Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry?

Hi! I've been doing this since 1994 (I started in the industry instead of going to college). I feel this way approximately once every 7-8 years. What I think I've learned is that I make stupid decisions reacting to those feelings.

After 35 years in tech and 10 years with the same company, today is my last day at a Fortune 100 tech firm. I left voluntarily with no new job lined up.

Never felt so relieved.

I realized that the depression I was experiencing was caused entirely by leadership, not my job. No matter which products I worked on, the same feelings of depression and ultimately loathing of the environment and process kept returning.

Don't get me wrong. My employer is world-class, and the benefits were amazing, but the software development and engineering culture are destroying their employees.

A sabbatical to rethink my career is in order.

I've saved for the past 20 years and realized that unless I take time now, I might never have the real opportunity to enjoy life the way I’ve dreamed. I now have two years of savings set aside, so we will see where life takes me. I might work for myself or simply step down from technology development into a new role.

Modern software engineering is killing its employees. Global teams across time zones working from 5:00am to 10:00pm., on projects that aren’t even mine—just because someone else left and needed someone competent to pick up the slack and carry the project to completion. Leaders overpromise and commit to deadlines without even asking if the solutions are feasible. Being reprimanded when you push back and say that the solution they just promised isn’t realistic or even possible.

I assume by industry you mean software development. And I’m not tired of that. Where else can you be integrally involved in different businesses? Communications, medical, education, e-commerce for anything/everything. We get to play in a lot of different playgrounds and potentially have a huge impact. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.

I am tired of the interview process. Here’s a take home assignment that you’ll code in isolation without feedback or interaction from us. Completely opposite of how you’d do the job. You’ll have to justify any assumptions you make. And if we don’t like your justification, pass.

Took 2 days on the assignment - this is kind of simplistic, not what we’d expect from a senior dev. Pass.

Take 4 days on the assignment - what took so long? We’d expect a senior dev to knock this out in 2 or 3 days. Pass.

Maybe we’ll tell you’re out. Or we’ll just ghost you. Depends on how our recruiting team is feeling that day.

Behavioral is generally where I “blow” it. I won’t lie and answer the “so tell me a time about xyz”. Sometimes xyz was terrible, and I didn’t handle it well. I know how I’d handle it now and can articulate that. Sorry. We’re looking for someone that handled this exactly right already.

Personally I screwed myself over the years by not chasing titles. I’ve done Staff and Principal level stuff. For years. But I didn’t fight for the title. So I generally get screened out of those pretty quickly because past titles don’t match what recruiting team has been told to look for.

But this is the price that must be paid. So I can work/play in a lot of different playgrounds. Keep applying. Keep trying. Eventually I’ll find something.

Oh yes. It's dog eat dog but among very lazy privileged dogs.

Don't confuse business with a humane enterprise. It operates according to a vague informal internal calculus, has little loyalty to staff or communities and will happily eat skilled, conscientious contributors. The utopian stuff about being intelligent and progressive is hyperbole; a side effect of a privileged class of the labor sector for 50 years for the simple reason of growth. Morals and ethics are after-thoughts. Communitas is to the FAANG nothing more than growth. As smart as this class thinks it is, it will wither and die when the corp welfare dries up.

I imagine this won't help right now, as you and everyone else need work immediately, but for the future I'd suggest you research opening a small software development business with other programmers or, even better, a cooperative. This requires learning business management, and assuming risks, but as you see it isn't like normal job really provides security.

The main advantage is that under this arrangement the people who are your bosses, or otherwise rule over that you do, in a normal corporate job, such as sales people and accountants, become your employees and have to answer to you and your peers. Technical merit and knowledg becomes the driving force, not fantasy sales pitches and bean counting.

The main downside, besides the business risk, is likely going to be lower pay. But you'll be doing what you find valuable, so you'll have much higher enjoyment at what you do.

Pretty done.

Employers: Making it an obligation that I act like we have in house tools that were meant to exist 3 years ago, doing everything manually.

Customers: So beholden to their technical debt that they would rather pay ten times the opex than the capex to remove the debt.

Shits me to tears.

I was feeling burnt out until I got a pretty cool job a couple of years back. Instead of corporate crap we're building a product for scientists. I'm working on a small team with minimal interference. It feels good.

The downside is that this kind of job is rare. If/when this ends I'll probably need to go right back to the corporate grind. I don't have any other marketable skills, nor a financial runway, so.... realistically I need to do this until I die/retire.

I'm both excited and terrified about how the AI thing is going to play out.

I'm a fan. It's obviously the future. But I think it might entirely replace us, or at least 95% of us.

Note that many companies are pretending to hire in order to look successful/growing. They might be willing to hire if some unicorn candidate comes along, but in practice the job ad is just marketing.

If you have the money, there's nothing wrong with quitting and doing your own thing for a while. Alternately, working for a fundamentally different kind of company can be rewarding. I found working at a small business (a sales company where tech was an afterthought) to be delightful and weird; everything was non-standard and many roles were just not hired for, but everyone's door was open and there's no bureaucracy, so whatever I wanted to be would be in my domain. The workload was low, so I made my own work and got into Facilities work, learned how to check the fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, and elevators. -And you know what? I opened up some of the smoke detectors and detected prior smoke in them; visual charring and melted plastic. The smoke detectors had been recalled for catching fire. I filed for replacement costs from the company, and now our smoke detectors won't burn the building down, which I think's pretty neat.

I was at Amazon warehouse for a year, I was getting contract offers for 6 months I was like f that wanting security. Eventually I took one and I'm at it now, six fig job. It was crazy though like impossible to get hired unless you went through a recruiter. I don't have a degree but have years of work exp.

Edit: I did see some news thing about trying to undo/keep 174.

I'm still trying to get my foot in the door. Ever since I started building 'raw' pages for people who had either "business ideas" or ran a 100 person sales team, no one has known or respected the difficulty of what goes into what we build or how it is actually a better solution than whatever they were asking for originally. Maybe once I actually break into the industry i will finally find a manager who understands what the solution is and how we get there in six months and equates that to a proper working solution instead of a internal-politics motivated project to get and edge over some other dept.

Just try to bear with it and keep applying, and prepare answers for the "stupid" questions, these are not going to go away. And yes, uncertainty is always tough.

You are also right in that the more deliberate way to get an increased salary or position is to change jobs. Yes, it happens internally as well, but it's harder to achieve. Also, going through multiple jobs is better for both experience but also in seeing what the industry actually looks like. When you work at the same company for many years, especially if that's pretty much the only job you've had, then you have just one data point, which is to say, you really don't know much.

The job market isn't booming, though it does seem to be picking up.

Unlike professions like medicine, software industry had been permissive. And there were history major becoming CTOs of leading finance companies, which leaked every consumer recoreds. Once the industry will gets rid of the pretenders, the deserving people will find their place.

The core issue here isn't just market conditions or bad hiring practices. It's that tech _workers_ have spent decades thinking they were somehow different from other _workers_, that they were 'partners' with capital rather than the labor behind it.

You're experiencing what people in every other industry have dealt with for generations: being treated as a disposable cost center when it's convenient for ownership. The solution isn't individual resilience or '''grinding harder''', it's collective action.

Tech workers need to organize. We need unions. We need to stop pretending that stock options and ping pong tables make us anything other than workers whose interests are fundamentally opposed to those who fire us on a whim to boost quarterly numbers.

The people who laid you off, who are outsourcing jobs, who are trying to replace workers with AI — they are not on your side! They never were! This is class warfare, and we tech workers have been deluding ourselves supporting the wrong side.

Sometimes I feel like the guy in the mongodb is webscale video and just want to go get a farm out in the country and shovel pig shit all day.

Yes, you aren't alone

I'm exhausted and burned out too. I'm fortunate that I can take some time away from work to recover and hopefully regain some passion for this, but I'm strongly considering retraining for a different industry

I'm happy to talk, as someone also going through the same stuff. Let me know, I can drop some contact info

In some way, software development is going the way hardware development went years ago. The engineers built tools and modules that put most of them out of work. Who designs amps or discrete circuits these days? Once you design a piece of hardware that works well, it can be re-used ad-infinitum, and most hardware today is really firmware running on microcontrollers. So it is a natural evolution that software is becoming automated. Unfortunate, but also an opportunity to do more interesting things. It is the managers that need to be replaced unless they can see further than the tecchies, and I have known some that do, usually they are ex-tecchies.

I have good c++ tests, no degree, a portfolio, and I cannot find a job in France.

I think I'm going to change country, I wish Scandinavia.

Currently working in a kitchen for schools, I will probably lose weight. I go home around 3pm, nap, and do some 3d modeling and "level design".

If you're willing to leave Silicon Valley, there are a lot of small companies out there that need one or two or a handful of decent software developers to do useful but non-cutting-edge work. They can't pay Silicon Valley money, obviously, but you get to be a lot closer to other kinds of work, which you might find satisfying in its own way.

For whatever reason, my career has been driven by curiosity, first computers and Fortran II, then real-time medical data analysis, then compilers, then collection of batch financial data from dozens of sources, then low-latency financial trading backed by genetic programming, then application security.

I've luckily managed to avoid too many brain-dead execs, but there have been spells that the gig is boring.

Looking back on it, there have been very few spells in which I have not been programming, if not for a gig, but on my own to explore my curiosity.

I'm over the industry cause it over-promised an under-delivered and the way it "changed" the world is largely through monopolies, extractive middlemen and manipulation.

Hard not to feel this way sometimes given the quality of some job listings and the negativity bias here and broader media. In such moments of despair I recall two axioms: change is inevitable and ongoing, and talent rarely resides in the C-suite.

I'm only 10 years in and currently at a science non-profit using a dead/toy framework, and honestly woefully unprepared for market at the moment. I'm constantly looking at job listings, though, and engaging with scads of recruiters to maintain a good feel for the market to inform my next steps. I see plenty of ads that are hyper-specific about the tooling du-jour, but a non-trivial percentage of the listings I see make it clear that higher-level prowess, like understanding a language and best practices, are more important than what ultimately boils down to the ability to RTFM for whatever widgets the CTO/CE is currently enamored with. These are the jobs I'm looking at. Sure, this could narrow your pool during what appears to be a tight market, but you're more likely to have worthwhile interviews. I'll apply to less intriguing jobs to avoid getting rusty at interviewing, though.

This kind of funk also inevitably drives me harder to just _do what I want to do_. What language and tools _do I want to use_? _What kind of problems do I want to solve_ moving forward? If you've sorted these out, great. Sure, this could _also_ narrow your pool even more, but you're more likely to find a high-quality match.

Finally, all of these companies foaming at the mouth to replace people with AI will regret it; it's already happening, in fact. It's happening in less/non-technical jobs (lol Klarna), so I'm not worried about coding jobs at all in the long run (not to diminish and current or short term turbulence, though). Smart execs/founders will see AI for what it is: a force multiplier, only as good as your existing staff. That said, I think it behooves devs to get right with AI/chat-assisted development. Of all the buzzy tools people fall in love with, I think this is the highest ROI I've seen yet.

TL;DR: I'm just not going to apply to jobs that don't give me "smart exec" smells, and I'm only applying if it really looks like something I'll care about doing. I realize this exudes some degree of privilege, hubris, and/or naivete, but I work my ass off and you only live once.

Anyone who can engineer software systems is likely able to engineer some kind of company. Not the path for everyone, but it is one way of moving forward without staying linked to the industry.

It's the highest paying cushiest career on earth. If you don't want to grind a little bit to secure that then don't. Just make less money doing something harder. It's your choice and personally I'm happy if there's less competition

It sounds like you have burnout and a burnout-related attitude issue, it is understandable but not always helpful. A lot of people find professional help talking through this to be very beneficial.

I found working at a restaurant as a cook delightful for 6 months, it wasn't at all fair as I was also still living off severance but it was very relaxing having straightforward work that was always done at the end of the shift as well as a creative outlet where I could do something with my hands.

The frustration is understandable but now you've got to find your new direction either a new way to approach tech work to increase your marketability and to find jobs where you'll be happier or a different direction and something different to do. You can be furious but unless you channel that into something positive it's just hurting yourself. Let yourself be mad for a while and then make yourself ready for whatever is next.

Ive been around since 2004. I've seen this cycle a few times now in the industry.

An accountant, proper CPA, needs like 5-10 hours of training per year to keep on top of their industry.

IT? Are we on mainframes? no we moved to individual pcs? I mean we moved to the mainframe in the cloud? No we moved to individual ai on GPUs? No we moved to the ai in the cloud?

IT is constantly changing and 10 hours per day of training isnt enough and if you're caught on Y framework when the industry moved on from that framework. Then you're SOL. Not many people still got those fortran jobs.

Now Hiring: Not You (2017): https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/now-hiring-not-...

No.

But I live and breathe tech even in my spare time[1]. You gotta learn to roll with the sh-t and set boundaries. I hate to say it but turn off HN, this place a hype machine designed to make you feel bad. It's like "Roast and Toast" x 1000 on here, not reality. It's toxic in a very passive-aggressive way (rather than reddit toxic, which is just aggressive).

I've been at this since 1988. (Made a few personal bad choices so not retired, lol [2]) I've changed jobs every 5-7 years since the post-2000 implosion. Don't bother with the FAANGs, its all style over substance tossing-off investors: they don't care about you at all and their top level management just want to be centibillionaires (or trillionaires).

Find smaller companies, that's what I started doing 20 years ago. I started a new job as a senior director at a 5000 person company 3 years ago, most money I've ever made in my career, great people who enjoy their work, no pressure to move up the ladder unless you want to (not much ladder for me, but the younger devs are happy to stay put without the dumb pressure to give 150% every year). Our revenue is <10B, and it is a German company so there's minimal (unremarkable) equity, but the base salary is great.

Find a company that makes boring products that sell. Mine is a stable boring company, making real-ware silicon products and associated cloud services for medical and automotive industry. Look for a company trying to grow profits at a normal rate, not a FAANG rate. Avoid the hype. Be boring. Slow and steady.

[1] also, if you're only in tech because you think that's where you're supposed to be, and don't have a deep passion for it, you're gonna have a bad time.

[2] Oh, and don't accidentally get someone you don't like pregnant. Because then you're completely f--ked.

The tech industry was always a little slimy but it's out of hand now. I've lost too much respect for the role of innovation in this current version of our society. We've passed a point where it's used against people more than for people.

Day after day here watching people with no substantive activity on their account spam their endless shovelware slop projects, I just can't feel like I want to be a part of this anymore.

First time?

I don't know your background or experience but I do know there are a lot of people in tech now who have never experienced a recession. Also, this startup image (which persisted to these being big companies) of them being employee-friendly, maverick and casual was really just a function of the boom times.

That veneer is long gone. We are now in the era of permanent layoffs to suppress wages and every one of us that can be replaced by AI will be.

I think for many tech workers, they're in for a rude awakening that they're just like any other worker and not special or somehow immune to the adversarial nature of the employer-employee relationship.

Back in 2000 and 2008 it took sa few years but the jobs came back. One might assume that'll happen again but I'm honestly not so sure. 2008 saw the elimination of a whole class of entry-level professional jobs for millenials that never came back.

Thing is, I don't think much of the economic activity in the tech sector is actually creating value anymore. Big tech are milking their respective golden geese until they inevitably die. Startups are largely just angling for a buyout in the AI gold rush that'll largely benefit the founders and the employees not so much.

Sure, but just keep in mind a couple things:

One it’s a down market, the worst since the dotcom bubble. Companies are going to be needlessly selective to keep the hiring people busy, and also to get people who are the most desperate and motivated as they’ll probably get them cheaper. Being self taught may not matter practically speaking, but it's not doing you any favors right now unfortunately.

The other thing the bear in mind is - this is the norm at a lot of industries, we in software have just frankly had it really easy for a couple decades now. What seems unreasonable to you is what lot of people have to go through even in a good market.

Come to academia.

I don't mean "become a professor"; I mean be a software developer at a college or university. They need them in large teams (IT department of a larger university) down to solo devs (working for a single department at a small liberal arts college—this is where I've been for 15 years).

It's true that you won't get the same level of pay—frankly, I've been woefully underpaid—but, by and large, they're not trying to replace everyone with AI, they adhere to basic standards of ethics, and they don't subscribe to crunch culture. If you're working in an academic department, chances are your bosses will basically think you're doing magic all the time and give you massive respect. Plus the job security is overall much higher. (Well, it has been. I suppose the current political situation may create some extra instability, depending on the position.)

Has little to do with “industry” and everything to do with America being led by post war, Cold War paranoids who drank lead water and huffed lead gas fumes, brains wired to march to a steady drum, right into building a shit hole country.

Sure is a whole lot of demand to show up just so from ossified gerontocrat pols who can’t provide for themselves and mock us to our faces about freedom.

A bunch of randos socialize we’re off the hook for each other, good luck! While also expecting we show up for jobs that secure their investments or they send out the riot cops. It’s a fucking brain dead social culture of learned helplessness copy pasted around office worker meat suits. An obvious, making it pointless, LARP.

Zero flexibility in human agency when too few know how to fix their stuff and need these brain dead jobs to trickle down to the poorer service workers.

used to see 80-100 lines of good code per programmer.

seeing up to 2400 lines a day in 4 hours of deep work. LLMs will greatly reduce the amount of people required, mainly seniors. erode the path for junior training and put further pressure in an industry continually contracting since 2021.

the amortization of software developing as R&D expense among many years implemented by the IRS didn't help either

I'm nearly done after seeing the nonstop indianization of my topics on google.

Niches from motorcycles to tech to music have become a punjab yellowpages and no one is even talking about it.

Google the most popular korean boyband in the world "BTS"

6/7 of my results are indian domains. What's the point of even trying anymore when ESL slop like that gets a massive SERP advantage for years now and is only getting worse?

you should never have allowed yourself to get sucked into corporate work. its the most common mistake that people make

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Don’t be so weak. The world is a harsh, cruel place. You are owed nothing. A man makes himself.