
Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo - zalequin
i&#x27;m 31.<p>have Bsc in CS, worked as software eng. for ~7 years.<p>tbh, i&#x27;m completely disillusioned with the industry and people in general. my expectations coming into the industry were based on the hacker ethos from the 80&#x27;s and 90&#x27;s, where a group of passionate and crazy smart people worked on tough and important problems, pulling engineering miracles daily. i&#x27;m talking about netscape and jamie zawinski, xerox and alan kay, l0pht and mudge, valve and gabe newell. legends.<p>entering the industry in the early to mid 2010&#x27;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&#x27;t need to as there were no real challenges to tackle.<p>perhaps i made bad career choices but what&#x27;s frustrating is that the industry seemed to shift into something else. in other words, the hacker ethos was lost. the culture changed. instead of engineering-centric one it shifted to sales and &quot;growth&quot; and hype. engineers have become relegated to the &quot;peasant&quot; cast, working the fields so that the ceo can sell the company for an inflated sum and move on to the next con (sorry, startup).<p>as i see things, my choices are either to open a company of my own, making what i believe in, or go back to academia where i&#x27;ll have more spare time to pursue my interests. but academia is dying, and dare i say irrelevant. it&#x27;s an outdated concept for a world where i can get &quot;educated&quot; on a subject within a week using the internet, at least enough so i can accomplish what i need. i&#x27;m not going to discover the higgs boson, nor do i want to become an expert in a singular domain. i want to build things.<p>so that takes me back to creating a business around something i believe in. but, it&#x27;ll have to be bootstrapped (vc money is just another boss), so the chances for success are extremely low.<p>what do you think?
======
ritchiea
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.

~~~
thom
Not to deny the obvious frustration of the poster, but it's sad to see such
wise and calm advice currently being downvoted.

~~~
ianai
It’s not helpful advice. He’s essentially finger wagging instead of offering
positive input.

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.

~~~
ritchiea
I empathize with how bad corporate America is, I struggle with it all the
time. I didn't intend my comments to sound like finger wagging. A lot of it is
turning to advice that legitimately helped me. When I felt most like "the
whole system is rotten" or "I don't feel like I have the status I hoped for"
it helped me when people close to me reminded me to think carefully about what
I'm actually looking for. The advice might not help you but it comes from a
good place and is not intended as finger wagging.

------
cynusx
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.

~~~
joecasson
> 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.

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

~~~
cynusx
We are talking about the difference between a functional engineering culture
(or mediocre) and a great hackerculture-based culture.

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,...

------
idoby
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.

~~~
godzillabrennus
Yeah, start your one thing. I’ve never worked a W2 job and I’ve been able to
work on interesting problems my entire career.

~~~
idoby
What's W2?

~~~
kube-system
There are two worker classifications in the US which refer to the tax forms
they get:

"W2": An employee. A regular job.

"1099": Independent contractor, freelancer.

~~~
mywittyname
To expand on this, the differences come down to taxation. There are taxes in
the use called FICA that are half-paid for by the employer for W2 workers and
not covered for 1099 employees. Also 1099 workers are able to deduct business-
related expenses from their income ta.

~~~
one2know
The most important distinction is clients large and small will try to rip off
1099 workers. The state labor office will not help 1099 workers. They must
hire lawyers sometimes to get payment.

------
scotty79
> 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.

~~~
Exmoor
Yes, the vast majority of software engineers in the 90's were working on
really mundane products guided by selling units. I would argue it was
significantly worse back then because it was a lot more difficult to engage
with peers outside your own company and the tooling people used was
significantly more likely to include a lot of proprietary niche products.

~~~
b_t_s
heck yea. There was no github or stack overflow, or the thousands of online
forums and offline meetups we have now. Maybe it was better in silicone
valley, but in the rest of he world it was pretty dreadful. My career doesn't
go back to the 90s, but even in the mid oughts writing firmware, the only
people I could find working on the same tech stack as me were the 4 other devs
on my team, and if we had a "stack overflow question" we had to just keep
banging our heads against it or ask a manager to call the vendor's sales rep
to find us an engineering manager who could arrange a conference all with a
dev. And there were delights like knocking on a teammate's door to ask how
much longer they'd have FooBar.c locked, because you need to edit it too and
version control didn't support 2 devs editing the same file. Sure,
foundational projects were easier to find back then, but _lot_ of things were
a _lot_ worse back in the "good old days".

------
bitcrazy
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.

~~~
lasereyes136
> 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.

------
dijit
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.

~~~
toyg
_> for every John Carmack there were thousands of behind the scenes people
simply doing a job_

Coupland's _Microserfs_ comes to mind.

------
op03
"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.

~~~
dijksterhuis
This is on point.

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”.

------
barrkel
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.

~~~
madsohm
At my previous company we did Scrum with a capital S. We did planning poker,
daily stand-ups (where we actually stood up), bi-weekly retrospectives and so
on. However, we (the engineers) had also made it clear to management that we
needed time slots for technical debt, which of course we got. It was a
pleasure to work in a so oiled machinery.

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.

~~~
barrkel
How often did features come from engineering, from an insight into what the
technology could do?

~~~
madsohm
My team probably did 10-12 tickets per sprint and at least one of those were
always technical debt related in some way.

~~~
barrkel
That's great, and probably better than average.

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

------
henriquez
> 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.

------
davewritescode
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.

~~~
mywittyname
And a good company will have (former) engineers in senior leadership. Most of
the tech companies I've worked for (non-fangs) had former engineers up to the
CTO/CDO/CIO level. Not exclusively, but there was a pretty good chance that
the manager or director of a technology department used to work in the salt
mines.

------
sscarduzio
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...](https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-charging-money-for-pro-
features-allowed-me-quit-my-job-6e71309457)

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

~~~
hn3333
How do you address his argument with the chances of success being too low?

~~~
sscarduzio
People talk about "chances of success" as it was a lottery with binary output
win (you are millionaire) vs lose (make no money and close).

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.

------
jl2718
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.

------
b_t_s
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.

------
galoisgirl
> 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.

------
And1
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.

------
slavoingilizov
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.

~~~
idoby
It's not either/or. Good luck building the next FB/Google/MS/Amazon/Apple
without exceptional tech and exceptional tech people. All of those companies
had breakthrough tech combined with breakthrough business ideas.

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.

~~~
slavoingilizov
I agree. I'm not suggesting tech isn't important at all. I'm just trying to
provide a counter point to the OP, whose argument sounds very one-sided.

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)

~~~
idoby
They're not in the tech industry, but they are _tech companies_. Tech
companies are companies who believe that in tech innovation is not only
possible, but necessary to drive exceptional business success. Those are
indeed few and far between.

~~~
rafiki6
That's a very interesting definition of a tech company and I think I have to
agree with it, although I've always been very much "tech companies build
tech".

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...](https://www.dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap.htm)

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.

------
TimJRobinson
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.

~~~
companyhen
Was going to suggest this.

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.

------
_ink_
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.

~~~
novalis78
That’s why I do like TheFoundation.com - their advertisement is a bit cheesy
but the core idea: to go out and find real world pain points for existing
businesses and then to figure out a software solution for them and even get
paid customers with a solution in mind has something exhilarating about it.
Automation, saved time, progress. Eventually your domain knowledge becomes so
huge that you see opportunities to enable a paradigm shift in an industry and
larger amounts of capital become available.

------
icoder
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.

------
maximente
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.

------
garymoon
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.

~~~
boomerhackr
But what about a source of income? I want to contribute to open source, but
after all we live in a capitalist society and people have to get a "real job"
(read: writing spyware for microsoft) in order to buy food and shelter and to
live, instead of writing code for free.

------
matt_s
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.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Talking about a handful of people - in the 80's we created the CTOS operating
system and desktop computers (pre-dated the IBM PC). The whole OS, through the
entirety of its existence, was worked on by 12 people.

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.

------
hyko
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!

------
santiagobasulto
> 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.

------
eganist
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...](https://www.manager-tools.com/all-
podcasts?field_content_domain_tid=5)

------
threeseed
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.

------
sendbitcoins
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.

~~~
sailfast
And the gunslingers were overly romanticized for years and years in movies and
only existed for a brief period. Also they died a lot.

------
rohan1024
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](http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html)

~~~
hn3333
Without having read the linked post yet (saved for later) I do believe that
the headline is right. We are the boss and the computer is our worker. We can
have as many as we need (AWS, DigitalOcean, etc.). We just need to give these
workers a task that will pay the rent. (And unfortunately the money still
comes from people, unless it's about automated stock/crypto market trading
bots.)

~~~
sova
Has nothing to do with humans being masters of technology ...

    
    
      "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."

------
sailfast
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.

------
f6v
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](https://www.principles.com) was exceptionally
useful in this regard.

------
scottlocklin
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.

~~~
PascLeRasc
I can confirm that embedded systems is super fun and feels like what "hacking"
or true engineering should be. I love digging through Analog Device's
datasheets, they're like poetry. Working with mux chips and hardware bit
shifting feels like some arcane art. I can't recommend it enough.

------
mindentropy
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.

------
rafiki6
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.

------
axegon_
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342537)

------
cyberdrunk
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.

------
sneak
> _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.

------
nailer
> 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.

------
tarsinge
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).

------
elpatoisthebest
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.

------
Thorentis
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.

~~~
hunter-gatherer
I second this option. In defense I did some interesting things. Everything
Thorentis said aligns with my experience as well. It isn't perfect, but has
unique positives. It is refreshing to work on unique problems that aren't
profit driven. It truly changes the dynamic of what you're doing. The pay
isn't as good, but it isn't _bad_.

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.

------
scottporad
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.

------
wayoutthere
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.

------
awinder
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 ;-).

------
_bxg1
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_.

------
leto_ii
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.

------
lasereyes136
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.

------
navbaker
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!

------
emilycanarelli
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/](https://www.ainfosec.com/about/pirate-flag/). Regardless, I hope you
find what you're looking for!

------
atomashpolskiy
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.

------
RickJWagner
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!

------
cmos
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/](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.

------
wdr1
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.

------
madsbuch
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!

------
taylodl
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!

------
davidajackson
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!

------
purerandomness
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...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHoBKQDRkJcOY2BO47q5Ruw/videos)

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

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

~~~
burntoutfire
> Netscape documentary "Project Code Rush"

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.

------
codingdave
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.

------
sbt
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.

------
lexa1979
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.

------
jerome-jh
Personally I like that one: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/31/billionaire-
investor-warren-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/31/billionaire-investor-
warren-buffetts-best-advice.html) It has been posted on HN someday. There is
one entry "work for people you respect".

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

[https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-
si...](https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-
behind-early-retirement/)

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

------
Serious007i
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 ...

------
zachlatta
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.

------
zwkrt
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.

~~~
cyberdrunk
> 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.

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

------
fsflover
See also:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23072333](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

------
leoplct
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.

------
JoeAltmaier
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.

------
dcarmo
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?

~~~
henriquez
Can you elaborate on this? How did the decline of academia lead to the status
quo posed by the OP? And how would returning to academia make any difference?
My perception is that there are bad financial incentives driving the decline
of academia, so I don’t necessarily believe it’s a problem that can be solved
entirely within the system.

------
markus_zhang
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?

------
namelosw
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?

~~~
abdabab
I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible. It will depend on the culture and
value system of the company.

------
jamil7
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.

------
sys_64738
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.

------
rb808
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.

------
diarmuidc
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

------
dennis_jeeves
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.

------
imsky
you're not alone

i could write the same post word-for-word

start your own company

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

------
Kaze404
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.

~~~
programmarchy
Capitalism dominates because it can absorb and productize counter culture.

------
speedgoose
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.

------
nojito
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.

