5 ms·

> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so pe

> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too. I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. I like the Integrity part, too. That seems to be something that's missing (from most vocations), these days. One of the reasons that I stuck with my last job for so long, was because the people I worked with, and for, had Integrity, and that's pretty important to me.

weinzierl 5mo ago
This is from 1880 and reminds me of something Dostoyevsky had written 14 years before. His quip in The Gambler was even more extreme because he spoke about working hard and saving every penny for generations with the subtext being that it makes everyone miserable.
UncleOxidant 5mo ago
> I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. Same. Claude/Gemini/DeepSeekV4/Qwen3.6 are enabling me to do way more experimentation than I could do on my own. 10X at least. Not getting paid for any of it, but that's OK, getting paid imposes limitations on what you can work on and imposes responsibilities that I don't care to have anymore. There's a certain kind of integrity in that as well.
- draftsman 5mo ago
  Do you find joy in using LLMs to write software? I tried using Claude/Cursor/CodeX/etc. for personal projects and experimentation, and I found no joy in it. I learned nothing, and when my MVPs were complete, I only had a shallow understanding of how the code that powered them worked.
  - skinfaxi 5mo ago
    I'm curious of the places you've found joy while writing software traditionally. For me, it has been in reasoning about the system, debugging issues, and discovering what works. The iterative process of eventually coming to a more complete understanding, as you stand on and build off of your prior understanding. All of those elements are present for me while using AI to augment my output. I have started using voice to interact with my coding harness though and I think that has maybe influenced my opinion. I also don't let things go fully autonomously and look at the diffs along the way.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
    I do, but I also use LLMs in a manner that seems drastically different, from most folks here. I use the standard $20/ChatGPT Pro sub, and run Thinking 5.5 as a chat interface. I use it like a "trusted personal advisor," as opposed to a "black box employee." I'm intimately involved in almost every step of the development process. Most of what I ask from the LLM, is function-length snippets. It's made a huge difference in the velocity and scope of my work. I have learned that I need to be very careful, though. The LLM sometimes really borks things, and I have to rip out the garbage, and rewrite the code, myself. I can't even imagine the quality of "vibe-coded" software.
    - t_mahmood 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      - ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
        And...we have an attack... I love this place, I really do, but this stuff gets a bit tiresome.
        onraglanroad 5mo ago
        It's a troll (based on username). Enjoy your retirement, I'll be there in a couple of years myself and hopefully doing equally useful stuff.
an0malous 5mo ago
This is conflated by the fact that most people start to enjoy things that give them a lot of money and prestige. Otherwise everyone would be in playing sports and making art, the things kids do before they care about money and prestige
- galangalalgol 5mo ago
  I started programming at 5, making it do what I wanted it to provided dopamine. I never found a sport I enjoyed. I do like painting though. I doubt very many people get into sanitation because they love making toilets clean, but even there I'm sure a few do. Before 2000 I think it was pretty normal for people to select software as a career without considering the compensation as a factor. It wasn't excessively better than other similar choices for one.
  - KellyCriterion 5mo ago
    > Before 2000 The salary expectations exploded when the VC/PE-bobos went into the space and started "build-and-sell-high". Sure there were Billionairs made before tech & internet, but public was not aware of most such transactions.
    - galangalalgol 5mo ago
      And that never changed salaries nearly as much in games, embedded, or outside the us. I never worked in any software position adjacent to the online economy, so I never saw any of those wacky salaries.
      - KellyCriterion 5mo ago
        > to the online economy, so I n that term is great, thanks! because: Outside of the "online community", a SWE salary is just a normal salary, all these superhigh salaries only came around the corner when it started to be about "international!" and "global scale!" and "disruption!" (of course LOL) and other things like these. In the 90s, a "SWE" was just a normal employee doing some IT dev stuf & co, but after DotCom-boom SWE et. al. became the heroes, esp. for scaling and selling companies quickly because they had their MBA-colleagues in mind :-D
steve_adams_86 5mo ago
> and that's pretty important to me The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble. I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject misery because of this. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but a large part of the problem was working with people who had very little integrity. They were great at masking it and presenting a different persona, but ultimately, we did bad things to people and made filthy money. I don't miss anything about it.
- neilv 5mo ago
  Like you, I've found that working with people of integrity (or some qualities closely related to that) is very important to me. Not in a "new-grad or corporate PR appropriating meaningless platitudes" kind of way. But in a "I have seen multiple times how one untrustworthy person can easily wreck all the work of a team or organization, and make their lives miserable, so averting that is a high priority" kind of way. Lately, in business context, I tend to characterize what I seek from people as "alignment". I think that many (not all) business people are still willing to buy in on that. And it will just have to be a given that the company and team goals with which people are aligned are respectable. What seems to be getting more difficult in the last few years is finding companies with respectable goals. Of course you knew to avoid any company in crypto. But now, with with a new VC gold rush of AI (often involving the same people who were happy to run crypto scams), there aren't a lot of startups that look respectable. Not all AI companies, nor all companies doing AI, are bad. But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush?
  - MrDarcy 5mo ago
    > But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush? Look for those who are trying to serve established respectable professions, ideally have already done so for many years or decades. Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism (in the ideal sense). Then look at their own mission. Then look at their own work. Do they show their work? Are they open? Do they willingly allow their customers to audit their work product? Does how they talk about their work match the work product itself? Does the thing do what it says on the tin? Are they hypocrites with respect to those they serve or those they manage? These are my strategies and I’ve found they lead to working almost exclusively with people who have high Integrity.
jancsika 5mo ago
[flagged]
- Paradigm2020 5mo ago
  Huh this is literally about human integrity, not a dapp. Why the need to insert this crypto spam ?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
    I assumed that it was a joke. I guess I could be wrong, though.
    - Paradigm2020 5mo ago
      It seemed serious but guess I should take the optimistic view, not gonna go down the rabbit hole. Thx
paulpauper 5mo ago
Given how much these jobs pay, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
Aurornis 5mo ago
It’s everywhere in tech. Ever since tech became known as the place to be for high paying jobs without requiring too much education or working hours, compared to traditional routes like doctor or lawyer. The better places to work have some ability to filter it out. Not perfectly, but enough to make it hard to be there if your goal is to max your paychecks while minimizing and/or hating your work.
xg15 5mo ago
I think this even affects people who do see their vocation in tech. The field has become so vast with many subfields that you can easily find yourself in a different subfield than the one you were originally interested in - probably even more so when everyone and everything is pulled towards AI.
solenoid0937 5mo ago
The funny thing is once I started working on what I actually cared about, my performance ratings went from average to amongst the highest in my org, and while I work a lot more now, I get a real sense of accomplishment at the end of day, and I'm a lot happier. (I always thought this was a cliche until I experienced it) People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team. It makes people around you give more of a damn. You really just have to find something you care about. This is especially easy at the big tech companies, but for some reason, most engineers don't even think about it - they get stuck in this miserable loop of stress and hating their work.
- crimsontech 5mo ago
  Same thing happened to me and I feel very blessed to get paid to do work that I would do for free as a hobby. > People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team as well. When hiring I always look for this, if someone is passionate about the work it often means they will put the effort in to be good at it, and it raises the team in a lot of ways.
- a123b456c 5mo ago
  It's nice if you find something you previously care about. But it can go the other way too-- you can care more about what you work on. You can focus on the reasons it is good, or efficient, or honest, or solves real problems, or whatever other metavalue motivates you to care more.
rfc3092 5mo ago
> I'm retired. I am not. And I am really wary of retirees giving advice on skipping the grind, enjoy life and choose a warm feeling job. I don’t have a house and if next round of layoffs hits, it is a ticking clock for my family. I’ll take extra bucks please.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
  It’s interesting that recounting personal experience is considered “giving advice.” BTW: I’m not retired by choice. I just found out -the hard way- that a significant portion of today’s tech workforce doesn’t want to work with people with gray hair. It’s a possibility that this could be a shared experience. We all get old, at some point. I’m extremely grateful to advice I was given, decades ago, about the importance of saving and investing for retirement.
HexPhantom 5mo ago
I think that's a good distinction: not everyone in tech has to be "passionate" in the romantic sense, but it's hard to do good work for years if you actively dislike the underlying activity
mlsu 5mo ago
What blows my mind is how little people seem to care about integrity. For how little they are willing to throw it away.

weinzierl 5mo ago

This is from 1880 and reminds me of something Dostoyevsky had written 14 years before. His quip in The Gambler was even more extreme because he spoke about working hard and saving every penny for generations with the subtext being that it makes everyone miserable.

UncleOxidant 5mo ago

> I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. Same. Claude/Gemini/DeepSeekV4/Qwen3.6 are enabling me to do way more experimentation than I could do on my own. 10X at least. Not getting paid for any of it, but that's OK, getting paid imposes limitations on what you can work on and imposes responsibilities that I don't care to have anymore. There's a certain kind of integrity in that as well.

draftsman 5mo ago
Do you find joy in using LLMs to write software? I tried using Claude/Cursor/CodeX/etc. for personal projects and experimentation, and I found no joy in it. I learned nothing, and when my MVPs were complete, I only had a shallow understanding of how the code that powered them worked.
- skinfaxi 5mo ago
  I'm curious of the places you've found joy while writing software traditionally. For me, it has been in reasoning about the system, debugging issues, and discovering what works. The iterative process of eventually coming to a more complete understanding, as you stand on and build off of your prior understanding. All of those elements are present for me while using AI to augment my output. I have started using voice to interact with my coding harness though and I think that has maybe influenced my opinion. I also don't let things go fully autonomously and look at the diffs along the way.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
  I do, but I also use LLMs in a manner that seems drastically different, from most folks here. I use the standard $20/ChatGPT Pro sub, and run Thinking 5.5 as a chat interface. I use it like a "trusted personal advisor," as opposed to a "black box employee." I'm intimately involved in almost every step of the development process. Most of what I ask from the LLM, is function-length snippets. It's made a huge difference in the velocity and scope of my work. I have learned that I need to be very careful, though. The LLM sometimes really borks things, and I have to rip out the garbage, and rewrite the code, myself. I can't even imagine the quality of "vibe-coded" software.
  - t_mahmood 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
      And...we have an attack... I love this place, I really do, but this stuff gets a bit tiresome.
      - onraglanroad 5mo ago
        It's a troll (based on username). Enjoy your retirement, I'll be there in a couple of years myself and hopefully doing equally useful stuff.

an0malous 5mo ago

This is conflated by the fact that most people start to enjoy things that give them a lot of money and prestige. Otherwise everyone would be in playing sports and making art, the things kids do before they care about money and prestige

galangalalgol 5mo ago
I started programming at 5, making it do what I wanted it to provided dopamine. I never found a sport I enjoyed. I do like painting though. I doubt very many people get into sanitation because they love making toilets clean, but even there I'm sure a few do. Before 2000 I think it was pretty normal for people to select software as a career without considering the compensation as a factor. It wasn't excessively better than other similar choices for one.
- KellyCriterion 5mo ago
  > Before 2000 The salary expectations exploded when the VC/PE-bobos went into the space and started "build-and-sell-high". Sure there were Billionairs made before tech & internet, but public was not aware of most such transactions.
  - galangalalgol 5mo ago
    And that never changed salaries nearly as much in games, embedded, or outside the us. I never worked in any software position adjacent to the online economy, so I never saw any of those wacky salaries.
    - KellyCriterion 5mo ago
      > to the online economy, so I n that term is great, thanks! because: Outside of the "online community", a SWE salary is just a normal salary, all these superhigh salaries only came around the corner when it started to be about "international!" and "global scale!" and "disruption!" (of course LOL) and other things like these. In the 90s, a "SWE" was just a normal employee doing some IT dev stuf & co, but after DotCom-boom SWE et. al. became the heroes, esp. for scaling and selling companies quickly because they had their MBA-colleagues in mind :-D

steve_adams_86 5mo ago

> and that's pretty important to me The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble. I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject misery because of this. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but a large part of the problem was working with people who had very little integrity. They were great at masking it and presenting a different persona, but ultimately, we did bad things to people and made filthy money. I don't miss anything about it.

neilv 5mo ago
Like you, I've found that working with people of integrity (or some qualities closely related to that) is very important to me. Not in a "new-grad or corporate PR appropriating meaningless platitudes" kind of way. But in a "I have seen multiple times how one untrustworthy person can easily wreck all the work of a team or organization, and make their lives miserable, so averting that is a high priority" kind of way. Lately, in business context, I tend to characterize what I seek from people as "alignment". I think that many (not all) business people are still willing to buy in on that. And it will just have to be a given that the company and team goals with which people are aligned are respectable. What seems to be getting more difficult in the last few years is finding companies with respectable goals. Of course you knew to avoid any company in crypto. But now, with with a new VC gold rush of AI (often involving the same people who were happy to run crypto scams), there aren't a lot of startups that look respectable. Not all AI companies, nor all companies doing AI, are bad. But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush?
- MrDarcy 5mo ago
  > But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush? Look for those who are trying to serve established respectable professions, ideally have already done so for many years or decades. Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism (in the ideal sense). Then look at their own mission. Then look at their own work. Do they show their work? Are they open? Do they willingly allow their customers to audit their work product? Does how they talk about their work match the work product itself? Does the thing do what it says on the tin? Are they hypocrites with respect to those they serve or those they manage? These are my strategies and I’ve found they lead to working almost exclusively with people who have high Integrity.

jancsika 5mo ago

[flagged]

Paradigm2020 5mo ago
Huh this is literally about human integrity, not a dapp. Why the need to insert this crypto spam ?
- ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
  I assumed that it was a joke. I guess I could be wrong, though.
  - Paradigm2020 5mo ago
    It seemed serious but guess I should take the optimistic view, not gonna go down the rabbit hole. Thx

paulpauper 5mo ago

Given how much these jobs pay, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Aurornis 5mo ago

It’s everywhere in tech. Ever since tech became known as the place to be for high paying jobs without requiring too much education or working hours, compared to traditional routes like doctor or lawyer. The better places to work have some ability to filter it out. Not perfectly, but enough to make it hard to be there if your goal is to max your paychecks while minimizing and/or hating your work.

xg15 5mo ago

I think this even affects people who do see their vocation in tech. The field has become so vast with many subfields that you can easily find yourself in a different subfield than the one you were originally interested in - probably even more so when everyone and everything is pulled towards AI.

solenoid0937 5mo ago

The funny thing is once I started working on what I actually cared about, my performance ratings went from average to amongst the highest in my org, and while I work a lot more now, I get a real sense of accomplishment at the end of day, and I'm a lot happier. (I always thought this was a cliche until I experienced it) People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team. It makes people around you give more of a damn. You really just have to find something you care about. This is especially easy at the big tech companies, but for some reason, most engineers don't even think about it - they get stuck in this miserable loop of stress and hating their work.

crimsontech 5mo ago
Same thing happened to me and I feel very blessed to get paid to do work that I would do for free as a hobby. > People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team as well. When hiring I always look for this, if someone is passionate about the work it often means they will put the effort in to be good at it, and it raises the team in a lot of ways.
a123b456c 5mo ago
It's nice if you find something you previously care about. But it can go the other way too-- you can care more about what you work on. You can focus on the reasons it is good, or efficient, or honest, or solves real problems, or whatever other metavalue motivates you to care more.

rfc3092 5mo ago

> I'm retired. I am not. And I am really wary of retirees giving advice on skipping the grind, enjoy life and choose a warm feeling job. I don’t have a house and if next round of layoffs hits, it is a ticking clock for my family. I’ll take extra bucks please.

ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
It’s interesting that recounting personal experience is considered “giving advice.” BTW: I’m not retired by choice. I just found out -the hard way- that a significant portion of today’s tech workforce doesn’t want to work with people with gray hair. It’s a possibility that this could be a shared experience. We all get old, at some point. I’m extremely grateful to advice I was given, decades ago, about the importance of saving and investing for retirement.

HexPhantom 5mo ago

I think that's a good distinction: not everyone in tech has to be "passionate" in the romantic sense, but it's hard to do good work for years if you actively dislike the underlying activity

mlsu 5mo ago

What blows my mind is how little people seem to care about integrity. For how little they are willing to throw it away.