd recruiters are.

Here's a typical job in that category. Boring but practical Chicago Dryer.[1]

    Industrial Controls Engineer
    Chicago Dryer
    Chicago, IL

    $80,000 to $110,000 Yearly
    Vision, Medical, Dental, Paid Time Off, Life Insurance, Retirement
    Full-Time

    5+ years of experience in controls & software engineering
    High-level knowledge of one or more programming languages (C, Pascal(structured-text))
    Familiarity with Windows, Linux & Realtime operating systems
    Familiarity with electrical codes for industrial machinery
    Electrical design & CAD experience for automation-controls
    Solid knowledge of classical-physics (mechanics & motion)
    Mechanical aptitude and ability to work with hand tools
    Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
    Ability to work well with personnel at all levels
    Beckhoff TwinCat3 experience is a plus
    Jira and GIT experience is a plus
    Electronics design & trouble-shooting is a plus

Leader in the heavy machinery that takes clean linen items after washing and dries, sorts, folds, and stacks them by the ton. There are vision systems and robotic grippers involved. They've been in business for over a century, building heavy duty laundry equipment. It's a very steady business. Probably good job security. The startups making all the noise in clothes folding, such as Foldimate and Laundroid, went bust. Chicago Dryer equipment processed a few tons of laundry while you were reading this.

That's what a blue-collar programming job looks like. But it will be a very clean blue collar.

[1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/c/Chicago-Dryer/Job/Industrial-...

How strict is something like that on the demands for CAD and Electrical Design stuff? Because I've never done any of that. I'd be happy to learn it, but that doesn't seem to matter anymore.

Wisdom in the past was, if you have half of it, apply, because it's always a wish list. I don't know if that still applies, though,

How do you find these positions?

I would also like to know

I've never worked in Silicon Valley but every company I've worked for is infected with Silicon Valley brainrot

Look for large companies dealing in physical goods. I work on warehouse software for a company selling motorcycle helmets and bbqs. Its a great intersection of tech and industry.

That's pretty cool. I would expect most of that sort of company to be buying off the shelf products these days but I guess some still roll their own

Thank you for the advice, I really appreciate that you took the time to do that. Very kind of you

Once you hit scale there are very few off the shelf solutions. Every major application is going to have some degree of customization involved.

Personally, I maintain a legacy codebase of a propietary application running several distribution centers. New feature requests, bug fixes, integrations, ever-changing business requirements mean its worth having staff on payroll to do it, as the contractor costs to do so are exorbitant.

There are around 3 million software developers in the US, most working for regular old enterprise companies in most major metropolitan areas in the US. All of the job boards have openings for those positions.

I spent my entire career from 1996-2020 working locally in Atlanta - 7 jobs in all - until my last three jobs that have been remote.

Which job boards? Monster is out of business and Indeed is so flooded with garbage that it is mostly useless.

I work at exactly one of these companies. It's been thoroughly refreshing, picking my tools and language, being able to defend my choices and help make new ones, have ownership of my part of the product, and see that all bear fruit going from a product that was on fire and mired in tech debt when I got there, to a smoothly running machine with my code at its heart now.

They definitely can't pay inflated Silicon Valley salaries, but I'm also at much less risk of getting that pink slip when some far-off executive decides I'm extraneous. I'm two hops from the company CEO, and even though I haven't met him, he's quite aware of my contribution and has requested projects for my skillset. I have direct lines to most of the executive engineers. That's gratifying.

I'm over the industry cause it over-promised an under-delivered and the way it "changed" the world is largely through monopolies, extractive middlemen and manipulation.

Don't forget a healthy dose of vendor lock-in!

I have good c++ tests, no degree, a portfolio, and I cannot find a job in France.

I think I'm going to change country, I wish Scandinavia.

Currently working in a kitchen for schools, I will probably lose weight. I go home around 3pm, nap, and do some 3d modeling and "level design".

I feel getting paid to write code doesn't work anymore (did it ever work?).

The bar in FAANG, which I've been luckily employed at for 9 yrs, is to i) identify an important business problem ii) propose a design to solve it iii) implement the design yourself or with the team iv) demonstrate solution and/or real world impact.

Coding, it turns out, is the easy part, which can be done by AIs as of 2025 :)

Identifying important business problems to solve, and translating those into engineering systems is still beyond the reach of AIs (luckily).

That said, human's job is getting harder everyday. Expectations go up every f'in year. The demands often look impossible (it turns out this is how you get the most out of people).

So best of luck! It's pretty tough out there. Too many new grads struggling. And relatively few jobs.

That said, this too shall pass. I've seen 3 major downturns since 2000, and this is just one of them. Boom and bust happens...

>> I've taken to telling people with absurdly high meeting count hiring processes and one way video screenings that I'm not interested.

Same here — it’s gotten way out of hand.

If you have any capital saved, maybe it’s time to go on QuietLight or another site and buy a small SaaS company with an SBA loan and work for yourself.

You’ve clearly been through the wringer and picked up real experience. So why not grab two others like yourself and build something of your own? Pick any industry. Eventually, you’ll hit a similar wall. Everyone does. That’s the moment that sorts people. Most quit. Very very few push through. Those with passion, as you claim ("love").

Honestly, I’m one of those brain-dead folks, trying to jam AI into everything. Not because it’s always smart, but because I don't have a choice. We pitch anything without AI, and no one even listens. No budget, no job—simple as that.

It’s a social epidemic. People look at each other. We all keep pushing things too far in one direction, even when it makes no sense. There are many ways to do some other things. (I'm reminding myself here, not you).

Bottom line: pick yourself up, find your crew, and start building. Then, lead like a brain-alive exec.

used to see 80-100 lines of good code per programmer.

seeing up to 2400 lines a day in 4 hours of deep work. LLMs will greatly reduce the amount of people required, mainly seniors. erode the path for junior training and put further pressure in an industry continually contracting since 2021.

the amortization of software developing as R&D expense among many years implemented by the IRS didn't help either

> used to see 80-100 lines of good code per programmer.

For what time frame? A day? A week? A ... ?

> seeing up to 2400 lines a day in 4 hours of deep work.

Now I get it.

Lines of code is not a metric for correctness nor fitness of purpose.

> LLMs will greatly reduce the amount of people required, mainly seniors.

This is just high-grade speculative bovine excrement.

I think the amortization is the primary issue, TBH.

I don't think so. Downturn is global, but amortisation issue is for a local market.

Not primarily the fault of the IRS, as they were just following the law passed in 2017 that didn't go into effect until years later. But there's a chance it gets changed back to the previous way by the same people who passed it.

> LLMs will greatly reduce the amount of people required, mainly seniors

Nope. LLM is unable to reason about correctness of code, since they only regurgitate code based on "most likely to come next".

Rather, senior programmers will even be more important to check for correctness. And this will likely lead to senior programmer burnout.

Come to academia.

I don't mean "become a professor"; I mean be a software developer at a college or university. They need them in large teams (IT department of a larger university) down to solo devs (working for a single department at a small liberal arts college—this is where I've been for 15 years).

It's true that you won't get the same level of pay—frankly, I've been woefully underpaid—but, by and large, they're not trying to replace everyone with AI, they adhere to basic standards of ethics, and they don't subscribe to crunch culture. If you're working in an academic department, chances are your bosses will basically think you're doing magic all the time and give you massive respect. Plus the job security is overall much higher. (Well, it has been. I suppose the current political situation may create some extra instability, depending on the position.)

Do these jobs get posted in all the normal places, or is there somewhere else I should look?

You might very well need to go looking at individual institutions' websites. Whether they get posted to places like Indeed or LinkedIn is going to be much more hit and miss than with big industry players or tech startups.

And yes, I am very personally aware of just how time-consuming and frustrating that can be.

I know a person that did this, 25+ years in industry.

He was forced into retirement after half a decade of what sounded like tortured politics, gross mismanagement and fiscal waste.

Many times they said they wanted something, he would do the legwork, collect requirements, and put up preliminary PoC, it would be approved, but then they scrap it at a cost of hundreds of thousands only 6 months later and then go with the 2nd outside vendor at a greater cost doing half of what was asked with 4x more people required on staff.

It turns out the first outside vendor was lied to initially by the Administration, they asked for and reviewed the existing work already done, and said they couldn't match or do better for the locked in budget amount already paid which met the needs they asked for, but ultimately didn't use at all. This almost never happens.

Those people who initially got hired as a result of that, were laid off within 1-2 years, and the work fell to helpdesk (without the resources).

The last few years they removed the various positions he had started with, eventually throwing him on helpdesk in-person and on the phones when they laid off the student/staff helpdesk people.

This was following Covid, and he was in that 90% fatality band of age demographics related to Covid, and they still forced him to in-person work.

In many areas, there is a large gap between needing something, and getting something. They may have a need, but they don't have the demand, and that's a structural issue that only gets worse over time until it fails and must be rebuilt from scratch.

Its really telling about these type of employment structures when the public data is known and shows certain age groups are at extreme risk, and they choose to put their workers in harms way anyway.

Given the many horror stories I've heard through the grapevine about academia (over decades), as well as the experiences that confirm many of those stories;

Sure there is a great need but through decades of scandals, mismanagement, and crises they've burnt the bridges and have a rightfully earned infamous level of notoriety.

The reason the need is so high is because they largely can't find anyone willing to subject themselves to that level of organizational malice.

The competent people won't even bother applying because there is no amount of money they would trade for their personal sanity.

I mean...sure, there are horror stories. There are horror stories in the corporate world, too. Any kind of large organization can become corrupt, misaligned with its own goals, or fully dysfunctional.

I'm very sorry about what happened to your acquaintance, but I guarantee their experience is not representative, based on 30+ years of living and working in and around academia.

No.

But I live and breathe tech even in my spare time[1]. You gotta learn to roll with the sh-t and set boundaries. I hate to say it but turn off HN, this place a hype machine designed to make you feel bad. It's like "Roast and Toast" x 1000 on here, not reality. It's toxic in a very passive-aggressive way (rather than reddit toxic, which is just aggressive).

I've been at this since 1988. (Made a few personal bad choices so not retired, lol [2]) I've changed jobs every 5-7 years since the post-2000 implosion. Don't bother with the FAANGs, its all style over substance tossing-off investors: they don't care about you at all and their top level management just want to be centibillionaires (or trillionaires).

Find smaller companies, that's what I started doing 20 years ago. I started a new job as a senior director at a 5000 person company 3 years ago, most money I've ever made in my career, great people who enjoy their work, no pressure to move up the ladder unless you want to (not much ladder for me, but the younger devs are happy to stay put without the dumb pressure to give 150% every year). Our revenue is <10B, and it is a German company so there's minimal (unremarkable) equity, but the base salary is great.

Find a company that makes boring products that sell. Mine is a stable boring company, making real-ware silicon products and associated cloud services for medical and automotive industry. Look for a company trying to grow profits at a normal rate, not a FAANG rate. Avoid the hype. Be boring. Slow and steady.

[1] also, if you're only in tech because you think that's where you're supposed to be, and don't have a deep passion for it, you're gonna have a bad time.

[2] Oh, and don't accidentally get someone you don't like pregnant. Because then you're completely f--ked.

> Find smaller companies, that's what I started doing 20 years ago. I started a new job as a senior director at a 5000 person company 3 years ago

That's a smaller company?

The biggest company I've ever worked for was 400 people

The smallest was 4

Lol you're right. :)

I worked at FAANGs so I consider 5000 small.

> I hate to say it but turn off HN, this place a hype machine designed to make you feel bad. It's like "Roast and Toast" x 1000 on here, not reality. It's toxic in a very passive-aggressive way

I have a completely different experience of HN than you do. There are the stray toxic folks, sure, but overall, this is one of the best dev forums--actively moderated, generally filled with intelligent comments, and often offering good advice. Just look at the thoughtful and understanding answers to this very post.

Yeah, it's currently full of AI shovelware because that's what the hype bubble demands, but there's a lot more good stuff here than not.

But they also have only had an account for an hour and clearly didn't read the whole post so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

OTA.

One time accounts.

HN ain't safe from stylometry.

http://bradconte.com/files/misc/HackerNewsParodyThread/

Most of the worlds 3 billion+ adults don’t have a “passion” for their jobs and do have an addiction to food and shelter. There is nothing wrong with working only to exchange labor for money.

The last thing I want to do when getting off of work is spend time coding and I haven’t written a single line of code that someone hasn’t paid me for in 30 years.

For whatever reason, my career has been driven by curiosity, first computers and Fortran II, then real-time medical data analysis, then compilers, then collection of batch financial data from dozens of sources, then low-latency financial trading backed by genetic programming, then application security.

I've luckily managed to avoid too many brain-dead execs, but there have been spells that the gig is boring.

Looking back on it, there have been very few spells in which I have not been programming, if not for a gig, but on my own to explore my curiosity.

It's the highest paying cushiest career on earth. If you don't want to grind a little bit to secure that then don't. Just make less money doing something harder. It's your choice and personally I'm happy if there's less competition

Software being a better career than other careers doesn’t relate to criticism in the post.

it absolutely does. go find a less ridiculous industry, it'll be more stable and it will pay less

Now Hiring: Not You (2017): https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/now-hiring-not-...

https://archive.ph/xAfha

I'm in this article, and I don't like it. lol

Hard not to feel this way sometimes given the quality of some job listings and the negativity bias here and broader media. In such moments of despair I recall two axioms: change is inevitable and ongoing, and talent rarely resides in the C-suite.

I'm only 10 years in and currently at a science non-profit using a dead/toy framework, and honestly woefully unprepared for market at the moment. I'm constantly looking at job listings, though, and engaging with scads of recruiters to maintain a good feel for the market to inform my next steps. I see plenty of ads that are hyper-specific about the tooling du-jour, but a non-trivial percentage of the listings I see make it clear that higher-level prowess, like understanding a language and best practices, are more important than what ultimately boils down to the ability to RTFM for whatever widgets the CTO/CE is currently enamored with. These are the jobs I'm looking at. Sure, this could narrow your pool during what appears to be a tight market, but you're more likely to have worthwhile interviews. I'll apply to less intriguing jobs to avoid getting rusty at interviewing, though.

This kind of funk also inevitably drives me harder to just _do what I want to do_. What language and tools _do I want to use_? _What kind of problems do I want to solve_ moving forward? If you've sorted these out, great. Sure, this could _also_ narrow your pool even more, but you're more likely to find a high-quality match.

Finally, all of these companies foaming at the mouth to replace people with AI will regret it; it's already happening, in fact. It's happening in less/non-technical jobs (lol Klarna), so I'm not worried about coding jobs at all in the long run (not to diminish and current or short term turbulence, though). Smart execs/founders will see AI for what it is: a force multiplier, only as good as your existing staff. That said, I think it behooves devs to get right with AI/chat-assisted development. Of all the buzzy tools people fall in love with, I think this is the highest ROI I've seen yet.

TL;DR: I'm just not going to apply to jobs that don't give me "smart exec" smells, and I'm only applying if it really looks like something I'll care about doing. I realize this exudes some degree of privilege, hubris, and/or naivete, but I work my ass off and you only live once.

The eager fascism permeating the industry, the tidal wave of AI propaganda pushing people into tepid custodial work, and the active hostility of executives towards their workers disgusts me and probably means that I won't be touching Silicon Valley tech companies anymore. If anything, I will aim to work against their interests whenever I can.

I still love programming and making things. Fortunately, I have the means to go off and do my own stuff for the foreseeable future.

I'm nearly done after seeing the nonstop indianization of my topics on google.

Niches from motorcycles to tech to music have become a punjab yellowpages and no one is even talking about it.

Google the most popular korean boyband in the world "BTS"

6/7 of my results are indian domains. What's the point of even trying anymore when ESL slop like that gets a massive SERP advantage for years now and is only getting worse?

Kindly revert back to me if you discover the needful solution.

Has little to do with “industry” and everything to do with America being led by post war, Cold War paranoids who drank lead water and huffed lead gas fumes, brains wired to march to a steady drum, right into building a shit hole country.

Sure is a whole lot of demand to show up just so from ossified gerontocrat pols who can’t provide for themselves and mock us to our faces about freedom.

A bunch of randos socialize we’re off the hook for each other, good luck! While also expecting we show up for jobs that secure their investments or they send out the riot cops. It’s a fucking brain dead social culture of learned helplessness copy pasted around office worker meat suits. An obvious, making it pointless, LARP.

Zero flexibility in human agency when too few know how to fix their stuff and need these brain dead jobs to trickle down to the poorer service workers.

you should never have allowed yourself to get sucked into corporate work. its the most common mistake that people make

Curse my foolish desire for food and shelter!

yes you are indeed foolish. you took the worst possible path without considering the possibility that you didnt have to turn yourself into a pathetic sycophant in order to feed yourself.

Don’t be so weak. The world is a harsh, cruel place. You are owed nothing. A man makes himself.

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