Ask HN: Are You Considering Leaving Tech All Together? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are You Considering Leaving Tech All Together?

6 pointskarakoram10 comments

I am starting to observe this more here and there. People are leaving tech for various reasons.

Possible Reasons:

- General direction of the industry. Many SWEs feel disillusioned due to various factors.

- Layoffs

- Many who entered the industry in the last 5-7 years have lost touch with it or lost the "passion" they once had.

I’ve been doing this twenty years, and to be honest, I’m loving it more now than I ever have before. It’s been a flywheel for me, the more experience I get, the more confident I get, the harder problems I get to work on, and accomplish them better. There are challenges sure, but what is disillusioning you?

I don’t know if this is a distinction worth making, but I’ve never really thought of my relationship as to the industry, it’s to the work, and I’ve always loved the work.

To be clear, I am not talking about me personally. Just what I have seen/heard.

I am not personally and have never really considered it. The industry has its ups and downs but I guess I've been fortunate enough to mostly experience the positives. And above all, computers and technology are still my passion, so I'm not sure what other field I would even switch to.

Kind of. I’m transitioning to something a little more biochemistry-oriented but I expect to be employing a lot of my tech skills

But yeah I hated being an SWE. 90% of my career’s projects consisted of reinventing the spreadsheet and 90% of my time was spent listening to people bikeshedding about the color of buttons. The direction of the industry is less relevant to my choices

I’m sure my new course will feature similar motifs of redundancy and soul-sucking pedantry, but I’ll give it a decade like I did software and move on to career #4 if I tire

> 90% of my career’s projects consisted of reinventing the spreadsheet and 90% of my time was spent listening to people bikeshedding about the color of buttons.

This, but for mobile apps.

"Uber for aircraft", "Cross LinkedIn with AirBnB with Google Maps", "Read the news", "Foursquare but for my hobby"… it was exciting when I was young and fresh and didn't know what was out there; now I know that I just didn't realise how many others were doing the same things.

Competition I didn't spot meant success was all about discovery rather than actual innovation, "build it and they will come" is just not true. Discovery means paying an ad-tax to the gatekeepers of eyeballs. But that's a bidding war, an all-pay auction for your version of the widely-instantiated "innovation" to win a temporary monopoly before the feature becomes table stakes in a bigger product, like IE was to Netscape, and Sherlock was to whoever that was, and Skype to all chat apps.

"paying an ad-tax to the gatekeepers of eyeballs" is such a great analogy for paying for google/fb ads. Its disheartening that to sell anything online you have to pay these companies thousands of dollars just to get in front of people.

I continually fantasize about doing something that doesn’t require a computer to design, manufacture, distribute, or sell. Let me know if you think of anything. Much as I hate them I do actually have a good time when things work out. Unfortunately when things work out you’ve solved some problem and the reward for solving a problem is more problems to solve.

Yep. But there are personal economic factors which allow me to consider it more seriously. I do find it less interesting than when I was in my 20s.

no.

We are just seeing a bubble popping in slow motion.

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