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How about “leaves the industry rather than have to use terrible things at dumb companies”, thus giving a survival bias that selects for shiny. I know I feel th

How about “leaves the industry rather than have to use terrible things at dumb companies”, thus giving a survival bias that selects for shiny. I know I feel that way about a lot of stuff now.

hkt 6y ago
One of the most relatable posts I've ever seen on HN. Same reason I'm working towards getting out.
- collyw 6y ago
  It´s kind of sad. I am the same. I want to do something different but I don´t know much else and the pay is reasonable (reasonable, not great, I am in Spain).
mtrovo 6y ago
That's a fair point and I can totally relate to it. There's a toxic relationship of startups always trying to one up each other to attract more attention as a great place to work and in general tech stack is just another tool on this fight. As a consequence workers are pushed to the same mindset, where fixing a problem with 10 microservices and a dozen AWS services is the expected and if you prove you can solve the same problem with a single machine running a cronjob with no external dependencies you're the weird one.
vvanders 6y ago
That's a really common pattern in gamedev too. Median career is something like ~3 years so those that stick around are okay with the crunch and other shitty parts of the industry. Combine that with gatekeeping/I did my time you have to do yours and not much has changed there over the years.
- blackrock 6y ago
  What’s the pay like for senior games engineers?
  - reasonabl_human 6y ago
    levels.fyi
ryandrake 6y ago
You don't even have to go that drastic. I was also tired of the "new technology treadmill" in software development, so I just changed roles in the same industry. Did a little product management for a while then settled on project management--for those same software companies. The pay is much worse but at least I'm not spending my time re-writing working software into "non-working software, but hey, it's in Scala."
isubasinghe 6y ago
yup I started my career and felt this way pretty quickly, I'm now trying to get a PhD instead, I love solving problems, so this seems like a good idea. I'm sure there are some great companies out there, but they seem to be rare. I just see don't see work in this industry to be sustainable and I cant see myself working as a Software Engineer when I'm 30+ or with a family.

How about “leaves the industry rather than have to use terrible things at dumb companies”, thus giving a survival bias that selects for shiny. I know I feel that way about a lot of stuff now.

hkt 6y ago

One of the most relatable posts I've ever seen on HN. Same reason I'm working towards getting out.

collyw 6y ago
It´s kind of sad. I am the same. I want to do something different but I don´t know much else and the pay is reasonable (reasonable, not great, I am in Spain).

mtrovo 6y ago

That's a fair point and I can totally relate to it. There's a toxic relationship of startups always trying to one up each other to attract more attention as a great place to work and in general tech stack is just another tool on this fight. As a consequence workers are pushed to the same mindset, where fixing a problem with 10 microservices and a dozen AWS services is the expected and if you prove you can solve the same problem with a single machine running a cronjob with no external dependencies you're the weird one.

vvanders 6y ago

That's a really common pattern in gamedev too. Median career is something like ~3 years so those that stick around are okay with the crunch and other shitty parts of the industry. Combine that with gatekeeping/I did my time you have to do yours and not much has changed there over the years.

blackrock 6y ago
What’s the pay like for senior games engineers?
- reasonabl_human 6y ago
  levels.fyi

ryandrake 6y ago

You don't even have to go that drastic. I was also tired of the "new technology treadmill" in software development, so I just changed roles in the same industry. Did a little product management for a while then settled on project management--for those same software companies. The pay is much worse but at least I'm not spending my time re-writing working software into "non-working software, but hey, it's in Scala."

isubasinghe 6y ago

yup I started my career and felt this way pretty quickly, I'm now trying to get a PhD instead, I love solving problems, so this seems like a good idea. I'm sure there are some great companies out there, but they seem to be rare. I just see don't see work in this industry to be sustainable and I cant see myself working as a Software Engineer when I'm 30+ or with a family.