I have also experience close to burnout and recovered multiple times, in the process I have lost very precious relationships, and entire years were spent in darkness. I also have friends who have been in tech for close to ten years, and are close to burning out though they would never admit to such. This is the nature of the beast, all things that appear glamorous on the outside ( Hollywood, Finance, Tech, many nonprofits) is very rotten on the inside.
You can't change the past, but you can recalibrate your expectations and medidate on what went wrong. Here are some thoughts, and I will be very harsh:
1. Your co-workers may be amazing, but they were never your friends. You ran a business and rented their years to help them build a nest egg, of which you would claim the majority share had it hatched. Alas, the business failed and thus, you no longer add value to each other's lives. Move on.
2. There's what you love, and there's what you do. It's best to keep some distance: because no one cares about what you love. VCs are vultures and this is well known, but they are also reflecting the reality of the market. In the market you're just a vendor. Think about all the food stands that you have walked past in your life, within each stand is an immigrant family who slave away for decades hoping for a better life. Have you ever thought about them and gave them time/money for their suffering? No, you only cared them inso far as they can cook for you. This is how others saw you.
3. Big companies, and indeed most big institutions is made by a silent majority of the defeated. Many have experienced what you have said and have long made their peace. They found joy elsewhere, and found distance between themselves and their work.
4. Find self worth and self-love outside of your role in the machine, there's the product you produce to trade time for money, and then there's you. They are different things. Imagine Instagram influencers who post pictures of themselves but feel depressed when they don't get enough likes. This is you right now, you're looking for external validation from how big your integer is in some database. You have to look elsewhere.
All accurate and objective and good for everyone to know early rather than late. Moving a bit further from the specifics, it's worth noting that this is not a natural state of affairs. Humans evolved to be in groups of about 30-100 people who they knew their whole lives and thus making catastrophic deception nearly impossible. Likewise vast sums of wealth did not exist nor total social and fiscal isolation surrounded by the complete opposite that characterize our city streets and daily life.
My point is that human psychology did not evolve in the context of our current world and will have enormous difficulty dealing with its bad sides. Although the specifics will vary, the number of people in the poster's position is undoubtedly enormous, with the vast majority too tired or ashamed of discussing it or just blaming themselves. This being the case, it would be nice to have serious study of it and resources to address it more effectively. Not to criticize any poster, but it is unfortunate than seeking advice from the web is currently the best one can do.
I agree with the OP comment, and also with this one. It is important to understand two things in coping with the state of the world in my opinion.
1) The reality is you need to find validation and fulfilment outside of work, because in our current society you are just a drone.
2) Don't be depressed because it seems like this is how it's always been. It hasn't. Our work culture is broken. People never used to be so far removed from their work. Trying to combine work and life is a natural thing, because people used to be tied up in it. Working the land, being close to home, running a family business, belonging to a small town of people you all known, having the social safety net of many people that are close to you and your family, being an independent contributor in the town's economy, etc. etc. This is how things were a few hundred years ago. Yes, there was less high tech gadgetry. There were corrupt officials, plagues, bad people. There will always be some element of this.
I really get the sense that so much of the first world's unhappiness right now is due to compartmentalising (the containerising if you like) of our lives. The solution to burnout at work is to create greater separation between work and home. But the problem itself is that we even need to do this. People can't live to enjoy what they do any more. You need to trade the majority of your waking hours for money you need to live. And when you do live, you're dreading returning to work and feeling burnout anyway. How depressing.
This is why the working-from-home trend that I hope COVID will kick-off is going to be a good thing. While we may still be working for the same companies, having a tighter integration between work and home is actually good for our mental health. Issues will be resolved faster. Nobody wants to be constantly angry in their own home. So if you're angry all the time while WFH, maybe you'll be more likely to look elsewhere. Taking breaks from work while at home is so much more refreshing. I can't think of anything more depressing that spending my lunch break in a work cafe with people I don't want to talk to, being flooded with fluorescent light, and thinking about how the rest of my working life will be spent in places like this.
> Working the land, being close to home, running a family business, belonging to a small town of people you all known, having the social safety net of many people that are close to you and your family, being an independent contributor in the town's economy, etc. etc. This is how things were a few hundred years ago.
Let’s not overglamorize rural poverty. This life came with 20–40% infant mortality and a very high rate of maternal death in childbirth (play 5+ rounds of not-quite-russian-roulette and the odds get pretty grim). Starvation and disease were ubiquitous. Many people suffered some now-trivial injury and ended up as lifelong cripples. The work was literally backbreaking and elderly people’s (i.e. >50 years old) bodies were just wrecked after a career of hard manual labor, assuming they lived that long at all. People’s indoor time was spent in small dark rooms with an open hearth worse than the worst second-hand cigarette smoke you can possibly find, and unbelievably uncomfortable beds. In the best case food was mediocre (mostly bread or porridge or similar) and everyone was slightly malnourished, especially in the winter. People generally just shat outside near their houses and hoped the dogs would take care of it. If they wanted water (for drinking, bathing, ...) they’d have to carry it on their heads/backs from the nearest well or stream; water is very heavy.
People had to make literally everything in an extremely labor-intensive way from scratch: clothes, food, housing, furniture, toys, tools, etc. Raising sheep (or finding some other fiber) and then carding the wool, spinning the wool, weaving every piece of fabric on a hand loom, sewing fabric into clothes takes unbelievable amounts of human time. Making a small hut by hand takes weeks if not months of work (and the result is usually drafty, leaky, and not very comfortable). Making bread by hand including growing the grain and grinding it is nearly a full time job for everyone in the society.
If for whatever reason you were different from the expected norms (or just got unlucky and crossed the wrong gossipy neighbor) the rumors about you would mercilessly destroy your social life, and possibly result in exile or death if neighbors decided you were (e.g.) a witch.
The local nobles took every liberty with peasants: robbery, beatings as sport, rape, murder. The roads between towns were plagued with bandits.
Etc.
There’s a reason that the world has now experienced several centuries of dramatic migration away from rural peasant farming and toward horribly exploitative urban factory labor.
Nobody's glamorizing rural poverty, the point was that our over-compartmentalized work culture is a relatively very recent phenomenon with negative consequences for many people such as decreased work satisfaction, decreased sense of social safety net/community, and loneliness.
It's kind of annoying how every time someone discusses aspects of society that may have regressed from the past, somebody chimes in to remind us that technology has advanced so life is better today. Well obviously, what's your point? Nobody's claiming we should get rid of 21st century technology and start living like medieval peasants.
There are a lot of negative aspects to a career spent «working the land» and «living in a small town where everyone knows everything about you, anonymity/privacy are impossible, and you depend on your neighbors for survival» even if you leave aside the «before modern technology» part.
But the previous commenter was explicitly talking about the supposed golden time of rural life a few centuries ago. In practice it was a hard and stressful life both physically and socially.
The summary of the downsides of peasant life was:
> Yes, there was less high tech gadgetry. There were corrupt officials, plagues, bad people. There will always be some element of this.
This is a dramatic understatement, to say the least.
> in our current society you are just a drone. [...] Don't be depressed because it seems like this is how it's always been. It hasn't.
Rural peasants have been treated much more like “just drones” for the past 8 (?) millennia since large-scale civilization built on agriculture than any modern office worker. (Hunter–gatherer societies are different in many ways, though also often precarious.)
Rural peasants do not lack for work anxiety. Or anxiety in their interpersonal relationships. In rural peasant societies many people feel alienated. Domestic abuse is rampant. And so on.
There are many beautiful and nostalgic things about historical rural life. But we shouldn’t get carried away.
> But the previous commenter was explicitly talking about the supposed golden time of rural life a few centuries ago.
No they weren't, like I said in my last comment, they were talking about the negative effects of the modern overcompartmentalization of work. It's not hard to see that there are certain benefits to working for oneself in one's own home vs. being a cog on an assembly line in some factory.
I imagine they were talking about farmers, not peasants. By the way the average medieval peasant had more time off than the average American worker since the work was seasonal. The takeaway there isn't "let's return to medieval technology and start living like medieval peasants again", it's "maybe there's something wrong with our society if despite the enormous technological advances from the past, certain elements of society like autonomy over one's time have regressed, controlling for technology".
Again, the original commenter was not arguing that we should all start living like the Amish. It's a failure of reading comprehension if that's how you interpreted it.
>There were corrupt officials, plagues, bad people.
How is this rosy-eyed?
I think many people today use the idea that even though some things are miserable today it ok, because they've been miserable always. It's a sad, self-defeating coping mechanism, a lame justification for how things are.
It's possible for some things to have been better in the past, much like some other things may be better in the present. Progress like regress is unilateral.
But still I would argue, we keep forgetting:
- Food
- Health
- Shelter
- Freedom
- Family is safe, not killed or taken away by barbarians or the plague or a demon
are pretty much at the top of “things that really stress us when we don’t have them.
I mean, everything else is icing on the cake. Not too long ago, people didn’t know whether they would starve to death during the next winter, their wife would die from childbirth or some local bogeyman would just burn down your house and enslave your family.
I’m talking about rural Mexico up through the 1960s, within the living memory of elderly people (with some of the features I mentioned persisting today or only recently changing). The US South was like this at least through the first few decades the 20th century (after WWII the US Federal government made a tremendous effort to bring jobs and infrastructure to underdeveloped parts of the country), as were many parts of Europe. Some places around the world still look largely like my description.
People quickly forget many of the hardships their own great grandparents faced.
Source: my parents are anthropologists and I spent a substantial amount of time as a child in the 1990s visiting an indigenous peasant village, sleeping in a dirt-floored hut with a hearth fire nearby, with no electricity and water carried on people’s heads from half a mile away, high infant mortality, belief that diseases are caused by witches (vs. germs), etc.
The past was fairly horrible, of course, but we've definitely lost elements of it which were good. For example, commerce where both parties know and care about each other on some level like you might find in a farmers market or similar. Remnants still exist, but the mass market replacement, supermarkets, are missing a lot that was once better in the past. We've certainly vastly exceeded any previous material lifestyle, I don't feel like we've exceeded a lot of the cultural aspects of the past. Not, of course, that I want a return to conservative rural culture or something, but there's definitely something uniquely atomised about modern life in the West.
I really enjoy real markets. They can be found in many parts of the world including in developed metropolises, and still existed in many places in the USA within living memory.
Their illegalization and displacement by supermarkets has been at least partly a deliberate political choice, and I don’t think it’s an inevitable part of modern life.
(Working as a vendor in a market stall is not necessarily a great career though.)
> For example, commerce where both parties know and care about each other on some level like you might find in a farmers market or similar.
There are farmers market around my area and my impression is that, if anything, people selling there can be more dishonest than the big chain stores - i.e. they will try selling a batch of bad apples, because they're not wealthy and they just need the money. Whereas big chains have quality standards and will just throw away bad food.
I think that's because at a farmers market you're still trading with somebody completely foreign to you. Pre-industrial societies were smaller, and based around tighter knit communities. Much harder to rip somebody off if they live 3 houses down and look after your kids twice a week, compared to some random person off the street.
@Theorentis said "a few hundred years ago", not "up until WWII".
I mean, @Theorentis is correct, in a way, about what's good about less-industrialized societies. Though it was more true of medieval serfs and classical societies than it was of "a few hundred years ago". But also @jacobulus is correct about the down-sides.
And when you say "pre-WWII", that makes me think of 1850-1950, which I suggest is, overall, literally worst-of-both-worlds. There's virtually no decent medicine until 1928, but industrialization and capitalism are in full jackbooted swing. You get all the psycho-social disadvantages of modernity, with virtually none of the benefits.
I did indeed have medieval serfs and particular feudal society in mind in my comment, and meant 500-600 years ago by "a few". I probbaly should have said "several".
The feudal system is often given a bad wrap, but after reading "The Servile State" (a critique of modern capitalism) I actually think we have much to learn from it that we have lost.
The feudal system (summary: rule by gangs of heavily armed thugs who force their local peasants to work by threatening to kill them otherwise, and take whatever liberties with them they like, including theft, kidnapping, rape, murder, ...) is given a “bad rap” because is was and is horrendously exploitative, leading to very bad outcomes for nearly everyone.
It persisted because there was not sufficient economic surplus or a sufficiently broad distribution of economic/social power to break the control of the armed thugs running things, except sometimes by other groups of armed thugs.
My “cherry picked examples” are the life stories of people I have personally met (and with high likelihood of your own ancestors and their neighbors within the past 150 years – certainly of my ancestors ~5 generations ago who were European peasants). It obviously wasn’t the case that every peasant was raped and then murdered by a local lord, but such violence was common and a constant threat.
Rural peasants were and are typically a foot shorter than people living in wealthy industrialized countries today (or people in hunter–gatherer tribes for that matter). Almost all of their calories come from staple starches, which they supplement as best they can. Periods of extreme hunger are common enough that most peasants experienced them at least a few times over a lifetime. What kind of good nutrition do you think people have/had?
Life expectancy was under 40 years old. Even life expectancy after age 5 was pretty short.
Anecdotally, the best professional experience in my 15+ career in tech was one startup. There the founders were very into doing “work-life harmony” instead of “work-life balance”. They made a point to have their friends meet your friends and each colleagues’s friends. Our partners and spouses knew each other. There was a big push to make sure your work is not simply something that you work and leave in the office, but that you’re part of the tribe. They genuinely cared.
It was an incredible experience. Everyone was very passionate. The company grew in revenue 1000%.
Which lead to disagreements between the founders, which inevitably lead to the one guy pushing that culture to quit and it all went downhill from there.
I’m obviously massively oversimplifying here and there were more factors, but the feeling of belonging was very real. And I know it was not just me as we have ex-colleagues gatherings from time to time and the sentiment is shared.
Yeah I admit it was a little bit cultish. Exactly what my partner complained of when I joined the startup. But as time went by it became a lot better.
I mean real cults short-circuit normal human tribal behavior for their own survival. And we usually consider it bad as the stuff the cult demands usually go against the society at large.
But in my case it was a rather productive and a moderately lucrative enterprise for all involved. Its just that instead of “oh honey your off to work see ya in 8hours” it was more “oh say hi to this and that for me” kinda thing. Just more human all around.
Anyway to answer your question - yeah we do stay in touch with some, not all of course.
>Which lead to disagreements between the founders, which inevitably lead to the one guy pushing that culture to quit and it all went downhill from there.
I go to work for 1 reason: compensation. I expect to get paid, and get the benefits agreed upon when I agreed to work here. I will be friendly to those I work with, so that I don't hate to come in to work every day.
Does that mean they have the right to meet my SO or friends or things/people/hobbies outside of work? Absolutely not. If I choose to do so, that's on me.
> This is why the working-from-home trend that I hope COVID will kick-off is going to be a good thing. While we may still be working for the same companies, having a tighter integration between work and home is actually good for our mental health.
Alternatively, it extends the reach of companies further into the home environment, and may exacerbate the existing trend for people not to switch off, which in turn makes it harder to achieve a good life-work balance. Imagine having a pressurised call-centre type role from home. Some people may feel greater pressure to appear 'corporate' in the home environment, others might not mind their kids or cats interrupting a Zoom meeting. Not everyone can create a suitable WFH environment in a nice spare room.
Whether this actually happens depends on corporate culture, the personalities and goals of the managers and employees, whether a crunch is on, and many other factors. But I'm not convinced that a tighter integration between work and home is necessarily always going to be a positive, from a mental health perspective.
True. I am hoping for a trend where it becomes normal that a kid interrupts some business meeting, or you talk to your coworker or CEO in a video chat while they are cooking or folding clothes or something. Almost as if you were talking to real people.
Ask a parent (usually mother) what happens if they try to bring a kid to their (non coronavirus era) office because they don't have anyone else to care for the kid that day. Almost always completely unacceptable, for reasons ranging from arbitrary fake professionalism to lack of interest in setting up a support structure and expecting employees to sacrifice their personal lives for the company.
I can only hope this "fake macho work persona" bubble-burst carries forward into post-covid.
I will try to overlook the sexism in your posting. In my company, its not umgingen that someone brings their kid to work. Be it to show the kids what they are doing all day, or because of some logistics thing, or daycare closed or whatnot. Never a problem. Also not uncommon to work from home for the same reason. And it's usually the men who do that (sorry if that doesn't fit into your stereotype).
> Working the land, being close to home, running a family business, belonging to a small town of people you all known, having the social safety net of many people that are close to you and your family, being an independent contributor in the town's economy, etc. etc. This is how things were a few hundred years ago.
I always wonder where and when exactly when people say things like that. Because whatever period I look at, there were wast groups of people who did not lived like this happy ideal.
Let's go further with it and read "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind".
Not to spoil too much but those people working land were cripples as well. Hunter gatherers had perfect life because unlike peasants they could enjoy their life instead of returning to the work in field.
Now think about how hunter gatherers were exposed to risk. What kind of stress they had everyday. Look at current animals how they live. It is some kind of freaking horror.
You an see I am not a fan of Harrari's book because it is "earlier it was so much better" without any real stuff in it.
I take issue with this drone nonsense. If you are helping people for money you are doing good with your life. If you are comfortable at work and not being physically or emotionally abused, there's absolutely nothing wrong with being a "drone". Not everyone should be a celebrity changing the world in their own big way. Imagine if the whole world was being constantly reshaped in 7 billion ways!
I think what drone means isn't that working typical office jobs at megacorps is bad and you should rather go and try to change the world, but that you are very replaceable in such jobs and there's not really a personal connection and that is the issue.
>I can't think of anything more depressing that spending my lunch break in a work cafe with people I don't want to talk to, being flooded with fluorescent light, and thinking about how the rest of my working life will be spent in places like this.
This is the best way to put it!
It's all make believe and facade. As naive as this sounds, we have to separate our work time and personal time. I don't know if that means we should have dual personalities akin to having different themes/profiles on phones, or we should have a clear separation of activities, but without one, is what leads to OPs path, and I have been there.
> I really get the sense that so much of the first world's unhappiness right now is due to compartmentalising (the containerising if you like) of our lives.
Division of labor is a tragedy. In the long run, it destroys the soul.
> Not to criticize any poster, but it is unfortunate than seeking advice from the web is currently the best one can do.
Having experienced some kind of a burnout and depression myself, one of the reasons for seeking out help on the web might be the need to find that help from like-minded people, not just someone with some generic wisdom.
People are quick to recommend professional help, and they aren't wrong. But a person with burnout, depression or other internal turmoil may be in dire need (or at least desire) for camaraderie from people who he considers like-minded. I knew I was. It may be very difficult to find that from mental health professionals, and of course that may not even be a therapist's task. It still leaves a hole to fill.
Hmm, just an anecdote (personal):
My grandfather was a farmer, rural town in Europe. The village was essentially ruled by three people (just before WWII): the mayor, the police officer and the priest. There was a strict hierarchy (“who owned the most”) and gossip, treason etc. were unescapable. He (and all generations before him) worked up their bodies to the bones only to survive. I think he took a single vacation to Italy when he got married. Work has never been about “realising your dream” until somewhat recently I think... Maybe watch the movie “The Dark Valley”.
A big difference may have been (and it is probably still how cultures and immigration clash): how family vs. society are seen. Germans see the government stand above family and all (e.g., government will take care of you, not family). Western societies have (deliberately) broken the family in its function. But that was probably necessary.
Humans adapt, that’s why we became what we are. Not sure I have the desire to “live with 100
people in a village I don’t like” encoded in my DNA.
I don’t want to downplay any anxiety or frustration, but I believe every generation had it/felt it the same way. We push and work ourselves up until we reach the level if anxiety we cannot longer cope with.
Objectively speaking: Who would prefer going back 250 years in history? No way on earth. Not even as a king.
> Moving a bit further from the specifics, it's worth noting that this is not a natural state of affairs. Humans evolved to be in groups of about 30-100 people who they knew their whole lives
Yup, there are still some anarcho-primitivists who think technology was a bad deal for us humans overall, and that living in a tribal setting of hunters-gatherers is best. The infamous "unabomber manifesto" was broadly advocating for this worldview, albeit with a very negative, nihilistic twist to it as one might expect. Kinda ironic to point that out when you look at OP's nearly-utopian attitude to tech, of course.
UB started with the right observations, but arrived at the wrong means prescriptions. He wandered off alone into the weeds, in both senses.
A wiser realization is that it's those in established power and the rich who are actively or willfully ignorantly sabotaging the planet and condemning billions of people to relatively more poverty, misery, disease, and death.
A million people nonviolently showing up to the seats of power, arresting crooked politicians and their enablers, and fine-tuning what cannot be fixed (by any POTUS, SCOTUS, or COTUS) from within (separation between church and wealth and state, public campaign financing, clean elections observed with exit polls and international observers, de-emphasized celebrity political promotion perhaps by lottery [as the ancient Greeks] rather than mainstream media popularity contest) are the necessary first steps before fixing anything else.
"Nonviolently showing up"? I might or might not agree but let's face it, most of us won't even bother to show up at a voting place on election day. People just don't care. Maybe they'll kvetch to their acquaintances about how bad the other side is, but overall there's a lot of complacency. Similarly, you don't need to arrest corrupt politicians, you just need to not vote for them. Support a primary challenger if they're incumbents. That kind of thing. But of course that's not going to happen either.
I think the problem in the current US political system is that a tiny majority of votes wins you everything. If this won you the 49% you deserve, then things would be different.
They are unemployed, not striking. Being unemployed means they are not needed by a corporation, thus them not working does not damage the profit of any corporation by disrupting its function. But when you are employed in a corporation and run its functions, then you can strike and exert pressure by disrupting its flow.
If we consider this striking, it would appear that a large portion of the population (I don't know the actual percentage), composed of all walks of life, has decided it's of the utmost important to union bust and push people back to work without really making any attempts at resolving anything, and even with the knowledge that forcing people back to work will result in additional loss of life. "Sure, the mine is collapsing on people and giving you all black lung, but if you don't get back in there the town will shut down".
Doesn't really bode well for any future mass action.
I don't think you can categorize layoffs as unintentional striking. Businesses are capable of laying off a lot of their workforce without crumbling, they just wind up running leaner and pruning some of the growth they had in the last few quarters. Striking means you organize enough of the employees that once they're gone the business cannot operate, no work gets done and there's an active effort by the strikers to advertise that the business is not operating in order to put further pressure on them.
The difference is purpose, and intent. The people not at work right now have been judged non-important, and have no purpose.
If the 10% was distributed differently, in the intent of maximum damage instead of minimum damage, and if they had a clear goal of overthrow, the ruling class would be fucked and the stock market would be at 0.
Of course, having a "strike" where everyone is willing to go back to work and only non-essential people are striking will not do much of anything as far as power relations. That much is obvious to anyone.
The simplest way to accomplish your goals would be through unions integrating and syndicating ultimately culminating into a general strike and overthrowing existing power structures.
In practice however, the national guard will start shooting beforethen (see: Haymarket square massacre, Battle of Blair Mountain), so you better stock up on weapons just in case.
Well, there are the billions who are now alive thanks to modern agriculture and medicine. We are perhaps comparing the best of the past with the worst of the present, which may not be a fair comparison. Best is to collect the best of past and present to create the best future.
But it also matters how those billions live, and considering that the vast majority live in extreme poverty the picture becomes less rosy. Not to speak of the ecological disasters of climate change and pollution this is causing, which also has an impact on our well being. Modern agriculture and medicine have in a way made it possible for all those people to be alive at the same time. I agree with your last sentence since we obviously can't change the past.
For that matter, the whole point of the primitivist argument is that humans have been quite happy about living in extreme physical deprivation for most of their history. It's only when the social milieu is totally FUBAR that "poverty" as we know it becomes a cause of deep unhappiness and dysfunction. Also as the OP shows, people can also be quite unhappy with their life despite living in a highly developed country and enjoying quite a bit of material wealth.
One can have the viewpoint that on average humans were likely happier 30,000 years ago, and that technology was a bad deal for us overall, without advocating that the solution is bombing society back in time.
I don't think technology is the problem. I think the institutions that install or preserve the structures that cause a lot of people misery is the problem.
There's a reason for those institutions, though. Within any social group larger than a primitive tribe, you can't coordinate pro-social behavior or resolve disputes without some formal institutions and structures of sorts. We've got to give the anarcho-primitivists credit where credit is due: at least they understand what it would take to get actual anarchism to work!
Specifically talks about how Hong Kong protestors have almost no formal hierarchical structures (to avoid the Chinese state arresting the leaders), yet remain highly functional and effective.
To have a group of protestors who volunteer for a commonly accepted goal among them be organized, functioning and effective without hierarchical structures is vastly different from having a whole society functional and effective without hierarchical structures. What every system first and foremost must face is how conflicts are resolved, because conflicts of every level of severity will arise without fail. A group without conflicts, that exists exactly because it is made of people who truly think exactly alike, like HK protesters, is not a good example. ANY group of people who truly think exactly alike is perfectly functional, no matter what it is they collectively value.
It sounds like the problem then is getting everyone to share fundamental values. If everyone has common ground to start from then it's easier to build towards a resolution of conflict.
I agree that any group of people will eventually have some form of conflict but I don't agree that a hierarchical structure is the only way to resolve said conflict. You could just as easily apply any of the methods of governance that humanity has devised to resolve a conflict so I don't think the method of governance is crucial to the resolution of conflict. I think that getting both parties to agree to a satisfactory resolution is what is critical. That can be done with force as in a hierarchy where an external party enforces a resolution on both conflicting parties or it could be done without outside intervention, this obviously happens all the time in a variety of situations.
Ideally, every conflict should be able to be resolved directly by the people involved without additional harm being caused. Maybe there is a way through education or other tools that we can build that would allow people to resolve any conflict in such a manner? Maybe prevention is the best remedy and there exists a way to defuse conflict before it reaches a level that cannot be easily resolved. My point is that resorting to authority or force is not the only solution.
While nature vs nurture is fun to speculate on, when raised in criticism of another's work it is usually only speculation and otherwise unproductive. Also often ignored is that they are somewhat conflated insofar as people's nature creates environments that then (not independently) nurture.
I'm not sure this is fair. Nobody really knows to what extent psychopathy is inherited vs caused by upbringing. The problem isn't necessarily disbelief in biology, the problem is nobody actually knows the answer.
Challenging something that's universally challenged seems comprehensible to me.
"Humans evolved to be in groups of about 30-100 people who they knew their whole lives"
When did this happen? A female chimpanzee will grow up in a tribe of 30 to 150 and then at adolescence move to another tribe of 30 to 150, and occasionally, after a tribal war, end up in another tribe of 30 to 150. Each tribe was typically surrounded by 1 to 5 other tribes of 30 to 150, and of course the chimpanzees had to keep track of their enemies, just as any species that engages in territory and warfare will have to keep track of what territory is held by who. So the average chimp has to keep track of several hundred other chimps, as well as tigers, gazelles, monkeys, etc. It's a complex situation.
When you say humans track 30 to 100 people, do you mean 10 million years ago? Because you can't mean homo sapiens? I personally know more than 12,000 people:
You are right, I am confused. How would I keep track of someone if I don't know them? This includes not just people but all of the animals that I interact with. My mom used to have a bird feeder and I spent countless hours watching the birds. I got to know several dozen as individuals, I was aware of their injuries and their style of eating (timid, brave, quick, slow). How might I keep track of them without knowing them? Perhaps you might consider that your ideas on this subject are a bit muddy?
Also, you misread the original comment when they wrote "their whole lives" -- they are asserting people never know more than that 30 to 100 people, an assertion which is absurd.
> You are right, I am confused. How would I keep track of someone if I don't know them?
What are you talking about? Just because you have to know someone to keep track of them doesn't mean everyone you encounter you can track or care about.
American Indians and Aboriginal Australians have been living like that well into historical times, and people were around to document their lives and societies - there's no real reason to suppose that humans at the most primitive state of society were living any differently. In a way, it's the one style of social organization that has truly stood the test of time; everything else has been a glorified self-imposed experiment. We're all guinea pigs living in self-enforced captivity.
> American Indians and Aboriginal Australians have been living like that well into historical times...
They're not time travelers from the past. They're our contemporaries, who are every bit as 'modern' as us. They just made a different set of choices along their historical arc.
> ...there's no real reason to suppose that humans at the most primitive state of society were living any differently.
At the same time there's also no real reason to suppose that primitive humans were living any similarly.
We just don't know. Any attempt to frame this differently is just ideology.
> If these people never went through the social evolutions the rest of the world underwent, they are indeed travelers from the past.
Logical error. That they didn't go through the same social evolutions that we went through doesn't mean they didn't go through any social evolutions at all.
(And indeed they must have; even keeping their societies static takes conscious effort, in the same vein that conservative reactionaries today aren't at all the same people, ethically and sociologically, as the simpler ancestors they try to emulate.)
And what stops one from doing that today? It's not like anyone really knows more than a couple dozen or so people. Just stop taking in any information from outside your circle or town... The approach has got downsides, but damn the peace of mind might be worth it.
This evolutionary take on matters feels like a template
"
Unhappy about <MODERN SITUATION> ? Well, in the stone age <MODERN SITUATION> wouldn't have happened, therefore, genes/anatomy not adapted and blah blah.
Addicted to <MODERN HABIT> ? Well, cro-magnons found it hard to <SATISFY NEED> and genes/biology adapted to move us to <SATISFY NEED>. So now that we have solved the problem, you still have these genes that get you addicted to <MODERN HABIT>...
"
It was an interesting thought the first few times that I encountered it. Now it feels like a cheap way to sound clever. "Oh, this guy has an evolutionary basis for his opinions, he must know so much about history biology and genetics too"
I propose we slowly let this cliche fall out of fashion.
I disagree, I think it's important to remind ourselves of the inbuilt limitations of our mind and body. The same way you need to remind yourself that even though sugary food tastes good, too much of it will cause a lot of problems (and for the same reasons). We shouldn't leave it at that though, serious thought needs to be put towards how we can overcome these problems.
> Think about all the food stands that you have walked past in your life, within each stand is an immigrant family who slave away for decades hoping for a better life. Have you ever thought about them and gave them time/money for their suffering?
I know what you mean and know what you're getting at. But I feel compelled to point out this particular example isn't quite the same. I never sought the immigrant family out, then told them that my motivation is to support amazing cooks rooted in authentic traditions. I just bought the food.
VCs will lie, literally. They explicitly say they will act in a particular way in a specific situation, and then, protected by nuanced 300 page contracts, will do the exact opposite of what they said they'll do. Assuming you accept that lying to people is unethical, people act transactionally with immigrant vendors, but not unethically in the same way.
Yeah the lying is really gross. It's an odd arrangement in this country where "shareholder value" can literally justify most things in the eyes of those with money. For a more personal anecdote, I have a friend who's been in the VC industry for 5+ years, and we had a very interesting conversation. He was closing a deal with a company and they asked for a higher valuation, and he thought objectively it's merited. But then he thought: "if I give you the higher valuation, then you would have more and I would have less, but I want more". And that's the root of it, human nature. Now assuming these VCs have been in the game for more than 5 years, I would imagine they would lie without a second thought.
Now see it from the VC's perspective, the game attracts all kinds of hustlers who'd lie to investors without a second thought as well. My friend and I were talking about what business culture is like in a certain area of the world, and he said: they oversell everything, so take everything they say and divide it by two, and start from there. So part of it is also a pre-emptive mechanism based on a history of such behaviors from others.
None of this make things "ok", but I'm just sharing an anecdote from the other side.
> It's an odd arrangement in this country where "shareholder value" can literally justify most things in the eyes of those with money.
I think a lot of the problem is not necessarily what the VC's do when it comes to situations, but that they lie, to themselves, to others, or both, about what they will do and at a fundamental level who they are. There's a world of difference between telling someone you're their friend and will protect them and nothing will go wrong when you know there's a good chance it will, and telling (or being) a friend but being up front that your job means you will act a certain way in specific situations, and that may be against the interests of others.
This happens in business, and it happens in personal life. I respect people that are consistent and represent themselves accurately, even if I don't like them or agree with them. People that misrepresent themselves are relying on an information asymmetry that they're creating to give themselves an advantage. This clearly works in many instances, but it also a "burnt-bridges" strategy that only works because of the relative anonymity that modern society provides. In some ways, this could be solved by more information about these people and how they function (which is how the free market works, best with more and more accurate info), but that's hard to accomplish because of their relative power.
I have no love for VCs. But let's be real honest. Doesn't the vast majority of startup wealth come from lying? I'm not talking about VCs lying to founders, but founders lying to their customers (selling ads, giving them "free" services while pick-pocketing their data) or exploiting people on the bottom of the food chain (the "gig" economy)?
In other words, everyone should be looking in the mirror.
> You blame everyone but yourself for becoming "soulless". Your very use of this word reveals a great lack of soul. You misuse it to describe working like a machine, an automaton. The nurse who is working like a machine to save lives at great risk to her own has the most wonderful, beautiful soul. What makes you soulless is that you're only thinking about yourself and "new products" (ways to make money) without any hint of a conscience troubled by the decisions made and actions taken in pursuit of those profits, and what that says about who you are. Or maybe the depression was a conscience trying hard to speak out, but it got snuffed by drugs rather than getting heard.
Please don't cross into personal attack on HN. And please don't cross-examine other users. That's not curious conversation, which is what we're here for.
Projection? As a fairly honest person it took a long time to stop assuming other people were too. The alternative world view is disappointing but you get used to it.
People are generally honest of course but investing is an adversarial setting essentially by definition, where honesty is hard to come by. Sometimes being more honest than needed might even put you at an unfair disadvantage, and keeping some cards close to your chest is just expected.
And of course, it's not like you have to get VC involved in order to run a successful business. You can self-bootstrap, which lets you focus 110% on efficiency and doing more with less. No BS involved.
I don't believe the parent was expressing surprise at this unethical behavior, they were instead pointing out one way the grandparent's example isn't quite equivalent to the situation the OP provided.
For what is worth, "there's the product you produce to trade time for money, and then there's you" is precisely what alienation from labor feels like, and you're advocating that one must just accept it. People have a deep need to relate as full human beings to their work. Trying to be content with finding self-worth only outside of work doesn't solve burnout. Work is a big chunk of our time and energy. Humans need to human.
Yes, I was surprised by that line. I tried to do that. 10 years ago I was a newly minted Ph.D. and my wife and I had to solve the 2 body problem and we compromised with our jobs so we could both be employed together in a nice town with a relatively low cost of living and a great place to raise a family. Our lives outside of work were fantastic! Great friends, nice house, lots of weekend activities, got my first pup (waiting my whole life to have my own place so I could have one), had my twins a year later.
But good God was my job (big company, lots of politics and bad management... the usual) absolutely soul crushing. I thought that I'd be able to make my peace with it in lieu of everything else which was near perfect, but the more time dragged on, the more it crushed me and sucked joy out of the other areas of my life. I will never forget the sense of existential dread that would overcome me every Sunday evening and the relief on Friday evenings.
Fortunately I was able to leave and take up an opportunity at a small startup in the ML/consulting space. It's entirely bootstrapped, so no VC people fucking everything up, and the management are incredibly nice and decent humans, and several of them I count as close friends. I love the work that I do, and I am almost always learning new things. I've been working here for 4 years, and I have never yet experienced that existential dread on a Sunday evening. Work is just another part of my life that I enjoy now, and it is incredible how happy and fulfilled I am with my life. My wife has fortunately experienced the same with the move and change in jobs.
I get hit up by recruiters for the big tech companies all the time and there simply is no reason why I would ever consider working at any of those companies to be another cog in the wheel. No amount of money can ever make up for what I have now.
So I would strongly encourage anyone who is in the situation described by OP or me above to try their best to switch jobs if possible. I can't fathom going through my whole adult life as unhappy as I was at my first job and I wouldn't wish it on even my worst enemy.
I appreciate reading your story. I'm ~6 years out of school having been in large companies and am wondering if it's normal to have the joy sucked out like I'm experiencing. If you don't mind me asking, how did you end up finding the small startup job? When I look at the job boards they're often dominated by the big guns or it's hard to sort through lots of small (oftentimes shady) postings - I don't know where to go to find small-by-design companies or similar mindset jobs.
I wish I had a better answer but like in almost all cases, it ends up being your network. In my case, my brother-in-law had been working for a few years at the company and he knew the founders as a couple of them were his mentors in grad school. So I knew enough about the company and when they needed to hire someone, him being able to vouch for me was enough to get me an interview with them.
That being said, I think places like ziprecruiter / indeed will still have job postings from smaller companies. The challenge, as you mentioned, is trying to figure out the good ones from the sketchy/shitty ones. Small companies can also be challenging if the management isn't great and they have bad culture. So I would definitely place a lot of weight on that if I were interviewing at smaller companies.
Funny enough, I just finished my PhD in December 2019. It's been hard getting interviews in the bay area (I want to stay close to family with older parents). I have great academic credentials but somehow I can't signal that to recruiters. I managed to snag an interview with a company I know I'll dread working for. The recruiter acknowledged it's a stress factory and weekends working where regular and I couldn't care less about their product.
I'm debating if I should take the job, assuming I pass the interview, to set foot in industry or keep searching continue working on a potentially monetizable passion project.
In this climate, I would probably lean towards taking up that job. You have a few good things going for you:
1. You have good academic credentials
2. You are trained in a "hot" field (my Ph.D. was in Physics but I've always loved software engineering and ML, but that was a very hard transition for me to pull off)
3. Getting a year or two under your belt is probably better than a large gap in your career if things continue to go south on the employment front. I suspect a decent number of ML/Datascience people are going to be laid off if they haven't already because they end up being more expensive and it isn't as easy to quantify their net impact / benefit to a company.
Just focus on how you can use your time at any job right now to improve your skills and round out your profile so you are a more attractive candidate for the kinds of jobs you'd like to target in a few years.
Also, if things bounce back in the next year, demand is still going to be high and you should be able to find a better job and switch relatively easily.
I think there's a tendency, when confronted with a person who is upset about having made their work their identity, to swing to the other extreme and advocate complete separation and dispassion.
Like everything else, we need to find balance. I like my job and think that in general I do good work. But I am not my work and my work is not me. It's a part of me, to be sure, and I feel connected to it, but work is a relatively small part of my identity.
It's rare that I can read this. I used to be equating my work to my soul. And it hurts badly when you're not surrounded with people in a similar mindset.
If you find that your skills and career make it unfeasible to find much realisation, then probably your best strategy is making work "just work" - there's a tendency to lying to oneself in this industry. The vast majority of developers are doing the equivalent of assembly line plumbing with a lot of delusions on top. This will hit sooner or later if you are not stupid.
really well put. "People have a deep need to relate as full human beings to their work." And those relationships can be very important - even though they might not outlast the time working together.
I think though that "meaningful work" is different from deeper meaning in life. Confusing the two causes suffering. I have worked at an adtech company with really good people. I helped start a nonprofit publication in Brooklyn full of college friends, artists and academics- which ended up being the sleaziest group of backstabbing grubs imaginable.
I have a manager right now whom I respect. He (CTO) gives good project guidance and makes clear decisions based on rational business reasons... I like him but have no illusions that he would fire me in a second if it were in the interests of the company. Keeping this in the back of my mind helps me modulate my response when I am frustrated or really almost any emotion to the excess.
Its possible to do very meaningful work without being friends. You can even be friendly and go out and drink together from time to time ... but always remember what you are there for.
You can find meaningful experiences out of work. They can even be "worklike". I am an EMT on weekends and I end up thinking about it during the week. The relationships at the corps are important but in the back of my mind I can understand that this activity is not exactly work. It could be but at the moment it is not. I am a systems engineer.
There is a lot to unpack in this. I strongly agree with you that work is about as central to our identity as can be.
I've been miserable at NYC tech companies with unlimited vacation and catered lunches... And a crappy attitude was at least 50% of that misery. (2 months of covid-19 and I find myself missing the commute at times)
When I was in school I worked for the university for free tuition. I was a groundskeeper and mowed and planted. I was outside. I occasionally drove a dumptruck to get loads of gravel or dirt. I worked with a guy who dropped out of highschool and played heavy metal in our truck as we drove around campus. When it rained we would hide out and play chess. He was an interesting dude full of contradictions.
I hated the job because I felt humiliated as a student working a menial job on campus. In hindsight I can see how important a job it was. It enabled me to get through school and afford a place to live. There were fun moments and good experiences (driving a full dumptruck down route18 is its own thrill...)
I was limited mostly by my attitude and a posture - who I thought I was. Dreaming about being somewhere else and avoiding people I knew.
I still catch myself engaging in that kind of behavior.
We do need to relate to each other as humans though work. This requires lots of re-calibration.
Same here. I've been at it for 25 years - I've had at least 3 major burnouts. For 24 years, I've constantly been saying, I gotta find something else that is far more constructive and rewarding.
This thread has really triggered something in me. I am 63 and recently retired from a gov job, which I hated for years. I just thought I hated my management, which I did. I did recognize symptoms the last couple years (sometimes I was physically unable to work while staring at the screen). My plan was to take a couple months off and then take a contract position doing development. I have been unable to even look earnestly since I secretly cannot stand the idea of going into another enterprise situation. It all seems to me to be utter bullshit. I realize that even though I have had burnout issues a couple times over the last 30 years, this is a major case of burnout that I am experiencing. I have always identified as a programmer, not just worked as a programmer. That was a mistake. I am currently unable to fully retire but now I can think about what else I should do. It is funny how profound this is to me right now all due to simply reading comments.
I burn out and quit on a regular basis, it takes me about 6 months to forget how awful it was and start looking for another contract again... I guess I have short memory.
Would you share yours? I'd really like to hear from an older person. I'd imagine you know 10x of what I do now. It would be incredibly helpful if you could share some of what you've experienced and learned.
My first burnout was pure depletion of energy. I was young, passionate, and believed in doing the best work I could. I was addicted to work and pushed myself to deliver. I did, and built a career. I left after almost a decade at that company and went to a new job that had 20x the employees and was well resourced.
I got to kick back a bit and the job was more about delivering accurately and not delivering volume. I spent the first 3 years in that position recovering from prior burnout while still working. I got bored, so I quit and started a business. I worked myself for years right into the ground, burned out again. I took a few months off and relaxed. I ended up geting bored again before I fully recovered and went back to work.
I changed career tracks and switched technologies figuring this would give me a challenge and excitement. A new profession, systems, and rules of engagement. I was truly excited at first and I worked hard. Then I burned out again, before having recovered from prior burnout. This time it isn't due to lack of work/life balance, its due to lack of technological and social satisfaction.
At first I thought it was a bout of imposter syndrome as it's a new career but as time went on I realized it's more about the industry, the direction it's going, and the effects of people getting into STEM for money and not because they're technologists. It's a lot of younger folks who boast about their adderall abuse, get excited to give presentations, and other stuff that I'm really not interested in.
I'm stuck in burnout #3 now. It’s easier to burn out after the first one. I don't have the ability to make a risky move at the moment, I have people who depend on me. I don't know what my next move is now but as you age and your responsibility grows your options shrink. I think I might ride out the virus and look for a new job in the hopes a new environment will give me a push to keep going.
> as you age and your responsibility grows your options shrink
This is common but not a universal experience. I do have much more responsibility now, but also a lot more options; unlike in our youth, we have no unsecured debt, don't live paycheck to paycheck, and have savings, which gives me the ability to plan ahead.
Mostly guessing, but I think I'm like halfway between you and the commenter you're replying to. I've been where you are, not from the exact same path, but what you're feeling is familiar to me.
My two cents: I find joy doing challenging work on products that are useful to a bunch of people without needing to be "the next big thing". But what I find more joy in is my life outside of work, in spending time with and taking care of my extended family (including my close friends). The most success I've had with this so far has been at a big tech company. This is for a number of reasons: the product I work on is more likely to be useful to lots of people that way (because a lot of the marketing work has been done already), which also makes the work challenging (because scale brings challenges), and compensation and work-life balance are good so I can spend a lot of low-stress time focusing on family. I personally find the most joy working on things that mostly make money through charging people money for services because it feels like the most honest way for my salary to be paid, but I'm not sure how much that relates to this, it might just be a personal preference. Reading your post, I wondered whether you misinterpreted your big-tech coworkers. They might not have been checked out, they might have just been doing their work while having other interests that were more important to them. That is my interpretation of the people I work with (and of myself). I think it can look pretty lame to excited young people, but it's actually the opposite; what's lame is being super into working rather than other better things.
But as a follow-on, something I've been thinking about recently is whether I can take the useful skills I've built through a career in tech and apply them elsewhere, supported by the savings I've been able to build up. I'm not sure what that looks like, but being able to gather, process, analyze, and operationalize data seems important for lots of things, and that's something I know how to do (and I'm not alone here, software is largely about processing data). But I don't know what the most useful thing is to do with those skills; right now what seems important and in demand is epidemiology, but it's probably too late to become useful to this moment. Probably something in the broad sustainability space is more forward-looking. I'm still looking around.
I guess the two points I'm trying to make are: 1. You may be able to find joy by having more modest expectations, and 2. There may be other useful things to do with the skills you built, you should keep your eyes open for them.
i'm about 40 yrs old - been working in tech (with linux) since the late 90s. gave my life to it, lost my physical and mental health; burned out numerous times. can't stand this industry anymore.
moral of the story: 99% of people still don't understand the nature of software. very few people--like rich hickey (clojure), or fpb (mythical man-month)--seem to get it. tech is mainstream and most people are missing historical context and experience.
(the goals of capitalism are typically at odds with building systems of the highest quality--and understandably so.)
the only creative spark in computing i have to sooth myself anymore is reading lisp or unix books from the 80s and 90s, because the content is so thoughtful (given the culture and smaller community at the time). the internet has become ruined by advertising and bloatware, and the culture has largely been ruined by bad habits and misunderstanding, imo.
Thanks for that. I tend to idealize my career but in reading your comment I stopped to think of both the good and bad parts of my working life, from the sublime to the boring and odd job tasks. Working life really is a mixed bag.
You mentioned Lisp. I just retired last year, and just turned 69. I only use Lisp now (three planned projects for the macOS store, one almost done, and all my writing is concentrated on Lisp) and am dropping other programming languages that I used to also love, including Lisp languages that are not Common Lisp.
I also agree that the Internet is not what it could be but I still find value by finding a few people who I really enjoy, follow their writing and podcasts, and ignore 99.999% of everything else. I also find that reading books is much more rewarding that browsing the web.
Sounds exactly like me. My burnout has gotten worse now that tech is mainstream. My current gig is more like a regular business that just happens to develop software. Most of the staff are social first technology second. I don’t fit in at all, and to be frank it depresses me. Not sure what I’m going to do in the future.
I can’t shoot the shit and talk strace or gdb with any of them.
After reading your reply to OP below, I agree we have a super similar path. Especially the beginning:
> My first burnout was pure depletion of energy. I was young, passionate, and believed in doing the best work I could. I was addicted to work and pushed myself to deliver. I did, and built a career. I left after almost a decade at that company [...]
(However, I never found a way to leave "Tech" for another profession--especially once I achieved a certain salary range, and others depended on me.)
> I can’t shoot the shit and talk strace or gdb with any of them.
> moral of the story: 99% of people still don't understand the > nature of software. very few people--like rich hickey ? ? (clojure), or fpb (mythical man-month)--seem to get it. tech >?is mainstream and most people are missing historical context >and experience.
This is it. As engineers, we want to build the best can. As managers of a business, we want to product the most profit we can. As marketers, the more income that comes in, the better off we are.
Chose 2 of the 3. Marketing almost always wins one of those slots.
If someone could produce a solid infrastructure to get rid of ads and all that nonsense, but still get a product out in front of everyone, I think that might be the holy grail.
(I hope that if you figure this out - you might give me a .5% royalty) when your successful.
>I think a 3rd or 4th burnout at 30 years of service is a lot harder to recover from, but I’m biased from my own experience
There is something else going here (or so it was for me). It's not the physical/mental exhaustion as is typically what defines 'burnout'. It's the depressing realization that most people around you are deluded piles of shit, even if they are 'nice' individuals.
Yeah you're absolutely correct. I wish I had more perspective to offer but that's what I got. The OP also sounds younger (I may be wrong), so I hope it is ok.
This is such a defeatist attitude and, I think, completely unnecessary. And saying it as fact sort of perpetuates the whole situation. It doesn't have to be this way. But most people allow it to be this way.
> Your co-workers may be amazing, but they were never your friends.
Anecdotally, I've met some of my best friends by working with them. I have many friends that I haven't met through work, but when you spend the bulk of your day with people you form bonds - and friendships - with them. It's sort of human nature.
> There's what you love, and there's what you do. It's best to keep some distance: because no one cares about what you love.
What you love and what you do don't _have_ to be different. And some people _do_ care about what you love. Most don't, sure. And at most larger companies you _are_ just a cog in the wheel. But that doesn't mean folks shouldn't strive to find meaningful work that they love to do. It may not pay as well monetarily, but it pays in other ways.
> No, you only cared them inso far as they can cook for you. This is how others saw you.
I don't seek out the immigrant family, but I'm friendly and cordial with them. I chat with them and treat them as equals. I pay them fairly for what they provide me. I don't try to squeeze every last cent out of them or negotiate my meal from them, or make them feel like less of a person. And in return they provide the same. Maybe I'm naive, sure. But if so, at least I'm not an asshole.
> Big companies, and indeed most big institutions is made by a silent majority of the defeated.
This is mostly true. I agree. It's unfortunate. But big institutions aren't the only options.
> You have to look elsewhere.
You don't have to. You can, and in some cases you should. But it's not the only option. There ARE people who aren't wholly obsessed with making money at all costs. Unfortunately, in the US at least, a lot of people don't have that attitude and _are_ obsessed with making money at all costs. And our society (at least in the US) has been built in ways that praise that sort of attitude. But there are plenty of people who aren't like that. It's hard to find them sometimes, depending on what sort of circles you run in and the sort of people you surround yourself with - but they are out there.
Everyday I keep reminding myself that I don't really own anything - for every single line of code I am compensated with the money that I could use for whatever purpose. That being said, the illusion of ownership and purpose is fake. You don't really own any thing, and your contribution to the code base only has meaning for the company, but is meaningless for yourself. You just make a deal with the owner of the product, a.k.a. the shareholders of a company, that you agree to sell your time/intelligence/effort to them for money.
> and your contribution to the code base only has meaning for the company, but is meaningless for yourself
An activity can have meaning in and of itself, and it's up to you whether you infuse something with meaning or not.
To me this is one of the themes of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance".
Concerning valuing code you write for others, do you value finishing a crossword puzzle or a game of cards? Those activities are of no use other than the joy of doing them. Programming can be the same way, and I believe whether it is like that has a lot to do with your inner state and how you approach it, regardless of whether you're doing it for a company or not.
I think compounding the problem right now is that people can't simply switch or take a sabbatical in this current climate. Those that are contemplating getting away from their current work are thinking twice about it, even if the workplace is already toxic.
> Have you ever thought about them and gave them time/money for their suffering? No, you only cared them inso far as they can cook for you. This is how others saw you.
Well, actually (and I'm deliberately using my sock puppet account to say this as this is one of the things one should just do and not brag about):
For some of us, many of us, but not most of us I'm afraid, we buy stuff not necessarily because we need it or even want it but partially because of who is selling it.
Every time the kids come to sell the newspaper on the weekend I buy it, read two pages that I coild have read online and leave it on the table in case my wife wants to read it. She doesn't so it ends in trash.
Meanwhile I've been part of teaching one kid the value of honest work. My brother-in-law paid for his first Mac using money he earned from selling newspapers in the weekends. He is an amazing producer now and has been working both as a singke man production team with a local TV station where he lives, at international conferences and sometimes with at least one if not two national TV stations.
Maybe I'm giving another brilliant kid a chance now? Based on the fact that they show up every weekend there might be some potential :-)
This could have been a Scandinavian thing, but I know kt exists in the US too. I think I heard about it in an audio book named something along the lines of "400 things cops know" or something:
<something along the lines of>
> As a police officer if you walk by a lemonade stand or (something else I can't remember) you should buy! Even if you aren't thirsty!
Personally, even as a grown up I've had customers telling me in no uncertain terms to raise my prices, and I've heard my boss (or technically, the operations manager, two steps above my boss) telling me again to tell a vendor from a less fortunate country that the contract was fine but the operations manager refused to pay the ridiculously low price they quoted.
I would also like to add that therapy is not just for the mentally ill, and nothing to be ashamed of. Navigating your career, and life in general, is tough and a good therapist can help put it in perspective. I personally went to therapy weekly for about six months to help deal with the impact of burnout on my life. I think I came away from it a more capable person.
My experience in therapy mostly focused on taking responsibility for my emotions. Usually the therapist would ask what was on my mind, and I would talk for a little while about the usually stuff that makes programmers sad. He would then guide the conversation to show how I could take responsibility not for the situation, but for my emotional response. At least that was my take away, I can’t say for sure that was his goal.
Do I think that your therapist would judge you for your problems? Absolutely not, if they are even an OK therapist. They are professionals, and are not trying to be your friend.
Another thing. The first therapist I went to sucked. She had me doing worksheets and other stuff that just didn’t work for me. I ended up switching (my wife made me switch) to a new therapist and it was a huge difference. If you do end up trying therapy, remember that this is a professional situation. You wouldn’t go to the same bad sandwich shop for lunch every day. If your therapist isn’t working for you, and you have given them a honest try, just switch therapists.
Ultimately, therapy was a leap of faith that I’m glad I took.
I felt bad going to a therapist at first — guilty, self conscious, like I must be so self absorbed. I addressed that early on and tried to be constructive but it took time to get over that. One way to look at it is that even if you are unhappy with your job in a bubble, so what? Isn't that something worth addressing and examining to understand better?
Being unhappy for any reason matters. I discovered I was unhappy for much more valid reasons than I ever imagined and taking that leap to therapy was quite life changing. The key thing was that my burnout had legitimate causes that weren't really my fault or a weakness or flaw in myself (at least not that I could easily control), and I learned a huge amount about how I needed to move forward.
I really don't think I would have done it, ever, without therapy.
This is a good point. My therapist lives thousands of kilometers away. If you have a good fit, the distance might not matter.
I had one in my city before and he was great too, but he knew a colleague might have more relevant experience. I was doubtful about the distance aspect, but it's been totally fine since day one. It's definitely worth considering.
Work on interesting things or make the things you're working on interesting. Don't work only for yourself; take on the mind of a servant and you'll often be grateful. Don't look for total fulfillment from the things you can see, or the things that pass away. Store up treasures in a place that won't fade away.
> There's what you love, and there's what you do. It's best to keep some distance: because no one cares about what you love.
Isn't that cultural? Cause I find I care a lot more about what people love than what they "do". Ask someone what they do [for a living], and you say "oh that's cool" and conversation is at a standstill again. Ask someone what they love and you'll get a whole different kind of conversation.
This sounds so American to me. I grew up in Eastern Europe and general attitude towards work, life, and friendship is so much different. Some of the best friendships I've made were at the companies I worked for. I've seen cases where people make so good friendships at work that it even makes them postpone switching jobs to move up the career ladder.
Work is not everything in your life. Work is important for sure, but there are other sources of joy in life. I can't help but think that Americans miss so much in life because of their obsession with work, money, and social status. Hence such posts on HN.
OP for the comment here. I'd just like to add that this advice is specific to article OP who was running a business. As an owner/operator, he/she is tasked with the responsibility to allocate capital/resources in an effective way (morality of capitalism notwithstanding, in the current system once you take the job, it's no longer about you). It's one thing to use love and passion as rhetoric, but as an employee I would prefer the person up top made rational decisions, and maintained some distance with each employee. What often happens is that for every employee the boss befriends, many are on the losing side of it.
I think a lot of people are generalizing the comment to people in all positions. I've befriended many people I worked with over the years, but I was not the one paying them, giving or denying them opportunities. I also really loved what I did, but I was not the one making sure it had exchange value on the market. Friendship, "passion", etc are really luxuries the OP wanted in this position, but really could not afford in large quantities.
I’m in the US and my experience is the same as yours. Maybe 50% of my friends are coworkers and former coworkers. I have almost always stayed at companies longer than I otherwise would because I loved my coworkers.
Burnout for me is caused by too much bureaucracy, too many meetings, and incompatible programming philosophies. Only twice in my long career have I left a job due to an insufferable coworker.
This really hits home for me. I'm at my most miserable when working with people who value doing things fast more than doing them well. I suspect those people are also at their most miserable when working with me. I see them as creating work that I'll have to do eventually to clean up their mess, and I suspect they see me as an insufferable gatekeeper.
Do you enjoy cleaning up their mess? If so, is it not the perfect environment, where everyone is doing something they do best and enjoy?
Or do you dislike cleaning it up? In this case, why do you do it? Noblesse Oblige?
Asking because I love refactoring. I also love pushing features fast. But I absolutely dread having to do "perfect code" in the first try. I keep trying to push this idea (inspired by Mythical-Man-Month) here in HN that a perfect team would have people "working fast and breaking things" with people working behind them that love refactoring everything cleaning it up.
Of course not. I may enjoy cleaning up my own messes, but not one that someone else has foisted upon me. The problem with teams like this is that the fast-movers are long gone by the time the impact of their expediency is being felt. They benefit from the accolades of a launch while shirking the responsibility of operating a product.
> In this case, why do you do it?
Because the product sucks and needs to be improved, but it is an unimprovable mess because everything was done expediently instead of well, some of which needs to be fixed in order to move forward. A lot of the hard work at this point is in figuring out the best pragmatic balance of what to fix vs. what to leave alone. A little forethought could have saved a lot of post-facto toil.
I do like iteration, doing things in small iterative chunks. But that is not the same as putting out a huge mess and hoping someone comes along who enjoys cleaning it up.
> The problem with teams like this is that the fast-movers are long gone by the time the impact of their expediency is being felt. They benefit from the accolades of a launch while shirking the responsibility of operating a product.
Yes, :100: :100:
I have seen this happen so many times. It's a vicious cycle of horribleness. The same people always seem to get the new development also because they were "so successful with the last launch" and the people maintaining it are perceived as slow and ineffectual because it takes so long to iterate (ironically because of the person who looks like a rock star).
I feel very lucky in my career that I don't have to put up with this anymore. If I could go back in time I would just tell myself to quit and find a more compatible company instead of suffering for years under a self-destructive system that punishes people like me. Since breaking free from that and starting my own projects, I've been very successful.
I don't mean to imply that I always write perfect code, or even great code, because surely I don't. I do expect some things to be throwaway that end up staying around. But doing something correct rather than fast in general is a much better long term strategy. Vary as necessary (but only when necessary).
I'm not the GP but I fully agree with what he said, so here is how I would answer your question:
I HATE cleaning up people's messy code. It's 10x easier to do it right the first time. Messy code to me is most messy because it's unclear what is being done. It often comes with insufficient tests, which makes refactoring dangerous.
To me it's a lot like walking into a messy house vs. a clean house. If the house has clutter everywhere, or has a smell from being dirty, then it's not comfortable to be in. If I have to work in it, or clean it, I'd much rather start with a well-organized clean house.
Refactoring is also not fun at all for me. I also LOVE pushing features fast. I don't obsess over "perfect code" but I do obsess over following best practices and stopping for a few minutes to think through a design.
My workflow is:
1. Get it working, minimal effort, PoC
2. Get tests written and passing.
3. Refactor to good code. Perfect is the enemy of good, but it doesn't get committed until it's readable, maintainable, tested, documented.
Sometimes I probably am a little slower than I otherwise could be, but people are often blown away at my ability to iterate and add features quickly. This is because my code is well organized, modular, DRY, and well tested. It takes a little longer the first release, but it more than pays for itself speed-wise as tech debt stays minimum and hackability is high. With over 10 years experience now with this method I'm convinced that it's the only sane way to do things. Anything else is sabotaging your own future.
If I really don't have time to do it right the first time, I know it will be hard to iterate on, it will have bugs in prod, and it will never be pleasant to work in. It takes 10x longer to refactor an existing app to be good code than it does to do it during development when it's all fresh in mind. The best hope is that it has a good spec so it can be re-written from scratch.
Maybe you should switch to a different programming domain. For example, embedded systems and security software tends to value correctness a lot more than e-commerce does.
This is less a current problem than a phenomenon I have seen over time. I do agree that different technologies attract different kinds of philosophies and it's definitely something I keep in mind when thinking about what to work on.
I should say: I have worked with lots of people who have a compatible philosophy, I would even say most of the people I've worked with do. But it really is the quickest and most severe way for me to become deflated by my work, when I come across someone who is constantly pushing against me to cut corners while I argue for them not to. I really think it makes us both miserable; they could usually have fixed whatever I'm asking them to fix in the time they spend debating me about it, but they don't want to, because it's the principle of it or something, and they think I'll go away. But then I don't, so we both waste tons of time without a very positive outcome.
More likely selection bias for people that comment on threads like these. I’ve worked in finance and vc backed tech for my whole career. I don’t agree with any of the sentiments expressed in the threads like these.
I’ve got friends from every job I’ve had in the last 20 years who I still see routinely including some of my best friends.
Sure, I think many of us can claim the same but the difference is you probably weren't the CEO or the boss like in OPs story. I think that changes things drastically. A boss can delude themselves into thinking employees are their friends, some even go so far as to claim employees as family. I generally stay away from small companies that pull this shit. This blurring of lines complicates every aspect of your job and leads to some very uncomfortable situations like asking for a raise, negotiating, etc...
Yeah... companies that harp on the "family" sentiment are either being disingenuous or naive given that they can get rid of you at the flip of a coin without remorse.
I'm 55 and I have mostly worked for three companies in my life: Penn State (10 years, started there 1990), Raytheon (3 years, started 1995), and a small hedge fund (started 1996, 12 years). I haven't worked for Penn State for about 4 years and I have lost touch with about 80% of the people I worked with there, but I still feel a strong bond to them. I have not worked at Raytheon for 15 years, and I've lost touch with 98% of my friends there, but every once in a while I do reconnect with them. I still work for the hedge fund and I do keep in touch with 50% of the people I met there even after they have moved on to other endeavors or retired. About half of my long term friendships came from work relationships.
Penn State (10 years, started there 1990), Raytheon (3 years, started 1995), and a small hedge fund (started 1996, 12 years)
Overlapping jobs like that indicates you are following a very different career structure than most people, so I’d hesitate to generalise your experience.
It is probably also industry (and city) dependent, I have found at my job in a midsized city that there are a number of probably life long friends within my company. Also, because it is one of the largest tech employers in the area, many of the intelligent people who want to stay in city (due to family and growing up in the area) want to and do spend their entire career there. We also have pretty reasonable career paths for people who want to only work 40 hours a week and for people who want to work more.
In the US: culture is very important. If you have bad coworkers, no amount of technical excitement can compensate. I am willing to hypothetically trade technical excitement for great colleagues (up to a reasonable extent).
It's different because in Eastern Europe you had to rely on your network to survive. Friendships are extremely important in Eastern Europe, N.A. is more individualistic and competitive(especially in the workplace) hence more loneliness, burnouts.
> There's what you love, and there's what you do. It's best to keep some distance:
Underrated piece of advice. Keep the way you make money and your passions separate. You love photography? Great, do it on weekends. If you become a pro you'll end up photographing weddings and hating your life and the thing you thought you loved.
I'm having similar issues, and i think i found a way out: stop playing their game. Don't make enterprise software. Don't write unit tests. Don't accept pull requests. Simply write software for yourself and have fun doing it. Forget refactoring code into modules, just fucking code. Don't worry about deployment with k8s, just copy the Python script to your production folder and run it. Fuck all that shit about git branch naming conventions, or how you're supposed to use an object factory, just do whatever you want in the moment, bit by bit, until your software works most of the time then use it. Forget configuration, just hard code values for now. Don't worry about documentation, just do it.
Your expectations, and the expectations of others, are your enemy here.
At least, that's what got me out it. I'm still disillusioned with the world but it's manageable if I can realize I'm making a difference to my son and wife every day, and that's what counts for me.
The OP said he is "disillusioned with technology" but I didn't see actual technology being described as the problem with any point. So there's a conflation here happening between technology and "tech" companies. And I can only say the phrase "tech" companies while using sarcasm quotes around "tech", because almost nobody at any of these companies develops actual technology. And that's a big part of the problem.
There's a subculture that's reinvented the merits of software engineering to being as ornate and ceremonious as possible.
It doesn't have to work well, or be bug free, or compatible with the previous version, or address any real world need.
No! Instead it has to use fashionable technology and be extremely complicated so other programmers can see how incredibly clever they are!
Almost like they took a random bug from the issue tracker by looking at last nights lotto numbers and then they opened to a random page of Knuth by letting a fan blow on the pages for 5 minutes and said "alright, I'll solve this problem in that way! Surely everyone will acknowledge my genius!"
It may be a slow lumbering buggy pile of brittle barely functional code about to implode, but boy does it look nice!
I don't agree with this view. I agree with the original commentor's comment. I do this myself outside of work just to enjoy building something without the responsibility of having to maintain it with 20 other engineers for two more decades.
However, even I can see that a team would get burnt if they built an enterprise software the way I code my personal email client. The problem here is that people forget that building software professionally is an engineering job. Like other forms of engineering, there are processes and good practices to facilitate both functional and non functional aspects of a software and the building process. While the extra burden of version control, testability and extendability takes some of the fun away, I would have reservations working with someone who pushes directly to a release branch, does not write test and hardcode values instead of uaing configuration. It's about balance and realising that job is a job.
ok, let's go back to 2014. I was working on a project, a web front end. The ticket was "change color of button". This sounded easy, modify the CSS.
However, the CSS was generated. From YAML. The YAML was generated from JSON. the JSON was pulled from mongo. The Mongo was updated through a strictly validated XSLT that had an enumeration of colors. Those colors did not include the button color we needed.
Don't worry! There was an ability to reroute the xml through the use of ruby mixins and then add the attribute by parsing the dom, editing it, then re-ingesting it later downstream so it gets out to mongo right.
oh and there's a cache layer at every point here. so make sure you invalidate it to see the change. every time.
I closed the ticket and did a few more like this for 6 weeks, mostly in ember - they were even crazier.
The product, an interface to some server software, had basic html with markup like this:
<ul class='links'>
<li><a href=/a>link</a></li>
</ul>
Like the most trivial stupidest simple code you can think of. 15 minutes of php, at most.
However, changing it to do something else was never direct. 4, 5, 6 maybe 7 different languages, servers, restrictions, databases, input and output formats ... absolute and total batshit.
I left. Company is worth over $100 million today, looks like I'm the loser I guess.
This isn't about having a dev and release branch, this is about endless layers of abstraction and insanity that make easy things 1,000 times harder and almost impossible.
> However, the CSS was generated. From YAML. The YAML was generated from JSON. the JSON was pulled from mongo. The Mongo was updated through a strictly validated XSLT that had an enumeration of colors.
I thought you were exaggerating to make a joke. Sigh.
> I left. Company is worth over $100 million today, looks like I'm the loser I guess.
Somebody played the lottery and won. 99.9999% played and lost.
You are not a "loser" for not playing the lottery.
The idea was that if they were going to port native than wow, we'd have this one amazing way to create all these interfaces on different systems!
As if we'd have 5 or so platforms and a single command to go "presto!" and build on a bunch of devices with a slight button offset change.
I always said "how about, if you want a linux version in qt, you fire up qt creator, drag your mouse around a bit, click a few times, take 20 minutes and that's it. You then literally just walk away because the work is done".
That sounds complicated. Though I'm not sure if this is a valid example to counter my view. I can't comment on the exact situation you went through. It could be that that complexity was a side effect of having to solve far more complex and frequent issues more easily as opposed to doing simpler and rarer things more easily (unless of course changing button colours is a frequent modification). It's also possible that the design was simply bad.
This doesn't mean that you were going to better off without git workflows, code reviews, tests. My experience has been the opposite. It's exactly where there's no good technical leads/technical discussions/code reviews I have seen this kind of mess. Each person goes on and do their own thing with no clear direction or architecture.
At the end of the day, for me, to stay sane in the face of this kind of nonsense(as in bad engineers - unfortunately there are those even at senior positions), so what if the button that could have taken a few minutes to change now takes 6 days if we are paid to do it? As a responsible engineer, you point out the issue perhaps with a proposal for improvement. If they listen, good. If they don't, fuck it. On the other hand, if all I end up doing is changing colors of buttons regularly, each taking a week, then for the sake of my career, just say no and move on - unless of course if the pay is so good that it makes sense to spend a couple years doing it - people have to do far more shitty jobs for less. And spend some of the free time to code like a cowboy :)
That's the whole point. What some people consider to be "good engineering" is a different set of standards, a different set of qualifiers.
Let's go back to 2012. I was yet again doing web stuff.
We had this hodgepodge of jasmine, junit, eslint and selenium and couldn't commit unless it all passed
But the tests broke more then the code itself, because it was <far more complicated then the thing being tested>. So more time was spent on fixing and babysitting the tests then writing the damn software.
Alas, we finally released and it totally completely bombed. Why?
Because those test suites don't care if something "feels" clunky or "looks" wrong ...The machine responded to the interface in machine time, it didn't actually test human time, which was the only thing that mattered. We should have relied on human dogfooding, like the business books say to do. I got arrogantly laughed at for suggesting it, multiple times; that simply wasn't "engineering" to this team.
Now of course tests are valuable, sometimes. But "sometimes", that's the important thing. Understanding when to make that call is actually important. When, where, what, why, and how - not just important for journalists.
But instead, like some 18th century royal court disconnected from reality, we did ceremony. So we wrote tests, most of them bullshit. One of the tests was essentially: "Does this image on the page load from s3?"
At least that one usually passed.
Except when AWS was down or our internet went out: "I guess we can't work today, the does_image_load_from_s3 test is preventing the commit." They were a waste of time and got in the way of actual work. But we HAD to have them, we MUST, right? Nonsense.
I'm convinced the tests were there because "doing it right" was about virtue signaling. So we built a salary defending potempkin village composed of pure thought stuff.
I imagine it all like a catholic mass: Men in robes walk around, ring bells, and use special boxes to wash their hands with special cloths; it's all very important if you go to church, but that's the point, it's praxis and faith: we were coding from plato's cave, creating intricate shadows of reality representing actual work.
Symbols passing as tools: like Dumbo fetishizing the feather and being oh so worried when it falls, everything passed the most sophisticated testing I had ever seen yet the program still crashed in the user's hands almost every time. All that work was mere ceremony.
Understanding how modern computing speeds and vc capital has allowed people to be wrapped up in their own bullshit, call it programming and get away with it, is a major insight into why technology sucks today.
It's not just you, everyone agrees. It's lame now.
What's strange is I can also give you examples of how testing code bugs that had been there for more than 3 years (security related mind you) and a company whose release branch didn't compile on my day one because a guy who doesn't believe in any software development process and committed directly to the release branch.
I don't mean, dogmatically follow unit tests (actually my statement wasn't predicated on unit tests). If you have a better approach that can validate the software is correct then I'm all ears. If you have a better collaboration tool than git, I'd be happy to try it. With all due respect, what I can't do is take your word for it that you can build software that works (covers all functional and non functional specs), and they continue to work as more code is added, and is worked on by more than one or two developers, and that you can continue to validate and roll out more software over the years even when the original developers aren't around. It's difficult, costly. It can work, it's just not the best way. The industry will evolve and come up with better tools and processes than we have today as we did before yesterday. Only thing I took from the couple examples you gave is that you've had the misfortune of working in some terrible teams. Though I still don't see how you'd be better off without the rest of the usual practices we have today. The guys who couldn't code the tests, I can't imagine them building a non trivial software well either. I'm not defending any one process. I just don't agree that we don't need any process, and that we should just write code that (seems to) works.
The thing that the parent poster is trying to point out is that our fancy programmer tools, processes, ceremonies and tests are worse than useless if they get in the way of actual work and make you miserable and unproductive. People leave jobs because of this. People burn out because of this. Companies lose money because of lack of productivity.
This is what this whole thread is about.
If tests are "taking the fun away", like you said, they're shit. Simple as that. Tests are a productivity tool, they're supposed to make your job easier by providing faster feedback. If manual test is faster than automated test, your automated tests are shit. If they're causing developers to write the bare minimum of tests it will only generate a false sense of security. This is even worse than saying "ok we don't have tests, let's be careful and test manually".
It's like that stupid saying that bad documentation is "better than nothing". It's funny how people change their minds when they spend four hours or more on a stupid rabbit hole because of outdated documentation.
On the other hand, one of the best jobs I ever had was maintaining shitty web apps written without source control, tests, documentation, patterns. Thousands of lines of code. Some of them didn't even have source code: I had to decompile the production server DLLs. I don't have any coder friend that got burned out by "bad code". Not having autonomy to improve the bad code, on the other hand, made a lot of them change jobs.
> Instead it has to use fashionable technology and be extremely complicated so other programmers can see how incredibly clever they are!
You are describing "CV-driven development", where people want to use heavily marketed technology brands in their CV as a substitute for real skill and experience.
Really well put. It's a combination of this phenomenon and a push for commoditising engineers/makers. Paradoxically it's based on "sound economics" - the clear advantage of commoditising "resources" and the clear advantage of anticipating a future stage (which in a massive asymmetry of information is what checkbox-investment appears to be addressing).
> Don't make enterprise software. Don't write unit tests. Don't accept pull requests. Simply write software for yourself and have fun doing it. Forget refactoring code into modules, just fucking code
I've found a really nice perspective on this recently: An app can be a home-cooked meal [1]
It's okay to build things that aren't popular, that don't scale, or that aren't economically viable, for the delight of a few users.
OT: someone close to me never tastes the food they cook, I can't understand that. You don't know how long to cook it, or how to season it, or if the balance of sour/sweet/salt/umami/whatever is right at the point you can fix it ...
But that's more an analogue of "use your program before you release it".
When I'm cooking food that I'm going to eat myself I try to limit tasting. If I taste a lot I'm likely to end up with sensory satiation and won't enjoy the meal much by the time I sit down at the table. Just smelling the food while I'm cooking it can trigger this for some dishes (typically curries and other similarly pungent dishes).
If I'm cooking a dish that I've cooked at least three or so times before I generally have a good idea of how things should be going and I can get away with only tasting once or twice at the end.
I am in this place. I have been working for months on an app that perhaps a few dozen people might want (in the semantic web space). If I have a few enthusiastic users who provide some feedback, I am good with that.
Enterprise software is often the epitome of being removed from the results and the fruits of your work, it's a prime example of what Marx was talking about.
You can write unit tests and Spring components with 64 character names all day long but by the end of the day you are completely disassociated from your contribution. Rarely is anybody there to thank you, who is grateful you made their life better, or who has some simple joy over what you created. It definitely happens (e.g. a major release) but it's not a regular event. It often doesn't feel like you just made your community a little better by producing something sensible.
I know people who do hobbies like carpentering and they hand out their (amazing) work as gifts. You can see them oozing with fulfillment when they do and going into their hobbyspace is an escape from the world of work-for-a-living.
This is far from enterprise software: I am planning all three apps to be free on Apple's App Store. I have (or will have) a web site for each, with extra material, terms of service, privacy info, etc. I will have links to my consulting web page and my books page so I might indirectly earn some income.
I have the same attitude with apps as with the books I write: if some people enjoy them and I get to occasionally meet (probably virtually) app users and book readers, then I am very good with that.
re: "going into their hobbyspace is an escape from the world of work-for-a-living": for most people this is really important. For me, I go wilderness hiking every day and have a hobby of cooking so I have several hours a day away from technical interests.
I have nothing to show for my 14 months at [redacted], but I still use the trivial little app I made years ago to redirect my search queries to different sites. It took all of 5 hours to write.
This is a great point, laced with justified indignation.
As a graybeard, I've seen multiple generations of "how to do software" and the most recent are the least fun. A lot of this is driven by the agile approach. It's tailor-made for dev burnout: from the endless tight cycles that force people into an infinite loop of productivity with scant satisfaction that comes with "completion", to all of the tools and philosophies designed to juice that endless loop to be successful/workable. CI/CD, Git, TDD, etc. These all impose on the developer's creativity, independence, and enjoyment. They turn devs into cogs--assembly line workers who must not stop the line at any cost.
One example: back in the day there was a nightly build, not a continuous one. And, you checked out a file, worked on it, and checked it back in. If someone else needed it they had to wait. That obviously had its limitations and it seems laughable by today's standards. But, it was reflective of a human pace that considered devs as people vs. optimizable assets. That is, it was workable because the expectations on devs weren't insane. But, now we commit and merge. Think of how much less fun it is to spend your time resolving merge conflicts.
More to the point, the approach itself implies a chaotic pace wherein code that meets the standards of a certain box must be produced at all times. Devs must bear the cost of resolving any conflicts (literally) that arise from this chaotic pace.
Likewise, with CI/CD. And don't get me started on the monkey-work that is TDD. You might argue that it improves code quality. But, it's hard to make the case that it improves job satisfaction. If you move more work from the creative, problem-solving bucket into the busy-work bucket, the result will not be personal fulfillment.
Does agile increase productivity for companies? Sure. But, it comes at a high cost that's mostly paid by devs.
The commodification/fungibilty of programmers is the goal. See, also open office plans.
I think the bad started for me (long ago) when the Microsoft style management and so-called MS best practices began to conquer the PNW.
In the late 90's a company I was in started driving to an exit. First they hired an ex-MS Group Program Mgr, whatever that means. Next, came tons of PMs pulling one or two devs into their projects/features. Doing it the MS way I guess (at least the MS way back then).
I was a manager, I refused to dole out my team members to PMs -- everything my team did was run through me. I don't even think I let them enter individual devs into their project plans. Just the team.
This worked well for us (my team) because I knew their capabilities, interests, family commitments, likes/dislikes, etc. I could adjust resources as needed to meet the team commitments. We had successes and failures as a team.
PMs who tried put pressure on my devs behind my back would really catch it from me.
My management style wasn't any new idea, it was what we did in the Army. Assign a team a task, then the team leader ensures the task is completed by the team.
It was a good time, we were the only real team in the place as the other managers embraced the MS way of doing things.
At end (right before dotcom bust) the company started doing some Agile-lite with two-week release cycles absent stories, standups, etc. I did like that enough to put it place at the next company I worked at.
I did get burned out though, mostly because I didn't want deal with what the industry had become as the last startup I was at petered out.
I still love programming but not enough to do it in modern shop.
>The commodification/fungibilty of programmers is the goal
This rings true. It's probably why I have always had a tendency to look sideways at these efforts to turn everyone into a coder. I get it: there's demand, opportunity, etc. But, for me, there's always been a cynical element of devaluing actual coders to it.
The stuff you're talking about regarding your management approach almost seems like a relic from a bygone era at this point. So many companies now allow the process to manage devs. PMs back then frequently over-focused on the work vs. people, but even many of them have been replaced with some version of a scrum master with an even more relentless focus on the never-ending storyboard. They're driving the work over people approach without apology because it's what the process demands.
This is not to say it's 100% the case across all companies. But, there's very much an inhuman element to the process that has manifested to some degree in nearly every place that employs agile.
Reading through this thread, and looking in the mirror, it's reinforcing the fact that I, too, am becoming a graybeard.
> Likewise, with CI/CD. And don't get me started on the monkey-work that is TDD. You might argue that it improves code quality. But, it's hard to make the case that it improves job satisfaction. If you move more work from the creative, problem-solving bucket into the busy-work bucket, the result will not be personal fulfillment.
> Does agile increase productivity for companies? Sure. But, it comes at a high cost that's mostly paid by devs.
I agree wholeheartedly with you. I'm by no means suggesting we move back to waterfall, but I am really enjoying the work I'm doing more and more of lately: embedded. Nominally it's a sort of Agile-type workflow (Kanban-ish), but because there's hardware design and manufacturing in the loop, things get planned out early and the multi-month plan doesn't change very much. New algorithm ideas pop up and get scheduled, new ways of doing sensor filtering pop up and get scheduled, but the direction of the wind doesn't change at the start of every "sprint". There are no sprints, just a prioritized/sequenced task list that gets reevaluated periodically.
(Plus, I get to go back to my old days C-hacker roots. The thing builds with a Makefile and spits out a ~32kB binary that gets flashed onto the device.)
>I'm by no means suggesting we move back to waterfall
I've always thought this was a red herring for scrum people to smack dissenters with. I've never done a strict waterfall with unyielding changes. Before agile, we would do 3 month release cycles. We prioritized what we wanted to get done in the 3 months and what we didn't get finished fell off to the next cycle. This was done in BigCompanyYou'veHeardOf and SmallSoftwareDevelopmentCo.
In my experience, waterfall project plans were never meant to be in stone, they were just a guide to give us an idea of what the project looked like. I've done a 3 year plan too. I'm sure some places implemented it strictly, probably government or heavily bureaucratic institutions.
I don't mind at all! Although I hate the question, because it's not a particularly actionable answer for most.
I started writing out the whole story, but in a nutshell: my formal background is a dual EE/CompSci bachelors, followed by an Masters in CompSci that focused on distributed systems. When I was a kid, I learned to program very young: Basic around 8, C in DOS around 11, C on Linux around 13. I fiddled with electronics some, but didn't really get it. I took the EE part of my schooling specifically because I wanted to learn more about how computers worked "under the hood" so to speak.
From there, I ran a web consultancy for a while, and ended up with a client that had a more math-heavy project. And then another client showed up with a project where a microcontroller made sense, and then another... My business partner was moving across the country, and I was enjoying what I was working on quite a bit more than I was in the web/mobile space, so we decided to part ways. I still do the occasional web/mobile project, but they're generally hardware-related (e.g. the Bluetooth connectivity portion of an IoT-type system). Over the years I've accumulated probably $15-20k worth of equipment and software license, and the customers keep showing up!
We have similar backgrounds in a way. I started coding as a kid too, at age 9. First Basic, then Pascal. Picked up C in my teens. Also tinkered with electronics and was part of an online robotics mailing list that was a lot of fun. It was very hard for me to get parts, living in the middle of nowhere in rural Southern Brazil, but some folks in the mailing list were super cool and shipped me parts from the US. I live in the US now.
I'm a CS major but took electives in embedded systems in college, and those were some of the most enjoyable classes I took. I'm now working on recalling some of that. Ordered some PIC parts and I'm currently taking an edX course on ARM programming.
My only problem right now is, I have no idea how I'd get into that space having a whole career built on server-side software.
That's awesome. I was an electronic fiddler as well as a kid, CS student, and it landed me a gig building IOT devices back in 2016. Unfortunately that company crashed, and I ended up in "cloud" systems stuff.
If you ever need any new hires... /u/cblum and I would like to have a word
I'd add open office plans to this. It's awful. You never quite get to focus, you don't build the rapport with your team, you don't get to customize your physical environment. Development really became a white collar version of the assembly line.
It's kind of weird by now. They will happily offer you $200k in annual salary, but an office with a window where you could keep a potted plant is out of the question.
"remember that sad library basement with the rows of depressing tables and power strips where you cried during finals in undergrad? welcome to your office for your next 40 years."
is it a form of abuse like trying to keep everyone under control? is it a form of psychological conditioning to remind you that you just a resource whose top priority is to be interrupted at any time so knowing that you don't really have any personal space sovereignty or privacy to your own thoughts or creativity but that you must answer and create only for the collective?
I don't feel I have a clear picture on what it's about any insights?
I can't say for certain, but I would guess it has something to do with the idea that all people must be available to each other at all times for the sake of raw productivity. So if there is a problem there is no time to wait. You just walk right up to the person you need to speak with and get it resolved then and there.
Open offices facilitate that feeling of persistent accessibility and production. No closed doors to slow anyone down, and no notion that you are there to do anything but work every minute of every day. So why on Earth would anyone need privacy?
This is full-on agile ethos. And, for the same reason, agile is also responsible for the reversal of telecommute policies at some companies.
You make a valid point. And I believe open office spaces are wrong for the same reasons that I believe agile is wrong: both assume that all work is fundamentally similar.
When I call someone and in the background I can hear 20 other people talk, I immediately assume that the person I called is not considered important in his/her company. Because high-level work needs uninterrupted quiet time.
For agile, it's similar. When you stop having different roles, then you implicitly assume that your lead architect and your junior trainee can do the same work, albeit at different speeds. If your architect has useful experience, that's an insult. Or it means that your entire product is simplistic enough to be built purely by trainees.
So both open office and agile effectively reduce your programmers to expendable grunts.
I have read somewhere that there is often _less_ face-to-face communication in an open landscape than with single offices. Possible reasons include an unwillingness to disturb everyone else, and that people in such situations tend to turn inward in order to isolate themselves from everything and everyone around them.
Also (and somewhat contradictory to the above), I expect that, if your colleagues are _too_ easily available, you'll be running to them with a half baked question in your head, only to blurt it out before realising you didn't think it through, and wasting both their time and your own. But before you go knocking on someone's office door to ask a question, you really want to be sure that you know what you want to ask, and that you understand the problem well enough for the answer to make sense to you. Which leads to a better conversation, less time wasted, and better learning.
In practice, this sucks. I have been both the asker and the reciever of the open floorspace surprise question. The reciever looses their train of thought and will struggle to give a decent answer off the cuff, the asker gets a shitty response as a result, and probably has to ask someone else more questions. Far better would be an email, and definitely not slack.
I understand but I think this is wrong. there's a benefit to asynchronous work and having multiple tasks in your queue that you're chipping away at its like the idea of task scheduling on a single processor I just think asynchronous is fundamentally more efficient for humans because they can maximize their productivity per task. And asynchronous "get back to you" allows there to be like a homeostatic equilibrium of priorities and allows everyone everything to get addressed. like hardware interrupts, and giving everyone that power, when it has a knock-on effect as well to whatever you working on it just doesn't make sense to me as something smart. I think it decreases productivity.
I believe the idea is that you don't notice time passing in an environment with purely artificial light, so you'll stay longer, work more. It's kind of the same reason why casinos and chicken farms don't have windows, either.
This is something I see people railing against all the time here. I'm young and new to the industry so I've never experienced anything other than open-plan offices. So maybe I just don't know what I'm missing out on but the idea of private offices/cubicles is really unappealing to me. I really like collaboration spaces, being able to see people's faces, being social, bouncing ideas off each other, pair programming etc. If I really need to put my head down and do some quiet work I can put some headphones on or move my laptop to a booth or quiet space. So I really don't see what the problem with open-plan is but I'm open to being convinced I'm wrong.
I have similar views on wfh, fwiw. Like 1-2 days a week is fine for me but full time remote is far too isolating IMO.
Back when I had a cubicle, I had a second chair and a white board in my cube, and people would come for a visit when they wanted to talk about something, and we'd draw on the whiteboard, and we were social and bouncing ideas off each other. Now, I'm in an open floor plan office, and when the guy who sits literally next to me wants to talk to me, he sends me something over slack. I think people don't want to disturb each other in an open floor plan office, so they rely on these IM tools more? I don't know, but I know it's way, way less social now than it was when I had my cube.
But what about the serendipitous things, like the unplanned conversations that lead to fruitful ideas, or the guy you're not directly speaking to overhearing your conversation and solving your problem for you? It seems to me you would lose all of that in an environment where you have to deliberately make the effort to enter someone else's closed space to talk to them.
Those still happen in common spaces, having an office or a cubicle won't eliminate those. The difference is, with your own space you can do deep work on your own terms. No longer is your train of thought constantly interrupted, and if someone does have a question or wants to meet or just hang out and shoot the shit, they can shoot you an email for a good time where you can devote them your full attention. Academia doesn't have this problem of isolation of ideas, and every professor there is has an office. Communicating to your colleagues is a company culture issue, not a physical space issue.
Fresh out of undergrad, open office layouts feel familiar to the long hours spent sitting at big tables in library basements, so I can see why some people like it initially. After a few years, you will be pining for four walls and a door to get anything done.
Fair enough, it obviously works for you. But on just a couple of points:
> The difference is, with your own space you can do deep work on your own terms. No longer is your train of thought constantly interrupted
What's wrong with headphones for deep work? Or appreciate not everyone has these, but where I work atm we have small 'quiet zone' booths where you can take your laptop if you really want to focus deeply.
As for being interrupted, again maybe it's just a company culture thing. Where I work people are generally pretty respectful if they see you with headphones on intensely focused on something, they'll probably just ping you a message on slack asking when's good to talk. But equally if people have headphones off, open body language- everyone feels happy to strike up conversation and there are no barriers in the way of collaboration.
I'm not sure i can convince you, but I can say that going to school in the 70's and 80s was a completely different experience. We did a minimum amount of group work. Homework was not done collaboratively.
So to my generation, this bouncing ideas thing is less of a requirement because we're used to doing our own work.
If you look at scientific papers from fifty years ago, most had just a few authors, now many of them list eight or ten.
The team approach seems to be taking over the world. However, I would point out that most truly great work, think Nobel prize, or truly awesome engineering work (K&R, UNIX) has till now mostly been achieved by individuals or by small teams, and that there was a lot of focused individual effort put into them.
I don't mean to sound condescending at all, because the young are going to win out by default, you guys are the future and we are the dinosaurs. You preferences and work habits will become the correct ones (whether they are better or not).
However, I would suggest that you like open plan environments because this preference has been trained into you since early grade school.
Private offices suck. The environment you want is ~5 developers per office. You get to build rapport with your coworkers, customize the physical space together, collaborate, differentiate yourselves from other teams. But you don't have to deal with Heather in recruiting telling Judy about the details of her wedding dress.
I don't really care about CI/CD (they just run), Git (better than project_name_final-03 on an unsecured ftp server), or TDD (just cheat and write post hoc tests).
What I really hate is filling in form A, which directs you to form B, which you fill in to see whether form C is required. Form B was put in place by a legal team, who don't provide any point of contact, and who are not your friendly local legal team.
Because the process of filling out forms is so time-consuming, your engineering team uses Asana to track it. However, your PMs use an excel spreadsheet, the legal team uses JIRA, your copywriters use a google doc, and the teams that own forms B and C use separate internally created tools. You update your form-filling progress in 6 different places, some of which have bugs and others of which aren't actively monitored, so you also have to use email/slack/skype messages to follow up the right people. Some of the right people are actually the wrong people. Some of the right people reject your proposal because they didn't read it properly. A few of them reject your proposal for reasons that are actually valid, but which you could not possibly have known, because they're based on tribal knowledge which is not documented anywhere.
Filling in the forms and fixing the issues takes literally 3 months and at least 4 group meetings as well as several skype/zoom calls. One day you are finally allowed to write the code. It's 150 lines including tests, across two services, and you're done in two days. Everything that caused your proposal to be rejected would have been found in development. You quietly wonder whether you would have been happier as a bricklayer.
I relate to this so much. At my work I have trying to a create a TABLE in a database for two weeks now. There is now 4 people involved in getting me the proper privileges to create the TABLE. It's weird how trivial things can spin into these horrible processes.
That kind of bureaucracy predates agile, but it may have increased in some places as people try to grapple with the chaos of endless sprint cycles and continuous change. i.e. trying to figure how to manage the madness. But, I don't see how your shop can be agile with that level of bureaucracy?
Anyway, I think my comments on CI/CD, Git, etc are being misconstrued. I'm not saying they don't have value. I'm saying they are frequently part of an ethos that leads to developer burnout.
For instance, your CI/CID process is one you must "appease", along with the rest of the bureaucracy. It may not feel as odious (and may even seem a relief, relatively speaking), but it contributes to your total load.
And, Git is fine. In fact, perhaps even perfect for the current culture (in philosophy, if not always in execution). Each developer has his/her own repo, you can work offline, you merge instead of locking check-outs, etc. But, that's the trick: it feels perfect because it allows you to work in the always-on philosophy of agile. Its popularity sprang up because this world of high burn-out, constant productivity demands it.
So, we can see the utility of these things and even appreciate them. But, the model they enable and expectations they create can still ultimately lead devs to burnout.
> Likewise, with CI/CD. And don't get me started on the monkey-work that is TDD. You might argue that it improves code quality. But, it's hard to make the case that it improves job satisfaction. If you move more work from the creative, problem-solving bucket into the busy-work bucket, the result will not be personal fulfillment.
A lot of the comments in this thread are pretty funny to me. CI systems are awesome when they are working. It is a real pain in the ass not knowing when something is broken or not being able to find out when it broke.
Similarly, writing good tests is really helpful for me. I do this even on my own personal projects.
These things are so helpful to me that these comments are like reading about people who hate source control.
I'd wager it's partly generational. If you came up in the agile world, then you likely see the upside but not the down since there's no reference point for the latter. Because, of course it's cool that these CI build processes kick off at commit points (or whatever). And, of course, the near instantaneous feedback that something is broken is more efficient than awaiting a nightly build. OTOH, we were much more cautious about the code we checked in because the stakes were higher and you didn't want to be the heel who broke the build. "Move fast and break things" was not a thing. Instead, "be thoughtful about what you're claiming to be good code" was the ethos.
But, this is not an argument about efficiency or whether these things can be made to work. The argument is about the cost to the developer of all of these things in sum, and the philosophy they serve.
Likewise with TDD. I'm not arguing that tests don't help code quality and I've heard others say they like writing them. YMMV and all that. But, it's more load on the developer and I've definitely seen it overdone.
So, again, without the reference of a "saner" world then you don't likely have the context to fully appreciate these costs. I see them, though, and frequently hear them when people complain about burnout. It's not CI/CD or TDD or whatever that's the problem. It's that these things are frequently used less as tools and more as the instruments of a philosophy that plugs developers in alongside them as just another part of the never-ending pipeline.
I disagree pretty strongly with your analysis. I have experience winging it without tests and CI systems. Of course it's not impossible or all bad, I still did it at the time because it was fun and I didn't know better.
Then I started working at a big company with a good engineering culture, I learned about writing tests and related tools, and had a much better experience. Now working without these things feels like driving without a seat belt, or maybe using a grinder without safety glasses (car accidents are too rare to be similar to bugs being introduced...).
I still have fun writing personal projects. It's just better with tests and CI. It sounds like you are pointing at issues with management styles that just happen to exist at the same time as useful tools like this, but I think they are almost if not completely orthogonal.
I hear you. My point here is not that every non-agile company is better than every agile company.
Not sure I'm getting my actual point across though so, rather than repeat myself, I'll just say the "continuous" part of CI/CD has implications on us as humans that are difficult to fulfill over the long-term. So, maybe really consider that word continuous in this context. We're just not made to be cogs in an automation pipeline that never ends, which is essentially where the philosophy (and its enabling tools) places us.
So, it can feel fine and you can see the merits of the tools, etc. But, none of that precludes the burnout that so many devs ultimately face over time.
I think for TDD, CI and CD really depends. When it makes my job easier? Sure.
A quick test framework that doesn't require too much boilerplate, a Github Actions CI that runs in a few seconds and help me, continuous deliver that has everything figured out for me?
I think those are a net positive.
When it makes my job a living hell? Nope.
A CI that takes 40 minutes to run? A CD that requires manual intervention and has "a line" of builds and you have to babysit your build? Testing that requires multiple lines of boilerplate?
Then I'd rather live without those things.
Now... don't get me started about JIRA and other tools, which are a tool for micromanagement.
Thats exactly what i did while working on dreaded big data. Got myself a microcontroller, implemented a small arm console and write fucking low level C code optimized the heck of cpu cycles for tiny games, no code reuse, no interfaced, no deadlines, no refacto, no security, no network, no politics. Barely version control (with appropriate "update" commit messages). Kept me sane while doing those things at work.
+1 on the small 1-2 weekend tangible projects, that you may have wanted to build before, but never got to, they are great for morale.
This weekend I implemented RS232-powered RGB LED that is controlled attiny85, which reacts to strings sent to that very same RS232. A gross violation of standard, probably, but it works! It definitely added a lot of joy.
I typed “git init” only after I finished the first working version which had a regular One-color LED, and could not yet do blinking :-)
For even more fun with low level breaking of standards, bit-banging rs232 is fun and very doable. Don't use timers for timing either, just spin the cpu the right number of times. :)
This project actually does decode of Rs232 data, with the special prefix triggering the interpreter mode where you can control the color and delay between the cycles. Only ground and TX pins are used to connect. Oh, and no interrupts - poll for the start bit while running the currently programmed light animation cycle :-)
One thing that made the development of it all immensely easier was having a Saleae logic analyzer. Highly recommend it (no affiliation, just a happy customer).
I feel fortunate to have chosen embedded software as the career path. 10 years in industry now and never had a dull moment (though I've had some bad colleagues/clients). I work inside a terminal all day, no GUI (even use GDB TUI), and somehow never get bored of it. I think having a physical entity responding to your code immediately (blinking LED for example) keeps the programmer interested.
In my field you're describing "playing the game", ironically.
In academia the aim is to get a proof of principal, write a short paper, and move on. If you care about reusable code you are building a foundation for someone else's success, but not necessarily your own.
Neither side is wrong, it's just a different game.
This! (And wait until you figure out there’s a lot of real companies running like that..)
I would say to also work in a domain you care about and like. I don’t like technology for technology sake and never did.
I like solving problems and see technology as a tool to do so. I love the company I work for, the people and the problems we get to solve. I love even more when I solve them without the need to write a single line of code.
This is really, really bad advice. Mutiny is hardly an answer to the problem here. It will certainly temporarily avoid the problems you face but if you are a member of a team and this is truly how you act you will get chucked out very quickly. But since you bring up a few of the issues you are facing it's important to address them. I want to focus on unit tests to start.
When I started my first programming job a couple of years ago I joined a team that demanded 100% code coverage. I hated them so much. I was still learning the ropes at this company and I only saw the unit tests as a barrier to getting my work done and earning my paycheck. My first solution was to create bogus tests that always passed. That was quickly discovered and I was reprimanded. My second solution was to get colleagues who shared my hate for unit tests to approve my PRs before they were reviewed by my team. That too was thwarted.
Then one day I was working with a teammate on a new feature and we discovered a bug. He quickly opened up a test file and wrote a unit test, then he went tried a couple solutions until the test turned green. Then he looked at me and said, "When when you are working in a pile of crap, testing makes you feel more confident about your code." That was my first insight into the value of testing. Eventually I came around and stopped trying to avoid tests. I just did the damn work. Once I established trust with my teammates they began to let the pressure off my PRs and slowly the displeasure of writing tests went away.
You pointed out a few different coding practices that frustrate you. And to be honest, those coding practices are not the gospel and should be deployed only when truly needed. However I think you have a serious problem with what a lot of us call being a good teammate. At the end of the day your goal should be to get the product shipped, once you focus on getting your features out the door, unit testing and pull requests become minor details in that process. At the end of the day those are just a cutesy to your teammates to show them that you are willing to be a responsible and helpful team member. Stop trying to fight everyone so much and maybe you will enjoy your job a little more.
I've recently started doing that and it's been a breath of fresh air.
I don't really like the stuff I work with, which is services. I think I've become good at it given the feedback I get from my peers every review cycle, but I really don't like it.
I felt burned out for a long time because of that.
Recently I've simply been doing what I'm interested in, in my spare time. That's learning about embedded systems, something I had an interest in in college but never pursued a career. And for fun, tinkering with old stuff that makes me nostalgic. I spent this last weekend coding in Pascal and messing around with FreeDOS :)
It's hard to do just the fun stuff because that's not what makes good software. It's the unit tests and pull reviews and such that make the software reliable and covering all the niggling edge cases. And that ultimately is what makes a piece of software good.
Not so sure about that. Unit tests and pull reviews are stopgaps so that you don't have to hire 1000x engineers just to get some work done. The true masters of this craft may not need those things
Believe it or not "all the edge cases" can still be perceived by the right mind. It's just that we as an industry have done seemingly everything we can to push those folks out, just look at OP as an example
I've supported ten-digits-per-year (non-SAAS) businesses without unit tests or code reviews and oftentimes deploying straight to production. As the sole SWE for my codebase. Supporting hundreds of remote installations with nothing more than SSH tunnels relayed through an ancient, colocated linux box. And the software was very good, didn't ship with many bugs (and when it did they got fixed real quick), and there were never any catastrophic, non-recoverable issues, nor ever any questions on the integrity of the system or my reporting. We were never seriously hacked (to our knowledge). Crazy times... not sure I would do it again, but.... it can be done.
My first dev job we did most of our work in vim sessions on the development server, and more than once I was asked to hotfix live code running in production. Through the grace of God and an abundance of caution nothing ever seriously blew up as a result of all this madness. (Though, ask my boss about the time he tried to move our MySQL instance onto some very early SSDs) Again, it can be done. I'm sure most of the old hats lying around have tons of stories like this.
If your expectations are not shipping with many bugs and avoiding serious blow ups then yes that's a fine way to do things. And if we're happy relying on a single SWE (what happens if you get hit by the proverbial bus?) then yes that's fine too. And if we never need to scale then SSHing into 100s of boxes is fine too.
Most of my job is replacing stuff like you describe. And it's definitely not fine. Nobody knows how it works because that single SWE is gone. It can't scale with the business and it's a huge drag on productivity because nothing can change without a massive testing effort to ensure it's not broken.
Agreed, but who can you really get mad at? The lone, inevitably overworked SWE that was asked to shoulder the entire burden of the business he worked for? Or management, who most likely denied that SWE the support he wanted?
In my last job I'd advocate tirelessly for unit tests, code reviews, all that. And it was always denied. Ironic given that the other engineers I worked with were MEs, who had notebooks full of processes describing how they were to work so that engineering issues would be caught. But the software? "I don't care how you do it, just ship the feature"
As an aside, I've always found "nobody knows how it worked because XXXXX is gone" to be kind of funny: the code knows, so go read the code. It'll mean everything takes 100x longer but the knowledge is there.
> In my last job I'd advocate tirelessly for unit tests, code reviews, all that. And it was always denied.
My approach to that is to not ask, just write the unit tests anyways, ask a peer to code review without management permission, etc.
We are professionals. Part of that responsibility is to know the best practices for our craft and put them into practice.
We also need to be good at getting the requirements from the technical and non-technical people we work with, and being able to show consistent, incremental progress, and a willingness to quickly change direction when the requirements change.
But we do not need to get input or permission for the process we use to produce those results.
> Agreed, but who can you really get mad at? The lone, inevitably overworked SWE that was asked to shoulder the entire burden of the business he worked for? Or management, who most likely denied that SWE the support he wanted?
There are plenty of SWEs that just don't know any better. I know because I was one of them while writing a lot of software for a business.
I don’t really expect just to do the fun stuff at work, but modern technology seems to progressively burn me out more and more.
I was drawn to software at a time when it seemed like we had control over things. With the advent of the cloud I feel like that control keeps slipping away more and more. Kubernetes is my new nemesis. I seem to be in the minority that perceives it as unnecessarily complex for most tasks. Someone once commented here on HN that the k8s trend made them think people are trying to pretend their code doesn’t run on hardware anymore, and that really resonated with me.
> I seem to be in the minority that perceives it as unnecessarily complex for most tasks.
My boss recently introduced Kubernetes to our software deployment.
The first thing he said, though, is if you don't absolutely need Kubernetes, don't use it. It is extremely complicated and finicky and difficult to deploy correctly, and can bite you in subtle ways.
Then he went on to describe, for our problems, how Kubernetes was absolutely necessary to scale without constant manual intervention and configuration and deployment processes consuming our time.
I appreciated that he had thoroughly thought through the problem before adding more complexity.
I do think there are options to achieve all of that - scale without manual intervention, etc. - without Kubernetes though. At least where I work, if I look at the deployment issues we have, those are all the product of bad decisions and lack of action due to higher priorities. There's no reason why there couldn't be more automation. They're building something new on Kubernetes which looks promising (though I really hope that as an app developer I don't have to think of Kubernetes things, which just irk me), but the current platform would work well too if investment was made into automating the parts that aren't automated.
You don't have to always cover all the edge cases. If you write software for fun, you can often just bake-in assumptions and neglect a lot of edge cases.
While I dabbled with python and Delphi for a bit,my first real development was on Salesforce platform with their proprietary language called Apex. The first thing every developer learns on thos platform is that your code has to have at least 75% test coverage before it can be pushed to production.Testing was inevitable and ultimately part of anything I had to write. With time,I started reading more and more about development, tried different languages and etc.It was really fascinating to read how a lot of people hate testing or teams skip them if the deadlines need to be met. What testing taught me is that if the test is hard to write,it means that the code is crap.Every time I wrote some quick hack,it used to take me 10 times longer to write unit test.
Short version: you find very small things that you can write tests around (pulling messy logic out into testable functions, writing tested utilities that replace dirty hacks, etc.) and start building your testing framework starting with that.
Long version:
Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Book by Michael C. Feathers
It’s almost always bad as a new guy to come in and start refactoring.
There are lots of weird if checks to deal with a vendor that returns bad data over the api every Sunday night. Your new clean code is going to crash and burn in all of these cases.
Unit tests are time-consuming and tedious to write, and generally deliver poor effort-per-bug-found except for initial development (especially since they often displace cross-component tests which tend to catch more bugs). And the cases they test simply reflect the prejudices and lack of imagination of the author. A far better alternative IME is to use generative testing (e.g. property-based testing), which automates the tedium of generating test cases, and finds far more bugs to boot. Bonus: you'll understand your code much better after you're forced to identify and formalize invariants ("properties") in order to write your tests!
I think it is excellent advice for someone who work by themselves and try to find some joy in coding after being in a rut. Yes, some conventions do emerge when being in a large team, it is inevitable, but this is not what this guy needs. Git + Trello is enough for personal projects or small teams. Anything else is a bonus or something you will add down the road and that includes testing or whatever other best practices. There are many jobs, especially in a non tech environments where you can be a sole dev or a part of a very small team, real small and mid businesses that generate value and are much more fun to work for for certain types of personality.
This comment resonates with me. I've been to meetings where we spent hours and discussed these things. I tend to ignore them and do as instructed. The work is pretty boring. But I get paid for it. I think my peers don't like me. I don't blend in. I'm not part of the culture. I will eventually get dismissed. But I'm not mad or angry. I move on to the next project where I contribute more effectively.
We need to accept change. Your company eventually will move you to a new project or dismiss you. They need to put your software baby on maintenance and squeeze out the last bucks before they shut it down. Life continues with or without you. If you become pro-active, you'll have a fun ride with it.
There has been a lot of cargo-culted best practice in the last 5-10 years that is unjustified busy-work. I have a little secret in the same vain. I turn off all email notifications, and have no apps on my phone. Never been an issue. I just check the source when it makes sense during my work day. No more senseless interruptions, no worrying about things that aren't actually on my agenda. A smooth workflow and peace of mind.
Rails was engineered around developer happiness, and I kind of miss those days. And while React is cool I'm still kind of resentful that companies insist on using React and adding a whole Node env when basic jQuery would have done the job.
Web development could be stupidly simple if we wanted it to be. I feel like it got too easy, and suddenly there were waves of bootcamp grads, and a lot of developers resented that.
Well, I refuse to use Javascript because I hate it, and it's ecosystem, and I've managed to do just fine job-wise. I think not doing JS is still an option.
I have written personal projects both with and without tests and every single time I don't write them I wish I had, usually pretty quickly. The time you save by not writing those first few tests always seems to be lost, and then some, pretty quickly in the extra manual testing that is required.
> Don't write unit tests. Don't accept pull requests. Simply write software for yourself and have fun doing it.
There's a careful balance here though right? For most projects your first users or clients are the unit tests. Why not have a future of repeatable client/user tests that insulate from regressions and to be your wingman to navigate future iterations? Also for me, I still review and accept my own pull requests on solo projects, because it is that last step when working on my own where I know I'm at a good point looking at my diffs and the last step in introducing mistakes.
Lets change the story to be about an artist being burnt out of art industry. Suddenly he has to deal with all the grant money, politics of the gallery etc. Feels like he doesn't want to do anything with art anymore.
And somebody in the thread suggests the artist just go to the nature and paint and don't think about any art styles and acceptance of peers and trends and etc. Just give yourself to painting and don't think about anything. Just paint with a coal on stones and loose yourself in it.
And you comment would be something like "There's a balance here though, you still need to paint on canvas with acrylic or something, otherwise you won't be able to validate your art in the future for you to progress etc."
But what is good code? What is bad code? I know what is slow code and what is fast, but not always fast is good and slow bad. So basically, good/bad code is mainly around maintainability. And if you are the only person that maintains it and can maintain it then you only need the code to be 'as good' as your ability to retain the memory of it's structure.
I don't know how your comment is contributing to the conversation. No one asked about the definition of good code.
The definition was assumed to be understood.
I worked with Tesla grid batteries (powerpack installations) at my last job, but I'm currently looking for work. I just got tired of "engineering" my personal projects, i just "program" them now!
That's a great approach. I personally enjoy coding novel or obscure data structures which I'd never get to implement at work, but hopefully might be useful to someone.
That's generally an unpopular and unwelcome opinion here, but I agree with you 100%. edit: and i'll happily take those downvotes, they are delicious thank you.
Not on this story. Those other folks are too busy configuring stuff, arguing about curl website/script.sh | sh, and building microservices to feel burnt out yet.
The thing that unit tests are really good for is providing a safety net when you make changes. And I love them. I have a few multi-year projects that sit and do their thing for months at a time with no changes; when I come back to them with a client request, the test suite is awesome for making sure that whatever I just changed didn't break something else (alternatively, the tests point out an assumption I made when writing the tests and the test needs to be changed). Either way, I appreciate it. Especially when there've been changes done by other people that I wasn't aware of.
Buuuuut... a lot of the personal projects I've worked on have zero unit tests. Maybe they have a couple of tests around a complicated algorithm, but mostly... no automated testing. What they do have though is a) version control, and b) a fast-iteration platform underneath them. They're also generally well factorered into small chunks.
As an example, I have a package that takes an org-mode file and extracts time entries to drive into time tracking software a client uses. Written in Lisp, zero tests. Every month I fire it up, look at the table of entries it's about to post, and hit "go". Looking at the table of entries provides two sanity checks: first, that I properly logged my hours that month (I'll occasionally forget to clock out for a weekend and rack up a 48 hour time log), and second, that it didn't encounter a bug while doing the processing. As of around September of last year, this program is done, and does its job perfectly every month.
Another example, also in Lisp, is used for making estimates for my clients. I give it a list of tasks with 3-point estimates, it churns through and calculates all the means and standard deviations, generates a file for Pandoc to consume, and spits out a PDF. I use it every couple of months. No tests, all done inside the SBCL repl. I obviously proofread the output PDF before sending it to a client, but that's again to check for bugs and to check for brain farts.
I've worked on great codebases that have giant test suites, and I've worked on terrible codebases that have giant test suites. And likewise for no test suites. While I appreciate the sentiment, I think it's dangerous to talk in absolutes like that. While I agree there is probably some degree of correlation between whether or not a codebase has a unit test suite and whether it's good code, writing unit tests does not intrinsically make the codebase good, and not writing unit tests does not intrinsically make a codebase bad.
Heh, yeah, that's fair, although I think there's some nuance in terms: accidental changes (to things that were working) is a form of regression in my mind. Depending on how the codebase is structured, changing the tests to match the new desired behaviour might be trivial or might be excruciatingly complicated. These days (mentioned elsewhere in this discussion) I'm working on more embedded stuff, and the only time I'm generally writing unit tests are for things that shouldn't change.
As an example, last year I was working on a custom LoRaWAN stack. As I was building out the various pieces, I was writing tests to verify that the output from generally-pure functions came out as expected. (This packet) + (This key) = (This encrypted packet). Those kinds of tests help a ton for catching stupid mistakes.
I think a lot of people miss this point entirely. Before the unit test thing, I would always have a tester project, it just wasn't formal or automated.
I see good value in modern unit tests when you are building some sort of automation engine, rules engine, etc. But I think a lot of people see them as a hammer and everything is a nail.
Yup, in my domain (games) unit tests are common for functionality that is easily applicable to them (e.g. linear algebra libraries) then integration tests are more common for systems (e.g. testing collision systems integration with the game engine, do you get the right callbacks or whatever) but once you hit the game itself automated testing is not massively useful as it's usually painful to setup and maintain and only covers "does this case still work" with no information on how good the end product actually is.
IMO a lot of places have forgotten the value of manual testing in terms of not only finding bugs but actually understanding how the product is used. Games companies prize iteration speed in terms of how quickly you can test a change in situ because we as game makers need to verify our changes by playing the game. I'm making a multiplayer game right now so I need to make sure what I do works on the server and clients which usually necessitates three copies of the game running together. Then we playtest it with a larger group weekly and playtest with even larger groups less regularly.
My impression of a lot of modern development elsewhere is that as soon as automated tests are green the code gets punted into production which seems utterly bonkers.
I think this is a natural reaction to advice being over prescribed and totally agree that in your free time you should do whatever it is you want and this is solid advice.
BUT I think we should also acknowledge that everything that slows you down in your free time has a reason for existing and most of that is communication or knowledge sharing within a team. Naming conventions, unit tests, and general documentation all exist to help other team members keep up with the pace of changes in the repository. If you're not planning to do something in a team setting or for this to be consumed outside of the work that you do then you don't need these things. But if you want to share with everyone else it's important that you don't totally ignore these things because it will come back to bite you in the long run.
The idea is to stop trying to make it easier to share and others to use and just write something that works for you.
Kinda like the idea for personal. Why spend so much effort to structure projects so others can use when chances are they won't or you don't care if they do. Work is governed by different realities.
This is just my personal approach to being disillusioned with tech, but I think about it a lot so I thought I'd share.
I think one of the most dangerous cliches we are taught when we are young is "do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life".
It sets up the expectation that your passion and your job should be tightly coupled, and if they aren't, there's something flawed with you.
Having a job where you feel creative, productive, and generally fulfilled is a great thing, but if you don't have it, that's fine too. Work the job as best you can, get whatever good parts you can strip from it (learning, socialization, coffee), and spend the other 8-10 hours a day doing things you actually like to do, tech or otherwise.
I try to walk the line of not leaving my friends and teammates out to dry, but also never "laying my body on the tracks" for the corporation. Your friends will return the favor; the company won't.
This definitely won't help you climb the ladder, and it won't garner you fame or fortune from your employment, but you'll be left with an identity and a soul that isn't controlled by profits. I've found it to be worth it, despite the prevailing culture.
It's often said that you should "Do what you love", but that's mostly bad advice. It encourages people to grind away their lives in pursuit of some mostly unattainable goal, such as being a movie star or a billionaire startup founder. And even if they do make it, often the reality is nothing like they imagined it would be, so they're still unhappy.
Do what you love is in the future. Love what you do is right now. As with the other patterns, it's meant to guide the small decisions that we make every moment of every day. It's less about changing what you do, and more about changing how you do it.
"Do what you love" treats "what you love" as a fixed thing, but it's not. I used to hate running. I would sometimes force myself to run a few miles because it's supposed to be healthy, but I never liked it. Then I read a book that said we are born to run, and that it can be fun. Inspired, I decided to try running just for fun, focus on the quality of every step, and forget about the goal completion aspect of it. Very quickly, I learned to enjoy running, and over time I've transformed my entire relationship with fitness and exercise to be oriented more toward enjoyment.
Naturally, this more intrinsic approach ultimately improves the quality of our efforts, which generally leads to greater extrinsic rewards as well. Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation are best when they are both pointed in the same direction. ...
Real work always seems to involve a certain amount of unpleasant, grinding effort though, and startups often have a lot of it. It's like having a baby. It's 5% cute, adorable moments, and 95% dirty diapers and vomit.
The key to loving these more unpleasant moments is meaning. If we genuinely care about and believe in our mission, then those difficult times begin to take on a more heroic quality.
Thank you for the quote, I like the part about the "what you love part" being fluid. I think that's why sometimes your career being "what you love" can be tough, because unless you're the boss, it's hard to steer the barge to align the group goals with your personal goals (another commenter had a good take on that aspect.)
For me personally, since I'm not the boss, I do what I can in my work to align the company goals with my goals, and vice versa, but also remember to fallback on what my real passions are on my own time. For me its a helpful way to cope when the goals really diverge and it's out of my hands.
>It's like having a baby. It's 5% cute, adorable moments, and 95% dirty diapers and vomit.
So true lmao, and you have to worry about them for several years until they are strong enough to walk their own path, even then, the worries at the back of your mind never goes away, they’re your kids after all, that’s why I will never have kids.
Job progression up the ladder is mostly inferior to lateral progression to a new company. That's partly why people stay such a short time in a role.
You'll get no loyalty, humanity, or recognition from the company. Give them the minimum to keep them happy and keep your job and focus the rest of your energy on something that will benefit you.
If you are inclined to give your minimum at something you spend time on everyday, it essentially means you shouldn't have started it in the first place.
Unless you are forced to do work you don't enjoy (work is what brings food to the table etc.), you should obviously find better work. Also, even if you are stuck, try to get out of it as soon as possible.
Choosing to do work you don't care about is simply bad decision making due to lack of understanding. In the long run it may even reduce the quality of your life.
I wouldn’t even say in the long run. I mean even at 22 if you hate your job so much that you’re going to the bar every night (been there), that isn’t a long term detriment, it’s an immediate one. Maybe you can excuse it and avoid thinking about it at that age because “everyone does it”, but that is exactly the kind of thinking that gets you into trouble with pretty much anything.
You can take pride in your work, you can do a good job, you can even enjoy it (I don't usually). But when it's quitting time, unless it's an emergency, you're done. And if I overwork some days because of deadlines or emergencies, I will underwork when the dust settles. That's fair.
I'll spend my time after work contracting or working on my own projects. Both of which benefit me more than over achieving in my day job.
And this is if you're working for someone else. If you have a stake - if it's something you are an equal partner with your collaborators on, something you believe in and stand to draw immensely from and have true decision-making ability - then of course it's reasonable to push more. You've already placed your stake, you want to be able to hold onto it.
But if you've been broughton to a project and you're not offerd that kind of stake, if you're there just for your labor, it's unreasonable to be asked for more than what was initially agreed upon, and it's also unreasonable for that initial offer to have included some kind of expectation of open-ended practice when compensation was defined and finite.
Exactly. I work 50-60 hours a week if I get paid by the hour. More if it's my own company. If it's a standard 40 hour week, then that's all I work. That's the deal we agreed to. The company doesn't give me anything for going that extra mile, so I just do regular hours and I save my energy for me.
I've never got a raise or a promotion, except by changing jobs. I got a bonus once. I've also been let go with 0 days notice the day before my birthday, without so much as a thank you. Companies treat you as an expendable cog, and that's what I give them in exchange. It's fair.
> Give them the minimum to keep them happy and keep your job and focus the rest of your energy on something that will benefit you.
In my experience this is the type of person in your team that - instead of consulting colleagues to arrange holidays cooperatively and ensure there's cover available, and that parents do ok given the extra encumbrances they're subject to etc. etc. - goes ahead and books out a whole year's leave at the earliest opportunity to maximise their own benefit.
Some of the least pleasant people I've had to work with were the ones that saw it as an inconvenience.
You may think they are unpleasant, but they may be happier for it. Perhaps they prioritize their time with friends and family above their relationships at work. They're turning other people's loyalty to the company and solidarity with colleagues to their advantage. It's not an irrational strategy if it maximizes happiness.
Have you worked in HR or management where these career paths are created?
Why doesn't it make sense to keep really good employees? If you know they are really good? Why does it make more sense to let that person go and pay some "maybe good" person up front much more?
Conventional wisdom, plus a few studies, has shown that if you want to get 15% or more of a raise, you need to jump somewhere else. Since they're hiring from the market, they have to offer (decent) market rates, while your current job is going to keep paying you at whatever rate you agreed to.
After a while it becomes a self-fulling prophecy -- they know you're jumping in 2-3 years, so they're not even going to try to keep you.
The talent pool isn't shrinking, either, so there will be more devs, and more IT guys -- be they in Seattle, or India -- as things more forward. This means they can probably find someone to replace you, and while it may be a loss of productivity, the lower salary (relative to increasing yours) may offset the costs.
Plus inside threats are big -- a senior dev-ops guy who has been there for 8 years knows how to break things just right, skim things off the top, or just take a "agent fee" from some vendors to push for their product to be rolled out. Keep em under a 3-4 years and they can't get their roots in enough to damage things.
That didn't answer my question at all. You said "if you want to get a 15% or more raise, you need to jump somewhere else". That's just coming out of thin air or based on "other companies do it". If you do work in HR or as a manager, what's the rational basis deciding just that number?
I'm coming from the 8 hours sleep, 8 hours of work, 8 hours of other stuff. There will obviously be things like chores and eating in there, but I think there is meaning and purpose derived from those things as well.
It takes me two hours from waking up to walking into work, so now we are at 6 hours. Then it takes me an hour to get home, down to 5. After prepping, cooking, eating, and cleaning dinner, as well as making lunch for the next day (usually just packaging leftovers), I lose another hour at least, 4 hours left. Getting ready for bed is a whole process, and the average human takes 14 minutes to fall asleep, so call it a half hour there, and throw in a half hour for just misc. waste time throughout the whole day for good measure, and you are left with three hours, or 12.5% of your day, that is truly yours. If you need to run an errand after work or do some chores, that time evaporates.
I guess you can strive to make productive use of those 180 minutes, but after a whole day it's hard to work remotely efficiently. A quick peek on HN turns into a 30 minute stint. I love playing guitar and reading books, both make me quite happy, but I find sometimes there just isn't enough time to engage in these hobbies, which makes me depressed. Sometimes I indulge on the dopamine hit of playing guitar for an hour or two, which makes me very happy, but at the cost of sleep, which ruins productivity and energy the next day, I get less done, and fall to a new low.
Sometimes I wonder how older generations of my family coped with full time factory work half a century ago, then I remember all of the raging alcoholics and realized that no, they didn't really cope well with this post industrial revolution work week construct either.
Transportation and meals come from that "other stuff" bucket, at least for 90% of jobs out there. You work for 8 hours and hopefully sleep for the full 8 hours. The edge cases all get taken out of your "free time" and what is left over is the time you get to spend on you. Which is way, way less than 8 hours.
I would say it's closer to 4 hours max. With kids, zero. It's hard to find meaning in those 4 hours when life is so complex. I would even argue that you need a dedicated entertainment bucket just to stay sane which further limits this other stuff bucket to merely a large handful of minutes. This handful of minutes is where you live your real life and it's really not enough.
I have a different take on this. "do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life" isn't a dangerous cliche, it is in fact true (note that many cliches are cliches because they are obvious truisms). The problem is that it has a number of caveats. One of which is that it is impossible to "do what you love" while taking direction from other people unless their goals and ideals are 100% aligned with your own, which is pretty much never the case. It doesn't matter who those people are, they could be the vulture capitalists mentioned in the post or they could just be your manager. It doesn't matter if you're able to have a beer with them at the end of the day if you have different motivations for doing the work that you're doing.
The other environments mentioned, a tech giant and a high growth unicorn, are obviously composed of people playing the same pathological game. They're all publicly working towards whatever goals the company has set while privately pursuing their own. I think most of this is inescapable with the way we currently structure corporations. Even when you purposefully try to avoid this outcome it still happens.
I think groups of people are able to achieve and maintain a sort of synchrony that allows them to "do what they love" together. You hear about it and sometimes are lucky enough to be there for it when different places, communities, or companies have that "golden age" where things are lined up perfectly, people are building on each other's work, and every day just seems to flow naturally. Often after the fact it gets derided as drinking the kool-aid or a reality distortion field but something happens when everyone buys in to the dream. I think we've lost a lot of that, we're too cynical and have convinced ourselves that it's not real and that's pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy since it leads to a permanent state of disillusionment. That's where we wind up just clocking in and out, doing an honest days work and narrowing our lives down to whatever is left over. You sell half your life to buy the other. In my mind that's much more dangerous than chasing your dreams.
This is a really thoughtful take, thank you. I completely agree about how the group dynamic and generally being aligned in goals makes the world of difference.
I feel this way in some of my social groups outside of work, for hobby or semi-professional endeavors I have. They're a lot of work but the people I do it with are all rowing in the same direction. In some ways, having those experiences makes the less-than-rosy realities of the day job more tolerable.
Steps, you say, the snake asked... without understanding...
um Terms like 'goal' or 'front' even unintentionally used may lead to a want in terms of an ethical norm. 'People are driven by goals and success' and that maybe lead to the conclusion 'peopleshould be striving' and even to the thought 'people have to work and therefore to laze didn't meet the character of humans ethically' (sry, for my bad english) ^^
I don’t agree that a meme like “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” means as much as you do.
I think watching people exist in the same literal loop of agency for 50 years is vastly more important than an arbitrary set of sounds. If the sound is a key to a cognitive idea, and the idea is “climb ladder for 50 years” literally?
The sounds and idea is mapped to a literal behavior. Focus on climbing a ladder. Why? Because that’s what we focus our agency on. Ladder to where? Up.
What?
Nobody should be set on an objective like climbing ladders to nowhere.
Do what you love. Be prepared to give it up and learn to love something new, and you’ll learn to love to learn and not get anxious about climbing ladders to nowhere, thus burning out.
People with a lot of money are able to make a lot of money and make it look easy. Climbing the ladder to where you can add two big numbers to get a bigger number based on a sense for generating new emotional objects but utility that’s more of the same is asinine and unfair.
You’re all building the analytics engines they’re using to push you to discover. IMO until a hardware revolution comes, software is hitting endgame for the masses.
My data set isn’t so large I can’t analyze it with anything more than an Nvidia card.
Why do we need the cloud when iPhone SE has an AI chip?
There’s novelty to consider for consumers. User experience sucks. Maybe some graphical toolkits for home users to leverage their graphics cards more easily?
Stop thinking “technology = cloud” which is a meme driving their business not your creativity and satisfaction.
The days of wanking DSLs are coming to an end as automation makes stamping out websites trivial. We know what UIs people will use well enough for business. It’ll happen. It’s all just text, after all.
Don’t get hung up on corporates demands for tech that looks like X.
Most of your problems sound like they stemmed from VC. Similar story. It's a good, and hard, lesson. Two things one should not touch when it comes to building healthy companies in 2020: crypto and equity sales to VC. They're going to become fossils soon anyhow [1].
Read Rework by Basecamp. Read The Beginning of Infinity by Deutch. Read the Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Hamming. Watch some Bret Victor talks. Ignore the negative memes about tech. They're all wrong, the rules get re-written every 10 years, and that is going to decrease in duration, not increase. You might be the person needed to re-write them.
Release your code. Teach. Share.
If you can, bootstrap. Give more than you take. Don't hire or work with assholes. Grow slowly. Don't over-lever yourself. Make something people not just want, but love. Know thyself. Don't outsource your thinking, build the thing only you can build.
If you are not working on the most important problem in your field, why not?
Most importantly, know that the future is bright and that our best days are not only ahead of us, but always will be.
> Most importantly, know that the future is bright and that our best days are not only ahead of us, but always will be.
I've read (and watched) everything on your list of recommendations. Perhaps I should reread Deutch's chapter on optimism, but I don't have the same conviction that you do. Where does your conviction come from?
That we're in the middle of an exponentially growing creation of new knowledge, and that (echoing Deutsch) all problems are soluble. Now, there are exceptions to this, for example, a sudden existential crisis. But I prefer to be an optimist in those scenarios, given humanity's demonstrated ability to achieve great things. There's a lot of negativity in the press about the global response to COVID-19, but I take a contrarian view and expect historians to look back at the heroic deeds of healthcare workers and researchers to overcome this crisis as unprecedented in scale and speed. It has exposed cracks in our institutions, surely, but I see it has a crystalizing moment to remind us all how much we can achieve.
What you're looking for is probably not conviction.
Conviction comes from seeing the state of things not being right and seeing a vision of what the state of things being right looks like.
If you don't have conviction, you probably don't have a vision of the state of things being right. That's why most of the world doesn't have conviction - either they lack vision on how the world should be, or their vision of how the world should be lacks the element of being visionary.
I would ascribe 3 things for you to consider:
1) You sound similar to someone who got cheated on and can't date again. You probably need some help handling emotions like betrayal.
2) Betrayal is really difficult to get over and (sorry to say) but you may never really get back to normal. This is the inner psychologist talking, sometimes wounds leave scars that don't fade.
3) If you can't survive an environment with politics and betrayal (which is good, it means you have a simple and pure heart), you will have to live with the fact that your mission is probably not found in the business world.
4) There are many missions out there. Find the one that resonates with your personal values. OR, surround yourself with people that resonate with your values, and take on their mission.
I don't think it's good to go back to what killed your inner child. That reminds me of being in an abusive relationship.
I'm bored of tech, apps, gadgets and all, despite the coollness factor. I was fascinated by technology when I was growing up, but I feel like the world's pressing needs and problems are not addressed because there's no "good money" to be made by solving them, which is absurd.
I wish beauty, wisdom and optimization would be better valued so we could find pleasure in designing things and cities with beautiful architectures with minimal negative impact on the environment. I wish we could redefine our position in the world as member of an ecosystem we should care for, instead of being merely consumers and "eyeballs" for advertisers.
You might enjoy the Software Disenchantment post we discussed 4 months ago, which was about the state of the software industry (rather than about personal burnout).
I agree. Just how much sheer talent and brainpower is being wasted in the Valley, where it's being used to create web apps that fade into irrelevance 90% of the time? How much would we gain as a society if we applied all of this talent to the climate crisis, or medicine, or actual physical engineering? Software is eating the world and shitting it out.
I wrote nearly this exact message in my mood journal today. I haven't had it quite as bad as the author, but I'm extremely, and it feels like permanently, burned out of working for a business/corporation. I fundamentally hate it. I walked out of my first corporate job after a month and now that I'm on my second, all I can think about is walking out. I hate it. I hate it so much. Every single day feels like I'm ruining my life and disappointing every teacher, family member, and friend I've ever had. On the way to work I fantasize about getting in a car accident. Like the author, I can't think about intellectual things anymore - I was in a grocery store this weekend trying to decide between a $3.99 and $4.98 item and I couldn't figure out which was the lower number.
I've been thinking about quitting and going to work at a grocery store for a while. It's not going to pay well but it'll pay more than being dead if you know what I mean.
I've been there, and am still recovering from burn out and a nervous breakdown.
Corporates can be hell for me.
I used to just want to drive my car into a tree on the way to work.
I was so dead inside. Just nothing going on.
I'm working from home now. But i'm still burnt out and recovering. I have no creativity. Things that should be straightforward seem pointless and repetitive.
When I sit down at my computer I'm filled with a deep existential sadness and find it very hard to do any work at all.
This whole thread, and your comment in particular, resonates. At the very least, knowing this might be the unspoken norm, rather than a personal challenge, that alone helps a ton.
Yeah I will say that this thread has been very validating as I haven't found anyone in my peer group who (at least admits to) feeling the same. What's the cure here? Obviously we could all use some therapy and/or meditation, but then what? To me it seems like we'd still be stuck in the same trap, just with better coping mechanisms.
That sounds awful, I'm really sorry to read this. Do you live somewhere where there's been a big uptick in hiring from grocery stores? I couldn't say whether it's a 'good' or a 'bad' move career-wise, bit it sounds like there are more important things for you right now, like your mental health and well-being. You should probably go for it if there's nothing stopping you. If there are things stopping you and there's no feasible way to work through them (financial constraints, culture, family commitments, etc.), you should seek someone you can talk to who can help you get a clearer picture of what you feel, where you are, and where you should go, like a therapist - it helps. In fact it's probably worth doing that whether you work in a grocery store or a corporate office. Good luck!
I'm going through similar feelings right now and I tend to bounce in and out of this state every couple of years. I think the root of it is depression and anxiety. I would seek mental health care before you make a life altering choice. If you had the flu you would go to the doctor, you wouldn't wake up and say wow I'm so tired I should quit my job. Mental health is no different. Medication, therapy, and changes to your routine can help and often quite quickly.
I'm not quite that bad, but I hate working in software. I'm on my 23rd year now. My goal that gets me through the day is to pay off the house and other debts and live a low-expense life. That will happen within 5 years. Once that is done, I only have to pull a few contracts a year and maybe work 3-6 months out of a year. Health insurance costs in the US murk the waters a bit.
I had this exact situation with numbers few weeks ago. Wasn’t able to figure out how much to pay for my groceries. It took five times for cashier to repeat until I understood. Felt like on other planet.
It started in January, affected my health in strange way. It’s my second week when don’t feel ill. Working from home works well, I didn’t lost my interest in engineering. But I don’t know what to do when I must sit in the office again. It’s hard to quit being single person who has a job in family.
I am not a pro giving advices, bet my email is in my profile. Talking makes it easier.
If it’s really that bad, why not just quit? The worst case is you’ll be forced to bag groceries out of necessity, and perhaps then you’ll have a newfound appreciation for the corporate job. All upside.
Have you been to therapy? Even if it's just to confirm that what you're experiencing is real and not in your head. It seems like it would do you some good.
it seems like it's really hard to be in that position. that must suck. I feel sorry for your that you're having that experience.
please quit your job. it sounds like otherwise you'll hit a crisis point where life comes in and forces you to make a change (like a real accident) if you feel it so strongly that you're having those feelings and thinking about it all the time please just go ahead and quit. It seems like life is giving you the signs and signals.
I know it's a hard time with work right now but sounds like you have some good support networks around you and from my own experience I can recommend working in small hospitality like the people are cool and when it's busy you get to pass the time, even as a waiter in a cafe or kitchen hand or dishwasher. I recommend against a grocery store unless it's a tiny deli or Bodega because you don't just have to work the cashier you have to pack the shelves and it's less engaging for you as a human than working in hospitality I think.
but at this moment maybe that's not the best suggestion. I don't know how you feel about factory work but I guess it's an option anyway best of luck please quit.
you got to honor how you feel about it right? otherwise who else is going to live your life if you don't.
My startup experience isn't quite the same as this, but it shares some aspects, and I've had some similar feelings in my lowest moments in the aftermath.
It's now almost six years since I walked away from my startup, and I left feeling some combination of exhaustion, shame, resentment, anger and sadness.
As time passed, and the fog has gradually lifted on the state I sometimes think of as "startup drunkenness", I've often cringed as I've thought back and wondered "ugh, what was I thinking?"
My main focus since then has been self-healing, personal development work.
Out of necessity, when conventional approaches like talk therapy didn't offer much relief or insight, I've ended up seeking and adopting some unconventional approaches to personal growth.
It's turned out to have been the most worthwhile thing I've done in my life.
I've been able to go deep in uncovering and resolving the issues in myself, that date back to well before my startup life, but that very much affected how things played out in my startup and in other aspects of my life.
Just as the writer of this piece has come to question the entire technology industry, my own journey has enabled me to see that whilst many of my problems originated within myself and my past experiences, many were just as much a case of being in a dysfunctional environment, and indeed a dysfunctional world.
But it's taken a lot of work to know how to tell the difference, and what to do about it.
My life now is pretty good, and has been on a steady improvement path for at least 5 years. All the key indicators in my life – relationship/family/friendships, health and career – are going well and getting better, though it's an ongoing effort to keep things improving, and of course external factors like the current crisis throw up complications none of us can avoid.
When I've written here about this topic in the past, people often reply asking for details about on the kinds of healing and development techniques I've used.
What I've said then and I'll say again here is that people are welcome to contact me and I'll be happy to share info with them directly.
But I also wonder if it's time to get more serious with a discussion about how we can build healthier companies.
As I've become healthier and more confident, I once again have the hunger to build companies, and am full of ideas on how to build them in such a way that they are great places to work and positive in their external impact.
But I'm just one person, with one perspective.
I'd love to hear from others who want to be part of an ongoing discussion about how we can build the kinds of companies and organisations we all wish existed.
Anyone is welcome to contact me about any of the above; email address is in my profile.
Meta response, but why do people write like this? I see this all over linked-in. Dramatic phrasing "But I'm just one person", coupled with the linebreak per line of text.
I see it as the emergence of post modernism in popular culture. People don't feel comfortable claiming knowledge of some 'truth' - relativism is too ingrained. You could say it derives from kindness and a desire not to impose nor offend; or (if you're Pascal Bruckner etc) an underconfidence in ourselves, our enlightenment.
Obviously, I'm extrapolating like crazy. But start to notice the 'my truth' qualifications - everyone does it now.
I write short paragraphs as they're easier to scan-read than long paragraphs.
And if you think that's dramatic phrasing, you should see the way I wrote back in my startup days 7+ years ago :)
My approach is to tread carefully and avoid seeming dogmatic. These are complex issues and discussions can easily go bad if they're not handled sensitively.
> Then I worked for a tech giant, and then for a high-growth unicorn. It shocked me how dilbertesque they both were. Full of politicians, and burnt out engineers in golden handcuffs who can't wait to get out, and meaningless business speak, and checked out employees who pretend they're "excited" about everything all the time. The young, wide-eyed engineers seem hopelessly naive to me now.
I don't know this person. I wasn't there. I don't know which tech giant.
Certainly there are plenty of stories of large multinationals with dilbertesque politics, and checked out zombies.
But something tells me that this author's experience was only because he was comparing it to the glory days of his own startup where everyone was intensely invested and engaged.
The truth is there is a middle ground: employment. You are engaged insofar as you receive a paycheck, and you want to do good work to continue getting that paycheck. But you also care enough to do a good job because you're human, and because you want a raise or a promotion, or even a cookie from your peers that says "go you". You probably also like the specific job more than you would other ones.
The loudest stories rise to the top of HN, but I think most professional industry is just this. That doesn't mean it's unhealthy. Politics has purpose.
And when you yourself are cynical, everyone else's excitement rings hollow and you think they are pretending and are actually checked out..
Also, depending on the place, a lot of the dilbertesque politics and process are just having a safe/more conservative culture. Getting buy in, satisfying stakeholders, making sure the safe happy protocol is followed - it's so you don't end up in a situation where a junior engineer is tasked with fixing production while you bleed $5k/minute and someone gets fired for it. Instead you blame the process and fix it methodically. That's arguably a lot better than cowbody devops.
At a startup, especially as a founder, you're encouraged to be a hero and give it your all partly because your incentives are really well aligned - if you succeed you could make $100mm or (a lot) more. As an employee, maybe you get fired or promoted, maybe your stock gains like 1% in value because of something you do or prevented... Some people are more checked out than others, but I agree, you're just an employee and it would be foolish to really put your heart and soul into your day job for most people
That is true to some extend for the employees’ motives, but the reality is that most just clearly don’t care beyond their paycheck or resume building.
Even the leadership doesn’t want to do what is best for the company/product, but what is best for themselves. It’ll be dressed up nicely of course, but that doesn’t change the reality of the thing.
> Instead you blame the process and fix it methodically.
You blame the process, but are unwilling to really change it, so you just keep repeating the same kind of fixes ad nauseam.
> Getting buy in, satisfying stakeholders, making sure the safe happy protocol is followed - it's so you don't end up in a situation where a junior engineer is tasked with fixing production
Its also so you can get the thing you really want by sacrificing the thing you don't care about. You get to maintain longer term relationships which lowers people's defensiveness and allows you to move more liquid through the pipes because there aren't people limiting your flow out of defensiveness or because they don't believe in what you're doing.
I think the middle ground can be a great place to work in tech, all it takes is one other person to work with that is willing to care about the things you achieve together.
Typical examples include our dysfunctional regression testing days. Tedium and pain when given the task alone and the person in change is just waiting to hear it's done. Bearable and in fact a shared challenge when you work through it together, with some small elements of process thrown in, and ended with credit given for getting the painful but necessary task done.
Even if a different person sitting near to you is checked out. I actually like to take my job satisfaction and rub it in their face a little.
I feel like a lot of times when people complain about a company politics, it's only because they are on the losing side of the issue. When it works in their favor it's just the company culture.
Mentally, I've started replacing complaints about politics with "nobody is listening to me".
I'm constantly witnessing silly political battles, regardless of whether I have skin in the game. If you've ever done consulting work and joined a project midway through you'll immediately receive a healthy dose of it.
I suspect decent companies are rarer than you think. I spent quite a few years doing short term contracts (usually 1-2 weeks) and out of all the places I visited there were only a couple that I'd consider working for.
In the old days, people went to church, played sports or bought a new pair of $300 sneakers to find fulfillment. Maybe bootcamps need a liberal arts or sports track.
How long will this hangover from change-the-world-itis last?
I think the fundamental flaw is trying to be 'successful'. Playing that game invariably requires you to pretend to be what you think the market wants.
I would suggest you think about building something you want that you find fun. If you're a scuba diver, build a dive computer. If you're a woodworker make a tool for making the best use of a board. The most important thing is you absolutely don't plan on making it a world-changing multi-billion dollar anything. Make it, even sell it if you want, and enjoy the ride.
For most people it's not about trying to be successful. It's about not having to be stressed out daily about basic needs like home, health, transport, kids upbringing etc. Unfortunately it all costs a lot of money these days, which makes you take a compromise for the sake of security for you and your closest relatives.
This is why normal, sane, people will put up with the Dilbert-esque world of business. They only have a month's savings and they have a mortgage and two kids to feed.
I share zackbloom's view that OP overly tried to be (financially) successful. Instead the ultra fast pace and high pressure of a VC backed startup he could have bootstrapped and instead of the soulcrushing corporate job he could have worked at a small company where there is no politics and people care about each other and their craft.
I don't know if OP deliberately chose to chase money, but he did and now complains that he lost his passion for technology. Yes, the other options leave you only with half or even less of the income but you will remain happy and can have a fulfilling work environment. With a software development job you will have a comfortable income no matter where you work so "i needed the money" is not an excuse.
> It's about not having to be stressed out daily about basic needs like home, health, transport, kids upbringing etc.
That is a problem that is better solved with politics than with technology. There is enough in the world that if we shared more, most people would not have to worry about these things. (I say most, solving for "all" is more difficult)
But let's be honest. Work isn't always going to be fun. Not having to stress about things is not going to make Dilbert-style corporations enjoyable. Just keep smiling and be happy you are not plowing the ground with an Ox.
> There is enough in the world that if we shared more, most people would not have to worry about these things. (I say most, solving for "all" is more difficult)
This is the state we are in now already - most people, as long as they have jobs, don't have to worry about these things.
People will say you're burned out, and they're not wrong... but this doesn't address the substance of the issue. To be an engineer or a scientist today means tolerating a lot of the things you've mentioned. I would amend your list to engineers that had a passion for EE and value human life (who doesn't?) but took a job at Raytheon. The things you identify are valid issues. If you're worn so thin you can't ignore them, it has the effect of ruining your entire relationship with the art. The thing to remember is that this is not the fundamental nature of science or engineering, but the nature of practicing these things today under the framework in which we live. From there, maybe you can find places where you can practice your art which are less prone to these issues. You may have to compromise on career stability or pay. People are rarely paid well to do fun, low stress things. Maybe the best thing to do is stay out of tech professionally, and slowly ease back into programming as a hobby by working on small projects. I'm not sure. All I know is that with burnout it's somewhat challenging to untoast toast, but you will recover eventually. It's just always a bit slower than one would hope, but it does happen.
Another angle perhaps is working on clarifying to yourself the ways in which you got hurt, so programming may feel less painful. I found that learning about politics and history-- specifically the history of engineering-- really helped me sort out my feelings. It also gives a sense of clarity of where the rotten parts come from and maybe how to avoid them.
David Graeber's Bullshit jobs might be an alright place to start. I also just enjoy indulging in the history of places like Tektronix in the 1960s by reading oscilloscope repair manuals... learning about Bell Labs, the Rad lab. It's nice to read about healthy engineering cultures to believe such a thing is possible.
This book really makes you appreciate all of the "things" we have today and how much goes into making everything. It is also humbling to me to know that every tool we have no matter how accurate was made with tools that were less accurate. Remember we started from literally rocks.
Does someone have something similar for the history of computers?
To completely stop doing tech professionally, or to ignore everything, to build up thick skin, and say "it's up to other people how my inventions are used."
I'm curious to what you think is the fundamental nature of science and engineering. Is science only intellectual curiosity just for the sake of it?
I've been working as an engineer in high paced roles at one of the FANGs for about 15 years now. I've gone through ups-and-downs in terms of what I call "creative energy", which I will refer to as coding "mojo".
1. You have a limited amount of mojo that you can throw at a problem. When you're young, this focus and energy is easy. You can throw it at problems that you may not be that vested in for a reward like money. It's also easy to recover. These times are great.
2. As you get older, mojo will become more cyclical. When you're in the troughs it will be difficult to focus your energy on a problem if you're not that vested with it. When you work on projects that fail, this will be extremely draining. At this stage, you will need to build "refresh" mechanisms into your schedule. It will help to work on non-tech yet creative passions on the side that have easy to reach end-states. I personally had this successfully going for over a decade.
3. Sometimes instead of being cyclical, your mojo will just totally flat-line. Sometimes it was too many death-march projects, sometimes it's personal health related, dealing with aging family members, or the stress of being a parent. If you haven't built in a refresh cycle that works for you yet, it's going to be very difficult to get your mojo flowing again. At this point more drastic measures are necessary. One piece of advice I heard was "take a break until you get really bored again."
After joining a project a few years ago that caused me to sacrifice my "refresh cycle", I found myself quickly in #3 as well. I wish I had better advice, but I'm planning to take some extended time off from the grind. [Advice to younger devs: this lifestyle requires active maintenance on your part to sustain and you won't know about this until it's too late. Save up and plan for a mid-career break.] I'm planning on working on some fun projects to expose me to new technology stacks and try to see what problems I can get excited about again and do some self-investments to open up alternative career paths. [I've always considered "retiring" into education at some point but maybe I'll play with a few different self-employment ideas first.]
There is an obscure Russian book on creativity and talent, “On the nature of Talent / The boy who could fly” by Igor Akimov and Victor Klimenko (1988), that explores the concept of “energy potential”-- the thing that you call “mojo”. It resonated with me 20 years ago, and it resonates now, after a re-reading.
Here are some quotes from that book. Please excuse my rough translation:
When the creator is larger than the task, he is OK -- he has no need to exercise his willpower or to spur himself.
When the creator is equal to the task (e.g. the shape of the chair he is designing causes him discomfort but he cannot figure out why exactly), the willpower wakes up and stands behind his back, expecting an assignment. If the creator has enough energy, the willpower just states, “here’s the task, no need to rush -- we’ll solve it, no need to worry”. But if the creator has low energy, the willpower rolls up the sleeves in order to gather up missing energy.
When the creator is smaller than the task, he’d better step aside, or the task will crush him.
If the creator’s energy is depleted, peace of mind is a godsend to him.
The ability to solve problems (the structure of the creator's soul) is not affected by any external conditions, nor by time. That’s why no matter how hard life tries to crush the creator, he cannot be crushed. To uplift him, there’s no need to pump him up with energy externally. All he needs to do is to muster up just a bit of strength to lift his eyelids -- and notice the task. Seeing the task is his salvation. Squash the smallest task -- swat! and it’s gone. No problem that the task was small: a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The subsequent task will be easier for him -- because he’s already moving, he has some momentum. And so his energy level begins to rise.
But if he wastes his energy potential, he loses himself. No protection: he is vulnerable all around, and even if nobody is intending to hurt him, he sees malicious intentions in every word, gesture or action, however well-intentioned.
Our energy capacity increases in only two cases:
1. When our energy is expended during creative labor.
2. When our energy is expended during physical exercise, resulting in pleasant tiredness.
Means of increasing our energy potential:
1. Positive emotions.
2. Motion / movement.
3. Solving problems.
Sounds like an interesting book. Not sure if I agree with the first point though. If the task is smaller than the creator no potential is being explored, no boundary being tested, no growth attained. It is going to feel like an unsatisfying chore.
1. It's going to be different for everyone. I think it should be activities that leave you feeling physically and mentally refreshed. Learning a new musical instrument and mountain climbing helped myself. I have had other coworkers who found a lot of value in learning to dance.
2. Be realistic about the fact you need a mental break. Avoid burning yourself out anymore than you already are. Discuss your strategy and reasoning with your family so it's not a shock to them and have a plan on how to cover finances and health-care.
Many of us engineers fancy ourselves as artisans who get to avoid working that 2nd job to pay for our art.
But the reality is that we pay the bill inside the companies we work for. Our art has to meet certain deadlines and specifications decided by others. We have to spend time in meetings about nothingness. Whether we get funded still comes down to dollars for value, with the exception that instead of the grants artists get, we call it salary.
Very little in life can be extracted from the fact that we must provide value to others and often on their terms, even if that value is doing little but filling up their meeting so they look very in charge.
I solve this by having a good book on my phone for when I am in meetings and ensuring that there are always many things I am doing beyond my job. There is plenty of opportunity for the purely fun "let's build something cool" type of engineering outside of work that can still contribute to your career.
Is technology the reason to wake in the morning, or is it curiosity that drives you?
Technology is a great place to find something new and interesting. And hey, there's lots of money to be made, and hopefully you've done well already. But curiosity can be for anything. Step away from technology. Find people doing things you don't understand, but look interesting. Try planting something. Read about history, archeology, psychology, philosophy. Visit museums. Technology and your relationship with it is like staying too long with someone you were in love with. Only over time can you rekindle the friendship, but for now your post is screaming out that you need space.
Many of us work with people whom we have never met in person, building products that are not real, to fill the needs of strangers whose jobs should unquestionably not exist. Furthermore, sometimes it feels impossible to do creative work on the side, as every input and output that is part of the process becomes a commodity to be tracked and sold. The Machine has not stopped. And it won't.
I think we are all sprinting towards an ambiguous neurological disaster. The more you think about the signs and symptoms, the harder it becomes to envision a future scenario, a future Self, where you stay in tech and do not burn out intellectually, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
The longer I work online, the more I understand how a digitally mediated life insulates us from the human experience. The question we all have to meditate on is whether the lifestyle benefits of working in tech, working remotely, outweigh the longterm negative effects on the psyche and the soul.
What you write sounds alarmingly familiar to me. It's probably not as simple as just calling it "burnout", but that may be one component of what you're going through.
I also learned the hard way that it's important to look after myself. And it took way too long when looking back today.
You seem to have invested way too much of yourself into this and maybe you have lost track of what's really important in life.
There's a lot of good advice and insights in this thread. You have good reason for feeling this way, and all of the paths people have suggested - ways to move on and stay in tech; how to leave tech entirely; how to make it a hobby instead of a job; or some other middle ground - are valid ways to address this problem.
But, I may suggest an additional option: do something about it. Build a business that eschews VC culture, or become a VC who doesn't fit in among their blood-sucking peers. Run for office, and use those resources to address these problems. Teach other how to avoid these mistakes. You may have found your big problem to solve - put that engineering intellect towards deliberately, systematically solving the problems which burned you. That problem-solving attitude you learned for writing programs can be applied to other problems, too.
This is the most difficult solution to your feelings, and no one would fault you for taking any of the other paths suggested in this thread. But, if you're up for it, you could make a real impact and I think you would find it very rewarding.
Thank you, I will consider it. I wonder what subset of these problems can be solved, and what subset is a fixed property of the human experience. I don't know yet. This is a massive problem, and a business is likely not the right vehicle to solve it. Political office might be, but everyone (myself included) seems disillusioned with that too. I'll think about it.
A bit depressing (and I don't even work in tech anymore!), but I think he nailed it - it's the rat race. It applies to anyone right now who feels stuck in a job with no meaning.
The whole album addresses this topic, it's very Pink Floyd-ian in the story that it tells through a nearly continuous track. "Pictures of Cats" is one of my favorites, an elegy for the 24/7 cycle of bad news and the toll it takes on us. Definitely worth a listen.
The complaints are human behavior rather than technology, or the culture around it. There are places that are better than others, but you're going to encounter self interest and "dilbertesque" behavior everywhere.
Personally, I view learning to deal with work is an emotional skill you have to develop. Even if you get a job doing math all day in a research position, you need to be ready for the usual academic politics problems.
Plus learning to recognize toxic environments and avoid them.
There's a lot of investors and companies that no one should ever work with because of this. Learning to recognize them is a tricky skill and some people are better off not playing the game at all.
There are more people in large organizations now, but the problems of greedy financiers and goofy bureaucratic behaviors go back thousands of years. I'm sure there is some subset of Dilbert comics that ancient Chinese officials would have found funny.
You are correct, and humans have been greedy, manipulative, and self-centered since the beginning of time. We often don't even see it in ourselves. I'm sure many of these people who contributed to his disillusionment probably thought they weren't too bad...especially when compared with some other person!
Pure toxic more common in webtech, gaming, and IT than other places. Although toxic webtech culture is kinda bleeding into software in general. Big corp and gov have different issues.
I hope this isn't controversial, but it's perfectly fine to dislike technology and even avoid it. There are technophiles and there are technophobes. Those who are attracted to technology and those who aren't. Some of us would like to live in London or New York, others want country life. Some of us love surfing and beaches, others climb the mountains.
There are PLENTY of things to dislike about the tech industry. More importantly, there are plenty of things to dislike about YOURSELF inside the tech bubble. So there isn't the right answer what you should or shouldn't do. Listen to yourself and that's your starting point.
I can share my personal experience. Generally speaking, I am a technophobe. I prefer old things that are hard to break. I understand that my dislike for the technology comes from the fact that I become too dependent on it (in multiple ways, including financially). I absolutely HATE this feeling. If you change the focus from 'technology' to 'yourself', you'll probably start understanding what exactly you dislike so much.
I think the only answer here is to stop clinging onto this 'life' you have.
The optimism you're seeking comes from looking forward to today, right now. Right here, right now.
Everything is the present moment. If you do not find yourself in the present moment - this could be due to the weight of money, weight of the future, weight of obligations - then abandon it all.
You don't need anything. Just reclaim the time that is yours. If you have enough runway for a year, that's all you need. Think about it. Would you rather have 20 more years of this 'hint of dissatisfaction', or just one year of bliss? If not bliss, at least closer to what once was, where we all come from. Just people trying to have fun and not think of larger consequences.
I would get off of anti-depressants, too.
I did throw everything away. I walked away from ~$10M, so this isn't the problem.
To live in the present moment one has to unsee the cant. That's the difficult part. How to keep the mind from focusing on all the bullshit that it can't unsee. The burnout, the disillusionment, the politics, the faded friendships. That's what's hard.
Don't go off of anti-depressants and don't stop going to therapy.
My burnout got so bad that I was starting to forget words and had a difficult time remembering short term tasks. I had trouble sleeping. My thoughts were cloudy and it became difficult to stay productive.
Therapy has given me the tools and framework to develop habits and patterns of thinking to cope with my burnout.
If I had been prescribed anti-depressants I wouldn't hesitate to be on them.
Unchecked, who knows how bad it could have gotten.
I can relate to a lot of the things you've stated. I won't get into the specifics but I understand your experience of working at a tech giant.
In my case, I decided to try to "play the game" for a while. After a few years, I realized clout, money, and the things it afforded were ultimately meaningless to me.
Things like mentoring young engineers, hobbies, and organizing local student hackathons definitely took the edge off. But ultimately so much of it, even the things for the community, was ego-driven. Trying to make the world a better place, a lot of the time, is ultimately ego-driven.
I tried many things but only found lasting peace in turning to God. Jesus died for your sins and I can testify that having faith in Him has lead me to a new, more meaningful life.
Life isn't necessarily easier, but every day is imbued with tremendous meaning.
You're clearly thoughtful, probably competent, and without a doubt, the Lord has a plan for your life. You just have to take the first step and accept Him as your savior.
My emails are always open.
Good luck, I am praying that you coming out of this season stronger than before.
We were all born spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1-3)
When we're dead spiritually, we're disconnected from the presence of God because of our sins.
Jesus' sacrifice made it possible to be brought back to spiritual life. By believing in Him, He wipes our sins clean. This is what it means to be saved :) (John 3:16)
How has turning to God changed your life? Did it change what you do or how you view the things you do? In other words, would your life look the same to an outside observer but there has been an internal shift in your mind?
It changed my heart.
Our actions stream outward from the motivations of our heart.
Prior to turning to God the motivations in my heart were shaped by societal constructs of success as a man. (Ephesians 2:1-3) Particularly influenced via hip-hop, tech, and stoicism.
My actions stemmed from that. I was moderately successful in material terms but the emptiness persisted. Moreover, my actions were hurting relationships I cared about because the motivation of my heart, however outwardly altruistic, ended up being self-centered.
Accepting Jesus as my savior started a change of heart. The motivation in my heart is now loving God and loving my neighbor as I love myself (Mark 12:30-31) and acting accordingly. It's a gradual process and I still have things to work through. But He has helped me overcome materialism, lust, and is (strongly) helping me overcome pride.
I don't want to speak for outside observers, but my dad and many old friends have commented on the change. Walking with the Lord is a completely different life for me. It's freedom.
I get what you mean. It's hard to let go of these realities we see. I see it all the time in my corp. And I am convinced, too, that it's hard to do fun/interesting things in technology. It honestly baffles me at times, how we just throw away our time so recklessly, so soullessly. We spend years and years in some place, and eventually all that we used to have dissolves. No more friendships, community, family, everything is just ulterior motives.
Instead of seeing what did happen, let's look at what may happen again. Maybe you find it hard to start coding again for you enjoy the collaboration part the most, and yet you imagine most people willing to rip your spine out for some money instead of making something cool for this time we have left.
Maybe it's fear of embracing the unknown. The reason people are in the golden handcuffs is because they always want to hold onto tomorrow - a tomorrow that may never come. And it's easy to forget we all disappear from this place someday. Money helps forget that. But the unknown is where the excitement is.
Either way, I think instead of ignoring those 'cants' one may want to instead avoid them at all costs. I can see why they seem like a reality, and because it often does become a reality. People are so vile, greedy, self-centered - even ourselves at times. The best way out is to forget all the incidentals of making a company. Maybe you can try doing bootstrapped stuff, so VCs don't exploit you.
I believe the spark can only alight through forgetting all of the larger goals. If you push yourself away from the premise of making money - maybe doing open source software - then you can avoid these people that prop up this disillusionment.
The cynicism you'll have to struggle with is finding the people worth the time. I have the same trouble. It's extremely hard. Only through a willing heart can you find those people that don't just want your money. We're going to be alone a lot, so it's about finding what makes you fine with the silence.
And most importantly, a long, long break from everything will help you find your flow again. Most of your day is sunk into another job, and it's hard to make sense of anything when most of your time is spent elsewhere.
These are just my conclusions. And to not appear like I'm all talk, I am in the same situation. I haven't even opened my work laptop today. I just don't care anymore. I'm looking forward to being fired.
> we just throw away our time so recklessly, so soullessly.
> No more friendships, community, family, everything is just ulterior motives.
> The reason people are in the golden handcuffs is because they always want to hold onto tomorrow - a tomorrow that may never come.
> People are so vile, greedy, self-centered - even ourselves at times.
> These are just my conclusions.
Just an observation, but these conclusions of yours seem to to revolve a lot around judging and directing resentment at other peoples' priorities and the authenticity of their motivations.
In particular, family, community and friendships are things
that help people get through their otherwise mundane workdays. For many, they're not lies or illusions, but rather, the very things that make dealing w/ occasional BS in the professional world worthwhile.
Perhaps it's a sign that you might benefit from more focus on yourself and your own process and purpose, instead of focusing on others, whose purpose and process you can't control.
I made an account just to say thank you to you - parent, and the original poster, and all the others I had read here. And to share my story.
I had the jobs I loved for a very long time (even being in the same corp; and even if jobs were hard). And then the job I loved rather abruptly ended. And I ended up in a job that isn’t exciting for me. And, there is a fair amount of politics and egos. But it pays well and is super flexible. And it’s not too dreadful - more like “meh, okay”. And worse - the alternatives aren’t more exciting either. So in a way - just a cynical way to look at having a luxury problem at hands, I guess.
So I focus on the things I can enjoy here and now, to stay in the moment, while keeping the eyes open for something that I can believe in. I find myself hard problems that I try to solve - yet do not have the pressure to, have little quick side projects, and do one hour of high intensity training every day. I focus on my family and friends outside of work (in the past years I gained a few) It helps.
But I think the reason of this state, is not just doing too much work - it’s that we need something to believe in, something to allow ourselves relax, and show child-like curiosity and emotions for. It’s having more control, if you wish, in some sense, or illusion thereof.
The modern world is so much make-pretend in an attempt to optimize everything, so judgemental, so result-oriented and transactional, that after a while it’s hard to find something “pure”, worth believing in and following. And especially hard after seeing a few cycles, to get excited about another one, people chasing the next holy grail...
Some people would get into a religion, it would definitely help me more if I could. But I can’t.
I have been also reading.
Of the many books that I have read to try to figure myself out - “the new earth”, “the brain that changes itself” and “thinking in systems” are probably among the ones that I would recommend the most. (Of course, the first one has some kind of association behind it, and the second does promote a brain-training app - science based. But it’s nice to see the reasons clear :-) Only the third one is “pure“ - but once you read it, you realize the entirety of the world is just a giant pile of interconnected systems on many levels, and you are back to square 1... :-)
I've been there. Burned out so hard I thought I had brain damage. You can't unsee what you have seen, you have to integrate and accept it. Depressing as it is to know how sick the industry is and how many sociopaths there are lurking you have to let go. You have to accept it, trying to unsee it will just make it worse.
It takes time because you will start to see it in other places too. I used to get triggered by TV programs or reading the news but these days Its just one of many thoughts. I've come to accept all the implications and let them unfold over time as my mind kept returning, ruminating. Eventually you will come to terms with it.
It's important to allow time to process as well as not spending all your time ruminating. Balance is the key. Keep living the best life you can but go easy on yourself.
The upside of this whole thing is you are wiser now. As time goes on and you process everything more you will become wiser still. It's tempting to become cynical and it's ok if you are for a while but the world is still full of wonder and hope and beauty, seek it out. There are still good people even in the darkest of times.
It's hard. but also easy. letting go. like dropping a cup from your hand.. it falls. but it's hard. so hard. the easiest thing in the world. to let go. is also really hard.
so you have to work at it. retrain you brain.
they have a system for this. it's called meditation.
and i need to do it more.
it's all about, whenever thoughts and feeling come up, bring your awareness back to the present moment. maybe by focusing on your breath, on the empty space around you, on a point. you will fail. again and again. mind will drift. keep bringing it back gently. that's all meditation is. sit there in stillness and bring your heart and mind to be in the present.
eventually, this happens even when you're not in sitting there meditating. so the past hold less sway, you walk away from it. remember, those thoughts and feeling, they are yours, but they are not you. you are something else.
your are what watches. so, just observe. but to do this, is so hard.
I also discovered, even meditation is not a cure. if there is karma you need to address, unfinished business, conversations which need to be had, something incomplete, you need to work that out and take some action. meditation is good for giving you super powers, and letting go of (parts of) things that are already complete, but which for whatever reason, your brain and limbic system has overconsolidated.
As long as the primary motivator remains profit, rather than increasing the averages person Quality of life, technology will be used to replace people to their detriment, rather than to their advantage.
I'm sorry I have no good reason for you why you shouldn't be depressed. I'm afraid, depression might be the appropriate reaction to the state of things.
I'm afraid, depression might be the appropriate reaction to the state of things.
The trouble with modern work is it's so intangible, there is no physical product at the end, no machine restored to working order, no field ploughed, just a pile of bits shifted around.
I keep saying it here, I think for most of us we would be better off dropping the side projects and instead doing something with our hands. It might be baking bread, playing with Lego, woodwork, DIY, anything away from the keyboard.
If I'm not mistaken it was Marx who said that people would be alienated from their product as they could not own the product created by their labor.
So yeah, well before 'digitalization' but after industrialization I suppose. Hence we'd have to go back in time quite a bit (at least in Europe) to be pre-industrialized to not be distant from the product of labor.
Even if profit is removed technology will still remain and shackle producers to production lines for the benefit of others by stripping away the autonomy of every individual though.
I don't think it's just "profit" that's the problem.
Whether you provide all of the basic needs for a man and he farms for others, or whether you provide him a wage.. it's all the same in the sense of removing his autonomy.
You'll notice from the writer's essay that he started to become "more happy" when he was able to exercise some autonomy without all of the pressure.
this does seem like burnout but there is something else at play here.
something which i have felt quite a lot is that in the 90s a lot of programming was creative and fun. it was to challenge authority.
it created things like winamp.. it really whips the llama's ass. when is the last time you heard of a recent startup with a title like that?
nowadays everyone around me is working on startups or talking to investors where they are simply falling in line.
the good old hacker spirit and the sheer disdain for authority and a great sense of wonder has gone. i see young kids, interns studying like crazy to get into faang, which drives me crazy.
in the 90s we didn't have that... there was only cool software like winamp... that too for free.. tell me a software as cool as that since ;)
In the 90's, programming was not as cumbersome (today it's building on top a bunch of volatile APIs that are obsolete every few years) and more rewarding (fewer people, projects, so more fame for everyone).
There's also much more public knowledge about much easier ways to make money these days. Why slave away in a dilbertesque environment when you can just stream your gaming sessions on Twitch or so... So of course those who find a normal tech job hard and exhausting will be discouraged at some point.
This might be it. In the 90s, tech was certainly non-conformist; you had a skill that not many people knew about; you could do magic! Now it's the opposite. If you behave and pretend to like the right people, there's a very slight chance you can retire early. Most likely, you'll just spend your years being a phony. Antithetical to the spirit of the 70s, 80s and 90s tech scene.
The same thing that has happened to every cool thing, we sold out. We are now an industry. I'm sure my 15-year old self would be bummed to hear that but hey, that guy didn't have bills to pay or kids to feed.
It is here in HN that I first heard Pablo Neruda's "No culpes a nadie". Even though a fan of Neruda I somehow had missed this. Perhaps this speaks to you something too:
## Don't Blame Anyone
Never complain about anyone, nor anything,
because basically you have done
what you wanted in your life.
Accept the difficulty of improving yourself
and the courage to start changing yourself.
The triumph of the true man emerges from
the ashes of his mistake.
Never complain about your loneliness or your
luck, face it with courage and accept it.
In one way or another it is the outcome of
your acts and the thought that you always
have to win.
Don't be embittered by your own failure or
blame it on another, accept yourself now or
you'll keep making excuses for yourself like a child.
Remember that any time is
a good time to begin and that nobody
is so horrible that they should give up.
Don't forget that the cause of your present
is your past, as well as the cause of your
future will be your present.
Learn from the bold, the strong,
those who don't accept situations, who
will live in spite of everything. Think less in
your problems and more in your work and
your problems, without eliminating them, will die.
Learn how to grow from the pain and to be
greater than the greatest of those
obstacles. Look at yourself in the mirror
and you will be free and strong and you will stop
being a puppet of circumstances because you
yourself are your own destiny.
Arise and look at the sun in the mornings
and breathe the light of the dawn.
You are part of the force of your life;
now wake up, fight, get going, be decisive
and you will triumph in life. Never think about
luck because luck is
the pretext of losers.
That is not a Neruda poem. It is apocryphal. Pablo,ever the communist, would have never written such a piece of libertarian crap.I am surprised that such a fan of Neruda as you claim to be did not notice that.
I was about to share it with people claiming it was from Neruda. I did a bit of searching and it appears that it is indeed apocryphal. Thanks for saving me the embarrassment.
I barely know anything about Neruda, and i was thinking... geez, I thought he was known as a good poet, did he really write that garbage? Maybe it lost something in translation? Whether you 'agree' with what it's apparently didactically trying to say or not, that's just a bad poem.
Perhaps you in your limited understanding of communism, fed to your by your propagandist overlords to control you, have failed to understand how someone could hold both views. Or maybe you just don't get people. multitudes.
Either way, it's a fact. Protip: this is the part where you see reality and update your perspective
I've got a bit of perspective on this outside the technology area.
When I was young, I loved being outside, camping, hiking, being in the forest, learning about plants and animals, foraging for berries and stuff. I ended up going to school for biology and ecosystems mangement. I worked on a few scientific studies, the stuff I actually liked, then ended up helping manage a long term research and education project. Suddenly, we were dealing more with money, government organizations other biologists. We ended up getting sucked into a bunch of politics, had our grant money and data held hostage by the government, dealt with shady corporations who didnt give a fuck. I watched lots of money get wasted on nothing on other projects simply to make companies look good while real problems went unaddressed and ignored.
Came to learn of the chain off command, the biologists that officially must sign off on work who do nothing but collect money for signing their name on a paper and tend to be in the pockets of mining companies, logging companies, the gas oil industries and again give no fucks outside getting that sweet pay cheque for writing their name on a paper. We were threatened with loss of funding after finding an endangered species on an active mine site and deciding to share the data publicly.
I just generally came to realize, that all the science and saving the world I'd wanted to do, didn't really matter to the people who funded this work or to governments in general and I became fairly jaded to it all. I seen renowned biologists steal grant money from volunteer organizations and shit like that. Hell I even met David Suzuki, turns out he's like any other celebrity, as soon as the camera's off the caring stops.
Reality just ended up being so different and souless compared do everything I'd learned in school. I just don't have any motivation to continue with it. Since then i've gone on to do other things, and I've found them a lot more fulfilling than that thing I thought I wanted to do and enjoyed as a child.
Lots of great comments here and on the gist. My 2¢:
I graduated CS in 2000, and from 2007-2010 worked at Google. Towards the end of that time I was struggling hard to get anything done; even just dragging myself into the office was difficult. I began to believe I really was an imposter: good at programming contests, interviewed well, but incapable of actually accomplishing anything. That spring I quit, and spent the summer volunteered at a dance camp, where I worked 12h a day doing mostly manual labour. I had never been happier or more hard-working; the only thing that could dent my productivity in the slightest was if the kitchen ran low on grub.
I seriously doubted I would ever go back to working with software again. I had no desire to do it whatsoever; indeed, I had lost confidence in my ability to hack any kind of actual job.
For the next seven years I did a lot of dancing, traded my skills as a photographer for passes & expenses attend events I wanted to go to, volunteered doing manual labour and A/V work in the summers, and eventually started teaching dancing locally. The latter at least brought in a little income, though not nearly enough.
During those years I did (checks spreadsheet) a mere 18 hours of coding spread over a dozen days - mostly writing small tools to automate my photo editing workflow.
Then, in 2016, a good friend of mine proposed to more or less create a job for me, working on what might be described as a modern rewrite of LambadMOO. It was my dream job, offered to me on a plate, but I wasn't sure I dare take it. Fortunately he didn't take no for an answer, started back in 2017 and three years later I am doing better than I have in a long, long time.
Sure: I'm still a lazy bugger (here I am on HN instead of coding!) and there are days when I don't get much done. And I'm more like a 1x programmer. But I love this project, have worked harder on it than anything else I've ever had as a job, and am so grateful to have been reminded how much I enjoy programming (at least when I am working on something that I care about).
Because of the economic situation my contract is likely to end in the autumn. I am genuinely doubtful about finding something else as fun and motivating as this has been—but I no longer worry that no tech work will ever interest me again, or that I'm no longer capable of feeding myself with my technical skills.
As someone who took three years off once to backpack, came back, and who is disillusioned again, I guess my one piece of advice is to not have kids while you're working in tech.
If you do, you immediately get used to the income, and then you get addicted. Not in a "high" sense, but you start expecting the best things for your kids. And then you're stuck for the next 20 years.
I'd say spend the first five years with kids in a lower-income role (assuming that's where you are now). Get used to that. Then if you're tempted by tech career again you can try it out and jump back out if you want.
> Has anyone been through this who managed to recover their optimism and creative spirit? Please help me. What can I do?
Have you tried helping someone? If not, find someone who needs help, then help them.
This seems to be a good way to hack past the kind of burnout you're talking about.
It's best if the thing a person needs help with is something you like to do (or once liked to do). It won't even seem like you're helping them, but you will be. Even better if the person needs help with something you've wanted to learn how to do but never could manage fit in.
A magical thing happens when you help someone. You forget about yourself. Maybe for only a little while, but that can really help reset what's not working in life.
There are so many ways to help people. You can help them online, pseudonymously if you prefer. You can help them publicly. You can volunteer to do something for an organization that has things that need to be done.
Kids need a lot of help. The elderly need a lot of help. Recently unemployed people need a lot of help. There are organization serving all of them, and they can all use your help.
It sounds like you have skills and experience that could help a lot of people. You may have already helped someone just by sharing your own experience that happens to overlap with someone else's.
People in this thread are complaining about how bad work is, but I believe school is even worse.
With work, you're at least not a "slave". You're (mostly) allowed to quit if it gets really bad, and you're ultimately responsible for where you work, what industry etc. With school (I'm thinking from primary to high-school here), you have no right to decide on anything. If you're learning things that don't interest you in the slightest, have to spend most of your time doing pointless, boring work and are surrounded by people you either don't like or actively hate... well... deal with it. Your age isn't yet greater than <insert magical number here>, so you're not allowed to decide for yourself. There's nothing you can do, especially if your parents aren't willing to listen. As long as there's no violence/abuse, the state won't step in, and all attempts at rebellion will be promptly squashed. Even if your parents do listen and let you go to school somewhere else, it's usually not that different. The curriculum is standardized, so you still learn the same boring stuff, and if you are somehow out of the norm (this matters for teenagers a lot), you will be, no matter where you go. I'm a blind person who has lived through this in secondary. I've known a lot of people in similar situations, blind people, LGBT people, people from different racial/ethnic backgrounds etc. There have even been cases where that kind of situation let to suicide.
You can't let work be your whole life or it's going to eat you up. Everyone should read how things are done at Joel's company. Joel spolsky knows how to create a responsible work environment that is sustainable that won't burn out engineers. Here is his key advice: 20 hours of your work week you spend on your SE studies + medition/rest/yoga + administrative stuff + meetings. the other 20 hours is on coding. If you're doing more than 40 hours per week, your not sustainable, and you need to do something to change that. Working at a start up is no excuse, not enough runway is no excuse. The only time you should be working more than 40 hours a week is if you own the freakin company or at least 30% of it.
What do you want out of work, friends and stability or risk and glory?
Work is an inherently ego driven, protection from death task by stacking more human and capital cost onto the problem of death. You can find friends in that, but it's not a stable social relationship.
You're not burnt out, in the sense that you got burned. You seem to be handling that fine (write down your conflicts though!), it seems more like you ran out of fuel for the fire. The sparks are still being created but there's nothing to burn.
Get into the 'why' behind art, the symbols, the inspirations for techniques, it's a great indicator where other souls found fuel to burn. Find another part of your life that gives you enough fuel input to start a new fire. Snap a branch off your culture's hierarchy or history and use it as a second stick to your own stick and start a brush fire. If you're single find something your lovers want burnt off.
I think you're starting again with real skills and experience this time. If you're the kind of guy that needs to be burning, all the comments about the cycles of business, numbers, money and all that are not going to work for you.
> If you're the kind of guy that needs to be burning, all the comments about the cycles of business, numbers, money and all that are not going to work for you.
No, they are not.
As to the rest of your post, I get your metaphors, but the path from understanding the metaphors to understanding how to turn that understanding into action is longer than you might think.
Could you give specific examples from your own life or from the lives of others? What does it mean to write down your conflicts? Is it writing down what all the subpersonalities want that's usually conflicting? And what do I then do with it? What does it mean to snap a branch off your culture's hierarchy or history? Become an activist? What does it mean to burn off what my lovers want burnt off? So far I've only burnt off what my lovers wanted me to keep, which is why they're not lovers anymore.
I appreciate your advice, but I need more specific guidance for it to work. Would you be willing to take the time to write that here? Also, could you tell a little bit of your own story? Who are you? What is your life like? (I'm not just asking out of curiosity; in this case it's important to know for the advice to work)
Are you disillusioned with technology, or with the business of technology?
In my experience, the term "business" is short for "the business of exploitation". Exploitation is ugly, and I've had experiences that can be compared to yours.
Our occupation (if you're doing it right - and few are) is masochistic in nature. You suffer to grow, and you grow to suffer (sometimes quite a bit more) for greater pursuits next time. It's the definition of type 2+ fun (https://www.tetongravity.com/story/adventure/the-three-and-a...). If you did the type of things I do, it would be easy to see our primary job as the application of self-discipline to mitigate emotional and existential pain caused by consistently pushing your limits (past your fatigue plateau); and the creation of new solutions are side effects of the mental blender you are capable of holding yourself in for 8+ hours a day. If you've had family members beg you to quit jobs "for your health", you probably know what I'm talking about.
Knowing (as I do now) how the business works can change the context behind the work. Context can be the difference between being a hero, and being exploited. I like being a hero; I don't like being a victim. I will happily sacrifice of myself to make something that users will love, or something that will change the way things are done; I don't want to bleed to make some dickhead rich.
If you have the money to coast for a while, perhaps it's time to think about building a non-profit. A non-profit would be less likely to attract those looking to exploit. Boil what you want to do down to chunks that you can complete yourself, and make sure it's something you're willing to bleed for.
Because pop-technology is void of any sort of spirit, culture or enthusiasm. It's all buzzwords, sale pitches and wheel reinventing put in a new wrapper and walled gardens.
What restored faith in technology for me personally is libre software hacker movement. It's just so fun to enjoy technology without all of that fake sillicon valley culture.
It's fun to _own_ technology and understand it and be able to hack it and experience it with like minded individuals.
If you're burned out try to find job in libre software, it won't pay as much but as far as spiritual rewards - it's the most you can get from this medium.
> Because pop-technology is void of any sort of spirit, culture or enthusiasm. It's all buzzwords, sale pitches and wheel reinventing put in a new wrapper and walled gardens.
This is sad but true, though.
Those buzzwords are marketing techniques, and those riding the trains of trends and buzzwords are the one getting the spotlight because human naturally follow blings and other human attentions are indeed power.
It's sad that people who work with careful, thoughtful, artful, and fortified with engineering and scientific craftsmanship rarely have the means to prove themselves.
Btw, what is libre software hacker movement, though?
Hacking (as per original MIT definition) means doing something clever or novel because of the love of the medium not to satisfy some sort of demand or business opportunity.
It's in the spirit of "look at this cool thing you can do".
I'm sure you're familiar with free(libre) software already and "libre hacking" is just that - some relatively useless fun programs or tools that people share under libre license.
My favorite example that I use every day would be doge[1] project that just prints a doge meme based on your terminal history whenever you startup your terminal. It has no real purpose other than make you smile an appreciate technology from the novelty point of view.
permissive licenses allowed turning a social movement into unpaid labor for FAANGs.
Instead of providing libre computing all the way to the end users, many developers are writing unpaid applications and libraries that will be locked down into some devices or SaaS.
> I realized libre movement is a mirage....
No, the mirage is to think that we either fix the whole world in two decades or the fight is lost.
> you cannot change the capitalist forces by writing a bunch of software
> No, the mirage is to think that we either fix the whole world in two decades or the fight is lost.
Two decades? The "year of Linux desktop" meme is older than that. GNU was created 1984. It's 34 years old now.
Software in 1984 was wildly different than now. But while free software is now more available than back then, it's not really much help to the world at large, is it.
The path to happiness when writing open source software is to create stuff that's (almost) entirely useless to other people ;)
(I'm only half joking, just pick a niche topic that's fun for you without thinking of others, there's a huge terra incognita of fun-but-useless software to explore, and not many people venture there).
I think you misunderstood me; as much as I believe in libre movement ideology my point was from a more pragmatic point of view.
Libre software is more fun to work with because you own it; it's open it's free and has community of people working on it.
It's not some bits in the cloud that do stuff when you click a button and the only power you have is support email that will be replied by a robot — it's an actual open project that you can feel. Even if you are not a programmer you can hire someone to create change for you.
Sure sometimes it's ugly, and sometimes there's conflict; sometimes it's insufficient and out-dated but it's much more spiritually empowering when you own the software and have the freedoms that come with libre software.
It's much easier to enjoy technology when it's actually there.
I think a lot of this is linked to your gatekeepers' power dynamics. We start off thinking that through effort and talent alone we can change the world. Maybe we could but we bumped right into the gatekeepers -- the middle managers, the disconnected-from-reality CEOs, the people who only warm their seats without ever actually helping the company -- and the resistance from them is so strong that we eventually give up.
That's fine. I am not into religion but I quite like the Buddhist concept that there exist battles you can never win by fighting and the only way you can win is to never fight them in the first place.
Go and find your happiness elsewhere. That is very okay.
As for how to get back to technology, well, following HN is a pretty good way to get inspired for ideas. Just do them without the idea that you'll make money and you could find happiness practising technology again.
Everyone who reads Hacker News should also consider if there is a political component to this. The guidelines for Hacker News encourage us to keep politics out of the comments, and most of the time that is an advantage, but there are cases where politics might be a contributing factor that needs to be considered. I see some comments here that say "This is such a USA experience, it is different in my country." Well, why is that? If it's true that there is something in the USA that contributes to burnout, would it be useful to consider the political situation in the country? Surely there are cases where the macro circumstances impact people's personal lives?
I feel like every engineer, at some point in their life, learns that engineering is a discipline devoted to producing value, typically business value, not one devoted to building cool shit. All else is just dealing with the implications of that.
Possibly related prior discussions, some of which include some comments of mine at my site where I try to discuss life perspective etc etc. Note that this is an attempt at collecting useful comments that could relate, NOT at an insinuation that the OP is lazy, a procrastinator, or other. But some comments were good, like finding balance, direction, etc.
(And I have, actually, put a lot at my web site (linked in my profile; hopefully skimmable for the parts that one finds helpful) that I think are relevant. Edit: like, for finding a family-like community almost wherever you go, search this page for "no one has to be alone": http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581716.html .)
Ever go swimming in a pond? It's not like a swimming pool. In a swimming pool, the water is clear, the bottom is sound, humans are the only creatures there, and you can be somewhat assured of your safety. In a pond, you can't see very far in the water, the bottom is mucky and soft, there are all sorts of other creatures, and something bad may very well happen to you.
A swimming pool is not a natural system. It takes lots of work and diligence to keep it running, and even then, bad things happen. Fortunately, a swimming pool is a system with a mostly finite set of parameters to change and a similarly-small set of outcomes to manage.
Technology, startups, and BigCorps are natural systems. They're like the pond; they evolved over time without any one person managing any of it.
It took me a long time to realize that many things in life were like that pond when I was thinking most of the world was like a swimming pool. There's nothing wrong with diving into various ecosystems that have emerged out of human complexity. In fact, you can find pleasures there you can find nowhere else. But there are significant differences that nobody tells you about. These systems are emergent, they have tons of variables you might never encounter or understand, and they change based on the actions of thousands, perhaps millions of people, all of whom are not aware that they are, in effect, managing the system. (Even if they knew, no one person has the mental ability to manage all of that.)
I said all of that to say this: natural systems do not have your best interests in mind. You form a startup? Ok, there's a preexisting set of "ramps" you are supposed to get on: bootstrap, niche, unicorn, etc. People who see you in the startup world see you as being on one of those ramps. That is how they process your existence. Same goes for BigCorps: the rule there is to get along, not make waves, and have people think of you as energetic, competent, and friendly.
These are not necessarily bad systems, but you have to keep in mind everyday you interact with them that it is ultimately you who are responsible for your emotional and personal safety, not the system (No matter what they might say to you)
So yes, be disillusioned. It sounds like you've earned it. Then reflect, learn, heal, and engage differently. You've been through a tough experience. I wish you the best. If you're half as smart as you sound, you've got this.
It happens to everyone. Maybe because you are loosing confidence in yourselves, you should start writing books, diaries or articles. That's how I started https://gauravtiwari.org. I was down with expectations, bored with studies and had no good friends. My blog kept me feel a little when readers started pouring in. After a couple of years, it went to be come a professional homepage for me and nowadays I showcase my portfolios with it
"I lost many friends".
No,you did not.Those weren't your friends.
Not sure if various feelings mentioned in the post are targeted correctly. Yes, there's lots of politics,bs,and coolaid drinking in a lot of companies,but that's the nature of what we humans are.
There are a lot of very rewarding and interesting jobs out there that don't have all that bs attached to them,just don't be shy to look a bit further.
Dude, you just got to get the fuck out of Silicon Valley. Tech in general has been raided by finance douches. You need to find a medium sized, profitable company somewhere not in california, new york, or florida, and go work there. You can mentor people and enjoy your life outside work and generally explore tech as you please.
>Tech in general has been raided by finance douches.
My observation is that many "old-school" tech people weren't replaced by finance people, but became them. Silicon Valley today is Wall Street of the 80s. VC Twitter is a meme. The common folk are waking up to this, thankfully.
I have experienced all of the negative emotions the OP experienced, although his seem to be more acute.
Some things which have helped me are to stop thinking about succeeding or advancing in life. Those goals are so high up most people don't even get close. OP got very close by being funded, and it sounds like the whole experience was a let-down over and above the business failure. It sounds like the OP has let go of those dreams, which is necessary especially once you know the dark side of those dreams.
Most people are just trying to survive. They have little control over their lives, and that relieves some of the self-blame when things go badly. It is okay to not be in control, to need help, to lose. That's where most people are. You have friends and allies.
Now that you know how the system works, would you feel better about yourself had you succeeded? Would you feel guilty?
I think OP is being too hard on himself, and he should look back on that experience with pride. "I was good enough that they gave me a shot." You could have been a contender. You actually landed a punch.
> Now that you know how the system works, would you feel better about yourself had you succeeded? Would you feel guilty?
I think about that sometimes. Had I been one of the young optimistic CEOs running around talking about how to improve the world completely unaware of the tech underbelly, what would my life be like? If I had a button in front of me that would teleport me into that life, would I press it? I'm honestly not sure, but I'm leaning towards no. I want to learn how to integrate all this and learn to operate knowing what I know. I don't think I'd choose staying hopelessly naive for another thirty years. (Then again, I don't think they'd press the button to teleport into my life either.)
well based on that belief I think you might have your answers to why you went through this experience. you clearly value discovering both sides of things and you say you want to integrate that. The positive take I have on that is you want to integrate all of that information positive and negative into something stronger and more real. that's ultimately more creative and future looking then the CEO kiddies who just ride the wave of success.
not to pep talk at all but possibly you could be setting yourself up for something great in future. jobs had a pretty terrible time getting fired by the Soda executive.
the thinking of it this way and I'm just brainstorming here perhaps any resistance you have to moving forward with this new perspective could be related to the fact that you're comfortable with how you now see yourself. no longer the hundred percent optimist doing something positive for the world. it's a more compromised position. you're more embracing the shadow side as well. I can understand why that would be hard but depending on your path it might be useful and could be your destiny.
A lot (most?) of the responses in this thread are "learn to leave work at work, fuck greedy capitalism, enjoy your family and hobbies". And most of those responses sound to me like they come from people with a lot of unresolved resentment and cynicism. I know that I can't do that.
But my god, the integration is hard. No one really prepares you for it. The old role models don't work because they're unwittingly or deliberately blind to this. (For example, I've never heard pg talk about this, even though ycombinator is practically a factory that inputs idealistic people and outputs people with experiences like mine) Biographies cover this quite superficially; you basically never hear from the person in their darkest hour.
I'm sure many people have gone through this, but to me it really feels like uncharted waters.
> For example, I've never heard pg talk about this
I remember him writing somewhere that he does not have another startup in him - that, at best, he can now do the YC. It's kind of a hint that doing a startup sucks.
BTW you may want to try reading Jacob Fisker's "Early retirement extreme". He's an ex-astrophysicist who became disillusioned with the way modern society is organized and wrote what is essentially a philosophy book about how one can live differently.
Re pg saying that, that's sort of different to what OP is saying. It's not just a general "startups suck" or "it's hard". It's a specific critique of the structural abusiveness of the industry which pg is actually a part of propagating these days.
I hear you, it does sound super hard, never seen it addressed in the "SV lore" and you could be onto some uncharted waters, would could spell opportunity. Whaddayathink?
Good to hear you're sounding a little better, because it must be super hard to go through that.
Re pg, it's obvious to me why nobody mentions this. It's not part of the narrative, which is designed to produce useful slaves (darts) to throw at a bet (target), with a blindfold on.
If you wanna chat more about it, you can mail me crisf7e@gmail.com. I have a feeling it could be interesting.
I've been thinking about why so many software developers feel this way, and among other things tried to explicitly distinguish[1] between three activities:
1. Programming
2. Coding
3. Software engineering
I had defined them as follows:
1. Programming is solving explicit problems in a verifiable manner.
2. Coding is expressing a programming solution in a formal language.
3. Software engineering is building a product for the real world.
I believe most of us here (and the OP) have this kind of relationship with the three, best case scenario:
1. Love programming.
2. Enjoy coding.
3. Tolerate software engineering.
Burnout, depression and disillusionment rarely come from 1 (pure, strict math world), might occasionally come from 2 ("bad" languages, "messy" frameworks, etc), but generally comes from 3 (business, politics, communication, value, finance).
Perhaps, it's a good idea to pinpoint the intrinsic "passion" (whatever you wanna call it) and differentiate it with accidental complexity of the real world.
Sometimes I feel this way when I have unaddressed issues in my life. And I don't necessarily mean emotional/psych things; Sometimes it is as simple as having a messy room/harddrive, or some things that have sat on the backburner for far too long. Take a step back and see if you have any of those things, then address them deliberately, and see if you feel better.
Tech has one truly good aspect: Lots of cash to go around. Extract as much shmoney as you can from corporations until you can be financial independent of them and peace out middle fingers in the air.
It sounds like the person is disillusioned with people and the industry more than the tech itself.
And yeah, jobs suck (even the good ones), but I think a bigger problem is the lack of friends and other social supports to make it OK that your job sucks.
The author writes they poured "every ounce of energy" in to their company. They were putting time in to the company instead of their human relationships, and unfortunately it bit them.
I've posted this once or twice before, but I always come back to this remarkably insightful comment by HN user dexwiz a while back.
The Screen, whether it’s TV, computer, or phone, has supplanted almost all social interactions. This manifests itself in things like SitComs on TV (just a bunch of friends or family hanging out) or Social Media on phones. It’s very easy to fill the social needs of right now with a Screen. But under even a minuscule amount of self reflection these are revealed as hollow substitutes for real human interaction.
The Job has completely taken over as a driving force in evaluating choices. The average person has to consider all options in the light of both the current employer and the specter of tomorrow’s. Moving across the country for a high paying job? Great! Moving to be closer to friends? That’s a career killer.
No wonder we are lonely. We make choices in the short term that optimize happiness, often at the expense of our relationships. Ghosting is not just for dates now. Then turn around and make choices in the long term that optimize employability at the expense of all else.
This is actually a very good time in your life. You can learn a lot about yourself and the world. The problem is not that you've got disillusioned: you're not disillusioned enough. What if that happy state you want to re-create was an illusion too?
You want to get the motivation back and get rid of the demotivation you've accumulated through the years. But what if motivation is an illusion? Doesn't it strike you as odd that instead of doing something we often try to create a motivation that would then make us do what we wanted to do in the first place? What if we could skip that extra step and just do the original thing? :) (And this doesn't mean to substitute positive motivation with negative or something like that. Just no motivation at all.) Similarly, what if instead of suffering from the bad feelings you could just let these feelings be without being driven by them?
I am in the same boat. 6 months ago, I quit my job because the management and engineering team I worked with were extremely difficult to work with. I had poured my heart out in the company. Grew the team from 1 to 6 developers. Worked extreme long hours because I enjoyed building the product.
I knew I didn't want to code after that. I enrolled in an online business management program. Joined a two people company as an intern two weeks ago. I am finally getting excited about building something new from scratch and I am learning quite a lot at the same time.
Take a break and spend time doing the things you love. You are extremely smart and aware about the problems you face. Learn that thing you always wanted to learn. You might get disinterested and may want to quit it but it's very important to keep at it.
If you join a team, I would advise you to join a small team with less or no politics.
I think building modern software is not programming any more. Now is about putting together libraries and open source plumbing, doing a bit of customization then testing, testing, monitoring, then figuring out why things aren't working.
I remember writing a lot more simple stuff. Whole applications with maybe a handful of libraries. It was great.
Spot on. This is why MIT moved away from feeding undergrads SICP: it was a sad realization that the reality of modern software development was less about building/understanding a world from first-principles, and more about finding yourself in a sea of libraries/frameworks and having to do enough "basic science" on them to discover how to make them do what you want (reliably).
There is burnout, then there is just being "done." If you're out of software and happy, then great. I think we reach a point where the draw of money + realization that software is horrible kind of collide and end up shaking you, making you realize life is short and limited and that there must be something more meaningful. Is that a bad thing? Only if you don't do something about it. you have an incredible opportunity to do good somewhere somehow. You'll need to fix your "charged emotional responses" and "reactivity" by learning to be with em instead of running and grasping, but there-after, you are freed of the animal-instinct burden. It' s a hard path to find and harder still to walk, but it's there. No words can capture it or give it, no thinking will show you the way out.
I would recommend hacking. Not cracking, mind you, but tinkering. Focusing not on building a product, but on toying for just a few hours with something you find cool, and have fun with it.
This is what made it for me when I started being disillusioned with my work (I became a developer thinking the internet would bring direct democracy like printing brought democracy, and instead it brought mass surveillance and complotism).
I play with the decentralized web (dat), with raspberry pi, with system programming, with whatever new (to me) I feel like. And just like that, I'm happy again and enjoying my craft again. I just want out of "the industry" and can't wait to have saved enough to be able to do that (gladly, this is a work line where we're lucky enough to be able to retire early, if we're good with simple life).
There are employees that work for the money. They are not your friends outside of work. They would rather get a promotion or a slightly better paying job than dream of starting their own company. They are not passionate about the project, and will not answer emails or call after hours. They are always the first to leave for lunch, and the first to clock out for the day.
They are suckers. Wait til they realize that they wasted their time building someone else's wealth instead of their own.
That's the sales pitch. That's what I believed when I joined the world of technology. And I felt sorry for them. I have the impression that you felt that at some point. No one else has your passion. I was lucky that reality quickly came to slap me on the face.
I co-founded a company with 4 other people and we were living the life. We were featured in techcrunch, investors lined up to throw money at us, we had a celebrity hanging with us. The paparazzi were never too far. But then, we worked together.
I realized I couldn't work with the CEO. Every other word he used was Hunger, passion, success, haters. I dropped those words from my vocabulary. He believed what I believe to the extreme. It was unpleasant to see it with my own eyes.
When our finances met reality, the clashes begun. I paid our office rent for a little while until I saw that it was in vain. Rather than go through my savings, I asked everyone to get a job until we can weather this downturn. Two people did. The other two threw my own words back at me. I lacked the passion and hunger for being in a start up. I stopped paying rent.
Long story short, it's been 2 years since the landlord changed the locks in the office and the CTO, who was secretly living there, has been kicked out. He has been homeless ever since. He has all the talent in the world, but he would not get a job and sit next to those suckers again.
Completely buying into the startup story does more harm then good. The first thing to remember is that when you have your own company, you'll have to hire employees. And no one can have the "passion" of the founders. The second thing, is that thinking that employees are suckers, gives you mentality of superiority. You feel above others, and end up being an unpleasant person to work with.
There is nothing wrong with being an employee who gets paid to solve a problem. In fact, it's the most important thing in a company. An employee that solves problems then disappears until the next day.
This makes me wish I posted a few years ago when I first started at a FAANG. I was fresh out of college and worked on an email product which was in an area I was interested but quickly learned how enterprise software is actually made. There is one interesting part which is the core and that’s the MVP. Working in this stage is exciting and fun to make and then there are years and years of slog smoothing out the edges and making it ready for production, which left me similarly disillusioned especially when my view of the real world fresh out of college was that every product that exists is interesting and perfect. Long story short, I worked on that boring project for two-ish years and saw the horrible political environment begin to deteriorate my once-ok team. I say once-ok because I convinced myself during that time that I liked my work because by all measures of society, I was successful, and having no knowledge of other teams I didn’t think there was an alternative. This was all I ever knew and thought every team in tech is like this. Which for the most part is actually true. Despite what Google and other big tech companies’ flashy recruiting and marketing, something like 99% of the engineers in those companies are doing boring shit to keep the money flowing . I also went through the exact same thought process where I thought my spirit had been drained and I could never get the excitement back because of this realization. I also often wondered if I had been permanently changed because of the experience and thought I would never feel creative again. However I made a big decision and took the leap to join a new team and couldn’t have landed in an environment that is more the polar opposite. And that is what gave me my spirit back. You need to find a product in a FAANG, or startup that you actually are passionate about and get to grow your own team and that will give you your passion back. Find a position which is an exact match for your skills and do not settle at all. If a position is not perfect do not even consider it and ask as many probing questions as you need and contact current members of the team to check for inconsistencies. Good luck and I hope you can find another project that brings you passion.
> This makes me wish I posted a few years ago when I first started at a FAANG. I was fresh out of college and worked on an email product which was in an area I was interested but quickly learned how enterprise software is actually made.
A FAANG email product is not enterprise software. I suspect that what you've seen in your product was, compared to typical enterprise software, a pinnacle of human achievement. Get a job in a bank and you'll see.
I've seen this again and again: good, honest people trying to do their best in their day to day... but unavoidably, whenever we reach a larger scale scenario, everything breaks. And it's not technology. It's people. You can live happy with a few friends, or many friends, as long as you stay in your small world. Even working on complicated things. But when you start trying to scale up and translate the magic to the big world, it becomes too much, because it's impossible. It's so messy and complex and there are so many parts out of your control, that you can't attempt to care and not end up hurt, to do things right, because no one has such power in a world this complex. The business landscape around technology is terrible... but that's just like any other large-scale landscape. Tech might scale well. What never scales nicely is adding more and more people to ambitious projects. We don't scale well.
So... Do not attempt to align your ambitions with money or the big world. Try to find a job where you can directly see the benefits of your work, and where you only need to think about "the people physically in front of you". Your curiosity is still there, it's only overshadowed by all the other problems you had to face. But they are separate things. It might take a while to see them separately again, but it's possible. You just need to identify this and stop pushing yourself in the directions where they overlap.
My response to this was to just recognize "I will have no control over outcomes unless I start playing corporate politics". I stopped reading up on the newest frameworks and started understanding finance and org behavior. Then I went and got an MBA.
Ultimately engineering is an entry-level job. Yes there are more senior engineering roles, but they all involve progressively more political involvement the higher you go. Turns out technology organizations are basically like every other hierarchy in human history.
You have been though trauma - whether or not it was self inflicted or your fault or anyone else's fault is nto the issue here at the moment. You are still in the midst of it (gathered from your writing) and it will pass (hopefully).
Look around and see if there is something you can do that involves service to your community (however you define that). For me volunteering as an EMT on weekends has helped me a lot.
Finding something where you feel like what you are doing is meaningful - even if in a very local small way - gets you grounded.
To address the writer I say to you that splendid and amazing technical achievments do not really lead to long term satisfaction unless they coinside well with a well defined long term buisness objective. I am an entrepenur also but I'm a small time life style technologist. I have a small means and I'm happy with it. It gives me freedom most of all. Think of all those big shot names that people were celebrating great valuations.If I only made one penny in my life its more than they have netted this whole time and probably ever will. Softbank is the poster child for stupid businesses. An app that will help you walk your dog. They billed a quarter billion for it. So if you lost people a billion say they are lucky because so and so would have lost you two!
The point is you are young and learning what failure tastes like. Its ok to be happy. Its ok to do all your internet browsing on a commodore 64. There are people crazy enough to do that.
Technology, science, and learning is good for its own sake only if it doesn't dominate your life. Don't make that stuff the ends in life. Remember technology are tools they are means. Archamedes made his best discovery just taking a bath.
Accept the world for what is vs. what you want it to be.
As child you revolted against reality by escaping into sci-fi. No judgement here.
I find that sci-fi, especially good sci-fi is more digestible form of philosophy.
As you aged and achieved comfort and "success" the world has revealed to be unfair. You always knew it to be the case but now you see it. The lies. The callous nature. The straight up self surviving people that seem to be self-satisfied without even a hint of guilt you get for accidentally swapping a fly.
You have guilt for not being as happy as you should be given how lucky you are despite all the things that didn't quite work out the way you wanted them to. And yet, wake up every day you must. Do something. You have companionship, yet another privilege you can feel guilty for not appreciating it enough.
So how to fix this? Stop expecting the world to be something it is not. Stop hoping for humanity. This is not a sad thought, but once you accept reality. Then and only then can you figure "okay, now what". What problems do I want to solve, which people do I want to help.
You realize you can't help everyone. So focus. Appreciate the gratitude you get by serving others. Could be family or your community, but big nameless though important causes won't feed your soul.
Check out some stuff on The Myth of Sisyphus. This may help you in your journey. What we fear to enslave us is the thing that may actual free us. The obligations of life provides the purpose that freedom never give.
Karmanye vadhika raste, Ma phaleshu kadachana
Ma karma phala he tur bhuh, ma te sangotsva karmanye
You have a right to “Karma” (actions) but never to any Fruits thereof. You should never be motivated by the results of your actions, nor should there be any attachment in not doing your prescribed activities.
There's a lot to dislike about business. Money complicates any relationship. On top of that, big business attracts big sharks that only care about money. But why be surprised? That's their job!
In short, it's no wonder that things go wrong in the startup world. Heck, most startups fail and as the old adage goes, "...failure permits no alibis". If you fail more often than not you WILL be crucified, especially by the people who's money you've lost. Imagine you're a general and you have just lost a battle. Do you expect your superiors to like you afterwards? Or your soldiers?
What IS a wonder is that we get anything good done at all, and we DO. Look at all the amazing products you use every day. It's insanely hard to pull this off, it requires one to have thick skin along with passion and optimism, all rolled up into a neat package. In short, you've got to have both.
But I'm curious as to what's wrong with "technology"? Technology is just something humans do, it's a form of crafting. We make stuff for fun and to make our lives easier. There are businesses built around said that complicate things on a human level, but without that infrastructure civilization is not possible.
It was business and politics that ruined technology for you, not technology itself. There's a reason why people warn you against turning your hobby into a career.
On the surface, it seems like a perfect idea to make a living by doing what you love, but it ceases to be fun. You won't be able to do only what you love and what your whims and desires guide you to do, instead you have to do all the things you don't really like, whatever is desired by others willing to pay. Your most marketable skill in tech may be something you don't really enjoy doing.
I was the "computer kid" growing up and in school, so obviously that influenced my choice of education and career. I used to tinker endlessly with new devices, Linux distros (did Linux From Scratch installs, all that), and programming, but I just don't really care to do that anymore. I've hopped off the gadget bandwagon and only ever upgrade when something eventually breaks. It is no longer a fun hobby for me to upgrade my PCs endlessly or to tinker with new features and perusing changelogs to check for them. Tech feels too much like work now.
Instead, I've picked up on some old creative hobbies, like miniature painting and crafts, something analog and tactile. I tinker with paint mixes and techniques, work on my artistic side.
I know 3D printing is becoming very big in that space too, but I am consciously trying to avoid it. It is tempting though, and luckily pretty far removed from where my career has taken me.
Burnout is something that just happens, in your case it was due to business nonsense and politics, which is what usually happens. Do what makes you have, not what used to make you happy.
I can't know where you're working or worked, but please don't think that this is every tech job in every company. There are plenty of smaller businesses doing great work where you get to have your say, good colleagues and some (at least) moderately interesting problems to work with.
My last 3 jobs (over 10 years) have all been with companies in the size of 30-50 people, with 20-50% being product/engineering, working on a SaaS product. My jobs have been nothing remotely like the Silicon Valley TV-series, so I'm quite surprised and appalled when people say how spot on (even if it's a mocking caricature) the show is. And your description of Dilbertesque politics fall very much in that same category.
Will smaller companies have the Big Engineering Problems that FAANG companies have? Of course not. But there's a huge middle ground in lots of different sectors. I'm working for a company that makes a platform for childcare centers, and we have a ton of challenges and opportunities - not what I'd expected 10 years ago. But the work is rewarding, even if I don't get to have a lot of challenges revolving super hard algorithms, huge data sets or whatever else might be all the rage. Most of our challenges is scaling on a budget, nurturing expertise in different areas in a 10-person team, translating feature requests between customer lingo to something we can implement, and many more similar not-wild-and-crazy tasks.
I do feel lucky, but I also do not feel like I was lucky and somehow found three magical unicorn companies to work for. And there's plenty of things that could be better, and I could make more money working at bigger companies but in my mind it's not worth the trade-off.
I have always worked with smaller companies as a rule, somewhere between 5-30 people usually. I don't live in the valley, so the startup game isn't even on my radar, and the companies are already making money solving problems so all the VC infused "Change the World" attitude isn't required. I don't have to care about IPOs, stock options or whatever.
There are still so many interesting problems to solve at smaller companies, often really niche problems that have no or little prior art meaning you get to really break ground. You are also tailoring software to work on problem sets of an entirely different domain to software. In FAANG style companies you're writing software that solves software problems, which is a layer of abstraction too far for me personally.
Being smaller companies they're often involved in the community as well. Software is so often ephemeral and disconnected, there have been years of my career where I never spoke to anyone who actually used my work. I'm not sure the client always tested it either, so it could feel like I was writing software for no-one. It is nice to be connected to the real world and users/clients more directly.
I can't contribute a lot; I'm not a programmer, and I've never started a company. Though I've always loved tech, I guess I was never that idealistic about anything. I've ridden the IPO bandwagon, done the acquisition thing, done the bigcorp thing. I've been "in the industry" for 25 years and I guess I've burned out a few times, but usually it was about the company I worked for and team I worked on at the time.
It doesn't sound like the poster's complaints are anything tech-specific, just that (s)he chose to deploy their optimism in the general direction of the tech industry, and can't deal with the fact that the industry just doesn't work in an altogether idealistic, altruistic manner. I question whether their subsequent employment is truly "better" in those regards, or if their standards are merely lower/more cynical.
I don't know how to say "don't have expectations that high" in a way that's any more useful than telling a depressed person to "stop being depressed", but while I can see WHY they've burned out, I just can't come up with a "solution".
You're an artist trying to find artistic and personal fulfillment in somebody else's art factory. That will never work.
You can try to make a living making your own art, and hustle and struggle the way artists do. Or you can work in a monotonous factory churning out someone else's art. The latter is easier, but it requires putting up with more bullshit. The former is harder, but you feel good about it. That's life.
1. Insist on work life balance, a40 hour work week, and stick to it. Employers very much do exist which want this just as much as you do.
2. Ensure you get plenty of unstructured time (play time) and also rest every day.
3. Realize that your employment does not define who you are.
4. Not all employers are awful. Seek out employers from publicly traded, midsize companies with profit motive (no government jobs/insurance companies, but no startups either). I find these jobs to be the "funnest", though I am currently a cog in the machine if a large company. They are fun because there's no time for politics, but there's no huge rush either, just get your job done and do it well. If you cannot switch, do whatever you need to do to stay sane in your current environment. Take care of you.
5. Exercise creativity -- a few minutes of "fun" programming a day -- and it will get fun again.
6. See a therapist. "Burnout" generally is accompanied anxiety and/or depression. It is certainly helping me.
Burnout can be temporary. But it requires work to overcome it.
Perhaps you need to find a new domain where you could apply your skills.
Why not inventing computer models of diseases for the drug research.
The FDA has already accepted a model in place of an expensive clinical trial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modelling_biological_systems
This isn’t how life as a software engineer has to be. I work for a small software company, which hasn’t taken any investment money, and is experiencing slow growth. The entire company is remote, and I love my coworkers, who I see daily, but only see in person a few times a year. I make enough money to live very comfortably with my family.
A lot has to do with your perspective on life. If work is life and it is what you get your value from, you’re bound to be disappointed if you work for someone else.
I can’t finish up this comment without mentioning that I’m a Christian, and I find value not solely in the work I do (what if I get injured and can’t work) or in my family (they’re human and far from perfect), but in being loved by God. Most people are gonna call that stupidity or the result of brainwashing or naïveté, but it’s a comfort few people have when the world turns upside down due to global pandemic and recession. I’m not here to argue religion with anyone, just to say that a Godless life can be a hopeless one.
> Then I worked for a tech giant, and then for a high-growth unicorn. It shocked me how dilbertesque they both were. Full of politicians, and burnt out engineers in golden handcuffs who can't wait to get out
Sorry this surprises you, OP. It's called "work" (I'm not intending to be condescending). People pay you to do something and you do it, having entered unto that mutual agreement. Nobody promised you it would be efficient or fair (yet it's much more efficient and much more fair than it was say 50 years ago).
It's not just you. It's many people. Being paid a lot to do very little seems to have some bizarre side-effects to people's psyche.
For anyone reading this, take charge of your personal life. Find people and invest your time, and causes and invest your money.
So many people lament the inequality in the world but do nothing of their own will to change it. Are we all so paralyzed we can't make personal decisions and instead cry out why our government isn't doing more?
"I do a lot of sports now and hang out with my non-techy friends and my wife. I cook a lot."
This implies that you didn't do these things before. Which implies that you were overworked, didn't take care of yourself and naturally you burnt out. I don't think it is an issue with tech, it is an issue with you prioritizing work over everything else.
> I was drawn to programming, science, technology and science fiction
ever since I was a little kid. I can't say it's because I wanted to
make the world a better place.
One of the main sources of burnout if feeling that your work is meaningless and only benefits the company owners.
Even if we are unaware of it.
The advice of doing things you love as personal projects might not be enough.
I wish I got to know you and your experience a bit better. But perhaps you didn't work on things that were ambitious enough? Some causes where technology need coders like us are so daunting and scary that it can be good for our personal motivation. Yes, I mean for you to seek out some fear and trembling. For me, if the project is too definite, too attainable, it feels like there is little exploration.
It's natural for us to go towards jobs and projects that feel secure. However security can often bring about boredom and bitterness if you let it take over you everyday.
I'd disagree with the statement that those people weren't your friends. Friends come and go (family too!), live and enjoy great people in the moment. There is nothing wrong with enjoying fleeting moments with people. If they become friends for long time; great. If not, it was fun while it lasted. Not everything has to evaluated for long-term ROI.
A thought occurred to me while reading this and the responses.
I had pretty severe burnout - who knew, working two jobs and studying full time isn't very smart - when I was very young in my career. In hindsight that was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It was even better that it happened early in my career when I didn't have dependents to care about or much of a career really.
Because of that I learned, unfortunately the hard way, that work is work and that's not your life. It took me a while, but I forced myself to stop worrying, thinking and in any way engage with work once the workday is done. I haven't taken work home in years.
Burnouts suck, the really bad ones are dangerous, too, because you lose your sense of reality, but, honestly, if people went through it once when it's relatively safe and you can rely on help to get through it, like I did, the rest of your life could/would be much better.
Lots of comments, not sure if anyone said this already.
If you're disillusioned because of the current Orwellian state the world is in (everything tracking you, hard locked in into ecosystems, etc...) Please know that this is not technology, technology has always been and will always be great. It's the business model that fucked us.
Business model for sure. Primarily the people who couldn't find a way to make money other than selling their users (at best), and of course the users themselves who knew and still normalized it.
Count the I-s in your text. Why would you want to program for yourself if you are already happy and mentally engaged otherwise? You will want to build something once you find a problem that you can solve for somebody else.
Or think of a product that you want all by yourself that is not available right now. Use programming to make it real.
I'm kind of there, too, though I was never as successful are you (I infer).
As far as sleeping well at night, unless you were a sadistic bastard to your employees, I think all else is (or should be) easily forgiven.
If you behaved monstrously to anyone (and I've been on the receiving end of a couple of those deals), you might apologize. Don't expect that it will be received well, but that's really all you can do.
Beyond that, I think you've mostly just discovered the nature of our reality. The Buddhists call it suffering, or just the inherent broken-ness or insufficiency of the world. Ecclesiastes knew it as well, along with many Western philosophers who followed.
What's to be done? Not much. Try to enjoy your life, which is almost over anyway. Try to have good time with your wife and whatever friends or people may be around. Eat, drink, and be merry, as you can. Godspeed.
I believe this kind of disillusion could not only simply explained by burnout. It's more like the Blue pill vs Red pill thing. Once you learned, you cannot unlearn. Blue pilled people are totally okay with these things, while some Red pilled people cannot get rid of their cynical views, and the feeling of defeating.
I work for a tech consultancy, apart from programming stuff, I also need to propose technical solutions to the clients, presenting slides with buzz word technologies which are actually very mediocre for me. Everybody else seems to be excited by those technologies. I can bear with it but sometimes I have same feeling as OP. If I own a startup doing similar business I would directly choose totally different sets of novel technologies that are much smaller, faster, outperform those solutions in almost every dimension.
Technologies are usually overlooked or being witch-hunted for tens of years. What we usually do today, there were a small bunch of people already knew them quite well more than half a century ago. That might mean now, you can already do what people usually do tens of years later, but too few people would agree with you. Just like John Barkus have to face "FORTRAN is extremely inefficient" bullshit for quite a while. After FORTRAN got rid of the inefficient reputation, he was interested in functional programming back in the day, while functional programming was even being witch-hunted till this day.
Imagine you have been thrown back to 1995, and a part of your job is to declare the "Blub Programming Language™"'s novelty over other languages to everybody (that would be a real job since there were so much marketing on the "Blub Programming Language™" back in the day), while there are even no basic things like parametric polymorphism and higher-order functions such as map and filter. Everybody was in hype, and completely ignore your cynical view on "Blub Programming Language™", despite the fact that those novel concepts are: very useful / straight forward to learn / already well established in the 1960s.
OK, so I've had no experience with startups. About the closest I came was flirting with biotech in the 80s. But for sure I've had my share of abject failure, anxt, depression, and all that.
Until my 30s, it was all about doing what interested me. In a word, having fun. I didn't care at all about money, and didn't need much, given my lifestyle in college and grad school. I also didn't care much about relationships, mostly because I was so incompetent about them.
I did go through a phase of seeing how much money I could make. At least, as a consultant. Probably because I was so incompetent building businesses.
But somewhere in the midst of that, I fully got that it's all a game, and that stuff means whatever we say it does. In some Landmark course about managing yourself as if you were a business. And then it became fun again.
I work in academia and get mild burnout twice a year (after the semester ends). I have actually found Churchill's advice on overcoming burnout quite helpful -- in short, find several real (physical) hobbies like painting or gardening.
Here are some excellent quotes from Churchill's small book "Painting as a Pasttime":
Painting as a Pastime
by Winston Churchill
The tired part of the mind can be rested and strengthen, not merely by rest, but by using other parts.
It is no use saying to the tired 'mental muscles' – if one: such an expression – 'I will give you a good rest,' 'I will go for a long walk,' or 'I will lie down and think of nothing.' The mind keeps busy just the same. If it has been weighing and measuring, it goes on weighing and measuring. If it has been worrying, it goes on worrying. It is only when new cells are called into activity, when new stars become the lords of ascendant, that relief, repose, refreshment are afforded.
To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real.
The need of an alternative outlook, of a change of atmosphere, of a diversion of effort, is essential.
The most common form of diversion is reading.
'What shall I do with all my books?' was the question; and the answer, 'Read them,' sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands.
Since change is an essential element in diversion of all kinds, it is naturally more restful and refreshing to read in a different language from that in which one's ordinary daily work is done. To have a second language at your disposal, even if you only know it enough to read it with pleasure, is a sensible advantage.
To restore psychic equilibrium we should call into use those parts of the mind which direct both eye and hand. Many men have found great advantage in practicing a handicraft for pleasure.
But best of all and easiest to procure are sketching and painting in all their forms.
We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joyride in the paint-box.
The description about the contrast between an easy, soul-less corporate environment and the insanely difficult startup environment where you get torn apart by vultures resonates very strongly with me.
I think anyone who has worked for a good mix of startups and corporations will understand the extreme difference. And yes, being around a bunch of highly optimistic people inside corporations is depressing.
And it's depressing that people get paid more to do useless bureaucratic things while in a corporation than adding real value whilst in a startup.
I blame Federal reserve banks and fiat money for this. That's why I work in cryptocurrency space now. Cryptocurrency allows you to get profit from systemic inefficiencies just like corporations but you get that nice efficiency, value-creation feeling of a startup.
That said, a lot of cryptocurrency projects do nothing at all and add 0 or even negative value. It doesn't really affect value of the token though. To me this is the ultimate proof that we have entered into a post-productivity era.
Why other people don't seem to notice this is beyond me.
I don't know how well this will go down in HN, but here's my take/secret:
Corporations and business aren't programming/tech/ science. Startups aren't tech. University and academics isn't science. Faculties aren't science. Peer review isn't science. Venture capitalists aren't tech. Silicon valley isn't tech/ science. "The web" isn't tech.
Let's try another analogy: modern art and art dealerships and art galleries aren't art. Art is taking a photo you like, or painting something you want to paint or building something you want to build. Working at it because you want it and you think it will be beautiful or purposeful: once you're trying to make business and money and find out what's popular and build reputation and sell you tend to stop doing art and start doing something else.
So to bring it back to tech and science.
Science is just the process of systematically trying to use experimentation, empiricism and reasoning to find out what you don't know. That's it! The rest is some combination of empty shells, dressing and propaganda.
Flashing LEDs isn't tech.
Tech is just tools used for some purpose, be it practical or enjoyment. Nothing more. A hammer is tech. A rock is tech. A string can be tech.
I program in R and python and get paid for it these days. But I try to not bring it home, because it's not tech, and it's not science and it's not programming. When I'm programming I'm usually in emacs and lisp. I do photography to produce things I think are beautiful. I cook to provide tasty and healthy and enjoyable experiences for my family (and a scientific mindset can be quite helpful there). I apply science just continuously in life. And I hack together things in tech because I enjoy it and to make my life easier: why just this weekend I made our living room into a video conference centre for our corona virus quarantine: my phone is the webcam and streams wirelessly to the computer, my computer streams wireless display to my TV, my TV routes sound back out through the AV unit, and the room is lit with customisable hue lighting. All done for a few bucks of software and it'll never sell a unit and I don't care, because money and selling isn't tech.
Many here will attempt to give you a justification or rationale to your predicament. I've discovered, through my own experience, that this way of coping is predominate in technology (when a problem reveals itself, find a solution). Sometimes this is the right way to approach it. For example, If you know the end you are seeking, finding a means and sticking with that way of being will eventually get you closer to that end. But if you don't know the end, you revert back to the means with which you are most familiar: attempting to solve it rationally. I've found this approach to be unfruitful. This sort of thinking is something I dwell in quite a bit. I'm happy to be a sounding-board for you if you want.
Exactly. If you label it as a "problem", you will continue seeking and believing that, if only you had the right knowledge, you'd be able to have a "solution". Or. if you had an answer that was at least convincing enough to yourself, then that's sufficient. Unfortunately, I don't believe it's that simple. You can dismiss this as a problem, find a valid solution, and move along. Or you can become familiar with what it is like to be with this unease and let it speak for itself. I'm not saying this will work for you, but I want to make present the falsity that pure rationality will be able to solve problems like these.
I worked in tech for 23 years, as an employee, freelancer, consultant, and business owner. I did development, devops, testing, management, sales... and after working my way through burnout several times and seeing the industry change in ways I don't like, I walked away to a new career. While not perfect and nowhere near as intellectually stimulating, it sure beats what I experienced in tech from an emotional and mental standpoint. So while "find your passion" is a little trite, there is something to be said for "find something that doesn't drain you every day, that pays your bills, that you might even enjoy, that enables you to live how you wish."
You may be disillusioned with technology, but to me, it seems that what disillusioned you was capitalism.
The problems you described are not technological, they're political. The Vulture Capitalists can be dishonest because they don't pay for their lies. The soulless corporations waste their time with political squabbles and poorly managed project because they capture enough profit to afford such inefficiencies. Burnout is not a problem because we still have a lot of younger and hopeful people to replace the burnt out ashes.
I personally see only two solutions: get out of the system, or change the system. Perhaps both. Note that the second one requires collective action.
Everyone has different talents. Without those bloodthirsty vultures we would have a hard time allocating capital to the right projects.
My experience with straddling a bunch of different worlds is that people in technology are often just impossible to satisfy. Mad because the ping pong table doesn't have exactly the brand of ping pong balls they wanted.
IMO it comes down to that the time in front of a screen to become a great programmer is not exactly great for mental health.
You have to use the great problem solving skills you have to solve this problem for your own brain though and stop blaming the external world. There is nothing more that could be done to make you happy.
The software engineer is the worker of the 21st century. In many organizations he/she is at the bottom of the pyramid. Some organizations like to insist on that point. Take it or leave it.
[Edit] try replacing software engineer with teacher, nurse.
That's just how life is, how business is. people are driven by motivation (a lot of times by money) you didn't lose any friends, if they are with you when you have something and now they're gone, they never were your friends.
I like to code, I do this since I have 13 (I have 30 now), I didn't start this to make money, I do this because I like it and I would do this even if I were not paid for
I worked with a lot of good people, but they are just coworkers, not my friends. you must figure out the difference and find your purpose. Maybe tech is not for you and that's ok if you are happy doing non-tech stuff you should focus on that.
It makes me think that maybe what’s so toxic nowadays is the expectation that the job is glamorous and exciting. For me the reality is still the same as 90’s dad’s enterprise software company, but with a big shiny layer of marketing.
Yo! I'm with some people building a community that I think could really resonate with what you're looking for out of your future. It's sort of but not really an incubator of people, and one of our number (who themselves has a hell of a story) is explicitly looking to upend the VC model for basically all of those reasons. Another is the only _liked_ advertiser on Reddit. I'm taking our toy sort-of-but-not-really chat bot and turning it human augmentation for domestic abuse clinicians. It's the first time in my career (~10yrs) that I've been excited about morning "standups".
Whne you accept VC money they will expect, demand results, they dont care about the consequences to you or your staff, they want a return on their money. Your're making a deal with the devil, but in return what are you really expecting or what do you want? A great company delivering great products or immense wealth? The impression I get is that everyone or at least the vast majority want Bill Gates level money, they want to be as rich as Zuckerberg. They want their own space program like Bezos. Deliver a great product in your own time, at a smaller scale and be happy with a reasonable profit.
I've been feeling burnout, although not to the same extent as OP, for many of the same reasons. The main difference is I never stopped loving programming or the creative aspects of making things. Ideally I'd like to be a full time hobbyist programmer, but that seems out of reach financially. If you want to get back into making stuff I suggest doing zero pressure hobby projects focused on whatever you enjoy about the process of making (not around a mission, or users and definitely not around money) and don't actually worry about finishing. Just focus on the act of making stuff happen
This kind-of explains how I felt when I was working in software. After we launched a successful product, I lost all motivation to continue open source for some time and eventually I lost my interest in the tech we were working with as well. Still to this day, my commits went down from >1k/yr to less than 10.
What helped me was changing to a different industry. I went into electric vehicles and now I write drive by wire firmware. It was really interesting to find that certain industries NEED help from those that know how to write and scale software, because they are traditionally led my the dinosauric.
As there is not really an educational background given, I'd suggest learning a new programming language or starting with SICP or other cool programming books, which have the potential to give the reader and eager learner many "Aha!" moments and insights. That should make programming interesting again. There is always more to learn about code and programming.
Or alternatively, do something else, until you get an interesting idea or need a tool for what you actually want to deal with and code it up. This can reinforce both, programming and the actual activity, that one wanted to do.
Why do you need to express creativity only through technology? You can make many beautiful and useful things that have nothing to do with software. Two examples that I've enjoyed are woodworking and welding.
Many here will attempt to give you a justification or rationale to your predicament. It's the way of coping with problems that technology teaches you (when a problem reveals itself, find a solution). Sometimes this is the right way to approach it. If you know the end you are seeking, finding a means towards it works. But if you are trying to determine the end, unthinkingly continuing down the same means is not going to satisfy your unease. This sort of thinking is something I dwell in quite a lot. I'm happy to be a sounding-board for you if you want.
Three years in and my conclusion so far is that work is nothing more than a mean to earn a living, and my free time is the time I can actually read/program about interesting stuff. The pragmatic attitude is therefore to stop caring much about work and especially not give it more time than expected.
Lots of jobs for developers but very hard to find a job that is actually inspiring at all. I just stop struggling to find a sense to it and stopped giving a fuck. It's relatively big money for relatively easy work, we shouldn't be complaining in a first place.
Think of an interesting non-software related domain that you enjoy and then use software to solve a problem in it. 10 years ago I scraped a run logger app backend for my running statistics and did data analysis on my GPS tracks that helped my training (things that Strava is doing today).
Don't make it into a product or publish it or do anything else that creates pressure on you. Just do it to solve your own problems. Be ok with the vast majority of those projects never being completed. The deal is to learn something and enjoy the pure act of creating something.
Real world is ... what it is. Good intention is not enough for good things to happen. Our system seems to be programmed in a way, that it can go worse it will, until it hits the brake.
So relax, the world is what it is. What needs to be changed is our perception. Plus, tech should define a person, it can be part of identity, but don't let it take hold of it. After all, technologies are just manmade tools, they are fancier but no different than knives and sticks. Why let a tool define what you are and what you should be?
You're disillusioned not with tech but with greedy political idiots who ru(i)n it. Fundamentally it's all simple with tech. You calculate things and apply your logic and experience and then you get a working system if you've done it correctly. No exceptions.
It's when you deal with self-interest and greed of business-people that are just there to bleed you dry you encounter problems.
My advice would be to limit your exposure to all things business in tech and just sit in the corner doing what you can do best: writing programs. Then it becomes fun again.
Your disillusion really resonates with my experience, and likely many others. The thing is, if you had succeeded in all you wanted, you would still be asking the same questions by now.
There are times for disillusion in everyone’s life.
Look at it as an opportunity. A moment in the now - where you are not only open to, but also craving, for a new direction or a different mindset on the direction to move forward.
I strongly believe in correct forward.
That means valuing your previous experiences, valuing feedback from others in the present, and striving for better in the future.
I love hacking on code, it's why I got into it. The Official side of it all can be a real bummer. I can always measure my burnout levels of Official work by how much I start hacking at home. I make a fairly distinct separation between work and home, always have. Even though I have worked late and passionately at times. :) I always enjoy the new file, the fresh project smell, the beauty of code.
There's something deeply joyous about the potential of an empty file and where you can take it. If I lost that joy, that would be very grievous.
You can hear a lot of young talented and passionated going deep and hard into what they love. But it seems that successful or not, there are some bits that are important in a normal life that intense personal pursuit wont provibe. Stability, belonging to a group come to mind. Even though in many jobs colleagues come and go, when you have a stable job with people you get to know, it's a plus.
I also wonder if it's not partly a personality trait. Or at least a temporary space into ones life.
Have you thought about looking for a job with a tech related non-profit? I joined one a few years ago after spending my entire career in the traditional for-profit tech space and I have been amazed at the difference between the two worlds. Most of the negative aspects of the VC driven tech world that you talk about don't really exist in the non-profit space. It's not all sunshine and roses, but might be a great way for you to get back to what you used to love as well as contribute to something meaningful.
I have interacted with some of the orgs in the list below. I'm fairly certain that they are all 501.3c orgs but hopefully this will give you an idea. I've tried to think of orgs that are mainly tech focused. Hope this helps.
Volunteer Match
Give Lively
UPchieve
WeVote
Learning Equality
OP is simply 'disillusioned' with corporations and business. And 'disillusioned' is the wrong word; he has simply learned 1st hand what they are like [a load of bullshit].
I think they found the answer, work outside of the tech industry. You can code in your free time for fun and personal development, do open source, or find a way for programming to add value to your workplace or community. I went from data science to day labor and I’m much happier.
Eventually I’ll save up and start a local business and I can always integrate technology as needed. Tech companies start with the premise of business following from technology and that’s not something I believe in or find meaningful anymore.
You get back the joy of building things by building things. Something that worked for me when I was in similar situation was working on some Arduiono projects. It's not only programming, you are making something in the physical world as well. The projects are usually simple and small, you don't get burned out. The actual programming is pretty simple - you don't need design patterns, some heavy framework or functional programming to make few LEDs blink or a motor to spin back and forth.
It’s a bit of a paradox when you try something audacious like a startup.
I raised money, had 6 full-time employees and went hard and a year in realized it wasn’t going to work. It sucked, the stress, the grind, the failure.
That experience has left me in the same state where you realize If you can get a startup off the ground that you can actually do anything you really want to go after.
But the flip side is you also now how have a taste for how bad it can go (if it failed) and now I find I can’t take a step towards anything without that fear.
I think burnout is about reducing the perceived world to a shallow mental model, getting locked in it voluntarily and getting depressed as a result. But it's a 3 wall prison cell: it works so long as the prisoner doesn't bother to look around to notice the missing wall.
My approach is to find curiously unexplainable things. The moment our mind spots a glitch in the matrix, an odd difference between the well known mental model and observations, it becomes excited and tries to fix the model.
You've got to restore the suspension of disbelief which resulted from your burnout.
If you have enough money to take some time off, do so.
The world is a shitty place ;
The world doesn't care about what you can offer ;
The world doesn't care for you ;
The world doesn't even care for itself ;
The world just doesn't care
The world won't be fine but that's not your fault.
The alternatives are either cynicism or escapism.
Protect yourself from toxic environment, grow inward, enjoy the beauty in life that you can find.
100x "your coworkers are not your friends." Especially if you are the boss. That doesnt preclude you from being friendly. But that doesnt make you friends.
You need to think about the motivations behind all of the parties you’re interacting with. Why did those investors give you money? Because they, and possible their LPs (their bosses effectively) wanted to make more money with their money. That’s it. That’s their whole job. Had you known this, you wouldn’t have been surprised when they acted how they did in order to return any capital possible once it was clear they were not making a return.
I was somewhat concerned when OP mentioned having lost "friends" over their failed company. This can either mean they got their friends to invest money (which is risky precisely because those usually would not be professional investors), or they considered their professional investors "friends".
Bill Watterson, of Calvin and Hobbes fame, gave advice that I've found helpful over the years, "To create your own life's meaning is not easy but it's still allowed and I think you'll be happier for the trouble."
> Many of the investors turned out to be bloodthirsty vultures
> I lost many friends
> This is just the reality of what happens to people when extreme stress ends in failure
> So the worst case scenario is that you get eaten by vultures and lose friends. And the best case scenario is that you're in a soulless machine that turns everyone into an automaton
You're not disillusioned with technology. You're disillusioned with humanity (as you probably ought to be.)
> But eventually I
started exercising, went on anti-depressants, and started therapy.
Then I got a job that has nothing to do with technology. Slowly my
happiness returned, and with it my ability to focus. I do a lot of
sports now and hang out with my non-techy friends and my wife. I cook
a lot.
Sounds like the issue had less to so with technology and more to do with lack of work-life balance and unaddressed clinical depression.
Depression caused by a burn-out, caused by a very sh*tty professional situation. I don't think it's unique to the tech sector but the tech industry _is_ harsh on people.
I work in semiconductor manufacturing and I'm in the same boat as OP.
I'm not enjoying the work anymore...working from home has helped somewhat with the burnout but the social isolation is getting to me too. At least I don't have to see my coworkers and boss who have stopped caring a long time ago.
Not sure what I am going to do if I just outright quit. My wife is supportive but I can't just sit at home doing hobbies.
I think the biggest problem is all the enthusiasm / money / speculation around every piece of “tech” being the next “big thing”
I’m wondering this for you and myself:
could you be happy and fulfilled letting go of the “tech” dream, and instead focus simply on solving problems for people we care about with people we care about?
Maybe some solutions use software maybe some use rope. Who cares with what.. are the people better off?
1) quit this ecosystem completely, go to countryside grow fruits, raise animals in farm.
2) Find a software job where you are a billable resource, aka consulting. You do this for x$/h. If you are good no one will bat an eye. You don't have to deal with investor, upper management. Every month you put y hours for x*y $ no bullshit. If you smell bullshit you walk out.
My solution to this is to keep my programming as a "hobby", to only do it for love without regard for money - and have an unrelated day job to fund my living expenses. This is also what Derek Sivers recommends https://sivers.org/balance
On mobile I couldn't get whole lines to wrap at my screen edge, couldn't figure out a way to view the raw txt instead of that weird web page. Opened termux, installed w3m, opened the url there, and then was able to view whole lines without repeatedly scrolling left and right. Maybe this will help someone else as well.
Leaving aside the organizational bullshit issues, a big frustration with IC work is that to be productive at it I have to essentially shut-off my brain during the rest of my life, as I simply don't have the mental energy to do deeply technical things outside of work while being productive at coding for work.
After work ... I bought an iPad and started making little songs using Garageband. I have total creative control, and tinkering away with music is fun for me.
Another generation used to build model railroads in their basements. I don't get it, but they had total creative control.
I'd say keep doing what you do and seem to like now. The rest may come back. One day you might think of an interesting idea would want to try it and then before you know you'll be already doing things to make that idea come to life. Just do not try to force things upon yourself.
> I can't say it's because I wanted to make the world a better place.
i see you saying this, but i don't think you believe this. the way you ended your essay sounds like you do want to make the world a better place through technology.
i am myself burnt out on technology, and i have come to a realization on something that's been burning a while. the simple fact of the matter is that society cannot be helped with technology. just get over that dream. this is all very clear in today's global health crisis. quite nearly all the problems are emphatically not technological in nature and cannot be solved with more technology.
it sounds like to me that you are actually happy but aren't happy with how or why you're happy. maybe that is something to work on? i'm not that old, but as i have aged, i see now that life is a blip. this drive to make a so-called mark is a fool's errand. just enjoy life locally and quit trying to have a global effect. so be happy that you've found some happiness.
i say "so what?" you can't read science fiction. why is that a mark of demerit? read dramas. read thrillers. read westerns. read comedies. there's a ton of material out there that has nothing to do with science. despite science's progress, it still cannot answer or even come close to exploring areas of life that we experience.
stop caring about products. think about things in emotive terms. if you like programming and creating and mathematics, maybe get into creative coding? use your technical ability to search for new expression. maybe use programming to explore your knot theory excursion. maybe volunteer your time to help people or communities who need technology help (i think one can help society on a very local level with a certain amount of technology).
i don't understand why you want to force a path. if a path is closed, it's closed. it doesn't make sense to be happy on your path with tons of other paths out there but to stand in front of the closed path asking "why?". move on and explore.
in dealing with depression and anxiety, the most powerful thought is to understand that you can't change the world. it makes no sense to try and change it, as you'll bury a deeper hole. all the drugs and therapy are meant to be catalyst to a realization that you can't bend the world as if you're gravity and that you must learn to ride the wave in a healthy way and make small adjustments to go where you want to go.
This isn't the right metaphor. I'm not trying to force a path; I have a very strong internal sense of a general direction I need to go. But there is no path in that direction. So I'm trying to forge one.
As for why that direction, I don't know of course. But if I were to speculate it's because I have a strong intuition that that's where my personal growth is.
Well, why getting yourself burned in a startup? Take a reasonable sized company with a traditional business you like but do not love and work there as an employee, best in a country where employee rights mean something.
Being a corporate black matter developer is actually quite good.
Both at the beginning and in the end the answer is always simple: hope. Not all people. There are good ones, even in technology. There are coworkers with whom your shared emotional experience was authentic. There will be more.
Try moving to a new city. I had a similar experience and moved from SF to NYC. NYC is less of a techie bubble than SF. You didn't mention where you live, but I just assumed it's somewhere in the Bay area.
You aren't disillusioned with technology, you're disillusioned with people.
That's not an excuse for the way people behave, but it's a useful thing to keep in mind when trying to think about how to change the problems. They're behavioral, social, and organizational problems, not technical ones.
Meaningful change can only come through those avenues, then, like politics. Of course, that's an ugly field on its own... if you prefer to keep a tech lens on it, you can try to design products to push society in certain directions, but you could also work towards that without doing any sort of technological work at all.
These sorts of things are the strongest sorts of anti-libertarian arguments I know of. The "market" necessarily devolves to the people who are willing to push the boundaries the most, because it's near-impossible to know all the bad actors exhaustively in advance, and because so many people are willing to compromise - at least somewhat - in their pursuit of personal security.
I would recommend looking and producing Art. Software-perls or paintings, poems whatever you like and admire. The more artist you are the more you suffer from applied art, it is not your fault :-)
Working on commons as a developer for France's state startups incubator as a freelance, without the burden of the internal HR, was a blessing for me after my private startup experience.
The soulless corporation is far from exclusive to what you call "tech". "Tech" is when they also put up a foosball table and paint the walls in bright colors.
Having worked for clients from SV, Japan and a few European countries, including my own, I would guess that it's not tech in general, but SV and VC culture that's the reason here.
Case in point: no other crowd is so accepting of using drugs or other substances to increase work performance.
Yes, there is coffee as the most common of such means, but funnily enough I had to ditch it cold turkey to keep up with these people, because improving my sleep quality instead was more effective.
Bottom line is SV offers more reward, but puts more pressure so it's not for everyone - especially not for me who loves his job, but certainly isn't married to it.
Been there. Still slightly am. It's tough. Expand your hobbies and invest in them as you have tech. See where it ends up. It(s) kind-of work(ed/ing) for me.
Take a week off, step away from the keyboard, find some humans, animals, get a hobby or go back to the one you had. Watch that Naval Ravikant Joe Rogan podcast.
>For a long time I couldn't focus on any remotely intellectual pursuit.
I even thought I permanently damaged my brain.
He didn't appear to mention the presumed cause of this. Stress?
As to the rest of the contents, it's a mistake to assume that two experiences given labels of "high-point" and "low point" having a common feature implies that all other experiences of the same species (presumed to be on some spectrum that they bookend) also share that feature. Maybe were he to have worked for a smaller scale established company, he would have found his experience to be less unpleasant.
The solution for me in the past has been a religious approach to work-life balance: LEAVE THE OFFICE AT 5 PM. Every day.
Sure have some leeway for the real genuine emergencies, but fixing a random bug or "finishing this off" is not worth hanging around after 5 for.
I did this and went from feeling burnt out, drained, and ultimately crushed at the end of each day, to leaving the office "hungry" and looking forward to coming back in tomorrow to continue fixing that bug or finishing off that thing or whatever with just enough energy remaining to get me through to 5pm again. Life is too short to "dedicate" yourself to a job.
I always keep in mind this story from 101 Zen Tales:
---
Muddy Road
Tanzan and Ekido were once travelling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling.
Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.
"Come on, girl," said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.
Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. "We monks don't do near females," he told Tanzan, "especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?"
"I left the girl there," said Tanzan. "Are you still carrying her?"
The issue is that even the venture capitalists and the the managers have own oppressors and there is no external solution to the issue that this person is facing.
I remember one time a manager explaining to me how incredibly aggressive and unrealistic targets the CEO sets for them and that is why we were getting the push. The reason is that the CEO is a result-based position and is receiving unrealistic pressure from the board of directors. On the other hand the members of the board of directors are trying to keep the company afloat and avoid this being their next-in-a-row investment failure so that they can officially be classified as "serial loser". In this world you are either oppressed by someone else or by pure reality. The Hollywood image of a 1920s oppressive capitalist smoking cigars all day and thinking of who's life he should destroy in the name of profit is laughable nonsense. That is just not how the world works.
I generally agree with this person's premises, but I reject his conclusion. He basically got the slap that he deserved, since there was a huge disconnect between his model of reality and actual reality. I know because I used to be this person and am currently recovering from what this person is experiencing. The solution can only come from within and as far as I can tell it involves finding inner peace and at the same time adopting a highly disagreeable personality traits.
This isn't going to be a popular response, but I read your entire article and I have the following advice.
First, what toy wrote tells me you started your business because you consider yourself to be highly intelligent and capable and you believed that you should be in charge. What you've said about how your business failed and how few people still want anything to do with you afterwards tells me you were not prepared, you do not understand how to run a business and you lack even a minimal competency when it comes to leadership. I do not want you to think I am being harsh and unfeeling, I am being critical because it's what you need to know if you ever intended to work in the tech industry again.
Almost everyone wants to be in charge and believes they could succeed in such a role given the chance. Of those who attempt to start their own businesses only about 10% have what it takes to merely stay in business. Fewer than 3% of business leaders have sufficient ability in the field they already work in to create a genuinely profitable business, and less than 0.3% have what it takes to found an industry disrupting company.
Investors will always behave the way you described because they're basically playing roulette and they've bet on a bunch of things in the hope that 10% of their investments will pay off because they know the statistics I just told you. Your friends abandoned you however, because as a boss you make them promises and promising things to your friends which you probably cannot deliver always damages the relationship.
Finally, it's time for my advice. One, you need to remove your ego and emotions from your work as this will always eventually damage working relationships and burn you out. Two, work is always a marathon, never a sprint. A lot of startup guys will tell you that you have to work 70 hour weeks, but this is not maintainable and will just result in failure later on as opposed to delayed sustainable success. Third, if it wasn't clear from my initial statements, you are not well suited to being high level management and changing that about yourself would likely take so long as to waste the rest of your career in pursuit of a highly stressful goal that is unlikely ever to feel worth the effort. I suggest you take an engineering position or stick to no higher than mid-level project management at an established company. Finding somewhere relaxing where you can limit your work hours to 40 or less per week is the only real chance you have at reversing the burnout, but only if you can remove your ego and emotions from your past and future professional work. I strongly recommend mindfulness meditation to help with getting past your former business failings and MO e forward into a career that you can find fulfilling.
You're not disillusioned with technology. You seem to have a great deal of interest and faith in technology.
You seem disillusioned with Capitalism.
The unfortunate truth is that Venture Capitalists run the entire tech industry, and they simply do not care about technology for technology's sake. They care about making money, for money's sake. No matter how innovative and impressive your technology may be, they are only measuring it in dollars.
If you are forced into a decision where you have to make your technology worse to make your bottom line better, you will be expected to make your technology worse ASAP. If you don't do it, the capitalists will take their money and go home.
You should look into some more altruistic tech projects. I have friends that work at a digital accessibility company that is funded almost entirely by donations. They seem to be in the unique situation of being funded for making software that works best for the users, not for making software that earns the most for their investors, as their investors expect no returns on their donations.
But as long as you're working in the commercial tech sector, you're going to have to deal with VCs who don't care one bit about the tech you're producing, only that it maximizes their returns.
They weren't ever your friends. People at work rarely transcend beyond co-workers and into actual friendship. If all you do together is work and around-work activities, they probably aren't your friends. You're effectively people locked in a cage together that happen to get along.
If you get together on days you don't work together then they might actually be your friend. If they've met your non-work friends they might be your friend. If they attend your birthday party where they don't work with 95% of people there they might be your friend.
If you don't invite them to those things you don't actually consider them a friend. If you hold any power over someone (e.g. CTO-employee relationships) and they do this stuff they still might not be your friend. But if they don't do any of this stuff they definitely, 100% are not your friend.
Also, one of the best ways to fuck up a friendship is to hire them. You need to be sure you can properly separate business and friendship if you ever do this.
I was shocked at the beginning of the lockdown in Silicon Valley how many colleagues immediately went to a dark place because they had virtually no support structure, social interaction, or even sense of identity outside of their in-person workplace associations. Granted, a lot of in-person socialization out of the office is also off-the-table, but that's not the problem I heard from people.
It's not healthy to live your entire life so embedded within a corporation.
Look at pre 2012 SV. All the ping-pong tables, all the beanbag chairs, the free beer, the free laundry, the sleep-pods, the cafeterias, etc. 'Cynical' people thought that these accruements were meant to keep you there and working all the time. People got rid of their apartments, set up Winnebagos in the parking lot. Intents do matter, but still, if you were that kind of person, the one that thought Google was just college 2.0, well, yeah, quarantime is not going to be good to you.
This pandemic is resetting a lot of things. Expectations of intimacy are another thing on the list.
It's a complex issue and if you ask 10 people, you'll get 23 answers.
One of my answers: the greater geopolitical community woke up to the power of Web 2.0 with Tahrir Square and the questions that social media technology poses to us all. Largely, Tahrir Square was the high water mark of Silicon Valley and the old promises of free information exchange and the hippie ethos that spawned it all. The reaction by the geopolitical leaders was swift afterwards.
Again, super complex topic, I cannot stress this enough.
When I visited the Google office in Mountain View, I noticed the streets around it were packed with parked RVs. Do those RVs belong to homeless employees?
I live alone and ended up going to live with my parents during this whole thing, since I can do my entire job remotely. It's largest amount of contiguous time I've spent with them in about a decade.
I feel that Americans tend to use the term "friend" a lot more casually than, say, the Japanese. In Japan, your boss is never your friend. Neither is your teachers, colleagues, parents or siblings. A "friend" in Japan is somewhat closer to a soulmate, and not surprisingly we don't have many (for some people, not at all).
If the Japanese word you are thinking about translates better to soulmate than to friend, then why not just assume it means soulmate instead of friend.
Surely Japanese people have relationships that fall between soulmate and coworker/acquaintance.
I often say that I think the greatest stroke of genius that Facebook had was calling it 'Friending' and 'Unfriending' instead of 'Add to your contacts' and 'Remove from your contacts'.
Then you're still friends. Depending on your performance and how both of you treat each other, that friendship may become affected but as long as you still treat each other as friends and hang out, that friendship will continue.
It's very common for the founders and early employees to be friends prior to the startup. He may have very well lost friends. He didn't elaborate, so we really don't know.
Are you completely oblivious as to how much of a dick you sound like? Here's a societies claimed moral compass nice thing to do: tell him you aren't friends, possibly give him the reasons why, and leave it like that.
Don't come to HN trying to humble yourself in posting this. I bet you're a ton of fun
Yeah I am a condescending dick - to people with no skills, no capital, no ability to execute.
They don't typically bring anything to the table! I happened to internalize the idea of a co-founder with somewhat of a network to resurrect an idea that needed to be funded, and I can say that yes it did get me/us taken more seriously.
I'm finding solidarity in this thread amongst the engineers that also are annoyed with over embellishing business sales guys that don't have a clue.
Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but the "solidarity" amongst engineers in this thread is somewhat close to "fuck the money, be more of a moral ethical human" which is so, so far from what you've described. I don't think you should automatically lump yourself in with them.
Yes, I, and many others, have something close to the same feelings you do towards these types. However, we don't pride ourselves on being manipulative wolves and going "hehe I actually hate you" under our breath.
Have you, perhaps, considered, that he maybe feels the same way about you, but is even more of a manipulative asshole and has strung you along more than you can possibly imagine by being a complete psychopath?
Anyways, there's probably not much of a point in trying to reason with somebody like you. If you can't tell, if there were only "you's" and "hims" in the world... it would only end in two petty parties, and then war, with no good for the hypothetical humanity at all. Enjoy your money and your arguably strange views on making the future a brighter place.
For me the simplest barometer is, if I'm gone tomorrow, how long they will remember me/talk about me. For people at work, I think it'll probably be an hour or so or maybe a day if I'm lucky (+ when they notice old commits). Helps keep the perspective clear.
One of the best pieces of advice is to completely separate and isolate your work life from your social life. Build a wall around both and don't mix them, learned the lesson the hard way after a decade in the industry
It keeps your work life clean of any distractions and forces you to build and maintain a social network that isn't tied to your work. Also cuts out a lot of emotions from decision making.
The last sentence is probably the best advise and i would extend it to any kind of social relationship. If you wish to keep your marriage/relationship/friendship/etc. intact, do not mess it with business.
I think tons of people fall into this trap in and outside tech, but just luckily never need to face the fact that they have no friends 10 years into their career.
> Then I worked for a tech giant, and then for a high-growth unicorn. It shocked me how dilbertesque they both were. Full of politicians, and burnt out engineers in golden handcuffs who can't wait to get out, and meaningless business speak, and checked out employees who pretend they're "excited" about everything all the time.
I left my big city office job to work remotely (after a 2.5 year "sabbatical" traveling the world) precisely because I couldn't stand that sh anymore. Remote work isn't a panacea and does have its cons, but no way in hell I'd trade it back for any office job.
In terms of finding one's "spark", I can relate. I used to be pretty starry-eyed too, majoring in math (because I enjoyed it, not for job opportunities or money), and working on a bunch of different kinds of projects for fun. As I've gotten older and had to succumb to the working world, I've also gotten more and more disillusioned over the years. I've felt my creativity and passion diminish.
I'd say part of it is from getting older, part of it is just a byproduct of our capitalist system that forces everyone to rent themselves out for money to rich people who want to make more money and become cogs in the "dilbertesque" machine exactly as you described. As bad as it is, it wouldn't be half as bad in my opinion if we could at least talk about it honestly, but sadly this can get you fired.
I don't have the solution, but I'd say to start by being less hard on yourself because most of those burnt out engineers are in the same position as you, they just didn't have the conviction or courage to follow through and leave. Accept that one's job is purely impersonal and just for money and co-workers are just business relationships, and don't expect more than that or you'll inevitably bound for disappointment.
Clarify what your goals are. Do you want to make money? Improve society? Work on intellectually challenging problems? Be happy? Those are all very different goals with different solutions.
And thanks for writing this post. The enormous reception is proof that you're not alone here, that a lot more of us feel the same way as you than you think. It's a sad reflection of our system, but short of a revolution all we can do is do the best we can. FIRE (financial independence) is the only true freedom of time.
Having read this a second time, I suspect that "technology" here is represented by "web framework launch Silicon valley velocity board IPO tickets vulture-capitalist 'go big or go home' standup burnrate" and little else.
Not all technology is like that. Technology happens without the constant churn of frameworks popping in and out of vogue, without a dependency being drug into the Google Graveyard on little notice, without scrum and story points. Technology happens without a single investor around. Technology happens outside of California ... it even can occur in the flyover states.
First, go make something with your hands. Or learn to. Makerspaces are shut most likely and of course Techshop folding was a drag but ... make something other than a sandcastle of bits that will be washed away when the moon of fashion drags a wave of fickle adherence over your hard work. Smash it or give it away. Now do it again, and again. You will like your third version.
Make something for yourself, that no investor will ever see. You will not make a dime out of it. Go ahead and program something to automate a personal itch. Maybe you just want to see what movies are around within fifty miles and then you won't to pick a theater; try prying that data out of some feeds and re-organizing it. Write something that alerts you on Wednesday when a new moon is going to be on a Friday or Saturday night so you can go to look at the stars somewhere far from the city. Do it without unit tests or deployment or CI/CD or a single git command.
Look for a problem where you work with the data, not with the UX or presentation or reaching for Bootstrap. Something where the web is not involved.
I can tell you what the lesson here is but you should do these things and figure out why it all feels so different and what you didn't like about ... before.
@mGBUfLn9, you point your finger in every directions but your own. There is one sentence where you pretend to do so, but you ever so quickly declare yourself not guilty.
"I lost many friends." That was entirely your choice. On a daily and hourly basis you chose striking it rich or satisfying your vainglory over people and relationships. You could have chosen to do this software as a side project, or via slow bootstrap, sans the shark investors. You didn't.
"But I can sleep at night fine. So I eventually decided it's mostly nobody's fault," then "hang out with my non-techy friends and my wife". Clearly you haven't put two and two together.
Let me guess: Your startup's business model was based on selling advertising, selling data on its users, and/or exploiting people in the "gig economy". Yet it's only your investors that you call "bloodthirsty vultures".
You blame everyone but yourself for becoming "soulless". Your very use of this word reveals a great lack of soul. You misuse it to describe working like a machine, an automaton. The nurse who is working like a machine to save lives at great risk to her own has the most wonderful, beautiful soul. What makes you soulless is that you're only thinking about yourself and "new products" (ways to make money) without any hint of a conscience troubled by the decisions made and actions taken in pursuit of those profits, and what that says about who you are. Or maybe the depression was a conscience trying hard to speak out, but it got snuffed by drugs rather than getting heard.
You can't "see past the cynicism" when you are the cynicism.
Spend less time figuring how much you can get and more time one what you can give. Ditch your transactional mindset. Give for giving's sake. Use your talents to make the world better, fuck the profits. Chose the more moral job over the more profitable one. The people you'll work with in those jobs will have lots of soul and it will rub off on you.
---
[I know this post will not be well received here on Hacker News, the techie Twitter. It's like walking into a church in the middle of Sunday service and to rail against organized religion and the hypocrisy of the worshipers.]
I'm not sure if its the internet which allows us to think more/faster and more global but i do have the general thought that a ton of things we do as humans is not worth while doing.
I would love to start today stopping capitalism and inventing a new system which optimizes for life stability, good food, travel, piece, sustainability and time with others.
Instead we optimize for revenue, growth and because everyone thinks they can do it better, they have the business idea, everyone likes to earn money.
Whats my conclusion? I try to optimze my work by making sure i control certain aspects, do what i think i enjoy and is more or less useful. But my goal is to stop working with 50 or so.
Funny enough, your story is strange though, you probably did not create your startup because you thought you would change the world, did you? Or did you do it because you thought its life fullfilling, it earns you respect and money?
My experience is limited, but what you're listing above to me sounds an awful lot like some fundamental issues with capitalism and not fundamental issues with technology. I can't speak to the rise and fall of your company, but I can speak with some confidence on your experience at a Tech Giant(tm) and a unicorn startup, having some experience with both and certainly many friends who work at both types of company.
Any Tech Giant office is going to be an absolutely miserable working environment. I had one interview with a larger company and I was struck by how openly bored my interviewers were. Obviously, YMMV and some places may be better than others. But having enough friends, even newly minted college graduates with a "six figs or bust", burn out after 6 months in a development role, it was enough to pretty much convince me to avoid them forever.
Furthermore, the "unicorn" startup is going to be extremely similar to a tech giant but with more desperation. You're joining a team of people who, in all likelihood, have very little attachment to the product and have read a few HN articles about how this is going to be the next big thing. Plus you have the young, fratty egos in play. A lot of these places are going to cover up the fact that it actually sucks to work there with "hey free keg at lunch!! haha don't have more than four ;)"
This might be too hot of a take for HN, but there is, in fact, NO job that you can work at and be valued as a person. You're appreciated for whatever value you bring into the company, but don't fool yourself into thinking that there is anything but a monetary string tying you together. You're not looking at anything wrong, you don't need an attitude shift, the system is broken from the ground up and we're forced to be participants, otherwise we won't make rent.
Find something you don't mind doing; I'd recommend looking at smaller companies with leaders who worked a long time at larger companies. In all likelihood, these companies were founded after the leaders experienced something similar to what you did. But it is your birthright as an American (citizen at least) to be perpetually unfulfilled.
I anticipated this was in the vein of, "It's all horrible, fundamentally antiquated shit that barely works and is preserved by inertial debt and captive markets of hegemonic corporations," not about the ennui of alienation in the bowels of Moloch[0]. xD
>So the worst case scenario is that you get eaten by vultures and lose friends. And the best case scenario is that you're in a soulless machine that turns everyone into an automaton.
If you're going for the gold, yes, that's what you may have to deal with.
If you're content working for yourself and not selling out to venture capitalists, life can be pretty sweet.
Watch an old movie and notice the many improvements in economic productivity, standard of living, quality of life.
E.g.: To get salt, had to travel to the local village. For this had to saddle up or harness a horse or two. Now can get the salt delivered or eat in a restaurant or drive to the village on a smooth road in a car with HVAC.
Car tires used to wear out in about 15,000 miles and were so vulnerable to rupture that had to carry a spare and know where the bumper jack was and how to change a tire. Now can get 75,000 miles from a set of tires.
Ever mess with a carburetor and ignition breaker points? Now have electronic engine controls with fuel injection. So, less maintenance, better fuel economy, fewer oil changes, longer engine life.
It goes on this way for cars and transportation more generally.
See how houses were built: Saws, hammers, and plaster. Now have electric saws, studs, beams, and panels already cut to size, and wall board. E.g., I had some wood to cut, with a saw got halfway through the first cut, then rushed out and got a circle saw, zip, zoom, cut all the pieces and they look really nice. Needed to drill some 1" holes; set aside the brace and bit in an old tool chest, got an electric drill, and done, really well, really nice clean holes, zip, zoom. Got the 1" spade bit on-line!
It goes on this way with hand tools, kitchen tools, yard tools, auto maintenance tools, etc. MUCH easier. E.g., kitchen tools can be awash in stainless steel; used to have to use expensive silver or rusty iron.
I do a single serving pizza I make myself: The ingredients for one pizza cost right at 40 cents with the flour at 9 cents. Fantastic agricultural productivity, along with the associated supply chain.
Tech has contributed to all of those.
I go to Google several times a day and to Amazon at least once a week. So, lots of use of tech.
Shopping, buying on-line, the shipping, tracking, paying -- lots of tech there, too.
Software? It can be a lot of fun! So, write some code, try it, get back errors, fix the errors, for that maybe put in some statements to trace the execution, and finally get it to run as desired. From then on, it won't wear out! And with that software often can just click on an icon or type in a short command and get the intended work done automatically! Boom!
A huge, biggie: Get rid of the typewriters! Beyond that, since I'm in math, get TeX for typing the math!!! Finally with TeX, the typing is no longer more work than the math, even math research! It took a LOT of transistors, processors, and computing just to get rid of the typewriters and get us to TeX.
Now that we know when the next big flash will come, we can have the telescopes looking and have the gravitational wave detectors expecting -- a prediction is for a big signal!
For work in an organization, it's long been with a lot of goal subordination, suck up to those above, piss on those below, and try to sabotage the people down the hall. But now with tech there are some advantages:
Clean, indoor work, no heavy lifting.
Safer work, e.g., won't get finger cut off in a saw or have a load of bricks fall on your head. Won't inhale or ingest stuff that will injure or kill you.
Won't get thrown off a horse or kicked by a mule.
Maybe will get a better tech job.
Maybe will find a good startup opportunity and get rich, as rich as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan, Ford, etc., heavily just from typing with fingers.
For my laptop, my incremental backups are at 11 GB -- time to do another full backup! I just got two new SATA hard disk drives, 7200 RPM, 6 Gbps data transfer rate, 4 TB per drive (no use of shingled recording)!! IIRC, $65 each! Amazing!!!
Just got in the USPS mail, ~$10, the Rostropovich performance of the Dvořák cello concerto,
B minor, with the Berlin Philharmonic and von Karajan: I lost my first copy in my recent move so wanted a replacement. Fast, easy search, ordering on-line! It's playing now: I've paid a LOT of attention to classical music and this performance is a good candidate for the most careful, passionate, and lyrical music and performance, art, "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion", ever. Could never dream of such.
For regular tires, it's been so long I don't remember in detail.
When I was growing up, 13,000 miles on a set of tires was about all we got.
The deal now, and for at least 20 years, is better rubber compounds for the tread, mesh under the tread to keep the tread from flexing on the road surface, and better cord, maybe Kevlar, for the rest. Now a lot of tires are super tough things.
For a Chevy S-10 Blazer, I bought some Cooper snow tires a few years ago, but I don't drive very much now so have put only maybe only 10,000 miles on them -- they show none or nearly no signs of wear yet.
I drove a Buick Turbo T-Type, heavy car but fast, for about 220,000 miles with just the original tires and one set of new tires. The new tires didn't wear as long as I hoped -- they sold me luxury, smooth riding tires, and I don't give even as much as a weak little hollow hoot about smooth, luxury.
I put 200,000+ miles on a Chevy Nova with just the original plus 1 or 2 sets of new tires; similarly for a hot rod Camaro. Then I was getting tires from Michelin.
Ballpark, the change I see is 13,000 miles growing up and 75,000 miles when I was doing a lot of driving.
But there are some exceptions: There are some luxury, smooth riding tires that, AFAIK, don't last as long. Some high performance tires have significantly higher coefficient of friction and, thus, shorter tread life. Maybe front wheel drive can chew up tires. Full time four wheel drive maybe shouldn't but I suspect does chew up tires. Soft suspensions tend to scrub the tires on the road.
Sounds like several bad work experiences in a row, but all with companies on a specific spectrum: hot startup -> unicorn -> megacorp. That's a particular flavor of company, and kind of a rough treadmill to walk on.
There are a lot of small to mid-size tech companies that actually make money, though maybe not unholy mountains of it, where work-life balance is great and people just want to make something customers love. There are also many agencies that fit that bill.
This risks sounding too simplistic, but in life I've found that work tends to fall into three categories:
1. People who want to get as rich as they possibly can.
2. People who want to make a living and enjoy life.
3. People who want work to be their passion.
I've learned to avoid #1 and #3.
Re: #1, Many of the best ways to get as rich as possible involve screwing other people over. The people who play that game and enjoy it end up being pretty cutthroat, because that's kind of the point. If that's not you (and it's not me), then it's not fun to be part of.
Re: #3, vocational "passion" is just hard. Sometimes this is because the dream is so big -- end world hunger, or something. Sometimes the dream is so popular -- become a world-famous artist, etc. This is where you'll find the dreamers and the starving artists. The people who thrive here sort of live in their own world where the more mundane concerns of life don't matter to them, otherwise they'd burn out and give up.
A lot of people think they need their work to be either about Riches or Passion (or worst of all, both), and so they go down those paths and find stress, exhaustion, and misery instead of happiness.
Meanwhile, in boring old Path #2, you have a whole lot of people who work from 9-5 and then go home. They think their job is kind of interesting, but they don't think they're "changing the world," and that's okay. The happiest folks here tend to be craftspersons who know how to make some kind of thing, and whatever it is, they make nice ones.
As for me, I spent years that I look back on now as a sad waste of time hunting for #1 and #3, before one day having basically no choice but to take a "kinda okay" job so I could buy groceries. I was badly burned out, and I decided I needed a break, that I'd take six months and just "work a stupid job" to recover and pay off my credit cards after my experiment in running my own business fizzled out. And after six months I realized I was the happiest I'd ever been.
Life is kind of weird. It's not glamorous or sexy to just work a regular job and go home at 5pm. But it can be the foundation of a really happy, satisfying life.
I don't know if that will help you or not, but, I hope some part of that is useful to you. Many people have been where you are now. It'll get better.
Tech is capitalism at its best and worst, with the best being bad for a lot of people. Self imposed hardship and self sacrifice is the name of the pursuit. Everyone is a chaser. You then have VCs and angels and business partners with immense leverage over these struggles, often struggling themselves.
This brings out the bad in a lot of people. Cheating, backstabbing, and a general lack of integrity. Pervasive, regardless of status or level.
I didn't understand this at all, but it turns out much of it is driven from fear, as most actions inevitably are. And it gets worse with rising stakes, so its worse at higher levels.
Integrity is expensive. Kindness is expensive. Empathy is expensive. And competence is rare.
So good meaning, goodhearted, friendly people fail to sustain their good nature when shit hits the fan. And shit is always hitting the fan. People will act good until they cannot afford to. Or think they can't. Until they're scared. And that's the saddest part. They think they have to cheat. They then witness others do it, and think its just the way. Not me we tell ourselves, but sooner or later, the ultimatum presents itself: be good or survive. And we've seen the fallen. Chances are we've been a victim of one. Or work for one. Or deal with one. Or sit next to one. And the one thing they're good at is survival. No wonder there are so damn many of them.
Then what is the answer?
Don't trust anyone. Ergo, integrity is the luxury most often enjoyed alone.
But.
If you enjoy your own company, then that's a start. If you have an incredible product or service, then that's a start. If you don't need anyone's help, then that's a start. And if you have a warm home you can return to, then that's a start.
The one thing that will make your life easier is obvious.
Kick ass.
Just be so good, and run with it, or don't bother. That should be the motto of every entrepreneur. Or any endeavor, for that matter.
You're jumping into a snake pit. That's a given. Bring a flamethrower, or don't bother.
Every kick ass startup kicks ass.
If your ass is being kicked, you're doing it wrong, and you're wrong. You'd be right to get out as soon as possible.
The title should read "extremely disillusioned with capitalism" because, well...this is it. That's how it goes. Of course your investors tore your company's carcass to shreds. Yeah everyone is overworked and pretending to enjoy slaving away in golden handcuffs. That's the system.
I read it as 'extremely disillusioned with business/capitalism side of technology'.
I think is normal and everyone sooner or later crash into it. Then one becomes like a drug dealer: I sell it but I don't use it (technology, of course).
Sounds like a bad case of capitalism. Doing skilled work you're proud of, with people you love and respect is one of the most rewarding things you can do. Doing it to make line go up is what prostitution is to enthusiastically consenting sex with people you love and respect.
It's not a suprise your playing a lot of sports. Depending on the sport you can momentarily tick those boxes. But your not left with anything afterwards.
Find something that needs doing in the world, find people who feel the same way.
Try science fiction as a practice.
I went through a similar progression. A couple of observations:
1) Part of what you experience is just gaining wisdom with age. You see how things really work, and you get disillusioned. The thrill of early experiences, does diminish over time. And that's not just software. The thrill of your first bicycle ride, is not reproducible. The sense of freedom you had, after that, riding around unsupervised -- that goes away too, obviously.
2) The word "tech" has changed radically over the years. I joined my first "high tech startup" in 1988. We really were doing technology that was just barely feasible at the time. The entire company was seven people -- founder, biz/ops guy, VP of engineering, four engineers. That was FUN. Figuring out how to solve these problems, seeing the parts come to life, seeing the whole thing come together, seeing it work for users as planned. In an environment like that, you really feel like you are doing something special, that you are lucky to be there, and you just want to spend all of your time on it. The fact that it might actually be worth serious money someday -- even better.
This incredibly exciting sense of being in a tech startup spread. Large companies would entice you by saying, this group is just like a startup within Megacorp. And I never understood how that fooled anyone. In that situation, you aren't scratching your itch, you are scratching Megacorp's itch, and that's a lot less exciting. There aren't seven of you. Outside your group, there are 700 or 7,000 or 70,000. Maybe you get a little bonus, or equity, but you don't own a chunk of the company YOU started.
However, Megacorp and similar companies definitely saw the advantage of getting their employees to commit to their work in the manner of startup employees, and so you get places like Google that gradually switch the incentive. First you want to be there all the time (back when Google was a startup). Then they make it enticing to be there all the time (campus, massages, gourmet dining, on-campus laundry and exercise, etc.). And finally, it's just expected. Being available and productive (or at least seeming to be) 24/7 is just the way things are at Megacorp these days.
And then finally, the last piece of it goes away: the interesting tech. "Tech" companies are no longer solving barely solvable, new problems. They are doing more of the same, implementing dull and possibly harmful goals for the sake of Megacorp. Megacorp is no more a tech company than it is an electricity company. It uses both to meet its goals, and you are merely someone familiar with either bits or electrons, using them in well-worn ways for the sole purpose of enriching Megacorp.
This is both a great pop song, and the lyrics really capture the disillusionment that sets in, although in a very different environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1-EPTAFE0o
Text of the gist since it's a bear to read on mobile:
"I was drawn to programming, science, technology and science fiction
ever since I was a little kid. I can't say it's because I wanted to
make the world a better place. Not really. I was simply drawn to it
because I was drawn to it. Writing programs was fun. Figuring out how
nature works was fascinating. Science fiction felt like a grand
adventure.
Then I started a software company and poured every ounce of energy
into it. It failed. That hurt, but that part is ok. I made a lot of
mistakes and learned from them. This experience made me much, much
better. I'm satisfied with that.
What's not ok is how things ended. Many of the investors turned out
to be bloodthirsty vultures who tore the carcass to pieces. Had we
IPO'ed, these same people would have stood there with giant smiles
telling everyone how they'd always known we were special and how
they'd supported us all along.
I lost many friends. Throughout the whole thing I was lucky to meet
many brilliant, creative, talented people. Together, we worked so
hard. Now we don't talk.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how I contributed to these failed
relationships. I learned a lot from that too. It wasn't my finest
hour, but I can sleep at night fine. So I eventually decided it's
mostly nobody's fault. This is just the reality of what happens to
people when extreme stress ends in failure.
Then I worked for a tech giant, and then for a high-growth unicorn. It
shocked me how dilbertesque they both were. Full of politicians, and
burnt out engineers in golden handcuffs who can't wait to get out, and
meaningless business speak, and checked out employees who pretend
they're "excited" about everything all the time. The young, wide-eyed
engineers seem hopelessly naive to me now.
So the worst case scenario is that you get eaten by vultures and lose
friends. And the best case scenario is that you're in a soulless
machine that turns everyone into an automaton. I know that's not the
whole picture. It's not even most of the picture. But that's the part
I can't unsee.
For a long time I couldn't focus on any remotely intellectual pursuit.
I even thought I permanently damaged my brain. But eventually I
started exercising, went on anti-depressants, and started therapy.
Then I got a job that has nothing to do with technology. Slowly my
happiness returned, and with it my ability to focus. I do a lot of
sports now and hang out with my non-techy friends and my wife. I cook
a lot. I got into knot theory. I find it fascinating and can do it for
hours. I'm surprisingly not bad at it. So I know I still have my
faculties.
But I still can't program, can't write, can't think of new products,
can't read science fiction. I'm mostly happy, but there is always a
hint of dissatisfaction underneath. I miss the creative, optimistic
person I once was. I want to see past the cynicism. I want to write
programs and make things. I want to work with a ragtag team again to
bring something to life that didn't exist before. I want to learn how
to see past the bullshit and be creative again. But I can't get myself
to do it. I hear the call and I know there's still a spark. But when I
take even the smallest step everything turns bleak and mundane. It's
like the magic has been bled out of me and I don't know how to summon
it back.
Has anyone been through this who managed to recover their optimism and
creative spirit? Please help me. What can I do?"
Well aware of the irony of posting this comment on YCombinator's HackerNews, but... sounds very much like the title of this should really be "Extremely disillusioned with capitalism. Please help"
There's very little in the content of the gist that's specific to software or technology. This isn't sectoral it's just about for-profit businesses.
Interesting way to post the question, if we are truly "done" with tech.
I'd say a LiveJournal entry might be more apropos. :)
TL;DR: Maybe tech isn't your gig. It's important to find what is.
First, my heart goes out to you. It really does stink to be where you are.
I'd say it's a matter of expectations. The "conventional wisdom" is "Don't have expectations, and you won't be disappointed."
Sounds good. I have yet to meet anyone that truly meets that bar.
We all have expectations. It's human nature.
The deal is how we react to those expectations.
I get my expectations trounced on a regular basis. That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.
Except for Dilbert's corollary: "That which does not kill me, leaves me weak and exhausted."
When you signed up for a tech career, why did you sign up for it? What did you expect?
In the 1980s, there was an explosion of doctors and lawyers. Medical schools were so crowded that people had to study abroad.
The reason was that a doctor could look forward to a six-figure salary (and a six-figure insurance bill); right out of the starting gate. Lawyers...maybe not as much, but LA Law was a popular show, back then, so everyone thought it was the best career move ever.
That resulted in a ton of mediocre doctors and lawyers. They didn't love what they did.
My father was a Harvard-graduate lawyer. Top of his class. Silver Star war hero (planted in Arlington). He could have written his own checks.
But he hated it, and joined the CIA, instead (which he later quit in disgust). I think he felt that he should have learned a different career, all his life. He was never happy, and that broke my heart.
SO HERE'S WHERE I MAKE IT ALL ABOUT ME:
It also taught me that it's really important to be happy with my vocation.
So here I am...refactoring myself to be happy.
I was a manager for a significant part of my career. I was very good at it.
And hated it. Being good at something is not the same as being happy doing it.
I love tech. My worst nightmare is to feel the way you do (talking to the poster). Nothing gives me more joy than to craft a superb application, and know that it is as close to perfect as God will allow.
That means that I have to be careful who I let have any control over my work. The current tech scene is absolutely nuts about money and prestige. People are more than willing to peddle cow flops, if they can buy a Tesla with the proceeds.
Others use money as a leash and a lash, to tie us down and force us to do their bidding.
People like me are nothing but transient resources to be used up and discarded.
So I have enough set aside to be...OK (not rolling in dough); even after this current kerfuffle. It allows me to be picky about what I do, and who I let have control of my work.
I'm really really into quality software. You might say that I'm obsessed. To me, it's a craft.
Think of me as the old Swiss guy, making cuckoo clocks in his garage. There's not much of a market for cuckoo clocks, but my clocks are gonna be the best clocks you can get. I won't let anyone force me to use crappy pine, when walnut is what works best, and I won't mass-produce them.
But I'm a happy little old clock maker, and if anyone wants really good cuckoo clocks, they know where to go. They just have to work with me, and not expect me to be hog-tied by bling.
I sincerely wish you the best, and hope you get your groove back.
Interesting venue to post this on. But as it's the afternoon in the US workday, it's a fair chance that many responses will come from US tech workers who are slacking off or taking a break from their job and were enticed in by the headline.
Given the culture of HN comments I reckon you'll get grooming tips and pointless anecdotes, condescending advice, or unhelpful peptalks.
What I'll say is that you probably are disillusioned with it because you saw how illusory most of it is. The best stuff is always produced by very small, tightly-knit teams, in an environment where creativity is allowed to flourish. In a monoculture like tech giant / unicorn startup, you're living in the Silicon Valley series bro and that's all there is to it.
There are lots of engineers out here on the internet doing fun things. We just don't spam github shit or write fancy landing pages to shamelessly promote ourselves. Join us.
> The best stuff is always produced by very small, tightly-knit teams...
This line hints at both the key problem and the path forward for the disillusioned engineer. Things go sideways when we realize that we are not building “the best stuff”. When we are working on the best stuff we realize that the sustainable joy comes from the team dynamics rather than the output of our work.
I think you haven't even hit bottom yet. Reality is much, much worse. There are notable exceptions, but the overwhelming odds are that every single relationship in your life-- your wife, family, friends, etc-- are just as dishonest and transactional. Think about it. If you really screw up badly, your wife will leave you, your friends won't return your calls and will refer to you only in hushed tones clucking about "what a shame it is". Their support of you isn't some inherent validation of You as a being, it's in support of you as you exist in society and in the larger world.
We have spent years, even decades, cultivating and grooming our own prisons. In the end, everything we cherish and value will be destroyed. It is 100% certain and there is no way around it. It's such a bleak thing to consider, yet at the same time it is an absolute truth.
After wrestling with these facts for years, I have come to understand the Zen koan about cherishing every moment drinking tea from a glass because to the master, the glass is already broken. Control of the larger world and the people within it are an illusion. In many respects, you are already dead and forgotten. The only thing you can do is admire the stunning beauty and sheer improbability of it all, and to be as kind as possible to those who deserve it, and to many who do not deserve it.
I don't know what happened to you to make you so cynical, and I honestly pity you for it, but I think this is the exact opposite of what someone in the OP's position needs to hear. It's well and good that you've found a zen way of looking at things despite how bleak you seem to find the whole world, but not everyone can manage such a radical mindset shift and don't need to have their faith in humanity eagerly torched.
Honestly, it's not cynicism, although it used to be until I really thought things through. It's just the truth. I have a great life, I have truly been blessed, and I am very thankful. But to me the glass is already broken. Things may come, things may go, the only thing I control is me, and I am at peace.
Again, that's a very healthy mindset to take no matter what the human condition is, but you don't have to take a scorched-earth perspective on life to adopt such a frame of mind. And for most people, who haven't developed such a frame of mind, that scorched-earth perspective can be really destructive.
Additionally, the part about relationships goes further than simple nihilism. Plenty of relationships are real and go further than transactions. Not all of them, but many of them. Again, I don't know who hurt you to make you take such a perspective, but your perspective is deeply skewed.
Ah I'm so glad you posted this! I've been trying to articulate a rejection of cycnism so it's perfect to have the opposite case presented!
I know it is semantics but it's important. You say "it's not cynicism", "it's just the truth". Cynicism is the belief that everyone is almost entirely self-interested. It squeezes out the possibility of altruism and generosity. Its sort of irrelevant whether it's the truth. So you are cynical.
Love that you've found some joy out of being at peace with your worldview.
That's not rock bottom. The knowledge inside major religions goes much deeper. Even if you have your life, relationships and ego bound together there are natural forces that bring us to one eternal doom.
You can have relationships based on emotionality instead of transacted value. It will be the norm for the next decade.
Belief in control of the larger world is trivial, we are the larger world. Gaze deeper into death, it is a tool for removing somethings or patterns that dont work anymore and it reveals more life underneath. Shame is the fear of disconnect, or rather the shame of shame is the fear of disconnection. Going through shame is normal, revealing and your reaction to it is far more important than what shame is as a social force or a feeling.
Flirting with death and being the outlawed cup that breaks and spills its relation to water everywhere is cool and all but people lose interest when you stop flirting and start breaking.
I spent 17 years going through that. I can't say I recovered my optimism, but I stopped being cynical and am now realistic (which people tend to think is pessimistic), but without it being negative. Get off the drugs, move into the country and eat a lot of peaches. Technology will never be enjoyable again, and that's a good thing. Grow your own food, make your own tools, build your own furniture. Use your intelligence to make your life better instead of helping greedy people try to shove more ads in front of people.
Let this be another lesson in sheltering your children too much. The real world is full of psychopaths and sycophants who can smell that naivety a mile away. The only way to fully internalise this is by being burnt. Again and again. Slowly one learns to see the telltale signs of self-interest and look past the smiles and colourful verbiage.
> Has anyone been through this who managed to recover their optimism and
creative spirit? Please help me. What can I do?
If you've come from a baseline of over-optimism your outlook sounds healthier now. Many look to start a family and coast through the next 30 years once they become disillusioned with their career.
Why is the title of this "disillusioned with technology" and not "disillusioned with the tech culture"? This is a very sketchily edited title (although not surprised as it is complaining about VC behavior and this website is owned by a VC firm).
Technology has well proven its worth. There is more money than ever in it. The problem is that anything that has a bunch of money it will absolutely attract the worst of people. That is your VCs, and your corporate politicians, etc. as the writer is complaining about.
These people literally provide almost no value to anyone else but themselves. They are parasites on our society. They subconsciously know it and thus they require the style of culture they drive and thrive in.
But, any cultural problems in tech can be blamed on no one else except the people who honestly enjoy creating and engineering. Why? Because it is our fault for not getting more aggressive and smarter in taking back the culture. There are now more PhDs and programmers than there ever has been in the history of humanity. There is no excuse any longer to allow this.
And also, can we quit with the bullshit of just calling all complaints about the industry a type of "burnout"?
This is actually quite common situation and it seems that the major cause is that tech is now saturated with "normies" (liberal arts college dropouts, SJW schizoids, etc) instead of math or biology majors like it used to be at the times of Bell labs or Xerox PARC or early Google.
Abstract bullshit, misapplication of statistical methods is another cause. We are drowning in the sea of screaming narcissistic virtue-signaling bullshit.
So, go back to concrete mathematics, grounded in reality modeling, lightweight high level prototyping languages and functional programming. This, like universal principles, will never fail you.
Biology?! I'm not even sure if math is in place here. I would put instead 'CS and engineering'.
People who do things that never existed before are rarely these who are good at math. These people are called engineers. They have different skillset and background and very different attitude towards solving problems.
Don't get me wrong, being computer engineer myself I have huge respect for both biology and math. I took a biology class recently and I do read math books.
> go back to concrete mathematics
I would say: go back to making things aka engineering
You get back the joy of building things by building things. Something that worked for me when I was in similar situation was working on some Arduiono projects. It's not only programming, you are making sometehing in the physical world as well. The projects are usually simple and small, you don't get burned out. The actual programming is pretty simple - you don't need design patterns, some havy framework or functional programming to make few LEDs blink or a mottor to spin back and forth.
Building things involves problem solving. The life sciences often involve problem solving without producing an artifact. I think it is the challenge of solving hard problems that unites both pursuits.
Machiavellianism (manipulate/deceive others)
Psychopathy (lack of remorse/empathy)
Sadism (pleasure in suffering of others)
Narcissism (egotism/self-obsession)
Sounds more like disillusionment with our quasi-free-market. In reality it's nothing but strongmen and subterfuge, and I fear America will ultimately lose whatever competitive edge it had left due to this.
I am not sure what's wrong with you and why you are happy but unhappy?! but if I would have to guess - it's most likely antidepressants/therapy. There is new "you" but you miss old "you". Brain chemistry is no joke and if you don't absolutely absolutely need medication don't do it. Ask good doctors for second, third and fourth opinions if needed.
If anything OP was worse off before they started treatment. Changing or getting off meds could be a valid choice but all the changes seem to have lead OP to a generally better life
I'm running through similar thoughts with this article. I graduated from college in 2006. My job survived the 2008 crisis. I rode out and built a stable life. I started a startup in 2011. Our product did not make it. I've been working on freelance and consulting gigs since then for small and big companies. My independent career taught me to be resilient: always saving, don't overspend. Your company does not have your backs. You need to take care of yourself and your family.
I notice I become less optimistic over the years. I got comfy with my successful gigs. To counter those trends, my important lesson is: keep learning. I got started as a C#/Java/C++ programmer. Over the years, I learned Rails, nodejs, React. I adapt to the new gigs. Heck, I even created a cryptocurrency. :)
Now, we're hit by a pandemic. My gig comes to an end. But I'm ready for the next thing. It's pretty exciting. Check out my new project built on redwoodjs. :)
You can't change the past, but you can recalibrate your expectations and medidate on what went wrong. Here are some thoughts, and I will be very harsh:
1. Your co-workers may be amazing, but they were never your friends. You ran a business and rented their years to help them build a nest egg, of which you would claim the majority share had it hatched. Alas, the business failed and thus, you no longer add value to each other's lives. Move on.
2. There's what you love, and there's what you do. It's best to keep some distance: because no one cares about what you love. VCs are vultures and this is well known, but they are also reflecting the reality of the market. In the market you're just a vendor. Think about all the food stands that you have walked past in your life, within each stand is an immigrant family who slave away for decades hoping for a better life. Have you ever thought about them and gave them time/money for their suffering? No, you only cared them inso far as they can cook for you. This is how others saw you.
3. Big companies, and indeed most big institutions is made by a silent majority of the defeated. Many have experienced what you have said and have long made their peace. They found joy elsewhere, and found distance between themselves and their work.
4. Find self worth and self-love outside of your role in the machine, there's the product you produce to trade time for money, and then there's you. They are different things. Imagine Instagram influencers who post pictures of themselves but feel depressed when they don't get enough likes. This is you right now, you're looking for external validation from how big your integer is in some database. You have to look elsewhere.