Ask HN: Do you ever feel disillusioned with tech industry as a whole?

We are not making the difference among cultural and technical determinism. Hence, we are buying mere narcissistic inventions as progress. It could be simply that Humanity needs a bit more experience handling IT. If I could change something, I would turn every Snapchat addict into a Wikipedia editor and would put Twitter to work like Reddit.

This is also a sign for a tech bubble; as long as startups keep creating no value beyond aesthetics.

I recommend you read "You Are Not A Gadget" by Jaron Lanier ;)

We seem to be an industry with a severe lack of professionalism.

We fail to manage risk, we neglect security, we rarely know we are regulated and we hold an air of contempt about the idea of being asked to pay for our failings like any other industry (car manufacturer, drugs, etc). It's too hard to make perfect software, but really easy to make everything else? The list goes on... We have made huge innovations and made real impacts, but we largely aren't doing it safely or respectfully and our attitude to privacy is horrifying. You might think you are okay, but look around you: look at the security of how you deploy, the missing tests, the broken accessibility, the trove of user data in your company, the code maintainability strategy, the lip service paid to copyright, the sheer number of hacks, etc. There are many who would like things to improve and many who challenge the norm, but that challenge will never be formalised until we lead from professional bodies spearheading how we should do things, rather than corporate bodies and celebrities pushing their agenda.

All the time. Take a look at the frontpage how many "DevOps" related conversations:

    - what is
    - what is not
    - whois doing it (is it a verb?!)

I mean it's hilarious and I define myself as a DevOps engineer because if I say sysadmin, for some reason ppl will ask me about AWS, Python/Ruby, Bash, Ansible, etc.

Anyway, serves as a reminder that my time is better spent reading technical books, watching keynotes (BCantrill's are nice) and not reading nonsense. It's the internet, you need to protect yourself from topics that have a high noise to substance ratio and these discussions are all noise.

It's like any other industry. You need to build a good brand in order to sell your products. What you mentioned are just brands... it's marketing. They all aim at the same things anyway so it doesn't matter who does what.

Yeah totally, 95% percent of what we do as humans is superficial garbage. Just a bunch of apes thumping their chests. "Look I made a thing!" But does it really matter? Probably not. I think having your mindset, you can make a bigger and more important impact on the world. I wish more people would think about real improvements to society, quality of life, our future as a species, etc. As opposed to random stupid gadgets... We have soooo many engineers in world, and a majority of them are working on mind sucking social media and advertising.

Are we supposed to care about a lot of startups or whatever the big companies are doing?

What ever made you feel like you should have any illusions to start with?