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My honest advice: Get out of the Hacker News hivemind. The folks on this site act like every programming job is either at a FAANG/MAGMA company, a startup, or
by Uehreka 3y ago
My honest advice: Get out of the Hacker News hivemind.
The folks on this site act like every programming job is either at a FAANG/MAGMA company, a startup, or not in tech. They are wrong.
If you are willing to look outside the valley (but still in almost any big city or suburb), there are oceans of tech companies that work in like, financial compliance dashboards or healthcare documentation or if you’re OK with it defense contractors. You can make $150-250k easy. Your life will involve waking up, attending a standup on Google Meet, adding an endpoint to a REST API, sending it off to be tested, then around 2 you fix whatever the testers found, send it off again, then clock out once there’s nothing else in your swim lane (possibly before 5).
You won’t get equity, and you won’t have the outlandish salaries people are always talking about on HN, but you’ll also have the freedom to not think about your job outside of work hours. If what you want is to leverage your skills into a comfortable life where you can spend time with your kids, this is the move.
I’ve seen people burn out and try to leave tech for greener pastures, it often doesn’t turn out as well as they expect. In other fields, you’ll be a lot more fungible and you’ll come to realize how much cushion and leverage developers get from being a somewhat scarce resource.
- spelunker 3y agoIMO this can lead to a different problem: boredom. I worked at a previous job where the primary product was in KTLO mode, and the company was really just waiting to be acquired. Not much to do, and nobody cared. I suppose it's really a spectrum in the end.
- sierisimo 3y agoI think this defines it. It's an spectrum. I made my jumps in the last 4 years... I got really burned out while working in a MAANGA company and move to a smaller company but the poor management of the projects made me quit. I then joined an startup and there was practically no automation and no consistency across the codebase so it was really messy and hard to follow, every new task required to re learn the module/code where you were working and the management was not interested on changing anything. Even I got called out for "not contributing enough to the product and focusing more on automating stuff" I'm going to start soon again at a big corp MAANGA style, the interviews showed the engineers are more happy and challenged there and there's not a big rush/demand as in the previous MAANGA I worked on... So yeah, it's a matter of searching what works for you (Yes, I haven't found what works for me, but I still have hope)
- paulus-saulus 3y agoI agree. Quit all IT news feeds and do only one thing . RELAX
- hardkorebob 3y agoI say quit it all And LEARN a new ontology. ;) Perhaps the (1972ACSP) Srimad-Purana or Gitoupanisad will assist? You want that year or previous. Anything after '72 is garbage.
- zubairq 3y agoGreat advice! Hacker news is only for us degenerates !
- itake 3y agoI've worked at small non-tech companies (less than 50 people) and the quality of my peers was frustrating.
- nik736 3y agoThis has one disadvantage: You will be working with people who don't want to work, do everything to waste your and their time and will drag you down. If you are fine with that everything is good, but if you have at least a bit of drive to achieve something great you will be very very unhappy.
- jsiepkes 3y agoIf you are into those kind of generalisations you could easily argue that's not very different from working at FANG where a lot of people only care about their own career and care very little about creating good products.
- kingTug 3y agoIt is really discouraging how defense contractors seem to be some of the easiest to get / most prevelant jobs at the moment.