
Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry? - throwaway_jaded
Pays well and everything but what are the things that make you dislike the industry.
======
nugget
Being on call and in a constant state of readiness to troubleshoot problems is
tiresome. Even if problems rarely occur, the constant awareness of potential
responsibility can quickly lead to burn out. The medical field has known this
for a long time, and as a result, physicians get paid a lot of money to take
extra call coverage. This is a very neglected topic of discussion within
software development.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Former ops engineer here. Get out of ops. In the current climate, it is rare
you'll find a role that compensates you for being on call frequently and the
toll it takes on you.

~~~
dijit
This a thousand times. Ops is undervalued and expected to deliver a lot in
today’s workforce. You get better respect and compensation for SWE. I wouldn’t
reccomend this career unless you’re unable to do software engineering.

~~~
majormajor
A fair number of places have engineers do ops. It's bad in the long run for
many reasons, but rarely do I see people ask about it at interview-time.

------
bargl
There is an expectation and honestly a need to keep up with changes to the
industry that I haven't seen in other fields. Any older dev has had to
transition at least 1-2 languages and it's not an easy step. That doesn't even
start covering how fast javascript frameworks are moving. Oh, hey you learned
Angular, that's so 3 years ago we don't do that here. We use Vue.js which is
better because _________. Vue will be replaced and you'll have to learn
something else. If you don't like constantly learning then you'll burn out. On
TOP of that most jobs expect you to work and learn this on your own. Which
leads to a ton of 9-5 developers who refuse, or other developers who make
sacrifices to stay on top of things.

It can also lead to franken-apps which have angular -> react -> vue all in
one. (Pause to take a breath) I love developing, but there is a lot to learn.
I only stay on top of the industry for about 6 months out of every year. It
works for me.

~~~
yakshaving_jgt
Are you a veteran who has experienced this? Because this sounds completely
wrong to me.

An experienced developer typically has no problem picking up new
languages/frameworks/tools/etc. There isn't much value in familiarising
oneself with arbitrary and invented things, of which there are many in our
industry, and they are ephemeral.

No, the real value is in knowing and understanding the _discovered_ things.
And since they are discovered and not invented, they do not change.

There's still plenty to learn, but you have more than a lifetime's worth of
learning ahead of you even if you steer clear of the shiny baubles that are
React/Angular(v[1..n])/Vue/Whatever.

~~~
danenania
I think a lot of the frustration comes not from the new languages/frameworks
themselves, but all the endlessly re-invented support tools that surround
them.

For example, learning React itself is great because you can pretty quickly see
how it cleans up your UI layer. It doesn't take that long and adds real value
to your projects.

Oh, but now you need to learn all the corner-cases of NPM, and now you need a
new test framework, and now you need to figure out the incantations to get
webpack x.y.z outputting just the right way. Oops now hot-reloading is broken.
And the chrome inspector is lagging for some reason.

None of these are interesting or fun problems to solve, but they are a pretty
substantial part of getting any new technology into production.

~~~
kentm
Our profession consistently ignores operation and maintenance in favor of
building a new thing, despite the former being at least as important.

How many people post negatively about Java in terms of productivity and cite
boilerplate as a productivity-killer, despite the massive advantages a JVM
stack brings?

------
Thriptic
Being viewed as a cost center rather than a revenue generator if you're not in
a tech centric company.

Having best practice and common sense ignored by management in the name of
expediency and then being blamed for the results (going over budget, building
something the client doesn't want, being late on delivery)

~~~
bargl
I had someone call us the Expense team. I put an end to that pretty quickly.
It is an easy wedge to drive between sales and engineering.

------
liquidise
Creative license: the trend i have seen at startups is moving more in the
direction of product and designer control over the things a company creates.
For developers seeking control over their creations, this can be a frustrating
thing to be a part of. Even at small startups, the value of designers and
product managers is pretty obvious. It can be tough to find the right balance
of control there.

Sexism: this is a tough topic. I worry that the people who care are not part
of the problem, yet they tend to beat themselves up about it more than those
who arguably should. I want more of everyone in tech, but to a large extent my
ability to affect change in this area is crippled insofar as i have a job at a
startup which requires lots of hours.

Hours/Appreciation: I've been a part of a few startups where employees,
especially engineers, care more than they arguably should. High senses of
responsibility are amazing assets for a company, but they rarely get
appreciated as much as they deserve. When leaders see lagging growth or
declining numbers, they try to incite urgency in the ranks. Those working the
hardest often take that urgency to heart the most, which can leave them
feeling really disheartened that their above-and-beyond efforts to this point
have gone unrecognized.

I'll close on a positive by saying that i love the tech and startup
industries. They provide so many people opportunities they wouldn't have had
otherwise. Like every industry, there are problems. Picking the size and
culture of the company you work at changes the landscape of those problems, so
be conscious which you are sensitive to and choose accordingly. If you are
happy to trade reduction in control for stability, bigger companies probably
your jam, for instance.

~~~
tootie
Product and design should own products most of the time. I think most startups
would be better off outsourcing their builds.

~~~
kamarg
Any particular reasons you think this? Does it apply to or exclude specific
industries?

~~~
tootie
I don't understand why you ever would. Your product is your product. It's
defined by what it does, not how it does it. It's all about customer
experience. Product market fit. That can and should be determined by market
research, user experience design testing and prototyping. Developers are there
to build with quality and to appropriate scale based on business strategy.

If you open a restaurant, is the menu written by a chef or by the guy who
built the oven? Are movie scripts written by the camera operators? What
industry asks it's technicians to decide what to create?

I actually just quit a job because developers were running the show way too
much. Nothing was ever delivered to expectations or satisfied user needs. It
was extremely frustrating for me to just be throwing code over the wall.

------
shade
I think there's a few things about the software industry that make it really
easy to become depressed, cynical, and jaded. We spend quite a lot of time
being pedantic, fixating on all kinds of specific details, and especially,
thinking about many different ways our applications can go wrong. In the
context of writing robust software, that's a good thing, but it can also be
really difficult to turn it off in the other parts of your life.

------
princekolt
The closer you get to the bleeding edge of the technology industry, the more
detached you get from "real life", generally.

~~~
rajeshmr
Nicely put!

------
vtange
In the Silicon Valley there's this feeling of monotony - that everyone is
doing the same thing. Given the price of housing you can make a pretty good
guess everyone is trying to either save up to move out or pay off a house
here. Everyone is either trying to come up with a way to enter the hottest
trendiest startup idea or doing indie games. Most of the meetups are
tech/work-related and even the non-tech meetups are flooded with male,
glasses, 20-30 something engineers. It's almost like everywhere you go you
can't escape the pressure of work.

Personally it almost seems like the whole interview process was made to
continue the whole tradition of getting high SAT or GRE scores for college,
this time swapping college with the FAANG companies. We basically took all the
problems with a standardized test-based education system and moved it to jobs.

------
IpV8
The growing divide between the haves and have-nots. I have found that people
in tech are generally completely oblivious to the massive amounts of
impoverished people around them and have no idea how to help them. Also the
technical advancements that we are seeing nowadays mostly seem to help people
who are already well off. It is difficult to find good tech companies that
have a high social good output.

~~~
vector_spaces
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, it was strange to see 22 year old recent
graduates arriving and immediately making six figure salaries while constantly
complaining about homeless people and describing certain areas with large
black and Latino populations as "sketchy"/"ghetto"/"unsafe".

It was very surreal (and sad) watching the demographics become much more
homogenous in the little corner store in the Castro I worked in. Our customer
base was once incredibly diverse, lots of LGBTQ folks, and also lots of
families. Slowly it became predominantly white and East/South Asian, young,
single, and affluent. We went from seeing EBT card usage drop from about 4-5
customers a day ($200 daily average) to one (literally) every 3 and half weeks
by the end of 2016.

In a similar vein: every tech company I've known whose product involves manual
labor (think: delivery, cleaning, retrieving scooters, packing/receiving, food
preparation, etc) treats and thinks about the workers doing the manual labor
very differently than the creatives, engineers, product folks, sales leads,
etc. The employees doing the manual labor are held to very different standards
of productivity and timeliness, often don't get benefits, definitely don't get
equity, and generally enjoy little room for advancement, and often they will
be employees in all but name and rights (1099).

Some of this is understandable to a point as their work is mission critical --
if your cooks show up late constantly and your product is "Uber but for
tapas", then your customer experience is going to suffer. But a tendency I've
observed personally and heard from friends in those jobs is that it seems
acceptable for manual workers to be shouted at, threatened, and generally be
treated abusively, while the same certainly wouldn't be ok if directed at
someone making salary. Meanwhile as an engineer if I have a zero day, no one
says a word to me, or if they do they're very polite about it.

------
tsumnia
A lot of issues have already been discussed, but one I haven't seen is the
constant reminder that people and the Internet are terrible. Ignoring people
that censor beheadings on YouTube and the Dark Web, I am very vividly aware of
things Goatse, Blue Waffle, 1 Guy 1 Jar, Ogrish, early 4chan's \b\ and those
mental images are very much burned into my brain.

Maybe its not every aspect in the tech industry or maybe its changing with the
next generation or maybe I just got into tech at a very impressionable age,
but I'm sure I'm not the only one that was exposed to that stuff early on.

I think that's a dark side. There's some generally fucked up shit out there
and someone has to be aware of it to keep it far, far away.

~~~
kentm
The tech industry idolizes and encourages terrible behavior, and it ends up
being self-reinforcing. Efforts to counteract that get pushback. How many
people will get upset if you suggest that Steve Jobs was not a good person and
probably shouldn't be idolized? Or that Linus's email habits are not a good
thing to emulate?

We will tell ourselves fun stories about how people being jerks just means
they are no bullshit people who care about getting things done.

~~~
tsumnia
I don't entirely agree with respect to my original post and that your use of
Jobs and Torvalds don't correctly align to my post.

I don't think the majority of people idolize stuff that makes everyone gag or
grimace in disgust. A small subset of internet trolls idolize and encourage
this behavior. Tech is only associated because it also shares the loner
basement dweller stereotype.

There are entire organizations designed to counteract underage pornography and
sex trafficking, everyone agrees this is a terrible thing. However, it still
persists despite opposition and tech is heavily involved in the process. This
gets back to my point that to be in tech requires an unavoidable knowledge of
the cruelty of man.

Someone's email habits pales in comparison.

~~~
kentm
Yeah I misread your post, sorry about that.

------
also_jaded
\- any interesting/impactful work is immediately crowded by tons of other
people willing to sacrifice more than you to own it. They usually win.

\- the prevalent engineering management culture is a form of psychological
manipulation to turn engineers into cogs and make you feel like you are always
behind and stressed. It emphasizes weekly bandaid fixes to long running
problems.

\- you have to work hard to be promoted, progress your career and make more
money; but higher positions generally have much greater stress, workload and
painful non-technical work (sales, politics)

\- the bay area becomes a nightmare in middle age. the local governments love
capitalizing tech income in the form of taxes or housing prices, but won't
change a thing to improve the your life. leading a normal middle class life
with kids in a safe area with good schools (e.g. peninsula, or Marin) will
completely exhaust a 2x200k dual income. Commutes are awful. Unless you win
the startup lottery, you'll be working your brains out and hardly find time to
enjoy life.

------
mat_jack1
I don't like the idea that tech comes first and people last. That is often the
case when the automation is simply meant to replace inefficient humans,
without really thinking to the consequences. I'm of course pro-automation as I
think it's an improvement for humanity, but I'm always worried about the end
result.

Also I don't like that most companies have this kind of double-speak when they
say that they are working to improve everyone lives while they simply want to
automate work away, avoid rules (simply because Internet is not regulated as
the rest of the economy) to make more money than in other ways.

------
monktastic1
I find the nearly infinite (and seemingly exponentially increasing) number of
ways things can go wrong, and the frequently arcane knowledge required to fix
them, incredibly mentally taxing. That's not what I want to fill up my mind
with.

If this were all in the service of healing the world in some way, it might be
worth it. But work is feeling increasingly disconnected from genuine human
problems.

~~~
goalieca
The systems are too damned complicated and poorly architected. Can’t just work
on mastering any single piece in isolation.. has to be verticals!!

------
keabel4
"Always Be Coding" \-- people who spend their time on work/passion
project/open source projects are somehow valued more than those who spend
their time on work/non-technical pursuits.

~~~
magic_beans
It's truly awful that this is expected in tech.

------
kentm
Developers that build a new thing are disproportionately valued over
developers who improve or maintain old things. The formers will be the
wunderkinds of the organization and referred to as "rock stars" and "10x-ers"
despite the quality of the work that they put out. The latter will have to
fight for promotions and be denigrated as "1x-ers". They will have to hear
that they are not as valuable because they are not innovators.

This leads to developers being biased towards building and working with new
things, and is a lot of the reason that we see flavor-of-the-week style
platforms and libraries that add very little value.

~~~
goalieca
I hate seeing people reinvent things without learning the lessons that the
maintainers are all so painfully aware of.

------
plessthanpt05
The interview process for developer/engineering roles.

~~~
RichardCA
It's not so much the process itself but the overall fact that your ability to
get hired ultimately hinges on things that are trivial and shallow. In general
I believe that skill and talent get rewarded, but everyone has a story about a
job they landed out of sheer luck - they knew some obscure tool or framework
that forced a hiring decision in their favor. Very few hiring managers are
genuinely talented at spotting talent. Most rely on some level of cargo-cult
knowledge, tribal shibboleths, and technical hazing rituals. Or they just hire
lazily and optimistically, and then you have to work with those people because
now you're one of them.

------
mindcrime
[https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/17/open-offices-have-
driven-p...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/17/open-offices-have-driven-
panasonic-to-make-horse-blinders-for-humans/)

~~~
jarsin
HA I got written up once for putting poster board on the sides of my desk to
form a wall. Could of used these then.

------
rajeshmr
Separate point : tech industry tends to make one delusional about ones
abilities (usually overestimation of intelligence)

------
0xmohit
Having to build technology that attempts to manipulate humans and call it
"Deep Learning".

------
anotherevan
Companies/organisations that expect you to behave more like cult members than
employees.

------
CharlesW
There's an under-appreciation of the psychological toll that content
moderators face.

------
rajeshmr
Long hours in the name of passion / customer obsession

------
jshowa1
Companies have very poor development processes and scheduling which is what
makes coding, in any language or framework, difficult because half the time
you don't even know what you should be writing. Even worse, asking others is
often hit and miss because some co-workers, who should know, don't make an
effort to define what's meant by certain requirements specific to a problem
domain. This often leads to shipping incomplete products that you have to
"fix" after deployment because you didn't have enough time to implement
features, didn't know features were needed, or the features weren't well
defined. In the meantime, project management thinks the project is done and is
piling more projects on you while you play catch up. I haven't figured out a
good system to handle this and even if I could, it requires buy in at multiple
levels and consistent application. If you've ever done group work in college,
doing this is almost impossible.

In short, work is just like college group work. One person does 90% of the
work while the others do about 10%.

------
caiobegotti
Intentional dehumanization in the name of delivery/progress/development.

~~~
rajeshmr
Well put.. strong words. I sometimes wonder if this happens only in the tech
industry or has this virus spread from tech to other industries as well.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Dehumanization isn't just the tech industry. It isn't even _just_ industry.
Our philosophy has dehumanized us.

Yes, the tech industry can be dehumanizing. (So can technology.) Yes,
_industry_ can be dehumanizing, as they try to wring every last cent out of
you without concern for what it does to you as a human. But I think the
problem runs deeper than that. It's basically a question of who we think we
are.

As a society, we no longer believe in God. We believe in the physical universe
- in matter and the laws of physics. That means that all we can be is matter
that obeys the laws of physics. That's _all_ we can be, because there is
nothing else.

In particular, we can't have any free will or any ability to make a real
choice. Matter that obeys the laws of physics doesn't choose anything - it
just obeys the laws of physics. We're just machines made of atoms obeying the
laws of quantm electrodynamics, which make up biochemicals obeying the laws of
biochemistry, which make up neurons obeying the laws of neurology - and
_nothing_ more.

We can't love in the real sense of the word - choosing what's best for the one
we love - because we can't choose anything. Even the lesser flavors of love
are just a matter of biochemicals and neurons just doing their thing.

There's no real beauty in any objective sense - there's just certain things
happen to hit our neurons in a certain way.

For that matter, there's no truth, either, and not just in the postmodern
sense. If our brains were built by evolution, they were built to give a good
enough answer fast enough. They were not built to find actual truth, even were
such a thing to exist.

So in this view, free will, love, beauty, and truth - everything we thought of
as making us human - are dead. We're just machines, just like the computers on
our desks. As more and more people believe this (and start to act like it), it
becomes more and more rare to be treated in a genuinely human way.

------
fweespeech
\- Alpha male posturing

\- People expect you to care about your job.

~~~
erikb
> \- People expect you to care about your job.

What I think is funny about this is that the actual expoiting slave driver
bosses will accept sometimes that you do what you get paid for and then go
home. They won't tell you so, but if you are able to read faces you can see
them smile a little with respect if you refuse to get exploited. But some of
the engineering colleagues will never accept that. 24/7 is the requirement.
Even if nobody, not even them, gets anything out of it.

~~~
fweespeech
Up to a point, yeah.

However, if it impacts them negatively in any way (i.e. They overpromised) you
will find that respect doesn't help.

------
alexchamberlain
The undeniable urge to solve all problems in life with a new app

~~~
astrodust
Is there an app to cure that urge?

~~~
alexchamberlain
Nah, just Hacker News and Reddit to distract us.

------
snarfy
You like to think you are adding value to the world. Many times you will end
up transferring it instead.

~~~
x220
If you have a job, you are adding value.

------
irrational
I'm inside most of the daylight hours. This isn't so bad when it's nasty
weather outside (for me this is when it is hot and sunny, apparently there are
actually people who like that kind of weather so YMMV), but when it is nice
outside and I'm stuck inside...

------
forgottenpass
Your business model is probably not going to be providing something useful to
an end user. The tool will be a pretext so you get incidental access to data
your surveillance system will exfiltrate.

\--

The term "Tech" is malleable to mean both a business vertical, or the
software-related division within any a company in any business domain. Expect
strategic equivocation between the two.

Any bad action or decision from the non-technical people in a "tech" company
is suddenly the fault of the nerds, they'll feel the heat and are expected to
fix it (even if the problem is by definition not their problem to fix). Credit
flows in the opposite direction, regardless of where it belongs.

------
strict9
Constant worry about ageism, discrimination, and making a living once you to
get to late 30s/early 40s. In particular SV but this is a concern everywhere.

What can you do then if you love programming and don't want to be a manager?
It's just terrifying.

------
acconrad
I never feel good enough. Ever. Part of that is my personality - I'm very hard
on myself. But especially on HN (for better or worse) it seems like everyday I
see someone who is making more money or building a better business or someone
who just is an amazing programmer and I still have so much to learn.

It can be a positive motivator for continuous improvement but at the same time
it can be overwhelming to feel like there is always so much to learn and
you'll never learn it all.

~~~
jiscariot
I agree with this sentiment--I mainly read HN/SSC and find the depth of
knowledge extremely humbling. You really have to try hard to look at your
status as absolute (or "compare yourself to yourself a week ago"), especially
because it looks like we are wired to see relative status as more important
(i.e. happiness derived from comparison to "peers").

It is a roller coaster of "I think I'm pretty good at this" to "jesus--I
understand 10% of what these HN comments are talking about." It helps if I
think about the alternative universe where I tried to do something with my
political science minor. That usually does the trick. :-)

------
notacoward
Day-to-day annoyances: slow builds, flaky tests, debugging horrible code
(especially if it's yours), open offices, certain coworkers

Psychological issues: on-call stress, unhealthy work-hours expectations,
impostor syndrome, family-unfriendly policies and social environment

Cultural issues: affluenza and general entitlement, discrimination, moral
posturing, people slamming your company and your product (rightly or wrongly -
both hurt)

------
daenz
This is changing, but the lack of focus on physical health is a major problem
that is literally shortening the lifespans of young developers. Getting up,
moving around, stretching, and taking physical breaks throughout the day will
prevent all kinds of physical problems down the road, but unfortunately,
because young people can sit and grind for 8+ hours, we don't do this.

------
reality_caster
There are limited truly impactful things to work on at any place. In places
under the limelight, they would always be taken over by more experienced and
smarter people (very few), most of the other work on tech around that which is
important but not truly impactful.

------
Phil987
Everything is over-engineered and at the same time duct taped and zip tied
together.

------
ljnelson
Rampant sexism.

------
theyoungwolf
there is always difficulty of balancing your learning/growth and the work that
you have to do for the company

~~~
rajeshmr
I had similar concerns and had reached out to the HN community quite a while
ago. Seems like this issue is felt across the industry!

------
erik_seaberg
Bugs always get triaged. Nobody can afford zero tolerance, as much as I would
like to work that way.

------
slentprog
Deadlines

~~~
anotherevan
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

— Douglas Adams

------
cs02rm0
The sedentary lifestyle.

------
k0t0n0
building mvp by working hard then getting replace because you can't put 5 to 8
hard each day.

------
toomanyrichies
Computers always had an aura of infallibility to me as a kid. But learning to
program taught me that they're only as infallible as their creators,
programmers, and operators. So to me, the dark side of our field is that you
"see how the sausage is made", as they say.

Which could be good or bad, depending on whether you agree with the statement
that ignorance is bliss. For instance, if you had asked me 5 years ago whether
owning a self-driving car would be awesome, I would have answered with an
enthusiastic yes. Now, as a novice-to-journeyman software engineer, if I had
to own a car at all, I'd buy one made before computers became a fundamental
component inside most vehicles (got my eye on a 1976 Chevy Silverado, but I
digress).

Call me paranoid, but I can't help but feel it's only a matter of time before
some hacker gains control of a highway full of cars and demands X # of bitcoin
from their occupants or he'll drive them all off a bridge.(1) I can't un-see
that image in my head, and it terrifies me. Security professionals need to be
right every single time in order to be successful at their jobs. Hackers need
to be right only once to be successful at theirs. It's a Sisyphean task trying
to keep people physically safe in a digital age, let alone keep their privacy
intact.

Which brings me to my other point- technology being used by those in power to
maintain and expand that power by weakening our expectations of privacy:

-Social media platforms are being co-opted to derive insights about everyday people that even they don't know about themselves, and these insights are being used to manipulate their behavior at the voting booth, at the shopping mall, etc.(2)

-Governments are creating "social credit scores" based on how well a citizen tows the official party line, who they associate with, or the opinions they express. And these scores can affect everything from their job prospects to their ability to get a loan to their very geographic mobility.(3)

-Facial recognition technology is being deployed in traffic cameras and even in wearable technology to make it easier to pick "undesirables" out of a crowd.(4)

I don't mean to single out one single country. If this technology exists,
there's a greater-than-zero chance in any country that sooner or later a
leader will come along who will seek to use that technology for their own
gain.

Sorry to get so dark, I don't mean to sound overly dramatic. I never thought
of myself as a tinfoil-hat type of person, and I hate that I'm essentially
slowly turning into one. Technology does a lot of good too, I'm just genuinely
scared for the future.

Sources:

(1) -[https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-
hig...](https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/)

(2) -[https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-
targ...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-
figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#62b1bc856668)
-[http://business.time.com/2012/07/31/big-data-knows-what-
your...](http://business.time.com/2012/07/31/big-data-knows-what-youre-doing-
right-now/) -[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-
cambr...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambridge-
analytica-explained.html)

(3) -[https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-
credit](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit)
-[https://observer.com/2018/02/america-isnt-far-off-from-
china...](https://observer.com/2018/02/america-isnt-far-off-from-chinas-
social-credit-score/)

(4) -[https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-police-go-robocop-
with-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-police-go-robocop-with-facial-
recognition-glasses-1518004353)

------
badpun
Have you seen Silicon Valley (the HBO show)?

