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i went on a rant about this stuff in a recent comment asking about Tech Bootcamps that i deleted half of cuz i knew it would just piss ppl off & was a waste of

by fat0wl 12y ago

i went on a rant about this stuff in a recent comment asking about Tech Bootcamps that i deleted half of cuz i knew it would just piss ppl off & was a waste of breath (all other comments were pretty much from ppl who lOoooOooOove 'em, half commenters had vested interest). but yeah tech bootcamps, consultant scammers, open source hipsters.... i see this stuff is rampant & it seems to be a downer in cyberspace. I code because its a passion, got a web dev job because one was offered & am desperately trying to get out of it so i can get some of the bloody CRUD out of my eyes (though thankfully I'm in Java web services which is much more expansive/rewarding than previous web technologies i've used). my coworkers complain that no one will throw raises/promotions at them. I look around & think "Why would you want to continue down this path? You're making well above a living wage and you claim to hate being in such a dispassionate workplace, why not just look for something more rewarding?" The response is always some utter bollocks about wanting to have a house so that when their parents visit they can have a nice place to spend time (for the sake of those 3 days/year, a major lifestyle choice is made). These ppl are pure scum and I see completely unqualified devs with this mindset making more money than myself & other much more intellectual programmers (the high rate guys are generally migrant consultants who blow with the wind). Then I see bootcamp classes advertised to overpriveleged failure-to-launch types, teaching them to be just as scummy/desperate. There is a joy to coding as there is to other creative disciplines, but the market doesn't encourage it so you need to look elsewhere. It's true that its there, but I bet it was much more prevalent in the cowboy days when the whole industry was a hacker movement. I also bet it was more difficult to sort things out when you couldn't just Google easily for the trending libs, so I suspect the concentration of pseudo-intellectuals was much lower. And in fact the venom I have against tech bootcamps is that the greatest takeaway I have from years of programming is the ability to self-educate. If I didn't gain this wonderful skill, I would not want to be in this industry at all. Programming without the ability to go above & beyond is a recipe for a dead-end job.

fat0wl 12y ago
if you downvoted this can you please explain why? I am actually desperate for reasons not to be so cynical about my job so i can at least scrape something out of my days until i find a better place... I wish I had a sunnier view of things but I am someone who wants to work hard but feels like an ant on an ant farm. ppl have advised me to go into startup scene but all the startups i've interviewed at in NY are mock corporations -- ad delivery, ad multimedia, analytics, facebook ripoff.... bleh. where to go?
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  Consider revising your writing style to be more formal and less conversational. Make an attempt to use punctuation where appropriate, especially with respect to commas and capitalization. Grammar errors will impact a reader's perception of you, regardless of whether your original intent had true merit or not. Your goal should be to communicate exactly the ideas you wish you convey, as concisely as possible. Natural language is the transfer protocol for ideas between humans. If you do not adhere to the published standards, you risk experiencing data loss in strict clients.
  - fat0wl 12y ago
    lol that is too true.... i don't mind conversational hippie-styling but HN is the one forum where i get regularly shredded for it
    - scrollaway 12y ago
      I have a casual and uncaring writing style in many places, but HN is not one of them. This is a place where I enjoy writing properly and reading properly-written comments, mostly because it forces commenters to put some thought into what they write. When you're here, you know that the majority of comments will have something insightful to add to the discussion and you do not feel like you're wasting your time reading them. Don't hate on this mindset. It's not appropriate everywhere, but it's not just a hippie concept, it has merits here.
- bjelkeman-again 12y ago
  I didn't downvote, but maybe it was the tone. "These ppl are pure scum" qualifies for me for others than some devs with other motivations than what I have. There are definitely good jobs which one can be passionate about out there. I didn't easily find that job myself when I was sick of my job and ended up creating it instead. This industry offers so much potential that I feel it is nearly only a matter of looking around to see what needs to be done. Not a given one will be successful, but doing ok so far. Done give up, look around yourself, the good stuff is out there.
innguest 12y ago
Thanks for writing this. HN is full of touchy-feely folks, hence the downvotes. For many, it's hard to look past tone. They react emotionally. Sure, maybe your grammar could be better or maybe if we forced everyone to have perfect grammar we'd never had read your post. I also have been dissatisfied with the industry and what it has become. I got into this to create solutions, not to glue others' solutions together. This isn't fun anymore. I'm looking for something more artistic like concept art drawing. I like what you said, "can't wait to get the CRUD out of my eyes"! I also agree on the startup point you made. Everything is about ads and how to make them better. Yawn to the max. So uninteresting. I'm afraid I don't have a cure for your cynicism. But I want to leave you with something. I was watching an instructional video of an artist teaching environment drawing technique. He said one of the fun things about drawing professionally is he has been doing it for 50 years and it's still interesting to him. Programming is mercurial and will have different "interesting" periods that will appeal to different people as it progresses. This era in programming is not my favorite.
- fat0wl 12y ago
  heh yes its funny i dont karma points seriously, i was mainly interested in hearing some qualitative sort of discussion but the main complaints i got were about grammar & negativity, neither of which i am particularly apologetic about. anyway, glad u appreciated & provided a thoughtful response :) i think you are right about the "mercurial" nature. my boss says it used to be much more fun before lots of mature libraries & package software existed. It was literally about algorithm design at all points. Now things are more about vetting existing technologies to see what the most widely-accepted & reliable standards are. And honestly, there are design patterns you can learn from that but realistically I've been in enterprise Java for 2 years and with that small amount of experience, I am already finding that 99% of the work we do is trivial. Anything that would be over my head is provided in a vendor API, and with modern code we can keep our own domain logic slim enough that it almost never gets out of hand. I think there is still a lot of interesting stuff to accomplish with code but as others pointed out, the industry is sortof over-expanded. Ideas are not leading programming so much as programming is leading to iteration through mundane ideas. The boring startup problem is the result of there being way less thinkers in the industry than do-ers, I'm sure... or that entrepreneurialism is in reality just planting the seeds of micro-corporations rather than acting as an incubator for mind-bending ideas. Having to be a part of this mundane period is probably my fault (for straying from art toward a career in programming) but maybe I can redeem myself somehow & take a last shot at heaven. I've been thinking of starting my own company, but as a deep-sleeper cell for DSP algorithms development... continue my machine learning / AI research from my master's degree, develop some really powerful tools with heavily optimized algorithms, then try to integrate them into the commercial space (audio editing software, most likely). Hmm... we'll see. Best of luck, again I appreciate u taking the time.

by fat0wl 12y ago

fat0wl 12y ago

if you downvoted this can you please explain why? I am actually desperate for reasons not to be so cynical about my job so i can at least scrape something out of my days until i find a better place... I wish I had a sunnier view of things but I am someone who wants to work hard but feels like an ant on an ant farm. ppl have advised me to go into startup scene but all the startups i've interviewed at in NY are mock corporations -- ad delivery, ad multimedia, analytics, facebook ripoff.... bleh. where to go?

logfromblammo 12y ago
Consider revising your writing style to be more formal and less conversational. Make an attempt to use punctuation where appropriate, especially with respect to commas and capitalization. Grammar errors will impact a reader's perception of you, regardless of whether your original intent had true merit or not. Your goal should be to communicate exactly the ideas you wish you convey, as concisely as possible. Natural language is the transfer protocol for ideas between humans. If you do not adhere to the published standards, you risk experiencing data loss in strict clients.
- fat0wl 12y ago
  lol that is too true.... i don't mind conversational hippie-styling but HN is the one forum where i get regularly shredded for it
  - scrollaway 12y ago
    I have a casual and uncaring writing style in many places, but HN is not one of them. This is a place where I enjoy writing properly and reading properly-written comments, mostly because it forces commenters to put some thought into what they write. When you're here, you know that the majority of comments will have something insightful to add to the discussion and you do not feel like you're wasting your time reading them. Don't hate on this mindset. It's not appropriate everywhere, but it's not just a hippie concept, it has merits here.
bjelkeman-again 12y ago
I didn't downvote, but maybe it was the tone. "These ppl are pure scum" qualifies for me for others than some devs with other motivations than what I have. There are definitely good jobs which one can be passionate about out there. I didn't easily find that job myself when I was sick of my job and ended up creating it instead. This industry offers so much potential that I feel it is nearly only a matter of looking around to see what needs to be done. Not a given one will be successful, but doing ok so far. Done give up, look around yourself, the good stuff is out there.

innguest 12y ago

Thanks for writing this. HN is full of touchy-feely folks, hence the downvotes. For many, it's hard to look past tone. They react emotionally. Sure, maybe your grammar could be better or maybe if we forced everyone to have perfect grammar we'd never had read your post. I also have been dissatisfied with the industry and what it has become. I got into this to create solutions, not to glue others' solutions together. This isn't fun anymore. I'm looking for something more artistic like concept art drawing. I like what you said, "can't wait to get the CRUD out of my eyes"! I also agree on the startup point you made. Everything is about ads and how to make them better. Yawn to the max. So uninteresting. I'm afraid I don't have a cure for your cynicism. But I want to leave you with something. I was watching an instructional video of an artist teaching environment drawing technique. He said one of the fun things about drawing professionally is he has been doing it for 50 years and it's still interesting to him. Programming is mercurial and will have different "interesting" periods that will appeal to different people as it progresses. This era in programming is not my favorite.

fat0wl 12y ago
heh yes its funny i dont karma points seriously, i was mainly interested in hearing some qualitative sort of discussion but the main complaints i got were about grammar & negativity, neither of which i am particularly apologetic about. anyway, glad u appreciated & provided a thoughtful response :) i think you are right about the "mercurial" nature. my boss says it used to be much more fun before lots of mature libraries & package software existed. It was literally about algorithm design at all points. Now things are more about vetting existing technologies to see what the most widely-accepted & reliable standards are. And honestly, there are design patterns you can learn from that but realistically I've been in enterprise Java for 2 years and with that small amount of experience, I am already finding that 99% of the work we do is trivial. Anything that would be over my head is provided in a vendor API, and with modern code we can keep our own domain logic slim enough that it almost never gets out of hand. I think there is still a lot of interesting stuff to accomplish with code but as others pointed out, the industry is sortof over-expanded. Ideas are not leading programming so much as programming is leading to iteration through mundane ideas. The boring startup problem is the result of there being way less thinkers in the industry than do-ers, I'm sure... or that entrepreneurialism is in reality just planting the seeds of micro-corporations rather than acting as an incubator for mind-bending ideas. Having to be a part of this mundane period is probably my fault (for straying from art toward a career in programming) but maybe I can redeem myself somehow & take a last shot at heaven. I've been thinking of starting my own company, but as a deep-sleeper cell for DSP algorithms development... continue my machine learning / AI research from my master's degree, develop some really powerful tools with heavily optimized algorithms, then try to integrate them into the commercial space (audio editing software, most likely). Hmm... we'll see. Best of luck, again I appreciate u taking the time.