13 ms·

Surviving disillusionment (2020)

• WantonQuantum 4y ago
  I like to work closely with the users of the software I’m working on. I volunteer to attend their meetings. I ask them how new features are working. I solicit feedback. It’s very rewarding even if sometimes it can be uncomfortable when things aren’t going well.
• pelasaco 4y ago
  It's all matter of mindset, changing work and challenges often, learning something new and stay away from all non-core discussions, specially politics.
  • plutonorm 4y ago
    Ha. If money has little value to you, if you value only meaning, then there is nothing anyone can do to help you be happy in this profession. If you want to challenge yourself intellectually beyond the minutia you are out of luck. If you want respect you are out of luck. If you want power, you are out of luck. It's a dead end profession and hopefully it will be automated away soon with LLMs.
    • pelasaco 4y ago
      you are so wrong. Harder than "write code" is to debug and integrate it. With time and gray hair, you are going to learn it.
      • plutonorm 4y ago
        I'm 41 and been in the industry since early 20s. There is no intellectual challenge here, because there is no art to what you describe, just man hours.
  • icepat 4y ago
    I think you're right. Another big aspect is the why behind getting into the industry. Myself, I ended up getting here entirely by accident. Ended up finding that I was good at it, and good at selling myself as a developer to employers. But the reason I got into this wasn't because I had some idealistic reason behind it. I got into this because it provides a job that gives you the salary, mobility, and time to yourself that lets you do anything you want when you walk out of the office. I love my job, I like doing software development, but for me it's never been about the ideals behind it. It's always been about what being a developer lets me do with my life. Looking at it that way, there's really nothing to be disillusioned by.
    • pelasaco 4y ago
      i think at least people that learned it before 2000, they wanted to be computer scientists. Then after 2000, a lot of people just decided to be software developer because of the money. I belong to the first group. It makes me happy to stick to the bits and bytes and the hacker mentality that I had in the 90s. In another hand my wife is teacher and she has more reason to be disillusioned by her job than me :)
• 082349872349872 4y ago
  It can't be all work; one also has to hack. cf "what is the little man there for?" https://books.google.ch/books?id=V3ByEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA575&lpg=PA575&dq=for+fun+maxwell+little+man+kelvin&source=bl&ots=ZoqvPNlu_F&sig=ACfU3U3OIHwEqUeCfjoj94GrhrazU444Zg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiasJCjwqP8AhUIg_0HHRChD8YQ6AF6BAgfEAM#v=onepage&q=for%20fun%20maxwell%20little%20man%20kelvin&f=false https://books.google.ch/books?id=V3ByEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA575&lpg=P...
• breck 4y ago
  > My dad introduced me to the genre with Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island, in which a team of five end up on an uninhabited island, and use their knowledge and ingenuity to rebuild a technological civilization from scratch. Now I gotta read this. (link: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1268 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1268)
  • wellanyway 4y ago
    Yes you do. It's absolutely incredible.
  • v-erne 4y ago
    I used to read quite a lot when I was in my early teens and this is one od two books that I vividly remember (other being Around the world in 80 days). I sincerly believe that this idea of rebuilding civilization from grounds up was responsible for me getting into STEM and becoming who I am now.
• breck 4y ago
  > One reality is the atmosphere of new technology, its incredible power to transform the human condition, the joy of the art of doing science and engineering, the trials of the creative process, the romance of the frontier. The other reality is the frustration and drudgery of operating in a world of corporate politics, bureaucracy, envy and greed To any programmers feeling similarly disillusioned with the "world of corporate politics": there is a war going on (the War to Liberate Ideas). Join the fight.
  • VieEnCode 4y ago
    Can you please elaborate? What do you mean by the war to liberate ideas?
    • breck 4y ago
      In the USA, it's to end copyright (Intellectual Freedom Amendment - https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.html https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.h... - basically freedom to publish) and censorship. In other countries, it's those things as well as more basic things (freedom of speech and the press).
  • kubanczyk 4y ago
    Lieutenant, if you go to that war, arm yourself with a more googlable name. The phrase "War to Liberate Ideas" gets you nothing on google/bing/ddg, with or without quotes. I think I know what you are referring to, but others don't.
    • breck 4y ago
      Copy that ;)
• hyperman1 4y ago
  I've seen this happen so much with IT people it became a bit of a clichė: Around 35, pure IT is not enough anymore. IT people just drop out. The simple cases become managers or architects. The more advanced cases start a bakery, go work in a call center. One of the most extreme cases was a very intelligent, very cynical, very anti religion guy who just quit without warning and joined the hare chrisna. We got photos from him in red clothes doing some kind of ritual. Huh? A big part for me is that IT just doesn't learn. Every 5 years, a new generation pops up, invents completely new tooling, and makes all the mistakes from the previous generation. Now your knowledge is obsolete, and after you relearn everything your tooling is worse than where you started. Enter a few years of slow tooling maturisation with a very predictable outcome, after which a new generation pops up, declares the existing stuff too complicated, and reinvent everything again. 35 is 4 or 5 of these cycles, bringing to front the huge wastefull uselessness of it all. Learning your whole life is a nice slogan, but becomes very pointless. The survivors that continue in IT, deal with it somehow. You enter a new cycle knowing it will be change but not much advancement, and don't learn the stack as deep as you used too. You get a life outside IT: Kids, hobbies, social events. You let the youngsters run before you, smile when they do better than your old tech would, and compare with older tools when they get stuck. And you keep some of your tech enthousiasm just for the hell of it.
  • thenanante 4y ago
    Could you give me some examples of those cycles? Genuinely curious what you mean. I started my career just a couple years ago. In my first company, they used 10+ year old tooling and imo it was terrible. A very old legacy mess monolith that made adding features pure torture. Trunk-based development with a "who needs tests" mindset, resulting in horrendously buggy code, 50:50 chance pulling newest version would break something. Several instances of files with over 10k lines of code and deep nesting, absolute nightmare. Absolutely no mindset for performance. They wrote quadratic complexity code in the backend to fetch data because hash-based data structures already seemed too advanced to many of my coworkers and then they wondered why their frontend was so terribly slow. Not that they had a lot of pressure to deliver a great product, because they are / were market leader in their B2B niche. I left within a year. Now I'm working in a company that uses all the latest gitlab CI/CD shenanigans, code reviews and heavy use of unit, integration and end to end tests. Everything is hosted in the cloud with a microservice architecture. We actually need it as we scale to millions of customers and have performance and reliability requirements. The difference is not just the tech stack that was horribly outdated and imo extremely tedious to work with, but also the mentality is completely different. In the first company, you couldn't change anything, there was a strict hierarchy and everything stayed as is because "it works". You totally got the feeling that there's some old people up in the hierarchy that were way too lazy to learn new things and didn't want to endanger their meaning in the company. When I left, I spoke with the Head of HR and he told me that basically all people that leave do so because of the mentioned reasons. So that company drives away motivated talent with their crap mentality. Pay wasn't very good either, but a first job is a first job after all. Now mind you, both companies are a couple decades old, but imo one always kept up and the other didn't. Both companies have 10+ year seniors. Personally, the people in the current company are way more competent and excited about work. Much more fun to work with, I learn more and I absolutely don't get the feeling the tooling is reinvented in any way. It's improved in all possible aspects I could think of and makes the development experience much better.
• ulnarkressty 4y ago
  Wonderfully written, I think most software developers born in the 70s-90s started like that. I'm not sure I understand the advice at the end. If one becomes so cynical as to consider pursuing manual labor instead of their life passion, wouldn't all manner of reading, hobbies and hacking end up in the "what's the point" hole? What's the point in coding a game of Pong that will end up on a shelf being used by nobody? What the point of being inspired by an old book if you're still writing CRUDs? The AI revolution can't come soon enough. We'll all be out of a job, but perhaps we'll all be better off.
  • plutonorm 4y ago
    It can't come soon enough. I can't escape this irritating boring profession because of family responsibilities. If I am forced out I won't have to shoulder the guilt.
• draw_down 4y ago
  I don’t think professional software development is worthy of being compared to monasticism. You shovel the shit and get paid. Nothing wrong with that, but it is what it is. No use pretending otherwise. There are so many other things to pursue in life besides computers. It’s ok to leave computers behind. It’s not a sad thing, it’s a happy thing. If it’s time to move on, realizing that is healthy and good. You don’t have to hate it to move on, just decide that there’s more to life.
  • 082349872349872 4y ago
    There's shoveling the shit and riding the horses, and then there's just shoveling the shit and getting paid. These are normally considered two very different jobs, but maybe software development conflates them more than horse training does?
  • plutonorm 4y ago
    What do I do if I am not content shoveling shit? I'm exceptionally bright, like many others in the field. When I chose it I did not expect it to be like this. The disrespect, the monotonous work, the hyper analytical and socially oblivious coworkers. The complete lack of promotion opportunities. I'd quit to start an unrelated business, but the financials just don't work out. I'd rather be working the fields.
    • hkon 4y ago
      How long have you been doing it?
      • plutonorm 4y ago
        18 years
    • xyzzy4747 4y ago
      You can choose a life of enjoyment or you can choose a life of making money and being annoyed all the time. Pick one. If you can accept it’ll often be annoying it gets a lot easier. You can job hop to make more money and get more experiences but it’s all the same BS anywhere you go. Even if you create your own company and hire people then the same sort of stuff happens too. Can’t really escape it.
• rockbruno 4y ago
  >world of corporate politics, bureaucracy, envy and greed— a world so depressing, that many people quit in frustration, never to come back. I think one reason people get disillusioned is not simply because those things are depressing, but because those things exist at the same time that there's a strong disconnect between what's the right thing to do and what will bring the company most _money_. The depressing part is having to go through all of these hoops and realize that it was all for nothing, because the end result is either not what the user truly needs or outright evil. I just want to build things that helps others.
  • majjam 4y ago
    The evil thing is what upsets me the most, so much of technology appears to have a truly sinister side nowadays. Perhaps it always did and Im only now seeing it.
  • obscur 4y ago
    What are some things you have met where it seemed outright evil? (I don’t have any work experience yet)
    • majjam 4y ago
      - Facial recognition being used in Uyghur concentration camps (1) - Crypto being used to scam People - Doorbell cams providing the police with a neighborhood cctv system (2) I could go on :( 1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide#Use_of_biometric_and_surveillance_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide#Use_of_biometr... 2)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(company)#Police_partnerships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(company)#Police_partners...
    • rockbruno 4y ago
      Deceptive marketing/monetisation, as in using psychological tricks to get people to spend money on things they don't want or need. Basically how every modern app and game works nowadays[0]. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g16heGLKlTA&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g16heGLKlTA&t=1s
    • 4y ago
• hermitcrab 4y ago
  I have been a professional software developer since the late 80s. I was getting a bit jaded and set up my own 1-man software business in 2005. I do all the programming, testing, documentation, support, marketing and sales. The variety of work, the freedom to do what I want and the fact that the financial rewards are directly linked to my work all help to keep me engaged. Interacting directly with my customers also helps. I have stuck with the same basic toolset (Qt and C++) which have grown with me.
  • fsloth 4y ago
    Sounds cool! What market is your product serving?
    • hermitcrab 4y ago
      I have 3 products now: PerfectTablePlan: Event seating plans. Hyper Plan: Visual task planner. Easy Data Transform: Data wrangling.
      • tomr75 4y ago
        can you make me the perfect rostering app :)
        • WJW 4y ago
          Not the person you replied to, but have been studying rostering the last few months out of curiosity. What does the rostering app you currently use (if any) do wrong and what would make it better for you?
        • hermitcrab 4y ago
          I did consider writing a rostering/scheduling app as a follow on to PerfectTablePlan. But it seems to me that the constraints vary wildly from one organization/market to the next. Making it very hard to create an 'off the shelf' package that is general enough to be useful while simple enough to be useable.
  • 4y ago
• fest 4y ago
  I guess this is why I lost interest in software that does not have a physical aspect rougly 5 years into my career doing random web development and being the tech cofounder at a shitty startup (though, successful enough to bootatrap me out of parents' nest): it just felt .. disconnected from the greater world. There is something magical in watching the software you wrote sling full size wood logs around (industrial automation), control and maintain a positive pressure in painting chamber, take off and fly away somewhere. And even the greater cost of failures/mistakes or the insane hours to debug a single bit set incorrect somewhere deep in SoCs RAM controller is not enough to offset it- you learn so much about the way world works (or doesn't- but that's something to learn as well). An off-by one error crashing and snapping conveyor belts, too large a P coefficient in pressure controller bending the doors, missing the requirement of closing the shutters for an outdoor heat exchanger leading to freezing and bursting it- though frustrating at the time leads to much better memories than debugging a PHP file deployed on a VPS with logging disabled.
  • resonious 4y ago
    I've been fantasizing about making a similar career switch for quite some time. I actually had the opportunity to do so 3.5 years ago, but decided to go for a more "boring" offer in an interesting city in another country. That decision has been fantastic for my social life, but professionally not very fulfilling.
  • scottwick 4y ago
    I feel the same way. I've been doing web-related stuff for about 13 years now and have lost much of my interest. Started dabbling with electronics and embedded systems about 5 years ago and it completely re-piqued my interest in writing software. I'm still doing backendy web things for money but would love to move away from that. Any recommendations for moving into the embedded field professionally? What sort of companies are you working for?
    • fest 4y ago
      Well, I don't think there is an easy way- I just walked away from the startup and lived on ramen for a couple of years, doing odd-ball contracts just to afford rent. During that time I learned a lot, essentially by telling prospective customers: "I do not have direct experience in this, but I have a pretty good idea on the involved steps. I am willing to do this as learning experience at a reduced rate". Many did agree, some projects turned out better than others- but eventually I did acquire enough experience to pass interviews at "real" companies. Past two companies hired me specifically for UAV projects, so my professional experience has been in this field- however, it is so wide, that you can easily branch out: * design one-off test hardware for various bench/field tests where an off the shelf solution doesn't fit (custom thrust stand, spring constant measurement jig to determine properties of vibration isolation solutions, simple blackbody for QA to determine if the LWIR payload meets specifications) * like physics/control systems? Lot of work on tuning PID controllers, implementing simulators for pure SWEs to not crash your expensive prototypes * hmm, it looks like we have excessive vibrations on the frame- whip up a small battery powered, WiFi enabled high-frequency accelerometer logger to dig deeper into it.
• neilv 4y ago
  > Yet I haven't heard of a single doctor who quit his practice and moved to Colorado to run a ski lodge. When I ask why, they all give the same response: the patients. Every day they see patients brought back to health, the bullshit recedes into the background, and they're reminded why they got into medicine. That kind of actual positive impact isn't the norm in tech.
  • larsrc 4y ago
    I was so lucky as to become the TL of the Code Search UI at Google less than a year after I joined. While there were certainly frustrations, one thing that was wonderful was meeting random SWEs and have them go "Code Search is awesome!" That's the equivalent of meeting the patient. Getting regular reminders of how what you do actually helps real people is a big booster. Certainly difficult to do for some programming jobs, but if that's the case, maybe ask yourself if you're working on the right part.
• omarelb 4y ago
  I believe that the more fundamental issue is that too many devs are 1) working on the wrong thing and 2) too disconnected to the users of their product, especially in larger companies. 1) I work at an early stage startup, and besides the tech challenges, what brings me most joy is our mission and vision of the product: to reduce the amount of time healthcare professionals are stuck doing administrative work, in turn allowing them to more effectively deliver care. I admit I was lucky to find a place building a product I can care about, and that it's a privilege. But for the love of god, please (try to) work on something you actually care about. For me that means building something that adds value to society, instead of e.g. trying to make [big corp] more money by ad optimization. I don't think I would feel fulfilled working on something like that, even if the engineering challenges of working on such a project could be great and fun. 2) The author mentions that doctors avoid leaving the sector, because they can see the impact they're having on their patients. It seems to me he missed the obvious analogy to us developers and the users of our software. If you never engage with the users of your product (which I do believe happens a lot, especially at larger companies), how will you know what value and joy it brings them? Staying close to the user, trying to understand them, is imo one of the most important (and fulfilling) things we can do as developers. It also allows us to do a better job, not in the least as a result of actually caring how your software will affect people. TL;DR try to work on something you actually care about
  • JanisErdmanis 4y ago
    Regarding your joy in working in tech, what types of administrative work can technology reduce for healthcare professionals? I find it depressing to see my general practitioner in front of a computer, typing in stuff, taking more time than it used to with paper.
    • omarelb 4y ago
      Thanks for the interest! The things you mention are exactly what we are looking to solve! Basically we are doing speech recognition specifically for the healthcare domain, so that for instance your GP or nurse can just report by voice instead of typing. It can really save them a lot of time that they can then spend to provide better care. Also, electronic health record systems (EHRs) like Epic generally have horrible UX, e.g. navigating to a specific page might take 6+ clicks. We'd like to improve that by for example enabling navigation by voice, filling in forms by voice, etc.
• fsloth 4y ago
  One of the things not mentioned here is that doctors are genuine professionals. Software developers, on the other hand, are in this weird limbo where some consider themselves as professionals and others do not. I am using the term "professional" in the wikipedia sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional. Similarly, some organizations treat software engineers as professionals, and other consider them closer to manual labor. The result is there is no shared understanding what it means to be a software engineer. Therefore it's quite hard to discuss software engineers as a single body of professionals, as the loose definition of the field means there won't be a single definition everyone could fall into. What I read from the article is that the author defines his "professionalism" as "inhabiting the monastery". That is fair and good, but there is no reason this definition and feeling should be shared with anyone else in the field. This lack of shared definition probably drives a lot of disillusionment. Someone thinks they are entering a monastery, but the next guy is there just to sweep the floors for a living. In monasteries most people are there to search for the higher purpose. But in software industry, "sweeping floors" is the most plausible job description, where no holy insight is expected to be gained. The described disillusionment might not be because the business is pathological (which it may very well) but because the practitioner entered the field with false expectations, imagining perhaps grand technological projects to move humanity forward, but founding themselves in the "sweeping factory". Another thing that comes to my mind - generally once you've been in the industry for a decade or so you are middle aged, and probably entering your middle age crisis where steretypically people re-evaluate their priorities and life goals. Which, given generally sofware people are not the dumbest people around, means there are lot of displeased people trying to search more meaningful careers, and given their general aptitude in complex tasks, can find lot of other fields (that don't need years of complex studioes) where they are quite good as well.
  • ravenstine 4y ago
    The problem in my eyes is that we're often not allowed to be professionals. Being a software developer can often feel little different from being in a high school programming class. Paradoxically, this feeling can have a positive correlation with years of experience. Looking back, I should have cherished my time as a junior developer because, frankly, I got to do more interesting things, write more original code, and actually have more say as to how work was going to be accomplished. By the time of being a high-tier mid-level or a senior engineer, the work not only becomes less interesting but is entrenched in a company's way of doing things. Somehow, senior engineers find themselves really not having as much power or influence over what they're working on. Hell, even lead developers often have limited power and are more or less supervisors with the responsibility of writing code. While the senior engineer's non-programmer friends get their own office or cube, he's sitting at a "shared" desk that's more or less a glorified high school computer lab with no personal touches. Few software developers manage to distinguish themselves or obtain a semblance of prestige. Those who do usually don't entirely deserve it, in my opinion. Software developers with name recognition today either are in the business of shilling books or founded a company that makes some parasitic social media product that makes the world a worse place. Or they're promoting some paradigm as gospel. Some exceptions include language and framework inventors; I think people have generally good opinions of Guido van Rossum, DHH, Ryan Dahl, Rich Harris, and so on. These people are still largely nobodies outside of software developer circles, despite the impact their creations have had on the world as a whole and on the careers of countless others. I think a major part of the disillusionment that goes unsaid is that "tech" today is far more associated with cyber dystopias than any sort of positive view of the future where software and humanity work together to solve real problems. This isn't to say the pessimistic view is a new one, because it's been around since time immemorial, but I do think that the institution of Silicon Valley isn't seen as favorable by the mainstream as it used to. When I got into software full time, programming as a career was in a bit of a renaissance after the recovery from 2008 and the easy money started really flowing. Joining an "innovative" startup was considered really cool, even by people who weren't programmers. Today, working in software and being a part of this industry is much closer to being seen as selling one's soul to the devil. When people think "tech", they think of cryptocurrency scams, Mark Zuckerberg, useful features disappearing on sites like YouTube, devices like Echo/Alexa that fail to live up to their promise, apps like TikTok warping the minds of young people, Tesla cars with their false advertising and shoddy production quality, the increasing prevalence of ads on streaming services... the list goes on and on. It all comes off as a giant swindle. The health care industry is a swindle too, but it still solves life and death problems. Most "tech" doesn't, but is a psy-op to dupe people out of their time and money. Doctors and surgeons don't completely change their toolset every 5 years because of the opinions of other doctors. Gee, I can't imagine why frustrated doctors stay in their field while programmers throw in the towel so often. Finally, I do think there's an unshakable taintedness to being a programmer while there's simultaneously an unshakable romanticism around being a doctor, or a lawyer, or even a starving artist. Programmers invest a ton of time and effort into learning their craft, and some end up sacrificing their social lives in their 20s with the belief that they'll really start living in their 30s after they've made a lot of money and have that senior title. They come to find that half their paycheck goes to the state, the women they're romantically interested in think programmers are "eww grody", and they've become pseudoautistic from a lack of healthy social interaction. A woman programmer may feel even more disillusioned because of biological reasons, and without the sort of respect they'd have had if they went to medical school. Some part of you has to love the field of software in order to stay in it. Unless you make beyond the average six-figure paycheck, you probably won't find fulfillment from anywhere but within.
• pydry 4y ago
  >Yet I haven't heard of a single doctor who quit his practice and moved to Colorado to run a ski lodge. When I ask why, they all give the same response: the patients. Every day they see patients brought back to health, the bullshit recedes into the background, and they're reminded why they got into medicine. >The default in engineering is different. We don't have a daily ritual built into our jobs that reminds us why we got into the field. This is just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation The difference between doctors and software engineers is just that it's easier for us to be alienated due to the nature of our work.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• hermitcrab 4y ago
  Accountants seem even more disillusioned than developers: https://www.reddit.com/r/Accounting/comments/zza7el/accountants_and_auditors_declined_17_between_2019/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Accounting/comments/zza7el/accounta... We're the cool nerds. ;0)
  • 082349872349872 4y ago
    We probably do better than dentists. ("gum gardeners") At least our customers just don't know what they want; theirs straight up lie about what they do.
    • hermitcrab 4y ago
      I expect accountants get lied to more than dentists.
      • type-r 4y ago
        maybe dentists wouldn't be lied to if they could actually tell if you floss or not. i always start flossing 2 weeks before my biannual cleaning and consistently receive glowing reviews from dentists on my dental hygiene. feels like the whole thing is a racket
      • throwanem 4y ago
        Accountants don't ask everyone they see whether they've been flossing.
    • urthor 4y ago
      Dentists work 4 days a week. They have a quiet chuckle.
• tomr75 4y ago
  I feel the exact same way as a doctor... I wonder if every profession loses its charm after 10 years For me it's losing the challenge/being disillusioned with the remaining goals
  • whaaswijk 4y ago
    This is surprising to hear. From my perspective as accomplices scientist being a doctor strikes me as one of the few jobs where you are obviously and directly helping people, thus “making the world a better place” (as we CS folks sometimes like to think we do).
    • WJW 4y ago
      That probably depends heavily on the field and even then, the endless flow of new patients can make it seem hopeless. Sure you patched up two guys today, but there will be five more tomorrow and every day after that. It's even worse if the patients in question don't just suffer from "unjust" illnesses that just happened by accident but are instead stubborn alcoholics or something like that. You can treat someone for the symptoms of liver failure, but you already know they'll be in again next week because they can't leave the bottle alone. And when this patient dies there will be hundreds more next week.
      • nradov 4y ago
        When my grandfather was in the hospital I got to talking with the patient in the next room, who was recovering from a quadruple heart bypass operation. He didn't like the hospital food, so he convinced his family to bring him a double cheeseburger and fries from the fast-food restaurant down the street. That's got to be a little disillusioning for doctors.
        • sul_tasto 4y ago
          I have a few friends who are doctors. One is a primary care physician and he talks about the frustrations of patients refusing to take care of their health or adopt behavioral changes he recommends. Most just want a prescription so that they can continue their bad habits. The other said he went into surgery because he didn’t want to have to work with patients who won’t take care of themselves. However, he occasionally looses patients on the operating table which never gets easier. As an undergraduate I considered going into academia, and one professor cautioned that I need to be prepared to see the ugly side of academics and be willing to tolerate seeing something I love be sullied by inter-departmental politics, publish or perish, difficult students, etc. In short, I think all professions have their upsides and downsides. I think the answer is to care about your craft for your self respect. I think you have to do your best ultimately for yourself. We’re putting a lot of our time/life into our craft, so it seems to me we owe it to ourselves to make it mean something, regardless of the reality of coworkers, the need for a paycheck, etc. I will also admit that living up to such a challenge is a daily struggle, and I don’t always measure up to my own ideals. But I’m always trying.
• rightbyte 4y ago
  I think disillusionment in software development is mainly about the social interactions at companies rather than about the technology itself. Sure, all these hype cycles are annoying and if you believe in them and they turn out bad. But they are only truly annoying if you are forced into them too early by the usual dogmatic evangelists using social shaming, management force or what not. But in the end the old tech is still there for you.
• wiseowise 4y ago
  A lot of personal anecdotes and projection on others. > Yet I haven't heard of a single doctor who quit his practice and moved to Colorado to run a ski lodge. How many doctors do you know?
• alkonaut 4y ago
  If you like programming like a craft or something almost magic, then work on something like that. There are jobs where the ratio of algorithms and problem solving to plumbing is perfectly fine. You don’t have to work with apis and databases and and yaml. I think too many get into software because of that magic feeling but then end up doing plumbing. Of course that’s not going to be as fulfilling as what you did on your ZX. But people plumb along or think that maybe it’s just time to go into management, they feel “done” with development. And that’s sad.
  • tangjurine 4y ago
    What types of jobs? Are there others than: Game dev Research programming? Startups/greenfield projects?
    • JonChesterfield 4y ago
      Compiler dev has its share of insane plumbing but also rewards stubbornly finding O(N) heuristics to non-polynomial problems. Cranelift are doing interesting things, e.g. https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/cranelift-progress-2022 https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/cranelift-progress-202...
    • alkonaut 4y ago
      Scientific/simulation, embedded, heavy desktop (e.g CAD), games, ML/AI etc Almost everything except “web development” I’d say.
• lapcat 4y ago
  (2020)
• mothsonasloth 4y ago
  I'm in the same boat, that I have contemplated starting a business making houmous as a street food vendor. The author's article does resonate with me but to add, I think the software game has changed a lot since the dot-com era. It has changed for worse, we are disconnected from the hardware and the users. We are just middleware integration specialists, depending on an ever decreasing amount of pioneers building systems, frameworks or low level processes. I want to build Dijkstras algorithms not write integration tests for APIs made terribly by Stripe
  • unity1001 4y ago
    > We are just middleware integration specialists It was always so? It is so in every single technology: A layer is built and its complexities are solved, enabling the people and society to move to the next level and build another layer on it. With every step, more layers are put in between the lowest level and where we are. But every layer pushes us up one level more, allowing us to do things that were unimaginable before. Technology has always been middleware. Somewhere someone discovers a pioneering, new implementation or tech. The rest of the process is doing middleware to bring that tech to the people.
• fedeb95 4y ago
  Just don't make your life revolve only around software development. Try to limit at the necessary extra hours, knowing that yes, they may boost your career for a while, but they both diminish your work quality and get you closer to burnout. In your free time, try to do other activities. Reading, fishing, hiking, learning a new language (not programming) through books and not the internet. That's what I do if anything.
• myth_drannon 4y ago
  Funny, I did exactly the same. Bought 486 off the ebay, got me some Turbo C and bunch of old books on computer graphics. It's very satisfying feeling vs even working on some hobby ML projects or some other new web fancy thing. My day job(web dev) is like everyday the same house is flooded with sewage and I need to clean it quickly and also put a smile on my face and tell how great is that and that I managed to do it all today and suggest new ways of cleaning sewage better.
• adbachman 4y ago
  For me this manifests as changing jobs about every two years. I also keep a Fred Brooks quote taped to the wall behind my monitors: The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. They build their castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month It doesn't fix alienation, but it helps. I particularly like to share it during interviews to get the vibe of the people I'm talking to and potentially going to be working with.
  • dkqmduems 4y ago
    Hard to overlook the ephemeral quality of castles in the air.
• pnf 4y ago
  The whole setup of expectations in tech is contrary to happiness for most people. The ideal of 'building the future' and other silly values such as 'change the world' are without content. Build which future? Change the world how? These empty values cannot hide the inherent meaningless of most tech jobs. Moreover, the pace of innovation in tech can burn people out for sure; trying to upskill all the time is no way to live as your brain changes and family life competes for time and attention. But more than that, the constant mini-revolutions in tech shorten history and reveal to anyone who cares to look the graveyard of innovation in miniature. It takes a strong will to consider without flinching that years of effort, success, and failure were transient curiosities to the world. In a tech career you must plan for your own obsolescence unless you move into the 'stable' trajectory of management. That's rough on the ego of any healthy person. That's not even to mention the challenges of soulless bureaucracies that constitute most of the job options these days. The solution is to find sources of power and leverage for oneself. This is admittedly hard to do in management-dominated jobs unless you also have the skills for management. If you have management skills, you can avoid burnout by avoiding notions of 'fixing organizations' or 'improving processes'. These are dead ends. Find opportunities of expanding the things you control and minimizing the things that control you. If you are a technician who is loath to become a manager, understand you also need to maximize your leverage. This comes with control through skill and ownership, not skill alone. People who want to see this advice as cynical are narrow-minded. Nothing about having leverage means you can't help people succeed, or be a team player, or be a 'good' person. In fact, unless you are a sociopath, you must have friends and allies and be committed to their well-being to be happy. What it does mean is you having the power to do all those things and not be helpless. Helplessness is the mind killer. The whole 'beginner mind' business is, paradoxically, a hack to put yourself back into an expansive state of power (the opposite of powerless). But it cannot last. Unless you are a happy hermit you will want to be in the world, with people, with organizations, with politics, with friends, with enemies, with family. Technical competence, among its many uses, is a kind of armor you put on to conquer, but it isn't terribly useful to hold on to what you've gained for long.
  • wellanyway 4y ago
    > setup of expectations in tech In my experience, people who plaster 'building the future' shit on every wall aren't engineers but HR department that is happy to exploit that unique amount of energy that comes from combining twenty eyer old people with no life and vague idealistic promises.
• ergonaught 4y ago
  It's what happens anytime money becomes the point. Call it extrinsic motivation if you prefer. The folks running the company no longer have nor engender a sense of mission; the folks flocking to your career are chasing dollars rather than love or mission. It feels soulless because it is soulless, and if you're one of the few who genuinely care/love, it's crushing. It's hardly exclusive to programming. My father was a plumber in love with the craft and even the art of it, and by mid 90s the industry had crushed the love right out of him. Happens everywhere.
  • kirse 4y ago
    if you're one of the few who genuinely care/love, it's crushing There's an upside to disillusionment in that we are stripped of all the ego and false beliefs we hold, as painful as it is. If you're one of the few who genuinely care/love, you'll come to the realizations you did. But the way out of the valley of disillusionment is to realize it doesn't matter how others approach it, because they are irrelevant. You get to do what you love and that's all that matters. Only the creator will ever truly understand the labor and love that goes into his creation, to expect that level of appreciation or care from others is unwise and irrational. In fact, holding that expectation might even reveal hidden motives that imply one's "love for the craft" is not as genuine as they'd think.
    • harimau777 4y ago
      The problem as I see it is that you have to care because the people who are just in it for a paycheck are on your team. Your boss is going to want to know why you aren't as fast as the developers who cut corners in order to get features delivered.
• jordanpg 4y ago
  I left software engineering after about 10 years to become a patent attorney. I'm about 3 months in (post-law school). I left software engineering because I just couldn't see myself doing it for another 20 years, especially if it was going to involve even more meetings (ie. management). I chose patent law because it seemed tech-adjacent. I'm in biglaw now. Too early to say if this was a wise move or not, but I do find myself fondly reminiscing about my cushy life as a SWE often, already. I have work much, much harder as a patent attorney and have much less free time and time off. Yes I get paid more, too. This is partially a function of biglaw, and partially a function of the legal world in general that is tethered to the billable hour. I guess my point is to take careful stock of the lifestyle being a SWE affords you relative to the workload and compensation before making any drastic moves.
• vgyhui 4y ago
  I got around this feeling of disillusionment by changing track to vulnerability research and exploit development. Now I spend my days figuring out how things work and how to break them to do things they were never designed to do. It's so much more satisfying that the tedious, unfulfilling, run-of-the-mill software development crap that I was doing prior to this. The nice thing about this switch is that all my previous experience in the field comes in very useful, unlike if I changed careers to something entirely different.
  • michael_leachim 4y ago
    hi, it is an interesting thought. Would you mind telling how one can start getting into it for a typical backend dev with 10 y.o.e? thanks a lot
• iceflinger 4y ago
  If being in tech requires crafting your own rituals in order to stay engaged, what's the motivation to not simply quit and start brewing beer and growing tomatoes while still keeping your own tech rituals? If the fulfillment of working with technology is coming from outside having technology as a career, why stay in technology as a career? Compared to the feeling mentioned between doctors and patients I still don't see any actual compelling reason that staying in tech as a business in its current state is worth it even to the most enthused about technology.
  • 411111111111111 4y ago
    > what's the motivation to not simply quit and start brewing beer and growing tomatoes while still keeping your own tech rituals? - money - job security - experience
    • iceflinger 4y ago
      None of those really insulate you from disillusionment.
      • TheCapeGreek 4y ago
        At least for me, and I am going to guess the majority of us, the comfort of a good paycheck outweighs the disillusionment, despite the result being a feeling that you're wasting 1/3 of your waking days on something you don't care about. Every time I look at some flashy purchase that I'd like and can get with finance (e.g. new car), it always seems affordable, but the long term cost is that I have to rigidly stay in my income bracket or rise above it. There's no room for risk to fail.
• lilboiluvr69 4y ago
  That was beautiful.
• amelius 4y ago
  > Maybe it’s an emergent property, maybe it’s an accident, maybe it’s by design; it doesn’t matter why, but the industry burns through people. It's by design. Employers want only young people because they are still gullible and don't question the politics.
• jgeada 4y ago
  The difference between medicine and engineering is that largely the AMA has endured that management is a support function and medical doctors largely remain in power in most practices. In engineering, particularly software and electronics we’ve allowed parasitic management to take over under the cover that “engineers aren’t people persons”. Look at how many of the awards in our fields go to management rather than the actual engineers that created the inventions that have revolutionized the world.
  • wellanyway 4y ago
    True. Amount of sheer disdain in IT management is infuriating.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      That's why it's important to cultivate managers from engineers, but that's really difficult. As an engineer that became a manager, and then went back to being an engineer, I know the process well. I was a very good manager, and I'm a very good engineer, but I love engineering, and hate management. However, there was no one else that I could trust to do the job, so I took up the mantle.
• eulers_secret 4y ago
  Wow, I read “Once you observe the darker side of human nature in the technology industry, you cannot forget or unsee it.” And then I hit the (skippable) paywall. I laughed, goddamn this is funny. An article about how exhausting this shit is and there’s fucking dark patterns shitting all over it. It’s so perfect, like a grand satire. Performance art done in software, but fully unintended and shockingly cynical.
• nemo 4y ago
  >The internet desensitized me to text and video. Anything that happens in front of a screen doesn't help with perspective anymore. But I discovered that getting away from the screen and handling physical items does. A little late on this one, but I've been recapping and fixing an old SE/30 I've had since '98, and it's been rewarding to do. I've also connected with old friends while doing it. Doing things in meatspace that are tied to computing has been really fun and running System 7.5.5 on an SE/30 also reminds me of how far things have progressed from back then while still some things seem timeless. It used to run NetBSD and run as a server ages ago. I also collect Roman and Ancient Greek coins (there are cheap ones), have a Roman emperor list filled out, and have a lot of lovely Greek art I've picked up over the decades. I just started a new Byzantium & the Middle Ages building out an eastern Roman emperor list. Holding each coin and learning about the era depicted and the people of that time is fascinating for me. Won't save you from burnout over tech, but it's always good to have hobbies that keep your spirits up.
• chris_wot 4y ago
  I got enormously disillusioned with Wikipedia. Then I decided to contribute to the Women in Red project. All my disillusionment went away! I wrote articles about Australian women - my last one being Kate Baker who championed the first truly quintessential Australian writer, Joseph Furphy.[1] Then I got banned and all of that came to an abrupt end. Now I’m using Wikishootme to document South-West Sydney as it’s unloved by politicians and those from the East and North Shore of Sydney. I’ve discovered the area I live in through the act of taking photos of the place I live in. It’s fantastic again! 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Baker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Baker
• harimau777 4y ago
  This article misses that for most software engineers there is no monastery. Unlike a doctor who actually is doing the thing they care about, healing patients. Most software engineers aren't doing anything related to expanding technology or even using technology in a skilled way. It's just an empty race to the bottom.
• dang 4y ago
  Discussed at the time: Surviving Disillusionment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24896650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24896650 - Oct 2020 (170 comments)
• agumonkey 4y ago
  two things come to mind: - I think part of this is related to this era. even MIT reopened glass smelting fabs. People need more stimuli than digital projections inside chips - All we really want is to contribute to others. Do something nice that is never gonna be of use to anybody and you'll feel down, do something super trivial that gives someone his smile's back and you're proud of your day.