I wish I had a sunnier view of things but I am someone who wants to work hard but feels like an ant on an ant farm. ppl have advised me to go into startup scene but all the startups i've interviewed at in NY are mock corporations -- ad delivery, ad multimedia, analytics, facebook ripoff.... bleh. where to go?
Grammar errors will impact a reader's perception of you, regardless of whether your original intent had true merit or not. Your goal should be to communicate exactly the ideas you wish you convey, as concisely as possible.
Natural language is the transfer protocol for ideas between humans. If you do not adhere to the published standards, you risk experiencing data loss in strict clients.
When you're here, you know that the majority of comments will have something insightful to add to the discussion and you do not feel like you're wasting your time reading them.
Don't hate on this mindset. It's not appropriate everywhere, but it's not just a hippie concept, it has merits here.
There are definitely good jobs which one can be passionate about out there. I didn't easily find that job myself when I was sick of my job and ended up creating it instead. This industry offers so much potential that I feel it is nearly only a matter of looking around to see what needs to be done. Not a given one will be successful, but doing ok so far. Done give up, look around yourself, the good stuff is out there.
A lot of tech feels like a very spiritually empty game, and I resent it for becoming this gruesome when really programming can be a beautiful pursuit as well. I'm trying to be patient, there is a company that has expressed interest in me that is much more into embracing proper design paradigms and modern approaches at least. At my current gig we are handcuffed by lots of legacy code, layers of bureaucracy, "Senior Devs & Architects" who are really at about junior level, and people who are difficult just for the sake of slowing down the pace of work.
Even in academia, I saw a lot of music tech students receive their masters degrees only to promptly jump into a tech bootcamp so they could then assume the position of low-end web dev rather than use any of the audio research skills they spent years trying to assimilate (bit of pot calling the kettle black here but I purposely ditched Ruby for a Java-based job so that I can get back into coding DSP & performance-intensive research apps -- I also spend a lot of time decompiling audio libs).
Living with this job for 2 years has been maddening & I am relieved that I have enough on my post-academia resume now to escape it one of these days. I really need to meet artists who code. Have even been considering going into indie game programming just to meet more of those types, though really my passion is more in electronic art than gaming (but electronic art is barely an industry at all outside advertising!)...
Many people do just jump in for the money, and others in this thread have addressed it, so I won't except to say that there are people who start out in an industry because they need the money (for example, I had to live on my own and start work at 17, no familial support), but then realize they really enjoy it and stay for the other stuff: problem solving, puzzles, building elegant things, and all the rest. Perhaps not most, but there are some.
As far as the passion vs. profit stuff, there's no denying that there's a serious tension there, and that's not going anywhere anytime soon. I've dealt with this too, and I saw three choices:
1) You can live like a pauper in an expensive area/decently in a very cheap area and do what you enjoy, even if no one ever buys it. There are people who do this with code - I've seen plenty of indie game devs pick a cheap area in the US, work the occasional freelance job, and spend every other moment working on their games. This can be a totally valid path if you're OK with its limitations. You know what this is like from the art side already, too.
2) You can try to get wealthy and then do whatever you want - no more working terrible jobs, being paid a fraction of what you're worth, being engulfed in [other] company politics, working for others when you'd rather be working for yourself, etc. I'm sure many people of us here on HN are doing exactly that.
3) You can try to find a decent compromise - some companies will give you 5% time, others may pay you to just do research (a previous company I worked for paid a few people to do nothing but work on an audio/3D visual coding framework, for example), others simply hit that sweet spot of giving you interesting stuff to work on for decent money.
A lot of tech feels like a very spiritually empty game, and I resent it for becoming this gruesome when really programming is a beautiful pursuit. I'm trying to be patient, there is a company that has expressed interest in me that is much more into embracing proper design paradigms and new approaches to back-end code. At my current gig we are handcuffed by lots of legacy code, layers of bureaucracy, "Senior Devs & Architects" who are really at about junior level, and people who are difficult just for the sake of slowing down the average pace of work.
Living with this for 2 years has been maddening & I am relieved that I have enough on my post-academia resume now to escape it one of these days.
1. Too much bile: | tech bootcamps, consultant scammers, open source hipsters... pure scum... i deleted half of cuz i knew it would just piss ppl off & was a waste of breath
If you know enough to not write this, why did you write it?
2. The lack of proper grammar. If you can't take the time to neatly express your ideas, why do you expect anyone to take them time to understand them?
