Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo
have Bsc in CS, worked as software eng. for ~7 years.
tbh, i'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's and 90's, where a group of passionate and crazy smart people worked on tough and important problems, pulling engineering miracles daily. i'm talking about netscape and jamie zawinski, xerox and alan kay, l0pht and mudge, valve and gabe newell. legends.
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.
perhaps i made bad career choices but what'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 "growth" and hype. engineers have become relegated to the "peasant" 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).
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'll have more spare time to pursue my interests. but academia is dying, and dare i say irrelevant. it's an outdated concept for a world where i can get "educated" on a subject within a week using the internet, at least enough so i can accomplish what i need. i'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.
so that takes me back to creating a business around something i believe in. but, it'll have to be bootstrapped (vc money is just another boss), so the chances for success are extremely low.
what do you think?
170 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadThis 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.
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.
Coupland's Microserfs comes to mind.
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.
However, my comment wasn't referring to technical debt.
One of the companies I had as a client, Healthy Workers, I had the same experience.
So I wouldn’t say kt is that uncommon in my experience.
Both companies are Dutch. I wonder if it is a culture thing too.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
Excellent quote. Can you give the source of this quote?
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...
ReadonlyREST (my own story) https://www.indiehackers.com/product/readonlyrest
It's an acquired skill that can be learned, trained, coached, and shared.
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.
Do you think starting a company working on compilers, operating systems etc will even work without huge resources and connections?
Not a compilers expert, but I will try to invent a fantasy example:
GCC/clang are ok for compiling generic programs, everyone is more or less happy with them.
One day you read on a HN that SpaceX satellites have to ship with 4 redundant CPUs. Every CPU costs $100K and consume a lot of power, but they are needed to correct errors introduced by cosmic rays.
You decide to create a compiler that creates programs with error correction automatically embedded. Using your compiler, SpaceX saves $100K and can have 20% smaller solar panels because they can ship it with 3 CPUs instead of 4.
1. How much $ do you think you can sell a single license? 2. How many customers will you actually need to be profitable? 3. How much of your time do you need to create a minimal prototype that you can DM to that SpaceX employee and get him/her in a valuable mutual-help feedback loop? 4. How much better can this compiler become in 1 year of refinement?
Chances are you can make as much you currently make in a year with your first 2 customers.
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html
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.
To some extent it's always been this way, but I think a combination of extreme financialization, globalization, and practices like scrum (which means well, I think, but is often used as a cudgel to 'inspect' developer performance) have made average developer life even less pleasant in the last decade.
I would suggest getting into development for embedded systems. The jobs don't seem as numerous as in VC-fueled web/app start-up style development, but when your product is expected to function without the ability to update its firmware/software near-instantaneously as modern webapps do, I think it changes the style of development cycle pretty dramatically.
"W2": An employee. A regular job.
"1099": Independent contractor, freelancer.
Working in countless industries.
Inventing asynchronous technology for an industry specific use case.
Using amalgamation of existing technologies to resolve industry specific issues.
Loads of others.
If you are young and healthy without crushing debt. Don’t go looking for a job. Go find an adventure.
I am looking exactly for adventure. I was in a consulting company where I was solving such problems. Now I am in a large product company where the bureaucracy is becoming unbearable. It is also more about where you are presently to get opportunities. I am in a country where the scope is limited.
What kind of expectations did these companies have when they interviewed you? Did they expect you to have experience in the domain or samples of previous work etc?
That's what I said, I suppose there are lots of people in their early 30's having a dilemma. I'm also struggling with something similar, but I recognise I have much to attain in level of expertise but do I want to do that? Is another question.
I'm approaching my 40s and I've had this dilemma since I was 25. I used to strive for being a top performer despite my hatred for working in this industry. I accelerated through the lower ranks and significantly increased my salary, but my happiness plateaued very early on. Over the last few years I've learned to lay low and give just enough to not get fired. I couldn't care less about the company or my work, I just want to clock out at the 8 hour mark - and not a minute later - then go work in my garden. I found this to be the optimal balance between financial security and my happiness.
If you've ever read "The Gervais Principle" - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... - you can classify me as a "Loser" on that spectrum.
I cannot thank enough for the article, absolutely nailed it. I have seen & been part of a startup growing from a mid stage to a unicorn and now after reading it I can connect the dots, it all make sense in such exhilarating way. My journey till now has been from over performing looser to a looser which is not bad. I'm seeing a pattern though, every 8-9 month I over-perform become a looser then get completely disillusioned and go off to a backpacking retreat. This worries me a bit now.
Ironically perhaps a truer picture of the industry was probably the fiction series "Halt and Catch Fire".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
>Ethereum
I understand that Eth is more than a cryptocurrency, but as your comment demonstrates, dividing those worlds isn't always quite so simple.
- as someone who was involved in ETH core starting in 2015
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.
Now if you want these things to be used right now, yes academia isn't the environment you are looking for.
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.
This is an excellent assessment. Any software product that depends on understanding deep first principles based complex systems has an ecological need to maintain a working engineering culture. At least in those parts of the organization that does product development.
I've worked my entire software engineer career in computer graphics and computer aided design (after getting my masters in physics) and while in these fields you've seen the usual MBA types poke their heads out, there have still been nooks where proper engineering was necessary.
So, find a company that seems to be needing internal development of non-trivial software.
But the original attention was correct as well - there are so many non-value adding bullshit jobs to keep things "professional" that they try to embrace all nooks an crannies, so even a healthy engineering culture is usually at risk, all the time.
Find the right team for you, there are many good and bad fits.
This is only true for established companies. At early stages those still might not have a proper engineering culture, whicih makes them turn into pyramid schemes sellling the dream, getting hackier and scammier with each iteration.
Also, the smaller companies tend to need good software people that can take the excel/matlab models and turn them into something enterprise.
I like how you phrased that. In the past I've said that I want to work for a technical manager on tech product for a tech company, but that wasn't quite right.
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
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,...
If a company has a short-sight problem, you can be sure that it comes from the brain. Ordinary employees, once they are not juniors anymore, tend to stick with a company, because jumping around every couple of years don't really look good on the resumes.