Staying sharp and engaged is tricky. It's easy for a person to become apathetic upon realizing how much churn and mis-spent energy there is in the industry, and when you're old and apathetic they assume that means it's time for the glue factory.

I feel exactly the same. I’ve had a great career within web development and UX design, in pretty significant ways, but it’s still not fulfilling and I’ve lost purpose in it.

I’ve turned my UX interest towards city planning, and I focus more on nature, farming, exercising. Whatever energy I have left I spend on a few startups.

Also, I’ve gone through all the medical and psychological steps to be a helicopter pilot (old dream) and I’m applying to schools at this very moment.

Looking to make the switch more permanent soon, I still have a day job as frontend developer.

Purpose and intention is all.

Careful with that, its one of "those jobs" that people flock to, but very hard to make a living in. A relative of mine did that, started rich, got his own helicopter, isn't rich anymore.

I have begun trying to find things I truly care about as a countermeasure to this fatigue, so far it seems to be moving in the direction of just helping with repairing and refurbishing used computer hardware. I know how to do it for my own purposes, it's less mentally taxing, you get to save useful stuff from going to the landfill and you will also help cut down on consumption. It probably helps that the results are immediate (broken device -> working device), but going this route will have a minuscule impact also on a larger scale.

I think people trick themselves into thinking that "changing the world" is their ticket to happiness. I think looking more locally is the key to happiness. Make your community better in some way and the results are immediate, and you get to be a part of something meaningful and present. If you become the local guy that fixes people's old computer hardware, then you'll be genuinely impacting people's lives for the better.

It is boring. So like you said, I just try to find an opportunity that could help, but it's hard to find.

A reason why I could not leave my job right now, is that it's well payed. That's a high risk when you have a family with kids.

I find my work far more impactful, knowing millions of patients are being treated by my software in some way.

At a startup, you get to have a large impact on the company so it definitely can feel like you're making a difference.

I've been doing customer projects for the last 8 years and it has been horrible experience. 99% of the things you're building are the same thing all over again (CRUD apps and various integrations) and pretty much 100% of the problems are caused by people acting stupid in different ways. It all just feels so pointless.

I wish I could come up with something else, but currently this is all I know. At least it all pays well. So golden handcuffs of sort I guess.

It's the same with how a lot of tech folks idolize farming. In reality it's a tough job with long hours and cold weather.

A few years ago they upped and moved to Wales and operate a cattle farm, they also home-school their kids. Mostly now I see their ads for pasture-fed beef on facebook. They seem happy.

My grandfather was a farmer and died after an accident cleaning something with gasoline. Sounds dumb (I don't know the details) but farmers tend to have accidents like that because the whole job is working with dangerous machinery, chemicals, and animals, and a "family farmer" has an incentive to take risks someone working for a corporation doesn't.

I remember a news story about a farmer who passed out from breathing something toxic, so his oldest son goes to get him, he passes out too, his wife goes...the whole family died like that one after the other.

Software Development can be mundane and repetitive. Stupid users cause most of my headaches but I use my hobbies as an outlet.

Might need to tailor your resume a bit but if you like coding it doesn't sound like you're at the point where it's time to leave everything.

I moved from being employed to being a contractor/consultant (somewhere between the two). In the last 8 years I've worked with 8 or 9 clients and each one had serious issues (all bar one * , I would say). There were either individuals with power or small groups who were holding everyone else back by making consistently poor decisions, and there were upper managers too blind to see it or remove the offending parties, despite being informed by their staff what was going on.

It grinds you down, but I feel very similarly to you - it pays damn well and I can't see another way to achieve the lifestyle I want.

(* that one was a huuuuge corporate, and a department with incredibly low productivity and systemic issues with working practices. However they produced quality software to a schedule that was clearly OK with them, so .... that's OK I guess)

That being said, I haven't left but have been wanting to for ages. I'd be more interested in staying if I could find a unionized work place (when Delta cut salaries by 20%, the pilots union was able to negotiate for profit sharing after the hard times were over, when my company did that, they refuse to even discuss whether we'll ever be bumped back up to normal… even if we get paid well already it doesn't mean we shouldn't work together for better working conditions and more of a stake at the table) or a worker owned co-op to work for, but so far that hasn't materialized.

I'm now ~7 years removed from active development and am finding it increasingly more difficult to find time to make a side project to show off while trying to raise a family. I miss development and keeping up with all the new stuff. It'd be hard for me to take the pay cut to return as a junior dev- so now I feel stuck.

I now work for a small consultancy company doing research and designing funding programmes for charitable foundations. It's great because I get to do lots of research, writing, and thinking and have a positive impact on the world. No regrets, I'm very glad to have made the transition.

Still follow HN out of mild addiction and because there are interesting articles.

My route in was pretty idiosyncratic, and I think that's true of many people in these kinds of jobs. A more standard way to transition into this kind of research/consulting/policy work from tech might be go for jobs in technology or innovation policy. If you're in the UK I can point out some orgs that do that kind of work but in any country there will be various think tanks, policy consultancies, etc.

I didn't work for a year and now I'm working on contract 6 months a year and try to maintain my boat/sail the other 6 months It gives me time to refuel and enjoy working in tech again.

Programming off and on for over 40 years. Left several times. Because nothing is as fucked up as I.T.

Did sales, consulting, several small businesses, and writing. Kept getting sucked back in. Because no one else digs as deep into things as us programmers. Became frustrated because we were always "skimming on the surface" of everything instead of deep diving into the cause instead of the effect. Besides, nothing turns me on more than watching something I built from nothing working for the first time. I haven't found that feeling anywhere else.

What do you do now?

Back into enterprise programming. Should be having a ball, but I'm more miserable than ever because of the total fuckedupness of management. Planning my next one-person business now.

Any regrets?

No. I had choices but picked programming. I often wonder how my life would have been different if I had become a mathematician, teacher, writer, artist, musician, or something else. But every time I talk to friends who went in those directions, I realized they had their own shit to deal with and I followed exactly the right path meant for me.

And how come you still follow HN?

Because my "Delete Programming from my DNA" button returns a stack overflow.

In all different companies that I have worked with, the finance department seemed to be consistently the most stressful, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants part of the company. I am curious for people to tell the horror stories that they had to go thru.

Should I do an Ask HN on the finance dept?

(edited formatting)

I get to play with lots of tech still, except it's more of the layer 1 stuff. Doing fiberoptical backhaul work, or installing DSL in peoples homes.

I'm still interested in both hardware and software. I run Gentoo Linux on my machines at home, and I have a DO VPS for "cloud things", but I'm glad it's not my job, because software issues can piss me off like no other thing is capable of.

Ps. Love the username/post combo.

I always laugh whenever TechCrunch or someone runs a story about some hot shot university winning a programming competition because they implemented an algorithm the fastest or created yet another new app.

When in the real world, most programming jobs are making changes to a really large code base trying your hardest not to break other things. Not nearly as glamorous.

"That's great, kid. Now figure out why this build works on everyone else's machine but not yours. And then once the build works why the test suite throws a series of errors, one at a time, each new one appearing as you fix the last, when everyone else tells you it's green (though at some point you'll figure out they're all passing flags to disable parts of it, but forgot they're doing that). Oh we have some other things for you to do that are actual programming but you can't do those until you fix that. Oh and when you're halfway done Fred over there's gonna tell you you need to pull master because he just updated all the dependencies. Oh hey what do you know about code signing and app store distribution?"

My company (Automation & controls) is partnered with electricians for all the jobs we bid on. Having electricians that know wiring for specialized bus networks, how to do basic troubleshooting on control circuits and all that is amazing to have.

Alternatively, for those reading this in the tech side, the job is super engaging. I get to work on programming machines the size of my bedroom. I get to travel and see equally interesting locations (Dam spillways, Agricultural facilities inland and at port, underground mines, etc.). The fact that I get to get out of my office a few days a month is a big reason I've stuck with my job for as long as I have (7+ years now)

EDIT TO INCLUDE SOME PICTURES (Both the Cool and the Ugly):

https://imgur.com/5uOWDGB https://imgur.com/oJozMBr https://imgur.com/95HSxlx https://imgur.com/yhrPUC3

As long as you understand digital logic well enough you'll be able to grasp the concepts. Having more formal education helps but is one of those fields that isn't strictly necessary unless you're working in a specialized sector. My personal take is that Software is still playing catch-up in this domain to the rest of the world but its coming. Up until the last 5 or 10 years the software was mostly just running the facilities but now integration to the business environments is becoming a bigger and bigger requirements of my clients.

I've mostly become hands off on the PLC/SCADA systems at my company now because the requirement for software utilities to function within the control system for data collection, trending, reporting, etc. has become so so much bigger. I have clients that want to use OCR to track shipping containers throughout their yard, clients who want me to integrate their invoicing systems to the operations so staff can see the scheduled daily loads coming, designing unmanned kiosks for customers to key through when coming to site and a whole lot more things.

Right now I'm trying to hack my treadmill with an Arduino unit so I can control it with software, and I'm learning a ton. Plus it's not a huge investment.

The programming languages are all defined in IEC 61131-3, and you can more or less use them interchangeably. You can use structured text for (clunky) text-based programming, ladder logic if you want to feel like an electrician in the 70s, or functional block diagrams if you like flowcharts. They each have pros and cons, and being able to use the different languages (with different paradigms) in a single application is one of the more interesting things about PLC programming. There are probably good textbooks for this, but I don't know of any.

PLC programs execute in a constant loop (scan inputs, execute program, set outputs), so basic programming problems (e.g. delaying execution of some function) often require some re-thinking on PLCs. Having a basic understanding of how a PLC actually executes your code is pretty critical. Again, there are probably textbooks for this, but if you buy a physical PLC, its datasheet might also explain this.

You'll need to connect the PLC to some hardware for it to do anything meaningful, so having a basic knowledge of electronics would be useful. If it's just a hobby, you probably wouldn't need to know any more than you would if you were working with an Arduino.

There aren't that many major PLC vendors, so to get started, you could by an entry-level PLC from one of the big players (e.g. Allen-Bradley Micro800 series). Admittedly, I haven't looked at PLC options in 5+ years so there might be better options these days. Unfortunately, PLCs are pretty pricey, and even a small one will probably set you back a few hundred bucks. There are probably simulators available if you're just curious about PLC programming languages, but I don't have any experience there.

I'll just say that my business was started by the owner in his farm's shop rebuilding/selling motors. When he expanded to doing controls they were like 3 employees and his friend was the electrician who they hired on. Since then the Electrician partnered with his Son-in-law and they train the majority of their guys right from their apprenticeship.

As much as I keep using "My company" throughout these posts I'm still just a guy in a programming/integrator role.

The guy who got me my job was a MS CS, my employer sought him out because they needed a guy for internal software projects. I did a hackathon with him and he hired me as his replacement when he moved to the gaming industry.

My degree is Software Systems Engineering, most of my coworkers are Electrical Engineers or some form of Electrical Diploma.

As long as you have a decent foundation in Networking and Digital Logic you'll be perfectly suited to program PLC/SCADA...

So, "systems integration" job involves making systems interoperate as seamlessly as possible, by doing so adding new features, or reducing weaknesses, like for example vendor lock-in (sadly this is not always possible in industrial automation, see below). So the concept applies also to other sectors - and there are indeed non-industrial automation SIs - you might want to add terms like "PLC", "SCADA", "ICS" (industrial control systems), "industrial automation", "controls" to your search.

As for my own experiences in the (industrial automation) system integration industry, in Italy:

As I said before, and said elsewhere by TheCapn, vendor lock-in (in the form of employing equipment by one company, and their tooling, and their services, etc.) is a thing. But at the same time, your job is to make heterogenous systems interoperate! So most certainly you'll have to work not with your usual tools. Personally I have found that the most successful companies rely on some vendor (and their support, and their expertise), but are very open with working with, and know, the others. Obviously the more you can develop autonomously the better; it is a trade-off between freedom of action and access to more credible (branded, battle-tested, supported by big company etc.) solutions.

Knowing when to add one part to the system, or where you can just expand one of the already existing parts in order to accomplish the task is fundamental. Too often I have seen superflous parts added where it would have been enough to extend one of the existing parts a little (This is often due to vendor lock-in, you cannot work on some equipment, so you put another device by your vendor of choice).

Another thing I love about my job is the "Jack-of-all-trades" mindset required. Also human skills are important, especially here where the industry is mostly composed of little shops: sometimes you just have to understand enough to call the right specialist and contract that part of the job to them. I started as more of a computer person than a engineering one, but I managed to gain some expertise over time thanks to this knowledge transfer.

Edit: System integrators as sibling says, I second that!

Especially

> Find your way into Industrial Electrical work if you can. You get a strong mix of tech and electrical, moreso than Residential, can't really say the comparison to Commercial work though...

Avoid residential electrical work if you are technology oriented! Yes, yes, home automation and all that, but that pales in comparison with industrial work. Commercial in theory has the same potential, but (at least here in Italy) the jobs are ..hm.. dodgy (very poor project management, tasks scattered across sub-sub-sub-contractors so nobody has really a clue of the global picture ..stuff like that)

This in reverse is part of why I am a programmer; it can take two or three days before I'm really pissed at a software problem, but physical stuff really annoys me in mere minutes.

Why? Don't really know. I know a bit of it is that I know how to get myself into trouble in software and then usually get back out much better than I do in the real world, but even so, I had the patience in software to develop that and I really don't for real things.

On the other hand, a screw-up can have bigger consequences when your buggy code is used by thousands of users a day.

My BF's dad owns an electrical company, and I know BF will most likely end up working there - I've considered in the past joining him. This post is encouraging because it seems like I could get all the movement and outdoor time that I'm missing with coding, and also be building stuff that's useful to people.

Do you see many female electricians? I suspect there are few - any ideas as to why? Is there a lot of heavy/difficult physical labor that I would be unable to do?

I took what I call a 12 year sabbatical from tech. I became an officer, went to pilot training, learned lots of new and useful skills, met lots of very good and interesting people, some of whom are my best friends.

Taking off from a short airfield in a blizzard, at night, wearing NVGs is an experience I don't care to re-live, but I'm glad I have something to talk about at parties.

A quote that affected me greatly during the time I was thinking about leaving: "if somebody wrote a book about your life, would anybody want to read it?"

After getting married (to somebody I met during one of my training courses), settling down, and having kids, a quieter, 40-hour-a-week lifestyle started to sound pretty good again. I had always been a hacker at heart, and realized that I was getting to the age where it was probably now-or-never if I wanted to re-enter the industry. So I went back into tech! It's better the 2nd time around.

Zero regrets.

The congressional recommendation is for entrance into the US Air Force Academy, which is a 4-year university.

If you already have your degree, you can apply for OTS (which is your initial officer training - I think it's 3 months long now) and a pilot slot directly.

Another option a lot of people overlook too is getting to pilot training via the Reserves or ANG. Those units can interview and hire you directly, and you'll go through the same training and do the same job with a lot less red tape.

If you don't let yourself explore, you're not going to be happy long term. (Eventually, you will hit that fabled mid-life identity crisis.)

Perhaps it's less that any one situation is preferable, but more that you need variety.

The first simply had another passion - travel. Work was just a way to pay for that. Eventually went to work for an agency, been there a long time and AFAICT couldn't be happier (despite being less well off materially). I've known a couple of others who fit this pattern. One left the industry to raise goats and make cheese instead.

Multiple have left to become full time parents. I hope they don't regret it, since this group includes my wife. ;)

Several others have left the industry but have not necessarily left tech. Some do light consulting. One's writing a book. Most are working on long-deferred personal tech projects.

I just about joined this third group before my savings took a 15% hit, so I might as well say why. I'm tired. I'm tired of the artificial deadlines, and processes that slow people down more than they improve quality, and the omnipresence of coworkers who exhibit every kind of bad engineering or interpersonal behavior (even though others are awesome). I want to enjoy making things again, and the moments when I can do that within the industry seem all too fleeting. Even the best of my dozen jobs stopped being fun, or just stopped. The thought of going through a modern tech interview process yet again so that I can do all the rest again just fills me with dread.

If a couple decides they want four kids, the numbers can work out, for 10 years or so - especially if childcare is expensive.

I think the ephemeral nature of software really plays poorly with the artificial deadlines, and the artificial importance of some projects in general.

Eventually you recognize the pattern, and there's no logical way to justify it, so it's harder to motivate yourself. You know the deadline isn't real, and you know the software will be rewritten next year with some new technology. You may even be rewriting last years right now.

Tooling churn hurts here as well, because eventually after enough iterations, new tools are just in the way of getting real work done. You know it's not gaining you anything by putting in the effort to learn Toolchain X, because arbitrarily different Toolchain Y is about to become the new industry fad, and will make all that prior arbitrary knowledge pointless.

Some of my favourite years in software were when I worked at an eCommerce agency that served only one framework. Learning I invested directly impacted my work for the coming years. I began to master the tools, which feels amazing. I could also see the real world effect the software had. Sure, it was simple, selling products to people. But commerce is an interesting problem space, and a fundamental part of society, so it was neat to be a part of it and see real companies I worked with grow because of my software.

It's been a few years since I left the industry, and I'd be surprised if any of the code I wrote professionally hasn't been superseded by now. Even worse, plenty of it was scrapped before it was even released.

Of course, I knew this would be the case when I was writing it - that does indeed affect one's motivation.

Well, the state of New Jersey is looking for programmers to update COBOL programs that were written 50 years ago, so you might be underestimating the sheer power of inertia in software development...

Again the deadlines and lack of planning ahead bites. Look we just need this little feature now, it can't take long? And again, and again. You never get enough time to take a step back and re-evaluate design decisions (or, God forbid, plan ahead and do it right in the first place) and fix what wasn't done right. No, it's always this little feature that needs to be quickly hacked in, another branch, another special case, how it interacts with other past or future special cases is anyone's guess, and the code base that was already full of hastily hacked together barely-functional crap grows more and more poorly thought out crap. Tests? What tests? No tests, so if you dare go back and try quickly fix some poor design.. well, someone is eventually hopefully going to find out what you broke and give you a completely uninformative bug report. Updates? Well there's no ticket for that. And besides, something might break, because there are no tests. There's no ticket for tests.

Sometimes you might even wish that the whole thing would be discarded and done from scratch..

For example, one of the open source projects that I contributed to most heavily, PyWikiBot, has been around for almost two decades now, and most of my contributions were made ~13-15 years ago, plus some minor maintenance since then, and most of those features I wrote are still in continuous use to this very day by me and many others. And that's just some random tooling library for Wikipedia stuff; imagine how much long-term impact your work would have if you were editing MediaWiki itself, or the Linux kernel, or gcc, or any number of other incredibly widely-used things.

Sure, bad programmers age out because they were never great at programming in the first place. But I would assume the HN crowd falls in the top half of competence because there are so many people here who seem smarter about programming than me. If you're good, you don't have to worry.

Maybe good programers age out because the technical side gets too repetitive, their jobs become more about politics, and they have enough money to change tracks later in life.

Which people you're talking about? The survivors who are still working in the field? Or those who had heart attacks at their desks at 50?

When it gets downright tiresome is when being the project janitor puts me in conflict with young "tech leads" who denigrate those contributions because they've only ever worked on that one project where other people took care of those things for them. It's like the difference between living in a college dorm where everything's taken care of for you, vs. having a house and kids and bills of your own. Being a strict individual contributor with no cares beyond the one piece of code in front of me is just a fond memory.

Unfortunately, few companies will hire someone with 30+ years' experience just to write code, even for a salary appropriate to that role. Companies want to pay those lower salaries not only for direct work product but also for growth potential. The worst part is, I know they're not wrong. The only way to do the kind of work I really enjoy, and only that work, is as a hobby.

You don't have to worry about keeping your current job, but getting a different one becomes a lot harder. Your 27 year-old interviewer might be thinking "You're my dads age, and my dad is crusty. No way you can wrap your head around lib-of-the-week.js"

Depends on the job. There are employers who recognize the value of somebody who has broad experience, and who can/will do things that are necessary but not fun. There are also employers who only measure hands-on-coding skills, and/or who insist that everyone should be on a "growth path" even if they're already at a higher level than most will reach. Good people don't have to worry at the first kind, and very much have to worry at the second.

I thought engineering enabled travel. I met countless "digital nomads" traveling the world, doing 20 hours of work a week at cafes. Making bank and getting to travel all they want.

Turns out they were just taking a leave of absence, every year, to travel, and just eating the pay cut.

A couple years older than you. I was working a nice gig at a startup until November. Nice because the owners were nice, the coworkers were nice and it was an interesting embedded application involving renewable energy - so not the run-of-the-mill web app. They ran out of funding in November but there was the possibility (prior to covid-19) that they would get more funding so I didn't look around much hoping I could just go back to work for them when they get more funding and avoid having to interview again.

Of course, that's not likely to happen at this point given where the economy is at. And I still can't bear the thought of interviewing again. So I'm effectively out of tech at this point. If someone comes along and offers me a gig without the arduous interview process I'd take it, but otherwise, I think I'm done.

OK nice it's not just me!

I got cancer and when I got better I have never wanted to go back to the office.

I have spent last 10 years travelling the world, reading, learning to live on very little. Never looked back. Life is not a bliss but I am happier in general and satified with tradeoffs I have made.

I still do some projects for my own satisfaction. Still enjoy programming and learning new skills.

Edit: I have been blessed that despite two engineering degrees (financial math and electronic engineering) I have never worked as a programmer for living.

Since I have learned by trial and error 6502 assembler to hack strategy games on C-64 programming have always been unspoiled free time, pure fun activity for me. And 19 programming languages later it is still so.

I live in small summerhouse, eat simple food, cook, own old, small car that I use only when necessary. I prefer biking whenever possible. Buy most clothes and stuff used or heavily discounted. Buying used stuff is also good for the planet. Learnt a lot of DIY which is both cool and satifying.

I despise urban enviroment but have to visit the city cause I take care of older parents. So the summerhouse and living in the forrest is both a choice and a way to spend less on rent..

In a way I always wanted this but given the opportunity I had been chasing money, opportunities, new experiences, following the rat race etc. Now as this is over I feel less conflicted which makes me happier.

You need way, way less money then you think you do but the expectations adjustment process on the mental level is very slow. But of course it is good to have some savings.

In case anyone is curious, I've been able to live well on about $6000-8000 a year. I certainly eat like a king, since fruits and vegetables are amazingly cheap here. Otherwise my hobbies are inexpensive, e.g. exercise and sports, writing software for personal projects, making digital art, etc.

It's not for everyone, but I would have really struggled on a more conventional path. It's been my experience that working for someone else is really degrading, although I'm sure some companies are better than others.

I consider myself extremely lucky, as most of my neighbors here lead very difficult lives. In the poorer half of the world, life is extremely brutal and arduous for most people. It's very sad and I've seen things here that are shocking and appalling (and I am not faint of heart, after spending many years "hustling" in the US). The behavior of other expats here also leaves something to be desired, although at least it's not as bad as Thailand...

Cambodia is developing rapidly, but somehow I doubt that the kleptocratic government here will manage to turn this place into the next Singapore or Korea :)

I really don't want to return to tech, because it simply is not my passion. I'm going to try to start an aerospace startup instead, which is my passion. Perfect timing right?

I think I'm starting to feel this. I'm neither talented nor educated enough to work on things I truly find interesting and my ability to learn feels like its completely flatlined these days. Unfortunately, I feel trapped in what I do rn, because it's really one of the only decently paying careers I can get.

Also saw that programmers were starting to be treated like factory workers where attendance and metrics like keystrokes per minute were more important than good well written and documented code.

The final straw however was "move fast and break things". Basically pump out change for the sake of change and let the end user do quality control.

One could argue that app stores have also played a significant role, basically taking thirty percent gross while depriving the developer of direct contact with the end user.

Bottom line, I’d rather be sailing.

So true! Saying both as developer and user!

The worst part is how this leads to more on-call and an increase in working off-hours.

This is a great quote, I'm going to steal this from you!

This is why I quit being a software engineer as well (I didn't leave the tech industry altogether tho, just switched career trajectories a bit).

I spent years trying to talk some sense into the people pushing that and trying to explain (it's as much art as science) but in the end the Scrum people won. So, I moved over to devops and consulting where most of the time I'm helping people with stuff, and the long death-march sprints to satisfy an arbitrarily deadline that nobody cared about until it got put on paper two weeks ago, and still doesn't matter except it will turn some spreadsheet field red that draws the Eye of Sauron from higher ups, are mostly over now. I get my coding fix by working on open source projects, and it's way more fulfilling.

Excellent phrase. Thank you.

This. Something has definitely changed in the last ~10 to 20 years since the end of the dotcom era of interviewing in the tech industry. Before it was as simple as reading the AUTHORS file in an open-source project like Linux to vouch for a programmer applying to somewhere like Red Hat or Mozilla. But now we are expecting them to write a proof of quicksort's worst-case runtime complexity or to explain the Diffie-Helman public key exchange mathematically on a whiteboard to "see how you think" and "prove programmer ability" which is unnecessarily academic and they either don't use it directly or search on Google for it anyway.

That's just the onsite interviews, pre-interviews are riddled with Leetcode, Hackerrank and Codility tests which can be cheated or the solution can be found on Google. What a shame that these flawed tests still exist.

I had a go at our manager recently after letting two people do our tech test then say they were too inexperienced. We could have worked that out before wasting their time.

it's kinda depressing in a way, because coding was at first, something that pulled me out of the slump i was in due to a shitty upbringing. i really like writing code, but the industry sure does know how to suck all the fun out of it.

I've gone to a number of career counselors. Trying to find something else to do. I have a number of other passions/interests. Just not sure how to turn them into a career? How did other people determine an alternate career to get into?

Ignorance is a bliss.

Some people are in tech because its a job, not because they love it. Some people got burned out. Some people discover other things that they love more then what they doing currently.

Not every programmer is 10x programmer who has side projects that they work on after work and dreams in c++. Same with any other profession. I'll bet there are skydiving instructors who don't care much about it anymore but still do it for monetary reasons.

Money. Its probably the best paying career in terms of how much you have to put in to get a good return.

It's not playing if you don't enjoy it ;)

* Meaninglessness. Most of the projects are simply not necessary, they do not help society in anyway, they just exist to make someone else wealthy.

* Tedium. The intellectual challenges aren't there after a while. There are countless intellectual challenges in the field of computing / computer science, but they are usually precisely the ones that industry has no interest on.

* Micromanagement. "Agile" and similar management practices (yes, I know, you're not doing it right, blah blah blah) are downright humiliating and infantilizing. Almost no other highly skilled professional has to tolerate such level of intrusion on their day-to-day activities. I love deep thinking and creative expression. The modern corporate setting prevents this by design.

* Open-spaces. See above.

* Idealism. I was so excited about the possibilities that the Internet opened for humanity. Now we have ad-tech and horrible exploitation of "gig-economy", warehouse workers and the like. This is definitely not what I have in mind when I started.

* Conformism. The tech industry is extremely conformist. Monetary consideration always wins. Deference to power always wins. "Hacker" used to mean something completely different. Almost opposite to the current definition.

I realized that what I always loved about computing was the endless creative and intellectual possibilities allowed by the medium. This is more or less the opposite of what the industry values, despite what they might advertise endlessly. There is nothing cool about it. It is stale and anti-intellectual.

I don't need a lot of money to be happy. You probably don't either. Time on this earth is the most valuable thing we have, and I would rather spend it waiting tables than enduring one more stand-up meeting.

I think creative nerds are the life-blood of the industry, but they tend to be shy and not assertive, so they have their life controlled by the "business types". I honestly believe that if the nerds told them to fuck off and started spending their time working on things they think are relevant, the world would become much better quickly. This won't happen, I know.

So much this.

wars aren't started over human-rights, they are fought when you f%%k with someone's money.

Most of the "creative nerds" I have encountered in this industry are arrogant, have grandiose beliefs about their own intelligence and have zero empathy for anybody who is not exactly like them. I don't think things would be much better if they ran the show.

I am too old to hang out with negative people, also too old for people who are only interested in making money. So I searching for a new tribe, I think outdoors people are the happiest bunch. I just don't know what can I do.

Had a coworker say to a client, "I could explain it you but you're not smart enough to understand it."

Absolutly ridiculous and toxic individual.

Ah, don't be so negative. I'm gonna do it or die trying.

I recently saw a video about Boeing that concluded that the whole debacle was due to it straying aware from its commitment to good engineering and to trying to please the wall street. It traced back to the source of decline as the purchase of McDonnell Douglas which was mainly done due to Boeing management feeling that they needed better "business types", which was all that McDonnell Douglas.

Slowly, but I am seeing an acceptance and respect towards the nerds/engineering instead of hype men & impressive stock figures. Wall street types are seen as the hyenas/fox in a sheep's skin that need not be celebrated and looked upto.

Meanwhile Wall St. simply downgrades, the MBAs shrug their shoulders and speak about drive-thru ordering as an innovation, the Founders get ousted, and people become sick.

Short-terms gains at the expense of long-term losses is a fact that has to controlled by the board of directors and the ridiculous salaries of CEOs has to be stopped. A rule must be put in place that the shares they gain cannot be used during their tenure and only used 2-5 yrs after leaving the post.

Founders bring in an MBA to run the company is like parents bringing in a Consultant to raise the children. You can never expect anyone else to care of the kids as much as their own parents.

I think that Google lost its way due to Eric Schmidt. Considering that [Page was forced out in 2001](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page#Changes_in_manageme...), he was away too long and Eric did his MBA-shit and screwed up the company. Page should have returned as CEO in 5 years instead of 10 yrs, it was too late by then. Now Google is Evil.

I feel that if someone like Page was leading Google and all the tech giants where lead by nerds like Satya Nadella & Sundar Pichai. PRISM & attack on encryption would not have been too strong. We need more founders like Elon Musk & Jack Dorsey. I hope someone like Sergey Brin advices the WhiteHouse on tech-business while Steve Woz or Richard Stallman advices on tech-ethics.

Mark Zuckerberg is a disaster, so is Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison & all Steve-Jobs-like creatures.

Video: "McDonnell Douglas had used Boeing's money to buy Boeing" - https://youtu.be/EESYomdoeCs?t=468

This is how I felt about myself, I spent my early twenty working a job living frugally saving and then quitting to work on my own projects. Failed entrepreneurship was a great lesson in how hard it is build things people want and how easy it is to build things you think people want. The difference is often very subtle small details, but asking the right questions to unearth those details in incredibly challenging.

The amount of things that someone will give their time or attention to our suprisingly small

True. Right now amidst the pandemic, it turned out the farmers, medical people, janitors, delivery guys are the most essential jobs.

I miss working at a small shop where we were fully trusted to deliver. I find I am able to do very well under Agile, but it certainly makes me feel dishonest that such a measurable portion of my day is spent measuring my performance. It feels like a fractal waste of time.

But I completely understand why it exists.

Incompetent leadership: bosses and leaders that are seemingly nice people, but have no clue as to what's going on in their organization. Typically managers that aren't technical at all, but they just "fell up" in the organization somehow.

Relatively low pay: speaks for itself. It's easier to deal with hard problems and difficult people when you're also not worrying about which bills to pay this month, and seeing your peers in other companies do a lot better than you. This was especially true when I was in academia.

Toxic work environment: This unfortunately has happened a couple of times, once in a small family-run shop (13 people) and once in academia (a different role than the aforementioned one). There was a common denominator with both - the person at or near the top was a nasty combination of incompetent, bitter, and pit their employees against each other. In other words people that were truly pathological. All in all in my career I've reported up through dozens if not over a hundred people total through the various chains of command, but these two stand out. With one in particular there's a bit of PTSD (in the small shop the CEO would threaten jobs for minor things - this was ~2010 when the economy was still near the bottom where I live, and his COO would do equally vicious things).

I work for a great company now with some of the most awesome leadership you could ask for. I'm glad I didn't quit.

Then I was a lawyer for around 15 years, and now I am moving on again. I am currently pursuing a masters degree in cognitive science, and I am planning to see if I can get into working on human cognition and AI/machine cognition in some interesting ways. (If anyone is doing anything like this, then hit me up. I am really interested.)

I do not regret my path at all. It is entirely likely that I could have made as much or more money if I had stayed with building websites and then gone into SWE or something, but a career in law was fun and challenging. And you can leave what you are doing at any time. I think a lot of people could stand to learn the lesson that you can, you really can, just say "screw it" and go do something else. It'll be ok, as long as you are even a little self-motivated.

I still follow HN because it is still one of the best online communities I've found, and it produces some of the more interesting and thoughtful interactions online. You know, it still has its faults, but overall I like it. HN is the primary way I discover new and interesting tech-related news, which still greatly interested me as a lawyer.

I don't really know the programs in the US very well. I didn't look at any when I was considering the field. Do you want to try to do a masters and then get into industry, or rather then continue with a PhD?

My best courses, I think because I was already scientifically/technically-minded, were the very math and technical based topics, like tax, retirement, real estate finance, etc, while the ones that I often had more difficulty with were things like family law and criminal law, for example, which were often much less intuitive and much more arbitrary-seeming to me.

Ultimately, law school was pretty easy for me overall. Certainly, I had friends and classmates who thought it was beastly difficult, though I suspect if they looked back at it now, most would say that it wasn't as bad as they felt at the time. It's different for everyone, right? Like anything else, how much you put in is how much you get out. I think that really probably anyone who can make it through an undergraduate program can make it through law school.

For the most part I liked the companies I worked at (which tended to be ~50 people when I joined) and my coworkers. The problems were interesting, though largely not things I was especially passionate about (I spent a couple years making software for call centers, a couple years on enterprise videoconferencing, etc.).

I decided to go my own way for a few reasons. First was financial - I had already started investing in some real estate on the side, and it wasn't a leap to see how much of a financial advantage you can gain from owning and running an operating business vs. being a salaried employee. Second was just that I really like to be in control. Even in a 100% self-owned small business you find that you're not really in control on a lot of things (getting permits from the city for stuff is exhausting, plus you've got a landlord, bank, etc.), but from a day-to-day perspective, I am the one who makes the call on everything.

Last was that it was a good way out of SF. I'm engaged (would've been married in three days... sigh), and I just have no desire to have kids anywhere in the Bay Area. This allowed me to move to San Diego, a place that I love and that is also perfect for this business.

Edit: To answer the last couple parts of the question, no regrets (I mean I guess in theory I would've kept working a steady job and started the business post-pandemic, but I believe all my choices were sound at the time that I made them). Also I still follow HN because I'll always be interested in tech.

I have a few questions, if you don't mind.

How did you get started with this? Is investing in real estate something you can do while being a salaried employee or do you need to do it full time? Also, what kind of investments were/are you making?

I own two small apartment buildings in the Bay Area (seven apartments total). I honestly just saw interest rates were low and thought real estate sounded like a good way to take advantage of that. I didn't know much, so I just found an agent through my local Realtor association and started looking at buildings. From there it's not that complicated - you just build a pretty straightforward model of your income and expenses, estimate conservatively, and pay a price that'll make it profitable. Beyond that just use common sense and don't do things like buy in dangerous areas.

I employ a full time property manager, so I have been a full time employee for most of the time I've owned it.

The tech industry nowadays is no longer about solving real-world problems and making the world a better place, instead it's all about screwing the end user in every single way possible, whether it's ads, stalking and privacy violations, spam ("marketing" as they call it) or just plain fraud where the company is happy to take the money but can't make it right if things don't go to plan and the customer is left holding the bag.

Most tech products nowadays aren't there to solve a real problem and aren't funded by customers buying them because they are good; instead they're funded by some VC scum and they're there to capture the market (or rent-seek) and prevent a legitimate business from starting (nobody can compete with free or below cost).

Technology-wise, we no longer use engineering as a means to an end to solve a business problem. Instead, engineering became its own thing and most companies encourage and reward those who opt for over-engineered solutions, which means you spend more time fighting with dozens of layers of abstractions and chasing the latest JS framework instead of actually delivering functionality. This is mostly a symptom of the previous point where showing "growth" and bragging about your (over) engineering is more important than actual profit.

Unfortunately there's just nothing out there that pays as well so I have no choice but to tough it out.

So I say this based on personal experience. The Siemens' sales force uses their size and influence (especially with existing customers) to absolutely screw over customers and smaller competitors with better products. Siemens is no different than many other big companies who can use all sorts of unethical (but legal) tactics to sell.

It's very possible to work as an engineer in a big company and have zero idea as to what everybody else is doing to screw people over.

There's plenty of bad actors (like any biz) but most of the time when I ship features everyone is happy, and no one is taken advantage of.

If your company starts to go the route of evil, you can find another job with people who are less morally bankrupt.

Most of the enterprise sales cycles I have worked under go from 3 months to a year anyway, and the implementation time might take 8 weeks to a year+ - so drive by spamming doesnt really get results.

(Payroll, Commercial Real Estate)

I'd much rather have a 40 hour a week job somewhere else, where everyone understands it's a job and you can be your own person at home. It's hard to articulate, and I could write much more about it, but it's almost like the identity you have to don to fit in there feels too all-consuming.

I don't want to pretend I'm changing the world instead of just installing a new social hierarchy run by the meritocratic elite. I don't want to pretend that programming is my only hobby -- I want to do other things than learn new Javascript frameworks at home. I like my nice 3 bedroom house which is just minutes from downtown and is less than 3x my annual income.

It's admittedly an outsider's perspective but the only reason I would go back is to save up money for a few years then go somewhere else.

1) I switched from being a software engineer to a data scientist in 2010, in part because of the culture. I totally get not enjoying the culture, though I do recognize how much it varies from person to person and company to company, so I try not to stereotype. But on some level, I get it.

2) We're opposites in some way. I've been writing code since I was 8 years old, and enjoy it. I'm the type of person who loves to find a fun and challenging problem and dive in so much I don't turn off. However, people like me are rare. In the last 15 years in the Bay Area, I've only worked with one other person who fit that criteria. Everyone else treated it like a 9 to 5 job. Me, I've never been one to judge or think negatively of that. That's how people are. It's normal. I get there are problems with SE culture, but some people being super passionate about what they do, to me isn't one of them. I don't believe I've ever annoyed anyone, bothered anyone after hours, or done anything unreasonable, and if I did I would appreciate people letting me know in a 1-on-1 fashion. The last thing I want to do is bother my coworkers.

3) You're on ycombinator, the center of Bay Area tech culture. Frankly, I'm baffled you like hacker news, for the people who like this kind of stuff after work hours, yet at the same time are anti that. YC is the heart of tech passion, and if you don't like it, why are you here? Not judging. Your comments and views are valuable. I'm asking out of genuine curiosity.

Citation needed. I think YC users think they are the center of tech (or the universe?).

What would be that actual proof that it was? Do we know how many users HN has? What % of VC actually spend time here? What % of meaningful founders actually spend time here? Ya the CEO of github will drop a post on a major thread concerning his company, but so what?

Honestly the more time I spend here the more I see two notable demographics: cynics trying to feel superior (like myself), and people trying to justify their own salary and lifestyles via a fat FANNG paycheck.

P.S. and college students / recent grads who know everything.

Ycombinator comes from Stanford which centers around creating CEOs, creating most of the companies in the bay area. Most non-yc bay area companies still have Stanford at its roots. I don't have a direct data point, but almost every company I've interviewed for in the last 10 years and have worked with, their CEO or CTO or some other c-suite "club" is strongly tied to Stanford and from that directly or indirectly tied to YC.

However, science has always been my #1 thing, and programming is my probably my #3. Interesting, but not the only thing I want to do. Working 40 hours a week at it is enough for me. I still love learning new things and getting better at the craft, but when I go home, I have other hobbies.

I'm hacking my treadmill with Arduino for fun. I'm brazing metal. I'm riding my bike more. I'm reading a fiction book that just came out. I just read a book about world development. All of that is a lot more interesting to me than going home and sitting at a different desk doing more programming, you know?

And while I'm not offended by your comments and this is entirely non-personal -- really, I'm just curious as well and enjoy talking to people with different perspectives -- the attitude that if I'm not always programming, I'm "less than" than other programmers seems oppressive to me. I'm still smart, I'm still curious, I'm still good at my job. But there's still the perception that if I am not programming more, I am falling behind.

So the solution for people like me is to pretend to be someone like you, who loves programming above all other things, and it's mildly exhausting. It's great that you love programming so much and I kind of envy you. But not everyone needs to be exactly like you to be a worthwhile contributor. (Again, not personal, I just enjoy putting these thoughts into words.)

Who says that? It's so backwards from everything I'm accustomed to in the bay area. (In the bay area I've done 10 years of data science and 5 years as a software engineer before that.) Maybe it's because I didn't go to universities out here and it's university culture? People at MIT can get very passionate about their projects.

I've had companies (many of them) advertise to me saying I should join them because they have a healthy 9 to 5 work culture. But what company doesn't? Maybe a young startup, but you sign up for that at that point.

Everyone I know who regularly works more than 40 hours a week (who isn't a CEO) is almost always because their boss asks for X quantity load of work done, which might be 50 hours of work, so they do the 50 hours instead of communicating they can't do that much within 40 hours. Sometimes it's because they're a junior and are afraid of not fitting in and are afraid of getting fired, but sometimes it's a senior who has their tech down, but not their communication skills down. It happens, and it's sad to see, because it almost always leads to burn out on their end. It's not a good thing.

I love what I do, but I do 40 hours a week. Want more? It better be a rare event (crunch times are a real thing in some industries) or you need to be paying me more, and I'm not cheap.

>So the solution for people like me is to pretend to be someone like you, who loves programming above all other things, and it's mildly exhausting.

I love programming, but it's just a tool. It's like saying you love hammering. It doesn't make a lot of sense when you take a step back. What I love is the projects I do. You mentioned hacking your tread mill, so it sounds like you do more tech hobby stuff after hours than most software engineers.

Frankly, I rarely do projects outside of work, despite loving what I do. Why? Because companies give me inspiration to do specific tasks that I love. Without working I have a hard time finding things to do. If I could find infinite things to do, I'd be a CEO, providing things for everyone else to do. The only people who truly don't turn off, end up being CEOs, not software engineers. (Unless they don't know how to capitalize, or some other edge case, of course.) So it's unrealistic to believe you have to be doing non-work tech to work in tech. That's just absurd.

Also, I can't say from country to country, but within the US software engineer culture, while it varies from company to company and team to team, is generally somewhat similar across the country. On the NYC side, working more than 40 hours a week is common (eg, quant work), where on the bay area side only working 40 hours a week and turning off (unless you're at a startup) is common.

Is it possible this has to do with too small of a sample size? It's easy to stereotype. We naturally do it unless we learn otherwise, sometimes through learning statistics, sometimes through other routes.

There is how to get into a data science job, and how to make that switch.

There is how to get into doing data science as a hobby or a skill/experience, and how to make that switch.

There is how did you make the switch to data science. That is, what is your story?

And there is the deeper dive, most people do not consider enough: "Will I like doing data science work?"

My story:

When I was a teen, I wrote a stock market bot that was pretty profitable. That may be a quant researcher job and skillset, but it is a kind of data science too, as data science is a research position, where creating models is part of the job spec, identical to a quant researcher.

So I got into it, out of hobby, not out of taking a class or reading a book, but by being infatuated with the plots I see in the stock market, seeing patterns everywhere. When I'm doing a 9 to 5 I have to put a timer on when I'm looking at plots, or I can easily spend days just taking in information. I just like it, a lot.

In 2010 I applied for a job as a software engineer, passed all the interviews, was going to do another SE gig, and then I was talking to a manager during an interview and I said something like, "With enough time and effort, nothing is impossible. That's what I love about programming." So, he threw a curve ball at me. He said something like, "We have a team of roughly 15 people classifying web sites, labeling if the site is porn, education, business, and so on. There are a little over 60 categories." This team worked on the web filter schools and dmvs all over the country paid a service for, to limit what websites people can go to.

I jumped on it, "I can automate that!" So he started a new team and put me on it. What did I do? I looked up how SEOs work and how Google's search engine worked. Certainly they were classifying websites in one way or another, so it was just a matter of research and figuring it out.

...in the end the project succeeded. What strongly surprised me at the time was how it ended up categorizing websites to a higher degree of accuracy than the people we were paying.

That's the non-business side of data science in a nutshell. It's figuring out how to do something often suspected or assumed to be impossible, and making it possible. It's not just researching how to do something, but using cutting edge research from published papers and often doing the next that no one has figured out yet.

Programming is a tool that automates thoughts. If you can figure it out you can put it into code. If it's a complex enough of a problem you can use ML to automate the writing parts of that algorithm you could write by hand. ML is often thought of as a way to generate a process, that can't be written by hand, and to some extent that is true, but only in the sense that it would take too long to write by hand. Eg, where writing by hand would need an if statement for each of the millions of hypothetical scenarios.

ML is also useful for giving insights. You have a hypothesis -- an idea of how to do a task -- and you run ML over it, and either it solves the problem, or it doesn't, and what it comes up with that is incorrect will always teach you something, so data science is often an iterative loop, where you put some ML in just to see how the data varies from your hypothesis giving better ideas in how to write a better model.

Sometimes someone will say data science is an analyst + software engineer, but that's not quite right. An analyst looks at data, plots it, organizes it, and then reports on their findings about what is to management. A data scientist looks at findings and applies predictive analytics to it, finding solutions to potential problems. Eg, "We'd like you predict future customer churn, and propose solutions that will eliminate this potential future customer churn, before it happens." This is done through identifying or classifying what the causes of customer churn are, then finding solutions to those causes (hypothesis), then writing some software that automatically enacts that solution. Then you can look at if that solution is working, and validate your hypothesis or invalidate and learn more of what is really going on. Hopefully that makes sense.

In summary, if there is a task that other software engineers can't figure out how to do but you can, regardless if you're using ML or not, it may be data science. (Keep in mind, software engineers can use ML, so while data scientists often use ML, ML is not data science.) The path from software engineering to data science is usually just that, taking what is deemed impossible by those around you and making it possible.

How to get into DS as a career: As a software engineer, your best bet is to transfer internally. It's rare for a company to higher a fresh data scientist who previously was a software engineer. Data scientists can help all companies, from startups to large companies, so you don't have to be at the "right" company to switch, you just have to find a problem that could benefit the company, advertise your hypothetical solution to management, and start doing it. Data scientists are the ones finding projects to benefit the company, and doing it. They're usually not being given projects from management like software engineers are, though ofc they can be given projects too. Keep in mind: I'm a lead data scientist, and my first data science roll I ended up leading a data science team, so my views are biased towards my own experience.

There are plenty of companies that have paid products and still do user-hostile things including stalking, spam, dark patterns, etc.

I paid full price for a Playstation 4. I still had to opt out of "enhanced data collection" and spend 15 minutes disabling every option on their bullshit attempt at a social network. Even the games themselves had their own telemetry crap I needed to disable buried deep in some advanced settings.

Spotify still insists on ratting me out to Facebook by loading their SDK even if I'm paying for the app. They also interrupt my flow every so often with in-app popovers about some stupid feature I don't care about.

A client I worked for that has a paid app had an insane amount of analytics and marketing SDKs in the app (including Facebook of course), so much that I actually refused to install the app or use the product myself even though they gave me a voucher.

This is a good point and I'm glad we're finally seeing some pushback. I would have a problem working for a company that does unethical things and I was surprised that so many people don't care. And before you tell me that people don't have a choice — perhaps some don't, but that certainly doesn't apply to all the crowd that moves to Silicon Valley to work for Google.

And Spotify doesn't make much money because most of their users are freeloaders. Their poor business model should not become the problem of the paying users.

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.spotify...

I always thought that I would be able to switch to any programming job I wanted, and that the only decision would be between making a lot and roughing it up (like the GP), or working for a better cause for less money (as you propose).

But now I find it -- after 25 years of professional experience -- nearly impossible to find any job. Maybe it is due to the coronavirus, or the budding depression (or both), but I've never seen the market so slow... :(

You might have to change tech stacks and rebrand yourself to appeal more to enterprisey jobs, but that's more of an issue of marketing than anything else. It will be a small transition, but once you do that you'll be fine.