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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sure, but just keep in mind a couple things:

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

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

Pretty done.

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

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

Shits me to tears.

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

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

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

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

I sometimes get feelings or down and up markets (namely my checking account) but do you have any good reliable sources on market trends for tech employment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I actually specifically look for those smaller companies. I don't live in Silicon Valley, nor have I ever made Silicon Valley money. I've never wanted to live there and I haven't wanted to work for FAANG since Google did away with "don't be evil."

If you happen to know where they are posting jobs, aside from the normal terrible job sites because I've been on them since November, I'm interested.

Do those cycles happen to correspond with the tech market crashes? =)

How do you find these positions?

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

For what time frame? A day? A week? A ... ?

> seeing up to 2400 lines a day in 4 hours of deep work.

Now I get it.

Lines of code is not a metric for correctness nor fitness of purpose.

> LLMs will greatly reduce the amount of people required, mainly seniors.

This is just high-grade speculative bovine excrement.

Nothing sexist in that quote, maybe have a break

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

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

Oh that's an entirely different flaming dumpster, but I feel that too.

I work at exactly one of these companies. It's been thoroughly refreshing, picking my tools and language, being able to defend my choices and help make new ones, have ownership of my part of the product, and see that all bear fruit going from a product that was on fire and mired in tech debt when I got there, to a smoothly running machine with my code at its heart now.

They definitely can't pay inflated Silicon Valley salaries, but I'm also at much less risk of getting that pink slip when some far-off executive decides I'm extraneous. I'm two hops from the company CEO, and even though I haven't met him, he's quite aware of my contribution and has requested projects for my skillset. I have direct lines to most of the executive engineers. That's gratifying.

Curse my foolish desire for food and shelter!

FRED has some data

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JPNM

I think the amortization is the primary issue, TBH.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The idea has been very high up on my list. But I need to pay the bills until I can put something together. I'm not interested in the current trend of "building" a company that burns VC money to prop up a garbage product just long enough to be sold and enshittified.

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Used against people." Those are good words. I am also deeply tired of that. I'm absolutely guilty of being one of those idiots that still thinks we could have nice things and products that work for reasonable prices if we just cared a little.

Oh, the seven year itch. I didn't think it would apply to work, but it makes sense that it would.

To my eye you seem to be extolling the virtues of the work. Which I still love.

> Find smaller companies, that's what I started doing 20 years ago. I started a new job as a senior director at a 5000 person company 3 years ago

That's a smaller company?

The biggest company I've ever worked for was 400 people

The smallest was 4

I'm in this article, and I don't like it. lol

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

Don't forget a healthy dose of vendor lock-in!

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

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

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

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

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

> The engineers built tools and modules that put most of them out of work.

Yes, but no. I'm in hardware. I deal with hardware engineers. This part of the industry is alive and well. You might not see it, but it's there.

> Once you design a piece of hardware that works well, it can be re-used ad-infinitum, and most hardware today is really firmware running on microcontrollers.

Yes to the first part, it's just like code. Write once, then run it perpetually. Except that isn't really the case. There are still jobs for maintaining COBOL systems. Likewise, legacy hardware needs to be replaced, improved, or repaired. Old companies die, new ones swoop in and capture market share. My employer is the only manufacturer I know of for a legacy system component. They have a captive market because no one else wants to take the two weeks in CAD, and phone time with the contract manufacturers. This kind of thing is everywhere.

> So it is a natural evolution that software is becoming automated.

Again, yes, but no. We automate things as a matter of course. We are engineers. This doesn't mean fewer jobs, it means a shifting job market. IE loom operator vs hand weaver.

For sure. I love my side projects and my jobs. I love writing code and designing systems. I’m burned out on the game I must play (and be good at) to be afforded the chance to write code, design systems, and be paid.

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

Isn't that part "the industry" being what it is?

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

That video keeps coming up in conversations all over. It's like the universe is trying to tell me something. I just wish I knew what it was. =)

First time?

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

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

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

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

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

Software being a better career than other careers doesn’t relate to criticism in the post.

Yeah. I just try to separate them in my mind or I’ll quit trying :) Not ready to retire just yet.

> I hate to say it but turn off HN, this place a hype machine designed to make you feel bad. It's like "Roast and Toast" x 1000 on here, not reality. It's toxic in a very passive-aggressive way

I have a completely different experience of HN than you do. There are the stray toxic folks, sure, but overall, this is one of the best dev forums--actively moderated, generally filled with intelligent comments, and often offering good advice. Just look at the thoughtful and understanding answers to this very post.

Yes, you aren't alone

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

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

I wish I had something more specific for you, but my experience is more on the demand-adjacent side (as an EE) rather than directly on the software side. The companies I've worked at have posted on the regular job sites but mainly worked through recruiters. Companies do often post announcements on their LinkedIn, if they have one.

I share your frustration with the fad-driven, cramming-AI-into-everything, rent-seeking model of modern software, and I wish you luck in your search.

I would also like to know

I've never worked in Silicon Valley but every company I've worked for is infected with Silicon Valley brainrot

No LinkedIn, I couldn't take another "this is what appendicitis taught me about B2B sales" post. But I bothered all the recruiters I know and fed my resume into the paper shredder of all the companies candidate portal early on.

I suspect all those great little companies are either laying low or staffed up with the glut of ex-<prestigious name> devs. Or the huge pool of ex federal employees who have lots of experience in "legacy" systems.

Saw that article a while back where even Glassdoor was admitting something like a third of their job posts were probably ghost jobs. I think that's hurting everyone though, all for the same reasons.

No, my last one happened at a market peak.

Here's a typical job in that category. Boring but practical Chicago Dryer.[1]

    Industrial Controls Engineer
    Chicago Dryer
    Chicago, IL

    $80,000 to $110,000 Yearly
    Vision, Medical, Dental, Paid Time Off, Life Insurance, Retirement
    Full-Time

    5+ years of experience in controls & software engineering
    High-level knowledge of one or more programming languages (C, Pascal(structured-text))
    Familiarity with Windows, Linux & Realtime operating systems
    Familiarity with electrical codes for industrial machinery
    Electrical design & CAD experience for automation-controls
    Solid knowledge of classical-physics (mechanics & motion)
    Mechanical aptitude and ability to work with hand tools
    Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
    Ability to work well with personnel at all levels
    Beckhoff TwinCat3 experience is a plus
    Jira and GIT experience is a plus
    Electronics design & trouble-shooting is a plus

Leader in the heavy machinery that takes clean linen items after washing and dries, sorts, folds, and stacks them by the ton. There are vision systems and robotic grippers involved. They've been in business for over a century, building heavy duty laundry equipment. It's a very steady business. Probably good job security. The startups making all the noise in clothes folding, such as Foldimate and Laundroid, went bust. Chicago Dryer equipment processed a few tons of laundry while you were reading this.

That's what a blue-collar programming job looks like. But it will be a very clean blue collar.

[1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/c/Chicago-Dryer/Job/Industrial-...

I'm not terribly hard to find, but vibe checking all the Ask HN readers is about as much "talking about it" as I really want to do. I normally try to keep focused on the positive and use my time constructively. Happy to make a connection to do the latter though.

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

How strict is something like that on the demands for CAD and Electrical Design stuff? Because I've never done any of that. I'd be happy to learn it, but that doesn't seem to matter anymore.

Yeah, I've heard about that 174 stuff too. Even if it was changed tomorrow and it was the actual reason for all the stagnation in hiring that some people say it is, I would expect it to take months for that impact to start showing up.

I feel that right in my soul. The other side of the coin is they are currently destroying the talent pipeline by keeping smart motivated people out of roles where they could learn fast and grow. The myopic strategy(or lack thereof) is astonishing to me.

Yeah, it's currently full of AI shovelware because that's what the hype bubble demands, but there's a lot more good stuff here than not.

But they also have only had an account for an hour and clearly didn't read the whole post so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

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

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

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

Look for large companies dealing in physical goods. I work on warehouse software for a company selling motorcycle helmets and bbqs. Its a great intersection of tech and industry.

Not primarily the fault of the IRS, as they were just following the law passed in 2017 that didn't go into effect until years later. But there's a chance it gets changed back to the previous way by the same people who passed it.

> LLMs will greatly reduce the amount of people required, mainly seniors

Nope. LLM is unable to reason about correctness of code, since they only regurgitate code based on "most likely to come next".

Rather, senior programmers will even be more important to check for correctness. And this will likely lead to senior programmer burnout.

Sometimes technical debt is kept rather than being fixed because "if we fix this some high-value technologically-challenged clients will no longer be able to use our service."

This is actually solvable but will need an "out of the box" thinking.

Fucking nice. Thank you

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

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

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

it absolutely does. go find a less ridiculous industry, it'll be more stable and it will pay less

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

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

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

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

Another is: https://hnhiring.com/trends