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If I may add something: I became dissatisfied with "IT as an industry" in the sense that, despite where I was working (a tiny shop, with tiny projects, flyover

If I may add something: I became dissatisfied with "IT as an industry" in the sense that, despite where I was working (a tiny shop, with tiny projects, flyover state, nothing is ever going to go viral or hit big), some people were apparently prepping for FAANG careers and generally trying to turn things into some Agile megashop with dozens of layers of technology, on and on, for some rinky-dink projects. I liked doing the rinky-dink projects but all of the overhead of play-acting like we needed to scale like Cloudflare was wearying. I took up with some TechShop stuff -- before it folded -- and enjoyed my work on laser engravers, and the CNC machines, and the lathes, and whatnot. My educational background and IT experience were certainly a help, and I thought, "Dang, it sure is nice to construct a physical object at the end of the day instead of an arrangement of magnetic fields that will simply be blown away when some high muckety-muck notices whatever fad has changed." I jumped ship for something adjacent where I use my IT skill constantly. Programming wasn't in the job description, but my ability to program brings a certain level of power. All of my decades of IT experience is very helpful here and I still feel like I am doing something with an actual concrete output and utility. So, I sympathize with the urge to pull the ripcord on some kind of jetpack and blast far away into the sky, but there are plenty of places that are not what HackerNews thinks of when they think IT that need all of your skills. Perhaps I like being a medium-sized fish in a smaller pond, it could be that, but it does feel fairly nice.

joyfullll 6y ago
Can you tell me a little more about this? I'm enjoying my current job as a coder, but I'm also feeling a hankering for something like what you describe. Feeling like I'm producing something a little more tangible would be nice.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  I work performing a lot of GIS (geospatial information systems) work for emergency services. Sometimes, I produce maps. Sometimes, someone wants to know where they ought to locate a five million dollar building for maximum results. My computing interests lie in automating tasks previously performed by humans, ETL, and analysis. I was doing web stuff back in the 1990s and went through so very many CRUD apps, but this is where my interests lie. What this means in my current job is that I find time-consuming tasks done by my predecessor and say, "Let's make this faster." Or I can look for subtle errors. Just as an example, because I am routing emergency services to houses and workplaces, I have a network of streets to deal with. Imagine them as a graph, where most of the data is attached to the edge rather than the node. Now, people have drawn these streets in using tools like ArcMap, but there can be problems. How many different kinds of mistakes might exist in connecting roads together? Try to enumerate the cases. I have found ten thus far. Each case is something that, if a human eyeballs it up close, they could say "oh yes," but it is not readily apparent. And so I have written code for a number of these cases that takes my human domain expertise of what is wrong with something and translates it into something even a rock (silicon) can understand. And the end result of finding these little mistakes is very real: help gets to someone just a few seconds faster. I interface with organizations that are not other IT organizations: property records, postal records, phone records, and so on. Sometimes this means wrangling proposed plats from developers. It's all real stuff, and it's all done in service of helping people who have immediate needs. It's very different from being in a room full of people who have little stickers on their Macs making Agile noises about whatever random shifts have occurred in the "client??" (and doesn't that word encompass a multitude of sins)'s latest wishlist.
  - mtyq 6y ago
    Great post, thanks for writing this up. I'm relatively new to the industry and have already been feeling annoyance/fatigue at the IT/agile "culture" (experienced at a failing startup and now at a large corporation) My fiancé and I are hoping to move out of the city before long, and I hope to find something as interesting and unique as what you're doing. Feeling inspired and hopeful that I can find a job that uses programming/technology but isn't a "tech job."
    - at_a_remove 6y ago
      I got my startup failure story out of the way in 2000, so I am lucky there. But yes, Agile has some fatigue for some who are tired of the faddishness. Some people find it invigorating, and more power to them. My guess is that tons of these kinds of jobs are out there because the real world still exists and the people in it are often using computers, but perhaps not as "centrally" to their jobs. However, people like you and I can provide options to them that they did not have before, and sometimes may not have even envisioned. Just as a case in point, this new place was setting up some machines and had a few tedious configuration problems, so I used batch files and a few more things to save them time and add reproducible results. They were shocked but this was stuff for me where I had to dust off things I had forgotten a decade prior. In my previous job, I found areas of satisfaction as I noticed above, and they were all tied to people (not users), to physical objects (rather than instatiations of some class), and so on. I noticed how much churn there was, how often things would have to be redone not because anything realistic demanded it, but because of style, or some kind of platform migration, or something else End-of-Lifed, and so on. Indeed, constant platform migration made me realize that nomads are not known for their lasting works of architecture.
      - joyfullll 6y ago
        Can I ask one more question: how did you make the move? And did you have a quantitative education? I know everyone's path is different, but I'm curious how you found your current role once you decided to get out of IT proper.

joyfullll 6y ago

Can you tell me a little more about this? I'm enjoying my current job as a coder, but I'm also feeling a hankering for something like what you describe. Feeling like I'm producing something a little more tangible would be nice.

at_a_remove 6y ago
I work performing a lot of GIS (geospatial information systems) work for emergency services. Sometimes, I produce maps. Sometimes, someone wants to know where they ought to locate a five million dollar building for maximum results. My computing interests lie in automating tasks previously performed by humans, ETL, and analysis. I was doing web stuff back in the 1990s and went through so very many CRUD apps, but this is where my interests lie. What this means in my current job is that I find time-consuming tasks done by my predecessor and say, "Let's make this faster." Or I can look for subtle errors. Just as an example, because I am routing emergency services to houses and workplaces, I have a network of streets to deal with. Imagine them as a graph, where most of the data is attached to the edge rather than the node. Now, people have drawn these streets in using tools like ArcMap, but there can be problems. How many different kinds of mistakes might exist in connecting roads together? Try to enumerate the cases. I have found ten thus far. Each case is something that, if a human eyeballs it up close, they could say "oh yes," but it is not readily apparent. And so I have written code for a number of these cases that takes my human domain expertise of what is wrong with something and translates it into something even a rock (silicon) can understand. And the end result of finding these little mistakes is very real: help gets to someone just a few seconds faster. I interface with organizations that are not other IT organizations: property records, postal records, phone records, and so on. Sometimes this means wrangling proposed plats from developers. It's all real stuff, and it's all done in service of helping people who have immediate needs. It's very different from being in a room full of people who have little stickers on their Macs making Agile noises about whatever random shifts have occurred in the "client??" (and doesn't that word encompass a multitude of sins)'s latest wishlist.
- mtyq 6y ago
  Great post, thanks for writing this up. I'm relatively new to the industry and have already been feeling annoyance/fatigue at the IT/agile "culture" (experienced at a failing startup and now at a large corporation) My fiancé and I are hoping to move out of the city before long, and I hope to find something as interesting and unique as what you're doing. Feeling inspired and hopeful that I can find a job that uses programming/technology but isn't a "tech job."
  - at_a_remove 6y ago
    I got my startup failure story out of the way in 2000, so I am lucky there. But yes, Agile has some fatigue for some who are tired of the faddishness. Some people find it invigorating, and more power to them. My guess is that tons of these kinds of jobs are out there because the real world still exists and the people in it are often using computers, but perhaps not as "centrally" to their jobs. However, people like you and I can provide options to them that they did not have before, and sometimes may not have even envisioned. Just as a case in point, this new place was setting up some machines and had a few tedious configuration problems, so I used batch files and a few more things to save them time and add reproducible results. They were shocked but this was stuff for me where I had to dust off things I had forgotten a decade prior. In my previous job, I found areas of satisfaction as I noticed above, and they were all tied to people (not users), to physical objects (rather than instatiations of some class), and so on. I noticed how much churn there was, how often things would have to be redone not because anything realistic demanded it, but because of style, or some kind of platform migration, or something else End-of-Lifed, and so on. Indeed, constant platform migration made me realize that nomads are not known for their lasting works of architecture.
    - joyfullll 6y ago
      Can I ask one more question: how did you make the move? And did you have a quantitative education? I know everyone's path is different, but I'm curious how you found your current role once you decided to get out of IT proper.