Hi! I've been doing this since 1994 (I started in the industry instead of going to college). I feel this way approximately once every 7-8 years. What I think I've learned is that I make stupid decisions reacting to those feelings.
> I make stupid decisions reacting to those feelings.
Yea it seems like the right thing to do is to step away and take a sabbatical to cool down, and then remember that we like money, and that it's just part of the game to get paid.
I assume by industry you mean software development. And I’m not tired of that. Where else can you be integrally involved in different businesses? Communications, medical, education, e-commerce for anything/everything. We get to play in a lot of different playgrounds and potentially have a huge impact. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.
I am tired of the interview process. Here’s a take home assignment that you’ll code in isolation without feedback or interaction from us. Completely opposite of how you’d do the job. You’ll have to justify any assumptions you make. And if we don’t like your justification, pass.
Took 2 days on the assignment - this is kind of simplistic, not what we’d expect from a senior dev. Pass.
Take 4 days on the assignment - what took so long? We’d expect a senior dev to knock this out in 2 or 3 days. Pass.
Maybe we’ll tell you’re out. Or we’ll just ghost you. Depends on how our recruiting team is feeling that day.
Behavioral is generally where I “blow” it. I won’t lie and answer the “so tell me a time about xyz”. Sometimes xyz was terrible, and I didn’t handle it well. I know how I’d handle it now and can articulate that. Sorry. We’re looking for someone that handled this exactly right already.
Personally I screwed myself over the years by not chasing titles. I’ve done Staff and Principal level stuff. For years. But I didn’t fight for the title. So I generally get screened out of those pretty quickly because past titles don’t match what recruiting team has been told to look for.
But this is the price that must be paid. So I can work/play in a lot of different playgrounds. Keep applying. Keep trying. Eventually I’ll find something.
For sure. I love my side projects and my jobs. I love writing code and designing systems. I’m burned out on the game I must play (and be good at) to be afforded the chance to write code, design systems, and be paid.
Oh yes. It's dog eat dog but among very lazy privileged dogs.
Don't confuse business with a humane enterprise. It operates according to a vague informal internal calculus, has little loyalty to staff or communities and will happily eat skilled, conscientious contributors. The utopian stuff about being intelligent and progressive is hyperbole; a side effect of a privileged class of the labor sector for 50 years for the simple reason of growth. Morals and ethics are after-thoughts. Communitas is to the FAANG nothing more than growth. As smart as this class thinks it is, it will wither and die when the corp welfare dries up.
I’ve seen way more people struggling with mental health issues largely from overwork and stress than overly privileged. I think I’ve once or twice worked with an engineer that was kinda lazy but that’s out of hundreds of people I’ve worked with closely over the years. The only people who gain from calling engineers lazy and privileged are executives. All it does is widen the stick used to flog you.
I just released this song… maybe somewhat related to these feelings.
The lyrics were inspired by Anthony de Mello's observation that most of us are like people on a bus, passing through the most beautiful country imaginable, but the shades are drawn and we are arguing about who has first place on the bus.
The music and song title were inspired by Warren Zevon - Lawyers, Guns And Money.
After 35 years in tech and 10 years with the same company, today is my last day at a Fortune 100 tech firm. I left voluntarily with no new job lined up.
Never felt so relieved.
I realized that the depression I was experiencing was caused entirely by leadership, not my job. No matter which products I worked on, the same feelings of depression and ultimately loathing of the environment and process kept returning.
Don't get me wrong. My employer is world-class, and the benefits were amazing, but the software development and engineering culture are destroying their employees.
A sabbatical to rethink my career is in order.
I've saved for the past 20 years and realized that unless I take time now, I might never have the real opportunity to enjoy life the way I’ve dreamed. I now have two years of savings set aside, so we will see where life takes me. I might work for myself or simply step down from technology development into a new role.
Modern software engineering is killing its employees. Global teams across time zones working from 5:00am to 10:00pm., on projects that aren’t even mine—just because someone else left and needed someone competent to pick up the slack and carry the project to completion. Leaders overpromise and commit to deadlines without even asking if the solutions are feasible. Being reprimanded when you push back and say that the solution they just promised isn’t realistic or even possible.
One more comment and a bit of advice for junior product and engineering staff. If someone else leaves, make it clear to your leadership that you cannot be expected to always pick up the slack. Don't get stuck in the cycle where leaders learn they can dump tasks on you and never backfill for the skill set. Becoming an essential team member will lessen your chances of getting promoted, and you will have very limited career change opportunities..
Sounds great until they’re PIPd. And I fully agree with you. The industry is hellbent on working people into the ground because they’re drunk on their newfound layoff powers. They absolutely love the turn around in their favor and I’ve personally witnessed management using horrible psychological tactics to overwork people in this environment. This industry really disgusts me, but hey, at least they’re going masks off finally so we can see them for what they really are.
I don’t care what people say online, I’ve seen excellent engineers treated like trash recently, some of which are also thinking of leaving the industry. That’s everyone’s loss.
I think we're going to see more of this. The general result of all the RIF/outsourcing seems to still be that the onshore employees workload increases and they burn out.
I'm genuinely glad that you said enough is enough. I hope you go make something rad and never need to go back to that world.
Sometimes technical debt is kept rather than being fixed because "if we fix this some high-value technologically-challenged clients will no longer be able to use our service."
This is actually solvable but will need an "out of the box" thinking.
I was feeling burnt out until I got a pretty cool job a couple of years back. Instead of corporate crap we're building a product for scientists. I'm working on a small team with minimal interference. It feels good.
The downside is that this kind of job is rare. If/when this ends I'll probably need to go right back to the corporate grind. I don't have any other marketable skills, nor a financial runway, so.... realistically I need to do this until I die/retire.
I'm both excited and terrified about how the AI thing is going to play out.
I'm a fan. It's obviously the future. But I think it might entirely replace us, or at least 95% of us.
I also work for scientists and researchers, and it's a whole different atmosphere. Being research-driven instead if profit-driven makes all the difference. It's a great gig...at least until the funding dries out.
I imagine this won't help right now, as you and everyone else need work immediately, but for the future I'd suggest you research opening a small software development business with other programmers or, even better, a cooperative. This requires learning business management, and assuming risks, but as you see it isn't like normal job really provides security.
The main advantage is that under this arrangement the people who are your bosses, or otherwise rule over that you do, in a normal corporate job, such as sales people and accountants, become your employees and have to answer to you and your peers. Technical merit and knowledg becomes the driving force, not fantasy sales pitches and bean counting.
The main downside, besides the business risk, is likely going to be lower pay. But you'll be doing what you find valuable, so you'll have much higher enjoyment at what you do.
Note that many companies are pretending to hire in order to look successful/growing. They might be willing to hire if some unicorn candidate comes along, but in practice the job ad is just marketing.
Saw that article a while back where even Glassdoor was admitting something like a third of their job posts were probably ghost jobs. I think that's hurting everyone though, all for the same reasons.
I was at Amazon warehouse for a year, I was getting contract offers for 6 months I was like f that wanting security. Eventually I took one and I'm at it now, six fig job. It was crazy though like impossible to get hired unless you went through a recruiter. I don't have a degree but have years of work exp.
Edit: I did see some news thing about trying to undo/keep 174.
Yeah, I've heard about that 174 stuff too. Even if it was changed tomorrow and it was the actual reason for all the stagnation in hiring that some people say it is, I would expect it to take months for that impact to start showing up.
If you have the money, there's nothing wrong with quitting and doing your own thing for a while. Alternately, working for a fundamentally different kind of company can be rewarding. I found working at a small business (a sales company where tech was an afterthought) to be delightful and weird; everything was non-standard and many roles were just not hired for, but everyone's door was open and there's no bureaucracy, so whatever I wanted to be would be in my domain. The workload was low, so I made my own work and got into Facilities work, learned how to check the fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, and elevators. -And you know what? I opened up some of the smoke detectors and detected prior smoke in them; visual charring and melted plastic. The smoke detectors had been recalled for catching fire. I filed for replacement costs from the company, and now our smoke detectors won't burn the building down, which I think's pretty neat.
I wish I had "do my own thing for a while" money. Sounds like you found a nice place to still do something useful but catch your breath. I'm hoping I can find something similar.
The core issue here isn't just market conditions or bad hiring practices. It's that tech _workers_ have spent decades thinking they were somehow different from other _workers_, that they were 'partners' with capital rather than the labor behind it.
You're experiencing what people in every other industry have dealt with for generations: being treated as a disposable cost center when it's convenient for ownership. The solution isn't individual resilience or '''grinding harder''', it's collective action.
Tech workers need to organize. We need unions. We need to stop pretending that stock options and ping pong tables make us anything other than workers whose interests are fundamentally opposed to those who fire us on a whim to boost quarterly numbers.
The people who laid you off, who are outsourcing jobs, who are trying to replace workers with AI — they are not on your side! They never were! This is class warfare, and we tech workers have been deluding ourselves supporting the wrong side.
I've been in a union before. The benefits were bad, the pay was bad, after negotiations they were still bad. The union said "we tried." So I have trouble seeing them as the panacea that is marketed.
I'm still trying to get my foot in the door. Ever since I started building 'raw' pages for people who had either "business ideas" or ran a 100 person sales team, no one has known or respected the difficulty of what goes into what we build or how it is actually a better solution than whatever they were asking for originally. Maybe once I actually break into the industry i will finally find a manager who understands what the solution is and how we get there in six months and equates that to a proper working solution instead of a internal-politics motivated project to get and edge over some other dept.
I feel that right in my soul. The other side of the coin is they are currently destroying the talent pipeline by keeping smart motivated people out of roles where they could learn fast and grow. The myopic strategy(or lack thereof) is astonishing to me.
You are delusional. I remember when I was starting (over 10 years ago), I worked with a guy who had a PhD in physics. We were doing WordPress stuff and I was getting paid higher than him (to add insult to injury I was based in a cheap third-world country and he was UK based). Since I've interacted with him a bit, I got to discover that he was very smart, mathematically inclined and did actually write correct English.
There is still no demand for physics. There is a world where we are heading for another bull market in tech but there is a also a world where this slump remains here forever. My guess is on the latter. The talent in the global south has considerably caught up in the last 15-20 years in terms of skills, language and numbers.
Just try to bear with it and keep applying, and prepare answers for the "stupid" questions, these are not going to go away. And yes, uncertainty is always tough.
You are also right in that the more deliberate way to get an increased salary or position is to change jobs. Yes, it happens internally as well, but it's harder to achieve. Also, going through multiple jobs is better for both experience but also in seeing what the industry actually looks like. When you work at the same company for many years, especially if that's pretty much the only job you've had, then you have just one data point, which is to say, you really don't know much.
The job market isn't booming, though it does seem to be picking up.
Unlike professions like medicine, software industry had been permissive. And there were history major becoming CTOs of leading finance companies, which leaked every consumer recoreds.
Once the industry will gets rid of the pretenders, the deserving people will find their place.
I'm exhausted and burned out too. I'm fortunate that I can take some time away from work to recover and hopefully regain some passion for this, but I'm strongly considering retraining for a different industry
I'm happy to talk, as someone also going through the same stuff. Let me know, I can drop some contact info
I'm not terribly hard to find, but vibe checking all the Ask HN readers is about as much "talking about it" as I really want to do. I normally try to keep focused on the positive and use my time constructively. Happy to make a connection to do the latter though.
In some way, software development is going the way hardware development went years ago. The engineers built tools and modules that put most of them out of work. Who designs amps or discrete circuits these days? Once you design a piece of hardware that works well, it can be re-used ad-infinitum, and most hardware today is really firmware running on microcontrollers. So it is a natural evolution that software is becoming automated. Unfortunate, but also an opportunity to do more interesting things. It is the managers that need to be replaced unless they can see further than the tecchies, and I have known some that do, usually they are ex-tecchies.
> The engineers built tools and modules that put most of them out of work.
Yes, but no. I'm in hardware. I deal with hardware engineers. This part of the industry is alive and well. You might not see it, but it's there.
> Once you design a piece of hardware that works well, it can be re-used ad-infinitum, and most hardware today is really firmware running on microcontrollers.
Yes to the first part, it's just like code. Write once, then run it perpetually. Except that isn't really the case. There are still jobs for maintaining COBOL systems. Likewise, legacy hardware needs to be replaced, improved, or repaired. Old companies die, new ones swoop in and capture market share. My employer is the only manufacturer I know of for a legacy system component. They have a captive market because no one else wants to take the two weeks in CAD, and phone time with the contract manufacturers. This kind of thing is everywhere.
> So it is a natural evolution that software is becoming automated.
Again, yes, but no. We automate things as a matter of course. We are engineers. This doesn't mean fewer jobs, it means a shifting job market. IE loom operator vs hand weaver.
If you're willing to leave Silicon Valley, there are a lot of small companies out there that need one or two or a handful of decent software developers to do useful but non-cutting-edge work. They can't pay Silicon Valley money, obviously, but you get to be a lot closer to other kinds of work, which you might find satisfying in its own way.
Look for large companies dealing in physical goods. I work on warehouse software for a company selling motorcycle helmets and bbqs. Its a great intersection of tech and industry.
I actually specifically look for those smaller companies. I don't live in Silicon Valley, nor have I ever made Silicon Valley money. I've never wanted to live there and I haven't wanted to work for FAANG since Google did away with "don't be evil."
If you happen to know where they are posting jobs, aside from the normal terrible job sites because I've been on them since November, I'm interested.
I wish I had something more specific for you, but my experience is more on the demand-adjacent side (as an EE) rather than directly on the software side. The companies I've worked at have posted on the regular job sites but mainly worked through recruiters. Companies do often post announcements on their LinkedIn, if they have one.
I share your frustration with the fad-driven, cramming-AI-into-everything, rent-seeking model of modern software, and I wish you luck in your search.
No LinkedIn, I couldn't take another "this is what appendicitis taught me about B2B sales" post. But I bothered all the recruiters I know and fed my resume into the paper shredder of all the companies candidate portal early on.
I suspect all those great little companies are either laying low or staffed up with the glut of ex-<prestigious name> devs. Or the huge pool of ex federal employees who have lots of experience in "legacy" systems.
Here's a typical job in that category. Boring but practical Chicago Dryer.[1]
Industrial Controls Engineer
Chicago Dryer
Chicago, IL
$80,000 to $110,000 Yearly
Vision, Medical, Dental, Paid Time Off, Life Insurance, Retirement
Full-Time
5+ years of experience in controls & software engineering
High-level knowledge of one or more programming languages (C, Pascal(structured-text))
Familiarity with Windows, Linux & Realtime operating systems
Familiarity with electrical codes for industrial machinery
Electrical design & CAD experience for automation-controls
Solid knowledge of classical-physics (mechanics & motion)
Mechanical aptitude and ability to work with hand tools
Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
Ability to work well with personnel at all levels
Beckhoff TwinCat3 experience is a plus
Jira and GIT experience is a plus
Electronics design & trouble-shooting is a plus
Leader in the heavy machinery that takes clean linen items after washing and dries, sorts, folds, and stacks them by the ton.
There are vision systems and robotic grippers involved.
They've been in business for over a century, building heavy duty laundry equipment. It's
a very steady business. Probably good job security.
The startups making all the noise in clothes folding, such as Foldimate and Laundroid, went bust.
Chicago Dryer equipment processed a few tons of laundry while you were reading this.
That's what a blue-collar programming job looks like. But it will be a very clean blue collar.
How strict is something like that on the demands for CAD and Electrical Design stuff? Because I've never done any of that. I'd be happy to learn it, but that doesn't seem to matter anymore.
I work at exactly one of these companies. It's been thoroughly refreshing, picking my tools and language, being able to defend my choices and help make new ones, have ownership of my part of the product, and see that all bear fruit going from a product that was on fire and mired in tech debt when I got there, to a smoothly running machine with my code at its heart now.
They definitely can't pay inflated Silicon Valley salaries, but I'm also at much less risk of getting that pink slip when some far-off executive decides I'm extraneous. I'm two hops from the company CEO, and even though I haven't met him, he's quite aware of my contribution and has requested projects for my skillset. I have direct lines to most of the executive engineers. That's gratifying.
For whatever reason, my career has been driven by curiosity, first computers and Fortran II, then real-time medical data analysis, then compilers, then collection of batch financial data from dozens of sources, then low-latency financial trading backed by genetic programming, then application security.
I've luckily managed to avoid too many brain-dead execs, but there have been spells that the gig is boring.
Looking back on it, there have been very few spells in which I have not been programming, if not for a gig, but on my own to explore my curiosity.
I'm over the industry cause it over-promised an under-delivered and the way it "changed" the world is largely through monopolies, extractive middlemen and manipulation.
Anyone who can engineer software systems is likely able to engineer some kind of company. Not the path for everyone, but it is one way of moving forward without staying linked to the industry.
The idea has been very high up on my list. But I need to pay the bills until I can put something together. I'm not interested in the current trend of "building" a company that burns VC money to prop up a garbage product just long enough to be sold and enshittified.
Hard not to feel this way sometimes given the quality of some job listings and the negativity bias here and broader media. In such moments of despair I recall two axioms: change is inevitable and ongoing, and talent rarely resides in the C-suite.
I'm only 10 years in and currently at a science non-profit using a dead/toy framework, and honestly woefully unprepared for market at the moment. I'm constantly looking at job listings, though, and engaging with scads of recruiters to maintain a good feel for the market to inform my next steps. I see plenty of ads that are hyper-specific about the tooling du-jour, but a non-trivial percentage of the listings I see make it clear that higher-level prowess, like understanding a language and best practices, are more important than what ultimately boils down to the ability to RTFM for whatever widgets the CTO/CE is currently enamored with. These are the jobs I'm looking at. Sure, this could narrow your pool during what appears to be a tight market, but you're more likely to have worthwhile interviews. I'll apply to less intriguing jobs to avoid getting rusty at interviewing, though.
This kind of funk also inevitably drives me harder to just _do what I want to do_. What language and tools _do I want to use_? _What kind of problems do I want to solve_ moving forward? If you've sorted these out, great. Sure, this could _also_ narrow your pool even more, but you're more likely to find a high-quality match.
Finally, all of these companies foaming at the mouth to replace people with AI will regret it; it's already happening, in fact. It's happening in less/non-technical jobs (lol Klarna), so I'm not worried about coding jobs at all in the long run (not to diminish and current or short term turbulence, though). Smart execs/founders will see AI for what it is: a force multiplier, only as good as your existing staff. That said, I think it behooves devs to get right with AI/chat-assisted development. Of all the buzzy tools people fall in love with, I think this is the highest ROI I've seen yet.
TL;DR: I'm just not going to apply to jobs that don't give me "smart exec" smells, and I'm only applying if it really looks like something I'll care about doing. I realize this exudes some degree of privilege, hubris, and/or naivete, but I work my ass off and you only live once.
It's the highest paying cushiest career on earth. If you don't want to grind a little bit to secure that then don't. Just make less money doing something harder. It's your choice and personally I'm happy if there's less competition
It sounds like you have burnout and a burnout-related attitude issue, it is understandable but not always helpful. A lot of people find professional help talking through this to be very beneficial.
I found working at a restaurant as a cook delightful for 6 months, it wasn't at all fair as I was also still living off severance but it was very relaxing having straightforward work that was always done at the end of the shift as well as a creative outlet where I could do something with my hands.
The frustration is understandable but now you've got to find your new direction either a new way to approach tech work to increase your marketability and to find jobs where you'll be happier or a different direction and something different to do. You can be furious but unless you channel that into something positive it's just hurting yourself. Let yourself be mad for a while and then make yourself ready for whatever is next.
Ive been around since 2004. I've seen this cycle a few times now in the industry.
An accountant, proper CPA, needs like 5-10 hours of training per year to keep on top of their industry.
IT? Are we on mainframes? no we moved to individual pcs? I mean we moved to the mainframe in the cloud? No we moved to individual ai on GPUs? No we moved to the ai in the cloud?
IT is constantly changing and 10 hours per day of training isnt enough and if you're caught on Y framework when the industry moved on from that framework. Then you're SOL. Not many people still got those fortran jobs.
But I live and breathe tech even in my spare time[1]. You gotta learn to roll with the sh-t and set boundaries. I hate to say it but turn off HN, this place a hype machine designed to make you feel bad. It's like "Roast and Toast" x 1000 on here, not reality. It's toxic in a very passive-aggressive way (rather than reddit toxic, which is just aggressive).
I've been at this since 1988. (Made a few personal bad choices so not retired, lol [2]) I've changed jobs every 5-7 years since the post-2000 implosion. Don't bother with the FAANGs, its all style over substance tossing-off investors: they don't care about you at all and their top level management just want to be centibillionaires (or trillionaires).
Find smaller companies, that's what I started doing 20 years ago. I started a new job as a senior director at a 5000 person company 3 years ago, most money I've ever made in my career, great people who enjoy their work, no pressure to move up the ladder unless you want to (not much ladder for me, but the younger devs are happy to stay put without the dumb pressure to give 150% every year). Our revenue is <10B, and it is a German company so there's minimal (unremarkable) equity, but the base salary is great.
Find a company that makes boring products that sell. Mine is a stable boring company, making real-ware silicon products and associated cloud services for medical and automotive industry. Look for a company trying to grow profits at a normal rate, not a FAANG rate. Avoid the hype. Be boring. Slow and steady.
[1] also, if you're only in tech because you think that's where you're supposed to be, and don't have a deep passion for it, you're gonna have a bad time.
[2] Oh, and don't accidentally get someone you don't like pregnant. Because then you're completely f--ked.
> I hate to say it but turn off HN, this place a hype machine designed to make you feel bad. It's like "Roast and Toast" x 1000 on here, not reality. It's toxic in a very passive-aggressive way
I have a completely different experience of HN than you do. There are the stray toxic folks, sure, but overall, this is one of the best dev forums--actively moderated, generally filled with intelligent comments, and often offering good advice. Just look at the thoughtful and understanding answers to this very post.
The tech industry was always a little slimy but it's out of hand now. I've lost too much respect for the role of innovation in this current version of our society. We've passed a point where it's used against people more than for people.
Day after day here watching people with no substantive activity on their account spam their endless shovelware slop projects, I just can't feel like I want to be a part of this anymore.
"Used against people." Those are good words. I am also deeply tired of that. I'm absolutely guilty of being one of those idiots that still thinks we could have nice things and products that work for reasonable prices if we just cared a little.
I don't know your background or experience but I do know there are a lot of people in tech now who have never experienced a recession. Also, this startup image (which persisted to these being big companies) of them being employee-friendly, maverick and casual was really just a function of the boom times.
That veneer is long gone. We are now in the era of permanent layoffs to suppress wages and every one of us that can be replaced by AI will be.
I think for many tech workers, they're in for a rude awakening that they're just like any other worker and not special or somehow immune to the adversarial nature of the employer-employee relationship.
Back in 2000 and 2008 it took sa few years but the jobs came back. One might assume that'll happen again but I'm honestly not so sure. 2008 saw the elimination of a whole class of entry-level professional jobs for millenials that never came back.
Thing is, I don't think much of the economic activity in the tech sector is actually creating value anymore. Big tech are milking their respective golden geese until they inevitably die. Startups are largely just angling for a buyout in the AI gold rush that'll largely benefit the founders and the employees not so much.
One it’s a down market, the worst since the dotcom bubble. Companies are going to be needlessly selective to keep the hiring people busy, and also to get people who are the most desperate and motivated as they’ll probably get them cheaper. Being self taught may not matter practically speaking, but it's not doing you any favors right now unfortunately.
The other thing the bear in mind is - this is the norm at a lot of industries, we in software have just frankly had it really easy for a couple decades now. What seems unreasonable to you is what lot of people have to go through even in a good market.
I sometimes get feelings or down and up markets (namely my checking account) but do you have any good reliable sources on market trends for tech employment?
I don't mean "become a professor"; I mean be a software developer at a college or university. They need them in large teams (IT department of a larger university) down to solo devs (working for a single department at a small liberal arts college—this is where I've been for 15 years).
It's true that you won't get the same level of pay—frankly, I've been woefully underpaid—but, by and large, they're not trying to replace everyone with AI, they adhere to basic standards of ethics, and they don't subscribe to crunch culture. If you're working in an academic department, chances are your bosses will basically think you're doing magic all the time and give you massive respect. Plus the job security is overall much higher. (Well, it has been. I suppose the current political situation may create some extra instability, depending on the position.)
You might very well need to go looking at individual institutions' websites. Whether they get posted to places like Indeed or LinkedIn is going to be much more hit and miss than with big industry players or tech startups.
And yes, I am very personally aware of just how time-consuming and frustrating that can be.
used to see 80-100 lines of good code per programmer.
seeing up to 2400 lines a day in 4 hours of deep work. LLMs will greatly reduce the amount of people required, mainly seniors. erode the path for junior training and put further pressure in an industry continually contracting since 2021.
the amortization of software developing as R&D expense among many years implemented by the IRS didn't help either
Not primarily the fault of the IRS, as they were just following the law passed in 2017 that didn't go into effect until years later. But there's a chance it gets changed back to the previous way by the same people who passed it.
I'm nearly done after seeing the nonstop indianization of my topics on google.
Niches from motorcycles to tech to music have become a punjab yellowpages and no one is even talking about it.
Google the most popular korean boyband in the world "BTS"
6/7 of my results are indian domains. What's the point of even trying anymore when ESL slop like that gets a massive SERP advantage for years now and is only getting worse?
Has little to do with “industry” and everything to do with America being led by post war, Cold War paranoids who drank lead water and huffed lead gas fumes, brains wired to march to a steady drum, right into building a shit hole country.
Sure is a whole lot of demand to show up just so from ossified gerontocrat pols who can’t provide for themselves and mock us to our faces about freedom.
A bunch of randos socialize we’re off the hook for each other, good luck! While also expecting we show up for jobs that secure their investments or they send out the riot cops. It’s a fucking brain dead social culture of learned helplessness copy pasted around office worker meat suits. An obvious, making it pointless, LARP.
Zero flexibility in human agency when too few know how to fix their stuff and need these brain dead jobs to trickle down to the poorer service workers.
Hi! I've been doing this since 1994 (I started in the industry instead of going to college). I feel this way approximately once every 7-8 years. What I think I've learned is that I make stupid decisions reacting to those feelings.
> I make stupid decisions reacting to those feelings.
Yea it seems like the right thing to do is to step away and take a sabbatical to cool down, and then remember that we like money, and that it's just part of the game to get paid.
Keep playing a wicked game whose rules are stacked against you for the shiny trophy. I’ll see you in therapy in a few years.
I guess another bit of advice is to do whatever you need to do to avoid ending up talking like this.
Oh, the seven year itch. I didn't think it would apply to work, but it makes sense that it would.
Do those cycles happen to correspond with the tech market crashes? =)
No, my last one happened at a market peak.
>> I've taken to telling people with absurdly high meeting count hiring processes and one way video screenings that I'm not interested.
Same here — it’s gotten way out of hand.
I assume by industry you mean software development. And I’m not tired of that. Where else can you be integrally involved in different businesses? Communications, medical, education, e-commerce for anything/everything. We get to play in a lot of different playgrounds and potentially have a huge impact. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.
I am tired of the interview process. Here’s a take home assignment that you’ll code in isolation without feedback or interaction from us. Completely opposite of how you’d do the job. You’ll have to justify any assumptions you make. And if we don’t like your justification, pass.
Took 2 days on the assignment - this is kind of simplistic, not what we’d expect from a senior dev. Pass.
Take 4 days on the assignment - what took so long? We’d expect a senior dev to knock this out in 2 or 3 days. Pass.
Maybe we’ll tell you’re out. Or we’ll just ghost you. Depends on how our recruiting team is feeling that day.
Behavioral is generally where I “blow” it. I won’t lie and answer the “so tell me a time about xyz”. Sometimes xyz was terrible, and I didn’t handle it well. I know how I’d handle it now and can articulate that. Sorry. We’re looking for someone that handled this exactly right already.
Personally I screwed myself over the years by not chasing titles. I’ve done Staff and Principal level stuff. For years. But I didn’t fight for the title. So I generally get screened out of those pretty quickly because past titles don’t match what recruiting team has been told to look for.
But this is the price that must be paid. So I can work/play in a lot of different playgrounds. Keep applying. Keep trying. Eventually I’ll find something.
To my eye you seem to be extolling the virtues of the work. Which I still love.
For sure. I love my side projects and my jobs. I love writing code and designing systems. I’m burned out on the game I must play (and be good at) to be afforded the chance to write code, design systems, and be paid.
Isn't that part "the industry" being what it is?
Yeah. I just try to separate them in my mind or I’ll quit trying :) Not ready to retire just yet.
Oh yes. It's dog eat dog but among very lazy privileged dogs.
Don't confuse business with a humane enterprise. It operates according to a vague informal internal calculus, has little loyalty to staff or communities and will happily eat skilled, conscientious contributors. The utopian stuff about being intelligent and progressive is hyperbole; a side effect of a privileged class of the labor sector for 50 years for the simple reason of growth. Morals and ethics are after-thoughts. Communitas is to the FAANG nothing more than growth. As smart as this class thinks it is, it will wither and die when the corp welfare dries up.
Wtf are you talking about “priveleged”?
Many people worked day and night to become a well paid engineer. And some rich founders of companies still do, coming from nothing.
I’ve seen way more people struggling with mental health issues largely from overwork and stress than overly privileged. I think I’ve once or twice worked with an engineer that was kinda lazy but that’s out of hundreds of people I’ve worked with closely over the years. The only people who gain from calling engineers lazy and privileged are executives. All it does is widen the stick used to flog you.
I just released this song… maybe somewhat related to these feelings.
The lyrics were inspired by Anthony de Mello's observation that most of us are like people on a bus, passing through the most beautiful country imaginable, but the shades are drawn and we are arguing about who has first place on the bus.
The music and song title were inspired by Warren Zevon - Lawyers, Guns And Money.
So inspired by two great philosophers.
https://lynkify.in/album/bus-rides-shades-and-windows/auUoEf...
Maybe someone should tell the business leadership and politicians to stop pulling down the shades on our behalf.
After 35 years in tech and 10 years with the same company, today is my last day at a Fortune 100 tech firm. I left voluntarily with no new job lined up.
Never felt so relieved.
I realized that the depression I was experiencing was caused entirely by leadership, not my job. No matter which products I worked on, the same feelings of depression and ultimately loathing of the environment and process kept returning.
Don't get me wrong. My employer is world-class, and the benefits were amazing, but the software development and engineering culture are destroying their employees.
A sabbatical to rethink my career is in order.
I've saved for the past 20 years and realized that unless I take time now, I might never have the real opportunity to enjoy life the way I’ve dreamed. I now have two years of savings set aside, so we will see where life takes me. I might work for myself or simply step down from technology development into a new role.
Modern software engineering is killing its employees. Global teams across time zones working from 5:00am to 10:00pm., on projects that aren’t even mine—just because someone else left and needed someone competent to pick up the slack and carry the project to completion. Leaders overpromise and commit to deadlines without even asking if the solutions are feasible. Being reprimanded when you push back and say that the solution they just promised isn’t realistic or even possible.
One more comment and a bit of advice for junior product and engineering staff. If someone else leaves, make it clear to your leadership that you cannot be expected to always pick up the slack. Don't get stuck in the cycle where leaders learn they can dump tasks on you and never backfill for the skill set. Becoming an essential team member will lessen your chances of getting promoted, and you will have very limited career change opportunities..
Sounds great until they’re PIPd. And I fully agree with you. The industry is hellbent on working people into the ground because they’re drunk on their newfound layoff powers. They absolutely love the turn around in their favor and I’ve personally witnessed management using horrible psychological tactics to overwork people in this environment. This industry really disgusts me, but hey, at least they’re going masks off finally so we can see them for what they really are.
I don’t care what people say online, I’ve seen excellent engineers treated like trash recently, some of which are also thinking of leaving the industry. That’s everyone’s loss.
I think we're going to see more of this. The general result of all the RIF/outsourcing seems to still be that the onshore employees workload increases and they burn out.
I'm genuinely glad that you said enough is enough. I hope you go make something rad and never need to go back to that world.
Pretty done.
Employers: Making it an obligation that I act like we have in house tools that were meant to exist 3 years ago, doing everything manually.
Customers: So beholden to their technical debt that they would rather pay ten times the opex than the capex to remove the debt.
Shits me to tears.
Sometimes technical debt is kept rather than being fixed because "if we fix this some high-value technologically-challenged clients will no longer be able to use our service."
This is actually solvable but will need an "out of the box" thinking.
Oh that's an entirely different flaming dumpster, but I feel that too.
I was feeling burnt out until I got a pretty cool job a couple of years back. Instead of corporate crap we're building a product for scientists. I'm working on a small team with minimal interference. It feels good.
The downside is that this kind of job is rare. If/when this ends I'll probably need to go right back to the corporate grind. I don't have any other marketable skills, nor a financial runway, so.... realistically I need to do this until I die/retire.
I'm both excited and terrified about how the AI thing is going to play out.
I'm a fan. It's obviously the future. But I think it might entirely replace us, or at least 95% of us.
I also work for scientists and researchers, and it's a whole different atmosphere. Being research-driven instead if profit-driven makes all the difference. It's a great gig...at least until the funding dries out.
I imagine this won't help right now, as you and everyone else need work immediately, but for the future I'd suggest you research opening a small software development business with other programmers or, even better, a cooperative. This requires learning business management, and assuming risks, but as you see it isn't like normal job really provides security.
The main advantage is that under this arrangement the people who are your bosses, or otherwise rule over that you do, in a normal corporate job, such as sales people and accountants, become your employees and have to answer to you and your peers. Technical merit and knowledg becomes the driving force, not fantasy sales pitches and bean counting.
The main downside, besides the business risk, is likely going to be lower pay. But you'll be doing what you find valuable, so you'll have much higher enjoyment at what you do.
I've been thinking really hard about it. Just gotta pay the bills until I can find something that works.
Note that many companies are pretending to hire in order to look successful/growing. They might be willing to hire if some unicorn candidate comes along, but in practice the job ad is just marketing.
Saw that article a while back where even Glassdoor was admitting something like a third of their job posts were probably ghost jobs. I think that's hurting everyone though, all for the same reasons.
I was at Amazon warehouse for a year, I was getting contract offers for 6 months I was like f that wanting security. Eventually I took one and I'm at it now, six fig job. It was crazy though like impossible to get hired unless you went through a recruiter. I don't have a degree but have years of work exp.
Edit: I did see some news thing about trying to undo/keep 174.
Yeah, I've heard about that 174 stuff too. Even if it was changed tomorrow and it was the actual reason for all the stagnation in hiring that some people say it is, I would expect it to take months for that impact to start showing up.
If you have the money, there's nothing wrong with quitting and doing your own thing for a while. Alternately, working for a fundamentally different kind of company can be rewarding. I found working at a small business (a sales company where tech was an afterthought) to be delightful and weird; everything was non-standard and many roles were just not hired for, but everyone's door was open and there's no bureaucracy, so whatever I wanted to be would be in my domain. The workload was low, so I made my own work and got into Facilities work, learned how to check the fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, and elevators. -And you know what? I opened up some of the smoke detectors and detected prior smoke in them; visual charring and melted plastic. The smoke detectors had been recalled for catching fire. I filed for replacement costs from the company, and now our smoke detectors won't burn the building down, which I think's pretty neat.
I wish I had "do my own thing for a while" money. Sounds like you found a nice place to still do something useful but catch your breath. I'm hoping I can find something similar.
The core issue here isn't just market conditions or bad hiring practices. It's that tech _workers_ have spent decades thinking they were somehow different from other _workers_, that they were 'partners' with capital rather than the labor behind it.
You're experiencing what people in every other industry have dealt with for generations: being treated as a disposable cost center when it's convenient for ownership. The solution isn't individual resilience or '''grinding harder''', it's collective action.
Tech workers need to organize. We need unions. We need to stop pretending that stock options and ping pong tables make us anything other than workers whose interests are fundamentally opposed to those who fire us on a whim to boost quarterly numbers.
The people who laid you off, who are outsourcing jobs, who are trying to replace workers with AI — they are not on your side! They never were! This is class warfare, and we tech workers have been deluding ourselves supporting the wrong side.
I've been in a union before. The benefits were bad, the pay was bad, after negotiations they were still bad. The union said "we tried." So I have trouble seeing them as the panacea that is marketed.
I'm still trying to get my foot in the door. Ever since I started building 'raw' pages for people who had either "business ideas" or ran a 100 person sales team, no one has known or respected the difficulty of what goes into what we build or how it is actually a better solution than whatever they were asking for originally. Maybe once I actually break into the industry i will finally find a manager who understands what the solution is and how we get there in six months and equates that to a proper working solution instead of a internal-politics motivated project to get and edge over some other dept.
I feel that right in my soul. The other side of the coin is they are currently destroying the talent pipeline by keeping smart motivated people out of roles where they could learn fast and grow. The myopic strategy(or lack thereof) is astonishing to me.
You are delusional. I remember when I was starting (over 10 years ago), I worked with a guy who had a PhD in physics. We were doing WordPress stuff and I was getting paid higher than him (to add insult to injury I was based in a cheap third-world country and he was UK based). Since I've interacted with him a bit, I got to discover that he was very smart, mathematically inclined and did actually write correct English.
There is still no demand for physics. There is a world where we are heading for another bull market in tech but there is a also a world where this slump remains here forever. My guess is on the latter. The talent in the global south has considerably caught up in the last 15-20 years in terms of skills, language and numbers.
Just try to bear with it and keep applying, and prepare answers for the "stupid" questions, these are not going to go away. And yes, uncertainty is always tough.
You are also right in that the more deliberate way to get an increased salary or position is to change jobs. Yes, it happens internally as well, but it's harder to achieve. Also, going through multiple jobs is better for both experience but also in seeing what the industry actually looks like. When you work at the same company for many years, especially if that's pretty much the only job you've had, then you have just one data point, which is to say, you really don't know much.
The job market isn't booming, though it does seem to be picking up.
Unlike professions like medicine, software industry had been permissive. And there were history major becoming CTOs of leading finance companies, which leaked every consumer recoreds. Once the industry will gets rid of the pretenders, the deserving people will find their place.
Sometimes I feel like the guy in the mongodb is webscale video and just want to go get a farm out in the country and shovel pig shit all day.
One of the jobs I’m most thankful of having was my very first one. On a farm. Dealing with pigs.
You can have that job. I’ll put up with 8 bosses, tps reports and air conditioning.
I imagine that shoveling pig shit all day gets old very quickly. It's very easy to try working at a farm and seeing if you like it.
That video keeps coming up in conversations all over. It's like the universe is trying to tell me something. I just wish I knew what it was. =)
Yes, you aren't alone
I'm exhausted and burned out too. I'm fortunate that I can take some time away from work to recover and hopefully regain some passion for this, but I'm strongly considering retraining for a different industry
I'm happy to talk, as someone also going through the same stuff. Let me know, I can drop some contact info
What industry are you thinking of moving towards?
I'm not terribly hard to find, but vibe checking all the Ask HN readers is about as much "talking about it" as I really want to do. I normally try to keep focused on the positive and use my time constructively. Happy to make a connection to do the latter though.
In some way, software development is going the way hardware development went years ago. The engineers built tools and modules that put most of them out of work. Who designs amps or discrete circuits these days? Once you design a piece of hardware that works well, it can be re-used ad-infinitum, and most hardware today is really firmware running on microcontrollers. So it is a natural evolution that software is becoming automated. Unfortunate, but also an opportunity to do more interesting things. It is the managers that need to be replaced unless they can see further than the tecchies, and I have known some that do, usually they are ex-tecchies.
> The engineers built tools and modules that put most of them out of work.
Yes, but no. I'm in hardware. I deal with hardware engineers. This part of the industry is alive and well. You might not see it, but it's there.
> Once you design a piece of hardware that works well, it can be re-used ad-infinitum, and most hardware today is really firmware running on microcontrollers.
Yes to the first part, it's just like code. Write once, then run it perpetually. Except that isn't really the case. There are still jobs for maintaining COBOL systems. Likewise, legacy hardware needs to be replaced, improved, or repaired. Old companies die, new ones swoop in and capture market share. My employer is the only manufacturer I know of for a legacy system component. They have a captive market because no one else wants to take the two weeks in CAD, and phone time with the contract manufacturers. This kind of thing is everywhere.
> So it is a natural evolution that software is becoming automated.
Again, yes, but no. We automate things as a matter of course. We are engineers. This doesn't mean fewer jobs, it means a shifting job market. IE loom operator vs hand weaver.
If you're willing to leave Silicon Valley, there are a lot of small companies out there that need one or two or a handful of decent software developers to do useful but non-cutting-edge work. They can't pay Silicon Valley money, obviously, but you get to be a lot closer to other kinds of work, which you might find satisfying in its own way.
How do you find these positions?
I would also like to know
I've never worked in Silicon Valley but every company I've worked for is infected with Silicon Valley brainrot
Look for large companies dealing in physical goods. I work on warehouse software for a company selling motorcycle helmets and bbqs. Its a great intersection of tech and industry.
I actually specifically look for those smaller companies. I don't live in Silicon Valley, nor have I ever made Silicon Valley money. I've never wanted to live there and I haven't wanted to work for FAANG since Google did away with "don't be evil."
If you happen to know where they are posting jobs, aside from the normal terrible job sites because I've been on them since November, I'm interested.
I wish I had something more specific for you, but my experience is more on the demand-adjacent side (as an EE) rather than directly on the software side. The companies I've worked at have posted on the regular job sites but mainly worked through recruiters. Companies do often post announcements on their LinkedIn, if they have one.
I share your frustration with the fad-driven, cramming-AI-into-everything, rent-seeking model of modern software, and I wish you luck in your search.
No LinkedIn, I couldn't take another "this is what appendicitis taught me about B2B sales" post. But I bothered all the recruiters I know and fed my resume into the paper shredder of all the companies candidate portal early on.
I suspect all those great little companies are either laying low or staffed up with the glut of ex-<prestigious name> devs. Or the huge pool of ex federal employees who have lots of experience in "legacy" systems.
Here's a typical job in that category. Boring but practical Chicago Dryer.[1]
Leader in the heavy machinery that takes clean linen items after washing and dries, sorts, folds, and stacks them by the ton. There are vision systems and robotic grippers involved. They've been in business for over a century, building heavy duty laundry equipment. It's a very steady business. Probably good job security. The startups making all the noise in clothes folding, such as Foldimate and Laundroid, went bust. Chicago Dryer equipment processed a few tons of laundry while you were reading this.That's what a blue-collar programming job looks like. But it will be a very clean blue collar.
[1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/c/Chicago-Dryer/Job/Industrial-...
How strict is something like that on the demands for CAD and Electrical Design stuff? Because I've never done any of that. I'd be happy to learn it, but that doesn't seem to matter anymore.
I work at exactly one of these companies. It's been thoroughly refreshing, picking my tools and language, being able to defend my choices and help make new ones, have ownership of my part of the product, and see that all bear fruit going from a product that was on fire and mired in tech debt when I got there, to a smoothly running machine with my code at its heart now.
They definitely can't pay inflated Silicon Valley salaries, but I'm also at much less risk of getting that pink slip when some far-off executive decides I'm extraneous. I'm two hops from the company CEO, and even though I haven't met him, he's quite aware of my contribution and has requested projects for my skillset. I have direct lines to most of the executive engineers. That's gratifying.
I have good c++ tests, no degree, a portfolio, and I cannot find a job in France.
I think I'm going to change country, I wish Scandinavia.
Currently working in a kitchen for schools, I will probably lose weight. I go home around 3pm, nap, and do some 3d modeling and "level design".
For whatever reason, my career has been driven by curiosity, first computers and Fortran II, then real-time medical data analysis, then compilers, then collection of batch financial data from dozens of sources, then low-latency financial trading backed by genetic programming, then application security.
I've luckily managed to avoid too many brain-dead execs, but there have been spells that the gig is boring.
Looking back on it, there have been very few spells in which I have not been programming, if not for a gig, but on my own to explore my curiosity.
I'm over the industry cause it over-promised an under-delivered and the way it "changed" the world is largely through monopolies, extractive middlemen and manipulation.
Don't forget a healthy dose of vendor lock-in!
Anyone who can engineer software systems is likely able to engineer some kind of company. Not the path for everyone, but it is one way of moving forward without staying linked to the industry.
The idea has been very high up on my list. But I need to pay the bills until I can put something together. I'm not interested in the current trend of "building" a company that burns VC money to prop up a garbage product just long enough to be sold and enshittified.
Hard not to feel this way sometimes given the quality of some job listings and the negativity bias here and broader media. In such moments of despair I recall two axioms: change is inevitable and ongoing, and talent rarely resides in the C-suite.
I'm only 10 years in and currently at a science non-profit using a dead/toy framework, and honestly woefully unprepared for market at the moment. I'm constantly looking at job listings, though, and engaging with scads of recruiters to maintain a good feel for the market to inform my next steps. I see plenty of ads that are hyper-specific about the tooling du-jour, but a non-trivial percentage of the listings I see make it clear that higher-level prowess, like understanding a language and best practices, are more important than what ultimately boils down to the ability to RTFM for whatever widgets the CTO/CE is currently enamored with. These are the jobs I'm looking at. Sure, this could narrow your pool during what appears to be a tight market, but you're more likely to have worthwhile interviews. I'll apply to less intriguing jobs to avoid getting rusty at interviewing, though.
This kind of funk also inevitably drives me harder to just _do what I want to do_. What language and tools _do I want to use_? _What kind of problems do I want to solve_ moving forward? If you've sorted these out, great. Sure, this could _also_ narrow your pool even more, but you're more likely to find a high-quality match.
Finally, all of these companies foaming at the mouth to replace people with AI will regret it; it's already happening, in fact. It's happening in less/non-technical jobs (lol Klarna), so I'm not worried about coding jobs at all in the long run (not to diminish and current or short term turbulence, though). Smart execs/founders will see AI for what it is: a force multiplier, only as good as your existing staff. That said, I think it behooves devs to get right with AI/chat-assisted development. Of all the buzzy tools people fall in love with, I think this is the highest ROI I've seen yet.
TL;DR: I'm just not going to apply to jobs that don't give me "smart exec" smells, and I'm only applying if it really looks like something I'll care about doing. I realize this exudes some degree of privilege, hubris, and/or naivete, but I work my ass off and you only live once.
It's the highest paying cushiest career on earth. If you don't want to grind a little bit to secure that then don't. Just make less money doing something harder. It's your choice and personally I'm happy if there's less competition
Software being a better career than other careers doesn’t relate to criticism in the post.
it absolutely does. go find a less ridiculous industry, it'll be more stable and it will pay less
It sounds like you have burnout and a burnout-related attitude issue, it is understandable but not always helpful. A lot of people find professional help talking through this to be very beneficial.
I found working at a restaurant as a cook delightful for 6 months, it wasn't at all fair as I was also still living off severance but it was very relaxing having straightforward work that was always done at the end of the shift as well as a creative outlet where I could do something with my hands.
The frustration is understandable but now you've got to find your new direction either a new way to approach tech work to increase your marketability and to find jobs where you'll be happier or a different direction and something different to do. You can be furious but unless you channel that into something positive it's just hurting yourself. Let yourself be mad for a while and then make yourself ready for whatever is next.
Ive been around since 2004. I've seen this cycle a few times now in the industry.
An accountant, proper CPA, needs like 5-10 hours of training per year to keep on top of their industry.
IT? Are we on mainframes? no we moved to individual pcs? I mean we moved to the mainframe in the cloud? No we moved to individual ai on GPUs? No we moved to the ai in the cloud?
IT is constantly changing and 10 hours per day of training isnt enough and if you're caught on Y framework when the industry moved on from that framework. Then you're SOL. Not many people still got those fortran jobs.
Now Hiring: Not You (2017): https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/now-hiring-not-...
https://archive.ph/xAfha
I'm in this article, and I don't like it. lol
No.
But I live and breathe tech even in my spare time[1]. You gotta learn to roll with the sh-t and set boundaries. I hate to say it but turn off HN, this place a hype machine designed to make you feel bad. It's like "Roast and Toast" x 1000 on here, not reality. It's toxic in a very passive-aggressive way (rather than reddit toxic, which is just aggressive).
I've been at this since 1988. (Made a few personal bad choices so not retired, lol [2]) I've changed jobs every 5-7 years since the post-2000 implosion. Don't bother with the FAANGs, its all style over substance tossing-off investors: they don't care about you at all and their top level management just want to be centibillionaires (or trillionaires).
Find smaller companies, that's what I started doing 20 years ago. I started a new job as a senior director at a 5000 person company 3 years ago, most money I've ever made in my career, great people who enjoy their work, no pressure to move up the ladder unless you want to (not much ladder for me, but the younger devs are happy to stay put without the dumb pressure to give 150% every year). Our revenue is <10B, and it is a German company so there's minimal (unremarkable) equity, but the base salary is great.
Find a company that makes boring products that sell. Mine is a stable boring company, making real-ware silicon products and associated cloud services for medical and automotive industry. Look for a company trying to grow profits at a normal rate, not a FAANG rate. Avoid the hype. Be boring. Slow and steady.
[1] also, if you're only in tech because you think that's where you're supposed to be, and don't have a deep passion for it, you're gonna have a bad time.
[2] Oh, and don't accidentally get someone you don't like pregnant. Because then you're completely f--ked.
> Find smaller companies, that's what I started doing 20 years ago. I started a new job as a senior director at a 5000 person company 3 years ago
That's a smaller company?
The biggest company I've ever worked for was 400 people
The smallest was 4
> I hate to say it but turn off HN, this place a hype machine designed to make you feel bad. It's like "Roast and Toast" x 1000 on here, not reality. It's toxic in a very passive-aggressive way
I have a completely different experience of HN than you do. There are the stray toxic folks, sure, but overall, this is one of the best dev forums--actively moderated, generally filled with intelligent comments, and often offering good advice. Just look at the thoughtful and understanding answers to this very post.
Yeah, it's currently full of AI shovelware because that's what the hype bubble demands, but there's a lot more good stuff here than not.
But they also have only had an account for an hour and clearly didn't read the whole post so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The tech industry was always a little slimy but it's out of hand now. I've lost too much respect for the role of innovation in this current version of our society. We've passed a point where it's used against people more than for people.
Day after day here watching people with no substantive activity on their account spam their endless shovelware slop projects, I just can't feel like I want to be a part of this anymore.
"Used against people." Those are good words. I am also deeply tired of that. I'm absolutely guilty of being one of those idiots that still thinks we could have nice things and products that work for reasonable prices if we just cared a little.
First time?
I don't know your background or experience but I do know there are a lot of people in tech now who have never experienced a recession. Also, this startup image (which persisted to these being big companies) of them being employee-friendly, maverick and casual was really just a function of the boom times.
That veneer is long gone. We are now in the era of permanent layoffs to suppress wages and every one of us that can be replaced by AI will be.
I think for many tech workers, they're in for a rude awakening that they're just like any other worker and not special or somehow immune to the adversarial nature of the employer-employee relationship.
Back in 2000 and 2008 it took sa few years but the jobs came back. One might assume that'll happen again but I'm honestly not so sure. 2008 saw the elimination of a whole class of entry-level professional jobs for millenials that never came back.
Thing is, I don't think much of the economic activity in the tech sector is actually creating value anymore. Big tech are milking their respective golden geese until they inevitably die. Startups are largely just angling for a buyout in the AI gold rush that'll largely benefit the founders and the employees not so much.
Sure, but just keep in mind a couple things:
One it’s a down market, the worst since the dotcom bubble. Companies are going to be needlessly selective to keep the hiring people busy, and also to get people who are the most desperate and motivated as they’ll probably get them cheaper. Being self taught may not matter practically speaking, but it's not doing you any favors right now unfortunately.
The other thing the bear in mind is - this is the norm at a lot of industries, we in software have just frankly had it really easy for a couple decades now. What seems unreasonable to you is what lot of people have to go through even in a good market.
I sometimes get feelings or down and up markets (namely my checking account) but do you have any good reliable sources on market trends for tech employment?
FRED has some data
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JPNM
Fucking nice. Thank you
Another is: https://hnhiring.com/trends
Come to academia.
I don't mean "become a professor"; I mean be a software developer at a college or university. They need them in large teams (IT department of a larger university) down to solo devs (working for a single department at a small liberal arts college—this is where I've been for 15 years).
It's true that you won't get the same level of pay—frankly, I've been woefully underpaid—but, by and large, they're not trying to replace everyone with AI, they adhere to basic standards of ethics, and they don't subscribe to crunch culture. If you're working in an academic department, chances are your bosses will basically think you're doing magic all the time and give you massive respect. Plus the job security is overall much higher. (Well, it has been. I suppose the current political situation may create some extra instability, depending on the position.)
Do these jobs get posted in all the normal places, or is there somewhere else I should look?
You might very well need to go looking at individual institutions' websites. Whether they get posted to places like Indeed or LinkedIn is going to be much more hit and miss than with big industry players or tech startups.
And yes, I am very personally aware of just how time-consuming and frustrating that can be.
used to see 80-100 lines of good code per programmer.
seeing up to 2400 lines a day in 4 hours of deep work. LLMs will greatly reduce the amount of people required, mainly seniors. erode the path for junior training and put further pressure in an industry continually contracting since 2021.
the amortization of software developing as R&D expense among many years implemented by the IRS didn't help either
> used to see 80-100 lines of good code per programmer.
For what time frame? A day? A week? A ... ?
> seeing up to 2400 lines a day in 4 hours of deep work.
Now I get it.
Lines of code is not a metric for correctness nor fitness of purpose.
> LLMs will greatly reduce the amount of people required, mainly seniors.
This is just high-grade speculative bovine excrement.
I think the amortization is the primary issue, TBH.
I don't think so. Downturn is global, but amortisation issue is for a local market.
Not primarily the fault of the IRS, as they were just following the law passed in 2017 that didn't go into effect until years later. But there's a chance it gets changed back to the previous way by the same people who passed it.
> LLMs will greatly reduce the amount of people required, mainly seniors
Nope. LLM is unable to reason about correctness of code, since they only regurgitate code based on "most likely to come next".
Rather, senior programmers will even be more important to check for correctness. And this will likely lead to senior programmer burnout.
I'm nearly done after seeing the nonstop indianization of my topics on google.
Niches from motorcycles to tech to music have become a punjab yellowpages and no one is even talking about it.
Google the most popular korean boyband in the world "BTS"
6/7 of my results are indian domains. What's the point of even trying anymore when ESL slop like that gets a massive SERP advantage for years now and is only getting worse?
you should never have allowed yourself to get sucked into corporate work. its the most common mistake that people make
Curse my foolish desire for food and shelter!
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Nothing sexist in that quote, maybe have a break
Has little to do with “industry” and everything to do with America being led by post war, Cold War paranoids who drank lead water and huffed lead gas fumes, brains wired to march to a steady drum, right into building a shit hole country.
Sure is a whole lot of demand to show up just so from ossified gerontocrat pols who can’t provide for themselves and mock us to our faces about freedom.
A bunch of randos socialize we’re off the hook for each other, good luck! While also expecting we show up for jobs that secure their investments or they send out the riot cops. It’s a fucking brain dead social culture of learned helplessness copy pasted around office worker meat suits. An obvious, making it pointless, LARP.
Zero flexibility in human agency when too few know how to fix their stuff and need these brain dead jobs to trickle down to the poorer service workers.
Don’t be so weak. The world is a harsh, cruel place. You are owed nothing. A man makes himself.