5 ms·
Why? Programming as a bottom-of-the-org-chart employee is boring and powerless. Every 5 years you have to re-learn almost everything because the fads change,
by seiji 11y ago
Why? Programming as a bottom-of-the-org-chart employee is boring and powerless. Every 5 years you have to re-learn almost everything because the fads change, but the substance doesn't change.
Today we need a 16 layer deep toolchain to create a HTML page because everything is javascript and dynamic and slower than generating server-side HTML, but it's The True Way Forward (ignoring the last 8 True Ways Forward we've had since 2002).
When you're competing against 22 year olds for job roles that didn't exist 6 months ago, the 22 year old has just has much experience in the new framework or toolchain or platform as you do at 35. They probably have even more experience because they have less to "unlearn" and more free time to understand all the quirks. They are more excited about learning it for the first time than you are about re-learning it for the 8th time.
Now we're using Go? Except it's no better than what we were using 10 years ago? But everybody else likes it, so we have to like it to? Great, let's kill my productivity for 8 months while I re-write all our systems and have them become less maintainable than they currently are.
I hear gardening is relaxing.
- cityzen 11y agotruth.
- cesarbs 11y agoThat's pretty much the reason why I asked the question. I feel the same way as you. The problem is, I don't know what else I would do. I've been coding since I was 9 and it's basically my only skill. I love programming and engineering but I feel more and more like I won't be able to put up with all the crap in our field.
- seiji 11y agoThere are options though. You can move towards a more teaching/"team lead"/"architect" role to get away from a lot of the day-to-day cycles. You can move to a company where people actually sick around for 10+ years (Google, etc) and get very specific domain expertise, but maybe only in one company's systems. You can try to start your own projects/companies/platforms, but that is much more hit-or-miss than lower risk employment. An easy place to start is just walk around a town, find inefficient processes (lots of manual interventions or paperwork) and try to help them with computers. HN has a pretty distorted view of an overall life trajectory anyway. HN expects you to be come a millionaire by 22-25 and a billionaire by 28-30 or you're marked a failure. Most people in the real world can't imagine such a life and really don't care about "success" that much. But, with HN being so SF-focused, you need to be a millionaire to afford a stable place to live—and trying to "save up" doesn't work when you're competing against 1,000 new startup millionaires every year for the same limited housing supply. For the price of a studio condo in SF, you could buy a mansion in another city and probably reduce stress a lot by not needing to keep up with the social media jonses.