Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

First I would take a step back and try to view the situation with less judgment. It's easy to look at the past and mythologize it and imagine it as perfect. Maybe there are more MBAs and executives and thought leaders today but the past you're romanticizing would have its own frustrations and road blocks.

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.

I think you want to seek out companies where the main business risk is technology risk still. That would be database companies, developer tools, artificial intelligence startups, operating systems, ...

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.

Shit, are you me?

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.

> entering the industry in the early to mid 2010's i found a landscape filled with self serving product managers, conmen [...]

> [...] 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.

I might be the same as you, except like 3 years ahead. I too felt the exact same way, so I left my cushy job (which paid pretty well) to start my own thing.

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.

I don't know your whole background; I think location plays a factor.

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.

"go back to academia" doesn't mean you have to go back there and collect certificates, take classes and pass exams.

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.

Many companies have interpreted Scrum Agile as a blueprint for a software factory line, where features are drawn up by product management, sprints are scheduled and work items cranked through with little discretion or agency for engineers, for immediate deployment once implemented and off to the next feature on the product management's roadmap. Sprint sprint sprint until sprints are a slog through technical debt, agile short term thinking always short-changing refactoring.

I want to tell you something that is probably not what you are looking for, but I can almost guarantee that it is the most important thing by a long shot.

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.

> my choices are either to open a company of my own, making what i believe in

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.

I just want to point out that engineers are in no way the "peasant" cast in any organization that's worth its salt. If you feel that way, I'd look for a new job.

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.

Defintely start your own company. You spent enough time in the industry to know what problems are worth solving. Take a very specific problem and solve it better than any generic solutions available. Be the king of your narrow niche market, and when you're successful maybe broaden it.

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

You could have a kid(assuming you're in that demographic). Then you'll be so short on time/energy that you can't possibly want to spend your evenings/weekends on moonshot coding projects. I'm being a bit facetious of course, but "engineers that cared nothing for the tech or the work" can also be interpreted as "mature engineers who have full/busy lives outside work and have learned the importance doing a solid weeks work moving the companies objectives forward and then dropping it to maintain their own mental health and avoid neglecting their families." I was talking about this yesterday with a coworker who said basically "Wow did my perspective on older workers who go home at 5:00 sharp change as soon as I had a kid." So just keep in mind that many of us have a radical and involuntary shift in our relationship with work/programming right around 30yo, in case you're approaching that transition.

> i'm talking about netscape and jamie zawinski, xerox and alan kay, l0pht and mudge, valve and gabe newell. legends.

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.

It's like looking in a mirror.

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.

OK. I'll try to play devil's advocate here.

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.

Get involved in the decentralization space (and not just cryptocurrencies). The hacker ethos is still alive and well there. Plenty of smart people trying to change the world like the hackers of the 80's and 90's and it's all fresh and new. Decentralized services (like IPFS, Sia, Ethereum, Scuttlebutt, Matrix, etc) are the new frontier for development and there's so much cool stuff being created.

This hits home. I was in a startup together with very smart people, way smarter than me. We tried to pull off the impossible and were succeeding quite well in that. Unfortunately nobody pays you for solving problems that no customer has. So the company ran out of money.

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.

Opening a company of your own solves all your problems and brings back others, only you can decide which you value more. An in-between route would be to go freelance, which in my area (Amsterdam) and our field (software dev) seems just as 'sure' as employment, but gives you more freedom to:

- 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.

don't take this personally, but you sound lazy, afraid, and without a mission in life. if you're seriously considering what you yourself have called an "irrelevant" and "outdated" thing that will take up, in all likelihood, multiple years of your life, you're clearly stalling.

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.

There are still FLOSS projects that still have that hacker culture you mention. You can still build things and feel good, though you probably won't get paid. Check their mailing lists, Github issues, IRC chats, Slack or whatever channel these projects use for communication, there are big discussions in what technical decisions to take. These projects always need help and also have different problems to be solved.

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.

I remember disillusionment in my 30's. I think this comes about when you have enough experience to realize there are a lot of people out there that have no clue what they are doing, people just going thru the motions.

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 utopian dreams of the 80s and 90s haven't really gone anywhere (in both senses).

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!

> were based on the hacker ethos from the 80's and 90's, where a group of passionate and crazy smart people worked on tough and important problems, pulling engineering miracles daily.

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've found career advancement as well as business success to largely be directly correlated with soft skills.

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...

I know the feeling all too well having been on the internet since the days of Apple eWorld, Compuserve, Mosaic, Pointcast, Usenet etc. All these weird and wonderful visions of what the future of the internet was going to be where it was all about culture e.g. Phrack, BBS, .Net etc. and less about business.

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.

I read it through the lens of American history, an exciting frontier was conquered by interesting gunslingers but now its just a bunch of strip malls and Wendy's.

You may find this essay by pg helpful in making your decision:

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

Find a place with some honest people, working on something that matters. You don't need to be some legendary hacker to work with solid people in a con-person free zone.

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.

I know where you're coming from, I've been there myself not so long ago, I'm your age and had the same thoughts. You're making judgments based on your feelings and frustrations rather than facts. Let me give some examples.

> 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.

Here’s some advice from a hacker-turned-MBA: find your passion outside of work.

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 at my wits end trying to find some challenging work. I have grown up reading about Stallman, Carmack and team, Zawinkski etc. I used to love reading "A little Black book of Computer Viruses" by Mark Ludwig and Michael Abrash's books on optimization.

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.

I'm very much in the same situation. I also recently finished a MSc in Data Science with the hopes that I can make a career switch into something a bit more exploratory, but that isn't really happening and then COVID happened.

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.

Welcome to my world. Exactly the same age and situation. Lead developer at this point at a large software company.

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

There are still fields where you hack on difficult technical problems - game dev, VR, computer vision, signal processing, blockchain (? - I don't know anything about it, so I may be wrong here). You can work there.

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

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.

> as i see things, my choices are either to open a company of my own, making what i believe in

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.

Regarding the landscape my explanation is that it hasn't really changed: the kind of companies driven by hacker ethos were a very tiny part in the 90's, the most part of the industry was enterprise software development. The catch is that nowadays companies are so good at marketing that most engineers fail to see that most SaaS companies are just the new incarnation of the same corporate MBA/sales driven world that existed before. In Office Space or in Neo's software company in the Matrix how were treated engineers? What were their expectations, were they thinking they were changing the world? A lot of dissatisfaction nowadays seems to come from that dissonance of what we think/are selled we do, vs what we really do. It helps to picture the typical front-end dev job as what would have been done with J2EE a few years ago in an enterprise setting. Technology and fashion has changed, but not the core of the industry and the enterprise world.

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've been in a somewhat similar boat. Similar age and experience at least.

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.

It sounds like most of your disillusionment is with the profit seeking. Now, sure there are still some caveats here, but have you considered working in defence? While private defence contractor companies still make tons of money, there is not the noticeable profit incentive floating around since government contracts are taken for granted, very lucrative, and last a long time.

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.

There are a lot of good thoughts here, especially those about focusing on companies with technology risk. It seems like you would enjoy working on something like that.

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.

Have you considered going in the other direction and working for a public company? I had similar feelings to components of this, and you might find it interesting / refreshing to see how companies work when leadership is primarily geared around returning for-real, actually-generated cash to investors. If you end up at companies that are in the middle and have been around for a while, the CEO's job is absolutely to get to a liquidity event. And you'd be right to realize that impacts the total environment of what is being built & how it's being built, it's not a con IMO though, it's a bad situation.

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 ;-).

I would say, first of all, if you're in The Valley you should leave. All of the cultural issues you describe are much worse there than other places. I haven't really encountered them at all personally.

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.

Like many people posting here, I think I share quite a bit of your situation and views.

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.

Don't romanticize the past. The hacker ethos was alive in only a few companies in the 80s and 90s. There have always been people that want to grad most of the upside of any company or activity.

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.

Look at places like the various university-affiliated research centers around the US. The one I work at is a pretty great blend of hard research and applied engineering with a solid base of support for innovation. Pretty much anyone can get funding for their ideas at various levels if they present a solid case!

I'm not sure if this would interest you, but what you're looking for in terms of culture is exactly what we have at the company I work for, Assured Information Security. The company was founded by four engineers who at first were working around a pool table until they got off the ground. That hacker mindset and employee-focused culture is still present today. This story might interest you! https://www.ainfosec.com/about/pirate-flag/. Regardless, I hope you find what you're looking for!

I'm also 31, been in the industry for 10 years, and can agree on most, if not all, points, that you've made.

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've worked for 10 years for a prominent Open Source company. Prior to that, I worked 8 years for a big data company and prior to that 12 years for a company that wrote banking software.

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!

Consider the field of Oceanography!

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.

You're working at the wrong place.

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.

As a lot of the comments suggest you can either be stoic about your job or stoic about your own aspirations. Choose wisely as the wrong choice can bring miserable: Being stoic about ones job never caring about aspirations might lead to cynicism and a dead soul. Being stoic about aspirations not caring about job can lead to a poor life with way too many worries (However, this appears to happen less in the software world).

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

Having been working in 80's and 90's I can definitely say you're romanticizing it. The people you're referring to were the exceptions, not the rule. All the problems we have today were present back then, too. We also bashed the waterfall methodology back in the 80's! The biggest difference between now and then is networking is cheaper, easier to configure, more reliable and waaay faster!

You should build your own things, if even on the side. You get:

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!

There's a wide community of people feeling just like you, assembling in "Maker communities", as they call it.

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

I believe the phrase you are looking for is "mission-driven".

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.

I can understand the sentiment. My own view is that the industry has seen a dwindling of opportunity that really started with the dotcom boom in 2000. Every year, startups target smaller and smaller opportunities while the big monopolies take an ever increasing share of the pie.

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

I think it's time you decide if your work defines you or of it's just a way to get the money that allows you to live and to do (almost) anything you want outside your work. It's time to decide if you want to take risk and live how you want to, or to keep some security and be happy with a side-project.

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

Personally I like that one: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/31/billionaire-investor-warren-... It has been posted on HN someday. There is one entry "work for people you respect".

Long term: Don't become a peasant, live life on your own terms.

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

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

Hi, I agree with you about the non-engineering centric mind in companies. I think we are idealizing a picture of what can be en engineer job in the 50's or 60's. I have this mental image where enginners are trying to find the "most" efficient solutions for a problem, not bothering about the market or consummers, etc ...

Email me? zach@zachlatta.com. I’ve spent the past 6 years building a nonprofit to revive the hacker ethos in teenagers worldwide. I’m hiring.

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 have been feeling the same way as you. I excelled working at Amazon and a few other companies for a decade, but I decided that the nature of the work just wasn't for me anymore.

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.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23072333

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

1527 points by throwaway839246 36 days ago | 731 comments

This looks the mindset to starts a bootstrapped startup. Build a solution for a problem you (or companies in your industry) have. It could be several iterations of changes until to reach a product-market fit but don't give up until you succeed.

You only have to make a living where you are, doing what you. Release the idea that you're part of some industry, and are instead a boutique craftsperson.

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

It's interesting that your feeling that "academia is dying, and dare i say irrelevant", to me, is exactly what brought us here and to the status quo you're complaining about. Maybe return to academia and improve things there?

Maybe you could try some of the positions out there that do require a lot of expertise, e.g. Malware Analysis? I mean companies are supposed to make money so what do you expect them to do if they cannot pull out great products?

I'm wondering the same thing. There are also a lot of people in HN who share the same view.

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

Quit your job and do something else. Theres plenty of things to see and do in the world and you young enough to do them. Tech isn't everything and the industry isn't changing anytime soon.

In the old days people who thought they had a business idea would get a bank loan. You don't need VC money if you believe in your idea and think it can be successful.

I think this is pretty common in all professions teachers, doctors, even unskilled workers its like WTF.

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

All jobs will have downsides, I guess you just want to find one where you can live with the downsides and the upsides far out weight them. For me, I moved between a number of unfulfilling roles until I ended up in my current position.

The tech is pretty conservative and tame but projects are small, the scope is broad and the flexibility to be creative in the implementation is high. The industry is a real niche and the company of a "nice" size (100-200). I like this space as you have more room to bring your own solutions to the table. The weight of a massive process and procedure is not there which helps

This is not merely an industry problem, most human enterprises in a society with abundance have nothing tangible to produce, hence the hype to justify their existence. Creating a tech business as you pointed out is not easy, but I think if you started a brick and mortar,down to earth business with level-headed partners it might be possible to pull it off, with little downsides.

My personal observation is that even level-headed people are few and far in between.

you're not alone

i could write the same post word-for-word

start your own company

We should start something. Any ideas of things that we can hack on?

Welcome to capitalism. When once computers and technology were part of counter culture, now it's just a new way for CEOs to buy new yatches.

90s hacker culture still exists; it's in a few startups, and particularly ones oriented around decentralized systems and payment; maybe data science stuff also. Probably in other places; embedded systems I'm guessing is good, industrial research labs can also be fun.

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.

Academia isn't dying and you can definitely build a lot of things that are much more advanced than what most companies are doing.

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

Tech ultimately doesn't matter. It's all about solving problems you (and by association the business) run into.

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.