Disillusioned by Tech in 2022
Speaking as a developer with over a decade of experience..
Web3 /cryptocurrency / NFTs make me feel like I’m taking crazy pills, turning even successful, veteran startup founders and respected VCs into shills.
Google search is worse, by nearly all accounts, than in was a few years ago.
Social media, more divisive than ever, is pressure testing the fabric of society.
Shopping on Amazon is like navigating a minefield of low quality garbage products flooded with fake reviews.
Streaming content is more abundant than ever, while the average content quality is, subjectively, rapidly diminishing.
On the job hunt within the past year, rarely I interviewed with a company that was working on anything even remotely interesting or groundbreaking.
As a consumer, I’m struggling to remember the last time I felt elated by a new app, website, or piece of tech.
Yet, despite all this, despite what feels like a downward trajectory, market caps are unfathomably high, and tech salaries are sitting at all time highs.
What’s going on?
How’s everyone else feeling?
66 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadOk, snarky comment aside, I agree with you on that point, and all the other points too.
I think the feeling of elation took a nose-dive when the fake-it-till-you're-acq-hired plans took greater precedence. And actually BEING acquired often meant the product got tanked. So, yeah, as a consumer I share your disappointment on that front.
All of this, agreed, while the "web3" appearing everywhere does not particularly help to take this market and the competence of most long-time leaders seriously any longer.
Yeah, my interest in computers and computing is nearly dead. There’s just nothing “hot” and “new” I see that really interests me. Perhaps this is because with experience, computing have mostly lost that magical appeal that led me to strive to figure out “how does this work”.
Every now and then it’s revived, but it never lasts so to the inaccessibility of the things that interest me or because it’s ultimately useless.
I’ll hopefully be leaving the industry in not too long. The money is very nice, but I’m not FAANG, so it’s not quite enough to keep me entrapped.
Also, not that this hasn’t been the case for a while, but I realized programming as a profession is almost nothing like what drew me into it originally.
Remote work is likely to continue to grow, find something your interested in, diversify your skills, take your time (not some hot tech of the week), create more options for your future.
Chin up, things often change for the better don't give up hope.
I'd hesitate to even call this stuff "tech" - search engines, streaming video, online retail and social networks were new 20 years ago, but now they're just part of the mainstream.
Objectively computers are faster than ever and there are more ways to apply that power.
It's already impossible for a lot of people to host their own web server from their home, to own the media they purchase without it potentially being erased by the vendor at a whim, to opt out of social media without a massive social (and professional) hit and computer power is being wasted on shitty electron apps and built-in OS adware.
Oh, on the subject of computer power being wasted, on a global scale it's being wasted on crypto, another attempt by a bunch of elitist executives to invent something that allows them to invent a new financial system in which they're still on top, but allows them to more easily commit tax evasion and money laundering.
All of our tech advances have largely been from massive companies trying to add scarcity to a system we invented that absolutely doesn't need it. Can't copy a MP3, can't copy an EXE, and now, you can't copy a JPG.
Yes, we do in fact have to participate in these dumbarse discussions. The choice to simply walk away from these things, particularly AS a tech worker, is bullshit artistry.
Remember to right click and save.
You're using this defeatist word "impossible", but it is not impossible - it is inconvenient. Work on making it more convenient, so that it won't seem impossible.
What makes the most noise in tech is things that can make money. And making money occurs by becoming a middleman, which is the polar opposite of the tech liberation dream. "Web3" has some interesting technology, but it's drowned out by money-seeking hucksterism - the exact same way we got "web2".
Aside from the start of bubbles where capital is still in exploratory mode, you're never going to get significant funding to write code that empowers users. Write it anyway!
Now that everything is laid bare and there's obvious failure everywhere, you have the opportunity to create something new.
Over a decade of experience is not actually that much (no offense). You might not remember what it was like when the tech industry actually was innovative, and many of those periods have been fairly insane. My advice is to embrace the disappointment and harness that to do something you find meaningful.
> My advice is to embrace the disappointment and harness that to do something you find meaningful.
I mean maybe if you are already wealthy, we’ll connected and have ideas that will survive in the current commercial culture.
You're thinking about this wrong. I've had a company fail and ended up living in my car. I was majorly in debt. The Texas AG filed a lawsuit against me which was super no-bueno. I ended up living in literal garages all over the country for years.
And yet, I was not disillusioned by what I did. I was disillusioned by all the crap I saw, but not my stuff.
To be a bit mean to the OP, nobody should expect the world to provide you fulfillment if you're not willing to create it yourself. Quit worrying about what exists or what "will survive in the current commercial culture" and find something to do yourself or a group to work with that's doing something interesting. Blaming the world for not being up to your satisfaction is old-man-yelling-at-clouds territory. The OP is too young to be that disillusioned.
When engrossed in the tech world, everything about it seems so important. Money has a way of making it seem that way. But most of it is inconsequential, even if it's minting billionaires and they tell you they're "changing the world". Meh. Go volunteer in a hospice to give your crisis of meaning a real stir.
Beautiful talk on that topic by Jonathan Blow, called "Preventing the collapse of civilization": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
The rapid consumerizaton of AR/VR tech is also pretty amazing given what the expected timeline for it was back in say 2015, when everyone was connected to a $2000 computer with wires and two sensors to play the one or two demos available.
A person's view of the world is usually just a rorschach test for their personal life. If you think the tech industry is slow/useless/uninnovative at the moment it likely just means you aren't personally doing the interesting work. You could change that by spending time learning the interesting tech and switching jobs to it, but the cynicism isn't relatable for those of us who deliberately work on interesting problems and continue to learn new and complex new things, rather than collect easy paychecks for boring work (they chose to do) then complain that life isn't exciting enough.
I do feel like some AI advancements instill that fleeting sense of magic, while others work so well that we (consumers) reap the benefits without even realizing it.
Can you share some specific AI advancements or projects that you’re particularly excited about?
Fair, but when I’m looking at the interesting work it’s clear they’re looking for established domain experts, not some guy who hacked some shit together because he was interested in it.
Also, I feel like it’s really easy to target interesting work and still end up doing the boring shit. Take the whole data science thing. How many jokes have you seen about eyed individuals stuck cleaning data from excel spreadsheets, or people who want to be hackers, digging into and analyzing wild zero-day threats, but instead get stuck in the majority of boring organizational/operational security work.
Disclaimer: obviously boring and interesting are highly subjective.
I personally don't buy into this analogy which I think its just a marketing ploy. The advance in AI is incremental in reality. Before neural networks have been widely implemented, other machine learning algorithms had been working fairly well. The highly non-linear models with hand-crafted domain-specific constraints just fit the data better and push the accuracy higher. But fundamentally, the way we treat data and prediction is not very different from other machine learning models.
Fusion, Quantum Computing, Carbon Capture, AI, Robotics, Space Travel, Bioengineering. So many fields are undergoing massive revolutions. More I'm sure I'm forgetting or don't know about too.
My biggest problem is that I have to pick what to work on. I'm currently going with VR which I've fallen in love with the same way I originally did with computing.
At some point I plan to make some educational experiences that touch some of the other areas I mentioned so I can explore those ideas more too.
If you are 20 - you are in a good position to get appropriate degree and start building your career. If you are 35+ with family and wrote backends and microservices - it is not that easy to move. How can you get into robotics, space travel, VR - will anyone hire you based on some pet projects? How many current engineers are able to go back to a school and get an MSc in Robotics and then start again as junior engineers?
We believed that computers would increase people's thinking skills, would make them smarter.
The saying, by a famous snake oil seller back then was that computers were "bicycles for the mind" in the sense that they'd make the mind's efforts more productive. There are still videos around with that guy saying that.
We were soooo wrong...
I also think humanity still at the beginning of that process, not the end. The internet has just gotten big enough and popular enough to be truly dangerous, that's what's required for it to be truly revolutionary in the way the printing press and radio once were.
More recently, I recall someone saying (possibly right here on HN) that the best and brightest aren't going to work on curing cancer or sending humans to Mars. Instead they go to work for Silicon Valley companies to optimize the process of posting cat pictures online.
we are witnessing a once in a generation reset where we get to make the lives of millions of corporate programmer and operations folks a bit better. Look at what Pulumi, Tanzu, Spotify/Backstage, Crossplane, Tailscale, Chainguard, Gitlab, Etc. are all doing.
The last reset like this was in the late 90s with Java. There’s still tens of billions of dollars being spent on IBM, Oracle, etc. that could be better spent. Channeling that all to Google, AWS, etc. isn’t going to solve things. There’s a vibrant ISV ecosystem out there.
(Disclosure , I work with VMware).
It's easier to create content (and data). Easier to monetize (sometimes outrageously so). And in many ways the content being created is more authentic in character than at any time in human history.
And yet every interaction feels transactional, like a consumer oriented branded lifestyle experience.
Probably the most "real" thing to watch in 2022: twitter feeds of Afghanistan. A rare window into historic tragedy. Guaranteed to leave the casual observer feeling helpless and bit as if hope has departed from the world ;)
Hacker News is not the place to go if you're looking for cohorts who feel the same thing.
People on this website are ... I don't know the right word, but I think the best way to phrase it is - lacking the sensitivity and awareness to really step back and evaluate if technology has been making the world a better place. This isn't to say technology can't do that, but what the human race has been doing with technology really is a bummer. We have every means to push ourselves forward, step up, and take care of each other. Hell we're post scarcity! But everyone is running around doing VC this, startup that, and how everything is going to be changed my "my really great idea" which is stupid. I had a brother-in-law, an executive of his company bragging about how he was using some of the smartest people he ever knew solve logistic problems for maximizing profit in the stupidest ways. I reply to every recruiter explicitly asking them how each role they're offering is genuinely helping the world a better place. I explicitly go out of my way asking for jobs to fight climate change and no one responds.
Personally I am confounded by the money making impetus of everyone.
I FEEL exactly how you're feeling, and I'm not sure how to get away from it or fix the state of things.
A lot of people will come out of the woodwork and provide thought-terminating statements like "be the change you want to see", or "be the light", or anything else that's really meant as a way to disengage the discussion without really addressing the issues. And let me tell you I have put my best foot forward in my personal endeavors to create solutions and tools that really try to help others out. But at the end of the day, we all rely on each other to be the communities that help each other, and it's not up to one person to carry that weight. We all need to recognize that this isn't right, and the direction we're headed isn't right. And, this is completely ignoring the big elephant in the room that despite all the technological "advancements" we're making, the planet is burning alive, with us on it, and we really won't have anything in the coming years.
I'm rambling, and I don't have a solution or words of advice. But, I want you to know you're not alone. Feel free to reach out if you're ever looking for a cohort to chat with. We can be grumpy together.
I'm a believer in Web3, though I completely understand people who are not. We'll just have to see where that plays out.
Most of my time is spent in neurotech. Fascinating stuff, and opportunity to have a huge impact on the lives of billions of people. We're specifically focused on sleep.
Wearables and sensors is also a fascinating area.
AI isn't just used to server you better advertisements. There's AI in health tech improving patient diagnosis, and will bring the cost of health care down (except in the US). AI is also used in engineering and design to help reduce material use.
You say the quality of streaming content is going down, and I tend to agree, but I also think these things go in waves, so I don't think storytelling is broken forever. But on the other side of media creation, how about the incredible CGI we have and how that is becoming more accessible to more people.
I do like your examples of Social Media and Amazon. I am mostly post-consumerist, and only purchase kindle books from Amazon. I used to be a big fan of Facebook, but most people I know have stopped posting, so it wasn't interesting anymore.
We don't need more "things" from Amazon, I hope people move to having fewer, better things.
I think Social Media is an ongoing experiment. It will still exist in the future, but I'm not sure we'll recognize it as we do today. I see so many people moving to tiktok, which as far as I can tell is a different experience to our older social medias.
So, in general, you're right to be jaded about the things you mentioned, but I also think we'll look back at this time as the golden age.
Web2 was like early industrialization, we're learning the lessons from that, we still have lots of work to do.
I think it’s the coming of age - next generation is taking the helm. As you get older you starting thinking the best is in the past - each generation does it with them “good old days” feelings.
I’ll leave you with my fav. quote when I encounter such duality…
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” ~Charles Dickens
It is just normal process I guess.
I think I get your feeling: there are giant Internet-based monopolies out there (e.g. Facebook, Amazon, Google...) which seem to be driven entirely by greed and power. Google's "Don't be evil" disappeared long ago. Those monopolies are no longer a force for the good and their technological allure has faded over the years.
If you are looking for exiting technology, you need to look outside the Web. I find autonomous driving and robotics really fascinating. I mean , the SpaceX rocket boosters return to Earth in a powered landing - how cool is that?