4 ms·

I've also gone in and out of software dev (don't really consider myself an engineer), with gaps of several years or longer in between. I did it part time for ha

I've also gone in and out of software dev (don't really consider myself an engineer), with gaps of several years or longer in between. I did it part time for half a decade, full time for about a decade, and I'm back to part time now. Other jobs in between were both enjoyable in and of themselves, but also made me see dev work in a different light. Namely, that it's super cushy but pretty soulless, lol. Definitely not for everyone, and not at every stage of their lives either. I would be happy to give up the cush for more meaning and fulfillment. Whether you would is up to you to find out! A lot of dev work is becoming less relevant now too, now that the ad bubbles have burst, countries are cracking down on privacy, Skynet is just around the corner, etc. Maybe it's a good thing you have other skills! If I were you, I'd use your youth not to fret about the past but to explore different options for the future. You're barely getting started. It's OK to try different things until you find one you like, do that for a bit, and then switch. My mom was an English major who switched careers four or five times, becoming happier each time. My dad was an engineer (civil/electrical) who had one job his entire career, and he was the most one-dimensional and unhappy person I ever knew, at least until he retired. Different life paths and outcomes. Your CS degree wasn't wasted. You still have a bachelor's, which is more than most people can say. You learned enough to work on the field, but maybe didn't want to stay there forever. It's okay. Even if you do want to go back, it's like riding a bike, you just remember and pick it back up again. Sure, the frameworks and languages might change, and the person next to you might be a killer robot, but the underlying principles are probably still similar. Your real job isn't coding, it's figuring out what would make you happy, fulfilled, and financially sustainable enough for the next few decades... but a few years at a time, typically, not all at once.

Gooblebrai 3y ago
Would you mind to expand on what do you mean by soulless?
- diarrhea 3y ago
  Not GP, but I understand soulless as without meaningful human interaction. Developers are generally and purposely shielded from end users. A lot of interaction is not in person, but in video calls, chats, email, internet forums like HN itself. It’s all very sterile. I’ve never shaken a happy customer’s hand, (nor been yelled at in person for that matter), for example. It’s not a thing many developers experience regularly. I like to think of health workers as a strongly contrasting occupation. Much higher highs, much lower lows. Certainly anything but sterile. Certainly not soulless!
  - screwturner68 3y ago
    Yep, I moved from Dev to ops many years ago simply because I wanted to talk to someone..anyone. I've been in consulting for the last 20 years and I talk to customers good or bad almost every day and I do get a kick out of it when they are stoked with my work. The funny thing is as I'm getting older and working with more complex and closer to alpha products I find myself writing code to make my life easier, funny how that works. As far as the industry as a whole, I wouldn't recommend it to my kid I think it's dying or at least dying in the US.
- solardev 3y ago
  Sure, but this is just my opinion. Part of it is what diarrhea said in a sibling response: Having minimal meaningful human interaction. Scrum meetings with your owners and such don't really count. If anything, those are worse than not having social interactions, lol. We're cloistered plumbers working in the dark crevices of systems most people don't want to touch or know about, and it's pretty much always a conversation killer to tell regular people outside of tech bubbles that you're a programmer. But more than that, often our work is itself devoid of purpose or meaning. We make ad tech and crypto and marketing pages for these big soulless corporations that only enrich a few shareholders, often at the expense of everyone else and sometimes society and democracy itself. I don't think Meta, Twitter, etc. are a net good for humanity. Maaaaaybe Netflix and Google are arguably less evil to some degree, but even that's debatable. And that's just the products and services they make, not even counting the knock-on effects of tech bubbles killing livability across the USA, for example. My first tech experience was as an intern, and the anti-spam startup I worked for in the early 2000s decided to sell their tech to the Chinese government to censor dissidents instead. I noped the heck out of there and tried to stay away from evil tech since then, instead working for small solar businesses and nonprofits. But even then, I'm under no illusion that I'm any sort of rebel, rather, just someone living on the fringes and feeding off the leftovers. All my work is still directly developed by Google (Analytics, GCP, etc.), Meta (React and FB ads), AWS, etc. -- the same companies that make their billions exploiting people. At the end of the day I think it's just run-of-the-mill capitalism, not that dissimilar from bankers, railroad barons, newspaper owners, mine owners, whatever... profit-driven and rent-seeking overlords that always put their own interests ahead of society's. It's a very different world than people who work in civil service, or as a professor or a rural teacher, or a nurse, or a dentist, or even a civil engineering, etc. Not only is it often a lonely and asocial job, it's also often an anti-social job that actively makes society worse in order to enrich a few people. I know it's not a popular opinion since this is a community of startup entrepreneurs, after all, but it's the hacker side of things that interested me at first. Big tech killed little tech, and I think it's also making our lives worse, offering more convenience at the expense of community. I often miss the pre-smartphone, pre-Amazon era when you'd still have to go out and interact with people and get to know them, instead of just WFH and getting everything delivered, for example. I often yearn of moving to less capitalist societies whose cities and towns are more walkable, more local, and generally more intimate. After twenty years of doing dev work, I feel like my impact on the world has been exactly zero, or maybe slightly negative, lol, and I can't wait to find another career. (Working on going back to school). But again, that's just me. Maybe someone like Sam Altman can look back in two decades and think "wow, we really changed the future of humanity for the better, huh?" Or not. We'll see, lol.
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  When I was still in college I got an internship at a local startup. One day, the other SWE and I went to lunch with a former coworker of the other SWE, and he told a story about how he worked on a team for YEARS that ended up not creating anything of value. I forget if the software just wasn’t needed in the end or what, but I remember thinking “damn, that must be really rare”… fast forward 8 years, I’ve now been on a similar team. The job was lax as fuck, like I worked maybe 8 hours A WEEK, but it was still somehow soul-crushing. What little work I did do, I knew it was garbage and wouldn’t live to see production use. The team was laid off a few months ago and I assume the code is in the garbage. Somehow I wish I worked even less than I did.

Gooblebrai 3y ago

Would you mind to expand on what do you mean by soulless?

diarrhea 3y ago
Not GP, but I understand soulless as without meaningful human interaction. Developers are generally and purposely shielded from end users. A lot of interaction is not in person, but in video calls, chats, email, internet forums like HN itself. It’s all very sterile. I’ve never shaken a happy customer’s hand, (nor been yelled at in person for that matter), for example. It’s not a thing many developers experience regularly. I like to think of health workers as a strongly contrasting occupation. Much higher highs, much lower lows. Certainly anything but sterile. Certainly not soulless!
- screwturner68 3y ago
  Yep, I moved from Dev to ops many years ago simply because I wanted to talk to someone..anyone. I've been in consulting for the last 20 years and I talk to customers good or bad almost every day and I do get a kick out of it when they are stoked with my work. The funny thing is as I'm getting older and working with more complex and closer to alpha products I find myself writing code to make my life easier, funny how that works. As far as the industry as a whole, I wouldn't recommend it to my kid I think it's dying or at least dying in the US.
solardev 3y ago
Sure, but this is just my opinion. Part of it is what diarrhea said in a sibling response: Having minimal meaningful human interaction. Scrum meetings with your owners and such don't really count. If anything, those are worse than not having social interactions, lol. We're cloistered plumbers working in the dark crevices of systems most people don't want to touch or know about, and it's pretty much always a conversation killer to tell regular people outside of tech bubbles that you're a programmer. But more than that, often our work is itself devoid of purpose or meaning. We make ad tech and crypto and marketing pages for these big soulless corporations that only enrich a few shareholders, often at the expense of everyone else and sometimes society and democracy itself. I don't think Meta, Twitter, etc. are a net good for humanity. Maaaaaybe Netflix and Google are arguably less evil to some degree, but even that's debatable. And that's just the products and services they make, not even counting the knock-on effects of tech bubbles killing livability across the USA, for example. My first tech experience was as an intern, and the anti-spam startup I worked for in the early 2000s decided to sell their tech to the Chinese government to censor dissidents instead. I noped the heck out of there and tried to stay away from evil tech since then, instead working for small solar businesses and nonprofits. But even then, I'm under no illusion that I'm any sort of rebel, rather, just someone living on the fringes and feeding off the leftovers. All my work is still directly developed by Google (Analytics, GCP, etc.), Meta (React and FB ads), AWS, etc. -- the same companies that make their billions exploiting people. At the end of the day I think it's just run-of-the-mill capitalism, not that dissimilar from bankers, railroad barons, newspaper owners, mine owners, whatever... profit-driven and rent-seeking overlords that always put their own interests ahead of society's. It's a very different world than people who work in civil service, or as a professor or a rural teacher, or a nurse, or a dentist, or even a civil engineering, etc. Not only is it often a lonely and asocial job, it's also often an anti-social job that actively makes society worse in order to enrich a few people. I know it's not a popular opinion since this is a community of startup entrepreneurs, after all, but it's the hacker side of things that interested me at first. Big tech killed little tech, and I think it's also making our lives worse, offering more convenience at the expense of community. I often miss the pre-smartphone, pre-Amazon era when you'd still have to go out and interact with people and get to know them, instead of just WFH and getting everything delivered, for example. I often yearn of moving to less capitalist societies whose cities and towns are more walkable, more local, and generally more intimate. After twenty years of doing dev work, I feel like my impact on the world has been exactly zero, or maybe slightly negative, lol, and I can't wait to find another career. (Working on going back to school). But again, that's just me. Maybe someone like Sam Altman can look back in two decades and think "wow, we really changed the future of humanity for the better, huh?" Or not. We'll see, lol.
gymbeaux 3y ago
When I was still in college I got an internship at a local startup. One day, the other SWE and I went to lunch with a former coworker of the other SWE, and he told a story about how he worked on a team for YEARS that ended up not creating anything of value. I forget if the software just wasn’t needed in the end or what, but I remember thinking “damn, that must be really rare”… fast forward 8 years, I’ve now been on a similar team. The job was lax as fuck, like I worked maybe 8 hours A WEEK, but it was still somehow soul-crushing. What little work I did do, I knew it was garbage and wouldn’t live to see production use. The team was laid off a few months ago and I assume the code is in the garbage. Somehow I wish I worked even less than I did.