The other thing it sounds like you're doing is looking around for a great opportunity rather than zeroing in on a thing you really care about and working on it. Your comment about engineers being a peasant class makes it sound like at least a part of you is more concerned about status than doing the kind of work that you say you're interested in.

Sounds like you need to answer for yourself what you're really looking for, how you would like to spend your days, what you would be proud of looking back on, etc. Rather than looking outward at the state of the industry, the status of developers, phds, MBAs, VCs or execs. If you want to build, start working on a product, figure out a market for it. But also know that at some point products do need to be sold, so eventually, you or a co-founder or your employees are going to have to figure out how to make money.

One of my favorite general pieces of advice is "you can decide what you want but you can't decide what it will cost you." You can decide to be a builder and an engineer but it probably won't come with the adulation you feel for Jamie Zawinski or Alan Kay. And if you talk to most people who are admired and have a lot of adulation, even if it's deserved, it's not something they tend to say they relish. They tend to still relish the work they valued for themselves and feel the adulation is overblown or doesn't actually give them anything of substance.

Excellent quote. Can you give the source of this quote?

Corporate America really is bad enough to warrant correction. If anything, I’d probably suggest learning about people to the OP of the thread. Find out how to spot personality types quickly and how best to work with them - including avoiding the toxic ones. But also temper it with not over analyzing-analysis can become its own damnation.

Probably drones and sensor-companies also qualify but don't really know much about that industry.

SpaceX's reusable rocket is a great example of technology risk and so is Tesla's affordable electric car.

Most startups today don't take these types of risks, SaaS is well-understood. The risks these companies take (in the eyes of investors) are in matching product features to the market and profitable go-to-market.

If you want all management to defer to engineers and their needs then you need to seek out a company where the success of those engineers will make or break the company.

That said, I think product and businesspeople are often not aware that having really solid tech yields dividends for years to come and will help them outcompete any peer as well increase the acquisition likelihood. Saas-companies should have a strong engineering culture, but unfortunately it's not a requirement to be a successful company in this category.

This is an excellent assessment. Any software product that depends on understanding deep first principles based complex systems has an ecological need to maintain a working engineering culture. At least in those parts of the organization that does product development.

I've worked my entire software engineer career in computer graphics and computer aided design (after getting my masters in physics) and while in these fields you've seen the usual MBA types poke their heads out, there have still been nooks where proper engineering was necessary.

So, find a company that seems to be needing internal development of non-trivial software.

But the original attention was correct as well - there are so many non-value adding bullshit jobs to keep things "professional" that they try to embrace all nooks an crannies, so even a healthy engineering culture is usually at risk, all the time.

This an incredibly inaccurate assertion. I'm not aware of a single business person would ever say, "I think we can win simply on positioning." [1] While people may not understand/appreciate the pressures or output of an engineering team, it is not to say that they don't recognize when the product stability is not there. It undermines the credibility in their statements and pitch.

[1] 10 years experience in Sales and Engineering at very small and medium sized businesses

In both cases, the product has to work and be stable however in a mediocre culture the cost of adding features goes up significantly over time, while if you have a really great team then the cost of adding features compresses or remains similar to the early stages.

This mostly comes down to good technology choices, unassuming code, fast tests, optimized developer flow and really solid architectural choices.

I was not talking about plain bad engineering cultures like no testing, modifying code in production, copy-paste development,...

This is only true for established companies. At early stages those still might not have a proper engineering culture, whicih makes them turn into pyramid schemes sellling the dream, getting hackier and scammier with each iteration.

Also, the smaller companies tend to need good software people that can take the excel/matlab models and turn them into something enterprise.

Find the right team for you, there are many good and bad fits.

If a company has a short-sight problem, you can be sure that it comes from the brain. Ordinary employees, once they are not juniors anymore, tend to stick with a company, because jumping around every couple of years don't really look good on the resumes.

I like how you phrased that. In the past I've said that I want to work for a technical manager on tech product for a tech company, but that wasn't quite right.

You're just being over 30, welcome. Those documentaries you watched on your old CRT TV while growing up were showing you fiction.

The tech industry is an ad mill. Academia is about innovation killing fiefdoms. What you need to realize is that for an institution, the first priority is maintaining homeostasis, and that means not letting you do something that might risk resources or upsetting the established order.

There's a reason why the hackers on TV were called rebels. They founded new institutions because the incumbents wouldn't let them play.

You want the hacker ethos? Make it yourself, that's what it's about.

Ironically perhaps a truer picture of the industry was probably the fiction series "Halt and Catch Fire".

Working in countless industries.

Inventing asynchronous technology for an industry specific use case.

Using amalgamation of existing technologies to resolve industry specific issues.

Loads of others.

If you are young and healthy without crushing debt. Don’t go looking for a job. Go find an adventure.

I am looking exactly for adventure. I was in a consulting company where I was solving such problems. Now I am in a large product company where the bureaucracy is becoming unbearable. It is also more about where you are presently to get opportunities. I am in a country where the scope is limited.

What kind of expectations did these companies have when they interviewed you? Did they expect you to have experience in the domain or samples of previous work etc?

"W2": An employee. A regular job.

"1099": Independent contractor, freelancer.

To some extent it's always been this way, but I think a combination of extreme financialization, globalization, and practices like scrum (which means well, I think, but is often used as a cudgel to 'inspect' developer performance) have made average developer life even less pleasant in the last decade.

I would suggest getting into development for embedded systems. The jobs don't seem as numerous as in VC-fueled web/app start-up style development, but when your product is expected to function without the ability to update its firmware/software near-instantaneously as modern webapps do, I think it changes the style of development cycle pretty dramatically.

That's what I said, I suppose there are lots of people in their early 30's having a dilemma. I'm also struggling with something similar, but I recognise I have much to attain in level of expertise but do I want to do that? Is another question.

I'm approaching my 40s and I've had this dilemma since I was 25. I used to strive for being a top performer despite my hatred for working in this industry. I accelerated through the lower ranks and significantly increased my salary, but my happiness plateaued very early on. Over the last few years I've learned to lay low and give just enough to not get fired. I couldn't care less about the company or my work, I just want to clock out at the 8 hour mark - and not a minute later - then go work in my garden. I found this to be the optimal balance between financial security and my happiness.

If you've ever read "The Gervais Principle" - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... - you can classify me as a "Loser" on that spectrum.

I cannot thank enough for the article, absolutely nailed it. I have seen & been part of a startup growing from a mid stage to a unicorn and now after reading it I can connect the dots, it all make sense in such exhilarating way. My journey till now has been from over performing looser to a looser which is not bad. I'm seeing a pattern though, every 8-9 month I over-perform become a looser then get completely disillusioned and go off to a backpacking retreat. This worries me a bit now.

> [...] the hacker ethos was lost. the culture changed

I'm 41 so I probably entered the IT industry a decade before you. Nothing changed. It was always like that. And I just strongly suspect it's not just IT. That's basically what 'work' and 'business' is.

Basically start having life outside of work. Work is just a source of money. Switch it every 2 years or so to whoever offers you more and chill. If you accidentally land in places that are not horrible then it's a bonus, but job shouldn't be in your top 3 (or even top 5) sources of satisfaction. Try different sized companies, try different modes of work. Just keep your salary climbing and figure out why life is worth living. And I'm not trying to push kids on you. I don't have any. You could just reach back and look at the stuff you did that made you tick. Try to rediscover and extend it. I'm sure dreams of developing groundbreaking technology in business setting wasn't the only thing that made you interested in technology.

This is all good advice. Find something you're passionate about outside of work. Maybe look for tech-related 501(c)3s, educational programs, or (if you're so inclined politically) social-justice related causes. All of these could use the help of an experienced IT guy/gal.

And (IMO) there's nothing better to recharge the 'ole batteries than to see the look in someone's eyes when something just clicks. Want to find the hacker ethos and culture? Pass it along to the next generation.

This right here is some good advice. Thanks! :)

3 years later, and still bootstrapped, I'm starting to see why things are the way they are. Not trying to sound too depressing, but at the end of the day, money is what matters, and the status quo is the most optimized form of money-making there is. Profit-seeking trumps everything; even if you create the next PageRank algorithm, in order to have value it still needs to be monetized.

I also realize the whole "everyone else is a conman" thinking is quite wrong. PMs do provide value (of course, some more than others); it's just harder to see as an engineer, since it feels like we're doing all the hard work.

This might go against the grain here, but my advice: change the attitude, unless you want to remain depressed.

Great advice. It is up to you to decide how you feel about your situation. There are no perfect answers, just ones that fit you better. Find the set of trade-offs you can live with.

> I also realize the whole "everyone else is a conman" thinking is quite wrong.

While true, there are a good number of people with agendas that aren't in your best interest. Take a queue from those people and look out for your best interest. Move on when you find something that fits you better.

Add to that: we tend to romanticise the past, and also the fact for every John Carmack there were thousands of behind the scenes people simply doing a job and maybe you'll see that the reality today is not much different.

The hacker ethos you envision does exist to some extent, I've been part of small units of people pushing boundaries, and it's deeply, deeply difficult work. Persistent frustration is the name of the game, and often a years worth of work will be rendered completely useless by something that happens a few weeks after you've completed something grandiose.

What I'm trying to drive at here is that there is a hacker ethos in large or small companies, but I don't think it's what you believe. And you have to seek it out, you don't "get a job" doing those kinds of things- passionate people seek passionate people.

Coupland's Microserfs comes to mind.

Find a prof working on something interesting to you and offer to help. Better still submit a patch to whatever source code they have put out in the public domain. Its a great way to get your leg in the door.

Lots of the labs in the country have techies on staff. It leaves the subject matter experts free from wasting endless amounts of time filling their heads with unnecessary garbage about software. DONT goto CS depts. Target multidisciplinary groups so when the Chemist is done with you, work with the Neuroscientist and then the Social Scientist and then the Astrophysicists etc. The longer you are loitering around one lab the more work will fall into your lap. After wasting my time at bluechips for few years, I moved to a univ lab, which morphed into working at the univ startup accelerator as various lab projects matured into startups.

My PhD friend is doing data science for a startup which grew out of a biology lab.

The team is basically her, the engineers and one dude keeping the business side running.

They now have their own office with plants.

University, not necessarily studying there, is great place to find these sorts of groups.

All the better if you are the lab tech who “makes computers do magic”.

So while we were still chasing features, we also had a say in when to do technical debt and could plan it out in a similar manner to new features.

However, my comment wasn't referring to technical debt.

One of the companies I had as a client, Healthy Workers, I had the same experience.

So I wouldn’t say kt is that uncommon in my experience.

Both companies are Dutch. I wonder if it is a culture thing too.

1. Find the right life partner. This is, by far, the most important factor to your success and happiness in life, and you are not going anywhere great until that is settled. Right now you get your affirmation and correction from your job. A good partner will fix that. A bad partner will ruin you to a point you will not recognize yourself. Eventually everyone ends up with someone, good or bad. Make this your top priority. Focus on it now. Do not wait.

2. Find god. Not necessarily religion. Belief in yourself is not enough. You have to find your assignment from an authority greater than yourself, and greater than the love or hatred of every being on earth. It has to be greater than greed or pain or lust or pride. This will come slowly.

3. Be simple. Be frugal. Reduce your needs. Spend less. Have few possessions. Don’t take on debt or long leases. Know exactly what you need for the rest of your life, save it, and don’t take risks on it.

4. If you have anything above what you need for the rest of your life. Be ready to take massive investment risks with it, and jump on anything that you feel in your heart for, especially yourself.

What do you believe in? Have you thought much on this? If you haven’t I’d recommend it. Introspection and mindfulness can really help you suss our what _you want_ from your career and life in general.

I’m with you on general disillusionment with the tech “industry” as you’ve posed it, but really that’s only part of the picture. There are still people on the fringes doing some pretty cutting edge work. It’s not where the big money is, but is much more engineering focused.

Regardless it’s worth double checking your assumption that you should completely strike out on your own. Chances are if you think about what you believe in, you’ll arrive at what you want, and from there you’ll find people with similar goals working on interesting projects.

Feel free to email me if you’d like to discuss. I’ve gone through a very similar “crisis” recently.

In most tech companies, senior engineers make as much if not more than senior managers. It's not until you get to the director level that you probably start passing engineers in salary.

I think you need a better job before you decide to bootstrap your own company. A little change would probably be good for you.

My favourite stories of engineers bootstrapping their own business with no investors, no employees, no MBA:

Sidekiq https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-charging-money-fo...

ReadonlyREST (my own story) https://www.indiehackers.com/product/readonlyrest

Well this is false:

- Define success: these tiny one-man digital businesses ran from home have so little expenses that going profitable is infinitely easier than any traditional VC funded startups with offices and teams.

- Speed: this is counterintuitive, but true: a one man band can take decisions and, pivot, optimize, and iterate at least twice faster than any team (no meetings, no presentations, no democracy).

- Time: when you are profitable, maybe you're not rich yet, but you have time. Time to add value to the product day after day. And you will get better and better at it.

If you create a subscription based business, even if you fail for the whole year at improving your conversion rates (you won't), your yearly recurring revenue will grow linearly. Meantime, your expenses are still minuscule.

It's an acquired skill that can be learned, trained, coached, and shared.

Do you think starting a company working on compilers, operating systems etc will even work without huge resources and connections?

Not a compilers expert, but I will try to invent a fantasy example:

GCC/clang are ok for compiling generic programs, everyone is more or less happy with them.

One day you read on a HN that SpaceX satellites have to ship with 4 redundant CPUs. Every CPU costs $100K and consume a lot of power, but they are needed to correct errors introduced by cosmic rays.

You decide to create a compiler that creates programs with error correction automatically embedded. Using your compiler, SpaceX saves $100K and can have 20% smaller solar panels because they can ship it with 3 CPUs instead of 4.

1. How much $ do you think you can sell a single license? 2. How many customers will you actually need to be profitable? 3. How much of your time do you need to create a minimal prototype that you can DM to that SpaceX employee and get him/her in a valuable mutual-help feedback loop? 4. How much better can this compiler become in 1 year of refinement?

Chances are you can make as much you currently make in a year with your first 2 customers.

And you're surprised that not everybody is a legend?

You made up you opinion based on a very small and very unrepresentative sample.

> entering the industry in the early to mid 2010's i found a landscape filled with self serving product managers, conmen (i think they call them executives and MBAs), and a populous of engineers that cared nothing for the tech or the work, and didn't need to as there were no real challenges to tackle.

My experience is different, much better. However, we're not playing with Legos, we have to make money.

Different companies make money in different ways. Some do it by tackling exceptionally difficult problems. Some do it by providing value. Some lie that they're providing value, or provide it to some people at the cost of others.

Always look at the company's business model. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

I hit this wall last year and I realized that I had to either: accept that work gets you money and you can live with stability and comfort and pursue your hobbies, or take a risk and see what your potential is.

I'm still figuring out what starting a company is for me (is it solo founding? freelancing? product? service?) and what I want out of my life (how do you feel about never ending uncertainty? being on call 24/7 for an unreasonable client?).

What I've found about myself is that building "a business I believe in" is really me saying "I want to be paid to help people I respect". The rest is just being willing to screw up, taking risks, being uncomfortable and having really supportive people around you that will listen when things are hard and you need to cry.

Start by taking some time off (4+ weeks) and into nature. Ask yourself what you really want.

Disclaimer: I think of myself as an engineer.

I do believe your frustration comes from observing actual issues and you're right to express your disappointment. However, I can see a lot of cynicism in your tone, and I feel there's a huge amount of judgement on those "cons" without trying to peek behind the curtain on what makes them behave like that.

To provide a different viewpoint - I've often seen this desire to do tech in a tech-first way fail massively. Many of us consider ourselves techies, so we believe we work in the tech industry. But we don't. We work in Finance, Productivity, Mobility, Food and similar industries, even though we're engineers. Apart from developer tooling and some exceptions - those industries are not about the tech. Countless times, I've seen engineers spend valuable resources (their own time) delivering the perfect tech solutions for non-existing problems (or over-engineered and expensive solutions to real problems, which could have been solved without tech much easier) Without the "cons" of UX, business development and product management, people like those would always disconnect from customers.

I do believe we should all try to find what motivates us and for many people here, this would be tech innovation. But dismissing the other roles in the companies we work with is just an endless utopia chasing, never productive.

I've been lucky to work with some great non-tech people and learn a lot from them. And from 10+ years in the industries (plural), I've seen many more examples of over-engineered and useless tech than failure of "cons" to grasp why engineers should be put first.

Assuming that everything is just about UX, PM and bizdev nets you the kind of mediocrity the OP is talking about. Sometimes what looks like over-engineering to the mediocre actually enables breaking new grounds in the hands of the excellent.

You can't build the next FB and Amazon without great tech. But they are not in the tech industry. Tech is the key ingredient (out of many)

The reality is the companies at the top right now all have EXCELLENT tech cultures, including one's you wouldn't have considered tech companies. An excellent tech culture is a form of operational excellence, which is how companies succeed. That's why all these companies are at the top and some big brand names in tech aren't necessarily at the top.

I know market cap is a very poor measure, but here:https://www.dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap...

Who are the top companies? Each one of these not only understands their industry extremely well, but they generally speaking, having spectacular operational excellence.

IBM was a top company before. What happened? Why did it fall from grace? It's because they lost that motivation to maintain operational excellence. They just couldn't compete with the new companies who did pursue the better ways of doing things.

Another project to look into is Arweave, they've developed a really nice solution to make data permanent and censorship-resistant. Great small dev community, looking for more to join in and build with them.

>Ethereum

I understand that Eth is more than a cryptocurrency, but as your comment demonstrates, dividing those worlds isn't always quite so simple.

Now I am in a big global company and my life sucks in a way it never has sucked before. I do not know how I will proceed from here, maybe I should leave software development completly and try something else.

But if you haven't done it, try working at a startup. May days there were nearly 100% coding. No pointless meetings, no useless managers, no corporate bullshit. Come in in the morning, fire up the IDE and do the things that need to be done. Fun three years.

- jump between / serve multiple employers (customers) - play with your hours (ie make some room for side project or other life goals) - play with your hourly rate (making it easier to play with your hours)

In general you may want to move close(r) to hardware dev work (not necessarily going embedded, but at least tied to it), especially within small startups or a mostly independently operating R&D team. Although anecdotal my experience is that this brings you more of what you search for.

PS: As for academia, I wouldn't go as far as saying you can replace it with some Googling / online education, but having been there for some years I do think your conclusion that you will not be happy there might still be correct, it's slow and rigid.

write down what you want out of life. without this, no decision matters because any decision just advances time without working towards a goal. perhaps "making intellectually curious stuff for a living" ends up on there, perhaps it doesn't. but without this, nothing matters because there's no direction.

i have no idea what success looks like to you, but i'm fairly sure you can bootstrap yourself with a 24 month window of $2000 living expenses. so, if you have $0 today, save up $50k and you have a 2 year runway. if you can't figure out how to save $50k quickly with 7 years exp as an SWE, or live on less than $2k/mo, you're not even trying. with that, you have 750 days to figure out/demonstrate to the world that you are worth $2k/month. that is eminently doable, imo.

It might fill that gap you have (at least it did for me).

In the end you will see your job just as an income source but most of your passion will be in contributing to FLOSS projects, if you get paid for contributing to FLOSS even better.

You mention those 80s 90s hacker ethos, be like that, be curious, try checking someone's else code, play it with, read what things need to be improved, hack it and show it.

You mentioned truly revolutionary things in computers that maybe a handful of people worked on. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of developers working on COBOL business systems dealing with PM's and MBA types in the 80's and 90's too.

Take some chances and bootstrap something into a business now.

The entire support organization was much larger. In Japan for instance, it was sold and supported through an organization of 1200 people. I always marveled at that - there were 100+ support people just for the work I did.

What has happened is that the internet as a tool has largely been colonised by corporate interests.

If you’re looking for a business adventure, Don’t look to retread the imagined glories of the past. Look to the future instead and apply the founder effect to some new technological frontier. Good luck!

This sound a lot like a startup. Being a dev at a startup is very different from the big Coorp. Maybe you only had experience with large companies?

If this is going to be your first time at trying something with startups, try to find A Job in one. Or maybe for founders looking for a CTO. Avoid funding a startup unless you have this crazy will that just pushes you to do it.

I mention this because "conmen (i think they call them executives and MBAs)" is a pretty broad brush to paint with, and if I had to take a guess, I'd think there's some association between your disillusionment with engineering as a profession and a soft-skills delta that might help you otherwise advance in your field and navigate corporate culture -- or culture generally.

This is all relevant because you may find yourself having a harder time with customer acquisition while running your own business if you don't re-examine your current world view.

That's probably step 0, at least if I were to try and build a mental model from what you wrote here.

An excellent resource: https://www.manager-tools.com/all-podcasts?field_content_dom...

You can still stumble across open source projects all the time which capture this ethos. Maybe spend some time helping them out. They definitely would appreciate it.

You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html

  "I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed for."

It sounds like you're perhaps working jobs where, if a broader objective exists, it doesn't really "matter" or it's made-up. "We're changing the world through [thing that sounds big but really means large-scale data collection for ads]"

Ever consider government? There are likely more bureaucrats and hoops, but if you do your job right you'll save lives.

> is that the industry seemed to shift into something else.

I bet the industry was always the same. Look at Neo's cubicle in the Matrix! There always were MBAs, and there always were glorified hackers. You just do not notice all the people who work on exciting things now.

> academia is dying, and dare i say irrelevant

That is a huge oversimplification. It's true that 99% of research will be put into the table and never applied anywhere. Yet the academia is responsible for studying fundamental aspects of life, which directly affects you and your family. We can now sequence the genomes of cancer patients to create a personalised treatment plan, just to give one example. Where do you think that knowledge comes from? Applying the same logic, we could say that VC and startups are completely irrelevant, since all they do is burn money without producing useful products. But that would simply not be the case.

Starting the company is definitely not a panacea. Imagine having to deal with sales yourself, when you call MBAs the conmen!

I'd encourage you to deeply reflect on what you want to do in life and which areas are of interest to you. https://www.principles.com was exceptionally useful in this regard.

Tech is great money. You can live a very comfortable life by putting in your 40 hours a week at a good company. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this; and treating it as a clock-in/clock-out type of job will keep you from burning out.

Use that comfort to explore your true passion. A lot of times this isn’t remotely related to tech — maybe it’s music, maybe it’s triathlons, maybe it’s building shitty robots. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to find a “meaningful” job where I could build things that changed the world. Spoiler alert: it didn’t happen because that’s not how it works. Once I figured that out I went and got an MBA, because if I was going to be part of a soul-draining machine, I might as well make bank while doing it.

The myth of the “hero engineer” is honestly one that those of us in technology management try to eliminate. A “hero engineer“ culture is basically one that doesn’t bother properly designing things so they have to be held together with duct tape and string. The “hero” feels accomplished and like he/she saved the day, but if they had done their job right in the first place, the heroics wouldn’t have been needed.

Don’t look to be a hero. Be a software janitor who has a life outside of work. You’ll be way happier.

I am into embedded domain because of being so close the metal guys and there were so many greats in the electronics domain too.

I still remember the days of early linux trying to boot Gentoo on a iMac G3 and going nuts seeing the final bootup. Building computers by myself. Reading war stories and flame wars on slashdot.

All these were in the golden years of the 90's.

Currently I am finding no inspiration with work as there is nothing revolutionary coming out. Corp jobs are a complete mess. The systems suck with uninspiring team members. No experimentation whatsoever.

I too am in the same place as you just 4 years older. I used to do interesting personal projects before but it has completely reduced because professional life really screws you over and reduces you to an empty shell. Now all I do is grind leetcode so that I can retire in some good engineering driven company.

But I think I've come to a realization. What we are experiencing is burn out. We have all the signs. We are jaded, cynical, tired, can't focus, easily agitated. (I'm assuming all this applies to you too).

If you have enough money, can I suggest taking a break? A sabbatical if you will. I'm considering doing the same. You might discover something else out there you'd be more interested in. You might come up with a brilliant idea that will be a viable business. Or you might just...take a break. That in and of itself is an incredibly important thing to do, especially for your mental health. When you've spent most of your adult waking hours focused on what is fundamentally bullsh*t to make other people money, it's easy to lose yourself and to lose perspective.

At the end of the day, we are humans and we need to remind ourselves of that.

The positive side in my case is that I get along extremely well with everyone I work with. But other than that, I can't say I'm really happy. Realistically speaking the only thing that keeps me around is my attachment to my coworkers. Absolutely nothing else. Over the years we've developed a really good and efficient workflow and ever since the lockdown, we've had 2 or 3 major releases, one of which was the largest one we have ever done by a long shot. All went textbook.

The industry is what it is, and it is filled with ass lickers who will get on your nerves no matter where you go. The type of people who make demands, won't listen to why they should re-think and then complain that what you have made doesn't serve them, even if it's word for word what they asked for. And when you confront them, it all ends with "Hehe, OK, can you do it like {{this}} now, sorry I'm not a technical person, hehe."

Starting your own business is a lot of dirty work. Almost all people fail, sooner rather than later( see my thoughts here[1] ). You either have to be extremely lucky and have a secure client(s) lined up or rely on VC(which from what I've seen having helped friends with startups is a lot worse than the ass lickers in big corporations).

I'm somewhat torn on your views on academia. For the most part it is irrelevant, unless you really dig into it. But then you end up into an endless rabbit hole of scientific paper references while new ones pop up every day. That is what I mostly do in my spare time (without the involvement of academia, just as a hobby at this point). It's like swimming through an ocean of seaweed.

So at this point I am where I am unless something dramatic changes. Reading papers, experimenting working on personal projects and see where that takes me. For better or worse that's the only advise I can give.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342537

IMO having to remain (at least minimally) profitable at every step along the way increases chance of success versus VC-funded models that can lose money for many years, obscuring the fact that one didn’t build a business, but actually built a money pit.

Pursuing ramen profitability is a fun intellectual exercise, and if you don’t live somewhere a 1br is $4000/mo, not very stressful or difficult either. There are tons of things people will pay $5/mo for.

Yep.

> it'll have to be bootstrapped (vc money is just another boss), so the chances for success are extremely low.

Also a lot of VCs are creeps. I've had a mate get pre-emptive death threats from one, another big one in London was found wandering the tube (subway) molesting women.

Bootstrapping is possible. You sound like a dev. I suggest making a minimal SaaS devtools product for something that bothers you.

I bootstrapped a website verification tool for 5 years, it's definitely possible.

If you're in the US, you can join an accelerator.

Edit: also to more specifically answer your question, I'm about the same age, and what I do is take any hacking/fun driven activities outside financial constraints (i.e. hobbies). Game development, learning niche languages, anything becomes possible to explore with freedom. I also started my own business, but I'm not sure it would suit you because it's the same game, except if like me you see entrepreneurship as hacking (just be aware the hardest problems will usually not be solved with code).

I don't have the answers to your career questions, unfortunately, my suggestion is pick something that excites you and do that. Your career (and life) will end one day. Do what makes you happy.

Life advice though, I might have a suggestion while you are looking for the perfect career move.

One thing I've been doing a lot in the last 2 years is making a serious effort to mentor junior developers or people who are interested in programming.

It started with some of the developers on my team. I made sure they knew that I was available after hours (with some boundaries) to help however I can. I've tried really hard to be supportive and do my best to build them up. Everything from code reviews on their personal projects to leet code explanations, how to ask for a raise to resume building. I average about 2 or 3 nights per week where someone at least reaches out for help.

It's been incredibly gratifying. I don't quite feel qualified to be a real mentor in something serious, but I do know web development. Paying that forward has been mentally rewarding. My relationships with these people have grown and I find honest joy when they message me telling me they've gotten the job, raise, or even when they have solved a problem on a project.

It wouldn't be a solution to all your concerns, but if nothing else, you might find some simple joy from inspiring others.

The pace is slower, but I've found managers on the whole to be more hands off, you get to be an individual contributor more easily, and there isn't the constant product hype.

Yes, iteration is slower. Yes, the documentation can be monotonous. No, you won't be writing code as often. But if you get the right job, you'll get to design some interesting stuff. You'll certainly learn a lot.

You can learn the next JavaScript framework through Google in a couple weeks. You aren't going to learn about how the software of a combat management system on a submarine works through Google. So much military hardware is "fly by wire" now, so there is software galore.

It's not for everybody, but with only 7 years into a career you should give it a shot. And then, worst case you decide it isn't for you, but maybe you get a great idea for a defence company along the way and you leave and win a government contract and get on the gravy train. Seriously, I'd say winning a Gov contract is easier than being bought by Google for $$$. Less competition, and you won't be selling based on growth potential, but on the quality of your product.

USAjobs often has ambiguous postings unfortunately. This is sometimes intentional. Networking in the defense department as a STEM guy is pretty easy, and whatever first gig you land can take you to something else in a few years. Recently had a coworker who was on our malware analysis team move positions and now works on software for DoD satellites, for example - something more inline with what he wanted to do.

If you want some more background on my experience or you feel like this is something you'd be interested in feel free to pm me.

What I would like to contribute to the conversation is this: life is long and you will benefit to think of it as an arc.

First, think about your career in ~7 year chapters. Congratulations, you just finished the first chapter! If you're 30, that means you probably have 4-6 more working chapters, then some retirement chapters thereafter. It seems like you found out some things you didn't like in that first chapter, and you want the next chapter to be different.

Second, spend some time to think about your life in reverse. What do you want your live to be like when you're 75 years old, and then work it backwards from there. If each chapter is a building block, then what do you need to accomplish in the next 7 years to move you toward what you want in the future. This is an exercise worth doing annually.

Or, maybe you only want to have one more working chapter and then you want to retire. So, you'd make a whole bunch of different choices if that were the case.

In any case, the point is that you're frustrated in the moment, but the moment is just a point on the arc of a long life. Use what you learned in the first chapter to move along the arc in a direction that you prefer.

Getting a bootstrapped company into something that yields enough cash for a salary isn't something that happens all the time, and it's going to require you to have some significant cash reserves. So if you can't do that right now, think about maybe making changes that build towards that future and focus on that, rather than the vagaries of what executives are doing & why they're doing it ;-).

And then second, I would say lower your expectations for your career/work in terms of being meaningful. Look at your job for what it is: an exchange of time for money. If you want, go the "FIRE" route and do intense saving for a few years and then retire early and pursue something else. Either way, I've found that it's liberating to separate my sense of purpose and happiness from what I do at my job. It's just really hard to find something that makes the world better and also pays the bills. Your happiness and purpose can still come from engineering, though I would recommend adding more to the mix than just that alone, but the key is separating them from your source of money.

I think the problem is a more fundamental societal one, namely that we have moved to a highly financialized, business-driven economy that is by its very nature trying to turn all aspects of our lives into tradable goods. In this context engineers (and tech workers in general) are more like factory workers than craftsmen (this is a fact that has yet to sink in for may of us).

There are however niches where you can find some of what you're looking for. Starting your own business is of course a valuable route. I think you can also find smaller companies that have more of a craft ethos, where people are driven by the work itself.

Perhaps one thing that may be required is an acceptance that more meaningful/satisfying work might bring fewer financial rewards. Once you become comfortable with that idea, I think many interesting avenues open up.

It can be hard but you should define your values, come up with questions that might show your values at work at a company, and start asking those questions. If a company doesn't want to answer your questions, it isn't a fit. Ask as many people at the company the same questions so you get a variety of answers. See of they have compatible answers, they don't need to be the same as people have different perceptions and ways of expressing themselves but the answers should hang together or they are not telling you the truth.

Many corporate tech jobs are sitting around being a pawn in other people's power games. If you can't accept that, find another place to work.

I totally understand, that since the 80s and early 90s IT has transformed from a craft into a full-fledged industry with a lot of money to be made, so the dilution of the original spirit and an influx of all kinds of people was to be expected.

Sadly, with all the money and hype and cultivation of the "nerd" culture among the masses, the IT has become "mainstream". By this I mean the very same process that happened in other niches, originally populated mostly by enthusiasts, that at some point showed the potential to bring huge profits. Like rock music or skateboarding, you get the idea. Basically, anything, that a person chooses as a way to express themselves, to oppose themselves to the rest of the world, both in healthy and not so healthy ways. To rebel, even.

I feel like in the past there were more people in this field, who were genuinely punk and misfits and revolutionaries (and I understand, how this may sound ridiculous, if taken at face value, but I'm speaking about the human spirit and attitude, not the intentions). These guys (overwhelmingly male, by the way) did not give a flying fuck about becoming celebrities and earning tons of money, or about saving the world and solving contemporary problems, or about outlook and diversity and inclusion and bringing everybody, including neighbour Joe and his wife and their dog onto the ship. They were happy just by doing the stuff they liked and sharing their happiness with a very limited circle of people, who really digged it.

Fast forward 30 years, now being an IT worker is completely normal, it's just an occupation, a job, where people earn money to spend them on other things, that they really like. Of course, there are many really smart and bright and devoted people as well, probably many more than ever before, but I feel like they are not of the same kind as 30 years before. They are nerds, not punks, and it makes all the difference in the world.

And with these structural changes comes the almost suffocating blandness (despite the outer gloss) and conformity, that you just can't relate to.

Just my 2 cents.

I can say with no reservations that Open Source is chock full of very smart people, many who love programming for the love of programming. (There are some who are in it for the money, or who go about it from a commercial angle. They can be strong contributors, too.) I'd highly recommend looking at ways to earn a living in Open Source, if passion for programming is what motivates you.

Good Luck!

Try hacking an underwater robot to navigate under ice from a ship during a storm. Or adding software on a remote buoy over dicy network connections to help it survive a hardware failure. Work every day knowing you are helping us to understand the worlds most precious resource better.

(shameless plug) https://careers.whoi.edu/

Most importantly work in a field with people who are passionate about their jobs!! It removes all the backstabbing when there is a higher common goal.

I've worked at startups that had more of the culture you desire, as well as places that have the culture you're current describing.

During the interview process you need to ask the right set of questions to help you understand the culture of the company & that it's a fit for you.

I found this out the hard way, but each job I learned a bit about what I didn't like & added to my questions to understand the next gig better. Over time I learned what I actually wanted & sought that out.

This is a subject I deeply care about. Throw me an email if you want to talk deeper!

1. More technical knowledge.

2. Ability to identify sooner which startups will fail, and what the red flags are early on for startups that will die. You might even have a startup die, but that's kind of a right of passage... and you'll learn a lot from it.

3. More future employment leverage that comes with the more technical knowledge/domain expertise(s) you develop

4. Maybe a successful business!

Good entry points are the IndieHackers podcast, and conferences like MicroConf (watch their conference talk recordings here, especially Patrick McKenzie's aka patio11 [0])

The basic idea is to create a sustainable job you love for yourself, the people that depend on you, and many others. The antithesis of "Our incredible journey", aka VC sellout.

Once you've done this, you can do whatever you want. Build a game company. Pursue academia [1]. Join the demoscene, tour the world, join demo party competitions and write sick 64k intros. Commit to open source and help the Haiku project. Hang around at your local hacker space and help create an independend mesh-based ISP.

I know exactly what you're talking about. I watched the Netscape documentary "Project Code Rush" [2] with Jamie Zawinski and loved the spirit and the feeling of doing something important. It feels like it's in such a stark contrast to many people's reality, pushing JIRA tickets in a toxic AdTech startup. However, I think it's an illusion. There never was a "golden age", and people simply forget that bullshit jobs always existed, you just don't see domcumentaries of them, nobody would watch them. For me, what helped me was realizing that the world, or the "industry" doesn't owe me anything, and I'm completely on my own, and if I want to do something meaningful, well, I'll have to create my own sustainable job to support myself and my loved ones.

There's a longer writeup by Alex Hillmann (who runs "Stacking the Bricks", with Amy Hoy) here [3], I'm just scratching the surface of the basic idea here.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHoBKQDRkJcOY2BO47q5Ruw/vid...

[1] Side note: academia seems mostly only broken in the US at the moment. In the rest of the world, it seems just fine - apart from the usual problems academia inherently has, but at least you can pursue an academic career without accumulating debt here in Europe. If you feel like it, why not move?

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

[3] https://dangerouslyawesome.com/10k-independents-project

What is immediately striking about this documentary is how unhealthy everyone there is looking. Just a ton of serious obesity, unhealthy skin in relatively young people.

There are organizations out there who care more about their impact on the world than on their profits and growth. They are harder to find. But they value the results of their work, and would probably be a better match for you. This sounds simple, but just go search for: "mission-driven companies", and see what you find.

What is needed is a return of anti-trust legislation in the US. Someone should write an opera called Schmidt in Washington.

Depending if you have kids/wife, your "choice" will be easier.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

If you like hacking, you can arrange your life to do that.

We are not “VC funded” and do creative, long-term work on a small team. We just started an endowment to help make sure we can exist for the next 50 years.

I felt like I was building systems that would fundamentally make everyone's lives worse, and at the request of reprehensible executives who can't justify their behavior. I couldn't help but see the bloated disaster of whatever organization I was in, how most of our problems came from lack of communication and a few people's personal agenda, and pitied us all that we had to spend our days in a chattering, dimly-lit concrete box hunched over our screens.

When you learn programming, it feels like it gives you incredible agency. That, I think, is the reason that many people take up jobs with computers. The parallels to wizards, dark magic, and alchemy present in classic programming texts like SICP is no accident, with programming you really do create something from nothing!

The issue is that it gives people /too much/ agency, more so than any medium-sized business has any intention of giving to a mere employee. Many popular websites could be programmed and maintained by a very small group of people, but it is in the business's best interest to split the work into many microservices such that the loss of any one employee doesn't even slow team velocity. Scrum isn't a way of estimating projects, it is a regime for developing a 100% replaceable workforce.

On the other hand, the agency you feel when programming is actually very ephemeral and abstract. Most code at a tech company of any size is lucky to exist for more than a few years. And while you are physically programming, you are really a human ape checked out at a computer screen frying your brain on meaningless puzzles.

Now this isn't so dire--in fact it is no worse than what the rest of the workforce has to put up with, other than the fact that for some reason at this job people are supposed to have some internal "passion for building". So I assessed how I wanted to actually spend my days, took my poorly-managed 401k and savings and picked up a retail job. I'm ramen-retired, meet new people all day and help them figure out what they want. I haven't had to debug Kubernetes for months! I might not get paid like I used to, but I feel better than I have in years.

I'm sure that other people have better ways of coping with tech than I did, and I don't really feel any ill-will to those in the industry, I mostly just don't understand how they do it.

What kind of retail do you work in? Something technical?

Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help (gist.github.com)

1527 points by throwaway839246 36 days ago | 731 comments

Do you have contacts in the 'industry'? Will they contract out subprojects to you? Start there.

Maybe people can also think more about how to bring the hacker ethos back? Or prove if it's not economically feasible?

Its worse for tech though because you salary probably wont be going up from here.

i could write the same post word-for-word

start your own company

If you're working in some horrid "make an app/website which does things" grind, of course it is boring. That was only exciting when nobody knew how to do it.

Now if you want these things to be used right now, yes academia isn't the environment you are looking for.

The hacker ethos never really existed.

My suggestions is to try and get into management because they need more people like you who can advocate for tech properly.