9 ms·
Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
Pays well and everything but what are the things that make you dislike the industry.
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- slentprog 8y agoDeadlines
- anotherevan 8y ago“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” — Douglas Adams
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- rajeshmr 8y agoLong hours in the name of passion / customer obsession
- princekolt 8y agoThe closer you get to the bleeding edge of the technology industry, the more detached you get from "real life", generally.
- rajeshmr 8y agoNicely put!
- theyoungwolf 8y agothere is always difficulty of balancing your learning/growth and the work that you have to do for the company
- rajeshmr 8y agoI had similar concerns and had reached out to the HN community quite a while ago. Seems like this issue is felt across the industry!
- fweespeech 8y ago- Alpha male posturing - People expect you to care about your job.
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- erikb 8y ago> - People expect you to care about your job. What I think is funny about this is that the actual expoiting slave driver bosses will accept sometimes that you do what you get paid for and then go home. They won't tell you so, but if you are able to read faces you can see them smile a little with respect if you refuse to get exploited. But some of the engineering colleagues will never accept that. 24/7 is the requirement. Even if nobody, not even them, gets anything out of it.
- fweespeech 8y agoUp to a point, yeah. However, if it impacts them negatively in any way (i.e. They overpromised) you will find that respect doesn't help.
- nugget 8y agoBeing on call and in a constant state of readiness to troubleshoot problems is tiresome. Even if problems rarely occur, the constant awareness of potential responsibility can quickly lead to burn out. The medical field has known this for a long time, and as a result, physicians get paid a lot of money to take extra call coverage. This is a very neglected topic of discussion within software development.
- rajeshmr 8y agoThis is a very important point but oft neglected too. I wish more people speak out about this.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoFormer ops engineer here. Get out of ops. In the current climate, it is rare you'll find a role that compensates you for being on call frequently and the toll it takes on you.
- dijit 8y agoThis a thousand times. Ops is undervalued and expected to deliver a lot in today’s workforce. You get better respect and compensation for SWE. I wouldn’t reccomend this career unless you’re unable to do software engineering.
- majormajor 8y agoA fair number of places have engineers do ops. It's bad in the long run for many reasons, but rarely do I see people ask about it at interview-time.
- MrMember 8y agoMan this one sucks. Being called at 2am to fix something once every couple of months isn't great but I can deal with it. Knowing I can be called at 2am on any day and be expected to fix something and not knowing when that will happen is what kills me. Despite the really good benefits in my current position I'm casually looking for a new job solely because of the on call schedule.
- plessthanpt05 8y agoThe interview process for developer/engineering roles.
- RichardCA 8y agoIt's not so much the process itself but the overall fact that your ability to get hired ultimately hinges on things that are trivial and shallow. In general I believe that skill and talent get rewarded, but everyone has a story about a job they landed out of sheer luck - they knew some obscure tool or framework that forced a hiring decision in their favor. Very few hiring managers are genuinely talented at spotting talent. Most rely on some level of cargo-cult knowledge, tribal shibboleths, and technical hazing rituals. Or they just hire lazily and optimistically, and then you have to work with those people because now you're one of them.
- 0xmohit 8y agoHaving to build technology that attempts to manipulate humans and call it "Deep Learning".
- Thriptic 8y agoBeing viewed as a cost center rather than a revenue generator if you're not in a tech centric company. Having best practice and common sense ignored by management in the name of expediency and then being blamed for the results (going over budget, building something the client doesn't want, being late on delivery)
- bargl 8y agoI had someone call us the Expense team. I put an end to that pretty quickly. It is an easy wedge to drive between sales and engineering.
- rajeshmr 8y agoSeparate point : tech industry tends to make one delusional about ones abilities (usually overestimation of intelligence)
- alexchamberlain 8y agoThe undeniable urge to solve all problems in life with a new app
- astrodust 8y agoIs there an app to cure that urge?
- alexchamberlain 8y agoNah, just Hacker News and Reddit to distract us.
- bargl 8y agoThere is an expectation and honestly a need to keep up with changes to the industry that I haven't seen in other fields. Any older dev has had to transition at least 1-2 languages and it's not an easy step. That doesn't even start covering how fast javascript frameworks are moving. Oh, hey you learned Angular, that's so 3 years ago we don't do that here. We use Vue.js which is better because _________. Vue will be replaced and you'll have to learn something else. If you don't like constantly learning then you'll burn out. On TOP of that most jobs expect you to work and learn this on your own. Which leads to a ton of 9-5 developers who refuse, or other developers who make sacrifices to stay on top of things. It can also lead to franken-apps which have angular -> react -> vue all in one. (Pause to take a breath) I love developing, but there is a lot to learn. I only stay on top of the industry for about 6 months out of every year. It works for me.
- andrewvc 8y ago> Any older dev has had to transition at least 1-2 languages and it's not an easy step Most devs I know have been through a whole bunch more than 2. I've had to use at least 8 over the last 10 years of dev. I didn't have to learn all of them well, but I did have to learn them.
- bargl 8y agoI was trying not to put a limit on it so I just put the lower end. I think an average of 1-2 per year isn't abnormal at all.
- yakshaving_jgt 8y agoAre you a veteran who has experienced this? Because this sounds completely wrong to me. An experienced developer typically has no problem picking up new languages/frameworks/tools/etc. There isn't much value in familiarising oneself with arbitrary and invented things, of which there are many in our industry, and they are ephemeral. No, the real value is in knowing and understanding the discovered things. And since they are discovered and not invented, they do not change. There's still plenty to learn, but you have more than a lifetime's worth of learning ahead of you even if you steer clear of the shiny baubles that are React/Angular(v[1..n])/Vue/Whatever.
- caiobegotti 8y agoIntentional dehumanization in the name of delivery/progress/development.
- rajeshmr 8y agoWell put.. strong words. I sometimes wonder if this happens only in the tech industry or has this virus spread from tech to other industries as well.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoDehumanization isn't just the tech industry. It isn't even just industry. Our philosophy has dehumanized us. Yes, the tech industry can be dehumanizing. (So can technology.) Yes, industry can be dehumanizing, as they try to wring every last cent out of you without concern for what it does to you as a human. But I think the problem runs deeper than that. It's basically a question of who we think we are. As a society, we no longer believe in God. We believe in the physical universe - in matter and the laws of physics. That means that all we can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics. That's all we can be, because there is nothing else. In particular, we can't have any free will or any ability to make a real choice. Matter that obeys the laws of physics doesn't choose anything - it just obeys the laws of physics. We're just machines made of atoms obeying the laws of quantm electrodynamics, which make up biochemicals obeying the laws of biochemistry, which make up neurons obeying the laws of neurology - and nothing more. We can't love in the real sense of the word - choosing what's best for the one we love - because we can't choose anything. Even the lesser flavors of love are just a matter of biochemicals and neurons just doing their thing. There's no real beauty in any objective sense - there's just certain things happen to hit our neurons in a certain way. For that matter, there's no truth, either, and not just in the postmodern sense. If our brains were built by evolution, they were built to give a good enough answer fast enough. They were not built to find actual truth, even were such a thing to exist. So in this view, free will, love, beauty, and truth - everything we thought of as making us human - are dead. We're just machines, just like the computers on our desks. As more and more people believe this (and start to act like it), it becomes more and more rare to be treated in a genuinely human way.
- liquidise 8y agoCreative license: the trend i have seen at startups is moving more in the direction of product and designer control over the things a company creates. For developers seeking control over their creations, this can be a frustrating thing to be a part of. Even at small startups, the value of designers and product managers is pretty obvious. It can be tough to find the right balance of control there. Sexism: this is a tough topic. I worry that the people who care are not part of the problem, yet they tend to beat themselves up about it more than those who arguably should. I want more of everyone in tech, but to a large extent my ability to affect change in this area is crippled insofar as i have a job at a startup which requires lots of hours. Hours/Appreciation: I've been a part of a few startups where employees, especially engineers, care more than they arguably should. High senses of responsibility are amazing assets for a company, but they rarely get appreciated as much as they deserve. When leaders see lagging growth or declining numbers, they try to incite urgency in the ranks. Those working the hardest often take that urgency to heart the most, which can leave them feeling really disheartened that their above-and-beyond efforts to this point have gone unrecognized. I'll close on a positive by saying that i love the tech and startup industries. They provide so many people opportunities they wouldn't have had otherwise. Like every industry, there are problems. Picking the size and culture of the company you work at changes the landscape of those problems, so be conscious which you are sensitive to and choose accordingly. If you are happy to trade reduction in control for stability, bigger companies probably your jam, for instance.
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- strict9 8y agoConstant worry about ageism, discrimination, and making a living once you to get to late 30s/early 40s. In particular SV but this is a concern everywhere. What can you do then if you love programming and don't want to be a manager? It's just terrifying.
- mat_jack1 8y agoI don't like the idea that tech comes first and people last. That is often the case when the automation is simply meant to replace inefficient humans, without really thinking to the consequences. I'm of course pro-automation as I think it's an improvement for humanity, but I'm always worried about the end result. Also I don't like that most companies have this kind of double-speak when they say that they are working to improve everyone lives while they simply want to automate work away, avoid rules (simply because Internet is not regulated as the rest of the economy) to make more money than in other ways.
- CharlesW 8y agoThere's an under-appreciation of the psychological toll that content moderators face.
- badpun 8y agoHave you seen Silicon Valley (the HBO show)?
- keabel4 8y ago"Always Be Coding" -- people who spend their time on work/passion project/open source projects are somehow valued more than those who spend their time on work/non-technical pursuits.
- magic_beans 8y agoIt's truly awful that this is expected in tech.
- kentm 8y agoThis is true and its truly awful. You'll have people who question your credentials because you don't have projects on github.
- also_jaded 8y ago- any interesting/impactful work is immediately crowded by tons of other people willing to sacrifice more than you to own it. They usually win. - the prevalent engineering management culture is a form of psychological manipulation to turn engineers into cogs and make you feel like you are always behind and stressed. It emphasizes weekly bandaid fixes to long running problems. - you have to work hard to be promoted, progress your career and make more money; but higher positions generally have much greater stress, workload and painful non-technical work (sales, politics) - the bay area becomes a nightmare in middle age. the local governments love capitalizing tech income in the form of taxes or housing prices, but won't change a thing to improve the your life. leading a normal middle class life with kids in a safe area with good schools (e.g. peninsula, or Marin) will completely exhaust a 2x200k dual income. Commutes are awful. Unless you win the startup lottery, you'll be working your brains out and hardly find time to enjoy life.
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- cs02rm0 8y agoThe sedentary lifestyle.
- erik_seaberg 8y agoBugs always get triaged. Nobody can afford zero tolerance, as much as I would like to work that way.
- daenz 8y agoThis is changing, but the lack of focus on physical health is a major problem that is literally shortening the lifespans of young developers. Getting up, moving around, stretching, and taking physical breaks throughout the day will prevent all kinds of physical problems down the road, but unfortunately, because young people can sit and grind for 8+ hours, we don't do this.
- mindcrime 8y agohttps://techcrunch.com/2018/10/17/open-offices-have-driven-panasonic-to-make-horse-blinders-for-humans/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/17/open-offices-have-driven-p...
- jarsin 8y agoHA I got written up once for putting poster board on the sides of my desk to form a wall. Could of used these then.
- IpV8 8y agoThe growing divide between the haves and have-nots. I have found that people in tech are generally completely oblivious to the massive amounts of impoverished people around them and have no idea how to help them. Also the technical advancements that we are seeing nowadays mostly seem to help people who are already well off. It is difficult to find good tech companies that have a high social good output.
- vector_spaces 8y agoLiving in the San Francisco Bay Area, it was strange to see 22 year old recent graduates arriving and immediately making six figure salaries while constantly complaining about homeless people and describing certain areas with large black and Latino populations as "sketchy"/"ghetto"/"unsafe". It was very surreal (and sad) watching the demographics become much more homogenous in the little corner store in the Castro I worked in. Our customer base was once incredibly diverse, lots of LGBTQ folks, and also lots of families. Slowly it became predominantly white and East/South Asian, young, single, and affluent. We went from seeing EBT card usage drop from about 4-5 customers a day ($200 daily average) to one (literally) every 3 and half weeks by the end of 2016. In a similar vein: every tech company I've known whose product involves manual labor (think: delivery, cleaning, retrieving scooters, packing/receiving, food preparation, etc) treats and thinks about the workers doing the manual labor very differently than the creatives, engineers, product folks, sales leads, etc. The employees doing the manual labor are held to very different standards of productivity and timeliness, often don't get benefits, definitely don't get equity, and generally enjoy little room for advancement, and often they will be employees in all but name and rights (1099). Some of this is understandable to a point as their work is mission critical -- if your cooks show up late constantly and your product is "Uber but for tapas", then your customer experience is going to suffer. But a tendency I've observed personally and heard from friends in those jobs is that it seems acceptable for manual workers to be shouted at, threatened, and generally be treated abusively, while the same certainly wouldn't be ok if directed at someone making salary. Meanwhile as an engineer if I have a zero day, no one says a word to me, or if they do they're very polite about it.
- shade 8y agoI think there's a few things about the software industry that make it really easy to become depressed, cynical, and jaded. We spend quite a lot of time being pedantic, fixating on all kinds of specific details, and especially, thinking about many different ways our applications can go wrong. In the context of writing robust software, that's a good thing, but it can also be really difficult to turn it off in the other parts of your life.
- irrational 8y agoI'm inside most of the daylight hours. This isn't so bad when it's nasty weather outside (for me this is when it is hot and sunny, apparently there are actually people who like that kind of weather so YMMV), but when it is nice outside and I'm stuck inside...
- vtange 8y agoIn the Silicon Valley there's this feeling of monotony - that everyone is doing the same thing. Given the price of housing you can make a pretty good guess everyone is trying to either save up to move out or pay off a house here. Everyone is either trying to come up with a way to enter the hottest trendiest startup idea or doing indie games. Most of the meetups are tech/work-related and even the non-tech meetups are flooded with male, glasses, 20-30 something engineers. It's almost like everywhere you go you can't escape the pressure of work. Personally it almost seems like the whole interview process was made to continue the whole tradition of getting high SAT or GRE scores for college, this time swapping college with the FAANG companies. We basically took all the problems with a standardized test-based education system and moved it to jobs.
- tsumnia 8y agoA lot of issues have already been discussed, but one I haven't seen is the constant reminder that people and the Internet are terrible. Ignoring people that censor beheadings on YouTube and the Dark Web, I am very vividly aware of things Goatse, Blue Waffle, 1 Guy 1 Jar, Ogrish, early 4chan's \b\ and those mental images are very much burned into my brain. Maybe its not every aspect in the tech industry or maybe its changing with the next generation or maybe I just got into tech at a very impressionable age, but I'm sure I'm not the only one that was exposed to that stuff early on. I think that's a dark side. There's some generally fucked up shit out there and someone has to be aware of it to keep it far, far away.
- kentm 8y agoThe tech industry idolizes and encourages terrible behavior, and it ends up being self-reinforcing. Efforts to counteract that get pushback. How many people will get upset if you suggest that Steve Jobs was not a good person and probably shouldn't be idolized? Or that Linus's email habits are not a good thing to emulate? We will tell ourselves fun stories about how people being jerks just means they are no bullshit people who care about getting things done.
- tsumnia 8y agoI don't entirely agree with respect to my original post and that your use of Jobs and Torvalds don't correctly align to my post. I don't think the majority of people idolize stuff that makes everyone gag or grimace in disgust. A small subset of internet trolls idolize and encourage this behavior. Tech is only associated because it also shares the loner basement dweller stereotype. There are entire organizations designed to counteract underage pornography and sex trafficking, everyone agrees this is a terrible thing. However, it still persists despite opposition and tech is heavily involved in the process. This gets back to my point that to be in tech requires an unavoidable knowledge of the cruelty of man. Someone's email habits pales in comparison.
- kentm 8y agoYeah I misread your post, sorry about that.
- snarfy 8y agoYou like to think you are adding value to the world. Many times you will end up transferring it instead.
- x220 8y agoIf you have a job, you are adding value.
- monktastic1 8y agoI find the nearly infinite (and seemingly exponentially increasing) number of ways things can go wrong, and the frequently arcane knowledge required to fix them, incredibly mentally taxing. That's not what I want to fill up my mind with. If this were all in the service of healing the world in some way, it might be worth it. But work is feeling increasingly disconnected from genuine human problems.
- toomanyrichies 8y agoComputers always had an aura of infallibility to me as a kid. But learning to program taught me that they're only as infallible as their creators, programmers, and operators. So to me, the dark side of our field is that you "see how the sausage is made", as they say. Which could be good or bad, depending on whether you agree with the statement that ignorance is bliss. For instance, if you had asked me 5 years ago whether owning a self-driving car would be awesome, I would have answered with an enthusiastic yes. Now, as a novice-to-journeyman software engineer, if I had to own a car at all, I'd buy one made before computers became a fundamental component inside most vehicles (got my eye on a 1976 Chevy Silverado, but I digress). Call me paranoid, but I can't help but feel it's only a matter of time before some hacker gains control of a highway full of cars and demands X # of bitcoin from their occupants or he'll drive them all off a bridge.(1) I can't un-see that image in my head, and it terrifies me. Security professionals need to be right every single time in order to be successful at their jobs. Hackers need to be right only once to be successful at theirs. It's a Sisyphean task trying to keep people physically safe in a digital age, let alone keep their privacy intact. Which brings me to my other point- technology being used by those in power to maintain and expand that power by weakening our expectations of privacy: -Social media platforms are being co-opted to derive insights about everyday people that even they don't know about themselves, and these insights are being used to manipulate their behavior at the voting booth, at the shopping mall, etc.(2) -Governments are creating "social credit scores" based on how well a citizen tows the official party line, who they associate with, or the opinions they express. And these scores can affect everything from their job prospects to their ability to get a loan to their very geographic mobility.(3) -Facial recognition technology is being deployed in traffic cameras and even in wearable technology to make it easier to pick "undesirables" out of a crowd.(4) I don't mean to single out one single country. If this technology exists, there's a greater-than-zero chance in any country that sooner or later a leader will come along who will seek to use that technology for their own gain. Sorry to get so dark, I don't mean to sound overly dramatic. I never thought of myself as a tinfoil-hat type of person, and I hate that I'm essentially slowly turning into one. Technology does a lot of good too, I'm just genuinely scared for the future. Sources: (1) -https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig... (2) -https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#62b1bc856668 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ... -http://business.time.com/2012/07/31/big-data-knows-what-youre-doing-right-now/ http://business.time.com/2012/07/31/big-data-knows-what-your... -https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambridge-analytica-explained.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambr... (3) -https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit -https://observer.com/2018/02/america-isnt-far-off-from-chinas-social-credit-score/ https://observer.com/2018/02/america-isnt-far-off-from-china... (4) -https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-police-go-robocop-with-facial-recognition-glasses-1518004353 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-police-go-robocop-with-...
- Phil987 8y agoEverything is over-engineered and at the same time duct taped and zip tied together.
- jshowa1 8y agoCompanies have very poor development processes and scheduling which is what makes coding, in any language or framework, difficult because half the time you don't even know what you should be writing. Even worse, asking others is often hit and miss because some co-workers, who should know, don't make an effort to define what's meant by certain requirements specific to a problem domain. This often leads to shipping incomplete products that you have to "fix" after deployment because you didn't have enough time to implement features, didn't know features were needed, or the features weren't well defined. In the meantime, project management thinks the project is done and is piling more projects on you while you play catch up. I haven't figured out a good system to handle this and even if I could, it requires buy in at multiple levels and consistent application. If you've ever done group work in college, doing this is almost impossible. In short, work is just like college group work. One person does 90% of the work while the others do about 10%.
- kentm 8y agoDevelopers that build a new thing are disproportionately valued over developers who improve or maintain old things. The formers will be the wunderkinds of the organization and referred to as "rock stars" and "10x-ers" despite the quality of the work that they put out. The latter will have to fight for promotions and be denigrated as "1x-ers". They will have to hear that they are not as valuable because they are not innovators. This leads to developers being biased towards building and working with new things, and is a lot of the reason that we see flavor-of-the-week style platforms and libraries that add very little value.
- goalieca 8y agoI hate seeing people reinvent things without learning the lessons that the maintainers are all so painfully aware of.
- ljnelson 8y agoRampant sexism.
- acconrad 8y agoI never feel good enough. Ever. Part of that is my personality - I'm very hard on myself. But especially on HN (for better or worse) it seems like everyday I see someone who is making more money or building a better business or someone who just is an amazing programmer and I still have so much to learn. It can be a positive motivator for continuous improvement but at the same time it can be overwhelming to feel like there is always so much to learn and you'll never learn it all.
- jiscariot 8y agoI agree with this sentiment--I mainly read HN/SSC and find the depth of knowledge extremely humbling. You really have to try hard to look at your status as absolute (or "compare yourself to yourself a week ago"), especially because it looks like we are wired to see relative status as more important (i.e. happiness derived from comparison to "peers"). It is a roller coaster of "I think I'm pretty good at this" to "jesus--I understand 10% of what these HN comments are talking about." It helps if I think about the alternative universe where I tried to do something with my political science minor. That usually does the trick. :-)
- notacoward 8y agoDay-to-day annoyances: slow builds, flaky tests, debugging horrible code (especially if it's yours), open offices, certain coworkers Psychological issues: on-call stress, unhealthy work-hours expectations, impostor syndrome, family-unfriendly policies and social environment Cultural issues: affluenza and general entitlement, discrimination, moral posturing, people slamming your company and your product (rightly or wrongly - both hurt)
- anotherevan 8y agoCompanies/organisations that expect you to behave more like cult members than employees.
- k0t0n0 8y agobuilding mvp by working hard then getting replace because you can't put 5 to 8 hard each day.
- forgottenpass 8y agoYour business model is probably not going to be providing something useful to an end user. The tool will be a pretext so you get incidental access to data your surveillance system will exfiltrate. -- The term "Tech" is malleable to mean both a business vertical, or the software-related division within any a company in any business domain. Expect strategic equivocation between the two. Any bad action or decision from the non-technical people in a "tech" company is suddenly the fault of the nerds, they'll feel the heat and are expected to fix it (even if the problem is by definition not their problem to fix). Credit flows in the opposite direction, regardless of where it belongs.
- reality_caster 8y agoThere are limited truly impactful things to work on at any place. In places under the limelight, they would always be taken over by more experienced and smarter people (very few), most of the other work on tech around that which is important but not truly impactful.